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.

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.