Figure 34. Cesare Cesariano, De Architectura, 1521
Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur was not a new conceptualisation of the body-in-space. It derived from a specific context alongside his own artistic development and continued the Western tradition of mathematical inscription upon the body. A comparison of Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur – literally ‘figure’ and ‘space lines’ – and Laban’s and Corbusier’s formulations of the body, with the representation of classical depictions of the ‘Vitruvian man’, yields remarkable similarities. The Vitruvian figure has been used throughout post-Renaissance Western culture as an index of the rational human subject. It continued into modernity as the hinge for certain ‘modernist’ representations of the body. Previously, the body was made to speak of its divine mathematical harmony. In modernity it articulated an aesthetic of order and stability. As I have shown, modernity’s investigation of ‘Man’ as a body of knowledge freed the body from its mathematical dependency in its relocation of epistemology to embodiment. Indeed, it was in this same historical moment that Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) argued for an environmental-genetic evolution of organisms, suggesting an organic process of bodily development. A modern Darwinian model of the human body therefore opposed the static ‘divine’ template afforded to humanity in Vitruvian man. Broadly speaking, the former idea conceived the body within a perpetual process of dynamic interaction with its environment whilst the latter offers a fixed, ‘closed’ body. Having been discussed in Vitruvius’s De Architectura more than two millennia ago, the ‘ideal’ figure persists as an index for a cultural imagination of the body that maintains its popular symbolism through cultural references. It is worth noting that Vitruvius is considered as the first architect to define his ideas in writing, as his proto-architectural doctrine describes a ‘symmetrical harmony’ of the body that can be utilised for ‘perfect buildings’.1 This architectonic conception of the body-in-space has already been demonstrated in Schlemmer’s work, and I now show how it informs the body produced by Laban and Corbusier.
Vitruvius’s work was rediscovered in 1414 by Poggio Bracciolini and then was made more widely known by Alberti. Subsequent translations of Vitruvius’s writings appeared throughout Europe during the sixteenth-century. Fra Giovanni Giocondo – himself an architect – made the woodcuts that served for the first illustrated print of De Architectura in 1511, a treatise that influenced subsequent generations of architects. The Italian translation of Vitruvius, by Cesare Cesariano in 1521 (see Figs 34 and 35), attempted to reconstruct the guidelines he had laid out for architectural principles based on the proportion of man as a divine reflection. Vitruvius states firstly that the principles of architectural design for a temple must depend on ‘symmetry and proportion … [like] those of a well shaped man’.2
Whilst it may seem common sense for buildings to be proportioned in relation to the shape and movement of their users, the basic principle of architecture is premised on a specific male body. However, Vitruvius next reduces, or rather, forces, the body to conform to an aesthetic of perfect geometry that came to inspire the production of ‘Vitruvian man’:
just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it … nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole … and that there is a symmetrical correspondence between the members separately and the entire form of the body with a certain part selected as standard.3
The realisation of Vitruvius’s ideas by Renaissance artists created a striking religious iconography. Giocondo and Cesariano represent the harmony upon which architecture should be founded as akin to the position of Jesus’s crucifixion. It must have occurred to Renaissance designers that the tortured, crucified body was reproduced in Vitruvius’s postulates. Whilst Jesus’s crucifixion occurred after Vitruvius wrote, crucifixion was a well-known method of execution in Classical times, one that Renaissance thinkers invariably recreated as they illustrated the tortured body whilst contorting it to geometric principles. We see this most emphatically in Cesariano’s depiction. Elsewhere the religious and the mathematical are conflated. In Francesco di Giorgio’s illustrations (Figs 37 and 38) – whilst not specifically of Vitruvian man – it is interesting to note the body’s structural and dimensional division into squares, with a central circle, grafted upon a direct representation of the cross. This served as the design for the architecture of a church. The central circle reflects Vitruvius’s claim that ‘[b]y means of this, through the architectural principles and the employment of the compasses, we find out the operation of the sun in the universe. In the midst thereof, the earth and sea naturally occupy the central point.’4 The body was constructed therefore from the synthesis of a discursive network.
Cesariano’s figure was close to Vitruvius’s ideal of the body within the geometry of the square and circle. However, like the tortured bodies configured by, and figuring, the cross, this body is disproportionate. Cesariano attempted to coerce the body into the Vitruvian ideal but instead skewed its representation. Mathematical rules distort the world in fitting it to an abstract model. For those that proceeded to read divine construction in Platonic geometry, Leonardo’s Vitruvian man (Fig. 39) testified, in its embodiment of a geometric harmony that governed the world, that man is the measure of all things. The image is still used support this claim. Philip Steadman remarks that ‘this is not evidence of an anthropocentric world-view. Since man was made in the image of God, so it was believed the proportions exemplified in the human form would reflect a divine and cosmic order’.5 I would suggest, on the contrary, that this implies that the Vitruvian man is evidence of an anthropocentric orientation because he is the image of God, and conversely, God is an image of man, since the mathematically proportioned body is a divine icon of truth. Human relation to divinity was ‘proved’ through the mathematical inscription of the body. Wittkower writes:
With the Renaissance revival of the Greek mathematical interpretation of God and the world, and invigorated by the Christian belief that Man as the image of God embodied harmonies of the Universe, the Vitruvian figure inscribed in a square and a circle became a symbol of the mathematical sympathy between microcosm and macrocosm.6
This anticipates Schlemmer’s bodily regime constructed upon a cosmic order. Laban’s production of the body in postwar Weimar culture also participated in such a universal structure, constructed according to classical laws on dimension. Renaissance architects employed the Vitruvian figure as the basis for design, under the mistaken belief that this was actual classical practice, which satisfied contemporary discourses of geometry and divinity. Like Schlemmer’s question regarding its primacy, the body was conceptualised through existing geometric principles that came to constitute its internal structural order. The modernist redeployment of the Vitruvian man is part of a phantasmic recuperation of the traumatised subject and its body according to the fantasised aesthetics of a mathematically objective, universal order.
The reclamation of Vitruvian ontology did not, however, pass without critique. Classical models of the subject’s location in space and time had been challenged in the nineteenth-century. William Blake challenged the Vitruvian figure as an index of Western rationality. Blake believed the body was something that should be open, containing ‘all being, time and space’7 rather than rationally closed. Steffi Engelstein points out, ‘Blake moves fluidly between the form taken by the human body, by human thought, and by human surroundings’.8 Western rationality inhibited a fundamental sense of the self as continuous with the world. As Anne Mellor writes on Blake: ‘all distinctions between the finite and infinite are merely modes of perception … Existence is then pure flux, motion energy.’9 Indeed, Jerusalem finally reunites his fragmented persona into an organic whole. Blake’s critique of the Western subject and its corporeal representation is re-imagined through the transcendent in rethinking man’s relationship to women and the environment. The body was conceived as part of the universe, but as a fluxive energy, which Blake attributes to an organic, infinite God, rather than to rational systems of mathematics and proportion.
Whilst Blake’s approach resonates with prewar imaginations of the subject considered thus far, it is the rationalistic aesthetic of Schlemmer’s version of Vitruvian man that is culturally dominant in the postwar return to order. Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’ are the compositional principle incarcerating Schlemmer’s figure, typifying the alignment of man with Pythagorian geometry that was restored in a postwar culture. This restoration was not just a nostalgic turn, but a cultural and ideological volte-face. Schlemmer’s Vitruvian man of Figur und Raumlineatur very much embodies the rationalised subject of postwar twentieth-century culture. Rudolf Laban, a Weimar dancer and choreographer, shared many similarities with Schlemmer in their post-Blakean reconstitution of the Vitruvian man within stable parameters. Laban abstractly conceptualised the relations of body-time-space in real bodies. He paid meticulous attention to people’s movement, having grown up fascinated with puppet performances and the theatre in his youth. He perceived how social spaces ordered people’s bodily behaviour, for example in the psycho-spatial structures of ‘theatres’ such as funerals and weddings. Such ‘structures’ enforced a regime of bodily practice, modifying behaviour and regulating movement. Laban studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and subsequently developed an interest in the dynamic relationship between form, movement and space.
As with Schlemmer, Laban’s ‘modernity’ consisted of ideas that now seem rather difficult to reconcile. His imagination of being within the world is initially quite Bergsonian, or even Blondelian. He suggested, for example, that ‘the whole visible universe is Motion’, and that human movement is part of universal motions.10 Influenced by theosophy, Laban understood human movement as a microcosm for the celestial movements of planets, of waves, of the architectonic movements of the Earth: nothing exists without some degree of movement, as the ‘electrons which circulate around a central spark like planets around the sun’.11 Therefore the unifying principle of the universe was dynamic movement. He remarked that ‘[o]nce it has been seen that movement runs through every aspect of living reality, it is not a great step to realize that movement brings together and binds experience making it one’.12 Human knowledge, sensorially derived, depends upon waves and vibrations. Movement therefore forms the basis of experience, knowledge and being in the world. Movement could also transform modes of being; Laban observed that psychological states are both affected by, and affect, the type of movement in space. To give a simple example, walking upright, in comparison to a slouched posture, transforms both the person and the space in which they move. Indeed, this consideration of activity and the relativity it introduces to space and time is neglected in Schlemmer’s placing of the taut, rigid mechanised body at the centre of a static matrix.
Despite his belief in movement as a fundamental principle, Laban developed essential laws for the constitution of this movement that were based on architectural, rather than temporal, principles. As Schlemmer sought to extract the fundamental laws of the fixed body-in-space, so Laban sought to analyse its dynamic laws of movement. As Lynn Brooks writes: ‘As an architect, Laban was comfortable with plotting points in space, with manipulating geometric forms … [and he] made explicit in use of the term “body architecture”.’13 Whilst researching movement Laban did not conceptualise it from a ‘bioceptual’ premise, where he might have considered the Bergsonian notion of temporality as the source of being, but rather understood the mathematical organisation of time as the basis for his work.
As Laban disseminated his rules for the body in dance through teaching and writing, he developed his concept of movement as vital to the knowledge and understanding of static form. In 1920 he published Die Welt des Tamers (The Dancer’s World), arguing that life exists not as meaningless flux, but as directed towards some purpose: ‘real dancers hope to communicate a sense of purpose and destiny for the human race’.14 The body’s relationship to space becomes the expression of personality. The two main influences cited by Laban were Plato’s Timaeus (particularly as it contained Pythagorian cosmology) and the Sufism of the Dervishes and their belief in the interconnection of existence through the essence of a unary divinity.15 As a teenager Laban had been trained in perspective and the golden section, and John Hodgson suggests that he was acquainted with Pythagorian thought, as he was taught compositional rules. Later, Laban was attracted by Ancient Greek philosophy, referring to Aristotle and Plato as well as Pythagoras. He developed neologisms like ‘choreosophie’ and ‘choreology’ from an interest in Greek language and etymology that he applied to his own research.
Several concepts in the Timaeus appealed to Laban: notably the universal order of things and, fittingly given the postwar cultural turn, a God creating order from a state of chaos. Laban was particularly attracted to the notion that rules governing celestial planets in rotation and force (the macrocosm) could also be found in human movement (the microcosm). Hodgson comments: ‘Throughout Laban’s writing, there is an underlying belief in an ultimate harmonious structure of the universe.’16 Plato’s discussion of the golden ratio offered geometric shapes as the compositional terms for the divine universe – earth a cube, air an octahedron, water an icosahedron and fire a tetrahedron. If existence and the universe was constituted through four elements, and those elements related to three-dimensional geometric shapes, then Laban – in his desire to directly correlate movement with universal principles – conceptualised the body-in-space in relation to the monadic atom and the crystal with which he became fascinated in researching mathematics and crystallography. For Laban, the divine shape of the crystal – as the ‘shape’ of postwar modernism also seen in revisions of Cubism – was interconnected with the human body. Laban constructed another modern ‘Vitruvian Man’, not through the direct influence of the Renaissance, as Blake, or even Schlemmer had, but based on his Greek influences. In Choreutics (1966), a collection of his postwar theories published posthumously, Laban wrote: ‘Pythagoras proved that the human body is built according to the Golden Section.’17 Hodgson argues:
Laban decided that the icosahedron was the figure within which the human body could best express space relationships and the tensions which all parts of the body can project. By seeing the body in the icosahedron, Laban felt that he was pointing to the link, the relationship between human anatomy, cell structure and the whole cosmos.18
Laban’s imagination of this relationship can be seen in Figure 42. In Choreographie (1926) Laban illustrated his use of the icosahedron. His contemporaries were also immersing themselves in classical Greek theory. Isadora Duncan travelled across Europe performing an imagined version of classical Greek dance19 and Emil Jaques-Dalcroze used Greek ideals in his own structuring of corporeal rhythms through ‘eurhythmics’, deriving his label from the Greek for ‘beautiful’ or ‘harmonious’ rhythm. Laban conceived human relations in a spatial matrix just as Schlemmer had done in Figur und Raumlineatur and Egozentrische Raumlineatur. Indeed, the two men knew one another: Schlemmer wrote to his wife regarding a dance congress, declaring Laban ‘a good man’.20 Conjuring an image akin to Schlemmer’s spatial rules, Laban explained his system thus: ‘When I put people anywhere, I do it according to angles and mathematical relationships to each other … I see … the whole group according to a mathematical pattern. You do it through your feeling.’21 Laban’s words demonstrate that his ‘feeling’ elided the subjective bioceptual for the objectivity of mathematical relations and patterns.
In the introduction to Choreutics, Laban discussed his conception of movement and the environment.22 He began with what would appear to be an embodied principle: ‘Our own movement and those we perceive around us are basic experiences.’23 He described the ‘f]orms of objects, as well as the shapes assumed by living organisms, wax and wane uninterruptedly … The illusion of a standstill is based on the snapshot-like perception of the mind which is able to receive only a single phase of the uninterrupted flux.’24 From a Bergsonian position he condemned the artifice of stasis since ‘forms are simultaneously created with and through movement. The illusion of standstills creates an artificial separation of space and movement.’25 This conception of being is one that corresponds to the ideas of both Gleizes and Sonia Delaunay:
we have clung too stubbornly to a static conception of our environment … Today we are perhaps still too accustomed to understanding objects as separate entities, standing in stabilised poses side by side in an empty space. Externally, it may appear so, but in reality continuous exchange and movement are taking place. Not for a moment do they come to a complete standstill, since matter itself is a compound of vibrations … [with the] unique and universal role of movement as a visible aspect of space.26
However, if Laban’s rejected the static in favour of organic, dynamic movement, he was nevertheless concerned, as Schlemmer was, with extracting ‘fundamental’ rules. To obtain laws of movement and space, he suggested that ‘[t]he unity of movement and space can be demonstrated by comparing the single snapshots of the mind with each other’27 that will provoke ‘similar laws’.28 In terms similar to those of Schlemmer describing bodily architecture, Laban wrote: ‘Movement is, so to speak, living architecture.’29 Discussing the body and a dynamic environment, Laban attempted to reconcile it within an objective language to observe the laws that structured this relationship. Yet, as Bergson demonstrated with Zeno’s paradox, the arrest of dynamism is inherent in such a language’s attempt to isolate movement into observable fragments; this fundamentally transforms the object of contemplation. Such is the not unrelated condition of both mathematics and photography. Laban, in establishing corporeal laws, arrests the body by constructing a ‘three-dimensional whole’.30 This idea is problematic: tri-dimensionality is not a ‘whole’, but a construction of space outside of time. Cubists attempted to go beyond the three dimensional to represent the totality of the object, simultaneously perceiving the surfaces obscured in linear perspective. Apollinaire understood the fourth dimension to be time, since it allowed the sense of a mobile spectatorship from a static position.
Laban assumed an axiomatic tri-coordinated system of architecture from which a conceptualisation of the universe in flux was supposed to derive. Herein lies the contradiction in his, and much, postwar thought about the body-in-space. Three dimensions certainly do not constitute a ‘whole’, but rather an extracted, thereby fragmentary, relation to time-space. It is interesting that Laban suggests that:
Children and the man of primitive ages see the world through a bodily perspective, that is through physical experience. They see the amazing unity of all existence. Man of later times loses this view … establishes stability in his mind as a contrasting partner to mobility. In this way he comes unrelated to his surroundings, which are, in the widest sense, the universe.31
There are aspects of de-anthropocentricised thought here, but there is a contradiction inherent in Laban’s understanding of movement through a method that fragments the ‘amazing unity of all existence’. He assumed that mathematical coordinates constituted a ‘whole’, later stating: ‘The principles of choreutics can easily be developed by taking the cube as the basis for our spatial orientation.’32 His insistence on an arbitrary shape that has a particular cultural, aesthetic appeal is repeated in its deployment as the form in which movement would be constituted. However, I would suggest that a cube plays no part in a child’s sense of infinite space. It is rather the lack of language, and therefore a lack of mathematics and geometry in conceptualising of space, which allows a child’s perception to be of an ‘amazing unity’. Such unity is shattered as the child is inculcated into a spatial coding that artificially fragments the surrounding world into concepts of discrete objects in perspectival space and linear time.33 In this sense all language is firstly spatial, since its symbolic encoding depends upon a prior sense of objects as spatially discrete and bounded.
Laban believed that ‘[t]he conception of the cube … [is a] fundamental principle of our orientation of space’.34 The cube’s rigidity constituted the fundamental principle of human existence in space. Yet he also suggested that bodily movement was ‘fluid and curving’, and that ‘a scaffolding closer to a spheric shape’35 can represent this element. The representation of fluidity through the geometric seems paradoxical; by definition, fluidity resists solidification and hypostasis. There also seems no reason why something curved – and therefore linear – should necessarily represent fluidity, and by extension, that the spherical should represent flux faithfully. Yet Laban synthesized the cube and sphere into an icosahedron. He believed Plato first described this solid, which for him constituted the universe. This was important for Laban since his interest in modern crystallography led to his discovery of the same form in nature. For Laban, the icosahedron was both classical and modern, synthesising a computational model of the diamond structure with Platonic architectures, to graft on the subject’s movement in time. The icosahedron would harmonise the Vitruvian square and circle.
Laban was fascinated by the quasi-architectural forms found in crystallography and imagined their relation to human movement, proposing: ‘We can understand all bodily movement as being a continuous creation of fragments of polyhedral forms. The body itself, in its anatomical or crystalline structure, is built up according to the laws of dynamic crystallisation.’36 Laban justified this position by recourse to the ‘ancient knowledge’ of Plato and Pythagoras,37 and referred to Plato’s notion that the universe is constituted by triangles, and that the golden section is a ‘ruling proportion’ for the ‘perfectly built human body’.38 Indeed he writes that ‘Pythagoras proved that the human is built according to the Golden Section’.39 Laban also mentioned the Greek sculptors Phidias and Polycletus, for whom Maillol expressed admiration.40 He informs us that they ‘represent the ideal human form and divine form’,41 and share with Leonardo their analysis of ‘the human figure based on the Golden Proportion’.42 These fundamental, classical principles served as the basis for Laban’s idea of the body-in-space: the ‘kinesphere’. The golden section is part of the apparatus used to formulate a notion of space that immediately surrounds the body and into which it can move. It is a geometric ‘personal space … like an aura’43 whose ‘periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs’.44 The kinesphere solidifies the geometric extension of the body’s space, like the notion of a ‘personal space’. It represented Laban’s development of a three-dimensional ‘Vitruvian man’.
The Platonic solids – the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron – were theorised as constituting the universe, as they also constituted each elemental state. Renaissance thinkers had resumed research into Platonic solids, as seen in Leonardo’s illustration of Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione of 1509 (Fig. 47), depicting ‘the solid that Plato considered the symbol of the Universe’.45 As Kemp writes, Pacioli sought to represent the three-dimensional skeletal structure of each Platonic solid and to relate these divine proportions to ‘their derivatives in three-dimensional form in a variety of materials, including wood and crystal’.46 Elsewhere, Alberti proposed that church architecture should consist of the circle, the square, the hexagon, the octagon, the decagon and the dodecagon.47 As Wittkower explains:
Alberti’s well-known mathematical definition, based on Vitruvius, beauty consists on the rational integration of the proportions of all the parts of a building … the harmony of the whole … We may now conclude that no geometrical form is more apt to fulfil this demand than the circle or forms deriving from it.48
Laban’s production of the icosahedron clearly developed from such sources. Indeed, Brooks calls Laban a ‘truly a “renaissance” man’ as ‘[t]hese forms have long held mystical and alluring qualities for philosophers, theologians, scientists and mathematicians’.49 Laban perceived movement and Platonic geometric bodies as constitutive of the universe, and conflated these into a system where a relatively sized ‘space crystal’ could define human movement. However, herein lies the fundamental problem in Laban’s conception of the body-in-space when it is compared to the type of modernist thought found within Gleizes and Delaunay. Just as the bioceptual creates knowledge originating from the body, Laban’s representation defines the body through abstract mathematical proportions to guarantee its pseudo-axiomatic status.
The icosahedron is a form of the Vitruvian squared circle in which the body may be measured. In Laban’s scheme it formed a kinespheric space. It is the most faceted of the Platonic solids, and therefore the nearest to a sphere whilst remaining a polyhedron; thus, unlike the sphere, it has definable three-dimensional points that can map the body within. Essentially, the kinespheric icosahedron exists three dimensionally as a conflation of the square and circle. Indeed, Schlemmer constructed a similar ‘kinesphere’ through circular and rectangular-crystal geometry. Laban referred to the icosahedron in Gymnastik und Tanz (Gymnastics and Dance) (1926), discussing man’s need to master choreology – the language of dance notation – by referring to ‘the laws of space in the icosahedron’.50 He conceived the cube as the ideal representation of space, whilst kinaesthetic movements of the body-in-space produced the sphere. Thus, ‘we recognise the cube inside the kinesphere as being representative of the most important space directions’.51 Laban illustrated the cube’s importance by demonstrating the body’s insertion into three-dimensional planes that synthesise into the icosahedron (Figs 43–46).
Whilst Laban fragmented the body’s movement in space to extract what he believed to be its fundamental laws, he nevertheless had a sense of embodied space. Despite his formalisation of this space by geometry, he seems to suggest that the body is not bounded by the limits of skin, but extends into space through time. The kinesphere therefore would appear to disrupt conventional narratives of the corporeal I/Other relationship by demonstrating that the space into which the body can dynamically move is also a part of the body’s time, despite appearing exterior to it. Body-space is a juncture between the space that lies outside the body’s immediate capacity to move into it and affect it, and the space occupied by corporeal interiority. Therefore a static body occupies the space dictated by its location within three dimensions but a moving body in time expands its spatial boundary beyond its corporeal surface, and that space must be considered as part of it. Gleizes’s and Delaunay’s bodies harmonised with their surrounding environment, blurring the distinction between body, space and time, simultaneously imagining the body as opening into, and co-extensive, with its surroundings. However, having conceived this, Laban then codified the body-in-space into a geometric language through the body’s icosahedral limits: his kinetographie.
In kinetographie, movement is reduced to the performer’s placement of their limbs at pre-designated points within the icosahedron that signifies the limits of the body. Within scripted movement the body moves through space, but it is a space of planes and geometric forms. Many students were attracted to Laban because of his ideas about the organic rhythm of human embodiment. However, in Mastery of Movement on Stage (1950) Hodgson, who studied and taught Laban’s work, asks ‘[w]here, one wonders, is the holistic approach so frequently recommended by Rudolf Laban?’52 He takes particular exception to Laban’s excessive concentration on choreography, related to Greek metric form, and statements such as: ‘Modern industrial workers are very often confined to one or other of the fundamental rhythms determined by the ancient Greeks.’53 Indeed, Laban’s fragmented, geometric formulation of the body is strikingly reminiscent of that found in the ‘scientific’ study of the body in motion for greater productivity undertaken by F.W. Taylor, the Gilbreths and Marey. Whilst Laban appealed to ‘the great flux of infinite movement’, he sought to break down that movement ‘into discrete “snapshots” wherein one position follows another’.54 If Laban attempted to provide harmonious movement, it was through the perceived harmony of mathematics rather than one deriving from the body. The grafting of the icosahedron’s scaffold onto the body created not a bio-temporal rhythm, but one conceived geometrically, to which the fiction of the ‘ideal’ body is meant to conform. Concerned with movement as the universe’s fundamental rule, the icosahedron does not allow for the deformation of form during movement as demonstrated by modernists in different fields, from Delaunay to Einstein to Mach. Form becomes relative and cannot be considered spatially rigid. If a performer is to learn a series of movements according to their body’s conformity to prescribed points in the icosahedron, this can only be possible once movement is fragmented into mathematical rhythms: the spontaneity of the body in organic movement is impossible.
I would also suggest that the body is incapable of the exact, precise movements required by its codification within the icosahedron. As spoken language derives from an abstracted representational system outside of bodily corporeality, perfect bodily adherence to ‘pure’ mathematics is achievable only through engineering. The body’s proportions, as well as its movement, must be mechanically derived for the configuration of the performer’s limbs to cohere perfectly to the Platonic solid into which its range of movement supposedly fits. There must at some point be a rupture caused by the contradiction between the static geometries of the spatial matrix and the biorhythms and variable proportions of the human body. Indeed, the icosahedron conceptualised by Laban has practical problems in the same way that the Vitruvian body is an idealised body. Bodies do not conform to fictions of perfection. Laban, however, like the classicists before him, found specific appeal in mathematical ‘truths’. He cited the ‘correspondence between the angles of the icosahedron … and the limbs. They appear to be either the same, or exactly half, or double, or those mentioned.’55 He also found that ‘the proportion between the length of the dimensional and diagonal transversals of the icosahedron and the length of its surface-lines follows the law of the Golden Section’.56 The implication is that the body is axiomatically constructed by the golden section if the icosahedron derives from laws that are common to both. The icosahedron, to function as conceptually ‘pure’, would surely require a type of ideal body based on ‘harmonious’ mathematical equations. This ‘ideal’ body is a mathematical fantasy, though it is disseminated and consumed as a desirable body in Western culture. Despite genetic realities, a ‘classical’ bodily aesthetic remains relatively unchanged (in thinking about the male rather than the female perhaps) as it is continually reproduced by culture industries for mass consumption.
It was not just in the field of theatre and dance that the body reverted to classical types. As I have shown, the idealisation of the body figured in the Greek nude found its way into public spaces as statues symbolising bodily ideals substituted for the immense numbers of soldiers killed in the war. R. Tait McKenzie, a popular sculptor of soldiers’ memorials in Britain, wrote:
I have tried to express the type on whom the future of England must depend. Blond, with hair wavy rather than curly, head well rounded, forehead slightly flat, the boss over the eyes large, but not so developed as it will be in later life. The brows are straight, nose not continuous with the brow as in the Greek, the mouth large and lips not too full.57
In England, we might therefore imagine that the soldier’s body in war memorials was configured largely on what later became understood as the ideal Aryan body. An aesthetic ideal was pursued that was antithetical to the ‘bantam’ physique of the average ‘Tommy’. This cultural programme was widespread in its attempt to envisage a new ideal body. It can be seen in Tait McKenzie’s Cambridge war memorial The Homecoming (1922) and the Scottish-American war memorial (1927) in Edinburgh. The production of monumental bodies reflected a pan-European neurosis about the physical quality of, particularly male, populations after the war that became bound up in both nationalist and racial discourses and the technical disciplining and management of its populations by ‘modern’ states. Eugenic discourses criticised the characteristics of the men who survived – believed often to be malingerers, pacifists and the disabled – whereas the ‘genetic elite’ had fought and died, or been physically and mentally traumatised, for their country. The future body needed to be both ‘modern’, to resist the shattering effect of technological shock, and to incorporate classical fictions of sculptural order. The monumental body therefore celebrated the transcendent, mythic body in contrast to the realities of disabled, disfigured and ‘diseased’ bodies that were not decomposing under French or mittel-European earth.
Despite the apparent dissimilarity of their abstracted bodies, Schlemmer and Laban were engaged by the same cultural tendency that motivated the institutional production of ‘Greek’ bodies by traditional sculptors from Britain’s conservative art institutions. Indeed, in many ways their modern bodies constitute the most extreme reversion to the ‘beauty’ of Classical Greece, through the insistence on the origin of geometry at the bedrock of Western civilisation. Whilst British sculptors substituted the soldier’s body with an aestheticised Greek one, Schlemmer and Laban’s monumentality lay in their mathematical abstraction of the body, eliding the ‘bioceptual’ with the geometric, the human for the inhuman. Jean-François Lyotard sees this as ‘a discourse of general physics, with its dynamics, its economics, its cybernetics’.58 Schlemmer’s and Laban’s abstractions lie in their conceptualising the body and its relation to space through movement as a medium through which to institute a cybernetic regime that imagines the body as a mechanical, mathematically derived object, which can be engineered. Lyotard argues the inhuman is produced when knowledge is no longer produced by embodied concepts, but is codified into information that is incapable of translated the overflowing codes of human knowledge. This is the body’s condition through its constitution in mathematical language.
Matthew Biro observes the creation in postwar German culture of a cyborg fantasy: ‘a figure upon which a broad range of Weimar modernists could project their utopian fantasies.’59 Biro sees this ‘new man’ as ‘a synthesis of organic and technological elements’60 making a ‘fearful response’ to the destruction of mechanised warfare.61 We might also add that it was a response not just to the trauma of war but to humanity’s wider sense of organic frailty as the influenza pandemic of 1919 ravaged Europe. The development of a modern, mathematical matrix that governs Being through a modelling of space-time was a reactionary cultural response to the war, even when, in contrast to the overt retrenchment of French art in the 1920s, it imagined itself to be radical. The space created by Oskar Schlemmer and Rudolf Laban accommodated the emergence of the inhuman, or perhaps rather post-human, ‘new man as cyborg’. Without focusing specifically on the robotic body itself, we might nevertheless see post-cubist conceptual articulations for its bionomic realisation in popular imaginations.
Schlemmer and Laban’s conceptualisation of the body at the centre of this universal order of time and space is a mechanistic one, but also one that is vacant. This production of the body is located within a specific mathematical bionomic, concerned with the relation between mechanical organism and geometric environment. Schlemmer’s figures are constructed as a type, premised on bodily mechanics explicitly configured according to geometric laws. Schlemmer’s diagram of ‘The laws of motion of the human body in space’ is represented by ‘Ambulant architecture’ (Fig. 49).62 Thus, for Beye,
The determination with which Oskar Schlemmer eliminated everything emotional from his work corresponds to a formal vocabulary whose strength and clarity is complete accord with the timeless, wholly generalized ideal nature of his figures … his aim is to model with such precision that any roughness which might suggest the calligraphic or the individual disappears.63
The cyborg is fundamental here as a symbol of utopian potential, but it is also a testament to death and the obliteration of the fragile human body within the forces of modernity. The body without emotion or devoid of individuality, the inhuman subject, is also effectively a utopian, immortal body that contains the fantasy of being resistant to trauma, shock and death. As I have demonstrated, Schlemmer and Laban conceive of such a body after the war. Schlemmer wrote of his radical ‘endeavour to free man from his physical bondage and to heighten his freedom of movement beyond his native potential in substituting for the organism the mechanical human figure’.64 In 1923 he ‘urged that we at the Bauhaus should no longer ignore the machine, technology, and engineering’,65 which is not surprising given his much earlier diary of October 1915 that equated the ribcage with a square; the head, eyes, belly, elbows, knees, shoulders and knuckles with a circle; the cylinder was a form for the neck, arms, and legs.66 The production of cyborg images in Weimar culture can be understood as part of a tradition of prosthesis.67 Yet Schlemmer presents a post-Vitruvian body closely resembling a utopian cybernetic body, but one vastly different from the dystopian corporeality that Biro identifies in a picture such as Raoul Hausmann’s montage Der eiserne Hindenburg (1920), ‘a dysfunctional, half-mechanized puppet, spouting military jargon, waving a sword, and propping up the initials of the Kaiser’,68 or Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Man that was Used Up’, or the grotesque hybridised body in the work of George Grosz and Otto Dix, to whom Armstrong and Biro both refer. Throughout Schlemmer’s career, the vacant body persists. It is asexual, mechanical, universally utopian. In 1922 Schlemmer wrote: ‘Life has become so mechanized, thanks to machines and a technology which our sense cannot possibly ignore, that we are intensely aware of man as a machine and the body as machinism.’69 Interestingly, Schlemmer contrasted the artist’s concern with the machine with a concurrent interest in atavistic art, of ‘primordial impulses’. He wrote: ‘they woke up to the unconscious, unanalyzable elements in the art forms of non-intellectuals: the non-Africans, peasants. Children, and madmen.’70 Nevertheless, Schlemmer and Laban sought to obtain the ‘primordial’ in the restoration of the body according to universal regulating geometries.
Schlemmer’s mathematical scaffolding of the body can be seen in his teaching notes. It is the uncovering and implementation of bodily laws that motivates Schlemmer, writing in the shadow of World War I: ‘one great theme remains, ancient, eternally fresh, the subject and form-giver of all times: man, the human figure. It has been said that he is the measure of all things.’71 Yet mathematics is assumed to be axiomatically the measure of ‘man’, for ‘We must surrender ourselves to the miracle of the proportions, the magnificence of the mathematical relationships and correspondences, and derive our laws from the results.’72 A number of paintings by Schlemmer – for example Vier Figuren und Kubus (1928), Bekleidete un Unbekleidete in Architektur (1929), Fünfzehnergruppe (1929), Bauhaustreppe (1932) among others – express his investigations of the principles and laws of the body within an environmental matrix. They are striking in their mathematically rational treatment of geometric space and the rigid body, or as von Maur writes, in their ‘clear, taut concept of space and figure’.73 The paintings seem almost prophetic in their depiction of social alienation and instrumentality, and the forms are reminiscent of Laban’s practice of placing people at angular positions to each other to conform to a ‘mathematical pattern’. The bodies themselves incorporate the angular, geometric qualities of the space they occupy, testifying to the notion of the fundamental interconnectedness of subjectivity and environment. However, the quality of that relationship is significantly different to that found in Gleizes or Delaunay, as here human subjects become architectural bodies. The body is not configured bioceptually, but geometrically. This is conceptually approached, as in Vier Figuren und Kubus, but this core practice resonates throughout the preceding and proceeding works. Bauhaustreppe projects Schlemmer’s utopian vision into the composition of a cultural scene. These works demonstrate his observation in 1923 that: ‘One thing is certain, and that is that the application of scientific principles to art is now widespread. Basic laws, numerical configuration. Anything connected with the psyche has become suspect.’74 Schlemmer worked on Bauhaus Stairway in 1932 after the Dessau Bauhaus had been closed under pressure from the National Socialists.75 It is painted from memory, as with Gleizes’s portraiture Jacques Nayral, emphasising what von Maur describes as the ‘the transcendent architecture of the staircase in the Dessau Bauhaus building’.76 The painting is, Arnold Lehman writes, ‘a symbolic representation of Bauhaus enlightenment, of youth in transitions from one generation to another, of potential for transformation in art and life from the rigid socio-political strictures of the part to the Utopian freedoms of the future’.77 Whilst a utopian articulation, it is rendered through a compositional structure based on a strict structural geometric architectonic of verticals, horizontals and diagonals that demonstrates the influence of Mondrian on Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. Within the geometric matrix are young, de-individualised, vacant bodies based on ‘Greek statuary … a vision of perfection’.78 It is the ideological synthesis of such space and body that engineers the youth of tomorrow in Schlemmer’s utopian vision.
Echoing the arguments of Rabinbach and Herf, von Maur writes:
Schlemmer and his contemporaries clearly evidenced a strong desire for centering and order, in response to an era made chaotic by political radicalization, emergency decrees, and mass unemployment. There can also be no question that Hitler knew how to harness this latent desire for order in the service of his own political aims.79
The utopian figures manifested in postwar modernity – a cybernetic ideal synthesising classicism and technology – are symptomatic of specific cultural ideologies within the era’s recuperation of the body, specifically regarding fatigue, fragility and the trauma of imminent death. Kracauer observed other areas within Weimar visual culture that contained such synergistic ‘utopian’ articulations. Beyond his scrutiny of the neue sachlichkeit, he reflected upon the manner in which aesthetic rationality came to form an irrational ‘cult’ of the bodily ‘ornament’. He perceived the subject’s greater conformity within culture through what he identified as:
The ornament, detached from its bearers, [that] must be understood rationally. It consists of lines and circles like those found in textbooks on Euclidean geometry, and also incorporates the elementary components of physics … Both the proliferations of organic forms and the emanations of spiritual life remain excluded.80
Kracauer’s criticism centres upon the (aesthetic) mass configuration of bodies into formal geometric patterns. Kracauer writes that the ‘Tiller Girls’, a faceless geometric arrangement of bodies, ‘are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’.81 Indeed, Jünger had already written that ‘anonymous slavery’ is ‘certainly our innermost will to sacrifice our freedom, to give up our existence as individuals and melt into a large life circle, in which the individual has as little self-sufficiency as a cell’.82 Such displays of mass bodily organisation visibly demonstrated the docility of the subject to the will of the state – a metaphor for not only authoritarian politics but the wider structures of technical management and ‘discipline’ in which the modern state could organise its populations, as objects of control, knowledge and, indeed, spectacle.
We might suggest that the mass organisation of the body within meta-geometric designs belongs to the notion of the monumental figure. Whilst a burgeoning body culture indeed existed before the war, the specific geometric configuration of lived monumental bodies presented a more disturbing political spectacle of control over Agamben’s notion of bios in the wake of its brutalisation in World War I. In his critique, Kracauer compared the ‘Tiller Girls’ to the ‘fragmented’ modernist body under capitalism and international Taylorisation, since the control of a proletarian mass could be ‘employed equally well at any point on the globe’83 after the destruction of ‘natural organisms’ it perceived as antithetical.84 Kracauer saw the complete rationalisation of bodily management in the spectacle of the ornament, stripped of the organic except for geometric coincidences with forms found in nature. Essentially, Kracauer identified a process of systematic dehumanisation characterising the rationalised, technological domination of the twentieth-century.
Kracauer argued that the female body operated as spectacle for audiences through its organisation with the same ‘geometric precision’85 of lines, rows and segments. Therefore, whilst the postwar subject’s social performance became systematised, so the consuming subject was organised and controlled, but through distraction. The masses consumed the geometric conformity whilst unaware of their own implication as organised consumers and producers, a rationality that reflected the industrial and technological rationalisation of their working lives through practices such as Taylorism which were increasingly employed during, and after, the war. Even if Taylorism per se had not reformed working practices before the war, as Rabinbach argues, ‘many changes advocated by Taylor were already adopted before his ideas were widely disseminated’.86 The world war facilitated the further technical reorganisation of German industry, and Rabinbach notes that its engineers urged ‘the imitation’ of American factory organisation.87 In France, however, its implementation remained highly controversial and was a popular subject within the press despite its limited impact on industry, where Taylorist practices were largely confined to automobile production. The Billancourt Renault strike against Taylorist practices in March 1913 indicated worker resistance. The syndicalist leader Alphonse Merrheim rejected Taylorism as a technology that ‘eliminated, annihilated and banished personality, intelligence, even the very desires of the workers, from the workshops and factories’.88 However, the war facilitated the restructuring of European industry, and with the introduction of a new, initially unskilled workforce that included women and children, work restrictions were marginalised whilst the scientific standardisation of work increased productivity. Therefore, despite increasing resistance to ‘the detested time-motion study, the premium wage system, and long hours of work in both France and Germany after 1917’, as Rabinbach argues, Taylorism became mainstream practice.89
Kracauer also observed in the stands, bearing witness to the spectacle of bodily organisation, a new form of modern subjectivity: die angestellten (the office-worker). He commented that this new urban subject emerged to characterise modern culture, with an increased expendable income,90 had ideas of demographic superiority and conformed precisely to modern capitalistic regimes of production and consumption, particularly through distraction by the spectacle.91 Kracauer proposed: ‘At the same moment at which firms are rationalized, these establishments rationalize the pleasures of the salary-earning armies.’92 For Kracauer the office worker also presented a mass organisation of bodies, but at the level of lived experience. They represented a subjective regime that symptomatised political, capitalist and bureaucratic rationality. He argued that the ‘coherent figure’ was fragmented within society, and its consciousness transformed through the cultural construction of its subjectivity. Later, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that this fragmentation of the subject by the effects of modernity produced a schizophrenic condition through the multiple, fragmentary roles and in particular the discourses into which a subject splits itself. ‘The language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a middle or high-level manager, or a government minister is a perfectly schizophrenic language.’93 Žižek now refers to the existential dimension of modernity’s condition whereby the state ‘compels me to betray the very ethical substance of my being’.94 Similarly, for Kracauer, writing within the moment of ‘modernity’, bios becomes ‘lost in an empty formalism’,95 and the ornament embodies the ‘monstrous’96 construction of modernity’s aestheticisation and politicisation of dehumanised organisation and rationalised control of its population. Kracauer therefore observed the absence of ‘nature’ and ‘organic unity’ within the ornament, whilst the organisation of the body into pseudo-naturalistic geometric shapes ‘dissects the human form here only so that the undistorted truth can fashion man anew’.97 This reconfiguration of the postwar subject is reminiscent of Marx’s earlier words: ‘the capitalist form of large scale industry reproduces the same division of labour in a more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine.’98 This is also something described by Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) and in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The embodied subject becomes a fragment, an ‘appendage’ of a higher cultural mechanism. Consequently, the body’s subjection to mechanical rhythms through rationalised constructions of space-time becomes the basis for modern subjectivity.
In the body’s gymnastic performance, Kracauer observed an exercise of subjective compliance in achieving ‘living star formations’ that ‘have no meaning beyond themselves’.99 This is distraction since: ‘physical training expropriates people’s energy, while the production and mindless consumption of the ornamental patterns divert them from the imperative to change the reigning order.’100 Similarly, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs of sports events in the Soviet Union demonstrated the state control of disciplined, yet docile, bodies based on ‘empty’ geometric formations becoming a ‘godless mythological cult’.101 According to Kracauer’s argument, we should consider Schlemmer’s and Laban’s models of the body as totemic manifestations of the metaphysical state of the body politic. ‘Monumental’ bodies replace the ‘atomised’ body as a fragment within a metastructural form of the body politic; it exists ‘above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it away from the eyes of its bearers’.102 The ‘Ornament’ surfaced in other areas of German visual art, such as the Neue Sachlichkeit103 and in the work of other Bauhaus artists, for example, Moholy-Nagy’s Traum des Mädchenpensionats (1925), which celebrated specific models of organisation. We might argue Cubism’s fundamental structural function in subjective relations to space and time constitutes what Eleanor Hight perceives in Moholy-Nagy’s photomontage: ‘The system of lines and overlapping forms that unifies the various images on the picture plane demonstrates again his reliance on the pictorial structure established in his paintings.’104 To quote Lefebvre: ‘all thinking about space and time was bound up with social practice – more precisely, with industrial practice, and with architectural and urbanistic research.’105 Indeed, the aestheticisation of mathematics and geometry was manifested in social practice as simultaneously nostalgic and reactionary in its production of a utopian future for a traumatised culture.
Rodchenko’s photographic documentation of the Russian ornament, such as his photographs Pioneer (1930) and Pryzhok v vodu (1934), was severely criticised for failing to capture the idealistic body. Margarita Tupitsyn argues that ‘the reader wants to see a beautiful trained body. In Rodchenko’s photograph, the character is killed by biological detail’.106 The boy’s smile in Pioneer cannot hide his ‘imperfect’ humanity, whilst Pryzhok v vodu exhibits the body in asymmetric pose and ‘ugly’ close-up detail. Rodchenko was condemned for ideologically emphasising transcendental individualism over the organised, anonymous, subservient body. Consequently, as Tupitsyn observes, Rodchenko’s status waned, and he was later assigned documentary projects devoid of human figures. Indeed, as Kracauer warned, the ornamental aesthetic consists of geometric patterns, from which ‘man as an organic being has disappeared’.107 Therefore, the ornamental organisation of subjects by the state, as Kracauer implied, is a utopian surface disguising a political ideology controlling the masses, themselves distracted by their own spectacle. Such a rationalisation, when wedded with reactionary politics, produced a subject that Theweleit identifies as having an armoured ego, as a consequence of external forces upon the subject, but also ‘capable of seamless fusion into larger formations with armorlike peripheries’.108 Theweleit sees in the ornamental structure a dammed libidinal energy, a sublimated surging torrent of reactionary irrationality, ‘a body in dissolution’,109 which Fascism could translate from ‘internal states into massive, external monuments or ornaments as a canalization system, which large numbers of people flow into, where their desire can flow’.110 Spengler’s socialist Prussian nationalism and Jünger’s celebration of the individual soldier who ‘melts into everything’ describe synthetic intersubjectivity within a community of masculinity and fascist politics, which constitutes a reactionary version of Romains’s ‘loss of self’. We might therefore consider the ‘Ornament’ as constituting a political body into which the subject is incorporated within a collective identity, the structures of which, given a reactionary turn, became the fascistic bodily geist based upon what Jünger called the ‘community of blood’ (Blutgemeinschaft).
The ‘retreat … into mythological structures of meaning’, the ‘irreality’111 produced in the rationalisation of postwar culture, Kracauer argued, was premised upon classical myth. In an attempt to re-inscribe stable laws of existence, the irreality of pseudo-axiomatic geometric universal laws were imagined in the control of the subject, itself conceived as the utopian figures Schlemmer and Laban represented. Kracauer also characterised the ornament as androgynous, ‘composed of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies in bathing suits … they are a linear system that no longer has any erotic meaning’.112 He perceived the body emptied of its relation to nature, reconstructed through mechanical function and mathematical engineering (although I disagree that this body loses its ‘erotic meaning’, and suggest it perhaps has even come to bear higher sexual potency).113 Nevertheless, for Kracauer, the figure of modernity is ‘[t]he human figure enlisted in the mass ornament [that] has begun the exodus from lush organic splendour and the constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity’.114 The individual is subsumed within a geometric mass derived from the very foundations of Western culture: mathematical order. As Kracauer wrote:
It is the rational and empty form of the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning, that appears in the mass ornament. As such, it proves to be a relapse into mythology of an order so great that one can hardly imagine its being exceeded, a relapse.115
These rationalised forms recur in Schlemmer’s and Laban’s production of modern man, alongside, to refer again to Lefebvre, ‘social practice … industrial practice, and … architectural and urbanistic research’.116 This is most overtly manifested in the work of Charles Edouard Jeanneret (who adopted the pseudonym ‘Le Corbusier’ with the publication of L’Esprit nouveau in 1920).117 He envisaged the architectural transformation of Western culture according to certain mythologies surrounding the subject’s subordination and conformity to ‘utopian’ universal, mathematical, laws.
Corbusier’s vision of the twentieth-century has fundamental similarities with that of Schlemmer and Laban in his development of an architectural imagination of the body-in-space. He envisaged an architectural reification of abstracted, reactionary ideologies of the body through its mathematical and capitalistic rationalisation. Whilst Corbusier’s architecture, embodying an entire regime of reactionary aesthetics, is celebrated as the embodiment of Modernism, we might suggest that he was more concerned with classicism than being a modernist: ‘Today I am accused of being a revolutionary. Yet I confess to having had only one master: the past; and only one discipline: the study of the past.’118 Indeed, as he often repeated in Towards a New Architecture (1923), society demands ‘Architecture or Revolution’. His aim was to provide Western culture with an ideologically compliant architecture for the postwar industrial masses and the bourgeois individual, precisely to avoid revolution. His architecture was fundamentally conservative in its anti-revolutionary objectives.
In The City of Tomorrow (1924), Corbusier contrasted his architectural matrix with an organic development of space and dwelling. He described the pre-modern urban development as the ‘pack-donkey’s way’ – his metaphor for ‘organic’ population which spread according to geographic features. Instead, Corbusier perceived technological modernity as a historical moment that could erase the environment’s influence on architecture. Whilst the traditional growth of cities, like the donkey, ‘meanders along’,119 Corbusier believed its organising precepts should be geometrically logical and progressive – repeating Enlightenment concepts of sequential time and space – regardless of environment. His foreword states that geometry provides the basis for human knowledge, and that through it ‘we perceive the external world and express the world within us’.120 He insisted that ‘[g]eometry is the foundation … Machinery is the result of geometry. The age in which we live is therefore essentially a geometrical one; all its ideas are orientated in the direction of geometry.’121 For Corbusier, technological modernity was therefore a teleological progression from Greek classicism. Like Schlemmer, he imagined a quasi-cybernetic body as the index for modern man. For example, in his comparison of the city with the body he insisted on avoiding the death of growth through environmental surgery – replacing organic ‘capillaries’ for geometric ‘arteries’. His ‘city of tomorrow’ is the cybernetic body and, like Schlemmer’s ‘Man’, was dependent on geometric flows for mechanical regulation, whilst his conception of space correlated to Schlemmer’s geometric web. Indeed, Corbusier praised the straight line, believing: ‘The curve is ruinous, difficult, dangerous; it is a paralysing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into human aim, into every human act.’122 He equated Platonic and Pythagorean geometry with Enlightenment rationality in architecture. ‘The right angle is the essential and sufficient implement of action, because it enables us to determine space with an absolute exactness.’123 Corbusier’s imagination of modern subjectivity demonstrates his engagement with the regimes of reactionary modernity:
man, by reason of his very nature, practises order … the straight line is instinctive in him and that his mind apprehends it as a lofty objective. Man, created by the universe, is the sum of that universe, as far as he himself is concerned … he has formulated [laws] and made of them a coherent scheme, a rational body of knowledge of which he can act, adapt and produce.124
For Corbusier, humanity’s ‘very nature’ is axiomatically geometric; the straight line is universally ‘instinctive’. Yet even more directly than Schlemmer, Corbusier emerged from Cubism. It was Ozenfant who encouraged Corbusier to paint after their introduction in 1918 and, as mentioned, it was Ozenfant’s L’Elan that credited Cubism with developing compositional structure. Françoise Ducros comments: ‘this sumptuous magazine reveals the transformations that turned the evolution of Cubism toward a form of classicism, although its title may also evoke a Bergsonian elan vital.’125 In L’Elan’s final issue, Ozenfant wrote ‘Notes sur le cubisme’, discussing ‘Purism’ whilst implying the passing of Cubism’s historical moment: ‘Cubism has assured itself a place of true importance in the history of the plastic arts, because it has already partly realized its purist aim of cleansing plastic language of extraneous terms … CUBISM IS A MOVEMENT OF PURISM.’126 Corbusier’s understanding of Cubism was profoundly affected by Ozenfant’s analysis as a ‘direct result’127 of their acquaintance. Indeed, he proclaimed his meeting with Ozenfant as momentous since ‘[t]he country was in the process of being reborn: We had the sense that an age of steel was beginning … the hours of construction would follow.’128 Later in 1918, they had a two-man show at Galerie Thomas, exhibiting works based on geometric shapes and classical aesthetics within a rationalised cubist structure. Corbusier wrote upon La Cheminée: ‘[My] first picture is a key to the understanding of [my] plastic vocabulary: volume in space. Space.’129 In advance of the exhibition Ozenfant and Corbusier had published Après le cubisme, its very title repeating the claim regarding Cubism’s consignment to history. Its first sentence declared: ‘The War over, everything organizes, everything is clarified and purified.’130 Cubism was discussed as ‘not without merit’, but was not ‘the art of tomorrow’131 that a ‘grateful’ purism was. Therefore they acknowledged the ‘uproar’ that Cubism provoked132 but insisted that ‘[w]e must search for the solid foundations of a fertile art’.133 The second chapter called for an art that responded to the culture of mechanisation, mass production, scientific analysis, organisation and classification, whereby Taylorism ‘is only a matter of the intelligent exploitation of scientific discoveries’.134 Modern industrial culture is based on ‘[t]he constructions of a new spirit [that] rise everywhere, the embryos of an architecture to come; there already reigns in them a harmony whose elements proceed from a certain rigor, from a respect for and application of laws’.135 Their manifesto was antithetical to Kracauer’s ideas in its combination of painting with architecture through rationalised Cubism, within their imagination of twentieth-century culture:
machines, because of their numerical calibration, have evolved more rapidly, attaining today a remarkable refinement and purity. This purity creates in us a new sensation, a new delectation, whose significance is cause for reflection; it is a new factor in the modern concept of Art … We are not unmoved by the intelligence that governs certain machines … they almost seem like projections of natural laws.136
As with Schlemmer’s model, Ozenfant’s and Corbusier’s emphasised the ‘[p]hysical and mathematical geometry [that] define the laws of force that are effectively [nature’s] organizing axes’.137 Their section on ‘Laws and their Relationship to Plastic Art: The Choice: Anthropocentrism, Anthropomorphism’ similarly proposed that the human body is ‘organized in accordance with the laws of symmetry’.138 It is in Après le cubisme that they offer ‘Purism’ as the term for their ‘modern spirit’, articulating their relation to the Ancient Greeks, reconciling art, science, industry, reason and order.139 Their magazine L’Esprit nouveau pursued their purist ideas and ambitions from 1920, maintaining the relationship of the classical to the modern through technology, as in the juxtaposition of Greek architecture, automobile design and the technological aesthetics of urban planning. Indeed, Antliff suggests that ‘the machine-made anonymity of the objects portrayed in [Corbusier’s] purist paintings became a metaphor for the international rationalisation of space and time precipitated by Taylorism’.140 Corbusier and Ozenfant felt they could pursue Cubism’s teleological “‘evolution” to its logical conclusion’,141 through the recuperation of Platonic ideals in ‘their simplest geometric forms’.142 In contrast to Cubism’s radical prewar intent, Silver suggests: ‘Purism was in the deepest sense a self-consciously anti-revolutionary theory and was, equally self-consciously, a movement that depended on the maintenance of the social order and believed in that social order.’143 As Paul Turner writes, Jeanneret’s intellectual arrival at Purism and architecture was ‘an expression of ideas and transcendent principles instead of issues of function, economy, structure and material integrity’.144
Jeanneret’s teacher at La Chaux-de-Fonds was L’Eplattenier, who expressed the importance of the architectural, geometric ornament. ‘My teacher has said: “Only nature inspires, is real … Ponder its cause, its form, its vital development and synthesize it by creating ornaments.”’145 Together with Jeanneret’s ‘Platonic conviction’146 of the conception of time, a conceptual structure of space and time harmonised his thought within a ‘divine Idea’.147 L’Eplattenier introduced Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856) to Jeanneret, emphasising the harmonious geometries and ornamental patterns of architecture across cultures. Turner argues that Corbusier’s designs actually follow Jones’s propositions, such as ‘natural forms should always be stylized and conventionalized before being used as ornament’.148 Corbusier’s library reveals his pre-war research, including Eugene Müntz’s Raphael, which expressed an academic attitude towards the High Renaissance.149 Maxime Collignon’s Mythologie figurée de la Grece was awarded to the 16 year-old Jeanneret in school, presenting classical figurative representations of Greek deities. Turner suggests these became figurative ‘norms’ that were ‘assimilated by the student and then applied to new problems’.150 A third book in Jeanneret’s formative years (containing his pre-1907 signature) was L’art de demain by Henry Provensal, a work that theoretically and conceptually aligned art history with philosophy, reflecting L’Eplattenier’s views that were so influential upon Jeanneret. A similar work, inscribed to Jeanneret from L’Eplattenier, is Edouard Schure’s Les grands initiés. It follows a mystical figure reappearing throughout history to reveal esoteric truths, referring to Krishna, Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus and others.151 Both Schure’s and Provensal’s work influenced Jeanneret’s conception of the epoch’s ‘need for … spiritual revival’152 based on esoteric laws. Particularly relevant to Jeanneret’s ideas was Schure’s estimation that Pythagoras was most relevant to modern man. Indeed, this chapter was the one most heavily annotated in Jeanneret’s copy.153 Turner concludes that Corbusier’s career, from Purism to the later Modulor, was ‘characterized most essentially by a search for generalization, universality, and absolute formal truths which would put Man in touch with a harmony underlying nature – a divine “axis,” as he called it’.154
Stanislaus von Moos identified in Jeanneret’s first built designs an obsession for ‘a strict, geometric language … the urge to make the structural laws of nature visible and to express them in clear, universal, geometric patterns.’155 These designs became increasingly influential as France began an immediate period of reconstruction when war – not expected to last five years – broke out in 1914. Jeanneret designed Maison Domino within this context. These buildings consisted of two horizontal planes traversing vertical columns connected by diagonal stairs. They were conceived as mass-produced prefabricated buildings for individual completion, but a synthesis between technological, industrial and aesthetic processes in the ‘purity’ of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal was fundamental in their design. After the war, Jeanneret exhibited his plans for the Maison Monol in 1919, and the Maison Citrohan156 in 1920–2 at the Salon d’Automne, along with designs for the Immeubles Villas and a city designed for three million people: the Ville Contemporaine. However, alongside mass housing designs, the Maison Citrohan was conceived for a single artist or intellectual who appreciated Corbusier’s cellular design based on the Platonic cube. Its conceptual and architectural development was made possible through the support of his clients – individual men who accepted his vision of the individual Platonic house-cell-machine. As Peter Serenyi notes, artists such as Ozenfant, Albert Jeanneret and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as businessmen like the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, Michael Stein and Pierre Savoye all sought Corbusier’s designs. Many of them were foreigners living in Paris, less interested in the organic historical development of a region’s architecture when compared to a new international style. His clients were ‘modern’ men who were constantly travelling, for whom the architectural cell provided a fashionable residence-machine. The requirement and support of his wealthy clients, and the need for mass-produced housing, therefore allowed Corbusier to pursue his geometric model of man and the environment.
Corbusier’s Immeubles Villas followed the Maison Citrohan, operating as cellular geometric units that constituted the wider ornamental framework of the apartment block. Serenyi refers to it as ‘an apartment super-block consisting of many individual “Maisons Citrohan”’.157 Corbusier himself referred to the ornamental construction of ‘cells’ to form a ‘whole’. The Immeubles Villas are a collection of, in Corbusier’s words, ‘cells’, or ‘machines for living in’, with designated communal areas within the multicellular ornament. The consideration of mass housing also informed his later Plan Voisin, whose designs, Corbusier stated, were based on the Monastery of Ema. This religious aspect – the monastery as temple of God and therefore as an architectural reflection of the body as metaphor for the ‘godly’, well-ordered, society – is important regarding the underlying harmony between the individual and the collective, the monad and the whole. As Georges Duby writes, many monasteries were based on the ‘ideal’ plans for the monastery of Saint-Gall (c.820), which embodied the mathematical order and universal harmony of the ‘heavenly court’ whilst monks were garrisoned within the overall organism.158 Richard Sennett refers to Christianity’s influence on medieval monastic organisations through ‘a new understanding of the Christian body’.159 John of Salisbury defined ‘body politic’ in 1159 as reflecting social order in the human body. Consequently, the city was to be codified and constructed according to the body, just as, for example, the ruler should surgically remove any rebellious factions as if they were a diseased organ.160 Corbusier’s imagination for mass, modern existence was influenced by a cellular monastic design that reflected an alienated, hermetic self – something Serenyi argues reflected Corbusier’s own condition as ‘an uprooted, single, lonely man’161 – that embodies a particular imagination of culture. Indeed, Corbusier’s designs omit consideration of the family as a multiple, complex, mobile, emotional set of relationships.162 As Richards shows, Corbusier envisaged the ‘self’ as a hermetic monad, removed from social and political participation, and subject to its instrumentalisation within a hierarchical, technocratic culture.163 We might therefore highlight architecture as a form of self-representation, just as fashion design was for Sonia Delaunay.
The first ‘communal’ building realised from Corbusier’s plans was the Palais du Peuple for the Salvation Army in Paris, 1926. The building was based on a geometric arrangement of the individual cells; Corbusier believed its architecture benefited the interior life of its inhabitants through ‘normalisation … standardisation … measure and proportion … [an] alliance between human values and numbers’.164 Whilst this building may have been successful for its inhabitants – largely single, retired war veterans – the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles has widely been considered a failure since it was unable to provide a successful architectural space for families of different sizes and dynamics. Corbusier’s successes depended upon single men and women who could accommodate structural isolation into their existence.165 The ‘Ornament’ emerges in Corbusier’s designs too, as the body becomes a fragmentary appendage for architectural topos. As a fragment, the subject is organised monadically according to a mathematically objective (rather than bioceptually subjective), measurable existence. The complex embodied, existential relation the subject has to space, time and others is subjugated by the subject’s instrumental value to the state that has harnessed the avant-garde’s reversion to primary aesthetic principles as a disciplinary technology. We might subsequently consider the consequences in the perceived denigration of the family and community within the twentieth-century.166 The bionomic of the subject and space is premised upon a geometric architectonic whereby the ‘masses’ are arranged according to the aesthetics of reactionary modernism. (Indeed, Richards argues that Corbusier firmly believed in anti-parliamentary authoritarianism, and was committed to the rhetoric and practice of violence. Again, revealing rhetorical affinities with a writer such as Jünger, Corbusier wrote: ‘Through the blood and the sufferings of battles, we must observe the flawless unfolding of the creative work … let us build for ourselves a new consciousness.’ Corbusier’s advocation of violently reorganising culture was increasingly aligned with ultra-right politics in the 1930s. He ‘embraced’ Italian Fascism, and accepted a position in France’s Vichy government.)167 The cellular utopia becomes ‘open prisons for the poor’.168 Such modern architectures render the subject akin to Schlemmer’s lonely, geometrically isolated body in Figur und Raumlineatur. We shall now consider that perhaps it is no coincidence that Corbusier’s architectural utopia of cellular living, walkways and communal areas is reminiscent of prison architectures and science fiction dystopias.
The idea of the living-machine reconciled primary aesthetic concepts, economics, politics and technology with the imagination of a vacant mechanical subject. The machine incorporated both classicism and technology to produce modernity’s ‘utopian’ architectures and an ‘anaesthetic’ pre-modern subjectivity.169 Corbusier’s estimation of the machine’s importance in replacing subjective existence, something Rosenblatt describes as producing ‘a monolithic aesthetic subject’,170 was fundamentally influenced by the inscription of a modular grid that effected disciplinary and regulatory operations upon the urban ‘population’. Whilst Rosenblatt locates Corbusier’s work within the late nineteenth-century positivist theorisation of mass society,171 Foucault has identified the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of this period.172 For him, these were embodied in the ‘the town of utopian reality’,173 conceived and built in the nineteenth-century for the working class:
One can easily see how the very grid pattern, the very layout, of the estate articulated, in a sort of perpendicular way, the disciplinary mechanisms that controlled the body, or bodies, by localizing families (one to a house) and individuals (one to a room) … and the normalization of behavior meant that a sort of spontaneous policing or control was carried out by the spatial layout of the town itself. It is easy to identify a whole series of disciplinary mechanisms in the working-class estate.174
Foucault even suggests at this point that such an inscription on population exists in all modern political regimes (an idea Agamben shows has its apotheosis in Nazi concentration camps).175
Foucault refers to the architect Charles Fourier as an example of the rationalisation and normalisation – which he argues is the basis for ‘liberalist’ racism – of mass society in the nineteenth-century whereby the state’s function was ‘to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature’.176 It was Fourier who had a profound importance upon Corbusier. Fourier’s claims for a ‘new world order’ after the French Revolution inspired Corbusier’s investigation of modern human and social sciences to find stable laws to reconcile his primary aesthetic concepts in re-establishing order amidst his perception of social chaos and despair.177 Fourier’s ideas were based on the emergent machine’s potential, perceived at the moment of his writing in the first industrial revolution178 and, like Corbusier, he reverted to classicism for laws of order in a revolutionary culture. Likewise, Fourier found intellectual refuge in the ‘perfection’ of linear Newtonian space-time – of its supposed cosmic harmony179 and treatment of temporality – in seeking ‘unity of man with himself, a unity of man with God and a unity of man with the universe’.180 These elements are echoed in Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. Indeed, Fourier described beauty as belonging to proportions that resonate within us, ‘beyond our senses’ in a neo-Platonic fashion. It is this proportion, or ‘axis’, Corbusier writes, ‘on which man is organized in perfect accord with nature and probably the universe … If the results of mathematical calculation appears satisfying and harmonious to us, it is because they proceed from the axis.’181
Corbusier discovered in Cubism a technique of linear construction through which to develop a stable geometric regime of compositional order. Similarly, Schlemmer and Laban developed a geometric cubist bionomic in the construction of a mathematical bodily architectonic. Indeed, Corbusier was not the only artist who sought to extend this technology – the geometric ornament as metaphor for a ‘new’ existence – in the reconstruction of culture itself; Doesburg and Mondrian also extracted cubist laws, as Green writes, to ‘make the ideal a reality not just in paintings but in the environment as a whole’.182 Whilst Doesburg was perhaps more concerned with international socialism and the downfall of European capitalism, he reached similar conclusions to those derived by Mondrian’s more theosophic approach, regarding the transformation of society through reconstructing the dynamic between humanity and the environment. Indeed, as Delaunay had sought to fashion her body into the fabric of modernity, internal spiritual conversion could be achieved through external cultural reorganisation. However, in 1919, Doesburg wrote of a ‘new plasticity, which only could appear in and by a period which was able to revolutionize completely the spiritual (inward) and material (outward) proportions’.183 Similarly, Mondrian wrote in the same year: ‘If we conceive these two extremes as manifestations of interiority and exteriority, we will find the new plasticism the tie uniting mind and life is not broken … a reconciliation of the mind-matter dualism.’184 Therefore, Mondrian asserted the importance of reconstructing existence upon a stable model: ‘In terms of composition the new plasticism is dualistic. Through the exact reconstruction of cosmic relations it is a direct expression of the universal.’185
Doesburg had a direct relation to cubist Paris from 1917 onwards. He met figures such as Severini and the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and saw the work of Gleizes, Metzinger and Gris at the Section d’Or. When Doesburg took the exhibition to Holland, he termed his and Mondrian’s De Stijl work, which was included at that point, as ‘Neo-Cubist’.186 His interpretation of Cubism emphasised its geometric basis, whilst critiquing its a posteriori approach in drawing form from nature. Meanwhile, for Mondrian, Cubism’s weakness was its incorporation of process, of the ‘fragmentary’ nature of phenomena rather than the stable laws of universal harmony he believed existed. Both artists derived a constructivist aesthetic from Cubism’s structural foundations. Whilst such ideals seem reconcilable with Purism, the Purists initially rejected non-objective painting as irrelevant ‘ornamental art’. Subsequently, they marginalised the De Stijl exhibition at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1923. Nevertheless, the 1923 De Stijl exhibition influenced Corbusier, particularly in the calculated, rational use of colour. Similarly, Léger was impressed, perceiving the importance of De Stijl’s non-objective canvases for architecture through their articulation of a ‘new spirit’ based on geometric abstraction, industrial design and universal harmony. He subsequently facilitated Doesburg’s and Mondrian’s reception in France.187
Schlemmer’s meeting with Doesburg after the latter’s visit to the Bauhaus in 1920, and his subsequent teaching of a De Stijl course in 1922, is testament to Cubism’s multiple connections. Later, Schlemmer wrote in a letter of 1926,
Mondrian: he is really the god of the Bauhaus, and Doesburg is his prophet. Perhaps Doesburg’s fanatical role as an agitator and prophet has distorted what started out a good thing. Mondrian is a god, and what he does is perfectly consistent with a certain type of Dutch architecture.188
Indeed, Mondrian’s view of ‘Man’ accorded with Schlemmer’s, as well as Laban’s and Corbusier’s thought. He wrote: ‘Modern man … exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract.’189 Mondrian attempted to represent what he perceived as the changed consciousness of the modern subject through art: ‘pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form … [within a] universal consciousness, which is one.’190 The avant-garde therefore – as Green notes – took ‘the collective role of “organizing man’s progress”, of becoming the agent of social and political change’.191 To this end, Mondrian’s paintings are, as Cox writes, a ‘para-mechanical pattern’ that ‘converts the logic of figure and ground … into a rationalist harmony of space and incident, horizontal and vertical’.192
Mondrian’s compositional matrix is constructed from a belief in the line as the foundation for a harmonious universal order upon which society should proceed. Doesburg’s painting, such as Contre-compositie VI (1925) articulates a similar regime of technological modernity, whilst we might consider his representation of a Russian dance in Ritme van een Russische dans (1918) through a geometric relationship of lines in stark contrast to the embodied becoming of Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dress that was inspired by a similar source. Schlemmer commented of Doesburg that he
rejects craftsmanship (the focus of the Bauhaus) in favor of the most modern tool: the machine. Exclusive and consistent use of only the horizontal and the vertical in art and architecture will, he thinks, make it possible to create a style which eliminates the individual, in favor of collectivism.193
Doesburg also attempted to represent higher spirituality through the dynamic diagonal, though Mondrian insisted on the Pythagorean purity of the right angle. Cubism’s fate became the adoption of linear abstraction, classical proportion and universality, in deriving the fundamental laws of being-in-space on which a new modern world was imagined. As Mondrian wrote in 1922: ‘Architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative art will then merge into architecture-as-our-environment.’194 Consequently, Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is a ‘cubist’ architecture, in his words, ‘a box hovering in the air … in a Virgilian dream’.195 It synthesised the vertical, horizontal and diagonal that concerned Doesburg through ‘the vertical penetrations’ and ‘bold diagonals’196 upon which a transformation of humanity was believed to be possible. For the artists mentioned in this chapter, this geometric aesthetic principle was fundamental in the schema that imagined twentieth-century Modernism’s transformation of the subject.
The imagination of cultural experience therefore proceeded through the reconciliation of aesthetics and technology within the reactionary postwar ideology of the state. The work of Schlemmer, Laban, Doesburg, Mondrian and Corbusier all continued to transform Cubism according to their own beliefs regarding order but, as Green argues, the postwar avant-garde betrayed Cubism through extracting from it the very laws of stability and order that its most progressive practitioners rejected. The architect Walter Curt Behrendt, for example, took exception to Corbusier’s abstracted rationality, especially in comparison to Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach to architecture and the environment. He criticised Corbusier’s concern not with ‘the structural problem of the building, but with the esthetic problem’,197 lamenting that international Cubism produced ‘a return to elementary geometry than a turn towards organic order’.198 Indeed, as Rob Imrie has recently argued for contemporary architecture, the embodied, existential subject is omitted for mathematical ideals of the body within a linear compositional matrix.199 Responding to Corbusier’s focus on the geometric, ornamental topography in his vision of the future, the Swiss architect Alexander von Senger rejected such architectural conceptions as communistic and mechanistic. Whilst perhaps not negative as terms in themselves, when combined within an aesthetic that elides embodiment, the remodelling of culture contains inherent problems. Serenyi notes that the German art historian and architect Cornelius Gurlitt responded to The City of Tomorrow and the concept of the plan Voisin with disbelief, and was left wondering if it was meant as an ironic gesture. The English architect Trystan Edwards regarded Corbusier’s proposals as ‘an oversimplified solution to the complex problems of the big city’, whilst S.D. Adshead criticised Corbusier’s inhumanity.200
The concern with aesthetics at the expense of the embodied subject is demonstrated in Corbusier’s Mundaneum, and his parliamentary buildings in Chandigarh, India. Karel Tiege, an avant-garde artist influential for the reception of modern art and artists (including Corbusier) into Czechoslovakia, famously critiqued the Mundaneum in 1929, arguing: ‘[the] fallacy of Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum is one of monumentality … the Germanic monumentality of architectural megalomania.’201 Tiege also critiqued Corbusier’s previous conceptualisation of the house as a machine for living as ‘a possible cover-up for all kinds of aestheticism and academicism’.202 There remains a central issue of neglecting practical, embodied needs at the expense of modern mythology. As Tiege continued:
the Mundaneum highlights the failure of those aesthetic and formalistic theories of Le Corbusier which we have always opposed from the constructivist viewpoint: the theory of the Golden Section, of geometric proportionality, in short, all a priori aesthetic formulae deduced from a formalistic perception of historical styles.203
For example, the ‘monumental unity’ and ‘harmonious proportionality’ of the building caused the windows in the exhibition hall to be ‘sacrificed to numerical and astronomical symbolism’.204 Tiege found that Corbusier’s lack of functionalism derived from his concerns with aesthetic style derived from a priori concepts and ‘historical cliché’. This, he deemed, was ultimately irresponsible,205 and he concluded: ‘Life of course is neither symmetrical nor triangular, neither star-shaped nor based on the Golden Section … [and] The Mundaneum is a fiasco of aesthetic theories and traditionalist superstitions.’206 However, the reconstruction of the body, transformed through mathematical and cosmological aesthetics, abstracted it from its own embodiment, something Tiege believed ‘foreshadows the attitudes of progressivistic architects and city planners of today’.207
Imrie reaches the same conclusion regarding the disappearance of embodiment from twenty-first century-architecture.208 He demonstrates that the majority of architects work only from a reductive concept of the body as a disembodied machine, devoid of sex, gender, race or disability.209 Schlemmer’s, Laban’s and Corbusier’s bodies all anticipated such an attitude, whilst Mondrian already omitted the importance of the body altogether. These bodies, and what Imrie describes as the ‘post-Galilean’ body, are presented as ‘neutral’ but are undeniably androcentric. Architecture continues to reproduce modernity’s ideal of the utopian body – white, male, athletic – but cybernetically and ideologically docile, especially since the body itself has become regarded as ‘impure and degenerate’210 compared to its mathematical purity inherent in modular design. One architect interviewed by Imrie commented, ‘the modular figure is a standard male but I think that it’s a universal concept’.211 Indeed, the body is no longer just mathematically reductive, it is absent, even obsolete. Bodily erasure and mobilisation of the mass into systematic, rationalised social patterns of production and consumption is one outcome of Corbusier’s ultimatum: ‘architecture or revolution’.
Corbusier’s designs for parliamentary buildings in Chandigarh from the 1950s instead receive different criticisms from Norma Evenson. She identifies the domination of a particular environment and subjectivity through the imagination of the subject-monad within a geometric matrix. Shortly after Indian independence from Britain’s colonial rule in 1947, Prime Minister Nehru declared on Chandigarh: ‘Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past … an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.’212 The irony exists that the ‘architectural freedom’ is based on an ideology that sought to control movement, whilst the ‘expression of the nation’ became a homogenous internationalist style with Corbusier’s ‘universal laws’ deriving from of an earlier historical moment. Even a book as general (albeit classicist) as David Watkin’s A History of Western Architecture comments: ‘The massiveness and near-megalomaniac scale of these buildings … are functionally disastrous.’213 Evenson’s more detailed critique refers to Corbusier’s alteration of the initial planner’s designs by ‘classicising and geometricizing [sic] the plan, straightening major streets and transforming the slightly irregular superblocks into rectangles. He sought to give the city a large-scale unified design appropriate to its monumental character.’214 Even though Evenson does not consider the architectural intentions and motives of the government commissioning the work, she nevertheless concludes it lacks ‘the functional viability’215 of native Indian towns that were constructed as a response to the bionomic between environment and subject.
My dear old chap, thank you for the Roman dedication, but I don’t give a hang for your Modulor.Blaise Cendrars to Le Corbusier, postcard dated 25 July 1950216
The design for the Chandigarh project incorporated Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’. The design was developed during World War II, patented in 1947 as an invention and sold out when published a year later.217 Corbusier envisaged that every architect and engineer would have a Modulor scale on their drawing board ‘so that every object designed for human use shall correspond to a single all-pervading harmony’.218 Just as Schlemmer and Laban reconfigured the Vitruvian man according to mathematical systems of bodily proportion and space, Corbusier’s Modulor was also a modernist imagination of the Renaissance figure reconfigured through a rationalisation of the human body-in-space as the basis for architectural design. His Modulor further omitted the necessities of embodied space in favour of an idealised mathematical computation of the human body and the universe in accordance with his own research in the thought of Plato and Pythagoras. Despite Corbusier’s ‘high Modernist’ status, there is hardly anything modern about the Modulor. Modulor 2 (1955), published just seven years after Le Modulor, maintained conservative Modernism’s fascination with the Renaissance and the Classical through the reinvigoration of the universal ‘Vitruvian’ man (see Fig. 53).
Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation was the first building to apply the Modulor. Wittkower argued that the theoretical shaping and order of the Modulor was derived from a set of numbers. ‘Always tied to higher civilizations. All systems of proportion are implicitly intellectual, for they are based on mathematical logic.’219 Wittkower is sympathetic to Corbusier’s position, and accepts the abstracted aesthetic based on disembodied rationalism as characteristic of ‘higher’ civilisation. As such Wittkower heralded the ‘bridge’ crossed by thinkers between ‘abstract mathematical thought and the phenomenal world that surrounds us … [as one of the] most extraordinary events in the early history of mankind’.220 We might agree that this is fundamental in a particular conception of the Western subject and yet, as discussed in the first chapter, is highly problematic. According to Wittkower, ‘[t]he quest for symmetry, balance, and proportional relationships is deeply embedded in human nature’221 which elevates humans above ‘lower’ animals, and with his notion of the subject’s intuitive ‘divine proportion’, was the problematic ground on which he supported Corbusier’s abstracted domination of the environment.
Wittkower saw that the Modulor ultimately derived from Greek thought.222 Indeed, Pythagoras was particularly important to Corbusier because of his discovery of a harmonious scale that had important consequences for rationalising the interrelationship of sound, space and numbers within universal mathematical harmony.223 The ratio of 1:2 was associated with beauty, and became the ratio of perfection. Corbusier, like Laban, was influenced by Plato’s Timaeus, which described an all-encompassing theory of the universe through simplistic geometric figures. Such a system was advocated in Vers une architecture, and even supported by French academics at the time, such as François Blondel, the first Academy director.224 Wittkower wrote: ‘Renaissance theory and practice pronounced axiomatically that the proportions of architecture must echo those of the human body … The Bible tells us that Man was created in the image of God. It logically follows that Man’s proportions are perfect.’225 The golden section, based on the Fibonacci system, is set according to number ratios226 calculated asa ∕ b =b ∕ a+b or, 1.618, the ‘number of beauty’.227 Yet Peter Collins suggests that Palladio was the only leading Renaissance architect to seriously attempt such theoretical proportion in practice, and experienced difficulties in implementing such a regime. (Similarly, there are frequent logistical disparities between the ‘defects’ in Corbusier’s designs and the built architecture.)228 Collins also argues that Vitruvian systems were not actually supported by the classical monuments of Greece and Rome, but adopted by Renaissance thinkers under a mistaken assumption.229 Within modernity’s classical turn, however, as Wittkower succinctly wrote: ‘Le Corbusier is thus in line of descent from Vitruvius and the Renaissance’,230 yet his modernity was based on an ‘objective and universal validity’ already exposed as fallacious.
The Unité d’Habitation therefore reintroduced Renaissance anthropometry to the design of the twentieth-century through the Modulor, itself consisting of the Fibonacci system applied to a human male six feet tall. Figure 52 demonstrates the Fibonacci series applied to rectangles that intersect the body at symbolic points. The red measurements to the left of the elliptical scale are from a Fibonacci series based on the square, whilst the blue measurements of the vertical are from the rectangle. Thereby a 1:2 ratio is maintained. However, Collins argues that the model fails ‘by the fact it is not capable of subdivision’.231 Additionally, whilst the measurements at the base level are small, it soon grows proportionately, whereby measurements ‘rapidly assume astronomic values as the logarithmic spiral progresses’.232 Corbusier attempted to counter this by introducing a second, blue spiral, though it was only the prior red that was based on the height of the body. In the Unité d’Habitation, the mathematics unravelled as the rooms fail to correspond to the Modulor’s designated dimensions. Collins somewhat sardonically quotes Corbusier, explaining the discrepancy as ‘a personal interpretation of the Modulor, the limitations which it imposes and the liberties which it allows’.233 Whilst Corbusier insisted that he had the right of freedom to alter his system at any time, he also wondered why American industry had not used the Modulor for the dimensions of mass manufacturing production.234 Collins writes: ‘One can imagine the chaos which would result if the norm were to be changed once mass production had started!’235 In addition, Corbusier’s six-foot man was originally based on 175 cm (or 5ft 921 in). However, calculations based on 175 cm were impractical for translating into inches, so he altered the anthropometric dimension to 72 inches to fall within a prescribed Fibonacci series. Instead of mathematics reflecting the ‘truths’ of human experience, ‘Man’ is consistently reconfigured to conform to abstracted mathematical patterns upon which a notion of Western subjectivity is rationalised.
Ultimately, it is for the technological rationalisation of existence that Wittkower praises Corbusier’s work as ‘a perfect means of unification in the mass production of manufactured articles’.236 Corbusier’s mass housing projects incorporated mathematical ratios of the human body in the design, systemic production and control of mass populations, whilst endorsing Taylorism as ‘one of the fundamental bases of his proposals for mass-produced housing’.237 As Brian Brace Taylor wrote, for Corbusier ‘the Machine commands the Man’.238 The mechanisation of the human body was based on an aesthetic derived from universal Platonic measurements – as the Modulor proposed – fantasised as obedient and productive within his Ornamental aesthetic for the ‘city of tomorrow’. Within this was the ‘human of tomorrow’ that Corbusier claimed could be organised into ‘garden cities and … “scientifically” managed in the factory’.239 Alongside Schlemmer’s utopian articulation of the human subject, the postwar modernist vision of the twentieth-century subject emerges. Indeed, Schlemmer described his own course based on ‘Man’ as a ‘nice totality’ that incorporated ‘[h]eredity, racial theory, reproductive biology, ethics, and so on’.240 The ‘modern’ subject was to emerge within this framework of a scientifically managed body-automaton, its energies regulated, its behaviour monitored and its development controlled according to positivistic human sciences. The bionomic between subject and environment imagined by the avant-garde in this chapter produces quite a different figure from that imagined by the modernist avant-garde before 1914: fractured, mechanised and abstractly rationalised outside of its own embodied existence.
