Page 118 - Libro Max Cetto

Max L. Cetto and the Territory of Architecture

Schmarsow who, at the beginning of our century, introduced this basic concept into aes-
thetics when he described architecture as a creative dialogue between man and his spatial
environment.” 26
Although it was not in the early twentieth century but in the late nineteenth century
when Schmarsow defined space as an essential ingredient of architecture, Cetto was right
27
to recognize its importance in the history and theory of architecture. Remarkably, he also
avoided characterizing space as a vacuum or negative space waiting to be molded, as argued
28
by architects such as Giedion, Zevi and many others, but, emphasizing its dynamic and
relative character (“space and its configuration”), he came closer to the original Schmarsow-
ian conception. According to Schmarsow, space as the essence of architectural creation was
not something physically manipulable, but a corporeal and psychological phenomenon, an
intuitive form (Anschauungsform), a sense or feeling (Raumgefühl) that is a product of the
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relationship between the human body and the world. In a way that seemed to paraphrase
Schmarsow, Cetto defined architecture as a “creative dialogue between man and his spatial
30
environment.”
While Alberti never spoke of architectural space, one can find some mentions of the
Latin root spatium in his Ten Books of Architecture. In effect, Alberti did speak of space, al-
though not in a contemporary sense, but in reference to concrete spaces (i.e., as a synonym
of room), and, more generically, to extensions and physical distances: when speaking of
intercolumniations, for example, he referred to them as spatium. A millennium and a half
earlier, Vitruvius had done the same: the mentions of space in his Ten Books of Architecture
referred to distances, areas and surfaces. The contemporary concept of space was neverthe-
less already implicit in many of the ideas of both authors. The most important is, perhaps,
the second of the Vitruvian principles (those on which “architecture depends”): dispositio, a
Latin rendering of the Greek diathesis. Generally translated as layout, arrangement or even
design, an analysis of the term reveals that it was not very different from the concept of
architectural space, meaning the spacing of objects as the primary operation of architectural
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design, what Alberti alluded to when speaking of the “movement of weights and the join-
ing and massing of bodies.” Especially when he claimed that these movements resulted in
things “beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man,” the Florentine architect comes
closer to Schmarsow’s and Cetto’s notions of spatial relations than to the more static and
substantialist conceptions of Giedion or Zevi. Similarly, with his mention of the “needs of
man,” Alberti was in agreement with the two German authors by granting this spacing of
physical bodies an anthropological dimension and, additionally, a sense of dwelling. In his
text, Cetto points out that, after Schmarsow, many theorists had tried to define the essence
of architecture, but without being able to capture its true complexity due to the bias of their
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perspectives. It is here where he affirms the irreducible in the experience of architecture.
As mentioned above, this irreducibility obeyed the different correlations in play, which con-
stituted the very territory or field of action of the architects: their disciplinary horizon.

26 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 10.
27 August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der Architektonischen Schöpfung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894). English translation
in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994), 281-97.
28 See especially Bruno Zevi, Saber ver la arquitectura (Buenos Aires: Poseidon, 1952), 19-32, and Sigfried Giedion,
Architecture and the Phenomena of Transition: The Three Space Conceptions in Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1971), 144-9.
29 Mallgrave and Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form and Space, 286.
30 Max L. Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico, 10.
31 While the suffixes positio and thesis respectively mean “position” and “posture,” the prefixes dis and dia –denoting
estrangement, separation or divergence– provide a sense of mobility or dynamism opposed to their isolated fixity. Dispositio
and diathesis would then mean relative or differentiated positions or postures and, in their active forms, would denote the
displacement or spacing of objects.
32 Formalist, aestheticist, political, socieconomic, religious, technical and scientific perspectives.

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