NATURE

The chapter opens with three quotations;

G. Semper, J.Ruskin, Louis Khan

“architecture, unlike others arts, does not find its patterns in nature”
“an architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, an let him there what
nature understand by buttress, and what by a dome”
“what man makes, nature cannot make. Nature does not build a house, nature does not make a
locomotive, nature does not make a playground”. They grow out of a desire to express”

Nature is the main category for the formulation of what architecture is or can be. Architecture, as a
human product, would seem not to belong to nature, however there have been several attempts to
connect them. Nature has always dealed with human kind, as Raymond Williams wrote. It is a part
of the history of the human thought.
The same stands for architecture. Break with nature; Modernism put nature into abeyance.
In 1960, with the coming of the environmental movement, a re-invented nature has returned in the
vocabulary.
The general distinction between:
-culture: world created by man
-nature: world in which man exists
It seems that architecture belongs to the first, culture.
Many attempts in the history to define architecture by relation to nature.
It is worth distinguishing between:
-those who think that architecture is like nature
-those who think that architecture is nature
-others.. (nor the first, neither the second).. what is then?

1. Nature as the source of beauty in architecture.

Platone in the Timeus says that all things in nature are governed by numerical relations or by
geometry. Neoplatonist argued that art followed the same principle.
Whatever happens in the real world is an imitation of what happens in the ideal world. Ideal world
is nature according to Plato.
Leon Battista Alberti applied this principle to architecture. He elaborated this concept with the
Concinnitas in De Re Aedificatoria.
Concinnitas is the harmony that underlies the graceful arrangement of parts in relation to each other
and to the whole. Significance of nature was seen as a model for architecture. Everything that nature
produces is with this principle. The model lies in the harmony existing in the natural world.
In the physics Aristotle had written that nature is a sort of inherent principle behind the world
moves. The ideal world of nature is something the artist have to deal. But nature is not perfect,
though the artist’s work it will become perfect.
In the seventeenth century, in the Ordonnance, Claude Perrault, although he was categorical,
marked the beginning of the demise of the idea that beauty resides in objects, rather is a construct of
the viewing subject. It marked the first reconsideration of architecture’s relation with nature.

2. The origin of architecture

The question of the origin of architecture has been long discussed. Long running theme between
architectural theorists.
Taking their cue from Vitruvius, in book 1 of De Architectura had described the mythical origin of
architecture, Reinassance and Post Renaissance architects speculated widely and wildly about the
form of the first architecture.
Filarete developed the first earliest text for the hypothtetical building of the primate man. This aims
to understand which were the essence of the first building to take it as an example for their time’s
architecture.
In his treatise, Filarete proposes that the first building were caves, tents, or huts, which provided the
original form of the column.
The Vitruvian myth of the first building provided convenient support in linking architecture the
mankind’s first natural state.
This idea, however, in the eighteenth century ceased any longer to take seriously and became a
mere superstition.
Marc Antoine Laugier; in his essay sur l’architecture, offered the best known example of the use of
the story of architecture’s origin in nature to legitimate a contemporary theory. Lay not in his
account of the natural origins of architecture, but in the use he then put it so.
Nature for Antoine Laugier had a different meaning and sense
-no source of proportions for beauty, as Alberti
-no something that can be experienced, as Romantics say
-it is a principle of construction and decoration for which the closest analogy must be reason.
Laugier was the last to legitimate and derive a theory of architecture from a primitive building. This
topic started to be consider after him too primitive and no longer meaningful.
In the nineteenth century nature underwent a major philosophical and scientific transformation.
Indeed Gottfried Semper in 1850 wrote that this definition (to derive a theory of architecture from a
primitive building) was inappropriate for what he had in mind.

3. The valorization of architecture: “mimesis”, or the imitation of nature

Nothing is created, is the repetition of something that already exists
Theory of arts found in classical authors, a fundamental idea was its capacity to imitate nature.
15th century the faithfulness with which a work of art reproduced nature came to be considered its
first criterion of its quality.
But architecture was nor a representative art as painting and sculpture were. Its inability to represent
nature constituted a serious obstacle to its acceptance as a liberal art.
If architecture was to stand on equal social terms of painting and sculpture, it was needed to prove
that architecture was an art in which nature was represented.
Main discussion between fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Theorists expressed two main argument to represent architecture as a mimesis art:
-Architecture imitates its own natural model, the hypothetical primitive buildings. In so far
architecture reproduced the forms of the hut or the tent, translating the timber or skin into stone, it
could be said to be an imitation of nature.
This theory that could be found in Vitruvius book, developed during the eigteenth century with
Diderot Encyclopedie where architecture was described as an art of imitation.
-The second Theory was developed in the eighteenth century: while architecture did not represent
the superficial appearances of nature, it represented the inherent principles, proving a more
profound form of mimesis. This approach to representation of nature we’ve already seen in Laugier,
but it was to be elaborated upon the second part of the eighteenth century. In social and material
terms, the purpose of this argument was clear and allowed architects to claim that their art was
superior the others.
The responsible to the fullest justification for the mimetic nature of architecture was Quatremere de
Quincy, who between 1788 and 1825 evolved an original argument.
He started by the question of whether nature architecture was supposed to imitate; referred to the
world of physical matter, or to the ideas people held of that world. His answer was to say that nature
was both.
His next issue was whether architecture’s imitation of nature was literal or metaphorical: his answer
was that it was both.
Architecture was founded upon 2 main principles
-the literal imitation of timber building in stone; primitive buildings originated in three types; the
cave, the tent and the timber hut each of which provided a natural model for architecture. It is
through the literal imitation of the natural process of building - represented by the timber hut - that
architecture succeeded in producing an impression of imitation. For Quatremere the representation
in stone of other materials, far from being a reprehensible lie, was an agreeable fiction giving rise to
much of architecture’s charm. All the arts, he suggested, achieve their effects by disguising.
He didn’t see the artifice as a mean to correct nature, rather as itself a quasi-natural process of
transformation. No conflict between nature and artifice. Nature has directed man in his formation
and work.
-the citation by analogy of the principles of order and harmony found in natural objects. In her
principle of order, of harmony Nature offers only analogies to architecture on all sides
The model of architecture is the order of nature that exists everywhere, without being visible at all.
Historically his vision was conceived a dead end, because its extreme rationalism makes his nature
such as an artificial construct.
On the other hand his notion of the art of architecture as pure idea was too valuable to be
abandoned.

Quatremere deve sostenere che tipo di imitazione fosse l’architettura:

due principi:
architettura che imita l’edificio primitivo, cave tent and timber hunt.. modello per l’architettura…
l’architettura era autorizzata a poterla aiutare.
Secondo principio: l’architettura ha leggi di ordine e armonia come la natura per cui può imitarla.
Valorizzare l’architettura perché un arte era considerata tale se aveva potere di imitazione.
Necessità di rendere la natura una arte liberale.
Diderot, laugier…
Imitazione dell’edificio primitivo e dei principi. Quatremere lo rende più esplicito, perché in natura
ci sono modelli. Principi di ordine e armonia

4. Nature invoked to justify artistic licence

As Greek remarked, in particular Aristotele, art partly completes what nature cannot bring to a
finish. Increasingly in Italy during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the notion that nature
was incomplete and imperfect justifying the artist’s licence in departing from a natural model.
“Artist who studies nature should be skilled in recognize its faults and corrects them” according to
Bernini.
Absorbed in French artists circle: André Félibien stated in L’Idée du Peintre Parfait that “although
nature is the source of beauty, art surpasses nature because in nature we find that individual objects
are usually imperfect. Nature is frustrated by accidents.”
This theory had an immediate impact on gardens design, both in Italy and France, Villa Lante,
Versailles. Garden design is about Organic nature works that demonstrated the superior power of
human intellect and artifice over nature’s inability to attain beauty.
This idea continued to be held well into the late eighteenth century. Sir William Chambers in
“Dissertation on Oriental gardening” argued that Nature is incapable of pleasing without the
assistance of art, although this argument was an attack upon the naturalism of the landscape
gardening of Capability Brown, much favoured by Whig Politicians.
5. As a political idea: nature as freedom, lack of constraint
The modern sense of nature as a virtue, as what is free and unaffected, was unknown before the
beginning of the 18th century.
The development of this meaning held in Britain as a reaction to what was perceived as the denial
of the natural rights of freedom of speech and so on by despotic regimes of Europe, topic widely
discusses in John Locke’s philosophy.
The link between political liberty and the freedom offers by nature was made explicit. While the
application of these ideas of nature formed the basis of the English picturesque landscape design,
their extension to architecture came more gradually, largely in connection with the development of
the theory of aesthetic, which is considered next.
Later versions of a basis of liberal politics appear in the nineteenth century American Philosoper
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in the twentieth centuries philosopher Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer in their Dialect of Enlightenment.
Nature as a basis for of liberal politics. Nature no more as an inherent law.

6. Nature as a construct of the viewer’s perception

Especially in eighteenth century the term of perception was introduced as sensation provoked in the
viewer. Visual relationship between the observer and the object.
The shift from the notion that the cause of beauty lay in the nature (objective world of matter) to the
view that the source of beauty lay not in the physicality of objects but in the manner which they
were been apprehended by the human mind has been alluded to relative to Claude Perrault. (finding
in the social context); beauty is in the social habits, in customs.
Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them,
and each mind perceive a different beauty —— was underrated by english philosopher following
the tradition of John Locke.
As a measure of arts Nature could no longer be simply external objects or phenomena, but had also
to include the quality of the human experience by which they were known.
In relation to architecture, the text which had the most extensive influence was Edmund Burke’s “A
philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful”.
Burke’s denial that the effects of architecture depend upon the imitation of nature’s proportions or
harmonies allowed him to concentrate upon his main argument, which was that aesthetic sensations,
of the sublime and of beauty, are induced by the sight of natural objects, and art succeeds in so far
as it can reproduce in the viewer the same sensation of delight or pain.
The creation of architectural effects to induce particular sensations in late eighteenth century and
nineteenth century became a major topic of discussion in French architectural circles, evident in Le
Camus de Mézières’s book “the genius of architecture” and in Boullée’s projects.
It was the studying of nature on one hand and of sensations on the other that pushed Boullée the aim
to create the so called “poetry of Architecture”. “I tried to find a composition made up of the effects
of the shadows.”
Perhaps the best built applications of these ideas are to be found in Soane architecture.
His house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was, as David Watkinn suggests, an attempt to interpret the
architecture of sensation firmly rejecting the notion that architecture had any model in nature,
insisting that it is an entirely art of invention. (near to the notion of Quatrémere’s description of
architecture as a “Rival to nature itself”.

7. Art as a second nature

Coined by Goethe, marked a substantial shift in thinking about the relationship art-nature in the
nearly nineteenth century. This new formulation came not from studying art, rather from studying
nature. Quatremere idea of nature was a stiff, rational construct without the slightest attention to any
directly observed natural phenomena.
Goethe criticism to French national scientists that classified species according to their parts, as they
were constructed as man-made artefacts.
There must be another means of representing nature, not in separate parts but in living actuality,
striving from the whole to the parts.
The artist should proceed in the same way (so that the work becomes the expression of the vital
force imparted by the artist). The quality of works of art was that they were the consequence of a
living spirit, and the seeing of them engaged the active perception of a living subject. In this art was
like nature both in its formation and in its apperception (accorgersi di percepire).
The idea that architecture follows the method of nature and is aimed by an inherent living force
(really associated to Gothic architecture).
Architecture as a second nature is well-seen in Semper and Ruskin.
They both accepted that architecture, while having some similes to nature, is itself not nature.
Architecture is inorganic nature built by human mind and differs from organic nature which is
individualized and animated by its indwelling spirit.
Semper, explicited distance from the tradition of imitation, and stated that the origins of architecture
did not lie in nature.
Architecture is imitation of a primal social gesture of enclosure of the space, not the physical object,
but the act. The industrial arts are the key to understand architectural rule in general.
On the other hand Semper acknowledged that there was an analogy with nature in the way
architectural forms developed (BUT it was no more than an analogy).
Semper’s notion of artifice is contained in two passages in particular in The four elements of
architecture (1851) and Der Stil (1861) and develops three distinct but related arguments.
-historically the technical rates preceded the art of buildings, which is no more than the application
to architectural themes of skills developed originally for other purposes.
-historically, man’s desire for enclosure preceded his knowledge of the means to achieve. It was the
enclosure of space, not the construction of huts that was the first architectural act.
-it is an inherent characteristic of architecture, to mask the reality of the materials of which it is
made. Looks like the argument that Quatremere de Quincy made. Semper said that the whole art of
architecture rested in the ability to translate ideas or themes from one material to another.
Quatremere stated instead that transmutation had been a way to maintain the old proposition that
architecture was an art of natural imitation.
Ruskin (take inspiration from the nature, a sort of modern imitation of the nature.. the power of the
individual) religious vision made him seen nature as God’s work, and this made him to believe
firmly that nature was the only source of all beauty. Advice to the painter: go to Nature in all
singleness of heart, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning… same advice
to architects. Certainly Ruskin believed that beauty came originally from natural objects.
The seven lamps of architecture (1849): architecture achieved its effects through a sympathy with
nature.
BUT!! Ruskin did not think that the mere imitation of natural forms would achieve anything but a
most inferior beauty: the quality of true art came from the imposition of man’s will and his ability to
impress his power of invention upon the raw material offered by nature.
Architecture is a second nature for Ruskin because it is the outcome of the uniquely human faculty
for mental and manual work.
His later writing put out on the other hand a different attitude towards nature. The significance of
nature was to be appreciated not through observation of natural phenomena, rather through
mythology.

8) Nature as the antidote to culture

Notion that nature was a means for resistance to the artificiality of culture presented in the
eighteenth century was fully exploited (sfruttato appieno) by english romantic poets Coleridge and
Wordsworth. But it was in the Usa that this idea had some architectural consequences.
Philosopher R. Waldo Emerson, inspired by Goethe and by English romantic poets, saw nature
(1830) as the quality of things revealed by the power of man’s mind. Its beauty in the beauty of his
own mind. But in nature he also saw the revelation of the supernatural, every natural fact is a
symbol of a spiritual fact. Therefore by means of nature man realizes his own spiritual being. (due
to his american context). Americans seek their inspiration from direct experience of the everyday,
of the nature (natural surrounding, unconditioned by history).
Bigger impact on Louis Sullivan, whose adulation of nature is entirely in the spirit of emerson’s
transcendentalism. Essay “what is architecture” in 1906, sought to create work free of cultural
convention and tradition and to realize emerson’s idea “art is nature passed through the alembic of
man”.
F. L. Wright (sullivan’s assistant) apparently absorbed many of the same ideas, but was to realize
them architecturally without resorting (senza fare ricorso) to naturalistic decoration.

9) The rejection of nature

The interest in nature as a model for the arts went into decline in the second part of the nineteenth
century due to developments in sciences, darwin’s theories and others which emphasized the
dissimilarity between natural process and artistic ones.
Baudelaire wrote “nature teaches us nothing”, “nature can can counsel nothing but crime”. The
quality of art lays in artificiality. Also Nietzsche “art is not an imitation of nature, but rather a
metaphysical supplement raised up beside it to overcome it.”
The distinction between nature and culture - hitherto so important - was now itself called into
question.
Modern architecture, nature has nothing to offer.
Wagner: architecture is able by itself to make forms that have no model in nature, a completely new
formation.
But what is the substitute of nature?
Art was an independent phenomenon on its own, comprehensible only in terms of its own laws,
manifested particularly in the tension in art between tendencies on the one hand to abstraction, and
on the other hand to expression.
Dutch de stijl to negate all aspect of nature, including gravity.
What would replace nature? Answer given by the italian futurists. Futurist architecture manifesto in
1914 “as ancient took inspiration from the natural element, we take inspiration from the new
mechanical world which we’ve created.”
Architecture finds its model in technology (20th century).
But technology has not been the only substitute for nature. The other one has been architecture’s
own tradition. The mistress art by bloomfield and the architecture of humanism by scott. They
attack ruskinian naturalism proposing the study of works of architecture in themselves.
Building and materials (studying) : architect = anatomy : sculptor
Louis kahn: what architecture makes, nature cannot make.
After all not every single architect negated nature: two exceptions are Frank Lloyd Wright and Le
Corbusier (like the light of the sun for example)
Wright emphasis upon nature belongs to Sullivan and Emerson american tradition. “nature
furnished the materials for architectural motifs out of which the architectural forms as we know
them had developed”. Even though it sounds like a 18th century’s declaration, it concerns the
identity of an american architecture.
Le Corbusier heavy influenced by Ruskin. Project for the Ville radieuse, of which the unité was a
built fragment, was to restore to man the relationship with nature that he had lost during the
urbanisation period. Condition in where man could return to contemplate and enjoy nature.

10) Environmentalism: nature as ecosystem and the critique to capitalism

The previous meaning of nature was transformed during the sixties by the environmental
movement, which has taken issue with the old assumption that nature and culture are separated
things and instead empathized that they both belong to the same system. Nature once again a
powerful concept within architecture, though imprecise as ever.
Rogers says “Architecture needs to minimize its confrontation with nature” and to do so it had to
respect the nature’s laws…working our buildings into the cycle of nature will return architecture to
its very roots.”
Relationship with the ecosystem.
Nature continues to be an active category within architecture.
STRUCTURE
The chapter opened with four quotations
Viollet Le Duc, Mies Van Der Rohe, Roland Barthes, Bernard Tschumi
“in fact, all architecture proceeds from structure, and the first condition at which it should aim is to
make the outward form accord with its structure” Viollet Le Duc
“in the English language you call everything structure. In Europe we don’t. We call a shack a shack
and not a structure. By structure we have a philosophical idea. The structure is the whole, from top
to bottom, to the last detail, with the same ideas. That is what we call structure.” Mies Van Der
Rohe
“one cannot speak about structure in terms of forms and viceversa” Roland Bartes
“the architect is not meant to question structure. The structure must stand firm. After all, what
would happen if a building collapsed?” Bernard Tschumi

In history, structure in relation to architecture has had three uses:

-Any building in its entirety:
Sir Chambers: “civil architecture is that branch of the builder’s art which has for its objects all
structures, from sacred to profane. Until well after the nineteenth century in the English Language,
this was the only recognized sense of the word structure;
-The system of supporting of a building:
Structure is distinguished from architecture’s other elements such as decoration, cladding or
services;
-A schema through which a drawn project, building, group of buildings, or entire city or region
become intelligible:
The schema may be identified by many elements such as tectonic parts, masses, systems of
interconnection or communication. None of these are themse lves structure, but signs that give
cause of the perception of structure.
In the twentieth century the number of elements perceived as structure has been wildely increased.
The key to understand the word is to recognize that structure is a metaphor, which while it had
started in building, only returned to architecture after foreign travel.
Furthermore structure is a metaphors borrowed from a different field:
-from natural history, which gave its nineteenth century meaning
-from linguistics, which provided its twentieth century
Even if, when the linguistics’ meaning was introduced, the biological one still remained.

1. Structure as that distinct element of whole concerned with its means of support
Borrowed from natural sciences, nineteenth-century.
Concerned with the mid-nineteenth century architect Viollet-le-Duc, who views that structure was
the basis of all architecture and justified the superiority of Gothic style (for its sincerity).
According to him it is impossible to separate the form of architecture of the 13th century from its
structure. Every form of this architecture is the result of a necessity of that structure, as in nature
there is not a form that is not produced by the necessity the organism. But he did not see the
structure as something that can be detached from the architecture, it’s not simply talking about the
structure as we might think of.
Every part of the building responded to a specific logic first of all a structural logic — every
architectural style responded to a certain way in which building could stand and being organized.
Every part was a coherent part of that whole. The inner structural logic.
The analytical drawings with which Viollet Le-Duc illustrated his writings to show the structure of
ancient buildings make it clear how far structure was an abstraction.
Viollet’s ideas of structure was rapidly taken into account in the USA, and was used by Eidlitz and
Schuyler.
Eidlitz best known book “The Nature and function of Art” took from Viollet the idea that structure
was basic to architecture, but employed it within a framework of German philosophical idealism.
Instead of perceiving the perfection of structure as the subject of architecture, Eidlitz saw structure
as the means by which the underlying Idea was represented.

Schuyler had a conception of structure strictly related and closer to Viollet’s, but still characteristics
of English use.
Schuyler conceived structure in terms of biology:
an organism is the assemblage on interdependent parts of which the structure is determined by the
function and of which the form is an expression of the structure. 

Later, Auguste Perret made a parallelism:
structure in steel or reinforced concrete : building = skeleton : animal.
As structural engineers are separated from architecture is easy for us to talk about structure as a
property apart from the rest of the building.
As Antoine Picon has shown, a capacity to describe and analyze the system of support
independently of the conventions of the building, and of assumed notions of stability (in other
words to think about the system of support independently of any actual building) was an
achievement of the late 18th century French engineers. 
 strutture studiate da sole.la
struttura prima era legata all’oggetto architettonico. Ogni struttura era
quindi soggettiva. Viene separata nel 18esimo secolo il sistema di supporto è
indipendente dall’architettura. Esprimono la magnificienza della scienza delle
costruzioni sulla base di una metafora tutta naturale.
But it only developed in the works of Soufflot, Patte and Peronnet.
Within these debates, there was a marked hesitancy to depart from the accepted conventions of what
looked stable, and only Soufflot and Perronet were prepared to take that risk.
According to Perronet
“The magic of these latter buildings consists largely in the fact that they were built, to imitate the
structure of animals [bones, ribs,…]”.
While it sounds like the well known passage of Alberti where he compares the constriction of a
building to the skin and bones of an animal (referring to their connectedness), Perronet was more
concerned about their lightness, relative to the conventional norms of building.
But two things in the Perronet remark are worth nothing in the present context:
-was natural history, not the simple load-bearing systems of building construction, that provided
Perronet with his model for structure. Structure as term for the support system in architecture was
originally a metaphor took by biology and not from building
-what Perronet wanted was a theory of construction (or structure) distinct from the practice of
construction (or building). Blondel divided architecture into distribution, decoration and
construction, division that reconsidered the Vitruvian triade: commodity, firmness, and delight.
Durand provided a definition of construction..
The significance of “structure” was that it allowed them to think about the system of support
without the interference of two-thousands years’ worth of accumulated customary wisdom derived
from the knowledge of existing objects. Poter creare una propria teoria
Although in 1770 Perronet used the word structure to draw an architecture free from traditions of
the various mechanical arts, he had said later than “ in imitating nature in our construction we could
make a durable works with a lot less material”.
Robert Willis was the first to use the term in the modern way.
It considered structure in a “mechanical” way.
Even into 1870’s english authors continued to use the phrase “mechanical structure” when they
wanted to signify the system of support independent of material substance.
There is no doubt about the fact that it was Viollet, both in French and English, the responsible for
popularasing the notion of structure as a free-standing metaphor.
Once it became possible, and later customary, to conceive the mechanical system of the structure
apart from the material facts of construction, most controversy about structure became concerned
with how far it should, or should not be visible in the resulting work.
The primacy of mechanical structure was by no means universally accepted by modernist architect,
especially by Mies.
On the contrary Semper didn’t consider structure as important as enclosing space. The same did his
disciple Adolf Loos, who thought “the architect’s general task is to provide a liveable space.. both
the carpet and the tapestry on the wall required a frame to hold them in the correct place.
Coop Himmeaublau declares that structural planning is never an immediate priority at the
beginning, but became more important during construction.
Indeed, more recently, the relegation of tectonic structure to an obviously subordinate place has
been the most literal sense of architectural “Deconstruction”.
Mies Van Der Rohe 1922 article “skyscrapers” presented the issue that Viollet-le-Duc would have
approved. It’s essential component. Lake Shore Apartments in Chicago.
Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts. Sincerity of the structure
in the 20th century. Structural part of the building was made visible.
At the end what began as an abstraction, whose very significance lay in its invisibility, has been
turned in modern parlance into a thing.

2. Structure in fields other than architecture

It is worth to consider what it was about the notion of structure within natural history that offered
such a potent image for architects.
18th century natural history work of the classification of species.
The initial Linnaeus method consisted in classifying a specimen through the visual evidence of its
parts according to 4 values (number, form, proportions and situations). These 4 values comprised
(comprendevano) the structure: the composition and arrangement of the pieces that make up its
body. Foucault argued that what failed in this method was not considering the property of life in
plants and animals.
Work of the later 18th cent. naturalists: the part previously classified on visual evidence, were now
classified within a hierarchy of their relative importance to the organism as a whole, a scheme
which necessarily involved defining them according to their function.
Structure was then intended as a feature that conveyed the relative functions of the parts, and it
ceased to be a property based on visible criteria alone.
Relate visible and invisible and structure is what make this relationship possible.
Conceive buildings as hierarchically arranged relationships of functional parts.
Structure as a relationship of the mechanical functions of parts, a relationship that is perceived
independently of the visual evidence of the building.
In Sociology. Spencer (enclosure) from whom the study of society was not distinct from the study
of natural history. Structures were the functional units of society and he distinguished between
operative and regulative (church, Army, …).
The structure was always the outcome of a particular function.
Quelllo che cambia non è una mera division tra parti, ma parti per il tutto. La struttura è un insieme
di parti in relazione non tra di loro ma con l’intero.

3. Structure as the means by which things become intelligible

Whereas previously biology had provided the model for structure, in the early 20th century its place
was to be taken by linguistic.
Saussure: Language is a system of independent terms in which the value of each term results solely
from the simultaneous presence of the other. Language should be studied asking how words carried
meaning. What made language intelligible was not meanings attached to particular words, but the
system within which they were used. (words in language, one in a system).
The structure of languages ceased to be a matter of a functional relationship between words and
became the study of the system of differences within language. Uncoupling structure from function.
The most promising material for the application of the linguistic sense of structure lay not in
architecture, but in space.
Space, as language, is not a substance, and, when considered a social space (rather that as enclosed
architectural space) is one of the properties through which societies constitute themselves.
Studying languages from a synchronic point of view, forgetting everything about their history and
observing how languages works as a system, as a collection of interconnected parts that could be
explained and understood only in relation to each other. Meaning was not important, noreach word
has its function. Inner logic of the language system.

Con Sassure si comincia ad analizzare il linguaggio chiedendosi non cosa le parole significhino, ma
come esse comunichino il linguaggio, ovvero la struttura del linguaggio cessa di essere una
questione relativa al rapporto funzionale tra le parole e il loro significato e diventa lo studio del
sistema in cui esse erano usate. Si arriva alla comprensione della struttura come uno schema
intelettuale attraverso cui le cose sono rese intelligibili. Ciò viene anche applicato alla sociologia
con l’antropologia strutturale, per la quale tutti i prodotti dell’attività sociale (rituali, istituzioni..)
rivelano la struttura della società, ossia la sua vita. La struttura considerata in questi termini cessa di
essere una proprietà degli oggetti, sebbene possa essere percepita attraverso essi. Lo studio delle
relazioni tra architettura e struttura del linguaggio viene proseguito negli anni 50 con la semiologia.

With Sassure one begins to analyze language by asking not what words mean, but how they
communicate language, the structure of language ceases to be a question of the functional
relationship between words and their meaning and becomes the study of the system in which they
were used. One arrives at the understanding of structure as an intellectual scheme through which
things are made intelligible. This is also applied to sociology with structural anthropology, for
which all products of social activity (rituals, institutions...) reveal the structure of society, its life.
The structure considered in these terms ceases to be a property of objects, although it can be
perceived through them. The study of the relations between architecture and language structure was
continued in the 1950s with semiology.

Herman Hertzberger: suggested the relationship between available architectural forms and their
capacity for individual interpretations might be understood as like the one between language and
speech. He was committed to work within the existing structure of socially established “arch-forms”
and could not create anything new. Could only realize objects that could be reconstructed by the
users of buildings to mean a new and unexpected things.
HISTORY
The chapter opened with three citations:
A. Sant’Elia and Tommaso Marinetti (Italian futurist), Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi, Daniel
Libeskind.

“This futuristic architecture cannot be subject to any law of historical continuity.”

“history doesn’t bother us very much today. I’m a traditionalist. I believe in history.”
“ultimately, the history of architecture is the material of architecture”
“to produce meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it”

When architect speak about history is always contentious, and confusing at the same time.
That history became a problem was an effect that brought to modernism, but it was an issue still
before the advent of modernism.

1. Historical Architecture in the nineteenth century

History was a discipline born in 19th century and generated a vast accumulation of knowledge about
the past and also a various theories of the processes of historical change to account for the
differences between the present and the past.
History is a 19th cent. science which generated vast accumulation of knowledge about the past and
various theories of the processes of historical change to account for the differences between the
present and the past.
Hegel: art has the power to bring into consciousness all that the human mind is capable of. It was
unlike any other document or evidence from the past, for it admitted the observer into the very
process of human consciousness itself.
Architecture was “history”, not just in the sense of a record of past events, but as an evidence of the
human mind’s capacity to reflect on its own experience.
Historical science for architects had a great means for discover general principles common to the
architecture of all the times, stated Burckhardt.
Viollet le Duc stated that history: discredit old prejudices and recover forgotten principles. It is the
base, according to him, for future works. Elimina I pregiudizi per questo viene definite storia.
But it became also a problem for two reasons:
The pure attention of knowledge about the past obstacles their actual scope for originality. 1890s
general fear about the escape from the excess of historical knowledge. Excess of archeological
knowledge. Endless stylistic revivals which could led to the devaluation of arts.
Obligation to put architects under to create “historical architecture”. In fact if previous architecture
gave the access to human consciousness about the past, nineteenth century’s architecture would in
turn reveal to future generations the nature of the 19th cent. mind — responsibility to the Future
which Morris. (render the architecture of the day “historical”).
But if history is a source of knowledge, it is also true that it can lead to problems:
- The enormous accumulation of knowledge about the previous architecture hinders the possibility
of being original (Gilbert Scott), as long as you remember the past it will never be possible to
develop a distinctive style (Van Brunt)
- History has presented the obligation to create historical architecture, because just as the
architecture of the past is representative of the past itself, 19th century architecture will be
representative of the spirit of the time. Ruskin: making today's architecture historic.
In Morris lecture are present both of the 19th century meanings of historical architecture:
architecture containing evidence of a comprehensive knowledge of the past, whether
(indipendentemente) in archeology or of its underlying principles
architecture that would in the future be recognized as manifesting the mind of the present.
Morris merged the two principle: having an historical architecture, but that shows and conveys the
spirit of the present time without imitating previous architecture.
William morris, responsabilità del futuro. L’architetto deve parlare nel futuro. Ci sono molti revival.
Tutti questi revival.. principi del presente nel futuro. Non si può parlare di revival perché bisogna
rappresentare la consapevolezza del presente per le generazioni future. Non ci deve essere
cancellazione del passato, ma deve essere riconosciuta nel futuro come manifestazione del presente.

2. History and Modernism

Anti-historical attitude during the early 20th century. Rejecting history was their revenge on the
past. Big part of they groundwork for their revenge had to be found in Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Nietzsche didn’t deny the significance of history as such, but saw the problem as a need to
overcome history and forget it, to attain a supra-historical consciousness as they live on the present.
Also Futurist manifesto rejected history in 1914:“This Futurist architecture cannot be subject to any
law of historical continuity” (William morris parlerà di historicism, attenzione al futuro, abbracciare
la consapevolezza del presente perchè possa essere riconosciuto nel future). Non si deve fare un
revival. La storia non è lo studio del passato. Se fosse così, revival.
During the first CIAM in 1928 the first paragraph stated that they refuse to adopt the design
principles of earlier epochs.
In Bauhaus, Gropius stated that students were not taught the history of architecture.
He considered history as too discorageous for the innocent beginner who would be afraid to create
his personality. Going to USA in 1936, Gropius adopted his anti-historicism to the American
context saying that the strength of the American culture lays in its absolute practicality and absence
of history.
Is modernism really anti-historical? Not at all in the sense of William Morris; modern architecture
was historical as it was an architecture wholly of the present, embodying the consciousness of the
present to be recognized in the future. This inspired Pevsner and Giedion. As history became just a
word for modernists, it would be impossible for both Pevsner and Giedion to describe modern
architecture as historical, even if this was what they did.
What they intended was an historicism in the sense of Popper, which definition of historicism was
widely against nineteenth-century’s architects. Historicism is the trend to believe in the power of
history to such a degree as to suffocate original action, and replace it by period precedent… all
revival of styles of the past is a sign of weakness.

3. History after Modernism

The readmission of history in architecture born in post-war Italy for several reason:
-Pre-war Italian Architecture was not as categorically anti-historical as Gropius or other CIAM’s
members. The novecento group developed a modern style of architecture which used traditional
elements. (Rationalists, even more hardline modernist, were surprisingly accommodating towards
the historical architecture). It was defined “Regionalismo critico”.
-Pre-war italian modernist had worked for the fascism regime, post-war Italian, for while rejected
Fascism, did not want to deny the quality of modernists’ work.
Concept of CONTINUITÀ — work of art carries significance not by being of that time but by
speaking across time (Rogers). No work is truly modern which is not genuinely rooted in tradition.
Two phenomena of History And Ambiente (context). Pensa a Torre Velasca di Rogers.
History: was not a naif concept; not confusing “history” with the “past”. History is a dialectic
between past and present and could only be made in present. Every new architectural work was also
historical. (Rogers, who can be held to be responsible to bring history again in architecture in Italy).
But how is possible to bring the historical knowledge into architecture?
Giorgio Gregotti in Il Territorio dell’Architettura and Aldo rossi in L’architettura della città both
published in 1966, tried to address this question.
Rossi: Functionalism was inadequate as a theory of urban form, because buildings outlast their
original functions and take on new ones without changing. Cities were constituted by
“permanencies”. Monuments reveal them, the physical signs of the past. Cities = historical texts.
So part of the concept of history for Rossi was the permanence of surviving artefacts, the other part
was related to “collective memory”.
In USA we have Robert Venturi in Complexity and contradiction in Architecture in 1966 and like
Rossi’s is a critique to orthodox modernism. But with a different perception of history and
criticizing the word “form”; his work was more based on history and form rather than in function
(as Rossi’s one).
The sense in which Venturi used history was far more modest: it consists of precedents, analyzed
from the point of view of modernism principles of composition. The use of historical references in
his works aims to enrich them with meaning. He criticizes the process of simplification typical of
the modernists.
It became generally accepted that what history did was to create interpretations of past events that
legitimated particular ideologies, and served the interests of particular groups of people, and much
of historians’ attention was turned to examination of the process by which history was made.

History as a product of the mind in the present.

Heritage:
Objects and buildings preserved from the past are offered as history itself, while the partiality of the
procedures that has rendered them as history is obscured under the satisfyingly concrete wholeness
which they present to our eyes. The result is that from the 1970s until today everyone has been
trying to prove that their work had a history.
History is not a given and fixed category, but exists only by virtue of being made and remade in the
present. Struggling with the conflicting interpretation of history expressed within the city.
To produce meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it, not to erase it, but
to deal with (Libeskind). With Libeskind the decorative architecture, the historical details added to
enrich the meaning (as Robert Venturi said) of Post-modernism, has been widely superated.
MEMORY
The chapter started by Three quotations:
John Ruskin, Giulio Carlo Argan e Peter Eisenmann
“We may live without her (architecture), and worship without her, but we cannot remember without
her.” John Ruskin 1849
“And for long time we have been speaking not of history, but of memory” G.C.Argan, 1979
“in the city..memory begins where history ends” Peter Eisenmann, introduction to Rossi, 1982

The creation of building for commemoration is the oldest purpose for architecture. “Intentional
buildings” are those architectures which are built to commemorate specific events or people.
But we have to say that buildings have been an unreliable (inaffidabile) tool for prolonging
memory; objects are survived but who or what is commemorated has been forgotten. Even if the
name is known we do not know nothing else about.
The relationship between memory and architecture is not simple for three reasons:
a) It is not clear how memory is part of the aesthetics of architecture; on the contrary, it does not
belong to it at all;
b) The difference between memory and history is not always clear: the two terms often appear as
synonyms;
c) Memory develops in three historical phases, in each of which it takes on a different meaning.
The Modern interest in memory and architecture has been less concerned with intentional buildings
than with the part played by memory in the perception of all works in architecture.
The word memory (as a necessary part of experience of a building) has appeared at least in three
different form since the eighteenth century with different purposes, really emphasized in the
1970s and 80s; it is possible to assume that memory was one of the concept most symptomatic of
general changes in architectural thought.
It is less straightforward rather than one could suppose, according to recent discussion.
It is far from certain (non è affatto certo) in which sense memory constitute a part of the aesthetic of
architecture.
The difference between history and memory isn’t always clear and sometimes they’re treated as
synonyms.
In each of the 3 phases (historical ones) memory had a different meaning
The fascination with memory for architects and urbanists has to do with the regularity with which
since antiquity philosopher and psychologist used architecture and cities as metaphors to describe
the phenomenon of mental process of memory.
In Civilization and Discontents Sigmund Freud used Rome to describe the preservation of
accumulated material in the mind, but went on to stress how otherwise unsuited this image was for a
comparison with the mental organism. This didn’t cause talking about Rome as an eternal city and
locus of memory. The rediscovery of Theatre of Memory by ancient Greek, memory technique with
which people can memorize a discourse thinking about walking into a house with its rooms,
connected much more buildings to memory.
Let’s now consider the three period.

18th century (theories of perception, memory is the faculty of perception)

First manifestation as an element in the aesthetic of architecture was eighteenth century
development.
Its appearance is generally attributed to its power to resist the fragmentation caused by the
expansion of knowledge.
The cultivation of “memory” as an aspect of response, held out (resistito) the hope of some form of
reparation.
The memory established the liberty of the subject; the value of memory gave every individual
the freedom to derive their own pleasure from the work.
As the discovery of memory has a philosophic origin, it is a mental process.
Joseph Addison in the 18th century proposed that pleasure derives not just from the sight (and the
other senses) but from the contemplation of what is imaginary, the association of ideas that works
of art evoke. But he did not say anything about the association of ideas, and of memory, in relation
to architecture. Apart from literature the art where his theory found its readiest application in the
eighteenth century was landscape gardening.
But a marked change took place in the latter part of that century, described by Thomas Whately in
Observation of the Modern Gardening (1770) as a move from an emblematic to an expressive mode
of association, in which natural scenery would evoke in every individual particular trains of ideas
which would become the cause of aesthetic pleasure. In British aesthetic the relationship between
three different levels of mental activity ( direct perception of obj., memory and imagination)
became the major theme.
Memory was the so called “improved perception”; it enhanced the range of ideas an object was
capable of evoking. ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS, the more ideas we associate to a thing, the more
pleasure we have from it, stronger is the emotion of sublimity or beauty we received from it.
Theory of aesthetic reception and some drawback (svantaggi):
• It heavily base on individual taste and was restricted to those who had a liberal education
• Locate the aesthetic in the mental process of the subject. It lay between the apprehension of
the obj and the emotions felt by the viewing subject.
In the first part of the century the ornaments of the English gardens evoked very precise memories
and associations, in the last part we move from an emblematic association to a more expressive one,
able to evoke in each individual different successions of ideas that become themselves the cause of
aesthetic pleasure. However, there are two problems in this theory:
-these new associations are cryptic, they need more education from the observer, and they were
based on individual taste. Not everyone can enjoy aesthetic pleasure.
-aesthetics is placed totally within the subject's mental processes.
(What eighteenth century’s philosophers wanted was more to undermine the authority of traditional
rules of order, proportions and ornament. Achieved this, they didn’t have no more value except to
consider them for having provided the basis for the second phase of architectural memory of
midnineteenth century).

mid-19th century historicism, familiar with history, few were worried with memory.
John Ruskin took up the theory of association of ideas and turned it into a more durable and robust
concept. In the lamp of Memory (1849), he wrote that Architecture of the past offered the
memory of human work, both manual and mental. This assertation created a sort of connection
between the present and the social world that had created that object as Memories of very distant
past. Differences with the 18th cent.
• what is remembered is not a chain of mental imaginings, but is exact and determinate: work
• memory is no more individual, rather social and collective. architecture as literature is one
of the tools with which a nation builds its own identity through shared memories
• memory relates not just to the past, but also to the present and to the future
His notion of memory was similar to his notion of history. The immediate impact of both within
Ruskin’s own time was primarily upon the preservation of ancient buildings.
He stressed to the preservation of buildings as they belong not to anyone in particular or to the
present, but to all time. In fact his influence was not immediate on new buildings but upon the
development of a conservation movement in Britain (Morris).
A refinement of Ruskin’s ideas about the memorial significance of ancient buildings was to appear
a little later in an essay by the Austrian Art Historian Alois Riegl.
He set out to question what exactly people valued in old buildings, in a writing about the
preservation of old buildings of the Austro-Hungarian government proposal for the protection of old
buildings. In doing so, he distinguished between:
-Historic-value: to say the evidence the work presented of a particular period;
-Age Value: a generalized sense of the passage of the time, and concluded by saying that the
majority of people searched for age-value in buildings. While Riegle was writing that, memory was
under attack, in particular thanks to Nietzsche’s works in which he said that, it is possible to live
without memory but it is not possible living without forgetting.
Within the discourse of modern architecture they just ignored the term memory.
Characteristic of this thinking is Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism (1914) in which
he heavily critics the German tradition of philosophical aesthetics. He wrote that Romanticism is
not favourable to plastic form, is too much concerned on abstract.
But while in the plastic arts as painting, sculpture and architecture, memory was neglected, in
literature it was fundamental.
Really visible in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust awareness that without
forgetting there can no be memory. Proust read many Ruskin’s writing and fully understood
Ruskin’s notion of a relationship between buildings, literature and memory and made its own, but
the notion of memory is different from Ruskin’s. Memory for Proust had an unusable and elusive
relationship to objects, including architecture. As Walter Benjamin put it, Proust’s work was more
about “forgetting”, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting is the wrap. Without forgetting
there is no memory, Proust believed, and the interest of memory lay in its interest with forgetting.
Point of contact with Freud.
For Proust while buildings could activate involuntary memories, the process was unreliable
(inaffidabile). So while memory was important in modernist aesthetics, its value came from a
recognition of the fundamental unlikeness and discontinuity between the physical world of object
(architecture) and the mental world of memory.
Così, mentre la memoria era importante nell'estetica modernista, il suo valore derivava dal
riconoscimento della fondamentale improbabilità e discontinuità tra il mondo fisico dell'oggetto
(l'architettura) e il mondo mentale della memoria.

Last third of the 20th century

The latest part of the 20th century has been obsessed with memory in a way that no period ever was
before. Museums, archives, heritage programmes are symptoms of a forgetting and terrified culture.
Distinction between history and memory by Walter Benjamin:
HISTORY : (19th cent. science) created distorted version of events that served the interests of
dominant power
MEMORY : as the principal tool by which the individual could resist the hegemony of history
In one particular activity, Western civilization has shown confidence of material elements in resist
the decay of memory: the memorials building of the wars, which had no earlier historical
counterparts. They show un unshakable confidence in the power of physical objects to preserve
memory.
When architects tried to involve themselves into these memory prolonging activities, they quickly
attracted criticism.
The denial of memory in the modernist aesthetic made it virtually impossible for anyone claiming
to be a modernist to associate themselves with memorial or commemorative works.
This denigration was increase by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,
extended attack upon associationism, claiming that memory had no part in perception
But at the same time with so much memorial activity by the 60’s, architects started to gaze
longingly at this rich reservoir of emotive meaning, from which they detached before.
Gaston Bachelard’s book stated that the house is one of the greatest powers in integration for the
thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. But even if this gave carte blanche to architects, the
main problem was that memory was purely mental.
AGAIN we come up to the fact that while individual memories may be triggered by buildings, built
works of architecture are not a satisfactory analogue for the mental world of memory. AS IN THE
EARLY 20TH CENTURY, THERE IS AN INHERENT UNLIKENESS OF MEMORY AND
ARCHITECTURE.
Memory is not localizable (French philosopher Michel de Certau).
Memory is unmoored (disancorata), lacking any fixed position, mobile… It is in decay when it is no
longer capable of this alteration. A relationship between memory and building now seems even less
plausible than it was with Proust.
Memory was reintroduced in architecture in the late 20th century to challenge modernist orthodoxy.
As Unger explained: Memory as a bearer (portatore) of cultural and historical values has been
consciously denied and ignored by the Neues Bauen, Modernist. The anonymity on the functionally
correct organization of the environment has asserted itself over collective memory…Hardly any city
that remains corresponds to its historical image.
Ungers’ projects from the early 80’s consciously evoked the memories of a lost city. Housing in
Berlin
Aldo Rossi was one of those who associated for the re-invention of memory with his book The
Architecture of the city (1966), where he suggests that the way to develop new forms of urban
architecture was to study those already existing. The buildings characterized the collective memory
of the city. (MEMORY IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF TrHE CITY)
Rossi said that whoever wants to build in a city would not only change its physical fabric but also
alter the collective memory of its inhabitants.
Took this idea from Marcel Poëte (historian) and Maurice Halbwachs (sociologist).
From the first took the fact that the phenomenon of a city could not be investigated through its
functional relations (as Chicago sociologist), but only through record its past, as manifested in the
present. Poëte gave the idea of permanencies
The second gave him the idea that the inhabitants of a city sha,red a collective memory manifested
in the building of a city. (Halbwachs’ theory derived from Durkheim’s society).
Memory is not individual (Freud), but socially constructed through mutual exchanges with other
people that were part of a community, which shared the space. Sense of alienation of the modern
period.
That memory (Rossi) does not relate to a specific physic place, but to the mental image of the
space formed by that group of people. It is not the urban artefact that originate memory, but its
mental images. “the union between the past and the future exists in the very idea of the city that it
flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person”. His memory was
more poetic than theoretical. Anti-historical in his attachment.
He provided with the idea that the city’s fabric constituted its collective memory.
The other who introduced the memory in modern architecture is the essay “Collage city” by Rowe
and Koetter (1975). They ask whether the ideal city might not “at one and the same time, behave
as both theatre of prophecy and theatre of memory”.
In general modernism had been at fault in supposing that novelty was possible without
acknowledgment of the memory-laden context from which it necessarily emerged.
Rowe’s oeuvre opened the way to postmodernism and its appeal to memory formed part of this.
Rossi, Ungers and Rowe provided to create a new kind of urbanism, a vision that started from
memory.
As Antoine Vidler put it “ Urbanism might be defined as the instrumental theory and practice of
constructing the city as memorial of itself”. New view of the city as embodied by memory of its
inhabitants.
“The city of collective memories” by Christine Boyer in 1994; how does the city became the locus
of collective memories? Assuming that cities are the embodiment of memories, she shares the new
orthodoxy.
The symptoms of the post modern orthodoxy of memory are 3
-lack of interest in the very extensive investigation into the general phenomenon of memory
undertaken in realms of psychology, philosophy and literature in the 20th cent;
-General assumption that social memory can be explained by reference to individual memory;
-supposition that building provide a satisfactory analogue in the material world for the aleatory
world of memory is far from convincing.

Nowadays incorporating practices (more important are the actions like ritual in places which create
social memories, collectives) are more important than inscribing practices (memory recorded as an
object), as Paul Connerton wrote in How societies remember.
The work of architecture would seem inutile unless accompanied by some kind of incorporating
practice.
Dolores Hayden in “Power of Place” wrote “the principal emphasis was upon public participation
through workshops which interpret and re-interpret the historical associations and significance of
particular places”.

Modernism had good reasons for detaching memory from architecture and urbanism.
The attempt to recover memory as a active constituent of them may be understandable in terms of
the apparent condition of silence to which modernism seemed to have reduced architecture by the
1960s; but with the indifference architects and urbanists showed to the investigation of memory that
had taken place in other disciplines during the twentieth century, it remains doubtful whether
architecture has achieved any distinctive contribution to the art of memory. Memory may well yet
prove a short lived architectural category – and one inherently alien to architecture.
Il modernismo aveva buone ragioni per staccare la memoria dall'architettura e
dall'urbanistica. Il tentativo di recuperare la memoria come componente attivo di essi può
essere comprensibile in termini di apparente condizione di silenzio a cui il modernismo
sembrava aver ridotto l'architettura negli anni Sessanta; ma con l'indifferenza mostrata da
architetti e urbanisti all'indagine della memoria che aveva avuto luogo in altre discipline nel
corso del XX secolo, resta da dubitare che l'architettura abbia apportato un contributo
distintivo all'arte della memoria. La memoria potrebbe ancora rivelarsi una categoria
architettonica di breve durata - e intrinsecamente estranea all'architettura.
FUNCTION

Function was without question an important category of modern architecture, but it has come into
its own in the critique of modernism.
What today we assume as function is the result of a process in thoughts. Adrian Forty, in this
chapter tried to trace historically what this term meant before it was given its present coherence and
intensity. The theory of function are theories are of recent making.
Generally, a function describes the result of an action of one quantity upon another. About
architecture, what is acting upon what?
From the eighteenth century the quantity was always taken upon the building’s tectonic elements.
(so function was related to the tectonics of buildings).
By the beginning of the 20th a new use of function came, one in which building were described as
acting upon people, or social material.
Historically we can identify 5 different uses of “function” prior to about 1930.
It is a metaphor that borrows there different field (mathematics, biology, sociology).
Problematic is the translation from German to English or Italian: German has three words whose
different nuances are lost by all being translated as Function.

1. As a mathematical metaphor – a critique of the classical system of ornament

Carlo Lodolì borrowed the term function from mathematic around 1740s (to describe the compound
of variables). His notion of function was the compound (insieme) of mechanical forces and material
within any specific component in architecture. “unite building with reason and let function be the
representation”. His thinking was popularized by Francesco Milizia who misleadingly
(erroneamente) presented it simply as an argument against superfluous decoration: “whatever is
seen should always have a function”.
The wrong translation had entirely lost the Lodoli’s mathematical metaphor.

2. As a biological metaphor, descriptive of the purposes of the parts of the construction

relative to each other and to the whole
In biology, function was a key concept. End of the 18th century, organs were analyzed according to
the functions they performed within the organism as a whole, and by their hierarchical relationship
to other organs. Function in this sense was closely related to structure.
Used in architecture by the 1850s by Viollet le Duc: the genus of modern times, who assigns every
individual object a distinct function. Function: the role played by each part within the structure.
“ we have to consider a building like a puzzle to pieces: the place and the function of each part
cannot be mistaken”. Biological origins of the metaphor. In English world, function was related to a
familiarity with the analyses of the constructive systems of Gothic architecture.

3. As a biological metaphor within the organic theory of form

A secondo but quite different biological metaphor of function derives from the organic notion of
form developed by German Romantics.
This is the context of Louis Sullivan’s famous remarks about form and function. Within the German
Romanticism, form was either mechanical or organic.
This distinction made by Schlegel and paraphrased by Coleridge:
“the form is either mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not
necessarily arising out of the properties of the material.. the organic form, on the other, is innate; it
shapes, as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same
with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life, such is the form”.
What constitutes the prime mover of the organic theory of form was a question left unanswered
since Aristotele.
Greenough is maybe the first English speaker to apply “function” to architecture (1840s),
development of organic form in visual arts. But his use was never exact
-once for the building’s utilitarian purpose
-the other much more transcendental notion of organic form
“Instead of forcing the functions of every sort of building into one general form, adopting an
outward shape for the sake of the eye or of association, without reference to the inner distribution,
let us begin from the heart as the nucleus, and work outward”.
The choice of the term was biological. But it is clear that Greenough was more interested less in
term of the satisfaction of the human needs (about which he didn’t have any theory), and more as
achieving that very eighteenth century architectural aim, the expression of appropriate character. “if
there be any principle of structure more plainly inculcated in the works of creator, that is the
principle of unflinching adaptation of forms to functions”.
He put into new life the old concept of character by linking it to use through the idea of function.
If Greenough conception of function was derived in part from Romantics’ organic theory of form,
this was true of the doctrine of suppressed function with which Louis Sullivan was captivated.
Exactly where Sullivan agreed to have coined the aphorism (forms follow function).
When Sullivan talks about function, it could be paraphrased as destiny. “in general outer
appearances resemble inner purposes.
Further proofs of what he wanted to express in saying function comes from Adler: function and
environment determine form, implying that function was not the same as environment.
The environment is an external agency.
In the 20th century this distinction has been lost: the organic theory of form, has been largely
forgotten and function (which was related to the previous) has been shifted to the action of external
agencies (environment, upon from). He was aware of the other biological meaning.
Eidlitz tried to reconcile the two biological notions. Viollet’s strictly mechanical and tectonic sense
of function with the German idealist notion of function. For Eidlitz, the expression of mechanical
function provides the means to represent the building’s innate function, the story of its being.

4. Function meaning use

By the mid-19th century, both of English and French used the word function as meaning the
activities designated for a particular building or part of the building.
Grenough wrote: “to apportion the spaces for convenience, decide their size, and model their shapes
for their functions, these acts organize a building. As a description of the activities specific to
particular building or a part of a building, function occurs more rarely that one could except before
the 20th century.

5. Function as the translation of the German words “sachlich”, “zweckmassig”,

“funktionell”
Where English has one word, “functional”, German, by 1900, had three.

a. Sachlichkeit
Literally: it means thingness. Its significance lies in the context of a debate about realism around
1880s and 1890s. In German speaking countries “realism” meant constructional rationalism,
mechanics of structures most clearly seen in modern engineering works.
But it lacked of the idea-bearing properties necessary to art, even if it was valued for its successful
disregard of historical style.
This conflict is conveyed by Otto Wagner in the preface of Sketches, Projects and Executed
buildings in 1890. The issue was to bring the realism lesson in engineering to architecture. The
main models were some British and American domestic architecture, which exemplified a realistic
vision of the home, with physical comfort.
In1896 the word sachlich was used to express these properties by Richard Streiter.
But sachlich was a precondition to art, couldn’t be art.
1902: Muthesius codified the realist agenda; his aim is to codify a “realist” German equivalent for
the practicality of the American and British domestic architecture. Simple, sachlich, rasonable.
For Muthesius sachlich was the remedy of the stylistic excesses of the 19th century architecture.
anti-ornamental, non-aristocratic, found in everyday objects, rational, scientific, sober, practical,
modern.
By 1920 it was applied to all modern architecture and became its synonym in Weimar, often
translated as the new objectivity, for non expressionist modern art.

Si ricerca l’oggettività e portare il realism dell’ingegneria nell’architetttura perché questa

oggettività diventi arte. Principi della repubblica di weimar.

b. Zweckmassigkeit
Muthesius also employed it. Zweck = purpose. Used to signify both the fulfilment of immediate
material needs (utility), but also in the sense of inner organic purpose, or destiny.
But it does mean not rational construction.
Attempt to lend it an aesthetic meaning. Since Kant eluded purpose from the category of aesthetic, a
major shift on understanding what was considered art was implied.
One indication of this change is given by Pal Frankl in 1914. He analyzed the change in architecture
in 4 categories:
-spatial form
-corporeal form
-visible form
-purposive intention (zweckgesinnung), but his concern with purpose (zweck) had nothing to deal
with construction
For the early 1920, a left-wing Berlin architects (the G group) stressed a lot on that word and turned
the whole previous conception of architectural aesthetic and so that Kant put outside art (the
purpose), became now its very subject. The interrelationship between architecture and use was its
primary content. Adolf Behne.
In this context we have to understand Mies Van der Rohe remarks about Zweckmässigkeit in a
lecture in 1924; the purpose of a building is its actual meaning.
But in later 1920s he changed his point of view and in a 1930 article he took a moderate line
following Muthesius that while attention to purpose was a precondition of beauty, it was not itself
the means to it. (Build Beautifully and practically! Stop This Cold Functionalism
[zweckmässigkeit])
Although sympathetic to the work of Sharoun, Haring, etc (expecially in their tendency towards the
negation of the form), Behne was critical of the way the results exaggerated the individuality of
each commission. This excess of individuality was contrary to sachlich tendency of modernity.
Based on the sociology Simmel, Behne saw modernity as the working-out of the conflict of the
principles of uniformity and universality with the individual forms of life. Behne individua il
significato dell’architettura modernista è lo scopo sociale, non deve privilegiare la sua singolarità
ma deve dialogare con lo scopo collettivo.
Those architects lacked the generality necessary to the social.
Like Simmel, Behne was interested in social significance. Impossible for whatever evolved out of
the personal or the individual to carry social significance. True functionalism was the making
visible not of the building’s single purpose, but its purpose considered in relation to the general,
collective purpose of society.

6. Function in the english speaking world 1930-60

In the English speaking countries during the 1930 and 1960, “functional” was the main word used
to describe modern architecture.
It was the term through which the polemic about modern architecture was conducted, for both
supporters and opponents.
A good example of this ambiguity driven by the term itself was the book “The International style”
in 1932 that accompanied the MoMA exhibition. Hitchcock and Johnson characterized as functional
those aspect of the European modernism they wished to discard. But in order to present architecture
as purely stylistic phenomenon, they had to invent a fictitious category of “functionalist”
architecture. Their account of the “functionalists” work was a caricature of Behne’s carefully
balanced argument: satisfying the particular client is one important function of architecture that the
European usually avoid.
1940s was important for modernists to be able that their work was not just dominated by form and
aesthetic, and yet wanted to avoid to be considered pure functionalists.
Alvar Aalto wrote “Technical functionalism cannot create definite architecture”
Frederick Kiesler “Modern functionalism in architecture is dead”
But there were also supporters like Walter Gropius who stated that Functionalism was not
confederated a rational process merely, it had to do with psychology.

7. The form-function paradigm

Implicit of the polemic with modern functionalism was the assumption of a relationship between the
building and its inhabitants. Describe either the action of the social environment upon the form of
the building and viceversa.
The historical question is the turning of “function” from a a description of the action of a building’s
own mechanical forces (upon its form) into a description of the action of the social environment
upon buildings, and the action o f building upon the society.
concept of environment.
But how far modern functionalism differ from earlier, classical theories about the relationship of
people to buildings.
Commodity: suitability of buildings to their uses (Vitruvian)
18th century in France convenience to describe a satisfactory relationship between buildings and
their occupants.
Convenience became an increasingly undynamic concert and collapsed into comfort.

However, what all these categories lacked (this is what distinguish them from the modernist notion
of function) was any sense that the building fulfilled, in a mechanical sense, the requirements of the
society within which it was produced.
But it was necessary to have a theory of society and a theory of social causes and effects
The best theory for society is biology. It gave the concept of milieu, or environment; human society
exists through its interaction with the physical and social surrounding (missing in the convenance).

The creation of anything like a theory of factionalism, synthesised from the disparate range of ideas
and historical examples, emerged in 1960s when architects started to react against modernism.
Modern architects, whose attitude one might be tempted to assume as functionalist, were careful to
distance themselves from any implication of deterministic thinking.
The Architecture of the City by Rossi. His critique of naif functionalism; architecture of city
consists of generic types in which its social memory is preserved. European cities consists of
buildings that have largely outlasted their original purpose without any loss of meaning , making
function an irrelevance.
Lefebvre, in The production of space, “functionalism” was one if the feature of abstract space that
flattered, homogenised form of space characteristic of modern capitalist societies. For Lefebvre
(common with Rossi) functionalism impoverishes because it fixed uses.

RILEGGERE BENE
Domanda: come la funzione va a modificare e a riempire il senso meccanico della forma
dell’edificio.
Di conseguenza rossi.

Relazione tra gli edifici e gli abitanti. Il concetto di "funzione" si trasformò da una descrizione
dell'azione delle forze meccaniche sulla forma dell'edificio, in una descrizione dell'azione
dell'ambiente sociale sugli edifici, e dell'azione dell'edificio sulla società. Cruciale per questa
trasformazione è stato il concetto di "ambiente".

Dobbiamo quindi capire come il moderno "funzionalismo" differisce dalle precedenti teorie
classiche sul rapporto delle persone con gli edifici.
Vitriuvio definì questo rapporto come utilitas= "comodità", più tardi Blondel lo chiamò
"convenienza", in inglese è stato tradotto "fitness". Tuttavia, queste definizioni non tenevano conto
della relazione tra gli edifici e l'uso. Per sostenere questo era necessaria una teoria della società e
una teoria delle cause e degli effetti sociali.

La fonte della teoria della società fu la biologia, che diede allo studio della società le nozioni di
"funzione", "gerarchia" e "ambiente". La nozione che la società umana esiste attraverso la sua
interazione con l'ambiente fisico e sociale circostante. Aristotele vedeva la relazione tra l'organismo
e il suo intorno come armoniosa, al contrario Lamarck vedeva la relazione come instabile.
La Cité Industrielle di Tony Garnier del 1901 ha discusso la connessione tra il layout della città e il
modo di vivere dei residenti.

Pochi esempi mostravano l'impatto degli edifici sulla società o sul comportamento umano, tra cui
principalmente le prigioni e le fabbriche (anche se si sosteneva che ciò che effettivamente
influenzava la vita degli "abitanti" era il regime e non gli edifici stessi) e tuttavia, non erano definiti
come edifici "funzionali".

Una teoria del "funzionalismo" emerse solo negli anni '60, quando architetti e critici iniziarono a
reagire al modernismo. Uno dei primi fu Aldo Rossi nel suo "L'architettura della città" del 1966. La
critica di Rossi al "funzionalismo ingenuo" era che l'architettura della città consiste in tipi generici
in cui si conserva la memoria sociale. L'introduzione della nozione di tipo gli permise di sostenere il
primato della "forma" sulla funzione. L'indagine sui tipi di edifici fatta negli anni '60 era parte di un
tentativo generale di trovare basi per il paradigma forma-funzione.

Henri Lefebvre considerava il "funzionalismo" caratteristico delle società capitaliste, dove la

"funzione" è enfatizzata al punto che ogni funzione ha un posto assegnato, e ogni possibilità di
multifunzionalità è eliminata. Secondo lui il "funzionalismo" impoverisce perché fissa gli usi.

Jean Baudrillard sosteneva che la funzionalità era un sistema di interpretazione, un tentativo di

fissare il significato degli oggetti secondo il loro uso.

Tra il 1960 e il 1980 sono state condotte varie discussioni sulla "funzione". Da un lato, Bernard
Tschumi, il cui obiettivo era quello di reintegrare la "funzione" nell'architettura. Dall'altro, Bill
Hillier ha fornito l'indagine più lucida sul paradigma forma-funzione. Il suo obiettivo era capire
cosa c'era di sbagliato nell'attuale teoria del funzionalismo per sostituirla con una migliore, poiché
percepiva che il fallimento dell'architettura modernista risiedeva nel fallimento della "funzione", e
che il fallimento non poteva essere tale se la relazione tra forma e funzione era così potente.
Secondo Hiller l'errore del paradigma è stato quello di assumere che l'edificio possa agire
meccanicamente sul comportamento degli individui. Ciò che egli suggerisce è che la relazione tra
forma e funzione a tutti i livelli dell'ambiente costruito, passa attraverso la variabile delle
configurazioni spaziali, ma, mancando un concetto di configurazione spaziale, è stato rifiutato.
Secondo Hiller, la principale cosa fuorviante è che la metafora tratta l'ambiente naturale come un
ambiente artificiale.

FORM

“The architect must be a form-artist; only the art of form leads the way to a new architecture”
August Endell, 1897
“The paradigm of the architect passed down to us through the modern period is that of the form
giver, the creator of hierarchical and symbolic structures characterized on the one hand, by their
unity of parts and, on the other, by the transparency of form to meaning.” Bernard Tschumi

The chapter opened with two quotations.

The first by August Endell, the second by Bernard Tschumi. Ninety years between them.
Tschumi warns us that the concept of form is one of the most important, but also most difficult in
architectural thought.
In his sentence he made clear which kind of problems we may encounter with it:
Of its indispensability to modernism, of the supposition that form is what architects create, of the
belief that form exists to transmit meaning.
Form is one of the triad of terms (form, space and design) through which architectural modernism
existed. Like for others arts, it is a subject of architecture, but for sure it had a big value in
architecture for its relations with materials. It has a privilege in physically shaping.
There is ambiguity in this word. It can be conceived as:
-shape: property of things as they are known to the senses;
-idea or essence: property of things as they are known to the mind.
German language is more advantaged.
_gestalt: which is the shape as perceived by senses;
_forms: which implies some degree of abstraction from the concrete particulare.
When this word started to be used in English world people had problems to understand the
differences about the two concepts, and they had difficulty in accommodating to a new concept.
But to talk about architecture without using the word form is inconceivable. Form is merely a
device for thought, it is neither a thing, nor a substance. And as a device, it is entered in
architectural speech just in the last century.

1. Form in antiquity: Aristotele e Plato

Plato was the originator of the concept of form. This word, for him, provided a solution to a lot of
problems, the nature of substance, the process of physical change, the perception of things.
Against Pitagora’s idea that everything could be described as numbers or ratios of numbers, Plato
argued that geometrical figures, triangles and solids, underlay the substance of the world.
In the Dialogue of Timaeus he firstly distinguish between things that always are and never become
(apprehensible by intelligence and with the aid or reasoning) and things that never are but always
become (objects of sensations)
“particulars are objects of sight and not intelligence, forms are objects of intelligence but not sight”.
In making anything, argues Plato, the maker follows the form, not the things already existing.
He gave an example. The carpenter makes a shuttle. In the making, the shuttle breaks. Will he
remake another shuttle looking like the broking one? Or will he look to the form according to which
he made the shuttle?
Forms as objects of thoughts find their correspondence in things which according to Plato are made
by either of one and two types of triangles. Presenting them as a series of shapes, those features of
objects were the inherently invisible form of things.
Plato identifies a world of ideas and a world of the senses. The form, that is the idea, is perfect and
perceptible only with intelligence but not with sight (what is always but never becomes), on the
contrary, the features of an object are perceived with sight and not with intelligence (what never is,
but always becomes). The objects of the world of the senses are created in the likeness of forms, i.e.
the idea, but on the contrary these will never reach perfection.

Aristotele reluctance to make categorical distinctions between forms and things. By form he meant
the essence of each thing and and its primary substance. !What desires the form is the matter, as the
woman desires the man”.
There is a reluctance in Aristotle in accepting Plato’s idea about the absolute priority to what is
always imperceptible to sights and to other senses.
Plants and animal have their pre-existence not in an idea, but in predecessors. This is true for all
objects which follows a material production process; everything must come from something.
The thing in progress has as its final step the implementation of the form, just as a house under
construction will result in the project conceived (form). The process of evolution is to the benefit of
the fully developed form, and it is not the latter to the benefit of the process (as it was for Plato), but
before the thing begins its process of development there must be an archetypal form; a house cannot
be built without the idea of a house.
Plato: form is unknowable, pre-existing idea, non è conoscibile se non dall’intelletto. L’uomo fa
sempre riferimento all’idea.
Aristotle: genetic material produced from the mind of the artist
Forma / materia la cosa è concepibile dai sensi è immutabili
Cosa elemento sensi, oggetto
2. Neoplatonic and Renaissance
During the Renaissance (fifteenth and sixteenth cent.), humanists started to use the word form as a
mere synonyms of shape.
Plotinus showed that beauty lies in the Ideal forms, asking: “on what principle does the architect,
when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house,
pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him is the inner idea stamped upon the mass
of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity?”
Marsilio Ficino translated Plotinus as an argument to identify beauty as in the independence of form
from matter.
The exception of that synonym was Alberti. In De Re Aedificatore wrote that “within the form and
figure of a building there resides some natural excellence that excites the mind and is immediately
recognized by it”, is based upon the Pythagorean theory of numbers and arithmetic.
Panofsky interpreted Alberti’s distinction between materia, the products of nature, and lineamenti,
the products of thought, in the same terms, strictly related to form, even if it is not convincing at all.
The Aristotelian notion of form, as a property of all material things, appeared in in sculpture.
Vasari, about sculpture: “an art which lifts the superfluous from the material, and reduces it to that
form which is drawn in the mind of the artist.

Post-Renaissance
It has to be said that while the notions of form developed in ancient philosophy were of interest to
humanist scholar, they had a little impact on the ordinary practice of architecture until the 20th
century.
The transformation of the term form into a more dynamic concept started in Germany around the
1790s. But even there for most of the 19th century the discourse was more related to the
philosophical aesthetic field. The new interest in form has two distinct aspects: the first comes out
from the philosophy of aesthetic perception of Kant and the second from the theory of nature and
natural generation by Goethe.

Kant
The discipline of the philosophical aesthetic in the late eighteenth century took off with the
realization that the source of beauty lays not in objects themselves, but in process by which they are
perceived. Form was to be a key concept, no longer a property of things, but exclusively of the
seeing of them. Kant established form as the basic category to perceive art. Aesthetic juddegments
are only related to form.
The judgement of beauty belonged to a separated state of mind, unconnected to knowledge or
emotions. Form was different to that aspect of things which is known through sensations. Form is
not matter. The aesthetic judgement, intended as what mind finds pleasing, occurs through its
ability to recognize in the external world something that satisfy the concept of form.
The significance of Kant’s thought, in the history of form, was to establish that Form lies in the
beholding, not in the things beholden, and as minds recognises beauty in objects, it is because it
sees between them a representation of that from, independent of content or meaning.
La forma sta nel contemplare, non nelle cose che sono trattenute, e poiché la mente riconosce la
bellezza negli oggetti, è perché vede tra loro una rappresentazione di ciò, indipendente dal
contenuto o dal significato.
Goethe
Nature as changing feature
Schiller’s concept of living form corresponded closely to the ideas that Goethe was developing
about natural science.
His thinking focused on what he saw as inadequacy of the methods of classifying things according
to their components parts, as Linnaeus and later Cuvier.
There is another method of presenting nature, not in fragmented part, but as a living actuality
striving from the whole to the parts. Linneaus used to treat nature as linear and static thing,
according to Goethe in nature nothing stands still.
He introduced is method to understand nature. He placed all specimen in a series from the simplex
to the most complex. He deduced that there was an Urform from whose all plants might be
contrived, be similar.
The Urform was a sort of principle of all organic material. In no sense could the form be considered
apart from the inward spirit.
The significance of this theory was to provide a theory of “form” which acknowledged the ever-
changing features of nature (and art) without posting the existence of an absolute ideal category,
known only by thought.
Notion of morphology, form as an inner principle behind the perceivable things (important idea for
architects), base of formalism.
Acting behind of a new protagonism of form in 19th century
Two schools of reflection.

Philosophical idealism
Form was associated with the investigation of meaning
For all idealist philosopher, the appearance of the things as presented to the senses hide an idea that
lays within them or beyond them. It is an approach based on Plato's theories.The idealist approach
to form is summarized by the idealist philosopher Robert Vischer: form is the substitute for the idea
and the artist's aim is to emancipate this idea.
Among all idealistic philosophers, the main figure is Hegel, for whom form was a property above
and before things, accessible only to thought. In addition to Hegel's theory, in this period in
Germany there are also those of Kant, for which form is a property of perception and Goethe, who
instead considers form with a seed, a genetic principle. The coexistence of these theories creates
confusion.

Platone: vede la forma come primordiale, che sta prima di tutto

Aristotele: come concetto che sta dentro le cose
Goethe---artistotel
Kant----Platone
Hegel: artista emancipa l’idea,

Formalism
725/5000
From the 30s of the nineteenth century, German philosophical aesthetics has been divided into two
schools:
-idealist - interested in the meaning of forms;
-formalist: focused on how forms are perceived.
The term form is common to both schools, but with a different meaning in each.
Herbart defined aesthetics in terms of the psychological reception of the elementary relationships of
lines, tones, planes and color.
Robert Zimmermann in these periods developed a theory of form, mainly focused on the perceived
relationships between forms, rather than on the forms themselves.
Adlof Goller: applies the formalist aesthetic to architecture.
He proposed that architecture is the true art of visible pure form, an inherently pleasurable,
meaningless play of lines or of light and shade. In viewing architectural works, we therefore lack
the ideas or memories that come to the mind while watching a painting or a sculpture. The form
delights the viewer without there being any content.
Architectural forms mean nothing to natural reason.

Wolfflin
In his doctoral thesis he exposes the concept of form.
Architectural forms for Wolfflin express moods and emotions.
According to him, this happens through empathy: works of art arouse our interest thanks to our
ability to perceive in them the sensations that we recognize coming from our own bodies.
Wolfflin recognizes within matter the presence of the force of form, which can be understood as the
force of life, the will that struggles to become form by overcoming the resistance of a shapeless
matter. It is a theory that takes up Aristotle, in which matter and form are inseparable.
If for Wolfflin we perceive the form through empathy, but above all through observation, then the
form belongs mainly to the perception of the one who observes it; for this reason, historical changes
in architecture must be understood as changes in the way of seeing.
In other words, the way of seeing has its own history, an affirmation descending from Kantian
aesthetics.
Coexistence of form and matter: form is not wrapped around matter as something extraneous but
works its way out of matter as an immanent will.
Matter and form are inseparable. So:
• ornament is not the antagonist of form, but the expression of excessive force of form.
• comments on modern architecture: the modern spirit characteristically prefers the
architectural firm to work its way out of the material with some effort. Not looking for a
conclusion, rather for the process of becoming.
• he acknowledged that if form belongs to the viewer perception, then historical changes
in architecture are to be understood primarily in terms of changing in the mode of
vision.
La forma vuole apparire. Cambia il modo di vedere le cose, cambia anche il modo di esprimere.
Fare uscire la forma.

Hildebrandt
Hildebrand distinguishes between form and appearance: things present themselves through a
multitude of changing appearances, none of which, however, reveals the shape, which can only be
perceived by the intellect.
One of Hildebrand's most important statements is: "in architecture, form must first and foremost be
identified through the experience of space".
The problem of form in the fine art (1893).
(Is directed against impressionism, against the view that the subject of art consists in the appearance
of things.)
Distinguishing between form and appearance: things present themselves in a multitude of changing
appearances, none of which reveals the form, which can only be perceived by the mind.
The sense of form is gained by the kinesthetic experience, the real or imagined movement necessary
to interpret the appearance things present to the eye.
For him, form in architecture is space. Form in architecture is to be identified primarily through the
experience of space.
La conoscenza della forma deriva solo dalla conoscenza dello spazio. Lo spaizo è la forma
dell’architettura. Il corpo per percepire la forma. Per achieve the form need to experience.

To sum up 19th century aesthetics:

• form as a property of the seeing of objects (Kant) or the objects themselves
• form as a germ, a generative principle contained within organic matter, or work of art
(Goethe) or as an idea preceding the thing (Hegel) Idealism -
• form as the end of art, and entire subject of art (Göeller) or as merely the sign, through
which an idea or force was revealed Formalista_percezione della forma, no idee di memoria.
• form in works of architecture presented by their mass, by their space (Hildebrand)

4. Modernism
Form within the twentieth century modernism
Modernist took the conscious decision to make form one of the recognizable element of their
vocabulary. They adopted it as their cardinal element.
-Not immediately implied a connection with other scientific frames, so it is not a directly metaphor.
Pure element of theoretical reflection of architecture.
-True sense of architecture lay beyond the immediately perceptible of the senses, not in its material.
-Aesthetic perception
-Essential part of architecture that was not conceding with his material features, exclusive control of
this specialized professional (architects). Precise term of architecture (highly intellectual trained
architects could use). Not linked with the academic architecture vocabulary (Ecole de beaux arts)
Adopted in the modernism because:
-it was not a metaphor
-it implied the true substance of architecture beyond the immediately perceptible world of
senses
-connected the mental apparatus of aesthetics with the material world
-gave the architect the description of that part of their work over which they held exclusive and
unequivocal control.

Form as resistance to ornament

Opposing form to something else. Form is considered as a positive quality against ornamentation.
Loos wrote “Ornament and Crime”, excess of ornamentation in late 19th cent. the idea that in order
to get free of that (rationalize the use of it) architects need different guides principle, like form.
More important underlined principles, like form.
Form describes and validates that aspect of architecture which is not ornament.
The main source of anti-decoration concept of form lays in the polemics against Secession artists in
Vienna in 1890s, evolved by Loos.
Even not using the term Idea, the underlying conception of form which he is employing nonetheless
remains Idealist, and allows him to argue that there is a “form” which is inherent to every material
and which is destroyed by decoration.
Form in modernism designates the means to describe that aspect of architecture that is not an
ornament. The concept of form has nothing to do with accessories, decorations, taste or style.
Loos emphasizes the importance of the form of the material as opposed to ornament, as each
material has its own language of forms and no one can claim for himself the forms of another
material, as forms are constituted through applicability and methods production of materials.

Form as antidote to mass culture

Polemics in the Deutcher Werkbund before the IWW, the idea that form could serve as a tool in
order to rationalize the way in which the industrial production of objects could create objects that
were more beautiful. Industrial aesthetic, daily life objets, advanced from a technological point of
view, but not from their formal. A new decorative language for the industrial production.
Herman Muthesius drew two specific oppositions between form and barbarism and form and
Impressionism.
Culture was a central concept in developing discourse against the alienation of capitalism. Form
therefore was a guarantee against the soullessness of modern economic life. (assenza di anima)
Attack upon Impressionism; relationship between art and market. Impressionism describes both the
effects of laissez faire and also the characteristics of the goods themselves, which betrayed signs of
over-stimulated, nervous activity.
Form has the power to achieve modernity and resists its worst aspects.
Kevin Lynch in 1960: Form as the means of resisting the effects of mass culture and of
urbanization. He concerned with the lack of intelligibility of contemporary American cities, we
must learn to see hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities. Making the city’s image more
evident.

Form vs social values

Form intended as a pejorative term. Moment in German, avanguard movements. Idea that architects
did not have to think of formalistic aspects but find link stronger with social problems to which
architecture was called to respond.
Excessive attention of appearance was bad (formalistic approach), more important social needs of
the words. No form, only building problems (Mies Van Der Rohe). Rejection of formalistic
approach (outer appearance)
For the so-called functionalist architects, the end was to negate the form. This was underlaid by the
complete rejection of the Kantian vision in which utility was excluded from the aesthetic values in
architecture. As a product of philosophical aspect, form wasn’t considerate by those who merely
applied technology in their work to social ends. Indeed the rejection of form was one of the most
explicit ways to affirm their attachment to the view of architecture as committed to social purpose.
1920 The modern functional building by Behne to nullify this polarity, introducing the fact that
form is is an eminently social matter. His “romantic” functionalism would only led to solutions that
were entirely individual and specific to their own particular circumstances, lacking any general
significance.
Behne idea is contradictory with his aim; opposition between the pursuit of individuality and of
socialized whole.
Georg Simmel:<3 while truly great work of art might be distinguished by the individual spirituality
of their creator, such works were of little value from the point of view of culture.
Behne proposed that form in architecture correspond in forms in society (social forms with Taut)
This equivalence was the only important new sense of “form” in the modern period.

Form vs functionalism
Positive one. 1950-1960s, against the reductional functionalism of the 1920s.
Aldo Rossi, “The architecture of the city” architecture has something to do with prominence of
form over time, not about changing function. Urban analysis, by ordinary architecture in
evolutionary cities, even when the social uses change, the form remains the same. Continuity in the
shape, despite the society changes. Promote the idea not to respond to functional needs, form should
follow function WAS A FALSE IDEA, architecture had to concentrate on forms, on those nearly
permanent architectural forms. Stay the same and to serve different functions moving from a
specific and limited set of forms.
The field within form was to have most significance was linguistic, which benefitted from Goethe
theory of form that influenced “On language” in 1936 by Humboldt.
Language is a form and not a substance — critic in the 60s to the functionalism as regarded as the
dominant aspect of architectural modernism.
Fundamental for those architects like Aldo van Eyck, Herman Hertzberger or Aldo Rossi. Forms in
architecture existed prior to.
Rossi formulated this argument firstly in terms of “types”, hough it was not particularly clear the
distinction between form and type. Form is absolutely indifferent to organization precisely when it
exists as typological form.
Eisenmann asserted that there is no correlation between form and function, nor between form and
meaning.
Forma positive---

Form vs meaning
form as a negative term
Robert Venturi C C in A, and L F LV. based upon the exploration of an existing environment,
create an architectural theory from an existing example. Did not to be understood of the problem of
form, but ordinary landscapes (LV streep) stressed something that architects were forgetting; the
communication. Form is not the main element, but recognisable elements that were recognisable to
a public and signs were integrated part of architecture, find a way to communicate something to the
public. MEANING had to be reintroduced into architecture against the too much stress on form
A corresponding, but converse argument, that too much attention to form had destroyed interest in
meaning, was pointed out by Robert Venturi. The modernist obsession to form denied attention to
meaning

Form vs reality
informal, a tradition of 20th cent. that had focused not on from as an ordinate element. The dadaist,
the situationist. Neo avant guard that promoted an investigation to form, to expand the definition of
what reality could be, to alternative ways to understand order in city and architecture.
Modern is an abstraction had a direct relationship with theories of form.
Anti-form movement emerged in France in 1950s amongst the Situationists. The propose is not
aesthetic, but an opposition to the process or rectification, of the tendency of capitalist culture to
turn ideas and relationships into things whose fixity obscures reality. Conceive architecture that had
no form, but dealt with reality without distorting it.

Form vs technical or environmental considerations

discussion of a number of tendencies in 60s and 70s to understand architecture as an environmental
art, architecture could act on a broader scale, to control and transform the environment.
Architectural form was a potential way to investigate this issue.
The first opposition originated in 19th century with Viollet le Duc. All architecture proceeds from
structure, and the first condition at which it should aim is to make the outward form accord with
that structure. The error in the renaissance is that form was the leading consideration. Principles
were no longer regarded and structural system there was none.
1950-1960 by Banham: Aformalism with an enthusiasm for technological innovation, purely
technical approach to issues of construction.

Form is not a permanent or timeless argument in architecture.

Concerning violet, who views that structure was the basis of architecture. It is impossible to
separate the form of architecture of the thirteenth century from its structure. Every form in this
architecture is a result of a necessity of that structure. Vedi structure.
SPACE
“what I am really interested in is designing architectural space” Neil Denari
“space is the most luxurious anybody can give anybody in the name of architecture” Sir Denys
Lasdun, 1997
“any definition of architecture itself requires a prior analysis and exposition of the concept of
space” Henry Lefebvre, 1974

These quotations might lead us to assume that space is the purest, irreducible substance of
architecture. The property unique to it, that sets it apart from all other artistic practices.
Since the eighteenth century, architects never used it. Architects talked implicitly maybe about
space using the terms volumes or voids. Sir Soane referred to void spaces and to the need in
devising a plan to avoid a loss of space.
As a word in the architecture vocabulary, it did not exist till 1890s. Its adoption is connected to
modernism.
Since 18th century we’ve talked about volumes and voids and just sometimes use the word space as
a synonym.
During the modern period, as well as being a physical property of dimension, space is also a
property of the mind, part of the apparatus through which we perceive the world.
It is thus simultaneously a thing within the world, that architects can manipulate, and a mental
construct through which the mind knows the world, and thus entirely outside the realm of
architectural practice
It was Lefebvre’s book “The production of Space” (1974) to expose the problem created by this
distinction between space conceived by the mind and the lived space encountered by the body, even
if it had a low influence within architecture.
The development of space as an architectural category happened mostly in Germany.
The german word “Raum” (which stands for the English word space) both represents a material
enclosure and a philosophical concept, because it lacks the suggestiveness of the original. As Peter
Collins pointed out, it is for Germans to consider space in a philosophical term. Room could be a
simply portion of limitless space and a philosophic.
But space’s meaning in architecture are not fixed, they take into account circumstances.

1. The preconditions of modernist architectural space

Architectural “space” originated in Germany during the nineteenth century.
There are two traditions of thought:
-space as an attempt to create a theory of architecture out of philosophy rather than out of
architectural traditions;
-space as a thing concerns more with a psychological approach to aesthetics (only emerged in
1890);
First traditions: (space as an attempt to create a theory of architecture out of philosophy rather than
out of architectural traditions)
It was Gottfried Semper that introduce “space” as the principal theme of modern architecture.
He firstly stated that the first impulse of architecture is enclosing space and the material
components are secondary to the spatial enclosure. Enclosure was being talked about amongst
architects as a theme of architecture in Germany in 1840s, but no one as Semper stated that spatial
enclosure was the fundamental property in architecture.
Adolf loos stated that “the architects’ task is to provide a livable space”.
Berlage in 1905 in a lecture stated that architecture is the art of spatial enclosure, it must emphasize
the architectonic nature of space and in a subsequent article in 1908 he declared that the purpose of
architecture is to create space and thus proceed from space.
All of those architects who had an influence on modernists in 1920s, followed Semper’s model and
saw architecture as a matter of enclosure.
Camillo Sitte, whose book City Planning according to Artistic Principles (1889); urban design as
“an art of space” Raumkunst and the prescription for modelling cities were based upon creating
enclosed spaces. It is important because for the first time the enclosure of space was applied to
exterior spaces. This aspect was to be crucial in the 1920s.

Come lo spazio viene visto dal punto di vista materiale, non dal punto di vista filosofico.
Turning now to the other tradition, which contributed to understand space as a thing concerns more
with a psychological approach to aesthetics. This assumption was born thanks to the development
of the theory of aesthetic perception, in the late nineteenth century.
The first philosopher was the Idealist Kant, which founded this philosophical tradition.
According to him, space is a property of the mind. It is not an empirical concept which derived from
outer experiences. Space does not represent any property of things in themselves, nor does it
represent them in relation to one another. Instead, space exists in the mind “a priori”.. as a pure
intuition, in which all objects must be determined and contains prior to all experience. Space is a
faculty of mind for Kant.
Later, Schopenhauer remarked that architecture had its existence primarily in our spatial perception.
Vischer talked later about empathy of architecture, as a projection of body sensation as a means of
interpreting the meaning of form.

Nietzsche in The birth of Tragedy 1872 stated that existence in the world seem justified as an
aesthetic phenomenon. If art and life were one, the distinction between subject and object could be
forgotten about, and art, as life, could be approached from the point of view of pure subjectivity.
culture in general derived from two instincts
-apollonian: realisation of the images presented to the mind in dreams, it provides a pleasure in
appearance, in vision;
-dionysian: intoxication experienced in song and dance, it involved the body’s whole being
we consider the dionysian to understanding more the space;
What derives from this is the excess of energy. He recognizes the importance of space as the field
where the dionysian instinct made its present felt.
space = a force field, generated by the dynamism of bodily movement. For Nietzsche, space is
where the Dionysian manifests itself, it is the force field generated by the dynamism of the body.
Theory of empathy 1870s. Adolf Hildebrand: attention to the process of perception of things in the
world might itself lead to grasping the inherent themes not only of sculpture but also of painting and
architecture. He emphasized movement both of the eyes an of the body in space.

For Hildebrand, space is the subject of art, and as Semper believes that bounded space is the
original impetus of architecture, but he emphasized the movement of both the eye and the body in
order to provide the mind with the range of images necessary through which the perception of space
can take place. It defines the spatial continuum as a three-dimensional extension and kinesthetic
activity of our imagination.
Unlike the other arts, architecture already projects space to us, without the need for imaginative
efforts of perception: space can be perceived directly as a form.
If this does not happen then the mind has considered the architectural work as mere matter.

3 ideas about space really significative in 1920s

• the space itself was the subject matter of art
• it was a continuum
• it was animated from within

And where all previous architectural commentators, Semper included, had seen either walls or load-
bearing members as the elements upon which architecture relied to convey its theme, Hildebrand
was able to argue that space itself IS the form with which the eye is concerned. Unless the mind had
first grasped the space as a form, it would be unable to see the physical elements as anything other
than just matter. … Si distingue tra spazio come forma e tra spazio enclosure.
Lo spazio stesso È la forma di cui si occupa l'occhio. A meno che la mente non abbia prima
afferrato lo spazio come una forma, non sarebbe in grado di vedere gli elementi fisici come
qualsiasi altra cosa che contenga.
The aesthetic of architecture DOES NOT lay in its material components.
Schmarsow, in “the essence of Architectural Creation”, equates space in architecture with form. In
perceiving things the mind projects into them knowledge of bodily sensations. He transposed the
theory of empathy not into perception of solid objects, rather into the encounter of space. Space
exists because we have a body.

Theodor Lipps: there are two kind of seeing: optical (concerned with matter) and aesthetic
(concerned with what was left after removing matter). Space was this dematerialized object, but
nothing can prevent us from eliminating the material. The spatial form can exist purely,
unmaterialized. The beauty of spatial form is my ability to live out an ideal sense of free movement.
Lipps theory has no conception of a space as enclosure.

Spazio dematerializzato viene visto non come mera questione di chiusura, ma si parla più di
una concezione filosofica.

Three conception of space in 1900

-to describe the original matter of architecture: for Hegel, and particularly for Semper, the
significance of spatial enclosure was as the purpose from which architecture, as an art, had
developed.
-to describe the cause of aesthetic perception in architecture: as developed by Schmarsow and Lipps
particularly, space provided an answer to the question of what in works of architecture stimulated
aesthetic perception
-to satisfy the expectation, fundamental to all nineteenth century art theory, that works of art should
reveal movement. How works of architecture, inherently static, might express motion was a
longstanding concern. Hildebrand’s work suggested space as the means of talking about movement,
in terms of kinetic bodily experience of the subject.

From Space To Spatiality

1900: incorporation of these ideas into everyday life
Endell: space as a negative form. Imprint of Lipps’s idea. The essential is not is not the form, rather
its reversal, the space; the void that expands rhythmically between the walls. The space being
created by the body. The musical and rhythmic quality of space instead remembers us about the
Dionysian instinct of Nietzsche.
Schindler: 1913 Manifesto. He stated that in the past the aim of all architectural effort was the
forma conquest of material mass, in the present this attention is no longer applied. It belongs
primarily to the Semper tradition, but then eliminates it. Looking for a way to think about
architecture free from materiality.
“we no longer have plastically shaped material-mass. The modern architect conceives the room and
forms it with wall and slabs. The only idea is space and its organization. Lacking the material mass,
the negative interior space appears positively on the exterior of the house. Thus, the box shaped
house appeared as the primitive form oth this new line of development”.
Un tempo si parlava di matericità. Non si da più importanza al vuoto, ma al material (semper
racchiudere lo spazio). Adesso l’attenzione cambia. Bisogna cercare un modo per pensare
l’architettura senza matericità. Cio che c’è dentro l’architettura e non la matericità. Afferma tutto
ciò in un manifesto. Nasce una nuova concezione. Prese le nuove idee, applicazione tangibile delle
idee filosofiche, attualizzandole e mediandole con quelle più storiche-architettoniche.
Spazialità ambito della mente umana.

What might be described as spatiality (as the space-perceiving faculty of human mind)?. Alois
Riegl and Paul Frankl.
• Riegl:
the development of art was not to be understood in relation to contingent external factors,
purpose, material or technique, but relative on its own internal development, which could
only be accounted for in terms of the different aesthetic perceptions of people at successive
stages of history. But if the human mind’s ability to interpret the material world has indeed
followed an historical progression, then the evidence of this progression is to be found in an
evolution of architectural space as built. So as modernity had a new meaning in the
historical development, it had to be accompanied by a new spatial perception.
Se la forma cambia è perché cambia lo sguardo della gente (legame con form: Wolfflinn)

• Frankl:
he developed a scheme for the analysis of space in Renaissance and post-Renaissance
architecture. 

- additive space in Renaissance; the spatiality of buildings was built up by a series of distinct
compartments

- spatial division in post-renaissance; there is a smooth flow of space through the whole
which is considered as a part of a larger, endless space. In architecture the interior in fact
(baroque) is something like a fragment, incomplete of a universal space.
The Frankl’s scheme offered a definition of spatiality with the example of buildings. This means
that this was at the cost of the concept of spatiality itself.
Schmarsow’s spatial construct was an effect of the mind while Frankl’s one had become a property
of building: while this might seem to have made it of more practical use to those involved with
architecture, at the same time it undermined the concept, and brings us back to the physical senses
of space as enclosure or continuum.
Se smarchsow parla di spazio mentale, questi ritornano alla chiusura.

Built space
The only architect whose building could be defined as “spatial” Wright.
One of the most important challenge was the effort to realize architecture as an art of space.
The specific problem facing architects in the first decades of the 1900 was to identify and legitimate
the modern, to establish a way of talking about it. In this “space” served their purpose.
The concept of spatiality offered a good a case as there could be for a new sort of architecture,
“space” offered a non-metaphorical, non-referential category for talking about architecture.
Ultimately the motives for the interest in space differ from the philosophical and scientific interest
in it.
There was no limit in the production of “space” in this period (1920-1930), but we’ll sum them up
in 3.

SPACE AS ENCLOSURE
Followed the tradition of Semper, Berlage and Behrl9ens. In 1920s this was the most commonly
understood sense of space. Raumplan by Loos, a terms that he used to describe his volumetric house
interiors.

SPACE AS CONTINUUM
The inside and outside space were infinite and continuous; really important for the De Stijl group.
One of the first demonstration was “Cité dans l’espace” Austrian Pavillion, installation by Kiesler.
Here, the Viennese architect suggest:
A system of tension in free space, a change of space into urbanism, no foundations no walls,
detachment from the earth, suppression of the static axis, in creating new possibilities for living it
creates a new society.

SPACE AS EXTENSION OF THE BODY

Non si vedono I limiti, i muri sono membrane lo spazio si estende all’esterno.
Space was perceived in terms of the body’s imagines extension within a volume. Original variant of
this was in the book Space as Membrane by Ebeling which influenced Mies. Space as a membrane,
a protective covering between man and the outer world. Directly formed by man’s activity, a
continuous force field, activated by man’s movement and desire of life.
Bauhaus: how, if space is the main subject of architecture, has to be taught?
Tired what had been previously been a better of speculative aesthetic concerned with the perception
of architecture into a scheme that could be applied to the creation of new works (Moholy)
He recognized that space was a biological faculty (Schmarsow), and spatiality was historically
conditioned and specific to each period of history (Riegl and Frankl). The task was to bring
mankind to the present awareness of space;
rejected the space as enclosure
rejected the equation space=volume
space is not concerned with materials
space is achieved by detaching the structural members — in the voids between them is created a
continuum of space that runs through the building and connects inside and outside.
Connected to what’s said before there is something more important than just continuum: boundaries
become fluids, space is conceived as flowing
— space is a product of motion and changes as man moves himself in space (Endell and Nietzsche)
Example: Volume and space relationships. If the side walls of a volume are scattered in different
directions, spatial patterns or spatial relations originate.
Part of what he means by this is conveyed in a caption to an illustration of Le Corbusier’s maison
La Roche, where he writes that a section of space is cut out of cosmic space by means of a network
of strips, wires and glass, just if space were a divisible, compact object.

1930s
Mies only now we can articulate space, open it up and connect it to the landscape
(main problem: be modern) was concerned with
• Nietzsche: live in the present free from constraints of history — free movement of the
subject. Against the previous vision that building was a solid physical mass.
• Eradication of symbolism. Architecture to be modern had to be sachlich (realistic vision of
the architecture, simple) and should not achieve its end through symbolic means.
Freedom in movement.
Mies talks about space, signifying his engagement with an aesthetic property which is “modern”.
Space was the pure essence of architecture, but just the modern one
The English word space was just used by the beginning of the 1940s when Germans emigrated to
USA and Britain. Even Wright and Johnson & Hitchcock did not use the word space, but volume.
Giedion lecture in Harvard named Space, time and architecture — space entered in the english
architectural vocabulary, as an art of space. Giedion successfully presented architectural space not
as a concept but as actually existing and recognizable in a corpus of modern built work.
Attempt to lessen the importance attached to the word “space” in post-modern, leading Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to remark in 1972, in “Learning from Las Vegas, perhaps, the
most significant an tyrrannical element now is space. If articulation has taken over from ornament,
space is what displayed symbolism.
As summarized by Charles Jencks the postmodernist approach to space was deliberately
unambitious and ambiguous compared to modernist practice. “the boundaries are often left unclear,
the space extended infinitely without apparent edge”. More striking was the exaggeration of flatness
and work’s image, and people complain about its neglect of space.
Denari and Lasdun may be seen as reactions to the denigration of space in postmodernism.
Tschumi recognized that space has the peculiarity of being both a concept (spatiality) and an
experience. “when the experience of space becomes its own concept”. According to him concept,
meant as spatiality and experience coincide.
The architectural morphologist Bill Hillier argued that buildings are probabilistic space machine
and, according to this, it is as spatial configurations, rather than as physical matter that buildings are
to be approached.

HEIDEGGER AND LEFEBVRE

1) Space is neither a property of mind nor it exists previous to one’s being in the world. There is no
space independently of one’s being in it. Not an external object, not an inner experience. Space is
not something that can be known apart from things, but only by their relation to other things (like
the rooms in a house and the sun).
Essay Building, Dwelling Thinking presents these ideas with a more concrete relationship to
buildings. We should see a “locale”, (the term he used instead of a where) as being created by the
presence of an object within it.
In considering relation between Space and Locale: a particular locale may have places that are near
or far from it, and that these new distances, which can be measured, constitute a particular sort of
space.
His notion of space contradicts all the notion about space in architecture by 1890 to 1930.
It was Heidegger’s absence of any account of the subject’s own body in the account of space that
provided Maurice Merleau Ponty’s alternative account of space: he argued the need to recognize the
body’s own spatiality: there would be no space if I don’t have my body.
Heidegger’s influence on architecture:
-place superseded space, in certain circles, as main word. Example: Aldo Van Eyck: whatever space
and time mean, place and occasion mean more, because space is in the image of man is place and
time is occasion. Because space and time are abstraction.
-Space is unmeasurable and non quantifiable.

2) The production of space in 1974. His starting point is the neglect of what space is; the mind
thinks of space, but it does so within a space, a space both conceptual and physical. A space that is
the embodiment of social relations and of ideology.
Expose the nature of the relation between the space produced by thought and the space within
which thought happens.
At the heart of this book there is the social space: what the cultural life of societies takes place
within, what incorporates the social actions of individuals. But is not a mere frame, it is a product. It
is a work and a product, a materialisation of social being. The particular feature of modern societies
is that they reduce this complex space which is at once perceived (through the social relationships),
conceived (by thought) and lived (ad a body experience), to an ABSTRACTION.
His project is to regain consciousness of the social space.
Lefebrvre divided into two different space;
-architectural space, by virtue of the experience that people have of it, is one of the means through
which social space is produced;
“architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits, produced by those who use
the space in question, with their lived experience”.
-the space of architects, on the other hand, is what the whole of this entry has been about: it is the
manipulation of space effected by architects in their professional practice, and the discourse in
which that activity takes place.
While architectural space which simply reproduces within individual subjects, is therefore no better
or no worse than the society in which it belongs. The space of architects is anathema (curse,
malediction). When Lefebvre writes, that any definition of architecture itself requires a prior
analysis and exposition of the concept of space, he might suppose that he shared the idea that space
is the exclusive quality of architecture. But all disciplines were involved with space. But all
disciplines didn’t give any definition or didn’t grasp properly the social space, rendering this into an
abstraction to their own purposes. In this architecture is worst than others. Architects are
responsible of the schism of mental and physical space, and they reinforced it.
Architects are responsible of space:
• the space given to him is not neutral, it has already been produced, is not transparent neither
Euclidean “this space has nothing innocent about it: it answers to particular tactics and
strategies, it is quite simply, the space of dominant mode of production, and hence, the space
of capitalism. He is critics of the entire tradition of architecture at the beginning of 1900,
this point derived from his studies about social space.
• It is not true that architects create in a condition of freedom — is not just his or her own; is
constituted through the space in which they live
• the apparatus employed by the architects are not transparent, neutral mediators, such as their
technique of drawing, they are part of the discourse of power. And moreover, the practice of
drawing is itself one of the prime means through which social space is turned into an
abstraction, homogenized for the purposes of exchange and drained of lived experience.
• the techniques of drawing by the architect, privilege the eye above all the senses and sustain
the tendency for image, and spectacle, to take the place of reality a tendency manifested
throughout modern capitalism. Architecture for Lefebvre is complicit in the reduction of
space to its visual image.
• Architecture, and this is particularly so of modernism, was partly responsible for making
space appear homogeneous. The reduction of the real to a plan existing in a void and
endowed with no other qualities. Architecture carries much of the responsibility for
perpetuating the deceptions by space. Space lies just other things lie.

Lefebvre’s criticism of space of architects came from his critic to abstract space, which is the
abstract correspondence of social space, which became abstract due to capitalism.
Its fundamental characteristics is the separation between mental space and lived space, with the
resulted that human subjects are alienated not just, as Marx saw it, from the results of their labour,
but from the entire experience of everyday life.
This abstract space, the creation of philosophy and of the sciences, is formulated in the thinker’s
mind before becoming and being projected into physical or reality.
The problem is not the space, rather its representation which led to a process of reduction, rendering
space becoming uniform.
Within abstract space, its occupants find that they themselves become abstractions, as users, and are
unable to see space other than in the mutilated form in which is presented to them, even if it seems
coherent and transparent this space has been flattened.
He puts it that architects and city-planners offered, as an ideology in action, an empty space that is
primordial, a container ready to receive fragmentary contents, a neutral medium into which
disjointed things, people and habitats might be introduced.
He seems to discuss of space in architecture as a linking to the exercise of power and domination in
the modern era.
Lefebvre distanced himself from Heidegger for his neglect of history, his omission of the body as a
dimension of space, and his failure to account how being is produced in anything others than
mythical terms. Lefebvre had something in common with both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty.
Lefebvre’s aim, as he puts it at one point, is to treat spatial practice as an extension of the body,
nietzschean attitude, but for Lefebvre space had a development in time. He departs an historical
analysis of space.
Space’s supremacy within architectural discourse:
What both Heidegger and Lefebvre make clear is that the space of which architects talk is not space
in general, but an understanding of it quite specific to their own metier, and it is a category invented
by themselves for purposes of their own.
The particular value of Lefebvre’s book is to resist the tendency to see architecture as a self
determining practice, setting its own objectives and inventing its own principles; on the contrary, as
Lefebvre makes clear, architecture is just a social practice among many, and its space-regulating
operations it serves not its own ends, but those of power in general.
Lefebvre argued also that a discourse about abstract space appeared before the twentieth century.

By realizing both physical space and a discourse about space, architects might be said to be
fulfilling their traditional role of finding the means to represent what otherwise resisted and existed
as ideology. This is a view that Lefebvre partly suggest. If either of those argument are correct, then
we must regard the success of the discourse about space within architecture as less to do with
architecture, and more with the needs of ruling power to present an acceptable and seemingly
uncontradictory account of its domination.

Realizzando sia lo spazio fisico che un discorso sullo spazio, si potrebbe dire che gli architetti
stanno adempiendo al loro ruolo tradizionale di trovare i mezzi per rappresentare ciò che altrimenti
resisteva ed esisteva come ideologia. Questa è una visione che Lefebvre suggerisce in parte. Se uno
di questi argomenti è corretto, allora dobbiamo considerare il successo del discorso sullo spazio
all'interno dell'architettura meno che abbia a che fare con l'architettura e più con le esigenze del
potere dominante per presentare un resoconto accettabile e apparentemente non contraddittorio del
suo dominio.