The drawing pen is a knife that enables architects to cut through the bodies of buildings—that is, the tool with which they write the history of their buildings. Architectural writing and reading are always architectural cutting. Claudius Galenus of Pergamum, know as Galen, a Greek physician born into an archi- tect’s family, stresses the homology between dissection and the combination of writing and reading in his description of the origins of anatomy.17 He places the
origin of medicine in anatomy itself:
“It was then superfluous to write a treatise like this one, because since their childhood, from their parents the pupil had learned dis- secting as they did for reading and writing. The ancients practiced adequately anatomy, not only the physicians, but also the philoso- phers. There was no need to worry that the procedures of dissec- tion could be forgotten since they were learned during childhood as the art of writing.”18
The knife sections the body and organizes knowledge, which is then written in treatises by the pen. In architectural drawings, the pen is a knife, a stiletto that becomes the stylus with which architects can pierce both bodies of buildings and bodies of drawings:
“Meanwhile I was publicly commenting on the books of the ancient physicians, I was proposed to comment on Erasitratus’ book, The Movement of the Blood. Following the tradition the sty- lus [grapheion] was nailed in the scroll and marked that part which advises on phlebotomy.”19
Manfredo Tafuri, an architectural critic and historian who knew how to draw, applies the same critical procedure in describing a method consonant with the aims of the “historical project” in architecture:20
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“Operating on its own constructions, history makes an incision with a scalpel in a body whose scars do not disappear; but at the same time, unhealed scars already mar the compactness of his- torical constructions, rendering them problematic and preventing them from presenting themselves as the ‘truth’.”21
Dissection is the task of knowledge since, as Foucault says, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting”.22 The process of cutting is at
the basis of our understanding of representation as an anatomical demonstra- tion. This concept will become clear through a comparison of two drawings of the twelfth century: one is an anatomical drawing kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the other is a representation of the Monastery of Canterbury. The Medieval anatomical drawing shows a human body in a dissecting frog-like position, a configuration that many corpses assume during the dissecting. The circulatory system of the veins is traced within it, in a phenomenal transpar- ency. The drawing of the Monastery of Canterbury displays a homologue repre- sentation: the buildings are laid out frog-like and the water system connecting them is traced in transparency, as in the anatomical drawing.
Knife and pen are the tools used by Aristotle in producing his scientific taxonomy entitled De Partibus Animaliurn (The Parts of Animals). Aristotle uni- fied into a common science dispersed kinds of knowledge generated by the empirical methods of various trades such as fishing and hunting. During the sixteenth century, emulating Aristotle’s taxonomic method, the humanist Fran- cesco Maria Grapaldo wrote a book entitled De Partibus Aedium (The Parts of Buildings). The book is a categorization of a built world achieved through the dissecting of many classical literary texts. Grapaldo is represented on the fron- tispiece holding a knife and a pen.23
A prodigious development in anatomical research took place during the sixteenth century and Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Edifice of the Human Body) is the epitome. According to Vesalius, anatomical investigation unveils the harmony between the use and function of the diverse parts.24 Furthermore, for Vesalius, the duty of the anatomist is to demonstrate
the number, location, figure, property, and composition of those parts.25 Anat-
omy is not only considered to be the process of taking a corpse apart, but also a way of reconstituting it as body in an anatomical theatre. The reconstitution of the body of architecture was at the core of Renaissance architectural investi- gations; the “tacquini di rilievo” (survey-logs) produced by humanist architects in measuring the architectural ruins of Rome. The drawings of the architects were equivalent to the drawings of the anatomists. These architects filled their notebooks with drawings of anatomical fragments of classical buildings. Their graphic annotations were not merely records of historical pieces and patterns, but, rather, carefully done bodily studies of parts of buildings. Autopsies of clas- sical edifices, they were a direct visual exploration, as the word autopsy indi- cated in its original Greek meaning. These graphic logs were the basis for writ- ing the story of future architecture by listing the numbers, locations, figures, properties, and compositions of classical building elements. Vesalius’s Fabrica demonstrates the central role of anatomical representation in the constitution of medical and human knowledge. Anatomical representation is also at the core
of the Dieci Libri di Architectura, a work by Giovanni Maria Rusconi, an almost forgotten architect of the sixteenth century, who made a beautiful set of illustra- tions for a text never completed. Rusconi completed his drawing work in 1553, a decade after the publishing of Vesalius’s Fabrica. The illustrations were then printed posthumously in 1590. Consisting of one-hundred and sixty elegant woodcuts, Rusconi’s illustrations reveal basic evidences on the construction practices of the sixteenth century. Representation of the architectural orders are mixed with depictions of the construction details, materials and materials prepa- ration, and working phases accompanied by brief explanatory descriptions
.
Rusconi’s drawings present the same facture of Vesalius’s anatomical illus- trations. The Vesalius anatomical figures are not inert corpses—they move in a beautiful landscape displaying a great dignity. They stroll at the feet of the Eugenean hills, located between Padua and Venice. Following an established tradition, these anatomical figures are shown through successive stages, and, as they become stripped first of their skin, then of their musculature, they con- form with the surrounding natural landscape gradually made barren by the passage of the seasons from spring to winter. In Rusconi’s drawings, we wit- ness the same representational procedure: the bodies of buildings are exposed through successive stages of dissection as they become stripped of their plas- tery skins to show the structural skeleton. A striking instance is Rusconi’s use of the dissection sequential process to show the processes of derivation of many classical details.
12.5
Collage of Vesalius’ and Rusconi’s Anatomical Images
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Dealing with abdominal viscera in Book V of the Fabrica, Vesalius did not show his anatomical demonstration within real corpses. Instead, his anatomical findings were represented within the remains of famous antique sculptures. Rusconi followed the same procedure: he showed the ‘viscera’ of buildings within the ruins of antique edifices. Rusconi’s drawings were trying to raise the role of construction documents into monuments of architectural science, just as Vesalius was trying to raise anatomical understanding above the world of objec- tified human violation. For Vesalius the bodies of his anatomical illustrations are not residual dead matter containing only the potential to be described, organized, and disciplined, but rather they are representations of embodiment of human culture. Similarly for Rusconi, building details are not lifeless building stuff to be designated, classified, but rather eco-niches of human embodiment fostering architectural imagination.
In the current state of anatomical investigation, physicians have exploited a new kind of knife and a new system of representation—a bloodless knife that can write the stories of the human body on the electronic screen. Medical imaging makes observable that which is hidden in the body. Physicians probe through bodies performing painless, benign vivisections; they use sonography, angiography, tomography, etc., with new digital knifes that allow non-invasive electronic vivisection and displays of anatomic structures.
In architecture, the use of true “electronic vivisection” of buildings and models as a base for generating construction drawings is poisoned by the prac- tice of imitating established representations—an imitation that does not model processes but only mimics products. In drawing buildings, the substance and the form of the contents and physical expressions are not two separate aspects, but they are embodied as one in the built object.
An assessment of the parallel medical imagining can be the springboard to foster a better mastery of the role of architectural imagination. The bod- ies of architecture surround our bodies; architecture and the human body are one in front of the other and, between the two, there is not a frontier, but a contact surface. The use of imaging tools should offer a way of writing and reading architecture, an imagining which can feed architectural imagination by rearranging into a meaningful whole the shattered world in which we live.