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With Out Trace Interdisciplinary

Investigations into Time Space and the


Body 1st Edition Simon Dwyer Rachel
Franks Reina Green
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With(Out) Trace
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Publishing Advisory Board

Ana Maria Borlescu


Peter Bray
Ann-Marie Cook
Robert Fisher
Lisa Howard
Peter Mario Kreuter
Stephen Morris
John Parry
Karl Spracklen
Peter Twohig

Inter-Disciplinary Press is a part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net


A Global Network for Dynamic Research and Publishing

2015
With(Out) Trace:

Interdisciplinary Investigations into Time, Space


and the Body

Edited by

Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green

Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network


for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and
encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and
which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary
publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a


retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior
permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland,


Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom.
+44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-441-0
First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green

Part I The Trace, Perception and Narrative

Touching Stories of Bodies Past: The Impoverishment of 3


Tactless Spaces
Anthony R. Brand

Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths: 17


The Corporeal Experience of Restored Ruins
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari

Ritualised Mythic Place: Body, Performance and Place 31


In a Traditional Sri Lankan Landscape
Wasana de Silva, Jonathan Hale and Nicole Porter

Monument of Anxiety 41
Moa Liew and Christel Nisbeth

Art as the Construction of Relations 63


Ana Vivoda

Deconstruction of Time, Space, Body and the 73


Narrative Perception of Fictional Film versus Video Art
Barbara Kaesbohrer

Part II The Trace, the Body and Space

Bau(dy)haus or the Relation of Body and Space in the 81


Context of Bauhaus’ Ideals: Schlemmer’s Spatial Body
and Ebeling’s Corporeal Space
Erdem Ceylan

Performing Arts and Fine Art: Busy with Bodies, What Body? 97
Peter Sonderen

Representing Conflict through Dance: Using Quantitative 107


Methods to Study Choreographic Time, Stage Space and
the Body in Motion
Susan Wiesner and Rommie L. Stalnaker
Aesthetic Bodily Intentionality: The Case of Dance 117
Edyta J. Kuzian

Jørn Utzon’s ‘Descriptive Narrative’: An Approach to 125


Space at the Sydney Opera House
Simon Dwyer

Other Worldly Spaces 135


Judy O’Buck Gordon

Part III Tracing Absent and Marginalised Bodies

Titanic Bodies: Longing for Closure and Identification 151


with an Other
Constantijn Smith

Body of Evidence: Constructing the Corpse in the Novels 161


of Dashiell Hammett
Rachel Franks

The Construction of the Labour Migrant’s Body: 173


Federal Germany’s Medical Selection of Turkish Labour
Migrants (1961-1973)
Maria Kramer

Constructing Islam, Gender and Class: Everyday Experiences 189


of Veiled Muslim Women in the Public Sphere of Istanbul
Nursem Keskin Aksay

Part IV Tracing the Changing Body, the Body of the Future

Disturbing Bodies: Bodily Decay in the American TV-Series 203


Nip/Tuck and the American Makeover Culture
Susan Teixeira

Body Image: Staying the Course through Reconstructive Surgery 213


Harriette Richard

Digital Art and Human Augmentation in Dialogue with the 225


Renaissance World View: A Study of the Transhuman
Reworking of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam
Rikke Gade Gammelgaard
‘Do not eat anything with a face! Do not kill your own soul!’: 235
Trans-Corporeality and Pollution in the
Edencliff Rooftop Garden
Anna Persson

Part V Shifting the Traces of Time and Space

Fluidity and Entropy in Contemporary Architecture: Chaos 245


between Space-Time and Matter-Energy
Irina Ioana Voda

Witnessing Wormholes in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision 257


Reina Green

Using Multiple Temporalities: Time as an Artistic Medium 269


Meredith Hughes

Time, Space and Body in the Age of Precarious Work 283


Mikko Jakonen
Introduction

Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green


‘Every contact leaves a trace’.
- Dr Edmond Locard’s ‘Exchange Principle’1

A trace is not only what is left behind as suggested by the above quotation. It is
not just an indication of a past presence. A trace can also be a way of going on, a
way of moving, as in a dance as the steps are traced across the floor, or as one
walks along the sand, leaving footprints. A trace can even be non-material, without
a physical presence, yet still reveal the occurrence of an event. Indeed, it may only
exist in the mind – merely an impression left by someone, something, at some
time. Further, a trace may be an action: the act of following a path, the footprints
of another, the vestigial remains of another body in another time in space; or it can
be the making of a path. One can trace one’s own way, mark one’s own course.
One can also explore, investigate and discover by tracing, making connections
where none were previously thought to exist.
The trace, its liminal nature, its function as both action and object, and its role
in research and discovery is, as the title, With(out) Trace: Inter-Disciplinary
Investigations into Time, Space and the Body, suggests, an overarching theme in
this collection, which brings together the seminal presentations and discussions
that took place at the Third Global Time, Space + the Body Conference, an
initiative of the research network Inter-Disciplinary.Net, held at Mansfield
College, Oxford, in September 2014. Scholars ranging from early-career
researchers to seasoned academics from twenty different countries and a wide
range of disciplines and perspectives met to discuss and debate ideas about time,
space, and the body, and their interconnection. As apparent from the range of
chapters published here, there were scholars of art, architecture, culture, dance,
gender, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, photography, sociology and
theatre, to name just some of the diverse disciplines represented. Yet, despite the
diversity of the research fields, perspectives and approaches, the chapters engaged
and connected with each other in both expected and surprising ways, and these
connections reveal the beauty and value of inter-disciplinary discussion. It is that
discussion that the editors of this ebook have tried to encapsulate, and it is their
hope that conversations begun at the conference will continue and be energised by
this publication.
All of the presenters at the Third Time, Space + the Body Conference were
invited to submit their original presentation scripts for publication. In an effort to
capture the conversations that took place over the three days of the conference, the
editing process was focused around resolving minor issues and ensuring
consistency both within each chapter and across the volume. Beyond that, a light
editorial hand has been used so that individual authors’ voices can be heard and
x Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
readers can have a sense of the range of perspectives presented at the conference.
Many of the more formal rules of writing have not been applied. For example,
some of the chapters are written in the first person, a point-of-view not often used
in academic writing, but one that encourages readers to engage directly with the
researchers.
The most significant difference between this volume and the conference is in
the grouping of the chapters themselves. Drawing on the conversations that
followed each group of papers at the conference, and the final roundtable
discussion, the editors have organised the chapters according to the following five
themes:

Part I The Trace, Perception and Narrative


Part II The Trace, the Body and Space
Part III Tracing Absent and Marginalised Bodies
Part IV Tracing the Changing Body, the Body of the Future
Part V Shifting the Traces of Time and Space

I The Trace, Perception and Narrative


In Part I, the chapters focus on how a trace – the marking of a path in time
and/or space – has an impact on the body, whether that impact is through
perception or emotion. The act of tracing, by recognising the marks of the past
within a given space, by moving through space, by watching others move through
time and space, or by depicting a space over time, has the power to affect our
understanding not only of time and space, but also of what makes us human.
Moreover, the act of tracing – of following a body as it moves, or making
connections between disparate times – promises a new perspective, and encourages
us to construct a narrative thread to help us make sense of our world and our place
in it.
This grouping of chapters therefore begins with ‘Touching Stories of Bodies
Past: Impoverishment of Tactless Spaces’ in which Anthony R. Brand examines
the concept of trace, how it is created, and its importance as a visible and tangible
reminder of our past. He argues that leaving traces is a form of storytelling, and
that the recognition of traces is a binding form of perception that connects us with
our past and our surroundings. He notes that hard architecture and the current
emphasis on newness leads to a misplaced desire to erase the traces and the stories
of the past – elements necessary for an understanding of human life and mortality.
Storytelling is also discussed by Stefano Bigotti and Carla Molinari in ‘Space and
Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths: The Corporeal Experience of Restored
Ruins.’ This discussion takes place within their examination of architecture as a
phenomenological experience, dependent on the human body. Through their
examination of museum restoration projects, they argue that new expository paths
not only create a narrative sequence, but also provide a different experience of
Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green xi
__________________________________________________________________
space and time, one that creates ‘temporal disorientation.’ Bodily experience is
further addressed by Wasana de Silva, Jonathan Hale and Nicole Porter in
‘Ritualised Mythic Place: Body, Performance and Place in Traditional Sri Lankan
Landscape.’ Exploring the cultural/religious ritual of Asala perahara from a
phenomenological perspective, they describe how, through bodily movement,
people develop unique connections with the landscape and translate the experience
of place and time into narratives and rituals. The phenomenological experience is
thereby inseparable from the physical body and the landscape through which the
body moves.
The relationship between bodily movement and the experience of space is also
discussed by Moa Liew and Christel Nisbeth in ‘Monument of Anxiety,’ in which
they examine issues of anxiety and architecture to consider how space affects our
perception of self. Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety and the
emotional and perceptual impact of space, they explore how spatial effects can be
measured and designed through a variety of methods, including dramaturgy,
narrative structure, rhythm and camera angles. Ana Vivoda in ‘Art as the
Construction of Relations’ offers a different perspective on the concept of trace,
perception and narrative as she looks not at the moving body in space, but at the
dynamic interplay between the artist and space through photography. The medium
records the presence of the artist in space and time. She argues that space is
transformed through serial photography into a network of visual signs that are open
to continuous reinterpretation. By noticing the trace of such signs, the artist’s
presence is authenticated and altered by the space. Visual images are also the focus
of exploration in Barbara Kaesbohrer’s ‘Deconstruction of Time, Space, Body and
the Narrative Perception of Fictional Film versus Video Art.’ In her chapter,
Kaesbohrer examines how our experience of time, space and the human body is
altered when film speed is changed. Through her analysis, she reveals how the
right timing is vital to our understanding of body, movement, space and,
ultimately, for narrative.

II The Trace, the Body and Space


While the chapters in the first grouping examine time, space and the body in
terms of the trace and its impact on perception and its role in the creation of
narrative, the next three groupings all focus in some way on the body. Part II
brings together chapters that explore how the body moves in space. Each of the
chapters offers a fresh way of thinking about the relationship of the body and
space, whether it is through a theorisation of the body and/or space, the application
of a new vocabulary to identify the movement of the body, or an examination of
the subjective, phenomenological, experience of space. These chapters draw on the
disciplines particularly associated with bodies in space such as performance,
especially dance, and architecture. In addition, a number of them also consider the
movement of the body in space as a journey and one, again, that can be structured
xii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
as narrative.
The chapter that opens Part II, Erdam Ceylan’s ‘Bau(dy)haus and the Relation
of Body and Space in the Context of Bauhaus’ Ideals,’ examines the
reconfiguration of the relationship between space and the body brought about by
Bauhaus in the early twentieth century. Theatre was central to Bauhaus thought
and Ceylan credits Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus stage workshop for
emphasising the spatiality of the body and the architect Ebeling for drawing
attention to the corporeality of space. Bauhaus thereby encouraged a new more
dynamic perspective of the body and space.
In his exploration of the question ‘Performing Arts and Fine Art: Busy with
Bodies, What Body?’ Peter Sonderen draws on the concept of performativity to
compare how the body is viewed as a work of art and how it is viewed in
performance. He looks back to G.E. Lessing’s distinction between the visual and
performing arts, a distinction rooted in language and the use of narrative, and to the
connection currently made between the two as both embrace the concept of ‘being
and becoming art,’ that functions in both space and time. The performing body is
also the subject of examination in Susan L. Wiesner and Rommie L. Stalnaker’s
‘Using Quantitative Methods to Study Choreographic Time, Stage Space and the
Body in Motion,’ in which they explore the complexities of communication
through body movement and gesture. By analysing dance movements and
metaphoric terms associated with conflict, they identify a shared vocabulary of
representative movements and metaphoric concepts, and determine that certain
movements, i.e. those associated with the concept of victim, occur in specific ways
in time and space. The focus on the performing body continues in Edyta Kuzian’s
‘Aesthetic Bodily Intentionality: The Case of Dance,’ which investigates the
expressive movement present in dance. She draws on Immanuel Kant’s notion of
taste to clarify the idea of meaningful, but non-goal oriented movement: ‘aesthetic
bodily intentionality,’ and argues that removing the goal-orientedness of bodily
movement aestheticises the body in motion, so that the dancing body becomes a
work of art, and not just an feat of expert performance.
The focus shifts in Simon Dwyer’s chapter, ‘Jørn Utzon’s ‘Descriptive
Narrative’: An Approach to Space at the Sydney Opera House,’ from performers to
patrons and the role of illumination as he examines the movement of patrons
through the various spaces between their arrival at the site and their attendance of a
performance. He argues that not only does lighting reinforce the architectural
definition of the spaces, but also links them together in a metaphysical journey, the
‘Descriptive Narrative,’ that follows Jørn Utzon’s original conception of the
building. In ‘Other Worldly Spaces,’ Judy Gordon probes the relationship of body
and space through the phenomenal detailing and spatial experiential properties of
two major works of architecture. In both, the physical structured space is enhanced
with phenomenal detailing that reinforces the perceptual experience and takes
people on a journey through the interaction of space and light, creating a sense of
Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green xiii
__________________________________________________________________
the ephemeral nature of the physical and otherworldliness.

III Tracing Absent and Marginalised Bodies


The chapters in this section focus on bodies that have in some way been
overlooked or looked over. This may be because they are no longer living and
have, perhaps, even disappeared with little trace or been overwritten by history.
Alternatively, they may have been marginalised, separated by their subordinate
relationship to an authority that has rendered them invisible – even as it has
simultaneously subjected them to close examination – fearful of the social change
such bodies signify. Tracing these peripheral bodies demands not only careful
research, but also a fresh perspective.
In ‘Titanic Bodies: Longing for Closure and Identification with an Other,’
Constantijn Smith discusses the ‘absent presence’ of the Titanic and the bodies of
those who died in the wreck. He argues that the missing bodies and the wreck’s
inaccessibility have left us without closure, and that our desire to know what
happened has led to the many reimaginings of the ship and its spaces through
replicas and movies. These fetishised spaces remind us of the absence – what we
cannot know – while also inspiring us to find out more. Dead bodies are also the
focus of Rachel Franks’ ‘Body of Evidence: Constructing the Corpse in the Novels
of Dashiell Hammett.’ Franks notes that while the corpse has a vital role in crime
fiction, it may be marginalised, little more than a ‘vic’ by which sleuths prove their
powers of detection, or fetishised as the plot’s main focus. She argues that
Hammett’s success is grounded in his ability to find a balance between these two
extremes, and that the body in crime fiction provides for justice, escapism, and an
opportunity for creative practice. Marginalised living bodies are the topic of Maria
Kramer’s ‘The Construction of the Labour Migrant’s Body: Federal Germany’s
Medical Selection of Turkish Labour Migrants (1961-1973).’ She explores how the
migrant’s body was constructed through medical examinations, particularly with
regard to health, disease, physical ability and disability, and how supposedly
objective assessments of the body intersected with ideas about race and gender and
were influenced by labour needs and national health politics. Nursem Keskin
Aksay, in ‘Constructing Islam, Gender and Class: Everyday Experiences of Veiled
Muslim Women in Public Sphere of Istanbul,’ asks us to turn our attention to the
marginalised bodies of veiled Muslim women. She points out Muslim women
wearing headscarves, who were previously often excluded from public spheres in
Turkey, have recently gained visibility. However, these women are ambivalent
about their increased visibility as they feel more detached from their religion, the
more their lifestyle is normalised.

IV Tracing the Changing Body, the Body of the Future


Standing in contrast to Part III which looks at bodies that are barely there –
missing or unseen, existing on the margins, this grouping of chapters considers the
xiv Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
changing body – the body of the future, whether that is of our own future – our
ageing, decaying bodies and our attempts to stem that decay with medical
technology, or the future promised by technology and the hybridisation of human
and machine. In these chapters, the act of tracing is through time, from the bodies
of the past and present to those promised in the future.
In ‘Disturbing Bodies: Bodily Decay in the American TV-Series Nip/Tuck and
the American Makeover Culture,’ Susan Teixeira examines makeover culture and
the idealisation of young, healthy bodies. She argues that in makeover culture the
body becomes a commodity through which individuals can obtain social and
economic capital. She examines the American TV-drama Nip/Tuck to explore how
the series reveals the need to control the body and limit the signs of ageing to
maintain social and economic status – and how, ultimately, the ageing body
ultimately controls the individual. Harriette Richard also looks at surgically altered
bodies in ‘Body Image: Staying the Course through Reconstructive Surgery,’
interviewing women who elected to have reconstructive surgery after undergoing a
mastectomy for breast cancer. She suggests that the Zeigarnik Effect, defined as
experiencing ‘disruptive thoughts or actions’ about a goal and persevering despite
setbacks, may explain why women continue with reconstruction despite delays and
medical complications.
With Rikke Gammelgaard’s chapter on the transhuman future in ‘Digital Art
and Human Augmentation in Dialogue with the Renaissance World View,’ the
focus moves from the surgically enhanced body to one that is technologically
enhanced – at least in art. Comparative analysis of Michelangelo’s fresco The
Creation of Adam (1512) with an anonymous digital reworking depicting Adam
with a robotic arm, an image which has become an icon for transhumanism,
suggests both anxiety about and hope for a transhuman future. The post-human is
also examined in Anna Persson’s ‘“Do not eat anything with a face! Do not kill
your own soul!”: Trans-Corporeality and Pollution in the Edencliff Rooftop
Garden.’ Examining Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) and
drawing on the theory of trans-corporeality, which views humans as inextricably
linked to their environment, Persson argues that the Rooftop Garden is both a form
of cultural pollution and demonstrates the high interdependence of humans and
non-humans.

V Shifting the Traces of Time and Space


In this, the final part of the volume, the emphasis is not on rethinking or
revisioning the body and its relationship to time, space and society, but on
rethinking the concepts of time and space themselves – offering new perspectives
on how time and space may be structured. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the arts, visual,
performance, and applied, offer fruitful ground in which to trace alternative
constructions of time and space. Diverse experiences of time and space are not,
however, limited to the arts as the chapters in this collection have revealed. Indeed,
Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks and Reina Green xv
__________________________________________________________________
new understandings of time and space can also result from social change and can
have a profound impact on our lives as the final chapter in this section
demonstrates.
This grouping begins with the reconsideration of architectural space offered by
Ioana Irina Voda in ‘Fluidity and Entropy in Contemporary Architecture: Chaos
between Space-Time and Matter-Energy,’ which examines fluidity, as connected
to chaos, and entropy as a measurement of architectural fluidity. She plots the
degree of architectural fluidity from Ancient Greece through to contemporary
times to note that it has reached a high point today, and asks whether chaos has
become a tool for developing new ideas about space and body interaction in
architecture.
New ideas about space and time are explored in Reina Green’s ‘Witnessing
Wormholes in Marie Clements’s Burning Vision,’ a play which depicts a world
that transcends chronological time and spatial boundaries to bring together
uranium mining in Canada, nuclear testing in the USA, and the bombing of
Hiroshima. Green argues that the resulting defamiliarisation of time and space,
along with the play’s staging in the round, encourages audience members to see
themselves not as passive spectators, but as witnesses called to take action.
Meredith Hughes also examines structures of time in ‘Using Multiple
Temporalities: Time as an Artistic Medium,’ describing her exploration of time as
a medium within her art practice. Hughes reflects on her use of time as a material
with qualities such as quantity and type, in combination with writing, eggshells,
ink, and alphabet stamps, drawing on the Buddhist concept of ‘dependent arising’
to examine the interdependence of existence, and to note the multiple forms of
time as expressed in her project 10,000 Words.
The final chapter of this section and of the collection, Mikko Jakonen’s ‘Time,
Space and Body in the Age of Precarious Work,’ shifts the focus from structures of
time and space within the arts to the social impact of the new relationship with
time and space experienced by the post-Ford, precarious worker. Jakonen notes
that this worker lives on constant ‘stand-by,’ an experience in which divisions of
time such as work time and free time no longer apply. Drawing on the concept of
precarity, Jakonen argues that an understanding of the impact of precarious work is
important to understanding contemporary societies, politics and economics.
As can be seen from this overview of the collection, the chapters span the
investigative range from theory to applied research, their theoretical grounding
running the gamut from Lessing to Kant and Kierkegaard. Through our
organisation of this collection, we offer one way of tracing the discussion and
connections between the chapters; however, other links are readily apparent. For
example, several chapters take similar theoretical approaches, drawing on
phenomenology which naturally lends itself to a discussion of bodily experience
and the conscious awareness of such. Equally, it is hard to ignore the links
resulting from discipline-specific approaches as, for example, in the discussions of
xvi Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
space and its physical structure from an architectural perspective. Nonetheless, it is
our hope that With(out) Trace: Inter-Disciplinary Investigations into Time, Space
and the Body accomplishes more than tracing a theme, a theory, or discipline
within the study of time, space and the body. Moreover, we hope that the
collection does not simply trace past debates about the relationship between the
three, though that is certainly important archival work. Our hope is that the
interdisciplinarity of the collection will suggest other ways of seeing the field and
of tracing new paths through it. Exploring those new perspectives and new paths
will undoubtedly enrich future thinking about the interconnections between time,
space and the body.
One promising area touched on by a number of the chapters is the relationship
between the static and the moving – a single visual image and multiple images
taken over time, the body at rest and the body in motion, a moment of time in
space and multiple times in the same space. The dual nature of time, space and the
body as momentarily static and ever-changing, as functioning as both a particle
and a wave is, we suggest, not only a promising area for future exploration, but
also emblematic of the spirit of this collection and the concept of the liminal trace.
The chapters in this collection function like the dual theories that examine light as
both a wave and a particle and thereby offer different perspectives on the same
phenomenon. Further, the concept of the trace itself embodies that duality in being
both a thing, a stationary object – ephemeral or otherwise – and a movement over
time and through space. In situating this collection of chapters within the ongoing
study of time, space and the body, we hope that it, too, can have the dual function
of marking a point in time and space – the Third Global Time, Space + the Body
Conference – and being part of the movement forward and further interdisciplinary
investigation into these interrelated fields.

Notes
1
W. J. Chisum and B. Turvey, ‘Evidence Dynamics: Locard’s Exchange Principle
& Crime Reconstruction,’ Journal of Behavioral Profiling 1.1 (January 2000),
viewed on 14 April 2015, http://www.profiling.org/journal.

Bibliography
Chisum, W. J. and B. Turvey. ‘Evidence Dynamics: Locard’s Exchange Principle
& Crime Reconstruction.’ Journal of Behavioral Profiling 1.1 (January 2000).
Viewed on 14 April 2015. http://www.profiling.org/journal.
Part I

The Trace, Perception and Narrative


Touching Stories of Bodies Past: The Impoverishment
of Tactless Spaces

Anthony R. Brand
Abstract
‘To dwell,’ claimed Walter Benjamin, ‘is to leave traces.’1 The act of leaving
traces is described by anthropologist, Tim Ingold, as ‘fundamental to being
human.’2 What is the trace, how is it created, and what is its importance to us as a
visible reminder of our past and of time made tangible? The central thesis of this
paper is that leaving traces is a form of storytelling, and that the perception of
traces is therefore a binding form of perception that connects us with our past and
our surroundings. In 1974, the environmental psychologist Robert Sommer
presented his thesis on ‘Hard Architecture’: environments that actively resist the
touch or impression of their inhabitants.3 For Sommer, evidence of hard
architecture was as legible in the creation of these new stoic spaces as it was in the
physiognomy of the occupants themselves. He reminds us of the reciprocal
relationship between man and environment and, thus, the responsibility of both. An
environment created to resist the impression of man, could nevertheless impress
upon man ‘somatic disorders, anxiety, and irritation,’ most commonly inducing
‘numbness to one’s surrounding […and] psychological withdrawal.’4 Although it
has indeed been forty years since Sommer diagnosed ‘hard architecture,’ it is only
now that its effects are being felt, like the trace itself, as an absent presence.5 Both
the trace and its erasure are unavoidably concerned with the recording,
experiencing, and expressing of time. A trace points towards the past. An erasure
of traces is thus a deliberate forgetting and an erasure of history – a denial of time.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Alois Riegl, I consider the types of traces our
bodies leave in time, space and the body, along with our perception of them, and
their significance in everyday life.

Key Words: Walter Benjamin, environment, haptic images, impression, Alois


Riegl, Robert Sommer, time, touch, traces.

*****

1. Absent Presence

Indeed, leaving traces is not just a habit, but the primal


phenomenon of all habits that are involved in inhabiting a place.6

Because it [the hand] fashions a new world, it leaves its imprint


everywhere upon it.7
4 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________
What is the trace? Tim Ingold has written extensively upon the traces of man
created within the environment, and defines it as ‘any enduring mark left in or on a
solid surface by a continuous movement.’8 These traces, he explains, are mostly of
two types, additive or reductive, that is to say, they may consist of a removal of
matter (such as a scratch or scrape) or an addition (such as a fingerprint or mark).9
Within these two actions, another distinction might be made between intentional
and unintentional traces. The Grimm brothers’ tale of Hansel and Gretel, for
instance, tells how the children left breadcrumbs in order to trace their way back,
(or similarly, how Ariadne’s thread allowed Theseus to retrace his steps through
the minotaur’s labyrinth). This is an additive and intentional trace. We may extend
this nomenclature further in recognising a temporal component regarding how long
a trace remains perceptible. In the case of the children’s breadcrumbs, these were
blown away or eaten within the time it took for the children to leave them and
return again. Regardless of their typology – the carefully engraved lettering on a
hard granite tombstone; the damp brown coffee ring left upon the table – these
traces make up a significant part of our quotidian environments. For Ingold,
therefore, humans are inherently ‘makers of traces,’ such that ‘whenever we talk or
walk we gesture with our bodies […and] these gestures leave traces or trails’; this
mark-making is therefore ‘fundamental to being human.’10 Part of this
fundamentality is not only making traces but also recognising what they are and
what they mean to us.
We can establish a definition of the trace as a sculpture (either additive or
reductive) of habitation that we may recognise as evincing a previous presence.
These traces are most humanising when they reveal a high degree of indexicality
such as a photograph, a handprint or a footprint.11 This may even extend to
irregularities or blemishes that point towards the human ‘error’ or ‘beauty’ of the
hand-made. While a more comprehensive exploration of the trace cannot be
undertaken here, it suffices to recognise that humans leave traces, and the materials
that are able to receive these impressions – let us call them impressionable
materials – will be subject to change in form and appearance over time. These
materials are worn and worked by the touch of their users and the weathering touch
of nature.12 These touches exhibit themselves as cracks, wrinkles, discolorations
and scars displayed in both our skin and surroundings. Traces of use and
habitation, such as these, have always recorded themselves in the palimpsest of our
culture, bearing witness to all of our stories and actions. This has not prevented an
enduring dream of immortality, however,13 and today aging is arrested on two
fronts: the organic skin of our bodies may be nipped, tucked, stretched and sucked,
to erase the visible traces of aging exhibited on its surface. The inorganic skin of
our possessions are created from only the most durable, resistant, and reflective of
materials – mirroring our own self-image and our apparent need for immunity from
the infection of time.14 It is upon these unintentional reductive traces that this work
Anthony R. Brand 5
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will focus, and the way in which they develop a rich tapestry of use that forms the
background of our experiences.

2. Erase the Traces

Forgetting […] is the effacement of traces.15


The man who hasn’t signed anything, who has left no picture
Who was not there, who said nothing:
How can they catch him?
Erase the traces!16

To make a trace is to make a mark, to demarcate or draw out, to leave an


explanatory trail and hence to tell the tale of past actions and experiences. One
need only think of characterful scratches and dints in antique furniture, or the
depressed stone steps of some medieval city, well-worn or well-loved through
habitual usage. An image is not lost upon Walter Benjamin, who offers the
example of the leather belt as one such object that ‘at some point in the course of
time a story has attached itself to it.’17 Of course, these stories are not explicit
messages, like a written testimony, waiting to be uncovered:

A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the
purpose of information; [...] it thus bears the trace of the
storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the
potter’s hand.18

Given the obvious cultural importance of storytelling and the rich inheritance of
traces, why would their erasure be something to celebrate or encourage?19
By the beginning of the twentieth century, there emerged a very clear
distinction between the accidental trace (laden with stories) – which was dwindling
with the advances in technology and industrialisation – and the intentional
bureaucratic tracings (rich in information) – which were implemented in order to
keep track of the masses. The repercussions of the former were voiced in particular
by the Arts and Crafts movement. William Morris, for instance, affirmed that in
order for something to be considered a work of art, it ‘must show obvious traces of
the hand of man […] without more interposition of machines.’20 It is with this
division that the hand of the artisan was amputated and replaced with the cold
prosthesis of the machine, and with it, the erasure of traces and the forgetting of
stories:21

Just as the industrial labor process separates off from handicraft,


so the form of communication corresponding to this process –
information – separates off from the form of communication
6 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________
corresponding to the artisanal process of labor, which is
storytelling.22

With the development of technology came the impoverishment of storytelling


(traces) and the forgetting of touch.23 Local governments were similarly interested
in ‘a means of compensating for the elimination of traces that takes place when
people disappear into the masses of big cities.’24 Written signatures were proving
insufficient among a predominantly illiterate populous as were the hopelessly
vague anthropometric ‘word-portraits’ proposed in 1879 by Alphonse Bertillon,
which broadly described a person’s facial characteristics.25 A more explicit and
readily decipherable form of recording an individual’s presence was required, and
by 1880 Sir William Hershel (District Commissioner of Hooghly in Bengal)
proposed the practice of recording fingerprints.26 Surrounded by mechanically
manufactured (traceless) commodities – all the while having their movements
subject to governmental tracing – individuals began to lose all sense of both
individuality and collective cultural identity. This loss of qualitative traces
(storytelling) threatened to sever the link between peoples past actions and their
present, inducing a disconcerting sense of timelessness and insignificance. This
concerning anonymity led individuals attempted to compensate ‘for the fact that
private life leaves no traces in the big city’ by furnishing their private interiors with
anything that might record a presence, in order ‘to prevent the traces, if not of its
days on earth then at least of its possessions and requisites to daily life, from
disappearing forever.’27
The stories recorded here were contrived and artificial compared to marks
produced by the artisan or through habitual use. In fact, it is often the traces of use
or habitation that make an object special or unique: these traces develop a value
that is personal or sentimental and, as such, is irreplaceable. In furniture, buildings,
or people, this trait is often referred to as ‘character,’ a word that comes from the
Greek referring to the tool used for engraving and leaving a mark or impression.
Such objects are able to acquire a strong user-object relationship – a narrative
history built up over time and use. The capacity an object has for achieving this is
what Jonathan Chapman refers to as the ‘Teddy-Bear Factor.’28 According to
Chapman, teddy-bears are objects we receive in childhood on which we bestow a
name, gender, and often age, that grow with us and accompany us on our
adventures. Just as we pick up scratches and scars, bumps and bruises, so too does
our fluffy accomplice, losing an eye here or a button there. In fact, long after these
bears ought to be put down – there are, after all, newer, fluffier, and certainly
cleaner teddy bears produced daily – they remain with us, too precious now to be
discarded or replaced. The teddy-bear has born witness to our childhood, and it
physically reminds us of these experiences.
Anthony R. Brand 7
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3. Detecting the Inmost Essence of What Has Been
Stories written into objects bring us into the hands of the collector, and for
Benjamin another aficionado of the trace:

One only has to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass
case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing
through them into their distant past.29

By bestowing on the objects ‘a connoisseur value rather than a use-value,’ the


collector thereby ‘frees’ these things ‘from the drudgery of being useful.’30
For Benjamin, ‘collecting is a form of physical memory.’31 The collector is the
collector of stories, it-narratives, woven into the fabric of the object, including
intended purposes and physical characteristics, as well as its history and context:
‘dates, place names, formats, previous owners.’32 All of these elements come
together ‘as a harmonious whole’33 to form a ‘magic encyclopaedia,’ in which each
of the scars and traces exhibit themselves as testament to the actions past.34
In order to maintain the object’s integrity, however, the collector must take
precautions to prevent any subsequent re-writes. These items therefore become
preserved – safe from the touch of the uninitiated and freed from the drudgery of
use – they are often encased in glass, as museological artefacts, protected from the
onrush of time, like a photographic image.
Indeed the advent of photography created the ability to ‘preserve permanent
and unmistakable traces of a human being.’35 With the proliferation of the camera
came the unquestionable authenticity of the image as proof of what has been, and
with it, the emergence of the detective novel.36 The indexical image of the
photograph differs from the metonymic trace (such as a footprint), but both record
past actions, one of the contact of light, the other of the user. The medium used,
including celluloid, clay and stone, retains the ‘inmost essence of what has been.’37
Hence, for Benjamin, ‘detective agencies […] follow the trail of the past.’38 This
particular capacity for observation, deduction, and creative reconstruction (based
on past experience) is not isolated to the detective, but has existed throughout the
world for centuries, and may be found, as Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, in both
huntsmen and shaman (or augurs). The hunter ‘learned to sniff out, record,
interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces’ as ‘excrement, tracks, hairs, [and]
feathers.’ Similarly the shaman – whose texts may be found dating as far back as
23BC – may also seek meaning in ‘animals’ innards, drops of oil on the water,
[and] heavenly bodies.’ The difference, Ginzburg insists, is temporal: divination
points towards the future, while the huntsman’s stories point towards a past.39 The
trace itself is both an immediate tangible impression and the intangible ghost of
memory, and its recognition relies upon the creative superimposition of both.
Ingold maintains that perceiving these traces ‘is a reading that is as much tactile as
visual,’40 and it is in this way that we experience time as a haptic sensation.41
8 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________
These complex stories – and the hunter as the original storyteller42 – can be
written (and read) in our surrounding environment, people and objects.43 Whether
these traces have negative or positive connotations is less important than
recognising the power of the trace and its ability to provoke such forceful
memories, associations, or emotions. This is the inherent value of the trace, a value
that cannot be possessed by anything new, untouched, or tactless.
This distinction was best described by the Austrian art historian, Alois Riegl, as
possessing either historical-value, age-value, or newness-value.

4. The Value of Age and Use


In his ‘Modern Cult of Monuments,’ Riegl distinguishes between two notions
of time: the objective, measurable time of the chronologist, and time ‘as a
phenomenon embedded in artefacts.’ The former increases predictably and
incrementally, whereas with regards the latter, ‘only in perception, could the traces
of proto-phenomenological, artifactual time emerge.’44 Armed with these concepts
of temporality, Riegl proposed two means by which an artefact (or monument)
could be of value to the modern perceiver (subject to their particular Kunstwollen).
The first he termed historical-value, and the second, age-value (Alterswert).
Something is historical, claims Riegl, on the basis that ‘it has been and is no
longer.’ Each object, action or event represents a link in the chain of time that
connects us to where we are now, and without which we would not be here. It is
thus irreplaceable, and its value increases predictably with time and rarity.45
The historical-value ‘arises from the particular individual stage it represents in
the development of human activity,’ and our interest in it lies therefore ‘in its
original status as an artefact.’46 Such is the case for the collector and the hunter:
those who intentionally seek the trace that ‘singles out one moment in the
developmental continuum of the past.’47 Therefore, ‘the more faithfully a
monument’s original state is preserved, the greater its historical value:
disfiguration and decay detract from it.’48
While historical-value ‘wishes to suspend time,’ age-value ‘is based solely on
the passage of time’ and ‘appreciates the past for itself.’49 Objects revered for age-
value:

Are indispensable catalysts which trigger in the beholder a sense


of the life cycle, of the emergence of the particular from the
general and its gradual but inevitable dissolution back into the
general.50

Age-value has therefore, a far greater appeal than historical-value, since it is not a
specialised perception that is required, but a more general, more human one, whose
‘immediate emotional effect depends on neither scholarly knowledge nor historical
education for its satisfaction, since it is evoked by mere sensory perception.’ Its
Anthony R. Brand 9
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impression may be felt more simply in the way it ‘touches the masses.’51 This
mode of ‘sensory perception’ is echoed by Ginzburg, who proposes a distinction
between two types of intuition, ‘high’ and ‘low’: ‘This “low intuition” is based on
the senses […and] can be found throughout the entire world, with no limits of
geography, history, ethnicity, sex or class.’52
This too, is akin to Benjamin’s conception of a tactile reception of the
environment, one that comes about not through concentrated attention – like that of
the huntsman or detective – but rather in a more casual, habitual manner that is
acquired through the body over time.53
The antithesis – and ‘most formidable opponent’ – of age-value is conceived by
Riegl to be newness-value. Newness-value, like age-value, is not a specialist
appraisal, and may similarly be appreciated ‘by anyone, regardless of education.’54
This appeal is to the purity of youth and the idealised notion of timeless perfection
and immortality. Just as age-value manifests itself most conspicuously ‘in the
corrosion of surfaces, in their patina, in the wear and tear of buildings and objects,
and so forth,’55 newness-value is apprehended by its visible lack of age-value or its
immaculate and untouched appearance.

5. Making a Better Impression


An appreciation of newness is not a problem in and of itself; the problem is a
misplaced prioritising of newness-value over and above age-value.
This fashionable misconception can lead to objects becoming discarded or
dismissed because they start to (inevitably) lose their shine. The corollary are
objects designed from materials that seemingly never age or degrade, nor therefore
record the imprint of time or the body. These hard-objects are still cast aside,
however, once their technology becomes outdated, or their style becomes
unfashionable – and they are left with no teddy-bear factor on which to fall back
on.
An obsession with the superficiality of newness-value threatens to keep us
removed from the pleasures of age-value and even repeated use (to the extent that
use is exhibited as age). Prioritising the image of untouched newness compromises
the perceived existential value of the object, that is, its ability to keep-time and co-
evolve with us, writing our narratives of use upon one another, by inhibiting the
ways in which we are able to record the narratives of use that we develop in our
environments, we simultaneously weaken that environments.56 Such priorities
seem eerily echoic of Robert Sommer’s benumbing ‘hard’ designs from four
decades ago. This design mentality may therefore be considered utterly at odds
with the task of architecture, which according to Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘is to situate us
in both space and time.’57 And yet, today we find our environments and spaces
around us becoming seemingly atemporal, or at least with designs aimed at a
warped ideal of a timeless presence. The success of hard architecture is an
unsustainable prioritising of newness-value and, in turn, a misplaced desire to erase
10 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________
the traces and with them the stories of use. These traces of habit are unintentional,
unavoidable, and – for the most part – not consciously sought after. Nevertheless,
they occur continuously, at every moment, and – so long as there are
impressionable people and materials – continue to construct a rich palimpsest of
use and past-presences. In our culture of youth and speed, the capacity for our
environments to keep-time and age with us is fundamental to fostering a sense of
belonging and an appreciation of life and mortality.58
Both Riegl and Benjamin appreciated the human imprint and the inherent
importance of the trace. An appreciation of traces is an appreciation of the gestures
and actions of people’s past use and habitation: appreciation of the haptic-images
of heritage and the enriched narrative of user-object relationships. Perhaps most of
all, a sensory appreciation of traces is a binding form of perception, both to those
with whom we make traces today, and to those for whom we leave our traces
tomorrow. ‘Bene speremus! Hominum enim vestigia video.’59

Notes
1
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk], trans. Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002),
9.
2
Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 177.
3
Robert Sommer, Tight Spaces: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1974), 3.
4
Ibid., 19.
5
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting [Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli], trans.
Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
6
Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1927-1934, trans. Rodney
Livingstone, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, Vol. 2,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 472.
7
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art [La vie des formes]. 1934. trans. Charles
Beecher Hogan and Greorge Kubler (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992), 184.
8
Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 43; Ingold, Being
Alive, 5.
9
Other types include cracks, imaginary lines, and stamps or prints (see previous
note).
10
Ingold, Being Alive, 5; 177.
11
Strictly speaking the footprints are only an indexical image of the foot or shoe
that created them, and not the person or animal. They are rather, a metonymic
image of the creator, that is to say, the footprint is an index of a foot, which itself
Anthony R. Brand 11
__________________________________________________________________

implies the body (and therefore the past presence) of its creator. It is therefore a
‘second-order sign.’
12
See in particular Ingold, Lines; Ingold, Being Alive; Ricoeur, Memory, History,
Forgetting; Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering: the Life
of Buildings in Time (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993).
13
A desire for immortality, of course, has been embedded in human mythology for
thousands of years (see Book III of The History of Herodotus¸ from the fifth
century BC).
14
Jonathan Chapman, Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and
Empathy (London: Earthscan, 2005).
15
Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 8 (see also 415-416).
16
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Aus dem Lesebuch für Städtebewohner,’ Versuche, Vol. 2
(Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1930).
17
Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934, 660.
18
Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire,
trans. Howard Eiland, ed. by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), 174.
19
We know that at the time Brecht wrote this (note 18), he had just returned to the
security (personal and emotional) of Augsburg, having failed to make any
impression in Berlin (six times the size of his more familiar Munich). Brecht was
left feeling lost and forgotten in a city whose vastness consumed individuals into a
single mass. See Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, The Cambridge Companion to
Brecht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
20
William Morris, Lesser Arts of Life (London: Electric Book Company, 1877), 9.
21
A distinction between what David Pye described as the (hand-made)
‘workmanship of risk’ and the (machine-made) ‘workmanship of certainty’: David
Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1968).
22
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 804.
23
Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, 732.
24
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 78.
25
Carlo Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi
(London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 120.
26
See Francis Galton, Fingerprints (London: MacMillan and Co., 1892).
27
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 77.
28
Chapman, Emotionally Durable Design, 118.
29
Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, 487.
30
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 9.
31
Ibid., 205.
32
Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, 489.
12 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________

33
Ibid., 489
34
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 858; Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-
1934, 487.
35
Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, 79.
36
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 9.
37
Ibid., 834. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna: Über Den Fall
Des Faltenwurfs, trans. Michaela Ott (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006).
38
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 204.
39
Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, 102-103.
40
Tim Ingold, ‘Footprints through the Weather-World: Walking, Breathing,
Knowing,’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16.s1 (2010): S128.
41
Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2012), 2:42.
42
‘[B]ecause he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks
[…] a coherent sequence of events.’ Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, 103.
43
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity,’
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, edited 14 March 2014, 155, viewed on 30
November 2014, http://sherlock-holm.es/; Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Sign of
Four,’ The Complete Sherlock Holmes, edited 14 March 2014, 70, viewed 30
November 2014, http://sherlock-holm.es/.
44
Mike Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History
and Temporality in Fin-De-Siècle Vienna (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2006), 144.
45
Alois Riegl, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,’
trans. Kurt W. Foster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions. 1903 ed. Kurt W. Foster
(New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1982), 21.
46
Riegl, ‘Modern Cult of Monuments,’ 34.
47
Ibid., 38.
48
Ibid., 34.
49
Ibid., 38.
50
Ibid., 24.
51
Ibid.
52
Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues, 125.
53
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney
Livingstone, and Howard Eiland, ed. Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty,
and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press 2008), 40.
54
Riegl, ‘Modern Cult of Monuments,’ 42.
55
Ibid., 32.
56
Chapman, Emotionally Durable Design, 116-117.
Anthony R. Brand 13
__________________________________________________________________

57
Pallasmaa, Encounters, 2:50.
58
Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester:
John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 35.
59
‘Let us be of good cheer, for I see the traces of man,’ from Pollio Vitruvius,
Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture [De Architectura]. 25BC. trans. Morris
Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).

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edited by Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA:
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and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael William Jennings, Brigid
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Bloch, Ernst. Traces [Spuren]. 1969. Translated by Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford,


CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Brecht, Bertolt. Versuche, Vol. 2. Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1930.

Chapman, Jonathan. Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and


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Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ninfa Moderna: Über Den Fall Des Faltenwurfs [Ninfa
Moderna: Essay on Falling Drapes]. Translated by Michaela Ott. Zurich:
Diaphanes, 2006.
14 Touching Stories of Bodies Past
__________________________________________________________________

Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity.’


The Complete Sherlock Holmes, edited 14 March 2014. Viewed 30 November
2014. http://sherlock-holm.es/.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the
Beryl Coronet.’ The Complete Sherlock Holmes, edited 14 March 2014. Viewed 30
November 2014. http://sherlock-holm.es/.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. ‘The Sign of Four.’ The Complete Sherlock Holmes, edited
14 March 2014. Viewed 30 November 2014. http://sherlock-holm.es/.

Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art [La vie des formes]. Translated by
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and Temporality in Fin-De-Siècle Vienna. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2006.

Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007.

Ingold, Tim. ‘Footprints through the Weather‐World: Walking, Breathing,


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Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Eye and Mind.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic


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Viewed 9 July 2014.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/auckland/docDetail.action?docID=2001601.
Anthony R. Brand 15
__________________________________________________________________

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Buildings in Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

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John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

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Oppositions. 1903. Edited by Kurt W. Foster. Translated by Kurt W. Foster and
Diane Ghirardo. 21-51. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1982.

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Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1974.

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25BC. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1914.

Anthony R. Brand is a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland. His thesis –


‘Touching Architecture: A Holistic Approach to Leprous Design’ – explores the
sense modality of touch (and embodied perception) in the design and experience of
contemporary architecture.
Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths:
The Corporeal Experience of Restored Ruins

Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari


Abstract
The relationship between space and time is one of the most important and
influential cognitive devices of our society. In particular, the concept of time is
being investigated more and more within architecture and the perception of time
has become a fundamental instrument to develop space. Nowadays, it becomes
necessary to understand architecture not only as a pure and static space, but also as
a phenomenological experience, activated by the presence and movement of the
body. Considering that, the body can be interpreted as a real tool to design the
knowledge of space, a central node to organise the architectural environment.
Beyond proportion, beyond measurement, the corporeal relations with time-space
are a method by which to compose an architecture of situations and to convert the
passive spectator into a key player. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to
understand how the body can be used to develop the experience, specifically in
museum spaces of restored ruins. In fact, expositive paths are based on narrative
sequences focused on telling a story to visitors: ruins can suggest different kinds
of perceptive experiences that hail from the dissonance of spatial temporal
dimensions. Two restoration projects, Palazzo Altemps and Crypta Balbi, both in
Rome, are clear examples of how ruins represent a suggestive scenario in which
the new path introduced shows a timeline, a route through sublime architectural
works of transience. Starting from these case studies, this paper describes the
emotional connection between time and space in architecture and how this
relationship could define the quality of the corporeal experience: the final and
fundamental purpose of this paper is to identify a system of fruition – actions able
to realise, through the body, the experience of architecture.

Key Words: Architecture, construction and constraints of space, corporeal


experience, measurement, narrative and expositive paths, ruins and archaeological
sites, time-space dimension.

*****

1. Architecture: Towards a New Interpretation of Time and Space


Space is the fundamental dimension of architecture, the basic object to define,
to shape, to structure. To use Bruno Zevi’s words:

It is quite normal that space, the empty space, is the protagonist


of architecture: because architecture [...] is also and almost the
environment, the scene where our life goes on.1
18 Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths
__________________________________________________________________
Indeed, architecture is the discipline which, for its nature and essence, is not only
developed in space, but which more properly develops space and models its
relations. The empty space is actually the result of construction and consequently it
is the space of man and experience. This key principle is the main distinction
between architecture and other arts: the object created does not have value for
itself, its role and quality are conditioned by the relationships which it enables,
defining the space and the environment around it. Luigi Moretti’s studies,
published in Spazio2 are particularly insightful. In his review, the Italian architect
underlines the importance of the fundamental composite role of space in re-
drawing some historical buildings, considering only the emptiness in a kind of
negative perspective of the solid volume.
In architecture, this supremacy of the dimension of space has been denied
several times and then rediscovered: the concept of space, indeed, has waxed and
waned at different times in history. In particular, it seems that the relationship with
time is one of the most incisive in the definition of space and its variations.3 As it
was clearly underlined by Siegfried Giedion in his famous text, ‘Space, Time and
Architecture,’ the relation between space and time has always been very strong,
and, starting from the twentieth century, basically indissoluble. The relationship
serves to define architecture as the ‘primary instrument to approach space and time
and to give to those dimensions a human measure.’4
Considering a method of design based on the definition of the time-space
dimension, sequences clearly have a strategic role and, yet, as Le Corbusier
maintained, ‘Architecture can be classified as dead or living by the degree to which
the rule of sequential movement has been ignored or, instead, brilliantly
observed.’5 As we can see, for example, in the architectural concept of the
promenade, the concept of the kinematic eye and the idea of the experience of
time-space dimension, even if restricted to the sense of sight, is fundamental to Le
Corbusier’s theoretical method.6 Years later, Bernard Tschumi7 also emphasised
that precise spatial sequences represent a fundamental composite method based on
the relation between space-event-movement, as did Moretti8 who, as previously
noted, used his studies on empty space to highlight the concept of sequence: a
concept in which spaces are defined, depending on their concatenation, by a
composite model which takes experience and movement as central nodes by which
to design architecture.
The sequence becomes, in this way, an element of the development of
experience, which is not limited to the pure value of description and complement,
but assumes a key role in the discovery and conquest – physical and intellectual –
of space. In the same way, Sergei Eisenstein identified the parallelism between the
sequential montage in architecture and cinema, and proposed it as both a real
cognitive method, and as simply an organising tool. Thus, the sequence is
considered a system of discovery, knowing and understanding, which becomes a
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 19
__________________________________________________________________
composite instrument able to relate itself directly with the experiential possibility
of space and to improve its narrative potentialities.9
The willingness to consider the art of building as a tool – one able to describe
temporal and narrative sequences – begs the question about how such a perception
of architecture occurs and how this can influence the experience of knowledge of a
building or place. Awareness of an intuitive satisfaction, resulting from the
phenomenological vision of the nature of the space, results from the relationship
between sight and intelligence, which is able to determine the particular
measurements of perceived reality. According to this perspective, the eye plays a
fundamental role in the relationship between the body and the physical
environment, having the duty of transferring to the mind the measurements and
relations of external space. An essential physiological couple, ‘the eye, the master
of ceremony and the intellect, the house owner’ are, according to Le Corbusier, in
the moment of knowledge of reality10. As a result, the meaning that the term
measurement acquires in this context must be considered, with the aim of
understanding the possible relationships between space and body.

2. Measurement as Relationship between Space and Time


The term measurement implies an abstract concept that refers to different
dimensional systems, culturally consolidated. The term is able to acquire a specific
meaning only when the same quantitative value is related to at least one physical
element, forming a relation with it and, thereby, describing its qualities. However,
absolute metrical values rarely produce an effective awareness of the dimension to
which one refers in the common imaginary. On the contrary, comparative locutions
such as a tower as tall as, a gallery as short as, a door as wide as... represent
simple but, at the same time, useful examples of how sensorial experience of
physical reality can help in transmitting dimensions and sizes.
On the other hand, as Lambertucci suggests,

[I]f a measurement associated to an object or a combination of


them, is already able to activate an elementary reaction, the game
becomes complex in the case in which different measurements
are related […] beginning to define spatial features.11

Such attributes that the human eye, the master of ceremony, perceives clearly,
understanding the adequacy or dissonance of the proportions of the environment in
which it is plunged, creates amazement, pleasure or even a sense of inhospitality
and unfitness in the mind of the user, the owner of the house. For example, walking
under the shades created by the giant order adopted in the Broad Street Station
(Richmond, Virginia)12 will suggest different emotions in comparison to the same
action in the space, vertically compressed, of the I Ching Pavilion.13 With their
20 Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths
__________________________________________________________________
contrasting measurements and proportions, both of these structures encourage
different moods and ideas as dictated by their antithetical atmospheres.
It is important to emphasise that this concept of the adequacy of proportions
comes from the idea of classical aesthetics, in which an exact agreement with the
rules and measurement of nature represents the necessary conditio sine qua non for
a definition of beauty, to which each composition should aspire. For example, the
ideas of reciprocity and relativity connect the different buildings of the Acropolis
in Athens and the observer, so that the the perception of the right proportions of the
buildings, reinforced by the optical illusions typical of the Greeks, is maintained by
the visitor.14 In the same way, when considered in light of Le Corbusier’s
argument, the Wall of Pecile of Villa Adriana,15 in which the masonry becomes an
auxiliary geometrical plan in the perception of the observer, is able to reveal the
depth of the same building, in relation to the width of the hilly landscape.
These kinds of issues, linked to the appropriateness and rightness of the space
measurement inside the perceptive experience of the architecture, deserve deeper
analysis. As already mentioned, the term measurement characterises only the
abstract meaning of dimension, while the adoption of other locutions, such as
adequate measurement or corresponding measurement, needs the use of a second
term, in this case an absolute, in order to make a persuasive association between
the metrical values and the observer.16
When is it that a measurement can be said to be adequate? And corresponding
to what?
Le Corbusier individuates in man, with his body and his possibilities of movement,
that the comparative term is able to inflect the harmony typical of the classical
proportions and the laws of nature:17 It is as tall as, it is smaller than me, it is
bigger than me, it is much bigger than me... With the synthesis of the Modul-or,18
the body is not only the main character of the architectural experience in place, but
also in power; the means and purpose of a composition which could not be right
and compliant to human needs, whether of a functional or a symbolic nature. The
sensorial perception of the space is no more a simple scale issue, but it involves
different aspects: ‘the size, the dimensions, the scale, the mass of the architectural
building, could be read again related to me,’19 related to the human body.

3. The Instance of Palazzo Altemps and Crypta Balbi


The topic of composition through narrative sequences assumes relevant
peculiarities regarding the design of exhibition itineraries. The desire to
communicate a message or to have cognitive participation becomes a fundamental
element for the development of museum design, and in particular, the paradigm
seems even more effective when considering paths that are integrated inside
existing buildings.20 In this case, the architectonic design is somehow coincident
with the itinerary, since it excludes the complexities deriving from other
components that are typical of new museums and which propose another concept
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 21
__________________________________________________________________
of time-space with further intensity and multiple meanings. In the following, we
will focus on two emblematic restored examples in Rome: Palazzo Altemps and
Crypta Balbi. They are places where there is determinate conflict between
archaeology and innovation, where the reasons of the past meet the epiphany of the
new: places where the ruin is not the remote but the impetus to experiment with
new ideas and innovations through the opposing tensions between history and
narrative sequences.
This examination will analyse both the narrative sequences as instruments for
the composition of the time-space dimension, and the theme of the body as a
perceptive measurement tool of such a dimension.
Inside Palazzo Altemps, as well as in the entire structure of the Museo
Nazionale Romano, ‘it is almost impossible to distinguish a collection from
another one, because they are all the result of crossed and continuous exchanges.’21
Walking through the rooms of the palace with a consistent pace permits visitors to
understand the space in which they find themselves. The sculptures – tall as me,
small as me, bigger than me – are all abstract parameters by which to measure the
rooms, the central courtyard created by Sangallo, the serving spaces and
understand the geometry and the spatiality of the palace, desired by Riario and
designed by Melozzo from Forlì.
When the glance of the observer meets that of the Apollo Kitharoidos, Ares
Ludovisi,22 or that of the other characters belonging to the museum, it starts a
dialogue between the anatomic proportions of the classical standard and those of
the human body. Hermes Logios becomes the unit of measurement of the arcades
underlying the loggia of the courtyard as an improvised Greek Kuroi. Athena
Parthenos in its own prominence seems to occupy the whole space of its hosting
room, making the room smaller and almost scaring the observer.
In this way, the sculptures become absolute references of the comparison able
to explain the phenomenological experience of architecture, ‘able to become
dimensional connections, useful to control the planning process.’23 Considering the
human body as a measurement value for the space highlights its double use: that of
being useful for the standardisation and that of being the occasion of a new
affirmation of the ancient meaning of proportion.24 This thesis was already
experimented with centuries ago by Policletus, who in his Kanon, imposed a role
in dimensional reference on man and his body, with the aim of assuring the
necessary precision to planning activity: a primitive modulus,25 useful both to the
creative process of the architect and to that of the sculptor. The discovery and
understanding of aesthetic standards of the past assume a new meaning in
considering the relation between body, space and time, as measurements and
ancient values are highlighted by the light of the present.26
The exceptional nature of the intervention of Crypta Balbi, a restoration project
directed by the architect Maria Letizia Conforto – the staging museum was curated
by the architect Franco Ceschi27 – is related to the remarkable dimensions of the
22 Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths
__________________________________________________________________
excavations and archaeological recoveries associated with the entire block. The
term, Crypta Balbi, is a reference to an urban area of average dimensions and
variously built in the heart of the historical centre of Rome. It is a complex project
of urban recovery, one which involves the realisation of new exhibitions that have
to be integrated with the building complex of Museo Nazionale Romano.28
It has to be remembered that the use of pre-existing historical buildings for the
insertion of museum parts is a common practice in Italy: the huge architectural
heritage of this country allows (and necessitates) solutions capable of addressing
the conservation of the buildings and the exhibition of the artworks. The dialogue
between content and container29 is typical of the experience in a museum and
seems to be the main key to understanding this typology of architecture, even
considering the contemporary international panorama. In light of the re-
qualification and recovery of the architectural heritage, this dialogue is
complicated by a dense plot of historical, cultural and artistic connections that
serve to characterise the Italian reality.
The complexity of the recovery intervention of the Crypta Balbi derives from
the articulation of the urban block, which encompasses a tremendous historical and
architectonical stratification. The project takes its form from the desire to highlight
this richness and make this heritage a fundamental exhibition within the museum
experience. Despite the quality of the evidence and of the didactic narration
proposed through panels and models in this accurate staging project, the main
artwork to be visited is the architectonic space in its sedimentation and temporal
evolution. In this way, the container becomes more relevant than the content. This
is not because of twisted logics or for architectonic credit, but due to a natural
connection between the place and the exhibited object.
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 23
__________________________________________________________________

Images 1-2: Palazzo Altemps: the classic proportions of the statues are references
by which to appreciate the measurements of the museum space.
© 2014, Carla Molinari. Used with permission.
24 Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths
__________________________________________________________________

Images 3-4: Crypta Balbi: timeline as a space path of ruins.


© 2014, Carla Molinari. Used with permission.

4. An Interpretative Analysis of Exhibit Design


It becomes necessary to specify that such cases represent the evidence of a
spatial connection between intervention and pre-existence, a modus operandi
adopted as ‘methodological support in the occasion in which the restoration of an
historic building shares the same role of a museum.’30 Such a joint orientation
towards a better use of space is no more random than that offered by the ancient
ruins, but is able to evaluate the content, linked to the appreciation and the
experiential needs of observers, and their comprehension of the narrative message
presented by the museum. Furthermore, it is important to recognise that exhibit
design is a complex field of architecture; the goal of this paper is not to clarify
aspects of this discipline, but to describe some aspects of experience in architecture
using the fundamental relationship between space, time and body, which appears
very defined in these kinds of buildings. In fact, the ruins testify, through their
presence and longevity, that a timeline capable of uniting space and the body of the
observer in only one architectural sequence is possible.
Certainly, considering the relation of time-space, the project of Crypta Balbi is
quite emblematic as it simultaneously offers two different narrative solutions. The
path at the height of the Roman city is developed along the horizontal axis as an
exhibition line that permits a direct comparison of the contemporary age to the
historical one. In contrast, the museum structure inside the building was designed
by continuous powerful vertical cuts, which remind us directly of the deep
temporal sedimentation. The spatial sequences, used in exhibit design to compose
the museum narrativity are, indeed, characterised by various approaches to time in
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 25
__________________________________________________________________
space. In Palazzo Altemps, the relations between exhibition space and temporal
line are even stronger and more defined: the narrative message of the museum is
solved in the duality of sculptural objects and the architectural space that surrounds
them. The walk through the rooms of Palazzo Altemps, as along the path in Crypta
Balbi, is characterised by the idea of retracing that historical moment, to live it.
Positioned in an intermediate space between past, present and future, the ruins
become an opportunity for unparalleled design experimentation and for orienting
new processes of invention. The stratification of the masonry walls of the Crypta
Balbi, like the characters stripped of unnecessary decoration in Palazzo Altemps,
reveal the nature of the materials and the nature concealed by time. A double
narrative code that seems to tie the classic structure to the modern research,
building relationships aimed at revealing the old to create new sensory experiences.
The multilayer cuts of Crypta Balbi, like the sculptural works in Palazzo
Altemps, create a reaction of temporal disorientation, a dizziness in which all the
complexity of the becoming is revealed, and the instant is annulled. In this way, the
exhibition seems to disappear, the museum itself becomes secondary; what is left is
a supremacy of space, time and absolute measurement of body: terms of
comparison in which all the experience of architecture is contained.

Notes
1
Bruno Zevi, Saper vedere l’architettura (Torino: Einaudi, 1948), 31.
2
Luigi Moretti, ‘Strutture e sequenze di spazi,’ Spazio 7 (1952): 9-20, 107-108.
3
This refers to the roles and potentialities of narrative structures as architectural
devices, as discussed in Carla Molinari and Stefano Bigiotti, The Storytelling in
Architecture: A Proposal to Read and to Write Spaces (Paper presented at the 5th
Global Conference on Storytelling, Lisbon, 10-16 May 2014).
4
Juani Pallasmaa, Gli occhi della pelle: L’architettura e i sensi (Milano: Jaca
Book, 2007), 26.
5
Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory,
Photography, and Film (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013), 123.
6
See Le Corbusier, Verso un’architettura (Milano: Longanesi, 1986).
7
See Bernard Tschumi, ‘Sequences,’ Architettura e Disgiunzione (Bologna:
Edizioni Pendragon, 2005).
8
Moretti, ‘Strutture e sequenze di spazi,’ 9-20, 107-108.
9
Considering this point of view, the composition takes on features similar to
those of a tale and, following the theories of Paul Ricoeur, precise narration could
become a strategic method, redefined in architectural terms, to solve the
contemporary complexity of time-space relationships.
10
Le Corbusier, Il modulor (Milano: Mazzotta Editore, 1995).
26 Space and Time in Narrative and Expositive Paths
__________________________________________________________________

11
Filippo Lambertucci, Esplorazioni spaziali (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2013), 45.
Translation by the authors.
12
In particular, there is a reference to the spatial quality of the Broad Street Station
in Richmond, Virginia as represented in Peter Zumthor, Atmosfere (Milan: Electa,
2nd ed., 2012), 8-9.
13
Ibid., 42-43
14
This refers to the notes of Le Corbusier about the Acropolis, according to which
‘the fraction of a millimeter participates. [...] Deformations which amaze. The
mouldings sag or incline themselves on the vertical axis to be offered in a better
way to the eye.’ Le Corbusier, Verso un architettura, 175. Translation by the
authors.
15
Ibid., pictures 14, 156. Translation by the authors.
16
The hypothesis finds a correspondence in the thought of Purini, according to
which, ‘it is not possible to measure with the same thing which is to be measured.
In architecture, the measurement value is something irreducible to the object to
which it is applied.’ Franco Purini, Una lezione sul disegno (Rome: Cangemi
editore, 1996). Translation by the authors.
17
A thesis proposed also by Lambertucci himself, according to which ‘the last term
of comparison-with the measure- are we, our body, with all its physical features;
the success of a measure that of the system of relations between measurements will
always be compared to those.’ Filippo Lambertucci, Esplorazioni spaziali, 53.
Translation by the authors.
18
The modul-or is not based solely on the forms of man, but the relationship
between the body and the golden rule becomes a useful architectural tool and
represents the true link between the tabula rasa of the modern and the classical
worlds. It is the aesthetic value of machinery and engineers, as opposed to the
classical canons architecture. Ideally, it is a meeting point dispersed over time:
human abstraction and severe rule.
19
Peter Zumthor, Atmosfere, 49. Translation by the authors.
20
See Sandro Ranellucci, Allestimento museale in edifici monumentali (Roma:
Kappa Ed., 2006).
21
Scoppola Francesco and S.D. Vordemann, Museo Nazionale Romano - Palazzo
Altemps (Roma: Electa, 1997), 9. Translation by the authors.
22
For more information about the exposition on Palazzo Altemps, see Matilde De
Angelis and Alessandra Capodiferro, eds., Palazzo Altemps, le collezioni (Milan:
Electa, 2012).
23
Le Corbusier, Verso un architetettura (Milan: Longanesi, 4th ed., 1973), 52.
Translation by the authors.
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 27
__________________________________________________________________

24
The language here is taken from the description of the planning process of the
Osenfont House. Mauro Moriconi, ‘Le misure di Le Corbusier,’ Spazio e Società-
Space and Society 87 (1996): 30. Translation by author.
25
This refers to the definition of modulus given by Vitruvio, De architectura, 1,2,4
according to which the measure is used for thinking about a building and consists
of a rata pars, a precise physical quantity, useful in determining the
commensurability of the architectural object.
26
For further information about the relationship between classical standard and
proportions, see Erwin Panofsky, ‘Storia della teoria delle proporzioni,’ Il
significato delle arti visive (Torino: Einaudi, 1962).
27
For further information, see Serena Baiani and Massimo Ghilardi eds., Crypta
Balbi – Fori Imperiali. Archelogia urbana a Roma e interventi di restauro
nell’anno del Grande Giubileo (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 2000).
28
The intervention was articulated into phases and lots that will be progressively
restored and incorporated into the inner part of the exhibition itinerary. In 2000, the
first functional lot was inaugurated. It constitutes the centre of the new museum
nucleus and hosts much of the evidence found during the excavation phases. More
recently, a new path was open through most of the block to the height of the city in
the period of Augusto.
29
This refers to the idea of a relationship between content and container as
discussed by Brandi in Cesare Brandi, Teoria generale della critica (Torino:
Einaudi, 1974).
30
Ranellucci, Allestimento museale in edifici monumentali, 53. Translation by the
authors.

Bibliography
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Bergson, Henry. Materia e memoria. Saggio sulla relazione tra il corpo e lo


spirito. Roma: Laterza, 1996.

Bloomer, Kent and Charles Moore. Corpo, memoria, architettura. Introduzione


alla progettazione architettonica. Firenze: Sansoni, 1981.

Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes. Torino: Einaudi, 2006.

Coates, Nigel. Narrative Architecture. Chichester: Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2012.
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De Angelis, Matilde and Alessandra Capodiferro, eds. Palazzo Altemps, le


collezioni, Milan: Electa, 2012.

Dewey, John. Arte come esperienza. Palermo: Aesthetica edizioni, 2007.

Ejzenstein, Sergei. Montaggio. Venezia: Marsilio, 1992.

Giedion, Siegfried. Spazio tempo e architettura. Milano: Hoepli, 1984.

Holl, Steven. Parallax. Milano: Postmedia, 1994.

Lambertucci, Filippo. Esplorazioni spaziali. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2013.

Le Corbusier. Il Modulor: saggio su una misura armonica su scala umana


universalmente applicabile all'architettura e alla meccanica. Milano: Edizioni
Mazzotta, 1974.

––. Verso un'architettura. Milano: Longanesi: 1986.

Merlau-Ponty, Maurice. Fenomenologia della percezione. Milano: Il Saggiatore,


1965.

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Moriconi, Marco. ‘Le misure di Le Corbusier.’ Spazio & Società – Space and
Society 76 (1996): 28-37.

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Book, 2007.

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Architecture as Experience. London: Phaidon, 2012.

Panofsky, Erwin. ‘Storia della teoria delle proporzioni.’ In Il significato delle arti
visive, edited by Renzo Federici, 43-69. Torino: Einaudi, 1962.

Queysanne, Bruno. ‘Alberti e la misura.’ Spazio & Società – Space and Society 83
(1998): 40-47.
Stefano Bigiotti and Carla Molinari 29
__________________________________________________________________

Ranellucci, Sandro. Allestimento museale in edifici monumentali. Roma: Kappa


Ed., 2006.

Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Architettura e Narratività,’ In Catalogo della Triennale XIX


edizione, edited by Derossi, De Luca, Tondo, 9-19. Milano: Edizioni Unicopli,
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Stefano Bigiotti is a PhD student in Architecture: theory and design, University La


Sapienza of Rome. His research is focused on architectural measure and composite
qualities of sustainability.

Carla Molinari is a PhD student in Architecture: theory and design, University La


Sapienza of Rome. Her research is focused on narrative, montage and sequence of
spaces.
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portraits
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Title: Portuguese portraits

Author: Aubrey F. G. Bell

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Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: B. H. Blackwell, 1917

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK


PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS ***
PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS
By the same Author
THE MAGIC OF SPAIN, 1912.
IN PORTUGAL, 1912.
POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE, 1913.
STUDIES IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE, 1914.
LYRICS OF GIL VICENTE, 1914.
PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1915.

New York Agents


LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
NUN’ ALVAREZ.
From the earliest (1526) edition of the Cronica.
[Frontispiece.
PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS
BY

AUBREY F. G. BELL

A notavel fama dos excelentes barões e muito antiguos antecessores dina de


perpetua lembrança
Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo

Oxford
B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET
MCMXVII
TO

THE COUNTLESS FORGOTTEN HEROES


OF PORTUGAL
In burning sands or Ocean’s blinding silt,
In Africa, Asia, and the icy North,
They lie: yet came they home who thus went forth,
Since of their bones is all their country built.
Preface
Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great
men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of
Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before
him—the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and
Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas
and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be
impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles
and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a
knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few
satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient
knowledge of Portuguese to read it with pleasure as it is difficult to
write or speak it.
There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in
subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and
sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the
seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have
loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000
were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the
battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red
with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like
Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were
sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez
de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the
stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail
and personal anecdote.
They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’
achievements outshone those of Greek and Roman. For indeed the
half-century (1498-1548) between the voyage of Vasco da Gama
and the death of Dom João de Castro is thick with names; the great
men tread on one another’s heels in the halls of fame, worthily
continuing the work of their predecessors during four centuries in
Portugal. Sousa, Mello, Meneses, Cunha, Castro, Noronha,
Mascarenhas, Coutinho, Pereira, Pacheco, Almeida, Azevedo, Sá,
Silva, Silveira—these are names the very catalogue of which must
be music to a Portuguese, and which would require a large volume
to chronicle in detail.
And many women hold a high place in Portuguese history, as the
Queen-Saint Elizabeth (or Isabel),[1] the stout-hearted bakeress of
Aljubarrota, Brites (Beatrice) de Almeida, who slew, if we are to trust
the tradition, seven Spaniards with her wooden baker’s shovel, or
the heroines of Diu.[2]
Among the men there is Affonso Henriquez, first King of Portugal,
half French by birth, and grandson of the Spanish King of Leon, but
in heart and action wholly Portuguese; loyal Egas Moniz; Gualdim
Paes and other legendary heroes in the conflict with the Moors which
transformed Portugal from a dependent province into a free
kingdom; and later, if not less legendary, Fernão Rodriguez
Pacheco, the astute defender of Celorico, who in starvation by a
miracle obtained a fish and sent it to the besieger to show that plenty
reigned in the town; or the defender of Coimbra, Martim Freitas,
heroically, almost quixotically loyal to the deposed King Sancho II.
On the sea the first to signalise himself was Fuas Roupinho, in the
twelfth century; and thenceforth Portugal never failed to produce
hardy if obscure seamen, to fish for cod in the Northern Seas or to
discover the west coast of Africa till Bartholomeu Diaz rounded the
Cape of Storms in 1487, and King João II rechristened it the Cape of
Good Hope.[3]
João II (1481-95), “the Perfect Prince,” or as Queen Isabella of
Spain more bluntly called him el hombre, “the man,” was one of a
series of great kings of the House of Avis, founded by João I (1385-
1433) “of good memory,” darling of the Lisbon people. João I was
succeeded by his eldest son, the noble but unfortunate student-king
Duarte (1433-8). Other brothers of Prince Henry the Navigator,
scarcely less famous, were the Infante Pedro, statesman and author,
who travelled through “the seven parts of the world,” and the Infante
Fernando, who died slowly with saintly patient heroism as a prisoner
of the Moors in Africa.
Under Manoel I (1495-1521) the Great, the Fortunate, and his son
João III (1521-57), Gama, Albuquerque and Dom João de Castro are
the most conspicuous names; but Dom Francisco de Almeida, first
Viceroy of India, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, discoverer of Brazil, Fernão
de Magalhães, the harsh and fiery navigator[4] who first penetrated
by sea to the North Pacific and was slain in the hour of his triumph—
his name lives in the Straits of Magellan—and many more were
almost equally celebrated. But especially among the discoverers and
early adventurers in India the men of fame are but types of hundreds
of less fortunate heroes who perished. Men left Portugal with their
lives in their hands, and for every one who (like Fernam Mendez
Pinto) survived to tell the tale scores sailed away who were never
seen or heard of afterwards.
Yet the population of Portugal in the first third of the sixteenth
century may have been but 1,500,000, and certainly did not reach
twice that figure. That is a fact that must uplift and inspire those who
study Portugal’s history or consider her future. For the Portuguese of
the sixteenth century fought not against or not only against hordes of
undisciplined savages, but against Moors and Turks highly civilised
and well equipped with artillery.
Perhaps the secret of their success is that their motto was “God,
King, and Country,” and that each man among them relied, under
Heaven, on himself, not on this or that sect or party or philosophy,
election promises or political programmes. They did not wait and
watch for some wonderful Ism, like a brazen serpent, to change the
face of the world: they as individuals simply, persistently set to work
and—changed it. In less than fifty years after the Portuguese first
reached India they were in Japan, converting and civilising the
Japanese, and had made possible that tremendous saying of
Camões:
E se mais mundo houvera lá chegára.
And had there been more world they would have reached it.
That is, of course, a terrible condemnation as well as an undying
honour, for unless each generation were to produce an Albuquerque
there could be no hope of maintaining conquests so wide, and
Albuquerque had had his hands tied by his own countrymen, so that,
like the blinded Samson, he achieved the ruin of his enemies by his
unaided strength and at the expense of his own life. But if
Portuguese statesmanship was at fault in India, there never failed a
sprinkling of individuals who spent their lives in ungrudging service
and heroic effort to counterbalance errors committed, and often died
heartbroken for their pains.
Two anecdotes will give an idea of the spirit that animated the
Portuguese in the sixteenth century. During the siege of Diu a
soldier, Fernão Penteado, seriously wounded in the head, went to
the surgeon, but, finding him busy with other wounded and hearing
the noise of a Turkish attack, he returned to the fight and came back
with a second serious wound in the head, only to find the surgeon
busier than before. Again he went to fight, and when the surgeon
was finally able to attend to him he had a third wound, in his right
arm.
The second incident occurred in North-West Africa. During a fight
Dom Affonso da Cunha, aiming a mighty cut with his sword at a
Moor, missed him, and the sword leapt from his hand. “Go fetch it,
you dog!” roared Cunha, and the terror-stricken Moor obediently
picked it up and gave it to him, trembling. Cunha thereupon spared
his life.
Such were those Portuguese of old, persistent, brave, proud,
magnificent. And something of their spirit survives in the Portugal of
to-day, ready to reappear at a crisis—more of it, perhaps, than is
generally imagined.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Antonio Coelho Gasco in his Conquista, Antiguidade e
Nobreza da mui insigne e inclita Cidade de Coimbra (Lisboa,
1805) drew the following rash picture of her from an ancient
portrait at Coimbra: “This very saintly lady was of gigantic frame
and very stout, very white and very red, with a long face and large
serene green eyes, nose rather low with wide nostrils, head long
and beautiful.”
[2] Isabel Fernandez, Barbara Fernandez, and Isabel Madeira.
Later heroines at home were Isabel Pereira in the defence of
Ouguella against the Spanish in 1644 and Elena Perez in the
similar siege of Monção in 1656.
[3] The Portuguese accounts of these discoveries are most
vivid and minute, a fascinating introduction to the geography of
what is now largely part of the British Empire.
[4] Garcia da Orta introduces him with the words “The Devil
entered into a Portuguese.”
Contents
PAGE
I
King Dinis 1
II
Nun’ Alvarez 17
III
Prince Henry the Navigator 47
IV
Vasco da Gama 61
V
Duarte Pacheco Pereira 79
VI
Affonso de Albuquerque 103
VII
Dom João de Castro 127
List of Illustrations
FACING PAGE
NUN’ ALVAREZ Frontispiece
From the earliest (1526) edition of the Cronica.
PRINCE HENRY THE NAVIGATOR 49
VASCO DA GAMA 63
AFFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE 105
From Gaspar Correa, Lendas da India, frontispiece to vol. ii. pt.
1.
JOÃO DE CASTRO 129
I
KING DINIS
(1261-1325)
Co’ este o reino prospero florece.
Camões, Os Lusiadas.
Um Dinis que ha de admirar o mundo.
Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, Ulyssippo.
When Henry of the French House of Burgundy became Count of
Portugal in 1095 he merely held a province in fealty to the King of
Leon, but by his son, the great Affonso I’s victories over the Moors it
almost automatically became an independent kingdom. The second
king, Sancho I, who has so many points of resemblance to King
Dinis, further established the new realm, and he and his successors
continued to wrest territory from the Moors. In the reign of the fifth
king, Dinis’ father, Affonso III, the conquest of Algarve was
completed, and the only remaining difficulty was the claim of the
kings of Castille to this region.
Dinis, born on October 9, 1261, was but a few years old when he
was sent to Seville to win the consent of his mother’s father, the
celebrated Alfonso the Learned, to waive his right to the latest
Portuguese conquest. As the shrewd Affonso III had foreseen, he
proved a successful diplomatist. Alfonso X, enchanted with the
grave, courtly bearing of his little grandson, knighted him and sent
him home with all his requests granted.
Thus it came about that when Dinis, to whom his father had given
a separate household but a few months before, ascended the throne
at the age of seventeen, he was the first king to begin to reign over
Portugal with its modern boundaries, from the River Minho to Faro.
Two centuries of great deeds had achieved this result—two more
were to pass before Spain was likewise entirely free of the Moorish
invader—and Dinis now in a reign of half a century (1279-1325) saw
to it that the heroism and sacrifices of his ancestors had not been in
vain.
His tutor had been a Frenchman, Ébrard de Cahors, who now
became Bishop of Coimbra, and the fame of his grandfather Alfonso
X was spread through the whole Peninsula. But, young as he was,
Dinis at once made it clear that he intended to rule as the national
King of Portugal and had resolution enough to withstand the
Castilian influence of his mother and Alfonso X. His first care was to
acquaint himself thoroughly with his kingdom, and he spent the great
part of the first year of his reign in visiting the country, paying
especial attention to the still almost deserted region of Alentejo.
But the first years of his reign were not entirely peaceful, for his
younger brother Affonso laid claim to the throne. Dinis was born
before the Pope had legitimised Affonso III’s second marriage;
Affonso, two years his junior, afterwards: hence the partisans of the
latter affected to consider Dinis illegitimate. The dispute was scarcely
settled when Dinis married Isabel, daughter of Pedro III of Aragon,
who proved so efficacious a mediator in the even more serious
troubles at the end of his reign, and, after sharing his throne for forty-
three years, is still venerated as the Queen-Saint of Portugal.
In his differences with Castile, Dinis was successful, both in peace
and war, and it was a tribute to his character and authority that he
was chosen as arbitrator between the claims of the kings of Castille
and Aragon. At home he was confronted by a powerful secular
clergy, by the excessive and growing wealth of the religious orders,
and by an overweening nobility, while his newly conquered kingdom
urgently required hands to till it and walls and castles for its defence.
Dinis dealt with all these problems in a spirit of equal wisdom and
firmness, upholding the rights of the throne and the rights of the
people till he had welded a scattered crowd of individuals into a
nation.
His quarrel with the clergy, who protested that the King had
infringed their rights, was referred to Rome, and in 1289 a formal but
not a lasting agreement was reached.
Two years later the King checked the ever-growing possessions of
the religious orders by a law limiting their right to gifts and legacies.
Their wealth was the result of the great part they had played during
the long conflict against the Moors, but it naturally began to prove
inconvenient to King and people in time of peace. The nobles were
in like case, and Dinis showed the same resolution towards them
and abolished certain of their privileges.
He could protect as well as check. When the Knights Templar
were abolished by the Pope, Dinis secured an exception for Portugal
and reorganised them as the Order of Christ in 1319. Indeed he was
essentially a builder, not a demolisher. In 1290 he founded the
University of Coimbra; in 1308 he renewed and consolidated the
treaty between Portugal and England; in 1317 he invited to Portugal
a Genoese, Manuel Pezagno, to organise his fleet and command it
as Admiral.
He encouraged agriculture, calling the peasants the “nerves of the
republic” and passed many laws to ensure their security, so that in
his reign men began to go in safety along the roads of Portugal,
hitherto infested by brigands, and he divided grants of land among
the poor of the towns. He planted near Leiria the pines which still
form so delightful a feature of the country between that town and
Alcobaça.
Some have called King Dinis a miser, others declare that in his
reign there was a saying “liberal as King Dinis.” It is certain that he
expended his money wisely, and, while no early king ever
accomplished more for the land over which he ruled, he left a full
treasury at his death. The charge of avarice perhaps arose from the
charming legend which so well exemplifies the simplicity of those
times.
The Queen was in the habit of distributing bread daily to a large
number of poor, and Dinis, who perhaps would rather have seen
them digging the soil, forbade the charity. Queen Isabel continued as
before, and one morning the King met her as she went out with her
apron full of bread.
“What have you there?” said King Dinis.
“Roses,” said the Queen.
“Let me see them,” said King Dinis.
And behold the Queen’s apron was filled with roses.
In the matter of buildings King Dinis not only fortified many towns
with castles and walls, but founded numerous churches and
convents. The traveller in Portugal even now can scarcely pass a
day without coming upon something to remind him of the sixth King
of Portugal. The convent of Odivellas, the cloisters of Alcobaça, the
beautiful ruins of the castle above Leiria are but three of many
instances which show how King Dinis’ work survives even in the
twentieth century.
It was said of him that—
Whate’er he willed
Dinis fulfilled.
But he nearly always wrought even better than he knew. He
realised no doubt that Portugal was an all-but-island, especially
when the relations with Castille were unfriendly; but he could
scarcely foresee that of his pinewoods would be built the “ships that
went to the discovery of new worlds and seas”; that a future Master
of his new Order of Christ would devote its vast revenues to the
great work of exploring the West Coast of Africa, the work which
bore so important a share in transforming Europe from all that we
connect with mediævalism to all that is modern; that his embryo fleet
would grow and prosper till Portugal became the foremost sea-
power; or that the treaty with England would still be bearing fruit six
centuries after his death.
The University, too, lasted and became one of the glories of
Portugal, and a source of many of her greatest men in the sixteenth
century. Since the sixteenth century, after being several times moved
from Coimbra to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Coimbra, it has been
fixed in the little town on the right bank of the Mondego and remains
one of the most treasured possessions of modern Portugal. The
quality that explains how so many of King Dinis’ institutions endured

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