This website is the digital supplement to the book, Architecture of the Soul: Buildings, Cities, and the Construction of Life in Early Modern Italy (under contract with Yale University Press). Examining built environments across the Italian peninsula and in relation to architectural cultures in other areas of Europe and the Islamic world, the monograph reimagines one of the most fundamental themes in the history of Western architecture: the association between buildings and the human body. Through a series of contextually interwoven case studies, it finds that architects in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy imitated not only the form of the body, but also (and more centrally) the processes of the soul, widely believed to be the divine principle of life inside the body that animated, shaped, organized, and governed the physiological functioning of all of its parts. On these grounds it was contended that buildings were living organisms in dialogue with the people who used them, transforming our understanding of how architecture was designed, constructed, and experienced in the pre-modern world. 

As the book took shape, however, it became clear that the visualization of this argument would require more than standard, printed images. For example, many of the architectural spaces found to have been informed by the interior of the body – little-known and difficult-to-access sewage canals, ventilation ducts, drainage pipes, pedestrian tunnels, stairways, wells, and more – had never been visually reconstructed; were damaged or altered; and were impossible to measure and reproduce by hand. When graphic evidence did survive, critical details were often missing or illegible. Finally, the functioning of these spaces invariably involved motion, which is impossible to show with static imagery.

To resolve these issues, a variety of digital technologies were employed. High-resolution laser scans were made of the main buildings under discussion in the book, which are currently being used to create high-density point clouds, BIM models, and 2D/3D animations. Although some of these materials will be displayed in the text, all of them will be presented here under Models & Animations, allowing for more effective visual representation as well as enhanced functionality. In their native digital format, these components will make it possible for users to watch animations of buildings’ ‘anatomical’ operations; access additional ground plans, elevations, sections, and axonometric projections; customize views of buildings in 360 degrees; make precise measurements; and zoom in on architectural drawings and models. What’s more, these materials will be available in AR/VR. In these immersive modes, users will have the ability to walk through highly accurate, full-scale digital recreations of buildings while judging proportions in relation to their own bodies and sharing observations with others in the same virtual space.

Daniel Savoy