Le Corbusier’s proposed redevelopment plan for central Paris with skyscrapers was called the Plan Voisin.
Presented in 1925, the scheme targeted a large section of Paris’s Right Bank. It proposed demolishing much of the existing urban fabric and replacing it with widely spaced cruciform towers, broad roads, parks, and separate pedestrian routes. The plan was sponsored by Gabriel Voisin, an avant-garde aircraft and automobile manufacturer, whose name it adopted.
Plan Voisin grew from Le Corbusier’s earlier Ville Contemporaine, an imaginary 1922 city designed for three million inhabitants. Unlike that general concept, Plan Voisin applied the skyscraper-and-park model to a real part of Paris. It was never built, largely because its wholesale clearance of historic neighbourhoods was too radical. The project is often confused with Plan Obus, Le Corbusier’s later proposal for Algiers, or with Haussmann’s very different 19th-century street renovations.