Item 18 - Appeal Application Nos. 2023-02 and 2023-03 for Cabrillo Town Center project

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HISTORIC RESOURCES ASSESSMENT TOWN CENTER PLAZA � C A A DULY 2022 SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA J Democratic Western European countries; developing nations of the Third World. Most observers probably saw the same virtues in the Modernist style for the postwar era. Some valued the style because it was the official style of America, now the unquestioned leader of the Western world. American prestige helped spread Modernism, but the main ideas still came from Europe. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was promoting a popular, influential version of Modernism. He moved beyond the white boxes of his 1920s designs to compose powerful forms like the Unite d'habitation, Marseille, France (1946-1952) and other projects. He moved away from thin stucco walls to massive concrete structures heavily modeled with external sun screens and other projections. Le Corbusier built these in roughly cast concrete ("biton brut") which frankly expressed the rough boarding framework into which the concrete was poured. Later known as "Brutalist" style, it was primarily a raw concrete construction technique, although the structures also had a primitive emotional presence. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier had proposed bulldozing central Paris "...to make way for free-standing towers, regularly lined up in the landscape." World War II destruction gave him the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Unite d'habitation was a prototype; but one of what he wanted, which was an entire city of housing blocks standing on columns above the sweeping natural landscape, each one intended to replace an entire traditional neighborhood. Interior "streets" ran down the length of this prototype on every third floor, giving access to interlocking two-story tall apartments. Le Corbusier provided a variety of unit sizes, hoping to encourage a variety of social groups to live together. A shopping arcade in the middle of the block, playgrounds, and a gymnasium on the roof were meant to provide all the usual neighborhood amenities within the structure itself. Fundamentally, Le Corbusier saw Modernism as, "...a mechanism for re -engineering society." Le Corbusier's vision of pristine towers hovering above the landscape inspired many postwar Modernist architects and urban planners. But his Marseille scheme proved too controversial and too expensive; no further expansion was attempted. Many housing projects in Europe were in bombed -out city centers, and many were on the periphery. A popular variation of Le Corbusier's concept was the point -block or tower block, which "...piled more stories on a smaller footprint to create what was in essence a housing skyscraper." These stood clustered together on the landscape and often rivaled the old church spires as the most dominant features on the skyline. Many European governments embraced these new forms of housing as a fast, cheap way to rebuild and a way to control the endless spread of suburbs during the baby boom. It was affordable housing for a wider range of social classes — government supported. American cities were not bombed out, but decades of middle-class "white flight" to suburbs left city cores surrounded by a disproportionate number of poor people, Play °touncif �07/21/22) 18 - 784 10/3/2023 13