Scale and identity in the housing projects of Coderch

The Modern Movement, and particularly Le Corbusier, has been criticised for its making of ‘complex house-simple city’ (Rowe and Koetter 1984: 93), a reference to the way in which the richness of the designs for private houses were lost at the urban scale. As Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter have noted:

The public world is simple, the private world is elaborate: and, if the private world affects a concern for contingency, the would-be public personality long maintained an almost too heroic disdain for any taint of the specific.

(Rowe and Koetter 1984: 93)