Did North Carolina State University accidentally honor a fascist?
If disavowing fascism should be easy, not celebrating it in our community spaces should be even easier. America has been more critical of who we choose to celebrate in recent years, particularly with white supremacists. In the last few months, a group of architecture students at North Carolina State University has raised similar concerns about an architect whose work served as a model for one of their galleries.
The group created a petition and website in November asking the university to redesign the floor pattern of the Allred Gallery in the College of Design after some students researched Le Corbusier, the acclaimed architect who inspired the pattern. They discovered ties to fascism, Mussolini’s regime, and anti-Semitism, none of which were mentioned alongside the quote, drawing, and signature of the architect that appears in the gallery.
The college’s administration seemed to agree on Le Corbusier’s ties to fascism in a November meeting. They will meet again in March. Sea Tong Veng, a fourth-year architecture student, says he senses the school would rather handle it quietly, and has not made a broader statement to the NC State campus.
“I feel even more uncomfortable than before because personally, I don’t think it is hard to say no fascism,” Veng says.
In a statement, College of Design Dean Mark Hoversten said the college “will use the design process to continue conversations in our college: first we must fully understand the context of the project, then we will ideate on potential solutions.”
Le Corbusier was controversial, even in life; his modernist creations were thought of as sterile and inhuman, as most avant-garde works are. His politics could be ambiguous: despite his fascist leanings, he designed buildings in Moscow during the USSR. He also wrote articles in different fascist newspapers and worked for the French Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazi Germany. Experts on Le Corbusier have known for years that he had fascist alignments, but the general public was clued in after several books came out in 2015 detailing his letters and connections to the far right.
The Allred Gallery’s design was unveiled in 2007 and pulls directly from Le Corbusier’s “Modulor,” an outline of a “standard” human body used for building measurements. Marc Perleman, the writer of a 2015 book on Le Corbusier, told The New York Times he considered the Modulor to be “the mathematicization of the body, the standardization of the body, the rationalization of the body.”
On their Change.org petition, the NC State protesters specify that they don’t wish to call out the Allred designer or anyone who helped create the gallery. Despite his status in the world of architecture, Le Corbusier’s relative obscurity to the general public is likely something that kept the gallery in place for so long. Veng says it’s likely architecture students failed to pick up on it over the last 15 years due to the demands of the college.
“No one really had time or the mental capacity to fight back, to really look at our environment with critical eyes,” Veng says. He credits his own upbringing in Cambodia, and his father’s experience under the Khmer Rouge regime, as leading him to do his own research and take a firm stance on the gallery.
It’s fairly commonplace to praise art while minimizing an artist’s politics, especially when what they accomplished is something extraordinary. It happens to artists across the political spectrum; I think about it every time I see Frida Kahlo used to sell mass-produced coffee mugs or notebooks. But art and design are always political, even if and especially when it tries to be apolitical.
All of this discussion could happen in a way that educates architecture students and encourages them to think critically about design. This is a moment for NC State to show leadership to the entire UNC System. It’s a moment to listen to students, publicly acknowledge a wrong, and envision someone more worthy of praise.
