Aspects of Mechanization in design: the rise, evolution and impact of mechanics in architecture.

A. Tzonis.

In the mid nineteen forties, modern architecture gained universal acceptance in the western world as the only viable way of implementing the vast post-war programs of construction. Barely twenty-five years later the situation drastically changed. Modern architecture was declared obsolete, dismissed as a grave error and blamed for practically everything that had gone wrong in the shaping of buildings, cities and landscapes. Moreover, post-modernism--a complex of tendencies conspicuously embracing everything which modern architecture was supposed to have been opposed to--emerged as the happy alternative.

In this reversal of opinion, an interesting change may be observed. During its victorious moments, modern architecture had been praised as the architecture of utility, of science, of rationality, of function and last but not least, of the machine. These now came to be seen as the agents of evil which had dehumanized the man-made environment, a position that was taken up in the mass circulation press as well as in more specialized architectural publications.

The argument which is at the core of both positive and negative critiques of modern architecture is confusing and limited, to the degree that one may wonder whether it is capable of yielding any interesting conclusions at all and whether the debate about modern architecture can ever advance through it. Two major weaknesses are: first, that 'utility', 'science', 'rationality', 'function' and 'machine' are used loosely and ambiguously; second, that they tend to narrow our focus and make us overlook human relations and the dynamics of social change in the emergence, evolution and crisis of modern architecture.

In order to think more clearly about the architecture of the years to come, a more rigorous and broad understanding of the past is required. We feel the best way to achieve this, is to investigate the conceptual development of modern architecture--in other words, to turn to the history of architectural thinking and the social history of architecture.

The following paper on the relation between machine and architecture and the mechanization of design is written in this perspective. We feel that this point is central to the understanding of other aspects of modern architecture: utility, science, rationality and function.

Mechanization of Design

Mechanization of design tends to be associated with the introduction of the machine onto the construction site, in the materials factory and in the functioning building itself.¹ The idea recalls the inventions of the industrial revolution and of even earlier times, such as Hero of Alexandria's steam-operated automatically opening temple door,² Alberti's built-in piping system that allowed the owner of the house to eavesdrop in every room,³ Domenico Fontana's near heroic display of organization in the moving of the obelisk,⁴ Agricola's mining machines,⁵ Perrault's hoisting apparatus for heavy construction elements,⁶ and Agostino Gerli's ventilation schemes for large indoor spaces.⁷ Mechanization also brings to mind the designers--Tatlin, Sant' Elia, Charot-- and the movements--Functionalism, the International Style--that imposed the machine and the machine-made look as the chief aesthetic prototypes for twentieth century design.

The connection between machine, mechanization and one's way of thinking is much more rare, and it usually evokes the image of the building working as a machine. This idea is contrasted to older, more humane approaches to architecture which viewed a building as a breathing body and not as an inanimate object. The famous dictum of Le Corbusier that a house is a machine to live in is often juxtaposed to Renaissance plans of buildings on which the human body has been drawn to determine the plan's subdivisions and shapes.

This is a popular, impressionistic interpretation of the development of architecture and there is some truth to it. But it overlooks the sixteenth and seventeenth century transformation of the architect's thinking, of his perception of purpose, of his sense of the world and of his relation to the rest of society.

In this more fundamental but less conspicuous aspect of mechanization, the machine was the catalyst in the creation of a new methodology in design and a new philosophy of construction and planning of buildings.

Although the introduction of the machine to technology, to style and to architectural thinking are related, the latter is the most important. Before the machine could be massively adapted to construction or become a standard of beauty, the thinking of the designer had to undergo a fundamental change and the conceptual system of architecture had to be altered.

The nature of this transformation, its origins, its impact and its relation to other developments--intellectual, institutional and social-- is complex. We have therefore to approach each of its aspects separately.

A Methodological Note

Before we discuss this change a clarification of the notion of conceptual systems in architecture is in order.

The thinking of the designer takes place on two levels. The lower involves organizing instructions and directives, in the form of drawings or verbal expressions which control design actions. The higher level consists of norms and facts to which design decisions of the lower level ultimately resort for justification and from which design decisions of the lower level are derived. In other words, what may be called theoretical and programmatic thinking controls the lower level operation thinking.

Directives and norms are linked by facts. These state, that when the design action mentioned in the directive is carried out, the norm is satisfied.

Such facts are linked to another type of fact which offers reasons for accepting them as true. We call this the backing.

Finally, the backing itself is supported by a base which accounts for the acceptability of the backing. The base, that is, tells us why the reasons offered in the backing for the truth of the fact are, in turn, admissible.

What we have sketched here is only the bare minimum of the conceptual framework of design, its kernel. It matches only partially the complexity, breadth and depth of design thinking; the elaborate network of argumentation through which architects arrive at their designs or through which they defend them. But the components of this kernel do capture sufficiently the fundamental characteristics of architectural thinking. This schema therefore is sufficient for our purpose, which is to identify and represent the most significant changes that occurred through the mechanization of architectural thinking.

Archaic versus Modern

What we refer to as the mechanization of design thinking involves the emergence of a new philosophy of construction, mechanics and the science of the strength of materials,⁹ meant a shift on the lower level as well as the higher level.

Given the conceptual framework we just adopted, we shall try to identify and compare the kinds of norms, facts, backings and bases of the periods before and after mechanization introduced a change in design thinking, periods we will call archaic and modern respectively.¹⁰

In archaic design the norm of purity governs the appropriate mixing of the elements that go into an object -- colors, materials, shapes, proportions -- to make it part of a well-tempered universe. The norm of purity dominates the thinking of these designers, as revealed in numerous documentations by anthropologists of oral tribal cultures, or in ancient texts such as the Bible and the Indian and Chinese cosmologies.

Purity can also be expressed negatively, in terms not of obligations but of prohibitions and taboos of pollution--the unfelicitous mixing of elements of design, which bring about chaos, deformity, monstrosity and discordance to the universe.

In Medieval and Renaissance literature the same norm takes the name ratio, concordia, consonnatia and harmony as it moves towards eclipse and replacement.

New modern norms of design emerge at this time, one of them--which concerns us from the point of view of mechanization--being the norm of the greatest efficiency, which dictates that the product of design, to be optimal from the economic point of view, provide the maximum benefit for the minimum cost.

Optimal Design

The idea of the optimal design of a perfect product as the intersection between a maximum and minimum is deeply rooted in ancient Greek thinking that goes beyond economic efficiency. It invites, as early as Hellenistic times, the formulations of the isoperimetrical problems treated by Zenodorus¹¹ of new mathematical propositions such as that defining the sphere as the body which, for a given surface, has the maximum volume and for a given volume, a minimum surface. It is responsible for the attachment to certain geometrical shapes as models of nature. "The shape of heaven must be spherical", argues Aristotle because the spherical shape is "perfect" and this is because "outside" of it "no part of itself can be found", no "addition" can be made to its surface. In other words it has reached a point where nothing can be taken from it or added to it. For similar reasons it is believed that light travels in straight lines. In Ptolemy's writings on astronomy the stellar orbits are seen as optimal. The Middle Ages held the same opinion. In the words of Peter of Padua's Proemium (1310), "Nature and art always strive to arrive at their ends by the shortest means".

Koyre spoke of the "hantise de la circularite"--the spell of circularity --haunting scientists in their study of nature, despite empirical evidence which discredited the circle as a model and despite their commitment to empirical evidence as a base for judging the truth. There is also the haunting of the straight line, of the right angle, of the meaning of the center of symmetry--all derived from an attachment to forms believed to be perfect and from a devotion to the idea of optimality, often regard- less of what was optimized and in what respect it was perfect.

Critisizing this blind belief in absolute optimality, Galileo in his important contribution to the mechanization of design which we shall discuss at greater length further on, remarked, "I do not see how it is possible to assert that the spherical form is absolutely more or less perfect than others". ¹²

The obsessive search to find patterns of optimization in nature runs parallel to the attempt to generate perfect shapes in fabricating the artificial world. Building elements, buildings, and city plans in the Renaissance are given an optimal geometrical pattern, usually a circle. But a closer look shows that what appears as a contentless, abstract optimal design is partially an act of faith for the optimization committed to the norm of efficiency to come, an avant-garde of the mechanization of architecture. It is also, several times, as in the case of the application of "perfect" shapes during the Renaissance, an application of a definite iconographic program on the representation of the perfect cosmos. Thus the design product to which a mathematically perfect shape was given is an imitation of the perfection which lies not in the product itself but in the cosmos. This operation of imitation and picturing is nothing but a version of the archaic norm of correspondence between the parts of the universe applied to the building. In this sense optimization is a left over from archaic thinking and the archaic world's commitment to the norm of harmony.

The world of facts in archaic and modern design

Archaic design depends on the world of facts provided by sacred cosmologies, divination manuals and books of early theology which contain taxonomies of auspicious or ominous objects and characteristics of objects. These taxonomies are validated through references internal to the accepted divine discourse, what we may call tribal myth, which acts as the base of archaic architectural thinking. This validation is a checking, mainly from the point of view of logical consistency, of whether or not a given statement confirms a pattern of universal correspondences or harmonies. Empirical verification plays a very minor role. Certainly this approach is only acceptable as long as no effective control over nature is desirable and design products obey the pre-economic norm of universal harmony. Once this norm is replaced by efficiency and control over nature, the situation changes.

"What sensible experience shows ought to be preferred over any argument even one that seems to be extremely well founded", stated Galileo.13 In another instance he rejects the practice of basing facts on the internal reality of a limited number of texts "contained in the books" within which he remarks sarcastically "you would be able to give to everything its place"¹⁴ -- a ~ backed only in the name of the authority of its author--in favour of empirical reality which he called in his Saggiatore "the true book... the one which is constantly open in front of our eyes".

The Gift of Observation

As in the case of optimization, the commitment to empirical verification of facts in architectural thinking and to the construction of accurate realistic pictures of the wqr1d to be used in the design process did not exclusively follow from economic interests and the adoption of the norm of efficiency. "Our statements are borne out by the facts" affirmed Aristotle while sever1y critisizing those who "in a discussion about phenomena make statements with which the phenomena conflict... yet out of affection for their fixed ideas these men behave like speakers defending a thesis in debate... not admitting that there are premises.. ."¹⁵ Aristotle did not adopt this point of view in order to control nature effectively nor to meet any norm of efficiency.

Using accurate standards of measurements and the most sensitive instruments to record data does not make for modern design thinking. It is important to remember that the initial use of the compass to select a site for a building or a grave took place within an archaic geomantical system of reasoning and that the "telescope had initially a wide astrological application. An interesting moment of tension between the two philosophies of reasoning occurred in the seventeenth century between Kepler (1571-1630) and Fludd (1579-1637).¹⁶ Kepler challenged Fludd's) contention that the universe was composed of "secret harmonies" that could be transcribed only by means of hieroglyphic symbols. He critisized Fludd's hermetic model of the world as "vague, ambiguous, obscure, dictated only by the delight in pictures". Kepler held that the order of the world was not in the invisible and enigmatic, but in the manifest evidence of the sign of things, what he called "signatura rerum". He sought out what could be perceived and accurately mapped in "geometrical... quantitative figures".¹⁷

Fludd defended himself by arguing that the harmonies of the world, without which he claimed "the whole universe (would) perish and be reduced to nothing", were in the "internal impulses that issued from nature herself" and therefore invisible to the empirical observer.

"It is vulgar mathematicians", Fludd accused, "who concern themselves with quantitative shadows; the alchemists and hermetic philosophers, however, comprehend the true core of natural bodies... (Kepler) has hold of the tail, I grasp the head: I perceive the first cause, he the effects". Kepler was blind to "first causes" because in Fludd's opinion he was "stuck too fast in the filth and clay of the impossibility of his doctrine". "I hold the tail but I hold it in my hand, you may grasp the head mentally though only I fear in your dreams" was Kepler's wry reply, expressing in the best manner the crave for control over knowledge but not over nature. ¹⁸

For all the major differences, the conflict between Fludd and Kepler was one of means and not ends. Both intended to reveal the harmony of the universe, but one proceeded to do so through divination while the other chose empirical observation and mathematical demonstration as his means.¹⁹

The possibility of reconciliation was not totally discounted by Kepler as is evident in his readiness to accept the value of Fludd's work should it prove fruitful. "If you shall have found in the very causes harmonies as limpid as minet then it will be proper for me to congratulate you for the gift of invention and myself on the gift of observation".²⁰

In a similar manner the late Medieval and Renaissance designer will loudly praise the gift of observation and will rejoice for the advances made at this time in the realistic representation of buildings but he will remain devoted to the archaic norm of harmony and in the same spirit as Kepler he will employ the various modern techniques of accurate measurement and exact representation of line volume light texture and color. He will hope that the drawing will reveal a secret resemblance to a harmony between a temple of antiquity and the hypothetical temple of Solomon.

The Analytical Approach

Mechanization of architecture could not have occurred without the use of mathematical methods and what today is called quantification. It is through such intellectual tools integrated as basic routines in the thinking of the modern designer that empirically based facts are secured and subjected to control and one's perception of them is tested within the context of empirical reality.

"Whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance" said Galileo, "I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded and as having this or that shape; as being large or small in relation to other things and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number or few or many... "²¹

None of the optimally efficient products could have been designed without the employment of analytical intellectual tools without the rigor of the modus geometricus. But as much as these modes of analytical thinking were essential for the development of modern efficient products they exist independently of the norm of efficiency integrated into the conceptual system of archaic design and playa dominant role in the practice of the so called primitive architecture of tribal societies or sacred architecture of theocratic empires. This is certainly contrary to the nineteenth century romantic interpretation of vernacular building or of pre-Renaissance design as being carried with a freedom of feeling intuition and inspiration an opinion which although never proven true has not completely fallen out of favor in our time. Current research reveals increasingly in the presence of analytical thinking in North African Middle Eastern Indian and Chinese geomancy and its links with divinatory building and planning.²²

Similar studies in history devoted to the lineages of the pythagoriac, platonist, neoplatonist and hermetic doctrines in Medieval and Renaissance architectural theories and practices demonstrate the dominance of quantification in the thinking of the designer. The Medieval architect justified design decisions by stating: "What has been done has been done according to geometry": ("Quod quae sunt, sunt facta per geometriam").²³ But geometry was still meant to set up a congruence between it and a divine biblical prototype or between it and esoteric cosmologies of antiquity; in other words geometry was meant to satisfy purity and harmony.

The idea that all phenomena are measurable and reducible to simple figures never emerges with more conviction than in the debates, of fourteenth century Oxford and Paris, on problems such as the measurement of charity in man, and by authors on divine matters like Oresme²⁴ and the Calculator²⁵ (so named in fact for his influential work, the Lifer Calculationum and his obsession with reckoning and his conviction that everything thinkable is computable).

Many of the logico-analytical methods of the Renaissance were developed in answer to questions such as Mersenne's: How the Arch of Noah had been able to carry 130 species, how it was possible for the angels to be simultaneously in the sky and on the earth and how the valley of Josaphat would be able to hold all the dead on the final judgement day.²⁶ In the same vein, but not necessarily with the same intentions" the young Galileo devoted a work to the quantification of Dante's Purgatorio.²⁷

John Dee, writing as late as 1570 in the introduction to the first English edition to Euclid's Elements, saw the ancient philosopher in the light of divination. Dee considered geometrical reasoning to be above all a key for unlocking the mysteries of the divine cosmology and not a method for reducing a chaotic unweildly universe into easily workable and utilitarian formulae.²⁸

Research in the history of science has shown that if Aristotelain rationalism had been unevenly adopted in the Renaissance along with the idea that it is "on all counts irrational", as he mentions in The Physics, "to assign geometrical figures to simple bodies"--which is one of the aspects of the analytical approach--neither mechanics nor modern architecture could have developed. These analytical methods and quantification, although essential for the development of modern architectural thinking and mechanization of design, are initially seen as integral parts of the archaic conceptual system of architecture.

When Jacques Besson in his Théâtre des Instruments Mathématiques et Mechaniques in 1579 called modern design "fruit of geometry", he reflected on archaic preoccupations with the search for secret harmonies as well as modern aspirations for control, measurement and estimating.

In trying to analyze the nature of transformation which mechanization brought about in architecture we have stressed aspects of continuity between archaic and modern thinking.

We have shown that while optimization, empirical verification of facts, analytical methods, quantification and efficiency do fit into an integral, coherent, operational, conceptual system of design, this happened within the framework of archaic design, before efficiency was adopted as a dominant architectural norm. In other words, architectural thinking meshed with the operations of the market and with the logic of a monetary economy or mercantilistic mentality and this in turn fulfilled the interests and aspirations of a rising commercial class for domination over society and control over production and complied with what Freud called the bourgeois "reality principle". All this arose before the 'fordo mercantorum" of the end of, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In fact, as Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance humanist, argued with some exaggeration and anger, "the science of numbering, chief and most divine", the "divine arithmetic"... "should not be confused"... "with the mercantile arithmetic". Thus, as much as these intellectual tools of design belong to the mercantile longing for action, its love of busy life and business, its greed for money, its obsession with bookkeeping, bills of exchange and pricing, we also find them at home with archaic ideals of leisure and contemplation of a devoted life and of a zeal for wisdom. But one may add in the reverse that although these tools of design developed initially within what we called archaic conceptual system of architecture, they are necessary for the emergence of modern design thinking.

The Break between archic and modern

Having focused on aspects of continuity between archaic and modern conceptual systems, we turn now to the break between the two.

The contrast between the norm of purity or harmony intrinsic to archaic design thinking versus the norm of efficiency of the modern one has been already mentioned.

The other characteristic difference lies in how these conceptual elements, whose isolated presence in archaic design has been noticed, fit together under the norm of efficiency into one coherent system of thinking creating a completely new conceptual framework for architecture.

Idea and Form versus Matter

The break between archaic and modern conceptual framework of architecture is best expressed in the debate about the relation between the form of a product and its matter around the end of the sixteenth century.

The archaic point of view is represented in what has been called the "neoplatonic theory of ideas 'I. There is, however, nothing uniquely platonic or neoplatonic about it. It is presented in the writings of

Plato, elaborated in Plotinus and abundantly discussed in the Medieval and Renaissance neo-platonist writers. But it is also typical of the whole archaic world.

According to this doctrine, the design product is determined by a plan, what is referred to as Idea or sometimes as Form, which exists in a "prefigured" way prior to the product and independently of it; as Ficino, the Renaissance humanist argued, "the architect's first notion of the building ('ratio') is in his psyche as an idea". Architecture is believed to be the capturing of the idea, "the forma exemplar" and the incorporation of it in matter, within an artificial object which, to quote Plotinus, "serves as a mirror" to catch this "image". Thus in the words of Pico della Mirandola, for every building there are two images, one "ideal" in the spirit, the other, "of the senses in the marble or stone or other material".

We can see now how the doctrine fits into the framework of archaic de- sign: matter shaped in a design product follows from idea, which is nothing but the set of rules of appropriate mixing of purity and harmony. The more the product resembles the Idea, the more the norm of purity is respected, the more pollution is avoided, the more harmony is established and the more the building, the city or the landscape becomes an "opus perfectum of excellens", a perfect or optimal artificial product.

The role of the machine has been catalytic in the creation of this new way of thinking in architecture.

Mirabilia and Engines

The machine itself was as detached from the conceptual elements as they were from each other. Vitruvius, for example, mentions that machines alleviate human pain yet he does not include efficiency among the primary purposes for their use. Moreover, his use of geometry is limited to analyzing the machine in terms of two elements only, the straight line and the circle employed in a rudimentary way to describe the machine only and not to explain its making. There is very little derived from empirical observation determining its organization. Vitruvius in De Arthitectura (X, 2) does however seem to tie the machine to the archaic doctrine of correspondence between artificial objects and the astral macrocosm, judging from his statement that "mechanics is founded... on the study of what causes the circular movements of the cosmos".

A closer look at Hero of Alexandria's machines reveals that they too are unrelated to concerns of efficiency and analytical methods. His machines belong to the realm of "mathematical magic"; they are, like their sixteenth century counterparts, "thaumaturgike" whose aim is to overwhelm the spectator with awe in the contemplation of the hidden powers in the world. Or again Hero's machines belong to the class of playful objects known as 'mirabilia', and it is from these that a seventeenth century successor, Salomon de Caux drew his inspiration for the famous garden machines, meant to surprise, delight, tease and amuse, contained in his Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes of 1615.³¹

The notion of efficiency is linked with machines for the first time in a very restricted field: the military. Why the idea of economic gain through machines was not more widespread in Antiquity has been the subject of great dispute. The constraints of the slave economy are probably the major cause.³² It has been argued that within this system only the increase in the number of slaves could improve productivity. Since the foremost means of obtaining slaves was warfare, and since the means for carrying out war were limited, all efforts were centered on making it efficient. If there was an economic interest attched to military machines it was only indirectly, by insuring victory in battles and consequently bringing in slaves.³³ This explains why the catalytic role of the machine in the development of mechanization should have occurred in connection with military engines, military products, military sites and military engineers.

With the decline of the slave and feudal economies and the rise of the market another means of economic gain was revealed outside of the military operations: the control of the processes of production aimed towards efficiency.

In pre-Renaissance writings machines are not conceived differently from any other object. They fit together with all other artificial objects in the same framework of archaic thinking. By the end of the sixteenth century it is clear that the design of military machines is viewed as a violation to archaic design norms. This is because the design of the military machine finally had become associated with a new type of thinking whose elements had been dislodged from their original mold and combined in a novel way.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century we see the concepts and methods we referred to before as separate entities assembled in the design of the military machine. The association between them becomes so strong that the machine seems for some time to be the only object capable of embodying the new thinking. Eventually the thinking is abstracted from its catalyst; once this abstraction occurs, the new type of thinking can be applied to other objects besides the machine. It can be generalized and projected to the design of any product, taking the place of the archaic doctrines of architecture.

The Discorsi e Dimonstratiorte MathematiC-he intorno a Due Nuove Scienze, a book by Galileo written in spite of a prohibition by the Church and subsequently published by Elzevier at Leiden in 1638, marked the decisive turning point in the conceptual revolution which eventually shattered the archaic framework of design. If the machine was the catalyst for this change, as we will show, then surely Galileo was the technician who gave mechanization an enduring cast through his work.

'The book, according to Galileo's account, owes a debt to the work carried out by technicians in the arsenal of Venice. It opens with a homage to the Venetians for the "constant activity which they display" in their "famous arsenal". Special tribute is payed to the artisans, "some who, partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations, have become highly expert an clever in explanation. '' ³⁴

The activities and, even more, the theories of these "first rank men" are the subject of the first pages of the Discorsi.. These artisans, we read, employed "stocks, scaffolding and bracings of larger dimensions for launching a big vessel than they do for a small one... in order to avoid the danger of the ship parting under its own weight".

In support of this practice one of the artisans explained that "many devices which succeed on a small scale do not work on a largescale" (emphasis added).

There is a similarity between this statement about scale and an observation made by Leonardo da Vinci in Manuscript A on the equivilance of pillars on struts and on beams. Leonardo remarked that "a support with twice the diameter will carry eight times as much weight as another, both having the same height" and that "many little supports held together are capable of bearing a greater load than if they are separated from each other". But Leonardo neither characterized this as exceptional in relation to contemporary doctrines of design nor did he attempt to generalize such observations.

On the contrary, Galileo focused on the event as an anomaly with broad implications. He saw it as putting into question what was seen as an evident conclusion stenuning out of the archaic doctrine of primacy of Idea over Matter whereby if a large object was "constructed in such a way that its parts bear to ~one another the same ratio as in a smaller one, and-, if the.smaller is sufficiently strong for the purpose for Which it was designed" then "the larger also should be able to withstand any severe and destructive tests to which it may be subjected".

He saw an even more serious challenge to the archaic doctrine, posed by the results of empirical observation:

"since mechanics has its foundation in geometry, where mere size cuts no figure... the properties of circles, triangles, cylinders, cones and other solid figures" do not "change with size".

In other words geometry and proportions, which were considered as ex- pressions of the Idea, could not control the structural behavior of the product which was bound also to Matter, that is size and, as is added at a later point, material out of which the machine is constructed.

Contrast the statement of Galileo with Alberti's who, two hundred years before Galileo wrote:

"We can in our Thought and Imagination contrive perfect Forms of Buildings entirely separate from Matter by settling and regulating in a certain Order the Disposition and Conjunction of the Lines and Angles. Which being granted, we shall call the Design a firm and graceful pre-ordering of the Lines and Angles, conceived in the Mind, and contrived by an ingenious Artist".³⁵

A similiar contrast emerges in the justification of the use of building models by Alberti. He suggests the use of "real Models of Wood or other Substance" .' These models are not for "charming the Eye", but to examine, in addition to aspects of "ornament", "how the Walls are made, and how strong and firm the Covering". The model therefore is explicitly applied to test issues 'of "Strength" without any awareness of problems which will emerge out of the reduction of size in the simulation.

Furthermore there is a criticism of the archaic doctrine by referring to the notion of the abstract and to the "deviations observed between the machines in the concrete and in the abstract", upsetting the belief that the former had to obey the latter. On the contrary, for Galileo the "abstract", the Idea were reflections of the "concrete" and the Matter and became subservient to the size and material of products.

The ancient formulae are broken, the system of design overturned. "The mere fact that it is matter" frees the machine from the hold of invariant, archaic "correspondences II. At the same time, however, the machine is subjugated to a new rule, tied to the changing material conditions, conditions which can be known only through "observation" and "demonstrated by geometrical methods ". If a large machine is built "of the same material and in the same proportion" as a smaller one, then the larger "will not be so strong or so resistant against violent treatment.” Proportions and form alone could not keep it from breaking.

The initial observations made by Galileo on machines are then transferred to construction elements such as pillars, cantilevers and architraves. Thus gradually the complete building fabric is seen in analogy with the machine. Its form does not follow the Idea, instead it is determined by the behavior of matter. The shape of its components depends on their material, their composition and their size.

What holds for machines holds for buildings also. Similarly what holds for buildings holds also for any natural body as long as it is seen as a construction. The form of a skeleton of a horse, a dog, a cat, a grasshopper as well as an ant are examples invoked by Galileo to point to the dependence of form on size and material generalizing mechanics as a theory of construction applicable to any fabric. The justification of the form of the machine becomes the explanation of the form of nature:

"To illustrate briefly, I have sketched a bone whose natural length has been increased three times and whose thickness has been multiplied until, for a correspondingly large animal, it would perform the same function which the small bone performs for its small animal. From the figures here shown you can see how out of proportion the enlarged bone appears. Clearly then, if one wishes to maintain in a great giant, the same proportion of limb as found in an ordinary man, he must either find a harder and stronger material for making the bones, or he must admit a diminution of strength in comparison with men of medium stature; for if his weight be increased inordinately, he will fall and be crushed under his own weight. Whereas if the size of the body is diminished, the strength of that body is not diminshed in the same proportion; indeed the smaller the body the greater its relative strength. Thus a small dog could probably carryon his back two or three dogs of his own size; but I believe that a horse could not carry even one of his own size."

The aim of Galileo's innovation was not to upset only the belief that placed the Idea on a higher plane than matter and myth above observation and empirical data. His main objective was efficiency in building. The search for efficiency is revealed in the norm presupposed behind the notion of the "limit", absolute resistance in the propositions of the Two New Sciences; that, "for every machine and structure, whether artificial or natural, there is set a necessary limit beyond which neither art nor nature can pass", that there is "one and one only" structural element which, when loaded, performs to the "limit between breaking and not breaking" while any other would either break or be "able to withstand some additional force tending to break it" being redundantly strong.

The notion of the limit brings us to a new definition for monstrosity and implicit ugliness:

"you can plainly see the impossibility of increasing the size of structures to vast dimensions either in art or in nature; likewise the impossibility of building ships, palaces or temples of enormous size in such a way that their oars, yards, beams, iron-bolts and in short, all their other parts will hold together; nor can nature produce trees of extraordinary size because the branches would break down under their own weight; so also it would be impossible to build up the bony structures of men, horses or other animals so as to hold together and perform their normal functions if these animals were to be increased enormously in height: for this increase in height can be accomplished only be employing a material which is harder and stronger than usual or by enlarging the size of the bones, thus changing their shape until the form and appearance of the animals suggest a monstrosity..."

The new definition of monstrosity which once more implies a departure from archaic doctrines which saw in the monster and the deformed an evidence of pollution. For Galileo the explanation does not contain anything at all punitive.³⁶

Mechanization of the Building Plan

As we have already suggested the machine was identified as an anomaly in relation to archaic thinking and subsequently used to undermine its dominance over architecture. The machine also played the role of a conceptual catalyst to bring together isolated pre-existing elements into a new conceptual system. To these two methodological or heuristic uses of the machine in development of modern architecture was added a third.

It was a short hand description of the new conceptual system of design. When a designer would say that a building was a machine, this meant that the concepts and methods to be followed in the design of a building were contained in mechanics. In addition behind this brief description of the new conceptual system as a machine was a rhetorical device which made the generalization of the new philosophy of construction legitimate.

It made the application of mechanics appear through an argument by analogy as desirable and permissible to objects other than the machines.³⁷ It was an invitation to make buildings appear removed from the normative network that linked them in the archaic world with the divine bodies of the astral orbits, the musical instruments, the human corpus and attached to the new world order of the market and of effective production.

Initially, the emergence of a new conceptual system impressed very few. Indicative are Galileo's politico ideological troubles; as Giorgio de Santillana remarked, "Roman society hardly took notice of the whole affair... There were more absorbing subjects to talk about, in that summer, 1633, such as Bernini's enormous and magnificent baldachin with the twisted columns which had just been inaugurated in St. Peter's 'I.

About a century later the situation had changed. When the cracks appeared on St. Peter's dome it was only "three mathematicians", Le Sueur, Jacquier, and Boscowich, men who were attached to the new framework of thinking, who were invited to report on the causes of the damage and to recommend solutions.

By the end of the eighteenth century mechanization of design spread beyond the problems of construction and stability into the plan of the building. The new thinking was transferred intact to deal with the efficient performance of the building as an envelope of activities and processes, what we will refer to simply as the building's function.

It is again to military architecture that one must turn for first developments. "The force of the fortress depends more on the quality of the plan than on the thickness of the walls" noted Francesco di Giorgio underlining the superior performance in defense of the triangular bastion over the circular tower.38 Two centuries later, in the time of Louis XIV, the optimal shape of the bastion was seen as the one which achieves maximum coverage for a minimum number of canons and operators; this problem brought together the most systematically collected empirical data and a most advanced ,contemporary geometrical thinking.³⁹

By the end of the eighteenth century the numerous projects by the French Academy of Science for the Hotel Dieu in Paris⁴⁰ and the elaborate calculations of Bentham for the multipurpose controversial Panopticon building41 reveal that mechanics had extended beyond the material fabric into problems of space allocation and arrangement of activities.

The spreading of mechanization of architecture was the result of a combination of conceptual developments and of the emergence of new interests. It was also the outcome of the establishment of new institutions. Intellectual innovations can be completely ineffective if not accompanied by institutional changes. Rarely in history have arguments themselves provided sufficient grounds for the adoption of the new thinking frame- works possible. This was the case with mechanization of architecture.

The establishment of a number of institutions in Europe indeed helped diffuse the mechanization of design and in turn accelerate the creation of new knowledge within the conceptual framework. Among these were the Academie Royale d'Architecture, the Academie des Sciences⁴² the Jardin du Roi, the army and especially, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees and the Ecole Militaire de Mezieres.

Under instructions from Colbert, the Academie Royale d'Architecture undertook in 1678 the extensive study of building materials. The academicians observed in a systematic and detailed way the quality of stones used in construction around and within Paris and studied the role of the sun, the wind, the rain and even the moon on their aging and corruption.⁴²

Other studies followed; strength tests of wood, metal and glass rods by Mariotte (1670-80) bending tests on oak wood beams by Parent (1707-08), the measurement of the sagging prior to rupture by Buffon. These were some of the first steps, inconceivable without institutional guidance and support, which later culminated in such projects as the first bridge over the Seine at Neui11y (1768-1772)., whose pier size was determined through strict calculations stemming from mechanics, and the Church of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, today's Pantheon, the first building whose column dimensions were dictated by rigorous application of mechanics.⁴³

Mechanization and the Aesthetic Approach

But mechanization was not the only impact of the market. We mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that other approaches to architecture emerged simultaneously with mechanization. This approach is opposed not only to archaic thinking but also to the mechanization of architecture.

The norm which governs it is neither sacred harmony nor economic efficiency, but aesthetic gratification. Aesthetic gratification meant search for pleasure in the visual organization of design products and was characterized by fantasy, a distaste for analytical methods, contempt for empirically founded data and an impatience with logical procedure. The aesthetic approach seemed to be if not hostile at least indifferent to mechanization. On a deeper level it was complementary to it.

To a great extent the growth of the mechanization of design, as we have already mentioned, followed from a deeper interest in economic gain, after the market emerged as the prime mover and organizer of human relations. The control of the cost of production became a major pre- occupation.

It eliminated the archaic fusion of wish and accomplishment by pressing the designer to pin down his aims through logic, observation, measurement and testing, prohibiting him from dreaming away his plans.

Aesthetization of design, on the other hand, encouraged fantasy; it played with make believe and placed the user of the environment in as-if situations, although in a different way from archaic design. Its opposition to mechanization was not regressive. It reacted to an interest equally new, equally linked with the emergence of the market, but its direction was different: the maximization of consumption. Its aim was to make the design product an object of desire, to turn buildings, cities and furniture into an intricate matrix which titilated the senses.

It also helped, through the dressing up of buildings and cities in the manner of antique times perceived as heroic, to provide an image of continuity, stability, respectability and legitimacy to the absolutist state, a new political order protective of the still fragile network of the growing commercial transactions.

Since both aesthetization and mechanization of design followed from the same social order and the same culture, one could not replace the other. Their opposition reflected on architecture a conflict which went deep into the nature of the operations of the market.

As pistons in a working engine give the impression that one is opposed to the other, aesthetization and mechaniztion of design appeared to be antagonistic although they pumped life into the body of the same society and could not exist independently.

The Building as an Instrument and the Arbitrary Beauties

The case of Claude Perrault's design for the Paris Observatory ⁴⁴ is illustrative. In it, he was accused of ignoring the message of mechanization, by Cassini, the Italian astronomer and first director of the Observatory. Cassini complained that Perrault was too pre- occupied with the orders and with their correct, beautiful and majestic arrangement, concerns typical of the architect. For Cassini it was obvious that "even the building is an instrument", a motto which has been repeated many times down to the present day in one form or another.⁴⁵

Now Perrault was anything but a stranger to mechanics. He was acquainted with science as a medical doctor, as a member of the Academie des Sciences and as a specialist in the construction of machines and in their theory and practice. What made such an expert discard his knowledge -all evidence pointing to the truth of Cassini's testimony? It was not lack of awareness.

Perrault himself made clear in his famous essay Ordonnance des cinq Especes de Colonnes (1682) that the "positive beauties" of mechanics were insufficient to explain why the design of some buildings gratify us. Another consideration and another way of thinking was required to account for what he called the "arbitrary" beauties .⁴⁶

The "positive beauties" of design reflected the positive characteristics of mechanics, the norm of efficient allocation of resources in the construction of a project, the objective facts of the behavior of the materials which in turn reflected the permanent properties of nature. The "arbitrary beauties" expressed only the values of society and as a result were temporary and subjective in compari- son to the positive nature of the physical world.

The testimony of Perrault is significant for it helps us to understand the conflict which divided architecture not as a result of lack of knowledge and absence of dialogue between the two parties but as the outcome of two attitudes opposed from the most early stage of their development. Perrault was a theoretician and a practitioner at ease in both approaches. He saw clearly that the two were fundamentally at odds and had nothing to gain from one another. As the techniques of mechanics steadily developed the ideas of aesthetics also advanced and it became harder for the mechanical side of design to share notions, expressions, idioms, heroes, prototypes and even institutional settings with the aesthetic tendency. Belidor47 the prominent engineer and builder of a large number of bridges and other large scale projects at the beginning of the eighteenth century, found inconceivable how architects operated without any knowledge of what the engineer considered as fundamental construction tools, while Boullee48 a prominent designer of projects mostly left unbuilt, stressed that architecture had nothing in common with construction.

The emergence of a new way of thinking in design had been accompanied by the generation of new institutions to support it. In a similar manner the appearance of two opposed conceptual systems by the beginning of the eighteenth century was to be followed by institutional antagonism.

We already referred to the role of the Royal Academy of Architecture in the mechanization of design during the last part of the seventeenth century. But equal in importance were its discussions on aesthetics. The dual role for which the Academy was initially intended only lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century. It was then that the newly founded Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees drained from the Academy the most important part of its technical teaching. By the end of the eighteenth century, two entirely new institutions, the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Polytechnique take the place of the old Academy, each charting its own direction, each developing its own curriculum, its own style of teaching and its own image of design in the minds of its students. In the Ecole Polytechnique mechanics was purified, sharpened and carried to extreme heights of excellence and specialization,⁴⁹ while at the Ecole des Beaux Arts aesthetics found equal success and became a powerful design method that imbued the design product with imagination, desire and flamboyance.

The Functionalist Antidote

The conceptual and institutional division between mechaniztion and aesthetics in design was the source of conflicts, confusion and redundancy. The need to arrest the negative aspects of this split triggered attempts at reconciliation. The lack of a common conceptual framework between engineer and architect was seen as the cause of losses in the construction and planning of buildings and larger design projects. Campaigns originating on the side of the state or other institutions representing mostly collective social interests tried to bring the two approaches together into a collaborative relation. Such efforts were usually carried out by designers animated by a mixture of pragmatism and vague idealism. Cesar Dali and his monumental work, the Revue General de l'Architecture et des Ttavaux Publics ⁵⁰ offers one of the earliest and most prominent examples of this reforming spirit aimed at overcoming, for the sake of a more socially and economically rational building profession, the growing divergence between "architects and engineers... perfectly isolated from each other".

Parallel to this was another set of attempts, more ideological than idealistic in motivation, which saw in the split between architects and engineers the danger of collapse for the overall design thinking and, to a certain degree, for the culture and society out of which it was born. A credibility crisis was at hand, and designers were afraid of succumbing to it.

Functionalism did not attempt to attack the causes of the conflict which stemmed from the new social and cultural order that the commercial revolution brought about. Nor did it try to reconcile the conflict. It only gave an appearance of a solution--an easy exit out of the impasse in which consumption and fantasy curtailed the potential for production and in which the less left for production diminished in turn the potential for consumption. It was to present saving and production symbolically represented by a structure-- crystalic or organic--stripped of ornament as gratification, as a desirable object of consumption. It tried to overcome the conflict between mechanization and aesthetics making them appear ~ each worked for the good of the other. It made every design decision seem like the result of engineering necessity. The visual order of buildings imitated diagrams found on engineering drawing boards, primers of geometry, textbooks on crystalography, handbooks of biology.

The way functionalists classified and evaluated the buildings of the past followed the same direction. Viollet le Duc, probably the most important representative of this approach, saw in the Medieval cathedral "the stability of every point of support... regulated by the kind and amount of work it had to perform. Every thrust of an arch found another thrust to cancel it... the whole system... was a frame". ⁵¹

The aim of functionalism was not to make utilitarian, rational, scientifically thought out or functional buildings but to signify, a word used by Fremin in his Memoires of 1702, one of the earliest functionalist documents.⁵² What counted in functionalism was how the building looked and not how it was made.

The marriage between aesthetic gratification and mechanization of design led to the birth of a style. Hence the elimination of ornaments and the use of only the "essential", or rather what appeared to be so, in the design recommended by Laugier, Lodoli and Milizia as early as the eighteenth century and by Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier as late as the twentieth; hence a certain preference for shapes and forms, of "elementary", puristic, tectonic components of the rectangular grid, circle, straight line and right angle to make the thinking behind the building appear geometrical (cartesian as it has often been referred to), all based on the vulgarization that engineers think in terms of circles, straight lines and right angles; hence the use of cubes, prisms and cylinders, conceived as the volumes that a machine can produce more easily (an idea that Frank Lloyd Wright believed and that the Bauhaus liked to propogate), hence the covering of masonry walls and even plain carpentry by plaster, by plywood or simply by color to imitate machine made products.⁵³

Not that this was the first time that the art of trompe l'oeil was applied to create illusions of building materials. But certainly the illusion itself was of a new kind.

Post Functionalism or New Humanism

We finally arrive to the 1970's, a decade which some architectural critics have characterized as the first truly post functionalist. The present situation is marked by the following:

1. Functionalism as an architectural movement has been exhausted.

2. No clear direction in architecture has emerged out of its ashes, the term post-functionalism signifying more the end of a certain approach than the beginning of a new one.

3. A pessimism has arisen about the future of mechanization in design.

4. A critique in the name of human rights has opposed mechanization for trying to subjugate the man made environment.

Functionalism is over, at least as we know it and as it has evolved since the eighteenth century. The decisive attacks arose from an impatience with its recourse to visual rhetoric in order to sublimate deeper social and cultural conflicts. Its solutions seem more suited to another, earlier epoch.

The critiques against mechanization of design in turn 'are part of a much broader disenchantment with technology and scientific thinking. Some identify technology as a villian to be eliminated; but others, correctly, see in it shortcomings which must be redeemed, horizons which must be expanded. The latter critiques have complained that mechanics, because of its narrow definition of efficiency, restricted to the set of construction elements of a design project, was unable to cope with the interaction between project and the quality of human relations. By developing concepts and techniques adapted to the behavior of natural objects and isolating the material aspects of the project from human relations, mechanization was able effectively to control nature in a way unprecedented in archaic societies. But this conceptual revolution followed the lead of the market towards an atomized social order very different from the collective structure of tribes or even from the kinship and manor dominated feudal society.

Today we are not as confident as we were in mechaniztion. We are ready to apply only partially such a limited way of thinking to design. But this does not mean that the grasp that mechanics has on nature should be loosened. It should be complemented rather by a more comprehensive approach. Socio-economic evaluations of technical plans which include the so-called externalities of a project and which introduce the imperative of the general interest to design are steps in this direction.

A project incorporates hours of work, a combination of human operations and efforts, but a project also acts on human ties and the flow and concentration of human power. Dependencies, domination, reciprocity are affected by the control a man-made object imposes on human behavior. These are issues that mechanization of design has not yet broached. If there is anything mechanical about the mechaniztion of design in the sense of being rigid, naive, thoughtless and unable to cope with complexity, it refers to the failure to relate questions of human relations to the various elements of material reality.

Buildings, their details and assemblages, have been linked with cost and function. They have been seen in terms of the behavior of the materials of their construction and performance. But from this view- point it appears as only through a glass darkly that each design product is a petrified human association and a human interraction to come.

The reason for these new concerns arises from the twilight we may be witnessing of the market as the prime mover of society. In this respect, perhaps we are in a situation symetrically opposed to that of the seventeenth century in Europe, with the market now retiring from the stage of the world theatre.

A second critism of mechanization in design, not completely unrelated to the first, concerns the carrying over of the model of mechanics to objects different than those for which it was initially intended: urban complexes, regions, social organizations, symbolic constructs, human psyche.

But if design is to satisfy contemporary humanistic imperatives, then any project which has a major impact on the quality of human relations requires a deep understanding of society, a knowledge which cannot be attained through the observation of human behavior and experiments with human subjects, as techniques transfered from mechanics have indicated.

Condorcet went beyond the confines of mechanics and aesthetics in design as early as the eighteenth century when for the first time in the history of architecture he advocated the participation of the community of users in the decision making process in the design of a hospital.⁵⁴ Such procedures of human interraction should not be seen as an exception to the rule in architecture. They are the essence of humanistic design and its source of creativity. The vision of Condorcet was to make the plan the outcome not of the ~ of Alberti, not of the Matter of Galileo nor of the Arbitrary Beauties of Perrault, but of human dialogue.

To develop such a new humanistic way of thinking by building on what mechanics has achieved and moving beyond it--as well as adding to the techniques of signification aesthetics developed but also sur- passing their attachment to the service of consumption--is not a task which can be accomplished overnight.

A large number of the contemporary user-oriented techniques of design do not offer a genuine alternative to existing practices. A critique of such techniques is not attempted in this paper. We have only to state here that the tyranny of the thinking of mechanics--and of aesthetics--is still to be felt in several of these efforts. Such participatory techniques have not yet succeeded in annulling pre- existing, historically inherited constraints and dependencies, in permitting a truly democratic intercourse which a humanistic architecture requires.

We have discussed the process of mechanization of design as an evolution in thinking, a shift in the rules of the game by which designers developed plans and evaluated them, a change in the conceptual framework of design. We have tried to show that the use of machines in buildings or the stylistic affinity between machines and buildings which are often referred to as the heart of mechanization, are phenomena which actually followed changes in mentality.

We have also tried to pla.ce mechanization of design in relation to antagonistic or conciliatory movements and to show how closely linked were these intellectual developments and institutional accomodations which followed them to interests associated with the operations of the market.

The market of course is not the sole cause of mechanization of design. For the new way of thinking to develop, a number of concepts and methods had to be available to draw from. These resources were not created with the aim of aiding the new type of thinking to come about, but the new thinking did not hesitate to plunder the goods that older inquiries had produced and that past societies had offered as answers to very different questions. The richness of an intellectual heritage and the ease with which such treasures can be culled was a prerequisite for the birth of a new way of thinking. A situation of intellectual openness, where the flexibility and freedom to assemble old pieces of cultures in new ways existed, was another valuable prerequisite. And certainly the creativity of the human mind and the pleasure it obtains by structuring was perhaps the most basic precondition for the new thinking to appear.

All these factors played an important role in the emergence and development of the mechanization of design in the seventeenth century, but even together they do not completely explain why a certain direction was chosen over the countless other turns which human inventiveness might have taken.

The development of the theories and methods of design was anything but a constant process. Growth was discontinuous and often unbalanced, according to changes of interest. Cost, effort and redundancy were the price of this evolution.

New interests now require a more humanistic phase in the mechanization of design. Some of the existing conceptual tools will vanish. But as in the seventeenth century, which witnessed the dawn of mechanization of design, a large number of pieces of the new phase lie scattered around us. They await a new conceptual and institutional framework in which to gain identity, recognition and currency.

NOTES

1 For the development of the history of engineering and of construc- tion techniques, we suggest Straub, H., A History of Civil Engineering, 1952., Collins, P., Concrete: The Vision cfa New Architecture., Davey, N., A History of Building Materials., Giedion, S., Mechanization Takes Command. (about machines in the construction and use of buildings), Parsons, W.B., Engineers and Engineering in the Renaissance. (although not a recent book, it is still a good introduction to the engineering of that period).

2 Hero of Alexandria, probably of the 1st century, the Di Herone Alessandrine de Gli Automati was published in Venice in 1589.

3 Alberti, L.B., De Re Aedificatoria, 1485, Book V, Ch. III, P 86. in his description of the house of a tyrant. Eng. transl. J. Leoni reprinted New York, 1966.

4 Fontana, Domenico. Della Trasportatione dell' Obelisco Vaticano... Rome, l590~ d'Onofrio, C., Gli Obelisci di Roma, 1967; Dibner, B., Moving the Obelisks, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.: and Oechslin, W., La Fama di Aristotele Fioravanti Ingegneree Architetto.

5 Agricola, or Georg Bauer, De Re Metallica., Basel, 1556.

6 Perrault, Cl., Recueil de Plusieurs Machines de Nouvelle Invention. Paris, 1700 (published posthumously).

7 Gerli, A., "Riflesso per cangiar l'aria dei spedali nelle prigioni ed in ogni altra publica coabita,tione" in Opuscoli, Parma, 1785.

8 For further and more detailed reading on the application of this model, see 1650-1800: Les Systèmes Conceptuels de l'Architecture, a research project funded by the C.O.R.D.A. of the Ministere de Ie Culture, France. By A. Tzonis et al., 1975, Cambridge. The work proposes a dis- course analysis method for describing continuities, breaks and innovations in the various levels of the conceptual systems of architecture in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. See also, A. Tzonis, M. Freeman, R. Berwick, Discourse Analysis and the Logic of Design, GSD Publication Series, Cambridge, 1978.

9 For the Aristotelian ideas of mechanics see Aristotle, Physics especially Book VII and Questiones Mechanicae attributed to Aristotle. For the history of the concepts of modern mechanics see Duhem, P., Les Origines de laStatique, 2 vols. Paris, 1905-6., and Dijksterhuis, FCJ., The Mechanization of the World Picture, Oxford, 1961., and Clagett, M., The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages.

10 This basic division of the architectural history pays more attention to the "meaning of architectural products, their use, the inten- tions of their creators and the attitudes towards them of the various social groups rather than the visual or technological organization. Looking at the factors which affected a major change in the evolution of thinking we find that they are connected with the emergence of the market as the major determinant of human relations.

This view of modern architecture and of the process of modernization as a result of the commerical revolution differs fundamentally from the studies which hold the industrial revolution and the technological inven- tions as the moving forces in the development of architecture. Machinery and technological products are not an index of modernity in our approach. They are introduced "to increase the control...over the pace and flow of work" (Keith Tribe. Land, Labour ~nd Econimic Discourse, London, 1978.). The basic periodization of history in terms of archaic and modern owes considerably to the work of Karl Polanyi on socio-economic develop- ment. According to Polanyi there is a fundamental transformation of society and economy in history which has been carried out by the introduc- tion of the market trade. This commercial revolution is the prime mover of human evolution. This model differs fundamentally from other approaches which the so called industrial, urban, scientific or demographic evolutions as the prime movers in history. K. Polanyi, et aI, Trade and Market in the Early Empires, Chicago, 1957. See in particular, "Aristotle Discovers the Economy"; K.Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York, 1944. Also, G. Dalton, Economic Development and Social Change, New York, 1971.

11 The treatment of the isoperimetrical problems of Zenodoros can be found in the writings of Pappose On the history of the problem, see G. Sarton, "The Tradition of Zenodoros", Isis, 28, 1938, pp. 461-462; and in, "The Years 'Forty Three"', ~ 34, 1942-~

12 Motion and Mechanics, (Fararo Nat. Edition XI, pp. 145-147). Quoted by L. Geymonat, Galileo Galilei, New York, 1957, p. 52.

13 Dialogue, Florence, 1957, (Fararo Nat. Edition VII, p. 80). Quoted by L. Geymonat, Op Cit., p. 184.

14 Letter of Galileo to Liceti, (Fararo Nat. Edition XVIII, p. 263). 15 Aristotle, The Physics.

16. Pauli, W., "The Influence of Archetypical Ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler" in Jung, C.G. and Pauli, W., The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, English Trans., London, 1955.

17 See "Letter to Hefulontius" quoted in Jung,~. Additional references to the quarrel in Peter J. Amman, "The Musical Theory and philosophy of Robert Fludd".

18 Kepler, J., ~pologia, p. 460.

19 Phillips, D., "Paradigms and Incommensurability", in Theory and Society, vol 2, no. 1, Spring 1975.

20 Kepler, Ibid.

21

22 Jaulin, R., La Geomancie, Analyse Formelle, Paris, 1964; Doutte, E., Magie et Religion Dans L'Afrique du Nord, 1909; Rouhier, A., Traite Elementaire De Geomancie, 1935. The archaic doctrines of African tribes reveal the same basic point of view; for examples see Griaule, M., Dieu D'Eau, Paris, 1948.

23 James Ackerman, "Aes sine Scientia Nihil est, Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan", Art Bulletin, XXXI, 1949.

24 Oresme, Nicloe Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde, published in Medieval Studies, 1941-43. Also Tractatus de Latitudine Formarum, by the same author (2nd ed.) Padua, 1486 where we read: "En seront examinees plas clairement et plus facilement des la que quelque chose qui leur est semblable est dessine en une figure plane, et que cette chose rendue claire par un exemple visible, est saisie rapidement et parfaitement par l'imagination des figures aide grandement a la conaissance des choses memes..." (Quoted by Duhem, ~., p. 379). Oresme concluded that the graphic des~ cription of all problems can be reduced to six simple figues and their combinations. (Duhem, ~., pp. 381-384).

25 An English schoolman of the fourteenth century, Richard Swineshead, is ascribed as the author of the Liber Calculationum.

26 Mersenne (1588-1648). Lenoble, R., Mersenne ou la Naissance du Mecanisme, Paris, 1943 is one of the most admirable studies of the transition between archaic thinking and the new science at the moment of "concordisme"-- the efforts to bridge the doctrines of the Bible with modern rationality. Lenoble quotes fascinating problems of optimal "space allocation" applied to biblical discussions by Mersenne in his La Verit~ des Sciences such as La geometrie des parallelogrannnes nous fait comprendre connnent les anges peuvent ~tre a ~la fois au ciel et sur la terre...le calcul des surfaces, connnent la vallee de Josaphat pourra facilement contenir tous les morts au jour du jugement dernier".

27 "Due lezioni all' academia Fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza del Inferno di Dante" Le Opere di G. Galilei Edit. Nat: U. Marchesini (ed.) Florence, 1899, vol. 9.

28 Yates, F., Theater of the World, 1969, (contains references to John Dee and his Preface). Enrico de Anelis, II Metodo Geometrico Nella Filosofia del Seicento gives a very good survey of the impact of the Euclidean method on modern scientific thinking. See also Gilbert, N.M., Renaissance Concepts of Method.

29 Pico dell a Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, Translation, C.G. Wallis, 1965.

30 The label neo-platonic was applied by historians who resisted against the anarchionistic interpretation of Renaissance architecture, seeing Renaissance architecture theory of proportions and geometry as the result of theological preoccupations rather than of scientific or aesthetic thinking. It has become evident that this neo-platonism was exaggerated for it overshadowed other concerns of the period--equally remote from... with, for example, magic.

Most recently, attention has been payed to Hermetism, due largely to the influence of such studies as Frances Yares' and Paolo Rossi's as an alternative tradition in Renaissance architecture theory and practice. Both views present problems. Neo-platonism and hermetism are tightly syncronized, which makes it difficult to isolate works which rep- resent one or the other; and neither is capable of characterizing on its own the conceptual organization of the period, being a partial incidence of the more global archaic conceptual framework.

31 Note that "mechanical" was associated with adultery during the Middle Ages due to an etymological error associating the machine with "moechos" which, in ancient Greek meant adulterer, the implication being that the adulterinae arts were proceeding secretly in their work with penetrating ingenuity. Taylor, J., (edit.), The Didascalicon, New York, 1961, p. 191.

32 For an explanation of the technological developments related to social change see White, 1., "What accelerated technical progress in the Western Middle Ages in Crombie, A. C., Scientific Change, 1963. for a point of view contrary to the one we present here, see Koyre, A., "Du Mond de l'Alea pres a l"Univers de la Precision", in Critique, Sept., 1948.

33 Silbemer, E., La Guerre Dans la Pensee Economique du XVle Siecle, 1939.

34 The following statements by Galileo are quoted from the Discorsi e Dimonstratione Matematiche intormo a Due Nuove Scienze.

35 Alberti, De Re Adji Ficatoria, 1485, Book I, chapter 1. This theme reoccurs in the writing of Plotinus who remarked that a house was first an idea and then a concrete reality in Plotj.nus, Ennead, 1.6.1. quoted in Panofsky, Ibid., p. 187. Thomas Aquinas in Thomas Aquinas, Quod Libeta IV.i.i., q~d in Panofsky, Ibid., p. 196 and Meister Eckhardt in Eckhardt, M. Predigten, Nr. 101, quoted by Panofsky, ~., p. 198, also shared the view that man-made objects were but realizations of the same forms cogitated beforehand in the mind, and Ficino argued along the same lines that "the architect starts conceiving a notion ('ratio') of the building as an idea in his psyche. More extensive discussion of Ficino on this topic is in Chastel, A, Marsile Ficin Et L'Art. It refers to Ficino's Comment. In Convivium, V,S and to Fico's Commento 11,6.

A text particularly explicit in presenting this archaic point pf view in architecture still alive during the Renaissance "...one can increase the measures and numbers, but they should always remain in the same ratios.

And whosoever should presume to transgress this rule would create a monster, he would break and violate natural laws". Francesco Giorgi's Memorandum for the Church of S. Francesco della Vigna, dated 1535 (quoted in Appendix 1, pp. 136-138 of R. Wittkover.

An extensive analysis of the concepts of Idea of Form is given in Panofsky, E. Idea, A Concept in Art Theory, New York, 1968 (originally published in Berlin in 1924). There has been serious debate concerning whether or not Galileo ever actually transcended a belief in the doctrine of the supremacy of Idea over Matter. Thus his lines on geometry and nature, from his Saggiatore are often quoted to prove that he did not. The book of nature, he says, "is written in a mathematical language whose char- actors are triangles, circles and other gjeometrical figures", and his reduction of the various building elements into prisms, cylinders and cubes may recall the archaic, platonic and neo-platonic commitment to geometry, the framework which his interpretations of geometry fits into is new, reversing the archaic framework.

It is true also that Galileo refused to believe in Kepler's model of the eliptical orbits of the planets, prefering the Copernicean circular model. This, several authors and especially A. Koyre in his, Etudes Galileennes, 1939, interpret as an evidence of Galileo's neo-platonism, of his being a victim of "hantise de la circularit~" (the haunting spell of circularity). Furthermore, E. Panofsky, in his Galileo as a Critic of the ~, the Haugue, 1954, refers to Galileo's corresp~ndence with MOnsignore Gianbattista Agucchi and to Agucchi's Discorso del Mezzo as evidences of Galileo's attachment to "mezzanita", what we may call "middleness". However, the Due Nuove Scienze shows no trace of such tendencies. The geometrization of nature is only a means to identify not yet conceived perfect forms of the artificial.

36 Already in Arlstotle's Generation of Animals, IV monstrosity, which is still explained by reference to the domination of Form over Matter as the case "whenever the Formal (eidos) nature has not gained control over the Material (uair) nature" (trans. A.L. Peck, 1942, is given an empirical, statistical definition: "the clan of things contrary to Nature, although... not...in her entirety but only...in the generality of cases".

37 Legitimation is used in the sense as it is in; Habermas, J." Legitimation Crisis, Boston" 1975. ;For him it is lIthe process that elicits generalized motives..,. that is, diffuse mass loyalty but avoids participationl'.

The analogy between machines and architectural objects is to be -found already in Vitruvius. He sees the design of both as determined only through proportions. He specifies the various parts of machines and of buildings using exclusively a module without referring to size.

In Book III, Chapter 1 on the design of temples he says liThe composition of temples... depends on proprtion... a fixed module... for the parts of a building and for the whole". Similarly in Book X, Chapter 10 on the design of catapults he asserts that their construction depends on proportions and that all their dimensions should be determined "from the length of the arrow which the machine is to let fly". For example, the size of the opening of the frame is specified only as the ninth part of the arrow.

Luca Pacioli a Renaissance theoretician of design and a mathematician has the same outlook. In the second chapter of his De DivinaProportione (1509) the analogy between military machines and military architecture products is stressed and right proportion is seen as the common determinant in their design: "Se ben se guard a generalmente tutte sue artigliarie, prendise qual voglia, commo bastioni e altri repari bombarde, briccole, trabochi, mangani, hohonfee, baliste, catapulte, arieti, testudini, grelli gatti, con tutte altre innumerabili machine ingeni e instumenti, sempre con forza de numeri mesura elor proportioni se t1"ovaranno fabricati e formati. Che altro sono roche, torri revelini, muri antemuri fossi ponti, turrioni, merli, manteletti e altrefortezze nelle terri citta e castelli, che tutta geometria e proportioni con debiti livelli e archipendoli librati e asettati"?

38 Francesco di Giorgip Trattato, Book IV. This statement contrasts with another of his: "The first and most perfect form of all is the round figure" in reference to the shape of temples (quoted from Trattato, Book V, Line 394). This contrast reveals the weakening of the archaic doctrine of perfect forms.

39 The history of scientification of fortification design and of the optimization of the bastion has not yet been written. See Horst De la Croix, "The literature of fortifications in Renaissance Italy". Technology and Culture, Vol. IV, No.1, Winter, 1963 and from the same author, "Military architecture and the radial city plan in the 16th century Italy", Art Bulletin, 4, 1962. Galileo himself lectured on military architecture and wrote two short treatises on the subject. F. P. Fiore, "La Citta Progressiva e it suo Disegno", P. Marconi (ed.), La Citta Come Forma Simbolica, Studi Della Teoria Della Architettura Nel'Rinascimento. See also Parent, M. and Verroust, J., ¥auban, Paris, 1971. The writings of Vauban have been edited by Colonel de Rocha d'Aiglun in Vauban~ Sa Famille, Ses Ecrits~ Ses Oisivites, Sa Correspondence.

40 Parisien A La Fin De L'Ancien Regime, 1975 and Les Machines A Guerir, 1976. There has been considerable and excellent research recently on this topic by Bruno Fortier, See La Politique De L'Espace.

41 Bentham, J. Panopticon, 1787. See also Howard, T., An account of the Principle Lazarettoes...,"1789. R. Evans "Bentham's Panopticon, an incident in the social history of architecture", Architectural Association Quarterly, 1972.

42 On the results of this unique empirical study, see in Revue Generale De L'Architecture Et Des Travaux Publics, Vol. X, 1852, p. 194 the Rapport de l'Academie Royale d'Architecture sur la Provenance et la qualite des pi~rres ~~pl°J;ee~ -~~ns le~ ~~ciens ed~fice~ de ~ari~",~~ de ses .~~v~r~ns,. d~~ande ~n l'annee 1678 par Colbert, surintendant des B~'timents with introduction and and notes by the Marquis de Laborde, Viollet-le-Duc, P. Michelot. See also Marquis de Laborde, Memoires et Dissertations, 1852 and Sellier, Ch. Rapport sur l'enqu~te ordonnee par Colbert en l678~ relativement Ii la qualite des pierres employ~es dans les constructions de Paris (Commission du Vieux-Paris, 1898, p. 15-18). The belief that moonlight corrupted the stones of buildings goes back to an archaic astrological belief about the destructive power of the moon on the things of this world. (see Avicennae Liber Cannonis Medicinae, Lib. IV, II, tract. II, cap. II referred to by Duhem in Le Systeme Du Monde, vol. II, Paris, 1914, p. 366). Even as late as 1702 Michel de Fremin in his Memoires Critiques De L'Architecture (p. 350) finds it necessary to devote a chapter to "If the moon eats the stones". 43 For a description of the project of the bridge see Description Des Pro_;ects De La Construction Du Pont De Neuilly...1788 by J. R. Perronet (1708-1794), the founder of the Ecole des Pontes et Chaussees.

The construction of the church of Sainte Genevieve in Paris started in 1757. Gathey and Rondelet belonged to the building supervisory committee applying exact scientific methods. After the French Revolution, the church was renamed the Pantheon. See Cathey, E. M. Memoire Sur L'Applica- tion De La Mechanique A La Construction Des Voutes Et.~~~D2~<:~;._.Rel~tif A L'Eglise De Ste. Genevieve, 1774 and Rondelet, J. P. (1743-1829) Memoire Historique Sur Le Dome Du Pantheon Francais, Paris, 1797.

44 There is no major recent monograph on the observatory building. C. Wolf's Histoire De L'Observatoire De Paris (1902) remains the best reference on the topic.

45 Cassini, J. D., Memoires Pour Servir A. L"Histoire Des Science Et A CelIe De L'Observatoire De Paris, 1810. Cassini's text has been analyzed by Tzonis et aI, Ope Cite p. 444. The argumentation in the text has been analyzed by Tzonis, A. et aI, Ope Cite p. 328.

46 The best book on Claude Perrault is by W. Herrman: The Theory of Claude Perrault, London, 1973, although .the author fails to explain in depth the cause for the antinomies in Perrault's thinking. See revue A. Tzonis, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Oct. 1976, Vol. XXXV, No.3.

47 Belidor, B. F. La Science Des Ingenieurs Dans La Conduite Des Travaux De Fortification Et D'Architecture Civille, Paris, 1739. ( a more modern edition with commentaries is by M. Navier, Paris, 1813) See in particular Livre I, "de la th~orie de la mac,connerie", P. 3.: "il faudra absoluement employer l'Alg~bre & la M~canique...(pour qui) on ne so it pas oblige d'attendre que l'experience ou Ie hazard nous les apprenne'.

48 Architecture is "the art of presenting images by the handling of forms", and it rejects science whose only purpose is to solve technical problems. For a full presentation of this point of view see Boullbe, E.L., Architecture, Essai Sur L'Art, 1793-1799. The text (Bibl. Nat. Paris, MS. 9143) has been edited by J. M. P~rouse de MOntclos, Paris, 1968 and by Helen Rosenau, London, 1953. There are two interesting texts by C. F. Viel de Saint-Maux (1745-1819) which are symptomatic of the fully developed conflict in design: Decadence De L'Architecture A La Fin Du XVIIle Siecle, 1800 and ~ L'Impuissance Des Mathematiques Polilr Assurer La Solidite Des Batiments, Paris, 1805.

49 For the development and diffusion of technical knowledge see: Arts, F.B., The Deve!opment of Technical Education In France, 1966, Taton, R., L'Enseignement Et La Diffusion Des S~iences En France Au XVIII Siecle, Paris, 1964 and Callot, J. P. Histoire De L'Ecole Poly technique.

50 This is explicitly the subject of the first issue op the Revue of 1840. See section entitled, "Absence des conditions des progres de l'artde batir". Even today the opposition between mechanics and aesthetics has been perceived as a conflict between the "two cultures"; the culture of art versus the culture of sceince. Science is critical of the formal and decorative parts of buildings which cannot be explained through mechanics. Aesthetics condemn the rational skeleton of buildings a prison which does not permit imagination to find a place. The theory of the "two cultures" is in fact only describing the conflict and gives no explanation of it. It does not investigate the causes of the conflict and obscures the fact that the two cultures depend equally to the culture of the market since the Renaissance.

51 Viollet-le-Duc, E.E. Discourses on Architecture, trans. by H. van Brunt, Boston, 1875, VII, pp. 276-277.

52 "Architecture is not building for the sake of building", said FrJmin. The building is a "symbol" which "signifies that which has to be signifies".

The idea of apparent firmness in the building enters gradually into the academic architectural doctrine in early eighteenth century without upsetting yet the presumption that architecture is a visual, formal exercise without reference to material and to size. J. F. Blondel in his Architecture franco~se I p.264, remarks in relation to H6tel de Lambert "...mais il samble du moins que les trumeaux les plus larges devroient ~tre places aux' extremites du batiment plu~t que dans Ie milieu, afln que la solidite parut en ~tre l'objet" (our emphasis). In another instance he stresses that "ll faut que ce qui porte ait un caracter de solidite relatif 'it ce qui est au-dessus; que Ie d~lic'at & l'orne ne soit pas sous Ie rustique & Ie simple.. .", Ibid. I, p.67.

Thus the academic requirement that everything in a building must have an explicit justification is satisfied but the warranting norm is apparent firmness or "character" of solidity both being visual, if not semantic aspects of architecture.

In relation to the famous dispute on the correct use of erect architectonic elements, resting on horizontal planes, on reclining planes, such as the balustrates of landings continuing up or down the stair case, Blondel takes again a functionalist stance, expressing in the adaptation of the element the requirements of apparent stability of the structure rather than finding a visual transformation of the balustrate, an "optical solution", the logic of visual consistancy as Juan Caramuel did; "Pour ...les balustres dont les moulures sont inclines ou horisontales, nous dirons que l'exemple des b~timents ~leves sur une demi-c6te ou sur une pente sensible, cornrne l'aile du nord a Versailles, & dont les plinthers & les corniches sont tenures horisontales, doivent servir d'autorit~ pour ne point admettre d'obliquit~ dans l'Architecture, sur-tout dans Ie cas dont i~ s'agit. Car ces balustrfs dont les moulures sont rampant78' offrent une idee contra ire a la solidite, que seule exige que leur axe etant perpendiculaire pour porter Ie po ids des tablettes, leurs moures soient horisontales...", for Caramel de Lobkowitz see his Architecture Civil Recta Y Obliqua, 1678. See W. Oechlin, "Observazoni su Guarino Guarini e Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz" in Guarino Guarini E l' Internazionalita Del Barocco, Torino, 1970, Vol. I. p. 573-597.

It is interesting to add here that the notion of "caractere" is used by J. F. Blondel in a sense very close to F:;-emin' s "Signification", "Toutes les differentes espetas de productions qui dependent de l'Architecture devant porter l'empreinte de la destination particuliere de chaque edifice, tous doiv~nt avoir un caract~re qui d~termine leur forme generale, & qui announce Ie bâtiment pour ce qu'il est" cours, Vol. II, p. 229.

53 The functionalist-mechanistic analogies of F. L. Wright can be found dispersed throughout his early writings. See Gutheim, F. (ed.) Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture, New York, 1941. The influence of Vio11et-1e-Duc is evident in those early texts as is shown by Hoffman, D., 'in "Frank Lloyd Wright and Vio11et-1e-Duc", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. XXVIII, No.3, Oct. 1969.

54 Condorcet, "Memoire inedit sur 1es Hopitaux", 1786. Presentation by A. Tzonis, Dix-Huitieme Siec1e, 1977, No.9. on Le Sain Et Le Ma1sain, ed. Jacques Gui11erme. For a short history and critique of user participation and relevant techniques in architecture, see A. Tzonis, Lefaivre, L., "The Populist movement in architecture", Dutch Forum, No.3, 1976. Or B,auwe1t, January 10,1975.