Lost and found

I've posted about Le Corbusier's Modulor before, and I remain interested in the architect's writings and work, particularly given connections to Chandigarh. So it was really cool to read, on the architecture Web site Archdaily, about a "lost" building of his recently discovered in Iraq. Le Corbusier designed the Baghdad Gymnasium in 1957, and it was built in the city in 1982; it was "rediscovered" less than a decade ago by Caecilia Pieri and has set off a movement toward preservation of buildings, insofar as it is still possible, in today's Iraq. AFP offers more detail on this fascinating story.

Order to madness

Le Corbusier, an architect and painter, created The Modulor, an anthropometric scale of proportions in the vein of Vitruvius, da Vinci, and Alberti, in 1943. (My fascination with Le Corbusier stems from Sumeet's growing up in Chandigarh, India's first planned city, which the architect had a big hand in planning.)

Le Corbusier described the measure as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things"; I picked up this copy of The Modulor (second edition, trans. Peter De Francia and Anna Bostock, Harvard University Press, 1966) from The Strand's $1 book cart. I admit that I understand the math behind it very little, but I love that he applies the system to city planning, building construction, painting and composition, and the movement of consumer goods. 

Lots of scans behind the cut, and in my Flickr set.

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