Mapping the Persistence and Evolution of the Quincunx
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Mapping the Persistence and Evolution of the Quincunx Fabio Colonnese1 Accepted: 20 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The quincunx is a pattern that passes through different ages and cultures of Western world. It spread in the Byzantine era; it flourishes during the Renaissance, either in combination or as an alternative to the Vitruvian proportioning criteria; it suffers from a process of mathematization in the eighteenth century; it arrives at the twentieth century in the form of the so-called “nine-square grid problem” and is further re-evaluated in its historical prospective at the end of the century, in the Post-modern context. This article provides a mapping of its diffusion and inquires its development and evolution through the centuries. Keywords Quincunx · Architectural plan · Square patterns
Introduction The game of tris or tic-tac-toe is widespread throughout the world. In ancient Rome, where people used to practice it onto the marble steps of theatres and arenas, it was named terni lapilli, for it consists in sequencing three pebbles (lapilli in Latin) inside a square grid of nine boxes. In the paper version, still practiced today by children, each of two players alternatively marks either a circle or a St Andrew’s cross in one of the nine boxes, trying to put three in a sequence. The result is that the grid, filled with crosses and circles, ends up resembling the plan of a quincunx church, a quadrangular building featuring an internal division in nine cells vaulted with domes or cross-vaults (Fig. 1). As in the game, in which the grid is quickly drawn before positioning the marks, modern architects have often adopted a similar approach and scheme as a sort of opening move in order to get a new project started. Obviously, its development is intertwined with the gradual spread of the grid as a drawing and design system, whose origins are here associated with the quincunx, a pattern that passed * Fabio Colonnese [email protected] 1
Department of History, Drawing and Restoration of Architecture, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy Vol.:(0123456789)
F. Colonnese Fig. 1 The game of tris or tictac-toe
through different ages and cultures of Western world. It spread in the Byzantine era; flourished during the Renaissance, migrating from religious to residential architecture; it suffered from a process of “mathematization” in the eighteenth century; it arrived at the twentieth century as a concrete-oriented layout and was further re-evaluated in its historical perspective in the Postmodern context. As this article will demonstrate, over the centuries the quincunx evolved along two intertwined paths, fueled by both its semantic, intertextual power and its geometric, combinatory potential. The former gradually provided new buildings with a direct reference to antiquity, to the centricity of Renaissance temples, to Italian villas (and culture) and, in the twentieth century, to a general idea of monumentality to elaborate, contest or distort; the latter offered designers a simple trigg
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