LE CORBUSIER AND ECSTASIS: A CYBER-HISTORY By MATTHEW DEMERS A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Matthew Demers 2 To Jennifer Thomas 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Charlie Hailey for his unerring and constructive patience; Greg Ulmer for providing the most fecund research framework imaginable in heuretics, and for his never-ending exuberance, humor, and advice; Nina Hofer as a model of intellectual intensity, profound humanity, and compassion; and Bill Tilson for clarity, perspicacity, and academic professionalism. A special thanks is reserved to Shivjit Sidhu, who inspired this project with a personal, critical tour of Chandigarh a life-time ago, and whose personal investment in myself and architecture in general provided a sense of creative personal agency as a basis for academic research. I would like to thank Anthony Rue and Janet Kreischer for providing much needed constructive diversion, and opportunities for personal, social, professional, and epicurean development (and indulgence). I also thank my parents for their lifelong and unconditional support of my aspirations and for their love of each other, the greatest guide to morality, balance, and strength that I know. The deepest gratitude is reserved Jennifer Thomas, my dedicated partner and the love of my life, without whose help and continuous support this project would not have been possible. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 9 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................... 10 ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... 11 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO CYBER-HISTORY ................................................................ 13 What is Cyber-History? ........................................................................................... 13 Productive Histories: Tactical Histories ................................................................... 15 History as Anabasis ................................................................................................ 19 Using Xenophon’s Anabasis as a Guide .......................................................... 19 “Thálatta! Thálatta!”: History as Goal-Oriented Method Production .................. 20 2 LITERATURE REVIEW: PRUITT-IGOE ON THE BEACH ...................................... 24 The Long Moment of Modernism’s Birth ................................................................. 24 Einstein on the Beach: Working with Historical Figures: ......................................... 26 New questions for an ulterior Modernism ................................................................ 27 A Proposed Alternative: Giedion’s Space-Time Figures as Analytical Framework .................................................................................................... 29 Giedion's Figural Space-Time Frames ............................................................. 32 First frame: the towers of Bologna ............................................................. 32 Second frame: perspectival space of the Parisian boulevards ................... 34 Third frame: the virtual frame of Cubism .................................................... 36 Le Corbuser's Framing Experiments ................................................................ 37 Early experiments: the Pavillon Parti ......................................................... 37 Movement organization in Le Corbusier's later published works ............... 40 Figure Analysis: Le Corbusier's Experimental Figure Proliferation ................... 43 Giedion and Benjamin: Competing Figures of History ...................................... 45 Modeling the Contemporary Context: Pruitt-Igoe as Historical Figure .............. 48 Moving Beyond the Modern: Jencks and the Unités ........................................ 51 Postmodernism and the Paper Tiger of Modernism: Establishing the Orthodoxy ...................................................................................................... 53 The short-term effects of circulation of the Pruitt-Igoe Figure: 5th figure- Whites vs. Grays ..................................................................................... 53 The static frame and the aporia of Le Corbusier’s legacy .......................... 57 Reworking Precedents, or Modernism as an Incomplete Method ........................... 61 Where Does This Leave Us? Casting Sand: Pruitt-Igoe on the Beach ................... 63 5 3 RESEARCH FRAMEWORK: HEURETICS AND CYBER-HISTORY AS AN ANALYTICAL TOOL ............................................................................................... 67 The Effects of the Didactic Static Frame In Rhetoric .............................................. 67 The Visualization of Thought ............................................................................ 67 Setting the Stage for the Neo-Scholastics: the Summulae Logicales of Petrus Hispanus ............................................................................................ 70 Meno's Paradox, the Syllogism, and the Problem of Discovery ....................... 80 Changes in Media Technology; Changes in Discourse: Ramus’ Graphic Outline and Printing Technology ................................................................... 84 Third Meanings and the Writing of Figural History .................................................. 90 From Hermeneutics to Heuretics ............................................................................ 93 Barthes' Seven Days of Rhetoric ...................................................................... 96 Ramus and the Conflation of Dialectic, Method, and Reason ........................ 100 Towards a Rhetoric of Invention: The CATTt Generator ................................ 104 The Wide Image and the Popcycle ................................................................. 106 From the image of wide scope to the composition of a mystory ............... 110 Constructing a mystory using the popcycle .............................................. 111 4 LE CORBUSIER’S WALK: THE DYNAMIC FRAME AS A TALE OF SPACE AND MOVEMENT ................................................................................................ 114 Movement as an Experimental Format ................................................................. 114 Manners of Movement: Ecstasis and the Radiant Moments........................... 117 Theoria: Travel as Paraphor ........................................................................... 121 Le Corbusier's Professional Discourse and the Approach to Val d'Ema ............... 124 Ecstasis and Discourse Concurrence: Le Corbusier at the Cartosa del Galluzzo in Val d’Ema ................................................................................. 127 The Return to Val d’Ema ................................................................................ 131 Method vs. Wandering: The Fragments of Parmenides ................................. 133 Jeanneret’s Voyage d’Orient and Ecstasis ........................................................... 139 Jeanneret and Ecstatic Movement in Mount Athos ........................................ 142 The Development of the Radiant Moments .................................................... 144 5 DEVELOPMENT OF A RADIANT METHOD ........................................................ 147 Precisions and Paraphor: Ecstasis Revisited ........................................................ 149 Precisions: The South American Lecture Tour ............................................... 149 Lecture experiments ................................................................................ 151 Isolating the Theory component of Corbu’s CATTt .................................. 153 "The American Prologue" as cyber-history ............................................... 157 The historical figure of the aerial view: rain cloud ecstasis ...................... 159 Historical figure of the aerial view: “The Law of the Meander” ................. 162 The Birth of the Radiant Category .................................................................. 163 When the Cathedrals were White: Heuretics Applied ........................................... 165 When the Cathedrals were White as an Opportunity for Rigorous CATTt Generator Analysis ...................................................................................... 166 6 The Cathedrals CATTtastrophe ...................................................................... 168 The Fairy CATTtastrophe ............................................................................... 171 The experiment in catastrophic movement: Filling in the CATTt .............. 172 Radiant pedagogy .................................................................................... 174 How Do We Corbu? ....................................................................................... 176 Solving Problems with Cathedrals .................................................................. 177 6 SYNCRESIS AND CONDUCTIVE INFERENCE IN LE CORBUSIER’S OEUVRE: THE POEM OF THE RIGHT ANGLE AS