ABSTRACT
The meaning of walls is also very much the reflection of ourselves and how we understand architecture as an extension of our body. This conceptual reversibility between body and architecture has a varied and far-reaching historical meaning in
Western culture that is not just symbolic, but also mythological, geographical, metaphorical and often also functional and formal, since this complex relationship can be considered as both universal and self-referential.19 In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, in particular during the Italian Renaissance the kinship between body, architecture and the city was elaborated with emphasis on religious and military constructions. Architects such as Pietro di Giacomo Cataneo and most of all Francesco di Giorgio Martini favoured a human body ‘either as an analogy for the city and its component parts or – in a sometimes almost literal sense – as a generator for the forms and proportions of buildings and their parts – cornices, columns, and capitals at one level, the plan of a church at another’, as the historian Simon Pepper describes.20 While di Giorgio
Martini’s famous fifteenth-century drawing depicts a walled city whose outer perimeter envelops a human body holding a tower on its head, similarly James C. Murphy uses a standing body, with arms outstretched sideways and overhead, to determine the proportions of a drawn section of the monastery church in Batalha, Portugal (1795), both drawings representing an explicitly anthropomorphic understanding of architecture and the world.
