ABSTRACT
The plans of the War Memorial Gym show space divided according to programmatic use and unified by a system of connecting passages; the plans relate the building to its site and intimate its structure and materiality. As Fred Lasserre confirms, ‘walls, roofs, stairs, windows, doors, floors’ must be studied according to ‘basic uses’ and their ‘essential qualities’. He also asserts that ‘the physiological needs of man’ and ‘social forces’ are ‘basic elements of architectural study’.2 The plan, as a consequence, records something of how these physiological needs and social forces are accommodated. But also implied in that conjunction of physiology and society is an attention to behaviour and what Le Corbusier among others called the ‘physio-psychological’, the emotive as well as utilitarian aspect of architectural experience. The walls, stairs and other prosaic elements by which the plan is parsed are also aesthetic elements, ‘advancing and retreating planes … interpenetrating, hovering, often transparent, without anything to fix them in realistic position’, they experience a ‘flattening out so that the interior and exterior could be seen simultaneously’, and as such they might be understood as ‘equivalent to psychic responses’3 (see Figure 7.1).
