program diagram urban planning architecture

“Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex.” “The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution,” Grant says. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of the eye. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by generations of architects, planners and idealists. The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate complex ideas. Some of the other diagrams in this survey are a bit more surprising. Le Corbusier’s iconic plan for his “Ville Radieuse” was an obvious choice when Grant and SPUR began to curate a new exhibition, “Grand Reductions: Ten diagrams that changed urban planning.” Le Corbusier’s tidy scheme for “towers in a park,” drawn as if on a blank slate, would influence planners for decades to come. “They were such compelling drawings of such a compelling idea.” “It swept everyone along,” says Benjamin Grant, the public realm and urban design program manager for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. His idea was radical for the 1930s, and it was his diagrams of it that really captured the imagination. The French modernist architect wanted to reform the polluted industrial city by building “towers in a park” where workers might live high above the streets, surrounded by green space and far from their factories.

Le Corbusier’s plan may not have had such power if he hadn’t put it on paper. A new exhibit from the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association showcases the simple visualizations of complex ideas that have changed how we live.

Program diagram urban planning architecture