Category: Seeing

Symmetry is harmonious compliance among the members of the work itself and correlation between the parts and the whole general figure based on a selected piece as standard. In the human body, there is a balanced symmetrical property from the forearm, foot, palm, finger, and other small elements; so it is with the buildings. For example, in the sacred edifices, symmetry is designed from the thickness of a column or from the module of triglyphs, as in a ballista from the hole what Greeks call the περίτρητος, as in a ship from the space in between each thole pin (διάπηγμα); in every other work, there is a system of symmetry calculated from a component.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio – De Architectura (translation in English ©J-W.HWANG)

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… As far as the eyes could reach, no one has perceived more than the slaughter houses, the enclosing walls and a few rare facades of the factories alongside the barracks and the monasteries; wherever stood the hovels and the rubbish of old walls blackened as cerecloth, of latest walls whitened as winding sheets; everywhere erected the parallel rows of trees, the aligned buildings and the flat constructions of the bleak long line and of the gloomy sadness of right angles. No heterogeneity on the tissue, no caprice of architecture, no crease. It was glacial, regular and hideous landscape. Nothing represses the heart like symmetry. Symmetry is ennui; ennui founds anguish. Despair bores. Imagine something more terrible than hell in which everyone suffers; it’s in that hell where one would be tedious. If such hell existed, a bit of the Boulevard de l’Hopital might have been its avenue.

Victor Hugo – Les Misérables (translation in English ©J-W.HWANG)

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