tor, and visual space, all of them sharing a common articulated movement and “without there being any need to spell the word or specify the move- ment in detail in order to translate one into the other.”78The translation is
more like a melody played in different keys. This example suggests how a space articulated in abstract language, visual representation, and tactile ex- perience can represent a unity. The subtlety of that unity becomes clear when we recognize that particular music does or does not belong to a par- ticular space. We can recognize the difference because a reverberation takes place on the boundary of the acoustic and visual space.
The phenomenon of reverberation brings to light the aspect of move- ment that makes movement truly communicative. It is for this reason that the French psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski chose resonance (réverbéra- tion) as a paradigm of communication in his own studies of the poetic image:
If, having the original image in our mind’s eye, we ask ourselves how that image comes alive and fills with life, we discover a new dynamic and vital category, a new property of the universe, reverberation. It is as though the sound of a hunting horn reverberating everywhere through its echo made the tiniest leaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and transform the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating, sonorous world. . . . It is the dynamism of the sonorous life itself which by engulfing and appropriating everything it finds in its path, fills the slice of space, or better the slice of the world that it assigns itself by its movement, making it reverberate, breathing into it its own life.79
We have not, as it might first appear, moved far from architecture. The phenomenon of resonance makes clear the communicative nature of movement, imagination, and language. It casts light on the spontaneous formation of identities and differences, similarities and analogies, and more generally on the metaphorical nature of all communication. At the same time, it is closely linked with rhythm, proportion, and harmony. It is well known that the primary meaning of proportion is analogical;80and while
analogy belongs to the metaphoricity of discourse, proportion more explic- itly represents its structure, which can be eventually expressed in numbers. We do not need to be reminded that proportion was, until recently, at the center of thinking about architecture and its order. But it is not always
understood or acknowledged that proportional thinking itself was prima- rily a mediation between the idea of the potential unity of the world and the uniqueness of a particular situation or phenomenon. In the history of West- ern culture, this process became a mediation between the celestial and the terrestrial order, between divine and human reality, and finally between the universal and the particular in the understanding of the world.
The process of mediation found its fulfillment in the hierarchy of rep- resentations, which is most explicitly reflected in the hierarchy of the arts. Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music, and indeed philos- ophy, each have certain possibilities of articulation, determined by the con- ditions of their embodiment. In philosophy or poetry, it is possible to speak about the idea of world unity or move into the domain of metaphysics or the- ology. In painting, this is impossible. Painting always depends for its artic- ulation on the iconicity of verbal language and thought. It has to create its own iconicity, informed by the content that has already been articulated through language. We find a similar pattern in other arts as we move toward architecture. Undoubtedly architecture itself is shaped by abstract con- cepts, geometry, and ideas, but never without mediation. It is difficult and somewhat problematic to realize a conceptual vision, diagram, or abstract thought directly in a building. In design we automatically use a series of mediating steps, such as drawings and models. The mediated nature of ab- stract concepts or ideas in architecture can be seen in the rare examples of buildings with a plan formed as an anagram in the shape of letters (figure 2.17). It is true that both buildings and letters can be constructed accord- ing to the same geometry, but in the former case geometry does not provide a clearly and explicitly articulated meaning. In a typical building, geometry reflects the conditions of the site, the program, and the overall spatial or- ganization. It is absorbed in the material and communicative nature of the space; and though other arts also inform the space, space has the power to situate them. To situate means also to communicate. What communicates and what is communicated in architecture? For the lack of a better term, I shall describe the enigmatic phenomenon of architectural communication as “architectonic” structure.81
Architectonics shares all the main characteristics of architectural space, which has an invisible power, communicated through other levels of
93 CHAPTER 2 THE NA TURE OF C OMMUNICA TIVE SP A CE 92
the articulated world. We can identify its structuring power not only in painting or sculpture but also in such areas as poetry, music, and science.82
In the Würzburg residence we can recognize the presence of archi- tectonics immediately in the tension between the ascending movement of the steps and the upper part of the hall, but perhaps even more strongly in the hall’s situating of the fresco not only optically but also in its physiog- nomy and content.83What has been achieved in the Würzburg stair hall is
quite remarkable, though in some ways typical of the period. It is even more remarkable when we realize that the work was collaborative, created by artists who did not even come from the same part of Europe. Such collabo- ration is obviously possible only in a well-structured communicative space that extends beyond the local situation into the culture as a whole.
On the concrete level of collaboration, one area of creativity seriously misunderstood in the aesthetic interpretation of art is decor. A typical ex- ample of decor is stucco, which is supposed to be looked at not as a work of art in its own right but as a mediating link between architecture, sculpture,
2.17.Johann David Steingruber, Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773), plan of a project dedicated to