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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
8. Erwin Panofsky (1991), re- vealed the importance of this profoundly symbolic gesture to place the infinite in the center of the drawing board as a glorious manifestation of the liberation from the theocentric world view.
9. According to Whitehead (1911, 119), “the spire of a Gothic cathedral and the im- portance of the unbounded straight line in modern Ge- ometry are both emblematic of the transformation of the modern world.”
10. Cf. Savignat 1981: 25, Carpo, 2011: 31, 75.
11. Cf. Voyatzaki, 2018, p. 9.
12. Lars Spuybroek (2011) in the ‘The Sympathy of Things’ presents the build- ing process of Gothic as a permanent condition of in-between, metaxy, using the term slider to express the continuous shift of prior- ities between construction, meaning, and continuity.
13. Mario Carpo, in his book ‘The Alphabet and the Al- gorithm,’ distinguishes the pre-Albertian times of ar- chitecture as autographic in lack of drawings to delegate to the builder the idea of the architect. Alberti sustained the distinction between the thinker and the maker, attrib- uting to architecture its allo- graphic nature.
eye becomes the most vital human organ to serve the search for truth (Savignat,1981) as knowledge is no longer theocentrically de- fined but becomes the outcome of the human intellect observing and revealing the requested truth.
The Renaissance human is conceived not only as intelligent but also as sublime. Its proportions reflect the natural beauty and harmony which design has to reflect in architectural forms. To substantiate this social project design needs a professional legitimization originated by the human intellect. This explains the division between contem- plating an idea and its making, that attributed superiority to the in- tellectual tectonics of human-centered Architecture. Design became the hallmark of a professional practice that distinguished intellectual from manual work, attributing to design a political and an ethical di- mension. Since then, Architecture’s social project has been to mani- fest the sovereignty of the human spirit and culture onto the natural world and to create forms and spaces that reflect this conception and directly and profoundly affect the habits, the aesthetics and the intel- lect of those experiencing them.
The new understanding of the human is not only diffused in the de- sign outcomes. The design tools and the design processes also have strong symbolism. The perspective, as a representation technique, is not only a consistent and accurate representation of what the ob- serving eye can see, but it also incorporates in its construction the visible presence of the vanishing point as the meeting point of the parallel lines, the infinite, what for Christianity was defined as the di- vine 8 Renaissance Architecture takes the infinite from the sky, that is to say from the end of the Gothic spire and iconoclastically locates it into the perspective drawing as a vanishing point 9 The accurate depiction of form and enclosure prior to construction is an achieve- ment of human-centered architecture that marks its development till present times. If what has to be built must be drawn in advance, then what can be built is what can be drawn 10 That means that the drawing with its techniques, tools, and means defines the context in which the architects are constrained to think and conceive form.
As for the design process, the architect-designer elaborates form and space, refined to the last detail, and employs the materials that can best fulfill the project, deterministically and linearly, following a top- down process. On the contrary, the builder works with the material idiosyncrasies of the building 11 negotiates with it, acts on it, teases it, fights with it, reconciles and attunes with it to extract the expected form always moving in between forces, tensions, perfection, imper- fections, and transitions in a bottom-up process 12 In the former case, the authorship is assigned to the one who generates the idea and the formal qualities and meanings of the outcome 13 , while in the latter to the one who masters the techniques and harnesses the materiality of the building.
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Architectural Interregnums
Constantin-Viktor Spiridonidis, Maria Vogiatzaki