chronosomatics | 1997.08.01 | Scott's 'Humanist Values' | 1 |
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Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism - A Study in the History of Taste (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1954).
Chapter Eight: "Humanist Values"
Stephen Lauf, "A Chronosomatic Interpolation of Scott's 'Humanist Values'", 1 August 1997.
Architecture, simply and immediately perceived, is a combination, revealed through light and shade, of spaces, of masses, and of lines. These few elements make the core of architectural experience: an experience which the literary fancy, the historical imagination, the casuistry of conscience and the calculations of science, cannot constitute or determine, though they may encircle and enrich. How great a chaos must ensue when our judgments of architecture are based upon these secondary and encircling interests the previous chapters have suggested, and the present state of architecture might confirm. It remains to be seen how far these central elements--these spaces, masses and lines--can provide a ground for our criticism that is adequate or secure.
The very notions of "transcribing ourselves into terms of architecture" and "transcribing architecture into terms of ourselves" together almost perfectly describe the relationship of chronosomatics to architecture. Scott designates these reciprocal operations as the "humanism of architecture" and proclaims them the foundation of "critical appreciation" (if not also judgment), yet this brand of "humanism" does not venture far beyond poetic personification except when it begins to closely match animism.
Now what is the cause of this discomfort? It suggested that the top-heavy building and the cramped space are ugly because they suggest the idea of instability, the idea of collapse, the idea of restriction, and so forth. But these ideas are not in themselves disagreeable. We read the definition of such words in a dictionary with equanimity, yet the definition, if it is a true one, will have conveyed the idea of restriction or collapse. Poetry will convey the ideas with vividness. Yet we experience from it no shadow of discomfort. On the contrary, Hamlet's 'cabined, cribbed, confined' delights us, for the very reason that the idea is vividly conveyed. Nor does Samson painfully trouble our peace, when
According to the theory of chronosomatics, the "great architects of the past," and of the future as well, reasonably had or will for the most part operate imaginatively according to the physiological process that chronosomatically corresponds to their "time" within human history.
To this statement several objections may be expected. This 'rising' of towers and 'springing' of arches, it will be said--these different movements which animate architecture--are mere metaphors of speech. No valid inference can be drawn from them. Again, the enjoyment of fine building is a simple and immediate experience, while this dual 'transcription,' by which we interpret the beauty of architecture, is a complicated process. And not only--it will again be objected--is the theory too complicated; it is also too physical. The body, it will be said, plays no part--or a small and infrequent part--in our conscious enjoyment of architecture, which commonly yields us rather an intellectual and spiritual satisfaction than a conscious physical delight. And it will be further said that such a theory is too 'farfetched'; we cannot readily imagine that the great architects of the past were guided by so sophisticated a principle of design. And, if some such process has indeed a place in architecture, it may be doubted finally how far it can account for all the varied pleasures we obtain. It will be convenient to consider these objections at the outset.
The most reassuring aspect of the theory of chronosomatics and its notion of the body as the timepiece of humanity's development has been the immediate understanding of those learning the theory for the first time, and it is this quick recognition that, more than anything else, suggests the potential universality of the idea and the metaphors it employed.
The springing of arches, the swelling of domes, and the soaring of spires are 'mere metaphors of speech.' Certainly they are metaphors. But a metaphor, when it is so obvious as to be universally employed and immediately understood, presupposes a true and reliable experience to which it can refer. Such metaphors are wholly different from literary conceits. A merely literary metaphor lays stress on its own ingenuity or felicity. When we read
This quotation from Scott is candidly the catalyst for Wilson's "The Natural Imagination." There are the notions of pleasure through unconscious processes and of the unconscious processes being the most "deep-seated and universal." Furthermore, there is the view of projecting the image of human function "upon the outside world," and, above all, there is the naming of these processes as natural. Wilson elaborates on each of these ideas in his effort to define, explain and demonstrate the workings of "the natural imagination" and its connection to architecture.
The next point is more likely to cause difficulty. The process of our theory is complex; the process of our felt enjoyment is the simplest thing we know. Yet here, too, it should be obvious that a process simple in consciousness need not be simple in analysis. It is not suggested that we think of ourselves as columns, or of columns as ourselves. No doubt when keen aesthetic sensibility is combined with introspective habit, the processes of transcription will tend to enter the field of consciousness. But there is no reason why even the acutest sensibility to a resultant pleasure should be conscious of the processes that go to make it. Yet some cause and some process there must be. The processes of which we are least conscious are precisely the most deep-seated and universal and continuous, as, for example, the process of breathing. And this habit of projecting the image of our own functions upon the outside world, of reading the outside world in our own terms, is certainly ancient, common, and profound. It is, in fact, the natural way of perceiving and interpreting what we see. It is the way of the child in whom perpetual pretence and 'endless imitation' are a spontaneous method of envisaging the world. It is the way of the savage, who believes in 'animism,' and conceives every object to be invested with powers like, his own. It is the way of the primitive peoples, who in the elaborate business of the dance give a bodily rendering to their beliefs and desires long before thought has accurately expressed them. It is the way of a superbly gifted race like the Greeks, whose mythology is one vast monument to just this instinct. It is the way of the poetic mind at all times and places, which humanises the external world, not in a series of artificial conceits, but simply so perceiving it. To perceive and interpret the world scientifically, as it actually is, is a later, a less 'natural,' a more sophisticated process, and one from which we still relapse even when we say the sun is rising. The scientific perception of the world is forced upon us; the humanist perception of it is ours by right. The scientific method is intellectually and practically useful, but the naive, the anthropomorphic way which humanises the world and interprets it by analogy with our own bodies and our own wills, is still the aesthetic way; it is the basis of poetry, and it is the foundation of architecture.
The primarily objective of The Body, The Imagination, and Architecture is to first define, explain, and demonstrate the link between human physiology and the operative modes of the human imagination, and then to further disclose the connection between this new theory of the imagination and the ever evolving architectural design process.
A similar confusion between what is conscious in architectural pleasure, and what is merely implied, seems to underlie the objection that our theory lays too great a stress on physical states. Our pleasure in architecture, it is true, is primarily one of the mind and the spirit. Yet the link between physical states and states of the mind and the emotions needs no emphasis. Our theory does not say that physical states enter largely into the spectator's consciousness; it says that they, or the suggestion of them, are a necessary precondition of his pleasure. Their absence from consciousness is indeed a point of real importance. Large modifications in our physical condition, when they occur, alter our mental and emotional tone; but, also, they absorb our consciousness. A person, for example, who is taking part in an exciting game, will feel exhilaration and may enjoy it; but the overtones of gaiety, the full intellectual and emotional interest of the state, are drowned in the physical experience. The mind is not free to attend to them. It is precisely because the conscious physical element in architectural pleasure is so slight, our imitative self-adjustment to architectural form so subtle, that we are enabled to attend wholly to the intellectual and emotional value which belongs to the physical state. If we look at some spirited eighteenth-century design, all life and flicker and full of vigorous and dancing curves, the physical echo of movement which they awaken is enough to recall the appropriate mental and emotional penumbra; it is not sufficient to overwhelm it. No one has suggested that the experiences of art are as violent or exciting as the experiences of physical activity; but it is claimed for them that they are subtler, more profound, more lasting, and, as it were, possessed of greater resonance. And this difference the theory we are considering assists us to understand.
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