Shepherd's Pie

Le Corbusier's Modular Man

When Le Corbusier became interesting in the "Golden Ration," he designed his own version of man as the model for the proportion. He was quite passionate about the sequence and wrote a book, The Modular, about it

"...For Le Corbusier, what industry needed was a system of proportional measurement which would reconcile the needs of the human body with the beauty inherent in the Golden Section. If such a system could be devised, which could simultaneously render the Golden Section proportional to the height of a human, then this would form an ideal basis for universal standardisation. Using such a system of commensurate measurements Le Corbusier proposed that architects, engineers and designers would find it relatively simple to produce forms that were both commodious and delightful and would find it more difficult to produce displeasing or impractical forms. After listening to Le Corbusier's arguments Albert Einstein summarised his intent as being to create a "scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy."A more mundane motive might also partially explain this endeavour. Le Corbusier saw that such a system could be patented and that when it became universally recognised and applied he "would have the right to claim royalties on everything that will be constructed on the basis of [his] measuring system"...."

...a review by Michael J. Ostwald

I think this means he was proposing a measuring system, like the Metric. All objects would would be measured in their relation to the proportion. Everything drafted automaticly into the scale. It's a pretty compelling idea.

posted by JRS @ 9:01 PM