Le Corbusier, L'Art decoratif d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Editions Crès, 1925), trans. James Dunnett as The Decorative Art of Today (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 192.
Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 188.
Ripolin was already a default surface in clinics, hospitals and sanatoria at the turn of the century and was explicitly understood to be inhospitable to the invisible microbial sources of disease and to paradoxically visualize that resistance with a look of hygiene. Advertisements for “Ripolin Enamel—The Most Sanitary Finish” in architectural and hospital journals in 1913, for example, cited studies on how the bacteria of cholera, diphtheria, typhus, staphylococcus and tuberculosis do not survive as long on glossy and flat Ripolin surfaces as on other surfaces.
Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT, 1995).
The overall transition from nomadism to the default of a built environment of mainly quadrilateral buildings across the whole Near East took around four thousand years through multiple parallel transitions in a polycentric mosaic of dispersed groups linked by complex networks of exchange and migration. Juan José Ibáñez et al., “The emergence of the Neolithic in the Near East: A protracted and multi-regional Model,” Quaternary International 470 (2018): 226–252.
Clark Spencer Larsen, “The agricultural revolution as environmental catastrophe: Implications for health and lifestyle in the Holocene,” Quaternary International 150, no. 1 (2006): 12–20.
A recent excavation of Neolithic buildings from 10,800 years ago in Kharaysin, Jordan revealed lime plaster floors made of successive layers from rough to smooth with a final layer of finer material, finished with a wash of the very finest lime plaster, which was either left unpainted white or painted with powdered red pigment. See Juan José Ibáñez et al., “Los primeros agricultores y ganaderos. Excavaciones en el yacimiento del Neolítico Precerámico A y B de Kharaysin (Zarqa, Jordania). Campañas de 2015 y 2016,” Informes y Trabajos 17 (2019): 103–123. These buildings, lined up in rows along a terraced hillside with spaces in between them, immediately preceded the domestication of plants and animals. They are transitional in anticipating the move from semi-sunken to freestanding buildings, but are already orthogonal and internally subdivided with walls. This supports the crucial sense of quadrilateral spaces defined by lime plaster as distinct from spaces defined as quadrilateral and then plastered. It took around one thousand years after the first use of lime plaster to define the interior space of buildings for that to become the general practice in the whole Near East.
No association between domestic and family, or even household, can be assumed, nor any simple opposition between domestic and special use buildings, everyday and ritualistic, profane and symbolic life. See Bill Finlayson et al., “Architecture, Sedentism, and Social Complexity at Pre-Pottery Neolithic A WF16, Southern Jordan,” The Journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant 47, no. 2 (2015): 8183–8188. Furthermore, no assumption can be made about how buildings were actually lived in, or not in a way that is familiar, from the archeological remains of a building alone but the building itself is a major part of that life rather than simply its host. Even more importantly, the first production of architecture by smooth white plaster is inseparable from building as burial. Architecture had, still has, an intimacy with death, and is even the mark and maintenance of such an intimacy that makes the very idea of daily life possible. In other words, it is never simply a host. It manufactures rather than houses. To think of architecture without thinking of the production of death is to avoid thinking about architecture.
The archeologists of the earliest examples of lime plastered interiors interpret it to mean that hygiene was an integral part of the transition from nomadism to settlement. Paleo-archeology increasingly identifies specific parts of Neolithic buildings and then specific buildings as receiving special attention to cleaning assumed to be associated with collective rituals interlaced with burials and communal processing and storage of crops. Analysis of the floors and where they smoothly curve up into walls shows that they were regularly washed.
This is not to argue that whiteness is in any way inherently “Western.” On the contrary, the argument here is that the way an ongoing set of cultural-intellectual-military-imperial-exclusionary traditions were forged as Western included particular appropriations of the whiteness of the ancient lime plaster architectures that can be found not only in the Near East and North Africa, but also in India, China, Central and South America. More precisely, it is about the extraction of whiteness from cultures that will be retroactively coded and subordinated by that very whiteness as Eastern and Southern.
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26.
Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 17.
Alberti, referring to Plato’s Laws, raises the possibility of organizing cities to isolate “foreigners” to avoid being “corrupted” by them and likewise to “free” gentry from “any contamination from the common people.” Ibid., 192.
On the multiple associations of the white (new Istrian marble, repurposed spolia from numerous sites, and plaster) and the polychrome (some red and green accents) in the building, see: Massimo Bulgarelli, “Bianco e colori. Sigismondo Malatesta, Alberti, e l’architettura del Tempio Malatestiano,” Opus Incertum 2 (2016): 48–57.
Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, trans. René Neu Watkins as The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three (Long Grove: Waveland, 1994), 85. Della famiglia closely echoed Xenophon’s ancient Greek text Oeconomicus, in which the virtue of a woman is threatened by the “trick” of having “rubbed in white lead in order to look even whiter than she is.” Xenophon, Oeconomicus, trans. H. G. Daykyns as The Economist (London: Macmillan and Co., 1897), 244. It is not simply that a natural versus artificial whiteness marks a woman’s virtue. A woman “adorned with purity” without makeup wearing a white dress is Xenophon’s allegorical figure of “Virtue” in Memorabilia, an earlier text. On the architectural misogyny of Alberti’s texts, see Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 327–389.
Alberti’s articulation of the tragedy of slavery in the short story De felicitate (Happiness) was written shortly before his Della famiglia on the organization of the household. On Alberti’s anti-slavery position, see Orlando Patterson, “Freedom, Slavery, and Identity in Renaissance Florence: The Faces of Leon Battista Alberti,” in The Oxford Handbook of Freedom, eds. David Schmidtz and Carmen E. Pavel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). De felicitate empathizes with the expressions of deepest pain by each of the different voices in a group of slaves, understood not as the physical violence inflicted on them but the pain of “social death” that Orlando Patterson has comprehensively traced throughout the millennial and ongoing history of slavery. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
The status of women and slavery intersect in Alberti’s Della famiglia, closely echoing Xenophon’s Oeconomicus which explicitly linked the control of the skin with purity, health, spatial order and a system of slavery in which the wife as property must labor while also appearing more virtuous than the servants, who themselves are hierarchically divided between those who will ultimately be freed and those who will remain enslaved. Della famiglia repeats the argument that the master of the household maintains control of the house (health, morality, economy) by refusing ever to appear as a slave to “his” wife. It compares the idealized household to Italy itself, noting that the authority of Italy has been undone by the “barbarian nations, distant slave people” arriving in its “very heart.” Alberti even argues that Italian “virtue” played as big a role as “violence” in the previous subjugation of these “savage” others. He embraces violent authority, supported by the attempt to naturalize hierarchy, servitude and property, while trying to reject the ultimate murderous transformation of human into non-human object that is the very definition of slavery.
A regime of subordination of perceived others was fully installed as a system of classifying shades of skin long before the “scientific” construction of race was used as the ongoing weapon of colonial domination and settler colonialism. Many of Alberti’s ancient Greek sources were obsessed with the indigenous character of Greeks, the unique status of the skins of people and objects and the need to preserve and purify it, particularly in Athens. Roman citizenship was self-consciously forged out of a diversity of geographic origins, including immigrants and freed slaves but maintained the idea of dominance by an idealized local population embodying the character of a particular place. In the continuous paradoxical process that organizes most exclusionary systems, some designated others were successively absorbed into that population and as it were converted into agents of its mythical purity, even policing it. The Vitruvius scrolls on architecture reframed by Alberti’s treatise include an environmental theory of geography and climate to explain the source of white skins in the north and dark skins in the south and the corresponding stereotypes of character, intelligence, health and courage—with Rome fit to “take command” because it is neither north nor south but temperate. In fact, Vitruvius initiated the transfer of stereotypes of East versus West that were first codified in Hippocrates’ late fifteenth-century BC medical text “Airs, Waters and Places” into stereotypes of South versus North. See Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 84. This “proto-racism” was directly linked to the question of health since “temperate” conditions were for Vitruvius the most “healthful environment” and implied an idealized skin color intermediate between white and black. Alberti’s treatise on architecture repeatedly cites Hippocrates and likewise argues that health-giving architecture provides temperate conditions.
After the waves of plague on the Italian peninsula starting in 1348, a 1363 decree in Florence sanctioned the importation of unlimited numbers of domestic slaves from the East to Tuscany provided that they were not Christians. The late medieval slave trade centered on the Black Sea enabled any free Christian or Muslim to legally enslave anyone who did not share the same religion. Otherness was more religious than racial and the majority of the slaves were women. See Hannah Barker, “Egyptian and Italian Merchants in the Black Sea Slave Trade, 1260–1500” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). For both Christians and Muslims, white was privileged as purity, but color coding of slaves (yellow, white, black, brown) in written slave contracts or ethnic coding (Tartar, Abkhazi, Circassian, Bulgarian, Russian, Turkish, Greek, Mingrelli, Ethiopian) were not yet racialized in the post trans-Atlantic slave trade sense, in which the slave owner self-identifies as white and manufactures blackness as the ever-threatening and necessarily dominated other.
The point being sketched here is to consider the possibility that the concept and reality of “whiteness as property” exposed by the seminal essay of Cheryl Harris is not only a highly specific historical and even late phase of the maintenance of the systemic violence of slavery after its official abolition in the United States, but is also a precise, even self-conscious, echo and continuation of a millennial association of whiteness and property in which both are continuously reconfigured yet architecture is ever present as agent and effect. See Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–1791.
Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 190.
Le Corbusier, “Salon d’automne,” L’Esprit Nouveau 19 (1923).
Le Corbusier, as quoted in Guillaume Janneau, “L’Exposition des arts techniques de 1925,” Le Bulletin de la vie artistique, February 1, 1923, 64.
A similar white model of Villa Besnus was exhibited at the Salon d’automne in 1923. The white plaster used to make the models of the early projects was not just a medium to represent the designs in exhibitions but a primary medium in which the designing was done. See Miguel de la Cova, “Plâtre de Paris. Las maquetas de Le Corbusier y Charles Lasnon (1922–1938). Diálogos sobre la materia y la forma,” LC. Revue de recherches sur Le Corbusier 1, no. 1 (2020): 24–37.
Villa Besnus may have been the only all-white building of Le Corbusier. Jan de Heer has pointed to interior sketches of the project, one dated April 1923, to raise the possibility that its interiors may have had other colors in addition to white. See Jan de Heer, The Architectonic Colour: Polychromy in the Purist Architecture of Le Corbusier (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 97. The sketches are more indicative of patterned wallpaper on one of the surfaces on the upper level rather than planes of color, echoing representations of the wall coverings in earlier projects. The main studio-living level appears to be defined only by white walls and patterns in the glass panes. It is not clear how the interiors of the main spaces were finished, but it is symptomatic that Le Corbusier never published photographs of them, as if editing out interiors already regarded as insufficiently modern and only showing the all-white interiors of two levels of the stairwell to show how the exterior white continues inside, thereby preserving the polemical thought a monochrome building entirely molded out of white.
Le Corbusier, “Notes a la suite,” Cahiers d’art 3 (1926): 49.
“A house that is completely white resembles a cream jug.” Le Corbusier, Almanach d’architecture modern (Paris: G. Crès & Cie, 1926), 146.
This off-whiteness of “white architecture” was a generic characteristic of canonic modern architecture. See Ivo Hammer, “White, Everything White? Josef Frank’s Villa Beer (1930) in Vienna, and its Materiality in the Context of the Discourse on ‘White Cubes,’” Built Heritage 4, no. 2 (2020): 1–16.
Anna Rosellini, “La surface puriste, de ‘L’Esprit Nouveau’ à la villa Savoye,” in Le Corbusier: l'oeuvre à l'épreuve de sa restauration, ed. Christine Mengin (Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2017), 90–101.
The painting Still Life with Bottles features a similar layering centered on some white crockery; in fact, it was made in 1922, one year before the space.
“Au Coeur de l’Afrique orientale,” L’illustré: Revue hebodomadaire suisse, May 8, 1924, 226–227.
The complex histories of the region during the slave trade undo any simple oppositions between slavery and freedom with multiple overlapping forms of servitude that continuously shift. See Philip Gooding, “Slavery, ‘Respectability,’ and being ‘Freeborn’ on the Shores of Nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika,” Slavery & Abolition 40, no. 1 (2019): 147–167.
“In four years, I’ve suffered and survived a terrible evolution. I’ve gobbled up an East of unity and power…All that bric-a-brac I treasured disgusts me now. I stumble through elementary geometry in my hunger for knowledge and eventual power. In this mad dash, red, blue, and yellow have become white. I’m besotted with white…we would be living between huge walls as smooth as they were white. It would be so ennobling that our progress would be regular, our gestures graceful, and everything would assume color…No ornamentation. The whole city one color, one substance.” Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, letter to William Ritter, November 1, 1911. Cited in Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 99.
“This journey to the East, far from the gossamer architecture of the north, is a response to the persistent call from the sun, the wide expanses of blue seas and the great white walls of temples—Constantinople, Asia Minor, Greece, southern Italy—will be like an ideally shaped vase from which the heart’s most profound feelings will flow...” Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, “Quelques Impressions,” La Feuille d'Avis de La Chaux-de-Fonds, July 20, 1911.
The whitewashing was both visual and historical in the sense that Ottoman narratives about the origin of the Parthenon recast the original building as white. In the early eighteenth century, Mahmud Efendi, a mufti of Athens, wrote a history of Athens in which Pericles, the general of the city who commissioned the Parthenon, called for an all-white building: “But we must construct an outstanding and magnificent temple, unsurpassed in quality. Its walls should be of pure white marble. The roof that will rest on the walls should be supported on beams of white marble too, and indeed so also should its ceilings and substructures be constructed of white marble.” Mahmud Efendi, Tarih-i Medinetü’l-Hukema, cited in Elizabeth Key Fowden, “The Parthenon, Pericles and King Solomon: A Case Study of Ottoman Archeological Imagination in Greece,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 42, no. 2 (2018): 269. Efendi described the quarry from which the “pure white” marble was extracted for the building and writes that the craftsmanship was so perfect that the building seemed to have been made of a single piece of marble with the whiteness of the structure still evident in the richly decorated interior. He also describes Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Athens, experiencing the “pure white” of the buildings on the Acropolis where he stayed. The logic, repeated by most European art historians in the early nineteenth century, is white building plus colored decoration rather than a fully colored architecture defined by its decoration.
Le Corbusier, Le Voyage d’Orient (1966), trans. Ivan Žaknić as Journey to the East (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 236.
Jeanneret had expected the city to have been more whitewashed because of the impressionist painting by Paul Signac he had seen in Munich and the Orientalist texts that he had read before travelling, and was disappointed when he saw it for the first time: “I want Stamboul to be white, brittle like chalk, and the light falling on it to crunch as it hits it…Under the white light I want a white city, but punctuated by green Cyprus trees.” Yet he increasingly celebrated the traditional whitewashing of houses and mosques, seeing it as a fading tradition and despairing that the post Ottoman future would be without the “majestic coat” of white: “No more whitewash in Turkey for a long time to come!”
It is symptomatic that Jeanneret does not talk about the Parthenon’s whiteness directly. He does talk about the Acropolis “becoming suddenly white” during a storm and the temple “sparkling like a diadem” against the “ink-black” mountains beyond. Some of his travel sketches captured this effect but others rendered it as a dark silhouette against a light sky. Monochrome, for Jeanneret, was precisely the capacity to absorb and radiate color. He describes the Parthenon appearing “yellow” when first seen from the boat. Closer up, the marble appears “reddish brown” by absorbing the color of the surrounding landscape, then becomes the “black pilot of marble” binding land to sky as the sun goes down. The travel notes of the preceding weeks in the Balkans, Turkey and Mount Athos repeatedly document how white emphasizes color and color emphasizes white before finally describing and portraying colors as coming out of white itself. The day after returning to Switzerland, Jeanneret’s description of future cities being all-white described how “a rainbow rises out of forms” that are “unpolluted by color” but respond to the movements of the sun. Three weeks later, he did some retrospective watercolors showing the fluted columns of the Parthenon in multi-colors—as if restoring the original ancient applied polychrome of the building with a polychrome now coming from the surrounding atmosphere.
See Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage 17 (April 1992): 58–77. Le Corbusier treats the vernacular whiteness of Algiers as a lesson for all Europe but argues that Algerians have lost touch with their own invention and that the Casbah has become an overcrowded den of criminality beyond the reach of any police investigation. Architecture needs to be re-cleansed in a time in which vernacular culture is not maintained and “Everything withers, becomes covered with dust. White becomes grey.” Le Corbusier, “Le folklore est l’expression fleurie des traditions,” Voici la France de ce mois 16 (June 1941): 27–32.
See Mabel Wilson, “Black Bodies/White Cities: Le Corbusier in Harlem,” ANY 16 (1996): 35–39. Le Corbusier spent his whole career obsessively describing and drawing black figures, attempting to tame “them” through confining stereotypes that undo or erase the multiplicities of blackness by “giving” singular form to it, redesigning the perceived other whose simultaneous attraction and threat is to seemingly be in touch with prehistory and the origin of design itself. Black figures are, as it were, avatars of the original designers of design, the ability to transform the material world into shelter, prosthetic extension and symbolism. Design itself has to be extracted from the other and possessed through multiple violent acts.
Le Corbusier, “L'Architecture et l'esprit mathématique,” January 4, 1946, in Les grands courants de la pensée mathématique, ed. Francois Le Lionnais (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1948), 483.
This very partial list is not offered as a chain of uniquely influential individuals. On the contrary, the argument here is that the whiteness of architecture was never an individual project but a broadband networked intersection of medical, governmental, religious, architectural, and artistic discourse in which the practice of white walls was not accompanied by its theorization and could, for example, already dominate so many of the projects in an architectural publication like Moderne Bauformen—Facaden, Interieurs, Details in 1902, even being polemically printed whiter than the pages of the journal, without any reference being made to it. White walls multiplied unevenly. Centers of experimentation with white did visibly move, for example from England to Austria at the turn of the century, as marked by this partial set of names, without ever being, as it were, designed in the usual sense.
On the sustained, intimate, mutually dependent relationship between modern architecture and tuberculosis sanatoria, and the pivotal role of disease and medical technologies in shaping the theory and aesthetics of modern architecture, see Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zurich: Lars Muller, 2019).
“Hygiène—Tentures, rideaux, etc.,” Revue Mensuelle de Touring Club de France (October 1899): 431.
“Boldly, the Touring-Club has exposed something still unheard of in France: a hotel room that looks like a hospital room. It is in the hospital that the rules of hygiene are best practiced…On the walls, paint, whether with whitewash or oil. And the paint clear, white, so you can easily follow the steps of a bug if by chance it sneaks into the hygienic nest where it must never penetrate.” Pierre Giffard, “La Chambre Blanche,” Revue Mensuelle de Touring Club de France (September 1900): 385–387.
Most of the detailed formula for making a hygienic hotel room suite was immediately reprinted in popular magazines and medical journals after Gustave Rives presented the report to the Tenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography in Paris in August 1900. Gustave Rives, “La Chambre d’hótel au point de vue de l’hygiène,” Xe Congrès International D’Hygiène et de Démographie a Paris en 1900 (Paris: Masson, 1900), 348–360.
At the end of 1903, the Touring-Club completed its conversion of a Paris building into its own headquarters, including an exhibition space to permanently display model hygienic rooms, installations and furniture. In fact, the whole building was renovated according to the same principles. Gustave Rives removed many internal walls to admit “air, light, life.” All hanging, molding and ornament was removed and every surface from cellar to attic (except the striped marble around the grand stairs) was “coated with a uniformly white, glossy paint.” This “immaculate shade” of white was portrayed as producing a “crisp,” “simple,” “fresh, healthy, and cheerful overall effect.” The office of the club president was symbolically “all white, quite simple—too simple perhaps… sacrificed to Ripolin.” G. Davin de Champolos, “Notre nouveau domicile.” Revue Mensuelle de Touring Club de France, February 1904, 49–51. Popular magazines like Le Monde illustré referred to the “immaculately white tone” of the building.
Mémoires de la Société d'agriculture, sciences, belles-lettres et arts d'Orléans (Orleans: Georges Michau & Cie, 1901), 122–124.
The international jury for the Exposition Universelle already noted that the Touring-Club protocol for hygienic rooms could be “a kind of code or manual” for guiding all the inhabited spaces of houses when reprinting the protocol in full in its own report. See “Chambre et cabinet de toilette hygiéniques pour les hotels, d’après le Touring-Club,” in Rapports du Jury International, Troisime Partie—Groupe XVI (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1900), 321.
The report on the model room in L’art décoratif made the argument (later associated with Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier) that this “healthy, fresh and happy” ensemble composed “without artistic pretension” is paradoxically a service to art in moving beauty from complex layers of ornament towards simplicity as new form of decoration in its own right. See A.T., “Chronique,” L’art décoratif 25 (October 1900): 41.
See Edmond Uhry, “Logements hygiéniques a bon marché et maison de rapport,” L’art décoratif 73 (October 1904): 128–136. The building closely followed the Touring-Club protocols, even in the use of a stenciled pattern to produce, as it were, a minimal hygienic decoration to substitute for the erased cornices.
John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe: With Various Papers Relative to the Plague, Together with Further Observations on Some Foreign Prisons and Hospitals, and Additional Remarks on the Present State of Those in Great Britain and Ireland (London: J. Johnson, C. Dilly and T. Cadell, 1791), 57.
The plague was only understood to have been caused by the Yersinia Pestis bacterium carried on the fleas of rats at the end of the nineteenth century. It is now understood to have accompanied and traumatized human settlement since Neolithic times. DNA analysis links its evolution to human settlement, trade routes, and ultimately the very decline of the Neolithic. The development of interlinked mega-settlements from 6,100 to 5,400 years ago that housed 10,000 to 20,000 people in dense proximity with other animals optimized the conditions for infectious disease that may have led to the collapse of those settlements. See Nicolás Rascovan et al., “Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia Pestis during the Neolithic Decline,” Cell 176, nos. 1–2 (January 2019): 295–305.