Matters of Size

Dimensions are not Signs or Symbols

Hadrian's Pantheon Portico

While America did not invent “bigger is better,” at least in buildings there is a perceived value to size in America: suburban homes valued in square feet rather than architectural quality, skyscrapers competing in height, etc. Hegemann and Peets cut to the core of the issue in talking about urban space in Washington DC:

The map of Washington, to be sure, is dotted over with a variety of expanded street-intersections bearing such labels as “square” or “circle”, but these are no more plazas in the architectural sense of the word than is a pile of stones a beautiful building. The idea that an open area is a virtue and a thing of beauty in itself, merely because it is so many square feet of space capable of growing grass or shrubs, that is an idea which one can sympathetically observe in a horse or caterpillar, but it is entirely unworthy of us human beings,… It is no more definitive praise to say of a city “square” that is has a superficies of two acres than is it to say of a piece of sculpture that it weighs a ton.^[1]

But it has somehow crept into the discourse lately that specific dimensions are in some way meaningful, whether a skyscraper is 1776 feet tall or a triumphal arch is 250 feet. Last year I presented a paper at a conference in Vicenza that dealt with the issue of how we see numbers in architecture. I argued against the idea that specific proportions are really perceivable (exceptions being pure forms like cubical or spherical spaces), but that we do see countable things—columns, bays, etc.—that, in sophisticated compositions like the façade of the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona, can be grouped into complex bay rhythms that approximate musical composition.

While Mark Wilson Jones has long argued for using original dimensions (Roman feet or palms) in analyzing the proportions of historical buildings^[2], he does not argue for those dimensions being symbolically meaningful in any way. His argument that the portico of the Pantheon was meant to have 50 ft. columns, but 40 footers were substituted because the ship sank with the taller columns, does not imply that either 50 or 40 feet were meaningful numbers to the Romans—they were merely standardized dimensions. He does suggest that we can tell then difference between 40 and 50 feet, but not that we can visually measure them precisely.

Iconography, with which I have been involved since my university days, is an essential component of the classical tradition. But almost no classical architect today knows very much about it. It’s assumed that “meaning” comes with the package of the classical orders and forms, but in fact their significance is highly variable, based on situation and associations. And never in the history of classical architecture did architects assign symbolic value to dimensions, because they always understood not only that dimensions are not precisely perceivable but also that dimensional systems are temporal and cultural constructs, not timeless signifiers (every city in Renaissance Italy had its own dimensional system, largely derived from elements of the human body, like feet, palms/hands, and arms).

Detail from Giampaolo Panini's painting of the interior of the Panbtheon

Is bigger always better? Not necessarily. The problem with classical architecture is that it is technically scalable, but in real terms it’s always “measured” against the human body. Quality—scale, composition, character—should count more than size. And meaning is not inevitable in any form of architecture, including the classical.

^[1] Werner Hegemann and. Elbert Peets, “The Plan of Washington,” American Vitruvius: An Architects' Handbook of Civic Art, ed. Alan J Plattus, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 1988, p. 286

^[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/architectural-history/article/abs/tempietto-and-the-roots-of-coincidence/7853772471A842B61B5D15525C84A28C