In the Beginning

In Le Corbusier's final testament he states 'in life it is above all necessary to act'. This would indicate that he wasn't interested in idle speculation, in just talking about it. It might also bring to mind that elemental biblical challenge as to our beginning; with the 'act' or with 'the word', but I'm not much of a bible reader so I don't know.
However such a view allows us to revisit his urban planning proposals with the view that he really meant it, and that he really meant his proposals for Paris (as above) of the twenties. But if we imagine ourselves the in the nineteen twenties, they must have looked provocative beyond belief, far from any imaginable reality. Indeed, they are drawn that way, with the perspective drawn as above, which the ordinary viewer would never see. This means these proposals can easily be read as speculative necessity, a seizing of opportunity by the architect who's tools are drawing rather than building, as a vision, and in the end, as 'utopia'.
But if we imagine ourselves in 1933, the mood has changed entirely. If you look at the post below ('Le Corbusier the Fascist') I say of course he was, but within a great many qualifications; such as it is impossible to imagine him holding any of the more idiotic views of Nazism (for instance).
And now, when we look at his 1933 scheme for Antwerp and see that in his endnote to The Radiant City's republication a year before his death; his coda, the end, he raises this to the summit of his achievements; his attempts at a 'Homeric world' we begin to understand why:

We understand that under the conditions of the thirties he genuinely thought he might be able to win that competition and build it. This was the dream worked out. He produced 30m of drawings to prove it; we are confronted not by views from the metaphorical mountaintop, but designs for traffic intersections and underpasses. He was bitterly disappointed when it was rejected.
This further sheds light on the notion of the hero; Le Corbusier's self image as a latter day Odysseus. If your intention is always to act, then you are mostly doomed to fail. Such a notion is embodied in the very concept of the hero, since as humans, how can we expect to be able to compete with figures who are half mortal and half immortal god. This is the difference between me and James Bond; James Bond is a necessary fiction.
So how extraordinary complex these images become, not just as images that might conjour up a bad day in Stevenage, but in the mental construct of their author. Our contemporary technologies are ridding us of the opportunity to act, there are no heroes anymore, but the apparent fallacies that underpin the attempt would seem to be genuine human weakness. It would seem an absolute cosmological necessity not to abolish tragedy.