with Paula Martin Rivera , Atimanyu Vashishth, Pelin Tamay, Celine Hobeichi , Hussain Al-Bahrani, Yasemin Cengic, Junjian Wang, Shalu Lin, Peter Bergman, Selin Nisa Acikel 

Modulor Man – 1:1 drawing
To be honest, when we pinned up the paper and scaled the Modulor to the correct dimension, I felt overwhelmed by how large it
appeared. I never expected to be so taken aback by how the Modulor Man looks at a 1:1 scale. Maybe I’m just one of those people
who struggle to grasp dimension — or maybe, the Modulor Man really doesn’t reflect the proportions of an actual human being.
The ‘healthy white male’ left my 19.8 x 35.57cm computer screen, to become a human scale representation. Drawn into a black
background, the white silhouette makes its exclusion become glaringly obvious — the Modulor is not just a design tool, but a system
that reinforces a narrow idealised vision of humanity that I don’t think ever really accounted for the modernist society, or at least it
doesn’t account for the society of the 21st century.
It was quite triggering to see how I kept having to approach the stair while drawing the modular silhouette, as without it, I wouldn’t
reach many extents of his ‘standard’ body. This made me realise how his rigid proportions (designed to represent a universal
standard) really fail to account for the diversity of a real human body. The form of his body, from his shoulders to his waist and head,
has proportions that feel distinctly “off” and don’t seem to align with any 1.829m tall man.
The silhouette is encapsulated within a grid drawn by Le Corbusier, seemingly inspired by the golden ratio and Fibonacci sequence.
Initially, I wasn’t planning on drawing the grid because it has always felt overly complex to understand. However, I suddenly found
myself symbolically incarcerating the Modulor within his own grid.
When painting the negative, this feeling became much more apparent, this ‘incarceration’ mirrored how design has often confined
humanity within rigid, idealised frameworks. This act of imprisonment reflected the way such systems reduce human complexity to
predetermined proportions, ignoring individuality and diversity.
The physical act of tracing its rigid, universal proportions emphasised its disconnection from the diversity and irrationality of real
human bodies. This tactile process underscored the critique: the Modulor’s standardisation is not a celebration of humanity, but an
imposition upon it—one that erases individuality in favor of conformity.
The Modulor man really seems as an act of simplification, where everything the human body encapsulates has been left aside..
Through a system, the human complexity has been reduced to predetermined proportions, ignoring individuality and diversity.