Plan Voisin
Le Corbusier proposed clearing a large part of central Paris so eighteen glass towers could stand in open ground.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- officially announced
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
Le Corbusier's publicly exhibited redevelopment proposal for the Right Bank of Paris.
Plan Voisin replaced dense historic neighborhoods with cruciform office towers, lower residential blocks, multilane roads and large areas of open space. Presented at the 1925 Exposition, it operated partly as an urban proposal and partly as a provocation advertising a new machine-age order.
Existence timeline
Le Corbusier presents the earlier Contemporary City model.
The Paris redevelopment is shown publicly with backing from the Voisin company.
No municipal construction program follows.
Related tower-in-park and road-planning ideas influence international redevelopment.
Plans, models and diagrams set out the proposed towers, roads and demolition area in central Paris.
Why it ended
Paris never adopted the scheme, and no implementation stage began. The city it targeted continued to evolve through smaller interventions rather than wholesale clearance.
Last confirmed trace
Original plans, models, publications and exhibition material survive in the Fondation Le Corbusier and major museum collections.
What it left behind
The unbuilt plan became both an influential modernist diagram and a cautionary symbol of top-down urban renewal willing to erase existing communities.
How we classified it
No generally obtainable public release existed; demonstrations, internal prototypes or archival fragments do not constitute public access to the proposed work.
The strongest verified milestone maps to officially_announced in Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.