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Sublime Indifference

This paper routes the contemporary discussion of architectural scale through a consideration of emotions, a genre of knowledge that operates in apparent antithesis to geometry, the conventional home of architectural discourse on scale. It situates the discussion in its historical and philosophical context, or theories of ‘soul’, and introduces the problem of how to conceive today and in architectural terms, what anthropologists now call the scale of the ‘psychosocial’.

The original paper was written for the 2010 AHRA Conference on the subject of ‘Scale’. It builds on in-depth research into the seventeenth century origins of modernism and uses the methods of intellectual history to develop a new historical insight into the role of the emotions in the perception of architecture. The paper was developed in part through research undertaken for a post-graduate history and theory programme entitled ‘The Forgetting of Air’, and the representation of air in films and contemporary architecture.

The paper situates the discussion of scale in its historical context, examining its pneumatic origins in ‘soul’, a concept that ran from the individual to the cosmological, from the classical philosophers through to the scientific revolution. Newtonian cosmology inaugurated a new concept of infinity, out of which emerged a new aesthetic theory, the sublime, and an ontological crisis in the form of ‘indifference’. The new ontology dispensed with the soul and the emotions were subsequently treated as subjective and biological. Although they acquired new status for determining the individual, they lost the ability to scale up and represent the social. Anthropologists are now beginning to recognize the ‘psychosocial’ dimension of the emotions and their cultural grounding. The paper asks a significant question: how might this understanding contribute to new theories of architectural scale?