Losing face

Coloured etching of the Altes Museum, by Friedrich Alexander Thielen, 1830, Museumsinsel, Berlin

In view of this preliminary transformation, the Stirling Staatsgalerie might be said to be already a second-degree version of the Schinkel prototype, operating on Schinkel by way of his modernist re-interpretation. One might extend Rowe’s comment logically to read a “palace of Assembly without a facade.” this Stirling’s central circular volume would be at once a memory of the Pantheon rotunda and of an empty assembly hall; the ramp would already be included in the elements of the project; the three-sided U of offices already subsituted for the courtyard parti; the entrance already off center, and most importantly, the rear wall of the “stoa” already eroded into a screen.

Schinkel's Altes Museum plan

Such formal transformation was, as we have noted, however, already present in Musée Mondial where Le Corbusier retained a reference to Schinkel in plan while entirely reformulating the type in section. The first-floor plan of the Corbusian museum is, indeed, uncannily similar to Stirling’s own reformulation of the Schinkel. In both, a U-shaped blockframes acentral circle; in both, the original dome of the pantheon has been lifted: in the cas df the Musée Mondial, Le Corbusier has substituted the inner space of a high ppyramid; in that of the taatsgalerie, Stirling has completed its ruination, opening it to the sky. Le Corbusier himself made the point that, with the entire monument raised up on pilotis, the distinction between front and back had been erased, thus beginning the process that Stirling accomplishes bu means of the continuous public route through the site from top to bottom. In this sense, Stirling would not simply be destroying the Pantheon, or attacking Schinkel’s monumental version of history, but also gentlry criticizing the idealistic and quasi-mystical aspiration of Corbusian modernism.
In both Schinkel and Le Corbusier, as we have noted, architecture is indissolubly bound to the contents, real and ideological, of the museum. In the altes Museum, the sequence of rooms that assemble the schools of western painting in chronological order is posed against the calm Pantheon at the center that establishes the notion of ahistorical permanence; the public, semipermeable face of the stoa confirms the museum’s connection to the city. Architecture operates as both representation and instruument of the display of a nation’s history and its artistic heritage as the active ingredient of continuing cultural development. It is at once sign and agent of a living history.
Similarly, in Le Corbusier Musée Mondial, the grand route of time is extended back to prehistory and forward to the ever-expanding present, working on insert temporality and spatiality across cultures and peoples into a universalizing frame that, again, proposes history (enlarged in its scope by the sciences of anthropology, ethnology, and geology) as the foundation of the future. the central volume, or “Sacrarium”, universalizes the western Pantheon and acts again as a center for atemporality. Here too the architecture operates as a symbol and mechanism and its tied to its contents.

in The architectural uncanny, Anthony Vidler, 1992, MIT Press

Le Corbusier's spiral Labyrinth

In the archive of Le Corbusier the World Museum is a precursor (in plan diagram at least) to a set of projects, hereafter to be referred to as the spiral museums. Those designs include the scheme for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Paris (1931), project for a Museum of Unlimited Extension (1939), the Cultural Centre of Ahmenedabad Museum (1954), the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (1957), and the Museum and Art Gallery of Chandigarh (completed in 1970). The spiral museum design also appears in the layout of urban design schemes such as the design for Rio de Janeiro (1929) and Saint-Die (1946). As a project the spiral museum occupies the archive in every decade from the 1920s until the architect’s death.
In the critical literature little is made of this occurrence, this design’s constant return, nor indeed of the spiral museum as a project within the archive. The built versions have not been considered remarkable in their own terms. What little critical interest that there is focuses upon the spiral form itself. Thus the spiral has been seen to stand for the architect’s interest in the symbolism of nature and patterns of growth and archetypal forms.
Yet the drawings from the Oeuvre Complete of the World Museum project are also manifestly setting out a promenade. This is a museum in which a spectator takes up an itinerary of history set out along a continuous wall; an itinerary carrying the spectator from the centre to edge of the museum, and it is this aspect of the design - how this promenade is being figured in the drawings - into which I inquire. In order to map out the promenade of the museum I point to a coincidence of figures - of the figure of this plan with that of a labyrinth. In literally appearing to take up the plan form of the labyrinth figure the project thus might be viewed as rehearsing the qualities of labyrinthine paradox (a recognition of a particular type of doubling)

Moulis, Antony, “Figure and Experience: The labyrinth and Le Corbusier’s World Museum”, Interstices No. 4 (Auckland) 1996: CD-ROM publication.

Le Corbusier's Tower of Babel

The Mundaneum was created in 1910 out of the initiative of two Belgian lawyers. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine aimed to gather together all the World's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification system.
Otlet regarded the project as the centerpiece of a new 'World City' — a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents.
If the task was already huge when Otlet developped his ideas, the later evolution of medias made impossible the target to be met. But some consider Mundaneum a forerunner of the Internet.

The Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium. More photos on dalbera.club.fr/mons/mundaneum/index.htm

Otlet commissioned architect Le Corbusier to design a Mundaneum project to be built in Geneva, in 1929. Drafts were made for a whole city on the hills of the swiss capital. The World Museum, centerpiece of the complex, was meant to narrate, on a single chronological axis going from prehistory to today, an all-encompassing description of Human creation, by indifferently displaying pictures, original objects or facsimiles.

Le Corbusier's Mundaneum (World Museum), Section and facades.

This project is the first, at least in diagram-plan, using the Spiral-museum typology, later recurring in a few Le Corbusier's museums. Its main feature is the very rigid and introverted corridor-shaped chronological exhibition path, going from the centre of the spiral and top of the building, towards its periphery, reaching the groundfloor at its end.