The Modulor

The Modulor is an anthropometric system of architectural proportion devised by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, combining human body measurements with the golden ratio to generate a scale of dimensions intended to be universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical design. Le Corbusier began developing it in 1943 amid postwar debates over dimensional standardization between the metric and imperial systems, producing a first graphical version that year and refining it after a 1945 meeting with mathematicians at the Sorbonne to incorporate the golden section rigorously. The system interlocks two measurement series keyed to a reference figure's navel height and total height with a raised arm, fixed at 1.83 metres, so that elements sized from it relate to one another and to the human body in golden-ratio proportion. Le Corbusier published Le Modulor in 1948 and a sequel, Modulor 2, in 1955, and applied the system across later work including the Unite d'Habitation and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. It stands as one of the twentieth century's most influential, and most contested, attempts to reconcile human-centred proportion with industrial standardization; a female counterpart to the system was considered and ultimately not adopted, a choice later scholarship has criticised as male-normative.