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MONSTROUS BODIES: Architecture and the Play of Appearance

This paper will describe the influence on my own research of two primary themes discussed by Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne in their series of papers on hermeneutics and architecture.1 The first is that understanding arises from a dialectical relationship between part and whole, a ‘circling’ between them in order to establish their mutual significance. The second is that understanding proceeds through metaphor, which, according to Lakoff and Johnson, arises primarily from embodied experience. Taken together, these points raise another question: Is the idea of part and whole in architecture itself a metaphor,and if so,is it one which arises from the body? In the writings of Vitruvius, the body was presented as a model of compositional unity, while modernism was founded upon methods of fragmentation derived from anatomy. As an alternative to the view of unity and fragmentation as opposites, Frascari's notion of the 'monstrous' in architecture will be used to explore the dialectical relation between part and whole, based upon hermeneutic conceptions of play, festival, and symbol.