Rough Theory

It’s always strange when you find a passage that could easily find a home in a critical text – except that it was actually written by someone who approves of what they’re describing. From the readings discussed in the History and Theory of Planning course today, comes this modernist fever-dream. I could as easily see a similar passage – with a very different valence – in a Frankfurt School critique:

The twentieth century is called upon to build a whole new civilization. From efficiency to efficiency, from rationalization to rationalization, it must so raise itself that it reaches total efficiency and total rationalization. (Paul Otlet, quoted by Le Corbusier in The Radiant City, 1933, p. 27)