Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T09:48:51.836Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Architecture, metaphor and the mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

John Onians
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The title of this lecture may arouse false expectations. Some of you will have come hoping for a disquisition on high theory. If you have, you will be disappointed. This talk is not about linguistics or philosophy. It is not even about architecture. Probably I should have called it ‘buildings, words and the body’ or just ‘living with buildings’. Far from uniting three lofty academic disciplines, as the title seems to do, this paper seeks to remind us of what we have lost by operating with such distinct and lofty categories. Instead of celebrating the separate natures of building, talking and thinking, it endeavours to draw attention to their inseparability. If it succeeds you will by the end be more aware of the extent to which none of these activities can happen without the others being involved. What is argued is that the making of buildings and the experiencing of buildings are both associated with distinctive mental operations and that this association is apparent in our use of language. To put it another way, we use metaphors from architecture to articulate our thoughts because the processes of design and construction and the experience of using building relate to basic mental operations and basic psychological needs. In other words, when we derive from building design the metaphor ‘plan’, as in ‘five-year plan’, or from building construction the expression ‘foundations’, as in ‘foundations of economic theory’ or from the experience of a building once constructed the concept of ’pillars’, as in ‘pillars of society’, we do so because there is a uniquely close relationship between building and thinking. It is on this relationship that I want to reflect. Since the topic is as vast as the worldwide history of architecture and thought, I will probably not get very far this evening. But I hope at least to demonstrate its importance, not just for architectural historians, but for linguisticians and philosophers as well. As I will argue, the study of architectural metaphors sheds light equally on the history of architecture, the history of language and the history of thought.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 35 , 1992 , pp. 192 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Budge, E. A. Wallis (ed.), Book of the Dead (1923), p. 357ffGoogle Scholar.

2 See Onians, J., Bearers of Meaning: the Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (1988), pp. 59–90 Google Scholar.

3 Smyth, H. W. (ed.), Greek Melic Poets (1906), p. 63 Google Scholar.

4 Pindar, , The Odes (Loeb, 1919)Google Scholar, Pythian 3, n, 114 fr., Pythian 6, 11, 8 ff., etc.

5 E.g. Sophocles, frag. 867.

6 See Onians, J., ‘Idea and product: potter and philosopher in Classical Athens’, Design History, (1991), pp. 65–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 G. Manetti, Vita Nicolai … R.I.S., 2.2, col. 950.

8 Frontispiece of Keplerus, Johannes, Tabulae Rudolphinae quibus astronimicae scientiae, temporum longinquitate collapsae restauratio continetur.. (Ulm, 1627)Google Scholar.

9 See e.g. Pritchard, J. B. (ed.), The Ancient Near East, An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Vol. 1, pp. 66–70 Google Scholar.