Revision as of 20:36, 21 January 2016

Dennis Pohl

Formulating the Mundaneum

“We’re on the verge of a historic moment for cities” ^[2]

“We are at the beginning of a historic transformation in cities. At a time when the concerns about urban equity, costs, health and the environment are intensifying, unprecedented technological change is going to enable cities to be more efficient, responsive, flexible and resilient.”^[3]

Otlet, Scheme and Reality

Corbusier, Current and Ideal traffic circulation

By 1927, Le Corbusier participated in the competition for the headquarters of the League of Nations, where his designs were rejected. In this occasion he met for the first time his later cher ami Paul Otlet, and it quickly turned out that both were already familiar with each others' ideas and writings. This becomes evident with regard to the used schemes, but also through the epistemic assumptions that underlie their world views.

Before meeting Le Corbusier, Otlet was fascinated by the idea of urbanism as a science, that systematically organizes all elements of life in infrastructures of flows, and was convinced to work with Van der Swaelmen, who already planned a world city on the site of Tervuren near Brussels in 1919.^[4]

Van der Swaelmen - Tervuren, 1916

For Otlet it was the first time where two notions of different practices started to match. Namely an environment ordered and structured according to principles of rationalization and taylorization. Rationalization meant as an epistemic practice reducing all relationships to those of means and ends that can be determined. On the other side taylorization as the possibility to analyze and synthesize workflows according to economic efficiency and productivity. Both principles are nowadays used as synonymous: if all modes of production are reduced to labor, then it's efficiency can be rationally determined through means and ends.

“By improving urban technology, it’s possible to significantly improve the lives of billions of people around the world. […] we want to supercharge existing efforts in areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems that city-dwellers face every day.”^[5]

Corbusier - scheme for the traffic circulation

Otlet's Formula

A formula that includes every atomic entity, instead was developed by his later friend Otlet as an answer to the question which he posts in Monde, whether the world is expressible by a unifying entity which could be determined. This represents Otlet’s dream: A “permanent and complete representation of the entire world,”^[9] that is located in one place.

Otlet understood very early the active potential of Architecture and Urbanism as a dispositif, a strategic apparatus, which by situating the subject in a specific environment performs an active understanding of the world on the subject.^[10] A world that can be determined by ascertainable facts through knowledge. Therefore he thought his Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique as an “architecture of ideas”, a manual to collect and organize the world's knowledge, which has to go in hand with contemporary developments of architecture. As the new modernist forms and use of materials propagated the abundance of decorative elements, Otlet believed in the possibility of language as a model of “raw data” reducing it to pure necessary information and unambiguous facts, while removing all inefficient assets of ambiguity or subjectivity. “Information, from which has been removed all dross and foreign elements, will be set out in a quite analytical way. It will be recorded on separate leaves or cards rather than being confined in volumes,” which will allow the standardized annotation of hypertext for the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC).^[11] Furthermore the “regulation through architecture and it's tendency of a total urbanism would help towards a better understanding of the book Traité de documentation and it's right functional and holistic desiderata.”^[12] An abstraction would enable Otlet to constitute the “equation of urbanism” as a type of sociology (S): U = u(S), because according to his definition: Urbanism “is an art of distributing public space in order to raise general human happiness; urbanization is the result of all activities which a society employs in order to reach its proposed goal; [and] a material expression of its organization.”^[13] The scientific position, which determines all characteristic values of a certain region by a systematic classification and observation, was developed by the Scottish biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, who was invited by Paul Otlet for the world exhibition 1913 in Gent to present his Town Planning Exhibition to a international audience.^[14] What is inevitably taken further by Geddes, is the positivist believe in a totality of science, which he unfolds from the ideas of Auguste Comte, Frederic Le Play and Elisée Reclus in order to get a unified understanding of an urban development in a special context. This position would allow to represent the complexity of a inhabited environment through data.^[15]

Thinking the Mundaneum

The only person, that Otlet considered capable for the architectural realization of the Mundaneum was Le Corbusier, whom he approached for the first time in Spring 1928. In a one of the first letters he asked the need to link “the idea and the building, in all it's symbolic representation. […] Mundaneum opus maximum.” Next to a center of documentation, information, science and education, the complex should link the Union of International Associations (UIA), which was founded by La Fontaine and Otlet in 1907, and the League of Nations. “A material and moral representation of The greatest Society of the nations (humanity);” an international city located on a extraterritorial area in Geneva.^[16] Despite their different backgrounds, both men had an ease to understand each other, since they “did frequently use similar terms such as plan, analysis, classification, abstraction, standardization and synthesis, not only to bring conceptual order into their disciplines and knowledge organization, but also in human action.”^[17] Moreover the appearance of common terms in their most significant publications are striking. Such as spirit, mankind, elements, work, system and history, just to name a few. These described circumstances, led both Utopians to think the Mundaneum as a system, rather than a singular central type of building; it was meant to include as many resources in the development process as possible. Because the Mundaneum is “an idea, an institution, a method, a material corpus of works and collections, a building, a network,”^[18] it had to be essentially conceptualized as an “organic plan with the possibility to expand on different scales with the multiplication of each part.”^[19] The possibility of expansion and a organic re-distribution of elements adapted according to new necessities and needs, is what guarantees the system efficiency, namely by constantly integrating more resources. (LINK to Dick Reckard) By designing and standardizing forms of life up to the smallest element, modernism propagated a new form of living which would ensure greatest efficiency. Otlet was supporting and encouraging Le Corbusier with his words: “The twentieth century is called upon to build a whole new civilization. From efficiency to efficiency, from rationalization to rationalization, it must so raise itself that it reaches total efficiency and rationalization. […] Architecture is one of the best bases not only of reconstruction (the deforming and skimpy name given to the whole of postwar activities) but of intellectual and social construction to which our era should dare to lay claim.”^[20] As the Wohnmaschine, Corbusiers famous housing project Unité d'habitation, the distribution of elements is purely shaped according to man's needs. The premise which underlies this notion, is that man's needs and desires can be determined, normalized and standardized in advance following geometrical models of objectivity.

“making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently”^[21]

Building the Mundaneum

In the first working phase from March to September 1928, the plans for the Mundaneum seemed to be rather a commissioned work than a collaboration. In the 3rd person singular, Otlet submitted descriptions and organizational schemes which would represent the institutional structures in a diagrammatic manner. In exchange Le Corbusier drafted the architectural plans and detailed descriptions, which lead to the publication N° 128 Mundaneum, printed by the international Associations in Brussels.^[22] Le Corbusier seemed to be a bit less enthusiastic in the Mundaneum project than Otlet, mainly because of his skepticism towards the League of Nations that he called a “misguided” and “pre-machinist creation.”^[23] This was also due to fact that he has been rejected prior in 1927 from the competition of the Palace for the League of Nations, what he already expressed with anger in a public announcement. However, during the second phase from September 1928 to August 1929, a period of a strong friendship occurred. The rise of the international debate after their first publications; letters starting with cher ami; and the common agreement of advancing the project to the next level by including more stakeholders and developing the Cité mondiale, just to mention some of the evidences. This led to the second publication by Paul Otlet La Cité mondiale in February 1929, which unexpectedly traumatized the diplomatic environment in Geneva. Although both tried to reorganize personal meetings with key figures from all stakeholders, the project didn't find any ground for its realization. Especially because Switzerland withdrew from the offer of an extraterritorial land use for the Cité mondiale. For Le Corbusier this was a reason to focus himself on a further theoretical approach of which the Ville Radieuse, that was presented on the 3rd CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930.^[24] After this experience Le Corbusier considered the Cité mondiale as “a closed case”, and withdrew himself from the political environment by considering himself without any political color, “since the groups that gather around our ideas are, militaristic bourgeois, communists, monarchists, socialists, radicals, League of Nations and fascists. When all colors are mixed, only white is the result. That stands for prudence, neutrality, decantation and the human search for truth.”^[25]

Governing the Mundaneum

Indeed there are several evidences where Le Corbusier considered him and his work “apolitical” or “above politics,”^[26] but maybe Otlet was more aware of the political force of this project than Le Corbusier himself. “Yet it is important to predict. Knowing, to predict in order to govern, was the enlightening formulation of Comte. Predict doesn't cost anything, was added by a master of contemporary urbanism (Le Corbusier).”^[27] That prediction doesn't cost anything and is “preparing the ways for the coming years”, Le Corbusier wrote to Arthur Fontaine and Albert Thomas from the International Labor Organization, in order to lobby for the project of the Cité mondiale.^[28] Indeed, it doesn't cost anything because the statistical data is in any case available, but he didn't seem to consider that prediction is a form of governing. A similar premise underlies in the present domination of the smart city ideologies, where large amounts of data are available to be used and predict for the sake of efficiency. Although most of the actors behind these ideas consider themselves apolitical, the governmental aspect is more than evident. A form of control and government, that is not only biopolitical but merely epistemic. Since nevertheless, the use of this data not only in order to standardize units for architecture as well as categories of knowledge is a determination of life, restricting it to the classifiable normality. What becomes clear in this juxtaposition of Le Corbusier's and Paul Otlet's work is that the standardization of architecture, goes in hand with an epistemic standardization, because it limits what can be thought, experienced and lived to that what is already there. The architecture in this case has to be considered here as an “epistemic object”, which exemplifies the cultural logic of its time.^[29] By its presence it brings the abstract cultural logic underlying its conception into the everyday experience, and becomes with material, form and function an actor that performs an epistemic practice on its inhabitants and users. In this case: the conception that everything can be known, represented and (pre-)determined through data.

1. ↑ Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde, Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935, P. 448.
2. ↑ Dan Doctoroff, New York Times 11.06.15, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/technology/sidewalk-labs-a-start-up-created-by-google-has-bold-aims-to-improve-city-living.html?_r=0
3. ↑ Dan Doctoroff, 10th June 2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/relevant
4. ↑ Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio, 1982, P. 128; See also: L. Van der Swaelmen, Préliminaires d'art civique, Leynde 1916, pp. 164 – 299.
5. ↑ Larry Page, Press release, 10th June 2015, http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
6. ↑ Le Corbusier, “A Contemporary City” from “The City of Tomorrow and its Planning”
7. ↑ Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Paris, Flammarion: 1994, pp. 114-115.
8. ↑ Ibd., P. 100.
9. ↑ Rayward, W Boyd (1994), "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868–1944) and Hypertext", P. 235.
10. ↑ The french term dispositif or translated apparatus, refers to Michel Foucault's description of a merely strategic function, “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid.” This distinction allows to go beyond the mere object, and rather deconstruct all elements involved in the production conditions and relate them to the distribution of power. See: Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh (1977) interview. In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed Colin Gordon), 1980: pp. 194 – 200.
11. ↑ Bernd Frohmann, “The role of facts in Paul Otlet’s modernist project of documentation”, in Rayward, W.B. (Ed.), European Modernism and the Information Society, Ashgate Publishers, London: 2008, p. 79.
12. ↑ “La régularisation de l’architecture et sa tendance à l’urbanisme total aident à mieux comprendre le livre et ses propres desiderata fonctionnels et intégraux.” See: Otlet, Paul, Traité de documentation, Bruxelles, Mundaneum, Palais Mondial, 1934, P. 329.
13. ↑ “L'urbanisme est l'art d'aménager l'espace collectif en vue d'accroîte le bonheur humain général; l'urbanisation est le résulat de toute l'activité qu'une Société déploie pour arriver au but qu'elle se propose; l'expression matérielle (corporelle) de son organisation.” Otlet, Paul, Traité de documentation, Bruxelles, Mundaneum, Palais Mondial, 1934, P. 205.
14. ↑ Thomas Pearce, Mettre des pierres autour des idées, Paul Otlet, de Cité Mondiale en de modernistische stedenbouw in de jaren 1930, PhD Thesis, KU Leuven: 2007, P. 39.
15. ↑ Volker Welter. Biopolis Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2003.
16. ↑ Letter from Paul Otlet to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Brussels 2nd April 1928. See:Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio, 1982, pp. 221-223.
17. ↑ W. Boyd Rayward, European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 1 jan. 2008, P. 129.
18. ↑ Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde, Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935, P. 448.
19. ↑ Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio, 1982, P. 223.
20. ↑ Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, P. 27.
21. ↑ http://www.sidewalkinc.com/
22. ↑ Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio, 1982, P. 128
23. ↑ Ibd., P. 232.
24. ↑ Ibd., P. 129.
25. ↑ Ibd., P. 255.
26. ↑ Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, MIT Press, 2002, P. 20.
27. ↑ Paul Otlet, Monde: essai d'universalisme - Connaissance du Monde, Sentiment du Monde, Action organisee et Plan du Monde, Bruxelles: Editiones Mundeum 1935, P. 407.
28. ↑ Giuliano Gresleri and Dario Matteoni. La Città Mondiale: Andersen, Hébrard, Otlet, Le Corbusier. Venezia: Marsilio, 1982, P. 241.
29. ↑ Considering architecture as an object of knowledge formation, the term “epistemic object” by the German philosopher Günter Abel, helps bring forth the epistemic characteristic of architecture. Epistemic objects according to Abel are these, on which our knowledge and empiric curiosity are focused. They are objects that perform an active contribution to what can be thought and how it can be thought. Moreover because one cannot avoid architecture, it determines our boundaries (of thinking). See: Günter Abel, Epistemische Objekte – was sind sie und was macht sie so wertvoll?, in: Hingst, Kai-Michael; Liatsi, Maria (ed.): Pragmata. Tübingen 2008.