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Extracts
from: Peter Nesteruk, A
Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy and Utopia in Visual Culture (2011).
From: Chapter Four: Architecture in Pieces:
the Rhetoric of Cohesion.
Contents: The Pantheon (Rome) oculus and coffers,
Framed spaces (aedicules), Arch as
Sign (I), introduction to the ‘Solar’, the Gothic, Solar differentiation (
Spoleto, Italy), House of God and House of Man ( Alberti, Palladio), the
Baroque, ‘two-part’ buildings, the Palazzo tradition and ‘the three parts’, the
piano nobile, the evolution of ‘top’,
bottom’ and middle’ layers, the Solar evolved, the Middle, the Entry-fronting, ‘whole
buildings’?, from verticals to horizontals, metonymy and synecdoche (parts and
wholes), from individual buildings to the strata of the built environment.
…Argument.
The previous chapter began
with an analysis of a photograph which was also an analysis of the temporal
rhetoric of a building and its context. The rhetorical implications of the
Washington Dome and the range of political readings these in turn implied, were
worked out according to a photograph taken from a particular vantage point.
Much the same could be said about the building in the background of the Turner
painting, which was examined in chapter two. The analyses of painting and
photography in previous chapters have already begun to deal with the symbolic messages
of architecture and the temporal implications of its parts - albeit as part of
a larger context and as seen from a particular place. In fact actually
experienced buildings are always seen from a particular place or limited range
of places, a given vantage point therefore will determine what is to be read as
significant context or detail. Photographs of a given building will reveal that
building's significant context as perceived from a particular place - a vantage
point which the photograph itself can not show, but which it must imply. So two
further implications here are those of a person in place and time and of a
consciousness which is literally filled by a particular vision. The word ‘vision’
is here used deliberately in both senses of the word: of the ability to see; of
the ability to be entranced, to be transported by something. In one sense it is
the implication of any given view of a given place in time and space that is
the topic of the next two chapters; in another sense it will be the subjectivity of its viewers, their
felt sense of self, of identity and belonging, of implied community or social
segregation, and of an implied place in the world, in the order of things and
in what may lie beyond things (their place in a given belief system), that will
be the central topic. In vision subject and object are united. In line with
previous readings, I will try to show that the implied (perceiving) subjectivity
of a given building or urban scene may only be (re)constructed through an
examination of the temporalities that are latent in any situation where space
and subjectivity meet.
The Pantheon ,
An observer entering the
Pantheon in
The illusion produced by each of
the coffers is that the narrowing of the upper parts of the decorative squares
is a result of a view into a tunnel, chamber, or passage, which appears to lead
into the space behind the tile and then upwards and into a space beyond. The
eye is lead first into the space and then up. Moreover the movement up
continues into regions unseen, thus giving the illusion an external or sublime
deixis (it points to the unseen as elsewhere or un-showable). By these means an
illusionistic space and a passage through that space are created, and a beyond,
'up', 'above', somewhere is suggested. This illusion is then repeated across
the dome, generalising the effect.[3]
This perspectival illusion also
has its implications for the viewer.
There is a position for the
viewer which is implied by the design of the coffers (the illusionism is
itself, of course, an implication of an original viewing position). The
narrowing of the lines of the squares in the upper portion of each coffer acts
as a foreshortening which, as we have seen, has implications for the imaginary
space 'behind' the concrete of the coffer; it also suggests that the implied
viewer (the viewer as implied by formal features of the text or object viewed)
is in a position which results in this foreshortening. It is as if the viewer
is placed in such a way that he or she is viewing the squares of each coffer
from a position above the centre of
each tile; the foreshortening implies that the viewer is looking slightly down upon the passage or illusionist
space implied by the apparent foreshortening. The net result is that the implied
viewer is lifted into a position
above that of which he or she actually occupies. I argue that this effect takes
place more on the side of the viewer than on that of the text or object -in
contradistinction to the previous effect discussed- because the effect is felt
to be in the viewer's position and
movement and not one taking place illusionistically 'within' the implied
space of the coffers. The effect of the coffer patterns is to lift the viewer
towards the light emerging at the top of the dome.[4] The uplifting proper to a temple space is
therefore accomplished as much by its formal design as by its more overt
symbolisms (perhaps such effects are all the more effective for being covert).
The square patterns are read as
if constituting a figure which then connotes certain effects. Imaginary lines
drawn from the centre of the squares out to the spectator, and into the space
of the coffers; both curve upwards, whether as a result of eye-leading, or of
an implied position for the viewer . As we have seen these effects are double
and their joint result is to lift the spectator physically with the intention
that this illusion will aid a spiritual uplifting. The fact that the concrete
coffers making-up the interior of the dome were covered by gold and included a
classical rosette at their centre (ancestor of the ubiquitous renaissance
rosette) only reinforces the factors that combine to produce an environment
suitable for spiritual elevation (the presence of the rosette does not
interfere with the eye-leading effects or implied illusionism of the sequences
of squares in each coffer nor do their combined presence change the impact of
the entire dome). A simple test of this hypothesis can be carried out by
reversing the pattern on the coffers, with the result that the foreshortening
effect now occurs in the bottom half of each tile. Immediately the space of the
dome feels utterly different with the resultant 'curving down' effect
apparently pushing the dome down upon
the spectators, making it seem heavy; rather than conveying the light
upward-leading effect of the current arrangement.[5]
If this double effect of lifting
and eye-leading seems, so far, to be wholly spatial in character, then this is
because we have not yet completed the figural and affective journey that the
coffered roof, taken together with its context, the temple, suggests for us. The
completion of this, initially spatial, logic, illusion, or figure, lies in the
temporal realm, or, more precisely (even of only in rhetorical terms) beyond it.
The gods represented within the temple taken together with the upward effects
of the formal construction of the dome as the top or significant upper part of
the interior, connote a time and place which is evoked, but which is itself
just beyond reach. This place is a somewhere 'above' as signalled by a sublime
deixis: the time referred to is therefore also outside or elsewhere. It
is an outside of time, beyond human
duration and so existing in eternity in the temporal realm of the gods. The
temporal effects of a sacred site usually point to the 'other' time populated
by a given society's immortals. The very function of a temple as sacred site is
to suggest the proximity or imagination of such an unimaginable state.
Furthermore there is a link between
experienced time and the rhetorical outside of time as described above. As we
shall see in the analysis that follows, the pastness, or age, of the gods that
ring the walls of the Pantheon as a reminder to would-be worshippers or prop to
collective memory, is also a reference to the future viability of the gods as
of the social formation which they underwrite. This temporalising experience
taken with the upwardness of the dome, therefore also suggests a movement up to
the 'next' place (and time) as the future. These references backwards and
forward are contrasted to our presentness in the temple in the same way as our
historical time-bound presentness takes place before the statues of those
immortals who abide in an eternal realm indicated by the elevating effect of
the dome, which leads from our present to the other time, or outside of time, occupied by the gods.
If temporality is always in some
way implicated in the sacred, it also has a special role to play in the
cohesion of identity (collective and individual). Architecture has a special
role to play in this process. Interiors and exteriors contribute to this
reinforcement of collective bonds - and not only in an obviously sacred
context. Any operation of collective meaning conferral is always (perhaps
definitively) in some measure a sacred one (this insight will become more
important when we come to examine the architecture of what appear to be more
secular forms of social organisation). It appears as if the fluxes and
contradictions of identity can only be fixed by an eternal guarantee. In the
absence of such a guarantee being present in all transparence, earthly
co-efficents, aided by the rhetoric of eternity, must come into play.
At first sight the contents and
design of the Pantheon gives it a classical flavour (making the identity of the
implied viewer a pagan). In actuality, new contents of a Christian nature
occupy all the key symbolic sites (the apse contains a Christian altar, and all
framed figures, whether painted or carved, whether contained by an aedicule or
picture frame, are Christian). Yet it seems possible that current viewers may simply
be moved by the uplift in an abstract sense; or else connect the affective
force of the interior of the Pantheon to their own individual or particular
cultural experiences of spirituality. The latter is perhaps (for the purposes
of this chapter) definable as an intense interiority combined with general
propositions or answers to key questions of life, acting as a kind of
sacralised sequence of default positions on the nature of existence, either not
thinkable beyond, or existing importantly in the realm of affect - even if the
thinking consciousness might question or hold provisional some of these beliefs
or feelings. In architecture, perhaps more than in painting, it is the link
between sacrality, collective cultural identity, and the rhetoric of time that
will be found to be of re-occurring importance.
The lower part, or wall, of the
interior of the Pantheon is, as already observed, punctuated by statues and
painted representations of Christian sacred figures. All exist with frames that
enlarge the space that they occupy, implying that their importance is greater
than the size and space of their simple representation. This framing effect
puts onto operation a differentiating mechanism that separates the the contents
of the frame from its surroundings. Intensification (of a particular kind
determined by the contents of the frame) is the general effect; in an already
intense (sacred) context the sacralisation is further intensified. The framing
of a representation -whether in addition to, or, as the very existence of the representation itself- suggests a
further addition of semantic significance. The interior of the frame (or the
representation referring to itself as such) is, by definition, a reframing of
reality (of an entity assumed to be real), and therefore connotes a special
space; sacred in a sacred context. This form, the aedicule, a framing device
made up of pillars or pilasters topped with an entablature and pediment, was in
fact the classical method for the marking out of a shrine. In temporal terms we
may be being offered, as in the case of the dome, a link to 'another time', to
a temporal elsewhere that connotes the content's eternal value (as assumed by
the belief system that they underpin) - or it may be that the temporalisation
of the framed figures takes the form of a relationship of past, present, and
future. For the human experience of time the unity and interrelation of these
three aspects of time is perhaps of greater (certainly more intimate)
importance than the negative or sublime notion of eternity.
The framed statues and paintings
of the interior of the Pantheon, as a product of the frame and of framedness as
a reminder of their status as representation, carry two major effects. On one
level the suggestion of a different form of presence connotes pastness
(formalistically it may also connote futuricity, but this option is foreclosed
by the context of the frame, the building in which it is found). Not only does
the differing manner of presence of the framed indicate the possible pastness
of the content, but the entities shown are supposed to have existed at some
stage in the past and been regarded as worthy of preservation. Tradition and
memory is cited or performed in order to reinforce belief in the present and so
provide social solidarity and cohesion (social, collective, and individual
identity). However the continuity of these is nowhere more important than in
the face of the great unknown, the future (we do, after all, already appear
safely to know about the past and the present). In this light, we find the
second level, follow the other figural temporal path, where the frame is read
as suggesting a special presence, or as indicating eternity. Yet this element,
‘present’, to be sure, most especially in the context of a sacred temple, can
not itself replace the temporal function which plays on our awareness of, and
anxiety for, the future. The future, after all, is within our experience of
time as a constituent part of any experienced temporality: eternity remains its
impossible outside or other. Rather, the effect of the extra-temporal
reinforces, legitimates, or cements -as noted in previous chapters- the
different aspects of time and society into a coherent and prescriptive
totality. This is, as we have seen, the typical rhetorical role or value of
eternity.
However, the framing of an image or a
statue does not exhaust the range of applications possible in the use of the
frame and amenable to temporal analysis. The work of Anna Mendieta in chapter three
showed a movement away from the
framing of something towards the framing of an absence, employing the work of
the frame without any obvious content. The idea was one of framing a place or
space as contentless, whilst still retaining its temporal correlates. From this
point of view the framing of emptiness or light is the framing of time: or the
meeting place of times: or the meeting place of time and its other. These
considerations naturally lead to the considerations of other kinds of
architectural and temporal framing, other than just as surrounds to images and
objects. In question is the symbolic-temporal role of windows and doors, of
portals and openings, of balconies (as the decoration of a piano nobile and as the framing of the owner) and of the
architectural appropriation of natural sites, of caves and of cleft rocks.
Mendieta's work, as we saw,
moved the reference point from the framed to the frame itself, in an exposé
that begins with the framing of things, but proceeds to reveal the role of
framing as such as the key symbolic
player or motivator of second meaning. If, in Mendieta, framing can indicate
futural possibility and utopian alternatives together with the glaze of
sacrality, then this temporal reading may also be found to apply to similar
forms found in architecture. This abstract possibility, or reading-potential,
whilst depending upon other contextual features to differentiate it from a
simple past deixis, nevertheless shares certain features with the Pantheon
frames: sacrality and futuricity (leaning upon a ‘historical’ past to be sure) operate
together in a politics of identity. If the frames of the Pantheon bind,
ensuring collective cohesion, Mendieta opens and unbinds, making time for a
individual identity which is also intimately bound up with the politics of gender.
In examining the temporal implications of architectural forms that frame, it
will be important not to lose sight of the fact that individual appropriations
or readings of such apparently simple experiential features such as entrances
and windows will perhaps give a different reading to that of the same forms
when they are read for their social symbolism.[6]
As applied to architecture
therefore, the approach developed in this study leads to a temporally inflected
poetics of space.[7] This reconsideration will include, not
only windows and doors, but also passages and stairs as temporal thresholds;
where what is shown is a particular nexus of past, present and future - or even
the edge of time itself. The frame or en-framing form carries with it the
effect of so intensifying the meaning relations of a given space that the
designated space immediately becomes the bearer of a significance relying upon
temporality (together with its other) for its force. An extra dimension of
meaning, one intimately tied to feeling or affectivity, and so to identity, is
activated when temporal depth is added to a space, when the latter is found to
be separated from its surroundings in such a way that its presence is
highlighted, differentiated, or otherwise placed in a relation of contrast
(including relations of absence or negation).
The experiential or lived forms
of temporality (the inter-relation of past, present, and future) were, as we
have seen, dramatised in Hopper's Stairway.[8] This painting places the implied viewer,
or viewer/character, at the centre of a temporal crossroads. However Hopper's
particular form of temporal anxiety need not be the only result of temporalised
frames. Similar temporal considerations can be found, for example, in the
photography of the Italian artist, Jacopo Benci, who offers the viewer a
photography of niches, doors, apertures, steps, and their transformation into
site-specific works of art. However, in Benci's photography, temporal anxiety
is tempered by an inquiring, often joyful, mood. If the transcendence indicated
in Hopper invokes doubt and anxiety; the fear of a state of stasis or hiatus:
then in Benci's work the the form of the transcendent is suggested as being
worthy of curiosity and not to be feared, even if a little enigmatic; Benci's
transcendent reaches towards the outside of time, even as Hopper's deixis
remains trapped within an untenable time. This effect, in Benci's photography
is a result, at least in part, of the ambiguous co-existence of the rhetoric of
eternity together with the forms of experiential time. The future does indeed
lie ahead somewhere along the stairs, and paths indicated; but the luminosity,
the idyll, and the rising motif of the stairs all suggest that this future may
also lead to the realm of the extra-temporal. Eternity evokes sacrality as
enigmatic apertures lead to 'other' landscapes, or even just up and into the
light.[9]
The carved stairways and sunken
paths taken as a further example of the temporality of openings also suggests a
customisation or simple appropriation of a natural feature which may then
become the source of a special temporal status. Such natural features, open to
the light, and suggesting sacred portals, may also be found in the many rock
clefts or fissures that have served humankind for sacred sites and where this
world and others were felt to meet.
These chosen places are therefore also passages or paths leading to
imaginary places and other times.
Whether in the Hittite religious
shrine in Boazcagli, Turkey, or the oracle sites in Greece, or exemplified by
the rock formation in Austria's, historical museum at Carnutum (the site of a
Roman army town or, castra), it is to
the temporality of clefts, fissures, and other forms of natural openings to the
sky (including even the ordinary forest glade) that we must now turn. Examples
could be multiplied across cultures. Such places appear to have in common a
conjunction of sky and rock or of sky and place such that the sky is framed
above by the surrounding rocks or trees and the eyes led upwards even as they
busy themselves with rituals below. Precisely like the oculus in the Pantheon, the opening above enacts an unmistakable
sacred symbolism whose figurative meaning leads beyond the time of the
everyday, beyond time itself.
The notion of the framed space
as used in the temporal analysis of architecture may now include the temporal
implications of the space that lies within or between the rocks (or other
natural forms that produce what is actually a double framing, that of the sky
above and that of the empty pocket of space that sits below it). When their
temporal connotations have been fully understood, such framed spaces can be
seen to take on the function of an approach, of a threshold, of a portal to
another symbolic space-time, to the
other 'temporality', to the extra-temporal realm of the eternal, as peopled by
the immortals, gods, and heroes of myth and religion. This operation may be
read as providing access to the 'other place': or it may be that the cleft
itself becomes the 'other' place - either way it functions as a holy site. Such
a framed space also acts as a theatrical frame for performance, in the full
sense of the term as a set of symbolic events which are also felt to be the
events themselves, which 'call up' the events, personages, and places they
enact, even as these later are evoked. The temporal ambiguity of such sites is
comparable to the ambiguity of the ritual acts often performed at such sites,
where one temporal action is read as enacting an extra-temporal or originary act
(in the sense of originary with respect to the history of the culture in
question, as myth). Here a present act is equivalent to an absent event, and
one time is equivalent to or contains another, or the outside of time may be
miraculously found within time itself. The connection of ritual with such sites
suggests that symbolic temporality functions as an important element in the way
performative ritual calls up the sacred.[10]
The temporal aspect to such
places or apertures, then, is that of eternity as opposed to the sub-lunary
temporality of the everyday. This world and its other, which exist through the
givens of experienced time, are opposed to one another as a this-side, or
inside, and an outside of time, a zone of eternal elsewhere (where the normal
rules of time and space do not apply, as for example, in the zone featured in
Tarkovsky's film, Stalker, and in the
turning points of his other films, where sacrality and belief are at issue). A
similar opposition obtains in folk tales where the positing of a fairy realm,
such as in the story of Rip van Winkle, appears to bring another temporality
into view. The time of Myth is always another time – the ‘before’ time (as
acted out or evoked at the heart of many rituals). The opening, then stands for
the threshold between normal and other-worldly forms of time, as the point of
transition between them (between 'in' and 'out', so to speak), between
experienced time and other time, from which strange messages come, and to which
sacrifices and offerings are sent, in search of enlightenment and to confirm
the (religious) collective identity of those partaking in the ritual.
Before returning to the Pantheon
for a final example of a type of temporal symbolism, I will try to bring
together the effects of frames and apertures, of spaces that are simultaneously
both closed and open. From a general framing to small openings, from statues
positioned between pillars, or, in the clearance of space around them, read as
self-framing, to images framed by pillasters, cornice, and dado, from objects
or their absence within the tight frames of niches to the enclosed spaces of
ritual sites open to the sky; all may, not only be approached temporally in the
search to explain their affective force, but may also be found to have applications
beyond their immediate sphere of reference. As applied to other forms of
architecture, and to the built environment as a whole, such forms still carry
important cultural resonances. In the small measure, eternity, utopia, the
sacred, or better, the micro-sacreds of private or individual appropriation,
are always potentially present in the form of the personal utopia that lies
behind the door, or the desire that seeks its true end outside of (or behind) a
particular window. In the collective forms of experience, however, (whether as
the possibility or generalisation of the former) the usual function is to
cement a hegemonic ideology or belief-system, or fractions thereof, into a
collective life with the possibility of various ends and fulfillments (that is,
with a future).
If, in the Poussin painting we
looked at in chapter two, the old pagan architecture was found to connote the
past, then this sense of pastness was
supported by a number of levels. The sense of the past was suggested by
the building in question being less present (as background) then the other
elements of the picture, by the style and condition of the ruins, and by the
symbolic-historical values of the architecture (a lost civilisation).[11] The two latter aspects appropriate a past
form for a present use that retains the pastness as a rhetorical value to be
employed (Christianity has succeeded paganism despite all of the latter's vain
glories). In the Pantheon the framing of Christian icons and statues within a
pagan surround turns this enfolding context (or frame) itself into an
appropriation of the past - here what is framed, the statues and paintings,
re-frames the frame, or significant context. The statues, as it where, cite the
pagan surround, and arrogate its scared functions, so displaying the
simultaneous use of a previous tradition (the power of the past) together with
the dominance of the new (the pastness of the past). It is as if the spaces
framed within the Pantheon are privileged in relation to the other spaces of
the building; that what appears within these frames over-rules or brings
together that which appears elsewhere.
The possession
of these sites indicates hegemony, dominance, and ownership. If the past is
co-opted to support a present effect, its existence into the future is,
nevertheless, underwritten by the eternal value of the sacred figures; the
future of a belief-system in time is
guarantied by a reference to the outside of time. Eternity promises to overrule
the threat of contingency and provide temporal continuity. The value of the
past (and so of the citation of structures that symbolise the past) is that it
provides the link backwards to an origin, or to a prior state of falleness,
that extends a retrospective continuity to a past fulfilled or redeemed; a past
which can then be read as evidence for the trans-historical truth of the
eternal. Symbolic-historical references in architecture call up this sense of
rootedness in time, even as sacred symbolisms call upon the eternal as a
complementary source of stability.
Introduction to the concept
of ‘Solar.’
Clearly the 'top', the
sense of the upper portions of buildings and parts of buildings, is important.
With its yoking of past myth, gods, and heroes (saints), for futural
subjunctive prescriptivity and its underwriting rhetoric of eternal guarantee,
this is the part of a building that appears to carry the strongest symbolic
potential, the part of a building most exploited by the dominant belief system,
and the part of a building which most epitomizes the collective life and
aspirations of a culture. I would like to coin a term, a neologism, for this
experientially distinct unit of urban life. This and other neologisms will be
based upon the belief that a terminology based upon zones of human,
predominantly visual, experience will help to differentiate between, on the one
hand, the 'actually experienced' and symbolic aspects of architecture (and so
of the historical reconstruction of this experience), and, on the other hand,
those other terms designed for abstract, technical, or 'timeless' forms of
intellectual utility.
The lexicon of architecture
itself suggests the word, 'Solar': a medieval term for a room in the sun, in
the upper-most storey. The key sense of the level beneath the sun is important
to this term, as is the idea of the floor, part, or zone of a building that
leads the eye upwards into the light and borrows its symbolic force both from
this proximity (a metonymy) and this passage or directionality (a deixis). Solar statues, image-filled pediments or
gables, and otherwise decorated cornices or entire upper stories, all partake
of, and contribute to, a solar effect in general, passing on to succeeding
generations not only a heritage of temporally symbolic material, which they
must identity with, label as anachronistic, or transform, but also the very place on a building where it would
be expected to appear. The symbolic solar is, therefore, trans-functional: the
decorated upper portions of arches or of capitals may join the decorated tops
of a given building (frieze, pediment, cornice, or statues) in creating the
'solar' effect. This zone would be the bearer of intense symbolic and affective
importance through conjoining, or drawing upon the semantic potential of actual
symbols and the forms that contains them, and the site itself through its
capacity to stimulate eye-raising and its metonymic proximity to the luminous.
However, if we broaden our
viewpoint to include the context of a given building (in practice something
difficult to avoid) then we begin to sense a special continuity between the
'tops' of buildings as such. A common strata is unveiled where the cornices,
top stories, their roofing and their decorations become a separate layer of the
urban experience, a distinct zone of the built environment. The logical end of
this process is the skyline, or rooftop view: the collective solar. As the
collective form of experiential temporality, with its supports disappearing
into the outside of time with its sacral connotations, the implication of such
a zone of human experience is that of an interlocking of a key symbolic zone
with its role in public space – its key symbolic function. The promise of a
future, founded on the eternal verities, provides for collective cohesion.
Whether ultimately comforting, or coercive, the temporal rhetoric of the
collective solar will be found to carry strong -if largely unnoticed because
viewed from within- affective and normative implications for collective
identity (the usual function of the sacred, whether in itself or in the form of
some secular symbolism). Any general view across the centre of
So far this chapter has only
dealt with public, social, or collective modes of experience. These forms,
generally normative by implication, are usually complemented by, or sometimes
contrasted to, a more private form of viewing, where a view of a roof with
religious symbolism, types of roof, private spaces (gardens, balconies,
windows) may incite a utopian impulse on the part of the viewer (indicating
freedom, an elevated mood, the link to a personal dream or wish). More directly
the private appropriation or customizing of an owned, rented, or even squatted
part of a rooftop can be seen in the distribution of flowers and vines, in the
creation of a personal roof-top garden in many cities around the world.
If roof-top space and its
decoration is often a mark of private ownership then roof space is also
appropriated by the poor and dispossessed to create roof-top shanty towns (perhaps
most famously in cities like
The concept of a solar, then,
collects together the upper reaches of a building as such, with its
connotations inspired by the horizon, proximity to our source of light and
eye-raising, together with other similar levels on other buildings and the
decorations often found on such levels, with the public and private aspirations
and desires of those who regard them.
Two to three part
symbolizing structures (Alberti,
Palladio).
The line of evolution
stretches from the renaissance use of the classical pediment and portico
frontage through to the Baroque church front (either bypassing the Gothic as a
predominantly ‘North-European’ style or reacting against it's symbolic meanings
in the spirit of Renaissance humanism). Both experientially, and in terms of
their symbol-bearing distribution, these styles present the onlooker with an
entrance floor plus a solar (echoing the classical pediment and portico). For
example, the huge entry arch of Leon Battista Alberti's, facade of St. Andrea,
This logic of two key
experiential parts (each with their own bottom to top sub-divisions to be sure)
is even clearer in the work of Palladio.[12] The symbolic significance of the 'solar'
and its dependence upon a contrasting, if supporting, lower part, a combination
entry-fronting, is demonstrated in the symbolic role of the double pediment in
the design of the temple or church front - in effect each 'part' was to have
its own pediment - the eye being led from the lower to the higher. This key
stylistic technique was used by Palladio in the Renaissance as part of a
general rediscovery and revalourisation of classical models. The lower pediment
was to refer to the 'house of man' (from which Palladio believed the form was
originally derived), and the upper pediment to the 'house of God', referring to
the function of the building itself and the traditional symbolic use of the
pediment in Classical civilisation. The upper part immediately assumes
responsibility for the most sacred connotations available. In effect, the
social meanings of the building are re-organised according to a priority set up
by this, one might say, axiom of the symbolic function of the solar position
(for example, see the facades of S. Francesco della Vigna, Venice, 1562-1570,
and S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1564-1580, both by Palladio).[13]
This logic of the double top
leads directly to the two part structures of the Baroque 'temple' front.
Baroque churches (and some palaces) may be conceived as having, in effect, only
two actually-experienced symbolic parts (the entry-fronting and the symbolic
solar). Furthermore, in such two part (public) buildings, there is often a
increase in symbolic density towards the top of each part or section and its
subdivisions (as well as being particularly concentrated within the solar
section itself), a development which follows the logic of two houses, the House
of God and House of Man division as developed by Palladio. Each 'House', in
effect, displays is own solar in a varying combination of capitals,
entablature, and pediment given over to symbolic-decorative material.
If Palladio's contribution to
the Baroque front was the cumulative intensity of the double top, then it was
Vignola who suggested the basic form that would support the Baroque front and
encourage the development of the front as a (highly ornamented and pilastered)
wall and not as an antique portico. This development can be found in the nave
and aisle structure of Vignola's, Il Gesu (begun 1568),
My contention here is that any
classification of a part as lying between the top and the bottom, between the
solar and the entry-fronting, as a kind of middle, effectively misplaces the
degree of independence of that part or its capacity for any separate symbolic,
and so temporal, signification. In other words, as found in the Baroque front,
any apparent middle (the section below the uppermost pediment) does not in fact
function as a true experiential middle (this will be a feature found in the
secular palazzo). This apparent 'middle' is not something perceived as a
separate signifying entity by the viewer, but as a weaker repeat of the top.
This combination is perceived as being contained with the overall form of the
solar - as can be seen in the addition of the Baroque scrolls or 'wings' that
bring together the upper levels into one experiential unit (although it is
interesting to note that Alberti had already offered this solution to the
problem of the unification of the upper half which also yielded a gain in
monumentality a hundred years before in the facade of Sta. Maria Novella
(1456-1470), Florence). In this way the Baroque front or facade can be seen to
be a two-part structure made up of an entry-fronting, designed for functional
passage and protection - but, of course with some decor and with some gravity
in its material and form - and the 'to look at' solar with its eye-leading, its
sacred symbolism, and its ability to awe - an effect exploited with increasing
deliberation in the Counter-reformation Baroque.
The implications
of this distinction between sacred and secular architecture will become
apparent if we take as an example an important square in
The ‘Three Parts’
explained…
The town houses on the
This secularity does not mean,
however that the urban town house or palazzo possessed no 'solar', and so
eschewed any form of decoration of its upper parts. First, the presence of the
skyline, of the source of light, above the tops of houses always suggests, from
the point of view of the on-looker in the street, a sense of upwardness, or
eye-raising, which reverses the direction of the (falling) light as if seeking
its source. In this sense all buildings participate in a collective solar
skyline with its general symbolic overtones. Second, individual houses did
begin to decorate their upper edge, but only after first decorating the piano nobile and then looking (often
under the pressure of legal limitations on exterior decor) to the solar as a
natural site for symbolic development. In effect the solar (as ornamented
cornice) entered into a kind of contest of symbolisms with the piano nobile in the town houses,
palazzos, and squares of the Renaissance and Baroque.
This contest of sites of
decoration was also a contest in architectural style as marker of social status
and learning. The renaissance flourish of conspicuous consumption accompanied
and motivated the introduction of the decorated cornice in particular, and of
the classical style as a decorative option in general, to the Italian renaissance
city. Decoration symbolised wealth and power, but also piety and learning. For
example, the Palazzo Medici (1446), by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, in Florence,
boasts an unusually rich cornice in an example which was to be imitated on many
palazzos across Italy, but especially in Rome, in the course of the next
century (see esp. Palazzo Farnese, Rome, by Sangallo and Michelangelo, 1541 and
1546). Such richness marks such a cornice out as a solar, as a symbolic, 'to
look at', entity, a symbolic showing-of of wealth and power. However, such
cornices are also a temporal reference back to classical art and architecture,
a historical-symbolic temporality which not only draws upon the learning and
aura of the past as a Golden Age, but may also be read as showing the intention
of the present owners to abrogate the role of the cultural and intellectual
leadership of the future. The ideals or ends of a city, community, or society
point ineluctably into the future; to be believed to be a special custodian of
such ideals is to have won a important battle in the war of ideological
dominance.
As a general effect, the cornice
considered as a solar, carries the notion of aspiration, of ideals, of social
dreams; abstract or repeated patterns indicate abstract ideas or general ideals
(time has been spent indicating value; particular time is transformed into
abstract value or local sacrality): whilst the piano nobile advertises more directly the concrete economic and
secular power of its owner. The conspicuous ornamentation of the piano nobile may also be augmented by
religious references as in the case of inset, or framed, religious statues,
emblems, or motifs - at least until restrained by law from further ostentatious
ornamentation. Temporally speaking, solar and piano nobile stand in a relationship of future to present: the past
can be found in the style (classicising) and in the solidity and materiality of
stone (especially when the latter is un-worked or rusticated). It is as if the
building had always been there, and (moving into less certain, subjunctive,
ground) always will be - we might hear in this yet another suggestion of the
rhetoric of eternity. If all this form, style and detail, amounts to a symbolic
claim to history and to the control of its direction, then this claim may well
be true in objective, as well as in ideological terms, as merchant and
patronage activities played an important role in the transformation of the
Renaissance city and society.
We have seen how apertures of
buildings may also function as symbolic openings (doors, windows); as portals
of symbolic as well as physical transition. Some of these apertures have
practical functions (exit, entry, light), and are therefore real openings: some
are purely symbolic, existing as imaginary, openings, or as ornament. These
latter function as a visual rhetoric; to be seen, or looked at, and not
especially to be passed through, or looked out of. Of course many openings
combine practical with symbolic functions, as in the case of figures of realist
origin where a feature (or group of features) in a scene of apparently neutral
description take of a second significance (like a cloud in the sky in the
context of the arrival of bad news). This is exactly the case with the first
floor or piano nobile balcony, which
elevates and exhibits features (the balcony as sign of wealth and power, and
site of exhibition of the people who possess them) - as well as permitting an
overview of the square or street below. The piano
nobile balcony leans upon the potential offered by the aura of openings, by
the rhetorical force of the frame, to impart special significance to those
framed by the balcony. Conversely
the addition of such a feature adds a similar social significance to the
building that displays it.
In opposition to the solar, with
its symbolism gathered around 'uppness', ideality, and the significance of a
border shared with the sky, and an entry-fronting that announces entrances and
exits, but also signals impassibility and protection, the piano nobile is usually the symbol-carrying portion of the third
experientially significant part of the building. A 'middle' may be found to
appear between the other two basic units. In streets that are often narrow and
crowded together, the top of a building occupies an inconvenient line of sight
and is hard to see from a distance. Moreover this limitation of convenient
vision or optimum visibility is true for any building from close up - people
are only really expected to stare upwards at the solar of a sacred building. It
is the first floor (or second in a wider street or square) that offers itself
readily to view providing the ideal place for a symbol advertising the
occupant's status or religiousity. In the latter case a religious emblem or
niche (containing a saint or a framed emblem) is clearly visible and makes up
part of the social-symbolic fabric of the street or urban setting,
participating in the collective belief structure of the inhabitants (see symbolic
niches or aedicules on ‘secular’ houses, such as a cardinal's residence, for
example, the Cancelaria, Rome, not a
religious building as such, rather a secular palace for a wealthy cleric, which
also carries a state function and as such is religious in terms of the aura of
power it is designed to carry).
However, this 'middle' level,
particularly where the evolution of the piano
nobile is concerned, takes on special symbolic significance as a mark of
wealth and status, when decoration, either in the form of balconies or of
ornament surrounding windows (or balconies) is employed, often ostentatiously,
to single out the owner as one who can afford such luxuries. This
ever-expanding significance, and so ornamentation, of the middle stories
encountered competition with the later comer, the cornice, only when excessive
decor was banned from the building's lower and middle portions. The protruding
cornice was often the only visible solar of an urban town house set in narrow
streets and small squares; when passers-by looked up the scrolled or
egg-and-dart decor of the cornice would immediately catch the eye. This secular
development is in marked contrast to the, always-already, featured solar of
sacred or palatial buildings, which will have employed the solar as the main
carrier of the symbolic message as a matter of course.
If, in the previous section we
saw how openings might 'mean' in quite a different way when taken in
conjunction with the solar of a building (in the relationship of the bell-tower
and spire of the cathedral to each other and to the look-out tower in Spoleto,
Italy), then with the piano nobile
and its evolution we can see how secular town houses utilised decorative
symbolism with its attendant social and temporal implications. This 'middle'
part was to continue its evolution as a symbolically important architectural feature,
with decorated balconies and windows proliferating until, by the nineteenth
century, all (even attic windows) were to be reframed in a given historicist
style. In this way we can see the evolution of the palazzo-style town house
into a model for future architectural appropriation.
From the point of view of its
consumption as a building (or a collection of buildings), it is the
participation of the palazzo-style in collective symbolic meaning that is
important - even as the style evolved to express individual (aristocratic or
merchant families') claims to power and status (public profile). In contrast to
the socially unifying meanings of the two-part structures of sacred buildings,
these secular structures express difference and hierarchy and are socially
divisive. This architectural display of wealth and power led to the passing of
laws to limit such displays, in the hope of limiting divisive social
competition among its elites and lessen the provocation felt by the other
social classes. It was this injunction, as we have seen, that lead to the
development of the cornice as a decorative feature and so the rise of a secular
symbolic solar that was to exercise such a profound influence upon later
architecture.
The Renaissance model of the road-facing
aspect of buildings in a town square or street was a great influence upon many
recent styles of urban building; whether in the form of housing, flats, or of
offices, the three-part palazzo design is a familiar face well into the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the neo-classical styles which
followed the Baroque and which advocated a return to 'pure' classicism (whose
architecture favours two experiential parts, as we saw in the pediment and
portico model), in fact incorporate the basic (experiential) units based upon
three parts. However if we go back to the Villa Medici, 1485, by Giuliano da
Sangallo, at Poggio a Caiano, outside Florence, we see a free-standing palace
which takes classicising elements and, in contrast to Palladio and the trajectory
that was to result in the Baroque temple front, makes them conform to a three
part structure.[15] The effect is clean, almost modern.
*
We have seen how the upper
'parts' of a building can be differentiated according to their symbolism and
function. In the cathedral (and in
the defensive tower) in Spoleto, the contrast of the symbolic solar of the
cathedral to the functional solar of the cathedral bell-tower ('to hear/see
from, be heard from') is augmented by the bell-towers' own symbolic solar, or
spire ('to be looked at'). By contrast the Renaissance and Baroque fronts of
(often older) sacred buildings often consist of a square or oblong
entry-fronting; apparently functional with huge openings for entry and exit -
although, like its Gothic predecessor, heavily ornamented (particularly along
its upper portion). This level is then topped by a triangular solar, where a
'middle' layer is incorporated into the solar by the addition of the wings that
complete the triangular pointing by leading it up to the pediment (often this
section is entirely symbolic; it has no other architectural function and in
fact behaves rather like a free-standing column, or ornamented steeple). The
overall structure of the sacred front works to utilise 'upness', soaring (hypsosis), or symbolic eye-leading to
the place where heaven is deemed, whether figuratively or literally, to be, and
where Christian emblems may further be used to concretise the message (crosses,
saints, Episcopal hats, the keys of St. Peter).
By contrast, in the case of
secular town houses, from the relatively modest terrace of the city street to
the free-standing palazzo or villa proper, we have a solar which is only rarely
'to look from', more often 'to let light in'. When the cornice or the upper
floors are decorated, it is also 'to look at'. Often, window-like openings onto
the solar floor may function to let air in, but not light; as in the case where a top storey is used for storage,
or in the case of the attenuated rooms often reserved for servants - as in the
case of an attic floor proper.
If the symbolically-charged term
'solar' may still be used for something as prosaic as the upper 'edge' of a
town house, it is partly because of its role as the distant upper story that
stimulates curiosity and questions, and dreams as the answer to these
questions, and partly because of its proximity to the skyline, which raises the
issue of eye-raising with all of its symbolic connotations. However, the term
'solar' comes into its own when considered as the total effect of the collective solar of an entire street or
sky line - a key part of the collective experience of the urban environment.
The cornice may be decorated or
minimal. In either case the solar as a visual part of a building may be read (intuition
will confirm this) as a combination of upper story and cornice. Indeed in most
town houses a typically thin cornice is often touched by the vestigial,
functional openings of the upper-most storey, a functional form imitated in
buildings where the windows taper in as they rise, a received part of the
'palazzo' style in the periods that follow. For a recent example of a solar
combining the palazzo three-part structure with bell-tower windows (to replace
the typically vestigial ventilation openings of the town-house solar) - we need
look no further than International Modernism, as in the case of the Pirelli
Tower (by Gio Ponti, of A&U Milan, 1955-8) in Milan, Mies van der Rohe, the
Seegram Building, in New York (1954-1958), and, in Post-modern guise, Phillip
Johnson & John Burgee, the AT&T Building, also New York (1978), all of
which feature a sequence of long windows in their solar.[16] When compared to buildings that lack a
solar, whether Modernist tower-blocks that just end with the last line of
windows or their architrave, or in the case of storage towers, beloved of
science-fiction, without any distinguishing features around their highest point;
when compared to such, buildings that have a solar feature appear 'finished'. Those
without deliver an unfinished effect (an effect used deliberately by some
architects, in these cases the deliberation confirms the intuition, as a
reaction confirms the force of the original). The expending of time to
symbolise a building's relationship to time, to its experience and its
rhetorical appropriation (symptomatic of a society's relation to what it holds
sacred), ornamentation or distinctiveness (of a part, of the solar) as the
indicator of the social value of a building, or even of an entire segment of
the built environment, these are the messages communicated to the perceiver by
the relative presence or absence of a solar. It would appear that,
psychologically as well as phenomenologically, buildings have to have a top;
but not necessarily a middle.
In secular architecture, as the
form that has been widely imitated throughout the architecture of the West, it
is generally the first proper floor (the floor above the ‘ground’ floor), or
sometimes the second floor (depending upon the height of the building, or the
openness of the street), which functions as the ornamented, 'to look at', piano nobile. This feature of the
'middle' of buildings, and so of the collective 'middle' of the built
environment in general, usually comes complete with a prominent balcony - or
with hierarchies of balconies, where several floors have taken on this function
('to be seen from', 'to be looked at'). The windows of this middle section (and
their decoration) usually taper off as they approach the solar. If the fusion
or ambiguity of the solar with respect to any middle section (bay, window,
niche, often topped with a decorative mini-pediment) is the norm in the sacred
architecture discussed above, then the ability to distinguish the solar from
the middle (initially often just the piano
nobile) is an important part of the development of secular
architecture.
The first mezzanine is never a
candidate for the role of piano nobile
or experiential 'middle' of a given building as, in functional, or structural,
terms and in terms of its symbolic, or experiential, force, it is normally a
part of the bottom-most segment, or entry-fronting, of a building. The
entry-fronting in the palazzo-style town house is usually rusticated or left
rough (effects in stone were later imitated by the use of rusticated plaster) -
or even semi-fortified. This design is true of collective structures also,
whether of a main street with a more or less continuous entry-fronting level,
which has been achieved by a combination of accident and contextualising
normativity, or for the planned Renaissance square, the Piazza del Popolo, Rome
(1538, remodeled 1814)). I have chosen to call this lowest significant
experiential level of urban architecture, the 'entry-fronting', bringing
together the practical functions of entry and exit, with the experiential
functions of eye-level daily life usually associated with shop fronts, window
displays, and the decorated entry portals of urban life).
The entry-fronting will reach
its apotheosis in nineteenth century Historicism, but similar, albeit ruder,
effects can be found in many Renaissance Florentine or Roman Palazzos. The
practical function of protection afforded by a rough-hewn or rusticated lower
storey, with few or heavily protected windows and entrances to defend and no
finely wrought surfaces to be spoilt by collision or assault, is also imposing
in a symbolic sense. Although the texture of rough-hewn stone imparts no
greater strength than that which has been smooth-cut, the former appears
stronger, perhaps due to its ability to suggest, or mimic, raw stone, the
cliffs from which it was hewn, or the natural rock upon which the building may
have been built. The rough-cut is as much an illusion, figure, or symbol as the
acculturation of the fine-cut stone of the piano
nobile; its apparent naturalism is designed to deter violence - when it
does not actually represent the threat of violence itself. The texture
functions as a symbolic threat, an act of intimidation, and gives the
appearance of a preparation for violence. The architectural rhetoric of this
feature appears to symbolise an absent, figurative, or potential power. Such an
effect may be described as drawing upon the notion of a 'low' secular sublime
(the veiled threat of violence from earthly powers): as opposed to the 'high'
sacred sublime residing in the inconceivable other realm of eternity (and the
threat of eternal damnation by the gods) drawn upon by religious buildings. The
traces of this architectural heritage can still be found in the sculptural
rhetoric of many forms of entry-fronting today.
The evolution of the
entry-fronting, the experiential lower part of the building, over the centuries
that followed, included a vastly expanded symbolic importance. For the next
significant stage in the development of this key feature of the built
environment, we must turn to the advent of Historicism. Most of the decorative
architectural styles of previous European history were recycled in the
nineteenth century art-currents variously known as Beaux Arts or Historicism. Original materials and weight-bearing
solutions were not repeated; rather the decorative element only was repeated in
plaster modeling, usually laid over brick. Historicism, however, presided over
a general reconstruction of the European city centre in the course of the nineteenth
century, of which the classic example is the
However this repetition of the
'classic' architectural styles of the past (Classical, Gothic, Renaissance,
Baroque, and the evolution of the Palazzo template, including a fully-fledged,
if somewhat Mannerist, Palazzo Style in mid-nineteenth century America) took
place in a completely different historical and cultural context, and therefore
played a fundamentally different role to that of the original time of the
styles in question (although, of course, the continuation of Neo-classicism
especially was itself already a reference back with all the attendant
historical connotations of such a move). An important part of the understanding
of the temporal aspects of this style is the partnership of this temporal
symbolism (the element of historical citation) with the temporal experience of
these buildings in actual life. This reference back to a previous cultural
epoch, replete with the metaleptic
figure of the Golden Age, and the current experience (whether of the time of
construction or of the literal present) of the borrowed style is also the
source of the ironic relationship found in the distance between the intended
(or implied) effect and the actual effect of such appropriations. The
symbolism, or rhetoric, of citation is both realised in, and put into question
by the (varying) experience of the 'consumers' of such architecture.
However, the presence of an augmented but
still immediate ground level, as key urban experiential category and integral
symbol-carrying part of the built environment, can clearly be seen to function
in the massive intimidating, and grandifying entry-fronting of nineteenth
century Historicism (and before, as noted in the Renaissance square, the Piazza del Popolo, in Rome and in the
early Palazzo). If we begin with the transformation of pillars, their parts and
their proportions, in the context of the development of a symbolically
significant lower part, then we notice that the pillars in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna have a
long decorated base leading to the column (often appearing to the viewer as if
it were the lower half of the column that were decorated) and are topped with
the usual capital. This singularly (dis)proportionate treatment of the
traditional top, middle, and bottom of the classical column (a model for so
much in classical and neo-classical architecture), is itself but a precise echo
of the extension given to the lowest section of most buildings in Viennese
Historicism (itself featuring precisely the extended entry-fronting found in
the Piazza del Popolo, Rome). Indeed
buildings within the Historicist 'Ring' zone of Vienna that have followed
Historicism, have also followed its proportions for the solar, facade and
entry-fronting so as to remain in context with its neighbours (even iconoclast
Adolf Loos obeys this rule, in Vienna, see the Loos-Haus (1911), a Bank, next to the Hoffburg on Michealerplatz).
The entry-fronting of most major
buildings in any part of Vienna touched by nineteenth century Historicism, is
extended up beyond the usual mezzanine to include an extra floor; the exterior
is rusticated or decorated to make this extension clear. The pan-European
nature of nineteenth century Historicism ensures that all of Europe's major
cities, insofar as they were redeveloped in this period, use this feature; the
extending of the 'bottom' up to and beyond a mezzanine level, the latter
becoming, in the process, the upper portion or floor of the lowest segment of
the building, a lesser floor situated between the ground floor and the first
floor proper (of a piano nobile
reconstituted as the bottom floor/s of an extended middle or facade). The
ordinary housing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries usually takes the
form of the, typically plain, European vernacular, with the usual proportions
of the parts, and the usual pattern of window size to match; larger for the piano nobile, becoming smaller as we
proceed upwards. Historicism repeats this pattern: but augments it with a
veneer of plaster moulding cast in a given Historicist style (usually
Neo-classical or Baroque).
The effect is intentionally grandiose,
with the collective entry-fronting in better proportion to the wider boulevards
of the Viennese 'Ring' - a kind of mega-boulevard affording broader views of
the surrounding architecture (a useful comparison may be made with the Parisian
nineteenth century boulevards designed by Haussmann). Such collective
architectural effects were clearly felt to be apposite to the capital of an
Empire (as they were for
Trans-building: we perceive
space as horizons, layers or zones each with their dominant field of meaning…
Now that we have taken the
step to identify the parts which make up buildings as they are actually
experienced, we can examine two important implications of this
re-conceptualisation. First, there is the step, already partly taken in some
previous analyses, towards dealing with collections of buildings, of collective
urban structures (or their perception as such), the trans-building, and its all-important sub-divisions (the collective
form of the solar, facade, and entry-fronting). Second, there are
considerations of a fundamental nature concerning the 'gendering' of received
architectural terms and assumptions to be considered; there then follow the
implications of these conceptual adjustments themselves upon interpretation.
From
the point of view of the lived experience of architecture, is there anything
left of the idea of a 'whole' building? This concept can only really be
employed if the building in question has some iconic status in a canon, if it
is a 'must go see' building, or if it, in some way, stands alone. However even
this caveat raises the question of how a building is framed. Expectation joins
viewpoint, as represented by photography, painting, or film. It is a question
of whether more attention is paid to the building from the point of view of
treating it as an art object, or as a cultural signifier, or as an engineering
project. Otherwise the only real 'wholes' are our three experiential
categories: entry-fronting, facade, and solar. It could be argued that these
have more actual integrity (that they alone manifest more significant
differences), than most so-called 'entire' buildings (clear exceptions are
palaces and churches that stand alone, however, more often these are found in
the context of an urban environment with which they relate). The Woolworth
Building (1913), for example, is often shown standing alone, a difficult
viewpoint to obtain, more typically it is found in the context of its
neighbours, some in similar styles, some in later contrasting designs (the ill-fated
Twin Towers in New York); all, however, manifest the three levels which are
recognisable despite stylistic differences.
One implication of the division
of buildings into parts which may carry more meaning than the building itself
and of the resultant joining together of the different levels of the built
environment into parallel segments, is the disturbing, or the uncovering, of a
dependency upon the 'gendering' of concepts normally used by traditional
criticism to describe buildings or to divide up the built environment into
discrete, prominent, and in this way, significant, entities. One rhetorical
element, present in any building said to be 'famous in itself', or which
'stands alone', is that of a masculinist (monist and individualistic)
preference for a solid and separate entity with a discrete identity. If this
way of conceptualising a building can be regarded as influenced by apparently
phallic skiamorphs, then it also
echoes or mirrors the Enlightenment notion of the Western Self, 'I', or
subject-position, as free-standing, independent, and free from all (irrational,
and so traditionally 'feminine') desire, de-contextualised and un-embedded;
that is, as a traditionally conceived formulation of the masculine gender role
(a normative role now questioned by many actual biological males in advanced
capitalist societies). It appears as if the assertion of a whole, or undivided
subject-hood, theoretically required for the positing an un-contradictory
proposition, also requires of architectural critics and traditional
aestheticians, the thesis of a whole undivided building in order for its
indivisibility, the source of its claim to rationality, to be supported (as
opposed to a consciousness of its debt to collective, even conflicting, forms
of being, which may traverse it and include emotive bases or 'illogical'
rationales based upon identity exchanges).
The opposing rhetorical pole
might well suggest the re-imbrocation of context or contrast, in such a way as
to, not only include these factors in any discussion of a building's character
or effect, but also to move toward a conceptualisation of the built environment
in terms of proximities, which produce continuities and contradictions -
perhaps in an architectural form of 'touching' (in the opposing and defining
'feminine' sense identified by the French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray).[17] As well as opening up the discussion onto
the trans-building structures that were posited as the actual units of
architectural urban experience above, the 'touch' of one building with another
allows discussion upon the role of edges of buildings, their joins, their
vertical contiguity, and upon the difference in texture or description of the
parts of buildings that lie around their contiguous edges, in their meetings
and mismatches of style and line (as in the example of Louis Sullivan's pilasters).
If this shift of terminology appears to be symbolic in its re-figuring of the
terms of description (or comparison) employed, it is important to note that
such a shift can result in an actual, even fundamental, change of preference
when it comes to the choice of buildings (always in the plural) to be
considered, analysed, or critically canonised (streets or views, rather than
single buildings, may become elements in the canon). The inclusion of context
involves a change in perspective that moves the emphasis onto co-existence. As
with the discussion on wholes, their sub-divisions, and their dispersal, so
this approach would also result in a number of buildings adjacent to one
another (a street or block), together with their combinations or contrasts of textures,
as the preferred unit of study. This coincidence of the experiential with an
'interested' or 'minority' viewpoint must immediately suggest options for a
political or ethically concerned architectural criticism.
Perhaps we are now in a position to
answer the question - implicit in the rejection of the notion of the 'whole' as
applied to architecture: what is a part? Usually, as we have seen, for the
viewer, a part is a part of the same: like-parts group together to make up
trans-individual clusters. Horizontal series combine with vanishing points.
Here the new or naturally perceived whole of the city or built environment is
either the street (the view down or along a street) or the solar, facade,
entry-fronting distinction propagated across numerous buildings. These
experiential 'wholes', can, for example, be seen from the 'same' level
(entry-fronting, facade, or solar), or from street level, from the windows of
the opposite facade, or from the vantage point or opening place that allows an
extended solar to be collected together into a skyline. It is here that the
three parts, in their trans-building potential, are at work at their maximum
extension. The three parts (or two in the Classical and Baroque architectural
symbolism if the Temple front) appear to act as collective units of perception
and so play a part in the co-ordination of social, collective, and individual
meaning by providing three basic (but not essential, nor trans-historical)
terms and their collective experiential forms (collective entry-fronting,
facade, solar). In the analyses that have preceded, it had already become
necessary to locate differing temporal values in the discrete parts of a given
building, indicating that any analysis of the temporal rhetoric of
actually-experienced architecture must already begin by dealing with a
vocabulary of parts, and so with slices through groups of buildings, rather
than exclusively focusing upon the discrete whole of a building with a Proper
Name. Apologies to Freud and the Enlightenment, but buildings are neither
penises nor people. Although it is the latter that think them.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2011.
[1] Out of the huge literature that exists on
the Pantheon, I have collected here only those studies which have attempted to
grapple with the building's impact and meaning or have something to say about
the coffers (an exhaustive bibliography can be found in Sperling, 1999). I have
listed them in reverse order of appearance (most recent first): Gert Sperling, Das Pantheon in Rom: Abbild und Mass des
Cosmos (Neuried: Ars Una, 1999); Claudia Conforti (ed.), Lo specchio del cielo: forme, significate,
tecniche e funzioni della cuppola dal Pantheon al Novecento (Milan, Electa,
1997); Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, 'Uber das Light im Pantheon', in Licht und Architektur, Tübingen (1990)
pp. 107-110; Tod A. Marder, 'Bernini and Alexander VII: Criticism & Praise
of the Pantheon in the Seventeenth Century', The Art Bulletin, Vol. 71, No.4 (Dec., 1989) pp. 628-645; Howard
Saalman, 'The Pantheon coffers: pattern and number', in Architectura, 18 (1988) pp. 121-122; J. B. Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981); William L. MacDonald, Pantheon: Design, Meaning, Progeny (London; Allen Lane, 1976) and The Architecture of the Roman Empire,
rev. ed. 1985 (New Haven & London,: Yale UP, 1965); Kijeld de Fine Licht, The Rotunda in Rome: A Study of Hadrian's
Pantheon (Aarhus, Jutland: Archeological Study Publications, VIII, 1969).
[2] In the critical literature the
coffers are usually
mentioned only in connection to: (i) their role as a lead-up to the oculus; (ii) the patterns of light-fall
and shadows that occur at differing times of the day; or (iii) combined with
numerological-theological references which could have no conceivable impact on
the consciousness of the viewer (see, for example, Sperling 1999, pp.10; 120).
[3] MacDonald (1976) alone comes close when
he suggests, but does not follow up the implications of his own pregnant
suggestion that: 'Their enboxed sides recede slanting inward, as if each
frame-like element of each coffer was the base portion or frustrum of an
oblique pyramid whose apex lay outside and above the dome' (p. 38).
[4] The final view of de Fine Licht (1969)
and the authorities he rests his claims on regarding the role of the (step
distortions on the) coffers is that they act as an 'optical correction' - to
what exact end is not stated. Undistorted coffers are frequently used with only
a loss of the uplifting effect as the net loss. 'Distorted coffers' have been
'known since Republican times' and are also to be found in Trajan's thermae (fn 32, p. 176). MacDonald
(1976) Illustration 137 (pp.
122-124). See also Tod A. Marder (1989), where the invisibility of the internal
proportions of the coffers extends even to many of the drawings made of the
Pantheon interior across the centuries; with drawings, engravings etc., we see
what the artist sees, comparison with photographic evidence reminds us of what
is left out; see the illustrations on pp. 635; 636; 638.
[5] For the role of the coffers as
'traditional decoration', that is, with no structural rationale, see de Fine
Licht (1969), p. 140. MacDonald (1976) notes, in one of the rare references to
numbers untainted with hermeticism, of the fact that there are 'twenty-eight
radial rows of coffers' whose function is 'seven and fourteen', whereas the
lower regions have as their functions 'four and eight' that, 'the coffer system
will not synchronise with the verticals of the zones below, except along the
four cardinal axes, and this adds a certain restlessness to the design' (p.
72). This separation of the dome from the drum further adds to its appearance
as 'floating'.
[6] De Fine Light argues that, 'there is no
evidence for establishing who stood in the 8 aedicules', an assertion that
makes an 'abstract', or experiential account of the effect of the absent
statues and their enframing structures all the more cogent (de Fine Light, 1969, p. 200).
[7] See esp. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (
[8] Much of the discussion around the theme
of plane and space in Hopper in chapter one could be carried over, mutatis mutandis, to the temporal
experience of architecture. The
temporal implications of 'Stairway', in particular, may be applied to
similarly configured spaces, and to
conjunctions of such spaces such as multiple joins or levels, of landings and
stairs - indeed any place where older and newer buildings join together, whether
as connections, juxtapositions, or extensions.The
temporal allusions of such places is as important to the effect/affect of such
spaces as their purely spatial configuration (if such a thing can be said to
exist from a human perspective).
The same can be said of
rooftop views, where the experience of the collected upper parts of
buildings may be found to call up utopian and dysutopian, public and private,
terms of temporal reference.
Finally, the discussion of 'New York Movie' has already suggested how
the internal space of a building may yield multiple movements in time, which
are also multipule moments in temporality - that is, subjectivity.
[9] Jacopo Benci, Faraway & Luminous (
[10] In this light the act or process of
performativity can be read as the calling up of something absent, even
radically absent (the extra-temporal) and making it, not only as if present,
but as if participated in (in this sense images and space may perform, that
is carry ritual force).
A ritual evocation; a
tropic exchange or figurative addition that functions exactly like the trope of prosopopoeia (the evocation of the
absent, or the dead, a form of personification, or another trope of naming). Prosopopoeia
as ritual form. If prosopopoeia resembles metaphor (itself the trope of
resemblance), what of other key tropes as ritual/tropic relations, and what of
their potential architectural/temporal significance? (The point being that in
the act of meaning making all
figurative means available may
be in play.) The relation of ritual to temporality is important as ritual
practices, particularly the more intense ones, often call up, or upon, an
alternate, or outside to, everyday temporality. If we classify ritual through figure,
ritual as a means to second meaning, this is what we get: metaphor; looks like = is (and
antiphrasis; irony = a parodic
relation): metonymy; next to or near = all tropes of
touching or spatial hierarchy,
margin/centre, left/right, the uses of upness, hypsosis, openness (sky), or enclosure
(earth/womb): synecdoche; part/whole relations = sympathetic magic/symbolism,
redivision of a medium, or landscape into parts: metalepsis; distant cause, present
effect over time or space (or contrary) = cause or effect from here to/from
'there', from present to past and future: and hyperbole; exaggeration = ritual
intensification: meiosis; understatement = desacralisation: and litotes (and
other tropes of negation) = emphasising absence in presence. Regarding ritual and time; the performative appears to
merge or exchange times, with the Other-time, the before-time, or eternity. A
general temporal formula for ritual: calling upon the eternal to safeguard the
future (of the group).
[11] There are many approaches to the
aethetics (or aesthetic reception and so rhetoricity) of ruins: a return to
Nature as a fall due to indivdual or collective pride, with time as the great
leveller
(variations with religious overtones, fall of Babel, etc); pastness as an echo or
leftover of the past, something on the edge or beyond understanding; futuricity
as vision of the potential future of viewer's time and civilisation; or the
temporal lack of presence of the former options read as an effect of
ghostliness, where the presence as it is reminds us of the absence of the thing
depicted (this would be the phenomenological and figurative basis of the other
options) - a
further sense of ghostliness would connote otherness, not temporal (eternal,
mythic, folkloristic or otherwise a-temporal, an version of the dream vision -
of 'unconscious' origin perhaps.
[12] See Robert Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991),
pp. 62-63.
[13] See Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism, Pl. 47, p.
69; Pl. 38, p. 63.
[14] See Loren Partridge, The Renaissance in Rome (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1996) and Linda Murry, The High Renaissance and Mannerism (London: Thames & Hiudson,
1977) for a range of representative images of the buildings mentioned.
[15] See Marvin Trachtenberg &
Isabelle Hyman, Architecture: From
Prehstory to Post-modernism (London: Academy Editions, 1986) p. 298.
[16] See Trachtenberg & Hyman, Architecture, for representative images
[17] See Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Two
Lips Speak Together’, in This Sex Which Is Not One (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1985) pp. 205-218; ‘Volume without Contours’, in The Irigaray
Reader, Edited By Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwells, 1991) pp. 53-67;
‘Veiled Lips’, in Marine Lover of
Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 77-119.