The sensual nature
of architectural imagination
It is common knowledge that Monsieur
Descartes did not accept as true what his senses communicated to his
mind since he had a total mistrust in sensorial information. Nevertheless,
when sitting at his dinner table, being a good Frenchman, he had to
make up his mind about his cook's gastronomic efforts. Thus, during
his breakfast, Monsieur Descartes had to put aside his philosophical
thinking. He considered the Trencher Bread and the omelet he was eating
by a sensorial assessment resulting from the savoring of the meal carefully
prepared for him. Monsieur Descartes knew that good cooks prepare food
anticipating the multiple sensorial effects and causes of the meal by
cooking for a combination of different sensory phenomena and evaluations.
Listening to the sizzling and cracking of fats, paying attention to
the fizzing, murmuring, and gurgling of cold and hot liquids and monitoring
the change in color shade during browning, glazing and clarifying are
the resource for cooks to make decisions conjecturing the final taste
and effect of their work.
In all probability, on a daily basis,
Monsieur Descartes, was facing a dilemma, the products of the process
of cooking, a process that could be easily recognized as a rational
activity as described in recipes and cookbooks, were always subjected
to the irrational judgments of a mingling of sensory activities taking
place before, during, and after each meal. His solution to this contradiction
was the creation of a cloven world: on the one hand, there is the trustable
mental reality of res cogitans and on the other hand the dreamlike physical
reality of res extensa. Res cogitans cannot be eaten, but res extensa
can be discerningly prepared, appreciated, and assimilated. Consequently,
Monsieur Descartes, who indeed was a very intelligent individual, hired
and fired his chef of cuisine on the finding generated by an appreciation
and estimation of res extensa as embodied in the dish presented on the
table rather than on the arid logic of the res cogitans computed and
explicated in cooking instructions and formulas. He knew the two domains
intertwine on a laid table and his cautious philosophy could not be
practiced at repast time.
The world of senses begins in the
periphery of our bodies and moves to inner and higher levels of perception
and from there, in analogical manner, senses rule the way we wittily
act in our world. The individuals working in the subject of Artificial
Intelligence are aware of this weird and wonderful contradiction of
the Cartesian cloven world. They know that is easier to develop a computer
processing system that can easily substitute for engineers, lawyers,
and physicians, but it is an impossible task, plainly a Sisyphean effort,
to develop systems able to substitute for draftspersons, cooks, gardeners,
and architects. In other words, since the act of transformation of drawing-stuff
into drawings mirrors the transformation of architectural-stuff into
architecture and both are analogous to the transformation of foodstuff
into food, they can be considered as events based on the non-rational
sensorial procedures ruling the human orders of res extensa.
The uneasy cloven arrangement governing
the correlation between res cogitans and res extensa was the supporting
subject of a reoccurring debate taking place between Professore Carlo
Scarpa and the court of his assistants at a table of the Trattoria del
Gaffaro.(1) This was a restaurant not far away
from the IUAV (istituto universitario architettura venezia) at the Tolentini
in Venice, where, during the days devoted to the review of student work
for Scarpa's design courses, the Professore and his assistants enjoyed
their lunch.(2) During the meal, the never missed
opportunity for a discussion delving into the problems of a view of
architecture as a cloven world bounded by design and construction was
generated by some comment or recollection caused by the tasting or the
making of the dish selected for that day for everybody by the Professore.
The ensuing move was always a reconstruction of an aphorism coined by
the French architect Auguste Perret. (3) Nobody
could ever remember it exactly; it was always necessary to launch a
laborious process of reconstruction of the original lines of the aphorism
by reminiscence and reasoning. The rebuilding of the phrase turned up
something sounding like: "You can become an engineer, but you are
born architect." The main step in the reconstruction was the recalling
that Perreti's aphorism was an acknowledged paraphrase of another well-known
adage coined by Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French Politician. Brillat-Savarin's
adage states: "you can become a cook but you are born a rostissier"
(a chef specialized in roasting meat) and it was published in his collection
of gastronomical ruminations, titled Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,
written at the end of the first quarter of the19th century.(4)
Having reached the restatement of
the two aphorisms, Scarpa's discussion with his assistants lingered
in a distillation of the idea embodied in the aphorisms. The wrapping
up was a condemning of the reliance of cook-engineers on formulas and
recipes belonging to the dry disciplined realm of the res cogitans.
In contrast, rostissier-architects were eulogized because their design-way
of thinking based on the sensuous surrounding of crucial procedures
for recognizing when a piece of meat is properly cooked or a building
has been properly conceived was becoming altogether too rare.
Scarpa's and his cohort's debate
attacks the foundations of an artificially transcendental and an impossible
unbiased objectivity within a construction of a continual teleological
pursuit for subjectivity. They have summoned by their dealing with the
res extensa unto themselves the entire spectrum of personal experiences
of the empirical self based on humor, including the comic ridiculousness
derived from the bathetic collision of high and low registers. During
dessert, a conclusion was reached by stating that architects who cannot
be aware of the sensual and transcendental relationship between gastronomic
provisions and gourmet food consumption cannot value and be aware of
the quintessential sensual and rational correlations which characterizes
the undisciplined discipline of architecture. Non-gourmet architects
would never be sympathetic to the Epicurean and non-Cartesian connection
existing between the arts of living and eating well with the arts of
cooking and building well. Destabilizing the false sublimity of objective
finitude within the framework of a continual teleological quest for
subjective infinity Scarpa and assistants were natural macaronic thinkers
jovially eating maccheroni saltati in padella and mercurially utilizing
the tripartite nature of the macaronic art to develop a palatable theory
of architecture. They were practicing a labor of macaronic ostention
implying what they meant by ''x'' by saying "x'' when pointing
to 'n' ingredients, and "not x" when pointing to 'm' ingredients.(5)
Presupposing a simultaneous and
ostensive comprehension of three ingredients: Virgilian Latin, Italian
cultivated literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
Lower-Po Valley dialect of everyday life, macaronic ostention was and
is an intellectual practice creating an extraordinary way of thinking.(6)
Scarpa and his assistants playing between Italian, Venetian dialect,
and architectural theory were following it not only as a technique for
a pleasant conversation, but also as a way of reflecting on the makeup
of architecture since the macaronic thinker's task is a vigilant identification
and extirpation of fraud into the bowels of thought.
Dismissal of food as a proper subject
for architectural theory is well rooted in the history of thought. Ben
Jonson, a play writer who earnestly disliked architects, used the power
of this analogy, in one of his Masques, to craftily criticize passionate
belief in the cultural predominance of architects of one of England's
first great architects Inigo Jones1573-1652. In the Masques (1624) Jonson
satirically describes a master-builder as a preposterous master-cook.(7)
Food, food preparation, and the desire that drives them have been thought
to be too caught up in the low corporality to be of any intellectual
interest. Locating taste, touch and smell below sight and hearing is
part of a pattern of dichotomies that includes the ruling of mind over
body; of reason over sense; of man over beast and culture over nature.
It also lines up with another pair of concepts the authority of male
over female and with 'masculine' persona over the 'feminine'.
The problem with this denigration
of the physical is not simply that the fundamental relationship bonding
food and eating with architecture and living fail to get the attention
that it deserves; rather it is that architecture itself goes astray.
Detached from their bodies, many theoreticians of architecture have
become a class of remote thinkers who can only speak to each other,
preoccupied with extraordinary problems that have no relevance to the
infraordinary of life. By contrast, stomach-affirming architects pay
more attention to ordinary experiences and seek to articulate built
environments devoted to artful living. Stomachs based designs do not
waste time with universals. They begin with inherited cultural wisdom
that they seek to further. Bodies and stomachs immerse us in the world,
engage us in all sorts of interactions, and blur rigid boundaries between
our surroundings and ourselves.
To further understand the nature
of macaronic thinking in architecture, a crucial corollary to append
to the fundamental analogy between cooking and designing elaborated
by Scarpa and his entourage is that, in traveling to see architecture
in other places outside of their own region, architects cannot visit
buildings without tasting local dishes and wines. If Kenneth Frampton
is correct, in advocating critical regionalism in architecture, a supreme
circumstance for architects to develop such intelligence is to understand
fully the relationship between regional foods and regional buildings.
Eating a hamburger in front of Leon Battista Alberti's Sant Andrea in
Mantua precludes the grow this quintessential intelligence. They are
experiencing the wrong synesthesia.(8) In front
of such an architecturally rich edifice, architects or future architects
who would like to increase their appreciation of the power of res extensa
in architecture should have a dish of homemade tagliatelle al sugo.(9)
Having had such a delectable dish, only then can they fully appreciate
the concinnitas controlling Alberti's masterpiece, because now they
finally have their "eyes in the belly," the proper eyes to
understand the makeup of res extensa.(10)
The notion of concinnitas is one
of the most powerful concepts elaborated by Alberti in his treatise
on the art of cooking -sorry -building. Concinnitas is a powerful tool
that architects have for bringing the sensual power of the res estensa
within the re aedificatoria. Concinnitas usually has been limited to
the realm of res cogitans, in particular by some scholars' they cannot
help it: euphemistically speaking, they probably live in a country where
the local cuisine is not very savory. These researchers have not yet
discovered that Alberti, in transferring the concept of concinnitas
to architecture, has carried on with it the ontological essence of its
Latin etymological origin. Concinnitas is a quality embodied in the
harmony of taste that results in a properly cooked dish in which the
different components are carefully calibrated.(11)
In his treatise, in defying the power of this architectural quality,
Alberti states that concinnitas is ì vim et quasi succumî
(energy and roughly a sauce). Concinnitas is the sauce in the tagliatelle
al sugo. Plain cooked pasta is in itself a meaningless gluey construct;
it always needs a good sauce (succum) to put on the force necessary
to enter the realm of the sensuous where architecture and cuisine are
at their best.
When in Venice, a traveling architect
should not fail to visit Scarpa's Olivetti Store, in Saint Mark's Square,
and he or she should not miss the occasion of tasting the riso col nero
de sepa (a rice dish where the sauce is prepared with squid ink) resulting
from the combination of sepe in tecia (sauté squids) with risotto
alla parmigiana. The critical synesthetic imagination, the magic beyond
the harmonic resolution of adding the squid ink to the rice, is the
same by which Scarpa selected to replace the little stones cast in a
mortar paste of the classical Venetian terrazzo floor of the shop with
monochromatic murrine. Murrine are sliced pieces of candle-layered Murano-glass
used to make the internal ornamentation of millefiori glass-paperweights.
Culinary and architectural materialities
are not (and were never) sub-disciplines. Architects' and cooks' critical
concerns aim at the concinnitas of matter(s), i.e., they focus on material
substances or material beings and their transformations and transubstantiations.
In cooking and designing, vital differences exist between what food
and buildings are in themselves (their substance) and the perceptible
qualities or characteristics (their accidents). The food and building
substances underlie all their visible, tangible, measurable qualities.
However these substances are in themselves not evident, materially quantifiable,
or measurable because they have no extension in space. The appearances
of the cuisine and architecture include all those outward characteristics
that can be perceived by the senses of sight, taste, touch, smell and
hearing. They are referred to as "accidents," not to be confused
with the common meaning of that word. For Aristotle things naturally
fall into ten categories. They are one Substance, and nine Accidents:
Quantity, Quality, Relation, Action, Passion, Time, Place, Disposition
(the arrangement of parts), and Habituation. Architects and cooks through
devising construction and cookery make something out of unrelated ingredients.
In other words, they are capable of converting what already exists into
something that it was not before. They perform a metabolic transubstantiation:
foodstuffs and building materials are metabolized into the substances
of cuisine and architecture and the "accidents" of the materials
and stuff of construction and cooking transmogrify by formal and sensuous
blends.(12) On the one hand, three basic types
of accidental rules control these transmogrifications. They are alteration
(change with respect to quality), augmentation and diminution (change
with respect to quantity), and motion (change with respect to place).
All changes with respect to other categories can be traced back to these
three rules. On the other hand, four causes--Material, Formal, Efficient,
and Finaló direct the transmutations. The Material Cause determines
the form of the substance incorporated in the building or in the dish,
i.e., clay or semolina dough determine the form of a brick building
or pasta dish. The Formal Cause, according to which the building and
dish are made, is the perceived idea generated by the cook and the architect
as intrinsic, determining cause, embodied in the matter. The Efficient
Causes are the agents, i.e., the builders or the chief staff. The Final
Cause is that for the sake of which (as, the desire to satisfy a patron,
to become famous and rich etc.) the building and dish are made.
The union of dream and solid stuff
in tectonic events rises to an expression of pleasure, a subjective
presence rather than an objective procedure with which both user and
architect must be engaged. The details and the fabricated devices become
playful demonstrations of cosmologically constructed events in an edifice.
Rejecting the pseudo-completeness and cacothecnics of many contemporary
design techniques that cannot perform the fundamental act of establishing
the indispensable cosmological relationship between material order and
cultural order, macaronic procedures are the essential verve to make
these inaugurations successful. This macaronic vision is launched by
the intuition of sensations combined with the predilections embodied
in our cooking up of the world. Architectural and culinary thinking
makes macaronic thinking alive by shaping and regulating conceptual
development by considering the necessary and positive interchanges that
take place between impressions of subjective and objective qualities.
The functioning of an architectural mind can and must be conceived in
bodily terms analogously related to those of proper thought about cooking.
The macaronic interchange between the impressions of body behaviors
together with the sensuous nature of subjective qualities and the measure
of objective qualities such as size, shape, temperature and weight is
essential for any ending artifact to be successful in terms of a plurality
of approaches which challenges authoritative categories.
To end this meditation, I should
recall an epigram by Francois La Rochefoucauld: "to eat is a necessity,
but to eat intelligently is an art." (13)
To it, I would add a remark put forward by Filarete in his treatise,
an architectural storytelling that begins with a discussion around a
dinner table: "it is obligation of man to eat and to build."(14)
Remembering how Claude Levi-Strauss
used cooking as a metaphor for the way the 'raw' images of nature are
'cooked' in culture so that they may be used as part of a symbolic system
I've here made a biscuit (cooked twice) using two aphorisms. Consequently,
to build and to cook are a necessity but to build and to cook intelligently
is the chief obligation of architecture and cuisine.
1. Carlo Scarpa (1906-1975), a
Venetian architect, was a controversial master of modern architectural
design. His departure from traditional modern design is evident in the
idiosyncratic yet powerful presence of his architectural works. He is
perhaps best known for his works such as the Brion Cemetery in Vito
d'Altivole and the Museum of Castelvecchio and the Banca Popolare in
Verona which illustrate his unique ability to weave built fragments
of the past, into contemporary expressions of architecture and design.
He taught architectural design studios at IUAV, of which he was also
the director for several years.
2. I was at the lowest level in
Scarpa's cohort; I was merely an addetto alle esercitazioni and the
delightfully educative lunches at the Gaffaro took up a substantial
amount of my meager salary.
3. A French engineer, Auguste Perret,
1874-1954, was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete, notably
in the church of Le Raincy, near Paris (1922-23). Perret ran a very
innovative contracting and engineering practice, specializing in reinforced
concrete, with a belief in the permanent value of "classical"
principles. He built warehouses, factories, residences, and theaters.
He saw gothic cathedrals as models of rational building from his study
of Notre Dame, recorded in a surviving notebook, which is exclusively
concerned with the visual effects of construction details and stained
glass.
4. An influential French politician
and a highly refined dilettante of the gastronomical art, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin,
(1755-1826), held office under the Directory and the Consulate. Brillat-Savarin
wrote works on political economy, law, and dueling, but his acknowledged
masterpiece is Physiologie du goût, ou Mèditation de gastronomie
transcendante, ouvrage thèorique, historique et l'ordre du jour,
8 vol. ("The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent
Gastronomy, a Work Theoretical, Historical, and Today") (1825).
The book is less an exposition on cuisine or culinary arts and more
a witty compendium of considerations, precepts, anecdotes and observations
of every kind that might enhance the pleasures of the table--with only
an occasional recipe being offered. The book went through several editions
during the 19th century and it was translated into English in 1884.
5. Ostention is one of four categories
of physical labor necessary to produce signification, namely: recognition,
ostention, replica and invention. Umberto Eco (1976).
6. Macaronic derives from the Italian
word macaroni (from which macaroon also comes). According to Teofilo
Folengo: "This poetic art is called 'macaronic' from macarones,
which are a certain dough made up of flour, cheese, and butter, thick,
coarse, and rustic. Thus, macaronic poems must have nothing but fat,
coarseness, and gross words in them. The macaronic in its purest form
is a northern Italian creation with its precedents in medieval burlesque,
goliardic verse and sacred parodies, and with extra-Italian continuators
and resonance in various European countries and in Rabelais. Its origins
lie in the late fifteenth-century Benedictine athenaeum of Padua and
specifically in the linguistic experimentalism of Tifi Odasi, whose
poem Macaronea defines the genre. Its fame was assured in the first
half of the following century by Odasi's Mantuan pupil and emulator
Teofilo Folengo (pseudonym Merlin Cocai). Folengoís Baldus (four
editions: 1517, 1521, 1534-35, and posthumously in 1552) is a mock-epic
poem of giants and farfetched chivalric adventures including the discovery
of the mouth of the Nile and a final descent into Hell. Baldus is the
genre's acknowledged masterpiece, and it enjoyed a notable popularity
in the 1500s with over a dozen editions and reprints. It was not without
influence on Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which it is cited
more than once. Such was the perceived connection that the first French
translation of Folengo's works in 1606 bore the title Histoire maccaronique
de Merlin Coccaie, prototype de Rablais. See: C. Cordiè (ed.),
Opere di Teofilo Folengo (Milan: Ricciardi, 1977), xii-xiii; M. Tetel,
Rabelais and Folengo, Comparative Literature, 15 (Fall 1963): 357-64;
I. Paccagnella, Plurilinguismo letterario: lingue, dialetti, linguaggi,
in Letteratura italiana. II. Produzione e consumo,. Roberto Antonelli
ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 103-67 (141).
7. Gordon, D. J. ‘Poet and
Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson
and Inigo Jones’, in Stephen Orgel, ed., The Renaissance Imagination.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975: 77-101.
8. A medical expression, synesthesia
(Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) labels involuntary
physical experiences of cross-modal associations. There are synesthetic
combinations involving combination among vision, hearing taste, touch,
scent, and other modalities. Theoretically, synesthesia could occur
from associations between any two or any number of the physical senses.
The first references to synesthesia can be found in manuscripts of Pythagoras
(6th century B.C.) and Aristotle (4th century B.C.). Surprisingly, medicine
has known synesthesia for more than 300 years. In the late 1800ís,
synesthesia generated a wave of scientific and popular interest especially
in art circles. Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, a synesthete, featured
an organ that produced multihued light beams in his symphony Prometheus,
the Poem of Fire. To many fin de siëcle Romantics, synesthetes
appeared to be humanity's spiritual vanguard, closer to God than the
sense-segregated masses. "Such highly sensitive people," wrote
Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract artist, "are like good,
much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibers at
every touch of the bow." The fascination soon peaked, however,
stymied by synesthesia's sheer impenetrability. The problem: No one
could crawl into synesthetes' heads to understand or share their unique
perceptions. After interest peaked between 1860 and 1930, it was forgotten,
remaining unexplained not for lack of trying, but simply because psychology
and neurology were premature sciences. Synesthetes such as Vladimir
Nabokov, Olivier Messiaen, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky, Nikolai
Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Scriabin are famous because
of their art rather than their synesthesia. Lack of obvious agreement
among synesthetes compounds the apparent difficulty. In fact, this rather
glaring problem - that two individuals with the same sensory pairings
do not report identical, or even similar, synesthetic responses - has
sometimes been taken as "proof" that synesthesia is not "real."
Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, disagreed on the color of
given notes and musical keys. "Researchers" from earlier centuries
did little more than make lists of stimuli and synesthetic responses,
followed by dismay that a pattern of correspondence was not obvious.
Similarity was not apparent because they were looking at the terminal
stage of a conscious perception itself, instead of some earlier process
that led to that perception.
9. Tagliatelle
are homemade noodles and in Mantova, they are called fojade (predictably
I must give the recipe in Italian). FOJADE
ALLA MANTOVANA: 400
gr di farina; 4 uova; 300 gr di carne macinata di vitello; 50 gr di
pancetta in una sola fetta; 50 gr di burro; 1 carota; 1 costa di sedano;
1 cipolla; 1/2 bicchiere di vino bianco secco; 500 gr di pomodori pelati;
50 gr di funghi secchi; un pizzico di cannella in polvere; 2 foglie
di alloro; 50 gr di grana grattugiato; sale, pepe.--* Versa la farina
a fontana sulla spianatoia, sguscia al centro le uova e impasta con
cura, fino ad ottenere una pasta liscia e omogenea; forma una palla,
coprila con un telo e lasciala riposare mezz'ora. Dopodichë tendila
in una sfoglia sottile , lasciala asciugare , arrotola e tagliala in
modo da ricavare delle tagliatelle di 1/2 cm circa di larghezza. Srotola
le spirali così ottenute, sistema le tagliatelle su un telo infrinato,
allargandole bene, e falle asciugare leggermente. Lascia ammorbidire
i funghi in acqua tiepida, poi strizzali e tagliali a pezzetti. Fai
soffriggere in una casseruola il sedano, la carota e la cipolla tritati
con 40 gr di burro e la pancetta a dadini; unisci i funghi , la carne
macinata, la cannella e l'alloro e bagna col vino bianco; mescola e
lascia cuocere a fuoco basso per 10 minuti. Aggiungi i pomodori pelati
sgocciolati e spezzetati, sala, pepa e lascia cuocere altri 20 minuti
, mescolando; al termine elimina l'alloro. Lessa le tagliatelle in abbondante
acqua bollente e salata, scolale al dente e cospargile col grana grattugiato
e il rimanente burro. Condisci col ragû e servi subito.
10. An Old Italian adage states:
first, you devour the food with the eyes and then with the belly, and
mothers forewarn children before a Festive meal not to have eyes bigger
than their tummy.
11. Monteil, Pierre. Beau et laid
en latin, Ètude de vocabulaire. Paris, C.Klincksieck, 1964.
12. Transubstantiation, known as
the doctrine of the real presence, is a Christian theological term indicating
the process whereby the bread and wine offered up at the communion service
has its substance changed to that of the body, blood, soul and divinity
of Jesus Christ while its accidents appear to be that of bread and wine.
What looks like, tastes like, etc., bread and wine is actually another
substance altogether. How this happens is a central mystery of the Catholic
faith. However, the term is defined by the Scholastic Fathers using
Aristotelian categories and I am using it in this connection rather
than the theological understanding.
13. From the "Maxims"
of La Rochefoucauld, Penguin Books, Translated by Leonard Tancock (The
original Maximes first appeared in 1665).
14. Filarete, Trattato dí
Architettura.
©
