quare id faciam?

An excerpt

From Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre, Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order, toward the end of chap. 1 'Taxis: the framework':

Taxis and its schemata are applied to buildings, regardless of their use. Churches, palaces, villas, gardens, and town plans can adopt the same plan pattern. The so-called centralized cross pattern, even more than the formal schemata from which it was derived, is not the property of a specific architect's work. Wittkower's table of 'Schematized plans of eleven of Palladio's villas' (1949), which has triggered so many interesting discussions on typology in architecture, although not incorrect in its application to Palladio's work, has had many misleading implications. It has obscured the fact that taxis and its schemata are general ordering devices and that their roots in the system of thought of classical poetics go beyond neoplatonism.
    The presence of the same taxis frame in artifacts of different meanings and uses is characteristic, in fact, of other cultural expressions that have adopted the classical canon: poetry, painting, and especially music. Ecclesiastical or operatic music, a dance, or a piece of chamber music can have the same musical subdivisions, the same formal schemata of partitioning. The compliance with the classical canon implies the introduction of normative schemata, with their combinations and transformations close to those used in classical architecture. The tripartition schema is present in all formal expressions of classical art. All classical works, whether in words, sounds, or shapes, are identifiable by their strict adherence to the schema that demarcates a realm of departure, a central realm, and a realm of arrival. It comes under many names: opening, continuation, completion; introduction, main part, conclusion; exposition, development, recapitulation. Most typical are the sonata form (Momigny 1806) and the ABA rondo form in music, in which the melodic strings are structured in rise (monte), bridge (ponte, and descent (fonte) parts (Ratner 1980). As in architecture and literature, so in music, the length of each part is unimportant. What matters is the clear distinction of each section, the characteristic formal role that it plays, and the rigorous application of the principle at every interlocked hierarchical step of the work. ... As in classical music, so in architecture, taxis acts not so much through the duplication of formulas as through new combinatorial patterns. There are other similarities in the application of taxis to the arts. The ABCDCBA taxis spatial formula encountered in Cesariano's illustrations is close to the crisscross pattern often found in classical poetry and rhetoric, known as the chiasmus pattern, and in its ABCBBCBA version it resembles the octave or octet form of the classical sonnet in the Renaissance.
    ....
    As classical architecture became a less favourable idiom and as the classical canon came to be seen as a despised formal straitjacket, it was taxis and its schemata that were first and most viciously attacked. The picturesque, romantic, regionalist, expressionist, and modernist anti-classicism took shape only after an alternative to the classical taxis of grid structures and tripartition was devised.

posted by paul bowman @ 5:46 PM