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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