Cover of "Der Modulor" by Le Corbusier (Ed.5, 1985)
Between 1942 and 1955 the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) developed a universal measuring system known as the "Modulor".
The Modulor represented an attempt to give architecture a mathematical order oriented to a human scale. Starting from the golden ratio and the proportions of the human body, Le Corbusier developed his doctrine for the proportions of construction. He started from an assumed standard size of the human body and marked three intervals related to each other in the proportion of the golden ratio.
Le Corbusier managed to combine the imperial measuring system based on the foot with the metric decimal system and at the same time to relate to human body measurements. As a result, he obtained a systematic planning basis for architecture and industrial products that gained worldwide currency and was applied by countless practitioners. —ETH Library, ETH Zurich
