Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

7On Scale and Detail

‘The Parthenon has remained, torn apart but not jostled […] If you look at the joints between the twenty sections of drums comprising the fluted columns, you won’t find them, even by running a fingernail over these areas, which can only be differentiated by the slight irregularities in the patina that each marble has collected over time.’

Le Corbusier, Journey to the East, 1911¹

Le Corbusier, with the fresh eyes of a 24-year-old, was not simply praising an extraordinary quality of craftsmanship when describing the grand flutes of the Parthenon’s Doric columns, and their unimaginably fine joints. He was speaking of a complete experience of architecture; a moment of connection.² Jumping forward some forty years, to when the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp was on the drawing board in Le Corbusier’s studio at Rue de Sèvres in Paris, we see a small exploratory model of the Ronchamp chapel, made of plaster of Paris; just cast, still soft.³ Those same fingers which had caressed the stones of Athens, are recorded to this day in the model, gouging out the back of the wall and with a pencil, making rough holes in the smooth, curved front surface – the first physical experiments to perforate the chapel’s thick south wall with small irregular openings, splaying to the interior and permeating it with light. For the maker and the viewer, the notion of ‘touch’ here underpins both the perception of architecture and the process of making it – sensually, intellectually ...