Le Corbusier’s Musée à croissance illimitée: A Limitless Diagram for Museology

• Irene Chin ^[1]
  1. [1] Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA
• Localización: Le Corbusier: 50 años después / Jorge Torres Cueco (aut.), 2016, ISBN 978-84-9048-373-2, págs. 407-421
• Idioma: español
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • “Let us imagine a true museum, one that contained everything, one that could present a complete picture after thepassage of time, after the destruction by time…” This paper considers La Musée à croissance illimitée, an unrealizedproposal from 1939 by Le Corbusier in which a series of galleries elevated on pilotis and organized about a square courtyardwould extend – infinitely. The paper unfolds as an analysis of the museum and its relationship to history and time, structuredby the form of Le Corbusier’s proposal. Four themes establish the parameters of the investigation – spatial organization,notions of monumentality, relationship to site, and ideas of growth – and Le Corbusier's resistant approach is considered as amethod of criticality. Order-less, face-less, place-less, end-less. To categorize the Museum of Unlimited Growth as such is notto suppose conditions without, conditions of lack, or absence; but rather is a means to consider the proposal as an absolute –a degree zero that subsumes and thus allows for conditions of possibility. The themes set up a dialectical reading of theproject, as its negations are bound to the assertive, positivity of the idea of a limitless spiral. Perpetually unfolding andfolding in on itself, the Musée resists the forces of time. It is the ur- museum, a concept that negates the historiography ofmuseums before and proposes an impossible model for museums to come.