The Architect's Brain

Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture

Harry Francis Mallgrave

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118078679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Architect's Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture is the first book to consider the relationship between the neurosciences and architecture, offering a compelling and provocative study in the field of architectural theory.

• Explores various moments of architectural thought over the last 500 years as a cognitive manifestation of philosophical, psychological, and physiological theory
• Looks at architectural thought through the lens of the remarkable insights of contemporary neuroscience, particularly as they have advanced within the last decade
• Demonstrates the neurological justification for some very timeless architectural ideas, from the multisensory nature of the architectural experience to the essential relationship of ambiguity and metaphor to creative thinking

Part I

Historical Essays

1

The Humanist Brain

Alberti, Vitruvius, and Leonardo

first we observed that the building is a form of body (Leon Battista Alberti)¹

In most architectural accounts, Renaissance humanism refers to the period in Italy that commences in the early fifteenth century and coincides with a new interest in classical theory. The ethos of humanism was not one-dimensional, for it infused all of the arts and humanities, including philosophy, rhetoric, poetry, art, architecture, law, and grammar. Generally, it entailed a new appreciation of classical Greek writers (now being diffused by the printing press), whose ideas had to be squared with late-antique and medieval sources as well as with the teachings of Christianity. In this respect, Leon Battista Alberti epitomized the humanist brain.

In the case of architecture, humanism often had a slightly different connotation. It has not only entailed the belief that the human being, by virtue of his divine creation, occupies a privileged place within the cosmos but also the fact that the human body holds a special fascination for architects. I am referring to the double analogy that views architecture as a metaphor for the human body, and the human body as a metaphor for architectural design. In this sense too Alberti was a humanist, for when his architectural treatise of the early-1450s appeared in print in 1486 (alongside the “ten books” of the classical Roman architect Vitruvius) he promulgated a way of thinking about architecture that would largely hold fast until the eighteenth century. In this way Alberti became perhaps the first architect in history to construct a unified body of theory – what historians have referred to as the theoretical basis for a new style.

Born a “natural,” or illegitimate, child into a wealthy family of merchants and bankers, Alberti came to this task with mixed blessings.² If his illegitimacy deprived him of legal inheritance, his family purse at least insured him of a good classical education at the University of Bologna, where he took his doctorate in canon law in 1428. By this date he had already begun to disclose his literary talent (his writings on a variety of subjects are prodigious) and interest in mathematics. Like many well educated men of the time, he gravitated into the service of the church, first as a secretary to the cardinal of Bologna. Four years after taking his doctorate, in 1432, he was living in Rome as a secretary to the head of the papal chancery, and therefore working indirectly for the pope. In 1434, however, civil unrest forced the papal court to leave Rome for Florence. It was here, where a new approach to architecture, sculpture, and painting was already taking hold, that Alberti formed a friendship with Filippo Brunelleschi and Donato Donatello, both of whom he may have met a few years earlier. Their shared interests were added to when Alberti began to paint, and within a year he wrote the first of his three artistic treatises, De pictura (On Painting, 1435). The date of his second artistic tract – De statua (On Sculpture) – is unknown, although it was quite possibly composed in the late 1440s. Meanwhile, around 1438, Alberti journeyed with the papal court to Ferrara, where he cultivated his interest in architecture. This pursuit intensified when Alberti and the papacy returned to Rome in 1443 and the scholar, once again following in the footsteps of Brunelleschi, began his investigation of Roman classical monuments. Out of these labors, and with his growing assurance, came his third and final artistic treatise, De re aedificatoria (On Building), which he presented in 10 books to Pope Nicholas V in 1452. With this task completed, Alberti devoted the next 20 years of his life to the practice of architecture, for which his fame surpassed that of his many literary endeavors.

De Pictura and De Statura

Although his treatise on architecture remains his largest theoretical undertaking, the two smaller studies on painting and sculpture already tell us much about his artistic outlook. De picitura is, first of all, a highly original work attempting to delineate the principles of linear perspective. Its aim is to elevate painting above the status of artisanship, and it provides several useful pointers about how painters can curry the favor of generous patrons by cultivating good manners and practicing high morals.³ In its dedication, Alberti exalts the inspired work of Renaissance artists by equating their efforts with the “distinguished and remarkable intellects” of classical times.⁴ Chief among them is Brunelleschi, who had recently completed the dome for the Florentine cathedral – that “enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports.”⁵

De pictura has two broad themes. One is Alberti’s attempt to supply this new ‘fine art’ with the theoretical underpinnings of geometry, which for him is not a mathematical issue but rather a divine ideal that brings an imperfect human being into closer harmony with the divinely created order of the universe. Geometry, for Alberti, is the humanization of space, and in fact the treatise opens with his apology for invoking geometry “as the product not of a pure mathematician but only of a painter.”⁶ Alberti also bases the measure of his perspectival geometry on three braccia – “the average height of a man’s body.”⁷ Thus the rules of perspective are corporeally embodied in human form.

The second theme is the concept of historia, the elaboration of which encompasses nearly half of the book. It does not mean “story,” as Alberti makes clear, and he devotes page after page to discussing how to achieve “this most important part of the painter’s work.”⁸ Collectively, this vital artistic quality resides in achieving grace and beauty in a work by displaying people with beautifully proportioned faces and members, possessing free will and appropriate movements, depicting a variety of bodies (young and old, male and female), abundant color, dignity and modesty, decorum, drama, monumentality, but above all, the animate display of emotion. Historia commands the artist, through his creativity, to produce a work “so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion.”⁹ It has therefore been said that just as Alberti’s theory of perspective provides a visual link between the painter’s eye and the objects within the spatial field, his notion of historia supplies an emotional link that should move the spectator to experience empathy. Quite naturally, he believed it to be an attribute favored in antiquity, and thus it is entirely logical for Alberti to open the third book of his treatise by encouraging painters to become familiar with classical poetry and rhetoric.¹⁰

This humanist slant is also very apparent in his tract on sculpture, in which he provides an individuated proportional system based on the variable measure of six human feet (therefore fixed according to the person and not to a standard, differing for persons of different height or foot length). Vitruvius, of course, had opened the third book of De architectura with a similar proportional system, albeit with some notable differences.¹¹ Vitruvius’s system of proportion, closely related to his notion of symmetry (symmetria), was based on a series of fractional relations of the body parts to the whole (the head, for instance is 1/10 of the body’s height), whereas Alberti divides each foot into ten inches and each inch into ten minutes in order to give very precise measurements. Vitruvius had also presented his proportional system just before he described the human figure lying on his back with outstretched arms and feet, contained within a circle and square. Alberti, however, presents his system without metaphysical fanfare. His numbers are purely measurements, even if also derived from the human body.

De Re Aedificatoria

But this does not mean that Alberti did not have his rationale. We can see this by turning to his much lengthier treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, where his artistic ideas find their logical conclusion. And if there is one compelling metaphor that appears consistently throughout the exposition of his theory it is the idea of corporeality – architecture as the re-creation of the human body. “The Great experts of antiquity,” as he informs us in one passage, “have instructed us that a building is very like an animal, and that Nature must be imitated when we delineate it.”¹² Again,

the physicians have noticed that Nature was so thorough in forming the bodies of animals, that she left no bone separate or disjointed from the rest. Likewise, we should link the bones and bind them fast with muscles and ligaments, so that their frame and structure is complete and rigid enough to ensure that its fabric will still stand on its own, even if all else is removed.¹³

This corporeal metaphor determines terminology. Columns and fortified areas of the wall are the “bones” of a building, the infill walls and paneling serve as muscles and ligaments, the finish of a building is its skin.¹⁴ The roof, too, has its “bones, muscles, infill paneling, skin, and crust,” while walls should not be too thick, “for who would not criticize a body for having excessively swollen limbs?”¹⁵ Every house, moreover, should have its large and welcoming “bosom.”¹⁶

Architecture for Alberti, more specifically, is not to be formed in the manner of just any human body, and thus his standard, or canon, demands a cosmological foundation. His opus on theory begins with the definition of a building as a “form of body,” which “consists of lineaments and matter, the one the product of thought, the other of Nature.”¹⁷ In this duality, we have the raw materials of nature at human disposal, upon which the architect impresses a design, like the divine creator, through the power of reason. Book One is entirely given over to the issue of lineaments, which Alberti defines as “the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.”¹⁸ Lineaments, as his larger text makes clear, are more than simple lines or the composition of a building’s outline; they form the building’s rational organization that is open to analysis through the six building categories of locality, area, compartition, walls, roofs, and openings. Area, the immediate site of a building, is where Alberti brings in his discussion of geometry, but compartition seems to be the essential term for him. It calls upon the architect’s greatest skill and experience for it “divides up the whole building into the parts by which it is articulated, and integrates its every part by composing all the lines and angles into a single, harmonious work that respects utility, dignity, and delight.”¹⁹ It also encompasses the element of decorum in mandating that nothing about a building should be inappropriate or unseemly.²⁰

Little that we have discussed so far departs from classical Vitruvian theory, which too is founded upon the belief that every composition of the architect should have “an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of a well-formed human being.”²¹ Neither is it especially at odds with the Stoic inclinations of Vitruvius, which allowed him to emphasize, above all, the primacy of sensory experience.

But Alberti will not be content with this resolution because he believed that Vitruvius never clearly disclosed how one could achieve this higher harmony of parts. Therefore he introduces a second duality that mirrors his earlier one of lineaments and nature, which is the dialectic of “beauty” and “ornament.” He introduces both concepts in Book Six, a point at which he resumes his treatise after a lapse of some time, in part, as Alberti himself acknowledges, because of the extreme difficulty of the task. In truth, he probably used his literary hiatus to consult a number of other classical sources.

We can surmise this, at least, when he proffers his first tentative definitions of his new duality: “Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.”²² This “great and holy matter” is rarely found in nature, which Alberti reports (with a typical corporeal metaphor) by citing a dialogue from Cicero’s De natura deorum in which a protagonist notes that on a recent visit to Athens he rarely found one beautiful youth in each platoon of military trainees.²³ Alberti seeks to repair this general deficiency of nature by offering the idea of ornament, which, in a cosmetic sense, can mask the defect of someone’s body, or groom or polish another part to make it more attractive. Thus, beauty is an “inherent property” of something, while ornament is “a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty.”²⁴

But this tentative definition, as the reader soon learns, is entirely misleading. Ornament, in particular, is for Alberti a much broader concept. It, along with beauty, can be found in the nature of the material, in its intellectual fashioning, and in the craftsmanship of the human hand.²⁵ The notion of ornament can also be applied to many other things. For example, the main ornament of a wall or roof, especially where vaulted, is its revetment.²⁶ The principal ornament of architecture is the column with its grace and conference of dignity.²⁷ The chief ornament of a library is its collection of rare books (especially if ancient sources).²⁸ And the ornaments of a city can reside in its situation, layout, composition, roads, squares, parks, and individual buildings.²⁹ A statue, he notes on one occasion, is the greatest ornament of all.³⁰ If there would be one way to summarize Alberti’s view of ornament, then, one might say that ornament is the material of building or design, either in its natural condition or with human labor applied to it – that is, it is material intrinsically attractive or impressed in some way by the human hand and brain. Such a definition is vaguely similar to but not coincidental with Vitruvius’s conception of ornament as a formal vocabulary, a system of ornamenta or rules of detailing applied to architectural membra (members).³¹

Nevertheless, this is not all that Alberti has to say on the subject, for three books later (in Book Nine) he returns to this “extremely difficult inquiry,” now armed with new terminology. Once again a corporeal analogy precedes his discussion, as Alberti considers the relative merits of slender versus “more buxom” female beauty. His objective is not to answer this human question, which smacks too much of subjectivity, but rather to provide beauty with a more solid or absolute underpinning. Hence beauty cannot be founded “on fancy,” but only in “the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I Historical Essays
• Part II Neuroscience and Architecture
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index