Events

Paul Otlet's Mundaneum, and Le Corbusier's pyramidal design for it, confounded critics as soon as it was published in L'Architecture vivante in 1929. Lost in the clamor to denounce the project as needlessly monumental, and in Corbusier's vehement, if incredulous, defense of its functionality was the equivalence that Otlet drew between the pursuit of financial profit and the acquisition of higher consciousness. How was it that Otlet came to equate financial speculation and spiritual attainment? Why did he characterize both processes as democratic, and how did he so readily identify these twin and simultaneous processes of subject formation with the logic of the pyramid? Presenting a genealogy of cosmic imagining in architectural discourse stretching back to William Richard Lethaby's iconoclastic history of architecture from 1892, this paper addresses a blind spot in left criticism of the Mundaneum and opens an examination of the architectural designation of fraternity as a spirit animating economic globalization.