Richard Anderson

Richard Anderson – Horizontal/ Vertical: Ludwig Hilberseimer Confronts the Metropolis
In 1924, German architect Ludwig Hilberseimer developed his Hochhausstadt, or High-Rise City. The project represented a fierce critique of the contemporary metropolis and of some of the alternative projects of that time. One of these projects is examined in detail by Richard Anderson. He describes Hilberseimer’s High-Rise City as a polemical reaction to Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, an unrealised project intended to house 3 million inhabitants developed two years earlier. Indeed, while both models offered a critique of the distribution of space within the capitalist metropolis, and contested the horizontal by use of skyscrapers and parklike landscapes, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine remained, according to Hilberseimer, (too) close to an essentially horizontal urban form. A form he literally criticised in his Hochhausstadt.