Paul Otlet. “Recherche de la forme architecturale du Palais Mondial,” June 4, 1919. Personal note showing a three-dimensional classification table. Mundaneum Archives.

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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 archi- tecture 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 orga- nization 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 organiza- tion 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 classi- fication 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 “intel- lectual labor” as an organizing framework for international soci- ety. 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-dimen- sional field. In depicting a classification table that had been folded onto itself, Otlet’s draw- ing 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 opera- tions 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,

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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 pro- ject, 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 rational- ization 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,

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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 intellec- tual labor can also help to trace the impact of a ubiquitous informational appa- ratus 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 adminis- trative 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

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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 3, no. 10 (1933). Left: Paul Otlet. Diagram of an unfolding cube showing the mul- tiple dimensions of documentary classification. From Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation: Le livre sur le livre (1934).

enactment.16 As Vismann remarks, it is the manner in which documents demand to be handled through standardized techniques that produces order across an entire regimental system. For Otlet, flattening was a strategy for arranging distinct entities in a uniform field, which allowed one to make com- parative associations in previously inconceivable ways. But he reasoned that the complexity of modern intellectual activities demanded even more oppor- tunities for creating informational linkages. Two dimensions were insufficient. A three-dimensional classification table of “Intellectual Labor” first published in 1920 (and later appearing in the 1928 Mundaneum publication) illustrates this correspondence between space and the practices of epistemological ratio- nalization. As Otlet pointed out in a personal note, the complexity of modern intellectual labor conceptualized in the diagram’s x, y, and z axes made archi- tecture essential: Three-dimensional form is exactly what architecture realizes through its edifices—this makes it possible to define it as the art of enclosing space. We must therefore seek out a constructive disposition that will permit the externalization of correlations and thus to create a building that responds as much as it can to its function and establishes a clear architectural principle.17 The multiplication of “correlations,” as illustrated in Otlet’s diagram, was made possible by a flat grid that paradoxically turns the corner and folds onto itself. Every edge of a three-dimensional cube is in fact a line in a table, dividing up information, that has been folded ninety degrees. Thus, where all information was already presumed to be relational, Otlet’s documentation science estab- lished that it could be articulated in additional dimensions. The dynamism of this system is described in another widely reproduced diagram of documen- tation science where planes (identifying the subject, language, time period, place, and medium of a specific document) unfold and fold into a cube. Thus, where Otlet saw documentation as an intervention in the modern lineage of classification and used the classification table as a basic device, his system also hinted at the obsolescence of classical taxonomy. Knowledge was not a stable accumulation of facts but a system realized in its operative dimensions. One can imagine this documentary topology expanding with additional informa- tional planes.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 The relationship between sur- face, flatness, and space is a central theme in the historiography of archi- tectural modernism. Flatness—in particular the physical flatness of walls—has been theorized as a nec- essary precondition for a modern “space” that could be shaped and molded by the architect, as in Walter Gropius’s Fagus Factory at Alfeld (1911–1913) or his Bauhaus School at Dessau (1926), where smooth constructive planes delimit Cartesian space with their crisp edges.18 Of particular relevance to Otlet’s intervention is the assumed modernism of the “problem of the corner.” Nancy Troy argues that the optical unfolding of surfaces allowed modernists to trivialize the ornamental forms that had proliferated in the nineteenth century and ultimately create a space of “extension” that was opposed to “enclosure.”19 In this reading, flattening asserts itself as an essential modernist technique for stripping away a bourgeois symbolic order to reveal instead the empiricism of modern spatial experience. Concerns over the surficiality of modernist aesthetics have also bridged architecture and the pictorial arts, where modernist flatness rests on the shaky foundation of sensorial logic.20 The development of Otlet’s documentation science instead affords an opera- tional, nonsensorial entry into the matter of flatness. Flattening can be spatial— in that it rearranges the relationships between discrete things—without being formal. To flatten a mathematical tree, for instance, is to reveal its nested data. A similar sense is afforded in the French expression mise à plat, which describes a methodical reordering or a case-by-case review. Today, it is also possible to “flatten” a pdf or image file; that is, to parse information and render a file more communicable. “Document culture” is based on this mode of flattening. Rather than pointing to the projective technique employed by Troy’s neoplasticist protagonists, flattening in Otlet’s system operates as an epistemological process that grants a virtual, permutable space. Otlet’s gridded cube thus functions much like Patrick Geddes’s “thinking machines,” diagrams that arranged information on a piece of paper whose origami-like manipulation produced possible relationships between discrete concepts.21 Throughout his career, Otlet was consumed with schematizing his visions, employing diagrams and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Walter Gropius. Bauhaus Dessau, 1926. Photograph by Lucia Moholy used by Sigfried Giedion to illustrate the “hovering rela- tions of planes” of modern archi- tectural space. From Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1947).

paper models whose folding operations were used to illustrate a theoretical space of organization. This geometric approach reflects Otlet’s predilection for an archaiz- ing cosmological view.22 But evaluated against the idealized representations of optical flatness that systematized architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century, articulated flatness—the act of folding this flattened space—becomes a technique for rearranging knowledge into new informational constellations and thus a countermeasure to an illusory representational space. While many have discussed the extrusion of the plan as a basis for modern space-making, Otlet defined architecture as a process of “enclosing” space.23 Otlet’s gridded cube was likewise not the immaterial, transparent, and inter- penetrating frame that would have appeared in modernist drawings; it was instead made of opaque surfaces. The “enclosure” of modernity has been dis- cussed by many thinkers, beginning with Walter Benjamin, who described inte- riorization as a dialectical force at the core of modern subjectivity and political existence.24 Before him, Gottfried Semper recognized enclosure as one of the four “elements” of architecture and the most basic act of dividing space; that is, a cultural technique that creates relationships through space.25 Otlet’s enclosure in turn demonstrates a practice at the juncture of these epistemological and spa- tial functions. The cube describes not modernism’s field of infinite and abstract extension but a delineated structure for collecting and sorting the vast content of the world. This idea of capture was also integral to Weber’s architectural suggestion of an “iron cage” of bureaucracy. What makes Otlet’s “enclosure” modern is this relationship to the real material operations of paperwork. The science of documentation should not as such be conflated with the legal- rational forms of authority theorized in classical accounts of the administrative state, where clerks and functionaries, organized in a hierarchy of offices accord- ing to their defined sphere of competence, collectively effectuate a system of legitimate domination. Yet the rational principles of clerical bureaucracy, which ensure that each thing is in its place, are constituent of the same organi- zational utopia. Otlet was a key member, beginning in the 1910s, of the International Congresses of Administrative Sciences and later a supporter of “municipal Taylorism,” a science of municipal government that applied the efficiency principles of scientific management to administrative labor.26 By modeling a document culture on the power of the administrative state, the Mundaneum was made to operate like a grid without looking like one. In this articulation, the myth of modern space as a universal, homogeneous field ordered by the architect from nothing but a grid of columns is reconceived as a material and informational operation. A world could be continuously remade by folding neat planes and paper documents into robust structures.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Office plan of the anthropometric service at Paris’s Palais de Justice, based on the principles established by Alphonse Bertillon. From “L’anthropométrie judiciaire à Paris en 1889,” Archives d’anthropologie crimi- nelle et des sciences pénales, vol. 5 (1890).

Document Culture Otlet first used documentation to refer to a science in 1903. In doing so, he leveraged a long-standing francophone definition of the word document that had shifting considerations of materiality.27 In French, the noun document has been in use since the thirteenth century. It was adopted from the Latin docu- mentum, referring to an example, a model, a lecture, a teaching, a demonstra- tion, or a piece of evidence or proof—essentially anything serving to instruct. Accordingly, the verb documenter (to document), from the Latin docere, came into use in the eighteenth century as a synonym for instruire (to instruct), or the act of learning in a broad sense. In its common usage, beginning in the mid- nineteenth century, the noun has been chiefly associated with material objects that serve a specific informative purpose: manuscripts, administrative records, archaeological objects, museum specimens. While some documentation spe- cialists conceptualized the document as less anchored by material supports— for example, in 1951 the documentalist Suzanne Briet suggested that anything, “even an antelope,” could be a document so long as it was contextualized as an instance of something for the purposes of study—what is most common still today is the substantive understanding of the document as a thing.28 In the 1870s, however, the verb to document began to be used in the sense of prepar- ing and supplying documents (fournir des documents), thereby also designating systematic record-keeping protocols.29 The transformation of “documentation” into a broadly applicable cultural technique is historically significant, as it illu- minates the extent to which repetitive and institutionalized procedures of paper-based information management had come to define modern life through governance and bureaucracy. It also highlights how documentation evolved in tandem with the new medium of photography, which since the mid-nineteenth century had been shaped by considerable bureaucratic enterprises such as the Mission héliographique and Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric filing system, widely implemented in metropolitan and colonial France.30 Paradoxically, this transformation of the document into a technique separated it from the act of learning. One could document simply by relaying information, without acquiring any new knowledge. The release of documents from systems of erudition marks the beginning of a truly modern conception of information management. The principles of documentation, set in place by Otlet in the 1890s for the purposes of professionalization, reveal a broader attempt to legitimize “intel- lectual labor” alongside the classical conception of work as a manual activity. When Otlet and his colleague the senator, lawyer, pacifist, and later Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henri La Fontaine developed separate indexing systems

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 and bibliographic repertories for the fields of law and sociology, their work addressed a problem that researchers, scientists, and other “intellectual work- ers” had faced throughout the latter third of the nineteenth century after the second print revolution: the most relevant information for scientific and cultural production was no longer found in books and treatises produced by unique authors but in proliferating “new” media such as journals, which had no sys- tematic bibliographic protocols. Not only were researchers spanning institu- tions, nations, and languages unable to access the knowledge they needed; they were not even aware of its existence. Pooling their experience, Otlet and La Fontaine sought to expand the efforts of earlier initiatives such as the Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers in Great Britain.31 Their new science of documentation moved away from the tradition of library science, or biblio- théconomie, in two ways. First, it was not constrained by the epistemic unit of the biblion; it now encompassed ostensibly all media (sound recordings, visual media, patents, journal articles, newspapers, statistical databases, physical objects, etc.). Second, whereas librarians had developed indexing techniques for traditional volumes, and while those were tailor-made for the individual collections and buildings they oversaw, Otlet and La Fontaine set up elastic principles they hoped could organize knowledge across all buildings where documents were stored, displayed, and consulted. In one of the first clear and explicit definitions of documentation, Otlet wrote, “By Documentation we mean the gathering and coordination of isolated documents so that they may become organized assemblages.”32 In essence, he was proposing that memory institutions (libraries, archives, research centers, learned societies, etc.)—and their design—be rethought not as places for conservation but as nodes in a network for access and communication. This was the “correlational” model. To accomplish their goals in the increasingly institutionalized conduits of global interaction, Otlet and La Fontaine founded two organizations: the Office international de bibliographie (OIB) and the Institut international de bibliogra- phie (IIB). On September 12, 1895, King Leopold II signed the OIB into exis-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 tence by royal decree, thereby creating a governmentally legitimized and funded operation.33 Its headquarters, on the rue de la Régence in Brussels, was envisioned as a kind of switchboard for an international information economy that had expanded in the late nineteenth century with the development of com- munications technologies such as the railroad and telegraphy.34 Here, a small brigade of workers, many of them the wives of prominent members of the Brussels elite, acted as the operators of an expansive card ledger system that required endless upkeep. Other well-known scientists and intellectuals—for instance, the French physiologist Charles Richet and the pioneering feminist Léonie La Fontaine (Henri La Fontaine’s sister)—contributed specialized bibli- ographies. Thus the system encompassed two complementary strands of intel- lectual labor: on the one hand, repetitive clerical work that could be done by low-wage or unpaid employees; on the other hand, skilled work that required expert knowledge. The OIB and IIB shared two basic instruments as part of their information architecture. The first was the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), derived by Otlet and La Fontaine from Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification of 1876, extending its application to any medium and covering all disciplines in ten classes (ranging from “0” for Generalities to “9” for History and Geography). As a system of “digitization,” not limited by the language-based subject headings that varied internationally, its application ensured shelf order across all libraries. (Otlet even used the UDC to articulate his folding diagrams.) The sec- ond instrument was the Répertoire bibliographique universel (RBU), an ever- growing inventory of index cards that aggregated records of all textual documents (books, journal articles, pamphlets, etc.) published in any language.35 It was to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Workers tending to the card cata- logues at the Office international de bibliographie in Brussels, n.d. Mundaneum Archives.

house this unfettered material growth that Otlet needed architecture. At its peak, the RBU materials amounted to 18 million index cards, and they were collected in hundreds of card catalogues that eventually occupied vast areas of the Palais du Cinquantenaire. The limits and expandability of Otlet’s epistemo- logical system were defined, like Carl Linnaeus’s, by a spatial apparatus of paper slips. But the continuities with that early modern cross-referencing sys- tem end with documentation’s aim not only to capture and index every species of document but to allow for the continual recombination of distinct entities in new ways. In the period preceding World War One, the IIB became a powerful institu- tion coordinating the standards of multiple nationalized documentation sys- tems, including the Bureau bibliographique de Paris (later renamed the Bureau bibliographique de France) and the Netherlands Institute of Documentation and Filing (NID).36 Parallel discourses later developed in Great Britain and in the United States, through the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB) and the American Documentation Institute.37 OIB materials even reached the Brazilian National Library.38 By the 1920s, the standardized protocols of documentation science, now widely applied across businesses, cultural institutions, governments, banks, and other memory institutions, con- stituted a genuine information movement. Before the present-day era of fiber optic networks and “information technologies,” a new professional class of “documentalists,” as they were called, reconceived knowledge as a discretized, technical substance that could be distributed across municipal, regional, and international space. An iconic illustration, published in Otlet’s encyclopedic Traité de documen- tation: Le livre sur le livre (1934), describes documentation science as a distinc- tive theory of media and materiality.39 The plate depicts how the world or “reality”—at first heterogeneous, messy, three-dimensional—is incrementally processed into an ordered state. After being filtered by “intelligences,” the things of the world are reorganized by established scientific methods. Various media then sequentially capture information so that it can be stored, circulated, and synthesized: the book, the bibliographic record, and the encyclopedia. Disassembled and reassembled, the world ultimately achieves an idealized state: a uniform grid. Documentation is thus conceived as a flattening of “things” into “classification.” Though this rearrangement of reality idealizes the organization of knowledge as a seamless procedure, it points to an idea that is familiar today: that material operations also encompass informational oper- ations. The illustration also emphasizes a key assumption made in Otlet’s system: that the term document ultimately conceptualizes information not as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Right: Table explaining documen- tation science as a comprehensive system of intellectual labor. From Paul Otlet, Traité de documenta- tion: Le livre sur le livre (1934). Opposite: Mathematics and Physical and Natural Sciences room at the Musée International, n.d. Mundaneum Archives.

an entity or a “thing”—as we tend to associate it in the pre- sent day—but as a process.40 Instead of emphasizing the semantic content of a single medium (“facts” themselves) or standalone containers, docu- mentation constructs relation- ships among them.41 Moreover, where historians discuss the book as a medium thought to somehow embody nature itself, the document was conceived as a support that stood for another entity. This was different from saying that the document was merely an “extract” of the book. Documentation proposed that information was a substance that could be grafted onto any number of material carriers.42 For example, with documents there was no distinction between a copy and an original, since both were assumed to carry the same informational value. As surrogate artifacts not limited to evidentiary forms of proof, the doc- uments of documentation science were conceived to undo a historicist attitude toward culture, reorienting their function toward the present. Recovering this theory of documentation as a process helps to suggest an altogether different, nonformalist genealogy of flattening. This reading also helps to correct Otlet’s position in architectural literature, which has cast him as an eclectic figure fixated on architecture’s symbolic power. Markus Krajewski, for instance, includes Otlet in his description of the universalizing early twentieth-century imagination as an ideology of “world projection” engi- neered to create an orderly “remainderless” reality.43 World projectors, for Krajewski, balance their world-making delusions with an obsessive pragmatism regarding the technical means required to achieve unprecedented scales of organization. But Otlet’s project should be distinguished from that of other “projectors”—even those who are indebted to him, such as the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, founder of the Munich-based bibliographic institute Die Brücke. Documentation was not only about the absorption of “everything” into an exceptionless system but about the fundamental “twoness” depicted in the iconic plate from the Traité de documentation: reality as such, experienced through sensorial apperception, would remain heterogeneous, or messy, though it could always potentially be articulated into an ordered state. This was not the empiricist world-conception in which knowledge is gained from experience as such. Reality is ascertained only when it is introduced as information in a system of documentary media, thereby making perception reliant on media. Like his diagrams of articulated flatness, Otlet’s plate points to the ambivalent

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 historicity of Otlet’s project, torn between classical ideas of universal order and synthesis—like the mappemonde of the Enlightenment Encyclopédie—and something beyond it, wherein information is granted mutable properties. Beneath the apparent idiosyncrasies of this early twentieth-century document culture was nevertheless a conviction that a new world would be “produced” only insofar as it was reconfigured from material already found in it, through permutable acts of organization.

Architecture for “Worldwide Society” The Mundaneum did not originate in the vacuum of bibliography. From the beginning, the “sciences” of documentation and internationalism were paired. Otlet and La Fontaine were well connected to the learned societies of turn-of- the-century Brussels and hoped to use institutional power to foster “interna- tional life” (vie intellectuelle), a “worldwide society” (société mondiale), even a state of mondialité.44 Like many other internationalists, they understood the world as tending toward disorder under the pressures of industrial modern- ization and believed internationalism—specifically, international intellectual cooperation—could foster a new world order above and beyond the obsolete unit of the nation-state.45 Over four decades, Otlet’s and La Fontaine’s activities included the foundation of the Union of International Associations (UIA), which beginning in 1910 coordinated international organizations such as the Universal Telegraphy Union and the International Federation of Miners; publi- cations promoting intellectual cooperation, including the Annuaire de la vie internationale; the organization of conferences, including the Congrès interna- tional des sciences administratives and the 1921 Pan-African Congress; and the Musée international, a large-scale exhibition inaugurated in 1910 that occupied at its peak one hundred rooms of the Palais du Cinquantenaire.46 Their work even informed the League of Nations and its foundation of an International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.47 By the mid-1930s, documentation had

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 evolved into a global pedagogical movement, reaching its apogee with the first World Congress of Universal Documentation, organized in conjunction with the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. In the 1928 Mundaneum publication, Otlet used the term mondialisation to describe the irreversible movement fostered by these initiatives.48 Architecture and urban planning began to play a key role in Otlet’s vision of international cooperation after the 1907 Peace Conference at The Hague, which led to the creation of the “Peace Palace,” designed by Louis M. Cordonnier and completed in 1913. For Otlet, the realization of an alternate system of global governance would require a physical headquarters to substantiate a framework of international cooperation. Shortly before 1913, when he helped to organize the First International Congress and Comparative Exposition of Cities in Ghent and cofounded the Union internationale des villes (UIV), Otlet became an intel- lectual and financial supporter of the World Centre of Communication, a Beaux-Arts plan for a metropolis of one million inhabitants conceived by the Norwegian-American painter and sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen and the French architect and planner Ernest Hébrard.49 Organized along a monumental axis lined with imposing academic-style pavilions and “palaces” dedicated to the arts and sciences, the plan’s central element was a Tower of Progress, a massive broadcasting station that would diffuse information internationally through wireless telegraphy. The project was conceived to encourage “harmo- nious and peaceful economic relations facilitated by science and culture.”50 For much of the 1910s, Otlet continued to advocate for the project, even seeking to realize it in Tervuren, near the former grounds of the colonial World’s Fair where the Congo Museum designed by Charles Girault had been erected. Earlier European proposals for projects of global governance, including Josef Hoffmann’s 1895 design called “Forum orbis—Insula pracis” and Peter Hendrick Eijkman’s and Paul Horrix’s World Capital, have been discussed at length in relation to Otlet’s work, but Otlet admired Andersen’s project for the centrality of “intellectual life” it proposed in the organization of an international society.51 Though Otlet would later embrace modernist architecture, his predilection for the classicizing monumentality of these early projects continued to inform later proposals. Beneath Otlet’s rhetoric of internationalism, his project retained its speci- ficity to Belgium and was seen from the beginning as useful to the kingdom’s development as an imperial power. Like the Netherlands and Switzerland, Belgium, and especially Brussels, attracted internationalists who harnessed an ideology of political “neutrality” whose principles of humanitarianism and uni- versal rights would be institutionalized in the League of Nations in the interwar

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 J. Lebègue & Cie. Map of the Congo Free State during its annexation by King Leopold II, 1896. Library of Congress.

period.52 But in Belgium, the pretext of neutrality also helped to elide the imperial motivations of King Leopold II, whose per- sonal annexation of the Congo Free State, a territory eighty times the size of Belgium, was used to earn the kingdom more power on the global stage. As is now well-known, several mil- lion indigenous people in cen- tral Africa died under the brutal Leopoldian regime.53 At this juncture of the complementary forces of utopian international- ism and violent imperialism, Belgium, in the three decades preceding World War One, hosted more “international” conferences, fairs, treaties, and organizations than any other nation.54 These included the 1905 International Congress of Worldwide Expansion, organized in the aftermath of the 1903 Casement Report (which publicly exposed Leopold’s atrocities) as a kind of preparatory event for Belgium’s eventual takeover of the Congo as an official colony in 1908. As Madeleine Herren notes, this event emboldened Belgians to identify culturally with the problematic idea of “Expansion,” a patriotic term calculated to blur the lines between internationalism and colo- nial power.55 Brussels’s identity as an aspiring world city endures to this day; it functions as the de facto capital of Europe, home to both the European Parliament and the NATO headquarters. Documentation’s cultural alignment with the violent dimension of European universalism has gone unexamined in the literature despite multiple institu- tional connections.56 The question of the Congo—and of Leopold’s work as a great act of “civilization”—recurred in Otlet’s own writings.57 At the 1905 congress, Otlet explicitly proposed documentation to facilitate Belgian “Expansion.”58 The official designation in 1895 (by royal decree) of the OIB as an asset of the Belgian government is but one indication that the treatment of information had begun to play an important role in the development of a modern imperial Belgium. Bureaucracy is elemental to the subject of imperial history precisely because its infrastructure of techniques allowed for control to be consolidated over large territories with relative ease. Otlet’s project was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 bolstered in official channels because it was understood as potentially helpful for smoothing a transition from a brittle imperial order. To document means not only to store, organize, and index but, in some cases, to colonize. For Otlet, the proven efficacy of a centralized bureaucratic apparatus provided the empirical means to negotiate a transnational system. The documentation practices Otlet advocated were built on paperwork technologies that affirmed colonial rule and compensated for the irrationality of their consequences with proclamations of a new “international” order.59 Otlet’s architectural ventures—not only the World Centre of Communication— were inevitably caught in the ideological paradox of neutrality, but his under- standing of architecture’s role in supporting international cooperation was transformed after Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914. As his publications began increasingly to focus on problems of statehood, world charters, and peace treaties, Otlet shepherded a series of architectural projects for international organizations and a headquarters for a rational bureaucracy that would manage a new global polity.60 When he returned to Belgium from wartime exile, he cam- paigned for the establishment of a League of Nations in Brussels, following the lead of the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs Paul Hymans and the Brussels Mayor Adolphe Max.61 Otlet explained in a series of personal notes and draw- ings that Brussels was uniquely situated at the crossroads of “worldwide currents” extending from Paris, London, The Hague, and Cologne—or, from his narrow European vantage point, the literal geographic center of the world. To promote Belgium as a neutral and progressive center of diplomacy, Otlet solicited the Belgian architect Oscar Francotte, who produced a design for a sprawling Beaux-Arts palace in Brussels’s Woluwe Park, the same location where Otlet proposed to create a new architecture for his Palais Mondial.62 A preference among League officials for Geneva as the headquarters of the orga- nization was widely known, however, and the project was not realized. At the Paris Peace Conference on February 5, 1919, Otlet and La Fontaine had petitioned the League to instate a Charter of Intellectual and Moral Interests alongside the League’s Charter of Work.63 Now, at the League’s first General Assembly meeting on November 15, 1920, the two men presented a resolution concerning the realization of an organ of intellectual cooperation that would supplement the League’s traditional diplomacy. Targeting the League’s limited “political” focus, these measures supplemented widespread criticism of the international organization’s “new diplomacy,” which replaced concrete bilat- eral relations with the nonbinding principles of a semi-universal association of states.64 But unlike other critics, Otlet embraced the League’s communicative aspects while believing that its potentially universal framework for exchange

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 should be made available not only to national delegates but to all individuals beyond the institution. In conjunction with the 1920 resolution, Otlet and La Fontaine hired the Belgian architect Oscar Van de Voorde to design a Maison des Associations Internationales to expand and house the UIA. Van de Voorde’s elliptical design incorporated two monumental towers that gave the project the appearance of a temple. Though the design was at odds with the functionalism sweeping across Belgium and Europe after World War One, it set up the prob- lem of how to compose an architectural program that could effectively accom- plish the dual missions of documentation and internationalism. At a time when most commentators, including in the field of architecture, were fixated on the impact of industrialization on society, Otlet engaged the increasingly debated category of “intellectual labor.” Before it became a central concern in organizations such as the International Labour Organization, the case of the “intellectual” had been made at the turn of the century in trade unions (for professions such as journalists and teachers).65 The creation in 1923 of an International Confederation of Intellectual Workers (CITI) and of the League of Nations International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1924 furthered the cause in political and economic spheres.66 Otlet and La Fontaine had themselves organized a conference on “The International Organization of Intellectual Labor” in August 1921.67 Otlet’s definition of intellectual labor was, however, both more expansive and more concrete than the one promoted by these institutions. In the bulk of his writings, he did not restrict intellectual work to a set of occupations—science, journalism, or art, for example—but defined it as an elementary set of activities that shaped even humdrum aspects of modern life. The Mundaneum, as described in the 1928 publication, was itself geared toward the general functions of “reading, audition, vision, obser- vation, and debate”—techniques practiced by all individuals, ostensibly span- ning class distinctions. To structure an architectural modernity around the figure of the intellectual worker is to reconsider the relationship between the laboring classes that are championed in the historiography of interwar mod- ernism and the ascending middle class of intellectuals and clerks whose work would have inspired modern practices of organization and norms of precision. In this genealogy, modernity is determined not by an army of workers moving from Siedlung to factory but by individuals circulating across a vast infrastruc- ture of cultural institutions, offices, government buildings, schools, businesses, libraries, and other spaces where information was managed. In the two decades that followed his interventions with the League of Nations, Otlet produced his own architectural schemas and enlisted several modern architects and planners, including Victor Bourgeois, Huib Hoste, and Maurice

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Heymans to give architectural form to an “intellectual” project that Otlet earnestly believed would put the world in order. Most of the commissioned architects were Belgian, and the schemes they developed consistently struggled with the conventions of nineteenth-century capital cities and the symbolic order of civic buildings.68 Though not one project was ultimately realized, his propaganda had an impact on architectural discourse. For instance, Otlet convinced a group of architects led by Le Corbusier, including Hoste and Fé Loquet, to include the Mundaneum programming in their submission to the 1933 international competition for the extension of Antwerp’s Left Bank. Several other competition entries—notably, projects by Raphaël Verwilghen, Jean-Jules Eggericx, Heymans, Émile Henvaux, Emile Van Leemputten, Pierre Verbruggen—included a Cité mondiale as part of their extension plan. Le Corbusier had also sought to establish himself as a “technician” of social order. His Ville contemporaine, a 1922 project for a city of three million inhab- itants, and his Plan Voisin of 1925 for the redevelopment of central Paris were influenced by the technocratic corporatism and the organizational culture of scientific management that would reshape French political discourse in the interwar period. Le Corbusier planned cities as if they were technologies for enforcing the hierarchical, centralized administration he believed was neces- sary to achieve a harmonious society.69 Though this authoritarian model, which led to a brief alliance with the Vichy regime during France’s occupation, is somewhat at odds with the ideals of Otlet’s internationalism, it projected social reform ideals to unprecedented scales of community. These doctrinaire projects molded Le Corbusier into the “world architect” who after 1927 began to create projects in Brazil, North Africa, and elsewhere. More important, however, they point to the crucial entwinement of early twentieth-century bureaucratic power and an ideology of centralization that was also conspicuously depicted in the 1928 Mundaneum publication, in a network diagram presented above the three- dimensional table showing the “International Organization of Intellectual Labor.” Organized around a central node marked as the “World Center,” the net- work harnessed the kind of political power found in Andersen’s and Hébrard’s earlier World Center. For Le Corbusier as for Otlet, articulated flatness was a tool to accelerate the movement of centralization that was inimical to the nineteenth- century nation-state system. The ultimate outcome of this bureaucratic moder- nity would be a worldwide society governed by a unique intellectual capital.

The Mundaneum The collaboration between Otlet and Le Corbusier was spurred in 1927 by one of the most well-known controversies in modernism: the architectural compe-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 tition for the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva. The vicissitudes of the competition—Le Corbusier’s disqualification, the jury’s selection of a classiciz- ing structure designed by a consortium of conservative architects, and Le Corbusier’s subsequent accusation of plagiarism against them—have cemented it as a central event in interwar European architecture, when the retrograde con- ventions of a monumental academic tradition toppled the progressive prospects of architectural functionalism on the international stage.70 (Though Otlet may have met Le Corbusier as early as 1923, their interactions during the competi- tion inspired him to become an ardent supporter of the French-Swiss archi- tect.)71 Before the final selection of an architect was announced, Otlet wrote to the head of the competition jury, the Belgian architect Victor Horta, to declare his support for Le Corbusier’s project because it demonstrated that a “page of History has turned. . . . To see [the League of Nations] housed in a Palace that follows an old formula would mean to dismiss it as already antiquated.”72 In this turn away from the monumentalism of the architects he had worked with— Hébrard, Francotte, and Van de Voorde—modern architecture encapsulated for him not only the constructive tenets of a new architectural functionalism but a rationality that, in suspending the nationalistic myths of the Beaux-Arts tradi- tion, was better aligned with the ostensibly neutral mechanisms required for the administration of a modern world order. In the months that followed, Le Corbusier invited Otlet to become a member of the patronage committee of the first Congrès international d’architecture moderne in 1928 at La Sarraz.73 At this crucial moment, the modernist rallying cry was that modern architecture had itself become a medium for the internationalization of society, and Otlet had become convinced that his own intellectual project would require the radical- ism of someone like Le Corbusier.74 The collaboration was thus initiated in 1928 by two fervent critics of the League, respectively troubled by the institu- tional and architectural conservativism of an organization that opted not to turn the “page of History.” The Mundaneum plan by Le Corbusier occupied a considerable site on the northern edge of Geneva, spanning from an elevated area of the Grand-Saconnex just north of Ariana Park to the existing headquarters of the International Labour Organization. The site plan was configured as two distinct pieces. The southern half abutting Lake Geneva organized a range of pragmatic programs, including residential districts for workers and visitors, a stadium, botanical and mineralogical gardens, a small port, and a train station connecting the site to Geneva’s center. Additional areas were reserved for the eventual addition of an airport and a wireless telegraphy station. Though Le Corbusier referred to the city as an “Acropolis,” the idea that the Mundaneum would be connected via

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 water, air, rail, and radio indicates that the project was understood as both a monument and a prominent node in a communicative network.75 In contrast to the organic planning of the southern area, the buildings in the northern quad- rant were arranged according to Golden Section ratios, as if to indicate that a universal order underpinned its program components. This area contained the “five traditional institutions of Intellectual Work”: World Museum, World Library, World University, Scientific Institute, and an International Associations Center.76 These five institutions expanded and synthesized the various initia- tives that Otlet had been developing over several decades, including the IIB and its RBU, the UIA, and the International Museum, giving them a permanent headquarters that would complement the activities of the League of Nations. Additional spaces were allocated for temporary exhibitions, a planetarium, and a sacrarium—Otlet’s version of a secular temple. The architecture of the Mundaneum generally followed the anonymous tech- nocratic genre of Le Corbusier’s projects from the mid-1920s, including his contemporaneous design for the Centrosoyuz Building in Moscow, a structure for 2,500 functionaries. This genre encompassed flat exterior walls, ribbon win- dows, and pilotis elevating the building as a solid mass above the ground plane. The Mundaneum’s World Library shared this architectural pragmatism with its eighteen stories raised on pilotis. The centrally located World Museum was a contentious exception, however, with its spiraling pyramid rising several sto- ries higher than any other structure on the site. As an expanded version of the Musée International that Otlet had created in 1910, it was meant to collect arti- facts and information from the beginning of time to the present day and from all regions of the world, providing what Otlet claimed was a “demonstration of the current state of the world.”77 Le Corbusier was equally hyperbolic, stating

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Opposite: Henri Paul Nénot, Julien Flegenheimer, Carlo Broggi, Camille Lefèvre, and Joseph Vago. Palais des Nations, Geneva, 1929–1936. United Nations Archives at Geneva. Left: Le Corbusier. Diagrams showing the organization of the World Museum’s continuous galleries in relation to the pilotis system. From Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète, vol. 1 (1937).

that its continuous spiraling ramp, which extended over 2.5 kilometers, would allow visitors to experience the “gestation of the world.” The visitor was meant to ascend the structure using inclined lifts and enter the museum at its apex before being led down the ramp, which was divided by a continuous pilotis system into three parallel “naves” corresponding to “objects, places, and times” (objets, espaces, temps).78 To accommodate the entire documented history of human activity in chronological order, the ramp grew wider as it descended in proportion with the knowledge available concerning each epoch. In contrast to the grand, elevational gesture of the ziggurat, Otlet explained that the museo- logical strategy consisted essentially in “placing before the eyes objects in a classified, interesting, and impersonal order, completing them with brief explications and oral commentary.”79 The intellectual work inspired by the Mundaneum was thus of a relatively mundane order. Nevertheless, the appar- ent literalization of a cumulative view of history, navigated as an exhibition and manifested in a monumental form, made the project the subject of vitriol on the part of functionalists such as Teige, who opposed the religious connotations of the project. The idea of the “nave” and the inclusion of a sacrarium certainly deflect from the four “functions” of dwelling, work, recreation, and transporta- tion championed by Le Corbusier. Moreover, neither Otlet nor Le Corbusier directly addressed the technical intricacies of managing a deluge of objects in the three naves, beyond references to the flexible wall system or submerged storage. How, along a diachronic path, could the developments taking place in Egypt, Babylonia, and elsewhere during the Middle Bronze Age possibly be coherently reconciled? How could such a system not only be “systematic” but empirically demonstrable, as Le Corbusier claimed? Otlet alleged that the term museum did not apply to the building after all; it was instead more of an “Idearium” or a “Useum,” he wrote in the Mundaneum publication, since documents were exhibited to “support ideas” rather than merely be displayed.80 Otlet had declared the obsolescence of the museum already in 1923. “The recent transformation of the concept ‘Museum’ into the concept ‘Documentation’” had brought humanity one step closer to the realiza- tion of a “universal civilization,” he concluded in a publication outlining his project for a Mundaneum that would five years later find its iconic form in Le Corbusier’s design.81 Moving away from the static plan relations of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 historical museum “type,” as crystallized, for instance, in Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altesmuseum in Berlin (1823–1830), Otlet proposed a museum with an entirely different mode of spectatorship. These were not works of art ratified by their auratic presence but “documents” subject to continual critique and elaboration. Here, objects were meant to demonstrate all of history itself— rather than the evolution of a certain discipline or branch of knowledge—and their imagined viewer was putatively global. The World Museum, however, did not reconcile museological experience with the same global view as the one in Geddes’s Outlook Tower, to which it has been compared.82 In organizing objects according to the UDC system, Otlet expected the ambulating visitor to abandon their position as a citizen of a nation and achieve a decentered, objective view. In his 1924 article “Autres icônes: Les musées,” published in L’esprit nouveau, Le Corbusier similarly pointed to the obsolescence of traditional museology by observing that “ours is the age of documentation.”83 By the 1920s, documentation was concretely impacting French cultural institutions, with organizations such as the Bureau bibliographique de France imposing new con- ventions on libraries, archives, and other research centers. A proliferation of “documentation centers”—research institutions focused not on the conserva- tion of cultural heritage but on the communication of information in distinct fields—was also beginning to reform the landscape of knowledge production across continental Europe. The claim that “ours is the age of documentation” thus pointed to a new technical culture in which public knowledge was no longer nar- rowly attached to books or the libraries that had traditionally housed them. Le Corbusier’s fascination with classification principles and instruments such as the Ronéo filing cabinet has been described as an attempt to extract an aesthetic language of organization and efficiency.84 But the practices and material infrastructure of documentation that shape the Mundaneum capture a more fundamental reorganization of the modern subject. Filing cabinets, Le Corbusier wrote, “with all their printed cards showing multiple fields, with their number- ing, their perforation, their cutouts . . . show that in the twentieth century we have learned to classify.”85 The question was how to achieve order in and activate ever-proliferating documents so that they remained retrievable. The fascination with the Ronéo cabinet and neatly ordered paper documents is evidence of an era of total intellectual reorganization caused by the so-called information overload discussed by historians of science today.86 The World Museum, a form produced at the intersection of Otlet’s and Le Corbusier’s theories, was envisaged by its authors as a kind of simulation of a world navigated as a field of information. The topological condition manufac-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 tured here and adapted to Le Corbusier’s 1931 project for a Museum of Endless Growth resonated with postwar theorists of “algorithmic order,” who saw labyrinthine structures as models of the emergent networked apparatuses of social control.87 The interior’s three naves, partitioning documents like the lines running across a classification table, were meant to reinforce this spatial con- dition. With its perpetual turning of the corner, folding the interior of the build- ing onto itself, the World Museum articulated the spatiality of the document as perpetual and recursive enclosure. Yet the entire system was simultaneously constrained by a form that also made it a monument to administrative order. Like the articulated flatness of Otlet’s classification table, which inherited a classical understanding of order while pointing to a proto-informatic one, so was the World Museum an ambiva- lent structure. Its pilotis system, an attempt to negotiate documentation with the infinite spatial extension of the modernist grid, is ultimately at odds with the prescriptive experience of the promenade architecturale that mediates space in a unidirectional itinerary. The “intellectual worker” imagined here is ultimately an indeterminate subject who inhabits both this building and Otlet’s gridded cube, a person who ambulates across the plan libre and yet must also find their way in the world by organizing information.

Intellectual Labor and Mondialisation The World Museum was, however, only one component of the Mundaneum plan. Otlet and Le Corbusier wrote that the various institutions collectively formed a vast “intellectual equipment” (outillage intellectuel) that would osten- sibly link all places where knowledge was produced.88 The classification table appearing at the beginning of the Mundaneum publication—the gridded cube titled “The International Organization of Intellectual Labor”—describes the full scope of this arrangement. It shows a vertical breakdown of the various “func- tions” of intellectual work, including conservation, diffusion, research, and publication, among others. Its horizontal axis conjugates these functions with the ten classes of knowledge that constitute the UDC, the bibliographic system conceived by Otlet: philosophy, sociology, history, literature, and so on. A third axis (depth) accounts for the scope of intellectual production taking place across the world. Its conspicuously Eurocentric perspective outlines the system’s “globality” in four classes: England, Central Europe, France, and “Etc.” With this system, the Mundaneum did not present a new architectural “type” (a new form for a specific program) but a cooperative understanding of discrete intellectual techniques. In the eighteenth century, the rationalization of public works in France had

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Paul Otlet. Diagram of his “World Plan” showing the reconstitution of a messy “world reality” into an organized state, 1932. Mundaneum Archives.

begun to replace monuments with urban components known as équipements, large-scale constructions such as markets, hospitals, and prisons that recom- posed the urban condition to order a population.89 But Otlet’s “equipment” moved beyond the physical parameters of the body. In suggesting that a modern order could emerge from acts of producing, circulating, and filing documents, the Mundaneum diverged from équipements like those in Tony Garnier’s pro- ject for a Cité industrielle, inspired by Saint-Simonian productivism and the emancipatory potential of industrial labor.90 In dissolving architectural type into interconnected intellectual functions, the Cité mondiale relocated the presumed locus of architectural “revolution” by measuring productivity as a problem of information and mediation.91 The line drawn between intellectual and industrial modes of rationalization is of course a dubious one.92 Otlet’s puristic, utopian conception of intellectual labor nevertheless supplements a historiography of modern architecture that limits the mechanisms of control and standardization that shape the built envi- ronment to industrial laboring bodies. An entire cognitive terrain has been erased as a site of architectural intervention in this historiography, beginning with the debate between Teige and Le Corbusier (when the project was first published) concerning functionalist claims of Sachlichkeit—architecture’s “matter-of-fact” response to function.93 As a revision of the modernization narrative, the emphasis on “intellectual labor” is particularly crucial for under- standing how the World Museum differed from the rest of the functionalist architecture of the site. The religious overtones consistently projected onto the building—through the inclusion, for instance, of a sacrarium alongside it or the proclamation that the museum performed as a symbolic “representation of the World”—offered Otlet and Le Corbusier a way out of the industrializing logic of modernism.94 A space of spiritual realization was the only imaginable ana- logue for the emancipatory space they assumed a documentary ontology could produce. Read from the inside out, the project actualized a process of cognitive labor rather than an overdetermined symbolic form. Otlet’s and Le Corbusier’s project thus extended the processes of globaliza- tion and bureaucratization that had been accelerating since the latter third of the nineteenth century into a generalized documentary reality.95 In this depar- ture from a nineteenth-century “public sphere” reconfigured by advances in print technology, a new community of “readers” was imagined in excess of the political unit of the nation-state. And yet, in 1931 Otlet still asserted that “mon- dialisation in the twentieth century takes the place of nineteenth-century colonisation.”96 Recalling the central term of the 1905 Mons Congress, he explained that both contributed to the same “general movement: Expansion.”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 The Mundaneum main- tained the imperializing view that the world could be “shaped” by a European project of civ- ilization. Frederick Cooper uses the term lumpiness to describe how interna- tionalism was a tool for a new imperialism and to explain how a global- izing language of shared humanity such as Otlet’s coexisted with the “structure of domination and exploitation” of empire.97 The articulated flatness of Otlet’s project was an organizational instrument to “shape” the world and mitigate its uncertainty—including by erasing this lumpiness. This is particularly evident in a set of drawings Otlet made to depict the ordering effect of global “document culture.” The images contrast the world “as it is”—a deflated, irregular lump of inchoate materiality—with the world “as it ought to be”—an ideal, taut, pla- tonic form. For instance, in a schema for a “World Plan,” the shapeless mass of a disordered world is incrementally funneled into increasingly flattened media before being reconstituted as a perfect sphere, identified as the “new civilization.” The Mundaneum is further evidence for the thesis that the fading of imperi- alism was the trigger for modernism’s ascent.98 The interwar displacement of colonial rule into global bureaucratic structures meant that architecture became an instrument for helping to navigate a world that was too heterogeneous. Despite having been developed as a rebuttal to the architectural order sanctioned in the competition for the Palais des Nations, Le Corbusier’s design for the Cité mondiale was an architectural encounter between empire and mondialisation. The intellectual techniques for articulating flatness were engineered to absorb a global network and ultimately supersede the inconveniences of a linguisti- cally, materially, and politically variegated world. In a moment when control of, and access to, knowledge has come to shape the political domain in obvious ways, the intellectual aspects of the Mundaneum cement it not as an exception in the history of modern architecture but as a realization of its flawed universalism.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Notes I thank Lucia Allais for critical insights that shaped this research. I am also grateful for the guid- ance of Stéphanie Manfroid during several visits to the Mundaneum archive. The comments of two anonymous readers greatly enriched this article. 1. For an account of early twentieth-century “information society,” a notion widely debated since the late 1970s, see James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 2. Born into a prominent Belgian family, Paul Otlet (1868–1944) was trained as a lawyer and developed the field of “documentation science,” widely recognized as a progenitor of today’s information science. As a peace activist and a proponent of international intellectual coopera- tion, he typically presented his work in opposition to the explicitly “political” project of the League of Nations. The extensive monographic literature on Otlet is indebted to the foundational work of W. Boyd Rayward. See W. Boyd Rayward, European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); Wouter Van Acker, “Universalism as Utopia: A Historical Study of the Schemes and Schemas of Paul Otlet (1868–1944)” (Ph.D. diss., University of Ghent, 2011); and Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). 3. Paul Otlet, personal note, 28 May 1919, in Mundaneum Archives, PP PO 140. All transla- tions from French, including this one, are my own unless otherwise noted. 4. “It is the function that must determine the organ, the life that it should have, that must give a building its form, its dimensions, and its structure.” Paul Otlet, “Recherche de la forme archi- tecturale du Palais Mondial,” personal note, 4 June 1919, in Mundaneum Archives, PP PO 140. 5. Even before modernist associations of the grid with architectural space, as in Le Corbusier’s plan libre, the grid served to systematize architectural practice. See, for instance, Jean-Nicolas- Louis Durand and Antoine Picon, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture: With Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000). On the grid’s significance in modernist culture, see Bernhard Siegert, “(Not) In Place: The Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces,” in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 97– 120; and Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 51–64. 6. Otlet, “Recherche de la forme architecturale du Palais Mondial.” 7. On the systematization of nature as a form of representation, see Michel Foucault, “Classifying,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), 125–65. 8. See Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 956–1,005. 9. For the foundational English-language literature on “print culture,” a term coined by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, see Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For a key French-language study, published twenty years earlier, see Henri-Jean Martin and Lucien Febvre, L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958). On print culture and modern architecture, see Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 10. See Paul Otlet and Le Corbusier, Mundaneum (Brussels: Union des associations interna- tionales, Palais Mondial, 1928), 29. 11. For Teige, the World Museum’s resemblance to Aztec pyramids paved a “perilous road” to academicism. Karel Teige, “Mundaneum,” Stavba 7, no. 10 (1929): 152. The debate was renewed in a 1974 issue of Oppositions with the publication of Teige’s critique and Le Corbusier’s rebuttal. See George Baird, “Architecture and Politics: A Polemical Dispute: A Critical Introduction to Karel Teige’s ‘Mundaneum,’ 1929 and Le Corbusier’s ‘In Defense of Architecture,’ 1933,” Oppositions 4 (1974): 79–108. 12. See Beatriz Colomina, “The Endless Museum: Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe,” Log, no. 15 (2009): 55–68; Anthony Vidler, “The Space of History: Modern Museums from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier,” in Scenes from the Street and Other Essays (New York: Monacelli Press, 2011), 294–316; and Charles van den Heuvel, “Envisioning Knowledge Architectures for a World Society: Paul Otlet’s Architectural and Epistemic Design Strategies,” in Making a New World: Architecture and Communities in Interwar Europe, ed. Rajesh Heyninckx and Tom Aevermaete (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 225–36. 13. Le Corbusier’s interest in systems of proportion and geometry has been widely discussed, most famously in Colin Rowe, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 1–28. 14. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 2. 15. On information technologies in modern political history, see Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, and David Sepkoski, “Introduction: Historicizing Big Data,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (2017): 1– 17; and Toni Weller, ed., Information History in the Modern World: Histories of the Information Age (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Recent architectural explorations of early twentieth-century bureaucratic culture include Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “The Larkin’s Technologies of Trust,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 77, no. 3 (2018): 300– 18; and Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 16. See Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 17. Otlet, “Recherche de la forme architecturale du Palais Mondial.” 18. In Space, Time, and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion used a photograph of the corner of Gropius’s Bauhaus, juxtaposed with Pablo Picasso’s L’arlésienne (1911–1912), to illustrate the “hovering relations of planes” that constituted modern architectural space. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 490–91. 19. See Nancy Troy, “Transition: The Problem of the Corner” in The De Stijl Environment (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 46–71. 20. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Metamorphosis of Axonometry,” Daidalos 1 (September 1981): 40–58. 21. Otlet and Geddes were frequent interlocutors and collaborators. On Geddes’s thinking machines, see Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31–40. 22. A sample of these sketches is in the Mundaneum Archives, box PP PO 956. Otlet’s geometric

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 diagrams are reminiscent of early modern paper instruments used to model complex mathemat- ical systems; for instance, Albrecht Dürer’s folded geometric models of three-dimensional poly- hedra. See Michael Friedman, A History of Folding in Mathematics: Mathematizing the Margins (Cham, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2018), 30–47. 23. Otlet, “Recherche de la forme architecturale du Palais Mondial.” 24. See Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 96–115. 25. See Gottfried Semper, “The Four Elements of Architecture,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74–129. 26. See Paul Otlet, Manuel de la documentation administrative (Brussels: Palais Mondial, 1923). 27. Paul Otlet, “Les sciences bibliographiques et la documentation,” Bulletin de l’Institut international de bibliographie 8 (1903): 254–71. See also W. Boyd Rayward, “The Origins of Information Science and the Institute of Bibliography/International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID),” Journal of the American Society for Information Science, no. 48 (April 1997): 289–300. 28. Suzanne Briet, Qu’est-ce que la documentation? (Paris: Éditions documentaires, indus- trielles et techniques, 1951), 7. Already in 1908, Otlet suggested that telephony and telegraphy were also modes of documentation. Paul Otlet, Conférence internationale de bibliographie et de documentation (Brussels: Polleunis et Ceuterick, 1908), 20. 29. Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales, “Documenter,” http://www.cnrtl.fr/ etymologie/documenter. See also Michael K. Buckland, “What Is a ‘Document’?,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48, no. 9 (September 1997): 804–9. 30. See M. Christine Boyer, “La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851,” in Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 21–54; and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. 31. The Royal Society Catalogue was introduced in the 1860s. On journals and scientific culture in the nineteenth century, see Alex Csiszar, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 32. Paul Otlet, “Rapport sur l’Institut international de bibliographie et l’organisation systéma- tique de la documentation,” in Actes de la Conférence internationale de bibliographie et de docu- mentation: Bruxelles, 10 et 11 Juillet, vol. 1 (Brussels: Institut international de bibliographie, 1908), 68. 33. See François Schollaert, “Création à Bruxelles d’un Office international de bibliographie,” Bulletin de l’Institut international de bibliographie, no. 2–3 (1895): 58–61. The IIB, which existed until 2002 as the International Federation for Information and Documentation, centered its activ- ities on the development of standardized indexing techniques and on the promotion of interna- tional intellectual cooperation through conferences and publications. The OIB did the practical work of documentation, including the maintenance and expansion of a bibliographic database and the distribution of standardized equipment, such as the card catalogues manufactured by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Damman, Washer & Cie. 34. See Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” in A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 815–996. 35. See Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, “Création d’un répertoire bibliographique universel,” in Conférence bibliographique internationale: Bruxelles 1895: Documents (Brussels: Imprimerie Veuve Ferdinand Larcier, 1896). Otlet and La Fontaine also created a Répertoire iconographique universel to collect visual materials. 36. On the history of documentation science in France, see Sylvie Fayet-Scribe, Histoire de la documentation en France: Culture, science et technologie de l’information: 1895–1937 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000). 37. For a history of ASLIB, see Dave Muddiman, “A New History of ASLIB, 1924–1950,” Journal of Documentation 61, no. 3 (2005): 402–28. 38. See Carlos Henrique Juvêncio and Georgete Medleg Rodrigues, “Contribution to the History of Documentation in Brazil: The Brazilian National Library and Its Relationship with the International Institute of Bibliography,” Brazilian Journal of Information Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–9. 39. Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation: Le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique (Brussels: Editiones Mundaneum, Palais Mondial, 1934), 41. 40. See John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes toward a Critical History,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (1988): 9–23. 41. On the status of “facts” in modern knowledge production, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1991): 93–124. 42. Otlet claimed that documentation produced a “Universal Book of Knowledge” (Livre Universel du Savoir): “a boundless work, always up-to-date, always growing, concentrating, syn- thesizing, systematizing each intellectual product from the first instant of its existence.” Otlet, Traité de documentation, 385. 43. See Markus Krajewski, World Projects: Global Information before World War I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). On “worldmaking,” see also Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Simon Schaffer, John Tresch, and Pasquale Gagliardi, eds., Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 44. The idea of a société mondiale was promoted by Belgians such as Otlet and Ernest Solvay, the wealthy industrialist and financial backer of several major Belgian institutions, including the IIB. See Ernest Solvay, “La société mondiale,” Annales de l’Institut des sciences sociales 6 (1900): 252–54. See also Alfred Fried, “La science de l’internationalisme,” in Annuaire de la vie inter- nationale, ed. Alfred Fried, Paul Otlet, and Henri La Fontaine (Brussels: Office central des insti- tutions internationales, 1909), 23–28. 45. On the mobilization of science and culture in early twentieth-century internationalism, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 46. Initially composed of 132 international organizations, the UIA became a prominent organ of transnational cooperation and exists to this day.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 47. On the relationship between the UAI and the League of Nations, see “L’oeuvre de l’Union des associations internationales en matière d’éducation et d’organisation du travail intellectuel: Mémorandum du Secrétaire général approuvé par le Conseil le 2 septembre 1921,” Société des Nations—Journal officiel, December 1921, 1,106–10. 48. The motivating narrative of the Mundaneum was that after “six thousand years of known and documented history, humanity has reached a stage of mondialisation.” Otlet and Le Corbusier, 2. This usage differs from Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of mondialisation as a multiplicity. See Jean-Luc Nancy, La création du monde, ou, La mondialisation (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 49. On the UIV, see Oscar Gaspari, “Cities against States? Hopes, Dreams and Shortcomings of the European Municipal Movement, 1900–1960,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 4 (2002): 597–621. 50. See Hendrik Christian Andersen and Ernest M. Hébrard, Création d’un Centre mondial de communication (Paris: Renouard, 1913). See also Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni, La città mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier (Venice: Marsilio, 1982). 51. See Wouter Van Acker and Geert Somsen, “A Tale of Two World Capitals: The Internationalisms of Pieter Eijkman and Paul Otlet,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 90, no. 4 (2012): 1,389–409. 52. On the discourse of “neutrality,” see Rebecka Lettevall, Geert Somsen, and Sven Widmalm, “Introduction,” in Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe: Intersections of Science, Culture, and Politics after the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–18. 53. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Pan Books, 2012); and Martin Ewans, European Atrocity, African Catastrophe: Leopold II, the Congo Free State and Its Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2017), 39–46. 54. See Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–16. 55. Madeleine Herren, Hintertüren zur Macht: Internationalismus und modernisierungsori- entierte Außenpolitik in Belgien, der Schweiz und den USA 1865–1914, Studien zur internatio- nalen Geschichte 9 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2000), 167–85. 56. The IIB’s first president, for example, was the Baron Édouard Descamps, a Belgian law pro- fessor, senator, and later an associate delegate of the Congo Free State, the president of the Superior Council of the Congo Free State, and secretary of the Société Antiesclavagiste, a Belgian antislavery society that framed many of Leopold’s violent actions in Africa as a “civilizing” mis- sion. The sociologist and politician Cyrille Van Overbergh, who founded the Société belge de sociologie and the Bureau international d’ethnographie, which supported the work of Belgium’s minister of colonies, was a secretary general of the UIA. Van Overbergh, who was also secretary general of the 1905 Mons Congress on “worldwide expansion,” was instrumental to the creation of a colonial sociological discourse in Belgium. Marc Poncelet, L’invention des sciences colo- niales belges (Paris: Karthala, 2008), 136. 57. See, for instance, Paul Otlet, “Le Congo est une bonne affaire,” La chronique, 19 March 1908. 58. Paul Otlet, “L’organisation rationnelle de l’information et de la documentation en matière économique,” in Congrès international d’expansion économique mondiale tenu à Mons du 24 au 28 septembre 1905 (Brussels: J. Gromaere, 1905). See also Paul Otlet, “L’expansion intellec- tuelle de la Belgique,” L’expansion belge 1, no. 1 (1908): 11–16.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 59. On the tangled and contradictory “papereality” created by colonial administration, see Bhavani Raman, Document Raj (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons, Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 60. See Paul Otlet, Les problèmes internationaux et la guerre: Tableau des conditions et solu- tions nouvelles de l’économie, du droit et de la politique, UAI Publication no. 50 (Geneva: Librairie Kundig, 1916); and Paul Otlet, Constitution mondiale de la Société des Nations: Le nou- veau droit des gens (Geneva: Atar; Paris: G. Crès, 1917). 61. See Carola Hein, The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (London: Praeger, 2004), 19–31. 62. Union des associations internationales, Le Palais de la Ligue des Nations à Bruxelles (Projet Francotte) (Brussels: Union des villes et communes belges, 1919). 63. See Paul Otlet, La société intellectuelle des nations (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1919). 64. See Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 94–115. 65. The French term travail intellectuel appeared in the early nineteenth century to describe a body of work and subsequently came to define a discourse of intellectual production, including issues such as intellectual property, intellectual freedom, and the legal recognition of intellectual occupations. On the legitimation of the “intellectual” in the interwar period, see Gisèle Sapiro, ed., L’espace intellectuel en Europe: De la formation des états-nations à la mondialisation, XIXe- XXIe siècle (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), 1–25, 111–46. 66. The CITI identified intellectual effort in distinction to its physical counterpart: “An intel- lectual worker is he who draws his means of existence from work in which intellectual effort [l’effort de l’esprit] . . . typically dominates physical effort.” Quoted in Sapiro, 120. 67. Union des associations internationales, Organisation internationale du travail intellectuel (Brussels: Union des associations internationales, 1921). 68. On architecture as a representation of state power, see Wolfgang Sonne, Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Prestel, 2003). Victor Bourgeois’s project, produced in 1931 after Otlet’s collaboration with Le Corbusier, was sited in Tervuren, which Otlet hoped would become an extraterritorial enclave for new international organizations. 69. See Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 132–47; and Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 161–263. 70. On the “internationalism” of Le Corbusier’s work in the 1920s, see Mark Crinson, Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 93– 141. 71. Though Otlet and Le Corbusier may have met earlier given the Belgian bibliographer’s interactions with the modernist circles of Brussels, their encounter during the League of Nations competition was facilitated by their mutual friend Blaise Cendrars. See Catherine Courtiau, “La Cité internationale 1927–1931,” Transnational Associations 39, no. 5 (October 1987): 262. 72. Paul Otlet to Victor Horta, 26 August 1927, in Mundaneum Archives, CM 8. 73. See Antonietta Folino, ed., Otlet—Le Corbusier: Lettere sulla costruzione della Cité mon-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 diale (1927–1934) (Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2016), 123–30. 74. Modernists typically correlated functionalism with internationalization. See, for instance, Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur, Bauhausbücher 1 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). 75. Le Corbusier’s 1929 version of the project, which linked it to an urbanization plan for Geneva, emphasizes this urban dimension. See Le Corbusier et al., eds., Le Corbusier: Oeuvre complète, vol. 1, 1910–1929 (Zurich: H. Girsberger, 1937), 196–97. 76. The World University would offer students selected from the world’s 225 universities an education preparing them for “world service.” Otlet and Le Corbusier, 14. This program compo- nent should be understood as an institutional descendant of Leopold’s 1907 project for an École mondiale, a training center for colonial officers who would further the project of Belgian expan- sionism. See Cyrille Van Overbergh, Rapport général sur les conclusions des sous-commissions présenté à la commission plénière de l’École mondiale (Brussels, 1907). 77. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 7. 78. The first nave contained objects themselves: tombs, a bust of Caesar, Mycenean pots, a Romanesque portico, portraits of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. The second nave featured visual documents that situated these objects in their historical epoch: graphics, photographs, scientific reconstructions. The third nave would display additional documents and visualiza- tions describing the context in which the objects were created. 79. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 10. 80. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 10. Later in the 1930s, Otlet collaborated with Otto Neurath on a visual museographical language. See Nader Vossoughian, “The Language of the World Museum: Otto Neurath, Paul Otlet, Le Corbusier,” Transnational Associations, no. 1–2 (2003): 82–93. 81. Paul Otlet, Sur la bibliothèque mondiale, UAI Publication no. 154 (Brussels: Union des associations internationales, 1923), 4. 82. See Patrick Geddes, “The Index Museum: Chapters from an Unpublished Manuscript,” Assemblage, no. 10 (1989): 66. See also Alessandra Ponte, “Building the Stair Spiral of Evolution: The Index Museum of Sir Patrick Geddes,” trans. Jessica Levine, Assemblage, no. 10 (1989): 47– 64; and Pierre Chabard, “Towers and Globes: Architectural and Epistemological Differences between Patrick Geddes’s Outlook Tower and Paul Otlet’s Mundaneums,” in European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past, ed. W. Boyd Rayward (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 105–27. 83. Le Corbusier, “Autres icônes: Les musées,” L’esprit nouveau, no. 20 (1924): n.p. 84. See Alexandra Lange, “White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cités d’affaires,” Grey Room, no. 9 (Fall 2002): 59–79. 85. Le Corbusier, “Autres icônes,” 17. In his lectures in South America, Le Corbusier claimed that the architect’s role was first and foremost to “classify.” Le Corbusier, “La cité mondiale,” in Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1930), 216–19. 86. See, for instance, Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 87. Eric C.H. de Bruyn, “Constructed Situations, Dynamic Labyrinths, and Learning Mazes: Behavioral Topologies of the Cold War,” Grey Room, no. 74 (2019): 55–57. 88. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 6. 89. See Bruno Fortier, “Logiques de l’équipement: Notes pour une histoire du projet,”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00315 by guest on 24 September 2021 Architecture-mouvement-continuité, no. 45 (May 1978): 80–85; and Georges Teyssot, “La ville- équipement: La production architecturale des bâtiments civils, 1795–1848,” Architecture- mouvement-continuité, no. 45 (May 1978): 86–94. 90. On Garnier’s project, see Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 243–50. 91. The relationship between modern architecture, industry, and political “revolution” is dis- cussed in McLeod, “‘Architecture or Revolution.’” 92. On the interface between physical and intellectual labor in modern organizational culture, see Delphine Gardey, Écrire, calculer, classer: Comment une révolution de papier a transformé les sociétés contemporaines (1800–1940) (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2008). 93. Le Corbusier implored Teige to “see how I am more sachlich than you are.” Le Corbusier, “Défense de l’architecture,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 3, no. 10 (1933): 53. 94. Otlet and Le Corbusier, 41. 95. This foreshadows postmodern discussions of globalization and information as the central forces of modernization. See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Jean-François Lyotard, La condition post- moderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 96. Paul Otlet, “La cité mondiale et la colonisation,” personal note no. 6458, 30 July 1931, in Mundaneum Archives, PP PO 5. Throughout the 1920s Otlet’s native Belgium pursued its colo- nial project in the Congo. As he worked to realize a Mundaneum, Otlet continued to promote the “great idealism” of Leopold’s project and proposed the creation of a Congoleum that in 1931 became a design by Victor Bourgeois. See Paul Otlet, “Léopold II et nos villes,” Le mouvement communal, no. 72 (1927): 17–20. 97. Cooper writes, “[What] was most “global” in the nineteenth century was not the actual structure of economic and political interaction, but the language in which slavery was discussed by its opponents: a language of shared humanity and the rights of man. . . . A globalizing language stood alongside a structure of domination and exploitation that was lumpy to an extreme.” Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 104. 98. See, for instance, Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003). See also Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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