The image of Le Corbusier’s hand sweeping over a model of his ‘Plan Voisin’ (in his book Ville Radieuse) [image_1] is one of the most (in)famous in twentieth-century urbanism.  His hand delivers what he called a radical ‘urban surgery’, in which highrise towers, parklands and freeways were cut into the crowded and dilapidated Right Bank of Paris. For Le Corbusier the hand represented the work of the architect-planner – that urban specialist who ‘provide[d] the vision and technical expertise to guide society towards harmony’ [1]. Their task, he argued,  was to ‘arrange, organize’ and ‘take hold’ of a problem, but also to ‘create…indispensable lyricism [and to]…’raise [the] heart’ [2]. One of the things about this image that shocks us still, even 70 years after it was first published, is the casual way in which the hand seems to sweep away large swathes of the historic city in order to produce the blank canvas ready to receive its creative marks. What further complicates this image is that the marks left are not the gestrural marks of the artist’s  paint on a canvas, but lines generated through carefully calculated studies of natural light, air circulation, density, function and automobility. This hand invokes an architecture that spans between expressive form and industrialisation (his plan took its name from his sponsors the Voisin Aircraft Company). It is a hand that at once clings to the idea of the architect’s creative vision but at the same time imagines itself to hand over authority to the machinic logics of industrialised production.

In second instance [image_2] LeCorbusier’s hand is photographed as it interacts with the architectural model for the Unite d’habitation in Marseilles of 1947-52. Here the hand delivers to us the concept of precast individual apartment units set into a structurally simple ferroconcrete grid by inserting or withdrawing a block of wood into a frame. For Le Corbusier, the image demonstrates the structural and modular principle of his housing project, and asks us to imagine the individual apartments being slotted in as if 'bottles into a wine rack’, as the architect put it.

A third example [image_3] further elaborates and complicates the image of the architect’s hand. This is Le Corbusier’s image of the Open Hand. This stylised hand stood for the ‘architect’s creation’. That is, an architecture at its most democratic and benevolent: ‘open to receive the wealth that the world has created’ but also enabled ‘to distribute it to the peoples of the world’. Architectural historian Russell Walden has argued that through the image of the Open Hand Le Corbusier ‘sought a new idealized order – a renewing spiritual dimension for industrial man.’ He goes on to observe that ‘[i]n his search for a symbol to express this consciousness, Le Corbusier went back to one of the oldest gestures in the mythology of the human race. Indeed, the theme extends right back to the cave painters of Pech-Merle (Dordgne) and has remained a major symbol for artists and scientists ever since’ [3]. In this sense the open hand symbolizes ‘reciprocity between the creative artist and his public’ [4].

The architect’s hand has traveled, here being quoted by Singaporean architect, Tay Kheng Soon, in his presentation of a Low-cost High-rise Plug-in Housing Block [image_4]. This proposed housing utilises precast structural frames as the overall architectural infrastructure. Housing units when purchased are plugged into the frame.

In Singapore the delivery of highrise modernism was in the hands of the Housing Development Board bureaucracy. Here are some quotes from former HDB Officers reflecting on where their hands were in relation to that building project.

“You must bear in mind that at that point we are all learning, nobody has done public housing of the scale and magnitude anywhere in the world. Singapore is trying to do something that nobody has done before. …So most of the Officers of my generation are very hands on, because there is nowhere you can learn. The textbooks don’t teach you. There are no countries you can look to…"

"We are everyday doing new things. So I would say that many of my colleagues of that time were like me, very hands on. We actually go down to the site, we actually plan and we really do everything and we get involved into policy discussions, we go down to ground to help supervise to see for ourselves… even though you are a leader…, the leader himself is also learning. So it has got to be very hands on and in a very direct way" [5].