Demers, Matthew.

Le Corbusier and ecstasis : a cyber-history / by Matthew Demers.

Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest, 2014.

289 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

George Santayana's famous adage, "who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" indicates a hinge between history and problem-solving, or the use of existing material and information about the past to create new solutions to contemporary problems. Cyber-history accesses the productive and inventive content of history, with the adaptation of historical materials to method-generating experiments using the conceptual tools of heuretics, the logic of invention. This dissertation articulates "cyber-history" through application of heuretics as an analytical tool in historical research, thus differing both from the use of heuretics as a set of tools for experimental method production, and from other forms of historical analysis, requiring the naming of this work as a differentiation from these existing systems. The historical documentation of Post-modernism's emergence in architecture becomes the site for an initial analysis using the concept of figural history developed out of Sigfried Giedion's space-time figures, to reveal aspects of the transition from modernism to its antecedents that have been obscured by traditional rhetorical methods.
The history of rhetoric is then examined to uncover the foundations and idiosyncrasies of academic research before presenting and ultimately applying heuretics in the analysis of Le Corbusier's urban oeuvre. Analysis is conducted on Le Corbusier's travel works: Voyage d'Orient, Precisions, and When the Cathedrals were White, culminating with an analytical framework for analyzing the Poem of the Right Angle. This first application of cyber-historical analysis reveals that Le Corbusier systematically developed a modern method out of method experiments that became increasingly deliberate over the course of his life, a method we have called ecstasis. Ecstasis is mental movement between images while remaining physically in place, where the place frequently instigates and catalyzes the mental movement. Le Corbusier called these ecstatic events "radiant moments", honed and gathered them into sets to form a radiant method for studying the Second Machine Age. In the Poem of the Right Angle Le Corbusier gathered material and themes that repeated across the ecstatic sets, called wide images, into a wide site, or a key to trigger ecstasis for acts of invention.

Le Corbusier, 1887-1965.
Modern movement (Architecture)
Mouvement moderne (Architecture)

Theses.

Location: Library main 287112
Call No.: BIB 227919
Status: Available