Animating Architecture: Empathy and Architectonic Space

Abstract

Kirsten Wagner’s essay focuses on the psychological and physiological perception of space and the inflection of both by empathy theory. She traces the development of empathy aesthetics and spatial perception in the early investigations of Hermann von Helmholtz, Hermann Lotze, and Wilhelm Wundt, and explicates how spatial representations, both visual and tactile, are traced by bodily movements. This subject-object union was understood by Robert Vischer as a symbolizing activity derived from “the pantheistic urge for union with the world.” Vischer’s theory was further systemized by Theodor Lipps, who proposed three pairings of opposing forces as the psychological armature within which we understand and resonate with external objects. Lipps’s debt to Karl Bötticher relates empathy theory very directly to architectural form, a theme subsequently taken up in Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” 1886. In the process, the classical concept of rules and proportion was reinterpreted as a scientific, psychological concept of emotional projection. An extreme version of the empathetic understanding of architectural space was reached by August Schmarsow, who saw it as a space projected by the axial body and shaped by the body’s visual and tactile faculties.