Oz

Volume 12 Article 2

1-1-1990

The Writing of Architecture: Mnemosyne and the Wax Tablet

Jeffrey Hildner

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Recommended Citation Hildner, Jeffrey (1990) "The Writing of Architecture: Mnemosyne and the Wax Tablet," Oz: Vol. 12. https://doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1190

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Jeffrey Hildner

The concomitant sensations second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier's awakened in us by the direct Essai sur l'arcbitecture of 1755. In this perception of a work of art ... are . canonical image of architecture's mythic only realized through memory. origins, a woman seated amidst broken Memory therefore 'does not fragments of classical architecture assume in art a subsidiary or an­ gestures with apparent graceful authority cillary function as happens in nor­ to the primitive hut's idealized (relcon­ mal life, but is, itself, Art, in which struction formed in accordance with all the various arts are united "principles ... founded on simple nature.' '6 without residua. Ancient myth­ Four trees are columns; four branches are ology saw this clearly, in a way, beams; branches above " inclining when it imagined that Mnemosyne towards each other, meet at their highest was the mother of the Muses.' point" (Laugier 12) and form a roof ter­ - Antonio RussP minating in triangular openings at two ends (a differentiation of the otherwise In the search for nature - for the "true" equal four sides- or quadripartite space origin and order of things - we will find - which we may say constitutes the in architecture the origins of memory and "original" example of formal hierarchy). the invention of culture. Architecture is the resistance to forgetfulness.2 She is the As is widely recognized, Laugier's simple Text of Memory ("eacb buman tbougbt, bas "first" architecture, innocent as it may ap­ its pages in tbis vast book {of arcbitecturel" )3, pear, was the basis for what was con­ the writing of the past, the present, and sidered a startling - essentially anti­ the future: the "wax writing-tablet" upon Renaissance- manifesto when the essay which are impressed the "images" of was first issued anonymously in 1753 , history.• sans illustration. Whereas Vitruvius (and commentators of Vitruvius, such as Memory is Architecture Perrault in the seventeenth century) had Past St;!t forth the idea of the rustic hut as the prototype from which all architecture has It was required that a small study be evolved, Laugier was not content with a added to a gardener's cottage at the merely dispassionate acknowledgment of brook's edge on a private estate and that the hut's rudimentary historical role. For it be in keeping with the rustic context Laugier, a Jesuit priest, the hut also established by the existing vernacular assumed pragmatic meaning and on­ buildings and pastoral landscape. I de­ tological, as well as typological, signifi­ cided on an architecture that might be a cance. The primitive hut was to be the contemplation and memory of "the home operative model for all present and future 1. Mnemosyne (?) Origins: from the frontispiece to the second edition of Marc­ of the first man,'' 5 the primitive hut, as architectural excellence; and, by a return Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'arcbitecture, 1755 4 represented in the frontispiece to the to the past, to architecture's (putative) origins in ature - in "natural" form-, allegorical visibilia of his frontispiece, Laugier's remembrance of origins. rooted in the earth" (McClung 118), 8 it is it represented the means whereby Laugier argued for a reductivist, neo­ the primary attribute of the simulacra to architectural morali ty might be revived classical language which "in an architec­ Significantly, however, with regard to the which it has in theory given rise (i.e., all and historical continuity sustained? As tural Order only the [free-standing] fundamental philosophical question of architectures) that they have, indeed, an intrinsic part of his fundamentally ra ­ column, the entablature and the pediment the structure of architecture's relationship ceased to be nature. Architecture is, fun­ tionalist agenda, Laugier asserted that [these are the identifiable fragments in the to nature to which his manifesto is prin­ damentally, the cessation of nature; it is classicism (in which we see trabeation foreground of the frontispiece - the cipally intellectually directed, Laugier's defined as (and defines) the presence of canonized as the root system of architec­ broken architrave being clearly intended "remembrance" is inherently paradox­ culture. Laugier's manifest intention to ture) is the authentic, albeit sophisticated, to represent the pediment which it ical. His frontispiece is a true representa­ pictorially (conlfuse the point where descendant of the "primitive" hut. Thus typically surrounds] may form an essen­ tion of neither nature nor culture: trees do nature stops and culture (art) begins (a from his narrative reconstruction of tial part" (Laugier 12 ; emphasis added). not "naturally" grow foursquare in plan; point which his text delineates with less mankind's creation of the primordial The rational tectonic of these three and whereas his archetype "has not ... ambiguity) recalls a passage from Tasso's building (Laugier 11-12 ), to which he gave elements - the walls of the Renaissance even ceased to be 'nature ,' inasmuch as epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata: "Art, indissoluble mental presence through the having yet to be born- we may regard as the upright members [trees] are still which does everything, remains hidden.

2 . Remembrance of the primitive hut; the (relenactm en t of culture. Project for an 3. Iconic view, from the sou thwest ; '' ... tbe temple continually resanctifies tbe world, because it at once addition to a garden er's cottage: south elevation , plan , site plan rep resents and co ntains it" (Eiiad e 591 5 There is such a mixture of culture .. . that you imagine that the ornaments and the arrangements are only natural. It seems as if nature were playing at imitating her own imitator, art" {Praz 229)?

Perhaps it is to the nature/culture paradox· (which is central to the problem of ar­ chitecture's metaphysic) that we may 4. Architecture has no Muse ... but memorializes the arts that do. Wall of the Nine Muses 5. Primitive hut after Chambers: the wall as largely attribute the subliminal power of ("Reminders"), daughters of Mnemosyne nonfigurative and secondary the primitive hut as Laugier has depicted it - specifically, a pitched roof volume generally held to be a personification of the temporal and symbolic limitations of Mnemosyne (Grimal103) . She was held (ideally comprised of the essential tripar­ architecture, referred to, variously, as "the her neoclassical iconography the valida­ to be the basis of all life and creativity tite syntax) -to operate in architectural personification of architecture;· "the god­ tion of a rich, classical Greek past. (forgetfulness - especially of the "true consciousness with unique dialectical dess Architectura," and "the muse."12 Perhaps we may think of her as order and origin of things" -was con­ resonance: possessed of a mythicized While it seems fairly clear that this Mnemosyne, Memory herself. sidered tantamount to death). 14 Moreover, "presumption of innocence," 10 it is the woman who holds in her left hand a com­ Mnemosyne was the Mother of the Muses iconic expression of a deeply entrenched, pass and square is, indeed, a goddess of According to classical mythology, -the Nine "Reminders" -who were the traditional image of shelter from which an architecture, it is also likely that, Mnemosyne (ni·mas '·e·ne), the goddess deific personifications of, and sources of advanced architecture usually seeks to significantly, she is a deity with no of Memory, or Remembrance, ("as inspiration for, the Arts. Like depart but may sometimes remember, as history. Perhaps, then, we may bring to monuments go to show and, indeed, the im­ Mnemosyne, her daughter Muses served in a momentary reflection. Correlatively, this goddess the greater historical and pression left by the name in the minds of as forces of culture, refinement, and the idea of the primitive hut, separate from metaphysical dimension - if not the men,")13 was either a Titaness born of civilization, towards the end that man the image of its specific form or elements, greater believableness - which her Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) or a might be enabled to rise above mere independent of a preconceived presence at this original "first" moment pure abstraction, memory personified­ banality in his artistic and intellectual typological guise, operates as a unique in the chronology of culture requires of a principle, whose presence was con­ aspirations.l 5 However, while Muses were metaphor for renewal and rethinking, as her. Perhaps, in a renewal of the sidered essential for the establishment of assigned to poetry, music, and dance (as an ever present reminder to return to a Renaissance tradition, we may (reli nvent the world. In the early stages of the Greek well as to astronomy and history), no contemplation of a rchitecture's her identity, attach her to a deity already theogony there was no god of time; the Muse was assigned to architecture or the cosmology and the problem of origins11 in existence, and in this manner bring to continuity of the world was guaranteed by other "fine arts." This may have been

In this regard , Laugier's frontispiece in­ vites a second level of meaning. If the primitive hut represents the origin of ar­ chitecture, I think that it also represents the origin of memory. (''Architecture ... {we} may live without her . . . but we cannot rememberwithouther" [Ruskin 182]). The frontispiece may be interpreted as illustrating not only the image of architec­ ture's origin but the moment of archi­ tecture's origin as well and, consequent­ ly, as illustrating the coincident moment of the inception of historical con­ sciousness and the (initial) enactment of culture. It is a picture of time as well as of typology.

Reflection on the significance of the presence of the female figure who appears to preside over the mise-en-scene suggests a line of thought that helps to give poetic sustenance to this idea, I believe. The 6. East elevation. The wall as event, figurative and primary: painterly surface and contemplative object, inscribing both the memory of nature 6 woman, clearly no mere mortal, has been (water and smoke) and the presence of geometric abstraction; the analogical "wax writing-tablet" because architecture, painting, and chitectural as well as garden elements: The temple, the symbol or paradigm of all sion or transparency whereby the copper sculpture were possibly, ironically, under­ they are the physical and psychological architecture, is the place of contemplation roof, which is typically outside, becomes, valued in Greece and Rome; or perhaps mediators between nature and culture, (con- temple-ation). But the absence of now visible from wi thin, the surrogate they had a more direct relationship with between the presence of the garden, on­ walls allows the original primitive hut to celestial vault. The motives of the tradi­ Mnemosyne herself.l6 In the Renaissance, intruded upon, and the presence of ar­ do no more than merely delimit the tional plaster molding make reference to nonetheless, the fine arts were considered chitecture, unsentimentalized. The precinct of sacred space: the act of nature. The wall and ceiling light fixtures the supreme arts largely because they lattice-columns are "trees," but unlike the definitive enclosure and the mature - black ash , mother-of-pearl inlay, and were perceived to have flourished among, original primitive hut they are products presence of the dialectical stained glass - are remembrances of and to have been highly honored by, the of culture, not nature. Each surrounds a phenomenology of interi or versus ex­ culture, to which the architectural and ancients, especially the Romans; and structural wood post which carries the terior is a later invention ("soon [man] wi ll decorative arts traditions belong (here as what seems to have been a matter of some roof load and allows the modernist ex­ fill in the space between two posts and feel inspired mainly by Mackintosh and debate is whether architecture is a sister pression of a dematerialized (glass) cor­ secure" [Laugier 12]). As McClung writes, Wright). art or mother of the arts.t 7 ner as read on the east and west walls. "What is not implied by the three struc­ tural elements [column, entablature, and Along the face of the exterio r stucco Alberti thought of architecture as the "art As the word template suggests, the word pediment], such as a wall, is tolerated canvas I have drawn the brook. Its painter­ of arts, the queen and sum of all the temple originally derives from the idea of [only] if it fulfills minimally necessary ly irregularity of line is also a reference to others" (Borsi 14). If Mnemosyne being "cut-out-from." Thus, the first tem­ functions and without flourish" (118). In the smoke of the chimney. The movement (Memory) is the Mother of the Muses ple, the primitive hut, is the sacred space this project, the (interior) room and the of line and allusion to nature are super­ (Arts) and Architecture is the Mother of that man cut-out-from the profane space wall are intended as primary architectural imposed on the stillness of a geometric the Arts, may we not make the poetic leap, of the world around him, the "revelation events. order. The delineation of the wa ll surface then, that Memory and Architecture are of an absolute reality, opposed to the is intended as a circumstantial, personal one? And, therefore, that if "memory is nonreality of the vast surrounding ex­ The interior ceiling is rendered a faux expression in opposition to the iconic, the necessary condition for the existence panse," of which Mircea Eliade writes.18 oxidized copper, a decorative act of inver- universal image of the pedimented of the arts" (McClung 148), that architec­ ture (memory made immanent) is the necessary condition for the existence of the arts? It seems, I believe, that we have a genuine basis for paraphrasing Russi and declaring that Memory is Architecture.

The (re)Enactment of Memory Present

As with the small project seen here, every architecture is attended by the same god­ dess of Memory who first attended its creation and breathed life into its form. Whether that form derives literally from Laugier's primitive hut, as here, or from the form of Alberti's "things as yet unseen and unheard of" (Borsi 13), every act of ar­ chitecture is a sacred breaking away from nature to culture, of which memory is the historian.

This new primitive hut is built on the foundation of a greenhouse formerly at­ tached to the cottage. It is a remembrance of the greenhouse, of the simple gabled form and associations with nature that it shares with the primitive hut. The painted window box, the cedar lattice-columns, 7. Exterior detail, diptych. The column as surrogate tree: "It is never the 8. Interior detail. References to nature !mimetic omament) versus and the cedar fan-truss pediment are ar- tbing but tbe version of tbe thing . .. !Wallace Stevens) references to culture !decorative arts and invention) 7 volume. The blind square stucco panel is literature of architecture. Not unlike the NOTES "supported" by two marble cubes. The Egyptians whose temples were virtually square and the cube are symbols of the illuminated manuscripts of stone, or the 1. Mario Praz quotes Ru ssi in Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts perfection of man, the inventor of culture Medieval Masons whose cathedrals were (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970!. and the "imaginator" of mathematical "book[s] to be read and understood .. . for 57. abstractions. Here the square interrupts there is history in them" (Proust; Frank 2. "There are but two strong conquerors of the the drawing of the brook and is the place 124), we, unavoidably, (re)write the text of forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture. of visual and mental rest- the place for architecture (memory) on the pages of our and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reali ty." !John Ruskin , The the superimposition of the writing of the own constructional inventions.2° Seven Lamps of Architecture [London: mind - as well as the center of the in­ Everyman's Library, 1969]. 1821. tended entrance procession. The wall and Mnemosyne (?) 3. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 2 vols. !New the interior room of which it is the face are York: Booklover Press, s.d.l, I: 211. See Narciso part of an architecture which has its We may apprehend Laugier's frontispiece, G. Menocal. "Louis Sullivan and Victor Hugo: Two Approaches to Reading Buildings.· · Via 8: origins in the cultural inventions of draw­ then, to be an allegory of the origins of Architecture and Literature !New Yo rk: Rizzoli, ing, painting, decoration, and geometric architecture, memory, and culture. 19861. 71: "Accord ing to Hugo, architecture abstraction. This is in dialectical opposi­ Mnemosyne (Memory), "the symbolic had been the most important repository of tion to the sim pie tectonic of the original representation of mental order;" 21 is author­ knowledge throughout the Middle Ages, but "wall-less" primitive hut which had yet to ing (and being authored by) the origin of literature usurped that premier role with the in­ 9 . Allegory of the invention of writing from vention of the printing press." Ellen Eve Frank include the musings of the other arts. Architecture. If Architecture and Memory monuments (architecture/memory) illuminates this theme of the architec­ are both abstractions, then the primitive ture/memory and li terature interrelationship in The Text of Architecture hut is their emblematic constructional ex­ the nineteenth century view of buildings (n. 21 Future pression and the goddess is their em­ center of vision and consciousness), sym­ in Literary Architecture: Essays Toward a Tradi­ blematic personified expression (Architec­ bolizes the moment of the mutual origina­ tion - Walter Pater, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Proust , Henry James !Berkeley: Univer­ One of the attributes of Mnemosyne is tura'Mnemosyne). The intersection of the tion of architecture and memory. Memory sity of Californ ia Press, 19791. Frank writes of that she knows everything - past, pre­ hand and the column, on the horizon line writes on the wax-tablet of Architecture architecture's memorial function. quoting Pater: sent, and future. Memory, then, includes of the eye and mind (at the geometric the origins of culture and the arts.22 .. In that grandiose art of building ... there [are] within it both the traditional idea of "remembrance of the past" as well as the "reminder" to create the future, and this apprehension of historical continuum constitutes our memory of the present.19 The memory of the past, present, and future is the genuine Text of Architecture.

In making architecture, memory of what has gone before, of the past (history), is in dialectical confrontation with newness, invention, with the as-yet-unappre­ hended-to-be. Memory is both part of that newness and separate from it, the "custo­ dian" of invention and the impediment to it, both the "treasure-house" (" Now let us turn to the treasure-house of inventions .. . memory" [Yates 5]) and the chains. Similar to writers, architects draw from the repositories of their imaginations on both the familiar and the unfamiliar (the new­ ly invented) texts of memory.

We are writers. We write buildings instead of books (perhaps in addition to books). We author (authorize/give authority to) architecture. We contribute steel volumes 10. Manuscript of stone: architecture as the writing of collective 11. Site plan as text; program for a theoretical project: "Eliade's Library to the Library housing the constructional 8 memory. Interior of the west temple. Memnonium, Thebes !On the Estate of the ' Ideal Villa' )" historical documents hardly less clearly legible the 'fallen branches in the forest ," man between the woman and the hut is one of greater something deeper than an idle speculation, than the manuscript chronicle''(34l. "chooses four of the strongest" !Laugier 12: em­ original interdependence and ontological import something tantalizing and refusing to be lightly 4. In the Greek ars memoria (an of memory! tradi­ phasis added!. (i.e., architecture sprung directly and instan­ dismissed, like all problems of origins" (3). Lieb­ tion which descended to Rome, architecture 9. The Laugierian hut (of the frontispiece) is clear­ taneously. in this form , from the mind of the god­ man echoes Nberti when she suggests that acted as a device for memory. Within the im­ ly a fabrication. artifice, the imagination of the dess without whom it could not exist). In both architecture might legitimately be the "synthesis agination. "images" !texts) were deposited on abbl!s acculturative mind and not an inevitable "readings" we may see the gesture as the sym­ of the arts:" nevertheless, she. like Praz, still refers "places" which were memorized in the evolutionary product of "simple nature" at all. bolic act of commencement which signifies the to architecture as a sister art, which is illustrative building. When these rooms. walls, and other Laugier's concept that "by imitating the natural break from time immemorial to time memorial of the more than rhetorical problem of architec­ syntactic "place" elements were mentally process, art was born" (Laugier 12) reflects the (n. 13l. ture's identity as unique among the arts vis-:1.-vis revisited " the vari ous deposits [were] de­ traditional privileging of nature over culture 13. Larousse WorldMytb.ology. ed. Pierre Grima! !New its proper kinship relationship and status. manded of their custodians:·· !Frances A. Yates, which has descended from Plato's idea of York: Gallery Books. 1989!, 103. The passage im­ 18. Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and tbe Profane: Tbe Tbe Art of Memory [Chicago: 'The University of mimesis wherein nature presents the ideal real­ plies the etymological relation between memory Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask !New Chicago Press. 1966], 3l. According to Cicero, ity that art should "re-present." In the medieval and monument ("the finest monument a man can York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1959: rpt. Har­ it was the poet Simon ides who was the inven­ aesthetics of Aquinas, by way of contrast, reality have is the memory he leaves behind him,'' court Brace Jovanovich, s.d.l , 21. tor of the art of memory when he used and truth were thought to reside in the mind of Alberti [Franco Borsi. Leon Battista Alberti !New 19. Mnemosyne's tripartite knowledge is transferred architecture as a mnemonic place system to the artist. Fidelity to the external world, to nature. York: Harper&Row, 1977l, 17]l, reminding us of to the human and literary realms with Memory identify the dead bodies in the banqueting hall was not a fundamental artistic requirement. It is architecture's inherent memorial function as serving as a corrective device, as Saint from which he had propitiously absented an aspect of Laugier's paradox, I believe, that he historian or cultural record-keeper (n.3l. Augustine's paradigmatic Confessions himself prior to its collapse. Cicero's passage employs mimetic theory to support an idealized 14. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. , s.v. "myth and demonstrates, in which Memory recalls to the from De oratore, quoted in Quintilian's Institutio object which he arrived at in the Aquinian mythology." sinner the errors of the past, thereby enabling aratoria, is the most famous text wherein manner. 15. Michael Stapleton, A Dictionary of Greek and him to correct the present. and redirect (re­ architecture is used as an analogue for 10. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics Roman Mythology !New York: Bell Publishing member) his future actions. memory/writing: "We require therefore places !Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), Company, 1978!, 141. 20. In "Architecture and Memory,'' Via 8: An:bitecrure [architecture], either real or imaginary, and im­ 107. The idea is Roland Barthes' for whom there 16. On the idea of resistance to the fine arts and the and Literature !New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 88-95, ages [writing/text] or simulacra which must be is "no transparent 'innocent' window on to . gap between their classical theory and practice Umberto Eco notes the development of the idea invented ... so that as Cicero says. 'we shall 'reality"' (119) - as we may say that Laugier's see Frank P Chambers, Cycles of Taste: An of the "Temple as book." He briefly recounts the employ tbe places and images respectively as a wax frontispiece "presumes" to be. Fixed in popular Unacknowledged Problem in Ancient Art and origin myth of the invention of writing which was writing-tablet and the letters written on it. " · (2 ). thought, for example, is the (mistaken) "pre­ Criticism !Cambridge: Harvard University Press, considered to be the death of memory because " The art of memory is like an inner writing" sumption" that the pitched roof is the "truthful" 1928) : and McClung 47. But we may speculate "it will allow men to remember without having !Yates 6l: architecture, therefore, is the wax image of home/reality. that perhaps the fine arts did not require the to use memory ever again" !89). While writing writing-tablet and "custodian" of this inner 11. "The primitive hut ... is no incidental concern of Muses as reminders. The Muses were principally came first to usurp the idea of memory and writing, of memory. theorists, no casual ingredient of myth or ritual. assigned to what we may say are the arts which, ultimately architecture as the primary chronicler 5. joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: The return to origins always implies a rethinking prior to the invention of writing. if not the print­ of memory (n. 3), nevertheless. "in modem times Tbe Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural of what you do customarily, a recall of the natural ing press, were ephemeral - that is. those that (as in ancient times) architecture superintends History !New York: The Museum of Modern (or even divine) sanction for your repeating them required memorization for their presence and the construction of containers for the documents Art, 1972!, 192. for a season" !Rykwert 192!. perpetuation: this as opposed to architecture, that represent the memory of a civilization: the 6. Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, 12. aJ Rykwert 45: McClung 120 !According to painting, and sculpture which we might say are library, the archive, the museum" !89) . Architec­ trans. Wolfgang Herrmann !Los Angeles: McClung, while the precise source of this god­ the arts in which memory is immanent - that is, ture memorializes (memori-a lizes) the Muses Hennessey & Ingalls, Inc., 1977!, 11. dess Architectura is unclear, it was common for which, due to the presence of an artifact, cannot through museums (muse-ums). 7. See William Alexander McClung. The Architec­ deities - neoplatonic abstractions with no be forgotten and are thus the very manifestation 21. Roger Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art ture of Paradise: Survivals of Eden and jerusalem history - to be invented in the Renaissance. of Mnemosyne/Memory. !London: The Warburg Institute, 1939!, 97. !Berkeley: University of California Press. 1983!: McClung points to Ben Jonson's masque, 17. Heinrich W6lfflin writes of the "peculiar 22. "Because the interpretation of a work of art con­ and Robin Middleton and David Watkin. Chloridia, 1631. in which "Architecture" per­ character of the art of building as compared with sists of two elements, the original one supplied Neoclassical and 19tb. Century Architecture !New sonified makes a fleeting appearance [only to all the other arts which, proceeding from it, have by the artist of the past and the one which is York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1980!. "All the deliverthe droll one-liner: "Architecture wi ll take gradually quite emancipated themselves." !Prin­ superimposed by the later interpreter, one must splendors of architecture ever conceived have you higher."]!: Middleton and Watkin 21 !This is ciples of Art History: Tbe Problem of the Development wait until the latter element also belongs to the been modeled on the little rustic hut ... It is by enigmatic: if it is not the non-existent muse of ar­ of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger[New past in order to see it peep through, just as would approaching the simplicity of this first model chitecture, which muse then?). b) The matter of York: Dover Publications. Inc. 1950]. 233!. While happen with a palimpsest or a manuscript writ­ that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true the woman's gesture is also subject to speculation architecture generally has been viewed as the art ten in sympathetic ink" !Praz 34). perfection is achieved" !Laugier 12l. Laugier's (so, too, is the significance of Cupid which which includes the others, and not vice versa, the aesthetic moralism, allied with French McClung [in personal correspondence] conjec­ status of architecture has been subject to debate Primitivism. had as its not insignificant tures to be "either mankind in its infancy" or !n. 16l. !See Rosanna Liebman, Modulus 18 theological aim to "equate primitiveness with "some sort of guiding or inspirational spirit for [Charlottesville: The University of Virginia perfection, and ... suggest that material progress mankind") . Is the woman's pointing a gesture of School of Architecture, 1987], intra.). Alberti [has] no relevance to man's spiritual progress, declaration or creation? We may speculate that especially prized painting, calling it "the mistress FIGURE CREDITS: 1. Laugier, op. cit.: 2. Watercolor which demand[s] only a constant reference to if it is one of declaration then it implies that the of the arts,'' whereof all beauty is born !Borsi 11): drawing by the author; 3, 6, 7, 8. Photographs by those natural virtues best exemplified in the hut had an existence prior to the scene depicted but from this we might infer the reality of there William Taylor; 4. Roman relief; Stapleton, op. cit.; past." Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern here !i.e., it "evolved" from Nature, with or being a conceptual distinction between the idea 5. Rykwert, op. cit.: 9. F. Schellenberg. engraving, Architecture 1750-1950 !Montreal: MeGill­ without man's helpl: that it had an origin separate of status and the idea of sum or origin. Mario 1786; Werner Oechslin, "Architecture and Nphabet,'' Queen's University Press, 1965!, 95. from the goddess who, upon arriving on the Praz. in contemplating "the parallel between Via 8: Architecture·and Literature !New York: Rizzoli, 8. While McClung correctly describes the rooted scene. now canonizes it or otherwise proclaims Iiterature and the visual [i.e. fine] arts,'' refers to 1986!: 10. Monuments of Egypt: Tbe Napaleonic Edi­ trees in Laugier's illustration (which man its authority and authenticity. If, on the other "the idea of the sister arts,'' among which he in­ tion, eds. Charles Coulston Gillispie and Michel presumably either planted or stumbled upon hand, the gesture is one of creation, then this is cludes architecture; he writes that this idea "has Dewachter !Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, [n. 12 b] l, the essay itself differs on this critical the moment of the hut's appearing: it was re­ been so rooted in men's minds since times of 1987!, from Pl. 37, A. Vol. II: 11. Drawing by the point regarding the "columns:" from among ceived by man intact. and thus the relationship remote antiquity [n. 16!] that there must be in it author. 9