Creature or a Body on the Table?

Four Episodes on the Notion of Architectural Composition

Abstract

This article historically revisits the theory of architectural composition through the relationship between body, assembly, and beauty. Through four episodes —from Renaissance treatise culture and the classical notion of disposition, through the arbitrariness introduced by Claude Perrault and the combinatory method of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, to the contemporary tensions between composition and system— it analyzes how different conceptions of architectural unity were linked to particular ways of understanding the body, creation, and beauty. Frankenstein’s creature works as a critical image through which to reflect on modernity and its procedures of assembly, reopening today the question of who —or what— defines the criteria of coherence and beauty in contemporary architecture.