Confabulations - Storytelling in Architecture-Ashgate - Routledge (2016)

Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture
Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our percep

tion, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a
narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas,
objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtaposi
tions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative
framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished
thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the
role of storytelling in architecture.
Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of
scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a
broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction fram
ing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four
key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory, and practice
of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour sec
tion, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.
Paul Emmons is a registered architect and professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Architecture Center of Virginia Tech where he directs the Ph.D. program in
Architecture + Design Research.
Marcia Feuerstein is an architect and associate professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Architecture Center of Virginia Tech. Her research investigates links between theory,
practice, and performance in architecture. She studied at Tufts University, the
University at Buffalo and University of Pennsylvania, where she received a Ph.D. in
Architecture.
Carolina Dayer is an architect in her native country Argentina and holds a Ph.D. in
Architectural Design Research from Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of
Virginia Tech. She teaches at Aarhus School of Architecture and The Royal Academy
of Fine Arts in Denmark. Her research and personal practice focuses on multivalent
forms of architectural drawing.
Confabulations: Storytelling
in Architecture
Editors: Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein,

and Carolina Dayer
Associate Editor: Luc Phinney
First published 2017
by Ashgate
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Ashgate
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Ashgate is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, Carolina Dayer, and Luc Phinney
selection and editorial material; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-4724-6932-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4724-6934-2 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-4724-6933-5 (ePdf)
Typeset in Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
Contents
List of figures viii

List of plates xi
List of contributors xiv
Foreword jack davis xx
Acknowledgements xxii
Introduction: homo fabula 1
PAUL EMMONS AND LUC PHINNEY
PART I
Architecture of stories
1 Glass and clay: Proust and Gallé 13
ELAINE SCARRY
2 The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s fabrication of site 24

QI ZHU
3 The “uncharted tides:” a literary map of Saint Petersburg 31

ANGELIKI SIOLI
4 Macaronically speaking 38
MANUELA ANTONIU
5 Il Mantecato: an architectural course served at the Frascaridonosor’s

Tavern of Crossed Destinies 46
FRANCO PISANI
PART II
Stories of architecture
6 Buildings remember 55
DAVID LEATHERBARROW
7 Object talks: confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo no

Cho-mei and Wajiro- Kon 64
IZUMI KUROISHI
vi Contents
8 Suspended ceiling stories: navigating the cosmo-technologies of
hospital ceilings 71
FEDERICA GOFFI
9 Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor 80

andreea mihalache
10 The enlightening radiance of shadows 87
HOOMAN KOLIJI
11 Architecture sub rosa: another tell-tale detail, with confabulations and

digressions 94
TRACEY EVE WINTON
Part III
Stories of theory
12 Language and architectural meaning 107
ALBERTO PÉREZ-GÓMEZ
13 Walls of gender 117

CLAUDIO SGARBI
14 Architecture’s two bodies 123

DONALD KUNZE
15 Camillo Sitte’s winged snail: festina lente and escargot 131

MARCIA FEUERSTEIN
16 Strange tales of architectural evolution 141

MATTHEW MINDRUP
17 Dialetti architettonici: storytelling in the vernacular 151

MICHELANGELO SABATINO
18 Miming a manner of architectural theory: Eudaimonia—A Pantomime

Dream Play 160
LISA LANDRUM
Part IV
Practice of stories
19 Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s architectural drawings 173
CAROLINA DAYER
20 In medias res: Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo 185

JONATHAN FOOTE
Contents vii
21 The function of fiction in fabrication: Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni,

the Italian confabulator 193
LOUISE PELLETIER
22 The Laughing Girls 199

MARC NEVEU
23 Mi punge vagezza, ovvero i misteri del mestiere 207

REBECCA WILLIAMSON
24 Confabulatores Nocturni 216

BRIAN AMBROZIAK AND ANDREW MCLELLAN
Index 220
Figures
2.1 Collage by author demonstrating Fengshui planning strategy 29

2.2 Hongcun Village in Hiuzhou Region, China. Photograph by author 30
4.1 Teofilo Folengo Baldus (Mantua, c. 1510). Frontispiece showing
Merlin Cocai being fed gnocchi by the Muses. © The British Library
Board, 1070.g.8 (frontispiece) 40
5.1 The first eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani 48
5.2 The second eleven Major Arcana (2015). © Franco Pisani 50
7.1 The arrangement of objects in Cho-mei’s hut. Pictorial explanation
of the history of Japanese interior, Graphics: History of Japanese
Interior: Japanese House from Ancient to Modern, Kawade Shinsho
series (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo shuppan, 2015). © Kazuko Koizumi 67
8.1 Dropped ceilings at the Ottawa Hospital (1980s). © Federica Goffi 75
8.2 Hospital ward. Santa Maria della Scala, Pellegrinaio (1440–1444).
© Biblioteca e Fototeca Giuliano Briganti, Santa Maria della Scala,
Siena 78
9.1 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood street in Bucharest, from a
journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers.
Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York 82
11.1 Detail from The Birth of John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1486–1490
(lower panel) and original collage by author incorporating Ceiling
Rosette, Cesare Cesariano, Vitruvius DeArchitectura, 1521, Liber
Secundus, XLV, and The Open Matrix of a Pregnant Woman, with
the Creature Inside, Girolamo Mercurio, La commare o raccoglitrice
dell’eccellentissimo signor Scipion Mercurio: Divisa in tre libri
(Verona: Francesco de’ Rossi, 1642), 18. 101
11.2 Silentium Postulo, table of gestures, from John Bulwer, Chirologia
or the Naturall Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking
Motions, and Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added
Chironomia: Or, the Art of Manvall Rhetoricke. Consisting of the
Naturall Expressions digested by Art in the Hand as the chiefest
Instrument of Eloquence, by Historical Manifesto’s exemplified, . . . .
By J. B. Gent. Philochirosophus. Manus membrum hominis
loquacissimum (London: Harper 1644) (left-hand panel) and
Figures ix
Harpocrates, Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome 1652–1654),
Vol. III, 590 (right-hand panel) 103
15.1 Camillo Sitte’s flying snail from the 3rd 1901 edition of Die Städte
bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: ein Beitrag zur Lösung
modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter
besonderer Beziehung auf Wien / von architekt Camillo Sitte (Wien:
Verlag von Carl Graeser, 1889). Internet Archive (University of
Toronto) 132
15.2 Sea Angel: microscopic marine winged snails (Zooplankon Clione
limacha, a shell-less cold water gastropod). NOAA Photo Library,
Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC 133
15.3 On the left: Crab holding a butterfly with the words Festina Lente.
This was Caesar Augustus’s emblem for Festina Lente from
ca. 19 BCE, reconceived in 1559 by Gabriel Simeone. Similar images
from this time replace festina lente with Matura (mature). On the
right: Aldus Manutius’s Dolphin Intertwined with Anchor. Internet
Archive (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze) 136
16.1 Le Corbusier’s Objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction),
collected 1925–1965. Shown here: objects collected on the beach,
1955. © Foundation Le Corbusier/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy,
2015 142
16.2 The Origin of the Corinthian order, engraving (Paris: J.-B. Coignard,
1684), illustrated in Claude Perrault’s Vitruvius, 2nd ed. (1684) 143
16.3 Charles Eisen, Primitive Hut, frontispiece of Essai sur l’Architecture
by Marc-Antoine Laugier, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755).
Wikimedia Commons 146
17.1 Coverpage: Virgilio Marchi, Architettura futurista (Foligno:
F. Campitelli, 1924) 155
17.2 View of exhibition: Giuseppe Pagano and Werner Daniel, Mostra di
Architettura rurale (Rural Architecture) (Milan, 1936). G. Pagano
and G. Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana “Quaderni della
Triennale” (Milan: Hoepli, 1936) 156
17.3 Ludovico Quaroni et al., La Martella (Matera, 1951). Giancarlo
De Carlo, “A proposito di La Martella,” Casabella-Continuità
(February–March, 1954): v–viii 157
18.1 A pantomime (or possibly Polymnia), with masks, lyre, and sword.
Late fifth or early sixth century ce ivory carving found in Trier,
Germany. Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv.
TC 2497. Photo: Ingrid Geske / bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY 162
18.2 Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play. Collage drawing, 2015.
© Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum 164
19.1 Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A to B), 1960. Ink on paper. Private
collection, originally published in Steinberg, The Labyrinth, 1960.
© The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York 175
19.2 Drawing by author of Brion cemetery chapel’s corner 179
19.3 Carlo Scarpa. Third floor plan heliographic copy showing burnt
mark on the reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San
x Figures
Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of
Venice, Venice. 1974–1978. NP 41691(detail). © Museo nazionale
delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio
Carlo Scarpa 182
20.1 Michelangelo and others, Mural drawings, apse of the New Sacristy
of San Lorenzo, 1526–1533. Reconstruction by author, after images
provided by the Polo Museale della città di Firenze, with permission 186
20.2 Michelangelo, cornice details (left and right) showing template
tracing, exterior window of Laurentian Library, c.1526. With
permission, Polo Museale della città di Firenze 189
22.1 House in Troy II collaged over a model of laughter. Image used by
permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison
Collins 205
23.1 Title page of Antonio Visentini for the first edition of Trattato di
Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali,
1767). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) 212
23.2 Frontispiece of Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio
Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato
di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali,
1771). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465) 213
23.3 Montage of architectural details from “P. Pozzi” (Padre Andrea
Pozzo, to whom Visentini refers as “architetto biasimato” (blamed
or blameworthy architect) in Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di
Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al
trattato di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice:
Pasquali, 1771). Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(2894-465) 214
24.1 time[scape]lab, Columbarium, Xerox on clay board, 2010. © Brian
Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan 217
Plates
1 Marco Frascari. Architectural Embodiment. © Paola Frascari

2 Marco Frascari. Architectural Storytelling—Cantastorie. © Paola Frascari
3 Algot Erikson, Vase with Arum Leaves, 1897, porcelain. Rörstrand Collection,
Stockholm. Photograph courtesy of Noël Allum
4 Charles Lyell, Frontispiece, Temple of Serapis, Principles of Geology (London:
John Murray, 1830). Smithsonian Libraries/Open Library
5 Emile Gallé, Geology, 1900–1904, with details. Image courtesy of Musée de
l’École de Nancy. Photograph by Nick Williams
6 Royal Doulton, The Arrival of the Unknown Princess. Photograph courtesy of
Elaine Scarry
7 Royal Doulton, Ali Baba. Courtesy of Replacements Ltd., Greensboro, NC.
8 Agathon Léonard, The Scarf Dance, biscuit figures, 1900. © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London
9 Alf Wallender, Vase and a Maiden, 1909 Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm.
Photo courtesy of Noël Alum. Emile Gallé, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1888–1889.
Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images
10 Emile Gallé, Carp Vase, 1878. Musée du Verre et du Cristal, Meisenthal,
France. © Yvonne Fleck
11 Emile Gallé, White Water Lily against Sky-blue Glass, two sides. Photograph
courtesy of James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine
12 Emile Gallé, Cattleya Vase, 1900, two sides. Photograph courtesy of Kitazawa
Museum of Art, Japan
13 Emile Gallé, L’Orée des Bois, 1902 [left]; Gallé, Flowers and Woodland,
1895–1900 [right]
14 Auguste and Antonin Daum, Birds in Snow. Photograph courtesy of Elaine
Scarry
15 Marco Frascari. We Make Architecture, But Architecture Makes Us. Illustrated
in Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing
(London: Routledge, 2011). © Paola Frascari
16 Marco Frascari. Stairs and Drawing. © Paola Frascari
17 View of Dublin. Photograph by author
18 Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper, (1657), oil on canvas. Dordrechts Museum
(Inventory number: 953/135)
19 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author
20 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, (1880 [cast in bronze, 1924]), Philadelphia.
Photograph by author
xii Plates
21 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by

author
22 Wajiro- Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida’s Modernology. Comprehensive illustration
of the house-hold of a newly-married couple. © Kon Wajiro- collection of
Kogakuin University
23 Detail of the Last Judgment; fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari
on the inside of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence
(1568 started) Reproduced with the permission of Opera di Santa Maria del
Fiore / Nicolò Orsi Battaglini / Alinari Archives, Florence
24 Still frame from Playtime (1964–67), Jacques Tati. © Photofest NYC
25 The Founding of Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, Lorenzo Vecchietta,
ca. 1441. v Federica Goffi
26 Domenico di Bartolo, Virgin of the Cloak. Santa Maria della Scala, Old Sacristy
(1444). © Federica Goffi
27 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood house and courtyard in Bucharest, from
a journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection
of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The
Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
28 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper,
37.8 × 55.2 cm. The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul
Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
29 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor,
gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 × 73.7 cm. Israel
Museum, Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural
Foundation. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
30 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran (c. 1710s–1900s). Courtesy of Parsa
Shirazi (left), Azad Koliji (right), and Ganjnameh Research Center, School
of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran
(plan Drawing)
31 Window patterns drawn by Mirza Akbar, late eighteenth century. © Victoria &
Albert Museum, London, Indian and South-East Asian Section, MS no. 44
32 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran. Left: The window from inside offers a view
opening to the garden outside and depicts an allegorical garden on the surface
of the screen Right: By grouping and associating certain forms in the geometric
pattern, the overall appearance of the girih window becomes analogous to
a garden drawn abstractly. © Azad Koliji and Hooman Koliji
33 The Annunciation to Zacharias (lower panel), and Zacharias Names the
Baptist (upper panel) Domenico Ghirlandaio and Workshop, 1490, Cappella
Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
34 Marco Frascari, The Door of Theory. © Paola Frascari
35 The first story. © Claudio Sgarbi
36 The second story. © Claudio Sgarbi
37 The third story. © Claudio Sgarbi
38 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Diana and Actæon. 50 × 73 cm, oil on wood, c. 1518,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Wikiart, Visual Art Encyclopedia
39 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in
March 2014, restaged August 2014, #1. Photographs © Lisa Landrum
Plates xiii
40 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in

41 Marco Frascari, Aristophanes’ Confabulation. © Paola Frascari
42 Marco Frascari. Scarpa’s Confabulation. © Paola Frascari
43 Carlo Scarpa. Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches
and perspective. NP 2437r. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.
Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa
44 Diagram by author over Brion cemetery chapel floor plan drawing (NP 2437r,
© MAXXI)
45 Carlo Scarpa, Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and
perspective. NP 2437r (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.
46 Photograph by author of Brion cemetery chapel corner, 2014
47 Photograph by author of Brion cemetery chapel interior ceiling corner
48 Diagram by author over Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery chapel reflected ceiling
plan drawing, NP 2699 (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo.
49 South elevation of Brion chapel with access area. NR 4165. © Museo nazionale
delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo
Scarpa
50 Unidentified project, section drawing. NR 46790. © Museo nazionale delle arti
del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa
51 Carlo Scarpa. Reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano,
Faculty of Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice / Floor Plan
1974–78. NR 41378. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione
Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa
52 Michelangelo, Profile sketches, c. 1526. Image by author, with permission from
the Polo Museale della città di Firenze
53 Servandoni’s first project for the facade of Saint-Sulpice (1731). Bibliothèque
nationale de France
54 Servandoni’s Triumphal Arch to the Glory of the King (1754). Bibliothèque
nationale de France
55 Diagram of the Laughing Girls from Troy, New York. Image used by permission
from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins
56 House in Troy I. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate,
courtesy of Allison Collins
57 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Saint-Exupéry, digital montage and graphite rendering,
2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan
58 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Thoreau, digital montage and graphite rendering,
59 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Calvino, digital montage and graphite rendering,
Contributors
Brian Ambroziak is Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee and co-creator

of time[scape]lab. His research engages the creative process, the development of
the artistic conscience, and focuses on the complex relationship between design
and methods of representation and visualization. He holds a Bachelor of Science
in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Master of Architecture from
Princeton University.
Manuela Antoniu obtained her professional (B.Arch) and post-professional (M.Arch.)

degrees in Canada, and her doctorate at the Architectural Association in London.
Her work has been exhibited in Europe and North America. She has published
with, among others, Princeton Architectural Press, McGill-Queen’s University Press,
Ashgate, and Routledge (for Architectural Theory Review). Having most recently
taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London) in History
and Theory, she is currently undergoing rigorous Zen training in a Buddhist temple
in Japan.
Carolina Dayer, Ph.D., teaches at Aarhus School of Architecture and The Royal
Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark. She is a licensed architect in her native country,
Argentina. Her research, teaching, and original work centers on theoretical and
experimental forms of architectural representation, as well as cultural, political and
material practices. Her Ph.D. work focused on questions of reality and everyday
life through the literary practice of Magic Realism and Carlo Scarpa’s drawings. She
has published, lectured internationally, and organized symposia on matters of the
imagination and drawing practices. Her personal design work has been exhibited in
Argentina and in United States.
Paul Emmons is a registered architect and Professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Architecture Center of Virginia Tech where he is Director of the Ph.D. program
in Architecture + Design Research. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of
Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from the University of Minnesota. His research on the
history and theory of architectural practices has focused on drawing and representa
tion. This work has been presented around the world at conferences and in numerous
publications. He also co-edited The Cultural Role of Architecture: Contemporary and
Historical Perspectives (2012).
Contributors xv
Marcia Feuerstein is an architect and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech’s
Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Her research and teaching consider
design through theories of the body, embodiment in architecture, performance,
and theater. Drawings, writings, images, and photographs have been published in
a number of architectural and academic texts. She also co-edited Architecture as
a Performing Art (2013) and Changing Places: ReMaking Institutional Buildings
(1992). Dr. Feuerstein earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, a M.Arch
from SUNY at Buffalo and B.S. from Tufts University. A member of the AIA and
licensed architect, she maintains a small architectural practice.
Jonathan Foote, Ph.D., is currently Associate Professor of History and Theory at the
Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. He has previously taught architecture at
Cal Poly State University, Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Campus, and as Director of
Graduate Studies at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. His dissertation,
Michelangelo, Templates and the On-site Imagination, examines Michelangelo’s unu
sual relationship with architecture as a work in progress.
Federica Goffi is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Graduate Program
at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University (2007–pre
sent). She currently teaches courses in drawing and studio, as well as Master’s and
Ph.D. courses. Previously she was Assistant Professor at the Interior Architecture
Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005–2007) teaching adap
tive reuse, time-architecture and architectural representation. She holds a Ph.D.
in Architectural Representation and Education from the Washington-Alexandria
Architecture Center, Virginia Tech. Her research and published articles investigate
the concept of TIME in its threefold nature of time–weather–tempo and as it informs
notions of built conservation (ARQ, In Form, Interstices, Int. AR.) Dr. Goffi is the
author of Time Matter[s]: Invention and Re-imagination in Built Conservation: The
Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s in the Vatican (Ashgate, 2013). She
holds a Dottore in Architettura from the University of Genoa, Italy and is a licensed
architect in her native country, Italy.
Hooman Koliji, a designer, author and educator, is Associate Professor of Architecture

at the University of Maryland. His design research explores the notions imagina
tion and representation at the intersection of architecture and landscape. He is the
author of books, essays, and projects on environments and places. His books include
In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in Islamic and
Western Traditions (2015) and Dirineh Khaneh: Sketches from Iranian Architecture
(2005, 2010). Koliji is a member of the editorial board of Nexus Network Journal:
Architecture and Mathematics. He emphasizes the value of imagination in integrating
theory and practice.
Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn
State University, University at Buffalo, LSU and Washington-Alexandria Architecture
Center, Virginia Tech. He studied architecture at N.C. State, and geography at
Georgia State and Penn State. Kunze has been interested in the poetic dimensional
izing of experience. His current projects concern the role of metalepsis and catalepsis
in the construction of performative architecture.
xvi Contributors
Izumi Kuroishi is Professor at the School of Cultural and Creative Studies, Aoyama
Gakuin University. Her research is the theory and history of modern Japanese urban
and architectural design including the works of Wajiro Kon, the idea of the sketch,
modern housing, garden suburbs, colonial architecture, and urban phenomenology.
Her projects consider memories of the lost landscape shelter housing, and food cul
ture and community in the damaged area of the Tohoku Great Earthquake and the
Tsunami in 2011. Published books include External Ideas of Architecture: works and
ideas of Wajiro Kon (2000) Constructing the Colonized Land (2014), and Earthquake
Recovery in the northern part of Japan and Wajiro Kon: knowledge of domestic
works and living (2015). She was a visiting vcholar at the CCA (Canadian Center for
Architecture) in 2015.
Lisa Landrum is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University

of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Her research on architecture’s dramatic agency has
been published in a number of edited books, including Architecture as a Performing
Art (2013), Architecture and Justice (2013), Architecture’s Appeal (2015), and
Filming the City (2016).
David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture, Chairman of the Architecture

Ph.D. Program, and Associate Dean at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has
taught architectural design, history, and theory since 1984. Before Penn he taught
at Cambridge University and the University of Westminster. He has also visited and
taught at many universities in the USA and abroad. David Leatherbarrow earned his
Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. in Art at
the University of Essex. His books include Architecture Oriented Otherwise (2009),
Topographical Stories: Studies in landscape and architecture (2004), and Surface
Architecture (2002), written in collaboration with Mohsen Mostafavi. Earlier books
include Uncommon Ground: Architecture, technology and topography, The Roots of
Architectural Invention: Site, enclosure and materials, and On Weathering: The life
of buildings in time, again with Mostafavi.
Andrew McLellan is Co-creator of time[scape]lab. His interest in writing and memory

has yielded design proposals and narratives recognized in numerous forms that include
exhibit and publication. He has been a lecturer at the University of Tennessee and the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he taught design studio and writing-
intensive seminars. Attending UNC-Charlotte, he earned both a Bachelor of Arts
in Architecture and a Bachelor of Architecture. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts in
Poetry from Queens University of Charlotte.
Andreea Mihalache is Assistant Professor at Clemson School of Architecture.

Born and raised in Bucharest she holds a Ph.D. from Ion Mincu University of
Architecture and Planning. A former Fulbright scholar, she had previous teach
ing appointments at Mississippi State University, Virginia Tech, and The Catholic
University of America. Her scholarship has examined intersections of architecture
with travel practices, photography and mobility in the twentieth century; national
identity and architecture; and dimensions of the sacred in architecture. She is inter
ested in fringe conditions, peripheries, and transition moments and has presented
her work through conferences and publications in the United States, Europe, and
Contributors xvii
the Middle East. She is currently completing a Ph.D. in architectural history, theory,
and representation at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.
Her doctoral work focuses on allegories of boredom in mid-century art and architec
ture, with a focus on the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Saul
Steinberg.
Matthew Mindrup is Senior Lecturer of Architecture at The University of Sydney.

An architect by training, Matthew completed a Ph.D. in Architecture and Design at
Virginia Tech in 2007 on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two architectural
models assembled by Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s. His research focuses on the
history and theory of architectural design practices with an emphasis on the making
and use of physical models
Marc J. Neveu has published on architectural pedagogy in the Italian eighteenth cen
tury as well as our contemporary context. In 2014 he was named as the Chair of the
School of Architecture at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. Neveu is the current
Executive Editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.
Louise Pelletier was trained as an architect. She is the Director of the School of Design
at UQAM, where she currently teaches. She taught at the School of Architecture at
McGill University from 1997 to 2006 and was a visiting professor at the University
of Montreal and the University of Oslo. She received a Ph.D. in the History and
Theory of Architecture from McGill University in 2000. Dr. Pelletier is the author of
Architecture In Words; Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture
(2006), and co-author of Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
(1997), written with A. Pérez-Gómez. Her work has also been published in collec
tions of essays and international journals. She participated as a curator and designer
in several exhibitions in Montreal, Japan, Brazil and Norway. Her most recent book,
Downfall, The Architecture of Excess (2014), is a novel that proposes a reflection on
contemporary practice.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez is the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of

Architecture at McGill University. He was born in Mexico City in 1949 and became
a Canadian citizen and a Quebec resident in 1987. He obtained his undergraduate
degree in architecture and engineering in Mexico City, did postgraduate work at
Cornell University, and was awarded a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. by the University
of Essex in the UK. He has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse,
and Toronto, at the Architectural Association in London, and was Director of the
Carleton University School of Architecture from 1983 to 1986. He has lectured
extensively worldwide. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern
Science (1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every
two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field. His most recent
book is Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006).
Luc Phinney is a πkfdod´n. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Ecotone
and Descant, as well as in the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning book Compass (2013). His
designs for buildings and landscapes have been constructed in Montana, Idaho, and
Wyoming, and he has taught courses in creative writing, architecture, and engineering
xviii Contributors
drawing for their associated departments at Johns Hopkins University. He is cur
rently a Ph.D. student at the Virginia Tech Washington-Alexandria Architecture
Center. He can be found building houses, throwing pots, or making trebuchets with
his two sons.
Franco Pisani, strongly tempted by the expanded opportunities offered by the “con
tamination” of apparently distant themes and disciplines, includes within the profes
sion of architecture research activities and didactic experiences. He lives and works in
Firenze, where he runs his own professional office FRANCOPiSANiARCHiTETTO,
practicing design at all scales “from the spoon to the city” and for public and private
clients. As an architectural educator he has taught both as professor and lecturer in
different universities and schools in Italy and abroad. In 2012 he co-founded the AIU
Agency for Interior Urbanism, an international collaborative platform committed
to design exploration and dialogue to address the need for alternative approaches
to urban planning. In 2014 he was appointed External Examiner for the School of
Interior Architecture of the University of Westminster in London, UK.
Michelangelo Sabatino is Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture

at the Illinois Institute College of Architecture in Chicago. Sabatino was trained as
an architect and architectural historian in Venice, Canada, and the USA. After com
pleting his architectural degree in Venice, his PhD in Canada, and a post-doctoral
fellowship at Harvard University, he taught at Yale University and the University
of Houston before moving to Chicago. His award-winning books include Pride in
Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2010) and,
with Jean-François Lejeune, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular
Dialogues and Contested Identities (2010). Michelangelo’s new book Arthur Erickson:
Architecture into Landscape is forthcoming in 2015. Other books forthcoming and
in production include Forms of Spirituality: Modern Architecture, Landscape, and
Preservation in New Harmony, Canada—Modern Architectures in History and The
Global Turn: Architecture and the Built Environment.
Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory
of Value at Harvard University. Among her many research interests are theories of rep
resentation, language, perception, crisis, corporeality, and the structures of verbal and
material fabrication. Her works include Resisting Representation (1994), On Beauty
and Being Just (2001), Dreaming by the Book (2001), Thinking in an Emergency
(2012), Rule of Law, Misrule of Men (2010), and Thermonuclear Monarchy (2014).
A wide-ranging intellect and renaissance woman, Professor Scarry is as erudite dis
cussing Heraclitus as hospital advertising. As Samuel Moyn, writing on Scarry for The
Nation, said: “Her first book, like all her succeeding ones, requires the suspension of
disbelief that intense visions always do.”
Claudio Sgarbi, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania), M.S. (University of Pennsylvania),

Dottore in Architettura (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia), is a practic
ing architect, adjunct research professor (Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism,
Carleton University) and has been working in the last 20 years as a technical director
for different building firms in Italy supervising and directing new constructions and
the renovation of existing buildings. He has published several articles and essays and
Contributors xix
a book: Vitruvio Ferrarese. “De architectura”: la prima versione illustrata (Franco

Cosimo Panini Editore, 2004).
Angeliki Sioli obtained a professional diploma in architecture from the University of

Thessaly in 2005, followed by a post-professional master’s degree in architectural
theory from the National Technical University of Athens in 2008. From 2005 to
2009 she worked as an architect and designer of small-scale objects, books and stage
sets for dance performances. In 2015 she was awarded a Ph.D. in the History &
Theory of Architecture from McGill University, Montreal. Her theoretical research
seeks connections between architecture and literature in the public realm of the
early twentieth-century European city, focusing on bodily spatial perception in the
urban environment. She has presented her work in professional and interdiscipli
nary conferences and architectural publications. She has taught studio and history
courses at McGill University and she is currently a full-time research professor in the
Department of Architecture at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher
Education in Puebla, Mexico.
Rebecca Williamson is a registered architect with experience in practice in Switzerland

and New York (offices of Santiago Calatrava, Sergio Calori, John Petrarca, and Livio
Vacchini). Dr. Williamson received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of
Pennsylvania with a dissertation on political and architectural designs in eighteenth-
century Italy. She has since published and presented her research on the history and
theories of architecture and urbanism internationally while maintaining a teaching
focus on design.
Tracey Eve Winton is an architect, scholar, and iconographer, who holds a Ph.D.
in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from Cambridge University, and an
M.Arch. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill. She teaches Design,
Cultural History, and Urban Studies at the School of Architecture, University of
Waterloo, Canada, where she is an Associate Professor, and in Italy where she is
Director of Studies for the Waterloo Rome program in Architecture. She has pro
duced nine original theatrical events with her undergraduate architecture students.
Her research ranges from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to adaptive reuse.
Qi Zhu is an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College and a practicing architect

in the state of California. Prior to teaching and practicing in California, she taught
at Carleton University. She received her Ph.D. in Architectural Design and Research
from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Foreword
A. Jack Davis, FAIA
Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Studies, Virginia Tech
We all tell stories every day of our lives for many different reasons: to share, to
remember, to teach, to imagine. Studies suggest that we daydream briefly (typically
about 14 seconds) but very frequently over two thousand times per day. If you are
not daydreaming at this moment, you’ll note that Confabulations: Storytelling in
Architecture is the first book-length examination of how the skill of storytelling pro
ductively directs the human imagination in design.
The College of Architecture and Urban Studies of Virginia Tech is pleased to be the
primary sponsor of the three efforts that engendered the creation of Confabulations:
Storytelling in Architecture: a symposium of the same name; an exhibition of draw
ings and fabrications; and the acquisition of, and construction of a new home for, the
extensive and unique library of the scholar-architect, Marco Frascari. All three events
took place at the College’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC) in
the spring of 2014.
This publication on WAAC’s thirty-fifth year, marks a special moment in the life
of this educational institution by acknowledging the contributions of an exceptional
former faculty member, Dr. Marco Frascari, who taught at Virginia Tech for eight
years (1997–2005), as the G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture, and founded
the Ph.D. program in Architecture + Design Research at WAAC. Frascari left to
become Director of the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton
University in Ottawa, Canada, where he died in 2013.
Frascari’s entire library was acquired from his widow, Paola Vaccari Frascari, by
the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the Library of Virginia Tech. A
new library space was designed and constructed by students at the Alexandria Center
to keep his collection intact as a living entity for future scholars. The placement of
Frascari’s collection in the school was conceived of as an aedicule, a room within a
room.
Like the physical library, this book is also a sort of an aedicule, a book within a
larger body of thought that addresses storytelling but, moreover, presents a way of
thinking about the interconnectedness of architecture, culture and life. It is also akin
to a mise en abyme, the literary trope of a play within a play. In this way, as the library
is an edifying room within the larger edifice of the university, this book is a dialogue
within the larger dialogue of architecture and narrative. Mise en abyme can also mean
to place in the center, and was originally used in this way in the visual system of her
aldry, where an escutcheon is placed within another larger shield. This center-within
a-center suggests the visual experience of seeing into two mirrors, infinitely reflecting.
The reflections gathered here have created a work that looks upon past and present
architectural theory and practice, to see beyond it. This book is the culmination of
Foreword xxi
numerous efforts by a diverse group of people and the reader may wish, like One
Thousand and One Nights, to have the stories never end. To understand Frasacari’s
capacity as an educator is to understand that he did not provide all the answers, for he
did not teach explicitly, but rather guided by nuance. He led the inquiring student in a
direction that had at its seaming conclusion the discovery of a wealth of new ideas—
new questions—to be further explored. Frascari, a fine storyteller, was well aware
of the close historical relation between rhetoric and architecture. Confabulations,
Storytelling in Architecture continues that pursuit and the continued dialogue to
which the University is dedicated.
Acknowledgements
Paola Vaccari Frascari has been an inspiring muse for this work and to her we express
our deepest gratitude. With acuteness and passion, Donald Kunze and Berrin Terim
provided editorial assistance that guided this book to better places. Many thanks to
the Northern Virginia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for funding
assistance. And at Virginia Tech our thanks go to many, especially to Dean Jack
Davis of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and to Jaan Holt and Henry
Hollander of the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center for their financial sup
port and good will to make beautiful things happen. Lastly, our thanks extend to all
the confabulators who made these architectural fables possible.
Introduction
Homo fabula
Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney
Whatever the origin of language, whatever the origin of shelter, it is in storytelling

that they cohere, and in storytelling that we become distinctly human. To be human is
to tell stories. Many animals build shelters. Many others pass on news, sing, chatter,
caterwaul. But we humans are, as far as can be told, unique in our telling ways. We are
the storytelling animal. Roland Barthes underscores the ubiquity of story: “narrative is
present in every age, in every place, and in every society; it begins with the very history
of mankind.”1 Perhaps, as Elie Wiesel mused, humanity was created to fill the world
with stories. The universality of narrative makes us members of the species homo
fabula and our stories connect us to, even when they distinguish us from, each other
and the world. Alongside the physical world, we reside in the constructed “make-be
lieve” realities that are human culture.2 We are not taught narrative; rather, narrative
issues from our intuitive ontology, our encountering and acting in the world.3
Story is older than writing, older, perhaps, than permanent settlement.4 The story
of stories emerges from the fragmentary prehistory of barely discernable tools—chips
of knapped flint, fired clay, charred wood—and stories figure the walls of Neolithic
caves with hunts and hands, pointing up the possibility that story is, itself, a primordial
tool. We don’t know how far story goes back, but we do know that it has occurred
in every human culture, and may even persist where culture has ceased to hold sway.5
Storytelling is the native language of our imagination and a well-told story can deftly
integrate technical, cultural and aesthetic thinking. This volume is founded on an
understanding of narrative as one of the essential methods of design, and through
these explorations, essays, drawings, and dialogues, we hope to arrive at a richer and
more nuanced understanding of what storytelling has to offer architecture.
1 Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image, Music, Text, trans
lated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang), 79.
2 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, on the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990) 7.
3 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge: Bellknap of
Harvard University Press, 2009) 131, 134–5.
4 Recent archaeological findings at the Turkish site Göbekli Tepe suggest a 12,000-year-old site of ritual
or social significance without accompanying residential habitation. Sandra Scham, “The World’s First
Temple,” Archaeology 61, no. 6 (November 2008): 22.
5 A Russian family was recently discovered to have been living in a remote corner of Siberia without
complex tools or technology—without, in fact, any contact with the outside world—for 40 years. “All
that [the children] knew of the outside world they learned entirely from their parents’ stories.” Mike
Dash, “For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World
War II,” Smithsonian, January 28, 2013. Accessed October 28, 2015.
2 Paul Emmons and Luc Phinney
“Architecture is embedded storytelling,” wrote architect, educator, and theorist
Marco Frascari, who stressed the reciprocity of architecture and narrative throughout
his career, and saw stories as key to creating “non-trivial” architecture.6 Confabulations:
storytelling in architecture follows Marco Frascari’s proposition that stories are the
wellspring of architecture, and his lifelong commitment to that “crafty process.”
Architects build stories while buildings edify inhabitants. Storytelling and architecture
are fundamental forms of what philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “world-making,”7
and, in a storytelling architecture, we may come to understand the fabrication (as it
were) of fabrication. Frascari corrects the misunderstanding of Vitruvius’s requirement
for the architect’s education of “historias . . . noverit” to mean, rather than “knowing
history,” “telling events,” and this suggests that there may be—there may have been,
all along—a genre of generative architectural storytelling.8
Storytelling is often overlooked today because it tends to withdraw in the face of
analytic methods.9 As Walter Benjamin warns, storytelling is becoming increasingly
remote,10 with the dissemination of information largely replacing the telling of stories.
Unlike stories, which gain weight and permanence with repetition, information’s
value evaporates when it is no longer new. In this context it should come as no sur
prise that architects often feel threatened—with irrelevance; with the currency of the
24-hour news cycle; or with currency in the wider sense, as a modern synonym of (or
surrogate for) presence. Though design drawings and models are still today usually
“presented,” didactically, to clients, builders, and other architects, these moments
may become, at their best, the telling of meaningful stories.
Confabulations: storytelling in architecture, following Frascari, is dedicated to
exploring architecture as a narrative art, and seeking in the narrative arts an expan
sion of architectural potential, integrating poetry and technique so as to engender, it
may be hoped, fabulous buildings.
At the root of the word confabulation is fabula, Latin for story or narrative, and the
source of “fable” in English. The word origin suggests that architectural storytelling is
much closer to divination than communication; fabula, from fari, to speak, describes
a person’s fate from its past participle, fatum, as “that which has been spoken.”11
Good architecture may be so storied as to feel fated; but this is a fate we make. The
suffix bula of fable signifies a tool or means. To tell a fable is thus to speak craftily.
Edifying stories are necessary but not determinant. Fables, like Aesop’s apologues,
are a specific sort of story: extremely compact, they set out a sequence of events that
do not directly state their own meaning; rather, they must be interpreted, and so
6 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the art of architectural drawing (New York: Routledge, 2011),
68. See also “An Architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytelling”
in Adam Sharr, ed., Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents
(New York: Routledge, 2012), 224–34.
7 Nelson Goodman, Ways of World-Making (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978).
8 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 173.
9 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, translated by Michael Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992).
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968) 83.
11 “fable, n.” OED Online (September 2015), http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/67384?rskey=JQS70a&re
sult=1&isAdvanced=false. Accessed November 9, 2015.
Introduction 3
support perpetual retelling. The epistemological status of fables is that of an enigma,
a non-analytical speaking in ciphers, requiring the reader to build bridges between the
known and the unknown.
Fables permeate architecture. Pindar tells of the very first temples at Delphi, begin
ning with one grown of laurel, the next built by bees of honey and feathers, the third
made by the gods out of bronze and finally the historical temple of stone constructed
by humans. Vitruvius’s story of having windows in our chests to reveal our true feel
ings is taken from Aesop, though he attributed it to Socrates.12 In the renaissance,
Leon Battista Alberti, in addition to his architectural treatise, wrote Apologi Centum
(100 fables).13 Alberti’s characters often included humans as well as inanimate objects
such as building stones. In the Enlightenment, the Venetian Carlo Lodoli created
fables for teaching his architectural theories, adjusting them to the particular audience
and situation.14 Doubtless one of the most famous fables of modern architecture was
uttered by Louis Kahn: “You say to Brick: ‘what do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says
to you, ‘I like an arch.’”15 This 18-word fable sinks into the memory of generations
of architecture students, continuing to provoke weighty deliberations on the “expres
sion” of material and structure.
The word confabulation also has a specialized psychological meaning that reveals
its further value for architectural design. When people have a severe memory disorder
and cannot recall certain aspects of their experiences, the mind invents memories to
fill in what cannot be recalled. The real and the imaginary are woven together seam
lessly even if they cannot logically coexist. To be afflicted with confabulation is to be
of two minds, to be in two places at once, to experience, counterfactually, simultane
ous irreconcilable truths.
But the fable itself possesses a different sort of relation to the counterfactual: the
writer of fables endeavors to “tell the truth but tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson
suggested. If a confabulation is fiction, it is not false: rather, its truths are undertones
and overtones, intimations of the unspoken. Confabulations weave together the
incommensurable, investigate the ineffable, and return us to everyday experiences
of life and an altered-ordinary. The maker of confabulations elides fact with fiction,
imagining possible future worlds deeply interconnected with those already existing.
Buildings, too, rarely tell their stories literally. Yet even the ones that come closest
to doing so such as the cathedrals that Victor Hugo contrasted to books (as a more
cumbersome storytelling medium), tell many of their most moving stories outside
the symbolic and stylistic languages of their carvings, stained glass, and other nearly
linguistic elements. The relief of the medieval pilgrim or the modern tourist stepping
into that cool dark (falling silent); the careful scrutiny of the builder, restorer, or stu
dent; the hubbub of the baptismal party: these are also stories belonging to the build
ing. The edifice is edified; polyhistorian. Please note that buildings do not themselves
tell (literally or literarily) stories: they provide the conditions of possibility for these
12 Mario Andrea Rigoni, “Una finestra aperta sul cuore (Note sulla metafora della ‘Sinceritas’ nella
tradizione occidentale),” Lettere italiane 4 (1974): 434–58.
13 David Marsh, editor, Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala,
Leonardo da Vinci, Bernardino Baldi, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 260
(Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004).
14 Marc Neveu, “Apologues, by Carlo Lodoli,” Journal of Architectural Education (2010): 57–64.
15 For the complete fable, see: John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis
I. Kahn (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979), 40.
stories. Buildings make stories possible just as the architect makes fables in order to
invent future buildings.
Confabulation is one of the most essential, least acknowledged, skills of the archi
tect. Confabulation finds connections, proposes questions, and offers an expanded
field for architectural insights. The chapters gathered here, themselves confabulations,
stand to situate us within the arc of a new theoretical paradigm, one which has been
with us (under the rose) all along, but which has taken on urgency in the new century.
Today much architecture is carried out in absence of a storytelling intelligence; or, if
stories are a part of architectural making their utilization is a peripheral and superfi
cial thing, a window-dressing; but the convergence of architecture and storytelling is
not just a question of “painting a picture with words” to better visualize or persuade
us of an already-extant architectural idea. Stories are constitutive, and offer ways of
seeing unavailable to other creative modes. Just as stories may be seen as an evolved
adaptation, providing the human organism with enhanced abilities to communicate,
cooperate, and respond to the unforeseen,16 confabulatory methodologies allow the
architect to engage productively with uncertain sites, sources, and situations, and so,
it may be hoped, to build our structures and cities with greater responsiveness and
resilience. Stories are one of the earliest, longest-lived, and most successful human
adaptations, and engaging with them offers to expand the adaptive capacity of the
architectural field.
Like any good future, profound architecture frustrates analysis and evades predic
tion. This is not merely because of its status as a not-yet-known, but is a result of
the way it is endowed with a storied presence. Narrative, in its turn, offers a way of
seeing, and of representing what is seen, that suits the structure of intuition, which
is replete with connotative as well as denotative meanings, and that activates the
somatic imagination. Architecture may speak to the senses, but it makes sense in nar
rative, that crafty speech. How it makes sense is another question. Donald Kunze, in
his contribution, explains that a confabulation is not merely an explanation. It is a
chiasmus, a crossing of opposites—of the real and the dream—where body and build
ing are uncannily joined in an epiphany.
If this were a fairytale, we would begin: Once upon a time . . .

At the entrance of the seventeenth-century garden labyrinth of Versailles, now
destroyed, stood the gilded bronze figures of Aesop, famously unattractive father of
fables, and Cupid, that beautiful, concupiscent child. There, according to the laby
rinth’s designer Charles Perrault (brother of architect Claude and best known by his
pen name, Mother Goose), the statue of Aesop was engraved with the words: “With
my animals full of ruse and babble, your living image, I’d like to teach you wisdom.
But my neighbor will have none of it.” Cupid replied: “I wish you love, and that is
wise; it is crazy to love nothing. Each animal says this in its own way, you only have to
listen.”17 At each turn and crossing in the maze, statues of the characters from one of
Aesop’s fables presented their stories. These sculptures fountained water from spouts
designed to sound like the animal they resembled. Accompanied by a brief carved
16 Boyd, Brian, “The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature: The delight we get from detecting pat
terns in books, and in life, can be measured and understood,” The American Scholar 77, no. 2 (2008):
118–27.
17 Charles Perrault, Le Labyrinthe de Versailles 1677, postface by Michel Conan (Paris: Moniteur, 1982).
Introduction 5
verse, each animal told its story mellifluously, multi-sensorially. These are the voices
in the labyrinth; but there are many voices.
Once upon a time the buildings were entered by crossing over a labyrinth—this
was the ancient Roman mosaic labyrinth that, though a convolution of radial and
bilateral symmetries, had, like the urban templum, four quadrants, each with its own
recursions.18 It was a threshold the visitor might step over; but which acted as a ward
and contained in itself a model of cosmos, polis, and elemental origins. It was also a
perfect place to get minutely lost. This is the form of the labyrinth; but there are many
forms—yet in a labyrinth, as in a book, we are never wholly lost.
We conceive of this book as encouraging a labyrinthine reading. After entering, one
can choose many different paths and returns, linking together separate chapters in
ways that create individually telling juxtapositions. Or readers can follow the linear
order of the book, taking a path that perambulates through four distinct sections,
which, like the labyrinth form of ancient roman mosaics, will get you lost in an organ
ized and intelligible manner. Each quadrant of this labyrinth, like Perrault’s, has its
share of speaking animals, but these creatures share their section with others of like
mind, equally fabulous, novel, unapologetically apological.
The first of four quadrants begins with chapters exploring the material of, and in,
narrative. We call these the “architecture of stories,” but they are equally stories as
architecture. These are followed by stories that buildings themselves tell, provoke, or
conceal. They are “stories of architecture.” Next are stories flickering up from the
deep well of theory: these are studies of the “stories of theory.” Finally, we visit stories
of design ensnared in the drawings of architects, asking what constitutes the “practice
of stories.” Whether you follow the forking paths, or hopscotch at the behest of your
own internal compass, you may orient yourself by these four directions, which are,
properly speaking, the genera of a storytelling architecture, which turn on the chias
matic relation of storytelling and architecture (the Minotaur).
Architecture in stories
The first of our four genres takes us from the alleys of Murano to the streets of
St. Petersburg, drawing together the diaspora of the material figure. When we speak
of “figures of speech,” we are discussing the broadest of rhetorical categories—
everything, it might be argued, that makes the tapestry of literature from the warp and
woof of history and everyday talk (and the indirect, the suggestive, and the implied).
These first chapters are the most literary in their sources; the most material in their
obsessions. These two conditions are fruit of a common tree—the ramifications of
the figural—for just as figures of speech relate glancingly, obliquely, dancingly, to
the symbolic and semantic, figuration in architecture should not be confused for the
semiotic obsessions of past generations of theorists and practitioners. If architecture
can still be said to speak, its speech, like that of a character in a Raymond Carver
story (Will you Please be Quiet, Please?), tells little, but always says more than it says.
When we say that an architectural environment “says more than it says,” we are
talking about its capacity to configure and reconfigure meaning. Understanding how
it says more than it says requires a practical knowledge of figuration, a sort of praxis
18 Hermann Kern, “Roman Mosaic Labyrinths” in Through the Labyrinth (Munich, NY: Prestel,
2000), 85.
of poiesis. In this the practitioner of oblique figurations is a maker of confabulations.
These are no longer “confabulations” in the everyday sense of the “confab” (parlay,
chin-wag, palaver, chat, causerie, conference, gabfest, or schmooze); rather, the archi
tectural confabulation is a configuration of the material world that owns its obliquity,
that (intangibly, but intelligibly) means something to us, in the colloquial sense of that
phrase. These authors are asking how it is that a building speaks volumes—by asking
how a volume speaks buildings.
Many are the architects who are also poets, novelists, and playwrights: Gian Lorenzo
Bernini and Sir John Vanbrugh were both architects and dramatists. John Hejduk illus
trated an edition of Aesop in 1991, but his interest in fables was deeper, linking them
with his masques, as evidenced by his opening The Mask of Medusa with the fable
of the Fox and the Goat. There are also fictional accounts of architecture that are
commentaries upon architecture, such as Victor Hugo’s “This will kill that” in Notre-
Dame de Paris. Sometimes fiction has such power that the world is remade in its
image—as occurred at Notre Dame, in the years following Hugo’s novel.
In this part, Qi Zhu explains the reforming of a Chinese landscape to make a city
in the form of an ox. The complex relation between reality and fiction here completes
a circle—not only do architects confabulate stories in order to create buildings,
but a town is confabulated in order to make a story. Angeliki Sioli takes us on a
walk through time and St. Petersburg following the lines of poets and novelists, and
Manuela Antoniu, recognizing the appetite we have developed, offers us a macaronic
repast, musing on the magic of words and their dialectal drift. After dinner, we sit
down to have our Tarot read by Franco Pisani.
These contributions share the importance of storytelling through the author-guided
imagination described by Elaine Scarry.19 Scarry begins this book, and our first part,
with a reverie on the poetics of materials, exploring the transformation of the proce
dural, material, knowledge of the master craftsman into the process of sensory mimesis
in literary art: the immaterial heft, that is, of the material. In asking after the mental
events accompanying color, in unfolding the translations from glass, to clay, to literary
imagery, she sows the seeds for the garden we will spend the rest of the book exploring.
The second quadrant among our genera of narrative architecture takes us into the
stories embodied in the built world itself. From the figuration of memory in the work
of Rodin to the inadvertent subtext of the reflected ceiling plan, we seesaw from
intents to accidents and find in them the common ground of a built environment that
is, inevitably, incessantly, sensuously, telling us stories.
It has long been accepted that buildings tell stories. They do not, however, always
tell the stories their makers conceive, intend, or even understand. From how they
are made, to how they are experienced, buildings offer stories that frequently exceed
their architects’ plans. Most directly, buildings tell stories through inscriptions, some
of which are written as if the building is speaking in first person. Buildings also tell
stories pictorially with frescos and sculpture. In this vein, Tracey Eve Winton serves
up a (silent) story of ornament.
19 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, 1999).

Introduction 7
Buildings, too, tell stories in more subtle and influential ways. The aging of a
building tells the story of its life, its alterations, and the care people have (or have
not) lavished upon it. John Ruskin writes the Stones of Venice to read the stories that
building stones tell of their makers; Joseph Brodsky writes Watermark more than a
century later to understand how his network of Venetian friends and acquaintances
resonate in those same stones. These comings-together-through-making constitute
confabulatory acts of edification.
Buildings can also tell tall tales. David Leatherbarrow begins this part of the laby
rinth with a walk in Philadelphia founded on three words: “places remember events.”
This is not merely a poetic inversion, but also an argument for an expanded definition
of mind. Cognitive psychologists have challenged our assumption of control over the
processes of memory: if recall is cue-driven and episodic, rather than intentional and
encyclopedic, then, in some sense, our chosen environments, the buildings and land
scapes we think within, are, in an expanded sense,20 our minds. French philosopher
Paul Ricoeur calls architecture the configuration of space and narrative the configura
tion of time.21 Interpreting Ricoeur, Leatherbarrow directly conflates the narrative
plot and the architectural plan. “The whole problem of plot and plan invention,”
he says, “is this: fabricating a configuration that allows the intelligible to arise from
the accidental.” He goes on to trace out this emergent “concordance” in art and
architecture, attending, with material specificity, to the psychodynamics of formal
configurations. He argues that these configurations can be understood both as plots
and plans; and that there is a reciprocity between these two ways of understanding
the built world.
The proposed synthesis is, naturally, its own confabulation, and the other authors
in this part of the book take up the back-and-forth, exploring, in echo of Elaine
Scarry, the human body as it is projected in the artifact (and thus the motile environ
ment of proprioception); and, in echo of Marco Frascari, the corporeal nature of
architectural demonstrations. Hooman Koliji outlines the physical story of a Persian
window to discover the imaginal properties with which it endows space. Izumi
Kuroishi examines how in different cultures the story of the primitive hut reflects
differing values for architecture. Andreea Mihalache reads clues to reconstruct the
lost Romania of Saul Steinberg, and Tracy Eve Winton makes a meal of architectural
elements. Following the example of Thales and the recommendation of Federica
Goffi, we depart from this part and prepare for the next by looking up—ceilings,
with their actual or theoretical constellations, as she reminds us, provide a unique
locus for daydreaming.
Stories of theory
If architectural theory had its historical beginnings with Vitruvius, then it began with
many memorable stories oft-repeated over the following two millennia: Dinocrates
20 For further discussion of recent theories in the psychology of the “expanded” mind, see Andy Clark,
Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
21 Paul Ricoeur, “Architecture and Narrative” translated in Identity and Difference, The Triennale in
the City, The Imageries of Difference, Triennale di Milano XIX Esposizione Internazionale (Milano:
Electa, 1996), 64–72.
presenting a design for Alexander’s city wearing nothing but a lion’s skin;
Callimachus’s invention of the Corinthian column capital while strolling through
a cemetery; the architect Diognetus saving the city of Rhodes from assault through
the cunning use of refuse. The story of the origin of architecture has long been set in
a primitive hut; but before the first house there was a builder, a teller, and a once for
that house to be (built) upon. In this quadrant Marc-Antoine Laugier’s 1753 story of
the primitive hut as the basis of an architectural theory is reconsidered by Mathew
Mindrup, who traces the idea and representation of genius as it appears in Laugier’s
frontispiece.
Some treatises clothe their meaning in stories. The 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
takes place in a dream, depicted as a fiction within a fiction, followed by a fiction
prior to that fiction. (And scholars call its macaronic nonce dialect impenetrable!)
Louis Sullivan wrote a dialogue between an experienced architect and a student in
Kindergarten Chats and Adolf Loos tells the tragic fable of the Poor Little Rich Man.
We are seduced by Jean-François de Bastide’s little house (La petite maison) and cap
tivated by the abyssal Carceri of Piranesi.
Architects have many coats and architectural narration takes as many forms. Le
Corbusier experimented with movies, cartoons, games, and poems to tell the stories
of his buildings. Viollet-le-Duc began his career writing dictionaries, at midlife wrote
lectures and ended his career with novels. Even the most prosaic of handbooks, Ernst
Neufert’s Architect’s Data, describes building types through the cycle of human life,
from birth to death, an apposite twin to Filarete’s Italian Renaissance story of the
virtuous conception, birth, and maturation of a baby-building-as-model into the full-
grown building. The visceral nature of stories, their ability to make complex thoughts
tangible, is a confabulatory tool employed by theorists in every era, from the most
poetic to the most verse-adverse.
Architecture can be poetic, but it cannot be poetry. In making a place for narra
tive in architectural theory we are attempting to make room for the various metrical
structures of time, not only its familiar and circumscribed forms (cyclic, chronologi
cal, biographical), but also as an architectural material no less plastic, malleable, or
expressive, than space. We begin with the understanding that narrative has had
its own theory, deeply concerned with temporality, and as longstanding as the his
tory of thought. What seems a new beginning for architecture may be a well-trod
path.
Word and image symbiotically join in the figurations of the line, in the signature
of the fabricated, in what Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls “techne-poeisis, an irreducible
knowledge of the body manifested in skills.” Pérez-Gómez opens our third quadrant
with his story of architectural theory, touching upon a broad swath of the history of
architecture to argue for the significance of the literary imagination, noting that the
literary image is not so much a still image as a reenactment of the scene it depicts.
Mimesis, in this context, is the imitation of the mime rather than the mirror: it takes
place, in architecture, as embodiment. This may be quite literal, as in the immured
bodies and voluptuous walls of northern Italy described by Claudio Sgarbi; it may be
metaphorical, as in the slow-quick transmutation of flesh Marcia Feuerstein finds in a
winged escargot and the way Camillo Sitte learns a new city; embodiment may even
become allegorical, as a demonstration of the architect’s pantomime of design, dem
onstrated by Lisa Landrum. Donald Kunze’s meditations lie (truthfully) in this section,
as well as Michelangelo Sabatino’s thoughtful reconstruction of the influence of the
Introduction 9
Italian vernacular on modern architects of that region. Finally, Matthew Mindrup’s
chapter (it is no accident) affords us a fortuitous abduction of the inconceivable.
Practice of stories
“No ideas but in things,” wrote the poet William Carlos Williams at the advent of
modernism, a claim which may sound self-evident to architects. This claim, however,
was not so much about a material epistemology as it was practical advice to his fellow
writers. That is, when crafting an image/poem, the author should guide the reader’s
imagination through a series of concrete, sense-rich moments of experience. What
Williams proposed, and what the authors in this part so aptly explore, is the irreduc
ibly material nature of imagination.
In this part we see all sorts of materializations, from the visual record of the changes
made by Michelangelo to full-size templates for construction details to the imaginary
scenes, optical games, and elaborate sets of Enlightenment architects. These authors
ask what it is for a story to be manifest in drawing. While this is a question with many
answers, part of what architects do is to explore and reinvent the expressive potential
of drawing. What is less often noted is that this reinvention is only secondarily com
municative: it is, first, a rebuilding of a world.
Many architectural drawings come before building, acting as precognition. Other
drawings, like the woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or Douglas Darden’s
collages in his graphic novel, Laughing Girls (analyzed by Marc Neveu), act as their
own curious stories. Any architect who has handled a rumpled set of as-built draw
ings, thick with its patchwork of submittals, RFIs (Requests for Information), and
addendums, has probably contemplated the distance between a set of drawings and
the building that arises from them. The speculative drawings of architects raise the
possibility that all architectural drawings, rather than representing a future build
ing, are confabulist pre-enactments—that is, they tell the story of a world that may
be, that could be, that might or even ought to be; but is not, and will never be. (The
conditional is a part of their configuration.) To borrow terminology from narrative
theory, the architectural drawing, whatever its verisimilitude, operates in the subjunc
tive mood.
Drawing, like storytelling, exists across the ambiguous dimension of reality and
fiction. This mood, or mode, the subjunctive “as if,” utilizes a suspension of dis
belief, and by this suspension inveigles, enmeshes, and embodies the reader in the
tale. Architects actively construe stories while drawing; and the ways these stories
are constructed are inseparable from the way a project is designed. The conflation is
methodological. The materials of the story are cousin to the materials of the build
ing. Conceiving architecture, the architect begins once, and when, and whereupon,
confabulating known realities with imagined possible fictions. Architecture, as world-
building, is the crafting of a fiction in order to project a future reality.
Architects are storytellers not only when they make their own designs but also
when they talk about their ideas with clients, builders, and other architects. In this
part Jon Foote takes us to Renaissance Italy and immerses us in the middle of one
of Michelangelo’s bustling construction sites, and Louise Pelletier introduces us to
the hidden patrons of Enlightenment France. From these wandering meditations,
Rebecca Williamson moves to a meditation on wandering, while Brian Ambroziak
and Andrew McLellan explore the formative stories of their own practice. Finally,
opening this closing part, Carolina Dayer explores how architectural drawings can
tell their own stories, even to the architects who are drawing them. Her close reading
of palimpsestial design drawings by Carlo Scarpa interpolates the motion of traces on
the page. This is a story of intrigue, of the meaningful accident, and the confabulation
of fire and the names of things.
These storied authors’ stories offer you, dear reader, a hand, like Aesop and Eros at
the labyrinth’s entry. Welcome to the garden. Here be stories.
Part I
1 Glass and clay

Proust and Gallé
Elaine Scarry
The substance we call clay has such remarkable features that an array of scientists
today believe that clay may have served as the worktable on which life learned to
live. Clay has the capacity to replicate itself not quite in the way that crystals grow,
and not quite in the way that DNA replicates itself, but in lattice works that are a
hybrid—or something in between—crystals and DNA. NASA scientist Leila Coyne
describes the “startling electronic properties” of clay, “defects” in its lattice work
that enable it to store energy and information “and then re-emit it.” Leila Coyne
states: “If you take a lump of clay and hit it with a hammer it blows ultraviolet
energy for a month.”1
The theory that clay is the worktable on which life learned to live is relatively new.
But two features of this account have been with us for millennia. First, the association
of clay with replication. On this northern European vase from the year 1900 [Plate 3],
a simple ginger leaf is repeated across the base. But if we scan across Babylonia,
Egypt, China, Islam, Greece, Rome, and North and South American pottery, we
inevitably find lines and images imprinted on the surface in repetitive streams. Clay
invites and incites repetition. The second feature of clay saluted across millennia is its
association with aliveness: the claims that it is alive, that while wet it seems to move,
that the “inert ball . . . acquire[s] a coiled spring of energy,”2 or even, as is said by
potters in the Andes, that “it is sensitive . . . and gets upset easily”3 are claims we have
all heard all our lives.
For Proust, clay was a worktable for the creation of both cities and persons.
In Place-Names: the Name, Marcel pictures Balbec “as on an old piece of Norman
pottery that still keeps the colour of the earth from which it was fashioned.”4 Marcel
asks us to inscribe two vivid pictures on the surface of this clay vase. The first is of
an innkeeper welcoming the boy to Balbec: “the inn-keeper who would pour me out
coffee and milk on my arrival.” The image, in other words, is that of a man holding a
serving vessel, a piece of pottery, from which he pours coffee and milk. Clay replicates
clay on its own surface.
1 Leila Coyne, quoted in and summarized by James Gleick, “Quiet Clay Revealed as Vibrant and
Primal,” New York Times, May 5, 1987. Gleick describes the work of University of Glasgow’s Graham
Cairns-Smith, a leading scientist investigating the link between clay and the origin of life.
2 Daniel Rhodes and Robin Hopper, Clay and Glazes for the Potter (Iola, WI: Krause Publications,
2000), 76.
3 Nicholas Tripcevich and Kevin J. Vaughn, Mining and Quarrying in the Ancient Andes: Sociopolitical,
Economic, and Symbolic Dimensions (New York: Springer Verlag, 2012), 116.
4 Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Holt, 1922), 251.
14 Elaine Scarry
The second picture—let us say the picture we must now inscribe on the other side of
the vase—requires us to imagine the innkeeper escorting Marcel down “to watch the
turbulent sea, unchained, before the church” [Plate 4]. The welcoming civility of the
first picture has been magnified in the upheaval of civilization out of the foundational
rock—the eruption of a Norman stone church out of the seabed floor.5 Once again
clay replicates clay, this time not in a local act of civility but in geological events.
The kinship between pottery making and geological creation was one appreci
ated by porcelain makers and scientists alike, as historian Robert Finley makes us
aware. The picture in plate 4 is not the bay of Balbec, but the bay of Naples. It is the
frontispiece of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology6 showing the ruined pillars of
an Graeco-Egyptian Temple that Lyell believed had been lifted up by volcanic action
from the seabed floor.7 The Wedgewood House, to which Darwin belonged and
which funded the Voyage of the Beagle, believed the interior of the earth acted like “a
titanic kiln, a heat-generating engine disgorging molten lava.”8
Emile Gallé was immersed in geology. His genius as a glassmaker was preceded by
15 years in which he performed color experiments on the local clays around Nancy.9
One of his masterworks in glass from the year 1900 is entitled Geology [Plate 5]. It
depicts the gradual formation of crystals as one moves down its surface, from the
radial and rectangular crystals half way down, to the three-dimensional jewels at
the base. The rayed crystals are of particular interest because when x-rays were first
invented in 1895, clay was a favorite subject of scientific inquiry; soon after, the major
porcelain houses in Europe began creating crystalline glazes in which the radial struc
ture of particles under heat emerged into view, as one can see in vases emerging from
Sevres, the leading porcelain house in France, and again from Rorstrand, the leading
porcelain house in Sweden.
5 Proust repeatedly stresses Balbec’s continuity with the geology beneath it. Legrandin twice speaks of
“the oldest bone in the geological skeleton that underlies our soil of Balbec,” “that oldest bone in
the earth’s skeleton.” Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 86, 249. Norman Gothic architecture,
Marcel realizes, expresses the moment when “the great phenomena of geology” suddenly blossoms into
a plant—suddenly makes the transition to aliveness: “and gothic art seemed to me a more living thing
now that . . . upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering
spire.” Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, p. 249. Clay once more acts as the worktable upon
which life learns to live. The sense of life emerging out of clay is visible in Gallé’s Jardinière of 1880
in which the faint green surface of the clay vase is covered with fern shaped stem-and-leaf ridges on
top of which are painted thistles in green, ash blue grey, and burnt sienna. Life emerging out of clay is
dramatically visible in the work of Bernard Palissy, a sixteenth-century Huguenot potter who deeply
influenced Gallé: out of the surface of a large ochre basin, for example, emerges what momentarily
seem all the early creatures of the earth—lizards, frogs, ferns, worms, crayfish, lobsters, and fish. For an
image of this basin, see Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics: European Ceramic Design 1500–1830
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 43. Gallé expresses his admiration for Palissy in “Le Décor
Symbolique,” his address to the Stanislas Academy, reprinted in Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé (London:
Academy Editions, 1976), 160–61. Tim Newark describes Palissy’s influence on Gallé in Emile Gallé
(Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell, 1989), 109.
6 Lyell’s book was first published in 1830; many reprintings and editions followed throughout the nine
teenth century.
7 Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010), 77. Finley writes, “Lyell’s examination of black discoloration on the columns
of the temple [of Sarapis] had persuaded him that they had been underwater for centuries and that
eruption by Vesuvius, followed by earthquake, had raised them to the surface once again” (77).
8 Finlay, The Pilgrim Art, 78, 79.
9 Gallé’s work with clay is richly described by Philippe Garner, Emile Gallé, 64–76.
Glass and clay 15

As important as clay is to Proust in the invention of places, it is more important in
the creation of persons, as we can see by turning to the high priestess of porcelain,
Aunt Léonie. Bed-ridden, Aunt Léonie takes events occurring outside her bedroom
window as narrative prompts for the invention of stories. But she is quite insistent
that no distracting event should take place outside her window when she is holding a
clay plate in her hands, a clay plate over which a story is hovering.
These were the only plates which had pictures on them and my aunt used to
amuse herself at every meal by reading the description [la legende], of whichever
[plate] might have been sent up to her. She would put on her spectacles and spell
out: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” and
smile, and say “Very good indeed.”10
“The Arrival of the Unknown Princess.” Very good indeed. Plate 6 shows a plate
made by Royal Doulton in their 1909 series on the Arabian Nights. Like Proust’s
Balbec vase with its depiction of clay events on its own surface, here we see—on either
side of the princess and her escort—huge clay vessels. They announce clay’s habit of
self-replication. Equally important, they suggest the immense unknown interior of
the Unknown Princess, the secret and sovereign interior that we see again depicted
on the Royal Doulton pattern for Ali Baba: clay replicates clay and conjures up the
unknowability of other persons [Plate 7].
In fact, the first time we hear about Aunt Léonie’s Arabian Night plates is not in the
episode just cited, but in the “Overture” where Marcel first describes the mysterious
interior of Swann, his “almost secret existence of a wholly different kind.” These are
aspects of his life that no one in the Combray household could ever have inferred. To
know about his bohemian-aristocratic life would have been as shocking to them as
finding out that after dinner Swann entered the pages of Virgil and dove down into the
arms of the sea-nymph Thetis. But now Marcel rejects that Virgilian story for:
an image more likely to have occurred to [Aunt Léonie], for she had seen it
painted on the plates we used for biscuits at Combray . . . the thought of having
had to dinner Ali Baba, who, as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved,
would make his way into the cave, resplendent with its unsuspected treasures.11
But if it is fair to call Aunt Léonie the High Priestess of Porcelain, it is less because of
the Arabian Night Plates than because of the madeleine passage.
When we think about the biscuit that prompts memories and narratives, we some
times forget that there is a substrate, a worktable, that is prior even to the tea-soaked
madeline and that is the porcelain tea-cup:
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water
and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character
or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on
colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and
recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s
10 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 38.

16 Elaine Scarry
park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and
their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its
surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being,
town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.12
Proust makes certain we do not miss this small porcelain lap of creation by likening
the Combray teacup to the Japanese porcelain bowl. Three points deserve our notice.
The specific clay mineral used in porcelain is kaolin; and kaolin’s major use is the
making of paper. Almost every time Proust speaks of porcelain, paper resides nearby.
Here what happens to the small bits of paper re-enacts the making of the porcelain
itself: when wet, the paper morsels swell and bend, just as the moistened clay did in
the making of the bowl. Second, the madeline that has infused into its surface the lime
blossoms itself re-enacts the Asian clay bowl that traditionally has a blossom inscribed
on its surface. The analogy between dough and clay, kneading dough, kneading clay,
is universally recognized: clay that has been fired but unglazed is called “the biscuit.”
Proust was acutely aware of the analogy as we can appreciate if we lift ourselves out
of Swann’s Way for a moment and go to In a Budding Grove where the young girls
in bloom are described first as dough, then as clay:
very young girls, in whom the unleavened flesh, like a precious dough, has not yet
risen [comme une pâte precieuse travaille encore]. They are malleable, a soft flow
of substance kneaded [un flot de matière ductile pétrie] by every passing impres
sion that possesses them. Each of them looks like a brief succession of little statu
ettes, representing gaiety, childish solemnity, fond coquettishness, amazement,
every one of them modeled by an expression that is full and frank, but fleeting.
This plasticity lends much variety and great charm to a girl . . .13
Conceivably, Proust could have been influenced here by the 20-inch high group of
biscuit (unglazed porcelain) figures of Agathon Léonard’s The Scarf Dance which
received the gold medal at the 1900 Universal Exposition [Plate 8].14
As we learn in Within a Budding Grove, Aunt Leonie underwrites Marcel’s crea
tions by leaving him her estate: her money, her furniture, her collection of antique
Chinese porcelain vases. Proust chooses to focus on the last, describing a moment
when Marcel decides to sell a large porcelain vase so that he will have the money
to give Gilberte endless days of pleasure, endless bouquets of roses and lilacs. How
Proust must have longed to say, give her 1001 days of pleasure. In fact he almost does:
Marcel surmises that the antique dealer will give him 1000 francs for the vase; instead
he receives 10,000—enabling one thousand and zero days of pleasure.
We should perhaps not speak about porcelain without invoking that other high
priestess of porcelain, Odette, that hallucinogenic, hypnagogic priestess of porcelain
12 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 14; emphasis added.

13 The transition from dough to clay in this passage, though audible in all translations, is most emphatic
in James Grieve’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (New York: Penguin, 2002), 482; emphasis
added.
14 Liana Paredes observes that, like many other artists in Paris that year, Léonard was inspired by the
American dancer Loïe Fuller. See Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain,
1750–2000 (London: Hillwood Museum, 2009), 106.
Glass and clay 17
whose early relation with Swann revolves around a cup of tea that is to this moment
in their love affair what “doing a cattleya” soon will be, and that Proust repeatedly
links to the madeline teacup. Dressed in “a tea-gown of pink silk,” Odette moves
around her apartment kissing each ceramic creature, then pours Swann some tea,
then adds some cream which causes her to laugh and exclaim, “A cloud!”15 Like the
Combray teacup, which produces villages, gardens, and rivers, this teacup has just
produced a cloud, as clouds, in turn, throughout the novel shape-shift into chariots,
horses, and gods. Porcelain in Odette’s world is phantasmagoric because it is shape
changing. Teacups and bowls become huge Chinese porcelain pots in which palms
are planted, or glow from within because they are lanterns, lanterns that—because
they are placed on floor, tables, and mantle—keep rising and falling, space shifting
as well as shape shifting. It is, in fact, a tea cup that first leads Marcel to the story of
Swann and Odette: what carries us from the “Overture” to “Swann’s Way” is the
“perfume—of a cup of tea” that prompts “a story which . . . had been told me of a
love affair in which Swann had been involved before I was born.”16 And many years
later, as Marcel walks in the bois, his longing for Odette and the world she represents
is focused on that same small porcelain terrain:
I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day with one of those women,
over a cup of tea, in a little house with dark-painted walls (as Mme. Swann’s were
still in the year after that in which the first part of this story ends) against which
would glow the orange flame, the red combustion, the pink and white flickering
of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening.17
If we rush too quickly by Odette, it is only because she is central to the account of
glass coming in the second half of this chapter.
But we cannot leave clay without attending to the extraordinary moment when
Proust—in describing Marcel’s grandmother—presents her as a clay vessel coming into
being on a potter’s wheel. The grandmother is walking in rapid circuits around the
Combray garden in a storm, her head thrown back like an open vessel to receive the
rain. She is coming to life, and reports, “At last one can breathe!”18 Meanwhile the mud
is climbing up her plum-colored skirt, in the same way a vase or pot on a potter’s wheel
gradually gains altitude. Proust interrupts the description for a page, then resumes her
ceaseless circuits, this time out in the fields, her face still thrown back, open to the sky,
a drop of moisture on her face; and now it is this upper part of her torso that acquires
the purple (“presque mauves”) and brown coloration of “the tilled fields in autumn.”
While in the first passage it was only her feet, then her hem line, then the lower half of
her skirt that were coated in clay, now her whole figure is from the earth.
And what of the space in between the two passages? It is dedicated to a descrip
tion of her unknowability, her foreign spirit, that makes the other residents of the
16 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 122. In this 1922 translation Odette “smiles”; in the Scott
Moncreiff-Terence Kilmartin translation, as in the original French, she laughs. See Remembrance of
Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage,
l982), 242. Here is the French: “et comme il rèpondit ‘crème’, lui dit en riant: ‘Un nuage!’”
18 Elaine Scarry
Combray household tease her cruelly: “she had brought so foreign a type of mind
into my father’s family that everyone made a joke of it.” Like the Ali Baba plates
that convey the profound and unknowable interior of Swann, clay is here again used
to summon a vast and sovereign interior. Because Proust has created here a vase-in
the-making rather than a finished vase, it is hard to locate a material equivalent. But
perhaps Alf Wallander’s 1909 Vase and a Maiden provides a kindred thought [Plate
9, left], as does Gallé’s extraordinary Orpheus and Eurydice vase where Eurydice’s
face is thrown back to the sky, like the grandmother’s [Plate 9, right]. In his notes on
the making of the vase, Gallé described Eurydice as created out of the materials of the
earth: “Eurydice . . . lies faint in a sooty brown crystal.”19 Batilde, like Eurydice, is
beloved of god, for her last name is Amédée.
The “Orpheus and Eurydice” vase carries us to Proust’s reliance on glass for achiev
ing the sovereignty of individual interiors, for sequestering an aura and atmosphere
around persons, and for carrying out color experiments. We have just traced an arc
in clay from Balbec’s “old piece of Norman pottery” to the grandmother rising into
life on a mystical potter’s wheel; we will now see the same arc from places to persons
in glass.
In Place Names: the Name, Florence, Venice, and Parma, along with the towns of
Brittany, are all designated glass vases. Parma seems to Marcel “compact and glossy,
violet-tinted, soft”; he then repeats the description, “I was to inhabit a dwelling
that was compact and glossy, violet-tinted, soft.” Like a Gallé vase with a botani
cally accurate lily on its surface, Florence is “a town miraculously embalmed, and
flower-like, since it was called the City of Lilies, and its Cathedral, Our Lady of the
Flower.” The acute accent on Vitré “barred its ancient glass with wooden lozenges.”
The rivulets of Quimperlé “thread[ed] their pearls upon a grey background, like the
pattern made, through the cobwebs upon a window, by rays of sunlight changed into
blunt points of tarnished silver.” Lamballe hovers between glass and kaolin: “gentle
Lamballe, whose whiteness ranged from egg-shell yellow to a pearly grey.”20
“Each town name in Italy and northern France is not “an inaccessible ideal but . . .
a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge,” an enclosed pack
age of air. Marcel enters the vase either by shrinking himself into a “minute person
age” or—as in the case of azure-emerald-amethyst Venice—by retaining his human
size and shouldering his way through the tight aperture, “penetrating indeed between
those ‘rocks of amethyst’ . . . by a supreme muscular effort . . . stripping myself, as of
a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room . . . I replaced it by an equal
quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere.”21
When Marcel becomes too sickly to travel, he regards his Parisian home as a
prosaic space of loss. But in fact, the retinue of vase-like distant cities will prove to
have just been a rehearsal for Proust’s tour de force evocation of Paris. Waiting for
Gilberte on the Champs Elysées, Marcel never knows when, or from what direction,
19 Gallé’s writes of the vase in Ecrits (his notes submitted to the Jury of the 1889 Universal Exposition), “It
has caught my fancy to work with awesome onyxes and to wrap a vase in streams of lava and pitch . . .
to use a flaming meteor and the gasses of hell to separate Orpheus from Eurydice who lies faint in a
sooty brown crystal” (Gallé, quoted by William Warmus in Emile Gallé: Dreams into Glass [Corning,
NY: Corning Museum of Glass, 1984], 31).
20 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 251, 252.
21 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 252, 254.
Glass and clay 19
she will appear. When she suddenly does materialize, it is always as though she has
arrived upon the lustrous surface of a glass vase. At one moment, out of nowhere,
the reddish-haired girl turns up against the background of a glistening fountain, as
though she were another Eurydice bodied forth on its silver spray. Another time she
slips on a sheet of ice and glides on the silver ground toward Marcel with her arms
outstretched:
Suddenly the sky was rent in two: . . . I had just seen, like a miraculous sign,
Mademoiselle’s blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed towards
me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, enlivened by the cold,
by being late, by her anxiety for a game; shortly before she reached me, she
slipped on a piece of ice and . . . it was with outstretched arms that she smil
ingly advanced, as though to embrace me. ‘Bravo! Bravo! that’s splendid;’ . . .
exclaimed [a nearby] lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs-Elysées,
their thanks to Gilberte for having come.22
Paris, like a piece of spun barley-sugar, and like Lamballe, Vitré, Venice, and Parma,
has glassy contours, contours magnified by the treasured objects Gilberte bestows
on Marcel—the agate marble that duplicates the color of her eyes, the frothy pack
age of white wax and “billows of pink ribbon” that, vase-like, enclose the essay on
Racine.
When historian Albert Sorel reviewed Proust’s translations and introductions to
Ruskin, he wrote a description of Proust’s prose that moved Proust to write a letter
expressing elation and thanks: Proust, Sorel said, “writes a flexible French, free
in movement and all-enveloping, with countless bursts of hues and colours, yet it
remains translucent and, at times, puts you in mind of the glass work in which Gallé
encloses his leafy traceries.”23 As Gilberte on the Champs Elysees makes clear, by
the time of Swann’s Way, it is not just Proust’s sentence style but his conception of
persons and places that are vase-like.
From the overture forward, Swann is pictured as a glass vessel, “a transparent
envelope”:
We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have
already formed about him . . . In the end they come to fill out so completely the
curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmo
niously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent
envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of
him which we recognize and to which we listen.24
Into this transparent envelope (as though Swann were a vase waiting to be filled),
Proust immediately positions a bouquet of herbs and leaves and berries, for
the sentence-after-next ends: “this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant
22 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 257; and for other details in this paragraph, see 255, 264, 265.
23 “Introduction,” Marcel Proust: the Critical Heritage, ed. Leighton Hodson (London: Routledge, 1989,
1997), 7.
24 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 15; emphasis added.
20 Elaine Scarry
with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of
tarragon.”
Though Proust’s reliance on Gallé is vast, spirited, and loving, it can be briefly
sampled here by a single place, the aquatic gardens of the Vivonne, and then a single
person, Odette.
Proust describes the pleasure Marcel takes watching a glass jar suspended in the
stream. The jar looks like solidified water; conversely the water (both within the jar
and without) looks like flowing crystal:
I enjoyed watching the glass jars which the village boys used to lower into the
Vivonne, to catch minnows, and which, filled by the stream, in which they in their
turn were enclosed, at once “containers” whose transparent sides were like solidi
fied water and “contents” plunged into a still larger container of liquid, flowing
crystal, conjured up an image of coolness more delicious and more provoking
than they would have done standing upon a table . . . showing it as perpetually in
flight between the impalpable water . . . and the insoluble glass . . .25
The passage at once summons Gallé’s underwater vases, like the example from
1876 where it is not clear whether the vase is in the water or the water in the vase
[Plate 10].
The lithe body of the self-delighting carp makes three turns to accommodate
the upward swirl of the water, a unitary silver rotation of liquid that seems to
make the vase—along with its gossamer fins and aquatic grasses—spin before
our eyes (while the fish itself, like a kestrel hovering in the wind, holds steady).
Chaste arrays of blacks, grays, and bronzes only very rarely give way to peach (the
center of the carp’s eye), to violet-blue (an occasional bubble or petal), and to aqua
(the bottom-most plane of glass).
A puzzling feature of the aquatic garden is Proust’s account of the solitary water lily
that the current never allows to rest:
it would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally repeating its
double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would uncoil, lengthen, reach
out, strain almost to breaking-point until the current again caught it, its green
moorings swung back over their anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to
what might finally be called its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there
a moment before moving off once again.26
I have not, nor has anyone I know, ever seen a water lily caught in a current, dragged
back and forth between two banks, “eternally repeating its double journey.” But its
strange fatality becomes immediately comprehensible if one looks to Gallé [Plate 11],
for indeed the gorgeous white water lily pressing up against one bank, will, when the
vase is rotated 180°, drift to the other side of the vase, where Gallé will inevitably
have placed an identical blossom, only altering slightly its posture or perspective. And
25 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 183–4;
emphasis added.
26 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 183–4;
emphasis added.
Glass and clay 21
when one continues to rotate the vase another 180°, back to the original bank comes
the water lily. The flower appears to be relentlessly ferried back and forth from one
side to the other.
The exquisite botanical precision of Gallé’s meadow flowers, garden flowers, and
hothouse flowers is not what he writes about in his submission notes to the exhibition
jurors. What he instead documents are his astonishing achievements in sequestering
color, and Proust re-enacts Gallé’s techniques in his own acts of sequestering color.
The passage above continues with an array of water lilies that have precise equivalents
in Gallé’s many water lily vases:
I have seen in its depths a clear, crude blue verging on violet, suggesting a floor
of Japanese cloisonné. Here and there on the surface, blushing like a straw
berry, floated a water-lily flower with a scarlet centre and white edges. . . .
Elsewhere a corner seemed to be reserved for the commoner kinds of lily, of a neat
pink or white like rocket-flowers, washed clean like porcelain, with housewifely
care.27
From places-as-vases, we now turn to a solitary instance of a person-as-vase. We last

saw Odette moving amidst her porcelain teacups, giant palm pots, glowing porcelain
lanterns. Swann repeatedly watches Odette through glass, both at the Verduins and
at her own apartment, as though she were in a vase. Proust’s full reliance on Gallé
becomes most clear when Odette enters the contracted envelope of air provided by
the carriage.
Gallé by his own account spent more than 35 years studying orchids, even writ
ing a scholarly article on the orchids specific to the Lorraine region of France. This
particular one—regarded by museum curators as one of the great masterpieces—is
a specific kind of orchid whose name we all know: it is a cattleya [Plate 12, left]. As
museum curator William Warmus observes, the vase is comprised of multiple acts of
glassmaking: the vase is “blown, overlaid, cut, engraved”—in order to create a sense
of “deep space” with some flowers reaching out and others “falling back” into the
depths beyond our reach,28 depths we encounter again on the other side [Plate 12,
right].
In the cattleya passage, Swann and Odette together inhabit the enclosed space of a
carriage. The aura of cattleyas envelopes Odette who is dressed in black velvet with
inserts of white silk, swan feathers, and lace. The aura is achieved by placing the cat
tleyas at three exactly-registered distances from her body, the first a cluster held in
her hand that reaches out to us and to Swann; a second resides beneath her veil but
is raised three inches from her body for the blossoms are poised on the tips of swan
feathers; a third falls back in deep space, for it resides next to her skin.
He climbed after her into the carriage. . . . She was holding in her hand a
bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered
her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was
dressed, beneath her cloak, in a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on
one side to reveal a large triangle of white silk skirt, and with a yoke, also of
27 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 185.
28 William Warmus, Emile Gallé, 100.
22 Elaine Scarry
white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few
more cattleyas.29
Gallé, in a speech to the Stanislas Academy, gave a description of orchids that may be
not only the single best description that has ever been given of an orchid, but perhaps
the single best description that has ever been given of Odette:
We confess our preferences for good old plants, cherished by our grandmothers.
But the rapid modern current is deeper and more powerful than the gentle brook
of our predilections. It sweeps everything along with it. It tosses us—as the last
bouquet of Ophelia—the orchid, with its richness, its inconceivable strangeness
of forms, of species, of perfumes, colors, caprices, pleasures, and disquieting
mysteries.30
Odette and the cattleya are each like the last bouquet of Ophelia.
The color of orchids and violets cling to her, envase and envelop her. Even when
there is no glass, no lace veil, no lavender parasol. Even when she walks in the open
air of the bois [Plate 13].
I met Mme Swann on foot . . . enveloped also in the artificial warmth of her own
house, which was suggested by nothing more than the bunch of violets crushed
into her bosom, whose flowering, vivid and blue against the grey sky, the freez
ing air, the naked boughs, had the same charming effect of . . . living actually in
a human atmosphere, in the atmosphere of this woman, as had in the vases and
jardinières of her drawing-room, beside the blazing fire, in front of the silk-covered
sofa, the flowers that looked out through closed windows at the falling snow. . . .31
This is a passage that then carries us to Odette’s porcelain tea-cup, the orange-red
pink shooting star of chrysanthemums at twilight, and Marcel’s longing for the
pleasure of her presence.
When Proust, who repeatedly commissioned vases from Gallé as presents for
friends,32 at last named him in his pages—as he does late in Within A Budding Grove,
and again in The Guermantes Way—it is in each instance at a moment of fallen snow,
in passages that summon the work of Auguste and Antonin Daum, who, after Gallé
29 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 253;
emphasis added.
30 Emile Gallé, “Discours de Réception,” L’Académie de Stanislas, May 17, 1900, reprinted in Philippe,
Emile Gallé, 161; translated from the French and emphasis added.
31 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin, 253;
emphasis added.
32 Garner, Emile Gallé, 128. Robert de Montesquiou’s 1897 essay “Orfèvre et Verrier: Gallé et Lalique”
invokes Florence and Venice, chrysanthemums and A Thousand and One Nights, and conveys his sense
of how one should regard “the gift” of a Gallé vase: “Such Gallés are the only gifts one still dares to
present to kings, who count themselves happy and proud to take them jealously into their possession
for the immortal honor of their museums. Yes, and it is fitting to here announce just in passing—since
the noble modesty of the maker has left it nearly unknown—that it was two vases by Gallé that France
offered to the tzar, to relieve him of his painful memories and as priceless lacrymatories that might at
last unburden him of his tears.”. See “Orfèvre et Verrier: Gallé et Lalique,” in Roseaux pensants (Paris:
Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1897), 176.
Glass and clay 23
died, continued his virtuosity in glass, sometimes, as here, eliminating all color, rely
ing solely on black and white [Plate 14].
In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, an encrusted

vein of snow; and even in the Champs-Elysées, instead of the girls one waits to
see, nothing but solitary sparrows.33
33 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terrence
Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), 407; see also vol. 1, Within a Budding Grove, trans. Moncrieff
and Kilmartin, 860.
2 The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s
fabrication of site
Qi Zhu
Ox, the treasure of a farmer.
With great diligence yet without a helpful ox,
the farmer toils in the fields
early in the morning in vain.
One ox is half of the family.1
These two maxims suggest the important role an ox played in the traditional agri
cultural society. However, the story of constructing a psycho-physical hybrid image
of an ox in the Hongcun village in the Huizhou region of China can be told under a
different grand narrative. The term grand narrative (or meta-narrative) was proposed
by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1984 to refer to a story that speaks
not just about one instance but about all-encompassing historical concepts.2 Professor
Marco Frascari formulated a grand narrative to capture his inexhaustible inquiries
into the tectonics of creating meaningful architecture. Frascari’s narrative is a result of
multidisciplinary studies. He investigated the structural anthropologists’ exploration
of how a meaningful structure is formed in society, as exemplified by Claude Lévi
Strauss’s work, The Raw and the Cooked, and probed how one uses one’s perceptions
to make sense of one’s surroundings, as explicated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in
Phenomenology of Perception. Frascari also studied how an adept craftsman handles
materials to make meaningful details, likening it to the way a chef slices celery or car
rots at a certain angle to imbue an edible object with a specific texture and taste. In
his later years, he became fascinated with neuroscience and how meaning is generated
in our emotional brain.3 After many interrelated studies over an extended period,
Frascari stated, “We make architecture, but architecture makes us.”4
1 The Chinese text for these proverbs is ⢋ᱟߌᇦᇍˈᴹऔᰐ⢋ⲭ䎧ᰙǄаཤ⢋ˈॺњᇦ,translated by

the author.
2 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), 27.
3 Such as Harry Francis Mallgrave’s, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Also see Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) and
John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2007).
4 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s
Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 66.
The fabulous ox in Fengshui 25
For Frascari, there is a fundamental reciprocal relationship between architecture
and those who inhabit it, which can be seen as simultaneously forming and being
formed. These looped processes of formation and transformation are intensely physi
cal and deeply emotional. Thus, the mutual relationship between architecture and the
public that inhabits it should not be based merely on achieving visual delight. In fact,
both architects and the public are called upon to resist succumbing to the eye candy—
pristine renderings generated by digital algorithms—that proliferate on architectural
magazine covers.
Frascari’s grand narrative calls for the creation of “non-trivial” architecture.5 He
suggests that, like non-trivial love, such architecture—and to a larger extent, such
environments—can only be brought forth through the active engagement of bodily
senses, along with rich storytelling. At the community college where I teach, archi
tectural design tends to be a technical and pragmatic enterprise. Even so, it is the
story it tells that engages the imagination of students and faculty. Many architectural
practitioners have also expressed how important stories are in the delivery of a good
piece of architecture.
This chapter intends to further illuminate the mutual relationship between the
environment and those who experience it, first by looking at experiments conducted
by psychologists on this topic, and then through the example of a Fengshui master in
the fifteenth century. I will examine how he planned a village through the storytelling
process. The environment he created through the confabulation of a wonderful story
has since sustained many generations of village residents.
We make architecture, but architecture makes us

An illustration by Frascari published in Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural
Drawing and entitled “We make architecture, but architecture makes us” reveals
the relationship between architecture and those who inhabit it [Plate 15]. The main
structure of the drawing is a portal, with two Greek Corinthian columns support
ing a lintel. A puppet is suspended, in a twisted and slightly sagging posture, by a
few strings affixed to the lintel. The puppet represents an architect. One hand holds
a drafting instrument (a square), while the other grasps a drawing of a building
elevation. The architecture, functioning as the puppeteer, controls the motions and
probably emotions of the architect. Ironically, the puppet as the architect creates the
puppeteer as the architectural frame.
The broader relationship between the environment and living creatures has been
widely studied by psychologists. The concept that the “environment makes us” can
be understood through the theory of classical conditioning, first formulated by the
Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in 1901.6 Pavlov discovered that dogs would auto
matically generate certain cognitive and physiological reactions to environmental
stimuli. A contemporary example of the environment conditioning human behavior
is the use of mobile phones by individuals, whose immersion in texting and online
surfing shapes an almost autistic form of public behavior.7
5 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 3, 7–9, 15, 30, 36, 37, 40, 41, 58, 70, 84, 96, 112.
6 As discussed in John G. Benjafield’s, A History of Psychology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996), 145.
7 James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus, Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public
Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23.
26 Qi Zhu
At the same time, we shape and reshape our daily environment. The concept that
“we make our environment” can be understood through the theory of operant (or
instrumental) conditioning, which stresses voluntary changes in behavior, was first
made popular by American psychologist B.F. Skinner.8 Skinner drew on the work of
an earlier psychologist, Edward Thorndike, who studied how a cat learned to reward
itself by opening a complex puzzle box through an iterative process of trial and error.
These studies demonstrated that animals are equipped with the power of reasoning to
affect their surroundings. Although animals can shape their settings, human society is
an even greater force in changing the environment to meet our needs and desires. We
do this with a large array of instruments—ranging from our simple skilled hands to
increasingly powerful machines and technological tools. These are examples of oper
ant conditioning because, unlike the automatic responses of classical conditioning,
they are voluntarily produced consequences in the environment.
In 1953, the American psychologist Richard Solomon and his associates conducted
an experiment that combined classical and operant conditioning with disturbing
results.9 In one group, dogs were put in boxes that had two compartments, with an
operable gate in the middle. When a light was turned off in one compartment, each
dog had a few seconds to jump into the other lit compartment; if the dog did not jump
an electrical shock was applied to the floor. Following the theory of classical condi
tioning, after a few trials, the dogs learned to jump into the other side to avoid being
shocked as soon as they saw the light off. Solomon conditioned another group of dogs
given no means to escape when the electrical shocks were activated. After a few trials,
these dogs became accustomed to the pain-inflicting environment. Even when these
dogs were later given a means to make a voluntary escape, they took the shocks rather
than avoid them. The behavioral abnormality produced by their previous adverse
conditioning was highly maladaptive. These dogs also expressed depressive behavior
at the end of the experiment.
Just as harmful conditioning brought damage to the dogs, similar conditioning can
happen in human society when people unconsciously and habitually are subjected to
adverse architectural or environmental conditioning. In his book Eleven Exercises,
and in his lectures, Frascari repeatedly emphasized that architects not only make
drawings for the construction of buildings, but they participate in the praxis of world
making.10 In this sense, the uncomfortable posture of the puppet in Plate 15 might
illustrate the harmful effects of adverse conditioning. The puppet could represent not
only the architect, but also the daily inhabitants of the building. His body is restrained
by the strings, so he can only take in the architecture visually, and not through other
sensory stimuli. He thus lacks emotional satisfaction.
The key effort lies in how to make a dwelling positively support and condition
both body and mind. How can architects, clients and builders, and other architec
tural enthusiasts not inadvertently make a negative contribution to the process of
world-making? This is a big question. Frascari led his students to create non-trivial
8 B.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1953), 59–60.
9 R.L. Solomon and L.C. Wynne, “Traumatic Avoidance Learning: Acquisition in Normal Dogs,”
Psychological Monographs 76, no. 4 (1953): 1–19. See also R.L. Solomon and L.C. Wynne, “Traumatic
Avoidance Learning: the Outcomes of Several Extinction Procedures with Dogs,” The Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 48, no. 2, (1953): 295.
10 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 2, 38.
architectural drawings as a way to avoid the creation of dreadful environments, and
therefore adverse conditioning of the inhabitants.11 Non-trivial architectural draw
ings require the embodiment of all the bodily senses to tell a story, as Frascari states:
For a building to exist, someone has to tell its facture in a “formative storytell
ing”. The story is told by a hesitant delineation of many lines. A hesitant set of
lines is a sensible and sensitive form of drawing, dwelling constantly on pensive
borders, where the drafting and writing of lines are buzzing backward through
history and igniting genetic and anagogic drawings. These lines are a way of
reaching what it is beyond the functional quotidian.12
These lines, drawn deliberately and synthesizing various sensory and cognitive inputs,
in essence, make a meaningful narration. The process of storytelling thus can create
a non-trivial architectural drawing that ultimately leads to the construction of non
trivial architecture.
Historically, the making of architecture did not commence solely on the drawing
board. It originated as well in the lived environment. However, the making of a non
trivial environment is analogous to the making of a non-trivial drawing. It asks for the
fabrication of a wonderful story, in addition to satisfying daily needs. The efficacy of
a well-fabricated story can put us in touch with the physical and cognitive potential
of the environment. The following Fengshui story provides an example of how a fan
tastic story was confabulated, leading to the founding of a meaningful architectural
environment.
The confabulation of Fengshui: The ox and Hongcun village

Fengshui, literally translated as “wind and water,” is probably the longest-living
tradition of environmental planning. It is also regarded as geomancy and is widely
practiced in China. The Reverend M.T. Yates introduced Fengshui to the West in
the late nineteenth century in the first article in the English language on the subject,
Ancestor Worship and Feng-shui. In his article, Yates described Fengshui as part sci
ence and part superstition, but noted, “even the scoffers noticed that geomantically
chosen sites were very attractive.”13
Hongcun village, located in the Huizhou region of China, was planned according to
Fengshui principles. The story of the village’s establishment was first told by the Wang
family (⊚∿ᇦ᯿), the founding family of the village. According to the genealogy of
the Wang family, in 1403–24, the seventy-sixth generation head of the family clan
was Wang Siji (⊚ᙍ⍾), who invited a famous Fengshui master, He Keda (օਟ䗮),
from the nearby town of Xiu Ning (Ձᆱ) to help with the planning of the village.14
According to various Chinese sources, Master He, spent 10 years in intensive
observation of the bends, junctures, and branches of the water courses; the mountain
11 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 8–9.
13 Andrew L. March, The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic Thought (New York: Praeger,
1974), 255.
14 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun. Zhongguo Lao Cun. Di 1 ban. ed. (Nanjing Shi: Jiangsu jiao yu chu ban she,
2005), 7–8.
28 Qi Zhu
ridges at the site; and the condition of the earth, air, water, trees, and soil, including
the aspects of taste, smell, and texture. He observed all the biological organisms and
inanimate elements, down to the minutest magnetic fields. Having done all that, he
visualized the image of a crouching ox.15 He decided to plan the village according to
this representation of an ox. Two old trees located in the northern Leigang (䴧዇) hills
were seen as the horns of the ox, and the houses and buildings as its body cells. A
half-moon shaped lake was dug on the location of an existing spring to form the first
of the four compartments of the ox’s stomach. On further advice from the geomancer,
a meandering channel that brought fresh water to the village from a nearby stream,
named Xixi (㾯ⓚ), was constructed to compose the intestines of the ox. Four wooden
bridges were built over the Xixi stream and Yangzhan River (㖺Ḹ⋣), which flowed
from the west to the south side of the site and represented the feet of the ox. A local
rhyme was made about this site:
Hill as the head of the ox,

trees are the horns;
houses as the body
and bridges as the foot.16
Throughout the next hundred years, generations of the Wang clan continued to
expand. New houses were built along the water sources and were conjured as the ox’s
intestines and the stomach. Later, around 1607, during the Ming Dynasty, a few fami
lies within the Wang clan dug another artificial lake at the south side of the village.
This lake became the last of the four compartments of the ox’s stomach.17
Visualizing the site as an ox was a mysterious fabrication by the geomancer
[Figure 2.1]. If we were to investigate the site, we would see hardly any obvious
physical resemblance to an ox. A great leap of imagination is required to visualize the
form of the site as an ox. The geomancer deliberately confabulated a story, or found
ing myth, about the site by cleverly employing the powerful cultural symbol of an
ox. The ox played an essential role for farming families in the harvesting of crops in
traditional Chinese agrarian society, and thus was greatly venerated. The Chinese leg
endary ruler called the Divine Farmer, who later became the patron god for farmers
and taught the ancient Chinese how to practice agriculture, was portrayed in ancient
literature as a horned ox-headed figure. In the Book of Changes, the ox was repre
sented with the Kun (ඔ) trigram, which has three broken lines stacked one on top
of the other, symbolizing earth. In yin yang theory, earth can overcome water. Thus,
the Fengshui master cogently reasoned that embedding the image of an ox within the
site could control a future flood. The ox also was one of the most beloved subjects for
traditional Chinese painting. One renowned example is a painting by Han Huang (丙
⓹) in the Tang Dynasty (618–907), entitled “The Five Oxen,” which depicts the ox as
a popular cultural symbol of fecundity. Using the fabulous ox to convey a story about
the site was intended to infuse the site with corresponding powers.
Furthermore, even though the design of the site was conceived of as an ox, the site
was not built as a visual copy of the ox. The correlation was not with its external
15 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun, 8.

16 Yihui Jin, Hong Cun, 9.
17 Yihui Jin, 10.
Figure 2.1 Collage by author demonstrating Fengshui planning strategy.
shape, but with its internal workings. For example, the geomancer associated the ox’s
digestive system to the layout of the digestive system of the village. Such a parallel not
only solved the village’s water supply, drainage system, and firefighting system, but it
also may have inspired the emotional belief that living in a place where even tough,
poorly digestible intake could be turned into nourishment would naturally bless the
villagers. Such an emotional bonding helped the villagers respect and diligently main
tain the water channels and the entire village site.
The cognitive powers generated by the story have resonated for centuries within
the emotional brains of its residents. After five centuries, the village is still well pre
served, and, in the year 2000, Hongcun was listed among UNESCO World Heritage
Sites [Figure 2.2]. The confabulation of a meaningful story as the guide for the
establishment and development of Hongcun not only created a non-trivial environ
ment, but also organically supported the growth of the village and the development
of its regional identity. Conceiving our environment through storytelling allows us to
negate the “immediate rational,” so as to allow the “mediated sensual,”18 and thus to
participate vicariously in the place-making process, as Frascari has often remarked.
Returning to the grand narrative by Frascari—“We make architecture, but archi
tecture make us”—and contemplating the depressed dogs as well as the fabulous
ox embodied in the Hongcun village site, this chapter has emphasized the critical
reciprocity and interdependence between a built environment and the people who

30 Qi Zhu
Figure 2.2 Hongcun Village in Hiuzhou Region, China.

construct it. For architects and architectural designers, the task of creating a meaning
ful environment requires the unification of the seemingly contradictory polarity of
mediated sensorial inputs and logical design thinking. One solution to this inherent
paradox, as illustrated by Hongcun village, is to confabulate a fantastic story infused
with cultural memories and cognitive potentials. The process of making up such a
story weaves sensory perceptions and rational thinking into a coherent whole, thus
integrating newly built edifices into the larger existing physical environment and
cultural context.
3 The “uncharted tides”
A literary map of Saint Petersburg
Angeliki Sioli
Before maps became associated with diagrammatic representations of land (or sea)
demarcating physical features in geometric space, or with collections of data displaying
spatial arrangements and distributions over an area, the word was also used to describe
the human face. Maps were literally physiognomies revealing the interconnections
between humans and their experiential worlds—at one time mythical or religious—and
grasping the general appearance and feeling of what they were depicting. It is in this sense
of the word that I venture to present a map of the European city of Saint Petersburg:
a remarkable urban environment of early modernity designed ex-nihilo on rational
and functionalist principles. It is a map that attempts to reveal the face of the city—the
general feeling of being in the place—as this is changing over time. To this end the map
is composed of literary descriptions: it is a map charted by words. I see literature —the
mode of storytelling par excellence—as capable of mapping specific but elusive quali
ties of the urban environment, qualities that analytical and scientific tools of represen
tation cannot record: a place’s atmosphere, mood, and inherent mythologies.
This literary map of Saint Petersburg is compiled from descriptions of the city’s
atmosphere at five distinct moments in time. It is drawn by the narrations of Alexander
Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale” (1833), Nikolai Gogol’s “Nevsky
Prospect” (1835), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Andrei Bely’s
Petersburg (1922) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951). These literary
pieces are selected particularly because their narratives draw heavily upon the carto
graphic, topological, and topographic reality of the city. The (nonetheless) fictional
plots and characters disclose for an architectural discourse how impressive public
architecture, city landmarks, large-scale public spaces, streets and squares—all those
elements that figure in any conventional map—instead of being understood as points
or surfaces in neutral homogeneous space and indicating merely location, are perceived
by the city’s inhabitants and are appropriated in their everyday experience. Dwelling
on the general prevailing atmospheres of the city—as felt by the characters in the
different time periods and sociopolitical conditions the literary pieces depict—this
alternative map portrays the drastically changing lived experience of Saint Petersburg
over the course of almost a century. It begins in 1824 and reaches 1916, when the city’s
name has just been wiped off the world map: changed two years earlier to Leningrad.
Petersburg enters literature for the very first time through Pushkin’s narrative poem,
“The Bronze Horseman.”1 The title of the poem refers to an equestrian statue of Tsar
1 Russian literature was still relatively new when Alexander Pushkin was born. Only a few poets,
playwrights, and historians preceded him, and the literary language itself was still evolving. See Elaine
32 Angeliki Sioli
Peter the Great, founder of the city, situated in Saint Petersburg’s Senate Square. It
was a statue commissioned by Catherine the Great and created over the course of 12
years (1770–82), but came to be known as the Bronze Horseman because of Pushkin’s
poem. The poem begins by recounting the foundation of the city in 1703: how the
Tsar stood by the shore of the Baltic Sea and imagined the birth of his Petersburg.
Rapidly moving forward an entire century to focus on Petersburg of 1824, it captures
in a lyrical way one of the most particular characteristics of the urban environment,
one that dramatically alters its cartography but is nevertheless extremely difficult
to map: the river’s “uncharted tides.”2 The Neva River—around which the city
unfolds—has flooded more than three hundred times since Petersburg’s founding,
causing untold damages. The inundation of November 1824 is still considered one
of the most catastrophic floods in the city’s history, with numerous human casualties
and the destruction of more than three hundred buildings.
Pushkin embarks on his description of the flood by first presenting the city under a
light of admiration and excitement, weaving a eulogy for its beauty and architecture: a
tactical move to avoid the tsarist censorship.3 In this initial description the Admiralty
building—topped with a dominant golden spire and focal point of three of the city’s
main streets—is rendered in poetic language as shining in the night, offering security
and guidance as darkness falls. But after this initial praise a radical change of scenery
is described. The author focuses on the devastating consequences of the flood: the
loss of life and the damage caused to the buildings. Squares and streets resemble lakes
with stagnant water, and the famous Winter Palace—home today to the Hermitage
museum—appears as a steep rock facing the edge of the sea:
Into the squares to lakes dilated,

Debouched, like riverbeds inflated,
What had been streets. The palace stood
Like a lone cliff the waters riding.4
Eugene, the story’s main character, loses his beloved Parasha during the flood and his
mental state is profoundly troubled. Standing by the foot of the Bronze Horseman he
blames the city’s founder—“the one by whose portentous will / The city by the sea
was planted”—for his tremendous personal loss.5 While his sanity is jeopardized the
day after the flood, the city returns to its normal everyday life:
. . . Dawn’s ray
From pallid banks of weary gray
Gleamed down upon the silent city
And found of yesterday’s alarm
No trace. . . .
Blair, Literary Petersburg, A Guide to the City and its Writers (New York: The Little Bookroom,
2006), 15.
2 Alexander Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” in Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry,
translated by Walter Arndt (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1984), 426.
3 Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 10.
4 Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 431.
5 Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 437.
The “uncharted tides” 33
And all returned to former calm.
Down streets re-won for old endeavor
Men walk as callously as ever,
The morning’s civil service troops,
Emerged from their nocturnal coops,
Are off to work. Cool tradesmen labor
To open cellar, vault, and store,
Robbed by Nevá the night before6
The atmosphere of Petersburg the day after the flood is that of a callous relentless
beauty, a daring act of human defiance to nature that often strikes back. This is a lit
erary image hinting at the ethos that individual will and personal desire have always
been perceived in Petersburg’s history as subaltern to the common good and social
progress. It is this ethos on which Pushkin based his poem and other Petersburg
authors their stories, as Elaine Blair discusses in her work Literary Petersburg,
A Guide to the City and its Writers (2006).7 This ethos, even myth, has haunted the
city since its very foundation when thousands of people died as a result of the harsh
construction conditions, obeying without complaint the authoritarian demands of
the Tsar and his engineers. “The Bronze Horseman” ends with the image of Peter’s
statue coming to life and chasing Eugene through the city’s streets, threatening to
kill him.
Some years later, Nikolai Gogol would further elaborate on the menacing atmos
phere prevailing in the city’s streets. Although when Gogol arrived at the city the
streets “were illuminated by thousands of oil lamps and the recent innovation,
gaslights,”8 they were still in the aftermath of the Decembrist uprising, during which
protesters had gathered on Senate Square in 1825 to demand a constitution from
Nicholas I. The Tsar ordered his troops to surround the demonstrators and fire on
the crowd. More than one thousand people were killed, and several dozen of the
organizers—who were mostly from the educated upper classes—were sentenced to
exile, hard labor, or death. After these events the participation of intellectuals in
public dissent ceased and aristocratic social life became—at least in the surface—
more orderly.9
This discrepancy between how the city appears on the surface and what is actually
taking place in the background is Gogol’s main focus in one of his Petersburg Tales,
titled “Nevsky Prospect.” The story describes the atmosphere of the street in the
year 1836. Nevsky Prospect was and still is the city’s most famous and fashionable
thoroughfare: a street 115 feet wide and almost 3 miles long, running in a straight line
from the Admiralty to Znamenskaya Square, one of Petersburg’s important public
spaces.10 The story’s opening pages resemble a street diary that captures the vividness
of the place, tracing the prevailing smells, the characters and figures that populate it,
6 Pushkin, “The Bronze Horseman,” 434–5.

8 Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Free
Press, 1995), 27.
10 Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Notes,” in Andrei Bely, Petersburg (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1978), 297.
34 Angeliki Sioli
as well as its dominant colors: “What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in
the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single
day and night.”11 The author records the different activities during the day but also
the different prevailing feelings: how serenity and stillness dominate in the late after
noon, how festivity emerges later in the evening.
As the plot unfolds, Gogol—like Pushkin—undermines the initial sense of festivity
and liveliness of the street. The story focuses on two friends who, while walking on
Nevsky, catch sight of two extraordinarily beautiful women. They decide to follow
and court them, encouraged discreetly by them, and split up as the two women go in
separate directions. The literary description elaborates on the women’s divine beauty,
their elegance and charm, only later to portray both men’s disappointment as they
realize that the first woman is a prostitute in a public house, trying to lure a potential
client; and the second one is married to an austere and protective German husband.
While neither of the two heroes’ romantic desire is ultimately fulfilled, Gogol makes
one of the two return back to Nevsky Prospect to find the emerging mood of the street
diametrically different:
But, along with the street lamp, everything breathes deceit. It lies all the time, this
Nevsky Prospect, but most of all at the time when night heaves its dense mass
upon it and sets off the white and pale yellow walls of the houses, when the whole
city turns into a rumbling and brilliance, myriads of carriages tumble from the
bridges, . . . and the devil himself lights the lamps only so as to show everything
not as it really looks.12
With Dostoyevsky, a unique mapping opportunity is offered as his renowned Crime

and Punishment unfolds in more infamous parts of the city: neighborhoods with
public houses and prostitutes, bars frequented by drunks and criminals; areas where
poor people, usually immigrants from the provinces, dwell. Haymarket Square and
the surrounding area emerge through the pages of the novel in July of 1865:
The heat in the streets was stifling. The stuffiness, the jostling crowds, the bricks
and mortar, scaffolding and dust everywhere, and that peculiar summer stench so
familiar to everyone who cannot get away from St. Petersburg into the country,
all combined to aggravate the disturbance of the young man’s nerves. The intoler
able reek from the public houses, so numerous in that part of the city, and the
sight of the drunken men encountered at every turn, even though this was not a
holiday, completed the mournfully repellent picture.13
This repellent image emerges not only from the city’s decadent areas. Dostoyevsky’s
hero, the university student Raskolnikov, troubled by the social injustices over the
lower class and his personal ethical dilemmas, reads even the city’s most spectacular
view in a skeptical way:
11 Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” in The Collected Tales, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 240.
12 Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect,” 271–2.
13 Feodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, translated by Jessie Coulson, edited by George Gibian
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 2.
He was on the Nikolaevsky Bridge . . . walked a few steps, and turned his face
towards the Neva, looking towards the Palace. There was not a cloud in the sky
and the water, unusually for the Neva, looked almost blue. The dome of the
cathedral, which is seen at its best from this point, not more than twenty paces
towards the chapel from the center of the bridge, shone through the clear air,
and every detail of its ornament was distinct. . . . He stood for a long time gazing
steadily into the distance; this spot was particularly familiar to him. A hundred
times, while he was at the university, had he stopped at this very place, usually on
his way home, to fix his eyes on the truly magnificent view and wonder each time
at the confused and indescribable sensation it woke in him. An inexplicable chill
always breathed on him from the superb panorama, for him a deaf and voiceless
spirit filled the splendid picture . . . Each time he marveled at his gloomy and
mysterious impression, and then, mistrustful of himself, deferred consideration of
the riddle to some future time.14
Saint Isaac’s Cathedral with its enormous golden dome emerges in all its brilliance in
front of Raskolnikov’s eyes but the impression gained—even before committing the
hideous crime that significantly blurs his consciousness as the plot unfolds—is always
dark and pessimistic. The everyday struggles of the lower classes find no expression
in the luxurious and grandiose architecture of this city; and, as Dostoyevsky depicts,
while they become gradually inured to its Western character, it still leaves them with
a sense of detachment and bewilderment. Dostoyevsky’s contemporary Leon Tolstoy
explicitly asserted in his novels that a Russian could not feel at home in Petersburg.15
In the early years of the twentieth century, though, ideas about Petersburg began
to shift: an admiration for the city and for its cosmopolitan spirit slowly developed
among the writers who lived there.16 The Western culture that Petersburg represented
no longer seemed so foreign to Russians.17 This change in the atmosphere of the city
is tentatively captured in Andrei Bely’ s novel Petersburg. The novel describes the city
in October of 1905, an eventful month with strikes and public protests manifesting
the political tension between the middle class and the aristocracy. This tension forced
the Tsar in power, Nicholas II, to grant the country a constitution, and led to the first
revolution of St. Petersburg in December 1905.18
In this turmoil the city streets, instead of conveying an atmosphere of deceit, fear or
bewilderment, were actively appropriated by the citizens as meeting places for politi
cal purposes. Their extensive length enabled massive demonstrations and gatherings,
and the Western character of the city was appreciated as a trigger, reinforcing the
working class’s demand for change and a different future. The streets belonged to the
crowds and their European character was a hope for them and Russia, as Bely puts it
somewhat hesitatingly:
Nevsky Prospect possesses a striking attribute: it consists of a place for the

circulation of the public. . . . Nevsky Prospect, like any prospect, is a public
14 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 95–6.

16 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 12.
36 Angeliki Sioli
prospect, that is: a prospect for the circulation of the public (not of air, for
instance) . . .
Nevsky Prospect is rectilineal (just between us), because it is a European pros
pect; and any European prospect is not merely a prospect, but (as I have already
said) a prospect that is European, because . . . yes . . .
For this reason, Nevsky Prospect is a rectilineal prospect.
Nevsky Prospect is a prospect of no small importance in this un-Russian—but
nonetheless—capital city. Other Russian cities are a wooden heap of hovels.19
Following Bely, authors like Vladimir Nabokov, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip
Mandelstam did not identify ominous elements in the city’s beauty.20 By the time
Nabokov had his first memories of Petersburg, later recorded in his autobiographical
novel Speak, Memory, a “distant war” was taking place (this is how the author refers
to World War I). Nabokov, at the age of 17 during the winter of 1916, reveals an
erotic and particularly human face of Saint Petersburg. Falling in love with Tamara, a
year younger than himself, the author maps meticulously all the different museums of
the city. His intention is not to chart cultural sites, but rather to create a map of secret
places where young lovers—for whom, as he eloquently puts it, “hotels disreputable
enough to admit them stood beyond the limits of their daring”21—could meet:
The Hermitage . . . offered nice nooks, especially in a certain hall on the ground
floor, among cabinets with scarabs, behind the sarcophagus of Nana. . . . In the
Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, two halls (Nos. 30 and 31, in its
northeastern corner), harboring repellently academic paintings by Shishkin . . .
offered a bit of privacy because of some tall stands with drawings.22
When museums and theaters close, the nocturnal landscape of the city provides the
most reliable protection for the two. Nabokov outlines a nocturnal experience of the
winter city, in which Petersburg emerges as a benevolent magical creature, and its
grandiose and immense architecture as the figure of a good giant in popular fairy-tales:
Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic
spines by the icy moisture of our eyelashes. As we crossed the vast squares, vari
ous architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness right before us. We felt
a cold thrill, generally associated not with height but with depth—with an abyss
opening at one’s feet—when great, monolithic pillars of polished granite . . .
zoomed above us to support the mysterious dome of St. Isaac’s cathedral. We
stopped on the brink, as it were, of these perilous massifs of stone and metal, and
with linked hands, in Lilliputian awe, craned our heads to watch new colossal
visions rise in our way—the ten glossy-gray atlantes of a palace portico, or a giant
vase of porphyry near the iron gate of a garden, or that enormous column with a
19 Andrei Bely, Petersburg, translated by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978), 2.
20 Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg, 11–12.
21 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1966), 234.
22 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 235–6.
black angel on its summit that obsessed, rather than adorned, the moon-flooded
Palace Square.23
In his collection of memories, Nabokov recounts that a friend of his used to say that
while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels
everything that happens in one point of time.24 In the alternative literary map I have
presented here, five distinct points of time captured by five different authors chart the
experiential context of Saint Petersburg across almost a century, foregrounding the
emotional impact of urban architecture on the inner lives of the inhabitants. A city
first perceived by its citizens as cold, hostile and menacing gradually took on different
qualities in their consciousness and was appropriated into their lives accordingly.
Moreover, the way each author describes the city sheds a light on different aspects
of Petersburg’s urban life: Pushkin touches on the political oppression dominant at
his time, Gogol renders erotic desires hidden below the surface (of fashion and soci
ety), Dostoyevsky illuminates the internal struggles of the individual psyche and the
working classes, Bely presents a political transformation that engages the urban space,
and Nabokov—like Gogol—touches again on the secret erotic desires in the city and
presents Petersburg as a place that engages the imagination of its inhabitants. Despite
the differences, the authors also reveal a significant lingering quality of the city: its
potential to stimulate or liberate the personal imagination in contradiction of its
political and social agendas; and the inhabitants’ potential to subvert these agendas,
as they are written in urban space, by taking over and living in that space.
In his work Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory
(1991) Marco Frascari argued that an architectural project is not just the designing of
a specific building; rather it is a projection of a future constructed world based on the
transformation of the past world through a specific design.25 In these literary works
the transformation of Petersburg’s past world, necessary as a context for any archi
tectural project, becomes alive and relevant to design in ways that elude objectifying
methodologies and scientific maps. The literary language of the novels discloses layers
of complexity and richness in the urban environment, and in the life of its citizens,
allowing for a mapping of an entirely different nature than what one might infer from
architectural writings such as treatises or manifestos. Despite literature’s characteriza
tion as fiction, the works under consideration reveal truths: dimensions of the city are
imagined but not just made up, are related to its historical, social and political reality
at a given time, and are ultimately the stuff of which Saint Petersburg’s atmospheres
and physiognomy are made over the years.
23 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 237.

24 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 156.
25 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 34.
4 Macaronically speaking
Manuela Antoniu
THE SETTING: Anteroom of Pope Eugenius IV, Florence, 1435.

THE DEBATE: La questione de la lingua, the language issue: should a return to
Latin be favored, or should the language of intellectual communication in the
Quattrocento be the vernacular?
THE PLAYERS: Humanists Lorenzo Valla, defender of correct Latin usage,
admirer of Quintilian, inspiration to Erasmus and no stranger to dispute, spar
ring with one Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, discoverer of ancient
manuscripts, yet less concerned with philological rigor.
ROOM TEMPERATURE: Hot, verging on explosively incandescent.
MEDIUM OF EXPRESSION: Verbal fisticuffs.
In the exchange of invectives between the two great men, Valla accused Poggio
Bracciolini of speaking Latin worse than his cook.1 Valla’s comparison alluded to
the incorrect Latin proliferating at the time (the barbarolexis of the ignoranti), but
the analogy spread into the next century, yielding the notion of “kitchen Latin.” The
comic potential of an exalted language descended to and spoken in the kitchen not
only had a liberating effect on Latin, but also spawned linguistic experiments that
privileged a relationship with the edible.2
Macaronic matters
From the Latin of the classical authors being given a trivial application was born
the ars macaronica. Arising at a time when humanist creativity was waning for too
strict an adherence to the classical model, macaronic Latin deliberately transposed
the latter’s loftiness into the realm of the body, with its functions and apertures. But
what started as a jocular debasement soon developed into a literary form of high
attainment. For, unlike kitchen Latin, which superficially Latinized the vernacular (by
basting Latin words and endings onto the local language), macaronic Latin required
a superlative knowledge of classical Latin’s phrasing, morphology, and (in poetry)
meter, in order to impose them, with a twist, on the volgare. A “non-Latin Latin,”
an example of Latinus grossus, exploiting the etymological proximity between Latin
1 Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots : Banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Mayenne:
Librairie José Corti, 1987), 172; Cecil Grayson, Dizionario bibliografico degli Italiani (Roma: Società
Grafica Romana, 1960), 704.
2 Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 194.
Macaronically speaking 39
and Italian, macaronic Latin poured the former into the mold of the latter while also
using words common to both languages, yet perverting them semantically, to comic
effect.3 The “macaronic” (meaning “coarse,” “unrefined”) treatment of language thus
proved an inexhaustible source of neologisms, injecting new vitality into Latin and
transforming it from a fixed-form language into an infinitely expansible one.4 The
virtuosity of macaronic Latin was to have lifted classical Latin out of its medieval
decay by mirroring that decay (that is, by affecting the barbarolexis of the illiterates).
From intellectual Padua hailed the poet Tifi degli Odasi, author of the Macaronea
(c. 1490) and acknowledged precursor to the most celebrated macaronic writer,
Teofilo Folengo. The erudite Folengo was also literary heir to Luigi Pulci who, with
his Morgante (published in Florence c. 1482), was the first to satirize chivalric litera
ture by bringing to the genre a macaronic inventiveness.5 With both degli Odasi and
Pulci as forerunners, Folengo reinscribed “inspiration”, giving a phagic, comic twist
to the topos of the nourishing Muse by transposing the chivalric exploits of the hero,
the eponymous Baldus, into a surreally edible world.
Folengo’s Baldus
Folengo’s virtuosic work in macaronic Latin, the Baldus, was a versified mock-
chivalric adventure set in 17 canti.6 In the voice of the narrating poet, the canti extol
the feats of Baldus, illegitimate grandchild of Charlemagne. Unaware of his lineage,
Baldus roams the earth by turns generating and extricating himself from all manner
of danger associated with canonic chivalry. Owing to its popularity, Folengo’s Baldus
was reprinted in quick succession throughout the Cinquecento, one of its first editions
showcasing, in its frontispiece, the small intaglio reproduced here (Figure 4.1). Let us
look at this image in some detail.
Surprisingly, the woodcut illustrates none of Baldus’s adventures, as might have
been expected of the sole image fronting a lengthy poem on chivalry. Instead, it is a
mise en abyme that, being placed at the beginning of the poem, reflects back upon the
process of creation that had generated the poem.
Folengo starts by declaiming that, before he can recount the exploits of Baldus, he
needs the support of the Muses, whose help he invokes. The form this support should
take is disclosed in verse 15 and distilled in the intaglio: “imboccare suum veniant
macarone poëtam,” or, “O, Muses, come and spoon-feed your poet some gnocchi”
(in northern Italy, gnocchi were called macaroni).7
3 Ugo Enrico Paoli, Il Latino Maccheronico (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1959), 12–14. Paoli shows that
Latinus grossus is macaronic not only because it is grossus but because it is Latinus: in classical Latin,
“Latin” as designating the language cannot be a noun (Latina lingua or Latinitas would be used
instead), and even if it were possible to use a noun, it should be in the neutral (Latinum) and not in the
masculine (Latinus).
4 Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots, 195, 202.
5 Pulci’s work influenced Rabelais (for Panurge), Goethe (for Mephistopheles), Cervantes, and Byron (for
Don Juan), who translated the Morgante into English. See Luigi Pulci, Morgante. The Epic Adventures
of Orlando and his Giant Friend Morgante, edited by Edoardo A. Lèbano, translated by Joseph Tusiani
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), xi–xxv.
6 The Baldus was first published in January 1517, in a volume of prose and verse entitled Liber
macaronices.
7 Paoli, Il Latino, 3–6; Luigi Messedaglia, “Vita e costume della Rinascenza in Merlin Cocai,” in
Medioevo e umanesimo (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1974), 431, 433.
40 Manuela Antoniu
Figure 4.1 Teofilo Folengo Baldus (Mantua, c. 1510). Frontispiece showing Merlin Cocai
being fed gnocchi by the Muses.
© The British Library Board, 1070.g.8 (frontispiece)
In the opening stanzas we also meet the Muses. Although beyond reach, the poet
has had privileged access to their abode, a mountain so high as to make Olympus
look like a mere hill.8 This über-Olympus is, however, made entirely of cheese.9 The
scene is set for the remainder of the landscape to be described as copiously edible:
rivers of broth, lakes of soup, and oceans of stew are all navigated by boats made of
pastry, embarked upon which the Muses, fish out quantities of gnocchi and succulent
meats. The Muses are not only apt fisherwomen, but also prodigious eaters. We learn
that, although they inhabit the peak of the mountain, they are constantly putting its
substance to edible use as grated cheese for their pasta dishes. With all this frenetic
consumption of hearty food, the Muses aspire to become, so Folengo assures us, as
big-bellied as barrels.10 When cooking, they produce gnocchi of comparable size. The
poet, in mock lament, invites us to imagine how wide one’s jaws must open in order
8 Canto I, 22, 23.

9 I, 28, 29.
10 I, 51. See Carlo Cordié, ed., Opere di Teofilo Folengo. La letteratura Italiana. Storia e testi, vol. 26,
part I (Milan: Ricciardi, 1977), 75.
11
to ingest one such gnocco. To keep the topographical description short, concludes
Folengo, this is the place where he fished out his macaronic art and where the Muses
made him their pot-bellied bard.12
The image of the versifier, the “pancificum poëtam,” whose main attribute is an
expansive midriff (literally, a paunch), takes us back to the beginning of the poem.
There we find that he shares this feature with the Muses, whom he calls his equally
“pancificae” sisters.13 In keeping with the ethos of macaronic Latin, this kinship is a
nod to classical poetry, specifically to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the Muses are
called the poet’s sisters (sorores, in non-macaronic Latin).14 But also true to maca
ronic form and consistent with the hyperrealism of the macaronic world, here the
“sisters” are the morphological antithesis of their classical counterparts, whose ideal
beauty has now changed from noun to verb: a progressive centrifugation of fleshy
layers and adipose tissues accruing as “pancific” excess.
Folengo implies that such corporeal surfeit (clearly absent in the classical Muses)
is congruous with his Muses’ superior inspirational capabilities. And what better
measure of this superiority, he asks, than his own girth, a direct equivalent for his
poetic creativity? Roughly translated, “When I think of the potbelliness of my stom
ach (panza), the cacophony of Parnassus is no match for my bagpipe (piva).”15 Here
we have a causal relation and a comparison. He compares a musical instrument in his
possession to some diffuse noise issuing from Parnassus. But are we to assume that
Folengo implies the sound produced by the bagpipe? If so, the comparison would
hold (being drawn between two elements of the same genus), but the causality would
be problematic: what direct connection could there be between the size of the poet’s
stomach and a contest of sounds? If, however, the bagpipe is referenced not as instru
ment but only descriptively (that is, not as a sound-producing object but for other
characteristics), then, while the comparison is destabilized (hovering now between
elements belonging to disparate categories) the causality becomes more intelligible.
To find out how that might be, let us return to the image [Figure 4.1].
There, we find that “Mer C,” short for Merlin Cocai (Folengo’s alias), is resisting
being force-fed by the Muse. Two aspects of his bodily habitus help support this view.
First, his facial expression, with raised eyebrows and mouth puckered, is emphati
cally not receptive to what is proffered by the alimenting Muse. Secondly, his torso is
backward leaning, a defensive posture for somebody who is seated.
Yet he manages to balance himself by holding onto the edge of the bowl and grab
bing hold of one gnocco—a way of reinforcing the notion that gnocchi are grossus
alimentum indeed. However, by reaching for one gnocco while simultaneously resist
ing another, what is Merlin actually doing?
Would he rather feed himself? Or does he mean to retaliate by visiting the same
aggression on Zana? Symmetry with the other Muse seems more immediate, however.
Forcing air out through her mouth, Togna plays the bagpipe (la piva).
This object is allusive of an empty stomach, being a leathery cavity whose volume is
constantly redefined by the transit of nothing more substantial than air. Air stands in
11 I, 52, 53.
12 I, 62, 63.
13 I, 13, 14.
14 See Paoli, Il Latino, 96.
15 I, 11, 12; Cordié, Opere di Teofilo Folengo, 71–2.
42 Manuela Antoniu
emphatic opposition to the substantial gnocchi that threaten to fill Folengo’s stomach.
Thus, it is not inadvertent that, in the image, the receptacle filled with gnocchi and the
receptacle filled with air are perspectivally juxtaposed as foreground and background.
Additionally, Merlin’s paunch is as roundly contoured as the bagpipe. This shared
morphology suggests—while Merlin still staves off ingesting the first gnocco—that
they are both full to the brim with air. Although, in morphological terms, this is a
repetitive configuration for the bagpipe, for Merlin it is the solidified memory of prior
fillings with substance, which have left their progressive mark in a distended stomach
cushioned in fat.
The aspect of roundness of a well-padded belly has noteworthy antecedents. In De
humani corporis fabrica,16 Vesalius joins Galen in his praise of the spherical form
displayed by certain bodily organs, such as the human head, heart, stomach, intestines
and female breasts. Vesalius mentions the ideality of the spherical form frequently
throughout the Fabrica, echoing related passages from two of his reference texts:
Plato’s Timaeus and Cicero’s De natura deorum II.17 At times Vesalius refers directly
to the Timaeus, whose physiological passages he knows well. One such passage is the
source of his comment that, thanks to the fabrica of the intestine, we need not eat
as often as we breathe, and therefore can dedicate ourselves to philosophy and the
Muses.18 Here is Vesalius’s reference in the Timaeus, 72d–73a:
[The gods] knew how intemperate we would be in the matter of food and drink,
and that gluttony would result in our using far more than the moderate or nec
essary amount. Hence, lest sudden destruction should occur through disease,
and the mortal race thus becoming imperfect should swiftly cease to exist, they
appointed the so-called lower belly as a receptacle to hold the superfluous food
and drink, and wound the bowels round in coils therein. This was to prevent the
nourishment passing through so rapidly as to force the body to crave replenish
ment equally rapidly and, thus making it insatiable, render all mankind, through
gluttony, bereft of philosophy and the Muses, and unobedient to the most divine
part of our nature.19
Before we return to Folengo and his Muses in light of this passage, we need to clarify
that what Plato denotes here as the “lower belly” is the abdomen, having just previ
ously talked about its counterpart above the diaphragm, the “upper belly” or thorax.
In the image of Folengo and his two Muses, upper and lower bellies figure promi
nently, if covertly. Indeed, the only immediately recognizable “lower belly” is that of
Merlin. But he is seated on a barrel, which (as we have seen) is the shape he used in
order to describe the Muses’ bellies, a shape tending toward the spherical. As a mark
of family resemblance, the barrel-shaped belly brings added credibility to Folengo’s
calling the Muses his siblings.
16 The best-known treatise in the history of Western medicine (published at Basel in 1543), Vesalius’s opus
represented a radical break from previous approaches to human anatomy, all of which had followed the
tradition established by Aristotle and Galen.
17 Jackie Pigeaud, “Formes et normes dans le De fabrica de Vésale” in Le Corps à la Renaissance. Actes
du XXXe Colloque de Tours 1987 (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), 411, 420.
18 Vesalius, Fabrica, as quoted in Pigeaud, “Formes et normes,” 409.
19 This combines the French translation in Pigeaud (409) with the English translations of Thomas Taylor
(Washington, DC: Bollingen, 1952) and John Warrington (London: J.M. Dent, 1965).
But there is one more sign of somatic kinship here between brother and sisters. If,
according to the Timaeus, the human intestines were devised to induce temperance
by prolonging the sensation of satiety, then the corollary would hold that someone
insatiable—as we have seen the Muses to be in their edible Olympus—is consequently
devoid of intestines. In other words, to be insatiable is to be someone whose “lower
belly” has been vacated of its organs and is now an empty cavity.
Again, the only immediately recognizable empty cavity in the image is that of the
piva. We can now refine the earlier suggestion, that Merlin’s lower belly might also
be empty for as long as he can sustain his indecision about partaking of the gnoc
chi. Merlin’s credentials as a formidable eater had been established and reconfirmed
throughout the opening stanzas of the Baldus: he is calling on the Muses to feed him
“five or eight” bowlfuls of gnocchi; his arbiter for poetic production is not Parnassus
but the “panza” of his “ventralia”; finally, he is the Muses’ “pancificum poëtam.”20
Since he is as “pancific” as his “pancificae” sisters, who are undisputedly insatiable, it
follows that, according to the Timaean equation, Merlin’s lower belly is also empty.
Or rather, it is bursting with emptiness, just as the emptiness of the piva is signaled
precisely by its being filled with air.
But regardless of whether Merlin’s abdomen is filled with air instead of intestines as
a result of voracity or vacillation on his part, its consequent condition is that which is
typical of the upper belly, of the thorax. This functional conflation of the lower with
the upper belly, both filled with air, implicitly describes Merlin in Vesalius’s terms:
someone who needs to eat as often as he breathes. The piva, then, stands not only for
his stomach but also for his lungs. This double semiotic status is signaled in the image,
where the only two mouths engaged in visible muscular activity are associated with
food (Merlin’s) and with breath (Togna’s). Therefore, just as we have seen the barrel
to be an externalized lower belly, so can we consider the bagpipe to be an external
ized upper belly. Held tightly against the chest as if to identify with it all the more, its
“emptiness” occurs in a strict relation of inverse proportionality to the emptying out
of the upper belly.
This pneumatic economy together with the proposition of outward projection
leads us to examine the ways in which Folengo references artistic inspiration. It is
not simply the gnocchi with which he demands to be fed, and the externalization of
“inspiration” is not only effected through such objectification. The presence of the
Muses allows us to also think of externalization through personification.
As we have seen, the poem starts with an invocation for help, which presupposes
a certain degree of helplessness (whether feigned or actual) on the part of the poet,
were he to be left unaided.21 This helplessness is heralded by the verb Folengo uses
for his entreaty: imboccare, which literally means to spoon-feed, to feed someone
who otherwise would be incapable of taking food. The diminution of (adult) capa
bilities that Folengo insinuates is actually explicit in a seventeenth-century transla
tion into French of the Baldus, whose title announces a telling filiation: Histoire
20 I, 16; I, 11; I, 63, respectively.
21 Folengo avails himself of the classical formula used by poets after Hesiod, giving it a macaronic twist.
At the beginning of Theogony, Hesiod tells of the Muses’ gift of knowledge to him. Later poets would
echo this motif in describing how they were inspired to compose poetry. See The Concise Oxford
Companion to Classical Literature, edited by M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996). Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.
44 Manuela Antoniu
maccaronique de Merlin Cocaie prototype de Rabelais (1606).22 In it, Folengo is

calling himself an infant (nourrisson) when invoking the Muses’ input.23 Yet, as the
poet vaunts a similar corpulence to that of the Muses, the latter could be his idealized
gargantuan image, his “pancific” alter egos. Hence the poet doubles himself, through
projection, by posing first as infant, then as Muse. Thus, using scale manipula
tion he postures both as phagic recipient (through miniaturization) and as phagic
donor (through magnification). The poet himself feeds the poet “inspiration;” and he
achieves to convey the internal process of becoming inspired by pure externalization.
But personification is only one way in which Folengo externalizes “inspiration.”
There remain the gnocchi.
Through its mise en abyme in the title page, the culinary eponym of macaronic
writing begets a double semiotic. Indeed, by appearing at the very beginning of a com
pleted poem, the gnocchi signify both inspiration and its result. As artistic production
is generally ulterior to inspiration, the poem would clearly need to exist before it
could be considered, retrospectively, “inspired.” Therefore, if we accept that Folengo
(as Zana) is actually feeding himself, what he contemplates ingesting in the object of
a gnocco is not only “inspiration” but also something he will have to have put out of
himself.24 If this evokes an image of the poet engaged in (proleptic) coprophagia, the
allusion is not out of place. Consistent with macaronic usage, scatological references
abound in the Baldus. For instance, the measure of the protagonist’s chivalric exploits
is given by how an anthropomorphic hell reacts to him in fear: by shitting its pants.25
Furthermore, as the dialectic of upper and lower bellies is mirrored in the respective
notions of inspiration and expiration, the latter can signify not only an expiratory
effort (such as that necessary for playing the piva), but any emission of wind, hence
carrying a carminative connotation. This would be fully within the (in)digestive logic
of vast quantities of food being consumed.
It would also point to a further identification of Folengo with Togna, the musical
Muse, and therefore to a subtle conflation of she and Zana, the alimentative Muse.
In the shape of the oversized gnocco assailing Merlin’s mouth, “inspiration” could
be an equally nourishing and gagging offering. The latter attribute would imply sup
pressing any means of expression through language. Therefore the aliment could feed
the artist’s métier just as easily as it could stifle it. Merlin’s hesitancy thus becomes
more comprehensible, especially as the locus of this transition is contained within his
own body. In the pharynx, that innermost organic overlap between the digestive and
respiratory systems, lower and upper bellies are confounded, feeding and breathing
intersect, Zana and Togna merge in a fulcrum where “inspiration” hovers between
pneuma and digesta.
We have seen how Folengo splits “inspiration” into both a phagic object and the
simultaneous activity of feeding that object to himself. Yet we have also seen how
he personifies inspiration in the generic figure of a Muse who is well endowed with
22 Cordié, Opere di Teofilo Folengo, xiii; Messedaglia, “Vita e costume della Rinascenza,” 551.
23 Reprint by G. Brunet, ed. (Paris: Delahays, 1859), 5.
24 In architectural terms, we could say that he is feeding himself both the blueprint (drawing) and the
footprint (construction) of artistic imagination. Keeping things internally macaronic, this fabulation is a
con: a footnote (to Marco’s musings on res macaronica) without a foothold (I had not read them before
writing this).
25 I, 4.
bodily mass. In fact, she is endowed with a corporeality that is perpetually augment
ing; and, in this, the lexical process mentioned at the beginning is directly mirrored.
For macaronism made elastic use of Latin by virtually expanding its lexis ad infini
tum—a fattening of the language with neologisms whose source was inexhaustible.
The insatiability of a mise en abyme?
5 Il Mantecato
An architectural course served at the
Frascaridonosor’s Tavern of Crossed Destinies
Franco Pisani
There is no deeper pleasure than thought and it is to thought that I often deliver
myself over.
To be included here, writing and sharing my thoughts with this banquet of storytell
ers, makes me feel like one of the mute characters sitting at the table of Calvino’s
Tavern of Crossed Destinies.
XII—Le Pendu (The Hanged Man/The Traitor)

I feel inappropriate and a bit out of place. I never met the Professor in person, even if
I always wanted to since the first time I heard his name. However, I walked the pages
of his books, fought monsters, resisted two tailed sirens and stepped many times into
his stories told by friends and disciples. But I’m having hard time finding my voice. As
tarot cards helped Calvino’s actors to recall their tales, I will use the figures that, one
after the other, populate my memory to tell the story.
XVI—La Maison de Dieu (The House of God/The Tower/Fire)

I cannot help but see Venice as the backdrop of action. When I think of Venice, I think
of its duality; of being hybrid and proud at the same time and, of course, of its water,
inexorably mirroring life.
II—La Papesse (The High Priestess/The Popess)

I think about Carlo Scarpa respecting that water at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia
as it floods.
V—Le Pape (The Hierophant/The Pope)

I recall the motto, verum ipsum factum, from which an incredible crucible of talents
was nourished under the guidance of Giuseppe Samonà at the Istituto Universitario
di Architettura di Venezia—where it was possible to stumble upon Manfredo Tafuri
in a cloud of smoke.
Il Mantecato 47
IIII—L’Empereur (The Emperor)

And where Arrigo Rudi used to sketch the Professor as Frascaridonosor while giving
desk crits to students with a freshly printed copy of Architecture: essay sur l’art by
Étienne-Louis Boullée, edited by a young Aldo Rossi. And, speaking of Aldo Rossi, it
was possible to eat bigoli al saor with him and Carlo Aymonino while talking about
il Gallaratese. I can only dream (unfortunately) of other mythological dinners at the
Trattoria del Gaffaro, where food, drawings, and thoughts continuously blend into
one other.
Unnumbered—Le Fou (The Fool)

And the “Etrusco”, as Carlo Scarpa himself used to call my thesis professor Giancarlo
Leoncilli Massi, was there as well. Less flatteringly, his students used to called him il
matto, or the fool. He was always telling stories about useless things like figures and
composition. Composition, what a gorgeous folly. I remember my 6H pencils, used as
blades on Shollers Hammer paper to study and figure things out. I recall the unrelent
ing necessity of décor.
III—L’Emperatrice (The Empress)
I envision the layers used by Palladio to compose the facades of il Redentore and San
Giorgio Maggiore. I remember my first Biennale dell’Architettura in 1991, where as a
student I felt the freezing wind by the Riva dei Giardini di Castello, where, ten years
before, I imagined the unforgettable silhouette of Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo mixed
with the Punta della Dogana.
XVII—L’Etoile (The Star); XX—Le Iugement (Judgement/The Angel)

I, then, find myself walking aimlessly around the Rialto fish market where I imagine
stumbling upon Pietro Querini, the Venetian merchant shipwrecked near the Lofoten
islands in 1432 who returned with a cargo of stick-shaped dried fishes. Baccalà came
from the stars in the skies of the remote north.
XX—Le Iugement (Judgement/The Angel)

I end up finding in the channels and calli of Venice its highest expression, as suggested
by the sybarites, in a dish called il Mantecato.
I arrive now at the ineffable core of my tale. The tavern’s menu suggests Mantecato
for today.
XVIII—La Lune (The Moon)

Fished at night, when, attracted by the moon, it reaches the surface of the ocean. The
bacalà is an artificial fish, arte facto, the result of a collaboration between man and
the elements and is pure reified memory free from nostalgia. Eviscerated and open like
a book, embalmed in sea salt or dried by the wind of the north, a bacalà is the smelly
Figure 5.1 The first eleven Major Arcana (2015).
© Franco Pisani
Il Mantecato 49
mummy of what was an ugly fish, named Gadus Morhua, a big cod which usually
swims in the cold waters of the northern Atlantic ocean.
XXI—Le Monde (The World)

Bacalà is a metaphor for the human condition of world-making.
VI—L’Amoreux (The Lovers)

And il Mantecato is a metaphor of the sublime expression of love for life, which
should be embodied by architecture too. The mummified fish returns back to life
through rehydration, and what was once living becomes a spiritual reservoir of itself;
it starts a third life as soaked meat with a flavor and a texture definitely altered by
man, correcting the draft of the gods.
XIIII—L’Emperance (Temperance)
To prepare il Mantecato is not an easy matter, it is a composition rite. After a short
period in boiling water, the reborn fish must be skinned and carefully boned. Then the
meat is chopped up into flakes and battered with a wooden spoon, gradually adding
a light and fruity one olive oil; the Ligurian is perfect. In a bowl previously rubbed
with garlic, it will start to “mount” as an eggnog, forming a light foam, a landscape
of white and creamy sauce. Finally a pinch of salt and pepper will temper the flavor,
chasing concinnitas.
It is then that, with my eyes closed, and the help of a little slice of toasted polenta,
I praise the inventors of this ointment.
VIII—Iustice (Justice)
It was not the work of a single man or a unique culture that invented such a prodi
gious dish. Like a city, it takes more than one person, or pencil. It is the result of a
never-ending series of little variations from chef to chef, from mother to son, in the
continuous search for its best expression. With my tongue I squeeze my gums and
caress my mouth’s cavities, so the taste buds might retrieve all the shadows of pleasure.
I love rituals. To prepare bacalà, for example, you must buy it in advance; it
should be desalted, hammered, soaked, drained. In short, you have to think about
it, and this is what I like: to hide thoughts in things, projects, or meals.
XI—Force (Strength/Fortitude)
Gastronomy and architecture are sisters in sublimating the basic needs of food and
protection in which humans compete with nature. Both defy the natural course
of events—correcting, diverting, and sometimes destroying. Both are alibis for and
redemption from abuses of nature. Both redeem barbarism by portraying imagery
of beauty and harmony. Both deal with health and living well. Both are synesthetic
experiences.
Figure 5.2 The second eleven Major Arcana (2015).
© Franco Pisani
Il Mantecato 51
X—La Roue de la Fortune (Wheel of Fortune)

The sublimation takes place in the brain, where memory, reality and desire continu
ously meet: past, present and future. Some call it a recipe; some may call it design.
I prefer to speak of composition: a difficult word, outdated, and maybe useless, but
magical and magnificent. Mantecare is an Italian word, with no equivalent in English.
It comes from manteca, the Spanish word for butter and is the act of inducing a fat to
give smooth texture and flavor to a mixture.
XVIIII—Le Soleil (The Sun)

Proceeding in parallel, we can think of composition as the oily part, able to amalgam
ate differences, to give them a new identity, a new meaning. Oil, added carefully,
celebrates the roughness of materials, combining them with the human aspiration to
transcend.
XIII—La Mort (Death)
But which water will be able to rehydrate the shriveled and smelly body of architec
ture? How long will it take to soak and purify it from the salt of formal excesses? Who
will wake up figures, reigniting the engine of variation?
I—Le Bateleur (The Magician/The Juggler)

Perhaps architectural education is that water; the amniotic fluid, made of students and
teachers which is called studio culture. That powerful mix of speculation and making
has the potential to give a new lift to the language of space which is buried deep,
exactly like the “fishiness” inside the baccalà. Only education will be able to give new
contemporary meanings to old words, without nostalgia.
XV—Le Diable (The Devil)

Some assert that you can learn architecture but you can’t teach architecture. This
sounds like a justification for irresponsible teachers, and I disagree—even if there is
something true about it. Architecture is a discipline with a feeble scientific constitu
tion. It consists of acts of faith, rituals, and illuminations, more than reassuring and
unequivocal formulas. You can teach architecture, even if it is very difficult, because,
as Le Corbusier states, “l’espace c’est indicible.”
VII—Le Chariot (The Chariot)

Working with space is building tangible stories around intangible figures, and the
design studio is the place where you can train and discover this skill. I do not know
how to teach someone how to find an idea; rather, I feel a duty to set up conditions
for architecture to happen. Storytelling as well as figurative speculations are ways
related to the verb “educate”: ex-ducere, to drive out something hidden or simply
unexpressed, in the way that fairytales are told to babies.
52 Franco Pisani
VIIII—L’Eremite (The Hermit)

Or perhaps it is a bit like the hermit, with his lantern always on, bringing light in the
darkness of ignorance. Like him, educators must re-learn the art of storytelling, to
prepare with labor and passion the fertile soil for the re-sprouting of meaningful space
in the conformist babel.
Because of tradition or maybe because of gluttony, whenever possible, on Fridays

I prepare baccalà.
Part II
6 Buildings remember
David Leatherbarrow
Places remember events. James Joyce listed this phrase, together with the term “topi
cal history,” among his guiding premises for Ulysses.1 Both expressions make the
same point: places are one of the means by which the past keeps itself present [Plate
17]. Joyce’s reputation aside, the suggestion that places remember seems strange. We
tend to believe that people have memories, maybe animals too, not houses, gardens,
or streets. More specifically—I mean epistemologically—we believe that memories
are located in the brain, like goods in a mental warehouse or entries in a cognitive
chamber, sensory impressions having taken up lodgings there after the travels of
perceptual experience. To think otherwise means breaking with a long tradition of
theorizing about perception. In point of fact, such a break did occur in twentieth-
century thought; specifically in continental philosophy, at more or less the same time
as Joyce’s Ulysses. But old assumptions still have force in what we take to be common
sense.
Joyce’s thesis runs against the grain of common sense because it de-centers the
action of memory by placing recollection in locations, things, and the human body,
its movements and involvements. This de-centering and relocation requires us to
reconsider both reflection and representation. In architecture, it means focusing not
on stories about but by buildings. For that to be done a basic premise must be
accepted: that the plans of buildings are like the plots of stories. This equivalence was
well expressed in the seventeenth century by the poet and playwright Ben Jonson in
Explorata: “If a man were to build a house, he would first appoint a place to build
it in, which he would define with certain bounds, so in the construction of a poem,
the action is aym’d at by the poet which answers place in a building; and action hath
its largeness, compass and proportion.”2 Here then is my thesis: poetic plots obtain
durable dimensions in architectural plans.
The stories buildings tell have both historical and fictional dimensions, variously
proportioned according to type—temples, for example, more fiction, houses more
history. This coupling becomes clear when the matter of plot coherence is considered.
1 See Eric Bulson, “Joyce’s Geodesy,” Journal of Modern Literature XXV, no. 2 (Winter 2001–2002):
91. The passage can be found in Phillip Herring, ed., Joyce’s Ulysses Note sheets in the British Museum
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 119. The editor suggests that Joyce made use of
this idea in the following line from the novel: “Coming events cast their shadows before.” For com
mentary on the “Places and events” passage in the Note sheets see also Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History,
Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 151, and Edward Casey, Getting Back into
Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 277.
2 Ben Jonson, Explorata: or Discoveries [1641], lines 3322–3330 (London: Penguin, 1975), 454.
56 David Leatherbarrow
The ensemble of events that constitutes the subject matter of an architectural plan
must have organization and structure. What gives a good story its unity, a bad one
its incoherence? Aristotle defined plots lacking coherence as episodic; a layout of
incidents whose association and arrangement is improbable or unintelligible. “I call
episodic a plot in which the episodes follow one another in no probable or inevitable
sequence.”3 Episodes are not bad, without them drama becomes boring; faulty is an
arrangement that has no order of likelihood or sense; hence a key opposition: one
event after another versus one event because of another. One event after another is
improbable because the world is not only a matter of chance, even if some things seem
to happen for no reason. Episodic configurations are unsuccessful as drama because
they fail to resemble life—the lives we would like to live—hence the temple fiction:
it’s a place where we behave like saints, even though we’re sinners. Plot structure
depends on the order of action, which in turn depends on connections internal to a
story’s unfolding, often a pattern of contrasts; one incident in response to another.
This is not a sequence of events that occurred in fact, for poetry concerns the possible
not the actual; it narrates events each of us may experience for ourselves, also the
decisions those occurrences might require; it concerns, finally, the sorts of stories that
Aristotle calls poetic universals, in which, he says, we take delight, because we always
experience pleasure in learning about ourselves.
The whole problem of plot and plan invention is this: fabricating a configuration
that allows the intelligible to arise from the accidental. Poetic composition in drama
and architecture depends on disjunctive events; it is not a model of perfect or seam
less concordance but of what Paul Ricoeur called concordant discordance, as if there
were reason in chance, an example of which would be a just reward.4 The unity that
exists in a memorable ensemble is one built out of surprising events and discordant
sequences. In spatial terms this allows improbable conjunctions or juxtapositions, as
well as repetitions. The real trick of inventing a compelling mythos is to begin with
disjunctive events and discover through unexpected reversals their possible coherence.
What would be the source of these disjunctions? None other than events that
were unforeseen, unfoldings that seem to have occurred for no reason at all, not
arbitrarily but contrary to what had been planned for in a script or an enclosure.
Their source is often external to the localized structure; intrusive, one can say, like an
unwelcome visitor; or improbable, like a springtime snow, or even crushing, like the
premature death of a very dear friend. Architecture’s provisions anticipate and invite
the enactment of cultural norms, now as then we will assemble in rows in front of
the stage. Sometimes, though, events occur—who knows why—that take no account
of expectations, events that force their way into well-structured arrangements and
their sequences, requiring of design composition, and indeed of life, adjustments and
realignments. Creative projects perform just these sorts of realignments. When legible
they narrate wonderful stories. In what follows I will consider two examples, one
interior and one exterior plot.
The central scene of Nicolas Maes’ 1657 oil painting Eavesdropper is polarized
between two situations: first, on the upper floor, in the middle distance, is a dinner
scene (a small group around refilled wine glasses); second, on the lower floor, again
3 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b 33–35 (New York: Random House, 1941), 1464.
4 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42ff.

Buildings remember 57
in the middle distance, a little closer to the foreground, is a tender scene of a different
sort, the embrace of two lovers, of shared intimacy but unequal devotion5 [Plate 18].
While he is wholly dedicated to affection, she is somewhat distracted, although pos
sibly pregnant. Perhaps she is thinking of the work she should be doing; or maybe
she’s heard someone on the landing, the person who occupies the center of the several
scenes and the foreground. Although unexpected, this third or middle position is
beautifully integrative: the fact of the girl’s descent—glass in hand—ties her to the
dining scene above, but her gesture of silence indicates her orientation toward the love
scene below. Yet, her eyes and smile are directed toward us—as if we are the ones to
whom she is gesturing, like an actor on stage. But only we see; she merely listens. The
raised finger: does it urge our silence, ask us to take note, or is it a sign of admoni
tion? Probably all three. Maes has several pages of sketches of this gesture, testing its
indications. Other studies used the open hand the way a lawyer would when offering
evidence that speaks for itself. In our picture, the wry smile assumes the girl’s guilt is
at once self-evident and amusing.
How about the margins of this little drama? In the foreground right hangs a world
map, below it, draped over a chair, are a gentleman’s street clothes and sword.
Another coat hangs from the door on the left, below it the sort of lamp one would
use outdoors. Thus, emblems of the street on each side frame the central scenes. One
plane deeper in the space, a double archway serves the same enclosing and bi-focal
purpose. Splitting the double is a significant vertical, a thin pilaster that not only
divides the arches but also supports a bust labeled Juno, believed at the time to preside
over home and marriage. In this instance the goddess looks aside, rather ambivalently
I think. The coat and sword are obviously male, from elsewhere (hence the map), and
quite probably sexual (undressed and phallic). Equally sexual, one supposes, is the
cat stealing the bird on the kitchen counter. The girl’s involvement in the embrace
has meant neglect of her duty—serving the next course. The cat’s paw has its prize,
likewise the man’s hand.
Thanks to its architecture, the painting presents six scenes in one ensemble: a room
through the door to the left, the staircase and corridor, the first floor dining room,
the kitchen to the far right, the lower passage with the lovers, and the garden and
distant house outdoors. Listed this way they stand as unrelated incidents or episodes,
in Aristotle’s terms. But that is like saying a good loaf of bread is nothing more than
flour plus yeast, salt, and water. The staircase, landing, and pilaster around which the
listener twists make the mixture of scenes into a single compound, and the architec
ture of the interior—its levels, distances, apertures, and materials—integrate all the
spatial elements into a story than narrates a moment of crisis. What we see is a house
divided (decorum above, desire below), the conflicts of which cluster around a defin
ing element and moment that jointly attest to the breakdown of social order.
Each of the scenes has key architectural elements: the table that gathers the meal,
the threshold at which the lovers stand, and the step on which the eavesdropper
hesitates. Maes signed the painting on the riser of this dramatic step. In the plans of a
plot each situation is given elements that define it, as well as its right place within the
5 Two texts by Martha Hollander have helped me a great deal in seeing the structure and meanings of this
painting. See: Martha Hollander, “The Divided House of Nicolaes Maes,” Word and Image 10, no. 2
(April–June, 1994): 138–55; and Martha Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
encompassing topography (the levels and distances). Consider the stratification of the
platforms: formal dining is elevated above the seduction scene, which is at the level of
the hungry cat, with the garden lower still.
The externalities that break in on the domestic scene polarize the setting from
foreground to background: the street (and map) from which the visitor has entered
extends all the way back to the garden, which appears through a large window, not
a door, but access beyond is implied in the stair rail to the right. In the far distance
another couple can be seen under a sky whose clouds foreshadow rain. Four arches
in perspective accelerate movement in this direction. The line to the left begins with
the circular mat in front of the first riser and ends in the circular frame on the dining
room wall—something of a dead end, for neither neighboring buildings nor sky make
an appearance, only soft light. The grid of tiny glass panes reinforces the theme of
containment, maybe confinement. And just as there are distinct settings, alternately
discordant and concordant, there are distinct characters, by my count 11: the four
around the table, the two lovers, and the eavesdropper, plus the two in the garden,
the crazy cat, and—above it all—Juno.
An unexpected visitor, a coming storm: the terminal points of the axis running
through the archways on the right express movements outside the compass and sched
ule of the domestic routine, the well-managed protocols of which shuttle between the
circles on the left. At this moment the seasons of natural and the schedules of urban
time are unsynchronized with the internal routines of domestic life, but each plays its
part in the story nevertheless. The listener and the landing bind together situations
and settings that would otherwise be discordant. Plots and plans are reciprocal and
equivalent forms of narration.
Now my second case, one closer to home, historically and geographically.
Like any other building in Philadelphia, the Rodin Museum has its own street
address, 2154 Benjamin Franklin Parkway [Plate 19], but arrival at that spot is
unexpectedly disorienting because little if anything of the building that houses the
collection can be seen from the street; instead, there is a sculpture, The Thinker [Plate
20] together with an oddly-free-standing wall that serves as its backdrop.6 The statue
and its stage stand within rows of majestic sycamore trees that shade the entire length
of the street. Enfielded by green, Rodin’s statue is rather like the artworks found
throughout Fairmount Park, as if its street address did not matter. Were that true,
one would be inclined to assume that the Museum is a pavilion in the park, not an
institution on the street. But that’s not true either, because the geometry of both the
backdrop and the approach conforms to the Parkway’s parallels and perpendiculars,
and therefore the entire town’s urban pattern.
From the very start, the Rodin Museum displays a rather ambiguous engagement
with competing frames of reference—the Park and the town—or perhaps divergent
lines of descent, as though the landscape and cityscape had jointly contributed to its
formation. If spaces of departure and arrival (a street address and front door) can be
seen as contrasting complementarities, then the ambiguity of the first can be seen as
a pretext for the clarity of the second. But again, the most visible sign of the Rodin
Museum on the Parkway is The Thinker. How is it that a work of sculpture can be
seen as the sign of an institution, as a substitute for a building’s façade or front door?
6 A very helpful study of this site and the several projects it includes is: David Brownlee, Building the City
Beautiful (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
Does an architectural work, like a speech, require this sort of indicative prolepsis? If
so, what might this one indicate or foreshadow?
Standing before The Thinker, a more self-absorbed and disengaged figure could
hardly be imagined. Encircled concentration is expressed through crossed limbs, low
ered shoulders, and raised knees, all drawn inward, magnetically, as if the world had
no gravitational pull. “Lost in thought,” he seems completely oblivious to the traffic
and trees. Yet, for all his concentricity, his position and posture play their parts in
the wider circumstances. Castings of Rodin’s great work have been positioned in
front of major museums throughout the world. Cleveland and Tokyo are two of the
several I have seen, another two are in and around Paris: one at the Musée Rodin,
the former Hôtel Brion, not far from les Invalides; and the other in Meudon, on the
outskirts of the city, at the Villa des Brillants, Rodin’s house, studio, and exhibition
hall. Neither of these Parisian locations is the spot the sculptor initially preferred.
His idea was that The Thinker should be placed at the end of Rue Soufflot, facing the
Pantheon with its back to the Luxembourg Palace and Gardens. That siting was not
approved; instead, the statue was erected directly in front of the Pantheon, behind a
fence, facing outward. Because it was said to block ceremonies in front of the votive
monument, the sculpture was moved 16 years later to the gardens of Hôtel Brion.
The siting of the Meudon Thinker reflects Rodin’s desires more precisely: it sits on
the Villa’s front lawn facing the town. And it rests on Rodin’s grave, as well as that
of his wife.
There are several clear differences between the Meudon and Philadelphia Thinkers
but the most obvious is that while in Philadelphia the base is only a plinth, the
Meudon support is a tombstone. Jules Mastbaum, who commissioned the Philadelphia
Museum and paid for building work at the Villa, surely knew of the grave, a fact also
recalled by visitors to the Parkway who have been to the Paris sites. The strain of con
centration is apparent in each Thinker; but in Philadelphia, where the grave is only a
memory, nothing specific attracts his thought. Yet, for all its encircled concentration,
The Thinker is inclined somewhat, downward, or forward, or both.
Everyone who looks at the work sees a figure absorbed in thought, as I have said.
That’s not wrong, but pensive concentration does not prevent the figure’s trunk and
limbs from being somewhat outgoing. These contrary movements cannot be accidental
in a work on which the master of position and gesture worked repeatedly. Although
the body is certainly all-of-a-piece, some of its parts ignore the codes of conduct that
would keep them at home—inclination toward or alignment with the body’s axis of
symmetry. The figure’s top half, for example, turns leftward, against the upright pos
ture proposed by the hips. This crossing has the effect of lowering the right shoulder
and raising the left, breaking their parallel with the waist. The arms complicate mat
ters and indicate even greater non-conformity. The vertical forearm has taken on the
task of a structural column (albeit eccentrically loaded); the other rests horizontally,
as if the knee had interrupted its lazy fall. The base of the chin’s support crosses the
trunk and rests on the left knee. This is not an easy position to adopt, especially for
a body with muscles as developed as these. Strain is required for the cross-over, as is
internal torsion, the result of which is some measure of disequilibrium. En masse and
despite the first impression of inwardness, The Thinker inclines out- and downward,
eccentrically, not exactly toward anyone viewing him but more widely and basically,
toward the ground on which the viewer stands. Considering both the Philadelphia
and Meudon figures, all one can really say about his orientation is that it is more or
less abysmal. If three directions are distinguished, inward, outward, and downward,
only the first indicates a figure absorbed into itself.
The Thinker on the Parkway has a double in the building. Unlike the first, the
second is very hard to see from the street, a little easier from the doorway of the free
standing wall, from which the museum front can be seen fully. At the center of that
front Cret formed a loggia-like hollow to house a full-size casting of Rodin’s Gates of
Hell, the very first such casting, paid for by the same person who funded the museum
and donated it to the city, Mastbaum. The Thinker, first envisaged as a portrait of
Dante, then as “a poet,” always had a central place on the Gates, on the mid-line of
the composition, at the level of the tympanum (rather like Jove in the Maes painting).
Both the open air and enclosed Thinkers incline away from their assigned moorings
(the rock seat and door frame). The inclination of the brow on the Gates is beyond
the tangle of bodies below—but still condemned—toward the shady pool of water at
the center of the sunken garden.
Let me pose my question concerning inclination or orientation more generally.
What magnetic force pulls both Thinkers out of their pensive concentricity? And what
does this counterforce, such that it exists, tell us more generally about the structure of
spatial passage from the Parkway to the museum, its movements, times, and—most
importantly—its narratives?
In mannerist and baroque painting and sculpture the aim of contrapposto or
“counter-positioning” was to use variety to give the sense of movement, for nothing
brings a work to life as much as movement. The important point is that a body’s lean
ings or those of its parts are always toward or away from some attractive or repulsive
figure nearby. This is to say, a figure comes to life, or defines itself, by taking a stand
for or against conditions outside itself. Both axial disequilibrium, which allows the
simultaneous appearance of front and back, and reaching in opposite directions,
are prompted by conditions outside the body. Position and gesture are a response
to these conditions. A figure’s profile indicates the choices it has made in the midst
of the circumstances that surround it. Put differently, freedom finds its foothold in a
context of antithetical surroundings. While The Thinker does not display anything
like the convulsive turnings of mannerist sculpture—not even the triple interests of
The Eavesdropper we considered above—I think it is fair to say that his posture has
comparable engagement with his vicinity, even if nothing specific in his surround
ings is particularly magnetic. In fact, his great success in communicating (the strain
of) thinking depends on the non-targeted character of his slight inclinations and
projections. Non-targeted and slight as it is, The Thinker’s eccentricity is a necessary
counterpart to his inwardness, making the sense of the work and the articulation of
the theme contingent on its milieu, its directions and its pacings.
I have said that the boulevard bronze sits on a stage that is backed up by a free
standing wall. Here again, we face a figure that is far from simple. Like The Thinker
it has a double, in this case a wall Rodin constructed in Meudon between 1907
and 1910. That wall, in turn, was a relocated and rebuilt fragment of the Château
d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, first constructed at the end of the seventeenth century for the
Conde family. The Château was largely burned during the Commune in 1871. Rodin
purchased the ruins in 1905 intending to remake the building as a place where he
could house and exhibit his works. When that plan proved to be unrealistic, he had
the ruined façade taken down and rebuilt at his Villa. In Philadelphia the same façade
was reproduced, positioned as it was in Meudon behind The Thinker, but without
a studio behind the wall, free-standing, rather like the statue without the grave. The
more abstract result indicates a concern for shapes more than stones, an image rather
than a relic.
To what degree is significance in architecture determined by the presence of recog
nizable elements? The installation and display of spolia in buildings is hardly new. It
was commonplace in remote antiquity, even more so in the renaissance. But spoils
were always understood in two ways: plunder taken from an enemy in war, increasing
their value; and goods that have been spoiled, the value of which is diminished by the
very act of seizure. Is this fragment the former or the latter sort of thing, the spolia
of a wealthy connoisseur? Or does this image, which is not a relic, have another role
on the Parkway and the museum, the role of a mnemonic device? According to this
premise, buildings speak to us of their past, which can also be, for some of us, our
past. We recall—perhaps it is better to say we are presented with—the memories they
express, variously discerned by each of us according to our capacity for recognition
and imagination. Apart from this, the stones and spaces patiently wait. Waiting and
remembering: that’s what buildings do so very well.
In the open expanse of the Parkway landscape the d’Issy facade looks like a garden
ruin, at least from a distance. Once the wall’s base platform is seen closely that first
impression loses strength, because the wall has been well maintained. In ruins the
boundary between stone and soil dissolves. Resistance, a foundation wall’s chief
purpose, is overcome by nature exercising its ancient claim over materials once taken
from it. Nothing like that is apparent in this case. The façade sits on a level platform,
above The Thinker, its pedestal, and the sidewalk stage, as sharply defined in fact as
it once was on Paul Cret’s drawing board. Its position and geometry give it an impor
tant role in the entry sequence, parallel to the lines of the Parkway, framing the line of
approach, mediating the distance between the sidewalk and the museum. But while it
is plainly congruent with the Parkway, it also indicates attachment to the garden and
museum beyond [Plate 21].
Two sets of steps raise the wall’s deck above the level of The Thinker’s platform.
Yet the façade’s ground plane is still below the museum’s entry level seen in the
distance. At the same time, the free façade’s base is approximately coplanar with the
basin below the fountain at the end of the pool. This alignment cannot be seen until
the threshold is crossed because the fountain and pool have been set within a sunken
garden. Earlier, I called the threshold in which the Gates of Hell sits “loggia-like.”
This distant recess complements the prominent portico of the d’Issy façade: the loggia
withdraws inward, like an upstairs room, the portico projects outward, like a garden
view. The facades are also distinct. Unlike the enclosing three-dimensionality of the
museum front, the d’Issy wall is flat, one-sided, and “open air.” Under-articulated
and ruin-like, the wall still offers the visitor, on approach to the museum, several
key decisions: passing through the portal one can either proceed straight ahead and
down the steps toward the pool, or go left or right along the ambulatory walk toward
the museum. This role and sense of the façade is practical and not representational,
not because it facilitates or accommodates various forms of movement and rest, but
because it allows for choice among them. When a building’s spaces and configuration
are generous they allow movement to freely express itself, and to take responsibility
for its choices among attractions that pull in contrary directions.
The garden at the center of the site comes as something of a surprise once you pass
through the gate wall, mainly because it is sunken; but also because it is so quiet.
It consists of a number of encircled figures. Because the basin is shallow and dark,
and the water is moved only by the breeze, a vivid sense of stillness is conveyed by the
pool, a quality that seems entirely appropriate to the plain, even somber, character of
the museum front, which some early critics described as “funereal,” though I am not
sure if they knew of the Meudon tomb. As built, axiality replaced concentricity in the
overall layout: the pool’s length is more than double its width. Yet, the rings of walks
and plantings still shelter the center. The pool’s rectangularity emphasizes the linear
connections between the approach walk (centered on The Thinker) and the steps from
the raised terrace into the museum entrance. Each of these elements has the same
central axis and nearly the same width. Further, the perimeter walks are not four-
but three-sided, hedged, and equipped with benches at the terminal wall, supporting
the fountain, in the shadow of the upper terrace. Thus, for all its concentricity—a
horizontal version of The Thinker’s—the garden also inclines forward, toward the
museum. This inclination makes the end wall rather significant topographically, con
centrating in a single line and sectional change a cluster of transitional elements or
settings. Let me explain.
First, the garden’s end wall supports the two stairs that connect the perimeter walks
to the level of the entry terrace. While the outer walks are raised by it, this wall also
terminates the parterre gardens that these very walks enclose. In other words, if its
first function is to link the gate, walks, and façade, its second is to bind the entire
sequence to the sunken garden. Given its roles in the garden, the wall’s rough rusti
cation is hardly surprising. Yet, the wall still displays parallels with the rather more
polished museum front, as if it were part of the façade’s base. The end wall’s most
important purpose is to limit the height of the entire “sunken” space, however. Were
its upper edge not so insistent, the garden’s sense of enclosure would not be so strong.
Despite the sheltered character of the whole setting the garden’s sense of enclosure
is weakened by the prolongation of the higher walks on the right and left; for each
of them continues past the façade to a terminal figure on the building’s central cross-
axis. The prolongation of each perimeter passage past the façade has the effect of
dislocating the center of the space to its margins, as if the garden really did not care
about the symmetrical composition of the whole ensemble. That lateral extension
cannot be ignored, for without this “prolongation,” the doubling of walks would be
entirely redundant.
The result of this configuration is a landscape figure that presents the same conflict
or tension as The Thinker: inward focus (concentricity) and outward orientation
(prolongation). The combination of sheltering and reaching sensed in the garden is
like the coupling of concentration and inclination in the sculpture. Qualities that were
combined in a single object are seen again in an enclosing space. Admittedly, the two
are oriented in opposite directions—The Thinker leans toward the Parkway and the
garden inclines toward the museum—but the important point is that both transcend
their encircled inwardness toward topics of interest in their surroundings. Although
the two forms of composition can be distinguished in still more ways, they offer expe
rience of the same kind of configuration: something defined unto itself that also invites
and expresses movement. If the same can be said of the Parkway (a bounded enclosure
that accommodates and indicates movement) then we have an interlocked series of
equivalent images (street, sculpture, and garden). This would mean that the several
parts of the project are intelligible because they echo and anticipate one another.
Contextuality of this sort is not between a setting and its given location, but among
the several parts of a designed ensemble. Although much of the meaning of an archi
tectural work is contingent on its engagements with its milieu, buildings must also be
all of a piece in themselves. Coherence such as this can take many forms—repetition
of elements, analogous forms of composition, similar treatment of materials, and so
on—but the key is that the parts express some kinship with one another, different
chapters in the same story.
From a distance, the building that houses the collection presents not one but two
facades: one resting on the entry terrace and another reflected in the pool. Composite
in its makeup and attached no less to the garden it terminates than to the interiors
it encloses, the façade is an element within the overall ensemble and the condensa
tion of its several settings, their most vivid and eloquent expression; rather like the
relationship between the traditional town and its countryside. The interiors that
house Rodin’s works are certainly the destination of the long approach; but from
an architectural point of view, much that they reveal has been shown already in all
that leads toward them. Putting this observation in reverse, and more positively, the
museum’s internal configuration in plan and section both confirms and concludes the
proleptic figures that structure and pace the approach: the Parkway, The Thinker,
the gate wall, garden, Gates sculpture, and façade. Making this point more gener
ally, one can say that a layout is narratively sensible when it acknowledges a double
orientation: inward, as an enclosure with local and specific qualities; and outward,
prompting and accommodating movement. Why this double role? Two reasons: for
the sake of unity within the overall ensemble and because of the dependency of parts
on the qualities of the whole, qualities that individual parts do not possess on their
own. Internal cohesion among parts, not just assembly, gives the work self-sameness
and identity—a compound, not only a mixture; one element because, and not merely
after, another. The repetitions, displacements, and ambiguities of levels and distances
are all evidences of the play between the parts and the whole of the ensemble, a play
that stages the passage from an apparent confusion, a seeming lack or shortcoming
of sense, to an excess of meaning. Instances of recollection include the mnemonic
functioning of spolia, the coupling of locations that are spatially and geographically
distinct, movements that collapse the distinction between “now” and “then,” and
several others I have described. An intelligible story in architecture arises when the
obvious or normalized sense of settings is enriched by references to other places and
situations, making an ensemble—a world—out of what would otherwise be nothing
but fragments.
7 Object talks
Confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo
no Chōmei and Wajirō Kon
Izumi Kuroishi
From the medieval period onwards in Japan, many literary works appeared in
which the main characters’ psychology, human relationships, and social background
were projected through descriptions of their places of residence. This is because the
concept of “house” in Japan includes multiple meanings, such as property owner
ship and the notion of family, as well as the physical building, and encompasses
the overall relationships between a person and their socio-historical environment.
However, Western understanding of Japanese architectural culture has failed to
consider such social implications of the concept of “house.” For example, a German
architect Bruno Taut, who lived in Japan from 1933 to 1936, tended to interpret the
Japanese house in relation to his idea of Japanese aesthetics.1 From rural houses to
the houses of designers, the small, simple, and naturalistic features of Japanese dwell
ings are now often appreciated in foreign texts as something derived from the spirit
of Zen Buddhist philosophy. But precisely because of their small-scale spaces, dense
relationships should exist in Japan between human lives and houses and created their
characteristics. In order to study how people actually lived and how they realized
the concept of houses, and to understand Japanese architectural culture, it is vital to
examine how the multiple meanings of “house” in Japan have been interpreted and
reflected in these living spaces.
In Japan, the term monogatari means “story,” and consists of mono-, “object,” and
-gatari, “talk.” This combination suggests that, in Japan, objects are commonly per
sonified, and that objects are recognized as equally important as, or complimentary
with, those of people’s writings and talks. But it will also show another understanding
of an idea of Marco Frascari’s, the “Tell-the-Tale not only Detail,” which suggests
that detailed reading of architectural forms and objects enable us to read hidden
architectural contexts but also to listen the story of people inscribed in the objects.2
The origin of architecture and its texts

As Joseph Rykwert explains in Adam’s House in Paradise, the concept of the origin
of architecture exists throughout the world and the idea of “house”and is a clue to
1 Bruno Taut wrote many texts on Japanese architecture and culture that were popularly translated into
Japanese: Forgotten Japan (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2007), Private View of Japanese Culture
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1992), Nippon (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1934, reprinted in 1975), Recovery of
Japanese Beauty (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1962).
2 Marco Frascari, “The Tell-the-Tale Detail,” VIA 7: The Building of Architecture 7 (1984): 23–37.
Object talks 65
understanding the historical process of the formation of the concept of architecture
from human activities.3 After Vitruvius told his story of the art’s beginnings with the
primitive hut, the notion of the origin of architecture as a house was continuously
discussed by architects and writers: in the theory of the eighteenth-century archi
tectural philosopher Marc-Antoine Laugier; in the works of the nineteenth-century
writer Henry David Thoreau; and in modernist architects’ theories, such as those of
Le Corbusier.
Particularly in the modern architectural discussions, two main types of situations.
One of them was when people experienced destruction of cities and architecture
through war or disaster, and the consequent establishment of emergency housing
as an essential dwelling condition. Another was when people had to reexamine and
recreate the cultural identity of architecture when faced with social turning points and
multicultural interactions.
Both of these cases have symbolic implications for the idea of the origin of
architectural space, but a slight difference in their application. In the former case,
people needed a great deal of building production, and interpreted the origin of archi
tecture in a reductive and abstract manner in order to apply it directly as the essential
and primal condition to formal and functional theory for planning. In the latter case,
the idea of the origin of architecture was reexamined from anthropological and philo
sophical viewpoints, and the cultural and historical meanings of architectural details,
construction systems, and regional and ethnographic contexts were studied for ana
lyzing human conditions. Here, the concept of the origin of architecture was recog
nized as dealing with people’s ontological foundation in the world. Marco Frascari’s
text, referenced above, extended the latter approach to the semiotic, historical, and
sensory examination of architectural designs and representations, and clarified the
role of imagination in understanding them, and bridged between the two.
In Japan, there have been many fusions with foreign cultures since antiquity, and
the Japanese concept of architecture and the house has continued transforming in
the face of natural disasters and wars. In the twentieth century, both understandings
of the concept of the origin of architecture mentioned above appeared as short-term
responses to external events. In Japan, there were examples in the texts establishing
Japanese architectural history with diverse historiographical logics, methods, and
motivations. Western historical texts were introduced based on the idea of evolution
ism, and reappeared in discussions about the appropriate design of national housing,
such as the discussions of national prototype housing based on the idea of the origin
of Japanese architecture, such as those by Wajirō Kon in the pre- World War II
period.4 These two interpretations of the idea of the origin of architecture are in a
situational rather than evolutionary relationship with people, whereas the idea of the
origin of architecture functioned to connect both interpretations in order to realize the
national prototype housing, which had to have minimum-scale, and which directly
3 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981).
4 See Wajirō Kon, “Rural Dwellings in Chôsen I,” Kenchiku-zasshi, no. 445 (1923): 273–320, Uzo
Nishiyama, Note of Architectural history (Tokyo: Sagami shobo, 1948), and Izumi Kuroishi,
“Domesticating Other’s Space: Surveys and Reforms of Housing in Chosen and Japan by Wajirō Kon”
in Constructing the Colonized Land: Entwined Perspectives of East Asia around WW II, edited by
Izumi Kuroishi (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 215–52.
66 Izumi Kuroishi
reflected the relationship between people and their social situation, and the social
meaning of architecture.
Thus, the current study addresses Japanese texts dealing with minimum-scale
houses, and examines the relationship between the text, space, and its social back
ground in two contrasting works: the Hōjōki (Record of the Ten Square-Foot Hut),
written by the twelfth-to-thirteenth-century priest Kamo no Chōmei, has often been
referred to by twentieth century architectural scholars as representing the origin of the
Japanese house; while the texts of the architect Wajirō Kon, written after the Kantō
Earthquake, examine minimum-scale houses as urgent state of dwelling. By compar
ing Chōmei’s and Kon’s ways of describing the space within a house, I will clarify how
these two writers describe their concepts of “house” as reflexions of societies, and I
will analyze how the stories of objects are essential in both cases to present alternative
approaches to the dwelling space.
Hōjōki
Hōjōki was written by Kamo no Chōmei in 1212, and is recognized as one of the
three representative Japanese medieval poetries, including Tsurezure-gusa (Essays in
Idleness) and Makurano-soshi (Pillow Book). Chōmei was a son of the superintendent
Shinto priest of Kamo Shrine, but was defeated in a quarrel concerning its priesthood.
He lost his inherited household including houses and assets to successive disasters of
fire, whirlwind, and earthquake. Having experienced famine, and feeling exhausted
by the pursuit of social success and happiness, he abandoned the Shinto priesthood
and lived in seclusion in the mountains. He was a highly acclaimed poet, as well as an
expert performer of wind and string instruments, and he had abundant knowledge of
Buddhist and Chinese literature. His house was extremely humble, but is described as
surprisingly joyful.
Hōjōki is laid out with dual use of Japanese and Chinese letters and is written in
an autobiographical-style combining a Chinese poem and Buddhist terminology. The
first half explains the various accidents, disasters, and social changes which occurred
during Chōmei’s lifetime; the second half deals with the process of setting himself
apart from society and of making houses of ever-decreasing size between the ages
of 30 and 60. The section describing his hut in the mountains [Figure 7.1] runs as
follows:
Since I retired into the deep mountain of Hino, I have made three shaku eaves
for a hearth. I put a bamboo grid on the south, set a shelf to prepare a water cup
for prayer, hung a picture of Amida on the north wall behind a paper curtain,
and the painted figure of Fugen with Lotus Sutra in front. Beside the east wall, I
have a grass carpet as a bed. In the south-west corner I have set a bamboo shelf
on which are placed three black leather baskets for keeping books of Japanese
poetry, music, and history. Beside the shelf are an ori (harp) and tsugi (lute), one
on either side. Such is my temporary hut.
In terms of its surroundings, there is a water pipe to the south. I have arranged
stones to collect water. As the wood is close to my hut, it is easy to gather
firewood. . . . Even though the valley is deep, the west side is open. I am some
times inspired with Buddha’s image. In spring, I see waves of wisteria flowers like
violet clouds wonderfully scenting the air. In summer, I hear the cuckoo’s voice
Object talks 67
Figure 7.1 The arrangement of objects in Chōmei’s hut. Pictorial explanation of the history
of Japanese interior, Graphics: History of Japanese Interior: Japanese House from
Ancient to Modern, Kawade Shinsho series (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo shuppan,
2015).
© Kazuko Koizumi
and imagine the way of death. In fall, I hear the evening cicadas as if they are
lamenting the ephemeral world. In winter, I enjoy the snow and imagine it as the
accumulation and melting of my sins.5
From this description we can deduce the following characteristics about Chōmei’s
hut. It had exterior facilities for fire and water providing the essential conditions for
life. He hung up various Buddha images for meditation, and he arranged tools and
instruments for playing music, reading books, and writing poetry. The orientation
of the house was essential for his inspiration by the surrounding natural world. Its
minimum-sized space was ten feet by ten feet, symbolizing the basic unit of Indian
Buddhism’s notion of the universe. Chōmei did not own the land, and he made the hut
5 Kamo no Chōmei, Hōjōki, edited by Shincho Nihon Koten Shusei and Norito Miki (Tokyo: Shincho
sha, 1976), 15–39. The portion describing the hut in the mountain is on pp. 31–32 and is translated by
the author.
68 Izumi Kuroishi
mobile so that it could be relocated to the best position for his favorite smells, sounds,
and visions in each season.
His text has a very rhythmic fluency, mirroring the rhythms of natural seasonal
visions, sounds, and images, and carries implications of humanity’s fate in the world.
It includes many references to classical Chinese and Indian stories and philosophies,
and uses diverse words for house: ie (house), sumika (abode), yado (lodging), and iori
(hermitage), which refer to different stages and features of dwelling. In his text, he
reduces his real-life situation to the primitive human condition in nature with of his
religious and poetic imagination.
Chōmei wrote about the process of losing his social status in parallel with the
decrease in size of his houses, and he recognized the house as a representation of pro
fane desires to possess property and land and to secure family life. Thus his hut in the
mountain is a temporary building without common comforts or material value, and it
enables him to be liberated from social pressure. However, its space is unexpectedly
filled with many tasteful objects and tools which express the richness of his spiritual
life. Each object has a specific history and meaning, and has a designated place within
the hut, and the hut itself is located according to the visions seen and sounds heard
from its window. These relationships were imbued with cultural meanings. The hut
was constructed by unifying Chōmei’s cultural values and sensory pleasures, and by
fulfilling his minimum needs for life.
In other words, instead of social representation and function, the hut represented
physical freedom and the world of the imagination. The size and form of the ten-foot
square hut was based on an Indian Buddhist idea recognizing the square as the core
of a vast universal space, which enables the unification of nature and people within its
minimal space.6 In Chōmei’s literary style, his writing expresses how space emerges
from the relationship between the meanings of objects and people, and shows how
organizing literary expression can create the structure of spatial meanings.
Survey of shelters in the twentieth century

The Japanese architect Wajirō Kon (1888–1973) conducted anthropological and
sociological research into living patterns and conditions in small-scale houses, and
examined the idea of the origin of architecture in Japan.7 However, he was critical
about other architectural scholars’ ideas of history, and proposed various possi
ble logics of architectural development; functional analysis of plans, technological
analysis of construction, and symbolical meanings of space etc,. In other words, he
6 In the last section of Hōjōki, Chōmei explains that he decided on the size and form of the hut following
the hut of a Buddhist monk Cudapanthaka. Chōmei, 39.
7 Wajirō Kon, Complete Works of Kon Wajirō (Tokyo: Domesu Shuppan, 1971), Volume 7. Kon
often mentioned the idea of the origin of Japanese architecture, specifically the house, in the volumes
Housing, Rural House, and Theory of Design. The background, meanings and transformation of the
idea of the origin of the Japanese house in Kon’s work is discussed in: Izumi Kuroishi, Kenchiku-gai
no Shiko-Kon Wajirō ron [Exterior Ideas of Architecture: Works and Ideas of Kon Wajirō] (Tokyo:
Domesu Shuppan, 2000), and in Izumi Kuroishi, “An Attempt to Search for the Origin of Architecture
in Japanese Peasant House,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the ACSA (1998): 547–53. In
those writings I also examined how Kon’s idea of the origin of the Japanese house was developed in
his study of the houses in Chosen and was extended in his later project of housing reform in Japan in
Constructing the Colonized Land.
Object talks 69
relativised the idea of origin and history of architecture. While he found that the
houses in agricultural areas were strongly influenced by religious, conventional, local,
and industrial rules, and family systems, his research on temporary houses after
the Kanto Earthquake investigated how capitalism influenced and changed people’s
lifestyles. Instead of architectural logics, he applied economic reasons to analyze the
rapidly changing houses. He divided the development of small-scale houses into three
stages: shelters that protected people’s bodies from natural forces; huts constructed
with freely available local materials; and “barracks” professionally constructed with
materials made in factories. He then analyzed the differences between these three
types, and proposed an idea of prototype housing to apply to plans for housing
improvement projects after the earthquake of 1923.8
Polemically, Kon also argued that, in any circumstance, people conceive of “the
place where they live as the best” and that “there is something poetic about naked
space.” He also praised the methodologies of new construction derived from poverty,
and inhabitants adapting themselves to urgent housing so that they might live with
the hope of rehabilitation. Kon was conscious that, in the war time, political slogans
drew on hackneyed historical expressions and philosophical-sounding words to give
an ideological sense of value to dwellings and the living environments in confined
situations—beautifying the idea of living in minimal space—and so manipulated the
relationship between people’s emotions and their living space to transform and con
ceal otherwise serious problems.
Stories of and by objects in Modernology

Nevertheless, for Kon, everyday space in a house is filled with poetics and stories of
life. He was interested in the idea of theatrical meaning of everyday space in French
Romanticism novels, and draw sketches of an earth floor of a peasant house explain
ing that even footsteps and traces of trash tell what kind of people lives there. Kon
conducted research he named “Modernology” into the arrangement of objects and
instruments in houses, into lifestyles, and into the psychological conditions of the
inhabitants. He discovered that people used their survival instinct to build huts, and
decorated them to express their identity in society. In his research on a newly wedded
couple’s minimum-size house, he explained how the scars and blemishes visible on the
carefully used and maintained objects and instruments told the story of the couple’s
personality and lifestyle.
In drawings titled “Comprehensive illustration of the house-hold of a newly-
married couple,” besides the names of the objects, there are detailed notes about
the history and characteristics of objects: the handbag is given by mother-in-law as
a souvenir of her trip, the lamp shades are hand made by wife by cutting lace fabric
and holding papers, the mandolin guitar with a broken cord is hidden on the top of a
8 “Barracks” usually describes military-style housing of many people living in a single, simple structure.
But in Japan in that period, people used this term to describe temporary buildings in general. Thus,
Kon categorized them in three, but still used “Barracks” for relatively big and strong temporal struc
ture. Kon’s texts on temporary houses, including: “Barracks,” “Memory of Barracks after the Kanto
Earthquake,” “Temporary Houses after the War,” and “Varieties of Temporary Housing Blocks after
the War,” are compiled in Housing, on pp. 285–349. In addition to these studies of temporary housing
in urban space, he also wrote about the huts and smaller houses in rural areas, which are in Housing on
pp. 350–85.
70 Izumi Kuroishi
book shelf, the cabinet in the living room was a clearance good, and so on [Plate 22].
The crowded appearance, and warm and intimate atmosphere, of the handmade
objects expresses how this young couple sincerely created their dwelling space with
love. In another research on minimum-size houses, Kon showed that people treasure
objects from altars and ancestors’ Buddhist mortuary tablets. He argued that modern
architecture and housing equated the primary meaning of a house with its economic
value, whereas people still needed to feel connected to others and to memories, and
suggested that while architects abstractly conceive architectural space, people under
stand their space from what they see and feel. Kon’s sketches of objects show how the
stories of and by objects created their space of dwelling.
Conclusion
Comparative consideration of the styles of approach to the idea of house shows that
each style expresses a different relationship with the social and natural environment.
Hōjōki demonstrates that there are two meanings in the idea of house: it is a physical
expression of human social desire, as well as a medium enabling the human body, per
ception, and subject, to be fused with nature and the universe. Poetry enabled Chōmei
to express the sensory and literary imagination of his ephemeral temporary house.
Meanwhile, Kon’s twentieth-century housing survey record shows that economic
productivity, construction methods, and people’s habits took the leading part in the
housing theory of the day, and suggests that the second meaning of a house expressed
by Hōjōki had been dismissed as superfluous. But his Modernology research also
explains that the house is the place where people’s memories and subjectivity are
formulated and that a person’s sense of body and perceptions are spatialized in
accordance with their relationship with objects. A significant finding in this examina
tion is the importance of the storytelling function of objects in terms of the creation
of people’s sense of dwelling and grounding in their homes. In Chomei’s case, his
liberation from the society strengthen his perceptions and relationship with objects.
In the case of Modernology, it shows that the scarcity made the meaning of objects
more important for the people.
Until the end of the World War II, most Japanese people’s houses remained small-
scale wooden constructions. However, we should not interpret the inhabitants’ space
and lifestyles as simply naturalistic and attuned with Zen Buddhism because of the
houses’ physical appearance. The meanings of the ephemerality and smallness of
buildings should be interpreted from social and residents’ viewpoints. It is universally
true that as a place where real people live, the house has transformed from period
to period according to social desires, economic and political conditions, bodily and
perceptual characteristics, and interactions with the natural and urban environment.
Comparative examination of thirteenth- and twentieth-century texts on the concept
of “house” and on the way they describe the space shows that, they sustained a
concept of space in the house as having emerged from the existential relationship
between human, object, nature and society, which they expressed through storytell
ing. These stories about “house” in Japan are based on the specifically ephemeral
and socially susceptible nature of Japanese people’s houses, but it also addresses
questions about the sustainable meaning of a house as a person’s place of dwelling to
be conceived not from architectural logics but from the people’s sense of life.
8 Suspended ceiling stories
Navigating the cosmo-technologies
of hospital ceilings
Federica Goffi
While all building elements tell their own stories, this is particularly true of ceilings.
Suspended ceilings are in-between places, cleaving an up-above from a down-below,
entwining materials with stories, hiding and revealing narratives within and without
the recto-verso condition of architecture. These suspended ceiling stories fall-into
place under the abductive hypothesis that ceilings are suspended (sus-pense) in a
deeply metaphorical and ephemeral sense. All ceilings-coela are firmly suspended
(firmament), especially when one can contemplate through them, and all the more so
in the case where the roof collapses.1
This storytelling about the levity of suspended ceilings begins in pre-Galilean time
uniting seemingly disjointed clues, which belong to authors and fabrics separated by
chronology, and yet deal with cross-narratives to reveal a discourse on the imagina
tion of suspended ceilings, as the paradigmatic first details of “the double-faced role of
technology, which unifies the tangible and intangible of architecture.”2 Even though
the stories of Modern false ceilings do enter this narrative, a distinction is necessary
between true and false ceilings: the first work through a metaphorical suspension
from the heavens through the levity of imagination, while the latter hang from struc
tural systems held down by gravity and are resolutely of the earth. False ceilings divide
horizontally: they are a mute manifestation of materials and technology. Instead,
true ceilings-coela—whether they are ceilings, floors above or roofs—suggest vertical
continuity from the ground to the sky, arousing contemplation.3
Looking up at contemporary hospital ceilings and the frescoed ceilings at the
Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (1440–1444) reveals that their design
affects how we orient ourselves, whether it is to find the thread of a story, an exit, or
the pipes of a sprinkler system. Re-reading ceiling stories through the solidity of their
sections reveals an original virtue of the ceiling: storytelling.4 Such re-readings ask for
more than an ordering of parts and the labeling of materials, to reach into cultural,
religious, political, and economic tales of assembly in architecture. These suspended
1 Human ideas began in contemplating the heavens. The augurs divided the sky into four regions (templa
coeli). Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1984), 123.
3 Alberti used the word tectum (Latin tego, cover) for overhead structures essential to health. See Leon
Battista Alberti, On The Art of Building in Ten Books, edited and translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil
Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 26–7.
4 Paul Emmons, “Immured. The Uncanny Solidity of Sections,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the
ACSA (2011): 172–8.
72 Federica Goffi
ceiling stories offer a series of multiple beginnings and multiple endings, in which ceil
ing structures are imagined from the top-down and built from the bottom-up.
Encompassing ceilings of the imagination

“What is your name?”
“My name is Italo Calvino.”
“Where were you born?”
“I was born in Sanremo. I was so born in Sanremo that I was born in America.”5
Calvino was suspended between a visible and an invisible city since his birth on
October 15, 1923 in Havana, Cuba. He is our upwardly-pointing compass for a
walkthrough of the imagination to consider what is suspended above us and to
follow a path that unites the visible with the invisible thereby opening up a storytell
ing through the ceiling. In his lecture on visibility, Calvino writes: “There is a line
in Dante (Purgatorio XVII.25) that reads: ‘Poi piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia’ (Then
rained down into the high fantasy. . .). I will start out this evening with an assertion:
fantasy is a place where it rains.”6
A first meaning derived from Dante (Then rained down into the high fantasy. . .)
is metaphorical: imagination is born in our dreams. A second meaning (“fantasy is
a place where it rains”) is literal: when and if it rains in a place, whether this be a
forest, a primitive hut or a contemporary ceiling, we become active in imagination as
a result of the necessity to improve both an original condition and the technology of
construction.7
In Filarete’s account of a possible beginning of architecture Adam enacts the first
shelter looking towards the sky (firmamentum) when he instinctively shields himself
from falling rainwater with his forearms and hands.8 He thus constructed the first
roof. Stability (firmitas) is experienced empathically through the overall body posture,
having his feet splayed apart. This translates in an anthropomorphically inspired
enclosure with openings on both sides, made of a double-pitch of interwoven tree
branches. Filarete’s ceiling is an integral sheltering structure uniting the earth with
heaven.9
This first detail in the Western architectural tradition is woven out of invention
and necessity to provide a shelter using materials at hand with the memory of a lost
paradise and through the consideration and beholding of the sky by means of the
body, which is the prime analogical instrument for the construction of meaning. The
5 “Italo Calvino—La Vita Privata,” video Rai.TV (May 5, 2009), http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/pro

grammi/media/ContentItem-37e06153-d5cb-4d19-9c23-9e7be0af8d8a.html. Accessed October 31,
2014.
6 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 81.
7 “Man Posts Stomach-churning Instagram Video of Sewage Pouring from the Ceiling after Pipes Burst
in Chicago Skyscraper,” Daily Mail Online (January 7, 2014), http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-2535499/Man-posts-stomach-churning-Instagram-video-sewage-pouring-ceiling-pipes-burst
Chicago-skyscraper.html. Accessed October 31, 2014.
8 Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana
Grassi (Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1972), Tav. 3, f. 4v, Tav. 4, f. 5r. See also Gen. 3:7–10.
9 Latin Coelum; Greek țȠ૙ȜȠȢ (convex). See Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of
the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 117–19.
Suspended ceiling stories 73
fall of Adam establishes a lost paradise above and an unexplored new earth below, an
inside and an outside, and a translocation that spurs imagination. A fertile rain spouts
down from the sky impregnating the imagination and the earth, marking a beginning
for man’s own edifying.10
In this story the first shelter both separated and united micro with macro cosmos,
the earth with the sky. The Latin word Firmamentum (vault of heaven), shares with
the Vitruvian Firmitas the root, firm (solid).11 Firmness is more than the modern idea
of structure. Stability and storytelling merge in the design of ceilings. This is evident
in Early Renaissance ceiling narratives that are registers of depth depicting through
metaphoric transparency the interplay of construction assemblies and cosmological
narratives.
Painted on the underside of Brunelleschi’s dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence,
Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 Last Judgment is a depiction of the Christian end-of-time, fres
coed in stages from the top down. The cumulus clouds marking heaven’s hierarchical
levels correspond to Brunelleschi’s horizontal rings of sandstone built from the bottom
up (1417–1436). Angels nearing the apex support an octagonal tabernacle in midair,
marking the presence of eight structural ribs. These non-verbal stories are carefully
constructed signs, relating the facts of construction through a signified cosmology.
Storytelling assumes here a diagnostic function: detecting structural anatomy through
the literal reading of the opaque plaster skin. Anagogical reading transcends the here
and now and excites our search for both facts and meaning.12 Anchorage holes, as
the indices of now-absent scaffolding structures, pierce simultaneously through the
transverse section of the vault and the spine of an open book whose pages are about
to close during this apocalyptic end-of-all time scenario when everyone is called to
account for their own life-tales [Plate 23]. The transgressive devil-supported book
opens into a circular darkness that indicates the mirrored complexity of the story
of suspension of the dome and the celestial vault alike. This convergence reveals the
synchronic junctures of cultural and structural storytelling.
Fiction and reality in everyday and end-of-time ceilings

The role of the ceiling as a paradigmatic place for storytelling invites contemplation
on what appears with increasing frequency, the oversimplified condition of a bare
soffit that either blatantly exposes the guts of a building and so too the prowess of
technology dominating everyday life, or, alternatively, is hidden by the accessible
dropped ceilings of acoustic panels on a grid constituting a blind and aphonic surface.
Both are examples of the physical ceiling without a story to tell.
Acoustic panels are a modern panacea offered since the 1930s as a universal remedy
for poor acoustic design, reducing our headroom in not just a physical dimension,
but also contributing to the actualization of the Cartesian paradigm of the non-place,
transforming the lack of attention to aural qualities into an affordable oversight.13
10 Filarete, Trattato di Architettura, V.1, 25.
11 See Gen 1:6.
12 Marco Frascari, “De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking,” in The Cultural Role of Architecture:
Contemporary and Historical Perspectives, edited by Paul Emmons, John Hendrix, and Jane Lomholt
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 83–92.
13 See Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
74 Federica Goffi
In dealing with modern everyday ceilings, their ordinary elements only have lit
eral meanings. The hanging air ducts, pipes, and electrical wiring show present-day
cosmo-technologies over and over-our-heads becoming the story of people living
inside a machine. Is this the beginning of a long story, and where did it start? The
sound of mechanical systems often leaves us with no other choice but to listen. In
Calvino’s T-zero—a fictional narrative that unites the beginning of time with an
apocalyptic life inside the machine—an endless ceiling stretches above in another end-
of-time scenario: “The ceiling that covers us is all iron gears that stick out: it is like
the belly of a car I have slipped under, to repair some breakdown, but I cannot slide
out because, while I am down there on my back, the car expands, stretches to cover
the whole world.”14
The industrial ceiling extends incessantly in countless places and times, echoing
Calvino’s lamentation. The industrial factory ceilings documented by Canadian pho
tographer Edward Burtinski in Xiamen City, China, had yet to come into existence.15
The transcendence of storytelling is transformed into a journey through the guts of
machine-buildings. What happens when we exceed efficiency and achieve alienation?
Is limitless ceiling-extension our absolute limit?
Calvino was filmed near the “woods of skyscrapers” under construction at La
Défense in Paris in 1974. He described Jacques Tati’s movie Playtime (1964–1967)
as a fictional future that was turning into reality.16 The film’s ironic ending shows a
thin city; its surfaces peel off. The falling of a just-installed ceiling turns into a seren
dipitous moment, allowing for other stories to emerge from behind the thin veneer
of modern lives, exposing the systems and the concealed characters in the movie
[Plate 24].
Looking-up and through the ceiling, Louis Khan criticized the modern “pasting
on” of layers of engineered materials synthesized to offer lighting and acoustic prop
erties. To avoid the invasion of systems he argued for the responsibility of the architect
to assign them an orderly place within buildings.17
An urgently needed re-reading: the contemporary hospital ceiling

Contemporary urbanized cultures’ ceilings reveal that they are often reduced to a
pragmatic surface without any desire for storytelling. The “dropped ceilings” of
acoustic panels at the Ottawa Hospital (c. 1980) serve as a case in point amongst
ceilings found in countless offices, restaurants, schools, libraries, airports, and so on,
which disregard the wide range of mind and body orientations. This replicable detail
is critical in its relation to hospital residents as they stare up from a bed; it offers
nothing but the mindless, monotonous, acoustic properties of a micro-porous surface.
A series of stickers with hand-written notations trace the route of fire sprinkler
systems concealed beyond the panels [Figure 8.1]. This infra-ordinary dashed line is
14 Italo Calvino, T Zero (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 92.

15 Marc Mayer, Ted Fishman, and Mark Kingwell, China: The Photographs of Edward Burtynski
(Göttingen (Allemagne): Steidl, 2005). Also see Burtynsky’s website, http://www.edwardburtynsky.
com/site_contents/Photographs/China.html. Accessed March 11, 2014.
16 Italo Calvino: Un Uomo Invisibile, directed by Nereo Rapetti (Paris: February, 1974). Documentary
film,YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jdiCztTLQw. Accessed June 13, 2015.
17 Louis I Kahn. Louis I. Kahn, Writings, Lectures, and Interviews (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 57,
258–63.
Figure 8.1 Dropped ceilings at the Ottawa Hospital (1980s).

© Federica Goffi
likely to fall into the oblivion of peripheral sight for most visitors, who are not prone
to look for respite in a ceiling lacking in sensorial and cultural stimulation. This ceil
ing is a planar divide between the everyday life of hospital residents and caretakers,
and the temporal occurrence of regular maintenance. This banality confirms that
hospitals are designed to best house machines rather than people, but they end up
failing both.18 These engineered ceilings extend undifferentiated from corridors into
the patients’ rooms, lacking opportunities for escape.
The intrusions of everyday life are central to the tale. Novelist Georges Perec, who
often wrote in his bed, used the ceiling as a place where he began confabulating:
I like ceilings, I like moldings and ceiling roses. They often serve me instead of a
muse and the intricate embellishments in the plasterwork put me readily in mind
of those other labyrinths, woven from phantasms, ideas and words. But people
no longer pay any attention to ceilings. They are made dispiritingly rectilinear or,
worse still, done up with so-called exposed beams.19
18 Esther Sternberg, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009).
19 George Perec, Spieces of Spaces and Other Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1999), 18.
76 Federica Goffi
The ceiling is a place where the invisible is overlaid and through which it becomes
approachable. Infra-ordinary clues at the Ottawa hospital are signs revealing a sto
rytelling of our time. Concerned with cost efficiency, modern everyday ceilings have
become blind and deaf to our needs, lacking real depth.
Mono-directional sightedness: architecture and systems engineering

Currently systems engineering occupies a critical interstitial space within architecture.
In a culture of technological development something has fallen out-of-sight, into the
void plenums created to negotiate a place for systems inside the hospital-machine.
Through a multidirectional gaze, combining direct and in-direct vision, the floor
and ceiling coalesce in the depths of reflected ceiling-plans. The efficacy, rather than
efficiency, of a story relies on taking it in through one reading event.20 The reflected
ceiling plan is a multilayered plot coalescing layers for an efficacious reading. In
modern and contemporary architecture and systems engineering, mono directional
sightedness (or lack thereof) is made visible and materializes in the aphonic and
opaque boundary of acoustic ceiling panels that negotiate competencies: the realm of
systems engineering is concealed above; below is the realm of architecture. Technical
systems are placed out-of-sight, precluding insightful reading through the ceiling.
When it comes to hospitals, navigating systems in and through ceilings is a poetic
necessity, which could be handled with low-tech diagnostic storytelling, emulating
medical advances in technology. Electromagnetic tracking allows surgeons to direct
surgical instruments in real time while operating.21 Visual cues embedded within a
larger artistic program would allow for ease of building systems detection during
inspections.
Entry through the ceiling: between fiction and reality at the Spedale
di Santa Maria della Scala
Italo Calvino’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures were not delivered at Harvard University
as planned. Calvino died in Siena on September 19, 1985 at the Ospedale di Santa
Maria della Scala, as a consequence of a stroke, before his trip to Cambridge. This
hospital remained in use from the tenth century until 1996. The ceilings from which
Calvino’s last fantasies might have rained down offered both physical and metaphysi
cal inspiration.
Some of the hospital’s frescoes depict episodes in the life of its founder, Beato
Sorore. During pregnancy, Sorore’s mother had a premonitory dream of the founding
of the hospital. She saw the gettatelli (orphans) climbing the steps of a ladder (scala
coeli) to reach Mary.22 Lorenzo Vecchietta, an early Renaissance painter who devoted
his life to the mission of the spedale, depicted the dream in a perspective fresco
20 Edgar Allan Poe, “Philosophy of Composition”, Graham’s Magazine, XXVIII, no. 4 (April 1846):
163–7.
21 “StealthStation® Surgical Navigation Systems.” Medtronic Surgical Navigation Systems (December
11, 2014), http://www.medtronic.com/for-healthcare-professionals/products-therapies/spinal/surgical
navigation-imaging/surgical-navigation-systems/. Accessed March 1, 2015.
22 The Tower of Babel is a ladder “with its top in the heavens”, Gen. 1:4–9. See Rama Coomaraswamy,
The Door in the Sky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6–61.
23
opening into the solidity of the wall [Plate 25]. The Virgin lifts an orphan through
a ceiling into another world, to approach the heavenly vault. On the opposite fresco,
the hospital construction is shown with a bricklayer climbing up a ladder carrying a
basket of bricks on his shoulder.24 The double meaning of edifying (edificatio)25 is
demonstrated in this parallel reading: the uplifting of construction materials, a literal
edification of the physical hospital, leads to another real edification, that is, a meta
physical, moral, uplifting of the spirit. It is the weaving of culture through building
acts that edifies us.
This entry-through-the-ceiling defines a place uniting time with sempiternity.26 The
vault’s spring-line defines a horizon where heaven meets the earth. Tellingly, from
a construction viewpoint, above this level vaulted structures need formwork until
construction settles, showing a critical shift in assembly methods and understand
ing.27 The vaulted ceiling partakes in the heavenly world, in a suspended in-between
condition.28
The starry sky of the ceiling is informed through analogy with Mary’s blue mantle
and affords the virtues of lightness to an otherwise weighty brick vault. The heavens
are described in the Bible as a tent or canopy stretched out by God.29 Middle Ages
exegetic readings (of Genesis 1:6–14) suggested that the heavenly vault was a solid
dome perforated with tiny holes through which the stars shown. In Domenico di
Bartolo’s, Virgin of the Cloak [Plate 26], her mantle is a coterminous surface shared
by heavenly and earthly realms, offering hospitality to pilgrims, the needy, the elderly,
the sick, and abandoned children. Angels suspend the mantle between their hands
forming a convex ceiling. This memorable storytelling offers insight into the mir
rored inverted profile of the 1440s’ diagonally intersecting semi-circular loadbearing
masonry vaults.
The original Ospedale was reincarnated in 1998 as a museum of its former life
[Figure 8.2].30 In contrast with original intentions, this reconception narrows edifying
to aesthetic experience, to the exclusion of the institution’s charitable mission. A Tati
moment—described as an ordinary occurrence—took place at the new hospital Le
Scotte in Siena when an acoustic ceiling panel fell down in real life in an operating
room just cleared after a surgery.31
23 Mariella Carlotti, Ante gradus. Gli affreschi del Pellegrinaio di Santa Maria della Scala Siena (Florence:
Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011), 52.
24 See Domenico di Bartolo, The Bishop Giving Alms, 1442–3.
25 Frascari, “De Beata Architectura,” 91.
26 Federica Goffi, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2013), 172–212.
27 This is about 30 degrees from the spring-line.
28 Hagia Sophia’s dome (Istanbul, 532–537 CE) is described as suspended from heaven by a golden chain.
Nadine Schibille, Hagia Sophia and the Bysantine Aesthetic Experience (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2014), 13–15.
29 Isaiah 40:22.
30 Cesare Brandi urged for museification (Corriere della Sera, September 23, 1968).
31 “Cade Controsoffitto in Chirurgia. Tragedia Sfiorata Alle Scotte—La Nazione.” Siena Cronaca
(December 11, 2014), http://www.lanazione.it/siena/cade-controsoffitto-in-chirurgia-tragedia-sfio
rata-alle-scotte-1.404067. Accessed March 3, 2015.
78 Federica Goffi
Figure 8.2 Hospital ward. Santa Maria della Scala, Pellegrinaio (1440–1444).
© Biblioteca e Fototeca Giuliano Briganti, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena
Drawing respite through the ceiling

What kinds of ceiling stories inhabit us today? What hides behind surfaces and what
is exposed? Do we live inside the machine or does the machine live inside us? Whether
occluded or exposed, the modern ceilings in a shopping mall, restaurant, or hospital
are unsurprisingly similar. Since this condition is so widespread, we almost cannot see
it anymore. There is little desire to raise one’s head to contemplate what lies above, as
the banal story told there is one and the same. Everyday ceilings have become inter
changeable and have lost seminal quality. The intrados/extrados ceiling condition is a
register of depth. The ceiling of acoustic panels is an infra-thin, overextended surface
that separates poetic from prosaic and architecture from systems engineering.32 That
which is considered an efficiently thin, acoustically absorbent ceiling, is in reality
a great divide that creates a suspended story of unbearable lightness. How can we
regain insight through the ceiling, affording real depth and the lightness that Calvino
described in his Memos for the Next Millennium?
American psychologist James Hillman, striving to restore the simple gesture of
looking upwards, claimed that the ceiling is the “most neglected segment of our
contemporary interior—interior in both architectural and psychological senses of the
32 Emmons, “Immured,” 176.

33
word.” Although built last, ceilings should be conceived first, renewing the uplifting
role of what is one of the most un-considered everyday details in contemporary tales.
To remediate our inability to look up, architects could begin living upside down
On the Ceiling, like the character in the novel by Éric Chevillard, who bemoans that
ceilings should not be reduced to one function and so become ordinary, when instead
they could be put to all best possible uses.34 Changing the angle of imaginative con
frontation and designing from the ceiling as a first detail invites us to re-consider this
primary architectural element.
Today tourists travel to historic buildings to look up at marvelous mirrored ceiling
journeys, yet they live in cities where they are seldom invited to look up. Instead of
making the ceiling a painting in a museum, we should reinvigorate our necks by creat
ing architecture that invites us to occasionally pause, look up, and reflect upon life.
Great ceilings demonstrate the necessity of artifice, since we cannot renounce look
ing up for council. True ceilings are cultural storytelling maps orienting us through
places and time, while running systems in and through buildings. Contextual re-read
ings take place through personal encounters with ceiling stories, opening up infinite
possibilities for memorable storytelling. This multilayered emplotment, a place for
respite, would be taken in one walk-through of places and ceilings.
33 James Hillman, The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, edited by Thomas Moore (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013), 108.
34 Éric Chevillard, On the Ceiling, translated by Jordan Stump, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997).
9 Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor
Andreea Mihalache
Dor
In 1933, at the young age of 19, Saul Steinberg left his native Bucharest to study archi
tecture in Milan. Years passed, he ultimately settled in New York City and became
an accomplished artist. One day, he asked a friend who was traveling to Bucharest
to take pictures of his childhood street—Strada Palas—and later projected the color
slides on the wall of his apartment. Looking at the oversized images he suddenly
sensed the overwhelming realization and pain that something was gone forever, some
thing that would never be retrieved or be accessible again. Observing the street from a
distance appeared as both a sacrilege and a legitimate desire: “I felt as though I were
peering into a tomb, lifting the sheet from a corpse. I felt angry as well as curious to
see, and then angry for having seen—as though I had lost something.”1 What felt like
a sickness with unknown causes found a temporary remedy, strange as it may seem,
in the very same things that had triggered it: “To cure myself of this illness I sent two
other friends to take pictures. One of them took the same pictures, but in winter with
snow, which was more beautiful because the changes were less obvious.”2
Steinberg describes an ailment familiar to many. Once installed, this unusual condi
tion surreptitiously takes over one’s soul and never goes away. As one learns to live
with it, the pain sometimes grows more intense, while other times stays dormant,
but remains present, unmistakably there. Regret and anger, love and pain, nostalgia
and wrath—Steinberg experiences the strange symptoms of a disease bearing the
Romanian name dor.
Explored mainly in literary studies and philosophy, but overlooked in visual arts,
dor as a creative emotion activates imagination. Missing and longing for a certain
being, place, or situation constructs a tension between what is lost, and often no
longer attainable, and what is desired, and equally unreachable; between memories
from the past and the anticipation of the future. Animated by dor, Steinberg returned
to his childhood street over and over again. While his drawings and sketches record
in minute detail, both in written and drawn form, neighbors, objects, and rooms, they
1 Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, translated by John Shepley (New York:
Random House, 2001), 42–3. The author would like to extend her special thanks to Dr. Sheila
Schwartz, the Research and Archives Director of The Saul Steinberg Foundation, for graciously opening
unforeseen doors and stairways.
2 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 43. Steinberg returned to Romania only once, in
September 1944, for a brief visit with his family, before being shipped back to Washington, D.C. from
Rome, where he had been stationed with the Office of Strategic Services.
Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor 81
are not intended to construct an accurate depiction of a lost reality. Instead, I suggest,
they are daydreams that propose stories about inhabitation and cultivate the rich
ambiguity between two seemingly contradictory manifestations of dor: homesickness
(dor de acasă) and wanderlust (dor de ducă).
Every language has its untranslatable words and the Romanian dor is one of them.3
Similar, but not fully overlapping with the English longing, spleen, and melancholy,
the German Sehnsucht, and the Portuguese saudade, dor describes a malaise turned
“toward an object or toward being.” Both an emotion present in Romanian folklore,
and a philosophical concept, dor confronts finitude with the anxiety of the infinite,
pain with pleasure, desire with restraint. In addition to homesickness and wanderlust,
the word makes other expressions such as mi-e dor de . . . (I miss someone or some
thing), and în dorul lelii (to accomplish something reluctantly and without a precise
objective). Etymologically derived from the Latin dolus (pain, suffering), it shares the
same root with the verbs a dori (to desire, but also to wish something to someone)
and a durea (to be in pain, to feel pain, to hurt). Romanian philosophers Lucian Blaga
and Constantin Noica, both of whom had affinities with Heidegger’s phenomenology,
have proposed dor as a specifically Romanian metaphysical concept.
Strada Palas, no. 4

Born to a Jewish family in the small city of Râmnicu Sarat, Steinberg grew up in
Bucharest on Palas Street, “a little street completely apart from traffic” that he
described as his “homeland.”4 His relationship with his home country was not an
easy one: “I don’t want to go back to Romania,”5 he confessed to his life-long friend,
Aldo Buzzi, and he never did. “Fucking Patria [homeland] who murdered millions,
who never accepted me. Unfortunately all my landscapes, smells, sounds, tastes—are
there. Houses, courtyards, sky, mountain air, snow,”6 he wrote in his journal on June
15, 1991, the day he turned 77.
In Italy Steinberg built a reputation as a cartoonist for Bertoldo, a humor newspa
per that welcomed young artists and writers. Beginning in 1938, he was subject to
Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws and tried to find refuge in another country. By
1941, he was sought by the police as a stateless foreign Jew with no rights to remain
in Italy. On April 27, 1941 he turned himself in and was taken to the Italian intern
ment camp of Tortoreto in the province of Teramo. After six weeks’ internment, he
managed to obtain the necessary visas to fly to Lisbon and board a ship to New York
in transit to the Dominican Republic, for which he had a residency visa. He spent a
year in Ciudad Trujillo before getting a US visa.
During this time his journal entries are filled with the details of a tedious daily
routine. The excruciating boredom makes every insignificant event become a little
wonder worth registering: on Monday, October 20: “At 7 in the evening I threw
3 See Anca Vasiliu, “Dor,” in Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical
Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 227–8. Adam Gopnik related Steinberg and
dor in his “Word Magic: How much really gets lost in translation?” in The New Yorker, May 26th
2014, p. 37.
4 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 42.
6 Journal, April 23 - July 5, 1991, spiral notebook, Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, formerly Box 75.
82 Andreea Mihalache
Figure 9.1 Steinberg's drawing of his childhood street, from a journal, December1940–
January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
© The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
away a cigarette butt and it landed upright.” followed by a tiny sketch of a burn
ing cigarette butt standing upright.7 He remembers his friend Eugen Campus from
Bucharest giving an onion to a dog and the dog eating it.8 One day, a watch received
as a gift from his former girlfriend, Adina, stops working, but then the following day
it miraculously starts ticking again.9
Among the drawings made in Ciudad Trujillo, Steinberg sketched his childhood
street, courtyard, and house [Figure 9.1].
Most likely never intended to be published, these sketches reveal his dor for a time
and place forever lost. Just as it seemed important to record the exact time when
7 “Alle
7 di sera ho buttato un mozzicone di sigaretta ed e caduto in piedi.” Handwritten journal,
December 1940–January 1943, entry from February 10–11, 1942. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly
Box 89. For a detailed account of Steinberg’s immigration ordeals, see Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent
from Paradise: Saul Steinberg’s Italian Years (1933–1941),” Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish
History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, No. 2 October 2011.
8 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943, entry from October 22, 1941. Saul Steinberg
Papers, formerly Box 89.
9 Handwritten journal. December 1940–January 1943, entry from February 11, 1942. Saul Steinberg
Papers, formerly Box 89.
his burning cigarette butt fell standing on the floor, or when the watch from Adina
stopped working and then inexplicably repaired itself, so it was important to mark
the precise moment when he made these drawings: “made this in Ciudad Trujillo, in
1941—August 19,”10 he writes on a “site plan” of his street. Written not as a casual
indication at the bottom of the page, the way similar annotations are usually scribbled,
but made visible in the white space on the right side of the drawing, the note resembles
a speech balloon or perhaps a thought bubble in the tradition of cartoons. The voice,
however, suggests otherwise: it has the serious, celebratory tone found in old votive
inscriptions used to mark royal edifications. It registers the time of the making of the
drawing, but also a cross-section through a past turned present. The next page of
the journal zooms into a detailed plan of the house, now explaining the time of the
drawing: “No. 4, Palas Street (from Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931”11
[Plate 27]. The two sketches have the significance of an inaugural act where recollec
tions become material, rather than mental, images. It is the materiality of memories
that Steinberg constructs through his mood of dor, marking two overlapping tenses:
the time of the making of the drawing, and the time of the memory within the drawing.
Let us return now to the “site plan” [Figure 9.1]. Connecting two main streets of the
neighborhood, Palas Street was fairly short: eight houses on one side and seven on the
other.12 For Steinberg, however, the street is much thicker because it is populated with
people, events, stories, and characters that construct a depth otherwise invisible. He
identifies the houses by the names of their inhabitants (Willy Kaufman, Mantuleasca,
Fischer, M-me Schor, M-me Riş, etc.), or by different characters associated with them:
un cane (a dog), il ragazzo paralitico (the paralytic boy), un tâmplar (a carpenter).13
Bouncing between Italian and Romanian, he constructs a form of Esperanto that joins
together two realities and two times, of the adult and of his child alter ego.
His family house is the only one identified by a number: 4. Without a name, the
house appears to lack identity. This, however, is deceiving, because numbers—and
number 4 in particular—have special significance in Steinberg’s universe; they are not
quantitative entities, but living creatures with character and feelings. To the friend
traveling to Bucharest, he would give specific instructions about what to capture
in the photographs: “the courtyard seen through the gate, the house number and
plate.”14 Several of his later drawings give life and stories to different numbers. One
in particular shows a Steinberg-resembling cat—another recurrent character in his
art—looking inside a number 4, which becomes a secret box that allows one to store,
then search; but, more importantly, to remember and imagine.
Four is an interesting number because it is a shape that would arouse the curios
ity of a cat. Most numbers are either open or closed. Number 8, for instance, is
closed; a cat has no business to look inside. A cat likes to peer into something
10 “fatto questo a Ciudad Trujillo nel 1941–19 agosto”. Handwritten journal, December 1940–
January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89.
11 “Strada Palas no. 4, (prin Antim) din 1918 (cred) fino al 1930 o 1931”. Handwritten journal,
December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89.
12 The two streets were Antim and Schitu Maicilor. The eponymous monasteries were located in the same
neighborhood, on the Arsenal Hill. The entire area was demolished by the communist regime in the
1980s to make room for a new administrative center of the communist party.
13 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89.
that is half open—a little bit open—a mystery. Number 3 is obvious; number 1
is nothing; 5 perhaps is more intriguing, but 4 certainly is perfectly designed and
engineered for a cat to look inside and find out what is going on. . . . The abstrac
tion, number 4, became a reality and the cat became an abstraction because it
combined itself with this number.15
To the viewer, the box appears empty—there is nothing inside. But for the Steinberg
cat the container is a memory box triggering recollections only accessible to him.
Similarly, the house at 4, Strada Palas is an almost-enclosed container, the only one
on the street represented as a box, rather than an unfinished rectangle. And that is
because the mysteries at no. 4 are waiting to be revealed.
Inhabitation
Steinberg grew up without toys, but surrounded by containers of different sizes.
His father owned a small factory that made cardboard boxes ranging in size from
lipstick holders “covered with colored paper and trimmed with gold and silver,” to
large boxes for Passover unleavened bread, “stacked up in big piles that took on the
appearance of fantastic cardboard buildings.”16 Similar to the mysterious cases that
fascinated young Saul, the house at no. 4 becomes an enigmatic box hiding many
secrets. Standing right outside the fence and marked in the sketch by a radiating sun,
a felinar (street lamp) sheds light onto the puzzle [Figure 9.1].
Moving up the drawing, we peek inside the courtyard. Beyond the fence, the walls
become transparent: inside the house we guess at what could be a butoi (barrel) and
a dulap (wardrobe). Then Steinberg invites us to turn the page and zoom in into the
courtyard [Plate 27]. Beyond the gate at no. 4 we find cişmeaua (the water pump), a
necessary utility at the beginning of the century. Typical for house typologies in early
twentieth-century Bucharest, several shotgun houses share a common courtyard. As
we advance toward the back, we pass through a grădină (garden) and by a cluster of
oţetari (castor bean). In a small nook bordered by a gard lemn (wooden fence) we
stumble upon scară, găleţi, gunoi (staircase, buckets, trash). Another curte internă
(interior courtyard) leads toward Schitu Maicilor, one of the two streets connected
through Palas Street. This labyrinth of courtyards, fences, and open and enclosed
spaces would only make sense in plan in the mind of an adult. Children, on the other
hand, would remember the qualities of spaces, how big or small they felt, along with
those details closer to the scale of their tiny stature: the wooden planks on the ground,
the buckets, the trash, or the stairs.
On the left, in front of the oţetari, we arrive at the family house, the only one
colored in light brown [Plate 27]. It is the adult, Italian-speaking Steinberg who
explains, in the upper right corner of the drawing, the evolution of the house, which
has matured along with the economic growth of the family:
Strada Palas No. 4 (through Antim) from 1918 (I think) until 1930 or 1931. Over
the last 3–4 years the street number is changed and becomes 9—first running
15 Saul Steinberg, quoted in Harold Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978),
28–9.
16 Steinberg with Buzzi, Reflections and Shadows, 6–7.
water is introduced in the house, then Sander’s apartment is redone, a new level
is added above the kitchen, everything is being modernized and we get electricity,
we even take the little room next to the kitchen, we redo the interiors, paint the
walls with airbrushed drawings, we buy furniture from the Chiţales.17
While these notes are written in Italian, everything related to the family house is in
Romanian. As Steinberg inhabits the rooms, he simultaneously inhabits his native
language, which, conversely, is the only one that can render the reality of the house.
Even the drawing conventions need meticulous explanations in Romanian to complete
the picture.
Nothing indicates where we enter the Steinbergs’ house. In Romanian folklore it is
often the window, rather than the door, that carries the significance of thresholds and
rites of passage. Popular beliefs mark the window as the place where sick children
pass from one side to the other in a specific ritual of name changing associated with
curing their illness.18 The house in the drawing is Steinberg’s home, but also an imag
ined house that we have access to through the threshold of any opening. The default
entrance would most likely be through the antreu (a large vestibule), from which we
are taken to the bucătărie (kitchen) to the right and casă (main house) to the left.
A fairly modest house for the family of four occupying it, the Steinbergs’ house
has little furniture. A găleată (bucket) sits on the kitchen floor and something that
resembles a trapdoor toward the pivniţă (basement)—si cadeva dentro (“one would
fall inside”), notes Steinberg, in Italian, as his thoughts, along with his steps, suddenly
slip and fall into another reality. A bufet (cupboard) and probably a bed and a table
occupy the one-window vestibule. What Steinberg designates as the main house is in
fact the largest room where we encounter the garderob vechiu (old wardrobe), garde
rob nou (new wardrobe), canapeaua mică (the small sofa), an etajeră (bookshelf),
a large bed, and a godin (a cylindrical heating stove). The latter holds a particular
significance for him: in the concert of childhood scents, “the metal stove had a special
smell when lit for the first time, since the surface had been greased to keep it from
rusting.”19 As he later confessed in an interview:
I find that one reliable instrument is the nose. I go back to the house where I lived
as a child, at night, and try to sniff a past. I allow the nasal emotions to tell me
the truth. I discover myself as a house. In the bedroom and living room are my
best friends and relatives—The Senses. Eyes, nose, tongue, fingers etc., in constant
conversation and emotion. I suspect the eye and nose to be older than I am, and
to have their own brains. They may be angels. Down in the basement I hear the
mumbling of my underworld: furnace and plumbing—my invisible relatives. . . .
And up in the attic, I hear the shrieks of the crazy cousins . . . We learn to live
with them.20
17 Handwritten journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers, formerly Box 89, author’s
translation from the Italian.
18 People said that changing the name of the child would confuse the illness, which would subsequently
lose the ability to recognize the child.
20 Typescript of interview with Adam Gopnik, August–September 1991, p.3, Saul Steinberg Papers,
formerly Box 67.
How do all these fragments of inhabitation come together? Why did Steinberg con
tinually return to a not-particularly-happy childhood and keep drawing that modest,
yet royal, house year after year, despite his open position of profound disdain and
skepticism toward his country of birth? If every history is a story, then how are they
woven at 4, Strada Palas?
And Beyond
An inconspicuous detail reappears in different renditions of Strada Palas throughout
the years: the upper left corner of the 1941 sketch from Ciudad Trujillo draws the eye
to this detail by the thick, heavy lines that reverse the drawing conventions usually
requiring the use of sharp, dark outlines in the foreground and fuzzy, blurred lines in
the background [Figure 9.1]; the family dinner vignette made in 1942, and entitled
Strada Palas, guides us toward it by the central strip of sepia sky shimmering through
the gold embroidered curtains [Plate 28]; a 1966 view of Strada Palas renders this
minuscule object next to an oversized tree, larger than the houses themselves and
hovering above them [Plate 29].
This discreet detail is a fragile ladder leading to a closed door—the door to the
pod (attic)? Or perhaps a door to nowhere? As Steinberg consistently remembers it
and brings it into presence, the ladder speaks of wanderlust and the desire to escape.
The adult attempts to free himself from the memories of his alter-ego child and the
convoluted feelings about his homeland, perhaps from the past, as well as from the
present. In the story of Jacob’s ladder, the angelic stairway opened up the path to
dreams and to a world invisible through the eyes of the mind, yet engraved in the
bodily action of climbing up and down the stairs. Describing the childhood home as
an “oneiric house, a house of dream-memory” that is “physically inscribed in us,”
Gaston Bachelard wrote:
After all these years, in spite of all the other anonymous stairways, we would
recapture the reflexes of the “first stairway,” we would not stumble on that rather
high step. The house’s entire being would open up, faithful to our being. We
would push the door that creaks with the same gesture, we would find our way in
the dark to the distant attic.21
Steinberg’s stairway to the attic joins dor as homesickness with dor as wanderlust,
the complicated mood that constantly drives him toward, and at the same time away
from, his memories. Dor constructs the scaffolding of his drawings, reminding him
(and us) about the intricate connections between here and there, now and then,
love and hate. Dor and daydreaming inhabit the ladder to the garret as a place of
becoming, of not-yet there, full of possibilities. Steinberg reshuffles the objects in
the memory box at no. 4, re-writing over and over again the same, though different,
confabulations.
21 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1994), 15.
10 The enlightening radiance
of shadows The radiance of shadows
Hooman Koliji
The confluence of geometry and light in architecture has the power to create spaces
of awe and wonderment. This is especially true of the uniquely Persian window
orosi. Stretching from floor to ceiling, an orosi is a thin wooden screen of complex
geometric patterns filled with colorful glass, mediating between the main room inside
and the courtyard garden outside. These windows are usually prestigiously centered
on the primary axis linking the edifice and garden as a celebratory destination. This
placement with its framing of views from inside and out creates a double emphasis on
reading the window beyond an artful architectural artifact. The orosi presents itself
as an embodiment of multiple societal and cultural apertures and planes. This simul
taneity of layers gestures to the arts, sciences, crafts, perception, religious imagina
tion, and social and political aspects of their situated time—all present in the orosi
window—that are most awakened for the viewer through an enchanting play of light
and shadows.
Throughout its history, windows have generally served as a symptomatic trope in
architectural discourses because “[the window] has functioned both as a practical
device (a material opening in the wall) and an epistemological metaphor (a figure
for the framed view of the viewing subject).”1 While the first function of orosi—a
utilitarian fenestration—is significant, it is its second function as a compelling aper
ture to the worlds of subjective wonder and the collective experience of a culture that
makes the telling of orosi a fascinating tale.
When seen in terms of the worlds it creates, the thin material window expands into
a thick realm of thresholds and interpenetrations, inviting the viewer to partake in its
conjuring. The exquisite colored glass of orosi windows suggests a multiplicity of nar
ratives at tectonic, experiential, and contemplative levels. The interplay between these
layers in orosi windows will be investigated as a fertile architecture facture.
A (hi)story of glazing and gazing

The origin of orosi windows can be traced back to the twelfth century across the
Islamic provinces. They were first utilized as a distinct window typology in the royal
palaces of the Safavids (1501–1722).2 European traveller Olearius visited Isfahan in
1 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009),
26.
2 Mehdi Amraee, Orosi, Panjirh Haye Ru Bi Nur [Orosi, the Windows Facing the Light]. 2nd ed.
(Tehran: sazman mutali’e va tadvin-e kutub-i ulumi insani (samt), markaz tahghigh va tusi’e ulum insani
88 Hooman Koliji
1637 and observed Persian windows “as big as their doors . . . they [the Persians] have
not yet the use of glass, but in winter they cover the frames of their windows, which
are made like lattices, with oiled paper.”3 Later, colored glass replaced translucent
waxed paper, making an orosi a luxurious and precious building element.4 Despite
the absence of local technology to produce colored glass, that Persians insisted on
achieving such glamorous windows suggests orosi windows were also associated with
social and political desires [Plate 30].
The celebratory Safavid palaces which made elaborate use of orosi windows cul
minated in a “display culture” of ornament to establish a new identity of their own,
one that differed from their predecessors and was distinct from their competitors, the
Ottomans.5 Subsequent orosi windows of the Qajars also demonstrate some of the
most sophisticated craftsmanship and ornamentation of the genre. This is evident in
their palaces, where power and beauty were intended to be on full display. The higher
the stature of the household, the more ornate was the orosi apertures. These palaces
extended the role of the window from ornamentation to the invocation of attributes
of authority and power, playfulness, and prestige. Beyond the question of status, the
creation of orosi windows also suggests an inner desire or a cultural urge to achieve
certain spatial qualities.
Etymological studies disagree on the exact origins of the word orosi. Since in
Persian the prefix or denotes “above” or “high,” Pirniya, an Iranian architectural
scholar, suspected that the name may have come about because the window opens
vertically. He further conjectured that the term orosi or oros might have associations
with the term aroos (bride), as an explanation for the soft or “feminine” nature of
the window.6 One can speculate on the ascending imaginative qualities of the orosi
as well as its veiling/unveiling related to its feminine nature. The lower operable part
of the window is named the latih or darak. In Farsi, latih means a patch, a piece of
clothing or textile, and darak means small door. A patchwork of artistic imagination,
orosi opens up a door in one’s subjective experience. The higher, fixed portion of an
orosi is called the katiba (inscription), which is derived from the root Arabic term
k-t-b (writing), and is also a root term for kitab (book), which implies deeper linkages
between spatial and textual forms.
Creating the window

The orosi window embodies a tradition of the conceiving of geometric forms, namely
girih, by geometers and mathematicians developed since the tenth century. The
Persian term girih and the Arabic word aqd, both denoting “knot,” referred to such
a geometric mode, and also allude to bringing together two separate entities—two
worlds. In translating pure geometric forms into built form, the orosi brings together
two worlds of mathematical concepts and material properties. In the West, practical
[Institute for the Study and Publication of Humanities Books, Center for Research and Development of
the Humanities], 2009).
3 See http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/olearius/travels.html#isfahan.
4 Amraee, Orosi.
5 For a discussion on display culture among three Courts of Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal see Gülru
Necipoğlu, “Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces,” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993).
6 Muhammad-Karim Pirniya, Mimari Irani [The Iranian Architecture] (Tehran: Soroush Danish, 2008).
The radiance of shadows 89
geometry achieved this by compromising theoretical geometry with physical material.
The conceiving of orosi involved ilm al-hiyal, literally the “Science of Trickery,” an
approach of approximating mathematical and geometric truths in physical bodies and
objects where cunning prevents compromising the ideal.7
Architects and designers created girih designs from scrolls that contained many
complex geometric patterns color-coded primarily in red, ochre, blue, and green
inks. The scrolls, such as those of the nineteenth-century architect Mirza Akbar, were
kept in secret to protect the geometric knowledge they contained [Plate 31]. Scroll
drawings show only quadrants or fragments of an “overall pattern meant to be mul
tiplied or rotated by symmetry.”8 The proportioned geometric drawing as a “repeat
unit” had no scalar obedience to its future physical realization in the window. The
drawings were intermediaries fluctuating between the realms of theoretical geometry
(immaterial) and construction (material). The drawing was an elusive memory device,
calling upon the craftsman’s imagination and skillfulness, as the “ability to make
such patterns was an expected part of the builder’s repertoire, learned from masters
and remembered.”9 In between the architect’s memory (quwwat al-hafiza), the form-
giving imagination (quwwat al-mutasawwira), and the physical window, the drawing
construed a forthcoming construction. The complex geometric drawings were built
upon invisible “blind” lines that were scored, uninked, into the paper’s surface.
Actual construction of the windows translated the invisible construction lines of
the geometrical drawing into the internal wooden rectilinear structure to support the
individual windows. The wooden framework was notched and the carved geometrical
pieces were joined tongue-and-groove so that the physical structure of the window
was held within a thin, minimal frame. Yet the sequence of drawing the geometrical
figure differed from the process of building it in wood.
Viewed metaphorically, the geometric drawing is a virtual window to the actual
one; the unit drawing is comparable to Alberti’s 1435 metaphor of the window. His
description of the picture plane as an open window (finestra aperta) expands our
notion of visual representation. By drawing the rectangular frame, Alberti created a
virtual window to the world he observed, and used that window as a means to con
nect the viewer to the subject of his paintings.10
Inhabiting orosi
Between inside and outside

The orosi window inhabits the vertical threshold between the interior room and the
garden space as almost the entire exterior wall of the room. Unlike the Albertian, or
Western, “picture window,” this Persian window is something to look upon, rather
7 Hooman Koliji, In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in Islamic and
Western Traditions (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 55.
8 Gülru Necipoğlu, Mohammad Al-Asad, and Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities,
The Topkapi Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture: Topkapi Palace Museum Library
Ms H. 1956. Sketchbooks & Albums (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1995), 10.
9 Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 177.
10 Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 30.
90 Hooman Koliji
than only look through. Uniform in geometry, the two faces of this window establish
very different interactions with their two audiences: inside inhabitants and outside
visitors. They represent distinct worlds, spatially and experientially.
The view of the window from inside dances with illuminated colorful shapes and
figures [Plate 32]. During daytime, the glowing, multicolored orosi window screen
appeals to one’s fantasy—phantasia, from the Latin root phos, or light. Elaborated by
stars and polygon girih patterns, the orosi invokes a symbolic presence of the celestial
spheres described by such Islamic thinkers as the Ikhwan al-Safa.11 A maze of geom
etry, light, and color, insightful reflection on an orosi reveals numerous geometric
patterns. Exceeding mere visual pleasure, it calls for musing beyond physical sight and
entering the realm of intellectual vision.
The outside view of the orosi from the garden or courtyard (hayat) displays the
homogenous intricate wooden interlocking geometric pattern, as the glass is visually
inert in the daylight. At night, interior light casts colored shadows into the garden
and reflections in the water. Instilled by similar principles, the garden presents a lush
landscape while bound by the rules of the geometry. The water of a pool, usually
centered on the orosi, combines the reflection of the sky with that of the window. This
stage-like setting of garden before window suggests that the entire garden is built in
order to represent a microcosm—a scene—for the orosi to gaze upon.12
Between gardens
Constellations of different shapes and figures of orosi patterns are named after natu
ral elements (bergamot, sun, star, flower, etc.). They are filled with glass colored
with natural pigments and semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli,13 thus making
the variegated geometry seem as if a garden. The presence of floral and vegetal
forms and colors in orosi present an abstract allegory of a garden. Additionally,
since an orosi has numerous apertures, it can bring the actual exterior garden into
the interior. When the orosi is completely open, the space of the room is continuous
with the garden outside, and people can pass through it. When fully shut, it is a var
iegated geometric pattern. Or it can concurrently offer both modes, the lower space
providing a framed view of the planted garden, while the upper portion frames
the gaze of the viewer toward the sky into a realm of abstract color forms. Sliding
between the material and abstract portrayals of the garden, the orosi embodies the
sensible while evoking the intelligible. The imagination becomes the link between
these two worlds.
11 The Ikhwan al-Safa associate Pythagorean theories of geometry with celestial orbits. For a study of their
thoughts, see Amnon Shiloah, trans., The Epistle on Music of the Ikhwān al-S∙āfā’ (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
University Press, 1978).
12 The contemporary idea of the gaze introduces it as a form of framing perceptive and cognitive functions
of the mind. However, the pre-modern world generally regarded gaze as a way of projecting the self to
the world and connecting oneself with the world as a whole. See Ivan Illich’s online text, “The Scopic
Past and the Ethics of the Gaze,” http://ournature.org/~novembre/illich/1998_scopic_past.PDF.
13 Hossein Lorzadeh, Ihya-i Hunarha-i Az Yad Rafih: Mabani Mimari Sunati Dar Iran [Revival of the
Forgotten Arts: Principles of Traditional Architecture in Iran], edited by Mahnaz Raieszadeh and
Hossein Mofid (Tehran: Mola Publications, 2010). Also see: Ashghar Sha’rbaf, Girih va Karbandi/
Girih and Pattern Making, vol. 1 (Tehran: Sazman-i miras farhangi [The Iranian Cultural Heritage
Center], 2006).
The orosi is a veiled window that invites the viewer to unveil, within, invisible
landscapes, offering a simultaneous experience of the natural and the abstract. This
concurrent engagement of the intellect and the senses requires an in-between cognitive
faculty, the imagination. Historically loaded with spiritual dimensions, the geometric
patterns become anagogical vehicles to unveil understandings belonging to a sym
bolic domain. Such a seemingly thin plane vividly projects light into the depth of the
space, and creates anamorphic washes of color on the wall and floor. In so doing, it
concretizes light into material, and expands the sensual experience of the outside to
the depth of the enclosure. The projected light, although in motion throughout the
day, portrays an eternal image fluctuating between the temporal and the eternal. The
orosi features an assemblage of frames within frames, shapes within shapes, each
attending to the potentiality of spatial depth and inviting the viewer into multilayered
sceneries.
Space of mundus imaginalis

The orosi comes into existence due to the light. It is an intermediary agency that
changes intangible light into palpable lumen, giving architecture a corporeal presence.
Marco Frascari’s discussion of lume materiale in Venetian architecture is insightful:
when architecture imprisons light, the light becomes architecture.14 Islamic philoso
phy’s play on the light has also impacted its architecture. Light as the source of crea
tion and beauty became central to architecture, and building apertures turned into
moments of such celebration. An intermediary realm between the invisible and visible
worlds, the mundus imaginalis, or the imaginal, is also described in terms of invis
ible light variegated into colors and shapes. The imaginal is a complex concept and
it is hard to define it in verbal terms; however, broadly described, the imaginal is the
intermediary world between the sensible and intelligible, a world of subtle bodies. It is
also described in terms of a “world of demonstration” (alam al-mithal), where things
are demonstrated in their subtle bodies, as where the light and shadow meet and the
invisible light becomes visible.
In this sense, the window itself is an imaginal world, as it changes the light passing
through it. Comprising two main material substances (wood and glass), orosi concur
rently feature the temporal world of phenomena and the intellectual world of timeless
ness, as geometry and light call for perpetual beauty. Glass, being a subtle, immaterial
material, holds imaginal attributes. Al-Gazali, interpreting The Light Verse, refers to
the “bulb of light” as analogous to imaginal existence.
A kaleidoscopic space, an anamorphic cast of colors and shadows in orosi win
dows appeals to the imaginal. Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), the Andalusian philosopher,
referred to colored glass as an imaginal being allowing the “invisible light” to become
visible in hues and colors. The stained-glass window, transforming invisible lux to
visible material lumens, is comparable to the evocative nature of the apparition of
truth, which has been captured by the French scholar of Islamic philosophy Henry
Corbin (1903–1978): “The theophanic concept . . . is that of an Apparition, which
is the transparition of divinity through the mirror of humanity, in the way the light
only becomes visible by taking shape and showing through the figure of a stained
14 Marco Frascari, “The Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice,” Perspecta 23, (1988): 136–45.
92 Hooman Koliji
glass window.”15 The projected light on the depth of the space is also a reminder of
Alhazen’s (965–1040) theory of the aesthetics of light. He elaborated on this phenom
enon in his Book on Optics:
All visible properties can be perceived only from the forms produced in the eye by
the forms of colours and lights of the visible objects . . . for light produces beauty,
and thus the sun, the moon and the stars look beautiful, without there being in
them a cause on account of which their form looks beautiful and appealing other
than their radiant light. Therefore, light by itself produces beauty.16
In Alhazen’s theory of visual aesthetics, pure beauty (al-husn) is the result of a sophis
ticated interaction of 22 diverse factors based on subject–object contextual relation
ships. However, he singled out two of those elements, light and color (as a quality
of light), and argued that these two by themselves were capable of producing beauty
and giving rise to a sense of pleasure.17 Built on light, the orosi window engages one’s
perceptual, imaginative and speculative faculties, arousing a sense of pleasure and
wonderment. Gazing at light, the orosi creates spaces of delight.
A subtle aperture
The orosi concurrently features the temporal world of phenomena and the intellectual
world of timelessness in all its aspects. The window itself is the least material substance
in the building, since, as an opening, it violates the thick masonry enclosure. An orosi
is a conglomerate, a hybrid of things, skills, and desires. From symbolic meanings to
religious imagination, from joyful experience to expressions of prestige and power,
orosi windows can show the way, give guidance, and tell tales.18 In describing the
author-guided imagination in literature, Elaine Scarry explains that Proust’s descrip
tion of colored lights moving over a wall’s surfaces invokes the solidity of the wall in
the reader’s imagination. Conversely, in architecture, the colored light projected from
the orosi moving across the actual wall suggests the metaphysical or ethereal to the
viewer’s imagination.19
The orosi embodies a co-existence of two extremes, the corporeal and the spiritual.
Its voluptuous embrace of sophisticated geometry, craft, and materials make it a
luxurious gem for the patron to satisfy their sense of social standing, while obtain
ing a sense of pleasure. At the same time, the orosi became a means to ascend from
the material world and experience a sense of wonderment and spirituality. With
the names associated with its shapes, girih holds semantic attributes of the material
world. The imaginative girih patterns are of the ideal, the creation and reading of
15 Henry Corbin, quoted in Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western
Esotericism. Suny Series in Western Esoteric Traditions (Albany NY. State University of New York
Press. 2000), 159.
16 Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, Kitab Al-Manazir [On Direct Vision], edited by Abd al-Hamid Sabra, 2 vols
(Kuwait: The National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters, 1983), 1:139, 200.
17 These properties are identified as light, colour, distance, position, solidity, shape, size, separation, conti
nuity, number, motion, rest, roughness, smoothness, transparency, opacity, shadow, darkness, beauty,
ugliness, similarity, and dissimilarity.
18 Frascari, “Lume Materiale.”
19 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14.
which is possible through the recognition of visual idioms, figural vocabularies, and
deep conceptual structure: the construction of a rich tale that is also an allegory.
The presence of colored vegetal patterns, a direct reference to the world of phe
nomena in orosi windows, pertains to a mimesis of natural phenomena. These are
allegories directing the viewer into the realm of gardens that are invisible. The view
to the outside environment makes the literal garden an integral part of the window,
complementing the allegorical garden. The space between the literal garden (outside
environment) and the allegorical garden (the garden found in orosi) is contemplative,
one that anticipates anagogical means leading the viewer to a higher, invisible realm—
namely the idyllic garden.
Suspended between the two gardens, orosi offers a third layer, the imaginal. The
imaginal invites the viewer to participate in observing the two gardens simultaneously
while inhabiting a third garden in one’s subjective mundus imaginalis, a space of alle
gory. Thus the orosi window offers the viewer three distinct, yet intertwined, spaces:
the literal garden, the allegorical garden, and the anagogical paradise, all of which are
apprehended through the inserted element of light.
Built on light, orosi comprises a representation of invisible gardens while at the
same time representing the visible garden. A threshold between interior and exterior,
the window offers powerful symbolic implications as an analogue to the space of
internal subjectivity and the external world.
11 Architecture sub rosa
Another tell-tale detail, with confabulations
and digressions
Tracey Eve Winton
Antipasto
Let’s tell stories for a while, if you please, but as Horace says, let’s make them relevant.
For fables, even ones we put down to old wives’ tales, are not only the first begin
nings of philosophy. Fables are also—and just as often—philosophy’s instrument.1
ELEVEN years before, while savoring a maccheronic delicacy, I was silently absorbing
“On Biting the Tongue.” In Italo Calvino’s fable, Mr. Palomar makes a habit of biting
his tongue three times before speaking, for the art of silence is more recondite than
the art of speech. Calvino proposes that silence is a kind of speech: both forestalling
and foreshadowing words, it unfurls a space for the unspoken and the unspeakable.2
So I thought about architectural elements as silent storytellers or speakers of silence.3
Vino
My treatise will hint at some things . . ., it will try to speak imperceptibly, to make
manifest in secrecy, to demonstrate in silence.4
In his treatise, The Contemplative Life, Philo of Alexandria describes banquets of

silence in which diners assumed special bodily postures to listen, wordlessly, to a
single storyteller:
[W]hen the banqueters have taken their places . . . after all are hushed in deep
silence—here one might ask when is there not silence, but at this point there
1 Angelo Poliziano, “Preliminary Lecture On Aristotle’s Prior Analytics: Lamia” in Angelo Poliziano’s
Lamia Text, Translation, and Introductory Studies, edited by Christopher S. Celenza (Leiden: Brill
2010), 195.
2 Italo Calvino, “On Biting the Tongue” in Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace, 1985), 102–4.
3 While I was living in Rome, Marco Frascari sent me an invitation to a “macaronic symposium” he was
planning in Alexandria, named On Biting the Tongue: Iconic Thinking and Silence in Architecture.
Recognizing the motif of silence and iconicity from the final lines of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
I sent him some work called “Unspeakable Acts of Architecture: Two Anecdotes Sub Rosa.” Though
Marco did not say it openly, his title also paid homage to Italo Calvino’s story concerning the meaning
of silence. Marco’s banquet of silence never took place—but that is another story.
4 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, i. I. 15. i English translation quoted in Raoul Mortley, From Word
to Silence: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek (Bonn: Hanstein 1986), 37.
Architecture sub rosa 95
is silence even more than before, so that no one dares to utter a sound, or
breathe more forcefully than usual—in this silence, I say, he makes enquiry
into some problem arising in the Holy Scriptures, or solves one propounded by
someone else.5
Dining without silence meant silence following in the banquet’s wake: outside the
confines of the room it was forbidden to repeat the secrets of the inner circle. We call
this strict confidence of sealed discourse sub rosa, Latin for “under the rose.”
The rose symbolized the world of the gods, heralding spring, the rebirth of earth’s
fertility. Greece brought roses to Rome, where the souls of the dead received fragrant
offerings. Renaissance iconography consecrated the rose to Venus, goddess of beauty.
To ensure the goddess’s amorous liaisons remained secret, her son Cupid dedicated
this flower to the young god Harpocrates, Egyptian deity of silence.
Humanists conflated Harpocrates with Hermes, suggesting a silence imposed on all
joinings and chiasms; extending to hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, and to the
arcana of icons, symbols, and messages from the other world. Under the rose passed
secret things restricted to architectural spaces: rites, confessions, miracles, intrigues,
and illicit love, secure only within their enclosure, changing meaning should they
cross the threshold.
Rose ornaments, as emblems of silence, marked the doors of rooms where secret
things transpired, so the story goes: overhanging confessionals and sculpted on ban
quet hall ceilings, roses reminded guests that stories told sub rosa conveyed inner
truth, not to pass beyond the walls.6
Primo
The mysteries are transmitted in a mysterious way.7
In the city of Florence stands the Dominican church Santa Maria Novella, its prin
cipal chapel jointly dedicated to the Virgin Mary and the city’s patron, Saint John
the Baptist. A close relative of the Medici rulers, the wealthy and powerful banker
Giovanni Tornabuoni commissioned these cycles, and in 1490 Domenico Ghirlandaio
painted the frescoes, assisted by his young apprentice Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The Life of John the Baptist’s iconographic program is based on The Gospel
according to St. Luke. Seven scenes laid into the plaster, and one adjacent on the rear
wall of the apse, integrate the solid material of the church with exquisitely designed
painted architecture. Each panel is a masterpiece demonstrating architecture’s sym
metry, modularity, and eurythmy, with articulated detailing configured to tell its own
story. Ghirlandaio creates architectural fantasies, and like many Renaissance perspec
tives, his istoria lends a pretext for the painter’s poetic inquiry into architecture as a
vehicle for meaning.
5 David Winston, ed., Philo of Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, Giants and Selections (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 54.
6 Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, Revised & Enlarged (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1952), 784.
7 Clement of Alexandria, Stromata. i. 1. 13. 4, quoted in Raoul Mortley, “Notes and Studies: The Theme
of Silence in Clement of Alexandria,” The Journal of Theological Studies XXIV, no. 1 (1973): 200.
96 Tracey Eve Winton
From below, the stories start with the Annunciation to Zacharias, a panel archi
tecturally jointed to The Visitation where Elizabeth meets her cousin Mary—both
miraculously with child—outside the walled city contiguous to the temple, its pow
erful fortifications and moat signifying corporeal purity, while to the left a nymph
bearing a platter of fruits (the spirit of fecundity) enters through an auricular outer
gateway. One level up, on the rear wall behind the altar, is the narrow panel showing
The Baptist in the Wilderness. The Birth of the Baptist is on the right, and on the left,
Zacharias Writing John’s Name. Above, The Baptism of Christ is on the left and John
Preaching to the Multitudes is on the right. Both scenes are in the countryside. At the
top, the lunette shows Herod’s Banquet, and, in the palace with its three coffered
barrel vaults, Salomé dancing. A servant carries a platter holding the Baptist’s head;
Herod clasps his hands in silent grief [Plate 33].
Herod’s temple sets the scene for the annunciation to Zacharias, who officiates as a
priest of Abijah. While the congregation waits outside the sanctuary, the elderly Jew
silently circles the temple in performance of the rite: swinging the censer, spreading
the heady fumigation of incense through the air. An angel of God appears to him and
announces a prophecy: his wife Elizabeth will bear him a son, to be named John. But
Zacharias responds to Gabriel’s annunciation with misgivings: at their great age, how
can he and Elizabeth conceive a child? He wants the archangel to give him a sign. To
punish his doubt, Zacharias is disciplined with silence: he cannot speak until his son is
born; no, until he writes John’s name. Silence is the sign of divine intervention.
“But when he came out, he was unable to speak to them; and they realized that
he had seen a vision in the temple; and he kept making signs to them, and remained
mute.”8
Secondo
Aby Warburg’s “science without a name” is the discipline that can help us to
uncover the cosmopoietic dimensions of architectural storytelling, which have
been too deeply hidden within the closets of architectural culture.9
In the Expulsion of Joachim, in which Joachim’s sacrifice is rejected on account of

his childlessness, Ghirlandaio depicted the Temple. In Zacharias, he transfigures both
temple and altar, detailing a stylistically classical architecture decorous with harmoni
ous geometries and Latin inscriptions. The temple façade is typologically modeled
on the Roman triumphal arch, based on the Arch of Constantine, symbolic nexus of
Christianity and Romanitas, and its ornamental friezes furnish telling motifs. Herod’s
Jerusalem is also the Golden Age of Florence. The building plan takes the form of a
cross, using steps and walls to distinguish gradations of sacrality and temporality on
the long frontal axis, from the biblical figures, through the Florentine citizens, to you,
the viewer. Linear elements—pilasters, cornices, borders—outline the temple, a line
amentary drawing configuring spatial relationships, surrounded by other buildings
structuring a dialogue between the painting’s twinned sides, the two vaulted portals
visually completing the triumphal arch.
8 Luke 1:22
9 Marco Frascari, “De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking,” paper presented at the 3rd Alvar Aalto
Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland, August 30, 2008.
The temple’s cavernous interior—its upper vault suggests a metaphorical womb

and space of generation—is bilaterally symmetrical about the altar, the painting’s
center of gravity, above which, between the gazes of Zacharias and the angel, the
perspectival lines of the architecture converge. The painted marble chancel models in
miniature the Tornabuoni chapel’s position in Santa Maria Novella, and its inscrip
tion, from Psalm 141:2, says: “Let my prayer be set before thee as incense. . . .” The
altar is ornamented with swags of fruit, roses and lilies, a palmette, and a scallop-shell
that served as a patera, the sacrificial vessel for renewal of eternal life, symbolizing
fertility and baptism.10 Arches springing over the altar, at the base of the vaulting arcs
rotating like the heavens, squaring and materializing the earth with marbles, opening
a chora. The arches bear iconography of seeds, pinecones, and pomegranates bursting
open, interspersed with wild quinces, symbols of love and fecundity.
Egg-and-dart ornament features abundantly as cornice-work, with eggs in the pilas
ter capitals. The invented order characterizes John the Baptist—his ultimate silencing
in death by decapitation giving a poignant resonance to the tenuous joint of shaft to
capital. Each pilaster but one is rendered in blood-red fire granite. To Gabriel’s right
stands the work’s patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni, behind whom the pilaster is uniquely
pale, as if his crimson-garbed body were corporeally intertwined with a temple pillar,
become one with his patron saint in tectonic form. Giovanni is not watching the holy
conversation; instead, his eyes are distracted by another man to the far left.
I pass over in silence Ghirlandaio’s mastery of perspective, his expertise in har
monizing complex spatial arrangements, in devising a richly material Renaissance
architecture to stage the biblical story. On our right-hand side, through an arch, is an
urban setting showing blue sky and a civic palazzo. Over the gateway, an inscription
traditionally attributed to poet Angelo Poliziano praises the city: “In the year 1490
when the most glorious city, renowned for its wealth, its victories, its arts and archi
tecture, lived in affluence, prosperity and peace.”11 On our left-hand side, towards the
campagna: a villa built in clay brick, with signs of a secret garden beyond the high
wall.
The city gate’s lower stratum shows a mythic sea-battle, with a cavalry battle
above. On its upper left a figure on horseback holds aloft a furled banner; another
mounted figure under a tree branch holds a blank cartouche. Zacharias provides the
plot, but the tale is far more complex: stories are nested in stories, scenes are narra
tives in frames, details become figurative discourse. Architectures within architec
tures. The grisaille panels represent friezes in the temple façade, carved reliefs on the
gate, and the grotesque faces of those pilasters (cleaving the viewer’s physical space in
the chapel and the istoria’s imaginary space) with candelabrum and torch motifs, for
perspectiva is the veil of light.
The Janus-headed complex with divine and human faces follows a typical
Annunciation structure. On the side of the angel messenger stand those dedicated
to the study of higher things, while on Zacharias’ side are merchants and nobles,
representing activities of civic and political life; the architectural background reflects
humanist culture’s recto and verso, vita contemplativa and vita activa.
10 In 1486, Ghirlandaio’s friend and collaborator Sandro Botticelli painted Venus floating to shore on a
shell of this type.
11 An. MCCCCLXXXX quo pulcherrima civitas opibus victoriis artibus aedificiis que nobilis copia salu
britate pace perfruebatur.
On the temple’s upper left relief, a Nike figure with a laurel wreath is crowning a
new Augustus (bearing a long scepter); reviving the grandeur of antiquity in Florence
is also the peaceful triumph of Christianity in the idiom of martial Romanitas. The
palmettes, laurels and goddess symbolize victory. Below, classical heads painted
between the pilasters run level with the heads of the literati, indicating the continuity
of the intellectual tradition, the poetic theology, disclosed by the dome of a classical
temple, shaped like their own headwear, which “crowns” them.
This centralized, circular-plan temple showing the divine Renaissance cosmos in
architectural form (with the statue of a human figure at its center) is a temple in a
temple in a temple; the cruciform holy temple in Jerusalem is set into Santa Maria
Novella, and into Herod’s temple is set the circular Roman temple. Its morphology
identifies it as the Temple of Mars Ultor that Augustus built in his Forum in Rome;
at the time of painting, Poliziano had recently unearthed evidence that Augustus
had founded Florence, and Mars predates John the Baptist as Florence’s patron.
Florentines believed their Baptistery had been a Temple of Mars in antiquity; in 1330
Filippo Villani described it in his book on the building of Florence:
Very noble and beautiful they built it with eight sides, and when it had been built
with great diligence, they dedicated it to the god Mars, who was the god of the
Romans, and they had his effigy carved in marble in the likeness of an armed
cavalier on horseback. They placed him on a marble pillar in the midst of that
temple, and held him in great reverence, and adored him as their god . . . And we
find that the said temple was begun during the reign of Octavianus Augustus.12
On the other side of Ghirlandaio’s Baptist wall—in real space—is the Strozzi chapel
featuring a frescoed Temple of Mars that Filippino Lippi painted during 1487–1502—
the same years. Both temples show Mars raised on his pillar.
Three ontological layers demonstrating the principle of quadratura are joined and
integrated by edifying frames, real and conceptual. The architectural “monster” makes
a place where stories and events can cohere. The setting characterizes the Florentine
renovatio of antique forms as the timeless truth of poetic myth and scripture weaving
into the city’s historical reality, intermediate between the temporal and eternal, with
architecture serving as vinculum, its visible surface a metaphorical hinge between
the fabulous and the actual. Giorgio Vasari notes numerous Florentine “members of
Government” plus all the Tornabuoni outside the Romanized temple playing the role
of congregation, to witness first the absence of Zacharias, then his muteness.
Florence’s political protagonists’ presence at the sacred events, like the architecture,
reflects an ideal humanistic world, brought forth in the public space of the church.
Naturalistic portraits on the angelic side include four key scholars of the higher truths
embedded in poetics. Special caps on their heads distinguish these men of letters, Giorgio
Vasari wrote, the attire of their public offices bespeaking their high social standing:
Besides this, to show how every kind of talent, but most particularly that of let
ters, flourished in that period, Domenico created four half-figures in a circle who
12 Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, translated by
Rose E. Selfe, edited by Philip H. Wicksteed (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1896), Book I,
¶41–2, 33.
are arguing with each other at the bottom of the scene. These figures represent the
most learned men to be found in Florence in those days, and they are as follows:
the first is Messer Marsilio Ficino, dressed in canonical attire; the second, wearing
a red cloak and a black scarf around his neck, is Cristoforo Landino; Demetrius
the Greek stands in their midst and is turning around, while the man who has
slightly raised his hand is Messer Angelo Poliziano.13
Ficino had consulted the latter three on his seminal translation of Plato’s Dialogues,
and in celebrating Florence’s new Golden Age, besides praising fables and teach
ing poetry, all four wrote using fabulous imagery. For them, poetic truth was vis
ceral, embodied, enacted, above philosophy, comparable to Ghirlandaio’s painterly
approach. The vivid imagery in their beloved literatures (including Homer, Hesiod,
Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Dante) furnished artists and architects material lexica
to reinterpret the elements of architecture. Naturalistic details tell the tale through
their phenomenological properties: poetics deal in concrete figurations.
Ghirlandaio positions the four in a secluded group. While they stand intimately
engaged in discussion, heads turning slightly to glance over shoulders, concerned
lest they be overheard, their lips are universally sealed in silence. What secret could
they hold? For, nearly invisible, blended into the red background between the heads
of Demetrios and Poliziano, hidden between the scarlet cloaks of two upper figures,
carved into the only column frankly rendered visible, a pilaster of flame-red granite,
is a stemmed rose.
Dolci
When looking at drawings, we sometimes cannot perceive what does exist, and
sometimes we perceive things that do not exist. In the graphic fillers can be
hidden—intentionally or unintentionally—stimuli too weak to be consciously
detected that can nevertheless powerfully affect our understanding of the archi
tecture in the drawings.14
In the Platonic theology, the truth is necessarily ineffable. Proclus explains that ini
tiation takes place by silence alone. Indeed, muesis, initiation, is literally interpreted
as silence. Man’s induction into divine creative power cannot take place by rational
thinking, which is restricted to the discursive world. The enigmatic rituals of creating
form demonstrate that divinity is reachable solely through the iteration of unspeak
able acts; only hieratic performance can give the soul the unspeakable power of the
gods.15 This power of essential universal cohesion and unity, Nature’s fundamental
force, is incomprehensible and inexplicable, and in this sense “irrational.” But its
power is the alogos that generates logos. A square whose sides are one unit long arises
13 Giorgio Vasari, “The Life of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Florentine Painter, 1449–1494” in Lives of the
Artists, translated with an introduction and notes by Julia C. Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 219.
14 Marco Frascari, The Virtue of Architecture: A 2009 Strenna (Ottawa: Lulu), 46.
15 Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and
Damascius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 190; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul:
The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 211.
from an irrational diagonal, a line that cannot be defined arithmetically, only enacted
geometrically, the very operation practiced in the mythic act of creation, the making
of perceptible order that characterizes architecture and conceals the unsayable, the
inscrutable, inside visible form.
Silentium mysticum marks the interval of gestation. As the angel announced,
Elizabeth falls pregnant. At the hour of birth, on a tablet, Zacharias silently inscribes
“His name is John.” His mouth is opened and he praises God. Ghirlandaio pairs this
Naming scene with the Birth. Look carefully at the former’s quadrate floor, which
early perspectivists used to construct the space of appearance, for there the artist sym
bolizes the geometrical principle of embodiment itself: the child’s entrance into the
world by architectonic analogy, through a cosmopoietic diagram drawn out on the
surface: a pattern of nested squares, rotated. The cardinal and diagonal points make
eight, the spiritually regenerative number of baptism, the octagon mediating between
square and circle, man and God. Florence’s own Baptistery represents the same figure
dedicated to St. John [Figure 11.1].
If you have any doubt about my story, then hush, because Ghirlandaio repeats this
arcane figure in his Birth of the Baptist, where it decorates a cubic material solid in the
lower left corner, right under a round tray or patera with a floral center. The square’s
rotation in space and time implied by the figure’s geometrical lines symbolizes the
mystical process of quadratura by which the ineffable becomes corporeal through
animating movement: heavenly, circular, nymphal. In the medieval “just measure”
the divine becomes human; word becomes flesh. Through three consecutive “gen
erative” rotations a dimensionless point becomes line, then plane, then solid body.
Ghirlandaio’s architecture tells the tale: it brings forth for Elizabeth, and speaks for
Zacharias: Iohannes est nomen eius.
“Names are symbols of created things; seek them not for Him who is uncreated,”
says Philo.16 The humanists, analogical thinkers par excellence, construed stories of
heroic pregnancy as cosmogonic fables. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Harpocrates, god
of silence, watches over pregnancy and birth. Divine things are revealed and con
cealed sub rosa, within the walls of the building or the body. Prior to Ghirlandaio,
Il Filarete wrote in his Trattato about the “pregnant” architect; a later artist dia
grammed cosmology on the womb. Pregnancy symbolizes inward meaning in things,
the secret, erotic connection back to the universe. At the birth of perspective istoria
painting, the artistic subject of the Annunciation proliferates as a metaphor of
creation.
Obscurity means I can’t verify whether the rose hovering over the fabulists is real.
Human truth concerns the meaningful, not the verifiable.
The architecture shows a unity unfolding itself out into details, and details that
enfold back into unity, facilitating a play between classical-mythic and Christian
readings of the scene. An anthemion in the capitals and on the altar below the shell
repeats the ornamentation on the pilasters, planar columns in the process of bodying
out. At the corners of the capitals, between acanthus leaves, rise cornucopias over
flowing with fruit: solid, juicy, sweet, and fertile. Is the anthemion a palmette, signify
ing Jerusalem, or, marking the place of his head, John’s future martyrdom? Nothing
is simple; everything hinges. Centered at the top of the capital, instead of the more
16 Charles Bigg, D.D., Christian Platonists of Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 8.

Figure 11.1 Detail from The Birth of John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Tornabuoni
Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1486–1490 (lower panel) and original
collage by author incorporating Ceiling Rosette, Cesare Cesariano, Vitruvius
De Architectura, 1521, Liber Secundus, XLV, and The Open Matrix of a
Pregnant Woman, with the Creature Inside, Girolamo Mercurio, La commare
o raccoglitrice dell’eccellentissimo signor Scipion Mercurio: Divisa in tre libri
(Verona: Francesco de’ Rossi, 1642), 18.
conventional Corinthian rose, from the leafy stalk sprouts the white Lily of Florence,
signature of the city, flower of Herculean immortality, of Marian annunciation. The
ancient writers called it, and her, Lilium mysticum. It is the lily’s scent that reveals her
divinity, just as the scent of the rose enjoins silence.
Caffé
These words turned Virgil to me with a look that, silent, said: “Be silent.”17
Architecture, like fables, is concerned with supra-rational reality, truths not fathomed
through logic but poetry. The temple’s Latin inscription relays silent speech from the
matrix, the sealed chamber: “Dominus ab utero vocavit me de ventre matris . . ..”18
Listen carefully. Only a few elements in the entire cycle, and in this painting, are ren
dered conspicuously in movement, animated by divine breath. The thurible of incense,
hovering in mid swing over the altar, wafts its invisible perfume through time and
space. The war grisaille, upper right. Two men and a boy on the human, “worldly”
side notice you looking at them—and return your gaze. Ghirlandaio paints the angel
Gabriel as he paints his nymphs, principles of inward erotic power, the life-force and
phantasia, who rather than materializing in flesh, shimmer in rarefied spiritus mundi.
Things in motion, in interaction, draw our attention—and Giovanni Tornabuoni’s—
away from the center to small, peripheral particulars.
The angelos is a messenger, translating knowledge between realms, from sacred
space to the phenomenal world by means of metaphor, by proportion, by analogical
thinking: the very thing under the cautionary sign of the rose. I recollect how Psalm
141 continues: “the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice. Set a watch, O
Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”19
Then there is something more: Poliziano, poet of fables, raises his right hand in a
traditional gesture.
Then, if you lift your eyes, the man directly above him makes the same gesture.
The noblewoman attired in blue, on the right, makes the same gesture.
And above, the Roman general, whose soldiers bear trophies of the divine world
(the Sun on our left) and the sublunary world of time (the Moon on our right), like
wise lifts his hand, to silently say:
Silentium postulo, I demand silence.
The creation secret is also an architectural secret. Lift up your eyes directly above the
two men making the sign of silence. Behind the fabulists, theologians and philologists,
reminding you of the attentive silence that precedes all poetic theology and is the
ground of all architecture, betraying the superabundant silent eloquence of Nature
and the gods, spilling over the wall, revealing the unseen pregnancy of the hortus
conclusus, is a telltale cascade of fragrant red roses.
For the higher we soar in contemplation the more limited becomes our expres
sions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the
Darkness which is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech,
but even into absolute Silence, of thoughts as well as of words. Thus, in the
former discourse, our contemplations descended from the highest to the lowest,
17 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Volume II, Purgatory, translated with and introduction and com
mentary by Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1985), Canto XXI, 103–4, 231.
18 Isaiah 49:1.
19 Ps. 141:2–3.
embracing an ever-widening number of conceptions, which increased at each

stage of the descent; but in the present discourse we mount upwards from below
to that which is the highest, and, according to the degree of transcendence, so
our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become
wholly voiceless, inasmuch as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.20
By this means alone I reveal the secret.
Figure 11.2 Silentium Postulo, table of gestures, from John Bulwer, Chirologia or the
Naturall Language of the Hand, Composed of the Speaking Motions, and
Discoursing Gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: Or, The Art
of Manvall Rhetoricke. Consisting of the Naturall Expressions digested by Art
in the Hand as the chiefest Instrument of Eloquence, by Historical Manifesto’s
exemplified, . . . by J. B. Gent. Philochirosophus. Manus membrum hominis
loquacissimum (London: Harper 1644) (left-hand panel) and Harpocrates,
Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome 1652–1654), Vol. III, 590 (right-hand
panel).
20 The Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. translated and edited with a commentary by
Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom (Godalming, Surrey, England: Garden City Press, 1923), ch. 3.
Part III
Stories of theory
12 Language and architectural

meaning
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Architecture’s primary function may well be to provide a communicative setting for

cultures, one that speaks both intellectually and emotionally, creating attuned set
tings for significant human action.1 While engineers may be better equipped to solve
building design problems in view of pragmatic use, structural efficiency, and energy
sustainability, we as architects like to think we can contribute something of specific
significance beyond those issues. We are often told that regardless of our intentions
architecture expresses political and economic power; we know that it can function as
a sign like publicity and often becomes a commodity; and if we have a modicum of
ethics, we worry that it doesn’t merely express our own self-indulgence. But regard
less of the representational intentions of our designs, which must be driven by a quest
for both beauty and justice, it is evident that communication of some sort, evidently
multilayered, is the primary social and cultural function of our discipline. And yet,
while we usually tend to think a lot about the role of pictures, drawings, forms, or
even spaces as geometric volumes, we generally disregard language, the languages
we speak and write, and assume they have little to do with design and architectural
meaning.
It is nevertheless obvious that living, natural languages, such as English, Spanish,
Greek, or French, constitute our primary mediation between pre-reflective embodied
consciousness (with its motor skills) and intellectual articulation. The languages we
speak (primarily oral) give us our cultural roots and are our primary medium of com
munication. I want to address the importance of language and its relationship with a
significant architecture, identifying the different aspects of this relationship and some
specific strategies for the involvement of language in design.
I take to heart the linguistic nature of human reality, particularly Martin Heidegger’s
observation that there is no Being before man speaks. I take my cues from philo
sophical hermeneutics and the concept of emerging language as part of the flesh of
the world, in continuity with habits and gestures.2 This is at odds with a constructiv
ist concept of language as a more or less arbitrary code, a vastly complex and hotly
1 A full treatment of this issue is the topic of my forthcoming book, Attunement: Architectural Meaning
after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016).
2 See particularly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1991) and Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). This is the
position of hermeneutic philosophers in the tradition of phenomenology, like Paul Ricoeur and his
students. George Steiner also argues against a constructivist theory of language in After Babel (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
108 Alberto Pérez-Gómez
debated issue. I will say a few more words about this philosophical position towards
the end of this chapter.
My concern is not with language as an auxiliary inspiration or as the unambiguous
prose of technical specifications. Poetic—original, polysemic—language is central to
the very possibility of retrieving cultural roots for architectural expression that may
result in appropriate atmospheric qualities, responsive to preexisting places. This
concern is not current in architectural theory and practice. The contemporary world
is generally suspicious of natural language, deemed fuzzy and deceitful, particularly
when compared to so-called mathematical languages, such as those that our comput
ers understand and that “get things done.” In North America, some years ago, writers
declared “the end of theory” in architecture. Taking as a mantra certain observations
by Foucault, they have retained a profound suspicion about language, construing it
as an irredeemable instrument of power and manipulation. In recent years this has
resulted in obsessions with algorithms and parametric design, a strategy of form gen
eration that deliberately bypasses language while legitimizing itself with the prospect
of infinite formal novelty and its presumed ethical neutrality.
The disregard of language by architects in the process of designing is not as recent
as it may appear. In the wake of nineteenth-century positivism and its increasing
acceptance of specialization in all areas of knowledge as the only way “forward,”
professional disciplines such as architecture became driven by instrumental efficiency.
Taking their cues from the theories of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand,3 who argued for
rational self-referentiality, architects focused on pragmatic, functionalist concerns,
believing that efficiently solving space planning and structural problems would be suf
ficient for forms to communicate their function. Nothing else was needed. Intentional
expression in analogy to poetic language, as had been theorized during the previous
century, was deemed unnecessary and even an aberration. Trying to protect the dis
cipline from the consequences of such a position, from effectively becoming a subset
of engineering, later architects subsequently reacted by associating architecture to the
Fine Arts, stressing the importance of formal issues in building composition, mostly
seeking a visual, stylistic coherence, whether motivated by political, religious, or
aesthetic ideologies; or by the egocentric concerns of an architect’s self-expression.
Although the result was in line with aesthetic concerns, the architectural mainstream
generally assumed theory (discourse) could be nothing other than applied science or
formal methodologies, and thus ignored a rich set of traditional discursive options
rooted in mythical and poetic language that had been crucial in the generation of
culturally significant work in the early stages of the history of architecture in Europe.
To put my point across I would like to highlight a few crucial historical moments
that are particularly illuminating. Writing in the first century bce, Vitruvius under
stood fully the primary communicative function of architecture. Respecting the divi
sions of knowledge first put forward by Aristotle, his theory—a form of narrative that
is totally unlike what we generally take for theory today—included properly theoreti
cal knowledge, theoria leading to sophia; practical knowledge leading to phronesis,
narrative wisdom; and technical knowledge, techne. These were autonomous forms
of knowing that contributed to the success of architecture as a communicative set
ting. Repeating the Ancient Greeks’ conviction that architecture must imitate the
3 Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture (1819; facs. reprint, München: UHL
Verlag, 1981).
Language and architectural meaning 109
perfect articulation of the superlunary cosmos, Vitruvius insisted on disposition,
or order on the basis of proportions, stressing the importance of concepts such as
commensurability: symmetria and eurythmia. Significantly, these are terms imported
from both the plastic arts or techne, and the performing arts associated with the
theatre—music, poetry and dance.4 This articulation afforded by architecture was the
most cherished property of culture, it was the aim of Greek theoria, the contempla
tion of order in Nature associated by Plato with mathemata, and mostly present to
the senses in the celestial realm. This theory was expressed in discursive texts (like
philosophy), and, Vitruvius tells us, is the same for a doctor or an architect. The
actual practice of architecture, however, was never understood as the “application”
of such theory. It involved both practical knowledge, conveyed through stories in the
language of everyday life to make wise and prudent decisions, and techne-poiesis, an
irreducible knowledge of the body manifested in skills, induced at times by external
forces and taught orally in relation to specific tasks while also acknowledging inborn
talent. Indeed, Vitruvius’ famous section in which he describes how architectural
forms should be disposed following mathematical proportions emulating the order
of the cosmos, includes, in continuity, the importance of storytelling in relation to
a category he named decor (decorum, correctness—associated also with ornament)
that accounted for crucial issues of meaning and appropriateness of form to cultural
situations—we would say programs—and natural sites. We easily grasp today the
formal issues involved in proportion but often miss the importance of the stories,
such as those that illuminate the presence of the famous caryatids in the Athenian
Erechtheion. The languages of mathesis and everyday speech—or mythos—were com
plementary in Antiquity and remained so until the Renaissance. Thus architecture
could open a clearing for dwelling in a menacing, mortal, sublunary world, and com
municate articulated order creating harmonious and tempered atmospheres mimetic
of the heavenly star-dance, yet also dressed appropriately for specific tasks, situations
or programs, framing all-important cultural habits.
The nature of architectural theory started to change after the inception of Cartesian
dualism in the seventeenth century, moving away from philosophical and rhetori
cal discourse and closer to technical knowledge. Nicolas Malebranche, a disciple of
Descartes, affirmed that only God is a true cause of all things, because only He knows
how he makes things happen, including the perceived relationship between our minds
and our bodies. Even if we will to move our arm, we don’t really know how we move
it, we are only witnessing an occasional cause, and ultimately it is God that moves
my arm. Conversely, we could infer that whenever we know mathematically—clearly
and distinctly—how something happens, for example how a lever operates in terms
of the proportions between distances to the fulcrum and applied forces, or how an
architectural plan or elevation is generated from strict geometrical operations, as is
often the case in Baroque design, then we are not only ethically and effectively crea
tive, but our mind is in fact operating through the very same ideas that are “in God.”
Thus “know-how,” the expected aim of instrumental theories, previously techné,
Aristotle’s irreducible technical knowledge, acquired the status previously held by
contemplative theoria, eventually becoming “applied science.” In the short term,
this assumption produced the Baroque instrumental, yet transcendental, theories of
4 M.P. Vitruvius, De Architectura, edited by F. Granger, bilingual edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1931), Book 1.
architect-polymaths like the Theatine father Guarino Guarini,5 and, eventually, the
first truly proto-positivistic architectural theory in the Western tradition in the writ
ings of Claude Perrault.6
Perrault questioned the fundamental assumption about architecture being capable
of re-presenting the order of the cosmos. In doing so, he opened up a modern aware
ness of the question of architecture’s meaning. He believed that architecture, like
human languages and civil law, changed in time and was the result of human conven
tions. The fact that the meanings of architecture may depend upon “custom” rather
than “nature,” however, did not make it in his view any less important or culturally
significant. Like the French language itself, at that point perceived to have attained
its summit and proper codification at the Académie Française, architecture could and
should be open to further refinement and “progress,” thus eventually suggesting the
possibility of architectural expression in the from of linguistic analogies.
In the Preface to his treatise, the Ordonnance (1683), Perrault questioned the anal
ogy of architectural and musical harmony on the basis of the diversity of the two
phenomena, addressed to independent senses conceived of as autonomous mechanical
receptors of sensory information.7 Thus he was the first writer ever to reject the useful
ness of optical corrections to reconcile traditional theory’s proportional prescriptions
with the execution of buildings that should be expressive for an embodied synesthetic
consciousness. For him the only purpose of mathematical rules in architecture was to
facilitate practice and systematize all dimensions in classical architecture, so that build
ings, now understood as aesthetic objects rather than primarily as settings for events,
could be built exactly following the designs of the architect: ideal—mathematical—
perfection externalized into built form. Once this was understood, it became the task
of the architect to innovate “aesthetically” within the “tradition,” now perceived as a
sort of ornamental syntax, making works increasingly more refined and magnificent,
capable of reflecting the glory and accomplishments of France during this period.
During the Enlightenment many architects questioned the instrumental intentions
of Perrault’s theories (which were easy to disbelieve given the conditions of pre-
Industrial Revolution practice) and took his insights as a challenge to understand
architectural meaning in relation to natural language rather than to mathematics,
foregrounding the issue of decor from Vitruvius. Thus the problem of expression
became primary.
The architectural theories of character and expression that developed during the
eighteenth century are very diverse. They try to understand the potential significance
of architecture both discursively and emotionally, and I shall not attempt in this
summary to do justice to their intricate subtleties. Seeking harmony with a Divine
nature could not be given up easily, particularly in view of the apparently definitive
successes of Newtonian cosmology and its God/geometrician. A central concern,
however, was to adequately express the uses for which a building was destined so that
it could provide a harmonious setting to actions, as well as representing the status of
5 Guarino Guarini, Architettura Civile (1737; facs. reprint, Milano: Edizione il Polifilo, 1968).
6 Claude Perrault, Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of
the Ancients, translated by I.K. McEwen (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of At and
the Humanities, 1993), Introduction, and in A. Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern
Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 18–39.
7 Perrault, Ordonnance, “Preface,” 47–53.
the building as if it were a social entity, the “mask” or public persona of its client.
Jacques-François Blondel, the most important teacher of architects in Paris around
1750, believed that excellent buildings possessed “a mute poetry, a sweet, interest
ing, firm or vigorous style, in a word, a certain melody that could be tender, moving,
strong, or terrible.”8 Just as a piece of music communicated its character through vari
ous tonal harmonies, evoking diverse states of nature and conveying sweet and vivid
passions, so proportion (understood mostly as geometric magnitude and no longer
as Pythagorean arithmetic ratios) now acted as a vehicle for architectural expression.
Thus buildings could be made terrifying or seductive, capable of expressing their
character, be it “the Temple of Vengeance or that of Love.”9 Notice how the inevita
ble mathematical and geometric qualities of architecture became subject to linguistic
expression, both discursive and poetic or emotional. This early modern development
constitutes the origin of our own possibilities to understand how fiction and natural
language may be crucial in design.
Yet, a second consequence of the Enlightenment, with problematic future conse
quences, must also be noted. The association of architecture with the Fine Arts became
commonplace during the eighteenth century. Arguing against Perrault, J.F. Blondel
thought that beauty was immutable, and that architects, with an open spirit and keen
sense of observation, should be capable of extrapolating it “from the productions of
the fine arts and the infinite variety of Nature.”10 This reveals a different assumption
about the reception of the work from that which had operated since Vitruvius. While
not totally immanent, the expression or significance of architecture was increasingly
internalized and transformed into a problem of “composition,” brought to fruition
through an objectified building. The temporal dimension, which was always central
in architectural meaning—both emotional and intellectual, and understood by the
“user” through the spatio-temporal situation (rituals and poetic programs) housed
by the architecture—receded in favor of the conception of architecture as “aesthetic
object.” Its potential significance could now be “read” out of time. The ultimate
accomplishment of this new paradigm, to be found only after 1800, would be an
architecture reduced to a sequence of novel or exciting forms for voyeuristic visits in
which linear time became an added factor, rather than being intrinsic to the situation:
what would become known as the promenade architecturale, a place for tourism
often better understood through “pictures,” rather than genuine participatory expe
rience. Buildings could then be conceived of as literal frameworks for “discursive”
writing, like Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève; or, even if generated as forms
motivated by fictions, incapable, yet, of transcending their status as aesthetic objects.
Continuing the insights of earlier character theory, two late eighteenth-century
French architects, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, sought
alternatives to this sort of objectified aesthetics and tried to re-introduce a temporal
dimension to architectural meaning, emphasizing the emotional “space-in-between”
the inhabitant and the building, the space of action, one never before theorized,
articulated through open narratives kindred to much-later surrealist techniques and
8 Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution et construction

des bâtiments . . . (Paris: Desaint, 1771), 9 vols, vol. 1, 376.
9 Blondel, Cours d’architecture, 376.
10 Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Françoise . . . (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1752), 318.
cinematographic montage.11 The very nature of theoretical writing about architecture

was also questioned. This implied a new concept of transmission and education, one
that could no longer depend on the assumption of theory as techne or applied science.
Boullée, Ledoux, and Viel de Saint-Maux declared the need for a new architectural
discourse capable of transcending the limitations of what they, mistakenly, yet justifi
ably in view of Perrault’s interpretation, perceived as the prosaic scientific prescrip
tions of Vitruvian theory and its re-incarnation in Renaissance and Neoclassical
treatises.12 Thus, they thought, the intentions of a new poetic architecture could be
better-articulated engaging narrative forms. Narrative and emplotment gave architects
such as Ledoux the tools to imagine an architecture that no longer simply reflected
the conventional order of society, like the “masks” of the earlier eighteenth-century
architecture, but was now fully in the realm of both human politics and fiction, devoid
of intrinsic transcendence, acknowledging new responsibilities. Ledoux understood
that it had become necessary for architecture to project a better future for society,
and that this project issued from the critical imagination of the architect/writer,
and not from rational analysis or mere societal consensus. His ideal city of Chaux,
described in exquisite literary form in his lavish L’Architecture considérée sous le
rapport de l’Art, des Moeurs et de la Législation (1804), proposes life as lived in new
institutions, formally innovative yet always seeking a reconciliation with the natural
world, a “space of appearance” for the “new man” of the French Revolution. The
new political subject could not dwell in the old classical architecture. Drawing from
Rousseau’s understanding of historicity, Ledoux was keenly aware of the fact that
the new humanity was irremediably other than that of the Ancien Régime. Thus he
designed places for freedom and responsibility, and his literary description discloses
the ethical and moral consequences of living in this new world.
Personal expression became a condition for this poetic possibility—a retrieval of the
universal in the creative soul of the architect. This realization corresponds to the nas
cent paradigm of Romanticism. Nicolas le Camus de Mezières imagined the inveterate
space of desire transferred to the experience of the private home, shifting the emphasis
from the exterior to interiority, in search of “limits” that could no longer be found in
the infinite, homogeneous space of natural science, increasingly identified in European
cultures with actual lived space. Employing descriptive narrative in his treatise Le
Génie de l’Architecture (1780), he illustrated the manner in which architects must
seek to design rooms, “qualitative” spaces characterized by appropriate moods to
specific focal actions, paradigmatic of harmonic environments, joined and modulated
as if in a theatrical experience, such that the house itself seduces and becomes a poetic
image of dwelling. Every space has its appropriate colors, light, ornaments, textures,
and iconography, and prepares the inhabitant for the adjoining room, ultimately
leading to a sense of recognition and wholeness in the boudoir, literally a space apart,
the uncommon sacred place which was the space for love. This is the first instance
in the history of architectural discourse in which the quality of space becomes the
11 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, de moeurs et se la legislation

(1804; facs. reprint, München: UHL Verlag, 1981), and Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, Le génie de
l’architecture (1780; facs. reprint, Genève: Minkoff, 1972).
12 Etienne-Louis Boullée, Essai sur l’art (Paris: Hermann, 1968), and Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux,
Lettres sur l’architecture des anciens et celles des modernes (1787; facs. reprint, Genève: Minkoff,
1974).
subject matter, and atmospheres and moods are conveyed not through mathematical
proportional relationships—like harmony in music—but through poetic words. This
is indeed the inception of the modern concept of Stimmung, or atmosphere, a term
that would be used by Romantic philosophy and later passed on to phenomenology
and architecture, as for instance in the works and theories of Peter Zumthor. At the
time when place, as an intersubjective cosmic topos, was being obliterated from the
public’s memory, Le Camus’ sought to retrieve it in discourse, in the hope of actual
izing it.
Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas has demonstrated how place is a condition of

consciousness in perception.13 Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Heidegger, adds
that mood, or Stimmung, the appropriate atmospheric quality we seek in architecture,
“rather than being itself in a place, is the very opening of the world, the very place
of Being.”14 Agamben elaborates that mood appears as the fundamental existential
mode of Dasein, not in the ontic but in the ontological plane, “neither within interior
ity nor in the world, but at their limit.”15 One may recall the fundamental phenom
enological context of these observations, already expressed by Buddhist philosopher
Nagarjuna in the second century of our era, when he affirmed the codependent arising
of subject, object, and action as we experience the world, neither of which terms can
be postulated to exist independently or prior to the other.16 One could then conclude
that place is therefore present in contemporary culture, but hidden by our techno
logical constructs, and it is the task of artifacts like literature, art, and architecture
to retrieve our attunement. Malpas has further pointed out that place emerges with
language, a point that we must qualify carefully. As I suggested, it is not language as
commonly assumed by constructionist linguists, as an arbitrary code of more or less
transparent signs that could be improved and left behind by some universal Esperanto,
but rather language understood as our fundamental human expressivity, inherently
poetic, indicative, polysemic, and open, in continuity with the body’s own expressiv
ity and gestures: language as our connection to others in view of our primordial social
being, and therefore connected to cultural habits. Properly understood in this way,
language is not arbitrary. It has the capacity of speaking about the world through us,
and it comes to fruition in dialogue, through the voice, Stimme. The nature of poetic
language, which is humanity’s original speech, is that it can be translated out of time
and place: like the work of art.
Thus, as we come back to consider the relationship of poetic language and architec
ture, the central concern of this essay, we can immediately identify some crucial issues.
Regardless of whether modern and contemporary fiction can truly play the role myth
did in pre-modern cultures, as Louis Aragon thought it could in his “antinovel” Paris
Peasant (1926), we may expect poetic fiction to function as much more than vague
inspiration. Acknowledging its role in design, both in the elaboration of programs
13 Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
14 Jenny Doussan, Time, Language and Visuality in Agamben’s Philosophy (London, UK: Palgrave
McMillan, 2013), 22–3.

15 Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, translated by K. Pinkus (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), quoted in Doussan, Time, Language, and Visuality, 22.
16 Nargajuna, Stanzas of the Middle Way, quoted in Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor
Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 221.
and in the disclosure of atmospheres, we can assume that it may further an architec
ture that gives place to significant human action, resonating with the purposefulness
which characterizes our biology, even while acknowledging our generalized nihilism
and the fact that contemporary man does not generally believe in the efficacy of ritual
as a from of participation through action (one whose results are not necessarily the
responsibility of those that act). Most of these questions were first acknowledged by
Romantic philosophers who believed the novel was the central form of artistic expres
sion, capable of addressing our modern existential questions better than any other
form of discourse, concerns that were taken into the twentieth century in the writings
and works of surrealist artists. Poetic language is the privileged medium of moods and
atmospheres, Stimmungen, and the expression of Gemüt: the Romantic concept of
emotional consciousness that anticipated the current neurophenomenological under
standing of embodied, emotional, cognition.
Paul Ricoeur, Richard Kearny, and Elaine Scarry, among others, have suggested in
their own ways that the human imagination is primarily linguistic.17 Furthermore, we
also know through neurobiology that mental images are not picture-like, but rather
literal re-enactments of scenes, necessarily operating through language.18 All this pos
sesses a fundamental challenge for architects, often consumed as we are by pictures
and their iterations.
Understanding the importance of literary language for architecture also entails,
fundamentally, grasping the crucial importance of literature to disclose the nature of
urban contexts with all their cultural complexities, essential for an ethical and poetic
practice of architecture and urban design. This is something that scientific mapping
and statistics can never accomplish. Let me emphasize: this is language in continuity
with phenomenology, as part of the flesh of the world, language therefore in the sense
defined by philosophical hermeneutics: inherently at odds, as Merleau-Ponty points
out, with the so-called language of algorithms and its desire for absolute clarity in its
unambiguous function as sign.19 This represents a paradoxical inversion of the condi
tions that characterized Classical architectural theory with its symbolic mathemati
cal proportions and geometries, necessitated by the changing conditions of culture,
resulting in what Dalibor Vesely has called the age of divided representation.20
It is plainly obvious that some of architecture’s traditional cultural roles can no
longer be implemented. The crisis affecting the profession since the beginning of
the European nineteenth century has been well documented. Durand was explicitly
responsible for asking architects (for the first time ever) to bypass what he believed
were irrelevant issues of linguistic expression in their design, and simply to solve a
functional problem which would repeatedly produce pleasure, seeking biological
homeostasis rather than attunement, which is by necessity a concordia discors. He
thought that extruding the building from its plan would bring about meaning auto
matically: the mere expression of a sign. Such a mathematization of design processes
17 See, for example, Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988), and Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
18 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 278–79. Thompson explains that in fact we visualize an object or a
scene by mentally enacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience of that scene.
19 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5.
20 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
is still with us in all our contemporary fashions and infatuations with the computer.
City planners prevailed over architects and urban designers, adopting the values of
the engineers in the service of political power and economic expediency: reason,
utility and efficiency became the determinants of the physical environment, assumed
to communicate, if needed, clear semantic messages, unencumbered by emotional
intentionality. Confronted by the inability of traditional forms and processes to
engage new materials and express modern values, architects had no option but to
experiment, engaging creative processes to find novel, emotionally charged forms.
Like other artistic disciplines engaged in poetic making—a making that attempts
not imposition but disclosure, the revelation of something that is already there,
and is thus familiar and habitual to a culture while being also new—architecture
has suffered during the last two centuries the limitations of potential solipsism and
near-nonsense, the syndrome of architecture made for architects, particularly when
detached from language and not framed through appropriate critical questions. This
has prolonged the crisis, some would even claim, the agony, of the discipline. Yet the
fundamental existential questions, which architecture traditionally answered—the
profound necessity for humans to inhabit a resonant world they may call home, even
when separated by global technological civilization from an innate sense of place—
remain as pressing as always.
At this juncture, the call for a careful and multilayered consideration of poetic and
hermeneutic language in the generation of architecture and the built environment
appears pressing. Narrative forms should be engaged for their fundamental capac
ity to orient ethical action. This is a call for history as interpretation through stories
about the past, one that acknowledges the deep roots of our questions in the history
of the Western world. Stories are also important for their unique ability to map
architecture’s urban context, increasingly synonymous with the human environment
at large; they are crucial to set in place human actions, as in Ricoeur’s narrative model
of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.21 This schema might suggest for
architecture a narrative understanding of site as prefiguration, form and atmosphere
as configuration, and lived program as refiguration, accounting for the nature of the
project as an ethical promise, communicating through emotion and reason. Engaging
hermeneutic and poetic language in this fashion we can imagine how architecture may
offer better alternatives to reconcile the personal imagination of the architect with
an understanding of local cultures and pressing political and social concerns, beyond
obsessions with fashion and form: the crucial dilemma we have inherited with our
modern condition.
Furthermore, in view of the poverty, neutrality, and even hostility of much of our
postindustrial environment, literary mediations of urban space in the form of novels
that reveal possibilities for significant human life keep acquiring growing significance
for any architectural practice that may seek to resist the pressures of consumerism,
banal functionalism, and ideological imperatives. Examples could be drawn from
works by authors such as Bely, Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Murakami, Soupault, Breton,
and Sebald, among others. Even literary science fiction, like Michel Houellebecq’s
The Possibility of an Island (2005) has the capacity to show, much better than the
theory of technology, what might happen to our humanity if we finally get rid of
21 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
death and desire: the limited place of intersubjectivity which has always been the gift
of architecture.
Architects today, with the help of digital media, are capable of proposing all sorts
of novelties. In our pathological urban contexts, it does not suffice to make contorted
buildings constructed with unfamiliar materials to house the same ubiquitous shops
and fashion designers. It is not enough either to merely disrupt habits through effects,
without proposing attuned alternatives for human action. Self-edification, the archi
tecture that completes us and lets us dwell, recognizing our human condition, will
not issue from this pictorial, formal acrobatics. The problem of historical and ethical
responsibility is often buried in a postmodern culture of pastiche and instrumental
ity. The literary imagination, drawing from language which is our being, forces an
acknowledgement of ground, crucial for architecture both literally and metaphori
cally, in a time when designing and building complex structures for their own sake has
become the leading fashion of practice.
13 Walls of gender
Claudio Sgarbi
Some stories are waiting to be told. Some stories occur but lie totally unnoticed.
Do they occur even if no one is around to tell them? It is irrelevant to ask why they
happened or if they would have not happened otherwise. What is peculiar about
the three stories I am going to tell is that they have no ending, but neither do they
have a beginning or a middle. They each lie incomplete, fragmentary, dismem
bered, and the way I can start to tell them is absolutely aleatory; but this is not a
justification for their oblivion. These stories had just begun to happen when they
were interrupted, by chance or on purpose. Or perhaps they happened all the way
through but their endings were lost forever. It is as if the Little Red Riding Hood
story had stopped right after the meeting with the Wolf, or as if it had come to us just
as a Little Red and Furry Dark, meeting in a forest. Maybe this is what had actually
happened, indeed—and some persuasive storyteller could have just made up all the
rest.
There is so much debris of lives; the task of figuring out the whole picture is left to
us, and the result is always spurious, apocryphal, inauthentic. We swim in a flood of
compromised beginnings without a single origin. We are a function of uncertainty and
yet the truth is our mandate. We have the stories we deserve. Here are three of them.
The first story is paper-thin and is about two men, their different ideals, and their
sacred and yet profane bodies. It was first manifested between the recto and verso of
a single sheet of paper.
The second story is about the public space of a town where people gathered around
the representation of an enigmatic space between the legs. This story is as resilient as
the convergence or divergence of genders can be.
The third story is about a body in the wall with a protruding turgid breast. It is a
wall-thick story.
For each story, I will present in this chapter just one of the many possible narrative
plots I have in mind, with a summary of historical notations.
First story: two ideal men

Two men were discussing ideal bodies and ideal buildings. Each of them sketched
on a different sheet of paper the images of their different ideal men in a square
and in a circle: one was a beautiful (according to his parameters) naked man
ready to enter a mundane contest for Mr. Universe; the other man was emaci
ated and ready to be crucified. Ecstasy and despair have the same outline. What,
indeed, could fit both into a square and also a circle?
118 Claudio Sgarbi
They swapped their sheets of paper, and looked at their images: apparently
there seemed to be no possible compromise between the two ideal men, who they
really were, what they wanted, who they were looking for; only the bare geometry
was retained.
Both men ended up becoming what their ideal images wanted to be: one became
the most renowned artist in the world and the other was executed and quartered.
Their images were their burdens and their destinies. Indeed, even though both of
them became what they had prefigured, each was quite unhappy about it. Were
these two different men, then, really ideal?
Everyone who remembered this curious accident, to avoid getting trapped into
any binding predestination and in order to cheat their destiny, decided to elect an
anonymous ideal man as their paradigm. The deceit spread like a virus. The land
was covered with buildings designed according to canons of an ideal man that
was “anybody” with the features of a recognizable “nobody.”
Now we know that destiny could not be fooled by this naive stratagem. Destiny
cannot be cheated, it is always waiting, insistent and even merciless: if the ideal
man chosen was anybody—a choice made to avoid getting trapped in somebody’s
fate—then everybody would be destined to become nobody. This was the revenge
of destiny. Disrespectful of such an epilogue, the story cannot be said to have
reached an end—notwithstanding the catastrophic overbuilding that took place
afterwards, or, possibly, as a result of it. The story just got stuck. It got tramme
led. Now it arrives, with every re-telling, at the same point, where it continuously
gets jammed in this constant recurrence of anybody as an ideal for every possible
building.
Someone even tried then to propose not only to avoid thinking about any ideal
man but also to avoid thinking all together. Destiny again gave back buildings
designed according to non-thinking [Plate 35].
Marginal notation
The history of the above story is about two men, Leonardo da Vinci and Giacomo
Andrea da Ferrara, who met in Milan, became friends, and worked together for the
Duke Ludovico il Moro between 1480 and 1500. They drew together (worked at the
same table and with the same instruments) on the famous image commonly known
as the “Vitruvian Man.”1 When the Duke of Milan was overthrown, Leonardo fled
from the city and Giacomo was executed and quartered. Giacomo had drawn two
alternative images: a lively erotic and athletic man on the recto and a crucified man on
the verso. Leonardo drew a moving body with perfect muscular fitness and his own
head mounted on top. Giacomo and Leonardo were, obviously, two men, but mascu
line domination of this field of knowledge was not under discussion at that time. The
more I enter into the details of the history, the more I realize that we inherit extremely
powerful images that have very profound consequences for our imagination, shaping
our thinking flesh and our conscience, and then we leave them unquestioned. The
1 I am trying to reconstruct philologically this event. Claudio Sgarbi, “Vitruvio Ferrarese, alcuni dettagli
quasi invisibili e un autore Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara” in Giovanni Giocondo, umanista, architetto
e antiquario, curators Pierre Gros and Pier Nicola Pagliara (Venezia: Centro Internazionale di Studi di
Architettura Andrea Palladio, Marsilio, 2014), 121–38.
Walls of gender 119
closer those images are, the less we are able to comprehend them because it is they
who comprehend us. My aim is to reconstruct the dynamic of that moment in Milan
when the destiny of an image, and a whole way of imagining, was put into play.
Giacomo and Leonardo display profound agreements and disagreements. Perhaps we
have to start to tell another story, taking into consideration the problem of the atopic
center (the genitals) where the pictures originate.
Second story: the city between the legs

Once there was a story begging to be told, so much so that a city of storytellers
was built around it. The story of the city (or the city of the story) began with the
worship of the space between our legs, including all the possible spaces that we
could have between our legs, from various perspectives.
People wandered around a landscape that was desolate and featureless except
for a single large monolith. One day, someone decided to scale the monolith to
claim it for his own. He managed to climb onto that stage, pulling down his pants
to moon the multitude. There was just a laugh at first that lasted for a while. Some
even say that this laugh restored fertility (which had been declining). Other people
got the idea, scaled the monolith and showed off whatever they had between their
legs. This did the trick. The monolith became the cornerstone of a new city.
Exposing suddenly the spaces between the legs was like the cuckoo game
played by children: now you see it, now you don’t. It was the rhythm and the
duration, it was the “gratitude for the gratuity” that made people laugh. But
behind every laugh there is tragedy. Time lapse, the casual stoppage, and the
sense of the direction, finally, matter. Human life is a continuum that moves from
comedy, to tragedy, to farce. There is no space outside of this continuum, no
place to compare one to the other, no neutral position.
The city never had the chance to be fully built. It was just enjoying its infinite
exordium when people began demolishing it, spreading debris around. The rea
sons for this premature decline were manifold. The beautiful complexity of the
space between the legs became just a “spot,” and the Euclidean dilemma about
any point being a thing or a hole was basically reduced to a debate between
penises, vaginas, and genital contiguities. Everything sticking out was phallic
and everything with an internal void was vaginal; any penetration or protrusion
degenerated to the idea that people have both penises and vaginas under different
names and guises, providing varieties of pleasure (even philosophically) relating
to orgasms and ejaculations. Pondering the space between the legs lost the sense
of the depth within the infinite spaces of divarication. Everything was unceasingly
distorted and mistaken. Eroticism, libido, sexuality, desire, pleasure, pornogra
phy, and love—lots of love—were translated into books, theatre, professionalism,
laws, prohibitions, and special permissions. Everything became the symbol of
something else, to the point that the people were terrorized by the idea of every
thing, and decided to lie hidden, doing nothing, and leaving their pubic spaces
empty. What remains now is like what was there before: a mess of debris, monu
ments, documents, and just some stones with fading images, intelligible only to
close observers. The city had not built up into anything before it became unno
ticeable. Perhaps we became accustomed to the idea that the cities, which were
the epicenters of immense joy, love, crime, perversion, depravation, degeneration,
120 Claudio Sgarbi
and the deepest sorrows were (and are) without individual characteristics. Sodom
and Gomorra had no proper look (at any rate, trying to watch them might prove
to be deleterious). All characteristic details which matter are the first to fade away
or are the target of prohibition. Carnivals and plagues come and go (the cuckoo
again!) and the city continues to wait. There will always be an apocalypse (if only
we will notice it), but the issue is, what are we doing while we wait? [Plate 36].
Marginal notation
My research began with a curiosity about three bas-reliefs that form a part of the rich
iconography of the cathedral of the city of Modena. The first is an image of Adam
without genitals. The second is the keystone of the main entry arch that shows a small
two-headed creature with oversized testicles and penis hanging above the gate. The
third shows a human figure with spread legs and a heavily damaged genital area. This
last sculpture is known as the Potta, a word with many layers of erotic meanings. The
sculpture was located on the roof of the cathedral and faced the main square. Grazia
Biondi and I have been researching the history of this image, known as the hermaph
rodite, in connection with the myth of the androgyne, the alchemical conjunction
of opposites, and several archaic figures known as Sheela-na-gig.2 There is also an
interesting relationship between the Latin name of the city, Mutina, and Mutunus, an
archaic god at the center of a complex erotic ritual. Devotees wore little double-faced
pendants with male and female winged genitals on each side. Particular attention was
devoted to the Potta during the sixteenth century, when a short treatise was published
to correct popular misconceptions. A priest from the Duomo was said to have painted
and dressed the sculpture, and soldiers had used the sculpture for target practice.
After such vandalizing, the bas-relief was reshaped. It is not by chance that another
priest from the Duomo, Gabriele Falloppia, a well-known anatomist—the fallopian
tubes are named after him—claimed in 1550 (in competition with Realdo Colombo)
to have discovered the clitoris. Many other writings, poems and popular jokes were
created around the Potta. John Wilmot referred to this complicated lore when he
composed the poem Signior Dildo in 1673 to celebrate the arrival in London of Mary
of Modena as the Queen Consort of James II.
Third story: who’s inside the wall?

Walls are useful to keep things both inside as well as outside, but what happens
when there are also things dwelling inside the wall? Things that indeed do not
want to remain hidden inside the wall and reveal themselves by piercing through
the wall? Actually, not just some-thing, but some-one, lives and dies in the wall.
We do not know all the precedents of this story. It begins with builders deter
mined to keep their work from being undone by magic. Whatever they built in
daylight would fall apart at night, no matter how carefully they erected it. The
stubborn master masons became possessed by the desire to defeat this curse and
kept erecting walls at all costs. They discovered that in order to make a wall
sound, they had to bury a mother inside it, leaving her turgid breast sticking out
2 Stefano Minarelli, Arte e alchimia in età romanica, Le metope del Duomo di Modena (Modena: Aedes
Muratoriana, 2004).
Walls of gender 121
from the wall, allowing it to continue to provide milk to the folk. The builders
petrified her and made the wall last. This is where the story is worth interrupting.
Some said that after this sacrifice of immurement, which allowed the builders to
complete the building, the immurers were imprisoned inside their own walls. To
escape they had to create wings to fly out, but they fell miserably to their deaths.
The milk they had sucked had weighed them down.
It is always true that walls lock someone either in or out. Who is inside and
who is outside? If you have to immure someone in the wall, whom would you like
to immure? —Nobody. Nobody is a nothingness showing through. If you make
anything out of nothing, the nothingness will always show through—so much so
that this was the solution that was adopted: inside the wall there must be a wall
with another wall inside, and so on. But where is the point inside the wall where
there is just the wall? Aren’t we inside those walls? Yes, but every wall in itself
contains just the wall!
People were frightened about a nothing and a nobody being inside the wall.
They preferred to have someone they knew inside the wall, maybe someone
they could trust—such as someone at home who is waiting for you; but there
was no reason why they should have someone they trusted sacrificed inside the
wall! The pain of sacrifice was too great, for the victims as well as for those who
immured their beloved, even if the sacrifice was a sacred mandate. So the sacrific
ing stopped, and the walls were made sound by containing just the matter out of
which they were made. Some people continued to be frightened at the prospect of
so many walls that were just walls with wall-ness inside. Like a ghost city with no
one around—wall-ness and nothing more—the absolute emptiness left a sense of
sublime loss. Infinite repetition of the negative solidity was horrifying. But, gradu
ally, people got accustomed to the horror, and the earth was ultimately encrusted
with walls that contained just themselves [Plate 37].
Marginal notation
I became intrigued by the so-called “Ballad of the Walled-up Wife,” or “Legend of
Mastro Manole,” while doing research on masculine and feminine roles in building.
After Mircea Eliade’s important research on construction rituals and myths, many
other studies have been devoted to the subject.3 I believe that the issue has a psycho
logical importance that goes much deeper than building’s animisms, personifications,
and sacrifices. Sacred should be interpreted in its original meaning of separated, distin
guished from the idea of an eternal return of mythic sensibility to profane disbelief. The
sacred should be seen as an obstacle preventing return to myth itself. Rituals, novels,
folk-tales, horror movies, and shared knowledge heavily rely on the persistence of this
trope (someone inside or behind the wall), which still pervades our imagination despite
the rationality of modern times. The theory and practice of architectural transparency,
or the recent glorification of the ventilated façade (a reiterated layering of more or less
transparent enclosures), are symptoms of the persistence of this repressed trope.
My discovery of a large number of stone female breasts in the stone walls of several
vernacular settlements, concentrated in the hills of Northern Italy, deserves further
3 Alan Dundes, ed., The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1996).
122 Claudio Sgarbi
consideration, and I continue to do research on the subject. Beside the presence of a

possible ultimate otherness beyond the limits (walls) of our attention, the legend bears
significantly on more global ideas, such as: the occurrence of failure in the reiteration
of an action; the necessity to repress the unknown; each gender’s identification of the
unknown with the other gender; the fate of the subject confronted with the desires of
the other; the subject’s relation to objects of desire and refusal; the depth of the dark
ness of the night; the acceptance of the death of the other; death as a necessary act of
love and dedication; the recurrence of life, springing from the recurrence of death; the
presence of gaps within the continuity of actions; the dreams of flying; the uncertain
differences between the milk of life and the milk of death; the twin-ness of breasts
and the necessity to choose between one or the other; the abjection of the choice; the
relation between milk and the fluidity of life and other body fluids; the alchemical
solidification of the fluid into the solid; the limit itself (the wall) as nourishment . . . .
The legend of the wall with the breast can be fused with that of Daedalus and the
Labyrinth, or with the story of the origin of the Corinthian order, or many rituals
involving the Great Mother and the White Goddess.
What holds all these stories together is the concept of our body as a simulacrum of
some-one-else. The body we pretend to possess is haunted, possessed, by the image of
some-body-else. We carry around an icon that does not belong to us. We either like
or hate this image of recurrent otherness, it participates in our emotions or it fights
against them, we see it as a gift or as a wicked spell, but we do not own it. It does not
belong to us. I think this is so fundamentally important for the architects who have
been led to believe that the image of the body of a building can be found inside the
building itself.
With these three stories I propose three moral assignments for those who design
and build walls: to think about a body that does not know the image it claims to
possess; to evoke a persona that does not know its gender; and to try to understand
sacrifices, who inflicts them, and who suffers them and their necessity.
People from diverse cultures have been trying to tell these stories in many different
ways, with moments of intense artistic manipulation and long periods of oblivion. But
they remain incomplete.
They are shreds of broken souls that try to en-gender species of spaces and end up
constructing walls.
14 Architecture’s two bodies
Donald Kunze
In collaboration with Claudio Sgarbi1
Marco Frascari and I grew up academically in the 1980s, when semiotics was the
rage. Roman Jakobson famously had converted neurological research on World War
I aphasia victims into a binary signifier that dominated architecture theory for the
remainder of the century.2 Metaphor, aligned with the brain’s ability to recognize
similarity, became the basis of humanistic poiesis. Metonymy took on functions
opposite this poetic: logic, instrumentality. Metaphor’s semblance-function connected
to the ethnography of sympathetic magic; in contagious magic, metonymic contiguity
revealed anticipations of rational causation.
While the binary metaphor-metonymy grounded humanistic theory in architecture,
it forced a misreading of one of its most respected sources, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In
his unfinished final work, The Visible and the Invisible, the French phenomenologist
had written:
[The realization that the world is not an object] does not mean that there was a
fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of
dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and
my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping
or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we
into the things.3
Functions clearly differentiated in the cases of aphasia victims’ loss of either semblance
or contiguity functions, seem, in individual non-aphasiac subjects, to combine in an
uncanny subject/object cross-inscription that is like having, paradoxically, two bodies
separated by a paradoxical void (dehiscence). These two bodies within the subject, made
invisible by cross-inscription, would not be distinguished without seeing them sepa
rated, in the aphasias of brain-damaged victims, into two separate pathological states.
While the binary of metaphor/metonymy was employed to commend ideological
victories of poetic mentality over instrumentality, binary logic would fail theoretically
1 Thanks to Claudio Sgarbi for developing the idea of catalepsis in conversations during Spring 2014.
2 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances
in Fundamentals of Language” (1956), http://theory.theasintheas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/
jakobson_Aphasia.pdf. Accessed April 2015.
3 Emphasis added. See Bernard Flynn, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/
entries/merleau-ponty. Accessed April 2015.
124 Donald Kunze
and ethnographically to account for the gap intrinsic to the “flesh of the world.”
Worse, binary logic would misrepresent the gap’s resistance to domestication,
related to what Ernst Jentsch had described as the “primary cross-inscription of the
uncanny”—life and death “passing into each other.”4
Frascari’s legacy began with an architectural version of the metaphor/metonymy
binary—the techneˉ of logos and the logos of techneˉ. In his first famous published
essay Frascari used chiasmus to allow the two terms to haunt each other.5 For
Frascari, logos was not “logic” but rather an account, a story, often a strange one. His
techneˉ came from Giambattista Vico’s factum, which the eighteenth-century phi
losopher had himself cross-inscribed with the True (verum), hidden within making.6
Vico’s uncanny epithet verum ipsum factum (we may know that which we have
made) reprised Heraclitus’s palintonos harmonieˉ (etymologically the architectural
joint between disparate parts) to produce Frascari’s clairvoyant idea that the detail
generated not just architecture but also a way of knowing.7 Techneˉ and logos were
like Castor and Pollux: mortal/divine twins circling around life and death like a sun
and moon around a common central earth—held apart by a diameter line that could,
at certain times, provide a liminal passageway for staging a forbidden reunion. This
chiastic image allowed Frascari to invent his own versions of palintonos harmonieˉ,
drawn from stories and other constructs using the same pattern.
How did Frascari discover this method? I suggest that he retroactively realized what
he had written in 1984, as if the words had come to him first, the full meanings later.
At a Semiotic Society of America meeting in 1985, Frascari and I were fascinated
by an analysis of the 1945 British film, Dead of Night.8 This anthology film about
an architect caught in a circular dream involved all four “detached virtualities” that
Jorge Luis Borges had identified with the fantastic: doubles, circular time travel, con
tamination of reality by the dream or fiction (e.g. theory by fabulation), and the story
in-the-story (literally con-fabulation).9 It is no coincidence that all four themes involve
the Jentschian uncanny: reversed predications, a gap, then cross-inscriptions of space
and time. But, even better, all four materialize the “dialectic of the two bodies” as
twins rotating about a common center, held apart by a diameter they will traverse to
make uncanny exceptions. The film, we realized, had spookily anticipated the theme
of our own session, “monsters of architecture.” It seemed to have already answered
the questions we had not yet asked!
After this demonstration of architecture’s involvement with the uncanny, I became
fascinated by film’s ability to demonstrate temporality in architecture, and developed
a “visual calculus” to describe it. Frascari’s trajectory went from monsters to cuisine
4 Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8,

no. 22 (August 26, 1906): 195–8 and 8, no. 23 (September 1, 1906): 203–5. Jentsch’s two “atoms” of
the uncanny were (1) the presence of death-in-life, as fate or fear of death; and (2) the continuation of
life past the point of literal death.
6 Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians . . ., translated by L.M. Palmer (Ithaca:
Cornell University, 1988).
7 Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (New York: Scribner, 1973). Palintonos harmonieˉ is in no way a
merger but a constructed, temporalized, and dynamic tension.
8 Arturo Cavalcanti et al., directors, Dead of Night (film) (London: Ealing Studios, 1945).
9 James E. Irby, “Introduction” in Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings,
translated by André Maurois and Donald A. Yates (New York: New Directions, 1964).
Architecture’s two bodies 125
and neuroscience. But both of us continued to draw on this primordial experience

of confabulation, particularly in the way that one story becomes an “every story,”
and particularly when two bodies forbidden to meet are allowed a brief exception, a
palintonic, tell-tale detail.
Frascari sped past the ideology of instrumentality/poiesis. Confabulation requires
experiment. It is not satisfied with an alibi of coincidentia oppositorum. More interest
ing and ethnographically substantive products of binary signification derive from the
occultation of one term of the binary in relation to the dominant term. Slavoj Žižek
describes occultation as “absolute recoil” (absoluter Gegenstoss): meaning “reso
nates from a distance,” creating, in the original term, the phenomenon of essence.10
Occultation and resonance are not abstractions. Although binaries vary widely—
they ground the contingencies of cultures, ideologies, and Zeitgeists—occultation’s
materiality creates a Rosetta Stone allowing comparisons across distant time periods
and contrasting cultures. James Frazer, Jane Harrison, and other turn-of-the-century
mythographers unknowingly corroborated Vico’s idea of a cultural “imaginative
universal” with massive ethnographical evidence of common practices—all of which
involved occultation and resonance.11
Humans invest the world with subjectivity by selectively negating/sublating its
objectivity. This “metonymical rule” might be stated as: “what privation removes as
object (limitation or intentional numbing of the senses—catalepsis) is returned—as
subject-in-disguise, suddenly appearing from out of a hiding-place (metalepsis).12 The
chief celebrity of this subjective return is the djinn or dæmon, the model for Eros who,
Hesiod warns, is a “loosener of limbs, who subdues the mind and prudent counsel in
the chests of all gods and of all men.”13 The djinn is distinct from the collective genius
of Psyche, the basis of ingenium (ingenuity), and the Stoic animus (penetrating spark),
which, as cœlum (heaven/wedge), is manifested by agutezza (wit), communicating the
gens of the manes, ancestral family spirits tended by Hestia at the household hearth.14
Metonymical occultation and resonance repairs damage done by Jakobson’s
binary of semblance/metaphor and contiguity/metonymy by showing how metonymy
uses negation and absence in material cultural practices.15 This has eluded many
10 Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (New York:
Verso, 2014).
11 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1968), §381.
12 Richard Broxton Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the
World, Time and Fate: New Interpretations of Greek, Roman and Kindred Evidence, Also of some
Basic Jewish and Christian Beliefs (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1951), 95, 111; see also Numa
Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece
and Rome (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956).
13 This critical component of Eros is missing in Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s citation of Hesiod’s Theogony,
116–20. Built Upon Love, Architectural Longing After Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT,
2006), 12. Pérez-Gómez steers away from catalepsis with his own added (non-Hesiodic, metaphoric)
attribute, “the love that softens hearts.” Socrates continues the catalepsy theme in his account of
Diotima’s instructions on the nature of love, related to the Socrated dæmon, Eros, a paralyzing “sting
ray” (Symposium).
14 For a disentanglement of djinn and gen and differentiation of Eros and Psyche, see H.C.E. Zacharias’s
review of Onians, Origins, in Anthropos 48, no. 1/2 (1953): 309–11, http://www.jstor.org/
stable/40451207. Accessed April 2015.
15 I have made a detailed case for the role of metonymy in the occultation process. See Donald Kunze,
“The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany”
126 Donald Kunze
humanists-phenomenologists who would seem most to benefit, and who have mis
read metonymy as against metaphor. This is flesh-of-the-world as both intertwin
ing and cross-inscription, a gap coincident with an overlap. To restore the place
of the subject—and subjectivity—in recognizing architecture’s two bodies requires
metonymy. And understanding metonymy, in my view, requires a combined reading
of Jacques Lacan and Vico.16
Experiment in occultation: close-up magic, picking pockets

The gap and the uncanny overlap of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world are embed
ded in religion, folk-lore, the obsessions of popular culture; and the magic materiality
of everyday space–time. This is the flesh that re-clothes bones on Judgment Day. It
does not transform objects directly; rather it alters the space–time horizons so that
objects become Real in subjective-receptive acts: surprise, discovery, annunciation,
apocalypse.
Consider the examples of the close-up magician and the pickpocket. Neither uses
props. Both numb perceptual space so that whatever travels through it seems to
appear or disappear as if by magic. Deadening space–time constitutes an act of
“catalepsis”—death-within-life. The presence of a numbed cataleptic space inside
spatial experience constitutes super-symmetry, a sustained balance maintained by
fractal-like recursion, a coincidence of something with itself—a more-than-everything
and less-than-nothing. Super-symmetry is experienced as “epiphany.” Numbing (vari
ants: paralysis, inattention, freezing, immobility, simulated death) can be theorized
through the rhetorical ideas of catalepsis and its complement, metalepsis, the form of
metonymy that regulates frames. “Confabulation” experiments with catalepsis and
metalepsis directly, using the themes of the story-in-the-story, travel through time, the
double, or contamination of reality by dreams or fictions.
Confabulation is not just a matter of providing logoi, accounts. Following Frascari,
we align the techneˉ of logos with Heraklitus’s palintonos harmonieˉ—the architectural
joining of two disparate materials, the combining of one part with that which is not a
part. Con-fabulation combines this alien non-part with super-symmetry, as epiphany
through-catalepsis. Con-fabulation challenges us to join unrelated stories, not to
compare and contrast, nor to defer to historical contexts. Only by suspending these
issues do new possibilities emerge.
Magic is about effects, not supernatural agencies. Magic sets up the site of art inside
the bodies/minds of the audience. The body of the audience, the ultimate site of excep
tion thanks to the rule that forbids it to speak or move, is where art and architecture
happen. Without experimental combination of unrelated stories, confabulation ter
minates prematurely as an interpretive exercise; with it, confabulation reveals the
conjoined relations of surprise, revelation, epiphany.
in Gevork Hartoonian, ed., Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate,
2015).
16 See Donald Kunze, “Vichianism after Vico” in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (London: Elsevier, 2009).
Close-up magic, picking pockets

Confabulation’s movement from the improbable to epiphany involves an imaginary
thin perceptual screen set up between the objective world and the subject’s space,
the point of view. The close-up magician must numb the space on the object-side of
this screen by performing a jumble of seemingly useless, mistaken, or unnecessary
motions. Hiddenness is, thus, in the brain of the viewer. Once the audience has ceased
to pay attention to these “accidents,” the space they occupied becomes available for
“exaptation,” a storage-container for occulting objects and motions technically in
plain view. Exaptation is an at-first useless consequence of some other functioning
trait, like the architectural spandrel in relation to an arch; but, when there is a new
environmental-contextual demand, the exapted trait quickly comes forward, always-
already present, ready to perform correctly and surprisingly.17 Occultation is the
means and necessary preface; exaptation produces the required surprise ending.
Because the pickpocket must work directly with the subject’s body, s/he builds
up occulted space on the alternative, subject side of the perceptual screen, invading
personal space that is usually protected. Numbing the “mark” until s/he ceases to take
notice, the pickpocket can then perform the well-practiced motions. Both the close-up
magician and the pickpocket require: (1) catalepsis, followed by metalepsis—use of
the space between the original culturally prescribed frame and a second extemporane
ously constructed frame, where (2) occultation stores actions or objects (exaptation),
resulting in a seemingly magical epiphany. Catalepsis thus relates directly to Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world, as well as to Jacques Lacan’s definition of the
phallic signifier, \, not solely in relation to sex but as the more general function of
appearing and disappearing. We can unify our notation of confusion–occultation–
exaptation–epiphany to a single term, the phallic \. We gain the function of visibility/
invisibility, without losing the sex.18
Simactæonides
The two “phallic” stories I experimentally confabulate combine (1) the project of
artificial memory and (2) the supersymmetry of space–time through detached virtual
ity, with particular emphasis on space-within-space. The first story is the invention
of artificial memory by Simonides of Ceos, directly related to Giulio Camillo’s and
Ramón Llull’s famous memory projects. Coincidentally, this is a story about archi
tectural collapse and the (magical) exaptation of occulted details, through palintonic
harmonieˉ, materialized as “acousmatics” (whisper, song), or stochastic resonance
(symmetry through and within accident). It leads us to conclude, with Piranesi,
17 Slavoj Žižek links exaptation to the architectural spandrel in “Architectural Parallax, Spandrels, and
Other Phenomena of Class Struggle,” Tilton Gallery, New York, April 23, 2009; reprinted in lacanian
ink, http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=218. Accessed April 2015.
18 The \ is phallus, not penis, as some have confused in relation to the ancient boundary-marker, the
herm. The herm’s phallus and head reveal the relationship of gens (sexuated being, psyche) to the
wealth of Hades brought forth at the beginning of the (Olympian) year by Hestia and distributed by
Hermes—gods who appear side by side rarely, but almost always in sculptures representing the cal
endar (Onians, Origins, 122). Herms thus function as apotropes, points of trade, boundary markers,
and family signs. See Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin, 1947).
128 Donald Kunze
that (architectural) Ruin is the ground of the True, revealing the role of Platonic
anamnesis, knowledge in the form of memory.19 This Ruin literalizes “going to
one’s ground” (Hegel’s zugrunde gehen)—subjectivity’s unique place of exaptation
(occulted circumstances).
Scopus, a well-known politician, hires the poet Simonides to sing his praises at a
banquet celebrating his victory in a wrestling contest. To avoid bringing bad luck on
his boastful employer, Simonides inserts a hymn to the twin gods, Castor and Pollux,
but Scopas is annoyed by this addition and refuses Simonides half the agreed-on fee.
Shortly afterwards, Simonides gets word that two strangers are waiting outside to
speak with him; but when he goes out to see what they want, the street is empty. Just
as he turns to go back to the banquet, the hall collapses. Victims are crushed beyond
recognition, and relatives arriving to claim their dead are distressed to find they cannot
identify the bodies for proper burial. Simonides, however, had memorized the name
of each guest by associating it with his place at the banquet table. He is now able to
name each corpse, referring to the spot where it had fallen. The technique of memory
places is invented. The grateful relatives reward Simonides handsomely, more than
restoring his fee lost on account of the reference to Castor and Pollux. The identities
of the two strangers who saved Simonides by calling him outside are easily guessed.
My second story combines the Simonides theme of spatial monstrosity—one space
enclosing another—with bodily monstrosity, one body enclosing another. Actæon, on
his way home after a successful hunt, stumbles across the sacred grove where Diana,
goddess of the hunt, is bathing with her attendants. Enraged, Diana splashes water
onto Actæon, transforming him into a stag, the most timid of the forest beasts. His
dogs sense the transformation and, failing to recognize their master now covered
with hide and horns, chase and kill him. The story, though short and ambiguous (did
Actæon deserve this harsh punishment?), has multiple versions and interpretations.
Most re-tellers consider it to be little more than a morality tale, but Luigi Vanvitelli,
architect of Caserta and fan of Vico’s New Science, placed a stone version of the story
at the head of a cascade representing the birth of the universe.20
Actæon is a member of Ovid’s “Theban panel”—including Cadmus, Semele,
Tiresius, Pentheus, and Bacchus—all famous for the uncanny theme of “seeing what
they should not have seen.”21 This \, the sudden appearance of what should have
remained occulted, involves the metonymic logic of concealing–revealing divine con
tents. Simonides also belongs to this tradition because, following the rule of exapta
tion, he had not originally intended to aid undertakers at a gruesome disaster scene
when he memorized the guests’ names and locations.
Detached virtuality, left-over spaces

Both stories reveal a key truth about architecture’s debt to occultation. The Simonides
story is about built objects and living-then-dead subjects within a paradoxical space
19 Žižek’s “absolute recoil,” absoluter Gegenstoss, is actualized by Hegel’s zugrunde gehen—“to go to

one’s ground.” I read this as “ruin” as well as (Hegel’s) Golgotha.
20 George Hersey, Architecture, Poetry, and Number in the Royal Palace at Caserta (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1983).
21 Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon, the Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3
(September 1980): 319.
of catalepsis (known through memory); Actæon’s story is about the structure of cata
lepsis in the formation of super-symmetry by means of detached virtuality. Actæon
walks through a domesticated forest, where game is there to be hunted. He stumbles
across a different kind of space, an uncanny space that is singular but still within the
forest—a space requiring a turn, a hinge. We must recall and consider Diana’s identity
as Djana, or Jana, consort of Janus/Dianus. The grove’s location is problematic. It is
inside the forest and outside it at the same time, a supersymmetry of the “part that is
not a part”22 [Plate 38].
Actæon “finds what he should not have found,” converting the privation of Diana’s
grove into a prohibition that, when violated, even unintentionally, must be punished.
Vico explains that the space protecting the sacred springs used to sanctify the first
marriages required ritualized entry.23 The phallic theme of visibility/invisibility is
key: the springs came from an invisible source (privation) and, as sacred, required
protection by religion (prohibition). What is privation, objectively, must be replaced,
subjectively, as prohibition. Actæon plays out this algorithmic relationship.
The supersymmetry of Diana’s grove is mirrored by Actæon’s two bodies, hunter
and hunted, in Ovid’s (otherwise inexplicably detailed) account of each of the
thirty-three plus three hunting dogs who pursue and devour their master. Three
bitches, Melanchoetes, Theridamas, and Oresitrophos, are the last to join the chase,
but thanks to the shortcut they take through the mountains, they arrive first on
the scene. Like close-up magicians, pickpockets, and the wolf of Little Red Riding
Hood, the three bitches use the space of catalepsis to slow down reality in order to
speed up their travel. These triplets count as a Cerberus, the three-headed protector
of Hades (ӆbdn, “the invisible,” another supersymmetry inside/outside the living
world).
Prohibition’s consequences: revenge

Just as Actæon may not have been completely innocent when he stumbled across
Diana’s grove, the collapse of the banquet hall in the Simonides tale may not have
been an accident. Nicole Loraux tells how the Prytaneion was devised as a part of
a conscious plan to supplant the clan-based “hearth religions” of individual house
holds. In the Athenian Prytaneion, an all-male fraternity maintained a collectivized
civic flame; the new political order used homosexual love to end the strife among
households, whose cyclopean independence had been enforced through individual
families’ hearths and manes.24
Simonides possibly had recognized the religious peril of such a transfer of power
and, as a precaution, inserted a poem of praise of the twin gods, Castor and Pollux,
into his encomium for Scopus. The story from this point of view curiously resonates
22 Lacan’s word for this phenomenon, extimité, was coined in Seminar XVI, “From One Other to
the Other” (1969). See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimity” in Mark Bracher, ed., Lacanian Theory of
Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University, 1994), 74–87.
23 Vico, New Science, §528.
24 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New York: Zone
Books, 2002). Loraux’s account qualifies Pérez-Gómez’s unrestrained praise for the Prytaneion as a
civic center for all citizens, in Built Upon Love, 130. The Prytaneion in the Simonides story was, like
the Athenian model, an exclusive men’s club.
130 Donald Kunze
with a thematic use of twinning.25 Scopus renders only a half-fee, refusing to pay for
the religious reference. The two strangers who call Simonides outside save him when
the hall collapses, crushing all inside: the story has mortal and immortal faces. The
corpses are unrecognizable; their bios is reduced to zoeˉ, pure animal life; they are,
as unnamed, carrion. Memory restores them, not to life, bios, but to the manes, the
familial-collective psyche.
The name in relation to the family hearth is the key to the Simonides story. Called
over by families desperate to identify the remains and avoid their relatives’ permanent
curse, he realizes his method of exaptation—the technique of memorizing names by
organizing their “accidental” locations within a system of precise placement. Now
with only the evidence of placement, he is able restore the names, critically tied to
the family hearth and worship of the manes. The Simonides story is a radical critique
of the Prytaneion, just as Euripides’ farce, Alcestis, hammered home the contradic
tory demands made on the wives and daughters who had attended the hearth-flame.
Simonides provides a cure with the chiastic/binary formula for artificial memory.
Confabulation is itself devoid of content. Rather, it is a site of exception whose
supersymmetry purifies all who pass through it. This Purgatory allows the second sym
bolic death, which could be read as death of, as well as in, the Symbolic. Thanks to the
exaptation of key details—overlooked by generations of expert tellers and scholars—
we uncover a history corroborated by the careful scholarship of Nicole Loraux, a
history that is true not just because it happened, but true because of the nature of
subjectivity and the subject’s relation to the flesh of the world. Confabulation’s rela
tion to this true is not accidental. Juxtaposition forces the palintonos harmonieˉ of
“stochastic resonance” that is the acousmatic medium of philosophic/psychoanalytic
as well as ethnographical (lived) truth. Verum ipsum factum. Now and only now do
we discover the epiphany of exception.
25 Donald Kunze, “Skiagraphy and the Ipsum of Architecture,” Architecture and Shadow, VIA 11 (1990):
62–75. My contention that the Simonides story is structured by chiasmus affords the realization of
an anomaly that has so far escaped scholarly commentary: the twin gods appear together, and their
overlap constitutes supersymmetry.
15 Camillo Sitte’s winged snail
Festina lente and escargot

Marcia Feuerstein
Viennese Architect Camillo Sitte’s 1899 book Der Städtbau [City Planning According
to Artistic Principles] concludes his treatise on planning and designing cities with an
image of a winged snail1 [Figure 15.1]. This colophon, his finishing touch to a book
filled with analytic diagrams and plans of both ancient and modern public spaces, is
a conundrum. Why did Sitte conclude his treatise on urban design with a flying snail?
It is the only image of its kind in the book: a rhetorical, even branding, device, it is an
emblem. This snail with wings has some precedents; architects who discuss snails—
with or without wings—less so. Architects who include this kind of emblem are rare—
although some consider the meaning of the image: festina lente. This chapter looks at
ideas of the snail—with and without wings—and then festina lente.
Le Corbusier, who knew Sitte’s book, likens snails to a home measured and fit to
its occupant’s unique life, a home “like a snail in its shell, in a lodging made exactly
to his measure.”2 Architecture is a measure of that life—an interrelationship of the
outer hard “shell” with the inner soft space for our habits of living—as embodiment.
Snails traditionally symbolize slowness yet they are also associated with deep inner
thought and steadiness. They indicate new beginnings and renewal—miraculously
appearing out of nowhere after springtime dew and rainfalls, climbing new plants
emerging from the ground.
A flying snail is another thing. Snails don’t have wings while butterflies, birds, and
angels do. Snails or gastropods are earth-bound, sliding on their “foot” through a
wave-like movement of the sole on the mucus or slime it produces as it moves forward.
The slime allows the snail to glide over uneven ground with its foot that includes a
head—at its front—that smells and barely sees.3 It carries its shell while perceiving
the world through its head as its foot grasps and glides on slime along the ground.
Snails are grounded, while Sitte’s takes flight. Winged snails only exist as microscopic
plankton, invisible to the human eye [Figure 15.2]. These winged sea snails are all
zooplankton, tiny marine animals—sea butterflies (Thecosomata, also known as the
potato chip of the sea) or sea angels (Clione limacine)—having wing-shaped bodies.
1 Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, translated by George R. Collins and
Christiane Crasemann Collins (New York: Random House, 1965), 164.
2 He continues, writing of “old and rotting buildings that form our snail-shell, our habitation, which
crush us in our daily contact with the putrid and useless and unproductive.” Le Corbusier, Towards a
New Architecture, translated by Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), 273, 236–7.
3 Retinalechoes, “The Snail’s Duality” in Retinalechoes, A Journal on Film, Art, Literature, February 7,
2013, http://retinalechoes.com/2013/02/07/the-snails-duality/. Accessed September, 13, 2014.
132 Marcia Feuerstein
Figure 15.1 Camillo Sitte’s flying snail from the 3rd 1901 edition of Die Städte-bau nach
seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen
der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien
/ von architekt Camillo Sitte (Wien: Verlag von Carl Graeser, 1889).
Internet Archive (University of Toronto)
“Plankton,” from the Greek word for wander, refers to microbes, plants, and animals
carried by ocean currents: translucent miniatures that feed on smaller plankton and
provide nutrition for larger and higher animals—sea angels, slugs, fish, and whales,
from tiny to huge.
A winged snail might be a monster; although, like Sitte’s invention, other instances
of airborne snails hold meaning that suggest a modern or god-like future. Francesco
del Cossa (c. 1435–1477), a fifteenth-century Italian artist, included two snails in his
painting The Annunciation (L’Annunciazione, 1470–1472)—each interpreted as a
figure of God, one earthbound and the other floating in the sky.4 One, the large snail
gliding along the bottom of del Cossa’s painting, is like a mirror of the other, floating
in the sky in the form of a cloud. It is no surprise that he included both of these snails
in his Annunciation, each representing the figure of God, symbolizing divine insemi
nation during the annunciation—one from heaven (as God) and the other, the Virgin,
miraculously emerging from fertile ground.5
Festina lente
Sitte’s flying snail might refer to a sacred future—leaving the ground and flying
away—as well as to festina lente, a Latin motto meaning “hurry [or hasten] slowly.”
The festina lente motto was enthusiastically embraced by artists, writers, architects,
thinkers, and emperors to carefully and thoughtfully design a way of life that balances
fast with slow. Many created images or emblems that represented this motto.
Sitte’s small festina lente emblem reimagines and reiterates his plea to “hurry slowly”
while designing new urban spaces, specifically the Vienna Ringstrasse (1860–1890s).
He focuses on slowing down the design process, despite designers’ overwhelming
desire for fast design decisions. His book reveals medieval public spaces that embody
a slower way life. Fast modern life upsets this balance: he asks designers to take a
mature, measured approach to design: slower designing for a slower life. On the sur
face he seems to wish for a return to a past, idyllic, urban life; in the end he proposes
4 Helen S. Ettlinger, “The Virgin Snail,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978):
316.
5 Daniel Arasse, “The Snail’s Gaze” in On n’y voit rien: Descriptions, translated by Alyson Waters
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 17–38.
Figure 15.2 Sea Angel: microscopic marine winged snails (Zooplankon Clione limacha, a shell-less cold water gastropod).
NOAA Photo Library, Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC
something else: a balance that affords the richness, beauty, and elegance of both quick
and slow. Look to the past while accepting the future, like the winged snail.
The traditional concept of festina lente—combining slow and quick—required
wisdom and cunning, or metis. Metis has been described as a way of knowing that is
different from speculative reasoning. It follows a complex route towards understand
ing, with ambiguous and shifting situations that defy logic or calculation.6 Metis also
requires maturity, obtained after years of study, work, and experience.
Consider baseball. A mature batter takes control of a game by slowing it down:
taking time while preparing for the pitch, waiting, calming down and considering
the pitcher before instantly reacting. The hitter’s mind is absolutely clear, and able to
make a quick decision at the last split second. So it is with designing.
Alberti recounts a similar process of maturity and metis coupled with festina lente
when observing how a design process moves from confusion to clarity. Immature
designers impatiently want to immediately conclude their designs; but Alberti advises:
as an architect you must wait and calm down, “until your initial enthusiasm for the
idea has mellowed . . . then once your judgment is governed by soberer thoughts
than your enthusiasm for inventions, you will be able to judge the matter more
thoroughly.”7 Patience signals a designer’s maturity, using sketches, drawings, and
models to “weigh up repeatedly and examine, with the advice of experts, the work as
a whole and . . . all of the parts . . . before continuing.”8 Only after prudent reflection
can a building be quickly constructed: slow then quick.
Marco Frascari recounts another slow quick story about drawing, metis, festina
lente, a Chinese artist, and a crab. The artist spent ten years preparing his image of a
perfect crab for his patron who had supported him over the decade. Finally his patron
lost patience, demanded the drawing and the artist instantly created a perfect crab.
The artist’s long and slow preparation immediately crystallized through metis. As
Frascari explains, “those who have metis act in a flash.”9
By practicing festina lente one achieves maturity by balancing the quick with the slow.
In design, we develop maturity through patience and experience, which gives us the
opportunity to know when a design is ripe and ready.10 Aulus Gellius (c. 123–170 ce)
discussed festina lente in Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) as the writing of maturity:11
6 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 18–20. See also Lisa Ann Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and
Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992),
xii.
7 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, edited and translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and
Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), Book Two, 1/20–21v, 35.
8 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, 34.
9 Marco Frascari, “Festina Lente (Hurrying Slowly) an essay on the building of speed,” GB Progetti 1–0
(1993): 18.
10 Conrad H Roth, “Festina Lente,” Varieties of unreligious experience, May 22, 2007, http://vunex.
blogspot.com/2007/05/festina-lente.html. Accessed August 10, 2014. Referring to the ideal time to
harvest. It also recalls Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare (#226 Perry Index) as well as Zeno
of Elea’s paradox of Achilles and Floyd’s “tortoise and hare” algorithm of infinite (cycle) loops in
mathematics.
11 Leofranc Holford-Strevens, “Aulus Gellius,” Oxford Bibliographies, DOI: 10.1093/
OBO/9780195389661-0200, August 28, 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/
obo-9780195389661/obo-9780195389661-0200.xml. Accessed October 24, 2014. Aulus Gellinus was
a second-century ce Roman scholar and author.
Camillo Sitte’s winged snail 135
(Augustus) used to say in conversation, and write in his letters, m/¡ȣࡏb¡`l_b¡´tn,
that is, “make haste slowly,” by which he recommended that to accomplish a
result we should use at once the promptness of energy and the delay of careful
ness, and it is from these two opposite qualities that maturitas springs.12
He was referring to Caesar Augustus (63 bce–14 ce), who adopted an image of a crab
and a butterfly to signify his idea of festina lente. Another image, which grafts a sail
onto a turtle’s shell, was adopted by Cosimo Medici, who had artist Giorgio Vasari
insert the image throughout his Palazzo Veccio in Florence (1559–1561). Vasari
included the turtle/sail in the frontispiece he designed for Bertoli’s translation of
Alberti’s previously cited treatise on Architecture. These two kinds of images signify
two ways of achieving festina lente: one, combining parts of animals and/or objects,
enables a third creature to acquire both traits and balance quickness with slowness
(the turtle-sail); the other maintains each object’s/animal’s innate character as they
engage in an ongoing struggle between these two opposing ways of being to achieve
the balance (the crab-butterfly). Each represents a different way of achieving maturity
by practicing festina lente. Caesar Augustus’s image13 of a crab holding a large butter
fly aloft in its claws recalls Frascari’s story of metis and the quickly drawn crab. The
huge nervous fluttering same-sized butterfly demonstrates the struggle by the butterfly
tricked into being caught by a cunning and clever crab, who then must continue to
hold onto the butterfly [Figure 15.3 left].
The turtle/sail emblem is closest to Sitte’s image: creating a new creature that is
enabled by the part of another: the turtle or snail representing the ground plus sails
or wings representing fast moving air. The slowly moving ground creature that then
catches the wind and moves over the water or becomes airborne.
Another image also within an architectural treatise has a dolphin intertwined with
(but not caught by) an anchor—combining the quickness of the dolphin tempered
by the weight and stability of the anchor [Figure 15.3 right]. Again, like the crab-
butterfly, the idea was created by the interaction of two things (an anchor and a dol
phin) that remain whole yet joined. It was included in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili:
The Strife of Love in a Dream published in 1499 by Aldus Manutius. Manutius then
borrowed the image for his own colophon and in his 1508 publication of Desiderius
Erasmus’s Adages (who included an adage on festina lente).14
The anchor/dolphin combination clearly indicates an opposition between lightness
and heaviness. Fast and slow, explored by Italio Calvino in his “Quickness,” along
with “Lightness,” considers “the opposition between lightness and weight,” show
ing how both are inextricably bound to one another.15 It also suggests a period of
wandering before striking the balance—whether while designing, drawing a crab, or
working on research. One philosopher writes, “whoever has spent long hours roam
ing among books, when every fragment . . . seems to open a new path, in turn quickly
12 Aulus Gellius, The attic nights of Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae), translated by John Carew Rolfe
(Cambridge, MA: W. Heinemann, 1960–1961), 10.11, 1–8.
13 W. Deonna, “The Crab and the Butterfly: A Study in Animal Symbolism,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 17, no. 1/2 (1954): 47–86.
14 Adagia II, 1, 1:Festina Lente.
15 Italo Calvino, “Lightness” and “Quickness” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988), 3–30, 31–54.
Figure 15.3 On the left: Crab holding a butterfly with the words Festina Lente. This was Caesar Augustus’s emblem for Festina Lente from c. 19
bce, reconceived in 1559 by Gabriel Simeone. Similar images from this time replace festina lente with Matura (mature). On the right:
Aldus Manutius’s Dolphin Intertwined with Anchor.
Internet Archive (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze)
abandoned for a new encounter . . . knows that not only that study can have no true
end, but also that it desires none.” He continues, “this festina lente, this shuttling
between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss, passion and action is the
rhythm of study”16 (and design.)
Camillo Sitte’s winged snail was not a sea butterfly, sea angel, or microscopic
winged snail plankton. Yet like plankton, designers, or a scholar roaming library
stacks (or electronic databases), Sitte wandered through the historic centers of vari
ous towns, through the plazas that were designed through centuries-long wanderings,
designed out of a kind of human current that, like a snail, followed topographic,
cultural, and functional life lived in the open. It was here that Sitte described a series
of urban situations, “old town” portions of European towns and cities, whose small-
scale character gave members of the public opportunities to interact with each other.
He was appalled by new urban plans designed through efficient (and quick) meth
ods that transformed the city’s population. This new approach, he believed, resulted
in the disappearance of nineteenth-century European public life and a culture retreat
ing from spontaneous human contact and intimate spaces.17 Sitte believed that public
life could be strengthened if these efficient methods were informed by his principles,
derived from the piazzas he found so appealing. Otherwise, public street life would
transform its people, both actor and audience, into a community of strangers: with
drawn, estranged from one another, and autonomous.
Sitte methodically researched cities to discover principles of city design based on
these historic public spaces. His method was different from the estrangement he
hoped to prevent. When Sitte arrived at a new city he would leave the train station
and:
bid the cabman drive immediately to the central square. There he would ask for
the leading bookstore and there he would inquire for three things: First, the best
tower from which to view the city; second, the best map of the city; and, third, the
hotel where one could eat the best dinners. Then, having cut the map into small
squares easily handled in the wind, he would go to the outlook tower, and there
spend several hours analyzing the plan of the town. Later he would study in detail
and make sketches of the cathedral square, [and] the market place.18
As he moved from the ground to sky and back again, Sitte was an active stranger, held
in the grasp of the streets and then detached and elevated: a “voyeur” of the city from
above literally viewing the urban plan. Moving between street and sky, he enacted the
role of an observer who, as a visitor, joined and then departed from the public realm.
He accomplished this thorough a web of interaction that provided “mutual support
and direct contact . . . .”19 Sitte’s method was to slowly meander the streets, nourished
by local cuisine, and climb up above the streets for a bird’s eye view, an overview of
the city plan all at once.
16 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, quoted in Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, edited by
Leland de la Durantaye (Stanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 2009), 144.
17 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976).
18 George R. Collins and Christiane Craseman Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City
Planning (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 63.
19 Sennett, Public Man, 294.
Sitte’s winged snail might refer to the transformation of the plazas and public
spaces that were slowly designed over time through everyday life, fitting the urban
life as a well-made suit, much like the previously cited reference to Le Corbusier’s
description of the snail shell as lodging made exactly to a human’s measure. Unlike
snails, who slowly glide over the ground, changes in topography, leaving a trail that
weaves through and negotiates the vagaries of a site, Sitte believed that, as new cities
were designed for faster movement, with a focus on roadways and streets, they lost
their slower everyday rhythm and erased the unique character of the original place.
Sitte was not trying to return to the past but rather hoped that his principles might
become integrated into modern, efficient designs of the new city. His principles
explored social and cultural opportunities embedded within the form and makeup
of public spaces via their unique character— opportunities to publically share their
daily life with each other on-the-ground.20 Rather than eliminating the urbane slow
ness of life enacted in medieval plazas and replacing it with quick and fast living, he
hoped for a moderate balance. Practicing festina lente for city design (on the Viennese
Ringstrasse) would prevent the tendency by designers to jump to conclusions with
out taking time to study, consider and learn. The overabundance of fast living and
designing called for slowness. Lingering. He observed that urban designers’ use of
efficient, rational, and technical methods—only taking a bird’s eye view—resulted in
fast yet uncooked designs produced on drawing boards without “meandering on the
ground” through site visits that engaged all the senses. The result could be seen in the
vacuous and soulless urban areas built at that time in Dresden, Munich, Paris, and
Vienna. Avoiding “nameless technicians” and engineers, the designers, he thought,
should use Austrian matter-of-fact Zeitgeist to create “artistic” cities, instead of
following a “mathematically precise” approach that treated people as machines.21
Noting that the physical setting had a strong influence on the human soul, he asked
that the designers, like the inhabitants, linger and wait while recognizing the power
of beauty and design that would “make its people at once secure happy”—adding
artistic to technical concepts.22 The art of city planning went beyond technical or
rational exercises,23 or an “engineer’s approach,” a concern shared by others such
as Musil, Freud, Loos, and, later, Le Corbusier.24 Sitte believed technically derived
designs contributed to generalized loneliness and agoraphobia: a fear of public
spaces.25 His conclusion reiterated that designing in the city, urban designers must
carefully consider both technical and artistic issues, laying immense responsibility at
the feet of planners.
20 Marcia Feuerstein, “Camillo Sitte’s Artistic Principles and the Enacting Public” in Proeedings of the
ACSA Annual Meeting (Boston, MA: ACSA, March 1996): 599–604.
21 Alfred Lichtwerk (1852–1914) identified a “cult of the engineers in planning” referring to British engi
neer William Lindley (1808–1900) whose hygienic approach completely changed the face of Hamburg.
Collins, Camillo Sitte, 35, fn. 24, 342. See also Sitte, City Planning, 246.
22 Collins, Camillo Sitte, 141.
23 Sitte, in Collins, Camillo Sitte, 299.
24 Such as Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995); Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), and Adolf Loos “Potemkin City” in
Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, translated by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 95–6. Le Corbusier also warned about the cult of the engineer
in Towards an Architecture.
25 Sitte, City Planning, 301.
Yet, again, why a winged snail? While Sitte reiterates the need for festina lente,
with a focus on the lente rather than the festina, he may have created this little snail
in dedication to his home, Vienna, and its historic medieval core. In his conclusion he
makes a plea for public spaces that maintain their unique character, hinting, through
the little snail, at a unique urban character in Vienna that “survived in relatively
unspoiled state from the preindustrial age”:26 specifically, Vienna’s snail market.
Snails had been a traditional part of the Viennese diet before and during Sitte’s
lifetime, embedded within Vienna’s cultural, religious, and culinary fabric.27 Austria,
and especially Vienna, was a center of heliciculture—raising snails or escargot for
human consumption—where snails were enjoyed as much as poultry.28 A vital ele
ment of Vienna’s farming economy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,29
her snail market was located behind Peterskirche on Jungferngasse, an integral part of
her urban fabric. This was Vienna’s historic “slow food”—escargot—a “poor man’s
oyster”; and since snails were considered fish rather than meat, during lent these
“Viennese Oysters” were shipped from Germany to meet the demand. This slow-
moving food disappeared from the Austrian diet until Viennese snail farmer Andreas
Gugumuck revived it in 2008 after discovering that Vienna was once a world capitol
of escargot.30 An original “slow food,” the Viennese snails and snail farming was
included in the slow food movement, founded by Carlo Petrini as a reaction against
the first McDonald’s built in Rome as well mass-produced foods. Its mission was to
encourage local traditional food as a foil to the rise and popularity of mass-produced
and fast food, and to reveal and revive authentic cultural culinary traditions and
provide opportunities to develop the taste for local regional foods.31 The slow food
movement fought against globalization, industrialization and capitalism of food—
similar to Sitte’s reaction against “nameless technicians” unaware of local urban
delicacies (historic and topographical)—against, as Frascari has written in reference
to postmodern design, the edibles produced by fast-food chains that “look like the
real thing, but . . . have been designed to be gulped down.”32
The snail was unique to the Viennese food tradition. Perhaps Sitte gave urban
designers opportunities to be like the Viennese snail, slow and tasty—rather than
26 Collins, Camillo Sitte, 14.

27 Vernon Lee, The Tower of Mirrors and other essays on the Spirit of Places (London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1918). See also Ark of Taste Austria, “Viennese snails,” Slow Food Foundation for
Biodiversity, 2014, http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/ark/details/1332/viennese-snails-#.VCcM2
e6AjU. Accessed June 6, 2014.
28 William Coxe, History of the House of Austria: From the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph
of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218–1792 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 3rd
ed. V.1, 398, fn.; John Bigland and Jedidiah Mores, A Geographical and Historical View of the World:
Exhibiting a Complete Delineation of the Natural and Artificial Features of Each Country (Boston:
Thomas B. Wait and Company, 1811), V.3, 176.
29 Robert Nordsieck, “Snail Cultivation (Heliciculture),” The Living World of Molluscs, http://www.mol
luscs.at/gastropoda/terrestrial/helix.html?/gastropoda/terrestrial/helix/cultivation.html. Accessed June 6,
2014.
30 Helen Soteriou, “Austria’s only snail farmer,” BBC News, Business, September 3, 2014, http://www.
bbc.com/news/business-29027461. Accessed October 29, 2014. See also “Verrückt: The Snail Farmer
of Vienna / 2015 Real Food Media Contest Winner,” https://vimeo.com/118520863. Accessed April 8,
2015.
31 Anne Meneley, “Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Slow Food,” Anthropoligica 46 (2004): 170–71.
32 Marco Frascari, “Semiotica Ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 40,
no. 1 (Autumn1986): 2–7, 3.
overly hasty and bland—and to step away, perhaps lighten up, to imagine themselves
overhead for an overview of their old city and, while flying toward the future (with
out denying the “modern approach”), to enjoy their own traditional snails (public
spaces). Sitte’s festina lente was a special concoction of winged snails following a
Viennese recipe—boiled, with garlic butter, dipped in beer batter, fried in hot lard,
served with a series of sauces: vinegar, horseradish, and onions with the addition of
wings.33
The flying snail is a mode of urban life to be constructed and savored while flying
toward the future. Perhaps it is also Sitte, who began his research on the ground
before climbing up the tower to look down with his map. Then, after spending time
in the sky, he returns to the ground, to his hotel—consuming a delicious, regionally
prepared meal of escargot. The wings lift Sitte up to see where he previously stood and
walked, quickly flying in the air where, before, on the ground, the slow and seemingly
static snail moved, leaving a trail in its wake.
33 Constanze von Hartmann and Ignacio Lantero, “The Making-of Food & Film: Viennese Snails,”
Wienerschnecke, http://www.themaking-of.eu/wiener-schnecke/. Accessed June 15, 2015.
16 Strange tales of architectural
evolution
Matthew Mindrup
An experienced designer knows that the design and construction of architecture

rarely goes according to plan. Unexpected discoveries can permeate the design pro
cess producing surprising results. But this unpredictability can be anticipated. For
the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, fortunate coincidences were an essential source of
inspiration in his own design work. An avid collector of natural objects, Le Corbusier
relied on these as objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction) to stimulate
his architectural imagination [Figure 16.1].1 Perhaps the most famous object in Le
Corbusier’s collection was a crab shell he found roaming a Long Island beach in the
1940s, which later inspired the roof structure of his Notre Dame du Haut chapel in
Ronchamp, France (completed 1955).
In architecture, creative affordances, like those Le Corbusier found with his objets à
réaction poètique, are made possible by what Louis Pasteur described as a “prepared
mind,” a mind actively engaged in a problem poised to recognize an everyday object
or event as inspiration for a solution. In his education of designers, the former
Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy developed exercises that would train his stu
dents for precisely this form of creative activity, arguing that the act of genius is “[t]he
flash-like act of connecting elements not obviously belonging together. Their produc
tive relationships, unnoticed before, produce a new result.”2
Unforeseen encounters with new architectural ideas are common in architectural
practice. A handful of these events have been recorded in architectural history includ
ing the Greek architect Callimachus’ invention of the Corinthian capital, Charles
Dominique-Joseph Eisen’s frontispiece for the 1755 edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s
Essai sur l’architecture (An Essay on Architecture), and Le Corbusier’s use of the crab
shell.3 The percentage of reported to actual incidents is probably very low, perhaps
because an explanation may be perceived as reducing the mystique of creative genius.
Taking a cue from Umberto Eco, who once observed how “every story tells a story
that has already been told,” this chapter explores the mutability between the everyday
and the extraordinary as a common thread in these tales of sudden architectural
inspiration.
1 Le Corbusier, “Les objets à réaction poétique” in Le Corbusier, L’Atelier de la recherche patiente (Paris:
Vincent et Fréal, 1960), 209.
2 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1961), 68.
3 Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 20.
142 Matthew Mindrup
Figure 16.1 Le Corbusier’s Objets à réaction poètique (objects of poetic reaction), collected
1925–1965. Shown here: objects collected on the beach, 1955.
© Foundation Le Corbusier/ADAGP. Licensed by Viscopy, 2015
A gap between object and idea

Perhaps the most vivid account for the serendipitous discovery of an architectural idea
is Vitruvius’ story of the Corinthian column capital. As Vitruvius recounted, while
strolling past the tomb of a young maiden from Corinth, the architect Callimachus
(meaning “very skillful”) happened upon a votive basket standing over her grave
that had a roof tile resting on top with an acanthus plant growing up along its sides.
Impressed by the novel arrangement, Callimachus “began to fashion columns for
the Corinthians on this model, and he set up symmetries, and thus he drew up the
principles for completing works of the Corinthian type” [Figure 16.2].4 In Vitruvius’
story, the invention of the Corinthian capital was not an idea first conceived by the
architect, but an arrangement of objects discovered and interpreted as a physical
model for architecture.
In Aristotle’s epistemology, accidental discoveries are important events in how we
know things, including those things we make in artistic production.5 As Aristotle
argued in the Physics, there are four types of causes for all things: a material, formal,
efficient, and final cause. However, Aristotle’s analysis of causality reaches a critical
4 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, translated by Ingrid Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), Book 4, Chapter 1, 55.
5 Aristotle, The Physics, with an English translation by Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford,
Vol. 1 (London: W. Heinemann, 1970), (194b17–20), Book 2, Chapter 3, 129.
Strange tales of architectural evolution 143
Figure 16.2 The origin of the Corinthian order, engraving (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1684),
illustrated in Claude Perrault’s Vitruvius, 2nd ed. (1684).
144 Matthew Mindrup

moment when he asks how those causes that result from tucheˉ (chance), like that
experienced by Callimachus, fit into the division of the four previously mentioned
causes.6 For Aristotle, those “accidents” effected by an agent “capable of choosing”
are different from what he refers to as automaton (natural accidents) which are lik
ened to being hit by a randomly falling rock.7 In the realm of design, affordances that
result from tucheˉ are efficient causes, sources “that set processes in motion”—that
are not determined by a final cause but whose outcomes, like Callimachus’ accidental
discovery of the basket, acanthus plant, and roof tile, are determined by their agent,
the designer, as a model for architecture.8
In practice, architects encounter a variety of sensorial stimuli both familiar and
unfamiliar. Yet not every experience may inspire a productive architectural idea.
Building upon Aristotle’s excursus on the causes for things we experience, empiricist
philosopher John Locke argued that simple ideas, like those of a basket, acanthus
plant, and clay roof tile have primary and secondary qualities that permit them to act
as models of architecture. According to Locke, we go through the world interrogat
ing sensory experience, noticing which primary qualities regularly seem to cluster
together—a thing’s size, shape, motion, number, or solidity as a single idea under
a single name.9 Yet, in the process of acquiring understanding, the imagination is
vulnerable to accidental encounters with things; and, in order to know them, it must
distinguish a thing’s primary from its secondary qualities—color, sound, taste, and
odor, which resemble the causes for a thing but do not inhere in an object, only in our
perception of it.10 This vulnerability is the hallmark of a playful imagination that can
shift between different final causes for the same thing and essential to the use of found
objects in a playful activity of make-believe.
For two children, a game of make-believe begins when an agreement is made that,
for example, a pile of snow is a fort. Kendall Walton, a philosopher on the points of
coincidence between toys and art, has argued how this snow pile is a found object that
children play with as a “prop” that “prompts” them to imagine what they might not
otherwise be creative enough to invent on their own—a fortress. By using the pile of
snow as a prop, they do not merely project an image of a fort with turrets, a tower,
and a moat. Rather, they imagine that the actual heap of snow is itself a fort.11 For
the German philosopher of hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, this act of play is
particularly strong in the creative arts whereby the artist’s (and here we also include
architect’s) engagement with a thing as if it was a something else permits them to go
beyond the limitations and conditions of their own imagination.12 Without entirely
dismissing what he already knew about a thing, Callimachus, like a child with a pile
of snow, held the identity of the basket and roof tile in suspense, making-believe
its material and formal characteristics were something else, the model of a column
6 Aristotle, Physics, Book 2, Chapters 4–6, 138–63.
7 Aristotle, Physics, (197b29), Book 2, Chapter 6, 161.
8 Aristotle, Physics, (198a5), Book 2, Chapter 6, 163.
9 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Collins, 1964), Book 2, Section xii,
132.
10 Locke, Essay, Book 2, Sections ix–xi, 119–34.
11 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25.
12 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Play of Art” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and other Essays, translated
by Nicholas Walker and edited by Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986),
124–9.
capital. Immanuel Kant called this mental state “free play” in which our faculties of
understanding and imagination cooperate with one another.13 That is to say that, in
the act of make-believe, a child creates a gap between the thing and idea enabling the
object to be disengaged from what Paul Ricoeur described as the world behind it, its
historical causes.14 For Umberto Eco, this disengagement is particularly strong in the
contemporary experience and reception of art. As he argued in The Open Work, every
reception of a work of art or architecture is both an interpretation and a performance
of it.15 In this conceptual moat, the imagination is free to posit other possibilities
(causes) for everyday objects, including models of architecture, which are open to
constant revision.
Genius, the flame of inspiration

Perhaps at no other time in architectural history was the characterization of an
architect’s moment of creative discovery given greater attention than in the eighteenth
century. One poignant example of a fortuitous event in architectural evolution can be
found in the frontispiece for the 1755 edition of Essai sur l’architecture. In his Essai,
Laugier sought to rectify the “faults” of current architectural practice by positing an
account for the origin of architecture as the imitation of nature.16 Eisen’s drawing for
the frontispiece depicted Lady Architecture, reclining on fragments of Greek columns
and cornices, directing the attention of an amazed putto towards a grouping of four
trees in which the trunks, branches, and leaves are organized into the appearance of a
Greek temple with four columns, an entablature, and pediment [Figure 16.3]. Laugier
regarded this “rustic hut” not as a fixed model to be copied in appearance, but one
whose principles should be imitated in the design of new architecture.17 Curiously,
Eisen’s drawing includes a flame above the head of the putto—a representation of
sudden inspiration identified with acts of genius during the eighteenth century.
The word “genius” comes from the Latin gen meaning to be born, to beget or to
come into being. In the ancient Roman religion, the genius was the spirit of the gens
(the family), a tutelary spirit allotted to everyone at birth. Until the eighteenth century,
this concept of genius remained a dominant understanding of the English word––
such as by Shakespeare when Macbeth recognizes how his “genius is rebuked” by
Banquo’s valorous “wisdom” which acts as his “guide”(3.1.57–62)18 In the ancient
world, genius was also intimately related to, but distinct from, ingenium as innate
character, disposition, or talent. In the Apology, Plato argued that the work of poets
was not the result of their genius since “what they composed emerged not from sophia
(wisdom), but by phýsis (nature) and because they were enthousiasmos (inspired), like
13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by James Creed Meredith and edited by Nicholas
Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49.
14 Paul Ricoeur, “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” translated by David Pellauer, Philosophy
Today 17, no. 2 (1973): 139–41.
15 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989), 3–4.
16 Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann
(Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1977), 11–14.
17 Laugier, Essay, 11–14.
18 This is discussed in Paul W. Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third
Critique (London: Continuum, 2010), 9.
146 Matthew Mindrup
Figure 16.3 Charles Eisen, Primitive Hut, frontispiece of Essai sur l’Architecture by Marc-
Antoine Laugier, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1755).
Wikimedia Commons
19
the prophets and givers of oracles.” For Plato, “[t]he poet is a light and winged and
holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of
his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.”20 As Plato makes clear in the Phaedrus,
the poet is not insane in the modern sense but overcome by divine madness from the
Muses––the mythical Ancient Greek goddesses believed to be the sources of inspira
tion for poets and artists.21
Slowly in the early modern world, genius, as a tutelary spirit, came to be equated
with the mind whose experience of furor poeticus (poetic fury) was conflated with
ingenium to constitute the genius within. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation and
commentaries on Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus explained how gods inspired the mind of
poets, caught up in the rapture of furor poeticus, one of four forms of furor divinus
(divine fury): divine, prophetic, amorous and poetic.22 At some time during the sev
enteenth century, as we notice in Antoine Furetiére’s Dictionnaire universel of 1690,
the ancient Roman sense of ingenium as “natural talent” was incorporated into the
French word for génie (genius) with the example: “Cet homme est un vaste génie, qui
est capable du tout” (This man is a vast genius, capable of all).23 A few years later,
Antoine Galland gave his famous mistranslation of the Arabic jinnıˉ in his collection of
Asian stories, Les mille et une nuits (The Thousand and One Nights).24 For Histoire
d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveilleuse in particular, Galland translated jinnıˉ, a super
natural creature made of smokeless fire, into French as the similar sounding “genie.”
Voltaire challenged this confusion in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie noting “[a]s I
have never seen any génie . . . I cannot speak of them from knowledge.”25 In Voltaire’s
account, the term “génie” still designated those talents into which invention occurs as
a kind of divine inspiration. However, those artists without invention or originality
are not considered geniuses, but only inspired by their predecessors.26
Modern usage of the term genius, as an extraordinary creative power, is essentially
an eighteenth-century development, part of the radical shift in epistemology and
aesthetic theory occurring at that time. Perhaps no two works are more important to
this critical transition than Plato’s Republic and the Enneads of Plotinus. As Socrates
famously reasoned in Book Ten of the Republic, the arts have a lowly status as forms
of knowing since they are imitations of the world of appearances and not of essences.
Compared to the work of a craftsman who makes a bed in accordance with the
essence of a bed, Plato compared the work of an artist to a mirror, reasoning that it
is merely a copy of the craftsman’s copy. M.H. Adams employed Plato’s analogy to
19 Plato, Apology, in Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, translated by Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966), Vol. 1, 22c.
20 Plato, Ion, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1871), 534b.
21 Plato, Phaedrus, in Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1925), Vol. 9, 245a.
22 Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology: Concerning the Immortality of the Soul (1474, VIII, 14–16) in
Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962), 137, n. 22.
23 Antoine Furetiére, Dictionnaire universel, (1690), Slatkin reprint edition, 2 vols. (Geneva 1970), 2, in
Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 70, n. 5.
24 Gallard’s translation was published in two parts: In vol. 9 as “Histoire d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveil
leuse” and vol. 10 as “Suite de l’Histoire d’Aladdin ou la Lampe merveilleuse.” Antoine Gallard,
Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes traduits en François, par M. Galland, Volumes 9 and 10 (Paris:
F. Delaulne, 1712).
25 Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (Genève: Cramer, 1770–1772), Vol. 6, 254.
26 Voltaire, Questions, 255–6.
148 Matthew Mindrup
describe the changing role of the creative imagination in his seminal work, The Mirror
and the Lamp.27 Adams argued that the Enneads of Plotinus underlay developments
in eighteenth-century poetry and academic philosophy. In it, the artist was permitted
to “go back to the Ideas from which Nature itself derives” as the source of their work,
since the “form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the
stone.”28 In Nathanael Culverwel’s 1652 work, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of
the Light of Nature, the role of the mind as receptor is now portrayed as a projector—
from mirror to an “intellectual lamp.”29 Laugier used a similar metaphor in the
preface to his Essai noting that it is “brilliant flashes” which “herald a genius” and he
himself witnessed “a bright light before his eyes” permitting him to see the principles
of architecture “distinctly.”30
Returning to the image of the flame above the putto’s head, in 1756 Jean Michel
Liotard created a drawing of Voltaire and his genius: a winged child with a flame
above its head, standing behind Voltaire’s portrait. Despite the changing locus of an
architect’s idea, something of its mystical origins remained in Romantic literature’s
usage of the Latin term “afflatus.” Originally coined by Cicero, afflatus meant “a
breath or blast of wind,” to give physical form to the sometimes staggering and stun
ning blow of divine inspiration.31 A conflation of this afflatus with the flame of genius
can be found throughout France in early Christian depictions of Pentecost when the
Holy Spirit blows into a room and fills the Apostles—represented by individual flames
above their heads.32 What was used to represent an Apostle filled with the Holy Spirit
gains a new identity in Eisen’s frontispiece. The putto is the genius of architecture
with Lady Architecture acting like a Muse directing the attention of the reader to
the four trees. The flame denotes the spark of inspiration that will be given to those
who will see, in the tree trunks, branches, and leaves, the origins of classical Greek
architecture. This sudden moment of insight, the imaginary connection of elements
not immediately belonging together is the moment of genius. But this spark of inspira
tion will not ignite an empty imagination since trees and branches are in themselves
not architecture, but only an architecture that the putto was already prepared to see.
The prepared mind for musement

To take advantage of possible inspiration a designer must possess a prepared mind,
which is able to find meaning in stimuli whether random or intentional. With every
new project, the designer is confronted by a new set of practical and technical require
ments or conditions. No matter how much relevant information is collected pertain
ing to the task, it is not sufficient to generate the design. Conversely, while arbitrary
formal invention may aid an architect’s search for new architectural ideas, it cannot
act as a substitute for it. As Louis Pasteur remarked in a speech to the Faculty
of Sciences at Lille, “fortune favors the prepared mind”—that is, to recognize an
27 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953).
28 Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna (London: The Medici Society, 1926), V.7.1,
in Abrams, The Mirror, 42, n. 38.

29 Abrams, The Mirror, 59.
30 Laugier, “Preface,” Essay, 2, 4.
31 Cicero, De rerum natura (2.167) also De oratore (2.194).
32 See Acts 2.
everyday object or event as inspiration for architecture, a designer must be actively
engaged in a problem.33 Le Corbusier’s collection of found objects in his studio
encouraged precisely these unpredictable moments of invention.
According to Le Corbusier’s own testimony, it was an empty crab shell whose
strength as a geometric form of two curvilinear surfaces joined at the edges
inspired the roof of his Notre Dame du Haut Chapel.34 This shell was one of Le
Corbusier’s collection of objets à réaction poètique, of which he spoke to students
in 1942, explaining how they “form the vast panoply of spokesmen who speak the
language of nature. They are caressed by your hands, your eyes gaze upon them,
they are evocative companions. . . .”35 For Le Corbusier, an object having poetic
potential must prompt speculation, engaging the body and mind to contemplate the
efficacy of its forms that may lie entirely outside the architect’s accustomed archi
tectural vocabulary. In themselves, Le Corbusier’s objets à réaction poètique, like
Callimachus’ basket or Eisen’s grouping of trees, have no recognizable architectural
purpose until they become an important factor for the architect, imparting imagina
tive direction.
Le Corbusier’s appropriation of the crab shell demonstrates that accidental
moments of creativity are dependent on the designer having experiences upon which
they can make hypothetical associations—projections. The American philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce described the formation of a hypothesis as “an act of insight,”
which explains an observed phenomenon and is based on prior experience. To explain
this insight, Peirce developed the concept of abduction, which describes a situation
in which the subject is confronted with an observed fact needing explanation and
finds an “idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting
together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation.”36 Similar to
an architect’s inspiration or afflatus, an abductive affordance from tucheˉ comes to
a subject in a flash. To enable our imaginations to take advantage of this shift back
and forth between analytic and associative modes of thought, Peirce recommended
the practice of musement, an occupation of the mind that casts aside all serious pur
pose and searches in “pure play” for “some connection” between two of the three
Universes of Experience (mere Ideas, Brute Actuality of things and facts, and Signs—a
Power to establish connections between objects, especially between those in different
Universes).37 As the term “muse” suggests, Peirce’s museument harkened back to
Plato’s description of the poet who is out of his mind and overcome by divine madness
from the Muse. What was attributed to a mythical creature in Plato is for Peirce an
ability of the artist or architect to engage in lively contemplation of experiences “with
speculation concerning its cause.”38
33 Louis Pasteur, “Dans les champs de l’observation le hazard ne favorise que les esprits reéparés.”
Lecture presented at the University of Lille, Douai, France, on December 7, 1854, in H. Petersen, ed.,
A Treasury of the World’s Great Speeches (New York: Simon Schuster, 1954), 473.
34 Le Corbusier, The Chapel at Ronchamp (Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 89–90.
35 Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, translated by Pierre
Chase (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 70–71.
36 Charles Sanders Peirce, “Pragmatism as the Logic of Abduction (Lecture VII)” in The Essential Peirce:
Selected Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Vol. 2, 227.
37 Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” in Pierce, Essential Pierce, 436.
38 Pierce, Essential Pierce, 436.
150 Matthew Mindrup
Conclusion
In a discussion about his creative process, Le Corbusier’s friend, the Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso, explained how inspiration is the mark of a sagacious individual who
has learned to harness aberrations during the creative process: “Inspiration exists, but
it has to find you working.” By Picasso’s own admission, the assemblage of a bicycle
seat and handlebars in his 1942 Bull’s Head sculpture was not predetermined but a
chance discovery that he was prepared to see:
One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled up together, I found an old bicycle seat
right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head.
The idea of the Bull’s Head came to me before I had a chance to think. All I did
was weld them together. . . . [But] if you were to see only the bull’s head and not
the bicycle seat and handlebars that form it, the sculpture would lose some of its
impact.39
Similar to Picasso, the range of experiences an architect may draw upon for inspira
tion can certainly include those of found objects and random experiences in nature.
Yet the moment of genius, the discovery of a fortuitous idea for abducting what we
had never before considered, cannot be predetermined. Behind each of these strange
tales of architectural invention is a working architect, whose mind is fully prepared
for the blow of inspiration to body forth an architectural conception.
39 Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 61.
17 Dialetti architettonici
Storytelling in the vernacular
Michelangelo Sabatino
Leon Battista Alberti was one of the few Renaissance architects who deployed
Latin as a language for storytelling. Most other architects after Alberti have alter
nated between regional vernaculars (that is, dialects) and proper Italian. My chapter
explores the deployment of the vernacular as a language of storytelling and as a
language for building (and drawing) in Italy during the twentieth century. By inter
rogating both “high” and “low” modes of creative expression, my focus is on hybrid
practices based on appropriation. Robert Venturi noted—together with Denise Scott
Brown and Steven Izenour—how the vernacular and Classical coexist in Italy: “The
Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian.”1 During
the Renaissance, Lombard architects “spoke” the classical language while absorbing
vernacular cues that ultimately distinguished their stories (and buildings) from those
of their counterparts in Florence and Rome. During the twentieth century, a heated
debate regarding storytelling in the vernacular (that is, dialect) versus storytelling in
Italian echoed the distinction between prose and poetry delineated by the philoso
pher Benedetto Croce in his seminal essay Folk Poetry and Poets’ Poetry (1929).2
Under Fascism, Benito Mussolini’s emphasis on national unity led him to ban the use
of regionally characterized vernaculars (that is, dialects) in favor of “proper” Italian.
Yet, just as the intelligentsia reacted against this forced suppression of their identity,
so too did architects who creatively combined regional vernacular cues within the
framework of a universal (that is, modern) language. Most of these architects used
drawings, photography, and even painting to help tell and illustrate their vernacu
lar stories of Italy’s lesser-known heritage in a land most known for its Popes and
Caesars.3
1 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten
Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2nd printing, 1978, of the 1977
Edition), 6.
2 Benedetto Croce, “Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte” in Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte (Bari: Gius.
Laterza & Figli, 1930). Translated into English as “Folk Poetry and Poets’ Poetry” in Philosophy,
Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays by Benedetto Croce (London: Oxford University Press, 1966),
382–96.
3 This chapter draws from my book: Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular
Tradition in Italy (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: The University of Toronto Press, 2010). Italian
translation: Orgoglio della modestia: Architettura moderna italiana e tradizione vernacolare (Milan:
Edizioni Franco Angeli, 2013).
152 Michelangelo Sabatino
Barbarians and regional dialects

The time has finally come to praise Italy’s barbarians—the creative and free spirits
of the peasantry who have remained loyal to their traditions and customs.4
Throughout the twentieth century, Italian architects and designers produced remark
able buildings, paintings, and objects inspired by the basic volumes, simple materials,
and regional values of a vernacular tradition that evolved over centuries of agrarian
life. Despite their significant influence on Italian modernism and design, these peas
ant builders and artisans whom Curzio Malaparte provocatively called “barbarians”
have largely remained behind the scenes. Through their appropriation of the vernacu
lar tradition, Italian artists and architects achieved a unique synthesis of collective
expression and individual identity, from the Futurist architects and painters of the
1920s such as Fortunato Depero and Virgilio Marchi to projects like the housing
estates of Matera by Ludovico Quaroni and his collaborators completed in the early
1950s. As Italy transitioned from a primarily agrarian to an industrial economy, the
emergence of new ways of life to accommodate urban dwelling fostered a dynamic
dialogue between long established customs and modern practices, between the ethos
of artisanal making and that of industrial production modes, between craftspeo
ple and designers. Through the successive political regimes of Liberal, Fascist, and
Republican Italy, a dialectic relation between past and present contributed to the
emergence of an dynamic regionalist modernism that embraced traditional practices
without succumbing to banal historicism or nostalgia.
For the historian writing in English about a phenomenon of appropriation that
unfolded in specific political and aesthetic contexts and whose manifestations were
expressed equally specifically in the Italian language, the use of a blanket term such as
vernacular in English threatens to blur or even obliterate vital nuances that distinguish
highly diverse practices and intentions. Borrowed from linguistics and first employed
by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1857, “vernacular” has specific associations with the
notion of common, familiar, or ordinary, and is hard-pressed to invoke the debates
that generated a variety of charged terms reflecting political and cultural stances
assumed by practitioners and critics in Italy during this period. It is a generalization
that serves a practical purpose but immediately calls for explanation. The plurality of
Italian expressions used to describe vernacular buildings implies the disparate agendas
behind their appropriation as well as the multifarious approaches to their use in the
design process.
Capri and Futurist dialects

Though interest in the vernacular buildings and objects of the Mediterranean regions
surfaced in the work and writings of Italian architects and artists during the late 1920s
and early 1930s, the initial impulse came from discussions and events that took place
earlier. The “remote” island of Capri occupied a special place in these discussions. Its
“rediscovery” in the late nineteenth century by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann
(1870–1956), among others, was in no small part attributable to impressions of
4 Curzio Malaparte, Italia barbara (Turin: Piero Gobetti, 1925).

Dialetti architettonici 153
vernacular architecture gleaned from travels in Italy. In a lecture Hoffmann presented
in 1911 entitled “Meine Arbeit (My Work),” he described the experience of traveling
in 1896 to places including Capri and Anacapri as a turning point in his architectural
education and career:
Finally I fled into the Campagn [sic] and refreshed myself at the simple peasant
buildings, that without pomp and without stylistic architecture nevertheless give
the land its special character. There, for the first time, it became clear to me what
matters in architecture.5
In an address delivered to the 1923 Convegno del Paesaggio (Symposium on

Landscape) in Capri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti praised the stile pratico (practical
style) of indigenous architecture.6 He celebrated the island’s local vernacular architec
ture for its rational rather than picturesque qualities, and asserted:
I believe that this is a Futuristic island; I feel that it is full of infinite originality as if
it had been sculpted by Futurist architects like Sant’Elia, Virgilio Marchi, painted
by Balla, Depero, Russolo, Prampolini, and sung and made musical by Francesco
Cangiullo and Casella!7
Despite his war cry of 1909 to “free this land [Italy] from its smelly gangrene of
professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians,” more than ten years later he
exonerated vernacular architecture and folk art, sparing it his anti-historicist wrath
and proclaiming it to lie outside the flux of the history of style.8 Marinetti saw beauty
and freedom in the dramatic and unpredictable, and ultimately anti-classical, land
scape of Capri.9
The Futurists were, paradoxically, interested in both the myth of the machine and
the primitive character of pre-industrial vernacular architecture and peasant art. The
use of the vernacular did not imply an end to the avant-garde, but rather a refram
ing of its objectives; the seemingly opposed mass-produced machine and historically
charged landscape in fact coincided and mutually influenced each other. In 1922,
Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960), an architect and set designer who was known as a
Futurist despite his expressionist style, lauded the vernacular architecture of Capri
as a model of contemporary design in Primitivismi capresi (Capri Primitivisms),10
5 Josef Hoffmann, manuscript of lecture dated February 22, 1911, and published as “My Work” in
Eduard F. Sekler, ed., Josef Hoffmann: Monograph and Catalogue of Works (New York: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 486–92.
6 Edwin Cerio, “Il convegno del paesaggio,” in Il convegno del paesaggio (Naples: Gaspare Casella,
1923), 66–68. A reprint with additional commentary can be found in Giuseppe Galasso, Alberto
G. White, and Valeria Mazzarelli, eds., Contributi a settanta anni dalla pubblicazione degli atti del
convegno del paesaggio (Capri: Edizioni la Conchiglia, 1993).
7 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Il discorso” in Il convegno del paesaggio, ed. Edwin Cerio (Naples:
Gaspare Casella, 1923).
8 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, translated by Robert Brain
(New York, NY: Viking Press, 1973), 19–24. Also see R. Warren Flint, ed., Marinetti: Selected Writings
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 39–44.
9 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Elogio di Capri,” Natura (January 1928): 41–8.
10 On Marchi, see Silvia Danesi, “Futurismo e disegno d’architettura” in Alessandro d’Amico
and Silvia Danesi, eds., Virgilio Marchi architetto scenografo futurista (Milan: Electa, 1977), 8–9. See
a short, illustrated article he published in Cronache d’attualità, a journal edited by
Anton Giulio Bragaglia, an avant-garde artist who served as director of the Casa
d’arte Bragaglia in Rome.
In his Architettura futurista (1924), Marchi elaborated on his discussion of the
relationship between the vernacular tradition and contemporary design. On the cover
page he reproduced a design for a hydroelectric station that reflected the sculptural
qualities of the Capri vernacular he had recorded in drawings a few years earlier. In
this volume as well as his Italia nuova architettura nuova (1931), Marchi expressed
admiration for the empirical, anti-intellectual approach of the primitivi (primitives)
in l’architettura rurale amalfitana e caprese (the rural architecture of Amalfi and
Capri).11 Marchi’s emphasis on primitivism again points to the combination of
expressionism and futurism in his work.
The artist and artisan Fortunato Depero took inspiration from Capri and the mez
zogiorno in paintings of the peasantry such as Portatrice caprese (1917) and Paese
di tarantelle (1918), which were to have a lasting impact on Italian modern art.12
Depero’s love of peasant vitality applied to customs such as the tarantella, a cacopho
nous folk dance typical of southern Italy. Depero employed traditional methods of
representation as well as media to give form to his Futuristic imagery. His description
of Italy’s rural landscapes and peasant life is indebted to the figurative tradition of
realism. He was interested in peasant “machines” such as the boldly painted horse-
drawn carts typical of the rural communities of southern Italy that were the object
of scholarship at that time by architecture professor Giuseppe Capitò.13 His prismi
lunari (lunar prisms) were most likely inspired by the colorful geometric ornament
typical of Sicilian and Neapolitan carts. Fishermen’s vessels were likewise ornamented
with bright colors by “amateur” artists (mainly the fishermen themselves). Depero’s
painting Carretto napoletano (1918), a forerunner to the aforementioned Paese delle
tarantelle, celebrates the peasant cart as an ancient machine of considerable dyna
mism and vitality, a subject popular at the time with the artistic and architectural
community.
Along with Depero’s spirited misreading of Capri’s folk art and architecture, a
number of other approaches gained ground. Capri became a focus for discussion of
the study and protection of peasant architecture and its relationship to the landscape.
Edwin Cerio organized the Convegno del paesaggio (Symposium on Landscape) in
1922, an important year for the preservation of the vernacular traditions of the built
environment. In 1922, the same year as the proceedings, Cerio published La casa nel
paesaggio di Capri, a book on vernacular domestic architecture of Capri. He praised
the anonymous builder and went so far as to prominently feature a photograph of
also Ezio Godoli, “Virgilio Marchi e l’architettura futurista nella prima metà degli anni Venti” in Il
Futurismo (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997), 44–9.
11 Virgilio Marchi, “Primitivismi capresi,” Cronache d’attualità 6–10 (1922): 49–51. Marchi read
dressed the theme of “primitivism” in “Quadro della capacità architettonica”in Architettura futurista
(Foligno: Franco Campitelli, 1924), 26–34, as well as “Primitivismi Capresi” and “Priorità futuriste”
in Italia nuova architettura nuova (Rome and Foligno: Franco Campitelli Editore, 1931), 19–23
and 25–32. Both were republished in Ezio Godoli and Milva Giacomelli, Virgilio Marchi. Scritti di
architettura (Florence: Octavo, 1995), Vol. 1, 57–61; Vol. 2, 31–40, 35–40.
12 Gabriella Belli, “Fonti del racconto popolare di Depero” in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ed.,
Depero (Milan: Electa, 1988), 206–9.
13 Giuseppe Capitò, Il Carretto Siciliano (Milan: Editori Piantanida Valcarenghi, 1923).
Figure 17.1 Coverpage: Virgilio Marchi, Architettura futurista (Foligno: F. Campitelli, 1924).
a local stonemason. The use of the term casa is significant in a discussion of the
hierarchies of domestic buildings, as the house was a less grand and formal type than
the villa, and was customarily identified with the vernacular tradition. Instead of
illustrating the text himself, Cerio enlisted the help of a Venetian artist living in Capri,
Gennaro Favai (1879–1958), who would go on to produce his own book on the
subject in 1930.14 Though Cerio’s involvement in the vernacular in Capri remained
largely unrivaled, in 1936 the Neapolitan historian and architect Roberto Pane pub
lished and personally illustrated a study on the vernacular architecture of Campania
(under whose rubric Capri fell).15
In addition to being politically active as the local mayor and leader of the pres
ervationist movement, Cerio also designed several houses employing the local ver
nacular vaulting traditions. His own home, called the Rosaio, is his most important
work.16 Cerio’s activities, which combined a broad cultural ambition with design
14 See Gennaro Favai, Capri (Venice: Tipografia del “Gazzettino,” 1930).
15 See Roberto Pane’s Architettura rurale in campania (Florence: Rinascimento del Libro, 1936).
16 Giuseppe Capponi, “Architettura ed Accademica a Capri: Il, ‘Rosaio’ di Edwin Cerio”
in Architettura e arti decorative (1929), 177–88; republished in Paolo Cortese and Isabella Sacco,
Giuseppe Capponi 1893–1936 (Roma Gangemi, 1991), 139. Virgilio Marchi cites the Rosaio in his
Italia nuova, architettura nuova (1931) and refers to Cerio as “geniale studioso (a genius of a scholar).”
Figure 17.2 View of exhibition: Giuseppe Pagano and Werner Daniel, Mostra di Architettura
rurale (Rural Architecture) (Milan, 1936).
G. Pagano and G. Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana “Quaderni della
Triennale” (Milan: Hoepli, 1936)
vision, likely set the stage for another amateur architect and literary figure, Curzio
Malaparte. Malaparte collaborated with the architect Adalberto Libera (1903–1963)
and a local brick and stone mason (Adolfo Amitrano) to design his private resi
dence, known as the Casa Malaparte (1938), also in Capri.17 As a protagonist of the
Strapaese–Stracittà controversy of the polemical circle of Mino Maccari that weighed
cosmopolitan urban values against local rural identities, Malaparte was the author of
Italia barbara (1927). This important text praises the “barbarous” peasantry and in
so doing contributes to the growing interest in the perceived spontaneity of the non-
educated rural masses of Italy.
Italian architecture and the rural vernacular house

Related to but also distinct from the Futurist experiences was Giuseppe Pagano’s
interest in the vernacular from a rationalist point of view. Staged four years after the
Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, Pagano and Daniel’s Rural Italian Architecture:
Functionality of the Rural House exhibition opened the year after Italy invaded
Ethiopia.18 Pagano opposed the triumph of bombastic classicizing architecture real
ized under Fascism in the name of Italianness. He projected the tectonic and material
simplicity of the vernacular in opposition to its picturesque simulation, as a potentially
17 Marida Talamona, Casa Malaparte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).
18 Antonio La Stella, “Architettura rurale,” in Cesare De Seta, ed., Giuseppe Pagano Fotografo
(Milan: Electa, 1979), 12–20.

Figure 17.3 View: Ludovico Quaroni et al., La Martella (Matera, 1951).

Giancarlo De Carlo, “A proposito di La Martella,” Casabella-Continuità
(February–March, 1954): v–viii
new impetus in modernist, rationalist design that could lay claim to traditional values
grounded in Italy’s agrarian past, and ultimately cast it as a source for contemporary
functionalism. The ambition was to foster awareness of and appreciation for a little
understood and up to then barely studied aspect of the built domain. Pagano brought
a new vision to the documentation of vernacular architecture thanks to the medium
of black and white photography, along with straightforward display tactics and the
polemical texts published in the accompanying catalogue; the public was exposed to
a wide range of vernacular buildings representing Italy’s diverse regions. A series of
horizontal panels were mounted on and hung perpendicular to the perimeter wall in
order to create a continuous band of identical niches that could be entered and exited
while traversing the exhibition space. A catalogue accompanied the exhibition.
Pagano’s vision for a new modern Italian architecture, infused with an ethos he
extracted from rural architectures, shared little with bourgeois nostalgia for “rustic
living” subsumed in designs for luxury weekend villas of the “leisure class” during the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pagano’s interest in economy of means
and its relationship to the vernacular tradition were at the base of his appreciation for
the work of Ignazio Gardella (1905–1999). Pagano cites Alberti in the context of an
article in which he comments on Gardella’s design of 1936 for the Chapel and Altar
at Varinella, which he describes as a “courageous lesson of modesty.”19 Only one year
after his Architettura rurale italiana exhibition, Pagano openly appreciated Gardella’s
use of elements of vernacular rural architecture—a brick screen that introduces the
symbol of the cross—as a means of achieving a work of modern art that was at once
rooted in the agrarian past of the area but also referenced contemporary materials
and forms.
The chapel project remained unrealized. However, Gardella used this type of screen
solution in his anti-tuberculosis clinic for Alessandria completed in 1938 in the Val
Padana of northern Italy. In this region brick screens (gelosie) were common in farm
houses and were used to filter light and allow for continual air circulation.20 It is
interesting to note, in terms of how education reflects approaches to the appropriation
of the vernacular tradition, that Gardella had been trained as a civil engineer at the
Milan Polytechnic, graduating in 1931. The brick screen was thus conceived as both
functional and ornamental; this concept of beauty through utility was not appreci
ated by academics who, rather than appreciating the use of the vernacular elements,
accused the building of looking inappropriately barn-like.21 Again we witness how
the engineering link was especially appealing to Pagano because he felt that engineers
were most apt to use the vernacular tradition without falling into the trap of folksy
local color.
A new village for Matera and the farmer’s vernacular

It had been hard at first. Grassano, like all the villages hereabouts, is a streak of
white at the summit of a bare hill, a sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the
solitude of the desert.22
Carlo Levi’s autobiographical account of his forced exile in the godforsaken region of
Lucania, Christ Stopped at Eboli, was published immediately after the end of World
War II (1945). His gripping poetic tale of the year he spent amongst the unschooled
often-illiterate peoples of the South served to reignite interest in post-war Italy
amongst “book-fed” intellectuals, artists, and architects for the arts of the peasantry.
Levi’s fascination with the natural and built environment of the South was captured
in an ethereal palette of whites and pinks in his paintings. The first architecture to
take its cue from Levi’s poeticizing of the South and its rural peoples was La Martella,
a new town completed in 1951, located in proximity of the hill town of Matera. It
was the first post-war experiment in which vernacular models like the casa colonica
(cottage) were employed to create an autonomous community for peasants who
formerly inhabited troglodyte dwellings referred to as sassi. Ludovico Quaroni led a
team of designers that included M. Agati, F. Gorio, P.M. Lugli, and M. Valori. The
19 Giuseppe Pagano, “Una lezione di modestia,” Casabella 11 (1937): 2–5.

20 Stefano Guidarini, Ignazio Gardella nell’architettura italiana: Opere 1929–1999 (Milan: Skira,
2002), 32–45. For Gardella’s personal commentary on the use of the brick screen, see Ignazio Gardella,
“Materiale e immateriale,” Materia: Rivista di archtiettura 5 (1990): 22–33.
21 See Raffaello Giolli, “Il dispensario antitubercolare d’Alessandria” in Cesare De Seta, ed.,
L’architettura razionale (Bari and Rome: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1972), 245–8.
22 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1947), 15.
completion of the village coincided with the opening of the Spontaneous Architecture
exhibition launched in Milan by Giancarlo De Carlo, Franco Albini, and Giuseppe
Samonà.
Quaroni’s La Martella shares much with the experiments conducted in the mid
1930s in the New Towns of the Roman littoral such as Sabaudia and Littoria. But the
political and economic conditions that made these projects possible during the inter
war years had changed radically with the fall of Fascism. While New Towns tended
to adopt both grids and winding streets, this post-war example steered completely
away from any echo of orthogonality. Despite the picturesque quality of the wind
ing streets the serial quality of the homes recalled the overlap between “authentic”
vernacular and a machine-made vernacular. Much like the New Towns which used
the casa colonica as a conventional (serially reproduced) type to offer housing to
displaced peasant communities, La Martella also offered new living conditions that
were at once hygienic and with which the peasants could still identify culturally as a
community. The elimination of those spaces associated with agrarian work was aimed
at assuring that the “promiscuous” and scarcely hygienic living conditions of the
peasants in the so-called sassi (in which animals often shared the living space) would
be remedied.
In translating anonymous sources into signature styles, artists, architects, and lit
erati transgressed the nature of the vernacular traditions they appropriated, which
had been propelled by and for common people, often socially and economically mar
ginalized from the rest of society. In so doing they indirectly brought new currency
to Antonio Gramsci’s “Southern Question” in which he discussed the hegemony of
the industrialized North over the poor rural South. For such thinkers, the dramatic
expressiveness and everyday vitality of rural and hill-town vernacular forms called
into question a European modernism enthralled with machine-age aesthetics and
abstraction. These sources encouraged the emergence of a uniquely Italian design
culture in which human ingenuity was enhanced by industrial means of production.
In a land of craftsmanship and botteghe, mass-produced objects and architecture have
been rare. The tension between the handmade and mass-produced is exemplified in
the poetic realism of much postwar architecture and design in Italy, which reacted
against the classicism of rationalism by embracing the vernacular, such as Ludovico
Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi’s Tiburtino housing estate in Rome (1949–1955) and Gio
Ponti’s sophisticated yet low-tech reed-and-ash Leggera chair (1948). Following the
example of Luchino Visconti’s neo-realist film La terra trema (The Earth Trembles),
which depicts the existential struggles of a Sicilian fishing village, Pier Paolo Pasolini
employed nonprofessional actors in such productions as Il vangelo secondo Matteo
(The Gospel According to Matthew), a directorial choice comparable to designers’
appropriation of so-called spontaneous folk art and architecture. Against the back
drop of an ever-changing political landscape (Liberal, Fascist, and Republican) Italian
architects and artists who evoked the uncorrupted values of the vernacular traditions
of peasantry set the stage for the modernization of rural life and the ruralization of
modern life.
18 Miming a manner of
architectural theory
Eudaimonia—A Pantomime Dream Play
Lisa Landrum
In the spring of 2014, as the culminating event of the Confabulations Symposium

held in honor of Marco Frascari,1 the author of this chapter in collaboration with
Ted Landrum devised and staged a performance entitled Eudaimonia: A Pantomime
Dream Play. The plot of this short play concerns the struggle for exemplary archi
tectural transformation, shared wisdom, and “happiness” (eudaimonia). The play
begins with a prosaic act of sweeping, and culminates with a poetic act of devising
a confabulous world soul—a social and situational event completed with assistance
from a chorus of symposium attendees. Intervening episodes dramatize a sequence of
disclosures in which a protean muse visits a daydreaming architect, attempting to stir
his memory and imagination with disciplinary devices unpacked from a magical suit
case. In this way, architect–symposiasts rediscover a plethora of embodied gestures,
agencies, and narratives integral to their work. As its title suggests, the pantomime
play was originally performed in silence, save for musical accompaniment (La Vie
en Rose). This re-presentation rejoins the ephemeral narrative of mimetic gestures to
more permanent and synthesizing media: poetic language and still images. Before set
ting forth the script (constructed retrospectively), it is helpful to expose foundational
premises concerning architecture and pantomime.
Architects mime
As Marco Frascari observed, an architect’s power of imagination is akin to that of
a theatrical mime, because both agents palpably conjure absent yet latent realities
through embodied acts of representation. Put simply, “the architect—as a mime—
makes visible what is invisible.”2 Frascari deemed drawing to be the primary medium
through which architects mime myriad realities—real and imagined—for both them
selves and others. His own drawings are populated with mime-like agents animating
architectural ideation. Frascari also interpreted how other architects incorporated
dancing and miming figures into drawings not simply to show human scale, but to
dramatize potential inhabitation, and to construe metaphoric, ethical, and anagogic
meanings in architectural settings and details.3 As he summarized in his last book,
1 March 28–29, 2014, Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (Virginia Tech).

2 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), xi.
3 Marco Frascari, “Miming a Manner of Building: Drawing as Story in the Work of Valeriano Pastor
and Carlo Scarpa,” Proceedings of the 86th ACSA Meeting on Constructing Identity (1998): 396–402,
Miming a manner of architectural theory 161
“During the performance of a drawing, [such] figures act as catalytic agents in helping
architects to define the nature of building.”4
Together with drawing, architects mime directly through embodied gestures:
through in situ demonstrations and persuasive acts of conjuration. In the course of
designing, architects assume many guises while hypothetically dwelling in present
and projected settings: plotting exemplary and everyday narratives that architectural
configurations invite and sustain. Whatever technologies architects employ, their own
individual and socially intertwined bodies remain a potent medium of representation
and transformation, helping to make the invisible visible, the intangible palpable, and
the obscure interpretable. Frascari embraced these mimetic agencies of the architect’s
living body. The present work puts this philosophy into action: by staging and script
ing a mime performance; and by suggesting that architects and architectural interpret
ers have much to learn from the ancient art of pantomime.
Architectural acts and ancient pantomime

Mimetic performance has always been integral to ritual practices of sympathetic magic,
and related interpretive and influential activities, especially dramatic poetry and choral
dance.5 As a distinct art form, the corporeal re-enactment of cultural narratives crystal
lized in ancient pantomime. Developing in Greece and Magna Graecia, this performa
tive art flourished with the Roman Empire, gaining popularity under patronage of
Augustus in the same years that Vitruvius composed De architectura.6 Like architecture,
pantomime mutely embodied and imparted mythic narratives for large multilingual
(and illiterate) audiences. Whereas ancient mime typically enacted amusing episodes
of everyday life with common gestures and speech,7 a pantomime more seriously,
silently, and pluralistically mimed “all” (panta): all the myths (often drawn from Greek
tragedy), and the many roles, agons, and implications within each myth. Wearing a
long silk tunic and closed-mouth mask, this versatile performer would successively
embody each agent in a tale, likely donning a different mask for each role. As ancient
sources attest, “they take on every guise: old men, young men, the humble, the mighty,
the dejected, the elated, servants, masters;”8 imitating “even the liquidity of water and
the sharpness of fire . . . the fierceness of a lion . . . the quivering of a tree,”9 alphabetic
reworked as “A Tradition of Architectural Figures: A Search for Vita Beata,” in Body and Building:
Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, edited by George Dodds, Robert Tavernor,
and Joseph Rykwert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 258–67. The title of this chapter intentionally
echoes that of Frascari’s 1998 essay.
Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 85.
5 Ismene Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (London: Duckworth,
2007), 64; Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Oxford University Press, 1948).
6 Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles, eds., New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 9–24, 169–84.
7 Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 29–30; Guy Davenport, trans., The Mimes of Herondas (San
Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981).
8 Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides on Behalf of Dancers” (Oration 64), 117, in Margaret Molloy, trans.,
Libanius and the Dancers (Hildersheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1996), 113–76.
9 Lucian, On the Dance 19, trans. A.M. Harmon, in The Works of Lucian, Vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1936), 209–89.
162 Lisa Landrum
Figure 18.1 A pantomime (or possibly Polymnia), with masks, lyre, and sword. Late fifth or
early sixth century ce ivory carving found in Trier, Germany. Antikensammlung,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. TC 2497.
Photo: Ingrid Geske / bpk, Berlin / Art Resource, NY
letters, and “Pythagorean philosophy.”10 Shifting from statuesque immobility to ship-

like speed and bird-like flight, a pantomime’s single body became animated by “many
souls.”11 These metaphoric and metamorphic performances were accompanied by
music and mythic narration. Depending on the venue (an intimate hall or imperial
theater), music and myth were provided by either a single instrumentalist and poet,
or a full orchestra and chorus of singers.12 However, the mimetic gestures of the solo
masked dancer remained a focus of attention. As scholar Edith Hall emphasizes, “at
the heart of all pantomime performance was the notion that a story could be told
through a dancer’s silent, rhythmical movements, poses and gestures.”13 Thus, the
pantomime was said to perform a “danced story” (fabula saltata).
For Greeks and Romans alike, the muse of pantomime was Polymnia, or Polyhymnia
[Figure 18.1]. For Hesiod, she embodied the honorific activity of “hymning,” having
10 Athenaeus, Sophists at Dinner 1.20d, in Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 140, 198 n.7.
11 Lucian, On the Dance 66.
12 Hall and Wyles, Ancient Pantomime, 3.
13 Edith Hall, “Pantomime: Visualizing Myth in the Roman Empire” in Performance in Greek and
Roman Theatre, ed. George Harrison and Vayos Liapis (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 453, in full 451–73.
14
knowledge of “many” (poly) hymns. Likewise, for Ovid and Horace she personi
fied mythic verse and storied song.15 Lucian credits Polymnia with ensuring that
pantomimes “remember everything,” from ancient myth to recent history.16 Together
with remembering stories, and thus serving as a living repository of cultural tradi
tion, myth, and history, the pantomime interpretively translated and conveyed these
stories in uniquely evocative and provocative ways. In doing so, they also celebrated
basic abilities to embody and enact meaning. An anonymous Greek epigram describes
the pantomime’s muse in this way: “I, Polymnia, am silent, but speak through the
entrancing motions of my hands, conveying by my gestures a speaking silence.”17
The epic poet Nonnus depicts her similarly: “Polymnia, nursing mother of the dance,
waved her arms, and sketched in the air an image of a soundless voice, speaking with
hands and moving eyes in a graphic picture of silence full of meaning.”18 This para
dox of mute communication via living images and visual meaning prefigures eight
eenth-century notions of architecture parlante, and recalls a fifth-century bce verse of
Simonides, “painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.”19 What these
arts share are communicative and narrative powers of non-verbal mimesis.
All the same, to ancient skeptics, the pantomime’s “entrancing” gestures offered
empty corrupting pleasures, leaving spectators charmed, but beguiled: their chaotic,
erotic, and hybrid dances not only deceived but maddened, aroused, and depraved.20
Others found profit amid pleasure. “Any pleasure elicited by the dance,” writes
Libanius, “enters into our soul through our eyes, [thus] we go away in a more agree
able form of mind”—meaning spectators become not merely content but decorously
wise: more “educated, self-disciplined, purified, buoyant, sharp-sighted, in control
of pleasures, [vigorously] seeking and carrying out what is just more forcefully than
injustice.”21 Lucian similarly valued pantomimes as “deeply learned,” capable of
embodying and, thus, teaching, order, beauty, symmetry, rhythm, meter, harmoni
ous movement, and gracefulness—qualities Vitruvius attributed to architecture.22
For these enthusiasts, the pantomime’s protean performance, enacting representative
struggles with many opposing forces, imparted edifying lessons. Indeed, according
to Lucian, pantomimes surpass philosophers and orators in illuminating truth, by
“making intelligible what is obscure.”23
Balancing skepticism and enthusiasm, the following pantomime script aims to
make intelligible and interpretable the diversely embodied gestures, agencies, and
stories fundamental to architectural theory, history and design, while simultaneously
“giving eudaimonia to many.”24
14 Hesiod, Theogony 78.
15 Ovid, Fasti 5.9–53; Horace, Odes 1.1.33.
16 Lucian, On the Dance 36–7.
17 Greek Anthology, 9.505.17–18, translated by W.R. Paton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2014), 281.
18 Nonnus, Dionysiaca 5.103–7, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, in Hall and Wyles, Ancient Pantomime, 399.
19 Quoted by Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium 3.46. Cf. “ut pictura poesis,” Horace, Ars Poetica 361.
20 Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 20, 66–78.
21 Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides,” 57, 76.
22 Lucian, On the Dance 25, 29, 70, with Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence, 79–97.
23 Lucian, On the Dance 36.
24 Libanius, “A Reply to Aristides,” 76.
164 Lisa Landrum
Figure 18.2 Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play. Collage drawing, 2015.

© Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum
Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play25
Tell us, Muse, of that figure, that architect of many turns, driven wayward
by fleeting novelties, dull labors, and hubristic ambitions.
Many were the arts, cities, peoples, languages, and stories she knew. Many
the struggles endured, and enjoyed.
Beginning where you will, tell us each part in turn.
Let us begin with that happy confabulator, dancing with crimson feet from
Mantua, to Venice, to fair Alexandria, where symposiasts gather,
thirsty for exchange, hungry for macaroni, desirous of disciplinary
renewal.
Now mingling, filling bellies, bodily minds digesting a feast of nourishing
discourse.
Amid the bustle there appears a masked figure, moving slowly, gracefully
around the school’s generous threshold, gloves and dress of black.
Bringing materials, then disappearing. Back again with timbers, tools,
props. Attending to duties.
With each turn of body and head, another face of this single actor appears.
Who is this strangely familiar figure, conspicuous yet concealed by three
mute masks, white as bone?
Who is this silent worker among the people? She of manifold faces: of
present, past, and future; theory, practice, and history; recto, verso,
and everything in-between; of foresight, hindsight, and insight; of
practical wisdom, cunning intelligence, and uncommonly common
sense.
She is Janus. She is Phronēsis. She is Hecate. She is Hermes Trismegistus.

She is three Fates, three Graces, three Hōrai, four seasons.
Her masks convey youthfulness, maturity, and wise old age.
She has faces of deceit, of truth, of deceit appearing as truth, and of truth
turned uncertain.
She is she, and she is he. She is beloved Hermaphrodite.
Let us call her Polymnia: she of countless hymns and edifying stories.
Daughter of Memory, Muse of Pantomime: one who remembers

everything and mimes all.
She is as old as the heavens, and knows a thing or two about architecture.
There she goes now, with inner level and plumb, preparing a place for
making.
Marking out a space of performance, choice, and desire: conjuring choˉra.
25 Script by Lisa Landrum and Ted Landrum. Complete annotations would exceed allotted space, but
select sources must be noted. The opening verses are adapted from Homer’s Odyssey and Hesiod’s
Theogony. Closing scenes recall the climax of Aristophanes’ Peace and the ending of Xenophon’s
Symposium. Palaestrio is the scheming architectus-slave in Plautus’ comedy Miles Gloriosus. Other
allusions: Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499); John Ruskin, The Ethics of the
Dust (1875); and August Strindberg, Dream Play (1901). Artistic allusions include: Nicholas Maes,
The Eavesdropper (1657); Francesco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799); and
Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (1880–1901). The verse structure is modeled after lost libretti, scripts
known to have been composed for ancient pantomime.
166 Lisa Landrum
In the middle of this clearing she sets a chair, builds a table, and places
upon the table a parchment.
Corner by corner, she fixes the parchment as if marking edges of a
building site.
Her fingers traverse the page as feet, prefiguring foundational dances of
ichnographia.
Stirred by these preliminary devisings, symposiasts move to and fro, from
chamber to chamber, murmuring, anticipating, gradually
assembling, sitting on steps rising from the threshold, forming—
within the vestibule—an improvised theater.
But who is this second figure stepping out from the chorus? This
melancholic sweeper dressed as mud, tending to perennial ethics of
dust?
Amid symposiasts he strides with a broom, a hoe, a rake of labors, a
mercurial staff, a handy crutch.
He is me. He is you. He is other, similar, and same.
He, too, is that architect of many turns, tossed by fortune, longing to
return, devoted, distracted, fastidious, fatigued.
Now sweeping in arcs, now plowing in line, head down he softens hard
ground, ox-like, ship-like, he plies an arid sea, combing crumbs,
particles and symposiasts, too, into gradual confluence.
Weary of work, he catches sight of the place Polymnia prepared.
Retiring his staff at the transformative threshold, he yawns, stretches, sits
and slouches, resting his head on the parchment pillow, trading his
task for dreaming.
He sinks into a deep sleep of reason, producing capricious couplings of
fantasy and wisdom, memory and reverie, love and strife.
Polymnia reappears (or was she there all along) taking pleasure in the
success of her snare.
With an invisible wink, she lifts an ironic finger to closed lips,
shhhhhhhhh, transforming loquacious symposiasts into curious
eavesdroppers, soliciting attention, complicity, reciprocal
dreaming.
From the folds of her tunic she produces a metronome, places it on the
table, and with a pluck establishes a measured tempo, with an eye
to subsequent work.
Tick-tock, Polymnia turns. Click-clack, descends. Tick-tock, vanishes.
Click-clack, returns, manifesting a mimesis of diurnal rhythms.
How many days and nights passed in slumber, none can say.
Now appearing as midnight, clad in black she stands with brazen feet,
poised as Taurus, crouched low, fierce horns shining above star-lit
masks.
Rising slowly, then with a sudden turn, bull horns become crescent moon,
arcing high over the dream-sweeper, crossing celestial thresholds.
With a swift shift in stance, and harvester’s swing, she lets fall the
crescent moon turned sharpened sickle, gift of Gaia, releasing
earth’s cyclic, re-generative potential.

In a flash Polymnia returns from the east, in the guise of rosy-fingered
Dawn. She is Helios, aglow, afire, adorned and encircled with
radiant yellow, kindling the sleeper’s imagination.
Bright day remains. Evanescent Polymnia does not.
Pronto, she’s back again, dressed for business, our grey-eyed Muse in
gentle azure, bearing a matching sky-blue valise.
Setting her case on the table, she opens its shell with a click, revealing a
radiant inner world.
One side is lined with luminous rose, the other bright ultramarine; nestled
within, a trove of magical props to be disclosed, one by one, to
prod the sleeper’s imagination.
First Polymnia releases a pair of winged compasses, the very tool devised
by Perdix, envied by Daedalus, brandished by Meton, macaronized
by Marco.
Fluttering round the architect’s head, these pseudo-angelic devices rouse
the air, but not yet the dreamer.
Alighting upon the table, the compasses await their turn to
enact proportional demonstrations.
Next, Polymnia unpacks a gilded triangle, an immortal isosceles with
perfect right angle, bearing integral laws long practiced by
Babylonians, Egyptians, Pythagorians, and Euclideans.
Holding the hypotenuse, she pokes a sharp vertex into the architect’s
elbow—to no avail.
And so it, too, rests on the table, a gnomon in repose, longing to cast uprights,
axonometrics, significant depths, and skeˉno/skiagraphia
for the dreamer.
Then Polymnia unsheathes a shining T-square, tinged with vermilion, straight-
edged companion to compasses and triangles.
From upright, she lets the potent rule fall across the drawing board—with
a slap.
But, again, the sleeper stirs not, save for a twitch of his index finger.
Unamused by the stubborn depth of his sleep, Polymnia gives a swift kick
to his chair.
Lifting his head from the cradle of his arms, the architect emerges from
the chrysalis of sleep.
Rejuvenated yet disoriented, he is blind to Polymnia (and the
symposiasts); but begins, bodily perceiving his situation.
Turning his torso, planting feet, extending hands, he grasps each tool in reach,
rehearsing operations, remembering the interplay between
reason and imagination.
As the architect plays, Polymnia pulls from her case a winged pencil.
Taking aim—as if releasing love’s arrow from an invisible bow—she
implants the pencil behind his ear.
Tickled, he raises hand to head, retrieves soft lead, and begins to draw, re-awak
ening embodied yet dormant skills.
Now sweeping in broad arcs, now plowing line-by-line, head down he
marks the parchment with measured strokes, syncopated dots and
168 Lisa Landrum
dashes, intuitive sketches and squiggles, navigating eternal laws of

meander.
Loom-like, he plies the parallel rule, handling the triangle as a trusty
shuttle; sighting lines as a surveyor; incising and dissecting as a
surgeon; simmering and savoring as a chef; caressing as a lover.
Seeking, searching, scheming, and scaling, guiding lineamenti stretch
across the palimpsestic page.
Sensing, smudging, scratching, and scoring, a cloud of graphite dust
bellows up from his forge, fanned by the compasses’ reciprocating
wings.
Transferring, transcribing, transfiguring, and translating, Hermes-like he steals
across multifarious thresholds.
But his pace changes.
Hastening slowly.
The architect-dreamer delves deeper, beneath tools, dreams and haptic
experience, seeking schemata from more fundamental, universal,
and substantial grounds.
Discerning his inquiry, Polymnia extracts Earth, Fire, Air, Water, and
Cosmos, figured in faceted forms: hexa–, tetra–, octa–, icosa–,
dodecahedron.
She casts these elements as dice upon the table: prime paradigms for this demi
urge, working toward a proper polity with the people.
She then retrieves a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Timaeus, opens to its “new begin
ning,” and points to its most difficult middling-mode: all-
receiving receptacle, nurse of becoming.
Recalling puzzling passages, the architect pauses.
Laying down his pencil, he turns toward the unseen seeing symposiasts,
his back to the portal.
Twisting to rest right elbow on left knee, and fixing right hand as pillar
beneath his chin, he comports himself in the manner of Rodin’s
thinker.
Hmmmmmmm, a pensive pose known also to pondering Polymnia and the
scheming slave Palaestrio.
As he contemplates with tortured gravitas, Polymnia draws more diverting
delights from the coffers of her case:
a flexible helix (a slinky), with its daedalic feats of gravity, levity, and
tenacity;
a malleable ruler, gift of Lesbos, model of pliant judgments and situational
adjustments, ever-bending, yielding to surprising particularities,
irregularities, opportunities;
a nautilus shell, with its storied inner labyrinth, spiraling geometries, and
pearlescent soundings of primal seas;
a delicate egg, with philosophical, alchemical, and zoomorphic
potentialities, birthing nested metaphors too numerous to name;
a dung beetle, cloaked as Khepri in hieroglyphs, unlikely progenitor of
Sisyphean sunrise, rebirth, and transformation, shaping life from
the dregs.
Tick-tock. Take-stock. Troubled times tug at the sleeve of anxious
architects.
Turning back to the drawing board with renewed vigor, he resumes
machinations: promising, probing, plotting, preparing, repairing.
Seeking further charms for the striving architect-dreamer, Polymnia
plunges both hands into her bottomless bag of tricks.
Withdrawing her right, now transformed as manus oculata, eye peering
from palm, she directs the architect, likewise, to perceive by hand
and make with vision.
Raising her left, she displays a crystalline ball, a luminous orb, which she
positions prominently at the head of the developing drawing.
Piqued, the architect peers into the specular sphere, seeing many things
anew: his own scheme synoptically reflected; a concentration of
spectators encircling the globe’s left horizon; and, warped to the
right, an opening to an ever-expansive milieu.
Eureka! Jumping to his feet, he faces, and finally, sees the symposiasts,
recognizing opportunity in the present situation, and his
obligations to the social body.
Unexpectedly, he turns away, opens the found door, admitting a burst of
spring air, and rushing out, disappears into the city.
Polymnia smiles, knowing he will return, bearing first fruits of seasoned
labors.
She tidies up: repacking paraphernalia into her sky-blue valise; clearing
the stage of timbers, tools and props; then retreating to fetch a
festive fetish.
Polymnia reappears with a bunraku-like puppet, tall as she, a chimerical
compass, with worldly head and bat-like wings, black as ink.
Together they dance a sweeping, swinging, leaping, pacing, scaling, pas
de deux.
Beginning with chaos, they enact cosmic ordering, manifesting fixed stars,
errant planets, gravitational attractions, and grand rhythmic
harmonies.
Making multiple micro-moves, they embody the ancient canon of
Polykleitos via modern modes of Decroux, dynamically adjusting
part-to-part to a-symmetrical whole.
Surveying the air and tracing stereotomic lines across the floor, they
demonstrate geometries of Roman augury and masonic lore.
Now miming manners of building, they improvise a compendium of
cooperative techneˉ, from ritual tent-raising to cyber-Hephaestian
robotica.
Galumph. Galumph.
What’s that?
Must be the architect whiffling back.
They stop mid-stride, withdrawing to make way for yet another
architectural act.
Polymnia returns, opening wide the double doors, framing distant
landscapes within a perfect square.
170 Lisa Landrum
There, at the crosshairs of the horizon, approaches the much-enduring

architect.
Atlas-like, he bears on his back a luminous translucent orb, an enormous
pneumatic model of the world soul, ephemeral and elastic as
language, moist as breath, glistening in dewy wetness wrought by
rain.
Now at the doorway, he presses the slippery circular orb against the square
opening, attempting to squeeze the confabulous pantosphere
through the perfect portal, into the mortal space of making.
With outstretched arms and legs forming a passionate X, navel at the
center, he strains, Vitruvius-like, to reconcile bodily proportions
with ideal geometries.
Sensing his struggle, symposiasts leap to their feet, grasping what they can
of the orb’s peripheral shoots and seams.
With a collective heave-ho, and the architect’s full-bodied push from the
rear, they succeed in bringing this newborn anima mundi into their
shared world, delivering all that collective memory, desire and
imagination could manage to retrieve.
Buoyant symposiasts encircle the grateful architect, and this mad model of
a world made fleetingly whole.
Hoisting glasses high, they raise a toast to Eudaimonia, renewing pledges
to that special kind of happiness activated by shared striving, and
by friendship in learning, exchanging, and interpreting
architectural stories as sources of practical wisdom and well-being.
Then some dash off to loved ones and others retreat to work, while those
who linger laugh, laud, frolic, kiss, and eventually depart, returning
bittersweet to separate spheres of influence.
But where now is Polymnia? Has she vanished? Is she lost, abandoned and
forgotten?
No, she is there, with happy confabulators, dancing across disciplinary
thresholds and divides.
Her mimetic practices are active in the night, in the dawn, in the everyday,
tacit in tools we tote, lines we draw, gestures we embody and
interchange.
Her polyvalent stories stir in our dreams, in the dregs, in the macaronic
sauce.
Her persuasive agencies thrive wherever symposiasts gather for happily
agonistic discourse.
Hence, if we pay attention, we find her influence latent within the walls,
beneath our feet, between the lines, in every pregnant pause,
remembering everything and miming all.
Part IV
Practice of stories
19 Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s

architectural drawings
Carolina Dayer
Architecture and storytelling share a common ground in the activity of world-mak

ing.1 Both are artisans who guide the viewer’s and listener’s imagination into another
realm. The storyteller’s architecture is primarily language. The architect’s primary
storytelling medium is drawing. Through drawing, an architect guides the viewer’s
imagination into another not-yet-real world that is projected much like divinatory
practices of reading palms or tarot cards. When architects are no longer present to
tell their story, we must rely on reading the clues from the making of their drawings.
The name of this book, Confabulations, is also part of the title of a small drawing
made by the theorist, architect and educator, Marco Frascari [Plate 42]. The draw
ing’s full title is “Scarpa Confabulation” and it identifies the aquiline eagle-like-nosed
individual shown in profile as the famous Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, with
whom Frascari taught and worked.
A close reading of the drawing framed with red ink reveals that the three sketches
on the imaginary sheet of paper “pinned” to the actual textured watercolor paper are
fragments of Scarpa’s main architectural obsessions: (from the top) a plan detail of
a window from the Brion chapel, the two overlapping circles of a Vesica Pisces, and
a stepping stair-like ziggurat line frequently found in his work. A different arrange
ment of the same elements is shown in Scarpa’s head. The architectural elements in
his brain are drawn first in gray and then overdrawn with red. In Italian, traditional
artist’s red chalk is literally called “blood.” The architect’s gray thoughts and the
“bleeding” hand-made drawings are thus closely interlinked.
The relationship between hand and mind, a duality often recited by Leon Battista
Alberti, is subtly negotiated here by Frascari. The red line, like Ariadne’s clue, that
appears to join head to hand is actually discontinuous. We can see that the gap dividing
the line near the edge of the drawn “sheet of paper” was a conscious decision because a
dot of ink ending the line at each side of the gap indicates a thoughtful pause. Rather than
assuming that prior mental ideas simply determine what the hand later traces, the two
lines connecting and disconnecting the head with the hand offer a double directionality.
Following Frascari’s dictum that “the storyteller does not know, but knows by
making,” the lines are more correctly read as indicating a cyclical exchange between
the head and the hand both from the inside out and the outside in.2 The gap is a blind
1 Marco Frascari, “An architectural good-life can be built, explained and taught only through storytell
ing” in Reading Architecture and Culture, edited by Adam Sharr (London: Routledge, 2012), 224–34.
2 Marco Frascari, Zibaldino. An elegant collation of architectural delights (Lexington: Self-Published,
2010), 24.
174 Carolina Dayer
spot where fiction and fact interchange through proximity. It is not a coincidence
that the gap is located closest to Scarpa’s nose and mouth, the parts of the body that
can reach out and absorb the world through inhaling and digesting. In fact, while the
hand is entirely “in” the drawing, the only part of Scarpa’s head that is shown over
lapping with the drawing is the tip of his prominent nose. It was Francois Rabelais’
friend Philibert de l’Orme, the sixteenth-century French architect, who wrote that the
Bad Architect “has a little nose” for he does not have the “intuition of good things.”3
Frascari’s drawn confabulation brings together both fact and fiction through fari,
a fable, meaning “to speak.”4 In the field of neurology, confabulating is a condition
in which the mind accepts both facts and fictions as one reality. A mental patient’s
confabulation might be the conviction that he is in Venice, although he also admits
that the town he is seeing through the window is Alexandria.5 He knows both places,
he feels both places, and, despite the contradiction, both places constitute his reality.
As a factual fiction that creates a world, Frascari’s drawing argues that architectural
thinking and making are embedded in the fictional/factual realm of confabulations.
In the drawing, the objects drawn on the sheet of paper are not the same as the
images in Scarpa’s mind; and yet he seems to happily acknowledge both realities as
one. Implied in this apparent contradiction, the confabulation allows for a thicker
notion of reality due to the linear apprehension of multiple realities as constituting a
totality. Confabulations are continuous and linear, but not as the simplistic linearity
of a straight line. Just like the telling lines of Romanian-born American illustrator
Saul Steinberg, a story line does not necessarily mean a straight line of narration
where the end is in constant view from the outset; it has twists, turns, and disruptions.
[Figure 19.1].6
Instead of thinking of the layering of simple readings of reality, I propose that
an architectural confabulation is a sole reality where events, thoughts, memories,
everyday life and the making of the drawing live through a continuous ductal line
that wanders and wonders throughout. Like the place that is two places but for the
confabulator is really one, architectural drawings are realities that juggle multiple
facts and fictions simultaneously.
Eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose work was
key for Frascari’s theory, calls these creations of facts and fictions “imaginary fig
ments.” A figment is a product of invention manifested in the world. Vico wrote:
The poet, . . . because his business is with the majority of men, induces persuasion
by giving plastic portrayals of exalted actions and characters; he works, as it were,
with “invented” examples. As a result, he may depart from the daily semblances
3 “Il n’a guères de nez, pour n’avoir sentiment des bonnes choses” writes de l’Orme in folio 28v of his
Traités d’architecture, quoted in Jean-Pierre Chupin, “Hermes’ Laugh: Philibert de l’Orme’s Imagery
as a Case of Analogical Edification” in Chora, Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, edited by
Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGill, 2, 1996), 44.
4 E.A. Andrews, Charles Short, Charlton Thomas Lewis, and William Freund. A Latin Dictionary
Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary, Rev., Enl., and in Great Part Rewritten by
Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
5 Armin Schnider, The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 32–4.
Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 144–5.
Linear stories in Carlo Scarpa’s architectural drawings 175
Figure 19.1 Saul Steinberg, Untitled (A to B), 1960. Ink on paper.

Private collection, originally published in Steinberg, The Labyrinth, 1960
© The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
of truth, in order to be able to frame a loftier semblance of reality. . . . He creates

imaginary figments which, in a way, are more real than physical reality itself.7
Through the contingency of the factum (made), Vico finds it productive to oscillate
between figmentum (fiction), and verum (truth).8 This would mean that in the idea of
making there is always both, the idea of falsification and the idea of truth that is higher
than other truths, truth and not just that which is true.9 The imaginary figment, for
Vico, creates a space outside a simple retelling of events, where multiple realities coex
7 iambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio Gianturco (Indianapolis:
G
Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 43.
8 In the English translation the word “figment” appears four times in the entire manuscript. In the Latin
version of the text, Vico uses the words mendacia and effingant. The first, mendacia, means a mistake
or error and it was habitually used to describe the errors made when writing books, as in a “slip of the
pen.” The word also means a fable, a fiction or a lie. With mendacia, there is an unintentional fault
or change that disrupts the course of something, as well as an intentional disruption or creation of an
imaginary narrative. The second word, effingant means to represent, portray, or form, but it also means
to falsify something. Again, the word denotes two realms, a positive quality in an unintentional fault
leading to a creation as well as a negative quality, a lie, and a misrepresentation. Giambattista Vico, De
Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione [sul Metodo Degli Studi Del Nostro Tempo] (Pisa: ETS, 2010).
9 Donald Kunze, “Architecture as Reading; Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity,” Journal of Architectural
Education 41, no. 4 (1988): 28–37.
176 Carolina Dayer
ist, leading to a confabulation. These concurrent worlds are not seen as contradictory;
rather, they are sensed as a coherent whole, reinforcing the aspect of togetherness
that the word confabulation carries with it.10 In “Scarpa Confabulation,” Frascari
shows the architect drawing the three aforementioned elements on the sheet of paper,
but their relationships are inverted from the images and the drawing inside his head.
The drawings on the sheet of paper also show a material thickness that the images in
Scarpa’s head lack. Two realities, the one in the architect’s head and the one in the
drawing, coexist as one despite their differences.
Architectural drawings intensify reality through confronting and dissolving assumed
distinctions between facts and fictions. For example, if an architect draws something in
plan that would not be possible in section, it becomes a contested realm where an inven
tion would allow both to coexist in some as yet unforeseen way. A confabulation is not
a fault or a negative element, but an invitation for architects to discover and make new
stories within their drawings. The architect tells stories to the drawing and the draw
ing tells stories to the architect. The construction is a confabulation, a fabulous talk
between two architects, the one doing the drawing and the one the drawing is making.
It is not a coincidence that Frascari would have invoked Scarpa’s name to think of
confabulations. Scarpa, a storyteller par excellence, exercised the power of confabu
lations throughout his architectural drawings. From doodles to musical score nota
tions, from sections coexisting together with different scale plan drawings, every trace,
planned or unplanned, seems to have whispered a story to the design of the building.
Scarpa’s practice of drawing things together relies on the observation that seemingly
unrelated events inevitably relate when encountered on the sheet of paper, allowing a
field of possible new thoughts to continually emerge.11 Such encounters with and inside
drawings resonate with a thought by Italo Calvino, another Italian storyteller who
believed that “in a work of literature, various levels of reality may meet while remain
ing distinct and separate, or else they may melt and mingle and knit together, achiev
ing a harmony among their contradictions or else forming an explosive mixture.”12
Similarly, Scarpa’s lines hold and release stories within the sheet of paper, constituting
distinct yet related levels of narrative within the architectural project.
My argument proposes that the making of architectural drawings is a linear pro
cess, linear understood not as a straight, nor predictable, but closely related to how
we live and how stories are made, connecting all the parts despite apparent contradic
tions. One could argue that Scarpa has, in fact, only made one drawing in his life, one
extremely long drawing, and that one drawing has made him. To demonstrate this, I
will tell three stories from three drawings that show different kinds of confabulations
in the Italian architect’s work.
10 William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 20), 177–211.
11 Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society
Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (edited by H. Kuklick) (1986): 1–40.
12 Italo Calvino, “Levels of Reality” in The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh (New York:
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986), 101.
Confabulation from drawing to building: the constructive drawing

In one of the design drawings for the Brion cemetery chapel, the mysterious draw
ing of an amorous couple embracing appears along the north-south centerline of
the chapel floor plan, below the south corner, and near the bottom of the sheet
[Plate 43].
The entire drawing was constructed in a highly specific way. To begin, a series of
straight lines were laid down to guide the construction of the square floor plan.13
These lines, constituting the primary making of the geometrical shape, are rendered
lightly on the sheet of paper. After constructing the square figure, the middle points
of each side are marked, dividing the square into four. The vertical diagonal line, per
pendicular to the widest side of the sheet of paper, is darker and longer than the rest
of the guide lines making the figure. Its distinct presence invites the eye of the reader
to move up and down the field of marks, thus encountering a series of drawings close
to the detailed chapel’s south corner rendered in the lower area of the sheet of paper.
This corner is adjacent to one of the planned access paths to the cemetery.
At a distance of 2 mm apart on the drawing, 11 parallel lines form the thickness
of the chapel walls that make the corner. A common practice among architects when
making drawings, the wall lines are first constructed continuously, delaying the deci
sion of locating windows or doors and giving literal meaning to the phrase “wall
opening.” Because when drawing with a triangle the awareness of where to begin a
line is more distinct than where to end it, the lightly traced parallel lines in the draw
ing suggest their origin on the east corner of the chapel proceeding afterwards toward
the south corner. Scarpa draws the next wall, now ascending from the south to the
west corner, by relying on the previously drawn lines that have intersected the vertical
line of the square’s axis. This form of referencing the drawing by meeting existing
lines allows architects to draw with agility without the need to measure every new
trace. The initial vertical guiding line that served the geometrical construction of the
square figure now serves, in addition, the delineation of architectural elements of the
chapel [Plate 44].
Scarpa’s drawings contain a full range of these types of guide lines.14 Their role,
however, is not only to guide the desired construction of a geometrical figure. When
guiding lines are considered as a surplus to the drawing, when they are allowed to
proceed beyond their endpoint and function, they have the potential to become lines
that guide the architect to more than one place. In other words, lines in the draw
ing can guide the architect instead of being merely determined by him or her. This
can be clearly observed along the aforementioned vertical centerline of the plan, the
south corner, and the scene drawn right below. Departing from the carefully deline
ated south corner, free-handedly Scarpa’s pencil follows the center guide line that
helped in the construction of the square figure and the chapel’s walls, and ends with
a naked amorous couple [Plate 45]. Such continuity between the drawings begins
13 The drawings on the page indicate two opposite orientations on the wider sides of the sheet, implying
that the architect shifted the position of the sheet to make the various drawings.
14 A guide is a person, agent, or element that knows the way and is able to take you there. A guide is also
used in architectural drawings and in construction sites in order to guide the architect and the builder.
The reference lines presume that the object in question is known, for example, in drawing, if one makes
a square, there are guide lines to construct the square.
178 Carolina Dayer
to expose the corner as an eventful place and even one of uncertainty or perhaps
transgression.15
The drawing depicts the corner as an element that may be understood as the cou
pling of two walls or two sets of 11 lines, and from this the architect discovers that
the center guiding line previously drawn with no specific purpose beyond its endpoint
can be suddenly activated. Perhaps, in the spirit of such architectural coupling, Scarpa
follows the corner and draws the naked couple. Right below, a sketch appears explor
ing the joint of two walls through a linear element. Just as if from each line a new
story emerges, the four realities—the square axis, the corner, the naked couple, and
the joint detail—are in fact interlaced as one.
The corner, an age-old place for meeting, is further manifest in the built project
through an indentation, also present in the drawing, inside the concrete corner. The
absence of material that makes room for a new reality at this part of the building is
made present through a layer of gold paint [Plate 46].16 While for the drawing of the
chapel’s walls precise and specific architectural drafting instruments were needed,
the tracing of the couple originated from freehanded curvilinear lines. Similarly, in
the built work linear planks of wood composed the formwork of the concrete walls,
precisely aligned and nailed, while the addition of the gold paint required a very
intimate and caressing treatment of the corner. The seemingly isolated stories emerg
ing from the making of the drawing materialize harmonically in the making of the
building. The gold indentation detail can be understood as an event that separates
the two walls as well as one that marks a moment of union. While a place for meet
ing, the corner is also a place for separation, recalling the commemoration of the
joined separation and the separated joining of the Brion couple.
Implied in the building, the two concurrent realities—union and separation—are
clearly seen not just along the vertical edge detail of the corner but also at the horizon
tal levels of the floor and the ceiling. On the outside, unlike the other corners of the
chapel, the floor that is underwater raises through small, L-shaped steps to meet the
corner from both sides of the wall [Figure 19.2]. The floor detail acts as a horizontal
corner that fully relates to the vertical one. Inside the chapel ceiling, suspended stucco
lucido panels are held away from the corner, creating a square opening that reveals
the concrete structure above. Here, Scarpa designs the horizontal suspended ceiling in
a playful relationship with the verticality of the wall [Plate 47]. In a reflected ceiling
plan drawing, Scarpa demonstrates this relationship by finding the dimensions of the
ceiling detail by tracing a series of arcs that derive from the vertical wall openings at
each side of the corner [Plate 48].
Drawing together walls, floor, and ceiling, as well as other scenes that emerge
from thinking with the drawing, will be translated later in the built edifice through
the presence of inside-out and upside-down relationships, making this corner in the
project a very unique one. In yet another chapel drawing, Scarpa wrote: “This chapel
15 Alberti described a corner as half of a building, since it links two walls and is essential to maintain
uprightness. He states that its stones should be an elbow that links around the corner into the walls like
claws. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil
Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 71.
16 I owe part of my knowledge and curiosity about corners to Professor Paul Emmons who has examined,
researched, and lectured on the topic of corners in architecture. Paul Emmons, The Mirror of Design
(London: Routledge, forthcoming).
Figure 19.2 Drawing by author of Brion cemetery chapel’s corner.
is dedicated to dream in memories” [Plate 49].17 In writing the phrase he inverts the
letters of the word sognare (dream) into sognaer. In addition he inverts the letters of
the word chiesetta (chapel) into ciehestta. A common practice in his writing, flipping
the letters of a word into a reality that still accepts the word as such, yet becomes a
different one, is a phonetic act of opening up a world through continuity. The drawn
dreams and draems of this chapel can be appreciated in the dreamy realities that
this complex built detail exhibits: the corner inside a corner, which also is the floor,
which also is the ceiling, and, conceivably, is also an amorous couple. In his essay
on Lightness, Calvino recalls a very common aspect of folktales that consists of the
flight of signifiers into other worlds.18 Quoting Vladimir Propp, who explains the
“transference of the hero” into different realms, Calvino emphasizes the linear aspect
of stories, in which linear does not mean homogenous, but rather that it travels in
17 “Questa ciehestta è dedicata a sognaer in memorie.”
18 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random
House, Inc., 1988), 3–29.

180 Carolina Dayer
and out, visiting many places and bringing forth the kind of hyper-reality of a seem
ingly discontinuous continuity.19 Inside-out, upside-down, and downside-up: several
realities of union and separation coexist at this acute place in the Brion cemetery
chapel.
Confabulation from architect to drawing: the attentive drawing

By cultivating an awareness of life as a continuous whole, Scarpa confronts assumed
borders between what is happening in the drawing and what is happening outside
of it. Events flow from the reality of the architect into the reality of the architecture.
Intentionally and unintentionally, the emotional life of the architect directly affects
the emotional life of the drawing and consequently the architectural design. This is
not simply an anecdotic interpretation of emotions operating at the creative level, but
has been confirmed by neurological research. Having studied this relationship, neu
roscientist Antonio Damasio notes: “The fabric of our minds and of our behavior is
woven around continuous cycles of emotions followed by feelings that become known
and beget new emotions, a running polyphony that underscores and punctuates spe
cific thoughts in our minds and actions in our behaviors.”20 Building on Damasio’s
research, Frascari argued that, for architects, “‘thinking well’ is based on cogni
tive processes combined with the feeling of emotions, intuitions and sensations.”21
Frascari maintains that good architects think “within” architecture, instead of “think
ing about architecture,” in an act of immersion in the materials of architectural
invention.22 This fundamental difference can be found in the symbiotic roles between
Scarpa’s everyday life events and the architectural drawings he made.
A section drawing of a room shows a column supporting a roof structure [Plate 50].
The cross-shaped joint detail between the column and the wall is drawn as having
four steel pieces that meet at each corner, leaving an empty space at the center. The
four pieces are angled towards the outside 11 degrees to meet the roof structure.
Immediately beside it, Scarpa draws in pencil a strange scene involving his wife,
Onorina, his son, Tobia, and himself.
Scarpa depicts an argument with his wife, Nini, with both of their bodies in profile.
In addition he draws his son’s figure looking directly towards us, the spectators of
the drawing, or towards Scarpa himself as he is making the drawing. Both parents
are stepping forward each with their left feet. Scarpa’s hands are inside his pockets
while Nini is armless with no breasts, and her back has been drawn as if she were
wearing a translucent dress. Tobia, their son, stands in the middle, right behind them
with a reddened face. Three speech bubbles record the dialogue between the family.
The couple is arguing: Nini shouts, Stupido; Carlo yells, Macacca (a word commonly
used in the Veneto, deriving from the Spanish macaco, or monkey; meaning “idiot”).
Finally, Tobia says in exasperation: Tutti Due, “You two!”23
19 Calvino, Memos, 27.
20 Antonio Damasio. The Feeling of What Happens. Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 43.

22 Marco Frascari, “Splendour and Miseries of Architectural Construction Drawings,” Interstices 11
(2010): 110.
23 Scarpa actually colors his son’s face with a red color pencil signalizing perhaps his frustration or
embarrassment.
After depicting the quarrel, Scarpa then draws over Nini’s body a new version
of the aforementioned detail between the column and the roof. This time the detail
shows a different element between the steel pieces. The new piece joins the four parts
together at a precise point just before the plates bend 11 degrees. Structurally, the
new element would tie together and strengthen the parts initially working in isola
tion. In the new design, the middle steel plate engages fully with the parts making the
joint, thus transforming it into a single piece. Just like the three figures inhabiting the
section, the detail purposely drawn in section emphasizes the presence of the number
three. While the two pairs of steel plates make possible the transference of loads, the
one singular element is in charge of joining and strengthening the two pairs.
Looking closely at the space of the dialogue offers more clues that reinforce the con
tinuous and linear practice by which Scarpa intertwined drawings with his everyday
life events in a yet more wonderful story. If we picture the three family members’
positions in plan view and we add Scarpa himself drawing, the diagram of the con
versation is, like the detail, a cross. One line of the cross marks the positions of the
couple, and its perpendicular one marks the visual connection between Tobia and
Scarpa himself drawing. The center point of this cross is the space where the quarrel
occurs, suggesting that the quarrel itself may have given birth to the idea of the new
detail. Without the quarrel, this arrangement would perhaps not exist. And yet there
is a strange aspect to how the three characters are positioned that reverses the story of
the quarrel into a story of concurrence. The similarity of the scene with the positions
of a bride, groom, and priest in the ritual of marriage, which also centers in a dialogue
and the exchange of three parts, is remarkable. The couple facing each other, the bride
on the left, the groom on the right, and the priest at the center at a higher position,
suggests that again two contradictory realities, a fight and a reconciliation, co-exist as
a coherent possibility for the architectural project.
The drawing becomes a space for the argument and the space of the argument
becomes a space for a new design, a chiasmus that cunningly reverses the values of
the quarrel into an affable architectural detail. The process is once again linear. The
beginning of this line departs from the initial section drawing; later, it leaves the
drawing to enter into the events of the architect’s everyday life; and then returns to
disclose what has happened. By the time the quarrel is told to the drawing, the parts
have already converged into one reality from two apparently distinct situations, inter
mingling family and architecture in such a way that they become one.
Confabulation from drawing to architect: the speaking drawing

In another late night at Carlo Scarpa’s house and studio, the tired Guido Pietropoli,
one of Scarpa’s assistants, is tracing the plan drawing for the reconstruction and
extension of the ex-convent of San Sebastiano to convert it for use by the Faculty of
Literature and Philosophy of the University of Venice. Pietropoli is drawing “trem
blottant”—making free-hand ink lines with a thin nib by tracing over the constructed
lines of the drawing below. The wavy pulse of his hand transfers through the nib into
the paper, expounding slightly different qualities each time a line is traced. The entire
drawing is made up of these thin lines. At first sight the lines seem drawn with a ruler;
however, with attention, subtle differences are discerned. Each line faintly expresses
particular movements of the hand, enlivening the drawing. The technique, according
to Pietropoli, requires slowness and is a bit annoying; however, thanks to the slight
182 Carolina Dayer
Figure 19.3 Carlo Scarpa. Third floor plan heliographic copy showing burnt mark on the
reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano, Faculty of
Literature and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice. 1974–1978. NP 41691
(detail).
© Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura,
Archivio Carlo Scarpa
variations, it imparts great character to the drawing.24 While slowly and carefully
drawing a long line in this way, the cigarette hanging from Pietropoli’s mouth con
tinued to burn until finally an ember of his cigarette fell onto the drawing. Before he
could brush it away, the hot ember immediately burned through the tracing paper.
Piercing through it, the ember left a perfectly round hole where it hit the paper [Figure
19.3]. Pietropoli cursed this loss of the night’s work and was contemplating starting
the drawing entirely over again when Scarpa saw it and exclaimed: “We will have a
tree here!” And he drew a circle around the unexpected hole.25 On the next plan for
San Sebastiano, the addition of the tree appears and is thoroughly integrated into the
project [Plate 51].
24 Interview by author with Guido Pietropoli, July 2013. Pietropoli learned the drawing technique in the
Atelier of Guillermo de la Fuente in Venice while working on the Venice Hospital project for Le Corbusier.
When Scarpa heard of the technique, he asked Pietropoli to use it in the drawings for San Sebastiano.
25 I thank Guido Pietropoli for telling me this story while we were observing Carlo Scarpa drawings
during the exhibition Progetti veneziani di Carlo Scarpa: le università at Archivio Progetti Iuav, curated
by Serena Maffioletti and Archivio Progetti – SBD with Leonardo Monaco and Mara Micol Reina in
Venice in July 2013.
These kinds of events, ink blots, coffee stains, and glitches with computer soft
ware, regularly happen in architectural design, yet are rarely if ever discussed in
writings about architectural drawing. This omission results in the incorrect assump
tion that architectural design is a one-way flow from a rational determination in the
mind that is only afterwards recorded on a drawing. However, for Scarpa, the mark
tells a story and listening to it allows him to accept the fiction as a fact. The fictive
element, that which is not true of the drawing, becomes a true discovery in the design
process. The story, as Frascari has stated, becomes a determinative component for
the architectural environment.26 It has an active role in the making of the project,
and it is not simply a metaphor for the project. The story is, once again, linear: it fol
lows the life of the drawing even under circumstances that to many architects would
signify a mistake.
The unexpected mark created by the ember became in Scarpa’s hands not just a tree
but a very specific one designated as a Fagus rubra. Fagus is the Latin name for the
genus to which the beech belongs and rubra means red. In Scarpa’s imagination the
unexpected burnt mark on the drawing travelled into reality as a red beech, known
for its blazing red foliage during the fall. Additionally, adjacent to the red/copper
beech tree, the drawing shows yet one more tree: a Tilia, or linden tree.
Right next to it Scarpa leaves a note that says, “perfume for when students are in
exam season.”27 The Tilia not only emits a delicious perfume when in blossom but
also holds in its leaves and flowers a delicious flavor recognized as carrying a calming
effect when consumed in the form of tea. From the slow, trembling construction of
lines of a late night at the drawing table to the imagining of a place through olfactory
vision, Scarpa’s San Sebastiano plan demonstrates the possibility of chance encoun
ters in the making of drawings.
When exceptions are seen as fruitful distractions, the making of the drawing acts as
a fateful window capable of re-introducing new realities into the work. The shaking
in the apparently straight linearity of the work by a sudden mistake, like the ember
burning the paper, allows the drawing to be concerned with two simultaneous realms:
what is happening now, that is, the fire pricking through the sheet; and what will be
happening later, the acceptance of the fact as already belonging to the work. Scarpa,
just like the confabulator, does not anticipate an outcome. However, even if reality
is full of contradictions, the confabulator makes sense of it by weaving the storyline
into one total reality. This confabulatory approach to architectural drawing by Scarpa
shows how he transforms the senseless marks into existing parts of the design to
make sense. In storytelling, there are exaggerated or absurd events that constitute the
wonder of a story. They may seem out-of-place, but it is precisely this displacement
that makes the story memorable.
Frascari compares the architect to the medieval troubadour who has a stock of
stories that are adjusted for every town, every audience, and even when encountering
unexpected events like a bird squawking while telling a story.28 The word troubadour
derives from the Provençal trobar, “to compose, to invent a poem.” The verb trobar
26 There is a distinction between informative cases, which are determined by a built environment, and
stories, which are determinative of an architectural environment. Frascari, “An architectural good-
life . . .” in Reading Architecture, 226
27 The original Italian note reads: “Il profumo al tempi degli esami.”
28 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 95–6.
184 Carolina Dayer
also means “to find,” like the finding of inspiration along the way as the story itself is
unfolding along that single, but very long digressive drawing of Scarpa’s life.
When making architectural drawings, the architect constantly experiences “excep
tions” that distract, interact, and provoke the imagination at minimal and significant
levels.29 From the wind entering the room while drawing to a heated argument with
the client, the architect’s work is always “interrupted” by something. When the
architect’s imagination has the capacity to find potency in instants of interruption or
suspension that detour from the expected and become active in the realm of the crea
tive, architectural confabulations emerge, and the reality of the design is thickened by
reality itself.30 What is more, these moments of interruption are crucial for thinking,
and we rely on our linear experiencing of the world to engage with and listen to them.
29 Donald Kunze expresses it like this: “Thus, it is important for architecture theory to pay its closest
attention to cases where representation breaks down, for it is precisely at such points that invisibility
becomes critical.” Donald Kunze, “Metalepsis of the Site of Exception” (unpublished essay, 2014),
art3idea.psu.edu/AAPP/AAPP.pdf. Accessed February 11, 2014.
30 Carolina Dayer, “Material Intuitions: Tracing Carlo Scarpa’s Nose” in Material Imagination, Reveries
on Architecture and Matter, edited by Matthew Mindrup (London: Ashgate, 2015), 13–28.
20 In medias res
Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo
Jonathan Foote
Nor does he begin the Trojan War with the egg (ab ovo)
but always he hurries to the action
and snatches the listener into the middle of things (in medias res)1
Good epic poets do not commence their tale from the beginning—ab ovo (with the
egg)—as Horace states, but rather descend in medias res (into the middle of things), a
reference to the Illiad opening already many years into the Trojan War. Perhaps this
sentiment of plunging into the middle of action was felt by researchers when, in 1976
upon the walls of the San Lorenzo New Sacristy in Florence, they uncovered an aston
ishing array of mural drawings beneath centuries-old plaster, recognized instantly as
the possible handiwork of Michelangelo himself. Scholars have since concluded that
a large number of these marks and sketches were indeed by the artist, or at least from
the hands of those working closely with him. Primarily related to the work at the
Laurentian Library in the years 1525 and 1526, the walls of the New Sacristy apse
preserve a palimpsest of hundreds of figural sketches, 1:1 scaled architectonic details,
and written messages [Figure 20.1].2 Employing a combination of red chalk, black
chalk, and charcoal, they comprise an extensive network of ruled lines and rapid
sketches. Among them are the largest drawings known to survive by Michelangelo:
two nearly four-meter elevations of the interior and exterior windows of the library,
rendered at a 1:1 scale. Paolo dal Poggetto’s book published in the late 1970s, I dis
egni murali di Michelangiolo e della sua scuola nella Sagrestia Nuova di San Lorenzo,
still remains the most comprehensive text on the matter.3 The scientific analyses of the
apse drawings have endured largely without controversy and have provided a reliable
basis from which future historians have integrated the material into their assessments
of Michelangelo’s work.
Rather than examine the drawings as a history of the building site, something
that has already been well explored, we ask—what story do the drawings tell? And,
additionally, what story was Michelangelo telling while making them? Histories
1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 145–147

2 Another group of wall drawings in the so-called lavamani or “stanza segreta” was also discovered and
documented but is not discussed here.
3 Paolo dal Poggetto, I disegni murali di Michelangiolo e della sua scuola nella Sagrestia Nuova di San
Lorenzo (Firenze: Centro Di, 1979). A second volume by Dal Poggetto offers a recent assessment of
scholarship. Paolo dal Poggetto, Michelangelo: La “stanza segreta”: i disegni murali nella Sagrestia
nuova di San Lorenzo (Firenze: Giunti, 2012).
186 Jonathan Foote
Figure 20.1 Michelangelo and others, Mural drawings, apse of the New Sacristy of San
Lorenzo, 1526–1533.
Reconstruction by author, after images provided by the Polo Museale della città
di Firenze, with permission
often rely on establishing reliable chronologies and authorship; stories, on probing

the gaps exposed by their inherent unreliability, a point of view much closer to the
use of the Latin word istoria. When L.B. Alberti compared the construing of an
appropriately constructed wall with the reading of a good istoria, the implication
was that architecture contains a hidden narrative of how it is made—its construc
tion—available through interpreting the clues of its facture.4 In this vein, looking
back at the spatio-temporal sequence of a wall’s construction is more akin to rewind
ing a thread that has been unwound, such that the original position of any point on
the spool cannot be precisely reconstructed. There is an assumption of a sequence
of events, of positions, of causes and effects; but one cannot say precisely what they
are. Conditions and relationships between the materials and marks of construction
provide a remarkable “middle ground” in which we are granted access through the
clues of its making.
Since Horace, in medias res has come to define a narrative structure that begins
by immersing the reader somewhere in the chronological middle, invoking a sense
4 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII.10

In medias res 187
that one is witnessing a small slice of a much longer tale that has been going on for a
while.5 Rather than trust in an omniscient voice that begins, “once upon a time,” or
ab ovo, the storyteller relies on events and characters within the story itself to clue us
in to past events. Observed in their totality, the mural drawings are a flash of action
of Michelangelo and his assistants, telling a story in medias res. This refers not only
to our encounter as the viewer beholding a sense of action in which we are immersed,
it more importantly refers to the proclivity of Michelangelo to avoid the remote,
omniscient voice and deal directly with the materials of construction as they unfold, in
situ and in dialogue with those around him. Although by the 1520s the notion of the
architect working remotely from the building site had become increasingly common,
Michelangelo maintained a decidedly intimate relationship with his materials, assis
tants, and the work in progress.
Extended onto the building site, the notion of in medias res suggests that the space
of construction contains an inherent and necessary agency in propelling the plotline
of construction forward. In this way, it seems clear that the drawings are more like
conversations than simple dictations, with the goal being the enlargement of the
space of deliberation rather than its deliberate reduction through pre-determined
or formalized building procedures. The construction site itself—the medias—thus
takes on a confabulatory role, where the surrounding action defines a place for creat
ing, or discovering, the istoria. Unlike drawings on the ground or on a horizontal
drawing surface, the upright wall surface furnished a site for Michelangelo and his
assistants to discuss construction in the same body posture as if they were building
it. In his relationship with the wall, small adjustments through marks, scratches,
and ticks act as traces in the confabulatory role of the building site. In observing
them closely, one senses the fundamental agency of the rhetorical space created by
the drawing process itself, as much as the specific instructions to the stonemasons
conveyed therein.
Introducing the medias

Centuries after the fact, the penetrating materiality of the drawings immerses us in
the middle of an imagined building site teeming with scarpellini (stone carvers) and
a sullen, demanding Michelangelo. In the spring of 1525, deep into construction on
the Laurentian Library, the artist attended to the stone carvers and assistants with a
combination of heavy oversight and exhaustion. A letter from Leonardo Sellaio, the
artist’s confidant in Rome, describes how Michelangelo, during this time, “had to be
teaching them [the scarpellini] all the time,” especially after they had repeatedly failed
to bring a number of figural models into good form.6 The library was proceeding
rapidly, with work commencing in early 1525, and Michelangelo predicted that the
entire project would be finished by the end of 1526. The foundations for the vestibule
were excavated in January 1526, while, at a frantic pace, figures and architectural
carvings were being concurrently produced for the adjacent New Sacristy project. In
5 Meir Steinberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13, no. 3
(1992): 481.
6 Letter dated March 10, 1526, DCCXLIII, in Il carteggio di Michelangelo, edited by Paola Barocchi and
Renzo Ristori, Vols I–V (Firenze: Sansoni, 1967), 3: 214.
188 Jonathan Foote
June of 1526, the exhausted artist wrote to his friend Giovan Fattucci in Rome, “I’m
working as hard as I can.”7
The large, unadorned surfaces of the New Sacristy apse must have provided an invit
ing space to discuss and instruct within such an active construction site, and it appears
from the finish application of fine intonaco that they were specifically prepared as
such.8 The proximity of the apse to the library worksite was an obvious advantage,
but there were probably spatial reasons as well. Covering a square footprint of just
over four meters on a side and six meters high, the apse created an enclosed and well-
defined drawing space, large enough to accommodate full size drawings, yet intimate
enough to designate a “space within a space” among the bristling worksite. The strik
ing presence of the 1:1 scaled library window drawings, facing each other from the
right- and left-hand walls, invite the visitor into the middle of the action. No doubt
a deliberate arrangement, the alignment of the exterior and interior window draw
ings are precisely placed across from each other, creating an inside-out space from an
otherwise impossible threshold—the medias. Using the physical site of the worksite,
Michelangelo placed himself in the imaginative space of the window, looking both
outward and inward simultaneously.
In spite of their prominence, the window drawings were probably not the first
drawings on the wall, appearing in several places as clearly drawn over the top of
drawings within arm’s reach.9 Plumbed, constructed geometrically, and carefully
measured, the prevailing view among scholars is that they could not have been made
before April 12, 1525, the day the Pope approved Michelangelo’s window design
from drawings sent to Rome.10 However, in a worksite tally book kept by two scar
pellini, Giovani di Sandro and Romolo di Guelfo, a large number of pre-carved jambs,
thresholds, and cornices for the library windows began arriving from the quarry just
three days later.11 Such a coincidence of timing suggests that Michelangelo was not
waiting for his patron’s approval in order to proceed, a somewhat common practice
for him. Rather than advance in a linear fashion, acquiring the proper approvals in
due time, Michelangelo planted himself within the material multiplicities of the work-
site. Neither beginning nor end, or perhaps flipping it, the privilege to alter the work
in progress was a hallmark of Michelangelo’s working method. Maybe anticipating
good weather, an opportune assembly of workman, or good quarry conditions, his
first priority was to keep the worksite, the space of the medias, moving. As a testa
ment to his desire to dwell within the middle state of a project, nearly two-thirds of
his figural oeuvre remains in a state of incompletion.12 Stoppages of work, in fact,
constituted some of the lowest moments of his life.
The window drawings record a remarkable “middle” stage of action, located
7 Letter dated June 17, 1526, DCCLII, in Carteggio, ed. Barocchi and Ristori, 3: 227. Translation by
author.
8 Caroline Elam, “The Mural Drawings in Michelangelo’s New Sacristy,” The Burlington Magazine 123,
no. 943 (October 1981): 592–4.
9 This concurs with Elam, “Mural Drawings,” 596. Dal Poggetto claims the window drawings probably
came first, Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 168–9.
10 Letter dated April 12, 1526, DCXCV, in Carteggio, ed. Barocchi and Ristori, 3: 141.
11 Lucilla Bardeschi Ciulich and Paola Barocchi, I ricordi di Michelangelo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970),
CLXXIII, 187–91.
12 Paula Carabell, “Image and Identity in the Unfinished Works of Michelangelo,” RES: Anthropology
and Aesthetics 32 (Autumn, 1997): 83–105.
In medias res 189
Figure 20.2 Michelangelo, Cornice details (left and right) showing template tracing, exterior
window for Laurentian Library, c. 1526.
With permission, Polo Museale della città di Firenze
somewhere between sketches and stone. Dal Poggetto, in his analysis, rightfully
referred to them as exempla, as they provided clear, graphic instructions for the stone
carvers to follow.13 However, in the tradition of Callimachus, who discovered the
exemplum for the Corinthian order in a funerary arrangement of acanthus leaves
and a weighted tile, Michelangelo imagined new possibilities within the exempla
simultaneously in use by the stone carvers.14 A clear demonstration of this occurs on
the exterior window in a series of marks on the cornice details. Although the primary
lines are drawn in black chalk (matita), Michelangelo switched to charcoal (carbone)
while working through some of the critical edges and joints.15 Looking closer at the
right side of the segmented pediment in Figure 20.2, a raked line drawn in charcoal
creates an unexpected condition at the soffit edge at a point where it would be highly
unusual to show a back slant in a frontal, orthographic view. No doubt this indicates
the tracing of a profiled cornice template, or modano, rotated and placed flat against
the wall. The appearance of the marks denoting a raked soffit would have been
entirely consistent with a template, since it would have defined a stone profile perpen
dicular to the wall, not parallel to it. What scholars have called pentimenti might also
be accounted for by the marks made by tracing the cornice template as an instrument
for seeking the imaginative potential of the window exemplum.
Michelangelo made regular use of modani at San Lorenzo, a special kind of 1:1
paper drawing that was both exploratory as well as instructive. He often employed
his templates as tracing devices for altering and adjusting cornice details and column
bases, creating a practice of using the materiality of the template—sliding, flipping,
and cutting—to collapse the space between paper and stone. For Michelangelo, trac
ing provided a mode where small, figural adjustments could be studied outside of
the constraints of compass and rule, the normative tools of an architect. The paper
13 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 168–9.

14 On Callimachus see, Vitruvius, De architectura, IV.i.9–10
15 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 84.
190 Jonathan Foote
modano thus became a surrogate building stone that could be carried to the site and
placed into the middle of the action. This is evident also on the left edge of the exterior
window segmented pediment, where one may observe a tick mark along the soffit
edge and a double rendering of the fillet edge. These marks together suggest the use
of a template placed flat against the wall, marked, dragged horizontally, and traced.
Enlarging the medias

The walls represent an enlargement of the medias that had been previously employed
at the detail level through the template. Once on the wall, assemblies of multiple
stones could be evaluated, as was probably the case with the 1:1 window drawings.
Stone cutting practices such as whittling, filing, and chipping are mirrored in the
marks of the wall drawings, and the use of templates, from horizontal to vertical,
from drawing board to the wall, shows how Michelangelo freely moved between the
drawing board and the worksite as an extension of the drawing board. The window
drawings are thus looking forward to the stonecutters as well as looking back at
Michelangelo’s imagination, flipping the beginning with the end.
Scaled at 1:1, the window drawings allowed for a particularly intimate relation
ship with the unfolding work, since minute alterations to lineaments and proportions
could be evaluated rapidly and without scaled mediation. No other drawing scale
provided a more direct access to the building istoria, a point that was not lost by
Alberti, who advocated large drawings whenever possible, “because in small draw
ings large weaknesses are easily hidden.”16 Vasari, in his introduction to the art of
sculpture, offers an extensive commentary on these advantages, including the pro
pensity to avoid errors and stone patching.17 And Scamozzi, in commenting on the
importance of large models, discusses how they reveal their character more readily
than smaller ones.18 Michelangelo, for his part, made full size models and drawings a
central aspect of his working method, both in sculpture and in architecture. Notable
achievements include two full-size wooden models of the Medici tomb assemblies for
the New Sacristy and a 12-foot wooden section of the cornice for the Palazzo Farnese,
floated in place above Rome and inspected by the Pope himself.19 Each one of these
related to how to, first, enlarge the medias, and, second, how to invite the artist and
his assistants into the sphere of its influence.
Another group of sketches, located within arm’s reach, reflects Michelangelo’s
practice of enlarging the medias through the combination of walls and templates.
Prominently drawn in red chalk, a cornice detail, facing left, is repeated three times in
variation, starting from the left and moving right [Plate 52]. Each iteration slides pre
cisely along the horizontal datum line, displaying slight variations of the profile along
the way. This rapid succession of profiles was a normative practice of Michelangelo,
and can be detected in several places in his surviving drawings as well as other places
16 Leon Battista Alberti and Cosimo Bartoli, Della pittura e della statua di Leonbatista Alberti (Milano:
Società tip. de’Classici Italiani, 1804), III: 57. Translation by author.
17 Gaetano Milanesi, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, Vol. I–IX (Firenze: Sansoni,
1906), I: 154–5. Benvenuto Cellini also praises the use of full size models in his Trattato della Scultura,
VI. Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Cordié, Trattato della scultura (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1960).
18 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964), Parta
Prima, 52.
19 Milanesi, Le vite, VII: 223; Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, 2: 366.
In medias res 191
20
on the wall. Imitating the use of a template, which could be slid and traced from left
to right, it demonstrated how small movements such as tapping and nudging could be
employed for speculating on future stone profiles. It also reflects Michelangelo’s pro
fessed attitude toward approaching sculpture through per forza di levare, by taking
away, as each drawn profile could be understood as a kind of removal, from left to
right, when imagined inside a block of stone. Employed extensively in his sculptural
work, the sequential, frontal removal of stone had the practical benefit of leaving
enough stone in place to discover the emergent figure while at the same time carving
it, a noticeable departure from his contemporaries, who attacked the block from all
four sides.21 In the case of the repetitive profile sketches, each subsequent iteration
both removed and relied on the one before it, creating a mediated situation between
Michelangelo, the red chalk, and the intonaco surface.
Time of the middle

Beginning a story in medias res appears at first like an impossibility, since the chronol
ogy of a story seems doomed without a clear articulation of what comes first. Equally
so, Michelangelo’s reliance on the agency of his materials reflects the paradox of occu
pying the medias, since its prolonging or enlarging marginalizes both the beginning
and end of construction, the two events that normally define an architectural project.
In this manner, carving stone or chiseling deeper in search of the perfect profile or
the emergent form results in reaching the actual, physical middle, while having no
material left at all. It is this impossibility that leads to the importance of developing
surrogate or analogical processes of material investigation. By shortening the gap
between conception and construction, there is the paradoxical desire to enlarge it by
carving out spaces, means, and methods for lingering within it. In the case of the San
Lorenzo worksite, the mural drawings provide an optimum site for this to play out, as
they are both in the worksite and outside it. As processes unfolding within the work-
site, they engaged assistants and in-situ conditions that would otherwise be excluded
in deliberations at his off-site workshop.22 On the other hand, the mural drawings
designated a specific site outside the normal mode of construction, concerned as it
is with beginnings or endings, a place of imagining carving and assembling stones
without actually doing so.
Michelangelo’s mural drawings show the inherent contradictions of occupying
the medias, a position that rejects any attempt to reconstruct a formalized pattern of
thought or behavior. In Florence, the architectural precedent on this point is certainly
Brunelleschi, who, according to his biographer Manetti, rejected giving instructions
to his stone carvers through models and drawings. Instead, he preferred to dictate
construction details orally and in piecemeal fashion as the work proceeded, “bit
by bit.”23 This can be detected in the mural drawings as well, through prominently
displayed notes such as “veni a vedere (come and see),” an enticing invitation to
20 See especially Charles De Tolnay, Corpus dei disegni di Michelangelo (Novara: Istituto geografico De
Agostini, 1975–1980), 202r, 250v, 536v.
21 Carabell, “Image and Identity,” 101–4.
22 Michelangelo maintained an active, off-site worksite on Via Mozza (present day Via San Zenobi).
23 “cosa per cosa,” in Antonio di Tuccio and Carlachiara Perrone, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi (Roma:
Salerno, 1992), 124.
192 Jonathan Foote
imagine how the murals could have summoned a dialogue between assistants or even
as a message left for Michelangelo himself.24 There is also the presence of a large
number of unknown tallies counting materials, days of assistant labor, or piecework,
another indication of the generosity of the walls to support the practical activity of
the worksite.
The typical linearity from design to client approval to execution is so ingrained
in architects today that it might be difficult to see how architecture could have pre
cipitated otherwise. By this common narrative, a project begins with “once upon a
time a client needed a building” and concludes, hopefully, with “the client walked
away happily ever after.” In between, the architect moves from initial sketches to
technical drawings, a process that has become precisely immured in contemporary
legal, technological, and financial frameworks. Michelangelo, however, conducted a
building site characterized by simultaneity and anachrony, creating a discrepancy, for
historians at least, between the order of construction events and the order of events
told by the factures and clues left for us to trace. As drawings imagined in medias res,
where one has to imagine backwards in order to look forward, the mural drawings
are not representative of a stage during a linear progression from design to execution,
as “snapshots.” Rather, they are flashes of a dynamic frame-within-a-frame worksite
where Michelangelo was operating between the quarries, adjacent worksites, the
Vatican, and the scarpellini. The specific task of drawing stones or templates for the
windows might start and end chronologically, but the construction of San Lorenzo
is narrated through a bi-directional movement of anticipation, looking back, and the
future anterior, one that desires no beginning nor end, but the medias.
24 Dal Poggetto, I disegni murali, 115.

21 The function of fiction
in fabrication
Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni, the Italian
confabulator
Louise Pelletier
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.1
When he passed away on January 19, 1766, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni was a
celebrated architect, known as an instigator of neoclassicism in France for his work
on the west facade of the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Ever since, scholars have
debated his relative importance in this project, whose construction evolved over a
span of more than a century in the hands of six architects. Although the nature of his
involvement in the construction of this parish church—the largest in Paris, designed
to rival Notre-Dame Cathedral—has been the subject of much debate among archi
tectural historians, the notoriety of the building itself entered popular culture a few
years ago for an entirely different reason. It became a prime location for crimes and
conspiracies in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003). Brown’s
story draws from previous works such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982)
by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh, which recounts the story
of the Priory of Sion, a secret society allegedly founded by Godfrey of Bouillon on
Mount Zion in 1099, and whose purpose was to protect a secret capable of bringing
about the collapse of the Catholic Church—a direct bloodline from Jesus Christ to the
Merovingian kings and their descendants. Although Brown’s novel and the pseudo-
historical works that inspired it have been deemed to be pure fabrication, there seems
to be intriguing evidence to justify the shroud of secrecy surrounding the commission
and the unending machinations that have marked the existence of the building since
its construction.
In 1642, Jean-Jacques Olier, a member the French Catholic secret society known
as the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, founded the Society of Saint-Sulpice. Shortly
after, he began the construction of a seminary that was to become a renowned hotbed
of the French school of spirituality. Since its foundation, the parish of Saint-Sulpice
was at the heart of the domain of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the
Merovingian kings were originally buried, the dynasty marked by the emergence
of a strong Christian culture among the aristocracy in France. In 1645 the architect
Christophe Gamard signed the drawings of the new church to be built on the site of an
old chapel that probably dated from the ninth century, and which would be dedicated
to Saint-Sulpice, a great servant of the Merovingian kings. Digging for the founda
tions of the new choir started the same year. The young Louis XIV and the princess of
1 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.2.139–40.

194 Louise Pelletier
Condé were present for the laying of the first stone, but the work was interrupted by
the troubles of the Fronde (1648–1653), which caused the Prince of Condé to oppose
Louis XIV on the absolutism of the monarchy. Absolutism was based on the principles
of the superiority of the hereditary monarchy and the divine origin of power. It would
become a source of great tension in France during the following century, as many
nobles and blood-princes contested the displacement of power from the primacy of
the kingdom to the increased sacredness of the person of the king. When Olier passed
away in 1657, not even the choir of Saint-Sulpice had been completed, and the first
mass would be celebrated only in 1660 in the Chapel of the Virgin, centrally placed
on the axis of the nave.
While the history of the construction is woven tightly with some of the most
powerful families of France at the time—who greatly contributed to its financing, as
is attested by the tombs of the Condé, Conti, and Lyunes families that were housed
in the crypt of the church until the French Revolution—in 1678 the Parish of Saint-
Sulpice went bankrupt and construction stopped for almost four decades. It started
again under the Regency of the Duke of Orleans, who authorized a lottery that was
used to finance the erection of the new nave and transept. Construction was resumed
in 1719 under the authority of Jean-Baptiste Languet de Gery, the priest of Saint-
Sulpice, and the supervision of yet another architect, Gilles Oppenord. In 1731 when
the question of the design of the west facade arose, the vault of the nave and the
interior decoration were already completed, but the bell tower set up at the crossing of
the transept by Oppenord in 1725 had to be demolished because its excessive weight
was compromising the stability of the structure. This unforgivable miscalculation
caused Oppenord to be relieved of his responsibility as architect of the project, but he
remained as decorator. Yet, one of the most important works of internal decoration
in 1729, the restoration of the Chapel of the Virgin, was entrusted not to him, but to
a young Italian painter from Florence, Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni.
Factual evidence about Servandoni’s life is scarce and often contentious. Born to
a French coachman from Lyon and an Italian mother, we know that he travelled
extensively and before his arrival in Paris around 1724, he spent some time in England
where he staged operas in Covent Garden in London and got married to a certain
Anne Harriol Roots.2 He came back to England at various key moments through
out his career, even during periods of great political instability and overt animosity
between France and England. He also gravitated around the circle of the Third
Earl of Burlington, a Whig courtier known as “the architect Earl” for his work on
Chiswick House and other neo-Palladian buildings.3 In Britain at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the Whig party favored a strong parliament over the idea of
an absolute monarch who could exercise unrestricted political power over its people,
and neo-Palladianism became a symbol of this political power that opposed royal
absolutism.4 The neo-Palladian influence is not negligible to an understanding of
the genealogy that led to Servandoni’s neoclassicism. It similarly signaled a return to
the simplicity of nature and the belief that God in his creation had followed simple
geometric order.
2 Archives Nationales de France, (MC), ET LXV-469, and Y-10237, dossier Planström (1761), 1–21.
3 Francesco Guidoboni, “Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni: sa première formation entre Florence, Rome et
Londres,” ArcHistoR anno I 1 (2014): 29–65.
4 John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963).
The function of fiction in fabrication 195
Upon his arrival in Paris, however, Servandoni immediately became involved with
a group of British expatriates from the opposing faction, the Jacobites. Associated to
the court of James II Stuart, the last Catholic King of England deposed by William of
Orange during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Jacobites took refuge in France
in the late seventeenth century. They formed a political movement with close ties to
the Tories, aiming to restore the Catholic King to the throne of England. Incidentally,
James II Stuart was also King of Scotland as James VII, and the Jacobites are believed
to have brought with them the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, thus creating the oldest
lodge in France as early as 1689. Most of them settled either in the parish of Saint-
Sulpice or in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where they established their court in exile.
At the baptism of his son in 1727, Servandoni chose as godmother the Duchess of
Fitz-James, wife of the natural son of James II Stuart, thus publicly acknowledging his
personal involvement with the decedents of the Catholic King in exile. Accompanying
the Duchess of Fitz-James, the Count of Maurepas held Servandoni’s newborn on
the baptismal font. Minister and Secretary of State for the marine and the royal
household, Maurepas was closely connected to the theater scene in Paris at the time,
and he also happened to be Chief Churchwarden of Saint-Sulpice. The godparents
Servandoni chose for his son help draw a powerful line of influence through his
career, and his personal connections with influential individuals begin to explain how
he first might have been involved with the parish.
At the time, Servandoni was known primarily as a painter of imaginary views with
picturesque ruins—known as vedute di fantasia—and as a stage set designer for the
Paris Opera. Servandoni’s work at the opera had already made a lasting impression
on his contemporaries, most importantly on the young monarch, Louis XV, who
attended a performance of Phaeton in the fall of 1730. It displayed a Palace of the
Sun, in which Servandoni had introduced an important reform in the tradition of
stage set design. His technique of “perspective seemed to have given this temple
an extraordinary elevation, because despite the smallness of the place, and without
having to move any machinery, the decorations were much higher in the back of the
theater than in the front.”5 At the same time, Servandoni created the impression of a
much greater width on the sides, using oblique perspectives, which gave the illusion
that the stage continued beyond interconnecting galleries. The king was so pleased
with what he saw that four months later Servandoni was introduced as a member of
the Royal Academy of Painting.
It is during this effervescent period of artistic activity that a competition for the
main façade of Saint-Sulpice was launched in 1730 [Plate 53]. Servandoni’s very first
drawing for the west facade shows the regal blazon on the pediment crowning the
entrance. At that time, Louis XV—the Beloved, as he was known—was only 22 and
still united all his subjects under the hopeful wish that he would bring renewed pros
perity to the kingdom. Although the massive façade with predominantly horizontal
composition did not relate directly to the interior of the building to which it gave
access, Servandoni still was chosen for the commission in 1732. When he revised
his design for the façade a decade later, much had changed on the political scene in
France. Besides Louis XV’s humiliating defeat in the War of the Polish Succession that
prevented his father in law, Stanisław I Leszczyn´ski, from ascending to the throne of
5 Henri De Chennevières, Revue des arts décoratifs, Tome I (Paris: Quantin-Éditeur, 1880–1881), 404.
Poland, the War of the Austrian Succession would result in further embarrassment for
the French King, in part due to an excruciating confession about his licentious way of
living, which dramatically altered his reputation.
Meanwhile, Servandoni was made Knight of the Order of Christ as stipulated
through a papal decree issued by Benedict XIV in 1743. M. Languet, Archbishop of
Sens and brother of the priest of Saint-Sulpice, presided over the ceremony.6 The
Order of Christ was created in the fourteenth century, shortly after the persecution of
the Knights Templar, who took refuge in Portugal where the king protected them.7
At that time, the original Templars changed their name to Knights of Christ, thus the
Portuguese branch of the Knights Templar is the origin of the Order of Christ. Even
to this day, this is still the highest decoration awarded by the Pope.
Although the line of Grand Masters of the Knights Templar is believed to have
ended with the burning at the stake of Jacques de Molay in 1314, the legend was
revived in the eighteenth century by Philippe II, Duke of Orleans. The regent during
Louis XV’s minority and one of the principal benefactors who secured financing for
the completion of the nave of Saint-Sulpice in the early eighteenth century, the Duke
signed, as Grand Master, the famous Larmenius Charter of Transmission. A manu
script supposedly created by Johannes Marcus Larmenius in 1324, it establishes a
direct lineage of Knight Templar Grand Masters from Jacques de Molay all the way
to the nineteenth century. Although some scholars believe that the Charter might be a
forgery, most agree that the signature of the Duke of Orleans and the subsequent mas
ters are genuine.8 The Regency of the Duke of Orleans had opened the door to many
forms of contestation in France, including the raise of Jansenism that openly opposed
the absolute power of the king. Tracing his lineage back to the first crusade estab
lished the authority of the duke through a fabricated ancestry that emanated from the
Primitive Church in Jerusalem, and rekindled the debate between heavenly powers
over earthly authorities. According to the charter, Louis de Bourbon-Condé and Louis
François Bourbon-Conti eventually succeeded the Duke of Orleans after his death in
1723. As mentioned earlier, the completion of Saint-Sulpice was greatly indebted to
the support of the Duke of Orleans under his regency, and the church cemetery con
tained the crypts of both the Conti and Condé families who also contributed greatly
to financing the construction. It is not unreasonable to infer that “Saint-Sulpice
benefited from one hundred years of sponsorship by the Princes of the Sanctuary, the
Dukes of Orleans, Bourbon-Condé, [and Bourbon-Conti] Knights Templar Grand
Masters.”9 Also, given the fact that since its foundation the parish of Saint-Sulpice
was established on the land where the Merovingian kings were originally buried, the
first dynasty whose power emanated from the Primitive Church, and was sponsored
6 Henri de Chennevières, Revue des arts décoratifs, 433–4

7 In 1307, the King Philip IV of France ordered an inquisition against the Knights Templar that led to
their annihilation in 1313.
8 “[The charter] was the work of a Jesuit named Father Bonani, who assisted Philippe II, Duke of Orleans
in 1705 to fabricate the document.” George Kenning, Kenning’s Masonic Encyclopedia and Handbook
of Masonic Archeology, History and Biography (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003; origi
nally published in 1878), 108–9. See also J.S.M. Ward, Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods (London:
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1921), 291–2 for a spirited defense of the authenticity of
the Charter of Larmenius.
9 Stuart Nettleton, The Alchemy Key, The Mystical Provenance of the Philosophers’ Stone (Sydney:
Taliesin Investments, 1998), 376–7.
The function of fiction in fabrication 197
by noble families who openly opposed the absolute power of the king, it seems fair to
speculate that Saint-Sulpice was intended to become the resting place of the Princes of
Christ, competing with Saint-Denis as the necropolis of the Kings of France.
The growing fascination with the legend of the Knights Templar in the eighteenth
century is further evidenced by a remarkable performance of an optic play produced
by Servandoni at the Salle des Machines in 1754, The Enchanted Forest. The optic
plays combined Servandoni’s celebrated talent for stage design, greatly influenced
by Galli Bibiena’s technique of perspectiva per angolo, and traditional pantomime
imported from England. Servandoni’s great accomplishment in these mute spectacles
was to elevate scenography to the status of spectacle in its own right. The Enchanted
Forest used as its starting point an epic poem by Torcato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered.
Inspired by historical events, it tells the story of the First Crusade called by Pope
Urban II in 1095 to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, but whereas Tasso’s ver
sion culminates with the capture of the Holy City by Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099,
Servandoni adapted the plot to focus on one specific episode, the moment preceding
the taking of Jerusalem by the crusaders. After many failed attempts by Christian
armies to enter a forest magically protected by evil forces, Godfrey receives in a dream
a divine revelation that only a disgraced crusader called Renauld, expelled after kill
ing a distant prince, can succeed over the enchanted forest. Whereas Godfrey is the
true hero of Tasso’s original epic poem, Renauld, the returning rebel who escaped to
evade punishment after killing the son of a monarch, plays a key role in Servandoni’s
revised version; but this introduction of a regicidal act is absent from Tasso’s account.
Instead, in the initial tale, Renaud fell “victim to a love delirium,” living in Eternal
Spring with the beautiful Armida.10 Was the heavenly vision that named Renauld, the
killer of a prince, as the only possible savior of the Holy City a veiled criticism of the
monarchy by Servandoni, asserting divine power over the terrestrial? In the second
half of the eighteenth century, the Jansenists were gaining power in France fighting
against the absolutist power of the king. But there is an even more explicit regicide in
Servandoni’s story that is also missing from Tasso’s. After other crusaders have failed
to penetrate and destroy the enchanted forest, Renauld realizes that as fighting any
individual tree will only increase the power of the forest he needs to kill the “King of
Trees” for the enchantment to cease. Again the necessity to eliminate the ruler of all
trees in order to remove the malfeasance of the infernal spirits asserts the domination
of Christ’s crusaders over earthly powers.
Furthermore, the perspective technique that Servandoni had brought to the French
stage, perspectiva per angolo, implicitly displaced the traditional importance given to
the king to a more democratic visual illusion. The absence of a central vanishing point
typical of the traditional princely theatres of the previous century, in favor of a more
open perspective construction where various planes receded in at least two directions
for the benefit of the entire audience, was in clear opposition to a centralized ideol
ogy. Coincidentally, shortly after the staging of Servandoni’s Enchanted Forest, and
long after Louis XV had fallen into public disfavor, Robert-François Damiens made
an attempt on the King’s life, the first attack on the life of a monarch in France since
the murder of Henri IV in 1610. At around the same time, the Austrian ambassador
wrote to Vienna confirming the situation was pervasive: “Public discontent is general.
10 See Torcato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (first published in 1581), Chant XIV, 99–116.
All conversations revolve around poison and death. Along the Hall of Mirrors, post
ers appear threatening the life of the king.”11
The same year as the production of The Enchanted Forest, another ephemeral
project by Servandoni expressed his growing disenchantment with the powerful,
yet increasingly decadent monarchy. In the early 1750s, Servandoni had produced a
number of proposals for a square in front of Saint-Sulpice, which would have created
a homogeneous ensemble, a perimeter of neoclassical houses. In 1754 to celebrate the
laying of the first stone of one of these houses, he designed an ephemeral Triumphal
Arch that was the centerpiece of the event. In an absolute monarchy, society is a body
of which the monarch is the head, the only decision-making center. The engraving
depicting the Triumphal Arch shows a sculpture of Louis XV under the arch, and
above his head, an enormous crown five times the size of the king’s head, suggesting
the greater importance attributed to the function of the king over the individual [Plate
54]. A barely veiled criticism of the absolutist role of the monarchy, the threatened
position of the king, standing still under the imposing symbol of the monarchy sus
pended by a faint flower garland, is acknowledged in the lower-right of the engraving
by a group of onlookers gathered at the foot of the statue. A man is pointing with his
sword not to the king but to the huge crown above him—aiming at the institution
rather than the king himself—and more precisely to the fickle garland holding the
crown, while a woman accompanying him opens her arms as if anticipating the dis
aster waiting to happen. Not surprisingly, Louis XV withheld funding to the project,
and only the one house begun in 1754 and still visible in the northeast corner of the
square was ever completed. Servandoni’s ephemeral work, either at the theater or for
urban celebrations, tells a story that helps make sense of his political convictions, but
also of his public demise and the dwindling of commissions toward the end of his life.
The Church of Saint-Sulpice has played a central role as a repository of century-old
secrets and political intrigues in many fictional works of literature and a strict aca
demic historical approach would prevent one from considering following speculative
leads. Yet I might venture an interpretative conclusion to this incomplete project.12
The fictional ancestry deliberately fabricated by the Duke of Orleans positioned
him as the undisputed torchbearer of the Templar in the eighteenth century, and
consequently placed Saint-Sulpice as the primary temple for an egalitarian faith.
Unsurprisingly during the French Revolution, while Christianity was suppressed and
many places of worship such as Notre-Dame Cathedral and Saint-Denis Basilica were
converted into warehouses, Saint-Sulpice was transformed into the temple of Reason
where the “Supreme Being” was worshiped. Did Servandoni play any role in provok
ing events that would ultimately lead to the fall of the monarchy? It is unquestionable
that the architect of the west facade of Saint-Sulpice was fascinated with the story of
the first crusade and saw himself as a spiritual descendent of the Knights Templar.
Moreover, many of his ephemeral projects promoted a critical stand against the abso
lutist power in France. Anything more would be pure confabulation!
11 Danielle Gallet, Madame de Pompadour ou le pouvoir féminin (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 296, my
translation.
12 I pay tribute to the heritage left by Marco Frascari and his inspirational way of approaching historical
conundrums.
22 The Laughing Girls
Marc J. Neveu
Though very little has been written about Douglas Darden (1951–1996) his work is
well known, mostly for the exquisite handmade monochrome drawings displayed in
various exhibitions and for his book Condemned Building, published in 1993. Less
well known is that Darden was working on a graphic novel during the final six years
of his life. Much bigger in scope than the ten short stories in Condemned Building,
the 150-page graphic novel was planned in addition to at least 30 objects. The first
dated material is from 1990, and at that time was already described as “an architec
tural novel” named in various ways, but most often as The Laughing Girls.1 By its
very nature, the project questions the relationship between architecture, storytelling,
and representation. This chapter will begin to propose that Darden’s particular act of
building may yield an alternative mode of architectural agency.
In an application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and
Crafts in 1994, Darden explained the intention of the work:
The purpose of this project is to establish a new approach toward communicat

ing the relationship between the evolution of design and its results. This design
project proposes an innovative form of communication, the architectural novel,
which examines the relationships between story telling, the process of design, and
the designed environment.2
Though similar themes and tactics are present, The Laughing Girls is a very different
project than Condemned Building. First, it was always intended as a graphic novel and
not as a monograph, treatise, or collection of projects. Next, Darden did not produce
any large-scale drawings for the project, similar to those in Condemned Building. The
representations rely more heavily on collage than on architectural drawing conven
tions such as plan and section. While narrative was an integral component in his ear
lier work, the importance of storytelling in The Laughing Girls is much more evident.
Condemned Building shows ten completed projects and no preparatory material is
presented. Unfinished and presented in various stages, The Laughing Girls can be read
1 When Darden died in 1996 all of the material in his office was collected and put into bankers’ boxes.
Much of that material has been returned to Allison Collins, Darden’s widow. Collins has shared the
work with Ben Ledbetter, an architect (and storyteller) based in New Haven, CT, and Ledbetter has
graciously allowed me to work with the archive. Much of the material presented in this chapter is based
upon previously unpublished archival work.
2 Application for Scholar-in-Residence at the California College of the Arts and Crafts, 1994, unpublished.
200 Marc J. Neveu
as almost exclusively “in process.” Perhaps most importantly, Darden articulated

the intentions of The Laughing Girls in a series of grant proposals. It takes a careful
reader to unpack the work in Condemned Building and no process work is shown.
In many ways, Condemned Building is a finished novel while The Laughing Girls can
be read as an annotated manuscript. As such, The Laughing Girls offers an unusual
look into Darden’s working process. Darden was critical of the marginalization of the
arts (and architecture in particular) and the alienation of architecture from the public.
He attributed this marginalization to the fact that designers and artists rarely share
their design process with the public, or even with each other. The intention of The
Laughing Girls was to overcome that alienation through storytelling. This project,
however, was not the voice of a sole author. It was intentionally collaborative and
interdisciplinary. In an undated portfolio titled The Graphic Novel: An Investigation
of the Interdisciplinary Design Process, Darden lists an array of collaborators and dis
ciplines.3 This collaging of collaborators would potentially allow Darden to reimagine
the role of the architect and architecture. The format of the graphic novel, according
to Darden, allowed for collaboration among all of the disciplines represented in the
studio. As well, the doubling of image and text to tell a story inherent to the medium
has a long lineage. Images of Greek vases, themselves covered by pictograms that tell
a story, are very much present in Darden’s notes for The Laughing Girls.
The first iteration of The Laughing Girls was for an architectural competition
in the early 1990s. Over the next five-plus years, the project and story evolved. By
1994 a series of short drafts had been constructed, as well as a series of artifacts that
included: two laughs modeled in foam, drawings of Helen’s cane, a juicer, and at least
two ankle tattoos.4 The most complete version dates from 1994 and includes eight
pages of collages of text and image. The story follows three girls—Polly, Cass and
Helen—as they travel from Troy, New York to Troy, Greece.5 Polly and Cass are
twin adolescent sisters who, after an argument with their parents, move out of their
childhood home and begin living in a converted water tower in Troy, New York, with
the older Helen, a classics major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, as their guardian.
Just after moving in, Cass absentmindedly leaves an antique soup tureen on the stove,
which causes a fire that destroys the water tower. Helen, who had been sleeping in
after a night of debauchery, is forced to jump from the tower and breaks her leg.6
Given the state of the house, the girls decide to move from Troy, New York, to the
other, ancient, Troy. En route, the girls travel through Boston where they have their
first taste of alcohol and decide to get tattoos.
Arriving in Athens, the girls feel a strange sense of déjà vu—the Plaka of Athens
reminds them of the forest around Troy. Travelling north to the site of ancient Troy
3 Participants included: Kelton Osborn (Print making), Jeff Dawson (Urban Design), James Trewitt
(Furniture Design), Virginia Grote (Ceramics), Andrew Grote (Cartooning and Illustration), Marty
Hammond (Computer Graphics), Mark Wilkerson (Industrial Design) and Douglas Darden—Program
Director (Architecture).
4 Drawings of the cane, the juicer and the tattoos are in the archive. Additional drawings exist in the
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts library at Colombia University. The locations of the modeled laughs
are not known at this time.
5 Darden consistently refers to Troy, “Greece.” This historical malapropism makes for a better story.
6 Darden included many x-rays of broken legs and various ways of bringing bones back together in the
archive. One specific image used by Darden in various collages is described as a “Delayed Union,”
which sounds as much like a Duchampian pun as it does a medical procedure.
The Laughing Girls 201
the girls begin to feel more and more at home, which makes them giggle and then
laugh. In the new Troy, they begin to build a new home, which curiously takes on
the characteristics of the girls themselves. As they walk through the house, the house
begins to laugh with them. A full 28 days since leaving their parents’ house a double
event takes place. Polly and Helen decide to go for a swim; Cass stays home planning
to make wine using a juicer that had survived the fire in Troy, NY. Without thinking,
Cass plugs the 110-volt juicer (American) into the 220-volt outlet (Greek) at precisely
the same moment that Polly and Helen slip out of their clothes and into the sea.
Darden concludes the story with the following:
A huge spark leaped out of the house while Polly and Helen—still laughing—
leaped into the sea. Perhaps the girls’ laughs combined with the spark—no one
knows—but when Helen and Polly rose to the surface of the sea, they saw a whole
new array of bright islands . . . The islands were all transfigured pieces of Troy,
New York. Cass got the last laugh.7
After the conclusion of the story Darden offers the following explanation:
This twice told tale of The Laughing Girls from Troy NY is a work in progress
graphic novel. The novel is a hybrid construction, image and story. The Laughing
Girls is an attempt to approximate Piet Mondrian’s proviso of 1937: The culture
of particular form is approaching its end. The culture of determined relations has
begun.
In toto, thirty-three objects are being designed which interrelate to create a
comprehensive story. At the heart of this story is a critique of the thinking which
characterizes American design, specifically that which polarizes the human body
from architecture, architecture from landscape, and design at large from a choral
event.8
Similar to his discontinuous genealogies in Condemned Building, Darden plays with

the latent potential of found objects in The Laughing Girls. Each object in a context
carries a certain meaning. When the object is removed, perhaps fragmented, and
then inserted into a new context, another meaning emerges. The original meaning,
however, is never wholly lost. Marcel Duchamp’s (or perhaps R. Mutt’s) Fountain,
for example, is both urinal and fountain.9 In a sense, Duchamp’s ready-mades are also
“twice told.” Similarly, Paul Ricoeur proposed that all discourse overflows with a
surplus of meaning.10 This surplus of meaning is at the root of metaphor, fiction, and
7 Douglas Darden, The Laughing Girls, unpublished graphic novel (1994), 8.
8 Darden, Laughing Girls, 8.
9 The rationale for, and defense of, Duchamp’s most famous readymade, the Fountain, was presented
in the second volume of the surrealist journal, The Blind Man (May 1917). In an article entitled “The
Richard Mutt Case,” the anonymous author explains, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made
the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so
that its useful significance disappeared under a new title and point of view—created a new thought for
that object.” Most scholars agree that Duchamp was indeed the author.
10 Paul Ricoeur describes surplus of meaning as the residue of literal interpretation. He discusses this idea
as well as the issue of metaphor and symbol in Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of
Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
202 Marc J. Neveu
also jokes. A pun works because there exist multiple meanings of words and similar
sounding words.11 A collage acts as a visual metaphor and follows Aristotle’s under
standing of the trope: “the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.”12
So too do many of the artifacts produced and objects collected that surround The
Laughing Girls.
Twice-told tales
Three stories inform The Laughing Girls; at least one is fictional. The first is a curi
ous case of mass hysteria reported on January 30, 1962 in Kashasha, Tanzania. An
epidemic of contagious laughter broke out at a mission-run girls’ school and contin
ued for six months. Ninety-five of the 159 students were affected. Laboratory tests,
however, found no infectious or toxic evidence. Three girls later came forward and
claimed to be the instigators of the laughter. This case is the only fully documented
account of such mass hysteria in the twentieth century. In early 1992 Darden made
a proposal to travel to the Bukoba district in Tanzania to research the site where this
“curious case” took place. In the proposal, he intended to “design a building to con
tain the schoolgirls’ laughter. I have no intention of designing the project to inhibit or
stop their laughter, but rather, I will propose a work of architecture which gives the
girls laughter a place to be.”13
Darden travelled to Greece in 1982. While there he visited Monemvasia and met
a German woman, Christiane Gollek, who re-named herself “Sophia” on her first
trip from her homeland of Germany to Greece. Sophia became quite close to an
American traveler, Janice Stechel who, while in Greece, renamed herself “Janus.”
The two women were quite close and even thought they might be twins. According to
Sophia, “It was as if we were each other’s shadows—not in a bad way, but positive,
like in a dream . . . we were sharing each other’s dreams.”14 A decade later, Darden
returned and again visited Sophia. In correspondence after the trip, Sophia told
Darden a story that resonates with The Laughing Girls. Sophia and Janus hiked to
Bassae to spend the night next to the temple to Apollo. They pitched their tent under
a large oak tree that sat opposite the temple. Once they had settled in, a lightning
storm began. The lightning brought thunder and a severe rainstorm that flooded
their tent. To overcome the fear of the storm, the girls began telling each other jokes.
Sophia thought that the laughter kept them alive. In another letter, Sophia describes
the ritual of the Epiphany (Éπf _ ´ i¡f_)—named by Sophia as the holiday “of the
lights”—in which swimmers dive into the sea to collect a cross that has been used to
bless the sea (and was then thrown in). In this story, Sophia introduces Carina—a
third girl, who was a bit older and acted as both mentor and guide to Sophia and
Janus.
11 Darden made a list of his favorite jokes from the movie Airplane. He categorized the various jokes as
puns, inversions, and repetitions.
12 Aristotle, The Poetics, in Aristotle, The Poetic; Longinus: On the Sublime; and Demetrius: On Style,
translated by W. Hamilton Fyfe (1927; London: William Heinemann, 1932), XXII, 9.
The translator further explains that the use of metaphor implies “the power of detecting ‘identity in
difference.’” This last phrase is often translated as the “similarities of dissimilars.”
13 Project Statement for Laughing Place, unpublished.
14 Christiane Gollek to Douglas Darden, unpublished letter, October 1982. Darden rewrites the quote in
a page of notes summarizing Gollek’s correspondence.
The third story is Euripides’ classical drama, The Trojan Women. Three girls—
Helen, Polyxena, and Cassandra—are involved in the play. In Darden’s version, Polly
is the namesake of Polyxena, the most beautiful daughter of Priam, who was sacri
ficed on the tomb of Achilles. Cass, or Cassandra, the twin to Polyxena, could see the
future, but was cursed because no one would believe her. Helen is the doppelgänger
for the other Helen who may have caused the Trojan War. In the notes around The
Laughing Girls, Darden makes frequent reference to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, in
which Nietzsche blames Euripides’ moralizing tone for the decline of Greek tragedy.
Darden, as quoted earlier, saw a similar decline in contemporary design thinking.
The Laughing Girls may be interpreted as a rewriting of Euripides’ Trojan Women to
promote the Dionysian spirit rather than an Apollonian nature. Given his auspicious
birth, Dionysius is often referred to as “twice born” (bp´k μdo¡´l¡n).
Twice-told Troys
The Laughing Girls was intended to take place in two places with some transit in the
middle. Darden refers to the sites, not only as Troy, New York and Troy, Greece, but
also as Troy I and Troy II. This is a small, but important, distinction. There is really
one Troy, with two sites. A diagram drawn by Darden outlines the story. Part One
takes place in Troy I (New York). Part Two takes place in transit. Part Three takes
place in Troy II (ancient). Each part would take place over the course of nine days,
with a final day (the 28th) acting as a postscript that returns the novel to the begin
ning. Each part is nine days long; the three nines plus one give the year: 1999. The
28-day calendar is based on lunar and menstrual cycles.15 Notes throughout the dia
gram (“shedding the egg,” “re-lining the uterus,” “ovulation,” “releasing the egg”)
make a direct connection to pregnancy. In many ways, this project is an affirmation
of life, unlike Darden’s meditation on dying in the Oxygen House in Condemned
Building.
A sectional drawing of a female figure at the bottom of the page maps the vari
ous parts of the story onto a female body (facing east) and includes the three main
characters. Part One includes objects that relate to the feet and the knees, and here
Darden described his design strategy as one that would work with fragments. The
girls’ house is represented as a collage of parts based on a water tower. A break in
the thigh (Helen’s) makes the transition to the next part, both in the diagram and
the story. Elements in the second part relate to Helen and to the upper legs or torso,
and are identified without establishing a full connection to other parts of the story (a
rental car, wine bar, tattoos). In this section, the design process is iterative but does
not achieve completion. This is also the section “in transit.” Part Three is, according
to Darden, the full embodiment of laughter. The site is referred to as a “laughscape”
and their house is referred to as a “Laughing House” [Plate 55].
Twice-told artifacts
The representations were not intended to be necessarily projections of built work.
Images produced by Darden were more often collages of existing artifacts. For
15 Also present in the archive are planning charts from Planned Parenthood that explain the Fertility
Awareness Method (FAM).
204 Marc J. Neveu
example, the plan of the Hudson River in Troy, New York and an x-ray of a broken
leg become a template for Helen’s cane; maps of ancient Troy (themselves a palimp
sest of constructions over time) give form to ankle tattoos; an image of a water tower
in Kaiserslautern, Germany becomes the elevation of the girls’ house in Troy, New
York; the hubcaps of an El Camino (a vehicle that is both car and truck) become
Hoplite shields. Many other examples exist.
The artifact that Darden seems to have studied most was the “found object” of
laughter. In 1992 he claimed to have recorded 27 young girls laughing. Three were
chosen and named Polly, Cass, and Helen.16 Other visual records include fluoroscopic
images and x-rays that were produced while the subject was “chuckling” and “laugh
ing robustly.” These “laughs” were then modeled in foam. Auditory analysis of the
laughing led to “temporal sections” for each of the laughs. These section cuts were
translated into three-dimensional form that Darden referred to as “topographies.”
While there is no direct mapping of projects onto the laugh track, Darden does, as
mentioned above, use the term “laughscape” in lieu of “landscape.” Laughter is
also related to the making of a room. According to Darden, “Laughter starts with
the space of the body, moves outward to affect a structure, and creates a site for an
event.”17 Indeed, the space of laughter informs the section of the girls’ house in Troy
[Plate 56].
Twice-told identities
In many ways, The Laughing Girls may be Darden’s most autobiographical pro
ject. Darden spent the 1988–1989 academic year at the American Academy in
Rome. While there, he experienced bouts of exhaustion. Returning to Denver after
his fellowship, he was diagnosed with leukemia. A friend recommended a book
that described Norman Cousins’ use of laughter to fight illness. Although Darden
relied on medical treatment, this approach was influential. While working on the
project, Darden noted that his cancer had gone into remission. Darden claimed “the
theme of the girl’s laughter was chosen because nothing else makes me proceed in
this world with a greater sense of hopeful lightness.”18 Unbearably light, given the
context.
Darden’s heritage was Greek and his family name derives from Dardanus, who
was the son of Zeus and Electra. Dardanus’ grandson, Tros, gave his name to the
city of Troy. Dardania thus became Troy. The strait just north of Troy is known
as the Dardanelles, a name Darden had fun with in postcards to himself. Priam, the
great-grandson of Tros, was the last king of Troy. Among his many children were, of
course, Helen, Cassandra, and Polyxena, the namesakes of Darden’s three laughing
girls. In an interesting twist, Robert Graves relates the Greek Varvanos (b_ ´ lb_ikn)
“burned up” (from the verb b_lb_ ´ πot, dardapto, “to wear, to slay, to burn up”) to
the name Dardanus.19 Fire is, of course, a key element in The Laughing Girls.
16 Anna Saporito, the daughter of an architect in Denver, is referenced in Darden’s notes for the project.
Polaroid photographs of Anna laughing were taken and used in various collages. She is, most likely, the
source of all the girls’ laughter.
19 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1955), 89, note 2.
Figure 22.1 House in Troy II collaged over a model of laughter.

Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy
of Allison Collins
206 Marc J. Neveu
In his proposal for the Scholar-in-Residence position at the California College of
the Arts and Crafts in 1994, Darden makes a specific connection between narrative
and identity:
The new work on the architectural novel is based on my belief in the necessity
of making architecture by folding other disciplines into its inquiry. Through
this seemingly circumspect approach the architect can more cogently seek a
recommencement with origins. It is through a recommencement with origins
that architecture establishes resonant cultural identities. A key component of this
recommencement is acknowledging that each of us has a life story, an inner nar
rative that we construct and which is our identity; that is, the narrative constructs
us. To assert the human subject at the center of architectural practice, it is crucial
to deepen the correspondence between personal, cultural, and architectural nar
ratives. The study of myths and stories as part of the act of designing is necessary
for the mooring of architecture to our culture. This mooring is further realized
by envisaging buildings and designed objects as having the capacity to tell stories
about the inhabitants and the places where they reside.20
This interplay of agencies not only affords a potentially rich and grounded reading of
place, it also provides a particular experience of selfhood and, by extension, identity.
In this way, metaphor is not simply a trope to embellish language, but rather a seman
tic innovation that holds the potential to re-describe reality. The role of the architect,
then, may be the invention of plots by synthesizing the heterogeneity of the world in
which we live. This understanding of both place and self may open up the potential of
architecture to provide more than shelter. Indeed, when one makes architecture, it is
always for another. It is an eminently social act, just like storytelling. This recognition
of “the other” is also inherently ethical, leading to a sense of identity and selfhood
that is essential to any sense of responsibility. It is clear that Darden understood this
to be not only the potential but also the obligation of building.
23 Mi punge vaghezza, ovvero i
misteri del mestiere1
Rebecca Williamson
“Mi punge vaghezza . . .” Marco Frascari said one day, pronouncing the words with
the kind of emphasis that made it sound like a citation from a text that any serious reader
of Italian literature pertinent to architecture should know. Frascari, for those who do not
know him, is an angel of architecture2. Before he became an angel, he produced drawings,
words, and actions that helped many of us think about and make architecture in ways we
had not done before.
Among other memorable advice, he recommended to “choose a tangential topic
and work on it in a tangential way.”3 “Tan-GEN-ti-al,” as he sonorously pronounced
it, did not sound dismissive, but instead pushed to the foreground an association with
tangere (to touch, as in the word tangible), so that the tangent could be defined as
much by the way it touched a topic as by its deviation from it.4 What follows is a story
about an adventure along such a tangent.
Frascari’s provocation set off a search for the source and implications of the phrase
mi punge vaghezza, but where to start? In Filarete, Alberti, and the other writers of
architectural treatises from the fifteenth century onward? It did not sound like them.5
Not that their writing never veers off the topic of architecture, strictly understood.
It most certainly does. The phrase just did not seem to match the qualities of their
writing, qualities only accessible by plunging into their books as close to their original
1 The title is untranslatable and frankly constructed of phrases that have become clichés in contemporary
Italian, as the rest of the text will reveal. The first part indicates vague longing, to be discussed in greater
detail. The second part is a common play on words based on the similarity of the words for mystery
(mistero) and craft (mestiere), evoking the acquisition of special knowledge inherent in craft. In Italian
architecture is a mestiere: a craft like bricklaying or carpentry.
2 Frascari, Marco, “A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration” in
Journal of Architectural Education (1984–) Vol. 44, No. 1 (Nov., 1990), pp. 11–19.
3 He spoke these words in an unrecorded conversation during the early 1990s.
4 A true tangent, in which a straight line and a curve coincide at only one point, is a near impossibility in
architecture once it passes from what Leon Battista Alberti calls “lineaments” that exist in the mind to
concretization, for in built works the touching parts are made up of stuff that takes up space, thus their
connection, however articulated, itself occupies space.
5 Leon Battista Alberti, or, if not him, then another of the treatise writers, would be the first
place one would look for a quotation in a conversation of this kind mainly because they had
so many curious things to say. Alberti, when he wrote in Italian, used more earthy words like
“più grassa Minerva,” which is untranslatable, but taken literally could mean “the fatter (goddess)
Minerva,” and seems intended to convey the relationship between intellect and tactile experience. In
any case “Mi punge vaghezza” sounds too ethereal for Alberti, and frankly for any of the other treatise
writers.
208 Rebecca Williamson
state as possible, surrendering to their peculiarities rather than seeking to extract only
the parts that lend themselves to clear summaries.6
Vaghezza originally did not convey vagueness in the negative sense with which
we might now view it, but instead a constellation of meanings related to wavering
movement, mystery, grace, and desire that are not neatly summarized in translation.7
The expression certainly has its place in architectural literature, for example in the
writing of the eighteenth-century Turinese architect Bernardo Vittone, conveying
his spiritual ardor, or in the more agitated words of the Venetian Giambattista
Piranesi, who described architecture as “soda vaghezza,” an untranslateable phrase
that conveys the paradoxical combination of wavering and solidity (in the sense of
uovo sodo, a hardboiled egg).8 It was surely one or the other or more likely both of
these authors that had sparked our conversation, but the mi punge did not sound
quite right for either.
Pungere relates to the English words “puncture,” “pungent,” and “poignant.” It
could convey the poke of a needle, the sting of an insect, or, by extension, the sensa
tion of a strong smell or an acute emotion, none of these being particularly common
notions in architectural writing. Perhaps mi punge vaghezza is an expression derived
from literature rather than architecture? Could it have been Dante? Petrarca? Both
certainly use the words pungere and vaghezza, but the exact expression does not seem
to appear.9 How about Leopardi? He uses vaghezza and its variants often, but not,
apparently, that particular phrase, although you, dear reader, are invited to continue
the search.10
For days, weeks, years, I looked for the phrase, regularly pleading for a clue so that
I could at least narrow it down to a single author or historical period. No matter how
much I explored inside the ancient edifice of architectural thought, and among its
annexes in other disciplines, there were still more spaces yet to reveal themselves. As
time passed, it became easier to get caught up in something else, only to remember,
6 This approach renders its practitioners skeptical of survey courses in the history of architecture based
on image identification and other convenient modes of summarizing and mastering the known while
avoiding the invitations to wallow in the unknown with which these authors tease their readers.
7 For a literary discussion of the word vaghezza and its associations with desire and indeterminacy, see
Giacomo Devoto, Archivio glottologico italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1964), 135–64.
8 Piranesi surely used this phrase somewhere, but how to retrieve it in the pages of his writing to sub
stantiate the memory? Another bibliographic search is in order. An inversion of the phrase occurs in a
mid-eighteenth-century text describing a religious building in the diocese of Milan: “La fabbrica . . . con
quella vaghezza soda ne’ finimenti anche esteriori, si conta fra le più maestose. . . .” in Nicoló Sormani,
Giornata terza. De’ passeggi storico-topografico-critici nella città, indi nella diocesi di Milano, ad
erudizione, e a diporto della gioventù nobile, e massime ecclesiastica, coll’intreccio di varie dissertazioni
(Milan: Malatesta, 1752), 139. The term vaghezza appears several times in Bernardo Antonio Vittone’s
Istruzioni elementari per indirizzo de’ giovani allo studio dell’ architettura civile: divise in libri tre’, e
dedicate alla maestà infinita di Dio Ottimo Massimo (Lugano: Agnelli, 1760). He uses the word to
convey desire, such as the desire to learn (8) and also as an equivalent to elegance, with implications of
grace and femininity, for example in referring to the Corinthian order (414).
9 For Dante’s use of the word vaghezza, see Inferno, Canto 29, line 114 and Purgatorio, Canto 18, line
144. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia (Milano: Hoepli, 1985) 149, 282.
10 Among multiple examples, line 23 of Canto I of Leopardi’s 1816 Appressamento della morte contains
the phrase “Quella vaghezza rimirando fiso” that is vaguely echoed in Piranesi’s soda vaghezza (men
tioned in note 7) in the juxtaposition of the wavering, indeterminate, and indefinite sense of vaghezza
with the firmness of fiso. See Le poesie di Giacomo Leopardi a cura di Giovanni Mestica, (Florence:
Barbèra, 1892), 404.
Mi punge vaghezza 209
think about it again, and wonder anew where to look. The specter of bibliographic
infinitude that haunts all research loomed.
When the World Wide Web appeared, it threw how we search and share into
disarray. We use our screens to answer almost any question that occurs to us, to
scan texts for words and phrases instead of really reading them, even to peruse old
books that we used to have to travel far to find and only touch with cotton gloves and
velvet-covered weights, sneezing from the dust. Now the screen shows that “mi punge
vaghezza” is common in speech and music. If only the phrase were labeled “obscure”
or “archaic.” But no, an abundance of information blocks understanding. The most
sober and scholastic-sounding assessment characterizes the phrase as an unattributed
“pedantic locution,” today used strictly with a joking tone.11
Normally the expression would be “mi punge vaghezza di.” The poke would be in
a direction, toward a goal or object. Without the di it indicates a generalized state: a
wavelike, background hum of restless curiosity. The lesson, after all these years, seems
to be that it is the pungency or poignancy of vagueness or vagaries that pokes us to
pursue whatever it is we are going to pursue, out of passion, not diligence, often not
even knowing if there is any goal, purpose, or end.
That cryptic and fragmentary bit of a past conversation appears unlikely to yield
much more than the story told here, although the search never ends and someone
reading these words might know or find the true origin of the phrase, in which case a
new chapter of the story might begin. The value in the lesson is instead in the implica
tion that the right place to look for something you do not already know would be old
books. These are exactly the right place to look for the wrong thing because of all the
treasures buried there, ready to sparkle again in the light of a new reading.
While reading ancient volumes we can smell the past in their pages, and, sensing
unfamiliar air, feel the presence of the writer and his entourage. The spine of the
book mirrors ours, and the two sides complete the enclosure formed by our arms.
The writer becomes a companion in unspoken conversations, invading our thoughts,
looking over our shoulders, nudging, judging, and provoking. Such companions from
the past yearn for connections to the living, thus continue to draw others into their
pages. Nothing pleases them more than when readers commune and debate the words
on the pages, aerating them in the process. The lines between present and past blur, as
do those between student and teacher.
The approach to understanding described here is thus about learning and learning,
not teaching and learning, nor even learning and teaching. In Italian, as in English, the
words for teaching and learning can be interchangeable in some informal or archaic
contexts. Imparare describes both how you learn (impari) and how you “learn me”
(m’impari), the latter a colloquial usage in both languages12. Imparucchiare, a word
for learning poorly, evokes the act of putting on a wig, as if to hide the baldness of
thought. To learn one has to remain bare. Only thus are we able to don the disciplines
11 “Dizionario Treccani,” http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/pungere. Accessed November 5, 2014. As

an example of the use of pungere, the same dictionary gives a citation from the Stanze of the poet
Angelo Poliziano in which he describes bold nymphs prodding Silene’s timid donkey with a switch.
Angelo Poliziano, CXII, in Le elegantissime stanze di m. Angelo Poliziano, e La ninfa Tiberina del
Molza colla vita del Poliziano scritta dal sig. abate Pierantonio Serassi (Bergamo: Lancelotti, 1747), 40.
For her assistance with the Poliziano text and other obscure terms, thanks to Maria Romagnoli, deemed
by Italo Calvino himself to be a brava lettrice.
12 Brambilla, Giuseppe, Saggio di uno spoglio filologico (Como: Ostinelli, 1831), 113.
and eruditions that ornament architecture.13 This is neither a passive nor aggressive
attitude toward learning. It is not about receiving facts, nor about conquering them.
Instead, it is a multivalent conversation, in which anyone, past or present, can chime
in at any time.
The lessons that Frascari left with us increase in value over time through a multipli
cation of effect. The formula has perhaps to do with his way of using language: often
concrete, never obfuscating, but always leaving room for interpretation. For example,
he once told a student, “what your detail needs is a piece of bacon.” The oddity of the
comment caught the student and those observing the exchange off guard. How could
one make sense of such a statement in the earnest context of contemporary design?
What does bacon have to do with design or construction?
The statement held within it history, science, and craft. He revealed that an oily, pli
able substance placed between parts would prevent moisture seepage and compensate
for differences in how materials react to temperature and humidity. It could, at the
same time, stand in for any transition in a joint. Frascari chose the word “bacon” for
its everydayness, conscious of the associations the word held in English. No doubt he
liked the evocation of the ambiance of the diner breakfast and the connotations of
dietary indulgence in an era in which fat was seen as a menace and bacon had not yet
had its trendy moment. Later we pondered the relationship between rendering as a
way to purify fat and as a kind of drawing and between strutto, or suet, and struttura,
structure.14 As with ingegno and ingegnere, or mistero and mestiere, branches of lin
guistic development rub together and can form new grafts. Important is not the proof
of etymology, but the fertility of the mating of ideas.
During his last years, as illness began to overtake him, Frascari would share obser
vations about his experiences and the meaning he derived from them. Just as when,
years before, he had broken his wrist and leg in the same accident, and mused about
ossa and ossatura, these more recent medical experiences became another source of
ideas about physical experience and its implications. The elements of our conversa
tion had to do with bodily understanding and the errors of the architects, the latter
understood both as contemporary architecture’s culpability with regard to the dismal
state of medical environments, and in a completely different sense, a medition on the
movement and formal implications inherent in the words errare, vagare, mutare: how
shapes and paths change, for better or worse.15
13 “Architecti est scientia pluribus disciplinis et variis eruditionibus ornate.” Marco Vitruvius Pollio, De
Architectura, The Loeb classical library, 251, translated by Frank Grainger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University press, 1931), Book I, Chapter 1, 6.
14 Thanks to Maria Romagnoli for pointing out that strutto, or rendered fat, derives its name from the
past participle of the word struggere, which means to melt or liquefy, thus distinguished from lardo,
which is a block of intact pork fat sliced thinly and enjoyed as a delicacy in Italy. The themes of various
forms of fat recall Alberti’s più grassa Minerva, discussed in note 4. In a footnote to the second para
graph of Book One of his translation of Alberti’s Della Pittura, Spencer indicates Alberti’s source as
the phrase “Agamus igitur pinguiu, ut aiunt, Minerva” in Cicero’s De amicita V, 19. In De Pictura, his
Latin version of the text, Alberti echoes Cicero with the word pinguiore, which would indicate plump
ness. In the contemporaneous Italian text he chose instead the more crass term grassa, reinforcing the
association with the substance of fat but also the general meatiness of the Goddess. See Leon Battista
Alberti, On Painting, translated by John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale, 1966), 100. For a discussion
of the relationship between pingue and grasso, which are not quite synonyms, see Niccolò Tommaseo,
Nuovo dizionario dei sinonimi della lingua italiana (Florence: Vieusseux, 1838), 446.
15 Roughly translated, Marco said: “After six weeks of intensive radiation and chemotherapy . . . where
Frascari’s implicit reference was to the Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti, a
manuscript completed in 1625 by the Sienese doctor Teofilo Gallacini, who sought
through analogy with notions of human health to expose the “errors” of architecture in
order to avoid their repetition and diffusion [Figure 23.1].16 While Gallacini explicitly
compared architectural soundness to the health in the human body, his concerns had
mainly to do with practical decisions impacting buildings before, during, and after
construction, such as the choice of site and materials, the distribution of loads, the
soundness of connections, and the preservation and restoration of existing structures.
In Italian errare and vagare are near synonyms. Both imply wandering movement, a
deviation from a predetermined path, that could be thought of negatively (the English
senses of “err” and “vague”) but that might also have a positive value, akin to the
tangential search described earlier, perhaps a not too distant cousin of the dérive
(drift) of the Situationists.17 This tension between the sure path and the meander, and
between rule and invention, is perennial in architecture.
Gallacini’s meditation on architectural erring inspired a particularly fraught display
of this tension in a juxtaposition of rigorist diatribe and florid drawings, the drawing
hand indulging in rendering visible the very forms that the accompanying written
words decry. In his 1767 edition of Gallacini’s text, to which he added illustrations,
and his 1771 Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di
continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti, the
Venetian architect and engraver Antonio Visentini used his own drawings and words
to expand Gallacini’s text and pushed his medical analogy further to show certain
architectural forms as deformed, even pathological [Figure 23.2].
As Visentini put it, his goal was to bring into plain view the most pernicious errors
introduced by the architects of his century, lambasting those who had pursued experi
ments with form as deforming the beauty and grace of architecture through “bizarre
trifling.”18 The illustrative technique Visentini employed, with fragments of architec
tural details colliding in what we might now call mash-ups, seems intended to demean
works in order to prove them malformed, bizarre, and thus erroneous.
As severe as Visentini’s judgements were, it is obvious that he took pleasure in draw
ing every curve.19 Those lines do not dissuade but instead render visible tantalizing
transgressions out of which new forms and ideas might be born [Figure 23.3].
Similarly, much of what we call pathology in the human body arises from everyday
I lived in a chemotherapeutic nirvana, I found my brain in a phial on the moon. I threaded it back in
through my ear. After which, I began to think. I’ve thought a lot about architecture and about the
body and how architects operate badly in the current situation. I’ve started to write something using
as instruments “memes” and “mirror neurons.” (Marco Frascari, e-mail message to the author dated
September 25, 2010.) Note the use of words such as “operate” and “instruments” that indicate a com
parison between architectural inquiry and surgery.
16 Teofilo Gallacini, Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1767), and Antonio
Visentini, Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al trattato
di Teofilo Gallacini sopra gli errori degli architetti. (Venice: Pasquali, 1771).
17 Guy-Ernest Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les Lèvres nues 9 (November 1956); and, in a modified
version, in Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958).
18 Visentini, Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, 1.
19 In another endeavor aimed at addressing problems by rendering them visible, Visentini had previously
illustrated Giovanni Poleni’s study of the structure of the dome of Saint Peter’s, meticulously recording
every meander of each crack. Giovanni Poleni, Memorie istoriche della gran cupola del tempio vaticano:
e de’ danni di essa, e de’ ristoramenti loro, divise in libri cinque (Padua: Stamperia del Seminario, 1748).
Figure 23.1 Title page drawn by Antonio Visentini for the first edition of Trattato di Teofilo
Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1767).
Courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2894-465)
In the center of the image the tools of architectural drawing hang from a ring,
loosely tied by the cord of a plumb line, an image that anticipates Frascari’s
discussion of elegance as an exposed connection or binding (ex-legare). Overlaid
upon the tools in a manner reminiscent of the collage-like organization of certain
of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s drawings is the image of a rolled sheet of paper
on which the title is written. The frame features plant forms that merge in places
with the architectural details. The specific construction of the frame, with its
juxtaposition of curves and spirals, resembles what Visentini and his associates
called rabéschi, a cognate of arabesque in which the implication of Arabic origins
is a stand-in for the exotic, with the hint of the feminine and the frivolous not
far behind. The image is similar to the forms that Visentini would hold up for
ridicule in his continuation of Gallacini’s treatise, the Osservazioni di Antonio
Visentini, architetto veneto, che servono di continuazione al Trattato di Teofilo
Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771).
Figure 23.2 Frontispiece of Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto,

che servono di continuazione al Trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori
degli architetti (Venice: Pasquali, 1771).
In the center of the image a woman seated on a rock holds a compass with which
she inscribes a circle on a tablet, her gaze seemingly focused into the distance
over her exposed left shoulder, her arm somewhat contorted as her left shoulder
thrusts forward. Her image is framed by another circle, this one showing the
signs of the zodiac. Cancer is at the top. On the upper right Virgo and on the
upper left Taurus are obscured by garlands hanging over the frame. Topping the
circle is a form resembling a ribbon threaded through a shell, evoking rocaille,
and other figures associated with Rococo decoration, along with more garlands,
appear below. Below the zodiac circle, framed by curling forms resembling
stylized leaves, sit the words La Perfezione. Are we to read perfection in the
simplicity of the circle (which any architect knows is one of the most difficult
forms to execute)? What then are we to make of the awkwardness of the figure,
the obscuring of part of the zodiac, and the other flourishes around the frame?
Figure 23.3 Montage of architectural details from “P. Pozzi” (Padre Andrea Pozzo, to whom
Visentini refers as “architetto biasimato” (blamed or blameworthy architect) in
Antonio Visentini’s Osservazioni di Antonio Visentini, architetto veneto, che
servono di continuazione al trattato di Teofilo Gallaccini sopra gli errori degli
architetti. (Venice: Pasquali, 1771), 41.
The original images are from Pozzo’s book on perspective drawing for painting
and architecture, his Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, with engravings
by Vincenzo Mariotti. Visentini shows fragments taken out of their context
as illustrations of principles of perspective for the purposes of generating
illusionistic paintings. The images at the middle left and top right, labeled n. 2
and n. 4 respectively, are in Pozzo’s book shown as two complete frames placed
side-by-side as Figure 100. In addition to truncating each image and nesting
them together with others, Visentini has embellished the detailing to intensify the
prominence of the flourishes. In his n. 6 he has gone so far as to transform the
clearly articulated wings of the angel (Figure 102 in Part II of the Perspectiva)
into feathery whorls. Visentini’s commentary describes the images in Pozzo’s
book as unworthy of taking physical form (aver corpo) and as “condemned,
and to be perpetually condemned, for the great improprieties contained within
them.” See Andrea Pozzo Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (Rome: Typis
Joannis Jacobi Komarek, 1693 (Part I) and 1700 (Part II)).
processes of replication and growth that take a novel direction. The danger these
processes pose is not in the forms themselves, but in their proliferation, the cases in
which cells manage to override the body’s editing process, known as apoptosis, that
normally keeps faulty cells from persisting and wreaking havoc.20
Frascari shared his fascination with parallels between architecture and notions of
health and illness, themes that continued to animate his conversations as his own
health began to fail. With whatever skepticism he may have viewed Visentini’s pro
ject, he was ruthless against what he saw as the contemporary errors of architects.
These were—and remain—never more obvious than in the hospitals and clinics in
which he spent so much time during his last years—the supposedly easy-to-clean
surfaces that harbor illness, the monotonous light, the lack of qualitative articulation
of the spaces, and the oppressive smoothness throughout.
Frascari provided a glimpse at how this performance-based approach to building,
fine tuned to minimize expenditures and maximize efficiency, increasingly infiltrates
our institutional environments and has made inroads into domestic spaces, suffo
cating sensibility. He understood better than anyone the responsibility to not yield
to the pressure to become part of a machine for the production of conformity. By
example and provocation, he prodded beyond habits and preconceptions, toward the
“meraviglia nel quotidiano,” the miracle/marvel in the everyday.21
Marco Frascari opened the doors for the tangential adventures described here by indi
cating a mode of searching liable to turn up more than the seeker could imagine find
ing. As our built environment and educational institutions alike succumb increasingly
to the banality of the clinical environments in which Frascari spent so many of his last
days, it is ever more important to follow his example, and privilege questioning over
answering and invention over certainty, in a constant state of seeking, such that the
true pleasures of our mestiere unfold in the process of probing its misteri. E ancora, e
per sempre, ci punge vaghezza . . .
20 Pertinent to this analogy is the proliferation of formal variations spawned of the increasing technical
ability to generate shapes. This tendency in architecture, called “parametricism” by some, today exists
as a nearly neo-Rococo style impacting mostly high-budget constructions in which novelty is a key
objective. As automated production makes these forms more feasible as built works, what processes
will determine what grows, persists, or perishes?
21 The phrase “l’importante è di trovare la meraviglia nel quotidiano,” which is consistent with Marco’s
acts and statements in other contexts, appears in a collage-drawing that Marco dedicated to his wife
Paola’s aunt Luciana. It is currently in the collection of the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.
The complete text states that: “The phenomenon of thaumaturgic architecture must be investigated. The
miracle (meraviglia) is the last category of thought left in the hands of architects. It is a very difficult cat
egory because we live in a world dominated by an excess of miracles. It is important to find the miracle
in the everyday. A weathervane is and must again be a source of marvel.” (Date unknown, translation R.
Williamson, 2015.) Thanks to Paola Frascari, Federica Goffi, and Claudio Sgarbi for explaining the con
text of the drawing and to Claudio for providing an image of the text. In other contexts Marco explained
that the excess of miracles could be seen in phenomena such as automatic doors that slide open as one
approaches without any effort on our part, or the water that pours from faucets with sensors. In an
earlier era these would have been marvelous experiences that we now barely notice and numbly accept as
ordinary. The miracle of the weathervane, on the other hand, is in the eloquent simplicity of the device.
24 Confabulatores Nocturni
Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan
From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is

total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-
odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not
infinite) . . . .1
Douglas Darden closed his book, Condemned Building, with an excerpt from Victor
Hugo’s famed chapter “This Will Kill That,” placing particular importance on the
written word as a portable conveyor of meaning—replacing a static architecture.2 The
words of Hugo’s Archdeacon are critical to any discussion involving literature and
architecture, seemingly so foreign to one another, for he claims that the two subjects
were once the same entity.
The theoretical project entitled Confabulatores Nocturni was born out of such
ideas and evolved into intertwined dreams that decipher and translate elements of
our own artistic conscience, with texture, surface, and shadow serving as letters of
a new alphabet. Existing between sunset and sunrise, the premise of Confabulatores
Nocturni is that the 11 volumes of illustrations contained in Diderot and d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie, a comprehensive catalogue of eighteenth-century society, are the visual
equivalent to Borges’ 26 orthographical characters, thereby possessing an infinite
number of, or 1,001, architectures.
By appropriating and recomposing through collage Diderot’s visual catalogue,
a series of forms emerged that were identified as places of refuge or perhaps even
tombs; they laid the groundwork for what would become an eight-by-eight niche
columbarium wall, with each niche holding a tomb or cabanon.3 The columbarium
is, in a sense, a library in the form of an upturned chessboard, holding the various
cabanons like so many urns. The conversations of the entombed are threaded by the
movement of a raven along the path of the elusive knight’s tour.4 Borges attributes
to Emerson the saying, “a library is a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead
1 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York:
New Directions, 1964), 54.
2 Douglas Darden, Condemned Building (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 158.
3 The Cabanon was initially introduced to us as a place designed by a hero, Le Corbusier, in Cap-Martin
in 1949. It was a place of refuge and, ultimately, a place of rest. To pay homage to others that influenced
our work, we proposed a set of cabins that would fictionally construct their own sense of time.
4 The knight’s tour describes a sequence of moves of a knight on a chessboard such that the knight occu
pies every square only once.
Confabulatores Nocturni 217
Figure 24.1 time[scape]lab, Columbarium, Xerox on clay board, 2010.

© Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan
218 Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan
men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their
pages.”5
Confabulatores Nocturni asks the following question: How might designers invoke
a reverence for artistic and literary precedent and engage in a kind of twilight—a
realm where dreams and storytelling expand upon existing conventions of architec
tural thought? The fictitious voices of various historic and literary figures stand as
characters in a game of chess and provide a platform from which to operate. Passage
to this game begins in the womb, enters the labyrinth, and crosses a threshold—a
bridge—to the observatory where one searches for understanding and meaning, for
alternative realities. This search necessitates the confessional, and ultimately ends in
silence.
Colloquy
In his lecture entitled “The Thousand and One Nights,” Borges references men whose
profession it was to tell stories during the night—the Confabulatores Nocturni. He
writes, “Those stories must have been fables. I suspect that the enchantment of fables
is not in their moral. What enchanted Aesop or the Hindu fabulists was to imagine
animals that were like little men, with their comedies and tragedies. The idea of the
moral proposition was added later. What was important was the fact that the wolf
spoke with the sheep . . . or the lion with the nightingale.”6 It was another nightin
gale, Keats’, that Borges recalled from his childhood, often hearing his father recite
the poem. He concluded later in life that animals are “eternal, timeless, because they
live in the present” while humans are mortal “because we live in the past and in the
future—because we remember a time when we did not exist, and foresee a time when
we shall be dead.”7 Our various colloquies serve as a kind of thanatopsis in which
specters yearn for immortality.
In the cases of Thoreau and Saint-Exupéry, the woodsman and the pilot were able
to converse about observations of their separate worlds. Saint-Exupéry, born 38 years
after Thoreau’s death, embraced flight, while Thoreau feared the railroad and the
telegraph, embracing instead slowness and the qualitative [Plates 57 and 58].
Saint-Exupéry. . . . there is an expression that if humans and lions were to

speak the same language, we would not understand a word.
That said, my fellow poet, my life of writing would be acces
sible and of much interest to you, but I become the lion
when discoursing upon my other occupation, the one in which
my wax wings were melted and I was claimed by the sea.
The myriad and ancient dreams of children were, for me, a
reality. To scrape the sky . . . for you, a sense of scale is a
slow and transcendent process. For me, the Icarian view was
immediate and profound, encapsulating the smallness of our
world . . .
5 Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1967–1968, edited by
Caˇ lin-Andrei Mihaˇ ilescu (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3.
6 Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, translated by Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1984), 55.
7 Borges, This Craft of Verse, 98–9.
Confabulatores Nocturni 219
Thoreau. But how expansive the mind . . . in the fractal flower can be
found the workings of the universe.
Saint-Exupéry. Have your past dreams not found you envious of the soaring
bird or even the jester-like raven that skirts our wall?
Thoreau. Envy hampers the spirit. I have flown with the highest raptors
and scampered with the field mouse, all from a state of repose.
The tunneling worm fleeing the saturated soil for the surface,
and the arc of the jumping trout in pursuit of a fly, are both like
men in that they tire, whatever the reason, of their condition. In
stillness I am most aware . . . Antaeus and I, close relatives . . .
as here you find my cabin rooted in the soil.
Saint-Exupéry. . . . but to cast a shadow as a gull does along the tracery of foam
. . . a shadow that is free from the care of gravity . . .
Thoreau. Will the bird ever know the joy found in observing the gentle
pace of the woods? Sometimes even the lens of a stagecoach
window moves too quickly. It was always the smallness and
silence of solitude in which I was permitted a glimpse of the soul
of Nature, and, in turn, my own. [Plate 59]
Epilogue
In Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle wrote that “tangible products” are said to be
reduced to the categories of “Cities . . . Fields . . . and Books” with the worth of
books “far surpassing that of the two others.”8 The intent behind citing this passage
emerges not from being partial to the written word, but to establish a sympathizing
companion to Hugo’s more frequently cited chapter “This Will Kill That,” and out of
an optimistic view that the transformative power of literature will inspire architecture
and expand upon traditional practices of imagining and representing space.
8 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman and Hall, 1831), 119.
Index
abduction 9, 149, 149n36 Babel 52, 107n2; Tower of 76n22

accident 6–7, 9–10, 56, 59, 66, 118, 127
Bachelard, Gaston 86, 86n21
Actæon 128–29 bacon 210
Adam 42, 73, 120

Barthes, Roland 1
Adam’s House in Paradise 65

Bastide, Jean-François de 8
Adams, M. H. 147–48 Bely, Andrei 31, 33n10, 35, 36, 36n19, 37,
adaptation 4
115
Aesop 2–4, 3n13, 6,10, 134n10 Benjamin, Walter 2
Agamben, Giorgio 113

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 6
Alberti, Leon Battista 3, 71n3, 89, 134–35,

Bertoli 135
151, 157, 173, 178n15, 186, 190, 207,

Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève 111
207n3, 207n4, 210n12

Biondi, Grazia 120
Algorithm 25, 108, 114, 129, 134n11

biscuit 15–16
Alhazen 92
bizarre 211
Ali Baba 15, 18; Ali Baba and the Forty

Blondel, Jacques-François 111
Thieves 15; see also Arabian Nights

Book of Changes (I Ching) 28
anagogy: anagogic 27, 73, 91, 93, 160

Borges, Jorge Luis 124, 216, 218
Androgyne 120
Boullée, Étienne-Louis 47, 112
Angels 73, 77, 85, 131; sea angels 132

Boyd, Brian 1n3, 4n16
annunciation 97, 100–01, 126, 132;
breast 42, 117, 120–22, 180
Annunciation (Francesco del Cossa) 132;

Brion 178; Brion cemetery chapel 173, 180;
Annunciation to Zacharias (Domenico

see also Scarpa
Ghirlandaio and Workshop) see

Brodsky, Joseph 7
Zacharias
Bronze Horseman 31–3
Apologi Centum 3
Brown, Dan 193
Arabian Nights (A Thousand and One Brown, Denise Scott 151, 151n1
Nights, Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp) Brunelleschi 73, 191, 191n23
15, 22n32, 15, 147, 147n24

Bucharest, Romania 80–1, 83–84
Aragon, Louis 113
Buddhism 68, 70
Architect’s Data 8
butterfly 135, 135n13, 137
architectural drawings 9–10, 27, 174, 176,
177n14, 180, 184

cabanon 216, 216n3
architecture parlante 163
Caesar Augustus 135
architecture: Baroque 60, 109; “non-trivial”

Cairns-Smith, Graham 13n1
2, 25; Norman Gothic 14n5
Callimachus 8, 141–42, 144, 149, 189
Architecture: essay sur l’art (Étienne-Louis

Calvino, Italo 46, 72, 74, 76, 78, 94,135,
Boullée) 47
176, 179, 179n18, 176n12, 209n10
Aristotle 24n3, 42n16, 56–7, 108–09, 142,

Camillo, Giulio 127
144, 202, 202n12

Capri 152–56
“as if” 9
Carlyle, Thomas 219
Augustus ix, 98, 135, 161

Carver, Raymond 5
aura 18, 21
Casey, Edward 55n1
autism: autistic 25
Castor 124, 128–29
Index 221
catalepsis 123n1, 125–27, 125n13, 129

De Beata Architectura: Places for Thinking
cattleya 17, 21–22
73n12, 96n9; see also Marco Frascari
ceiling 6–7, 71–9, 87, 95, 178–79

De natura deorum 42
Cerberus 129
Dead of Night 124
Cerio, Edwin 153n6, 154–55, 155n16

decor 109–110; decorum 57, 109
Chaux 112
Decroux 169
Chevillard, Éric 79
Dehiscence 123
chiasmus 4, 124, 130n25, 181

del Cossa, Francesco 132
Chomei, Kamo no 66, 66n5

Depero, Fortunato 152–54
choˉra 97, 174n3

Der Städtbau [City Planning According to
Cicero 42, 148, 210n12; ciceroni153

Artistic Principles] 131; see also Camillo
Clark, Andy 7n20
Sitte
clay 1, 6, 13–18 13n1, 14n5, 14n9, 14n9,

Dérive 211, 211n15
16n13, 97, 144

Descartes, Rene 109
coincidentia oppositorum 125

Diana 128–29
collage 9, 199–200, 200n6, 202–03, 204n16,

Diderot 216
212, 215n19, 216

Dinocrates 7
Colonna, Francesco: see Hypnerotomachia

Diognetus 8
Poliphili
djinn 125, 125n14
columbarium 216
DNA, Deoxyribonucleic acid 13
Combray 15–18
Dostoevsky, Fyodor : Crime and Punishment
concinnitas 49
31, 34
concordance 7, 56
drawing 44n24, 83, 89, 96, 135, 160–61,
Condemned Building 199–201, 203, 216; see

173–84, 177n14, 182n24
also Darden
drawings: anagogic 27, 73, 91, 93
conditioning 25–7; classical 25; operant, or

dream 4, 8, 47, 72, 76, 86, 97, 119, 122, 124,
instrumental 26
165–70, 179, 202, 216
confabulation 2–7, 86, 124, 173–74, 176,

Duchamp, Marcel 201, 201n9
184
Duke of Orleans 194, 196, 196n8, 198
configuration 115
Duomo 120, 184
contemplation 71, 73, 102, 109, 149

Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 108, 114
contrapposto 60
Corbin, Henry 91
earth 13–14, 14n5121, 17–18, 124, 168;
Corinth 142
earthquake 14n7, 66, 69, 69n8
Corinthian 8, 25, 122, 141–42, 189, 208n7;

Eavesdropper see Nicolas Maes
Column 8, 25, 122, 142, 208n7

Eco, Umberto 141, 141n3, 145, 145n15
corner 21, 23
Eisen, Charles-Dominique-Joseph 141, 145,
counterfactual 3
148–49
Coutts, Howard 14
Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural
Coyne, Leila 13, 13n1
Drawing 2n6, 25–26; see also Marco
crab 134–35, 135n13, 141, 149
Frascari
Cret, Paul 61
Eliade, Mircea 121
Croce, Benedetto 151

emblem 57, 95, 131–32, 135
Culverwel, Nathanael 148

emplotment 79, 112
Cupid 4, 95
Enchanted Forest 197–98; see also
Servandoni
da Ferrara, Giacomo Andrea 118, 118n1

Enlightenment 3, 9, 110–11
Daedalus 118, 122, 167

enthousiasmos 145
dal Poggetto, Paolo 185, 185n3, 188,

epiphany 4, 126–30
188n9
Erasmus, Desiderius 38, 135
Damasio, Antonio 24n3, 180, 180n20

Erechtheion 109
Dante Alighieri 60, 72, 99, 208, 208n8

Eros 10, 125, 125n13–14
Darden, Douglas 9, 24, 199–204, 199n1,

errors 175n8, 190, 210–11, 215
200n3, 200n5–6, 202n11, 202n14, etymology 210
204n16, 206, 216

eudaimonia 160, 163, 170
Dasein 113
Euripides 130, 203
Daum, Auguste and Antonin 22

exaptation 127–30, 127n17
222 Index
exempla 189 Greece 13, 95, 161, 200, 200n5, 202–03

“expanded” mind 7n20 Guarini, Guarino 110
fables 2–4, 6, 94, 99–100, 102, 218 Hall, Edith 162

fabula saltata 162 health 49, 71n3, 211, 215
fabulation 44n24, 124, 126 heaven 71–3, 71n1, 76n22, 77, 77n28, 97,
facts and fictions 174, 176 125, 132; sky 71, 71n1, 72–3, 77, 132
factum 46, 124, 130, 175 Heidegger, Martin 81, 107, 113
facture 27, 87, 186, 192 Hejduk, John 6
Falloppia, Gabriele 120 heliciculture 139
Fascism 81, 151, 156, 159 Heraclitus 120, 124
Fengshui 25, 27–8 Hermaphrodite 165
Festina Lente 131–32, 134–35, 134n9–10, hermeneutic(s) 95, 107, 107n2, 114–15, 144
137–40 Hermes 95, 127n18, 168
Ficino, Marsilio 99, 147 Hesiod 43n21, 99, 125, 125n13, 162
fiction 3, 6, 8–9, 37, 56, 73, 76, 111, 113, Hillman, James 78
124, 174–75, 175n8, 183 Hoffmann, Josef 152–53
figures of speech 5 homesickness 81, 86
Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino) 8, 72, homo fabula 1
100, 207 Huizhou, China: Hongcun, 24, 27, 29–30
Finley, Robert 14, 14n7 Horace 94, 99, 163, 185–86
fire 1, 10, 16, 22, 183, 204 hospital 71, 74–8, 182n24
First Crusade 196–98 house 8, 28, 56–7, 64–70, 68n7, 69n8;
Florence Italy 18, 22n32, 73, 95–6, 98–101, housing 65–6, 69–70, 152, 159
135, 151, 185, 191, 193 Huang, Han 28
folklore 81, 85 Hugo, Victor 3, 6, 216, 219
Fondazione Querini Stampalia 46 humanism: humanist 38, 95, 97–8, 100, 123,
France 9, 14, 18, 21, 22n32, 110, 148, 126
193–98 hypnagogy: hypnagogic 16
Frascari, Marco 2, 2n6, 7, 24–9, 64–5, 91, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 8–9, 94n3, 135;
94n3, 123–26, 134–35, 139, 160–61, 165n25
161n3, 173–74, 176, 180, 183, 183n28,
198n12, 207, 210–15, 210n13, 215n19 Ibn Arabi 91
fresco 6, 71, 73, 76–7, 95, 98 identity 29, 63, 65, 69, 83, 88, 129, 144, 148,
Furetiére, Antoine 147 151–52, 202n12, 206
Futurist: Futurists 152–54, 156 Illiad 185
image: psycho-physical hybrid 24; image/
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 144 poem 9
Gallacini, Teofilo 211 imaginary figment 174–75; imagination:
Gallé, Emile 14, 14n5, 14n9, 18n19, 22n30, somatic 4
22n32 immure 8, 121, 192; immurement 121
Gamard, Christopher 193 imparare 209
Gastronomy 49 in medias res 185–87, 191–92
Gates of Hell 60–1; see also Auguste Rodin infra-ordinary 74,76
Gellius, Aulus 134–35 ingegnere 210; ingegno 210
Gemüt 114 ingenium 125, 145, 147
Gender 117, 122 inhabitation 80, 84–5, 160
geomancy 27; geomancer 28–9 insegnare 209
gesture 57, 59–60, 78, 86,102, 107, 113, instrument 25–6, 41, 66–7, 69, 72, 76, 85,
160–70 94, 118, 108–110, 210n13; instrumentality
Ghirlandaio, Domenico 95–102, 97n10 123, 125, 116
Gleick, James 13n1 interdisciplinary 200
Gogol, Nikolai 31, 33–4, 37 intonaco 188, 191
Goya, Francesco 165n25 invisible 72, 76, 83, 85–6, 89, 91, 93, 99,
Goodman, Nelson 2 102, 123, 129, 131, 160–61, 166–67
Gramsci, Antonio 159 istoria 95, 97, 99–100, 114, 186–87, 190
graphic novel 9, 199–201 iteration 190–91, 200; iterative 26, 203
Index 223
Jakobson, Roman 123, 125

Manole, Mastro 121
Janus 97, 165, 202; Janus/Dianus 129

manus oculata 169
Japan : Japanese 15–16, 21, 64–70, 68n7

Marchi, Virgilio 152–54
Jeanneret-Gris, Charles-Édouard see Le

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 153
Corbusier
mask 111–12, 161; Mask of Medusa 6
Jentsch, Ernst 124, 124n4

materials 180, 186–87, 191–92
jokes 120, 202, 202n11

mathemata 109; mathematization 114;
Joyce, James 55, 55n1, 115

mathesis 109
memory 3, 6–7, 42, 46–7, 51, 55, 59, 72, 83,
Kahn, Louis 3
86, 89, 113, 127–30, 160, 208n7
Kant, Immanuel 145

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 24, 114, 123,
Kearny, Richard 114

126–27
Kindergarten Chats 8; see also Louis

mestiere 207n1, 210, 215
Sullivan
meta-narrative 2
Knights Templar 196–98

metalepsis 125–27
knot 88
Metamorphoses see Ovid
metaphor 49, 71–3, 87, 89, 100, 102,
Labrouste 111
123–26, 148, 183, 201–02, 201n10,
Labyrinth 4–5, 7, 10, 122, 168, 218

202n12, 206
Lacan, Jacques 126–27, 129n22

metis 134–35
Laughing Girls 199–204

Meton 167
laughscape 202–04; laughter 203–04

metonymy 123–26, 125n15, 128
Laugier, Marc-Antoine 8, 65, 141, 145, 148

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
Laurentian Library 185, 187

95, 185, 187
Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas 111–12

mimesis 6, 8, 93, 163, 166; mimetic 109,
Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-

160–62, 172
Gris) 8, 51, 65, 131, 131n2, 138, 138n24,

mise en abyme 39, 44–5
141, 149–50, 182n24, 216

mistake 183
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 111–12

mistero 207n1, 210
Leonardo da Vinci 118–19

modani 189
Leopardi, Giacomo 208, 208n9

Modernology 69–70
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 24; and The Raw and

Moholy-Nagy, László 141
the Cooked 24
monarchy 194, 197–98
Levi, Carlo 158

monster 98, 132; “monsters of architecture”
light 87, 90–3

124; Monsters of Architecture:
lines 97, 100, 168–70, 173–74, 176–78,

Anthropomorphism in Architectural
177n14, 181, 183, 185, 189

Theory 37; see also Marco Frascari
Liotard, Jean Michel 148

Moro, Duke Ludovico il 118
Lippi, Filippino 98
Mother Goose 4
Locke, John 144

mural drawings 185, 187, 191–92
Lodoli, Carlo 3
Muses, the 39–44, 43n21, 147
Loos, Adolf 8, 138

Mussolini, Benito 81, 151
Loraux, Nicole 129, 129n24, 130

Mutina 120
Louis Pasteur 141, 148
Louis XV 195–98
Nabokov, Vladimir 31, 36–7; Speak, Memory
Lucian 163
31, 36
Lume Materiale in the Architecture of Venice

narrative 1–2, 4–9, 15, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 60,
91, 91n14; see also Marco Frascari

71, 74, 87, 108, 111–12; grand see meta
Lyell, Charles 14, 14n7
narrative
Lyotard, Jean-François 24
neo-Palladianism 194
Neufert, Ernst 8
macaronic 6, 8, 38–41, 39n3, 43n21, 44,

neurology 174
44n24, 94n3, 170; macaronica 38

neuroscience 24, 125
Maes, Nicolas 56–7, 60, 165n25

Nevsky Prospect 31, 33–6
magic 6, 120, 123, 126–27, 161, 216

New York City, USA 80, 200–01, 203–04
Malaparte, Curzio 152,156

Nietzsche, Frederick 203
Malebranche, Nicolas 109

Notre-Dame de Paris 6
224 Index
objets à réaction poètique 141, 149

Proclus 99
Ordonnance 110
proleptic 44, 63; prolepsis 59
Olier, Jean-Jacques 193–94

promenade architecturale 11
Oppenord, Gilles 194

proprioception 7
ornament 6, 36, 88, 97, 109, 154, 209

Proust, Marcel 13, 14n5, 15–9, 20–2
orosi 87–93
Prytaneion 129, 128n24, 130
ossatura 210
pun 200n6, 202, 202n11
Ottawa, Canada 74, 76

pungere 208, 209n10
Ovid 128; The Metamorphoses 41, 99–100

puppet 25–6, 169; puppeteer 25
Pushkin, Alexander 31–4, 31n1, 37
Pagano, Giuseppe 156–8

Pythagorean 90n11, 111, 162
Palaestrio 168
palintonos harmonieˉ 124, 126

Quaroni, Ludovico 152, 157–9
Palissy, Bernard 14n5

quarrel 66, 181
Palladio, Andrea 47, 118n1
Pane, Roberto 155

Rabelais, François 39n5, 44, 174
pantomime 8, 160–5, 197

reader 3, 5, 9, 10, 92, 148, 177, 186, 200,
paradox 30, 114, 123, 128, 134n10, 153,

207–9, 208n5
163, 191, 208

recto and verso 97, 117
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 159

Redentore, il 47
Pavlov, Ivan 25
refiguration 115
Peirce, Charles Sanders 149

Remembrance of Things Past 17n16
Perdix 167
Ricoeur, Paul 7, 55n1, 55–6, 107n2, 114–5,
Perec, George 75
145, 201, 201n10
Performance 25, 96, 99, 145, 160–3, 165

Ridolfi, Mario 159
Perrault, Charles 110–2, 143

Rodin, Auguste 58–9, 60, 63, 165n25, 168;
Persia 7, 87–9
Rodin Museum, Philadelphia 58
perspectiva per angolo 197

Rorstrand 14
Petrini, Carlo 139

Rossi, Aldo 47
phallic 57, 119, 127, 129

Rousseau 112
Phenomenology of Perception see Maurice

Ruskin, John 7, 19, 165n25
Merleau-Ponty
Rykwert, Joseph see Adam’s House in
Philo of Alexandria 94
Paradise
phroneˉsis 108
phýsis 145
Saint Petersburg 31–2, 36–7
Pindar 3
Saint-Exupéry 218–9
Piranesi, Giambattista 208, 208n7, 208n9;

Samonà, Giuseppe 46, 159
Carceri 8, 127, 212

San Giorgio Maggiore 47
plankton 131–2, 137

San Lorenzo New Sacristy 185
plastic 8, 109, 174; plasticity 16

San Sebastiano 181–3, 182n24
Plato 42, 99, 109, 128, 145, 147, 149, 168

Santa Maria Del Fiore (Florence) 73
Plot 7, 31, 34–5, 55–8, 76, 97, 117, 161, 197,

Santa Maria Novella (Florence) 95, 97–8,
206
101
poetics of materials 6
Scarpa, Carlo 46–7, 173–9, 180–4, 182n24,
poiesis 6, 109, 123, 125

182n25
Poliziano, Angelo 97–9, 102, 209n10

Scarpellini 187–8, 192
Pollux 124, 128–9

scenography 197
Polly, Cass and Helen 200–1, 203–4

scent 19, 85, 101
Polykleitos 169
Scott, Sir George Gilbert 152
Polymnia 162–3, 165–9

sea angel 131–32
Ponti, Gio 159

secret 15, 36–7, 83–4, 89, 95, 97, 99, 100,
Potta 120
102–3, 193, 198
pottery 13–4,18
selfhood 206
Pozzo, Andrea 214

Semiotic Society of America 124; semiotic(s)
praxis 5, 26
5, 43–4, 65, 123
prefiguration 115
sensory 6, 26–7, 30, 55, 65, 68, 70, 110,
Prince of Condé 19
144
Index 225
Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò 193–8; see Tepe, Göbekli 1n4

also The Enchanted Forest theater 36, 162, 166, 195, 198
shadow 16n13, 49, 55n1, 58–9, 62, 87, 89, Thecosomata 131
90–3, 92n17 theoria 108–9
Shakespeare 145 Thinker 58–62, 62n25; see also Auguste
Sheela-na-gig 120 Rodin
Siena 71, 76–8 Thompson, Evan 114n18
silence 57, 94–7, 94n3, 99, 100–02, 160, Thoreau, Henry David 65, 218–9
163, 218–9 Thorndike, Edward 26
Simactæonides 127 threshold 5, 57, 61, 85, 87, 89, 93, 95,
Simonides of Ceos 127–9, 129n24, 130, 165–6, 168, 170, 188, 218
130n30, 163 Timaeus 42–3, 168
Sitte, Camillo 8, 131–2, 135, 137–9, 140 time: chronological 8; cyclic 8; metrical
situation 3–4, 56–8, 63, 65–6, 68–9, 80, 109, structures of 8; temporality 8, 96, 124
111, 134, 137, 149, 160, 167–9, 181, 191, topographies 204
197, 210–11 topos 39, 113
sketch 47, 57, 70, 80–5, 117, 134, 137, 163, Trismegistus, Hermes 165
168, 173, 178, 185, 188, 190–2 Triumphal Arch 96, 198
Skinner, B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) 26 Trojan Women 203
sky 17–19, 22, 58, 81, 86, 90, 97, 137, 140 Troubadour 183
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters see Troy 4, 200–5
Francesco Goya tucheˉ 149
snail 131–5, 131n2, 137–9, 140
Socrates 3, 125n13, 147 uncertain 4, 122, 165
Solomon, Richard 26 unknowability 15, 17
sophia 108, 145; Sophia 202
Sorel, Albert 19 vagare 210–11; vaghezza 207–09, 207n4,
spolia 61, 63 208n6, 208n7, 208n9, 215; vagueness
Steinberg, Saul 7, 80–6, 174–5, 187 208–09
Stimme 113; Stimmung 113; Stimmungen 114 Vanbrugh, Sir John 6
stimuli: environmental 25 Vanvitelli, Luigi 128
The Stones of Venice 7; see John Ruskin Vasari, Giorgio 73, 98, 135, 190
storytelling 1–6, 9, 25, 27, 29, 31, 51–2, 70, Vecchietta, Lorenzo 76
71–4, 76–7, 79, 96, 109, 151, 173, 183, vedute di fantasia 195
199, 200, 206, 218; formative 27 Venice 7, 18–9, 22n32, 46–7, 91, 165, 174,
strutto 210, 210n12; struttura 210 181–2, 182n24, 182n25, 212–4; Venetian
subjunctive 9 3, 7, 18, 47, 91, 155, 171, 208, 211
Sullivan, Louis 8 Venturi, Robert 151
supersymmetry 126–7, 129, 130, 130n25 Venus 95, 97
symmetria 109; symmetry 41, 59, 89, 95, Vernacular 121, 151–9
126–7, 129, 163; symmetrical 62, 97, 169 Versailles 4
synesthesia: synesthetic 49, 110 Verum 46, 124, 130, 175; verum ipsum
factum 46, 124, 130
tangent 207, 207n3; tangential 207, 211, Vesely, Dalibor 114
215; tangere 207 Vico, Giambattista 71n1, 124–9, 174–5,
Tasso, Torcato 197 175n8
Tati, Jacques 74, 77 Viel de Saint-Maux 112
Taut, Bruno 64, 64n1 Vienna 138–9, 197; Vienna Ringstrasse 132
Tavern of Crossed Destinies 46 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 8
Teatro del Mondo 47 Virgil 15, 99, 102; Virgilian 15
techné 108–9, 112, 124, 126, 169; techne Virgin Mary 95
poiesis 8, 109 Virtue of Architecture 99n14; see also Marco
technology: construction 72; technological Frascari
tools 26 Visentini, Antonio 211–15, 211n17
Tell-the-Tale Detail 64n2, 71n2, 124n5; see Vitruvius 2–3, 7, 65, 101, 108–9, 110–11,
also Marco Frascari 142–3, 161, 163, 170; Vitruvian 73, 112,
templates 189, 190, 192 118, 151; Vitruvian Man 118
226 Index
Vittone, Bernardo 208, 208n7
Williams, William Carlos 9
Voltaire 147–8
Window 3–7, 3, 18, 22–3, 58, 68, 85, 87–9,
volgare 38
90–3, 173–7, 183, 185, 188–9, 188n9,
190–2, 219
Wajiro, Kon, 64–8, 68n7

world-building 9; world-making 2, 26, 49,
Wallander, Alf Vase and a Maiden 18

173
Walton, Kendall 144
Warburg, Aby 96
Yates, M. T., Reverend 27
Watermark 7
“We make architecture, but architecture

Zacharias see 96–100
makes us.” 24
Žižek, Slavoj 125, 127n17
Wiesel, Elie 1
Zumthor, Peter 113
Plate 1 Marco Frascari. Architectural Embodiment. © Paola Frascari

Part I
Plate 2 Marco Frascari. Architectural Storytelling—Cantastorie. © Paola Frascari

Plate 3 Algot Erikson, “Vase with Arum Leaves,” 1897, porcelain. Rörstrand Collection,
Stockholm. Photograph courtesy of Noël Allum
Plate 4 Charles Lyell, Frontispiece, Temple of Serapis, Principles of Geology (London: John
Murray, 1830). Smithsonian Libraries/Open Library
Plate 5 Emile Gallé, Geology, 1900–1904, with details. Image courtesy of Musée de l’École
de Nancy. Photograph by Nick Williams
Plate 6 Royal Doulton, The Arrival of the Unknown Princess.
Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry
Plate 7 Royal Doulton, Ali Baba. Courtesy of Replacements

Ltd., Greensboro, NC.
Plate 8 Agathon Léonard, The Scarf Dance, biscuit figures, 1900. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Plate 9 Alf Wallender, Vase and a Maiden, 1909 Rörstrand Collection, Stockholm. Photo courtesy of Noël Allum; Emile Gallé,
Orpheus and Eurydice, 1888–1889, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France/Bridgeman Images
Plate 10 Emile Gallé, Carp Vase, 1878. Musée du Verre et du Cristal,
Meisenthal, France. © Yvonne Fleck
Plate 11 Emile Gallé, White Water Lily against Sky-blue Glass, two sides. Photograph courtesy of James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine
Plate 12 Emile Gallé, Cattleya Vase, 1900, two sides. Photograph courtesy of Kitazawa Museum of Art, Japan
Plate 13 Emile Gallé, L’Orée des Bois, 1902 [left]; Emile Gallé, Flowers and Woodland, 1895–1900 [right]
Plate 14 Auguste and Antonin Daum, Birds in Snow. Photograph courtesy of Elaine Scarry
Plate 15 Marco Frascari. We Make Architecture, But Architecture Makes Us.
Illustrated in Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing
(London: Routledge, 2011). © Paola Frascari
Part II
Plate 16 Marco Frascari. Stairs and Drawing. © Paola Frascari

Plate 17 View of Dublin. Photograph by author
Plate 18 Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper, (1657), oil on canvas. Dordrechts Museum (Inventory number: 953/135)
Plate 19 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author
Plate 20 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, (1880 [cast in bronze, 1924]), Philadelphia.
Plate 21 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by author
Plate 22 Wajiro¯ Kon and Kenkichi Yoshida’s Modernology. Comprehensive illustration of the house-hold
of a newly-married couple. © Kon Wajiro¯ collection of Kogakuin University
Plate 23 Detail of the Last Judgment; fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari on
the inside of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (1568 started)
Reproduced with the permission of Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore / Nicolò Orsi Battaglini /
Alinari Archives, Florence
Plate 24 Still frame from Playtime (1964–67), Jacques Tati. © Photofest NYC
Plate 25 The Founding of Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, Lorenzo

Vecchietta, ca. 1441. © Federica Goffi
Plate 26 Domenico di Bartolo, Virgin of the Cloak. Santa Maria della Scala, Old Sacristy
(1444). © Federica Goffi
Plate 27 Steinberg’s drawing of his childhood house and courtyard in Bucharest, from a
journal, December 1940–January 1943. Saul Steinberg Papers. Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Plate 28 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1942. Ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper, 37.8 × 55.2 cm.
The Saul Steinberg Foundation, New York. © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Plate 29 Saul Steinberg, Strada Palas, 1966. Graphite, pen, colored inks, watercolor,
gouache, colored chalks and gold enamel on paper, 58.4 × 73.7 cm. Israel Museum,
Jerusalem; Gift of the artist, through the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. © The Saul
Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Plate 30 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran (c. 1710s–1900s). Courtesy of Parsa Shirazi (left),
Azad Koliji (right), and Ganjnameh Research Center, School of Architecture and Urban
Planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran (plan Drawing)
Plate 31 Window patterns drawn by Mirza Akbar, late eighteenth century. © Victoria &
Albert Museum, London, Indian and South-East Asian Section, MS no. 44
Plate 32 Dowlatabad Garden, Yazd, Iran. Left: The window from inside offers a view opening to the garden outside
and depicts an allegorical garden on the surface of the screen Right: By grouping and associating certain forms in the
geometric pattern, the overall appearance of the girih window becomes analogous to a garden drawn abstractly.
© Azad Koliji and Hooman Koliji
Plate 33 The Annunciation to Zacharias (lower panel), and Zacharias Names
the Baptist (upper panel) Domenico Ghirlandaio and Workshop, 1490, Cappella
Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Part III
Stories of theory
Plate 34 Marco Frascari, The Door of Theory. © Paola Frascari

Plate 35 The first story. © Claudio Sgarbi
Plate 36 The second story. © Claudio Sgarbi
Plate 37 The third story. © Claudio Sgarbi
Plate 38 Lucas Cranach the Elder. Diana and Actæon. 50 × 73 cm, oil on wood, c. 1518,
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. Wikiart, Visual Art Encyclopedia
Plate 39 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in
Plate 40 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in
Part IV
Practice of stories
Plate 41 Marco Frascari, Aristophanes’ Confabulation. © Paola Frascari

Plate 42 Marco Frascari. Scarpa’s Confabulation. © Paola Frascari
Plate 43 Carlo Scarpa. Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and perspective.
NP 2437r. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio
Carlo Scarpa
Plate 44 Diagram by author over Brion cemetery chapel floor plan drawing (NP 2437r,
© MAXXI)
Plate 45 Carlo Scarpa, Chapel Floor Plan and study of south entrance; sketches and
perspective. NP 2437r (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione
Plate 47 Brion cemetery chapel interior ceiling
corner. Photograph by author, 2014
Plate 46 Brion cemetery chapel corner. Photograph
by author, 2014
Plate 48 Diagram by author over Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery chapel reflected
ceiling plan drawing, NP 2699 (detail). © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI
secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa
Plate 49 South elevation of Brion chapel with access area. NR 4165. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura,
Archivio Carlo Scarpa
Plate 50 Unidentified project, section drawing. NR 46790. © Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo. Fondazione
Plate 51 Carlo Scarpa. Reconstruction and extensions of the Convent of San Sebastiano, Faculty of Literature
and Philosophy, University of Venice, Venice / Floor Plan 1974–78. NR 41378. © Museo nazionale delle arti
del XXI secolo. Fondazione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa
Plate 52 Michelangelo, Profile sketches, c. 1526. Image by author, with permission
from the Polo Museale della città di Firenze
Plate 53 Servandoni’s first project for the facade of Saint-Sulpice (1731). Bibliothèque
nationale de France
Plate 54 Servandoni’s Triumphal Arch to the Glory of the King (1754). Bibliothèque nationale de France
Plate 55 Diagram of the Laughing Girls from Troy, New York. Image used by permission
from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins
Plate 56 House in Troy I. Image used by permission from the Douglas Darden Estate, courtesy of Allison Collins
Plate 57 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Saint-Exupéry, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan
Plate 58 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Thoreau, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew
McLellan
Plate 59 time[scape]lab, Cabanon Calvino, digital montage and graphite rendering, 2010. © Brian Ambroziak and Andrew McLellan

Confabulations - Storytelling in Architecture-Ashgate - Routledge (2016)

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Confabulations - Storytelling in Architecture-Ashgate - Routledge (2016)

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Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our percep­

Paul Emmons is a registered architect and professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Marcia Feuerstein is an architect and associate professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Editors: Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein,

ISBN: 978-1-4724-6932-8 (hbk)

List of figures viii

2 The fabulous ox in Fengshui’s fabrication of site 24

3 The “uncharted tides:” a literary map of Saint Petersburg 31

5 Il Mantecato: an architectural course served at the Frascaridonosor’s

7 Object talks: confabulation of dwelling space in the texts of Kamo no

9 Saul Steinberg’s stories of dor 80

11 Architecture sub rosa: another tell-tale detail, with confabulations and

13 Walls of gender 117

14 Architecture’s two bodies 123

15 Camillo Sitte’s winged snail: festina lente and escargot 131

16 Strange tales of architectural evolution 141

17 Dialetti architettonici: storytelling in the vernacular 151

18 Miming a manner of architectural theory: Eudaimonia—A Pantomime

20 In medias res: Michelangelo’s mural drawings at San Lorenzo 185

21 The function of fiction in fabrication: Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni,

22 The Laughing Girls 199

23 Mi punge vagezza, ovvero i misteri del mestiere 207

24 Confabulatores Nocturni 216

2.1 Collage by author demonstrating Fengshui planning strategy 29

1 Marco Frascari. Architectural Embodiment. © Paola Frascari

21 Paul Philippe Cret, Rodin Museum, (1929), Philadelphia. Photograph by

40 Episodes from Eudaimonia: A Pantomime Dream Play, originally performed in

Brian Ambroziak is Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee and co-creator

Manuela Antoniu obtained her professional (B.Arch) and post-professional (M.Arch.)

Paul Emmons is a registered architect and Professor at the Washington-Alexandria

Hooman Koliji, a designer, author and educator, is Associate Professor of Architecture

Lisa Landrum is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University

David Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture, Chairman of the Architecture

Andrew McLellan is Co-creator of time[scape]lab. His interest in writing and memory

Andreea Mihalache is Assistant Professor at Clemson School of Architecture.

Matthew Mindrup is Senior Lecturer of Architecture at The University of Sydney.

Alberto Pérez-Gómez is the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of

Michelangelo Sabatino is Professor and Director of the Ph.D. Program in Architecture

Claudio Sgarbi, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania), M.S. (University of Pennsylvania),

a book: Vitruvio Ferrarese. “De architectura”: la prima versione illustrata (Franco

Angeliki Sioli obtained a professional diploma in architecture from the University of

Rebecca Williamson is a registered architect with experience in practice in Switzerland

Qi Zhu is an adjunct professor at Diablo Valley College and a practicing architect

Whatever the origin of language, whatever the origin of shelter, it is in storytelling

8 Frascari, Eleven Exercises, 173.

If this were a fairytale, we would begin: Once upon a time . . .

19 Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, 1999).

1 Glass and clay

Glass and clay 15

10 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 38.

12 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 14; emphasis added.

15 Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff, 242.

From places-as-vases, we now turn to a solitary instance of a person-as-vase. We last

In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, an encrusted

Ox, the treasure of a farmer.

With great diligence yet without a helpful ox,

the farmer toils in the fields

early in the morning in vain.

One ox is half of the family.1

1 The Chinese text for these proverbs is ⢋ᱟߌᇦᇍˈᴹऔᰐ⢋ⲭ䎧ᰙǄаཤ⢋ˈॺњᇦ,translated by

We make architecture, but architecture makes us

The confabulation of Fengshui: The ox and Hongcun village

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our percep

5 “Italo Calvino—La Vita Privata,” video Rai.TV (May 5, 2009), http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/pro