All these things can be seen as aspects of what «post-Modernity» has criticised in the Modernist project. 5 Cf., for example, the lecture given in 1918 by Alexander Blok, «Le naufrage de l’humanisme»: «ce q (.)ĢNevertheless, the present author’s personal experience of teaching at a University (Jussieu) which is an archetypal late-Modernist construction, of being continually confronted by the reticence (for instances amongst students) provoked by a type of University building constructed on a resolutely geometric ground-plan, with a proclaimed refusal of all that is sinuous 3 and ambiguous, a rational façade or, rather, a façade of rationality, and an apparent indifference to the needs of both its inhabitants and its urban and historical context - even down to details such as the piles which lift the building from the ground and produce intolerable wind tunnels (not to say its hidden, cancerous, asbestos).4 Le Corbusier wrote: «L’ingénieur, inspiré par la loi d’économie et conduit par le calcul, nous met (.).3 Le Corbusier wrote of a canal near Strasbourg: «ce canal est absolument droit à travers tout le pa (.).Indeed the word cannot, I would suggest, be understood - at least in aesthetic domains - in any but a historical sense. That this usage should be current is of course linked to complex historical phenomena and the present «reticence» concerning, for example, many forms of High Modernist architecture, a reticence rooted in a particular political and aesthetic context. It is indeed striking that in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, several of the examples of utterances which contain the adjective «inhuman» in the sense of «not worthy of or conforming to the needs of human beings», relate to modem urban architecture 2. The adjective «inhuman» articulates, in its standard dictionary acceptation, two characteristics often attributed to Modernist, and particularly late Modernist, architecture: firstly its «brutality» (as in the English school of Late Modernist, Le Corbusier-influenced architecture: «The New Brutalism» 1) secondly its «not having the qualities natural to human beings», as when it is claimed, not only of high-rise buildings but more broadly of Modernist texts, paintings or music, that they make «inhuman» demands on the reader - in other words that Modernist texts are not texts that we «naturally» «want» or even «are able» to read.
2 «has the world's most inhuman subways» and «one large block which would tend to be inhuman and mon (.)ġAs the title of this article somewhat provocatively suggests, what will be examined here is the relationship between «inhumanity» and International Modernism, working out from Modernist architecture, and notably from the work of Le Corbusier.1 Influential belated Modernist movement associated with two British architects, Alison and Peter Sm (.).