Article,
Architectural metaphors of knowledge : the Mundaneum designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet, and Le Corbusier
Library Trends, (2013)
DOI: 10.1353/lib.2012.0036
Abstract
The author discusses the architectural plans of the Mundaneum made in the 1930s by the Belgian modernist architect Maurice Heymans in the footsteps of Le Corbusier and in collaboration with Paul Otlet. The Mundaneum was the utopian concept of a world center for the accumulation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge, invented by the visionary encyclopedist and internationalist Paul Otlet. In Heymans’s architecture, a complex architectural metaphor is created for the Mundaneum, conveying its hidden meaning as a center of initiation into synthesized knowledge. In particular, this article deconstructs the metaphorical architectural complex designed by Heymans and focuses on how the architectural spaces as designed by Heymans are structured in analogy to schemes for the organization of knowledge made by Otlet. In three different designs of the Mundaneum, the analogy is studied between, on the one hand, the architectural structure (designed by Heymans) and, on the other hand, the structure of the cosmology, the book Monde, and the vision of knowledge dissemination as invented by Otlet. The article argues that the analogies between the organization of architectural space and knowledge, as expressed in the drawings of Heymans and Otlet, are elaborated by means of a mode of visual thinking that is parallel to and rooted in the art of memory and utopian imagination. In the Footsteps of Le Corbusier In 1935, the Belgian modernist architect Maurice Heymans (1909–1991) elaborated numerous highly detailed drawings of the Mundaneum as conceived by his compatriot, the documentalist and utopian internationalist, Paul Otlet (1868–1944). The Mundaneum was Otlet’s expanded project LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 61, No. 2, 2012 (“Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors,” edited by Wouter Van Acker and Pieter Uyttenhove), pp. 371–396. © 2012 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 372 library trends/fall 2012 of what he called “Offices of Documentation,” which he defined as a new kind of information service that would supplement and eventually absorb libraries. Otlet had strongly criticized their conservative approach to information services and their outmoded methods of classification and cataloging (Rayward, 1997, p. 295). The Mundaneum was intended to be a scientific, documentary, educational, and social institution that would explain the world in all its parts and, by doing so, would help to bring peace to the world. Otlet also applied the term to the complex of institutions that he and his colleague, the prominent Belgian socialist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henri La Fontaine, had directed and had brought together in the Palais Mondial (World Palace) in the left wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Heymans is especially known for his achievements as the head of the Urbanist Department in the Belgian Congo after World War II. But, in 1935, when he designed the Mundaneum for Otlet, he was still at the beginning of his career.1 He had graduated in 1930 from the Institut Supérieur des Arts Décoratifs de l’Etat (ISAD) in La Cambre—the “Belgian Bauhaus,” as Jacques Aron calls it (Aron, 1982)—and had interned at the architectural offices of the leading Belgian architects Victor Bourgeois (1897–1962), Gaston Brunfaut (1894–1974), Jean-Jules Eggericx (1884–1963), and Raphaël Verwilghen (1885–1963). He was a member of the Belgian CIAM group (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and published regularly in journals such as L’Époque and La Cité. In 1932, he won the competition for an urbanization plan of the Belgian town Termonde. Heymans translated Otlet’s utopian vision of the Mundaneum into architecture, and therefore followed in the footsteps of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier—the leading avant-gardist of the new machine esthetics in modern architecture—who had drafted detailed plans for a Mundaneum near Geneva in 1928. Otlet and Le Corbusier had published a booklet in 1928 with the plans for a center of information, science, and education to complement the political League of Nations. The most pronounced building of the Intellectual Centre of the Mundaneum was the World Museum, which had the form of a spiraling pyramid that reconfigured Otlet’s International Museum in Brussels (fig. 1). The pyramidal museum gave the impression of a sort of a sacred temple complex dating from Babylonian or Assyrian times. In particular, the seven-tiered, ziggurat-like form of the World Museum resembled formally the observatory of the palace of Khorsabad, with which we know Le Corbusier was familiar.2 The publication of the plans of the Mundaneum triggered fierce reactions by contemporary architectural critics regarding the historicist traits and academic tendencies of the Mundaneum, which, in their eyes, ran counter to the functionalist principles of modernist architecture of which Le Corbusier in particular was considered to be one of the founding fathers. Karel Teige drew a bead in the architectural journal Stabva 373 architectural metaphors/van acker Figure 1. Le Corbusier, Perspective of the Mundaneum (1928.08) (Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris FLC, fonds Mundaneum FLC SABAM Belgium 2012). 374 library trends/fall 2012 in September 1929 on the historical reminiscences of the Mundaneum and the estheticizing, nonfunctional principles of Le Corbusier’s work. He admonished Le Corbusier that, through his reluctance to abandon monumentality, he, of all people, had taken the perilous road toward academicism (Teige, 1929 as reproduced in Hays, 1974).3 El Lissitzky made a similar critique of the Mundaneum in Marxist terms in the journal Bauindustrie (Lissitzky, 1928). In an essay, “Idole und Idolverehrer,” Lissitzky focused on the ”pseudo-functionalism” of Le Corbusier, against which the Soviet idolaters amid the constructivist and functionalist movements should be on their guard. In a long 1933 essay, “In Defense of Architecture,” Le Corbusier answered these accusations of academicism, historicist formalism, and religious symbolism that were being made in regard to his design for the Mundaneum (as reproduced in Hays, 1974, pp. 598–614). Patiently, he built up his counterattack against the value of Sachlickheit, or functional directness of expression, on the basis of which Teige, Lissitizky, Mart Stam, and Hannes Meyer were building a front against Le Corbusier, starting from a statement made by Meyer, and quoted by Teige, that “all things in this world are a product of the formula: function times economics” (as reproduced in Hays, 1974, p. 599). In his defense, Le Corbusier directly addressed Teige and told him that in his opinion, esthetics was a fundamental human function and that he therefore opposed Sachlichkeit, or the logic of economic functionality as the sole foundation of modern architecture. Although the Mundaneum was “only a provisional image destined, through its iconography, to work its way into the minds of those who had the means or interest to occupy themselves with it,” each building type, Le Corbusier assured us, was “rigorously appropriate to each specific function” (Hays, 1974, p. 608)4 Le Corbusier then responded to the central issue in the Mundaneum design that Teige and Lissitzsky objected to, namely, that the Sacrarium in the World Museum revealed that the World Museum was not a museum but, rather, a sort of “sanctuary” and that the pyramidal form that is reminiscent of Babylonian or Assyrian temples expressed this sacred function in a classical monumental fashion. In the same nuanced manner, Le Corbusier argued that the functionality of modern architecture did not exclude it from having a spiritual dimension. The Museum of Human Creation had the shape of a spiraling pyramid to respond to “the absolute continuity of events in history, and the Sacrarium was designed in such a way as to show how great geniuses have, in their time, incarnated the general current of ideas and have convulsed the world. For new things have not convulsed the world, new ideas have: the things being merely the manifestation of ideas” (Hays, 1974, p. 605). In reaction to the supposed sacred function of the World Museum, Le Corbusier referred to and defended the “organizational efforts” of Paul Otlet, whom he described as “one of those ardent youths with grey 375 architectural metaphors/van acker hair,” “visionaries,” and “organizers of ideas” whose “intellectual awakening dates from 1870s” (Hays, 1974, pp. 605–607). Otlet had thought, Le Corbusier said, that Thus, after the attempts of practical adjustment of the International Labour Office and the League of Nations, it was necessary to go back to the source: we have gone back to what dominates the great balance of the world, pure idea, pure thought. This is the conception of Paul Otlet, of Brussels, the brilliant promoter of the Cité Mondiale. Hence, a new spiritual dimension in architecture is called for. (Le Corbusier 1960, p. 218) In the same way that Eiffel had made the Eiffel Tower as a “temple to calculation,” Le Corbusier stated, he had intended to show with the Mundaneum that architecture is “a manifestation of order.” In 1933, Le Corbusier included a reduced and restructured version of the Mundaneum in his submission for the international town-planning competition for the extension of Antwerp into the left bank of the great bend of the river Scheldt, a proposal that he elaborated in collaboration with Otlet, Huib Hoste (1881–1957), and Fé Loquet. But besides the team of Le Corbusier, at least five other teams had included a Mundaneum or a Cité Mondiale. Among them, there was the team of Maurice Heymans and Emile Henvaux (1903–1991). From a critical review that Victor Bourgeois wrote about the competition and a conference in 1933 organized by the Société Belge des Urbanistes et Architectes Modernistes (SBUAM), it becomes clear that these different teams included a Cité Mondiale in their project as a visual statement that communicated the idea that the development
