Architecture has its own music and its own rhythm.
I had never realized this before.
Until I came across a text that changed my way of understanding spaces.
I usually keep books jealously because, once read, a book is part of you.
Directly or indirectly, by reaction or adhesion, partially or totally, it enters your blood and your head.
Adding to the infinite layers of experience that form your conscience and your identity.
Someday you will want to look through it and you will surely find new meanings.
That is why I deeply regretted realizing that I had not written down the title and author of that book.
At that time I lived in London, I found this book in my hands.
It was from an architect friend and I started reading it.
I don’t even know what book it is but it changed my way of seeing structures.
I had never before thought that architecture can be understood through rhythm.
That aesthetics imitates the heartbeat.
That buildings and spaces, that architecture, do indeed have their own music.
Suddenly I began to imagine the high tones suggested by Gothic cathedrals and the low tones whispered by Romanesque monasteries.
I began to hear the regularity of the sound inspired by ancient Greek temples, the distances between columns that sound to the rhythm of our heart.
A bad construction bothers us aesthetically as much as a bothersome noise.
That happens for the same reason: it lacks rhythm, melody or grace.
We visit the great cities of art, we admire extraordinary natural landscapes and we appreciate harmony in houses, as in music.
Empty spaces and full spaces, colors like notes: the person who designs spaces is, in his own way, a composer.
We walk surrounded by beauty and we can feel the sensation of well-being that it provokes within us.
Beauty calls for beauty. Destroying beauty is a bit like destroying life.
Balance, elegance, harmony have their origin within us.
In the wonderful “heterogeneous repetition” of nature and its laws.
Through architecture and decoration, we project our interiority into the world.
Emmanuel Raffaele Maraziti