ABSTRACT
The being of building is riven. A duality, a binary division, entered its ontology—in modernism. The discourse on type was later transformed by Le Corbusier with his Ur-text of architecture in industrial capitalist modernity, Toward an Architecture, in the early twentieth century. Le Corbusier, as is well known, considered ‘man’ himself to be a type. In citing the work of J. N. L. Durand, Joan Copjec brings to our attention a passage in Precis des lecons d’architecture—totally ignored by architectural historians—where Durand wrote: ‘In all times and in all places, the entirety of man’s thoughts and actions have had their origin in two principles: the love of well-being and the aversion to every sort of pain’. The ‘pre-history’ of the pornographic architecture in the present, exemplified in the return of ‘One divides into Two’, in fact goes back to the nineteenth century.
