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Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception

The classical philosophers said, the soul never thinks without phantasm, which is to say that thought needs a material image, something to carry the thought.

So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception and understanding.

The architectural imagination doesn't need an image to be presented in front of it rather it forms images on its own.

We can be shown to buildings, one made in the olden age and one very modern but if we compare the two we can notice some comparisons in both. This means that both building had a link together a connection. 

 

Lecture 1.2 Wittkower's Palladian Diagram

Rudolf Wittkower discovered that there was one thing in common with each building designed by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

 

The buildings more likely villas had some deep structural diagram in common, some geometrical ordering system that was not always immediately apparent, but was latent and could be discovered through this activity of measuring and drawing.

There are several things we can get through this. First of all, appearance is important. Appearance, representation, but also something deeper than surface appearance.

There's also a deeper diagrammatic structure. 

Second of all, repetition is important. Each of  villa has something in common, but they're all variations on a single, common theme.

And third is the relationship between that diagram, and what we might want to call the architectural understanding, how we understand that. 

Now we can be precise about the imagination. It's one part of a three-part system. At the lowest level, we might say, is our sensory experience-- our sight, our touch of the materials of a building, possibly the sounds of the building, smells of the stones but these arrive at Raw Sense Data.

 

The understanding, which is at the highest level, knows nothing of those Raw Sense Data. It has no way of scanning. It has no way of matching up that sense data with anything that the understanding can understand. That's where the imagination comes in, it comes in between the Sensory Experience and Understanding. 

 

Lecture 1.3 Typology

 One of the most fundamental concepts in architectural design is the concept of typology, which literally just means the logic of types.

A more interesting notion of typology comes from the French architectural theorist Quatremére de Quincy. "The word 'type' does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated perfectly as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model." The functional type is not wrong, but we need a theory of type that's more fundamental.

 

Lecture 1.4 Perspective

Another primary example of the architectural imagination is the system of perspective. The invention of perspective was by the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi.

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Brunelleschi was an architect in Florence. He was actually trained first as a silversmith. And Brunelleschi noticed that when he stood in the doorway of the Florence Cathedral and looked out at the Florence Baptistery, which was just across the piazza, he noticed something about orthogonal lines-- that all orthogonal lines converge to a point in infinity.

Brunelleschi wanted to make his observation scientific. So, 

Brunelleschi turned his back to the baptistery, put the mirror on an easel, (which he created  and if he fixed his vision-- if he made a kind of aperture that fixed his vision-- then he would be able to etch in the points on the silver surface which were the corners of the baptistery. And then he would be able to draw and etch on the surface the way the orthogonal lines of the baptistery converged toward a single vanishing point. And then, he would finish and paint over the silver perspectival image of the baptistery, so that when he held the image up before the baptistery, he could match exactly the image to the actual thing and see that it was a scientifically constructed linear perspective.

A Brief Explanation on Perspective 

There are three major kinds of prospective drawings. And what differentiates these three kinds, we call them one point, two point, and three point because they are the number of vanishing points that are used on the drawing.

 

 

Perhaps the most important thing that we notice with a one point perspective is that, as a viewing subject we notice how our viewpoint is looking right at the vanishing point. So where we're looking is where all these lines are converging.

The second kind of perspective drawing is a two point perspective. It's very similar to a one point, except now, there are two vanishing points.

We notice how a farmhouse has two sides that are perpendicular to each other. The parallel lines on one of these sides are converging at the left vanishing point, while the parallel lines on the other side are converging at the right vanishing point. The parts of the building that are closest to us are appearing larger, whereas the parts that are farther away appear smaller.

A final perspective we can make is a three point. This is very similar to the two point, except now a third point has been added, where the vertical lines are going to converge.

This is especially useful when you think about how tall buildings appear, or at least, how we generally depict tall buildings. Since the top is far away, it appears smaller. On a tower we notice how just as one side converges to the right, the other side converges to the left. Now, the vertical lines are converging to a vanishing point far above us.

 

Lecture 1.5 The Ideal City

Now, if we're going to think of perspective as the structure described in Erwin Panofsky's book Perspective as Symbolic Form, as this mechanism for constructing knowledge about the world, not just for describing a world that already exists, then we need a couple of things. We need a system. And the system should have both a structure, and that structure should relate elements one to another within the system. So imagine the perspective of a city. In that perspective of the city, you not only would use perspective to regulate buildings or to describe buildings, perspective would also relate buildings to one another, and indeed, following Panofsky, would open up, would expand almost to infinity the possibility of spatial perception and spatial experience.

 

2.1 Wittkower's Theory of Architecture

A book published in 1949 by  Rudolf Wittkower entitled "Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism" and its characterization of the Renaissance architect.

What we can say is that Wittkower's is a broad attempt to characterize the theory of architecture as it emerged in the 15th and 16th century in a distinct set of places. In Florence, in Rome, and in Venice.

Furthermore, the book is broken up into four chapters that deal with issues that Wittkower took to be absolutely fundamental. First, there is the question of symbolism. In other words, how buildings mean.

The second chapter looks at the problem of the appropriation of form. In other words, how did architects look back to the deep past, and in particular, to the pagan classical past, seize that tradition, reinterpret in syntax and reinvent classicism as a system.

Third, the question of typology and the development of building types. Are we talking about churches? Are we talking about villas? Are we talking about institutional buildings?

And lastly, the question of proportion. The geometric ideal. The question of measure.

 

Two things to say about this book. The first is that it was highly invested in an abstract and intellectual approach to the Renaissance. It underscored the rise of theory in the 15th and 16th century, and the ways in which the works of a given architect might offer a coherent kind of investigation into a set of problems surrounding perspective, proportion, geometry, and the advent of ideal form and architecture.

This highly abstract approach had repercussions. What it means, ironically, is that Wittkower was absolutely disinvested from the complexities of history. He was not interested in the cultural context out of which architecture arose. He does not delve into patronage, religious history, the monastic orders, particular events that might have marked the Renaissance. Instead, he steps back to analyze architectural form as an autonomous project.

 

2.2 Wittkower and Alberti

Let's turn to Wittkower's analysis of Alberti, and on particular, Alberti's relationship to antiquity.

How do you define a wall?

To explain this, Wittkower offers the diagram in his book with an explanation. These are his words:"In his religious buildings. Alberti consistently avoided the combination of arch and column."

That's what you see on the diagram. "When Alberti uses columns, he did, in fact, give them a straight entablature, while when he introduced arches, he made them rest on pillars."

And that's what you see on the left-hand side of the diagram. Sometimes these pillars had half columns adossed to them, emphasizing their decorative role.

Wittkower continues, "Whereas the first motif is Greek, the second is Roman." The first motif is based on the functional meaning of the column. It's supporting those arches.

The second is based on the cohesion and unity of the wall. To explain the latter point, in the Coliseum, the arch pillars may be interpreted as residues of a pierced wall with half columns which carry the straight entablatures placed on them entirely as ornament. That's very explicitly carried out at the Coliseum. Arches rest on pillars.

The column and the entablature are purely decorative. Ultimately, Wittkower's argument will be that in the architecture of churches, Alberti is going to reject the column entirely and turn towards a pure expression of the wall, a kind of architecture of the wall.

 

2.5 San Sebastiano & Sant'Andrea

San Sebastiano in Mantua, begun in 1460, and Sant'Andrea, also in Mantua, begun in 1462. In these churches where columns are absent signifies a kind of decisive turning point in Alberti's project, in his interpretation of architecture writ large.

Here's Wittkower:

"The Tempio and Santa Maria Novella are connected in so far as they show the compromise of wall and column, a compromise which was later abandoned. Here the compliance with the authority of classical motifs was replaced by their interpretation in terms of a consistent wall architecture."

For Wittkower, the four churches offer a coherent sequence. From the very beginning, we are given a problem, how to give a church, a religious edifice, a classical aspect. How to find the sources that are going to solve the problem of masking a two-story structure and, ultimately, coming in the end at an aesthetic affirmation of the whole, of some ideal principle of unity.

One of the dangers here, of course, is to confuse Wittkower with Alberti. We want to make sure that we understand that Wittkower's approach, which is about using diagrams to distill some kind of fundamental understanding of architecture and its elements, is about schematizing buildings. He is not going to want to address Alberti's exploration of vernacular aesthetics that are part of a far more eclectic understanding of religious architecture than Wittkower allows. However, to think about Wittkower's reading of Alberti is  also to understand an approach that fundamentally looks at the diagram as the revelatory tool for understanding architecture and its development.

 

There is Columnar Architecture that resembles the greek old structures and there is Wall Architecture that resemble the Colosseum. 

 

3.1 Hegel's History

Aesthetics doesn't have a history. We owe the conceptualization and the model for a philosophy of art history to the German idealist philosopher Hegel. In aesthetic experience, we have to distinguish between aesthetic pleasure, let's say, and truth.

Hegel is after a model where art deals with truth-- that art discloses truths about the world by giving those truths appearance. And art in its highest vocation is an art in which the truth of beings, that is to say of individuals, but also being as a whole-- that is the unconditioned, the absolute, the totality in which that being opens itself up.

And what Hegel imagines is that all the cultures through time and all of the epochs of art can be assembled together in this giant global mechanism.

Hegel is a very systematic philosopher, and he wants a total system, a mechanism that gathers up all the cultures and all the epochs of art into a single, coherent, unified system.

He wants the subjective realm to react back to the object, so that the object takes on a more primary role and, therefore, the subject can know truths about the object, truths about the world, because the subject makes those truths appear.

 

3.2 Hegel's Spirit

The central claims of Hegel's philosophy of art are constructed in his famously opaque terminology, primarily the idea of the Spirit or the "Geist." And sometimes you'll hear it as "Zeitgeist," which is literally the "spirit of the time."

The first way, which I would call the traditionalist or the conservative way, is to see the Geist or the Spirit as a kind of all-encompassing substance that determines reality. Now that substance, that substantial view, that traditional view of the Geist as being like a thing would almost understand the Geist as a person-like. You could even say it comes very close to the idea of a god, especially in Western literature. Now that's fine, except the idea of spirit as god is just not helpful for us as historians. Mainly because if god is controlling everything, there's just not much that we can do about it.

 Hegel constructs three epochs in which Spirit learns about itself through art.

The first epoch is what he calls the symbolic, which is basically everything prior to Ancient Greece. The second epoch is the classical, which is centered in Greece in the fifth century Before Common Era. And the third epoch is the romantic. Now what Hegel means by the romantic is basically art after the Roman Empire, or art in the countries of the Romance languages.

So what he calls "romantic" is actually what we would call late medieval and Renaissance as well as 18th century art.

As art moves through these epochs, initially art is very, very close to nature. Initially, art deals very much with the earth. And so for Hegel, and this is very important for us, of course. Architecture is the primary art. Architecture is the inaugural art. Because architecture is the art that deals most closely with the earth.

It's made of stone and brick and wood, which are all from the earth. But also, architecture is a very bodily art for Hegel. And for Hegel, the art moves from the more bodily, the more sensuous, the more material forms. As it moves through time, it becomes less material. It dematerializes itself. And it becomes higher and higher in the conceptual, spiritual realm and starts to move away from the body.

 

3.3 Symbolic Architecture

In the earliest architecture, which is the symbolic, Spirit is still trying to free itself in away from nature. So architecture has to deal with nature. But it's very important for Hegel that the earliest architecture, the Tower of Babel, but also he talks a lot about the pyramids, it's very important that the pyramids are not natural, but they're dealing with nature. The pyramids for Hegel is architecture representing the Spirit trying to free itself from nature. So it's important that the pyramids are a very abstract form. They don't mimic nature.

Now there are times when other ancient arts like Egyptian art, think of the Sphinx, famously in a way confuses human forms with animal forms. And the Egyptians would often repeat them, have sort of a line of sphinxs or a line of animal forms. Hegel sees this as a struggle of the Spirit, trying to free itself from nature. So it repeats itself.

If you think about it, the sites of Egyptian architecture, they're often-- it's an assemblage of very different and distinct objects. So the symbolic architecture is the architecture of marking and assembling.

 

3.4 Romantic Architecture

 At the other end of history, architecture will find its primary form in the interior. So we move away from the object that marks and toward the interior. This is the romantic stage of architecture, and its paradigm is the Gothic cathedral.

Hegel conceptualized the Gothic cathedral as an enormous interior landscape.

And the great Gothic cathedrals, which Hegel knew, which he had visited, were so large that they almost take on a kind of atmosphere. They have a kind of interior atmosphere. The stone of the cathedral, very unlike the stone of the pyramids, is a stone that denies its own stone-ness. It's been carved away. It's been ornamented. It's been decorated and refined until the stone seems to be just vectors of energy surging upward. And then there's the stained glass, of course, modulates the light, modulates this atmosphere. And the space takes on a kind of diaphanous quality, a kind of lace-like quality. It's important that it's collective. It's important that it's dematerialized because here, the Spirit, in the romantic period, is leaving the sensuous realm, is leaving nature, is leaving the object realm, and becoming more conceptual, becoming more self-conscious-- more self-conscious, more conceptual, and less material.

 

3.5 Classical Architecture

 In between the symbolic and the romantic is the classical, whose architectural paradigm is, of course, the Greek temple. Hegel understands the Greek temple, first of all, as a harmonious relation between form and function. Think of it this way: the symbolic for Hegel really is pre-functional. There's no real reason for the pyramids. Of course, we know that they were tombs of the pharaohs, but there's no function in terms of the spirit. Where in the Gothic cathedral, it is, we could say, post-functional. It's use doesn't really matter. It's more this dematerialized representation of a conceptual realm. But in the classic Greek temple, function and form are exquisitely coordinated. Its function is to house a god. But more important, its function is to show forth the Spirit in the object.

In the romantic period, Spirit has almost left the object. In the symbolic period, Spirit is outside the object, and the object is pointing to it. In the classical period, Spirit shows forth from within the object.

 

3.6 The End of Art

For Hegel, it is the sensuous material, everyday world that is the illusion because it's not imbued enough with Spirit.

Hegel uses the term "der Schein," which literally means appearance, but also has an English cognate, which is, exactly, "shining," a kind of shining forth. So art shines forth in the sense that it transforms the sensuous world. It transforms the material world into a representation of Spirit through the work of the imagination.

The real paradigm of the romantic is painting and music. Why painting and music? Painting is two-dimensional. It starts to move out of the three-dimensional, physical, material world into the realm of pure vision, a pure representation. And music is even less material or more dematerialized. The material of music is just time and rhythm. And Hegel privileges music in the romantic. Because he thought that the time and rhythm of music was really representing or uniting with the time and rhythm of human thought itself. So music is the most conceptual art.

Hegel has a very beautiful quotation about philosophy-- "Philosophy always arrives too late. As the thought of the world, it only makes its appearance after actuality has finished its process of development and is over. ...Only in the maturation of actuality does the ideal appear to confront the real. Then the ideal reconstructs this world for itself in the form of an intellectual realm, comprehending in its substance. When philosophy paints its grey on grey then the form of life has grown old, and this grey on grey is not capable of rejuvenating it, merely of understanding it. The owl of Minerva only begins its flight when the twilight falls."

4.1 "That is Architecture"

We begin with an aphorism by the Viennese 20th-century architect Adolf Loos. Loos writes, "If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forests, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something says, 'someone lies buried here.' That is architecture."