‹‹Bisogno fare qualsiasi cosa, fuorché l’invenzione di cose nuove: la vera invinzione è il non inventare nulla. Chi si rende consapevole di tutta l’inventabilità dell’inventabile è colui che non inventa nulla, perché ormai tutto quello di cui è capace questo nostro sistema planetario è già stato prodotto, ed è tutto qui: più esso sarà reinventato e piu sara posto in crisi.
Ma occorre viceversa capirlo.
Dunque pianificare vuol dire lasciare lavorare la realtà, comprendendone il senso del miglior utilizzo››.
S. Muratori, Autocoscienza e realtà nella storia delle ecumeni civili, a cura di G. Maranucci, Roma 1976.
One question is of singular importance to the contemporary architect attempting to return to the classical tradition amidst the dissolving wake of the modernist movement. That question is “what is unchanging in architecture?” Tradition, in this sense, is the means by which we access truth. The adjective classical denotes works of architecture which are prized as the finest exemplars of a tradition. These are held up as models for the guidance of current practice and for the assurance of future success. Therefore, the form that the examples in a classical tradition take is necessarily contingent on the material requirements and propriety connected with both time and place.
The classical architecture of one era will not take shape in the same way as that of another, nor will the architecture of one place necessarily resemble that of a different place even at the same time. Conventions such as patterns of use, fashion, language and ways of building change over time and in different places, gaining their correctness through general acceptance and habit. This accepted knowledge and these skills and customs—-means by which we pursue the true, the beautiful and the good—-are guarded and handed on by the custodians of tradition to succeeding generations. As part of this transfer, the means of accessing truth is developed and changed according to the requirements of time and place. The tradition of one place may not be the same as that of another. The purpose of tradition is to bring into conformity the way we each pursue our ends in the particular with the best possible means of achieving those ends in the universal. In other words, tradition is the way in which our judgment is informed through the comparison of the way things are with the way things should be. Thus tradition is not about preserving a unique way of building, but of ensuring that our buildings are the best they can possibly be.
The concept of imitation is essential to an understanding of tradition. The idea of mimesis, first formulated by Aristotle in his Poetics, became an explicit principle of creative formation and procedure from ancient Greece until the end of the Renaissance.[i] As James Ackerman has noted, the concept of imitation was understood in two ways both for the ancients and the thinkers of the Renaissance.[ii] Imitation in art occurred both in mimesis—the imitation of nature or human behavior, and in the imitation of preceding artists. The first mode of imitation forms the framework in which moral judgment is made possible, while the second provides a means of translating these universal truths for a particular time and place.
Imitation, as Quatremere de Quincy enunciated as late as 1823, was seen not as mere copying of natural forms or previous works, but as the embodiment of apparent universal rules governing the production of beauty in the work of art.[iii] These rules could be extracted from nature and perfected over time through the imitation of predecessors in a tradition. As Ackerman points out, imitation is inherently forward looking. By this he means that the artist is able to use imitation during the creation of the work of art. This view is in opposition to that of modern art historians who use the concept of “influence,” an idea only debatable after the creation of the work of art and in the service of the art historian.[iv]
How are we then to judge what is essential in a tradition? What can be discarded in the face of improved technology, or to suit changing political or physical conditions? This question has undoubtedly been the starting point of all architectural endeavors and probably troubled the architects of the fourteenth century as much as it did the proponents of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revivals. In a world so full of varying forms it has been difficult to determine what concepts and categories should guide contemporary practice. Compounded with a seeming abundance of choices, the void left by modernism’s denial of tradition has exaggerated its self-proclaimed goal of severing us from the past. We are faced not only with the questions raised by the contingent reality of tradition itself, but by any attempt to restore a tradition that has been systematically eradicated.
As citizens of the United States our tradition is that of the West. This is not to say that the tradition of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian architecture is the only one in our country, or the first, but that it is the visible part our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The need to separate our new republic from the colonialism of England and justify our classically derived system of government prepared the United States for the embodiment of its constitution in an architecture of Western classicism. Little wonder that the author of the Declaration of Independence should also design the new Capitol of Virginia using the classicism of the Roman temple.
Fiske Kimball in his American Architecture asserts that “the classical ideal thus embodied was ultimately to rule in America to a degree unknown in Europe.”[v] Indeed, it was to precede it by more than a decade. The embodiment of the political order in the architecture of America is significant in that it points to the most essential truth of the classical tradition: the understanding that the highest good in life is the perfection of our nature, a good held since the Greeks to be accomplished through the moral life led in community. This is the self-evident truth behind the most just political systems of the past and the guiding principle in the American founding.
What this understanding means for architecture is that our ability to pursue our highest end as individuals is dependent on the freedom insured by our government, and that architecture serves this good as the embodiment of the state.[vi] In other words, architecture is the visible part of the more important activity of politics. Conversely, it is only in the freedom provided by well-ordered politics that architecture can be pursued. Vitruvius opens his De re aedificatoria by noting that it is in the realm of peace brought about by the Emperor Augustus’ conquest of the world that the opportunity and need for civic buildings arose, thus grounding architecture in a particular relationship with politics.[vii] Not only can mere building become architecture, but architecture can embody the polity and legitimate its claim to authority. By doing so, it can establish the means for its citizens to pursue the moral life.
Traditions are necessarily conventional. This means that they are contingent on materials, climate and circumstance. Conventional knowledge is particular, temporal and accidental, meaning that it could have been otherwise. Limited by the contingencies of both time and place, knowledge of convention is gained from experience and hearsay. The best pitch of a roof is dependant on the climate and characteristics of the location. That there exists a hierarchy of architectural orders and that they include an architrave, frieze and corona is not necessarily true (although the predominance of such features across traditions could point to a correspondence with a larger order). So too, the rules governing a given order’s proportions may vary with the changing requirements and traditions of the building and its purpose. Gaining as they do their acceptance through trial and error, such conventions are not necessary truths, or a priori knowledge, but point to a correspondence with an order outside of sense experience. Conventions have been adduced to be the best possible way of embodying the necessary truths of political life. Conventional knowledge on its own may be factually true and empirically verifiable, however, by its very nature it cannot be true in every instance. It can only tell us about the actual world and hence what is the case; it can say nothing about the ideal world and what should be the case.[viii]
When the American founders referred to the self-evident truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness they were invoking the necessary truth of nature, the repository first described by the ancient Greeks of the true, the beautiful and the good.[ix] As a priori knowledge, these truths of nature can be known through reason independently of experience or empirical evidence and are understood as incontrovertible imperatives. In platonic terms Nature can be described as the intuitive realm of perfect forms; for Vitruvius she was “the architect [who] placed the hinges as central axes” of the earth.[x] For our purposes it is sufficient to say that nature is the totality of universal truths both known and unknown including the laws of physics, the rules of geometry and logic, and the truths described in the American Constitution such as justice, liberty, the equality of man, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, nature includes not only the natural objects around us such as plants, animals and rocks, but the system of principles by which things can be explained according to reason and which were true prior to their discovery. More importantly, nature provides the mark against which rational judgment is made possible, the moral order which allows us to state confidently that democracy is the best form of government because it has as its goal the good of every citizen, and the goal of all our efforts as human beings.
We can posit the idea of democracy, though a state where every citizen has been treated equally has never existed, because we can see that a state where some or all are not free is imperfect. In other words, the truth of nature is revealed only through the comparison of things we experience or accept with things we know to be true through reason. The truth of nature is self-evident, but it can only be accessed through our experience of conventional truth. As Socrates points out to Meno, people do not enquire into what they fancy they know, though they may in fact be entirely ignorant of it, unless they begin to compare what they think they know with the truth of nature.[xi] For example, we are gifted with the concept of justice at birth, but we must experience different embodiments of justice in practice to be able to understand perfect justice, and we must always be ready to reexamine our necessarily incomplete knowledge of justice. This Socratic doubt leading to the discovery of the order of nature—to the intrinsic, universal and enduring—is made possible only through out experience with the extrinsic, particular and transient we encounter in the here and now.[xii]
For the pagan writers of antiquity truth was embodied in number. The comparison between knowledge of convention and nature could be expressed through the concept of the part and its relationship with the whole. Number and the relation between numbers, or proportion, were seen as ideal frameworks upon which the basis of nature was modeled. The application of number and proportion to conventional material resulted in measure, and the correct use of number and proportion resulted in the beauty of the building. To phrase this another way, measure was meaning embodied in experience through beauty.
For Vitruvius, architecture depended upon number in the form of Order, Arrangement, Eurhythmy, Symmetry, Propriety and Economy. In the first place, “ordering is the proportion to scale of the work’s correspondence to an overall proportional scheme of symmetry.”[xiii] In other words, for the work to be beautiful it must initially conform to a geometrical framework extending to the subsequent design.[xiv] Arrangement, eurhythmy, symmetry, propriety and economy are aspects of this proportional application of number to material and depend on measure, which determines the relationships that make up proportion. At the center of this ideal proportional analogy Vitruvius placed the human body, described in the correspondence between the form of the extended human figure within the perfect geometric shapes of the square and circle.[xv] The anthropomorphic analogy was subsequently taken as the beginning of classical imitation and dominated architectural theory well through the sixteenth century.
According to Vitruvius the architect employs both conventional knowledge gained through experience, which Vitruvius termed fabrica, and the knowledge of the necessary truths of nature to explain a work’s beauty through ratiocinatio, or reasoned judgment. Just as the limbs of the body are proportioned in relation to the whole within a meaningful framework, beautiful buildings must have a relationship between their elements and the whole corresponding to their enduring purpose. The perfect geometrical forms within which the finite proportions of the human body are inscribed allow us to explain their beauty according to a higher meaning. Thus measure is essential for Vitruvius in the application of proportion to material, but only insofar as it serves the meaning inherent in the number it defines.
Renaissance thinkers such as Leon Battista Alberti took the tradition of Socratic skepticism, or the understanding that expertise must include both the knowledge of convention and of nature to its highest level, analytically breaking up all accepted thought into its constituent parts and reassembling them in a way that could answer the requirements of new and changing circumstances. Alberti, in his own words, "never stopped exploring, considering, and measuring everything, and comparing the information through line drawings, until [he] had grasped and understood fully what each had to contribute in terms of ingenuity and skill,” or until he had determined through measure the dimensions imitated by the ancients from nature.[xvi] Critical to this ability was the understanding that the content of a thing was more important then its form, and that form served as the access to a thing’s content.
The essence of the modernist movement lies in the mistaken belief that this Socratic doubt, instigated by our encounter with conventional truth, can only be answered by conventional truth, or fact. When Enlightenment thinkers realized the possibilities of the connection between natural and conventional truth based upon improvements in the science of measurement their Socratic doubt of received ideas turned to a revolutionary doubt in the very meaning of the universe. As soon as the measure of a thing (formerly a means of extracting a material object from a universal idea) became the thing’s very meaning, the imitation of nature by architects became pointless. While previous thought had held that regardless of the form of a thing such as the universe, the meaning behind it was immutable, the new view held that the way we perceive the universe, or the form of a thing, was all we could know about it, and therefore the way it should be.
Artists and architects, in the tradition of Socrates, have always questioned accepted truths and sought to translate them into the language of their own time. However, the Enlightenment’s rejection of inherent meaning required that artists’ translations could only be descriptive, meaning that they now relied on measure devoid of meaning. Imitation, in order to avoid the trap of mere copying, must be undertaken analytically. This means that, just as Alberti carefully studied all the ways in which the greatest buildings had treated specific conditions thereby arriving at an understanding of the universal they all pointed toward, imitation must be undertaken with a thorough knowledge of the whole body of traditional architecture and extract from each model pieces of the eventual solution for the given set of conditions. Imitation in the Enlightenment became the descriptive copying of the measurements and particulars of specific buildings. It was no longer the analytical treatment of precedents as a kit of parts capable of innumerable possibilities, all working within the framework of a building’s inherent purpose.
In order to judge what is essential in a tradition and what may be discarded in the face of improved technology, it will be necessary to recover our ability to think analytically. In other words, we must recover the understanding of imitation. The twentieth-century Italian architectural theorist Saverio Muratori has posited the existence of two types of consciousness essential to all architectural traditions. Spontaneous consciousness is entirely conventional and, though invariably traditional, lacks the analytical capacity for imitation. It could be described as something quite similar to Vitruvius’ fabrica, or practice. Spontaneous consciousness is simply the way things are built. Critical consciousness, on the other hand, represents the theoretical side of architecture. "When someone builds his own house with his own hands, he does not follow the dictates of the various architectural schools or currents and does not choose to build it out of structural steel or tree trunks without distinction: he does it as a house is built at that particular moment and in his own cultural area, thus acting in full spontaneous consciousness. Acting with critical consciousness is almost the opposite: when we are going through one of those critical periods . . . people are obliged to choose what they are doing, but let us make it clear, they do not choose having acquired greater maturity but out of uncertainty that what they are doing is right or wrong, in the absence of their community codifying what is right and wrong."[xvii] Muratori describes this modern absence of communal consensus as a crisis, carefully reminding us that the term does not necessarily denote a catastrophe, but rather the point at which an unresolved question is recognized and addressed. Critical consciousness is for Muratori both the cause of modernism and the only means of returning to and continuing architectural tradition. "If it is impossible to resuscitate spontaneous consciousness when we no longer have it, it is wise to exercise critical consciousness for the best. And the best that this can produce is to stick to the world of spontaneous consciousness, i.e. to recuperate what we would do if we had continued to operate through it."[xviii] It is only with our critical consciousness that we can regain the necessary ability to compare what is with what should be.
This is accomplished, according to Muratori, through the analytical “reading” [lettura] of the great buildings and cities of the past and the extraction from them of the essential human patterns of building. Rather than merely copying details—roof pitches, façades, column diminution or plans—the traditional architect must break down all the examples of the way in which buildings in the tradition conventionally treat specific problems, and from them reassemble a theory of universal types of architecture, both on the scale of the individual building scale and that of the larger city. Central to this endeavor is the understanding that although there may be new uses for buildings and cities, there are a limited number of building and urban types. These types derive from universal constants among buildings and cities.
Modernism attempted to replace spontaneous consciousness, a principle intimately linked with tradition, with a wholly theoretical vision of the future. As a result, however, architects have come to rely completely on conventional knowledge and the denial of analytical thought. In the attempt to enthrone critical consciousness as the sole means of producing art, modernist thinkers have been forced back upon conventional truth utterly devoid of theory and meaning. Modernism, for all its insistence on originality and freedom from tradition, is in fact a slave merely to the way things are done. Neoclassicism, the ultimate manifestation of modernism, is motivated to copy only particulars in just the same way that twentieth-century modern architecture can do nothing more than conform to the whims of its architect.
In order to comprehend what is unchanging in traditional architecture, we must understand that while conventional truth cannot prescribe the way things should be, it is the only means by which we are led to compare the way things are with the way they ought to be. Practice informs theory. Conventional knowledge provides the means by which we can access the order of nature. It is only through the analytical imitation of convention that we can apprehend the universal order of nature and make manifest the city of God.
NOTES
[i] Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. (New York: Random House, 1941), 478.
[ii] Ackerman, “Imitation.” Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 64.
[iii] Quatremère de Quincy. An Essay on the Nature, the End, and Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. Trans. J.C. Kent. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1837), 11.
[iv] Ackerman, 65.
[v] Kimball, American Architecture. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 75.
[vi] Westfall, Carroll William, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 49.
[vii] Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio. Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Ingrid D. Rowland. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 21.
[viii] Westfall, Architectural Principles, 56.
[ix] Westfall, Carroll William. “Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur M. Melzer, et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. 72-91), 76.
[x] Vitruvius, 109.
[xi] Plato. “The Meno.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 389.
[xii] Westfall, in Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture, has described this doubt as “pious skepticism,” which has been replaced by the impious skepticism of modernity.
[xiii] Vitruvius, 24.
[xiv] Vitruvius, Commentary, 149.
[xv] Vitruvius, 47.
[xvi] Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Trans. Joseph Rykwert. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), 155.
[xvii] Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology. Florence, Italy: Alinea, 2001), 36.
[xviii] Caniggia and Maffei, 42.
Showing posts with label Treatises. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Treatises. Show all posts
From the Meno
Men. O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits' end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons-and very good ones they were, as I thought-at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that. you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.
Soc. You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me.
Men. What do you mean, Socrates?
Soc. I can tell why you made a simile about me.
Men. Why?
Soc. In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them-as well they may-but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry.
Men. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the, very subject about which he is to enquire.
Men. Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?
Soc. I think not.
Men. Why not?
Soc. I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that-
Men. What did they say?
Soc. They spoke of a glorious truth, as I conceive.
Men. What was it? and who were they?
Soc. Some of them were priests and priestesses, who had studied how they might be able to give a reason of their profession: there, have been poets also, who spoke of these things by inspiration, like Pindar, and many others who were inspired. And they say-mark, now, and see whether their words are true-they say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness. "For in the ninth year Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages." The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, rand having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection -all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue.
Men. Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?
Soc. I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction.
Soc. You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me.
Men. What do you mean, Socrates?
Soc. I can tell why you made a simile about me.
Men. Why?
Soc. In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them-as well they may-but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry.
Men. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the, very subject about which he is to enquire.
Men. Well, Socrates, and is not the argument sound?
Soc. I think not.
Men. Why not?
Soc. I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that-
Men. What did they say?
Soc. They spoke of a glorious truth, as I conceive.
Men. What was it? and who were they?
Soc. Some of them were priests and priestesses, who had studied how they might be able to give a reason of their profession: there, have been poets also, who spoke of these things by inspiration, like Pindar, and many others who were inspired. And they say-mark, now, and see whether their words are true-they say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is, that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness. "For in the ninth year Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages." The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, rand having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things; there is no difficulty in her eliciting or as men say learning, out of a single recollection -all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue.
Men. Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?
Soc. I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction.
On Classicism and the Purpose of Architecture
Classicism and Tradition
The classical is a term used to denote works of architecture of the past which are prized by later generations as the most perfect examples for the guidance of current practice and for the assurance of future success. The classical is the embodiment of the best in a continuous tradition of architecture stretching from the origins of building to our own time. As such, the form that the classical takes is necessarily contingent on the requirements and propriety of both time and place. The classical of one era will not take shape in the same way as that of another, nor will the classical of one place necessarily resemble that of a different place even at the same time. Conventions such as habits, fashion, language and ways of building change over time and in different places, gaining their correctness through general acceptance and tradition. To understand this is to realize that tradition is the way things change, the means by which universal truths are translated to the particular and conventional, or more importantly, the means by which we have access to the universal. Tradition is not an impediment to change, but a proven system through which innovation and adaptation are given the possibility of realization. Within a tradition knowledge, skills and customs are guarded and handed on to succeeding generations, and it is through the tradition that they are necessarily altered.
American Tradition
As citizens of America our tradition is that of the West. This is not to say that the tradition of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian architecture is the only one in our country, or the first, but that it is the embodiment of our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The need to separate our new republic from the colonialism of England and justify our classical system of government prepared America for the embodiment of its constitution in an architecture of western classicism. Little wonder that the author of the Declaration of Independence should also design the new capitol of Virginia using the classicism of the Roman temple. Fiske Kimball in his American Architecture (1928) asserts that “the classical ideal thus embodied was ultimately to rule in America to a degree unknown in Europe." Indeed, it was to precede it by more than a decade.
The Purpose of Architecture
To the contemporary architect wishing to participate in the tradition of classical architecture the question of what is unchanging in a tradition is of singular importance. In a tradition so full of seemingly different forms it has been difficult to determine what it is that should guide contemporary practice. The embodiment of the political order in the architecture of America is significant in that it points to the most essential truth of the classical tradition: the understanding that the highest good in life is the perfection of our nature, a good held since the Greeks to be accomplished through the moral life led in community. This is the self-evident truth behind all of the greatest political systems of the past and the guiding principle in the formation of our American system of government, and the one still at work in our constitution. What this means for architecture is that our ability to pursue our highest end as individuals is dependent on the freedom insured by our government, and that architecture serves this good as the embodiment of the state. In other words, architecture is the visible part of the more important politics.
The classical is a term used to denote works of architecture of the past which are prized by later generations as the most perfect examples for the guidance of current practice and for the assurance of future success. The classical is the embodiment of the best in a continuous tradition of architecture stretching from the origins of building to our own time. As such, the form that the classical takes is necessarily contingent on the requirements and propriety of both time and place. The classical of one era will not take shape in the same way as that of another, nor will the classical of one place necessarily resemble that of a different place even at the same time. Conventions such as habits, fashion, language and ways of building change over time and in different places, gaining their correctness through general acceptance and tradition. To understand this is to realize that tradition is the way things change, the means by which universal truths are translated to the particular and conventional, or more importantly, the means by which we have access to the universal. Tradition is not an impediment to change, but a proven system through which innovation and adaptation are given the possibility of realization. Within a tradition knowledge, skills and customs are guarded and handed on to succeeding generations, and it is through the tradition that they are necessarily altered.
American Tradition
As citizens of America our tradition is that of the West. This is not to say that the tradition of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian architecture is the only one in our country, or the first, but that it is the embodiment of our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The need to separate our new republic from the colonialism of England and justify our classical system of government prepared America for the embodiment of its constitution in an architecture of western classicism. Little wonder that the author of the Declaration of Independence should also design the new capitol of Virginia using the classicism of the Roman temple. Fiske Kimball in his American Architecture (1928) asserts that “the classical ideal thus embodied was ultimately to rule in America to a degree unknown in Europe." Indeed, it was to precede it by more than a decade.
The Purpose of Architecture
To the contemporary architect wishing to participate in the tradition of classical architecture the question of what is unchanging in a tradition is of singular importance. In a tradition so full of seemingly different forms it has been difficult to determine what it is that should guide contemporary practice. The embodiment of the political order in the architecture of America is significant in that it points to the most essential truth of the classical tradition: the understanding that the highest good in life is the perfection of our nature, a good held since the Greeks to be accomplished through the moral life led in community. This is the self-evident truth behind all of the greatest political systems of the past and the guiding principle in the formation of our American system of government, and the one still at work in our constitution. What this means for architecture is that our ability to pursue our highest end as individuals is dependent on the freedom insured by our government, and that architecture serves this good as the embodiment of the state. In other words, architecture is the visible part of the more important politics.
Classicism and Neoclassicism
What is the difference between classicism and neoclassicism, between great architecture and abortive attempts to return to it? Why am I interested in figuring out the difference between classicism and neoclassicism? The contrast sheds light on those tenets of traditional architecture which are most ambiguous to me, and which are perhaps, most essential. I am not interested so much in demonstrating the benefits of a classical architecture as I am in understanding how it can be successfully invoked once again. It appears to me from a survey of contemporary traditional buildings that one of the greatest pitfalls for the architect attempting to reestablish a connection with classical architecture is the error of revivalism. It will be my goal to describe how revivalism is in fact directly antithetical to the concept of tradition, and more significantly, how the essential conflict lies in our understanding of how man progresses through history. Perhaps this too is only symptomatic of a deeper contrast; regardless I will determine that as I continue the debate.
Is revivalism really the greatest pitfall for the classical architect today? There are a number of ways of approaching the question of what differentiates the continual awareness of the past, characteristic of classical architecture, from neoclassicism, a term used to describe movements such as revivalism, or eclecticism which seek to make a specific historical period, or period motif, the basis for all modern building and which have successfully been shown to be the progenitors of modernism. That modern architecture’s nature is akin to that of neoclassicism is symptomatic of the difference between classicism and revivalism. Several thoughtful expositions of the kinship between the ideals of neoclassicism and modernism exist, but these are merely similarities in the degree to which there has been a departure from a rational understanding of how we are capable of living.
The beginning of the question lies in the difference between classicism and neoclassicism just as I have phrased it, but it will be helpful to understand how neoclassicism and modernism are similar in order to distinguish the more essential contrast. More basic than the terms classicism and neoclassicism is an understanding of how the advent of historicism, or a shift in the way we have viewed progress has changed the process of imitation, the means by which we participate in tradition. Latent in the theory driving revivalism is the concept that contemporary architecture is in a different category from that of the past. This understanding of “the modern” is derived from the supposition that humanity is progressing toward a state of perfection on earth.
To begin to understand these ideas it will be necessary to understand how both Vitruvius and Alberti regarded history and the history of historicism. I propose to continue this exploration in the coming months.
Is revivalism really the greatest pitfall for the classical architect today? There are a number of ways of approaching the question of what differentiates the continual awareness of the past, characteristic of classical architecture, from neoclassicism, a term used to describe movements such as revivalism, or eclecticism which seek to make a specific historical period, or period motif, the basis for all modern building and which have successfully been shown to be the progenitors of modernism. That modern architecture’s nature is akin to that of neoclassicism is symptomatic of the difference between classicism and revivalism. Several thoughtful expositions of the kinship between the ideals of neoclassicism and modernism exist, but these are merely similarities in the degree to which there has been a departure from a rational understanding of how we are capable of living.
The beginning of the question lies in the difference between classicism and neoclassicism just as I have phrased it, but it will be helpful to understand how neoclassicism and modernism are similar in order to distinguish the more essential contrast. More basic than the terms classicism and neoclassicism is an understanding of how the advent of historicism, or a shift in the way we have viewed progress has changed the process of imitation, the means by which we participate in tradition. Latent in the theory driving revivalism is the concept that contemporary architecture is in a different category from that of the past. This understanding of “the modern” is derived from the supposition that humanity is progressing toward a state of perfection on earth.
To begin to understand these ideas it will be necessary to understand how both Vitruvius and Alberti regarded history and the history of historicism. I propose to continue this exploration in the coming months.
The Architecture of Humanism
After a reading of Geoffrey Scott's seminal book, The Architecture of Humanism, an analysis of modern architectural criticism, I have condensed the six fallacies attending the assessment of buildings that he posits, as well as his own: the fallacy of empathy. Though published almost one hundred years ago, they are still as relevant today, if not even more so in the current debate of traditional architecture. The essential error of all of these fallacies is that they make those under their thrall take for granted the fallacy’s most essential qualities. Critics and architects have been so caught up in the frenzy of of whatever trend is popular at the time that they do not notice the weakness and oversimplification of its argument.
Romantic (Poetic) – In regarding architecture as symbolic the romantic fallacy takes a detail from an era and spins it into a complete vision of that era. This is accomplished through the essentially literary association of significant experiences which can be different for every viewer in every age, rather than the necessarily direct and sensuous experience which Scott claims architecture requires.
Romantic (Naturalism and the Picturesque) – Here, as in the poetic fallacy, architecture is increasingly judged on moral grounds. The degree to which architecture conforms to the literary ideal of nature demonstrates its sanctity and thereby its worth to the romantic. However, nature is not an absence of rule. Architecture without rules is nothing more than “slovenly art.” As such, the result of following Nature is simply to justify the artist’s caprice.
Mechanical – Following the growing trend of specialization demanded of the arts in order for their successful subservience to the new god of Science, the most beautiful architecture is seen as that in which the structure is the best and in which it is most truthfully displayed. Once again the facts contradict the assertion. Neither Doric or Gothic architecture—the architecture praised by this fallacy’s advocates—use “good construction truthfully expressed,” but rather construction that is based in an aesthetic demand.
Ethical – Once the romantic interest in what architecture indirectly signified was established, it was a natural progression to seek for a moral reference in architecture. Architecture which was insincere “signified” a corrupt era or regime and was inimical to the morals of its viewer. To say this is, however, to confuse a moral failure with an aesthetic judgment. An artist’s moral rectitude does not dictate the aesthetic value of the product of his skill.
Biological – With the advent of the theory of evolution came the corollary dominance of the desire not to appreciate, but to explain. Thus, the focus of a biological criticism is no longer on the worthy events or terms of a historical sequence, but on the uniformity and gradual progression of the sequence itself. This places all parts of the sequence on an equal footing, the best with the worst, the mediocre with the excellent. More importantly, it focuses, with an intellectual interest, attention on the insignificant moments since these serve to complete the sequence. When a given moment in the sequence refuses to fit it is ignored or skirted over because it fails to illustrate the idea of artistic development within the more important concept of the sequence itself.
Academic Tradition - Simply put, this is the idea that the imposition of rule and order, specifically the five canonical orders, is accompanied by a stultification of the discipline. But this is not the case in any worthy building until the Romantic movement. “Architecture requires a principle of permanence.” It requires, like all art, a cannon against which it can judge itself. The rules and orders of ancient Rome served to ground art in truth, through the example of the past. In the Renaissance the rules of Vitruvius are “quoted illustrated, venerated, praised” and entirely disregarded.
Empathy (Scott’s Fallacy) – Through the transcription of architecture into terms of ourselves we are able to identify ourselves with its apparent state. What this means, however, is that in the projection of human functions on the outside world the viewer is simply imbuing the object with qualities which he, the subject, desires it to have. Once again, there is an attempt to alter reality to fit the requirements of our caprice.
Additional Fallacies that may be added to the the list:
The Zeitgeist
Functionalism
Sincerity
Utopianism
Decadence
Relativism
Romantic (Poetic) – In regarding architecture as symbolic the romantic fallacy takes a detail from an era and spins it into a complete vision of that era. This is accomplished through the essentially literary association of significant experiences which can be different for every viewer in every age, rather than the necessarily direct and sensuous experience which Scott claims architecture requires.
Romantic (Naturalism and the Picturesque) – Here, as in the poetic fallacy, architecture is increasingly judged on moral grounds. The degree to which architecture conforms to the literary ideal of nature demonstrates its sanctity and thereby its worth to the romantic. However, nature is not an absence of rule. Architecture without rules is nothing more than “slovenly art.” As such, the result of following Nature is simply to justify the artist’s caprice.
Mechanical – Following the growing trend of specialization demanded of the arts in order for their successful subservience to the new god of Science, the most beautiful architecture is seen as that in which the structure is the best and in which it is most truthfully displayed. Once again the facts contradict the assertion. Neither Doric or Gothic architecture—the architecture praised by this fallacy’s advocates—use “good construction truthfully expressed,” but rather construction that is based in an aesthetic demand.
Ethical – Once the romantic interest in what architecture indirectly signified was established, it was a natural progression to seek for a moral reference in architecture. Architecture which was insincere “signified” a corrupt era or regime and was inimical to the morals of its viewer. To say this is, however, to confuse a moral failure with an aesthetic judgment. An artist’s moral rectitude does not dictate the aesthetic value of the product of his skill.
Biological – With the advent of the theory of evolution came the corollary dominance of the desire not to appreciate, but to explain. Thus, the focus of a biological criticism is no longer on the worthy events or terms of a historical sequence, but on the uniformity and gradual progression of the sequence itself. This places all parts of the sequence on an equal footing, the best with the worst, the mediocre with the excellent. More importantly, it focuses, with an intellectual interest, attention on the insignificant moments since these serve to complete the sequence. When a given moment in the sequence refuses to fit it is ignored or skirted over because it fails to illustrate the idea of artistic development within the more important concept of the sequence itself.
Academic Tradition - Simply put, this is the idea that the imposition of rule and order, specifically the five canonical orders, is accompanied by a stultification of the discipline. But this is not the case in any worthy building until the Romantic movement. “Architecture requires a principle of permanence.” It requires, like all art, a cannon against which it can judge itself. The rules and orders of ancient Rome served to ground art in truth, through the example of the past. In the Renaissance the rules of Vitruvius are “quoted illustrated, venerated, praised” and entirely disregarded.
Empathy (Scott’s Fallacy) – Through the transcription of architecture into terms of ourselves we are able to identify ourselves with its apparent state. What this means, however, is that in the projection of human functions on the outside world the viewer is simply imbuing the object with qualities which he, the subject, desires it to have. Once again, there is an attempt to alter reality to fit the requirements of our caprice.
Additional Fallacies that may be added to the the list:
The Zeitgeist
Functionalism
Sincerity
Utopianism
Decadence
Relativism
Architecture and Macaroni
Architects, never eat your maccheroni without a proper sauce!
A gentle manifesto in two stages expanding a macaronic and alchemic meditation on the anti-Cartesian nature of architectural imagination
By Marco Frascari
Sed prius altorium vestrum chiamare bisognat, o macaronaeam Musae quae funditis artem.
Teofilo Folengo, Baldus 1:5-6
"You are what you eat." American proverb
When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony. --Maire-Antoine Careme
Life is a combination of magic and pasta. --Federico Fellini
The sensual nature of architectural imagination
It is common knowledge that Monsieur Descartes did not accept as true what his senses communicated to his mind since he had a total mistrust in sensorial information. Nevertheless, when sitting at his dinner table, being a good Frenchman, he had to make up his mind about his cook's gastronomic efforts. Thus, during his breakfast, Monsieur Descartes had to put aside his philosophical thinking. He considered the Trencher Bread and the omelet he was eating by a sensorial assessment resulting from the savoring of the meal carefully prepared for him. Monsieur Descartes knew that good cooks prepare food anticipating the multiple sensorial effects and causes of the meal by cooking for a combination of different sensory phenomena and evaluations. Listening to the sizzling and cracking of fats, paying attention to the fizzing, murmuring, and gurgling of cold and hot liquids and monitoring the change in color shade during browning, glazing and clarifying are the resource for cooks to make decisions conjecturing the final taste and effect of their work.
In all probability, on a daily basis, Monsieur Descartes, was facing a dilemma, the products of the process of cooking, a process that could be easily recognized as a rational activity as described in recipes and cookbooks, were always subjected to the irrational judgments of a mingling of sensory activities taking place before, during, and after each meal. His solution to this contradiction was the creation of a cloven world: on the one hand, there is the trustable mental reality of res cogitans and on the other hand the dreamlike physical reality of res extensa. Res cogitans cannot be eaten, but res extensa can be discerningly prepared, appreciated, and assimilated. Consequently, Monsieur Descartes, who indeed was a very intelligent individual, hired and fired his chef of cuisine on the finding generated by an appreciation and estimation of res extensa as embodied in the dish presented on the table rather than on the arid logic of the res cogitans computed and explicated in cooking instructions and formulas. He knew the two domains intertwine on a laid table and his cautious philosophy could not be practiced at repast time.
The world of senses begins in the periphery of our bodies and moves to inner and higher levels of perception and from there, in analogical manner, senses rule the way we wittily act in our world. The individuals working in the subject of Artificial Intelligence are aware of this weird and wonderful contradiction of the Cartesian cloven world. They know that is easier to develop a computer processing system that can easily substitute for engineers, lawyers, and physicians, but it is an impossible task, plainly a Sisyphean effort, to develop systems able to substitute for draftspersons, cooks, gardeners, and architects. In other words, since the act of transformation of drawing-stuff into drawings mirrors the transformation of architectural-stuff into architecture and both are analogous to the transformation of foodstuff into food, they can be considered as events based on the non-rational sensorial procedures ruling the human orders of res extensa.
The uneasy cloven arrangement governing the correlation between res cogitans and res extensa was the supporting subject of a reoccurring debate taking place between Professore Carlo Scarpa and the court of his assistants at a table of the Trattoria del Gaffaro.(1) This was a restaurant not far away from the IUAV (istituto universitario architettura venezia) at the Tolentini in Venice, where, during the days devoted to the review of student work for Scarpa's design courses, the Professore and his assistants enjoyed their lunch.(2) During the meal, the never missed opportunity for a discussion delving into the problems of a view of architecture as a cloven world bounded by design and construction was generated by some comment or recollection caused by the tasting or the making of the dish selected for that day for everybody by the Professore. The ensuing move was always a reconstruction of an aphorism coined by the French architect Auguste Perret. (3) Nobody could ever remember it exactly; it was always necessary to launch a laborious process of reconstruction of the original lines of the aphorism by reminiscence and reasoning. The rebuilding of the phrase turned up something sounding like: "You can become an engineer, but you are born architect." The main step in the reconstruction was the recalling that Perreti's aphorism was an acknowledged paraphrase of another well-known adage coined by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French Politician. Brillat-Savarin's adage states: "you can become a cook but you are born a rostissier" (a chef specialized in roasting meat) and it was published in his collection of gastronomical ruminations, titled Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, written at the end of the first quarter of the19th century.(4)
Having reached the restatement of the two aphorisms, Scarpa's discussion with his assistants lingered in a distillation of the idea embodied in the aphorisms. The wrapping up was a condemning of the reliance of cook-engineers on formulas and recipes belonging to the dry disciplined realm of the res cogitans. In contrast, rostissier-architects were eulogized because their design-way of thinking based on the sensuous surrounding of crucial procedures for recognizing when a piece of meat is properly cooked or a building has been properly conceived was becoming altogether too rare.
Scarpa's and his cohort's debate attacks the foundations of an artificially transcendental and an impossible unbiased objectivity within a construction of a continual teleological pursuit for subjectivity. They have summoned by their dealing with the res extensa unto themselves the entire spectrum of personal experiences of the empirical self based on humor, including the comic ridiculousness derived from the bathetic collision of high and low registers. During dessert, a conclusion was reached by stating that architects who cannot be aware of the sensual and transcendental relationship between gastronomic provisions and gourmet food consumption cannot value and be aware of the quintessential sensual and rational correlations which characterizes the undisciplined discipline of architecture. Non-gourmet architects would never be sympathetic to the Epicurean and non-Cartesian connection existing between the arts of living and eating well with the arts of cooking and building well. Destabilizing the false sublimity of objective finitude within the framework of a continual teleological quest for subjective infinity Scarpa and assistants were natural macaronic thinkers jovially eating maccheroni saltati in padella and mercurially utilizing the tripartite nature of the macaronic art to develop a palatable theory of architecture. They were practicing a labor of macaronic ostention implying what they meant by ''x'' by saying "x'' when pointing to 'n' ingredients, and "not x" when pointing to 'm' ingredients.(5)
Presupposing a simultaneous and ostensive comprehension of three ingredients: Virgilian Latin, Italian cultivated literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Lower-Po Valley dialect of everyday life, macaronic ostention was and is an intellectual practice creating an extraordinary way of thinking.(6) Scarpa and his assistants playing between Italian, Venetian dialect, and architectural theory were following it not only as a technique for a pleasant conversation, but also as a way of reflecting on the makeup of architecture since the macaronic thinker's task is a vigilant identification and extirpation of fraud into the bowels of thought.
Dismissal of food as a proper subject for architectural theory is well rooted in the history of thought. Ben Jonson, a play writer who earnestly disliked architects, used the power of this analogy, in one of his Masques, to craftily criticize passionate belief in the cultural predominance of architects of one of England's first great architects Inigo Jones1573-1652. In the Masques (1624) Jonson satirically describes a master-builder as a preposterous master-cook.(7) Food, food preparation, and the desire that drives them have been thought to be too caught up in the low corporality to be of any intellectual interest. Locating taste, touch and smell below sight and hearing is part of a pattern of dichotomies that includes the ruling of mind over body; of reason over sense; of man over beast and culture over nature. It also lines up with another pair of concepts the authority of male over female and with 'masculine' persona over the 'feminine'.
The problem with this denigration of the physical is not simply that the fundamental relationship bonding food and eating with architecture and living fail to get the attention that it deserves; rather it is that architecture itself goes astray. Detached from their bodies, many theoreticians of architecture have become a class of remote thinkers who can only speak to each other, preoccupied with extraordinary problems that have no relevance to the infraordinary of life. By contrast, stomach-affirming architects pay more attention to ordinary experiences and seek to articulate built environments devoted to artful living. Stomachs based designs do not waste time with universals. They begin with inherited cultural wisdom that they seek to further. Bodies and stomachs immerse us in the world, engage us in all sorts of interactions, and blur rigid boundaries between our surroundings and ourselves.
To further understand the nature of macaronic thinking in architecture, a crucial corollary to append to the fundamental analogy between cooking and designing elaborated by Scarpa and his entourage is that, in traveling to see architecture in other places outside of their own region, architects cannot visit buildings without tasting local dishes and wines. If Kenneth Frampton is correct, in advocating critical regionalism in architecture, a supreme circumstance for architects to develop such intelligence is to understand fully the relationship between regional foods and regional buildings. Eating a hamburger in front of Leon Battista Alberti's Sant Andrea in Mantua precludes the grow this quintessential intelligence. They are experiencing the wrong synesthesia.(8) In front of such an architecturally rich edifice, architects or future architects who would like to increase their appreciation of the power of res extensa in architecture should have a dish of homemade tagliatelle al sugo.(9) Having had such a delectable dish, only then can they fully appreciate the concinnitas controlling Alberti's masterpiece, because now they finally have their "eyes in the belly," the proper eyes to understand the makeup of res extensa.(10)
The notion of concinnitas is one of the most powerful concepts elaborated by Alberti in his treatise on the art of cooking -sorry -building. Concinnitas is a powerful tool that architects have for bringing the sensual power of the res estensa within the re aedificatoria. Concinnitas usually has been limited to the realm of res cogitans, in particular by some scholars' they cannot help it: euphemistically speaking, they probably live in a country where the local cuisine is not very savory. These researchers have not yet discovered that Alberti, in transferring the concept of concinnitas to architecture, has carried on with it the ontological essence of its Latin etymological origin. Concinnitas is a quality embodied in the harmony of taste that results in a properly cooked dish in which the different components are carefully calibrated.(11) In his treatise, in defying the power of this architectural quality, Alberti states that concinnitas is ì vim et quasi succumî (energy and roughly a sauce). Concinnitas is the sauce in the tagliatelle al sugo. Plain cooked pasta is in itself a meaningless gluey construct; it always needs a good sauce (succum) to put on the force necessary to enter the realm of the sensuous where architecture and cuisine are at their best.
When in Venice, a traveling architect should not fail to visit Scarpa's Olivetti Store, in Saint Mark's Square, and he or she should not miss the occasion of tasting the riso col nero de sepa (a rice dish where the sauce is prepared with squid ink) resulting from the combination of sepe in tecia (sauté squids) with risotto alla parmigiana. The critical synesthetic imagination, the magic beyond the harmonic resolution of adding the squid ink to the rice, is the same by which Scarpa selected to replace the little stones cast in a mortar paste of the classical Venetian terrazzo floor of the shop with monochromatic murrine. Murrine are sliced pieces of candle-layered Murano-glass used to make the internal ornamentation of millefiori glass-paperweights.
Culinary and architectural materialities are not (and were never) sub-disciplines. Architects' and cooks' critical concerns aim at the concinnitas of matter(s), i.e., they focus on material substances or material beings and their transformations and transubstantiations. In cooking and designing, vital differences exist between what food and buildings are in themselves (their substance) and the perceptible qualities or characteristics (their accidents). The food and building substances underlie all their visible, tangible, measurable qualities. However these substances are in themselves not evident, materially quantifiable, or measurable because they have no extension in space. The appearances of the cuisine and architecture include all those outward characteristics that can be perceived by the senses of sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing. They are referred to as "accidents," not to be confused with the common meaning of that word. For Aristotle things naturally fall into ten categories. They are one Substance, and nine Accidents: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion, Time, Place, Disposition (the arrangement of parts), and Habituation. Architects and cooks through devising construction and cookery make something out of unrelated ingredients. In other words, they are capable of converting what already exists into something that it was not before. They perform a metabolic transubstantiation: foodstuffs and building materials are metabolized into the substances of cuisine and architecture and the "accidents" of the materials and stuff of construction and cooking transmogrify by formal and sensuous blends.(12) On the one hand, three basic types of accidental rules control these transmogrifications. They are alteration (change with respect to quality), augmentation and diminution (change with respect to quantity), and motion (change with respect to place). All changes with respect to other categories can be traced back to these three rules. On the other hand, four causes--Material, Formal, Efficient, and Finaló direct the transmutations. The Material Cause determines the form of the substance incorporated in the building or in the dish, i.e., clay or semolina dough determine the form of a brick building or pasta dish. The Formal Cause, according to which the building and dish are made, is the perceived idea generated by the cook and the architect as intrinsic, determining cause, embodied in the matter. The Efficient Causes are the agents, i.e., the builders or the chief staff. The Final Cause is that for the sake of which (as, the desire to satisfy a patron, to become famous and rich etc.) the building and dish are made.
The union of dream and solid stuff in tectonic events rises to an expression of pleasure, a subjective presence rather than an objective procedure with which both user and architect must be engaged. The details and the fabricated devices become playful demonstrations of cosmologically constructed events in an edifice. Rejecting the pseudo-completeness and cacothecnics of many contemporary design techniques that cannot perform the fundamental act of establishing the indispensable cosmological relationship between material order and cultural order, macaronic procedures are the essential verve to make these inaugurations successful. This macaronic vision is launched by the intuition of sensations combined with the predilections embodied in our cooking up of the world. Architectural and culinary thinking makes macaronic thinking alive by shaping and regulating conceptual development by considering the necessary and positive interchanges that take place between impressions of subjective and objective qualities. The functioning of an architectural mind can and must be conceived in bodily terms analogously related to those of proper thought about cooking. The macaronic interchange between the impressions of body behaviors together with the sensuous nature of subjective qualities and the measure of objective qualities such as size, shape, temperature and weight is essential for any ending artifact to be successful in terms of a plurality of approaches which challenges authoritative categories.
To end this meditation, I should recall an epigram by Francois La Rochefoucauld: "to eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art." (13) To it, I would add a remark put forward by Filarete in his treatise, an architectural storytelling that begins with a discussion around a dinner table: "it is obligation of man to eat and to build."(14)
Remembering how Claude Levi-Strauss used cooking as a metaphor for the way the 'raw' images of nature are 'cooked' in culture so that they may be used as part of a symbolic system I've here made a biscuit (cooked twice) using two aphorisms. Consequently, to build and to cook are a necessity but to build and to cook intelligently is the chief obligation of architecture and cuisine.
1. Carlo Scarpa (1906-1975), a Venetian architect, was a controversial master of modern architectural design. His departure from traditional modern design is evident in the idiosyncratic yet powerful presence of his architectural works. He is perhaps best known for his works such as the Brion Cemetery in Vito d'Altivole and the Museum of Castelvecchio and the Banca Popolare in Verona which illustrate his unique ability to weave built fragments of the past, into contemporary expressions of architecture and design. He taught architectural design studios at IUAV, of which he was also the director for several years.
2. I was at the lowest level in Scarpa's cohort; I was merely an addetto alle esercitazioni and the delightfully educative lunches at the Gaffaro took up a substantial amount of my meager salary.
3. A French engineer, Auguste Perret, 1874-1954, was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, notably in the church of Le Raincy, near Paris (1922-23). Perret ran a very innovative contracting and engineering practice, specializing in reinforced concrete, with a belief in the permanent value of "classical" principles. He built warehouses, factories, residences, and theaters. He saw gothic cathedrals as models of rational building from his study of Notre Dame, recorded in a surviving notebook, which is exclusively concerned with the visual effects of construction details and stained glass.
4. An influential French politician and a highly refined dilettante of the gastronomical art, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, (1755-1826), held office under the Directory and the Consulate. Brillat-Savarin wrote works on political economy, law, and dueling, but his acknowledged masterpiece is Physiologie du goût, ou Mèditation de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage thèorique, historique et l'ordre du jour, 8 vol. ("The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent Gastronomy, a Work Theoretical, Historical, and Today") (1825). The book is less an exposition on cuisine or culinary arts and more a witty compendium of considerations, precepts, anecdotes and observations of every kind that might enhance the pleasures of the table--with only an occasional recipe being offered. The book went through several editions during the 19th century and it was translated into English in 1884.
5. Ostention is one of four categories of physical labor necessary to produce signification, namely: recognition, ostention, replica and invention. Umberto Eco (1976).
6. Macaronic derives from the Italian word macaroni (from which macaroon also comes). According to Teofilo Folengo: "This poetic art is called 'macaronic' from macarones, which are a certain dough made up of flour, cheese, and butter, thick, coarse, and rustic. Thus, macaronic poems must have nothing but fat, coarseness, and gross words in them. The macaronic in its purest form is a northern Italian creation with its precedents in medieval burlesque, goliardic verse and sacred parodies, and with extra-Italian continuators and resonance in various European countries and in Rabelais. Its origins lie in the late fifteenth-century Benedictine athenaeum of Padua and specifically in the linguistic experimentalism of Tifi Odasi, whose poem Macaronea defines the genre. Its fame was assured in the first half of the following century by Odasi's Mantuan pupil and emulator Teofilo Folengo (pseudonym Merlin Cocai). Folengoís Baldus (four editions: 1517, 1521, 1534-35, and posthumously in 1552) is a mock-epic poem of giants and farfetched chivalric adventures including the discovery of the mouth of the Nile and a final descent into Hell. Baldus is the genre's acknowledged masterpiece, and it enjoyed a notable popularity in the 1500s with over a dozen editions and reprints. It was not without influence on Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which it is cited more than once. Such was the perceived connection that the first French translation of Folengo's works in 1606 bore the title Histoire maccaronique de Merlin Coccaie, prototype de Rablais. See: C. Cordiè (ed.), Opere di Teofilo Folengo (Milan: Ricciardi, 1977), xii-xiii; M. Tetel, Rabelais and Folengo, Comparative Literature, 15 (Fall 1963): 357-64; I. Paccagnella, Plurilinguismo letterario: lingue, dialetti, linguaggi, in Letteratura italiana. II. Produzione e consumo,. Roberto Antonelli ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 103-67 (141).
7. Gordon, D. J. ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, in Stephen Orgel, ed., The Renaissance Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975: 77-101.
8. A medical expression, synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) labels involuntary physical experiences of cross-modal associations. There are synesthetic combinations involving combination among vision, hearing taste, touch, scent, and other modalities. Theoretically, synesthesia could occur from associations between any two or any number of the physical senses. The first references to synesthesia can be found in manuscripts of Pythagoras (6th century B.C.) and Aristotle (4th century B.C.). Surprisingly, medicine has known synesthesia for more than 300 years. In the late 1800ís, synesthesia generated a wave of scientific and popular interest especially in art circles. Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, a synesthete, featured an organ that produced multihued light beams in his symphony Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. To many fin de siëcle Romantics, synesthetes appeared to be humanity's spiritual vanguard, closer to God than the sense-segregated masses. "Such highly sensitive people," wrote Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract artist, "are like good, much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibers at every touch of the bow." The fascination soon peaked, however, stymied by synesthesia's sheer impenetrability. The problem: No one could crawl into synesthetes' heads to understand or share their unique perceptions. After interest peaked between 1860 and 1930, it was forgotten, remaining unexplained not for lack of trying, but simply because psychology and neurology were premature sciences. Synesthetes such as Vladimir Nabokov, Olivier Messiaen, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Scriabin are famous because of their art rather than their synesthesia. Lack of obvious agreement among synesthetes compounds the apparent difficulty. In fact, this rather glaring problem - that two individuals with the same sensory pairings do not report identical, or even similar, synesthetic responses - has sometimes been taken as "proof" that synesthesia is not "real." Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, disagreed on the color of given notes and musical keys. "Researchers" from earlier centuries did little more than make lists of stimuli and synesthetic responses, followed by dismay that a pattern of correspondence was not obvious. Similarity was not apparent because they were looking at the terminal stage of a conscious perception itself, instead of some earlier process that led to that perception.
9. Tagliatelle are homemade noodles and in Mantova, they are called fojade (predictably I must give the recipe in Italian). FOJADE ALLA MANTOVANA: 400 gr di farina; 4 uova; 300 gr di carne macinata di vitello; 50 gr di pancetta in una sola fetta; 50 gr di burro; 1 carota; 1 costa di sedano; 1 cipolla; 1/2 bicchiere di vino bianco secco; 500 gr di pomodori pelati; 50 gr di funghi secchi; un pizzico di cannella in polvere; 2 foglie di alloro; 50 gr di grana grattugiato; sale, pepe.--* Versa la farina a fontana sulla spianatoia, sguscia al centro le uova e impasta con cura, fino ad ottenere una pasta liscia e omogenea; forma una palla, coprila con un telo e lasciala riposare mezz'ora. Dopodichë tendila in una sfoglia sottile , lasciala asciugare , arrotola e tagliala in modo da ricavare delle tagliatelle di 1/2 cm circa di larghezza. Srotola le spirali così ottenute, sistema le tagliatelle su un telo infrinato, allargandole bene, e falle asciugare leggermente. Lascia ammorbidire i funghi in acqua tiepida, poi strizzali e tagliali a pezzetti. Fai soffriggere in una casseruola il sedano, la carota e la cipolla tritati con 40 gr di burro e la pancetta a dadini; unisci i funghi , la carne macinata, la cannella e l'alloro e bagna col vino bianco; mescola e lascia cuocere a fuoco basso per 10 minuti. Aggiungi i pomodori pelati sgocciolati e spezzetati, sala, pepa e lascia cuocere altri 20 minuti , mescolando; al termine elimina l'alloro. Lessa le tagliatelle in abbondante acqua bollente e salata, scolale al dente e cospargile col grana grattugiato e il rimanente burro. Condisci col ragû e servi subito.
10. An Old Italian adage states: first, you devour the food with the eyes and then with the belly, and mothers forewarn children before a Festive meal not to have eyes bigger than their tummy.
11. Monteil, Pierre. Beau et laid en latin, Ètude de vocabulaire. Paris, C.Klincksieck, 1964.
12. Transubstantiation, known as the doctrine of the real presence, is a Christian theological term indicating the process whereby the bread and wine offered up at the communion service has its substance changed to that of the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ while its accidents appear to be that of bread and wine. What looks like, tastes like, etc., bread and wine is actually another substance altogether. How this happens is a central mystery of the Catholic faith. However, the term is defined by the Scholastic Fathers using Aristotelian categories and I am using it in this connection rather than the theological understanding.
13. From the "Maxims" of La Rochefoucauld, Penguin Books, Translated by Leonard Tancock (The original Maximes first appeared in 1665).
14. Filarete, Trattato dí Architettura.
Cesare Cesariano and The Renaissance Treatise
Cesare Cesariano’s Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura was the first translation of the Latin text of Vitruvius into the vernacular. Printed in Como by Gottardo da Ponte on July 15th 1521, the folio format of the volume allowed space for translation, commentary and illustrations all on the same page, with striking graphic effect and ease of reference. In the tradition of the medieval gloss, the translated text of Vitruvius, printed in a larger font, takes up a sometimes less than a third of the page, while the densely printed commentary surrounds it, filling out the page.
In comparison to Alberti, Cesariano was quite different. First, he translated into the vernacular (not writing a new treatise in Latin), and second, the manner with which he treated antique architecture was completely different. He did not write a new treatise, but created a coherent, printed version of Vitruvius with comprehensive commentary that allowed the contemporary use of ancient methods. Whereas Alberti saw classical architecture, not only as a superior form, but a cornerstone upon which to recommence the same pursuit of beauty, Cesariano mainly sought to justify and improve current medieval practices in architecture through the integration of ancient practices. Cesariano’s task, according to Carol Herselle Krinsky, was “to reconstruct antique architecture by linking Roman prototypes with familiar buildings which appeared to have something in common with what was said in Vitruvius’s text.”
Cesariano’s commentary forms an encyclopedic and carefully crafted appendix in which he attempts to explain the selected readings from various versions of the text, and expand on their meaning. His approach seems to be the medieval and humanistic method of extracting from the text the most important points, thereby creating a collection of references necessary for the compilation of a personal system of cross-references. It contains numerous quotations from Classical authors, including Aristotle and Pliny, as well as contemporary opinions. It is also clear that Cesariano was familiar with the works of Alberti, Filarete, and Fra Giocondo. However, the commentary reveals little or no interest in the scientific investigation of actual ancient buildings. Cesariano tends to regard the past “in a medieval way, focusing on its continuity with the present, and its value as a confirmation of contemporary ideas,” rather than in the more Renaissance way, as a separate and distinct age that can provide insight into the construction of a renewed architecture.
For the most part, the translation itself can be considered “accurate, complete and free of gross misinterpretations.” There are, however, numerous areas of interpretation basic to a complete understanding of Vitruvius that remain fairly ambiguous. It is known that there were earlier partial, if not complete, translations of Vitruvius dating to the middle of the 15th century, but these were never published. In addition to consulting earlier editions of Vitruvius’ text, Cesariano relied heavily on Fra Giovanni Giocondo’s 1511 edition, and on the basis of this text, reorganized some of the work that he had already translated.
Cesariano’s updated Vitruvius gains most of its originality and independence not from its commentary, but from its illustrations. There are 119 woodblock prints illustrating his interpretation of Vitruvius. Cesariano drew heavily from Fra Giocondo’s first illustrated edition of Vitruvius as an iconographic source, altering the more ambiguous or limited solutions. He was not, however, limited to reinterpretations, but also included independent contributions, especially with regard to cities, temples and basilicas, and the explanation of individual architectural points that he found valuable or difficult to understand. He is the first to attempt a reconstruction of Vitruvius’s Basilica at Fano and the realism and care with regard to detail that is apparent in the illustrations point to the fact that Cesariano saw parts of the text such as this as the most crucial area for an increased understanding of Vitruvius. Although Cesariano’s basis for many of his drawings is in the work Fra Giocondo, who gave him some idea of Roman ruins, “he seems to have been incapable of imagining ancient temples as not resembling a church.” Thus, his illustrations of Vitruvian temples invert the structure, placing the columns on the inside with the solid wall surrounding them. “In this way the peripteral type of temple becomes a sort of basilica with nave and side aisles, with some relationship in its spatial proportions to the atrium of the Milanese basilica of Sant’ Ambrosio…The façade of the pseudodipteral temple is in every way similar to that of a Renaissance church.” Cesariano’s interpretation of the ancient treatise is full of such mistaken or intentional alterations of the Roman types to suite current understandings of building typology and religion.
Cesariano’s main addition to Alberti is, however, his development of the anthropomorphic analogy, which he gives us with a “dose of Neoplatonic eroticism.” In his illustration entitled The Measurement of the Human figure, and All Symmetries Corrected and Proportioned to Correspond with a Geometrical Program, he does just this by overlaying a sexually aroused and rather uncomfortable Vitruvian man over a 30X30 grid composed of three-fingers squares. This is significant not only in that Cesariano is attempting to reconcile Leonardo’s Vitruvian man (whose center is different for both circle and the square), “but because he makes it equally clear how impossible to follow these directions really are.” The figure’s proportions cannot be full cubic in this layout, not to mention the fact that they tend to distort the body. This aside, what is important to realize is that Cesariano attempted to fully integrate the then-current concern of the anthropomorphic analogy, and the idea of man as procreator of the building, with a literal reading of Vitruvius; and that he did so in a graphic demonstration. The grid that divides up the space surrounding the “homo ad quadrate” is the basis from which, according to Cesariano, all proportional modules are to be derived. The symmetry is all encompassing, and is generated from even the smallest parts of the body, including the knuckles and the spaces between them, and even the veins, nerves, skin, and muscles. “‘All flesh,’ even hairs and pores are modules. And they all must be numerically compatible when the body is used as the hidden structure of a building, or any form ‘built or to be built by architectural science’.” Unlike Alberti, who described the process of design as a thing “conceived in the mind, expressed in lines and angles, and realized by resourcefulness and learned talent,” Cesariano attempted a physical construction of the Vitruvian man as procreator.
Concinnitas, or Beauty Reconciled
What does Alberti mean by concinnitas? How does he learn what it is so that he can introduce it into his building? and what role, then, does concinnitas play in investing a building with beauty?
Concinnitas, Alberti’s powerful term for “the absolute and fundamental rule of Nature” denotes, with such a description and by its very nature, a difficult, and illusive theory. While Alberti makes no more specific statement than that concinnitas composes parts “according to some precise rule,” the very framework in which concinnitas is conceived will help the thoughtful architect, philosopher or political thinker in its pursuit, for concinnitas is more than a mere pattern book rule to be followed. Rather it is the way in which Beauty is reconciled to the particular example on earth. Concinnitas translates the ineffable idea of Beauty to us through minute adjustment of proportion, thereby rendering it perceptible to the senses. The pursuit of concinnitas is the highest goal of the architect, or indeed of man in general.
“Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect.” Concinnitas flourishes in birth and death, in creation and destruction, and in every changing state between these extremes. Indeed, there can be no written formula for such an idea because it is not a static result, but a defining action whose very meaning is to take parts which are in every case different, and arrange them such that they form through their correspondence a complete and perfect whole. Concinnitas is the final and defining quality of architecture, or art in general. As such, it surpasses the crude necessities of shelter and protection, enters the realm beauty, and becomes something that arouses delight in the beholder.
Thus, a discussion of concinnitas must begin with the understanding that it is something which governs both the practical and aesthetic qualities of building; it is behind and above decisions concerning the material or order of building. What Alberti is telling us is that no truly functional thing can be made without concinnitas, and that any discussion of concinnitas must therefore govern and surpass that of firmness and commodity. Architecture, Alberti tells us, in agreement with Vitruvius, is worthy of praise when it is commodious, firm, and delightful. Yet for Alberti, the final requirement is the most vital. “Of the three conditions that apply to every form of construction – that what we construct should be appropriate to its use, lasting in structure, and graceful and pleasing in its appearance – the first two have been dealt with and there remains the third, the noblest and most necessary of all.” In other words, firmness and commodity are necessities not just of a palazzo, but also of a barn. What sets great buildings apart is that they delight our senses with the beauty arising from their proportions, not just relative to themselves, but to the cosmos.
“All care”, he tells us, “all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is to built is useful, commodious, yes – but also embellished and wholly graceful, so that anyone seeing it would not feel that the expense might have been invested better elsewhere.” Thus, architecture for Alberti is most concerned with beauty, in that every good which architecture brings to humanity is a result of its grace and appropriateness. “To have satisfied necessity is trite and insignificant, to have catered to convenience unrewarding when the inelegance in a work causes offense.” The task of the architect is to reach beyond necessity and evoke pleasure in the viewer. This is accomplished through concinnitas.
Central to Alberti’s theory of concinnitas is the idea that architecture is a composition of various individual parts that follows a rational arrangement. Beauty, Alberti tells us, “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." It is in the correct manipulation of these elements that beauty is achieved. “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoned faculty that is inborn in the mind… 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.”
The theory of concinnitas is grounded in a perfect composition of the various parts. If these elements such as cornices, windows, walls, columns, doors, and porticoes are altered from their perfect manifestation in the whole, concinnitas will no longer be present in the work. Indeed, one might also say that, just as a “reasoning faculty is in born in the mind,” so too a “natural excellence” exists as a potential in every building. The individual building in this description already exists as a perfect idea which the art of the architect attempts to emulate. In other words, a failure to correctly arrange the parts according to the rules of concinnitas regulating the composition of the whole will results in an unsuccessful building, or one that does not attain the perfection it is innately capable of.
How then do we achieve this proportionate arrangement? If beauty is the reasoned harmony of all the parts, then that harmony may be described, Alberti tells us, using Number, Outline and Position. For Alberti number was a quantitative relationship between things in a formula, but more importantly, it was also a qualitative entity in its own right. As George Hersey so beautifully explains there were whole churches, cities, kingdoms and heavens of numbers, each with its own particular character and even genealogical structure. 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 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 whole, which they form, has the quality of beauty. We will return to this.
“But,” Alberti continues, “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.” In other words, concinnitas takes varying numbers of things which have different shapes, and lie in various positions, and creates (according to a “precise rule”) a complete and beautiful whole.
Concinnitas is not simple the combination of number shape and position, or a glorification of just of position, rather it is the manipulation of the three qualities such that each is altered to form a suitable and distinct whole, appropriate for its unique location and purpose on earth. To make this distinction more apparent, let us even say that position is sufficient to compose a literal version of a building’s heavenly counterpart, but that concinnitas breaths the life into an otherwise inanimate copy. Concinnitas fractures the perfect harmony of ideal beauty just enough for man to comprehend it. In short, concinnitas is like the bending of a perfect rectangle to fit the curvature of the globe it would otherwise be incompatible with.
Concinnitas, Alberti’s powerful term for “the absolute and fundamental rule of Nature” denotes, with such a description and by its very nature, a difficult, and illusive theory. While Alberti makes no more specific statement than that concinnitas composes parts “according to some precise rule,” the very framework in which concinnitas is conceived will help the thoughtful architect, philosopher or political thinker in its pursuit, for concinnitas is more than a mere pattern book rule to be followed. Rather it is the way in which Beauty is reconciled to the particular example on earth. Concinnitas translates the ineffable idea of Beauty to us through minute adjustment of proportion, thereby rendering it perceptible to the senses. The pursuit of concinnitas is the highest goal of the architect, or indeed of man in general.
“Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect.” Concinnitas flourishes in birth and death, in creation and destruction, and in every changing state between these extremes. Indeed, there can be no written formula for such an idea because it is not a static result, but a defining action whose very meaning is to take parts which are in every case different, and arrange them such that they form through their correspondence a complete and perfect whole. Concinnitas is the final and defining quality of architecture, or art in general. As such, it surpasses the crude necessities of shelter and protection, enters the realm beauty, and becomes something that arouses delight in the beholder.
Thus, a discussion of concinnitas must begin with the understanding that it is something which governs both the practical and aesthetic qualities of building; it is behind and above decisions concerning the material or order of building. What Alberti is telling us is that no truly functional thing can be made without concinnitas, and that any discussion of concinnitas must therefore govern and surpass that of firmness and commodity. Architecture, Alberti tells us, in agreement with Vitruvius, is worthy of praise when it is commodious, firm, and delightful. Yet for Alberti, the final requirement is the most vital. “Of the three conditions that apply to every form of construction – that what we construct should be appropriate to its use, lasting in structure, and graceful and pleasing in its appearance – the first two have been dealt with and there remains the third, the noblest and most necessary of all.” In other words, firmness and commodity are necessities not just of a palazzo, but also of a barn. What sets great buildings apart is that they delight our senses with the beauty arising from their proportions, not just relative to themselves, but to the cosmos.
“All care”, he tells us, “all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is to built is useful, commodious, yes – but also embellished and wholly graceful, so that anyone seeing it would not feel that the expense might have been invested better elsewhere.” Thus, architecture for Alberti is most concerned with beauty, in that every good which architecture brings to humanity is a result of its grace and appropriateness. “To have satisfied necessity is trite and insignificant, to have catered to convenience unrewarding when the inelegance in a work causes offense.” The task of the architect is to reach beyond necessity and evoke pleasure in the viewer. This is accomplished through concinnitas.
Central to Alberti’s theory of concinnitas is the idea that architecture is a composition of various individual parts that follows a rational arrangement. Beauty, Alberti tells us, “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." It is in the correct manipulation of these elements that beauty is achieved. “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoned faculty that is inborn in the mind… 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.”
The theory of concinnitas is grounded in a perfect composition of the various parts. If these elements such as cornices, windows, walls, columns, doors, and porticoes are altered from their perfect manifestation in the whole, concinnitas will no longer be present in the work. Indeed, one might also say that, just as a “reasoning faculty is in born in the mind,” so too a “natural excellence” exists as a potential in every building. The individual building in this description already exists as a perfect idea which the art of the architect attempts to emulate. In other words, a failure to correctly arrange the parts according to the rules of concinnitas regulating the composition of the whole will results in an unsuccessful building, or one that does not attain the perfection it is innately capable of.
How then do we achieve this proportionate arrangement? If beauty is the reasoned harmony of all the parts, then that harmony may be described, Alberti tells us, using Number, Outline and Position. For Alberti number was a quantitative relationship between things in a formula, but more importantly, it was also a qualitative entity in its own right. As George Hersey so beautifully explains there were whole churches, cities, kingdoms and heavens of numbers, each with its own particular character and even genealogical structure. 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 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 whole, which they form, has the quality of beauty. We will return to this.
“But,” Alberti continues, “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.” In other words, concinnitas takes varying numbers of things which have different shapes, and lie in various positions, and creates (according to a “precise rule”) a complete and beautiful whole.
Concinnitas is not simple the combination of number shape and position, or a glorification of just of position, rather it is the manipulation of the three qualities such that each is altered to form a suitable and distinct whole, appropriate for its unique location and purpose on earth. To make this distinction more apparent, let us even say that position is sufficient to compose a literal version of a building’s heavenly counterpart, but that concinnitas breaths the life into an otherwise inanimate copy. Concinnitas fractures the perfect harmony of ideal beauty just enough for man to comprehend it. In short, concinnitas is like the bending of a perfect rectangle to fit the curvature of the globe it would otherwise be incompatible with.
Alberti on Beauty and Concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature
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.
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