Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture

Kim Sexton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317281856
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in premodern and modern cultural contexts.

Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture poses one overarching question: How does a period's understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post?war Europe with scientifically?framed, body?centred provocations.

By adding the third factor—science—to the architecture and body equation, this book presents a nuanced appreciation for architectural creativity and its embeddedness in other sets of social, institutional and political relationships. In so doing, it spatializes body theory and ties it to the experience of the built environment in ways that disturb traditional boundaries between the architectural container and the corporeally contained.

1 Architecture before the body?

Articulation and proportion in Archaic and Classical Greece

Lian Chikako Chang

When we look into our past, we see some things and not others. Even the word look, which frames the search for history as a predominantly visual affair, is suggestive: the cultures of alphabetic writing and print, as well as those of television and digital media, prioritize the ordering and aestheticizing of things according to appearance. So it is no wonder that architectural meaning has often been sought in the visible arrangement of its parts. This has been especially true of proportion. Understood as a visible manifestation of the mathematical order of nature, proportion has a particular hold on the architectural imagination. Classical Greek temples, with their rows of columns and frontal entablatures, have lent themselves to endless geometric speculations carried out through diagrams overlaid on reconstructed elevations; and the limbs of Greek figural sculptures have likewise been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that one might have thought reserved for the physiognomic nude ‘posture photos’ of the mid-twentieth century.

No doubt, the ancients crafted their sculptures and temples according to measure. And it is equally clear that they drew an analogy between the measures of parts of the human body and parts of temples: the existence of reliefs describing units of measure through images of feet, hand spans, and arm spans (or cubits) suggests this, as does other evidence from various quarters (Figure 1.1). But our culture’s ready recognition of the visual above all else has made historians blind to other sources of understanding. Although proportion was a fascination and even obsession for the ancient Greeks, this chapter argues that its earliest and primary significance was neither formal nor mathematical. In its first use, in fact, proportion was not a visual concern at all. Through the Archaic (eigth to sixth centuries BCE) and Classical (fifth and fourth centuries BCE) periods, interest in proportion was instead driven by worldly concerns about politics, health and craft. It had to do with the sharing out of power, the mixing of bodily fluids and forces within oneself, and the just creation of the universe by a master craftsman. Proportion guaranteed the coherent articulation of things.

Figure 1.1 Greek metrological relief, c. fifth century BCE. Ashmolean Museum

Photo: Ashmolean Museum

The analogy between these two visually loaded entities, the building and the human body, is central to both the origins and subsequent history of proportion. The history of this relationship reads like the history of western architectural theory itself; scholars have traced its Greek manifestations and later trajectories in sophisticated ways, identifying how various architectural elements are visually or morphologically analogous to parts of bodies or to groups of them. While this has made the importance of the body in Greek architecture abundantly clear, the notions of the body and of proportion are more often assumed than questioned.

This chapter offers an argument in three sections. The first suggests that in its ancient origins from Plato’s Classical period through Vitruvius’ Roman one (fifth to first centuries BCE), proportion was not primarily a visual affair. Bodies and buildings alike were understood through proportion – but this proportion was not only, and not primarily, understood in terms of the visible arrangement of parts. The second section goes back in time to Homer’s Archaic Greece to find that instead of a concept of the body, the early Greeks had a set of words and cultural values that elevated a notion of articulation. To be well articulated was to be alive; to fall apart was to die. This idea of articulation becomes the key to understanding what the nascent idea of proportion meant as it emerged in the Classical period. The third and final section of this chapter argues that the conception of a body that arises in the Classical period – as illustrated by interrelated discussions about warfare, health and politics – is one in which the body’s order and life, or articulation, is guaranteed by its proportion.

In the Timaeus, Plato writes about the divine crafting of gods and forms of mortal life, including human bodies, in terms that are both modeled on and models for the work of mortal human craftsmen. In so doing, his text on proportion comes to serve as the West’s earliest extant architectural theory, an original source of ideas on architectural meaning. By unpacking the cultural and intellectual history behind Plato’s ideas, this chapter broadens our understanding of proportion to erode the hegemony of vision, as David Michael Levin (1993) calls it, in our understanding of the origins of the Western architectural tradition.

Proportioned bodies

In questions of the body and architecture in Western history, the first stop is inevitably Vitruvius (†15 BCE), the Roman writer of the earliest extant treatise on architecture. On Architecture (De Architectura), which until the eighteenth century was the canonical reference for architectural theory, is comprised of ten books. Of these, two deal with the proportions of parts of the Greek temples – mostly the columns – while the other eight deal with: general principles and the layout of cities; the types and proper handling of building materials; fora, basilicas, theaters, baths, and other public buildings; climates and private buildings; interior finishes, painting, and pigments; various sources and kinds of water, as well as its collection and management; the movement of the celestial bodies and the creation of sundials and other clocks; and machines and stratagems for warfare. Despite this breadth of topics, proportion and its basis in the human body are by far the best known of Vitruvian themes. He writes that ‘if a person is imagined lying back with outstretched arms and feet within a circle whose center is at the navel, the fingers and toes will trace the circumference of this circle as they move about’, while the soles of the feet, crown of the head, and outstretched arms also achieve the dimensions of a square (Vitr. De Arch. 3.1.3, trans. 1999). And so, he continues:

if Nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions (proportio) the separate individual elements answer to the total form, then the ancients [that is, the Greeks] seem to have had reason to … [require] a correspondence between the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.

(Vitr. De Arch. 3.1.4, trans. 1999)

Leonardo da Vinci has made this image familiar to the point of banality (McEwen, 2003, p. 156; Lester, 2011). The fact that Leonardo’s famous ink drawing of 1490 depicts his ‘Vitruvian Man’ standing, instead of lying down as in Vitruvius’ text, suggests a subtle but meaningful shift in priorities in the intervening millennium and a half: whereas the ancients saw human kind as an imperfect and passive recasting of a more perfect order, the early moderns began to picture themselves as active in the projection of this order. That this was not just a quirk of Leonardo is corroborated by the raft of other attempts at this image in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all of which also depict a standing figure: Taccola (c. 1449), Francesco di Giorgio (c. 1495), Fra Giovanni Giocondo (1511), Cesare Cesariano (1521), Francesco Giorgi (1525), and Albrecht Dürer (1532). Moreover, the urge to render visible what Vitruvius had been content to leave as an image in the mind’s eye reflects the early modern faith in humankind’s ability to see intelligible reality directly. This belief was not shared in antiquity but in modernity became almost tautological: reality is what is seen with one’s eyes.

Comparisons of the various ‘orders’, or types of columns, comprise the other body-centered visual trope that architecture inherited from the Vitruvian tradition. Here again, Vitruvius’ text has been reinterpreted to suit successive eras: while ‘Vitruvian classicism’ has come to stand for a rigid or prescriptive set of canonical forms, Vitruvius himself frequently reminds his reader that it is the architect’s job to select and adapt the principles of proportion for each specific project (Rowland and Howe, 1999, p. 15). He gives proportional guidelines not primarily through images, but rather in the form of numerical relationships described in text. The column types are codified as ‘orders’ starting only in the architectural treatises of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Raphael, Serlio, Palladio, and Vignola. Taken together, these works have gone a long way towards fixing in architectural historians’ minds the notion that proportion in architecture has always been conceived in terms of the visible measurement and arrangement of parts into wholes, as in the human body.

But human bodies are not assembled out of so many parts. Throughout history, there have been other ways of understanding the self as a physical entity, and other ways of grounding ideas and methods of building in lived experiences. Even a cursory reading of Vitruvius reveals this: his lengthy discussions of climate, drinking water, building materials, and the task of city foundation draw on contemporary understandings of health that go back to the Hippocratics in the fifth century BCE, suggesting the regulation of a different kind of body, as will be seen in Ece Okay’s chapter in this volume. For example, Vitruvius’ discussion of building materials hinges on each material’s relative proportions of elements: He describes stones from Anician quarries north of Rome as having ‘endless virtues’, since ‘neither freezing storms nor the touch of fire can hurt them; they are firm and last to a great old age because they have little air and fire in their natural composition, a moderate amount of water, and a very great deal of earth’ (Vitr. De Arch. 2.7.3, trans. 1999). The qualities endowed upon a material by a given set of proportions also depend on how the material is used. For example, alder ‘would hardly seem to be a useful wood’ because ‘it is composed of a great deal of air and fire, not much earth, and little water’. It does not, Vitruvius reports, ‘last for even a short time out of the earth’. But when it is ‘densely fixed as pilings under the foundations of buildings in swampy sites, by absorbing the liquid it lacks by nature it remains undecayed for eternity’ (Vitr. De Arch. 2.9.10, trans. 1999). Proportion, here, is circumstantial.

Vitruvius similarly discusses human bodies in terms of the substances they contain, absorb and emit. He is particularly concerned about the design of theaters, because when spectators sit motionless in pleasure in a theater they have, in Vitruvius’ words, ‘wide-open pores, in which the breath of the wind can easily take hold’. This puts people at risk if the theater is sited near ‘unhealthful places’; for example, if winds blow swamp air into the theater, ‘they will pour their harmful vapors into the spectator’s bodies’ (Vitr. De Arch. 5.3.1, trans. 1999). But neither is a ‘direct southern exposure’ healthy. In such a case, ‘the air, enclosed by the theater’s curvature’ gets heated and thus ‘boils off and thus reduces the moisture in the bodies of the spectators’ (Vitr. De Arch. 5.3.2, trans. 1999). Along the porticoes outside the theater, Vitruvius recommends planting gardens for three reasons: first, ‘because the subtle and light air from green plants flows in as the body exercises and clears the vision, carrying off the dense moisture from the eyes’; second, because such places help a populace with weight loss, as ‘the air, sucking away moisture from the limbs, reduces fullness … dissipating whatever the body has absorbed beyond what it can bear’; and finally, because ‘in open-air places the more noxious humors are sucked out of bodies, just as they seem to be drawn out of the earth on clouds’ (Vitr. De Arch. 5.9.5–6, trans. 1999). In this way, Greek and Roman medical theories take center stage in architectural design, through the notion of a body regulated by the proportioned mixing of humors and elements within itself.

While Vitruvius’ text is the earliest architectural treatise to have survived, he is not the first to write about these issues. He himself mentions architects who wrote in Classical Greece, and at times his text is more of an attempt at translating these Greek authors than original writing (Rowland and Howe, 1999, p. xiii). As such, Vitruvius has often been seen as a window as much onto the ideas of the Classical period as onto his own time. For Vitruvius, as for the Classical Greeks, the ‘body’ with its permeable boundary could equally be a city, building, material, animal or human being. Each of these bodies could be well proportioned in its elements and therefore cohesively mixed, solid and peaceful – or poorly proportioned and therefore disarticulated, subject to illness and strife as elements separate from each other. This idea of health does not describe a body of visibly proportioned limbs but rather, a porous container with a hidden interior, whose inner conditions are made partially apparent through the symptoms that emerge to its surface. It is a body embedded in its environment and subject to constant flux and flows. The architecture that Vitruvius describes in relation to this body is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Alberto Pérez-Gómez
• Introduction
• 1 Architecture before the body? Articulation and proportion in Archaic and Classical Greece
• 2 Healing in motion: locotherapy and the architecture of the Pergamene Asklepieion in the second century CE
• 3 The crafted bodies of Suger: reconsidering the matter of St-Denis
• 4 Gothic skins: penitents at the cathedral
• 5 Hybrid bodies move to center stage on a brothel in medieval Languedoc
• 6 Visceral space: dissection and Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel
• 7 Soaking in architecture: Montaigne, thermal baths and sixteenth-century medical treatises
• 8 Academic bodies and anatomical architecture in early modern Bologna
• 9 The eye of modernity: form, proportion and rhythm in German architectural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
• 10 Body and space, Gothic and Cubism: a Czech avant-garde between empathy, aesthetics and science
• 11 Rehabilitating the invalid body: architecture and citizenship in Jaap Bakema’s design for a Dutch postwar village for the disabled
• 12 Sacred fortresses: the church of Ste-Bernadette of Banlay and the mechanized body in postwar France
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index