MELANCHOLY
Embodiments in Architecture
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Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer’s engravings of Melancholy, Knight Death and the Devil, and St. Jerome in his Study, act as symbolic representations of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual, respectively. In Melancholy, Dürer draws from the four clinical humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. As described by Hippocrates of Kos in his Nature of Man, deficiency or excess of one of the four elements causes imbalance to the human body. Thus, the psychic state of melancholy is characterized by pathological alteration of humor manifested in intellectual stillness. In his Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (1991), Marco Frascari seeks “the melancholic reader” as the one who “uses bodily and corporal tropes as key images of the essence of architecture. Just as we think architecture with our bodies, we think our bodies through architecture.”
In Frascari’s terms, the bodily figure persistently manifests itself to the scale of making, as a genealogical tracing of the impression in techne. So, impression is an ancient soul-carrying figure which travels in time through means of poiesis. Architecture then becomes the vessel – carrier of the mythical, godly, or ideal bodily figures. The necessity of the melancholic condition makes possible the realization of the close relationship between the intelligible and the sensible mirrored in architectural form.
The Frascari Symposium VII seeks paper proposals and creative works that focus on the three key elements of melancholy in the architectural imagination: flesh, shadow, and geometry.
FLESH
In the architectural imagination, flesh – body and soul – not only inhabits buildings, flesh merges with architectural bodies. Provocatively impressed on the right buttock of the Diller-Scofidio chimera, the author-architects define Flesh (1994) as “the outermost surface of the ‘body’ bordering all relations in ‘space.’” (title page) This collection of texts (conversations, lectures, essays, copies, recordings, eaves-droppings) and images (photographs, slides, ads, drawings, overlays, film stills, models) explore transgressions of that border revealing the merging of bodies – mutant bodies – in ever-changing relationships with space in multiple dimensions. Published four years earlier, in Monsters of Architecture, Frascari writes that “[i]n architecture the grotesque body is a body in a continuous metamorphosis, a body freed from the mirror of itself - freed from similar resemblance.” (p35) Stasis is a persistent figment of our collective imagination. Is the architectural body ever freed from itself, from its own figurements? Where are the constantly evolving boundaries of the flesh and space? How does extended reality complicate our understanding of our own flesh?
GEOMETRY
Melancholy, a winged figure – often interpreted as a personification of Melancholy or a self-portrait of Dürer himself – sits slumped in a contemplative pose amidst a seemingly disorganized clutter of unused scientific instruments and assorted objects associated with geometry. While scattered tools like a calipers, a claw hammer, a saw, nails, and a ruler hint at the creative process, their disarray evokes a sense of frustration, confusion, or being overwhelmed. This feeling is further reinforced by the inclusion of unfinished geometric forms such as a truncated polyhedron, a puzzling three-dimensioned object defying easy categorization. However, despite this apparent chaos, order emerges through the presence of specific geometric shapes. A perfect sphere rests on the ground, embodying its inherent harmony. Etched into the wall behind the figure, a 4 by 4 “magic square” suggests an underlying order within the throes of creative Melancholy. The use of these elements highlights the significance of mathematical and geometric principles in forming the foundation for artistic techniques such as linear perspective. Thus, geometry, an abstract embodiment of “noble science” and with enigmatic symbolism, continues to fascinate contemporary scholars and requires further exploration and interpretation.
SHADOW
Shadow – skiá presents itself in the dichotomy of stillness and shadow casting. Skiá is the silence of darkness, or staging of the shadow in which Dürer finds himself. Personified in Melancholy, Dürer is surrounded by shadow casting forms, drawing and building construction instruments, implying the once upon a time action, in the anima and its aim towards the intelligible. Analogically, the architect can find being personified in Melancholy, contemplating on the instrumental of the anima and the yearned transition to the vita activa. Historically, the practice of architecture benefits from the inherited wealth of soul-carrying figurations, which require the architect to be a storyteller and curator. This seventh session of the Frascari Symposium is interested in arguments addressing the question of a practice of architecture in which the instrumental demonstrates skiá as the active tracing of the inherited collection of figurations. Thus, representation is a form of staged reflection of the imaginal.
