What is the height of Le Corbusier's Modulor man?
Answer
1.83 meters
Le Corbusier’s Modulor man was based on a height of 1.83 meters.
The Modulor was Le Corbusier’s proportional system for architecture, developed to connect building dimensions with the human body. He combined a six-foot-tall figure with the golden ratio and a sequence of measurements intended to guide spaces, furniture and structural dimensions. The raised-arm figure reached 2.26 meters.
The system did not begin with 1.83 meters. Le Corbusier initially used 1.75 meters as the reference height, based on an average French man. In 1946 he changed it to 1.83 meters, partly because he believed the taller figure better matched the heroic male proportions familiar from English detective novels.
The Modulor influenced several of his buildings, including the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. It is easy to confuse the man’s standing height with the raised-arm measurement, or to treat 1.80 meters as the official figure because it is a convenient rounded approximation. The canonical value used for the Modulor man is 1.83 meters.