ABSTRACT
A photo from the archives documents a meeting between Le Corbusier and
Albert Einstein. As recounted in Le Modulor, Le Corbusier had traveled to
the New World, a place he previously had declared the “Land of the Timid”
because of its refusal to subject its powerful modernism to ordering prin-
ciples, a failure of which he thought the congested assortment of spires and
historical styles in Manhattan was iconic. Now Le Corbusier had trekked
to pastoral New Jersey seeking Einstein’s endorsement of the Modulor. He
had visited captains of industry, kings of commerce and leading academics,
peddling his new measure and proselytizing its benefits. Here was a new
rule, he proclaimed, derived from the correlation of the human figure with
the Golden Section, that should replace the metric and imperial measures
not only for the aesthetic composition of buildings or cities, but also for
the fabrication of all of their components, tools and the rest of industrial
production. If Le Corbusier’s offer to completely re-plan the city from the
top-down had been ignored before World War II, now in the dawn of a new
age, he offered a device that would imbue order from the bottom up and
across every scale, from screws to buildings to regions.
