Pier Vittorio Aureli
Life, Abstracted: Notes on the Floor Plan
The Sebastiano Serlio, plan from Castrametation of the Romans, 1551-54, refers to what within the discipline of architecture is commonly understood as a “floor plan,” that is, the orthogonal view of a horizontal section of a building. The drawn plan is thus not just an abstraction of architecture but a “concrete abstraction,” since together with other forms of architectural notation, the plan translates many determinations - money, measures, code, gender, class, rituals, beliefs, ideologies, environmental conditions, etc.
The floor plan as a “concrete abstraction,” as something that even in its abstract status of notation is both determined by and determinate of particular conditions and how we dwell, inhabit, and produce space.
Reification - which derives from the Latin word res - describes the process through which objects, places, and human relationships become objectified into “things,” or in other words, commeasurable entities.
According to Marx, the human activity of labor becomes a commodity within capitalism, and thus a thing that can be bought and sold, measured and organized. Writing, accounting, and legal apparatuses became so crucial to early societies that they underwent a process of abstraction and brought tangible consequences to the organization of built space.
The geometrization of the space responds to one of the most essential features of early sedentary communities: the ritualization of life. Rituals, sets of actions are according to a more or less prescribed order, providing orientation and continuity. The use of the geometry in organizing the space of daily life was a tendency for the monadic communities.
Private, Public, Sacred
The Forma Urbis Romae is a large marble map of ancient Rome.
The map was detailed enough to show the floor plans of nearly every temple, bath, and insula in the central Roman city. It was the outcome of making the city quantifiable. The boundaries of the plan were decided based on the available space on the marble, instead of by geographical or political borders as modern maps usually are.
On the map are names and plans of public buildings, streets, and private homes. The creators used signs and details like columns (public spaces) and staircases.
Vitruvius presented three main techniques to draw correctly, and thus design architecture: Ichnographia (plan), Ortographia (elevation and section) and scenographia (tridimensional rendering). While orthography and scenography represent buildings as they appear to build, ichnography, defined as the tracing of a geometrical projection of a horizontal buildings section, is an abstraction of the building that represents a datum not visible from within the building structure itself.
Land measure and the surveying instruments played a crucial role in the relation between geometry and economy. The juridical abstraction of the city into patrimonial values was at odds with the ritualization of space upon which the planning of towns was founded: both were instrumental in augmenting and facilitating social consensus.
Function, Diagram, Form
The monasteries were built as an apparatus to direct daily life in all of its physical and mental aspects (prayer and contemplation), in the monastery, there are no differences between the monastic rules and life. All the aspects of life had to acquire a ritualized form, and those aspects were therefore translated into a common space: dormitory (sleeping), refectory (eating), library (studying), workshop (working), etc. The organization of those spaces generates repeatable patterns that create a spatial condition that was reflected by an architecture made of simple, generic and rhythmic forms.
All the different spaces are planned within a grid, which allows for an efficient organization of such a wide range of various activities. The result is the management of life, within which everything was measured in term of space but also in terms of time (defined by clocks and the sound of bells).
The aspect of abstraction on the form of monasteries anticipates what would become one of the fundamental tendencies of modernity: this tendency will manifest itself in the increasing standardization of architectural components both in terms of their design and materialization and in the what lack of a better term we can define as “generic architecture.”
The monastery became a fundamental model for industrial civilizations thus became a model for modern institutions in which the floor plan becomes the sine qua non of architecture, such as the hospital, prison, school, and above all, housing. The spatial ritualization of daily routines became the model for movements and projects that challenged the inevitability of industrial capitalism.
Oikos, Economy, Housing
Back to the Greek word oikonomia, which in turn is composed of two words: oikos, which is usually translated as "household"; and nemein, which is best translated as "management and dispensation."
The Oeconomicus is a Socratic dialogue principally about household-management and agriculture. The domestic life found its origin in the ritualization of life, not limited to religion.
The management of domestic life became increasingly focused on the management of the household - small society, formatted by the agglomeration of the different families houses that compose the society.
For the greeks, the political and social spaces were separated between polis and household. The household management can we understood as an economic order that assigns every moment of daily life in a specific place in the house. The economy implies translation of life into a typical spatial arrangement - a plan.
Economic Relation
House: emphasize the symbolic dimension of the domestic realm;
Housing: Focuses on the functioning of the house.
In the middle ages, domestic activities would often coalesce within one room, from the fifteenth century, we see an increasing separation of domestic activities. Henry Robert publishes a book called “On the Dwelling of the laboring classes” where Robert collected arguments for the construction of working-class housing.
The reflection of capitalism and the industrial revolution response to change the living conditions of working-class in the 19 century, providing a minimum of worker’s welfare of the living.
The preservation of domestic privacy and independence of the different families, the house define a specific function for each room. With that which family had their apartment and their private rooms, effectively preventing the communication of contagious disease.
In Roberts’ Model houses, the sense of home economics and considerable social organization overlap and become one, and the plan becomes the most legible hieroglyph of a political economy crystallized into space.
Other Plans
Empty space was considered a vacuum before the renaissance because it has an unphysical presence and incommensurability. Techniques to accurately measure come in the late middle ages with the system of orthogonal projections praised by architects and artists as Leon Battista, Alberti, Raphael, and Palladio.
The floor plan is not the horizontal part - but it defines the space with the materials. The social contingencies are animating and in the end producing spaces what we call the cold war between “form” and “content.” The plan would focus on the way of strategies of normalization, standardization, and typologization (Lefevre: The Production of Space).
To Robin Evans, if an architectural plan describes anything, it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace records - walls, doors, windows, and stairs - are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited spaces.
The floors plan through the history of architecture would reveal the way life has been ritualized, abstracted, and thus reified to become legible and organizable.
Nowadays after BIM (Building Information Modeling) comes, the plan is no longer the primary object of design. The architects can use plan, section, and elevations simultaneously.
Use the plan as reification and the “power of abstract.”