Thread by @Trad_Arch_Bdays

What is Architecture? What and why the Classical?

Thread to be continued and added to...

1/ Architecture is not "building" per se. It is the analogical re-presentation of the space of our world and how we perceive and inhabit that space and orient ourselves in-and-beyond it. The objectification of space as patterned and oriented. (Lonergan, Eliade).

2/ The ancient painted caves can be understood as naves of underground cathedrals (sanctuaries), whose ceilings are analogous to frescoed vaults. It re-presents the space of their world and their place within as cosmologically understood. As above, so here, so below. Analogical.

3/ Laugier represents the materialist/tectonicist turn, understanding architecture and its forms principally as the elaboration of building construction. Back to nature, reductively understood. But as Semper later showed, there would have been no "primitive hut" in paradise.

4/ The differing views are tellingly illustrated in the following example from San Pietro, Bologna. The former is re-presented in the bottom, considered "pastiche" by the latters' view re-presented on the top. These divergent conceptions persists today amongst architects.

5/ Semper's 4 Elements of Architecture cut the gordian knot introduced by Laugier. His mound, roof, hearth, and wall/screen I re-interpret/translate as re-stated, ground, sky, threshold, horizon. You might say the former are physical, the latter metaphysical.

6/ Sir Roger Scruton conspicuously recovers the ancient analogical understanding in his book "The Classical Vernacular". For Scruton, the purpose of architecture is to make us at home in the world. But, he furthers: "if man is to be at home in the world...

7/ then he must make the world in his own image, and – occasionally – in the image of the angel he aspires to be. In its humble way, classical [architecture] attempts to transform the city into a temple, to spread over the human world the mantle of grace.”

8/ Architecture makes us at home and orients us in-and-beyond the world when it analogically re-presents the space and materiality of our world and patterns/orders it intelligbly according to the phenomenological way we perceive and inhabit it. Visual-spatial-tactile-temporal.

9/ So what does this all mean wrt design? Semper's constituent elements provide a seemingly pendantic though nonetheless essential foundation from which to build a phenomenological discussion of architecture and composition as it relates to pictorial space and music.

10/ We cannot help but see spatially, but we perceive space and movement relatively, not absolutely-- from our own bodily point of view (Merleau-Ponty). Re: this relative movement-- bodies in space appear to move left, right, up, down, forwards, backwards, circuitously (Alberti).

11/ This is to say we read things as spatially relative: Bottom/Middle/Top (BMT), Beginning/Middle/End (BME), Foreground/Middleground/Background (FMB); in relation to ourselves and other objects in our spatio-visual field.

12/ Architecture is not simply an object in space, but an objectification of space through its re-presentation of this relative spatial patterning-- when it analogously re-presents how we perceive/experience/inhabit space, and intelligibly orders it= composition.

13/ To begin: Lutyens' Tea Room exhibits Semper's restated ground (base), restated sky (Roof/eaves), restated horizon (wall), restated thresholds (doors, windows). Thresholds = framed opening within/interrupting horizon, a visuo-spatial epiphany between two worlds.

14/ But it also exhibits rhythm, symmetria, hierarchy, virtual movement, BME, BMT. The visual experience is intelligibly patterned. Thresholds pierce the eave in a vertical movement against the grain of the horizon. Chimneys = visual analog. Human figure against horizon = analog.

15/ Another: Palladio, Villa Pisani. No classical "orders" but still classical b/c moldings, virtual movement, etc. Re-stated ground, sky, horizon, threshold. BMT; BME; Focal center; Eye patterns circuitously around middle thresholds. No real "virtual depth" without FMB planes.

16/ Costigan, Francis - Shrewsbury House, Madison IN.

BMT; BME; Virtual movement; hierarchy. Eye can move around composition + rest and focus. Central door breaks upward thru virtual horizontal datum of flanking windows-- overdoors/overwindows mimic shape of this movement.

Costigan, Francis - Lanier Mansion, Madison IN.

Similar comments as above. Parapet shape above mimics the eye movement across the lower thresholds below. Strong bookends flank create focal center with larger openings. Added pilasters great vertical registers as focal emphases.

Reid, Joseph Neel - Eagle House, Atlanta GA.

5 bays. Overall Tripartite BME, BMT; nested tripartite in center. Strong bookends flank lighter center. Upper windows move up through virtual horizontal architrave/frieze, overdoor pushing upward; all movements reinforced by pediment.

19/ In the preceding examples, a characteristic feature of the classical emerges (among many): the vertical counterpoint to the horizontal, and the visual movement upwards. Analogical: bodily, we relate to the world vertically within our horizon.

20/ The horizon, the "space between", and our vertical orientation within it, preoccupies the formal language that emerges as classical architecture. In philosophy, Plato termed this perceived tension the "metaxy". In classical architecture, the "Orders" come to embody this.

21/ We've seen a few domestic examples that manifest this "metaxical" movement, their center of gravity oriented upward. Here is an example whose center of gravity is compositionally low, its virtual movement staticized and frustrated.

Eglise Notre-Dame, Vincennes France.

22/ Here are just some possible compositional solutions, among many.

23/ WRT center of gravity, comparatively toggle back and forth between these similar facades. Note how, while both are lovely, the center of gravity is virtually sinking lower on the left (Dormition Cathedral, UK) compared the right (Basilica of St Zeno, Verona)

24/ Another example of two facades covering similar surface areas but composed to different results. Both handsome in their own way, the right (Chiesa dei Santi Siro e Materno, Desio) better composed than the left (Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore, Palmanova).

25/ These last two facades begin to introduce spatial depth into their compositions, such that we can begin to talk about FMB. At this point the relationship to painting and pictorial space can be foregrounded bc architecture can participate in the same compressed visual world.

26/ M-P: "We grasp external space through our bodily situation…A system of possible movements, or “motor projects”, radiates from us to our environment...Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument…

27/...For us the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions…We also find that spatial forms or distances are not so much relations between different points in objective space

28/ as they are relations between these points and a central perspective– our body. In short, these relations are different ways for external stimuli to test, to solicit, and to vary our grasp on the world, our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now.”

29/ We cannot help but see spatially. In 3D we perceive actual depth, but in 2D we perceive virtual depth analogously to how we perceive actual depth. We can see this simply by using lines to create virtual planes. The same will be true in architectural delineations.

30/ Painting partakes of the same virtual visual space. How do we perceive virtual depth? Virtual perspective (FMB). Horizon line. Scale change. Overlap. Shade/Shadow. Light/Dark. Etc. As in Painting, so in Architecture.

31/ We have to remember those creating classical architecture were not "just" builders and craftsmen, but artists. Architects were typically trained in drawing, painting and sculpture (and poetry/music). We have to retrain our eyes to see as they saw to create as they created.

32/ As in painting so in architecture, as in actual depth so in virtual depth. A facade understood as compressed space.

33/ The visual understanding operative in renaissance painting was operative in renaissance facades (though Empoli only finished in the 19th century). They often made use of contrasting colors as well as scale to differentiate foreground and middleground and background features

34/ See also Virtual Depth by misalignment as well as scale. Compress what you see of the NYPL facade from actual 3D into 2D. The portico elements are larger and its entablature misaligns. So in creating virtual depth when planes are compressed together.

35/ See further how change in scale within compressed 2D space creates virtual depth. The portico of Giulio Romano's Palazzo del Te feels very foregrounded in relation to the flanking loggias, but it's actually almost coplanar.

36/ Or Wren at Hampton Court Palace east facade. Here only the scale of the window panes change in the center, and the window sill drops, both causing the portico to feel perspectivally foregrounded though its wall is coplanar with the flanks.

37/ The image comes alive when the composition patterns eye movement and points of repose, but also when there is a visual tension between FMB as between actual and virtual space. The Sistine Madonna is simultaneously FG and BG, mediating the two while stepping into our view.

38/ As in painting, so in architecture:

Temple Protestant, La Rochelle France.

39/ In the same vein, a more complex drama unfolds in the facade of St. Blaise, Dubrovnik, where the visual diamond-shaped dance is repeated at nested scales.

40/ In increasing complexity, our eyes move around the facade of Rainaldi's Sant'Andrea della Valle triangularly while the center ripples forwards towards us actually and virtually by the scale change of the central thresholds, just like the Sistine Madonna steps into our view.

41/ Visual simultaneity or ambiguity contributes to the life of a composition. When we can read something as simultaneously as part of one aspect of a composition And/Or as part of another aspect, it introduces a hypostases allowing our eyes to move naturally between readings.