21 - Le Corbusier’s Modulor and the Debate on Proportion in France

Summary

On Friday, September 28, 1951, Le Corbusier addressed the First International Conference on Proportion in the Arts at the Milan Triennale, introducing, with affirmed modesty, the system of proportional measurements he had invented in the preceding years as if it were an elementary, prosaic tool: “The Modulor, which I have described to you, is a simple work tool, a tool such as aviation, such as many other improvements created by men.” But his position at the Milan event was far from modest, as he was the only contributor to have arrived armed not only with an analytical theory, but also with a structured attempt at proposing a comprehensive proportional system, which was ready for implementation at all the scales of architectural design.

One year earlier, the Paris-based architect had published a compact square volume, entitled Le Modulor, essai sur une mesure harmonique à l’échelle humaine, applicable universellement à l’architecture et à la mécanique (The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics). His book was devoted to the presentation of an ambitious system, accompanied by an endless series of autobiographic considerations. The original neologism of the title belonged to a long series of terms assembled by him, and often edging on the oxymoron, such as the “immeuble-villas” (“villa-apartments”) or the “cité-jardin verticale” (“vertical garden-cities”). In this particular case, the term Modulor was composed by the fusion of the notion of module with the notion of the golden section. In his 1950 volume, Le Corbusier collected not only the results of several years of research specifically devoted to the creation of his own system, as discussed below, but also those of decades spent thinking about proportions and standards, in the context of an open, and often heated debate involving painters, philosophers, scientists, as well as architects.

In his presentation of the Modulor, Le Corbusier insisted on measurements, proposing an analogy with music, a field he was familiar with: according to him, the Modulor was “a tool of linear or optical measures, similar to musical script.” This parallel with music was meant to be explored in his office in the 1950s by the young Greek engineer and composer Yannis Xenakis, who worked on key projects such as the La Tourette monastery and the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair.