COLLOQUIUM - Mantha Zarmakoupi, “Disabling the Classical"

Jaffe 113

The classical has been constructed on ideals of perfection—of body, proportion, and reason—in ancient art and architecture. Modern readings of Polykleitos’s Canon and Vitruvius’s De architectura have cast the human form as both the origin and the measure of architecture. This talk traces the construction of the classical and the historiography of classical architecture as a genealogy of measure and typology, and as a history of normalization.

Fixing the classical as a universal and purified ideal has helped shape an ideology of ability: architecture, like art, organizes the fiction of wholeness—symmetry, harmony, and health as signs of beauty and truth. To “disable” the classical in the historiography of classical architecture is not to reject this lineage but to expose its exclusions and to imagine a historiography that measures not perfection but multiplicity.