Embodied Memories, Retroactive Traces: Le Corbusier’s Travel Sketches in <em>Le Modulor</em>

This article explores the agency of the architectural travel sketch and considers its narrative and strategic value as a tool of remembering, distorting, and forgetting. Based upon original archival research, the paper focuses on annotated sketches that Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) included in the 1950 book Le Modulor, in the chapter ‘Vérifications matérielles et coda’, mainly deriving from two journeys: the 1911 journey to the East and a 1948 visit to Turkey. The paper reconstitutes the background of this graphic material and explores how the resonance between the two journeys is creatively utilized in defense of the Modulor and how the reused sketches intervene in the revisited past, re-contextualizing it according to the strategic needs of the present. Exploring Le Corbusier’s method of sketching, editing, and redrawing, I argue that the references presented in the ‘Vérifications’ chapter retroactively construct ‘prefigurations’ of the Modulor system and lead to a synchronization of past and present. Finally, building upon concepts from memory studies, I discuss the travel sketch as an embodied-memory device, capturing the very act of the measuring and drawing hand, and providing a link to a corporeal experience that is constantly remolded and rewritten.