Forms and techniques: Le Corbusier, the spiral plan and diagram architecture

Abstract

While Le Corbusier's spiral plan projects have long been debated for their symbolic and rhetorical meaning - dealing with initiation, procession, ritual, generative nature, unlimited growth and so on - little attention is paid to their actual production as designs. If we look for the emergence of the spiral plan as a production of Le Corbusier's studio then we might begin with a sketch design for the Villa La Roche made in 1923 and not with the project for the Mundaneum (1928) generally credited as the point at which the architect 'invents' the spiral type [1]. Taking the Villa La Roche spiral experiment as a tentative beginning marks a much longer history of the spiral plan type in Le Corbusier's work that links the architect's early domestic projects to later major public building proposals such as the Venice Hospital (1964).