325encountered together in an Egyptian tomb chamber.
Literature: Böhme 2001> furnishing, gathering, plan
> haptic qualities, materiality, sensory perception, surface
> architecture, detail, materiality, structure, tectonicsKarl Friedrich Schinkel (1979) sums up the role of tecton-
ics when he says that architecture is ‘construction elevated
through sentiment’. The constructive aspect, then, ought not
to be restricted to physical requirements, but expressed per-
ceptibly through form as well.
The constructive functions of columns, beams or win-
dow frames are endowed with vivid expression only when
they are rendered graspable by the senses. It is far from easy,
since the distribution of forces or the demands made on ma-
terials, for example, remain hidden from sight. Nonetheless,
analogies with comparable processes taking place within our
own bodies provide us with some notion of them (> empa-
thy). ‘We have carried loads, and learned what pressure and
counter-pressure are, (...) Therefore we know how to value
the proud joy of a column’ (Wölfflin 1886/1999). Through
analogies with the human body, tectonics corresponds to our
existential state of mind, as when the upright position of ver-
tical elements expresses independence in relation to resistance
offered by the downward pressure of gravity. Only through
the contrast with the verticality of our upright, standing bod-
ies and the horizontality of reclining on the earth does the
dynamism of free forms acquire their dramatic potential.
Independently of analogies with the body, the tectonic
function of the> column is also noticeable when it is formed
so that the pressure from above is made visible through swell-
ing (entasis), which at the same time expresses the force of
resistance. Tectonic qualities are visualized directly throughTable
Tactile
Technics
Tectonics