Anton Gorlenko
B O D Y S Q UA R E D Notes on the inevitability of elegiac architecture
Under the guidance of Sylvie Taher
History and Theory Studies 3 AA School of Architecture
London MMXIV
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Wall around the Royal Salt works by Claude Nicola Ledoux, postcard, drawing
I
Always hierarchy. Le Corbusier
It is almost a truism that, although built and inhabited by man, architectural structures are bigger than a man. In spite of this, and in order to efface any traces of the truistic taste, the following proposition will be put forward: along with its main purpose to provide humans with space for living, work and rituals, architectural form conveys and specifically articulates its own dimensional superiority over mortals, for the notion of architectural scale cannot be understood merely in its absolute terms, as size, but, what is more, it must be comprehended in terms of ratio, in relation to a body. Common use of the expression large scale without mentioning the reference unit – body – presents us with the situation of a dead metaphor, when the implication of comparison with the size of the body becomes the linguistic norm: self-evident and even unnoticed. A closer look at the word scale presents us with an extensive constellation of definitions and semantic nuances all deriving from the original Latin scala, which means ladder. Two activities can be metaphorically equated: 1). Scaling up the ladder, as the physical transition between the levels in space by means of repeated rhythmical movement 2). Resizing of an object that is the subjective virtual transfer from one dimensional level/system to another. The form of the ladder might resemble the simple ruler or a diagram of the scale bar on a map. The connection between the ladder, size and the fish skin (other meaning of scale) might seem less transparent. However, through the figurative usage of a term as in “the scales fall from someone’s eyes”, all of a sudden, a glimpse of meaning comes into being. The scale can be construed as the solid cognitive shell which hides the absolute size and nature of thing below the chitin of relative appearance. The apparent scale of the building states the seeming impossibility to sense its objective size. What happens when the duality of humans and buildings is transformed into a triad of expanding entities: body — building — city? Saying city would describe the particular case of landscape — given spatial entity, which has been formed naturally over time and without the single will. Landscape is so big that cannot be grasped instantly, thus the physical experiencing of landscape always implies the temporal dimension — that is the definition of journey. The extension in time sets the main distinction between a landscape and a building — but also provides a building with a possible scenario of being like a landscape (or like a city). Body – building — city: even before any image comes to mind, a certain relationship can be sensed: a building stands as a medium between the extra small size of a man and the extra large scale of the city. Architecture is a device – an extra medium – but also a metaphor for city at large, otherwise ungraspable. For what architecture fills (read: frames) is the space between one’s eye and the landscape. The tension between two dimensional extremes — body and landscape – revealed itself in the changes of the system of measurements that took place in France in the late XVIII century (1795). The metric system, where meter was calculated as 1/40000 000 part of Paris meridian was applied all over the Europe by Napoleon during the fol-
lowing decade and replaced the ancient units of measurements based on the sizes of the human body, parts of the body and the simplest movements: digitus (finger), palmus (palm), pes (foot), cubit (ell), passus (double step) — each country had its own version. Since then, the length was never again assimilated, even metaphorically, with the human, but became the derivative from the size of the territory, precisely measured and consequently fully controlled. This shift might seem insufficient: after all it was just the names of the units and the abstract numbers that changed. Yet, we would propose that this polar reorientation of the reference point (from small to extra large) belonged to the same paradigm as the formation of new scale degree in architecture, when – as Pier Vittorio Aureli argued — […]the city unfolded in a new regional and generic dimension, where architecture as form disappeared: the engineering of the region.1 During the next two centuries, human structures set in meters seemed to tend to approach the size, from which the meter derived: the circumference of the globe. The amount of space under control kept growing, thus in 1983, meter was officially redefined: this time in astrophysical terms as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. Impersonalization of the system of measurements in end of the XVIII century coincided with the start of the process the anonymization of architecture as a result of its growing sizes. In the architecture of the Modern time, it must have been Boullée, who omitted the private architectural typologies for the first time: the public monuments of Boullée were “addressed and celebrated its use by the anonymous and free individual”2, whose anonymity was apparently the result of literal invisibility of a man. In the course of history of the large scale, from Boullée’s “Architecture, Essay on Art” to “Bigness” of Rem Koolhaas the new way of drawing based on the impossible point of view was developed: aerial perspectives and plans starting at 1:1000, in which case the human figure becomes just a 1 mm mote. Architectural theorist Alexander Rappaport proposed that architectural bigness causes a “paradoxical scale schizophrenia”3, when the large intervention exists as an imaginary integral entity (as seen on the drawing board) and also as a suppressing environment, irrational and incognizable in its real vastness. In order to remedy this cognitive dissonance, or at least to question it, the theorists and visionaries of the last decades have proposed an extensive repertoire of scenarios for the architecture to tame the city scale via such concepts as megastructure, city within the city, archipelago etc. In what follows we would try to define and analyze the alternative examples when the biggest urban effect was achieved by the smallest interventions and when the body and the city were bridged not by means of architectural 1 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press, 2011), ? 2 Aureli, 142 3 “Скромное оживление и масштабная шизофрения”(Modest revival and scale schizophrenia), last modified May 3, 2013, http://papardes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/blog-post_03.html
Public meter standard by Chalgrin from 18th century (36, rue de Vaugirard, Paris).
expansion, but on the contrary — by compression. The case to be considered is when the building – instead of becoming the metonymy of the city – mimics the body, presenting us with a concept of building within the building. In his essay on Gothic architecture, John Summerson traces back the origins of an aedicula, a small symbolic representation of architecture within architecture: “It has also been used to preserve the human scale in a building deliberately enlarged to express the superhuman character of a God”.4 When the connection between the human and its biggest organizational structure (city) takes the form of a critical contemplation on one’s finiteness and one’s feebleness to conquer the city, building becomes the only evidence for its user of the true scale relationship between the body and the world. Swedish art-critic and writer Ulf Linde proposed once, speaking of the architecture of Peter Celsing that a building is monumental not because it appears to be greater than what it actually is, but because it appears smaller than what it actually is5. Thus, occurring in the interaction between the beholder and building as a matter of appearance and perception, monumentality is the grandeur hidden by scale. Monumentality can only be activated by one’s body stepping in. Compare two images of the private house of Russian avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov (table at the next page). One shows the volume of the building within the street context, when the house appears to be comparatively small in relation to the neighbouring urban masses, underlining its solitude. The other image shows Melnikov himself inside the house appearing insignificantly small in the 5 meter tall space of his studio. The relationship of the building 4 John Summerson. Heavenly mansions : and other essays on architecture (New York : W.W. Norton, 1998), 4 5 Peter Celsing : en bok om en arkitekt och hans verk (Stockh. : Liberförlag / arkitekturmuseet, 1981), 125 -131. This reference was kindly suggested and translated by Buster Rönngren.
to the city is metonymically reproduced in the relationship between the body and the building. Building mimics its owner merging two scale systems. Even the inscription on the facade: CONSTANTINE MELNIKOV, ARCHITECT – arguably refers to the building itself, not the owner. Anatoly Strigalev argues in the preface to Melnikov’s autobiography: “Melnikov had happen to build relatively small buildings, in absolute terms. Yet there is frequently confirmed observation: the real building would appear surprisingly smaller in its physical dimensions than one might expect, after the prior consideration of the project via the drawings and photographs. After one walks around the building and experiences its interior spaces it “grows up” again. This is the evidence of monumentality of Melnikov’s architecture”6. When the category of form is completely discredited by the omnivorous eclecticism, the scale stands as the only substantial decision for the architect to make. Miesian less is more could be replaced by The even simpler motto: small is big. In his early work Toward the Philosophy of the Act (1921), Mikhail Bakhtin created the concept of non-alibi of being: “which underlies the concrete and once-occurrent ought of the answerably performed act, [...] is not something I come to know of and to cognize, but is something I acknowledge and affirm in a unique or once-occurrent manner”.7 The thing to acknowledge is one’s size. If alibi means elsewhere, the unacceptable alibi for the architect would be the bird’s-eye (in the absence of God’s eye) view, and if the size of the body cannot be changed, the project’s scale could be changed to approach here. “In reality, axes are not perceived in the bird’s-eye views shown in plans on the drawing board, but from the ground, by a man standing erect and looking before him”,8 – Le Corbusier wrote. The ability of an architect to discern a human in this project, simply means to share the view point with a human, hence, to be a human. 6 Константин Мельников, Архитектура моей жизни, (Konstantin Melnikov, Architecture of my Life) (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985), fragment translated by A. Gorlenko. 7 Mikhail Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, (Austin: University, of Texas Press, 1993), 40 8 Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, (London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2007), 221
II. He designed a church where his own coffin couldn’t fit through the door. John Hejduk
There is a building in the history of architecture whose small size seems to be not just the consequence of any typological or pragmatic decision, but a deliberate design manifestation. This is Tempietto (1502) of Donato Bramante, an exemplary structure of Italian Renaissance which name (literally small temple) gave a birth to a long tradition of commemorative projects of the New time. Being dedicated to Saint Peter, this small sanctuary was erected to commemorate the legendary point on the Janiculum hill where, as it was believed then, the apostle was crucified. The contrast between the small and large formed the crucial paradox of Bramante’s career in general. Tempietto took its form against the dramatic background project of Pope Julius II to restructure the whole city of Rome, which was to be crowned by the new, giant Basilica of Saint Peters. Bramante was the architect for this vision, which was fated to remain in the realm of utopia. The size of Tempietto relates to Bramante’s proposal for St. Peter as approximately 1:10, thus it could be considered as a conceptual model that happen to remain more real that its prototype. It is a marble David that shattered the giant by the very fact of its material presence – whereas the height (and form) of Tempietto reminds the head of Goliath himself – the dome of St. Peters. The giant was finally erected by the following generations of architects, but its unbelievable scale displaced the above mentioned paradox of monumentality by the calamity of dimensional confusion. Commemorating merely one’s ambition, St. Peter’s cathedral disrupts the stair of dimensional relationships, so that human perception can’t ascend it anymore: oppression of masses doesn’t lead to one’s revelation. Reproaching this megalomania, Tempietto (head) crowns the hill of Janiculum (body), as a clear alternative to adjacent Vatican: grandeur achieved not against but in collaboration with landscape. Tempietto seems to exist simultaneously in different scale and temporal registers. Apart from its evident dialogue with St. Peter’s Cathedral, it is presented to the city of Rome in general. Its specific position within the larger context may be illustrated by the the placement logic of the monument. The only clue in the ancient chronicle mentioned that the apostle was executed “between two metae”. In Latin, metae means either he turning point marked by the pillar at each end of the ancient circus or a pyramid (in the argument between roman antiquarians of the time Bramante inclined to the latter definition). One of two pyramids was found near the Vatican (demolished in XVI century), while the only other Roman pyramid was detected at a distance of (sic!) 3.5 km: the tomb of Gaius Cestius near Porta Ostiense. The middle of the straight line between these two artifacts points at the monastery of Saint-Pietro in Montorio; Tempietto was erected in its courtyard9. 9 Jack Freiberg, Bramante’s Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown (Cambridge University Press: 2014), 63-70
This alchemical and quasi-scientific operation demonstrates the way to look at the city, when the vast historical and material data is re-imagined creatively and when the most significant decisions are based on, at times, tiny, almost unrecognizable details of the city fabric. At that time, the city was read as the constellation of artifacts, which were to be subjectively edited, re-imagined, framed, connected or even moved. Pier Vittorio Aureli in his study on Piranesi describes precisely the same ideological reading of the city, but two centuries later, when this tradition was almost spent: […] the production of a knowledge of the city still [was] informed by conjectures, assertions, and decisions rather than just scientific “facts”.10 Tempietto is an exemplary operation of making a microscopic notch on the body of the city, pointlike particle, whose size, shape, and structure is irrelevant in a given scale context – yet, semantically, it is a true origin point for the new coordinate system to be established. 10 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility..., 114-115
IV.
V. III.
II.
I.
Works of Bramante in Rome
I.Tempietto
II.Via Giulia
III.Coutyard of Santa Maria della Pace
IV. Belvedere Courtyard V. Basilica of Saint Peter (not realised)
Antonio Filarete, Crucifixion of St. Peter
Janus
John Hejduk, sketch
The origin point implies the intersection; at the same time, the crucifixion cross, although made to kill a human, is still probably the most precise symbolic representation, – as a consequence of its monstrous instrumentality – of a human body. John Hejduk mentioned in one of his interviews: “What always interests me in the old paintings is the construction of the cross. How the cross was constructed? How it was detailed? I think that is important to know”. The cross of St. Peter was apparently a specific one. Apostle was crucified upside down on a cross, which ,according to the famous relief of Antonio Filarete, had two diagonal bracing elements. Forming a triangular in elevation this cross found its rhyme in the pyramid’s silhouette. Tempietto was erected between two pyramids which were also fondly imagined in XV century to be the gravestones of the two legendary brothers-founders of Rome: Romulus and Remus. Marking the geometrical center between them, Tempietto becomes an unexpected architectural reconciliation of brothers’ famous arguing (led to a fratricide) about where Rome should be built. In this seemingly endless enfilade of associations and spaces inhabited by their personifications, one zooms-in-and-out alternately: from body to city. This, the vision of two brothers staring at two polar directions activates the next figure: double faced pagan god Janus, from whom Janiculum, the eighth roman hill, gained its name. Janus was the deity of beginnings and transitions, guardian of gates, doors and passages. Being usually rendered with two faces — orientated to the past and to the future – Janus, thus, was looking after the temporal transitions as well. Janus’ temple in ancient Rome was in fact composed of four triumphal arches arranged in a cross. The rotunda of Tempietto, being equal from all sides, forms a meta-threshold that connects entities in all directions, therefore serves as the opening towards the transcendent dimension. Having in mind the fact that Janus’s token was the key, it becomes evident that St. Peter (the guardian of Paradise gate) is the direct iconographical successor of the pagan god. For what both of them look after is the limit; the enfilade seems to loop here.
III
And what is space anyway if not the body’s absence at every given point? Joseph Brodsky
Being always beloved by poets, who have been spending time on its villas and who have established numerous poetic academies here since XVI century, Janiculum is the point beyond the city, yet aimed to be a place to observe the city. For to think of life poet must escape life, thus there is always an urge for an exclusion and distance. In 1979 a Russian poet in exile and future Nobel prize laureate, Joseph Brodsky, arrived in Rome as a poet-stipendiary of American Academy located on Janiculum. His opus magnum inspired by that stay is Roman Elegies, whose title and classical elegiac meter were borrowed from Goethe. In this poem, while tracing poet’s flânerie along the city and montaging spatial impressions with personal reflections, Brodsky presents the reader with a powerful optical zoom. The realization of one’s vulnerable smallness in comparison to the scale of the city is reflected in the poem by transitions between the small and giant, between one’s body, limbs, eye and the landscape. Eggshells of cupolas, vertebrae of bell towers Colonnades’ limbs sprawled wide in their blissful, heathen. Brodsky possibly would have seen the vast panorama of Rome from the famous observation point having the courtyard with Tempietto right behind his shoulder. The accidental, ex facte, geographical coincidence presents us with the notion of elegiac architecture. The genre of elegy originated as ancient Greek lament song with a flute accompaniment. Already in Roman poetic tradition (for example in Catullus), elegy was developed into a lyrical contemplation of one’s fundamental conditions: life and death. If described spatially, the elegy can be seen as the reflection of one’s limits or the comprehension of finiteness in space and time. In this inherent capacity to link the dimensional extremes, architecture arguably approaches poetry, whose task is to link what is otherwise unbridgeable within language. Inherent capacity of monumental to compress the matter, finds its trans-disciplinary parallel in poetic capacity to accelerate the language: […] there are times when, by means of a single word, a single rhyme, the writer of a poem manages to find himself where no one has ever been before him, further, perhaps, than he himself would have wished for. The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.11 At first glance, a poem definitely appears smaller than what it actually is. Miniature Tempietto can be read as an example of an architectural elegy distinct from the epic megalomania of Julius II, who, questioning scale limits, was responsible for architecture of the Modern time to have made its first, though unsuc11“Joseph Brodsky - Nobel Lecture”, Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 1 Dec 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture.html>
cessful attempt of extraordinary city reform. Epic utopia is public, anonymous and unreal, whereas small elegiac form by means of its presence stresses the very deixis of person, place and time: I’m here now. Confirming its monumentality, Tempietto is much bigger in absolute values than it appears: 9 m in diameter by 13 m height12 (Melnikov House has precisely the same dimensions). However, the position of the beholder is fixed: one can only see the temple as a whole, when standing at the steps leading to the courtyard through the arch, which in turn frames Tempietto as a viewfinder of a camera. This apparently dictates the closer focal distance to the eye, thus the temple is perceived as being projected on the surface, framed by the arch. Simple perspective calculation proves that from this fixed viewpoint Tempietto appears to be nearly equal to man’s height. Sitting behind the scenic screen of the arch and within its cortile as lonely inhabitant, Tempietto is an animated architectural character, the ditto of its beholder looking back at him. This effect confirms the mechanic of aura production proposed by Walter Benjamin: Experience of aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationship to the relations between the inanimate or natural object and [the person]... to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in turn13. In his Nobel lecture Joseph Brodsky argued that a poet writes because: [...] the black vertical clot of words on the white sheet of paper presumably reminds him of his own situation in the world, of the balance between space and his body14. The body of Tempietto with its 16 Tuscan columns — invariant to 16 lines in each of Brodsky’s stanza – is a small masterly carved elegy on the page of its courtyard. The initial project of Bramante proposed the circular loggia around, likening the plan to a giant eye, with the pupil of the temple, thus an old city stared into the sky and at the new city to come.
The primordial definition of space reads: the space is where I don’t exist.
12 Mark Wilson Jones, “The Tempietto and the Roots of Coincidence”, Architectural History 33 (1990), 1-28 13 Walter Benjamin. Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1982), 155-200 14 “Joseph Brodsky - Nobel Lecture”, Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 1 Dec 2013. <http:// www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture.html>
References: Books Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge (Mass): MIT Press, 2011 Mikhail Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, Austin: University, of Texas Press, 1993 Walter Benjamin. Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1982. Peter Celsing : en bok om en arkitekt och hans verk, Stockholm : Liberförlag / arkitekturmuseet, 1981 Jack Freiberg, Bramante’s Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown, Cambridge University Press: 2014 Mark Wilson Jones, “The Tempietto and the Roots of Coincidence”, Architectural History 33 (1990), 1- 28 Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2007 John Summerson. Heavenly mansions : and other essays on architecture. New York : W.W. Norton, 1998. Константин Мельников, Архитектура моей жизни, (Konstantin Melnikov, Architecture of my life), Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985 Web “Joseph Brodsky - Nobel Lecture”, Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 1 Dec 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture. html> Tower and Labyrinth (Bashnya i Labirint), blog of Alexander Rappaport. Web. 19 Apr 2013 <http://papardes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/blog-post_03.html>
XII Наклонись, я шепну Тебе на ухо что-то: я благодарен за все; за куриный хрящик и за стрекот ножниц, уже кроящих мне пустоту, раз она -- Твоя. Ничего, что черна. Ничего, что в ней ни руки, ни лица, ни его овала. Чем незримей вещь, тем оно верней, что она когда-то существовала на земле, и тем больше она -- везде. Ты был первым, с кем это случилось, правда? Только то и держится на гвозде, что не делится без остатка на два. Я был в Риме. Был залит светом. Так, как только может мечтать обломок! На сетчатке моей -- золотой пятак. Хватит на всю длину потемок.
J. Brodsky, Roman Elegies (last stanza)
Donato Bramante, Tempietto, plan (from S. Serlio)