30 Paul Otlet. “Recherche De La Forme Architecturale Du Palais Mondial,” June 4, 1919

Paul Otlet. “Recherche de la forme architecturale du Palais Mondial,” June 4, 1919. Personal note showing a three-dimensional classification table. Mundaneum Archives. 30 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00315 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Articulated Flatness: Document Culture and Modernism in the Mundaneum and Beyond MICHAEL FACIEJEW Years before collaborating with Le Corbusier on his controversial 1928 project for a Mundaneum, the Belgian internationalist Paul Otlet sought a new architecture for what today might be called a global “information society.”1 In 1919, Otlet was granted a parcel of land in Brussels’s Parc Woluwe to develop an organization that would supplement the recently formed League of Nations. For Otlet, whose heterogeneous career spanned the fields of bibliography, law, international relations, and beyond, this was an opportunity to expand the col- lection of institutions he had been developing since the turn of the century in the neoclassical Palais du Cinquantenaire: the International Institute of Bibliography, the Union of International Associations, and his International Museum.2 This time, he would develop a veritable headquarters for international intellectual cooperation: a “Palais Mondial,” or World Palace. Otlet’s basic architectural idea can be found in a series of personal notes and sketches wherein he claimed that the required combination of building programs (a museum, a laboratory, a parliament, and an assembly hall, among others) had never been addressed by architects: “What dimensions,—what interior layout,—what massing, what relationship to the site and landscape,—what style,—what decoration will the Palais Mondial have?”3 In response, Otlet demanded an architecture that would in hindsight be considered “modern”: it should have “no unnecessary decora- tions,” and its “form” should develop like “an organ” from a logical organization of its “function.”4 While he had only a vague idea of what the resulting architecture would look like, Otlet did describe this “function” by drawing a gridded cube—a perhaps unexpected outcome of his biological characterization of form. The grid has been seen as modern architects’ most privileged instrument.5 But Otlet’s grid was of an entirely different kind—not the planned grid of point columns that could be extruded into a spatial system. Rather his cube was based on a classification table. A classification table is not spatial in the way modernists would have understood the term; it does not create a continuum that might be senso- rially experienced. Quite the contrary, it relies on a fundamental flatness, arraying Grey Room 82, Winter 2021, pp. 30–63. © 2021 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 31 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Right: Diagrams showing “intellectual labor” as an organizing framework for international society. From Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier, Mundaneum (1928). Opposite: Le Corbusier. Mundaneum plan, 1928. From Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier, Mundaneum (1928). discrete entities uniformly in a two-dimensional field. In depicting a classification table that had been folded onto itself, Otlet’s drawing presented a device that was both flat and three-dimensional. What was most useful about this “constructive disposition” for the architecture of the Palais Mondial, Otlet rea- soned, was that it produced “correlations.”6 Thus, in adopting the classification table as a basic model, Otlet inscribed his architecture into a history of epistemic rationalization— a history of a modern compulsion to flatten a variegated and heterogeneous world into a homogeneous and operable field of activity, as if such a uniform field was possible to begin with. Yet in proposing a system structured by correlations, Otlet borrowed the operative functions of another ordering device, the matrix, whose vectorial operations stray from the classical model of organization that underlies early modern taxonomies like the eighteenth- century botanist Carl Linnaeus’s regnum vegetabile.7 Where classification tables establish authority by representing order, a matrix does so through the operations it enforces. The correlations proposed by Otlet were motivated by the epistemic regime of a new “science of documentation,” a knowledge economy avant la lettre, where documents were to be medial units that could store the world’s information and circulate it without limits. Otlet’s matric grid and its associated cube, that is, were based on a documentary and informational principle that developed in parallel with the movement of universalization examined by Max Weber in his theorization of paperwork as the elementary force of modernization.8 In this article, I propose to name this principle “articulated flatness.” It is a principle that can turn a grid into a three-dimensional operational space that grants objects multiple, virtual states of organization. My aim is to uncover the impact of early twentieth-century “document culture” (distinct from the “print culture” that preceded it) on modern architecture through an analysis of the architecture of the Palais Mondial and its eventual successor, the Mundaneum.9 The same three-dimensional figure Otlet drew in 1919 was also featured, in more developed form, in the 1928 Mundaneum publication that presented the Le Corbusier–designed plan for a Cité Mondiale (World City), with its ziggurat- shaped World Museum.10 Here again, Otlet’s table described the full scope of intellectual activities that would take place inside the Cité Mondiale (research, 32 Grey Room 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 discussion, scientific work, among others) across all fields of knowledge pro- duction, ranging from the exact sciences to philosophy. Despite the prominence of the diagram in this publication, it has been overlooked. Instead, the Mundaneum endures in architectural history as an enigma in modernist form- making—dominated by debates about the spiral and the pyramid as iconic forms. Ever since the Czech artist Karel Teige’s 1929 vitriolic critique of the project, it has been identified as a relapse of symbolism and monumentality in modernism’s otherwise triumphant ascent.11 This formalist critique, however, misses the significance of the architecture of the Mundaneum as a contribution to articulated flatness; that is, to the spatial model of epistemological rationalization proposed by documentation science. The Mundaneum’s connection to media has been noted: it has been contex- tualized through early twentieth-century mass media, discussed as a con- frontation of the legacy of public institutions since the print culture of the Enlightenment, and theorized as a building meant to somehow be read by a hermeneutic subject like a “book.”12 The Mundaneum’s latent classicism, Faciejew | Articulated Flatness: Document Culture and Modernism in the Mundaneum and Beyond 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 affirmed in Le Corbusier’s use of the Golden Ratio to organize the site plan, has also been explored.13 But the Mundaneum’s folded form, and its copublication with a table describing the increasingly debated interwar category of intellectual labor can also help to trace the impact of a ubiquitous informational apparatus on the development of architectural modernism. The crucial term in the 1928 publication that declared the Mundaneum to be a culmination of “six thousand years of known and documented history” was not the “culminative” aspect, which connotes monumental hierarchy, but the word document.14 The empiricism of this “document” suggests an altogether different genealogy for twentieth-century modernism, whose mythology is based on the assumed universality of the subject of the manual worker. To center the figure of the intellectual worker is to uncover organizational tenets that run deeper than the industrial utopianism that has conditioned a teleological history of modern architecture. When taken as a piece of evidence of the “document culture” that impacted ideas about organization (of space and of information) between the late nineteenth century and World War Two—that is, during the traditional periodization of architectural modernism’s internationalization—the Mundaneum becomes a chapter in the history of the administrative state.15 It is a history of power relegated to bureaucratic procedures and of modern architecture validat- ing the imperializing self-evidence that to organize information is to organize the world. Flatness and Modernity While documentation was, initially at least, less concerned with the administrative apparatus of the modern state, it was also founded on the idea that the document was the fundamental unit for the organization of life at large. The flatness of the document, like the paperwork technologies addressed by Cornelia Vismann, Lisa Gitelman, and other historians of media, proposed a mode of spatialization that depended not on the representation of order but its 34 Grey Room 82 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Opposite: Le Corbusier. View of the Mundaneum and its central World Museum prepared for a diorama to be exhibited in Geneva, 1929. From Le Corbusier, “Défense de l’architecture,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui

Load more