“The donkey, in Le Corbusier’s writings, remained, for me, a repository of unsolved ideas in architecture, some but not all of which are concerned with ethics and philosophy.” Catherine Ingraham“I am a donkey, but a donkey with an eye: the eye of a donkey capable of sensations. I am a donkey with an instinct for proportion. I am and always will be an unrepenant visualist. When it’s beautiful it’s beautiful – but that’s the Modulor!...The Modulor lengthens donkeys’ ears (here I refer to another donkey than my aforementioned self)."



Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who was widely known as Le Corbusier (Engl. the raven), developed the Modulor as an anthropometric scale of proportions for his architectural visions and a bridge between the Imperial and the Metric system. The Manichean enemy of the raven and his Modulor is much less known: the donkey, which Le Corbusier attributes an almost monstrous agency in his early works. His meandering paths are the real floor plans of grown cities like London and Paris; for Le Corbusier the donkey is the true architect of Europe!

In the donkey and his supposed inertia, laziness, stubbornness, and resistance to modernism and modernity all the problems that Le Corbusier faces while trying to achieve his urban and architectural goals are reborn in animal form. In Le Corbusier’s writings, especially in his early work from the 1920s, the donkey – as a messy and material beast of burden – appears to be a constant saboteur of Le Corbusier’s orderly and abstract aesthetic politics of the straight line. In the "The City of Tomorrow," (1925) a widely read influential text of modernist architectural writing, the donkey resurfaces again and again as a “recurrent figure of resistance to modernity, of ornamental froufrou and dilatory historicism,” as architectural theorist Catherine Ingraham points out. (Ingraham 1998: 65)

Le Corbusier laments over and over in "The City of Tomorrow": “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance...The Pack-Donkey’s Way is responsible for the plan of every continental city.” (Le Corbusier 1967 [1925]: 11f)Of course Le Corbusier’s donkey is an imaginary donkey; the negative attributes that the master architect attaches to the animal are born out of misozooist sentiments. Magical Marxist Andrew Merrifield’s "The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World" (2008) is a welcomed antidote to these Corbusian resentments.

On closer inspection the modern discourse on architecture turns out to resemble a menagerie of animal figuration with far-reaching implications. In a famous phrase from Capital, Marx praises even the worst human architect in comparison to the best bee building a beehive, because the former plans and pictures models and building structures in the ideal sense first, before applying them to reality. With stressing the human consciousness of the planning architect as ruler in the kingdom of ends and enthroning the architect as guardian of the humanimalian border regime, Marx falls short of the level of his own theoretical achievement and maintains the idealistic modernist legacy in new clothes. It is precisely Le Corbusier’s donkey that shows that the aesthetic purity of the conscious will to plan cannot be separated from the messy reality that involves many actors like animals, bureaucracies, and technologies, the surveillance of construction workers and anti-colonial dissidence, electric lines, pencils and regional building codes, long meetings and overlooked details. (Mitchell 2002: 45)

Plans do not fall from the head to the ground and become buildings, they are subject to continuous revision and renegotiation – the birthplace of architecture is not to be found in the head of planners but on the construction site, where it is generally recommended to wear a helmet.The messy materiality of reality affects the consciousness, not least that of Le Corbusier. As in the case of the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille and the planning and building of Chandigarh in India as the new capital of two states placed on the border, industrial aesthetics are achieved only through seemingly pre-industrial modes of production. In the absence of train rails or motorized transport, the donkey enters the stage of modernist architecture again: this time as enabler and facilitator of urban development, which is why Le Corbusier planned to build him a monument. (Vibhor 2010) (FA)



Sources:

Ingraham, Catherine (1998): Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity. Yale University Press.

Le Corbusier (1967): The City of Tomorrow [1925], Paris: Dover Publications.

Mitchell, Timothy (2002): Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mohan, Vibhor (2010): Corbusier wanted a donkey monument. In: The Times of India, Sep 11 2010.

Merrifield, Andy (2008): The wisdom of donkeys: finding tranquility in a chaotic world. New York: Walker, distributed to the trade by Macmillan.