Building modern furniture. Antimodulor 2, 2015

Wooden panel with book, photographs and documents.
Nine wooden chairs. Variable measurements.

Modulor, an anthropomorphic model of ideal proportions which aimed to maintain a harmonious dimension between people, buildings and furniture. Initially, the Modulor was 1.75 m. high, but was modified to 1.83 m. In Le Corbusier’s imagination, beyond the Eurocentric hegemony of the healthy, productive, white male, there is no female version of the Modulor, nor is there any difference based on ethnic-racial or functional diversity (1).

The Antimodulor 2 project reproduces nine times the same chair model that appears in the book How to build modern furniture by Mario Del Fabbro (2). But each chair corresponds to a different height, so that the lowest chair is adapted to a person who is 1.13 m tall and the tallest to a person who is 2.03 m tall. In this variety of sizes, the only chair that has not been replicated is the one that coincides precisely with the proportions of the Modulor and which, unsurprisingly, are the same as those on which Del Fabbro bases his book. Antimodulor 2 aims to critically analyse Lecorbuserian standardisation and homogenisation by subverting it to the codes of bricolage. A way of making that frees us from the logic of the machine and emancipates us from the servitude of the market.

(1) The Indian city of Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier under the premises of the Modulor, serves as an example of Eurocentric tyranny, since the average height of Indian men is 1.61m. and of women 1.52m.

(2) Massively and uninterruptedly published in Spain from the end of the 1960s to the 1990s by Cursos a distancia CEAC.

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Exhibition:
Essay on fatigue
Curatorship: Martí Peran.
Fabra i Coats. Barcelona. October 2014 – August 2015.