Le Corbusier

“We maintain that the task facing humans is to create order, and that their words and deeds are determined by the straight line and the right angle; we also maintain that the straight line is an innate instrument which represents a noble goal in their thinking.”

For Le Corbusier, thinking and working were closely related to the idea of the straight line and the right angle in particular. Between 1947 and 1953, he designed 19 lithographies along with accompanying texts entitled “Le Poème de l’angle droit” or “The Poem of the Right Angle”. In a sense, this group of works is a summary of Le Corbusier’s principal ideas and themes: the relationship between nature and culture and between art and architecture, including urban planning. He described the right angle as being the only constant.

“The right angle can be said to be the dead centre of all the forces which keep the universe in balance. There is only one right angle, but the other angles occur an infinite number of times; in other words, the right angle dominates the other angles due to its constancy and uniqueness.”

On one page of the poem, Le Corbusier painted a drawing hand. Of course, the hand he painted is not drawing just anything, it is drawing a cross – a vertical line and a horizontal line at right angles to each other. In the lithographies, Le Corbusier processed motifs taken from a lifetime of creativity. The open hand appears next to the Modulor.