Alberti on Beauty and Concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature

Alberti's definition of beauty: "Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse."

Concinnitas: "When you make judgements on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind. It is clearly so, since no one can look at anything shameful, deformed, or disgusting without immediate displeasure and aversion. What arouses and provokes such sensation in the mind we shall inquire into in detail, but shall limit our consideration to whatever evidence presents itself that is relevant to our argument. For within the form and figure of a building there resides some natural excellence and perfection that excites the mind and is immediately recognized by it. I myself believe that form, dignity, grace, and other such qualities depend on it, and as soon as anything is removed or altered, these qualities are themselves weakened and perish. Once we are convinced of this it will not take long to discuss what may be removed, enlarged, or altered, in the form and figure. For every body consists entirely of parts that are fixed and individual; if these are removed, enlarged, reduced, or transferred somewhere inappropriate, the very composition will be spoiled that gives the body its seemly appearance. 

"From this we may conclude, without pursuing such questions any longer, that the three principal components of that whole theory into which we inquire are number, what we might call outline, and position. But arising from the composition and connection of these three is a further quality in which beauty shines full face: our term for this is concinnitas; which we say is nourished with every grace and splendor. It is the task and aim of concinnitas to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance. 

"That is why when the mind is reached by way of sight or sound, or any other means, concinnitas is instantly recognized. It is our nature to desire the best, and to cling to it with pleasure. Neither in the whole body nor in its parts does concinnitas flourish as much as it does in Nature herself.; thus I might call it the spouse and soul of reason. It has a vast range in which to exercise itself and bloom-it runs through man's entire life and government, it molds the whole form of Nature. Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect. Without concinnitas this could hardly be achieved, for the critical sympathy of the parts would be lost. So much for this. 

"If this is accepted, let us conclude as follows. Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance between the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline,  and position, as dictated by coninnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature. This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth." -On The Art of Building in Ten Books, Book IX, Chapter v.

Number: In Alberti's time number was a quantitative relationship between things in a formula. This may sound a little too Desecration, however we must remember that Descartes along with most of the thinkers of his age still looked on numbers as more than just quantitave entities. A number's quantitative value was subordinate to its qualitative meaning, as Alberti goes on to say in the passage directly following that on concinnitas.

Outline: Outline is difficult to understand as it can mean several things. I believe it is directly tied to Alberti's idea of lineamente, or the lines and angles which form the building (as opposed to the material, or structura). Regardless, it is something like the form, or type of the building, in that in the outline informs us of the building's purpose (to some degree this is also accomplished by ornament). Branko Mitrovic, has called lineamente shape, which I think is not far from the truth. 

Position: This has to do with Alberti's use of the term collocation, or the placement of the parts of a body in such a relationship that the the whole which they form has the quality of beauty. 

Concinnitas takes varying numbers of things which have different shapes, and lie in various positions, and composes, (according to "some precise rule") a complete and beautiful whole. We recognize the presence of concinnitas, not through long study or developed taste, but instantly, when by means of the senses, our mind encounters this correspondence or sympathy between multiple elements of a whole, or parts of a body.

La Cité, C’est Moi

Vainglorious French architects set out to destroy Paris.

Theodore Dalrymple

22 July 2008

The socialist mayor of Paris, in cooperation with French architects, is about to do what both Hitler and Le Corbusier wanted to accomplish but couldn’t: destroy the city. With a population approximately the size of London’s, but only half the land area, Paris is both overcrowded and suffering from a housing shortage. The solution, according to the mayor, is to build large numbers of tower blocks, destroying once and for all the city’s famous skyline.

It isn’t difficult to detect the crude self-interest and thirst for cultural vandalism behind French architects’ salivation. “This is just the beginning,” said one of them, Michel Angevin. “Paris is going to change, and will look very different soon enough.” Never mind that people don’t want it; the architects know better what is good for them. With a lordly contempt for his fellow citizens—and ignoring the fact that Paris is still one of the richest and most productive cities in the world, its architectural conservatism notwithstanding—another architect, Jean Nouvel, urged the city council to go even further in its plan for aesthetic destruction. “We need to stop thinking of Paris as a museum city,” he said.

As it happens, Nouvel, who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize this year, is the architect who managed the supremely difficult feat of producing a museum even more hideous than the Centre Pompidou. Located near the Eiffel Tower, his Musée du quai Branly, which now houses the national collection of African and Oceanic art, is an eyesore so terrible that for a man of normal aesthetic sensitivity to look at it is sheer torture. It is the perfect example of the egotism of certain modern architects, who believe that the most important quality of a building is the stamp of the architect’s originality.

To travel around France, moreover, is to observe the collapse of the country’s architectural taste and talent. With very few exceptions, it is impossible to find anything built in the last 50 years that rises above banal—except for buildings that are eye-catchingly brutal and aesthetically destructive of everything for miles around.

Nouvel has said that architecture is “the petrification of a cultural moment.” If so, the moment is a long one, and it spans Europe. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier wanted to pull down Paris and build something like Novosibirsk; in the 1950s, the city council of Bath wanted to pull down the Georgian city and replace it with purely functional blocks of the kind that have destroyed other townscapes in Britain; in the same decade, Joop den Uyl, then an Amsterdam city councillor and eventually prime minister of the Netherlands, wanted to pull down seventeenth-century Amsterdam and replace it with housing projects that he considered more socially just and efficient.

The only explanation for such wishes is a ravening egotism. In order even to entertain an idea like den Uyl’s, one must believe both that what one inherits from the past is worth nothing, and that one is capable by one’s unaided, brilliant self of doing better. The result is the Musée du quai Branly. Look upon it and despair.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Here's Something From My Current Project

Une Hotel en Paris...



This is an alternate version for the portico based on a chimney out of Vitruvius Brittanicus

Les Ux

From The Times
September 29, 2007
Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage
By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers.
Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.
The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light – irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.
The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below.
Mr Kunstmann, a spokesman for the movement, met The Times last week in the back room of a bar in central Paris. Beside him sat a thin, austere-looking woman who sipped a beer, gave her name only as Lanso and barely said a word throughout the interview.
From time to time, however, she whispered into Mr Kunstmann’s ear and he relayed the message. “We are the counterpoint to an era where everything is slow and complicated,” he said. “It’s very difficult to get anything done through official channels. If you want to do it, you have to be clandestine.”
Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches.One group, which is all-female, specialises in “infiltration” – getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.
A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.
He did, however, say that Lanso was the leader of a branch called the Untergunther – the name comes from a German record whose music served as an alarm on an early mission – which specialised in restoration. This group, whose members include architects and historians, rebuilt an abandoned 100-year-old French government bunker and renovated a 12th-century crypt, he said. They claim to be motivated by a desire to preserve Paris’s heritage.
Last year the Untergunther spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France’s greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening – French television said that they had their own set of keys – they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.
When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.
“We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock,” said Mr Kunstmann. But he was unrepentant.
“In any other country, a monument such as the Panthéon would be maintained in a perfect state. But not in France. Here, if we hadn’t restored the clock, no one else would have bothered.”