The Question of
Autonomy in Architecture
Liane Lefaivre
Alexander Tzonis
Firm believers in the idea of autonomy in architecture1
see architecture as having its own problems and its own way of thinking,
independent of any other concern. They conceive built form as determined by
purely formal norms and assume that such norms are the only suitable criteria
for judging the quality of buildings. Sociological, economic, political, and
technological concerns are taken as necessary evils that must be tamed, compromised,
or exploited for the designer to be able to concentrate on the central problem
of architecture, which is form.
The following historical inquiry, sketchy as it might be, into the
emergence and early development of the idea of autonomy shows that the
preoccupation with autonomy is a passing phenomenon that emerges under certain
conditions. The idea of autonomy is historically specific and intrinsically
linked with how architecture is viewed and socially used. The sinuous
conceptual path we retrace here cannot be associated directly with specific
social or economic events nor with any specific action of a single social
group. But neither is it the outcome of a random process or of a remote battle
of ideas fighting ideas. Clients, builders, and users of architecture are
pushed by motivations, constrained by attitudes, carried away by dreams.
Autonomy is such a motivation, attitude, dream.
From anthropological data and from the study of literature, it
appears that archaic culture did not possess the idea of autonomy of
architecture. The forms of buildings were dictated by the directives of
"purity" or "harmony" and taboos of pollution so that they
conformed to the divine order of things. The practice of architecture was
interwoven with ritual while the theory was bound up with conceptual systems of
divination. Ancient Greek culture carried on this tradition; formal perfection
was believed to be the outcome of moral perfection-which is, in the end, a
version of the doctrine of purity and harmony.
By the fourth century B.C., however, a new approach is apparent.
"Why do you charge me for your plates more than any other maker though
they are neither stronger nor costlier to make?" asks Socrates of the
technician. And the latter answers, "because the proportions of mine are
better because they fit better." The design product is seen as serving an
additional goal. It is "fit" for use. Socrates again is quoted by
Xenophon in the Commentarii as saying that "the same things are
both beautiful and ugly. ..for all things are good and beautiful in relation to
those purposes for which they are well adapted." Norms of conformity to a
universal cosmological order are replaced by the plurality of profane,
utilitarian purposes.
The idea of autonomoy in the arts emerged almost simultaneously
with, and in opposition to, this utilitarian approach. Statues', says the
sophist Alcidamas, give only pleasure to the eye; they are of no use. Socrates
writes in Pistias that the beautiful (eurythmon) in relation to a
purpose is superior to the beautiful in itself. From these two statements, one
thing is clear: A new formal attitude toward design was born, and the question
of whether forms are normative in themselves-that is, autonomous-became an
issue.
However few and fragmented are the references to architecture in
antiquity, they reveal that the decline in the belief in the norms of purity
and in the divine order coincided with the emergence of utilitarian norms and,
as concerns us, of norms that refer to form itself. But formal norms are not
entirely autonomous. Some formal patterns are preferred to others on the basis
of how well they gratify, how well they please sensually. Thus formal norms are
not really autonomous. They depend ultimately on a hedonistic, aesthetic norm.
The treatise of Vitruvius, De Architectura, is a unique
document on architecture at the crossroads.2 Utilitarian as well as
autonomous points of view of architecture come out in a fragmented manner
throughout the text. But social flux had not yet arrived at a threshold where
all these novel intellectual findings could be put into a coherent system. For
this reason, the text suffers from ambiguities and indecisions. One of the
resulting difficulties for a contemporary student is to find exact equivalents
between the concepts of Vitruvius and the concepts of our times; that is,
between concepts developed in epochs in which the crystallization of ideas was
significantly different.
Most translations of Virtruvius, however scholarly, when trying to
establish a one-to-one correspondence between terms of the two periods, run
into the danger of becoming oversimplified and/or anachronistic. For this
reason we shall retain here, for the most part, the terminology found in the
original text.
In the Vitruvian analysis of the norms of architecture, ordinatio
and decorum appear to carry over archaic connotations of purity. Decorum,
on the other hand, also refers to social felicitousness. So does distributio
which, in other instances, together with firmitatis and utitilatis,
belongs to a utilitarian outlook of design. Venustas, symmetria, and
eurythmia view the building as a formal object organized by symmetrical
correspondences: the "symmetriae," free of divinatory or utilitarian
connotations. A more opaque norm is dispositio, "the fit assemblage
of details, and, arising from this assemblage, the elegant effect of the work
and its dimension along with a certain quality and character" (bk. r,
chap. 2). There are three kinds of disposition, which in Greek are called ideae:
ichnographia (ground plan), orthographia (elevation), and scenographia
(perspective). All three "arise from imagination and invention"
(Fig. I).
Despite later associations, it seems that ideae belong to
the context of Democritus and Lucretius and not of Plato. ldeae means
forms of objects existing or planned, not archetypal, metaphysical structures.
This is evident from the classifications of ideae that represent
buildings in a manner similar to how Democritus pictured the diferences in
atoms.3 Vitruvius refers to The Nature of the Universe, Lucretius's
long poem, in his introduction (bk. r, chap. I). That ideae4
are close to what the latter calls "images" can be seen in the
part of the treatise where Vitruvius discusses the problem of optical
illusions.
According to Lucretius, "images" are "films,"
"replicas or insubstantial shapes of things. ..thrown off from the
sutfaceofobjects," "floating," "traveling,"
"weaving ...the aspect and form. ..of the object." These images,
which "travel through a great deal of air," may be altered along the
way. A building may be thought of as having a form different from that which it
has in reality and, while shaped correctly, it might be seen as ill formed.
Lucretius refers to the "square towers of a city in the distance which
often appear round" (bk. 4). Vitruvius discusses the "angle columns
which appear more slender" because of "the air {which} consumes and
lessens in appearance the diameter of the shafts." He also refers to the
upper part of the building which gives the appearance of leaning
backwards." Vitruvius accordingly suggests that "what the eye cheats
us of must be made by calculation" (bk. 3, chap. 3). The architect must
"make thicker," "add," "supplement," and
"incline" to overcome such problems of vision that deform the proper ideae.
Vitruvius is here warning the architect to consider the ideae as
they will be perceived by the viewer and not as things that exist on their own.
This is something that the archaic architecture of purity could not allow for,
as it was concerned with the essence of the products and not with the senses of
the viewers. But for a sensualistic architecture it is a most appropriate
observation. With the introduction of the Democritus-Lucretius paradigm one
more argument emerges in favor of the autonomy of architecture: that as a
field, architecture deals with problems of pure visibility that are not only
apart from construction and use but are also highly specialized as they belong
to the world of illusions and optical corrections. Vitruvius goes on to suggest
other readjustments that "will produce a more pictorial (graphicoteram)
effect in the general view" (bk. 4, chap. 3). The introduction of the
Democritus-Lucretius paradigm of optics in architecture, with its abstractions
and organization of categories, represents a first step toward looking at
buildings as coherent problems of pure visibility, of "pictorial
effect," with their own methods for solution apart from construction and
devoid of use.
References to architecture are as scarce in the writing of the
Middle Ages as they are in that of antiquity. They appear inside larger
theoretical works that deal with architecture as part of an overall, universal
system of world order. Some forms are believed to be auspicious and to keep
evil at bay; others are categorized as boding ill. Very little of these
writings can be seen as an expression of the autonomy of architecture,
especially during the earlier period. Toward the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, however, one frequently comes across a utilitarian view. In
addition, in these late- medieval texts beautiful forms come to be seen not
only as reflections of the beauty of a higher order or as beautiful in their
capacity to reflect this order; they become beautiful in themselves and are
seen as objects of gratification. Entering into contact with them becomes an
end in itself. In other words, architectural form is now perceived as having a
measure of autonomy.
The Ten Books on Architecture by Alberti is the first
treatise 'on architecture after Vitruvius.5 It is better written
than Vitruvius and is closer to our own sensibility. It also contains the first
major theoretical statement of the autonomy of architecture. In the text,
architectural forms are seen as products of formal norms whose ultimate warrant
is the pleasure of the viewer. This interpretaton of Alberti does, however,
rest on a highly selective reading of his book. The reader must be warned that
Alberti, while not as ambiguous as Vitruvius, can be very contradictory. His
treatise is really many treatises in one, each written from a particular point
of view. Such a tolerance for ambiguity is revealing not only about Alberti but
also about the general state of architectural thinking at the time.
As with Vitruvius, the Ten Books of Architecture do not
present a unified picture of architecture. The difference is that in Alberti
the ruptures are much deeper and more visible. There is a strong desire to
maintain an overall unity, even if it is only an apparent one. This results in
the keeping of uncompromised, opposed opinions within the same work. The idea
of autonomy that clearly emerges out of the work is one of the major splitting
forces. But in the end these are not allowed to dominate the overall conception
of architecture. There is a divinatory point of view, especially in the fifth,
sixth, and seventh chapters of the ninth book. There is also a prominently
displayed utilitarian point of view that approaches buildings as "most
beautiful when they are most useful for service" (bk. I, chap. I I). There
is a compromise between the utilitarian and aesthetic norms that oppose both a
strictly autonomous view of architectural forms, as when Alberti writes that
"Beauty was never separate and distinct from Conveniency" (bk. I,
chap. 1 I), and is equally at odds with a purely utilitarian outlook, as when
he asserts that "Works should be not only strong and useful but also
pleasant to the sight" (bk. I, chap. 10). Finally, there is a strong
endorsement of the norm of pure, formal pleasure and of the idea of
architecture as an autonomous, purely formal activity. The "Pleasure and
Delight which we feel on the Viewing of any Building, arise," according to
Vitruvius, "from nothing else but Beauty and Ornament." For
"when we lift up our eyes to Heaven ...we admire [God} more for the
Beauties we see than for Conveniencies which we feel and derive from
them." Beauty "is necessary in any Thing. ..particularly in
building," while the satisfaction of "necessity is a very small
Matter" as it "affords no manner of Pleasure" (bk. 6, chap. 2).
Three types of argument in the treatise clearly support the idea of
autonomy in architecture: the psychological, that there is an autonomous agent
in man seeking visual pleasure in buildings; the formalistic, that the visual
organization of buildings can be abstracted and analyzed in terms of autonomous
attributes; and the institutional, that the production of visual pleasure
through buildings and formal organization in architecture is handled by the
identifiable autonomous group of "Ingenious Artists." In addition
Alberti suggests that looking at buildings gives us "Pleasure and
Delight" (bk. 6, chap. 2) "by a kind of natural Instinct" (bk.
2, chap. 2) or "sense in the Mind" (bk. 9, chap. 5) or because of
"a secret Argument and Discourse implanted in the Mind itself' (bk. 9,
chap. 5). Alberti finds that this pleasure is due to the formal organization of
the building, that which he calls "Design" and which he sees as a
"firm and graceful preordering of lines and angles conceived in the
Mind" (bk. I, chap. I).
The strongest argument for the autonomy of architecture is made at
the opening of the book, where Alberti declares the independence of
architectural form: "It is the Property and Business of the Design to
appoint to the Edifice and all its Parts their proper Places. ..Nor has this
Design any Thing that makes it in its Nature inseparable from Matter (neque
habet lineamentum in Ie, ut materiam sequatur) (bk. r, chap. I). "We
can," he continues, "in our Thought and Imagination, by settling and
regulating in a certain Order, the Disposition and Conjunction of the Lines and
Angles" (bk. r, chap. I).
Throughout the treatise it is clearly the architect whose "Mind
conceives and contrives" the "Design," and this is seen as a
natural state of affairs. The role of the architect as an "Ingenious
Artist," autonomous from the "manual Operator" (Preface) and
from the "Hand of the Artificer" (bk. 6, chap. 4) is stressed again
and again.
Alberti did not conceive this way of looking at architecture in a
vacuum. Not only had Vitruvius contributed to its early stages but so had
Plato, Cicero, and many other antique and medieval authors. Alberti remembers
the palaces, uncovers and selects fragments, fits everything together into a
pattern, but other Renaissance theoreticians did the same. They recognized
Alberti's synthesis because it was something that they had always wanted to
see.
Essential as it is to find the roots of this new conceptual
framework of architecture and the context from which they emerged, it is
equally important to identify the moment they joined together to form a common
trunk and the conditions under which they did so. The search for the reasons
why the Renaissance promoted certain thoughts more than any other period before
or why it placed them together in a synthesis never yet attempted is also part
of this investigation.
We have tried to locate the idea of autonomy in architectural texts
and to show its steady progress. Our presentation has been sketchy and
selective, but we do not think we have led the reader to conclusions that can
be disqualified by reference to other authors or other writings. We shall now
try to see if this progress is linked with other developments in society.6
We must first look into what we might call the microsociological
situation and try to discern the status of architecture as an institution at
this time and how the idea of autonomy related to this status. We see in this
respect the struggle to bring about an intellectual elite of architects which,
through an accelerated division of labor, favored innovation. This innovation
was increasingly in demand since society was growing and becoming more
activated, with the gradual introduction of the market as a moving factor. At
the same time, this new architectural elite aspired to a superior economic and
social status relative to the builder-technician to whom was delegated
increasingly manual labor. It is wrong to imagine that this elite developed out
of the differentiation of tasks existing among the old stock of builders. On
the contrary, the new architectural functions were filled by people who were
initially goldsmiths (Brunelleschi), lawyers (Alberti), painters and sculptors
(Michelangelo), and even men of letters (Francesco Colonna). For the ambitious of
this elite the idea of autonomy, backed by the conceptual separation between
design and structure, form and matter, as well as by what Alberti calls the
"Force and Rule of Design" or the "property and Business. ..[of
Design} to appoint and deliberate," served as an excellent argument to
legitimize their independence from, and domination over, traditional, skilled
groups of builders.
Other, broader social and economic developments played an equally
important role in the emergence and evolution of the idea of autonomy in
architecture. Alberti uses the notion to present the enjoyment of beauty in a
building as a natural ("inata") drive of the individual. In other
texts, such as Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, this drive
is identified with the erotic one (Fig. 2). The privatization and erotization
of the use and acquisition of buildings displaces the consciousness of the
social dimension of design objects. They make buildings look as if they occupy
a place in human life and a role in human relations very different from the
role they in fact play. Such a displacement of consciousness, while not
affecting the act of acquisition itself, gives it by analogy to other acts,
particularly the erotic, a stronger image of social acceptability than it ever
had before.7 The putting together and hoarding of buildings that
function as depositories of power for the court nobility are made to appear to
society at large as ordered, natural phenomena rather than as arbitrary and
temporary facts of domination, which they are in reality.
The point has been made by scholars that the rising powerful group
of merchants and financiers of the Renaissance championed the release of the
circulation of products and labor from deeply rooted taboos and obligations.
This new mentality is best expressed by Pico della Mirandola: "free
judgment. ..confined by no bounds" where the individual is able "to
fix the limits of {his} nature for himself." No wonder this social group
found felicitous the idea of autonomy of architecture, with its strongly
individualistic character, its belief in the solitary "Mind" as a
source of private pleasure, its insular enjoyment of buildings, and its claim
to generate designs out of the unadulterated springs of the creative soul.
The idea of autonomy gives architecture an as-if status. It
makes architecture seem to be detached while in fact it is engaged. It makes
architectural practice appear to be a purely psychological, if not
physiological, drive while in fact it is a social institution. It makes architects
appear to be serving the desires of all while they are serving the interests of
certain groups only. The idea of autonomy is related to different groups in
different ways. It is therefore a multifunctional instrument that permits
intellectual elites, court nobility, merchants, and financiers to cooperate at
a moment when their interests coincide, so as to reinforce each other's
position.
One of Alberti's basic contributions to advancing the idea of
autonomy in architecture is his identification of the set of abstract
attributes through which a building is to be seen as a purely formal structure.
His list includes: "Order, Number, Size, Situation and Form" (bk. 6,
chap. 5) and, again, "Size, Quality, Angles, Situation and Colour"
(bk. 9, chap. 7). The operations by which these attributes are "mixed
together" (bk. 9, chap. 8) or "put together." by
"Conjuntion and Connection" (bk. 9, chap. 5) are "Election,
Distribution, Disposition" (bk. 6, chap. 4).
This set of attributes is an extension of Vitruvius's dispositio or
ideae. Alberti alludes to these two terms (once as "Design"
and once as "Idea" (bk. 9, chap. 10), which refer to the
"reduction {of the building] into lines. " This understanding of
architecture promotes the conceptual independence and insularity of the formal
system of architecture. It offers group identity to the architects by providing
a special, abstract language for describing the world and controlling it. The
materialization of this abstract representation of the building is expressed in
the drawing.
Alberti's view of drawing, on the one hand, is very reserved.
Drawings are not essential in his treatise. His text clearly voices the belief
that drawings can be put to good use "to examine and complete" the
built product in advance:
I have often started in
my Mind with Ideas of Buildings which have given me wonderful Delight: Wherein
when I have come to reduce them to lines, I have found in those very Parts
which most pleased me many gross Errors that required great Correction; and upon
a second Review of such a Draft.
..
He adds that "I have been sensible and ashamed of my own
Innaccuracy" in failing in the "Measuring of Weights, Superficies and
Solids" (bk. 9, chap. 10). He sees, on the other hand, a danger in being
carried away by the visual-formal aspects of the drawing as such and in being
distracted by the gratification one derives from the drawing of a building.
This, he fears, might detract the architect "from a rigorous Examination
of the Parts which he ought to make" (bk. 2, chap. I). It might cause the
"vain Architect" "by charming the Eye and striking the Fancy of
the Beholder" to be easily drawn "into an Admiration of himself"
(bk. 2, chap. I). Alberti recommends as a first measure in avoiding such a
danger the use of models rather than drawings which "would not have [to
be]. ..too exactly finished or too delicate and neat but plain and
simple."
But the basic issue is not models versus drawings. The fundamental
conflict is between the privatization of architecture and its traditional
social use. In this respect, while Alberti is ready to accept the autonomy of
the hedonistic visual experience, and through it the legitimization of the
private interest of the hoarder nobleman of the court, he is not allowing this
autonomy to spread over the actual work of the architect. Nor does he approve
of the process of production of design being turned into an intimate,
hedonistic, asocial act.
The designer, whether technician or humanist, must continue working
toward a social product.
Alberti's warnings could not arrest the massive introduction of the
drawing into architectural thinking. Drawing influenced the growth of the idea
of autonomy, while at the same time the rise of autonomy was one of the major
factors that accelerated the spread of the graphic means of architectural
thinking. The drawing is important in making the canon of regularity apply to
buildings. It organizes the formal fabric, isolates its elements, and strips
them of construction or associations with utility. It foregrounds-to use a term
coined by the Russian formalists-the formal characteristics of a building,
elicits patterns, and helps them relate to a formal structure. The drawing also
plays a most important role in coping with questions of irregularity.
We have already noted in Vitruvius the problem of optical illusion
as pre-eminently an expression of the autonomy of architecture. Alberti refers
to this problem but pays it little heed. In later treatises, however, it rises
to prominence. The correction of optical errors and the return of the building
to an apparent state of regularity are among the critical formal problems of
architecture that drawing is called upon to solve (Figs. 3a, b, c).
Sebastiano Serlio, in his Seven Books on Architecture, published
over a period of almost forty years between 1537 and 1575, gives a central role
to drawing. The contrast with Alberti's Ten Books, in which illustration
plays no role at all, is enormous. On the other hand, Serlio is simply putting
into effect what Alberti had stated as a program. It has been said that Serlio
uses illustrations to popularize the subject. One wonders, however, if for the
popular readership of his days it was not easier to read his "ideae"
than his words.
More than a popularizer, the drawing is a formal canonizer (Fig. 4)
and a formal problem solver. It establishes formal norms and tactics for the
attainment of formal perfection. More specifically, the Seventh Book deals
with "many accidents that may occur to the architect," anomalies
(Figs. 5, 6a), among them "strange forms of sites" that are seen as
obstacles in reaching perfection (Figs. 6b, c).
There are similarities between the archaic norm of purity and the
emerging modern norm of beauty relative to the state of perfection they both
seek. Perfect buildings, whether pure or beautiful, are seen as valid products
of complete and consistent logical systems. These systems are developed through
the use of generative rules that cannot produce a design that contradicts them
nor tolerate the addition of a new generative rule. There is also an
optimistic, agonistic attitude common to both systems. In archaic texts
there is a hero designer – a king or a prince – who after a struggle succeeds
in arresting disorder and monstrosity on the site and constructs the perfect
palace or the perfect city in the same way that he overcomes the enemy on the
battlefront. The same fighting spirit of architecture is to be found in the
writings of the Renaissance. Considering our discussion of the society of this
time as seeing itself as a society of achievement, such a grandiloquent
portrait of the architect would not seem out of place.
Certainly there are also differences between the two systems. In the
case of archaic design, the penalty of pollution is seen as' catastrophic. For
the Renaissance the "Error" of "Deformity" that fails
"to satisfy our immoderate Desire for Perfection" is, as Alberti
would say, an offense "to the Eye" and "to the Mind."
Serlio's Seventh Book deals with the problem of formal
irtegularity primarily through graphic means. In a number of case studies he
demonstrates how a regular orthogonal, atrium-type building can relate to the
irregularity of the site (sito fuori di squadro) and normalize
"ugly and unsupportable" anomalies (Figs. 7, Sa-f). His solution can
be generalized as follows: As one penetrates the building coming from the
outside, one passes through a sequence of public spaces. These ought to be
placed in the center of the building. They must also be regularly shaped in
order to lead the viewer to infer that the rest of the building is as regular.
Then, as one proceeds from the public spaces toward the private or servant
areas, which must be placed near the periphery of the site, oblique and scalene
spaces are permitted. This irregularity results from the boundaries of the site
itself, which chop off part of the space that otherwise would have been
regular.
Just as Vitruvius had tried to compensate for what the eye cheats us
of, Serlio attempted to make up for what the site takes away. The perfect plan
is not an essence of the building but a sense that belongs to its viewer.
Regularity of form is not an objective state of the product, but a subjective
state of the mind that depends on the relationship between the viewer and an
artifact's organization. This relationship can be deliberately controlled by
the architect, as Serlio demonstrates by carrying out a compromise with the
help of the abstraction of the drawing. The drawing foregrounds the essential
elements of the formal problem juxtaposing the orthogonal canvas of the
building against the obliqueness of its contours, leaving out of the picture
the nonessential.
The new formal abstraction of building was a problem-solving tool.
So, too, the drawing as an object became an implicit assertion of the autonomy
of architecture. It contributed to the production of a formally perfect plan
while it silently argued for the right of existence of the formal problem.. It
assumed the architect to be the guardian of the rules of beauty, the proprietor
of special problem-solving instruments, and the dextrous negotiator in the
conflict between the canon of form and deformation.
These formal exercises that compromise regularity and promote the
autonomy of architecture can be interpreted as Serlio's effort to help
architects, as a group, to establish a specialty, an identity, at a moment when
their claimed exclusivity over all problems of building was being challenged by
military engineers.8 These exercises can also be seen as an ingenious set of
suggestions for a new problem typical of an increasing number of clients who
were faced with the short supply of regular city sites-that is, how to achieve,
on an irregular site, new norms of perfection for their buildings as a way of
bringing themselves closer to the status of the court.
Despite the overwhelming, formalistic preoccupations of Serlio's propositioni,
they were ultimately derived from Renaissance social norms and thus express
political and social values of the period (SUC? 'as the primacy of the public [honore
publico} over the private interest and the domination of the master over
the servant). Despite the imperatives of formal completeness and consistency,
the social use of architecture had not yet been completely nibbled away.
Alberti, too, had meshed the idea of formal regularity with signification of
social hierarchy when he wrote that exceptions to the canon of regularity could
be tolerated only in the private sector. In the public sector, on the other
hand, perfect order always had to be respected (bk. 9, chap. I). Moreover, one
can infer from Serlio's drawings that in a situation of limited resources, such
as when space is constrained, the perfection of the public realm can be gained
at the expense of the private or servant realm. Indeed, one finds that the
hierarchy of spatial ordering from the street to the center and from the center
to the periphery, which is homologous to the hierarchy from the regular to the
irregular, corresponds to a social hierarchy from the public to the private and
from the master to the servant.
Dispositio,
and therefore ideae, "arise,"
according to Vitruvius, "from imagination and invention." Alberti,
too, in the preface of his Ten Books, stresses that an architect devises
"with Thought and Invention." This statement implies that the
"ingenious Artist" produces something nonmaterial yet capable of
taming matter; capable of transforming something that in itself does not
delight into a source of pleasure. It underlines the creative aspect of the
artist who, in the words of Michaelangelo, "invent[s} that which never has
been found." Both statements support the architect's superiority over the
manual worker. Both imply the similarity between the architect and the humanist
poet and rhetorician who produce something nonmaterial and constantly generate
new forms. Both present the architect as involved in an aspect of design in
which the military engineer could not compete.
After the time of Alberti, there were other social developments that
may be linked with the trend toward imagination, invention, and "that
which has been found" that occurred toward the end of the fifteenth
century. One such development was the rise of the commercialization of life
that favored newness and deviation from established standards. Another was the increase
in social mobility and the emergence of a class of rentiers. Both phenomena led
to a mentality of hostility against the newcomers to power. This mentality was
expressed in the praise for the non-obvious perfection, that is, for the
perfect form that seems at first irregular or whose rules of regularity are
obscure. The newcomer upstarts are expected to be unable to pass such a
difficult cultural test and thus to be intimidated.
Within this framework the architect had to work under constant
pressure and had to struggle between conforming and indulging in
inconsequential innovation. We can interpret the rising tide of playful
trespassing on formal norms during the beginning of the sixteenth century as
the result of this struggle. The irregular forms of this period were not
generated in the hybrid manner of the Serlio plan. They are intentional
anomalies that were not born out of a clash with constraints. They emerged from
violations of formal norms, usually by inverting rules of placement of architectonic
elements or by distorting forms. The Renaissance art of representation played
an important part in generating such distortions. We have already seen it being
engaged in the overcoming of irregularities resulting from optical illusions.
It was now employed in the reverse sense, generating irregularities by
translating normal forms into angular, oblique, serpentine twists.
These anomalies arose within the context of the autonomy of
architecture. They deviated from formal norms for no other reason than to
return to formal concerns and to acknowledge the glorious insularity of the
formal problematic. They are playful demonstrations of the formal virtuosity of
an architect who devoted himself to formal campaigns while dreaming of formal
trophies with which to enrich the imagery of his heroic uniqueness.
Alternatively, they may be seen as blissful, brief escapades, largely resulting
from the capabilities generated by the new, abstract idiom of space
representation and from the belief in the primacy of aesthetic formal joy. This
state of affairs no longer seems to conform to Alberti's opinion that the
production of architecture should be kept within the confines of a social act
while permitting consumption to take its solitary path of individualism.
Vasari praises Michelangelo's power to generate new forms,9
nella invenzione della veramente garbata architettura." He sees in
the artist's works "something very different from the ornamentation and
measure, order and rule" of "reason and rule." Michelangelo's
"license," "bizarre breaks" and departures from
"common usage" "amazed everyone" and "gave great
encouragement to imitate him."
It is certainly an exaggeration to say that Michelangelo brought
about these changes spontaneously. It was, however, in his time and in
reference to his work that a new sensibility toward distortion, inversion, and
other formal anomalies emerged. This new sensibility grew in opposition to the
idea of autonomy. It was linked to a new social use of architecture – that of
criticism.
Techniques of projection such as perspective, in addition to being
used for correcting optical illusions, were put into use for the duplication of
regular forms. Introducing the paradigm of perspective-its method and its
concepts-to architecture had a very important effect. Not only did it make
forms available for easy manipulation and the purposeful deviation from formal
norms as easy as their imitation, it also made the act of duplication an object
of observation. It provided an abstract level that imitation could be referred
to and with which one could reflect upon the relation between model and
reproduction, error and illusion, truth and falsehood.
Many of these discussions can be seen from our point of view as
bizarre, dealing as they do with shadow images, mirror images, and
anamorphosis. Often they have magic connotations in the sense that they deal
with the esoteric and with deep powers of the universe. There are arguments
that what is pictured is not the real world but rather its secret identity.
What is real and open is ciphered through its representation into a mysterious
icon (Figs. 9a, b).
All this leads to the seeing of irregular patterns as
something
more than a new variety of forms generated by the use of projection. Irregular
patterns can be seen as pictures of regular forms and as comments on the act of
picturing-an effort that has failed. They can be understood as epistemological
rather than formal statements. Perfect forms that undergo the torture of
stretching, squeezing, and bending, of being penetrated, mutilated, and
lacerated should not be taken as disfigured designs, as monsters. They are the
dramatis personae composing allegories about "Mimesis and Vanitas,"
about desire and failure. In the framework of the antiscientific view of the
Counterreformation,10 they can be interpreted as stating that we can
see "only through the glass darkly," that knowledge is impossible and
that faith, grace, and the legitimacy o(the institution of the Catholic Church
are warranted.
One might interpret inversions and
transformations, the contrapposti and the figure serpentinate, as
expressions of the ideas of Vicenzo Danti,11 a theoretician of art
one generation younger than Michelangelo, who wrote that "disorder.
..finally has the purpose of order" because "if there were no
disorder the order would not be known, inasmuch as natural disorder is a means
of making known the divine order and human disorder of making known the natural
order" (p. 216). One can also find in the idea of inversion and transformation
the same thinking as in Montaigne's passage:
of ignorance I speake
sumptuously and plentiously, and of learning meagerly and pitiously.
..purposely I treate of nothing, but of nothing: nor of anyone science but of
unscience.
(3. 357)12
Such epistemological, theological reflections on
representation bring to mind Bernini's theatrical experirnents13 in
which the act of mimicking becomes the subject of the play and in which the
actors' acting as if they were the spectators looking out at the spectators as
if the latter were the actors results in the problems of conventionality and
limits of knowledge being most forcefully confronted.
One might even proceed beyond this level of
fideistic epistemological critique and argue that what we have in
hand is a Pyrrhonist moral critique
and a discontent with the institutions of the time. In fact, perhaps it can be
seen as the antipode of the previously prevailing efforts of humanists to
legitimize the emerging absolutist states during the end of the fifteenth
century. Distortion, the allegory of mimesis that fails or deceives, by
picturing how form emerges arbitrarily under the ruling of the conventions of
representation, tells us in the same mood as Machiavelli, Montaigne, or Erasmus
does how the flitting states of law and order result from arbitrary power and
how limited their legitimacy is. "There is nothing so grossly and largely
offending, nor so ordinarily wronging as the Lawes" (3.377).14
When Michelangelo "wished to separate himself from the whole.
.." formal thinking of architecture that surrounded him, he expressed not
only an aesthetic, autonomous position about formal norms that have to be
replaced but also an engaged philosophical and moral position about laws and
institutions that have failed.
We can now interpret the "melancholic behavior that swept
through Europe, referred to by Wittkower,15 not only as another
expression of the bourgeois aggressive doctrine of individualism but also as a
social psychology of being torn away. It indicated the painful impact of the
unweaving of the social fabric, an early state of what Durkheim called anomy,
which will become increasingly not the exception but a common occurrence in
the modern world.
Serlio's solutions to the problem of how to save the order of the
plan in the face of the anomalies of the site seem similar to a solution to a
different problem – that of the orthogonally inscribed form of a balustrade
climbing up onto the inclined plane of a stair. In this case the abacus and the
base block of the baluster are cut into trapezia or triangular prisms. As in
Serlio's plans, the peripheral spaces are mutilated; the sleeve and the belly
of the balustrade, analogous to the public spaces in Serlio's plan, are kept
intact.
The hybrid type of solutions are challenged by Giovanni Caramuel de
Lobkowitz in his Architectura Civil Recta y Obliqua.16 He
sees in what we will call for the moment the Serlian solution – which permits
two sets of figures, one regular and the other irregular, to sit side by side
in the same plan – a violation of the imperatives of consistency and
completeness of the formal Renaissance system of architecture. His rebuttal is
accompanied by counterproposals.
The title of Caramuel's treatise, in which the two concepts
"recta" and "obliqua" are juxtaposed, reveals from the
start his program to set up a new paradigm and a new method in architecture:
the "obliqua" in juxtaposition to the already existing
"recta." Caramuel, rather forgotten today, deserves a place among the
key theoreticians of architecture of his time. Born in Madrid in 1660, a most
important linguist, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, and administrator,
he added to his preoccupations architectural theory and, to some extent, even
practice.17 Caramuel was conscious of the importance of his
contribution and called it "a new art" (arte nueva) a
forerunner in name, if not in some of its visual characteristics, of a
twentieth-century movement in art and architecture.
Like Serlio, Caramuel presents a series of case studies (Figs.
10a-g) expressed in drawings. But there is more of a system in his approach:
there is a more theoretical text to back it, and the catalogue of the anomalies
is much longer, almost exhaustive. Caramuel goes far beyond Serlio's effort to
save the appearance of regularity, and he introduces a new system of formal
norms. The methodological key to this system is given in the fourth treatise,
"The Logarithmical Transfiguration of the Platonic Bodies," in which
methods already used by cartographers for the mapping of forms from one plane
to another and from one system of coordinates to another are systemically
analyzed. The fifth treatise is devoted to architecture in general while the
sixth concentrates exclusively on "architectura obliqua." Three types
of transformations are considered: of the plan, of the elevation, and of a
mixture of both. The orthogonal regularity matrix that had underlined the norms
of regularity and symmetry of the Renaissance is loosened. It is as if the
traditional, austere orthogonal order becomes elastic, bent, compressed,
stretched. Regular forms thus translated do not lose any of their topological
properties, as one would say in a more contemporary mathematical language; they
become plastic in order to fit inside any constraints that might surround them.
In the much-discussed case of the balustrade of a stair, the regular
baluster, representing the "architectura recta" is seen as inscribed
in an orthogonal grid. The grid is bent so that the angle of its axes is able
to match the angle of the slope of the stair. The shape of the baluster is thus
transformed following the transformation of its grid. The resulting figure
might seem distorted when examined as an isolated form, but it will be
perceived as regular if it is accepted as part of a total system. Did the
transformations of Caramuel also deal with epistemological and moral ideas?
Were his laminas allegories? Or are his cases campaigns for extending
the frontier of a new formal universe that he is urging us to colonize?
Caramuel was hardly a subversive. He was a system builder who in
fact introduced a powerful, rigorous, logical framework for architecture and
removed from deformations any possible association with disorder, distortion,
or dissent. He tried to generate a higher formal order that would encompass all
the formal anomalies developed since the years of canonization with Alberti.
For this purpose he generated a new level of abstraction, looking at regular
architectural forms as parts of a consistent and complete system, one of many that
can be generated. Any such new, formal system springs from presuppositions
about the autonomy of architectural form that are similar to those we have
already discussed. The difference is the change in the accepted
"mother" formal norms. Caramuel's systems – "architectura
obliqua" being one of them – are therefore validated logically only,
without recourse to hedonistic or psychologistic warrants.
We can interpret Caramuel's efforts in several ways: as an attempt
to marry the concerns of the architect for visual order with the preoccupations
of the engineer for rational method; to adapt the idea of autonomy to the
mounting scientism of his day; to recuperate the deformations following the
crisis of the Italian absolutist regimes of the beginning of the sixteenth
century and restore them to conformity; and to facilitate the production of
beautiful design products for use by the even more powerful, "totalitarian
court nobility of the seventeenth century.
It is interesting to compare Caramuel's ideas with those of his
contemporary Claude Perrault, who also cast off the hedonistic psychologistic
warrants of the Renaissance. His attitude was what one may call Machiavellian.
Indeed, Perrault argued that in order to exercise social control through
architecture, the goal of aesthetic gratification must be replaced in the mind
of the architect by its real political and social function. He criticized the
idea of positive beauties that were supposed to be based in human nature and
counterproposed the arbitrary beauties, determined by social institutions. In
other words, he rejected the idea of autonomy in favor of a more
straightforward, realistic theory of architecture.
Perrault's ideas met with little sympathy among his contemporaries.
Caramuel's attempts to reform architecture also failed. Neither theoretician
succeeded in leading architecture beyond the confines of the idea of perfection
that had been shaped by the interests of the court nobility for legitimation.
They both remained prisoners of the old world order of the ancien regime. Critical
statements against Caramuel's system can be found by his contemporary Guarini
and by J.F. Blondel.18 Their remarks are interesting because they
point to the new direction architecture would take; they are early
functionalist statements. They argue against oblique shapes because they see
them as contradicting the norm of stability. Form, therefore, is not autonomous
but rather is an instrument for achieving firmness. On the other hand, a
closer look at this argument reveals that form must only signify stability,
and not necessarily contribute to it physically.
Functionalists see the problem of the split between the formal and
aesthetic outlooks in architecture as resulting from the very idea of autonomy.
Form for them depends on efficient function. All the elements of the building
must portray function or be eliminated.
Architecture is once more a rhetoric in the service of the
mercantile class seeking to legitimize the norm of efficiency as the highest in
all facets of human life.
Functionalists like Violet-le-Duc, Gaudi, Horta, Aalto, or Scharoun
have come to picture complex cases of forces in form that resemble the shapes
displayed in Caramuel's Laminas. It was only with the crisis of the
market that occurred between the two World Wars that the functionalist movement
came under attack and that an end was put to such experiments. One of the main
targets of criticism at that time was the dependence of this movement on the
interests of the mercantile class. At the same time, new attempts were made to
reform architecture in accordance with the new aspirations for equity,
democracy, and social justice. But it was only during the 1960s, a decade of
major legitimation crises for the modern state, that a new, powerful movement
came to dominate architecture. It violently attacked the idea of autonomy as
well as any other architectural idea imposed "from above,"
functionalism included. It was a sentimental, anti-intellectual, populist
movement.19 It aspired to an architecture generated spontaneously by
the masses themselves, left free to create in a world unencumbered by elite
professional dogma. The populist movement threatened the conceptual and
institutional post-Renaissance foundations of architecture. It lost its force
quickly, however, and by the middle of the 1960s, following the economic
crisis, the spread of neoconservatism, and the growth of its own internal
weakness, it declined into a marginal fluster.
Now we observe a comeback of the idea of autonomy. It is not a
return to the norm of beauty of the court nobility, but nevertheless an
irrational accent is once more placed on the preciousness of form. Now,
however, it is a preciousness devoid of sensualistic, hedonistic aspects. The
disinterested mental exercises from which the new formalism is supposed to
spring recall Caramuel's "cool" formal systems, free of extraneous
elements. But the reoccurrence of the dogma of formal norms smacks of social
conformism at a moment when social evolution is desperately needed.
The new autonomy claims to be a continuation of the critical
attitudes of the sixties, but without its naivete. The blind belief in formal
canon restores confidence to architecture but also further weakens the
architect's ability for self-observation and for passing judgment on the social
use of his or her products. The new autonomy cannot satisfy the needs and
aspirations for social change. Its ambiguous image of professionalism, combined
with its lack of social accountability and its criticism deprived of social context,
offers only temporary relief from the chaotic state of populism and will
ultimately lead to an impasse. Its naive, if not deliberately misleading,
approach is characteristic of an almost pathological social amnesia that is
dooming architecture to a state of joyful passivity and sad self-gratification.20
Historical analysis is one of the first steps toward the rational thinking
needed to overcome this state.
Our brief, historical account has been undertaken to clarify the
meaning of the idea of autonomy by restoring the memory of its emergence and
development and its social context and use. On the eve of the reign of the
market, autonomy was a playful game between Eros and Hermes. Now, at its
twilight, it appears as a sad choice between Saturn and Narcissus. During its
evolution, the idea of autonomy stimulated the development of new levels of
abstraction and new plateaus of formal analysis. The methods of distancing from
the architectural object, of foregrounding and systematizing its visual
structural attributes helped the promotion of the idea as much as they were
by-products of its growth. Historical investigation has shown that these
methods were "autonomous" in the sense that once they emerged to
operate in a certain framework of concepts and interests they were put to new
social uses outside their original tasks. Today they can be turned away from
their original orientation, combined with social-historical studies, and be
made into instruments of social change. The workings of such a methodology is the
topic of another essay.
Notes
1 Many studies have been carried out on autonomy
over the past twenty years. We refer here to only one stimulating study, M.
Muller et al., Autonomie der Kunst. ..,Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1972. The
numerous French and Italian writings on this topic are inspired by Althusser's
concept of autonomie. English bibliography on autonomy is less abundant
and concerns mainly studies in literature. See writings by the School of New
Criticism. For the origins of aesthetic theories in antiquity and the Middle
Ages, see W. Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, vols. 1 and 2, Mouton
and P. W.N, The Hague and Warsaw, 1964 and 1967. For the Middle Ages see also
E. de Bruyne, Etudes d'Esthetique Mediivale, De Tempel, Gent, 1946.
2 Vitruvius Ten Books (tr. F. Granger) Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970.
3. G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Pre-Socratic
Philosophers, Cambridge, 1973, chap. 17.
4 G. Vlastos, "The Physical Theory of
Anaxagoras," in The Pre-Socratics, ed. A. P. D. Mourelatos, New
York, 1974, p. 461.
5. L. B. Alberti, The
Ten Books of Architecture (tr. J. Leoni, ed. J. Ryckwert) London, Tiranti,
1965. First published in Latin 1485.
6 For valuable information on the sociology of the
Renaissance, see P. Burke, Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Italy, London,
1972, and M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1972.
7 W. Sombart, Luxury and Rise of Capitalism, Ann
Arbot, University of Chicago Press, 1967 (original German publication, 1913).
8 H. de la Croix, "Military Architecture and
the Radial City Plan in the Sixteenth Century Italy," Art Bulletin 42,
no. 4 (1960).
9 D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of
Art, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1981.
10 H. Haydn, The Counterrenaissance, New
York, 1950, chaps. 2, 3, 4.
11 Vicenzo Danti, II Primo Libro. ..delle.
..Proporzioni, Florence, 1567; also edited by P. Barocchi, Tratiati d'Arte
del Cinquecento…. Bari, 1960, Vol. I.
12 M. de Montaigne, Essayes, tcans. J.
Florio,-London, 1603.
13 M. Fagiolo, La Scenographia, Florence,
1973, pp. 66-64.
14 de Montaigne, Essayes.
15 R. and M. Wittkower, Born under Saturn, New
York, 1963.
16 Published in Vigevano, 1678. On
Cacarnuel, see D. de Bernardi Ferrero, "n Conte I. Cararnuel. ..Architetto
e Teorico dell'Architettuca," Palladio 15 (1965), andJ. Connors,
"Bernini's S. Andrea al Quirinale: Payments and Planning," journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians, March 1982.
17 A. G. Marino, “Il colonnato di Piazza S.
Pietro. ..," Palladio
23.
18 W. Oechslin, "Bemerkungen zu Guarino
Guarini and Juan Cararnuel de Lobkowitz," Raggi 9, no. 3 (1969).
19 A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, "The Populist
Movement in Architecture," Forum 3 (1976) (Originally published in
German in Bauwelt, January 1975).
20 A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, "The Narcissist
Phase in Architecture," Harvard Architectural Review I (1979).