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excerpts from:
Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture - Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
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The following passages were underlined in the text by a previous book borrower. The highlighted text relates to the theory of chronosomatics and The Body, the Imagination and Architecture, and because of this coincidence I am making a record of "text on text" here.
p. 4:
Architects can no longer do without the identification of the human body and its elements in the architectural body. This new anthropomorphic practice of the topology between body and building avoids the facile road of isomorphism, isotopy, and metaphoric representations of the past. Instead, using the body as a designated element for architectural metonymies, new kinds of instrumental and theoretical representations can be reached. Through embodiment, architecture becomes a perspicuous representation. This is a real human project, i.e., a representation given within a therapeutic dimension. In other words, has to do with the reconciliation between the art of living well and the art of constructing well.
p. 4:
The role of the architect is to make visible that which is invisible.
p. 7-8:
The aim of this book is to present the bodily of architectural production as it develops from the secularization of the myth of the body in architectural demonstrations. In architecture, the use of myth cannot be founded upon an essential or metaphysical definition of the myth itself. No satisfactory theory of myth exists in the contemporary critical practice of architecture, but the word and the notion have a wide currency in the theoretical writings of architects who reject the metaphysics that nurtured the modern theory of myth.
p. 8:
Architectural knowledge is a way of thinking that cannot be explained either by demonstrative reasoning or by the scientific method. It requires explanations fostered by the telling of histories that do not distinguish between artistic and scientific rationality, or in other words, between mythos and logos.
...restore the privileges of myth.
..process of secularization...
p. 9:
...interpretation of the myth should occur at its point of departure.
Consequently, deposing the myth, architectural demythization has removed the kernel of architectural knowledge, and perhaps a rereading of the relationship and function in architecture's beginnings can bring a new insight into architectural quality and its human--perhaps too human--dimension of corporeal presences.
"A chiasm is an exchange between the phenomenal body and the 'objective' body, between the perceiving and the perceived" (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 215). This is the hidden power of the grotesque image, which always crosses its own boundaries and blends with its own settings.
p. 15:
"It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphors from the human body and its parts and from human senses and passions. Thus, head for top and beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of rake, a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe, the gorge of a river; a neck of land; an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the Latin used umbilicus, navel in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom. (Vico 1744, 2:I, 405)
p. 18:
Here, the monstrous being embodied in the stone discloses the Janus-like tendency of any monstrous joint to present the enigma of past and future architectural artifacts.
p. 22:
A concrete case of fragmentary architecture is the architettura di spoglio (architecture of spoils). This is not an architecture of prefabricated romantic ruins, or of post-modern "instant history," but it is a way of producing architecture as the assimilation of prior architectural artifacts. Buildings are cultural texts that are generated by assembling fragments, excerpts, citations, passages, and quotations.. Every building is then both assimilation and a transformation of other buildings.
p. 24:
The images devised for the Ars Memorandi are hybrids in which it is possible to summarize in one image only the totality, for instance of the New Testament (Baltrusatis 1969, 311). From this point of view, the monster, a cultural trophy, becomes an edifying theater of memory. Buildings signify the machine, theater of memory, housing the never-ending representations of the drama and comedy of human life. Barbaro, in his commentary on Vitruvius's treatise (Book 10, 442), sees the force that makes a machine moving, analogous to imagination (fantasia), the force that moves the human mind. If we consider architecture to be a machine analogous to the human mind, then buildings, as the synoptical constructions embodied in the monster of the ars memorandi, exemplify and suggest rather than determine or impose. Edifices become expressions of intellectual pleasure and architecture manifests a reality that acts between sensory experiences and physical expressions.
p. 49:
..."my body model of the things, and the things model of my body" (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 131). As Vico has pointed out in a rhetorical chiasm, the body is the highest order of representation, because "man in his ignorance makes himself the ruler of the universe . . . So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter preposition is truer than the former, for then when man understands, he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand, he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them." (Vico 1744, vi, 405)
p. 61:
Architecture is a kind of corporeal time machine where the past, the present, and the future are related architecturally through memory.
p. 75:
Museography then becomes a science of possible solutions of the different kinds of interpretation and time frameworks established by the collective memory in the artifacts preserved in a museum.
p. 89:
For example, in Canaletto's capricci or vedute di fantasia located in Venice, an imaginary new Venice is envisioned on top of the old one. This is a Venice emerging from a metamorphosis, and its visual construing takes place through the assembly of built and unbuilt designs, on invented and real things, a genetic and most remarkable collage of architectural quotations, suggesting a way for a possible reality.
p. 94:
The myth of the origin of drawing, as it was handed down to posterity by Pliny the Elder, tells us the story of Diboutades tracing the shadow of her departing lovers on a wall.
The following is the entire Marginalia of the text:
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Architectural Detail: See Text.
Body: There is no contradiction in saying that architecture builds on the cultural dimension of a place, and then in stating that it depends on a corporeal image that does not need a specific place. The first statement applies to the construction of architecture, whereas the second bears on the construing of it. The problem is the reconciliation between the two in a productive manner. Too many dark shadows are cast on architecture, preventing the drawing of the image of architecture. Architects as image makers do not know anymore how to put a real image on their artifacts. The actual substance of architecture is not recognized by the professionals and most of the professors have forgotten the process of the Vitruvian jigurata similitudine. The real image of architecture is hidden; its present being is a quasi-body. This figurative tradition began in the language of a Homeric poem. The image is shaped by Homer in describing a cave located on the shores of Ithaca, and inhabited by Nymphs.
Beneath it lies, the Naiades delight
Where bowls and urn of workmanship divine And massy beams in native marble shine;
On which the Nymphs amazing web displays,
Of purple hue, and exquisite array. (Porphiry 1823, 179)
The enigma set by Homer is beautifully unfolded by the philosopher, poet, and hierophant, Porphiry, in the only intact allegorical exegesis of a poetic text handed down to us from classical antiquity. The Hellenistic hierophant interprets the passage as a representation of reality as corporeality.
For the formation of the flesh is on and about the bones, which in the body of animals resemble stones. Hence these instruments of weaving consist of stones, and not of any other matter. But the purple web will evidently be the flesh which is woven from the blood. (Porphiry 1823, 180)
In his interpretation of Homer's figure, Porphiry singles out an architectural corporeality to construe the artifacts located in the cave.
The native marble looms and the purple web are the representation of the corporeal nature of the extraordinary tectonics of architecture. The divine artifacts are simultaneously the cosmos and the cosmetic of the constructed world, the bare structure and the pleasurable reclothing of it, the skeleton of an edifice and its necessary decorative flesh. It is the image of a body, a silent representation. To be more precise, these are two bodies incorporated in the artifacts -the human body, the weaver, and the body of the artifact itself. Sometimes they merge; sometimes they are far apart. This tension between them allows the constructing and the construing of architecture.
In any field of human inquiry, a crucial question is that of translation. How do you translate something into something else? How do you substitute a signifier with another signifier for the same signified? This question is present in many different forms, in both the practice and theory of architecture- The most fascinating one is the translation of drawings into buildings and buildings in drawings. The human body is the instrument of these chiasmatic translations, an edifying activity. The body measures and constructs edifices. The body is then the key semiotic tool for translating the diverse system of unconscious feelings into conscious meanings that make up the rhizome of sign composing an edifice. An exemplary illustration of the power of the body in performing translations is the use of the body by the mime. The mime's body demonstrates how corporeality, the material side of humanity, can be a metalanguage, or perhaps using the same procedure Jarry had used to generate the term 'pataphysics, a more proper term than metalanguage can be generated for defining the corporeality expressed in a pantomime. The corporeality of the mime is a 'patalanguage that translates from the mime signified-body to the audience signifier-body. In architecture, the body translates buildings in drawings and drawings into buildings.
Chiasm: Following Edgar Allan Poe's belief that "nonsense is the essential sense of marginal notes" (Poe 1984, 1311), 1 might state nonsensically that a chiasm is a way of thinking and the thinking of a way.
Corporeality: See Body.
Detail: See Text.
Dream: One of the most influential books of architectural theory is the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream), an in-folio with 170 xylographics printed by Aldo Manuzio in 1499 in Venice. It is a story of a dream that is full of architectural vision.
A hypothetical design of the unknown and thereby an important tool for acquiring knowledge, the dream is seen as a narration developed within the labyrinth of the reflections between the physical and metaphysical possibilities of things. This oneiric locus of reflection is the place where geometry, philosophy, and science discover their common origin or "nature," i.e., their roots in human imagination. Dreams are the way by which myths are created (Lanternari 1981). The dream (sopor) is where we learn representation because a dream is a representation of being awake. During the dream, visual images are dominant and a monstrous semiosis takes place. This is acknowledged by Scarpa in recounting one of his architectural dreams: "I always dreamed of building a house with moveable stone walls: vertical planes which run on bearings and grooves" (Dal Co 1986, 276). Oneiric images show the possibility of transformation, a transformation that makes visible the invisible. A dream is a mode of production in which images can be manipulated through dimensional and scale change combinations, and with analogies resulting in the creation of new forms and understandings. Dream and myth are not irrational instruments; they are the ontic tools for penetrating the rigor of reason enlightening the imaginary aspects of human thinking. Dreams are a preverbal structure, a way of thinking by the use of images (States 1988). The chiasmatic nature of dream and reality is perfectly expressed in a Chinese sacred canon. In Nam Han, Chen Ching, Chaung Chou narrates that he dreamed of being a butterfly, and once awake he asked himself if he was not a butterfly dreaming of being a man (Focchi 1981, 241). This Chinese dream indicates the importance of a surrealistic approach to architecture. Dalibor Vesely has argued that the true nature of the surrealist movement has been obscured by the unfortunate identification of the philosophical dimension of surrealism with its artistic doctrine- The doctrinal public persona presented by many surrealists, and uncritically accepted by the audience of the avant-garde, has hidden "the primary goal of the movement: to reach an absolute reconciliation of dream and reality" (Vesely 1978, 7). The most amazing side of surrealist inquiry is the purpose of technology in providing the material for a new creative vision of objects, contaminating the visible with the invisible- One qualifying image, or rather a technological trope from Comte Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, encapsulates this attitude:
beautiful as a chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. (Ducasse 1969)
From the point of view of this surrealistic trophy, technology helps in generating beautiful images that give us the possibility of not drawing any firm distinction between the concrete and the abstract, between dream and reality.
Ichnography: The ichnographia or plan is the place (topos) where the architect makes visible that which is invisible. This practice is based on processes of demonstration. Demonstrations occur both in the constructing of theoretical schemata and in the constructing of building plans. Architects demonstrate through tangible signs, the drawings, the intangible that operates in the tangible. This demonstration is the setting of the enigma of the labor involved in architecture. The drawing of a plan, which is a projection using the compass of the human body, reveals its nature of being an architectural project. Ichnography, one of architecture's most fascinating and puzzling enigmas, presents the entire building by simplifying its reality, yet at the same time, it manifests a more complete view of the building's interacting parts by showing more of what is visible. A plan presents the invisible aspect of architecture, representing an original in a way that can never be seen. In a plan, the building's dynamic nature is manifested in a topological outline and through a demonstrative depiction of architecture, three-dimensional extensions are represented on a two-dimensional plane. The content of the plan incorporates that which is present in the visible building, but is itself invisible.
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Metaphorically speaking, the drawing of a plan represents the coalescence of architectural imagining. If we assume that this architectural imagining results from an intangible superfaculty that arises from the possession of a metaphysical eye able to envision a future building, the enigma of the architectural plan is a false problem. However, if we consider the extraordinary capacity of architects to imagine a building by tracing the plan of it, the enigma becomes real. Architects can draw a plan of a building in direct sight, reconstruct the plan of a demolished structure, or devise a plan for a future building. The common denominator in all these graphic procedures is the making visible of that which is invisible. Through a peculiar and curious procedure of decomposition, selection and recomposition, through a polysemic use of simple black marks on paper, architects use a topological game to trace rooms whose functions become self-evident in the composition of the plan. The marks on the paper define the rooms they represent as private or public spaces, as formal or service-related places. Plans guide the construction of a building as well as the construing of it as it is, will be, or has been.
Joint: See Text.
Machine: The analogy, machine-edifice, is a long-standing one, and has always been used to judge architecture. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre (1985) have clearly shown that buildings have been praised as well as condemned for being machinelike. This long tradition began with Vitruvius, who saw the devising of machinery as one of the three branches of architecture, vis aedificatio (the devising of edifices), gnomonica (the devising of the proportions dictated by natural light), machinatio (the devising of machinery) (Vitruvius 1584, 1: ii, 1). Technology is the doctrine dealing with the dual nature of machine and edifice; it is the theory as well as the practice of architectural production. Architecture exemplifies and suggests rather than determines or imposes, and technology becomes the expression of pleasure -Alberti's voluptas. Technology becomes a reality acting between sensory experiences and physical expressions, being the union of the homo faber with the homo ludens. Technology is a subjective presence rather than an objective procedure to which the client and architect must be subjected.
Metaphor: See Tropes.
Metonymy: See Tropes.
Representation: See Dream and Body.
Semiosis: Signification, or semiosis, is the process by which meanings are attached to signs. Buildings are impressive agglomerates of signs; they are rhizomes of processes of signification. These aggregates of signs should be studied by means of a quasi-doctrine, the semiotics of architecture. Based on a naive generalization of the relationships between the signifier and the signified, i.e., the Vitruvian binomial and quod signficat and quod significatur, this quasi-doctrine was in the spotlight during the late sixties and early seventies when every architectural school had at least one young faculty member teaching a course on the semiotics of architecture. Now semiotics is at the periphery of architectural education and of the profession. Nevertheless, the question of how meanings are carried by buildings is still one of the most challenging questions that can be asked in the realm of architectural theory.
Signified: See Signifier.
Signifier: In an article to demystify the jargon-ridden language of architectural semiotics, Geoffrey Broadbent (1977, 475) suggests that one can find one's way through architectural semiotics by using six basic terms: signified, signified, referent, icon, index, and symbol. Then one should become positively fluent in another twenty or so, and if someone wants to become very sophisticated, he/she should learn a dozen terms from the realm of rhetoric. However, the chiasm between the signifier and the signified is the most important relationship to be discussed within the semiotics of architecture because it is the foundation of the development of the concept of function. As previously mentioned in this book, Vitruvius recorded the importance of this binomial, stating that an architect "manifestly needs to have experience of both kinds" (Vitruvius 1930, I:iii, 3).
At the beginning of semiotics as an academic discipline during the '60s, architectural semioticians went wild on the topic. De Fusco equated the exterior of the building with signifier and the interior with the signified. Eco suggested that building elements denote their functions and promote them e.g., the door is the signifier and the function of communication between two rooms is signified. Arguing that a building can be a signifier or signified at the same time a signifier for the various media by which the building can be represented and a signified for its cultural generation -Broadbent generated perhaps the most refined definition from a general point of view of semiotics, but not really from an architectural point of view. Buildings are built for making visible the invisible. They are what Pomian Krzysztof (1982) calls semifoii; objects that are valuated or praised, not for their functional utility but for the wonder they create. This wonder can be explained only by making a reference to the invisible. Architects are then thaumaturges who relate a visible signifier with an invisible signifier.
Techne: When a translator of a Greek text encounters the word techne, almost automatically he translates it as the latinate word "art." This follows a process of simplification begun by the Romans with their wholesale, uncontrolled borrowing of Greek culture, and the consequent need to find equivalent Latin words for Greek terms. Techne is a strange word. It has always been difficult to define its semantic realm, and it becomes more complicated when it is coupled with the word logos. The changes in meaning, at various times and in different places, of the word "technology" are thus quite astonishing. The most surprising change occurred during the Enlightenment, when the components of the word were reversed. Dividing technology into its original components of techne and logos, one can set up a mirror relationship between the techne of logos and the logos of techne.
At the time of the Enlightenment, the rhetorical techne of logos was replaced by the scientific logos of techne. In architecture, however, this replacement did not occur because technology existed with both forms in chiastic presence in the constructed world. Translating this chiastic presence into a language proper to architecture, we might say that there is no construction without a construing, and no construing without a construction. This is exemplified in the process of the making of architectural details. A trigliph is the embodiment in stone of a wood technology, which as Hersey has pointed out, already was the embodiment of a bone technology. This detailing process is the result of two components. One is predominantly manual and operative, and is based on the logos of the techne (technology). The other is mental and reflective, and is based on the techne of the logos (rhetoric). The use of these binomials returns architecture to its original nature as a discipline with a system of knowledge that can then be transferred into the instrumental knowledge necessary to practice construction. The decoration of a Doric temple is a construing in stone of the elements of a wooden building, whereas the construing of a cosmological order is constructed in a Renaissance view. Nontrivial buildings are always devised with this chiastic quality. They are thinking machines in which the wood, stone, concrete, metal, mortar, and glass are unified by design into a stereographic multiplicity. The essence of techne is by no means technological. Techne belongs to the notion of poesis, which reveals or discloses aletheia, the truth, and goes hand in hand with epistime or scientia. In common language, the derivative words (technical, technique, technology) have lost the original meaning and are understood to be only of an instrumental nature.
Technology: See Techne and Machine.
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Text: The detail, or the joint, is the basic unit or segment of architectural texts and any construction of meanings. The joint, as knot, is the archetypical origin of the idea of text. Gottfried Semper (1803-1897), an architect and theoretician, indicates that the genesis of architecture is in the real, and, to be more precise, is caused by the contingent reality. From Semper's point of view, architectural texts are always cultural texts. Man, following first, his need for order, and second, his need for shelter, covering, and delimitation, generated textile materials. The origin of architecture, as of any other human expression, is in the making of textile materials. The process of making textiles is based on threading and twining -operations that suggest the knot. The knot is, then, for Semper, "the oldest technical symbol and the expression of the first cosmogonic idea which arose among peoples" (Semper 1878, 1, 11). By means of a philological game, Semper prepares and develops his concept of the role of the knot in the discussion of the role of the textile art in his book, Der Stil. This language game, which seems patterned after one of Vico's etymological games on the "nature" of words, begins by considering the German term naht, the seam, the "joining," as an expedient, a nothbehelf, for joining two planes of similar or dissimilar materials. Semper juxtaposes noth and naht and from this, derives a maxim that he proposes as the first rule for art: to make virtue of necessity (Semper 1878, 1:73, n. 1; Rykwert 1975, 71-73). In the footnote, Semper further develops the word game: naht and noth are likened to the philological lineage of knoten, noed, nodus, and related to the originating Greek term meaning force, necessity. Semper gives as supporting evidence a reference to Alber Hofer, a disciple of Von Humbolt, who set the connection existing between the Indo-European root/noc/and the Latin neco, nexus, necessity, nectere (to spin). The word puzzle set by Semper's word play is solved in a later passage discussing the origin of the windbreak or fence, a surface woven of reeds or branches, as the first type of textile product that was used for making architecture (Semper 1878, 1:213). The relationship between textile products and understanding space find a confirmation in many creation myths, which place textile arts among the first given. The Babylonian god Marduk plaited a wicker hurdle on the surface of the waters, created dust, and spread it on the hurdle. An ancient Mesopotamian myth describes the creation of the earth using a reed mat. The Dogon of West Africa tell how their first ancestor received a square-bottomed basket with a round mouth like those used today. This basket, upended, served as a model on which the ancestor erected a world system with a circular base representing the sun and a square terrace representing the sky.
Textile product is not used in a simple metaphor developed for an understanding of space based on discursive or methodological analogies. Rather, it must be regarded as a morphological procedure. Indeed, classical Roman rhetoricians selected the Latin verb texo, texin, textum, texere (to weave) to indicate both the acts of composing a literary work or an architectural piece. The textile is in itself a construction of critical knowledge. This knowledge is based on the twofold being of any product generated by a technology, the processes of construction and construing. In the joint (the knot-the detail), the practical norms of technology and the aesthetic norms come together in a dialectic antinomy. The detail is the unit of text production. Through the detail (the knot), the construction and the construing of the text take place, by means of a theoretical analogy.
A theoretical analogy is the basis for the understanding of space. A text may occupy the space between two knots; it may occupy time. In its design, derived from the weaving, a text allows a bilateral view of reality composed of warp and wool A vertical slice of space must be cut to build a wall. A wall is constructed vertically, but it is construed horizontally in a plan. A horizontal slice allows a vertical view (Bunn 1981, 105; see also Ichnography). This is the traditional process for devising architectural texts. The drawing with its lines of construction is the memory of the traditional preparation of a site for the construction of any building. On the ground, the batterboards holding the intersecting lines of the sawkerfs and chalk lines tensioned by the plumb lines reminisce a huge horizontal loom with the first yarns of the warp and the wool
The understanding of space as a cognitive category emerged as the result of the use of textile: a two-dimensional object torqued in a three-dimensional system (Bunn 1981, 25, 46). the role of space as cognitive category is the fundamental aspect in any text. As Calvino has pointed out, independent of signs, space does not exist, and, perhaps, never existed (Calvino 1968, 29). The space in question is not the unambiguous, empirical, scientific space, but the ambiguous space of imagination, where the union of aevum and locus is achieved by a textus. This concept is explicitly singled out by Lotman: "By stimulating an infinite object (reality) with the means of a finite text, the work of art with its space substitutes not a part (or better, not only a part) of the life to be represented, but all this life as a whole. Every single text simulates a certain object which is at the same time particular and universal" (Lotman 1977, 29). In this sense, on the one hand, architecture transforms nonsemiotic materials such as stone, wood, glass, and textiles into symbols that afford intellectual joy. On the other hand, it constructs an imaginary physical reality of the second order out of the symbolic materials, that is, the representational symbols. Representational symbols suggest a union between the signifier and the signified and between the structure of a symbol and its content. A kind of human icon, they bear a direct resemblance to the object and in this way they ensure a greater truthfulness and intelligibility than do conventional symbols.
Tropes: Buildings are passive structures in which the quotidian art of living well finds infinite expression. In them the lineaments of construction and the harmony of building elements trace the tropes of human habits that are elicited by a figurative imagination. This is based on topical thinking, an interactive procedure that produces a knowledge based on images and figures, an eidetic process. Paraphrasing the definition of trope given by Abrahm Fraunee in his Arcadian Rhetoric, we can say that a trope or turning is when an image is turned from its natural signification to some other, so conveniently that it seems willing led rather than driven by a force to that other signification. A powerful conceptual tool, a trope is a playful interpretation that relates forms (eidos) that would otherwise never be associated. A trope is always based on rhetorical figures of signification metaphor, metonymy, and irony. Achieving meanings through the translation of formal characteristics, a trope is a form of thinking which, with the help of cross-referenced images, generates an elemental architecture able to establish eloquent and intelligible constructed environments for human life. Building elements then become like Leibniz's monads, through which it is possible to see the totality of an architectural reality by looking at a detail. Horns, hairs, and the decoration of capitals become meaningful monads of architectural imagination. They are powerful tropes, embodied trophies. These trophies, transmuted into supports and expressing human feelings, then become meaningful building elements. Through the tropes, the bodies of the victims of wars or sacrifices transubstantiate in the stones of which the building consists, reversing the direction of causality in time just as hunters, in their ritual reconstructions of the bodies of their victims, sought to annul the casualty. In the metaphor, the "substitution" is done by a visual similarity. In metonymy, the transfer of meaning is achieved by "causality" or "congruency" between representation and function, which may be physical or conceptual. The relationship between architectural representation and detail is based on substitutability of function, not the imitation of form, which is Mukarovsky's (1977) multifunctional approach. Architectural detail, by its inclusion or exclusion from semantic and referential relations, is the site of the real union of function and representation. Irony is a subtle weapon of criticism, a necessary tool for building through destroying. Roman Jakobson (1956), in a seminal study, reduces the system of tropes to two, which he then organizes on the two fundamental axes of language: the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic axes. Metaphor is a substitution done on the paradigmatic axis in absentia, whereas metonymy is a substitution done on the syntagmatic axis in presentia. This theory was developed by Jakobson in discussing the two tropes--metaphor and metonymy--on the observation of two types of aphatic disturbances of language. Aphasia is a loss of the power to use or understand words, usually resulting from a brain lesion. Apraxia is a loss of the ability to execute complex muscular movements, resulting from brain damage. Following Jakobson's theorization, a similar theory is possible for the objects of architecture if we consider the two types of space disturbances to be constructive and distributive apraxias.
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