Nguyen Vu: WARP: Response to Visionary Metropolis: Tony Garnier's Une Cité Industrielle

The amount of work that Tony Garnier has produced for Une Cité Industrielle shows how obsessive he is about bringing this idea of a modern city, that was planned to be virtually utopian, to life. Considering what the citizens of this city would want, Garnier depicted every single intricate detail in the architectural floor plan and also in the specific sketches of different areas of the city (residential zones, industrial zones etc.) I must admit at first glance his renderings do just seem like pretty architectural illustrations but as I looked closer the small texts revealed that in creating this ideal metropolis, Garnier was considering the needs of every individual that would live in this society.
Not only did Garnier and his peers create proposals for a "greener" society, they also brought to light the flaws of industrialization. In Pierre Paulus' piece The Industrial Region, the portrayal of the smog billowing out of the factory chimneys caused me to almost smell the toxic fumes. I can not begin to imagine what life was like to for people like Tony Garnier during the industrial revolution. Yes everything around you is advancing at a rapid rate and society is improving, but at what cost? Humans were beginning to be less and less considerate of environmental degradation that was also occurring and that drove Garnier (and many other "designers and reformers") to propose a change for the better. To me, Une Cité Industrielle is a fine example of how one person was able to process and synthesize the information around him and turned it into a proposal to revamp society.