University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Architectural metaphors of knowledge: The Mundaneum designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet, and Le Corbusier

Van Acker, Wouter

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89743

Description

Title
Architectural metaphors of knowledge: The Mundaneum designs of Maurice Heymans, Paul Otlet, and Le Corbusier
Author(s)
Van Acker, Wouter
Issue Date
2012
Keyword(s)
  • Information and Space
  • Spatial Analogies
  • Architecture Metaphors
Abstract
The author discusses the architectural plans of the Mundaneum made in the 1930s by the Belgian modernist architect Maurice Heymans in the footsteps of Le Corbusier and in collaboration with Paul Otlet. The Mundaneum was the utopian concept of a world center for the accumulation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge, invented by the visionary encyclopedist and internationalist Paul Otlet. In Heymans’s architecture, a complex architectural metaphor is created for the Mundaneum, conveying its hidden meaning as a center of initiation into synthesized knowledge. In particular, this article deconstructs the metaphorical architectural complex designed by Heymans and focuses on how the architectural spaces as designed by Heymans are structured in analogy to schemes for the organization of knowledge made by Otlet. In three different designs of the Mundaneum, the analogy is studied between, on the one hand, the architectural structure (designed by Heymans) and, on the other hand, the structure of the cosmology, the book Monde, and the vision of knowledge dissemination as invented by Otlet. The article argues that the analogies between the organization of architectural space and knowledge, as expressed in the drawings of Heymans and Otlet, are elaborated by means of a mode of visual thinking that is parallel to and rooted in the art of memory and utopian imagination.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/89743
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2012.0036
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections

Library Trends 61 (2) Fall 2012: Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors PRIMARY
Library Trends 61 (2) Fall 2012: Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors. Edited by Wouter Van Acker and Pieter Uyttenhove