2. Ideas

In the 19th Century, cities were becoming over-crowded industrial slums, with families packed into rows  of terraced houses surrounding work houses which were all constructed during the industrial revolution and a radical solution to this problem was needed. In the late 19th century the British planner Ebenezer Howard promoted a planning strategy that emphasized the formation of satellite towns around large cities. These towns were intended to have their own agricultural belts and commercial districts (Szarkowski, 2013). A radical architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier, was a founding member of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM).  Le Corbusier took Howard’s idea of the radial garden city and developed it as a city of the future, consisting of large apartment buildings isolated in a park-like setting on pilotis. Le Corbusier’s theories were adopted by the builders of public housing in Europe and the United States. For the design of the buildings themselves, Le Corbusier criticized any effort at ornamentation. The large Spartan structures in cities, but not ‘of’ cities, have been widely criticized for being boring and unfriendly to pedestrians.

His main intention was to flatten the world’s most compacted un-organised cities namely Paris, France, and rebuild them in his vision, including concepts that are still used today such as keeping the industrial ‘dirty’ zones to the edge of the city away from the housing areas. However, his idea of this city never took off. Mostly today what is left of Le Corbusier’s grand idea are the tower blocks or cheap social housing which, although still around today, are slowly being torn down in favour of ground level living. His ideas, though, are still seen in modern architecture such as in areas like London’s Canary Warf as a prime example of a commercial zone as well as city parks providing social green space.

Le Corbusier’s use of concrete in this way, however, did bring about the use concrete on a large scale as a flexible building material. The Humber bridge makes use of this and its simplistic functional shape is also a reflection of Le Corbusier’s idea of modular architecture, one of his 5 points of architecture, in the way the bridge is constructed. Also, its positioning in the city brings a highway to the city centre for traffic to flow effectively, which was an idea by Le Corbusier to have a central highway in and out of cities. His idea of streets in the sky also brought about a technical and engineering revolution, with some ideas of Le Corbusier’s catching on, such as city tower blocks bringing about technological advancement in the use of concrete without which the Humber Bridge may not be what it is today.

The idea of the HumberBridge was to replace the ferry system that was used on the Humber estuary to take traffic across from either bank to prevent them going via Goole, a far longer round trip. The bridge followed the Humber bridge act of 1959 which was amended twice, in 1971 and 1973 due to politics of the time, before the building got under way, which caused upset for the people of the then county of Humberside. The grand scheme was to build a bridge to span the river which would be a triumph of British engineering and would soon pay for itself with tolls and create smooth passage from Hessle to Barton for the volume of traffic far too great to continue using the ferry system.