Plan Voisin

You are standing in the shadow of a radical vision that would have erased the very streets beneath your feet. In the early nineteen twenties, the architect Le Corbusier unveiled the Plan Voisin, an aggressive proposal to demolish a vast swath of central Paris on the Right Bank. He intended to raze hundreds of hectares of the historic city, including the medieval streets of the Marais, to clear the way for his machine age masterpiece. The project takes its name from Gabriel Voisin, a prominent French aircraft manufacturer who provided the funding for the study. Le Corbusier believed the existing city was an unhealthy, congested mess of horse carriages and narrow alleys. He drafted plans for eighteen identical, sixty-story glass cruciform skyscrapers, which he envisioned as a clean, efficient business district. These towers were designed to accommodate millions of people while being surrounded by wide highways and expansive, manicured parks. While the modern landscape here seems fixed, the Plan Voisin served as a jarring reminder of how close the city came to a total transformation. Le Corbusier was careful to spare only a few key landmarks, such as the Porte-Saint-Denis and the Porte-Saint-Martin, which would have stood as lonely remnants in his new, standardized grid. Though the project was never built, it became a foundational document for modernist urban planning, influencing everything from the layout of corporate office districts to the vertical design of cities around the world.