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White Collar Corbusier: From the Casier to the cits d'affaires Author(s): Alexandra Lange Source: Grey Room, No. 9 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 58-79 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262601 . Accessed: 27/03/2011 19:24
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ALEXANDRALANGE

After World War I France looked to America, not for architecture but for equipment. Le Corbusier's 1935 trip, chronicled in When the Cathedrals Were White, was actually five years behind the times. His countrymen Hyacinthe Dubreuil and Georges Duhamel (both of whose books Le Corbusier owned) had already craned their necks at New York and Chicago skyscrapers and watched the car carcasses go by on Ford's assembly line. But they were social critics, not designers. It was Le Corbusier who extended Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management beyond the factory and into society as part of the larger interwar application of timesaving principles to the white-collar office and a resumption of the SaintSimonian ideal of the right man for the job. Le Corbusier's affinity for scientific management linked him to other post-World War I thinkers in France who saw technology, in the right hands, as the revolutionary element for society.' Mary McLeod's pioneering research about this affiliation is a contribution to intellectual history that I would like to extend toward design. It is my contention that scientific management--"the regime of records"-generated new equipment and a new architecture to contain that equipment and its attendant personnel. Le Corbusier was as aware of management's products as he was of its policies, and one can read his work of the 1920s and 1930s, from furniture to cities, as parallel to the market-driven rationalization of industry and bureaucracy. The aesthetic was clearly similar: office Taylorism, the second iteration of the field established by Taylor's disciples, privileged clean surfaces, the open plan, global surveillance, and efficiency of movement for its product-white, thin, weightless paper-an invention that embodies the aesthetic of early Modernist architecture. Starting with the blank sheet, this essay will trace two entwined histories: first, the advances in office design after 1900, which led to a modernization of the workplace along factory-like lines; next, the development of Le Corbusier's domestic cabinets, the Casiers standard, and their redeployment in his office-building

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designs before the war. In both the anonymous and the heroic versions the filing cabinet (and its resident papers) can be seen as a building block for the twentieth century design of offices and, by extension, white-collar lifestyles. Le Corbusier's Casiers read as blueprints for his ideas about office buildings and cites d'affaires: designs not arbitrarily imposed, but generated from the inside out, dimensioned by the path of standardized white paper. By placing Le Corbusier back into a wider debate about the politics of organization, I hope to historicize his ideas, showing the ways in which reality and architectural fantasy do and do not coincide. The implications of the built analogies between the worker in his building and his index card on file are fairly obvious, and most sinisterly expressed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World--written and published contemporaneously with Le Corbusier's Casier development. As we shall see, to anti-Americanists such as Duhamel, the United States already looked like the brave new biologically engineered world. No longer anonymous but named, identified, the procession [of test tubes] marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room. "Eighty-eight cubic meters of card index," said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered. "Brought up-to-date every morning," [added the Director of Hatcheries]. "And coordinated every afternoon ..."2 Huxley's tale, published in 1932, opens with a guided tour of violet-hued hell, as the Director of Hatcheries takes a set of Alpha youths through the assembly-line production of socially and biologically engineered humanity. The bottles move at a regal pace along the conveyor belt, tended by smocked lab workers on one of three steel-mesh galleries, reaching daylight on their predetermined Decanting day. This is Taylorism taken to its logical, eugenic conclusion: scientific advances applied to perfecting the building block of society-the human-and merged with the Fordist architecture of efficiency, the assembly line. The belief in the perfectibility of each man for the job unites with a perfecting structure into which man must make himself fit. Those who don't, like Huxley's protagonist Bernard Marx, are doomed to a restless search for a room, a test tube, even an index card of nonstandardized dimensions: there's no room for idiosyncrasy on a 3-by-5 rectangle. Huxley's novel is the worst-case scenario, but it describes a society whose postnatal equipment, architecture, and urbanism function as smoothly as his Hatchery.

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Which came first, standardized paper or the filing cabinet? Before it could be fit into a cabinet, the white-collar product had to be standardized so that letters could be layered rather than rolled and separated into individual pigeonholes. Although there is no exact date for the "invention" of the 8.5-by-11-inch sheet or its European metric equivalent, the typewriter and the filing cabinet-generator and receptor-were developed contemporaneously in the last decades of the nineteenth century and widely adopted in the United States and abroad after 1890. So closely intertwined are the machine and the writing surface, that letter paper is typically identified as "typewriter" size in standards manuals before the advent of the computer and its printer.3 Historians of the typewriter claim that its invention "swelled the output of recorded words," and therefore facilitated the rise of larger and larger business and bureaucracy.4 Taylor initiated his research into factory efficiency during this period and indeed generated reams of new paperwork. His engineers, dispatched to factories, came equipped with clipboard and stopwatch. While the employees produced goods, the experts produced timed, "scientific" records of their method, on forms that soon multiplied in specificity.5 "Each department head has a loose leaf notebook in which pieces, materials, models, order of operations are listed," noted Hyacinthe Dubreuil in his account of his trip to America in the late 1920s.6 One of American industry's improvements, in his view, was the insistence that all interfactory communication be in writing, on specially printed sheets bearing the legend "Words fly away, writing remains." "Naturally a special personnel is constantly occupied with replacing loose leaves and keeping up-to-date these 'Manufacturing Organizing Records' that every department head always has at hand," Dubreuil wrote. "Through [this record keeping], industry exists under what might be called a 'regime of records' as completely as do sports."7 Frank B. Gilbreth, an early Taylor disciple, anticipated the role of future human resources departments in his own system of "White Cards,"an index with the names and addresses of all the acceptable workers that had ever been on his payroll, with notations of the work they were best able to do.8 Gilbreth, as readers of Cheaper by the Dozen are well aware, insisted on efficiency as a way of life. He kept a notebook with him at all times and asked that his employees do the same. "Farfrom interfering with memory, it simply frees the memory from superfluous details, leaving more time to be devoted the memorizing the important things of life," wife and partner Lillian Moller Gilbreth wrote of such prosthetics, echoing Le Corbusier's claims for the filing cabinet.9 Later Gilbreth would hire

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himself out to bring greater efficiency to the paper world he had helped create, studying the movement of papers on a desk as Taylor once studied wheelbarrows of coal. Both Gilbreth and Dubreuil saw that the paper record could become a useful substitute for the man himself, as he could be evaluated numerically and twodimensionally, far from the scene of labor. Dubreuil intended his book to rebut the contention (of Duhamel and others) that America was producing a race of automatons, but inadvertently proved their point. Just as a criminal who has once passed through the hand of justice is photographed from different angles and methodically measured, examined, and weighed, so in the case of any work that has been once performed they meticulously collect all information of any use if it is to be repeated.10 The criminal metaphor is useful, for we associate penal institutions with surveillance, evaluation, numbers instead of names, and they, like the modern office, are typically arranged in a structure of identical cells. These records, however, chart not crimes but deeds-how a product is completed-so that someone else can be taught how to do it or so that the worker in question can learn to do it faster, creating interchangeable workers to make the interchangeable parts. Parallel with the speeding-up of factories, Alexander Hamilton Church advocated the interchangeability of executives, replacing ad hoc, hierarchical decision making with formal communication systems in the hope of "transcending individual memory."11 Seeking the managerial counterpart to Gantt charts, Church translated the skills of current managers into handbooks and manuals so that companies could better survive the death or departure of an executive. After World War I a third set of forms was added to the mix: psychological and aptitude tests, completing the portrait of an individual-physical, managerial, psychological-in two dimensions. All these records also required a physical apparatus of organization so that a new office worker could find a file as easily as the experienced one who put it away. Taylor's system, therefore, created both new personnel and new equipment needs. The first filing cabinets were introduced in the 1880s, large wooden cabinets that supported open drawers in which papers were stored loose, in alphabetical or chronological order, held in place with a metal clamp. Shannon Sectional Cabinets Genuine Businesses alternated between HE Shanmon Arch method has, this system and the newer verfi Sbeenfor twenty years, and is tical files, introduced ten years da, th saest wayto file letter or tsie

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later. The vertical system did not prevail until 1911, despite its now obvious advantages: items could be inserted without folding or fastening, and thus could easily be removed or regrouped; a single drawer could hold eight to ten times the number of documents as a flat-filing drawer; and one could easily flip through the documents to find a particularitem. The earliest bureaucracies to adopt the system were libraries, circa 1876, which purchased thousands of vertical card indexes as they changed over to the Dewey decimal system.12 George Dewey's company, the LibraryBureau, manufactured not only the file cabinets themselves, but also the indispensable guides, folders, and handbooks explaining how to file. Offices also maintained concurrent index card and letter files. Documents were filed by number, with each number corresponding to a particular person or company. An index of the numbers miniaturized the arrangement of the full-size cabinets. Given the complicated nature of the multiple files, Dewey's pamphlets on filing advocated hiring specialists in the field, professional file keepers, and centralizing a company's records on one floor. Office manuals of the early twenties, therefore, devoted themselves to the arrangements of cabinets, desks, and departments in relation to their place in the paper-processing hierarchy. Their schematic diagrams aped the organization of Ford's factories, in which the assembly lines followed the force of gravity. Private offices were eliminated in the attempt to create a true assembly line of signatures, stamps, or other addenda-what the manager lost in privacy, he gained in literal oversight, becoming one desk among many on a wide-open floor.13 On the first floor of Frank Lloyd Wright'sLarkin Building (1904), for example, partner Darwin Martin (the inventor of the Cardex, a predecessor of the Rolodex), sat at one end of the open first-floor atrium, at the same level as the managerial employees. At the opposite end, up a half-flight and behind a low wall, sat the Larkins.14 his best-selling In of 1919, Lee Galloway used an insurance company as his guinea Office Management pig, suggesting that the directors first chart the path of a policy, working with a plan of the current desks.15 The result: a bird's nest of overlapping, crisscrossing lines, some heading to other departments on other floors, others indicating multiple stops at the same person's desk. His solution: placing all policy-making departments in one open room, rearranging the desks into functional rows, and adding mechanical overhead conveyors to eliminate the

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scurrying clerks, thereby turning the policy's path into a simple rectangle ending at the manager's desk for the official company seal. Once the organizational path had been cleared, Galloway and his contemporary, William H. Leffingwell, turned their minds to better systems for paper movement. The simplest solution would be desks set close enough together for papers to be handed between them without any employees having to get up (or look at each other). More technologically advanced were systems of pneumatic tubes (actually installed in Paris in the 1920s), a double-belt (bidirectional) conveyor built down the center of two rows of desks, or even an overhead ferry of clips strung from moving cables.16 If such a system was unaffordable, Galloway suggested developing a messenger system that sounds practically mechanized: scheduled rounds of drop-offs and deliveries, including the use of the elevator as an unmanned dumbwaiter, rather than task-by-task calls to the messenger center. The telephone, and an e-mail-like machine called the telautograph, were considered the most useful eliminators of messengers, though these devices, as a sort of infernal bargain, created work-slowing chat. The best employees were those who minded their own time and their boss's business, incorporating the manager's checks into their routine. "'Clock-watching' should be cultivated, not tabooed. Experience has shown ... that the clerks who use the clocks as a pace-maker or time-marker accomplish much more than those who fail to mark the passage of time.""17 As an element in the paper's path, the desk also needed to be simplified. "The desk is no longer a storage place-nor even ornamental--but a tool for making the quickest possible turnover of business papers," Galloway writes. At the end of the day nothing should remain on its smooth surface. The rolltop desk of the nineteenth century protected work but encouraged disorder; the modern clerk's desk "should be trained down to fighting trim, supplied with emergency rations, and all camouflage removed."18The not-a-moment-to-lose exigencies of wartime are thus linked to office life: the streamlined desk (flat top, three shallow drawers) is a symbol not just of corporate, but of national loyalty. Frank Gilbreth studied the desktop itself, using time-lapse photography to draw the "confused series of lines" that were the typical office worker's hand movements. Gilbreth's goal was to create an efficient rectangle of movement, without overlap or backup, for the movement of papers on the individual worker's fiefdom.19 A "desk directory" would specify each-appropriate item and its optimal location on the two-by-three-foot top. Managers with stopwatches might drop by and time how long it took a clerk to find an eraser or a ruler, or they might

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check the desk at their leisure: the new drawers had no locks.20 "Something is wrong," Galloway quotes one office manager as saying, "if a clerk, in seven seconds, cannot put his hand on any paper or article needed which is temporarily in his possession."21 The operative words in this statement are seven seconds-time sheets accounted for every minute in the worker's day, with or without the manager's stopwatch-and temporarily, for nothing is the clerk's to keep. The most evocative example of the successive reductions of the clerk's autonomy turns up in Leffingwell's discussion of sick employees.22 In order not to lose a day's work to illness (or an office's worth to fire), each clerk should be expected to have no more than a wire in-box's worth of work to do at the end of the day. This slim, open basket, clearly marked with the clerk's name and location, would be placed for the night in a fireproof safe, a miniature of the office itself. Should any clerk not show up for work, his basket could be examined-he has nothing to hide, after all-for any pressing paperwork. First the clerk lost his rolltop, and then he lost his drawers, now even his desktop was to be taken from him. His life, in sum, could be contained in a shallow trough. If the typical office building reflects the boxed-in existence of the office worker, so the suggested method of desk arrangement suggests the larger arrangement of that desk on the floor of that building (and, in any big city, of that particular office tower-cum-filing cabinet along a street of similar black prisms). In his 1951 book White Collar, C. Wright Mills titles a chapter "The Enormous File": "Each office within the skyscraper is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the great symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape."23The expansion and standardization of filing, at least in the United States, was closely allied with the rise of the skyscraper. Steel frames allowed buildings to rise higher, and floors to stretch wider, visually unencumbered by thick concrete columns. As buildings grew taller than fire truck ladders could reach, the market grew for all-steel office furniture, replacing heavy, flammable wooden cabinets. Steel wastebaskets were in particular demand, as office workers were prone to tossing cigar butts in atop their paper trash. The structure of the new office and the structure of its new equipment were thus, literally, cut from the same material and designed to resist the drawbacks of paper. The first typewriter of 1873

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came attached to a modified metal sewing machine stand (though its innards were derived from the rifles also made by Remington Rand), ready to be inserted into the office grid as a seamstress's equipment would be lined up in a sweatshop.24 Although William LeBaron Jenney's experiments preceded fireproof office furniture, it was the invention of this furniture that made the early steel-framed Chicago skyscrapers financially viable. The Steelcase Company was founded in 1912 to tap the growing metal-furniture market, though their product line was not fully refined until after World War I, when they began to offer sixteen different desks, all with interchangeable file drawers, which could be customized to hold typewriters and stationery for secretaries, receipts and invoices for clerks.25The sixteen models are an example of the variation within the frame we will see later in whole office buildings: the file drawer creates a module, which, multiplied, creates different sizes of desktops, some with interchangeable troughs to hold files, others with adjustable typewriter tables. One's job was visible with a glance at the purpose-built desktop; its importance to the firm visible with a glance at its proximity to the powerful. Differences in rank were expressed in larger multiples or fancier materials-executives still wanted the wood look, long after its obsolescence. Steelcase's desktop filing system was even called "Victor"-the war-winning nation could now turn its attention back to industrial efficiency, with secretaries as the privates. A circa 1920 promotional photograph for Steelcase capitalizes on the connection between the steel cabinet and the steel frame: fresh-faced salesmen sit and stand on the drawers of their new filing cabinet, promoting its indestructibility.26 One assumes that the top salesman-the biggest risk-taker-is seated in the top drawer.

Le Corbusier's growing interest in the products and process of mechanical production shifted his thinking about architectural space. The type-needs he identified for furniture were also applicable to the home (the minimum dwelling of fourteen square meters) and to the office, for which he designed a type-bureau. A closer look at Le Corbusier's designs for furniture-not the sexy chaise basculant, but the boxy Casiers-reveals a slow movement toward modularity that precedes and is simultaneous with his designs for office buildings of the late twenties and thirties

Steelcase promotional c. photograph, 1920. 66 GreyRoom 09

and coincides with the writing of both The Radiant City and When the Cathedrals Were White. It is the furniture that generates the conceptual structure of Le Corbusier's designs for offices, buildings that are organized from within by the ebb and flow of paper, as Albert Kahn's factories were designed as carapaces for the assembly line. By the midtwenties Europe was producing its own metal furniture, both at the high end (international experiments in bicycle tubing) and in the mass market (a French company, Strafor, produced the all-metal "Minister" desk in 1920).27 Le Corbusier extensively reproduced the designs of one British manufacturer, Roneo, in the article "Type-Needs, Type-Furniture" in The Decorative Art of Today. There he shows only the new steel cabinets and desks, identifying their material in captions, as if to prove their industrial perfection. He describes furniture as a prosthetic device, an extension of man's limbs that can be standardized for everyone. The filing cabinet assists the fallible memory and is thus the brains of the operation, both holding information and allowing its regular circulation as pieces of paper among the company's employees. "We organize our affairs and, having won our freedom, we think about something else-about art for example (for it is very comforting)."28 The smoothness of movement from mind to file requires close attention, a concern Le Corbusier addresses in a long footnote to his main text: We have learnt that in the context of the rigorous order demanded by business, it is necessary to have a file on the filing system itself.... [The businessman's] documents need a precise place according to type; they are put away in a particular drawer, and the game of filing cards allows them to be retrieved immediately; this function has staff assigned to it, and they have their own furniture.29 Every paper has a place in the chain of record keeping, and there is furniture designed especially for each place. The card index serves as a file on the file and is minded by its own staff. Le Corbusier sees these "human-limb objects" as without style, or beyond style-the actualization of his dreams for universal design. Le Corbusier suggested that furniture designers ought to leave their historical home in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and go to the industrial quarters where planes and cars were manufactured. The makers of vehicles had already recognized the needs all mankind had in common, the "type-needs," and set about creating a universalized product, perfected by market forces. Le Corbusier and Amed6e Ozenfant had

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described this process as "the law of mechanical selection": "Objects tend toward a type that is determined by the evolution of forms between the ideal of the greatest utility and that which satisfies the necessities of economic production. ... [This gives them] the advantage of being perfectly legible and effortlessly recognizable."30 After 1918 Le Corbusier and Ozenfant went through an intense period of conceptual "vacuum-cleaning," examining every aspect of the household for opportunities to eliminate, streamline, and standardize.31"Can the industrial product be correct,"Le Corbusier wondered, "when it is thrown into confusion by interference from outside?"32 Such "interference" was from architecture unable to accommodate, either stylistically or spatially, the mountains of new products. Equipement, Le Corbusier finally decided, has to replace mobilier. "Everything in its place,"' wrote Le Corbusier in 1925. "Forthis we need furniture precise in its arrangement, as is the furniture in offices.... In fact, the house is nothing more than cabinets on one side, chairs and tables on the other."33 Furniture should be reduced to the minimum number of sculptural pieces-tables and chairs-while bureaus, wardrobes, china cabinets, bookshelves, even beds could be incorporated into the room-dividing units he dubbed Casiers standard. Casier was a word taken from the world of the office, but it had become an archaism describing the system that filing cabinets had replaced: the pigeonholes in high-backed desks in which individual clerks kept track of their correspondence in their own secret way.34 One could install Casiers instead of walls, replacing architecture with furniture, creating the effect of a clerestory (light in all parts of a room) and leaving the center of the room free. In his collages of various Salon interiors, the furniture almost appears to be afloat in the rigid container of the cabinet walls. The Casiers are forever, the people and their sculptural chairs just passing through. This, in fact, was Le Corbusier's argument for the built-in storage in the Unit6s d'habitation; families could move up and down in the building, carting only a suitcase from house to house. In the business world a briefcase would do. Le Corbusier first designed pigeonholes for his mother in the late teens, while working at home in La-Chaux-de-Fonds.35 In a secretaire-bureau he fashioned a predecessor of the multifunctional desk. The work surface was broad and flat, with shallow drawers fitted underneath. At the back he drew a small edifice: wooden arches fronting shelves, like an open gallery, anchored by a service core of small drawers at one end. At the same end the thin legs were replaced by a single tapering volume, like a fragment of an upside-down obelisk; this hollow leg was hinged in front and could be pulled out to reveal storage slots and a set of vertical pigeonholes. Though stylistically distant from the Casiers, this piece reveals Le Corbusier's

LeCorbusier. S~cretaire-bureau for Mme. c. Jeanneret-Perret, 1920. 68 GreyRoom 09

overriding concern for hidden, fitted, and structural storage. The parts of the desk demonstrate the differences in their functions (books are too large to fit in the drawers, small items would be lost in the base of the hollow leg) but are incorporated into a materially integrated whole. Like the Casiers, it is domesticated office furniture, the lessons of business applied to the piece of the bourgeois interior designed for contact with the outside world via bills, receipts, requests-papers. The bridge between Madame Jeanneret-Perret's desk and her son's metallic, modular systems is the work of Francis Jourdain, who designed interchangeable domestic equipment in the teens out of warm, more traditional woods. Le Corbusier saw Jourdain's work at the Salon d'Automne of 1913. In a letter of that year Le Corbusier praised Jourdain's "immeubles-meubles." Jourdain's cabinets lined the walls of his own kitchen in Henri Sauvage's "La Sportive" on the Rue Vavin and, more presciently, created a kind of built-in home office in a salon-library, transforming a corner into a seamless assembly of book:? :~? shelves, seating, and work surface.36 Jourdain had I : i ?~ :~ . ~I : ~?O ?' i ? -r_i ?? i :cJ~ been publicly working with the idea of "interi; changeable furniture" since the 1904 Salon, at which he exhibited a teak series, without orna- -:::~r~lr~;~ ilY~ti~lR7~~::~~i-_$1Bt~:~~:-ment, that could be arranged and added on to :-:::::-:::::I: -li:-:: over a period of years. "Furniture for special : -.uses is simply a last resort, a simplistic solution that doesn't merit our attention," Jourdain wrote in 1918 after he had been hired by Innovation, : makers of elaborate, specialized travel trunks.37 Innovation's products, of course, were advertised I~ and reproduced by Le Corbusier in L'Esprit nou:ff~::-::-:-i:-:: :i: : -_i:: :::-::-:i:-:::::i veau, and Jourdain historian Suzanne Tise notes :::II-I:~--Ii:i---; -::: -:-:------;-:--:iiiii-i -s: --- ::i -:::::-:that one such person-size trunk appears in both :: :: - :;-;::-:-:::::-~ --...I ;~ Le Corbusier's magazine and Jourdain's archive, ::: : :: :::: ;; suggesting that Jourdain may have designed the ::: :: piece.38 After he began working for the luggage -- : ::: :: company, Jourdain's designs lost some of their ?:: country air and became tauter, more intricate, and more recognizably prototypes for designs like the Casiers: a 1920 office design, for example, features studded birch paneling, which looks like either riveted metal sheets or the tacked leather exterior

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Top:FrancisJourdain. 1912. furniture, Interchangeable Bottom:FrancisJourdain. Ensembles of interchangeable 1912-1913. furniture, Sus to i s 69

of a trunk. A pivoting telephone table stands to attention next to the director's chair. In a design of 1925-26 Jourdain cantilevered small tables off the walls next to builtin seats; the supports appear to be made of then au courant curved bicycle tubing. While built-in storage, used to display objects and as low room dividers, appear in Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret's designs as early as 1922, it is not until the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau that the Casiers become recognizably modular and apparently (though not actually) mass-produced. The Pavilion was meant to be a module in its own right, the model unit for the planned hanging garden city of the immeuble-villas. A famous photo shows Le Corbusier's hand (like the hand of God) removing one unit from the ensemble. In the Pavilion the cabinets appear in every room in the house, always black-fronted and white-walled. One set defines the living room; upstairs, another set wraps the boudoir, hiding closet space behind rolldown doors (like a rolltop desk) and turning a corner to become a dressing table. It is here that we see the flexibility Le Corbusier envisioned, the ability of the Casiers to replace numerous traditional pieces of furniture, all used for storage, but which propriety demanded take different forms. These first Casiers were built on a module of 35.5 x 75 x 150 centimeters, a human dimension, according to Le Once Corbusier, within which "all household objects can be contained with ease."39 in production, one ought to be able to order the cabinets in wood or metal, varnished or powder-coated like a car body, with customized interiors based on careful measurements of one's possessions, from pots to sweaters.40 The Casiers also serve, conceptually and functionally, as windows. In most of Le Corbusier's large-scale projects, as in the typical office, each unit has windows on only one wall. The Casiers let light into the back of the room, as they stop short of the ceiling, but their shiny surfaces-stainless steel or glass after 1929--also bounce light back from the interior, creating the appearance of another illumination

ris

.,.ON"

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09 G:le Roomr

source. In Le Corbusier's sketches of domestic interiors (those of the Villa Meyer, 1925, for example) it is sometimes hard to tell which long horizontal unit, subdivided into squares, is the Casiers and which is the window, as the openings are all the same size. Along the balcony of the Pavilion, at the same level as the windows to the interior, is a set of metal frames, some fitted with opaque panels, others open to the view but directing the eye upward to the sky and away from the other architects' pavilions. Le Corbusier breaks the view down into contemplative squares, as the Casiers frame objets a r6action po6tique. In their 1935 Apartment for a Bachelor, Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, and Pierre Jeanneret used a new industrial technology to imprint the doors of the Casiers (stocked with phonograph equipment) with renderings of their own ideal city, the Ville Radieuse. They gave their bachelor, an up-to-date engineer, the rational view he ought to have: the ideal city for the ideal client, his stuff, like the urban environment, organized into units in a grid of increasing, though related, proportions. The architecture of Le Corbusier's slab buildings constitutes another square in this grid. The subdivided facades contain the individual like a specimen in a test tube on a bottle rack. The director of the 1920s company could read the activity of his employees in the checkerboard of lights, on or off, in the cells of his building's facade, or in the desk lamps, on or off, across the open-plan floors. Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine turns the residential quarters into perpetual observers of efficiency, the apartmentbuildings forming a low, concrete ring around the cross-shaped, all-glass, all-bureaux center. Le Corbusier houses the businessmen in the first ring, adjacent to their offices, connected by transportation systems centered on the business hub. His future society is not equal but organized, creating separate spaces for each rung of the culture that already existed. In L'Espritnouveau the editors wrote, "The prodigious intellectual effort of the period has created an elite of marvelous fecundity; an elite which has yet to find a place in the social machinery or in the If government and which is dying of hunger."41 the Casier is the building block for the office, the office is the building block of the city, the minimal module for the individual, as the minimum dwelling would be for the family. In the Ouevre complkte Le Corbusier wrote of the Casiers he designed for the 1929 Salon d'Automne, With the same standard frame, it is possible to create extremely different equipment depending on the destination of the cabinets ... They can be placed in a freestanding spine, or along a wall, or become the wall that separates two spaces ... Enormous diversity of combinations, a variety of destinations, unity of principle in the whole, calm.42

Opposite:LeCorbusierand Pierre Jeanneret.Casiersstandard, Pavilion LEsprit de Nouveau,1925. Le Right: Corbusier. Bureaux-types, Centrosoyuz,1927.
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71

At each scale the idea of the Casier reasserts itself, structuring stuff, humans, and the business into a legible, hierarchical slab that is wall and machine, architecture and equipment, immeuble and meuble. The 1928 Centrosoyuz project was Le Corbusier's first attempt at housing a bureaucracy. Unlike his later efforts, the fagade had no architectural hierarchy, no obvious floor for the chef-perhaps a nod to the communal system of government that was employing him; but the absence of directors placed all the emphasis, instead, on the flow. This type of building reflects two distinct phases: the first is the disordered influx of people on a vast horizontal plane situated at ground level; this is a lake. The second is fixed, quiet work, sheltered from the noise and hubbuboffices, with rivers as a means of communication between them.43 The office Le Corbusier sketched for the Centrosoyuz would become the officetype, repeated in projects as diverse as the Rentenanstalt insurance slab (1933) and the Algiers Admiralty (1938-42). In the drawings for the Centrosoyuz Le Corbusier includes a plan and a section of what he calls bureaux-types:type 3m, which includes one two-meter-wide shelf and a one-meter door; type 6m, with two shelves and two doors; and type 9m, with three of each. In the accompanying plan the distribution is shown slightly differently: 6m has 2.5 cabinets and a door; 9m has four cabinets and a door.44 But the point is the same: Le Corbusier linked the Casiers to the size of the offices, using them as the module to size doors and, in later projects, windows. In the Ouevre complhte exactly the same drawing is used to show the office for Rentenanstalt and for Algiers, the only change being the addition of a concrete brisesoleil for the African sun.45This office is viewed laterally, the big window at the left and a wall of Casiers topped with a clerestory panel at the right. The cabinets are typically shown with a flip-down desk panel, with filing cabinets at waist height, open shelves above and sliding doors below. A line of flat-topped tables (threedrawer desks in other drawings) stretches away from the implied camera; each table is equipped with a bentwood Thonet arm-

Offices, Top:LeCorbusier. 1927. Centrosoyuz, Center:LeCorbusier. Offices, Rentenanstalt project,1933. Bottom:LeCorbusier. Offices, AlgiersAdmiralty project, 1938-42.
72 Grey Room 09

chair, and all are headed in the same direction: the paper flow moves across the building from right to left. Each employee faces away from the architect's view, looking to him just as one imagines them looking to their supervisor, observing them from the end of the floor.46 The building is constructed in section like an upright sandwich: window, column, desk, aisle, Casiers, hall, column. The fagade of the building, whether in concrete or glass, sits in front of the structural grid (at the Centrosoyuz Le Corbusier didn't even bother to line up the facade with the columns), emphasizing its freedom from load. These heavy, drawer-laden walls are the architect's version of the rooms of Roneo cabinets. The desks are thus sandwiched between twin systems of rigorous organization-the large grid of the window-wall and the small grid of the Casier-wall-and lined up for a manager's view. The regularity of the furniture would make it easy to see any human irregularity. In the Rentenanstalt project not only do the partition walls and the column grid line up, but they also align with the mullions of the curtain wall. The office effectively becomes a Casier unit, 35.5 centimeters upped to a 3-meter minimum and fitted with a glass front. The section of the Rentenanstalt project shows Le Corbusier's vertical zoning most clearly, indicating the position of desks on several floors and including the Casiers on all the floors.47The productivity chart only appears in the top-floor office, furnished not with a desk but with Le Corbusier's sculptural chairs and coffee tables, asserting hierarchy through difference from the typical. The glassfronted offices appear to be hung off the cabinets, which run the entire height of the building like a spine. The ends of the partition walls create a visible hierarchy by indicating relative size of offices, but the pattern, varying within a set dimension, recalls the Casier walls, which are horizontally fitted with a variety of storage systems (shelves, drawers, doors) while maintaining an even height and depth. The cantilever at times suggests an open drawer pulled beyond the column frame. Rentenanstalt, like the Centrosoyuz, has a single-loaded corridor, so the offices are all pointing in one direction. In the Admiralty project the line of Casiers wraps around the hall that surrounds the elevator core, a doughnut of thickened equipment, such as the elevators, within the lightweight architecture of partition and

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curtain wall.48 The filing system prosthetically replaces memory but also, eventually, people, lining the halls with cabinets instead of the tiny secretaries' offices seen in standard office plans. Le Corbusier's zoned system aligns the Casiers with the building's servant spaces-the hall, the elevator, and the fire stairs-an internal building for labor, as the faQadeis for the show of work. The heat and dust of effort, like the pessimistic productivity chart, is hidden behind opaque Casier doors.

In his 1925 "Confession," Le Corbusier asked: "Can the industrial product be correct when it is thrown into confusion by interference from outside?"49 In the decades following, Le Corbusier devoted himself to eliminating interference between furniture and architecture, seeking carapaces, at multiple scales, with the proportions of the people and products within. His interwar societal ideal was based on the model of the file, as was Huxley's Brave New World, although Le Corbusier did not dabble in bioengineering. The world of the filing cabinet, however, leaves smaller and smaller spaces for confusion, process, production. In Brave New World, for example, reproduction and ritual are exiled to the American wilderness, or other places visited for precisely timed vacations, and presented as a living diorama of the past. Huxley's savages represent the ultimate failure of any total systematization, and one should look, in conclusion, at the different ways in which Taylorism encounters reality. The anonymous designers of Steelcase and Roneo forged ahead, drawing straight lines for any bureaucrat who would buy their product. Their filing cabinets were the first architecture designed around the 8.5-by-11-inch sheet, a modular system by default. The dimensions of the filing cabinets could then be used as the building block by architects of new office towers. In a moment of coincidence, Le Corbusier reproduced these products in L'Espritnouveau, envying their perfection as akin to that of nature.50 But he was convinced he could do better: the Casiers, domestic and bureaucratic, would become an essential, structural part of the bureaucratic machine rather than a temporary solution. His vision of the cit6 d'affaires was of a modular, architect-designed whole, rather than the reality of a place like postwar New York, where a series of designers, known and unknown, plugged into the grid in remarkably consistent ways. Le Corbusier'srefusal to participate in the office furniture market,as it then existed, extended even to his own office space. In a 1937 Architecture d'aujourd'hui article on "Les agences des architectes," the plan of his offices on the Rue des Sevres bore

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no resemblance to his bureaux-types: it was instead a long whitewashed corridor, narrower than it is high, with vertical windows. The drafting tables are in rows, facing the master's desk, but an overloaded flat file in the foreground is the only sign of the Casiers. Le Corbusier insisted, however, that architects would be responsible for the design of everything from buildings to highways, once a closer rapport had been established between design and industry. The author, J.P.Sabatou, added: "Interior equipment, the complement to this program, necessitates even more intimate contact with life. We must therefore develop an organization that extends itself into all the equipment in the country.""51 Only Le Corbusier's erstwhile mentor, Auguste Perret, made the move to the total environment of the postwar office in his and his brother Gustave's atelier at the back of their 1932 Rue Raynouard apartment house (at eleven stories, one of the tallest buildings in Paris at the time). A long row of operable steel-framed windows, set in front of the concrete column grid, looks out onto the Rue Berton. Along the window wall are arranged long, perpendicular drafting tables, three to a column bay, the seats all facing the Perret brothers' office. The tables of the engineers, the designers, the surveyors, succeed each other in an established order. The "patrons" direct by setting an example: only two steps separate them from their collaborators.... How, in this vast and luminous atelier, where the bare concrete pillars supply the order and the rhythm of a colonnade, can one not feel the nobility of the profession?52 The Perret office is not an exact version of Le Corbusier's ideal, for the building is irregular in plan, the office occupies only two stories, and there are, sadly, no built-in cabinets. Only in the design office of Michel Roux-Spitz does one see storage systems. The long drafting tables there are fitted underneath with a complex of pigeonholes and drawers. But the Rue Raynouard building is a concrete frame, plugged with different functional units: below the atelier are three garage levels, above are nine stories of flats-the Perrets never had to go outside to get to home, office, or automobile. The spectacular curved concrete staircase, for clients ratherthan cars, looks forwardto highway

Top:Officeof Le Corbusier. FromJ.P.Sabatou,Agences des 1937. Architectes, Center: Officeof Michel Roux-Spitz. Bottom:Officeof Auguste and GustavePerret. Lan-ge I WhiUtCoIar Corbusier: Fromthe Casier to the ci;&sd"fhai-res 75

on-ramps or back to Giacomo Matt6-Trucco'sFiat factory. The Perrets were willing to build a fragment of the efficient future, while Le Corbusier preferredto wait (in his monkish corridor) for the patron who would fund the whole vision. In his attempt to turn Taylor's ideas into an urban scheme, Le Corbusier seemed to have lost sight of the originating principle of scientific management: that of incremental improvement, in which every saved second, or square inch, counts.

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Notes 1. Mary McLeod, "'Architecture or Revolution': Taylorism, Technology, and Social Change," Art Journal 43 (Summer 1983): 132-147,and Mary McLeod, "Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1985). McLeod cites a variety of Taylorist histories, including Charles S. Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s," Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970): 27-61; and Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World & Brave New World Revisited (1932; reprint, New York: Perennial Library, 1965), 5. 3. H. Arthur Klein, The World of Measurements: Masterpieces, Mysteries and Muddles of Metrology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 80-81. 4. Richard Nelson Current, The Typewriter and the Men Who Made It (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 121-122. 5. One of Taylor's disciples, H.L. Gantt, is best known for inventing the "Gantt chart," a form that provided a standard framework for comparing employee productivity over time. 6. Hyacinthe Dubreuil, Robots or Men? A French Workman's Experience in American Industry, trans. Frances Merrill and Mason Merrill (1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1977), 73. Titled Standards in France, Robots or Men? in the United States, and published with an introduction by the director of the Taylor Society. Le Corbusier owned a heavily annotated copy. 7. Dubreuil, Robots, 74. Sports become part of the factory regime as well, perceived as a safe outlet for excess energies. They are so determined in Huxley's world, with the addition of a heavy reliance on equipment (no jogging allowed), further stimulating the production-consumption cycle. 8. Edna Yost, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 90. 9. Lillian Moller Gilbreth, The Quest of the One Best Way: A Sketch of the Life of Frank Bunker Gilbreth (n.p., 1925), 61. 10. Dubreuil, Robots, 74. 11. JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12-15. 12. Yates, Control, 56-62. 13. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 197. 14. Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 50-51. 15. Lee Galloway, Office Management, Its Principles and Practice (1918; reprint, New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1919). 16. William Henry Leffingwell, Office Management, Principles and Practice (New York: A.W. Shaw Company, 1925), 333-334, 365. 17. Leffingwell, Office Management, 385, 18. Galloway, Office Management, 90. 19. Leffingwell, Office Management, 503.

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20. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (New York:Thames and Hudson, 1992), 126. 21. Galloway, Office Management, 91. 22. Leffingwell, Office Management, 404. 23. Mills, White Collar, 189. 24. John Zellers, The Typewriter: A Short History, on Its 75th Anniversary, 1873-1948 (New York: Necomen Society of England, American Branch, 1948), 13. 25. Steelcase: The First 75 Years (Grand Rapids: Steelcase, 1987), 12-14. 26. Steelcase, 11. 27. Francois Grunfeld, Marie-Laure Jousset, and Isabelle Forestier, eds., L'Empire du bureau 1900-2000 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1984), 186-187. 28. Le Corbuiser, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (1925; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 75. Emphasis in original. 29. Le Corbusier, Decorative Art, 77. 30. Jeanneret and Ozenfant, in George H. Marcus, Le Corbusier: Inside the Machine for Living: Furniture and Interiors (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000), 24. 31. Arthur Ruegg, "Les contributions de Le Corbusier a l'art d'habiter, 1912-1937: De la decoration i interieure l'aquipement," in Le Corbusier, une encyclop6die (Paris: CCI/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), 126. 32. Le Corbusier, Decorative Art, as translated by Renato De Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer: Furniture, 1929 (Woodbury, NY: Barron's, 1977), 9. 33. Author's translation. "'A chaque outil sa place,' donc des meubles pr6cis en leur dispositif, comme sont pr6cis les meubles de bureaux.... Au fait, la maison n'est autre chose que des casiers d'une part, des chaises et des tables d'autre part" [Le Corbusier, Almanach d'architecture moderne (1925; reprint, Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1975), 110]. 34. Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 220. 35. Ruegg, "Les contributions," 125. 36. Troy, Modernism, 136-138. 37. Suzanne Tise, "Francis Jourdain,"in Jourdain, Arlette Barr6-Despond (New York:Rizzoli, 1991), 266. 38. Tise, "Francis Jourdain," 341. Ruegg suggests the trunks as inspirations for the storage units in the Maison La Roche-Jeanneret, which are fitted with similar combinations of drawers and shelves. Ruegg, "Les contributions," 126. 39. Author's translation. Le Corbusier, Almanach, 113. Stanley Abercrombie argues that the true interest in modularity came to America from Europe, inspired by Le Corbusier's system in the Pavilion and Marcel Breuer's simultaneous experiments in Germany. Breuer's cabinets, designed on an almost identical module of thirty-three centimeters, appear in his apartment designs of 1925 and 1927, and his office building in Mainz of 1929. Breuer's cabinets, like the later Casiers standards, emphasize the horizontal with rectangular sliding doors, and are perched well above the ground on storklike legs. Stanley Abercrombie, "Office Supplies," in On the Job: Design and the American Office (New York:

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Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 86. 40. One imagines Le Corbusier awaiting the day when kitchen utensils and articles of clothing achieved a similar degree of conformity; the men's shirt, in fact, when laundered professionally already has a cardboardlike, filable consistency. Charlotte Perriand illustrated her 1948 design for a system of plastic drawers on metal racks by showing the bins stacked alternately with paper or shirts. 41. McLeod, "Architecture or Revolution," 139. 42. Author's translation. "Avec la meme carcasse standard, il est possible de crier des 6quipements etremement diff6rents suivant les destinations des casiers.... Ils peuvent 6tre disposes en 6pine libre, ou adoss6s au mur, ou constituant le mur de separation de deux piBces.... Diversit6 6norme de combinasions, variet6 dans la destination, unite de principe dans l'ensemble, calme" [Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complbte (Zurich: Editions d'Architecture, 1961-67), 2:47]. 43. Le Corbusier, Pr6cisions sur un 6tat present de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme (Paris: G. Cres, 1930), 48. 44. Le Corbusier, Garland Architectural Archives (Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier, 1982), 4:52. 45. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complbte, 1:206ff., 2:34ff., 4:56. 46. Jean-Louis Cohen points out the "reassuringly optimistic production curves on the walls" of the offices, designed "as laboratories for planners," in Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928-1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 89. 47. Le Corbusier, Garland Architectural Archives, 11:316. Also worth noting in this section is the presence of a one-bay-wide window-washing cart. Nineteen years before Lever House, Le Corbusier had anticipated the cleaning needs of the curtain-wall slab building. 48. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complbte, 4:48ff. 49. De Fusco, Le Corbusier, 9. 50. In a 1936 apartment for the Paris Salon des Arts M6nagers, Le Corbusier attached the "Bib" cabinets of another French manufacturer, Flambo, to the walls of the library area. Ruegg, "Les contributions," 133. 51. Author's translation. "L'6quipement interieur, compl6ment de ce programme, necessite un contact encore plus intime avec la vie. C'est donc 'en 6ventail' qui'il faut d6velopper une organization qui s'6tend g l'6quipement entier du pays" [J. P. Sabatou, "Les agences d'architectes," Architecture d'aujourd'hui 8 (March 1937): 65]. 52. Author's translation. "Le tables des ing6nieurs, des dessinateurs, des metreurs, se succedent dans un ordre 6tabli. Les 'patrons' dirigent en 'dominant': deux marches seule les separent de leurs collaborateurs. .... Comment, dans ce vaste et lumineux atelier, oi les piliers de beton bruts de d6coffrage apportent l'ordonnance et le rythme d'une colonnade, ne pas ressentir la noblesse de la profession?" [Sabatou, "Les agences," 73-74].

Lange tIWhite Collar Corbusier: Fromthe Casier to the cit6s d'affaires

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