Plan Obús de Le Corbusier (1932) versus Metrópolis de Fritz Lang (1926). Dos discursos contrapuestos sobre la imagen de la ciudad a finales de los años veinte.

Abstract

In Metropolis, the images of the viaducts, elevated above the ground between the skyscrapers do not occupy more than fi ve minutes between the running time of the fi lm. However, they summary and synthesize an image of modern city architecture which it had been built through diff erent proposals, including some of the own Le Corbusier in the 1920s: the Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan Voisin (1925). The reference of Manhattan and, at the same time, the social critique to capitalism and the role of the technique are present in both cases; the distortion in the formal mechanisms that Fritz Lang operates in the construction of the fi lmic space is no stranger to these issues. However the urban topography is constructed with autonomous buildings that are connected with streets at various levels that stress its factory and machinist condition. The Obus Plan for Algiers and its previous proposals of 1929 in diff erent South American locations departs from that formal strategy and previous ones of own Le Corbusier to consider the possibility of the viaducts to shelter under them the new building typologies; its urban radicalism in the superimposition of diff erent programmes privileges the hedonistic enjoyment of the landscape against the oppression of the viaducts of Metropolis. This work will analyze the formal strategies that diff erently constructed in each case the space of the city and the diff erent relationship that arises between technology, landscape and social space.