Histories — The Endless Pavilion

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontane were interested in precisely such a critique of the museum and proposed instead a center for world knowledge - the Mundaneum. While the Mundaneum as a project of modernism’s universalizing hubris, one that essentialized and flattened multivalent ways of constructing knowledge, it also had a temporal dimension as a network and a machine that would project knowledge to a person “anywhere in his armchair”. When commissioned by Paul Otlet to design a Mundaneum (1929), Le Corbusier designs a stepping pyramid with a double spiral plan, with obvious references to archaic forms of monumentalism like the Temple of Babel and the Ziggurat at Khorsabad. In doing so Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum privileged monumentalism over temporality and phenomenal experience over networked thinking. Indeed, in an ultimate irony of the Mumfordian “impossibility of the modernist monument”, the Mundaneum’s form alluded to the most archaic representations of monumentalism - a ziggurat.

Le Corbusier was one of the most vocal critics of the museum typology as a repository of the ‘high arts’. In L’Espirit Nouveau, he calls for a public inquiry by proposing a heretical question “Should the Louvre be burnt?” Again, at the Internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (1925), Le Corbusier challenges the very concept of the museum, “The museum is bad because it does not tell the whole story. It misleads, it dissimulates, it deludes. It is a liar.” Le Corbusier’s diatribe was against the museum as a static, staid, highly curated and closed entity - enshrined in the structures of royal authority. The thought that Royal authority would mandate what is art and the architectures that frame and support it deeply infuriated Le Corbusier and led to a career long quest to find a modern archetype for the musuem. Replacing the museum artifact with ‘knowledge’ relocates the problem of the museum from authority inscribed in palace structures to modernist rationality and temporality. Since knowledge is ever growing, inherently temporal and open-ended, the archetype for a museum of knowledge would have to address the question of time - a project that could be built incrementally, to absorb ever increasing forms of knowledge. Musée d’Art Contemporain (1931) and the Museum of Unlimited Growth (1939) were two of several futile attempts to build an Endless Museum - in Barcelona (1932), Antwerp (1933), Paris at the International Exhibition (1937), the postwar reconstruction of Saint-Dié (1945), Brussels at the International Exhibition (1958), Berlin (1961) and Erlenbach (1963). The exhibition will trace these projects that culminate in the three late career museums - Sanskar Kendra or The City Museum in Ahmedabad (1954), The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (1959) and the Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh (1968).

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontane were interested in precisely such a critique of the museum and proposed instead a center for world knowledge - the Mundaneum. While the Mundaneum as a project of modernism’s universalizing hubris, one that essentialized and flattened multivalent ways of constructing knowledge, it also had a temporal dimension as a network and a machine that would project knowledge to a person “anywhere in his armchair”. When commissioned by Paul Otlet to design a Mundaneum (1929), Le Corbusier designs a stepping pyramid with a double spiral plan, with obvious references to archaic forms of monumentalism like the Temple of Babel and the Ziggurat at Khorsabad. In doing so Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum privileged monumentalism over temporality and phenomenal experience over networked thinking. Indeed, in an ultimate irony of the Mumfordian “impossibility of the modernist monument”, the Mundaneum’s form alluded to the most archaic representations of monumentalism - a ziggurat.