Author: Elena Goukassian / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the summer of 1948, while visiting the 13th-century ruins of the Chaalis Abbey, just north of Paris, the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret “was struck by the fine proportions of the door (that of the transept, as I remember).
” Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, proceeded to reach into his pocket and take out a specially designed red-and-blue measuring tape to see whether the proportions were as perfect as he imagined. They were!Le Corbusier used the same tape to measure Ancient Egyptian ruins, as well as historic buildings in Istanbul, İzmir, Athens, Lima, and beyond. He claimed that they, too, conformed to his measuring tape’s uniquely calculated proportions. But what was this magical measuring tape? And how and why did the architect design it in the first place?
Dubbed the “Modulor Rule,” Le Corbusier’s invention was the result of years of frustration with the metric system. According to the architect, the metric system was devoid of all human context, and hence incompatible with architectural needs. But because it was already deeply ingrained in the vocabulary of architects and engineers worldwide, it would be impractical to get rid of the metric system entirely. Instead, Le Corbusier hoped to inject some much-needed humanity into it.
“The French Revolution did away with the foot-and-inch system, with all its slow and complicated processes,” the architect wrote in his 1948 text The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. (This was the first of two whole books he dedicated to his new approach.
) “The savants of the [1875 Metre] Convention adopted a concrete measure so devoid of personality and passion that it became an abstraction, a symbol: the metre, forty-millionth part of the meridian of the earth.”
In as much as Le Corbusier hated the metric system, he wasn’t fond of the Imperial system either, calling it “steadfast in its attachment to the human body, but atrociously difficult to handle.” In the increasingly globalized world of the 1940s, he felt the best way to deal with this problem would be to somehow fuse the two measurement systems into a single universal one.
For philosophical inspiration, Le Corbusier looked to music. “Music, like architecture, is time and space,” he wrote. “Music and architecture alike are a matter of measure.” Just…
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