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The expression of movement in architecture

a
Adam Hardy
a
The Welsh School of Architecture, Bute Building, King Edward VII Avenue,
Cardiff, CF10 3NB, United Kingdom

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 471

The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 16
Number 4

The expression of movement in

architecture

Adam Hardy The Welsh School of Architecture, Bute Building,

Downloaded by [Mr Adam Hardy] at 09:26 29 July 2011

King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3NB, United

Kingdom

‘Movement’ in Architecture can mean different things, and the idea of ‘expressed move-
ment’ has, alone, been variously conceived. This article attempts to distinguish between
these notions and propose a taxonomy. Two general categories are defined: ‘contained
movement’, where it is not the architecture that is thought of as moving, but the eye,
mind, imagined body or forces; and ‘represented movement’, where there is an implication
or illusion that the architecture is in motion. It is argued that different kinds of movement
often work together. These ideas are illustrated and situated through a brief historiographi-
cal survey, first outlining the tradition of discussing expressed movement in western archi-
tecture, then extending to writings on the arts and architecture of India. An analysis of
movement in Indian temple architecture is put forward in order to demonstrate how an
interpretation of a particular kind of architecture in terms of specific movement patterns
can be substantiated, primarily by communicating these patterns unambiguously through
visual means. Finally, current thinking about architectural movement is touched upon. It
is suggested that openness to the diversity of conceptions of how movement is expressed
may both sharpen the analysis of architecture and extend the possibilities for its creation.

Introduction esoteric nor uniquely modernist. A staircase rises, a

People move about in a building, lifts and escalators
go up and down, sun and shade play across the walls,
the breeze wafts through and the foundations gently
settle. Apart from these literal kinds of movement,
architecture can express movement—or in other
words imply, convey or embody movement—
without actually moving. As pointed out by Adrian
Forty, with a hint of scepticism, ‘The notion that
architecture represents implied movement within
forms that are not themselves in motion has been a
conventional part of modernist thinking, and still
seems to be widely taken for granted.’1
Everyday metaphors demonstrate that an experi-
ence of implied architectural motion is neither
cornice runs across, a corridor snakes, a spire
soars. Everybody knows, of course, that they all
stay still: it is the eye and the mind that rise or run,
or maybe perceive a visual force, or follow the
repetitive rhythm of steps or an imaginary being
climbing them. Other metaphors, however, are
closer to suggesting that the building really does
move. When the ogee nods we are not so willing
to attribute its motion to our eyes, and even when
a humble porch projects, the implication is that it
is the porch itself, or the wall behind, that does
the throwing forward.
Language, then, recognises that two general cat-
egories of expressed movement can be sensed in

# 2011 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2011.598698

 472
The expression of
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architecture
Adam Hardy
architecture. These may be termed ‘contained’ and
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‘represented’ movement. ‘Contained movement’ is
seen in the architecture: it is the not the architecture
that is thought of as moving, but the eye and mind,
or the imagined body, or forces. ‘Represented
movement’ comprises formal characteristics which
imply that architecture itself is moving: not actually
moving, of course, but illustrating movement, or
perhaps even creating an illusion of movement.
As a simple test of the difference, movement is
‘represented’ if, in the mind’s eye, one can fully
and precisely imagine the building or building part
in question passing through successive stages of
displacement or transformation. ‘Contained move-
ment’ is perceived when the imagination runs up
the stairs, or follows virtual penguins along ramps.
‘Represented movement’ calls for suspension of
disbelief in order to imagine that before our very
eyes the building is moving.
This paper attempts to understand the workings
of these two kinds of expression. It presents a brief
historiographical survey, both to situate and to illus-
trate the ideas, outlining the tradition of discussing
expressed movement in western architecture and
extending to writings on the arts and architecture
of India.This is followed by an analysis of mediaeval
Indian temples, which display a coherent system of
architectural dynamics founded on means of
expression—predominantly of ‘represented’ move-
ment—that have been suggested only vaguely in
discussions of western architecture. The paper
concludes by suggesting that familiarity with the
principles and properties examined here can
extend the imaginative possibilities of architectural
creation.
It is important to make clear that the mechan-
isms being discussed are experiential ones; they
probably explain little of the psychology of percep-
tion or neuro-physiological processes in the brain.
This is not to ignore the fact that cognitive psy-
chology directly stimulated some of the aesthetic
theories surveyed here, nor that neuroscience
could add a dimension to this discussion. Indeed,
certain theories of movement touched on here,
notably those of gestalt theory, have claimed a
physiological and scientific basis. Yet, the more
primary and universal a process, the less it illumi-
nates the distinctive movement patterns of a par-
ticular architecture. Even if perception is now
rarely understood as a passive reception of data,
such patterns are experienced not in the first
instants of making sense, but in a further act of
interpretation which can be analysed without
knowing what goes on in the visual cortex.
Despite the support of common metaphors, my
evidence for these ways of seeing lies largely in
the interpretations of writers on architecture, and
in my own experience and reflections. Yet, I
would like to argue that, while complementary
or even contradictory interpretations of movement
patterns in a work of architecture may be valid,
the range of such interpretations is not arbitrary.
There will be certain ones that the architecture
itself allows. My example of Indian temples will
be used to show how an interpretation of a par-
ticular kind of architecture in terms of specific
movement patterns can be substantiated if they
are clearly visualised and communicated. They
need to be shown, through visual means. This is
possible for ‘represented’ movement, at least,

because the stages of transformation can be pre-
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cisely imagined.
Multiple mechanisms of architectural
dynamics
Failure to distinguish between different kinds of
movement in architecture causes confusion. There
are cases where it is not even made clear whether
the movement in question is expressed, or of
another sort. For example, one discussion of ‘Body
Movement’, which deals mainly with the ‘inter-
action of body form and movement with architec-
ture’ (kinaesthetic response, the promenade
architecturale, and so on) arrives at Tatlin’s tower
(Fig. 1) and declares that it ‘seems to streak and
spin through space, implying a movement which
begins with the building itself but which shoots
out into space and the future.’2 The author launches
into expressed movement without warning, then
lets it drop without a trace.
A whole range of notions of how movement is
expressed can be identified within the broad cat-
egories of ‘contained’ and ‘represented’ movement.
An attempt to summarise this range is presented in
the table above. The categories will be recalled
throughout the paper by their respective numbers
(A1, B2, etc.).
These various kinds of expressed movement work
together. When an individual form or space is
sensed as dynamic, there may be more than one
way of explaining this because the motion is being
conveyed by parallel means. Take the example of a
staircase: the eye shins up it, sliding up the banisters
(A1), scaling the rhythm of the steps (A2), and may
be half way down again when it meets the phantom
473
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body plodding up (A5). Often a dynamic form can
be explained in terms of both contained and rep-
resented movement. In Michelangelo’s staircase at
the Biblioteca Laurenziana (Fig. 2), the dynamics of
a familiar staircase are complemented by a down-
ward surge created by steps which bulge, distorted
outward relative to normal stairs (B1). The spiralling
sheaths of Tatlin’s tower sweep up one’s eye and
projected body (A1, A5), while they writhe up and
onwards, twisted, so seemingly twisting (B1). Curvi-
linear Gothic window tracery (Fig. 3) sways as the
eye meanders up its mullions (A1), as well as
through a realisation that Geometrical tracery
(Fig. 4) is being stroked into something flowing
and continuous (B1). Flowing forms (see also
figs 8, 9 below) regardless of a previous norm,
may suggest their own process of growth or cre-
ation (B2): while the eye traces lines or slides over
surfaces (A1), the mind’s hand caresses the curves
and mimics their imagined making.
Alongside more intrinsic means of expression,
association (A9) and figural representation (B9)
may also play a part. That pictorial representation
can portray movement is self-evident to figurative
painters and sculptors. Four seraphim hovering in
pendentives hold aloft the dome of Hagia Sophia
on twenty-four wings and many prayers, preventing
the potential movement of celestial collapse. At the
Fo-Guang-Si monastery (Fig. 5), the curved carpen-
try of bracketed eaves is given extra uplift by
wooden wings. Modernism eschewed such
methods, but flirted with association, still hoping
to take flight: Saarinen’s TWA terminal at Kennedy
Airport is wingless but has ‘aerodynamic’ curves.
The sense of growth in curvilinear tracery is undeni-
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Adam Hardy

Table categorising concepts of how movement is expressed in architecture (the numbering is used throughout the
Downloaded by [Mr Adam Hardy] at 09:26 29 July 2011

article to refer to these categories)

A. Contained movement B. Represented movement

(Conception/perception of movement in the (Conception/perception of movement by the
architecture) architecture)

Movement of eye and mind Sense of transformation

A1. Movement of eye/mind along lines, across B1. Change with reference to a norm (including
planes, around surfaces, through spaces (includes norms or previous stages of a tradition)
continuous or flowing rhythm)

A2. Movement of eye/mind from form to form/ B2. Indication of process of creation, real or
space to space (through repetitive rhythm, or imagined (growth, evolution, making,
through variety and contrast) development within a tradition)

A3. Delayed completion: through weak or concealed B3. Projection (emergence of a form out of another);
boundaries; partially obscured, overlapping, incomp- multiple or sequential projection of nested forms
lete, fragmented, or open-ended forms or spaces

A4. Shifting configurations: through overlap/ B4. Bursting or dissolution of boundaries –

interpenetration, alternative entities, ambiguous interpenetration or fusion seen as actions or
figure/ground relationships processes

Projected bodily movement

A5. Imagined movement of one’s body through or B5. Repetition with gradual change
into space, along a route etc.

A6. Imagined movement through space, along a B6. Repetitive rhythm with growth (expanding
route etc. of other people, creatures, vehicles etc. repetition)

Perceived forces
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A7. Visual/perceptual forces (e.g. as in gestalt theory) B7. Proliferation (progressive multiplication)
A8. Imagined muscular or mechanical forces, in
equilibrium, tension, conflict etc. (potential or
future movement imagined)
Association
A9. Evocation of movement through association
(forms reminiscent of creatures or things that really
move, including plants or other organisms that
grow or evolve)
ably enhanced by a reminiscence of vegetation.
Michelangelo’s bulging stairs have poured down
more insistently for some observers by reminding
them of lava. 3
The parallel working of different principles of
movement is brought to bear architecturally
through deliberate reinforcement. For an idea of
movement to be expressed, beyond the everyday
motion of rising gables and projecting porches, it
has to be insisted on. Every arch and every vault
springs at its springing, then leaps; but to do so
intensely, arches and vaults need the kind of tr-
eatment seen in the Angel Choir at Lincoln (see
Fig. 4): fountains of foliate capitals (B9), then
gushing bundles of corrugated ribs (A1). If reinforce-
ment is needed in a single element, in an architec-
tural whole it is even more necessary to show that
movement is meant, and not just commonplace.
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B8. Fragmentation (splitting) seen as an action or
process
Pictorial representation
B9. Figurative portrayal of movement (through
sculpture, painting etc.)
Dynamism has to be underscored by multiple
clues. Various mechanisms of movement must be
harnessed, strengthened and choreographed.
A ubiquitous way of reinforcing an idea of move-
ment is repetition. Though continuous moulded
shapes convey motion, a single dynamic form
does not generally constitute dynamic architecture:
one bent stair does not make a cascade. Various
means of expressing movement presuppose a com-
posite form and have repetition as their basis.
Repetitive rhythm leads the eye along paths of
contained movement (A2), portrays the trajectories
of entities conceived as shifting (B5) and beats out
patterns of growth (B6) or proliferation (B7). To
increase repetition is to reinforce the sense of
movement, and rhythms are faster when the
number of parts is greater, their frequency
denser: at least, up to that nebulous point at
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Figure 1. Monument to
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the Third International

(1919 –20), by Vladimir
Tatlin.

Figure 2. Staircase in
the vestibule of the
Biblioteca Laurenziana
(begun 1524), Florence,
by Michelangelo.

which individual parts begin to merge into an
undifferentiated field.
The categories in my table cannot be applied
wholesale to any building, even one that is mani-
festly dynamic. If an architect must use multiple
means in order to choreograph movement, a critic
or historian must unpick those same mechanisms
and expose their workings, and be precise about
what kinds of movement are concerned. Particular
ways of conceiving of and expressing movement
are characteristic of particular architectures. What
is subjective or arbitrary must be distinguished
from significant principles, and an indication of
the latter is the presence of mutually reinforcing
clues.
The tradition of discussing expressed
movement in western architecture
That a sense of movement in painting, architecture
or landscape could arise through the wanderings
of the eye was recognised in eighteenth-century
England. The painter William Hogarth defined intri-
cacy as ‘that peculiarity in the lines, which compose
it, that lead the eye a wanton kind of chace’, 4
implying not only that lines are followed by the
eye (A1), but that the eye is kept on the move by

Downloaded by [Mr Adam Hardy] at 09:26 29 July 2011
variety and contrast (A2) and a pleasurably thwarted
search for completion (A3). These qualities had
already been recommended by Pope for the
design of gardens conceived as much for the eye
to stroll in as for the visitor. Pope went further, advo-
cating compositions that demand shifting view-
points, and with indistinct boundaries:
Let not each beauty everywhere be spied,
Where half the skill is decently to hide,
He gains all points who pleasingly confounds,
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Figure 3. East window
(c. 1300), Selby Abbey.
Figure 4. Angel Choir
(1256 –1280), Lincoln
Cathedral.
Surprises, varies and conceals the bounds.5
Robert Adam’s definition of architectural move-
ment recommended variety and contrast (A2) to
keep the eye moving from surface to surface, from
mass to mass, and around outlines: ‘Movement is
meant to express, the rise and fall, the advance
and recess, with other diversity of form, in different
parts of the building, so as to add greatly to the pic-
turesque of the composition’.6
While bodily movement was a prerequisite for
fully experiencing the swell and ebb of parklands,
English eighteenth-century theories, emphasising
the eye, did not speculate on whether bodily sen-
sations played a part. These were brought to the
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Adam Hardy
Figure 5. Fo-Guang-Si
Downloaded by [Mr Adam Hardy] at 09:26 29 July 2011
monastery, Wutai Shan,
China (ninth century
AD).
fore by Germanic aesthetic theory. Goethe, in 1793,
evoking an analogy between dance and the rhyth-
mic experience of moving through a building,
pointed to the ‘sense of movement in the human
body’ as a neglected aspect of architecture.7 His
concern was for the experience of a moving
person rather than movement expressed in architec-
tural forms, but the latter rose to prominence during
the late-nineteenth century in the psycho-physio-
logical theory of empathy (Einfühlung).8 Empathy
theory proposed that the experience of art involves
the observer’s identification with the work,
through projection into it of the soul, or of
emotions, or—most relevant in relation to move-
ment—of bodily sensations. In the words of Heinrich
Wölfflin, who pioneered the application of empathy
theory to architectural history, ‘Our own bodily
organisation is the form through which we appre-
hend everything physical’.9
Wölfflin characterises the Baroque (including
what has since been termed Mannerism), in contrast
to Renaissance architecture, as a dynamic style
which ‘never offers us perfection and fulfilment, or
the static calm of “being”, only the unrest of
change and the tension of transience.’10 He runs
through a whole range of ways in which the
Baroque conveys the ‘illusion of movement’, an
aspect of its ‘painterliness’. That ‘tension of transi-
ence’ is created by forces, especially muscular ones
(A8), which impart a sense of the ‘violent and pas-
sionate effort’ of lifting and carrying.11 Windows
uncomfortably placed within a bay are squeezed,
and the ovals and inharmonious rectangles favoured
by the Baroque are, through their dissonant pro-
portions, not self-contained and resolved, and
therefore strive towards balance and completion.
For Wölfflin it is through the observer’s bodily
responses that such ostensibly visual tensions
act.12 But the breaking up of forms (eg, broken
pediments) and the ‘tendency to dissolve the hori-
zontals’ are conceived by Wölfflin, along with con-
trasted light and shade (like chiaroscuro in
painting), primarily as devices that keep the eye
moving (A1), and he sees ‘painterly elusiveness’ in
the phenomena of partial concealment and interpe-
netration (A3) and in boundaries that are indistinct
or perhaps ambiguous (A4): ‘devices such as super-
imposed pilasters, blurred contours, and in short,
the abolition of all clearly separated elements’.13
While all these are aspects of ‘contained’ move-
ment, it is ‘representational’ principles that truly
create an ‘illusion of movement’. Some of these
are hinted at by Wölfflin. An equally significant
interpretation of interpenetrating three-dimensional
forms is to conceive of them as complete but over-
lapping and (given a sense of direction) emerging
out of one another (B3). This idea may be implied
when Wölfflin remarks that, in the seventeenth
century, pediments ‘piled up and were thrust out-
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Figure 6. Church of
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Santi Vincente e
Anastasio (1650),
Rome, by Martino
Longhi the Younger.

Figure 7. San Carlo alle

Quattro Fontane
(1665 –76), Rome, by
Francesco Borromini.

and subsiding. A cinematic vision of a series of

wards’ (Fig. 6).14 Windows squeezed within a bay
may be pushed up to touch or even pierce
through the architrave (B4). Wölfflin observes that,
with the advent of undulating walls, the whole
mass began to ‘surge’: ‘concave end bays were
bays contrasted with a lively convex movement
towards the spectator in the centre’ (Fig. 7).15 The
illusionistic aspect of this surge is surely through
comparison with habitual straight walls (B1), given
power by bodily identification with the swelling
related forms undergoing a process of transform-
ation (B5) is suggested by what Wölfflin calls ‘a
rhythmic sequence, as opposed to a merely regular
and metric one’: ‘The effort and slow gathering of
force is expressed by a progress from pilasters to
half-columns and then to whole columns; above
all, when clusters of columns pile up in the centre’.16
Wölfflin’s preoccupation was with form as bodily,
solid stuff: August Schmarsow set a seal on the idea
of architecture as essentially the ‘creatress of space’
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Adam Hardy
(Raumsgestalterin). For Schmarsow, the projection
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of our sense of bodily motion (A5) was the whole
basis of our perception of space: ‘We cannot
express its relation to ourselves in any way other
than by imagining that we are in motion, measuring
the length, width and depth, or by attributing to the
static lines, surfaces, and volumes the movements
that our eyes and our kinaesthetic sensations
suggest to us, even though we survey the dimen-
sions while standing still.’17 Space subsequently
took centre stage in modernist discourse on archi-
tecture, and the notion of ‘flowing space’ became
familiar. Flowing space might conceivably be expres-
sible as ‘represented movement’, since space, trans-
formed into a substance, can be imagined oozing
progressively through a building: but only into
more space already there. Dynamic space belongs
principally to the ‘contained’ side of my table: the
flow is not of space itself, but of the eye, the mind
or Schmarsow’s projected body.
Prominent among those who, after Schmarsow’s
contribution, brought ‘form’ and ‘space’ together
as complementary concerns was Paul Frankl. If
Wölfflin had made the contrast between Renais-
sance and Baroque into a Hegelian dialectic polarity,
Frankl does this still more boldly in his Principles of
Architectural History (1914). For ‘spatial form’ (ie,
space), the contrast is between ‘spatial addition’
and ‘spatial division’; for ‘corporeal form’ (solid
elements), between serene ‘generators of forces’
and tormented ‘transmitters of forces’. Split, bent
or overlapped, Baroque forms are incomplete and
transitory (A3), and this instability and lack of defi-
nition in the individual part is paralleled by the
necessity to look at a Baroque building from many
angles, each view being ‘unstable, incomplete, acci-
dental’. Here we have the basis of Frankl’s third
polarity, concerning ‘visible form’ (ie, the sensuous
experience of architecture): one image versus many
images.18 This is less a matter of a succession of
views (A2) or delayed completion (A3), than of shifting
entities (A4), an idea that Frankl takes to takes to a high
degree of complexity: ‘These separate images cannot
be reciprocally explained. They are interlocked; they
interpenetrate; they fuse into a unit of multiplicity’.19
Frankl is suggesting a kind of whole that is graspable
only through moments of unfocused insight into an
undifferentiated totality.20 To comprehend the build-
ing the body must move, and contained movement
is revealed as the mind moves through multiple and
often contradictory interpretations.
Meanwhile, the machine age advanced apace,
and the notion of muscular forces in art and architec-
ture, energised already by the iron thrust of mechan-
ical forces, thrilled to the nervous currents of
electrons teeming through the sinuous ligaments of
the Jugendstil. The Belgian Art Nouveau designer
and architect Henry van de Velde allied such thoughts
to ‘graphological’ ideas about the expressiveness of
lines. ‘When I say that a line is a force’, he wrote in
1902, ‘I make an entirely factual statement: the line
borrows its energy from the person who traced
it.’21 Dynamism in lines, as well as in colours and
shapes, became a concern for Wassily Kandisky and
Paul Klee, two artists associated with the Bauhaus
in the 1920s. Kandinsky defined a line as ‘the track
made by the moving point’,22 and Klee famously
made lines by taking a dot for a walk.
But, lines apart, whither the work of art in the
dawning age of the motion picture? Before the

First World War, Cubism took up the idea that many
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views make a totality (A4) and looked for ways of
showing them all at once. The Italian Futurists
made movement their core principle. In his epic
Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Siegfried
Giedion, heir to the art historical currents we have
been examining, gives prominence to Cubism and
Futurism. Through Giedion we can get a glimpse
of movement in the modern movement. An una-
shamed proponent of Zeitgeists, he sees movement
as manifesting the respective spirits of the Baroque
and the modern ages, reflecting the propensity of
the former, in both the scientific and mystical
realms, to reach for infinity, and paralleling twenti-
eth-century atomic theory and the space-time conti-
nuum. Thus, the spiral lantern crowning Borromini’s
Sant’ Ivo is somehow longing to be like Tatlin’s
tower, alas too early!23
For Giedion, certain ‘constituent facts’ transcend
the stylistic features of a period. One such is the
undulating wall, seen in the façade of Borromini’s
church of San Carlo alle Quatro Fontane, Rome
(see Fig.7 above), reappearing in English serpentine
crescents and again in modern architecture. The
means of expression in the undulating movement
are barely discussed; but at San Carlo one may
notice how deviation from the norm (B1) is under-
scored by the eye following the lines of the
curving cornices (A1), foiled by the counter curve
of the central pavilion bulging out of the second
tier (A1, B3). Giedion does remark that the central
bay ‘soars upward’, as emphasised by the heaven-
ward gaze of the Saint’s statue (B9), the arched
wings of flanking angels and the oval (hence direc-
tional) medallion (A1);24 one might also note how
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The Journal
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the bay pierces the interrupted upper cornice (B4),
and is given potential continuation by means of
weak termination (A3) in a thin, curly coping,
limply pointing skyward.
Discussing Futurism, Giedion reproduces the
1914 drawing by the architect Antonio Sant’ Elia,
showing a skyscraper with lift towers, and traffic
routes crossing one another at different levels.25
While this is a matter of literal, mechanical move-
ment, futurist paintings attempted to demonstrate,
like stroboscopic photographs, that ‘objects in
motion multiply and distort themselves [B7, B5],
just as do vibrations, which indeed they are, in
passing through space’.26 Balla’s 1913 painting
‘Speed’ shows a repeated, gradually expanding
and distorting, streaked, diaphanous bulge bursting
from right to left. The Futurist sculptor Umberto
Boccioni sought to represent the integrated whole
consisting of the moving object + its environment.
Denying that movement could be captured
through repetition, he embarked on the ‘intuitive
search for the one single form which produces con-
tinuity in space’.27 Boccioni’s ‘Bottle Evolving in
Space’ (Fig. 8; 1911– 12) is the Futurist sculpture
illustrated by Giedion, who quotes the sculptor’s
assertion (which in Giedion’s view anticipates
atomic theory) that ‘We should start from the
central nucleus of the object, wanting to create
itself’.28 Did Boccioni really start from the nucleus,
or make a clay bottle and then gouge bits out?
Wouldn’t we see it in reverse if he had called it
‘Bottle Dissolving in Acid’?
In architecture, the use of (seemingly) moulded,
fused forms to express movement occurs in Erich
Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower (Fig. 9). Incidentally,
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Figure 8. Bottle
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Evolving in Space
(1911 –12), by Umberto
Boccioni (from Giedion,
Space, Time and
Architecture, 1941; Fig.
263 on p. 441: see Note
28 below).

Figure 9. Einstein
Tower (1920 –24),
Potsdam, by Erich
Mendelsohn.
Mendelsohn found Giedion’s parallel between
modern architecture and relativity ‘ludicrous’, and
Einsten agreed that ‘it is simply bull without any
rational basis’.29 Mendelsohn also experimented
with the kind of smooth bulges, sleek horizontal
striations and raked speed-wings associated with
Art Deco, but came to repudiate the architectural
use of shapes developed for actual speed (thus
evoking an association, A9), as showing a ‘misun-
derstanding of the essence of architecture’.30 room, are understood as dealing with objective prop-
Mention must be made here of the comprehensive erties that are inherent in any perceived object or
theory for explaining the dynamics of visual form space (Fig. 10). Perceptual forces (A7) are considered
that, during the early decades of the twentieth to be attributes of objects in the same way as colours
century, developed from the earlier insights of are: ‘All percepts are dynamic, that is, possessed by
empathy theory. This was gestalt theory, based on directed tensions. These tensions are inherent com-
the concept that the brain grasps perceptual ponents of the perceptual stimulus. . .’.31 This
wholes (gestalts) which are more primary and power- theory focuses on the brain rather than the body,
ful than their constituent elements. The best-known but postulates nonetheless a physiologiscal activity
application of gestalt psychology to theories of art in the perceiving brain which causes an equivalent
and architecture is in the writings of Rudolph psychological effect.32
Arnheim from the 1940s onwards. In this view, In Arnheim’s scheme, the formal structure of a
experiences such as that of hanging a picture on a work of art is the result of the artist’s organisation
wall, or of finding the right place for a table in a of perceptual forces. Expression or meaning thus

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inheres in the aesthetic qualities of a work.33 This
contention flows from an undercurrent in discus-
sions of formal dynamics concerning the possibilities
of an intrinsic symbolism of form. That expressed
movement may offer explanations of how such sym-
bolism can work will become clear in relation to
Indian architecture.
Conceptions of movement in the arts and
architecture of India
While it is primarily through a visual argument that I
shall presently justify my interpretation of move-
ment in Indian temple architecture, the line of
thought in which this interpretation is rooted has
perceived motion in the arts of India as inseparably
bound up with particular ideas about their meaning.
In the early twentieth century, Indian art came
increasingly to be seen in the west as essentially spiri-
tual. In this respect, the name of A. K. Coomaraswamy
(1877–1947) looms large, with his Platonic/Vedantic
vision of Indian art as a particular embodiment of the
universal Perennial Philosophy. In this view, the
purpose of ‘Traditional’ art is to be a ‘support to con-
templation’, pointing to the changeless Absolute
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beyond appearances. A Traditional work of art reflects Figure 10. Perceptual
a transcendent archetype, becoming an ‘adequate’ forces: ‘Objects that
look “too close” to
and intrinsic symbol that gives form to ‘things that
each other display
cannot be seen except by the intellect’.34 Coomaras- mutual repulsion: they
wamy insists that ‘ascertained means of operation’ want to be moved
for Traditional works of art were passed down by apart. At a somewhat
craft lineages, but he is not explicit about whether closer distance the
interval looks just right
this meant that any formal mechanisms were necess-
or they may seem to
ary to enable ‘adequate’symbols to carry their intrinsic attract each other’;
meanings. Whether or not one subscribes to the Per- Rudolph Arnheim, The
ennialist creed, it is ideas about movement that have Dynamics of
provided the most promising clues to such mechan- Architectural Form,
1977: p. 19, Figure 8.
isms.
(Courtesy of the
In the interpretations of Indian art by the Indolo- University of California
gist Heinrich Zimmer, a subtle shift can be sensed Press [print] and
from Coomaraswamy’s doctrine of the work of art Margaret Nettinga
as a manifestation of something divine, to the idea [online]).
that a vision of the mysterious process of divine
manifestation is the meaning that certain works
convey, an interpretation backed up by the very
myths that they depict. Zimmer sees movement as
central to the expression of this meaning, identifying
in Indian art a ‘phenomenon of the expanding
form’. Of a south Indian sculpted image of the lin-
godbhava (origin of the linga, the phallic emblem
of Shiva) (see Fig. 14 below), Zimmer writes:
The solid rock is apparently animated by an
energy of growth. The niche-like spilt in its side
seems actually to be widening, unfolding, to dis-
close the anthropomorphic apparition within.
The solid mass of stone, by a subtle artifice of
the craftsman, has been converted into a dyna-
morphic event. In this respect, this piece of sculp-
ture is more like a motion picture than a painting.
The notion that there is nothing static, nothing
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Figure 11. Stele (sixth
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century AD) at Parel,
near Mumbai
(photograph by Gerard
Foekema).
abiding, but only the flow of a relentless process,
with everything originating, growing, decaying,
vanishing—this wholly dynamic view of life, of
the individual and of the universe, is one of the
fundamental conceptions. . . of later Hinduism.35
The workings of this ‘subtle artifice’ are not exposed
here, nor for another of Zimmer’s examples, the
stele of proliferating Shiva images at Parel
(Fig. 11): this work ‘is conceived, and should be
read by the eye, as a never-ending process. The
giant slab seems to be expanding, both vertically
and sidewise, with the life-force of the athletic
organisms which throb and heave across its
surface’.36
In 1946, the same year in which Zimmer’s Myths
and Symbols appeared, Stella Kramrisch published
The Hindu Temple. Kramrisch interprets the temple
as a symbol of manifestation: ‘The temple is the con-
crete shape (mūrti) of the Essence; as such it is the
residence and vesture of God. The masonry is its
sheath (kośa) and body. The temple is the monu-
ment of manifestation.’37 She identifies the point
above the finial as ‘the Bindu, its Highest Point,
the limit between the unmanifest and the mani-
fest’.38 On the whole, Kramrisch does not tie
these insights to an analysis of specific architectural
forms, but she makes the important observation
that the images projecting from the walls of a
shrine (B3) seem to be driven forth from the
sanctum (garbha griha, ‘womb chamber’).39
When Kramrisch extends the concept of move-
ment to three dimensions, things become proble-
matic: ‘On this vertical axis are threaded the levels
of the building, its floors (bhūmi) and profiles,
their projections and recesses. Expansion proceeds
from the central point of the Garbhagrha, in the
horizontal, and all the directions of space; this
spread with its proliferation and particularisation is
gathered up towards the apex; the broad mass
with its many forms is reduced to a point, beyond
its total form’.40 This is to confuse two notions of
movement. Outward movement, as Kramrisch
herself implies, is represented through the emer-
gence of embedded forms (B3), while the upward
movement could only follow the trajectory of the

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eye or mind (A1), or a visual force (A7). I shall pre-
sently try to show that conceptually embedded
forms in a temple design can only be imagined as
emanating downwards and outwards, even where
the whole is seen as expanding upwards. At this
point it can be noted that within the logic of Kram-
risch’s own metaphysical view, aspiration towards
union with the divine must be inwards and
upwards to the unity beyond form, while manifes-
tation must be downwards and outwards from the
one to the many: God is up there and comes
down to earth.
The idea of divine energy radiating from the
sanctum has become widespread in studies of
Indian temples, but they rarely discuss how such a
process might be embodied architecturally.41 While
Kramrisch began to do this for temple architecture,
Alice Boner, a practising artist who embraced the
Coomaraswamian vision of works of art as ‘trans-
mitters of supersensual realities’,42 proposed a set
of formal principles for the Indian sculptural compo-
sition, a kind of gestalt theory of the spirit, focusing
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Figure 12. Dancing
Shiva at Cave 4 (sixth
century AD), Badami
(photograph by the
Author [left]; space
division [centre] and
time division [right]
from Alice Boner’s
Principles of
Composition in Indian
Sculpture, 1962).
on the great sculptural panels in sixth- to seventh-
century cave temples. As means of expressing
motion, Boner implies movement of the eye (A1),
and above all perceptual forces (A7). For Boner,
forms have intrinsic meaning because they arise
from movement of the cosmic Life-force, creating
currents of energy: ‘lines, forms and colours are
not accidental, but are direct manifestations of
these inner forces, and therefore present a perfect
analogy to spiritual reality, their ultimate Cause’.43
According to Boner, the composition is regulated
by a circle, usually centred on the navel of the main
deity, and divided up by six, eight or twelve diam-
eters (Fig. 12). The points where the diameters
meet the circumference are joined to create a
matrix of lines. Some of these lines form a vertical
grid (‘space-division or measure’), others create a
web of selected diameters and oblique chords paral-
lel to these (‘time division or movement’): ‘One is
static and the other kinetic, and interlaced they con-
stitute the integrated whole of the composition’.44
Animated by these lines of energy the sculpted
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panel becomes, like a yantra, a ‘functional organ-
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ism’ for contemplation. The mystery of manifes-
tation is contemplated in the coherence of the
whole, maintained by the still centre, the ‘hidden,
invisible revealer, the controller of all active powers
at work’.45 In the ‘polar complementarism of
centre and circumference’ we find ‘a true and ade-
quate material figuration of the complementarism
between principle and manifestation’.46 Boner
thus proposes a formal means for the workings of
an ‘adequate’ symbol.
For Boner, word and form are different languages,
acting on ‘different faculties in man’; both are ‘ema-
nations of the supreme Life-force and both stand as
symbols for transcendent Reality’.47
The idea of the unity of the Indian arts is stressed
by Kapila Vatsyayan, who sees them as grounded in
a unified Indian culture of which the idea of a trans-
cendent source of all creation is a perennial theme.
As a dancer, thus inevitably concerned with move-
ment, Vatsyayan has played a prominent role in rein-
terpreting the principles of classical Indian dance. In
her discussion of movement, mainly in relation to
dance and sculpture, Boner-like diagrams for sculp-
ture are paralleled by an underlying structure for
Indian dance, a vertical mandala against which
movements are defined. Like Boner, Vatsyayan inter-
prets the symbolism of manifestation, of the embo-
diment in art of the relationship between the one
and the many, in terms of a dynamic field integrated
around the centre. Thus, in the sama dance posture:
‘It is the physical and psychical centre which is the
beginning and the end. All dynamic actions return
to this stillness.’48 In the interpretation of Indian
temple architecture that follows, the relationship
between the one and the many is embodied quite
differently, through a concrete representation of
interpenetrating forms bubbling out from a centre
and from one another, coming apart and exploding
into the void.
Seeing is believing: showing movement
patterns in Indian temples
The presence of mutually reinforcing ways of
expressing movement is a strong clue to under-
standing architectural intentions, and to interpreting
the character of an architectural work, type or tra-
dition. How can such an interpretation be substan-
tiated? First and foremost, given the visual and
spatial nature of architecture, it must be possible
for the interpretation to be fully and clearly visual-
ised, or imagined. Clarity does not preclude ambigu-
ity: alternative interpretations may be possible, and
perhaps equally meaningful, but they need to separ-
ately identified. Subsequently, for the interpretation
to attain the status of critical knowledge, the visual-
isation must be communicable: that is, replicable in
other minds.49
The clearest way to communicate a way of seeing
a building—other than, in the case of movement, of
dancing it—is through drawings models. Where
contained movement is concerned, drawings need
to be backed up by verbal argument. The eye,
after all, or the imagined body, will roam anywhere
you let them; so arrows on a drawing will need to be
justified as appropriate ones. Represented move-
ment, however, lends itself naturally to represen-
tation, as its implied stages can be shown in a
sequence of images. I have long contended that,
more definitively than through a static drawing, a

particular conception of represented movement
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could be validated though computer animation,
where the stages could be merged into a continuous
flow. An opportunity to demonstrate the dynamics
of Indian temples in an animation arose recently, in
the form of a display created for an exhibition in
Shanghai of Indian art from the British Museum
and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The animation
may be viewed online.50 Entitled ‘Emanating Temple
Forms’, it is based principally on the examples that I
shall present here, and so is a substantiation of the
analysis below.
In a Hindu temple, the shrine proper is conceived
as the house of the god, as the god’s body and as
the universe. It consists of a square sanctum con-
taining the image of the main deity, surrounded by
thick walls which carry a superstructure, which is
not for going into but for the exterior expression
of an inner principle. The plan is organised around
crossed axes oriented to the cardinal points, with a
vertical axis carrying this arrangement through the
ascending stages of the tower. Thus, concentricity,
radiality and verticality give inherent channels for
contained movement. Bodily, ritual movement is
directed around the shrine, and inwards to the
dark sanctum—paths that thereby contain the
motion of imagined bodies (A5, A6); while, in the
vertical dimension, contained movement is predo-
minantly that of the eye and mind up the diminish-
ing stages of the tower towards the point of the
finial (A1, A2): spires aspire.
It was between the sixth and thirteenth centuries
that Indian temple architecture developed its means
of representing movement, used with increasing
insistence. Far from reinforcing the contained
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inward and upward movement, the represented
movement complements it, surging in the opposite
directions, downward and outward. In these direc-
tions, embedded elements are portrayed as emer-
ging, expanding and proliferating. Simultaneously,
there is frequently a strong sense of upward
growth of the whole, but the emerging parts can
only be understood as flowing out and down, as
the summit recedes heavenward.
The means employed to represent this motion in
Indian temple architecture fall, at different times,
under the entire range of categories listed in the
right-hand column of my table. This is not to state
that all the possibilities summarised under these head-
ings, intended to encompass architecture more
broadly, find expression in Indian temples. Certain
means are characteristic of this architecture, and
some of these are particular versions of the principles
that the headings denote. The characteristic devices
illustrated (Fig. 13),51 are projection (pushing forward
of embedded forms; B3), staggering (multiple projec-
tions, stepping out; B3), splitting (forms cut in half;
B8), bursting of boundaries (crossing over the frame;
B4), expanding repetition (similar forms increasing in
size; B6), progressive multiplication (similar forms
increasing in number; B7). Although not unambigu-
ously indicative of movement when employed singly,
these mechanisms reinforce one another when
working together, further underlined by sculptural
depiction of movement (B9), such as arches spewing
from the jaws of monsters.
As a first example we may look at just one part of
a south Indian temple wall, a niche containing a
sculpted depiction of the lingodbhava (Fig. 14),
similar to the image of the same myth that
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Figure 13. Means of

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expressing movement
in Indian temple
architecture:
a. Projection
b. Staggering
c. Splitting
d. Bursting of
boundaries
e. Progressive
multiplication
f. Expanding repetition.

Figure 14. Lingodbhava

(‘origin of the linga’),
from the Brihadeshvara
temple (1000 AD),
Tanjavur, India. The
third image down is as it
actually is (Author’s
Photoshop work on a
photograph by Gerard
Foekema).
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Zimmer described as ‘animated by an energy of Figure 15. Tower of the

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growth’. Figurative representation (B9) certainly Galaganatha temple

(late seventh century),
plays a part here, aided by knowledge of the story:
Pattadakal.
the linga emerges from the void, Shiva appears
from within it; Vishnu dives down in boar form,
Brahma flies up in bird form, neither can reach the
end of the endlessly expanding shaft. This process
is expressed through splitting (B8), afforded by the
architectural frame, especially through the simple
device of the split pilaster, and projection (B3). The
sequence of unfolding is emerge-grow-split-move
apart-emerge-grow-split-emerge-grow.
The principle of splitting, again combined with
projection, plays an important role in the patterns
traced out by gavakshas (horseshoe arch gable
motifs) in the curved spires (shikharas) typical of
early north Indian shrines (Fig. 15). These owe
their complex surfaces to a gradual metamorphosis
of the image in stone of a multi-storey wooden
palace, replete with many pavilions. The gavaksha
motifs seen here originally represented wooden
dormer gables in thatched eaves, but also imply
the presence of a barrel roof running back behind
them. A single arch mounted on two halves recalls
a common type of structure, well known from Bud-
dhist chaitya halls, with a barrel-roofed nave plus Below this, pulsating down to the climactic
side aisles. Temple architects came to recognise outburst at their foot, eight pairs of ‘eave’ mould-
the potential of this form for dynamic expression, ings successively put forward a gavaksha: each
treating the halves as deriving from a whole arch, time the arch splits, and the halves slide apart,
seen splitting into two; and, further, by exploiting unveiling glimpses of an inner world through
the idea that this split arch, before breaking apart, tiers of celestial colonnade, as a further gavaksha
has emerged and grown out of the arch above it. emerges from the depths. Emanation must be
This configuration, giving birth to a smaller version conceived as downwards, either from on high,
of itself, forms the apex of the central spine on or piling out as the summit recedes upwards:
each face of the superstructure (see Fig.15). there is the emergence of the crown, and the
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Figure 16. Dynamics of A fundamental concept in many traditions of

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the central spine of the
Galaganatha temple.
unfolding of the uppermost pair of eave mould-
ings (Fig. 16). The full sequence, with further
proliferation, is shown in the ‘Emanating Temple
Forms’ animation.52
Indian temple architecture is that the shrine is com-
posed of many aedicules; that is, of images of
shrines—of various kinds, at various scales, com-
bined in various ways. These three-dimensionally
conceived, embedded forms are the basic compo-
sitional elements, and dynamism is expressed
primarily by means of their interrelationships. The
idea of one god with many aspects is made visible
when one sees that many divine abodes are linked
into a heavenly palace. One example of this multi-
aedicularity is the later, composite north Indian
shrine form that developed out of the type with a
unitary shikhara like the one just described.53
Around the tenth century AD, minor images of
itself—half-embedded, half-emerged (B3)—began
to be projected along the cardinal axes of the
former type, with miniature spires crowning
embedded pillar forms appearing at its corners
(Fig. 17). By the mid-eleventh century this idea had
blossomed into the seething complexity of temples
like the Kandariya Mahadeva, Khajuraho (Fig. 18).
‘Quarter-shikharas’ (three-quarters embedded)
have now appeared at the sides of the ‘half-shi-
kharas’, allowing the overall pattern of four-emer-
ging-from-one to be reflected in embedded
clusters. Thus, the temple design (shown in Fig.
17), which crowns the composition, emerges twice
more down each face, each time smaller. The cruci-
form movement pattern of the whole, not purely its
shape, is reflected in the parts.
The dynamics of this temple (Fig. 19) involves a
sequence of increasingly complex configurations,
each stage growing from the previous one. The
sequence begins at the bottom, increasing in size
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Figure 17. Principle of

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the composite Shekhari

type of north Indian
shrine.

Figure 18. Kandariya

Mahadeva temple
(c. 1050), Khajuraho.

ing at the apex as the whole tree gets bigger. Rather,

with each step, to explain how downward and
outward emission and proliferation (B7) are
accompanied by an illusion of growth in the whole
through upward-expanding repetition (B6). This is
not an upward explosion, nor like the upward pro-
gress of a pine tree, where new growth keeps appear-
the whole swells upwards while its parts emerge and
multiply downwards and outwards. The penultimate
stage shows the temple as it actually is, and the final
stage represents the implied centrifugal coming apart
to which all this cumulative unfurling has been
leading. Here, still in structured formation, the pre-
viously interpenetrating aedicular components have
become fully differentiated, as they explode out and
down from centre and from subcentres, on their
way towards dissolution. To propose a different
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Figure 19. Dynamics of interpretation, the challenge is to draw it, or better

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the Kandariya still to animate it.54

Mahadeva temple.
Now, up to the point at which everything
explodes, this drawing (and the corresponding
passage in the animation) also reflects the unfolding
of this particular architectural tradition, which, in a
way that is characteristic of Indian temple architec-
ture in general, evolved following the same
general pattern of centrifugal unfurling as the one
expressed in a single shrine. This was because the
temple architects extrapolated successively more
complex designs from the earlier ones, playing out
the potential of the architectural language they
had created. Earlier, simpler forms were not super-
seded but incorporated, remaining visible within
the new ones. In this particular tradition it was the
single shikhara that provided the starting point,
ever present at the summit as new forms were
sequentially pulled out from below. With knowl-
edge of the tradition, therefore, the sense of move-
ment is augmented through recognition of the
stages of growth (B2).
Once this degree of elaboration has been
reached, there arises a more complicated contained
movement than the one leading the eye up the
tower: a movement of endlessly shifting entities (in
terms of our categories, infinite A4).
In the complex whole, individual shapes are recog-
nised with relative difficulty, and focused on only
momentarily.55 Elsewhere I have argued that, in
many temple-building traditions, this effect of an
oceanic plenitude from which forms emerge fleet-
ingly into the observer’s consciousness before dissol-
ving back, comes about through the very same
process that leads increasingly towards an illusion

of movement: ie, through different effects of the
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same process.56 To recognise this beautifully
organic evolution towards dynamism, both illusionis-
tic (represented), and conceptual (contained), is no
‘biological fallacy’,57 but to see a development that
is visible in the monuments. Of course, to show
that such an evolution did take place it is necessary
to make a careful study of many examples, and to
be rigorous about dates. But, once again, under-
standing the dynamic pattern depends first of all on
seeing it clearly.
In our survey of the literature, movement in the
arts of India was seen to have been understood as
a bearer of meaning and, more specifically, linked
to the idea of divine and cosmic manifestation. In
India, a perception of emerging and expanding cre-
ation does indeed seem to have been an intuition of
the way things are that ran deeper than philosophi-
cal divisions. A pattern, seen in the architectural
forms of temples, of emergence and growth orig-
inating at a point and unfolding through a series
of stages, finds numerous parallels in visions of the
evolution of the cosmos, or (more or less synon-
ymous) that of a hierarchy of deities, taking place
through sequential emanation. The concept of the
temple as an unfolding universe can be supported
by showing congruence between architectural com-
position and certain schemes for placing images of
gods, and certain systems of ritual. Leaving aside
the representation of emanation, the concomitant
effect in temple designs of a fertile continuum pro-
vokes irresistible analogies with recurrent Indian
notions of an underlying unity from which the mul-
tiplicity of creation emerges and returns (the same
mystery imagined as ocean rather than seed).
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Context, therefore, supports the formal interpret-
ation, and some may consider this the soundest evi-
dence for it. If one’s viewpoint is that of the
‘Perennial Philosophy’, then temple dynamics as I
have explained them here illustrate an ‘adequate
symbol’ of manifestation, with its workings appar-
ent. But my argument here is that the formal struc-
ture of a work of architecture has to be clearly seen
before one can begin to approach meanings, hom-
ologies or explanations.
Moving forward
It is beyond the scope of this paper to make a detailed
survey of contemporary discussion of movement in
architecture, but my impression is that the kinds of
expression that I have dealt with are often evoked in
passing, with no attempt to distinguish between
them. Other kinds of movement are certainly more
widely appreciated: the movement of people
through buildings, the changing views experienced
by the moving subject, the actual movement of
parts of buildings. There is even a present tendency
to deride expressed movement. Kari Jormakka, in a
recent book aiming to approach ‘a total theory of
movement’, barely touches on it, except to dismiss
streamlined forms as conventional signs. He claims
that ‘formal representations of movement’ fail
because ‘they spatialize time, functioning at best in
a way similar to musical notation’.58
Jormakka’s real approval is reserved for architecture
which is ‘the dynamic product of fields of forces’.59
Here he is referring to ‘parametric design’, the use
of computers to model the inflection of forms under
the simultaneous influence of various forces—not
visual, implied muscular, or spiritual forces, but
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forces such as gravitational, thermal and, perhaps,
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social. A building created in this way may, as Greg
Lynn has argued, be said to contain potential or
‘virtual’ movement in the manner of a landscape
that has been gradually modulated by the elements.60
The process produces visually dynamic shapes, even if
it is claimed that the forms are not ‘a style’, but the
outcome of a scientific procedure.
A similar attitude prevails, beyond the parametric,
in relation to the ‘space of flows’ characteristic of an
age of electronic information networks—a concept,
it has been asserted, that has encouraged the aban-
donment of ‘idealizing fictions of solidity and perma-
nence’ in favour of a vision reminiscent of the Hindu
‘wholly dynamic view of life’ described by Zimmer in
the passage cited earlier.61 Again, the themes that
are the focus of this article are ignored, apparently
through disdain for what is tangible: ‘the outcome
of applying the notion directly to concrete for-
mations tends to belie the complexity of the
notion. . . a “space of flows” remains a spatial deter-
mination and not a spatial classification’.62
Yet, whatever the means of creating a space of
flows or a parametric building, it will wriggle as
our eyes slither over it (A1), wave as we expect it
to be straight (B1), squiggle when we trace it with
an imaginary pen (B2) and squirm because it looks
like a worm (A9). Principles of expressed movement
that do gain approval in parametric circles are those
(A3, A4) contributing to the sense of a unified
field—an experiential field, indeed, not a field of
impersonal forces. Patrik Schumacher propounds a
frankly formal vision of the parametric: ‘Imagine
there are no more landmarks to hold on, no axes
to follow and no more boundaries to cross’.63 He
has been interpreting Zaha Hadid’s work in similar
terms for some time: ‘Everywhere variations within
the field are offered as local (and temporary) possi-
bilities of identification, without ever implying an
unambiguous territorialisation of the space’.64
The aspiration is towards the creation of some-
thing palpably elusive, demanding the mental
movement of endless reconfiguration. It is a step
beyond Pope’s ‘concealment of the bounds’, and
not far from Frankl’s ‘unit of multiplicity’ or from
the undifferentiated continuum sensed in Indian
temple walls. Something like this vision is being
advocated by Jormakka when he invokes the philo-
sopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘smooth space’.
In contrast to rationally articulated and measurable
‘striated space’, smooth space cannot be visualised
as a coherent whole, and can only be experienced
through all the senses (‘haptically’).
It is strange that here the primacy of bodily experi-
ence is being extolled in un-sensuous terms, upheld
in an aura of embarrassment about imagery, rep-
resentation, ornament, even form (in the fleshly
sense as well as the transcendental). My own
emphasis on the visualisation of movement patterns
might be accused, following one stock argument, of
an ocular, anti-tactile bias. But the conceptions of
movement discussed in this article—inadequately
recognised, yet enshrined in everyday metaphors—
call for, and heighten, bodily identification with
architecture, perhaps even more comprehensively
than empathy theory proposed. This is true for
movement contained in the surge and cadence of
clustered lines or the pulsation of forms repeated,
as well as for movement represented in forms that
appear to bulge and twist, or to emerge and

grow. Here, as much or more than in the paths
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people take in buildings, or the actions they
perform in them, architecture finds parallels with
dance, making patterns in space and time that are
conceived in terms of the body.65 Such patterns
may be cosmic, and perhaps divine, but they are cer-
tainly human.
To understand how architecture can express move-
ment is important not only for a deeper analysis of
works of the past, but also to keep alive the whole
range of architecture’s possibilities. Therefore, as
the cutting edge goes slicing on relentlessly, let us
not bundle up the great traditions of the world and
lock them in a single box labelled ‘static’. Borromini
may not have been trying to design Tatlin’s tower,
but centuries earlier, in India (see figs 18, 19 above),
architects did not have to wait for stroboscopic pho-
tography before they could make a million bottles
evolve in space and dissolve into infinity. Let archi-
tects not render the world in monochrome by
blindly or sanctimoniously restricting their palette,
nor limit the dance to a few measured steps.
Notes and references
Illustrations by the Author unless noted otherwise.
1. A. Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern
Architecture (London, Thames and Hudson, 1997),
p. 57.
2. R. J. Yudell, ‘Body Movement’, in, K. C. Bloomer and
C. W. Moore, eds, Body, Memory and Architecture
(New Haven and London, Yale University Press,
1977), pp. 57 –76; 66.
3. J. S. Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Har-
mondsworth, Pelikan Books, 1970), p. 120: ‘. . .the sof-
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tened convex treads appear to advance, spreading out,
as Tolnay phrased it, like a flow of lava, which they
resemble in colour. The globules emerging at their
sides fortify this impression; they seem to have been
forced ahead by the pressure of the balustrade’.
4. W. Hogarth, An Analysis of Beauty (London, first pub-
lished 1753: 1772 edition), p. 25.
5. A. Pope, Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington
(first published 1731, London), lines 53– 56.
6. R. Adam, The Works in Architecture of Robert and
James Adam, 1778 edition, ed., R. Oresko (London,
Academy Editions, 1975), p. 46.
7. A. Forty, op. cit., p. 262, quoting J. Gage, Goethe on
Art (London, Scolar Press, 1980), pp. 196–197.
8. For surveys of empathy theory see C. van den Ven, ‘Ideas
of Space in German Architectural Theory 1850–1920’,
Architectural Association Quarterly, 9, 2.3 (1977),
pp.31–39; H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou, Intro-
duction, Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in
German Aesthetics 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, Getty
Centre for the History of Arts and Humanities, 1994),
pp. 1–85. See also S. Kite, Adrian Stokes: An Architec-
tonic Eye (London, Maney, 2009), pp. 26–8.
9. H. Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architec-
ture (1886); trs., Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy,
Form and Space, op. cit., pp. 150 –190; 157.
10. H. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (1888); trs.,
K. Simon (London, Collins, 1964), p. 62.
11. Ibid., p. 58.
12. Made clear in Wölfflin, Prolegomena, op. cit.,
pp. 150– 159.
13. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, op. cit., p. 68.
14. Ibid., p. 59.
15. Ibid., p. 61.
16. Ibid., p. 61.
17. A. Schmarsow, ‘The Essence of Architectural Cre-
ation’(1893); trs., Mallgrave and Ikonomou,
Empathy, Form and Space, op. cit., pp. 282 –297;
 496
The expression of
movement in
architecture
Adam Hardy
291. Geoffrey Scott, in the first and most eloquent
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application of empathy theory to architecture in
English, echoes Schmarsow, calls space ‘the very
centre of architectural art’ and observes that ‘We
adapt ourselves instinctively to the spaces in which
we stand, project ourselves into them, fill them
ideally with our movements’: The Architecture of
Humanism (London, Constable, 1914), p. 223. Scott
evokes concepts of expressed movement already pro-
posed by German writers.
18. In his essay Problem of Form (1893) the sculptor
A. Hildebrand had distinguished between ‘pure
vision’, and ‘kinetic vision’ in which the observer
must move in order to comprehend the whole; see
van de Ven, op. cit., p. 32.
19. P. Frankl, Principles of Architectural History, tr. and ed.,
J. F. O’Gorman (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,
1973), p.151.
20. A. Ehrehzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, Uni-
versity of California Press, 1967), distinguishes
between syncretistic (undifferentiated) vision and ana-
lytic (gestalt) vision, viewing creative processes as
driven by an oscillation between the two.
21. Quoted in K. Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in
Architecture (Basel, Birkhäuser, 2002), p. 8: incidentally
the idea was prefigured by Hogarth (op. cit., p. 39).
22. Quoted in Jormakka, ibid., p. 7.
23. S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the growth
of a new tradition (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1967; first published, 1941), p. 117.
24. Ibid., p. 110.
25. Ibid., p. 319, fig. 192.
26. Second Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1912)
quoted in Giedion, op. cit., p. 440.
27. ‘Plastic Dynamics’ (15th December, 1913), from
,www.391.org?manifestos/umbertoboccioni_
plasticdynamism.htm. [accesssed 03. 09. 08].
28. Giedion, op. cit., pp. 441 and 442, fig. 263.
29. D. Topper, ‘Natural Science and Visual Art: Reflections
on the Interface’, in, E. Garber, ed., Beyond History of
Science: Essays in Honor of Robert E. Schofield (Mon-
treal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990),
pp. 296– 310; p. 298.
30. Quoted by Jormakka, op. cit., p. 13.
31. R. Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Ber-
keley and Los Angeles, University of California Press,
1977), p. 220.
32. R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (London, Faber,
1967; first published 1956), p. 7.
33. See, for example, Mallgrave and Eleftherios, Introduc-
tion, Empathy, Form and Space, op. cit., pp. 18– 21.
34. A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Why Exhibit Works of Art?’, in
Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York,
Dover, 1956), p. 11.
35. H. Zimmer, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civi-
lization, ed., J. Campbell (New York, Bollingen Series,
1946), p. 131.
36. Ibid., p. 134.
37. S. Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple (Calcutta, University
of Calcutta, 1946), p. 165.
38. Ibid., p. 176.
39. Ibid., p. 306.
40. Ibid., p. 167.
41. Apart from mine (see Note 51 below), a recent sus-
tained discussion of movement in Hindu temples is
P. Indorf’s ‘Interpreting the Hindu Temple Form: A
Model Based on its Conceptualization as a Formal
Expression of Measured Movement’, Artibus Asiae,
64, 2 (2004), pp. 177–210. Indorf proposes (with
limited evidence) that, in the construction of a temple,
four different systems of measurement embodied four
distinct dynamic and directional implications.
42. A. Boner, Principles of Composition in Hindu Sculpture
(Delhi, IGNCA, 1990; first published Leiden, 1962),
p. 37.
43. Ibid., p. 12.

44. Ibid., p. 44.
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45. Ibid., p. 26.
46. Ibid., p. 24.
47. Ibid., p. 13.
48. K. Vatsyayan, The Square and the Circle of the Indian
Arts (New Delhi, Roli Books, 1983), p. 52.
49. See J. Macquet, ‘Aesthetic Anthropology as Critical
Knowledge’, in The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthro-
pologist Looks at the Visual Arts (New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 1986), Appendix,
pp. 243– 251.
50. See http://www.prasada.org.uk/prasada_design_
projects_multimedia_display.html
51. My earlier attempts to explain these principles include
Indian Temple Architecture: Form and Transformation
(New Delhi, IGNCA, 1995), Chapter 1 and The
Temple Architecture of India (Chichester, Wiley,
2007), Chapter 3.
52. See http://www.prasada.org.uk/prasada_design_
projects_multimedia_display.html and for a home-
made stage-by-stage version see ,http://www.
cardiff.ac.uk/archi/hardya.php .
53. A. Hardy, ‘Śekharı̄ Temples’, Artibus Asiae, 62, 1
(2002), pp. 81–137.
54. See http://www.prasada.org.uk/prasada_design_
projects_multimedia_display.html, and again for a
version with the stages shown in quick succession
see ,http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/archi/hardya.php .
55. This idea of forms emerging from a substratum in an illu-
sionistic (represented) way is suggested by Zimmer in
relation to the seventh-century Arjuna’s Penance relief
at Mahabalipuram: ‘the rock transforms itself into a
telling procession of animated figures, drifting by, fleet-
ingly passing, like a flock of luminous clouds. The anon-
ymous, undifferentiated substance manifests every kind
of being.’ (Zimmer, op. cit., p. 120). Richard Lannoy
interprets the fifth-century mural paintings in the
Ajanta caves in terms of ‘tactile, unified field awareness’,
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in which forms emerge from the ‘mysterious plenitude’:
there is ‘no background, strictly speaking, from which
the figures are to loom—only other figures, plants,
rocks, flowers and ambiguously constructed architec-
tural boxes, all pressing outwards’. See R. Lannoy, The
Speaking Tree (Oxford, OUP, 1971), pp. 48–51.
56. A. Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, op. cit.,
pp. 66– 68.
57. The phrase is Geoffrey Scott’s. In spite of his debts to
German aestheticians, he was sceptical of attempts to
discover all-embracing patterns of stylistic development.
58. K. Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in Architec-
ture, op. cit., p. 80.
59. Ibid., p. 87.
60. G. Lynn, Animate Form (Princeton, Princeton Architec-
tural Press, 1999).
61. C. L. Smith and A. Ballantyne, Guest Editorial ‘Thinking
Flows’, Architecural Theory Review, 13, 3 (2008),
pp. 271– 273; 271.
62. Ibid., p. 272.
63. P. Schumacher, ‘The Future is Parametric’, in Building
Design (19th September, 2008), p. 22.
64. P. Schumacher, ‘The Architecture of Movement’,
http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/movement.
htm [accessed 01.04.11], first published as ‘Architek-
tur der Bewegung’ in ARCH + , 134/135, Wohnen
zur Disposition (December, 1996).
65. Comparisons between dance and architecture have
generally concentrated on architecture as a frame for
human movement, neglecting movement expressed
by architecture, which seems to me to be a more fruitful
point of analogy. For a summary of a project exploring
connections between the classical systems of Indian
temple architecture and Indian dance, by A. Lopez y
Royo and A. Hardy, see ,http://humanitieslab.
stanford.edu/49/Home.. See also D. Shastri, The
Dance of Architecture: choreographic and architectural
movement (PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2010).