The Thread of the Virtual Movement from Wölfflin to Lynn

Fabio Colonnese

doi:10.14361/dak-2021-0208

Abstract

All buildings move under the effect of physical forces of the earth. It is unperceivable, but they move. Some of them are also designed to move to perform their functions. However, most of them look absolutely still. Nevertheless, architects, critics, and historians of architecture often borrowed terms from scientific disciplines to describe a building or parts of it as if it is actually moving. Since antiquity, artistic literature has been full of »dynamized« descriptions of artwork virtually set in motion to enhance the narrative quality of the communication, but in architecture this happens only from the end of the 18th century onward. Since the end of the 19th century, a sequence of scholars and architects Heinrich Wölfflin, Colin Rowe, Peter Eisenman, and Greg Lynn have been developing a series of analytical and design tools that were used to introduce (or to query) time and motion in architecture, who different forms are here presented, classified, and discussed.

Highlights

The technique of dynamization of the description, through which a virtual movement is applied to the gaze of the beholder and to the figures depicted, was transferred into architecture only around the 18th century, as testified to by Robert Adam’s written suggestions coming from the picturesque composition
Inspired by Vischer’s emphatic approach, the evolution of visual perception studies, and the power of scientific metaphors, Wölff lin contributed to interpret the architectural form as an expression of real or virtual forces affecting the building and to adopt the deformation as a category to illustrate this phenomenon in an »elastic« sense, like in Borromini’s architecture, or in a »plastic« sense, like in the metaphor of the catastrophe adopted by some of the Deconstructivist architects
The phenomenal transparency, which considers the coexistence of alternative configurations in the building, uses the time needed to pass from one to another to denote a different kind of movement

Summary

Introduction

Architects’ interest in virtual movement is revealed by some of their drawings – think of the growing importance of diagrams and the envisioning of intangible phenomena (Colonnese 2012) – and by the terminology and metaphors that architects, critics, and historians of architecture adopt to describe buildings that look absolutely still This article compares it to the technique of the description of works of art since antiquity, individuating the »dynamization« as a shared approach. Large and complex buildings have been described following the gaze of a hypothetical beholder along the sequence of their interior rooms or the different levels of elevation, and by attributing movement to the parts and »animating« the inert bodies of the architecture This kind of description, which requires an audience able to share the experience and sensations, only emerges in the literature of architecture around the 18th century. Despite Lynn borrowing the term »animate« from animation software terminology (Lynn 1999: 11), it indirectly alludes to cartoons – anime is the proper Japanese term for animation movies – and to animals, whose adaptive strategies had been described by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and to the soul, the anima of living beings, for movement is naturally interpreted as an ancestral sign of life

A Kind of Motion

Conclusions