Architecture as the Framework of Human Perception

In 2016 the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs published a report that went surprisingly unnoticed—which declared that for first time in human history more of the global population now lived in cities than in rural areas.1 This event, happening in the lifetime of any readers of these words is rather extraordinary, but especially for architects, as it means that when the majority of humankind (at the time of writing 54 percent to be exact) exits the front door of their home or building of residence, their visual field is defined not by a natural ecological horizon but an architectural one—in the form of cities. If one were to extrapolate further it could be reasonably claimed that architecture has thus had a shift in its historical role from being the discipline responsible for producing the enclosures that protect humans from nature, to a contemporary position as the discipline responsible for producing the majority of the visual framework of human perception.2 This realignment within the field of architecture warrants significant further consideration in multiple disciplines, yet for the purpose of this essay it is enough to allow me to make my claim—that independent of its status as an art or nonart, the shift in architecture status qualifies it to be of enough cultural significance that it requires consideration in aesthetic registers in philosophy as well as in architectural theory and practice.3

While it may seem unusual to contemporary readers to be presented with such a strong link between the discipline of architecture and the perception of human reality, architecture, in fact, has a long history of calibrating the human perception of reality, albeit in more focused registers. While the full extent of these relationships is beyond the ambitions of our subject, it may be useful to note a few examples that anticipate architecture’s role in defining the visual framework of human perception.4 For instance, on the Athenian Acropolis lies the infamous Parthenon, completed in 438 BCE, which included in its construction exquisite and purposeful mutations of the rigid systems of classical architecture that were designed to overcome what were perceived faults in human visual perception. These were known as optical refinements and were introduced into the design of the Parthenon, at staggering expense, to recalibrate how the human eye perceives the visual reality of the building to appear more optically perfect. As the temples of Greek antiquity became larger, the perspectival distortions became greater. Their response was to introduce these shape anomalies that torque, twist, tilt, bend, and skew architectural elements so that while they disobeyed the strict rules of classical architecture, they appeared to better follow them.

We find another example of architecture being asked to revise the visual framework of human perception nearly five hundred years after the previous example, this time in Roman antiquity—through the writings of Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. In Book VI, Chapter II of his Ten Books on Architecture he writes, “If things that are true appear false, there should be no doubt that it is proper to make additions and subtractions according to the nature of the site.”5 Here he is indicating, once again, that it is the responsibility of the architect not only to construct buildings but to orchestrate their visual perception through unorthodox adjustments to their physical form.

A final example, among many possible, occurs in the nascent Florentine Renaissance, nearly 1500 years after the writings of Vitruvius, where in 1421 architect Filippo Brunelleschi conducted his legendary “perspectival experiments” in front of the Florentine Baptistery, adjacent to the Duomo where he was employed as the master architect for the construction of the then incomplete dome. Through using mirrors, drawings, and sightlines, Brunelleschi discovered how to accurately calculate horizon line isocephaly, the form of perspective drawing that allows one to calculate perceived distance away from the human eye using a third dimension, being representational depth. Perspective drawing was, for architecture, a tool used as an accurate predictor of the visual appearance of reality prior to its actual construction, thereby enabling new trajectories in not only architectural design, where the technique originated, but also in painting, the combination of which we would later recognize as the Italian Renaissance.

At this point we will accept that architecture’s status as an art or nonart is, for the time being, unresolvable, and that in lieu of such resolution, the contemporary claim for aesthetic consideration within architecture emerges from its recent transition from producing objects in a field of “nature” to defining the majority of the visual framework of human perception—a continuation of the line of inquiry inaugurated in the Renaissance, and therefore hardly a newcomer to the discipline.6 The question, then, would be that while architecture is qualified to be a subject for aesthetic consideration, does the discipline of architecture, via architects, want to engage in such discourse? The answer for the past century and up through the current moment has been a resounding no. Why is this so?