Recently I was going through some old pictures and I saw a picture of my son when he was just a cute toddler. Like most 2 year olds, he was fascinated by the telephone. It was kept on a side table and his main mission in life was to be able to reach it and grab it without our assistance. That picture of him attempting to reach the telephone, trying to be as tall as he could is adorable. He’s now close to being 6’ tall but when I see him standing near that side table I compare how much he has grown in so little time. That side table looks so short in front of him.
I spent my early years in a two storey house in a village. When my dad moved to Mumbai, we had to shift in a 2 bedroom apartment which seemed like a matchbox compared to our earlier house and it took us a while to get used to this tiny living space. My memories of the earlier house were of spacious rooms and a huge garden in front of it. When I visited this house a few years later, I was quite disappointed by the scale. It seemed so huge when I was small and now it looked just ‘normal’.
The point here is that we tend to perceive our physical environment in relation to our size. The mental comparison we make of the built structure to our size determines whether we can relate to it or we’re in awe of it. Clever use of this psychology has resulted in interesting architecture.
Look at the Hindu temple plan and section. You’ll see that even though the height of the built structure increases towards the inner sanctum the interior space becomes smaller. As you go from the main hall towards the inner sanctum, light and adornments on the walls become less. The inner sanctum does not have any windows at all. It is like a journey from outwards to inwards. From being amongst thousands you’re slowly forming your own connection with the divinity.
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| Sketch by Mariel Drego - Sketches of the Past |
On the other hand churches have a huge main hall. They have a lot of light coming into the main hall and it is usually adorned with murals and sculptures. Reasons are many but the main reason lies in the fact that once Christianity was accepted as a religion in the Roman empire it became the seat of power. Therefore, it was important to make the structure grand. Here secular and spiritual events took place in the same place at different times. Congregation was important as more and more people were encouraged to accept faith.
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| Church Plan |
Psychological impact of building proportions has been explored by the architects over the centuries. It has been a major influence in the building design. Many methods were used to bring harmony and order to building proportions. We saw in earlier post how mathematical ratios were used in the building design. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Indians used their own proportional systems. The interesting theme running across the ancient world in developing proportion system seems to be the human body proportion. Each civilization tried to imitate nature’s perfect work, the human body in their work of art. Egyptians measured everything from roads to town squares to pyramids in terms of the length of a palm.
Vastushastra, the science in building design in India follows Vastu Purush Mandala pattern in which 'Purush' represents the cosmic man and 'Mandala', the mathematical representation of the cosmos. Together they represent proportional system for the building keeping in mind maximum wellbeing of the residents.
The Greeks developed classical orders based on the human proportions. Vitruvius, the famous architect of the 1st century, studied classical proportions and defined the Vitruvian man later sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci. In recent times swiss architect Le Corbusier developed a proportion system called Le Modulor.
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| Vaastu Purush Mandala |
The Greeks developed classical orders based on the human proportions. Vitruvius, the famous architect of the 1st century, studied classical proportions and defined the Vitruvian man later sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci. In recent times swiss architect Le Corbusier developed a proportion system called Le Modulor.
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| Vitruvian Man - Sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci |
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| La Modulor by Le Corbusier |
Proportional systems were made, accepted, discarded, modified. They were mathematical, spiritual or followed patterns in nature. Squares, triangles, circles and pentagons became hot favourites and were called sacred geometry for their perfect shapes and spiritual significance.
But if squares are perfect and so are circles and triangles then why do we fall in love with a building designed by Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry which seems to defy all the proportion norms.
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| Nuragic and Contemporary Art Museum - Cagliary, Italy |
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| Walt Disney Center - Los Angeles, USA |
It’s that little x-factor that architects add to their design. Call it intuition or design sense, that special ingredient they put in their design recipe to make it extra-ordinary. I don’t think great architects of our times sit and draw buildings to fit some proportional system. I think they are born with a proportion bone in them. It gives them that power to go beyond mathematical ratios, classical orders or ‘Vaastushastra’ to create a building Vitruvius would proudly declare in his work De architectura as 'firmitas, utilitas, venustas' - solid, useful and beautiful.
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Wonderfully written & co-relating with personal experience makes it stand out. :-)
ReplyDeleteThank you, Tinku :-)
ReplyDeleteInteresting bone to pick....glad the architects of the kind deviate from the perfect lines, to go beyond....the inner proportions of the temple and the church sanctum, make it even more informative!
ReplyDelete