Le Corbusier: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Fid-Bau Portal

Le Corbusier: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Birksted, Jan

Find the facts and then interpret their significance, but what to do when the facts are deliberately hidden, falsified or otherwise manipulated? This is often the case with the most mythical figures and events in history. In research over the years, language, and by extension sign systems, have been two interdisciplinary models that have encouraged the author to observe and to analyse in greater depth than would otherwise have been possible. Now, faced with such complex facts, the ‘science and research of the historian’ need to establish special procedures to observe and interpret such facts beyond what is available to the naked eye. The concepts of icon, index, trace and symbol can also be extended to visual materials. There is a tendency to use architectural photographs to discuss architecture, but photographs are not architecture; they are representations of architecture (which, to complicate matters, is itself a form of representation). And so by extending these concepts of icon, index, trace and symbol to photographs, they too can be used as primary sources to disclose additional information in architectural history. Thus, cultures, societies and history are inherently changing and unstable formations – which raises the two fundamental questions of history: of the relations between present and past, and of agency, that is of the relations between individual strategy and sociocultural formation. In this respect, the lies, and even more so the damned lies, of history are the true and proper materials of historical research, whose statistical‐like patterns the historian needs to unravel.