Published at the XXIXth ICHA, Amsterdam 1996: Mental Maps and Guidelines - Mythological Images in Iconology and Archaic Modernism: A Study in Conceptual Systems - Cornelius Steckner

Mental maps and guidelines

121
Dr. Cornelius Steckner
Köln, Germany

Mythological Images in Iconology
and Archaic Modernism:
A Study in Conceptual Systems

The Icarus over the entrance to the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Townhall is not just an insignificant decoration. The mythological image, from the standpoint of information technology, becomes a helpful visual orientation to the places within the architectural and urban labyrinth. The humanists there followed the traditional art of memory. Like Simonides of Keos they had a square matrix in mind to place physical mythological images within a physical space. This engendered a tendency towards rectangular architecture and urban spaces. This is where the concept of Simonides meets the physical urban space of Hippodamos.

The square checkerboard is not the only frame to be used in combination with mythological images as patterns of recognition. Less geometrical concepts can also give mental access to architectural structures, even those difficult to survey. The serpentine guideline of Ariadne is one example. Yet another conceptual system uses the mythological images itself for a more imaginative organisation both of the mental and architectural space. In modern buidings as well, mythological images often serve to organize architectural functions. Humanist mythology survives as figuration in modern space.
The three traditional conceptual systems for the organization of mental and physical access to space are the focus of this poster for the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art.

CONTENTS:

1 Conceptual Systems in Iconology
1.1 The Ordinal Grid of the Humanists, or:
Mythological Figures following Conceptual Frames
1.2 Map and Meaning: The Topological Concept
1.3 Topological Orientation for Architectural Space
1.4 Topological Maps as Overlay to Urban Space
2 Archaic Modernism
2.1 Modern Figurative Organisation
2.2 The Survival of Mythology as Modern Figurative Organisation
3 References
1 Conceptual Systems in Iconology
1.1 The Ordinal Grid of the Humanists, or:
Mythological Figures following Conceptual Frames

"We may call it the principle of intersection - having in mind the use of letters and numbers arranged on the sides of a checkerboard or map which are used conjointly to plot a particular square of area. The Renaissance artist or artistic adviser had in his mind a number of such maps, listing, say, Ovidian stories on one side and typical tasks on the other. Just as the letter B on such a map does not indicate one field but a zone which is only narrowed down by consulting the number, so the story of Icons, for instance, does not have one meaning but a whole range of meaning, which in its turn is then determined by the context. Lomazzo used the theme [of Icarus] because of its association with water, while the humanist who advised on the decoration of the Amsterdam Townhall selected it for the Bankruptcy Court as a warning against high flying ambition, while Arion's rescue by a dolphin symbolizes, not water, but insurance against shipwreck." This is the mental map of the humanists, as described by E.H. Gombrich in his chapter "Aims and Limits of Iconology" in Symbolic Images




Mental Map 1: The Ovidian marbles from the Amsterdam Townhall

The marbles in the Amsterdam Townhall are not just decoration. They are placed over the entrances to specific places to mark the social relevance of these rooms. Their meaning, bound to places, becomes a mental map to guide to the specific functions of their architectural frame. The marble is not used to praise Ovid or his stories, but to refer to the order of the mental matrix. In this checkerboard the place A1 links assurance with Ovid, Ars III, 265 and B1 bankruptcy with Ovid, Ars II, 94. This checkerboard of places is an ordinal frame and conceptual system to give order to physical space and matter. It is the way humanists shelved books in the studiolo, and the method by which their followers organize museums and libraries like the Warburg Library, as Fritz Saxl has noted.

1.2 Map and Meaning: The Topological Concept


The checkerboard forms an ordinal geometrical frame to organize mental places and physical space. But the checkerboard grid also forms a structural overlay providing mental access to geography. It is this pattern which enables us to locate places on topographical maps. Through the concept of the AEDIFICIUM, Umberto Eco recently has shown that the traditional humanist means of facilitating intellectual access is in conflict with the dimensionality of topography.



Mental Map 2: Topological order combined with ordinal order: The AEDIFICIUM of Umberto Eco's Il nome della Rosa

The AEDIFICIUM is a highly ordered library whose organizing principle is incompatible with the humanist's ordinal map. The conceptual system of the AEDIFICIUM follows the topography of the physical world. If ANGLIA is located in the north-west of Europe, books on ANGLIA are found in the north-west corner of the northern wing of the building. The northern wing is not the only space related to the physical world. The open centre correlates to the Mediterranean, with loci named GALLIA, ACAIA, AEGYPTUS, LEONES, AMOR-ROMA and YSPANIA. In this topographical arrangement, the ordering principle is a conceptual system with geographical meaning. The mental map of the AEDIFICIUM is a map of Europe, locating historical writers in the north, writers on grammar in Hibernia, theological books in Iudea and philosophical writers in Africa and Arabia, equivalent to Leones.

1.3 Topological Orientation for Architectural Space

Topological meaning on top of topographical orientation has become a kind of encyclopedic convention widely used as mental map and guideline for World Fairs.



Mental Map 3: Topological distribution of the images of the most important builidings, centered at the Suez Canal Pavilion. World Fair, Paris 1867

At first glance the distribution of the buildings of the main quarter of the Paris World Fair of 1867 is as confusing as the AEDIFICIUM. The positions of the Turkish mosque and the Egyptian and Indian temples remain obscure unless it is realized that these architectural icons are to be found in building Nr. 79, the Pavilion of the Suez Canal Company. The location of the buildings is intended to help form a picture of the coming Suez Canal (1859-1869) as the main artery of worldwide traffic.

Present-day examples of this style of mental map style, combining topographical location with topological meaning, can be found in architectural spaces like the EPCOT in Florida and the Hagenbeck Tierpark at Hamburg.
1.4 Topological Maps as Overlay to Urban Space

The topological overlay is used to guide people through existing urban spaces as well. A typical topological map was designed by Harry Beck for the London Underground in 1931. The same form was employed by Kees Broos for his map of the Municipal Transport Company of Amsterdam, with its close reliance on the townscape of Amsterdam,. This topological map is a conceptional overlay over urban space. We can speak of a special type of map binding the urban space not to a grid but to a net structure which has many topographical properties.

2 Archaic Modernism
2.1 Modern Figurative Organisation

Despite its reliance on topography, the topological map is essentially an abstract overlay, supplying mental orientation for spaces with a confusing structure. The Suprematists and the Charte d'Athènes seem to have inspired a more figurative variant, in which architectural spatial concepts form their own mental maps and guidelines. This leads to a different ideal of the city than the checkerboard style of Hippodamian circles and other geometrical patterns. The new organic architecture has a tendency towards zoomorphic structures, and thus becomes figurative.


Mental Map 4: The "Corno di renna of Rovaniemi", published in the Dizionario Enciclopedico di Architettura e Urbanistica

To the humanist ordinal view these maps remain invisible. The names of the figurations are known, but they are not seen. So s.v. "Rovaniemi" in the Dizionario Enciclopedico di Architettura e Urbanistica we read of the Corno di renna designed by Alvar Aalto in 1944-1945: "La soluzione urbanistica trovata da Aalto per R. costituisce un esempio significativo del rationalismo nella sua traduzione organica." The author of the article does not realize that Alvar Aalto's drawing is not just an illustration of the concept, but is the concept itself.

Remaining invisible to the humanist mind, Alvar Aalto's reindeer's horn is published together with the sitting reindeer as the pattern of urban organisation even in the Dizionario Enciclopedico. But any tourist map gives a better view of the mythological animal of Lapland: The main buildings of Rovaniemi are organized following the image of the reindeer. The urban functions follow the organism. The eye is the modern stadium. The head is framed by the municipal institutions and the heart of all is the University of Lapland. The urban concept is not only the outline of the city but the memory map for orientation as well.
The figuration is an organisational map of conceptual meaning. The same figurative style of organisation, in the form of a bird or aeroplane, was used by Lucio Costa in the shape of Brasilia (see the Dizionario Enciclopedico). More recently, the Nagoya City Science Museum of 1989 organizes the Exhibition of Life Sciences around the outline of man.
These conceptual systems of order, orientation and functional organisation remain invisible to perspective view from the ground. But nevertheless, with their pictorial logic, such figurations provide easy-to-remember mental maps and guidelines for modern urban space. For that reason, figurative conceptual maps are widely used to organize human space. Because images of man and of numerous animals are present in everybody's mind, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic structures have proved effective as ordering devices and are enjoying a comeback as patterns of urban organisation. Further examples are Mesa-City by Paolo Soleri (also found in the Dizionario Enciclopedico) and Vela Luca by Ricardo Porro. Because of their tendency to mythologize the images/structures/spaces involved, I call them a form of Archaic Modernism.


Mental Map 5: Paolo Soleri, organisational map of Mesa-City,1959.



2.2 The Survival of Mythology as Modern Figurative Organisation

For the urban architect the power of imagination is an instrument to organize urban space and to map it for collective memory. For Ricardo Porro the Vela Luca project of 1972 returns mythology to urban space and collective memory: "The island of Korcula is said to have been colonized by the Argonauts and the neighbour island to have housed the Harpies. I wanted to bear in mind the spirit of this landscape in creating an urban project with houses. Public services, an administrative centre, with streets, squares, a parking lot and a port. On the basis of these elements I wanted the whole composition to represent the image of a mythological man, a giant rising from the water, whose different parts, seen from the distance, would merge and form a body, like in painting of Arcimboldo's: the administrative centre would form the head, the restaurant the stomach, the central labyrinth the intestines, the social spaces the hands, the amphitheatre the pelvis and the quay would represent the phallus. All the houses on the main square have the form of a torso fragment, a shoulder, an armpit, a chest ... And the city became man."

3 References:

1