Architectural SYNAESTHESIA:

    a hypothesis on the makeup of Scarpa's modernist architectural drawings.

By Marco Frascari
mfrascar@vt.edu ACAUS, VT 1001 Prince St. Alexandria VA 22314

 

To truly appreciate this paper's synesthetic hypothesis about Carlo Scarpa's drawings is to read or to listen this paper sitting at one of many cafés scattered along the Zattere waterfront in Venice, during a pleasantly warm mid-summer night meanwhile enjoying a few multicolored Popsicles and listening to a CD playing Luigi Nono's A Carlo Scarpa, Architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili. Known to medical science for almost three hundred years synesthesia, a technical expression meaning crossing of the senses (Greek syn = together, and aisthesis = sensation/perception) has been recently confirmed as a legitimate neurological condition. Synesthesia occurs through the associations of two or more physical senses and other sense modalities. Called synesthetes, the individuals with synesthesia "smell" colors, "see" sounds and "feel" tastes. In these cross-modal associations, the elicited sensations are both emotional and noëtic and the phenomenon of synesthesia interfaces virtual perceptions with normal sensory perception, rather than replacing one perceptual mode for another.

During the early part of the 20th Century, The Russian Neurologist A.R. Luria observed that 'S', one of his patients, was a synesthete that experienced words as having a "taste and weight...something oily slipping through the hand." Upon hearing a specific sound pitch, 'S' saw "a brown strip against a dark background that had red tongue-like edges" and tasted it as "sweet and sour borscht." In Joris-Karl (Charles-Marie-Georges) Huysmans' novel Against The Grain (A Rebours), one of the characters describes a synesthetic orchestra of liqueurs intersecting sound with taste.

Indeed, each one of the liquors corresponded in taste, he fancied, with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for example, resembled the clarinet in its shrill, velvety tone; kümmel was like the oboe, whose timbre is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette were like the flute, sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then to complete the orchestra come kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh eruptions of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of tubas, while the thundering of cymbals and the big drum, beaten hard, evoked the rakis of Chios and the mastics.

At the beginning of the artistic and scientific fascination with synesthesia, multimodal concerts of son et lumiere, sometimes including aromas and scents, were fashionable and often featured color-organs, keyboards that controlled colored lights as well as musical notes. Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, a known synesthete, featured an organ that produced multihued light beams in his symphony Prometheus, the Poem of Fire. To the fin de siècle artists, synesthetes appeared to be humanity's spiritual vanguard, rising above the sense-segregated masses. "Such highly sensitive people," wrote Wassily Kandinsky "are like gods, much-played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibers at every touch of the bow." However, the scientific concern was baffled by synesthesia's sheer impenetrability. No one could actually understand or share synesthetes' unique perceptions. Two individuals with the same sensory cross-modality do not report identical, or even similar, synesthetic responses-- - Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov, for example, disagreed on the color of given notes and keys. After a peak of interest between 1860 and 1930, synesthesia was forgotten and disregarded mostly because its subjective character was considered unsuitable for proper scientific study. The lack of obvious agreement among synesthetes, was taken as "proof" that synesthesia was not "real." The possibility of scientific comparison was not apparent because doctors were looking at the terminal stage of a conscious perception, instead of taking into account the previous processes that led to that perception.

Lately, a revival of scientific interest in synesthesia has taken place following cognitive and multimedia studies that are contemplating the condition not as an anomaly of the mind, but as a norm of human perception, imagination, and creativity. As Bulat Galeyev points out, synesthesia is not merely a psychic abnormality, but a powerful variety of non-verbal thinking. This additional perception is real, often outside the body, instead of being projected by the mind's eye. Synesthesia is projected and perceived externally in peri-personal space, the limb-axis space immediately surrounding the body, never at a long distance as in the spatial telo-reception of vision or audition. On hearing music, a synesthete studied by Richard E. Cytowic, sees objects-- - falling gold balls, shooting lines and metallic waves-that, much like oscilloscope tracings, are hovering on a "screen" six inches from her nose.

Synesthetes perceive by merging primary and secondary qualities in the cloven world of the res extensa and cogitans. Synesthetic inter-sensory associations are emotional states of affairs appreciating that there are ineffable things you hear, invisible things that you see, and impalpable things that you touch, that are describable but beyond words. Nevertheless, these experiences are accompanied by a sense of certitude (the "this is it" feeling) and a conviction that what is perceived is actual and valid. They are noëtic illuminations based on facts that are experienced indirectly but at the same time coupled with a feeling of certitude. Scientific studies of synesthetic individuals have demonstrated that the color of a number is a much more precise perception than the digit in verifying the accuracy of a computation and the feeling of shapes evoked by tasting food is better than aromas for judging if a victual is properly made. Synesthesia is not a concept, but a material experience occurring in the brain and it should be clearly distinguished from poetic devices, literary metaphors, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic. Commonplace expressions such as "loud colors", "dark sounds", "sweet smells", "soft voice" and "sound structure" employed for descriptions of complex experiences probably antedates intentionally formal manipulation of language and derive from synesthetic experiences. A biblical zeugma stating that people saw sounds and noises provides one of the earliest evidences of the phenomena.

Current medical studies of this extraordinary sensory fusion, synesthesia can give radical insights into the multi-modal work done by Carlo Scarpa in his drawing and teaching by associating the delight of res extensa with the judgment of the res cogitans in cross-sensual emotive constructs. Scarpa's drawings, give to the architects studying them a weird and wonderful sensation of looming over multifaceted and exceptionally personal events. As the already mentioned Nono's carefully titled musical piece reveals, Scarpa achieves "possible infinites" in his drawings by demonstrating the substance of architecture in its potential infinite transmogrifying. Scarpa's drawings are the best illustration of a synesthetic drafting since they result from a contraposition of sweet and sour lines, fast and slow-cooked drafted surfaces and range from design drawing done for dining-in to construction drawing for carry-out. Scarpa used drawing even when following logical or other rational procedures of critical thinking could easily solve the problem at hand.

If I want to see things, I do not trust anything else. I put them in front of me, here on paper, to be able to see them. I want to see, and for this I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it.

The drawing surface and its interfacing with to the drafting media becomes Scarpa's essential expression of his synesthetic experience as inauguration of architectural imagination. By practicing a synesthetic mediation or appropriation Scarpa sees something different, he can solve what Paul Valery has label the Paradox the Architect.

This joining of the information received by one sense to a perception in another sense is the essence of the architectural thinking that ought to take place during the drafting preceding the constructing a building. Architectural concerns in matter(s), material substances or material beings and their transformations and transubstantiations in the built world can be recognized through a synesthetic view of the drawing procedures. In drawing, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. With the possibility of drafting fat graphite lines, sharply thick India ink lines, waxy-red colored pencil lines or gleaming gold marker lines, an architect can use any of them to draw a plan, a section or an elevation and the represented architecture should not change. The standard belief is that the selection of one media or another depends purely on the taste of the draftsperson and has no influence on the represented architecture. Perhaps the drawing will look different with different media and supports, but the built edifice will not change. If this is true, why was Scarpa so particular in the selection of pens, pencils, charcoals, markers and papers to draw or sketch his architectural projections? It would be logical and efficient to use just one unified medium. A complex phenomena hides beyond this behavior; Scarpa is using architectural drafting media and skills to solve and test through subjective synesthesias the objective inter-modality and inter-media nature of architecture The making sense of a projected architectural object becomes an integral, indivisible, simultaneous process by which a construction will sound good, look good and feel good if a colored making of the drawings. Since in the reality of the constructed world the separations between "sensation", "perception" and "emotion," are mere cognitive abstraction.

Another corroborating reflection about the powerful role Scarpa ascribed to the act of drawing in con-fusing sensual perceptions is that if we accept, for a moment, the professional separation between subjective design drawings and objective construction drawings the logical conclusion is that the latter should have been easily codified. However, architects have an incredibly hard time in agreeing on construction notations, a predicament which probably extends back to the Biblical turris confusionis and Nimrod's rave, "Rafel mai amech sabi almi," meaningless to anyone but himself. Each office, each architect has an individual system. After a confusing beginning, western musicians have mostly agreed on a system of notation, but architects have not been able of doing so in spite of the many unification and standardization attempts made by nations and professional associations. The reason is simple, the process of figuring out "sound edifices and structures" is in reality a synesthetic process since neither the normative nor the arbitrary can give satisfactory answers to the question of the conditionality of our perceptions and judgments. Synesthetic drafting acts within the conditionality of architectural perceptions and judgments and their applicability in relation to others. By moving away from medieval tracing floors to paper, architectural drawings have evolved in a specific manifestation of non-verbal thinking, realized by either involuntary or purposeful comparison of the impressions of different modalities, drawing from structural or semantic and, most of all, emotional similarity. Drawings become aromatic-chromatic-visual tools to flavor buildings. A productive explanation of this request for a mixing of factual lines and non-factual demonstrations is that architects, in their tracings, are not making transparent notations but synesthetic images.

The most commonly known synesthesias are the chromo-graphic and the chromo-aural. A little known allegoric description of the phenomena is told in Gargantua and Pantagruel, a prominent book in Carlo's Scarpa's Library. The Rabelaisian allegory sheds light on the synesthetic character of the manipulation of architectural accidents in drawing. In the Quart Libre, Rabelais tells that, while traveling the Nordic seas, Pantagruel and friends hear sounds, but cannot find the source. The boat captain explains that they have reached the border of the Frozen Sea and at the begging of winter there was a battle between the Arimaspians (One-eyed-people) and the Nephalibates (Cloud-dwellers) and the clatter that they are hearing is generated by the thawing of the frozen sounds and cries of the battle .

Here, here, said Pantagruel, here are some that are not yet thawed. He then threw us on the deck whole handfuls of frozen words, which seemed to us like your rough sugar-plums, of many colors, like those used in heraldry; some words gules (this means also jests and merry sayings), some vert, some azure, some black, some or (this means also fair words); and when we had somewhat warmed them between our hands, they melted like snow, and we really heard them, but could not understand them, for it was a barbarous gibberish. One of them only, which was pretty big, having been warmed between Friar John's hands, gave a sound much like that of chestnuts when they are thrown into the fire without being first cut, which made us all start. This was the report of a field-piece in its time, cried Friar John.

In describing the "glace et lumier" ciphering of the sounds, the English version is reasonable - the translator used heraldic color replacement - but not accurate; the expressions used by Rabelais to describe the substantial look of the frozen sounds are "des motz de gueule, des motz de sinople, des motz de azur, des motz de sable, des motz dorez." If motz (mots) could be easily translated as "words," Michel Foucault's puzzling title Les Mots et les Choses, translated in English, The Order of Things, could have been acceptably translated as "The Words and the Things." Pantagruel is handling and thawing not merely verbal sounds but meaningful "frozen colored orders of things," as something made in a medium (air) and transformed in another medium (heraldically colored ice). This transubstantiation makes visible tangible and palpable the invisible order and configurations in the material form of iced-up sounds.

Investigating the mapping of a structure, originally composed in one medium, onto another structure in another medium is the fundamental undertaking of Scarpa's architectural drawings. To create, view, or interpret an architectural drawing is not usually acknowledged to involve senses since vision is deemed the exclusively necessary and sufficient sense. Nevertheless, Scarpa used drawings to figure out human dwelling and construct edifices that are bundles of intertwined sensory perceptions, which intermingle and determine human thinking. Produced first with concerns for specific physical events, these drawings explore synestheticly all the sensory necessities of dwelling. Infused with an "invisible tincture" Scarpa's drafting links elaborates a thoughtful architecture. On paper, he created rooms for thoughts meanwhile planning for human order and disorder. Through drafting, he visualized raw thoughts and then constructed or deconstructed through variety of formal, conceptual, and physical actions on paper, anticipating the yet to come conceptual and physical events in the buildings. To make sure that architectural ineffability and immaterialities are not (will not and were never) subordinate to pure visual formalism, Scarpa's critical concern aims at the concinnitas of matter(s), i.e., the concentration on material substances or material beings and their transformations and transubstantiations reveals in his drafting the vital differences between what buildings are in themselves (their substance) and the perceptible qualities or characteristics (their accidents not to be confused with the common meaning of that word ). The architectural substance underlies all their visible, tangible, measurable qualities. A substance that in itself is not evident, materially quantifiable, or measurable because it has no extension but its accidents are and the appearances of architecture include all those outward characteristics that can be perceived by the senses of sight, taste, touch, smell and hearing "architectural accidents," that in a synesthetic transubstantiation Scarpa manipulates as drawing accidents.

The first thing that architectural students-generally third and forth years undergraduates-about to take Scarpa's design studio learned from the school's grapevine was that a major change had to take place in their "design habits." They would no longer be not required to present their work traced in china ink on carta da lucido (heavy translucent vellum). This was the dominant presentation method elaborated by the Milanese architects of Italian Rationalism teaching in Venice (I. Gardella, F. Albini and Co.) considered a conditio sine qua non to show pseudo-professional efficiency at the time when the cyanotype duplication of drawings was assessed as the most efficient procedure for architectural communications. The implicit requirement of Scarpa's studio was that non-duplicable drawings were to be traced on Bristol board or similar material using a range of colored pencils and pens. The first attempts were too often drawings with blue skies, red bricks, green grass and gray concrete, black poché and terracotta parterre. Unfailingly, these drawings dissatisfied and frustrated Scarpa, who after examining and carefully touching them, urged his assistants to explain to students that the colors used in the drawings were not to suit a process of material identification or to give pseudo-effects of tri-dimensionality, but, to make architectural ideas visible, tainted with non-visible phenomena and tinted with meanings. .

The ongoing quarrel on the use of colors between Scarpa and the students was the analogical and anagogic relationship between pigments on paper and pigments in the constructed world. The colored drawings of the students where based on photographic and photometric definition of hues and tints whereas Scarpa's drafting was performed within a phenomenological and anagogic understanding of colors. For Scarpa the red of a waxy pencil, the red of a brick and the red of an India ink identical on a Newtonian photometric comparison, but in a drawing, they are dissimilar colors with different cognitive and emotional natures To further complicate this condition, the marks made by the same pencil on two different kinds of paper support are not the identical and their nuances fashion different intermodalities. In a synesthetic perception, the marks of those reds cannot substitute each other, especially if they are simultaneously read ­and felt by running the fingers over the drawing surface.

Although Rabelais never reveals who won the battle of the Frozen Sea, in Scarpa's drawing, the Cloud-dwellers, the perceivers of nuances, are the winners against the perspectival or photographic rulers, the One-eyed people. In the inaugural address of 1964-65 IUAV Academic Year, Scarpa stated:

What I want to say is that the sense of space is never given by a pictorial order but always by physical phenomena Modern art has enabled us to see certain phenomena with new eyes and to make discoveries of primary importance about natural facts.

For Scarpa, drawings were a never-ending alternation between the representable and non-representable. Consequently, the drawn surface had to be made a glimmering receptacle of architectural desire instead of being precipitated in a transparency by which the drafted representations were not through or within the drawings but merely photographic appearances denying any reflection of architectural perceptions.

Photographs are of no use: a drawing is useful. Take a photograph and a drawing. I understand the drawing better. A bad photograph is a public act of falsification. The human eye is better than the camera, because is mobile, and a camera though you cannot reproach it for anything regard to it does not state anything true, everything is false; or else, if it is a great photographer who is taking the picture and he seizes a particularly illuminating angle of view, and it is the artistic instinct of the photographer which is involved instead of colors, pencil or pastel strokes.

In drafting, the elicited sensations perceived by synesthetes are emotional and noëtic and the conclusion is reached when the lines rest-or better, become frozen - in an emotional balance. As long as the searched for result is not achieved, the drawing cannot rest; the battle lines and colors are changed until the intended nuances of synesthetic perception is achieved. Its reality and vividness are what makes architectural synesthesia so motivating in its violation of conventional perceptions of what building look like. Architectural drawings then become metaphors, not in the literal meaning, but factually they are a metaphorein, a carry over, a moving of sensory information from one modality to another modality, from one emotion to another emotion. Conventionally rendered drawings-non-synesthetic drafting - are merely stylistic deceptions. These drawings are comparable to the cardboard and plaster cakes on bakery shelves or the plastic sushi displayed in Japanese Restaurants' windows. They look good to a photographic eye, but there is no way for us to know if they project any valid quality of the real ones since the accidents of cutting, baking, cooking or tasting are not transubstantiated in the casting and coloring of plastic. These representations waste everyone's resources, as, in time, they have to be replaced by procedural representations conveying the past, dealing with the present and casting the future, since in the architectural imagination there are no dead ends, but rather a continuous set of connections. If an anticipated or perceived percept gets in the connective system, it flows through different sensorial path and the crossing over generates interferences and interfacings which makes the devising of new buildings possible by using parallel sensorial realms. In other words, if we were really at the Zattere, our Popsicles would let us know the buzz of what I did not tell, but it is embodied in the color of my words.