Modulor

Commemorative Swiss coin showing the modulor.

The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions devised by the Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965).

It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the Imperial system and the Metric system. It is based on the height of an English man with his arm raised.

It was used as a system to set out a number of Le Corbusier's buildings and was later codified into two books.

History

Le Corbusier developed the Modulor in the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the work of Leone Battista Alberti, and other attempts to discover mathematical proportions in the human body and then to use that knowledge to improve both the appearance and function of architecture.^[1] The system is based on human measurements, the double unit, the Fibonacci numbers, and the golden ratio. Le Corbusier described it as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things."

With the Modulor, Le Corbusier sought to introduce a scale of visual measures that would unite two virtually incompatible systems: the Anglo Saxon foot and inch and the French Metric system.^[2] Whilst he was intrigued by ancient civilisations who used measuring systems linked to the human body: elbow (cubit), finger (digit), thumb (inch) etc., he was troubled by the metre as a measure that was a forty-millionth part of the meridian of the earth.^[3]

In 1943, in response to the French National Organisation for Standardisation's (AFNOR) requirement for standardising all the objects involved in the construction process, Le Corbusier asked an apprentice to consider a scale based upon a man with his arm raised to 2.20m in height.^[4] The result, in August 1943 was the first graphical representation of the derivation of the scale. This was refined after a visit to the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences in Sorbonne on 7 February 1945 which resulted in the inclusion of a golden section into the representation.^[5]

Whilst initially the Modulor Man's height was based on a French man's height of 1.75m it was changed to six feet in 1946 because "in English detective novels, the good-looking men, such as policemen, are always six feet tall!"^[6] The dimensions were refined to give round numbers and the overall height of the raised arm was set at 2.26m.

Promotion

On the 10 January 1946, Le Corbusier on a visit to New York met with Henry J. Kaiser, an American industrialist whose Kaiser Shipyard had built Liberty Ships during World War Two. Kaiser's project was to build ten thousand new houses a day, but he had changed his mind and decided to build cars instead.^[7] During the interview, Le Corbusier sympathised with Kaiser's problems of coordinating the adoption of equipment between the American and English armies because of the differences in units of length and promoted his own harmonious scale.^[8]

On the same trip he met with David E. Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority to promote the use of his harmonious scale on further civil engineering projects.^[9]

He also applied the principle of the Modulor to the efficient design of distribution crates in post war France.^[10]

Graphic representation

The graphic representation of the Modulor, a stylised human figure with one arm raised, stands next to two vertical measurements, a red series based on the figure's navel height (1.08m in the original version, 1.13m in the revised version) then segmented according to Phi, and a blue series based on the figure's entire height, double the navel height (2.16m in the original version, 2.26m in the revised), segmented similarly. A spiral, graphically developed between the red and blue segments, seems to mimic the volume of the human figure.

Practical application

Le Corbusier used his Modulor scale in the design of many buildings, including:

Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles

In his first book The Modulor, Le Corbusier has a chapter on the use of the modular in the Unité d'Habitation. The modular governs: the plan, section and elevations; the brise-soleil; the roof; the supporting columns and the plan and section of the apartments. It was also used for the dimensions of the commemorative stone laid on 14 October 1947.^[11] A version of the Modulor Man was cast in concrete near the entrance.

Church of Sainte Marie de La Tourette

In the Church of Sainte Marie de La Tourette Le Corbusier floors the majority of the church in pale concrete panels set to Modulor dimensions.^[12] Also, the engineer Iannis Xenakis applied the Modulor system to the design of the exterior vertical ventilators or "ondulatoires".^[13]

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

In the Carpenter Center the Modulor system was used for the brise-soleil distances, the floor to floor heights, the bay distances and the column thicknesses.^[14] Le Corbusier conceived that the dimensioning of the entrance ramp would be "visible essay on the mathematics of the human body".^[15]

Publication

Le Corbusier published Le Modulor in 1948, followed by Modulor 2 in 1955. These works were first published in English as The Modulor in 1954 and Modulor 2 (Let the User Speak Next) in 1958.

The 2004 reprinted box set including both books was printed in a square format using the Modulor with the series twenty seven to one hundred and forty reduced in size to one tenth.^[16]

Criticism

Critics of the Modulor have raised concerns with the system. In the words of Robin Evans, the female body "was only belatedly considered and rejected as a source of proportional harmony".^[17]

Commemorative Usage

Backside of the Swiss 10 CHF banknote, showing the Modulor

• A picture of the Modulor appears on the eighth banknote series on the 10 CHF Swiss banknote dedicated to Le Corbusier.

See also

• Body proportions
• Rudolf Wittkower
• Vitruvian Man
• Anthropometry
• Ergonomics
• Rule of thumb
• List of strange units of measurement
• Preferred number, especially the section about Renard series, which covers a mathematical approach on evenly distributed numbers using geometric sequences, for use in constructing houses or devices.

Footnotes

1. ^ Ostwald, Michael(2001) p146
2. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p17
3. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p20
4. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p36
5. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p43
6. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p56
7. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p52
8. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p115
9. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p53
10. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p122
11. ^ Le Corbusier(2004) p131
12. ^ Samuel(2007) p62
13. ^ Samuel(2007) p83
14. ^ Sekler & Curtis (1978) p158
15. ^ Sekler & Curtis (1978) p182
16. ^ Le Corbusier (2004). The Modulor 2. Birkhäuser. p. back cover. 
17. ^ Ostwald(2001) p146

Sources

• Curtis, William, and Eduard F. Sekler. 1978. Le Corbusier at Work: The Genesis of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Evans, Robin. 1995. The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-05049-8
• Le Corbusier (2004). The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. Basel & Boston: Birkhäuser.  Second impression of the 2000 facsimile reprint of the first English edition, in 2 volumes, 1954 and 1958. ISBN 3-7643-6188-3 (Basel); ISBN 0-8176-6188-3 (Boston)
• Ostwald, Michael. 2001. "The Modulor and Modulor 2 by Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), 2 volumes. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000" [book review]. Nexus Network Journal 3, no. 1:145–48.
• Samuel, Flora (2007). Corbusier in Detail. Architectural Press. 

External links

• Proportional Systems in the architecture of Le Corbusier