le modulor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.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. 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.

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.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.

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!" 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. 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.

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.

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

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.

imformation from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulor