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Q 2008 Christopher Hight
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British Library Cataloguing i n Publication Data
A catalogue r ecord for this book is available from the British Libr ary
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hight. Christopher.
Architectural principl es in tbe age of cybernetics I Christopher Hight.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780 -415-38481 -0 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-415-38482-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I . Architectur e-- Philosophy. 2. Humanism in architecture. 3. Ratio and proportion. l. I ~ tie.
NA2500.H536 2007
720.1 --dc22
2007012695
IS 13 N 0-203-08656-2 Master e-book IS 13 N
978-0-415-3848 1-0 (bhkl
978-0-415-38482-7 (pbkl
978-0-203-08656-8 (ebk)
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Cambridge University Press: 9.7, !).8
Daniel Lee: 1.5
Diller Scofidio +Renfro: 3.2, 3.3
FLC/ADGAP, Paris and DACS London 2006: 1.2, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 5.3, 6. 1, 7. 1, 9. 1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4, 9.5,
9.6, 9.9
Greg Lynn FORM: 3. 1. 5.4, 5.5, 5.6
MIT Press: 5.2
NASA Goddard Space l i g h ~ Center: 1. 1
The Getty Center of tbe History of Art and tbe Humanities: 2.1
UNStudio: 6.2, 6.3, 6.4
USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office: 10.1
TEXT CREDITS
Epigraph to Chapter 1 is from "Pierre Boulez: Passing Thr ough the Screen: Michel Foucault, Aesthet.-
ics, Method and Epistemology, New York: Tho New Press, 1998. Courtesy of The New Press.
vi
1.1 Satellite photo of Manhattan, New York, September 12, 2001. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Contents
vii CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
01 Chapter !. INTRODUCTION
03 Prologue: Infernal Returns
05 The Body of Architectural Knowledge
12 The Structure of the Book
15 Chapter 2. THE PHENOMENAL
ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE
18 Primal Identification
20 The Home of Man
22 The Decay of Modern Architecture
29 The Pathos of Phenomenology
33 Chapter 3. THE STRUCTURAL
CONTINUITIES OF CLASSICISM
35 ClassiCal Systems of Knowledge and
SubJects
38 Gendered Bodies of Architecture
4 The Hidden Interior of Architecture
44 Moderntty as "The End of the Classical'
48 The Paradoxes of Not-Modern
Architecture
~ 1 Post -Structural Problems
55 Chapter 4. MODULOR RESIDUES OF
HISTORY
~ ~ Recalling the Modular
61 The Residual Historicity of the Modular
62 The Modular as 'One Example'
64 The Modular as Vitruvtus's Heir
67 Unftntshed Business
71 Chapter 5. A MID-CENTURY
RENAISSANCE
73 Witt kower's Renaissance
76 A Paradigm Shift'
77 The Architectural Principles or the
Modular
79 Pomts of Emergence
81 The Rowe Effect
88 Diagrams or Discoursivity
,_ W AS A IIWfl AID filM ll IIIIIIIS AS A IIW'Il: 111 MOIIIA'
100.1111 ll II CO!Iml IS A SCAli fM IIPII IIASIIOIOO If SP&Ct
z .. D IIIII .,,&... 1111 I
l!!lll l I I tt ll Ill I I I I Me.
1.2 Le Corbusier. The Modular, Figure 172, Modular 2. Copyright, FLC/ AOGAP. Paris and
DACS London. 2006. T1115 1s tile last 1111age of the Modulor '" 1 he book On the nght of the
figure a1 e 1he two F1bonacc' sequences. wh1ch Le (l)(bus1er called 'Red' and 'Blue' scales
of measure. w1th a stylized human f1gure 'nsmbedw,thn these meaSln es Tile square on
the farnght suggestsadenvat1on from theGotden Sect,on Below the ma,ndrawng. the
wo scales a' erepeatedasa' ule. wh1ch. as thecapt,onsuggests. became thebas,sfor a
vers1on of the Modulor as at ape measure
architectural ideas of subjectivity. I am, therefore, also concerned with the
spaces and dynamics of projection through which obj ects of knowledge and
concepts are formulated. I hope that this theoretical examination operates
as a partial history of the present, a moment when the very concepts of the
body, order and subj ectivity all promise to be radically transformed by digital
technology, new organizations of power, and when the traditional objects and
ordering of architect ural knowledge seem in crisis or even eclipsed.
My primary site of examination is the sudden, and heretofore
unexplained, re-appearance of the human figure in mid-twentieth-century
archi t ecture and its relationship to recent interest in the body in reference
to issues of post-humanism, digital t echnology, globalization and science.
There are several reasons why I locate my inquiries around this apparent
backwater of modem archi tectural history. First, histories of modern archi-
tecture have overlooked the discourse around the human figure prevalent
between the late 1940s and the early 1960s in many parts of Europe and
America. A few articles exist, but these are often very specific or idiosyncratic;
still others, which often seek to continue this discourse, are theoretically
regressive. Accounts in broader historical texts are absent or cursory. Even Le
C01busier's Modulor, t he most famous representative of this discourse, has
06 INTRODUCTION
epiphenomena produced by feedback loops. codes. and informational errors
(mutations); bodies became performative containers for the transmission
and transformation of this semiotic code across generations.
And so. by 1969. none other than Martin Heidegger felt compelled
to announce the "completion" of the age of humarust metaphysics by the
"new and fundamental science called cybemetics."'
6
He speculated on what
remained for thought when the sciences of the human subject were gov-
erned by informational"function" rather than "ontological meaning." As then
dominant strains of cognitive psychology must have seemed to demonstrate,
philosophy had become information theory. Epistemology and ontology
merged into information.
17
Today's descendants of s uch post-war cybernetics continue to
deterritorialize the body to fashion new assemblages of subjects and tech-
nologies. We can combine genetic material to create "transgenic" creatures
even as we discover that most of the stem-celllines available for use with
the United States are already contaminated with mouse DNA. Scientists are
developing at least two different techniques for growing "cow-free" steaks in
laboratories while performance artist Stelarc and medical researchers attempt
to grow living tissue in the shape of human ears. Artists like Eduardo Kac pro-
duce phosphorescent bunnies as transgenic bio-art. Structural engineers are
seriously proposing that buildings should grow themselves, either formally
via "genetic algorithm" software or even as actual construction. Nanotech
may realize the promise of the Vitruvian body by annealing utility, commod-
ity and delight on the fly.
At the same time, these body technologies have coupled with social
and political frameworks to place representations of subjects via the body
at the center of debate, whether as in the advancement of multi-culturalism,
feminist cyborg theory. green politics or even by the Religious Right. Debates
about genetically modified food. cloning, stem cell research. living wills, and
electronic implants regist er concern over the development of what Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and recently Hardt and Negri (among others). have
diagnosed as the biopolitics of a control society. Rather than operating
through the Hobbsian ideas of a body politic, biopower operates directly
upon a multitude of individual bodies through administrative functions
and technologies, transforming concepts of public and private, interior and
exterior, local and global. Society, it is said of our post-colonial. globalized
condition. is no longer an organic and hierarchical unity of its parts but
rather a network of radically different multi tudes. Giorgio Agamben, echo-
ing Heidegger, has recently argued that we are experiencing a shift wherein
the intimacies of the body and its management have become the site where
our hopes, desires. nightmares and power are negotiated and manifested as
new forms of subjectivity and social order alike.
18
That is to say, our bodies
are part of constructed assemblages, commingling objects with subject ivities
10 INTRODUCTION
I examine these operations in this chapter by examining the "phenomeno-
logical" position and follow on in the next chapter with an analysis of
"post-structuralist" arguments.
PRIMAL IDENTIFICATION
In the late 1970s, a critique of modernism began to emerge that attempted to
produce a theory of architectural design based upon hermeneutics and phe-
nomenology, especially the writings of Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
the later work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, of course, Martin Heidegger.
While never formalized as a "school," the writ ings of Joseph Rykwert, Alberto
Perez-Gomez, J uhani Pallasmaa, David Leather barrow, and Dalibor Vesely,
to name a few, have constructed a rather stable and coherent formation of
thought within contemporary architecture. This architectural version of
hermeneutic phenomenology emerged from institutions like Cranbrook,
Cambridge Universi ty and the University of Pennsylvania, expanding with
s uccessive generations of graduates. Indeed, even while presenting itself as
an a lternative to normative practices of architecture as a service profession,
it has become a prevalent pedagogy within the academy, strongly represented,
for example, in the annual conferences of the American Collegiate Schools
of Architecture. While each aut hor has different emphases, the relationship
between the body and architect ure is a recurrent theme.
I want to exami ne this posi tion through case studies of texts by two
of its most important adherents, Joseph Rykwert and his former student
Alberto Perez-Gomez. First, I will examine Rykwert's career capstone, The
Dancing Column, and his use of historical materia.! to produce a theoretical
claim that the metaphorical proj ection of the body is the origin of architec-
ture, both historically and concept ually. I will then examine the implications
of thi s claim for understandings of modernity, turning to Perez-Gomez's
analysis of the origin of modern architecture in his widely read Architecture
and the Crisis of Modem Science. For both Rykwert and Perez-G6mez, bodily
metaphors serve as the foundation of archit ectural order. Ultimately, theirs
is a polemical project that argues for how the body metaphor operated in
the past in order t o speculate upon how that relati onship might be recovered
in the present. I have selected these two t exts as case studies not simply
because they have been influential but also because they present the most
susta ined argument s in regards to the relationship of architectural history t o
concepts of the body and order. However, the sorts of statements and claims
they present are repeated in many other texts, lectures, and course syllabi.
In his massive text, The Dancing Col umn, Joseph Rykwer t presented
a veritable edifice of archaeological and ethnological evidence of the role of
the body in ancient Greek architecture, which he interprets via hermeneutic
and phenomenological frameworks. Rykwert claimed that the basic post-and-
lintel structural principle of the Greek temple allowed a "primal identification
18 THE PHENOMENAL ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE
(topos) that sets humanity apart, in an architectonically closed and symboli-
cally ordered space distinct from the world of nature.
In these arguments, anthropos and arche are synonymous. Designate
a pile of stone "architecture" and you extend the category of"human" or
"culture" to its creators; withhold this name and you have animals or bar-
barians. '3 Myths of the origin of architecture are filled with references to a
use of the body to measure out the dimensions of a fabled primitive but. If
Freud suggested that we are "prosthetic gods," born too early and unable to
survive without supplement, then architecture serves as the original pros-
thetic. Aristotle argued that the mark of cultu re and humanity's transcendence
over animals was the construction of cities. In all these examples, the "open"
of sensations and instinct of animal intensity are transformed into a closed
world of human representation through the extensive projection of the body.'
4
In other words, the projection of the body in architecture symbolically circum-
scribes the "ascent" of the animal named Homo sapiens and bestows upon
this creature a proper name, Human.
THE DECAY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE
Ultimately, Rykwert's "necessary condition" defines a humanist architectural
tradition irrespective of style or location, though inaugurated in ancient
Greece and formalized byVitruvius. While this canon is most apparent in
the classical orders, it is not limited to a style, nor does the use of classical
details ensure coherence within this humanist canon, as we shall see.
In fact, the claim that the body metaphor is the "necessary condi -
tion" of architecture and of being human has important implications for the
phenomenologists' understanding of modernity and modernism. Because the
metaphoric commerce is not limited to a classical style, Perez-Gomez sug-
gests that "the origins of modern architecture cannot simply be a matter of
eval uating the extent to which the classical orders were used or rejected."
16
Instead, the origin of modern architecture is to be found in the erosion of the
metaphoric relationship between the body and architecture and thus of archi -
tecture's "necessary conclition" itself.
Perez-Gomez located the beginning of this erosion in later seventeenth-
century France and in Claude Perrault's controversial treatise, Ordonnance
des cinq especes de colonnes selon la methode de anciens (1683). For Perez-
Gomez, this text marks "the 'beginning of the end' of traditi onal architec-
ture," due to its displacement of body metaphors by "scientific" reason. '"
Because Perrault's Ordonnance figures so strongly in this argument, it is
useful to examine his interpretation in detail.
Perrault, in Perez-Gomez's recounting, never questioned the clas-
s ical orders or the importance of proportions as s uch. Instead, he rejected
the body's authority as a model for the classical orders. Perrault argued
that rules of proportion created an "arbitrary beauty" based on "fancy"
22 THE PHENOMENAL ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE
Architecture becomes simply a technologically enframing, as Heiddeger
described it, in which humanity becomes "standing reserve," instrumental-
ized for autonomous processes in which meaning is replaced by the infinite
exchange of empty signs. In conformity, Perez-G6mez laments that "most
contemporary architecture speaks only to a technological process, not to
the world of man."
36
He further claims that:
Clearly today, in a world of complex technological systems, we control, in-
dividuaUy, very little; yet our actions ... have a phenomenal importance ...
This is why T would argue formalistic .strategies in architecture, regard-
less of the legitimizing frame of reference (in Marxist theory, linguistics,
physics, or evolutionary biology) may be dangerously irresponsible.
31
Moreover, if body metaphors were the core of a rchitecture's metaphysical
function, its decline would have disturbed the humanist perspective that
"places man at the center of the universe and makes him master of Being."
38
The split between the world and the subject that he argues began in the
late eighteenth century is literally concretized by architecture. In so far that
modern architecture specifically intended t o break with a figurative poiesis
of the classical tradition, it is deliberately nihilistic-without and against
meaning. Both speak of cold, "sterile" cities of dead, speechless architectures
in which a lonely figure is doomed to walk sullen streets planned by techno-
crats for maximum circulation rather than for "dwelling."
39
In a different way, we can see this phenomenological argument as
part of a broader interpretation of modernity as incompatible with human-
ist embodiment. Iconic modernist images of the body a re often said to
index a profound break with humanistic emb odiment offered by historical
worldviews, even from a not explicitly phenomenological point of view. The
dynamic bodies depicted in Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase or
Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity, Sanford Kwinter has suggested, seem
incompatible with the Vitruvian Figure's static geometry and organic wholes,
which seem to speak to a "tradition whose time and space belong t o late
Greek and early Christian cosmology" rat her than modern field and energy

Likewise, the chrono-phot ography of Marey, Muybridge, and later,

Edgerton, represented new geomet ries of the body in motion, dynamic orders
made manifest only though mechanical means of recording and reproduc-
tion." For Jonathan Crary, such techniques of machinic observation amounted
to nothing Jess than the "uprooting of perception from any space-t ime
co-ordinates" of the embodied subject.
42
Crary has argued these examples
mark a fundamental rupture and displacement of the lived body in the late
nineteenth century:
The breakthrough of Muybridge's work in 1878 was its deployment of
machinic high speeds for the creation of perceptual units beyond the
capacity of human vision, and their subsequent abstract arrangement
outside the terms of any subjective experience.
43
26 THE PHENOMENAL ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE
Perez-Gomez, the life-world was once balanced and now it is out of control.
However, he assumes that t here was always something t o balance, that
knowledge operated through such opposed forces, and that this dialectic is
real and et ernal. Indeed, his objective ultimately must be to conserve tbis
dichotomy because he cannot imagine an arcbitecture that works outside
tbis structure.
As a result, their accounts are suffused with what Gianni Vattimo
has called a dangerous "pathos of authenticity," in which the loss of an au-
thentic and authoritative origin is at once mourned and monument alized.'"
This pathos is a sublime aesthetic of a fall from a mythic Eden of wholeness
and harmony, before the world was split in two, when meaning was unified,
when spirit was unified with form, and the spirit of man looked towards a
higher purpose, when archi tecture was noble and asserted man's centered
place, bis authority over nature and technol ogy. Architecture's future lies
only in redeeming itself and being reborn into the metaphors of the lost,
Vitruvian, tradition. To this end, Perez-Gomez has argued that a "living
tradition" of architecture can only be reconstructed by "visiting and inter-
preting t he t races and documents of the past," re-founding a new tradi ti on
upon shattered fragments of the old.
57
This may seem well intended and
comforting. Yet, if s ince the dawn of modernity Architecture has shared the
crypt with Man and God, architectural theory becomes a mystical reanimation
of a corpse.
Fortunately, we do not need to share in this eschatological dread
because to differentiate the modern from an authentic tradi tion in this way
is, of course, entirely modernist itself. In fact, it is exactly the same as the
differentiation of the modern from the past that Perrault himself hoped to
establish, though of course with the opposi te intent of demonstrating the
s uperiority of the scientific modernity of late seventeenth-century Paris to
the ancient tradition .5
8
Perez-Gomez simply inverts the comparison, longing
fo r the non-scientific stability of the past. Addi tionally, the phenomenologist
attempts to resolve a perceived imbalance between dueling pairs-the for-
mal and the perceptual, the subjective and the object ive, the rational and the
poetic. Such opposi tions belong to distinctively modernist organi zations of
thought, traceable back t o Kant and Hume. Phenomenology, however, elevat es
what at the dawn of modernity served as critical distinctions, for example, in
Kant's grand philosophical project, into an ontology that t akes these catego-
ries as eternal realities.
59
They introduce ideas s uch as intentionality and
intertextuality as ways of spanning the supposed abyss but the very premise
of such an abyss, and the need to span it and therefore reinforce its existence,
is also characteristically modernist.
60
Likewise, what they accomplish is not really a critique of technology
and rationalization. Instead, they naturalize the modernist myth of autono-
mous technology and ever increasing instrumentalism and rationalism. 5
1
30 THE PHENOMENAL ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE
cultural convention to a principle of natural order, transforming the body
into a geometric set of "abstract" relationships that appear t ranscendent of
both culture and physical form.
9
While Rykwert's identity suggests harmonic
consonance, Agrest's deployment of Barthes's term, shifter implies that the
Vitruvian system is neither natural nor a priori, but is a cultural, linguistic,
construction. Moreover, rather than revealing a metaphysical truth, it serves
to naturalize cultural and historical values as truthful and conceal violence
done by them. Because for both Lynn and Agrest, the Vitruvian system and
its anthropomorphism must be somehow displaced, "opened" (Agrest) or
"involuted" (Lynn) to new possibilities, for them, the task of architectural
theory is not to recover the body metaphor but to expose it as neither neu-
tral, natural nor true, but as a construction of thought and culture.' "
Yet, even here, at the very points where their narratives diverge,
one can detect certain shared conditions upon which their disagreements
depend. Agrest's term, "shifter," is itself s imply another word for trope, mean-
ing "turning." For Agrest, the metaphorical resemblance ascribed between
a standing body and the post-and-lintel system would not be a "primal
identification" or expression of the subject's embodied experience but an
instance of ideological shifting, in which the subject is conditioned, or even
constructed, through the experience of architecture. Nevertheless, it is gov-
erned by a conception of metaphorical signification and representation via
formal systems of order in which the body, architecture and the subject con-
stitute a closed loop of reference. Agrest concludes with a phrase, that maps
Rykwert's "double-metaphor," but that draws attention to architecture's role
in the construction of subjectivity, "I am spoken through the city and the city
is read through me.""
GENDERED BODIES OF ARCHITECTURE
To better understand this statement, it is useful to examine Agrest's argument
about the relat ionship between the Vitruvian body and issues of gender.
12
In
fact, her text was part of a renewed interest in gender within critical archi -
tectural discourse. Agrest suggests that issues of sexuality and gender bad
been rather neglected in architecture.'
3
Agres t begins by declaring, "logocen-
trism and anthropomorphism, in particu Jar male anthropomorphism, have
underlain the system of architecture ever s ince Vitruvius, (who was then]
read and rewritten in the Renaissance and through the Modern Movement."'
Her use of the word "underlain" suggests that the male body has been the
foundation of architecture while also being unconscious. As a result, women
and the female body have been "excluded," "outside," "repressed" in the
dominant Vitruvian system.
15
Agrest then describes a nuanced three-fold process of displacement of
the female body and women in this system. The phallocentric Vitruvian system
first of all projected a specifically male body as the model for architecture
38 STRUCTURAL CONTINUITIES OF CLASSICISM
3.2 Diller+ Scofidio, Para-site, 1989. Installation for the Projects Room at the Museum
of Modern Art. New York. Copyright. Diller Scofi dio +Renfro: courtesy of Diller Scofidio
Renfro.
3.3 Diller Scofidio +Renfro, Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. 2002. Copy-
right, Diller Scofidio +Renfro; courtesy of Diller Scofidio +Renfro.
42 STRUCTURAL CONTINUITI ES OF CLASSICI SM
a single system between the Renaissance and the twentieth century whereas
Foucault maps three different organizations of knowledge during this same
timeframe.
39
This single architectural episteme is defined by a set of rela-
tionships which Foucault named "modem" but Eisenman calls the "classical."
Eisenman then attempts to flesh out architecture's classical episteme,
arguing that it is governed by three "fictions," or what in Foucaultian terms
one might call three historical a priori conditions for architecture. Each of
these is necessary for the Western humanist system of architecture. The first
is "representation," in which architecture is taken to s tand for something
beside itself. For him, the canonization of ancient classical architecture by
Renaissance architects marks the arrival of this "fiction" by representing
ancient Greek and Roman architecture and the values for which these old
architectures seemed to stand. The second condition is that architecture rep-
resents "truth," a natural order or divine law. Eisenman, like Agrest and her
critique of"ideology," but also equally like Perez-G6mez and Rykwert, locates
the origin of this "fiction" in the Renaissance use of the Vitruvian Figure,
which be asserts without further elaboration, "is the most renowned exam-
ple" of an architecture that related "anthropomorphic geometry" to natural
and divine models of order.
41
The third condition is "history," or rather, the
idea that architecture must represent timeless qualities, or be "classic." The
Renaissance is said to have originated this timel essness by its reference to
antique forms as models. Each condition reinforces the others and trian-
gulates the "continuous mode of thought [that) can be referred to as the
classical."" One can clearly see how Eisenman's assumptions are repeated
in Greg Lynn's idea that the value of the whole has governed the whole of
architectural history, and echo Agrest's Marxist-feminist critique of what
she sees as the unbroken phallocentrism of the "Vitruvian system."
Thus far, Eisenman repeats certain claims of the phenomenologists.
For example, he argues that the division between classical architecture and
truly modem architecture cannot be defined stylistically but is to be located
in the disruption of a deeper structure of signification. He also shares their
understanding of Renaissance architecture as referring to religious value,
while suggesting that Enlightenment architecture privileged rational and
positivistic lmowledge. If Renaissance architecture sought to represent
cosmological, or divine truths, Eisenman argues that the "Enlightenment
aspired to a rational process of design whose ends were a product of pure,
secular reason."
43
Eisenman even parallels Perez-G6mez's reading of Durand
as the architect who overturned Renaissance architectural cosmology with
a belief in reason. Again like Perez-G6mez, Eisenman asserts that Durand's
proto-functionalism led more or less directly to the International Style of the
twentieth century.
However, Eisenman attempts to s how that the shift towards ratio-
nalism between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries was a superficial
46 STRUCTURAL CONTINUITIES OF CLASSICI SM
which he was born. For writers who constantly bemoan alienation, the post-
structuralist pursuit of accomplished nihilism may be their only hope.
In this regard, Eisenman's text offers at once a hand of friendship and
of challenge towards phenomenology in the direction of the "accomplished
nihilism" which Vattimo concludes is "our only hope" in the present age.
60
To
shed the pathos that shackles the phenomenologists' project and re-fashion
the body-building relationship, they need to embrace post-structuralist
architectural thought as well as contemporary theories."'
The second paradox rests within this possibility of a post-
structuralist phenomenology of the body in architecture. As we have seen,
the post-structuralists cannot be post-modern since modern architecture
curiously exists only in what Eisenman calls a "no longer future." The break
with classicism has yet to be accomplished. Nor can the post-structuralists
project a different architectural model or suggest that we progress beyond
the classical without collapsing their discourse back into the fictions of the
classical (in this case, that of progress). As a side-effect, their architecture
must continually defer to modernist (that is, the not-yet-modern but really
classical) architecture as simulacra that, paradoxically, operate as origins
for their thought of a not-classical architecture. One sees this sensibility in
Eisenman's continual reference to Terragni and to Le Corbusier. His 1963
doctoral thesis examined Le Corbusier and Terragni's architectures (among
others), diagramming their designs to present an extended formal analysis
of how these architectures could be understood without reference to any-
thing outside their compositional effects and organizational rules. To do so,
he attempted to draw out the organizing principles of their architecture in
abstract diagrams related to the spatial and formal effects experienced by
the subject of the architecture. Though he could not articulate it in such
terms then, this quest for "The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture" (his
title) can be understood as an attempt to mine the history of modern archi-
tecture in order to produce a theory of architectural affects for the subject. 5
2
Subsequently, he has repeatedly returned, in words and design, to modern
"texts" to reveal their "fictions as fictions." His early nine-square grid
permutations, his overlaid grids extracted from cartographic systems, his
archaeology of lost structures and his penchant for incomplete formal
tropes (such as the "el") and folding, are all agents of this critical trans-
valuation of value. Recently, Eisenman published a long promised book on
Terragni, an event that bookends Eisenman's own body of work, one that
began and ends with his Transformations, Decompositions, Critique of
Giuseppe Terragni, since his work remains the point of origin of Eisenman's
diagrams and design processes.
63
In these terms, the post-structuralists
work is not "not-classical," but rather the playing through, or full revelation,
of the classical project as a fiction.
64
SO STRUCTURAL CONTINUITIES OF CLASSICISM
4.2 Le Corbusier, derivation of the Modular as a measure related to the human figure and Golden Section, Le
Modulor, Figure 9,1948. Copyright, FLC/ADGAP. Paris and DACS London, 2006.
Beyond this simple account, any attempt to explain the Modular is
frustrated by the nature of the texts that described it. While the books were
designed using the Modular, and might be thought of as the first products
of the system, the content shows little concern for systematic organization.
Hastily edited, Le Modular and Modular 2 were montages of tales of origin,
and polemics about the future. Le Corbusier combined broad cosmological
theories with anecdotes about the Modular's implementation, travelogue,
and correspondence. These disjointed narratives were accompanied by
parallel streams of diagrams, sketches, captioned and uncaptioned photo-
graphs, found objects, mathematical formulae and tables of numbers. The
tone ranges from megalomaniacal to false modesty. The texts resist rigorous
interpretation or deconstruction because their arguments disintegrate before
the reader. Because of this, they can be interpreted to support almost any
reading that one cares to project.
3
Of course, they were huge hits. The first edition sold out quickly
and was translated into English in 1951, though by that time it was a lready
widely discussed within Anglo-American architectural discourse. Soon, Le
Modular was translat ed into Spanish and was published in South America;
shortly thereafter German and J apanese editions ensured it became a world-
wide phenomenon. Its successes spawned symposia, numerous articles,
lectures, imitators and competitors. The British Library contains dozens of
similar measuring systems created in the 1950s, many citing the Modular
as their chief precedent. The second volume followed in 1955 (published in
English in 1958), comprising a collection of correspondence from devotees of
the Modular around the world, accounts of its use within Le Corbusier's own
archi tecture, as well as tales of his efforts to have it patented. In addition, Le
Corbusier collected a considerable amount of material for a never published
thi rd volume (under the working title, Modular III) .
4
The Modular was the
58 MODULOR RESIDUES OF HISTORY
4.5 Replica Modular tape measure and film canister for sale at the Fondation Le Corbusi er. Photo by
Christopher Hight; product copyright, FLC/ADGAP. Paris and DACS London. 2006.
Eisenman-who had previously avoided it-reinstat ed the Modular into tbe
genealogy of crucial "diagrams" in modern architecture that also included
tbe nine-square diagrams made so famous byWittkower and Rowe. " In
1997, it playfully reappeared on the wall s and annals of the Architectural
Association in a student project that juxtaposed it with John Travolta's
uncannily similar stance on the poster for the film "Saturday Night Fever."
References in journals multiplied. Now it is difficult to mention anthro-
pomorphism, architecture and modernism without citing the Modular as
a prime example. What is important is not the depth or breadth of wr iting
about the Modular-there remain only a few articles that treat it in a sus-
tained fashion and no books. It continues to be seen as a historical footnote,
but this position has become mobilized for a variety of purposes.
THE MODULOR AS "ONE EXAMPLE"
Because the phenomenologists seek to recover a meaningful relationship be-
tween the body and building, they present the Modular as a path not taken.
At the end of The Dancing Column, Rykwert argued for the need t o reinstate
a metaphorical relationship between t he building, the body and the world:
One example of what can be done seems to be provided by Le Corbusier's
Modular. It was perhaps the most convincing attempt to set out a mimetic
teaching and it is at least partiaUy successful ... [It] has so far been an
isolated instance of a techne formulated for current conditions.
13
In this statement, Modular re-emerges from the nihilist despair of modernity
as the exemplar of how architecture and construction might be re-aligned with
a "metaphorical commerce" between building and the body.
14
He presented the
62 MODULOR RESIDUES OF HISTORY
3.1 Greg Lynn FORM, drawing comparing composite and spline curves, Animate Form. 1999. Copyright Greg Lynn FORM:
courtesy Greg Lynn FORM.
However, even as post-struct uralists see the Modula r as an icon of
modernism's classicism, it continues to appear as a strangely anachronistic
figure, arriving in the waning days of high modernism as a reactionary gesture
to buttress the edifice of architectural humanism that was already beginning
to crumble. Lynn portrays the Modular as a sign of decadence in an article
concerning Charles Gwathmey's architecture, comparing the Modulor with
another Le Corbusier drawing of the body, that of an aging boxer. Lynn
argues that Gwathmey's architecture is like the latter, an over-exercised and
worn-out body, an exaggeration of the classical body. Lynn's critique is
double-edged. In an echo of Rowe's article on "Modernism and Mannerism,"
Lynn argues that Gwathmey's formalisms mark the decline of the classical
system through exaggeration, "the deterioration of a seemingly whole struc-
ture ... What appears in modernism as a well-maintained, stable purity, is
now exercised excessively."
27
Lynn's reference to an aging body builder sug-
gests t he decrepitude of the classical modernism inherit ed by the so-called
"New York Five."
28
Their a rchitectures at once repeated and exaggerated the
latent Vitruvian formalism of their Oedipal father, Le Corbusier. The forms of
the "New York Five" are mannerist exhaustions of this modern classical sys-
tem, final evidence that the humanist ideology has become bad faith, or to put
this into Eisenman's terms, the anthropomorphism of the Modular reveals
modern architecture as merely a simulation ofVit ruvian (classical) values.
29
The Modular figures in this genealogy as a belated revelation of
modernism's humanism and Platonism, and as a Vitruvian body in crisis. The
Modular refers to a modernism that is not so modern, as a final attempt to
shore up a decayed body of classical architectural knowledge. The Modular
has been very useful to post-structuralists yet it also is a source of embar-
rassment for it reveals their father figure's premature obsolescence, and
modern architecture's failure. As such, it marks the beginning of the end of
this continuity of an architectural humanism. The last in a historical succes-
sion, the Modular takes its place at the end of a classical lineage, not simply
as the heir ofVitruvius but as the last , decrepit descendant in its genealogy
of humanism.
For this very reason the Modular now appears in architectural dis-
course far more frequently than it has since t he I 950s, especially in attempts
to formulate a post -humanist architecture because it seems to reveal a mod-
ernism unable to break with a classical tradition. A marginal figure weirdly
becomes central to how we understand modernism and its historicity, but at
the same time undermines modernism's importance since the repetition of
the human figure in the Modular seems to index the repetition of the classical
within modernity.
Nevertheless, as with the phenomenologists, the revision of the
Modular has a paradoxical effect. Because Lynn and Eisenman implicitly
position their work as the first t ruly modern (not-classical) architecture,
66 MODULOR RESIDUES OF HISTORY
~ - . , _ -
5.
A MID-CENTURY
RENAISSANCE
What this generation sought was
historical justifications for its own
attitudes, and it sought them in two
main areas of history- the traditions
of Modem Architecture itself .. . and
the longer traditions of classicism.
-Reyner Banham
fascination for this form in spite of its impracticalities, Wittkower referred
to the supposed dominance of N eo-Platonist cosmology in which the circle
or sphere was thought the perfect form, followed by the cube or square and
then the other Platonic solids. For example, Wittkower argued that Alberti
claimed that: "no geometrical form is more apt to fulfill this demand than
the circle and the forms deriving from it. In such centralized plans the geo-
metrical pattern will appear absolute, immutable, static and entirely lucid."'
Similarly, Wittkower cited Palladio's rephrasing of Plato's Timaeus where
the geometry of the circle was said to be the "most perfect and uniform of
all" geomet1i c shapes and could therefore be used to repeat ideal reality as a
shadow in human experience.
The interest in these geometries was furthered, Wittkower argued,
by the recently rediscovered books ofVitruvi us, especially Cesariano's 1521
translation. The Vit ruvian Figure was the link between Nee-Platonist cos-
mology and a rchitectural forms. "This simple picture," Wittkower argued,
"seemed to reveal a deep and fundamental truth about man .. . and its impor-
tance for Renaissance architects can hardly be overestimated."
5
Indeed, the
Vitruvian Figure is first drawn as such during this period, and Wittkower
juxtaposes illustrations of six examples from the early 1500s with nine
plans of centralized churches from Serlio's fifth book on architect ure (1547)
and several sketches by Leonardo of centralized churches. Because the lat-
ter were purely notional projects, never intended to be realized, Wittkower
declared, they should be understood not as architectural plans so much as
"documents of Renaissance religion." The use of the Vitruvian proportion,
"that organic geometrical equilibrium where all the parts are harmonically
related like members of the body" the divine order would reveal itself in the
stony shadows of human experience.7
The importance Wittkower gives to Nee-Platonic religion for Renaissance
architecture has some correspondence to Michel Foucault's controversial
charact erization of the same era. Foucault also saw Neo-Platonism as
philosophically dominating what he called the Renaissance episteme, which
he argued had no concept of the "sign" in the modern sense. Signs did not
represent or symbolize in the sense of Husserlian signifier nor as metaphors;
instead, all true resemblances were understood as real relat ions. There re-
semblances were made evident via signat ures:
The system of signatures reverses the relation of the visible to the invis-
ible. Resemblance was the invisible form of that which from the depths
of the world made things visible; but in order that this form may be
brought out into the light in its tum there must be a visible figure that
wiU draw it out from its profound invisibility. a
In mathematics, geometry did not prescribe an aesthetic idea of harmony or
balance but rather the reverse: they were marks that corresponded and made
74 A MID-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
manifest the constitution of the world. Among the terms for such relations
were conjunctio, similitudo, concertus, amicita and proportio.
9
Regardless of the accuracy ofFoucault's characterization of Renaissance
thought, because both he and Wittkower emphasize Nee-Platonism as the
dominant world-view, it can shed light on claims made in contemporary
architectural discourse because Peter Eisenman's "End of the Classical". to
name one example, combines Wittkower's understanding of Renaissance
architecture with Foucault's analyses.'" Indeed, Eisenman's entire argument
depends on the commensurability of their understandings of the Renaissance.
For Wittkower, the rediscovery ofVitruvius's text was caught within the web
of Nee-Platonic similitude. In Foucault's Nee-Platonist classical episteme,
humanity was at the pivot of the great fulcrum between shadowy nature and
the ideal reality of God, "the centre upon which all relations are concerted
and from which they are once again reflected."" Likewise, in Wittkower's
Nee-Platonic Renaissance, the Vitruvian Figure revealed an "intellectual rela-
tionship between the soul and God" as a double signature.
12
First, it revealed
the similitude of the human body with t he divine geometry of the circle and
square. Then it provided a signature, proportion, through which this could
be replicat ed. For example, in Divina proportione, mathematician Luca
Pacioli (whom Wittkower quoted). argued for the use of the Vit ruvian body as
a model for architectural order because, "from the human body derive all and
every ratio and proport ion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of na-
ture."13 Wittkower also quoted Alberti's edict to, "borrow all our rules for the
harmonic relations (fin ito) from the musicians to whom this sort of number
is extremely well known, and for those particular things when Nature shows
herself most excellent and complete."'" Similarly, for Palladia, churches
should be built, "in such a manner and with such properties, that all the
parts together may convey a sweet harmony (une soave armour) to the eyes
of the beholders."
15
Wittkower interpreted this passage as meaning that, "the
architect who relies on those harmonics is not translating musical rat ios
into architectures but makes use of a universal harmony apparent in mus ic:
'certissimum est naturam in omnibus sui esse persimilen '."
16
The translation
Wittkower uses and his reproduction of the Latin are important; his transla-
tion inevitably suggest s aesthetical pleasure in the modern sense, but the
original retains a greater sense of N eo-Platonic similitudo. It is vital t o note
how different this is from the modern phenomenological explanation. The
order was not to be perceived by an autonomous subject so much as it placed
the subject within an order of divine resemblance that instantiated itself
through signat ures. It did not matter if such orders were perceptible to the
occupant nor ultimately to produce pleasing results for the eye, though that
might also be a result. Ultimately, the symbolic operation of Renaissance
archi tecture is understood as an intellectual problem of the installation of
divine order through its geometric s ignatures for the mind's eye.
ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES IN THE AGE OF CYBERNETICS 75
A PARADIGM SHIFT?
Wittkower's title is t hus ironic because he attempted to demonstrate the
importance of religious thought in the architecture of the sixteenth cen-
tury, albeit one that placed humanity at the hinge between the natural and
divine worlds. This was no doubt intentional as his title name-checked
Geoffrey Scott's, The Architecture of Humanism (1914). which had provided
the dominant interpretation of late quattro and quintecento architecture
for early twentieth-century Anglo-American architects. In Scott's rendering,
the Renaissance was humanist in the modern sense of a secular discourse
of taste and aesthetic pleasure. Wittkower explicitly rejects this "hedonist"
reading, which he attributes to the influence of Ruskin, on his very first
page. Accordingly, Wittkower added two words to his own title that radi-
cally a ltered Scott's intention: "Age" to signify the historical and cultural
specificity of the architecture that he believed Scott, Ruskin and others had
anachronistically elided wi th their own and which Wittkower sought to
recontextualize; the addition of"Principles" suggests that these architectures
spoke to a transcendental truth rather than subjective aesthetics. Thus,
Wittkower's "sampling" of Scott's title reclaims the Renaissance in new
terms. Indeed, it has often been said that Architectural Principles inaugurated
a new "paradigm" about the Renaissance, its relationship to modernity,
and in many ways the relation between architectural order and meaning.
This term "paradigm" is problematic but also indicative of the sense that
Wittkower created a stable and homogenous frame for architects' under-
standings of Renaissance architecture.
The first edition of Architectural Principles of six hundred copies
was intended for Renaissance scholars, although Wittkower thought a few
architects might also be interested.
17
It rapidly sold out, as did a second
more affordable edition. Soon, Wittkower's book became a featured text in
architectural schools and ateliers across Britain and America, devoured by
an emerging generation and est ablished professionals, who attempted to
convert his analysis of Renaissance architecture into tools for rebuilding
post-war cities.'
8
It soon became a standard course reading for architectural
students and remained so until the 1980s. Reyner Banham declared, "The
general impact of Professor Wittkower's book on a whole generation of post-
war architectural students ... [was) one of the phenomena [of the time)."' " In
the early 1960s, Peter Smithson rebuked a crhical review of Architectural
Principles that had been published in the journal of the Royal Institute of
British Architects by declaring Wittkower, "the only art-historian ... capable
of describing and analysing buildings in spatial and plastic terms," and
dubbing Architectural Principles the single most important English text on
architecture since the end of World War II.2 A review by Kenneth Clark pre-
dicted Wittkower's "masterpiece of scholarship" would completely s upplant
then dominant account s of Renaissance architecture.
21
Similar statements
76 A MID-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
were made by many other architects and art historians.
22
By the mid- 1960s,
in a Foreword to another, far larger, example ofWittkower's scholarship, Art
and Architecture in Italy. 1600- 1700, Nikolaus Pevsner wrot e:
Scores have profited from, and been inspired by Archltectural Principles
in the Age of Humanism and its lesson of the importance of consistent
modular relations. No other book on the subject of architectural history
written by scholars of his generation had such a creative effect on men
in practice.
23
This view remained the consensus-for architects at least. In the late 1980s,
James Ackerman suggested Architectural Principles' legacy was as the most
read scholarly work on architecture in a thousand years- implying a similar
importance to Vitruvius's De Architectura written at the turn of that mil -
lennium.24 More recently, in her analysis of the role of a rchitectural hlstory
in post-war architecture, Alina Payne confirmed Clark's prediction that,
"Wittkower's paradigm .. . relegated an old one [that of Scott and Ruskin] into
obsolescence."
25
Payne attributes its influence to the way it allowed modern
architects to understand historical material in a way that seemed familiar to
their concerns and therefore made history useful for them.
26
For her, the book
marks a "warp" in history between an early twentieth-century architecture
that privileged regu lating lines, systemization, essent ialism and abstraction
and an "emerging discourse" of post-modernism that wou ld increasingly tum
towards bistory.
27
In all these assessments, the importance of the book is
attributed to its impact on architects. Not only did Wittkower's text replace
one representation of architecture's history, it affected the historical unfold-
ing of modern architecture.
THE ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES OF THE MODULOR
In the processes of installing a new understanding of Renaissance archi -
tecture, Wittkower also assisted in establishing the conventional reading of
the Modulor as the heir to the Vitruvian Figure. At the time of their publica-
tion, both Architectural Principles and Le Modular were conjoined twins, one
looking back, the other forward. For example, in a 1950 lecture at London's
Institut e for Contemporary Art, Siegfried Giedion reported that Le Modular
and Architectural Principles were the most widely read texts in the United
Stat es at MIT and at the ETH in Zurich.
28
In an article in the infl uential
journal, Architectural Design, Ruth Olltsky and John Voelker expressed the
consensus view of the time:
It is seldom that chance timing in the publication of two books has been
so fortunate as in the case of Dr. Wittkower's Architectural Principles
in the Age of Humanism and Le Corbusier's Le Modulor. Both books are
concerned, broadly speaking, with interpretations of man's place in
the universe. The first explicitly, through historical documentation, the
second implicitly, through the development of mind and idea. Each book
ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES IN THE AGE OF CYBERNETICS 77
iUuminates the other, and through them it becomes possible to see the
origins of many ismes that are very much alive amongst architects at the
present time.
29
Likewise, Reyner Banbam's manifesto for New Brutalism situated these two
texts as central to the future of post-World War II architecture.
3
Combined,
he argued, these books represented a truly awesome force for "evil as well as
good" since they were as important for the revi talization of modern archi-
tecture (e.g., Smithson's architecture) as they were for a so-called modern
N eo-Palladian revival.
31
Moreover, Wittkower and Le Corbusier engaged each other's work
directly. Whi le the historian claimed discomfort with his new-found celeb-
rity among the star architects of the day, he often emerged from the dim
stacks of the Warburg Institute to share their spotlight. In his conclusion
to Architectural Principles, Wittkower s uggested there had been a mid-20th
century renaissance in studies of proportion, and in a 1949 lecture at
the Architectural Association he argued that the Modulor was the prime
example of a "new and unexpected solution to this ancient problem."
32
Complimentarily, Le Corbusier quoted at length a letter from Wittkower
s t ating that the Modulor provided a prelimnnary answer to the adaptation
ofNeo-Platonic proportion systems for modem scientific theories of"space-
time."33 In 1954, Wittkower made an even stronger assertion that the Modular
was the "first consistent synthesis since the breakdown of the older systems"
that had occurred at the end of the Renaissance.
31
Another article of 1963
compared the ancient proportioning system to that of the Renaissance as an
evolution "moving closer to the Modulor."" He followed with a final assess-
ment that remains the co=on understanding of the Modulor:
Le Corbusier is thus in line of descent from Vitruvius and the Renaissance.
When you look at his design of the "Stele of the Measure" built at the
Unite d'Habitation at Marseille, you are right back at the anthropomet-
ric Renaissance exercises.
36
Thus, Wittkower installed and championed the now common understanding
of the Modulor as a modern Vitruvian Figure. Even more, Wittkower argued
the Modulor demonstrated the "coherence of our cultural tradition" with the
Renaissance.
37
If Le Corbusier was the heir to Vitruvius, Wittkower was the
lawyer who executed the estate.
This dialogue between Le Corbusier and Wittkower continued
throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s through lectures, articles and
revised editions of their respective texts. By the early 1960s this fortuitous
alignment seemed to have shifted. Some have attributed this to the rise of
historical post-modernism; others, such as Peter Smithson, argued that ar-
chitects in the late 1940s were looking for something to believe in and having
found it with the writings ofWittkower and Le Corbusier soon moved beyond
their mid-century crisis of faith.
3
"
78 A MID-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
fascination for this form in spite of its impracticalities, Wittkower referred
to the supposed dominance of N eo-Platonist cosmology in which the circle
or sphere was thought the perfect form, followed by the cube or square and
then the other Platonic solids. For example, Wittkower argued that Alberti
claimed that: "no geometrical form is more apt to fulfill this demand than
the circle and the forms deriving from it. In such centralized plans the geo-
metrical pattern will appear absolute, immutable, static and entirely lucid."'
Similarly, Wittkower cited Palladio's rephrasing of Plato's Timaeus where
the geometry of the circle was said to be the "most perfect and uniform of
all" geomet1i c shapes and could therefore be used to repeat ideal reality as a
shadow in human experience.
The interest in these geometries was furthered, Wittkower argued,
by the recently rediscovered books ofVitruvi us, especially Cesariano's 1521
translation. The Vit ruvian Figure was the link between Nee-Platonist cos-
mology and a rchitectural forms. "This simple picture," Wittkower argued,
"seemed to reveal a deep and fundamental truth about man .. . and its impor-
tance for Renaissance architects can hardly be overestimated."
5
Indeed, the
Vitruvian Figure is first drawn as such during this period, and Wittkower
juxtaposes illustrations of six examples from the early 1500s with nine
plans of centralized churches from Serlio's fifth book on architect ure (1547)
and several sketches by Leonardo of centralized churches. Because the lat-
ter were purely notional projects, never intended to be realized, Wittkower
declared, they should be understood not as architectural plans so much as
"documents of Renaissance religion." The use of the Vitruvian proportion,
"that organic geometrical equilibrium where all the parts are harmonically
related like members of the body" the divine order would reveal itself in the
stony shadows of human experience.7
The importance Wittkower gives to Nee-Platonic religion for Renaissance
architecture has some correspondence to Michel Foucault's controversial
charact erization of the same era. Foucault also saw Neo-Platonism as
philosophically dominating what he called the Renaissance episteme, which
he argued had no concept of the "sign" in the modern sense. Signs did not
represent or symbolize in the sense of Husserlian signifier nor as metaphors;
instead, all true resemblances were understood as real relat ions. There re-
semblances were made evident via signat ures:
The system of signatures reverses the relation of the visible to the invis-
ible. Resemblance was the invisible form of that which from the depths
of the world made things visible; but in order that this form may be
brought out into the light in its tum there must be a visible figure that
wiU draw it out from its profound invisibility. a
In mathematics, geometry did not prescribe an aesthetic idea of harmony or
balance but rather the reverse: they were marks that corresponded and made
74 A MID-CENTURY RENAISSANCE
5.
A MID-CENTURY
RENAISSANCE
What this generation sought was
historical justifications for its own
attitudes, and it sought them in two
main areas of history- the traditions
of Modem Architecture itself .. . and
the longer traditions of classicism.
-Reyner Banham
Terragni, Giuseppe, .5lhJ.. 85
terrorism, 'war on terror', 5
Thiersch, August, 98, 153
Thompson, D'Arcy, 7, 140, 176
time-lapse photography, 174
Time-Saver Standards, 81
timelessness, !1.6. 47-8
tools, 121-2
trade routes, 162, 163, 167
transcendental-empir'ical doublet, 94
transgenic creatures, J.O
Trump, Donald, 4
191 -2
Tschumi, Bernard, 43
'l'tiWhitt, Jacqueline. 219
Uexkiill, Jakob Johann, 125-6, 180
UN Studio, 35; Mobius House, 106-8, 109
Unite de Habitation, 59, 172, 177-8, 179
urban planning, 170, 171 ,172,179-80
van Berkel. Ben, 11, 106
Vattimo, Gianni. 25, 30.. 19, 50
Vesely, Dalibor, l.a
Vidler, Anl.bony, 4, 64-5, 211- 12
Villa La Roche, 59
Villa Malcontents, 72, 82, 83, 84, 104
Villa Stein, 82, 83, 81, 101
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene, 162
Virilio, Paul, 116, 167
Vi scher, Robert, 14 7-8, 153
vision, cone of, 173
Vitruvian Figure, 7, 8, 17, 46, 63, 68, 103-4,
165,186, 187; Agrest, 36-40; Lynn, 37,4 1-4,
45; Modulor as heir to, 63, 64-7, 67-9;
Wittkower, 15
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus. 7, 19, 20, 22. 36,
185, 187-8; Perrault and 22-3
Vives, Juan Luis, 33
Voelker. John, XJ-8
Von Kannen vortices, 184
vortices, 184. 194-5
238 INDEX
war, 4, 115, 167-8, 171-2
'war on terror', 5
Warb urg, Aby, 98
whole, the, 45, !1.6. 52-3
Wiener, Norbert, 9-10, 127, 183, 194,222
Wigley, Mark, 35, 45. 115,116,219
Winner, Langdon, 31, 115
Wirknetz, 126
Wittkower, Rudolf, 7, 62. 73-80, 81, 82, 85-6,
88-9,93,95,97- 100, 118, 129, 193, 194, 216,
2 17; diagrams, fi2. 72, 73-4. 99; Modulor,
106, 155; proportion, 79-80, 100-3,
139-40; Renaissance, 73-6, 88, 189
Wiilfflin, Heinrich. 51. 57, 98-9, 153, 177
work studies, 165, 174
World Trade Center, 3-5
WorldWarL 167
WorldWarii,4, 115,171-2
Worringer, Wilhelm. 123
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 85

Yale Art and Architecture Building, 59
Yamasaki, Minoru, 3
Yerkes. Robert, 128, 129, 130- 1
Zeising, Adolf, 111, 143, 146, 117. 118
Zevi, Bruno, 80
Ziiek, Slavoj, 3-4