Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object by van Eck Caroline

Author:van Eck, Caroline [van Eck, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2015-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

Designing and looking at a building thus conceived both draw on a cultural memory shared by the architect and the viewer, and appeal to the viewer’s capacity to appreciate the building as a whole whose experience unfolds in time as he or she walks through it.311 This happens in Soane’s buildings through the activation of cultural memory and the representation of character, as his own remarks on Pitzhanger show, the London house he largely rebuilt for himself in 1800–1803 (fig. 62). Here the façade is transformed into the face of the owner, full of visual clues as to this character and occupations:

Describe the front. No man will suppose that the architect or owner had attained civic crowns for saving the lives of his fellow citizens […]. To judge of this species of building we should endeavour to discover the object to be attained: for example, in the building before you, if we suppose the person about to build possessed of a number of detached pieces of ornament, such as eagles and wreaths, demiboys and foliage, columns and statues, pedestals and acroters &c, and that from a desire to preserve them from ruin, or to form a building to give a faint idea of an Italian villa […] this building may thus be considered as a picture, a sort of portrait.312

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