Where is the place of the human being in modern architecture?
In a period of experimentations with new materials, 3D printing, and augmented reality; in a period where technology seems to gradually replace human skills and craft, where electronic kiosks can take your order in a restaurant, where even humanoid robots can make medical diagnosis, where is the place of the human in this transformers world? Above all, where is the place of the human in modern architecture?
Architecture has always been the concrete answer to some of the most vital human problems: for example, to protect ourselves from the elements and wild animals or to offer a place where we can fulfil our primary needs like eating, sleeping, resting and socialising.
In recent years, a lot of factors have crossed the road of architecture, constantly shifting its path. All these influential factors have a different origin: economical, political, technological, social, psychological, and cultural. But in this, what about human needs? Man’s primary needs appear to be lost in this muddle of superficial external factors, which obscure the true aim of architecture: design for the human being.
Recently, in the architecture practice, we can observe how it’s a common practice to deny the utility of an object to increase its beauty. However, usually, this process often convolutes the actual meaning of this said object, and consequently a denial of its beauty. For example, many building facades with their eccentric forms or their overly stressed and symmetric proportions do not allow an easy identification of the entrance. How many times have we negatively judged a building just because its apparently beautiful exterior form leads to a loss of internal orientation?
According to Simona Chiodo, author of a number of books on the relation between aesthetics and architecture and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at DAStu (Politecnico di Milano), asserts that “an architectural object can be beautiful if its aesthetic dimension facilitates, and does not obstruct, its utility, because its utility means facilitating an essential part of its identity”, which is the “human measure”. In other words, to design a beautiful architecture we must begin from the human proportion and measure.
To support this argument, that beauty, utility, and human proportions are strictly connected, this essay focuses primarily on one very famous building: the Unité D’Habitation by Le Corbusier. After a general overview of the architect and the Modern Movement (of which the Unité D’Habitation was the catalyst after the World War II), the essay will explain the fundamental concept of Le Corbusier’s Modulor and describe the architecture, and why it is considered one of the finest examples of beauty based on human proportion. This building is an example on how utility can be link with human proportion without loosing its beauty; it may not be the answer to the contemporary problem of architecture. However,
it shows a glimmer to light up one of the infinitive possible paths, which the contemporary architect can follow to read the present society, with its problems but most of all unlimited potentiality.
Le Corbusier’s Unité D’Habitation as a timeless example of a beautiful ”machine à l’habiter”
It is possible to consider that the “machine à l’habiter” is ancient and out-dated. That it cannot be used as an example for the 21st century where concrete has been replaced by lighter and prefabricated materials and the requirements of a house are different from the ones after World War II, when there was the necessity to build quickly, with some modern conveniences, for a huge number of people and respecting the latest health and safety regulations.
There are many reasons why the Unité D’Habitation has been chosen as an example in which beauty, proportions, and utility come together to create one of the buildings that changed the architecture of the 20th century.
The first reason can be found in the architect who designed the building: Charles-Edouard Jeannearet or better known as Le Corbusier.
Charles-Edouard Jeannearet was born in the Swiss town of La-Chaux-de-Fonds on October 6th, 1887 from a family of artists: his father designed boxes and watches, while his mother was a piano teacher. He didn’t have professional training as an architect but at 15 he entered the municipal art school of his birth town. Jeannearet started teaching himself architecture through readings, visiting museums, sketching buildings and traveling all around Europe (Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, etc.). He left his hometown to move to Paris in 1917 with the new name of Le Corbusier. During these years he had already established himself as an avant-garde architect and had already started thinking about his Five Points and sketching the DomIno House (1914-1915). These ideas would emerge later in his book on the Five Points of a New Architecture (1927) and in the design of the Unité D’Habitation (1944). Between 1918 and 1922, Le Corbusier worked more as a Purist painting, developing his ideology as a painter. He continued with his theoretical studies, which led him to the design of the Maison “Citrohan”, which was a further development, after the Domino House, to solve the housing problem and design for “modern people”. He was convinced that “A grand epoch has just begun. There exists a new spirit. There already exists a crowd of works in the new spirit, they are found especially in industrial production. Architecture is suffocating in its current uses”. His most famous maxim, Une maison est une machine-à-habiter (A house is a machine to live in), was formulated during these years.
In 1928, Le Corbusier endeavoured to Modern Movement as the greatest style in Europe with the foundation of the CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architect) to establish the basis of this new style.
As the Great Depression ravaged Europe, the architect focused more on urban design and the designing solutions for the mass housing needed by the working class. In 1944, at the end of World War II, these previous topics were used to the design of the Unité D’Habitation.
Le Corbusier died in France in 1965, after 20 years of a renown career in designing a different types of “making architecture” represented by, for example, Chapelle of Notre–Dame-Du-Haut (1950-1955) or Chandigarh (1951 -1956), which today are considered architectural masterpieces.
The architecture of the 20th century has been heavily influenced by the figure of Le Corbusier as an urbanist, an architect, a painter and a philosopher “who ruminated on the human condition in the modern age”. He designed buildings of different typologies (houses, churches, museums, etc.) all around the world, which reflected his vision of the world and society. Countless authors have written books on his “full of shades” personality and his figure has attracted reverence and denigration since his death. One thing is certain, the history of architecture cannot be completely understood without the figure of this architect, pioneer of the Modern Movement and careful observer of the human condition and needs in the modern age.
Secondly, there’s another reason, directly connected with the figure of Le Corbusier, why the Unité D’Habitation is an appropriate example of unit between beauty, utility and human proportion. The history of architecture has always been related to the concept of proportion and beauty and to the unsolvable question: is the beauty of an object intrinsic to its geometry or in the eye of the observer? In the past, beauty has always been related to three canons: repetition, harmony, and variety. Recently, some architects have added a fourth requirement: the human scale.
According to Kappraff, an American professor of mathematics, the human scale is important because it “reflects the desire of humans to feel personally connected to their art and their dwellings”. He argues that in the history of architecture “two systems succeeded to some measure in satisfying the canons of proportion: the antiquity one, used by Roman architects, and the second one developed by Le Corbusier during the 20th century.”
It is with Vitruvius (80/70 B.C – 15 B.C), in his celebrated work “De Architectura”, that for the first time we can find a written explanation of the importance of proportion in
architecture and of the relationship between human proportion and architecture, through the relationship established between man and nature. In the chapter “On symmetry: in
Temples and the Human Body”, Vitruvius clearly delineated the use of the human body as a model for architecture:
“[..] since nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients have good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme. […] Further, it was from the members of the body that they derived the fundamental ideas of the measures which are obviously necessary in all works, as the finger, palm, foot and cubit.”
Vitruvius’s theory of the relationship between proportion, human scale, and beauty was supported during the Renaissance by other authors such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 1472), Filarete (1400 – 1469), and Di Giorgio Martini (1439 -1501).
At the end of the Renaissance Kappraff stated that “the proportion system collapsed and the architecture, without an adequate system, start bringing awful results.” Le Corbusier created the first modern system of proportion, the Modulor, based on the irrational number phi, the golden mean (which modulates the parts of the human body) and the Fibonacci series. The Modulor was first of all a theoretical idea, used by Le Corbusier and other architects. However it was also often used as a literally measure for some architectural projects, such as for example the Unite D’Habitation.
The last reason why the Unite D’Habitation can be seen as a building, which has changed the course of the 20th century architecture, it is also the final point of Le Corbusier’s thirty years of research on the theme of the modern man and the relationship between beauty and utility. It is the architecture in which all his theory of “The Five Points of Architecture”, the Modulor, and the ideology of the Modern Movement converge.
Modernist architecture is a term used to group different styles of architecture that emerged during the first half of the 20th century and became more famous after World War II. All these styles are united by multiple features: the rejection of the traditional neoclassical architecture and Beaux-Arts that were popular in the 19th century and the use of new industrial materials like steel, reinforced concrete, and glass.
Le Corbusier, who was one of the pioneers of this movement in Europe, co-founded in 1920 a journal called “L’Esprit Nouveau” to promote an architecture that was “functional, pure, and free of any decoration or historical associations”. This kind of architecture is the perfect example of a style, which tries to combine the beauty of no-decorations materials with their function. Le Corbusier’s himself explained that he “had given the house its fundamental importance, calling it “machine to live in,” thus exacting from it the complete and perfect answer to a well-set question.”
The Modulor
The image of the individual human played a fundamental role in Le Corbusier’s work: it is the unit of measurement of all the parts of a building. “One must always try to find the human scale,” said Le Corbusier, “an architecture must be walked through, traversed”.
After many years of study, in 1948 the architect published a book “Le Modulor” (followed in 1955 by another version “Le Modulor 2”), in which he explained his proportion system based on the human scale, to be used during the design of a building. The Modulor is literally based on the height of a man (1.83m) with his arm raised up (2.26m). Even if Le Corbusier’s modern system of proportion was influenced by Vitruvius’ man and Leonardo’s man, “it was based on the irrational number Phi and the golden ratio, through the double geometric and Fibonacci Phi series”.
This new proportional system, which follows the canons to build a good design (repetition, harmony, variety, and human scale), was more than a revival of the Renaissance theory; it went beyond inscribing the human figure in a circle and in a square.
“Le Corbusier’s man” is more dynamic and is related to the environment and to the surroundings. The architect in his theory understood that the man is not perfect and immutable. Le Corbusier studied the human being not only as a perfect proportional scheme coming from nature, but above all as a biological organism, which continuously changes from its birth, during its life, to its death.
At this point, it is necessary to consider that Le Corbusier was also a purist artist and that this part of his personality influenced a lot both his way of seeing the world “as a microcosm governed by mathematics and his restless research of the absolutely beautiful measures”.
All these reflections upon the human being enabled Le Corbusier translate theory to practice, as shown in the Unité d’Habitation of Marseilles. In effect, in one of the chapters of his book “Le Modulor” Le Corbusier explained how to use this system of proportion in all the different parts of the buildings, from the structure of the building to the roof, from the elevation to the brise-soleil.
What is even more interesting, as well as making Le Corbusier’s research deeper and a step further compared with Vitruvius’ proportional system, is that the Swiss architect joined into a unique proportion system the figure of the “modern man” but also the one of the “modern woman”.
As a matter of fact, the Modulor is composed by two series, the blue (man) and the red (woman) series, coming from the Fibonacci phi series. As Kappraff explains in his book, the blue is a phi series, while the red series “is the arithmetic mean of successive lengths of the blue series that brace it”.
Le Corbusier used this new proportion system as a means to help him design an architecture for the modern men and women, who felt unfamiliar and extraneous in the buildings built in the 19th and 20th century.
The Modulor was not only a concrete means to design architectures for everyone but also an ideology to try to understand the human needs after the destruction of World War II and the place of the man in the modern world.
The Unité D’Habitation
The Unite D’Habitation was commissioned to Le Corbusier by the French State in December 1945. Raoul Dautry, the Minister of Reconstruction and City Planning of the city of Marseilles, asked the Swiss architect to design a building, which could be
“built quickly, must contain a large number of apartments, must comply with all the latest health and safety regulations, must be of attractive design and in addition must contain some modern conveniences“.
This gave Le Corbusier the opportunity, after years of research, to put into practice his ideology (his Modulor proportional system, his five points of architecture and the use of industrial materials), which led to the construction of an architectural symbol of his ideas.
The Unite D’Habitation, built between 1947 and 1952, is “a vertical garden city“ for 1600 people with additional social and cultural features (shops, restaurant, sports area, school, etc.). The apartments follow in section the L-shape with the accesses at alternating levels, as previously studied for a residential development in Geneva, asked by the Swiss businessman Edmond Wanner (1929).
Furthermore, The architecture follows literally “ The Five Points of Architecture” (1926); (1) the building is supported by stout pilotis and it is structurally constituted by a reinforced-concrete frame in which the 337 apartments are inserted, (2) there are 32 different apartment type but all of them is characterized by the plan-libre, (3) the external wall is façade libre
and they are distinguished by brise-soleil, and (5) The roof is toit jardin and it includes some
common facilities (like a nursery school and a gymnasium), while there are some other common areas (like shops, restaurant) at level 7 and 8, which can be distinguished also from the outside thanks to their height.
Adhering to the ideology of the Modern Movement, the architecture is functional and free of any decorations. The materials used are reinforced concrete and steel beams. There is a correspondence between exterior and interior: from the outside, the façades show exactly the interior functions and change their character when there is a shift from private apartments to common areas. The aesthetic dimension of the building facilitates and does not obstruct its utility.
The rough use of concrete without any finishing touch has often led to an easily association between the Unite D’Habitation with brutalism. However, the massive material (primarily used to control light) embellishes and animates the elevation, through careful measurement and dimensioning across the building. Further, the contrast with the glass and steel gave an innovative look for those years. According to Francoise Choay, a French architectural and urban historian and theorist, “the aesthetics coincides with logic [and…] each architectural element becomes an opportunity for sculpture, although it never loses its function”.
As far as the use of the Modulor is concerned, and consequently of the human proportion for the design of the architecture, the same Le Corbusier claimed that it was used for the “General Plan and Section” and for a typical apartment.
Even if some authors are very sceptical about the use of the Modulor in all the parts of the building, the starting point of Le Corbusier’s project was solving the housing problems and creating a mass housing building for the modern human being. It’s normal, and it would be strange if the opposite were true, that sometimes the common sense has the best on some cold numerical measurements. What is really interesting in Le Corbusier’s approach is the way he designed the feeling of spaces, by trying to physically enter into the project and putting himself in the shoes of the users of his homes.
What really makes Le Corbusier’s works well known also today is his understanding of the machine world in which he was born and his efforts to design a solution for the modern man “lost in the frenetic development of the technique”.
Conclusion
The Unite D’Habitation as a piece of architecture that has been debated and there were in the past some dissenting views on its non-compliance to the health and safety regulation, the brutalist external facades, the poor sound insulation, the wrong light control, and the
construction system. However, it is necessary to consider that it was a prototype for mass housing to answer the needs of the modern man and woman. It was not just a housing.
Rather, it was a “cité radieuse” with multiple functions and extra features.
As argued previously, the architecture is completely functional and without any superficial detail. The unfinished concrete and the studies of the lights and the human’s proportions give to the interior an aesthetic and sculptural result. Le Corbusier’s work was an innovative response for the period, in line with the new technologies and the new industrial development; a non-utopian answer to the destruction of the world and the need of mass housing.
Even though, when the building was finished no one wanted to move there to start a new life after the war, and even if today, when looking at the building, most of the people consider it strange and unpleasant because of the grey concrete façade, the “vertical garden city” has always been occupy. The architecture is an alive cultural place where people meet and are induced to meet thanks to the position of stairs, lifts and corridors. Furthermore, the happy life in the condominium is supported by the different common areas, which are still used.
The Unite D’Habitation is the third most visited place in Marseilles and its prototype has been replicated four times (Reze 1955, West Berlin 1957, Briey 1961, Firminy 1967). The architecture has been candidated for membership to the UNESCO World Heritage as “an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement” and it has influenced entire generations of architects during the 20th century.
This architecture is the perfect example of how the aesthetic dimension comes from functional elements and a deep reflection on the relationship between contemporary human proportions and needs. The argument is not to bring to a repetition of the same building in our cities, since it would be completely wrong in our society, were the technology, habits, needs and way of living are completely different, but to underline how the process leading to the design of this architecture has been based on a careful consideration of contextual and external factors, preserving the anthropocentrism of the discipline.
In his 2012 book Museum without Walls, architecture critic Jonathan Meades wrote:
“The roof of l’Unité is a transcendent work: it is as though Odysseus is beside you. In a few
gestures, it summons the entirety of the Mediterranean’s mythic history. It is exhilarating and humbling, it occasions aesthetic bliss. It demonstrates the beatific power of great art, great architecture.”
To understand how the contemporary situation can be managed, we are forced to look at the past, while considering the current problems and needs. Do we need a new proportional system? Or do we just need to isolate the architecture from superficial externalities, which negatively affect the end result? Maybe we don’t need a unique transcendent work but different architectures, which with their beauty, utility and human proportion, can create a new “Odysseus” landscape.