1 CS3 Architectural Theory and Criticism I

Handout 1: Space and Form Wlfflin and Schmarsow as

forerunners of modernist theory

The aim of our creations is the art of space, the essence of architecture. H. P. Berlage (1908)

The question of form and space is clearly addressed in a huge number of modernist buildings. And I think it is not wrong to see a connection between the theories of pre-modern thinkers like Wlfflin and Schmarsow and the built form of some of the outstanding examples of modernism.

Historically, where does this interest in abstract form and space stem from?

Here are two examples that are especially important for the development and understanding of modernist theories: Both Heinrich Wlfflin and August Schmarsow were art historians, they were of a type of erudite scientists that you well might find very boring. But it has to be pointed out that these and many other art historians of the decades circa 18901910 started to think about architecture in a new way.

They did not deal with the question of style any longer, a question that had for so long monopolized architectural theory, but much more they sought for the fundaments of architecture. They wanted to find out what architecture pre-eminently could be described as.

They sought help from other disciplines such as upcoming psychological and physiological research. They asked how we perceive architecture, what our relationship as human beings towards architecture can be described as. Thus they arrived at definitions that influenced the development of modern architecture in a way that has for a long time been neglected.

To put it in a simple (and not totally correct) way, one can say that Wlfflin looked at the architectural form as a mass or a body to discover its effects on the beholder and, the other way round, our way of inscribing human features into architecture.

As for Schmarsow, he found architecture the art of shaping space. He is the first to theorize architectural space in all its complexity and again, its impacts on the human being within architecture.

Thus the two of them (and many others) opened the way to describe architecture not in terms of style any longer, but in more abstract formal terms, always considering the relationship between architecture and the beholder or user.

Architecture, creatress of space: August Schmarsow (18531936)

Born 1853 in Schildfeld, Mecklenburg; died 1936 in Baden-Baden. He lectured in art history from 1881 onwards. In 1894 he became Professor in Leipzig. He attempted to expand art history into a theoretical discipline, asking methodical questions of judging art. For his self-image as art historian the unity of empirical scholarship and aesthetic was the deciding factor.

Schmarsow wrote The Essence of Architectural Creation (Das Wesen der architektonischen Schpfung), as his inaugural lecture in Leipzig, 1893.

For the introduction of Schmarsows ideas, I will follow Harry Francis Mallgrave who has written a comprehensive introduction to Schmarsows, Wlfflins and other art historians theories in a book called Empathy, Form and Space. Mallgrave states:

Previous historical treatments of architecture, Schmarsow argued, had always followed two patterns neither of which did it justice. The traditional point of view did not consider architecture truly an art, for it was implicated with a purpose; it therefore had to be classified with tectonics and the handicrafts as an unfree art. The second perspective,

2 that of thoughtful architects, saw architecture chiefly as the art of dressing. They view their activity as little more than superficial composition of a purely technical and decorative kind, the pasting up of inherited styles on the framework of a functional construction. The art of dressing, as Schmarsow called architecture, taking up a word of Semper, who had developed the notion of the dressing of architecture, and criticizing it, had led architecture down the false path of externalization, the path of undue prominence given to the faade of a building. Schmarsow aimed at correcting this aesthetics from without by an aesthetics from within. His leading tenet very directly challenged the whole thrust of Wlfflins psychology of form. The essence of every architectural creation since the beginning of time is not its form, Schmarsow insisted, but the fact that it is a spatial construct.1

Schmarsow himself had written: From the troglodytes cave to the Arabs tent; from the long processional avenue to the Egyptian pilgrimage temple to the Greek gods glorious column-borne roof; from the Carribean hut to the German Reichstag building we can say in the most general terms that they are all without exception spatial constructs [Raumgebilde], whatever their material, duration, and construction, and whatever the configuration of their supporting and supported parts.2 Our sense of space [Raumgefhl] and spatial imagination [Raumphantasie] press towards spatial creation [Raumgestaltung]; they seek their satisfaction in art. We call this art architecture; in plain words, it is the creatress of space [Raumgestalterin].3 We all carry the dominant coordinate of the axial system within ourselves in the vertical line that runs from head to toe. This means as long as we desire an enclosure for ourselves, the meridian of our body need not be visibly defined; we ourselves, in our person, are its visual manifestation. As the creatress of space, architecture creates, in a way that no other art can, enclosures for us in which the vertical middle axis is not physically present but remains empty. It operates only ideally and is defined as the place of the subject. For this reason, such interior spaces remain the principal element far into the evolution of architecture as an art.4

Mallgrave:

The principal concern for architecture as a spatial creation is not so much the development of this vertical axis but the enclosure of the subject. Thus the most important dimension for actual space creation is depth. Because of the organization of our body, we always give space a direction; the orientation of the face and limbs determines what is ahead and whether we are moving forward or backward. In this way direction transforms every spatial enclosure into a living space.5

The new disciplines of aesthetics and art history had hit their stride by the 1890s, at a pace of speculation that perhaps has not since been and will not ever be equated. Artistically, the atmosphere was no less exhilarating, especially when we begin to take note of the extent to which various Secessions, the Jugendstil, and the underlying architectural realism of the 1890s (soon to be christened Sachlichkeit) were nurtured by these very same innovations in theory. It certainly no longer needs to be said that it was precisely these events rather than some doubtful break with 1 Harry Francis Mallgrave, Empathy, Form and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics 18731893 (Santa Monica: Getty, 1994), p. 58. 2 August Schmarsow, The Essence of Architectural Creation, cited after Mallgrave, Empathy, Form and Space, p. 286. 3 August Schmarsow, The Essence of Architectural Creation, cited after Mallgrave, Empathy, Form and Space, p. 287. 4 Ibid. 5 Mallgrave, Empathy, Form and Space, p. 61.

3 history that appointed the notions of form and space with their array of meanings that proved so suggestive and fertile to the art and architecture of the first half of the century. It would take an uncritical return to the polemics of late Modernism to believe otherwise.6

Schmarsows spatial theory: the three coordinates

Three axes: vertical, width and depth:

In a psycho-psychological interpretation Schmarsow identifies the three particular characteristics of the human anatomy as decisive in the experience of space that we are surrounded by. Thus, the height is the first dimension, derived from the vertical axis of man; width, the second dimension, is experienced foremost as correlation of the extension of our shoulders and our stretched arms to the sides; and depth directly relates to our frontal direction, the way our eyes are directed, the way we act and move forwards.7 A simple table can be set up to explain how Schmarsow saw the value of these three coordinates.

Human body dimension art creative principle

Vertical 1. Dim. Height Sculpture Proportion (body) Horizontal 2. Dim. Width Painting Symmetry (body/space)

Direction 3. Dim. Depth Architecture Rhythm (space)

Since painting contains both the body- as well as the space principle, Schmarsow valued this art as the highest of all three.

Reception of these theories in Modernism

It is a reflection of his writing style that it was rather his ideas, not so much his publications, which had a resounding success. Their influence on the theories of modern architecture cannot be overestimated. Authors such as Paul Frankl, Hermann Srgel, Leo Adler or Fritz Schumacher followed Schmarsow on his way or further developed his ideas.8

Also Mies van der Rohe, when declaring in 1923, that Building art is the spatially apprehended will of the epoch,9 was indirectly referring to the theories of the art historians Schmarsow, Wlfflin and their colleagues. One can claim that Schmarsows sentence of the Raumwille as the living soul of architectural creation is the decisive precondition for the development of modern architecture.10

But in the English-speaking parts of the world, space was only theorized through Geoffrey Scott with his adaptation of German-language art history, Architecture of Humanism, of 1914. Although Frank Lloyd Wright had started developing a new sense of space in his Prairie Houses from ca. 1890 onwards, he would only write about the term space in 1928. Similarly, Le Corbusier who was a master of architectural space would only write about architectural space as late as 1948. What does that mean? They were designing, learning from their (built) environment, reading, but not so much writing about space as a topic. Sigfried Giedion said about the new space:

The traditional terms all burst and vanish when brought into relation with the new buildings: space or sculpture (plastic). This is no longer sufficient. The houses by Le Corbusier are neither spatial nor plastic: air blows through them! Neither space nor

6 Mallgrave, Empathy, Form and Space, p. 66. 7 Eleftherios Ikonomo, Afterword to Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, p. 362. Translation C. Schnoor. 8 Jasper Cepl, Afterword to Schmarsow, Barock und Rokoko, S. 16f. Translation C. Schnoor. 9 Mies van der Rohe, in G, No. 1, 1923. 10 Cf. Jasper Cepl, Afterword to Schmarsow, Barock und Rokoko, S. 16f.

4 sculpture are valid terms, only RELATION and PERVASION! There is only one single non-dividable space. Between inside and outside the covering layers disappear.11

Architectural historian Colin Rowe quotes Le Corbusier, saying:

A building is like a soap bubble. This bubble is perfect an harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is the result of an interior. This debilitating half truth, Rowe adds, has proved to be one of Le Corbusiers more persuasive observations. That it never had very much to do with practice should be obvious; but, it it is an impeccable statement of academic theory relating to domed and vaulted structures, it is also a dictum which could only lend support to the notion of the building as preferably a free standing object in the round.12 What do you think is more relevant to understand architecture from the inside out as space that might determine the outside or from the outside in as a mass, form or body that would determine the space inside?

Further it should be noticed that, on the whole, International Style space was a system which tended to prohibit any display of beams; and, rather than the upper surface of the roof slab being flat, it seems even more certainly to have required that the under surfaces of the roofs and floors should present uninterrupted planes.13

Taking the intended freedom of the plan as a starting point, he argues that column and underside of the roof had to remain separate in order not to lead to a compartmentalization of space and thus to a violation of something of the freedom of the plan.

Architecture as mass and form: Heinrich Wlfflin (18641945)

In contrast to the spatial approach of [] Schmarsow [], the art historian Heinrich Wlfflin initially believed that the anthropomorphic physiognomy embodied in corporeal mass was the essence of architecture. [] He invented a new branch: Psychology of Architecture, which had the task of explaining the hidden symbolism of architectural masses, that was infused into them by the latent forces of the human soul. For this new science, he wrote his Prolegomena. This first publication, his dissertation, contained Wlfflins article of faith which he would never betray; namely, that the one and only object of architecture was corporeal form: didnt Man himself had a corporeal body?14

In 1864, Heinrich Wlfflin was born in Winterthur, Switzerland. In 1886 he wrote his doctoral dissertation, Prolegomena for a Psychology of Architecture. He became Professor for Art History in Basel, Switzerland, in 1893.

Wlfflin argues according to the psychological theory of empathy that it is our own physical, corporeal strength which we find mirrored in architecture. Imitation of nature, one of the central topics of architectural theory since its beginnings, obtains a new meaning through his psychologically influenced research. For Wlfflin, it is human nature that is expressed in buildings: to him, it is our ability to feel or own body that explains the aesthetic impression of a building. Wlfflin sees the building as if it was a built counterpart of ourselves a being with a body, which allows us to read its character, through its shape and physiognomy.15

Wlfflin says: 11 Sigfried Giedion, cited after Jasper Cepl, Afterword to August Schmarsow, Barock und Rokoko, p. 21. Translation C. Schnoor. 12 Colin Rowe in Collage City, 1978, p. 56. 13 Colin Rowe, Neo-Classicism and Modern Architecture II, in: Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, p. 141. 14 Van de Ven, Space in Architecture, p. 94. 15 Jasper Cepl, Quellentexte, S. 272, translation C Schnoor.

5 We understand only what we ourselves can do. Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body. If we were purely visual beings, we would always be denied an aesthetic judgment of the physical world. But as human beings with a body that teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength, and so on, we gather the experience that enables us to identify with the conditions of other forms. We read our own image into all phenomena. We expect everything to possess what we know to be the conditions of our own well-being. Not, that we expect to find the appearance of a human being in the forms of organic nature: we interpret the physical world through the categories that we share with it. We also define the expressive capability of these forms accordingly. They can communicate to us only what we ourselves use their qualities to express. At this point, some might become dubious and question what similarities or expressive feelings we could possibly share with an inanimate stone. Briefly, there are degrees of heaviness, balance, hardness, etc., all of which have expressive value for us. Since only the human form, of course, can express all that lies in humanity, architecture will be unable to express particular emotions that are manifested through specific faculties. Nor should it try to do so. Its subject remains the great vital feelings, the moods that presuppose a constant and stable body condition.16

They can only show us what we have in common with them.

Le Corbusier

Architecture is the masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light. Our eyes were made for seeing forms in light; shadow and light reveal forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, and pyramids are the great primary forms that light reveals well; the image is clear and tangible for us, without ambiguity. That is why these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms.17

Poch In architecture [poch] means the blackening in of residual areas, such as the thick structural solids of a plan. At the Beaux-Arts, the precise profile of the plan was inked by the designer, while the rougher work of filling in the outlined area could be done by a beginning student. The word also came to be used as a noun at the Beaux-Arts, where either poch pur (black) or poch dilu (gray) could be required. Since the structural system used by the Beaux-Arts was load-bearing masonry, poch aided the reading of the plan by its direct proportional relationship to the white areas of the rooms it bounded; that is, a large space could be assumed to have a higher ceiling, and its wider span (and greater load) would require larger supports. Thus the volumetric aspects of the design could be read from the two-dimensional abstraction of the plan. With the triumph of the structural frame, the intimate relationship of solid to void the prized beau poch became meaningless, and was of course scorned by modernists. The term poch has only recently returned to common use, though it is perhaps little understood.18

16 Heinrich Wlfflin, cited after Mallgrave, p. 1512. 17 Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, p. 102. 18 Michael Dennis, Court and Garden (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), p. 4-5.