Architectural Technicities

A Foray Into Larval Space

Stavros Kousoulas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032235257
• eBook ISBN: 9781000614091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To respond, it will embark on a captivating journey through many singular architectural concepts. The entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands will outline an architectural act that moves beyond representation. A ferryman who stutters will present two different types of architectural minds. A stilus and a theory of signs will reconsider the ways architects can develop a particular kind of intuition, while architectural technicities will bring forth a membranic and territorial understanding of architecture. Finally, as a melody that sings itself, a larval architecture will be introduced, bringing space and time together.

Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment.

1 An Architect Who Stutters

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-2

During the twentieth century, art and philosophy posed a similar problem: to renounce the domain of representation and instead take the conditions of representation as their object. Regardless of the responses proposed in these fields, it is the formulation of the problem that matters. What does it take to embark on the quest of exploring the conditions of representation, a quest that many have called the Odyssey of philosophy?¹ Much of the production of twentieth-century art aimed not at the reproduction of visible forms but rather at highlighting the non-visible forces that act in parallel to these forms. The intensity of presentation took precedence over the discreteness of representation. If, however, blocks of sensation were produced and extracted in the artistic field, what could one claim for architecture? Moreover, if architectural representation is taken for granted, both in architectural production and in its pedagogies, what is it that grounds this certainty?

1.1 Ulysses’s Ship

While the origins of the word ‘architect’ are undoubtedly Greek, relatively little attention has been given to the intricate connections between the constant shifts in the word’s usage in civil and naval architecture. Ancient Greek urban societies developed both the resources and the need not only for ambitious public buildings but also for large, complex ships. Temples and naval fleets are testimonies to this. The root τcκτων (tékton) is first used – at least in written form – in Homer’s Odyssey to describe the lack of skilled shipbuilders on the island of the Cyclopes, stating that

ου̉δ’ ἄνδρες νηῶν ἐνὶ τέκτονες οἵ κε κάμοιεν

νήας ευ̉σσέλμους, αἴ κεν τελέοιεν ἕκαστα.

(there are no shipbuilders who can finish

well covered ships which can reach any destination.)²

Τέκτων stands in ancient Greek for the craftsman – carpenter, shipbuilder and so on – in hard materials – wood, stone, metal – as well as for the originator, the producer, the master or artist. Homer’s reference to τέκτονες as shipbuilders does not predate much the appearance of the derived word αρχιτέκτων (arhitékton), a term by then used for both civil and naval architects.³ The two professions were regarded as closely related in terms of social status, public responsibility and professional function. Despite apparent differences in the required knowledge, skills and experience, the two fields shared many similarities.

These similarities extend also to the field of theoretical endeavours developed by figures prominent in architectural theory. Both Vitruvius and Alberti refer, albeit in different ways and for different purposes, to the proximity between civil and naval architecture. One cannot but note here Alberti’s now lost text Navis, which was widely read and discussed at the end of the fifteenth century.⁴ Despite the loss of Alberti’s treatise on naval architecture, we can get a sense of his approach towards shipbuilding from Chapter XII of De Re Aedificatoria. The relationship between De Re Aedificatoria and De Re Navalis is best highlighted via the application of principles developed in the former so as to distinguish between proper shipbuilding and what was called fabrilis peritia, the empirical shipbuilding practice.⁵ The rationalization of construction through the use of formal proportional principles and through the elimination of construction faults by the study of past and contemporary techniques, as well as the thorough knowledge of physics and contemporary scientific developments were pivotal for Alberti’s references to naval architecture.⁶ It is this latter aspect that binds Alberti and Vitruvius, namely the rationalization of every building process, aiming at the optimization of its functional performance.

Nevertheless, Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s references to naval architecture also intersect in a minor way. It is this marginal point that will interest us here. Vitruvius, Alberti, civil and naval architecture intersect on the issue of entasis, a typical characteristic of columns in Doric temples. Entasis is the slight convexity in the body of a column, originating from the Greek word εντείνειν, which means to stretch, to apply tension, to bow. According to historian Francis Penrose, it is the

swelling given to a column in the middle parts of the shaft for the purpose of correcting a disagreeable optical illusion, which is found to give an attenuated appearance to columns formed with straight sides, and to cause their outlines to seem concave instead of straight.⁷

In this regard, architect Patrick Nuttgens comments that ‘most Greek buildings of the Golden Period use entasis, the device whereby tapering columns are given a slight swelling about a third of the way up to counteract a tendency of the eye to see them as curving inwards from their side.’⁸

1.1.1 A Column, a Wave, a Paper and a Brain

Entasis was probably first used in the Later Temple of Aphaia in Aigina, around 490 BCE and is most often found in Doric Temples built in mainland Greece, southern Italy, as well as, later on, in Renaissance buildings.⁹ The Doric order is arguably the oldest, simplest and preferred style in temple construction in the Mediterranean throughout classical antiquity.¹⁰ Many scholars, including Vitruvius, argue that the Doric order obtained its proportion, strength and beauty from its analogy with the human figure. According to Vitruvius, a Doric column’s diameter–height ratio should be based on the relationship between foot length and height in a man’s figure.¹¹ Entasis not only creates an aesthetic weight that makes the appearance of the construction look plastic and animated, it also supports the bearing load ‘not as a lifeless, isolated element but comparable to a muscle in action.’¹² In Vitruvius’s words,

These proportionate enlargements are made in the thickness of columns on account of the different heights to which the eye has to climb. For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented in the beholder. With regard to the enlargement made at the middle of columns, which among the Greeks is called entasis, at the end of the book a figure and a calculation will be subjoined, showing how an agreeable and appropriate effect may be produced by it.¹³

The figure and calculation Vitruvius mentions are lost and therefore there is not an accurate description of his approach regarding the design of entasis. Alberti, however, deals with this issue. In De Re Aedificatoria, he outlines the Vitruvian approach in ambiguous yet intriguing terms: ambiguous due to the lack of illustrations, intriguing due to the reference of a design method which implies the presence of something broader than a mere issue of appropriate calculation, representation and building technique. Alberti informs us of the use of what he calls a tabula gracilis: tracing the curvature with a thin and flexible wooden board, providing in this way the template for the stonecutters on site.¹⁴ What is astonishing is that this precise reference to the use of a thin, flexible wooden board is borrowed directly from the practices of ancient naval architecture and its construction techniques of forming the curvatures of a ship’s hull.¹⁵ The use of wooden boards provided the outline for curving the hull of the ship’s main structure, both for larger constructions that took place in the state shipyards and for smaller ones done by groups of both builders and fishermen alike. In many ways, it is a building process that is still present, not so much in the sites where the massive contemporary naval structures are built, but in the small-scaled docks of provincial seashores.

Traditionally, the use of entasis in Doric temples is connected by many archaeologists and architectural historians either with the resolution of an optical illusion regarding the vertical development of the columns or with supposed aesthetic refinements. However, it is worth mentioning that both of the traditional explanations recently have been discarded in favour of a third approach, the so-called engineering hypothesis.¹⁶ According to this hypothesis, the load-bearing strength of the column is at its peak when tapered along its length, being thickest in the middle and thinnest at both ends, with the optimal shape for a column being the one that uses entasis.¹⁷ In addition, it has been shown that such a column would be lighter for the same compressive force, resulting in the optimization of material use.¹⁸ It is at this point that one can move from the technical understanding of entasis to its other meaning in Greek. Entasis stands not only for stretching but also for intensity. Doric columns and wooden hulls not only share a common method of construction, they also share a common problem. The ways of dealing with intensive forces highlight that before any outlining of arcs and hyperboles on the ground of Athens or on the sand of Delos, there operates an assemblage of intensities. These intensities range from the brute force of the waves to the bending of the heated wood, the curvature of hulls and columns to the sliding on water and marble.

If the architectural mind is to be understood not as a fixed term, as a relatum, but as a relation, then how can one approach the conventions regarding the primacy of representation when it comes to its cognitive abilities? If the forces we have seen operating on the development of entasis in columns precede their representation or annotation, then why is primacy given to the architect’s ability to represent and project? Most importantly, how can one shift from a commanding subject towards a fully material assemblage of formal co-production? To begin approaching these questions, I will refer to cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind Andy Clark’s hypothesis of the extended mind.

The extended mind hypothesis challenges the convention that the mind is primarily representational and has to be conceived as a set of functions that take place solely in the brain.¹⁹ It also challenges one of the main premises of representational theory, namely that cognition consists of the manipulation of symbols in thoughts that take place in the human brain.²⁰ Clark situates human beings in physical environments where they biologically exist in constant, real-time interaction with those environments. The necessity to situate human beings within a fully material interactive environment stems from his effort to prove that representational models of mind are insufficient when it comes to real-time responses to the exigencies of the environment.²¹ If one assumes that the mind is indeed representational, then one cannot but face the inability of almost any form of action in any given environment, let alone the one assuming that any decision should be made instantly. Imagine a representational mind that wishes to cognize ways of avoiding an approaching object in motion while driving a car. It would first have to come up with all different kinds of representational schemata only to classify the approaching object. Considering that all this happens in real time, and both the mind and the object are on a collision trajectory, the challenge increases. The mind not only has to symbolically process the object from many different perspectives, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• What Is Architecture’s Problem?
• 1 An Architect Who Stutters
• 2 Technicities of Architectural Intuition
• 3 Architecture on the Limit
• 4 Larval Space
• Index