metaphysical & metaphorical musings : art, architecture, and arithmetic

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Going Modulor

The search for science has led me back to Le Corbusier's Le Modulor.  The standard scale of modern architecture, this is the metric of Pruitt-Igoe, the science behind the space.  In the pursuit of a "living-machine" that takes the human as its measure, Yamasaki created an unlivable-machine.

We get a break on this one; the science already shows its fabrication.  The standard for modulor was changed ex post facto, from 1.75 metres to 6 feet, from the height of the average Frenchman to the height of good-looking policemen in English detective novels.

As previously noted, modulor is homophonous with modular, synonymous with infinitely repeatable design, like the homogenous blocks of Pruitt-Igoe.  Modular housing itself is prefabricated structures that can be moved; in the case of Pruitt-Igoe, the buildings weren't modular, but the design (based on the Modulor) assumed that its residents were--that humans can be picked up and deposited into prefabricated spaces and philosophies.

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