Your House was Designed for an English Detective

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Read the Room, a weekly research newsletter and maybe a podcast for designers who are interested in science. [00:00:13] I am your host and newsletter author, Dr. Katie Pedido of Built Experience Lab. [00:00:20] This is our first audio recording for Read the Room. I know that the audio isn't flawless. This is a low budget experience. I am currently in the closet with a vocal shield around my head and I am in the worst posture possible. So we're going to see if this works for this week and what we can improve for next week. [00:00:45] Let's get into it. This is issue three of Read the Room. [00:00:51] Your house was designed for a French Detective. [00:00:55] Last week I was in Amherst, Massachusetts for the EDRA 57 conference. The the Environmental Design Research association, or EDRA, has been my disciplinary home since graduate school. Going back to the conference each year is like getting a warm hug from some very smart people. [00:01:14] So if you've been looking for more research and citations in environmental design. If you have enjoyed this newsletter, I can happily point you to my friends at edra. [00:01:26] This week we'll be talking about the man, the myth, the legend. [00:01:32] Le Corbusier. [00:01:35] Yeah, okay, hold on to your drafting pencils. If you've been raised in the church of Modernism, this issue or this episode is less about one single academic study, but rather a series of biased, unscientific decisions that resulted in a very problematic design standard. [00:01:55] This week also brings a new feature, a short audio recording of each newsletter. This was requested by several people. I totally get it and as you can hear, it's nothing fancy, but you'll see the podcast episode linked in each newsletter from now on and if someone forwarded this to you, they have great taste. You can subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts and I encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter as well. [00:02:23] Warmest welcome. Let's get into it with the confidence of a person who has never had to squeeze into a middle seat in economy. [00:02:34] This figure raises a claw like hand above his head. A distended shoulder joint fixed to a short arm gripping a thigh of peculiar proportion. [00:02:48] The narrow waisted man stands at 1.83 meters or precisely 6ft tall, reaching for a ceiling height calculated specifically for him. He is the modular man. [00:03:02] For the last 70 years you have been living in his house. [00:03:07] This strange man is a construction of Swiss French architect le Corbusier. [00:03:12] In 1940 he set to solve a problem that had bothered him for years. [00:03:18] He felt the metric system was incompatible with architecture. It lacked a human element. So he decided to create a new measurement system that was based entirely on the proportions of the human body. [00:03:30] A universal scale. [00:03:33] What could go wrong? [00:03:36] Le Corbusier didn't measure thousands of people to create a set of average proportions, which would be a problematic solution, but at least maybe somewhat scientific. [00:03:45] He didn't consult a database of anthropometric data. He didn't even use his own proportions. Instead, he simply visualized a handsome English gentleman from a crime novel he enjoyed. [00:03:59] Originally, he set the modular figure's height at 1.75 meters, which is about 5 foot 9, or the average height of a Frenchman at the time. If you're having trouble picturing this, I would recommend looking in the newsletter to see what the modular actually looked like. [00:04:17] But that first pass didn't align with the golden ratio and the figure felt too short and inelegant. [00:04:25] So perhaps having just finished the Hound of the Baskervilles, Le Corbusier remarked, in English detective novels, the good looking men, such as policemen, are always six feet tall. [00:04:38] That is a genuine quote. I did not make this up. And that is how the modular man was born. Curiously beloved detective Hercule Poirot. [00:04:48] Oh no, y', all, I'm. I'm not going to cut anything from this podcast yet, so you're going to hear it live as I'm attempting to record in one pass of Agatha Christie fame. This detective was notably shorter at 5 foot 4. [00:05:04] Regardless, this arbitrary decision based on the description of a fictional detective became the basis for mass residential developments across Europe Post World War II, named the Unite d' Abatacion, y'. All. I don't know why I decided that this first audio episode would be the one with all the French words because I am cannot pronounce French words. [00:05:28] Let's keep going. We're going to try or Otherwise known as housing units equipped with built in furniture and using modular measurements, the apartments featured door frames, stairs, ceiling heights and corridor widths calibrated to a man who only existed to Le Corbusier and perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you are a 6 foot tall British lawman, the world now fit you like a glove. [00:05:57] His earliest and most famous Unite project in Marseille. Marseille is still standing. [00:06:06] Locals call it the Nuthouse. [00:06:09] The internal corridors. [00:06:12] These were Le Corbusier's streets in the air design, which won a lot of awards because it was intended to encourage chance encounters between residents, which is my nightmare. [00:06:24] They were fitted to the modular man's reach measurement. [00:06:28] They are famously, frustratingly narrow. [00:06:32] The Berlin unit, built just five years later, abandoned the modular for Interior dimensions specced by the German government specifically because German building codes couldn't accommodate how narrow the original measurements were. So the Berlin version raised the ceiling heights to about eight and a half feet and and adjusted the corridor widths. [00:06:55] Surprising absolutely nobody. Modular does not seem to work at scale. And again, surprising nobody. Le Corbusier threw a fit in the press about the Berlin project. [00:07:09] The logia, which is an open air architectural feature, is another case. Le Corbusier had a very specific intent for the loggia. It was designed to be just wide enough to lean against the railing, so smoke a cigarette and take in the view. [00:07:24] In other words, it was not intended to be a usable outdoor space for social life. [00:07:31] Residents who used their balconies were disappointed to find them fitted to the dimensions of a single very tall smoking man. [00:07:39] And after speaking with residents in 2025, Wallpaper magazine summarized the remarks of an elderly woman. [00:07:47] She said, like other residents, she would love to add a meter or so to its width and to the loggia. [00:07:55] And okay, I admit people do seem to actually otherwise love these apartments and find them charming, which drives me a little nuts. But they very infrequently pop up for sale because residents tend to stay in them for decades. [00:08:10] That alone does not validate the modular design standards. It just only suggests that residents have found ways to cope and adjust. And as we'll talk more in this episode, those coping mechanisms and adjustments might lead to longer term injury. [00:08:30] One final note on the UNITE projects, the kitchens are a different story and I'd encourage you to look in the newsletter for the visuals here. [00:08:41] Charlotte Perriand, who designed the apartment interiors, was a rigorous designer with her own approach. [00:08:48] She was very function over form. [00:08:52] Her kitchen is compact for efficiency and it actually even looks small in comparison to the other dimensions of the apartments, as her style was influenced by Japanese design principles, not by Le Corbusier. [00:09:08] It's arguably the most livable part of the apartment, so I'd encourage you to check out what it looks like. [00:09:15] Now we go across the pond. [00:09:17] In 1950, right as the nut house was being constructed, the United States Air Force was having a very different reckoning. Its pilots couldn't control their planes. [00:09:29] Crashes were happening far too frequently and no one could figure out why. [00:09:34] The Air Force assumed that the problem was pilot error and it was really expensive. So they commissioned a study to understand it better. [00:09:42] This leads us to a 23 year old botanist turned US Air Force researcher Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels, who was tasked with measuring more than 4,000 pilots on over 100 dimensions of size, things like height, torso length, arm length, leg length. [00:10:01] The assumption was that if we updated the average pilot profile, that would lead to a better fitting cockpit and then fewer errors. [00:10:12] But Daniels was not convinced. Before joining the Air Force, he had written a Harvard thesis arguing that there was no such thing as an average person. Now he had 4,000 pilots to actually test out his hypothesis. [00:10:26] So he went out to define average. And he defined it generously. [00:10:31] Anyone within 30% of the mean on 10 dimensions counted as average. [00:10:39] He wanted to know how many pilots would fall within the average range on all 10 dimensions simultaneously, meaning that you were average in arm length, you were average in torso length, average in leg length, all at the same time. [00:10:55] Out of the 4,063 pilots, he measured zero. [00:11:02] Literally not a single one. Zero pilots fit the average profile across all 10 dimensions. So the cockpit had been designed for a person who, like the modular man, did not exist. Every single pilot had what Daniels called a jagged profile, such that they were average in some dimensions and outliers in others. And it was always in completely different individual combinations. [00:11:27] And interestingly, we use the term spiky profile now to describe the widely varied cognitive traits of neurodivergent folks. [00:11:37] So the Air Force, after they got his report to their credit, did something about it. They actually accepted Daniels findings and then pivoted away from the use of average dimensions for cockpit design. Instead, they required manufacturers to design adjustable cockpits that could accommodate the actual range of pilot bodies. [00:11:58] And the crashes decreased. [00:12:02] There is no average body, and designing for one excludes everyone. [00:12:10] I talk about this a lot in the context of neurodiversity, too, because there is no average brain either. [00:12:17] Interestingly, the anthropometric data or the body measurement data that has historically underpinned our design standards makes this worse, not better. [00:12:27] For decades, the most widely used data sets in design and engineering came from military surveys, which meant they came primarily from male service members. The first major US army anthropometric survey that included comparable numbers of women wasn't conducted until 1988. [00:12:46] Before that, female dimensions were often estimated as a fixed percentage of male dimensions. So a female arm is X percentage of a typical male arm. [00:12:57] As you might imagine, that approach was really flawed, particularly in the regions that are most relevant to workspace design, like reach. [00:13:06] So standard reach ranges that are encoded in our design guidelines and references assume arm lengths that almost entirely exclude the lower percentiles of the female population. [00:13:20] And the challenges of these design standards are still visible in every building, even if we're not referring to the modular anymore, we still have standard counter heights that are calibrated to male arm length and that causes shoulder strain for folks who are shorter, like women and elderly people during kitchen work, standard corridor widths, door hardware heights and switch placements. All of these things carry assumptions about who the correct user is, and ultimately these things accumulate and can have negative physical consequences over time. [00:13:58] I leave the newsletter there as we get into the Research to Explore section. I have three papers and a tool for you to check out. Today. [00:14:09] I linked Lt. Gilbert Daniels first report. [00:14:14] He published his findings in a 1952 technical paper for Wright Patterson Air Force Base called the Average Man Question Mark. [00:14:23] Todd Rose, former professor at Harvard, wrote a book in 2016 called the End of Average, which tells the whole story, far more than you're getting in 20 minutes from me. But the original technical report is actually pretty short. It's readable. It's remarkably enjoyable as far as technical reports go. So that's linked the 1988 U.S. army Anthropometric Survey, or ANSER, was the most widely used design data set for decades. As I mentioned earlier, it's based on US Military data, not civilian data. [00:15:01] So it's worth checking out because understanding what it measures, who it measured, and why that matters for the spaces you design is really worth your time. I didn't link that survey itself, it's a long one, but Penn State has a really unique visual dashboard to interact with the data that I linked Instead, a few decades later, Dr. Claire C. Gordon, who is one of the same U.S. army researchers responsible for the 1988 Ansor survey, she was also responsible for a 2012 update to that survey. They collected a new military data set, but then concluded that our overall population, including civilians, is significantly taller and wider now than in the 1980s. [00:15:53] And then finally, a 2024 study measured upper limb muscle activation, posture and discomfort across Chinese women of different ages performing kitchen tasks at standard counter heights. [00:16:06] It could be really easy, I think, to brush off the impact of Le Corbusier's residential ruler, but I think this article shows how the effects may actually accumulate in a significant negative way over time. Like it's not just awkward and it's not just a little bit uncomfortable. It can really accumulate and cause musculoskeletal injury over time. [00:16:31] And a final note, the question worth asking in your next meeting. [00:16:36] I really wasn't sure whether to discuss modular yet or really ever, especially since it's not like we ever adopted the actual modular approach. [00:16:47] And so I think at face value, it can seem like a silly, failed attempt by, objectively, an awful guy. [00:16:56] But the idea of anthropometric standardization behind modular still has a very real impact on design today. And that's why I thought it was worth talking about. [00:17:07] It's just not named modular anymore. But these biased, unscientific standards and measurements are still very much present in the reference guides that you pick up every day and the technical specs behind the products we design. [00:17:21] So the question worth asking early and often whose body does this design actually fit and whose doesn't? What about wheelchair users? Other disabled folks? Children? There are so many bodies that are often excluded from design conversations. [00:17:39] If you want someone to bring these conversations to your table, I'm your gal to work with me on an upcoming project or speaking engagement, Shoot me an email or a message on LinkedIn. [00:17:50] Until next week, I am your host, Dr. Katie Pedito. I feel like 75% confident about this audio recording, but I can confidently tell you that I will be making some improvements for next week so that I'm not hunched over in my closet anymore. [00:18:10] I will talk to you next week for issue four.