ABSTRACT
This chapter is an interpretive genealogy of the unbuilt Museum of Knowledge (MOK) that Le Corbusier proposed in place of the Governor’s Palace. As the ‘head’ of the Capitol Complex, the MOK is a quizzical project that started as an institution that was intended to support the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, that then metamorphosized into the Museum of Infinite Growth and finally remained unfinished as an audio-visual institution to accompany an infinitely large storehouse of digital information, what we today know as ‘the internet’ or, more specifically, as ‘Google’. It argues that the MOK is better read not as unfinished project but as a project left incomplete by purpose, not because Le Corbusier ran out of time, but because of the basic constitutive contradiction of the (Enlightenment) project, i.e., the inevitable gap between the certainty of information promised by an infinite database and the inevitable instability of meaning that making sense, or making knowledge, out of information entails. The MOK as such, I argue, is not the empty site of a failed project, but a site whose emptiness is as such a marker of the gap between information and knowledge that marks our digital age.
