The body of the Modulor

No doubt, there are numerous ways to read the Modulor: As an hybrid aggregate in two volumes, as a book of polemics and discourses, as an autobiography, as a book on architecture or as a series of prophecies. It is even possible to read it as a route to reach a genious? architecture through matemathics and art. Certainly, all of the above have been done for half a century and are still being done today. However, this work which is titled ?The Body of the Modulor?, has chosen to read the Modulor metonimycally, even as an allegory. The main assertion is that Modulor stands beyond being a book on architecture, and that it tries to designate a brand-new politics of architecture over multiplicities of bodies with its claims of transcendency. Historically, Modulor posseses the conventions of the societies of discipline (which Michel Foucault has described), in the threshold of societies of control (which Gilles Deleuze has explained), produces a brand-new framing for the bodies. But this time, (as Hardt and Negri discuss it in `Empire?,) control is produced and diffused by the users of the Modulor, by those who live within it and who design with it. Modulor, being a geometrical scale for bio-hygien, is a design technology of perpetual repetition, and unlike the genetical amelioration project, it does not aim to annihilate. Designing to design: Le Corbusier preached to reach the `gold of design? (by his Module d?or) with a scale of measures -by using it personally within his designs effectively- which designers would use with ease. But the Modulor, in an attempt to blow down the ruling metre and foot-ich systems and puting a personal scale in their place, has tripped itself by seeking help from transcendency, by not relinquishing utilitarianism, by insisting on sexualism and by being faithful to historicism. On the other hand, it seems that, what Modulor could not manage to accomplish, namely the job to siege the bodies and close them down into a lack of politicality, was carried out by the `Empire without Rome? of today. Because of this reason exactly, Modulor has to be read as an allegory. Architecture, has to continue to deal with the moduloric, by chasing the lines of power of the practices which Frye has explained with her `cage? metaphor. Keywords: Body, body without organs, Charles-Èdouard Jeanneret, city, great closure, harmony, Le Corbusier, masculinity, modern architecture, modulor, panopticon, plane of consistency, proportion in architecture, sexism, societies of control, transcendence, twentieth century architecture, Unité de Habitation, universality, utilitarianism.