3.3 Architecture for the characters

3.3 Architecture for the characters: Development of characters

There are cases where architects followed a tradition of developing characters to produce architecture in the past. A well-documented case following this tradition is Le Corbusier’s ‘modern man’. Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier is interested in breaking Victorian and bourgeois traditions (Flint, 2014). He developed the modern man as a tool to break the old traditions. Le Corbusier invented new ways of thinking and building in the architectural discipline. Modern Man (Flint, 2014) is a biography that portrays Le Corbusier as a constant self-inventor and genius (Argitect, 2010). He sought to refashion the world through his vision. Le Corbusier invented the ‘Modern Man’ to develop the theory that supports his buildings that fall under the modern architecture category. He used this figure of the modern man to describe an architectural context that insists that sacred buildings conform to the modern man’s proportions. Although the creation of the modern man was an attempt to start a new vocabulary for designers to draw from, this study argues that the concept of the modern man is flawed in that Le Corbusier’s aspirations were subjective and imposed on readers, as men and women are influenced to have the same aspirations.

Critics labelled Le Corbusier as a stubborn man whose strong opinions were often contradictory regarding the urban form. Hseuh-Bruni (2015) mentions that the French architect portrayed himself as concerned with improving living conditions. In truth, Le Corbusier was obsessed with uniformity, artificial order, and control that symbolised totalitarian rule. This totalitarianism resulted in segregated societies (Hseuh-Bruni, 2015).

Le Corbusier’s work was influenced by the aftermath of World War I: pollution, poverty, tuberculosis, overcrowding, and chronic housing shortages (Maycroft, 2010). He wrote passionately about his aspirational architectural concepts. He called a home a machine in which to live. His utopia included affordable homes for the masses located within cities arranged for efficiency and maximum order (Flint, 2014). This collection of machines was a utopian city for the modern man.

The creation and description of users of a particular architecture is a tradition that early architects employed. Le Corbusier’s sketch of the Modulor man showed a silhouette of a man who was 1.83m tall. The first sketch of this man was finished in 1943. The value of the sketch was proportion and how proportions bring order to the relationship between humans and their surroundings.

Another architect who practised this tradition of describing architecture’s uses is the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius described an ideal man’s proportions, resulting in a drawing of a multi-limbed man in a circle and square drawn by the famous renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci used this figure to describe an architectural context that insists that sacred buildings conform to its proportions. This study adopts the tradition by developing various dwelling types representing clothing-buildings from imagined nomadic characters. The following chapters describe the proposed nomadic characters, the potential spaces they could use as part of their living arrangements, and the architecture that encourages using that space.

Despite far-reaching influence on architecture development, Le Corbusier has critiqued himself and evolved, which is evident in his buildings. In Modern architecture: A critical history, British architect, critic, and historian Kenneth Frampton (1985) surveyed modern architecture and outlined trends and philosophies of the twentieth century. Frampton (1985) divides Le Corbusier’s architecture into two sections, from the early days to 1930, and between 1930 and 1960. Frampton (1985) describes Le Corbusier’s early work as the kind that enriches the abstract and has the reductive nature of the purist style. Purism is defined as an art movement that attempts to restore regular composition (Gibson, 2017). The style is distinguished by the purity of geometric form (Gibson, 2017). Le Corbusier then lost interest in heroic and grand modernist projects (Maycroft, 2010). He followed architecture as it evolved into more exposed concrete that is monumental in scale in the architectural style is known as brutalism1 (Frampton, 1985).

The thesis follows the same tradition of architectural practice, which can be described as an act of planning, designing, and altering what has to be improved (Figure 11).

1 The word ‘brutalism’ is derived from the French expression beton brut, which is translated as ‘raw’ or ‘rough concrete’ (Hanley, 2019). 30

Figure 13: Vitruvian Man and Modern Man (Argitect, 2010).