On the level

by Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh

There is something comforting and reassuring about this thing. I received it as a gift and it has always seemed to me to be a kind of moral object, in the same way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom describes Davy Byrne’s as a ‘moral pub’. There is something of that world in it too, with its brass and hardwood, reservoirs of spirit and glass optics, which I imagine as seen in mid-day sunlight filtered through leaded windows. It has a calm demeanour, quite different from files or hammers or saws. Its role is not to act upon another object, but to rest in relation to it and to tell us something through that adjacency. The level’s presence bestows a stillness and it has to be still to be used. Its action doesn’t come from the application of some force, but in rest, when the movement of the bubble comes to a halt in its gently-arcing capsule of volatile liquid. The substance is a warm yellow and the bubble so thing-like that it might seem an object trapped in a magically liquid amber, or even a little parcel of air conveyed to us from some primeval past.

The level is not graduated, only the middle point matters, and around this the tool is symmetrical – with the exception of a second liquid sight, this for reading verticality, which is let into one side of the instrument. Now, although I’ve just claimed that the level doesn’t demand the action of a force, of course it does, but it’s one not applied by its user, for it relies upon the differential effect of gravity upon the air and ethanol in the glass chamber – the same force that renders the surface of any bucket of water horizontal, or rather subtly compliant with the curvature of the earth.

Levels seem to be about lines or planes, but in the first instance they are really – as the etymological link between level and the Latin libra implies – about points of balance around which these are projected. Spirit levels are scales that weigh things against one another, converting this vertical relation into a projection of horizontality that is ultimately tangential. The tapering curvature of the sides of this level, with the protective brass plates laid into the ends of its bottom face, I much enjoy, partly – I suppose – because it ambiguously both draws the object to a close and projects it, giving the instrument a conclusiveness while at the same time extending it by gesturing along the line it constructs. But the pleasure is also to do with the affinity that the resultant form suggests with liquidity, on which the tool’s principle of operation depends. The level’s ship-shape brings to my mind eighteenth-century engravings that I have sometimes seen of ships at sea emerging from below the horizon line, or Pliny’s story of a light at the top of a mast seeming to descend and eventually disappear below the watery surface as the boat recedes from view. While this level is a small object that fits comfortably in the hand, its sensitivity to great – planetary, even cosmic – forces makes it something much more than this and feeds the imagination with vast horizons. Today we may live in a world of unprecedentedly precise technologies, but I find they don’t – as this level does – give me an idea of precision that sets my mind in motion in the same way. The micro-circuitry embedded in my iPhone gives me information, but as an object it is, I have to say, far from a tool with which to dream.