Your House Was Designed for an English Detective

Issue 003: Your House Was Designed for a French Detective

I was in Amherst, Massachusetts this past week for the EDRA57 conference. The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) has been my disciplinary home since graduate school. Going back to the conference each year is like getting a warm hug from very smart people. If you’ve been looking for more citations and research in environmental design, I can happily point you to my friends at EDRA.

This week: the man, the myth, the legend RizGod LeCorbusier. Hold on to your drafting pencils if you’ve been raised in the Church of Modernism. This issue is less about one single academic study, but rather a series of biased, unscientific decisions that resulted in a very problematic design standard.

This week also brings a new feature: a short audio recording of each newsletter. This was requested by several people (and I get it, I’d rather listen than read sometimes). It’s nothing fancy, but you’ll see the podcast episode linked in each newsletter from now on. Today’s audio can be found here!

And if someone forwarded this to you, they have great taste - you can subscribe for yourself here.

Warmest welcome,
Dr. Kati Peditto

With the confidence of a person who has never had to squeeze into a middle seat in economy, the figure raises a claw-like hand above his head, a distended shoulder jointed to a short arm gripping a thigh of peculiar proportion. The narrow-waisted man stands at 1.83 meters or precisely six feet tall, reaching for a ceiling height calculated specifically for him. He is the Modulor man. For the last seventy years, you have been living in his house.

This strange man is a construction of Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. In 1940, Le Corbusier set out to solve a problem that had bothered him for years. 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. A universal scale. What could go wrong!?

Le Corbusier didn’t measure thousands of people to create a set of average proportions (albeit a problematic solution, but at least somewhat scientific). 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. Originally, he set the Modulor figure’s height at 1.75 meters (about 5'9"), or the average height of a Frenchman.

But it didn’t align with the Golden ratio, and the figure felt too short and inelegant. 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.” I did not make this up. And the Modulor man was born.

(Curiously, beloved detective Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie fame was notably shorter at 5’4”.)

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 Unité d’habitation, or “housing units.” Equipped with built-in furniture and using Modulor measurements, the apartments featured door frames, stairs, ceiling heights, and corridor widths calibrated to a man who existed only to Le Corbusier and perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you were a six-foot-tall British lawman, the world now fit you like a (claw-shaped) glove.

His earliest and most famous Unité project in Marseilles is still standing. Locals call it "The Nuthouse."

The internal corridors (Le Corbusier's awarded "streets in the air” design, intended to encourage chance encounters between residents - my nightmare btw) were fitted to the Modulor man's reach measurement. They are famously, frustratingly narrow. The Berlin Unité, built just five years later, abandoned the Modulor for interior dimensions specifically because German building codes couldn't accommodate them. The Berlin version raised ceiling heights to 260cm (8.5ft) and adjusted corridor widths. Surprising absolutely nobody, Modulor does not seem to work at scale. And again, surprising nobody, Le Corbusier threw a fit in the press about the Berlin project.

The loggia (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, smoke a cigarette, and take in the view. In other words, it was not intended to be a usable outdoor space for social life. Residents who used their balconies were disappointed to find them fitted to the dimensions of a single, very tall, smoking man. After speaking with residents in 2025, Wallpaper Magazine summarized the remarks of an elderly woman: “Like other residents, she would love to add a metre or so to its width and the loggia.”

And okay, I admit - people do seem to actually otherwise love these apartments and find them charming. They very infrequently pop up for sale, as residents tend to stay in them for decades. BUT that alone does not validate the Modulor design standards. It only suggests that residents have found ways to cope and adjust.

One final note on the Unité projects: The kitchens are a different story. Charlotte Perriand, who designed the apartment interiors, was a rigorous designer with her own approach to form vs. function. Her kitchen is compact for efficiency and 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). It is arguably the most livable part of the apartment.

In 1950, right as the Nuthouse was being constructed, the United States Air Force was having a very different reckoning. Its pilots couldn't control their planes. Crashes were happening far too frequently and no one could figure out why. The Air Force assumed the problem was pilot error, and commissioned a study to understand it better. It was a very expensive problem, after all.

A 23-year-old botanist turned U.S. Air Force researcher, Lt. Gilbert Daniels was tasked with measuring more than 4,000 pilots on over 100 dimensions of size: height, torso length, arm length, leg length, etc. The assumption was that updating the "average" pilot profile would lead to a better-fitting cockpit… and fewer errors?

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. And now he had 4,000 pilots to actually test out his hypothesis.

So he defined "average" generously: anyone within 30% of the mean on ten dimensions counted as “average.” Then he asked: how many pilots fall within the average range on ALL ten dimensions simultaneously?

Out of 4,063 pilots measured: zero.

Literally not a single one. ZERO pilots fit the average profile across all ten dimensions. The cockpit had been designed for a person who, like the Modulor Man, did not exist. Every single pilot had what Daniels called a “jagged profile,” such that they were average in some dimensions, outliers in others, and in completely individual combinations. (Interestingly, we use the term “spiky profile” to describe the widely-varied cognitive traits of neurodivergent folks!)

The Air Force, to its credit, did something about it: they accepted Daniels' findings and 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. The crashes decreased!

There is no average body, and designing for one excludes everyone. I talk about this a lot in the context of neurodiversity too - there is no average brain either!

The anthropometric data that has historically underpinned design standards makes this worse, not better. For decades, the most widely used datasets in design and engineering came from military surveys, which meant they came primarily from male servicemembers. The first major U.S. Army anthropometric survey that included comparable numbers of women wasn't conducted until 1988. Before that, female dimensions were often estimated as a fixed percentage of male dimensions. As you might imagine, that approach was very flawed, particularly in the regions most relevant to workspace design (like reach). Standard reach ranges encoded in design guidelines assume arm lengths that exclude the lower percentiles of the female population.

The challenges of design standards are visible in every building. Standard counter heights calibrated to male arm length cause elevated shoulder strain for shorter users (disproportionately women and elderly people) during kitchen work. Standard corridor widths, door hardware heights, and switch placements all carry embedded assumptions about the “correct user” and can have negative physical consequences over time.

AKA: I downloaded these papers and vetted them, so you don’t have to.

I wasn’t sure whether to discuss Modulor yet (or ever). Especially since it’s not like we ever widely adopted the actual Modulor approach. It can seem like a silly, failed attempt by a pretty awful guy. But the idea of anthropometric standardization behind Modulor still has a very real impact on design today… it’s just not named Modulor. And these biased, unscientific standards are still very much present in reference guides and technical specifications.

So the question worth asking, early and often: whose body does this design actually fit? And whose doesn't it? What about wheelchair users? Other disabled folks? Children? There are many bodies often excluded from design conversations.

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, reply to this email or visit katipeditto.com.

Until next week,

Dr. Kati Peditto