Enchanted Catastrophe

Abstract

This chapter rethinks Le Corbusier’s idea of New York as an “enchanted catastrophe” by focusing on related concerns about architectural elevation and capitalist “creative destruction” in critical writings about the rise of the modernist American metropolis. In particular, it considers essays by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and novels by John Dos Passos as well as key French texts by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel de Certeau, among others. In turn, it traces the post-World War II shift according to which Paris “lost its hegemony,” as Beauvoir put it, and New York appeared to replace it as the capital of the twentieth century.