Arts & Culture Magazine - January/February 2008 - (Page 68) In the modern era the common interest of the two disciplines regarding poetic space can be traced to the Italian Renaissance architect, sculptor and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). His greatest feat was the construction of the dome of Florence Cathedral. This Florentine polymath was the first architect to work out a method of proportion of structures based on math and perspective, arrived at through his studies of the mathematical principles of ancient Roman architecture, whose forms he revived and made central to the canons of Western architectural style. Modern architecture and sculpture up until the twentieth century begin in Brunelleschi’s grasp of the underlying logic of Roman architecture. His realization developed into four major subsets: linear perspective, which incorporates both converging lines and diminishing size; the separation of planes; atmospheric perspective; and classic color theory. The specific event demonstrating Brunelleschi’s understanding of architectural space is well-recorded. Around 1450 he set up a demonstration of perspective just inside the main doorway of Florence Cathedral. His amazed fellow citizens were invited to look out across the way and compare their view of the Baptistery with the peephole view of his picture drawn with converging parallel lines. His invention of a single point perspective, in which all parallel lines meet at the vanishing point on an imaginary horizon, has been the fundamental convention for conceptualizing architecture and some genres of sculpture ever since. In the Critique of Pure Reason the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) describes space as an “a priori intuition and with another a priori intuition, time, sense experience is comprehensible.” The foundation of this insight, like all conceptions of space before modern physics, has its origin in theology. Our conception of space is related to our conception of a supreme being or beings. Even unbelievers mature with subliminal presumptions and conclusions of the society’s relationship of where the deity is in relation to self. Of course, climate and geology play a role in our conception of space, but before the modern era, the principle formation of spatial aesthetics was based in an individual’s religious beliefs. In the Judeo-Christian world Yahweh/ Jehovah is outside us. The originator of Bud68 : : arts and culture magazine dhism, Siddharta Guatama, taught that enlightenment came from within, in the realization of the self as one with nature. This polarity of man’s relationship to enlightenment has had profound consequences on architecture and sculpture. In Judeo-Christianity, because the deity is above (outside), our conception of space (nature) is outside us. Architecture in the West up until the twentieth century reflected this fundamental relationship of man to the divine. Western architecture emphasizes containment of space with fixed walls keeping nature outside. Buddhist architecture of Japan makes use of sliding walls; in this way, nature is not outside the building, but integrated within it. Often a Japanese garden will actually continue into the building as one continuous feature of the building’s design. In this sense, Brunelleschi’s perspective was an outgrowth of his spiritual beliefs, as the Golden Pavilion of Rokuonji outside Kyoto, Japan was a realization of Buddhist theology in which the distinction between interior and exterior space dissolves. Western painting after the Renaissance had the containment of the frame and the distancing of perspective. Buddhist scroll painting opens like a roll of film achieving a stereoscopic effect as each episode opens with panoply of incident, encircling the viewer with nature. The concomitant of this distinction in sculpture is that in Catholicism the psychological emphasis of religious art is awe; in Buddhism, meditation. In Blair Kamin’s Why Architecture Matters, the author recalls a memo he sent to the then-editor of the Chicago Tribune concerning the paper’s contemplation of dropping its architecture critic. And what adds to the enjoyment of this inescapable art is good sculpture, when the aesthetic concerns of the architect are echoed in the sculpture. Sited to serve as a visual synopsis of the building, this kind of sculpture is ancient in its intention, but much contemporary architectonic sculpture has broken away from this context. Still using architecture as a reference, several outstanding contemporary sculptors have divorced themselves from the traditional role of such art to produce sculpture that references architecture but is not an appendage to architecture. Three come to mind: Michael Heizer (1944- ), Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) and Rachel Whiteread (1963- ). “You can ignore a piece of sculpture or a painting hung on the walls of the Art Institute,” wrote Kamin, “but architecture is the inescapable art.” No question.
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