Critiques of the Vessel and Queens Library can be found in Kevin Gotkin, “Stair Worship,” Avery Review (2018); Sharon Otterman, “New Library Is a $41.5 Million Masterpiece. But about Those Stairs,” New York Times, November 5, 2019.
On discussions of the Ed Roberts Campus see Aimi Hamraie Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Accessibility (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and on Maison Bordeaux, see Jos Boys, Doing Disability Differently, An Alternative Handbook on Architecture (London, Routledge, 2014).
Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, Getty Center Papers (1993), 149–192. The writing on Wölfflin’s concepts of form, empathy, and style is vast. A good entry point on the emergence of these ideas within Wölfflin’s thinking are Mallgrave and Ikonomous, Empathy, Form and Space. Alina Payne, “Portable Ruins: The Pergamon Altar, Heinrich Wölfflin, and German Art History at the Fin de Siècle,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53, no. 1 (2008): 168–189; Alina Payne, “Wölfflin, Architecture and the Problem of Stilwandlung,” Journal of Art Historiography 7 (December 2012); Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). For an exploration of Wölfflin’s idea of “vitality,” see Vlad Ionescu, “Architectural Symbolism: Body and Space in Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer,” Architectural Histories 4, no. 1 (2016). Wölfflin discounted earlier aesthetics as limited to a “reckoning by the eye” and argued that aesthetic sensibilities involve a total psychological and physiological form of perception related to people’s senses of their own bodies. Interestingly, he also used the example of blindness to elaborate on his point. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 155.
Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 159–160
Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 183.
On the influence of Wölfflin in the work of postwar formalists such as Colin Rowe, see Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 61–63. See also Mark Jarzombek, “De-scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism,” Assemblage 23 (1994): 29–69.
This section on pedagogy is directly inspired by Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s work. See Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing.
As someone who had only recently learned how to walk and stand on an artificial limb that extended up to my hip, I found this activity absurd at best.
“The effect of asymmetry, as has already been noted in passing, makes the relation clear: It gives us physical discomfort. This is because, in our anthropomorphic perception of the object, we identify with it just as if the symmetry of our own body were disturbed or a limb were mutilated.” Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 164.
“Even if a house has little resemblance with the human figure, we recognize in the windows organs which resemble our eyes… The part above the windows becomes a forehead… If the windows are shaded by a projecting cornice, we gain the impression that the eyebrows are knitted to form a protective roof over the eyes.” Wölfflin, quoted in Daniela Bohde, “The Physiognomics of Architecture: Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Sedlmayr, and Paul Schultze-Naumburg,” in German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, ed. Daniel Adler and Mitchell Frank (London: Routledge, 2012), 126.
Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 164.
Mallgrave and Ikonomou, “Introduction,” 53.
The key essay on race in architectural aesthetic theory is Irene Cheng, “Structural Racialism in Modern Architectural Theory,” in Irene Cheng, Charles Davis, and Mabel Wilson, Race in Modern Architecture, (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020),134–152.
Schultze-Naumburg wrote: “To this end, it will be initially demonstrated how the relation between the physicality of the artist and his work is one of inextricable dependence, and how impossible it is for him to surpass the conditions of his own corporeality. A recognition, however, of this close relation simultaneously establishes the contrary procedure, which allows us to draw inferences from the artwork (or the judgment of such) to the artist (or the one making the judgment). Thus is it possible to gain information about the racial basis of the population not only from works of the past; rather in regard to the present, too, it is possible to arrive at interpretations of artistic products which explain certain things that would otherwise remain enigmatic.” Paul Schultze-Naumburg, “Art and Race” (1928), excerpted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 496.
Schultze-Naumburg wrote: “Houses have faces like human beings and they exhibit a certain expression by which one can recognize them and infer their inner state, provided one is able to understand the clear language of physiognomy, at least to a degree. On the basis of the expression of the two houses juxtaposed … it is not difficult to imagine the person which corresponds to the buildings. The image at the top seems to bear the features which are to be expected in the face of a down-to-earth, loyal and friendly farmer of good race… The house at the bottom … has no expression at all. Its face is swollen and, in its sheer dullness, it is vividly reminiscent of the human mush which has spread through the land and which has neither a clear face nor a noble physique.” Quoted in Bohde, “Physiognomics of Architecture,” 126. See also Paul Schultze-Naumburg, “Die Physiognomie der Industriearchitektur,” Die Umschau: Illustrierte Wochenschrift über die Fortschritte in Wissenschaft und Technik 27 (1923): 673–678; Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Das Gesicht des deutschen Hauses (Munich: Callwey, 1929). Both of the latter works are cited in Bohde, “Physiognomics of Architecture.”
Schultze-Naumburg, Art and Race, 498.
Schultze-Naumburg, quoted in Bohde, “Physiognomics of Architecture,” 126. The scholar of disability, Tobin Siebers has written on Schultze-Naumburg’s theories of art in Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2008).
Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 160.
Further, Wölfflin wrote: “Everything living tries to escape from this and to achieve the natural posture of regularity and balance. The relation of form to matter is conveyed in this effort of organic will to penetrate the body.” Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 160.
Schultze-Naumburg, “Art and Race”; Georges Batailles, “L’informe,” Documents 1 (1929): 382; Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
This essay is adapted from “Chapter 4. A Form of Impairment,” in David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Thank you to Judy Selhorst for the edits to this version of this work.