The early 20th century World-wide Web
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
The New York Times recently ran this feature on Paul Otlet, the Belgian information scientist and utopianist. You can also view a short documentary on Otlet that was made for Dutch television here. The article is a helpful overview, cribbing primarily from Françoise Lévy’s essential, detailed, but very hard-to-find film, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World. It doesn’t, however, clarify what has always seemed to me the primary difficulty of Otlet’s project: the often confusing distinction between collecting original documents (in the form of paper or evidentiary objects) and cataloging them. Otlet’s Mundaneum did both.
Also left out, but of importance to architectural historians, is Otlet’s collaboration with Le Corbusier on a scheme for the Mundaneum in Geneva. While Corb was quickly mired in references to primal historical forms (as the critic Karel Teige pointed out in 1929), Otlet’s equally figural attitude was naively diagrammatic.
Le Corbusier’s sketches for the Mundaneum (from Oeuvre complète)
Otlet’s sketches