Learning from L.C. II

Learning from Corbusier. Picture from Sebastien Berthier and Michel Sikorski, 2006

Le Corbusier's spiral labyrinth

In the archive of Le Corbusier the World Museum is a precursor (in plan diagram at least) to a set of projects, hereafter to be referred to as the spiral museums. Those designs include the scheme for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris (1931), project for a Museum of Unlimited Extension (1939), the Cultural Centre of Ahmenedabad Museum (1954), the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (1957), and the Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh (completed in 1970). The spiral museum design also appears in the layout of urban design schemes such as the design for Rio de Janeiro (1929) and Saint-Die (1946). As a project the spiral museum occupies the archive in every decade from the 1920s until the architect’s death.
In the critical literature little is made of this occurrence, this design’s constant return, nor indeed of the spiral museum as a project within the archive. The built versions have not been considered remarkable in their own terms. What little critical interest that there is focuses upon the spiral form itself. Thus the spiral has been seen to stand for the architect’s interest in the symbolism of nature and patterns of growth and archetypal forms.
Yet the drawings from the Oeuvre Complete of the World Museum project are also manifestly setting out a promenade. This is a museum in which a spectator takes up an itinerary of history set out along a continuous wall; an itinerary carrying the spectator from the centre to edge of the museum, and it is this aspect of the design - how this promenade is being figured in the drawings - into which I inquire. In order to map out the promenade of the museum I point to a coincidence of figures - of the figure of this plan with that of a labyrinth. In literally appearing to take up the plan form of the labyrinth figure the project thus might be viewed as rehearsing the qualities of labyrinthine paradox (a recognition of a particular type of doubling)

Moulis, Antony, “Figure and Experience: The labyrinth and Le Corbusier’s World Museum”, Interstices No. 4 (Auckland) 1996: CD-ROM publication.

Permanent exhibition preview

Rendering by Vincent Chalot, October 18th, 2008
Shift to zoom in, Ctrl to zoom out, click and drag to move in the picture

Pyramids

On ne peut pas l’entendre [la différance] et nous verrons en quoi elle passe aussi l’ordre de l’entendement. Elle se propose par une marque muette, par un monument tacite, je dirai même une pyramide, songeant ainsi non seulement à la forme de la lettre lorsqu’elle s’imprime en majeur ou en majuscule, mais à tel texte de l’Encyclopédie de Hegel où le corps du signe est comparé à la pyramide égyptienne. Le a de la diffrence, donc ne s’entend pas, il demeure silencieux, secet et discret comme un tombeau : oikesis.”

Marges de la Philosophie, Jacques DERRIDA, 1968

Plans and sections

Sections, Pierre de Brun and Sébastien Berthier
Plan and organizational diagrams, Pierre de Brun and Sébastien Berthier

Permanent exhibition layout

1 : presentation
2 : transversal exhibition
3 : News, library and foyer

1) the museum's permanent exhibition layout is organised along a single spiral timeline, narrating the discovery of otherness, from Ethnocentrism (on the top) to the so called french Multiculturalism (on the lowest part).

2) the transversal exhibition, the most mobile part of the museum, sits on the lowest part of the spiral and cut through the building, linking separate geographical zones.

3) the museum's path ends back in the lobby, through the News and Library areas.

Over / Under

The tower of Babel

Construction of the Tower of Babel, Hendrick van Cleve III (1525-1589/Belgian),
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Tower of Babel (Hebrew: מגדל בבל‎ Migdal Bavel Arabic: برج بابل‎ Burj Babil) is a structure featured in chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis, an enormous tower intended as the crowning achievement of the city of Babilu, the Akkadian name for Babylon. According to the biblical account, Babel was a city that united humanity, all speaking a single language and migrating from the east; it was the home city of the great king Nimrod, and the first city to be built after the Great Flood. The people decided their city should have a tower so immense that it would have "its top in the heavens." (וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם). However, the Tower of Babel was not built for the worship and praise of God, but was dedicated to the glory of man, with a motive of making a 'name' for the builders "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" - Genesis 11:4. God seeing what the people were doing, gave each person a different language to confuse them and scattered the people throughout the earth.

Cité de l'immigration

Cité de l'immigration, model, Patrick Bouchain

Forum's ceiling.

Learning from L.C.

Learning from Corbusier. Picture from Sebastien Berthier and Michel Sikorski, 2006

Encyclopedic plateaus.

Plan of the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton, 1851

The huge glass and steel structure of the Crystal Palace is built by Joseph Paxton to shelter the 1851 London World Fair, where the state of the art in science from around the world is brought together for the first time. The building is organized along what Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen call the Axis of Progress.

Entering the Crystal Palace though the south transept, the visitor encountered a twofold starting point; the beginning of the exhibition itself and the "point zero" of human civilisation. From South to North along the central transept of the palace he would progress through various degrees of "primitiveness" — from Tunis, through China and the Middle East, to India, Turkey and Egypt. The developmental line continued in the main nave, where the visitor was led, east to west, from the new world, through the European coninent, and finally to the conceived culmination of the exhibition and culture alike — the industrial products of the British Empire. The Great Exhibition was a carefully choreographed exercise in progressive historiography.

in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, Mari Hvattum, Christian Hermansen, Routledge, 2004

Here, space and time are compressed into one single narrative, where (non-Western) contemporary societies are understood as primitive steps of human evolution. Rather than of a geographic journey, the experience proposed to the public here is one of a time-travel. There is no Other, only different degrees of accomplishment.

Diagram plan for the Ideal Museum, According, to Wikipedia, Gottfried Semper, Mainz, 1852

A very similar diagram is proposed by German architect Gottfried Semper (1805-1975) for his Ideal Museum. Attentive observer of "primitive" societies, driven by the idea that Art, rather than witnessing a cultural evolution, synthesizes an evolution of techniques, he outlines his Ideal Museum as such : pieces are grouped by medium, each group along a evolution axis that would go from the periphery to the centre of the museum, from the less developed technique. Here as well, time and space are compiled into one single narrative, with the least concern for cultural contexts.

The universal collection would form a great comparative matrix in which the artefacts were arranged not according to chronology of aesthetic value (the most common criteria for museum classification at the time), but according to the four primordial techniques of making, and their corresponding "elements". The section comprising textile art, for instance, would begin with the simplest wickerwork, expand to more defined textile products, and culminate in the metamorphosed motif of Beklidung in its different guises" […] The "complete and universal collection" was meant to provide a comprensive overview of human making. It would be not simply another museum but a complete encyclopaedia of human culture : a system of axioms by means of which a science of art could be established."

Encyclopedic plateau, Plan of the LACMA, OMA, 2002

Not far, in some respect, from the above mentioned modernist universalist fantasies, the encyclopedic plateau proposed by OMA for the LACMA in 2004 is yet divided in four geographic/thematic stripes, each of them separated from the others by deep circulation trenches, and organized along its own timeline (History), at is own speed. Through transverse paths, visitors are invited to experience diachronisms and synchronisms in the collections.

Musée cannibale

Musee Cannibale, exhibition boolket, by Musée d'Ethnographie, Neuchâtel, Swiss

Sous le titre Le musée cannibale, l'équipe du MEN consacre son exposition temporaire au désir de se nourrir des autres qui a présidé à la création et au développement des musées d'ethnographie.
Constituées au fil des années par une succession d'acquisitions et de missions de collecte sur le terrain, les collections des musées d'ethnographie témoignent du désir d'incorporer une altérité d'autant plus valorisée qu'elle semble radicale.

Musee Cannibale, boolket of the exhibition, by Musée d'Ethnographie, Neuchâtel, Swiss

Pour alimenter les visiteurs de leurs expositions, les muséologues extraient de leurs réserves des bribes de culture matérielle qu'ils apprêtent sur la base de recettes contrastées destinées à présenter tel ou tel aspect d'une similarité ou d'une différence entre l'ici et l'ailleurs. Ils dressent la table de cérémonie qui permet la consommation d'un lien social avec l'humanité tout entière. Ils en viennent même parfois à se consommer eux-mêmes à travers une mise en scène de leur propre pratique ou de leur propre regard.
Mais toujours ils s'interrogent sur les liens que les questions identitaires entretiennent avec la violence et le sacré, territoires hantés par la pulsion cannibale, à la fois communion sacrificielle, création symbolique et mode de lecture de l'autre.
[Marc-Olivier Gonseth]

Museums endangered by their publicness

Removal of a museum's glass window,Santiago Sierra
Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium. September 2004
More photos HERE

All the Museum's glass windows were removed and the security equipment disconnected, including cameras and alarms. This forced the transfer of the museum's modern art collection and the protection of the office area.

Description of the installation / performance, as given on Santiago Sierra's website

300 ton, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria. April 2004
More photos HERE

292 tons of concrete bricks were carried to the top floor of the Kunsthause Bregenz and the weight distributed on temporary supports through the whole building. Since 300 tons is the maximum wight the structure of the building can sustain, the number of visitors permitted at any time was never allowed to exceed 100, which represents an additional 8 tons.

Description of the installation / performance, as given on Santiago Sierra's website

Slavoj Zizek on multiculturalism.

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the ‘culturalization of politics’. Political differences - differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation - are naturalized and neutralized into ‘cultural’ differences, that is into different ‘ways of life’ which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be ‘tolerated’. This demands a response in the terms Walter Benjamin offers: from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as the Welfare State or various sociapost-political ersatz.

Tolerance as an ideological categroy, Slavoj Zizek. in Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number 4, Summer 2008
© 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/08/3404-0009$10.00. All rights reserved.
Text available online HERE

"Généro-Cité"

French Pavillon, 2008 Venice Biennale
published on www.lafrenchtouch.org

Pinned on the man's nipples, mottos such as : Generous versus Generic, Ethics, Optimism, New Attitudes

Le Corbusier's Tower of Babel.

The Mundaneum was created in 1910 out of the initiative of two Belgian lawyers. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine aimed to gather together all the World's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification system.
Otlet regarded the project as the centerpiece of a new 'World City' — a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents.
If the task was already huge when Otlet developped his ideas, the later evolution of medias made impossible the target to be met. But some consider Mundaneum a forerunner of the Internet.

The Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium. More photos on dalbera.club.fr/mons/mundaneum/index.htm

Otlet commissioned architect Le Corbusier to design a Mundaneum project to be built in Geneva, in 1929. Drafts were made for a whole city on the hills of the swiss capital. The World Museum, centerpiece of the complex, was meant to narrate, on a single chronological axis going from prehistory to today, an all-encompassing description of Human creation, by indifferently displaying pictures, original objects or facsimiles.

Le Corbusier's Mundaneum (World Museum), Section and facades.

This project is the first, at least in diagram-plan, using the Spiral-museum typology, later recurring in a few Le Corbusier's museums. Its main feature is the very rigid and introverted corridor-shaped chronological exhibition path, going from the centre of the spiral and top of the building, towards its periphery, reaching the groundfloor at its end.

Witnessing the differend. A grammar.

As a site of acknowledgement to Non-Western societies, often unknown by the public, the Musée du Quai Branly is the expression of France's will to give the right place to Primitive Art in its institutions. Further, it testifies there is no more hierarchy between arts than between peoples.

Text as appears at the exit of the Pavillon des Sessions exhibition

The concept of Art, as experienced in western culture, is far from being universal. In doesn't balance Western and "primitives", or "first" cultures. Rather, it assimilates the non-western World. While aiming at weakening the colonial dominant/dominated dialectic, our beatific admiration for primitive Arts actually gives it a new form.

A few typologies, reinforcing and making dialectics such as subject/object, self/other, dominant/dominated, art/ethnology, explicit, are tested on the site.

A collage of typologies.

From left to right and top to bottom

1. Panopticon
2. Irreductible dialectic
3. Curratorial project
4. Collage
5. Overwhelming totality
6. Collection of individualities

The satue says :

Left : Place de la Concorde Paris Auteur : GIRAUD Patrick
Right : ©musée du quai Branly (Paris, Place de la Concorde, Easter Island statue)

Comparable pictures. Comparable situations ?

On the left : one of the obelisks set on Place de la Concorde, Paris. They were offered to France by egyptian Vice-King Mehemet Ali in 1830. In exchange of the obelisks, France offered a clock, which orns, since then, Cairo's Citadel, but never actually worked. The other Obelisk (which was never brought in France) was officially given back to Egypt by President Mitterrand.

On the right, an advertisement for Quai Branly Museum's opening. To our knowledge, the statue on the collage never left Easter Island. But it is virtually taken away from its space and time (its authenticity, according to Benjamin), cleaned from its original meaning, and put in the middle of the piazza as a monument. The asterisk, recurring in the museum's communication, is giving it a voice. And oh, surprise ! the statue speaks french.

This is not a hate declaration.

Quai Branly Museum being blown up. Collage on a Jean Nouvel's rendering of the project.