This website is a digital supplement to the forthcoming monograph, Architecture of the Soul: Buildings, Cities, and the Construction of Life in Early Modern Italy. In this book, a series of thematically interwoven case studies illuminates a fundamental link between the architecture of early modern Italy and the human soul, widely believed at the time to be the divine principle of life inside the body. Examining buildings in relation to wide-ranging philosophical, religious, and scientific discourses, it finds that architects sought to invest their structures with the qualities of the soul, not only by imitating the body’s interior but also, and more centrally, by recreating the body’s physiological processes, following its organizational logic, and adapting its material properties. On these grounds it was contended that buildings were brought to life and into living dialogue with the people who used them, challenging our understanding of how architecture was experienced in the pre-modern world. 

As the book began taking shape, however, it became clear that illustrating this argument would require more than standard printed images. Many of the architectural spaces found to have imitated the body’s interior – little-known and difficult-to-access sewage canals, ventilation ducts, drainage pipes, pedestrian tunnels, stairways, wells, and so on – had never been visually reconstructed; were damaged or altered from their original designs; and were impossible to measure and reproduce by hand. When graphic evidence of these environments did survive, critical details were often illegible when viewed in photographs. Finally, the functioning of these spaces invariably involved motion, which is impossible to capture 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 3D point clouds, BIM models, and animations. Although some of these materials will be displayed in the text, all of them will be presented here under Models & Animations, allowing for a wider range of visual representation as well as enhanced functionality. In their native digital format, they will make it possible for users to watch animations of buildings’ ‘anatomical’ operations; zoom in on architectural drawings and models; access additional ground plans, elevations, sections, and axonometric projections; customize views of buildings in 360 degrees; and make precise measurements. 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