C 2329 MODERN ARCHITECTURE [LE CORBUSIER, THE MODULOR AND UNITE D HABITATION]

Le Corbusier
Modulor System
Unite D' Habitation

Content

Architect Profile...2
System THE MODULOR....5
Building UNITE D' HABITATION....8
Summary MODULOR...19
Reference BIBILIOGRAPHY...19

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Architect Profile LE CORBUSIER (1887–1965)

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, one of the greatest architects of the early 1900’s, was
born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, on October 6th, 1887. He was known
throughout the world as an architect, urban planner, painter, sculptor and author.
His "…early work was related to nature, but as his ideas matured, he developed the
Maison-Domino, a basic building prototype for mass production with free-standing
pillars and rigid floors" ("Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, Le Corbusier"). His ideas
became foundational to the modern approach to architecture.

Jeanneret’s father was an engraver of white enamel dial plates for watches and
clocks, but he did not desired to follow in his father’s footsteps as an engraver. At
the age of 13, he began studying at the La Chaux-de-Fond’s college of art. It was
here that he was introduced to the idea of becoming an architect. At first he hated
the idea because he didn’t like what he saw being done in architecture. Despite his
initial feelings, he studied architecture under Charles L’Eplattenier from 1900 to
1907. In 1905, he was assigned his first project, later to be called Villa Fallet. The
public did not like his design and expressed their displeasure, which was the
beginning of many skirmishes he would have with public opinion. But from this
project he was able to earn enough money to travel to Italy to see first hand
different architecture and to develop a personal perspective that was not molded by
the opinion of a school. Between 1907 and 1911, he traveled to northern and central
Italy, Budapest, Vienna, Lyon and Paris, Germany, the Balkans, Greece and
Constantinople traveling with a backpack containing a few personal belongings and a
scratch pad to sketch what architecture he saw along his journey.

For a short time from 1908 to 1909, Jeanneret worked for an architect named
Auguste Perret who built with reinforced concrete. Perret was hated by many people
in the profession and not considered a true architect. Jeanneret gained much of his
architectural experience working for Perret. In 1910, he traveled to Germany where
he went to work for Peter Behrens in Berlin, but, in 1912, returned to La Chaux-de-

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Fonds to become an instructor in the newly founded architecture department at the

college of art.
After 1915, Jeanneret’s designs became more radical. But from the beginning he
experienced much hostility towards his ideas. Later, though, he became widely
recognized and left a permanent mark on the concept of modern architecture and
city planning. His design strategy was to use sensible systems that were functional in
living with the use of simple modules and spaces. Through his designs, he tended to
be extreme. He incorporated industrial forms into his housing and apartment
schemes; these concepts of residential building designs came about by his study of
the problems in architecture and urban planning during the industrial era. Whether
designing a city plan or a building, his main focus was to always place man at the
center of his design principles. The architecture was always to support the functions
of the person whether working, relaxing, or partaking in other activity.
Jeanneret became the founder and co-publisher of the periodical "L’Esprit Nouveau"
(The New Spirit) in 1920 and began signing his articles under the name Le Corbusier,
which was his maternal grandmother’s name. Within L’Esprit Nouveau, he wrote
articles which supported his theories on architecture, one being the idea of a house
as "a machine for living." His style of architecture and writings focused on
contemporary needs, modern materials, and engineering achievements.

In 1923, a building was built in Vaucresson, near Paris, according to his design. This
was the first of many. Other well known buildings designed by him are the pilgrim
church Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1950-55), the Visual Arts Center at
Harvard University (1961-62), the Pavillon Suisse in the Cite Universitaire in Paris
(1932), the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro (1936-1945), and the
Philips-Pavillon at the Brussels World Fair (1958). In 1934, Le Corbusier received an
honorary doctoral degree from the University of Zurich; later, in 1955, he received an
honorary doctoral degree from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich after
beginning his studies for "Modulor" in 1941 and designing and building many of his
buildings.

After World War II, Le Corbusier "rejected his earlier industrial forms and
utilized vernacular materials, brute concrete and articulated structure" ("Charles-
Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, Le Corbusier"). Within these architectural designs or town-
planning schemes the vehicular, pedestrian and functional zones were always
emphasized; as before, the person was the focal point.
He was involved in many city-planning projects but only two of these project
implemented his ideas completely; one city was Pessac-Bordeaux and the
other Chandigarh, India.

"In this latter project, Le Corbusier received a contract from the government of India
in 1950 to build the new capital of the Indian state of Punjab, which was established
after the Second World War. Here in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier applied on a grand
scale all the disciplines practiced by him. As a planning consultant, he directed the
team of architects who were responsible for the project. He himself designed the
three major buildings that dominate the government district: The Palace of Justice
(1955), the Secretariat (1958), which houses the various ministries, and the

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Parliament Building (1962)" ("The portrayed personalities/10 franc banknote: Le

Corbusier").

Between 1942 and 1955, Le Corbusier founded the Modular, his own scale of
measurement of architecture, which measured the standard human height to be
1829 millimeters. "The ‘Modulor’ represents an attempt to combine the English
measuring system, which is based on the foot, with the metric decimal system and,
at the same time, to establish relationships with human anatomical stature. The
‘Modulor’ is based on the golden section and the proportions of the human body"
("The portrayed personalities/10 franc banknote: Le Corbusier").

Besides his architectural involvement, Le Corbusier was also known for his paintings.
Through painting he foresaw the formal elements of architecture. When he painted,
he experimented with ideas of design (i.e. space, volume and mass) and later
applied many of these ideas to architecture. His art was influenced by his contact
with Cubism, Leger and Purism, and with the pre-war Surrealist movement.
Le Corbusier died on August 27, 1965 in France by the Mediterranean at
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.
Some of his ideas of modern architecture were:
1. To replace cellars and foundations with upright forms driven in the ground to
serve as the foundation.
2. To use roof gardens.
3. To free internal planning by changing the position of floor supports so that
there is not a need to interrupt space with a support beam.
4. Having windows run horizontally from wall to wall.
5. Creation of walls that would only serve as curtains and would not carry load.
6. To separate work and relaxation into separate spaces.

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System THE MODULOR

INTRODUCTION
The Modulor is an anthropometric scale of proportions.
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.

The Modulor System

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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.

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.

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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.[10]

Le corbusier believe Modulor Man's height was based on a French man's height of
1.75m.
Le Corbusier asked an apprentice to consider a scale based upon a man with his arm
raised to 2.20m in height. 
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.

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Building UNITE D' HABITATION

INTRODUCTION
The design for this building was originally dubbed "Housing Unit" (Unité d'Habitation
in French), and it became the basis for several buildings designed by the same
architect throughout Europe of the same name. To distinguish the buildings, this
original building in Marseille, France, is now called the Radiant City, and known in
French as Cité Radieuse. It also known informally as the "House of the Mad" (Maison
du Fada in French). This building was the first order Corbusier received from the
French state, and it is one of Corbusier's iconic projects and one of the basic
references for any architect. Starts to be scheduled immediately after the Second
World War (1945-46), entering into construction in 1951. This work, on an
unprecedented scale for its author, is relentizada by budget problems and will take
five years to run, instead of the originally planned twelve months

The project was the first opportunity to implement Corbusier's theories, to a scale
that would lead to Modulor. At the same time was an innovative integration of a
system of distributing goods and services that provide independent support to the
dwelling unit, responding to the needs of its residents and ensuring operational
autonomy in relation to the outside. This self-intended by nature Corbusier was an
expression of concern that began to emerge in the twenties, in their analysis of
urban phenomena of distribution and circulation began to impact on modern society.
With its system of housing, Le Corbusier was opposed to the desurbanización or, as
he said, the "mania of the houses." Instead, he skyscrapers of urban architecture as

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integrated units to be established exactly a role and have a predetermined. If they

could follow exactly all the services of the community, to fulfill the dream of both the
garden city, as at the foot of the skyscraper would be enough space for a large
green area.

SYSTEM MODULOR
In 1950, Le Corbusier developed the concept of module, a new system of proportions
based on the Renaissance, which replaces the traditional metric.
This measurement system is based on the actions of human beings, contrary to what
decimal system. In the words of Le Corbusier, a machine, a cabinet or a newspaper
are extensions of man. And the architecture and therefore, any object created by
man, should impacts both mental and emotional level but also at more physical or
body. " Projects like the Unity Room Marseille (1947-1952, France), the Chapel of
Ronchamp (1950-1954, France) and the city of Chandigarh in India were based on
the system Modulor.

The plan

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Naked Rainforced Concrete

Column

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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. A version of the Modulor Man was cast in concrete near the
entrance

Commemorative Stone

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Section

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The Elevation

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Buildings Model

The Roof that support the modulor system

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The brise-soleil also support the modulor system

Green Invironment

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Elevated on pilotis, with access corridors on every third floor to double-heihgt full
width apartments with sun-screen elevations. and with a roof play exercise space

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The Circulation

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Summary MODULOR
I summaries the modulor is gorvens lengts, surfaces and volumes. It
maintains the human scale everywhere, lending itself to an infinitary of
combinations, it ensures unity within divetsity, an inestimable boon, the miracle of
numbers.

Reference BIBILIOGRAPHY
The modulor Book 1 - Le Cobusier
The modulor Book 2 - Le Cobusier edited by Cambridge University
www.greatbuildings.com
www.scribd.com
en.wikipedia.org

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