Tectonics in Architecture

It is impossible to consider spirituality in architecture without coming to terms with materiality. This presents us with a fundamental paradox: how can the most ethereal, evanescent, and 'purest' dimension of our humanity be at all connected to, even dependent on our most heavy, permanent, and measurable expression? Our inherited dualist narratives (i.e., Earth vs. Heaven, body vs. mind, flesh vs. soul) seem to preclude their reconciliation except during some momentary mystical or miraculous event or ritual.

But what our 'classical' philosophy (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomist, or Cartesian) and Abrahamic religions present as incommensurable ontologies are not so in the eyes of alternative philosophies (e.g., Deweyian pragmatism, Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology, Whitehead's process philosophy) and theologies (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism). From these perspectives spirituality and embodiment are not mutually exclusive or loosely 'linked' but an indivisible whole. This is not far fetched. Developments in neuroscience, psychoanalysis, psychology, and medicine tend to support non-dualist interpretations of the binary matter-consciousness. Needless to say that this non-dual perspective is not how we consider, discuss, or engage architecture today.

In this paper, we explore the relationship between architectural materiality and spirituality using this alternative viewpoint and refer to Brutalism, undoubtedly the most tectonic of the architectural languages of Modernity, to illuminate the close bond between spirituality and materiality.

October 04, 2020, marked the 300th birth anniversary of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78), the Veneto-born Roman architect, delineator, amateur archeologist, historical fabulist, and theorist. During his brief but massively productive life Piranesi created over one thousand copper plate etchings of Rome and its environs, albeit not always as others saw it. 185 of these were published in his well-known, Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna (Various Views of Ancient and Modern Rome) and his later, Varie Vedute di Roma (Various Views of Rome), both of which he printed continuously, from his early twenties until his last years, capturing the full range of his artistic development.

Particularly later in his career, Piranesi often used perspectival representation, less to document than to depict – to incite in those who viewed his images, the sensations of the sublime, a simulacrum of his own responses to these singular places.
The core of the exhibition is not Piranesi’s vedute (or views) however; rather, our focus is his obsessive study of ancient Roman construction techniques primarily from, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de Romani (1758-61). These analytique-like compositions are remarkable, not because of what they depict or document, but because of what Piranesi demonstrates. Absent the visual hyperbole of the vedute, Piranesi uses materials and methods of construction to shore-up his argument against French and German academicians who favored Greek antiquity as the source of later (read lesser) Roman art and architecture. These tectonic drawings (expressions of idea through construction and structure) illustrate his vitriolic prose, arguing for the hegemony of Roman architecture based on Etruscan and Egyptian roots. Piranesi’s historical exegesis was eschewed by most of his contemporaries. Yet, since the publication of such relatively recent paradigm-shifting works as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), it is an idea that continues to gain currency.

There are two contemporaneous constituencies accreted to the Piranesian core; work from Fellows and Affiliated Fellows of the American Academy in Rome (AAR), and student projects from a Spring 2020 UTK School of Architecture seminar/workshop. The work of the AAR Fellows is marked by their appreciation of site specificity and the material presence of Rome and beyond. Participants in the workshop used one of Piranesi’s construction studies (included in this exhibition) as springboards for digitally-based excursions. Together, this exhibition’s contemporaneous components demonstrate the continuing capacity for Piranesi’s work to incite private reveries for public colloquy and the ongoing role of the hand, vis-à-vis the drawing-out of architecture, as a vital means to understanding construction technique as a necessary prelude to the act of building idea.

The exhibition is curated by George Dodds, PhD, Alvin & Sally Beaman Professor, at the University of Tennessee. It is designed by Louis Gauci, Architect. The work of the Fellows of the American Academy of Rome (FAAR) and student work notwithstanding, all of the etchings, prints, and books on display are from the private collection of George Dodds. The FAAR work on display spans three decades; it includes the work of Caroline B. Constant, Thomas K. Davis, Rosetta Elkin, Ursula Emery-McClure, Gary Hilderbrand, Steven Kieran, Thomas Leslie, James Timberlake, Michael McClure, Kiel Moe, Mark Schimmenti, Ted Shelton, and Tricia Stuth.

Image Credits: Ewing Gallery, Eric Cagely, and George Dodds,  2021

This thesis research investigates the architectural and tectonic potential that can stem from behavioral complexity of collective construction in biological systems and its dynamic relations with the colony in terms of the continuous construction and adaptation process over the time. The role model considered as a case study regards the dynamics of honeycomb formation, and in particular three fundamental behaviours have been extracted from this biological process: stigmergic behavior, structural self-stabilization capacity and environmental adaptability. All these features were then coded into a multi agent system interacting in an heterogeneous environment and capable of selectively adding elements to a particle-spring system that is periodically self-adjusting, simulating material behavior. The outcomes, strongly rich and heterogeneous in their spatial organization, are characterized by a continuous tectonic of emerging singularities seamlessly flowing into one another.