Part I:Form and History
Introduction to Part I
Welcome to Part I: Form and History.
This part of the course introduces the idea of the architectural imagination as a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual
understanding.
You will be introduced to some of the challenges involved in writing architectural history, revealing that architecture does not always have
a straightforward relationship to its own history.
The four modules in Part I are:
1 The Architectural Imagination: An Introduction
2 Reading Architecture: Column and Wall
3 Hegel and Architectural History
4 Aldo Rossi and Typology
Credits
'Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois' by Carol M. Highsmith. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011631309/
'Quattro libri dell´architettura", prima edizione 1570 - Libro II - Villa Cornaro in piombino Dese' by Andrea Palladio.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pallarch2-2.jpg
'Bildnis des Philosophen Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Berlin 1831' by Jakob Schlesinger.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hegel_portrait_by_Schlesinger_1831.jpg
'Comotero di San Cataldo, Modena' by Rowena. https://www.flickr.com/photos/rowenaoscura/8936092401/ License:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
Introduction and Checklist
Introduction
In Module 1 "The Architectural Imagination: An Introduction," you will explore the idea of the architectural imagination as a faculty that
mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding.
You will examine two examples of the architectural imagination, perspective drawing and architectural typology, and complete a series of
exercises that will ask you to apply and expand your knowledge.
Exercise 1.1 asks you to apply close reading and analysis skills by comparing two buildings. Exercises 1.2 and 1.3 ask you to further
explore orthographic drawings: first by reading a plan, then by drawing your own.
Module Checklist
The following components and tasks are REQUIRED as part of Module 1:
View the lecture:
Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception
Lecture 1.2 Wittkower's Palladian Diagram
Lecture 1.3 Typology
Lecture 1.4 Perspective
Lecture 1.5 The Ideal City
Complete and submit the exercises:
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Exercise 1.1 Compare Two Buildings (Self-Assessment)
Exercise 1.2 Read a Plan (Concept Check)
Exercise 1.3 Draw a Plan (Self-Assessment)
Suggested Readings (OPTIONAL)
The following readings are suggested, but not required.
NOTE: A copy of each text is NOT provided.
Ackerman, James. "The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing." Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the
Visual Arts, MIT Press, 2002, pp. 293-317.
Hays, K. Michael. "Architecture's Appearance and the Practices of Imagination." Log, vol. 37, 2016, pp. 205-213.
Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood, Zone Books, 1997.
Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. 2nd ed., Wiley, 1998.
Credits
Adapted from 'I quattro libri dell'architettura (1790) pag II 009.jpg' by Andrea Palladio - incisore Giovanni Silvestrini.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:I_quattro_libri_dell%27architettura_(1790)_pag_II_009.jpg
Adapted from 'I quattro libri dell'architettura (1790) pag II 008.jpg' by Andrea Palladio - incisore Giovanni Silvestrini.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:I_quattro_libri_dell%27architettura_(1790)_pag_II_008.jpg
Adapted from 'Moyen vniuersel de pratiquer la perspective sur les tableaux, ou surfaces irregulieres - ensemble quelques
particularitez concernant cet art, and celuy de la graueure en taille-douce (1653) (14582312270).jpg' by Abraham Bosse.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moyen_vniuersel_de_pratiquer_la_perspective_sur_les_tableaux,_ou_surfaces_irregulieres__ensemble_quelques_particularitez_concernant_cet_art,_and_celuy_de_la_graueure_en_taille-douce_(1653)_(14582312270).jpg
Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception
Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception.
[
🎥] K. MICHAEL HAYS. Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
K. MICHAEL HAYS: I'm in Gund Hall, which is the home of the Graduate School of Design. And I'm in the studio space, which is where
the most intense activity takes place of design, of analysis and research, of imagination.
We'll speak about the architectural imagination. And I'm going to suggest that some concept like the imagination is necessary if we
want to treat architecture as a mode of knowledge. The classical philosophers said, the soul never thinks without phantasm, which is to
say that thought needs a material
image, something to carry the thought. So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception and
understanding. What's implied is that there is actually a space in the mind where the work of picturing takes place. The imagination is
different from other mental processes like perceiving or remembering insofar as to perceive something requires that something has to
be there. And that's not required of the imagination. And even to remember something-- the event or the object or the person-- it had to
have already been there in order to remember. But the imagination creates its image. The image isn't there until the imagination
produces it. The imagination is also different from a concept because the imagination requires the materialization of thought.
For example, I can conceptualize freedom. I can even explain to you what freedom is as a concept. But it's very difficult to show you
freedom. In order to show you freedom, I would have to construct a picture. I would have to construct a scene. Then I could help you
imagine freedom in that materialization, in that scene, in that picturing. So we should think of the imagination as the capacity for
producing images, the mental capacity to picture things. And what we want to show is that there is a specific kind of imagination, which
is the architectural imagination.
Look at these two images. Let's say you know nothing about them. You don't know what their function is. You don't know who their
patron was. You don't know where they are. But you can already start to compare them nevertheless. One is made of stone. The other
one is made of white stuff and glass, probably wood or steel. Look at how they meet the ground. One is nestled into the ground. It
almost seems to be emerging from the earth. Indeed, some scholars would say that it even compares itself to the landscape and to the
mountains around it. It almost wants to become like a mountain. Now, the other one is also very conscious of the landscape, but it's
lifted off the earth. It doesn't emerge from the earth, but it kind of perches on the earth. But both of them are conscious of the ground.
Already, the architectural imagination is starting to emerge. And then we could also say they have something else in common.
They both have a kind of wrapper, which encloses a single volume. But the wrapper is very special. It's a modulated wrapper. It's made
of columns. Even though one has stone columns, one has steel columns,
even though the columns have different spacings, the space in between the columns is important. The proportion of space in between
the columns and the rhythm of the columns is important. And then look at how the columns meet the horizontal beam, or what we call
the entablature. In one case, there's a very articulated picture of the joinery, the way the vertical column meets the entablature. And
there are several pieces in between that make that transition from horizontal to vertical articulate. Now, the other one doesn't have all
those pieces. But it almost seems like there's still great thought about the pieces. But it's a kind of negation of all the articulation. And
yet, in the very negation, the intensity of that joint is still made.
So what do we have? They're both empty, rectangular volumes defined by a wrapper. And the wrapper is articulated by columns and
space that have a geometry, a kind of geometrical, proportional system. They both pay a lot of attention of how they meet the ground.
And they both pay a lot of attention about how they're in a landscape. So what has happened is that we have constructed. And what
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has started to emerge is a very particular kind of imagination that is purely architectural. It's independent of the materials. It's
independent of the function. It's independent of who paid for it. And we have adapted a set of assumptions about one building to a set
of perceptions about another building. We've worked across those two buildings. Now, what's implied here is that template of things, in
some sense, had to preexist our understanding of those buildings. That set of architectural characteristics that they share in common
had to, in some sense, already be there when we start to perceive those buildings. This is nothing less than the architectural
imagination at work. And what we have arrived at is a fundamental instance of aesthetic judgment. In the comparison, that set of
assumptions emerged. And it is as if it preexisted in order that you could make the comparison in the first place.
So what's happening is that, let's say, a very old building is shaping our perception of a very new building,
but also that that more modern building is shaping our perception of the old building. And it seems as if that template of items and
assumptions that we made about the wrapper, about the ground, about the landscape-- it seems as if those assumptions preexisted
our perception.
Lecture 1.2 Wittkower's Palladian Diagram
Lecture 1.2 Wittkower's Palladian Diagram.
[
🎥] K. MICHAEL HAYS. Lecture 1.2 Wittkower’s Palladian Diagram.
K. MICHAEL HAYS: I'm going to give another example of the architectural imagination at work. There's a very famous study by an
architecture historian named Rudolf Wittkower called "Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism." And it's a study of every villa
that the Italian architect Andrea Palladio ever
built.
So let's imagine that Wittkower went with the students. He probably visited all the villas in the northern part of Italy. He may have
measured them. He and his students probably drew them. And what he began to realize is that the villas, as different as they were, had
some deep structural diagram in common, some geometrical ordering system that was not always immediately apparent, but was
latent and could be discovered through this activity of measuring and drawing. Some of the villas were simple farmhouses. They were
not decorated compared to the great urban villas in Italy. Others were lavishly decorated, both on the inside and on the exterior.
Wittkower didn't look at any of that. Some of the villas were made of different material-- stucco. Some actually were made of more
precious materials like stone. Wittkower didn't see any of that. All Wittkower cared about was this common diagram, this template. And
out of that template, he devised or he imagined the geometrical essence of the Palladian villa.
And in his final diagram --you can see it here-- he draws that diagram. This is the architectural imagination at work.
There are several things we can get through this. First of all, appearance is important. Appearance, representation, but also something
deeper than surface appearance. There's also a deeper diagrammatic structure. Second of all, repetition is important. Each of these
villas have something in common, but they're all variations on a single, common theme. And third is the relationship between that
template, that diagram, and what we might want to call the architectural understanding, how we understand that. We can think of it this
way. When Wittkower draws that diagram and when we look at that diagram, there's a kind of harmonious resonance. There's a kind of
vibration in our minds between that visual image and something that we're starting to understand, some idea of a villa type, that we're
starting to understand.
And here is how the imagination, which we see in that diagram, in that drawing, bridges the gap between the raw sense data of
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perception and the architectural understanding itself. Now we can be precise about the imagination. It's one part of a three-part
system.
At the lowest level, we might say, is our sensory experience-- our sight, our touch of the materials of a building. Even maybe the
sounds of the building, or maybe even the smells of the stone and the stucco of the building. But those arrive as raw sense data.
They're unencoded. They're unprocessed. And the understanding, which is at the highest level, knows nothing of those raw sense
data. It has no way of scanning. It has no way of matching up that sense data with anything that the understanding can understand.
That's where the imagination comes in. The imagination is the third thing that operates in the space between the sense data and the
perceptions of the building and the architectural understanding. And the work of the imagination, what it has the capacity to do, is
schematize. Remember that diagram of Wittkower. He actually draws the deep structure of those villas and that schematization, that
deep structure-- that the understanding can scan.
The understanding has templates already available that it can match to that geometrical schema. Now, you might even want to say that
because that schema is so rigorous and because it is repeated, it has the appearance, or it seems that it has universal validity. And
indeed, Wittkower thought that the Palladian diagram did have universal validity. We can think of it this way. When the imagination
presents its schema to the understanding, it sets us on the path toward knowledge. And whatever knowledge is, it will have something
to do with this interaction of the understanding and the imagination. The important thing for us is that this is a specific kind of
architectural knowledge. It comes from the experience of architectural sense data. It's been schematized into an architectural diagram,
and the architectural understanding has scanned it. In some ways, you might understand the imagination and the understanding as
opposed. The imagination is temporal, the understanding is universal. The imagination is multiple while the understanding is singular.
But the understanding is also passive. It receives the imagination's input. The imagination is active. So we might say that the
imagination organizes the sensuous manifold according to organizing principles that can be received by the understanding.
And here we have the idea that architecture produces knowledge.
Lecture 1.3 Typology
Lecture 1.3 Typology.
[
🎥] K. MICHAEL HAYS. Lecture 1.3 Typology.
K. MICHAEL HAYS: One of the most fundamental concepts that you'll learn in architectural design is the concept of typology, which
literally just means the logic of types. When we think of typology, we might think in terms of a functional typology, like the warehouse
type or the apartment type. Now this is not wrong, but it's very, very limiting.
A warehouse might be converted into an apartment building, and an apartment building is converted into a boutique, and a palazzo is
converted into a hospital, and a hospital into a school. A more interesting notion of typology comes from the French architectural
theorist Quatremére de Quincy. "The word 'type' does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated
perfectly as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model." The functional type is not wrong, but we need a
theory of type that's more fundamental. We need a theory of type that would account for the way Palladio's diagram generates multiple
variations of the villa. One of Palladio's villas is not a model for the other. It's rather the case that a single rule exists --a single set of
procedures-- a geometrical organization that produces variations on the villa type. It's important that Palladio's villas serve a social
function. They're farmhouses. They're also representations of a gentry class that's emerging into its own at a particular moment in
history. But all that substratum of conventions, of patronage, of social codes and conventions is emerging through the very appearance
of the villa type.
That is to say, the social conventions arerepresented through the architecture.
Lecture 1.4 Perspective
Lecture 1.4 Perspective.
[
🎥] K. MICHAEL HAYS. Lecture 1.4 Perspective.
K. MICHAEL HAYS: Another primary example of the architectural imagination is the system of perspective.
I want to tell the story of the invention of perspective by the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi Brunelleschi was an architect in
Florence. He was actually trained first as a silversmith. And Brunelleschi noticed that when he stood in the doorway of the Florence
Cathedral and looked out at the Florence Baptistery, which was just across the piazza, he noticed something about orthogonal lines -that all orthogonal lines converge to a point in infinity. Brunelleschi wanted to make his observation scientific. Now, as a silversmith,
Brunelleschi could make a very highly polished silver surface that would reflect like a mirror. Brunelleschi turned his back to the
baptistery, put the mirror on an easel, and if he fixed his vision --if he made a kind of aperture that fixed his vision-- then he would be
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able to etch in the points
on the silver surface which were the corners of the baptistery. And then he would be able to draw and etch on the surface the way the
orthogonal lines of the baptistery converged toward a single vanishing
point. And then, he would finish and paint over the silver perspectival image of the baptistery, so that when he held the image up before
the baptistery, he could match exactly the image to the actual thing and see that it was a scientifically constructed linear perspective.
So perspective as a system brings together self and the world. It brings them all together and organizes them according to a single
point of view. It's important that perspective anticipates a modern rationalized conception of space, but it's even more important that
the viewing mind is productively caught up in its own world. It challenges the view of a separation of a preexisting stable world that's
separate from the viewing mind. It brings those two together.
Lecture 1.5 The Ideal City
Lecture 1.5 The Ideal City.
[
🎥] K. MICHAEL HAYS. Lecture 1.4 Perspective.
K. MICHAEL HAYS: I brought you into my office partly to make the point that the study of architecture is not just about doing work in
studio. It also involves the reading and writing of text. But mainly, I wanted to show you a particular book. If you're going to study
perspective as an object of knowledge, if you're going to think about perspective as an object of reflection, as I've claimed we can do,
you can't avoid the book from the 1920s by Erwin Panofsky called "Perspective as Symbolic Form."
The title comes from the philosophy of symbolic form, which studies knowledge. Now, if you think of scientific knowledge, you think of
knowledge mainly being about the facts of science, or the facts of nature. But in the study of symbolic form, knowledge is about the
facts of culture. And Panofsky was interested in the way perspective gives us --perspective is like a cultural construct. Perspective
doesn't just describe a world which already exists. Perspective actually constructs a world for a viewer. So it is a mode of knowledge. I
want to read you a passage from "Perspective as Symbolic Form." He does two things in this passage.
First of all, he actually compares perspective to the cognitive achievement of the discovery of infinity, or the cognitive achievement of
the discovery of geometry. And second of all, he then compares perspective and the knowledge that we get from perspective to
philosophy itself. Listen. "...not only did perspective elevate art to a 'science'... the subjective visual impression was indeed so far
rationalized that this very impression could itself become the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet, in an entirely modern sense,
'infinite' experiential world." So he's comparing perspective to the discovery and the understanding of infinity. And then he says, "One
could even compare the function of Renaissance perspective with that of critical philosophy." Now, critical philosophy is a code word
for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The reason they call it critical philosophy is for Kant, philosophy does not just try to explain or
study or reflect on things that are in the world. Critical philosophy reflects on the very possibility of knowledge, on the very possibility of
experience. And it's these conditions of possibility that Panofsky is comparing a perspective to, that perspective is like a condition of
possibility for knowing itself, or for experience itself. And then finally, he says, "The result was a translation of psychophysiological
space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective." So Panofsky puts to a very powerful point a point
that we made earlier, which is that perspective, in an almost unique conceptual system, brings subject and object together, brings
viewer and the world together.
Now, if we're going to think of perspective as this structure,
as this template, as this mechanism for constructing knowledge about the world,
not just for describing a world that already exists,
then we need a couple of things.
We need a system.
And the system should have both a structure,
and that structure should relate elements one
to another within the system.
So imagine the perspective of a city.
In that perspective of the city, you not only
would use perspective to regulate buildings or to describe buildings,
perspective would also relate buildings to one another,
and indeed, following Panofsky, would open up,
would expand almost to infinity the possibility of spatial perception
and spatial experience.
What I'd like to do as one final example of perspective
as the architectural imagination, or as a component
of the architectural imagination, is look at three paintings
from the Italian Renaissance.
These paintings are normally referred to now as "The Ideal City" paintings.
You'll sometimes hear them called the Urbino panel, the Baltimore
panel, and the Berlin panel.
We think they were all painted in Urbino,
but now we describe the three different panels from the cities
that they're located in now.
The important point is that the three panels seem to be-or we can be certain they are actually paintings
in a series that show systematic transformations of urban space
through the technique of perspective.
Let's look at these now.
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The first one is the Urbino panel.
And you can see that it describes an urban space, very symmetrical
urban space, with this amazing circular temple,
or temple shape, right in the center.
The space itself is like a T shape.
You can see that it comes up toward the viewer
and then flares out like a T shape.
And that T shape then is framed by the surfaces of these various palazzi.
Now, if you look into the background, it's really a closed perspective.
Just to the right of the round temple, you can just
barely see hints of sky and mountains.
But more or less, it's a closed perspective.
In this panel, the floor of the space, the piazza itself, is only one level.
Notice that the buildings are on plinths, raised slightly.
And then look at the style of the buildings.
If you know a little more about stylistic history,
you would see that the style of buildings is very uniform.
And for the 15th century, it's very modern.
So this is a very modern, almost avant-garde, and very homogeneous
style of architecture that's used in this perspective painting.
And then one final thing I'll point out-this will become important a little bit later-is that the light, which perspective also controls,
is actually coming from the left and actually coming pretty high.
The second panel I want to show is called the Baltimore panel.
It's a very different scene.
It's a variation on the scene we just saw insofar as again,
the piazza itself is T shaped.
It comes forward from the center and then flares out.
But notice, rather than a single level floor, this floor has two levels.
It really looks like a proscenium.
And it was thought at some point that these paintings might be
prototypes for theatrical stage sets.
We now think that that's not the case.
We think they're actually almost like objects of meditation.
They probably would have become part of furniture.
In any case, look at the space that I've described as proscenium space.
And you notice that in the Urbino panel, the entire front
part of the painting, let's say the stage part of the painting,
is unoccupied by architecture.
The architecture is pushed back into the middle ground.
In the Baltimore panel, the proscenium is also absent of architecture as such,
but there are four columns.
And these are very, very symbolic columns.
They're not holding up anything.
They're just describing space.
Instead of those columns, what you get in the Urbino panel
are just these two wells.
And these wells are spread out very, very far to the edge of the space.
But the important thing is that where in the Urbino panel
the floor was flat, in the Baltimore panel, the floor has two levels.
All of the architecture is on the second level.
The rest of the architecture is removed from,
let's call it the proscenium or the stage.
Now, look at the architecture.
Look at the style of the architecture.
Compared to the Urbino panel, it's very, very eclectic.
You have this ancient triumphal arch.
You have what looks like an ancient coliseum,
but it's really too small to be a coliseum.
So it's sort of like an amphitheater probably.
On the other hand, to the right of the axis, this almost futuristic,
kind of stacked polygonal temple, and then the modern palazzi.
The backgrounds seem to vary as well because you
can see in the background of the Baltimore panel,
the triumphal arch is almost like a semi-transparent screen.
You can see through it, whereas the temple in the Urbino panel was closed.
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Also, where the background in the Urbino panel
was closed, in the Baltimore panel, you can actually see through the city
to hills.
Here, some of the buildings are on plinths, some of them not.
So that may not be consequential yet.
But stylistically, as I said, they're very different.
This one's very eclectic, whereas the Urbino panel is very homogeneous.
And then finally-- and here's where the whole set,
the whole transformational process comes together-- is the Berlin panel.
The Berlin panel, in terms of where the architecture is
relative to the point of view, it's almost the inverse
because in the Berlin panel, we're not standing looking at a triumphal arch
or looking at a temple.
We're in this architectural organization.
And the four columns, though they relate to the four columns of the Baltimore
panel, now they're actually part of the architecture.
They're actually structural or constructional.
And you can see-if you know stylistically-- we're standing in a very, very modern,
advanced Renaissance building.
The Berlin panel, in contrast to the single level of Urbino,
the two level Baltimore floor, now Berlin has three levels.
We're standing now not in the lowest level as before.
But we're standing in the highest level.
We can see that right after you step out of the triumphal arch-or we think it's this construction that we're standing in-just as you step off, you go down some steps.
The steps are hidden by the edge of the floor.
And then you're down a level.
The buildings here don't have plinths.
So we have a comparison that in Urbino, all the buildings had plinths.
In Baltimore, some of the buildings had plinths.
In Berlin, none of the buildings have plinths.
And then the background of the painting-- in Urbino, it was closed.
In Baltimore, it was semi-open.
And in Berlin, it's totally open.
What we're seeing is almost like an experiment in perspective,
or almost like a kind of combination of perspective and typology,
where what we're seeing are variations of an urban fabric,
variations of an urban form that, through perspective, can
be controlled in a highly systematic way, an almost mathematical way,
but at the same time proves capable of almost infinite variation.
And the important thing is that the variation is architectural variation.
It's spatial variation.
It's variation on the way the urban place or the urban form-it's variation on the way the urban form works.
So in this example, we can see both that the system of perspective, because it
is a system, allows for variation in the arrangement of urban space,
and that that arrangement, because of the systematicity of perspective,
starts to construct a typology.
So again, this is why we think of typology and perspective, or typology
and perspective together, as examples of the architectural imagination.
But there's one more thing about a system like perspective,
a system that constructs knowledge rather than just
describing objects that already exist.
A system, if it's going to work, will always contain its other.
It will always contain, let's say, the undoing of the system.
Now, perspective represents this, or contains this, in a very dramatic way.
Think about that point of convergence, that point
where all lines converge in infinity.
And then think of that picture plane where we actually
see the representation that perspective gives us.
When we try to go back into infinity, and that picture plane blocks our way,
and we realize that we, of course, can't reach infinity,
but that somehow, we get the strange sense
that there's something looking back at us at the other end
of that line of vision.
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That thing looking back at us might be perspective's other.
It might be the city itself, the social city that's
looking back at us as individuals, that we're
locked into this perspectival system by that point of view,
but that somehow, the social city and the collective is looking back at us.
Or it might just be the thing, that unthinkable thing that is not us.
And it's very interesting if we go back to the Urbino panel one last time
and look at a close-up of the door to that temple.
And notice that the painter painted that door slightly ajar.
Now, look even more closely.
When they cleaned the painting a few years ago,
they discovered-- you see that little spot just
to the right of the door in that space of very deep shadow.
They discovered the nail hole where the nail
had been from which the painters would pull
the string that represented all the converging lines of the perspective.
But that hole, that point of convergence,
that point where the thing exists that's looking back at us,
is inside the temple, inside the darkness, the void,
that the temple is enclosing.
It's almost as if architecture itself is somehow-the whole reason for architecture is to contain that void and that moment
of convergence where the thing that's looking back at us,
that's challenging our very existence as subject, resides.
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