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Nold Egenter
Joined: 31 Dec 2005
Posts: 51
Location: Zurich Switzerland
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 Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 2:47 am Post subject: LITTLE HEAD |
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LITTLE HEAD
--Good morning my friend. Little head, little head! Its mad! Its absolutely mad!
Good morning! What is "little head"? "Head of a baby"? You have become father last night?
--Absolutely mad. A superficial phantasy term for one of the greatest things of humanity!
Evidently you are about to become crazy yourself!
--We are talking about an important architectural term, or more correctly one introduced by the history of art. Or as it is now called the "theory of architecture"! Architectural-Einsteinism!
Wow! Relativity theory of architecture?
--Exactly! Wonderful. I give you the doctor title for this: relativity theory of architecture!
Thank you.
--Today I have one of these handy dictionaries on art with me. it is some sort of a crime thriller for me. I cite: "Capital" from lat. 'capitellum', meaning: 'little head'.
I got the point!
--It is the uppermost plastically extended part of a column, pillar or pilaster. It is defined as the intermediate part between support and load.
Thus, in fact the art historian defines its general validity as an engineering concept!
--Exactly. I continue: The capital should enlarge the surface of support and thus marks the intermediate function between load and column.
Wow, that is a really forced generalisation for this wide field of formal expression called 'capital' of columns.
--You are right, that is what the dictionary says: the capital is an architectural element which has developed great changes through the history of architecture!
I am sure they start with Egyptian art with its lotus and papyrus forms.
--Exactly, but no comment regarding interpretation. Emphasis is on Greek architecture. It has developed three orders: Doric, Ionian and Corinthian.
Vitruvius, the Bible of the art historian when it comes to architecture!
--Roman architecture has combined Ionian and Corinthian forms to what is now called a "composite capital".
Just distributing new names!
--Byzantine art brought some new creations. Mentioned are "basket-type", and "triangular capitals". Wooden architecture developed the so called "mushroom capital". Early romanesque architecture (since 1000) created the "cubic capital", an almalgamation between cube and bowl, transmitting the roundness of the columns towards the cubic bodies of their load.
Incredible, this rationalisation taken out of the blue!
--"Goblet type of capital". Romanesque art brought the" figure capital" with individual figures. Important is the antique "acanthus capital" as a model for various types of capitals using leafs as decoration.
Mamma mia, what a confusion!
--But this evident confusion is very interesting and important, the attempt to make science on the level of a botanist describing things in front of his eyes. The poor scientist is not aware that the material has a cultural history which is quite different from objects of natural science.
The element of capital is taken out of its context an defined in a very narrow sense as a functional part valid for all variations.
--And from this standpoint all the historical phenomena are registered and provided with some sort of "on the spot term" based on formal analogies.
This evidently is the method of the art historian applied to architectural history as a history of style.
--It is highly contraproductive, in fact completely puzzling. It creates a highly differentiated set of solutions for a functional problem which is solved according to tastes of a certain style period. A type of interpretation but a very questionable one!
Because we can use an entirely different method?
--Exactly! We can interprete the column as an important architectural form which had its own evolution through much deeper times. The monumental parts are considered a relatively late "transmaterialisation" of much earlier forms which were not monumentalised yet. The essential meaning is formed in the early phase. This basic meaning is essentially maintained, but of course, the form adapts to new conditions.
Wow! Darwinism of the Ionian column?
--This approach is represented by a German archaeologist who in the thirties of the last century worked essentially in the Ancient Near East, Mesopotamia and Egypt.
I have heard of this, Walter Andrae is his name, isn't it? "The Ionian column, built form or symbol?" The title of his book.
--Yes. He makes two basic steps. First he takes it out of the monumental architectural context saying that it was originally a free standing symbol having its expression as an element of its own.
Good argument, but what support?
--This comes from a wide spectrum of similar symbols of the Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian context.
I remember the so called Neandria capital, a kind of of bouquet or bunch of flowers, wonderful!
--The second point is the hypothesis that it came out of a pre-monumental tradition which worked with fibrous materials. In this context the phantasy terms of the art historians are eliminated.
The Ionian column is a bundle?
--Damn it, you are quite good in concluding! It shows its cylindrical reed structure in the lower part, the strings which hold it together and the 'natural' ears on top are rolled in like in the natural condition.
The term 'capital becomes nonsense!
--Exactly. Also the load function, a late acquisition. We have to deal with a free standing symbol.
And what was its symbolic function?
--Have you ever seen mature reed plants in the evening light?
Yes, I know what you mean: madly shining!
--Now, if you bind some of them them still rooted, you receive a fairly well defined cylindrical lower part and an upper part quite different, formally and in regard to expression: madly shining!
Two contrasting parts in the same form, a kind of YinYang symbolism?
--Exactly. You can also say some sort of a dynamically PRO-truding part sprouts out of a well defined PORTION. The ancient term 'proportion' gains a quite different meaning.
PRO/PORTION? Very nice! Coincidence of opposites! Aesthetics combined with philosophy. Must be something very primordial in regard to human culture.
--Nature above, technostability below. Note that the binding of stalks always becomes circular, what is bound thus becomes cylindrical: the "automatic" birth of geometry!
Thus we get an entirely new topic. The reed column is extremely simple, but at the same time of a high complexity.
--Not only that. It must have been wide spread in antiquity and it was the nucleus of a then-time worldview. As an elementary symbol of polar harmony it was very likely related to the great number of life trees of antiquity, or even to symbols of deities like Ishtar-Inanna in Mesopotamia or to the Osiris symbol of the Djed pillar. Maybe its harmonious symbolism of 'heaven and earth' also played an important role in early religion!
The 'tree of cognition'!
--I think symbols of this type had also a deep reaching history as cognitive models. Natural forms were 'discovered' by analogy with this model.
It seems that pre-modern architecture had some sort of feeling for the deeper meaning of this type of columns without really knowing what it was. Maybe this is the reason why it survived into our times as a symbol of high standing?
--Anthropologically we can assume that it had a long traditional history as a fibrous topo-semantic sign used for various types of nutrition control. A history which might have been important already during the Lower Paleolithic with a broad spectrum of food control. And very likely it became very important in Neolithic times when the process of defining productive surfaces and whole village-habitats as territory for sedentary life had become well developed.
But why could it become so important that it acquired the highest values in those times?
--There must have been a sudden transition from marking agricultural surfaces for temporal food production to a really higher system of territorial demarcation of local habitat The one who had come first to a habitat place and had set up his demarcation - usually in the middle of the access line, that is between woods and reed fields, was considered the founder of the settlement, his house becoming the founder-line with certain privileges, a local hegemony in the sedentary agrarian village. One can easily imagine that this cluster of ancient families cared for these privileges and ritually renewed the demarcation every year using newly grown plant materials and strictly keeping the traditional form.
It in fact created sedentary village life with secured food production?
--Exactly. Doubtless, the territorio-political aspect so to say was most important. But at the same time the territorial symbol was the aesthetic model for their whole material culture, practical and aesthetic, and we can say that this principle of categorical polarity, of 'coincidence of opposites' has survived in many respects in the arts into our times.
Is art in whatever form a kind of nostalgy of this type of primordial birth of culture?
--I think so. In early times it created a harmonious world in which balance on the basis of these principles were essential. We still have indicators of this world as a world in which everything was one and one was everything, called 'hen kai pan' among the Greeks. Aesthetic harmony was the essential quality of this world.
It did not last?
--On one hand we have indicators, that this type of harmonious worldview existed into the early civilisations on a global level. Egypt, Mesopotamia etc.
It was some sort of the primary level of world view?
--I am convinced of this. However, the development of analytic thinking among Greek presocrats and philosophers shows the intrusion of a dissolving process, which pushed this analogous thinking into the background.
And disappeared?
--No, I think it survived in religion with the harmony of heaven and earth and, as mentioned above, in the arts, as a challenge for those leaning more towards the harmonious way of interpreting the forms of culture. Not in modern and post-modern architecture, nota bene! Architects got attracted by the "aesthetics" of the industry of mass production, e.g. of the ocean steamer builders, by the air-dynamic geometry of the automobile and air-plane constructors as we can explicitly see it in the case of LeCorbusier. They favoured the machine, rejected cultural history, the human condition.
Not without fault of the art historians I suppose!
--Doubtless, but that is too one-sided. Architects too are responsible. They still live in some sort of pseudo-religious myth thinking they are some sort of omniscient world creators, considering the art critiques and historians as the priesthood to praise their creations, distinguishing their 'divine architecture' from mere 'building'!
Architecture must build up research! Amen.
--Amen.
Lets go to have a drink!
--Good idea.[b][/b]
_________________
Architectural Anthropology (vol. 1) figures among ca. 200 books under the title
*Theory of the world*
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~lemelin/bib_pt04.html |
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solidred
Joined: 05 Jan 2006
Posts: 773
Location: Scotland
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| Posted: Wed Jan 28, 2009 4:43 pm Post subject: |
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“ The capital should enlarge the surface of support and thus marks the intermediate function between load and column.”
My guess is that this functional explanation only works in the stone version of trabeation; where the joint is held by the compression of the structure’s own weight. Yet we’re told that the essential column, beam and pediment form of Classicism is based upon a timber prototype. In a timber version of column and beam, the jointing would surely be more likely to be lashed together; knotted with a second material? The second most obvious method would be doweled joints. With the former, we have another knot at the top of a column which is slightly different to the self-knotted reeds out front. Furthermore, whilst I do follow the notion of manipulated reeds signifying a sort of early version of an axis-mundi, I don’t quite get how the leap was made between the signification of crops and the deployment of the same signification in structure, since there is nothing suggested by the form of the tied crop suggesting ‘support for something above’ unless, of course, they had an attitude about the sky as something requiring support…
By the way, I did an extensive image-search on Google into both column capitals and tied crops and tied reeds. Unfortunately I’d better not post them here as some of them are subject to copyright and all are the property of others. Furthermore, few of them are particularly great… if they were, I’d post the link(s). Anyway, the closest I could find to tied reeds was the tying of reeds cross-axis by a separate binding element, such that the reeds were bunched in order to make thatch (thatched roofs). Other tied crops were tied in different ways and for different purposes, for example vines tied to a framework (for basic support) or yams reinforced in various ways. However, I do recall something of the sort described above from childhood; in the garden. Perhaps it was daffodils being tied upon themselves once the flowers had wilted.
[Then there’s the half-windsor, dimpled knot of the neck-tie, which is of course irrelevant chronologically but curiously similar to certain Romanesque column-heads… but perhaps I merely confuse matters by mentioning it. I just get slightly manic forging unexpected connections… but there we have a fabric column, capital and real human head  ]
Finally, there’s a book related to this theme in the sense that its author relates the kinship between the process of weaving and the ‘making of the cosmos’ and between the form of the loom and the forms of Classicism and between warp and weft and the form of the Greek city… something I explored in my workshop project I referred to in my Daedalus post. It’s called Socrates’ Ancestor, by Indra Kagis McEwen (1993, MIT Press). |
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