The revelations about Le Corbusier’s political beliefs have come to light in books published this year — 50 years after his death — including “ Le Corbusier, un fascisme français ” by Xavier de Jarcy and François Chaslin’s “ Un Corbusier. ” These studies of archived material sparked a national debate in France over the architect’s legacy and exposed the connection between Le Corbusier, anti-Semitism, fascism and the Vichy regime.

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Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme ” does not touch on any of this. It chooses to present the architect’s development and evolution within the artistic and architectural context of the age. Le Corbusier, the exhibit claims (in a purple and near-incomprehensible language that only exists, and indeed thrives, in art galleries), “drew on the organic laws of human perception and cognition to define the principles of a multi-faceted creativity at the origins of modernism.”

This included a design principle Le Corbusier named the Modulor, a system of measurement on the scale of the average man that he became oddly obsessed with after he conceived it in 1943. This Monsieur Tout-le-monde, or Everyman, with a height of 183 cm, or 226cm with his arm in the air, was presented by Le Corbusier as a matter of philosophical, scientific and historical fact, since he claimed it to be based upon classical systems. The Modulor would be used in the conception of his greatest work, the Unité d’habitation — perhaps the finest piece of modernist architecture built in Europe in the 20th century — as well as the planned city of Chandigarh in northern India.

What the exhibition should say, but doesn’t, is that the Modulor was born 1943, in a period in which two ideologies dominated Europe with ideas related to the perfectibility of man and the standardization and rationalization of the human form: communism and fascism; homo Sovieticus and the Aryan race. Modernism had been rejected by the Nazi regime as degenerate, but its principles echoed through many of their grand design projects, including the colossal beach resort at Prora. The connection between totalitarianism and an architectural form that seeks to shape man rather than be shaped by man’s needs is inescapable.

Given Le Corbusier’s fascist sympathies, this seems like a rather important concept and connection to leave out. With all we know about the architect, to try and explain his work, and especially the Modulor, without considering both the political and historical context in which he operated, as well as his own ideological sympathies, is fundamentally dishonest and a total obfuscation. It makes the exhibition a grand lie.

Le Corbusier: Mesures de l’homme ” believes itself to be innovative to the extent that modernist architectural principles are rarely considered with the human dimension in mind.

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