The Modulor

In the years around the Second World War, Le Corbusier set out to solve a problem he believed underlay all of architecture: the absence of a human measure. The metric system was indifferent to the body; it measured in abstract units that had nothing to do with the reach of an arm or the height of a standing person. He set out to repair this by deriving a scale of proportions rooted in the human figure and tuned to the golden ratio. He named it the Modulor, fusing module and or, the French for gold. It was, he announced with characteristic grandeur, 'a range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things.' The figure from which the system was derived was male, European, and approximately six feet tall—a height chosen partly, by Le Corbusier's own cheerful admission, because the heroes of English detective novels were