Exploring Synesthesia

This connection will be readily understandable to anyone who has visited a building whose acoustics bring about an emotional response. In San Francesco della Vigna in Venice, for example, the proportional relationships the architect Sansovino derived from Vitruvius and studies of ruins results not so much in visual harmony as a place where the polyphonic tones of even a small choir conspire to bring about spiritual refreshment. The building, in effect, becomes the lungs, throat, tongue, teeth, and lips of a voice the speaks to the invisible soul.

The silence of architecture drawings is a momentary sublation of the tones, smells, textures, gravities, balances, and breezes contained within buildings, spaces, intervals, and relations of ground to sky that the building constructs. The blending of senses afforded by buildings is the key to how people use their bodies to enact places, and how places become emblems of identity through this enactment.

Buildings have a double life. The majority of it is spent in hibernation, waiting for the intensive redefinition of space and time that comes with festivals. Lights, banners, festoons, and decorations made of food as well as paper and wood make over the building into a version of a ginger-bread house.

In the festal time and space of the holiday, architecture becomes theatrical. In Italian Travels, Goethe describes Rome during the annual Carnival: streets turn into race-tracks, buildings are set ablaze by candles mounted on the façades and roofs, masked crowds carry candles on tall sticks because the trick is keep one’s candle lit while trying to blow out others’. In the Jacques Tati film, Les vacances de M. Hulot, a seaside resort - already somewhat ‘festal’ as a holiday structure - is thrown into high gear as Hulot inadvertently sets off a shed filled with fireworks. A “war in miniature” animates the sea-side scene and we are reminded of Bernard Tschumi’s comment that “the perfect architecture is fireworks.” Crowds, parades, idlers, or even one figure in black crossing an empty square at noon can restructure a space. The sound of drums, cymbals, horns can reverberate through city streets to make them the biggest instrument of the orchestra.

In other words, there is synæsthesia-in-general because the senses are not just the five that we identify with the presemed “separate” organs of eyes, ears, tongue, skin, and nose but the complex of impressions that come about because, even before the brain tries to sort things out, the ears, nose, eyes, tongue and skin have conspired, leaked over, merged, and shared secret information. And, once the brain begins to say what “it” sees, smells, tastes, and so on, it also adds the structure of events, fears, hungers, and hopes to the mix. The sensations of gravity, balance, and motion are added. When architecture takes these over into the drawing, the liaisons dangereuse must take up the life of the line, color, paper texture. Once reincarnated as a building, however, the spirits are again released into the air