153> beauty, proportion
> sensory perception, sound
> furnishingAccording to Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, the stuff of
architecture is ‘matter itself in its immediate externality as
a heavy mass subject to mechanical laws’ (1993, 90). The
erection of a building is in fact a struggle against the forces
of gravity, which becomes vividly perceptible to us in the
building design because we must resist the very same forces
with our own bodies. But it is not only the Earth that ex-
ercises attractive force. Gravitational forces are also ef-
fected between individual masses that sit on the Earth’s
surface. To be sure, these are not relevant from the perspec-
tive of physics, but we do nonetheless experience the forces
of attraction and repulsion that emanate from masses.
In perceptual images, they become distinct as forces of
intuition, independent > force fields that do not exert force
downward like gravity, but instead radiate from each > body
in various directions. To some extent, we sense heaviness and
immobility in architecture in an immediately physical way,
and to some extent, we perceive them visually as > form
character (> empathy). Lightness, the counterpart to heavi-
ness, is experienced primarily as the overcoming of heaviness,
either as a real property or an expressive quality. In expressive
terms, heaviness and lightness condition one another recipro-
cally.
We know what heaviness is because we feel the weight
and inertia of our own bodies, for example when we must
overcome its drag in order to climb a flight of stairs; and we are
all familiar with the resistance through which heavy masses
oppose our own physical actions, for instance when open-
ing a heavy door. Our vertical stance in particular converts
resistance against the downward pressure of gravity into an
existential experience. As an explicit axis of orientation, thisHarmony
Hearing
Hearth
Heaviness and lightness