Le Corbusier, l'aereo e il destino della metropoli moderna

The experience of the flight plays a decisive role in Le Corbusier's comprehension of the modern space. The airplane brings about a revolution in perception, representation, planning and scales: the entire spatial dimension is overturned when thought from above, from the borderless, immaterial, connective element of air. In this way the airplane becomes an ideological tool to imagine and legitimize the Ville Radieuse, almost an implicit intuition of the future global city. The article discusses the social, anthropological and political implication of this intuition, also showing the links between Le Corbusier's theory and the philosophical debate about the essence of Modernity. [Publisher's text].