Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture 9781472469328, 9781472469342, 9781472469335

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of plates
List of contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: homo fabula
Part I: Architecture of stories
Chapter 1: Glass and clay: Proust and Gallé
Chapter 2: The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s fabrication of site
Chapter 3: The “uncharted tides:” a literary map of Saint Petersburg
Chapter 4: Macaronically speaking
Chapter 5: Il Mantecato: an architectural course served at the Frascaridonosor’s Tavern of Crossed Destinies
Part II: Stories of architecture
Chapter 6: Buildings remember
Chapter 7: Object talks: confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo no Chōmei and Wajirō Kon
Chapter 8: Suspended ceiling stories: navigating the cosmo-technologies of hospital ceilings
Chapter 9: Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor
Chapter 10: The enlightening radiance of shadows
Chapter 11: Architecture sub rosa: another tell-tale detail, with confabulations and digressions
Part III: Stories of theory
Chapter 12: Language and architectural meaning
Chapter 13: Walls of gender
Chapter 14: Architecture’s two bodies
Chapter 15: Camillo Sitte’s winged snail: festina lente and escargot
Chapter 16: Strange tales of architectural evolution
Chapter 17: Dialetti architettonici: storytelling in the vernacular
Chapter 18: Miming a manner of architectural theory: Eudaimonia—A Pantomime Dream Play
Part IV: Practice of stories
Chapter 19: Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s architectural drawings
Chapter 20: In medias res: Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo
Chapter 21: The function of fiction in fabrication: Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, the Italian confabulator
Chapter 22: The Laughing Girls
Chapter 23: Mi punge vagezza, ovvero i misteri del mestiere
Chapter 24: Confabulatores Nocturni
Index

Citation preview

Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our percep­ tion, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations:  Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtaposi­ tions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction fram­ ing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory, and practice of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour sec­ tion, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives. Paul Emmons is a registered architect and professor at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech where he directs the Ph.D. program in Architecture + Design Research. Marcia Feuerstein is an architect and associate professor at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech. Her research investigates links between theory, practice, and performance in architecture. She studied at Tufts University, the University at Buffalo and University of Pennsylvania, where she received a Ph.D. in Architecture. Carolina Dayer is an architect in her native country Argentina and holds a Ph.D. in Architectural Design Research from Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech. She teaches at Aarhus School of Architecture and The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark. Her research and personal practice focuses on multivalent forms of architectural drawing.

Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture

Editors: Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, and Carolina Dayer Associate Editor: Luc Phinney

First published 2017 by Ashgate 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Ashgate 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Ashgate is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, Carolina Dayer, and Luc Phinney selection and editorial material; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-4724-6932-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-4724-6934-2 (ePub) ISBN: 978-1-4724-6933-5 (ePdf) Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures List of plates List of contributors Foreword jack davis Acknowledgements Introduction: homo fabula

viii xi xiv xx xxii 1

PAUL EMMONS AND LUC PHINNEY

PART I

Architecture of stories 1 Glass and clay: Proust and Gallé

13

ELAINE SCARRY

2 The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s fabrication of site

24

QI ZHU

3 The “uncharted tides:” a literary map of Saint Petersburg

31

ANGELIKI SIOLI

4 Macaronically speaking

38

MANUELA ANTONIU

5 Il Mantecato: an architectural course served at the Frascaridonosor’s Tavern of Crossed Destinies

46

FRANCO PISANI

PART II

Stories of architecture 6 Buildings remember

55

DAVID LEATHERBARROW

7 Object talks: confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo no Cho-mei and Wajiro- Kon IZUMI KUROISHI

64

vi

Contents

8 Suspended ceiling stories: navigating the cosmo-technologies of hospital ceilings

71

FEDERICA GOFFI

9 Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor andreea mihalache 10 The enlightening radiance of shadows

80 87

HOOMAN KOLIJI

11 Architecture sub rosa: another tell-tale detail, with confabulations and digressions

94

TRACEY EVE WINTON

Part III

Stories of theory 12 Language and architectural meaning

107

ALBERTO PÉREZ-GÓMEZ

13 Walls of gender

117

CLAUDIO SGARBI

14 Architecture’s two bodies

123

DONALD KUNZE

15 Camillo Sitte’s winged snail: festina lente and escargot

131

MARCIA FEUERSTEIN

16 Strange tales of architectural evolution

141

MATTHEW MINDRUP

17 Dialetti architettonici: storytelling in the vernacular

151

MICHELANGELO SABATINO

18 Miming a manner of architectural theory: Eudaimonia—A Pantomime Dream Play

160

LISA LANDRUM

Part IV

Practice of stories 19 Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s architectural drawings

173

CAROLINA DAYER

20 In medias res: Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo JONATHAN FOOTE

185

Contents 21 The function of fiction in fabrication: Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, the Italian confabulator

vii

193

LOUISE PELLETIER

22 The Laughing Girls

199

MARC NEVEU

23 Mi punge vagezza, ovvero i misteri del mestiere

207

REBECCA WILLIAMSON

24 Confabulatores Nocturni

216

BRIAN AMBROZIAK AND ANDREW MCLELLAN

Index

220

Figures

2.1 Collage by author demonstrating Fengshui planning strategy 2.2 Hongcun Village in Hiuzhou Region, China. Photograph by author 4.1 Teofilo Folengo Baldus (Mantua, c. 1510). Frontispiece showing Merlin Cocai being fed gnocchi by the Muses. © The British Library Board, 1070.g.8 (frontispiece) 5.1 The first eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani 5.2 The second eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani 7.1 The arrangement of objects in Cho-mei’s hut. Pictorial explanation of the history of Japanese interior, Graphics: History of Japanese Interior: Japanese House from Ancient to Modern, Kawade Shinsho series (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo shuppan, 2015). © Kazuko Koizumi 8.1 Dropped ceilings at the Ottawa Hospital (1980s). © Federica Goffi 8.2 Hospital ward. Santa Maria della Scala, Pellegrinaio (1440–1444). © Biblioteca e Fototeca Giuliano Briganti, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena 9.1 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 11.1 Detail from The Birth of John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1486–1490 (lower panel) and original collage by author incorporating Ceiling Rosette, Cesare Cesariano, Vitruvius DeArchitectura, 1521, Liber Secundus, XLV, and The Open Matrix of a Pregnant Woman, with the Creature Inside, Girolamo Mercurio, La commare o raccoglitrice dell’eccellentissimo signor Scipion Mercurio: Divisa in tre libri (Verona: Francesco de’ Rossi, 1642), 18. 11.2 Silentium Postulo, table of gestures, from John Bulwer, Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, the Art of Manvall Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions digested by Art in the Hand as the chiefest Instrument of Eloquence, by Historical Manifesto’s exemplified, . . . . By J. B. Gent. Philochirosophus. Manus membrum hominis loquacissimum (London: Harper 1644) (left-hand panel) and

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Harpocrates, Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome 1652–1654), Vol. III, 590 (right-hand panel) Camillo Sitte’s flying snail from the 3rd 1901 edition of Die Städte­ bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien / von architekt Camillo Sitte (Wien: Verlag von Carl Graeser, 1889). Internet Archive (University of Toronto) Sea Angel: microscopic marine winged snails (Zooplankon Clione limacha, a shell-less cold water gastropod). NOAA Photo Library, Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC On the left: Crab holding a butterfly with the words Festina Lente. This was Caesar Augustus’s emblem for Festina Lente from ca. 19 BCE, reconceived in 1559 by Gabriel Simeone. Similar images from this time replace festina lente with Matura (mature). On the right: Aldus Manutius’s Dolphin Intertwined with Anchor. Internet Archive (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze) Le Corbusier’s Objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction), collected 1925–1965. Shown here: objects collected on the beach, 1955. © Foundation Le Corbusier/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2015 The Origin of the Corinthian order, engraving (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1684), illustrated in Claude Perrault’s Vitruvius, 2nd ed. (1684) Charles Eisen, Primitive Hut, frontispiece of Essai sur l’Architecture by Marc-Antoine Laugier, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755). Wikimedia Commons Coverpage: Virgilio Marchi, Architettura futurista (Foligno: F. Campitelli, 1924) View of exhibition: Giuseppe Pagano and Werner Daniel, Mostra di Architettura rurale (Rural Architecture) (Milan, 1936). G. Pagano and G. Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana “Quaderni della Triennale” (Milan: Hoepli, 1936) Ludovico Quaroni et al., La Martella (Matera, 1951). Giancarlo De Carlo, “A proposito di La Martella,” Casabella-Continuità (February–March, 1954): v–viii A pantomime (or possibly Polymnia), with masks, lyre, and sword. Late fifth or early sixth century ce ivory carving found in Trier, Germany. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. TC 2497. Photo: Ingrid Geske / bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play. Collage drawing, 2015. © Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A to B), 1960. Ink on paper. Private collection, originally published in Steinberg, The Labyrinth, 1960. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Drawing by author of Brion cemetery chapel’s corner Carlo Scarpa. Third floor plan heliographic copy showing burnt mark on the reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San

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Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice. 1974–1978. NP 41691(detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa Michelangelo and others, Mural drawings, apse of the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, 1526–1533. Reconstruction by author, after images provided by the Polo Museale della città di Firenze, with permission Michelangelo, cornice details (left and right) showing template tracing, exterior window of Laurentian Library, c.1526. With permission, Polo Museale della città di Firenze House in Troy II collaged over a model of laughter. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins Title page of Antonio Visentini for the first edition of Trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1767). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) Frontispiece of Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) Montage of architectural details from “P. Pozzi” (Padre Andrea Pozzo, to whom Visentini refers as “architetto biasimato” (blamed or blameworthy architect) in Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) time[scape]lab, Columbarium, Xerox on clay board, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

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Plates

1 Marco Frascari. Architectural Embodiment. © Paola Frascari 2 Marco Frascari. Architectural Storytelling—Cantastorie. © Paola Frascari 3 Algot Erikson, Vase with Arum Leaves, 1897, porcelain. Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm. Photograph courtesy of Noël Allum 4 Charles Lyell, Frontispiece, Temple of Serapis, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830). Smithsonian Libraries/Open Library 5 Emile Gallé, Geology, 1900–1904, with details. Image courtesy of Musée de l’École de Nancy. Photograph by Nick Williams 6 Royal Doulton, The Arrival of the Unknown Princess. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry 7 Royal Doulton, Ali Baba. Courtesy of Replacements Ltd., Greensboro, NC. 8 Agathon Léonard, The Scarf Dance, biscuit figures, 1900. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 9 Alf Wallender, Vase and a Maiden, 1909 Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Noël Alum. Emile Gallé, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1888–1889. Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images 10 Emile Gallé, Carp Vase, 1878. Musée du Verre et du Cristal, Meisenthal, France. © Yvonne Fleck 11 Emile Gallé, White Water Lily against Sky-blue Glass, two sides. Photograph courtesy of James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine 12 Emile Gallé, Cattleya Vase, 1900, two sides. Photograph courtesy of Kitazawa Museum of Art, Japan 13 Emile Gallé, L’Orée des Bois, 1902 [left]; Gallé, Flowers and Woodland, 1895–1900 [right] 14 Auguste and Antonin Daum, Birds in Snow. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry 15 Marco Frascari. We Make Architecture, But Architecture Makes Us. Illustrated in Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (London: Routledge, 2011). © Paola Frascari 16 Marco Frascari. Stairs and Drawing. © Paola Frascari 17 View of Dublin. Photograph by author 18 Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper, (1657), oil on canvas. Dordrechts Museum (Inventory number: 953/135) 19 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author 20 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, (1880 [cast in bronze, 1924]), Philadelphia. Photograph by author

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21 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author 22 Wajiro- Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida’s Modernology. Comprehensive illustration of the house-hold of a newly-married couple. © Kon Wajiro- collection of Kogakuin University 23 Detail of the Last Judgment; fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari on the inside of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (1568 started) Reproduced with the permission of Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Alinari Archives, Florence 24 Still frame from Playtime (1964–67), Jacques Tati. © Photofest NYC 25 The Founding of Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, Lorenzo Vecchietta, ca. 1441. v Federica Goffi 26 Domenico di Bartolo, Virgin of the Cloak. Santa Maria della Scala, Old Sacristy (1444). © Federica Goffi 27 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood house and courtyard in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 28 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 × 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 29 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 × 73.7 cm. Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 30 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran (c. 1710s–1900s). Courtesy of Parsa Shirazi (left), Azad Koliji (right), and Ganjnameh Research Center, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran (plan Drawing) 31 Window patterns drawn by Mirza Akbar, late eighteenth century. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Indian and South-East Asian Section, MS no. 44 32 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran. Left: The window from inside offers a view opening to the garden outside and depicts an allegorical garden on the surface of the screen Right: By grouping and associating certain forms in the geometric pattern, the overall appearance of the girih window becomes analogous to a garden drawn abstractly. © Azad Koliji and Hooman Koliji 33 The Annunciation to Zacharias (lower panel), and Zacharias Names the Baptist (upper panel) Domenico Ghirlandaio and Workshop, 1490, Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence 34 Marco Frascari, The Door of Theory. © Paola Frascari 35 The first story. © Claudio Sgarbi 36 The second story. © Claudio Sgarbi 37 The third story. © Claudio Sgarbi 38 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Diana and Actæon. 50 × 73 cm, oil on wood, c. 1518, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Wikiart, Visual Art Encyclopedia 39 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in March 2014, restaged August 2014, #1. Photographs © Lisa Landrum

Plates

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40 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in March 2014, restaged August 2014, #2. Photographs © Lisa Landrum 41 Marco Frascari, Aristophanes’ Confabulation. © Paola Frascari 42 Marco Frascari. Scarpa’s Confabulation. © Paola Frascari 43 Carlo Scarpa. Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and perspective. NP 2437r. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 44 Diagram by author over Brion cemetery chapel floor plan drawing (NP 2437r, © MAXXI) 45 Carlo Scarpa, Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and perspective. NP 2437r (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 46 Photograph by author of Brion cemetery chapel corner, 2014 47 Photograph by author of Brion cemetery chapel interior ceiling corner 48 Diagram by author over Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery chapel reflected ceiling plan drawing, NP 2699 (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 49 South elevation of Brion chapel with access area. NR 4165. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 50 Unidentified project, section drawing. NR 46790. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 51 Carlo Scarpa. Reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice / Floor Plan 1974–78. NR 41378. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa 52 Michelangelo, Profile sketches, c. 1526. Image by author, with permission from the Polo Museale della città di Firenze 53 Servandoni’s first project for the facade of Saint-Sulpice (1731). Bibliothèque nationale de France 54 Servandoni’s Triumphal Arch to the Glory of the King (1754). Bibliothèque nationale de France 55 Diagram of the Laughing Girls from Troy, New York. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins 56 House in Troy I. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins 57 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Saint-Exupéry, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan 58 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Thoreau, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan 59 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Calvino, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

Contributors

Brian Ambroziak is Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee and co-creator of time[scape]lab. His research engages the creative process, the development of the artistic conscience, and focuses on the complex relationship between design and methods of representation and visualization. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. Manuela Antoniu obtained her professional (B.Arch) and post-professional (M.Arch.) degrees in Canada, and her doctorate at the Architectural Association in London. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and North America. She has published with, among others, Princeton Architectural Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Ashgate, and Routledge (for Architectural Theory Review). Having most recently taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London) in History and Theory, she is currently undergoing rigorous Zen training in a Buddhist temple in Japan. Carolina Dayer, Ph.D., teaches at Aarhus School of Architecture and The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark. She is a licensed architect in her native country, Argentina. Her research, teaching, and original work centers on theoretical and experimental forms of architectural representation, as well as cultural, political and material practices. Her Ph.D. work focused on questions of reality and everyday life through the literary practice of Magic Realism and Carlo Scarpa’s drawings. She has published, lectured internationally, and organized symposia on matters of the imagination and drawing practices. Her personal design work has been exhibited in Argentina and in United States. Paul Emmons is a registered architect and Professor at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech where he is Director of the Ph.D. program in Architecture + Design Research. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from the University of Minnesota. His research on the history and theory of architectural practices has focused on drawing and representa­ tion. This work has been presented around the world at conferences and in numerous publications. He also co-edited The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (2012).

Contributors

xv

Marcia Feuerstein is an architect and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Her research and teaching consider design through theories of the body, embodiment in architecture, performance, and theater. Drawings, writings, images, and photographs have been published in a number of architectural and academic texts. She also co-edited Architecture as a Performing Art (2013) and Changing Places: ReMaking Institutional Buildings (1992). Dr. Feuerstein earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, a M.Arch from SUNY at Buffalo and B.S. from Tufts University. A member of the AIA and licensed architect, she maintains a small architectural practice. Jonathan Foote, Ph.D., is currently Associate Professor of History and Theory at the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. He has previously taught architecture at Cal Poly State University, Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Campus, and as Director of Graduate Studies at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. His dissertation, Michelangelo, Templates and the On-site Imagination, examines Michelangelo’s unu­ sual relationship with architecture as a work in progress. Federica Goffi is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Graduate Program at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University (2007–pre­ sent). She currently teaches courses in drawing and studio, as well as Master’s and Ph.D. courses. Previously she was Assistant Professor at the Interior Architecture Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005–2007) teaching adap­ tive reuse, time-architecture and architectural representation. She holds a Ph.D. in Architectural Representation and Education from the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech. Her research and published articles investigate the concept of TIME in its threefold nature of time–weather–tempo and as it informs notions of built conservation (ARQ, In Form, Interstices, Int. AR.) Dr. Goffi is the author of Time Matter[s]: Invention and Re-imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s in the Vatican (Ashgate, 2013). She holds a Dottore in Architettura from the University of Genoa, Italy and is a licensed architect in her native country, Italy. Hooman Koliji, a designer, author and educator, is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Maryland. His design research explores the notions imagina­ tion and representation at the intersection of architecture and landscape. He is the author of books, essays, and projects on environments and places. His books include In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in Islamic and Western Traditions (2015) and Dirineh Khaneh: Sketches from Iranian Architecture (2005, 2010). Koliji is a member of the editorial board of Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics. He emphasizes the value of imagination in integrating theory and practice. Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn State University, University at Buffalo, LSU and Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, Virginia Tech. He studied architecture at N.C. State, and geography at Georgia State and Penn State. Kunze has been interested in the poetic dimensional­ izing of experience. His current projects concern the role of metalepsis and catalepsis in the construction of performative architecture.

xvi

Contributors

Izumi Kuroishi is Professor at the School of Cultural and Creative Studies, Aoyama Gakuin University. Her research is the theory and history of modern Japanese urban and architectural design including the works of Wajiro Kon, the idea of the sketch, modern housing, garden suburbs, colonial architecture, and urban phenomenology. Her projects consider memories of the lost landscape shelter housing, and food cul­ ture and community in the damaged area of the Tohoku Great Earthquake and the Tsunami in 2011. Published books include External Ideas of Architecture: works and ideas of Wajiro Kon (2000) Constructing the Colonized Land (2014), and Earthquake Recovery in the northern part of Japan and Wajiro Kon: knowledge of domestic works and living (2015). She was a visiting vcholar at the CCA (Canadian Center for Architecture) in 2015. Lisa Landrum is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Her research on architecture’s dramatic agency has been published in a number of edited books, including Architecture as a Performing Art (2013), Architecture and Justice (2013), Architecture’s Appeal (2015), and Filming the City (2016). David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture, Chairman of the Architecture Ph.D. Program, and Associate Dean at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught architectural design, history, and theory since 1984. Before Penn he taught at Cambridge University and the University of Westminster. He has also visited and taught at many universities in the USA and abroad. David Leatherbarrow earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. in Art at the University of Essex. His books include Architecture Oriented Otherwise (2009), Topographical Stories: Studies in landscape and architecture (2004), and Surface Architecture (2002), written in collaboration with Mohsen Mostafavi. Earlier books include Uncommon Ground: Architecture, technology and topography, The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, enclosure and materials, and On Weathering: The life of buildings in time, again with Mostafavi. Andrew McLellan is Co-creator of time[scape]lab. His interest in writing and memory has yielded design proposals and narratives recognized in numerous forms that include exhibit and publication. He has been a lecturer at the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he taught design studio and writingintensive seminars. Attending UNC-Charlotte, he earned both a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and a Bachelor of Architecture. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Queens University of Charlotte. Andreea Mihalache is Assistant Professor at Clemson School of Architecture. Born and raised in Bucharest she holds a Ph.D. from Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Planning. A former Fulbright scholar, she had previous teach­ ing appointments  at  Mississippi State University, Virginia Tech, and The Catholic University  of America.  Her scholarship has examined intersections of architecture with travel practices, photography and mobility in the twentieth century; national identity and architecture; and dimensions of the sacred in architecture. She is inter­ ested in fringe conditions,  peripheries, and transition moments and has presented her work through conferences and publications in the United States, Europe, and

Contributors

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the Middle East. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in architectural history, theory, and representation  at Virginia Tech’s  Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Her doctoral work focuses on allegories of boredom in mid-century art and architec­ ture, with a focus on the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Saul Steinberg. Matthew Mindrup is Senior Lecturer of Architecture at The University of Sydney. An architect by training, Matthew completed a Ph.D. in Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech in 2007 on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two architectural models assembled by Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s. His research focuses on the history and theory of architectural design practices with an emphasis on the making and use of physical models Marc J. Neveu has published on architectural pedagogy in the Italian eighteenth cen­ tury as well as our contemporary context. In 2014 he was named as the Chair of the School of Architecture at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. Neveu is the current Executive Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education. Louise Pelletier was trained as an architect. She is the Director of the School of Design at UQAM, where she currently teaches. She taught at the School of Architecture at McGill University from 1997 to 2006 and was a visiting professor at the University of Montreal and the University of Oslo. She received a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University in 2000. Dr. Pelletier is the author of Architecture In Words; Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (2006), and co-author of Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997), written with A. Pérez-Gómez. Her work has also been published in collec­ tions of essays and international journals. She participated as a curator and designer in several exhibitions in Montreal, Japan, Brazil and Norway. Her most recent book, Downfall, The Architecture of Excess (2014), is a novel that proposes a reflection on contemporary practice. Alberto Pérez-Gómez is the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University. He was born in Mexico City in 1949 and became a Canadian citizen and a Quebec resident in 1987. He obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. by the University of Essex in the UK. He has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse, and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in London, and was Director of the Carleton University School of Architecture from 1983 to 1986. He has lectured extensively worldwide. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field. His most recent book is Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006). Luc Phinney is a πkfdod´n. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Ecotone and Descant, as well as in the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning book Compass (2013). His designs for buildings and landscapes have been constructed in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and he has taught courses in creative writing, architecture, and engineering

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Contributors

drawing for their associated departments at Johns Hopkins University. He is cur­ rently a Ph.D. student at the Virginia Tech Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. He can be found building houses, throwing pots, or making trebuchets with his two sons. Franco Pisani, strongly tempted by the expanded opportunities offered by the “con­ tamination” of apparently distant themes and disciplines, includes within the profes­ sion of architecture research activities and didactic experiences. He lives and works in Firenze, where he runs his own professional office FRANCOPiSANiARCHiTETTO, practicing design at all scales “from the spoon to the city” and for public and private clients. As an architectural educator he has taught both as professor and lecturer in different universities and schools in Italy and abroad. In 2012 he co-founded the AIU Agency for Interior Urbanism, an international collaborative platform committed to design exploration and dialogue to address the need for alternative approaches to urban planning. In 2014 he was appointed External Examiner for the School of Interior Architecture of the University of Westminster in London, UK. Michelangelo Sabatino is Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture at the Illinois Institute College of Architecture in Chicago. Sabatino was trained as an architect and architectural historian in Venice, Canada, and the USA. After com­ pleting his architectural degree in Venice, his PhD in Canada, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he taught at Yale University and the University of Houston before moving to Chicago. His award-winning books include Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2010) and, with Jean-François Lejeune, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (2010). Michelangelo’s new book Arthur Erickson: Architecture into Landscape is forthcoming in 2015. Other books forthcoming and in production include Forms of Spirituality: Modern Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony, Canada—Modern Architectures in History and The Global Turn: Architecture and the Built Environment. Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Among her many research interests are theories of rep­ resentation, language, perception, crisis, corporeality, and the structures of verbal and material fabrication. Her works include Resisting Representation (1994), On Beauty and Being Just (2001), Dreaming by the Book (2001), Thinking in an Emergency (2012), Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (2010), and Thermonuclear Monarchy (2014). A wide-ranging intellect and renaissance woman, Professor Scarry is as erudite dis­ cussing Heraclitus as hospital advertising. As Samuel Moyn, writing on Scarry for The Nation, said: “Her first book, like all her succeeding ones, requires the suspension of disbelief that intense visions always do.” Claudio Sgarbi, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania), M.S. (University of Pennsylvania), Dottore in Architettura (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia), is a practic­ ing architect, adjunct research professor (Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University) and has been working in the last 20 years as a technical director for different building firms in Italy supervising and directing new constructions and the renovation of existing buildings. He has published several articles and essays and

Contributors

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a book: Vitruvio Ferrarese. “De architectura”: la prima versione illustrata (Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, 2004). Angeliki Sioli obtained a professional diploma in architecture from the University of Thessaly in 2005, followed by a post-professional master’s degree in architectural theory from the National Technical University of Athens in 2008. From 2005 to 2009 she worked as an architect and designer of small-scale objects, books and stage sets for dance performances. In 2015 she was awarded a Ph.D. in the History & Theory of Architecture from McGill University, Montreal. Her theoretical research seeks connections between architecture and literature in the public realm of the early twentieth-century European city, focusing on bodily spatial perception in the urban environment. She has presented her work in professional and interdiscipli­ nary conferences and architectural publications. She has taught studio and history courses at McGill University and she is currently a full-time research professor in the Department of Architecture at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Puebla, Mexico. Rebecca Williamson is a registered architect with experience in practice in Switzerland and New York (offices of Santiago Calatrava, Sergio Calori, John Petrarca, and Livio Vacchini). Dr. Williamson received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on political and architectural designs in eighteenthcentury Italy. She has since published and presented her research on the history and theories of architecture and urbanism internationally while maintaining a teaching focus on design. Tracey Eve Winton is an architect, scholar, and iconographer, who holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from Cambridge University, and an M.Arch. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill. She teaches Design, Cultural History, and Urban Studies at the School of Architecture, University of Waterloo, Canada, where she is an Associate Professor, and in Italy where she is Director of Studies for the Waterloo Rome program in Architecture. She has pro­ duced nine original theatrical events with her undergraduate architecture students. Her research ranges from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to adaptive reuse. Qi Zhu is an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College and a practicing architect in the state of California. Prior to teaching and practicing in California, she taught at Carleton University. She received her Ph.D. in Architectural Design and Research from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Foreword A. Jack Davis, FAIA Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech

We all tell stories every day of our lives for many different reasons: to share, to remember, to teach, to imagine. Studies suggest that we daydream briefly (typically about 14 seconds) but very frequently over two thousand times per day. If you are not daydreaming at this moment, you’ll note that Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture is the first book-length examination of how the skill of storytelling pro­ ductively directs the human imagination in design. The College of Architecture and Urban Studies of Virginia Tech is pleased to be the primary sponsor of the three efforts that engendered the creation of Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture: a symposium of the same name; an exhibition of draw­ ings and fabrications; and the acquisition of, and construction of a new home for, the extensive and unique library of the scholar-architect, Marco Frascari. All three events took place at the College’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC) in the spring of 2014. This publication on WAAC’s thirty-fifth year, marks a special moment in the life of this educational institution by acknowledging the contributions of an exceptional former faculty member, Dr. Marco Frascari, who taught at Virginia Tech for eight years (1997–2005), as the G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture, and founded the Ph.D. program in Architecture + Design Research at WAAC. Frascari left to become Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he died in 2013. Frascari’s entire library was acquired from his widow, Paola Vaccari Frascari, by the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the Library of Virginia Tech. A new library space was designed and constructed by students at the Alexandria Center to keep his collection intact as a living entity for future scholars. The placement of Frascari’s collection in the school was conceived of as an aedicule, a room within a room. Like the physical library, this book is also a sort of an aedicule, a book within a larger body of thought that addresses storytelling but, moreover, presents a way of thinking about the interconnectedness of architecture, culture and life. It is also akin to a mise en abyme, the literary trope of a play within a play. In this way, as the library is an edifying room within the larger edifice of the university, this book is a dialogue within the larger dialogue of architecture and narrative. Mise en abyme can also mean to place in the center, and was originally used in this way in the visual system of her­ aldry, where an escutcheon is placed within another larger shield. This center-within­ a-center suggests the visual experience of seeing into two mirrors, infinitely reflecting. The reflections gathered here have created a work that looks upon past and present architectural theory and practice, to see beyond it. This book is the culmination of

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numerous efforts by a diverse group of people and the reader may wish, like One Thousand and One Nights, to have the stories never end. To understand Frasacari’s capacity as an educator is to understand that he did not provide all the answers, for he did not teach explicitly, but rather guided by nuance. He led the inquiring student in a direction that had at its seaming conclusion the discovery of a wealth of new ideas— new questions—to be further explored. Frascari, a fine storyteller, was well aware of the close historical relation between rhetoric and architecture. Confabulations, Storytelling in Architecture continues that pursuit and the continued dialogue to which the University is dedicated.

Acknowledgements

Paola Vaccari Frascari has been an inspiring muse for this work and to her we express our deepest gratitude. With acuteness and passion, Donald Kunze and Berrin Terim provided editorial assistance that guided this book to better places. Many thanks to the Northern Virginia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for funding assistance. And at Virginia Tech our thanks go to many, especially to Dean Jack Davis of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and to Jaan Holt and Henry Hollander of the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center for their financial sup­ port and good will to make beautiful things happen. Lastly, our thanks extend to all the confabulators who made these architectural fables possible.

Introduction Homo fabula Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney

Whatever the origin of language, whatever the origin of shelter, it is in storytelling that they cohere, and in storytelling that we become distinctly human. To be human is to tell stories. Many animals build shelters. Many others pass on news, sing, chatter, caterwaul. But we humans are, as far as can be told, unique in our telling ways. We are the storytelling animal. Roland Barthes underscores the ubiquity of story: “narrative is present in every age, in every place, and in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind.”1 Perhaps, as Elie Wiesel mused, humanity was created to fill the world with stories. The universality of narrative makes us members of the species homo fabula and our stories connect us to, even when they distinguish us from, each other and the world. Alongside the physical world, we reside in the constructed “make-be­ lieve” realities that are human culture.2 We are not taught narrative; rather, narrative issues from our intuitive ontology, our encountering and acting in the world.3 Story is older than writing, older, perhaps, than permanent settlement.4 The story of stories emerges from the fragmentary prehistory of barely discernable tools—chips of knapped flint, fired clay, charred wood—and stories figure the walls of Neolithic caves with hunts and hands, pointing up the possibility that story is, itself, a primordial tool. We don’t know how far story goes back, but we do know that it has occurred in every human culture, and may even persist where culture has ceased to hold sway.5 Storytelling is the native language of our imagination and a well-told story can deftly integrate technical, cultural and aesthetic thinking. This volume is founded on an understanding of narrative as one of the essential methods of design, and through these explorations, essays, drawings, and dialogues, we hope to arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of what storytelling has to offer architecture. 1 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image, Music, Text, trans­ lated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang), 79. 2 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, on the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990) 7. 3 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge: Bellknap of Harvard University Press, 2009) 131, 134–5. 4 Recent archaeological findings at the Turkish site Göbekli Tepe suggest a 12,000-year-old site of ritual or social significance without accompanying residential habitation. Sandra Scham, “The World’s First Temple,” Archaeology 61, no. 6 (November 2008): 22. 5 A Russian family was recently discovered to have been living in a remote corner of Siberia without complex tools or technology—without, in fact, any contact with the outside world—for 40 years. “All that [the children] knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories.” Mike Dash, “For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II,” Smithsonian, January 28, 2013. Accessed October 28, 2015.

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“Architecture is embedded storytelling,” wrote architect, educator, and theorist Marco Frascari, who stressed the reciprocity of architecture and narrative throughout his career, and saw stories as key to creating “non-trivial” architecture.6 Confabulations: storytelling in architecture follows Marco Frascari’s proposition that stories are the wellspring of architecture, and his lifelong commitment to that “crafty process.” Architects build stories while buildings edify inhabitants. Storytelling and architecture are fundamental forms of what philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “world-making,”7 and, in a storytelling architecture, we may come to understand the fabrication (as it were) of fabrication. Frascari corrects the misunderstanding of Vitruvius’s requirement for the architect’s education of “historias . . . noverit” to mean, rather than “knowing history,” “telling events,” and this suggests that there may be—there may have been, all along—a genre of generative architectural storytelling.8 Storytelling is often overlooked today because it tends to withdraw in the face of analytic methods.9 As Walter Benjamin warns, storytelling is becoming increasingly remote,10 with the dissemination of information largely replacing the telling of stories. Unlike stories, which gain weight and permanence with repetition, information’s value evaporates when it is no longer new. In this context it should come as no sur­ prise that architects often feel threatened—with irrelevance; with the currency of the 24-hour news cycle; or with currency in the wider sense, as a modern synonym of (or surrogate for) presence. Though design drawings and models are still today usually “presented,” didactically, to clients, builders, and other architects, these moments may become, at their best, the telling of meaningful stories. Confabulations: storytelling in architecture, following Frascari, is dedicated to exploring architecture as a narrative art, and seeking in the narrative arts an expan­ sion of architectural potential, integrating poetry and technique so as to engender, it may be hoped, fabulous buildings. At the root of the word confabulation is fabula, Latin for story or narrative, and the source of “fable” in English. The word origin suggests that architectural storytelling is much closer to divination than communication; fabula, from fari, to speak, describes a person’s fate from its past participle, fatum, as “that which has been spoken.”11 Good architecture may be so storied as to feel fated; but this is a fate we make. The suffix bula of fable signifies a tool or means. To tell a fable is thus to speak craftily. Edifying stories are necessary but not determinant. Fables, like Aesop’s apologues, are a specific sort of story: extremely compact, they set out a sequence of events that do not directly state their own meaning; rather, they must be interpreted, and so

6 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the art of architectural drawing (New York: Routledge, 2011), 68. See also “An Architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytelling” in Adam Sharr, ed., Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents (New York: Routledge, 2012), 224–34. 7 Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-Making (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).

8 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 173.

9 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, translated by Michael Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1992). 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968) 83. 11 “fable, n.” OED Online (September 2015), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67384?rskey=JQS70a&re sult=1&isAdvanced=false. Accessed November 9, 2015.

Introduction

3

support perpetual retelling. The epistemological status of fables is that of an enigma, a non-analytical speaking in ciphers, requiring the reader to build bridges between the known and the unknown. Fables permeate architecture. Pindar tells of the very first temples at Delphi, begin­ ning with one grown of laurel, the next built by bees of honey and feathers, the third made by the gods out of bronze and finally the historical temple of stone constructed by humans. Vitruvius’s story of having windows in our chests to reveal our true feel­ ings is taken from Aesop, though he attributed it to Socrates.12 In the renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, in addition to his architectural treatise, wrote Apologi Centum (100 fables).13 Alberti’s characters often included humans as well as inanimate objects such as building stones. In the Enlightenment, the Venetian Carlo Lodoli created fables for teaching his architectural theories, adjusting them to the particular audience and situation.14 Doubtless one of the most famous fables of modern architecture was uttered by Louis Kahn: “You say to Brick: ‘what do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’”15 This 18-word fable sinks into the memory of generations of architecture students, continuing to provoke weighty deliberations on the “expres­ sion” of material and structure. The word confabulation also has a specialized psychological meaning that reveals its further value for architectural design. When people have a severe memory disorder and cannot recall certain aspects of their experiences, the mind invents memories to fill in what cannot be recalled. The real and the imaginary are woven together seam­ lessly even if they cannot logically coexist. To be afflicted with confabulation is to be of two minds, to be in two places at once, to experience, counterfactually, simultane­ ous irreconcilable truths. But the fable itself possesses a different sort of relation to the counterfactual: the writer of fables endeavors to “tell the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson suggested. If a confabulation is fiction, it is not false: rather, its truths are undertones and overtones, intimations of the unspoken. Confabulations weave together the incommensurable, investigate the ineffable, and return us to everyday experiences of life and an altered-ordinary. The maker of confabulations elides fact with fiction, imagining possible future worlds deeply interconnected with those already existing. Buildings, too, rarely tell their stories literally. Yet even the ones that come closest to doing so such as the cathedrals that Victor Hugo contrasted to books (as a more cumbersome storytelling medium), tell many of their most moving stories outside the symbolic and stylistic languages of their carvings, stained glass, and other nearly linguistic elements. The relief of the medieval pilgrim or the modern tourist stepping into that cool dark (falling silent); the careful scrutiny of the builder, restorer, or stu­ dent; the hubbub of the baptismal party: these are also stories belonging to the build­ ing. The edifice is edified; polyhistorian. Please note that buildings do not themselves tell (literally or literarily) stories: they provide the conditions of possibility for these 12 Mario Andrea Rigoni, “Una finestra aperta sul cuore (Note sulla metafora della ‘Sinceritas’ nella tradizione occidentale),” Lettere italiane 4 (1974): 434–58. 13 David Marsh, editor, Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernardino Baldi, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 260 (Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004). 14 Marc Neveu, “Apologues, by Carlo Lodoli,” Journal of Architectural Education (2010): 57–64. 15 For the complete fable, see: John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979), 40.

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stories. Buildings make stories possible just as the architect makes fables in order to invent future buildings. Confabulation is one of the most essential, least acknowledged, skills of the archi­ tect. Confabulation finds connections, proposes questions, and offers an expanded field for architectural insights. The chapters gathered here, themselves confabulations, stand to situate us within the arc of a new theoretical paradigm, one which has been with us (under the rose) all along, but which has taken on urgency in the new century. Today much architecture is carried out in absence of a storytelling intelligence; or, if stories are a part of architectural making their utilization is a peripheral and superfi­ cial thing, a window-dressing; but the convergence of architecture and storytelling is not just a question of “painting a picture with words” to better visualize or persuade us of an already-extant architectural idea. Stories are constitutive, and offer ways of seeing unavailable to other creative modes. Just as stories may be seen as an evolved adaptation, providing the human organism with enhanced abilities to communicate, cooperate, and respond to the unforeseen,16 confabulatory methodologies allow the architect to engage productively with uncertain sites, sources, and situations, and so, it may be hoped, to build our structures and cities with greater responsiveness and resilience. Stories are one of the earliest, longest-lived, and most successful human adaptations, and engaging with them offers to expand the adaptive capacity of the architectural field. Like any good future, profound architecture frustrates analysis and evades predic­ tion. This is not merely because of its status as a not-yet-known, but is a result of the way it is endowed with a storied presence. Narrative, in its turn, offers a way of seeing, and of representing what is seen, that suits the structure of intuition, which is replete with connotative as well as denotative meanings, and that activates the somatic imagination. Architecture may speak to the senses, but it makes sense in nar­ rative, that crafty speech. How it makes sense is another question. Donald Kunze, in his contribution, explains that a confabulation is not merely an explanation. It is a chiasmus, a crossing of opposites—of the real and the dream—where body and build­ ing are uncannily joined in an epiphany. If this were a fairytale, we would begin: Once upon a time . . . At the entrance of the seventeenth-century garden labyrinth of Versailles, now destroyed, stood the gilded bronze figures of Aesop, famously unattractive father of fables, and Cupid, that beautiful, concupiscent child. There, according to the laby­ rinth’s designer Charles Perrault (brother of architect Claude and best known by his pen name, Mother Goose), the statue of Aesop was engraved with the words: “With my animals full of ruse and babble, your living image, I’d like to teach you wisdom. But my neighbor will have none of it.” Cupid replied: “I wish you love, and that is wise; it is crazy to love nothing. Each animal says this in its own way, you only have to listen.”17 At each turn and crossing in the maze, statues of the characters from one of Aesop’s fables presented their stories. These sculptures fountained water from spouts designed to sound like the animal they resembled. Accompanied by a brief carved 16 Boyd, Brian, “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature: The delight we get from detecting pat­ terns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood,” The American Scholar 77, no. 2 (2008): 118–27. 17 Charles Perrault, Le Labyrinthe de Versailles 1677, postface by Michel Conan (Paris: Moniteur, 1982).

Introduction

5

verse, each animal told its story mellifluously, multi-sensorially. These are the voices in the labyrinth; but there are many voices. Once upon a time the buildings were entered by crossing over a labyrinth—this was the ancient Roman mosaic labyrinth that, though a convolution of radial and bilateral symmetries, had, like the urban templum, four quadrants, each with its own recursions.18 It was a threshold the visitor might step over; but which acted as a ward and contained in itself a model of cosmos, polis, and elemental origins. It was also a perfect place to get minutely lost. This is the form of the labyrinth; but there are many forms—yet in a labyrinth, as in a book, we are never wholly lost. We conceive of this book as encouraging a labyrinthine reading. After entering, one can choose many different paths and returns, linking together separate chapters in ways that create individually telling juxtapositions. Or readers can follow the linear order of the book, taking a path that perambulates through four distinct sections, which, like the labyrinth form of ancient roman mosaics, will get you lost in an organ­ ized and intelligible manner. Each quadrant of this labyrinth, like Perrault’s, has its share of speaking animals, but these creatures share their section with others of like mind, equally fabulous, novel, unapologetically apological. The first of four quadrants begins with chapters exploring the material of, and in, narrative. We call these the “architecture of stories,” but they are equally stories as architecture. These are followed by stories that buildings themselves tell, provoke, or conceal. They are “stories of architecture.” Next are stories flickering up from the deep well of theory: these are studies of the “stories of theory.” Finally, we visit stories of design ensnared in the drawings of architects, asking what constitutes the “practice of stories.” Whether you follow the forking paths, or hopscotch at the behest of your own internal compass, you may orient yourself by these four directions, which are, properly speaking, the genera of a storytelling architecture, which turn on the chias­ matic relation of storytelling and architecture (the Minotaur).

Architecture in stories The first of our four genres takes us from the alleys of Murano to the streets of St. Petersburg, drawing together the diaspora of the material figure. When we speak of “figures of speech,” we are discussing the broadest of rhetorical categories— everything, it might be argued, that makes the tapestry of literature from the warp and woof of history and everyday talk (and the indirect, the suggestive, and the implied). These first chapters are the most literary in their sources; the most material in their obsessions. These two conditions are fruit of a common tree—the ramifications of the figural—for just as figures of speech relate glancingly, obliquely, dancingly, to the symbolic and semantic, figuration in architecture should not be confused for the semiotic obsessions of past generations of theorists and practitioners. If architecture can still be said to speak, its speech, like that of a character in a Raymond Carver story (Will you Please be Quiet, Please?), tells little, but always says more than it says. When we say that an architectural environment “says more than it says,” we are talking about its capacity to configure and reconfigure meaning. Understanding how it says more than it says requires a practical knowledge of figuration, a sort of praxis 18 Hermann Kern, “Roman Mosaic Labyrinths” in Through the Labyrinth (Munich, NY: Prestel, 2000), 85.

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of poiesis. In this the practitioner of oblique figurations is a maker of confabulations. These are no longer “confabulations” in the everyday sense of the “confab” (parlay, chin-wag, palaver, chat, causerie, conference, gabfest, or schmooze); rather, the archi­ tectural confabulation is a configuration of the material world that owns its obliquity, that (intangibly, but intelligibly) means something to us, in the colloquial sense of that phrase. These authors are asking how it is that a building speaks volumes—by asking how a volume speaks buildings. Many are the architects who are also poets, novelists, and playwrights: Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Sir John Vanbrugh were both architects and dramatists. John Hejduk illus­ trated an edition of Aesop in 1991, but his interest in fables was deeper, linking them with his masques, as evidenced by his opening The Mask of Medusa  with the fable of the Fox and the Goat. There are also fictional accounts of architecture that are commentaries upon architecture, such as Victor Hugo’s “This will kill that” in NotreDame de Paris. Sometimes fiction has such power that the world is remade in its image—as occurred at Notre Dame, in the years following Hugo’s novel. In this part, Qi Zhu explains the reforming of a Chinese landscape to make a city in the form of an ox. The complex relation between reality and fiction here completes a circle—not only do architects confabulate stories in order to create buildings, but a town is confabulated in order to make a story. Angeliki Sioli takes us on a walk through time and St. Petersburg following the lines of poets and novelists, and Manuela Antoniu, recognizing the appetite we have developed, offers us a macaronic repast, musing on the magic of words and their dialectal drift. After dinner, we sit down to have our Tarot read by Franco Pisani. These contributions share the importance of storytelling through the author-guided imagination described by Elaine Scarry.19 Scarry begins this book, and our first part, with a reverie on the poetics of materials, exploring the transformation of the proce­ dural, material, knowledge of the master craftsman into the process of sensory mimesis in literary art: the immaterial heft, that is, of the material. In asking after the mental events accompanying color, in unfolding the translations from glass, to clay, to literary imagery, she sows the seeds for the garden we will spend the rest of the book exploring.

Stories of architecture The second quadrant among our genera of narrative architecture takes us into the stories embodied in the built world itself. From the figuration of memory in the work of Rodin to the inadvertent subtext of the reflected ceiling plan, we seesaw from intents to accidents and find in them the common ground of a built environment that is, inevitably, incessantly, sensuously, telling us stories. It has long been accepted that buildings tell stories. They do not, however, always tell the stories their makers conceive, intend, or even understand. From how they are made, to how they are experienced, buildings offer stories that frequently exceed their architects’ plans. Most directly, buildings tell stories through inscriptions, some of which are written as if the building is speaking in first person. Buildings also tell stories pictorially with frescos and sculpture. In this vein, Tracey Eve Winton serves up a (silent) story of ornament.

19 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, 1999).

Introduction

7

Buildings, too, tell stories in more subtle and influential ways. The aging of a building tells the story of its life, its alterations, and the care people have (or have not) lavished upon it. John Ruskin writes the Stones of Venice to read the stories that building stones tell of their makers; Joseph Brodsky writes Watermark more than a century later to understand how his network of Venetian friends and acquaintances resonate in those same stones. These comings-together-through-making constitute confabulatory acts of edification. Buildings can also tell tall tales. David Leatherbarrow begins this part of the laby­ rinth with a walk in Philadelphia founded on three words: “places remember events.” This is not merely a poetic inversion, but also an argument for an expanded definition of mind. Cognitive psychologists have challenged our assumption of control over the processes of memory: if recall is cue-driven and episodic, rather than intentional and encyclopedic, then, in some sense, our chosen environments, the buildings and land­ scapes we think within, are, in an expanded sense,20 our minds. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls architecture the configuration of space and narrative the configura­ tion of time.21 Interpreting Ricoeur, Leatherbarrow directly conflates the narrative plot and the architectural plan. “The whole problem of plot and plan invention,” he says, “is this: fabricating a configuration that allows the intelligible to arise from the accidental.” He goes on to trace out this emergent “concordance” in art and architecture, attending, with material specificity, to the psychodynamics of formal configurations. He argues that these configurations can be understood both as plots and plans; and that there is a reciprocity between these two ways of understanding the built world. The proposed synthesis is, naturally, its own confabulation, and the other authors in this part of the book take up the back-and-forth, exploring, in echo of Elaine Scarry, the human body as it is projected in the artifact (and thus the motile environ­ ment of proprioception); and, in echo of Marco Frascari, the corporeal nature of architectural demonstrations. Hooman Koliji outlines the physical story of a Persian window to discover the imaginal properties with which it endows space. Izumi Kuroishi examines how in different cultures the story of the primitive hut reflects differing values for architecture. Andreea Mihalache reads clues to reconstruct the lost Romania of Saul Steinberg, and Tracy Eve Winton makes a meal of architectural elements. Following the example of Thales and the recommendation of Federica Goffi, we depart from this part and prepare for the next by looking up—ceilings, with their actual or theoretical constellations, as she reminds us, provide a unique locus for daydreaming.

Stories of theory If architectural theory had its historical beginnings with Vitruvius, then it began with many memorable stories oft-repeated over the following two millennia:  Dinocrates

20 For further discussion of recent theories in the psychology of the “expanded” mind, see Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21 Paul Ricoeur, “Architecture and Narrative” translated in Identity and Difference, The Triennale in the City, The Imageries of Difference, Triennale di Milano XIX Esposizione Internazionale (Milano: Electa, 1996), 64–72.

8

Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney

presenting a design for Alexander’s city wearing nothing but a lion’s skin; Callimachus’s invention of the Corinthian column capital while strolling through a cemetery; the architect Diognetus saving the city of Rhodes from assault through the cunning use of refuse. The story of the origin of architecture has long been set in a primitive hut; but before the first house there was a builder, a teller, and a once for that house to be (built) upon. In this quadrant Marc-Antoine Laugier’s 1753 story of the primitive hut as the basis of an architectural theory is reconsidered by Mathew Mindrup, who traces the idea and representation of genius as it appears in Laugier’s frontispiece. Some treatises clothe their meaning in stories. The 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili takes place in a dream, depicted as a fiction within a fiction, followed by a fiction prior to that fiction. (And scholars call its macaronic nonce dialect impenetrable!) Louis Sullivan wrote a dialogue between an experienced architect and a student in Kindergarten Chats and Adolf Loos tells the tragic fable of the Poor Little Rich Man. We are seduced by Jean-François de Bastide’s little house (La petite maison) and cap­ tivated by the abyssal Carceri of Piranesi. Architects have many coats and architectural narration takes as many forms. Le Corbusier experimented with movies, cartoons, games, and poems to tell the stories of his buildings. Viollet-le-Duc began his career writing dictionaries, at midlife wrote lectures and ended his career with novels. Even the most prosaic of handbooks, Ernst Neufert’s Architect’s Data, describes building types through the cycle of human life, from birth to death, an apposite twin to Filarete’s Italian Renaissance story of the virtuous conception, birth, and maturation of a baby-building-as-model into the fullgrown building. The visceral nature of stories, their ability to make complex thoughts tangible, is a confabulatory tool employed by theorists in every era, from the most poetic to the most verse-adverse. Architecture can be poetic, but it cannot be poetry. In making a place for narra­ tive in architectural theory we are attempting to make room for the various metrical structures of time, not only its familiar and circumscribed forms (cyclic, chronologi­ cal, biographical), but also as an architectural material no less plastic, malleable, or expressive, than space. We begin with the understanding that narrative has had its own theory, deeply concerned with temporality, and as longstanding as the his­ tory of thought. What seems a new beginning for architecture may be a well-trod path. Word and image symbiotically join in the figurations of the line, in the signature of the fabricated, in what Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls “techne-poeisis, an irreducible knowledge of the body manifested in skills.” Pérez-Gómez opens our third quadrant with his story of architectural theory, touching upon a broad swath of the history of architecture to argue for the significance of the literary imagination, noting that the literary image is not so much a still image as a reenactment of the scene it depicts. Mimesis, in this context, is the imitation of the mime rather than the mirror: it takes place, in architecture, as embodiment. This may be quite literal, as in the immured bodies and voluptuous walls of northern Italy described by Claudio Sgarbi; it may be metaphorical, as in the slow-quick transmutation of flesh Marcia Feuerstein finds in a winged escargot and the way Camillo Sitte learns a new city; embodiment may even become allegorical, as a demonstration of the architect’s pantomime of design, dem­ onstrated by Lisa Landrum. Donald Kunze’s meditations lie (truthfully) in this section, as well as Michelangelo Sabatino’s thoughtful reconstruction of the influence of the

Introduction

9

Italian vernacular on modern architects of that region. Finally, Matthew Mindrup’s chapter (it is no accident) affords us a fortuitous abduction of the inconceivable.

Practice of stories “No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams at the advent of modernism, a claim which may sound self-evident to architects. This claim, however, was not so much about a material epistemology as it was practical advice to his fellow writers. That is, when crafting an image/poem, the author should guide the reader’s imagination through a series of concrete, sense-rich moments of experience. What Williams proposed, and what the authors in this part so aptly explore, is the irreduc­ ibly material nature of imagination. In this part we see all sorts of materializations, from the visual record of the changes made by Michelangelo to full-size templates for construction details to the imaginary scenes, optical games, and elaborate sets of Enlightenment architects. These authors ask what it is for a story to be manifest in drawing. While this is a question with many answers, part of what architects do is to explore and reinvent the expressive potential of drawing. What is less often noted is that this reinvention is only secondarily com­ municative: it is, first, a rebuilding of a world. Many architectural drawings come before building, acting as precognition. Other drawings, like the woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Douglas Darden’s collages in his graphic novel, Laughing Girls (analyzed by Marc Neveu), act as their own curious stories. Any architect who has handled a rumpled set of as-built draw­ ings, thick with its patchwork of submittals, RFIs (Requests for Information), and addendums, has probably contemplated the distance between a set of drawings and the building that arises from them. The speculative drawings of architects raise the possibility that all architectural drawings, rather than representing a future build­ ing, are confabulist pre-enactments—that is, they tell the story of a world that may be, that could be, that might or even ought to be; but is not, and will never be. (The conditional is a part of their configuration.) To borrow terminology from narrative theory, the architectural drawing, whatever its verisimilitude, operates in the subjunc­ tive mood. Drawing, like storytelling, exists across the ambiguous dimension of reality and fiction. This mood, or mode, the subjunctive “as if,” utilizes a suspension of dis­ belief, and by this suspension inveigles, enmeshes, and embodies the reader in the tale. Architects actively construe stories while drawing; and the ways these stories are constructed are inseparable from the way a project is designed. The conflation is methodological. The materials of the story are cousin to the materials of the build­ ing. Conceiving architecture, the architect begins once, and when, and whereupon, confabulating known realities with imagined possible fictions. Architecture, as worldbuilding, is the crafting of a fiction in order to project a future reality. Architects are storytellers not only when they make their own designs but also when they talk about their ideas with clients, builders, and other architects. In this part Jon Foote takes us to Renaissance Italy and immerses us in the middle of one of Michelangelo’s bustling construction sites, and Louise Pelletier introduces us to the hidden patrons of Enlightenment France. From these wandering meditations, Rebecca  Williamson moves to a meditation on wandering, while Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan explore the formative stories of their own practice. Finally,

10 Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney opening this closing part, Carolina Dayer explores how architectural drawings can tell their own stories, even to the architects who are drawing them. Her close reading of palimpsestial design drawings by Carlo Scarpa interpolates the motion of traces on the page. This is a story of intrigue, of the meaningful accident, and the confabulation of fire and the names of things. These storied authors’ stories offer you, dear reader, a hand, like Aesop and Eros at the labyrinth’s entry. Welcome to the garden. Here be stories.

Part I

Architecture of stories

1

Glass and clay Proust and Gallé Elaine Scarry

The substance we call clay has such remarkable features that an array of scientists today believe that clay may have served as the worktable on which life learned to live. Clay has the capacity to replicate itself not quite in the way that crystals grow, and not quite in the way that DNA replicates itself, but in lattice works that are a hybrid—or something in between—crystals and DNA. NASA scientist Leila Coyne describes the “startling electronic properties” of clay, “defects” in its lattice work that enable it to store energy and information “and then re-emit it.” Leila Coyne states: “If you take a lump of clay and hit it with a hammer it blows ultraviolet energy for a month.”1 The theory that clay is the worktable on which life learned to live is relatively new. But two features of this account have been with us for millennia. First, the association of clay with replication. On this northern European vase from the year 1900 [Plate 3], a simple ginger leaf is repeated across the base. But if we scan across Babylonia, Egypt, China, Islam, Greece, Rome, and North and South American pottery, we inevitably find lines and images imprinted on the surface in repetitive streams. Clay invites and incites repetition. The second feature of clay saluted across millennia is its association with aliveness: the claims that it is alive, that while wet it seems to move, that the “inert ball . . . acquire[s] a coiled spring of energy,”2 or even, as is said by potters in the Andes, that “it is sensitive . . . and gets upset easily”3 are claims we have all heard all our lives. For Proust, clay was a worktable for the creation of both cities and persons. In Place-Names: the Name, Marcel pictures Balbec “as on an old piece of Norman pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned.”4 Marcel asks us to inscribe two vivid pictures on the surface of this clay vase. The first is of an innkeeper welcoming the boy to Balbec: “the inn-keeper who would pour me out coffee and milk on my arrival.” The image, in other words, is that of a man holding a serving vessel, a piece of pottery, from which he pours coffee and milk. Clay replicates clay on its own surface. 1 Leila Coyne, quoted in and summarized by James Gleick, “Quiet Clay Revealed as Vibrant and Primal,” New York Times, May 5, 1987. Gleick describes the work of University of Glasgow’s Graham Cairns-Smith, a leading scientist investigating the link between clay and the origin of life. 2 Daniel Rhodes and Robin Hopper, Clay and Glazes for the Potter (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2000), 76. 3 Nicholas Tripcevich and Kevin J. Vaughn, Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes: Sociopolitical, Economic, and Symbolic Dimensions (New York: Springer Verlag, 2012), 116.

4 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Holt, 1922), 251.

14 Elaine Scarry The second picture—let us say the picture we must now inscribe on the other side of the vase—requires us to imagine the innkeeper escorting Marcel down “to watch the turbulent sea, unchained, before the church” [Plate 4]. The welcoming civility of the first picture has been magnified in the upheaval of civilization out of the foundational rock—the eruption of a Norman stone church out of the seabed floor.5 Once again clay replicates clay, this time not in a local act of civility but in geological events. The kinship between pottery making and geological creation was one appreci­ ated by porcelain makers and scientists alike, as historian Robert Finley makes us aware. The picture in plate 4 is not the bay of Balbec, but the bay of Naples. It is the frontispiece of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology6 showing the ruined pillars of an Graeco-Egyptian Temple that Lyell believed had been lifted up by volcanic action from the seabed floor.7 The Wedgewood House, to which Darwin belonged and which funded the Voyage of the Beagle, believed the interior of the earth acted like “a titanic kiln, a heat-generating engine disgorging molten lava.”8 Emile Gallé was immersed in geology. His genius as a glassmaker was preceded by 15 years in which he performed color experiments on the local clays around Nancy.9 One of his masterworks in glass from the year 1900 is entitled Geology [Plate 5]. It depicts the gradual formation of crystals as one moves down its surface, from the radial and rectangular crystals half way down, to the three-dimensional jewels at the base. The rayed crystals are of particular interest because when x-rays were first invented in 1895, clay was a favorite subject of scientific inquiry; soon after, the major porcelain houses in Europe began creating crystalline glazes in which the radial struc­ ture of particles under heat emerged into view, as one can see in vases emerging from Sevres, the leading porcelain house in France, and again from Rorstrand, the leading porcelain house in Sweden. 5 Proust repeatedly stresses Balbec’s continuity with the geology beneath it. Legrandin twice speaks of “the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil of Balbec,” “that oldest bone in the earth’s skeleton.” Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 86, 249. Norman Gothic architecture, Marcel realizes, expresses the moment when “the great phenomena of geology” suddenly blossoms into a plant—suddenly makes the transition to aliveness: “and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing now that . . . upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire.” Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, p. 249. Clay once more acts as the worktable upon which life learns to live. The sense of life emerging out of clay is visible in Gallé’s Jardinière of 1880 in which the faint green surface of the clay vase is covered with fern shaped stem-and-leaf ridges on top of which are painted thistles in green, ash blue grey, and burnt sienna. Life emerging out of clay is dramatically visible in the work of Bernard Palissy, a sixteenth-century Huguenot potter who deeply influenced Gallé: out of the surface of a large ochre basin, for example, emerges what momentarily seem all the early creatures of the earth—lizards, frogs, ferns, worms, crayfish, lobsters, and fish. For an image of this basin, see Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design 1500–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 43. Gallé expresses his admiration for Palissy in “Le Décor Symbolique,” his address to the Stanislas Academy, reprinted in Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé (London: Academy Editions, 1976), 160–61. Tim Newark describes Palissy’s influence on Gallé in Emile Gallé (Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell, 1989), 109. 6 Lyell’s book was first published in 1830; many reprintings and editions followed throughout the nine­ teenth century. 7 Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 77. Finley writes, “Lyell’s examination of black discoloration on the columns of the temple [of Sarapis] had persuaded him that they had been underwater for centuries and that eruption by Vesuvius, followed by earthquake, had raised them to the surface once again” (77). 8 Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 78, 79.

9 Gallé’s work with clay is richly described by Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé, 64–76.

Glass and clay

15

As important as clay is to Proust in the invention of places, it is more important in the creation of persons, as we can see by turning to the high priestess of porcelain, Aunt Léonie. Bed-ridden, Aunt Léonie takes events occurring outside her bedroom window as narrative prompts for the invention of stories. But she is quite insistent that no distracting event should take place outside her window when she is holding a clay plate in her hands, a clay plate over which a story is hovering. These were the only plates which had pictures on them and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the description [la legende], of whichever [plate] might have been sent up to her. She would put on her spectacles and spell out: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” and smile, and say “Very good indeed.”10 “The Arrival of the Unknown Princess.” Very good indeed. Plate 6 shows a plate made by Royal Doulton in their 1909 series on the Arabian Nights. Like Proust’s Balbec vase with its depiction of clay events on its own surface, here we see—on either side of the princess and her escort—huge clay vessels. They announce clay’s habit of self-replication. Equally important, they suggest the immense unknown interior of the Unknown Princess, the secret and sovereign interior that we see again depicted on the Royal Doulton pattern for Ali Baba: clay replicates clay and conjures up the unknowability of other persons [Plate 7]. In fact, the first time we hear about Aunt Léonie’s Arabian Night plates is not in the episode just cited, but in the “Overture” where Marcel first describes the mysterious interior of Swann, his “almost secret existence of a wholly different kind.” These are aspects of his life that no one in the Combray household could ever have inferred. To know about his bohemian-aristocratic life would have been as shocking to them as finding out that after dinner Swann entered the pages of Virgil and dove down into the arms of the sea-nymph Thetis. But now Marcel rejects that Virgilian story for: an image more likely to have occurred to [Aunt Léonie], for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray . . . the thought of having had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved, would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.11 But if it is fair to call Aunt Léonie the High Priestess of Porcelain, it is less because of the Arabian Night Plates than because of the madeleine passage. When we think about the biscuit that prompts memories and narratives, we some­ times forget that there is a substrate, a worktable, that is prior even to the tea-soaked madeline and that is the porcelain tea-cup: And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s 10 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 38. 11 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 14.

16 Elaine Scarry park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.12 Proust makes certain we do not miss this small porcelain lap of creation by likening the Combray teacup to the Japanese porcelain bowl. Three points deserve our notice. The specific clay mineral used in porcelain is kaolin; and kaolin’s major use is the making of paper. Almost every time Proust speaks of porcelain, paper resides nearby. Here what happens to the small bits of paper re-enacts the making of the porcelain itself: when wet, the paper morsels swell and bend, just as the moistened clay did in the making of the bowl. Second, the madeline that has infused into its surface the lime blossoms itself re-enacts the Asian clay bowl that traditionally has a blossom inscribed on its surface. The analogy between dough and clay, kneading dough, kneading clay, is universally recognized: clay that has been fired but unglazed is called “the biscuit.” Proust was acutely aware of the analogy as we can appreciate if we lift ourselves out of Swann’s Way for a moment and go to In a Budding Grove where the young girls in bloom are described first as dough, then as clay: very young girls, in whom the unleavened flesh, like a precious dough, has not yet risen [comme une pâte precieuse travaille encore]. They are malleable, a soft flow of substance kneaded [un flot de matière ductile pétrie] by every passing impres­ sion that possesses them. Each of them looks like a brief succession of little statu­ ettes, representing gaiety, childish solemnity, fond coquettishness, amazement, every one of them modeled by an expression that is full and frank, but fleeting. This plasticity lends much variety and great charm to a girl . . .13 Conceivably, Proust could have been influenced here by the 20-inch high group of biscuit (unglazed porcelain) figures of Agathon Léonard’s The Scarf Dance which received the gold medal at the 1900 Universal Exposition [Plate 8].14 As we learn in Within a Budding Grove, Aunt Leonie underwrites Marcel’s crea­ tions by leaving him her estate: her money, her furniture, her collection of antique Chinese porcelain vases. Proust chooses to focus on the last, describing a moment when Marcel decides to sell a large porcelain vase so that he will have the money to give Gilberte endless days of pleasure, endless bouquets of roses and lilacs. How Proust must have longed to say, give her 1001 days of pleasure. In fact he almost does: Marcel surmises that the antique dealer will give him 1000 francs for the vase; instead he receives 10,000—enabling one thousand and zero days of pleasure. We should perhaps not speak about porcelain without invoking that other high priestess of porcelain, Odette, that hallucinogenic, hypnagogic priestess of porcelain

12 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 14; emphasis added. 13 The transition from dough to clay in this passage, though audible in all translations, is most emphatic in James Grieve’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (New York: Penguin, 2002), 482; emphasis added. 14 Liana Paredes observes that, like many other artists in Paris that year, Léonard was inspired by the American dancer Loïe Fuller. See Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750–2000 (London: Hillwood Museum, 2009), 106.

Glass and clay

17

whose early relation with Swann revolves around a cup of tea that is to this moment in their love affair what “doing a cattleya” soon will be, and that Proust repeatedly links to the madeline teacup. Dressed in “a tea-gown of pink silk,” Odette moves around her apartment kissing each ceramic creature, then pours Swann some tea, then adds some cream which causes her to laugh and exclaim, “A cloud!”15 Like the Combray teacup, which produces villages, gardens, and rivers, this teacup has just produced a cloud, as clouds, in turn, throughout the novel shape-shift into chariots, horses, and gods. Porcelain in Odette’s world is phantasmagoric because it is shape changing. Teacups and bowls become huge Chinese porcelain pots in which palms are planted, or glow from within because they are lanterns, lanterns that—because they are placed on floor, tables, and mantle—keep rising and falling, space shifting as well as shape shifting. It is, in fact, a tea cup that first leads Marcel to the story of Swann and Odette: what carries us from the “Overture” to “Swann’s Way” is the “perfume—of a cup of tea” that prompts “a story which . . . had been told me of a love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born.”16 And many years later, as Marcel walks in the bois, his longing for Odette and the world she represents is focused on that same small porcelain terrain: I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day with one of those women, over a cup of tea, in a little house with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann’s were still in the year after that in which the first part of this story ends) against which would glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening.17 If we rush too quickly by Odette, it is only because she is central to the account of glass coming in the second half of this chapter. But we cannot leave clay without attending to the extraordinary moment when Proust—in describing Marcel’s grandmother—presents her as a clay vessel coming into being on a potter’s wheel. The grandmother is walking in rapid circuits around the Combray garden in a storm, her head thrown back like an open vessel to receive the rain. She is coming to life, and reports, “At last one can breathe!”18 Meanwhile the mud is climbing up her plum-colored skirt, in the same way a vase or pot on a potter’s wheel gradually gains altitude. Proust interrupts the description for a page, then resumes her ceaseless circuits, this time out in the fields, her face still thrown back, open to the sky, a drop of moisture on her face; and now it is this upper part of her torso that acquires the purple (“presque mauves”) and brown coloration of “the tilled fields in autumn.” While in the first passage it was only her feet, then her hem line, then the lower half of her skirt that were coated in clay, now her whole figure is from the earth. And what of the space in between the two passages? It is dedicated to a descrip­ tion of her unknowability, her foreign spirit, that makes the other residents of the

15 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 242.

16 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 122. In this 1922 translation Odette “smiles”; in the Scott

Moncreiff-Terence Kilmartin translation, as in the original French, she laughs. See Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, l982), 242. Here is the French: “et comme il rèpondit ‘crème’, lui dit en riant: ‘Un nuage!’” 17 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 275. 18 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 10.

18 Elaine Scarry Combray household tease her cruelly: “she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father’s family that everyone made a joke of it.” Like the Ali Baba plates that convey the profound and unknowable interior of Swann, clay is here again used to summon a vast and sovereign interior. Because Proust has created here a vase-in­ the-making rather than a finished vase, it is hard to locate a material equivalent. But perhaps Alf Wallander’s 1909 Vase and a Maiden provides a kindred thought [Plate 9, left], as does Gallé’s extraordinary Orpheus and Eurydice vase where Eurydice’s face is thrown back to the sky, like the grandmother’s [Plate 9, right]. In his notes on the making of the vase, Gallé described Eurydice as created out of the materials of the earth: “Eurydice . . . lies faint in a sooty brown crystal.”19 Batilde, like Eurydice, is beloved of god, for her last name is Amédée. The “Orpheus and Eurydice” vase carries us to Proust’s reliance on glass for achiev­ ing the sovereignty of individual interiors, for sequestering an aura and atmosphere around persons, and for carrying out color experiments. We have just traced an arc in clay from Balbec’s “old piece of Norman pottery” to the grandmother rising into life on a mystical potter’s wheel; we will now see the same arc from places to persons in glass. In Place Names: the Name, Florence, Venice, and Parma, along with the towns of Brittany, are all designated glass vases. Parma seems to Marcel “compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft”; he then repeats the description, “I was to inhabit a dwelling that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft.” Like a Gallé vase with a botani­ cally accurate lily on its surface, Florence is “a town miraculously embalmed, and flower-like, since it was called the City of Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the Flower.” The acute accent on Vitré “barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges.” The rivulets of Quimperlé “thread[ed] their pearls upon a grey background, like the pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into blunt points of tarnished silver.” Lamballe hovers between glass and kaolin: “gentle Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey.”20 “Each town name in Italy and northern France is not “an inaccessible ideal but . . . a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge,” an enclosed pack­ age of air. Marcel enters the vase either by shrinking himself into a “minute person­ age” or—as in the case of azure-emerald-amethyst Venice—by retaining his human size and shouldering his way through the tight aperture, “penetrating indeed between those ‘rocks of amethyst’ . . . by a supreme muscular effort . . . stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room . . . I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere.”21 When Marcel becomes too sickly to travel, he regards his Parisian home as a prosaic space of loss. But in fact, the retinue of vase-like distant cities will prove to have just been a rehearsal for Proust’s tour de force evocation of Paris. Waiting for Gilberte on the Champs Elysées, Marcel never knows when, or from what direction,

19 Gallé’s writes of the vase in Ecrits (his notes submitted to the Jury of the 1889 Universal Exposition), “It has caught my fancy to work with awesome onyxes and to wrap a vase in streams of lava and pitch . . . to use a flaming meteor and the gasses of hell to separate Orpheus from Eurydice who lies faint in a sooty brown crystal” (Gallé, quoted by William Warmus in Emile Gallé: Dreams into Glass [Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 1984], 31). 20 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 251, 252. 21 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 252, 254.

Glass and clay

19

she will appear. When she suddenly does materialize, it is always as though she has arrived upon the lustrous surface of a glass vase. At one moment, out of nowhere, the reddish-haired girl turns up against the background of a glistening fountain, as though she were another Eurydice bodied forth on its silver spray. Another time she slips on a sheet of ice and glides on the silver ground toward Marcel with her arms outstretched: Suddenly the sky was rent in two: . . . I had just seen, like a miraculous sign, Mademoiselle’s blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, enlivened by the cold, by being late, by her anxiety for a game; shortly before she reached me, she slipped on a piece of ice and . . . it was with outstretched arms that she smil­ ingly advanced, as though to embrace me. ‘Bravo! Bravo! that’s splendid;’ . . . exclaimed [a nearby] lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs-Elysées, their thanks to Gilberte for having come.22 Paris, like a piece of spun barley-sugar, and like Lamballe, Vitré, Venice, and Parma, has glassy contours, contours magnified by the treasured objects Gilberte bestows on Marcel—the agate marble that duplicates the color of her eyes, the frothy pack­ age of white wax and “billows of pink ribbon” that, vase-like, enclose the essay on Racine. When historian Albert Sorel reviewed Proust’s translations and introductions to Ruskin, he wrote a description of Proust’s prose that moved Proust to write a letter expressing elation and thanks: Proust, Sorel said, “writes a flexible French, free in movement and all-enveloping, with countless bursts of hues and colours, yet it remains translucent and, at times, puts you in mind of the glass work in which Gallé encloses his leafy traceries.”23 As Gilberte on the Champs Elysees makes clear, by the time of Swann’s Way, it is not just Proust’s sentence style but his conception of persons and places that are vase-like. From the overture forward, Swann is pictured as a glass vessel, “a transparent envelope”: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him . . . In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmo­ niously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.24 Into this transparent envelope (as though Swann were a vase waiting to be filled), Proust immediately positions a bouquet of herbs and leaves and berries, for the  sentence-after-next ends: “this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant

22 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 257; and for other details in this paragraph, see 255, 264, 265. 23 “Introduction,” Marcel Proust: the Critical Heritage, ed. Leighton Hodson (London: Routledge, 1989, 1997), 7. 24 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 15; emphasis added.

20 Elaine Scarry with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon.” Though Proust’s reliance on Gallé is vast, spirited, and loving, it can be briefly sampled here by a single place, the aquatic gardens of the Vivonne, and then a single person, Odette. Proust describes the pleasure Marcel takes watching a glass jar suspended in the stream. The jar looks like solidified water; conversely the water (both within the jar and without) looks like flowing crystal: I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their turn were enclosed, at once “containers” whose transparent sides were like solidi­ fied water and “contents” plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking than they would have done standing upon a table . . . showing it as perpetually in flight between the impalpable water . . . and the insoluble glass . . .25 The passage at once summons Gallé’s underwater vases, like the example from 1876 where it is not clear whether the vase is in the water or the water in the vase [Plate 10]. The lithe body of the self-delighting carp makes three turns to accommodate the upward swirl of the water, a unitary silver rotation of liquid that seems to make  the  vase—along with its gossamer fins and aquatic grasses—spin before our eyes  (while the fish itself, like a kestrel hovering in the wind, holds steady). Chaste arrays of blacks, grays, and bronzes only very rarely give way to peach (the center of the carp’s eye), to violet-blue (an occasional bubble or petal), and to aqua (the bottom-most plane of glass). A puzzling feature of the aquatic garden is Proust’s account of the solitary water lily that the current never allows to rest: it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might finally be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before moving off once again.26 I have not, nor has anyone I know, ever seen a water lily caught in a current, dragged back and forth between two banks, “eternally repeating its double journey.” But its strange fatality becomes immediately comprehensible if one looks to Gallé [Plate 11], for indeed the gorgeous white water lily pressing up against one bank, will, when the vase is rotated 180°, drift to the other side of the vase, where Gallé will inevitably have placed an identical blossom, only altering slightly its posture or perspective. And 25 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 183–4; emphasis added. 26 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 183–4; emphasis added.

Glass and clay

21

when one continues to rotate the vase another 180°, back to the original bank comes the water lily. The flower appears to be relentlessly ferried back and forth from one side to the other. The exquisite botanical precision of Gallé’s meadow flowers, garden flowers, and hothouse flowers is not what he writes about in his submission notes to the exhibition jurors. What he instead documents are his astonishing achievements in sequestering color, and Proust re-enacts Gallé’s techniques in his own acts of sequestering color. The passage above continues with an array of water lilies that have precise equivalents in Gallé’s many water lily vases: I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a straw­ berry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. . . . Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely care.27 From places-as-vases, we now turn to a solitary instance of a person-as-vase. We last saw Odette moving amidst her porcelain teacups, giant palm pots, glowing porcelain lanterns. Swann repeatedly watches Odette through glass, both at the Verduins and at her own apartment, as though she were in a vase. Proust’s full reliance on Gallé becomes most clear when Odette enters the contracted envelope of air provided by the carriage. Gallé by his own account spent more than 35 years studying orchids, even writ­ ing a scholarly article on the orchids specific to the Lorraine region of France. This particular one—regarded by museum curators as one of the great masterpieces—is a specific kind of orchid whose name we all know: it is a cattleya [Plate 12, left]. As museum curator William Warmus observes, the vase is comprised of multiple acts of glassmaking: the vase is “blown, overlaid, cut, engraved”—in order to create a sense of “deep space” with some flowers reaching out and others “falling back” into the depths beyond our reach,28 depths we encounter again on the other side [Plate 12, right]. In the cattleya passage, Swann and Odette together inhabit the enclosed space of a carriage. The aura of cattleyas envelopes Odette who is dressed in black velvet with inserts of white silk, swan feathers, and lace. The aura is achieved by placing the cat­ tleyas at three exactly-registered distances from her body, the first a cluster held in her hand that reaches out to us and to Swann; a second resides beneath her veil but is raised three inches from her body for the blossoms are poised on the tips of swan feathers; a third falls back in deep space, for it resides next to her skin. He climbed after her into the carriage. . . . She was holding in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was dressed,  beneath her cloak, in a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side to reveal a large triangle of white silk skirt, and with a yoke, also of 27 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 185. 28 William Warmus, Emile Gallé, 100.

22

Elaine Scarry white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few more cattleyas.29

Gallé, in a speech to the Stanislas Academy, gave a description of orchids that may be not only the single best description that has ever been given of an orchid, but perhaps the single best description that has ever been given of Odette: We confess our preferences for good old plants, cherished by our grandmothers. But the rapid modern current is deeper and more powerful than the gentle brook of our predilections. It sweeps everything along with it. It tosses us—as the last bouquet of Ophelia—the orchid, with its richness, its inconceivable strangeness of forms, of species, of perfumes, colors, caprices, pleasures, and disquieting mysteries.30 Odette and the cattleya are each like the last bouquet of Ophelia. The color of orchids and violets cling to her, envase and envelop her. Even when there is no glass, no lace veil, no lavender parasol. Even when she walks in the open air of the bois [Plate 13]. I met Mme Swann on foot . . . enveloped also in the artificial warmth of her own house, which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freez­ ing air, the naked boughs, had the same charming effect of . . . living actually in a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this woman, as had in the vases and jardinières of her drawing-room, beside the blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered sofa, the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow. . . .31 This is a passage that then carries us to Odette’s porcelain tea-cup, the orange-red­ pink shooting star of chrysanthemums at twilight, and Marcel’s longing for the pleasure of her presence. When Proust, who repeatedly commissioned vases from Gallé as presents for friends,32 at last named him in his pages—as he does late in Within A Budding Grove, and again in The Guermantes Way—it is in each instance at a moment of fallen snow, in passages that summon the work of Auguste and Antonin Daum, who, after Gallé 29 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 253; emphasis added. 30 Emile Gallé, “Discours de Réception,” L’Académie de Stanislas, May 17, 1900, reprinted in Philippe, Emile Gallé, 161; translated from the French and emphasis added. 31 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 253; emphasis added. 32 Garner, Emile Gallé, 128. Robert de Montesquiou’s 1897 essay “Orfèvre et Verrier: Gallé et Lalique” invokes Florence and Venice, chrysanthemums and A Thousand and One Nights, and conveys his sense of how one should regard “the gift” of a Gallé vase: “Such Gallés are the only gifts one still dares to present to kings, who count themselves happy and proud to take them jealously into their possession for the immortal honor of their museums. Yes, and it is fitting to here announce just in passing—since the noble modesty of the maker has left it nearly unknown—that it was two vases by Gallé that France offered to the tzar, to relieve him of his painful memories and as priceless lacrymatories that might at last unburden him of his tears.”. See “Orfèvre et Verrier: Gallé et Lalique,” in Roseaux pensants (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1897), 176.

Glass and clay

23

died, continued his virtuosity in glass, sometimes, as here, eliminating all color, rely­ ing solely on black and white [Plate 14]. In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, an encrusted vein of snow; and even in the Champs-Elysées, instead of the girls one waits to see, nothing but solitary sparrows.33

33 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), 407; see also vol. 1, Within a Budding Grove, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 860.

2

The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s

fabrication of site

Qi Zhu

Ox, the treasure of a farmer.

With great diligence yet without a helpful ox,

the farmer toils in the fields

early in the morning in vain.

One ox is half of the family.1 These two maxims suggest the important role an ox played in the traditional agri­ cultural society. However, the story of constructing a psycho-physical hybrid image of an ox in the Hongcun village in the Huizhou region of China can be told under a different grand narrative. The term grand narrative (or meta-narrative) was proposed by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1984 to refer to a story that speaks not just about one instance but about all-encompassing historical concepts.2 Professor Marco Frascari formulated a grand narrative to capture his inexhaustible inquiries into the tectonics of creating meaningful architecture. Frascari’s narrative is a result of multidisciplinary studies. He investigated the structural anthropologists’ exploration of how a meaningful structure is formed in society, as exemplified by Claude Lévi­ Strauss’s work, The Raw and the Cooked, and probed how one uses one’s perceptions to make sense of one’s surroundings, as explicated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. Frascari also studied how an adept craftsman handles materials to make meaningful details, likening it to the way a chef slices celery or car­ rots at a certain angle to imbue an edible object with a specific texture and taste. In his later years, he became fascinated with neuroscience and how meaning is generated in our emotional brain.3 After many interrelated studies over an extended period, Frascari stated, “We make architecture, but architecture makes us.”4 1 The Chinese text for these proverbs is ⢋ᱟߌᇦᇍˈᴹऔᰐ⢋ⲭ䎧ᰙDŽаཤ⢋ˈॺњᇦ,translated by the author. 2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 27. 3 Such as Harry Francis Mallgrave’s, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Also see Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) and John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 4 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 66.

The fabulous ox in Fengshui

25

For Frascari, there is a fundamental reciprocal relationship between architecture and those who inhabit it, which can be seen as simultaneously forming and being formed. These looped processes of formation and transformation are intensely physi­ cal and deeply emotional. Thus, the mutual relationship between architecture and the public that inhabits it should not be based merely on achieving visual delight. In fact, both architects and the public are called upon to resist succumbing to the eye candy— pristine renderings generated by digital algorithms—that proliferate on architectural magazine covers. Frascari’s grand narrative calls for the creation of “non-trivial” architecture.5 He suggests that, like non-trivial love, such architecture—and to a larger extent, such environments—can only be brought forth through the active engagement of bodily senses, along with rich storytelling. At the community college where I teach, archi­ tectural design tends to be a technical and pragmatic enterprise. Even so, it is the story it tells that engages the imagination of students and faculty. Many architectural practitioners have also expressed how important stories are in the delivery of a good piece of architecture. This chapter intends to further illuminate the mutual relationship between the environment and those who experience it, first by looking at experiments conducted by psychologists on this topic, and then through the example of a Fengshui master in the fifteenth century. I will examine how he planned a village through the storytelling process. The environment he created through the confabulation of a wonderful story has since sustained many generations of village residents.

We make architecture, but architecture makes us An illustration by Frascari published in Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing and entitled “We make architecture, but architecture makes us” reveals the relationship between architecture and those who inhabit it [Plate 15]. The main structure of the drawing is a portal, with two Greek Corinthian columns support­ ing a lintel. A puppet is suspended, in a twisted and slightly sagging posture, by a few strings affixed to the lintel. The puppet represents an architect. One hand holds a drafting instrument (a square), while the other grasps a drawing of a building elevation. The architecture, functioning as the puppeteer, controls the motions and probably emotions of the architect. Ironically, the puppet as the architect creates the puppeteer as the architectural frame. The broader relationship between the environment and living creatures has been widely studied by psychologists. The concept that the “environment makes us” can be understood through the theory of classical conditioning, first formulated by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in 1901.6 Pavlov discovered that dogs would auto­ matically generate certain cognitive and physiological reactions to environmental stimuli. A contemporary example of the environment conditioning human behavior is the use of mobile phones by individuals, whose immersion in texting and online surfing shapes an almost autistic form of public behavior.7 5 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 3, 7–9, 15, 30, 36, 37, 40, 41, 58, 70, 84, 96, 112. 6 As discussed in John G. Benjafield’s, A History of Psychology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 145. 7 James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.

26 Qi Zhu At the same time, we shape and reshape our daily environment. The concept that “we make our environment” can be understood through the theory of operant (or instrumental) conditioning, which stresses voluntary changes in behavior, was first made popular by American psychologist B.F. Skinner.8 Skinner drew on the work of an earlier psychologist, Edward Thorndike, who studied how a cat learned to reward itself by opening a complex puzzle box through an iterative process of trial and error. These studies demonstrated that animals are equipped with the power of reasoning to affect their surroundings. Although animals can shape their settings, human society is an even greater force in changing the environment to meet our needs and desires. We do this with a large array of instruments—ranging from our simple skilled hands to increasingly powerful machines and technological tools. These are examples of oper­ ant conditioning because, unlike the automatic responses of classical conditioning, they are voluntarily produced consequences in the environment. In 1953, the American psychologist Richard Solomon and his associates conducted an experiment that combined classical and operant conditioning with disturbing results.9 In one group, dogs were put in boxes that had two compartments, with an operable gate in the middle. When a light was turned off in one compartment, each dog had a few seconds to jump into the other lit compartment; if the dog did not jump an electrical shock was applied to the floor. Following the theory of classical condi­ tioning, after a few trials, the dogs learned to jump into the other side to avoid being shocked as soon as they saw the light off. Solomon conditioned another group of dogs given no means to escape when the electrical shocks were activated. After a few trials, these dogs became accustomed to the pain-inflicting environment. Even when these dogs were later given a means to make a voluntary escape, they took the shocks rather than avoid them. The behavioral abnormality produced by their previous adverse conditioning was highly maladaptive. These dogs also expressed depressive behavior at the end of the experiment. Just as harmful conditioning brought damage to the dogs, similar conditioning can happen in human society when people unconsciously and habitually are subjected to adverse architectural or environmental conditioning. In his book Eleven Exercises, and in his lectures, Frascari repeatedly emphasized that architects not only make drawings for the construction of buildings, but they participate in the praxis of world­ making.10 In this sense, the uncomfortable posture of the puppet in Plate 15 might illustrate the harmful effects of adverse conditioning. The puppet could represent not only the architect, but also the daily inhabitants of the building. His body is restrained by the strings, so he can only take in the architecture visually, and not through other sensory stimuli. He thus lacks emotional satisfaction. The key effort lies in how to make a dwelling positively support and condition both body and mind. How can architects, clients and builders, and other architec­ tural enthusiasts not inadvertently make a negative contribution to the process of world-making? This is a big question. Frascari led his students to create non-trivial

8 B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1953), 59–60. 9 R.L. Solomon and L.C. Wynne, “Traumatic Avoidance Learning: Acquisition in Normal Dogs,” Psychological Monographs 76, no. 4 (1953): 1–19. See also R.L. Solomon and L.C. Wynne, “Traumatic Avoidance Learning: the Outcomes of Several Extinction Procedures with Dogs,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 48, no. 2, (1953): 295. 10 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 2, 38.

The fabulous ox in Fengshui

27

architectural drawings as a way to avoid the creation of dreadful environments, and therefore adverse conditioning of the inhabitants.11 Non-trivial architectural draw­ ings require the embodiment of all the bodily senses to tell a story, as Frascari states: For a building to exist, someone has to tell its facture in a “formative storytell­ ing”. The story is told by a hesitant delineation of many lines. A hesitant set of lines is a sensible and sensitive form of drawing, dwelling constantly on pensive borders, where the drafting and writing of lines are buzzing backward through history and igniting genetic and anagogic drawings. These lines are a way of reaching what it is beyond the functional quotidian.12 These lines, drawn deliberately and synthesizing various sensory and cognitive inputs, in essence, make a meaningful narration. The process of storytelling thus can create a non-trivial architectural drawing that ultimately leads to the construction of non­ trivial architecture. Historically, the making of architecture did not commence solely on the drawing board. It originated as well in the lived environment. However, the making of a non­ trivial environment is analogous to the making of a non-trivial drawing. It asks for the fabrication of a wonderful story, in addition to satisfying daily needs. The efficacy of a well-fabricated story can put us in touch with the physical and cognitive potential of the environment. The following Fengshui story provides an example of how a fan­ tastic story was confabulated, leading to the founding of a meaningful architectural environment.

The confabulation of Fengshui: The ox and Hongcun village Fengshui, literally translated as “wind and water,” is probably the longest-living tradition of environmental planning. It is also regarded as geomancy and is widely practiced in China. The Reverend M.T. Yates introduced Fengshui to the West in the late nineteenth century in the first article in the English language on the subject, Ancestor Worship and Feng-shui. In his article, Yates described Fengshui as part sci­ ence and part superstition, but noted, “even the scoffers noticed that geomantically chosen sites were very attractive.”13 Hongcun village, located in the Huizhou region of China, was planned according to Fengshui principles. The story of the village’s establishment was first told by the Wang family (⊚∿ᇦ᯿), the founding family of the village. According to the genealogy of the Wang family, in 1403–24, the seventy-sixth generation head of the family clan was Wang Siji (⊚ᙍ⍾), who invited a famous Fengshui master, He Keda (օਟ䗮), from the nearby town of Xiu Ning (Ձᆱ) to help with the planning of the village.14 According to various Chinese sources, Master He, spent 10 years in intensive observation of the bends, junctures, and branches of the water courses; the mountain

11 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 8–9.

12 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 68.

13 Andrew L. March, The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic Thought (New York: Praeger,

1974), 255. 14 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun. Zhongguo Lao Cun. Di 1 ban. ed. (Nanjing Shi: Jiangsu jiao yu chu ban she, 2005), 7–8.

28 Qi Zhu

ridges at the site; and the condition of the earth, air, water, trees, and soil, including the aspects of taste, smell, and texture. He observed all the biological organisms and inanimate elements, down to the minutest magnetic fields. Having done all that, he visualized the image of a crouching ox.15 He decided to plan the village according to this representation of an ox. Two old trees located in the northern Leigang (䴧዇) hills were seen as the horns of the ox, and the houses and buildings as its body cells. A half-moon shaped lake was dug on the location of an existing spring to form the first of the four compartments of the ox’s stomach. On further advice from the geomancer, a meandering channel that brought fresh water to the village from a nearby stream, named Xixi (㾯ⓚ), was constructed to compose the intestines of the ox. Four wooden bridges were built over the Xixi stream and Yangzhan River (㖺Ḹ⋣), which flowed from the west to the south side of the site and represented the feet of the ox. A local rhyme was made about this site: Hill as the head of the ox, trees are the horns; houses as the body and bridges as the foot.16 Throughout the next hundred years, generations of the Wang clan continued to expand. New houses were built along the water sources and were conjured as the ox’s intestines and the stomach. Later, around 1607, during the Ming Dynasty, a few fami­ lies within the Wang clan dug another artificial lake at the south side of the village. This lake became the last of the four compartments of the ox’s stomach.17 Visualizing the site as an ox was a mysterious fabrication by the geomancer [Figure  2.1]. If we were to investigate the site, we would see hardly any obvious physical resemblance to an ox. A great leap of imagination is required to visualize the form of the site as an ox. The geomancer deliberately confabulated a story, or found­ ing myth, about the site by cleverly employing the powerful cultural symbol of an ox. The ox played an essential role for farming families in the harvesting of crops in traditional Chinese agrarian society, and thus was greatly venerated. The Chinese leg­ endary ruler called the Divine Farmer, who later became the patron god for farmers and taught the ancient Chinese how to practice agriculture, was portrayed in ancient literature as a horned ox-headed figure. In the Book of Changes, the ox was repre­ sented with the Kun (ඔ) trigram, which has three broken lines stacked one on top of the other, symbolizing earth. In yin yang theory, earth can overcome water. Thus, the Fengshui master cogently reasoned that embedding the image of an ox within the site could control a future flood. The ox also was one of the most beloved subjects for traditional Chinese painting. One renowned example is a painting by Han Huang (丙 ⓹) in the Tang Dynasty (618–907), entitled “The Five Oxen,” which depicts the ox as a popular cultural symbol of fecundity. Using the fabulous ox to convey a story about the site was intended to infuse the site with corresponding powers. Furthermore, even though the design of the site was conceived of as an ox, the site was not built as a visual copy of the ox. The correlation was not with its external 15 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun, 8. 16 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun, 9. 17 Yihui Jin, 10.

The fabulous ox in Fengshui

29

Figure 2.1 Collage by author demonstrating Fengshui planning strategy.

shape, but with its internal workings. For example, the geomancer associated the ox’s digestive system to the layout of the digestive system of the village. Such a parallel not only solved the village’s water supply, drainage system, and firefighting system, but it also may have inspired the emotional belief that living in a place where even tough, poorly digestible intake could be turned into nourishment would naturally bless the villagers. Such an emotional bonding helped the villagers respect and diligently main­ tain the water channels and the entire village site. The cognitive powers generated by the story have resonated for centuries within the emotional brains of its residents. After five centuries, the village is still well pre­ served, and, in the year 2000, Hongcun was listed among UNESCO World Heritage Sites [Figure 2.2]. The confabulation of a meaningful story as the guide for the establishment and development of Hongcun not only created a non-trivial environ­ ment, but also organically supported the growth of the village and the development of its regional identity. Conceiving our environment through storytelling allows us to negate the “immediate rational,” so as to allow the “mediated sensual,”18 and thus to participate vicariously in the place-making process, as Frascari has often remarked. Returning to the grand narrative by Frascari—“We make architecture, but archi­ tecture make us”—and contemplating the depressed dogs as well as the fabulous ox embodied in the Hongcun village site, this chapter has emphasized the critical reciprocity and interdependence between a built environment and the people who

18 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 114.

30 Qi Zhu

Figure 2.2 Hongcun Village in Hiuzhou Region, China. Photograph by author

construct it. For architects and architectural designers, the task of creating a meaning­ ful environment requires the unification of the seemingly contradictory polarity of mediated sensorial inputs and logical design thinking. One solution to this inherent paradox, as illustrated by Hongcun village, is to confabulate a fantastic story infused with cultural memories and cognitive potentials. The process of making up such a story weaves sensory perceptions and rational thinking into a coherent whole, thus integrating newly built edifices into the larger existing physical environment and cultural context.

3

The “uncharted tides” A literary map of Saint Petersburg Angeliki Sioli

Before maps became associated with diagrammatic representations of land (or sea) demarcating physical features in geometric space, or with collections of data displaying spatial arrangements and distributions over an area, the word was also used to describe the human face. Maps were literally physiognomies revealing the interconnections between humans and their experiential worlds—at one time mythical or religious—and grasping the general appearance and feeling of what they were depicting. It is in this sense of the word that I venture to present a map of the European city of Saint Petersburg: a remarkable urban environment of early modernity designed ex-nihilo on rational and functionalist principles. It is a map that attempts to reveal the face of the city—the general feeling of being in the place—as this is changing over time. To this end the map is composed of literary descriptions: it is a map charted by words. I see literature —the mode of storytelling par excellence—as capable of mapping specific but elusive quali­ ties of the urban environment, qualities that analytical and scientific tools of represen­ tation cannot record: a place’s atmosphere, mood, and inherent mythologies. This literary map of Saint Petersburg is compiled from descriptions of the city’s atmosphere at five distinct moments in time. It is drawn by the narrations of Alexander Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale” (1833), Nikolai Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect” (1835), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1922) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951). These literary pieces are selected particularly because their narratives draw heavily upon the carto­ graphic, topological, and topographic reality of the city. The (nonetheless) fictional plots and characters disclose for an architectural discourse how impressive public architecture, city landmarks, large-scale public spaces, streets and squares—all those elements that figure in any conventional map—instead of being understood as points or surfaces in neutral homogeneous space and indicating merely location, are perceived by the city’s inhabitants and are appropriated in their everyday experience. Dwelling on the general prevailing atmospheres of the city—as felt by the characters in the different time periods and sociopolitical conditions the literary pieces depict—this alternative map portrays the drastically changing lived experience of Saint Petersburg over the course of almost a century. It begins in 1824 and reaches 1916, when the city’s name has just been wiped off the world map: changed two years earlier to Leningrad. Petersburg enters literature for the very first time through Pushkin’s narrative poem, “The Bronze Horseman.”1 The title of the poem refers to an equestrian statue of Tsar 1 Russian literature was still relatively new when Alexander Pushkin was born. Only a few poets, playwrights, and historians preceded him, and the literary language itself was still evolving. See Elaine

32 Angeliki Sioli

Peter the Great, founder of the city, situated in Saint Petersburg’s Senate Square. It was a statue commissioned by Catherine the Great and created over the course of 12 years (1770–82), but came to be known as the Bronze Horseman because of Pushkin’s poem. The poem begins by recounting the foundation of the city in 1703: how the Tsar stood by the shore of the Baltic Sea and imagined the birth of his Petersburg. Rapidly moving forward an entire century to focus on Petersburg of 1824, it captures in a lyrical way one of the most particular characteristics of the urban environment, one that dramatically alters its cartography but is nevertheless extremely difficult to map: the river’s “uncharted tides.”2 The Neva River—around which the city unfolds—has flooded more than three hundred times since Petersburg’s founding, causing untold damages. The inundation of November 1824 is still considered one of the most catastrophic floods in the city’s history, with numerous human casualties and the destruction of more than three hundred buildings. Pushkin embarks on his description of the flood by first presenting the city under a light of admiration and excitement, weaving a eulogy for its beauty and architecture: a tactical move to avoid the tsarist censorship.3 In this initial description the Admiralty building—topped with a dominant golden spire and focal point of three of the city’s main streets—is rendered in poetic language as shining in the night, offering security and guidance as darkness falls. But after this initial praise a radical change of scenery is described. The author focuses on the devastating consequences of the flood: the loss of life and the damage caused to the buildings. Squares and streets resemble lakes with stagnant water, and the famous Winter Palace—home today to the Hermitage museum—appears as a steep rock facing the edge of the sea: Into the squares to lakes dilated, Debouched, like riverbeds inflated, What had been streets. The palace stood Like a lone cliff the waters riding.4 Eugene, the story’s main character, loses his beloved Parasha during the flood and his mental state is profoundly troubled. Standing by the foot of the Bronze Horseman he blames the city’s founder—“the one by whose portentous will / The city by the sea was planted”—for his tremendous personal loss.5 While his sanity is jeopardized the day after the flood, the city returns to its normal everyday life: . . . Dawn’s ray From pallid banks of weary gray Gleamed down upon the silent city And found of yesterday’s alarm No trace. . . .

2 3 4 5

Blair, Literary Petersburg, A Guide to the City and its Writers (New York: The Little Bookroom, 2006), 15. Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” in Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, translated by Walter Arndt (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1984), 426. Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 10. Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 431. Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 437.

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And all returned to former calm. Down streets re-won for old endeavor Men walk as callously as ever, The morning’s civil service troops, Emerged from their nocturnal coops, Are off to work. Cool tradesmen labor To open cellar, vault, and store, Robbed by Nevá the night before6 The atmosphere of Petersburg the day after the flood is that of a callous relentless beauty, a daring act of human defiance to nature that often strikes back. This is a lit­ erary image hinting at the ethos that individual will and personal desire have always been perceived in Petersburg’s history as subaltern to the common good and social progress. It is this ethos on which Pushkin based his poem and other Petersburg authors their stories, as Elaine Blair discusses in her work Literary Petersburg, A Guide to the City and its Writers (2006).7 This ethos, even myth, has haunted the city since its very foundation when thousands of people died as a result of the harsh construction conditions, obeying without complaint the authoritarian demands of the Tsar and his engineers. “The Bronze Horseman” ends with the image of Peter’s statue coming to life and chasing Eugene through the city’s streets, threatening to kill him. Some years later, Nikolai Gogol would further elaborate on the menacing atmos­ phere prevailing in the city’s streets. Although when Gogol arrived at the city the streets “were illuminated by thousands of oil lamps and the recent innovation, gaslights,”8 they were still in the aftermath of the Decembrist uprising, during which protesters had gathered on Senate Square in 1825 to demand a constitution from Nicholas I. The Tsar ordered his troops to surround the demonstrators and fire on the crowd. More than one thousand people were killed, and several dozen of the organizers—who were mostly from the educated upper classes—were sentenced to exile, hard labor, or death. After these events the participation of intellectuals in public dissent ceased and aristocratic social life became—at least in the surface— more orderly.9 This discrepancy between how the city appears on the surface and what is actually taking place in the background is Gogol’s main focus in one of his Petersburg Tales, titled “Nevsky Prospect.” The story describes the atmosphere of the street in the year 1836. Nevsky Prospect was and still is the city’s most famous and fashionable thoroughfare: a street 115 feet wide and almost 3 miles long, running in a straight line from the Admiralty to Znamenskaya Square, one of Petersburg’s important public spaces.10 The story’s opening pages resemble a street diary that captures the vividness of the place, tracing the prevailing smells, the characters and figures that populate it,

6 Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 434–5. 7 Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 12. 8 Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Free Press, 1995), 27. 9 Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 29. 10 Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Notes,” in Andrei Bely, Petersburg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 297.

34 Angeliki Sioli as well as its dominant colors: “What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single day and night.”11 The author records the different activities during the day but also the different prevailing feelings: how serenity and stillness dominate in the late after­ noon, how festivity emerges later in the evening. As the plot unfolds, Gogol—like Pushkin—undermines the initial sense of festivity and liveliness of the street. The story focuses on two friends who, while walking on Nevsky, catch sight of two extraordinarily beautiful women. They decide to follow and court them, encouraged discreetly by them, and split up as the two women go in separate directions. The literary description elaborates on the women’s divine beauty, their elegance and charm, only later to portray both men’s disappointment as they realize that the first woman is a prostitute in a public house, trying to lure a potential client; and the second one is married to an austere and protective German husband. While neither of the two heroes’ romantic desire is ultimately fulfilled, Gogol makes one of the two return back to Nevsky Prospect to find the emerging mood of the street diametrically different: But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the bridges, . . . and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything not as it really looks.12 With Dostoyevsky, a unique mapping opportunity is offered as his renowned Crime and Punishment unfolds in more infamous parts of the city: neighborhoods with public houses and prostitutes, bars frequented by drunks and criminals; areas where poor people, usually immigrants from the provinces, dwell. Haymarket Square and the surrounding area emerge through the pages of the novel in July of 1865: The heat in the streets was stifling. The stuffiness, the jostling crowds, the bricks and mortar, scaffolding and dust everywhere, and that peculiar summer stench so familiar to everyone who cannot get away from St. Petersburg into the country, all combined to aggravate the disturbance of the young man’s nerves. The intoler­ able reek from the public houses, so numerous in that part of the city, and the sight of the drunken men encountered at every turn, even though this was not a holiday, completed the mournfully repellent picture.13 This repellent image emerges not only from the city’s decadent areas. Dostoyevsky’s hero, the university student Raskolnikov, troubled by the social injustices over the lower class and his personal ethical dilemmas, reads even the city’s most spectacular view in a skeptical way: 11 Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” in The Collected Tales, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 240. 12 Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” 271–2. 13 Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, translated by Jessie Coulson, edited by George Gibian (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 2.

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He was on the Nikolaevsky Bridge . . . walked a few steps, and turned his face towards the Neva, looking towards the Palace. There was not a cloud in the sky and the water, unusually for the Neva, looked almost blue. The dome of the cathedral, which is seen at its best from this point, not more than twenty paces towards the chapel from the center of the bridge, shone through the clear air, and every detail of its ornament was distinct. . . . He stood for a long time gazing steadily into the distance; this spot was particularly familiar to him. A hundred times, while he was at the university, had he stopped at this very place, usually on his way home, to fix his eyes on the truly magnificent view and wonder each time at the confused and indescribable sensation it woke in him. An inexplicable chill always breathed on him from the superb panorama, for him a deaf and voiceless spirit filled the splendid picture . . . Each time he marveled at his gloomy and mysterious impression, and then, mistrustful of himself, deferred consideration of the riddle to some future time.14 Saint Isaac’s Cathedral with its enormous golden dome emerges in all its brilliance in front of Raskolnikov’s eyes but the impression gained—even before committing the hideous crime that significantly blurs his consciousness as the plot unfolds—is always dark and pessimistic. The everyday struggles of the lower classes find no expression in the luxurious and grandiose architecture of this city; and, as Dostoyevsky depicts, while they become gradually inured to its Western character, it still leaves them with a sense of detachment and bewilderment. Dostoyevsky’s contemporary Leon Tolstoy explicitly asserted in his novels that a Russian could not feel at home in Petersburg.15 In the early years of the twentieth century, though, ideas about Petersburg began to shift: an admiration for the city and for its cosmopolitan spirit slowly developed among the writers who lived there.16 The Western culture that Petersburg represented no longer seemed so foreign to Russians.17 This change in the atmosphere of the city is tentatively captured in Andrei Bely’ s novel Petersburg. The novel describes the city in October of 1905, an eventful month with strikes and public protests manifesting the political tension between the middle class and the aristocracy. This tension forced the Tsar in power, Nicholas II, to grant the country a constitution, and led to the first revolution of St. Petersburg in December 1905.18 In this turmoil the city streets, instead of conveying an atmosphere of deceit, fear or bewilderment, were actively appropriated by the citizens as meeting places for politi­ cal purposes. Their extensive length enabled massive demonstrations and gatherings, and the Western character of the city was appreciated as a trigger, reinforcing the working class’s demand for change and a different future. The streets belonged to the crowds and their European character was a hope for them and Russia, as Bely puts it somewhat hesitatingly: Nevsky Prospect possesses a striking attribute: it consists of a place for the circulation of the public. . . . Nevsky Prospect, like any prospect, is a public 14 15 16 17 18

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 95–6. Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 59. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 12. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 12. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 71.

36 Angeliki Sioli prospect, that is: a prospect for the circulation of the public (not of air, for instance) . . . Nevsky Prospect is rectilineal (just between us), because it is a European pros­ pect; and any European prospect is not merely a prospect, but (as I have already said) a prospect that is European, because . . . yes . . . For this reason, Nevsky Prospect is a rectilineal prospect. Nevsky Prospect is a prospect of no small importance in this un-Russian—but nonetheless—capital city. Other Russian cities are a wooden heap of hovels.19 Following Bely, authors like Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam did not identify ominous elements in the city’s beauty.20 By the time Nabokov had his first memories of Petersburg, later recorded in his autobiographical novel Speak, Memory, a “distant war” was taking place (this is how the author refers to World War I). Nabokov, at the age of 17 during the winter of 1916, reveals an erotic and particularly human face of Saint Petersburg. Falling in love with Tamara, a year younger than himself, the author maps meticulously all the different museums of the city. His intention is not to chart cultural sites, but rather to create a map of secret places where young lovers—for whom, as he eloquently puts it, “hotels disreputable enough to admit them stood beyond the limits of their daring”21—could meet: The Hermitage . . . offered nice nooks, especially in a certain hall on the ground floor, among cabinets with scarabs, behind the sarcophagus of Nana. . . . In the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, two halls (Nos. 30 and 31, in its northeastern corner), harboring repellently academic paintings by Shishkin . . . offered a bit of privacy because of some tall stands with drawings.22 When museums and theaters close, the nocturnal landscape of the city provides the most reliable protection for the two. Nabokov outlines a nocturnal experience of the winter city, in which Petersburg emerges as a benevolent magical creature, and its grandiose and immense architecture as the figure of a good giant in popular fairy-tales: Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines by the icy moisture of our eyelashes. As we crossed the vast squares, vari­ ous architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness right before us. We felt a cold thrill, generally associated not with height but with depth—with an abyss opening at one’s feet—when great, monolithic pillars of polished granite  . . . zoomed above us to support the mysterious dome of St. Isaac’s cathedral. We stopped on the brink, as it were, of these perilous massifs of stone and metal, and with linked hands, in Lilliputian awe, craned our heads to watch new colossal visions rise in our way—the ten glossy-gray atlantes of a palace portico, or a giant vase of porphyry near the iron gate of a garden, or that enormous column with a

19 Andrei Bely, Petersburg, translated by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 2. 20 Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 11–12. 21 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 234. 22 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 235–6.

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black angel on its summit that obsessed, rather than adorned, the moon-flooded Palace Square.23 In his collection of memories, Nabokov recounts that a friend of his used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.24 In the alternative literary map I have presented here, five distinct points of time captured by five different authors chart the experiential context of Saint Petersburg across almost a century, foregrounding the emotional impact of urban architecture on the inner lives of the inhabitants. A city first perceived by its citizens as cold, hostile and menacing gradually took on different qualities in their consciousness and was appropriated into their lives accordingly. Moreover, the way each author describes the city sheds a light on different aspects of Petersburg’s urban life: Pushkin touches on the political oppression dominant at his time, Gogol renders erotic desires hidden below the surface (of fashion and soci­ ety), Dostoyevsky illuminates the internal struggles of the individual psyche and the working classes, Bely presents a political transformation that engages the urban space, and Nabokov—like Gogol—touches again on the secret erotic desires in the city and presents Petersburg as a place that engages the imagination of its inhabitants. Despite the differences, the authors also reveal a significant lingering quality of the city: its potential to stimulate or liberate the personal imagination in contradiction of its political and social agendas; and the inhabitants’ potential to subvert these agendas, as they are written in urban space, by taking over and living in that space. In his work Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (1991) Marco Frascari argued that an architectural project is not just the designing of a specific building; rather it is a projection of a future constructed world based on the transformation of the past world through a specific design.25 In these literary works the transformation of Petersburg’s past world, necessary as a context for any archi­ tectural project, becomes alive and relevant to design in ways that elude objectifying methodologies and scientific maps. The literary language of the novels discloses layers of complexity and richness in the urban environment, and in the life of its citizens, allowing for a mapping of an entirely different nature than what one might infer from architectural writings such as treatises or manifestos. Despite literature’s characteriza­ tion as fiction, the works under consideration reveal truths: dimensions of the city are imagined but not just made up, are related to its historical, social and political reality at a given time, and are ultimately the stuff of which Saint Petersburg’s atmospheres and physiognomy are made over the years.

23 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 237. 24 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 156. 25 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 34.

4

Macaronically speaking Manuela Antoniu

THE SETTING: Anteroom of Pope Eugenius IV, Florence, 1435. THE DEBATE: La questione de la lingua, the language issue: should a return to Latin be favored, or should the language of intellectual communication in the Quattrocento be the vernacular? THE PLAYERS: Humanists Lorenzo Valla, defender of correct Latin usage, admirer of Quintilian, inspiration to Erasmus and no stranger to dispute, spar­ ring with one Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, discoverer of ancient manuscripts, yet less concerned with philological rigor. ROOM TEMPERATURE: Hot, verging on explosively incandescent.

MEDIUM OF EXPRESSION: Verbal fisticuffs.

In the exchange of invectives between the two great men, Valla accused Poggio Bracciolini of speaking Latin worse than his cook.1 Valla’s comparison alluded to the incorrect Latin proliferating at the time (the barbarolexis of the ignoranti), but the analogy spread into the next century, yielding the notion of “kitchen Latin.” The comic potential of an exalted language descended to and spoken in the kitchen not only had a liberating effect on Latin, but also spawned linguistic experiments that privileged a relationship with the edible.2

Macaronic matters From the Latin of the classical authors being given a trivial application was born the ars macaronica. Arising at a time when humanist creativity was waning for too strict an adherence to the classical model, macaronic Latin deliberately transposed the latter’s loftiness into the realm of the body, with its functions and apertures. But what started as a jocular debasement soon developed into a literary form of high attainment. For, unlike kitchen Latin, which superficially Latinized the vernacular (by basting Latin words and endings onto the local language), macaronic Latin required a superlative knowledge of classical Latin’s phrasing, morphology, and (in poetry) meter, in order to impose them, with a twist, on the volgare. A “non-Latin Latin,” an example of Latinus grossus, exploiting the etymological proximity between Latin 1 Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots : Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Mayenne: Librairie José Corti, 1987), 172; Cecil Grayson, Dizionario bibliografico degli Italiani (Roma: Società Grafica Romana, 1960), 704. 2 Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 194.

Macaronically speaking

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and Italian, macaronic Latin poured the former into the mold of the latter while also using words common to both languages, yet perverting them semantically, to comic effect.3 The “macaronic” (meaning “coarse,” “unrefined”) treatment of language thus proved an inexhaustible source of neologisms, injecting new vitality into Latin and transforming it from a fixed-form language into an infinitely expansible one.4 The virtuosity of macaronic Latin was to have lifted classical Latin out of its medieval decay by mirroring that decay (that is, by affecting the barbarolexis of the illiterates). From intellectual Padua hailed the poet Tifi degli Odasi, author of the Macaronea (c. 1490) and acknowledged precursor to the most celebrated macaronic writer, Teofilo Folengo. The erudite Folengo was also literary heir to Luigi Pulci who, with his Morgante (published in Florence c. 1482), was the first to satirize chivalric litera­ ture by bringing to the genre a macaronic inventiveness.5 With both degli Odasi and Pulci as forerunners, Folengo reinscribed “inspiration”, giving a phagic, comic twist to the topos of the nourishing Muse by transposing the chivalric exploits of the hero, the eponymous Baldus, into a surreally edible world.

Folengo’s Baldus Folengo’s virtuosic work in macaronic Latin, the Baldus, was a versified mockchivalric adventure set in 17 canti.6 In the voice of the narrating poet, the canti extol the feats of Baldus, illegitimate grandchild of Charlemagne. Unaware of his lineage, Baldus roams the earth by turns generating and extricating himself from all manner of danger associated with canonic chivalry. Owing to its popularity, Folengo’s Baldus was reprinted in quick succession throughout the Cinquecento, one of its first editions showcasing, in its frontispiece, the small intaglio reproduced here (Figure 4.1). Let us look at this image in some detail. Surprisingly, the woodcut illustrates none of Baldus’s adventures, as might have been expected of the sole image fronting a lengthy poem on chivalry. Instead, it is a mise en abyme that, being placed at the beginning of the poem, reflects back upon the process of creation that had generated the poem. Folengo starts by declaiming that, before he can recount the exploits of Baldus, he needs the support of the Muses, whose help he invokes. The form this support should take is disclosed in verse 15 and distilled in the intaglio: “imboccare suum veniant macarone poëtam,” or, “O, Muses, come and spoon-feed your poet some gnocchi” (in northern Italy, gnocchi were called macaroni).7 3 Ugo Enrico Paoli, Il Latino Maccheronico (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1959), 12–14. Paoli shows that Latinus grossus is macaronic not only because it is grossus but because it is Latinus: in classical Latin, “Latin” as designating the language cannot be a noun (Latina lingua or Latinitas would be used instead), and even if it were possible to use a noun, it should be in the neutral (Latinum) and not in the masculine (Latinus). 4 Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 195, 202. 5 Pulci’s work influenced Rabelais (for Panurge), Goethe (for Mephistopheles), Cervantes, and Byron (for Don Juan), who translated the Morgante into English. See Luigi Pulci, Morgante. The Epic Adventures of Orlando and his Giant Friend Morgante, edited by Edoardo A. Lèbano, translated by Joseph Tusiani (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), xi–xxv. 6 The Baldus was first published in January 1517, in a volume of prose and verse entitled Liber macaronices. 7 Paoli, Il Latino, 3–6; Luigi Messedaglia, “Vita e costume della Rinascenza in Merlin Cocai,” in Medioevo e umanesimo (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1974), 431, 433.

40 Manuela Antoniu

Figure 4.1 Teofilo Folengo Baldus (Mantua, c. 1510). Frontispiece showing Merlin Cocai being fed gnocchi by the Muses. © The British Library Board, 1070.g.8 (frontispiece)

In the opening stanzas we also meet the Muses. Although beyond reach, the poet has had privileged access to their abode, a mountain so high as to make Olympus look like a mere hill.8 This über-Olympus is, however, made entirely of cheese.9 The scene is set for the remainder of the landscape to be described as copiously edible: rivers of broth, lakes of soup, and oceans of stew are all navigated by boats made of pastry, embarked upon which the Muses, fish out quantities of gnocchi and succulent meats. The Muses are not only apt fisherwomen, but also prodigious eaters. We learn that, although they inhabit the peak of the mountain, they are constantly putting its substance to edible use as grated cheese for their pasta dishes. With all this frenetic consumption of hearty food, the Muses aspire to become, so Folengo assures us, as big-bellied as barrels.10 When cooking, they produce gnocchi of comparable size. The poet, in mock lament, invites us to imagine how wide one’s jaws must open in order 8 Canto I, 22, 23. 9 I, 28, 29. 10 I, 51. See Carlo Cordié, ed., Opere di Teofilo Folengo. La letteratura Italiana. Storia e testi, vol. 26, part I (Milan: Ricciardi, 1977), 75.

Macaronically speaking 11

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to ingest one such gnocco. To keep the topographical description short, concludes Folengo, this is the place where he fished out his macaronic art and where the Muses made him their pot-bellied bard.12 The image of the versifier, the “pancificum poëtam,” whose main attribute is an expansive midriff (literally, a paunch), takes us back to the beginning of the poem. There we find that he shares this feature with the Muses, whom he calls his equally “pancificae” sisters.13 In keeping with the ethos of macaronic Latin, this kinship is a nod to classical poetry, specifically to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the Muses are called the poet’s sisters (sorores, in non-macaronic Latin).14 But also true to maca­ ronic form and consistent with the hyperrealism of the macaronic world, here the “sisters” are the morphological antithesis of their classical counterparts, whose ideal beauty has now changed from noun to verb: a progressive centrifugation of fleshy layers and adipose tissues accruing as “pancific” excess. Folengo implies that such corporeal surfeit (clearly absent in the classical Muses) is congruous with his Muses’ superior inspirational capabilities. And what better measure of this superiority, he asks, than his own girth, a direct equivalent for his poetic creativity? Roughly translated, “When I think of the potbelliness of my stom­ ach (panza), the cacophony of Parnassus is no match for my bagpipe (piva).”15 Here we have a causal relation and a comparison. He compares a musical instrument in his possession to some diffuse noise issuing from Parnassus. But are we to assume that Folengo implies the sound produced by the bagpipe? If so, the comparison would hold (being drawn between two elements of the same genus), but the causality would be problematic: what direct connection could there be between the size of the poet’s stomach and a contest of sounds? If, however, the bagpipe is referenced not as instru­ ment but only descriptively (that is, not as a sound-producing object but for other characteristics), then, while the comparison is destabilized (hovering now between elements belonging to disparate categories) the causality becomes more intelligible. To find out how that might be, let us return to the image [Figure 4.1]. There, we find that “Mer C,” short for Merlin Cocai (Folengo’s alias), is resisting being force-fed by the Muse. Two aspects of his bodily habitus help support this view. First, his facial expression, with raised eyebrows and mouth puckered, is emphati­ cally not receptive to what is proffered by the alimenting Muse. Secondly, his torso is backward leaning, a defensive posture for somebody who is seated. Yet he manages to balance himself by holding onto the edge of the bowl and grab­ bing hold of one gnocco—a way of reinforcing the notion that gnocchi are grossus alimentum indeed. However, by reaching for one gnocco while simultaneously resist­ ing another, what is Merlin actually doing? Would he rather feed himself? Or does he mean to retaliate by visiting the same aggression on Zana? Symmetry with the other Muse seems more immediate, however. Forcing air out through her mouth, Togna plays the bagpipe (la piva). This object is allusive of an empty stomach, being a leathery cavity whose volume is constantly redefined by the transit of nothing more substantial than air. Air stands in 11 12 13 14 15

I, 52, 53.

I, 62, 63.

I, 13, 14.

See Paoli, Il Latino, 96.

I, 11, 12; Cordié, Opere di Teofilo Folengo, 71–2.

42 Manuela Antoniu

emphatic opposition to the substantial gnocchi that threaten to fill Folengo’s stomach. Thus, it is not inadvertent that, in the image, the receptacle filled with gnocchi and the receptacle filled with air are perspectivally juxtaposed as foreground and background. Additionally, Merlin’s paunch is as roundly contoured as the bagpipe. This shared morphology suggests—while Merlin still staves off ingesting the first gnocco—that they are both full to the brim with air. Although, in morphological terms, this is a repetitive configuration for the bagpipe, for Merlin it is the solidified memory of prior fillings with substance, which have left their progressive mark in a distended stomach cushioned in fat. The aspect of roundness of a well-padded belly has noteworthy antecedents. In De humani corporis fabrica,16 Vesalius joins Galen in his praise of the spherical form displayed by certain bodily organs, such as the human head, heart, stomach, intestines and female breasts. Vesalius mentions the ideality of the spherical form frequently throughout the Fabrica, echoing related passages from two of his reference texts: Plato’s Timaeus and Cicero’s De natura deorum II.17 At times Vesalius refers directly to the Timaeus, whose physiological passages he knows well. One such passage is the source of his comment that, thanks to the fabrica of the intestine, we need not eat as often as we breathe, and therefore can dedicate ourselves to philosophy and the Muses.18 Here is Vesalius’s reference in the Timaeus, 72d–73a: [The gods] knew how intemperate we would be in the matter of food and drink, and that gluttony would result in our using far more than the moderate or nec­ essary amount. Hence, lest sudden destruction should occur through disease, and the mortal race thus becoming imperfect should swiftly cease to exist, they appointed the so-called lower belly as a receptacle to hold the superfluous food and drink, and wound the bowels round in coils therein. This was to prevent the nourishment passing through so rapidly as to force the body to crave replenish­ ment equally rapidly and, thus making it insatiable, render all mankind, through gluttony, bereft of philosophy and the Muses, and unobedient to the most divine part of our nature.19 Before we return to Folengo and his Muses in light of this passage, we need to clarify that what Plato denotes here as the “lower belly” is the abdomen, having just previ­ ously talked about its counterpart above the diaphragm, the “upper belly” or thorax. In the image of Folengo and his two Muses, upper and lower bellies figure promi­ nently, if covertly. Indeed, the only immediately recognizable “lower belly” is that of Merlin. But he is seated on a barrel, which (as we have seen) is the shape he used in order to describe the Muses’ bellies, a shape tending toward the spherical. As a mark of family resemblance, the barrel-shaped belly brings added credibility to Folengo’s calling the Muses his siblings. 16 The best-known treatise in the history of Western medicine (published at Basel in 1543), Vesalius’s opus represented a radical break from previous approaches to human anatomy, all of which had followed the tradition established by Aristotle and Galen. 17 Jackie Pigeaud, “Formes et normes dans le De fabrica de Vésale” in Le Corps à la Renaissance. Actes du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), 411, 420. 18 Vesalius, Fabrica, as quoted in Pigeaud, “Formes et normes,” 409. 19 This combines the French translation in Pigeaud (409) with the English translations of Thomas Taylor (Washington, DC: Bollingen, 1952) and John Warrington (London: J.M. Dent, 1965).

Macaronically speaking

43

But there is one more sign of somatic kinship here between brother and sisters. If, according to the Timaeus, the human intestines were devised to induce temperance by prolonging the sensation of satiety, then the corollary would hold that someone insatiable—as we have seen the Muses to be in their edible Olympus—is consequently devoid of intestines. In other words, to be insatiable is to be someone whose “lower belly” has been vacated of its organs and is now an empty cavity. Again, the only immediately recognizable empty cavity in the image is that of the piva. We can now refine the earlier suggestion, that Merlin’s lower belly might also be empty for as long as he can sustain his indecision about partaking of the gnoc­ chi. Merlin’s credentials as a formidable eater had been established and reconfirmed throughout the opening stanzas of the Baldus: he is calling on the Muses to feed him “five or eight” bowlfuls of gnocchi; his arbiter for poetic production is not Parnassus but the “panza” of his “ventralia”; finally, he is the Muses’ “pancificum poëtam.”20 Since he is as “pancific” as his “pancificae” sisters, who are undisputedly insatiable, it follows that, according to the Timaean equation, Merlin’s lower belly is also empty. Or rather, it is bursting with emptiness, just as the emptiness of the piva is signaled precisely by its being filled with air. But regardless of whether Merlin’s abdomen is filled with air instead of intestines as a result of voracity or vacillation on his part, its consequent condition is that which is typical of the upper belly, of the thorax. This functional conflation of the lower with the upper belly, both filled with air, implicitly describes Merlin in Vesalius’s terms: someone who needs to eat as often as he breathes. The piva, then, stands not only for his stomach but also for his lungs. This double semiotic status is signaled in the image, where the only two mouths engaged in visible muscular activity are associated with food (Merlin’s) and with breath (Togna’s). Therefore, just as we have seen the barrel to be an externalized lower belly, so can we consider the bagpipe to be an external­ ized upper belly. Held tightly against the chest as if to identify with it all the more, its “emptiness” occurs in a strict relation of inverse proportionality to the emptying out of the upper belly. This pneumatic economy together with the proposition of outward projection leads us to examine the ways in which Folengo references artistic inspiration. It is not simply the gnocchi with which he demands to be fed, and the externalization of “inspiration” is not only effected through such objectification. The presence of the Muses allows us to also think of externalization through personification. As we have seen, the poem starts with an invocation for help, which presupposes a certain degree of helplessness (whether feigned or actual) on the part of the poet, were he to be left unaided.21 This helplessness is heralded by the verb Folengo uses for his entreaty: imboccare, which literally means to spoon-feed, to feed someone who otherwise would be incapable of taking food. The diminution of (adult) capa­ bilities that Folengo insinuates is actually explicit in a seventeenth-century transla­ tion into French of the Baldus, whose title announces a telling filiation: Histoire

20 I, 16; I, 11; I, 63, respectively.

21 Folengo avails himself of the classical formula used by poets after Hesiod, giving it a macaronic twist.

At the beginning of Theogony, Hesiod tells of the Muses’ gift of knowledge to him. Later poets would echo this motif in describing how they were inspired to compose poetry. See The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, edited by M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

44

Manuela Antoniu

maccaronique de Merlin Cocaie prototype de Rabelais (1606).22 In it, Folengo is calling himself an infant (nourrisson) when invoking the Muses’ input.23 Yet, as the poet vaunts a similar corpulence to that of the Muses, the latter could be his idealized gargantuan image, his “pancific” alter egos. Hence the poet doubles himself, through projection, by posing first as infant, then as Muse. Thus, using scale manipula­ tion he postures both as phagic recipient (through miniaturization) and as phagic donor (through magnification). The poet himself feeds the poet “inspiration;” and he achieves to convey the internal process of becoming inspired by pure externalization. But personification is only one way in which Folengo externalizes “inspiration.” There remain the gnocchi. Through its mise en abyme in the title page, the culinary eponym of macaronic writing begets a double semiotic. Indeed, by appearing at the very beginning of a com­ pleted poem, the gnocchi signify both inspiration and its result. As artistic production is generally ulterior to inspiration, the poem would clearly need to exist before it could be considered, retrospectively, “inspired.” Therefore, if we accept that Folengo (as Zana) is actually feeding himself, what he contemplates ingesting in the object of a gnocco is not only “inspiration” but also something he will have to have put out of himself.24 If this evokes an image of the poet engaged in (proleptic) coprophagia, the allusion is not out of place. Consistent with macaronic usage, scatological references abound in the Baldus. For instance, the measure of the protagonist’s chivalric exploits is given by how an anthropomorphic hell reacts to him in fear: by shitting its pants.25 Furthermore, as the dialectic of upper and lower bellies is mirrored in the respective notions of inspiration and expiration, the latter can signify not only an expiratory effort (such as that necessary for playing the piva), but any emission of wind, hence carrying a carminative connotation. This would be fully within the (in)digestive logic of vast quantities of food being consumed. It would also point to a further identification of Folengo with Togna, the musical Muse, and therefore to a subtle conflation of she and Zana, the alimentative Muse. In the shape of the oversized gnocco assailing Merlin’s mouth, “inspiration” could be an equally nourishing and gagging offering. The latter attribute would imply sup­ pressing any means of expression through language. Therefore the aliment could feed the artist’s métier just as easily as it could stifle it. Merlin’s hesitancy thus becomes more comprehensible, especially as the locus of this transition is contained within his own body. In the pharynx, that innermost organic overlap between the digestive and respiratory systems, lower and upper bellies are confounded, feeding and breathing intersect, Zana and Togna merge in a fulcrum where “inspiration” hovers between pneuma and digesta. We have seen how Folengo splits “inspiration” into both a phagic object and the simultaneous activity of feeding that object to himself. Yet we have also seen how he personifies inspiration in the generic figure of a Muse who is well endowed with

22 Cordié, Opere di Teofilo Folengo, xiii; Messedaglia, “Vita e costume della Rinascenza,” 551.

23 Reprint by G. Brunet, ed. (Paris: Delahays, 1859), 5.

24 In architectural terms, we could say that he is feeding himself both the blueprint (drawing) and the

footprint (construction) of artistic imagination. Keeping things internally macaronic, this fabulation is a con: a footnote (to Marco’s musings on res macaronica) without a foothold (I had not read them before writing this). 25 I, 4.

Macaronically speaking

45

bodily mass. In fact, she is endowed with a corporeality that is perpetually augment­ ing; and, in this, the lexical process mentioned at the beginning is directly mirrored. For macaronism made elastic use of Latin by virtually expanding its lexis ad infini­ tum—a fattening of the language with neologisms whose source was inexhaustible. The insatiability of a mise en abyme?

5

Il Mantecato An architectural course served at the Frascaridonosor’s Tavern of Crossed Destinies Franco Pisani

There is no deeper pleasure than thought and it is to thought that I often deliver myself over. To be included here, writing and sharing my thoughts with this banquet of storytell­ ers, makes me feel like one of the mute characters sitting at the table of Calvino’s Tavern of Crossed Destinies.

XII—Le Pendu (The Hanged Man/The Traitor) I feel inappropriate and a bit out of place. I never met the Professor in person, even if I always wanted to since the first time I heard his name. However, I walked the pages of his books, fought monsters, resisted two tailed sirens and stepped many times into his stories told by friends and disciples. But I’m having hard time finding my voice. As tarot cards helped Calvino’s actors to recall their tales, I will use the figures that, one after the other, populate my memory to tell the story.

XVI—La Maison de Dieu (The House of God/The Tower/Fire) I cannot help but see Venice as the backdrop of action. When I think of Venice, I think of its duality; of being hybrid and proud at the same time and, of course, of its water, inexorably mirroring life.

II—La Papesse (The High Priestess/The Popess) I think about Carlo Scarpa respecting that water at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia as it floods.

V—Le Pape (The Hierophant/The Pope) I recall the motto, verum ipsum factum, from which an incredible crucible of talents was nourished under the guidance of Giuseppe Samonà at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia—where it was possible to stumble upon Manfredo Tafuri in a cloud of smoke.

Il Mantecato

47

IIII—L’Empereur (The Emperor) And where Arrigo Rudi used to sketch the Professor as Frascaridonosor while giving desk crits to students with a freshly printed copy of Architecture: essay sur l’art by Étienne-Louis Boullée, edited by a young Aldo Rossi. And, speaking of Aldo Rossi, it was possible to eat bigoli al saor with him and Carlo Aymonino while talking about il Gallaratese. I can only dream (unfortunately) of other mythological dinners at the Trattoria del Gaffaro, where food, drawings, and thoughts continuously blend into one other.

Unnumbered—Le Fou (The Fool) And the “Etrusco”, as Carlo Scarpa himself used to call my thesis professor Giancarlo Leoncilli Massi, was there as well. Less flatteringly, his students used to called him il matto, or the fool. He was always telling stories about useless things like figures and composition. Composition, what a gorgeous folly. I remember my 6H pencils, used as blades on Shollers Hammer paper to study and figure things out. I recall the unrelent­ ing necessity of décor.

III—L’Emperatrice (The Empress) I envision the layers used by Palladio to compose the facades of il Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore. I remember my first Biennale dell’Architettura in 1991, where as a student I felt the freezing wind by the Riva dei Giardini di Castello, where, ten years before, I imagined the unforgettable silhouette of Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo mixed with the Punta della Dogana.

XVII—L’Etoile (The Star); XX—Le Iugement (Judgement/The Angel) I, then, find myself walking aimlessly around the Rialto fish market where I imagine stumbling upon Pietro Querini, the Venetian merchant shipwrecked near the Lofoten islands in 1432 who returned with a cargo of stick-shaped dried fishes. Baccalà came from the stars in the skies of the remote north.

XX—Le Iugement (Judgement/The Angel) I end up finding in the channels and calli of Venice its highest expression, as suggested by the sybarites, in a dish called il Mantecato. I arrive now at the ineffable core of my tale. The tavern’s menu suggests Mantecato for today.

XVIII—La Lune (The Moon) Fished at night, when, attracted by the moon, it reaches the surface of the ocean. The bacalà is an artificial fish, arte facto, the result of a collaboration between man and the elements and is pure reified memory free from nostalgia. Eviscerated and open like a book, embalmed in sea salt or dried by the wind of the north, a bacalà is the smelly

Figure 5.1 The first eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani

Il Mantecato

49

mummy of what was an ugly fish, named Gadus Morhua, a big cod which usually swims in the cold waters of the northern Atlantic ocean.

XXI—Le Monde (The World) Bacalà is a metaphor for the human condition of world-making.

VI—L’Amoreux (The Lovers) And il Mantecato is a metaphor of the sublime expression of love for life, which should be embodied by architecture too. The mummified fish returns back to life through rehydration, and what was once living becomes a spiritual reservoir of itself; it starts a third life as soaked meat with a flavor and a texture definitely altered by man, correcting the draft of the gods.

XIIII—L’Emperance (Temperance) To prepare il Mantecato is not an easy matter, it is a composition rite. After a short period in boiling water, the reborn fish must be skinned and carefully boned. Then the meat is chopped up into flakes and battered with a wooden spoon, gradually adding a light and fruity one olive oil; the Ligurian is perfect. In a bowl previously rubbed with garlic, it will start to “mount” as an eggnog, forming a light foam, a landscape of white and creamy sauce. Finally a pinch of salt and pepper will temper the flavor, chasing concinnitas. It is then that, with my eyes closed, and the help of a little slice of toasted polenta, I praise the inventors of this ointment.

VIII—Iustice (Justice) It was not the work of a single man or a unique culture that invented such a prodi­ gious dish. Like a city, it takes more than one person, or pencil. It is the result of a never-ending series of little variations from chef to chef, from mother to son, in the continuous search for its best expression. With my tongue I squeeze my gums and caress my mouth’s cavities, so the taste buds might retrieve all the shadows of pleasure. I love rituals. To prepare bacalà, for example, you must buy it in advance; it should be desalted, hammered, soaked, drained. In short, you have to think about it, and this is what I like: to hide thoughts in things, projects, or meals.

XI—Force (Strength/Fortitude) Gastronomy and architecture are sisters in sublimating the basic needs of food and protection in which humans compete with nature. Both defy the natural course of events—correcting, diverting, and sometimes destroying. Both are alibis for and redemption from abuses of nature. Both redeem barbarism by portraying imagery of beauty and harmony. Both deal with health and living well. Both are synesthetic experiences.

Figure 5.2 The second eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani

Il Mantecato

51

X—La Roue de la Fortune (Wheel of Fortune) The sublimation takes place in the brain, where memory, reality and desire continu­ ously meet: past, present and future. Some call it a recipe; some may call it design. I prefer to speak of composition: a difficult word, outdated, and maybe useless, but magical and magnificent. Mantecare is an Italian word, with no equivalent in English. It comes from manteca, the Spanish word for butter and is the act of inducing a fat to give smooth texture and flavor to a mixture.

XVIIII—Le Soleil (The Sun) Proceeding in parallel, we can think of composition as the oily part, able to amalgam­ ate differences, to give them a new identity, a new meaning. Oil, added carefully, celebrates the roughness of materials, combining them with the human aspiration to transcend.

XIII—La Mort (Death) But which water will be able to rehydrate the shriveled and smelly body of architec­ ture? How long will it take to soak and purify it from the salt of formal excesses? Who will wake up figures, reigniting the engine of variation?

I—Le Bateleur (The Magician/The Juggler) Perhaps architectural education is that water; the amniotic fluid, made of students and teachers which is called studio culture. That powerful mix of speculation and making has the potential to give a new lift to the language of space which is buried deep, exactly like the “fishiness” inside the baccalà. Only education will be able to give new contemporary meanings to old words, without nostalgia.

XV—Le Diable (The Devil) Some assert that you can learn architecture but you can’t teach architecture. This sounds like a justification for irresponsible teachers, and I disagree—even if there is something true about it. Architecture is a discipline with a feeble scientific constitu­ tion. It consists of acts of faith, rituals, and illuminations, more than reassuring and unequivocal formulas. You can teach architecture, even if it is very difficult, because, as Le Corbusier states, “l’espace c’est indicible.”

VII—Le Chariot (The Chariot) Working with space is building tangible stories around intangible figures, and the design studio is the place where you can train and discover this skill. I do not know how to teach someone how to find an idea; rather, I feel a duty to set up conditions for architecture to happen. Storytelling as well as figurative speculations are ways related to the verb “educate”: ex-ducere, to drive out something hidden or simply unexpressed, in the way that fairytales are told to babies.

52 Franco Pisani

VIIII—L’Eremite (The Hermit) Or perhaps it is a bit like the hermit, with his lantern always on, bringing light in the darkness of ignorance. Like him, educators must re-learn the art of storytelling, to prepare with labor and passion the fertile soil for the re-sprouting of meaningful space in the conformist babel. Because of tradition or maybe because of gluttony, whenever possible, on Fridays I prepare baccalà.

Part II

Stories of architecture

6

Buildings remember David Leatherbarrow

Places remember events. James Joyce listed this phrase, together with the term “topi­ cal history,” among his guiding premises for Ulysses.1 Both expressions make the same point: places are one of the means by which the past keeps itself present [Plate 17]. Joyce’s reputation aside, the suggestion that places remember seems strange. We tend to believe that people have memories, maybe animals too, not houses, gardens, or streets. More specifically—I mean epistemologically—we believe that memories are located in the brain, like goods in a mental warehouse or entries in a cognitive chamber, sensory impressions having taken up lodgings there after the travels of perceptual experience. To think otherwise means breaking with a long tradition of theorizing about perception. In point of fact, such a break did occur in twentiethcentury thought; specifically in continental philosophy, at more or less the same time as Joyce’s Ulysses. But old assumptions still have force in what we take to be common sense. Joyce’s thesis runs against the grain of common sense because it de-centers the action of memory by placing recollection in locations, things, and the human body, its movements and involvements. This de-centering and relocation requires us to reconsider both reflection and representation. In architecture, it means focusing not on stories about but by buildings. For that to be done a basic premise must be accepted: that the plans of buildings are like the plots of stories. This equivalence was well expressed in the seventeenth century by the poet and playwright Ben Jonson in Explorata: “If a man were to build a house, he would first appoint a place to build it in, which he would define with certain bounds, so in the construction of a poem, the action is aym’d at by the poet which answers place in a building; and action hath its largeness, compass and proportion.”2 Here then is my thesis: poetic plots obtain durable dimensions in architectural plans. The stories buildings tell have both historical and fictional dimensions, variously proportioned according to type—temples, for example, more fiction, houses more history. This coupling becomes clear when the matter of plot coherence is considered. 1 See Eric Bulson, “Joyce’s Geodesy,” Journal of Modern Literature XXV, no. 2 (Winter 2001–2002): 91. The passage can be found in Phillip Herring, ed., Joyce’s Ulysses Note sheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 119. The editor suggests that Joyce made use of this idea in the following line from the novel: “Coming events cast their shadows before.” For com­ mentary on the “Places and events” passage in the Note sheets see also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 151, and Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 277. 2 Ben Jonson, Explorata: or Discoveries [1641], lines 3322–3330 (London: Penguin, 1975), 454.

56 David Leatherbarrow The ensemble of events that constitutes the subject matter of an architectural plan must have organization and structure. What gives a good story its unity, a bad one its incoherence? Aristotle defined plots lacking coherence as episodic; a layout of incidents whose association and arrangement is improbable or unintelligible. “I call episodic a plot in which the episodes follow one another in no probable or inevitable sequence.”3 Episodes are not bad, without them drama becomes boring; faulty is an arrangement that has no order of likelihood or sense; hence a key opposition: one event after another versus one event because of another. One event after another is improbable because the world is not only a matter of chance, even if some things seem to happen for no reason. Episodic configurations are unsuccessful as drama because they fail to resemble life—the lives we would like to live—hence the temple fiction: it’s a place where we behave like saints, even though we’re sinners. Plot structure depends on the order of action, which in turn depends on connections internal to a story’s unfolding, often a pattern of contrasts; one incident in response to another. This is not a sequence of events that occurred in fact, for poetry concerns the possible not the actual; it narrates events each of us may experience for ourselves, also the decisions those occurrences might require; it concerns, finally, the sorts of stories that Aristotle calls poetic universals, in which, he says, we take delight, because we always experience pleasure in learning about ourselves. The whole problem of plot and plan invention is this: fabricating a configuration that allows the intelligible to arise from the accidental. Poetic composition in drama and architecture depends on disjunctive events; it is not a model of perfect or seam­ less concordance but of what Paul Ricoeur called concordant discordance, as if there were reason in chance, an example of which would be a just reward.4 The unity that exists in a memorable ensemble is one built out of surprising events and discordant sequences. In spatial terms this allows improbable conjunctions or juxtapositions, as well as repetitions. The real trick of inventing a compelling mythos is to begin with disjunctive events and discover through unexpected reversals their possible coherence. What would be the source of these disjunctions? None other than events that were unforeseen, unfoldings that seem to have occurred for no reason at all, not arbitrarily but contrary to what had been planned for in a script or an enclosure. Their source is often external to the localized structure; intrusive, one can say, like an unwelcome visitor; or improbable, like a springtime snow, or even crushing, like the premature death of a very dear friend. Architecture’s provisions anticipate and invite the enactment of cultural norms, now as then we will assemble in rows in front of the stage. Sometimes, though, events occur—who knows why—that take no account of expectations, events that force their way into well-structured arrangements and their sequences, requiring of design composition, and indeed of life, adjustments and realignments. Creative projects perform just these sorts of realignments. When legible they narrate wonderful stories. In what follows I will consider two examples, one interior and one exterior plot. The central scene of Nicolas Maes’ 1657 oil painting Eavesdropper is polarized between two situations: first, on the upper floor, in the middle distance, is a dinner scene (a small group around refilled wine glasses); second, on the lower floor, again 3 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b 33–35 (New York: Random House, 1941), 1464.

4 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42ff.

Buildings remember

57

in the middle distance, a little closer to the foreground, is a tender scene of a different sort, the embrace of two lovers, of shared intimacy but unequal devotion5 [Plate 18]. While he is wholly dedicated to affection, she is somewhat distracted, although pos­ sibly pregnant. Perhaps she is thinking of the work she should be doing; or maybe she’s heard someone on the landing, the person who occupies the center of the several scenes and the foreground. Although unexpected, this third or middle position is beautifully integrative: the fact of the girl’s descent—glass in hand—ties her to the dining scene above, but her gesture of silence indicates her orientation toward the love scene below. Yet, her eyes and smile are directed toward us—as if we are the ones to whom she is gesturing, like an actor on stage. But only we see; she merely listens. The raised finger: does it urge our silence, ask us to take note, or is it a sign of admoni­ tion? Probably all three. Maes has several pages of sketches of this gesture, testing its indications. Other studies used the open hand the way a lawyer would when offering evidence that speaks for itself. In our picture, the wry smile assumes the girl’s guilt is at once self-evident and amusing. How about the margins of this little drama? In the foreground right hangs a world map, below it, draped over a chair, are a gentleman’s street clothes and sword. Another coat hangs from the door on the left, below it the sort of lamp one would use outdoors. Thus, emblems of the street on each side frame the central scenes. One plane deeper in the space, a double archway serves the same enclosing and bi-focal purpose. Splitting the double is a significant vertical, a thin pilaster that not only divides the arches but also supports a bust labeled Juno, believed at the time to preside over home and marriage. In this instance the goddess looks aside, rather ambivalently I think. The coat and sword are obviously male, from elsewhere (hence the map), and quite probably sexual (undressed and phallic). Equally sexual, one supposes, is the cat stealing the bird on the kitchen counter. The girl’s involvement in the embrace has meant neglect of her duty—serving the next course. The cat’s paw has its prize, likewise the man’s hand. Thanks to its architecture, the painting presents six scenes in one ensemble: a room through the door to the left, the staircase and corridor, the first floor dining room, the kitchen to the far right, the lower passage with the lovers, and the garden and distant house outdoors. Listed this way they stand as unrelated incidents or episodes, in Aristotle’s terms. But that is like saying a good loaf of bread is nothing more than flour plus yeast, salt, and water. The staircase, landing, and pilaster around which the listener twists make the mixture of scenes into a single compound, and the architec­ ture of the interior—its levels, distances, apertures, and materials—integrate all the spatial elements into a story than narrates a moment of crisis. What we see is a house divided (decorum above, desire below), the conflicts of which cluster around a defin­ ing element and moment that jointly attest to the breakdown of social order. Each of the scenes has key architectural elements: the table that gathers the meal, the threshold at which the lovers stand, and the step on which the eavesdropper hesitates. Maes signed the painting on the riser of this dramatic step. In the plans of a plot each situation is given elements that define it, as well as its right place within the 5 Two texts by Martha Hollander have helped me a great deal in seeing the structure and meanings of this painting. See: Martha Hollander, “The Divided House of Nicolaes Maes,” Word and Image 10, no. 2 (April–June, 1994): 138–55; and Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

58 David Leatherbarrow

encompassing topography (the levels and distances). Consider the stratification of the platforms: formal dining is elevated above the seduction scene, which is at the level of the hungry cat, with the garden lower still. The externalities that break in on the domestic scene polarize the setting from foreground to background: the street (and map) from which the visitor has entered extends all the way back to the garden, which appears through a large window, not a door, but access beyond is implied in the stair rail to the right. In the far distance another couple can be seen under a sky whose clouds foreshadow rain. Four arches in perspective accelerate movement in this direction. The line to the left begins with the circular mat in front of the first riser and ends in the circular frame on the dining room wall—something of a dead end, for neither neighboring buildings nor sky make an appearance, only soft light. The grid of tiny glass panes reinforces the theme of containment, maybe confinement. And just as there are distinct settings, alternately discordant and concordant, there are distinct characters, by my count 11: the four around the table, the two lovers, and the eavesdropper, plus the two in the garden, the crazy cat, and—above it all—Juno. An unexpected visitor, a coming storm: the terminal points of the axis running through the archways on the right express movements outside the compass and sched­ ule of the domestic routine, the well-managed protocols of which shuttle between the circles on the left. At this moment the seasons of natural and the schedules of urban time are unsynchronized with the internal routines of domestic life, but each plays its part in the story nevertheless. The listener and the landing bind together situations and settings that would otherwise be discordant. Plots and plans are reciprocal and equivalent forms of narration. Now my second case, one closer to home, historically and geographically. Like any other building in Philadelphia, the Rodin Museum has its own street address, 2154 Benjamin Franklin Parkway [Plate 19], but arrival at that spot is unexpectedly disorienting because little if anything of the building that houses the collection can be seen from the street; instead, there is a sculpture, The Thinker [Plate 20] together with an oddly-free-standing wall that serves as its backdrop.6 The statue and its stage stand within rows of majestic sycamore trees that shade the entire length of the street. Enfielded by green, Rodin’s statue is rather like the artworks found throughout Fairmount Park, as if its street address did not matter. Were that true, one would be inclined to assume that the Museum is a pavilion in the park, not an institution on the street. But that’s not true either, because the geometry of both the backdrop and the approach conforms to the Parkway’s parallels and perpendiculars, and therefore the entire town’s urban pattern. From the very start, the Rodin Museum displays a rather ambiguous engagement with competing frames of reference—the Park and the town—or perhaps divergent lines of descent, as though the landscape and cityscape had jointly contributed to its formation. If spaces of departure and arrival (a street address and front door) can be seen as contrasting complementarities, then the ambiguity of the first can be seen as a pretext for the clarity of the second. But again, the most visible sign of the Rodin Museum on the Parkway is The Thinker. How is it that a work of sculpture can be seen as the sign of an institution, as a substitute for a building’s façade or front door? 6 A very helpful study of this site and the several projects it includes is: David Brownlee, Building the City Beautiful (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

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Does an architectural work, like a speech, require this sort of indicative prolepsis? If so, what might this one indicate or foreshadow? Standing before The Thinker, a more self-absorbed and disengaged figure could hardly be imagined. Encircled concentration is expressed through crossed limbs, low­ ered shoulders, and raised knees, all drawn inward, magnetically, as if the world had no gravitational pull. “Lost in thought,” he seems completely oblivious to the traffic and trees. Yet, for all his concentricity, his position and posture play their parts in the wider circumstances.  Castings of Rodin’s great work have been positioned in front of major museums throughout the world. Cleveland and Tokyo are two of the several I have seen, another two are in and around Paris: one at the Musée Rodin, the former Hôtel Brion, not far from les Invalides; and the other in Meudon, on the outskirts of the city, at the Villa des Brillants, Rodin’s house, studio, and exhibition hall. Neither of these Parisian locations is the spot the sculptor initially preferred. His idea was that The Thinker should be placed at the end of Rue Soufflot, facing the Pantheon with its back to the Luxembourg Palace and Gardens. That siting was not approved; instead, the statue was erected directly in front of the Pantheon, behind a fence, facing outward. Because it was said to block ceremonies in front of the votive monument, the sculpture was moved 16 years later to the gardens of Hôtel Brion. The siting of the Meudon Thinker reflects Rodin’s desires more precisely: it sits on the Villa’s front lawn facing the town. And it rests on Rodin’s grave, as well as that of his wife. There are several clear differences between the Meudon and Philadelphia Thinkers but the most obvious is that while in Philadelphia the base is only a plinth, the Meudon support is a tombstone. Jules Mastbaum, who commissioned the Philadelphia Museum and paid for building work at the Villa, surely knew of the grave, a fact also recalled by visitors to the Parkway who have been to the Paris sites. The strain of con­ centration is apparent in each Thinker; but in Philadelphia, where the grave is only a memory, nothing specific attracts his thought. Yet, for all its encircled concentration, The Thinker is inclined somewhat, downward, or forward, or both. Everyone who looks at the work sees a figure absorbed in thought, as I have said. That’s not wrong, but pensive concentration does not prevent the figure’s trunk and limbs from being somewhat outgoing. These contrary movements cannot be accidental in a work on which the master of position and gesture worked repeatedly. Although the body is certainly all-of-a-piece, some of its parts ignore the codes of conduct that would keep them at home—inclination toward or alignment with the body’s axis of symmetry. The figure’s top half, for example, turns leftward, against the upright pos­ ture proposed by the hips. This crossing has the effect of lowering the right shoulder and raising the left, breaking their parallel with the waist. The arms complicate mat­ ters and indicate even greater non-conformity. The vertical forearm has taken on the task of a structural column (albeit eccentrically loaded); the other rests horizontally, as if the knee had interrupted its lazy fall. The base of the chin’s support crosses the trunk and rests on the left knee. This is not an easy position to adopt, especially for a body with muscles as developed as these. Strain is required for the cross-over, as is internal torsion, the result of which is some measure of disequilibrium. En masse and despite the first impression of inwardness, The Thinker inclines out- and downward, eccentrically, not exactly toward anyone viewing him but more widely and basically, toward the ground on which the viewer stands. Considering both the Philadelphia and Meudon figures, all one can really say about his orientation is that it is more or

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less abysmal. If three directions are distinguished, inward, outward, and downward, only the first indicates a figure absorbed into itself. The Thinker on the Parkway has a double in the building. Unlike the first, the second is very hard to see from the street, a little easier from the doorway of the free­ standing wall, from which the museum front can be seen fully. At the center of that front Cret formed a loggia-like hollow to house a full-size casting of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the very first such casting, paid for by the same person who funded the museum and donated it to the city, Mastbaum. The Thinker, first envisaged as a portrait of Dante, then as “a poet,” always had a central place on the Gates, on the mid-line of the composition, at the level of the tympanum (rather like Jove in the Maes painting). Both the open air and enclosed Thinkers incline away from their assigned moorings (the rock seat and door frame). The inclination of the brow on the Gates is beyond the tangle of bodies below—but still condemned—toward the shady pool of water at the center of the sunken garden. Let me pose my question concerning inclination or orientation more generally. What magnetic force pulls both Thinkers out of their pensive concentricity? And what does this counterforce, such that it exists, tell us more generally about the structure of spatial passage from the Parkway to the museum, its movements, times, and—most importantly—its narratives? In mannerist and baroque painting and sculpture the aim of contrapposto or “counter-positioning” was to use variety to give the sense of movement, for nothing brings a work to life as much as movement. The important point is that a body’s lean­ ings or those of its parts are always toward or away from some attractive or repulsive figure nearby. This is to say, a figure comes to life, or defines itself, by taking a stand for or against conditions outside itself. Both axial disequilibrium, which allows the simultaneous appearance of front and back, and reaching in opposite directions, are prompted by conditions outside the body. Position and gesture are a response to these conditions. A figure’s profile indicates the choices it has made in the midst of the circumstances that surround it. Put differently, freedom finds its foothold in a context of antithetical surroundings. While The Thinker does not display anything like the convulsive turnings of mannerist sculpture—not even the triple interests of The Eavesdropper we considered above—I think it is fair to say that his posture has comparable engagement with his vicinity, even if nothing specific in his surround­ ings is particularly magnetic. In fact, his great success in communicating (the strain of) thinking depends on the non-targeted character of his slight inclinations and projections. Non-targeted and slight as it is, The Thinker’s eccentricity is a necessary counterpart to his inwardness, making the sense of the work and the articulation of the theme contingent on its milieu, its directions and its pacings. I have said that the boulevard bronze sits on a stage that is backed up by a free­ standing wall. Here again, we face a figure that is far from simple. Like The Thinker it has a double, in this case a wall Rodin constructed in Meudon between 1907 and 1910. That wall, in turn, was a relocated and rebuilt fragment of the Château d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, first constructed at the end of the seventeenth century for the Conde family. The Château was largely burned during the Commune in 1871. Rodin purchased the ruins in 1905 intending to remake the building as a place where he could house and exhibit his works. When that plan proved to be unrealistic, he had the ruined façade taken down and rebuilt at his Villa. In Philadelphia the same façade was reproduced, positioned as it was in Meudon behind The Thinker, but without

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a studio behind the wall, free-standing, rather like the statue without the grave. The more abstract result indicates a concern for shapes more than stones, an image rather than a relic. To what degree is significance in architecture determined by the presence of recog­ nizable elements? The installation and display of spolia in buildings is hardly new. It was commonplace in remote antiquity, even more so in the renaissance. But spoils were always understood in two ways: plunder taken from an enemy in war, increasing their value; and goods that have been spoiled, the value of which is diminished by the very act of seizure. Is this fragment the former or the latter sort of thing, the spolia of a wealthy connoisseur? Or does this image, which is not a relic, have another role on the Parkway and the museum, the role of a mnemonic device? According to this premise, buildings speak to us of their past, which can also be, for some of us, our past. We recall—perhaps it is better to say we are presented with—the memories they express, variously discerned by each of us according to our capacity for recognition and imagination. Apart from this, the stones and spaces patiently wait. Waiting and remembering: that’s what buildings do so very well. In the open expanse of the Parkway landscape the d’Issy facade looks like a garden ruin, at least from a distance. Once the wall’s base platform is seen closely that first impression loses strength, because the wall has been well maintained. In ruins the boundary between stone and soil dissolves. Resistance, a foundation wall’s chief purpose, is overcome by nature exercising its ancient claim over materials once taken from it. Nothing like that is apparent in this case. The façade sits on a level platform, above The Thinker, its pedestal, and the sidewalk stage, as sharply defined in fact as it once was on Paul Cret’s drawing board. Its position and geometry give it an impor­ tant role in the entry sequence, parallel to the lines of the Parkway, framing the line of approach, mediating the distance between the sidewalk and the museum. But while it is plainly congruent with the Parkway, it also indicates attachment to the garden and museum beyond [Plate 21]. Two sets of steps raise the wall’s deck above the level of The Thinker’s platform. Yet the façade’s ground plane is still below the museum’s entry level seen in the distance. At the same time, the free façade’s base is approximately coplanar with the basin below the fountain at the end of the pool. This alignment cannot be seen until the threshold is crossed because the fountain and pool have been set within a sunken garden. Earlier, I called the threshold in which the Gates of Hell sits “loggia-like.” This distant recess complements the prominent portico of the d’Issy façade: the loggia withdraws inward, like an upstairs room, the portico projects outward, like a garden view. The facades are also distinct. Unlike the enclosing three-dimensionality of the museum front, the d’Issy wall is flat, one-sided, and “open air.” Under-articulated and ruin-like, the wall still offers the visitor, on approach to the museum, several key decisions: passing through the portal one can either proceed straight ahead and down the steps toward the pool, or go left or right along the ambulatory walk toward the museum. This role and sense of the façade is practical and not representational, not because it facilitates or accommodates various forms of movement and rest, but because it allows for choice among them. When a building’s spaces and configuration are generous they allow movement to freely express itself, and to take responsibility for its choices among attractions that pull in contrary directions. The garden at the center of the site comes as something of a surprise once you pass through the gate wall, mainly because it is sunken; but also because it is so quiet.

62 David Leatherbarrow

It consists of a number of encircled figures. Because the basin is shallow and dark, and the water is moved only by the breeze, a vivid sense of stillness is conveyed by the pool, a quality that seems entirely appropriate to the plain, even somber, character of the museum front, which some early critics described as “funereal,” though I am not sure if they knew of the Meudon tomb. As built, axiality replaced concentricity in the overall layout: the pool’s length is more than double its width. Yet, the rings of walks and plantings still shelter the center. The pool’s rectangularity emphasizes the linear connections between the approach walk (centered on The Thinker) and the steps from the raised terrace into the museum entrance. Each of these elements has the same central axis and nearly the same width. Further, the perimeter walks are not fourbut three-sided, hedged, and equipped with benches at the terminal wall, supporting the fountain, in the shadow of the upper terrace. Thus, for all its concentricity—a horizontal version of The Thinker’s—the garden also inclines forward, toward the museum. This inclination makes the end wall rather significant topographically, con­ centrating in a single line and sectional change a cluster of transitional elements or settings. Let me explain. First, the garden’s end wall supports the two stairs that connect the perimeter walks to the level of the entry terrace. While the outer walks are raised by it, this wall also terminates the parterre gardens that these very walks enclose. In other words, if its first function is to link the gate, walks, and façade, its second is to bind the entire sequence to the sunken garden. Given its roles in the garden, the wall’s rough rusti­ cation is hardly surprising. Yet, the wall still displays parallels with the rather more polished museum front, as if it were part of the façade’s base. The end wall’s most important purpose is to limit the height of the entire “sunken” space, however. Were its upper edge not so insistent, the garden’s sense of enclosure would not be so strong. Despite the sheltered character of the whole setting the garden’s sense of enclosure is weakened by the prolongation of the higher walks on the right and left; for each of them continues past the façade to a terminal figure on the building’s central crossaxis. The prolongation of each perimeter passage past the façade has the effect of dislocating the center of the space to its margins, as if the garden really did not care about the symmetrical composition of the whole ensemble. That lateral extension cannot be ignored, for without this “prolongation,” the doubling of walks would be entirely redundant. The result of this configuration is a landscape figure that presents the same conflict or tension as The Thinker: inward focus (concentricity) and outward orientation (prolongation). The combination of sheltering and reaching sensed in the garden is like the coupling of concentration and inclination in the sculpture. Qualities that were combined in a single object are seen again in an enclosing space. Admittedly, the two are oriented in opposite directions—The Thinker leans toward the Parkway and the garden inclines toward the museum—but the important point is that both transcend their encircled inwardness toward topics of interest in their surroundings. Although the two forms of composition can be distinguished in still more ways, they offer expe­ rience of the same kind of configuration: something defined unto itself that also invites and expresses movement. If the same can be said of the Parkway (a bounded enclosure that accommodates and indicates movement) then we have an interlocked series of equivalent images (street, sculpture, and garden). This would mean that the several parts of the project are intelligible because they echo and anticipate one another. Contextuality of this sort is not between a setting and its given location, but among

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the several parts of a designed ensemble. Although much of the meaning of an archi­ tectural work is contingent on its engagements with its milieu, buildings must also be all of a piece in themselves. Coherence such as this can take many forms—repetition of elements, analogous forms of composition, similar treatment of materials, and so on—but the key is that the parts express some kinship with one another, different chapters in the same story. From a distance, the building that houses the collection presents not one but two facades: one resting on the entry terrace and another reflected in the pool. Composite in its makeup and attached no less to the garden it terminates than to the interiors it encloses, the façade is an element within the overall ensemble and the condensa­ tion of its several settings, their most vivid and eloquent expression; rather like the relationship between the traditional town and its countryside. The interiors that house Rodin’s works are certainly the destination of the long approach; but from an architectural point of view, much that they reveal has been shown already in all that leads toward them. Putting this observation in reverse, and more positively, the museum’s internal configuration in plan and section both confirms and concludes the proleptic figures that structure and pace the approach: the Parkway, The Thinker, the gate wall, garden, Gates sculpture, and façade. Making this point more gener­ ally, one can say that a layout is narratively sensible when it acknowledges a double orientation: inward, as an enclosure with local and specific qualities; and outward, prompting and accommodating movement. Why this double role? Two reasons: for the sake of unity within the overall ensemble and because of the dependency of parts on the qualities of the whole, qualities that individual parts do not possess on their own. Internal cohesion among parts, not just assembly, gives the work self-sameness and identity—a compound, not only a mixture; one element because, and not merely after, another. The repetitions, displacements, and ambiguities of levels and distances are all evidences of the play between the parts and the whole of the ensemble, a play that stages the passage from an apparent confusion, a seeming lack or shortcoming of sense, to an excess of meaning. Instances of recollection include the mnemonic functioning of spolia, the coupling of locations that are spatially and geographically distinct, movements that collapse the distinction between “now” and “then,” and several others I have described. An intelligible story in architecture arises when the obvious or normalized sense of settings is enriched by references to other places and situations, making an ensemble—a world—out of what would otherwise be nothing but fragments.

7

Object talks Confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo no Cho¯mei and Wajiro¯ Kon Izumi Kuroishi

From the medieval period onwards in Japan, many literary works appeared in which the main characters’ psychology, human relationships, and social background were projected through descriptions of their places of residence. This is because the concept of “house” in Japan includes multiple meanings, such as property owner­ ship and the notion of family, as well as the physical building, and encompasses the overall relationships between a person and their socio-historical environment. However, Western understanding of Japanese architectural culture has failed to consider such social implications of the concept of “house.” For example, a German architect Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936, tended to interpret the Japanese house in relation to his idea of Japanese aesthetics.1 From rural houses to the houses of designers, the small, simple, and naturalistic features of Japanese dwell­ ings are now often appreciated in foreign texts as something derived from the spirit of Zen Buddhist philosophy. But precisely because of their small-scale spaces, dense relationships should exist in Japan between human lives and houses and created their characteristics. In order to study how people actually lived and how they realized the concept of houses, and to understand Japanese architectural culture, it is vital to examine how the multiple meanings of “house” in Japan have been interpreted and reflected in these living spaces. In Japan, the term monogatari means “story,” and consists of mono-, “object,” and -gatari, “talk.” This combination suggests that, in Japan, objects are commonly per­ sonified, and that objects are recognized as equally important as, or complimentary with, those of people’s writings and talks. But it will also show another understanding of an idea of Marco Frascari’s, the “Tell-the-Tale not only Detail,” which suggests that detailed reading of architectural forms and objects enable us to read hidden architectural contexts but also to listen the story of people inscribed in the objects.2

The origin of architecture and its texts As Joseph Rykwert explains in Adam’s House in Paradise, the concept of the origin of architecture exists throughout the world and the idea of “house”and is a clue to 1 Bruno Taut wrote many texts on Japanese architecture and culture that were popularly translated into Japanese: Forgotten Japan (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2007), Private View of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1992), Nippon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934, reprinted in 1975), Recovery of Japanese Beauty (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962). 2 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture 7 (1984): 23–37.

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understanding the historical process of the formation of the concept of architecture from human activities.3 After Vitruvius told his story of the art’s beginnings with the primitive hut, the notion of the origin of architecture as a house was continuously discussed by architects and writers: in the theory of the eighteenth-century archi­ tectural philosopher Marc-Antoine Laugier; in the works of the nineteenth-century writer Henry David Thoreau; and in modernist architects’ theories, such as those of Le Corbusier. Particularly in the modern architectural discussions, two main types of situations. One of them was when people experienced destruction of cities and architecture through war or disaster, and the consequent establishment of emergency housing as an essential dwelling condition. Another was when people had to reexamine and recreate the cultural identity of architecture when faced with social turning points and multicultural interactions. Both of these cases have symbolic implications for the idea of the origin of architectural space, but a slight difference in their application. In the former case, people needed a great deal of building production, and interpreted the origin of archi­ tecture in a reductive and abstract manner in order to apply it directly as the essential and primal condition to formal and functional theory for planning. In the latter case, the idea of the origin of architecture was reexamined from anthropological and philo­ sophical viewpoints, and the cultural and historical meanings of architectural details, construction systems, and regional and ethnographic contexts were studied for ana­ lyzing human conditions. Here, the concept of the origin of architecture was recog­ nized as dealing with people’s ontological foundation in the world. Marco Frascari’s text, referenced above, extended the latter approach to the semiotic, historical, and sensory examination of architectural designs and representations, and clarified the role of imagination in understanding them, and bridged between the two. In Japan, there have been many fusions with foreign cultures since antiquity, and the Japanese concept of architecture and the house has continued transforming in the face of natural disasters and wars. In the twentieth century, both understandings of the concept of the origin of architecture mentioned above appeared as short-term responses to external events. In Japan, there were examples in the texts establishing Japanese architectural history with diverse historiographical logics, methods, and motivations. Western historical texts were introduced based on the idea of evolution­ ism, and reappeared in discussions about the appropriate design of national housing, such as the discussions of national prototype housing based on the idea of the origin of Japanese architecture, such as those by Wajiro¯ Kon in the pre- World War  II period.4 These two interpretations of the idea of the origin of architecture are in a situational rather than evolutionary relationship with people, whereas the idea of the origin of architecture functioned to connect both interpretations in order to realize the national prototype housing, which had to have minimum-scale, and which directly

3 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). 4 See Wajiro¯ Kon, “Rural Dwellings in Chôsen I,” Kenchiku-zasshi, no. 445 (1923): 273–320, Uzo Nishiyama, Note of Architectural history (Tokyo: Sagami shobo, 1948), and Izumi Kuroishi, “Domesticating Other’s Space: Surveys and Reforms of Housing in Chosen and Japan by Wajiro¯ Kon” in Constructing the Colonized Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around WW II, edited by Izumi Kuroishi (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 215–52.

66 Izumi Kuroishi reflected the relationship between people and their social situation, and the social meaning of architecture. Thus, the current study addresses Japanese texts dealing with minimum-scale houses, and examines the relationship between the text, space, and its social back­ ground in two contrasting works: the Ho¯jo¯ki (Record of the Ten Square-Foot Hut), written by the twelfth-to-thirteenth-century priest Kamo no Cho¯mei, has often been referred to by twentieth century architectural scholars as representing the origin of the Japanese house; while the texts of the architect Wajiro¯ Kon, written after the Kanto¯ Earthquake, examine minimum-scale houses as urgent state of dwelling. By compar­ ing Cho¯mei’s and Kon’s ways of describing the space within a house, I will clarify how these two writers describe their concepts of “house” as reflexions of societies, and I will analyze how the stories of objects are essential in both cases to present alternative approaches to the dwelling space.

Ho¯jo¯ki Ho¯jo¯ki was written by Kamo no Cho¯mei in 1212, and is recognized as one of the three representative Japanese medieval poetries, including Tsurezure-gusa (Essays in Idleness) and Makurano-soshi (Pillow Book). Cho¯mei was a son of the superintendent Shinto priest of Kamo Shrine, but was defeated in a quarrel concerning its priesthood. He lost his inherited household including houses and assets to successive disasters of fire, whirlwind, and earthquake. Having experienced famine, and feeling exhausted by the pursuit of social success and happiness, he abandoned the Shinto priesthood and lived in seclusion in the mountains. He was a highly acclaimed poet, as well as an expert performer of wind and string instruments, and he had abundant knowledge of Buddhist and Chinese literature. His house was extremely humble, but is described as surprisingly joyful. Ho¯jo¯ki is laid out with dual use of Japanese and Chinese letters and is written in an autobiographical-style combining a Chinese poem and Buddhist terminology. The first half explains the various accidents, disasters, and social changes which occurred during Cho¯mei’s lifetime; the second half deals with the process of setting himself apart from society and of making houses of ever-decreasing size between the ages of 30 and 60. The section describing his hut in the mountains [Figure 7.1] runs as follows: Since I retired into the deep mountain of Hino, I have made three shaku eaves for a hearth. I put a bamboo grid on the south, set a shelf to prepare a water cup for prayer, hung a picture of Amida on the north wall behind a paper curtain, and the painted figure of Fugen with Lotus Sutra in front. Beside the east wall, I have a grass carpet as a bed. In the south-west corner I have set a bamboo shelf on which are placed three black leather baskets for keeping books of Japanese poetry, music, and history. Beside the shelf are an ori (harp) and tsugi (lute), one on either side. Such is my temporary hut. In terms of its surroundings, there is a water pipe to the south. I have arranged stones to collect water. As the wood is close to my hut, it is easy to gather firewood. . . . Even though the valley is deep, the west side is open. I am some­ times inspired with Buddha’s image. In spring, I see waves of wisteria flowers like violet clouds wonderfully scenting the air. In summer, I hear the cuckoo’s voice

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Figure 7.1 The arrangement of objects in Cho¯mei’s hut. Pictorial explanation of the history of Japanese interior, Graphics: History of Japanese Interior: Japanese House from Ancient to Modern, Kawade Shinsho series (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo shuppan, 2015). © Kazuko Koizumi

and imagine the way of death. In fall, I hear the evening cicadas as if they are lamenting the ephemeral world. In winter, I enjoy the snow and imagine it as the accumulation and melting of my sins.5 From this description we can deduce the following characteristics about Cho¯mei’s hut. It had exterior facilities for fire and water providing the essential conditions for life. He hung up various Buddha images for meditation, and he arranged tools and instruments for playing music, reading books, and writing poetry. The orientation of the house was essential for his inspiration by the surrounding natural world. Its minimum-sized space was ten feet by ten feet, symbolizing the basic unit of Indian Buddhism’s notion of the universe. Cho¯mei did not own the land, and he made the hut 5 Kamo no Cho¯mei, Ho¯jo¯ki, edited by Shincho Nihon Koten Shusei and Norito Miki (Tokyo: Shincho­ sha, 1976), 15–39. The portion describing the hut in the mountain is on pp. 31–32 and is translated by the author.

68 Izumi Kuroishi

mobile so that it could be relocated to the best position for his favorite smells, sounds, and visions in each season. His text has a very rhythmic fluency, mirroring the rhythms of natural seasonal visions, sounds, and images, and carries implications of humanity’s fate in the world. It includes many references to classical Chinese and Indian stories and philosophies, and uses diverse words for house: ie (house), sumika (abode), yado (lodging), and iori (hermitage), which refer to different stages and features of dwelling. In his text, he reduces his real-life situation to the primitive human condition in nature with of his religious and poetic imagination. Cho¯mei wrote about the process of losing his social status in parallel with the decrease in size of his houses, and he recognized the house as a representation of pro­ fane desires to possess property and land and to secure family life. Thus his hut in the mountain is a temporary building without common comforts or material value, and it enables him to be liberated from social pressure. However, its space is unexpectedly filled with many tasteful objects and tools which express the richness of his spiritual life. Each object has a specific history and meaning, and has a designated place within the hut, and the hut itself is located according to the visions seen and sounds heard from its window. These relationships were imbued with cultural meanings. The hut was constructed by unifying Cho¯mei’s cultural values and sensory pleasures, and by fulfilling his minimum needs for life. In other words, instead of social representation and function, the hut represented physical freedom and the world of the imagination. The size and form of the ten-foot square hut was based on an Indian Buddhist idea recognizing the square as the core of a vast universal space, which enables the unification of nature and people within its minimal space.6 In Cho¯mei’s literary style, his writing expresses how space emerges from the relationship between the meanings of objects and people, and shows how organizing literary expression can create the structure of spatial meanings.

Survey of shelters in the twentieth century The Japanese architect Wajiro¯ Kon (1888–1973) conducted anthropological and sociological research into living patterns and conditions in small-scale houses, and examined the idea of the origin of architecture in Japan.7 However, he was critical about other architectural scholars’ ideas of history, and proposed various possi­ ble logics of architectural development; functional analysis of plans, technological analysis of construction, and symbolical meanings of space etc,. In other words, he

6 In the last section of Ho¯jo¯ki, Cho¯mei explains that he decided on the size and form of the hut following the hut of a Buddhist monk Cudapanthaka. Cho¯mei, 39. 7 Wajiro¯ Kon, Complete Works of Kon Wajiro¯ (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1971), Volume 7. Kon often mentioned the idea of the origin of Japanese architecture, specifically the house, in the volumes Housing, Rural House, and Theory of Design. The background, meanings and transformation of the idea of the origin of the Japanese house in Kon’s work is discussed in: Izumi Kuroishi, Kenchiku-gai no Shiko-Kon Wajiro¯ ron [Exterior Ideas of Architecture: Works and Ideas of Kon Wajiro¯] (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 2000), and in Izumi Kuroishi, “An Attempt to Search for the Origin of Architecture in Japanese Peasant House,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the ACSA (1998): 547–53. In those writings I also examined how Kon’s idea of the origin of the Japanese house was developed in his study of the houses in Chosen and was extended in his later project of housing reform in Japan in Constructing the Colonized Land.

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relativised the idea of origin and history of architecture. While he found that the houses in agricultural areas were strongly influenced by religious, conventional, local, and industrial rules, and family systems, his research on temporary houses after the Kanto Earthquake investigated how capitalism influenced and changed people’s lifestyles. Instead of architectural logics, he applied economic reasons to analyze the rapidly changing houses. He divided the development of small-scale houses into three stages: shelters that protected people’s bodies from natural forces; huts constructed with freely available local materials; and “barracks” professionally constructed with materials made in factories. He then analyzed the differences between these three types, and proposed an idea of prototype housing to apply to plans for housing improvement projects after the earthquake of 1923.8 Polemically, Kon also argued that, in any circumstance, people conceive of “the place where they live as the best” and that “there is something poetic about naked space.” He also praised the methodologies of new construction derived from poverty, and inhabitants adapting themselves to urgent housing so that they might live with the hope of rehabilitation. Kon was conscious that, in the war time, political slogans drew on hackneyed historical expressions and philosophical-sounding words to give an ideological sense of value to dwellings and the living environments in confined situations—beautifying the idea of living in minimal space—and so manipulated the relationship between people’s emotions and their living space to transform and con­ ceal otherwise serious problems.

Stories of and by objects in Modernology Nevertheless, for Kon, everyday space in a house is filled with poetics and stories of life. He was interested in the idea of theatrical meaning of everyday space in French Romanticism novels, and draw sketches of an earth floor of a peasant house explain­ ing that even footsteps and traces of trash tell what kind of people lives there. Kon conducted research he named “Modernology” into the arrangement of objects and instruments in houses, into lifestyles, and into the psychological conditions of the inhabitants. He discovered that people used their survival instinct to build huts, and decorated them to express their identity in society. In his research on a newly wedded couple’s minimum-size house, he explained how the scars and blemishes visible on the carefully used and maintained objects and instruments told the story of the couple’s personality and lifestyle. In drawings titled “Comprehensive illustration of the house-hold of a newlymarried couple,” besides the names of the objects, there are detailed notes about the history and characteristics of objects: the handbag is given by mother-in-law as a souvenir of her trip, the lamp shades are hand made by wife by cutting lace fabric and holding papers, the mandolin guitar with a broken cord is hidden on the top of a 8 “Barracks” usually describes military-style housing of many people living in a single, simple structure. But in Japan in that period, people used this term to describe temporary buildings in general. Thus, Kon categorized them in three, but still used “Barracks” for relatively big and strong temporal struc­ ture. Kon’s texts on temporary houses, including: “Barracks,” “Memory of Barracks after the Kanto Earthquake,” “Temporary Houses after the War,” and “Varieties of Temporary Housing Blocks after the War,” are compiled in Housing, on pp. 285–349. In addition to these studies of temporary housing in urban space, he also wrote about the huts and smaller houses in rural areas, which are in Housing on pp. 350–85.

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book shelf, the cabinet in the living room was a clearance good, and so on [Plate 22]. The crowded appearance, and warm and intimate atmosphere, of the handmade objects expresses how this young couple sincerely created their dwelling space with love. In another research on minimum-size houses, Kon showed that people treasure objects from altars and ancestors’ Buddhist mortuary tablets. He argued that modern architecture and housing equated the primary meaning of a house with its economic value, whereas people still needed to feel connected to others and to memories, and suggested that while architects abstractly conceive architectural space, people under­ stand their space from what they see and feel. Kon’s sketches of objects show how the stories of and by objects created their space of dwelling.

Conclusion Comparative consideration of the styles of approach to the idea of house shows that each style expresses a different relationship with the social and natural environment. Ho¯jo¯ki demonstrates that there are two meanings in the idea of house: it is a physical expression of human social desire, as well as a medium enabling the human body, per­ ception, and subject, to be fused with nature and the universe. Poetry enabled Cho¯mei to express the sensory and literary imagination of his ephemeral temporary house. Meanwhile, Kon’s twentieth-century housing survey record shows that economic productivity, construction methods, and people’s habits took the leading part in the housing theory of the day, and suggests that the second meaning of a house expressed by Ho¯jo¯ki had been dismissed as superfluous. But his Modernology research also explains that the house is the place where people’s memories and subjectivity are formulated and that a person’s sense of body and perceptions are spatialized in accordance with their relationship with objects. A significant finding in this examina­ tion is the importance of the storytelling function of objects in terms of the creation of people’s sense of dwelling and grounding in their homes. In Chomei’s case, his liberation from the society strengthen his perceptions and relationship with objects. In the case of Modernology, it shows that the scarcity made the meaning of objects more important for the people. Until the end of the World War II, most Japanese people’s houses remained smallscale wooden constructions. However, we should not interpret the inhabitants’ space and lifestyles as simply naturalistic and attuned with Zen Buddhism because of the houses’ physical appearance. The meanings of the ephemerality and smallness of buildings should be interpreted from social and residents’ viewpoints. It is universally true that as a place where real people live, the house has transformed from period to period according to social desires, economic and political conditions, bodily and perceptual characteristics, and interactions with the natural and urban environment. Comparative examination of thirteenth- and twentieth-century texts on the concept of “house” and on the way they describe the space shows that, they sustained a concept of space in the house as having emerged from the existential relationship between human, object, nature and society, which they expressed through storytell­ ing. These stories about “house” in Japan are based on the specifically ephemeral and socially susceptible nature of Japanese people’s houses, but it also addresses questions about the sustainable meaning of a house as a person’s place of dwelling to be conceived not from architectural logics but from the people’s sense of life.

8

Suspended ceiling stories Navigating the cosmo-technologies of hospital ceilings Federica Goffi

While all building elements tell their own stories, this is particularly true of ceilings. Suspended ceilings are in-between places, cleaving an up-above from a down-below, entwining materials with stories, hiding and revealing narratives within and without the recto-verso condition of architecture. These suspended ceiling stories fall-into­ place under the abductive hypothesis that ceilings are suspended (sus-pense) in a deeply metaphorical and ephemeral sense. All ceilings-coela are firmly suspended (firmament), especially when one can contemplate through them, and all the more so in the case where the roof collapses.1 This storytelling about the levity of suspended ceilings begins in pre-Galilean time uniting seemingly disjointed clues, which belong to authors and fabrics separated by chronology, and yet deal with cross-narratives to reveal a discourse on the imagina­ tion of suspended ceilings, as the paradigmatic first details of “the double-faced role of technology, which unifies the tangible and intangible of architecture.”2 Even though the stories of Modern false ceilings do enter this narrative, a distinction is necessary between true and false ceilings: the first work through a metaphorical suspension from the heavens through the levity of imagination, while the latter hang from struc­ tural systems held down by gravity and are resolutely of the earth. False ceilings divide horizontally: they are a mute manifestation of materials and technology. Instead, true ceilings-coela—whether they are ceilings, floors above or roofs—suggest vertical continuity from the ground to the sky, arousing contemplation.3 Looking up at contemporary hospital ceilings and the frescoed ceilings at the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (1440–1444) reveals that their design affects how we orient ourselves, whether it is to find the thread of a story, an exit, or the pipes of a sprinkler system. Re-reading ceiling stories through the solidity of their sections reveals an original virtue of the ceiling: storytelling.4 Such re-readings ask for more than an ordering of parts and the labeling of materials, to reach into cultural, religious, political, and economic tales of assembly in architecture. These suspended 1 Human ideas began in contemplating the heavens. The augurs divided the sky into four regions (templa coeli). Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 123. 2 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture 7 (1984): 23–37. 3 Alberti used the word tectum (Latin tego, cover) for overhead structures essential to health. See Leon Battista Alberti, On The Art of Building in Ten Books, edited and translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 26–7. 4 Paul Emmons, “Immured. The Uncanny Solidity of Sections,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the ACSA (2011): 172–8.

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ceiling stories offer a series of multiple beginnings and multiple endings, in which ceil­ ing structures are imagined from the top-down and built from the bottom-up.

Encompassing ceilings of the imagination “What is your name?”

“My name is Italo Calvino.”

“Where were you born?”

“I was born in Sanremo. I was so born in Sanremo that I was born in America.”5

Calvino was suspended between a visible and an invisible city since his birth on October 15, 1923 in Havana, Cuba. He is our upwardly-pointing compass for a walkthrough of the imagination to consider what is suspended above us and to follow a path that unites the visible with the invisible thereby opening up a storytell­ ing through the ceiling. In his lecture on visibility, Calvino writes: “There is a line in Dante (Purgatorio XVII.25) that reads: ‘Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia’ (Then rained down into the high fantasy. . .). I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”6 A first meaning derived from Dante (Then rained down into the high fantasy. . .) is metaphorical: imagination is born in our dreams. A second meaning (“fantasy is a place where it rains”) is literal: when and if it rains in a place, whether this be a forest, a primitive hut or a contemporary ceiling, we become active in imagination as a result of the necessity to improve both an original condition and the technology of construction.7 In Filarete’s account of a possible beginning of architecture Adam enacts the first shelter looking towards the sky (firmamentum) when he instinctively shields himself from falling rainwater with his forearms and hands.8 He thus constructed the first roof. Stability (firmitas) is experienced empathically through the overall body posture, having his feet splayed apart. This translates in an anthropomorphically inspired enclosure with openings on both sides, made of a double-pitch of interwoven tree branches. Filarete’s ceiling is an integral sheltering structure uniting the earth with heaven.9 This first detail in the Western architectural tradition is woven out of invention and necessity to provide a shelter using materials at hand with the memory of a lost paradise and through the consideration and beholding of the sky by means of the body, which is the prime analogical instrument for the construction of meaning. The

5 “Italo Calvino—La Vita Privata,” video Rai.TV (May 5, 2009), http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/pro­ grammi/media/ContentItem-37e06153-d5cb-4d19-9c23-9e7be0af8d8a.html. Accessed October 31, 2014. 6 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 81. 7 “Man Posts Stomach-churning Instagram Video of Sewage Pouring from the Ceiling after Pipes Burst in Chicago Skyscraper,” Daily Mail Online (January 7, 2014), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-2535499/Man-posts-stomach-churning-Instagram-video-sewage-pouring-ceiling-pipes-burst­ Chicago-skyscraper.html. Accessed October 31, 2014. 8 Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1972), Tav. 3, f. 4v, Tav. 4, f. 5r. See also Gen. 3:7–10. 9 Latin Coelum; Greek țȠ૙ȜȠȢ (convex). See Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 117–19.

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fall of Adam establishes a lost paradise above and an unexplored new earth below, an inside and an outside, and a translocation that spurs imagination. A fertile rain spouts down from the sky impregnating the imagination and the earth, marking a beginning for man’s own edifying.10 In this story the first shelter both separated and united micro with macro cosmos, the earth with the sky. The Latin word Firmamentum (vault of heaven), shares with the Vitruvian Firmitas the root, firm (solid).11 Firmness is more than the modern idea of structure. Stability and storytelling merge in the design of ceilings. This is evident in Early Renaissance ceiling narratives that are registers of depth depicting through metaphoric transparency the interplay of construction assemblies and cosmological narratives. Painted on the underside of Brunelleschi’s dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 Last Judgment is a depiction of the Christian end-of-time, fres­ coed in stages from the top down. The cumulus clouds marking heaven’s hierarchical levels correspond to Brunelleschi’s horizontal rings of sandstone built from the bottom up (1417–1436). Angels nearing the apex support an octagonal tabernacle in midair, marking the presence of eight structural ribs. These non-verbal stories are carefully constructed signs, relating the facts of construction through a signified cosmology. Storytelling assumes here a diagnostic function: detecting structural anatomy through the literal reading of the opaque plaster skin. Anagogical reading transcends the here and now and excites our search for both facts and meaning.12 Anchorage holes, as the indices of now-absent scaffolding structures, pierce simultaneously through the transverse section of the vault and the spine of an open book whose pages are about to close during this apocalyptic end-of-all time scenario when everyone is called to account for their own life-tales [Plate 23]. The transgressive devil-supported book opens into a circular darkness that indicates the mirrored complexity of the story of suspension of the dome and the celestial vault alike. This convergence reveals the synchronic junctures of cultural and structural storytelling.

Fiction and reality in everyday and end-of-time ceilings The role of the ceiling as a paradigmatic place for storytelling invites contemplation on what appears with increasing frequency, the oversimplified condition of a bare soffit that either blatantly exposes the guts of a building and so too the prowess of technology dominating everyday life, or, alternatively, is hidden by the accessible dropped ceilings of acoustic panels on a grid constituting a blind and aphonic surface. Both are examples of the physical ceiling without a story to tell. Acoustic panels are a modern panacea offered since the 1930s as a universal remedy for poor acoustic design, reducing our headroom in not just a physical dimension, but also contributing to the actualization of the Cartesian paradigm of the non-place, transforming the lack of attention to aural qualities into an affordable oversight.13

10 Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, V.1, 25.

11 See Gen 1:6.

12 Marco Frascari, “De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking,” in The Cultural Role of Architecture:

Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, edited by Paul Emmons, John Hendrix, and Jane Lomholt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 83–92. 13 See Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

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In dealing with modern everyday ceilings, their ordinary elements only have lit­ eral meanings. The hanging air ducts, pipes, and electrical wiring show present-day cosmo-technologies over and over-our-heads becoming the story of people living inside a machine. Is this the beginning of a long story, and where did it start? The sound of mechanical systems often leaves us with no other choice but to listen. In Calvino’s T-zero—a fictional narrative that unites the beginning of time with an apocalyptic life inside the machine—an endless ceiling stretches above in another endof-time scenario: “The ceiling that covers us is all iron gears that stick out: it is like the belly of a car I have slipped under, to repair some breakdown, but I cannot slide out because, while I am down there on my back, the car expands, stretches to cover the whole world.”14 The industrial ceiling extends incessantly in countless places and times, echoing Calvino’s lamentation. The industrial factory ceilings documented by Canadian pho­ tographer Edward Burtinski in Xiamen City, China, had yet to come into existence.15 The transcendence of storytelling is transformed into a journey through the guts of machine-buildings. What happens when we exceed efficiency and achieve alienation? Is limitless ceiling-extension our absolute limit? Calvino was filmed near the “woods of skyscrapers” under construction at La Défense in Paris in 1974. He described Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime (1964–1967) as a fictional future that was turning into reality.16 The film’s ironic ending shows a thin city; its surfaces peel off. The falling of a just-installed ceiling turns into a seren­ dipitous moment, allowing for other stories to emerge from behind the thin veneer of modern lives, exposing the systems and the concealed characters in the movie [Plate 24]. Looking-up and through the ceiling, Louis Khan criticized the modern “pasting­ on” of layers of engineered materials synthesized to offer lighting and acoustic prop­ erties. To avoid the invasion of systems he argued for the responsibility of the architect to assign them an orderly place within buildings.17

An urgently needed re-reading: the contemporary hospital ceiling Contemporary urbanized cultures’ ceilings reveal that they are often reduced to a pragmatic surface without any desire for storytelling. The “dropped ceilings” of acoustic panels at the Ottawa Hospital (c. 1980) serve as a case in point amongst ceilings found in countless offices, restaurants, schools, libraries, airports, and so on, which disregard the wide range of mind and body orientations. This replicable detail is critical in its relation to hospital residents as they stare up from a bed; it offers nothing but the mindless, monotonous, acoustic properties of a micro-porous surface. A series of stickers with hand-written notations trace the route of fire sprinkler systems concealed beyond the panels [Figure 8.1]. This infra-ordinary dashed line is 14 Italo Calvino, T Zero (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 92. 15 Marc Mayer, Ted Fishman, and Mark Kingwell, China: The Photographs of Edward Burtynski (Göttingen (Allemagne): Steidl, 2005). Also see Burtynsky’s website, http://www.edwardburtynsky. com/site_contents/Photographs/China.html. Accessed March 11, 2014. 16 Italo Calvino: Un Uomo Invisibile, directed by Nereo Rapetti (Paris: February, 1974). Documentary film,YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jdiCztTLQw. Accessed June 13, 2015. 17 Louis I Kahn. Louis I. Kahn, Writings, Lectures, and Interviews (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 57, 258–63.

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Figure 8.1 Dropped ceilings at the Ottawa Hospital (1980s). © Federica Goffi

likely to fall into the oblivion of peripheral sight for most visitors, who are not prone to look for respite in a ceiling lacking in sensorial and cultural stimulation. This ceil­ ing is a planar divide between the everyday life of hospital residents and caretakers, and the temporal occurrence of regular maintenance. This banality confirms that hospitals are designed to best house machines rather than people, but they end up failing both.18 These engineered ceilings extend undifferentiated from corridors into the patients’ rooms, lacking opportunities for escape. The intrusions of everyday life are central to the tale. Novelist Georges Perec, who often wrote in his bed, used the ceiling as a place where he began confabulating: I like ceilings, I like moldings and ceiling roses. They often serve me instead of a muse and the intricate embellishments in the plasterwork put me readily in mind of those other labyrinths, woven from phantasms, ideas and words. But people no longer pay any attention to ceilings. They are made dispiritingly rectilinear or, worse still, done up with so-called exposed beams.19 18 Esther Sternberg, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009). 19 George Perec, Spieces of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1999), 18.

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The ceiling is a place where the invisible is overlaid and through which it becomes approachable. Infra-ordinary clues at the Ottawa hospital are signs revealing a sto­ rytelling of our time. Concerned with cost efficiency, modern everyday ceilings have become blind and deaf to our needs, lacking real depth.

Mono-directional sightedness: architecture and systems engineering Currently systems engineering occupies a critical interstitial space within architecture. In a culture of technological development something has fallen out-of-sight, into the void plenums created to negotiate a place for systems inside the hospital-machine. Through a multidirectional gaze, combining direct and in-direct vision, the floor and ceiling coalesce in the depths of reflected ceiling-plans. The efficacy, rather than efficiency, of a story relies on taking it in through one reading event.20 The reflected ceiling plan is a multilayered plot coalescing layers for an efficacious reading. In modern and contemporary architecture and systems engineering, mono directional sightedness (or lack thereof) is made visible and materializes in the aphonic and opaque boundary of acoustic ceiling panels that negotiate competencies: the realm of systems engineering is concealed above; below is the realm of architecture. Technical systems are placed out-of-sight, precluding insightful reading through the ceiling. When it comes to hospitals, navigating systems in and through ceilings is a poetic necessity, which could be handled with low-tech diagnostic storytelling, emulating medical advances in technology. Electromagnetic tracking allows surgeons to direct surgical instruments in real time while operating.21 Visual cues embedded within a larger artistic program would allow for ease of building systems detection during inspections.

Entry through the ceiling: between fiction and reality at the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala Italo Calvino’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures were not delivered at Harvard University as planned. Calvino died in Siena on September 19, 1985 at the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, as a consequence of a stroke, before his trip to Cambridge. This hospital remained in use from the tenth century until 1996. The ceilings from which Calvino’s last fantasies might have rained down offered both physical and metaphysi­ cal inspiration. Some of the hospital’s frescoes depict episodes in the life of its founder, Beato Sorore. During pregnancy, Sorore’s mother had a premonitory dream of the founding of the hospital. She saw the gettatelli (orphans) climbing the steps of a ladder (scala coeli) to reach Mary.22 Lorenzo Vecchietta, an early Renaissance painter who devoted his life to the mission of the spedale, depicted the dream in a perspective fresco

20 Edgar Allan Poe, “Philosophy of Composition”, Graham’s Magazine, XXVIII, no. 4 (April 1846): 163–7. 21 “StealthStation® Surgical Navigation Systems.” Medtronic Surgical Navigation Systems (December 11, 2014), http://www.medtronic.com/for-healthcare-professionals/products-therapies/spinal/surgical­ navigation-imaging/surgical-navigation-systems/. Accessed March 1, 2015. 22 The Tower of Babel is a ladder “with its top in the heavens”, Gen. 1:4–9. See Rama Coomaraswamy, The Door in the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6–61.

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23

opening into the solidity of the wall [Plate 25]. The Virgin lifts an orphan through a ceiling into another world, to approach the heavenly vault. On the opposite fresco, the hospital construction is shown with a bricklayer climbing up a ladder carrying a basket of bricks on his shoulder.24 The double meaning of edifying (edificatio)25 is demonstrated in this parallel reading: the uplifting of construction materials, a literal edification of the physical hospital, leads to another real edification, that is, a meta­ physical, moral, uplifting of the spirit. It is the weaving of culture through building acts that edifies us. This entry-through-the-ceiling defines a place uniting time with sempiternity.26 The vault’s spring-line defines a horizon where heaven meets the earth. Tellingly, from a construction viewpoint, above this level vaulted structures need formwork until construction settles, showing a critical shift in assembly methods and understand­ ing.27 The vaulted ceiling partakes in the heavenly world, in a suspended in-between condition.28 The starry sky of the ceiling is informed through analogy with Mary’s blue mantle and affords the virtues of lightness to an otherwise weighty brick vault. The heavens are described in the Bible as a tent or canopy stretched out by God.29 Middle Ages exegetic readings (of Genesis 1:6–14) suggested that the heavenly vault was a solid dome perforated with tiny holes through which the stars shown. In Domenico di Bartolo’s, Virgin of the Cloak [Plate 26], her mantle is a coterminous surface shared by heavenly and earthly realms, offering hospitality to pilgrims, the needy, the elderly, the sick, and abandoned children. Angels suspend the mantle between their hands forming a convex ceiling. This memorable storytelling offers insight into the mir­ rored inverted profile of the 1440s’ diagonally intersecting semi-circular loadbearing masonry vaults. The original Ospedale was reincarnated in 1998 as a museum of its former life [Figure 8.2].30 In contrast with original intentions, this reconception narrows edifying to aesthetic experience, to the exclusion of the institution’s charitable mission. A Tati moment—described as an ordinary occurrence—took place at the new hospital Le Scotte in Siena when an acoustic ceiling panel fell down in real life in an operating room just cleared after a surgery.31

23 Mariella Carlotti, Ante gradus. Gli affreschi del Pellegrinaio di Santa Maria della Scala Siena (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011), 52. 24 See Domenico di Bartolo, The Bishop Giving Alms, 1442–3. 25 Frascari, “De Beata Architectura,” 91. 26 Federica Goffi, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 172–212. 27 This is about 30 degrees from the spring-line. 28 Hagia Sophia’s dome (Istanbul, 532–537 CE) is described as suspended from heaven by a golden chain. Nadine Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Bysantine Aesthetic Experience (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 13–15. 29 Isaiah 40:22. 30 Cesare Brandi urged for museification (Corriere della Sera, September 23, 1968). 31 “Cade Controsoffitto in Chirurgia. Tragedia Sfiorata Alle Scotte—La Nazione.” Siena Cronaca (December 11, 2014), http://www.lanazione.it/siena/cade-controsoffitto-in-chirurgia-tragedia-sfio­ rata-alle-scotte-1.404067. Accessed March 3, 2015.

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Figure 8.2 Hospital ward. Santa Maria della Scala, Pellegrinaio (1440–1444). © Biblioteca e Fototeca Giuliano Briganti, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena

Drawing respite through the ceiling What kinds of ceiling stories inhabit us today? What hides behind surfaces and what is exposed? Do we live inside the machine or does the machine live inside us? Whether occluded or exposed, the modern ceilings in a shopping mall, restaurant, or hospital are unsurprisingly similar. Since this condition is so widespread, we almost cannot see it anymore. There is little desire to raise one’s head to contemplate what lies above, as the banal story told there is one and the same. Everyday ceilings have become inter­ changeable and have lost seminal quality. The intrados/extrados ceiling condition is a register of depth. The ceiling of acoustic panels is an infra-thin, overextended surface that separates poetic from prosaic and architecture from systems engineering.32 That which is considered an efficiently thin, acoustically absorbent ceiling, is in reality a great divide that creates a suspended story of unbearable lightness. How can we regain insight through the ceiling, affording real depth and the lightness that Calvino described in his Memos for the Next Millennium? American psychologist James Hillman, striving to restore the simple gesture of looking upwards, claimed that the ceiling is the “most neglected segment of our contemporary interior—interior in both architectural and psychological senses of the

32 Emmons, “Immured,” 176.

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33

word.” Although built last, ceilings should be conceived first, renewing the uplifting role of what is one of the most un-considered everyday details in contemporary tales. To remediate our inability to look up, architects could begin living upside down On the Ceiling, like the character in the novel by Éric Chevillard, who bemoans that ceilings should not be reduced to one function and so become ordinary, when instead they could be put to all best possible uses.34 Changing the angle of imaginative con­ frontation and designing from the ceiling as a first detail invites us to re-consider this primary architectural element. Today tourists travel to historic buildings to look up at marvelous mirrored ceiling journeys, yet they live in cities where they are seldom invited to look up. Instead of making the ceiling a painting in a museum, we should reinvigorate our necks by creat­ ing architecture that invites us to occasionally pause, look up, and reflect upon life. Great ceilings demonstrate the necessity of artifice, since we cannot renounce look­ ing up for council. True ceilings are cultural storytelling maps orienting us through places and time, while running systems in and through buildings. Contextual re-read­ ings take place through personal encounters with ceiling stories, opening up infinite possibilities for memorable storytelling. This multilayered emplotment, a place for respite, would be taken in one walk-through of places and ceilings.

33 James Hillman, The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 108. 34 Éric Chevillard, On the Ceiling, translated by Jordan Stump, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

9

Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor Andreea Mihalache

Dor In 1933, at the young age of 19, Saul Steinberg left his native Bucharest to study archi­ tecture in Milan. Years passed, he ultimately settled in New York City and became an accomplished artist. One day, he asked a friend who was traveling to Bucharest to take pictures of his childhood street—Strada Palas—and later projected the color slides on the wall of his apartment. Looking at the oversized images he suddenly sensed the overwhelming realization and pain that something was gone forever, some­ thing that would never be retrieved or be accessible again. Observing the street from a distance appeared as both a sacrilege and a legitimate desire: “I felt as though I were peering into a tomb, lifting the sheet from a corpse. I felt angry as well as curious to see, and then angry for having seen—as though I had lost something.”1 What felt like a sickness with unknown causes found a temporary remedy, strange as it may seem, in the very same things that had triggered it: “To cure myself of this illness I sent two other friends to take pictures. One of them took the same pictures, but in winter with snow, which was more beautiful because the changes were less obvious.”2 Steinberg describes an ailment familiar to many. Once installed, this unusual condi­ tion surreptitiously takes over one’s soul and never goes away. As one learns to live with it, the pain sometimes grows more intense, while other times stays dormant, but remains present, unmistakably there. Regret and anger, love and pain, nostalgia and wrath—Steinberg experiences the strange symptoms of a disease bearing the Romanian name dor. Explored mainly in literary studies and philosophy, but overlooked in visual arts, dor as a creative emotion activates imagination. Missing and longing for a certain being, place, or situation constructs a tension between what is lost, and often no longer attainable, and what is desired, and equally unreachable; between memories from the past and the anticipation of the future. Animated by dor, Steinberg returned to his childhood street over and over again. While his drawings and sketches record in minute detail, both in written and drawn form, neighbors, objects, and rooms, they 1 Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, translated by John Shepley (New York: Random House, 2001), 42–3. The author would like to extend her special thanks to Dr. Sheila Schwartz, the Research and Archives Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation, for graciously opening unforeseen doors and stairways. 2 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 43. Steinberg returned to Romania only once, in September 1944, for a brief visit with his family, before being shipped back to Washington, D.C. from Rome, where he had been stationed with the Office of Strategic Services.

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are not intended to construct an accurate depiction of a lost reality. Instead, I suggest, they are daydreams that propose stories about inhabitation and cultivate the rich ambiguity between two seemingly contradictory manifestations of dor: homesickness (dor de acasa˘) and wanderlust (dor de duca˘). Every language has its untranslatable words and the Romanian dor is one of them.3 Similar, but not fully overlapping with the English longing, spleen, and melancholy, the German Sehnsucht, and the Portuguese saudade, dor describes a malaise turned “toward an object or toward being.” Both an emotion present in Romanian folklore, and a philosophical concept, dor confronts finitude with the anxiety of the infinite, pain with pleasure, desire with restraint. In addition to homesickness and wanderlust, the word makes other expressions such as mi-e dor de . . . (I miss someone or some­ thing), and în dorul lelii (to accomplish something reluctantly and without a precise objective). Etymologically derived from the Latin dolus (pain, suffering), it shares the same root with the verbs a dori (to desire, but also to wish something to someone) and a durea (to be in pain, to feel pain, to hurt). Romanian philosophers Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica, both of whom had affinities with Heidegger’s phenomenology, have proposed dor as a specifically Romanian metaphysical concept.

Strada Palas, no. 4 Born to a Jewish family in the small city of Râmnicu Sarat, Steinberg grew up in Bucharest on Palas Street, “a little street completely apart from traffic” that he described as his “homeland.”4 His relationship with his home country was not an easy one: “I don’t want to go back to Romania,”5 he confessed to his life-long friend, Aldo Buzzi, and he never did. “Fucking Patria [homeland] who murdered millions, who never accepted me. Unfortunately all my landscapes, smells, sounds, tastes—are there. Houses, courtyards, sky, mountain air, snow,”6 he wrote in his journal on June 15, 1991, the day he turned 77. In Italy Steinberg built a reputation as a cartoonist for Bertoldo, a humor newspa­ per that welcomed young artists and writers. Beginning in 1938, he was subject to Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws and tried to find refuge in another country. By 1941, he was sought by the police as a stateless foreign Jew with no rights to remain in Italy. On April 27, 1941 he turned himself in and was taken to the Italian intern­ ment camp of Tortoreto in the province of Teramo. After six weeks’ internment, he managed to obtain the necessary visas to fly to Lisbon and board a ship to New York in transit to the Dominican Republic, for which he had a residency visa. He spent a year in Ciudad Trujillo before getting a US visa. During this time his journal entries are filled with the details of a tedious daily routine. The excruciating boredom makes every insignificant event become a little wonder worth registering: on Monday, October 20: “At 7 in the evening I threw 3 See Anca Vasiliu, “Dor,” in Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 227–8. Adam Gopnik related Steinberg and dor in his “Word Magic: How much really gets lost in translation?” in The New Yorker, May 26th 2014, p. 37. 4 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 42. 5 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 41. 6 Journal, April 23 - July 5, 1991, spiral notebook, Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, formerly Box 75.

82 Andreea Mihalache

Figure 9.1 Steinberg's drawing of his childhood street, from a journal, December1940– January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

away a cigarette butt and it landed upright.” followed by a tiny sketch of a burn­ ing cigarette butt standing upright.7 He remembers his friend Eugen Campus from Bucharest giving an onion to a dog and the dog eating it.8 One day, a watch received as a gift from his former girlfriend, Adina, stops working, but then the following day it miraculously starts ticking again.9 Among the drawings made in Ciudad Trujillo, Steinberg sketched his childhood street, courtyard, and house [Figure 9.1]. Most likely never intended to be published, these sketches reveal his dor for a time and place forever lost. Just as it seemed important to record the exact time when

7 “Alle 7 di sera ho buttato un mozzicone di sigaretta ed e caduto in piedi.” Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943, entry from February 10–11, 1942. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89. For a detailed account of Steinberg’s immigration ordeals, see Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years (1933–1941),” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, No. 2 October 2011. 8 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943, entry from October 22, 1941. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89. 9 Handwritten journal. December 1940–January 1943, entry from February 11, 1942. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89.

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his burning cigarette butt fell standing on the floor, or when the watch from Adina stopped working and then inexplicably repaired itself, so it was important to mark the precise moment when he made these drawings: “made this in Ciudad Trujillo, in 1941—August 19,”10 he writes on a “site plan” of his street. Written not as a casual indication at the bottom of the page, the way similar annotations are usually scribbled, but made visible in the white space on the right side of the drawing, the note resembles a speech balloon or perhaps a thought bubble in the tradition of cartoons. The voice, however, suggests otherwise: it has the serious, celebratory tone found in old votive inscriptions used to mark royal edifications. It registers the time of the making of the drawing, but also a cross-section through a past turned present. The next page of the journal zooms into a detailed plan of the house, now explaining the time of the drawing: “No. 4, Palas Street (from Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931”11 [Plate 27]. The two sketches have the significance of an inaugural act where recollec­ tions become material, rather than mental, images. It is the materiality of memories that Steinberg constructs through his mood of dor, marking two overlapping tenses: the time of the making of the drawing, and the time of the memory within the drawing. Let us return now to the “site plan” [Figure 9.1]. Connecting two main streets of the neighborhood, Palas Street was fairly short: eight houses on one side and seven on the other.12 For Steinberg, however, the street is much thicker because it is populated with people, events, stories, and characters that construct a depth otherwise invisible. He identifies the houses by the names of their inhabitants (Willy Kaufman, Mantuleasca, Fischer, M-me Schor, M-me Ris¸, etc.), or by different characters associated with them: un cane (a dog), il ragazzo paralitico (the paralytic boy), un tâmplar (a carpenter).13 Bouncing between Italian and Romanian, he constructs a form of Esperanto that joins together two realities and two times, of the adult and of his child alter ego. His family house is the only one identified by a number: 4. Without a name, the house appears to lack identity. This, however, is deceiving, because numbers—and number 4 in particular—have special significance in Steinberg’s universe; they are not quantitative entities, but living creatures with character and feelings. To the friend traveling to Bucharest, he would give specific instructions about what to capture in the photographs: “the courtyard seen through the gate, the house number and plate.”14 Several of his later drawings give life and stories to different numbers. One in particular shows a Steinberg-resembling cat—another recurrent character in his art—looking inside a number 4, which becomes a secret box that allows one to store, then search; but, more importantly, to remember and imagine. Four is an interesting number because it is a shape that would arouse the curios­ ity of a cat. Most numbers are either open or closed. Number 8, for instance, is closed; a cat has no business to look inside. A cat likes to peer into something 10 “fatto questo a Ciudad Trujillo nel 1941–19 agosto”. Handwritten journal, December 1940– January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89. 11 “Strada Palas no. 4, (prin Antim) din 1918 (cred) fino al 1930 o 1931”. Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89. 12 The two streets were Antim and Schitu Maicilor. The eponymous monasteries were located in the same neighborhood, on the Arsenal Hill. The entire area was demolished by the communist regime in the 1980s to make room for a new administrative center of the communist party. 13 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89. 14 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 43.

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that is half open—a little bit open—a mystery. Number 3 is obvious; number 1 is nothing; 5 perhaps is more intriguing, but 4 certainly is perfectly designed and engineered for a cat to look inside and find out what is going on. . . . The abstrac­ tion, number 4, became a reality and the cat became an abstraction because it combined itself with this number.15

To the viewer, the box appears empty—there is nothing inside. But for the Steinberg­ cat the container is a memory box triggering recollections only accessible to him. Similarly, the house at 4, Strada Palas is an almost-enclosed container, the only one on the street represented as a box, rather than an unfinished rectangle. And that is because the mysteries at no. 4 are waiting to be revealed.

Inhabitation Steinberg grew up without toys, but surrounded by containers of different sizes. His father owned a small factory that made cardboard boxes ranging in size from lipstick holders “covered with colored paper and trimmed with gold and silver,” to large boxes for Passover unleavened bread, “stacked up in big piles that took on the appearance of fantastic cardboard buildings.”16 Similar to the mysterious cases that fascinated young Saul, the house at no. 4 becomes an enigmatic box hiding many secrets. Standing right outside the fence and marked in the sketch by a radiating sun, a felinar (street lamp) sheds light onto the puzzle [Figure 9.1]. Moving up the drawing, we peek inside the courtyard. Beyond the fence, the walls become transparent: inside the house we guess at what could be a butoi (barrel) and a dulap (wardrobe). Then Steinberg invites us to turn the page and zoom in into the courtyard [Plate 27]. Beyond the gate at no. 4 we find cis¸meaua (the water pump), a necessary utility at the beginning of the century. Typical for house typologies in early twentieth-century Bucharest, several shotgun houses share a common courtyard. As we advance toward the back, we pass through a gra˘dina˘ (garden) and by a cluster of ot¸etari (castor bean). In a small nook bordered by a gard lemn (wooden fence) we stumble upon scara˘, ga˘let¸i, gunoi (staircase, buckets, trash). Another curte interna˘ (interior courtyard) leads toward Schitu Maicilor, one of the two streets connected through Palas Street. This labyrinth of courtyards, fences, and open and enclosed spaces would only make sense in plan in the mind of an adult. Children, on the other hand, would remember the qualities of spaces, how big or small they felt, along with those details closer to the scale of their tiny stature: the wooden planks on the ground, the buckets, the trash, or the stairs. On the left, in front of the ot¸etari, we arrive at the family house, the only one colored in light brown [Plate 27]. It is the adult, Italian-speaking Steinberg who explains, in the upper right corner of the drawing, the evolution of the house, which has matured along with the economic growth of the family: Strada Palas No. 4 (through Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931. Over the last 3–4 years the street number is changed and becomes 9—first running 15 Saul Steinberg, quoted in Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 28–9. 16 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 6–7.

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water is introduced in the house, then Sander’s apartment is redone, a new level is added above the kitchen, everything is being modernized and we get electricity, we even take the little room next to the kitchen, we redo the interiors, paint the walls with airbrushed drawings, we buy furniture from the Chit¸ales.17 While these notes are written in Italian, everything related to the family house is in Romanian. As Steinberg inhabits the rooms, he simultaneously inhabits his native language, which, conversely, is the only one that can render the reality of the house. Even the drawing conventions need meticulous explanations in Romanian to complete the picture. Nothing indicates where we enter the Steinbergs’ house. In Romanian folklore it is often the window, rather than the door, that carries the significance of thresholds and rites of passage. Popular beliefs mark the window as the place where sick children pass from one side to the other in a specific ritual of name changing associated with curing their illness.18 The house in the drawing is Steinberg’s home, but also an imag­ ined house that we have access to through the threshold of any opening. The default entrance would most likely be through the antreu (a large vestibule), from which we are taken to the buca˘ta˘rie (kitchen) to the right and casa˘ (main house) to the left. A fairly modest house for the family of four occupying it, the Steinbergs’ house has little furniture. A ga˘leata˘ (bucket) sits on the kitchen floor and something that resembles a trapdoor toward the pivnit¸a˘ (basement)—si cadeva dentro (“one would fall inside”), notes Steinberg, in Italian, as his thoughts, along with his steps, suddenly slip and fall into another reality. A bufet (cupboard) and probably a bed and a table occupy the one-window vestibule. What Steinberg designates as the main house is in fact the largest room where we encounter the garderob vechiu (old wardrobe), garde­ rob nou (new wardrobe), canapeaua mica˘ (the small sofa), an etajera˘ (bookshelf), a large bed, and a godin (a cylindrical heating stove). The latter holds a particular significance for him: in the concert of childhood scents, “the metal stove had a special smell when lit for the first time, since the surface had been greased to keep it from rusting.”19 As he later confessed in an interview: I find that one reliable instrument is the nose. I go back to the house where I lived as a child, at night, and try to sniff a past. I allow the nasal emotions to tell me the truth. I discover myself as a house. In the bedroom and living room are my best friends and relatives—The Senses. Eyes, nose, tongue, fingers etc., in constant conversation and emotion. I suspect the eye and nose to be older than I am, and to have their own brains. They may be angels. Down in the basement I hear the mumbling of my underworld: furnace and plumbing—my invisible relatives. . . . And up in the attic, I hear the shrieks of the crazy cousins . . . We learn to live with them.20

17 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89, author’s translation from the Italian. 18 People said that changing the name of the child would confuse the illness, which would subsequently lose the ability to recognize the child. 19 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 5. 20 Typescript of interview with Adam Gopnik, August–September 1991, p.3, Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 67.

86 Andreea Mihalache How do all these fragments of inhabitation come together? Why did Steinberg con­ tinually return to a not-particularly-happy childhood and keep drawing that modest, yet royal, house year after year, despite his open position of profound disdain and skepticism toward his country of birth? If every history is a story, then how are they woven at 4, Strada Palas?

And Beyond An inconspicuous detail reappears in different renditions of Strada Palas throughout the years: the upper left corner of the 1941 sketch from Ciudad Trujillo draws the eye to this detail by the thick, heavy lines that reverse the drawing conventions usually requiring the use of sharp, dark outlines in the foreground and fuzzy, blurred lines in the background [Figure 9.1]; the family dinner vignette made in 1942, and entitled Strada Palas, guides us toward it by the central strip of sepia sky shimmering through the gold embroidered curtains [Plate 28]; a 1966 view of Strada Palas renders this minuscule object next to an oversized tree, larger than the houses themselves and hovering above them [Plate 29]. This discreet detail is a fragile ladder leading to a closed door—the door to the pod (attic)? Or perhaps a door to nowhere? As Steinberg consistently remembers it and brings it into presence, the ladder speaks of wanderlust and the desire to escape. The adult attempts to free himself from the memories of his alter-ego child and the convoluted feelings about his homeland, perhaps from the past, as well as from the present. In the story of Jacob’s ladder, the angelic stairway opened up the path to dreams and to a world invisible through the eyes of the mind, yet engraved in the bodily action of climbing up and down the stairs. Describing the childhood home as an “oneiric house, a house of dream-memory” that is “physically inscribed in us,” Gaston Bachelard wrote: After all these years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather high step. The house’s entire being would open up, faithful to our being. We would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in the dark to the distant attic.21 Steinberg’s stairway to the attic joins dor as homesickness with dor as wanderlust, the complicated mood that constantly drives him toward, and at the same time away from, his memories. Dor constructs the scaffolding of his drawings, reminding him (and us) about the intricate connections between here and there, now and then, love and hate. Dor and daydreaming inhabit the ladder to the garret as a place of becoming, of not-yet there, full of possibilities. Steinberg reshuffles the objects in the memory box at no. 4, re-writing over and over again the same, though different, confabulations.

21 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 15.

10 The enlightening radiance of shadows The radiance of shadows Hooman Koliji

The confluence of geometry and light in architecture has the power to create spaces of awe and wonderment. This is especially true of the uniquely Persian window orosi. Stretching from floor to ceiling, an orosi is a thin wooden screen of complex geometric patterns filled with colorful glass, mediating between the main room inside and the courtyard garden outside. These windows are usually prestigiously centered on the primary axis linking the edifice and garden as a celebratory destination. This placement with its framing of views from inside and out creates a double emphasis on reading the window beyond an artful architectural artifact. The orosi presents itself as an embodiment of multiple societal and cultural apertures and planes. This simul­ taneity of layers gestures to the arts, sciences, crafts, perception, religious imagina­ tion, and social and political aspects of their situated time—all present in the orosi window—that are most awakened for the viewer through an enchanting play of light and shadows. Throughout its history, windows have generally served as a symptomatic trope in architectural discourses because “[the window] has functioned both as a practical device (a material opening in the wall) and an epistemological metaphor (a figure for  the framed view of the viewing subject).”1 While the first function of orosi—a utilitarian fenestration—is significant, it is its second function as a compelling aper­ ture to the worlds of subjective wonder and the collective experience of a culture that makes the telling of orosi a fascinating tale. When seen in terms of the worlds it creates, the thin material window expands into a thick realm of thresholds and interpenetrations, inviting the viewer to partake in its conjuring. The exquisite colored glass of orosi windows suggests a multiplicity of nar­ ratives at tectonic, experiential, and contemplative levels. The interplay between these layers in orosi windows will be investigated as a fertile architecture facture.

A (hi)story of glazing and gazing The origin of orosi windows can be traced back to the twelfth century across the Islamic provinces. They were first utilized as a distinct window typology in the royal palaces of the Safavids (1501–1722).2 European traveller Olearius visited Isfahan in 1 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 26. 2 Mehdi Amraee, Orosi, Panjirh Haye Ru Bi Nur [Orosi, the Windows Facing the Light]. 2nd ed. (Tehran: sazman mutali’e va tadvin-e kutub-i ulumi insani (samt), markaz tahghigh va tusi’e ulum insani

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1637 and observed Persian windows “as big as their doors . . . they [the Persians] have not yet the use of glass, but in winter they cover the frames of their windows, which are made like lattices, with oiled paper.”3 Later, colored glass replaced translucent waxed paper, making an orosi a luxurious and precious building element.4 Despite the absence of local technology to produce colored glass, that Persians insisted on achieving such glamorous windows suggests orosi windows were also associated with social and political desires [Plate 30]. The celebratory Safavid palaces which made elaborate use of orosi windows cul­ minated in a “display culture” of ornament to establish a new identity of their own, one that differed from their predecessors and was distinct from their competitors, the Ottomans.5 Subsequent orosi windows of the Qajars also demonstrate some of the most sophisticated craftsmanship and ornamentation of the genre. This is evident in their palaces, where power and beauty were intended to be on full display. The higher the stature of the household, the more ornate was the orosi apertures. These palaces extended the role of the window from ornamentation to the invocation of attributes of authority and power, playfulness, and prestige. Beyond the question of status, the creation of orosi windows also suggests an inner desire or a cultural urge to achieve certain spatial qualities. Etymological studies disagree on the exact origins of the word orosi. Since in Persian the prefix or denotes “above” or “high,” Pirniya, an Iranian architectural scholar, suspected that the name may have come about because the window opens vertically. He further conjectured that the term orosi or oros might have associations with the term aroos (bride), as an explanation for the soft or “feminine” nature of the window.6 One can speculate on the ascending imaginative qualities of the orosi as well as its veiling/unveiling related to its feminine nature. The lower operable part of the window is named the latih or darak. In Farsi, latih means a patch, a piece of clothing or textile, and darak means small door. A patchwork of artistic imagination, orosi opens up a door in one’s subjective experience. The higher, fixed portion of an orosi is called the katiba (inscription), which is derived from the root Arabic term k-t-b (writing), and is also a root term for kitab (book), which implies deeper linkages between spatial and textual forms.

Creating the window The orosi window embodies a tradition of the conceiving of geometric forms, namely girih, by geometers and mathematicians developed since the tenth century. The Persian term girih and the Arabic word aqd, both denoting “knot,” referred to such a geometric mode, and also allude to bringing together two separate entities—two worlds. In translating pure geometric forms into built form, the orosi brings together two worlds of mathematical concepts and material properties. In the West, practical

3 4 5 6

[Institute for the Study and Publication of Humanities Books, Center for Research and Development of the Humanities], 2009). See http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/olearius/travels.html#isfahan. Amraee, Orosi. For a discussion on display culture among three Courts of Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal see Gülru Necipog˘ lu, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993). Muhammad-Karim Pirniya, Mimari Irani [The Iranian Architecture] (Tehran: Soroush Danish, 2008).

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geometry achieved this by compromising theoretical geometry with physical material. The conceiving of orosi involved ilm al-hiyal, literally the “Science of Trickery,” an approach of approximating mathematical and geometric truths in physical bodies and objects where cunning prevents compromising the ideal.7 Architects and designers created girih designs from scrolls that contained many complex geometric patterns color-coded primarily in red, ochre, blue, and green inks. The scrolls, such as those of the nineteenth-century architect Mirza Akbar, were kept in secret to protect the geometric knowledge they contained [Plate 31]. Scroll drawings show only quadrants or fragments of an “overall pattern meant to be mul­ tiplied or rotated by symmetry.”8 The proportioned geometric drawing as a “repeat unit” had no scalar obedience to its future physical realization in the window. The drawings were intermediaries fluctuating between the realms of theoretical geometry (immaterial) and construction (material). The drawing was an elusive memory device, calling upon the craftsman’s imagination and skillfulness, as the “ability to make such patterns was an expected part of the builder’s repertoire, learned from masters and remembered.”9 In between the architect’s memory (quwwat al-hafiza), the formgiving imagination (quwwat al-mutasawwira), and the physical window, the drawing construed a forthcoming construction. The complex geometric drawings were built upon invisible “blind” lines that were scored, uninked, into the paper’s surface. Actual construction of the windows translated the invisible construction lines of the geometrical drawing into the internal wooden rectilinear structure to support the individual windows. The wooden framework was notched and the carved geometrical pieces were joined tongue-and-groove so that the physical structure of the window was held within a thin, minimal frame. Yet the sequence of drawing the geometrical figure differed from the process of building it in wood. Viewed metaphorically, the geometric drawing is a virtual window to the actual one; the unit drawing is comparable to Alberti’s 1435 metaphor of the window. His description of the picture plane as an open window (finestra aperta) expands our notion of visual representation. By drawing the rectangular frame, Alberti created a virtual window to the world he observed, and used that window as a means to con­ nect the viewer to the subject of his paintings.10

Inhabiting orosi Between inside and outside The orosi window inhabits the vertical threshold between the interior room and the garden space as almost the entire exterior wall of the room. Unlike the Albertian, or Western, “picture window,” this Persian window is something to look upon, rather 7 Hooman Koliji, In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in Islamic and Western Traditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 55. 8 Gülru Necipog˘ lu, Mohammad Al-Asad, and Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture: Topkapi Palace Museum Library Ms H. 1956. Sketchbooks & Albums (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 10. 9 Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 177. 10 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 30.

90 Hooman Koliji than only look through. Uniform in geometry, the two faces of this window establish very different interactions with their two audiences: inside inhabitants and outside visitors. They represent distinct worlds, spatially and experientially. The view of the window from inside dances with illuminated colorful shapes and figures [Plate 32]. During daytime, the glowing, multicolored orosi window screen appeals to one’s fantasy—phantasia, from the Latin root phos, or light. Elaborated by stars and polygon girih patterns, the orosi invokes a symbolic presence of the celestial spheres described by such Islamic thinkers as the Ikhwan al-Safa.11 A maze of geom­ etry, light, and color, insightful reflection on an orosi reveals numerous geometric patterns. Exceeding mere visual pleasure, it calls for musing beyond physical sight and entering the realm of intellectual vision. The outside view of the orosi from the garden or courtyard (hayat) displays the homogenous intricate wooden interlocking geometric pattern, as the glass is visually inert in the daylight. At night, interior light casts colored shadows into the garden and reflections in the water. Instilled by similar principles, the garden presents a lush landscape while bound by the rules of the geometry. The water of a pool, usually centered on the orosi, combines the reflection of the sky with that of the window. This stage-like setting of garden before window suggests that the entire garden is built in order to represent a microcosm—a scene—for the orosi to gaze upon.12 Between gardens Constellations of different shapes and figures of orosi patterns are named after natu­ ral elements (bergamot, sun, star, flower, etc.). They are filled with glass colored with natural pigments and semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli,13 thus making the variegated geometry seem as if a garden. The presence of floral and vegetal forms and colors in orosi present an abstract allegory of a garden. Additionally, since an orosi has numerous apertures, it can bring the actual exterior garden into the interior. When the orosi is completely open, the space of the room is continuous with the garden outside, and people can pass through it. When fully shut, it is a var­ iegated geometric pattern. Or it can concurrently offer both modes, the lower space providing a framed view of the planted garden, while the upper portion frames the gaze of the viewer toward the sky into a realm of abstract color forms. Sliding between the material and abstract portrayals of the garden, the orosi embodies the sensible while evoking the intelligible. The imagination becomes the link between these two worlds.

11 The Ikhwan al-Safa associate Pythagorean theories of geometry with celestial orbits. For a study of their thoughts, see Amnon Shiloah, trans., The Epistle on Music of the Ikhwa¯n al-S∙a¯fa¯’ (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1978). 12 The contemporary idea of the gaze introduces it as a form of framing perceptive and cognitive functions of the mind. However, the pre-modern world generally regarded gaze as a way of projecting the self to the world and connecting oneself with the world as a whole. See Ivan Illich’s online text, “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze,” http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1998_scopic_past.PDF. 13 Hossein Lorzadeh, Ihya-i Hunarha-i Az Yad Rafih: Mabani Mimari Sunati Dar Iran [Revival of the Forgotten Arts: Principles of Traditional Architecture in Iran], edited by Mahnaz Raieszadeh and Hossein Mofid (Tehran: Mola Publications, 2010). Also see: Ashghar Sha’rbaf, Girih va Karbandi/ Girih and Pattern Making, vol. 1 (Tehran: Sazman-i miras farhangi [The Iranian Cultural Heritage Center], 2006).

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The orosi is a veiled window that invites the viewer to unveil, within, invisible landscapes, offering a simultaneous experience of the natural and the abstract. This concurrent engagement of the intellect and the senses requires an in-between cognitive faculty, the imagination. Historically loaded with spiritual dimensions, the geometric patterns become anagogical vehicles to unveil understandings belonging to a sym­ bolic domain. Such a seemingly thin plane vividly projects light into the depth of the space, and creates anamorphic washes of color on the wall and floor. In so doing, it concretizes light into material, and expands the sensual experience of the outside to the depth of the enclosure. The projected light, although in motion throughout the day, portrays an eternal image fluctuating between the temporal and the eternal. The orosi features an assemblage of frames within frames, shapes within shapes, each attending to the potentiality of spatial depth and inviting the viewer into multilayered sceneries.

Space of mundus imaginalis The orosi comes into existence due to the light. It is an intermediary agency that changes intangible light into palpable lumen, giving architecture a corporeal presence. Marco Frascari’s discussion of lume materiale in Venetian architecture is insightful: when architecture imprisons light, the light becomes architecture.14 Islamic philoso­ phy’s play on the light has also impacted its architecture. Light as the source of crea­ tion and beauty became central to architecture, and building apertures turned into moments of such celebration. An intermediary realm between the invisible and visible worlds, the mundus imaginalis, or the imaginal, is also described in terms of invis­ ible light variegated into colors and shapes. The imaginal is a complex concept and it is hard to define it in verbal terms; however, broadly described, the imaginal is the intermediary world between the sensible and intelligible, a world of subtle bodies. It is also described in terms of a “world of demonstration” (alam al-mithal), where things are demonstrated in their subtle bodies, as where the light and shadow meet and the invisible light becomes visible. In this sense, the window itself is an imaginal world, as it changes the light passing through it. Comprising two main material substances (wood and glass), orosi concur­ rently feature the temporal world of phenomena and the intellectual world of timeless­ ness, as geometry and light call for perpetual beauty. Glass, being a subtle, immaterial material, holds imaginal attributes. Al-Gazali, interpreting The Light Verse, refers to the “bulb of light” as analogous to imaginal existence. A kaleidoscopic space, an anamorphic cast of colors and shadows in orosi win­ dows appeals to the imaginal. Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), the Andalusian philosopher, referred to colored glass as an imaginal being allowing the “invisible light” to become visible in hues and colors. The stained-glass window, transforming invisible lux to visible material lumens, is comparable to the evocative nature of the apparition of truth, which has been captured by the French scholar of Islamic philosophy Henry Corbin (1903–1978): “The theophanic concept . . . is that of an Apparition, which is the transparition of divinity through the mirror of humanity, in the way the light only becomes visible by taking shape and showing through the figure of a stained

14 Marco Frascari, “The Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice,” Perspecta 23, (1988): 136–45.

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glass window.”15 The projected light on the depth of the space is also a reminder of Alhazen’s (965–1040) theory of the aesthetics of light. He elaborated on this phenom­ enon in his Book on Optics: All visible properties can be perceived only from the forms produced in the eye by the forms of colours and lights of the visible objects . . . for light produces beauty, and thus the sun, the moon and the stars look beautiful, without there being in them a cause on account of which their form looks beautiful and appealing other than their radiant light. Therefore, light by itself produces beauty.16 In Alhazen’s theory of visual aesthetics, pure beauty (al-husn) is the result of a sophis­ ticated interaction of 22 diverse factors based on subject–object contextual relation­ ships. However, he singled out two of those elements, light and color (as a quality of light), and argued that these two by themselves were capable of producing beauty and giving rise to a sense of pleasure.17 Built on light, the orosi window engages one’s perceptual, imaginative and speculative faculties, arousing a sense of pleasure and wonderment. Gazing at light, the orosi creates spaces of delight.

A subtle aperture The orosi concurrently features the temporal world of phenomena and the intellectual world of timelessness in all its aspects. The window itself is the least material substance in the building, since, as an opening, it violates the thick masonry enclosure. An orosi is a conglomerate, a hybrid of things, skills, and desires. From symbolic meanings to religious imagination, from joyful experience to expressions of prestige and power, orosi windows can show the way, give guidance, and tell tales.18 In describing the author-guided imagination in literature, Elaine Scarry explains that Proust’s descrip­ tion of colored lights moving over a wall’s surfaces invokes the solidity of the wall in the reader’s imagination. Conversely, in architecture, the colored light projected from the orosi moving across the actual wall suggests the metaphysical or ethereal to the viewer’s imagination.19 The orosi embodies a co-existence of two extremes, the corporeal and the spiritual. Its voluptuous embrace of sophisticated geometry, craft, and materials make it a luxurious gem for the patron to satisfy their sense of social standing, while obtain­ ing a sense of pleasure. At the same time, the orosi became a means to ascend from the material world and experience a sense of wonderment and spirituality. With the names associated with its shapes, girih holds semantic attributes of the material world. The imaginative girih patterns are of the ideal, the creation and reading of 15 Henry Corbin, quoted in Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism. Suny Series in Western Esoteric Traditions (Albany NY. State University of New York Press. 2000), 159. 16 Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, Kitab Al-Manazir [On Direct Vision], edited by Abd al-Hamid Sabra, 2 vols (Kuwait: The National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters, 1983), 1:139, 200. 17 These properties are identified as light, colour, distance, position, solidity, shape, size, separation, conti­ nuity, number, motion, rest, roughness, smoothness, transparency, opacity, shadow, darkness, beauty, ugliness, similarity, and dissimilarity. 18 Frascari, “Lume Materiale.” 19 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14.

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which is possible through the recognition of visual idioms, figural vocabularies, and deep conceptual structure: the construction of a rich tale that is also an allegory. The presence of colored vegetal patterns, a direct reference to the world of phe­ nomena in orosi windows, pertains to a mimesis of natural phenomena. These are allegories directing the viewer into the realm of gardens that are invisible. The view to the outside environment makes the literal garden an integral part of the window, complementing the allegorical garden. The space between the literal garden (outside environment) and the allegorical garden (the garden found in orosi) is contemplative, one that anticipates anagogical means leading the viewer to a higher, invisible realm— namely the idyllic garden. Suspended between the two gardens, orosi offers a third layer, the imaginal. The imaginal invites the viewer to participate in observing the two gardens simultaneously while inhabiting a third garden in one’s subjective mundus imaginalis, a space of alle­ gory. Thus the orosi window offers the viewer three distinct, yet intertwined, spaces: the literal garden, the allegorical garden, and the anagogical paradise, all of which are apprehended through the inserted element of light. Built on light, orosi comprises a representation of invisible gardens while at the same time representing the visible garden. A threshold between interior and exterior, the window offers powerful symbolic implications as an analogue to the space of internal subjectivity and the external world.

11 Architecture sub rosa Another tell-tale detail, with confabulations and digressions Tracey Eve Winton

Antipasto Let’s tell stories for a while, if you please, but as Horace says, let’s make them relevant. For fables, even ones we put down to old wives’ tales, are not only the first begin­ nings of philosophy. Fables are also—and just as often—philosophy’s instrument.1 ELEVEN years before, while savoring a maccheronic delicacy, I was silently absorbing “On Biting the Tongue.” In Italo Calvino’s fable, Mr. Palomar makes a habit of biting his tongue three times before speaking, for the art of silence is more recondite than the art of speech. Calvino proposes that silence is a kind of speech: both forestalling and foreshadowing words, it unfurls a space for the unspoken and the unspeakable.2 So I thought about architectural elements as silent storytellers or speakers of silence.3

Vino My treatise will hint at some things . . ., it will try to speak imperceptibly, to make manifest in secrecy, to demonstrate in silence.4 In his treatise, The Contemplative Life, Philo of Alexandria describes banquets of silence in which diners assumed special bodily postures to listen, wordlessly, to a single storyteller: [W]hen the banqueters have taken their places . . . after all are hushed in deep silence—here one might ask when is there not silence, but at this point there 1 Angelo Poliziano, “Preliminary Lecture On Aristotle’s Prior Analytics: Lamia” in Angelo Poliziano’s Lamia Text, Translation, and Introductory Studies, edited by Christopher S. Celenza (Leiden: Brill 2010), 195. 2 Italo Calvino, “On Biting the Tongue” in Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985), 102–4. 3 While I was living in Rome, Marco Frascari sent me an invitation to a “macaronic symposium” he was planning in Alexandria, named On Biting the Tongue: Iconic Thinking and Silence in Architecture. Recognizing the motif of silence and iconicity from the final lines of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, I sent him some work called “Unspeakable Acts of Architecture: Two Anecdotes Sub Rosa.” Though Marco did not say it openly, his title also paid homage to Italo Calvino’s story concerning the meaning of silence. Marco’s banquet of silence never took place—but that is another story. 4 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, i. I. 15. i English translation quoted in Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein 1986), 37.

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is silence even more than before, so that no one dares to utter a sound, or breathe more forcefully than usual—in this silence, I say, he makes enquiry into some problem arising in the Holy Scriptures, or solves one propounded by someone else.5 Dining without silence meant silence following in the banquet’s wake: outside the confines of the room it was forbidden to repeat the secrets of the inner circle. We call this strict confidence of sealed discourse sub rosa, Latin for “under the rose.” The rose symbolized the world of the gods, heralding spring, the rebirth of earth’s fertility. Greece brought roses to Rome, where the souls of the dead received fragrant offerings. Renaissance iconography consecrated the rose to Venus, goddess of beauty. To ensure the goddess’s amorous liaisons remained secret, her son Cupid dedicated this flower to the young god Harpocrates, Egyptian deity of silence. Humanists conflated Harpocrates with Hermes, suggesting a silence imposed on all joinings and chiasms; extending to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, and to the arcana of icons, symbols, and messages from the other world. Under the rose passed secret things restricted to architectural spaces: rites, confessions, miracles, intrigues, and illicit love, secure only within their enclosure, changing meaning should they cross the threshold. Rose ornaments, as emblems of silence, marked the doors of rooms where secret things transpired, so the story goes: overhanging confessionals and sculpted on ban­ quet hall ceilings, roses reminded guests that stories told sub rosa conveyed inner truth, not to pass beyond the walls.6

Primo The mysteries are transmitted in a mysterious way.7 In the city of Florence stands the Dominican church Santa Maria Novella, its prin­ cipal chapel jointly dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the city’s patron, Saint John the Baptist. A close relative of the Medici rulers, the wealthy and powerful banker Giovanni Tornabuoni commissioned these cycles, and in 1490 Domenico Ghirlandaio painted the frescoes, assisted by his young apprentice Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Life of John the Baptist’s iconographic program is based on The Gospel according to St. Luke. Seven scenes laid into the plaster, and one adjacent on the rear wall of the apse, integrate the solid material of the church with exquisitely designed painted architecture. Each panel is a masterpiece demonstrating architecture’s sym­ metry, modularity, and eurythmy, with articulated detailing configured to tell its own story. Ghirlandaio creates architectural fantasies, and like many Renaissance perspec­ tives, his istoria lends a pretext for the painter’s poetic inquiry into architecture as a vehicle for meaning.

5 David Winston, ed., Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, Giants and Selections (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 54. 6 Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, Revised & Enlarged (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 784. 7 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata. i. 1. 13. 4, quoted in Raoul Mortley, “Notes and Studies: The Theme of Silence in Clement of Alexandria,” The Journal of Theological Studies XXIV, no. 1 (1973): 200.

96 Tracey Eve Winton From below, the stories start with the Annunciation to Zacharias, a panel archi­ tecturally jointed to The Visitation where Elizabeth meets her cousin Mary—both miraculously with child—outside the walled city contiguous to the temple, its pow­ erful fortifications and moat signifying corporeal purity, while to the left a nymph bearing a platter of fruits (the spirit of fecundity) enters through an auricular outer gateway. One level up, on the rear wall behind the altar, is the narrow panel showing The Baptist in the Wilderness. The Birth of the Baptist is on the right, and on the left, Zacharias Writing John’s Name. Above, The Baptism of Christ is on the left and John Preaching to the Multitudes is on the right. Both scenes are in the countryside. At the top, the lunette shows Herod’s Banquet, and, in the palace with its three coffered barrel vaults, Salomé dancing. A servant carries a platter holding the Baptist’s head; Herod clasps his hands in silent grief [Plate 33]. Herod’s temple sets the scene for the annunciation to Zacharias, who officiates as a priest of Abijah. While the congregation waits outside the sanctuary, the elderly Jew silently circles the temple in performance of the rite: swinging the censer, spreading the heady fumigation of incense through the air. An angel of God appears to him and announces a prophecy: his wife Elizabeth will bear him a son, to be named John. But Zacharias responds to Gabriel’s annunciation with misgivings: at their great age, how can he and Elizabeth conceive a child? He wants the archangel to give him a sign. To punish his doubt, Zacharias is disciplined with silence: he cannot speak until his son is born; no, until he writes John’s name. Silence is the sign of divine intervention. “But when he came out, he was unable to speak to them; and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple; and he kept making signs to them, and remained mute.”8

Secondo Aby Warburg’s “science without a name” is the discipline that can help us to uncover the cosmopoietic dimensions of architectural storytelling, which have been too deeply hidden within the closets of architectural culture.9 In the Expulsion of Joachim, in which Joachim’s sacrifice is rejected on account of his childlessness, Ghirlandaio depicted the Temple. In Zacharias, he transfigures both temple and altar, detailing a stylistically classical architecture decorous with harmoni­ ous geometries and Latin inscriptions. The temple façade is typologically modeled on the Roman triumphal arch, based on the Arch of Constantine, symbolic nexus of Christianity and Romanitas, and its ornamental friezes furnish telling motifs. Herod’s Jerusalem is also the Golden Age of Florence. The building plan takes the form of a cross, using steps and walls to distinguish gradations of sacrality and temporality on the long frontal axis, from the biblical figures, through the Florentine citizens, to you, the viewer. Linear elements—pilasters, cornices, borders—outline the temple, a line­ amentary drawing configuring spatial relationships, surrounded by other buildings structuring a dialogue between the painting’s twinned sides, the two vaulted portals visually completing the triumphal arch. 8 Luke 1:22 9 Marco Frascari, “De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking,” paper presented at the 3rd Alvar Aalto Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, August 30, 2008.

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The temple’s cavernous interior—its upper vault suggests a metaphorical womb and space of generation—is bilaterally symmetrical about the altar, the painting’s center of gravity, above which, between the gazes of Zacharias and the angel, the perspectival lines of the architecture converge. The painted marble chancel models in miniature the Tornabuoni chapel’s position in Santa Maria Novella, and its inscrip­ tion, from Psalm 141:2, says: “Let my prayer be set before thee as incense. . . .” The altar is ornamented with swags of fruit, roses and lilies, a palmette, and a scallop-shell that served as a patera, the sacrificial vessel for renewal of eternal life, symbolizing fertility and baptism.10 Arches springing over the altar, at the base of the vaulting arcs rotating like the heavens, squaring and materializing the earth with marbles, opening a chora. The arches bear iconography of seeds, pinecones, and pomegranates bursting open, interspersed with wild quinces, symbols of love and fecundity. Egg-and-dart ornament features abundantly as cornice-work, with eggs in the pilas­ ter capitals. The invented order characterizes John the Baptist—his ultimate silencing in death by decapitation giving a poignant resonance to the tenuous joint of shaft to capital. Each pilaster but one is rendered in blood-red fire granite. To Gabriel’s right stands the work’s patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni, behind whom the pilaster is uniquely pale, as if his crimson-garbed body were corporeally intertwined with a temple pillar, become one with his patron saint in tectonic form. Giovanni is not watching the holy conversation; instead, his eyes are distracted by another man to the far left. I pass over in silence Ghirlandaio’s mastery of perspective, his expertise in har­ monizing complex spatial arrangements, in devising a richly material Renaissance architecture to stage the biblical story. On our right-hand side, through an arch, is an urban setting showing blue sky and a civic palazzo. Over the gateway, an inscription traditionally attributed to poet Angelo Poliziano praises the city: “In the year 1490 when the most glorious city, renowned for its wealth, its victories, its arts and archi­ tecture, lived in affluence, prosperity and peace.”11 On our left-hand side, towards the campagna: a villa built in clay brick, with signs of a secret garden beyond the high wall. The city gate’s lower stratum shows a mythic sea-battle, with a cavalry battle above. On its upper left a figure on horseback holds aloft a furled banner; another mounted figure under a tree branch holds a blank cartouche. Zacharias provides the plot, but the tale is far more complex: stories are nested in stories, scenes are narra­ tives in frames, details become figurative discourse. Architectures within architec­ tures. The grisaille panels represent friezes in the temple façade, carved reliefs on the gate, and the grotesque faces of those pilasters (cleaving the viewer’s physical space in the chapel and the istoria’s imaginary space) with candelabrum and torch motifs, for perspectiva is the veil of light. The Janus-headed complex with divine and human faces follows a typical Annunciation structure. On the side of the angel messenger stand those dedicated to the study of higher things, while on Zacharias’ side are merchants and nobles, representing activities of civic and political life; the architectural background reflects humanist culture’s recto and verso, vita contemplativa and vita activa. 10 In 1486, Ghirlandaio’s friend and collaborator Sandro Botticelli painted Venus floating to shore on a shell of this type. 11 An. MCCCCLXXXX quo pulcherrima civitas opibus victoriis artibus aedificiis que nobilis copia salu­ britate pace perfruebatur.

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On the temple’s upper left relief, a Nike figure with a laurel wreath is crowning a new Augustus (bearing a long scepter); reviving the grandeur of antiquity in Florence is also the peaceful triumph of Christianity in the idiom of martial Romanitas. The palmettes, laurels and goddess symbolize victory. Below, classical heads painted between the pilasters run level with the heads of the literati, indicating the continuity of the intellectual tradition, the poetic theology, disclosed by the dome of a classical temple, shaped like their own headwear, which “crowns” them. This centralized, circular-plan temple showing the divine Renaissance cosmos in architectural form (with the statue of a human figure at its center) is a temple in a temple in a temple; the cruciform holy temple in Jerusalem is set into Santa Maria Novella, and into Herod’s temple is set the circular Roman temple. Its morphology identifies it as the Temple of Mars Ultor that Augustus built in his Forum in Rome; at the time of painting, Poliziano had recently unearthed evidence that Augustus had founded Florence, and Mars predates John the Baptist as Florence’s patron. Florentines believed their Baptistery had been a Temple of Mars in antiquity; in 1330 Filippo Villani described it in his book on the building of Florence: Very noble and beautiful they built it with eight sides, and when it had been built with great diligence, they dedicated it to the god Mars, who was the god of the Romans, and they had his effigy carved in marble in the likeness of an armed cavalier on horseback. They placed him on a marble pillar in the midst of that temple, and held him in great reverence, and adored him as their god . . . And we find that the said temple was begun during the reign of Octavianus Augustus.12 On the other side of Ghirlandaio’s Baptist wall—in real space—is the Strozzi chapel featuring a frescoed Temple of Mars that Filippino Lippi painted during 1487–1502— the same years. Both temples show Mars raised on his pillar. Three ontological layers demonstrating the principle of quadratura are joined and integrated by edifying frames, real and conceptual. The architectural “monster” makes a place where stories and events can cohere. The setting characterizes the Florentine renovatio of antique forms as the timeless truth of poetic myth and scripture weaving into the city’s historical reality, intermediate between the temporal and eternal, with architecture serving as vinculum, its visible surface a metaphorical hinge between the fabulous and the actual. Giorgio Vasari notes numerous Florentine “members of Government” plus all the Tornabuoni outside the Romanized temple playing the role of congregation, to witness first the absence of Zacharias, then his muteness. Florence’s political protagonists’ presence at the sacred events, like the architecture, reflects an ideal humanistic world, brought forth in the public space of the church. Naturalistic portraits on the angelic side include four key scholars of the higher truths embedded in poetics. Special caps on their heads distinguish these men of letters, Giorgio Vasari wrote, the attire of their public offices bespeaking their high social standing: Besides this, to show how every kind of talent, but most particularly that of let­ ters, flourished in that period, Domenico created four half-figures in a circle who 12 Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, translated by Rose E. Selfe, edited by Philip H. Wicksteed (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1896), Book I, ¶41–2, 33.

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are arguing with each other at the bottom of the scene. These figures represent the most learned men to be found in Florence in those days, and they are as follows: the first is Messer Marsilio Ficino, dressed in canonical attire; the second, wearing a red cloak and a black scarf around his neck, is Cristoforo Landino; Demetrius the Greek stands in their midst and is turning around, while the man who has slightly raised his hand is Messer Angelo Poliziano.13 Ficino had consulted the latter three on his seminal translation of Plato’s Dialogues, and in celebrating Florence’s new Golden Age, besides praising fables and teach­ ing poetry, all four wrote using fabulous imagery. For them, poetic truth was vis­ ceral, embodied, enacted, above philosophy, comparable to Ghirlandaio’s painterly approach. The vivid imagery in their beloved literatures (including Homer, Hesiod, Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Dante) furnished artists and architects material lexica to reinterpret the elements of architecture. Naturalistic details tell the tale through their phenomenological properties: poetics deal in concrete figurations. Ghirlandaio positions the four in a secluded group. While they stand intimately engaged in discussion, heads turning slightly to glance over shoulders, concerned lest they be overheard, their lips are universally sealed in silence. What secret could they hold? For, nearly invisible, blended into the red background between the heads of Demetrios and Poliziano, hidden between the scarlet cloaks of two upper figures, carved into the only column frankly rendered visible, a pilaster of flame-red granite, is a stemmed rose.

Dolci When looking at drawings, we sometimes cannot perceive what does exist, and sometimes we perceive things that do not exist. In the graphic fillers can be hidden—intentionally or unintentionally—stimuli too weak to be consciously detected that can nevertheless powerfully affect our understanding of the archi­ tecture in the drawings.14 In the Platonic theology, the truth is necessarily ineffable. Proclus explains that ini­ tiation takes place by silence alone. Indeed, muesis, initiation, is literally interpreted as silence. Man’s induction into divine creative power cannot take place by rational thinking, which is restricted to the discursive world. The enigmatic rituals of creating form demonstrate that divinity is reachable solely through the iteration of unspeak­ able acts; only hieratic performance can give the soul the unspeakable power of the gods.15 This power of essential universal cohesion and unity, Nature’s fundamental force, is incomprehensible and inexplicable, and in this sense “irrational.” But its power is the alogos that generates logos. A square whose sides are one unit long arises

13 Giorgio Vasari, “The Life of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Florentine Painter, 1449–1494” in Lives of the Artists, translated with an introduction and notes by Julia C. Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 219. 14 Marco Frascari, The Virtue of Architecture: A 2009 Strenna (Ottawa: Lulu), 46. 15 Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 190; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 211.

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from an irrational diagonal, a line that cannot be defined arithmetically, only enacted geometrically, the very operation practiced in the mythic act of creation, the making of perceptible order that characterizes architecture and conceals the unsayable, the inscrutable, inside visible form. Silentium mysticum marks the interval of gestation. As the angel announced, Elizabeth falls pregnant. At the hour of birth, on a tablet, Zacharias silently inscribes “His name is John.” His mouth is opened and he praises God. Ghirlandaio pairs this Naming scene with the Birth. Look carefully at the former’s quadrate floor, which early perspectivists used to construct the space of appearance, for there the artist sym­ bolizes the geometrical principle of embodiment itself: the child’s entrance into the world by architectonic analogy, through a cosmopoietic diagram drawn out on the surface: a pattern of nested squares, rotated. The cardinal and diagonal points make eight, the spiritually regenerative number of baptism, the octagon mediating between square and circle, man and God. Florence’s own Baptistery represents the same figure dedicated to St. John [Figure 11.1]. If you have any doubt about my story, then hush, because Ghirlandaio repeats this arcane figure in his Birth of the Baptist, where it decorates a cubic material solid in the lower left corner, right under a round tray or patera with a floral center. The square’s rotation in space and time implied by the figure’s geometrical lines symbolizes the mystical process of quadratura by which the ineffable becomes corporeal through animating movement: heavenly, circular, nymphal. In the medieval “just measure” the divine becomes human; word becomes flesh. Through three consecutive “gen­ erative” rotations a dimensionless point becomes line, then plane, then solid body. Ghirlandaio’s architecture tells the tale: it brings forth for Elizabeth, and speaks for Zacharias: Iohannes est nomen eius. “Names are symbols of created things; seek them not for Him who is uncreated,” says Philo.16 The humanists, analogical thinkers par excellence, construed stories of heroic pregnancy as cosmogonic fables. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Harpocrates, god of silence, watches over pregnancy and birth. Divine things are revealed and con­ cealed sub rosa, within the walls of the building or the body. Prior to Ghirlandaio, Il Filarete wrote in his Trattato about the “pregnant” architect; a later artist dia­ grammed cosmology on the womb. Pregnancy symbolizes inward meaning in things, the secret, erotic connection back to the universe. At the birth of perspective istoria painting, the artistic subject of the Annunciation proliferates as a metaphor of creation. Obscurity means I can’t verify whether the rose hovering over the fabulists is real. Human truth concerns the meaningful, not the verifiable. The architecture shows a unity unfolding itself out into details, and details that enfold back into unity, facilitating a play between classical-mythic and Christian readings of the scene. An anthemion in the capitals and on the altar below the shell repeats the ornamentation on the pilasters, planar columns in the process of bodying out. At the corners of the capitals, between acanthus leaves, rise cornucopias over­ flowing with fruit: solid, juicy, sweet, and fertile. Is the anthemion a palmette, signify­ ing Jerusalem, or, marking the place of his head, John’s future martyrdom? Nothing is simple; everything hinges. Centered at the top of the capital, instead of the more

16 Charles Bigg, D.D., Christian Platonists of Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 8.

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Figure 11.1 Detail from The Birth of John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1486–1490 (lower panel) and original collage by author incorporating Ceiling Rosette, Cesare Cesariano, Vitruvius De Architectura, 1521, Liber Secundus, XLV, and The Open Matrix of a Pregnant Woman, with the Creature Inside, Girolamo Mercurio, La commare o raccoglitrice dell’eccellentissimo signor Scipion Mercurio: Divisa in tre libri (Verona: Francesco de’ Rossi, 1642), 18.

conventional Corinthian rose, from the leafy stalk sprouts the white Lily of Florence, signature of the city, flower of Herculean immortality, of Marian annunciation. The ancient writers called it, and her, Lilium mysticum. It is the lily’s scent that reveals her divinity, just as the scent of the rose enjoins silence.

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Caffé These words turned Virgil to me with a look that, silent, said: “Be silent.”17 Architecture, like fables, is concerned with supra-rational reality, truths not fathomed through logic but poetry. The temple’s Latin inscription relays silent speech from the matrix, the sealed chamber: “Dominus ab utero vocavit me de ventre matris . . ..”18 Listen carefully. Only a few elements in the entire cycle, and in this painting, are ren­ dered conspicuously in movement, animated by divine breath. The thurible of incense, hovering in mid swing over the altar, wafts its invisible perfume through time and space. The war grisaille, upper right. Two men and a boy on the human, “worldly” side notice you looking at them—and return your gaze. Ghirlandaio paints the angel Gabriel as he paints his nymphs, principles of inward erotic power, the life-force and phantasia, who rather than materializing in flesh, shimmer in rarefied spiritus mundi. Things in motion, in interaction, draw our attention—and Giovanni Tornabuoni’s— away from the center to small, peripheral particulars. The angelos is a messenger, translating knowledge between realms, from sacred space to the phenomenal world by means of metaphor, by proportion, by analogical thinking: the very thing under the cautionary sign of the rose. I recollect how Psalm 141 continues: “the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice. Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”19 Then there is something more: Poliziano, poet of fables, raises his right hand in a traditional gesture. Then, if you lift your eyes, the man directly above him makes the same gesture. The noblewoman attired in blue, on the right, makes the same gesture. And above, the Roman general, whose soldiers bear trophies of the divine world (the Sun on our left) and the sublunary world of time (the Moon on our right), like­ wise lifts his hand, to silently say: Silentium postulo, I demand silence. The creation secret is also an architectural secret. Lift up your eyes directly above the two men making the sign of silence. Behind the fabulists, theologians and philologists, reminding you of the attentive silence that precedes all poetic theology and is the ground of all architecture, betraying the superabundant silent eloquence of Nature and the gods, spilling over the wall, revealing the unseen pregnancy of the hortus conclusus, is a telltale cascade of fragrant red roses. For the higher we soar in contemplation the more limited becomes our expres­ sions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the Darkness which is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute Silence, of thoughts as well as of words. Thus, in the former discourse, our contemplations descended from the highest to the lowest, 17 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume II, Purgatory, translated with and introduction and com­ mentary by Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1985), Canto XXI, 103–4, 231. 18 Isaiah 49:1. 19 Ps. 141:2–3.

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embracing an ever-widening number of conceptions, which increased at each stage of the descent; but in the present discourse we mount upwards from below to that which is the highest, and, according to the degree of transcendence, so our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, inasmuch as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.20 By this means alone I reveal the secret.

Figure 11.2 Silentium Postulo, table of gestures, from John Bulwer, Chirologia or the Naturall Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, The Art of Manvall Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions digested by Art in the Hand as the chiefest Instrument of Eloquence, by Historical Manifesto’s exemplified, . . . by J. B. Gent. Philochirosophus. Manus membrum hominis loquacissimum (London: Harper 1644) (left-hand panel) and Harpocrates, Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome 1652–1654), Vol. III, 590 (right-hand panel).

20 The Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. translated and edited with a commentary by Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom (Godalming, Surrey, England: Garden City Press, 1923), ch. 3.

Part III

Stories of theory

12 Language and architectural meaning Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Architecture’s primary function may well be to provide a communicative setting for cultures, one that speaks both intellectually and emotionally, creating attuned set­ tings for significant human action.1 While engineers may be better equipped to solve building design problems in view of pragmatic use, structural efficiency, and energy sustainability, we as architects like to think we can contribute something of specific significance beyond those issues. We are often told that regardless of our intentions architecture expresses political and economic power; we know that it can function as a sign like publicity and often becomes a commodity; and if we have a modicum of ethics, we worry that it doesn’t merely express our own self-indulgence. But regard­ less of the representational intentions of our designs, which must be driven by a quest for both beauty and justice, it is evident that communication of some sort, evidently multilayered, is the primary social and cultural function of our discipline. And yet, while we usually tend to think a lot about the role of pictures, drawings, forms, or even spaces as geometric volumes, we generally disregard language, the languages we speak and write, and assume they have little to do with design and architectural meaning. It is nevertheless obvious that living, natural languages, such as English, Spanish, Greek, or French, constitute our primary mediation between pre-reflective embodied consciousness (with its motor skills) and intellectual articulation. The languages we speak (primarily oral) give us our cultural roots and are our primary medium of com­ munication. I want to address the importance of language and its relationship with a significant architecture, identifying the different aspects of this relationship and some specific strategies for the involvement of language in design. I take to heart the linguistic nature of human reality, particularly Martin Heidegger’s observation that there is no Being before man speaks. I take my cues from philo­ sophical hermeneutics and the concept of emerging language as part of the flesh of the world, in continuity with habits and gestures.2 This is at odds with a constructiv­ ist concept of language as a more or less arbitrary code, a vastly complex and hotly

1 A full treatment of this issue is the topic of my forthcoming book, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). 2 See particularly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991) and Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). This is the position of hermeneutic philosophers in the tradition of phenomenology, like Paul Ricoeur and his students. George Steiner also argues against a constructivist theory of language in After Babel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

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debated issue. I will say a few more words about this philosophical position towards the end of this chapter. My concern is not with language as an auxiliary inspiration or as the unambiguous prose of technical specifications. Poetic—original, polysemic—language is central to the very possibility of retrieving cultural roots for architectural expression that may result in appropriate atmospheric qualities, responsive to preexisting places. This concern is not current in architectural theory and practice. The contemporary world is generally suspicious of natural language, deemed fuzzy and deceitful, particularly when compared to so-called mathematical languages, such as those that our comput­ ers understand and that “get things done.” In North America, some years ago, writers declared “the end of theory” in architecture. Taking as a mantra certain observations by Foucault, they have retained a profound suspicion about language, construing it as an irredeemable instrument of power and manipulation. In recent years this has resulted in obsessions with algorithms and parametric design, a strategy of form gen­ eration that deliberately bypasses language while legitimizing itself with the prospect of infinite formal novelty and its presumed ethical neutrality. The disregard of language by architects in the process of designing is not as recent as it may appear. In the wake of nineteenth-century positivism and its increasing acceptance of specialization in all areas of knowledge as the only way “forward,” professional disciplines such as architecture became driven by instrumental efficiency. Taking their cues from the theories of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,3 who argued for rational self-referentiality, architects focused on pragmatic, functionalist concerns, believing that efficiently solving space planning and structural problems would be suf­ ficient for forms to communicate their function. Nothing else was needed. Intentional expression in analogy to poetic language, as had been theorized during the previous century, was deemed unnecessary and even an aberration. Trying to protect the dis­ cipline from the consequences of such a position, from effectively becoming a subset of engineering, later architects subsequently reacted by associating architecture to the Fine Arts, stressing the importance of formal issues in building composition, mostly seeking a visual, stylistic coherence, whether motivated by political, religious, or aesthetic ideologies; or by the egocentric concerns of an architect’s self-expression. Although the result was in line with aesthetic concerns, the architectural mainstream generally assumed theory (discourse) could be nothing other than applied science or formal methodologies, and thus ignored a rich set of traditional discursive options rooted in mythical and poetic language that had been crucial in the generation of culturally significant work in the early stages of the history of architecture in Europe. To put my point across I would like to highlight a few crucial historical moments that are particularly illuminating. Writing in the first century bce, Vitruvius under­ stood fully the primary communicative function of architecture. Respecting the divi­ sions of knowledge first put forward by Aristotle, his theory—a form of narrative that is totally unlike what we generally take for theory today—included properly theoreti­ cal knowledge, theoria leading to sophia; practical knowledge leading to phronesis, narrative wisdom; and technical knowledge, techne. These were autonomous forms of knowing that contributed to the success of architecture as a communicative set­ ting. Repeating the Ancient Greeks’ conviction that architecture must imitate the 3 Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture (1819; facs. reprint, München: UHL Verlag, 1981).

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perfect articulation of the superlunary cosmos, Vitruvius insisted on disposition, or order on the basis of proportions, stressing the importance of concepts such as commensurability: symmetria and eurythmia. Significantly, these are terms imported from both the plastic arts or techne, and the performing arts associated with the theatre—music, poetry and dance.4 This articulation afforded by architecture was the most cherished property of culture, it was the aim of Greek theoria, the contempla­ tion of order in Nature associated by Plato with mathemata, and mostly present to the senses in the celestial realm. This theory was expressed in discursive texts (like philosophy), and, Vitruvius tells us, is the same for a doctor or an architect. The actual practice of architecture, however, was never understood as the “application” of such theory. It involved both practical knowledge, conveyed through stories in the language of everyday life to make wise and prudent decisions, and techne-poiesis, an irreducible knowledge of the body manifested in skills, induced at times by external forces and taught orally in relation to specific tasks while also acknowledging inborn talent. Indeed, Vitruvius’ famous section in which he describes how architectural forms should be disposed following mathematical proportions emulating the order of the cosmos, includes, in continuity, the importance of storytelling in relation to a category he named decor (decorum, correctness—associated also with ornament) that accounted for crucial issues of meaning and appropriateness of form to cultural situations—we would say programs—and natural sites. We easily grasp today the formal issues involved in proportion but often miss the importance of the stories, such as those that illuminate the presence of the famous caryatids in the Athenian Erechtheion. The languages of mathesis and everyday speech—or mythos—were com­ plementary in Antiquity and remained so until the Renaissance. Thus architecture could open a clearing for dwelling in a menacing, mortal, sublunary world, and com­ municate articulated order creating harmonious and tempered atmospheres mimetic of the heavenly star-dance, yet also dressed appropriately for specific tasks, situations or programs, framing all-important cultural habits. The nature of architectural theory started to change after the inception of Cartesian dualism in the seventeenth century, moving away from philosophical and rhetori­ cal discourse and closer to technical knowledge. Nicolas Malebranche, a disciple of Descartes, affirmed that only God is a true cause of all things, because only He knows how he makes things happen, including the perceived relationship between our minds and our bodies. Even if we will to move our arm, we don’t really know how we move it, we are only witnessing an occasional cause, and ultimately it is God that moves my arm. Conversely, we could infer that whenever we know mathematically—clearly and distinctly—how something happens, for example how a lever operates in terms of the proportions between distances to the fulcrum and applied forces, or how an architectural plan or elevation is generated from strict geometrical operations, as is often the case in Baroque design, then we are not only ethically and effectively crea­ tive, but our mind is in fact operating through the very same ideas that are “in God.” Thus “know-how,” the expected aim of instrumental theories, previously techné, Aristotle’s irreducible technical knowledge, acquired the status previously held by contemplative theoria, eventually becoming “applied science.” In the short term, this assumption produced the Baroque instrumental, yet transcendental, theories of 4 M.P. Vitruvius, De Architectura, edited by F. Granger, bilingual edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), Book 1.

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architect-polymaths like the Theatine father Guarino Guarini,5 and, eventually, the first truly proto-positivistic architectural theory in the Western tradition in the writ­ ings of Claude Perrault.6 Perrault questioned the fundamental assumption about architecture being capable of re-presenting the order of the cosmos. In doing so, he opened up a modern aware­ ness of the question of architecture’s meaning. He believed that architecture, like human languages and civil law, changed in time and was the result of human conven­ tions. The fact that the meanings of architecture may depend upon “custom” rather than “nature,” however, did not make it in his view any less important or culturally significant. Like the French language itself, at that point perceived to have attained its summit and proper codification at the Académie Française, architecture could and should be open to further refinement and “progress,” thus eventually suggesting the possibility of architectural expression in the from of linguistic analogies. In the Preface to his treatise, the Ordonnance (1683), Perrault questioned the anal­ ogy of architectural and musical harmony on the basis of the diversity of the two phenomena, addressed to independent senses conceived of as autonomous mechanical receptors of sensory information.7 Thus he was the first writer ever to reject the useful­ ness of optical corrections to reconcile traditional theory’s proportional prescriptions with the execution of buildings that should be expressive for an embodied synesthetic consciousness. For him the only purpose of mathematical rules in architecture was to facilitate practice and systematize all dimensions in classical architecture, so that build­ ings, now understood as aesthetic objects rather than primarily as settings for events, could be built exactly following the designs of the architect: ideal—mathematical— perfection externalized into built form. Once this was understood, it became the task of the architect to innovate “aesthetically” within the “tradition,” now perceived as a sort of ornamental syntax, making works increasingly more refined and magnificent, capable of reflecting the glory and accomplishments of France during this period. During the Enlightenment many architects questioned the instrumental intentions of Perrault’s theories (which were easy to disbelieve given the conditions of preIndustrial Revolution practice) and took his insights as a challenge to understand architectural meaning in relation to natural language rather than to mathematics, foregrounding the issue of decor from Vitruvius. Thus the problem of expression became primary. The architectural theories of character and expression that developed during the eighteenth century are very diverse. They try to understand the potential significance of architecture both discursively and emotionally, and I shall not attempt in this summary to do justice to their intricate subtleties. Seeking harmony with a Divine nature could not be given up easily, particularly in view of the apparently definitive successes of Newtonian cosmology and its God/geometrician. A central concern, however, was to adequately express the uses for which a building was destined so that it could provide a harmonious setting to actions, as well as representing the status of

5 Guarino Guarini, Architettura Civile (1737; facs. reprint, Milano: Edizione il Polifilo, 1968). 6 Claude Perrault, Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, translated by I.K. McEwen (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of At and the Humanities, 1993), Introduction, and in A. Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 18–39. 7 Perrault, Ordonnance, “Preface,” 47–53.

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the building as if it were a social entity, the “mask” or public persona of its client. Jacques-François Blondel, the most important teacher of architects in Paris around 1750, believed that excellent buildings possessed “a mute poetry, a sweet, interest­ ing, firm or vigorous style, in a word, a certain melody that could be tender, moving, strong, or terrible.”8 Just as a piece of music communicated its character through vari­ ous tonal harmonies, evoking diverse states of nature and conveying sweet and vivid passions, so proportion (understood mostly as geometric magnitude and no longer as Pythagorean arithmetic ratios) now acted as a vehicle for architectural expression. Thus buildings could be made terrifying or seductive, capable of expressing their character, be it “the Temple of Vengeance or that of Love.”9 Notice how the inevita­ ble mathematical and geometric qualities of architecture became subject to linguistic expression, both discursive and poetic or emotional. This early modern development constitutes the origin of our own possibilities to understand how fiction and natural language may be crucial in design. Yet, a second consequence of the Enlightenment, with problematic future conse­ quences, must also be noted. The association of architecture with the Fine Arts became commonplace during the eighteenth century. Arguing against Perrault, J.F. Blondel thought that beauty was immutable, and that architects, with an open spirit and keen sense of observation, should be capable of extrapolating it “from the productions of the fine arts and the infinite variety of Nature.”10 This reveals a different assumption about the reception of the work from that which had operated since Vitruvius. While not totally immanent, the expression or significance of architecture was increasingly internalized and transformed into a problem of “composition,” brought to fruition through an objectified building. The temporal dimension, which was always central in architectural meaning—both emotional and intellectual, and understood by the “user” through the spatio-temporal situation (rituals and poetic programs) housed by the architecture—receded in favor of the conception of architecture as “aesthetic object.” Its potential significance could now be “read” out of time. The ultimate accomplishment of this new paradigm, to be found only after 1800, would be an architecture reduced to a sequence of novel or exciting forms for voyeuristic visits in which linear time became an added factor, rather than being intrinsic to the situation: what would become known as the promenade architecturale, a place for tourism often better understood through “pictures,” rather than genuine participatory expe­ rience. Buildings could then be conceived of as literal frameworks for “discursive” writing, like Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève; or, even if generated as forms motivated by fictions, incapable, yet, of transcending their status as aesthetic objects. Continuing the insights of earlier character theory, two late eighteenth-century French architects, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, sought alternatives to this sort of objectified aesthetics and tried to re-introduce a temporal dimension to architectural meaning, emphasizing the emotional “space-in-between” the inhabitant and the building, the space of action, one never before theorized, articulated through open narratives kindred to much-later surrealist techniques and

8 Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution et construction des bâtiments . . . (Paris: Desaint, 1771), 9 vols, vol. 1, 376. 9 Blondel, Cours d’architecture, 376. 10 Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Françoise . . . (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1752), 318.

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cinematographic montage.11 The very nature of theoretical writing about architecture was also questioned. This implied a new concept of transmission and education, one that could no longer depend on the assumption of theory as techne or applied science. Boullée, Ledoux, and Viel de Saint-Maux declared the need for a new architectural discourse capable of transcending the limitations of what they, mistakenly, yet justifi­ ably in view of Perrault’s interpretation, perceived as the prosaic scientific prescrip­ tions of Vitruvian theory and its re-incarnation in Renaissance and Neoclassical treatises.12 Thus, they thought, the intentions of a new poetic architecture could be better-articulated engaging narrative forms. Narrative and emplotment gave architects such as Ledoux the tools to imagine an architecture that no longer simply reflected the conventional order of society, like the “masks” of the earlier eighteenth-century architecture, but was now fully in the realm of both human politics and fiction, devoid of intrinsic transcendence, acknowledging new responsibilities. Ledoux understood that it had become necessary for architecture to project a better future for society, and that this project issued from the critical imagination of the architect/writer, and not from rational analysis or mere societal consensus. His ideal city of Chaux, described in exquisite literary form in his lavish L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’Art, des Moeurs et de la Législation (1804), proposes life as lived in new institutions, formally innovative yet always seeking a reconciliation with the natural world, a “space of appearance” for the “new man” of the French Revolution. The new political subject could not dwell in the old classical architecture. Drawing from Rousseau’s understanding of historicity, Ledoux was keenly aware of the fact that the new humanity was irremediably other than that of the Ancien Régime. Thus he designed places for freedom and responsibility, and his literary description discloses the ethical and moral consequences of living in this new world. Personal expression became a condition for this poetic possibility—a retrieval of the universal in the creative soul of the architect. This realization corresponds to the nas­ cent paradigm of Romanticism. Nicolas le Camus de Mezières imagined the inveterate space of desire transferred to the experience of the private home, shifting the emphasis from the exterior to interiority, in search of “limits” that could no longer be found in the infinite, homogeneous space of natural science, increasingly identified in European cultures with actual lived space. Employing descriptive narrative in his treatise Le Génie de l’Architecture (1780), he illustrated the manner in which architects must seek to design rooms, “qualitative” spaces characterized by appropriate moods to specific focal actions, paradigmatic of harmonic environments, joined and modulated as if in a theatrical experience, such that the house itself seduces and becomes a poetic image of dwelling. Every space has its appropriate colors, light, ornaments, textures, and iconography, and prepares the inhabitant for the adjoining room, ultimately leading to a sense of recognition and wholeness in the boudoir, literally a space apart, the uncommon sacred place which was the space for love. This is the first instance in the history of architectural discourse in which the quality of space becomes the

11 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, de moeurs et se la legislation (1804; facs. reprint, München: UHL Verlag, 1981), and Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, Le génie de l’architecture (1780; facs. reprint, Genève: Minkoff, 1972). 12 Etienne-Louis Boullée, Essai sur l’art (Paris: Hermann, 1968), and Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux, Lettres sur l’architecture des anciens et celles des modernes (1787; facs. reprint, Genève: Minkoff, 1974).

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subject matter, and atmospheres and moods are conveyed not through mathematical proportional relationships—like harmony in music—but through poetic words. This is indeed the inception of the modern concept of Stimmung, or atmosphere, a term that would be used by Romantic philosophy and later passed on to phenomenology and architecture, as for instance in the works and theories of Peter Zumthor. At the time when place, as an intersubjective cosmic topos, was being obliterated from the public’s memory, Le Camus’ sought to retrieve it in discourse, in the hope of actual­ izing it. Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas has demonstrated how place is a condition of consciousness in perception.13 Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Heidegger, adds that mood, or Stimmung, the appropriate atmospheric quality we seek in architecture, “rather than being itself in a place, is the very opening of the world, the very place of Being.”14 Agamben elaborates that mood appears as the fundamental existential mode of Dasein, not in the ontic but in the ontological plane, “neither within interior­ ity nor in the world, but at their limit.”15 One may recall the fundamental phenom­ enological context of these observations, already expressed by Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna in the second century of our era, when he affirmed the codependent arising of subject, object, and action as we experience the world, neither of which terms can be postulated to exist independently or prior to the other.16 One could then conclude that place is therefore present in contemporary culture, but hidden by our techno­ logical constructs, and it is the task of artifacts like literature, art, and architecture to retrieve our attunement. Malpas has further pointed out that place emerges with language, a point that we must qualify carefully. As I suggested, it is not language as commonly assumed by constructionist linguists, as an arbitrary code of more or less transparent signs that could be improved and left behind by some universal Esperanto, but rather language understood as our fundamental human expressivity, inherently poetic, indicative, polysemic, and open, in continuity with the body’s own expressiv­ ity and gestures: language as our connection to others in view of our primordial social being, and therefore connected to cultural habits. Properly understood in this way, language is not arbitrary. It has the capacity of speaking about the world through us, and it comes to fruition in dialogue, through the voice, Stimme. The nature of poetic language, which is humanity’s original speech, is that it can be translated out of time and place: like the work of art. Thus, as we come back to consider the relationship of poetic language and architec­ ture, the central concern of this essay, we can immediately identify some crucial issues. Regardless of whether modern and contemporary fiction can truly play the role myth did in pre-modern cultures, as Louis Aragon thought it could in his “antinovel” Paris Peasant (1926), we may expect poetic fiction to function as much more than vague inspiration. Acknowledging its role in design, both in the elaboration of programs

13 Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

14 Jenny Doussan, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben’s Philosophy (London, UK: Palgrave

McMillan, 2013), 22–3. 15 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, translated by K. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), quoted in Doussan, Time, Language, and Visuality, 22. 16 Nargajuna, Stanzas of the Middle Way, quoted in Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 221.

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and in the disclosure of atmospheres, we can assume that it may further an architec­ ture that gives place to significant human action, resonating with the purposefulness which characterizes our biology, even while acknowledging our generalized nihilism and the fact that contemporary man does not generally believe in the efficacy of ritual as a from of participation through action (one whose results are not necessarily the responsibility of those that act). Most of these questions were first acknowledged by Romantic philosophers who believed the novel was the central form of artistic expres­ sion, capable of addressing our modern existential questions better than any other form of discourse, concerns that were taken into the twentieth century in the writings and works of surrealist artists. Poetic language is the privileged medium of moods and atmospheres, Stimmungen, and the expression of Gemüt: the Romantic concept of emotional consciousness that anticipated the current neurophenomenological under­ standing of embodied, emotional, cognition. Paul Ricoeur, Richard Kearny, and Elaine Scarry, among others, have suggested in their own ways that the human imagination is primarily linguistic.17 Furthermore, we also know through neurobiology that mental images are not picture-like, but rather literal re-enactments of scenes, necessarily operating through language.18 All this pos­ sesses a fundamental challenge for architects, often consumed as we are by pictures and their iterations. Understanding the importance of literary language for architecture also entails, fundamentally, grasping the crucial importance of literature to disclose the nature of urban contexts with all their cultural complexities, essential for an ethical and poetic practice of architecture and urban design. This is something that scientific mapping and statistics can never accomplish. Let me emphasize: this is language in continuity with phenomenology, as part of the flesh of the world, language therefore in the sense defined by philosophical hermeneutics: inherently at odds, as Merleau-Ponty points out, with the so-called language of algorithms and its desire for absolute clarity in its unambiguous function as sign.19 This represents a paradoxical inversion of the condi­ tions that characterized Classical architectural theory with its symbolic mathemati­ cal proportions and geometries, necessitated by the changing conditions of culture, resulting in what Dalibor Vesely has called the age of divided representation.20 It is plainly obvious that some of architecture’s traditional cultural roles can no longer be implemented. The crisis affecting the profession since the beginning of the European nineteenth century has been well documented. Durand was explicitly responsible for asking architects (for the first time ever) to bypass what he believed were irrelevant issues of linguistic expression in their design, and simply to solve a functional problem which would repeatedly produce pleasure, seeking biological homeostasis rather than attunement, which is by necessity a concordia discors. He thought that extruding the building from its plan would bring about meaning auto­ matically: the mere expression of a sign. Such a mathematization of design processes 17 See, for example, Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), and Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 18 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 278–79. Thompson explains that in fact we visualize an object or a scene by mentally enacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience of that scene. 19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5. 20 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

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is still with us in all our contemporary fashions and infatuations with the computer. City planners prevailed over architects and urban designers, adopting the values of the engineers in the service of political power and economic expediency: reason, utility and efficiency became the determinants of the physical environment, assumed to communicate, if needed, clear semantic messages, unencumbered by emotional intentionality. Confronted by the inability of traditional forms and processes to engage new materials and express modern values, architects had no option but to experiment, engaging creative processes to find novel, emotionally charged forms. Like other artistic disciplines engaged in poetic making—a making that attempts not imposition but disclosure, the revelation of something that is already there, and is thus familiar and habitual to a culture while being also new—architecture has suffered during the last two centuries the limitations of potential solipsism and near-nonsense, the syndrome of architecture made for architects, particularly when detached from language and not framed through appropriate critical questions. This has prolonged the crisis, some would even claim, the agony, of the discipline. Yet the fundamental existential questions, which architecture traditionally answered—the profound necessity for humans to inhabit a resonant world they may call home, even when separated by global technological civilization from an innate sense of place— remain as pressing as always. At this juncture, the call for a careful and multilayered consideration of poetic and hermeneutic language in the generation of architecture and the built environment appears pressing. Narrative forms should be engaged for their fundamental capac­ ity to orient ethical action. This is a call for history as interpretation through stories about the past, one that acknowledges the deep roots of our questions in the history of the Western world. Stories are also important for their unique ability to map architecture’s urban context, increasingly synonymous with the human environment at large; they are crucial to set in place human actions, as in Ricoeur’s narrative model of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.21 This schema might suggest for architecture a narrative understanding of site as prefiguration, form and atmosphere as configuration, and lived program as refiguration, accounting for the nature of the project as an ethical promise, communicating through emotion and reason. Engaging hermeneutic and poetic language in this fashion we can imagine how architecture may offer better alternatives to reconcile the personal imagination of the architect with an understanding of local cultures and pressing political and social concerns, beyond obsessions with fashion and form: the crucial dilemma we have inherited with our modern condition. Furthermore, in view of the poverty, neutrality, and even hostility of much of our postindustrial environment, literary mediations of urban space in the form of novels that reveal possibilities for significant human life keep acquiring growing significance for any architectural practice that may seek to resist the pressures of consumerism, banal functionalism, and ideological imperatives. Examples could be drawn from works by authors such as Bely, Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Murakami, Soupault, Breton, and Sebald, among others. Even literary science fiction, like Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005) has the capacity to show, much better than the theory of technology, what might happen to our humanity if we finally get rid of

21 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

116 Alberto Pérez-Gómez death and desire: the limited place of intersubjectivity which has always been the gift of architecture. Architects today, with the help of digital media, are capable of proposing all sorts of novelties. In our pathological urban contexts, it does not suffice to make contorted buildings constructed with unfamiliar materials to house the same ubiquitous shops and fashion designers. It is not enough either to merely disrupt habits through effects, without proposing attuned alternatives for human action. Self-edification, the archi­ tecture that completes us and lets us dwell, recognizing our human condition, will not issue from this pictorial, formal acrobatics. The problem of historical and ethical responsibility is often buried in a postmodern culture of pastiche and instrumental­ ity. The literary imagination, drawing from language which is our being, forces an acknowledgement of ground, crucial for architecture both literally and metaphori­ cally, in a time when designing and building complex structures for their own sake has become the leading fashion of practice.

13 Walls of gender

Claudio Sgarbi

Some stories are waiting to be told. Some stories occur but lie totally unnoticed. Do they occur even if no one is around to tell them? It is irrelevant to ask why they happened or if they would have not happened otherwise. What is peculiar about the three stories I am going to tell is that they have no ending, but neither do they have a  beginning or a middle. They each lie incomplete, fragmentary, dismem­ bered, and the way I can start to tell them is absolutely aleatory; but this is not a justification for  their oblivion. These stories had just begun to happen when they were interrupted, by chance or on purpose. Or perhaps they happened all the way through but their endings were lost forever. It is as if the Little Red Riding Hood story had stopped right after the meeting with the Wolf, or as if it had come to us just as a Little Red and Furry Dark, meeting in a forest. Maybe this is what had actually happened, indeed—and some persuasive storyteller could have just made up all the rest. There is so much debris of lives; the task of figuring out the whole picture is left to us, and the result is always spurious, apocryphal, inauthentic. We swim in a flood of compromised beginnings without a single origin. We are a function of uncertainty and yet the truth is our mandate. We have the stories we deserve. Here are three of them. The first story is paper-thin and is about two men, their different ideals, and their sacred and yet profane bodies. It was first manifested between the recto and verso of a single sheet of paper. The second story is about the public space of a town where people gathered around the representation of an enigmatic space between the legs. This story is as resilient as the convergence or divergence of genders can be. The third story is about a body in the wall with a protruding turgid breast. It is a wall-thick story. For each story, I will present in this chapter just one of the many possible narrative plots I have in mind, with a summary of historical notations.

First story: two ideal men Two men were discussing ideal bodies and ideal buildings. Each of them sketched on a different sheet of paper the images of their different ideal men in a square and in a circle: one was a beautiful (according to his parameters) naked man ready to enter a mundane contest for Mr. Universe; the other man was emaci­ ated and ready to be crucified. Ecstasy and despair have the same outline. What, indeed, could fit both into a square and also a circle?

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Claudio Sgarbi They swapped their sheets of paper, and looked at their images: apparently there seemed to be no possible compromise between the two ideal men, who they really were, what they wanted, who they were looking for; only the bare geometry was retained. Both men ended up becoming what their ideal images wanted to be: one became the most renowned artist in the world and the other was executed and quartered. Their images were their burdens and their destinies. Indeed, even though both of them became what they had prefigured, each was quite unhappy about it. Were these two different men, then, really ideal? Everyone who remembered this curious accident, to avoid getting trapped into any binding predestination and in order to cheat their destiny, decided to elect an anonymous ideal man as their paradigm. The deceit spread like a virus. The land was covered with buildings designed according to canons of an ideal man that was “anybody” with the features of a recognizable “nobody.” Now we know that destiny could not be fooled by this naive stratagem. Destiny cannot be cheated, it is always waiting, insistent and even merciless: if the ideal man chosen was anybody—a choice made to avoid getting trapped in somebody’s fate—then everybody would be destined to become nobody. This was the revenge of destiny. Disrespectful of such an epilogue, the story cannot be said to have reached an end—notwithstanding the catastrophic overbuilding that took place afterwards, or, possibly, as a result of it. The story just got stuck. It got tramme­ led. Now it arrives, with every re-telling, at the same point, where it continuously gets jammed in this constant recurrence of anybody as an ideal for every possible building. Someone even tried then to propose not only to avoid thinking about any ideal man but also to avoid thinking all together. Destiny again gave back buildings designed according to non-thinking [Plate 35].

Marginal notation The history of the above story is about two men, Leonardo da Vinci and Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara, who met in Milan, became friends, and worked together for the Duke Ludovico il Moro between 1480 and 1500. They drew together (worked at the same table and with the same instruments) on the famous image commonly known as the “Vitruvian Man.”1 When the Duke of Milan was overthrown, Leonardo fled from the city and Giacomo was executed and quartered. Giacomo had drawn two alternative images: a lively erotic and athletic man on the recto and a crucified man on the verso. Leonardo drew a moving body with perfect muscular fitness and his own head mounted on top. Giacomo and Leonardo were, obviously, two men, but mascu­ line domination of this field of knowledge was not under discussion at that time. The more I enter into the details of the history, the more I realize that we inherit extremely powerful images that have very profound consequences for our imagination, shaping our thinking flesh and our conscience, and then we leave them unquestioned. The 1 I am trying to reconstruct philologically this event. Claudio Sgarbi, “Vitruvio Ferrarese, alcuni dettagli quasi invisibili e un autore Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara” in Giovanni Giocondo, umanista, architetto e antiquario, curators Pierre Gros and Pier Nicola Pagliara (Venezia: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Marsilio, 2014), 121–38.

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closer those images are, the less we are able to comprehend them because it is they who comprehend us. My aim is to reconstruct the dynamic of that moment in Milan when the destiny of an image, and a whole way of imagining, was put into play. Giacomo and Leonardo display profound agreements and disagreements. Perhaps we have to start to tell another story, taking into consideration the problem of the atopic center (the genitals) where the pictures originate.

Second story: the city between the legs Once there was a story begging to be told, so much so that a city of storytellers was built around it. The story of the city (or the city of the story) began with the worship of the space between our legs, including all the possible spaces that we could have between our legs, from various perspectives. People wandered around a landscape that was desolate and featureless except for a single large monolith. One day, someone decided to scale the monolith to claim it for his own. He managed to climb onto that stage, pulling down his pants to moon the multitude. There was just a laugh at first that lasted for a while. Some even say that this laugh restored fertility (which had been declining). Other people got the idea, scaled the monolith and showed off whatever they had between their legs. This did the trick. The monolith became the cornerstone of a new city. Exposing suddenly the spaces between the legs was like the cuckoo game played by children: now you see it, now you don’t. It was the rhythm and the duration, it was the “gratitude for the gratuity” that made people laugh. But behind every laugh there is tragedy. Time lapse, the casual stoppage, and the sense of the direction, finally, matter. Human life is a continuum that moves from comedy, to tragedy, to farce. There is no space outside of this continuum, no place to compare one to the other, no neutral position. The city never had the chance to be fully built. It was just enjoying its infinite exordium when people began demolishing it, spreading debris around. The rea­ sons for this premature decline were manifold. The beautiful complexity of the space between the legs became just a “spot,” and the Euclidean dilemma about any point being a thing or a hole was basically reduced to a debate between penises, vaginas, and genital contiguities. Everything sticking out was phallic and everything with an internal void was vaginal; any penetration or protrusion degenerated to the idea that people have both penises and vaginas under different names and guises, providing varieties of pleasure (even philosophically) relating to orgasms and ejaculations. Pondering the space between the legs lost the sense of the depth within the infinite spaces of divarication. Everything was unceasingly distorted and mistaken. Eroticism, libido, sexuality, desire, pleasure, pornogra­ phy, and love—lots of love—were translated into books, theatre, professionalism, laws, prohibitions, and special permissions. Everything became the symbol of something else, to the point that the people were terrorized by the idea of every­ thing, and decided to lie hidden, doing nothing, and leaving their pubic spaces empty. What remains now is like what was there before: a mess of debris, monu­ ments, documents, and just some stones with fading images, intelligible only to close observers. The city had not built up into anything before it became unno­ ticeable. Perhaps we became accustomed to the idea that the cities, which were the epicenters of immense joy, love, crime, perversion, depravation, degeneration,

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Claudio Sgarbi and the deepest sorrows were (and are) without individual characteristics. Sodom and Gomorra had no proper look (at any rate, trying to watch them might prove to be deleterious). All characteristic details which matter are the first to fade away or are the target of prohibition. Carnivals and plagues come and go (the cuckoo again!) and the city continues to wait. There will always be an apocalypse (if only we will notice it), but the issue is, what are we doing while we wait? [Plate 36].

Marginal notation My research began with a curiosity about three bas-reliefs that form a part of the rich iconography of the cathedral of the city of Modena. The first is an image of Adam without genitals. The second is the keystone of the main entry arch that shows a small two-headed creature with oversized testicles and penis hanging above the gate. The third shows a human figure with spread legs and a heavily damaged genital area. This last sculpture is known as the Potta, a word with many layers of erotic meanings. The sculpture was located on the roof of the cathedral and faced the main square. Grazia Biondi and I have been researching the history of this image, known as the hermaph­ rodite, in connection with the myth of the androgyne, the alchemical conjunction of opposites, and several archaic figures known as Sheela-na-gig.2 There is also an interesting relationship between the Latin name of the city, Mutina, and Mutunus, an archaic god at the center of a complex erotic ritual. Devotees wore little double-faced pendants with male and female winged genitals on each side. Particular attention was devoted to the Potta during the sixteenth century, when a short treatise was published to correct popular misconceptions. A priest from the Duomo was said to have painted and dressed the sculpture, and soldiers had used the sculpture for target practice. After such vandalizing, the bas-relief was reshaped. It is not by chance that another priest from the Duomo, Gabriele Falloppia, a well-known anatomist—the fallopian tubes are named after him—claimed in 1550 (in competition with Realdo Colombo) to have discovered the clitoris. Many other writings, poems and popular jokes were created around the Potta. John Wilmot referred to this complicated lore when he composed the poem Signior Dildo in 1673 to celebrate the arrival in London of Mary of Modena as the Queen Consort of James II.

Third story: who’s inside the wall? Walls are useful to keep things both inside as well as outside, but what happens when there are also things dwelling inside the wall? Things that indeed do not want to remain hidden inside the wall and reveal themselves by piercing through the wall? Actually, not just some-thing, but some-one, lives and dies in the wall. We do not know all the precedents of this story. It begins with builders deter­ mined to keep their work from being undone by magic. Whatever they built in daylight would fall apart at night, no matter how carefully they erected it. The stubborn master masons became possessed by the desire to defeat this curse and kept erecting walls at all costs. They discovered that in order to make a wall sound, they had to bury a mother inside it, leaving her turgid breast sticking out 2 Stefano Minarelli, Arte e alchimia in età romanica, Le metope del Duomo di Modena (Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 2004).

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from the wall, allowing it to continue to provide milk to the folk. The builders petrified her and made the wall last. This is where the story is worth interrupting. Some said that after this sacrifice of immurement, which allowed the builders to complete the building, the immurers were imprisoned inside their own walls. To escape they had to create wings to fly out, but they fell miserably to their deaths. The milk they had sucked had weighed them down. It is always true that walls lock someone either in or out. Who is inside and who is outside? If you have to immure someone in the wall, whom would you like to immure? —Nobody. Nobody is a nothingness showing through. If you make anything out of nothing, the nothingness will always show through—so much so that this was the solution that was adopted: inside the wall there must be a wall with another wall inside, and so on. But where is the point inside the wall where there is just the wall? Aren’t we inside those walls? Yes, but every wall in itself contains just the wall! People were frightened about a nothing and a nobody being inside the wall. They preferred to have someone they knew inside the wall, maybe someone they could trust—such as someone at home who is waiting for you; but there was no reason why they should have someone they trusted sacrificed inside the wall! The pain of sacrifice was too great, for the victims as well as for those who immured their beloved, even if the sacrifice was a sacred mandate. So the sacrific­ ing stopped, and the walls were made sound by containing just the matter out of which they were made. Some people continued to be frightened at the prospect of so many walls that were just walls with wall-ness inside. Like a ghost city with no one around—wall-ness and nothing more—the absolute emptiness left a sense of sublime loss. Infinite repetition of the negative solidity was horrifying. But, gradu­ ally, people got accustomed to the horror, and the earth was ultimately encrusted with walls that contained just themselves [Plate 37]. Marginal notation I became intrigued by the so-called “Ballad of the Walled-up Wife,” or “Legend of Mastro Manole,” while doing research on masculine and feminine roles in building. After Mircea Eliade’s important research on construction rituals and myths, many other studies have been devoted to the subject.3 I believe that the issue has a psycho­ logical importance that goes much deeper than building’s animisms, personifications, and sacrifices. Sacred should be interpreted in its original meaning of separated, distin­ guished from the idea of an eternal return of mythic sensibility to profane disbelief. The sacred should be seen as an obstacle preventing return to myth itself. Rituals, novels, folk-tales, horror movies, and shared knowledge heavily rely on the persistence of this trope (someone inside or behind the wall), which still pervades our imagination despite the rationality of modern times. The theory and practice of architectural transparency, or the recent glorification of the ventilated façade (a reiterated layering of more or less transparent enclosures), are symptoms of the persistence of this repressed trope. My discovery of a large number of stone female breasts in the stone walls of several vernacular settlements, concentrated in the hills of Northern Italy, deserves further

3 Alan Dundes, ed., The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1996).

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consideration, and I continue to do research on the subject. Beside the presence of a possible ultimate otherness beyond the limits (walls) of our attention, the legend bears significantly on more global ideas, such as: the occurrence of failure in the reiteration of an action; the necessity to repress the unknown; each gender’s identification of the unknown with the other gender; the fate of the subject confronted with the desires of the other; the subject’s relation to objects of desire and refusal; the depth of the dark­ ness of the night; the acceptance of the death of the other; death as a necessary act of love and dedication; the recurrence of life, springing from the recurrence of death; the presence of gaps within the continuity of actions; the dreams of flying; the uncertain differences between the milk of life and the milk of death; the twin-ness of breasts and the necessity to choose between one or the other; the abjection of the choice; the relation between milk and the fluidity of life and other body fluids; the alchemical solidification of the fluid into the solid; the limit itself (the wall) as nourishment . . . . The legend of the wall with the breast can be fused with that of Daedalus and the Labyrinth, or with the story of the origin of the Corinthian order, or many rituals involving the Great Mother and the White Goddess. What holds all these stories together is the concept of our body as a simulacrum of some-one-else. The body we pretend to possess is haunted, possessed, by the image of some-body-else. We carry around an icon that does not belong to us. We either like or hate this image of recurrent otherness, it participates in our emotions or it fights against them, we see it as a gift or as a wicked spell, but we do not own it. It does not belong to us. I think this is so fundamentally important for the architects who have been led to believe that the image of the body of a building can be found inside the building itself. With these three stories I propose three moral assignments for those who design and build walls: to think about a body that does not know the image it claims to possess; to evoke a persona that does not know its gender; and to try to understand sacrifices, who inflicts them, and who suffers them and their necessity. People from diverse cultures have been trying to tell these stories in many different ways, with moments of intense artistic manipulation and long periods of oblivion. But they remain incomplete. They are shreds of broken souls that try to en-gender species of spaces and end up constructing walls.

14 Architecture’s two bodies Donald Kunze In collaboration with Claudio Sgarbi1

Marco Frascari and I grew up academically in the 1980s, when semiotics was the rage. Roman Jakobson famously had converted neurological research on World War I aphasia victims into a binary signifier that dominated architecture theory for the remainder of the century.2 Metaphor, aligned with the brain’s ability to recognize similarity, became the basis of humanistic poiesis. Metonymy took on functions opposite this poetic: logic, instrumentality. Metaphor’s semblance-function connected to the ethnography of sympathetic magic; in contagious magic, metonymic contiguity revealed anticipations of rational causation. While the binary metaphor-metonymy grounded humanistic theory in architecture, it forced a misreading of one of its most respected sources, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his unfinished final work, The Visible and the Invisible, the French phenomenologist had written: [The realization that the world is not an object] does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things.3 Functions clearly differentiated in the cases of aphasia victims’ loss of either semblance or contiguity functions, seem, in individual non-aphasiac subjects, to combine in an uncanny subject/object cross-inscription that is like having, paradoxically, two bodies separated by a paradoxical void (dehiscence). These two bodies within the subject, made invisible by cross-inscription, would not be distinguished without seeing them sepa­ rated, in the aphasias of brain-damaged victims, into two separate pathological states. While the binary of metaphor/metonymy was employed to commend ideological victories of poetic mentality over instrumentality, binary logic would fail theoretically

1 Thanks to Claudio Sgarbi for developing the idea of catalepsis in conversations during Spring 2014. 2 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances in Fundamentals of Language” (1956),  http://theory.theasintheas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ jakobson_Aphasia.pdf. Accessed April 2015. 3 Emphasis added. See Bernard Flynn, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,”  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/ entries/merleau-ponty. Accessed April 2015.

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and ethnographically to account for the gap intrinsic to the “flesh of the world.” Worse, binary logic would misrepresent the gap’s resistance to domestication, related to what Ernst Jentsch had described as the “primary cross-inscription of the uncanny”—life and death “passing into each other.”4 Frascari’s legacy began with an architectural version of the metaphor/metonymy binary—the techneˉ of logos and the logos of techneˉ. In his first famous published essay Frascari used chiasmus to allow the two terms to haunt each other.5 For Frascari, logos was not “logic” but rather an account, a story, often a strange one. His techneˉ came from Giambattista Vico’s factum, which the eighteenth-century phi­ losopher had himself cross-inscribed with the True (verum), hidden within making.6 Vico’s uncanny epithet verum ipsum factum (we may know that which we have made) reprised Heraclitus’s palintonos harmonieˉ (etymologically the architectural joint between disparate parts) to produce Frascari’s clairvoyant idea that the detail generated not just architecture but also a way of knowing.7 Techneˉ and logos were like Castor and Pollux: mortal/divine twins circling around life and death like a sun and moon around a common central earth—held apart by a diameter line that could, at certain times, provide a liminal passageway for staging a forbidden reunion. This chiastic image allowed Frascari to invent his own versions of palintonos harmonieˉ, drawn from stories and other constructs using the same pattern. How did Frascari discover this method? I suggest that he retroactively realized what he had written in 1984, as if the words had come to him first, the full meanings later. At a Semiotic Society of America meeting in 1985, Frascari and I were fascinated by an analysis of the 1945 British film, Dead of Night.8 This anthology film about an architect caught in a circular dream involved all four “detached virtualities” that Jorge Luis Borges had identified with the fantastic: doubles, circular time travel, con­ tamination of reality by the dream or fiction (e.g. theory by fabulation), and the story­ in-the-story (literally con-fabulation).9 It is no coincidence that all four themes involve the Jentschian uncanny: reversed predications, a gap, then cross-inscriptions of space and time. But, even better, all four materialize the “dialectic of the two bodies” as twins rotating about a common center, held apart by a diameter they will traverse to make uncanny exceptions. The film, we realized, had spookily anticipated the theme of our own session, “monsters of architecture.” It seemed to have already answered the questions we had not yet asked! After this demonstration of architecture’s involvement with the uncanny, I became fascinated by film’s ability to demonstrate temporality in architecture, and developed a “visual calculus” to describe it. Frascari’s trajectory went from monsters to cuisine

4 Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8, no. 22 (August 26, 1906): 195–8 and 8, no. 23 (September 1, 1906): 203–5. Jentsch’s two “atoms” of the uncanny were (1) the presence of death-in-life, as fate or fear of death; and (2) the continuation of life past the point of literal death. 5 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture 7 (1984): 23–37. 6 Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians . . ., translated by L.M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1988). 7 Edward Hussey,  The Presocratics (New York: Scribner, 1973). Palintonos harmonieˉ is in no way a merger but a constructed, temporalized, and dynamic tension. 8 Arturo Cavalcanti et al., directors, Dead of Night (film) (London: Ealing Studios, 1945). 9 James E. Irby, “Introduction” in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, translated by André Maurois and Donald A. Yates (New York: New Directions, 1964).

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and neuroscience. But both of us continued to draw on this primordial experience of confabulation, particularly in the way that one story becomes an “every story,” and particularly when two bodies forbidden to meet are allowed a brief exception, a palintonic, tell-tale detail. Frascari sped past the ideology of instrumentality/poiesis. Confabulation requires experiment. It is not satisfied with an alibi of coincidentia oppositorum. More interest­ ing and ethnographically substantive products of binary signification derive from the occultation of one term of the binary in relation to the dominant term. Slavoj Žižek describes occultation as “absolute recoil” (absoluter Gegenstoss): meaning “reso­ nates from a distance,” creating, in the original term, the phenomenon of essence.10 Occultation and resonance are not abstractions. Although binaries vary widely— they ground the contingencies of cultures, ideologies, and Zeitgeists—occultation’s materiality creates a Rosetta Stone allowing comparisons across distant time periods and contrasting cultures. James Frazer, Jane Harrison, and other turn-of-the-century mythographers unknowingly corroborated Vico’s idea of a cultural “imaginative universal” with massive ethnographical evidence of common practices—all of which involved occultation and resonance.11 Humans invest the world with subjectivity by selectively negating/sublating its objectivity. This “metonymical rule” might be stated as: “what privation removes as object (limitation or intentional numbing of the senses—catalepsis) is returned—as subject-in-disguise, suddenly appearing from out of a hiding-place (metalepsis).12 The chief celebrity of this subjective return is the djinn or dæmon, the model for Eros who, Hesiod warns, is a “loosener of limbs, who subdues the mind and prudent counsel in the chests of all gods and of all men.”13 The djinn is distinct from the collective genius of Psyche, the basis of ingenium (ingenuity), and the Stoic animus (penetrating spark), which, as cœlum (heaven/wedge), is manifested by agutezza (wit), communicating the gens of the manes, ancestral family spirits tended by Hestia at the household hearth.14 Metonymical occultation and resonance repairs damage done by Jakobson’s binary of semblance/metaphor and contiguity/metonymy by showing how metonymy uses negation and absence in material cultural practices.15 This has eluded many 10 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2014). 11 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1968), §381. 12 Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence, Also of some Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1951), 95, 111; see also Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956). 13 This critical component of Eros is missing in Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s citation of Hesiod’s Theogony, 116–20. Built Upon Love, Architectural Longing After Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006), 12. Pérez-Gómez steers away from catalepsis with his own added (non-Hesiodic, metaphoric) attribute, “the love that softens hearts.” Socrates continues the catalepsy theme in his account of Diotima’s instructions on the nature of love, related to the Socrated dæmon, Eros, a paralyzing “sting­ ray” (Symposium). 14 For a disentanglement of djinn and gen and differentiation of Eros and Psyche, see H.C.E. Zacharias’s review of Onians, Origins, in Anthropos 48, no. 1/2 (1953): 309–11, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40451207. Accessed April 2015. 15 I have made a detailed case for the role of metonymy in the occultation process. See Donald Kunze, “The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany”

126 Donald Kunze humanists-phenomenologists who would seem most to benefit, and who have mis­ read metonymy as against metaphor. This is flesh-of-the-world as both intertwin­ ing and cross-inscription, a gap coincident with an overlap. To restore the place of the subject—and subjectivity—in recognizing architecture’s two bodies requires metonymy. And understanding metonymy, in my view, requires a combined reading of Jacques Lacan and Vico.16

Experiment in occultation: close-up magic, picking pockets The gap and the uncanny overlap of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world are embed­ ded in religion, folk-lore, the obsessions of popular culture; and the magic materiality of everyday space–time. This is the flesh that re-clothes bones on Judgment Day. It does not transform objects directly; rather it alters the space–time horizons so that objects become Real in subjective-receptive acts: surprise, discovery, annunciation, apocalypse. Consider the examples of the close-up magician and the pickpocket. Neither uses props. Both numb perceptual space so that whatever travels through it seems to appear or disappear as if by magic. Deadening space–time constitutes an act of “catalepsis”—death-within-life. The presence of a numbed cataleptic space inside spatial experience constitutes super-symmetry, a sustained balance maintained by fractal-like recursion, a coincidence of something with itself—a more-than-everything and less-than-nothing. Super-symmetry is experienced as “epiphany.” Numbing (vari­ ants: paralysis, inattention, freezing, immobility, simulated death) can be theorized through the rhetorical ideas of catalepsis and its complement, metalepsis, the form of metonymy that regulates frames. “Confabulation” experiments with catalepsis and metalepsis directly, using the themes of the story-in-the-story, travel through time, the double, or contamination of reality by dreams or fictions. Confabulation is not just a matter of providing logoi, accounts. Following Frascari, we align the techneˉ of logos with Heraklitus’s palintonos harmonieˉ—the architectural joining of two disparate materials, the combining of one part with that which is not a part. Con-fabulation combines this alien non-part with super-symmetry, as epiphany­ through-catalepsis. Con-fabulation challenges us to join unrelated stories, not to compare and contrast, nor to defer to historical contexts. Only by suspending these issues do new possibilities emerge. Magic is about effects, not supernatural agencies. Magic sets up the site of art inside the bodies/minds of the audience. The body of the audience, the ultimate site of excep­ tion thanks to the rule that forbids it to speak or move, is where art and architecture happen. Without experimental combination of unrelated stories, confabulation ter­ minates prematurely as an interpretive exercise; with it, confabulation reveals the conjoined relations of surprise, revelation, epiphany.

in Gevork Hartoonian, ed., Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015). 16 See Donald Kunze, “Vichianism after Vico” in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (London: Elsevier, 2009).

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Close-up magic, picking pockets Confabulation’s movement from the improbable to epiphany involves an imaginary thin perceptual screen set up between the objective world and the subject’s space, the point of view. The close-up magician must numb the space on the object-side of this screen by performing a jumble of seemingly useless, mistaken, or unnecessary motions. Hiddenness is, thus, in the brain of the viewer. Once the audience has ceased to pay attention to these “accidents,” the space they occupied becomes available for “exaptation,” a storage-container for occulting objects and motions technically in plain view. Exaptation is an at-first useless consequence of some other functioning trait, like the architectural spandrel in relation to an arch; but, when there is a new environmental-contextual demand, the exapted trait quickly comes forward, alwaysalready present, ready to perform correctly and surprisingly.17 Occultation is the means and necessary preface; exaptation produces the required surprise ending. Because the pickpocket must work directly with the subject’s body, s/he builds up occulted space on the alternative, subject side of the perceptual screen, invading personal space that is usually protected. Numbing the “mark” until s/he ceases to take notice, the pickpocket can then perform the well-practiced motions. Both the close-up magician and the pickpocket require: (1) catalepsis, followed by metalepsis—use of the space between the original culturally prescribed frame and a second extemporane­ ously constructed frame, where (2) occultation stores actions or objects (exaptation), resulting in a seemingly magical epiphany. Catalepsis thus relates directly to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world, as well as to Jacques Lacan’s definition of the phallic signifier, \, not solely in relation to sex but as the more general function of appearing and disappearing. We can unify our notation of confusion–occultation– exaptation–epiphany to a single term, the phallic \. We gain the function of visibility/ invisibility, without losing the sex.18

Simactæonides The two “phallic” stories I experimentally confabulate combine (1) the project of artificial memory and (2) the supersymmetry of space–time through detached virtual­ ity, with particular emphasis on space-within-space. The first story is the invention of artificial memory by Simonides of Ceos, directly related to Giulio Camillo’s and Ramón Llull’s famous memory projects. Coincidentally, this is a story about archi­ tectural collapse and the (magical) exaptation of occulted details, through palintonic harmonieˉ, materialized as “acousmatics” (whisper, song), or stochastic resonance (symmetry through and within accident). It leads us to conclude, with Piranesi, 17 Slavoj Žižek links exaptation to the architectural spandrel in “Architectural Parallax, Spandrels, and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle,” Tilton Gallery, New York, April 23, 2009; reprinted in lacanian ink, http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=218. Accessed April 2015. 18 The \ is phallus, not penis, as some have confused in relation to the ancient boundary-marker, the herm. The herm’s phallus and head reveal the relationship of gens (sexuated being, psyche) to the wealth of Hades brought forth at the beginning of the (Olympian) year by Hestia and distributed by Hermes—gods who appear side by side rarely, but almost always in sculptures representing the cal­ endar (Onians, Origins, 122). Herms thus function as apotropes, points of trade, boundary markers, and family signs. See Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1947).

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that (architectural) Ruin is the ground of the True, revealing the role of Platonic anamnesis, knowledge in the form of memory.19 This Ruin literalizes “going to one’s ground” (Hegel’s zugrunde gehen)—subjectivity’s unique place of exaptation (occulted circumstances). Scopus, a well-known politician, hires the poet Simonides to sing his praises at a banquet celebrating his victory in a wrestling contest. To avoid bringing bad luck on his boastful employer, Simonides inserts a hymn to the twin gods, Castor and Pollux, but Scopas is annoyed by this addition and refuses Simonides half the agreed-on fee. Shortly afterwards, Simonides gets word that two strangers are waiting outside to speak with him; but when he goes out to see what they want, the street is empty. Just as he turns to go back to the banquet, the hall collapses. Victims are crushed beyond recognition, and relatives arriving to claim their dead are distressed to find they cannot identify the bodies for proper burial. Simonides, however, had memorized the name of each guest by associating it with his place at the banquet table. He is now able to name each corpse, referring to the spot where it had fallen. The technique of memory places is invented. The grateful relatives reward Simonides handsomely, more than restoring his fee lost on account of the reference to Castor and Pollux. The identities of the two strangers who saved Simonides by calling him outside are easily guessed. My second story combines the Simonides theme of spatial monstrosity—one space enclosing another—with bodily monstrosity, one body enclosing another. Actæon, on his way home after a successful hunt, stumbles across the sacred grove where Diana, goddess of the hunt, is bathing with her attendants. Enraged, Diana splashes water onto Actæon, transforming him into a stag, the most timid of the forest beasts. His dogs sense the transformation and, failing to recognize their master now covered with hide and horns, chase and kill him. The story, though short and ambiguous (did Actæon deserve this harsh punishment?), has multiple versions and interpretations. Most re-tellers consider it to be little more than a morality tale, but Luigi Vanvitelli, architect of Caserta and fan of Vico’s New Science, placed a stone version of the story at the head of a cascade representing the birth of the universe.20 Actæon is a member of Ovid’s “Theban panel”—including Cadmus, Semele, Tiresius, Pentheus, and Bacchus—all famous for the uncanny theme of “seeing what they should not have seen.”21 This \, the sudden appearance of what should have remained occulted, involves the metonymic logic of concealing–revealing divine con­ tents. Simonides also belongs to this tradition because, following the rule of exapta­ tion, he had not originally intended to aid undertakers at a gruesome disaster scene when he memorized the guests’ names and locations. Detached virtuality, left-over spaces Both stories reveal a key truth about architecture’s debt to occultation. The Simonides story is about built objects and living-then-dead subjects within a paradoxical space

19 Žižek’s “absolute recoil,” absoluter Gegenstoss, is actualized by Hegel’s zugrunde gehen—“to go to one’s ground.” I read this as “ruin” as well as (Hegel’s) Golgotha. 20 George Hersey, Architecture, Poetry, and Number in the Royal Palace at Caserta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). 21 Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon, the Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (September 1980): 319.

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of catalepsis (known through memory); Actæon’s story is about the structure of cata­ lepsis in the formation of super-symmetry by means of detached virtuality. Actæon walks through a domesticated forest, where game is there to be hunted. He stumbles across a different kind of space, an uncanny space that is singular but still within the forest—a space requiring a turn, a hinge. We must recall and consider Diana’s identity as Djana, or Jana, consort of Janus/Dianus. The grove’s location is problematic. It is inside the forest and outside it at the same time, a supersymmetry of the “part that is not a part”22 [Plate 38]. Actæon “finds what he should not have found,” converting the privation of Diana’s grove into a prohibition that, when violated, even unintentionally, must be punished. Vico explains that the space protecting the sacred springs used to sanctify the first marriages required ritualized entry.23 The phallic theme of visibility/invisibility is key: the springs came from an invisible source (privation) and, as sacred, required protection by religion (prohibition). What is privation, objectively, must be replaced, subjectively, as prohibition. Actæon plays out this algorithmic relationship. The supersymmetry of Diana’s grove is mirrored by Actæon’s two bodies, hunter and hunted, in Ovid’s (otherwise inexplicably detailed) account of each of the thirty-three plus three hunting dogs who pursue and devour their master. Three bitches, Melanchoetes, Theridamas, and Oresitrophos, are the last to join the chase, but thanks to the shortcut they take through the mountains, they arrive first on the scene. Like close-up magicians, pickpockets, and the wolf of Little Red Riding Hood, the three bitches use the space of catalepsis to slow down reality in order to speed up their travel. These triplets count as a Cerberus, the three-headed protector of Hades (ӆbdn, “the invisible,” another supersymmetry inside/outside the living world). Prohibition’s consequences: revenge Just as Actæon may not have been completely innocent when he stumbled across Diana’s grove, the collapse of the banquet hall in the Simonides tale may not have been an accident. Nicole Loraux tells how the Prytaneion was devised as a part of a conscious plan to supplant the clan-based “hearth religions” of individual house­ holds. In the Athenian Prytaneion, an all-male fraternity maintained a collectivized civic flame; the new political order used homosexual love to end the strife among households, whose cyclopean independence had been enforced through individual families’ hearths and manes.24 Simonides possibly had recognized the religious peril of such a transfer of power and, as a precaution, inserted a poem of praise of the twin gods, Castor and Pollux, into his encomium for Scopus. The story from this point of view curiously resonates

22 Lacan’s word for this phenomenon, extimité, was coined in Seminar XVI, “From One Other to the Other” (1969). See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimity” in Mark Bracher,  ed., Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University, 1994), 74–87. 23 Vico, New Science, §528. 24 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Loraux’s account qualifies Pérez-Gómez’s unrestrained praise for the Prytaneion as a civic center for all citizens, in Built Upon Love, 130. The Prytaneion in the Simonides story was, like the Athenian model, an exclusive men’s club.

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with a thematic use of twinning.25 Scopus renders only a half-fee, refusing to pay for the religious reference. The two strangers who call Simonides outside save him when the hall collapses, crushing all inside: the story has mortal and immortal faces. The corpses are unrecognizable; their bios is reduced to zoeˉ, pure animal life; they are, as unnamed, carrion. Memory restores them, not to life, bios, but to the manes, the familial-collective psyche. The name in relation to the family hearth is the key to the Simonides story. Called over by families desperate to identify the remains and avoid their relatives’ permanent curse, he realizes his method of exaptation—the technique of memorizing names by organizing their “accidental” locations within a system of precise placement. Now with only the evidence of placement, he is able restore the names, critically tied to the family hearth and worship of the manes. The Simonides story is a radical critique of the Prytaneion, just as Euripides’ farce, Alcestis, hammered home the contradic­ tory demands made on the wives and daughters who had attended the hearth-flame. Simonides provides a cure with the chiastic/binary formula for artificial memory. Confabulation is itself devoid of content. Rather, it is a site of exception whose supersymmetry purifies all who pass through it. This Purgatory allows the second sym­ bolic death, which could be read as death of, as well as in, the Symbolic. Thanks to the exaptation of key details—overlooked by generations of expert tellers and scholars— we uncover a history corroborated by the careful scholarship of Nicole Loraux, a history that is true not just because it happened, but true because of the nature of subjectivity and the subject’s relation to the flesh of the world. Confabulation’s rela­ tion to this true is not accidental. Juxtaposition forces the palintonos harmonieˉ of “stochastic resonance” that is the acousmatic medium of philosophic/psychoanalytic as well as ethnographical (lived) truth. Verum ipsum factum. Now and only now do we discover the epiphany of exception.

25 Donald Kunze, “Skiagraphy and the Ipsum of Architecture,” Architecture and Shadow, VIA 11 (1990): 62–75. My contention that the Simonides story is structured by chiasmus affords the realization of an anomaly that has so far escaped scholarly commentary: the twin gods appear together, and their overlap constitutes supersymmetry.

15 Camillo Sitte’s winged snail

Festina lente and escargot Marcia Feuerstein

Viennese Architect Camillo Sitte’s 1899 book Der Städtbau [City Planning According to Artistic Principles] concludes his treatise on planning and designing cities with an image of a winged snail1 [Figure 15.1]. This colophon, his finishing touch to a book filled with analytic diagrams and plans of both ancient and modern public spaces, is a conundrum. Why did Sitte conclude his treatise on urban design with a flying snail? It is the only image of its kind in the book: a rhetorical, even branding, device, it is an emblem. This snail with wings has some precedents; architects who discuss snails— with or without wings—less so. Architects who include this kind of emblem are rare— although some consider the meaning of the image: festina lente. This chapter looks at ideas of the snail—with and without wings—and then festina lente. Le Corbusier, who knew Sitte’s book, likens snails to a home measured and fit to its occupant’s unique life, a home “like a snail in its shell, in a lodging made exactly to his measure.”2 Architecture is a measure of that life—an interrelationship of the outer hard “shell” with the inner soft space for our habits of living—as embodiment. Snails traditionally symbolize slowness yet they are also associated with deep inner thought and steadiness. They indicate new beginnings and renewal—miraculously appearing out of nowhere after springtime dew and rainfalls, climbing new plants emerging from the ground. A flying snail is another thing. Snails don’t have wings while butterflies, birds, and angels do. Snails or gastropods are earth-bound, sliding on their “foot” through a wave-like movement of the sole on the mucus or slime it produces as it moves forward. The slime allows the snail to glide over uneven ground with its foot that includes a head—at its front—that smells and barely sees.3 It carries its shell while perceiving the world through its head as its foot grasps and glides on slime along the ground. Snails are grounded, while Sitte’s takes flight. Winged snails only exist as microscopic plankton, invisible to the human eye [Figure 15.2]. These winged sea snails are all zooplankton, tiny marine animals—sea butterflies (Thecosomata, also known as the potato chip of the sea) or sea angels (Clione limacine)—having wing-shaped bodies.

1 Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, translated by George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Random House, 1965), 164. 2 He continues, writing of “old and rotting buildings that form our snail-shell, our habitation, which crush us in our daily contact with the putrid and useless and unproductive.” Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, translated by Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 273, 236–7. 3 Retinalechoes, “The Snail’s Duality” in Retinalechoes, A Journal on Film, Art, Literature, February 7, 2013, http://retinalechoes.com/2013/02/07/the-snails-duality/. Accessed September, 13, 2014.

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Figure 15.1 Camillo Sitte’s flying snail from the 3rd 1901 edition of Die Städte-bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien / von architekt Camillo Sitte (Wien: Verlag von Carl Graeser, 1889). Internet Archive (University of Toronto)

“Plankton,” from the Greek word for wander, refers to microbes, plants, and animals carried by ocean currents: translucent miniatures that feed on smaller plankton and provide nutrition for larger and higher animals—sea angels, slugs, fish, and whales, from tiny to huge. A winged snail might be a monster; although, like Sitte’s invention, other instances of airborne snails hold meaning that suggest a modern or god-like future. Francesco del Cossa (c. 1435–1477), a fifteenth-century Italian artist, included two snails in his painting The Annunciation (L’Annunciazione, 1470–1472)—each interpreted as a figure of God, one earthbound and the other floating in the sky.4 One, the large snail gliding along the bottom of del Cossa’s painting, is like a mirror of the other, floating in the sky in the form of a cloud. It is no surprise that he included both of these snails in his Annunciation, each representing the figure of God, symbolizing divine insemi­ nation during the annunciation—one from heaven (as God) and the other, the Virgin, miraculously emerging from fertile ground.5

Festina lente Sitte’s flying snail might refer to a sacred future—leaving the ground and flying away—as well as to festina lente, a Latin motto meaning “hurry [or hasten] slowly.” The festina lente motto was enthusiastically embraced by artists, writers, architects, thinkers, and emperors to carefully and thoughtfully design a way of life that balances fast with slow. Many created images or emblems that represented this motto. Sitte’s small festina lente emblem reimagines and reiterates his plea to “hurry slowly” while designing new urban spaces, specifically the Vienna Ringstrasse (1860–1890s). He focuses on slowing down the design process, despite designers’ overwhelming desire for fast design decisions. His book reveals medieval public spaces that embody a slower way life. Fast modern life upsets this balance: he asks designers to take a mature, measured approach to design: slower designing for a slower life. On the sur­ face he seems to wish for a return to a past, idyllic, urban life; in the end he proposes 4 Helen S. Ettlinger, “The Virgin Snail,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 316. 5 Daniel Arasse, “The Snail’s Gaze” in On n’y voit rien: Descriptions, translated by Alyson Waters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 17–38.

Figure 15.2 Sea Angel: microscopic marine winged snails (Zooplankon Clione limacha, a shell-less cold water gastropod). NOAA Photo Library, Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC

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something else: a balance that affords the richness, beauty, and elegance of both quick and slow. Look to the past while accepting the future, like the winged snail. The traditional concept of festina lente—combining slow and quick—required wisdom and cunning, or metis. Metis has been described as a way of knowing that is different from speculative reasoning. It follows a complex route towards understand­ ing, with ambiguous and shifting situations that defy logic or calculation.6 Metis also requires maturity, obtained after years of study, work, and experience. Consider baseball. A mature batter takes control of a game by slowing it down: taking time while preparing for the pitch, waiting, calming down and considering the pitcher before instantly reacting. The hitter’s mind is absolutely clear, and able to make a quick decision at the last split second. So it is with designing. Alberti recounts a similar process of maturity and metis coupled with festina lente when observing how a design process moves from confusion to clarity. Immature designers impatiently want to immediately conclude their designs; but Alberti advises: as an architect you must wait and calm down, “until your initial enthusiasm for the idea has mellowed . . . then once your judgment is governed by soberer thoughts than your enthusiasm for inventions, you will be able to judge the matter more thoroughly.”7 Patience signals a designer’s maturity, using sketches, drawings, and models to “weigh up repeatedly and examine, with the advice of experts, the work as a whole and . . . all of the parts . . . before continuing.”8 Only after prudent reflection can a building be quickly constructed: slow then quick. Marco Frascari recounts another slow quick story about drawing, metis, festina lente, a Chinese artist, and a crab. The artist spent ten years preparing his image of a perfect crab for his patron who had supported him over the decade. Finally his patron lost patience, demanded the drawing and the artist instantly created a perfect crab. The artist’s long and slow preparation immediately crystallized through metis. As Frascari explains, “those who have metis act in a flash.”9 By practicing festina lente one achieves maturity by balancing the quick with the slow. In design, we develop maturity through patience and experience, which gives us the opportunity to know when a design is ripe and ready.10 Aulus Gellius (c. 123–170 ce) discussed festina lente in Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) as the writing of maturity:11

6 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 18–20. See also Lisa Ann Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), xii. 7 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, edited and translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), Book Two, 1/20–21v, 35. 8 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 34. 9 Marco Frascari, “Festina Lente (Hurrying Slowly) an essay on the building of speed,” GB Progetti 1–0 (1993): 18. 10 Conrad H Roth, “Festina Lente,” Varieties of unreligious experience, May 22, 2007, http://vunex. blogspot.com/2007/05/festina-lente.html. Accessed August 10, 2014. Referring to the ideal time to harvest. It also recalls Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare (#226 Perry Index) as well as Zeno of Elea’s paradox of Achilles and Floyd’s “tortoise and hare” algorithm of infinite (cycle) loops in mathematics. 11 Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Aulus Gellius,” Oxford Bibliographies, DOI: 10.1093/ OBO/9780195389661-0200, August 28, 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/ obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0200.xml. Accessed October 24, 2014. Aulus Gellinus was a second-century ce Roman scholar and author.

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(Augustus) used to say in conversation, and write in his letters, m/¡ȣࡏb¡`l_b¡´tn, that is, “make haste slowly,”  by which he recommended that to accomplish a result we should use at once the promptness of energy and the delay of careful­ ness, and it is from these two opposite qualities that maturitas springs.12 He was referring to Caesar Augustus (63 bce–14 ce), who adopted an image of a crab and a butterfly to signify his idea of festina lente. Another image, which grafts a sail onto a turtle’s shell, was adopted by Cosimo Medici, who had artist Giorgio Vasari insert the image throughout his Palazzo Veccio in Florence (1559–1561). Vasari included the turtle/sail in the frontispiece he designed for Bertoli’s translation of Alberti’s previously cited treatise on Architecture. These two kinds of images signify two ways of achieving festina lente: one, combining parts of animals and/or objects, enables a third creature to acquire both traits and balance quickness with slowness (the turtle-sail); the other maintains each object’s/animal’s innate character as they engage in an ongoing struggle between these two opposing ways of being to achieve the balance (the crab-butterfly). Each represents a different way of achieving maturity by practicing festina lente. Caesar Augustus’s image13 of a crab holding a large butter­ fly aloft in its claws recalls Frascari’s story of metis and the quickly drawn crab. The huge nervous fluttering same-sized butterfly demonstrates the struggle by the butterfly tricked into being caught by a cunning and clever crab, who then must continue to hold onto the butterfly [Figure 15.3 left]. The turtle/sail emblem is closest to Sitte’s image: creating a new creature that is enabled by the part of another: the turtle or snail representing the ground plus sails or wings representing fast moving air. The slowly moving ground creature that then catches the wind and moves over the water or becomes airborne. Another image also within an architectural treatise has a dolphin intertwined with (but not caught by) an anchor—combining the quickness of the dolphin tempered by the weight and stability of the anchor [Figure 15.3 right]. Again, like the crabbutterfly, the idea was created by the interaction of two things (an anchor and a dol­ phin) that remain whole yet joined. It was included in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream published in 1499 by Aldus Manutius. Manutius then borrowed the image for his own colophon and in his 1508 publication of Desiderius Erasmus’s Adages (who included an adage on festina lente).14 The anchor/dolphin combination clearly indicates an opposition between lightness and heaviness. Fast and slow, explored by Italio Calvino in his “Quickness,” along with “Lightness,” considers “the opposition between lightness and weight,” show­ ing how both are inextricably bound to one another.15 It also suggests a period of wandering before striking the balance—whether while designing, drawing a crab, or working on research. One philosopher writes, “whoever has spent long hours roam­ ing among books, when every fragment . . . seems to open a new path, in turn quickly

12 Aulus Gellius, The attic nights of Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae), translated by John Carew Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: W. Heinemann, 1960–1961), 10.11, 1–8. 13 W. Deonna, “The Crab and the Butterfly: A Study in Animal Symbolism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17, no. 1/2 (1954): 47–86. 14 Adagia II, 1, 1:Festina Lente. 15 Italo Calvino, “Lightness” and “Quickness” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3–30, 31–54.

Figure 15.3 On the left: Crab holding a butterfly with the words Festina Lente. This was Caesar Augustus’s emblem for Festina Lente from c. 19 bce, reconceived in 1559 by Gabriel Simeone. Similar images from this time replace festina lente with Matura (mature). On the right: Aldus Manutius’s Dolphin Intertwined with Anchor. Internet Archive (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze)

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abandoned for a new encounter . . . knows that not only that study can have no true end, but also that it desires none.” He continues, “this festina lente, this shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss, passion and action is the rhythm of study”16 (and design.) Camillo Sitte’s winged snail was not a sea butterfly, sea angel, or microscopic winged snail plankton. Yet like plankton, designers, or a scholar roaming library stacks (or electronic databases), Sitte wandered through the historic centers of vari­ ous towns, through the plazas that were designed through centuries-long wanderings, designed out of a kind of human current that, like a snail, followed topographic, cultural, and functional life lived in the open. It was here that Sitte described a series of urban situations, “old town” portions of European towns and cities, whose smallscale character gave members of the public opportunities to interact with each other. He was appalled by new urban plans designed through efficient (and quick) meth­ ods that transformed the city’s population. This new approach, he believed, resulted in the disappearance of nineteenth-century European public life and a culture retreat­ ing from spontaneous human contact and intimate spaces.17 Sitte believed that public life could be strengthened if these efficient methods were informed by his principles, derived from the piazzas he found so appealing. Otherwise, public street life would transform its people, both actor and audience, into a community of strangers: with­ drawn, estranged from one another, and autonomous. Sitte methodically researched cities to discover principles of city design based on these historic public spaces. His method was different from the estrangement he hoped to prevent. When Sitte arrived at a new city he would leave the train station and: bid the cabman drive immediately to the central square. There he would ask for the leading bookstore and there he would inquire for three things: First, the best tower from which to view the city; second, the best map of the city; and, third, the hotel where one could eat the best dinners. Then, having cut the map into small squares easily handled in the wind, he would go to the outlook tower, and there spend several hours analyzing the plan of the town. Later he would study in detail and make sketches of the cathedral square, [and] the market place.18 As he moved from the ground to sky and back again, Sitte was an active stranger, held in the grasp of the streets and then detached and elevated: a “voyeur” of the city from above literally viewing the urban plan. Moving between street and sky, he enacted the role of an observer who, as a visitor, joined and then departed from the public realm. He accomplished this thorough a web of interaction that provided “mutual support and direct contact . . . .”19 Sitte’s method was to slowly meander the streets, nourished by local cuisine, and climb up above the streets for a bird’s eye view, an overview of the city plan all at once.

16 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, quoted in Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, edited by Leland de la Durantaye (Stanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 2009), 144. 17 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976). 18 George R. Collins and Christiane Craseman Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 63. 19 Sennett, Public Man, 294.

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Sitte’s winged snail might refer to the transformation of the plazas and public spaces that were slowly designed over time through everyday life, fitting the urban life as a well-made suit, much like the previously cited reference to Le Corbusier’s description of the snail shell as lodging made exactly to a human’s measure. Unlike snails, who slowly glide over the ground, changes in topography, leaving a trail that weaves through and negotiates the vagaries of a site, Sitte believed that, as new cities were designed for faster movement, with a focus on roadways and streets, they lost their slower everyday rhythm and erased the unique character of the original place. Sitte was not trying to return to the past but rather hoped that his principles might become integrated into modern, efficient designs of the new city. His principles explored social and cultural opportunities embedded within the form and makeup of public spaces via their unique character— opportunities to publically share their daily life with each other on-the-ground.20 Rather than eliminating the urbane slow­ ness of life enacted in medieval plazas and replacing it with quick and fast living, he hoped for a moderate balance. Practicing festina lente for city design (on the Viennese Ringstrasse) would prevent the tendency by designers to jump to conclusions with­ out taking time to study, consider and learn. The overabundance of fast living and designing called for slowness. Lingering. He observed that urban designers’ use of efficient, rational, and technical methods—only taking a bird’s eye view—resulted in fast yet uncooked designs produced on drawing boards without “meandering on the ground” through site visits that engaged all the senses. The result could be seen in the vacuous and soulless urban areas built at that time in Dresden, Munich, Paris, and Vienna. Avoiding “nameless technicians” and engineers, the designers, he thought, should use Austrian matter-of-fact Zeitgeist to create “artistic” cities, instead of following a “mathematically precise” approach that treated people as machines.21 Noting that the physical setting had a strong influence on the human soul, he asked that the designers, like the inhabitants, linger and wait while recognizing the power of beauty and design that would “make its people at once secure happy”—adding artistic to technical concepts.22 The art of city planning went beyond technical or rational exercises,23 or an “engineer’s approach,” a concern shared by others such as Musil, Freud, Loos, and, later, Le Corbusier.24 Sitte believed technically derived designs contributed to generalized loneliness and agoraphobia: a fear of public spaces.25 His conclusion reiterated that designing in the city, urban designers must carefully consider both technical and artistic issues, laying immense responsibility at the feet of planners.

20 Marcia Feuerstein, “Camillo Sitte’s Artistic Principles and the Enacting Public” in Proeedings of the ACSA Annual Meeting (Boston, MA: ACSA, March 1996): 599–604. 21 Alfred Lichtwerk (1852–1914) identified a “cult of the engineers in planning” referring to British engi­ neer William Lindley (1808–1900) whose hygienic approach completely changed the face of Hamburg. Collins, Camillo Sitte, 35, fn. 24, 342. See also Sitte, City Planning, 246. 22 Collins, Camillo Sitte, 141. 23 Sitte, in Collins, Camillo Sitte, 299. 24 Such as Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995); Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), and Adolf Loos “Potemkin City” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, translated by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 95–6. Le Corbusier also warned about the cult of the engineer in Towards an Architecture. 25 Sitte, City Planning, 301.

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Yet, again, why a winged snail? While Sitte reiterates the need for festina lente, with a focus on the lente rather than the festina, he may have created this little snail in dedication to his home, Vienna, and its historic medieval core. In his conclusion he makes a plea for public spaces that maintain their unique character, hinting, through the little snail, at a unique urban character in Vienna that “survived in relatively unspoiled state from the preindustrial age”:26 specifically, Vienna’s snail market. Snails had been a traditional part of the Viennese diet before and during Sitte’s lifetime, embedded within Vienna’s cultural, religious, and culinary fabric.27 Austria, and especially Vienna, was a center of heliciculture—raising snails or escargot for human consumption—where snails were enjoyed as much as poultry.28 A vital ele­ ment of Vienna’s farming economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,29 her snail market was located behind Peterskirche on Jungferngasse, an integral part of her urban fabric. This was Vienna’s historic “slow food”—escargot—a “poor man’s oyster”; and since snails were considered fish rather than meat, during lent these “Viennese Oysters” were shipped from Germany to meet the demand. This slowmoving food disappeared from the Austrian diet until Viennese snail farmer Andreas Gugumuck revived it in 2008 after discovering that Vienna was once a world capitol of escargot.30 An original “slow food,” the Viennese snails and snail farming was included in the slow food movement, founded by Carlo Petrini as a reaction against the first McDonald’s built in Rome as well mass-produced foods. Its mission was to encourage local traditional food as a foil to the rise and popularity of mass-produced and fast food, and to reveal and revive authentic cultural culinary traditions and provide opportunities to develop the taste for local regional foods.31 The slow food movement fought against globalization, industrialization and capitalism of food— similar to Sitte’s reaction against “nameless technicians” unaware of local urban delicacies (historic and topographical)—against, as Frascari has written in reference to postmodern design, the edibles produced by fast-food chains that “look like the real thing, but . . . have been designed to be gulped down.”32 The snail was unique to the Viennese food tradition. Perhaps Sitte gave urban designers opportunities to be like the Viennese snail, slow and tasty—rather than 26 Collins, Camillo Sitte, 14. 27 Vernon Lee, The Tower of Mirrors and other essays on the Spirit of Places (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1918). See also Ark of Taste Austria, “Viennese snails,” Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, 2014, http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/ark/details/1332/viennese-snails-#.VCcM2­ e6AjU. Accessed June 6, 2014. 28 William Coxe, History of the House of Austria: From the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218–1792 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 3rd ed. V.1, 398, fn.; John Bigland and Jedidiah Mores, A Geographical and Historical View of the World: Exhibiting a Complete Delineation of the Natural and Artificial Features of Each Country (Boston: Thomas B. Wait and Company, 1811), V.3, 176. 29 Robert Nordsieck, “Snail Cultivation (Heliciculture),” The Living World of Molluscs, http://www.mol­ luscs.at/gastropoda/terrestrial/helix.html?/gastropoda/terrestrial/helix/cultivation.html. Accessed June 6, 2014. 30 Helen Soteriou, “Austria’s only snail farmer,” BBC News, Business, September 3, 2014, http://www. bbc.com/news/business-29027461. Accessed October 29, 2014. See also “Verrückt: The Snail Farmer of Vienna / 2015 Real Food Media Contest Winner,” https://vimeo.com/118520863. Accessed April 8, 2015. 31 Anne Meneley, “Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Slow Food,” Anthropoligica 46 (2004): 170–71. 32 Marco Frascari, “Semiotica Ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 40, no. 1 (Autumn1986): 2–7, 3.

140 Marcia Feuerstein

overly hasty and bland—and to step away, perhaps lighten up, to imagine themselves overhead for an overview of their old city and, while flying toward the future (with­ out denying the “modern approach”), to enjoy their own traditional snails (public spaces). Sitte’s festina lente was a special concoction of winged snails following a Viennese recipe—boiled, with garlic butter, dipped in beer batter, fried in hot lard, served with a series of sauces: vinegar, horseradish, and onions with the addition of wings.33 The flying snail is a mode of urban life to be constructed and savored while flying toward the future. Perhaps it is also Sitte, who began his research on the ground before climbing up the tower to look down with his map. Then, after spending time in the sky, he returns to the ground, to his hotel—consuming a delicious, regionally prepared meal of escargot. The wings lift Sitte up to see where he previously stood and walked, quickly flying in the air where, before, on the ground, the slow and seemingly static snail moved, leaving a trail in its wake.

33 Constanze von Hartmann and Ignacio Lantero, “The Making-of Food & Film: Viennese Snails,” Wienerschnecke, http://www.themaking-of.eu/wiener-schnecke/. Accessed June 15, 2015.

16 Strange tales of architectural evolution Matthew Mindrup

An experienced designer knows that the design and construction of architecture rarely goes according to plan. Unexpected discoveries can permeate the design pro­ cess producing surprising results. But this unpredictability can be anticipated. For the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, fortunate coincidences were an essential source of inspiration in his own design work. An avid collector of natural objects, Le Corbusier relied on these as objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction) to stimulate his architectural imagination [Figure 16.1].1 Perhaps the most famous object in Le Corbusier’s collection was a crab shell he found roaming a Long Island beach in the 1940s, which later inspired the roof structure of his Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France (completed 1955). In architecture, creative affordances, like those Le Corbusier found with his objets à réaction poètique, are made possible by what Louis Pasteur described as a “prepared­ mind,” a mind actively engaged in a problem poised to recognize an everyday object or event as inspiration for a solution. In his education of designers, the former Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy developed exercises that would train his stu­ dents for precisely this form of creative activity, arguing that the act of genius is “[t]he flash-like act of connecting elements not obviously belonging together. Their produc­ tive relationships, unnoticed before, produce a new result.”2 Unforeseen encounters with new architectural ideas are common in architectural practice. A handful of these events have been recorded in architectural history includ­ ing the Greek architect Callimachus’ invention of the Corinthian capital, Charles­ Dominique-Joseph Eisen’s frontispiece for the 1755 edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (An Essay on Architecture), and Le Corbusier’s use of the crab shell.3 The percentage of reported to actual incidents is probably very low, perhaps because an explanation may be perceived as reducing the mystique of creative genius. Taking a cue from Umberto Eco, who once observed how “every story tells a story that has already been told,” this chapter explores the mutability between the everyday and the extraordinary as a common thread in these tales of sudden architectural inspiration.

1 Le Corbusier, “Les objets à réaction poétique” in Le Corbusier, L’Atelier de la recherche patiente (Paris: Vincent et Fréal, 1960), 209. 2 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1961), 68. 3 Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 20.

142 Matthew Mindrup

Figure 16.1 Le Corbusier’s Objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction), collected 1925–1965. Shown here: objects collected on the beach, 1955. © Foundation Le Corbusier/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2015

A gap between object and idea Perhaps the most vivid account for the serendipitous discovery of an architectural idea is Vitruvius’ story of the Corinthian column capital. As Vitruvius recounted, while strolling past the tomb of a young maiden from Corinth, the architect Callimachus (meaning “very skillful”) happened upon a votive basket standing over her grave that had a roof tile resting on top with an acanthus plant growing up along its sides. Impressed by the novel arrangement, Callimachus “began to fashion columns for the Corinthians on this model, and he set up symmetries, and thus he drew up the principles for completing works of the Corinthian type” [Figure 16.2].4 In Vitruvius’ story, the invention of the Corinthian capital was not an idea first conceived by the architect, but an arrangement of objects discovered and interpreted as a physical model for architecture. In Aristotle’s epistemology, accidental discoveries are important events in how we know things, including those things we make in artistic production.5 As Aristotle argued in the Physics, there are four types of causes for all things: a material, formal, efficient, and final cause. However, Aristotle’s analysis of causality reaches a critical 4 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Ingrid Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Book 4, Chapter 1, 55. 5 Aristotle, The Physics, with an English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, Vol. 1 (London: W. Heinemann, 1970), (194b17–20), Book 2, Chapter 3, 129.

Strange tales of architectural evolution

Figure 16.2 The origin of the Corinthian order, engraving (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1684),

illustrated in Claude Perrault’s Vitruvius, 2nd ed. (1684).

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144 Matthew Mindrup moment when he asks how those causes that result from tucheˉ (chance), like that experienced by Callimachus, fit into the division of the four previously mentioned causes.6 For Aristotle, those “accidents” effected by an agent “capable of choosing” are different from what he refers to as automaton (natural accidents) which are lik­ ened to being hit by a randomly falling rock.7 In the realm of design, affordances that result from tucheˉ are efficient causes, sources “that set processes in motion”—that are not determined by a final cause but whose outcomes, like Callimachus’ accidental discovery of the basket, acanthus plant, and roof tile, are determined by their agent, the designer, as a model for architecture.8 In practice, architects encounter a variety of sensorial stimuli both familiar and unfamiliar. Yet not every experience may inspire a productive architectural idea. Building upon Aristotle’s excursus on the causes for things we experience, empiricist philosopher John Locke argued that simple ideas, like those of a basket, acanthus plant, and clay roof tile have primary and secondary qualities that permit them to act as models of architecture. According to Locke, we go through the world interrogat­ ing sensory experience, noticing which primary qualities regularly seem to cluster together—a thing’s size, shape, motion, number, or solidity as a single idea under a single name.9 Yet, in the process of acquiring understanding, the imagination is vulnerable to accidental encounters with things; and, in order to know them, it must distinguish a thing’s primary from its secondary qualities—color, sound, taste, and odor, which resemble the causes for a thing but do not inhere in an object, only in our perception of it.10 This vulnerability is the hallmark of a playful imagination that can shift between different final causes for the same thing and essential to the use of found objects in a playful activity of make-believe. For two children, a game of make-believe begins when an agreement is made that, for example, a pile of snow is a fort. Kendall Walton, a philosopher on the points of coincidence between toys and art, has argued how this snow pile is a found object that children play with as a “prop” that “prompts” them to imagine what they might not otherwise be creative enough to invent on their own—a fortress. By using the pile of snow as a prop, they do not merely project an image of a fort with turrets, a tower, and a moat. Rather, they imagine that the actual heap of snow is itself a fort.11 For the German philosopher of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, this act of play is particularly strong in the creative arts whereby the artist’s (and here we also include architect’s) engagement with a thing as if it was a something else permits them to go beyond the limitations and conditions of their own imagination.12 Without entirely dismissing what he already knew about a thing, Callimachus, like a child with a pile of snow, held the identity of the basket and roof tile in suspense, making-believe its material and formal characteristics were something else, the model of a column 6 7 8 9

Aristotle, Physics, Book 2, Chapters 4–6, 138–63.

Aristotle, Physics, (197b29), Book 2, Chapter 6, 161.

Aristotle, Physics, (198a5), Book 2, Chapter 6, 163.

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Collins, 1964), Book 2, Section xii,

132. 10 Locke, Essay, Book 2, Sections ix–xi, 119–34. 11 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25. 12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, translated by Nicholas Walker and edited by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 124–9.

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capital. Immanuel Kant called this mental state “free play” in which our faculties of understanding and imagination cooperate with one another.13 That is to say that, in the act of make-believe, a child creates a gap between the thing and idea enabling the object to be disengaged from what Paul Ricoeur described as the world behind it, its historical causes.14 For Umberto Eco, this disengagement is particularly strong in the contemporary experience and reception of art. As he argued in The Open Work, every reception of a work of art or architecture is both an interpretation and a performance of it.15 In this conceptual moat, the imagination is free to posit other possibilities (causes) for everyday objects, including models of architecture, which are open to constant revision.

Genius, the flame of inspiration Perhaps at no other time in architectural history was the characterization of an architect’s moment of creative discovery given greater attention than in the eighteenth century. One poignant example of a fortuitous event in architectural evolution can be found in the frontispiece for the 1755 edition of Essai sur l’architecture. In his Essai, Laugier sought to rectify the “faults” of current architectural practice by positing an account for the origin of architecture as the imitation of nature.16 Eisen’s drawing for the frontispiece depicted Lady Architecture, reclining on fragments of Greek columns and cornices, directing the attention of an amazed putto towards a grouping of four trees in which the trunks, branches, and leaves are organized into the appearance of a Greek temple with four columns, an entablature, and pediment [Figure 16.3]. Laugier regarded this “rustic hut” not as a fixed model to be copied in appearance, but one whose principles should be imitated in the design of new architecture.17 Curiously, Eisen’s drawing includes a flame above the head of the putto—a representation of sudden inspiration identified with acts of genius during the eighteenth century. The word “genius” comes from the Latin gen meaning to be born, to beget or to come into being. In the ancient Roman religion, the genius was the spirit of the gens (the family), a tutelary spirit allotted to everyone at birth. Until the eighteenth century, this concept of genius remained a dominant understanding of the English word–– such as by Shakespeare when Macbeth recognizes how his “genius is rebuked” by Banquo’s valorous “wisdom” which acts as his “guide”(3.1.57–62)18 In the ancient world, genius was also intimately related to, but distinct from, ingenium as innate character, disposition, or talent. In the Apology, Plato argued that the work of poets was not the result of their genius since “what they composed emerged not from sophia (wisdom), but by phýsis (nature) and because they were enthousiasmos (inspired), like 13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith and edited by Nicholas Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49. 14 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” translated by David Pellauer, Philosophy Today 17, no. 2 (1973): 139–41. 15 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3–4. 16 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1977), 11–14. 17 Laugier, Essay, 11–14. 18 This is discussed in Paul W. Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third Critique (London: Continuum, 2010), 9.

146 Matthew Mindrup

Figure 16.3 Charles Eisen, Primitive Hut, frontispiece of Essai sur l’Architecture by MarcAntoine Laugier, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755). Wikimedia Commons

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19

the prophets and givers of oracles.” For Plato, “[t]he poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.”20 As Plato makes clear in the Phaedrus, the poet is not insane in the modern sense but overcome by divine madness from the Muses––the mythical Ancient Greek goddesses believed to be the sources of inspira­ tion for poets and artists.21 Slowly in the early modern world, genius, as a tutelary spirit, came to be equated with the mind whose experience of furor poeticus (poetic fury) was conflated with ingenium to constitute the genius within. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation and commentaries on Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus explained how gods inspired the mind of poets, caught up in the rapture of furor poeticus, one of four forms of furor divinus (divine fury): divine, prophetic, amorous and poetic.22 At some time during the sev­ enteenth century, as we notice in Antoine Furetiére’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690, the ancient Roman sense of ingenium as “natural talent” was incorporated into the French word for génie (genius) with the example: “Cet homme est un vaste génie, qui est capable du tout” (This man is a vast genius, capable of all).23 A few years later, Antoine Galland gave his famous mistranslation of the Arabic jinnıˉ in his collection of Asian stories, Les mille et une nuits (The Thousand and One Nights).24 For Histoire d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveilleuse in particular, Galland translated jinnıˉ, a super­ natural creature made of smokeless fire, into French as the similar sounding “genie.” Voltaire challenged this confusion in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie noting “[a]s I have never seen any génie . . . I cannot speak of them from knowledge.”25 In Voltaire’s account, the term “génie” still designated those talents into which invention occurs as a kind of divine inspiration. However, those artists without invention or originality are not considered geniuses, but only inspired by their predecessors.26 Modern usage of the term genius, as an extraordinary creative power, is essentially an eighteenth-century development, part of the radical shift in epistemology and aesthetic theory occurring at that time. Perhaps no two works are more important to this critical transition than Plato’s Republic and the Enneads of Plotinus. As Socrates famously reasoned in Book Ten of the Republic, the arts have a lowly status as forms of knowing since they are imitations of the world of appearances and not of essences. Compared to the work of a craftsman who makes a bed in accordance with the essence of a bed, Plato compared the work of an artist to a mirror, reasoning that it is merely a copy of the craftsman’s copy. M.H. Adams employed Plato’s analogy to 19 Plato, Apology, in Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, translated by Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), Vol. 1, 22c. 20 Plato, Ion, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1871), 534b. 21 Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), Vol. 9, 245a. 22 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology: Concerning the Immortality of the Soul (1474, VIII, 14–16) in Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 137, n. 22.

23 Antoine Furetiére, Dictionnaire universel, (1690), Slatkin reprint edition, 2 vols. (Geneva 1970), 2, in

Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 70, n. 5.

24 Gallard’s translation was published in two parts: In vol. 9 as “Histoire d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveil­ leuse” and vol. 10 as “Suite de l’Histoire d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveilleuse.” Antoine Gallard, Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes traduits en François, par M. Galland, Volumes 9 and 10 (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1712). 25 Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Genève: Cramer, 1770–1772), Vol. 6, 254. 26 Voltaire, Questions, 255–6.

148 Matthew Mindrup describe the changing role of the creative imagination in his seminal work, The Mirror and the Lamp.27 Adams argued that the Enneads of Plotinus underlay developments in eighteenth-century poetry and academic philosophy. In it, the artist was permitted to “go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives” as the source of their work, since the “form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone.”28 In Nathanael Culverwel’s 1652 work, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, the role of the mind as receptor is now portrayed as a projector— from mirror to an “intellectual lamp.”29 Laugier used a similar metaphor in the preface to his Essai noting that it is “brilliant flashes” which “herald a genius” and he himself witnessed “a bright light before his eyes” permitting him to see the principles of architecture “distinctly.”30 Returning to the image of the flame above the putto’s head, in 1756 Jean Michel Liotard created a drawing of Voltaire and his genius: a winged child with a flame above its head, standing behind Voltaire’s portrait. Despite the changing locus of an architect’s idea, something of its mystical origins remained in Romantic literature’s usage of the Latin term “afflatus.” Originally coined by Cicero, afflatus meant “a breath or blast of wind,” to give physical form to the sometimes staggering and stun­ ning blow of divine inspiration.31 A conflation of this afflatus with the flame of genius can be found throughout France in early Christian depictions of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit blows into a room and fills the Apostles—represented by individual flames above their heads.32 What was used to represent an Apostle filled with the Holy Spirit gains a new identity in Eisen’s frontispiece. The putto is the genius of architecture with Lady Architecture acting like a Muse directing the attention of the reader to the four trees. The flame denotes the spark of inspiration that will be given to those who will see, in the tree trunks, branches, and leaves, the origins of classical Greek architecture. This sudden moment of insight, the imaginary connection of elements not immediately belonging together is the moment of genius. But this spark of inspira­ tion will not ignite an empty imagination since trees and branches are in themselves not architecture, but only an architecture that the putto was already prepared to see.

The prepared mind for musement To take advantage of possible inspiration a designer must possess a prepared mind, which is able to find meaning in stimuli whether random or intentional. With every new project, the designer is confronted by a new set of practical and technical require­ ments or conditions. No matter how much relevant information is collected pertain­ ing to the task, it is not sufficient to generate the design. Conversely, while arbitrary formal invention may aid an architect’s search for new architectural ideas, it cannot act as a substitute for it. As Louis Pasteur remarked in a speech to the Faculty of Sciences at Lille, “fortune favors the prepared mind”—that is, to recognize an

27 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).

28 Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna (London: The Medici Society, 1926), V.7.1,

in Abrams, The Mirror, 42, n. 38. 29 Abrams, The Mirror, 59. 30 Laugier, “Preface,” Essay, 2, 4. 31 Cicero, De rerum natura (2.167) also De oratore (2.194). 32 See Acts 2.

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everyday object or event as inspiration for architecture, a designer must be actively engaged in a problem.33 Le Corbusier’s collection of found objects in his studio encouraged precisely these unpredictable moments of invention. According to Le Corbusier’s own testimony, it was an empty crab shell whose strength as a geometric form of two curvilinear surfaces joined at the edges inspired the roof of his Notre Dame du Haut Chapel.34 This shell was one of Le Corbusier’s collection of objets à réaction poètique, of which he spoke to students in 1942, explaining how they “form the vast panoply of spokesmen who speak the language of nature. They are caressed by your hands, your eyes gaze upon them, they are evocative companions. . . .”35 For Le Corbusier, an object having poetic potential must prompt speculation, engaging the body and mind to contemplate the efficacy of its forms that may lie entirely outside the architect’s accustomed archi­ tectural vocabulary. In themselves, Le Corbusier’s objets à réaction poètique, like Callimachus’ basket or Eisen’s grouping of trees, have no recognizable architectural purpose until they become an important factor for the architect, imparting imagina­ tive direction. Le Corbusier’s appropriation of the crab shell demonstrates that accidental moments of creativity are dependent on the designer having experiences upon which they can make hypothetical associations—projections. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce described the formation of a hypothesis as “an act of insight,” which explains an observed phenomenon and is based on prior experience. To explain this insight, Peirce developed the concept of abduction, which describes a situation in which the subject is confronted with an observed fact needing explanation and finds an “idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.”36 Similar to an architect’s inspiration or afflatus, an abductive affordance from tucheˉ comes to a subject in a flash. To enable our imaginations to take advantage of this shift back and forth between analytic and associative modes of thought, Peirce recommended the practice of musement, an occupation of the mind that casts aside all serious pur­ pose and searches in “pure play” for “some connection” between two of the three Universes of Experience (mere Ideas, Brute Actuality of things and facts, and Signs—a Power to establish connections between objects, especially between those in different Universes).37 As the term “muse” suggests, Peirce’s museument harkened back to Plato’s description of the poet who is out of his mind and overcome by divine madness from the Muse. What was attributed to a mythical creature in Plato is for Peirce an ability of the artist or architect to engage in lively contemplation of experiences “with speculation concerning its cause.”38

33 Louis Pasteur, “Dans les champs de l’observation le hazard ne favorise que les esprits reéparés.” Lecture presented at the University of Lille, Douai, France, on December 7, 1854, in H. Petersen, ed., A Treasury of the World’s Great Speeches (New York: Simon Schuster, 1954), 473. 34 Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp (Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 89–90. 35 Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, translated by Pierre Chase (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 70–71. 36 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction (Lecture VII)” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 227. 37 Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” in Pierce, Essential Pierce, 436. 38 Pierce, Essential Pierce, 436.

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Conclusion In a discussion about his creative process, Le Corbusier’s friend, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, explained how inspiration is the mark of a sagacious individual who has learned to harness aberrations during the creative process: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” By Picasso’s own admission, the assemblage of a bicycle seat and handlebars in his 1942 Bull’s Head sculpture was not predetermined but a chance discovery that he was prepared to see: One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled up together, I found an old bicycle seat right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the Bull’s Head came to me before I had a chance to think. All I did was weld them together. . . . [But] if you were to see only the bull’s head and not the bicycle seat and handlebars that form it, the sculpture would lose some of its impact.39 Similar to Picasso, the range of experiences an architect may draw upon for inspira­ tion can certainly include those of found objects and random experiences in nature. Yet the moment of genius, the discovery of a fortuitous idea for abducting what we had never before considered, cannot be predetermined. Behind each of these strange tales of architectural invention is a working architect, whose mind is fully prepared for the blow of inspiration to body forth an architectural conception.

39 Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 61.

17 Dialetti architettonici Storytelling in the vernacular Michelangelo Sabatino

Leon Battista Alberti was one of the few Renaissance architects who deployed Latin as a language for storytelling. Most other architects after Alberti have alter­ nated between regional vernaculars (that is, dialects) and proper Italian. My chapter explores the deployment of the vernacular as a language of storytelling and as a language for building (and drawing) in Italy during the twentieth century. By inter­ rogating both “high” and “low” modes of creative expression, my focus is on hybrid practices based on appropriation. Robert Venturi noted—together with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour—how the vernacular and Classical coexist in Italy: “The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian.”1 During the Renaissance, Lombard architects “spoke” the classical language while absorbing vernacular cues that ultimately distinguished their stories (and buildings) from those of their counterparts in Florence and Rome. During the twentieth century, a heated debate regarding storytelling in the vernacular (that is, dialect) versus storytelling in Italian echoed the distinction between prose and poetry delineated by the philoso­ pher Benedetto Croce in his seminal essay Folk Poetry and Poets’ Poetry (1929).2 Under Fascism, Benito Mussolini’s emphasis on national unity led him to ban the use of regionally characterized vernaculars (that is, dialects) in favor of “proper” Italian. Yet, just as the intelligentsia reacted against this forced suppression of their identity, so too did architects who creatively combined regional vernacular cues within the framework of a universal (that is, modern) language. Most of these architects used drawings, photography, and even painting to help tell and illustrate their vernacu­ lar stories of Italy’s lesser-known heritage in a land most known for its Popes and Caesars.3

1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2nd printing, 1978, of the 1977 Edition), 6. 2 Benedetto Croce, “Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte” in Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1930). Translated into English as “Folk Poetry and Poets’ Poetry” in Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays by Benedetto Croce (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 382–96. 3 This chapter draws from my book: Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: The University of Toronto Press, 2010). Italian translation: Orgoglio della modestia: Architettura moderna italiana e tradizione vernacolare (Milan: Edizioni Franco Angeli, 2013).

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Barbarians and regional dialects The time has finally come to praise Italy’s barbarians—the creative and free spirits of the peasantry who have remained loyal to their traditions and customs.4 Throughout the twentieth century, Italian architects and designers produced remark­ able buildings, paintings, and objects inspired by the basic volumes, simple materials, and regional values of a vernacular tradition that evolved over centuries of agrarian life. Despite their significant influence on Italian modernism and design, these peas­ ant builders and artisans whom Curzio Malaparte provocatively called “barbarians” have largely remained behind the scenes. Through their appropriation of the vernacu­ lar tradition, Italian artists and architects achieved a unique synthesis of collective expression and individual identity, from the Futurist architects and painters of the 1920s such as Fortunato Depero and Virgilio Marchi to projects like the housing estates of Matera by Ludovico Quaroni and his collaborators completed in the early 1950s. As Italy transitioned from a primarily agrarian to an industrial economy, the emergence of new ways of life to accommodate urban dwelling fostered a dynamic dialogue between long established customs and modern practices, between the ethos of artisanal making and that of industrial production modes, between craftspeo­ ple and designers. Through the successive political regimes of Liberal, Fascist, and Republican Italy, a dialectic relation between past and present contributed to the emergence of an dynamic regionalist modernism that embraced traditional practices without succumbing to banal historicism or nostalgia. For the historian writing in English about a phenomenon of appropriation that unfolded in specific political and aesthetic contexts and whose manifestations were expressed equally specifically in the Italian language, the use of a blanket term such as vernacular in English threatens to blur or even obliterate vital nuances that distinguish highly diverse practices and intentions. Borrowed from linguistics and first employed by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1857, “vernacular” has specific associations with the notion of common, familiar, or ordinary, and is hard-pressed to invoke the debates that generated a variety of charged terms reflecting political and cultural stances assumed by practitioners and critics in Italy during this period. It is a generalization that serves a practical purpose but immediately calls for explanation. The plurality of Italian expressions used to describe vernacular buildings implies the disparate agendas behind their appropriation as well as the multifarious approaches to their use in the design process.

Capri and Futurist dialects Though interest in the vernacular buildings and objects of the Mediterranean regions surfaced in the work and writings of Italian architects and artists during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the initial impulse came from discussions and events that took place earlier. The “remote” island of Capri occupied a special place in these discussions. Its “rediscovery” in the late nineteenth century by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), among others, was in no small part attributable to impressions of

4 Curzio Malaparte, Italia barbara (Turin: Piero Gobetti, 1925).

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vernacular architecture gleaned from travels in Italy. In a lecture Hoffmann presented in 1911 entitled “Meine Arbeit (My Work),” he described the experience of traveling in 1896 to places including Capri and Anacapri as a turning point in his architectural education and career: Finally I fled into the Campagn [sic] and refreshed myself at the simple peasant buildings, that without pomp and without stylistic architecture nevertheless give the land its special character. There, for the first time, it became clear to me what matters in architecture.5 In an address delivered to the 1923 Convegno del Paesaggio (Symposium on Landscape) in Capri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti praised the stile pratico (practical style) of indigenous architecture.6 He celebrated the island’s local vernacular architec­ ture for its rational rather than picturesque qualities, and asserted: I believe that this is a Futuristic island; I feel that it is full of infinite originality as if it had been sculpted by Futurist architects like Sant’Elia, Virgilio Marchi, painted by Balla, Depero, Russolo, Prampolini, and sung and made musical by Francesco Cangiullo and Casella!7 Despite his war cry of 1909 to “free this land [Italy] from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians,” more than ten years later he exonerated vernacular architecture and folk art, sparing it his anti-historicist wrath and proclaiming it to lie outside the flux of the history of style.8 Marinetti saw beauty and freedom in the dramatic and unpredictable, and ultimately anti-classical, land­ scape of Capri.9 The Futurists were, paradoxically, interested in both the myth of the machine and the primitive character of pre-industrial vernacular architecture and peasant art. The use of the vernacular did not imply an end to the avant-garde, but rather a refram­ ing of its objectives; the seemingly opposed mass-produced machine and historically charged landscape in fact coincided and mutually influenced each other. In 1922, Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960), an architect and set designer who was known as a Futurist despite his expressionist style, lauded the vernacular architecture of Capri as a model of contemporary design in Primitivismi capresi (Capri Primitivisms),10 5 Josef Hoffmann, manuscript of lecture dated February 22, 1911, and published as “My Work” in Eduard F. Sekler, ed., Josef Hoffmann: Monograph and Catalogue of Works (New York: Princeton University Press, 1985), 486–92. 6 Edwin Cerio, “Il convegno del paesaggio,” in Il convegno del paesaggio (Naples: Gaspare Casella, 1923), 66–68. A reprint with additional commentary can be found in Giuseppe Galasso, Alberto G.  White, and Valeria Mazzarelli, eds., Contributi a settanta anni dalla pubblicazione degli atti del convegno del paesaggio (Capri: Edizioni la Conchiglia, 1993). 7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Il discorso” in Il convegno del paesaggio, ed. Edwin Cerio (Naples: Gaspare Casella, 1923). 8 Filippo Tommaso  Marinetti, in Umbro Apollonio,  Futurist Manifestos, translated by Robert Brain (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1973), 19–24. Also see R. Warren Flint, ed., Marinetti: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 39–44. 9 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Elogio di Capri,” Natura (January 1928): 41–8. 10 On Marchi, see Silvia Danesi, “Futurismo e disegno d’architettura” in Alessandro d’Amico and Silvia Danesi, eds., Virgilio Marchi architetto scenografo futurista (Milan: Electa, 1977), 8–9. See

154 Michelangelo Sabatino a short, illustrated article he published in Cronache d’attualità, a journal edited by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, an avant-garde artist who served as director of the Casa d’arte Bragaglia in Rome. In his Architettura futurista (1924), Marchi elaborated on his discussion of the relationship between the vernacular tradition and contemporary design. On the cover page he reproduced a design for a hydroelectric station that reflected the sculptural qualities of the Capri vernacular he had recorded in drawings a few years earlier. In this volume as well as his Italia nuova architettura nuova (1931), Marchi expressed admiration for the empirical, anti-intellectual approach of the primitivi (primitives) in  l’architettura rurale amalfitana e caprese (the rural architecture of Amalfi and Capri).11 Marchi’s emphasis on primitivism again points to the combination of expressionism and futurism in his work. The artist and artisan Fortunato Depero took inspiration from Capri and the mez­ zogiorno in paintings of the peasantry such as Portatrice caprese (1917) and Paese di tarantelle (1918), which were to have a lasting impact on Italian modern art.12 Depero’s love of peasant vitality applied to customs such as the tarantella, a cacopho­ nous folk dance typical of southern Italy. Depero employed traditional methods of representation as well as media to give form to his Futuristic imagery. His description of Italy’s rural landscapes and peasant life is indebted to the figurative tradition of realism. He was interested in peasant “machines” such as the boldly painted horsedrawn carts typical of the rural communities of southern Italy that were the object of scholarship at that time by architecture professor Giuseppe Capitò.13 His prismi lunari (lunar prisms) were most likely inspired by the colorful geometric ornament typical of Sicilian and Neapolitan carts. Fishermen’s vessels were likewise ornamented with bright colors by “amateur” artists (mainly the fishermen themselves). Depero’s painting Carretto napoletano (1918), a forerunner to the aforementioned Paese delle tarantelle, celebrates the peasant cart as an ancient machine of considerable dyna­ mism and vitality, a subject popular at the time with the artistic and architectural community. Along with Depero’s spirited misreading of Capri’s folk art and architecture, a number of other approaches gained ground. Capri became a focus for discussion of the study and protection of peasant architecture and its relationship to the landscape. Edwin Cerio organized the Convegno del paesaggio (Symposium on Landscape) in 1922, an important year for the preservation of the vernacular traditions of the built environment. In 1922, the same year as the proceedings, Cerio published La casa nel paesaggio di Capri, a book on vernacular domestic architecture of Capri. He praised the anonymous builder and went so far as to prominently feature a photograph of also Ezio Godoli, “Virgilio Marchi e l’architettura futurista nella prima metà degli anni Venti” in Il Futurismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997), 44–9. 11 Virgilio Marchi, “Primitivismi capresi,” Cronache d’attualità 6–10 (1922): 49–51. Marchi read­ dressed the theme of “primitivism” in “Quadro della capacità architettonica”in Architettura futurista (Foligno: Franco Campitelli, 1924), 26–34, as well as “Primitivismi Capresi” and “Priorità futuriste” in Italia nuova architettura nuova (Rome and Foligno: Franco Campitelli Editore, 1931), 19–23 and 25–32. Both were republished in Ezio Godoli and Milva Giacomelli, Virgilio Marchi. Scritti di architettura (Florence: Octavo, 1995), Vol. 1, 57–61; Vol. 2, 31–40, 35–40. 12 Gabriella Belli, “Fonti del racconto popolare di Depero” in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ed., Depero (Milan: Electa, 1988), 206–9. 13 Giuseppe Capitò, Il Carretto Siciliano (Milan: Editori Piantanida Valcarenghi, 1923).

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Figure 17.1 Coverpage: Virgilio Marchi, Architettura futurista (Foligno: F. Campitelli, 1924).

a local stonemason. The use of the term casa is significant in a discussion of the hierarchies of domestic buildings, as the house was a less grand and formal type than the villa, and was customarily identified with the vernacular tradition. Instead of illustrating the text himself, Cerio enlisted the help of a Venetian artist living in Capri, Gennaro Favai (1879–1958), who would go on to produce his own book on the subject in 1930.14 Though Cerio’s involvement in the vernacular in Capri remained largely unrivaled, in 1936 the Neapolitan historian and architect Roberto Pane pub­ lished and personally illustrated a study on the vernacular architecture of Campania (under whose rubric Capri fell).15 In addition to being politically active as the local mayor and leader of the pres­ ervationist movement, Cerio also designed several houses employing the local ver­ nacular vaulting traditions. His own home, called the Rosaio, is his most important work.16 Cerio’s activities, which combined a broad cultural ambition with design 14 See Gennaro Favai, Capri (Venice: Tipografia del “Gazzettino,” 1930).

15 See Roberto Pane’s Architettura rurale in campania (Florence: Rinascimento del Libro, 1936).

16 Giuseppe Capponi, “Architettura ed Accademica a Capri: Il, ‘Rosaio’ di Edwin Cerio”

in  Architettura  e  arti decorative (1929), 177–88; republished in Paolo Cortese and Isabella Sacco, Giuseppe Capponi 1893–1936 (Roma Gangemi, 1991), 139. Virgilio Marchi cites the Rosaio in his Italia nuova, architettura nuova (1931) and refers to Cerio as “geniale studioso (a genius of a scholar).”

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Figure 17.2 View of exhibition: Giuseppe Pagano and Werner Daniel, Mostra di Architettura rurale (Rural Architecture) (Milan, 1936). G. Pagano and G. Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana “Quaderni della Triennale” (Milan: Hoepli, 1936)

vision, likely set the stage for another amateur architect and literary figure, Curzio Malaparte. Malaparte collaborated with the architect Adalberto Libera (1903–1963) and a local brick and stone mason (Adolfo Amitrano) to design his private resi­ dence, known as the Casa Malaparte (1938), also in Capri.17 As a protagonist of the Strapaese–Stracittà controversy of the polemical circle of Mino Maccari that weighed cosmopolitan urban values against local rural identities, Malaparte was the author of Italia barbara (1927). This important text praises the “barbarous” peasantry and in so doing contributes to the growing interest in the perceived spontaneity of the noneducated rural masses of Italy.

Italian architecture and the rural vernacular house Related to but also distinct from the Futurist experiences was Giuseppe Pagano’s interest in the vernacular from a rationalist point of view. Staged four years after the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, Pagano and Daniel’s Rural Italian Architecture: Functionality of the Rural House exhibition opened the year after Italy invaded Ethiopia.18 Pagano opposed the triumph of bombastic classicizing architecture real­ ized under Fascism in the name of Italianness. He projected the tectonic and material simplicity of the vernacular in opposition to its picturesque simulation, as a potentially 17 Marida Talamona, Casa Malaparte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).

18 Antonio La Stella, “Architettura rurale,” in Cesare De Seta, ed., Giuseppe Pagano Fotografo

(Milan: Electa, 1979), 12–20.

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Figure 17.3 View: Ludovico Quaroni et al., La Martella (Matera, 1951). Giancarlo De Carlo, “A proposito di La Martella,” Casabella-Continuità (February–March, 1954): v–viii

new impetus in modernist, rationalist design that could lay claim to traditional values grounded in Italy’s agrarian past, and ultimately cast it as a source for contemporary functionalism. The ambition was to foster awareness of and appreciation for a little understood and up to then barely studied aspect of the built domain. Pagano brought a new vision to the documentation of vernacular architecture thanks to the medium of black and white photography, along with straightforward display tactics and the polemical texts published in the accompanying catalogue; the public was exposed to a wide range of vernacular buildings representing Italy’s diverse regions. A series of horizontal panels were mounted on and hung perpendicular to the perimeter wall in order to create a continuous band of identical niches that could be entered and exited while traversing the exhibition space. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition. Pagano’s vision for a new modern Italian architecture, infused with an ethos he extracted from rural architectures, shared little with bourgeois nostalgia for “rustic living” subsumed in designs for luxury weekend villas of the “leisure class” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pagano’s interest in economy of means and its relationship to the vernacular tradition were at the base of his appreciation for the work of Ignazio Gardella (1905–1999). Pagano cites Alberti in the context of an

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article in which he comments on Gardella’s design of 1936 for the Chapel and Altar at Varinella, which he describes as a “courageous lesson of modesty.”19 Only one year after his Architettura rurale italiana exhibition, Pagano openly appreciated Gardella’s use of elements of vernacular rural architecture—a brick screen that introduces the symbol of the cross—as a means of achieving a work of modern art that was at once rooted in the agrarian past of the area but also referenced contemporary materials and forms. The chapel project remained unrealized. However, Gardella used this type of screen solution in his anti-tuberculosis clinic for Alessandria completed in 1938 in the Val Padana of northern Italy. In this region brick screens (gelosie) were common in farm­ houses and were used to filter light and allow for continual air circulation.20 It is interesting to note, in terms of how education reflects approaches to the appropriation of the vernacular tradition, that Gardella had been trained as a civil engineer at the Milan Polytechnic, graduating in 1931. The brick screen was thus conceived as both functional and ornamental; this concept of beauty through utility was not appreci­ ated by academics who, rather than appreciating the use of the vernacular elements, accused the building of looking inappropriately barn-like.21 Again we witness how the engineering link was especially appealing to Pagano because he felt that engineers were most apt to use the vernacular tradition without falling into the trap of folksy local color.

A new village for Matera and the farmer’s vernacular It had been hard at first. Grassano, like all the villages hereabouts, is a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, a sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert.22 Carlo Levi’s autobiographical account of his forced exile in the godforsaken region of Lucania, Christ Stopped at Eboli, was published immediately after the end of World War II (1945). His gripping poetic tale of the year he spent amongst the unschooled often-illiterate peoples of the South served to reignite interest in post-war Italy amongst “book-fed” intellectuals, artists, and architects for the arts of the peasantry. Levi’s fascination with the natural and built environment of the South was captured in an ethereal palette of whites and pinks in his paintings. The first architecture to take its cue from Levi’s poeticizing of the South and its rural peoples was La Martella, a new town completed in 1951, located in proximity of the hill town of Matera. It was the first post-war experiment in which vernacular models like the casa colonica (cottage) were employed to create an autonomous community for peasants who formerly inhabited troglodyte dwellings referred to as sassi. Ludovico Quaroni led a team of designers that included M. Agati, F. Gorio, P.M. Lugli, and M. Valori. The

19 Giuseppe Pagano, “Una lezione di modestia,” Casabella 11 (1937): 2–5. 20 Stefano Guidarini, Ignazio Gardella nell’architettura italiana: Opere 1929–1999 (Milan: Skira, 2002), 32–45. For Gardella’s personal commentary on the use of the brick screen, see Ignazio Gardella, “Materiale e immateriale,” Materia: Rivista di archtiettura 5 (1990): 22–33. 21 See Raffaello Giolli, “Il dispensario antitubercolare d’Alessandria” in Cesare De Seta, ed., L’architettura razionale (Bari and Rome: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1972), 245–8. 22 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1947), 15.

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completion of the village coincided with the opening of the Spontaneous Architecture

exhibition launched in Milan by Giancarlo De Carlo, Franco Albini, and Giuseppe

Samonà. Quaroni’s La Martella shares much with the experiments conducted in the mid 1930s in the New Towns of the Roman littoral such as Sabaudia and Littoria. But the political and economic conditions that made these projects possible during the inter­ war years had changed radically with the fall of Fascism. While New Towns tended to adopt both grids and winding streets, this post-war example steered completely away from any echo of orthogonality. Despite the picturesque quality of the wind­ ing streets the serial quality of the homes recalled the overlap between “authentic” vernacular and a machine-made vernacular. Much like the New Towns which used the casa colonica as a conventional (serially reproduced) type to offer housing to displaced peasant communities, La Martella also offered new living conditions that were at once hygienic and with which the peasants could still identify culturally as a community. The elimination of those spaces associated with agrarian work was aimed at assuring that the “promiscuous” and scarcely hygienic living conditions of the peasants in the so-called sassi (in which animals often shared the living space) would be remedied. In translating anonymous sources into signature styles, artists, architects, and lit­ erati transgressed the nature of the vernacular traditions they appropriated, which had been propelled by and for common people, often socially and economically mar­ ginalized from the rest of society. In so doing they indirectly brought new currency to Antonio Gramsci’s “Southern Question” in which he discussed the hegemony of the industrialized North over the poor rural South. For such thinkers, the dramatic expressiveness and everyday vitality of rural and hill-town vernacular forms called into question a European modernism enthralled with machine-age aesthetics and abstraction. These sources encouraged the emergence of a uniquely Italian design culture in which human ingenuity was enhanced by industrial means of production. In a land of craftsmanship and botteghe, mass-produced objects and architecture have been rare. The tension between the handmade and mass-produced is exemplified in the poetic realism of much postwar architecture and design in Italy, which reacted against the classicism of rationalism by embracing the vernacular, such as Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi’s Tiburtino housing estate in Rome (1949–1955) and Gio Ponti’s sophisticated yet low-tech reed-and-ash Leggera chair (1948). Following the example of Luchino Visconti’s neo-realist film La terra trema (The Earth Trembles), which depicts the existential struggles of a Sicilian fishing village, Pier Paolo Pasolini employed nonprofessional actors in such productions as Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew), a directorial choice comparable to designers’ appropriation of so-called spontaneous folk art and architecture. Against the back­ drop of an ever-changing political landscape (Liberal, Fascist, and Republican) Italian architects and artists who evoked the uncorrupted values of the vernacular traditions of peasantry set the stage for the modernization of rural life and the ruralization of modern life.

18 Miming a manner of architectural theory Eudaimonia—A Pantomime Dream Play Lisa Landrum

In the spring of 2014, as the culminating event of the Confabulations Symposium held in honor of Marco Frascari,1 the author of this chapter in collaboration with Ted Landrum devised and staged a performance entitled Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play. The plot of this short play concerns the struggle for exemplary archi­ tectural transformation, shared wisdom, and “happiness” (eudaimonia). The play begins with a prosaic act of sweeping, and culminates with a poetic act of devising a confabulous world soul—a social and situational event completed with assistance from a chorus of symposium attendees. Intervening episodes dramatize a sequence of disclosures in which a protean muse visits a daydreaming architect, attempting to stir his memory and imagination with disciplinary devices unpacked from a magical suit­ case. In this way, architect–symposiasts rediscover a plethora of embodied gestures, agencies, and narratives integral to their work. As its title suggests, the pantomime play was originally performed in silence, save for musical accompaniment (La Vie en Rose). This re-presentation rejoins the ephemeral narrative of mimetic gestures to more permanent and synthesizing media: poetic language and still images. Before set­ ting forth the script (constructed retrospectively), it is helpful to expose foundational premises concerning architecture and pantomime.

Architects mime As Marco Frascari observed, an architect’s power of imagination is akin to that of a theatrical mime, because both agents palpably conjure absent yet latent realities through embodied acts of representation. Put simply, “the architect—as a mime— makes visible what is invisible.”2 Frascari deemed drawing to be the primary medium through which architects mime myriad realities—real and imagined—for both them­ selves and others. His own drawings are populated with mime-like agents animating architectural ideation. Frascari also interpreted how other architects incorporated dancing and miming figures into drawings not simply to show human scale, but to dramatize potential inhabitation, and to construe metaphoric, ethical, and anagogic meanings in architectural settings and details.3 As he summarized in his last book, 1 March 28–29, 2014, Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (Virginia Tech). 2 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), xi. 3 Marco Frascari, “Miming a Manner of Building: Drawing as Story in the Work of Valeriano Pastor and Carlo Scarpa,” Proceedings of the 86th ACSA Meeting on Constructing Identity (1998): 396–402,

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“During the performance of a drawing, [such] figures act as catalytic agents in helping architects to define the nature of building.”4 Together with drawing, architects mime directly through embodied gestures: through in situ demonstrations and persuasive acts of conjuration. In the course of designing, architects assume many guises while hypothetically dwelling in present and projected settings: plotting exemplary and everyday narratives that architectural configurations invite and sustain. Whatever technologies architects employ, their own individual and socially intertwined bodies remain a potent medium of representation and transformation, helping to make the invisible visible, the intangible palpable, and the obscure interpretable. Frascari embraced these mimetic agencies of the architect’s living body. The present work puts this philosophy into action: by staging and script­ ing a mime performance; and by suggesting that architects and architectural interpret­ ers have much to learn from the ancient art of pantomime.

Architectural acts and ancient pantomime Mimetic performance has always been integral to ritual practices of sympathetic magic, and related interpretive and influential activities, especially dramatic poetry and choral dance.5 As a distinct art form, the corporeal re-enactment of cultural narratives crystal­ lized in ancient pantomime. Developing in Greece and Magna Graecia, this performa­ tive art flourished with the Roman Empire, gaining popularity under patronage of Augustus in the same years that Vitruvius composed De architectura.6 Like architecture, pantomime mutely embodied and imparted mythic narratives for  large multilingual (and illiterate) audiences. Whereas ancient mime typically enacted amusing episodes of everyday life with common gestures and speech,7 a pantomime more seriously, silently, and pluralistically mimed “all” (panta): all the myths (often drawn from Greek tragedy), and the many roles, agons, and implications within each myth. Wearing a long silk tunic and closed-mouth mask, this versatile performer would  successively embody each agent in a tale, likely donning a different mask for each role. As ancient sources attest, “they take on every guise: old men, young men, the humble, the mighty, the dejected, the elated, servants, masters;”8 imitating “even the liquidity of water and the sharpness of fire . . . the fierceness of a lion . . . the quivering of a tree,”9 alphabetic

4 5 6 7 8 9

reworked as “A Tradition of Architectural Figures: A Search for Vita Beata,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, edited by George Dodds, Robert Tavernor, and Joseph Rykwert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 258–67. The title of this chapter intentionally echoes that of Frascari’s 1998 essay. Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 85. Ismene Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (London: Duckworth, 2007), 64; Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Oxford University Press, 1948). Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles, eds., New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9–24, 169–84. Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 29–30; Guy Davenport, trans., The Mimes of Herondas (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981). Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides on Behalf of Dancers” (Oration 64), 117, in Margaret Molloy, trans., Libanius and the Dancers (Hildersheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1996), 113–76. Lucian, On the Dance 19, trans. A.M. Harmon, in The Works of Lucian, Vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 209–89.

162 Lisa Landrum

Figure 18.1 A pantomime (or possibly Polymnia), with masks, lyre, and sword. Late fifth or early sixth century ce ivory carving found in Trier, Germany. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. TC 2497. Photo: Ingrid Geske / bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY

letters, and “Pythagorean philosophy.”10 Shifting from statuesque immobility to shiplike speed and bird-like flight, a pantomime’s single body became animated by “many souls.”11 These metaphoric and metamorphic performances were accompanied by music and mythic narration. Depending on the venue (an intimate hall or imperial theater), music and myth were provided by either a single instrumentalist and poet, or a full orchestra and chorus of singers.12 However, the mimetic gestures of the solo masked dancer remained a focus of attention. As scholar Edith Hall emphasizes, “at the heart of all pantomime performance was the notion that a story could be told through a dancer’s silent, rhythmical movements, poses and gestures.”13 Thus, the pantomime was said to perform a “danced story” (fabula saltata). For Greeks and Romans alike, the muse of pantomime was Polymnia, or Polyhymnia [Figure 18.1]. For Hesiod, she embodied the honorific activity of “hymning,” having 10 11 12 13

Athenaeus, Sophists at Dinner 1.20d, in Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 140, 198 n.7.

Lucian, On the Dance 66.

Hall and Wyles, Ancient Pantomime, 3.

Edith Hall, “Pantomime: Visualizing Myth in the Roman Empire” in Performance in Greek and

Roman Theatre, ed. George Harrison and Vayos Liapis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 453, in full 451–73.

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14

knowledge of “many” (poly) hymns. Likewise, for Ovid and Horace she personi­ fied mythic verse and storied song.15 Lucian credits Polymnia with ensuring that pantomimes “remember everything,” from ancient myth to recent history.16 Together with remembering stories, and thus serving as a living repository of cultural tradi­ tion, myth, and history, the pantomime interpretively translated and conveyed these stories in uniquely evocative and provocative ways. In doing so, they also celebrated basic abilities to embody and enact meaning. An anonymous Greek epigram describes the pantomime’s muse in this way: “I, Polymnia, am silent, but speak through the entrancing motions of my hands, conveying by my gestures a speaking silence.”17 The epic poet Nonnus depicts her similarly: “Polymnia, nursing mother of the dance, waved her arms, and sketched in the air an image of a soundless voice, speaking with hands and moving eyes in a graphic picture of silence full of meaning.”18 This para­ dox of mute communication via living images and visual meaning prefigures eight­ eenth-century notions of architecture parlante, and recalls a fifth-century bce verse of Simonides, “painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.”19 What these arts share are communicative and narrative powers of non-verbal mimesis. All the same, to ancient skeptics, the pantomime’s “entrancing” gestures offered empty corrupting pleasures, leaving spectators charmed, but beguiled: their chaotic, erotic, and hybrid dances not only deceived but maddened, aroused, and depraved.20 Others found profit amid pleasure. “Any pleasure elicited by the dance,” writes Libanius, “enters into our soul through our eyes, [thus] we go away in a more agree­ able form of mind”—meaning spectators become not merely content but decorously wise: more “educated, self-disciplined, purified, buoyant, sharp-sighted, in control of pleasures, [vigorously] seeking and carrying out what is just more forcefully than injustice.”21 Lucian similarly valued pantomimes as “deeply learned,” capable of embodying and, thus, teaching, order, beauty, symmetry, rhythm, meter, harmoni­ ous movement, and gracefulness—qualities Vitruvius attributed to architecture.22 For these enthusiasts, the pantomime’s protean performance, enacting representative struggles with many opposing forces, imparted edifying lessons. Indeed, according to Lucian, pantomimes surpass philosophers and orators in illuminating truth, by “making intelligible what is obscure.”23 Balancing skepticism and enthusiasm, the following pantomime script aims to make intelligible and interpretable the diversely embodied gestures, agencies, and stories fundamental to architectural theory, history and design, while simultaneously “giving eudaimonia to many.”24

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Hesiod, Theogony 78.

Ovid, Fasti 5.9–53; Horace, Odes 1.1.33.

Lucian, On the Dance 36–7.

Greek Anthology, 9.505.17–18, translated by W.R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2014), 281. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 5.103–7, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, in Hall and Wyles, Ancient Pantomime, 399. Quoted by Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium 3.46. Cf. “ut pictura poesis,” Horace, Ars Poetica 361. Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 20, 66–78. Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides,” 57, 76. Lucian, On the Dance 25, 29, 70, with Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 79–97. Lucian, On the Dance 36. Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides,” 76.

164 Lisa Landrum

Figure 18.2 Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play. Collage drawing, 2015. © Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum

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Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play25 Tell us, Muse, of that figure, that architect of many turns, driven wayward by fleeting novelties, dull labors, and hubristic ambitions. Many were the arts, cities, peoples, languages, and stories she knew. Many the struggles endured, and enjoyed. Beginning where you will, tell us each part in turn. Let us begin with that happy confabulator, dancing with crimson feet from Mantua, to Venice, to fair Alexandria, where symposiasts gather, thirsty for exchange, hungry for macaroni, desirous of disciplinary renewal. Now mingling, filling bellies, bodily minds digesting a feast of nourishing discourse. Amid the bustle there appears a masked figure, moving slowly, gracefully around the school’s generous threshold, gloves and dress of black. Bringing materials, then disappearing. Back again with timbers, tools, props. Attending to duties. With each turn of body and head, another face of this single actor appears. Who is this strangely familiar figure, conspicuous yet concealed by three mute masks, white as bone? Who is this silent worker among the people? She of manifold faces: of

present, past, and future; theory, practice, and history; recto, verso,

and everything in-between; of foresight, hindsight, and insight; of

practical wisdom, cunning intelligence, and uncommonly common

sense.

She is Janus. She is Phrone¯sis. She is Hecate. She is Hermes Trismegistus. She is three Fates, three Graces, three Ho¯rai, four seasons. Her masks convey youthfulness, maturity, and wise old age. She has faces of deceit, of truth, of deceit appearing as truth, and of truth turned uncertain.

She is she, and she is he. She is beloved Hermaphrodite.

Let us call her Polymnia: she of countless hymns and edifying stories.

Daughter of Memory, Muse of Pantomime: one who remembers everything and mimes all. She is as old as the heavens, and knows a thing or two about architecture. There she goes now, with inner level and plumb, preparing a place for making. Marking out a space of performance, choice, and desire: conjuring choˉra. 25 Script by Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum. Complete annotations would exceed allotted space, but select sources must be noted. The opening verses are adapted from Homer’s Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony. Closing scenes recall the climax of Aristophanes’ Peace and the ending of Xenophon’s Symposium. Palaestrio is the scheming architectus-slave in Plautus’ comedy Miles Gloriosus. Other allusions: Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia  Poliphili (1499); John Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust (1875); and August Strindberg, Dream Play (1901). Artistic allusions include: Nicholas Maes, The Eavesdropper (1657); Francesco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799); and Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (1880–1901). The verse structure is modeled after lost libretti, scripts known to have been composed for ancient pantomime.

166 Lisa Landrum In the middle of this clearing she sets a chair, builds a table, and places upon the table a parchment. Corner by corner, she fixes the parchment as if marking edges of a building site. Her fingers traverse the page as feet, prefiguring foundational dances of ichnographia. Stirred by these preliminary devisings, symposiasts move to and fro, from chamber to chamber, murmuring, anticipating, gradually assembling, sitting on steps rising from the threshold, forming— within the vestibule—an improvised theater. But who is this second figure stepping out from the chorus? This melancholic sweeper dressed as mud, tending to perennial ethics of dust? Amid symposiasts he strides with a broom, a hoe, a rake of labors, a mercurial staff, a handy crutch. He is me. He is you. He is other, similar, and same. He, too, is that architect of many turns, tossed by fortune, longing to return, devoted, distracted, fastidious, fatigued. Now sweeping in arcs, now plowing in line, head down he softens hard ground, ox-like, ship-like, he plies an arid sea, combing crumbs, particles and symposiasts, too, into gradual confluence. Weary of work, he catches sight of the place Polymnia prepared. Retiring his staff at the transformative threshold, he yawns, stretches, sits and slouches, resting his head on the parchment pillow, trading his task for dreaming. He sinks into a deep sleep of reason, producing capricious couplings of fantasy and wisdom, memory and reverie, love and strife. Polymnia reappears (or was she there all along) taking pleasure in the success of her snare. With an invisible wink, she lifts an ironic finger to closed lips, shhhhhhhhh, transforming loquacious symposiasts into curious eavesdroppers, soliciting attention, complicity, reciprocal dreaming. From the folds of her tunic she produces a metronome, places it on the table, and with a pluck establishes a measured tempo, with an eye to subsequent work. Tick-tock, Polymnia turns. Click-clack, descends. Tick-tock, vanishes. Click-clack, returns, manifesting a mimesis of diurnal rhythms. How many days and nights passed in slumber, none can say. Now appearing as midnight, clad in black she stands with brazen feet, poised as Taurus, crouched low, fierce horns shining above star-lit masks. Rising slowly, then with a sudden turn, bull horns become crescent moon, arcing high over the dream-sweeper, crossing celestial thresholds. With a swift shift in stance, and harvester’s swing, she lets fall the

crescent moon turned sharpened sickle, gift of Gaia, releasing

earth’s cyclic, re-generative potential.

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In a flash Polymnia returns from the east, in the guise of rosy-fingered Dawn. She is Helios, aglow, afire, adorned and encircled with radiant yellow, kindling the sleeper’s imagination. Bright day remains. Evanescent Polymnia does not. Pronto, she’s back again, dressed for business, our grey-eyed Muse in gentle azure, bearing a matching sky-blue valise. Setting her case on the table, she opens its shell with a click, revealing a radiant inner world. One side is lined with luminous rose, the other bright ultramarine; nestled within, a trove of magical props to be disclosed, one by one, to prod the sleeper’s imagination. First Polymnia releases a pair of winged compasses, the very tool devised by Perdix, envied by Daedalus, brandished by Meton, macaronized by Marco. Fluttering round the architect’s head, these pseudo-angelic devices rouse the air, but not yet the dreamer. Alighting upon the table, the compasses await their turn to enact proportional demonstrations. Next, Polymnia unpacks a gilded triangle, an immortal isosceles with perfect right angle, bearing integral laws long practiced by Babylonians, Egyptians, Pythagorians, and Euclideans. Holding the hypotenuse, she pokes a sharp vertex into the architect’s elbow—to no avail. And so it, too, rests on the table, a gnomon in repose, longing to cast uprights, axonometrics, significant depths, and skeˉno/skiagraphia for the dreamer. Then Polymnia unsheathes a shining T-square, tinged with vermilion, straightedged companion to compasses and triangles. From upright, she lets the potent rule fall across the drawing board—with a slap. But, again, the sleeper stirs not, save for a twitch of his index finger. Unamused by the stubborn depth of his sleep, Polymnia gives a swift kick to his chair. Lifting his head from the cradle of his arms, the architect emerges from the chrysalis of sleep. Rejuvenated yet disoriented, he is blind to Polymnia (and the symposiasts); but begins, bodily perceiving his situation. Turning his torso, planting feet, extending hands, he grasps each tool in reach, rehearsing operations, remembering the interplay between reason and imagination. As the architect plays, Polymnia pulls from her case a winged pencil. Taking aim—as if releasing love’s arrow from an invisible bow—she implants the pencil behind his ear. Tickled, he raises hand to head, retrieves soft lead, and begins to draw, re-awak­ ening embodied yet dormant skills. Now sweeping in broad arcs, now plowing line-by-line, head down he marks the parchment with measured strokes, syncopated dots and

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dashes, intuitive sketches and squiggles, navigating eternal laws of meander. Loom-like, he plies the parallel rule, handling the triangle as a trusty shuttle; sighting lines as a surveyor; incising and dissecting as a surgeon; simmering and savoring as a chef; caressing as a lover. Seeking, searching, scheming, and scaling, guiding lineamenti stretch across the palimpsestic page. Sensing, smudging, scratching, and scoring, a cloud of graphite dust bellows up from his forge, fanned by the compasses’ reciprocating wings. Transferring, transcribing, transfiguring, and translating, Hermes-like he steals across multifarious thresholds. But his pace changes. Hastening slowly. The architect-dreamer delves deeper, beneath tools, dreams and haptic experience, seeking schemata from more fundamental, universal, and substantial grounds. Discerning his inquiry, Polymnia extracts Earth, Fire, Air, Water, and Cosmos, figured in faceted forms: hexa–, tetra–, octa–, icosa–, dodecahedron. She casts these elements as dice upon the table: prime paradigms for this demi­ urge, working toward a proper polity with the people. She then retrieves a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Timaeus, opens to its “new begin­ ning,” and points to its most difficult middling-mode: allreceiving receptacle, nurse of becoming. Recalling puzzling passages, the architect pauses. Laying down his pencil, he turns toward the unseen seeing symposiasts, his back to the portal. Twisting to rest right elbow on left knee, and fixing right hand as pillar beneath his chin, he comports himself in the manner of Rodin’s thinker. Hmmmmmmm, a pensive pose known also to pondering Polymnia and the scheming slave Palaestrio. As he contemplates with tortured gravitas, Polymnia draws more diverting delights from the coffers of her case: a flexible helix (a slinky), with its daedalic feats of gravity, levity, and tenacity; a malleable ruler, gift of Lesbos, model of pliant judgments and situational adjustments, ever-bending, yielding to surprising particularities, irregularities, opportunities; a nautilus shell, with its storied inner labyrinth, spiraling geometries, and pearlescent soundings of primal seas; a delicate egg, with philosophical, alchemical, and zoomorphic potentialities, birthing nested metaphors too numerous to name; a dung beetle, cloaked as Khepri in hieroglyphs, unlikely progenitor of Sisyphean sunrise, rebirth, and transformation, shaping life from the dregs.

Miming a manner of architectural theory Tick-tock. Take-stock. Troubled times tug at the sleeve of anxious architects. Turning back to the drawing board with renewed vigor, he resumes machinations: promising, probing, plotting, preparing, repairing. Seeking further charms for the striving architect-dreamer, Polymnia plunges both hands into her bottomless bag of tricks. Withdrawing her right, now transformed as manus oculata, eye peering from palm, she directs the architect, likewise, to perceive by hand and make with vision. Raising her left, she displays a crystalline ball, a luminous orb, which she positions prominently at the head of the developing drawing. Piqued, the architect peers into the specular sphere, seeing many things anew: his own scheme synoptically reflected; a concentration of spectators encircling the globe’s left horizon; and, warped to the right, an opening to an ever-expansive milieu. Eureka! Jumping to his feet, he faces, and finally, sees the symposiasts, recognizing opportunity in the present situation, and his obligations to the social body. Unexpectedly, he turns away, opens the found door, admitting a burst of spring air, and rushing out, disappears into the city. Polymnia smiles, knowing he will return, bearing first fruits of seasoned labors. She tidies up: repacking paraphernalia into her sky-blue valise; clearing the stage of timbers, tools and props; then retreating to fetch a festive fetish. Polymnia reappears with a bunraku-like puppet, tall as she, a chimerical compass, with worldly head and bat-like wings, black as ink. Together they dance a sweeping, swinging, leaping, pacing, scaling, pas de deux. Beginning with chaos, they enact cosmic ordering, manifesting fixed stars, errant planets, gravitational attractions, and grand rhythmic harmonies. Making multiple micro-moves, they embody the ancient canon of Polykleitos via modern modes of Decroux, dynamically adjusting part-to-part to a-symmetrical whole. Surveying the air and tracing stereotomic lines across the floor, they demonstrate geometries of Roman augury and masonic lore. Now miming manners of building, they improvise a compendium of cooperative techneˉ, from ritual tent-raising to cyber-Hephaestian robotica. Galumph. Galumph. What’s that? Must be the architect whiffling back. They stop mid-stride, withdrawing to make way for yet another architectural act. Polymnia returns, opening wide the double doors, framing distant landscapes within a perfect square.

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There, at the crosshairs of the horizon, approaches the much-enduring architect. Atlas-like, he bears on his back a luminous translucent orb, an enormous pneumatic model of the world soul, ephemeral and elastic as language, moist as breath, glistening in dewy wetness wrought by rain. Now at the doorway, he presses the slippery circular orb against the square opening, attempting to squeeze the confabulous pantosphere through the perfect portal, into the mortal space of making. With outstretched arms and legs forming a passionate X, navel at the center, he strains, Vitruvius-like, to reconcile bodily proportions with ideal geometries. Sensing his struggle, symposiasts leap to their feet, grasping what they can of the orb’s peripheral shoots and seams. With a collective heave-ho, and the architect’s full-bodied push from the rear, they succeed in bringing this newborn anima mundi into their shared world, delivering all that collective memory, desire and imagination could manage to retrieve. Buoyant symposiasts encircle the grateful architect, and this mad model of a world made fleetingly whole. Hoisting glasses high, they raise a toast to Eudaimonia, renewing pledges to that special kind of happiness activated by shared striving, and by friendship in learning, exchanging, and interpreting architectural stories as sources of practical wisdom and well-being. Then some dash off to loved ones and others retreat to work, while those who linger laugh, laud, frolic, kiss, and eventually depart, returning bittersweet to separate spheres of influence. But where now is Polymnia? Has she vanished? Is she lost, abandoned and forgotten? No, she is there, with happy confabulators, dancing across disciplinary thresholds and divides. Her mimetic practices are active in the night, in the dawn, in the everyday, tacit in tools we tote, lines we draw, gestures we embody and interchange. Her polyvalent stories stir in our dreams, in the dregs, in the macaronic sauce. Her persuasive agencies thrive wherever symposiasts gather for happily agonistic discourse. Hence, if we pay attention, we find her influence latent within the walls, beneath our feet, between the lines, in every pregnant pause, remembering everything and miming all.

Part IV

Practice of stories

19 Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s architectural drawings Carolina Dayer

Architecture and storytelling share a common ground in the activity of world-mak­ ing.1 Both are artisans who guide the viewer’s and listener’s imagination into another realm. The storyteller’s architecture is primarily language. The architect’s primary storytelling medium is drawing. Through drawing, an architect guides the viewer’s imagination into another not-yet-real world that is projected much like divinatory practices of reading palms or tarot cards. When architects are no longer present to tell their story, we must rely on reading the clues from the making of their drawings. The name of this book, Confabulations, is also part of the title of a small drawing made by the theorist, architect and educator, Marco Frascari [Plate 42]. The draw­ ing’s full title is “Scarpa Confabulation” and it identifies the aquiline eagle-like-nosed individual shown in profile as the famous Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, with whom Frascari taught and worked. A close reading of the drawing framed with red ink reveals that the three sketches on the imaginary sheet of paper “pinned” to the actual textured watercolor paper are fragments of Scarpa’s main architectural obsessions: (from the top) a plan detail of a window from the Brion chapel, the two overlapping circles of a Vesica Pisces, and a stepping stair-like ziggurat line frequently found in his work. A different arrange­ ment of the same elements is shown in Scarpa’s head. The architectural elements in his brain are drawn first in gray and then overdrawn with red. In Italian, traditional artist’s red chalk is literally called “blood.” The architect’s gray thoughts and the “bleeding” hand-made drawings are thus closely interlinked. The relationship between hand and mind, a duality often recited by Leon Battista Alberti, is subtly negotiated here by Frascari. The red line, like Ariadne’s clue, that appears to join head to hand is actually discontinuous. We can see that the gap dividing the line near the edge of the drawn “sheet of paper” was a conscious decision because a dot of ink ending the line at each side of the gap indicates a thoughtful pause. Rather than assuming that prior mental ideas simply determine what the hand later traces, the two lines connecting and disconnecting the head with the hand offer a double directionality. Following Frascari’s dictum that “the storyteller does not know, but knows by making,” the lines are more correctly read as indicating a cyclical exchange between the head and the hand both from the inside out and the outside in.2 The gap is a blind 1 2

Marco Frascari, “An architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytell­ ing” in Reading Architecture and Culture, edited by Adam Sharr (London: Routledge, 2012), 224–34. Marco Frascari, Zibaldino. An elegant collation of architectural delights (Lexington: Self-Published, 2010), 24.

174 Carolina Dayer spot where fiction and fact interchange through proximity. It is not a coincidence that the gap is located closest to Scarpa’s nose and mouth, the parts of the body that can reach out and absorb the world through inhaling and digesting. In fact, while the hand is entirely “in” the drawing, the only part of Scarpa’s head that is shown over­ lapping with the drawing is the tip of his prominent nose. It was Francois Rabelais’ friend Philibert de l’Orme, the sixteenth-century French architect, who wrote that the Bad Architect “has a little nose” for he does not have the “intuition of good things.”3 Frascari’s drawn confabulation brings together both fact and fiction through fari, a fable, meaning “to speak.”4 In the field of neurology, confabulating is a condition in which the mind accepts both facts and fictions as one reality. A mental patient’s confabulation might be the conviction that he is in Venice, although he also admits that the town he is seeing through the window is Alexandria.5 He knows both places, he feels both places, and, despite the contradiction, both places constitute his reality. As a factual fiction that creates a world, Frascari’s drawing argues that architectural thinking and making are embedded in the fictional/factual realm of confabulations. In the drawing, the objects drawn on the sheet of paper are not the same as the images in Scarpa’s mind; and yet he seems to happily acknowledge both realities as one. Implied in this apparent contradiction, the confabulation allows for a thicker notion of reality due to the linear apprehension of multiple realities as constituting a totality. Confabulations are continuous and linear, but not as the simplistic linearity of a straight line. Just like the telling lines of Romanian-born American illustrator Saul Steinberg, a story line does not necessarily mean a straight line of narration where the end is in constant view from the outset; it has twists, turns, and disruptions. [Figure 19.1].6 Instead of thinking of the layering of simple readings of reality, I propose that an architectural confabulation is a sole reality where events, thoughts, memories, everyday life and the making of the drawing live through a continuous ductal line that wanders and wonders throughout. Like the place that is two places but for the confabulator is really one, architectural drawings are realities that juggle multiple facts and fictions simultaneously. Eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose work was key for Frascari’s theory, calls these creations of facts and fictions “imaginary fig­ ments.” A figment is a product of invention manifested in the world. Vico wrote: The poet, . . . because his business is with the majority of men, induces persuasion by giving plastic portrayals of exalted actions and characters; he works, as it were, with “invented” examples. As a result, he may depart from the daily semblances 3

4

5 6

“Il n’a guères de nez, pour n’avoir sentiment des bonnes choses” writes de l’Orme in folio 28v of his Traités d’architecture, quoted in Jean-Pierre Chupin, “Hermes’ Laugh: Philibert de l’Orme’s Imagery as a Case of Analogical Edification” in Chora, Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, edited by Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGill, 2, 1996), 44. E.A. Andrews, Charles Short, Charlton Thomas Lewis, and William Freund. A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, Rev., Enl., and in Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Armin Schnider, The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32–4. Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 144–5.

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Figure 19.1 Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A to B), 1960. Ink on paper. Private collection, originally published in Steinberg, The Labyrinth, 1960 © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

of truth, in order to be able to frame a loftier semblance of reality. . . . He creates imaginary figments which, in a way, are more real than physical reality itself.7 Through the contingency of the factum (made), Vico finds it productive to oscillate between figmentum (fiction), and verum (truth).8 This would mean that in the idea of making there is always both, the idea of falsification and the idea of truth that is higher than other truths, truth and not just that which is true.9 The imaginary figment, for Vico, creates a space outside a simple retelling of events, where multiple realities coex­

7

iambattista Vico,  On the Study Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis: G Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 43. 8 In the English translation the word “figment” appears four times in the entire manuscript. In the Latin version of the text, Vico uses the words mendacia and effingant. The first, mendacia, means a mistake or error and it was habitually used to describe the errors made when writing books, as in a “slip of the pen.” The word also means a fable, a fiction or a lie. With mendacia, there is an unintentional fault or change that disrupts the course of something, as well as an intentional disruption or creation of an imaginary narrative. The second word, effingant means to represent, portray, or form, but it also means to falsify something. Again, the word denotes two realms, a positive quality in an unintentional fault leading to a creation as well as a negative quality, a lie, and a misrepresentation. Giambattista Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione [sul Metodo Degli Studi Del Nostro Tempo] (Pisa: ETS, 2010). 9 Donald Kunze, “Architecture as Reading; Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity,” Journal of Architectural Education 41, no. 4 (1988): 28–37.

176 Carolina Dayer ist, leading to a confabulation. These concurrent worlds are not seen as contradictory; rather, they are sensed as a coherent whole, reinforcing the aspect of togetherness that the word confabulation carries with it.10 In “Scarpa Confabulation,” Frascari shows the architect drawing the three aforementioned elements on the sheet of paper, but their relationships are inverted from the images and the drawing inside his head. The drawings on the sheet of paper also show a material thickness that the images in Scarpa’s head lack. Two realities, the one in the architect’s head and the one in the drawing, coexist as one despite their differences. Architectural drawings intensify reality through confronting and dissolving assumed distinctions between facts and fictions. For example, if an architect draws something in plan that would not be possible in section, it becomes a contested realm where an inven­ tion would allow both to coexist in some as yet unforeseen way. A confabulation is not a fault or a negative element, but an invitation for architects to discover and make new stories within their drawings. The architect tells stories to the drawing and the draw­ ing tells stories to the architect. The construction is a confabulation, a fabulous talk between two architects, the one doing the drawing and the one the drawing is making. It is not a coincidence that Frascari would have invoked Scarpa’s name to think of confabulations. Scarpa, a storyteller par excellence, exercised the power of confabu­ lations throughout his architectural drawings. From doodles to musical score nota­ tions, from sections coexisting together with different scale plan drawings, every trace, planned or unplanned, seems to have whispered a story to the design of the building. Scarpa’s practice of drawing things together relies on the observation that seemingly unrelated events inevitably relate when encountered on the sheet of paper, allowing a field of possible new thoughts to continually emerge.11 Such encounters with and inside drawings resonate with a thought by Italo Calvino, another Italian storyteller who believed that “in a work of literature, various levels of reality may meet while remain­ ing distinct and separate, or else they may melt and mingle and knit together, achiev­ ing a harmony among their contradictions or else forming an explosive mixture.”12 Similarly, Scarpa’s lines hold and release stories within the sheet of paper, constituting distinct yet related levels of narrative within the architectural project. My argument proposes that the making of architectural drawings is a linear pro­ cess, linear understood not as a straight, nor predictable, but closely related to how we live and how stories are made, connecting all the parts despite apparent contradic­ tions. One could argue that Scarpa has, in fact, only made one drawing in his life, one extremely long drawing, and that one drawing has made him. To demonstrate this, I will tell three stories from three drawings that show different kinds of confabulations in the Italian architect’s work.

10 William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 20), 177–211. 11 Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (edited by H. Kuklick) (1986): 1–40. 12 Italo Calvino, “Levels of Reality” in The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986), 101.

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Confabulation from drawing to building: the constructive drawing In one of the design drawings for the Brion cemetery chapel, the mysterious draw­ ing of an amorous couple embracing appears along the north-south centerline of the  chapel floor plan, below the south corner, and near the bottom of the sheet [Plate 43]. The entire drawing was constructed in a highly specific way. To begin, a series of straight lines were laid down to guide the construction of the square floor plan.13 These lines, constituting the primary making of the geometrical shape, are rendered lightly on the sheet of paper. After constructing the square figure, the middle points of each side are marked, dividing the square into four. The vertical diagonal line, per­ pendicular to the widest side of the sheet of paper, is darker and longer than the rest of the guide lines making the figure. Its distinct presence invites the eye of the reader to move up and down the field of marks, thus encountering a series of drawings close to the detailed chapel’s south corner rendered in the lower area of the sheet of paper. This corner is adjacent to one of the planned access paths to the cemetery. At a distance of 2 mm apart on the drawing, 11 parallel lines form the thickness of the chapel walls that make the corner. A common practice among architects when making drawings, the wall lines are first constructed continuously, delaying the deci­ sion of locating windows or doors and giving literal meaning to the phrase “wall opening.” Because when drawing with a triangle the awareness of where to begin a line is more distinct than where to end it, the lightly traced parallel lines in the draw­ ing suggest their origin on the east corner of the chapel proceeding afterwards toward the south corner. Scarpa draws the next wall, now ascending from the south to the west corner, by relying on the previously drawn lines that have intersected the vertical line of the square’s axis. This form of referencing the drawing by meeting existing lines allows architects to draw with agility without the need to measure every new trace. The initial vertical guiding line that served the geometrical construction of the square figure now serves, in addition, the delineation of architectural elements of the chapel [Plate 44]. Scarpa’s drawings contain a full range of these types of guide lines.14 Their role, however, is not only to guide the desired construction of a geometrical figure. When guiding lines are considered as a surplus to the drawing, when they are allowed to proceed beyond their endpoint and function, they have the potential to become lines that guide the architect to more than one place. In other words, lines in the draw­ ing can guide the architect instead of being merely determined by him or her. This can be clearly observed along the aforementioned vertical centerline of the plan, the south corner, and the scene drawn right below. Departing from the carefully deline­ ated south corner, free-handedly Scarpa’s pencil follows the center guide line that helped in the construction of the square figure and the chapel’s walls, and ends with a naked amorous couple [Plate 45]. Such continuity between the drawings begins

13 The drawings on the page indicate two opposite orientations on the wider sides of the sheet, implying that the architect shifted the position of the sheet to make the various drawings. 14 A guide is a person, agent, or element that knows the way and is able to take you there. A guide is also used in architectural drawings and in construction sites in order to guide the architect and the builder. The reference lines presume that the object in question is known, for example, in drawing, if one makes a square, there are guide lines to construct the square.

178 Carolina Dayer to expose the corner as an eventful place and even one of uncertainty or perhaps transgression.15 The drawing depicts the corner as an element that may be understood as the cou­ pling of two walls or two sets of 11 lines, and from this the architect discovers that the center guiding line previously drawn with no specific purpose beyond its endpoint can be suddenly activated. Perhaps, in the spirit of such architectural coupling, Scarpa follows the corner and draws the naked couple. Right below, a sketch appears explor­ ing the joint of two walls through a linear element. Just as if from each line a new story emerges, the four realities—the square axis, the corner, the naked couple, and the joint detail—are in fact interlaced as one. The corner, an age-old place for meeting, is further manifest in the built project through an indentation, also present in the drawing, inside the concrete corner. The absence of material that makes room for a new reality at this part of the building is made present through a layer of gold paint [Plate 46].16 While for the drawing of the chapel’s walls precise and specific architectural drafting instruments were needed, the tracing of the couple originated from freehanded curvilinear lines. Similarly, in the built work linear planks of wood composed the formwork of the concrete walls, precisely aligned and nailed, while the addition of the gold paint required a very intimate and caressing treatment of the corner. The seemingly isolated stories emerg­ ing from the making of the drawing materialize harmonically in the making of the building. The gold indentation detail can be understood as an event that separates the two walls as well as one that marks a moment of union. While a place for meet­ ing, the corner is also a place for separation, recalling the commemoration of the joined separation and the separated joining of the Brion couple. Implied in the building, the two concurrent realities—union and separation—are clearly seen not just along the vertical edge detail of the corner but also at the horizon­ tal levels of the floor and the ceiling. On the outside, unlike the other corners of the chapel, the floor that is underwater raises through small, L-shaped steps to meet the corner from both sides of the wall [Figure 19.2]. The floor detail acts as a horizontal corner that fully relates to the vertical one. Inside the chapel ceiling, suspended stucco lucido panels are held away from the corner, creating a square opening that reveals the concrete structure above. Here, Scarpa designs the horizontal suspended ceiling in a playful relationship with the verticality of the wall [Plate 47]. In a reflected ceiling plan drawing, Scarpa demonstrates this relationship by finding the dimensions of the ceiling detail by tracing a series of arcs that derive from the vertical wall openings at each side of the corner [Plate 48]. Drawing together walls, floor, and ceiling, as well as other scenes that emerge from thinking with the drawing, will be translated later in the built edifice through the presence of inside-out and upside-down relationships, making this corner in the project a very unique one. In yet another chapel drawing, Scarpa wrote: “This chapel

15 Alberti described a corner as half of a building, since it links two walls and is essential to maintain uprightness. He states that its stones should be an elbow that links around the corner into the walls like claws. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 71. 16 I owe part of my knowledge and curiosity about corners to Professor Paul Emmons who has examined, researched, and lectured on the topic of corners in architecture. Paul Emmons, The Mirror of Design (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

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Figure 19.2 Drawing by author of Brion cemetery chapel’s corner.

is dedicated to dream in memories” [Plate 49].17 In writing the phrase he inverts the letters of the word sognare (dream) into sognaer. In addition he inverts the letters of the word chiesetta (chapel) into ciehestta. A common practice in his writing, flipping the letters of a word into a reality that still accepts the word as such, yet becomes a different one, is a phonetic act of opening up a world through continuity. The drawn dreams and draems of this chapel can be appreciated in the dreamy realities that this complex built detail exhibits: the corner inside a corner, which also is the floor, which also is the ceiling, and, conceivably, is also an amorous couple. In his essay on Lightness, Calvino recalls a very common aspect of folktales that consists of the flight of signifiers into other worlds.18 Quoting Vladimir Propp, who explains the “transference of the hero” into different realms, Calvino emphasizes the linear aspect of stories, in which linear does not mean homogenous, but rather that it travels in 17 “Questa ciehestta è dedicata a sognaer in memorie.”

18 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random

House, Inc., 1988), 3–29.

180 Carolina Dayer and out, visiting many places and bringing forth the kind of hyper-reality of a seem­ ingly discontinuous continuity.19 Inside-out, upside-down, and downside-up: several realities of union and separation coexist at this acute place in the Brion cemetery chapel.

Confabulation from architect to drawing: the attentive drawing By cultivating an awareness of life as a continuous whole, Scarpa confronts assumed borders between what is happening in the drawing and what is happening outside of it. Events flow from the reality of the architect into the reality of the architecture. Intentionally and unintentionally, the emotional life of the architect directly affects the emotional life of the drawing and consequently the architectural design. This is not simply an anecdotic interpretation of emotions operating at the creative level, but has been confirmed by neurological research. Having studied this relationship, neu­ roscientist Antonio Damasio notes: “The fabric of our minds and of our behavior is woven around continuous cycles of emotions followed by feelings that become known and beget new emotions, a running polyphony that underscores and punctuates spe­ cific thoughts in our minds and actions in our behaviors.”20 Building on Damasio’s research, Frascari argued that, for architects, “‘thinking well’ is based on cogni­ tive processes combined with the feeling of emotions, intuitions and sensations.”21 Frascari maintains that good architects think “within” architecture, instead of “think­ ing about architecture,” in an act of immersion in the materials of architectural invention.22 This fundamental difference can be found in the symbiotic roles between Scarpa’s everyday life events and the architectural drawings he made. A section drawing of a room shows a column supporting a roof structure [Plate 50]. The cross-shaped joint detail between the column and the wall is drawn as having four steel pieces that meet at each corner, leaving an empty space at the center. The four pieces are angled towards the outside 11 degrees to meet the roof structure. Immediately beside it, Scarpa draws in pencil a strange scene involving his wife, Onorina, his son, Tobia, and himself. Scarpa depicts an argument with his wife, Nini, with both of their bodies in profile. In addition he draws his son’s figure looking directly towards us, the spectators of the drawing, or towards Scarpa himself as he is making the drawing. Both parents are stepping forward each with their left feet. Scarpa’s hands are inside his pockets while Nini is armless with no breasts, and her back has been drawn as if she were wearing a translucent dress. Tobia, their son, stands in the middle, right behind them with a reddened face. Three speech bubbles record the dialogue between the family. The couple is arguing: Nini shouts, Stupido; Carlo yells, Macacca (a word commonly used in the Veneto, deriving from the Spanish macaco, or monkey; meaning “idiot”). Finally, Tobia says in exasperation: Tutti Due, “You two!”23 19 Calvino, Memos, 27.

20 Antonio Damasio. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

(New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 43. 21 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 67. 22 Marco Frascari, “Splendour and Miseries of Architectural Construction Drawings,” Interstices 11 (2010): 110. 23 Scarpa actually colors his son’s face with a red color pencil signalizing perhaps his frustration or embarrassment.

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After depicting the quarrel, Scarpa then draws over Nini’s body a new version of the aforementioned detail between the column and the roof. This time the detail shows a different element between the steel pieces. The new piece joins the four parts together at a precise point just before the plates bend 11 degrees. Structurally, the new element would tie together and strengthen the parts initially working in isola­ tion. In the new design, the middle steel plate engages fully with the parts making the joint, thus transforming it into a single piece. Just like the three figures inhabiting the section, the detail purposely drawn in section emphasizes the presence of the number three. While the two pairs of steel plates make possible the transference of loads, the one singular element is in charge of joining and strengthening the two pairs. Looking closely at the space of the dialogue offers more clues that reinforce the con­ tinuous and linear practice by which Scarpa intertwined drawings with his everyday life events in a yet more wonderful story. If we picture the three family members’ positions in plan view and we add Scarpa himself drawing, the diagram of the con­ versation is, like the detail, a cross. One line of the cross marks the positions of the couple, and its perpendicular one marks the visual connection between Tobia and Scarpa himself drawing. The center point of this cross is the space where the quarrel occurs, suggesting that the quarrel itself may have given birth to the idea of the new detail. Without the quarrel, this arrangement would perhaps not exist. And yet there is a strange aspect to how the three characters are positioned that reverses the story of the quarrel into a story of concurrence. The similarity of the scene with the positions of a bride, groom, and priest in the ritual of marriage, which also centers in a dialogue and the exchange of three parts, is remarkable. The couple facing each other, the bride on the left, the groom on the right, and the priest at the center at a higher position, suggests that again two contradictory realities, a fight and a reconciliation, co-exist as a coherent possibility for the architectural project. The drawing becomes a space for the argument and the space of the argument becomes a space for a new design, a chiasmus that cunningly reverses the values of the quarrel into an affable architectural detail. The process is once again linear. The beginning of this line departs from the initial section drawing; later, it leaves the drawing to enter into the events of the architect’s everyday life; and then returns to disclose what has happened. By the time the quarrel is told to the drawing, the parts have already converged into one reality from two apparently distinct situations, inter­ mingling family and architecture in such a way that they become one.

Confabulation from drawing to architect: the speaking drawing In another late night at Carlo Scarpa’s house and studio, the tired Guido Pietropoli, one of Scarpa’s assistants, is tracing the plan drawing for the reconstruction and extension of the ex-convent of San Sebastiano to convert it for use by the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of the University of Venice. Pietropoli is drawing “trem­ blottant”—making free-hand ink lines with a thin nib by tracing over the constructed lines of the drawing below. The wavy pulse of his hand transfers through the nib into the paper, expounding slightly different qualities each time a line is traced. The entire drawing is made up of these thin lines. At first sight the lines seem drawn with a ruler; however, with attention, subtle differences are discerned. Each line faintly expresses particular movements of the hand, enlivening the drawing. The technique, according to Pietropoli, requires slowness and is a bit annoying; however, thanks to the slight

182 Carolina Dayer

Figure 19.3 Carlo Scarpa. Third floor plan heliographic copy showing burnt mark on the reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice. 1974–1978. NP 41691 (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

variations, it imparts great character to the drawing.24 While slowly and carefully drawing a long line in this way, the cigarette hanging from Pietropoli’s mouth con­ tinued to burn until finally an ember of his cigarette fell onto the drawing. Before he could brush it away, the hot ember immediately burned through the tracing paper. Piercing through it, the ember left a perfectly round hole where it hit the paper [Figure 19.3]. Pietropoli cursed this loss of the night’s work and was contemplating starting the drawing entirely over again when Scarpa saw it and exclaimed: “We will have a tree here!” And he drew a circle around the unexpected hole.25 On the next plan for San Sebastiano, the addition of the tree appears and is thoroughly integrated into the project [Plate 51]. 24 Interview by author with Guido Pietropoli, July 2013. Pietropoli learned the drawing technique in the Atelier of Guillermo de la Fuente in Venice while working on the Venice Hospital project for Le Corbusier. When Scarpa heard of the technique, he asked Pietropoli to use it in the drawings for San Sebastiano. 25 I thank Guido Pietropoli for telling me this story while we were observing Carlo Scarpa drawings during the exhibition Progetti veneziani di Carlo Scarpa: le università at Archivio Progetti Iuav, curated by Serena Maffioletti and Archivio Progetti – SBD with Leonardo Monaco and Mara Micol Reina in Venice in July 2013.

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These kinds of events, ink blots, coffee stains, and glitches with computer soft­ ware, regularly happen in architectural design, yet are rarely if ever discussed in writings about architectural drawing. This omission results in the incorrect assump­ tion that architectural design is a one-way flow from a rational determination in the mind that is only afterwards recorded on a drawing. However, for Scarpa, the mark tells a story and listening to it allows him to accept the fiction as a fact. The fictive element, that which is not true of the drawing, becomes a true discovery in the design process. The story, as Frascari has stated, becomes a determinative component for the architectural environment.26 It has an active role in the making of the project, and it is not simply a metaphor for the project. The story is, once again, linear: it fol­ lows the life of the drawing even under circumstances that to many architects would signify a mistake. The unexpected mark created by the ember became in Scarpa’s hands not just a tree but a very specific one designated as a Fagus rubra. Fagus is the Latin name for the genus to which the beech belongs and rubra means red. In Scarpa’s imagination the unexpected burnt mark on the drawing travelled into reality as a red beech, known for its blazing red foliage during the fall. Additionally, adjacent to the red/copper beech tree, the drawing shows yet one more tree: a Tilia, or linden tree. Right next to it Scarpa leaves a note that says, “perfume for when students are in exam season.”27 The Tilia not only emits a delicious perfume when in blossom but also holds in its leaves and flowers a delicious flavor recognized as carrying a calming effect when consumed in the form of tea. From the slow, trembling construction of lines of a late night at the drawing table to the imagining of a place through olfactory vision, Scarpa’s San Sebastiano plan demonstrates the possibility of chance encoun­ ters in the making of drawings. When exceptions are seen as fruitful distractions, the making of the drawing acts as a fateful window capable of re-introducing new realities into the work. The shaking in the apparently straight linearity of the work by a sudden mistake, like the ember burning the paper, allows the drawing to be concerned with two simultaneous realms: what is happening now, that is, the fire pricking through the sheet; and what will be happening later, the acceptance of the fact as already belonging to the work. Scarpa, just like the confabulator, does not anticipate an outcome. However, even if reality is full of contradictions, the confabulator makes sense of it by weaving the storyline into one total reality. This confabulatory approach to architectural drawing by Scarpa shows how he transforms the senseless marks into existing parts of the design to make sense. In storytelling, there are exaggerated or absurd events that constitute the wonder of a story. They may seem out-of-place, but it is precisely this displacement that makes the story memorable. Frascari compares the architect to the medieval troubadour who has a stock of stories that are adjusted for every town, every audience, and even when encountering unexpected events like a bird squawking while telling a story.28 The word troubadour derives from the Provençal trobar, “to compose, to invent a poem.” The verb trobar 26 There is a distinction between informative cases, which are determined by a built environment, and stories, which are determinative of an architectural environment. Frascari, “An architectural goodlife . . .” in Reading Architecture, 226 27 The original Italian note reads: “Il profumo al tempi degli esami.” 28 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 95–6.

184 Carolina Dayer also means “to find,” like the finding of inspiration along the way as the story itself is unfolding along that single, but very long digressive drawing of Scarpa’s life. When making architectural drawings, the architect constantly experiences “excep­ tions” that distract, interact, and provoke the imagination at minimal and significant levels.29 From the wind entering the room while drawing to a heated argument with the client, the architect’s work is always “interrupted” by something. When the architect’s imagination has the capacity to find potency in instants of interruption or suspension that detour from the expected and become active in the realm of the crea­ tive, architectural confabulations emerge, and the reality of the design is thickened by reality itself.30 What is more, these moments of interruption are crucial for thinking, and we rely on our linear experiencing of the world to engage with and listen to them.

29 Donald Kunze expresses it like this: “Thus, it is important for architecture theory to pay its closest attention to cases where representation breaks down, for it is precisely at such points that invisibility becomes critical.” Donald Kunze, “Metalepsis of the Site of Exception” (unpublished essay, 2014), art3idea.psu.edu/AAPP/AAPP.pdf. Accessed February 11, 2014. 30 Carolina Dayer, “Material Intuitions: Tracing Carlo Scarpa’s Nose” in Material Imagination, Reveries on Architecture and Matter, edited by Matthew Mindrup (London: Ashgate, 2015), 13–28.

20 In medias res Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo Jonathan Foote

Nor does he begin the Trojan War with the egg (ab ovo) but always he hurries to the action and snatches the listener into the middle of things (in medias res)1 Good epic poets do not commence their tale from the beginning—ab ovo (with the egg)—as Horace states, but rather descend in medias res (into the middle of things), a reference to the Illiad opening already many years into the Trojan War. Perhaps this sentiment of plunging into the middle of action was felt by researchers when, in 1976 upon the walls of the San Lorenzo New Sacristy in Florence, they uncovered an aston­ ishing array of mural drawings beneath centuries-old plaster, recognized instantly as the possible handiwork of Michelangelo himself. Scholars have since concluded that a large number of these marks and sketches were indeed by the artist, or at least from the hands of those working closely with him. Primarily related to the work at the Laurentian Library in the years 1525 and 1526, the walls of the New Sacristy apse preserve a palimpsest of hundreds of figural sketches, 1:1 scaled architectonic details, and written messages [Figure 20.1].2 Employing a combination of red chalk, black chalk, and charcoal, they comprise an extensive network of ruled lines and rapid sketches. Among them are the largest drawings known to survive by Michelangelo: two nearly four-meter elevations of the interior and exterior windows of the library, rendered at a 1:1 scale. Paolo dal Poggetto’s book published in the late 1970s, I dis­ egni murali di Michelangiolo e della sua scuola nella Sagrestia Nuova di San Lorenzo, still remains the most comprehensive text on the matter.3 The scientific analyses of the apse drawings have endured largely without controversy and have provided a reliable basis from which future historians have integrated the material into their assessments of Michelangelo’s work. Rather than examine the drawings as a history of the building site, something that has already been well explored, we ask—what story do the drawings tell? And, additionally, what story was Michelangelo telling while making them? Histories

1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 145–147 2 Another group of wall drawings in the so-called lavamani or “stanza segreta” was also discovered and documented but is not discussed here. 3 Paolo dal Poggetto, I disegni murali di Michelangiolo e della sua scuola nella Sagrestia Nuova di San Lorenzo (Firenze: Centro Di, 1979). A second volume by Dal Poggetto offers a recent assessment of scholarship. Paolo dal Poggetto, Michelangelo: La “stanza segreta”: i disegni murali nella Sagrestia nuova di San Lorenzo (Firenze: Giunti, 2012).

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Figure 20.1 Michelangelo and others, Mural drawings, apse of the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo, 1526–1533. Reconstruction by author, after images provided by the Polo Museale della città di Firenze, with permission

often rely on establishing reliable chronologies and authorship; stories, on probing the gaps exposed by their inherent unreliability, a point of view much closer to the use of the Latin word istoria. When L.B. Alberti compared the construing of an appropriately constructed wall with the reading of a good istoria, the implication was that architecture contains a hidden narrative of how it is made—its construc­ tion—available through interpreting the clues of its facture.4 In this vein, looking back at the spatio-temporal sequence of a wall’s construction is more akin to rewind­ ing a thread that has been unwound, such that the original position of any point on the spool cannot be precisely reconstructed. There is an assumption of a sequence of events, of positions, of causes and effects; but one cannot say precisely what they are. Conditions and relationships between the materials and marks of construction provide a remarkable “middle ground” in which we are granted access through the clues of its making. Since Horace, in medias res has come to define a narrative structure that begins by immersing the reader somewhere in the chronological middle, invoking a sense

4 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII.10

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that one is witnessing a small slice of a much longer tale that has been going on for a while.5 Rather than trust in an omniscient voice that begins, “once upon a time,” or ab ovo, the storyteller relies on events and characters within the story itself to clue us in to past events. Observed in their totality, the mural drawings are a flash of action of Michelangelo and his assistants, telling a story in medias res. This refers not only to our encounter as the viewer beholding a sense of action in which we are immersed, it more importantly refers to the proclivity of Michelangelo to avoid the remote, omniscient voice and deal directly with the materials of construction as they unfold, in situ and in dialogue with those around him. Although by the 1520s the notion of the architect working remotely from the building site had become increasingly common, Michelangelo maintained a decidedly intimate relationship with his materials, assis­ tants, and the work in progress. Extended onto the building site, the notion of in medias res suggests that the space of construction contains an inherent and necessary agency in propelling the plotline of construction forward. In this way, it seems clear that the drawings are more like conversations than simple dictations, with the goal being the enlargement of the space of deliberation rather than its deliberate reduction through pre-determined or formalized building procedures. The construction site itself—the medias—thus takes on a confabulatory role, where the surrounding action defines a place for creat­ ing, or discovering, the istoria. Unlike drawings on the ground or on a horizontal drawing surface, the upright wall surface furnished a site for Michelangelo and his assistants to discuss construction in the same body posture as if they were building it. In his relationship with the wall, small adjustments through marks, scratches, and ticks act as traces in the confabulatory role of the building site. In observing them closely, one senses the fundamental agency of the rhetorical space created by the drawing process itself, as much as the specific instructions to the stonemasons conveyed therein.

Introducing the medias Centuries after the fact, the penetrating materiality of the drawings immerses us in the middle of an imagined building site teeming with scarpellini (stone carvers) and a sullen, demanding Michelangelo. In the spring of 1525, deep into construction on the Laurentian Library, the artist attended to the stone carvers and assistants with a combination of heavy oversight and exhaustion. A letter from Leonardo Sellaio, the artist’s confidant in Rome, describes how Michelangelo, during this time, “had to be teaching them [the scarpellini] all the time,” especially after they had repeatedly failed to bring a number of figural models into good form.6 The library was proceeding rapidly, with work commencing in early 1525, and Michelangelo predicted that the entire project would be finished by the end of 1526. The foundations for the vestibule were excavated in January 1526, while, at a frantic pace, figures and architectural carvings were being concurrently produced for the adjacent New Sacristy project. In

5 Meir Steinberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13, no. 3 (1992): 481. 6 Letter dated March 10, 1526, DCCXLIII, in Il carteggio di Michelangelo, edited by Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, Vols I–V (Firenze: Sansoni, 1967), 3: 214.

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June of 1526, the exhausted artist wrote to his friend Giovan Fattucci in Rome, “I’m working as hard as I can.”7 The large, unadorned surfaces of the New Sacristy apse must have provided an invit­ ing space to discuss and instruct within such an active construction site, and it appears from the finish application of fine intonaco that they were specifically prepared as such.8 The proximity of the apse to the library worksite was an obvious advantage, but there were probably spatial reasons as well. Covering a square footprint of just over four meters on a side and six meters high, the apse created an enclosed and welldefined drawing space, large enough to accommodate full size drawings, yet intimate enough to designate a “space within a space” among the bristling worksite. The strik­ ing presence of the 1:1 scaled library window drawings, facing each other from the right- and left-hand walls, invite the visitor into the middle of the action. No doubt a deliberate arrangement, the alignment of the exterior and interior window draw­ ings are precisely placed across from each other, creating an inside-out space from an otherwise impossible threshold—the medias. Using the physical site of the worksite, Michelangelo placed himself in the imaginative space of the window, looking both outward and inward simultaneously. In spite of their prominence, the window drawings were probably not the first drawings on the wall, appearing in several places as clearly drawn over the top of drawings within arm’s reach.9 Plumbed, constructed geometrically, and carefully measured, the prevailing view among scholars is that they could not have been made before April 12, 1525, the day the Pope approved Michelangelo’s window design from drawings sent to Rome.10 However, in a worksite tally book kept by two scar­ pellini, Giovani di Sandro and Romolo di Guelfo, a large number of pre-carved jambs, thresholds, and cornices for the library windows began arriving from the quarry just three days later.11 Such a coincidence of timing suggests that Michelangelo was not waiting for his patron’s approval in order to proceed, a somewhat common practice for him. Rather than advance in a linear fashion, acquiring the proper approvals in due time, Michelangelo planted himself within the material multiplicities of the worksite. Neither beginning nor end, or perhaps flipping it, the privilege to alter the work in progress was a hallmark of Michelangelo’s working method. Maybe anticipating good weather, an opportune assembly of workman, or good quarry conditions, his first priority was to keep the worksite, the space of the medias, moving. As a testa­ ment to his desire to dwell within the middle state of a project, nearly two-thirds of his figural oeuvre remains in a state of incompletion.12 Stoppages of work, in fact, constituted some of the lowest moments of his life. The window drawings record a remarkable “middle” stage of action, located 7 Letter dated June 17, 1526, DCCLII, in Carteggio, ed. Barocchi and Ristori, 3: 227. Translation by author. 8 Caroline Elam, “The Mural Drawings in Michelangelo’s New Sacristy,” The Burlington Magazine 123, no. 943 (October 1981): 592–4. 9 This concurs with Elam, “Mural Drawings,” 596. Dal Poggetto claims the window drawings probably came first, Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 168–9. 10 Letter dated April 12, 1526, DCXCV, in Carteggio, ed. Barocchi and Ristori, 3: 141. 11 Lucilla Bardeschi Ciulich and Paola Barocchi, I ricordi di Michelangelo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970), CLXXIII, 187–91. 12 Paula Carabell, “Image and Identity in the Unfinished Works of Michelangelo,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 32 (Autumn, 1997): 83–105.

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Figure 20.2 Michelangelo, Cornice details (left and right) showing template tracing, exterior window for Laurentian Library, c. 1526. With permission, Polo Museale della città di Firenze

somewhere between sketches and stone. Dal Poggetto, in his analysis, rightfully referred to them as exempla, as they provided clear, graphic instructions for the stone carvers to follow.13 However, in the tradition of Callimachus, who discovered the exemplum for the Corinthian order in a funerary arrangement of acanthus leaves and a weighted tile, Michelangelo imagined new possibilities within the exempla simultaneously in use by the stone carvers.14 A clear demonstration of this occurs on the exterior window in a series of marks on the cornice details. Although the primary lines are drawn in black chalk (matita), Michelangelo switched to charcoal (carbone) while working through some of the critical edges and joints.15 Looking closer at the right side of the segmented pediment in Figure 20.2, a raked line drawn in charcoal creates an unexpected condition at the soffit edge at a point where it would be highly unusual to show a back slant in a frontal, orthographic view. No doubt this indicates the tracing of a profiled cornice template, or modano, rotated and placed flat against the wall. The appearance of the marks denoting a raked soffit would have been entirely consistent with a template, since it would have defined a stone profile perpen­ dicular to the wall, not parallel to it. What scholars have called pentimenti might also be accounted for by the marks made by tracing the cornice template as an instrument for seeking the imaginative potential of the window exemplum. Michelangelo made regular use of modani at San Lorenzo, a special kind of 1:1 paper drawing that was both exploratory as well as instructive. He often employed his templates as tracing devices for altering and adjusting cornice details and column bases, creating a practice of using the materiality of the template—sliding, flipping, and cutting—to collapse the space between paper and stone. For Michelangelo, trac­ ing provided a mode where small, figural adjustments could be studied outside of the constraints of compass and rule, the normative tools of an architect. The paper 13 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 168–9. 14 On Callimachus see, Vitruvius, De architectura, IV.i.9–10 15 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 84.

190 Jonathan Foote

modano thus became a surrogate building stone that could be carried to the site and placed into the middle of the action. This is evident also on the left edge of the exterior window segmented pediment, where one may observe a tick mark along the soffit edge and a double rendering of the fillet edge. These marks together suggest the use of a template placed flat against the wall, marked, dragged horizontally, and traced.

Enlarging the medias The walls represent an enlargement of the medias that had been previously employed at the detail level through the template. Once on the wall, assemblies of multiple stones could be evaluated, as was probably the case with the 1:1 window drawings. Stone cutting practices such as whittling, filing, and chipping are mirrored in the marks of the wall drawings, and the use of templates, from horizontal to vertical, from drawing board to the wall, shows how Michelangelo freely moved between the drawing board and the worksite as an extension of the drawing board. The window drawings are thus looking forward to the stonecutters as well as looking back at Michelangelo’s imagination, flipping the beginning with the end. Scaled at 1:1, the window drawings allowed for a particularly intimate relation­ ship with the unfolding work, since minute alterations to lineaments and proportions could be evaluated rapidly and without scaled mediation. No other drawing scale provided a more direct access to the building istoria, a point that was not lost by Alberti, who advocated large drawings whenever possible, “because in small draw­ ings large weaknesses are easily hidden.”16 Vasari, in his introduction to the art of sculpture, offers an extensive commentary on these advantages, including the pro­ pensity to avoid errors and stone patching.17 And Scamozzi, in commenting on the importance of large models, discusses how they reveal their character more readily than smaller ones.18 Michelangelo, for his part, made full size models and drawings a central aspect of his working method, both in sculpture and in architecture. Notable achievements include two full-size wooden models of the Medici tomb assemblies for the New Sacristy and a 12-foot wooden section of the cornice for the Palazzo Farnese, floated in place above Rome and inspected by the Pope himself.19 Each one of these related to how to, first, enlarge the medias, and, second, how to invite the artist and his assistants into the sphere of its influence. Another group of sketches, located within arm’s reach, reflects Michelangelo’s practice of enlarging the medias through the combination of walls and templates. Prominently drawn in red chalk, a cornice detail, facing left, is repeated three times in variation, starting from the left and moving right [Plate 52]. Each iteration slides pre­ cisely along the horizontal datum line, displaying slight variations of the profile along the way. This rapid succession of profiles was a normative practice of Michelangelo, and can be detected in several places in his surviving drawings as well as other places 16 Leon Battista Alberti and Cosimo Bartoli, Della pittura e della statua di Leonbatista Alberti (Milano: Società tip. de’Classici Italiani, 1804), III: 57. Translation by author. 17 Gaetano Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, Vol. I–IX (Firenze: Sansoni, 1906), I: 154–5. Benvenuto Cellini also praises the use of full size models in his Trattato della Scultura, VI. Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Cordié, Trattato della scultura (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1960). 18 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964), Parta Prima, 52. 19 Milanesi, Le vite, VII: 223; Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, 2: 366.

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20

on the wall. Imitating the use of a template, which could be slid and traced from left to right, it demonstrated how small movements such as tapping and nudging could be employed for speculating on future stone profiles. It also reflects Michelangelo’s pro­ fessed attitude toward approaching sculpture through per forza di levare, by taking away, as each drawn profile could be understood as a kind of removal, from left to right, when imagined inside a block of stone. Employed extensively in his sculptural work, the sequential, frontal removal of stone had the practical benefit of leaving enough stone in place to discover the emergent figure while at the same time carving it, a noticeable departure from his contemporaries, who attacked the block from all four sides.21 In the case of the repetitive profile sketches, each subsequent iteration both removed and relied on the one before it, creating a mediated situation between Michelangelo, the red chalk, and the intonaco surface.

Time of the middle Beginning a story in medias res appears at first like an impossibility, since the chronol­ ogy of a story seems doomed without a clear articulation of what comes first. Equally so, Michelangelo’s reliance on the agency of his materials reflects the paradox of occu­ pying the medias, since its prolonging or enlarging marginalizes both the beginning and end of construction, the two events that normally define an architectural project. In this manner, carving stone or chiseling deeper in search of the perfect profile or the emergent form results in reaching the actual, physical middle, while having no material left at all. It is this impossibility that leads to the importance of developing surrogate or analogical processes of material investigation. By shortening the gap between conception and construction, there is the paradoxical desire to enlarge it by carving out spaces, means, and methods for lingering within it. In the case of the San Lorenzo worksite, the mural drawings provide an optimum site for this to play out, as they are both in the worksite and outside it. As processes unfolding within the worksite, they engaged assistants and in-situ conditions that would otherwise be excluded in deliberations at his off-site workshop.22 On the other hand, the mural drawings designated a specific site outside the normal mode of construction, concerned as it is with beginnings or endings, a place of imagining carving and assembling stones without actually doing so. Michelangelo’s mural drawings show the inherent contradictions of occupying the medias, a position that rejects any attempt to reconstruct a formalized pattern of thought or behavior. In Florence, the architectural precedent on this point is certainly Brunelleschi, who, according to his biographer Manetti, rejected giving instructions to his stone carvers through models and drawings. Instead, he preferred to dictate construction details orally and in piecemeal fashion as the work proceeded, “bit by bit.”23 This can be detected in the mural drawings as well, through prominently displayed notes such as “veni a vedere (come and see),” an enticing invitation to

20 See especially Charles De Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo (Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1975–1980), 202r, 250v, 536v. 21 Carabell, “Image and Identity,” 101–4. 22 Michelangelo maintained an active, off-site worksite on Via Mozza (present day Via San Zenobi). 23 “cosa per cosa,” in Antonio di Tuccio and Carlachiara Perrone, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi (Roma: Salerno, 1992), 124.

192 Jonathan Foote

imagine how the murals could have summoned a dialogue between assistants or even as a message left for Michelangelo himself.24 There is also the presence of a large number of unknown tallies counting materials, days of assistant labor, or piecework, another indication of the generosity of the walls to support the practical activity of the worksite. The typical linearity from design to client approval to execution is so ingrained in architects today that it might be difficult to see how architecture could have pre­ cipitated otherwise. By this common narrative, a project begins with “once upon a time a client needed a building” and concludes, hopefully, with “the client walked away happily ever after.” In between, the architect moves from initial sketches to technical drawings, a process that has become precisely immured in contemporary legal, technological, and financial frameworks. Michelangelo, however, conducted a building site characterized by simultaneity and anachrony, creating a discrepancy, for historians at least, between the order of construction events and the order of events told by the factures and clues left for us to trace. As drawings imagined in medias res, where one has to imagine backwards in order to look forward, the mural drawings are not representative of a stage during a linear progression from design to execution, as “snapshots.” Rather, they are flashes of a dynamic frame-within-a-frame worksite where Michelangelo was operating between the quarries, adjacent worksites, the Vatican, and the scarpellini. The specific task of drawing stones or templates for the windows might start and end chronologically, but the construction of San Lorenzo is narrated through a bi-directional movement of anticipation, looking back, and the future anterior, one that desires no beginning nor end, but the medias.

24 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 115.

21 The function of fiction in fabrication Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, the Italian confabulator Louise Pelletier All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.1 When he passed away on January 19, 1766, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni was a celebrated architect, known as an instigator of neoclassicism in France for his work on the west facade of the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Ever since, scholars have debated his relative importance in this project, whose construction evolved over a span of more than a century in the hands of six architects. Although the nature of his involvement in the construction of this parish church—the largest in Paris, designed to rival Notre-Dame Cathedral—has been the subject of much debate among archi­ tectural historians, the notoriety of the building itself entered popular culture a few years ago for an entirely different reason. It became a prime location for crimes and conspiracies in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003). Brown’s story draws from previous works such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, which recounts the story of the Priory of Sion, a secret society allegedly founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on Mount Zion in 1099, and whose purpose was to protect a secret capable of bringing about the collapse of the Catholic Church—a direct bloodline from Jesus Christ to the Merovingian kings and their descendants. Although Brown’s novel and the pseudohistorical works that inspired it have been deemed to be pure fabrication, there seems to be intriguing evidence to justify the shroud of secrecy surrounding the commission and the unending machinations that have marked the existence of the building since its construction. In 1642, Jean-Jacques Olier, a member the French Catholic secret society known as the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, founded the Society of Saint-Sulpice. Shortly after, he began the construction of a seminary that was to become a renowned hotbed of the French school of spirituality. Since its foundation, the parish of Saint-Sulpice was at the heart of the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the Merovingian kings were originally buried, the dynasty marked by the emergence of a strong Christian culture among the aristocracy in France. In 1645 the architect Christophe Gamard signed the drawings of the new church to be built on the site of an old chapel that probably dated from the ninth century, and which would be dedicated to Saint-Sulpice, a great servant of the Merovingian kings. Digging for the founda­ tions of the new choir started the same year. The young Louis XIV and the princess of

1 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.2.139–40.

194 Louise Pelletier

Condé were present for the laying of the first stone, but the work was interrupted by the troubles of the Fronde (1648–1653), which caused the Prince of Condé to oppose Louis XIV on the absolutism of the monarchy. Absolutism was based on the principles of the superiority of the hereditary monarchy and the divine origin of power. It would become a source of great tension in France during the following century, as many nobles and blood-princes contested the displacement of power from the primacy of the kingdom to the increased sacredness of the person of the king. When Olier passed away in 1657, not even the choir of Saint-Sulpice had been completed, and the first mass would be celebrated only in 1660 in the Chapel of the Virgin, centrally placed on the axis of the nave. While the history of the construction is woven tightly with some of the most powerful families of France at the time—who greatly contributed to its financing, as is attested by the tombs of the Condé, Conti, and Lyunes families that were housed in the crypt of the church until the French Revolution—in 1678 the Parish of SaintSulpice went bankrupt and construction stopped for almost four decades. It started again under the Regency of the Duke of Orleans, who authorized a lottery that was used to finance the erection of the new nave and transept. Construction was resumed in 1719 under the authority of Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gery, the priest of SaintSulpice, and the supervision of yet another architect, Gilles Oppenord. In 1731 when the question of the design of the west facade arose, the vault of the nave and the interior decoration were already completed, but the bell tower set up at the crossing of the transept by Oppenord in 1725 had to be demolished because its excessive weight was compromising the stability of the structure. This unforgivable miscalculation caused Oppenord to be relieved of his responsibility as architect of the project, but he remained as decorator. Yet, one of the most important works of internal decoration in 1729, the restoration of the Chapel of the Virgin, was entrusted not to him, but to a young Italian painter from Florence, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni. Factual evidence about Servandoni’s life is scarce and often contentious. Born to a French coachman from Lyon and an Italian mother, we know that he travelled extensively and before his arrival in Paris around 1724, he spent some time in England where he staged operas in Covent Garden in London and got married to a certain Anne Harriol Roots.2 He came back to England at various key moments through­ out his career, even during periods of great political instability and overt animosity between France and England. He also gravitated around the circle of the Third Earl of Burlington, a Whig courtier known as “the architect Earl” for his work on Chiswick House and other neo-Palladian buildings.3 In Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Whig party favored a strong parliament over the idea of an absolute monarch who could exercise unrestricted political power over its people, and neo-Palladianism became a symbol of this political power that opposed royal absolutism.4 The neo-Palladian influence is not negligible to an understanding of the genealogy that led to Servandoni’s neoclassicism. It similarly signaled a return to the simplicity of nature and the belief that God in his creation had followed simple geometric order. 2 Archives Nationales de France, (MC), ET LXV-469, and Y-10237, dossier Planström (1761), 1–21. 3 Francesco Guidoboni, “Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni: sa première formation entre Florence, Rome et Londres,” ArcHistoR anno I 1 (2014): 29–65. 4 John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963).

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Upon his arrival in Paris, however, Servandoni immediately became involved with a group of British expatriates from the opposing faction, the Jacobites. Associated to the court of James II Stuart, the last Catholic King of England deposed by William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Jacobites took refuge in France in the late seventeenth century. They formed a political movement with close ties to the Tories, aiming to restore the Catholic King to the throne of England. Incidentally, James II Stuart was also King of Scotland as James VII, and the Jacobites are believed to have brought with them the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, thus creating the oldest lodge in France as early as 1689. Most of them settled either in the parish of SaintSulpice or in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where they established their court in exile. At the baptism of his son in 1727, Servandoni chose as godmother the Duchess of Fitz-James, wife of the natural son of James II Stuart, thus publicly acknowledging his personal involvement with the decedents of the Catholic King in exile. Accompanying the Duchess of Fitz-James, the Count of Maurepas held Servandoni’s newborn on the baptismal font. Minister and Secretary of State for the marine and the royal household, Maurepas was closely connected to the theater scene in Paris at the time, and he also happened to be Chief Churchwarden of Saint-Sulpice. The godparents Servandoni chose for his son help draw a powerful line of influence through his career, and his personal connections with influential individuals begin to explain how he first might have been involved with the parish. At the time, Servandoni was known primarily as a painter of imaginary views with picturesque ruins—known as vedute di fantasia—and as a stage set designer for the Paris Opera. Servandoni’s work at the opera had already made a lasting impression on his contemporaries, most importantly on the young monarch, Louis XV, who attended a performance of Phaeton in the fall of 1730. It displayed a Palace of the Sun, in which Servandoni had introduced an important reform in the tradition of stage set design. His technique of “perspective seemed to have given this temple an extraordinary elevation, because despite the smallness of the place, and without having to move any machinery, the decorations were much higher in the back of the theater than in the front.”5 At the same time, Servandoni created the impression of a much greater width on the sides, using oblique perspectives, which gave the illusion that the stage continued beyond interconnecting galleries. The king was so pleased with what he saw that four months later Servandoni was introduced as a member of the Royal Academy of Painting. It is during this effervescent period of artistic activity that a competition for the main façade of Saint-Sulpice was launched in 1730 [Plate 53]. Servandoni’s very first drawing for the west facade shows the regal blazon on the pediment crowning the entrance. At that time, Louis XV—the Beloved, as he was known—was only 22 and still united all his subjects under the hopeful wish that he would bring renewed pros­ perity to the kingdom. Although the massive façade with predominantly horizontal composition did not relate directly to the interior of the building to which it gave access, Servandoni still was chosen for the commission in 1732. When he revised his design for the façade a decade later, much had changed on the political scene in France. Besides Louis XV’s humiliating defeat in the War of the Polish Succession that prevented his father in law, Stanisław I Leszczyn´ski, from ascending to the throne of

5 Henri De Chennevières, Revue des arts décoratifs, Tome I (Paris: Quantin-Éditeur, 1880–1881), 404.

196 Louise Pelletier Poland, the War of the Austrian Succession would result in further embarrassment for the French King, in part due to an excruciating confession about his licentious way of living, which dramatically altered his reputation. Meanwhile, Servandoni was made Knight of the Order of Christ as stipulated through a papal decree issued by Benedict XIV in 1743. M. Languet, Archbishop of Sens and brother of the priest of Saint-Sulpice, presided over the ceremony.6 The Order of Christ was created in the fourteenth century, shortly after the persecution of the Knights Templar, who took refuge in Portugal where the king protected them.7 At that time, the original Templars changed their name to Knights of Christ, thus the Portuguese branch of the Knights Templar is the origin of the Order of Christ. Even to this day, this is still the highest decoration awarded by the Pope. Although the line of Grand Masters of the Knights Templar is believed to have ended with the burning at the stake of Jacques de Molay in 1314, the legend was revived in the eighteenth century by Philippe II, Duke of Orleans. The regent during Louis XV’s minority and one of the principal benefactors who secured financing for the completion of the nave of Saint-Sulpice in the early eighteenth century, the Duke signed, as Grand Master, the famous Larmenius Charter of Transmission. A manu­ script supposedly created by Johannes Marcus Larmenius in 1324, it establishes a direct lineage of Knight Templar Grand Masters from Jacques de Molay all the way to the nineteenth century. Although some scholars believe that the Charter might be a forgery, most agree that the signature of the Duke of Orleans and the subsequent mas­ ters are genuine.8 The Regency of the Duke of Orleans had opened the door to many forms of contestation in France, including the raise of Jansenism that openly opposed the absolute power of the king. Tracing his lineage back to the first crusade estab­ lished the authority of the duke through a fabricated ancestry that emanated from the Primitive Church in Jerusalem, and rekindled the debate between heavenly powers over earthly authorities. According to the charter, Louis de Bourbon-Condé and Louis François Bourbon-Conti eventually succeeded the Duke of Orleans after his death in 1723. As mentioned earlier, the completion of Saint-Sulpice was greatly indebted to the support of the Duke of Orleans under his regency, and the church cemetery con­ tained the crypts of both the Conti and Condé families who also contributed greatly to financing the construction. It is not unreasonable to infer that “Saint-Sulpice benefited from one hundred years of sponsorship by the Princes of the Sanctuary, the Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon-Condé, [and Bourbon-Conti] Knights Templar Grand Masters.”9 Also, given the fact that since its foundation the parish of Saint-Sulpice was established on the land where the Merovingian kings were originally buried, the first dynasty whose power emanated from the Primitive Church, and was sponsored 6 Henri de Chennevières, Revue des arts décoratifs, 433–4 7 In 1307, the King Philip IV of France ordered an inquisition against the Knights Templar that led to their annihilation in 1313. 8 “[The charter] was the work of a Jesuit named Father Bonani, who assisted Philippe II, Duke of Orleans in 1705 to fabricate the document.” George Kenning, Kenning’s Masonic Encyclopedia and Handbook of Masonic Archeology, History and Biography (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003; origi­ nally published in 1878), 108–9. See also J.S.M. Ward, Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1921), 291–2 for a spirited defense of the authenticity of the Charter of Larmenius. 9 Stuart Nettleton, The Alchemy Key, The Mystical Provenance of the Philosophers’ Stone (Sydney: Taliesin Investments, 1998), 376–7.

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by noble families who openly opposed the absolute power of the king, it seems fair to speculate that Saint-Sulpice was intended to become the resting place of the Princes of Christ, competing with Saint-Denis as the necropolis of the Kings of France. The growing fascination with the legend of the Knights Templar in the eighteenth century is further evidenced by a remarkable performance of an optic play produced by Servandoni at the Salle des Machines in 1754, The Enchanted Forest. The optic plays combined Servandoni’s celebrated talent for stage design, greatly influenced by Galli Bibiena’s technique of perspectiva per angolo, and traditional pantomime imported from England. Servandoni’s great accomplishment in these mute spectacles was to elevate scenography to the status of spectacle in its own right. The Enchanted Forest used as its starting point an epic poem by Torcato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered. Inspired by historical events, it tells the story of the First Crusade called by Pope Urban II in 1095 to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, but whereas Tasso’s ver­ sion culminates with the capture of the Holy City by Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099, Servandoni adapted the plot to focus on one specific episode, the moment preceding the taking of Jerusalem by the crusaders. After many failed attempts by Christian armies to enter a forest magically protected by evil forces, Godfrey receives in a dream a divine revelation that only a disgraced crusader called Renauld, expelled after kill­ ing a distant prince, can succeed over the enchanted forest. Whereas Godfrey is the true hero of Tasso’s original epic poem, Renauld, the returning rebel who escaped to evade punishment after killing the son of a monarch, plays a key role in Servandoni’s revised version; but this introduction of a regicidal act is absent from Tasso’s account. Instead, in the initial tale, Renaud fell “victim to a love delirium,” living in Eternal Spring with the beautiful Armida.10 Was the heavenly vision that named Renauld, the killer of a prince, as the only possible savior of the Holy City a veiled criticism of the monarchy by Servandoni, asserting divine power over the terrestrial? In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Jansenists were gaining power in France fighting against the absolutist power of the king. But there is an even more explicit regicide in Servandoni’s story that is also missing from Tasso’s. After other crusaders have failed to penetrate and destroy the enchanted forest, Renauld realizes that as fighting any individual tree will only increase the power of the forest he needs to kill the “King of Trees” for the enchantment to cease. Again the necessity to eliminate the ruler of all trees in order to remove the malfeasance of the infernal spirits asserts the domination of Christ’s crusaders over earthly powers. Furthermore, the perspective technique that Servandoni had brought to the French stage, perspectiva per angolo, implicitly displaced the traditional importance given to the king to a more democratic visual illusion. The absence of a central vanishing point typical of the traditional princely theatres of the previous century, in favor of a more open perspective construction where various planes receded in at least two directions for the benefit of the entire audience, was in clear opposition to a centralized ideol­ ogy. Coincidentally, shortly after the staging of Servandoni’s Enchanted Forest, and long after Louis XV had fallen into public disfavor, Robert-François Damiens made an attempt on the King’s life, the first attack on the life of a monarch in France since the murder of Henri IV in 1610. At around the same time, the Austrian ambassador wrote to Vienna confirming the situation was pervasive: “Public discontent is general.

10 See Torcato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (first published in 1581), Chant XIV, 99–116.

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All conversations revolve around poison and death. Along the Hall of Mirrors, post­ ers appear threatening the life of the king.”11 The same year as the production of The Enchanted Forest, another ephemeral project by Servandoni expressed his growing disenchantment with the powerful, yet increasingly decadent monarchy. In the early 1750s, Servandoni had produced a number of proposals for a square in front of Saint-Sulpice, which would have created a homogeneous ensemble, a perimeter of neoclassical houses. In 1754 to celebrate the laying of the first stone of one of these houses, he designed an ephemeral Triumphal Arch that was the centerpiece of the event. In an absolute monarchy, society is a body of which the monarch is the head, the only decision-making center. The engraving depicting the Triumphal Arch shows a sculpture of Louis XV under the arch, and above his head, an enormous crown five times the size of the king’s head, suggesting the greater importance attributed to the function of the king over the individual [Plate 54]. A barely veiled criticism of the absolutist role of the monarchy, the threatened position of the king, standing still under the imposing symbol of the monarchy sus­ pended by a faint flower garland, is acknowledged in the lower-right of the engraving by a group of onlookers gathered at the foot of the statue. A man is pointing with his sword not to the king but to the huge crown above him—aiming at the institution rather than the king himself—and more precisely to the fickle garland holding the crown, while a woman accompanying him opens her arms as if anticipating the dis­ aster waiting to happen. Not surprisingly, Louis XV withheld funding to the project, and only the one house begun in 1754 and still visible in the northeast corner of the square was ever completed. Servandoni’s ephemeral work, either at the theater or for urban celebrations, tells a story that helps make sense of his political convictions, but also of his public demise and the dwindling of commissions toward the end of his life. The Church of Saint-Sulpice has played a central role as a repository of century-old secrets and political intrigues in many fictional works of literature and a strict aca­ demic historical approach would prevent one from considering following speculative leads. Yet I might venture an interpretative conclusion to this incomplete project.12 The fictional ancestry deliberately fabricated by the Duke of Orleans positioned him as the undisputed torchbearer of the Templar in the eighteenth century, and consequently placed Saint-Sulpice as the primary temple for an egalitarian faith. Unsurprisingly during the French Revolution, while Christianity was suppressed and many places of worship such as Notre-Dame Cathedral and Saint-Denis Basilica were converted into warehouses, Saint-Sulpice was transformed into the temple of Reason where the “Supreme Being” was worshiped. Did Servandoni play any role in provok­ ing events that would ultimately lead to the fall of the monarchy? It is unquestionable that the architect of the west facade of Saint-Sulpice was fascinated with the story of the first crusade and saw himself as a spiritual descendent of the Knights Templar. Moreover, many of his ephemeral projects promoted a critical stand against the abso­ lutist power in France. Anything more would be pure confabulation!

11 Danielle Gallet, Madame de Pompadour ou le pouvoir féminin (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 296, my translation. 12 I pay tribute to the heritage left by Marco Frascari and his inspirational way of approaching historical conundrums.

22 The Laughing Girls

Marc J. Neveu

Though very little has been written about Douglas Darden (1951–1996) his work is well known, mostly for the exquisite handmade monochrome drawings displayed in various exhibitions and for his book Condemned Building, published in 1993. Less well known is that Darden was working on a graphic novel during the final six years of his life. Much bigger in scope than the ten short stories in Condemned Building, the 150-page graphic novel was planned in addition to at least 30 objects. The first dated material is from 1990, and at that time was already described as “an architec­ tural novel” named in various ways, but most often as The Laughing Girls.1 By its very nature, the project questions the relationship between architecture, storytelling, and representation. This chapter will begin to propose that Darden’s particular act of building may yield an alternative mode of architectural agency. In an application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts in 1994, Darden explained the intention of the work: The purpose of this project is to establish a new approach toward communicat­ ing the relationship between the evolution of design and its results. This design project proposes an innovative form of communication, the architectural novel, which examines the relationships between story telling, the process of design, and the designed environment.2 Though similar themes and tactics are present, The Laughing Girls is a very different project than Condemned Building. First, it was always intended as a graphic novel and not as a monograph, treatise, or collection of projects. Next, Darden did not produce any large-scale drawings for the project, similar to those in Condemned Building. The representations rely more heavily on collage than on architectural drawing conven­ tions such as plan and section. While narrative was an integral component in his ear­ lier work, the importance of storytelling in The Laughing Girls is much more evident. Condemned Building shows ten completed projects and no preparatory material is presented. Unfinished and presented in various stages, The Laughing Girls can be read

1 When Darden died in 1996 all of the material in his office was collected and put into bankers’ boxes. Much of that material has been returned to Allison Collins, Darden’s widow. Collins has shared the work with Ben Ledbetter, an architect (and storyteller) based in New Haven, CT, and Ledbetter has graciously allowed me to work with the archive. Much of the material presented in this chapter is based upon previously unpublished archival work. 2 Application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, 1994, unpublished.

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as almost exclusively “in process.” Perhaps most importantly, Darden articulated the intentions of The Laughing Girls in a series of grant proposals. It takes a careful reader to unpack the work in Condemned Building and no process work is shown. In many ways, Condemned Building is a finished novel while The Laughing Girls can be read as an annotated manuscript. As such, The Laughing Girls offers an unusual look into Darden’s working process. Darden was critical of the marginalization of the arts (and architecture in particular) and the alienation of architecture from the public. He attributed this marginalization to the fact that designers and artists rarely share their design process with the public, or even with each other. The intention of The Laughing Girls was to overcome that alienation through storytelling. This project, however, was not the voice of a sole author. It was intentionally collaborative and interdisciplinary. In an undated portfolio titled The Graphic Novel: An Investigation of the Interdisciplinary Design Process, Darden lists an array of collaborators and dis­ ciplines.3 This collaging of collaborators would potentially allow Darden to reimagine the role of the architect and architecture. The format of the graphic novel, according to Darden, allowed for collaboration among all of the disciplines represented in the studio. As well, the doubling of image and text to tell a story inherent to the medium has a long lineage. Images of Greek vases, themselves covered by pictograms that tell a story, are very much present in Darden’s notes for The Laughing Girls. The first iteration of The Laughing Girls was for an architectural competition in the early 1990s. Over the next five-plus years, the project and story evolved. By 1994 a series of short drafts had been constructed, as well as a series of artifacts that included: two laughs modeled in foam, drawings of Helen’s cane, a juicer, and at least two ankle tattoos.4 The most complete version dates from 1994 and includes eight pages of collages of text and image. The story follows three girls—Polly, Cass and Helen—as they travel from Troy, New York to Troy, Greece.5 Polly and Cass are twin adolescent sisters who, after an argument with their parents, move out of their childhood home and begin living in a converted water tower in Troy, New York, with the older Helen, a classics major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as their guardian. Just after moving in, Cass absentmindedly leaves an antique soup tureen on the stove, which causes a fire that destroys the water tower. Helen, who had been sleeping in after a night of debauchery, is forced to jump from the tower and breaks her leg.6 Given the state of the house, the girls decide to move from Troy, New York, to the other, ancient, Troy. En route, the girls travel through Boston where they have their first taste of alcohol and decide to get tattoos. Arriving in Athens, the girls feel a strange sense of déjà vu—the Plaka of Athens reminds them of the forest around Troy. Travelling north to the site of ancient Troy 3 Participants included: Kelton Osborn (Print making), Jeff Dawson (Urban Design), James Trewitt (Furniture Design), Virginia Grote (Ceramics), Andrew Grote (Cartooning and Illustration), Marty Hammond (Computer Graphics), Mark Wilkerson (Industrial Design) and Douglas Darden—Program Director (Architecture). 4 Drawings of the cane, the juicer and the tattoos are in the archive. Additional drawings exist in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts library at Colombia University. The locations of the modeled laughs are not known at this time. 5 Darden consistently refers to Troy, “Greece.” This historical malapropism makes for a better story. 6 Darden included many x-rays of broken legs and various ways of bringing bones back together in the archive. One specific image used by Darden in various collages is described as a “Delayed Union,” which sounds as much like a Duchampian pun as it does a medical procedure.

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the girls begin to feel more and more at home, which makes them giggle and then laugh. In the new Troy, they begin to build a new home, which curiously takes on the characteristics of the girls themselves. As they walk through the house, the house begins to laugh with them. A full 28 days since leaving their parents’ house a double event takes place. Polly and Helen decide to go for a swim; Cass stays home planning to make wine using a juicer that had survived the fire in Troy, NY. Without thinking, Cass plugs the 110-volt juicer (American) into the 220-volt outlet (Greek) at precisely the same moment that Polly and Helen slip out of their clothes and into the sea. Darden concludes the story with the following: A huge spark leaped out of the house while Polly and Helen—still laughing— leaped into the sea. Perhaps the girls’ laughs combined with the spark—no one knows—but when Helen and Polly rose to the surface of the sea, they saw a whole new array of bright islands . . . The islands were all transfigured pieces of Troy, New York. Cass got the last laugh.7 After the conclusion of the story Darden offers the following explanation: This twice told tale of The Laughing Girls from Troy NY is a work in progress graphic novel. The novel is a hybrid construction, image and story. The Laughing Girls is an attempt to approximate Piet Mondrian’s proviso of 1937: The culture of particular form is approaching its end. The culture of determined relations has begun. In toto, thirty-three objects are being designed which interrelate to create a comprehensive story. At the heart of this story is a critique of the thinking which characterizes American design, specifically that which polarizes the human body from architecture, architecture from landscape, and design at large from a choral event.8 Similar to his discontinuous genealogies in Condemned Building, Darden plays with the latent potential of found objects in The Laughing Girls. Each object in a context carries a certain meaning. When the object is removed, perhaps fragmented, and then inserted into a new context, another meaning emerges. The original meaning, however, is never wholly lost. Marcel Duchamp’s (or perhaps R. Mutt’s) Fountain, for example, is both urinal and fountain.9 In a sense, Duchamp’s ready-mades are also “twice told.” Similarly, Paul Ricoeur proposed that all discourse overflows with a surplus of meaning.10 This surplus of meaning is at the root of metaphor, fiction, and 7 Douglas Darden, The Laughing Girls, unpublished graphic novel (1994), 8.

8 Darden, Laughing Girls, 8.

9 The rationale for, and defense of, Duchamp’s most famous readymade, the Fountain, was presented

in the second volume of the surrealist journal, The Blind Man (May 1917). In an article entitled “The Richard Mutt Case,” the anonymous author explains, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.” Most scholars agree that Duchamp was indeed the author. 10 Paul Ricoeur describes surplus of meaning as the residue of literal interpretation. He discusses this idea as well as the issue of metaphor and symbol in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).

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also jokes. A pun works because there exist multiple meanings of words and similar sounding words.11 A collage acts as a visual metaphor and follows Aristotle’s under­ standing of the trope: “the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.”12 So too do many of the artifacts produced and objects collected that surround The Laughing Girls.

Twice-told tales Three stories inform The Laughing Girls; at least one is fictional. The first is a curi­ ous case of mass hysteria reported on January 30, 1962 in Kashasha, Tanzania. An epidemic of contagious laughter broke out at a mission-run girls’ school and contin­ ued for six months. Ninety-five of the 159 students were affected. Laboratory tests, however, found no infectious or toxic evidence. Three girls later came forward and claimed to be the instigators of the laughter. This case is the only fully documented account of such mass hysteria in the twentieth century. In early 1992 Darden made a proposal to travel to the Bukoba district in Tanzania to research the site where this “curious case” took place. In the proposal, he intended to “design a building to con­ tain the schoolgirls’ laughter. I have no intention of designing the project to inhibit or stop their laughter, but rather, I will propose a work of architecture which gives the girls laughter a place to be.”13 Darden travelled to Greece in 1982. While there he visited Monemvasia and met a German woman, Christiane Gollek, who re-named herself “Sophia” on her first trip from her homeland of Germany to Greece. Sophia became quite close to an American traveler, Janice Stechel who, while in Greece, renamed herself “Janus.” The two women were quite close and even thought they might be twins. According to Sophia, “It was as if we were each other’s shadows—not in a bad way, but positive, like in a dream . . . we were sharing each other’s dreams.”14 A decade later, Darden returned and again visited Sophia. In correspondence after the trip, Sophia told Darden a story that resonates with The Laughing Girls. Sophia and Janus hiked to Bassae to spend the night next to the temple to Apollo. They pitched their tent under a large oak tree that sat opposite the temple. Once they had settled in, a lightning storm began. The lightning brought thunder and a severe rainstorm that flooded their tent. To overcome the fear of the storm, the girls began telling each other jokes. Sophia thought that the laughter kept them alive. In another letter, Sophia describes the ritual of the Epiphany (Éπf _  ´ i¡f_)—named by Sophia as the holiday “of the lights”—in which swimmers dive into the sea to collect a cross that has been used to bless the sea (and was then thrown in). In this story, Sophia introduces Carina—a third girl, who was a bit older and acted as both mentor and guide to Sophia and Janus. 11 Darden made a list of his favorite jokes from the movie Airplane. He categorized the various jokes as puns, inversions, and repetitions. 12 Aristotle, The Poetics, in Aristotle, The Poetic; Longinus: On the Sublime; and Demetrius: On Style, translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe (1927; London: William Heinemann, 1932), XXII, 9. The translator further explains that the use of metaphor implies “the power of detecting ‘identity in difference.’” This last phrase is often translated as the “similarities of dissimilars.” 13 Project Statement for Laughing Place, unpublished. 14 Christiane Gollek to Douglas Darden, unpublished letter, October 1982. Darden rewrites the quote in a page of notes summarizing Gollek’s correspondence.

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The third story is Euripides’ classical drama, The Trojan Women. Three girls— Helen, Polyxena, and Cassandra—are involved in the play. In Darden’s version, Polly is the namesake of Polyxena, the most beautiful daughter of Priam, who was sacri­ ficed on the tomb of Achilles. Cass, or Cassandra, the twin to Polyxena, could see the future, but was cursed because no one would believe her. Helen is the doppelgänger for the other Helen who may have caused the Trojan War. In the notes around The Laughing Girls, Darden makes frequent reference to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche blames Euripides’ moralizing tone for the decline of Greek tragedy. Darden, as quoted earlier, saw a similar decline in contemporary design thinking. The Laughing Girls may be interpreted as a rewriting of Euripides’ Trojan Women to promote the Dionysian spirit rather than an Apollonian nature. Given his auspicious birth, Dionysius is often referred to as “twice born” (bp´k μdo¡´l¡n).

Twice-told Troys The Laughing Girls was intended to take place in two places with some transit in the middle. Darden refers to the sites, not only as Troy, New York and Troy, Greece, but also as Troy I and Troy II. This is a small, but important, distinction. There is really one Troy, with two sites. A diagram drawn by Darden outlines the story. Part One takes place in Troy I (New York). Part Two takes place in transit. Part Three takes place in Troy II (ancient). Each part would take place over the course of nine days, with a final day (the 28th) acting as a postscript that returns the novel to the begin­ ning. Each part is nine days long; the three nines plus one give the year: 1999. The 28-day calendar is based on lunar and menstrual cycles.15 Notes throughout the dia­ gram (“shedding the egg,” “re-lining the uterus,” “ovulation,” “releasing the egg”) make a direct connection to pregnancy. In many ways, this project is an affirmation of life, unlike Darden’s meditation on dying in the Oxygen House in Condemned Building. A sectional drawing of a female figure at the bottom of the page maps the vari­ ous parts of the story onto a female body (facing east) and includes the three main characters. Part One includes objects that relate to the feet and the knees, and here Darden described his design strategy as one that would work with fragments. The girls’ house is represented as a collage of parts based on a water tower. A break in the thigh (Helen’s) makes the transition to the next part, both in the diagram and the story. Elements in the second part relate to Helen and to the upper legs or torso, and are identified without establishing a full connection to other parts of the story (a rental car, wine bar, tattoos). In this section, the design process is iterative but does not achieve completion. This is also the section “in transit.” Part Three is, according to Darden, the full embodiment of laughter. The site is referred to as a “laughscape” and their house is referred to as a “Laughing House” [Plate 55].

Twice-told artifacts The representations were not intended to be necessarily projections of built work. Images produced by Darden were more often collages of existing artifacts. For 15 Also present in the archive are planning charts from Planned Parenthood that explain the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM).

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example, the plan of the Hudson River in Troy, New York and an x-ray of a broken leg become a template for Helen’s cane; maps of ancient Troy (themselves a palimp­ sest of constructions over time) give form to ankle tattoos; an image of a water tower in Kaiserslautern, Germany becomes the elevation of the girls’ house in Troy, New York; the hubcaps of an El Camino (a vehicle that is both car and truck) become Hoplite shields. Many other examples exist. The artifact that Darden seems to have studied most was the “found object” of laughter. In 1992 he claimed to have recorded 27 young girls laughing. Three were chosen and named Polly, Cass, and Helen.16 Other visual records include fluoroscopic images and x-rays that were produced while the subject was “chuckling” and “laugh­ ing robustly.” These “laughs” were then modeled in foam. Auditory analysis of the laughing led to “temporal sections” for each of the laughs. These section cuts were translated into three-dimensional form that Darden referred to as “topographies.” While there is no direct mapping of projects onto the laugh track, Darden does, as mentioned above, use the term “laughscape” in lieu of “landscape.” Laughter is also related to the making of a room. According to Darden, “Laughter starts with the space of the body, moves outward to affect a structure, and creates a site for an event.”17 Indeed, the space of laughter informs the section of the girls’ house in Troy [Plate 56].

Twice-told identities In many ways, The Laughing Girls may be Darden’s most autobiographical pro­ ject. Darden spent the 1988–1989 academic year at the American Academy in Rome. While there, he experienced bouts of exhaustion. Returning to Denver after his fellowship, he was diagnosed with leukemia. A friend recommended a book that  described Norman Cousins’ use of laughter to fight illness. Although Darden relied on medical treatment, this approach was influential. While working on the project, Darden noted that his cancer had gone into remission. Darden claimed “the theme of the girl’s laughter was chosen because nothing else makes me proceed in this world with a greater sense of hopeful lightness.”18 Unbearably light, given the context. Darden’s heritage was Greek and his family name derives from Dardanus, who was the son of Zeus and Electra. Dardanus’ grandson, Tros, gave his name to the city of Troy. Dardania thus became Troy. The strait just north of Troy is known as the Dardanelles, a name Darden had fun with in postcards to himself. Priam, the great-grandson of Tros, was the last king of Troy. Among his many children were, of course, Helen, Cassandra, and Polyxena, the namesakes of Darden’s three laughing girls. In an interesting twist, Robert Graves relates the Greek Varvanos (b_  ´ lb_ikn) “burned up” (from the verb b_lb_ ´ πot, dardapto, “to wear, to slay, to burn up”) to the name Dardanus.19 Fire is, of course, a key element in The Laughing Girls.

16 Anna Saporito, the daughter of an architect in Denver, is referenced in Darden’s notes for the project. Polaroid photographs of Anna laughing were taken and used in various collages. She is, most likely, the source of all the girls’ laughter. 17 Application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, 1994, unpublished. 18 Application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, 1994, unpublished. 19 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1955), 89, note 2.

The Laughing Girls

Figure 22.1 House in Troy II collaged over a model of laughter. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins

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206 Marc J. Neveu In his proposal for the Scholar-in-Residence position at the California College of the Arts and Crafts in 1994, Darden makes a specific connection between narrative and identity: The new work on the architectural novel is based on my belief in the necessity of making architecture by folding other disciplines into its inquiry. Through this seemingly circumspect approach the architect can more cogently seek a recommencement with origins. It is through a recommencement with origins that architecture establishes resonant cultural identities. A key component of this recommencement is acknowledging that each of us has a life story, an inner nar­ rative that we construct and which is our identity; that is, the narrative constructs us. To assert the human subject at the center of architectural practice, it is crucial to deepen the correspondence between personal, cultural, and architectural nar­ ratives. The study of myths and stories as part of the act of designing is necessary for the mooring of architecture to our culture. This mooring is further realized by envisaging buildings and designed objects as having the capacity to tell stories about the inhabitants and the places where they reside.20 This interplay of agencies not only affords a potentially rich and grounded reading of place, it also provides a particular experience of selfhood and, by extension, identity. In this way, metaphor is not simply a trope to embellish language, but rather a seman­ tic innovation that holds the potential to re-describe reality. The role of the architect, then, may be the invention of plots by synthesizing the heterogeneity of the world in which we live. This understanding of both place and self may open up the potential of architecture to provide more than shelter. Indeed, when one makes architecture, it is always for another. It is an eminently social act, just like storytelling. This recognition of “the other” is also inherently ethical, leading to a sense of identity and selfhood that is essential to any sense of responsibility. It is clear that Darden understood this to be not only the potential but also the obligation of building.

20 Application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, 1994, unpublished.

23 Mi punge vaghezza, ovvero i misteri del mestiere1 Rebecca Williamson

“Mi punge vaghezza . . .” Marco Frascari said one day, pronouncing the words with the kind of emphasis that made it sound like a citation from a text that any serious reader of Italian literature pertinent to architecture should know. Frascari, for those who do not know him, is an angel of architecture2. Before he became an angel, he produced drawings, words, and actions that helped many of us think about and make architecture in ways we had not done before. Among other memorable advice, he recommended to “choose a tangential topic and work on it in a tangential way.”3 “Tan-GEN-ti-al,” as he sonorously pronounced it, did not sound dismissive, but instead pushed to the foreground an association with tangere (to touch, as in the word tangible), so that the tangent could be defined as much by the way it touched a topic as by its deviation from it.4 What follows is a story about an adventure along such a tangent. Frascari’s provocation set off a search for the source and implications of the phrase mi punge vaghezza, but where to start? In Filarete, Alberti, and the other writers of architectural treatises from the fifteenth century onward? It did not sound like them.5 Not that their writing never veers off the topic of architecture, strictly understood. It most certainly does. The phrase just did not seem to match the qualities of their writing, qualities only accessible by plunging into their books as close to their original

1 The title is untranslatable and frankly constructed of phrases that have become clichés in contemporary Italian, as the rest of the text will reveal. The first part indicates vague longing, to be discussed in greater detail. The second part is a common play on words based on the similarity of the words for mystery (mistero) and craft (mestiere), evoking the acquisition of special knowledge inherent in craft. In Italian architecture is a mestiere: a craft like bricklaying or carpentry. 2 Frascari, Marco, “A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration” in Journal of Architectural Education (1984–) Vol. 44, No. 1 (Nov., 1990), pp. 11–19. 3 He spoke these words in an unrecorded conversation during the early 1990s. 4 A true tangent, in which a straight line and a curve coincide at only one point, is a near impossibility in architecture once it passes from what Leon Battista Alberti calls “lineaments” that exist in the mind to concretization, for in built works the touching parts are made up of stuff that takes up space, thus their connection, however articulated, itself occupies space. 5 Leon Battista Alberti, or, if not him, then another of the treatise writers, would be the first place one would look for a quotation in a conversation of this kind mainly because they had so many curious  things to say. Alberti, when he wrote in Italian, used more earthy words like “più grassa Minerva,” which is untranslatable, but taken literally could mean “the fatter (goddess) Minerva,” and seems intended to convey the relationship between intellect and tactile experience. In any case “Mi punge vaghezza” sounds too ethereal for Alberti, and frankly for any of the other treatise writers.

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state as possible, surrendering to their peculiarities rather than seeking to extract only the parts that lend themselves to clear summaries.6 Vaghezza originally did not convey vagueness in the negative sense with which we might now view it, but instead a constellation of meanings related to wavering movement, mystery, grace, and desire that are not neatly summarized in translation.7 The expression certainly has its place in architectural literature, for example in the writing of the eighteenth-century Turinese architect Bernardo Vittone, conveying his spiritual ardor, or in the more agitated words of the Venetian Giambattista Piranesi, who described architecture as “soda vaghezza,” an untranslateable phrase that conveys the paradoxical combination of wavering and solidity (in the sense of uovo sodo, a hardboiled egg).8 It was surely one or the other or more likely both of these authors that had sparked our conversation, but the mi punge did not sound quite right for either. Pungere relates to the English words “puncture,” “pungent,” and “poignant.” It could convey the poke of a needle, the sting of an insect, or, by extension, the sensa­ tion of a strong smell or an acute emotion, none of these being particularly common notions in architectural writing. Perhaps mi punge vaghezza is an expression derived from literature rather than architecture? Could it have been Dante? Petrarca? Both certainly use the words pungere and vaghezza, but the exact expression does not seem to appear.9 How about Leopardi? He uses vaghezza and its variants often, but not, apparently, that particular phrase, although you, dear reader, are invited to continue the search.10 For days, weeks, years, I looked for the phrase, regularly pleading for a clue so that I could at least narrow it down to a single author or historical period. No matter how much I explored inside the ancient edifice of architectural thought, and among its annexes in other disciplines, there were still more spaces yet to reveal themselves. As time passed, it became easier to get caught up in something else, only to remember, 6 This approach renders its practitioners skeptical of survey courses in the history of architecture based on image identification and other convenient modes of summarizing and mastering the known while avoiding the invitations to wallow in the unknown with which these authors tease their readers. 7 For a literary discussion of the word vaghezza and its associations with desire and indeterminacy, see Giacomo Devoto, Archivio glottologico italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1964), 135–64. 8 Piranesi surely used this phrase somewhere, but how to retrieve it in the pages of his writing to sub­ stantiate the memory? Another bibliographic search is in order. An inversion of the phrase occurs in a mid-eighteenth-century text describing a religious building in the diocese of Milan: “La fabbrica . . . con quella vaghezza soda ne’ finimenti anche esteriori, si conta fra le più maestose. . . .” in Nicoló Sormani, Giornata terza. De’ passeggi storico-topografico-critici nella città, indi nella diocesi di Milano, ad erudizione, e a diporto della gioventù nobile, e massime ecclesiastica, coll’intreccio di varie dissertazioni (Milan: Malatesta, 1752), 139. The term vaghezza appears several times in Bernardo Antonio Vittone’s Istruzioni elementari per indirizzo de’ giovani allo studio dell’ architettura civile: divise in libri tre’, e dedicate alla maestà infinita di Dio Ottimo Massimo (Lugano: Agnelli, 1760). He uses the word to convey desire, such as the desire to learn (8) and also as an equivalent to elegance, with implications of grace and femininity, for example in referring to the Corinthian order (414). 9 For Dante’s use of the word vaghezza, see Inferno, Canto 29, line 114 and Purgatorio, Canto 18, line 144. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia (Milano: Hoepli, 1985) 149, 282. 10 Among multiple examples, line 23 of Canto I of Leopardi’s 1816 Appressamento della morte contains the phrase “Quella vaghezza rimirando fiso” that is vaguely echoed in Piranesi’s soda vaghezza (men­ tioned in note 7) in the juxtaposition of the wavering, indeterminate, and indefinite sense of vaghezza with the firmness of fiso. See Le poesie di Giacomo Leopardi a cura di Giovanni Mestica, (Florence: Barbèra, 1892), 404.

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think about it again, and wonder anew where to look. The specter of bibliographic infinitude that haunts all research loomed. When the World Wide Web appeared, it threw how we search and share into disarray. We use our screens to answer almost any question that occurs to us, to scan texts for words and phrases instead of really reading them, even to peruse old books that we used to have to travel far to find and only touch with cotton gloves and velvet-covered weights, sneezing from the dust. Now the screen shows that “mi punge vaghezza” is common in speech and music. If only the phrase were labeled “obscure” or “archaic.” But no, an abundance of information blocks understanding. The most sober and scholastic-sounding assessment characterizes the phrase as an unattributed “pedantic locution,” today used strictly with a joking tone.11 Normally the expression would be “mi punge vaghezza di.” The poke would be in a direction, toward a goal or object. Without the di it indicates a generalized state: a wavelike, background hum of restless curiosity. The lesson, after all these years, seems to be that it is the pungency or poignancy of vagueness or vagaries that pokes us to pursue whatever it is we are going to pursue, out of passion, not diligence, often not even knowing if there is any goal, purpose, or end. That cryptic and fragmentary bit of a past conversation appears unlikely to yield much more than the story told here, although the search never ends and someone reading these words might know or find the true origin of the phrase, in which case a new chapter of the story might begin. The value in the lesson is instead in the implica­ tion that the right place to look for something you do not already know would be old books. These are exactly the right place to look for the wrong thing because of all the treasures buried there, ready to sparkle again in the light of a new reading. While reading ancient volumes we can smell the past in their pages, and, sensing unfamiliar air, feel the presence of the writer and his entourage. The spine of the book mirrors ours, and the two sides complete the enclosure formed by our arms. The writer becomes a companion in unspoken conversations, invading our thoughts, looking over our shoulders, nudging, judging, and provoking. Such companions from the past yearn for connections to the living, thus continue to draw others into their pages. Nothing pleases them more than when readers commune and debate the words on the pages, aerating them in the process. The lines between present and past blur, as do those between student and teacher. The approach to understanding described here is thus about learning and learning, not teaching and learning, nor even learning and teaching. In Italian, as in English, the words for teaching and learning can be interchangeable in some informal or archaic contexts. Imparare describes both how you learn (impari) and how you “learn me” (m’impari), the latter a colloquial usage in both languages12. Imparucchiare, a word for learning poorly, evokes the act of putting on a wig, as if to hide the baldness of thought. To learn one has to remain bare. Only thus are we able to don the disciplines 11 “Dizionario Treccani,” http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/pungere. Accessed November 5, 2014. As an example of the use of pungere, the same dictionary gives a citation from the Stanze of the poet Angelo Poliziano in which he describes bold nymphs prodding Silene’s timid donkey with a switch. Angelo Poliziano, CXII, in Le elegantissime stanze di m. Angelo Poliziano, e La ninfa Tiberina del Molza colla vita del Poliziano scritta dal sig. abate Pierantonio Serassi (Bergamo: Lancelotti, 1747), 40. For her assistance with the Poliziano text and other obscure terms, thanks to Maria Romagnoli, deemed by Italo Calvino himself to be a brava lettrice. 12 Brambilla, Giuseppe, Saggio di uno spoglio filologico (Como: Ostinelli, 1831), 113.

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and eruditions that ornament architecture.13 This is neither a passive nor aggressive attitude toward learning. It is not about receiving facts, nor about conquering them. Instead, it is a multivalent conversation, in which anyone, past or present, can chime in at any time. The lessons that Frascari left with us increase in value over time through a multipli­ cation of effect. The formula has perhaps to do with his way of using language: often concrete, never obfuscating, but always leaving room for interpretation. For example, he once told a student, “what your detail needs is a piece of bacon.” The oddity of the comment caught the student and those observing the exchange off guard. How could one make sense of such a statement in the earnest context of contemporary design? What does bacon have to do with design or construction? The statement held within it history, science, and craft. He revealed that an oily, pli­ able substance placed between parts would prevent moisture seepage and compensate for differences in how materials react to temperature and humidity. It could, at the same time, stand in for any transition in a joint. Frascari chose the word “bacon” for its everydayness, conscious of the associations the word held in English. No doubt he liked the evocation of the ambiance of the diner breakfast and the connotations of dietary indulgence in an era in which fat was seen as a menace and bacon had not yet had its trendy moment. Later we pondered the relationship between rendering as a way to purify fat and as a kind of drawing and between strutto, or suet, and struttura, structure.14 As with ingegno and ingegnere, or mistero and mestiere, branches of lin­ guistic development rub together and can form new grafts. Important is not the proof of etymology, but the fertility of the mating of ideas. During his last years, as illness began to overtake him, Frascari would share obser­ vations about his experiences and the meaning he derived from them. Just as when, years before, he had broken his wrist and leg in the same accident, and mused about ossa and ossatura, these more recent medical experiences became another source of ideas about physical experience and its implications. The elements of our conversa­ tion had to do with bodily understanding and the errors of the architects, the latter understood both as contemporary architecture’s culpability with regard to the dismal state of medical environments, and in a completely different sense, a medition on the movement and formal implications inherent in the words errare, vagare, mutare: how shapes and paths change, for better or worse.15 13 “Architecti est scientia pluribus disciplinis et variis eruditionibus ornate.” Marco Vitruvius Pollio, De Architectura, The Loeb classical library, 251, translated by Frank Grainger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1931), Book I, Chapter 1, 6. 14 Thanks to Maria Romagnoli for pointing out that strutto, or rendered fat, derives its name from the past participle of the word struggere, which means to melt or liquefy, thus distinguished from lardo, which is a block of intact pork fat sliced thinly and enjoyed as a delicacy in Italy. The themes of various forms of fat recall Alberti’s più grassa Minerva, discussed in note 4. In a footnote to the second para­ graph of Book One of his translation of Alberti’s Della Pittura, Spencer indicates Alberti’s source as the phrase “Agamus igitur pinguiu, ut aiunt, Minerva” in Cicero’s De amicita V, 19. In De Pictura, his Latin version of the text, Alberti echoes Cicero with the word pinguiore, which would indicate plump­ ness. In the contemporaneous Italian text he chose instead the more crass term grassa, reinforcing the association with the substance of fat but also the general meatiness of the Goddess. See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, translated by John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale, 1966), 100. For a discussion of the relationship between pingue and grasso, which are not quite synonyms, see Niccolò Tommaseo, Nuovo dizionario dei sinonimi della lingua italiana (Florence: Vieusseux, 1838), 446. 15 Roughly translated, Marco said: “After six weeks of intensive radiation and chemotherapy . . . where

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Frascari’s implicit reference was to the Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti, a manuscript completed in 1625 by the Sienese doctor Teofilo Gallacini, who sought through analogy with notions of human health to expose the “errors” of architecture in order to avoid their repetition and diffusion [Figure 23.1].16 While Gallacini explicitly compared architectural soundness to the health in the human body, his concerns had mainly to do with practical decisions impacting buildings before, during, and after construction, such as the choice of site and materials, the distribution of loads, the soundness of connections, and the preservation and restoration of existing structures. In Italian errare and vagare are near synonyms. Both imply wandering movement, a deviation from a predetermined path, that could be thought of negatively (the English senses of “err” and “vague”) but that might also have a positive value, akin to the tangential search described earlier, perhaps a not too distant cousin of the dérive (drift) of the Situationists.17 This tension between the sure path and the meander, and between rule and invention, is perennial in architecture. Gallacini’s meditation on architectural erring inspired a particularly fraught display of this tension in a juxtaposition of rigorist diatribe and florid drawings, the drawing hand indulging in rendering visible the very forms that the accompanying written words decry. In his 1767 edition of Gallacini’s text, to which he added illustrations, and his 1771 Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti, the Venetian architect and engraver Antonio Visentini used his own drawings and words to expand Gallacini’s text and pushed his medical analogy further to show certain architectural forms as deformed, even pathological [Figure 23.2]. As Visentini put it, his goal was to bring into plain view the most pernicious errors introduced by the architects of his century, lambasting those who had pursued experi­ ments with form as deforming the beauty and grace of architecture through “bizarre trifling.”18 The illustrative technique Visentini employed, with fragments of architec­ tural details colliding in what we might now call mash-ups, seems intended to demean works in order to prove them malformed, bizarre, and thus erroneous. As severe as Visentini’s judgements were, it is obvious that he took pleasure in draw­ ing every curve.19 Those lines do not dissuade but instead render visible tantalizing transgressions out of which new forms and ideas might be born [Figure  23.3]. Similarly, much of what we call pathology in the human body arises from everyday

16

17 18 19

I lived in a chemotherapeutic nirvana, I found my brain in a phial on the moon. I threaded it back in through my ear. After which, I began to think. I’ve thought a lot about architecture and about the body and how architects operate badly in the current situation. I’ve started to write something using as instruments “memes” and “mirror neurons.” (Marco Frascari, e-mail message to the author dated September 25, 2010.) Note the use of words such as “operate” and “instruments” that indicate a com­ parison between architectural inquiry and surgery. Teofilo Gallacini, Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1767), and Antonio Visentini, Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti. (Venice: Pasquali, 1771). Guy-Ernest Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les Lèvres nues  9 (November 1956); and, in a modified version, in Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958). Visentini, Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, 1. In another endeavor aimed at addressing problems by rendering them visible, Visentini had previously illustrated Giovanni Poleni’s study of the structure of the dome of Saint Peter’s, meticulously recording every meander of each crack. Giovanni Poleni, Memorie istoriche della gran cupola del tempio vaticano: e de’ danni di essa, e de’ ristoramenti loro, divise in libri cinque (Padua: Stamperia del Seminario, 1748).

212 Rebecca Williamson

Figure 23.1 Title page drawn by Antonio Visentini for the first edition of Trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1767). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) In the center of the image the tools of architectural drawing hang from a ring, loosely tied by the cord of a plumb line, an image that anticipates Frascari’s discussion of elegance as an exposed connection or binding (ex-legare). Overlaid upon the tools in a manner reminiscent of the collage-like organization of certain of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s drawings is the image of a rolled sheet of paper on which the title is written. The frame features plant forms that merge in places with the architectural details. The specific construction of the frame, with its juxtaposition of curves and spirals, resembles what Visentini and his associates called rabéschi, a cognate of arabesque in which the implication of Arabic origins is a stand-in for the exotic, with the hint of the feminine and the frivolous not far behind. The image is similar to the forms that Visentini would hold up for ridicule in his continuation of Gallacini’s treatise, the Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al Trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771).

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Figure 23.2 Frontispiece of Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al Trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) In the center of the image a woman seated on a rock holds a compass with which she inscribes a circle on a tablet, her gaze seemingly focused into the distance over her exposed left shoulder, her arm somewhat contorted as her left shoulder thrusts forward. Her image is framed by another circle, this one showing the signs of the zodiac. Cancer is at the top. On the upper right Virgo and on the upper left Taurus are obscured by garlands hanging over the frame. Topping the circle is a form resembling a ribbon threaded through a shell, evoking rocaille, and other figures associated with Rococo decoration, along with more garlands, appear below. Below the zodiac circle, framed by curling forms resembling stylized leaves, sit the words La Perfezione. Are we to read perfection in the simplicity of the circle (which any architect knows is one of the most difficult forms to execute)? What then are we to make of the awkwardness of the figure, the obscuring of part of the zodiac, and the other flourishes around the frame?

214 Rebecca Williamson

Figure 23.3 Montage of architectural details from “P. Pozzi” (Padre Andrea Pozzo, to whom Visentini refers as “architetto biasimato” (blamed or blameworthy architect) in Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti. (Venice: Pasquali, 1771), 41. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) The original images are from Pozzo’s book on perspective drawing for painting and architecture, his Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, with engravings by Vincenzo Mariotti. Visentini shows fragments taken out of their context as illustrations of principles of perspective for the purposes of generating illusionistic paintings. The images at the middle left and top right, labeled n. 2 and n. 4 respectively, are in Pozzo’s book shown as two complete frames placed side-by-side as Figure 100. In addition to truncating each image and nesting them together with others, Visentini has embellished the detailing to intensify the prominence of the flourishes. In his n. 6 he has gone so far as to transform the clearly articulated wings of the angel (Figure 102 in Part II of the Perspectiva) into feathery whorls. Visentini’s commentary describes the images in Pozzo’s book as unworthy of taking physical form (aver corpo) and as “condemned, and to be perpetually condemned, for the great improprieties contained within them.” See Andrea Pozzo Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (Rome: Typis Joannis Jacobi Komarek, 1693 (Part I) and 1700 (Part II)).

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processes of replication and growth that take a novel direction. The danger these processes pose is not in the forms themselves, but in their proliferation, the cases in which cells manage to override the body’s editing process, known as apoptosis, that normally keeps faulty cells from persisting and wreaking havoc.20 Frascari shared his fascination with parallels between architecture and notions of health and illness, themes that continued to animate his conversations as his own health began to fail. With whatever skepticism he may have viewed Visentini’s pro­ ject, he was ruthless against what he saw as the contemporary errors of architects. These were—and remain—never more obvious than in the hospitals and clinics in which he spent so much time during his last years—the supposedly easy-to-clean surfaces that harbor illness, the monotonous light, the lack of qualitative articulation of the spaces, and the oppressive smoothness throughout. Frascari provided a glimpse at how this performance-based approach to building, fine tuned to minimize expenditures and maximize efficiency, increasingly infiltrates our institutional environments and has made inroads into domestic spaces, suffo­ cating sensibility. He understood better than anyone the responsibility to not yield to the pressure to become part of a machine for the production of conformity. By example and provocation, he prodded beyond habits and preconceptions, toward the “meraviglia nel quotidiano,” the miracle/marvel in the everyday.21 Marco Frascari opened the doors for the tangential adventures described here by indi­ cating a mode of searching liable to turn up more than the seeker could imagine find­ ing. As our built environment and educational institutions alike succumb increasingly to the banality of the clinical environments in which Frascari spent so many of his last days, it is ever more important to follow his example, and privilege questioning over answering and invention over certainty, in a constant state of seeking, such that the true pleasures of our mestiere unfold in the process of probing its misteri. E ancora, e per sempre, ci punge vaghezza . . .

20 Pertinent to this analogy is the proliferation of formal variations spawned of the increasing technical ability to generate shapes. This tendency in architecture, called “parametricism” by some, today exists as a nearly neo-Rococo style impacting mostly high-budget constructions in which novelty is a key objective. As automated production makes these forms more feasible as built works, what processes will determine what grows, persists, or perishes? 21 The phrase “l’importante è di trovare la meraviglia nel quotidiano,” which is consistent with Marco’s acts and statements in other contexts, appears in a collage-drawing that Marco dedicated to his wife Paola’s aunt Luciana. It is currently in the collection of the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. The complete text states that: “The phenomenon of thaumaturgic architecture must be investigated. The miracle (meraviglia) is the last category of thought left in the hands of architects. It is a very difficult cat­ egory because we live in a world dominated by an excess of miracles. It is important to find the miracle in the everyday. A weathervane is and must again be a source of marvel.” (Date unknown, translation R. Williamson, 2015.) Thanks to Paola Frascari, Federica Goffi, and Claudio Sgarbi for explaining the con­ text of the drawing and to Claudio for providing an image of the text. In other contexts Marco explained that the excess of miracles could be seen in phenomena such as automatic doors that slide open as one approaches without any effort on our part, or the water that pours from faucets with sensors. In an earlier era these would have been marvelous experiences that we now barely notice and numbly accept as ordinary. The miracle of the weathervane, on the other hand, is in the eloquent simplicity of the device.

24 Confabulatores Nocturni Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twentyodd  orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite) . . . .1 Douglas Darden closed his book, Condemned Building, with an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s famed chapter “This Will Kill That,” placing particular importance on the written word as a portable conveyor of meaning—replacing a static architecture.2 The words of Hugo’s Archdeacon are critical to any discussion involving literature and architecture, seemingly so foreign to one another, for he claims that the two subjects were once the same entity. The theoretical project entitled Confabulatores Nocturni was born out of such ideas and evolved into intertwined dreams that decipher and translate elements of our own artistic conscience, with texture, surface, and shadow serving as letters of a new alphabet. Existing between sunset and sunrise, the premise of Confabulatores Nocturni is that the 11 volumes of illustrations contained in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a comprehensive catalogue of eighteenth-century society, are the visual equivalent to Borges’ 26 orthographical characters, thereby possessing an infinite number of, or 1,001, architectures. By appropriating and recomposing through collage Diderot’s visual catalogue, a series of forms emerged that were identified as places of refuge or perhaps even tombs; they laid the groundwork for what would become an eight-by-eight niche columbarium wall, with each niche holding a tomb or cabanon.3 The columbarium is, in a sense, a library in the form of an upturned chessboard, holding the various cabanons like so many urns. The conversations of the entombed are threaded by the movement of a raven along the path of the elusive knight’s tour.4 Borges attributes to Emerson the saying, “a library is a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead

1 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 54. 2 Douglas Darden, Condemned Building (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 158. 3 The Cabanon was initially introduced to us as a place designed by a hero, Le Corbusier, in Cap-Martin in 1949. It was a place of refuge and, ultimately, a place of rest. To pay homage to others that influenced our work, we proposed a set of cabins that would fictionally construct their own sense of time. 4 The knight’s tour describes a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight occu­ pies every square only once.

Confabulatores Nocturni

Figure 24.1 time[scape]lab, Columbarium, Xerox on clay board, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

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218 Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their pages.”5 Confabulatores Nocturni asks the following question: How might designers invoke a reverence for artistic and literary precedent and engage in a kind of twilight—a realm where dreams and storytelling expand upon existing conventions of architec­ tural thought? The fictitious voices of various historic and literary figures stand as characters in a game of chess and provide a platform from which to operate. Passage to this game begins in the womb, enters the labyrinth, and crosses a threshold—a bridge—to the observatory where one searches for understanding and meaning, for alternative realities. This search necessitates the confessional, and ultimately ends in silence.

Colloquy In his lecture entitled “The Thousand and One Nights,” Borges references men whose profession it was to tell stories during the night—the Confabulatores Nocturni. He writes, “Those stories must have been fables. I suspect that the enchantment of fables is not in their moral. What enchanted Aesop or the Hindu fabulists was to imagine animals that were like little men, with their comedies and tragedies. The idea of the moral proposition was added later. What was important was the fact that the wolf spoke with the sheep . . . or the lion with the nightingale.”6 It was another nightin­ gale, Keats’, that Borges recalled from his childhood, often hearing his father recite the poem. He concluded later in life that animals are “eternal, timeless, because they live in the present” while humans are mortal “because we live in the past and in the future—because we remember a time when we did not exist, and foresee a time when we shall be dead.”7 Our various colloquies serve as a kind of thanatopsis in which specters yearn for immortality. In the cases of Thoreau and Saint-Exupéry, the woodsman and the pilot were able to converse about observations of their separate worlds. Saint-Exupéry, born 38 years after Thoreau’s death, embraced flight, while Thoreau feared the railroad and the telegraph, embracing instead slowness and the qualitative [Plates 57 and 58]. Saint-Exupéry.

. . . there is an expression that if humans and lions were to speak the same language, we would not understand a word. That said, my fellow poet, my life of writing would be acces­ sible and  of much interest to you, but I become the lion when discoursing upon my other occupation, the one in which my wax wings were melted and I was claimed by the sea. The myriad  and ancient dreams of children were, for me, a reality. To scrape the sky . . . for you, a sense of scale is a slow and transcendent process. For me, the Icarian view was immediate and profound, encapsulating the smallness of our world . . .

5 Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1967–1968, edited by Caˇ lin-Andrei Mihaˇ ilescu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3. 6 Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, translated by Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1984), 55. 7 Borges, This Craft of Verse, 98–9.

Confabulatores Nocturni Thoreau. Saint-Exupéry. Thoreau.

Saint-Exupéry. Thoreau.

219

But how expansive the mind . . . in the fractal flower can be found the workings of the universe. Have your past dreams not found you envious of the soaring bird or even the jester-like raven that skirts our wall? Envy hampers the spirit. I have flown with the highest raptors and scampered with the field mouse, all from a state of repose. The tunneling worm fleeing the saturated soil for the surface, and the arc of the jumping trout in pursuit of a fly, are both like men in that they tire, whatever the reason, of their condition. In stillness I am most aware . . . Antaeus and I, close relatives . . . as here you find my cabin rooted in the soil. . . . but to cast a shadow as a gull does along the tracery of foam . . . a shadow that is free from the care of gravity . . . Will the bird ever know the joy found in observing the gentle pace of the woods? Sometimes even the lens of a stagecoach window moves too quickly. It was always the smallness and silence of solitude in which I was permitted a glimpse of the soul of Nature, and, in turn, my own. [Plate 59]

Epilogue In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle wrote that “tangible products” are said to be reduced to the categories of “Cities . . . Fields . . . and Books” with the worth of books “far surpassing that of the two others.”8 The intent behind citing this passage emerges not from being partial to the written word, but to establish a sympathizing companion to Hugo’s more frequently cited chapter “This Will Kill That,” and out of an optimistic view that the transformative power of literature will inspire architecture and expand upon traditional practices of imagining and representing space.

8 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman and Hall, 1831), 119.

Index

abduction 9, 149, 149n36 accident 6–7, 9–10, 56, 59, 66, 118, 127

Actæon 128–29 Adam 42, 73, 120

Adam’s House in Paradise 65

Adams, M. H. 147–48 adaptation 4

Aesop 2–4, 3n13, 6,10, 134n10 Agamben, Giorgio 113

Alberti, Leon Battista 3, 71n3, 89, 134–35,

151, 157, 173, 178n15, 186, 190, 207,

207n3, 207n4, 210n12

Algorithm 25, 108, 114, 129, 134n11

Alhazen 92

Ali Baba 15, 18; Ali Baba and the Forty

Thieves 15; see also Arabian Nights

anagogy: anagogic 27, 73, 91, 93, 160

Androgyne 120

Angels 73, 77, 85, 131; sea angels 132

annunciation 97, 100–01, 126, 132;

Annunciation (Francesco del Cossa) 132;

Annunciation to Zacharias (Domenico

Ghirlandaio and Workshop) see

Zacharias

Apologi Centum 3

Arabian Nights (A Thousand and One Nights, Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp) 15, 22n32, 15, 147, 147n24

Aragon, Louis 113

Architect’s Data 8

architectural drawings 9–10, 27, 174, 176,

177n14, 180, 184

architecture parlante 163

architecture: Baroque 60, 109; “non-trivial”

2, 25; Norman Gothic 14n5

Architecture: essay sur l’art (Étienne-Louis

Boullée) 47

Aristotle 24n3, 42n16, 56–7, 108–09, 142,

144, 202, 202n12

“as if” 9

Augustus ix, 98, 135, 161

aura 18, 21

autism: autistic 25

Babel 52, 107n2; Tower of 76n22 Bachelard, Gaston 86, 86n21 bacon 210

Barthes, Roland 1

Bastide, Jean-François de 8

Bely, Andrei 31, 33n10, 35, 36, 36n19, 37,

115

Benjamin, Walter 2

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 6

Bertoli 135

Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève 111

Biondi, Grazia 120

biscuit 15–16 bizarre 211

Blondel, Jacques-François 111

Book of Changes (I Ching) 28

Borges, Jorge Luis 124, 216, 218

Boullée, Étienne-Louis 47, 112

Boyd, Brian 1n3, 4n16 breast 42, 117, 120–22, 180

Brion 178; Brion cemetery chapel 173, 180;

see also Scarpa

Brodsky, Joseph 7

Bronze Horseman 31–3 Brown, Dan 193

Brown, Denise Scott 151, 151n1 Brunelleschi 73, 191, 191n23

Bucharest, Romania 80–1, 83–84 Buddhism 68, 70

butterfly 135, 135n13, 137

cabanon 216, 216n3 Caesar Augustus 135

Cairns-Smith, Graham 13n1 Callimachus 8, 141–42, 144, 149, 189

Calvino, Italo 46, 72, 74, 76, 78, 94,135,

176, 179, 179n18, 176n12, 209n10

Camillo, Giulio 127

Capri 152–56 Carlyle, Thomas 219

Carver, Raymond 5

Casey, Edward 55n1 Castor 124, 128–29

Index catalepsis 123n1, 125–27, 125n13, 129

cattleya 17, 21–22

ceiling 6–7, 71–9, 87, 95, 178–79

Cerberus 129

Cerio, Edwin 153n6, 154–55, 155n16

Chaux 112

Chevillard, Éric 79

chiasmus 4, 124, 130n25, 181

Chomei, Kamo no 66, 66n5

choˉra 97, 174n3

Cicero 42, 148, 210n12; ciceroni153

Clark, Andy 7n20

clay 1, 6, 13–18 13n1, 14n5, 14n9, 14n9,

16n13, 97, 144

coincidentia oppositorum 125

collage 9, 199–200, 200n6, 202–03, 204n16,

212, 215n19, 216

Colonna, Francesco: see Hypnerotomachia

Poliphili

columbarium 216

Combray 15–18

concinnitas 49

concordance 7, 56

Condemned Building 199–201, 203, 216; see

also Darden

conditioning 25–7; classical 25; operant, or

instrumental 26

confabulation 2–7, 86, 124, 173–74, 176,

184

configuration 115

contemplation 71, 73, 102, 109, 149

contrapposto 60

Corbin, Henry 91

Corinth 142

Corinthian 8, 25, 122, 141–42, 189, 208n7;

Column 8, 25, 122, 142, 208n7

corner 21, 23

counterfactual 3

Coutts, Howard 14

Coyne, Leila 13, 13n1

crab 134–35, 135n13, 141, 149

Cret, Paul 61

Croce, Benedetto 151

Culverwel, Nathanael 148

Cupid 4, 95

da Ferrara, Giacomo Andrea 118, 118n1

Daedalus 118, 122, 167

dal Poggetto, Paolo 185, 185n3, 188,

188n9

Damasio, Antonio 24n3, 180, 180n20

Dante Alighieri 60, 72, 99, 208, 208n8

Darden, Douglas 9, 24, 199–204, 199n1,

200n3, 200n5–6, 202n11, 202n14, 204n16, 206, 216

Dasein 113

Daum, Auguste and Antonin 22

221

De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking 73n12, 96n9; see also Marco Frascari

De natura deorum 42

Dead of Night 124

decor 109–110; decorum 57, 109

Decroux 169

Dehiscence 123

del Cossa, Francesco 132

Depero, Fortunato 152–54

Der Städtbau [City Planning According to

Artistic Principles] 131; see also Camillo Sitte

Dérive 211, 211n15

Descartes, Rene 109

Diana 128–29

Diderot 216

Dinocrates 7

Diognetus 8

djinn 125, 125n14

DNA, Deoxyribonucleic acid 13

Dostoevsky, Fyodor : Crime and Punishment

31, 34

drawing 44n24, 83, 89, 96, 135, 160–61,

173–84, 177n14, 182n24

drawings: anagogic 27, 73, 91, 93

dream 4, 8, 47, 72, 76, 86, 97, 119, 122, 124,

165–70, 179, 202, 216

Duchamp, Marcel 201, 201n9

Duke of Orleans 194, 196, 196n8, 198

Duomo 120, 184

Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 108, 114

earth 13–14, 14n5121, 17–18, 124, 168;

earthquake 14n7, 66, 69, 69n8

Eavesdropper see Nicolas Maes

Eco, Umberto 141, 141n3, 145, 145n15

Eisen, Charles-Dominique-Joseph 141, 145,

148–49 Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing 2n6, 25–26; see also Marco Frascari Eliade, Mircea 121

emblem 57, 95, 131–32, 135

emplotment 79, 112

Enchanted Forest 197–98; see also

Servandoni

Enlightenment 3, 9, 110–11

enthousiasmos 145

epiphany 4, 126–30

Erasmus, Desiderius 38, 135

Erechtheion 109

Eros 10, 125, 125n13–14

errors 175n8, 190, 210–11, 215

etymology 210

eudaimonia 160, 163, 170

Euripides 130, 203

exaptation 127–30, 127n17

222 Index

exempla 189 “expanded” mind 7n20

Greece 13, 95, 161, 200, 200n5, 202–03 Guarini, Guarino 110

fables 2–4, 6, 94, 99–100, 102, 218 fabula saltata 162 fabulation 44n24, 124, 126 facts and fictions 174, 176 factum 46, 124, 130, 175 facture 27, 87, 186, 192 Falloppia, Gabriele 120 Fascism 81, 151, 156, 159 Fengshui 25, 27–8 Festina Lente 131–32, 134–35, 134n9–10, 137–40 Ficino, Marsilio 99, 147 fiction 3, 6, 8–9, 37, 56, 73, 76, 111, 113, 124, 174–75, 175n8, 183 figures of speech 5 Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino) 8, 72, 100, 207 Finley, Robert 14, 14n7 fire 1, 10, 16, 22, 183, 204 First Crusade 196–98 Florence Italy 18, 22n32, 73, 95–6, 98–101, 135, 151, 185, 191, 193 folklore 81, 85 Fondazione Querini Stampalia 46 France 9, 14, 18, 21, 22n32, 110, 148, 193–98 Frascari, Marco 2, 2n6, 7, 24–9, 64–5, 91, 94n3, 123–26, 134–35, 139, 160–61, 161n3, 173–74, 176, 180, 183, 183n28, 198n12, 207, 210–15, 210n13, 215n19 fresco 6, 71, 73, 76–7, 95, 98 Furetiére, Antoine 147 Futurist: Futurists 152–54, 156

Hall, Edith 162 health 49, 71n3, 211, 215 heaven 71–3, 71n1, 76n22, 77, 77n28, 97, 125, 132; sky 71, 71n1, 72–3, 77, 132 Heidegger, Martin 81, 107, 113 Hejduk, John 6 heliciculture 139 Heraclitus 120, 124 Hermaphrodite 165 hermeneutic(s) 95, 107, 107n2, 114–15, 144 Hermes 95, 127n18, 168 Hesiod 43n21, 99, 125, 125n13, 162 Hillman, James 78 Hoffmann, Josef 152–53 homesickness 81, 86 homo fabula 1 Huizhou, China: Hongcun, 24, 27, 29–30 Horace 94, 99, 163, 185–86 hospital 71, 74–8, 182n24 house 8, 28, 56–7, 64–70, 68n7, 69n8; housing 65–6, 69–70, 152, 159 Huang, Han 28 Hugo, Victor 3, 6, 216, 219 humanism: humanist 38, 95, 97–8, 100, 123, 126 hypnagogy: hypnagogic 16 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 8–9, 94n3, 135; 165n25

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 144 Gallacini, Teofilo 211 Gallé, Emile 14, 14n5, 14n9, 18n19, 22n30, 22n32 Gamard, Christopher 193 Gastronomy 49 Gates of Hell 60–1; see also Auguste Rodin Gellius, Aulus 134–35 Gemüt 114 Gender 117, 122 geomancy 27; geomancer 28–9 gesture 57, 59–60, 78, 86,102, 107, 113, 160–70 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 95–102, 97n10 Gleick, James 13n1 Gogol, Nikolai 31, 33–4, 37 Goya, Francesco 165n25 Goodman, Nelson 2 Gramsci, Antonio 159 graphic novel 9, 199–201

Ibn Arabi 91 identity 29, 63, 65, 69, 83, 88, 129, 144, 148, 151–52, 202n12, 206 Illiad 185 image: psycho-physical hybrid 24; image/ poem 9 imaginary figment 174–75; imagination: somatic 4 immure 8, 121, 192; immurement 121 imparare 209 in medias res 185–87, 191–92 infra-ordinary 74,76 ingegnere 210; ingegno 210 ingenium 125, 145, 147 inhabitation 80, 84–5, 160 insegnare 209 instrument 25–6, 41, 66–7, 69, 72, 76, 85, 94, 118, 108–110, 210n13; instrumentality 123, 125, 116 interdisciplinary 200 intonaco 188, 191 invisible 72, 76, 83, 85–6, 89, 91, 93, 99, 102, 123, 129, 131, 160–61, 166–67 istoria 95, 97, 99–100, 114, 186–87, 190 iteration 190–91, 200; iterative 26, 203

Index Jakobson, Roman 123, 125

Janus 97, 165, 202; Janus/Dianus 129

Japan : Japanese 15–16, 21, 64–70, 68n7

Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-Édouard see Le

Corbusier

Jentsch, Ernst 124, 124n4

jokes 120, 202, 202n11

Joyce, James 55, 55n1, 115

Kahn, Louis 3

Kant, Immanuel 145

Kearny, Richard 114

Kindergarten Chats 8; see also Louis

Sullivan

Knights Templar 196–98

knot 88

Labrouste 111

Labyrinth 4–5, 7, 10, 122, 168, 218

Lacan, Jacques 126–27, 129n22

Laughing Girls 199–204

laughscape 202–04; laughter 203–04

Laugier, Marc-Antoine 8, 65, 141, 145, 148

Laurentian Library 185, 187

Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas 111–12

Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-

Gris) 8, 51, 65, 131, 131n2, 138, 138n24,

141, 149–50, 182n24, 216

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 111–12

Leonardo da Vinci 118–19

Leopardi, Giacomo 208, 208n9

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 24; and The Raw and

the Cooked 24

Levi, Carlo 158

light 87, 90–3

lines 97, 100, 168–70, 173–74, 176–78,

177n14, 181, 183, 185, 189

Liotard, Jean Michel 148

Lippi, Filippino 98

Locke, John 144

Lodoli, Carlo 3

Loos, Adolf 8, 138

Loraux, Nicole 129, 129n24, 130

Louis Pasteur 141, 148

Louis XV 195–98

Lucian 163

Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice

91, 91n14; see also Marco Frascari

Lyell, Charles 14, 14n7

Lyotard, Jean-François 24

macaronic 6, 8, 38–41, 39n3, 43n21, 44,

44n24, 94n3, 170; macaronica 38

Maes, Nicolas 56–7, 60, 165n25

magic 6, 120, 123, 126–27, 161, 216

Malaparte, Curzio 152,156

Malebranche, Nicolas 109

223

Manole, Mastro 121

manus oculata 169

Marchi, Virgilio 152–54

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 153

mask 111–12, 161; Mask of Medusa 6

materials 180, 186–87, 191–92

mathemata 109; mathematization 114;

mathesis 109

memory 3, 6–7, 42, 46–7, 51, 55, 59, 72, 83,

86, 89, 113, 127–30, 160, 208n7

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 24, 114, 123,

126–27

mestiere 207n1, 210, 215

meta-narrative 2

metalepsis 125–27

Metamorphoses see Ovid

metaphor 49, 71–3, 87, 89, 100, 102,

123–26, 148, 183, 201–02, 201n10,

202n12, 206

metis 134–35

Meton 167

metonymy 123–26, 125n15, 128

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

95, 185, 187

mimesis 6, 8, 93, 163, 166; mimetic 109,

160–62, 172

mise en abyme 39, 44–5

mistake 183

mistero 207n1, 210

modani 189

Modernology 69–70

Moholy-Nagy, László 141

monarchy 194, 197–98

monster 98, 132; “monsters of architecture”

124; Monsters of Architecture:

Anthropomorphism in Architectural

Theory 37; see also Marco Frascari

Moro, Duke Ludovico il 118

Mother Goose 4

mural drawings 185, 187, 191–92

Muses, the 39–44, 43n21, 147

Mussolini, Benito 81, 151

Mutina 120

Nabokov, Vladimir 31, 36–7; Speak, Memory

31, 36

narrative 1–2, 4–9, 15, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 60,

71, 74, 87, 108, 111–12; grand see meta­ narrative

neo-Palladianism 194

Neufert, Ernst 8

neurology 174

neuroscience 24, 125

Nevsky Prospect 31, 33–6

New York City, USA 80, 200–01, 203–04

Nietzsche, Frederick 203

Notre-Dame de Paris 6

224 Index

objets à réaction poètique 141, 149

Ordonnance 110

Olier, Jean-Jacques 193–94

Oppenord, Gilles 194

ornament 6, 36, 88, 97, 109, 154, 209

orosi 87–93

ossatura 210

Ottawa, Canada 74, 76

Ovid 128; The Metamorphoses 41, 99–100

Pagano, Giuseppe 156–8

Palaestrio 168

palintonos harmonieˉ 124, 126

Palissy, Bernard 14n5

Palladio, Andrea 47, 118n1

Pane, Roberto 155

pantomime 8, 160–5, 197

paradox 30, 114, 123, 128, 134n10, 153,

163, 191, 208

Pasolini, Pier Paolo 159

Pavlov, Ivan 25

Peirce, Charles Sanders 149

Perdix 167

Perec, George 75

Performance 25, 96, 99, 145, 160–3, 165

Perrault, Charles 110–2, 143

Persia 7, 87–9

perspectiva per angolo 197

Petrini, Carlo 139

phallic 57, 119, 127, 129

Phenomenology of Perception see Maurice

Merleau-Ponty

Philo of Alexandria 94

phroneˉsis 108

phýsis 145

Pindar 3

Piranesi, Giambattista 208, 208n7, 208n9;

Carceri 8, 127, 212

plankton 131–2, 137

plastic 8, 109, 174; plasticity 16

Plato 42, 99, 109, 128, 145, 147, 149, 168

Plot 7, 31, 34–5, 55–8, 76, 97, 117, 161, 197,

206

poetics of materials 6

poiesis 6, 109, 123, 125

Poliziano, Angelo 97–9, 102, 209n10

Pollux 124, 128–9

Polly, Cass and Helen 200–1, 203–4

Polykleitos 169

Polymnia 162–3, 165–9

Ponti, Gio 159

Potta 120

pottery 13–4,18

Pozzo, Andrea 214

praxis 5, 26

prefiguration 115

Prince of Condé 19

Proclus 99

proleptic 44, 63; prolepsis 59

promenade architecturale 11

proprioception 7

Proust, Marcel 13, 14n5, 15–9, 20–2

Prytaneion 129, 128n24, 130

pun 200n6, 202, 202n11

pungere 208, 209n10

puppet 25–6, 169; puppeteer 25

Pushkin, Alexander 31–4, 31n1, 37

Pythagorean 90n11, 111, 162

Quaroni, Ludovico 152, 157–9

quarrel 66, 181

Rabelais, François 39n5, 44, 174

reader 3, 5, 9, 10, 92, 148, 177, 186, 200,

207–9, 208n5

recto and verso 97, 117

Redentore, il 47

refiguration 115

Remembrance of Things Past 17n16

Ricoeur, Paul 7, 55n1, 55–6, 107n2, 114–5,

145, 201, 201n10

Ridolfi, Mario 159

Rodin, Auguste 58–9, 60, 63, 165n25, 168;

Rodin Museum, Philadelphia 58

Rorstrand 14

Rossi, Aldo 47

Rousseau 112

Ruskin, John 7, 19, 165n25

Rykwert, Joseph see Adam’s House in

Paradise Saint Petersburg 31–2, 36–7

Saint-Exupéry 218–9

Samonà, Giuseppe 46, 159

San Giorgio Maggiore 47

San Lorenzo New Sacristy 185

San Sebastiano 181–3, 182n24

Santa Maria Del Fiore (Florence) 73

Santa Maria Novella (Florence) 95, 97–8,

101

Scarpa, Carlo 46–7, 173–9, 180–4, 182n24,

182n25

Scarpellini 187–8, 192

scenography 197

scent 19, 85, 101

Scott, Sir George Gilbert 152

sea angel 131–32

secret 15, 36–7, 83–4, 89, 95, 97, 99, 100,

102–3, 193, 198

selfhood 206

Semiotic Society of America 124; semiotic(s)

5, 43–4, 65, 123

sensory 6, 26–7, 30, 55, 65, 68, 70, 110,

144

Index Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò 193–8; see also The Enchanted Forest shadow 16n13, 49, 55n1, 58–9, 62, 87, 89, 90–3, 92n17 Shakespeare 145 Sheela-na-gig 120 Siena 71, 76–8 silence 57, 94–7, 94n3, 99, 100–02, 160, 163, 218–9 Simactæonides 127 Simonides of Ceos 127–9, 129n24, 130, 130n30, 163 Sitte, Camillo 8, 131–2, 135, 137–9, 140 situation 3–4, 56–8, 63, 65–6, 68–9, 80, 109, 111, 134, 137, 149, 160, 167–9, 181, 191, 197, 210–11 sketch 47, 57, 70, 80–5, 117, 134, 137, 163, 168, 173, 178, 185, 188, 190–2 Skinner, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) 26 sky 17–19, 22, 58, 81, 86, 90, 97, 137, 140 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters see Francesco Goya snail 131–5, 131n2, 137–9, 140 Socrates 3, 125n13, 147 Solomon, Richard 26 sophia 108, 145; Sophia 202 Sorel, Albert 19 spolia 61, 63 Steinberg, Saul 7, 80–6, 174–5, 187 Stimme 113; Stimmung 113; Stimmungen 114 stimuli: environmental 25 The Stones of Venice 7; see John Ruskin storytelling 1–6, 9, 25, 27, 29, 31, 51–2, 70, 71–4, 76–7, 79, 96, 109, 151, 173, 183, 199, 200, 206, 218; formative 27 strutto 210, 210n12; struttura 210 subjunctive 9 Sullivan, Louis 8 supersymmetry 126–7, 129, 130, 130n25 symmetria 109; symmetry 41, 59, 89, 95, 126–7, 129, 163; symmetrical 62, 97, 169 synesthesia: synesthetic 49, 110 tangent 207, 207n3; tangential 207, 211, 215; tangere 207 Tasso, Torcato 197 Tati, Jacques 74, 77 Taut, Bruno 64, 64n1 Tavern of Crossed Destinies 46 Teatro del Mondo 47 techné 108–9, 112, 124, 126, 169; techne­ poiesis 8, 109 technology: construction 72; technological tools 26 Tell-the-Tale Detail 64n2, 71n2, 124n5; see also Marco Frascari templates 189, 190, 192

225

Tepe, Göbekli 1n4 theater 36, 162, 166, 195, 198 Thecosomata 131 theoria 108–9 Thinker 58–62, 62n25; see also Auguste Rodin Thompson, Evan 114n18 Thoreau, Henry David 65, 218–9 Thorndike, Edward 26 threshold 5, 57, 61, 85, 87, 89, 93, 95, 165–6, 168, 170, 188, 218 Timaeus 42–3, 168 time: chronological 8; cyclic 8; metrical structures of 8; temporality 8, 96, 124 topographies 204 topos 39, 113 Trismegistus, Hermes 165 Triumphal Arch 96, 198 Trojan Women 203 Troubadour 183 Troy 4, 200–5 tucheˉ 149 uncertain 4, 122, 165 unknowability 15, 17 vagare 210–11; vaghezza 207–09, 207n4, 208n6, 208n7, 208n9, 215; vagueness 208–09 Vanbrugh, Sir John 6 Vanvitelli, Luigi 128 Vasari, Giorgio 73, 98, 135, 190 Vecchietta, Lorenzo 76 vedute di fantasia 195 Venice 7, 18–9, 22n32, 46–7, 91, 165, 174, 181–2, 182n24, 182n25, 212–4; Venetian 3, 7, 18, 47, 91, 155, 171, 208, 211 Venturi, Robert 151 Venus 95, 97 Vernacular 121, 151–9 Versailles 4 Verum 46, 124, 130, 175; verum ipsum factum 46, 124, 130 Vesely, Dalibor 114 Vico, Giambattista 71n1, 124–9, 174–5, 175n8 Viel de Saint-Maux 112 Vienna 138–9, 197; Vienna Ringstrasse 132 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 8 Virgil 15, 99, 102; Virgilian 15 Virgin Mary 95 Virtue of Architecture 99n14; see also Marco Frascari Visentini, Antonio 211–15, 211n17 Vitruvius 2–3, 7, 65, 101, 108–9, 110–11, 142–3, 161, 163, 170; Vitruvian 73, 112, 118, 151; Vitruvian Man 118

226 Index Vittone, Bernardo 208, 208n7

Voltaire 147–8

volgare 38

Wajiro, Kon, 64–8, 68n7

Wallander, Alf Vase and a Maiden 18

Walton, Kendall 144

Warburg, Aby 96

Watermark 7

“We make architecture, but architecture

makes us.” 24

Wiesel, Elie 1

Williams, William Carlos 9

Window 3–7, 3, 18, 22–3, 58, 68, 85, 87–9,

90–3, 173–7, 183, 185, 188–9, 188n9,

190–2, 219

world-building 9; world-making 2, 26, 49,

173

Yates, M. T., Reverend 27

Zacharias see 96–100

Žižek, Slavoj 125, 127n17

Zumthor, Peter 113

Plate 1 Marco Frascari. Architectural Embodiment. © Paola Frascari

Part I

Architecture of stories

Plate 2 Marco Frascari. Architectural Storytelling—Cantastorie. © Paola Frascari

Plate 3 Algot Erikson, “Vase with Arum Leaves,” 1897, porcelain. Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm. Photograph courtesy of Noël Allum

Plate 4 Charles Lyell, Frontispiece, Temple of Serapis, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830). Smithsonian Libraries/Open Library

Plate 5 Emile Gallé, Geology, 1900–1904, with details. Image courtesy of Musée de l’École de Nancy. Photograph by Nick Williams

Plate 6 Royal Doulton, The Arrival of the Unknown Princess. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry

Plate 7 Royal Doulton, Ali Baba. Courtesy of Replacements Ltd., Greensboro, NC.

Plate 8 Agathon Léonard, The Scarf Dance, biscuit figures, 1900. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Plate 9 Alf Wallender, Vase and a Maiden, 1909 Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Noël Allum; Emile Gallé, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1888–1889, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images

Plate 10 Emile Gallé, Carp Vase, 1878. Musée du Verre et du Cristal, Meisenthal, France. © Yvonne Fleck

Plate 11 Emile Gallé, White Water Lily against Sky-blue Glass, two sides. Photograph courtesy of James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine

Plate 12 Emile Gallé, Cattleya Vase, 1900, two sides. Photograph courtesy of Kitazawa Museum of Art, Japan

Plate 13 Emile Gallé, L’Orée des Bois, 1902 [left]; Emile Gallé, Flowers and Woodland, 1895–1900 [right]

Plate 14 Auguste and Antonin Daum, Birds in Snow. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry

Plate 15 Marco Frascari. We Make Architecture, But Architecture Makes Us. Illustrated in Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing (London: Routledge, 2011). © Paola Frascari

Part II

Stories of architecture

Plate 16 Marco Frascari. Stairs and Drawing. © Paola Frascari

Plate 17 View of Dublin. Photograph by author

Plate 18 Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper, (1657), oil on canvas. Dordrechts Museum (Inventory number: 953/135)

Plate 19 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author

Plate 20 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, (1880 [cast in bronze, 1924]), Philadelphia. Photograph by author

Plate 21 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author

Plate 22 Wajiro¯ Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida’s Modernology. Comprehensive illustration of the house-hold of a newly-married couple. © Kon Wajiro¯ collection of Kogakuin University

Plate 23 Detail of the Last Judgment; fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari on the inside of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (1568 started) Reproduced with the permission of Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Alinari Archives, Florence

Plate 24 Still frame from Playtime (1964–67), Jacques Tati. © Photofest NYC

Plate 25 The Founding of Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, Lorenzo Vecchietta, ca. 1441. © Federica Goffi

Plate 26 Domenico di Bartolo, Virgin of the Cloak. Santa Maria della Scala, Old Sacristy (1444). © Federica Goffi

Plate 27 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood house and courtyard in Bucharest, from a journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Plate 28 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 × 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Plate 29 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor, gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 × 73.7 cm. Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Plate 30 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran (c. 1710s–1900s). Courtesy of Parsa Shirazi (left), Azad Koliji (right), and Ganjnameh Research Center, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran (plan Drawing)

Plate 31 Window patterns drawn by Mirza Akbar, late eighteenth century. © Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Indian and South-East Asian Section, MS no. 44

Plate 32 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran. Left: The window from inside offers a view opening to the garden outside and depicts an allegorical garden on the surface of the screen Right: By grouping and associating certain forms in the geometric pattern, the overall appearance of the girih window becomes analogous to a garden drawn abstractly. © Azad Koliji and Hooman Koliji

Plate 33 The Annunciation to Zacharias (lower panel), and Zacharias Names the Baptist (upper panel) Domenico Ghirlandaio and Workshop, 1490, Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence

Part III

Stories of theory

Plate 34 Marco Frascari, The Door of Theory. © Paola Frascari

Plate 35 The first story. © Claudio Sgarbi

Plate 36 The second story. © Claudio Sgarbi

Plate 37 The third story. © Claudio Sgarbi

Plate 38 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Diana and Actæon. 50 × 73 cm, oil on wood, c. 1518, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Wikiart, Visual Art Encyclopedia

Plate 39 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in March 2014, restaged August 2014, #1. Photographs © Lisa Landrum

Plate 40 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in March 2014, restaged August 2014, #2. Photographs © Lisa Landrum

Part IV

Practice of stories

Plate 41 Marco Frascari, Aristophanes’ Confabulation. © Paola Frascari

Plate 42 Marco Frascari. Scarpa’s Confabulation. © Paola Frascari

Plate 43 Carlo Scarpa. Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and perspective. NP 2437r. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 44 Diagram by author over Brion cemetery chapel floor plan drawing (NP 2437r, © MAXXI)

Plate 45 Carlo Scarpa, Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and perspective. NP 2437r (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 47 Brion cemetery chapel interior ceiling corner. Photograph by author, 2014 Plate 46 Brion cemetery chapel corner. Photograph by author, 2014

Plate 48 Diagram by author over Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery chapel reflected ceiling plan drawing, NP 2699 (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 49 South elevation of Brion chapel with access area. NR 4165. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 50 Unidentified project, section drawing. NR 46790. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 51 Carlo Scarpa. Reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice / Floor Plan 1974–78. NR 41378. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa

Plate 52 Michelangelo, Profile sketches, c. 1526. Image by author, with permission from the Polo Museale della città di Firenze

Plate 53 Servandoni’s first project for the facade of Saint-Sulpice (1731). Bibliothèque nationale de France

Plate 54 Servandoni’s Triumphal Arch to the Glory of the King (1754). Bibliothèque nationale de France

Plate 55 Diagram of the Laughing Girls from Troy, New York. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins

Plate 56 House in Troy I. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins

Plate 57 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Saint-Exupéry, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

Plate 58 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Thoreau, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

Plate 59 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Calvino, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan