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.
