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Title
Year
Relics of Electronic Hallucinations. Gazing at Early Computational Fluid Dynamics Drawings from Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center
2024
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2024
Rules, A Short History Of What We Live By, A book by Lorraine Daston
2024
Survey and characterisation of the archaeological landscape of Lovo
2024
Stoclet 1911 - Restitution
2024
Stoclet 1911 - Hypothesis
2024
TV Show: 3D Digitization and Built Heritage Preservation
2024
Drawing air: the evolution of the representation of air in architectural drawing from the industrial revolution to the present
2023
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2023
Analysis, Systems & Composition
2023
Code Tracing
2023
Maison du Peuple full scale experience on its original site
2023
From projection to building and vice versa
2023
Emergence of pre-digital algorithmic design
2023
Comparing Randomness
2023
[x] Anthropic Units in Baroque Architecture, the Gallery of the Palazzo Spada and the Roman Palm
2023
Workshop Glyph
2023
Re-presentation as an analytical tool in Baroque Architecture
2022
Crossed Experimentations of Low-Altitude Surveys For The Detection Of Buried Structures
2022
Chamber Music Hall of Horta's Palais des Beaux-Arts: 3D Hypothesis
2022
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Algorithmic Music II/II
2022
Misreading, once again...
2022
Perspectives on Dwelling : Architectural Anthropologies of Home
2022
Workshop (fig.22)
2022
Towards a multi-scale semantic characterization of the built heritage
2021
De l'incarnation de la protoarchitecture
2021
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Algorithmic Music I/II
2021
Noise
2021
(Close) Reading Morphosis
2021
Jeu d’échelles / échelles du jeu
2021
Pohlke
2021
Workshop (fig.)
2021
Perspectiva Virtualis
2021
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2020
Exploitation des numérisations pour l'analyse urbaine en contexte archéologique
2020
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - The Algorists
2020
Urban Planning Representation
2020
Projection built into Sketchpad III: origin of a critical field in computer graphics
2020
Architectural Analysis, Survey and Documentation of Built Heritage
2019
Exploitation de numérisations hétérogènes pour la représentation et l'analyse d'un site archéologique de grande échelle : Pachacamac 1532
2019
Relecture de vocabulaires d’architecture : apport de la complexité des représentations numériques dans la caractérisation de formes architecturales
2019
Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple 3D restitution hypothesis
2019
Architectural Analysis and Graphic Representation - Morphosis in the 1980s
2019
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Medley II/II
2019
Histoires de Représentation
2019
Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple 3D restitution hypothesis
2019
Building Drawings : Decoding and Recoding the Graphic Projection Algorithm in Architectural Representation
2019
Places Royales Françaises. Réflexion d’une logique d’édification à travers une corrélation entre une analyse sémantique et un signal géométrique
2018
Virtual Systems – Actual Objects: Rendition of Morphosis ' Compositional Principles in the mid 1980s
2018
Formal Analysis and Computer Process - Medley I/II
2018

Anthropic Units in Baroque Architecture, the Gallery of the Palazzo Spada and the Roman Palm

Contribution to the 2023 European Architectural Envisioning Association (EAEA16). Envisioning Architectural Scales in the Analogue and Virtual Representation of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2023.

Abstract:

Historically, measurement units have been linked to bodily proportions. From the ancient cubit based on the length between the elbow and the middle finger used by the Sumerians and the ancient Egyptians, to the foot still in use in a minority of nations today, human-based systems of units allowed for straight forward representations of scale. No tools were needed to apprehend the surrounding environment. The dimensions were quite literally incorporated within humans, in the Latin corpus, the body. Measurements were consequences of a palpable reality linked to a close material universe. After the French Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment looked for a unified way of measuring lengths and weights. During the 1875 General Conference on Weights and Measures, seventeen states adopted the international system of units (Moreau, 1953) which brought the question of scale to an astronomical division with its primary measurement of length, the meter, determined by a subdivision of the earth perimeter along the Paris meridian. The search for a unified unit has also caused a standardization of our perception of measurements (Lugli, 2019). The physicality of our relationship to scale has tailed off.

Considering the determining role of measurement and scale in architectural design, questioning the shift from a unit of measurement based on the body (and apprehensible on a human scale) to a unit based on a fraction of the earth seems necessary. As an extension, understanding the impact of historical dimensional systems on compositional logics constitutes a telling way of reinvestigating references from architecture history. Why is a precise understanding of the link between scale and measurement necessary to apprehend composition in its proportions? We will study Baroque architecture as it offers many avenues to explore the singular relationship that links body and scale to proportions, space and representation.

The aim is to reinvestigate the link between body and composition through a drawing-based analysis of a case study which makes use of anthropic units of measurement, directly linking architecture to human proportions. This analysis will focus on Borromini’s Gallery of the Palazzo Spada with the aim of capturing, through the re-drawing of original documents, the impact of the Roman palm and its resulting drawing scales on the proportional logics, the geometric lines, and the design process. The gallery has been studied through multiple lenses as one of Baroque’s most emblematic anamorphosis. We will shed a new light on it, by offering a reading of this historical Baroque building through the architect’s tools, research in history by copying, by re-drawing, as a way to understand.

Link to the full paper