Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the sensory experience of architecture from classical times to the present day, examining how this finds expression both in one of the earliest literary discussions of an architectural structure, Pliny the Younger’s epistle about his villa at Laurentum, and in the work and writing of the present-day architect Peter Zumthor. Tracing a shared interest in architecture as an immersive experience in these diverse figures, and bringing together architectural and literary analysis, it suggests that a phenomenological experience of architecture is fundamental not only to the experience of buildings themselves, but also to the ways in which they are re-imagined in writing.
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Notes
- 1.
Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957); English translation: The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1994).
- 2.
Cf. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, pp. 60–61, where he writes that those who seek to understand the first house must ‘recapture the quality of the light […] the sweet smells that linger in the empty rooms […] the resonance of each room’.
- 3.
At least, this seems to be true for ‘normal’ people. According to Oswald Mathias Ungers, however, architects bring many other modes of perception to the design of a building (‘Designing and Thinking in Images, Metaphors and Analogies’, in Quellentexte zur Architekturtheorie: Nachdenken über Architektur, ed. by Fritz Neumeyer and Jasper Cepl [Munich: Prestel, 2002], pp. 531–39). The experience of one of the authors of this paper, who is an architect, confirms his findings.
- 4.
In his inaugural lecture at the University of Leipzig in 1893, the art historian August Schmarsow defined architecture as ‘the art of space’. See August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/Autoren/Schmarsow/Schmarsow1894.htm [accessed 7 February 2018]. Literally he speaks of ‘the art of space’ (‘Raumkunst’) and ‘architecture as the designer of space’ (‘Architektur als Raumgestalterin’); Cf. also Ulrich Müller, Raum, Bewegung und Zeit im Werk von Walter Gropius und Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004). This mode of having a house in the mind is thus not an invention of the late nineteenth century, and is not limited to a certain period.
- 5.
See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Cf. also Müller, Raum, Bewegung und Zeit.
- 6.
See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1986), pp. 213ff. Le Corbusier acknowledges and stresses the importance of the plan, but at the same time he warns against what he calls the ‘illusion of the plan’, which he sees in its formalistic usage.
- 7.
Examples of other architects or artists who emphasised the importance of experiencing spaces in motion or speed include Adolf Loos and Filippo Marinetti. Cf. Adolf Loos, ‘Architektur’ (1909), in Trotzdem. Adolf Loos Gesammelte Schriften 1900–1930, ed. by Adolf Opel (Vienna: Prachner, 1997), pp. 90–104.
- 8.
Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Talks with Students, trans. by Pierre Chase (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), pp. 44–45. The first words of the quotation in the original text read: ‘An architecture must be walked through and traversed […]’.
- 9.
See Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l´Architecture (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899). The famous sketch combining a plan of the Acropolis with the visitors’ view appears on p. 415. Le Corbusier uses this drawing in his Towards an Architecture twice: first on p. 115 as a sort of frontispiece to the chapter ‘Three Reminders to Architects: III: Plan’, and again on p. 222 to illustrate his thoughts in the chapter ‘Architecture: II: The Illusion of the Plan’. Le Corbusier uses another of Choisy’s drawings on p. 121: a drawing of the contemporary plan of the Acropolis (Choisy, p. 412). See also Turit Fröbe, ‘Weg und Bewegung in der Architektur Le Corbusiers’, Wolkenkuckucksheim 9 (2004), http://www.cloud-cuckoo.net/openarchive/wolke/deu/Themen/041/Froebe/froebe.htm [accessed 12 February 2018].
- 10.
Our understanding of the concept of ‘atmosphere’ is based upon Gernot Böhme, Architektur und Atmosphäre, 2nd edn (Paderborn: Fink, 2013), published in English translation as Atmospheric Architectures (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Also Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre, 7th edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013); Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 2014).
- 11.
Besides the obvious reference to Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, one could point to almost any outstanding book in the history of literature that contains a description of a building. One obvious example, which deals specifically with architecture is Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974); Cf. Chapter 9 in this volume. For an introduction to the field of architecture in literature, see Winfried Nerdinger and Hilde Strobl, Architektur wie sie im Buche steht: Fiktive Bauten und Städte in der Literatur (Salzburg: Pustet, 2006).
- 12.
Unless otherwise stated, all English translations of Epistula 2.17 are quoted by paragraph number from Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, trans. by P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 47–51.
- 13.
Scholars have expended much energy on the attempt; see for example Reinhard Förtsch, Archäologischer Kommentar zu den Villenbriefen des jüngeren Plinius (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1993). But these attempts are doomed to be fruitless, because, as the most recent commentary on ep. 2.17 points out: ‘Though we have no reason to doubt that Pliny’s villa really existed, to read 2.17 purely for documentary value misses much of its meaning: this is, above all, a textual villa’ (Christopher Whitton, Pliny the Younger, Epistles, II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], p. 218).
- 14.
The translation is by Sabine Vogt.
- 15.
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), p. 43.
- 16.
Zumthor, Atmospheres, p. 45.
- 17.
Peter Zumthor, Sigrid Hauser, and Hélène Binet, Therme Vals (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2007), p. 18.
- 18.
Zumthor, Atmospheres, p. 77.
- 19.
Zumthor et al., Therme Vals, p. 81.
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Düchs, M., Vogt, S. (2020). The House of the Senses: Experiencing Buildings with Peter Zumthor and Pliny the Younger. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_4
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