Axis 6 of twelve · ENT
Would substantially changing the form change what the work knows? Substitute a different form for this content: what does the work stop being able to say? A high score means the answer is everything — form is the instrument of the knowledge rather than its container.
Floored at 7.0. A work whose form is arbitrary cannot reach the summit however profound its content.
1754 works · floor · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows, because it claims a universe of ordered love and its form enacts the order. A prologue and three canticles of thirty-three make a hundred; every canto is tercets closing on one line; all three canticles end on “stelle”. The rhyme chain is part of the knowledge: each tercet’s middle line opens the next tercet’s rhyme, so the verse cannot rest until the canto’s single last line pays the debt, as the journey cannot stop short of its end. “Cristo” is rhymed only with itself (Par. XII, XIV, XIX, XXXII). The centre, line 7,117 of 14,233, is the hinge of the doctrine of love (Purg. XVII.125). Held a step from the top: the form does not change from Hell to the Empyrean, and what the knowledge asks to change is carried in diction and rhyme.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Every line means one thing to the speaker and another to an audience that knows the myth, and only a staged recognition plot makes that doubleness the experience. The irony works at the level of the word: Oedipus will fight for Laius “as though it were that of my own father” (264), and he curses the man who shares his hearth “with my knowledge” (250). The interrogation is in the form. His questions run at 20 to the thousand words in the first episode, 55 in the third and 71 in the fourth, and fall to 21 when nothing is left to ask. Held a step from the top only by the slack in the quarrel.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the trilogy loses what it knows. Its claim is that justice is learned over time and through repetition, and only a sequence can make it. The first two plays rhyme: a homecoming, a deception at the door, a killing inside, a tableau over two bodies, the trapping robe shown both times (Ag. 1382; Cho. 997–1000). The third breaks the rhyme by changing the form itself. The scene leaves the house for Delphi and then Athens (Eum. 235); the chorus, which watched in the first play and urged in the second, becomes a party to the case; votes replace the blow. One signal fire opens the trilogy, and a procession of torches closes it.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses everything it knows, because what it knows is harmonic. Its claim is that desire is a suspension no object resolves, and the music is a suspension no cadence resolves until both lovers are dead. As a play the claim becomes a speech; as a number opera every cadence refutes it. In Act II the duet reaches for its cadence and is cut off by Brangäne’s scream and Kurwenal’s “Rette dich, Tristan!”
“Save yourself, Tristan!”: the Day breaks in as an interrupted cadence. In Act III Isolde completes that music, and that cadence, over his body. Held off the top where the poem doubles the music: the Day and Night dispute says as doctrine what the harmony knows, and Marke narrates what the audience has watched.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
The form knows what the content alone could not say. It works by ring: apoina, ransom, comes seven times in the first book and eight in the last, and at most three times in any book between; the full dawn line stands only at 1.477 and 24.788. The embassy that fails at Achilles’ hut (IX) is answered by the one that succeeds (XXIV). And the formula is part of the structure. The couplet that sends Patroclus’ soul to Hades (16.856–857) sends Hector’s (22.362–363), so the two deaths are told as one, with the hero’s own to come. A prose that varies the lines, as Butler’s does, loses that knowledge. Book X stands outside the ring.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Prose and verse stage one Job who did not “sin with his lips” (2:10) and another who curses his day; only the audience holds the prologue’s knowledge, and 42:7 joins the two by approving the second. The dialogue enacts the failure of argument: lines are taken and turned (9:2 and 25:4), and the cycles shrink until Zophar has no third speech. The divine speech answers a lawsuit with questions, 28 per cent of its verses against a tenth or less in the other voices measured, and answers the third chapter term by term. Held below the top by Elihu, who stands between Job’s signed demand (31:35) and its answer, and by a blurred third cycle.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Tell the story in order, from Troy to Ithaca, and the poem loses what it knows. Opening on the absence lets the absence define him first. His lies on Ithaca are told in the same first person as the wonders, so Alcinous’ praise of a teller “Unlike those vagrants who on falsehood live” (XI.363–366) hangs over every tale. The second half climbs a ladder of recognitions graded by intimacy, son, dog, nurse, herdsmen, suitors, wife, father, each by a different sign, the last two by things only the household knows. The numerical centre falls where the leader yields to his crew, mounon eonta, “who stand alone” (XII.297): the hinge between return with companions and return alone.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Put one style in place of eighteen and the book can no longer say that a single day is lived in many registers. Sirens opens with a 62-line overture that ends “Begin!” (Sirens, 11) and shrinks its sentences to a mean of 5.5 words. The press speaks in 63 headlines; simultaneity becomes nineteen crosscut sections in Wandering Rocks; Oxen grows English prose from Latin litany to slang as a child is born. Hallucination becomes a play for 269 speakers, the impersonal cosmos a catechism of about 309 questions, Molly eight sentences. Held below the top by forms laid on rather than grown: the Cyclops interpolations repeat one device, and Eumaeus enacts tedium at a length that partly becomes it.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on the 1674 work. The subject is freedom within law, and the line enacts it. The metre holds, with about 96.5 per cent of lines between nine and eleven syllables by estimate, and inside it the sense runs free: in the 1667 text read, 58.3 per cent of lines end unpunctuated and rhyme falls below chance. Opening in Hell, the poem makes the reader meet evil first as glory. Hell’s council and Heaven’s fall silent before the same question (II.402, III.214–217). The 1674 centre, line 5,283 of 10,565, falls in the chariot passage (VI.766), four lines after the 1667 centre at “Ascended” (VI.762). Michael’s turn from showing to telling enacts fallen sight failing (XII.8–11).
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. First, the loss of a self in a crew: the narrator’s “I” runs at 31.0 per thousand words of narration in chs. 1–22, six to ten through the middle, 0.7 among the omens and none in the chase, while Ahab’s name rises from 0.9 to 7.6 per thousand; the Epilogue returns at 31.0. Second, the failure of knowledge: the cetology, the heads and the skeleton each concede the whale, “I know him not, and never will” (ch. 86), so the form argues that only the chase will do. Third, reading: one coin, seven readers (ch. 99). Held a step down by seams the form does not govern, such as the disclosure ch. 106 confesses is out of place.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. In the first volume’s longest sentence the rooms of a lifetime whirl round the waking sleeper until “the good angel of certainty” makes them stand still (Combray I). Combray ends where it began, with the waker in the dark. The two ways are kept apart in “the sealed vessels” of separate afternoons (Combray II) and joined in the last volume, which ends on a vow to write the book just read. The child does not know what the man knows, so the reader lives the lost time before the doctrine that regains it. Held from the top because its maker never finally shaped the last third, and because the narrator tells what he could not know.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Its claim, that the instrumental world, however great, does not reach the human community, is made by the form. The recitative speaks before there are words and refuses three movements; then the baritone gives it words. The joy theme is laid out as variations that add voices one at a time, so the community is assembled in the hearing. Recast as a cantata, the work would lose the refused movements; made instrumental, as once planned, it would lose the refusal. The finale has been read as four different forms; the orchestral fugato and the second “Ihr stürzt nieder” come nearest a container.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Substitute a shrine with the same images inside it and the work stops knowing what it knows. The knowledge is in the body of the walker. The galleries are walled above the eye on both sides, so the reader is alone with the story and the sky for ten circuits, always turning right, always rising. The first gallery gives the Buddha’s life above and the former lives beneath, so one walks between the end and its causes. Then a merchant’s son’s pilgrimage occupies three galleries, and the walker’s progress is his. Then one gate, and no more walls: the form itself performs the passage from forms to the formless, and the perforated stupas make the last lesson optical, the Buddha seen by degrees and then the empty stupa. Held just below the top by the chapter that cannot be walked: the foot, buried by the builders.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Substitute a different form and nearly everything goes, because the painting knows what it knows at this size, hung before a standing viewer. The figures at about life size put the viewer in the room, where the gazes meet. The canvas within the canvas is seen from behind, so the picture shows the back of a picture while being one. The mirror can show what stands where we stand only if we stand before a flat image. The dark upper half gives the room its volume and the figures their smallness. As a print or a photograph, the viewer is no longer in the king’s place. Held a step below the top by the two dark canvases, which carry part of the argument and cannot be read.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Only theatre makes an audience wait in the same time as the characters, so the subject is not described but undergone: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” (I) is a line about the evening the audience is spending. The two acts make the form a series, and the repetition implies a third evening and a hundredth. Vladimir’s round song at the start of the second act, “A dog came in the kitchen / And stole a crust of bread.”, loops on itself and is the form in small. Beckett’s own novel of a wandering pair, Mercier et Camier, has the couple and none of this knowledge. Held a tenth below the top because the structure, once seen, is seen whole.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The portmanteau is the instrument: “chaosmos” (I.5) and “collideorscape” (I.6) hold two things in one word because the book’s knowledge is that they are one, “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.” (I.8). The circle makes recurrence a structure, not a claim. I.8 is written in river names, so the river tells its own story. II.2 is set as a schoolbook, one twin’s notes in each margin and the sister’s in footnotes: the children’s minds are the architecture of the page. Without the form there is a family anecdote. Held below the top because in II.3 and III.3 the accreted density lets the form go slack into a holder for notebook matter.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is continuity: that the states of one mind follow one another without the rest a movement-break gives. Beethoven forbade the division. The opening is a fugue because in a fugue one idea is the whole texture: four equal voices take the subject in turn, and the lament is common to all before anything else is heard. The variation set is the form of identity under change, placed where a slow movement would stand. The hinges are recitative, speech between states. Held below the top by the variation coda and the Presto’s second trio, where the form holds more than it needs.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the work knows nothing. Build it in stone and it no longer needs the rite, and with the rite go its knowledge and its meaning. The perishable materials are not a limitation the rite answers; they are the instrument of the work’s knowing. Posts in the earth rot, thatch fails, unpainted cypress silvers, and so every twenty years the form must pass through the hands of living carpenters, which on the work’s own argument is the only way a form is kept. The paired site makes the knowledge visible: the work is two places, one occupied and one waiting. A kami never seen is served at a building never entered. Held below the top only because the full form, the rite included, is open to so few.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows. Troy’s fall is told by Aeneas to Dido, so the narration is the seduction: she asks once more “to hear the Trojan sorrow” (4.78–79). The parade and the shield put Augustan time inside the mythic, and the hero cannot read them: “Unknown the names, he yet admires the grace” (8.730). The ring closes in the Latin. The first sight of Aeneas, “Extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra” (1.92), returns for Turnus in the poem’s second-last line, “Ast illi solvuntur frigore membra” (12.951), and the last line is the one that ended Camilla (11.831). The founder’s verb, condere (1.5, 1.33), becomes the sword’s (12.950). Held a step down by the unrevised form: fifty-seven open lines, and the seams of III.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. On a bare stage Dover cliff puts the audience where the blind man is, “Methinks the ground is even.” “Horrible steep.” (4.6); only theatre can make that fall. The verse breaks as the order breaks: Lear speaks almost wholly verse in Act II and a quarter prose in Act IV. The storm breaks into seven short scenes, and the play’s arithmetical centre falls inside it, in 3.2. “Nothing” sounds twenty times in Act I and once in Act V. Held below the top band by the Quarto and Folio question: this shape is neither 1608’s nor 1623’s, and the Folio cuts the mock trial of 3.6.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the world remembers what its actors forget, and its form is an orchestra that remembers. Motives grow from one another: the nature figure of the prelude becomes the Rhine, then Erda, then, inverted, the gods’ twilight; the ring’s figure becomes Valhalla’s. In Götterdämmerung Siegfried, drugged, cannot recall Brünnhilde, and the orchestra recalls her under every line; given the antidote, he narrates his life over the music of the whole cycle. The melody Sieglinde sings in Walküre Act III returns to end the work, so the last word is a memory. Made a play or a novel, the cycle would lose its witness. The cost: the narrations, where form becomes container, and the twelve-year seam in Siegfried.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the novel loses what it knows. A townsman writing “thirteen years” after the murder (Pt. I, Bk. I, ch. 1), from testimony, narrates a case about testimony, and the gap at the window puts the reader where the jury will be. One night is told three times: from Alyosha’s side, from Mitya’s, “the very night, and perhaps the very hour” (Pt. III, Bk. VIII, ch. 6), and from the police’s. The rings close: Rachel’s “little boots” (Pt. I, Bk. II, ch. 3) return as Ilusha’s, and the elder’s corruption is answered, without comment, by “no smell of decay” (Epilogue, ch. 3). Held off the top by the narrator’s breaches, as when “I am not a doctor” (Pt. IV, Bk. XI, ch. 9) opens a night no witness saw; by the hinge that opens Book X; and by the frame left open for a sequel the author did not live to write.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its subject, the gap between being and seeming, is staged through acting: the Player weeps “For Hecuba?” (2.2); the Mousetrap tests guilt by performance, “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2); Hamlet plays mad. The arithmetical centre falls in 3.2, on “show”. The soliloquy becomes the shape of a mind, and Hamlet speaks 39.2 per cent of the play: only verse in Act I, 73.1 per cent prose in Act II. Held below the top by sprawl and by the unit: this text places a seventh soliloquy (4.4) after the killing of Polonius, where the Folio has none after 3.3.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
The ceiling knows what it knows through a shallow barrel vault, whose painted architecture divides it into three heights of time. The lunettes, lowest and darkest, hold the ancestors: history unredeemed. The curving haunches hold the seers on their thrones, between earth and heaven. The flat crown, highest and furthest off, holds the time before history. The Creation of Eve, the Church born from Christ’s side in the standard typology, sits at the geometric centre. Substitute a series of panels and all of it goes: the vertical ranking, the backward procession, the act of looking up into sacred time. Held below the top by the change of scale between the halves, a correction rather than a plan.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. What can be known from texts: the relay of authors, Arab historian and Morisco translator makes truth a formal problem, and Cide Hamete’s margin can leave the cave undecided, “Decide for thyself in thy wisdom, reader” (II.XXIV). A life lived inside its own reception: only a second part could hold characters who have read their own printed lives, and it ends in documents, a sworn statement, a will, a death certificate. Two minds negotiating one world: half the text is talk, and from II.XLIV knight and squire take alternate chapters. Held off the top by Part I’s insets, whose form owes nothing to the frame, and by the summaries that close Part II’s romance threads.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The work states its formal principle, and the form enacts it: “Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form” (Ep. II.X). Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. That no one sees the whole: Austerlitz and Borodino are dealt out among the column, the emperors and the wounded, and the passions of 160,000 men come to “a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history” (III.XI). That the same act is free from within and necessary from without: soldiers hauling a wattle wall in the fiction return in the essay as men hauling a log, “command and power in their primary form” (Ep. II.VII). That time is a cause. Held off the top because the Second Epilogue can be lifted out, and never returns to the fiction.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently or not at all. In a basilica or a cella the eye is directed to an end; here it is gathered to a centre and sent up. The visitor stands equidistant from the wall all round, under the only light, and the building knows the world as a sphere by putting the body inside one. Time enters through the oculus, so the room is also a dial. The form has shown what it can carry: it became a church in 609 with almost no change to its structure, and serves as tomb, assembly and a room crossed by millions without loss. Held below the top by the junction: from outside, porch and rotunda do not form one figure.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The form is how the building knows what it knows. Its claim is that the divine is light and the church a heavenly city, and the structure makes the claim: three storeys and the flyers turn the wall into a frame, so the light is coloured by the whole of sacred history before it reaches the floor. The plan settles how worship is lived. The visitor enters under Judgment and Incarnation, walks east under the saints and turns at the crossing between the Old Law and the New; the pilgrim circles the relic or goes down into the crypt. At the Royal Portal the prophets and kings are columns, holding up the door to the New Law. Substitute clear glass and plain walls and all of it goes. Held below the top because the old front shows its seams.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that the believer stands inside the story. The form makes it true by tense. The Gospel is past, carried by the Evangelist; the crowd choruses are the dramatic present; the arias are a single soul, now, stopping the story to answer it; the chorales are the congregation, outside time. As an opera it would lose the congregation; as a sermon, the voices; as a plain Gospel Passion such as Schütz wrote, the present tense of response. The double choir is the form of dialogue, one choir calling, the other asking “Wen?” and “Wie?”. Held below the top by da capo returns longer than the meditation needs, and by stretches where the two choirs sing as one.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Twenty-four separate songs with nothing between them: the silences are the walking. The strophic form is the form of compulsion; “Gute Nacht” says its four stanzas to one tune because the walker can say nothing else, and “Der Leiermann” is a strophe over a drone because the old man’s life is one. Voice and piano are two halves of a divided self. Recast as opera, the work loses the solitude; as spoken poems, the knowledge, since the verse alone does not know that the linden is death; as a through-composed scena, the stations. Held below the top where the two-part shape is accident and a few strophic repeats carry less than their form implies.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that an ending is reached by attenuation. The form is attenuation at every scale: the first movement’s coda thins to soloists, the Ländler ends in pieces, the Adagio’s strophes lose weight at each return, and the whole descends a semitone. Set this content as a song cycle, which Mahler had just done, and a voice would say the farewell; here no one says it, and the removal of the voice is the knowledge. The first movement’s song never runs without the halting rhythm returning beneath it, so the form enacts the interruption it is about. Held off the top where the inner movements come nearest to containers.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that one confession can hold every manner of saying it, chant, Palestrina’s style, the double choir, the Dresden aria, the galant duet, and that the Ordinary from “Kyrie” to “pacem” is one span. Set it in one style and the knowledge goes. Break it into its four fascicles and the Gratias loses its answer and the Agnus Dei’s G minor the D major it falls away from. Parody here is form, not economy: the Dona nobis can be the Gratias again only in a work that has already sung the Gratias. Held below the top because the Gloria’s numbers are Dresden’s container, the Osanna’s return is the rubric’s, and the Benedictus’s obbligato is left without an instrument.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is the gap between what people say and what the music knows. As the play it exists and is less: the not-knowing becomes mannerism without an orchestra that knows. As Wagner it is Tristan, and the opacity is gone. The voices never sing together, in a love story; each person is alone in the music as Arkel says the soul is, “L’âme humaine aime à s’en aller seule”
“The human soul likes to go away alone.” The orchestra carries what a scene withheld into the interlude after it, and at the one plain statement, “Je t’aime,” “Je t’aime aussi,” it stops. Held off the top where the stage shaped the form: the interludes have the length Carré’s sets required, and the scene the form needs is the scene the theatre can lose.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and nearly all the knowledge goes. Told in order by an omniscient narrator, this is a Gothic family tragedy with a secret. Told as it is, it is a novel about how a society makes its past, and about who is permitted to know it. The fact of Bon’s ancestry is withheld to the end, late enough that every earlier version, Rosa’s demon and Mr. Compson’s octoroon, is exposed as a story its teller needed. In the eighth chapter the form performs the knowledge: Quentin and Shreve become Henry and Bon, the two pairs merging in the narration, so that the act of telling becomes the act it tells. Even the appended Chronology, flat and dated beside the narration, belongs to the argument about what a record can hold. Held off the very top only because the long Compson chapters at times carry information as a container would.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Clarke’s novel, written alongside it, explains the monolith, HAL’s breakdown and the room; the film does not. What the film knows is the experience of a scale beyond human comprehension, and only duration, silence and the large-format image can carry that. The match cut is the form of evolution: millions of years elided because nothing in them matters but the tool. The speechless outer parts frame the talking middle, so language is one stage among others, and the docking to The Blue Danube makes the machine a dancer. Held below the top by two joints where the form is a container: the intermission, which is roadshow furniture, and the briefing at Clavius, laid out in plain conventional scene grammar.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The proportion is the argument: an evening weighed against ten years says what the book knows, that the life of feeling, not the life of events, is where a life is lived and lost. The brackets are a claim: the world reports deaths in passing, and the form makes the reader feel that passing as an outrage. The free indirect style, moving among minds with no centre, means Mrs Ramsay can be known only as the sum of other people’s partial sight, and the last part makes that method the action: Lily paints her from memory on the lawn while the family sails her promise out to sea. The novel ends as the picture ends, with a line drawn “in the centre”, and the book’s own centre is the short corridor of the middle part. Held off the very top only by the stretches of the last part where the alternation becomes scheme.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. Closed, the work shows the world before humanity, without colour. Opened, it shows history read left to right, from the joining of the first pair to damnation, and the act of opening performs the passage from creation into the human world. One high horizon runs across all three open panels, so that Eden, the garden and Hell are one land seen at three times. Closed, the shutters cover the centre exactly: the garden lies inside creation. Hang the four images apart and the work loses what it knows. The axis is held below the top by the centre’s additive field, which the form contains rather than requires.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the film can say nothing it says. The real time is the knowledge: the viewer learns the order of the day as Jeanne keeps it, by living it, and so learns to read a pot left uncovered as she does. The fixed frame is the knowledge: the camera will not cut away, so the labour cinema always cut away from cannot be escaped, and the killing is filmed with the same patience as the cutlet. The frontal set-ups make the flat a series of stages for one performer and fix the viewer in the room as she is fixed in it. The light switched off at every exit makes economy a rhythm. Cut it to ninety minutes and the deviations become plot points; move the camera and the order becomes a subject seen from outside.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is the cave. The images are seen by descent, in the dark, one lamp’s circle at a time, so a five-metre aurochs is never seen whole; the Falling Horse is painted round a pillar and is seen only in parts. The bulges of the wall are bellies and shoulders, the calcite is the Hall’s light, and the one human is placed where the floor drops. On a flat lit wall these figures are zoology. The replicas are the proof: faithful to the surfaces and not the cave, lacking what the form knows, the cold, the dark and the hill above. Held from the top because the Passage and the Apse use the form less, and part of what the form knows is the cave’s own.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Substitute a basilica and the building loses its heaven; substitute a centralised plan and it loses its procession. What it knows, that the liturgy moves toward the altar under a cosmos that comes down to meet it, it knows only in this form. And the form changed the use. The cathedral rite of the capital took its shape here: the entrance of emperor and patriarch through the Imperial Door into the light; the procession down the long axis toward the sanctuary; the galleries setting the court and the women above the floor of the nave. Held below the top because the furnishing that fixed the rite in the space, ambo, solea and silver screen, is lost, and the cross-axis is the form’s less articulate half.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows, because each world speaks its own verse: Knittelvers for the sixteenth-century scholar, the free madrigal line for Mephisto, folk strophes for Gretchen, blank verse for the one moment of gratitude, prose for the one scene where verse fails, Dante’s terza rima for a rebirth (4727), trimeter for Helen, and rhyme taught to her as the marriage of two ages. The architecture knows it too. The wager returns 9,882 lines later with “Werd’ ich” become “dürft’ ich” (1699, 11581), so whether Faust lost is held in the mood of a verb. Held a step down by sixty years of accretion: the prose scene kept from the earliest draft, the Earth Spirit residue, and acts that shrink from 1,953 lines to 1,004.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narration is in the third person but held to Raskolnikov’s consciousness, so the reader is inside the murderer from the first step on the stairs and shares his fever and his calculations. The detective form with the killer known makes every scene with Porfiry a question of whether he will confess, not of who did it: conscience in a civil-service uniform. The duels in speech, which raise the dialogue to nearly two thirds of the third, fourth and sixth parts, make the idea argue with persons. And the Epilogue’s turn from scene to summary, with almost no speech in it, is itself the passage “from one world into another” (Epilogue, II). Held below the top because the hold on Raskolnikov is broken for Svidrigaïlov, Luzhin and Dounia more often than the design needs.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the tale loses what it knows. Persons without names are persons as positions, and the honorific grammar, which marks who acts by the respect the verb pays, makes rank the medium in which every act is seen. The poem is the form of intimacy: lovers meet in exchanged poems before they meet in person, and a poor poem condemns its writer, as Suetsumuhana’s do (ch. 6). The narrator is a gentlewoman of the household who comments, hesitates, reports what the serving women said and closes the book on a doubt about her source (ch. 54), so that the tale is gossip raised to knowledge, partial by design. The generational chronicle carries the knowledge of recurrence. Held from the top because the first part is episodic in a way the form permits rather than requires.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows through a barrel-vaulted hall with one blind wall and one of windows. The spiral of three tiers is the knowledge: time descends, the Passion arrives at the height of the viewer’s body, and the door home is under the Judgment. The pairs are a property of the room: Visitation and Pact face each other because the arch has two sides; each Virtue looks at its Vice across the nave; Hope rises on the side of the blessed. Substitute panels and the descent, the facings and the exit under judgment are lost. Held below the top: the windows break the pairing on the walls, and the apse, extended later, closes the axis with another hand’s work.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play’s speed is its argument. Macbeth hopes that “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7), and the compressed form shows the deed never done when done: the first half climbs to the murder and the feast, the second shows the deed repeating itself without end, on Banquo, then on Macduff’s household, then on the country. The crucial scenes are set at night, and darkness is the medium of the knowledge. Duncan’s murder happens off stage and is known through broken exchanges, “Did not you speak?” “When?” “Now.” “As I descended?” (2.2), and the Porter’s comic prose turns the castle door into hell’s gate at the moment the deed is discovered. The equivocal antithesis of the first scene, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1), is the grammar of the whole. Held off the top because the English scene (4.3) relaxes into a container, and Hecate’s scene is form without function.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The double plot is the argument: told singly, Anna’s story is a tragedy of passion and Levin’s a conversion, and neither knows what the pairing knows, that the two lives answer the same questions (death, the body, honesty, what to live for) and that the answers are not freely chosen. The free indirect style, passing from Karenin to Seryozha to the dog within pages, is the instrument of the novel’s justice: each is seen from within for as long as it takes to understand them, Karenin included, whose chasm the reader enters (II.8). The chapters shorten as Anna’s mind narrows; the seventh part’s are the shortest of the first seven. Held off the top by the argued chapters, where the form becomes a container.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Make it life-size and the inversion goes: the weak one is no longer the giant. Make it bronze and the stone’s whiteness and weight go, and with them a body standing against its own mass. Set Goliath’s head at the feet and the moment becomes the victory, and the disclosure goes. The contrapposto is the instrument. The right side is closed, the bearing leg and the hanging hand; the left is open, the free leg forward and the arm raised with the sling: rest and readiness in one body. Held below the top: the shallow block governs the profile more than the idea does, and the large head and hands answer a height the work never reached.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told by an authorial narrator, Emma would be judged; told in her first person, pitied or excused. The impersonal free indirect style does both and neither: her reveries come in her own worn vocabulary, and the sentence around them, without a word of comment, shows the vocabulary as worn. That double vision is what the book knows. The agricultural show is form as argument: two languages proved one by being spliced. The frame is a second instrument: the book opens on Charles and closes on Charles and Homais, so that Emma’s life is enclosed in the world she tried to leave, which closes over her without a ripple. The cab ride (III.1) is given wholly from outside, and the knowledge is in the withholding. Held off the top by the dropped “nous”, the one place where the form is not the instrument.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows through its place. It is painted on the end wall of a refectory where the friars ate at long tables, and the painted table is the head table of that room: Christ eats with the community at every meal. Substitute a panel or a print and that claim goes. The second instrument is the single instant: a painting can show twelve reactions to one sentence at once, as a wave, where a narrative must list them in turn. Held below the top because the painted room does not continue the real one exactly: it stands well above the floor, and its space holds to the eye, not to measurement. Later losses are not charged.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The sonata form here is a process, not a container: the theme is a triad left unfinished at its first statement, and the form’s stages, exposition, crisis, a new theme in the development, a recapitulation that arrives before it is due and a coda as fulfilment, are the stages of its becoming a melody. Recast as a single programmatic overture, the work would lose the death and its aftermath; as separate pieces, the sense that the funeral stands in the middle of a life. The finale starts from the bass alone and adds the theme only after two variations, so the listener hears construction. Held below the top because the later variations are less necessary than the first movement’s every stage.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows through the hinged polyptych. Closed, it is grey stone, a domestic room and two kneeling burghers; opened, colour, flesh and paradise. The form performs the passage from promise to fulfilment and from image to presence: the two Johns of the closed state are statues, and in the Deësis the Baptist is alive. Substitute a single panel or a fresco and the two times, the act of opening and the rhythm of weekday and feast are lost. The glaze carries the argument about the particular. Held below the top by the joint between the registers, here the form’s own seam.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the play loses what it knows, because the conditions of Attic tragedy carry its knowledge: masks, costume, a chorus, a festival of Dionysus. The chorus are the god’s Asian maenads, so the play’s lyric voice is the cult’s, beautiful and pitiless, and the ecstasy is heard from within before its cost is seen. An actor in a smiling mask plays a god who plays a man; the dressing scene makes costume, the theatre’s own means, the instrument of destruction. The messenger convention keeps both great acts of violence off stage and in the mind, as the god keeps the king’s desire to see; the one thing brought on is the head. A narrative could tell the story; only this form makes the spectator complicit in the watching it punishes.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Turn it into a treatise and it loses what it knows. The sequence of speeches is itself a ladder, rising and correcting, so that the reader climbs as the lover does. The narration through removes, Apollodorus from Aristodemus, Socrates from Diotima, enacts love as the intermediary and the begetting of speech in another. The order is disturbed by the body: the hiccups put the physician before the comedian, the theme in comic form. After the ascent the door opens on Alcibiades, crowned and drunk, so that the doctrine is tested at once against one man’s love of one man; the drama answers the speech, and a treatise could not hold both and leave the tension standing. The close gives the last word to a life, not a thesis.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The monochrome is the colour of the news, which reached Paris in newspaper photographs and reports, and the horse’s newsprint hatching says so. Room and street are one space, so there is nowhere to go: the house that should protect burns, and the room has a sky with a light in it. The bodies are broken into planes, so the violence is done to the drawing itself. The frieze sends the eye from scream to scream and back. Made a naturalistic scene with an aeroplane overhead, it becomes a report of one afternoon in one town, and loses the absent killer, the trapped space and the light that sees nothing. Only the bird and the setting are slack.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Its meaning, that the victory carries the darkness inside it, is made only by form: the transition without a break, without which the finale would be a new piece rather than a resolution; the recall of the scherzo inside the finale, which is the work’s thought, not a reminiscence; the tonal arch from C minor to C major. The first movement’s sonata form is compressed until the exposition repeat is felt as pressure, and its coda is long because the recapitulation has not settled the argument. The oboe’s bar is form too, a solo breaking a tutti. The joint is the Andante, whose double-variation plan is a container the themes fill.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Four minds circle a woman who has no voice of her own, so the book knows Caddy only as an absence, and that absence is what the brothers’ lives are about. Each section’s form is its teller’s relation to time. Benjy’s achronology is a loss that never becomes past; Quentin’s dissolving syntax is a mind in which the past has swallowed the present; Jason’s straight line of complaint is a man who lives only in the present of money; the fourth section, told from outside, releases the reader from the family’s minds into the light of an ordinary morning. The reader begins in confusion and is given understanding in the order of the family’s disintegration. Held off the top because the turn to an outside narrator in the fourth section, though necessary, is the one place where the form explains rather than enacts.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The rules are the instrument: one day and one place make the passion a pressure with no outlet, and bienséance, which forbids blood on stage, makes speech the only action, so that a play about what cannot be said is made entirely of saying. The confession, the declaration and the accusation are the events; the one physical act on stage is a sword taken and not used. The alexandrine couplet, with its caesura and rhyme, holds the most disordered feeling in the most ordered line, and that tension is the play’s subject. The récit is the form’s other instrument: the monster can exist only as told, at the remove of a servant’s grief. Held off the top because the confidant system is partly convention, and Ismène and Panope do little beyond carrying news.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows by being a machine that changes. Substitute a single panel and it loses its central statement: that the dying body is the closed state of a body whose open state is light. The Crucifixion is backed by the Annunciation and the Resurrection, so the same boards carry the dead and the risen body; the Nativity is backed by the Temptation, the infant’s household and the saint’s assault one board. The Lamentation lies at the altar table’s height, where the body would lie. The second parting turns the whole toward the house’s carved saint, seen only when both pairs of doors are open. Held below the top because the shrine is a given the form was built round, and the tabernacle is more ornament than instrument.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The frame placed first means the life is read from its end, as the motto respice finem demanded and as its owner never did. The contraction of time is the instrument of the knowledge: some forty years pass in chapters II and III, the months of illness fill IV to IX, weeks and days fill X and XI, and the last three days and the final hour fill XII. The reader feels the narrowing rather than being told of it, and the descent ends in a reversal the form has prepared: the carriage that seemed to go forward is found going back, at the moment of light. Held below the top only by the explanatory narrator of II and III, where the form pauses to say what it has already shown.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Substitute a small nave with chapels or a plain oval, and the purpose is lived differently or not at all. The friars at their office are enclosed in one body of wall that moves around them; there is no nave to look down, only a centre to stand in and an altar visible from the door. The section takes the eye from motion to stillness to light in one movement: the worshipper’s ascent, made by looking. A low vault on a small plot is made to climb by its own coffering, so a poor church has a heaven. The cloister is a courtyard without corners; the crypt, the same figure below. Use is credited: the church has served its purpose since 1641 with no change to its structure. Held below the top because what the form knows is one thing known completely; it carries no second purpose, as the Pantheon carried the church.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The decisive formal fact is the placing of the reveal. At the end, it would make a twist thriller. Placed in the last third, it makes the viewer watch the remaking knowing what Scottie does not, and feel it as Judy does; that transfer carries the knowledge that the lover’s image erases the person. The second half’s return to the places of the first makes the viewer complicit: we want the grey suit and the bun as he does. The spiral is the form of the whole: titles, hair, staircase, and a plot that circles back to the tower. Held below the top where the form is a container: the inquest and Elster’s office, in conventional scene grammar.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. A scroll twice as tall as it is wide makes looking an ascent: the eye enters at the foot with the travellers and has to climb, and the climb is the meaning. Lay the same mountains along a handscroll and they become a journey unrolled in time, a sequence of places; set them in a horizontal panel and the mountain is one feature of a view. Either way the confrontation is gone. The mist is the second device: it removes the middle distance, so the peak cannot be measured from the ground. The lower third follows its period’s conventions more than it reinvents them.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge is lost. The unbroken paragraph is the voice’s inability to pause. The sentence withdraws its claims as it makes them, and the book names its method as a question: “By aporia pure and simple?” Recast as an essay, its matter would assert that the self cannot be found; as it stands, it performs the search and the failure, and the failure is lived through clause by clause. The sequence is a reduction: surrogates proposed, inhabited and disowned in turn, the earlier heroes, Mahood twice, then Worm, who cannot even be a surrogate. The last sentence runs on by commas with no full stop until the last word, so the form does what the words say. Held off the top where, in the middle, the monotony becomes a container for argument rather than its instrument.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, which is the book’s whole claim. Narrated, the six would be six separate people seen from outside. Given as soliloquies in one shared idiom, they are six ways of being one consciousness, and the reader cannot tell where the common voice ends and the person begins. That is what the book knows. The interludes, impersonal and timed by the sun, give what the soliloquies cannot: a world without a self, which the selves pass through. The last section turns the form on itself. Bernard, the maker of phrases, tries to make one story of the six and admits he has no phrase for it, and the form at that moment becomes the failure it describes: one voice where there had been six. Held a tenth below the top only because the regular alternation, kept across nine sections, becomes at points a frame more than an instrument.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this is ordinary and bearable, which only an even form can carry. The ellipses are the content: the parents are left out of their children’s days as the great events are left out of the film, and the viewer learns to live with what is not shown as the parents do. The low, still camera makes the viewer a guest on the floor, not an observer above it. The frontal address makes the viewer the one spoken to, which Noriko’s confession needs. The trains and smoke between scenes set the family in a time that moves whether or not anyone is kind. Make it a melodrama and the knowledge becomes pathos; raise the camera and the parents become small. The one cost is the score, a container rather than an instrument.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book knows nothing. Told as a straight novel, the story is an émigré’s delusion and a poet’s accidental death; told as poem and commentary, it becomes an argument about reading, made by the reader’s own experience of reading it. The truth about Kinbote is never stated: it is assembled by the reader from the poem’s silences, the commentary’s slips and the index’s entries, so the form is the method of the knowledge. Setting a poem about grief beside a commentary about a king makes the reader feel the violence of appropriation from inside. The notes on the assassin turn the act of annotation into the countdown to a death, and the line numbers are its clock. Even the missing thousandth line is form at work. Held just short of the highest figure only because some of the apparatus’s play, the cross-references and certain index jokes, delights more than it knows.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that one harmonic law can hold unlimited character, and that return transforms. The variation on a ground is the instrument of the first: the bass and its cadences stay, the surface becomes canon, dance, lament and joke, and the law is heard by surviving. The da capo is the instrument of the second. As a suite the work would lose the law; as variations on the tune, the hidden return. The two manuals are form too, letting two lines cross without collision. The joint is in the free variations, where the group of three is a container the pieces fill, not a form that thinks.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the play stops knowing almost everything it knows. In a novel the Characters would be a narrator’s conceit, in a story an idea. Only on a stage, before real actors who must impersonate them, does the gap between the fixed form of a character and the living, changeable actor become visible and audible, and that gap is the subject. The rehearsal frame, the Manager’s cuts, the Leading Lady’s reading of the Stepdaughter, the prompter taking the scene down in shorthand, the stagehand’s mistaken curtain: each is a property of theatre made an instrument of thought. The ending works only because the spectator, like the Actors, cannot decide whether the shot was a performance. Held a step from the top by the Father’s lectures, where form briefly becomes container.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. A narrated memory would be the old man’s version of the past; the tape is the past in its own words, unchanged, so that the present cannot revise it and can only switch it off. The machine makes the discontinuity of the self audible: the young voice’s confidence and the old body’s silence occupy the stage at once. Its controls are the drama. Rewind, wind forward and stop are Krapp’s choices about his life, and the audience watches him choose, more than once, not to hear the vision he gave his life to. The last image, the man still and the tape running on in silence, says what no line could. Held a shade below the summit because the form does one thing, once.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops being able to say what it says. The meaning is the distance, and the distance exists only because a single perspective construction puts the hall and the street in one measurable space: the viewer can calculate how far Christ stands from the three men, and the calculation is the content. In a narrative cycle, a print or a written account the halves would become two scenes; here they are one place and two orders. The small panel makes the geometry an object for close, private looking, a viewer leaning in to measure. The two lights divide sacred from common within one form. Held below the top because what the form knows depends partly on a key the panel does not give.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that a person is an image held before another, and that an image can fail; only film can show it, because only in film is the person literally a projected image. When Alma’s trust breaks, the film breaks in the gate. When the self is shared, the face is shared. The doubled monologue shows the same words belonging to listener and speaker at once, and Nykvist’s close-ups make the face the whole field. The cost lies at the edges of the form. The prologue’s catalogue is collage, and most of its items are not instruments of the knowledge; the crew on the crane restates what the burning frame has already shown.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The work knows what it knows only as these canvases on these walls; the room counts where they depend on it. The octagon sets them on every side, so that once the door closes there is no outside to the work. The eye level and distance of the hang meet the body, so the viewer stands within the field rather than before an object. The light from above makes the paintings change with the sky, and gives the work duration. The two kinds, single field and black form, facing each other across the room, are the argument of the form. Substitute a gallery hang and all of it goes, as the dispersed Seagram murals show. Held below the top because the form depends at every point on a building that is not the painter’s.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The form is continuous change: the narrative passes from episode to episode by links of place, kin, theme and teller, as bodies pass from shape to shape. Recast as separate tales, the poem keeps its stories and loses what it knows, that the world is one unbroken flux from chaos (1.5 to 9) to the poet’s present. Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid (1997) runs that experiment: a fine book of tales that no longer knows this. The end turns the form on itself. Pythagoras’ Tempus edax rerum (15.234) is answered by a work that nec edax abolere vetustas (15.872), devouring age cannot destroy: the one thing the form exempts from flux is the form. Held below the top: some transitions are mechanical, the chronology is loose, and from Book XII Troy and Rome are handled as digest rather than as change.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the novel loses what it knows. The fifth chapter gives every girl’s end before her story is told, so the whole is read as a remembering of what is already lost. One register poem holds two cousins: “玉带林中挂，金簪雪里埋”
“a jade belt hangs in the wood; a gold hairpin is buried in the snow”, the names of Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochai hidden in its lines. The doubles carry the knowledge: Zhen and Jia, true and false; the two houses; the elegy for Qingwen, revised in Daiyu’s hearing and heard as hers (ch. 78). The setting has a plot: the garden is built, lived in, searched and emptied. Verse is characterisation, so the form judges its speakers. Held below the top because Cao’s form is not closed: the fall is foretold and begun (ch. 74–80), not enacted.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The wall knows what it knows through a single undivided field above an altar. With no frame it stops being a picture and becomes an opening: the blue does not end at an edge. Its vertical is the judgment itself. The dead rise from the level nearest the floor, the elect go up, the damned come down, and the mouth of hell opens directly above the altar, at the celebrant’s height; the priest says Mass at its edge. Substitute a tiered altarpiece or a set of panels and the rotation, the unbounded space and the vertical sentence all go. Held below the top for two reasons: the upper ring reads from the floor only as mass, and the altar and its furnishings cut into the lowest zone, hiding the foot of the argument.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Use is the test of the form, and the temple is lived from outside: approached from the gateway at an angle, walked along, its door opened eastward to the altar and the sunrise. The form knows this. The frieze begins at the south-west corner and runs in two streams along the long sides to meet over the east door, so a person walking the building’s length meets a procession moving with them in stone. The programme, myth outside and city within, is a sequence the body walks through, not a set of panels, and the refinements make the mass read as tense rather than stacked. Substitute a hall or a stele and the walking-round goes, and the argument with it. Held below the top because the interior was shaped for a statue now lost, and the frieze cannot be seen as the form proposes.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told as Antigone’s tragedy alone the play would be a martyrdom; told as Creon’s alone, a fall of pride. With two centres it knows that the two claims destroy each other, and that the one who survives learns. The form buries her as the city does: she is led into the rock and the play goes on without her. The modes carry the conflict. Antigone sings her lament with the chorus while Creon answers in spoken iambics; at the end it is Creon who breaks into lyric over his son, the lament passing to the man who refused it. Stichomythia makes each confrontation a contest of single lines. Held off the top by the oblique fourth stasimon and by 904 to 920, where the form holds content it does not need.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is the collective: an order in which nothing develops as an individual does, and the many act as one until one is destroyed. The form is ostinato and block. Patterns repeat, layered and cut off, not argued. Sonata form would give the music a protagonist and a history, and the work could not say that the rite has neither. In the Danse sacrale the metre changes almost bar by bar, and the irregular pulse is the form of compulsion. Held down by the ballet: the Abduction and the Rival Tribes take their length from stage action, and in concert the form there comes nearest a container.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The regulated poem is the instrument of what Du Fu knows, not its container. Its rule is parallelism in the middle couplets, line set against line character by character, and he uses it to think correlatively: “國破山河在，城春草木深”
“the state is broken; mountains and rivers remain. The city in spring: grass and trees grow deep”, the broken state against the spring city. In “Climbing High” the falling leaves stand against the river, the boundless against the unending, a vertical fall against a horizontal flow. Put it in prose and the knowledge goes: that the cosmos and the ruined self answer each other is carried by the paired lines. The long old-style poems, “Journey North” and “Five Hundred Words”, need their length and freedom to move from state to road to household; the form changes with what must be known.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that seduction is music. Giovanni has no aria of his own self; he lives in other people’s music. In “Là ci darem la mano” he proposes, Zerlina answers with his tune to her own hesitating words, and the exchanges shorten; then 2/4 gives way to 6/8 and they sing together. No play can do that. At the ball a minuet, a contredanse and a German dance sound together, class as metre, until Zerlina’s scream breaks all three. Held down where the number form is a container: Vienna slotted in new arias, and the secco recitative carries plot without carrying the knowledge.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows through an arched wall above the eye. The real lunette becomes the nearest painted arch; the orthogonals of pavement and cornice run into the gap between the two central figures; the steps descend toward the viewer, so the measurers are nearest and the speculators farthest; the last arch opens on sky, so the house of thought is unfinished, as the real basilica was. Substitute a panel and the simultaneity of the disciplines, the hierarchy by height and the open heaven go. Held off the top because the lunette is given by the room, the viewpoint sits above any standing eye, and the form’s answer to the facing wall is credited only as an answer.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Substitute a mastaba or a stepped mound for this content, a king’s burial, and the work stops knowing what it knows: permanence as geometry, the mound as a plane of light, the king inside the mountain rather than under a heap. The form changed how the purpose was lived: the funeral came up from the river to a mountain, and the body went up a passage two cubits square to a room no one would enter again. The visitor still lives it in the body: forty metres bent double, the Gallery’s release, the box. Since Herodotus it has been the measure of the monument, and it is entered daily. Held below the top because the cult the form served needed the temple and causeway, which are lost, and because two of its three chambers carry a knowledge that is unsettled.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poem knows that a culture can survive as a heap of quotations no one can inhabit, and it is that heap: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (430) is the method as well as the confession. The absence of a governing speaker is the absence of a governing belief; the voices drift into one another, Marie into the prophet, the lady’s chair into the pub, because no consciousness holds them. The title the drafts carried for the first two parts, “He Do the Police in Different Voices”, names the instrument. The verse forms are argument: a blank-verse pastiche for the lady, quatrains for the typist, broken incantation for the thunder. A continuous narrative or a single lyric voice would have stated the theme and lost the condition. Held off the top because some of the unity is supplied from outside the verse by the notes, where a form should carry its own.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The form is the instrument. The double time is the clearest case. On Cyprus the action runs so short from the landing to the murder that there is no time for the adultery to have happened, while the talk implies weeks: Bianca complains of Cassio’s week away, and Emilia reports that Iago “woo’d me to steal it” (3.3) a hundred times. On the stage the short clock is the one felt, and the speed of the passion is the speed of the play. The soliloquies make the audience Iago’s confidant: we know and cannot tell, which is the jealous man’s position inverted. The island confines everyone to one house and one garrison. Set the matter in Cinthio’s form, the novella, and it says only that a Moor was deceived; the drama shows how deception feels from inside.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Substitute the form. Hagia Sophia’s scheme, and the hall divides into a nave and lesser spaces. A hypostyle hall, and the direction survives but the single heaven is lost in a forest of supports. A dome on four piers at this span, and the piers stand in the rows or the semidomes return. What the octagon knows is that a whole congregation can stand under one undivided cover, see the mihrab and hear the tribune, and that is lived every Friday: the rows run unbroken across the floor, and latecomers take the galleries without leaving the room. No later Ottoman imperial mosque gives a congregation one room as this does. Held below the top because the court is the tradition’s court unchanged, and the loge and the galleries are secondary spaces the form merely accommodates.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a man can be trapped inside fixed patterns acting on him from outside. The forms are the trap. The Doctor’s idée fixe is a passacaglia on a twelve-note row, a ground that cannot change; Act II is a symphony because it develops evidence; Act III’s inventions are obsessions, and the murder is one note, B, held. The interlude breaks into D minor because the composer’s compassion stands outside the trap. Held below the top because Berg said the forms were not meant to be heard as such and part of what they know reaches the score-reader more than the listener, and the tavern scherzo’s form is nearer a container.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The web is the argument. Told as Dorothea’s story alone, Middlemarch is a novel of a wrong marriage set right; told as Lydgate’s, a tragedy of ambition. Only the four strands, laid against one another and joined by a town, know what the book knows: that no life is self-made, and that the shape of one is the pressure of the others on it. The narrator who moves from centre to centre, with “so much to do in unravelling certain human lots” (ch. 15), is the instrument of the book’s justice, as the free indirect style is: Casaubon, Rosamond and Bulstrode are each entered for as long as understanding takes. The eight Books, each titled for a phase, give the whole its seasons. Held off the top where the commentary explains what the form has already shown.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
The form is the knowledge. Told forward, Kane’s life is a rise-and-fall biography. Told as five partial accounts that overlap and contradict, it becomes a demonstration that the man cannot be known, and the audience’s failure to assemble him is the film’s statement. The witnesses are placed where their bias shows: Thatcher’s account is a manuscript in a vault, Leland’s an old man’s performance, Susan’s told drunk. The deep focus is the same knowledge in the image: everything in the frame is sharp, and the man is still not there. Held a step from the top because the film does not wholly trust its form: it gives the audience the sled, an answer no witness had, and tells the reporter a word cannot explain a life while showing the audience the word.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Substitute another form and what the temple knows goes with it. Worship here is lived as procession and ascent: west to east across water, then inward through three enclosures and upward through three heights to the sanctuary. Each stage closes the view behind it and opens the next. The galleries face inward; the second is blind outside and turns the walker toward the summit. The relief gallery makes circumambulation a reading: to walk the ritual circuit is to pass through the epics, the court, the judgment and the creation of the world, in that order. The last stairs make the ascent a labour of the body. The form is the instrument of the theology, not its housing. Held below the top by the precinct, whose form no longer tells its purpose, and by the cramped interiors the vault imposes.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poem knows grief as a mind that breaks its own decorum and must be called back: twice a higher strain interrupts the pastoral, “That strain I heard was of a higher mood”, and twice the singer recalls Arethusa or Alpheus to restore the lower key. The irregular rhyme is the instrument, lines reaching for a rhyme that comes late or not at all, as the consolation does. Three waves each rise to a voice from beyond, Phoebus, Peter, the vision of the saints, and only the third holds. Then the one regular stanza closes the irregularity in order, form arriving as the mourner arrives at composure. Held a tenth off the top because the flowers are a container the form must then disown.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that understanding comes late, by repetition transformed. Act III repeats Act I, landscape, transformation and ceremony, and the repetition is the knowledge: the rite Amfortas refuses in Act I, Parsifal restores in Act III, and the audience that watched the first with him watches the second knowing. The middle act is the inverse world, its chromatic harmony set against the Grail’s diatonic writing, so that the form states the temptation as the sacred turned over. Recast as an oratorio, the work would lose the bodily wound and the spear in the air; as a number opera, the slowed time on which the ceremony depends. Held below the top by the narrations, where the form comes closest to a container for exposition.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel knows that lives which never touch are bound, and only the form can say it: the plot never brings Clarissa and Septimus into one room, so the bond is made by the clocks, by the motor car both wonder at, by the aeroplane the whole park reads, by the line of Shakespeare that passes between them, and by the news that comes to the party with Bradshaw. Told in chapters, by one narrator or over a longer span, the book would be two stories and a coincidence. The single day is the argument about time: the hours are “irrevocable”, the past is present only as memory behind each person, and the party is the day’s one act of making. The free indirect style, crossing within a page from Clarissa to Peter to Rezia to a stranger in the street, is the instrument of the claim that the self lives in others. Held just off the top because the long Bourton retrospect in Peter’s strand loosens the form toward the conventional flashback.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a society is a set of voices heard at once, each with its own interest. Only the ensemble can say it. In the Act II terzetto the Count and Countess quarrel at the closet door while Susanna, unseen, comments above them, and three versions of one moment are heard at once. The Act II finale adds a voice at each turn of the plot, so that the crowd builds as the Count’s case builds, until seven people stand in two factions. The sextet’s joke is in its counterpoint: Susanna arrives in rage, slaps Figaro, and is talked round while the others repeat that Marcellina is his mother. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The cost is Act IV, where five arias in a row return to the older aria opera.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Two voices that never meet are the two answers to mortality, kept apart. The weight of the last song is the knowledge: the farewell takes as long as everything before it, so time stretches at the point of leaving. The ending’s form is the claim: the voice repeats “ewig” (“for ever”) and the harmony does not close, so the work ends by not ending, and the added sixth is the earth going on. The interlude is form as event, a death told in orchestra alone. Recast for voices and piano, as Mahler also wrote it, the work loses the colour of its earth; as a symphony without voices, its words. Held below the top by the middle songs, where the form is nearest to a container of pictures.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The play is a game in a closed room, and what it knows is that ending is a move the game can approach and not make: “Something is taking its course”, and the course is the form itself. The opening, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished”, states the whole structure as a grammar of approach without arrival, and the close returns the handkerchief to Hamm’s face, so that the last image is the first. The stage is the instrument: the ladder to the two windows, the chair wheeled to the exact centre, the bins at the edge. Prose, which Beckett had just used for the trilogy, could tell of the room; only theatre makes an audience sit in it for its length and wait for the end with Hamm.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that order recovered is made, not returned to. A finale in rondo or sonata form would come home; the fugue, the form of law, has to be built voice by voice, and its licences are the form’s knowledge that the law strains. The Largo is form as search, a transition that is the content. The descending third is the form’s grammar at every scale, from motive to key plan, so that the Adagio’s F sharp minor and the development’s B minor are the same law driven to its edges. As a suite of character pieces the work would lose its argument. Held below the top at the Scherzo, tied to the plan by motive more than form, and at the fugue’s episodes, where the form fills time it has earned.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poems came first and the prose after, so the book is a man reading his past: the dream sonnet no one could judge “ora è manifesto alli più semplici” (now is plain to the simplest, III). The divisions set reason over passion and then give way: Tanto gentile needs none (XXVI), and after the death they come before the poem so that it may end “più vedova” (more widowed, XXXI). The thirty-one poems fall ten, canzone, four, canzone, four, canzone, ten, and the dream of her death stands sixteenth, at the centre. Prose cannot do what the poems do, nor poems what the prose does: the knowledge is the gap between them. Held off the top because some divisions are a container, not an instrument.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops being able to say what it says. On a gold ground, or as a panel on an altar, this Trinity would be an image of doctrine. Built as a chapel opened in the wall, with its vanishing point set low, at about the eye of one who stands before it, it becomes a place in the church: a vault the viewer looks up into and could walk under, a tomb the viewer stands beside. The vertical stacking is the doctrine of the Trinity rendered as architecture; the pilasters are the threshold between the living and the sacred; the skeleton at the foot of the wall is the viewer’s own future at the viewer’s own height. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The body knows that the self is plural and that each self has its own way of seeing, and it knows this by being three poets in three forms, not by saying so. Caeiro’s plain line, the syntax of a man who will not subordinate, is his epistemology: “Há metafísica bastante em não pensar em nada” (“There is metaphysics enough in thinking about nothing”, V). The tautology of XX is an argument made by repetition. The compressed, latinate stanzas of Reis, inverted and closed, are his discipline: in “Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada / Teu exclui ou exagera” the enjambment holds the “nada” across the break. Campos’s verse paragraph swells and breaks as the self does. Rewrite the three as one voice and the body knows nothing it now knows. Held a step below the top because the late Campos and the lesser Reis use their forms by habit.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. The knowledge is that the sky moves, and it is known only as paint moving: the strokes are laid in the directions of the current, and a smooth sky of the same colours would be a night, not a force. The Rhône canvas is the controlled experiment: the same format, blues, yellows and stars, painted from the motif, and it knows a different thing, a town reflected in calm water. Change the viewpoint and the cypress no longer crosses the sky; change the scale and the strokes no longer read as marks; take the colour away and the lit windows against the blue, the whole argument about the town, go with it. Held below the top for the village, which is drawn rather than painted, in a shorthand from another kind of picture, and knows less than the rest.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses almost all it knows. Its knowledge is that Comala is dead and that the dead are still speaking about what killed them; the form is that knowledge. Juan Preciado’s journey is told as if to a listener, and only at the middle does the reader learn that the listener is Dorotea and the teller a corpse: the reader has been among the dead the whole time, and learns it at the moment Juan Preciado does. The fragments without order are the murmurs themselves, and the reader must assemble Pedro’s life as the dead assemble their grievances. The two narrations meet at the end, when Pedro is killed by the son who brought Juan Preciado to Comala. Held off the very top only because the hinge between the halves is felt as a change of instrument as much as a deepening.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The stanza is the instrument of the book’s double vision: a quatrain lifts, the enclosed quatrain turns, and the couplet lands, often with a laugh, so that feeling and its deflation are joined in every fourteen lines, and the reader is made to feel and to watch himself feeling. The narrator’s presence is the form’s second instrument: the book knows that its people are made of books because the man telling it is visibly making one, discussing his rhymes and ageing across the years of its writing. The two letters set outside the stanza are its sharpest knowledge: when Tatiana and then Onegin speak without guard, the stanza falls away, and its return marks the world closing over them. The structure is a mirror, letter, refusal and lecture in the fourth chapter against letter, refusal and reproach in the eighth, and the symmetry is the meaning: the roles exchange, and time does not. Held just off the top because the Journey set after the eighth chapter and the numbered blanks loosen the frame the mirror closes.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The upright format, with the figure pressed into the lower third against the picture plane, makes the body a relief on a tomb; the empty wall above makes the death a loss and not an event. Painted wide, the tub becomes a bed and the picture a deathbed scene; with Corday in it, as later painters chose, it becomes the story of a crime; on a small canvas the body at life size no longer stands the viewer at the bier. The writing works only in a painted object: the dead man still holds the text that brought his murderer in, and the painter has signed his tomb. Held a step below the top for the paper beside the banknote, where the form tells rather than shows.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told by one narrator, this would be a grotesque tale of a funeral. Told in fifty-nine separate monologues, it knows that the Bundrens cannot reach one another, since the reader holds what no member of the family holds. The form gives Darl’s isolation its measure: he speaks nineteen of the sections, nearly a third, and knows what the others hide, Dewey Dell’s pregnancy and Jewel’s paternity, and the form’s own law makes that knowledge a danger to him. Addie’s single section, set after her death, makes the dead woman the one voice outside the family’s time, and it answers the book’s first third. Cash’s numbered list shows a mind by its shape. Held a step off the top by the strain of Darl’s clairvoyance: he tells his mother’s death while he is away on the road with Jewel, which tests the law of the monologue, and the book accepts it without quite earning it.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The close-up against white is the interrogation itself: the viewer is denied space as Joan is denied counsel, sees only the face being questioned and the faces questioning, and cannot step back to judge. The mismatched eye lines unsettle where anyone stands, which is the condition of a prisoner who cannot tell friend from enemy. Silence bears weight: her voice is never heard, so the face is the only testimony, and it is testimony that cannot be cross-examined. Set the same trial in a wide, legible courtroom and it becomes a debate the viewer can score; this form makes it a suffering the viewer must share. The cost is in the intertitles, which break the face’s continuity and are a container, not an instrument.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the panel stops knowing what it knows. It knows by the circle: three who are distinct but bound in one figure, the heads and shoulders inclining along a curve no figure breaks. It knows by reverse perspective: the footstools and the base of the table widen toward the front, so the empty side of the table is the viewer’s place, and the viewer is drawn to the table rather than looking at it from outside. It knows as an icon, an image venerated face to face in a church, made to be looked at and to look back. As narrative painting in linear perspective it would be a scene; as text it would be doctrine. Held below the top because the panel was made to stand among other panels and in gold, and that setting is no longer carried by the panel as it stands.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that one voice can colonise another, which only music can stage as a fact rather than a report. Iago’s idiom is set in the drinking song: trills, staccato, chromatic slides, sardonic grace notes, the swagger of “Inaffia l’ugola!”
“Wet your throat!” Through Acts II and III those gestures enter Otello’s music, and his heroic line breaks into fragments. “Era la notte, Cassio dormia”
“It was night, Cassio was sleeping” is a lie sung sotto voce, so the poison arrives as intimacy. The kiss motive, given at the end of Act I, returns only at the end of Act IV: the form’s two poles are one melody. The cost lies in the Act III concertato, where the form serves the ensemble more than the drama, and in the homage chorus.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The three movements grow, each roughly twice the length of the last, and the growth is the passage from plea to praise: the cry is brief, the waiting longer, the song longest. The fugue is the form of waiting, expectans expectavi, subject entering after subject and the choral fugue arriving over the instrumental one. The coda’s ostinato, in a metre it does not fit, is the form of eternity: a pattern that turns and does not come round to the downbeat in the same place. The orchestration is form too: without violins there is no singing line above the chorus, and the voices are the only warmth. Recast as an orchestral symphony with a choral finale, the work would lose its claim that the singing is the symphony. Held below the top where the Allegro’s blocks are arranged rather than compelled.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Put the group in a museum under even light and it no longer floats: the light has a source, the rays fall from nothing, and the vision becomes a sculpture of a vision. Remove the boxes and the witness goes. The hidden light shows grace as what falls from outside the work, by an unseen cause. The forward-bowing pediment makes the vision a scene and the viewer an audience. The grading of media, from painted heaven through stucco and gilt to marble and inlay, measures the distance from heaven to the grave in matter. Held below the top by its one good view and its dependence on the hour.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the panel stops knowing what it knows. Its claim, that an expression cannot be fixed, is made by the means: the sfumato is deepest at the corners of the mouth and eyes, so the expression exists only as a reading of shadow and changes as the eye moves. Drawn with an outline, the face would be one face. Without the half-length and the hands the pyramid has no base and the gaze no anchor, and the two halves of the land, meeting only behind the head, make her the hinge of the world behind her. The small size is required: a face at about life size, held at the distance of a person. Held a step below the top because the land’s share of the knowledge is partly lost under the varnish, and because much of the form’s work happens at a scale of millimetres that the viewer at the glass cannot see.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and nearly everything goes. The knowledge is the figure’s balance: a body on one foot inside a closed ring, the four hands touching the ring’s space at their reach, so that the world and the dancer share one boundary. In relief, against a wall, the ring is a frame; in the round it is a world, and the figure is seen from every side as it was in procession. In bronze the locks and the sash stand free, level in the air, a speed stone cannot hold without support. The lost-wax process lets the fluency of the wax model become metal, and the solid cast gives a carried god his weight. Painted, the image teaches the iconography; only the bronze lets the dance stand and be carried. Held a step below the top because the type, not this cast, is the form’s author.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge. Cutting between the father’s rise and the son’s fall makes each scene a commentary on its neighbour: Vito holding the infant Michael on the stoop after killing Fanucci sits against Michael’s children seen through glass. The counterfactual has been run: The Godfather Saga (television, 1977) and later re-edits tell it in order, and it becomes a chronicle in which the founder’s warmth precedes the son’s cold and explains it. Intercut, the two coexist, and the film can say they are one act at two temperatures. Held a step from the top because not every joint works: the cut from quarantine to the Communion rhymes; some crossings around the hearings are scheduled rather than earned.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Cut in classical continuity, the same script is the minor B-picture the dedication promised. Time skips because Michel skips: the jump cuts are the impatience of a self that will not stay in one shot, and the drive on the back of Patricia’s head is desire too quick for continuity. The handheld street shooting is the freedom the film is about, with the real Paris passing behind the fiction. A borrowed gesture in a film made of borrowed films folds theme into form. The hotel room is a second grammar, the long take for a man stopped and waiting. A step from the top: the manner also covers errands that do not need it.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that consciousness keeps no border between what is, what was and what is wished, and the straight cut is how it knows it: the cemetery opens from Carla’s bed without a dissolve. Its other knowledge is that the film it is about is the film it is. In the screen tests actresses play Luisa and Carla while Luisa watches, so Guido’s life is cast before his eyes; only a film made inside the making of a film could stage that. The tower meant to launch a spaceship becomes the staircase into the ring. Held from the top by the middle stretch, where the form contains the hotel’s comings and goings without shaping them.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute an orthogonal hall, however fine, and the building loses almost everything it knows. Its knowledge is that light can be graded by the depth of a wall; that a roof parted from its walls by a line of light reads as weightless; that a floor falling to an altar turns standing into approach; that a wall curved inward on the east gathers a crowd outside as an apse gathers one within. None of this survives a change of form, because the form is how it is known. The use changes with it: the pilgrimage lived as an ascent, an outdoor mass and a passage into a room whose subject is light. A small deduction for the shelter and the chaplain’s house, good plain work but not instruments of the same knowledge.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of the knowledge goes; the film of 2009, which kept the plot and much of the dialogue and lost the rest, is the controlled experiment. The grid is the clockwork: a fixed frame in which every panel has equal weight, so that a gutter can be a second or thirty years, and chapter IV can hold a life at once because the page holds moments side by side, as Manhattan does. The mirrored layout of chapter V makes the symmetry of its title from Blake into the experience of reading. The text of one scene laid over the images of another, the pirate comic’s narration over the street, makes irony a function of the medium. The documents change the reading of the panels: they are the world the drawn world claims to be. Held a little below the top because the back matter’s prose is a lesser instrument than the pages it follows.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is made only of talk because the world it shows is made only of talk: JR’s empire exists on the telephone and in the mail, never as a thing, and the novel exists as speech, with almost no body, setting or interiority except what speech lets slip. There are no chapters because the market does not close; the reader gets no rest because no one in the book gets any. Speakers interrupt, mishear and answer the wrong question, and the reader must do the listening they do not do. The bridging passages are the one place where description rules, and what they describe is the natural world being sold off. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Held a step below the top because the monotony the form requires is at moments only monotony, and the labour of identification is not always repaid by what is identified.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Jake has no words for what is in him, and the film gives him none; it gives him a form with two grammars. Outside the ring, scenes are played in plain, often static set-ups, at length, the talk overlapping. Inside it the film turns expressionist: speeds change, the camera goes where no spectator could stand, sound is stripped out or distorted. The ring is the one place his interior can be seen, and the form alone carries that knowledge. The colour home movies are a third term, the happy marriage in the form people use to record happiness. A step from the top: the frame is conventional biographical grammar, and Miami is told in ordinary scene form.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes entire. The book knows that consciousness proceeds by association and not by sequence, and knows it only because it is written so: the clock and the conception are joined in Mrs Shandy’s mind as they are joined in the book’s first chapter, by Locke’s law. It knows that time lived and time written cannot be made to agree, because Tristram falls further behind his life the more he writes; no linear form could state that except as an aside. The diagrams of the narrative line, the black page and the blank page are not ornaments; they are the form demonstrating what it cannot do in words. The digressive and the progressive are one movement. Held a tenth below the highest because the seventh volume’s journey is a frame other books could have held.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute a form and the pamphlet stops being able to say almost everything it says. As a plain tract, which Swift had already written in 1720 and 1728, it says that Ireland is being ruined and should help itself, and no one listens; the paragraph of other expedients is that tract, inside this one, refused. As the projector’s proposal it knows what the plain tract cannot: that the evil is in the form of reasoning, and so must be shown in that form, with its numbers, its tables of advantage and its professions of disinterest. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, and the reader’s assent and recoil, which are the disclosure, are produced by it and by nothing else. Held just off the top only because the form is borrowed whole from its targets, and could be borrowed by a lesser hand to lesser effect.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the precinct can no longer say what it knows. Roof the altar and the emperor no longer stands under heaven; square the hall and the year no longer stands in a ring holding up the sky; lower the raised way and the walk from earth to heaven becomes a path through a park. The two rounded corners of the plan make the cosmology the shape of the land enclosed. The open altar, round within square, sets the body at the centre of the world’s order and uses sound to tell it so. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: the rite was the form walked. Held from the top only because the rite is gone, and the precinct now carries its meaning as a shape, not as an act; the form still carries it whole.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The three planes are the knowledge: the liturgy in full orchestra and chorus, public and ceremonial; the soldiers in a chamber group, close and speaking; the boys and organ at a distance, a rite going on elsewhere. They are kept apart because the work’s claim is that they do not hear one another, and they meet only in the Libera me, at the moment the two soldiers lie down to sleep. As a sequence of Owen songs the work would lose the rite it indicts; with Owen read between movements it would lose the contradiction made in the same bar, the boys’ Hostias against “half the seed”. Held below the top by the Dies irae, where the alternation becomes a pattern, and by the Sanctus, whose poem is placed more than required.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Put the relics on the altar of an ordinary chapel and the building loses nearly everything it says. The reliquary form places the worshipper inside the shrine, so that the relic’s holiness is the air of the room. The two storeys make rank spatial: household below, king and relics above, the king’s door at his own level. The glass makes the walls the history and the history the light: the programme is not hung on the building but is its enclosure. The axis runs from the west door to the tribune under the Passion window, so every step is toward the relics. Held below the top because that focus has stood empty since the Revolution.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that one cell can contract and expand. The fugue’s fan is the form of opening out and drawing back, and no other form would carry it, because the entries themselves are the expansion. The antiphonal division is the form of dialogue and echo: in the second movement the two groups throw the material across the stage, and reduced to one orchestra the argument would become a texture. The Adagio’s arch is the form of night falling and lifting. The finale’s diatonic return is the knowledge the whole exists to reach, and it needs the three movements before it. Held below the top by the second movement and the finale’s episodes, where sonata and rondo are good containers more than instruments.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The finale’s knowledge, that a fixed law can hold every kind of feeling and still end where it began, is the passacaglia’s own; recast as a sonata rondo it would become a victory or a defeat, not a fate. The first movement’s knowledge, that a whole movement can grow from one interval, is the chain of thirds made form, the development extending the chain. The central group of the finale, written at half the pace, is a slow movement folded into the variation chain, and the return of the ground after it is a recapitulation folded into variation. Held below the top by the third movement, a container for good spirits more than an instrument.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The letter is the act. Valmont writes to Tourvel from a courtesan’s bed, using Émilie’s back as his desk, and the letter is innocent to its recipient and obscene to the reader who knows: the same words carry two meanings at once, and only this form can hold them. The plot is the circulation of letters, and the denouement is their publication: Valmont, dying, gives Danceny the correspondence, and Merteuil is undone by her own letters read aloud in society. The reader holding the book holds the instrument of her fall. Told in the third person, it would be a tale of seduction with a moral. Held a tenth from the top by the ending, where the last letters report events rather than enact them.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the event left no image and that only speech, place and the present can carry it; archival footage would put a picture where the absence is. The interpreters, heard after each answer, put a delay into every testimony, so that the viewer waits with the words and cannot hurry past them. Return to the same acts from many mouths makes knowledge by convergence, held in duration so that it is undergone rather than summarised. Re-staging puts witnesses back into their gestures: memory becomes action before the camera, in Bomba’s scissors. The cost: some long landscape passages are a container more than an instrument.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film knows nothing. Its knowledge is that seeing is made, and only a form that shows the camera, the editor, the projection and the audience in the course of showing a city can know it. Given intertitles and a narrator it becomes a newsreel of Soviet cities; given a story it becomes a fiction set among them. The editing is the instrument. When Svilova freezes a carriage in the street and the film cuts to her bench, the halted frame is image and strip at once, and the audience learns what motion on film is made of while watching it. The frame closes the form: the film is shown to an audience inside it. Held a step from the top because the middle catalogue could be ordered otherwise without loss.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely. What it knows is a relation between a body and a field: the viewer’s presence at a given distance before a surface that exceeds the eye. That exists only at this width, this height and this colour. Make it easel size and it is a diagram of a stripe painting; make it a mural for distant viewing and the field closes into an object. The red is an instrument, an advancing colour that comes toward the viewer. The zips are an instrument: they give the field a measure without composing it, so the eye has something to cross rather than something to look at. Every decision serves the encounter. Held just below the Rothko Chapel, because the form does not control the conditions of its own seeing: it depends on the viewer and the hang.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Confessio means both admission and praise, and the book is both at once. Told in the third person, or to a human reader, it would be a memoir of conversion; told to God, who already knows it, the telling becomes the act of being known, and raises the question of why one tells at all (X.3.3 to 4.6). The second person is the instrument: the self examined before a listener who cannot be deceived. The order of the books enacts the argument: the past gathered, the gathering examined as memory, memory opening on time, time on the eternal and on creation, and the end in the sabbath rest where the first sentence began. Held below the top because the hinge at the tenth book is felt by many readers as a break, and the exegesis sometimes becomes a container.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narration is held to K.: the reader never knows more than the accused, never learns the charge, never sees a judge, and so stands in his condition rather than observing it. An omniscient narrator would turn the book into a satire of a court; this one makes it the experience of one. The structure of stations without progress is the second instrument, and the accretion of the middle belongs to it: approach after approach returns K. to where he began, so that the book takes the very shape of the postponement Titorelli describes, a case kept open and never advanced. The parable inside the cathedral chapter, with its commentary of competing readings, models the book’s own form as a text that will not yield one meaning. The frame, the vantage and the stations are Kafka’s, and they carry the knowledge. Held off the top because the order of the middle is not his, the book is unfinished, and a few chapters hold their episode without adding to what the form knows.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The work knows what it knows through glass and light in a closed bay. An image of light rather than pigment: the conch brightens from the windows beside it. The frontal figures look at the viewer wherever he stands; the emperor’s presence is the medium’s property. The panels stand at the altar’s height, so the gifts are permanently arriving, and the pairs are the room’s: bread one side, wine the other, because the altar has two sides. Substitute fresco and the light dies; a narrative and the presence goes. Held below the top: the panels are seen square on only from inside the chancel, garden and gold are two geometries meeting at an arch, and the programme is now met through a bare octagon under a painted dome.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Put “Song of Myself” into stanzas and its equality goes: the end-stopped, paratactic line gives each item of the catalogue a line of its own and none subordinate to another, which is the democracy the poem knows. The shifting pronoun, the “I” passing into “you” and back, is the instrument of the claim that self and reader are one ground, and it lets “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” speak across time: “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt”. The book’s own form, one title kept for a lifetime and rewritten in each edition, is a growing body, the grass of its name, and in “Lilacs” the weaving of three motifs is the work of mourning. Held off the top because the clustering of the later book is in part arbitrary, and in the occasional and late poems the line is a container.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. As a treatise the Phaedo would be four arguments for immortality, three of them weak. As a dialogue set on the last day, the arguments are performed by a man to whom their conclusion is about to matter, and his conduct is the evidence they cannot supply: the work knows that the proof fails and the life succeeds, and only the form can know both at once. The frame, with Echecrates’ own dismay (88c to d), puts the reader among those who heard and doubted. Proofs, collapse, misology, recovery, the deeper account, myth, death: each step answers the doubt of the one before. Myth comes where argument stops, and Socrates says so: “kalos gar ho kindunos”
“for the risk is a fine one” (114d). Held off the top by the long argued stretches where the drama goes quiet.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told by an omniscient narrator, Heathcliff and Catherine would be judged or explained; told by Lockwood and Nelly, they are seen only from outside, by a man who cannot understand them and a woman who disapproves, and the passion stays out of reach, which is the knowledge. Nelly’s account is coloured: she withholds Catherine’s illness from Edgar, and she lets Heathcliff overhear half of chapter 9 and not the rest, so the reader judges the judge. The two generations are the argument: the second half replays the first in altered terms, so that the repetition can fail. The chronology, laid to the month across some thirty years, is the form’s spine. Held a step down because the frame thins in the second volume, where Lockwood is a listener and little more.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and what the city knows goes with it. The grid makes every household live on the city’s axis: a Teotihuacano woke, cooked and buried the dead at fifteen and a half degrees east of north, inside the cosmogram. The compound makes the corporate group the unit of life: no house stands alone, the patio with its shrine is the centre, the burials lie under the floors, and the street sees a blank wall. The Avenue is terraced, with stairs between its sunken plazas, so that walking north is climbing toward the mountain. The Ciudadela puts the city on one level floor before one temple: audience is a form before it is an event. Worship, rule and dwelling are lived as procession, enclosure and rank. Held below the top because no interior teaches: what the form knows, it knows out of doors.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The poem is a set of instructions to a farmer who will never finish, and the precept form is the argument: work is endless, the imperative never stops, and the seasons turn the lesson back to its start. Turn it into narrative and the labour becomes plot; turn it into lyric and the labour goes. The alternation of dark and bright endings makes the reader live the poem’s double view of labour instead of being told it. The Aristaeus is the form’s own crisis: the manual meets a loss no precept answers, and the poem moves into myth to find what the manual cannot. The seal sets the poet at Naples, “studiis florentem ignobilis oti”, flourishing in the pursuits of inglorious ease (4.564), while Caesar thunders on the Euphrates.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The canvas knows what it knows through darkness and one light. The call is not a gesture answered but a beam crossing an empty wall and finding faces in the order they turn. Substitute even daylight, as on the vault overhead, and the picture can no longer say that the call comes from one side, into a room that was not waiting for it. The setting completes the form. The canvas hangs on a side wall and is seen obliquely, across a rail, the way the call enters, and its light comes from the altar side. Facing it, the Martyrdom answers: vocation on one wall, death on the other. Held below the top by the space, whose depth cannot be measured.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The canvas knows what it knows through a large field, near life size, built on one diagonal and one light. The muskets are ruled straight, the victims are an irregular heap, and the lantern between them throws its light one way, onto the victims. Order and person, darkness and exposure, are set against each other by the form itself. Substitute a print, as in the Disasters, and the scale, the colour and the single source of light all go: the picture can no longer say that the victim is the only lit thing in the world. Held below the top because the background is barely formed, and the form’s knowledge stops at the edge of the light.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narration stays with Gregor while he lives, close enough that the reader shares his worries about the train before sharing his horror, and that order is the disclosure: a mind so formed by work that it meets its own transformation as a scheduling problem. When he dies the narration leaves him and goes with the family, out of the flat and into the sun, so that the form performs the expulsion the story describes; the reader is made to feel the relief the family feels, and to be implicated in it. The three parts, each ending with Gregor driven back or dead, give the story the shape of a sentence carried out in three stages. The flat style that reports the impossible without wonder is the third instrument, and the three work as one: vantage, division and style each carry the same knowledge. Held off the top because the closing pages state in the family’s thoughts what the form had already shown.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Tlön” is a world invented by an encyclopedia, told as an inquiry into an encyclopedia, so that the reader watches a fiction become a fact by the means it describes. “Pierre Menard” can say that a text changes with its reader only by being a review that reads two identical texts differently, the second “casi infinitamente más rico” (almost infinitely richer). The detective form of “La muerte y la brújula” is the trap: Lönnrot’s reason is what kills him. The spy story of “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan” is a fork in time enacted as a murder. “El Sur” is built to be read two ways at once, as event and as dream, as the postscript of 1956 says. Held off the top because a collection is additive: the two parts and their prologues give an order, but most stories could stand in another, and in the slighter pieces the form holds a conceit without adding to it.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two contrary books are the argument: printed as one run of lyrics, the songs would be a mixture of the sweet and the bitter; paired, each state is seen from the other, and neither is the truth alone. The naive speaker is the instrument of Innocence’s knowledge, since the indictment is made by what the child does not say. The composite plate belongs to the knowledge as well: text and design are etched as one, the designs grow through the lines, and the copies answer the words differently in each. Held off the top for two reasons. Blake’s own reordering shows that the sequence within each half is not load-bearing; and most readers have met the poems in type, without the plates, and still received most of what they know.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book moves from a boy’s “I” in its first three stories to a third person that never again belongs to a narrator, as if the child’s self were absorbed by the city. Free indirect style is the instrument. “Clay” is told in Maria’s own euphemisms, “Everyone was so fond of Maria”, in the longest sentences in the book, and the form knows what she cannot say: that she is pitied, and that the verse she sings twice is not the one about suitors. Endings stop at the edge of change: Polly “remembered what she had been waiting for”; Eveline’s eyes give “no sign”. Paralysis has a shape: a mind “circling round and round in the same orbit” in “An Encounter”, the horse Johnny walking round King Billy’s statue in “The Dead”. Held off the top because the frame grew by addition, and in “After the Race” and “A Mother” form holds more than it shapes.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The Mass is a fixed text in a fixed order, and Beethoven makes the fixity the instrument. Belief is a recitation, not a mood, so the Credo is built on a word repeated, a ritornello that holds dozens of clauses in one form. Peace cannot be stated as won, because the last movement is a petition, so the Agnus Dei is built of interruption and return, the petition broken and resumed. The Benedictus, a long aria for violin over chorus and soloists, knows that the divine presence is a duration, not a climax. As an oratorio the ritual address would be lost; as a symphony, the words that make the war a war against a prayer. Held below the top where the Gloria’s form serves the speed of its text more than the work’s knowledge.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The monologue with imagined interlocutors is the instrument of what the book knows: a consciousness that cannot say anything without forestalling the listener’s reply, so that every assertion carries its own retraction and the lie is folded into the truth. Recast in the third person, the book becomes a case history, which it exists to refuse: an author who reported this man would confirm his horror of being a piano key. The inverted order is the second instrument. Theory before episode means the reader first takes the doctrine as a philosophy and then finds it a wound, which is the book’s point. The frame at both ends, an author declaring the man fictional yet bound to exist and an editor cutting him off, makes the voice an exhibit while letting it speak entire. Held off the top because the second part, as narrative, is told more conventionally than the first, and the form there is partly a container for scenes.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The knowledge is that this body is present, not represented as an ideal, and it is known through the flat frontal light: model her in Cabanel’s soft shadow and she is Venus again. The composition must stay Titian’s, exactly enough to be recognised, or the inversion has nothing to invert. The look must meet a standing viewer at near life size, or the viewer is not placed as the client. The servant must bring the flowers forward into that space, or the transaction stays offstage. Make it a print, a smaller panel, a profile or a sleeping figure, and the picture no longer knows what it knows. Held below the top for the right side: the servant’s face and the cat are given in darks so close to the ground that part of what the form carries is hard to read at the distance the form requires.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
As a painting or a cycle of paintings the work would lose its argument by accumulation, its private scale, the multiplicity that makes witness public, and the caption, which is half the form. The caption is the instrument: “Por qué?” (32), “Enterrar y callar” (18), “Yo lo vi” (44) are the voice of someone who saw, speaking under the plate and never explaining. In a book with illustrations the images would serve a text; here the text serves the image and fails it on purpose. The aquatint is the void around atrocity, the etched line the witness’s speed. The form is the knowledge. Held below the highest figure because the last group borrows the form of the Caprichos rather than extending its own.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told directly, by an omniscient narrator, the story of Kurtz would be an exposé. Told by Marlow to men who never answer him, on a river that was once one of the dark places of the earth, it becomes a confession that implicates its hearers. The double frame is the instrument: the tale is heard through a narrator who began by praising the Thames and ends by seeing it lead “into the heart of an immense darkness”. Marlow’s struggle to tell is itself the subject, that what he lived through cannot be passed on; and the lie at the end is told inside a telling that is supposed to be true. Held a step down because the form’s scepticism about telling at times becomes the adjectival vagueness it describes.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (J1129) states the poetics, and the poems perform it: the slant rhyme is the knowledge that the world does not close as the hymn promised, and a true rhyme would lie. The dash holds a thought open past the point where syntax would settle it. The hymn quatrain, the most communal of measures, carries the most private of experiences, and so enacts the soul’s separation from its congregation. In J341 the metre itself goes numb until it reaches “This is the Hour of Lead”; in J465 the last stanza breaks its line into pieces at the fly’s buzz, as the senses break. The editors of 1890, who regularised the rhymes and the punctuation, are the proof, since their versions say less. What holds the axis a step below the top is the sameness of the instrument: one form across the whole body, made to know a great deal but one, and in many lesser poems a container rather than an instrument.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the Rock is lived otherwise. Put it in a basilica and it becomes the end of a nave, approached and faced; put it in a hypostyle mosque and it becomes one point in a field ordered toward Mecca. The concentric plan makes it the centre, gone round in two rings under the only height in the building. The form knows the Rock as the centre of a world rather than the goal of a road. It has shown what it can carry: a shrine, a church under the Crusaders, a shrine again, with no change to its plan. Held below the top because the form was taken whole from an existing type, and because the rites it was first made for are not well documented.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently or not at all. The owner of a conventional villa receives in a long hall and looks one way; here he stands at a centre with four doors open, the point where four landscapes meet. The loggias make outdoor rooms of four exposures, so the day can be followed round the house: morning on one front, evening on another, shade always somewhere. Arrival is a climb and a turn into the light, the same from any side, so there is no servants’ approach and no privileged one. Retirement becomes contemplation and reception a centring, and four centuries of dwelling have shown that the form carries ordinary life as well as ceremony. Held below the top where the form ignores use: the cramped stairs, the cold quarter, the hall that is grand to cross and hard to inhabit.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Put the auction onstage and the play becomes a melodrama of ruin; keep it off, with the party dancing in the third act while the bidding goes on in town, and the form says what the play knows, that history arrives while people are occupied with something else. The symmetrical frame, nursery to nursery, arrival to departure, blossom to frost, makes leaving the measure of what was there. The mixed genre is not a tone but a way of knowing: loss in this world is ridiculous and terrible together, and a single register could not hold both. Dialogue that misses its target is the instrument of the disclosure. Held just off the top by Trofimov’s speeches, which lift out without the structure noticing.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The two halves are set side by side and never joined: the doubling is found only by laying Moran over Molloy, and the book knows its central matter only through that act. Molloy’s single unbroken paragraph is the form of a mind with no rest and no hierarchy, where a stone and a killing receive the same sentence. Moran’s report begins in neat paragraphs and orderly reasoning and decays as he decays, so that the form of his half enacts his loss of form. The last lines, repeating the first and denying them, turn the whole report into fiction at the moment it closes. Tell it in the third person, or in one sequence with the identity of the two made plain, and nothing is left but a story about tramps. Held a step off the top because the episodes of the first part could be reordered with less loss than the frame suggests.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose cannot be lived. The enfilade of the state apartments is the order of precedence: rank becomes a matter of how many doors a courtier may pass. The king’s bedroom on the axis puts the rising and retiring of one body, the lever and coucher, at the centre of the state. The Hall of Mirrors makes passage a ceremony. The garden makes walking a reading of power, and Louis XIV wrote out a route for showing it, the Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles, the form read aloud. Put the court in a palace on a street and it cannot be held, watched or staged. Held below the top: the enfilade was a French convention first, and so bound a form has carried no later use but a museum.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The Divan knows that the sacred and the profane cannot be held apart, and the ghazal is how it knows it: each couplet is complete, Persian grammar leaves the addressee without gender, and the radif returns the same word under shifting senses, so that one poem reads as love, as devotion and as address to a prince, and no reading cancels another. In a masnavi the ambiguity would have to resolve; in prose it would become doctrine. The radif is an instrument: “do not grieve” closes every couplet of the Joseph ghazal and turns each new grief into the same consolation. The pen-name is form too, since “hāfez” is one who has the Qur’an by heart. Held at 9.2 by the occasional and panegyric pieces, where the form is a container.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a built church and much of what the complex knows is lost. The form makes worship a descent: the church is not seen from afar but come upon, below one’s feet, and reached by going down. It makes church and ground one substance, the holy place a part of the land and not an object set on it. It hides: from a distance the quarter is invisible, sunk below the plateau. It makes pilgrimage a route through trench and tunnel, from church to church and from the dark into light. The form has carried what it was made for: some eight centuries of liturgy, monastic life in the cells, burial in the rock and the great feasts. Held below the top because the semi-detached and converted units read as excavations more than as churches released, and the shelters change how the courts are lived.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Much of it. The shallow box presses ten figures into a frieze against the front plane, so the grief happens at the viewer’s own height and distance, with no space to retreat into. Life size makes the bodies present rather than narrated. The gold ground and the painted tracery say that this is an altar image, a devotional object, and also a real event of flesh; the tension between carved shrine and wet face is the knowledge. The raised centre gives the cross its upright without opening a sky. As a small panel, or as a scene in a landscape, the picture would be a story seen from outside. Held a step below the top because the arrangement could in principle be carved; the form needs painting for the flesh and the tears.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. Told in order, this is a melodrama of escape and infanticide, and the reader would judge the act before understanding it. Told as it is, circling, withholding, approaching the shed only after a long run of the life that led there, it reproduces how trauma returns: in fragments, provoked by objects, never all at once. The book’s word for this, “rememory”, is also its method. The monologues of the second part dissolve syntax as the three women’s identities merge, and the unpunctuated section is the only form in which the ship could be spoken. The openings of the three parts, spiteful, loud, quiet, chart the haunting as a single curve. Held off the top because the third part returns to a plainer, more dispersed narration, and the climax at the gate is reached by plot more than by form.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The woodblock cannot blur: every form must be cut with an edge, so foam becomes fingers and spray becomes drops, and the sea becomes a thing with parts. The flat printed colour gives the wave as a shape, not an illusion of water, so it can be rhymed with a mountain. Prussian blue gives a depth the medium had never held, so the sea is heavier than the air above it. The horizontal sheet gives the crest its span, and the multiple is itself the form: men at work for the Edo market, sold cheaply to Edo townsmen. In oil at two metres the wave gains water and loses its hand. Held below the top because the figures and boats are drawn in the print’s stock manner, and the invention is in the water.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows, because the knowledge is in how the parts are made. In Acknowledgement the four-note figure moves from bass to saxophone, through a cycle of keys, and then to the voice: praise spread into every key and then given words, which is what the title means. Pursuance gives effort its form, a fast blues taken past its own frame, opened and closed by single players. Psalm is the form’s finest stroke: the saxophone recites the printed poem, so the instrument becomes the voice of prayer and the words are present without being sung. The sequence is the argument. Resolution holds it short of the top, a strong theme and solos that could stand in another suite.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The two arias of Act I are the instrument of its first knowledge: the slow one is the self that might love, the fast one the self that refuses, and Alfredo’s voice entering from outside the cabaletta is the knowledge that the refusal has already failed. The party is form: the waltz, the brindisi, Flora’s choruses and the carnival make society audible as music the heroine sings over and, in Act III, cannot join. The return of the prelude makes the opera a memory heard from its end, and the letter spoken, not sung, is the voice at its last. Recast as Dumas’s play, the work loses the divided self of Act I and the theme that crosses three acts. Held below the top where cabalettas and choruses are containers the convention supplied.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Its claim is that the blessing on those who mourn and the blessing on the dead are one blessing, and the form makes it: the outer movements share a word, a key and, at the close, music. The house of the Lord stands at the centre of the arch. The fugue of the third movement is form as statement: the souls are in God’s hand, and a single D is held unmoving under the voices for its whole length. Held below the top because the form stood without the fifth movement at Bremen, and because the contrapuntal close comes three times.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Here the form is the knowledge. The poem’s claim is that time is redeemed only by return, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning” (Little Gidding V), and the form performs it: East Coker opens with “In my beginning is my end” and closes on the inversion, each poem comes back to its opening, and the whole ends at the gate of the rose garden where it began, to “know the place for the first time”. Recast as an essay, the argument survives and the knowledge does not: what the reader learns is the recognition of a phrase, an image, a movement on its second and third coming. The flat passages are formal too, enacting the “intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings” they describe. Held below the top because one plan four times sets a template that The Dry Salvages fills more than it needs.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The essay is the instrument: a trial of the judgment on any matter, left when the trial is made, so that the book knows the self as an activity rather than a thing. Cast as a treatise, the material would have to settle what the book leaves moving; cast as a memoir, it would have to narrate a life the book refuses to arrange. The strata are part of the form, the late additions arguing with the first text in the same paragraph, a mind of about 1590 correcting one of 1572 without erasing it. The book says so of itself: “livre consubstantiel à son autheur” (II.18). Titles that mislead, as “Des coches” (III.6) turns to the Conquest, are form too. Held off the top by the Book I chapters in which the form is still a container.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the illuminated book, Copy E as reference. Plate 76 shows Albion before the crucified Christ at the head of chapter 4, twenty plates before the words reach the act on plate 96: the design knows the end before the text does, and Los’s sight of past, present and future at once (plate 15) is made literal by the page. The frame closes in images, plate 1 answered by plates 97 and 100. Gouged words leave visible gaps on plate 3; a quatrain in chapter 2 is etched in mirror writing. Typeset text loses all of it. Held below the top because a run of chapter 2 can change order without the work knowing anything different, and on many plates design and text run side by side without engaging.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and most of what the panel knows goes. It knows the room as a witness knows it, from one place at one moment, and only an image that is itself a surface seen from one place can make a mirror show what stands where the viewer stands. The small panel, read close, is the knowledge: the reflection, the inscription and the roundels are legible only at the distance of someone in the room, and at that distance the viewer joins the two men at the door. The single window gives the room one time of day. As a large canvas or a fresco the mirror would become an emblem and the witness would leave. Held a step below the top because part of what the panel knows depends on a purpose the form does not settle.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the palace knows goes with it. Power here is lived as passage: through a sequence of gates, each closing the view behind it and opening a larger emptiness ahead, to a throne raised on three tiers of marble. The great audience is a form before it is a ceremony. Officials take their places by rank on the paving of the court, and the space is the order of the state, made visible to those who stand in it. The Gate of Heavenly Purity makes the threshold between government and household a building, and the lanes of the Inner Court make the life within them one of enclosure. Held below the top because the form compelled so totally that life fled it: the Qing emperors moved their daily residence into a smaller hall, and their summers outside the city.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The book knows what it knows through the codex and the letter. The order of the script, from the running majuscule to the great display letters, is an order of sacred weight: the size of a word is what the word is. The opening, a decorated page facing a text page, is the unit of experience: the symbol page faces the portrait, the portrait faces the initial, and the Chi-Rho follows the cross. Substitute a plain codex and the Word made flesh in the letter goes; substitute a wall cycle and the intimacy goes, with the turning of the leaf. Held below the top because the unfinished decoration and the absent portraits leave the scheme uneven, and away from the great pages the minor decoration follows the scribe’s space rather than the text’s sense.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly entirely. The knowledge is the confrontation, and it is known only as this shallow space: the floor tips up, the curtains crowd forward, and the figures have nowhere to stand but toward the viewer, who is not looking into a room but being met at its edge. Paint the same five women in perspective and they become a scene seen at a distance; reduce the size and the stare stops at the frame; model the masks in flesh and the violence of the construction goes. The ledge of fruit is the form’s lever, a table pushed at the viewer’s body. The discord of the faces is the form’s account of time, the picture visibly changing its mind. Held below the top because that discord is partly the record of a making that stopped, and the axis cannot credit as form what may only be a halt.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
What the work knows, it knows only as this surface. The knowledge is that a body is built as a hillside is built, patch by patch, in colour; a finished, blended academic surface would deny it in saying it. The repeated blue contours show the edge being found; the bare canvas shows the light as the ground everything is laid on; the figures lean with the trunks because they are made of the same strokes. The size matters: the bodies are near life size and the vault is above the viewer’s head. Make it a drawing, a small panel or a photograph, or finish it, and the proposition goes. The London canvas, smaller and more covered, says less of it. Held below the top because part of the form is unachieved: in places it cannot be said whether the bareness is the form or the stopping, and the axis cannot credit what was not decided.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The letters are written to the moment, in Richardson’s phrase, in the middle of events whose end the writer cannot see; so Clarissa reasons about her choices without a narrator’s hindsight, and the reader watches her judged by a future she does not have. The double correspondence is the instrument: Clarissa writes to Anna that she trusts a step, and the next letter is Lovelace to Belford explaining how he arranged it. Letters are objects in the plot, hidden in the garden wall, intercepted, forged, copied, kept, and at last gathered by Belford into the record that is the book. The rape is not narrated by its victim; its gap, then the broken papers, is the form of the violation. Held a little off the top in economy.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narrator’s voice, garrulous, digressive, distracted by a snuffbox or a name, enacts the world’s inattention: it treats Akaky as the department does, as an occasion for anecdote. Into it the humane passage breaks for one paragraph, and the form itself shows a conscience surfacing in an indifferent discourse and sinking again. Told plainly, the story would be a sentimental tale with a moral; told in this voice, it knows that sympathy and mockery are made of the same words. The fantastic ending is the second instrument: the realist world offers no redress, so the form leaves realism to supply it, and the ghost’s comic vagueness keeps the redress unreliable. Boris Eikhenbaum’s essay “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919) is a study of exactly this. Held off the top only by the digressions that are not instruments.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
What the form knows. The chapel is narrow and its side walls are seen obliquely from the entrance; the composition is built for that angle, Saul foreshortened outward and the horse’s bulk turned so the picture reads from the nave. The light is painted as falling from the direction of the chapel’s real opening, so the room’s light and heaven’s are one. And only a picture can show a light with no source: the voice in Acts is left out because painting cannot carry it, and the work makes that limit its theology. In a relief, a text or a film with sound, the revelation becomes an event others could witness. Held below the top by the dark lower zone where the groom’s legs drown.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Because only Werther writes, the reader is shut inside the self the book diagnoses: Wilhelm’s advice is felt only in what Werther answers, Lotte and Albert only as he sees them, and the closure of the form is the closure of the condition. Then the form breaks. When Werther can no longer give an account of himself the editor takes the pen, and the book passes from the first person to the third, from rapture to report, so that the death is told by the world the letters had kept out. The final sentences are the editor’s, and that is the argument. The peasant lad of 1787 is a second instrument: the report lets Werther be seen pleading a case that is his own. Held below the top because the middle of Book Two keeps the form without deepening it.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The rondel’s returns are a mind that circles: in the first number “mit Augen trinkt”, drinks with the eyes, comes back as the poet’s drink comes back, and every return is changed by what the music has done between. The Sprechstimme is the knowledge itself: sing these words and they become sentiment, speak them and they become parody, and the work’s truth is in neither. In Der Mondfleck the canons turn backward at their midpoint while Pierrot turns to rub at the spot on his own back; the form is the gesture. Held below the top because the three-by-seven frame is a numerical scheme as much as a necessity, and Colombine and Serenade contain their poems more than they enact them.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Rechronologise it (affair, party, diner, hired killing, death, then dream) and nothing remains but a sad story and a long fantasy sequence; the knowledge lies in the order. Because the dream comes first, the audience lives inside the defence before it sees what is defended against, and is implicated in the wish: we wanted Betty to be brilliant and Rita to be hers. The box is the formal hinge, placed where the dreamer can no longer hold the lie. The proportion of the parts, two hours against thirty minutes, is itself the argument about how much of a life is spent in repair. Held below the top where the form is a container: the cross-cutting between unrelated threads is series grammar.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the picture stops knowing what it knows. Its argument, that one cannot see the world and one’s death from the same place, is not illustrated but enacted: the viewer stands before the men and sees a smear, moves to the edge and sees the skull, and loses the men. That needs a flat panel, a fixed perspective and a body moving in front of it, and it is lost in a reproduction seen square on, where the skull is a puzzle. The near-square format and the life size set the viewer on the men’s floor. The stand holds the objects at the height of hands and faces, so the learning sits between the persons. What holds it is that the shelves are partly inventory, a container for what they hold.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Told omnisciently, or from Cereno’s side or Babo’s, it would be a story of a slave revolt; told through Delano, it is a story of how a certain kind of mind fails to see one, and the reader’s own misreading is the evidence. The third person bound to his consciousness lets the narrator report every clue while Delano explains each away, so that on a second reading every page reverses its meaning. The deposition is the second instrument: a flat legal voice that supplies the facts and shows, by its form, that the official account is another partial view. The coda then sets two conclusions side by side, Delano’s “the past is passed” and Cereno’s “The negro.” Form is the instrument of the knowledge three times over. Held off the top because the seam between the day and the documents is abrupt in a way the work uses but does not fully shape.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the dream and the waking world are one continuous place and that the dead are present among the living, and only a camera that does not cut between them can carry it. The homecoming is the proof: in one movement the empty house becomes a house with a wife in it, and the viewer, who saw Miyagi die, receives her as Genjūrō does, without a seam to mark the impossible. Cut it, and she becomes a trick. The lateral movement, like a handscroll unrolled, makes time pass as space: the pan from bath to picnic moves the lovers through a season. The costs: Tōbei’s strand is staged conventionally, the form there a container rather than an instrument, and the score at times underlines what the camera has made clear.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. No effect can show the Zone’s danger, because the film’s knowledge is that the danger is in the visitor; so the form shows nothing happening for minutes at a time, and the viewer learns, as the Writer does not, to wait and go round. The long take is the Zone’s law made into the viewer’s experience. The colour is knowledge: the world outside is the brown of a life without belief, and the colour that touches the daughter at the end says where the Zone’s grace has gone. Held a step below the top because the argument is at times placed in the dialogue, where the form becomes its container.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. In a Latin cross the eye is directed to an end; in a round Renaissance chapel it rests. Here the star is never seen whole from any point: wherever one stands, convex answers concave and lobe answers lobe, until one looks up and sees the multiplicity resolved in the dome’s circle and its single light. The form is the argument: many truths, one Wisdom; the plan cannot be grasped from below and is grasped from above. The continuous entablature makes the room one wall in motion, so that a community of scholars at worship gathers under a resolution it cannot see on its own level, and the court’s axis delivers the scholar to the door. Held below the top because the use itself, the mass and the university’s feast days, is lived much as in any small church: the form changes how it is understood more than what is done.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The canvas hangs over the tomb: the burial painted is the burial of the body lying below it, so the viewer in the chapel stands among the mourners, at their height, before a body that is actually there. The frieze runs horizontal and the heaven vertical, and the knowledge is the meeting of a closed human row with an opening above it. The two manners are the content: earth is painted as it is seen and heaven as it is believed, and the difference is what the picture asserts. Make it a small devotional panel and the mourners are no longer the viewer’s company; make it one manner and the two orders collapse into one. Held below the top because, reproduced, the canvas still says much of what it says.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
What the work knows, it knows only at this size and in this place. The canvas fills the end wall of the oratory, and its figures at about life size stand at a viewer’s height: the knights who met there stood in the yard with the prisoners and the old woman, witnesses of their own patron’s death. The emptiness above and to the right is the knowledge that the deed is small and the institution large; reduced to a print, the void becomes a margin and the claim goes. The weight sits low and left, so the eye crosses bare stone to the group as the prisoners’ eyes do. Held a step below the top because some of the right half is more stated than built in paint.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows, which is that a world of process can be held without being fixed. Recast as a sonata symphony, it would have to state and recapitulate, and the sea would become a subject treated; recast as a single tone poem, it would lose the three angles on one element, morning light, play and strife, and the return of dawn inside the storm. The title is form too: esquisses, sketches, a claim of the provisional for a score of the greatest finish. The cyclic close is the instrument of the knowledge, since only a transformed return can say that the same thing is never the same. The joint is the middle panel, whose place is a convention, a scherzo between two weights, more than a necessity.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: ascent as a goal at the end of a path. That knowledge lives in the tall arched format, the three registers stacked on the vertical, and the placement. Seen from the west door through the screen’s arch, the panel’s arched head echoes the arch around it, the frame’s columns carry the church’s stone to the picture’s threshold, and the gold stands among the apse windows. The figures are scaled for that distance, and close to they look colossal. Substitute an easel picture, a horizontal format or a museum wall, and the approach, the arrival and the meeting of painted and real light are gone. Held below the top because the panel still reads whole off its altar, as its century in a gallery showed, and because God’s register is attached rather than grown.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the album knows is lost. Pulse is how popular song keeps time, and its near-absence is the knowledge: grief as a time that does not move forward, songs floating over drones without the beat that would carry them to a chorus. Arranged for the old band, Bright Horses and Ghosteen Speaks would become songs about grief instead of its duration. The plan carries the argument at the largest scale: the first part short and visionary, the second long, its length waiting made audible, and Fireflies, spoken, the one place the voice stops singing. The form knows at every scale, from the song to the plan. Only the middle songs of the first part, which share one idiom without each needing it differently, hold it from the top.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The painting knows how light sits on a town at one moment. The beads of light exist only in oil, and only at a size where the touches fuse at a few steps and separate at arm’s length, so the viewer’s approach and retreat is part of the work. The near-square format lets the town be held whole: as a long panorama it is a map, as an upright it is a tower. The shadowed near band and the sunlit far band need the full width to read as weather. As an engraving or a photograph the sparkle becomes information and the shadow brown. Held a step below the top because the lower band follows the genre’s convention, and the invention lies in the handling more than in the whole structure.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute a valley-floor estate with the same rooms and almost nothing the site knows survives. The approach along the ridge makes arrival a descent onto the settlement seen whole. The terraces make the estate’s farming a stair of fields and the slope a thing walked. The water passes the Inca’s door first and the lower half last, so that rank is lived daily as the order of the fountains. The Torreón makes the solstice an event inside a room, the light meeting the rock. The two halves and the plaza between them make the social order a thing crossed on foot, and the dwellings step with the contours, so that to live there was to live on the ridge’s own section. Held below the top by the roofs, which are gone, so that no interior can be lived or judged, and by the uncertainty of purpose, which leaves some of the form’s intent unreadable.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and what does the picture stop knowing? Paint the same subject naturalistically, a man at a railing at sunset with his hands to his face, and it knows nothing: he is a man with a headache. The knowledge is in the form. The curves are one wave running through sky, water and body, which is the claim that the inner state and the world are one vibration; the straight railing and the upright walkers are another order, perspective and good sense, and the picture is built on the collision of the two at the figure. The bare board and the visible crayon refuse finish as the state refuses composure, and the close, upright scale puts the viewer on the road. Held below the top because the form makes one claim with one device.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The fragmentation gives the world as a beast undergoes it: hands that feed and hands that strike, a halter, a door, consequences without explanations. The ellipses that make the plot hard to follow are the donkey’s own relation to it; the viewer stands where he stands, among people whose reasons arrive only as acts. The models’ flat delivery shows human beings from outside, with the opacity they have for an animal, so that Gérard’s cruelty and Marie’s longing are given as behaviour, not psychology. Sound carries what the image refuses. Act it, explain it, score it throughout, and it becomes an animal story with a moral. The cost is real and holds it off the top: where the ellipsis loses the viewer entirely, at the gendarme, the form obscures more than it knows.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that music is the measure of its own power. The kinds of song are the kinds of world. Thrace sings in strophes and dances; news comes in recitative, so the Messenger’s speech is heard as speech breaking into song; supplication is ornament, so in “Possente spirto” Orfeo’s art is visibly at full stretch, the plain line printed beside the ornamented to show what the ornament adds. Instrumental colour marks the boundary: trombones and regal below, strings and recorders above. The Prologue’s ritornello, heard again at the end of Act II and before Act V, makes the loss a return to the frame. Held down by Act IV, whose form is too brisk to hold the turn, and by the Apollo ending, whose form follows ceremony more than drama.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Form is the whole of what the work knows. The purpose was a reception, a signature and the display of a state, and the form changed how each was lived. Arrival: there is no door; the king climbs the steps onto a floor and is inside without a threshold crossed. The ceremony: a book signed at a glass table before the onyx wall, two chairs facing the room, not a dais. The display: visitors see nothing exhibited; they see themselves, in glass, chrome and water. The end: the route finishes at a woman standing in water, and the visitor turns back. Substitute a hall of rooms with exhibits and nothing the building knows survives. Held below the top because the purpose was so slight that no lived use tested the form, which is why the Tugendhat House is the harder case, and because the form says the columns carry and the walls are free, which is doubted of the original.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the villa stops knowing what it knows. The stagger is the argument: in a single block the inner rooms would face walls; in the geese-in-flight plan every principal room turns a corner onto the garden. The sliding partition makes each room a frame its dweller sets: open the shōji and the pond enters; close them and the paper diffuses its light. The circuit makes the garden a sequence in time, each tea house a station facing a different quarter, season and view of the same water. The moon platform makes the house an instrument for one event. Viewing, tea, boating and reception are lived differently because of where the rooms stand and how they open. Held below the top by accretion: the form was found over fifty years, and the New Palace refines it rather than extends it.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The interlace of hunt and bedroom is the argument: told in sequence, the lady’s visits are a test of chastity; told against the hunts, they are a hunt, and on the third day the quarry fails as the fox fails, by doubling and concealment. The narration withholds what Gawain does not know: the reader learns that the host and the Green Knight are one only at the Green Chapel, with him, and so takes the test too, judging the girdle as he judged it. The bob and wheel closes each stanza with a short stroke that turns or undercuts what the long lines built: a summary, a jest, a forecast. The return of the first line at the last makes the poem a circle, as the pentangle is a knot without end and the plot a year that comes round. Held just off the top because the Morgan passage, where explanation replaces enactment, is the one place the form becomes a container.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing that its opposites are one. The finale’s sonata form is the instrument: its themes are stated apart, as if they were a sonata’s contrasts, and the coda shows that they were counterpoint all along, so the form’s late revelation is the knowledge. Recast as a fugue, the work would show the law without the world it governs; as a plain sonata, the world without the law. The first movement makes its claim the other way, letting a buffa tune become the matter of development inside a ceremonial allegro, and the Trio binds the third movement to the fourth. The joints: the Andante’s form serves its beauty more than the work’s argument, and the Menuetto, apart from the Trio’s hint, could serve another symphony.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, because the form enacts the withdrawal on the voice itself. The voice is intact above and chopped below in the opening track, processed past recognition in the second, distorted under brass in the third. In the fourth, the one song about not being there, it is clear and unprocessed, the irony the form depends on; the fifth removes it entirely. The closing song is sung almost bare over pump organ and harp, before silence and a wordless coda. Played as conventional songs, these tracks would keep their tunes and lose what they know. Only the sixth and seventh, closer to container than instrument, hold it below the top.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the canvas knows disappears. Model the bodies and they become nudes in a landscape, the ring a scene; add perspective and the hill becomes a place, the dance an event that happened there. The knowledge, that the dance is a force and not a scene, lives in the flatness, the three fields, the cutting of the figures by the edges, and the ellipse that tilts toward the viewer at the front and away at the back. The vermilion carries it too: the canvas of 1909, the same composition in pale pink, knows something gentler. Form is the instrument in every part. The ceiling is set by the scope of what is known: one thing, known completely.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. What the canvas knows is that seeing is construction, and it knows it only as these patches, each a decision of colour and direction set beside the last, the whole field made of the one unit, so that the world and the act of looking at it are one surface. Paint the mountain smoothly, modelled in light and shade, and the work would know a mountain, not the making of a seen mountain; paint it in the broken Impressionist touch and it would know a moment of light, not a structure that endures. The seams where sky enters the ridge and plain enters foreground are the form’s argument: the world is continuous in sensation, not divided into things. At this size the patches read as marks and as planes at once. Held below the top because the series shows that the form, not this canvas’s configuration of it, carries the knowledge.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute any other form and nothing remains. What the garden knows is the relation of fifteen masses across a measured void, seen from a fixed seated line; described, painted, photographed from above or walked through, it loses that knowledge. The plan is the instrument. The long rectangle denies the eye a centre, the groups pull against each other across the gravel, the wall sets a near horizon, and the veranda holds the viewer at a distance that is not crossed, for the garden is entered only to rake it. Use is changed by form: a garden that cannot be strolled, only sat before, makes looking into dwelling. The rake lines, renewed by hand, make the form a practice rather than a picture.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly entirely. The knowledge is that a lived room can become one atmosphere in which only the made things keep their shape, and it is known only as this flood of one colour over a drawn room. Paint the furniture in its own colours and the rank of art over things goes; render the space in perspective and the red becomes a wall, not a field; reduce the size and the field becomes a swatch. The reserve lines are the form’s argument made visible: the room exists as what the colour left uncovered, its geometry the residue of an earlier state. The depicted works, small and fast in their own palettes, are the only depth the picture allows, windows in the red. Held below the top because the ring of works is arranged more than formed: its order round the edge could change without the knowledge changing.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that a city’s life is in its scattered people, and its form makes the viewer a citizen of that city: the wide 70mm frame, deep focus and absence of close-ups leave the eye free to wander, find a gag in a corner, miss another, and so practise the attention the film says the city deadens. The form’s own curve is the argument: straight lines, grey and blue, glass and silence by day; circles, colour and noise by night and dawn. The sound, built after shooting, is an instrument, the modern world heard in small mechanical noises. Make it a story with a hero and close-ups and it becomes a satire told to the viewer. The one cost: on a small screen much of the form is lost.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The work knows what it knows only as these canvases on these walls. The ovals: the canvases follow the curve, with no corner and no stopping point, and the water closes round the viewer. The central place: the viewer stands in the middle of the pond, where no shore is, so the form puts the body where the eye has no standpoint, which is what the work discloses. The light from above: the painted day changes with the real one, and the cycle has duration. Substitute a gallery hang and this goes; the large panels of the same campaign hung elsewhere are superb paintings of water on a wall, and not the pond. Held below the top because Monet had wanted a round pavilion, and the ovals were what a long orangery could hold.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work says nothing. At easel size the web becomes a pattern, seen whole from outside; at this size it surrounds the eye. Brushed, the line would show a wrist and an edge; poured, it shows the speed and weight of an arm and the pull of gravity, thick where the stick paused and threaded where it flew. Without a centre the gaze has to travel, and the travelling is what the painting knows. Where the web thins, the weave shows through, and the ground is inside the image rather than behind it. In reproduction the work is close to nothing, which is the measure. Held a step below the top by the edges, the one decision the field does not compel, and by the share of the form that only scale delivers.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. The poured line is the knowledge: it records a movement in air, made by a body walking round a horizontal field it could not reach across. The layers are time: the black under everything and the white on top, the order legible, so the surface is a sequence and not a state. The unprimed duck is the ground’s own evidence: the enamel sits where thick and sinks where thin, and the margins show where the painter stopped. The size is the body’s: at easel scale the same skein is a doodle; at five metres it is a place. The imitations are the controlled experiment, and they fail here. Held below the top for one cost the form sustains: made flat, seen upright. Krauss’s reading, that the wall betrays the horizontal that made it, names a real loss, and the margins, a frame once it hangs, are where the two conditions meet.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses nearly everything it knows. Cast three boys at three ages, or age one actor with makeup, and it becomes a story of growing up; made as it was, it is the showing of time on bodies, faces, voices and a mother’s weight, and the viewer’s own sense of years is the instrument. The unmarked cut is the formal centre: no title says what year it is, and the viewer reads the year from a haircut, a Harry Potter launch, an Obama sign, the colour of a phone. The episodic, unemphatic order is required by the same knowledge, since drama would make milestones. Held from the top because within each year the form is plain, and part of the knowledge rests on the production story the viewer brings.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Substitute a single plot and the work loses what it knows. The alternation of court and tavern is the instrument: the play extempore rehearses the royal interview before it happens, so that when the King reproaches his son (1 Henry IV, 3.2) we have already heard Falstaff say it, and the prince, playing his father, has told us the end. The division of verse and prose is a map of the world, and the prince alone moves freely between them. The counterfeit is the form’s motif: Falstaff shamming death beside Hotspur dead, the King’s coats on the field. The two-part shape is itself knowledge, the second part’s slower and sicker movement enacting the time the first part spends. Held below the top by the second part’s replay of the reconciliation, where the repetition is not fully turned into meaning.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work stops knowing something. The strict line is the instrument: the order of the alexandrine and the closure of the sonnet press against disorder, decay and boredom, and the tension between them is what the poems know. “Harmonie du soir”, whose repeated lines circle back like the waltz and the incense it names, “Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!”, “Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!”, knows its theme only through that recurrence. The second level is the architecture of 1861, which turns a body of lyrics into a trajectory: the arrangement carries an argument, the descent and the voyage, that the poems taken singly do not. Held below the top because the architecture is loose in the middle of “Spleen et Idéal”, and because many poems would lose little in another regular form.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Substitute the form. A hemisphere would have needed the buttressing the commune had renounced, and would have sunk behind the drum seen from the street. A Gothic vault on flying buttresses would have been the northern cathedral the city refused. Each loses what this form knows: that the city’s sky stands by its own geometry. The pointed profile lets the rings close without centering and lifts the dome above the roofs, so structure and sign are one decision. Inside, the east end of a long church becomes a centred sanctuary, altar and choir under an octagon of light. Held below the top because the outline was fixed before him, and the absence of centering cannot be read from the floor.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that two voices make the Office, the Church’s, many and bound to its tones, and the soul’s, few and free, and that they alternate. Set the concertos aside and the bride is silent; set the psalms aside and no one answers her; set the chant aside and the new music is a concert. The chant is not a container: in Nisi Dominus it is the whole texture, in the Sonata the one sung thing, in the Magnificat the fixed point every verse decorates differently. The ascent of the concertos is a shape the ear can follow. Held below the Passion and the Mass because the print leaves the form open: two Magnificats, ritornellos that may go, concertos offered for other rooms. A form the author lets be varied is less the instrument of knowledge than one he fixes.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The poem’s knowledge, the state against the man, could be told in prose, and Gogol and Dostoevsky told it. Change the form, though, and the poem loses what it knows. The double voice is the argument: the Introduction is a true ode and the tale a true tale, and the poem holds the state’s greatness and its cost together only because it speaks in both registers, in one metre, without reconciling them. In prose the Introduction would be propaganda or irony; in verse it is both and neither. The tetrameter without stanzas lets the verse paragraph run at the length of the action: long in the flood, broken to a half-line at the threat, then quickened into the gallop, where the metre becomes the hooves on the pavement. The symmetry of the two parts, each closing on the man and the statue, is the form of the argument, and the islet at the end returns the poem to the empty shore of its first line.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The charge is that drafts have no settled form, so their form can be the instrument of nothing, and that the triadic architecture is invisible to most who read it. Where the form is finished, change it and the knowledge goes. The elegiac distich, a long line answered by a shorter falling one, is the motion of “Brod und Wein”: the rise toward the gods, the fall back to the time of need. The free hymn defers its subject and joins clauses without stating their relation, and so enacts a relation to the divine that cannot be stated straight; the “Patmos” sentence puts nearness first and the god last. “Hälfte des Lebens” is two strophes of seven lines, summer and winter, with nothing between: the form is the halving. The drafts charge the axis, since form unfinished is form not yet achieved.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The impersonal half sees the system, from Chancery to Chesney Wold to Tom-all-Alone’s, in a present tense in which nothing is concluded. Esther’s half sees persons, in a past tense that has ended, and its knowledge is partial by design: she cannot see what the reader sees, that her mother is in the next chapter. The book’s claim, that a society is connected and that no one inside it can see the connexion, is carried by the gap between the two, and the reader alone holds both. Esther’s first sentence states the form’s knowledge, that the good person sees little: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (chapter 3). Held off the top because some numbers alternate for supply more than for meaning.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narrator gives no interior: the kid’s thoughts are never told, and the company is seen only as it acts. Landscape and killing receive the same weight and the same diction, and the book names its own law in the desert’s “optical democracy”, where no one thing, man or stone, has precedence. Give the kid a consciousness, or the narrator a judgment, and the knowledge goes: that a killing weighs no more than the weather. The chapter headnotes make the novel a ledger set against the judge’s: he records in order to erase, and the book records what he erased. Held off the top because the picaresque frame is episodic, the twenty-eight years before the last chapter pass in a few pages, and what brings the kid to the jakes is carried by little more than his abstentions.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The work knows that philosophy is answerable to the city and that the city’s answer is a vote, and only a speech at trial can say it: the audience is the jury, and the reader is placed among the voters. The speech is addressed to the men of Athens until the end, when Socrates gives the title “ō andres dikastai”
“men of the jury” (40a) to those who voted to acquit, since only they have judged. The two unspoken votes are the form’s hinges: the defence that could not persuade becomes, after the verdict, a speech that no longer needs to, and after the sentence one that addresses two juries apart. In the Meletus passage the practice on trial is performed inside the form that condemns it, and the jurors’ unheard noise (20e, 30c) builds the hostile crowd into the monologue. Recast as a dialogue, the work loses the city as listener; recast as narrative, it loses the reader’s place on the jury. Held off the top because the middle of the defence, from 31c to 35d, slackens into the forensic container.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the dialogue can no longer say what it says. The speeches are performed and then judged, so the reader has felt the difference between Lysias’s speech and the palinode before being told what it is; the recantation is a form that knows a speaker can be wrong and turn. Its rule that a speech must be composed like a living creature, with head and feet, middle and extremities fitting one another and the whole (264c), is its description of itself. The case against writing has its force only from inside a written imitation of living speech, which ends by saying the serious man writes for amusement, sowing in gardens of letters (276d). What holds it there is the second half: Phaedrus thins to assent, the exchange could there be a treatise, and the two halves are joined by argument more than by form.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its subject is art as a power over others that is bounded in time and must be given up, and the form enacts it. The action takes about as long as its playing; Prospero sets the clock in 1.2, “At least two glasses”, and in 5.1 the work ceases at the hour he named: the play is a performance run by a maker within it. The masque of 4.1 is a play inside the play, staged with spirits as actors, and its breaking off is the moment the maker remembers what his art cannot govern: “Our revels now are ended”. The Epilogue passes the power to the audience: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown”. Told across years, or as narrative, all this would be lost.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play is about what speech does and what silence costs, and its form is made of speech acts and their failures. The Nurse says the name, so that Phaedra can answer “sou tad’, ouk emou kleueis”
“you hear this from yourself, not from me” (352). Phaedra and Hippolytus never speak to each other: she hears his rage through a door, the oath shuts the one mouth that could save him, and the tablet speaks for the dead woman and is believed against the living man. The diptych is the instrument: the first half is the woman destroyed by the power she resists, the second the man destroyed by the power he refuses, and the two goddesses at the frame make the halves two faces of one law. The goddess who closes the play is the form’s last word on itself: she can tell the truth, and she cannot stay for the death. Held off the top by the joint at the tablet, where a lie and an oath, devices rather than one growing action, carry the play across its midpoint.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing. A painted Lamentation can spread across a landscape; in one block the two figures must be one mass, and the one mass is the meaning. Mother and son cannot be separated: the cloth of her mantle is the bed of his body, and the pyramid makes the mother the ground of the son, literally. Marble polished to its limit gives the dead body a light that paint gives by colour, and the stone’s weight is the body’s weight. Cast it in bronze and the light of the flesh and the depth of the folds are lost; cut it as relief and the weight is lost. Held below the top because composed grief could also be painted.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book knows that consciousness is made of language, and knows it by being written in the language that consciousness has at each age: the nursery rhyme, the address on the flyleaf of a geography book widening from Stephen’s name to “The Universe”, the sermon’s rhetoric absorbed into the boy’s terror, the aesthete’s cadence, the scholastic proof. Told in one adult voice the same events would be a memoir about a boy; told this way they are the boy’s mind becoming able to say them. The five rising and collapsing movements are the argument that each liberation is provisional. The diary ending is form as knowledge: the narrator withdraws because Stephen now writes himself, and the fragments show how unfinished that self is. Held off the top by the last chapter’s dialogues, where the form becomes a container for argument.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The form stages speech failing: the stutter; an accusation made in a voice “silvery and low” (ch. XVI); a court where the dead man’s “lasting tongue-tie” cuts off inquiry (ch. XVIII). The three endings are the instrument of the knowledge. Told straight to the hanging, the story is a martyrdom. With the naval chronicle, where the master-at-arms is “vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd” (ch. XXV), and the ballad after it, the work knows that the official record inverts the truth and that the people keep it in a song printed “rudely” at Portsmouth. The withheld interview is formal knowledge too (ch. XIX). Held off the top because the essay chapters are containers more than instruments, and the draft’s joins show in the order of the opening.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a plotted form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that a life passes without event, that history arrives as rumour, and that desire is sustained by its deferral; a novel of crises would assert the opposite in its shape. The instruments: the imperfect tense, which turns action into habit; free indirect style held close to a mind that cannot decide; chapters that end on dispersal rather than climax; the juxtaposition of the private and the public, the idyll at Fontainebleau during the June days, the auction of Mme Arnoux’s furniture a few pages from the coup (III.5); and the blank before III.6, where the form performs the passing of time instead of narrating it. Held a step from the top because the middle of the second part at times becomes a container of social scenes rather than an instrument.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The first person is not a container: the beauty of Humbert’s prose is the evidence, and the reader must read through it to a child the narrator cannot see. Told in the third person, the story becomes a case history or a melodrama. Remove the foreword and the reader loses what is held, unknowingly, from the first page: that Dolores is already dead, and that this book is her only memorial. Two parts shaped as two journeys, a possession and then a pursuit by a double, perform the narrator’s defeat, and the clues are planted so that a second reading becomes a different book. The afterword’s claim that “Lolita has no moral in tow” sets a second frame, to be weighed against the first.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the building knows is lost. The height, and the arcade at half of it, make one space of nave and aisles: the city stands in it as one body, and the eye is carried from the crowd to the vault in one movement. The axis from the Judgment portal to the apse makes entry a passage under judgment toward presence; the ambulatory lets pilgrims circle the relics while the chapter keeps the choir; the west front speaks before the door opens. Give the same content a hall of the same floor area and the claim of the city of God goes; lower the vault and the nave stops saying it. Held below the top because the light, the form’s other instrument, survives only in part, and the upper west front is a screen that does not answer the body behind it.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Gatsby exists only as Nick sees and hears him: assembled from rumour, that he killed a man, that he was a German spy, that he was an Oxford man; from Jordan’s story; from the versions he tells; and from the schedule his father brings. A man who is his own invention can be known only as a succession of versions, by a narrator “within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled” (chapter 2). The past is given out of order, Louisville in chapter 4, Dan Cody in chapter 6, the courtship again in chapter 8, so that the conception comes before the facts and survives them. Nick’s complicity makes the judging part of what is judged. Charged: he reports Wilson’s night and Gatsby’s last thoughts, which he could not have witnessed; the book marks the second as conjecture, the first barely.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The hanging scroll is the instrument of the knowledge. Its upright field makes the eye climb stage by stage, as the viewer the treatise imagines travels and dwells in a landscape without leaving the room; the height of the scroll is the height of the mountain as it is experienced. Silk and ink wash make the mist possible: the ground of the painting is the air of the picture, and the mountain emerges from it rather than being laid on it. Substitute a handscroll and the mountain becomes a sequence; substitute a fixed viewpoint and the three distances collapse into one. The knowledge partly survives reduction, a good photograph keeping more of it than of many works on this scale, which holds the axis below the top.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and most of what the work knows goes. In relief or in a niche the body would be a picture of a body; freestanding, it has a back, a side and a weight on one leg, and the viewer who walks round it finds that the face meets theirs from no side. In marble the polished skin would lose the metal’s lustre against the chased hair and beard, and that contrast is how the work separates the living from the dead. At heroic scale the boy would cease to be a boy, and the disproportion of sword to body, the argument of the story, would go. The column set the face above the eye, so that the downward gaze fell toward those below and not upon them. Held a step below the top because the feather carries a meaning the form does not decide, and because part of the form, the column and the elevation, is lost.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the story loses what it knows. Told by Bartleby, or by an omniscient narrator, it would have to explain him or decline to; told by the lawyer, it can show a man who cannot explain him and will not stop trying, and that is the knowledge the story has. Every explanation offered is the narrator’s, and every one fails; the reader is put in the narrator’s chair and handed the same failure. The formula is the second instrument: one sentence, conditional and courteous, whose repetition is the action, and whose softness, a preference and not a refusal, is what makes it unanswerable. The coda’s rumour, offered and doubted in one breath, is the form’s last move, an explanation the teller can only report. Held a tenth off the top because the opening portraits work in an inherited form that the story turns but did not make.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and these pieces stop knowing what they know. Vor dem Gesetz is one closed movement from waiting to death, and its brevity is the life it encloses; told at length it would become the story of a man, not the law of a life. Eine kaiserliche Botschaft is built of clauses that keep adding obstacles, so that the syntax is the distance the message cannot cross. Auf der Galerie puts the true world in the conditional and the false world in the indicative, and the reader’s knowledge lives in the gap between its two sentences. The title story runs in long, scarcely broken paragraphs that move as a nightmare moves, with no exit until its last words. The report is a lecture, and only a lecture could show the ape’s mastery as the ape’s captivity. Held below the very top because some lesser pieces could have taken other shapes.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. In Akutagawa the testimonies are words, and words are known to lie. Here each account is shown, and a viewer believes what he sees: the film makes the viewer undergo belief and its undoing four times, and learn that seeing is a kind of testimony too. The three spaces carry the argument: the courtyard’s flat light and frontal address seat the viewer as judge; the forest’s broken sun plays every version with equal vividness; the gate’s rain is where the accounts are weighed. The plainest witness is examined last, at the gate, by the frame rather than the court. The cost is the coda, where the form hands the film to a stated message, and the frame’s talk, which explains what the form has shown.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. In Nightingale the short eighth line falls inside each stanza as the poem falls back toward the self, and the long ode’s continuous address is the flight it describes: in a narrative or a sonnet the bird could not be followed and lost. The Urn’s questions are its form; the poem knows the urn will not answer, and its last lines are the urn’s reply, which cannot be taken wholly as the urn’s or as the poet’s. To Autumn’s eleventh line delays each close, so that the season lingers in the stanza as it lingers in the year, from morning ripening to the “soft-dying day”. Held at 9.1 by Psyche’s irregular paragraphs, which feel provisional, and by Indolence, whose form could be another without loss.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Put this abbey on a plain and it becomes a fine Benedictine house; it loses nearly all it knows. The vertical form is the knowledge. The ascent from the strand to the summit is the pilgrimage and the theology at once: the body climbs what the soul is meant to climb. The stacking of the Merveille makes rank and the order of the day spatial, and the height of the cloister makes contemplation a matter of nearness to the sky and distance from the sea. The rock makes the church’s place a claim: it stands at the top because it is first. The steepness that elevates also repels, so the form is the defence. Held below the top because the church at the summit is formally ordinary inside.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Un cœur simple” is told at the pace of a life seen from outside: years pass in a sentence and an afternoon takes pages, and the narration never rises above Félicité’s understanding to judge it, so that the parrot vision cannot be read as either mockery or miracle. A novel would explain her; the tale cannot, and that is the point. “Saint Julien” is written as the window it names: flat, bright, repetitive, sequential, a legend in panels. “Hérodias” is a single day in three sections, a classical unity, with its event offstage. The backward order makes the first tale’s Holy Ghost the last stage of a history the book then unwinds to its source. Held off the top only because the third tale’s form is more a container for its material.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that the rules hold everyone at once, and the form is an ensemble without a centre, staged in depth so that several actions run in one frame and a servant’s crisis plays behind a master’s. In the château corridor at night the guests say goodnight across many doors in one moving shot, the social order visible as traffic. At the fête a revolver is fired and the guests applaud it as entertainment: farce and danger occupy one space because they are one thing. As melodrama it would mourn André; as farce it would forgive everyone; it does both, and that is what it says. Held a step below the top because the Paris act is staged more conventionally than the château.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Make the assembly a block among blocks and the claim that the gathering is the centre of the state disappears. Remove the layered wall and light, shade and threshold go together: the building’s knowledge of its climate and of the passage from administration to assembly is in the wall. Take away the lake and the citadel stands in the city instead of apart from it. The form changes how the purpose is lived: members pass from the offices of the ring through the ambulatory, tall and changing with the light, into the chamber, and the passage states what it is to enter the assembly. Held a tenth below the top band because some rooms of the ring are conventional offices.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose cannot be lived. In a row, a mound or a single stone the year has no frame: the monument knows the solstice by the shape of its opening, by the gaps between the uprights and by the axis that runs through the horseshoe to the Heel Stone and the Avenue. Inside, the body stands at the centre of a raised horizon, equidistant from the ring, enclosed and open to the sky at once, and the horseshoe turns it toward one point of the horizon and its opposite. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, a calendar that is a place. Held below the top because the life lived in it, rite, feast or burial, is inferred, so the claim that the form is everything rests in part on our reading of it.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. The picture is about the removal of a surface from a body, and it is made of a surface that will not close over the body: paint applied, rubbed and broken, so that the flesh seems to come apart into light. The flaying and the facture are one act. Make it in the finished, enamelled surface of the painter’s middle years and it becomes an illustration of cruelty; make it a print and the burning air that binds the witnesses to the victim goes. The near life size matters: the inverted head hangs at about the height of a seated viewer’s knee, and the viewer stands where Midas sits. Held below the top because at the right edge and in the lower foreground the dissolution loses the form rather than enacting it.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in a sober third person, Brás Cubas is a dull life: a rich man’s affairs, a seat in the Chamber, no children. Told by himself, dead, with the right to digress, mock, skip, leave a chapter blank and blame the reader, the caprice becomes the matter: the narrator does to the reader what his class does to everyone, and the reader enjoys it. The chapter of dots on not becoming a minister is the career, rendered exactly. The dead man’s freedom from consequence is the living man’s freedom from consequence, made formal: the form is an instrument of knowledge. Held a little below the very highest because some typographical play is ornament rather than knowledge.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived. The worshipper is turned toward Mecca by the building before the court is seen: orientation is done to the body, not told. The congregation stands under the sky, in rows across the qibla axis; the iwans give shade and depth, and the arcades hold the court’s edge. The mosque has two climates, summer in the court and under the iwans, winter in the low domed halls beside the sanctuary. The madrasas open from the mosque, prayer and teaching one block. Substitute a hypostyle and the open heaven and the four directions are lost; substitute a centralised plan and the court with its seasons is lost. Held below the top because the lateral iwans serve less distinct uses than the entry and qibla iwans, and because the madrasas are reached from the court, not seen from it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Put the pagoda back on the axis in front of the Kondō and the precinct says something else: one approach, one hierarchy, relic before image. Side by side, the precinct is not walked toward but walked round. The visitor sees both from the gate, circles each, and is never given a single goal, and the gate’s central post, standing where the approach would run, makes that refusal the first thing met. The form is the instrument of what the temple knows: the equality of relic and image is not stated but walked. The octagon of the Yumedono knows the circling of a memorial as a rectangular hall would not. What holds the axis is that the later run of the cloister to the Daikōdō closed the precinct to the north and changed the courtyard’s proportion from the one the plan first gave.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The front is the clearest case: a near-square of level registers under two towers, where Chartres and Reims thrust upward. The horizontal order says that this church faces a city: a civic façade seen across a public square, the kings at the height of the street’s attention. The five vessels make the interior a forest of piers through which the crowd moves while the clergy sing in an enclosed choir, and the carved enclosure tells the life of Christ to those outside it. Form and use are one account: the city before the front, the crowd round the choir, the clergy within. What holds the axis is the baroque sanctuary at the point of focus, and an elevation remodelled as a compromise between two ideas.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the trilogy loses what it knows: that the three ideals are one argument, each turning against itself in its own way, which only three films in three registers under one law can show. Blue’s form is the instrument of its grief: the fades break the film where grief breaks time, the extreme close-ups shrink the world to what Julie can bear to see, and the music, half heard and broken off, is the bond she refuses. White’s comedy is required, since revenge as equality can be shown only at a distance that lets the viewer laugh at cruelty. Red’s crosscutting of two lives that almost meet is the form of chance, and the ferry gathers the three forms into one: it means nothing without the two films before it, so the form knows at the scale of the whole what no single film could. What holds it a step from the top is the middle of White, plot in a plain container.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and nearly everything goes. The knowledge, that this is a dead body and that you are standing at its feet, exists only as this viewpoint. Laid across the picture it would be a Lamentation like hundreds; seen from the head it would be a portrait of a dead face; seen from above, a diagram. The shortened perspective is form in the service of knowledge: a true projection would give enormous feet and a lost face, and the painter chose the face and the wounds over optical correctness. The near monochrome makes flesh, stone and cloth one substance, which is the meaning: the god is matter now. The size matters too, under a square metre, for a viewer at arm’s length. Held below the top by the mourners’ corner, a second form, a frieze of faces, fitted into the first rather than born of it.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this love exists in what is not done and not seen. The form is made of the not-seen: the spouses without faces, the affair offscreen, the question whether the two ever slept together left unanswered. The camera stands behind doorframes, corridors, bars and half-drawn curtains, so the viewer is the neighbour, watching as the building watches, and the frames enclose the two as their propriety does. The repetitions on the same music make time a loop, as obsession lives it, and the dresses are the only clock. Shown as a conventional melodrama, with the affair seen and the spouses given faces, the knowledge would become a plot. Held below the top where the coda’s newsreel is pasted rather than formed.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The duration is the knowledge: the villagers wait, and the viewer waits with them in real time for a deliverance that does not come, so that the viewer’s hope is the villagers’ hope, and is used as theirs is. The tango is the knowledge that this world moves and does not advance. One night seen four times makes the community a web of watchers who see and do not help, and the Doctor at his window with his notebook is the form looking at itself. The long take refuses the ellipsis that would grant mercy: Estike’s chapter cannot be cut away from. Held from the top where a take’s length becomes endurance, chiefly in the dance.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The figures are still because they are built of touches: no stroke carries movement, so the crowd is frozen into a pattern, and the regulated leisure the picture shows is shown by the regularity of its making. The light vibrates because the colours are separate: the sun on the grass and the shadow under the trees are made of the same touches in different proportions, and the eye completes them. The size matters: at six square metres the touches resolve at the distance from which a viewer sees the whole crowd, and break up as the viewer comes close, as a crowd does. Paint it in Impressionist brushwork and it is another sunny afternoon; paint it small and it is a sketch. Held below the top because the surface is in two campaigns, the touches laid over an earlier brushed layer, which shows through in places.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute any other form and what the work knows is gone. It knows that genius can be shown as mass, silhouette and inclination, and only sculpture in the round, seen from a distance and from every side, by day and by night, can show that. A painting of the same figure would be a portrait in a cloak; a description would be Romantic rhetoric. The cloak is the instrument: it turns a body into a single volume and leaves the head and the lean to carry everything. The knowledge depends too on scale and siting: the figure must loom. A real dressing gown dipped in plaster for the studies, then the robe reworked, shows the form found by the material itself. Held below the top only because the single figure makes the instrument simple: the form is wholly the knowledge, but the knowledge is one thing.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. The knowledge is that a landscape is lived in time, and the handscroll is the form that knows it: unrolled an arm’s length at a time, it makes the viewer travel the river, and no point of it is seen with the whole. As a hanging scroll the same hills would be a view; on a wall they would be a panorama, all at once; here they are a duration. The dry, layered stroke is also the form of the knowledge, since the claim that the mind is in the brush is made only because every passage is built of the same marks. The water is form, not absence: the river is the paper. Some long passages of hill would know the same in another arrangement, which holds the axis below the top.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work’s knowledge goes. A painting can show Daphne becoming laurel, as Pollaiuolo’s does, but only marble can show it as a change of one substance into another, because here everything is literally the same stone: flesh and bark are one material made to read as two, and the sculptor’s act repeats the myth’s. The polish of the skin against the roughened bark is the boundary between woman and tree, and it moves up her body as one walks. Free-standing, the change becomes a sequence in time, given by the viewer’s steps; the weight of the marble makes the speed impossible, and so marvellous. Held below the top because the form does not deepen the meaning of the change beyond the change: it knows how she turns more than what it means that she does.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Set the chamber at ground level, shorten or level the passage, or let the light in by the door, and the building no longer measures the year or stages the sun’s entry into the dark. The form is the instrument. The narrow rising passage makes the beam a line that moves; the vault holds the chamber dark and dry, so that the light is an event; the cross-plan gives the beam a destination; the cairn is the mountain that makes the interior an underworld. The form has shown what else it can carry: a dwelling of gods in Irish story, an antiquarian marvel, a place filled each December by lottery. Held below the top because the recesses and the carving are inherited from the type, and their part in the purpose is not known.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. The canvas knows touch, and knows it as matter: the sleeve is not painted as gold but built as gold, a surface one could feel, and the hands are modelled thinly beside it, so that skin is soft against the hard light of the garment. As a drawing, and the drawing exists, the subject survives and the knowledge does not: the drawing is a story of being seen, the painting the weight of a hand. Life size places the viewer at arm’s length, close enough to be present and too close to watch a scene. The dark isolates the couple in a privacy only darkness gives. Held below the top because the setting knows nothing particular, and the lower canvas carries less than the centre.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: identity under transformation, one material as menace, love, prayer and play. In four separate movements each character would stand alone and the knowledge would go; continuity and double function make every character a state of one material, heard as such. The fugato is the form’s instrument: the motifs of struggle are set in the most rule-bound texture, turn into play, and the play delivers the recapitulation. The quiet end is form too, making the return of the opening scales a conclusion, not a frame. Held below the top where the form is a container: in the sequences and recitative links, and in a recapitulation that compresses unevenly.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The knowledge is that in the storm there is no place to stand, and the vortex is that knowledge: there is no horizon to orient by, the eye is drawn round and in, and it finds at the centre only a dark hull it cannot quite read. A conventional marine with the same steamer, the same sea and a horizon would know a different thing, a ship in danger seen from safety. The handling belongs to the form: snow, spray and smoke are given in one kind of mark, so that the elements cannot be told apart, which is the experience. The break of light sits off the spiral’s axis, so the form holds both the turning and the opening. Held below the top because its knowledge is of one kind, and parts of the lower field are less articulated than the centre.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The knowledge is that she is in two places at once, as a person and as a service, and that we stand where the client stands. That knowledge is the mirror’s discrepancy: correct the optics and the man must stand where the viewer stands, and the viewer becomes the client; leave them incorrect and the viewer is both in his place and not. A photograph, a narrative, a correct perspective or a cabinet size would each lose it. The near life size and the counter at the bottom edge are what place the viewer at the bar, and the still life is form too, since she is painted with the same touch as the bottles. Held below the top for the right side of the reflection, where the man and her back are drawn more summarily than the front and read in places as a diagram of the idea rather than its painting.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that loss is absorbed, and only a form that loses its own subject can make the viewer do that rather than be told it. By the hour mark the viewer has stopped asking where Anna is: the disclosure is performed in the audience. The take holds after the event has ended, so that the viewer watches what people do when nothing is happening to them, which is the film’s whole question. The framing is an instrument, figures at the edge of the frame outweighed by walls, facades and sea. Make it a mystery and it becomes a thriller; give it a plot and the forgetting becomes a failing rather than the condition.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. In a painting or a panel the cleft would be a line; here it is a real fissure in a real rock, and the river descends through the earth’s own body. The open air is the form: the relief takes the sea light and the shadows of the day, and its figures stand in the same weather as the people before it. The depth of the relief is graded to meaning: the elephants and the serpents swell almost free of the rock, the distant celestials are shallow. The unfinished second version nearby shows by contrast how much the choice of this rock with this cleft did. Held a step below the top because the many figures of the upper register would read nearly as well in any large relief field.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that complicity is an appetite, and the form administers the appetite: the narration lets Henry sell the life to the viewer as he sells it to himself, the velocity never allows a pause in which to object, the songs make every acquisition a pleasure, and the freeze-frames hold the moments he is proud of. A slower, third-person telling would know less; it would judge, and lose the pleasure that is the subject. The last day proves it: the cutting becomes the drug, and the viewer feels the paranoia before the plot explains it. Held below the top where the form carries exposition: the courtroom, Karen’s talk with the lawyer, the final address to the camera, which states what the structure has shown.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and most of what the canvas knows goes. It knows the studio as someone who has stepped round the curtain knows it: the curtain at the near edge, dark and close, is the threshold, and only a picture seen from one place can make the viewer an intruder at a private act. The painter’s back can be shown only in an image; in words he would have a face. The picture within the picture, where only the wreath is begun, shows the finished work and its first marks at once. The light falling alike on map, eagle, model and mask argues that one attention makes history and studio equal, and the upright format stacks history over its muse over its maker. It is held below the top because the allegory’s terms are lent, not formed.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived. No court is entered on its axis: the axis is reached, not given, and audience becomes a passage through thresholds. The Myrtles is one long axis to a single throne, a form for government; the Lions is centripetal, columns and water drawn to the middle, a form for a household. Exchange the plans and neither life can be lived. The sills are low, framing the views for a seated body. Water is held level with the floor: pools at the brim, jets that bubble rather than spout, channels flush with the paving. The inscriptions sit where the eye rests and say what the room is. Held below the top because the two palaces do not make one form, their junction an accident, and because the rooms built for Charles V close the view the Mirador of Lindaraja was set to frame.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is that the war is inside nature and inside each man, and the form carries it: the voiceovers float above the action and cannot always be assigned to a face, so the company becomes one divided consciousness; the cuts from a dying man to a lit leaf are not relief from the battle but its continuation in another register; the hill is held long enough that the viewer tires with the men. Held below the top where the form becomes a container: the Tall and Staros dispute over the field telephone is plain dramatic grammar, and the Bell marriage returns in a blue shorthand that explains more than it discovers.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The softness disturbs only because it is painted with hard truth: the watch on the branch has the weight and drape of a real object, its numerals and case exact, and painted loosely it would be a cartoon of a melting watch, which unsettles no one. The small size bears load: the precision of a miniature, seen at the hand’s distance, gives the dream the intimacy and authority of a thing seen close; enlarged to a wall, the image becomes a poster, and its later life as one shows what it loses. The low viewpoint and the dark near ground against the far light give the dream a waking edge. Held below the top because the soft watch passes into other media and keeps its idea.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the picture stops knowing what it knows. The knowledge is confinement, a god with no room, and it exists only in the format: a strip of about one to six and a half, the body pressed between slab and lid, the hand and the hair breaking the edge because the box will not hold them. In an upright panel it would be a Lamentation without mourners; under open sky, a study of a corpse; seen from above, an image of pity rather than of an equal. The low viewpoint puts the viewer in the tomb, the life size makes the measure the viewer’s body, and the eye’s passage from head to feet takes time that is part of the meaning. Held below the top because part of what the form knew may have depended on a setting now lost.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. The work knows that a person is exposed to the boundless with nothing to hold, and it knows it only as this field: the missing repoussoir leaves the viewer no edge to stand behind, and the unbroken horizon means the eye cannot leave the picture by a side. The proportion of sky to land is the proportion of the unknown to the known. The figure’s size is the argument: double it and he is a figure in a landscape; halve it and he is lost, and there is no one to stand with. The wide format against the one upright is the meeting of a person and the infinite. Held below the top because the dark, worked surface, glazes laid and relaid over two years and now darkened, is not wholly the instrument.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. In a gridded cemetery the mourner walks to a plot. Here the mourner walks a passage from city to field to forest, and the form decides what the funeral is: a journey whose stages are open ground, cross, chapel and grove. The crematorium changes how grief is lived together: three chapels let several funerals be held at once, each apart, and the shared loggia gathers them at a common threshold. The Woodland Chapel turns a small rite into a passage from forest shade into a white domed room and out again. The burial woodland makes the dead part of the forest instead of setting them before it. The form has served without break since the 1920s, across changes in belief and burial practice. Held below the top by the junctions between the parts of a long campaign.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived at every step. Arrival is made part of the plan: the car circles under the house and sets its passengers down at the door. Going upstairs becomes a slow walk through changing views, the promenade architecturale. Living room and terrace are one space divided by glass. The landscape is seen as a horizontal band, the same at every front. Machine and service are on the ground, the family in the air, the sun on the roof. Substitute a masonry house on the ground and almost nothing the house knows survives. Held below the top because the form failed part of the purpose: the main floor packs its rooms round the terrace less freely than the doctrine claims, and the envelope neither kept out water nor kept in heat.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The knowledge is that love lives in time, and the form is time: each film confined to less than a day, the second to close to its own running time, the gaps of nine years real, so that the faces seen in 2013 are the faces of 1995 aged by the years the story says have passed. No make-up could know this. The long take on the move, two people walking and talking in one shot, leaves no cut to escape into. And the form narrows across the three, from a free walk to a walk against a clock to a car and a hotel room, and the narrowing space is the marriage. Held only where the lunch table sets talk in a static ensemble.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived at every step. A house beside the falls would offer a view; this one is lived in with the water’s sound under the floor, as part of the room. The terraces are outdoor rooms hung over the stream, so that a weekend is lived half outside in the trees. Gathering at the fire is gathering at the rock of the site. The stream is reached from the living room, so bathing and the house are one. The narrow entry makes the room’s width and the forest felt. Substitute a house on the opposite bank and almost nothing it knows survives. Held below the top by the rooms beyond the living room: the bedrooms are small and dark, the interior is cramped against the terraces, and the form fought its own fabric in damp and leaks.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a remembered love is a set of fragments, not a story, and that it ends only when the singer stops and something else goes on. The first song cannot close, because the longing it states is not over; the next begins in the key the first hinted at and never reached. The short songs of early happiness are short because happiness in memory is brief. The last song’s postlude returns to the postlude of no. 12, so the end is a memory of a memory, given to the instrument because the words are now buried. Recast as a through-composed scena, the work would lose the gaps; as spoken poems, the piano’s contradiction of the voice, which is half its knowledge. Held below the top where nos. 3 to 5 are closer to a group than a form.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently or not at all. Put the spring in a swimming hall and bathing becomes lengths and a clock; here there is no lane and no single pool to face, and the field of blocks makes the bath a wandering, in which the bather finds rooms by turning corners and chooses heat or cold, light or dark, company or solitude. The blocks hide and reveal, so the bath is never seen whole. The sunk section and the openings to the valley make the passage from inside to outside a passage from the mountain’s interior to its face. The form is the instrument of what the bath knows about the body. Held below the top because the changing rooms and service blocks carry use more than knowledge, and the joining to the hotel, given by the site, is the form’s weakest moment.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the self is visible only in its acts, and that a man can be absent from his own face. The models’ blankness is the content. Michel does not perform his inner life, so the viewer, like the inspector, must read it from what the hands do. The fragmented framing, a wrist, a pocket, a door, makes the world a set of objects to be taken, which is how Michel sees it. The voice-over that repeats the image makes him a man recounting what he did as though he had watched it, and the ellipses carry the indifference of his time. Shot as a thriller with actors who express, the film would know suspense and psychology and lose compulsion and grace. Where the form hurries, in the last movement, it is held a step from the top.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that persons are thinning before the world of things, and the form enacts it. Figures stand at the edge of the frame or behind pillars, grilles and blinds; the shot is held after a character has left, so that it outlives its occupant; architecture and objects are given the duration a melodrama gives faces. The coda completes the form: the film’s grammar, applied without the lovers, becomes what it was always about. Told as a romance, with the meeting kept or missed in a scene of feeling, the story would know only that a love failed. Told this way it knows that the failure belongs to a world. The middle episodes use the form as manner more than instrument.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that memory under persuasion has no stable order. The form is the knowledge: the same scene restaged with A in different places and costumes as X revises his account; cuts that carry a gesture begun in one time to its completion in another; a narration that describes a room the image contradicts, until the image yields; sound that drops out or swells as if the film itself were remembering. The ending is told, unmade and retold. Told in order, with the flashbacks marked and the past settled, the film would become a mystery whose solution reduced it to a plot about an affair, and its subject would vanish. Held below the top only where the form repeats for length rather than for revision in the middle stretch.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and nearly everything goes. As photographs, the images are evidence, and the cycle’s subject is that evidence failing: the passage from photograph to painting is the knowledge. The blur is not a style here. It measures the distance between the viewer and what happened, and it deepens where knowledge is least, in Hanged and the third Dead. The grey withholds the colour of blood and of flags. With its repetitions the cycle is a film strip slowed to fifteen frames: the repeated motifs show that one instant of a photograph is not the event, and the three canvases of Confrontation catch a face between expressions no single frame could hold. The scale runs from Funeral, the public ending, to the third Dead, the private vanishing. Only the Arrest pair carries little of this.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and almost everything the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in silence and its breaking. Desire’s meaning is the minutes of quiet before the eruption; played as a song with a verse and a chorus it would say nothing. The voice, set low and half-articulate as one sound among the instruments, enacts the self that has to be stilled, and the music is heard as arriving rather than performed. Side one runs without a break, so that rainbow, garden and fall are one movement, and the choir of I Believe in You enters as an answer the voice cannot give itself. Each side moves from stillness to a height and back. Inheritance, nearer a container, holds it short of the top.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. What it knows is flight without a flier, and it knows it only through this profile and this surface. The constriction over the foot is where the form leaves the ground; make it thicker and the work stands rather than rises. The swell and taper give the eye its acceleration, and the oblique top makes the end an opening. The polish is not finish but argument: it turns mass into light and lets the surroundings pass across the bronze, so the solid seems less solid than the air round it. The marble versions, with the same profile, know something heavier and quieter, and show that the material is part of the knowledge. Held below the top because the knowledge is one, and neighbouring proportions know nearly the same.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The broken line is the knowledge: a line made of beats is a rhythm, an unbroken line is a boundary, and the canvas knows the city and the music only because its lines are made of units. The absence of black is the knowledge: with black the colours would sit in compartments; without it they are the structure and the field is all light. The square is the knowledge: no direction dominates, so the vertical and horizontal pulses are equal, as the grid of streets is. The size lets the field be seen whole and read in detail at once. Held a step below the top because the form completes a system, and part of what it knows the system already knew.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is the split between image and sound: the image is the house, the sound is the camp, and the household lives in the gap the audience is made to hear. Show the camp and the knowledge is gone, replaced by a spectacle the subject has taught us to distrust. The fixed cameras enter no face and offer no feeling for identification, and the audience is placed as an observer who, like the family, can choose not to listen. The thermal image is a second form for a second world. Held from the top by the red screen and by moments where the form underlines itself.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The collection’s strongest claim. A book arguing that a system keeps everything but the body and the cost could not be one sequence; it has to be two halves that answer one to one, and it is. A cell answered by hospital waiting rooms; a queue by a laundromat; a partner who corrects an apartment by a daughter who says we’ve got it; a summons by phone by a call that rescues; a man held in a dark store with a cake box by a man held in snow with a wrapped box, both of them on their way; a worker made a legacy dependency by a grocer folding a rent notice smaller; a map that deletes a café by a blind cat steered by two taps; testimony overwritten by testimony falsified out of mercy; a complete record by an unfinished game. The halves run within about seven hundred and fifty words of each other, each under its own epigraph. Nothing announces the scheme.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely. The design runs to every edge, so that the image’s boundary is the object’s boundary: that is the knowledge, the end of the gap between picture and thing. Put a margin round it and it becomes a picture of a flag, and the question closes; paint it smoothly in flat oil and it becomes a flag made of paint, and the question closes the other way. Encaustic keeps each stroke separate and fixed, a record of handling and a field of light at once, and the collage beneath holds the news of a particular year inside the emblem. The proportion, about 1.43 to 1 against the regulation 1.9, shows the design fitted to a painting’s rectangle, not the reverse. Held below the top because the scale is one the form permits rather than compels.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its manner is the one Auerbach set beside Homer in the first chapter of Mimesis: on the way to Moriah nothing is described, no landscape and no thought, only the speech that matters and the silence of three days, so that the background is, in his word, “fraught”, and the reader stands where Abraham stands, before a God who does not explain. The composite form is itself knowledge: the God of chapter 1, who speaks and it is done, and the God of chapter 2, who shapes man from dust and walks in the garden “in the cool of the day” (3:8), stand side by side, and the book will not choose. The toledot frame makes it a genealogy, which is what it is about. Held at 9.0 by the seams.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. The agon of two set speeches gives Jason his reasons as public argument, and the form exposes them: rhetoric is the instrument of the betrayal. The chorus, Greek women bound to silence by Medea’s oath, is the community that sees and permits, and its odes move from sympathy to horror in the order the play needs. The monologue’s oscillation is a form of thought, resolve and relapse spoken in turn. The ending inverts the machine: instead of a god descending to settle the action, the human agent rises out of reach on the god’s machine, and the form announces that no justice will be done. Held at 9.0 because the form is inherited and used with exceptional point, not invented for this knowledge.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The plain memoir is the instrument: Gulliver reports everything with the same literal care, so that his credulity and his pride become visible exactly where he does not see them, in his defence of England to the King, in his pleasure at a Lilliputian title. The symmetry of the first two parts makes scale the argument; the fourth part’s inversion of man and beast is possible only because the reader has learned in the first two to read a body as a measure. The frame completes the form: in the letter to Sympson, written after his return, Gulliver complains that the world has not been reformed by his book in six months, and the satire closes over its narrator. Held off the top because the third part’s form is a container whose episodes could be told in any order and any frame.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Substitute an anthology for the frame and the work stops knowing what it knows: that a tale’s meaning is a function of its teller, its audience and the tale it answers. The Miller parodies the Knight because he is drunk and the Knight first; the Pardoner’s sermon damns because he says what it is for; Sir Thopas is a joke because its teller is the poet, and his second tale is Melibee because his rhyme has been silenced (B 2120, VII 930). Rhyme royal serves the Prioress’s miracle and the Clerk’s exemplum, couplets the quarrels, prose the treatises. Where the frame is present it is the instrument of the knowledge; the cost is that it works fully within fragments, fitfully between them.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The retrospective first person from the cellar is the instrument: the narrator tells his life as a sequence of roles handed to him, and only at the end of the telling can he say what the Prologue already knew, so the form is the passage from being used to knowing it. “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” The picaresque sequence, each episode a new institution and a new script, is the argument that the condition is not a single injustice but a structure met everywhere. The shift of style from naturalism to the surreal tracks the narrator’s loss of every given frame, and the anonymous narrator is the form of invisibility itself. Held off the top because the episodic form, which is the knowledge, is also additive: some Brotherhood episodes could be shuffled or merged without loss, and the Epilogue states what the form has shown.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form. Put the height in the gateways, as the later temples of the south did, and the god’s house becomes the innermost and smallest thing, reached through ever taller doors: a different theology of approach. Here the gates are lower than the god and the summit stands over the sanctum, so the visitor walks toward the highest point and enters under it. The second wall makes worship a path round the god inside the mountain. The great court shows the tower whole, and the god is present to the city as a fact of the skyline. Held below the top because the halls before the sanctum are serviceable rather than formative, and the passages that complete the programme are closed to most who use the temple.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the complex stops being able to say almost everything it says. In brick or timber it would be a palace and a tomb; in solid stone, without interiors, its chapels are the palace of the dead, usable only by the ka, and the solidity is the statement. The stepped pyramid, unlike a single mound or a smooth pyramid, shows ascent as a series of stages, and the inward-leaning layers make the mass read as built up round a core rather than piled. Held at 9.0 because part of the form came by enlargement rather than conception, which leaves seams in the whole.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The ring is the argument: the prologue tells the reader to climb the wall of Uruk, inspect its brickwork and find the tablet of lapis lazuli in its box; at the end of the eleventh tablet Gilgamesh, home with nothing, shows the boatman Ur-shanabi the same wall in the same words. The man failed to escape death; the city stands, and the story is on the tablet the reader holds. A prose chronicle of the deeds, or a hymn, could not know that. The nesting does the same work: the Flood is told in Uta-napishti’s own voice, the one survivor’s testimony set inside the account of the man who cannot survive. Within the ring the form works by pairs and returns: the doubled hero, the dreams that teach the reader to read signs, Enkidu’s seven nights with Shamhat answered by the king’s seven days of sleep, the counted double-hours that make duration a thing undergone. What holds the figure there: Tablet XII stands outside the closed ring and blurs the shape the ring made; the seams where older poems were joined show in places; and the gaps leave parts of the form unknowable, so that a reader cannot always tell where the shape is the poem’s and where it is the scribe’s.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The short fiction that passes for a document, a manuscript found in the last volume of Pope’s Iliad, a biography with dates in its title, a condemned man’s own statement, knows what no novel could: that a life or a doctrine is a text, open to forgery, compression and annotation, and that the reader is always reading at second hand. “El inmortal” ends by doubting its own authorship because its words are other men’s; the doubt is the form. “La casa de Asterión” knows the Minotaur only because it withholds the name until the last word. “El Aleph” sets the vision of everything in one paragraph between pages of literary satire, and the disproportion is its argument about language and totality. Held off the top because in a few of the later pieces the frame is a container and the turn could have been told another way.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is a notebook of the damned and is written as one: broken sentences, exclamations, dashes, sudden changes of address, to Satan, to God, to “vous”, voices that interrupt one another. What it knows is that the self cannot hold one position long enough to be saved or damned, and the oscillation is the knowledge; a verse narrative or a reasoned memoir would lose it. “Délires I” gives the poet only through the voice of his victim, so that the reader knows him as the other knew him. “Alchimie du verbe” sets the verse inside the prose as evidence, and the change of medium is the verdict: song is what he was, prose what he now is. “Adieu” calms the syntax as it reaches its resolve. Held off the top because in “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible” the fragment sometimes becomes a container for argument rather than its instrument.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, and the play’s own history proves it. Played for identification, as Zurich received it, it becomes the tragedy of an indomitable mother, the reading Brecht revised his text against. The chronicle form knows that the war has no plot and no end. The captions know that what matters is not what happens but how and why, so that the audience watches the bargaining rather than waiting for the outcome. The songs know that a woman can sing a truth she does not live by, as in the Great Capitulation, or one that undercuts her, as in the Courage song on the road after the curse of the sixth scene. The repetition, child by child, is the argument that she will not learn. Held off the top because the form’s knowledge is partly enforced by the songs rather than embodied in the scenes.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
In the great poems the form is the knowledge. L’infinito knows that the infinite is made by a limit, and makes it in its syntax: from “questa siepe”, this hedge, to “quello / infinito silenzio”, that infinite silence, and back to “questa voce”, this voice, the lines running over their ends until near and far change places. In the free canzone the stanza lasts as long as the thought, and the settenario’s short fall at a stanza’s end carries the disappointment, so that in A Silvia and Le ricordanze recollection swells and breaks. Il sabato del villaggio sets the eve before the feast because pleasure lives in expectation. Held at 9.0: the book’s form is looser than a cycle’s, the civic canzoni’s regular form is a container, and the codas, the moral to the “garzoncello scherzoso”, playful boy, sometimes state what the image already knew.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first sentence folds three times into one: a man before a firing squad, an afternoon far in the past, and a future the reader has not reached, from which both are told. The whole novel is built on that fold. Things are told as already remembered and deaths announced before they come, so that history in Macondo is fate before it is event. The recurrence of names across seven generations is the circularity of the family made visible on the page, and the one voice that reports a levitating priest and a massacre in the same tone is the instrument by which the official history is shown to be as fantastic as the marvels and more false. The end is prepared from the first chapters, with Melquíades’s parchments: the last Aureliano reads the book of his family while the wind destroys the town, and the reader finishes the novel as the town is erased. What holds the axis there is the middle chronicle, a container in which many episodes could be moved within their generation without the book knowing less; the end redeems that additive stretch rather than shaping it from within.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The cycle argues that saying transforms things, and it makes the argument by saying. The Ninth’s nouns, “Haus, / Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster” (“house, / bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window”), are lifted into the line and kept, doing what the question around them proposes. The address is the second instrument: the cycle speaks to those who cannot answer, the angel, the dead and the beloved, and the unanswered address enacts the separation it laments. The ten parts carry a turn, from the First’s cry to the praise of the Seventh and Ninth, and the long, flexible line holds both the stretched lament and the broken-off exclamation. Held off the top where the form contains a doctrine stated rather than enacted, in the expository passages of the Eighth and parts of the Sixth.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops being able to say most of what it knows. The tall panel, read from below over an altar, makes the eye climb from the dark crowd to the light, which is the act the lower figures cannot perform; the arm that points upward points the viewer where the apostles do not look. The two scales, near life size below and small and far above, make the summit distant and the affliction present. The slope of the mount divides the zones and joins them, so that the panel is one picture with two laws of light. As two panels, or as a frieze in sequence, the simultaneity of glory and suffering, which is the argument, is lost. Held below the top by the weaker lower right, where form becomes crowd.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
At its centre the form is the knowledge. The book knows time by being shaped by it: the first day takes a chapter, the first three weeks a chapter, and the last years take what the first weeks took, so that the reader undergoes the shrinking of time the hero describes. The ironic narrator, “der raunende Beschwörer des Imperfekts”
“the murmuring conjurer of the past tense” (“Vorsatz”), is the form of the double view, inside the enchantment and above it; the foreword calls the story old, told in the past of a world that ended with the war, and the last page is that world ending. The leitmotif, taken from Wagner (Clavdia’s slanting eyes and Hippe’s, the borrowed pencil, the X-ray, the thermometer), makes the repetition of days the repetition of the text and recurrence the medium of memory and eros. Told in sequence and in proportion, the story would be a sanatorium chronicle. What holds the axis at 9.0: the essay chapters and the long disputations loosen the form toward a container, and their ideas could stand as essays, as Mann wrote many of them.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The ottava rima of “Sailing to Byzantium” is itself the artifice the soul asks to be gathered into: the poem is the golden bird it wishes to become. The sequences know their matter by breaking: the “Meditations” narrow from the ancestral house to the stare’s nest, so that a civil war is known as a narrowing of the field of vision. “Leda” breaks its eleventh line across the page at “And Agamemnon dead”, the line cut as the history is cut. “Among School Children” travels in eight stanzas from a schoolroom to the question of the dancer, never dividing its scenes, and the form is the claim. The book as ordered argues as well, sailing out of nature in its first poem and ending at midnight among the dead in its epilogue. What holds it below the top is the middle of the book: a miscellany the frame contains rather than shapes, with “A Man Young and Old” looser than the sequences before it.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told as a life in sequence, Hadji Murat would be a hero of romance; told as it is, a chapter at each seat of power, he becomes what each seat sees, a piece to be used, bought or destroyed, and only the reader holds him whole. The two despots stand in chapters that mirror each other, so the form makes the equation the book argues. The frame makes the history a memory occasioned by a weed, which is the book’s claim that this death belongs to the natural order the plough destroys. Held below the top because the life told to Loris-Melikov sits in the structure as recital rather than as form.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first-person retrospect is the instrument of the book’s justice: the older Pip tells the younger Pip’s misreading without correcting it, so the reader shares the belief that Miss Havisham is the benefactor and is caught by the revelation of chapter 39 exactly as Pip is. Told in the third person, the book would be a story about a snob; told this way, it makes the reader complicit in the snobbery and then in the shame. The three stages are the three acts of expectation: formed, enjoyed, destroyed. The weekly instalment is in the texture: chapters end on turns, the file in the pub, the stranger on the stairs. Held off the top because the river, the trial and the coda are told more quickly than the form had led the reader to expect.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses most of what it knows: put the tomb at the garden’s centre and it becomes a pavilion among trees; the approach, the reveal and the edge of the world are gone. Lose the symmetry and the claim of a perfect order goes with it. The form changes the use: the visit becomes a procession, through a dark threshold into a measured garden, up onto a white platform and in to a dim octagon where the grave is shown as a cenotaph and kept in the crypt below. What holds the axis is a split between image and space. The outer dome is a sign made for the city and the river, and the chamber under the inner dome does not know it.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The irony lives in the gap between what Huck reports and what the reader sees: he admires Emmeline Grangerford’s verses and the family’s parlour, he thinks himself wicked, and the reader knows otherwise at every point. Told in the third person, the novel would judge the South from above; told by Huck, it shows a mind built by the South working its way, without words for it, against what built it, and leaves the reader to supply the verdict Huck cannot reach. The downstream structure is the second instrument: episode follows episode as the raft passes town after town, and the current carries the pair deeper into danger as the book goes on. Held off the top because the episodic form also admits slack, the coincidence that Aunt Sally is Tom’s aunt is a seam, and in the evasion the form serves the gag rather than the knowledge.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the story loses what it knows. Its knowledge lies in the gap between the officer’s lucid, technical, loving exposition and what is being exposed; a narrator who judged would close that gap. The point of view held near a traveller who understands the mechanism and refuses its meaning is the second instrument: the reader is placed where the liberal observer stands and made to feel how little his disapproval does. The third is the story’s central object, a machine for writing, which inscribes a sentence in a script so ornamented the traveller cannot decipher it, so that the form of the tale, exposition first and then the body as the page, turns on writing itself. Vantage, voice and object carry one knowledge. Held off the top by the close, where the form loosens into a scene of flight whose rhythm is not the rest’s.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows, nearly throughout. The verse paragraph is the instrument of a mind thinking about its own past: it moves from the scene to the reflection on the scene and back, and the blank verse lets the remembered moment and the present remembering share one sentence. The order is not chronological. The spots of time are withheld until Book XI, so that the poem enacts what it argues, that the past returns when it is needed; and at the Simplon the narrative breaks off to address Imagination at the very point where the narrative failed. As prose memoir the poem would keep the episodes and lose their double consciousness; as lyric it would lose the claim of epic scale, which is the argument. Held below the top because the form is container rather than instrument in the chronicle of Books IX and X and in Vaudracour and Julia.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. At this size the figures are near life, and the kneeling son’s back is at the viewer’s height: the viewer stands behind him and is received with him. The dark is form, not ground; it isolates the embrace, makes the house a presence without walls, and measures the elder son’s distance in shadow. The red binds father and elder son as one blood across the gap. The handling is knowledge: the father’s hands are built of thick paint that reads as warmth and weight, the son’s rags scraped and dragged. As a small panel or a smooth classical picture the reception would become an anecdote. Held below the top because the middle figures and the background are form without function.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The passé composé and the unlinked sentence give a consciousness without causes, each moment set beside the last: the book knows his life as he lives it, without the story a life is supposed to have. The two parts are the second instrument. The first gives the events; the second gives them again, retold by examining magistrate, witnesses and prosecutor as a narrative of guilt, so that the form itself shows what the book discloses: the court writes the psychological novel Meursault refused to be in. At the shooting the plain prose turns for the first time to metaphor and rhythm, so that the style breaks when the life does; it breaks again, into eloquence, when the chaplain provokes him. Held off the top because the time and place of narration stay unresolved, a diary’s “today” in the opening and a retrospect elsewhere, and the book never makes the inconsistency mean.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. A cycle of fragments in shifting metres is the form of a mind under siege: the lullaby of II breaks into the speaker’s plea for prayer, the Prelude marches, the Epilogue mourns. The fragmentation is also the form of transmission: short pieces that a few friends could carry in memory. A single continuous elegy, or a narrative poem, would lose the self that splits (“No, it is not I”) and the chorus the Dedication gathers. The frame of prose and epigraph, added some twenty years after the verse, turns a lament into a testimony with its date and its mandate. Held at 9.0 because some of the numbered pieces sit side by side with little to separate their forms.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The claim that grace arrives through the visible world is made only by painting light as the one agent that binds the figure and everything else; a narrative image with a seraph would say that grace comes from above and against nature. The horizontal panel and the saint placed off centre, facing out of the field toward the source, give the picture its open side: the event happens where we cannot see, and we see only what it does to a man and a world. The layered rock rising at the right, the cell and the recession at the left are shelter and openness side by side. The glazed oil is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: the difference between time as measured pulse and time abolished. The Liturgie knows it as cycles of seventeen and twenty-nine durations that do not close within the movement. The Abîme knows it as one voice holding a note, which only a solo can say. The Danse knows the trumpet as unison; harmony would make it a crowd. The Louanges know eternity as pulse without hierarchy under a climbing line; a developing form would give eternity a plot. Held below the top because the Intermède knows nothing the others do not, the Fouillis’s alternation is nearer a container, and the Louanges’ forms were made for other instruments and fit the argument rather than being born of it.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
What the work knows, it knows at this width and in this room. The Albergo is a small board room and the canvas is its whole end wall: whoever stands there stands at the edge of the crowd at Calvary, at the scale of the figures, with the cross above. The width is the argument. Only a field this wide can hold the stages of one act side by side and still bring every line back to the centre. The light is the second instrument, a dark ground and quick highlights that pick out a few and leave the many in shadow: the disclosure about attention, made visible. Make it an altarpiece, a print or a reduced canvas and the immersion and the simultaneity go. Held below the top because the same conception, reduced, still says much of what it says, as the earlier canvas shows.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The knowledge is that the myth hides in plain sight, and only an image in which two depths are seen at once can hold it: the workroom in shadow and the alcove in light, the story’s beginning near and its end far, read in one glance and understood only on a second. Told in words, the disguise is announced; painted, it goes undetected. The wheel knows motion only as paint: the blur is not a sign for speed but speed seen. Whether Pallas and Arachne stand before the tapestry or are woven into it is left open, a thing paint can do and prose cannot. Held below the top because the later enlargement leaves the present format not wholly the painter’s.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. A continuous novel of Liutov’s campaign would supply what the cycle withholds: causes, transitions, a resolved narrator. The fragments are the instrument of the knowledge. The narrator is never whole, the war never makes a story, and each piece ends at the moment its meaning is unbearable. The juxtapositions do the arguing: a lyric prose poem beside a Cossack’s letter reporting a father’s murder of his son and a son’s revenge on the father, the narrator’s voice beside voices he cannot master. The close answers the opening. A book that began on Jewish death ends on a Jewish death in the Red Army, and the narrator is now the one who buries. The form is the knowledge.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Almost entirely. Put the books at the head of an ordinary stair and the passage to learning becomes a corridor; the vestibule’s compression, its height and its flooding stair make arrival an event, and the reader enters the hall already changed. In the hall the form is the regime of study: the desk-benches belong to the architecture, fixed to the bay, so that each reader takes a place the building gives and each book had its place at its desk, and ceiling and floor repeat one pattern over and under the aisle. Held below the highest marks because the hall is a type adapted, and because the books have left the desks.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in the frame and the way out of it. A show announces itself, plays, bids farewell, and gives way through a crossfade to A Day in the Life, where the mask drops. Placed first, that song would be a great song; placed after the reprise it is a waking. Within it, dreaming verses and a hurried morning are joined by orchestral ascents, so that the form is the gap between routine and vision. She’s Leaving Home gives the parents the counter-voice, holding both sides at once. Sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top: the frame lapses after the second track, and four songs are containers.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. This is theatre about deception, built of deceptions staged: the Merchant is an actor sent by Odysseus to play a part, and the audience watches Neoptolemus play his, and knows. The bow is the drama’s single object and its argument; whoever holds it on stage holds the moral initiative, and the audience sees it pass. The iambic line breaks between speakers in the crises as the alliance breaks and reforms, and the cries put the body outside the verse. The god appears exactly where a man of integrity and a man of grievance have each won, and Troy has lost. In narrative this would be a turn of plot; on stage it is a question about what the gods’ order costs.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The saga style shows only what a witness could see and hear: deeds, speech, faces, the weight of a phrase. The saga knows that in this society the self is public, that honour is what others see and say, and its form makes the reader stand where the participants stand, inferring motive from Skarpheðinn’s grin or a silence. Give it a narrator’s access to minds and it would know what the participants cannot, and lose its tragedy, which is that every act is read by others and answered. The double structure is the argument: Gunnarr’s story shows the hero’s way to death, Njáll’s the wise man’s, the same law at work on different virtues. Held off the top where genealogy and procedure become a container rather than an instrument.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing the one thing it knows: that a player given room will make melody instead of navigating harmony. Its thirty-two bars hold one event, the half-step lift from D Dorian to E flat Dorian at the bridge, and because it is the only event the frame allows, it becomes an event. In “Flamenco Sketches” the form hands duration to the soloist, so that the structure is literally his judgment. “Blue in Green” turns in a ten-bar cycle with no clear point of arrival, and the circling is the sorrow. The method belongs to the form: frames given late, takes kept whole. “Freddie Freeloader” is borrowed rather than made.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Montage is the argument: the meaning is made in the collision of shots as the revolt is made in the collision of men, and the viewer is assembled into a mass as the crowd is. The smashing of the plate, broken into overlapping cuts, makes one gesture of rage a detonation; the steps, cut so that the descent lasts far longer than any stair could, make terror a duration; the lions, three shots of three statues, make stone rise. The five acts answer to the dialectic of the argument. Told in continuous action with individual heroes, the same story would be an adventure; this form makes it the birth of a collective. Held below the top where the titles carry an argument the cutting has already made.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? There is a controlled case: the danse macabre as a cycle of woodcuts, one victim to a block, turned page by page. That form knows death as an appointment, individual and in sequence. The panel knows death as simultaneous: every estate, every place, land and sea, all at once, from a height no one in the picture occupies. Only a single field seen whole can say “at once”, and only a high panoramic viewpoint can say “everywhere”. The landscape format is the front line; the diagonal of the horse and the drive of the army toward the trap give the campaign its direction. One scorched key across the surface makes the world itself a casualty. Held below the top because the dense lower band is partly an inventory a frieze could carry.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose is lived otherwise. The stone vault closes the church into one enclosure of masonry, where a timber-roofed nave is a stone box under a wooden lid. The alternating system turns the nave into paired steps toward the shrine, a procession measured in pier and vault, and the incised cylinders make each double bay distinct, so the walk reads as stages. On the site, the church’s mass above the gorge makes the community’s guardian visible to a valley. Peterborough and Norwich, under timber, show what is lost. Held below the top by the church as it stands, and charged to the work: the Gothic east end, the rebuilt choir vault and the later towers make a palimpsest, Romanesque only in its core.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Black and white is the colour of the archive, and the film’s past is the past as photographed; colour is kept for ritual and the living present, and once for a single child in the mass. The red coat is the film’s argument in form: the number becomes one person only when someone looks, and is then seen dead on a cart. Without it the film could only state that each life is a world. The list, recurring as an object, shapes the plot. The epilogue hands the fiction over to the people it represents, survivor beside actor, which no other form could do in one gesture. A step from the top: the conversion arc is a container, the shape of many films.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told in order, the childhood would be a period drama about a strict father. The fragment is the form of memory: scenes begin late and break off, and the camera moves at a child’s height. The cut from the family’s grief to the birth of the stars is the argument itself: the death of one boy and the making of the world are held in one frame, and the film never says how they are related. The whisper is the form of prayer, addressing God without declaring him. Held at 9.0: the adult frame is a container, its glass towers stating isolation rather than enacting it, and a longer version of the same shape shows the form loose at the joints.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The prologue opens on Alexander’s toy theatre, its curtain rising on the title, and the epilogue closes on Helena reading Strindberg’s prefatory note to A Dream Play. Framed so, the whole can admit ghosts without asking whether they are real, and the frame is the knowledge: the little world is a made world. The colour law carries the argument, the Ekdahl rooms in reds, golds and candle warmth, the bishop’s house bleached to white, grey and black. The five parts give a novel’s time, in which the household is lived in, not visited, so that the bare house is felt as loss. The cost is plain: parts of the chronicle are a novel’s matter.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what it knows goes. The painting is made for a page held in the hands at reading distance, and its knowledge is that a whole world can be contained in that space and still not be exhausted: the eye goes in and finds more at every magnification. Enlarged to a wall, the small worlds in the rocks would become ornament and the king a figure on a hill; reduced to a plate in a printed book, the gold and the depth of the colour go dead. The block of Ferdowsi’s text set into the composition makes it a page of a book, read in sequence, the first king after the prologues. Held below the top because its meaning, sovereignty as cosmic order, could be carried by other forms, if less fully.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The book’s knowledge is that faith cannot be communicated, and its form performs that. An author called de silentio writes about a man whose defining act is silence. A poet of the hero eulogises a man he says he cannot understand. The Exordium tries four times to retell the story and each time produces a lesser Abraham, so that the reader learns the story cannot be told rightly by anyone who has not made the movement. The subtitle names a form in which argument and song alternate because neither alone can reach the subject. Put Kierkegaard’s own name in place of the pseudonym, or a summary of Genesis 22 in place of the Exordium, and the book stops knowing that it stands outside what it describes. The argument can be restated as a treatise, and has been; the restatement loses exactly this.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The knowledge is that the act consumes the actor, and it lives in the paint. The flesh is dragged and smeared, so the god looks half-made, eroding as he eats. The black is a void with no floor, so there is no world outside the act. The crop presses the head to the edge and traps the figure in its frame as in its compulsion, and the upright format stands the body as tall as the field allows. In Rubens’s finish the same subject knows a story about a god; this knows a condition. Held below the top because it was made for a wall among other walls and is now a different object, and because the summary lower body is less known than the rest.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the hall knows? Entirely. Put the same orchestra and the same public in a shoebox and the society of the concert changes: rank returns, front and back return, and the orchestra becomes a picture seen from one side. Here the form is the knowledge. Blocks of a few hundred seats make each listener part of a small group and of the whole at once; seats behind and beside the orchestra let the audience see the players’ faces and the conductor’s; the asymmetry means no seat repeats another, so the hall is lived as a landscape in which one finds one’s way. The foyer’s branching paths prepare that knowledge, a crowd dispersing and reassembling. Few buildings so fully make their purpose by their form. What holds it at 9.0: some acoustic consequences of the form, which the record does not settle, are compromises it imposes rather than instruments of what it knows.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The size puts the viewer on the raft: the near edge of the planks almost touches the frame and the bodies there are drawn large. The two opposed pyramids are the argument: the sail drives one way, the bodies strain the other, and that contradiction is the castaways’ condition, carried by the wind away from what they hail. The diagonal from lower left to upper right is the passage from death to hope, laid across the whole width, so that reading the picture is making the climb. The horizon carries the climax as an almost empty interval; reduce the canvas and the speck becomes a sign. As an engraving the picture would know the story; at this size it knows the experience. Held below the top by the shadowed middle, where form is mass rather than argument.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the story loses what it knows. The narrator speaks from after the art has died, as the historian of a vanished entertainment, so the artist is seen from outside, by a public voice that half shares the public’s incomprehension; the whole drama is that no one can see him from inside. Only at the end does the form break into his own speech, and what he says overturns what the chronicle has told. The three movements are the arc of an art and a life in one, the public’s interest and his body declining together. Told in the first person the story would become a complaint; told as a novella with a world around him it would lose the cage, the one place where his art exists. Held a little below the top because the summary of the middle movement is the one place the form carries rather than makes.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Put the march last and the symphony becomes a victory with a sad introduction; that is the form the work refuses, and the refusal is its knowledge. The finale’s divided violins make the lament a line nobody holds, heard only as a sum: grief that one voice cannot carry. The waltz in five is a dance with a beat too many, graceful and lame. The dying close is form as content, for the work ends by ceasing. The costs lie inside the first movement, which is built in blocks, with seams between its sections and sequences that fill a container. The architecture thinks; some of the first movement’s joinery does not.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is the exercise book: what we read is what Malone writes, and the text lasts as long as his pencil and his life, so its end is his death, not a report of it. The alternation of present state and story is the argument made structural: each time the story fails, the room returns, and each time the room becomes unbearable, the story resumes. The renaming of Sapo as Macmann, after a gap Malone cannot account for, makes the passage of time and a failing mind into form. The close, the prose breaking into short lines that thin to nothing, is the only way the book could end: a dying consciousness cannot narrate its death, and the form shows the narration stopping. Held off the very top because the Lambert pages could be shaped otherwise without loss.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Gull’s teaching, taken from Hinton, is that time is a solid in which every moment coexists. The comics page is exactly that: a field of moments laid side by side and read in sequence. In the tenth and fourteenth chapters the panels hold 1888 and the century after it on one page, so that the claim is demonstrated, not asserted. The regular grid of small panels slows time to the pace of the murder and the inquest. Campbell’s scratched line makes the past look like its own engravings and refuses the killing any glamour. The appendices are form as well: the notes show the seam between record and invention, which is the book’s argument about history, and the comic coda ends that argument in comedy. A prose novel would have to say what these pages show.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Put the studies inside the laboratory blocks and the separation of thought from experiment, the building’s claim about research, disappears. Close the court with a fourth side, or plant it, and the institute loses its relation to the horizon, the one thing it is turned toward. Stack the services in shafts and the laboratories cannot change, and the building’s patience with time goes. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: one walks out of a laboratory, across a bridge, into a study, and sees the sea, and the scientists’ daily movement is shaped by that sequence. Held from the top band because the laboratories, much of the floor area, are neutral by intent.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a linear biography and the film stops knowing what it knows: that a remembered mother and a present wife are one face to the man who looks; that a newsreel of soldiers wading a lake is as much his memory as the barn; that a life is not told forward but returned to. The form is the knowledge. The doubled casting says in image what a novel would need a sentence to say. The shifts between colour and monochrome mark kinds of remembering, not dates. The narrator kept off screen puts the audience in his place. Held a step from the top because the form’s demand is not always repaid: on a first viewing the doubled roles confuse more than they reveal, and some joins lean on knowledge from outside the film, the director’s life and his father’s poems.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poems stop knowing what they know. The form is the dramatic utterance in time: a voice addressing someone present and arguing toward a conclusion it does not yet have, so that the poem knows love as thinking under pressure. Set the “Valediction” in prose and the compasses become a simile; in the poem the tetrameter quatrains turn as the compass turns, and the end returns to the start. “The Flea” makes the gap between stanzas the place where the woman acts, and the poem learns of her act only by its traces: “Purpled thy nail.” The invented stanzas fit the argument’s shape, with the short lines falling where the thought turns, and “The Canonization” frames each stanza with “love”, the word it is canonizing. Held below the top because in some poems the form is a vessel for a clever case, and the body as a whole has no form, since its order is an editor’s.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and what is lost? The figurative versions exist, in his own glass paintings and earlier canvases of the Deluge and the Last Judgement, and they know something different: an event that happens to people. This canvas knows the event as the dissolution of the world into force, and only the abstracted form can say that, because the loss of outline is the content. The size is part of the knowledge: three metres wide, the field exceeds the eye’s span and puts the viewer inside the storm; reduced to a reproduction, it becomes a diagram of its incidents. Held below the top because the content can be carried, if differently, by forms he himself used, and because the dissolved subjects are read with knowledge from outside the canvas.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge. The laisse is a block, closed by its assonance, and the poem uses each block as a station: the action does not flow, it is set down in panels, and the panels can be repeated with variation. In the horn debate and at Roland’s death the same moment returns two or three times with a different emphasis, so that a decision is seen from several sides and time is held still, as in the liturgy or in a row of carved capitals. Parataxis does the same work in the line: deeds placed side by side, causes left unstated, the hearer left to judge. Turn this into continuous narrative, with motive explained and the joins smoothed, and the poem loses its sense of a judgment made in public, and with it the weight that lets Roland’s fault and his sanctity stand together without comment.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Put the same image and paintings in an ordinary hall entered from the front, with no pond, and the work stops being able to say its central thing: that paradise is seen from this side, across water, before it is entered. The form sets the worshipper as one awaiting rebirth, on the eastern shore, looking west, the face given through the lattice, the sun going down behind it. Inside, the form makes the descent: the image high on its dais under the canopy, the bodhisattvas coming down the walls, the doors opening on landscapes where Amida arrives. The wings that house nothing prove that the form is the knowledge: the hall is lived as a vision.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that the body comes down to us, and it is known only through the painting’s place and its plane: an upright altarpiece whose figures press against the front edge, a slab whose corner seems to stand out of the canvas over the altar table, a descent read top to bottom in one look. A relief would give the weight but not the dark; a narrative cycle the event but not the instant in which the body is about to be laid down and is still held. The stillness of painting holds the carriers’ strain indefinitely, turning labour into offering. The charge: the knowledge depended on the chapel, the altar and the low viewpoint, and part of it now lives by inference.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The pageant within the day within history is the knowledge: the audience watches England’s past and then itself, and the novel watches the audience, so that the reader is placed one ring further out and the mirrors face the reader too. The interval is structural, not a pause. The acts of the title are the pageant’s and the gaps between them, where the real acts happen: the flirtation, the quarrel, the snake, Giles’s silent rage. La Trobe’s failure when the illusion breaks, and nature’s taking of the gap, cows, rain and swallows, is the form’s argument that art and the common life must fill each other’s silences. The last sentence turns the novel itself into a prologue. Held at 9.0, not above, because the unrevised text leaves some transitions rough.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
A different form would change almost everything the work knows. It knows that the ice is a building and the ship a part of it, and it knows this only through the form: the diagonal thrust of the stack, the slabs laid as planes, edge on edge, in the same hard drawing as the timbers of the hull, so that ship and ice are made of the same kind of thing. Make it a storm and it becomes the old picture of struggle. Make the wreck large and central and it is a disaster told; here it is a disaster found. Remove the horizon bergs and the order becomes local. The smooth surface, with no visible stroke, is knowledge too: no hand made this. Held at 9.0 for the foreground, which knows less than the stack.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that desire and holiness here occupy two musical worlds that cannot meet. Jochanaan’s music is diatonic, square, hymnic and brass-coloured; Salome’s is chromatic, restless and decorative; the court’s is nervous and fragmented. Their encounter is a collision of idioms, and her three addresses are three times the same gesture of praise turned to disgust. The continuous act is the instrument: there is no exit from the night, and the pressure never drops to a number ending. The Dance is the form’s wordless centre, where the bargain is struck without language. The final scene takes the form of the Liebestod and fills it with a dead man’s head. Held below the top by the Dance’s salon orientalism and by the quintet, more container than instrument.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
What the statue knows it knows only as this mass. Its knowledge is that the deity is the sum of its signs, and the stone gives that sum the weight of a body: in a codex the same figure would be a list of attributes; in the block they become one presence that stands over the viewer. The frontality is the form of address: the figure does not move, it confronts. The symmetry is the form of necessity, the doubled serpents making a face out of a pair. The hidden underside is form doing what no picture could, carrying knowledge into the part of the object that faces the earth. Make it a painting, a smaller figure or a relief and the proposition goes. Held at 9.0 because part of the meaning rests on a code the form does not itself teach.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in the third person, Clamence’s story would be a moral tale about a hypocrite; told as his monologue to a silent listener, it is the hypocrisy in action, and the reader is worked on by the technique the book discloses. The confession is visibly a performance, so no statement can be taken at face value, least of all those that sound most like the author. The listener’s silence is the second instrument: never heard, he is supplied by the reader, and when Clamence asks him at the end what happened to him one night on the quays, the question lands on us. The five days and the descent from bar to sickbed carry the theme, the voice more feverish as its power grows. Held a little below the top because the answering of unheard objections is at times too convenient, and the middle leans on catalogue more than on form.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The two viewpoints are the theology: put Christ under the same low eye as the soldiers and he becomes a statue on a plinth; raise the soldiers to his level and the viewer is no longer among the sleepers. The pyramid of four bodies rising to one head makes the resurrection a geometry of ascent without movement. The vertical of the body divides the landscape, and only the division makes the seasons a statement about him. The painted columns open the wall of the council hall onto the event. The stillness is the knowledge: a resurrection that does not soar but stands. Held below the top because the form, however exact, works one idea rather than a room of them.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows, which is that an ending in death must be answered at the scale of the whole. The Scherzo’s move to second place sets the Adagio beside the Finale, so that the last hour is one ascent. The quiet end of the first movement means the work cannot close until the coda gathers it, and the combination of themes is the form of that gathering: the movements become one sound. The block form, with its terraces and halts, is the form of contemplation. Held below the top because the Finale’s middle could take another shape without loss, as the versions show, and because the outer movements follow a sonata plan more than remake it.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the album loses most of what it knows. Its subject is a self dissolving into feeling and time, and the sequence acts it out. The introductions are long; the voice enters late inside a wall it does not command; the tracks lengthen, the first six running about twenty-nine minutes and the last six about forty-two and a half, so the listener is held in the descent past comfort, and from “Prayers for Rain” to “Untitled” the order is the order in which the self goes under. As three-minute songs it would keep its words and lose its knowledge. The length is the instrument. Held from the top by the four songs from “Lovesong” to “Fascination Street”, which keep the ordinary song form and are transformed only by placement.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the forces and the work loses what it knows. With one cello the lyric centre cannot sit in the tenor while a bass remains below it; the first movement’s E flat theme and the Adagio’s three-layer texture need five players. The Adagio’s ternary form is the instrument of its knowledge: suspension, rupture, and a return that cannot be the same,. The Trio’s slower tempo within a Presto is form as meaning, the dance stopped to hear something else. The semitone turns are placed at the joints of form, not inside the surface, so that the key plan is the argument. Held down by the Finale, whose plan is closer to a container for its popular material, and by the first movement’s transitions, where the form holds more than it needs.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The reverse zoom starts on a face or a hand and withdraws until the person is a figure in a composition, placed each time inside a picture larger and older than himself. The narration announces Barry’s ruin and his son’s death before they are seen, so fate becomes a property of the telling and the viewer watches, like the period’s order, already knowing. The tableau’s stillness makes rank visible as arrangement. Substitute close coverage, cutting for tension and the novel’s first-person voice, and the film becomes the story of a rogue, not the portrait of a world in which a rogue is weightless. Each instrument does the knowing. What holds the figure from the top is Part I’s episodic chain, the novel’s form carried over rather than remade.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. In three-quarter view this is a portrait of a man; frontal and symmetrical, it is a claim about what a man is. The symmetry is the knowledge: hair, shoulders and face are ordered about one vertical axis, and the one break in it is the maker’s hand, so the form itself says that the human departs from the divine schema exactly in the act of making. The head, about life size, sets the viewer face to face, as before an icon, and the inscription stands on the ground at eye level, as on an icon’s. Held a step below the top: the coat in the lower third carries the knowledge less than the rest.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a neutral museum and almost nothing the work knows survives. The visitor lives the history as the form gives it: the descent, the choice of roads, the dead end of the Tower behind its door, the vertigo of exile in the Garden, the long climb to continuity, and on every floor the void across the path, crossed on a bridge, looked into and never entered. The building makes the visitor perform absence, not read about it, and that it was open to visitors empty before any object was installed shows how much of the knowledge the form holds alone. Held below the top where the form ignores part of its purpose: the galleries are hard to exhibit in, and the first permanent exhibition was widely found to crowd and contradict the building.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows. Its knowledge is isolation, people with no one to stand with them, and its form is one voice alone at night, without the band whose sound had meant community, recorded in a room on a machine for sketches. The songs were recorded with the band as well, and those versions were set aside; the cassette was issued. The reverb puts the voice in an empty space, and the hiss is the room. The narrators speak in testimony, flat and particular, and the form refuses the release a chorus would give. The sequence is counted here, once, from a killer to faith. Only Used Cars and Open All Night serve without enacting.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is complicity, and the form produces it: first-person narration that makes the audience Alex’s confidant, wide-angle lenses that give his violence the pace of a cartoon, music that makes the beatings dance. The viewer enjoys the first forty minutes, and then sits with Alex, eyes clamped, watching films of violence set to Beethoven, and the sickness is the viewer’s too. A third-person, realist telling would give a case study and lose the argument, since the argument is that the audience wanted the cure and should not have. The symmetry of the second half is the form’s proof. Held below the top where the form becomes a container: the prison and hospital scenes play in conventional comic grammar.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Nearly all of it. The figure exists only as the outcome of a fight between drawing and stroke: the contour is found, lost and found again in the same passage, so that the image of the body is also the record of its unmaking. Paint a clean figure in the same pose and the canvas becomes a caricature of a pin-up; abstract it further and the idol vanishes into the ground. The flesh colours are the flesh, the matter oil paint was made to render. The scale meets the viewer’s body face to face. The unresolved edges and the cut-off legs say that the figure is not finished because it cannot be. Held below the top because that knowledge depends on unfinish, and the line between necessary unfinish and indecision is not always visible on the canvas.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The nested narrators are the argument: Maksim Maksimych, who loves Pechorin and cannot understand him; the traveller, who reads the man’s face and gait like a physiognomist and still misjudges; Pechorin, who understands himself perfectly and is no better for it. The order is the argument too. The reader learns he is dead before reading a word of his, so the journal is read as a closed life, and its plans for the future are already void. The last tale swings back to the question whether character is fate, and lets the simplest witness answer it. Told in order, by one narrator, this would be a Romantic tale of a cold man; told this way it is a study of how a person is known and misknown. Held a tenth off the top by the unequal weight of “Princess Mary”, which tilts the design.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. The knowledge is that speed takes away the world’s edges, and it is known only as paint that has none: the field is scumbled and glazed so that rain, steam, cloud and light are one substance, and the only edges in the picture are the train and its line. Painted with a topographer’s clarity, the scene becomes a view of a bridge with a train on it, and the speed goes. The viewpoint is the second instrument, high and oblique, with the track plunging out of the corner, so that the viewer is on the line or over it. Held short of the top because the form so subordinates the small figures, the hare above all, that part of what they were meant to know is lost to it.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is spatial and the form is architecture: stairs up to the Parks, stairs down to the semi-basement, stairs down again to the bunker, so that rank is always where a body stands in the frame. The Parks’ glass wall opens on a lawn; the Kims’ street-level window opens on feet and a drunk man urinating. The change of genre is itself the instrument: the caper assumes the Kims can rise, and the horror discovers a family already below them. And the central sense, smell, cannot be filmed; it is shown only in reactions, a wrinkled nose, a lowered window, so the viewer is placed as the Kims are. Held off the top by the epilogue’s voice-over and a climax in a thriller’s ordinary grammar.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a man can pass from murder to love in one day, which only a form moving between inside and outside without words can carry. The superimpositions are the Man’s mind, the Woman from the City’s arms closing round him as he lies awake, the city’s dancers floating over the marsh as she talks. The travelling camera turns a decision into a walk, and the trolley carries the couple in one movement from the country of the crime into the city of the courtship, so a change of heart is felt as distance covered. Told in speech, or as realist drama, it is an anecdote. The cost is the comic middle, where the form becomes a container for routines.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses almost everything it knows, because its knowledge lives in the space. The same songs played as the group played them live, fast and loud, would make a punk record about unease; set as Hannett set them, the drums dry and separate, the guitar pushed back, the voice close, long delays leaving rooms of silence between sounds, they are the isolation they describe. The sequence is counted here, once. Disorder’s plea opens, I Remember Nothing’s amnesia closes, and the sides move from Outside to Inside, hinged by New Dawn Fades and She’s Lost Control. Held from the very top because the frame is thin: the middle of each side could be reordered with little loss, and Interzone, an older song’s rush, serves without enacting.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute the conventional form and the purpose is lived differently. In a cruciform church with a domed crossing the shrine would stand off centre in the nave, an obstacle on the way to the high altar. Here it is the centre, and the plan is shaped to the pilgrim’s movement round the Altar of Mercy and back. The free arcade and the lit outer wall make the room an envelope of light round that point: the believer kneels in the brightest space, and the sacred is felt as present. The high altar keeps the east, so the form holds two centres without confusion, the sacrament on the axis, the place of help at the heart. Held at 9.0: the exterior gives none of this away, and still wears the cross.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work can no longer say what it says. As a single canvas the war would be a scene; as an altar it is a sequence and a liturgy, four panels as four times of day, read out, through, back, and down to the night of the grave, so that a day of war becomes a life and a death. The altar form makes the argument against sacrifice possible: only in the crucifix’s place can the hung corpse be read as a crucifixion that saves no one, and only in the predella can the sleeping men be the entombed Christ. The technique is part of the knowledge: the glaze by which the saints were made eternal is spent on rot and wounds. Held at 9.0 because the centre is crowded beyond what the form demands.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a box with skylights and electric light, and what the building knows is gone: the passing of the day across a painting, the room as a unit one can stand in, the courts that let the eye rest on trees between rooms, the porch that shows the vault before one is under it. The form changes how the purpose is lived at every step. To look at a picture here is to look in a particular light at a particular hour, at the scale of a house; the visitor always knows where the outside is. Held just below the top because the vaults run long and their partitions move, so each installation partly arranges the room, and because the threshold, it is reported, was long bypassed.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The groom is never shown, so the marriage is an abstraction to which Noriko gives herself, and the viewer cannot weigh Satake any more than she can. The wedding is cut, so the threshold is felt as an absence in the life of the house. The still shots of trees, sea and empty rooms set the family inside a time that will go on without it. The repeated journeys, the train to Tokyo, the ride to the sea, the train to Kyoto, measure a relation by its last instances. The vase at the inn is the form’s purest act: a cut that withholds the content of a feeling and makes the viewer hold it. Made as a conventional marriage drama, the knowledge would become a plot about a match. Held a step from the top because the inn speech carries in words what the form already holds.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. The meaning is the viewer’s position: one stands on the floor of the chapel, beneath the history on the walls, and looks up into a fire one cannot reach. The curvature turns the figure into motion; on a flat wall he would be a picture of a burning man, not a burning that rises over the viewer. The ambiguity of ascent and fall depends on foreshortening from directly below, which only a cupola gives. The most reproduced image of the work, a flat circular photograph, loses the vertigo, and with it the knowledge, which is the proof that the form carries it. Held at 9.0, below Las Meninas at 9.6 and The Large Bathers at 9.2, because the form’s work is concentrated in one effect, the vertical.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what the pursuit of certainty costs in time. The form is accumulation: dated title cards, the decades passing in clothes and cars, a time-lapse of the Transamerica Pyramid rising, a lead handed from man to man as each is worn out. The film is built from documents, letters, ciphers, case files, handwriting exemplars, and its scenes are mostly people reading and comparing them, so that the viewer does the investigators’ work and arrives where they do. The violence is concentrated in the first hour and then withdrawn, so the long middle is felt as the case becoming paper. The closing line-up, a man pointing at a photograph twenty-two years late, is the form’s last word. The cost: the Graysmith third, compressed into montage, departs from the duration that is the form’s law.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, because the knowledge lives in the mismatch. Set to the sound the subject seems to ask for, dark, heavy and loud, these words would be one more protest; set as they are, to bright tunes, a thin high voice, an autoharp, a bugle and a line of Eddie Cochran, they show how a country carries its wars, in jingles, hymns and songs for children. The sequence is counted here, once: England, then the soldier’s eye, then Gallipoli, then England’s dark places, and the end in the earth, with the voice handed to a man for the last song. The device is one, applied song by song; in Bitter Branches and Hanging in the Wire it serves the frame without enacting it, and elsewhere it is the instrument of everything the record knows.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The removes, the clauses ending in “said Austerlitz”, are not a mannerism but the shape of how a destroyed past reaches anyone at all: never directly, always as told by someone who was told. The near absence of paragraph breaks makes the telling one breath, a memory that cannot stop once it has begun. The photographs, uncaptioned, are at once evidence and its failure: the boy in the page’s costume, whose photograph Věra gives him, is and is not Austerlitz, and the reader is put where he is, before an image that will not speak. The long sentence through Terezín enacts the ghetto’s administration as an inventory without end. Held below the top because some of the images are illustration, a plan or a building the text has already described, and there the form becomes a container.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that one melody can be everywhere in a texture and nowhere on its surface, and then be revealed. Set as a tenor cantus firmus, the hymn would be a scaffold heard apart from the other voices from the first bar, and the end would reveal nothing. Composed freely, there would be no hidden presence at all. Paraphrase in imitation is the instrument: each point begins with a phrase of the chant and lets it dissolve into counterpoint, so the hymn is the law of the fabric and not an object in it. The chordal Et incarnatus is form too, the one place the counterpoint yields. Held below the top because the liturgy gives the order, and in the long texted movements the form serves the succession of the words more than it thinks.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the record knows almost nothing, because its knowledge is the sound. Underneath, most of these are plain pop songs; When You Sleep or Sometimes played clean on one guitar would be pleasant and say little. The bending pitch is the instability of desire; the buried voice is the self dissolved into what it feels; sampled feedback turns the guitar’s excess into melody, so that noise becomes tenderness. The sequence is counted here, once: the most violent blur opens the record, Touched turns it toward its height, and the one dance releases it. But the second half is not argued as a sequence, and three tracks there could be reordered without loss.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. The thinness is the knowledge: a figure of normal mass at this height would be a statue of a man, and this is a man seen across a space, with the space eaten into him. The surface is the second instrument: kneaded and scored everywhere, it refuses a contour, so the eye finds no edge to rest on and the figure seems to vibrate where it meets the air. The scale is the third: at about life size the figure is met at the viewer’s level, so its distance is a distance within the same room; smaller it would be a figurine, larger a monument. The heavy feet and base are the fourth, holding the walker to the earth. Held below the top because the bronze carries a making done in plaster, one step removed.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the picture stops knowing what it knows. The matter is the meaning: the ash-and-tar blacks and the burnt surface are Sulamith’s ashen hair made into the whole field, so that the victim is the colour of everything and the figure of nothing. The perspective is the argument: a central vanishing point puts the viewer in the hall, on the axis meant for ceremony, walking toward the fire. The scale makes the hall a place the body stands before, not an image of a place. The word written in the corner, in the painter’s hand, is the only figure: the victim enters as a name, as on a memorial. As a photograph or a drawing, the matter and the scale are lost, and with them the ash. Only some of the surface incident is not doing this work.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. A jetty reaches out to something, a boat or deep water; this one reaches out and turns back into its own centre, and the work’s knowledge, that making returns to its ground, exists as that turn. The site is the form: placed where the lake rises and falls and salts what it covers, the coil carries its own change as part of what it is; in a gallery or on stable ground the same coil would be a monument to permanence, the opposite claim. The material is the knowledge: the shore’s basalt dumped, not dressed, so the made and the found are not told apart at the edge. Held below the top for one cost the form sustains: the spiral is known as a figure from above, and on foot the walker has the path and not the figure.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived at every step. Arrival is a slow ascent, ground to terrace to porch, turning, so that to enter is to leave the earth. Inside there are no rooms: sleeping, eating, cooking and sitting are places round a core, divided by objects, not walls. The walls are the weather: the same room is a different room in each season and at each hour, and the inhabitant lives the landscape rather than looking out at it. Privacy, enclosure, the hearth and the bath are all held in the one wooden object at the centre. Put a conventional house on the same meadow and nothing this house knows survives. Held from the top because the form failed part of the purpose: the glass made the room hot in summer and wet with condensation in winter, the insects called for screens the form never allowed for, and the dweller was always seen.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is the distance between the acts and the account of them, and the form is that distance. Remove Holly’s narration and it becomes a crime film about a handsome killer, the film the lawmen in its last scene are already watching. Give the narration to Kit and the emptiness becomes a confession. Move the camera close, cut for suspense or score the killings, and the deaths take on the weight the film refuses them; the refusal shows how little they weigh to the two who cause them. A children’s tune over killing is the form of a child’s consciousness. The cost is at the edge, and it is paid: some of the nature photography is beauty for its own sake, and there the form is a container.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. Put the congregation in an ordinary hall with windows down the sides, and worship faces an object among other objects in an even light; here it faces the only light in the room, and the light is the cross. Entry by a turn past the oblique wall makes arrival a passage from the street into the dark, so that the gathering begins already withdrawn. Silence, attention and the passage of the morning are made part of the service by the form. Held below the top because the form carries one act of worship and one posture, much of what it knows is known in the first minute, and the glass in the cross, which the form did not want, stands between the room and the weather it meant to admit.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Everything. The cycle knows that history is made by erasure and that erasure leaves a mark, and the form is that knowledge made physical: each scene is one sheet on which earlier states are rubbed out and still show, so every frame carries the ghost of the frames before it. In cel animation, in live film or in a set of finished drawings the theme would become a statement about memory instead of an act of it. The landscape changes by the eraser’s pressure, at the speed of a man drawing: land under someone’s hand, which is the political claim. A desk becomes a city, a cat a telephone, a body the veld, because one mark serves each in turn. Only the sound and the episodic sequence are less necessary than the drawn surface.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would another form say this? It would not. The pair of folding screens is the knowledge. The two screens make the two powers separate objects facing each other; the gap of the hinge is the gap of the sky; the folding of the panels in standing use advances and recesses the figures, so that the gods seem to lean out of the gold; and the gold leaf turns light into the substance of the sky, changing with the light of the room. On a hanging scroll the confrontation becomes a pattern; lit evenly, the gold becomes a background. The cropping needs a format with edges that stand in space. Kōrin’s copy, which moves the figures in from the edges, shows by contrast how much of the meaning lay in the placement.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the knowledge is the form. A record about a self withdrawing from speech is built of songs that end before their choruses, a voice that enters late or not at all, and then a side with no words. Sound and Vision’s vocal waits through most of its first half, as its subject waits. Warszawa’s invented language is speech without meaning, voice kept and sense removed. The harmonised drums make rhythm sound broken and machine-made at once. The sequence is counted here, once: the personal fragments yield through a wordless bridge to the impersonal and the collective, and the near-equal sides weigh equally. What in the World and Weeping Wall, where the form serves without enacting, hold it short of the top.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a form: put the same halls, in the same order and colour, on dry ground, and the building stops being able to say nearly everything it says. It can no longer stand as a guest on the threshold of a sacred island; the approach by boat through a gate in the sea becomes a walk through a gate on a path; the tide no longer turns it twice a day from a palace on the sea to a structure on posts over mud. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: the low height keeps the building beneath the mountain and close to the water, the corridors make the visit a passage over the sea, and the platform faces the gate so that worship looks outward to the threshold. Held a step below the top because the halls, one by one, are of received types.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and ask what the house can no longer say. Almost everything. Make the walls opaque and pierced with windows and it becomes a house overlooked or a house in shadow; the translucent wall is how it knows privacy and light together. Fix the partitions and it becomes a clinic or a home, not each by turns; the moving screens are how it knows the passage of a day. Close the section and the salon loses the light that crosses it from the courtyard wall to the library. Hide the frame and the house no longer shows how it stands under the storey above. Form is the instrument of the knowledge from section to hinge. Held just below the very top because some fittings are form as display rather than form as knowledge.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the knowledge is the form. A record about a voice seeking grace in a space far larger than itself is built of sound placed in silence, of a voice set low and indistinct among the instruments, of pieces whose shape is decided by the edit rather than by verse and chorus. Ascension Day’s cut is the form’s sharpest statement: the frenzy does not resolve, it is ended, and the listener is left in the silence with what was not completed. New Grass’s refusal to build to a climax is its content, patience made audible. Held a step from the top only at Taphead, where the form serves its slowness without wholly enacting it.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that lives repeat across generations without their owners seeing it. The parallel cut of father and daughter retracing a first love at the same hour is the knowledge itself; neither knows of the other’s evening, and only the form can set them side by side. The ensemble is the instrument of the second truth, that each sees a part: no strand is privileged, and the camera stands back, outside a window or behind glass, as if it too saw only the backs of heads. Yang-Yang’s method is made the film’s. The frame of three rites makes a year stand for a life. Held off the top where the form contains rather than shapes: the business strand and the Fatty plot keep a conventional dramatic grammar.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in duration: hope that arrives only after long waiting, and force that exists only as many players gathered. Cut Monheim to four minutes and its climax is an effect; at its length it is a vigil kept. The recorded voices place the music in real streets, so that the ensemble answers a world, not a mood. The sequence argues too: the record begins at its summit, descends, rises again in Sleep, and disperses before its last climax. Only the crescendo’s return on every side, and the arranged passages of Static and the last side, hold it short.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The grid is the knowledge of mass production: the face supplied in units, each the same and different only where the process falters. The silkscreen is the knowledge of the photograph as public property: no likeness made, a likeness reproduced. The out-of-register colour is the knowledge of the mask: lips and eyelids slip off the face they paint. The two panels are the knowledge of death in the image: one screen, one half dressed and one left to fade. A single Marilyn knows the icon and not the consumption; a painted Marilyn knows a likeness and not a product. Held below the top because the count is permitted rather than compelled, and the movement is legible only across the whole, so that the parts, studied, say less than the sum.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Shot in a real town, it would be a crime story about a showman; painted, it is a world as a mind perceives it, and every lean of a wall is knowledge of that mind. The frame is the instrument: the viewer has been inside the narrator’s perception for an hour before learning he is an inmate, and then finds the asylum courtyard painted and distorted in the same way, so that the frame extends the uncertainty to the doctor instead of returning the viewer to a sane world. The acts move from the open fair to the closed cell, the space narrowing with the knowledge. The cost: the fixed camera is partly the period’s habit, and the procedural scenes are container more than instrument.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The strongest axis. Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how a mind holding all of time at once would hold a life. Its means is the cut: images of Hannah intercut with the present are read as memory because cinema has taught its audience to read them so, and the film uses that habit as its argument, so that the viewer’s own grammar is the one the visitors are rewriting. Chiang’s novella does this with tense; the film does it with montage, and the equivalent is exact and the film’s own. The circular logogram, without beginning or end, is the shape of the edit. Held a step from the top because, once the turn is made, the closing sequence explains it.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the bridge stops knowing what it knows. A fixed arch of the same span would carry the load and hide the release the hinges give; a solid arch would carry it and lose the reading of the box; a steel truss would cross the gorge and say nothing of concrete’s power to be shell, wall and slab at once. What the bridge knows, that deck and arch can work as one section and that a profile can be the diagram of its own bending, exists only in this form. Use is lived through it as well: the narrow deck, the open views on both sides, the thinness felt by someone walking across. What holds the figure is that passage is not changed in kind by the form; the form changes how the crossing is seen more than how it is lived.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work can say nothing. The knowledge of the nkondi is its accumulation: a community’s agreements and grievances are not depicted on it, they are driven into it. A painting of a nail figure, a carved figure with carved nails, or a list of oaths would each lose the thing itself: that each settlement is a physical act on one body, permanent and visible to all, and that the force grows with each. The form enacts the threat as well: the medicine is sealed inside, behind the mirror, and the iron faces out. Few works anywhere make form so completely the instrument of what they know; the form is the institution. Held at 9.0 and not higher because on many figures the carved body is subordinate and generic, and only the head and the accretion carry the knowledge.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Paint it with a brush and the line becomes drawing, deliberate and of the wrist; the work would know composition, not an act. Make it small and the field becomes an object seen whole, a pattern, and the body’s scale and the eye’s loss of edge go with it. Give it a centre and the equality of every part, which is its knowledge of order, is gone. Remove the layering and the depth without perspective goes too, dark behind pale and dark in front of it. Held a step below the top because the form completes a method the painter had found and practised for three years, and part of what this canvas knows, the method already knew.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and nothing of the work remains: what the canvas knows is the reduction, and the reduction is the form. A square, because it is the least directional shape, neither landscape nor portrait; black, the absence of colour and light; centred in white, so that it is a figure, the first figure, and not a monochrome field; brushed by hand, so that it is a made thing and not a diagram. Form is the instrument of the knowledge. Two things hold it from the top. Part of what the form knew was its position: in the corner it was an icon, and that knowledge belonged to the hang, now lost. And the form can be stated, as it was in a pamphlet, and remade, as the later versions show, so the knowledge is not wholly bound to this surface.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely, at every point tested. Make it smaller and it can be seen whole and becomes an object; its knowledge depends on exceeding the eye. Let the tips follow the ground and the land is no longer measured; the single level plane is the instrument by which every rise and dip becomes visible. Put it in a gallery and there is no weather and no horizon. Photograph it and the photograph shows a storm, the one thing the work does not promise. Take away the night and the dissolving and reappearing of the grid, the work’s chief event, goes unseen. Held at 9.0 because the cabin and the arrangements of a visit, though necessary, are administered conditions as much as form.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: that one harmonic cycle can be both a moment and an hour. The form is the instrument of that knowledge. The eleven chords are heard first as the opening, a few minutes long, and then each is held for a section, so the opening is the whole work compressed and the whole work is the opening slowed. The pulse the length of a breath makes the body the measure of the phrase, which a written phrase length would lose; the cueing makes the players’ listening the form’s joints. Recast as eleven separate pieces, the cycle and its return would go; with fixed lengths, the work would stop being a process its players enact. The joint is inside the sections, where some build-ups are containers the chord fills.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The question is put to two young men, Plato’s brothers, whose own souls are the stake: Glaucon, who wants the pleasures the first city lacks (it is the “huōn polin”
“city of pigs”, 372d), has the temper the book diagnoses. The narrated frame puts the whole in the mode Book III calls mixed, part narration and part imitation, so that the book enacts the theory it states. The images admit that the dialectic which would know the good is not to hand: Socrates gives the good’s offspring, the sun, not the good. A treatise would lose the irony and the turn to myth. Held below 9.0 because from Book II the dialogue thins to assent, and much of II to V and VIII could be set as exposition and lose only manner.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
The nested telling is the instrument of the knowledge. Every layer is told to someone who must act on it: the war is narrated to the blind king who could have prevented it, by a charioteer given divine sight, so that every battle reaches us as a father’s loss; the whole is recited to Janamejaya, great-grandson of Arjuna, at a sacrifice of revenge on the serpents, which is halted, as the war was not. The author appears in his own work as grandfather, witness and fixer of the succession, so authorship becomes complicity. The Gītā’s dialogue, set in the stopped moment before battle, is the form of decision itself, and the books of teaching are given by a dying man to a victor who would rather not rule. Substitute a linear epic and the work can no longer say that its hearers are inside the chain of consequence. Held below 9.0 because the open frame admits matter the form does not shape, and the joins show: doubled episodes, ages and journeys that do not agree, books that end and begin again.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narration never leaves Winston, so the book knows only what a citizen of Oceania can know: whether the Brotherhood exists, whether Big Brother lives and what year it is are never settled, and the reader is deceived exactly as Winston is, by Charrington and by O’Brien. The surveillance is the form. Told from outside, the book would be a report on a state; told from inside one skull, it is the experience of being watched and then entered. The three parts move from the mind alone, to the mind with one other, to the mind taken; and the last sentence, “He loved Big Brother.”, is the narration’s own close third person turned into the Party’s language, the interior abolished from within. Held off the top because the Goldstein tract is a container set inside the novel, an essay the form carries rather than one it requires to be shaped this way.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Substitute another form and the building can no longer say what it knows: that every direction leads to a grave under heaven. Michelangelo’s core knows it, and the core governs the space. Four piers carry one dome over the tomb, the arms and apses gather to the crossing, and under the dome no direction outranks another. The nave postpones that knowledge; it does not replace it. And the form changed how the purpose is lived: the Mass at the altar over the tomb, the processions down the nave, the blessing urbi et orbi from the central loggia, the piazza gathering the crowd as one congregation. Held below the top by the joint: the building learns its centre only at the crossing.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, at the frame. Told as a treatise, the teaching that the seeker is the sought would be a proposition; told as a journey of many birds who dwindle to thirty, it is an experience the reader undergoes, and the number is the meaning, since only a remnant can arrive and the remnant’s number is the king’s name. The bird is the instrument: a soul with wings and a habit, so that the excuses are speech in character. The anecdote is the instrument of the middle, each question answered by a story, so that the poem teaches as a master teaches, by example. Held off the top because the middle’s form is a container more than an instrument: the chain of question and story could run for fewer stations or more and say what it says.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its knowledge is of a will that cannot act and does not yield, and the form is immobility: the protagonist nailed to the rock for the whole performance, every action brought to him, his only deeds words, silence and refusal. His silence through the prologue, while others nail him, is the first statement of it. The secret is the second instrument: the plot moves only by what he will and will not say. The visitors are graded as answers to him: Oceanus counsels yielding, Io suffers without knowing why, Hermes serves. “hekōn hekōn hēmarton, ouk arnēsomai”
“Willingly, willingly I erred, I will not deny it” (about 266). Held off the top by the Io scene’s exposition and an open end that leans on a sequel the form does not contain.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narration stays at K.’s shoulder, and the change Kafka made in the manuscript, from “ich” to “K.”, kept the restriction and gained the distance. So the castle is known only by testimony, and neither K. nor the reader can test any account against another. Give the book an omniscient narrator who enters the castle and it stops knowing what it knows: that authority is what is said of it. The long speeches are the instrument, not padding in principle; each is a hearing in which K. is examined and examines, and each closes with a new reason why nothing can be done. The deferral that is the subject is the shape. Held below the top on two charges: the open end is partly accident rather than form, since Brod reported that Kafka had told him of an ending the book never reaches; and in the late chapters the speeches become a container for more of the same.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Without the frame the hundred would be an anthology; with it they are acts of a society, told in turn under a ruler, the hearers’ laughter and blushes recorded, so that the book’s claim, that narrative is how a people recovers order and pleasure in the face of death, is enacted, not stated. The order of the themes gives the hundred a direction, from Fortune to magnificence. Dioneo’s privilege builds licence into law, so that the most indecent tale and the most troubling come from one licensed voice. The chastity of the company against the licence of its tales is the form’s own argument about telling and doing. Held below the top: within a day the order of the tales is often loose, and the ballate are conventional in themselves.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The interlace is the argument: from the third book the war and the Ring are told apart, so that the reader follows Helm’s Deep and the Pelennor knowing that none of it matters unless two hobbits beyond the mountains go on walking, and knows, as the captains at the Black Gate do not, how near the end is. The point of view climbs register by register from the Shire’s voice to Gondor’s, so the high world is seen by those who do not belong to it. The long aftermath knows that victory does not restore. Held off the top because the first book’s form is long a container, and the interlace of the last two books doubles back awkwardly in time.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its episodes are divided like frames of film; it ends in a cinema where the film has broken and a rocket stands over the roof, so that the reader is revealed as the audience under the warhead. Its structure is the rocket’s: a long climb through three parts and a fragmenting descent in the fourth, where Slothrop’s dispersal is carried by the narration’s own breaking into short titled pieces. It trains its reader in paranoia, demanding connections it will not confirm, so that reading becomes the condition the book discloses, and it sets Mexico’s chance against Pointsman’s cause in the plot itself. The cost: the fourth part’s dissolution, though designed, loses more than the design needs, and the third part’s episodes do not press the argument equally.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. A family that cannot name its own members is told in pieces that do not name each other. “Was” gives the comic surface of 1859, a poker hand played for a slave woman with Tomey’s Turl dealing, without telling who Turl is; the ledger in “The Bear” tells it, long after; “Delta Autumn” makes the same blood return in a tent; the last part brings a body home to a family the white town cannot see as one. The reader learns the genealogy as Isaac does, by reading entries out of order: the book’s form is the ledger. The fourth section, an unbroken block, is the form of an argument that cannot reach a period. Held below 9.0 because “Pantaloon” and the farce of “The Fire and the Hearth” still read as stories brought in.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A third-person life of Adrian could keep most of the matter, and Zeitblom is sometimes a convenience for lectures; that burden is real and holds the axis below the top. But the humanist telling the daemonic, with love and without the means to judge it, is itself the disclosure: the decent German who sees and cannot stop it. The double time sets each stage of the damnation beside a report from the war, the bombing of Munich, the invasion, the camps opened to the townspeople, so that the allegory is made by juxtaposition and not by statement. Chapter XXV, given as Adrian’s own document and not as Zeitblom’s account, keeps the devil unprovable: hallucination or visit, the form will not say. And the novel is built as its own subject, a strict and total construction in which every motif is a row, so that the book is what Adrian’s art is, and pays the same price in warmth.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. What it knows is the cost of a defence, and only duration can carry that. The hour of recruitment means the dead are men the viewer has watched chosen. The planning on the map makes the battle legible: the flooded fields, the bridge, the houses given up. Kambei’s scroll makes attrition visible, circle by circle. In the rain the form itself breaks down into confusion as the discipline is tested. And the frame, harvest to planting, is the shape of the argument that the land outlasts the sword. Held below the top because underneath this is classical narrative cinema, and much of the first part, the town and the comedy, is in conventional scene grammar, a container rather than an instrument.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the panel loses much of what it knows: that the whole and its failure are made of an endless number of correct small acts. This form holds both scales at once. From a standing distance the tower is a single mass leaning in cloud; at the distance of a hand the surface is a field of separate tasks, each legible, none aware of the whole. A print would keep the drawing and lose the atmosphere that sets the mass in air; a larger canvas would lose the miniaturist’s scale that makes each labourer a figure. The high viewpoint is knowledge too: the king stands below and sees less than the viewer does. Held below the top because the foreground group, larger and differently scaled, sits on the form somewhat as a separate scene.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The suppliant form sets the hero at a boundary he must not cross, the grove’s edge marked by a rock, and makes him wait while the world comes to him: the stillness is the argument, since a man who could once move nothing proves to be the thing every party must move. Then the form breaks at the thunder. The blind man who has been led by the hand for the whole play stands and leads, and the drama of sight that was Oedipus Tyrannus is answered in staging, not in words. The end is told, not shown, by a messenger who did not see it: the play knows that death cannot be witnessed, and only Theseus saw, and he cannot say. Held off the top by the middle, where the suppliant mechanism is a container rather than an instrument.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The ghazal is not Rumi’s form; he uses it as given, and much of what the Divan says is said again in the couplets of the Masnavi. But inside the poem the form is the knowledge. The radif, the refrain word at the end of every couplet, becomes a turning: “koja-id, koja-id”, “biya-id, biya-id”, the poem circling one word as the dancer circles one point. The metre, taken from the fast and stressed measures, makes the poem a thing done with the body. The signature given to Shams makes the self lost in the beloved a fact of the form; khamush closes the form by silencing it. Put these poems into narrative or prose and they can no longer show a self undone as it speaks. Below the top because the larger form, the Divan as a book, was never made.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. “Quiet Night Thought” knows what it knows through its parallel couplet: 舉頭 and 低頭, the head raised and the head lowered, moon and home in one motion, the frost mistaken in the second line prepared by the light in the first. In prose it is a homesick man looking up. “Departing Baidi at Dawn” is one breath of twenty-eight characters with none repeated: the boat has passed ten thousand mountains before the gibbons on both banks have stopped crying, and the poem’s speed is its subject. Shu dao nan has the road’s form, its lines lurching from three characters to more than ten, the cry returning as refrain; Jiang jin jiu staggers in the metre of drink. Held off the top because many poems across the body use a received form in the received way, as a container: the form is the instrument in the best hundred, not in the thousand.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The unities are a rule, and a rule can contain a play without knowing anything. Here the rule knows. One hall, one day, and four people who cannot leave it: the closed room is the closed chain, and every scene is a demand made of someone who wants someone else. The alexandrine couplet, two halves weighed against each other, is the grammar of a love that cannot tell itself from its opposite. The récit is form as knowledge: the killing at the altar is not seen but told, by Oreste to the woman who ordered it, so that what is watched is not the death but its reception. An open stage with the deaths shown would lose exactly that. Held below the top by the plotted reversals of the third act, which turn on mechanism as much as on form.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. A play can make its audience share the doubt as narration cannot: the spectator watches Segismundo wake in the palace knowing it is real, then watches him wake in the tower and be told it was a dream, and is left in his place, unable to say which waking to trust. The shape of tower, palace, tower and then the world enacts the argument’s two trials and its conclusion. The verse forms are functional: décimas for the soul, romance for the narratives of fact, silva for the violent arrival. Rosaura moves from disguise to recovered name as Segismundo moves from beast to king. Held below the top by machinery the argument does not need, the sword token and the convenient paternity, and by court scenes that carry exposition rather than knowledge.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. In the hymn the time-structure is the meaning: a present plea frames a remembered epiphany, inside which the goddess names a past pattern and predicts its return, so that the poem enacts the recurrence it discloses, three tenses folded into one prayer. In fragment 31 the movement from a sentence of observation to a run of short clauses is the body failing; that the stanza of the broken tongue is also the most broken in transmission is an accident and is not credited. The adonic, a short fall after three long lines, closes each stanza like a caught breath, and fragment 16’s priamel makes its argument by its order. Held off the top because the form of most of the body, and the shape of the books, cannot now be judged.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The rhyme royal stanza is the instrument of the poem’s deliberation: each stanza turns a thought, closes on its couplet, and lets the next reconsider, which is how Criseyde decides and how the narrator hesitates. The narrator is form become knowledge: a teller who says he only follows his author, serves the servants of the God of Love and cannot know his heroine’s heart makes the reader’s uncertainty about her the poem’s subject. The five books follow the wheel, and the turn falls where the fourth book’s proem addresses Fortune. “The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen” (I.1) is a plan executed. Held off the top because the closing stanzas append frames the form has not prepared.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute the masonry original, which exists, and much of what the work knows is lost. A built temple rises from level ground; this one is reached by going down into a pit and then climbing, so worship is lived as a descent into the earth and an ascent into the god’s house. A built temple is assembled; this one is one stone, the god’s mountain a single body, and the court that freed it is part of the experience, its cliffs a cloister and a horizon. Circumambulation is doubled, on the floor of the court under the cliffs and on the upper terrace among the subsidiary shrines. Held below the top because pillars, beams and roof storeys carried over from building say “built” in a work that was cut.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. A novel about forgery is made, openly, of other books: quotation and allusion enter unmarked, so that the reader is made a connoisseur who must tell the borrowed from the made. The parties are rendered as overlapping fragments of talk with no governing voice, which is what a society of copies sounds like. The plot is built of near-meetings, characters crossing in the same rooms without recognising one another, so that the failed recognition is the shape of the book and not only its theme. Held off the top because the form is not equally instrumental throughout: many of the satirical episodes inside the frame are containers rather than instruments, and the third part’s movement to Spain is told more conventionally than what precedes it.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The dialogue’s thesis is that persuading crowds by speeches is flattery and that only question and answer between two people can produce knowledge; the form enacts the thesis and tests it. Gorgias, master of the long speech, is made to answer briefly; Polus, who imitates his teacher’s jingling style in his first speech (448c), cannot hold the short form; Callicles answers only to oblige Gorgias and at last refuses, and Socrates is left to question himself. The myth comes when argument has done what it can, and the dialogue says why. A treatise could state the four flatteries; it could not show the method failing to persuade the one man who most needs it. Held below 9.0 by the inconsistent dramatic date, a form left loose.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The narration is in Aschenbach’s own style, measured, dignified and classical, the style the second chapter praises; it is therefore the instrument of the fall as well as its record, and as he loses himself the prose keeps its composure, which is the horror. In the fifth chapter the narrator steps back and judges, in the moral tone Aschenbach himself had used of others, so that the form performs the doubleness of form the book discusses. The five chapters fall like the acts of a tragedy, with the turn in the third and the catastrophe in the fifth, and the leitmotifs bind them. A novel would explain; a lyric would not judge; the novella in this voice does both and lets each undercut the other. Held below 9 because the essay of the second chapter is container more than instrument.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes, because the work knows what it knows as the walls of the room where the Nine sat. The governors were placed between the two possible cities, their choices on either side of them. Fresco binds the image to the building: the city is painted inside the city’s own palace, and the view of the country runs the length of a wall as the road runs out of the gate. Allegory on the short wall and observation on the long wall is the form of the argument itself, cause in figures and effect in the world. On a panel or in a book the cycle would be a treatise with pictures. Held below the top because the north wall depends on its labels and comes close to a diagram.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The endnotes interrupt the reading every few pages and send it to the back of the book and back, so that reading becomes a recursion, the motion of a habit. The chronology is broken and the climax withheld: the book begins in the Year of Glad, with Hal already beyond speech, and ends earlier, leaving the events that connect them, the digging up of the father’s head among them, for the reader to reconstruct. A novel about a pleasure that asks nothing is built so that it cannot be consumed without work. The braiding of the academy on the hill and the recovery house below it makes the parallel between discipline and addiction structural. Held off the top because many episodes inside the frame are containers rather than instruments, and the satirical future could be stripped out with less loss than the form’s defenders claim.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute a basilica and the building stops knowing what it knows. In a nave the congregation faces an end; here it stands in a ring round a centre seen through screens, in a hierarchy of nearness: people in the ambulatory, women and the court in the gallery, clergy in the presbytery, the heaven of the dome over a place where none of them stands. No one sees the whole at once; the building is learned by walking, the sacred known as what is glimpsed and approached. The presbytery turns the centre toward the altar and sets the court’s image at the place of the offering, so that liturgy and empire become one procession. Held below the top by centre against axis: the form gathers the eye to the middle, the liturgy sends it to the apse, the narthex adds a third direction, and the three are carried, not resolved.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. Told forward, the book would be the story of how a Bronx boy became a man of systems; told backward, it is an excavation in which every layer is a deposit of the one below, as the landfill is, and the reader digs down to the gun and the lost father knowing what they became. The three interludes of Manx Martin run the other way, so that the ball goes forward while the life goes back, and the two meet at the book’s end in the same months. The prologue, a crowd’s day, and the epilogue, a web of linked documents, frame the half-century as two kinds of collective, the stadium and the network. Held off the top because within the parts the form is looser than the frame: several sections are self-contained episodes that another arrangement would hold as well, and the prologue’s separate life shows the modularity.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The form is the argument. A work about a register that converts persons into standing is narrated by a voice the register converts, deepest at night, and released only in the interludes, which are written from outside the sovereign in a plain prose the apparatus never reaches. Change the form and the knowledge goes: the interview can take his cadence only because the narration has already been taken; the archive can leave Ariadne’s fields blank only because the book has taught the reader what a filled field costs. The kingdom’s own instruments do the work, a hand-ruled form of three lines for the woman lost on the first page, Under Name he wrote nothing. Under Address he wrote the square. Held below the highest band because the fourth volume’s decrees and catalogues often restate in the apparatus what a scene has already enacted.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the strongest songs lose what they know. “Heroin” has no fixed tempo because its subject is the rush and the ebb; at a steady pulse it would describe the drug instead of enacting it. “I’m Waiting for the Man” never lets its piano chords change pace, so the song is the waiting and the walk. In “Venus in Furs” the drone and the single-pitched guitar are the bond and the viola is the lash. “All Tomorrow’s Parties” repeats because the parties do; “European Son” ends in dissolution, not cadence. Held from the top: “Run Run Run” and “There She Goes Again” are containers, not instruments.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes: without its darkened orchestra it loses the weight of the grave. The Confutatis is a form that thinks: male and female choirs in alternation, fierce and tender, stage the separation of the damned from the saved, and the modulating “Oro supplex” enacts the self’s descent before the Lacrimosa. The Tuba mirum moves from cosmic summons to the single voice and back to company. The ring makes the whole form an argument: rest and light, asked for at the start, are asked for again at the end with the same music, unanswered and unchanged, and the prayer returns from “me” to “them”. What holds the axis is Süssmayr’s Sanctus, Benedictus and Hosanna, conventional forms correctly filled, and the Hosanna’s return in a key not its own.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Five parts approach one city from five distances, Europe’s academy, an exile’s breakdown, an American journalist, the police record, a German life across the century, so that Santa Teresa is reached by every route and explained by none. The crimes part’s repetition is the instrument of its knowledge: the reader learns numbness, then is ashamed of it. The critics never find Archimboldi and the reader does, so the book knows something its seekers do not: the author they want is not where literature lives but where the killing is. The withheld solution is the book’s knowledge of impunity; solve one murder and it becomes a thriller. Held off the top because the parts are semi-autonomous, each able to stand as a book of its own, and because the Fate part’s form serves the whole less closely than the others.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A theatre’s half circle faces its audience to a stage; the amphitheatre’s ellipse turns the audience on itself, so that the people watch the spectacle and watch themselves watching, and the emperor is a spectator in full view. The form changes what a public is: a crowd that sees itself as one body, ranked. The long axis gives pursuit and combat room; the closed ring gives no exit to the animals or the condemned, so that the form is also the trap. It has carried other uses since, as fortress, quarry, shrine and monument, and as the type of the stadium. Held below the top because the form is the type’s, and its use is gone.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Shorten the nave and the coronation, a rite of procession, loses its length and its approach. Change the west front and the threshold stops being double, glass where the door’s story should be and figures facing in as well as out. Take the angels from the buttresses and the city loses its guard, and the structure its reason to be seen. In these places the form is the instrument of the knowledge. It is less so in the general body of the church, the High Gothic cathedral in its common form, which would serve another see as well; what is Reims’s own lies in the front, the coronation axis and the buttresses.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the strongest songs lose what they know. The quiet-loud song is the record’s argument: a murmured, numb verse and a screamed chorus hold apathy and rage as one feeling at two volumes, and at a steady dynamic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would no longer know that the shrug and the scream are the same act. “Polly” is acoustic and almost uninflected, so the predator stays ordinary; “Something in the Way” is nearly whispered, so the outcast’s song cannot be heard as a performance to a crowd. Each side ends quiet after loud, the song’s form at the scale of the side. What holds it short of the top: the sequence is front-loaded, and the fast tracks are containers.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. What it knows is the equality of keys, and that is said only by the cycle: a set of twelve or twenty would claim nothing, and the full twenty-four, in order, is the argument. The pair says the second thing, that free invention and strict imitation belong together. Inside the fugues the form is the instrument: in the C sharp minor fugue the gathering of five voices is the growth of the piece, and in the B minor fugue a chromatic subject makes fugue the form of something like doubt, every pitch present and none secure. Held below the top because within the cycle the form is a collection: substitute one piece and the book knows the same.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Lengthen the hall and the one congregation becomes a nave with a head and a tail. Close the tympana and the even light that makes every place in the room equal is gone. Take the tombs from behind the qibla and prayer no longer passes toward the founder and the garden. The forecourt, arcaded in the same domed unit as the hall, makes assembly before prayer part of the prayer: the form is the instrument by which a Friday is lived here. Held short of the top because the instrument is largely inherited: the two-semidome section that gives the hall its axis was Hagia Sophia’s before it was this building’s, and some of what the form knows belongs to the type.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Put this content in another form and the record loses most of what it knows, because its knowledge is in the sound. The managed self of the seventh track is spoken by a machine, and that is the meaning: on paper the list would be satire, on record it is a verdict. The machine has already spoken a line in the second track; at the hinge it takes the microphone. The sequence is itself form: six songs, the hinge, then five falling from frantic to still. The sixth track’s loss of self is acted out by its own guitar, the tenth is a lullaby because its subject is sedation, and the last is slow because it asks for slowness. What holds it short of the top: the eighth and eleventh are conventional songs, and the form matters less there.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The book argues that the world appears as perception makes it, and the book is a perception made by hand. On plate 14 Blake names his own process, printing “in the infernal method, by corrosives”, which melt “apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid”: the acid that bites the copper to raise the letters is the cleansing of the doors of perception, and the reader holds the result. The mixed form is the contraries in practice, the Devil’s voice against the Angel’s, aphorism against vision, prose against song, each correcting the other, so that “Opposition is true Friendship” is a law of the form as well as a saying. Typeset as a treatise the book would be a manifesto; set as verse it would lose the satire. Held off the top by the loose sequence of the middle plates.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The three scaffolds make the book’s argument as architecture: the first exposes one of the pair, the second unites the three in secret at night, the third in public by day, and the progress from hidden to shown is the moral the book argues. The romance form, which the sketch defines as “a Neutral Territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet”, is the instrument of its central knowledge: that a sign’s meaning is made by the eye that reads it, so every marvel must be kept between fact and interpretation. The frame enacts the same knowledge on its author, who finds the faded letter in an attic, feels it burn on his breast, and is himself put out of office, the “decapitated Surveyor”. Held below the top because the narrator’s glosses sometimes step outside the form to tell what it shows.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. As separate prints on a wall the pictures are strong single images, many of them, but the book’s knowledge is relational: that the flag recurs, that the jukebox and the television answer each other, that a funeral follows a party, that the dead beside U.S. 66 lie a few pages from the shrouded car at Long Beach. The viewer moves from picture to picture without being told, with nothing but a place name, as a reader moves from stanza to stanza. The grain of the 35mm negative, the oblique frame and the available light are themselves the knowledge of a country seen in passing. The Paris edition is the test: the same images, set beside texts about America, become illustrations of an essay. Held below the top because many single plates keep much of their knowledge out of sequence.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Here the form is the knowledge. Turn “Andrea del Sarto” into a third-person account and the self-deception becomes a narrator’s verdict; in the monologue it is enacted, and the reader convicts Andrea out of his own mouth while feeling the pull of his excuse. Blougram’s apology depends on its auditor, the journalist Gigadibs. Karshish’s letter lets the physician’s scruples betray his fascination in their very order of topics: herbs, then Lazarus, then herbs, then Lazarus. The single six-line stanza of “Childe Roland”, its rhymes returning like the knight’s tread, makes the waste land inescapable. “One Word More”, in unrhymed trochaic pentameter, is the form as dedication. Held below 9.0 because the book’s own form, a miscellany ordered without a strong design, adds little to what the poems know singly; the dispersal of 1863 shows how loosely the whole was held.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the rite changes. A centralised martyrium would gather pilgrims at a point; this plan makes them move. The ambulatory turns arrival into circulation, the galleries hold the overflow above, and the crypt and the stair behind the altar give the two gestures of the cult, to descend to the body and to embrace the image, their own paths. The narthex makes entry a passage under judgement rather than a doorway. The Obradoiro and its stair set the threshold high above the plaza, so that the end of the road is a climb. Four façades on four plazas make the building the city’s form. Held below the top because some of the later shell is container rather than instrument.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute the pyramid of the commemorative monument, Eustache at its apex and the others grouped below him in rising lines, and the work would know the opposite of what it knows: a hero and his followers, sacrifice made glorious, the town looking up. Substitute a relief or a painting and the circuit goes, and with it the knowledge that each man is alone and that no view gives the whole. The dispersed ring on a low base, with no centre and no front, is the instrument of the content: it makes the viewer walk among the condemned and meet them one by one, and the gaps between them, which no one closes, state their solitude. The modelling of each body as a state of mind is form as knowledge. Held under 9 because the arrangement was not fixed by the figures themselves, and a setting can undo half of it.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The six alternating lines of the octave build a feeling and the couplet turns on it, and that turn is the poem’s way of knowing: the mind’s mobility enacted eight lines at a time. “What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, / Is much more common where the climate’s sultry” (I.63): the double rhyme makes the deflation itself the knowledge. “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, / Sermons and soda-water the day after” (II.178) does the same with a whole morality. In prose, blank verse or couplets the satire could be stated, but not the hovering between sincerity and irony that is the subject. The serial form, the narrator answering his reviewers canto by canto, is part of what it knows. What holds it a step down is the large architecture: a sequence, not a shape.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Two parts of eighteen chapters, the first of the attractions forming and the second of their consequences, are the experiment and its result. The chemical formula decides the cast: four persons, two pairs, one exchange. In the second part the extracts from Ottilie’s diary give the one who speaks least an interior that is never confessional: maxims where a heroine of sensibility would pour herself out, so that her inwardness is shown as restraint. The inset novella of the neighbours’ children, brought together by a near drowning, who live, is the same configuration resolved the other way, a control set beside the experiment. Held below 9.0 because the diary sometimes carries what the form does not need, and the middle of the second part loosens the frame.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. A novel would narrate the decline continuously and explain it; the play shows four moments years apart and leaves the decisive events in the gaps, so that the audience experiences what the sisters experience, time passing without anyone choosing it. The seasonal shape, spring name day, winter carnival, night of fire, autumn departure, is the law of the action. The polyphonic dialogue, where one person’s hope and another’s indifference sound in the same moment, is the form of the disclosure. The space narrows from drawing room to bedroom to the garden outside a house the sisters no longer own in any sense that matters. Held below 9 by a few scenes of plain exposition, Vershinin’s second speech and Kulygin’s Latin among them.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The Panther’s bars are in the metre: the regular iambic line paces, the run-on from “der Stäbe” to “so müd” is the gaze sliding past them, and the short last line of the third stanza is the image dying. “Römische Fontäne” is one sentence that overflows its lines as the water overflows the basins. The Torso’s sonnet makes its turn the moment of being seen. “Das Karussell” brings its refrain round as the animals come round. The thing poem is by conception a form in which the shape is the meaning, and at its best the book proves it. Held off the top because across so many poems the method sometimes becomes manner, and a number of sonnets carry their matter rather than know it.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The sonnet is the most closed of lyric forms, and Rilke fills it with a content whose whole claim is that nothing should be held closed. The fourteen lines are a figure of the rose of I.5, which blooms each year and passes, and of song, which exists only while it is sung. The turn between octave and sestet carries, again and again, the turn from lament to praise. The sequence form bears weight too: a single elegy would have made the dead girl its subject; fifty-five sonnets let her become one presence among horse, fruit, fountain and machine, which is what the book says the dead become. Held off the top because in the lesser sonnets the form is a container, and the turn is made because sonnets turn.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this is happening to anyone, on these streets, now, and that no story will rescue it. Faces that belong to no actor give Antonio no star’s immunity. Real streets put the theft inside a city that does not stop for it, so indifference is shown by crowds who merely continue. A few days and one Sunday make the stake exactly a job. The camera stays at walking distance, often a step behind father and son, so the viewer walks with them rather than above them. Made a studio melodrama, the knowledge would become pathos. The cost is the score, a container for feeling rather than an instrument of it.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. The gold ground is the instrument: there is no room, no horizon, no air, so that the space between angel and Virgin is not a distance in a house but a distance in heaven’s own light, and the word crosses it in that light. Raised words could not exist in this way in oil or in fresco: they are built of gesso and gold, part of the ground they cross. The width of the central field is used as the measure of her withdrawal; she pulls to the right edge of her throne, and the empty gold between them is the hesitation. Line carries the feeling because nothing else is permitted to. Held below 9.0 because the polyptych and its saints are a container more than an instrument.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The movement from blank verse to lyric is the argument. Act I is the speech of a bound mind, measured and argumentative, held in the rocks of its own hatred; as the curse is withdrawn and Asia descends, the verse breaks into echoes and songs, and in Act IV the world speaks only in song, as if freedom were a change of prosody. The curse is recalled through a phantasm so that the hatred is heard outside the self. Demogorgon answers Asia’s catechism with oracles and silence because the truth is “imageless”. Asia’s song turns back through age and youth toward a birth beyond birth, the form enacting a return to origin. Held below 9.0 by Act III, where the change of the world is narrated in blank verse descriptions that any form could carry.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the film knows is lost. Its knowledge is that watching is complicity, and in film the viewer stands where Jeffrey stands: behind the slats, in the dark, looking at a lit rectangle. The closet is a cinema. The songs are agents, not decoration. “In Dreams” passes from Ben’s mime to Frank’s car tape and becomes Frank’s anthem; Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” bends from the town’s theme to Frank’s fetish to Dorothy’s sorrow. Only a medium of recorded sound can make one song change owners. Splet’s drones under the domestic rooms make the underworld audible where nothing is seen. Held a step below by what prose could keep: the plot, the triangle and the descent all survive outside film.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the icons came out of this. Three hours of a world without the paintings, in black and white, are followed by the paintings alone, in colour, with no people. Scenes of Andrei at work would make the art the hero; this form makes the world the source and the art its issue. The unequal episodes give a life lived among events that do not centre on the artist, and the long takes hold one man inside the crowd and the land. Held below the top because the Theophanes and Feast episodes contain an argument more than they enact it, and dialogue and image at times leave a seam.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
What the picture knows, it knows at this size and in this frieze. A small genre picture of a village funeral says nothing the Salon had not seen; the knowledge is that ordinary people at life size occupy the place of history, and only the format can say it. The frieze is the instrument: one ground line, no figure raised above another, no lit protagonist, so that the composition is itself an equality and a dispersal. The grave is set at the bottom edge, and the viewer stands at the graveside. The horizon of cliffs repeats the line of heads, so that the town and its land are one band. Substitute a pyramid, a heaven or a hero and the argument goes. Held below the top because the form is in places a crowding rather than a construction: the right side reads as a wall, and the depth of the space is compressed in a way partly decided and partly not.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play is built so that the audience knows from the prologue what Electra does not: that Orestes lives. Every scene after is watched across that gap, and the form is the knowledge, since only a form that holds the truth back from its heroine and gives it to its audience can show what grief, hope and hatred do to a mind working on a false report. Electra is kept before the audience for nearly the whole play, so that her endurance is the play’s duration. The late recognition sets her resolve to kill alone before she knows she has a brother, so that her will is shown as hers, not Orestes’. Held a little off the top by the messenger speech, the form’s most container-like stretch.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Would another form say the same? No. The contradictions of the space depend on line. An etched line can be the edge of one plane and the beginning of another; a beam can pass in front of a pier at one end and behind it at the other, because nothing in etching fixes depth but the eye’s assent. In paint, with colour and light to place things, the impossibility would be fixed and refuted. The etched black is the second instrument: the re-bitten plates of 1761 build darkness out of line, so that the dark is made as the prison is made. And sixteen plates are a system without boundary where one would be an image. Held from the top because a few plates would survive as drawings, and the order of the set carries little.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a ferry, a tunnel or a girder bridge and the traffic still crosses; what goes is the crossing as lived. The raised promenade makes going between two cities a walk in the air, above the vehicles, with the river beneath and a city on each side. The cables’ curve makes it an ascent and a descent; the towers make it a passage through gates; the web frames every view in moving lines. For the walker the harbour and the two cities are learned from the bridge. Held below the top because the roadway, the larger share of the use since the 1950s, is lived as a road. The turn to motor traffic, a campaign of the work’s own life, weighs here: the driver passes through the form unchanged by it, and the rail use the deck was built around is gone.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. The picture knows that the figures are found by light in darkness, that the sacred is not displayed but discovered, and that knowledge is the shadow and the cave. A drawn contour would set the figures before the dark; here they come out of it, their edges dissolving into shadow. The pyramid of the group, apex at the Virgin’s head, makes one body of four, and the vertical chain of hands through the centre makes the composition itself the gesture of protection, recognition and blessing. The upright arched format, made for an altar, gives height to the cave and depth behind the group. As a print the dark ground would lose its function; as a fresco it could not be built. Held a step below the top for the far landscape and the plants, form the knowledge does not strictly need, and for the darkened varnish, which hides some of the gradation the argument depends on.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a mind can be wholly deceived by what it most admires, and the form enacts it: the reader, kept close to Isabel, is given Osmond and Madame Merle much as she sees them, with only hints, as in chapter 40, where Isabel finds Merle standing while Osmond sits, a relation registered as an image before it is understood. The three-year gap is the form’s boldest act: what the marriage became is not shown but discovered, in chapter 42, as Isabel discovers it. A narrative told across those years would know less. The title is form as well: a portrait, a figure framed and looked at, which is what Osmond wants of her and what the novel refuses to leave her as. Held a step off the top by the looser chapters that hold The Inevitable.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The four acts make a circle: the play opens with Marina, the samovar and Astrov’s weariness, and closes with Marina, the knitting, the accounts and the carriages leaving, so the form itself says that nothing will change. The crisis is placed in the third act, where the old drama would put it, and the form then refuses its consequences: the fourth act is aftermath without resolution, and the refusal is the content. Dialogue at cross purposes, people talking past one another at one table, shows lives lived side by side without meeting. Told as a novel the story would explain Vanya; as this play it shows him only in what he does and fails to do. Held off the top by the expository passages of the first act.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. One room, never left, with a further room behind it: Hedda’s world is the set, and the inner room with the General’s portrait and the piano is where she retreats and where she dies. The play knows her confinement by confining its audience. Its other instrument is the withheld statement: no soliloquy, no confidant who hears the truth, and the meaning lives in objects and in what is said around them, the hat, the slippers, the stove she asks to have lit in the first act and uses in the third. Brack’s talk of a triangle is social banter and the plot’s actual geometry. Held off the top only by the residue of the well-made machinery, the coincidence of the dropped manuscript.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute the form of Chartres, three aisles, a transept and a tall clerestory over low aisles, and the building stops knowing what it knows: that the congregation is one space, seen across rather than down, lit from three heights at once. Here the form is how the purpose is lived. Processions move round the whole church without crossing a transept. A worshipper in the inner aisle stands in a tall lit room of its own and sees into the central vessel. The light falls in tiers, so that one stands always in the lower part of a brightness that climbs, and the double ambulatory makes the east end a turning, not a wall. Held below the top by the west front and the later chapels, and by a clerestory the section compresses.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the odes lose what they know. Their wisdom is measure, and the strict stanza is measure enacted: a feeling large enough to break a line is held inside a quantity that will not bend. Latin word order is the second instrument: 1.5 sets the slender boy inside the roses and the girl inside the grotto in the order of the words, so that the syntax holds the embrace it describes. The swerving close is the third: 3.3 breaks off its grand speech with the poet reining in his own lyre, restraint shown where it costs most. The ring of 1.1 and 3.30 in one metre makes the first collection a single built object. Held below 9.0 because in the slighter odes the form is a container more than knowledge.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. Its knowledge is weightlessness, the suspension of grief, and that is carried by the panel’s refusals: no cast shadows, no horizon, figures that would fall if the picture had space to fall in. Give it depth and ground, as del Sarto would, and it becomes an ordinary Lamentation. Its knowledge is also that the body is given to the altar: the panel’s size and its place above the altar make the descent a passage into the viewer’s world, and the window beside it, whose light the panel answers, joins it to the Annunciation on the wall. A print keeps the composition and loses the scale and the colour, which are the instrument. Held below the top because part of the form’s force depends on a chapel the panel cannot carry when reproduced.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the panel loses what it knows: that the labour, the play and the mountains are seen at once, in one air. The snow makes the ground white, so figures, trees and birds read as dark silhouettes, drawn rather than modelled, legible as pattern from any distance. The diagonal from the hunters through the trees to the valley is the reading order, and the reading order is the return. The high view over the hunters’ shoulders puts the viewer in their place and denies them faces. Put the scene in a calendar strip with its border and the single field is lost; make the view frontal and the descent goes. Held below the top by the composite geography, a convention laid over the observed, and by incident the form permits rather than compels.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. The one act on which everything turns happens offstage and arrives by report: the Messenger saw Samson stand as if in prayer or in deep thought, and cannot show his face, so the form itself makes the warrant undecidable. Because the scene never changes, Samson’s stillness is the drama: the world comes to him and is refused. Because the play is for reading, the Chorus can think at length in a verse no stage would sustain. And the preface’s claim from Aristotle, that tragedy can “purge the mind of those and such-like passions”, is answered by the last line, which performs the purgation it named. Held below 9.0 by the slack choruses of the middle.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The upright format is the instrument: it lets earth and heaven stand one over the other, the battle below and the cosmos above, so that the eye climbs from the press of men to the curve of the world to the sun, and the meaning is that climb. Only painting can hold the minute and the immense at once, every lance and every cloud given at the same finish, so that one looks from a horseman’s plume to the far coasts in a single field. The tablet, words hung in the image, sets the picture’s two ways of knowing, count and vision, side by side. A narrative, or a film’s moving camera, would separate what the panel holds at once. Held below the top because the scale is a cabinet history picture’s, and a print could carry much of the battle half.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The method is a collision: a slow, composed vocal line set on a band playing with restless invention, so that the mind’s arrangement and the body’s alarm are heard at once; played by a rock band in time, these songs would be laments and no more. The title track’s three sections, dirge, hymn, dirge, are the rite’s shape, a death, a rising, a return. Lazarus is slow because its speaker is past hurry. The sequence is counted here, once: a death foretold, a speaker beyond it, an exile and a farewell, with Dollar Days dissolving into the closing song so that the last two are one departure. Held from the top by ’Tis a Pity and Sue, nearer containers than instruments.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. As a treatise it would state that women need money and privacy; as written it shows a mind being interrupted, which is its subject. The beadle turns her off the grass and the little fish of her thought hides; the library door shuts; a Manx cat makes her ask what is missing from the luncheon. The book enacts the conditions it describes, and its own sentences are the evidence for its claim about the sentence: a prose loose, ironic and turning back on itself, made to hold an argument without the pomp of the men’s books it quotes. The fictional “I” is the form of the claim that no one woman speaks, and that “we think back through our mothers if we are women” (ch. 4). Held off the top because the last chapter’s turn to the androgynous mind leaves the dramatised method for statement.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. The rhymed alexandrine couplet is the measure of civility itself, the polite form in which every speaker, Alceste included, must speak: his rage is confined to the very decorum he denounces, and the comedy lives in the strain. The sonnet scene sets a bad poem in short lines against the alexandrine and against a popular song, so that the play’s argument about sincerity becomes an argument about style. The single place is Célimène’s house, the salon itself, from which Alceste can escape only by leaving the play, and his exit is the work’s conclusion. Held off the top by the lawsuit and the tribunal, which the form keeps out of sight at some cost to necessity: the plot needs both verdicts, and the stage never shows either.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. As a novel of Nick Adams it would have to supply causes and continuity, and its knowledge is that the century arrives in fragments, public violence and private damage side by side and joined only in the reader. The interleaving is the instrument: the same book holds the woman in labour on the road from Adrianople and the Caesarean of “Indian Camp”, and it closes on a hanging and a king in his garden after a last story in which a man refuses to think. The form of “Big Two-Hearted River” is itself the knowledge: an action of total, minute attention whose purpose is to keep something out, so that the method of the sentence and the condition of the man are one. Held just short of the top because the fit between interchapter and story is sometimes only general, and two stories sit in the frame without adding to what it knows.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The single act without an interval is the argument: there is no moment in which the audience, or Julie, can step out of the night and recover, and the morning comes on the stage as it comes to her. The kitchen is the servants’ room, into which the mistress comes down; the play never leaves it, and the world upstairs exists only as the bell and the speaking tube, which is how servants know it. The seduction happens offstage, during the peasants’ dance, so that the form puts the audience where the servants are, outside the door, hearing the song. Held a step from the top by Julie’s narrated history, where the form turns briefly into a container for exposition.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a single college building, teaching is a corridor and a set of rooms; here each discipline is a house, its professor lives above his class, and the student’s door opens onto the colonnade a few steps from the teacher’s. The Lawn makes the community visible to itself: anyone crossing it is in the common room. The form has shown what it carries. Two centuries on, the pavilions still house faculty, the Lawn rooms are still lived in by students chosen for the honour, and the university’s ceremonies are held on the green before the Rotunda. Held below the top by what the form did not foresee: a university grown many times its size now holds the village as a ceremonial core, and the Dome Room never worked well as a library.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional priory, cloister and chapel on a levelled terrace, and much of what the house knows is lost. The friar’s solitude is no longer a cell turned to the valley but a room on a corridor. The day is no longer a descent from cell to study to table to church. Prayer no longer begins with a passage down into a dark box from which the light has been taken except where it is admitted. Friars and lay faithful no longer divide across a raised altar. Walking a corridor is no longer a passage through measured light. Form is the instrument of the life, not its container. Held below the top because the form served even its first life imperfectly, with cold, long routes and an unusable court, and fitted the narrower life that followed less well.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the worship is lived differently. In an aisled church half the people see the altar between columns and the preacher speaks to a room of compartments; here they are one assembly in one space, and the order’s liturgy, the preaching, the frequent Mass, confession in the chapels and devotion at the founder’s tomb, each has its place without crossing another. The linked chapels let side devotion go on while the nave is in use; the dome’s light makes the approach a movement toward brightness. The vault is made to be looked up at from the nave, and the unveiling of Ignatius makes the transept an event. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge is Alberti’s as much as Vignola’s.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Restore the piano and the grid returns, and with it the hierarchy the record removes. Fix the changes and the soloist is navigating again, and the claim that the line can carry its own harmony is lost. The quartet of two horns, bass and drums is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. “Lonely Woman” makes the form the meaning: two tempos at once, so that grief and the world are heard in the same moment. The sequence opens on the lament, sets the long lyric of “Peace” at the end of side one, and closes on “Chronology”, time itself at speed. Held below the top because the outline of each piece, head, solos, head, is the inherited one, and on the fast tracks the form is conventional where the playing is not.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a basilica and the work loses what it knows. In a long nave the ruler is a point on the way to the altar; here the court stands round a centre, and the king is set in the ring above it, facing the altar across open space, under the vault. The form makes the hierarchy spatial, visible from every point: each person knows by storey where they stand. For six hundred years the coronation rite took its order from the building, the king anointed below and led up to the throne in the gallery, so the form carried a ceremony long after its dynasty had gone; it carried burial and pilgrimage too. Held below the top because the axis now runs on into a second building of another form, and the throne’s dialogue with the vault has lost its first image.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the man and the house are one thing. The Steadicam is the house’s gaze, gliding behind the boy at his height and behind the father in the maze, never tiring, so that the viewer moves as the hotel moves. The symmetry is the trap: halls, rooms and the twins framed dead centre, with nowhere to go but forward. The title cards narrow from a month to days to hours as the family’s world closes. Every apparition can be the shining or madness, except the storeroom bolt drawn from outside, placed where the ghost must be real for Jack to be free, and the hotel’s space does not add up. Told with the novel’s explained hotel, the film would be a ghost story. Held from the top because Hallorann’s cross-cut journey uses the suspense grammar of any thriller.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
In the best poems the form is the knowledge. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is an epistemology made into a structure: thirteen discontinuous views, none of them privileged, so that its argument, that reality is the sum of ways of seeing and that “The blackbird whistling / Or just after” are both its beauty, could not be made in a continuous poem. “The Snow Man”, fifteen lines in five tercets and one unbroken sentence, enacts the mind emptying as it reads. “Sunday Morning” needs the long blank verse paragraph for a meditation that turns and returns. “Anecdote of the Jar” rhymes and half rhymes around “round” and “ground” as the jar orders the hill. Held below the summit because the order of the book is not an argued form: Harmonium is a gathering, not a made sequence like Leaves of Grass, and “The Comedian as the Letter C” is a form that holds its content loosely.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in order, Billy’s life would be a war memoir with a breakdown at the end; told as it is, the war is never over, because every moment of the life opens onto the boxcar or the slaughterhouse, and the reader lives the structure of the trauma instead of being told of it. The book is built in short blocks divided by white space, moments set side by side rather than in sequence. The frame turns a novel into a testimony about the impossibility of the novel, which is its knowledge about massacre. The refrain is form as ethics: it is the only ceremony the dead receive. Held a step below the top because the Tralfamadore episodes in the zoo, with Montana Wildhack, are closer to a container for jokes than an instrument.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work cannot say what it says. A narrative sequence would put the stories one after another; the map holds them present at once on one ground, which is the claim: that the country carries all its stories together, and that a place is where lines cross. The dotted infill is not texture but the substance of the country between sites, and its zoning tells where one being’s country gives way to another’s. The fire’s spread across the dotting enacts the story’s event on the ground. Held below 9.0 because the form is partly a convention the painting inherits, and the field ends at the canvas’s edges rather than the country’s.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The grain, the handheld camera, the long lens in crowds, the dated captions and the police diagram make the viewer a witness to evidence rather than a spectator of a drama, and that is the knowledge: the battle as a system, read as an intelligence officer or a historian reads it, from both sides. The procedural form is even-handed by structure, each move shown from the side that makes it and then from the side that suffers it. The frame tells the story backward from the moment the method succeeds, and the pyramid on Mathieu’s blackboard is the film’s structure laid bare. Held below the top because the coda turns from chronicle to lyric, and the turn is willed rather than grown.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. The semicircle over a door makes the judgment a threshold: the faithful enter the church beneath the judge, past the dead rising just above their heads, and the verses cut in the stone address them as they pass. The scale hierarchy, impossible in a narrative picture, is the theology: the Christ’s size is his authority, the souls’ smallness their condition. Cut in the stone of the building, the relief makes the judgment part of the church’s fabric, as permanent as the wall. As a painting or a manuscript page the threshold is gone. Held a step below the top because the form is the genre’s, which every Judgment portal shares, and this carver’s command of it is fuller rather than new.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the house stops being able to say anything: the same objects in a gallery of even top light would be a storeroom of casts. What the house knows, that memory is layered, that the antique is seen only in fragment and glimpse, that a room is never closed but always gives onto another, it knows only through its sections, borrowed views, planes and mirrors. The form also changes how use is lived. Soane dined, worked and taught his pupils among the collection, and the office windows look onto the fragments, so that drawing and study happened inside the model. Held below the top because the street rooms at the front, and parts of No. 12, are conventional Georgian rooms in which the form is a container.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and see what the picture loses. Campbell’s lines carry the sentiment and a prose account carries the event; neither carries the meaning, which is lodged in paint. The ship is laid thin and translucent, already passing out of matter; the tug is dark, opaque and hard-edged, so that the future is the only solid thing in the picture; the sun is impasto, so that the end of the day is the most physical thing on the canvas. The meaning is that distribution of substance, and temperature does the rest, cool left and hot right. A print or a drawing would know a lesser thing. Held short of the top only because the processional arrangement, read from left to right, is a conventional armature.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses most of what it knows. Its knowledge is that this class cannot be touched, and the form demonstrates it: each interruption, however violent, leaves the six exactly as they were at the next scene. Because dreams are entered without signal, the viewer learns that within this world the difference between the massacre and the dinner is no difference at all; one wakes and resumes. A linear satire with a plot and a comeuppance would have to let something happen to them, and the film’s point is that nothing does. The road, outside every scene, shows them walking with nowhere to arrive. Held below the top by the episodic frame: the interruptions are interchangeable instruments.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Level with the highest. Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The single centre of consciousness is the instrument: there is only Lurie, his mind’s commentary running on in the present tense, so the reader cannot enter Lucy or Petrus, and the book’s central questions, why she stays and what Petrus knew, are unanswerable because the form will not let a man of Lurie’s kind answer them. Give Lucy a chapter and the book becomes a lesser one that explains her. The present tense removes the retrospective narrator who might have learned: there is no later Lurie to judge the earlier. The free indirect style lets his irony and the book’s coincide and then part, so the reader learns to read past him. Form and knowledge are one.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. Put a suspension bridge or a chain of girders here and the trains would cross as well, but the bridge would no longer know what this one knows: that its strength can be read, member by member, by a passenger and a passer-by. The statics and the figure are one diagram. And the form changes how the purpose is lived. A train does not pass over this bridge but through it, inside the lattice, the girders flicking past the windows and the water seen between them; crossing the Firth by rail is an experience of being held within the structure. Held below the top because what the form governs is one passage, not a range of uses.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: one law, many cases, one shared world. Ten films of close to an hour, each closed on itself, under a number rather than a named precept, make the viewer find the commandment in the case instead of reading the case under it. One estate and crossing tenants make the cases a society: the seminar in VIII sets the case of II as a problem, so the cycle reads itself, and the clerk of VI appears in X’s post office. As one long film it would lose the closure of each case; as a serial with continuing characters, the discreteness the precepts require. The cost is the loose mapping: where the commandments could be reshuffled, the form is in part a frame.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Wholly. Put the chamber on the square’s axis with a straight entrance, and the turning of the body that the building means is gone; put a court before it, and prayer becomes congregation; part the dome’s inside from its outside, and the one surface, turned inward and outward, is lost. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: the darkness of the passage makes the light of the chamber; the diminishing medallions make the dome seem to rise; the unbroken skin of tile, its structural lines in turquoise, makes the structure legible as ornament and the ornament as structure. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge, though complete, is of one experience, the entry and the dome, where Sainte-Chapelle (9.3 here) makes its form carry an order of life as well.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Form is the knowledge on almost every track. The production is the clearest case: each instrument sits in its own treated space and none touches another, so a record about isolation sounds isolated. Mixed as the group played live, it would know a crowd and stop knowing the solitude. “Twenty Four Hours” swings between slow and fast with no transition, and the swing is the mind it describes. “The Eternal” barely moves because its subject is what does not change; “Atrocity Exhibition” circles on a pattern that will not develop. The tracks lengthen from a mean of 4:21 on side one to 5:38 on side two. Only side one’s middle tracks would survive another form.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. Develop No. 4, No. 7 or No. 20 into longer pieces and the knowledge that a whole state is complete in its moment is gone: brevity is the instrument, not the container. The withheld tonic of No. 2 is form as dread; the melody of No. 6, in the left hand under repeated chords, is form as weight; the single repeated note of No. 15, heard as A flat and then as G sharp, is form as one thought changing its meaning. The key cycle makes a whole of fragments, each a key that will not come back. Held below the top because the cycle is a borrowed frame: within it, another prelude in the same key would sit as well.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is the continuity. Played as ten separate songs it would be a set of complaints; played without a break from heartbeat to heartbeat it is one life, each pressure arriving before the last has finished. The segues carry meaning: the clocks break into Time, the till begins Money, Brain Damage runs straight into the inventory of Eclipse. The reprise of Breathe returns the first song as the speaker finds his life half spent, and the speaking voices, set low, give the madness witnesses. The sequence is counted here, once: side one runs from first breath to death, side two runs the course again. Held from the top because Money and Us and Them would stand alone.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that time can stand still inside a form built for motion. The sonata is a form of conflict and resolution; Schubert fills it with a song that does not develop so much as recur, and the length of the first movement, which the repeat doubles, is the instrument of the stillness. A shorter or faster form would make the trill an incident; this one makes it a condition. The third-related keys are form too: they shift the light without the tension of modulation, so the music moves by change of colour. The Andante’s ternary form is the form of memory returning changed. Held below the top in the finale, where the rondo is a container the material fills well.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the rite is lived otherwise. In a hall or a basilica the worshipper faces an end. Here the worshipper climbs, then passes inward from light to dark through spaces that narrow and grow lower as the roofs above grow higher, and at the centre walks round it. The form makes the theology spatial: the god is at the bottom of the mountain’s interior and under its summit outside, one point read twice. The sculpture puts the world on the outer body and leaves the cell bare, so the passage inward is a passage from the many to the one, and the balconies let the circuit see out. Held below the top: the form is the type’s, and it now holds a lapsed use.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
What the canvas knows, it knows as this form: a museum composition, quoted, filled with the present, and either half changed loses the knowledge. Paint the scene small, as genre, and it is an anecdote of a picnic; give it the Salon’s finish, modelled flesh and one unifying atmosphere, and it becomes the decent pastoral it exposes. The flat frontal light makes the body a fact rather than a form, so the look and the nakedness reach the viewer without the alibi of modelling. The disjunction between the studio group and the painted wood, and the scale of the far bather, make the picture declare itself a made thing, an assembly of quotations, and that is part of what it says. Held below the top because in places it cannot be told whether the disjunction is the form or a want of resolution.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Another form would change almost everything the work knows. It knows the animal as emerging from the rock in the dark. The figures are placed on bulges and edges that give them volume: the horses’ heads on a convex wall, the lions along a long stretch of the End Chamber, where in a moving light they move. Carried flame makes the many-legged bison run. Scraping the wall turns the surface into a ground on which a black line reads. The depth orders it: red and dots at the front, the densest black figures and the composite at the back. Put the same animals on portable panels, or light them evenly, and the emergence, the motion and the passage inward go. Held below 9.0 because much of the cave’s figuring is placed without that use of relief.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The form changes how worship is lived at every step. Arrival is made a rite: one leaves the street, enters low and dark and rises into the room, so that coming to worship is a passage and not the crossing of a porch. Sitting is made a gathering: no one sits far from the speaker, and the congregation in its galleries is part of what each member sees. Light is made equal: none comes from a side, none picks out an altar. Leaving is made a meeting, the congregation going out toward the minister. Worship and the parish’s social life share a door and a hall. Substitute a nave and a spire and almost all of this is lost: the procession, the hierarchy of front and back and the street return. Held below the summit because Unity House lives its purpose less distinctly than the temple, and the side entrance has always been hard for a stranger to find.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work stops saying what it says. Make it a domed cube and the tomb becomes a house for the dead among other houses; give the tower windows and storeys and it becomes a fortress or a minaret. What the building knows, that a ruler’s name can be made to stand over a whole plain for a thousand years, is said only by this form: a closed vertical shell, ribbed to hold light, capped by a point, with the name written round it twice where the eye looks first and last. The form is the instrument. Held below the Pantheon’s 9.5 and Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.3 because it governs the outside only; how the purpose is lived inside it does not change.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived at nearly every step. Arrival is a turn: the door is found at the back and low, the stair climbs in shadow and comes up into light, so that entering is part of the plan. Living and dining are one room round the fire, the household gathered in a single space rather than distributed among closed ones. The raised floor and the parapets make the city private without walls; the doors along the south side make the balcony half of the room. The dining table, with lamps on posts at its corners, makes a room within the room for the meal. Substitute a revival house on the same lot and almost nothing this house knows survives. Held below the top because the form costs its life something: the interior low and often dark, the entrance confounding, the bedrooms cramped.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Bill’s waking life is already a dream. The city is built and looks built: the same corners recur, and the light comes from lamps, windows and Christmas lights. Characters echo each other’s last words, so speech becomes a dream’s speech. Night and then day over the same places is the instrument of the knowledge: what was charged at night is emptied in daylight, from the party to the toy store. Shot on location and paced as a thriller, the story would be about a conspiracy. One cost keeps it a step from the top: the black-and-white inserts, which state the jealousy too plainly.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that the same thing seen and heard for long enough becomes a different thing. Only a long form of slow change in repeated cells can make that a fact rather than a report. Cut to concert length, it becomes a suite of minimalist pieces, which is what the recordings are. The three families of images in three appearances each are a theme and variations in space, and the knee plays, Wilson’s term for the joints, give the whole its articulation. The music’s processes and the stage’s slow transformations are one procedure in two media. Held below the top because in places the form is a container: the Trials hold text play the form would survive without.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The plainness is the instrument: Aguayo’s even light and Buñuel’s level camera give the fetish, the hanging and the feast the weight of the milking of a cow, and that equality is the argument, that the sacred and the obscene belong to one order of fact. Shot as surrealism, the feast would be a dream and could be dismissed; shot as melodrama, Viridiana’s fall would be a tragedy and could be pitied. The diptych knows too: the second attempt on her repeats the first in another class’s language, so that the old man’s desire and the beggars’ appetite are seen as one. Held from the top only because the form enacts a thesis it held before it began.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional form, a beamed hall with windows, and the building stops being able to say what it says: that the roof is held up by the same members that let the light in, so that the workers sit among the structure as in a wood, and that the room’s world is the room. The light from above and the absence of a view are not conditions of that knowledge; they are it. The carport sequence makes the change of world an act of entering. The tower takes the same knowledge into section: floors grown from a trunk, every level open to its band of light. Held short of the top by the tower, whose form tells its purpose little about how laboratory work is lived, and by the office ranges round the room, whose form could change without great loss.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The axis asks what the work would stop knowing in another form, and here the answer is most of it. A poem about time as a circle, the self as passage and the instant as the door out of history is made as a single sentence that cannot end, closing on a colon that opens it again. Change that, and the claim that the poem’s time is not linear becomes an opinion instead of an experience. The fixed hendecasyllable carries the river’s current under the storm of images; the 584 lines bind a private love to a cosmic cycle. Madrid, 1937 lands as it does because no full stop separates it from the rooms before and the tribunal after: history and the bedroom are, grammatically, one breath. Held below 9 because the count is known only from the note, and the inner order of the movements is loose enough that several could change places without loss.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The question this axis asks was answered in public. In 1984 the American release put much of the same footage into chronological order in 139 minutes, and was received as a confused gangster picture, because what the film knows lives in the order of its parts. Told from the opium den outward, the childhood is not backstory but the place Noodles goes back to; 1968 is not an epilogue but the present from which the whole is remembered; and the final smile, set in 1933 after the revelation of 1968, makes it possible that the old man was dreamed by the young one. The transitions, the peephole and the station, are instruments of that knowledge.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the life of the building changes at every point. In a reading room under a dome the reader is one of many at long tables, watched and lit from above; here the reader chooses: the carrel alone at the light, the table nearer the stacks, the hall among others. Fetching a book is a walk from light into shadow and back, and from any floor the circles place the reader in the whole. Arriving is an ascent from the low arcade into the highest room, so the library is entered as a centre and left by its edges. Put the programme in an open-plan box and almost none of this survives. Held below the top because the gift is to the reader more than to the book: the stacks are dim and fixed, the form resists the library’s later change of use, and the entry confuses.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the theatre stops knowing what it knows. Make the cavea a rectangle and the audience no longer sees itself. Close it into a half-circle behind a high stage wall and the hills are shut out and the orchestra halved. Flatten the rake and both seeing and hearing fail. The form is the instrument by which a crowd becomes an audience and a voice reaches it, and the audience’s sense of being one body is a direct product of the bowl. Held below the top because the stage building is lost, and half of the first relation, the curve set against the straight stage front, can no longer be read as it stands.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told forward as suspense, this is a crime story. Told as a reconstruction twenty-seven years after, with the end given first, it becomes an anatomy of complicity: the reader, knowing what everyone in the town knew, watches them fail one by one, and shares their position. The fragmentation of testimony is the knowledge. The conflicting accounts of the weather, of who warned whom, of whether the note under the door was seen, show that a collective act has no single author and no single truth. The narrator’s own kin among the witnesses turn the investigation into an implication, and the placing of the killing last makes the chronicle a slow approach to what was known from the first line. What holds the axis a tenth below the summit is that the frame at times serves exposition: the wedding history of the second chapter is told straight, and could stand in a conventional novel.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. Its truth, that a rough devotion opens onto heaven, rests on three formal facts together: the plain shell that hides the interior; the light, even and high from windows at two levels, that takes shadow out of the nave; and the stucco that blurs where wall ends and vault begins, so that the painted sky is not a picture on a ceiling but the ceiling’s absence. Make the oval a basilica and the gathered congregation becomes a column; darken the windows and the vision becomes a mystery. The choir’s deeper colour and narrower space make the return from glory to Passion a passage, not a statement. Held just short because the inherited Steinhausen scheme carries part of it.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a body really did these things in a world that does not care. The wide, held frame is the instrument. The camera stands back and lets the stunt run without a cut, so that Johnnie, the train and the hazard are seen in one image and known to have been done; cut into close-ups and inserts, the knowledge would be trickery. The mirrored chases are form as meaning: the world going north is the world going south with its obstacles reversed, and Johnnie’s competence is his learning it. The still face is the form of the stance, attention without display. Held a step from the top because the prologue and the battle are told in an ordinary manner, where the form is a container.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much goes. The handscroll is the instrument of the knowledge: the realm is known as a journey in time, a section at a time, and the viewer’s unrolling is the travel. A hanging scroll could show one mountain; it could not show a thousand li. The mineral colour is the second instrument. In ink the land would be atmosphere and mood; in blue and green it becomes a jewelled, ordered and lasting world, which is what the scroll claims of the realm. The low proportion, some twenty-three times as long as it is high, keeps the horizon level and the viewer always at the height of the travellers, never above the whole. The axis stops below the top because a section mounted alone keeps much of its power, and some stretches are formally interchangeable.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge. Eighteen stories in chronological order, 1958 to 2005, most of them one continuous action, make a life legible as a sequence of procedures, and the sequence cannot be reordered: shelter, stack, sash, floor, block, gym, grave, locker, file, deer, stairs, grave, demolition, road. The decisive formal act is in Boxer, where earlier stories return as file entries, the steel glove, the button-pushing remark, the altered meal periods, so that the reader holds the prose version of each event against the record’s version and finds both accurate. No other form could set the two accounts side by side across one life. What holds it a step below the top is shape: two stories run in long blocks against the short paragraphs of the rest, and only the first has the reason of a boy with no one to speak to.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the canvas stops being able to say its main thing. Painted cleanly, in Krohg’s manner, this would be a sad scene; painted as it is, it is the remembering of a sad scene, nine years later, by the one who survived it. The scratches that run down through the paint are at once rain on a window, tears, the wear of a memory handled too often, and the record of the painter’s repeated attack on the canvas: the form is the instrument of the knowledge. The hands dissolving into each other, the face holding while all around it frays, the curtain allowed to go muddy at its edge: each decision says what the picture knows about grief. Held below the top because the table at the right and the lower left are worked into indistinctness rather than meaning; there the form is struggle, not instrument.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. As chant alone it would lose the new order built over the old. As a motet, with words in the upper voices, it would lose the stretched word and the suspended time; as a two-voice organum, the mass of sound that makes many voices one. The two textures are the form’s instruments: where the chant moves slowly, the tenor holds and time stops; where the chant has a melisma, the tenor takes measure and the old melody itself starts to move in the new time. The alternation with the choir’s plainchant frames the polyphony as an expansion of the liturgy, not a replacement. The joint is inside the long spans, where phrase units fill a held note more than they shape it.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The knowledge is that two men at a game are as permanent as the table, and it exists only as the constructive stroke: parallel touches building coats, faces and wood from one material, so that no figure is softer than the furniture. The near symmetry is the knowledge of the duel; break it into a narrative composition and the game becomes an event. The reduction to two is the knowledge of the closed world: the versions with onlookers know a social scene, and the series is the controlled experiment that shows the difference. The small format keeps the men at a table’s distance, intimate in size, which makes the monumentality of the form the more striking. Held a step below the top for the slackness of the background.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The print knows the mountain as flat areas of colour meeting at edges, with the graded colour of bokashi standing for light; in oil the same design becomes a painted landscape and loses the emblem’s clarity. The woodblock makes the clouds and the forest a pattern of repeated marks, and the repetition is what gives the cone its size. The print is a multiple, sold cheaply in Edo, and the sacred mountain in the hands of anyone who would buy it is part of what the work is: the pilgrim’s mountain made a household image. Held a step below the top because the design’s knowledge is partly separable from its medium: as a drawing in colour, much of it would survive.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The work knows what it knows as ink on paper on folding screens. On absorbent paper the mist exists because wet ink spreads and fades into the fibres and the paper’s own colour is the air; in oil the same picture would be a painting of fog, not fog. Set up in its zigzag, the panels come forward and fall back, so that groves on a forward fold advance and those in a valley recede, and the folds double the depth the ink makes. Seen at a seated eye the field runs wider than the eye can hold, and the viewer is inside the weather rather than before a view. Substitute a hanging scroll and the enclosure goes; hang it flat and the folds go. Held below the top because the screen form may have been given to the paintings after they were made.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the house knows? Almost everything. The living floor is the knowledge: reading, conversation, music, dining and the winter garden are not rooms but places in one space, marked by a plane of stone, a curve of wood, a curtain, a carpet, a group of chairs, and the family moves among them without doors. The sinking glass makes the boundary between house and garden a matter of a switch and the season, so that the landscape is lived, not looked at. The section sets privacy above and openness below, so a day in the house runs from the closed to the open. Put rooms off a hall in its place and nothing of this survives. Held below the top because the bedroom floor is conventional, its form a container, and because the open room needed curtains, heating and air-handling to be lived in, so that its knowledge is partly kept by machinery.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Much of it would go. The figure knows what it knows in three dimensions and in the round: the turn of the body, the hand’s distance from the cheek, the way the crossed leg locks the figure to itself while the free foot leaves it, all change as one moves and are given by no single view. A painting or a relief would show the pose; it would not let the viewer walk round a thought. The scale, below life size and above the portable, makes the figure an object of address, neither ornament nor monument. The metal matters: bronze takes the slender fingers that stone would not hold, and the cast is one continuous skin from crown to stool. Held a step below the top because the wooden figure of Kōryū-ji could carry the content, with loss.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. A monument in the new town would know loss as a subject; this knows it as a place. Only this form lets the walker move through the old streets with the town’s mass at the height of the body, so that the knowledge, that the plan survives and the life does not, is had by walking. Only the cretto makes the streets cracks, and so ties the town’s pattern to the earthquake’s wound; only the casting over the rubble makes the work a burial rather than a model; only the size of the real town makes the aerial image the whole of a community. Held just short of the top: part of the knowledge lies in the history one brings, and the field, uniform by design, gives its knowledge at once and then repeats it.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the abbey knows? Very largely. Carve and paint the same plan as the great Benedictine churches were, and the life of poverty loses its enclosure: the bare stone is the knowledge that nothing is needed but the office and the work. The pointed vault and the cut stone make the church an instrument for the unaccompanied voice, the chant completed by the room. The cloister’s tilt and steps make the walk round the garth a bodily knowledge of the ground; the night stair makes the horarium a path. Held below the top because the form has been empty of its community since 1791, and the lost refectory takes a destination from the cloister’s circuit.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film can no longer say what it knows. A photograph is a moment held after it has gone, which is what a memory is, and the film is made of them: the past, the woman, the museum, the jetty come as stills because that is how the past is had. The one moving shot is the knowledge in an instant: for a few seconds the past is alive, and the viewer feels the difference between an image and a life. The dissolves are time passing in the mind, slowed and quickened. The loop makes the knowledge exact, since the prologue’s still was always of his death. Held below the top because the future section’s stills are composed more for their device than for what they know.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
What the figure knows, it knows only as this mixture. It knows that a girl and her image can be confused: wax is the material nearest to skin, and the hair and cloth are not represented but present, so that the eye cannot hold the boundary. It knows that she is looked at as a thing is looked at: the case and the under life size scale make her an exhibit. Change the form and the knowledge goes. In marble she would be a statue of a dancer, in a drawing a study; the bronzes keep the skirt and the ribbon and lose the skin, so that the uncanny falls by half and the figure turns dark and monumental. Held below the top because part of the knowledge depends on a case and on a surface whose colour has changed.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. A single canvas of the façade, however fine, knows only one hour; the claim that appearance is time can be made only by repetition with difference, and the serial form is the instrument of that claim, not its container. Within the canvas the form knows too. The façade cropped to fill the field turns architecture into a surface for light, and the crusted impasto makes paint into something like the stone it represents, so that the material of the picture enacts the meeting of permanence and change. Held short of the top because the form is, in practice, never seen whole: the set is dispersed, known through a few canvases or through reproductions in rows.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the house stops knowing what it knows. Roof the court and it is a dark corridor house. Open the street wall and its argument about the city disappears. Put the rooms in a row along an internal hall and the daily crossing of the open air, which is the whole of its knowledge about dwelling with nature, is gone. The section in three parts is the instrument by which the family’s day is lived: waking, crossing, bathing and eating are each placed in relation to the sky. Use is changed by form. Held just below the top because the house’s knowledge is concentrated in one device, if a total one, and its form changes fewer kinds of living than a house like Villa Savoye (8.6), with its arrival, route and roof.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The book’s strongest axis. Change the form and the knowledge goes almost entirely. A story about a house larger inside than outside is told in a book larger inside than outside: layers of commentary nest inside each other, each claiming to contain the last and each leaking into it. The footnote, the instrument of scholarly control, becomes the passage by which Johnny’s breakdown seeps into Zampanò’s calm, and the reader’s eye, moving down the page from text to note to note within note, performs the descent the explorers make. In the labyrinth chapter the boxed and mirrored notes are a maze the reader is inside; in the late explorations the near-empty page is the void, read at the speed of falling. The blue word house marks the word as a space in every line it stands in. Held just off the top because some effects are decorative rather than instrumental, a few typographic games repeat their discovery, and the appendices extend the form more than they deepen it.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form, the same couple painted as bodies in a room or a landscape, kissing, and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. The knowledge is that love dissolves two persons into one shape while leaving each a separate face, and only this form says it, because only here are the bodies made of the same ornament as the world and the faces made of flesh. The square sets the closed shape in a field without horizon, so the couple is outside place; the edge gives the one ground it has a limit; the gold makes the scene an icon, which is the claim that eros is sacred. Held below the top because the form makes its one claim and then repeats it in ornament: the knowledge is complete at a glance, and the further form adds texture, not knowledge.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived at every step. Arrival is a compression and a release. Moving from room to room is climbing or descending a few steps; each room is felt as a place with its own height, and the others are glimpsed from it at an angle across levels. The household’s order, guest, host, wife, children and servants, is lived as altitude and sightline. Substitute a stacked plan or an open floor and almost nothing the house knows survives: the watch of the lady’s room over the hall, the raising of the dining room and the graded withdrawal into privacy all depend on the section. Held below the top because the exterior knows little and says so on purpose, and because the knowledge is one of interiors.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Here the garden is strongest. Its form is the instrument of its knowledge: substitute an axial plan or an open prospect and nothing the garden knows survives. It knows that a world is made of concealment and revelation, that depth is made by what is withheld, that a view is earned by a turning path, a gallery, a gate, a framing window. Its use is lived through its form: one walks it as one unrolls a handscroll, scene by scene, and the halls are where the walk stops to look; the lattice windows of the galleries each frame a different view of the same water. The borrowed pagoda shows that the form knows its limits and passes them. It stops short of the top because the form is shared, and loosened into lawn in the east.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the chapel stops knowing nearly everything it knows. Give it a timber or plastered interior and the memory of the trees and the fire, which the wall carries in its ribbing and its smell, is gone. Give it windows and the darkness that makes the opening an event is gone. Roof the opening and the rain no longer falls on the lead, and the room is no longer open to the weather and the hour. Straighten the passage and the turn from field into cell is gone. Set it in a village and its hermit’s solitude is gone. What the chapel knows about withdrawal, about making as offering, about light from above, it knows by being this shape made this way. Held a step below the top because the knowledge is narrow, of one room and one passage, and a few of the exterior decisions are free rather than compelled.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told in order on one clock, it is an evacuation picture. Told as a week, a day and an hour folded into one movement, it makes the viewer hold three experiences of time at once, and the knowledge is that the soldier’s week, the sailor’s day and the pilot’s hour are one event at different pressures. The repetition across strands is knowledge too: the Spitfire’s ditching seen from the air and then from the boat, so that the viewer learns how little any one man sees. The withheld enemy is the form of the soldier’s experience, death from above and out of frame. Held from the top: the convergence is also a device of suspense, and where day and night alternate across the cuts the clocks blur.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and almost everything goes. The scale is the knowledge: the canvas is built to exceed the field of sight at close range, and in reproduction it becomes a pleasing arrangement of colour, which it is not. The soft edge is the knowledge: hard, it would make the rectangles objects on a ground; feathered and scumbled, they hover and cannot be fixed. The thin layered paint is the knowledge: colour laid in veils, so that light seems to come from within the surface rather than fall on it. The upright format sets the dark mass above eye level, where it presses. Held below the top because the form completes a format already found, and depends on hanging and light outside itself.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. In paint on wood or cartonnage the claim of incorruptible divine flesh goes, because the material is the claim. As a statue in a temple it would lose its office, to replace a face on the body itself, at the scale of the head, laid over the mummy in the coffin. The front gives a face for eternity; the back carries the text that protects it. Without the back the protection goes, without the gaze the presence. Even the materials are argued: gold for flesh, lapis for hair, glass and stone for colour that cannot fade. Held below the top because the form was set by the tradition more than found here, and because its display since 1925, upright and seen in the round under glass, is a form its makers did not intend.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The poem gives a reason to doubt its own form. Its verse is honey on the rim of a cup of bitter wormwood, “musaeo dulci contingere melle”, to touch it with the sweet honey of the Muses (1.947), and the figure makes the verse a coating. The form does more than the figure admits. Lucretius likens atoms to letters, a few of which, rearranged, make different words, so that the poem’s own text models its universe, a finite stock of elements recombined without end, and its repeated lines recur as atoms recur. Epicurus’ prose states the same physics and cannot make the void felt, or set the reader on the shore of “suave, mari magno”, sweet, when on the great sea (2.1). Substitute prose and the argument survives; the cure does not. The honey figure holds it below 9.0.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the judgment goes: the poem is sung by Rāma’s sons, unknown to him, at his own sacrifice: the king hears his story, the abandonment of their mother included, from children he does not know he has, and the poet who made it sheltered the wife he sent away. The poem contains its own making and its own audience, and turns the hearing into the judgment. The books move through orders of being as through a topography of dharma: the city, the monkey kingdom whose politics mirror Ayodhyā’s, the rākṣasa city, the war, the return. Held below the top because the form is partly a product of growth: the frame sits in the later books, and the joins can be seen.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The form is an inventory on a road, and it knows something no other form would. In a world where things have more life than people, the description of things is where the life is: Sobakevich’s furniture, every chair of which seems to say “и я тоже Собакевич”
(I too am Sobakevich), Plyushkin’s heap in the corner, Korobochka’s clocks. The census list is the book’s form in small: names, trades, deaths. The volume is a ring, opening on two peasants who debate whether the britzka’s wheel would reach Moscow and closing on the same carriage become the troika. Rewrite it as a straight satirical novel and the inflation of the similes, which is the knowledge, goes. Held a step down because the form is completed by a promise: the volume points beyond itself to a structure it does not contain.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in sequence, Christmas’s life is a case history that explains its murderer. Set as the book sets it, between the night before the killing and the week after, his past arrives as memory working on a man already doomed, and the reader holds the end while watching it made. Lena’s frame is the argument: the book opens and closes on a woman the violence does not touch, so that the town’s fury is seen as a passing weather on a road that runs on. The form says what the book knows: that a life is made by what others decide about it, and that it is surrounded by lives that do not notice it. Held a step down because Hightower’s double function, witness and confessant, strains the frame in chapter 20, and the joins are sometimes visible.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book’s argument is the relation of small lives to large history, and its form is that relation: the lovers’ strands alternate with chapters of chronicle in which the edict, the price or the pestilence that crushes them is shown from above, so that the reader holds both scales at once. The found manuscript is not ornament. It lets the narrator be ironic about seventeenth-century rhetoric while honouring seventeenth-century suffering, and it makes the telling a recovery of the forgotten, which is the book’s ethic. The parting of the lovers into two strands from chapter 9 gives a novel of Providence its proper shape: two lives guided without knowing each other’s paths. Charged: where the chronicle becomes essay (chs. 28, 31, 32) the form turns container, and the Storia della colonna infame had to be set outside the novel to be said at all.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The static form is the argument: captives have no action, and a play that gave them a plot would lie about captivity. Hecuba on stage from the end of the prologue to the close, receiving each blow, makes the audience stay where she stays. The visitors from the Greek camp, the herald again and again and then Menelaus, bring the victors’ world to the women and take from it each time, and the herald’s returns make the form a rhythm of summons. The chorus are the same captives as the actors, so the odes are the city’s own memory, not commentary from outside. The divine prologue frames it all with the knowledge that the Greeks will be wrecked. Held off the top by the Helen debate, partly a container for sophistic display.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The proportion is the argument: more than half the book shows Umuofia whole, before any white man is more than a rumour, so that when the church arrives the reader knows exactly what is being broken. A novel that began with the missionaries would know the conflict and not the loss. The exile places the hero outside his world just as it begins to change, so that he comes back to find it gone. The narrator speaks as the clan’s own voice, and that voice is the instrument: the reader is inside the culture’s reasoning, its cruelties included. The turn to the Commissioner in the last paragraphs enacts the erasure the book is about. Held off the top because Part Three is compressed.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows. The diptych of youth and age, fifty years apart with the reign between left out, is the argument: triumph and decline seen as one shape, the second part answering the first, fight for fight and hall for barrow. The interlaced digressions, which a linear romance would cut, are how the poem knows that every victory carries its sequel: the Finnsburg song at the height of Danish joy says what no character says. In the line, variation names one thing again and again, God as Lord, Ruler and Guardian, and makes a world of remembered names and reputation. Held below the top because the local joints, the homecoming and the turn to Modthryth, are loose.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. As a treatise the economics would be a crank’s tract; as a diary the year would lose its arc. It is the folding of two years and two months into one year, ordered by season, that turns observation into an argument for renewal. The form also teaches the method: chapters pair and answer, “Solitude” and “Visitors”, “Reading” and “Sounds”, “The Ponds” and “The Pond in Winter”, so that book is weighed against world and company against solitude. Held below the top because “Economy” is in another form from the rest, a polemic that the seasonal book must then outlive, and the hinge between the two is felt.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The forms know things. In “Byzantium” the stanza’s long and short lines enact the movement between the mire and the image, and the last stanza piles its spirits and dolphins until the sea floods the form. The “Dialogue” is a dialogue because the knowledge is the quarrel: given only the Self, the affirmation would be cheap. “Vacillation”, eight numbered parts in different measures, is itself the vacillation it names: “Between extremities / Man runs his course”. The Crazy Jane poems need the ballad and the refrain, since the plain form is the argument against the Bishop’s sophistication. The ottava rima of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” carries the aristocratic decorum the poem mourns: “We were the last romantics”. What holds it below the top is the order of the whole, which is that of a collection, its parts set side by side rather than formed into one instrument.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The form changes how prayer is lived. The rows stand across the aisles, each facing the qibla, none placed before another by the architecture; substitute a basilica and prayer acquires a nave, a front and a hierarchy. The field knows that prayer is direction, not approach. It grew for two centuries without change of kind, and with the north arcade open, court and hall, ablution and prayer were one space. Al-Hakam II gave it an axis, an enclosure and a crown without breaking its law. The building as it stands has made the substitution at its centre, a cruciform church with choir and capilla mayor, and its walled arcades divide court from hall. That costs most; the tension of axis and field, and al-Mansur’s aisles, which leave the mihrab off centre, cost less.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the war is a regression. The form is a single line upriver, each station older than the last: the television crew, the surf and the Wagner; the lit stage; a bridge with no commander; arrows and a spear; a stone temple and a sacrifice. The river is the journey from the modern to the archaic. The dossier is part of the form, since Kurtz is read into being as the boat nears him; so is the sound, since rotor and fan become one and the war is heard in the hotel room before it is seen. Held below the top where the river ends and the compound becomes tableaux, and where the voice-over carries what the form should.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. In verse, or in Baudelaire’s anecdotal prose poem, the visions would be framed: a speaker, a scene, a moral. The prose block without an anecdote lets images stand side by side with no logic but adjacency, and that is the knowledge: a perception in which the city, the dawn and the self arrive at once and are not ranked. “Enfance” uses numbered sections to break childhood into separate views that never become a memory. “Marine” makes the land and the sea one motion, in lines that run as waves, so that the form does what the poem says. Held below the top because the form of the book as a whole is the editors’ and is not an instrument: the living form is the piece, not the collection.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. What it knows is obsession, and the recurring theme is obsession’s form: an idea that returns whatever its surroundings and is changed by them. Recast as a suite of five pieces without the idée fixe, the work becomes picturesque scenes; recast as an opera, the beloved becomes a singer with a will, when the point is that she is only an image. A wordless symphony with a printed frame is the right form for a dream told in the first person. Held below the top because the shapes inside the movements are often containers: the first movement’s sonata plan is loose and its development diffuse, the waltz is a waltz, and the march is a borrowed march.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the doubt is in the harmony and the arrangement. God Only Knows sits on a key it seldom states, with the bass under inversions, so devotion never stands on firm ground: on a plainer setting it would be a love song. Let’s Go Away for Awhile is an escape that cannot be spoken. The mono mix fuses instruments into new timbres, so the whole is one voice. The sequence is counted here, once: side one in the couple’s present, side two in its doubt, closing on a train leaving. Held short of the top by Sloop John B, a container from another session, and by two songs the form serves without enacting.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that the high path and the low are one world. The Singspiel’s mixed form, spoken word beside music, strophic song beside chorale, is that knowledge: Papageno’s songs and Sarastro’s hymns are two musics of one stage, and neither is subordinated. The trials are staged as music. Tamino’s silence is enforced against Pamina’s G minor aria, which he cannot answer, and fire and water are crossed to the flute’s march. The two finales are the form at its strongest, long spans that move from Boys to Speaker to chorus in one current. Held down by the spoken middle of Act II, where the dialogue carries the plot without the music, and by the Queen’s last attack, dispatched in a few bars.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The play is built on the two modes of the erotic rasa as the theory names them, love in union and love in separation, and the structure is the passage from the first through the second to a third, union regained with a son. Told as narrative, as in the epic, the story is a lawsuit. Staged, the audience holds in view what the persons do not know, that the king does not lie, and the court scene becomes a tragedy of forgetting rather than of bad faith. The languages carry the social order: the king’s Sanskrit and Shakuntala’s Prakrit meet across a rank the play is about. The stanzas stop time for the moments the play must hold: the deer, the farewell, the longing. Held below the top because the form is in great part the inherited form, and much of what it knows the genre already knew how to say.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The engraved line is the knight’s world: one burin makes the polish of steel, the hide of the horse, the rot on Death’s face and the scrub of the gorge, so that the moral contrast is also a contrast of surfaces cut in one plate. Constancy is hardness and shine, corruption frayed and broken hatching. In paint the armour would become colour and the dread would lose its graphic edge; in a large format the intimacy of a meditation held in the hand would go. Held short of the top: the frieze in profile is a form painting and relief had used for centuries, and the emblem programme can be, and has been, told in words.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows, because its knowledge is in the sound. Where the Streets Have No Name delays its arrival for nearly two minutes, and the delay is the longing. With or Without You is built on a bass line that hardly changes and a climax withheld, so the song does not resolve because the bind does not. Running to Stand Still barely moves while its title runs. The production’s space is the desert the album is about, and the sequence descends from a run toward a city, through elegy and violence, to a hush. The form matters less in side two’s middle, where songs are containers.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The chronicle, the slow and even tempo of a family’s dated occasions, is the instrument of the decline: because the book keeps the family’s own time, its dinners, its anniversaries, the hundredth jubilee of the firm in the seventh part, the reader feels the time running down with them. The narrative contracts from the crowded table of 1835 to the few women in Gerda’s drawing room at the end, and the focus narrows from a household to Thomas’s mind to Hanno’s single day at school in the eleventh part, told hour by hour: the form shrinks as the family does. The leitmotifs carry the inheritance itself, since a recurring trait is what a family is, and the typhus chapter’s turn to clinical prose makes the last Buddenbrook a case. Held off the top because for long stretches the form is a capacious container for episodes, not the knowledge itself.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The concentric frames are the argument: Walton writes to his sister, Victor speaks to Walton, the creature speaks to Victor, and the creature watches the De Laceys. At the centre, where an omniscient novel would put the monster’s outside, this one puts his voice, and the reader is made to hear him as Victor would not. The structure is a set of refused hearings around one granted hearing: the blind man listens and the sighted flee. The frame also makes the book a warning delivered and taken, for Walton, a second Victor, turns his ship south. Told in one voice the book would know what happened; told in these it knows what it is to be unheard. Held off the top because Victor must report, nearly verbatim, a speech of several chapters, and the creature’s education is compressed into a contrivance.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The confession told in the first person by the criminal is the only form in which “The Tell-Tale Heart” can know what it knows: the reader hears the sanity argued and watches it fail in the same sentences, and the beating heart can be his own. “The Cask” is told fifty years after, by a man who has never been caught, and its last words, “In pace requiescat!”, close the tale and the grave together. The detective tale’s form, the crime, the false lines of the police, the solution told back, is the form of its knowledge, that the mind can reconstruct the hidden. In “Usher” the doubled structure, house and family, the poem inside the tale, the romance read aloud while the vault opens, is how the tale thinks. Held off the top because in the weaker tales the frame is a formula.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The poem holds that every space larger than a red globule of blood is made by the hammer of Los, and that the poet’s work is done in a pulsation; its structure is that claim, every event happening at once in the moment Milton descends and Blake is struck, told in two books that are not sequence but simultaneity. The designs carry what the words withhold: the paired full-page plates of William and Robert, each with a star falling toward the foot, mirror one another and make the union of two poets something seen. The illuminated page is the poem’s politics of vision, the hand against the press. Held below the top because the designs are often not tied to the text beside them, and because plates moved between copies: a form that could be reordered is in part a container.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book’s argument is that this woman’s judgment of her own life has authority, and the form is that claim enacted: an autobiography, as the subtitle says, told by the woman herself ten years on, who addresses the reader as an equal and at moments turns to the present tense as if the scene had not ended. Told in the third person, the novel would be a romance about a governess; told in the first, it is a mind refusing its station. The five stations are each a household and each a different order of dependence, and the sequence is the education. “Reader, I married him” (ch. 38) makes the woman the subject of the verb. Held off the top because the narrator rarely weighs her younger self against her later knowledge, and the Marsh End coincidences show the form serving the plot.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book argues that character must be judged on the whole evidence and not on appearance, and its plot makes the reader judge as Allworthy does, on partial testimony, and wrongly. The secret of Tom’s birth is in plain sight, in Bridget’s conduct and Jenny’s story; a second reading finds what the narrator showed and withheld. The span each book covers narrows, from the years of a childhood to days on the road and a single night at Upton, then days in London, so that the hero is tried under pressure as his fortunes fall. The three movements carry the comic theodicy of expulsion, ordeal and restoration. The prefatory chapters make judgment the reader’s own task, which is the subject of the book. Held off the top because the essays and the interpolated histories are containers rather than instruments, and a form so governed by its plot can show the inner life only from outside.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses one thing it knows exactly: that Carmen is known only through performance. Almost every one of her great solos is a song or a dance given within the drama, to the soldiers, to Zuniga, to José, to the tavern. José sings the opera’s great aria of feeling, the Flower Song, and she answers it not with feeling but with a demand: the mountains. The one time she sings for no one is over the cards, and what she says then is death. In the last act the form doubles the space, the crowd inside cutting across the duet outside. Held down where the form is only the genre’s container: the dialogue’s plot work, and spectacle numbers that travel as suites.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The three sealed settings, joined only by wires and radio, are the knowledge that the system cannot be recalled once begun: no character can cross between them, and the cutting enacts the failure of communication the film is about. The documentary manner is the second instrument: the assault on Burpelson is filmed handheld like newsreel and the bomber’s checklists are performed with technical care, so that the farce sits inside real procedure and the viewer learns that the procedures are sound and the men insane. Sellers in three parts, a British officer, an American president and a German scientist, makes the alliance one actor’s repertoire. Fail-Safe, the same premise told as tragedy in the same year, shows the danger and cannot show the absurdity of reason itself. Held from the top because the War Room’s comic scenes use the ordinary grammar of filmed theatre.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Each story is built as a slow comic exposure of a self-satisfied mind followed by a single sudden blow, and the knowledge is in the ratio: grace is not earned by development but arrives as an interruption, so the story must be long in complacency and short in catastrophe. A novel would have to supply the aftermath and the change, which this grace refuses to guarantee. The free indirect style that rides inside the grandmother or Mrs. Hopewell, mocking their clichés in their own words, is the second instrument: the reader shares the complacency the ending breaks. The book’s order adds a third, ten repetitions of the pattern in ten guises, so that the pattern reads as law. Held below the top because the collection is an arrangement rather than a composed sequence: the stories share no character or place, and the order, though meaningful, could change in its middle without loss.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Within the poems, form is the knowledge. The one rhyme of “Daddy” is the child’s chant the poem uses to break the father’s spell: set it in blank verse and the exorcism is lost. The tercets of “Ariel”, enjambed across the stanza breaks, are the gallop, and the short lines are its speed. The couplets of “Edge”, each a still pair, are the perfected stillness. “Lady Lazarus” takes the timing of a stand-up routine as its form of resurrection. The charge falls on the form of the book, which is not Plath’s. The arc she built, from love to spring, was replaced by an arc that ends in death, and what the book knows as a whole changed with it. Poem by poem the axis would stand at 9.0; the assembly costs two tenths.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows: its subject is the self that must wear a mask to tell the truth, and the masks are audible. Bono’s voice comes through distortion on “Zoo Station” and “The Fly”, where a falsetto answers him; the Edge’s guitar is processed out of its old chime; “Even Better Than the Real Thing” makes its surface its argument. Against them “One” is set nearly bare, and the unmasked form is the confession. The sequence knows too: arrival, the hinge of betrayal at the fourth track, the descent into “Love Is Blindness”. “Wild Horses”, “Tryin’” and “Ultraviolet” are nearer containers, and hold it from the top.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. A perspectivism argued in a treatise would refute itself by its form; here each section is an attempt, often ending in a question, a self-correction or a mask, so the book does what §2 asks of the philosophers of the dangerous perhaps. The plan is the second instrument: three parts of essay that clear the ground, an interlude that breaks the reader’s breath, five parts that build on the cleared ground, and “Was ist vornehm?” put last because it is the question all the others served. The poem then says in song what the prose has been approaching. Held below 9.0 because the middle of the book, the parts on scholars and on peoples, is loosely joined to the plan, and the interlude’s place in it is architectural more than necessary.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The fresco is painted on the wall of a lit room, and its light is that room’s light: the claim that the sacred stands in our world is made literal by shadows cast from the chapel’s own window. The frieze, wide and above the eye, lets three moments be read as one place, so that time becomes distance and the miracle and the payment flank the question as its two halves. Figures near life size high on the wall have the gravity of statues on a building. As a panel or a print the window, the light and the room’s part are lost. Held below the top because continuous narration is inherited, the left episode is crowded, and the order of reading works against the frieze.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
At its hinge the form is the knowledge. The film’s argument, that the spectator will follow sympathy wherever the camera takes it, exists only in the broken structure. Keep Marion alive to the end, or reveal Norman’s secret at the start, and the film can say nothing about its audience. The peephole is the hinge: the audience looks through Norman’s eye at Marion undressing, and from then on the camera’s point of view is his. The shower, a killing assembled from fragments, is a second instance. What holds the axis here is that this knowing is gathered at the break: between its set pieces the search of the second film moves by the familiar steps of the investigation thriller, where the plot knows more than the form, and the courthouse closes it with a lecture in a film whose method is to show.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the interior stops knowing nearly everything: a Gothic nave of the same plan would house the same liturgy and lose the claim that structure is creation, because here the claim is the structure. The façades, three stages of one life turned to the sun’s course, make the building a calendar of Christ that the day walks through. The double-twist column carries the knowledge in its section, square below and nearly round above. What holds the axis is the exterior as built: the Nativity’s knowledge lives in its sculpture more than in its form, the Passion speaks another language, and the unbuilt Glory leaves the form’s principal statement, entry into glory, unmade. The building as it stands knows birth and death, and is entered from the side.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Tell Salamis as a Greek victory ode, as Simonides could and did, and the play would know nothing it knows: here victory is learned only as loss, and the audience, who were at the battle, hear their own deeds as a catalogue of foreign dead. The form is lament, and the play is built as a lament grows: foreboding, report, cause, and then the body. The distance is the instrument: Susa, not Salamis; a chorus of old men who did not sail; the Queen’s dignity against her son’s rags. The trochaic tetrameter, the oldest dialogue metre, gives the court and the ghost an archaic weight. Held off the top because the static disposition of two actors and a chorus, inherited from early tragedy, carries the knowledge more than it discovers it: the instrument was not newly made for this play.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Close the eyes and it knows nothing about the viewer. Take away the vertical edge of the hanging and the double world goes: near and far, stillness and work, the body and the house, the present and the moment after. Turn the canvas upright and she cannot lie the length of it, level with the eye, her head at the left where the eye begins. The form is the instrument: the divide is a seam the eye must cross, and crossing it is how the picture says that the nude and the chests belong together. Held a step below the top because the instrument is a single hinge between two fields, and the structure does not develop across the surface.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that Ethan belongs to the space outside the frame of home. The form is the threshold. The camera opens inside a dark doorway looking out and closes there as the door shuts on him; the home is a lit interior seen from the desert, the desert a light seen from inside. The VistaVision landscape dwarfs the riders and makes the years a matter of space. The ellipses across seasons, carried by Martin’s letter in Laurie’s voice, keep time at the settlement’s pace, so the obsession is measured against lives going on. The cost: the letter and the comic interludes are containers rather than instruments, and the form slackens at the settlement.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose is lived differently. In a basilica the festival crowd would queue down a nave; here it enters from the water into a centre and circles it, each chapel seen in turn through its arch, so that the pilgrimage becomes a circuit round the Virgin’s crown. The sanctuary, set beyond a second arch, holds the high altar apart from the crowd and frames it as a stage, and the friars’ choir behind keeps the daily office apart from the city’s yearly rite. Outside, the form makes the church the hinge of the basin, so that the vow is seen by every ship entering the canal; the building does its work on the city by its silhouette. Held below the top where the two parts read as two ideas, and where the ambulatory is narrow for the crowds it serves on the one day it fills.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the inflation is the meaning. The wall of sound is the dream at the size the dreamers need it: on a plain band arrangement the title track would be a complaint about a town, and with the wall it is a wager on getting out. Thunder Road is built as an invitation that keeps growing, from harmonica and piano to the whole band, so the song moves away and does not return. Jungleland is built in movements, violin to band to the saxophone’s long solo to the hushed end, and its length is the night. The four long songs, nearly two-thirds of the running time, are forms that know what they say. Night and She’s the One are containers.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a basilican nave the eye goes to an end; here it goes up into five heavens in turn, and the gold surface, absorbing and returning the light of a few windows and lamps, makes the liturgy happen in a glowing cave rather than a lit hall. The form knows the state as sacred by joining the chapel to the palace, and the city as a reliquary by setting the relic under the altar on the axis of the cross. The narthex makes entry a passage through Genesis. Held below 9.0 because the exterior’s accreted form displays that knowledge rather than serving as its instrument.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The handscroll is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Unrolled an arm’s span at a time, the city is known as it is known on foot: in sequence, with what lies ahead hidden and what lies behind rolled away. The viewpoint, high and oblique, moves with the viewer and gives every part equal clarity; there is no centre and no privileged place to stand, and that is the work’s social knowledge made spatial. The rise in density from right to left can be read only as a progression in time. On a hanging scroll, a wall or a panel the work would lose its sequence, its suspense at the bridge and its threshold at the gate, and become a map. The form was inherited and is fulfilled rather than reinvented.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book’s argument is the likeness of the two states, and the form makes it by juxtaposition rather than statement: a chapter in the German camp, then one in the Soviet prison; Eichmann and Liss inspecting the new gas chamber, then Soviet officers drinking after the encirclement; the heroism of House 6/1, then the commissar writing his denunciation of Grekov. Told as one life, it would be a dissident’s novel; told as a war chronicle, a patriotic one. Only the panorama, with its cuts, knows that the same law runs through the camp, the front and the institute. The plain free indirect voice that passes from a German officer to a Soviet one without changing tone is the instrument of the book’s justice. Held off the top because, where the essay chapters stand, the form becomes a container for what it elsewhere enacts.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The romance tells a story by leaving most of it out: it starts in the middle, gives speech without saying who speaks, and stops before the outcome is explained. That form is the book’s fatalism. In Romance sonámbulo the reader never learns why the smuggler is wounded or how the girl died, and the poem’s knowledge is exactly that not knowing: violence arrives in this world as an event without a cause one can be told. The single assonance carried through a poem is a second instrument, a sound that will not change while the story breaks. With the gaps filled, the book would be a description of Andalusia; as it stands, it is a world in which fate is the grammar. Held off the top because the form is inherited, and in the slighter poems it holds the image without adding knowledge.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The double-sided freestanding altarpiece is the instrument: the Mother faces the nave and the city, the Passion faces the choir and the clergy who celebrate the sacrifice at that altar, and the Eucharist was elevated between the two. Gold ground makes every scene a vision rather than a window. The front’s single field at the scale of a court, against the back’s small fields read close and in sequence, is the difference between an image to stand before and a story to follow. The inscription puts the painter inside the picture’s petition. Held below the top because the narrative scenes, as compositions, would say most of what they say in fresco or in a manuscript, and the cycle’s order is the Gospel’s more than the form’s.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is that terror is not left behind by prayer, and the form carries it: the Dies irae breaks into the sequence after the Liber scriptus and after the Confutatis, and into the responsory at the end, so the shape of the whole is a return, not a progress. The Requiem aeternam reprised in the Libera me, now in the soprano’s voice, turns the opening’s collective prayer into one person’s. Recast as separate movements in liturgical order without the returns, it would be a fine Mass and would not know this. Held below 9.0 because the liturgy fixes most of the order: the four middle movements are placed by the rite, not by the argument.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the doors know goes. The graded relief is the instrument: figures in the foreground lean almost out of the field into the viewer’s space, the middle ground recedes in lower relief, the far architecture is drawn in the metal, so that each panel is a continuum from our world into the depth of the story, and that continuum is the claim that sacred history stands in the viewer’s own space. Gold carries a second meaning: the light of the field is not a sky but the metal, and the whole surface reads as radiance at the door of the sacrament. As a painting the passage from body to drawing would be lost; as sculpture in the round, the space. The doors are a door, and the form is the entry. Held below the top because the multi-episode panels use the form as a container in places, and the frame sits beside the narrative more than inside it.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. In a rectangular forecourt the crowd would face the façade as an audience faces a stage; in the oval it is gathered to a centre and turned round the obelisk, so that it sees itself before it sees the pope, and the blessing falls on a body rather than a mass. The open colonnade lets the city in at every point and still bounds the square, so that welcome is lived, not stated: one walks through the arms, not through a gate. The trapezoid makes the last approach a slight ascent between converging walls of sight. The form has carried blessings, funerals, canonisations and a vigil of hundreds of thousands. Held from the top by the junction of the two figures and by an east end that no longer closes as it did.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The narration runs out of order: chapters circle back over the same missions and the same death, and every return yields a little more. That is the form of a mind that will not look at what it has seen, and also the form of the catch itself, a closed loop the reader enters again and again before discovering what is inside. Told in sequence, Snowden’s death would be one terrible incident early in a war novel; told as the book tells it, it is the book’s reason. The sentences carry the same law on the small scale: the chiasmus and the reversal are the catch in syntax. The figure stops short of the summit because the loop also lets the middle idle, and because the final chapter’s escape is told in a different, nearly sentimental key.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a third person chronicle and the book loses its knowledge. The form is a man cracking apart who tells his life against time to a listener who wants to know what happened next, so that the novel’s content, history as something a person makes and gets wrong, is enacted by its telling. Saleem’s errors belong to the form: he notices that he has placed Gandhi’s assassination on the wrong date, and lets it stand, because in his India it happened then. The pickling of the chapters into jars is the form named: preservation that alters what it preserves. Padma’s interruptions make the reader a listener and the book a performance. Held off the top because the frame is sometimes worked harder than it needs, and in the later chapters the allegory, rather than the form, carries some of the knowledge.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play’s claim, that the town is the spectators, is made by the theatre itself: the Mayor’s line is turned out across the footlights, the epigraph names the play a mirror, and the dumb scene makes the audience look at a stage of frozen faces until it sees its own. Told as a story, the anecdote would be a joke about a mistaken clerk; as a play, where each official must speak his fear aloud and the audience knows what none of them knows, it becomes a demonstration that fear invents its object, carried by dramatic irony from the first act to the reading of the letter. The letter itself, read aloud in turns by those it insults, each passing it on at his own portrait, is a device only the stage could make. Held below the top because the five-act comic frame is inherited and works conventionally for long stretches.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The cross-cutting of the two conferences is the claim that law and crime are mirrors: made in sequence they would be two scenes; cut together they are one institution. The absent crime, given only by sound over empty images, makes the viewer supply the murder, and so implicates the viewer in the city’s imagination. The sound design is the instrument of the plot and of the argument at once: a blind man, a tune, a city that hears before it sees. The court is the form of the argument itself, a trial in which the accused speaks for the first time. Held below the top because the procedural middle is a container, information any form could carry, and the coda is set as a statement.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. A Prufrock told in prose, or in regular stanzas, would be a portrait of a timid man; told in this verse he is the hesitation itself. The broken verse paragraphs, the questions that loop back (“And how should I presume?”), the rhymes that click shut on trivia, the line that suddenly shortens (“And in short, I was afraid.”), the refrains that return like the room’s chatter: these are how the poem knows that thought has replaced action. The couplet “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” stands alone as a stanza, the one moment the self wishes away its own consciousness, and its isolation on the page is its meaning. “Preludes” makes its four parts four hours and four sensibilities. Held off the top by the satires, whose form is a container for a joke.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The forms carry the knowledge. Poem 85 is one elegiac couplet: the hexameter poses the question, the pentameter answers with ignorance and ends on the passive, physical excrucior, and in any other shape the self-division would be described, not enacted. Poem 8 is in choliambics, iambic lines that limp at the close, for a man resolving to hold out, obdura, whose resolve falters line by line. The galliambics of 63, short syllables crowding at the line’s end, are the rhythm of the Cybele cult’s frenzy. In 64 the frame of the coverlet lets an abandoned marriage sit inside a celebrated one, which is the poem’s argument. The hendecasyllable gives the polymetrics the speed of talk. Held below 9.0 because in the epigrams the couplet is often a neutral container for a joke.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would another form change what it knows? Largely. The knowledge is a sequence, a life read in time, and the frieze makes the eye travel it; a canvas of near-square proportion would show a group, not a passage. The yellow corners make the picture a worn fresco on a golden wall, an old sacred thing; without them it is a large Tahitian scene. The flat colour and the absence of cast shadow put every figure in one dream-time, so that birth and death sit on the same ground. The coarse cloth, its weave showing through thin paint, gives the matte surface of a mural; on fine canvas the picture would read as an easel painting enlarged. Held below the top because the middle is episodic: its groups could be rearranged without changing what the frieze says, and the reading from right to left needs the painter’s letter to be secured.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional museum and almost nothing this building knows survives. The form changes how the purpose is lived at every point: the visit is one walk with a beginning and an end; art is seen in sequence, in a single line of time; the whole show is visible at once across the void, so that the visitor knows where they are in it; and the crowd becomes part of what is seen. The form is the instrument of that knowledge, not its container. Held below the top because the form fights part of its purpose: walls that lean back, a floor that slopes, bays too shallow to step back from a large canvas, so that painting is shown against the building’s grain. The galleries of 1992 restore flat walls by leaving the form, and their necessity is the form’s admission.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. As single prints on a wall the photographs are documents of places; in the book they become an argument made by sequence. One plate to a spread, the facing page blank, isolates each image and gives it the silence of an object; the order sets face against facade and poster against person, and lets its motifs recur from plate to plate. Set in a magazine with captions and text it would become reportage, and plead; as a portfolio it would be a set of fine prints. The two parts are the knowledge of a passage from the people to their buildings. Held below the top because the exhibition, the other half of the unit, hung another order, so that the form is strong rather than single, and some plates could shift without loss.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a form and much goes. Painted wood is the instrument: the grain and dryness of the material are the desiccated body; the polychromy gives the flesh its sallow, sun-dried colour and the hair its gold, so that the residue of beauty is present only as colour and is lost in any monochrome version; the built-up hair has a matted, fibrous texture that marble could not take and bronze would harden. Frontal and freestanding at the scale of life, it meets the viewer as a person met in a church, not as an image on a wall. Make it a painting and the confrontation goes; make it marble and the material ennobles what the figure renounces. Held below 9 because the column-like format is the devotional type’s, and the back and sides add little to what the front knows.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The abba quatrain closes on the sound it opened with: each stanza turns back to its first rhyme, which is grief’s motion, going out and returning, and over more than seven hundred stanzas that enclosure becomes the poem’s sense of being held in a circle that only time loosens. The sequence is the knowledge of mourning as duration: a single elegy could state the consolation, but only a sequence written and ordered across years can show it arriving slowly, failing, returning and being half believed. The three Christmases, the first desolate, the second kept calmly, the third at a new house, let the form carry the change. Section V gives the poem’s own theory of its form: “For words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within”, the measured language as a narcotic for pain. Held a little lower because the frame is loose in the middle and the epilogue’s form, an epithalamium, is grafted on.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The panel knows what it knows through oil at this size: the far city exists only because glazed oil can carry detail and atmosphere at once, so that the world beyond the arches is both minutely there and very far. The near square with its three arches sets the donor and the Virgin in a symmetry that the column divides and the light unites. The two figures at the parapet stand with their backs to us at the threshold, so that the viewer’s looking out becomes part of the structure. The small size makes devotion private: one viewer, close, as Rolin is close. As a fresco or a large canvas the intimacy and the distance would both be lost. Held below the top because the perspective is assembled from more than one viewpoint.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person is retrospective, told from after Lausanne, and the flatness of the telling is the grief: the narrator never says what he feels about Catherine’s death, because the form is a man refusing the abstract words the book has shown to be obscene. The declarative sentence is the ethic of chapter 27 made into syntax. The five books move from the collective “we” of the first chapter to the single “I” walking alone in the rain, the separate peace rendered as a narrowing of grammatical person. The lovers’ private idiom, repetitive and childish, is the form of a world shrunk to two. Charged because that idiom sometimes reads as limitation rather than as form, and because the drift of the second book is structural slack, not designed stillness.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in Sensei’s voice alone, the book would be a confession; told by the young man alone, a mystery without solution. The two together know what neither knows: that a man can be loved, studied and still not seen, and that the truth about him, once given, arrives too late to be answered. The letter is the form’s instrument. Written to be read after its writer’s death, it cannot be argued with, and because Sensei asks that the secret be kept from his wife, the knowledge passes to one stranger and stops there. The young man’s first sentence is past and habitual, and tells the reader he knows the end, so that the first parts are elegiac from the start. Held off the top by the silence of the frame: the young man’s later life, and what he did with the secret, is a silence the form makes and does not fully use.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
What the poem knows is in its form. Its subject is the power of not acting, and the form withholds action for some two thousand lines: the hero sits, walks and answers. Every offer is narrated at length and refused in short, and the form is that asymmetry, Satan’s abundance against the Son’s spare replies. Turned into a narrative of deeds, it could no longer say that the deed is the standing. The one act comes at the pinnacle, and the form has made it inevitable and enormous. The close knows itself: after the hymn the hero goes home “unobserved” (IV), the quietest end of any English epic. Held a step down because the panoramas loosen the tension, and the four books sit less exactly on the action than the temptations do.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. Unity of place, elsewhere a convention, becomes the play’s subject: a palace of doors, where the mother waits outside one, the emperor hides behind another, and every room can be overheard. The overheard scene of the second act is the form’s knowledge in one image: the stage as surveillance, the audience placed with the hidden Néron, the lovers’ speech made deadly by a listener. Unity of time compresses the birth of a tyrant into one day, so that the change appears not as development but as release, which is what the play claims it is. The alexandrine, with its symmetry and formal address, is the court’s mask, and the couplet’s closure lets a line turn the mask into a blade at the caesura. Held off the top because the reported deaths of the fifth act, required by bienséance, are handled conventionally.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise or not at all. A pyramid with one stair, the common Maya type, gives the temple a front and the plaza a direction; the radial plan makes the summit the centre of the world, approached alike from four sides, and every face a calendar seen from the platform. The serpent of light needs this form exactly: the stepped corner, the balustrade and the orientation together make the figure, and no other section would. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge is outward: the temple on top is small and its rooms do not carry the building’s idea, and the use the form was built for is lost, so its power over a lived purpose is now read, not seen.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how the world looks from inside Travis. The form is that perception: the windshield as frame, the rear-view mirror holding his eyes, slow motion where he fixes on something, and a diary voice that says what he thinks he is. Herrmann’s score is split the same way, a saxophone for the longing and a drum and brass figure for the menace, never reconciled. The diary falls silent at the shootout: the narrator stops narrating when he acts. A film made wholly of one man’s perception cannot certify that its last scenes are not that perception, so the epilogue’s doubt is the form’s own. Held below the top where the form opens, in the scenes Travis does not witness.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the picture stops knowing its chief thing. Paint the same deed as Géricault painted the Medusa, the figures large and legible in the foreground, and the canvas becomes a protest about the drowned. Painted as it is, the drowned are found late, small and in pieces, inside a splendour that fills nine tenths of the field, and the knowledge becomes knowledge about looking: how the world’s attention goes to the spectacle and finds the victims last. That knowledge exists only as this proportion and this colour, the red of the sun and the red on the water being one red. The form is the instrument. Held short of the top because the fragmented foreground is not wholly controlled: it is painted in a different, more illustrative register than the rest.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form of side two and the knowledge goes. The medley knows that the end of something can be made of its unfinished parts: fragments, each a song abandoned, joined so that their incompleteness becomes passage, and the theme of “You Never Give Me Your Money” returns in “Carry That Weight” as the past returns at a farewell. In “The End” the form is the meaning: one drum solo, three guitarists trading in turn, then the couplet and the chord. The sequence, counted here once, is built: side two runs from sunrise to ending, and side one closes on a riff cut off into silence before the record turns over. Held from the top because side one’s songs are sequenced rather than made one, and “Her Majesty” undoes the ending on purpose.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work loses most of what it knows. The knowledge is of a body held at one instant between resistance and collapse, and it requires a single unmoving form at the scale of a body, seen by a body: the viewer’s own muscles answer. El Greco’s painting of the subject becomes a landscape of fate. Virgil’s poem makes it an event in time, with a cry that rises “ad sidera” (to the stars), which the stone cannot utter. Lessing’s treatise is the proof that form is the instrument here: the open mouth is what marble can do with a scream. Held below the top by frontality: a group carved in the round and conceived as a relief, which weakens from the sides and the back.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a central church the procession would arrive at once; here it advances through the even hall to the opening of the dome and stops at the altar before a sanctuary it can see and not enter. In a basilica with a walled choir the friars would be absent from the people’s worship; here they are present by sound and glimpse, which is what intercession means. The linked chapels keep the nave one room for ceremony and still give each altar its place. Outside, the front on its steps faces the canal and the city, a destination seen from where the walk begins. Four centuries as a friars’ church and a state’s votive church have shown the form carries both. Held below the top because the front, the plain flanks and the turrets carry less of this knowledge than the interior.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and what is lost? The canvas knows the instant of encounter, and its form is the instrument of that knowledge. The field divides into two states of being, solitary cool space at the left and crowded warm noise at the right, and Bacchus’s leap crosses the division. The near-square format holds the halves in balance, so that the eye crosses as the god does. Ariadne’s twist is the knowledge in one figure: her body still turned toward the ship that is gone, her head already caught. As a frieze or a sequence of scenes the picture would lose the simultaneity of loss and arrival that is its meaning. Below the top because the form organises a story rather than reorganising seeing itself.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record stops knowing its one thing, that the one and the many are a single passion. The titles are the form: solo, duet, group, trio and group, single solo and group, group and solo. The order turns the soloist’s relation to the band into the drama, and ends on the group with one, so that the farewell is spoken by a voice inside the mass. Side two, run without a break, makes the second half one movement of passion rather than three tunes. The overdub is form too: the alto sounds over the ensemble rather than inside a solo chorus, so the one is literally laid over the many. Recast as tunes with solos, the record would lose its argument. Held below the top because the seams of side two are where the form comes nearest to a container.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Without names, each person is what the catastrophe makes of them, and the reader must learn them by voice and relation, as the blind learn one another. Without quotation marks the voices run together, and the reader must listen, sort and sometimes fail to tell who speaks: the form puts the reader in the ward, in a dark that is white. The long paragraph refuses the rest of white space, as the inmates are refused rest. The narrator, ironic and humane, sees what no one inside can, and stands where the doctor’s wife stands, the one witness who can see and must decide what to do with it. Given names, inverted commas and a chaptered realism, the book would be a well-made catastrophe novel. Held off the top because the method is Saramago’s general method, not invented for this knowledge, and some of the commentary sits outside the form’s work.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a hypostyle mosque prayer spreads across a field of supports; here it is gathered under one vault facing the court, and the voice of the preacher and the teacher carries across an open square. The four schools teach in four iwans that face each other across one court, so the plurality of law is seen as one body; the students lived in cells stacked round their own small courts, a city of learning lived in and not only visited. From the iwan the tomb is felt, the founder present at every prayer, and the bent entry makes every entrance an arrival. Held below the top: the madrasas are lived apart, and the teaching is gone.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in its pace. A record about dying is built slow: tempos held back, drums often absent or light, strings and piano where guitars would be, the voice close and unforced. Everybody Hurts is built as a lullaby in a rocking metre that climbs, so the song consoles by its shape before its words. Nightswimming repeats one piano figure under the memory it tells, and the repetition is the remembering. Sweetness Follows holds grief under sweetness on a drone. Sequence is counted here, once: from the low road of Drive through the songs of endings to the water of the close. Held from the top: four songs are containers the form neither needs nor shapes.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes, because the record’s answer to grief is its sound. Sung by one voice over a small band, these songs would be private mourning; sung by the whole room, they are the community the words call for, so the form performs the claim. The sequence is counted here, once: four of the first five tracks build the children’s town; the second half widens to love, summons, history and refusal; and In the Backseat lets a single voice close what the crowd opened. The build within each track repeats the build of the whole. Held from the top because the frame stops at four, the second half is a set of songs more than a form, and the crescendo, used track after track, becomes a habit as well as an instrument.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute fired brick or concrete and the building can no longer say its chief thing: that it exists by the labour of the people who pray in it. The form makes upkeep a festival and the festival a part of the town’s year, the toron standing in the wall as a permanent invitation to climb. The platform lifts worship above market and flood while turning the qibla wall toward the square, so that the mosque is the face of the town’s common space. The grid of piers makes the congregation a field of rows among columns, the hypostyle’s ordering of prayer. The form has carried more than a century of daily prayer and of renewal. Held below the top because the hall is the inherited hypostyle, and much of what the form knows is known through the practice it requires.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, which is that clarity and polyphony are not opposed. Declamation passed among shifting groups of voices is the instrument: no line is reduced to accompaniment, yet the words fall one at a time and are heard. Make the Gloria and Credo full imitation and the words go; make them plain chords throughout and the six voices stop being six. The form also knows time: the melismatic movements are slow because they set prayer as duration, the wordy ones swift because they set statement. The voice count is form too, widening to seven for the last petition for peace. Held below the top because the five-movement frame is the rite’s, and in the Kyrie and Sanctus the form is the standard imitative design of its age, filled supremely, not rethought.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a chronological life for this form and the book loses its knowledge: that a life has designs, visible only when its parts are laid over one another. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another”: the sentence is the form’s own account of itself. Each chapter is a lens set on one theme, and the forward drift of the whole carries the reader from the cradle to the son, the spiral turning outward. The close names the method of the whole: a funnel hidden among trees like the sailor in a puzzle picture. Held below the high band because the magazine origin shows in repeated scene-setting and an even, essay-length cut.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The wordless opening makes Plainview a body before he is a voice, so that when he speaks, in the pitch of 1911, “I’m an oilman”, speech arrives as a tool of the deal. The film knows that this man’s language is salesmanship, and only the order of silence and speech can show it. H. W.’s deafness makes the theme literal: the son can no longer hear the pitch, and the father will not learn his language. And the frame narrows across the whole, from open scrub to an interior with a bowling alley, so the form enacts the man’s closing in. Held below the top by the middle, where the Henry and pipeline passages run in a plainer grammar, the form a container more than an instrument.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and several songs lose what they know. 15 Step sets its anxiety in five beats to the bar, a dance pulse that cannot settle. The cycling arpeggios of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi are the undertow, so the form is the drowning. All I Need is a single build that breaks, and the obsessive love it describes is that build. In Videotape the rhythm enters off the piano’s pulse, and a ballad of farewell is heard as an unsteady heart; regularised, it would be sentimental. The sequence counts once: two halves of almost equal length, with Faust Arp at the hinge, a mind racing with no band behind it. Bodysnatchers and Jigsaw Falling into Place are containers more than instruments.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is carried by silence and elision: give the film a conventional score and the dread becomes suspense; show Moss’s death and it becomes a tragedy with a villain, which it refuses. The strands are cut so that Ed Tom arrives after everything, and this lateness, repeated, is the argument — he is never in the scene the film seems to make for him. The dreams close the film because nothing else could; a confrontation would answer a question the film holds open. The sound is the instrument: chirp, boot on gravel, air in a vent carry what dialogue will not. Held below the top where form is a container: the Wells thread and the hospital advance the plot in plain genre grammar.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. Three panels, not one: each figure is alone in its own field and cannot see the others, so the triptych is a set of isolations, where one canvas would make the same three creatures a scene. The orange is the second instrument: a flat ground with no horizon and no cast shadow puts the figures nowhere, neither a room nor a landscape, and that nowhere is the knowledge. The scale is the third: under a metre high, the creatures are met face to face. The glass, which Bacon wanted, lays the viewer’s own reflection over them. Held below the top because the form is first stated here rather than mastered: the supports are perfunctory, and the version of 1988 found a more articulated space.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge. A first person with no outside check is the only form in which the book’s finding can be made: the reader is inside the split and cannot tell, at the moment, whether a scene is lived or invented, as the narrator cannot. The slides of the past tense into the present enact the collapse of narrated distance in a starving mind. The four-part cycle, each part ending in a remission that fails, makes the claim that hunger is not a story with a turn but a recurrence. Told in the third person, or as a plot of fall and rescue, the book would say nothing it now says. Held from the nineties by the fourth part, where the form loosens and the cycle runs on rather than closes.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops being able to say what it says. A smooth stepped pyramid shows a god’s house from outside; here the form puts the visitor inside the god’s attention. The faces are on every tower and turned every way, so that nowhere on the upper terrace is one unseen, and the cramped plan, which forbids standing back, forces the meeting close. The ascent sorts the orders of the world by level, so the visitor passes through the kingdom’s life to its centre. What the building knows, sovereignty as a benign and omnipresent gaze, is known through its form. Held below the top by use as lived: the inner gallery and the lower courts are dark, cut up and hard to read, and how the chapels were served is not known. The form is the knowledge at the top, less so lower down.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The narration is aligned with Elizabeth closely enough that the reader takes Wickham’s story (16) as she does and dislikes Darcy as she does, and must then undergo her recognition when the letter comes. Told by a narrator who explained Darcy, the book would know about prejudice; told this way, it makes the reader commit it. The letter is the second instrument: a document read, reread and reinterpreted across a whole chapter (36), so that the novel’s knowledge is shown as an act of reading. The placing of the reversal at the centre is the third: the second half is the long test of whether two people who now know themselves can act on it. Held off the top because the resolution is managed partly offstage, Darcy’s decisive act reported in Mrs Gardiner’s letter (52), where the form is serviceable rather than the argument.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Told as a text, it would have to say who these people are; the painting’s knowledge is that it does not. As a fresco or an altarpiece it would be read as a story, because the place would supply one. The small size makes it a thing for one viewer at close range, the woman’s look met by one person at a time. The oil, laid in thin layers and soft transitions, is what makes the air wet and the storm’s light green, so that the knowledge that the weather is the matter of the picture is carried by paint and not by a sign. Held below the top because part of what the picture knows has to be brought to it, and because the columns carry their meaning as a sign rather than as painting.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. As one group, touching, the parents would console each other; as a relief they would become a picture of mourning rather than mourners present in the place; standing, they would be sentinels; placed in Germany, they would mourn for the nation rather than before the dead. The form is two closed masses, each folded on itself, kneeling apart at the edge of the field: grief isolates, the dead are faced, and the living are lower than a standing person and higher than the graves. The granite matters too, its weight and its indifference to weather making the vigil permanent. Only the carving’s surface, broad and even, adds little the masses do not already say. Four tenths under The Large Bathers at 9.2.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told straight, a dying man who builds a park is a triumph and a weepie. Told in two movements, the second a wake at which the deed is reconstructed by men who were present and did not understand it, it becomes a film about how a meaningful act is seen from outside: doubted, appropriated, honoured in drink and forgotten by morning. The viewer knows what the mourners do not, that he knew, yet sees the building of the park only through their recollections, so the deed is never shown whole. The hinge is a single cut, from Watanabe going out into the rain with the petition to his funeral portrait. The costs are real and weigh: the narrator explains at the start what the images could carry and is then dropped, and the first movement is handled more conventionally than the second, so that the form becomes the instrument of the knowledge fully only when the wake begins.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. The several simultaneous viewpoints of the Persian page, which a single perspective would abolish, are here the instrument: every room is seen at once, every door shown shut at once, so that the enclosure is total and felt as total. A single view could show a pursuit; only this form can show a maze from everywhere and make the viewer search it. The page adds a second law: the text panels sit within the painting’s field and the architecture rises past them, word and building one fabric, and the inscriptions on the palace make the house a text. The eye’s path up the stair is Yusuf’s path. Held below 9.0 because the compartmented form is the tradition’s, bent to this purpose rather than invented.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the worship is lived differently. A single shrine in a court, as at Thanjavur, presents the god as a mountain seen. Madurai makes worship a passage: from the noise of the outer halls, where goods are sold, through gate and corridor and darker hall to the lamp at the centre. The distance between the worshipper and the sacred is the form. The enclosures make the temple a city in the city, holding market, teaching, music and marriage; the gates face the four directions so that processions issue to the streets; the tank court gives light and air at the middle of the dark. Held below the top because accretion blurs the passage: axes meet at angles, the tallest gate is not the main entrance, and much of the building is passed through, closed or a museum.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how terror and safety look to a child. The stylisation is the instrument: the bedroom is a church because to the boy his mother’s marriage is a rite he cannot interrupt; the cellar steps are steep and endless; the river is a storybook landscape because a child escaping sees it so, enormous animals near and himself small. The rhyme of the two arrests is the form’s argument: the same framing, the same officers closing in, and the second time the child can speak. The duet is form as knowledge, faith answering its counterfeit in the same tune. Held from the top because the town scenes use a plainer studio grammar and the frame states what the form has shown.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first-person narration, in the present tense for Gilead and the past for the time before, confines the reader to what a Handmaid may see: the winged bonnet is a narrative rule, and the state is known only in glimpses. The Night parts are the only time that is hers, and the alternation of Night and day is the shape of her life. The narration doubts itself, “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling”; she gives versions of Luke’s fate and of the night with Nick and takes them back. Then the Historical Notes turn the whole: the tale was spoken onto tapes, and its order was set by two men, so the reader learns too late that the form itself was taken from her. Testimony, unreliability and appropriation are what the book knows, and its form makes them. Held off the top because Jezebel’s slackens the confinement into exposition.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a society is a field of performances that cross without meeting, and the mosaic is the instrument: characters pass one another at the airport, in the pile-up on the freeway, at the hospital and in the clubs, and the viewer, like the city, attends to whoever is loudest. The sound enacts it: the slogans of the Walker truck bleed into a love scene, and conversations overlap so that what is said matters less than who is heard. Told through one protagonist it would be a story about a singer or a campaign; told as a plot it would explain the killing. The threads converge only at the Parthenon, in one crowd, and the convergence is a murder and a song. Held a little below the top where the mosaic adds rather than builds.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional temple, raised on a plinth with one door and a dark sanctum, and the building can no longer say that the word is open to all, that it is reached by descent, and that it is surrounded by common water rather than walled from it. The form changes how worship is lived. The worshipper goes down from the town, walks the parikrama round the water, bathes, crosses the causeway in a slow line, enters from the west and may leave by any door, and hears the hymns before reaching the book. The nightly procession to the Akal Takht and back is possible because the causeway lies on the axis. Held below the top because the ground floor and the setting carry the knowledge; the upper storeys and the gilding add splendour more than knowledge.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. As a panel on an altar it would face a congregation and ask to be venerated. As a fresco on the stair wall it meets one body at a time, on foot and rising, and asks to be greeted in passing, which the inscription says outright. The matte surface of fresco, taking in the light with no gloss and no gold, is the poverty the image teaches. Its scale is set to the stair and the corridor, the figures seen first from below and then level. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: a rule of life made as an architecture inside an architecture. Held below 9.0 because part of this knowledge lies in the siting, which the form uses rather than creates.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as drama, played close with the motives spoken, it would be a story of a con gone wrong and a jealous killing. Told as it is, at a distance, the people small in the frame, the dramatic scenes cut away from, the seasons given more time than the quarrels, and the whole remembered by a child who saw it sideways, it knows that human schemes are small against the turning year, and that those living them see little of what is happening. Linda’s narration, wandering off to the devil and the end of the world, is the instrument: the meaning reaches us through someone who does not grasp it. The coda completes the form. Held below the top because the distance costs the knowledge drama gives, of Abby’s and Bill’s minds.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. Painted smoothly, the face would become a likeness, and the painting’s knowledge, that a self is built of the matter it works in, would be lost: the flesh is laid in thick, worked paint, so the face is a made thing and a living one at once. The tools dissolve into the same open strokes as the ground, hand and instrument one stuff. The circles are drawn lines, the only lines in the picture, set against a body made of none. A figure at about life size, frontal, at the standing viewer’s eye, makes the encounter a meeting. As a print the impasto would flatten, and the argument with it.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? Throughout. The ramps make a crowd with luggage a stream rather than a queue. The separation of levels lets arrival and departure, the long journey and the daily commute, pass one another without crossing. The single room with one clock at its centre gives a city a place to meet and a commuter a daily passage through a civic hall. And the buried yard changed how the city around it is lived: substitute a train shed and there is no Park Avenue as the city knows it, no district of offices built over the tracks. What the form knows, that a terminal can be a room and a district rather than a shed and a barrier, no other form could say. Held off the top because the Beaux-Arts envelope is less instrument than container: a different dress would change little of what the building does.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. Put the school in a building of rooms and the pedagogy of the open hall, every student in sight of every other and of the teachers, vanishes. Put the structure inside and the room is no longer free. Lower the floor to grade and the hall loses its separation from the street and its podium. The universal space is not a container for teaching but the claim the hall makes, about teaching and about building. Life in the room is changed by it, and seventy years of students have found that it governs how one works there, for good, in the shared culture of the studio, and for ill, in heat, noise and distraction. The lower level, a conventional floor of rooms, is where form and knowledge separate.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film can no longer say what it knows. A blind girl and a man known by touch, told in a cinema without voices: had the film spoken, she would know him by his voice in the shop, and the ending could not exist. Silence is the condition of the misrecognition and of the recognition both. The audience, which sees everything, is set against the girl, who sees nothing, and the whole film is played as the sight she lacks, until her sight and ours meet on one face. The score, Chaplin’s own, takes the place of speech and of feeling stated. The opening, in which public speech is noise, declares the form’s argument. Held below the top because the episodic body of the film, the party, the nightclub and the car, is a container for comedy, used rather than formed: a different set of gags would know the same.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Lay the couple under a slab in a plot and the arcosolium’s truth, shelter, a bridge, two bodies leaning together, is lost. Stand the walls upright and the lawn is a closed yard; inclined, they hold the place and give the landscape back. Take the chapel out of the water and its separateness from the garden must be stated by sign rather than lived as approach. The route is the instrument: entering by the circles, choosing water or tomb, arriving at the couple across grass, the visitor performs the relation to death the building proposes. Even the stepped edge knows something, making every arris register light, water and time. Held lower because the knowledge is spread over episodes, not given at a stroke.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Ruth narrates from after the end and freely tells what she could not have seen: the grandfather’s death, the grandmother’s widowhood, Helen’s last drive, all imagined in full and told as memory. That habit is the book’s knowledge: memory and imagination are one faculty, and to remember is to make the lost present and to be pulled toward them. The first sentence, “My name is Ruth,” and the paragraph that follows, a list of those who had her care, set the form of the whole: custody passing from hand to hand, each hand letting go. The ending moves into the conditional, imagining Lucille in places Ruth will never see, so that the form closes on the absence it has argued. Held off the top: stretches of the middle could be told in the third person with little loss, and some meditations stand beside the action rather than within it.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely. The knowledge is that the act requires force against force, and it is known as geometry: the arms of the two women and the arms of the man meet at one point, the wound, the apex of a pyramid, and the diagonal of the sword completes it. Give it the Florentine form, Judith standing with the head held up, and the work knows victory, not labour. Give it Caravaggio’s, the woman at arm’s length across a frieze, and it knows revulsion. Without the raking light the forms do not lock; without the near life size the struggle is an illustration. The wider dark presses the group into a compact block of action. Held below the top because the form was found in the Naples canvas and is here perfected, not discovered.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and almost everything the work knows changes. Its knowledge is the relation between confinement and release, and the triptych is its instrument: two closed panels, interiors without a window, hinged on an open one with a horizon. In the old form the wings could close over the centre; here closing them would shut freedom back inside the rooms. The narrower wings flank and press on the wider centre. Within the panels the form carries the meaning again: the wings’ figures are jammed against the frame, cut by it, upside down within it, while the centre’s figures sit in space with sea behind them. Make it one canvas and the departure is an incident; make it three pictures and the passage is lost. Short of the top because some of what the wings know rests on symbols that could be other symbols.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Put this content into a continuous realist novel and it stops knowing what it knows. The elision is the knowledge. Komako is seen only as Shimamura sees her, in reflections, through doors, as a voice down a corridor, and the form enacts the distance that is the book’s subject. The order of time opens on the second visit and recalls the first, so that the first meeting is a memory already lost when the book begins, and closes on the third. The mirror is the book’s way of knowing in miniature: Shimamura sees most clearly what is superimposed and unreal. Joined by season rather than by event, the episodes make the passage of a year the thing that is wasted. Held off the top only because the late joins, the autumn section and the ending, owe something to the book’s history rather than to its design.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. In prose the split self is a question of whom a pronoun names. On film the camera shows Tyler as a body in the same frame as the narrator, and the audience is deceived along with him: the medium is the hallucination. The film makes this its subject. Tyler is a projectionist who splices frames into other people’s films; the film splices him into its own frames before he exists, and ends on a frame of his kind. The catalogue labels floating in the condominium show the bought self as a page. Held a step below the top by the last half hour, told in ordinary thriller grammar, and by the replay that explains what the form had already shown.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Build the temple in the open and the work loses what it knows. In the hill the king is the mountain of Nubia: his body is the cliff face, and the land itself is made to carry his likeness to the river. The way in is a way into the earth, darkening and lowering, so that the sun’s entry is an entry into a cave and not only down a nave. That is form as the instrument of the knowledge. The use it served, the cult and the procession toward the sanctuary, was lived on that axis as a descent into the god’s interior, and the form still makes every visitor live it so. Held from the top because the interior is the built temple’s plan translated into rock, room for room, and the Small Temple repeats the idea at smaller scale without changing it.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows is lost. It knows that a single line is enough: give the same music a bass and a continuo and the knowledge goes, because the absent parts are the point. The fixed plan of six places carries a second knowledge, that one instrument can be shown under six lights, key by key, by holding the frame constant. The Prelude is free because it alone tests the instrument before the dances bind it; the Sarabande is slow and chordal because it alone stops time. The joint is in the galanterie pairs, where the dance frame is the genre’s container more than the work’s invention, and the form holds the music rather than knowing anything through it.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is in its sound. A record about a self consumed as product refuses to sound like a product: the drums are heard in their room, the voice is dry and close, and songs that could be hits are allowed to collapse into feedback. Polished, these songs would be complaints about fame delivered as its merchandise; recorded this way, the abrasion is the argument. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on the fame of the last record, sets the tender songs at intervals, and closes on a round of acceptance. Held short of the top by the two remixed singles, whose softer surface breaks the argument at its two most exposed points, and by Very Ape and tourette’s, which fill the form.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the building knows goes with it. Put the college’s office in an aisled church with a crossing and the choir loses its enclosure and its sound: the single high vessel is the instrument that makes a few voices fill a cathedral volume. The screen makes the division of the institution spatial, the college within, everyone else in the antechapel, the organ on the threshold. The glass makes the walls the history, so the programme is the enclosure; the unbroken vault makes the two halves one room. Held below the top because the antechapel is less bound to its purpose than the choir, and the chantry the plan was made for has ended.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The text is cut into short blocks set apart by white space, with no chapters, no dates and no names for the two travellers: time is a run of days without a calendar, as it is for them. The dialogue, unmarked and brief, records how little language a world needs when almost nothing is left to say, and its repetitions are the form of their survival. The sentence carries the world: stripped to “and” after “and”, the parataxis of a world in which nothing causes anything any more, it widens in the memories and in the coda into the full subordinate sentence of a world that had causes. The unnamed figures let the particular stand for any father and any son. Held a little off the top because the closing family and the coda change the book’s mode at its end, and the form does not wholly prepare the change.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the film loses its knowledge. The camera stands far back and high, and the armies are banners of a single colour moving across hills under clouds: men are seen as heaven would see them, which is the film’s statement about what they are doing. The colours of the houses make the war a pattern of houses rather than of persons. The Noh grammar of the playing, Nakadai’s whitened face set like a mask, Harada’s gliding walk and sudden stillness, places the figures in a form where deeds have fixed shapes and fixed returns, so that the karmic law is the acting style. The silent siege is the form at its height. Held a step from the top because the narrative is linear and staged scene by scene in a classical way.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a life is lived in scenes with gaps between them, and that the gaps are where things are lost. We never see the lovers decide, quarrel or reunite; we see Christmas Eve, then a winter dawn after the damage, then the end. The form makes memory audible. Act IV begins as Act I began, with the same music and the same two men at work, so the return is heard as a repetition that cannot be one; and Mimì’s last scene is made of the Act I themes, so that she dies inside the music of their first meeting. Held below the top by Act II’s set piece of crowd and spectacle, and by closed numbers that invite applause inside a form that elsewhere refuses it.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The ground bass is the instrument of the knowledge. Dido’s first air and her last are both on grounds, and a ground is a form in which the bass cannot be argued with: her grief is a pattern she can sing against but not leave, and in the Lament the voice’s phrases, set across the ground, make the struggle audible. The witches’ echo chorus is the court’s choruses turned inside out. Short numbers joined by recitative give the hour its speed, a tragedy in which events arrive faster than reflection. Held down by the broken frame of Act II, where the form the work had is not the form that survives, and by the dances, containers of the school stage.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the sound is the disclosure. Played by the band of 1969, live and at tempo with the vocals forward, Family Affair would be a sad song; as made, with a box ticking under a muffled voice and nothing resolving, it is the condition itself. The sequence is counted here, once. Side one opens with a song about not wanting to move and ends on a title with no music in it; side two ends by taking the band’s last anthem of gratitude and slowing it until it sounds like an accusation. Each side’s last music is a long Africa groove, a frame placed twice. Held short of the top because the middle of side two loosens: Time and Brave & Strong could change places, or leave, and the form would know the same.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Paint this subject in modelled bodies under one light and it becomes the Golden Age as Ingres or Puvis painted it, a scene seen through a window; here it is a surface, and the joy is in the surface. The flatness of the colour is the ease of the bodies; the unbroken contour is their freedom from effort; the incompatible scales are the dream’s own logic, in which near and far matter less than rhythm. The ring of dancers is the form compressed into one motif, a closed curve made of bodies. The axis stops short of the top because what the form knows is chiefly about form, and much of the human content would survive in another manner.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is separation within one space, and the structure carries it: the high horizon that keeps the women below the line of the harvest; the frieze, three figures strung parallel to the picture plane, which gives them the permanence of relief and denies them depth and destination; two scales, near and far, with no figure between, so that the distance from gleaner to harvest is empty stubble; and the light, which gives the far field gold and the near bodies weight. Make it upright, as the earlier version was, and the frieze and the long field go; bring the harvest forward and the exclusion becomes an incident. Held below the top because the colour is placed by design more than it is the instrument of the knowledge.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. What the stone knows is that the king’s power is a height, and it knows it by being one: an upright slab about two metres tall, tapered at the top, its field a slope, so that the object, the mountain and the hierarchy are one shape. Set the same content in registers and it becomes a record of events; set it in a wall frieze and it loses its apex; paint it and it loses the permanence a public monument in stone claimed. Relief is the right means, with the stone left bare round the king to stand as sky. Held below the top because the form’s argument is stated chiefly through one diagonal and one apex, and the lost bottom hides how the ascent began.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The near real time is the knowledge: waiting for a diagnosis is lived as minutes, and the viewer is made to wait in them. The clocked intertitles keep death in the frame, every chapter heading a countdown, and the hand-off of chapters to Angèle, Bob or Dorothée shows Cléo as others see her, which is the condition the film is about. The form turns at the hinge: mirrors and interiors before the song, street and open air after it, so that the camera’s freedom is her freedom. Told as a day in ellipsis it would be a melodrama of illness; told this way it is a study of attention. Held below the top because the middle chapters loosen the form’s grip for a stretch.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows. A record about endless motion across a continent is built of long repetitions without development, a pulse that does not tire, and a second side that never stops. The train is not described; the form is the train. Metal on Metal is the clearest case: the title track’s melody falls away and the rhythm of the rails remains, so the listener moves from riding the train to hearing its machinery. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is circular: the last track takes up the words and line of the first, and the album ends on its own beginning, which is what “endless” claims. Side one’s three pieces, more containers than instruments, hold it short of the top.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. Its subject is the failure of speech, will and prayer, and the form fails in the same places. The lines shrink as the poem goes on; the incantation of the last part repeats because nothing can advance; the prayer begins and breaks off before its noun, and the breaking is the knowledge, a soul that cannot reach the word. The three stanzas of the Shadow are built as the gap they name: two terms, then the Shadow, set in a different margin. The ending takes the form of a nursery rhyme and puts the end of the world into it, so that a children’s game is the measure of apocalypse. Prose would explain the hollowness; this form enacts it. Held a little off the top because the second to fourth parts use a lyric form Eliot could have used elsewhere.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. It knows that this order lives in bodies, in how men fold a shirt and stand in a line. Told by scenes and dialogue, the story is petty jealousy in a barracks; told through drill, labour and landscape, it shows the order before the man who breaks under it. The memory frame is the second instrument: Galoup’s blindness to his own desire becomes the film’s ellipsis, which the viewer must read because he will not. The dance is the form’s last statement, the drilled body moving alone. The cost lies in a share of the film that is container rather than instrument: the town scenes are added colour, and the narration sometimes says less than the image it frames.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. The knowledge is that the world is a view from a self, and it is carried by the figure’s back: turn him to face us and the picture is a portrait in a landscape, which knows something else; move him to the margin and he is staffage again, and the view is ours, unmediated. The slopes converging on his head make him the vanishing focus, so that the eye cannot reach the distance without passing through him. The fog is form, not mood: it erases the middle ground, so that near and far have no joining path, and the gulf is made by omission. The upright format bars the view with his body. Held below the top because the far scenery, arranged and balanced, is set rather than necessary, and knows less than the near.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, because the form is the claim. A record that says the self is a meeting of patterns is built of interlocking parts with no centre: no instrument leads, and the voice enters as one more part, often answered by a chorus of itself. Played as conventional songs, with a singer in front, these words would be one man’s complaints; here the individual is already dissolved, and the dissolving is pleasure. The sequence is counted here, once: side one builds the trance, side two takes it apart. Held below the top by the second side, which argues its undoing more by slowing than by form, with Houses in Motion nearer a container, and by the first side’s two fast grooves, which share one form.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that hearing is interpretation, and only a film of recorded sound can make the viewer commit the error himself: we hear the tape as Harry hears it, filtered and partly recovered, and take the line as he takes it. When the stress moves, the viewer’s hearing is convicted with his. Whether the recording has changed or Harry’s ear has, the form places the change in the listener. The point of audition is bound to Harry as the camera of Chinatown is bound to its detective. The last shot completes the form: panning mechanically across the stripped room, the camera has become a surveillance camera. Held below the top because most of the film is classical continuity, and the change of stress can be felt as a device.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The angels’ gaze is the camera: Alekan’s slow, unbound movement through walls, over roofs and along train carriages is the experience of eternity, attention without weight. The overlapping interior voices, heard and cut off, are the city’s consciousness, and the angels’ listening is the film’s; told as plot, it would vanish. The black and white is the angels’ poverty of sense, and the colour is not decoration but the content of the fall: when Damiel sees colour, the viewer learns in the eye what he has gained. The looser, warmer grammar after the fall is itself knowledge, the overview lost. Held from the top because that second form does less work, and the closing monologue reverts to statement.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the canvas knows? Almost entirely. Paint the scene with academic modelling, cast shadows and atmospheric depth, and it becomes an anecdote of the desert: a woman about to be eaten, a story with a next moment. The knowledge of the picture is that there is no next moment, and the form carries it: the contour that seals every thing in its outline, the light that falls equally and casts nothing, the bands of sand, water, hills and sky stacked flat so that nothing recedes, the figures set parallel to the picture plane like a frieze. The stillness is not depicted; it is the condition of the paint. The wide format lays the sleeper along the bottom edge, so her length is the picture’s ground, and the lion stands across her as the one vertical. Held below the top because the hills and sky could be painted otherwise with smaller loss.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and most of what the work knows goes. The strip is time: a story of cause and consequence unrolled in one direction, without frames, so that the oath and the death are the same cloth at two points of one walk, and the viewer’s passage along it is the passage of 1064 to 1066. The borders are a second register beside the first, and they change with the story: beasts and fables early, the ghost fleet under the comet, the stripped dead at the battle. Form becomes comment. The inscriptions bind word to image without displacing it. Made as a hanging, it could surround a great interior and hold a congregation inside a history; a codex could hold the scenes, not the momentum, the scale or the public presence. Held below the top because where and how it hung is inference.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and almost nothing the house knows survives. Open the street front and the withdrawal is gone; light the vestibule and the hall’s release is gone; give the library stair a rail and a landing and it becomes a stair, not a rising into the wall; open the roof to a view and it becomes a terrace among others. The house’s knowledge is its sequence of light and dark, closed and open, low and high, and the sequence is the form. Arrival is lived as passage from the noise of Tacubaya through dimness into light; the garden is lived through one framed opening; the sky is possessed by excluding everything else. Held below the top because the forms are few, and the later colours and objects carry part of the meaning in things that could be otherwise.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building stops knowing what it knows. In a corridor block with rooms on both sides, half the patients lose the sun. Without the terraces the rest cure becomes confinement. Without the splayed wings the life of the healthy, kitchen, staff and service, presses on the sick. Without the room designed from the bed, the patient is housed but not considered. The form changed how illness was lived, every hour of every day of a stay that lasted months, and that is the axis at its proper height. It is held below the top because the regime it was made for is gone, so that what the form knew is now partly a record rather than a use, and because the later hospital years blurred some of it.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The frontal, symmetrical framing down the courtyards makes the house a grid in which each wife has a fixed place, and the viewer sees, as the household does, who is lit and who is dark. The master, kept to long shot and the edge of the frame, makes power impersonal: no face to hate, only a rule. The camera’s confinement to the compound makes the walls the world. The seasonal parts make the plot a cycle rather than a story, so the ending is not a resolution but a return. With close-ups of the master and the town outside, it would be a melodrama about a bad husband. Held from the top because the grid sometimes holds the women at a distance the drama wants closed, Songlian’s collapse above all.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. The panel knows a person in the instant of turning, and knows it through modelling: the head is turned by light, cheek and jaw rounded by graded shadow, so that the turn is felt as movement in space, not drawn as a position. A profile could not hold the doubled bodies; a drawing could hold the pose and lose the warmth of the face against the white fur; a full length would lose the closeness, and the hand at the centre of a half-length field, where it can be read joint by joint. The small panel puts the viewer close enough to be ignored by her, which is the point. Held below the top because the content could be told nearly as well in another portrait of the same size, and because the dark ground as it now stands governs how the turn reads.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in the third person, or by a narrator who explains, the book would be a dystopia about clones. Told by Kathy, retrospective, euphemistic, circling and correcting herself, it becomes a book about how a person knows and does not know what will happen to her. The reader learns the premise as the children did, by hints and half-admissions, and has half accepted it before it is stated: the form does to the reader what Hailsham did to them, and that is the knowledge. The vocabulary is part of the form: “carer”, “donation”, “completed” are the system’s words, and Kathy uses them without irony, so that her acquiescence is in her grammar. Held off the top because Miss Emily’s late explanation steps outside the form’s method and tells what the form had been showing.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
What the work knows, it knows as painting. The knowledge is a simultaneity: a body seen from behind and the face of the same body seen from in front, in one instant, through a device inside the picture. Only a painted image holds that, since a painted mirror can show what no viewer could stand to see, and its blur can be a decision rather than an accident. The form is the instrument: the dark ground makes the flesh glow, the unbroken contour makes the body a single gesture, and the mirror, a picture within the picture, makes the painting about images. In sculpture the face would be lost or given; in words the withheld face would become a statement. Held below the top because the Cupid and the curtain are carried by the form rather than knowing through it.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The double square is the instrument: at about two to one the field spreads beyond the cone of easy vision, and the viewer is set before an expanse with nowhere to stand, which is the loneliness the letter names. The division nearly at the half puts sky and earth in equal contest. The stroke is the knowledge: the same short, loaded mark makes the wind in the wheat and the turbulence in the air, so that threat and abundance are visibly one stuff, and the paths, made of the same marks, cannot be read as roads into calm depth. Put this content on an upright canvas or a smooth, finished surface and what remains is a stormy landscape with birds. Held below the top because one passage, the crows, could change considerably in number and handling without the form knowing less.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The close third person, held on Archer for thirty-three chapters, is the book’s instrument: the reader shares his belief that he sees through his world, and shares his blindness to May. The narrator’s irony sits a half-step above him, so that his picture of himself as a man of taste and freedom is quietly measured against what he does. Told from May’s side, or from everywhere, the novel would know her strategy and lose the shock of the farewell dinner and of the last chapter, where Dallas tells his father that his mother knew, and that on her deathbed she said he had given up the thing he most wanted. The form withholds exactly what the society withholds. Held off the top because the double pace of Book I, half social panorama and half love story, is not fully fused.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Here, nearly entirely. The knowledge of “Le Cimetière marin”, a mind’s motion from stillness to action under a law of measure, is carried by the measure: six decasyllables to the stanza, rhymed aabccb, the returning rhyme the sea itself, “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!”, “The sea, the sea, forever beginning again!”. The short, insistent lines of “Palme” are the patience they recommend. The serpent’s stanzas coil and turn back on themselves. Set in prose, the poems would lose not a decoration but their argument: that the mind is free only within constraint. Every poem in the book keeps fixed metre and rhyme, and the uniformity is part of the claim.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the stone can no longer say what it says. The disc is the sun, and it is the wheel of time: cyclical time made visible as concentric rings, the small cycle of days turning within the great cycle of ages, the present at the centre and the boundary at the rim. Laid out as a codex page or a frieze, the same signs would become a sequence; on the disc they are simultaneous, every age present at once round a face that is now. The material is part of the form: basalt, monumental, its permanence set against the content’s claim that every world ends. The symmetry of the serpents, meeting at a date above and at two faces below, closes the circle. Held below 9.0 because the stone’s function, and so the way its form was met in use, is not known.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Because the camera is bound to Jeff’s apartment and his sightline, the audience sees only what he sees, at his distance, through his long lens and binoculars, and infers as he infers. Told from everywhere, following Thorwald down the stairs or into the street, the film would be a murder story; held to the window, it is a film about watching, and the viewer’s appetite for the next window is its subject. The cutting does the knowing: Jeff’s face, what he sees, his face again. The form completes itself when the watched man crosses the yard into the frame from which the film has looked. Two costs hold it below the top: the binding is broken once by design, when the viewer sees what sleeping Jeff does not, and many of the apartment’s dialogue scenes use inherited studio grammar.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. What the canvas knows is depth without a picture and an act without a subject, and it knows both only as poured line over encrusted ground. The poured line is the knowledge: a skein has no edge drawn by a hand at the surface; it lands, and its loops and pools record speed and height, so the event is legible in the mark. The embedded objects are the knowledge: painted keys and coins would be a still life, and real ones pressed into impasto are matter in the depth, the sea-change made literal. The upright is the knowledge in part, a tall field read top to bottom, like looking down into water. Held below the top because the canvas is two forms, one laid over the other: a brushed and knifed ground of an older kind under the pour of the new.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge goes. The canvas knows that the god is present only as touch, and only painting’s control of edge and tone can make a cloud at once vapour and lover: the half face is legible or not according to how long one looks, and that undecidability is the meaning. A sculpture would have to give the god a body; a text names him; a drawing loses the warm flesh against the cold grey, which is the picture’s whole relation. The tall format makes the cloud descend and enclose, and the view from behind makes the viewer a witness kept from her face, at once discreet and intrusive. Held below the top because the rapt profile could be carried by another painted design.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes entirely. Told in the third person, Kate would be a case of delusion or a figure in a post-apocalyptic tale; told as a narrative, her loss would be a plot. The typescript makes the reader the one other person on earth, receiving the only document there is. The declarative sentence is the instrument: each proposition states a fact, the facts never add up to the truth, and the gap between them is where the grief lives. The self-corrections and misattributions are the form of memory without a second witness, and the undecidability of her solitude survives only because no other voice ever enters. Held a step below the top because the form’s knowledge is fully delivered before the length is spent.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. Poured line is the knowledge: it is a trace of motion, and the work knows the body only because its marks are traces. The floor and the scale are the knowledge: a field one can walk round and be inside, which an easel canvas could not hold. The poles are the knowledge: a measure in a field of impulse, and the work knows the relation of the two only because both lie in one surface and the skeins that cross the poles bind them in. Make it a third of the size and the field becomes a pattern; take away the aluminium and the surface stops moving with the viewer. Held a step below the top because the integration of the poles is not complete everywhere: in places they sit on the field as a later decision rather than grow from it.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Make the walls straight and they need buttresses and thickness; the room becomes a box with a roof on it, and the claim that form and not mass gives stability disappears. Make the roof flat and the waves of the walls lose their partner and their reason. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: one sees in the moving wall what holds it up, and that seeing is the building’s meaning. Use is lived through the form as well: a congregation sits in a room without a single support, the whole space given to it. What keeps the axis from the top is that the liturgical life of the room is not changed by its form as Sainte-Chapelle’s cage of glass or the Pantheon’s sphere change theirs.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. What it knows is that virtue is consonance and evil its absence, and only a sung form can make that a fact. Recast as a spoken play, the Devil is one more speaker among many and the work’s law disappears; recast as a series of songs, the soul has no journey. Monophony is form too: the Virtues sing in one line, so the community is heard as one voice, and Anima’s solo lines, alone against it, are heard as separation. The Virtues sing in turn and the chorus answers, so the procession becomes a rite in which the soul’s absence is felt. The joint is the procession, a sequence of declarations that the Virtues fill, where a different number of stations would change little of what the work knows.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The folding screen stands in zigzag: the panels advance and recede, the gold catches light at different angles on alternate leaves, and the clusters on the forward folds come toward the viewer while those in the valleys sink. The rhythm of the plants is the rhythm of the folds, and as the viewer moves the field moves. The pair gives the journey: one screen, then the other, with the open gold of the left as the far bank. The gold ground is water, air and distance at once because it is none of them, and only such a field can make an absent bridge present. Held below the top because the zigzag’s play is shared with every screen of the type.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the work knows goes. What it knows is attention held in one instant: the stream that would end in a second is kept for as long as anyone looks, and only a still image can do that. The knowledge is in the light, the means by which value is given: the wall, the bread and her forearms are made precious by how light lies on them, and in a description or a print the light becomes a statement rather than an experience. The size matters: at 45.5 by 41 cm the canvas asks to be approached, and the viewer stands at the table, a private witness rather than a public. Held below the top because dignity in attention could be carried in other forms, with loss of intensity more than of content.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the guilty man cannot tell where he is being watched from, and neither can the viewer. The static long take serves both the tapes and the film’s own scenes, so that any shot may be surveillance, and the opening rewind turns the first image into evidence. The viewer becomes a watcher who also cannot see, and is asked in the last shot to search the frame for an answer the film will not mark. The absence of a score removes the instruction to feel, leaving judgement to the watcher as it is left to Georges. Told in conventional coverage, with a revealed sender, it would be a thriller about a stalker. Held below the top because the marriage and station scenes fall into ordinary shot and reverse shot.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the book knows goes. The unattributed dialogue makes the reader do what Elizabeth must do: work out who is speaking, what they want and what has happened elsewhere, from voices that talk past each other and never wait for an answer. The one-sided telephone call is the book’s figure for its whole world, speech without a listener. The descriptive passages, unhurried and silent, are the only places where anyone looks at anything, and they are tied to the house and the view, so the form sets attention against noise. The title states the form: Gothic ornament nailed onto a carpenter’s frame, the house, the novel’s mode, the ministry and the company alike. Held off the top because the plot’s machinery is sometimes delivered as information to be decoded rather than discovered.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. It knows lift and weight at once, and it knows them because it is marble, the heaviest of the sculptor’s means, made to land. Cast in bronze it would be lighter, and the contest would slacken. Painted, it would lose the wind, which exists only as pressure on solid cloth seen in the round. Taken off the ship it would lose the arrival: the prow’s thrust and the figure’s forward pitch are one diagonal. The two marbles, grey hull and white goddess, part the made thing from the divine body while the diagonal joins them. Held below the top: what the form knows is one instant.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Its argument is that style governs and sincerity follows, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing” (Act III), and the form is that argument enacted: a farce whose every turn is made by a sentence, whose persons are their manners, and whose plot obeys the law of the epigram at the scale of action, so that the lie of the name comes true. The symmetry of two couples, two inventions and two proposals says that persons in this world are interchangeable forms. As a realist play the same matter becomes an exposure of hypocrisy; as prose fiction it loses the speed by which it argues. Held short of the top because farce is a form Wilde perfected rather than made.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building stops knowing that an art school is a house of light and labour. The north studios are their windows; the library is a room of dark and light whose form is its reading; the section’s climb to the top-lit museum and the roof corridor makes the act of making an ascent. The form also knows its own history: the eight years between the phases are legible, the east half in the curving language of the 1890s and the west half in the hard geometry of 1907, and the building holds the change as growth rather than as a seam. Held below the top because the knowledge lies in rooms and sections more than in the whole, and the north front, its greatest façade, is chiefly frank use.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that death in front of you is still not your death, and it depends on the real body: a model shark, a photograph or a painting would be an image of a threat, and the viewer’s body would not register it. The glass is the second term: it shows everything and allows no contact, so that the separation the title names is built as a wall. The fluid makes the dead body seem to swim, so that the work is at once alive in pose and dead in fact, its whole proposition made physical. The frieze proportion makes the body something to walk along. Held below the top because the replacement showed that the form is the concept and the kind, not this body, and because the three bays add little that the knowledge needs.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is like to live inside a dread that cannot be named. Told as a realist drama of a poor young father in a bad city, the content would remain and the knowledge would go. The sound, a hiss and roar that never stops, allows no quiet in which to leave the condition, and the child’s cry is made unbearable by being made continuous. The duration holds shots past comfort, so time is lived as Henry lives it. The black and white sets small lit figures in deep darkness. And the dream logic, in which a fallen head is made into erasers, renders a man’s sense of his own use. Held below the top because the planet frame is staged as emblem more than woven into the same fabric.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a self is made in the gaps. The three-actor triptych is the instrument. The film never shows the years between chapters, Juan’s death, the juvenile sentence, a thin boy remade as a muscled dealer, and the viewer must recognise Chiron across bodies that share little but the eyes and the stoop; that act of recognition is what Kevin performs in the diner. Told as one continuous life with one actor ageing, the knowledge would become a story of change; told this way it is a story of what persists. Faces held at the centre of the frame, looking almost into the lens, put the viewer where the one person who sees him stands. Held below the top where the second chapter leans on school-drama scaffolding.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that a man without standing cannot know what he suspects, and that suspicion writes its own story. The camera is bound to Jong-su, and we see only what he sees. The evidence is built so that it does not prove: a watch, a cat that comes to a common sound, a reservoir Ben looks at, a greenhouse that is not burnt. The late shots of Jong-su at Hae-mi’s laptop, writing, open the possibility that the ending is his novel, so the form folds the act of narration into the crime. Told from outside him, with a greenhouse burning or Hae-mi found, the knowledge would become a plot. Held below the top because the closing violence gives a resolution the form had trained the viewer to distrust, and the laptop half pays for it.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The three nested times make every past event already a memory of a dead man told by a dying one. The car journey places the viewer in suspended time, approaching an act that everyone in the car but the wives understands. The freeze-frame captions convert each living gangster into his own death notice the moment he appears, so that the comedy is shadowed throughout by the ending. Duration is the instrument: three and a half hours make the viewer live through time until the last act cashes it as age, and a shorter film could not know that time is the sentence. The withholding of Frank’s inner life is formal too, since the man who obeys has no interior to show. Held below the top by the middle hour, where the form loosens into chronicle and carries events rather than knowing them.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing almost everything. The publicity still is the knowledge: a single frame that implies a film, plain as a studio handout, so that narrative is promised and withheld. Make the images colour, large and captioned and they become portraits of characters, and the viewer no longer supplies the story. The single model is the knowledge: with sixty-nine women the series would be a survey of stereotypes; with one, the self is shown to be the costume. The series is the knowledge, since only repetition across difference can disclose the absence of an essential self. Black and white sets the images in a past the viewer half remembers. Held a step below the top because the number and the order are open.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The target fills the square canvas edge to edge, so the painting does not depict a target, it is one, and the question whether it is a sign or a picture can be asked only of this form. Encaustic is the knowledge: it sets each stroke as it falls, keeping the hand visible on an image that needs no hand, and the newsprint beneath puts the printed, public world inside the sign. The casts must be casts: painted faces would be a picture of anonymity, cast faces are anonymity in fact, taken from a person and indistinguishable. The box sets them in their own space, physical and above the plane. Photographed, printed or painted, the work would no longer stand between object and image. Held a step down by the front, whose closed state the work does not need.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Change the identical envelope and the variation can no longer be seen as variation; paint the mill finish and the boxes stop taking the colour of the light; wall up the glazing and the work becomes an inventory; reduce it to one box and there is no field, no comparison and no passage of light down a row. The form is the instrument: the work knows by the precise relation of a constant to its variants, of objects to a building and of the building to the land, and none of it can be put into another form without loss. What holds the figure short of the top is that the form can be stated in a sentence and grasped quickly as a principle; the depth lies in its realization, case by case.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The torque is the knowledge: a plate with parallel ellipses at top and bottom is a wall; turned, it leans, and the leaning is the whole experience of threat and release. The scale is the knowledge: at table height these forms are models, objects seen from outside, and know nothing of enclosure. The sequence along one hall is the knowledge of the title: the walk from simple to complex is the work’s time. The material is the knowledge of weight: the same shapes in plaster or glass would lose the gravity on which every effect depends. Held below 9 because part of what the room knows each sculpture knows alone, so that the ensemble is in part an arrangement of forms already complete, and because the gallery, not the work, sets the frame of the whole.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form for this content and nearly everything goes. A painting of Ross, a photograph of a heap, a fixed sculpture weighing 175 lb: each would lose the diminishing, the taking, the restoring and the shared responsibility, which are what the work knows. The form is the instrument. Weight stands for the body, depletion for dying, the visitor’s hand for the public’s part in it, replenishment for memory and love, and the certificate for the institution’s duty to keep that memory alive. The work knows these things only by being a pile from which one may take and which may be refilled. Held below the highest marks because a related form, the paper stack or another candy work, knows much the same, and because the work can be realised loosely and remain itself.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely, because the canvas knows nothing apart from its form: the knowledge is the relation of these planes at these sizes, and a change of proportion is a change of proposition. Make the red smaller and the balance becomes symmetry; make the blue red and the answer across the diagonal is lost; curve one line and the law is broken. Held below the top for two reasons. The proposition survives reproduction better than most paintings: a print carries the relations nearly whole, and what it loses, the brushed whites and the slight relief of the bands, is real but secondary. And the sibling canvases show that other arrangements can hold the same knowledge.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told without the screen, the story is a boy cleared of a theft and given the girl; told through the screen, it is about what the pictures do to the boy. The film within the film is the instrument: the dream is shaped like the pictures he projects, the rival and the father reappear in its roles, and the detective’s competence is the competence only a cut can give. The montage is a lesson in editing given by edits, a statement made in the only form that could make it. The ending closes the form on itself: the boy at the port copies the screen gesture by gesture, and the form shows the ellipsis that defeats him. Held a step from the top because the chase in the dream’s second half works as pure set piece, where the form contains stunts rather than knowing through them.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely: the form is all there is. The soft edge is the knowledge: a hard edge would make the rectangles objects on a ground, and the feathered edge lets them hover, dissolve and advance. The thin layering is the knowledge: colour laid in veils lets the lower layer show through the upper, so that the light seems to come from inside the canvas. The size is the knowledge: at the scale of the body the field is a presence, and in reproduction it is a chart of colours. The frontal, symmetrical stack is the knowledge: with no diagonal and no movement across, the field faces the viewer as a person stands. Held below the top because the form is the format’s, made in 1949 to 1950 and shared by every canvas of the kind.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows, because the form is all it has. Its knowledge is that a frame makes music of whatever it encloses. A recording of silence loses the room and so knows nothing; a gallery installation loses the performer’s ritual and the clock; a statement of the idea in words loses the experience of having one’s own hearing turned on oneself. The concert form, with its timed duration and its performer, is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. The title as a duration is form too: it makes time, not pitch, the one parameter. Held below the top by the three divisions, a container the published note empties of necessity.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly entirely, and at one precise place: the sentence and the pipe share one plane and one material. Because the words are painted, they are an image too, and the denial applies to itself; set the sentence on a label beside the frame and the work becomes a picture with a comment, and loses the self-reference that is its knowledge. Because the pipe is painted with illusion, the denial bites; drawn as a diagram, it would be a sign denying it is a thing, which no one doubts. The plain ground isolates both as specimens. Held below the top because the oil itself carries little: the knowledge passes almost whole into a print or a reproduction.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Change the form and the poem would lose part of what it knows. Told king after king, each tragedy is one moment in a succession that will end: Sohrab’s death is also a scene in the reign of Kavus, whose glory is waning. Myth passes into legend and into history, and the vanishing of the demons and the Simorgh is what the form tells: the world grows ordinary as it nears the poet’s time. The self-contained couplet makes the poem’s judgment portable, and its gnomic lines have passed into speech. Held well below the top: the chronicle is the source’s form, carried over rather than made, its episodes joined by succession, not by one action, with no ring of its own.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Willis’s top-light puts the Don’s eyes in shadow in the first scene, so that the audience must read a man it cannot see into, and the film teaches it to do so for three hours; by the baptism it reads Michael the same way, and the darkness that was menace has become intimacy. The slow dissolves and long held scenes make the viewer sit in the rooms where decisions are made, and the consent the family asks of its members is asked of the viewer too. The baptism intercut states the thesis in form alone. Held a step from the top because much of the film is in conventional scene grammar, where the form contains the content rather than knowing it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The chronicler is the instrument: a man of the town, half-implicated, who sets rumour and his own guesses beside what he saw, so that the reader knows the town as it knew itself, a place where everyone talks and no one knows. Possession by ideas is shown as contagion, and the narrator’s talk is a vector of it. The scandal scene, the whole cast brought into one room until the room explodes, in Varvara Petrovna’s drawing room in Part One and at the fête in Part Three, is the form by which a society is shown losing its law. Charged: the narrator’s knowledge is inconsistent, since he reports private scenes, Kirillov’s death and Stavrogin’s nights, that he could not have seen, and the book shifts to an omniscient register when it needs one; and the withdrawal of “At Tikhon’s” leaves the centre the form is built to circle emptier than the design intended.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The open form is the instrument of one knowledge: that form, surat, is the vessel of meaning, ma’na, and that meaning breaks every vessel. Tales open inside tales because the meaning will not stay in a story; the gloss overruns the tale because the tale was only the measure; the voice, speaking to Husam as he writes, interrupts itself because it is moved by what it says. The reed’s complaint, which the whole poem is, has no plot because separation has none. Yet much of the form is a container. Put the teaching into an anthology of tales with commentary, which is what Sana’i’s poem was, and most of it survives; the books could run to four or to ten and say the same; and the open form admits slack the knowledge does not need. The form knows something, and permits more than it knows.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows is lost. The chronicle of tableaux knows that history passes over its rulers: the scenes do not lead into one another as plot, and the people’s scenes frame the tsar’s. Boris’s tragedy is in his speech, so his music is declamation. The bells are the form of state and church at once. Set as a number opera, the work would know a tyrant’s fall; set as it is, it knows a people’s history with a tyrant in it. The cost: the tableaux can be reordered without collapse, as a later edition proved, and the Polish act is a container for an opera of another kind.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The episode, each one a unit of performance, gives every life its own rise and fall within the larger fall: impermanence is not only said but is the rhythm by which the work is heard, story after story closing on a death, a vow or a departure. The alternation of prose and seven-and-five verse marks travel and parting, as when Shigehira is carried captive down the Tōkaidō, and the waka set into the narrative let warriors die as poets: Tadanori’s poem is found in his quiver. The closing book changes what the whole knows. The Kakuichi text ends not on the execution of Rokudai and the end of the line, as Book 12 does, but on a woman’s salvation. Held off the top because the episodic form is also a container, holding digressions the design does not need.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is that the story matters as address, and the unstaged oratorio without characters is the form that says it. Give Christ a voice and a stage, as a Passion or an opera would, and the “we” of the choruses becomes a crowd watching someone else. The chorus is the instrument: congregation in “Surely”, mob in “He trusted in God”, rebels in the second psalm, heaven in “Worthy is the Lamb”. The shepherds sit in Part I like a window, and the Amen gives the last word to every voice. Held down by the borrowings: “For unto us” and “All we like sheep” were Italian love duets, their melismas still falling where the old words fell, and a form that carried another text first is in part a container.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the strongest songs lose what they know. “Tomorrow Never Knows” refuses harmonic motion because its subject is the stilled mind. The octet of “Eleanor Rigby” removes the band, so the song about loneliness has no group in it. In “For No One” the chamber distance of clavichord and horn is the indifference, and “She Said She Said” breaks its metre where the memory breaks in. The sequence knows something too: the state’s demand opens the record, the first side closes on talk of death, and the second ends in the void. Held a step lower by four or five tracks, “Doctor Robert” among them, that are containers rather than instruments.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. A teaching that warns against followers cannot be given as a treatise without contradicting itself; it must be dramatised, and the drama is the knowledge: Zarathustra’s fear of his own thought, his silence before it, his illness after it, his laughter at its paraphrase. The recurrence exists in the book as an ordeal undergone, not a proposition proved, and that is the point. The comic fourth part, where the higher men worship an ass, tests the teaching by its parody. Held below the top because in Parts I and II the form is often a container: those speeches could be set as numbered aphorisms without loss, and Nietzsche did set much of the same thought so, in The Gay Science and in Beyond Good and Evil.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The boarding house is the instrument: a vertical society in one building, the landlady and the best lodgers on the first floor, Goriot climbing floor by floor to the third as his money goes, so that the descent of a man is measured as a staircase. From that house Rastignac crosses Paris to the faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée-d’Antin and back each day, and the alternation of the pension’s soup and the salon’s brilliance is the comparison the book exists to make. Three strands braided through one witness give three answers to one question, how to rise in Paris: by the father’s sacrifice, by the aristocrat’s grace, by the convict’s crime. Told as Goriot’s story alone it would be a pathetic tale. Held off the top by the narrator’s essays, where the form becomes a container for the author’s sociology.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
In the chevet, change the form and the knowledge goes: an ambulatory of thick walls and separate apsidal chapels cannot say that the sanctuary is filled with uninterrupted light, which is the whole claim. In the transept the width is the necropolis: the kings lie in the arms of the cross, round the saint’s choir, and the plan makes rank and memory spatial. The glazed triforium makes the upper church one luminous wall. What holds the score down: the church as it stands is two forms fitted together, Suger’s lower chevet under a thirteenth-century upper choir, and the seam is legible; the fortified west front does not know what the nave knows; and much of what the form meant, the coloured glass, the gilt doors, the shrine of the saints, is now reconstruction or loss.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The pastoral frame is the instrument: only where nothing should happen but song and love can an eviction register as violence, and the dialogue of the first poem sets the fortunate and the dispossessed under one beech with no narrator to reconcile them. The alternation of dialogue and single voice, and the pairing of poems about the fifth, make the book a sequence that argues, each poem read against its partner. The hexameter, Homer’s line given to herdsmen, carries the mode’s strain between low matter and high form, and the fourth poem announces it: “paulo maiora canamus”, let us sing a little greater things (4.1). Held at 8.7 because in the contests the form holds inherited material rather than making new knowledge.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the knowledge is in the sound of the night. Visions of Johanna’s structure, verse on verse without a release, is the vigil it describes. Stuck Inside of Mobile turns its refrain into the trap of its title: every verse ends back in the same place. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands asks a question at each refrain and never answers it, devotion that cannot arrive, and its length is its meaning. The sequence moves from carnival to vigil to dispersal to worship, and the whole last side given to one song is a formal act. Held from the top: the songs survive other forms, as the singer’s own stage resettings of 1966 show, and the blues numbers are containers.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The form carries the knowledge. The two books are a mirror: province and capital, a mayor’s wife and a marquis’s daughter, a ladder at Verrières and a ladder in the rue de Grenelle, the seminary and the salon as two schools of the same mask. Reduce it to a single line of rise and fall and the book loses its proof, that the two worlds teach one lesson. The close third person, moving in and out of Julien’s head, puts the reader inside the calculation and outside it at once, which is what the book knows about ambition. The epigraphs are a second voice that mocks the first; the mirror of I.13 states the method and is itself ironic. Charged by the Fervaques chapters, where form becomes repetition.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. Told in order, the book would be the story of a revolution and a rescue, with Nostromo’s ride to Cayta and Barrios’s return as its climax and the Occidental Republic as its happy end. Told as it is, the secession is known before its making, then given through Captain Mitchell’s complacent narration as a tale for visitors, and the reader sees the progress as the mine’s law repeating itself; the coda foresees the next revolution, this time against the material interests themselves. The absence of a governing consciousness is the instrument of the book’s view that no one in it understands what he is part of. Charged: the third part, after Decoud’s death, narrows toward a single plot told more nearly in sequence, and there the form is less the knowledge than the container of an ending.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Ended at the suicide, the play is a tragedy of honour and madness, and it knows only what Ajax knows. Run on over the body, it knows what he could not: that the code he died for is now in the hands of lesser men, that the army’s law and the hero’s honour cannot both rule, and that the man he hated most is the only one able to give him his due. The death at the middle of the action is the instrument of that knowledge, not an accident of plotting. The empty stage, the chorus gone, gives the suicide speech a solitude no messenger’s report could. Charged: the doubled quarrel turns the last movement for a time into a container for argument, and the form there carries less than it does before.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. Told in the written French of the juries, the war, the colony and the factory would become subjects; in the spoken voice of a man who was there and is still afraid, they are what was suffered and cannot be dressed up. The voice is the argument. Its sneer is the defence of a body that has learned it will be used up, and its occasional tenderness breaks through precisely because the register has no place for it. The picaresque frame, with a narrator always moving on, is the form of a man who has nowhere to stand, and Robinson’s appearance at each station turns the episodic line into a fate. Held off the top because the second half’s form slackens: the medical chapters drift back toward chronicle, and the ending, though earned, arrives by event, Madelon’s shots in the taxi, rather than by a turn of the form itself.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel about Pilate reaches the reader through three witnesses, Woland, who was there, Ivan’s dream, and the Master’s restored pages, and the three tell one story in one voice, so the form itself argues that the truth is not the property of the one who writes it and cannot be burned. The two times are joined at the end, when the Master, the author of Pilate, sets him free: the novel within the novel becomes the plot of the novel, and the writer’s mercy is his last act. The contrast of styles, the chapters in Yershalaim grave and exact, the Moscow chapters a comic narrator’s patter, is the contrast of the two worlds’ relation to truth. Held off the top by the episodic Moscow middle, where the form is a sequence of numbers on a variety bill rather than the instrument of the knowledge.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The seven phase titles tell a woman’s life as stages of a kind, from The Maiden to Fulfilment, and the irony of the last title is the book’s argument in a word. The seasonal order makes the moral story a natural one, and so makes the social judgment look unnatural. The great events are withheld from view: the Chase ends in a fog and a sentence on a coarse pattern traced on a blank tissue (XI); the murder is known through a landlady’s ear and a stain; the hanging is a flag. The form shows not the violence but its consequence, which is what the novel knows about where the violence lies. Held off the top by the argued passages, where the form becomes a container for essay, and by coincidences it tolerates rather than requires.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much goes. The triptych opens: closed, it is grisaille stone, the Annunciation as sculpture in niches; opened, it is colour, flesh and one winter landscape continuous across three panels, so that the object enacts the incarnation’s movement from word and promise into bodies. Scale is the instrument: at about life size on a high altar, the still life sits at the eye of celebrant and congregation, and jar and wheat stand between the viewer and the child as the altar does. The ring of empty ground can be held only on a large flat field seen whole. The wings set the donors in the season of the Nativity, the patron’s request made into a claim. Held below the top because the background episodes could be told in another form, and the reduced versions in prints and copies keep much of the centre’s argument.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. Where the sound is the content, form is the instrument: Are You Experienced? knows what it knows only through backward tape, and I Don’t Live Today ends in feedback because a statement could not carry what the noise carries. The trio is a form too, leaving room in which one guitar can be rhythm, lead and noise at once, with drums phrased like jazz to fill the space a band would. The sequence is counted here, once: the British record opens with the sound declared, lifts near its close from songs into space in the long instrumental, and ends with an initiation. Held where it is because many of the songs are pop and rhythm and blues frames with a solo in the middle, and the middle of each side could be reordered without loss.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Put the relics in an ordinary church of one level and the building stops saying that the martyr was raised. The raised eastern arm makes holiness a matter of level: one climbs toward the saint. The screen and the steps make the monastic community a church inside the church, enclosed above the laity. The ambulatory turns the pilgrim’s devotion into movement round a centre. The Martyrdom keeps the site of the killing as a place in the plan, not a picture. The Perpendicular nave gives the lay church its own height and light, a room for crowds and processions. Held below the top because the shrine the eastern form was made to hold has been gone since 1538, and because a long accretion means that some forms were inherited rather than chosen.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The painting knows what it knows as a tall field over an altar, its figures at about life size, with the ledge at the bottom as the line where the vision meets the space of the people before it: Sixtus points across that line, Barbara looks down across it, the putti lean on it. The curtains make the picture plane a veil drawn back, so that the picture is the act of showing. It is a single frontal apparition, not a narrative; a print would lose the life size that places the viewer at the threshold. Held below the top because part of what the form knew depended on its first setting, the altar and whatever faced it, which the gallery wall does not supply, and because the image has proved that much of it survives reduction to postcard size.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the worship changes. A stupa is not entered; it is gone round, and what it knows is kinetic: the body learns the centre by keeping it on the right. The railing makes the path a roofless room; the offset entrances force a turn from the outer world into the circuit; the terrace gives a second, higher round nearer the dome. The gates work otherwise: frontal, read standing, they make the threshold a book one passes through. Put this content in a hall with the relics on an altar and the circling goes; put the stories on the railing in sequence, as at Bharhut, and the threshold loses its weight. The Gupta Buddhas against the drum, one facing each gate, give the circuit a face at every entrance and change what arrival is.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The form governs how the purpose is lived. The axis is a graded sequence of access: the public at the outer courts, priests further in, the king and high priest at the sanctuary, each pylon a threshold that sorts people. The hall makes the god’s route a lit nave through a dark forest, so the procession is lived as passage out of the first marsh. The cross axis joins the temple to the city’s festivals, south to Mut and on to Luxor. Change the form to one great room and that passage goes. Accretion knows something too: because each reign built in front, the walk inward is a walk back in time. Against this, the form was summed, not conceived, and the second axis, the crowded First Court and the cluttered east blur the sequence.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its doctrine is that salvation is a way walked, not a state held; that the way is narrow and lies straight; that it can be left by a stile into a pleasant meadow; and that the end is unknown until it is reached. The road is that doctrine. The dream frame works too: the dreamer sees and does not intervene, which puts the reader where the believer stands, watching a life he cannot steer, and the last waking, set directly after Ignorance is carried to the hillside door, ends the book on the dreamer’s own uncertainty. The companions are formal necessity, since the book holds that no soul is saved alone. Charged: the dialogues are form as container, doctrine poured into a conversation that could be a tract.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge in the large. Part One’s single morning, set against the years of the rest, makes the reader live inertia as duration before learning its cause; the Dream, placed at the end of Part One rather than at the start, turns from what he is to why, and does it as a dream, the one form in which Oblomovka can still exist. The arc is circular, from the sofa on Gorokhovaya Street through one summer of motion to the sofa on the Vyborg side; a straight novel of failure could not say that he goes home. The summer is told in the season’s time, the lilac blooming and fading, and the Vyborg years in no time at all. Charged: the Stolz chapters are a container.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Much of it. The knowledge is that the monsters come out of darkness, and here they are made of it: aquatint at full depth, lightening toward the figure, so the creatures emerge from a tone rather than being drawn on a ground. The etched line gives the man and the lynx their solidity; the aquatint gives the night its substance; the two techniques are the two orders of the picture. The title, etched on the block, is a thing in the image’s world. The print form belongs to what it knows: a multiplied image, a public address, the hinge of a numbered sequence. Held below the top because the idea survives as a drawing, with real but partial loss.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The strophe is the instrument of the poem’s knowledge. Its fourth line, heavier by one stress, is again and again the place of the narrator’s foreknowledge: the strophe that opens this version introduces the girl and closes “dar umbe muosen degene vil verliesen den lîp”
“for her sake many warriors had to lose their lives”. The end is known from the start and every festival is watched in its light, so the fatalism is carried by the metre rather than stated. The two halves mirror each other: a wooing journey down the Rhine and a doomed journey down the Danube, a hall of feasting at Worms and a hall of burning at Etzel’s court. In the romance couplet or in prose the foreknowledge would go. Held below the top because the courtly description sits in the same form without being changed by it.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the riot belongs to no one and to everyone, and the form is the instrument of that knowledge: a mosaic of short scenes among a dozen figures, none of them the centre, so that by closing time every grievance has been heard and none outweighs the others; one block, so that every claim is a claim on the same ground; one day, so that the heat is a clock. Told as a melodrama with one protagonist, the film would have to choose a side. The design carries the temperature, in Dickerson’s reds, oranges and yellows and a frame that tilts more as the day goes on, and the coda completes the form with a quarrel over wages. Held below the top because Mookie as connecting thread is a convenience, and some vignettes are sketch comedy filling the mosaic.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in the third person with an author’s access to Jake’s mind, the wound would be stated and the reticence lost; but the reticence is Jake, and the gaps in what he tells are the measure of his pain. The first person also lets the book judge its narrator: his contempt for Cohn and his pimping for Brett are recorded by the man who does them, and the reader sees past him. The three books are a form with a meaning, the city, the rite and the return, with the two taxis matching at either end, so that the structure enacts the second epigraph: motion that comes back to where it began. Dialogue is the instrument, not the vehicle; what Jake and Brett cannot say is held in what they do say. Held off the top because the first book is looser in structure than the rest.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the building knows is lost. In a corridor block of flats on one level each dwelling would face one way, its living room would be one storey high, and the corridor would run on every floor; in a perimeter block the services would be in the city, not in the building. Here the section makes each flat a house of two floors with east and west light, the morning in one room and the evening in another; the frame makes each dwelling a unit; the pilotis and the roof make the ground and the sky part of the plan; the school on the roof makes childhood part of the building’s life. Held below the top by the interior streets, which the form calls streets and which are lived as corridors, and by the flats’ narrowness.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. In verse “La Chevelure” is a hymn; in prose “Un hémisphère dans une chevelure” is a reverie that can be interrupted, and the book’s knowledge lies in the interruption: the bailiff in “La Chambre double”, the second thoughts of “La Fausse Monnaie”, the narrator of “Le Mauvais Vitrier” shouting down from his window after the glazier’s panes are smashed, “La vie en beau! la vie en beau!”, “Life made beautiful! life made beautiful!”. Prose holds the anecdote, the dialogue, the reported argument and the sudden essay of “Les Foules” and “Les Veuves”, which the verse lyric of the time could not. The cut-anywhere whole is itself the form of the city’s discontinuous experience. Held below the top because the doublets put verse content in a prose container, and the whole, by its own avowal, is a series and not a form.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person in an ass’s hide is the instrument: Lucius hears and sees what no free man could, because no one guards speech before a donkey, and a human mind trapped in a beast’s body is the book’s image of the soul under appetite. The double narrator, the curious young man who suffers and the initiate who tells, lets the book enjoy every adultery tale and then condemn the enjoyment; the prologue’s laetaberis (“you will be delighted”) draws the reader into the pleasure the priest rebukes, so the form implicates its reader. Held off the top because in the ninth and tenth books the frame becomes a container: the ass is present at tales rather than living them, and for stretches the form loosens to an anthology.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The alternation is the argument: the general chapters say that what befalls the Joads befalls a hundred thousand, and the Joads say that each of the hundred thousand is a family with a grandfather who will not leave his land. Remove the general chapters and it is a family saga of hard luck; remove the Joads and it is a pamphlet. The two voices draw closer as the book goes, until in the last chapters the family’s fate and the general fate run together, the flood falling on all the boxcars alike, and the closing gesture completes the move from “I” to “we” that chapter 14 names. The road is the form of the middle movement. Held under the summit because the Joad chapters, taken alone, are conventional in their making, and some general chapters are essays rather than instruments.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
What the work knows, it knows as this one field. The knowledge is that the idea and the people are one body in one space: an allegorical figure and a stripped corpse share the light, the smoke and the paving, and the flag’s colours are carried down through the crowd into the wounded man’s clothes, so that the ideal is visibly made of the people it leads. Set the allegory in an upper register, as a ceiling would, and that knowledge goes; make it a print or a narrative series and the simultaneity goes; reduce the scale and the dead stop pressing at the viewer’s feet. The pyramid is the argument: from the dead to the flag in one climb. Held below the top because parts of the form are conventional containers, the Géricault pyramid and the classical stride brought in whole, and the background is summary.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the book loses what it knows. The knowledge is that consciousness has become a passive surface on which things deposit themselves without order, and the long line, with its enumerations and its chains of “como” in which the subject is lost among the likenesses, enacts that loss of hierarchy. “Galope muerto” opens on similes that never reach what they compare, “Como cenizas, como mares poblándose”, like ashes, like seas peopling themselves, and the syntax is the slow motion of the world it describes. “Walking Around” is a catalogue because the city arrives as one. The borrowed titles emptied of their forms are part of the meaning: the old orders survive as names. Where the form weakens, the method has become a habit, and the prose poems of the first volume are the book’s least necessary pages.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses its central claim, that the troubles are not separate issues but one condition: the unbroken flow across each side, the recurring melodic material and the closing return of the opening theme make war, addiction, ecology, faith and the city one span heard in one breath. The tenderness of the setting against the hardness of the subject is itself the knowledge, a protest that does not shout. The voice in dialogue with itself, plainest in Save the Children, is the form of a man arguing with his own despair. Held from the top because three of the songs stood alone as singles, and Right On and God Is Love serve the flow more than they enact it.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the house knows changes. Separate the palace from the monastery and the king governs from a court, not from beside the altar; break the block into a campus and the dead, the monks, the students and the ministers no longer share one roof and one law. The form made the purpose lived: the king’s day was ordered by the hours sung beyond his wall, papers from the empire came to a room that opened on the Mass, and the community prayed for the founder above his body. Held below the top because the form ignores much of daily use, and the grid could hold other contents nearly as well.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told in order, it would be a thriller with a twist. Told as it is, the explosion is a hole at the centre, known first through Ossipon’s newspaper and Heat’s view of the remains on the hospital table, so that every domestic chapter after it is read with the knowledge Winnie lacks, and the two chapters that go back to Stevie alive are unbearable as no chronological telling could make them. The irony is the instrument, not the decoration: in a world where no one understands another, the narrator’s distance reproduces the sealed lives of its people and lets the reader see what none of them see. Verloc’s confession, a grievance talked for pages to a wife who hears only that Stevie is dead, is two monologues and no dialogue. The cost is a certain stiffness in the official chapters.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The past is told as prayer: each of the elders, kneeling in the same church on the same night, goes back through a life, so that the family’s history is delivered as confession before God, and the reader learns what the boy on the floor does not. The order of the prayers, sister, father, mother, moves from the outer witness to the man at the centre to the secret of John’s birth, and the third part sets John’s conversion over all of it. Told in order of time the book would be a family saga; told this way it is a judgment on whether salvation can come down a line that corrupt. The cost: the prayer is a convention the prose often drops for plain retrospective narration, and the frame is felt less in the middle than at its ends.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. The strophic song, the same music verse after verse, is the instrument of its knowledge in its best songs: Tangled Up in Blue’s verses change time, place and person over a figure that never changes, so that the form enacts the finding that one love persists through every change; Idiot Wind’s refrain returns the indictment until its last return turns it round. The sequence is counted here, once: the whole story first, then its facets, rage at the centre of side one, tenderness and grace late on side two, a shrug to close. The two sessions join without a seam a listener hears as a fault, and give the record two lights, warm and bare. The limit: several songs are containers in a familiar folk form.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows is lost. Its claim is that creation is an order given in sequence, a word followed by a deed, and the form makes the claim: the secco recitative gives the word of Genesis, the accompanied recitative or aria realises it in sound, and the chorus answers in praise. In Gleich öffnet sich the order is reversed, and the music makes the beast before the voice names it. The Chaos is the strongest case: as a symphonic introduction its lack of cadence would be a style, but as the first thing in a creation it is the knowledge itself. Recast as a cantata of praise it would lose the days; as an opera, the angels’ distance. Charged: Part III leaves the law of word and deed for operatic duet, and the repeated trio and chorus of Part II is container more than instrument.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute the form. Paint Venus with Masaccio’s weight, in a deep perspective box, with the sea as Leonardo would have painted water, and the picture would no longer know that this beauty does not belong to the world it is arriving in. The weightlessness, the line that bends anatomy to grace, the shallow stage and the flat sea are the instrument of that claim, not its container. The composition says the same: the axis set off centre, Venus pushed a little to the right by the wind’s thrust, makes a movement rather than an icon, and the strip of action read from left to right like a frieze makes an arrival. Held below 9.0 because part of the form is Botticelli’s manner, shared across his work rather than peculiar to this picture, and the flatness of sea and landscape is partly convention.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how little an investigator sees. The camera is bound to Gittes: over his shoulder, through his binoculars, his camera’s viewfinder and windscreens, and never beyond what he knows. The viewer learns what he learns, in his order, and is wrong when he is wrong, about Evelyn above all. Told from everywhere, the film would lose the knowledge that partial sight does harm. The ending completes the form: the camera, bound to him for two hours, rises away from him over the street. Held below the top because, that binding apart, the form is the studio mystery’s inherited grammar, well used rather than remade.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The Swede is seen first from outside, as a hero and then as a bore, and only then from within, so that the inner life Zuckerman invents is offered as a guess against the blankness he met at dinner: the form is the book’s claim that we know others only by imagining them wrongly. At the reunion, where Zuckerman dances and drifts from himself into the chronicle, the passage from fact to invention is a visible seam. The three parts carry the Fall. The last part’s single evening, broken open by retrospect, presses the past on a present the Swede cannot leave, and the book ends in the middle of the party, on a question, not an outcome. Held below the top because the frame, once dropped, is never closed, and because the long retrospects of the second part could stand in another order.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The form is the circuit, crossing and return three times over, so that the reader learns the border as a line one crosses into loss. The tales set into the narration without frame or typographic mark are the form’s claim: Billy’s life and the tales he is told stand on one footing, and he is passing into a tale himself as the book proceeds. The untranslated Spanish enacts what the tales describe, a world that is there and not wholly given. The symmetries hold the shape: the wolf carried south and the brother carried north, the arrival of the first sentence and the dawn of the last page. Held below the top because the second and third crossings rhyme with the first more loosely than the design promises, and the third part, the shortest, is a hinge that does little but turn.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what a man becomes against a space that will not notice him. The 70mm frame makes Lawrence a mark on an emptiness, and the duration of the well, the Nefud and the Sinai makes the viewer cross what he crosses. The size of the image is the size of his ambition and the measure of its folly. The frame of the memorial, with witnesses who disagree, makes the life an enigma, and the two parts are the rise and the fall. Told as a chamber drama, the film would keep the psychology and lose the knowledge that the self was made out there and could not survive coming back. Held below the top because Part Two’s political scenes use inherited studio grammar, and the enigma of the frame is posed more than worked by the form.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose is lived otherwise, because the form is the ceremony. The terrace makes arrival an ascent. The stair’s shallow steps and two turns slow the approach and set it in stages. The Gate makes a guarded threshold, from which the halls are reached at an angle. The reliefs show those who climb what they are doing, the procession passing its own image toward the king; the hall puts a multitude in a forest of columns facing a single seat. Substitute a walled palace on the level, entered from a street, and most of what the terrace knows about the many and the one is gone. As it stands, stair, gate, bases and reliefs still carry it. Held below the top because the terrace is a set of halls on a grid, its unity in programme more than in plan.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. The weekly serial is the instrument of its subject: a town’s surface of coffee, pie and intrigue played as soap, while the truth is deferred beneath it, and the form’s delays are the town’s denial. The film changes the form on purpose, from serial to feature and from the town to Laura, and the change is the knowledge: what the series made a mystery, the film makes an experience. The Return makes elapsed time its material: twenty-five years are on the actors’ faces, and its question, whether the past can be returned to, is put by the form of a revival. Held below the top by the second season’s middle, a container filled to order, and by Return threads that are pause rather than knowledge.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a basilica and the purpose is lived differently: the worshipper would be drawn along a processional axis toward a holy end, not set in a rank across the building beside equals. Substitute an open courtyard mosque of mud and palm and the community loses its monument and its city centre. The broad hall makes prayer a collective line; the courtyard makes the mosque an extension of the city, entered from its gates, crossed, sat in, used for teaching and gathering; the transept makes the place of the caliph or the imam legible without breaking the equality of the rows. The form has carried its purpose through thirteen centuries of rulers and rites. Held below the high band because courtyard and hall are a juxtaposition, a field and a shed, rather than a form in which every part changes the others.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The fable makes the animals’ limits the engine of the plot: those who cannot read cannot check the wall, and those who cannot remember accept that the wording was always so. The narration stays at the level of the common animals’ understanding and reports what they are told, so that the reader meets Squealer’s arguments as the animals do and must supply the truth the narrator withholds. Only the fable can end on its last image: in a realist novel of the Soviet state the rulers cannot turn into their enemies before the reader’s eyes, and here they do. Held below the top on a charge the form brings with it: by mapping class onto species, the fable makes the sheep stupid and the pigs clever by nature, and implies a determinism about the many that the argument does not intend.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. In an aisled basilica columns divide the crowd, the side spaces are passage, and the relic is seen down a narrow central vessel. Here everyone stands in one room, and the chapels are rooms of their own opening off it, so that public worship and private devotion each have a form. The approach is a sequence: the piazza, the front as gate, the compressed porch, the release into the nave, the walk under the vault to the crossing and down to the relic. The form makes the visit to the blood a procession, and five centuries of use show it carries parish life as well as the feast. Held below the top because the later eastern parts carry the purpose less tightly, and the form’s knowledge is clearest in the nave.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told as a plain essay against enthusiasm and the moderns, the book would argue that the modern mind is mad; told in the hack’s voice, through his apparatus, it shows the madness working and catches the reader in it, since to follow Section IX the reader must decide where the irony stops, and cannot. The alternation of tale and digression is the Apology’s division made structure: the corruptions of religion and of learning are shown as one by being made to interleave, Peter’s glosses on the will answering the critics and the index-learners. The gaps marked “Hiatus in MS.” make the book an instance of the decay it describes. Held off the top because the tale sections, taken alone, are allegory in a container any pamphleteer could have used: the form’s knowledge lives in the frame more than in the tale.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Put a realist novel in its place and the book can no longer say what it knows. The mock biography is the instrument: the biographer’s voice, bound to facts and documents, is set against a subject whose facts are impossible, and the gap shows how much of a life is convention. The span of centuries makes the self historical. Each age imposes its weather, its costume and its prose, and the prose changes with the age: coloured and euphuistic in the first chapter, Augustan in the fourth, damp and fecund in the fifth, quick and fractured in the sixth. The change of sex takes a sentence and is then lived at length, so that the form, not an argument, shows identity persisting through it. Held off the top because the frame slackens into episode in the middle chapters.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses its central knowledge. The braid of dream and waking, kept distinct for most of its length, merges in the last half hour: the rescue, the Ministry blown apart and the flight with Jill are filmed in the same register as the waking world, so the viewer takes the dream for the ending, as Sam does. When the camera returns to the chair, the audience has been made to want the escape and is shown what that wanting is. That is form as the instrument of the disclosure. The design knows it too: ducts everywhere, screens too small to see, desks too small to work at, make the state a built environment. Held below the top because much of the middle is a conventional chase, and the earlier dreams are often decoration.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows pressure, and pressure is density and speed. A record about a citizen surrounded by systems is built as a surround, a voice that must command the noise or drown in it. Over a plain loop Rebel Without a Pause would be a boast; over the scream it is a man holding his ground in an alarm. The sequence is counted here, once: the record is framed as a show and a broadcast, opening on a live crowd and paced by station breaks, so the songs arrive as transmissions from a station at war with the channels named in She Watch Channel Zero?! and Don’t Believe the Hype. Held short of the top: the frame is laid on lightly, much of the order could change without loss, and two tracks are containers rather than instruments.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. Set “Home Burial” as a prose story and it keeps its plot but loses its instrument: the pressure of iambic expectation against the broken, overlapping half-line exchanges of two people who cannot hear each other, where a line shared between two speakers is itself the gap between them. The book knows that meaning lives in tone and that tone is what fails between people, and it carries that knowledge in the counterpoint of metre and speech: the reader hears the husband’s flatness and the wife’s pitch because the line holds both to one measure. The dialogue form, without a narrator’s verdict in most poems, is the second instrument; it leaves both definitions of home in the air and both builders at the wall. Where the form bears less, in “Blueberries” and “The Generations of Men”, the poems are weaker, which argues the point.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told in the third person, Holden is a case, a disturbed boy wandering New York. Told in his own voice, from a place of recovery he does not explain, he is a mind that hides its wound in the very talk that reveals it, and the reader learns the grief, the breakdown and the fear of the fall by hearing what he cannot hear in himself. The retrospective frame, opened in the first chapter and closed in the last, makes the whole a telling to someone, and the last lines make the telling the subject: to tell is to miss. The episodic form carries the drift of a breakdown, one encounter after another with no cause but the next. Held below the top because the middle is loose, the form holding episodes without adding to the knowledge, and the picaresque is inherited rather than made to know something new.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a living narrator, and the film loses what it knows. The man telling the story is already what Norma is, a has-been held in the past tense, and his voice, dry, quick and professional, is a screenwriter’s, narrating his own end as a pitch. The form knows what the story says. The grammar is the old Hollywood’s, used to show the old Hollywood dead: deep studio interiors, the iris of a silent film, and the close-up as the last image, a close-up the film itself gives while the newsreel cameras only pretend to. Ending on her face, coming toward the lens, completes the argument in the medium’s own unit. Held a step from the top: the frame is laid round a conventionally told middle, a well-made melodrama, and the Betty scenes could sit in another picture.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The knowledge is obscurity: that the frontier was not legible to the people inside it, that a man’s death could go unobserved, that talk in a saloon is noise with meaning somewhere in it. The fogged image and the sunk dialogue are that knowledge, not a style laid over it. A clean print and a clear track would give a plot about a brothel and a mine; the audience would understand McCabe before the town did. The songs, laid over from outside the story’s world, are the one voice allowed to be clear, which places the elegy outside the town. Held at the figure because the structure of events underneath is conventional: a stranger, a rise, a threat, a showdown.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The sentence that starts again and again on “Because”, the dropped punctuation that lets each phrase hang without completion, the liturgical responses set into the line: these are the condition of a will that cannot close its own act. The third section is three stairs because the climb is in three stages, and the window on the May time is placed where the ascent falters. In the sixth, “Although I do not hope to turn again” (VI) answers the first line of the poem, and the whole movement is carried by one changed word. Held from the top because the six-part frame is the shape of an assembly as well as of an argument, and the fifth section’s wordplay is a form of thought the poem only half believes in.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? At the scale of the city, wholly. Put the tower on the lot line, or give it setbacks, and its claim, that a commercial building can stand apart and owe the street a room, disappears: the plaza is the knowledge. Arrival is changed at every step, from pavement to platform, past the pools, under the low canopy, into a lobby whose floor is the plaza’s floor, so that the boundary between public ground and the corporation’s house is drawn as a sheet of glass. The uniform face makes the life of the floors legible from outside as one order. Held short of the top because the office floors are deliberately generic: the purpose most fully transformed is the street’s, not the occupant’s.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The ballet is placed in the middle, not at the end, so the whole second half is lived under a prophecy already performed. Inside the ballet the form turns from stage to cinema: proscenium and footlights give way to a space only the camera can make, and possession by the dance is shown as a change of medium. The last performance reverses it: the camera stays in the theatre and shows the empty place in the light, and the death is known by an absence the form has taught us to read. Colour is knowledge too; red belongs to the shoes, to Vicky’s hair and to the stage. The cost: the frame story is told in a conventional theatrical register.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. The reading room as one undivided volume, books on the walls and readers at the centre under one light, makes the public a single body at work; divide it into bays or alcoves and it becomes a set of studies. The iron spine is what lets one room be so long and so open, where masonry vaults would have needed heavy piers and broken the field. The names exist outside because the shelves stand where they do inside, so the front tells the room’s order. The stair, as the hinge between dim and lit, makes arrival part of reading. Held short of the top because the ground floor, essential as service, carries less of the meaning.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is exposure, and the arrangements make the exposure: one voice, one instrument, and at most three companions. Score River for a band and the singer is no longer alone at the piano at Christmas; the song’s claim, that she is alone because of who she is, is gone. The open tunings make chords that hover between major and minor and sit under the voice without resolving it, which is how the ambivalence sounds. The sequence is counted here, once. Each side ends at the piano, alone, side one on the title song and side two on the cafe at closing time, and the road out in All I Want is answered by the flight home in This Flight Tonight. The limit: the lighter songs are placed rather than required, and the two-sided shape is clear, not inevitable.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
On side two the form is the knowledge. A continuous suite, cut between sleep and waking, with voices breaking in from outside, the call to wake and then a radio and a helicopter at the end of Waking the Witch, says what a sequence of songs could not: that the drowning woman’s night is one consciousness drifting in and out of itself. Watching You Without Me is sung by someone who cannot be heard, and the voices in the room are mixed past her. The sequence is counted here, once: a day side of songs and a night side of the suite. What holds it from the top is that side one’s strong songs could change order without loss, so half the record’s form is container rather than instrument.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is gained as the poem is: a fragment at first, read again a little longer each time, and only in Mortal Man revealed as addressed to the dead: the confession was a conversation with a lineage. The pairing of u and i, nine tracks apart, is the arc from self-hatred to self-love, and i is placed as a live performance interrupted by a fight, the love of self tested at once by the community it is for. The jazz and funk are not colour: they are the inheritance the record claims, so the sound carries the argument about where the self comes from. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top by the slack middle of the second half, where tracks become containers for a theme.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. What the picture knows it knows by colour and touch: that the office and the man are one red, told apart only where paint becomes skin, and that the gaze, held still, goes on judging whoever stands before it. A text could state that the pope was shrewd; it could not keep the viewer under that look for as long as they stay, nor make the robe and the face one substance. The life-size scale and the close crop are part of the knowledge: the viewer is placed at audience distance. Held below the top because the portrait form is given rather than invented, and because a bust, the head at Apsley House, carries much of the same knowledge without the throne.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The painting knows what it knows through a vast canvas, figures near life size, lit unevenly, in depth from the front step to the dark under the arch. The light is the form. It ranks the company: the officers first, the girl as emblem, the ensign, then the rest falling away into shadow. Musket, partisan and lance give the crowd its motion. Substitute the row portrait of the tradition and almost everything goes: the order arriving out of noise, the ranking by light, the threshold. Held below the top because the portrait contract still governs part of the form: the rear rank is a container, not an instrument. The captain’s present centring is the trimming’s, and counts neither way.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building cannot say its one thing: that the king below and the dynasty above are one structure. A tomb beside a temple, or a temple without the stair, would say only that a king was buried near a shrine. Here the vertical section is the knowledge: text above, body below, stair and conduit between, and the mountain round them all. The form also changed how the purpose was lived. The stair was sealed after the burial, so the living reached the dead only through the conduit and the floor, and the rites in the temple were performed directly over the body. That is form as instrument. What holds it below the highest: the exterior form is the type’s, not this programme’s.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Marcello is made of what he cannot face. The past arrives in the order of his mind on the drive, not the order of events, and the shot of 1917 comes late, as a man’s buried cause comes late. The image composes him: framed small in giant rooms, cut by shadow and blinds, tilted when his world is false. The camera leaves its rule only in the wood, where the hand-held flight of Anna breaks the order he serves at the moment it kills. The architecture of the regime, its empty halls, is the political argument made into space, and the cave is not only told but lit. Held below the top because the flashback frame, once established, is used conventionally in the middle, and the coda stands outside the form rather than completing it.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is the murmur: a voice heard within the band, words half caught, songs that keep the listener at the edge of understanding. Put Michael Stipe in front of the mix with his words clear, and these would become a set of oblique songs; set into the texture, the words become part of the sound of a place. The production enacts it: Mitch Easter and Don Dixon pack guitar, bass, piano and layered voices close together, so that nothing is fully foregrounded. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side moves from drive to stillness, the second from tension to an open close. Held from the top because the form is one container repeated in nearly every song, and the order could be changed with little loss.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The novel is a detective story whose last scene is withheld, and the withholding is the whole of its knowledge: told to a solution, in either direction, it would become a thriller or a case history; ended at the crying, it leaves the reader where Oedipa stands, between a real Tristero and a projected one, with no ground to choose. The reader’s work is the heroine’s, sorting signal from noise in a text dense with names, acronyms and false leads, and the book’s discourse on entropy, Nefastis’s machine and Maxwell’s Demon with the sensitive who must feed it information, is built into what the reader does. The play within the novel, a revenge plot that turns on a changed text, mirrors the novel’s concern with corrupted transmission. Held below the top because some set pieces are containers for comedy rather than instruments, and the short form limits how far the method can be tested.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is to outlive one’s time. The ball is the instrument, and its duration is the knowledge. A long sequence in which nothing happens to the plot but the Prince’s tiredness lets the viewer feel the hours pass as he feels them: the heat, the dancing, the full chamber pots in a closed room, the girls on the sofa, the young men who will run the new state. Told in ten minutes it would be a party; told at this length it is an era ending in real time. The widescreen frame holds the Prince small inside rooms that outlast him, and the ending at dawn completes the form: the death is never shown, only walked toward. What holds the figure is that the first two hours use the epic’s inherited grammar, handsomely, as container rather than instrument.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses most of what it knows. In the past tense or an omniscient voice, Cromwell would be a figure seen from above, the reader holding his end over him; the present tense takes that away and gives the reader his uncertainty, so that the book knows power as a sequence of unforeseen days. The pronoun locks the reader inside one intelligence that notices prices, faces, weather and debts at once; the form is how the book argues that this attention is what Cromwell is. The Putney prologue and the leap to 1527, the life between rendered as memory, make the man’s past a store he draws on, like his ledgers. Charged: the pronoun’s ambiguity is a cost the form inflicts on its own clarity, and the later volumes’ “he, Cromwell” concedes it.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In the court-and-pylon temple of the later kings the procession passes through gates on the level toward a dark interior; here it climbs in the open, terrace by terrace, and the god’s barque arrives at the mountain itself. The form makes the mortuary cult a stage of the ascent into the west, and the king’s temple the hinge between the cultivated plain and the cliff of the dead. The porticoes turn each rise into a reading wall, so the climb passes the reign’s argument in order. Held below the top: the porticoes are also containers for a programme another frame could carry, the chapels sit beside the axis rather than being demanded by it, and the small sanctuary leaves the knowledge mostly in the approach.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. In a long nave Word and sacrament would stand apart and the people in ranks; the knowledge that the parish is one body round one axis lives only in the ring of galleries and the stacking of pulpit, altar and organ. Take away the dome and the room loses its vertical: the inner dome is the canopy that makes the theatre a church. The form changes how worship is lived, to hear, see and sing together in tiers. The crowding of the galleries and the distance of the highest tiers from the altar are a cost, lightly held.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The past is given in its own idiom, so the reader inhabits the eighteenth century’s language as the surveyors do; yet the idiom is a pastiche, visibly made and riddled with knowing anachronism, so history arrives as a telling, not a record. The frame is the instrument of that knowledge: a clergyman whose reliability his listeners doubt, children who challenge him, an uncle who wants a moral, and this many-voiced telling is set against the Line’s single straight inscription. The middle part has the Line’s shape, a westward progress, mile by mile, broken by digressions that are the world the Line excludes. The last part closes as a life does, not as a plot. Held below the top because the middle part’s episodes could often stand in another order without the work knowing anything different, and the frame thins for long stretches.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows, and what it knows depends on the form being conventional. The classical plan is the official speech; the ambiguity lives in how the plan is filled. The Largo stands third and is the work’s largest slow music, and the silence of its brass sets the private lament apart in sound from the public movements on either side. The coda is made by repetition and register, an insistence only a symphonic close could make. Recast as a programme work it would lose its deniability; given an open ending like the Fourth’s, it would lose the compelled affirmation that is its subject. Held below the top by the scherzo, whose form is a container its tone fills, and by the finale’s slow section, placed more than required.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The polyphony is the argument. A novel about a system that processes every kind of life into one output enacts the flattening in nine registers, and the two short parts after the machine has finished are spoken in voices the machine has made: a removed man in counted present tense, a widower in sentences that will not line up. The form carries knowledge at the scale of the page as well: a daily schedule ending in an unticked box marked Remember; a stairwell where a sentence breaks off because there was no next; a hospital clock that stays at two thirty-one. The design holds to the last part, where the narration belongs to the state and the men inside it keep their own idioms. Every part stops where it arrives. Marked below the summit by the childhood part, beautifully made and formally conventional, and by a bunker that makes its meaning by inventory as often as by form.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very largely. The contradictory perspective is the knowledge: a street drawn to one vanishing point would be a stage set, and the canvas knows the instability of the familiar only because its ground will not agree with itself. The cut between light and shadow is the knowledge: the child runs from the lit half toward the dark, and the plot of the picture is a passage across a boundary of light. The cast shadow is the knowledge: only painting can show a shadow without its cause and hold the threat unseen and fixed. The upright format pitches the street upward and makes the run a climb. Held below the top because the elements are a vocabulary shared with a dozen canvases, and some of what the form knows it knows as a system.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Put a full figure in place of the head and the work stops saying what it says. The head alone, kept near the rounded mass of the boulder it was cut from, makes the ruler a stone of the land rather than a man standing on it: the face comes out of the mass, and the mass is never denied. The flattened back fixes the viewer in one confrontation; a statue in the round would invite circling and lose it. The helmet, closing the top of the boulder, makes the contour of the stone the contour of the office. Carve it in wood or model it in clay and the claim to permanence goes. Held below the nines because the form, once found, is constant across the body and discovers nothing further in any one head, and because the stone at hand may have given part of it.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The clinical, catalogic first person is the instrument: a narrator who records wound, chrome and intercourse in one vocabulary is the condition the book discloses, the levelling of flesh and machine, and any other voice would comment on what this one enacts. The end placed at the start makes the narrative a ritual rather than a story, a re-enactment of a death already known, which is exactly what Vaughan’s circle does with the deaths of the famous. The author’s name given to the narrator closes the gap between the book and its maker and denies the reader the comfort of a frame. Held below the top because the form, once set, does not develop: the last chapters use the instrument as the first did, and at moments it becomes a container for further instances.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. Its knowledge, that grace is an artifice set against nature, is carried by drawing and proportion, by the visible stretching of a body that the eye measures against the natural body it remembers. A sentence could say that the ideal exceeds the real; only the image makes the eye feel the excess. The leap of scale at the right can exist only in painted space, as a contradiction the eye cannot resolve. The tall upright for a chapel wall makes the neck and the column the verticals of the whole, and the polish belongs to the claim of artifice. Held below 9 because the prophet and the vessel need a key outside the form, and the unfinished right side leaves part of the form undecided.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is the form: a music in which no part leads and the whole is made after the fact. Played as heads and solos by a quintet, these tunes would be vamps; their meaning is the density of the field and the way a voice emerges from it. The editing is a second form inside the first: “Pharaoh’s Dance” repeats a passage by tape, and the title track returns to its rubato episode as a refrain, so that a jam gains a shape no player chose in the moment. The sequence is counted here, once: two side-long pieces set the method, the third side runs it as rock, the fourth gives a groove and then a written ballad. Held down by the third side, form as container, and by side lengths that placed some pieces. Under Low at 9.0, a tenth under Remain in Light.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Largely, yes. Replace the descent with a door at grade and the passage from darkness into light, which is the building’s knowledge, is gone; replace the crown with walls and the congregation is enclosed instead of set under the sky; replace the circle with a nave and gathering becomes procession. The form changes how worship is lived: the faithful come down into it, look up rather than forward, and stand in a ring of light. Designed in 1958, before the Second Vatican Council reshaped the liturgy, it arrived at a gathered, centred congregation by form. Held short of the top because the altar and the order of the rite within the circle are conventional: the form transforms the threshold and the ceiling more than the rite.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told as a historical novel, slavery would be past; told as a slave narrative, the narrator would belong to that world. The time-crossing makes the knowledge: a woman of 1976, with her vocabulary and her assumptions, is put under the law of the early nineteenth century and discovers how much of her resistance was circumstance. Kevin’s crossing doubles it, for a white man of liberal goodwill learns how comfortably the house would receive him. The first-person retrospective, opening on the lost arm, makes every chapter a movement toward a wound the reader already knows. And the rule that Dana returns only when she fears for her life ties her survival, chapter by chapter, to violence. The one charge against the form is the frame: the present-day scenes are thin in places, and the form carries them rather than needing them.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
What the work knows it knows only as a bronze in the round, at this scale, at this height, in this square. In painting or relief the stride and the counter-twist would be a single view, and the threat would not change as one walks round it. In the round, the rider’s turn is discovered in motion, and the viewer is drawn into the captain’s field of vision and out of it. Bronze is required: marble could not hold the free foreleg, the open spaces between the legs or the thin projecting baton, and the dark metal against the sky is the silhouette. Height is required: the scowl and the foreshortened chest are calculated for the view from below. Held below the top because the knowledge is one simple proposition.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that history reaches people from outside the frame, and that those it reaches cannot see or say it whole. The long fixed takes hold the household at a distance and let events happen at its edges; violence is mostly off screen or deep in a shot; the great events are told after, by letter, rumour or a closing card. The youngest brother’s exchanges are written on paper and shown as intertitles in the manner of silent film, and Hinomi’s diary gives a private register for what public speech could not hold. Who speaks which language is the colonial order heard. What holds it from the top: in places the ellipsis exceeds what it buys, and distance becomes mere opacity.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Nadsat is the instrument of the argument: the reader is conditioned into a vocabulary by repetition, as Alex is conditioned into nausea, and the argot holds the violence at a distance that lets the reader enjoy it, which is the complicity the book wants the reader to feel before the cure arrives. Told in standard English from outside, the book would be a case history and would know less. The first person makes the question of the self concrete: the voice that tells the story is the self the state tried to remove, and its survival in the telling is part of the answer. The symmetry of three sevens, with Part Three retracing Part One, is the form of nemesis. Held off the top by the mechanical joinery of Part Three, where the form shows its hand.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A novel would give the old man a past in scenes, a society and a plot; this book knows him as a man alone with a task, and its single unbroken action, without chapters, is the shape of the ordeal: no cut lets the reader rest when the old man cannot. The close third person, speaking much of the time through the old man’s words aloud to the fish, the birds and his own hand, is the instrument of solitude: a man who has no one to speak to speaks to everything. The coda is the second instrument. The point of view leaves him, and tourists at a café take the great spine for a shark’s, so that the form enacts the gap between the deed and its witness. Held off the top because the parable form and the third person are inherited, and in the long middle the form carries the endurance more than it adds to the knowledge.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The detective novel, the form most committed to a solution, is the instrument for showing that there is none: the case evaporates, the client disappears, the watcher is the watched. The threefold structure is the second instrument: the same story told three times, at increasing nearness to its teller, enacts the last narrator’s claim that he has been writing one story all along. Ghosts, with persons named for colours and a time that is both 1947 and the present, becomes allegory by its form alone. The frame of City of Glass, revealed in its last pages as a reconstruction from Quinn’s notebook by a friend of Auster, makes the reader’s knowledge as unstable as Quinn’s. Held off the top because The Locked Room returns largely to the conventions of the realist first-person novel, and the formal pressure loosens there.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The size is the knowledge: at the scale of a book plate these forms are diagrams in a manual; at over three metres they are presences that outsize the body, and a life becomes something one stands inside. The sequence is the knowledge: the ages exist only in the passage from panel to panel, and the change of ground is felt as time. The medium bears it: matte, even tempera gives the flat, luminous grounds on which the forms float, without the depth or weight of oil. Substitute one canvas or an easel series and the life as duration goes. Held below the top because the form was meant for a temple never built, and its place, hang and order of approach are unrealised.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building can no longer say what it says. The same collection in a rectangular hall with stacks would hold the books and lose the claim that the reader stands within the whole of them; under a dome it would set the reader beneath a heaven of ornament and lose the bare, democratic plainness of the drum. The approach is the same: put the entrance on the level, or make the stair wide and lit, and the ascent from street to knowledge is gone. Form is the instrument here, and use is lived through it daily: readers walk the galleries, the circle orients them, the light tells the time. Held below the top because the knowledge is concentrated in the rotunda and the stair, and the block could take another form with little loss.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because the knowledge is the descent, and the descent is made of sound. The self disintegrates and so does the music: songs collapse into noise, beats are processed until they break, the voice moves from shout to whisper as the self empties. The contrasts carry meaning. March of the Pigs stops its thrash for a moment of piano and then resumes, the respite mocked; A Warm Place arrives just before the last stretch, the last warmth. The sequence is counted here, once: from announcement through appetite and violence to the act and the aftermath, with Hurt, the quietest track, placed where only it could stand. Held from the top by the middle, where Ruiner, I Do Not Want This and Eraser share one form and serve without enacting.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Put the counters in a vaulted masonry hall lit from side windows and the transparency of the transaction is lost: the daylight on every slip and coin, the sense of a public service with nothing hidden. Replace the bolted skin with carved stone and the building no longer says that its walls are a hung surface on a frame. The glass floor is the clearest instance: it makes light a property of the whole section, not of one room, and so takes the office below into the same order. In the hall and the skin the form is the instrument of the work’s knowledge; the office floors above, competent and ordinary, are its container, and they hold the axis below the top.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a life is a sequence of roles without a visible audience, and the form is exactly such a sequence: appointments joined only by the car and the dossier, played for a camera the film shows cannot be seen. The changes of genre are the changes of role, so the film’s shape is Oscar’s day. The limousine, where he makes himself up and unmakes himself between scenes, is the dressing room as the only constant space, and the film returns there as he does. An actor’s day told with motives and a named employer would turn the condition into a story about a job. Held from the top by the arbitrariness of number and order: the sequence could be reordered with little change in what it knows.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is the argument. A book about an aggregate could not be written around a protagonist without contradicting itself, so the attention roves and never adjudicates. Each movement performs its form: the Fugue’s decorations enter porch by porch on one subject; the Ostinato’s bins are aligned under a changing surface; the Presto circulates objects until no one knows whose they are; the Canon puts two women wrapping presents in facing windows, one half a second behind, and has three phrases said in one kitchen a beat after the last. The order is chosen: Thanksgiving follows Halloween, and the sale, with the Patel house already unnamed, precedes the night that emptied it, so the reader meets the absence as the crescent does. The form closes on itself: the Coverage Map’s first entry after the outage repeats its last before it. Emma’s notebook is the book’s double, a column for what happened and one for what recurred. Marked at 8.7, below the top where the narration explains what the structure shows.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. The stacked space is the knowledge: a world in which size is rank and the vertical is the order of being, heaven over earth over the pit. In the space of a Leonardo the Virgin could not be the size she is, and the cosmos would become a landscape. The ring is a form only painting can hold, a circle of motion stopped at the top of a turn. The inscription joins word and image on one surface, so that the picture is also a document dated in the hand of its maker. Held a step below the top: the same programme could be carried by an altarpiece of another format or an illuminated page, with loss of rhythm and scale more than of meaning.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Its knowledge is that a single structural act, a plate on eight points, can make a space with no fixed use, which the user orders and the structure does not: universal space. Put walls in the hall and the idea goes; put the roof on a box and the corners stop flying and the plate stops reading as carried; take away the podium and the temple goes with it. The form also changes how the purpose is lived, though not as a picture gallery would have it: curators and artists have had to answer the hall with installations and free-standing structures, and the room has made a tradition of response to itself. What holds the axis below the top is the split: the lower galleries, where most of the art is seen, are competent rooms whose form is the instrument of nothing the hall knows.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows, because its knowledge is the interplay. Each guitar part is incomplete without the other, and the song exists only in their meeting: Venus and See No Evil are built from parts that answer each other, not from a lead over a rhythm. The title track’s form is its meaning: verse and chorus, then a long passage that climbs through stages to a climax, and then the verse again, so that the song knows what it is to wait, to break and to return. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side rises from the nervous songs to the title track’s ten minutes, and the second runs from Elevation to the slow dread of Torn Curtain. Held from the top because Prove It and Guiding Light use a familiar verse and chorus as a container for the guitars rather than as a form that knows.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The work knows what it knows as a life-size frieze seen from below: the viewer stands beneath the table, and the board looks down. A narrative of a meeting, a written record or a series of single portraits would keep the men and lose the one thing the picture is, the instant of being looked at by a body that has authority over you. The table cuts every figure at the waist, so that office is literally the furniture between them and us. The horizontals of carpet and panelling close the space; the risen syndic’s diagonal and the servant’s head break it exactly enough. Set the eye level with the table and the bench comes down to a group. Held below the top because the mechanisms are the genre’s, refined rather than invented.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A novel would supply causes, transitions and a continuous self; this book knows the addicted life as discontinuous, a series of episodes with nothing between them but the next one, and the gaps between the stories are part of what it says. The single retrospective voice, telling from a recovery it never fully describes, is the second instrument: it can be shaken by what it remembers, can doubt itself, and can leap forward to a future it already knows, so that wreck and survival sit in one sentence. The stories end by breaking frame, in an address, a prophecy or a late admission, and that habit is the narrator’s whole condition. Held off the top because the linked-story form is inherited, and in the slighter middle stories the form holds the episode without adding to the knowledge.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is the record given back in stages, and there are now two records. The narrative releases what the mother knows in the order she can bear; the log releases what the state knows in the order it is filed, and the reader holds both while the people hold one. A day at Randolph’s is an entry that reads no entries for period. An amendment by employee 40731, initials CR, is read in November and explained in December. The coda feeds a file into a furnace. Change the form and the book loses what it knows, which is how long a truth can travel before it is said, and how differently it travels on paper. Only the road form, inherited whole, holds the axis below the top band.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that flight is not escape, and the form is that knowledge: a pursuit that runs out to the edge of the salt and back along its own track, so that the second half undoes the first and the place fled from becomes the goal. The cutting is the other instrument: the point of interest held near the centre of the frame across cuts, so that a hundred fast shots read as one line of motion, and the characters are told by their hands and machines, Furiosa’s prosthetic arm, Max’s muzzle, Nux’s steering wheel kept as a relic, rather than by speech. Held below the top because the chase form is inherited, and in two places the instrument rests.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the knowledge is in the pressure. A record about desire lived as dread is built of loops that repeat without resolving, bass pitched so low it is felt before it is heard, and voices set back, overheard, never in front. No voice leads: five singers pass through eleven tracks, a building of separate rooms heard through walls, as Man Next Door names it. The live guitar enters the loop as violence, and that collision is the argument. The sequence is counted here, once: the method laid bare at the start, Teardrop at the centre of the first half, Group Four as climax, (Exchange) as ending. Held short of the top: the form is one form repeated, and in the second half it serves more than enacts.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The record’s condition, desire held at a distance until it breaks out, is in its structure: the long songs hold a slow, restrained body and then break into a coda or a new tempo (PDA, Stella, The New), so that release comes only after waiting and only in sound. The parts are arranged as the people in the songs are: guitars, bass and voice interlock without meeting, each keeping its own line, the bass often carrying the melody the voice withholds. Sung plainly, these songs would be laments; here the estrangement is heard. The sequence is counted here, once: a threshold that fades in, a first half that states the city, a second half that descends through Stella to The New’s release and a quiet close. Held from the top by the second half’s soft panels, where the form serves as container.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the argument goes. Told as a treatise, the case against optimism is a debate the optimist can answer; told as a breakneck romance it is a demonstration, because each refrain of “tout est au mieux”, all is for the best, is laid against the latest catastrophe, and the repetition does the refuting. Speed is the instrument: suffering dispatched in a sentence enacts the optimist’s indifference and makes it monstrous. The reunions are the second instrument: the plot’s providence is the doctrine, and both are shown to be contrivance. The ending changes the form at the moment the argument changes: the voyage stops, the book stops moving, and the last chapter is a fixed place and a few short exchanges. Held off the top because the persons are flat by necessity, which limits what the form can know of experience from inside.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The diagonal table is the form’s argument: it drives the eye into the depth of the barn toward the door where more people are pressing in, so that the feast seems to have no end, and the door-tray at the front turns the flow back, so that food is the hinge of the picture. The figures, large and close to the picture plane, put the viewer at the table’s corner, among the pourer, the child and the carriers, in the same relation to the feast as the gentleman at the far end. A print or a small panel could tell the story; it could not give this crowding and this weight. Held below the top because the content survives translation into a drawing better than a picture whose form is its whole content would.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a hall or a basilica the worshippers gather; here almost no one gathers, and the form knows the god as hidden, reached by graded withdrawal from the world: the outer court open to many, each inner room to fewer, the sanctuary to the king’s proxy alone. The building teaches its hierarchy of persons and of purity by light and by the rising floor, not by sign. The roof and the stairways make the festival a form, the god’s image carried up one stair to meet the sun and down the other, so the section is a route. The enclosure corridor wraps the temple as an object kept. Held from the top because the form is the type’s rather than this building’s own.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The diminishing parts are the knowledge: memory dilates the remote and compresses the near, and the proportions make the reader live it, a summer taking hundreds of pages and decades a short part. The memoir with Ada’s interjections makes the past a thing two people quarrel over and write together; the editor’s brackets remind the reader that the lovers are old and dying as they write. “The Texture of Time”, set inside a drive towards Ada, makes the treatise’s claim, that time is felt in its intervals and not measured in its passage, a lived journey with an arrival. The counter-world lets the past be a place, which is what a remembered childhood is. Held off the top because the counter-world’s apparatus often serves jokes rather than knowledge, and some of the form is a stage for Van’s performances.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. In polished 35mm the empty city would look staged; on video it looks recorded, with the texture of news footage and surveillance after the broadcasters have stopped, a document of what happened. The fast shutter and stuttering cuts of the attacks put the ten seconds of infection into the editing, so that the audience, like the characters, cannot see clearly enough to hesitate: the form enforces the rule. The ellipsis of the title is knowledge too: the catastrophe happens entirely off screen, and the film begins after it, as the survivors know it. Held from the top by the last act, which could be shot in the manner of any action film of its day, and nearly is.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows: that a man can be close to others and alone. Shot and reverse shot inside the car keep each passenger in his own frame, side by side and never together. The long shots of the car crawling over the hills, the voices continuing at the same level, put the man in a landscape that does not notice him, and the gravel works, earth moved from one place to another, are the image of what he asks. The withheld motive is a formal choice: a reason would make the film a case and the viewer a judge. The black screen puts the viewer in the hole. Held from the top by the first reel, where form waits on content, and by a coda argued by contrast rather than formed out of what came before.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work loses what it knows. Shown from inside the diner, it is a genre scene of four people at a counter; the knowledge of exclusion depends on the vantage outside, across the street, in the dark. The horizontal format runs the street out of frame at both ends, so the diner is one lit point in a city without edge. The glass is painted without reflection, so the barrier is invisible and still absolute. The diagonal of the counter carries the eye into the light and stops it at the urns and the back wall. The missing door is a formal fact with a meaning. Change any of these and the picture says something else. Held below the top because the image transposes almost whole into reproduction, film still or poster: the staging, not the painting, carries most of the knowledge.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. What it knows is that desire does not keep the line between the imagined and the done, and the unmarked cut is that knowledge: the viewer, like Séverine, cannot sort the fantasy from the act, and neither the Duke’s rite nor the closing scene can be assigned. Mark the dreams with dissolves and a harp and the film becomes a case history, with a patient and a cure. The flat, even style, which gives a whipping and a breakfast the same lens, is the bourgeois surface the desire runs beneath; the withheld box makes the viewer’s curiosity a client’s; the bells dissolve the plot’s catastrophe at the close. What holds the axis is the gangster plot, told in the inherited grammar and outside the form’s doubt until the end.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The numbered grid is the instrument of the book’s claim that an empire, or a world, can be known only as a set of combinations and never as a whole: read in the order of the chapters it is one book, read series by series it is another, and the reader becomes Kublai, trying to master the atlas by its pattern. The italic dialogues are the second instrument. They question the cities as they are told, so that the book contains its own theory of knowledge, and the admission about Venice, made in the frame, changes every city already read. The staggered entry and exit of the series gives the whole a symmetry the content disputes. Held below the top because some cities, taken singly, are containers for a paradox rather than forms of it.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The scale is the knowledge: at this size the viewer stands as a child stands to a mother, beneath her and outside the sac, and the smaller spiders, met at the eye, show the difference; at three metres one looks at a spider, at nine one is under a mother. The legs make an enclosure one can enter and not be held in, shelter and threat in one structure. The sac is placed where the eye finds it only from beneath, and out of reach. The points on which the legs stand make a great weight appear to hover, so the protective body is also precarious. Held below 9.0: the form is the creature’s own anatomy, scaled, and its knowledge is shared with the other large spiders; it is apt more than invented.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. As a full statue the neck would lose its reach and the crown its tension; the bust cut at the collar is what lets head and crown be one counterpoised shape. Unpainted, it would be the quartzite heads of the same workshop, superb and different: abstract, without the living skin, without the crown as colour. Without the inlaid eye it would not look. The form knows what it knows as a model: a face made to be seen from all sides and copied, and the painted bust is the one form that carries a complete reference image of a face, colour included, in three dimensions. Held below the top because its knowledge is the face, not a structure beyond it.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and see what the church stops being able to say. Make the vault flat or coffered and the light no longer falls; the room loses its sky. Give the building a tower and gables and it says that the church is a public monument, the opposite of what it knows. Remove the corridors and the parish is no longer threaded along the same street of light as its worship. The form is the instrument: the service is held in light whose source no one sees, and the working rooms share the building’s daylight and its grid, so the form changes how the purpose is lived. What it knows is one turn of light, not a whole way of living or of seeing.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Silentium knows that one line taken up by many voices and slowed becomes a single descending mass, and that the end of a process can be silence; only a canon can know that, and a free slow movement would lose it. Ludus knows that sound is measured by the silence around it, and its widening sections and general pauses are that knowledge. The pairing is form too: a movement of play and one without motion, in that order, so that the second is heard as what the first was clearing toward. The concerto frame is half container, and in Silentium the soloists are less soloists than voices of the canon. The joint is in Ludus, whose sections could be fewer without the form thinking differently.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The concealed camera is the knowledge: the men are seen as she sees them, unaware and unarranged, and the audience is placed in the hunter’s van looking out at a species. As she changes, the form changes with her: the camera comes closer, the frames turn from surveillance to portraiture, and by the forest she is the one watched, from outside, by a man. The black room is the form’s other instrument, an abstraction with no depth where what happens to the men can be read only as image, never as event. Held below the top because the Highland third relaxes into a more ordinary drift, and the motorcyclist is plot more than form.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and most of what the work knows goes. It knows a passage made by a person through a space, watched by others, with the god at the far end, and the room is that space. Whoever reclines in it is surrounded by the sequence at the scale of the bodies present, on a ledge one step from the floor, so that the painted women share the room with the living ones; the glances across the corners put the viewer between figures who see each other. As a scroll, a vase frieze or a panel picture it would illustrate a rite; as a room it encloses one, and the matron by the door gives the household its place within it. Held below the top because the ledge and the red ground are the style’s shared conventions, not forms made for this knowledge, and because what is enclosed stays uncertain.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about a self that cannot be consoled is built so that nothing consoles: songs cut off before they close, forms that refuse a chorus’s return, a pulse that does not vary in We Carry On and Machine Gun, and a voice placed alone against machinery that does not adjust to it. The Rip enacts the argument inside one track: the human figure on a guitar is taken over by the synthesiser, and the song grows more beautiful as it grows less human. The sequence is counted here, once: it carries the descent. Nylon Smile, Plastic and Magic Doors serve the form without enacting it, and the sequence intensifies more than it turns.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute the form the Committee proposed, masonry walls and a dome, and the building can no longer say what it says: that a structure can be a system rather than a mass, that space can be measured by repetition of one bay, and that a monument can be made and unmade. The form is the knowledge. The module is both the building’s order and its method of production; transparency is both its light and its claim. Use is changed by the form: a crowd of tens of thousands in daylight, among goods and trees, with no interior wall to direct it, is a different experience of a public building. Held below the top because at Sydenham the form became a frame for historical courts, framing the knowledge rather than being it, and because the vault and finials keep a residue of style.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told in order, it is a story of a couple who part, erase each other and meet again. Told as it is, the audience meets Clementine as Joel does, twice, without knowing the first time that it is the second. The journey backward through memory makes the direction of feeling the axis of the film: the bitter end comes first and the tenderness last, so that loss grows as the love grows. The dissolving image is the knowledge, not decoration: faces blur, a book’s covers go blank, a street empties, and the viewer sees erasure happen. The two lines are one event. Held off the top by the outside line, shot in a plainer grammar and carrying exposition the form elsewhere makes unnecessary.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Told forward, the life of Odilo Unverdorben is a familiar story of a war criminal who escaped and lived quietly in America. Told backward, it becomes the argument. The narrator travels toward the offence and cannot know it until he arrives, so the structure is the approach of a conscience to the thing it has refused to know. The reversal makes medicine wounding in New York and murder creation in the camp, so the form is the moral inversion it discloses. The narrator’s separation from the body that acts is the perpetrator’s doubling made into a point of view. The reversed dialogue, line by line, is incomprehensible until it is read again forward. Held off the top because the device is also a source of comedy that the knowledge does not need, and through much of the American part the form entertains more than it knows.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows, because the knowledge is in the restraint. A record about holding back from waking is built of songs that hold back: climaxes are withheld, the voice stays low, and release comes only at the end of Fake Empire and in the coda of Slow Show. The opening piano sits across the beat, so the song floats off its own pulse, and that drift is the half-awake state the words name. The drums press while the voice declines to, and that tension is the subject. The sequence argues too, from the public night to a private hush. What holds it short of the top is Guest Room and Racing Like a Pro, closer to containers.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived. On the upper floor the day is lived in one open room and the night in separate rooms made by the family’s own hands, and the move from one to the other is part of the day. The children’s rooms, the mother’s and the living room are one space in different states. Built-in seats and cupboards and washbasins in the rooms make small rooms serve several uses, and the corner window opens the room to the air as a balcony would. Substitute a conventional house and almost nothing the upper floor knows survives. Held below the top because the ground floor is lived much as any house of its time, behind fixed walls, so that the form’s knowledge is gathered on one storey; and because the exterior’s freedom from structure is partly a dress.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a centred, frontal composition, the two at a table facing the viewer, and the picture loses almost everything it knows: the distance, the corner, the sense of a glance one should not be making, the man half out of the woman’s world. The zigzag of tables is access and barrier at once, leading the eye in and keeping it off. The mirror’s blur turns the reflected heads into shadows and the room into a closed box. The palette, every note dulled, is the hour. Form here is the instrument, not the container: isolation is shown as placement. Held below the top because the form serves one relation rather than founding a whole way of seeing.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and almost everything goes. The work knows stillness, and stillness is what painting alone can hold: a poem would have to pass through the meditation in time, and a play would have to break it. The light is the knowledge. One source, placed within the picture, makes everything in the field a function of its distance from the flame: the face nearest and brightest, the hand on the skull half lit, the skull darker, the room lost. Change the light and the hierarchy of life and death goes with it. The near life size of the figure and the closeness of the view put the viewer at the table, in the dark beyond the lamp. Held below the top because the iconography could be, and was, carried in other forms.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and almost everything is lost. As a painting or a drawing the image would be a pleasant invention, a man jumping a puddle, with none of its knowledge. What it knows is that this happened, exactly so, for a fraction of a second, and that no hand arranged it. The photograph’s claim to have been there is the content, and the shutter’s instant is the instrument: the gap between heel and water exists only because the exposure was short enough to hold it. Black and white makes the man and his reflection one sign, a silhouette and its mirror, on a grey ground where the ripples draw circles. Held below 9 because the composition is in part a gift of chance, and the maker’s share in it is narrower than a painter’s.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing anything, because here the form is the instrument of the knowledge in the most literal sense architecture offers. Change the inclination of the gnomon and it no longer tells the time; change the curvature of the bowl and it no longer maps the sky. The form also changes how the purpose is lived: observation becomes a walk, the observer moves inside the instrument along its scale and reads the shadow at the scale of a body, and the court’s knowledge is performed in open ground rather than in a closed tower. Held from the top for two reasons. The identity of form and function belongs to each instrument, not to the ensemble, whose arrangement is not itself knowledge; and the purpose has lapsed, so the form’s knowledge must now be explained to most who enter it.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and nearly everything goes. As the photograph alone it would be a family snapshot; the work knows what it knows because a photographed instant has been remade by hand over long labour, so that attention is spent on a person who withholds herself, and the snapshot’s accident becomes deliberate. The turned head is the form’s centre: the portrait is invoked and refused in one act, and the viewer’s wish to see the face is the content. The grey field is form as argument, the blank set as the thing the figure looks at. The softened, nearly photographic finish lets the canvas pass for a photograph at a distance and declare itself as paint near to. Held below the top because the form completes a method twenty-five years old, and part of what it knows the method already knew.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because its knowledge is a process. Synchronise the loops and it becomes a pattern; give it a beginning, a climax and an end and it becomes a piece one listens to, which is what it exists not to be. In 2/1 the voices drift in and out of one another and the harmony is an accident the system makes, and that drift is the content. The sequence is counted here, once: piano, then voices, then piano and voices together, then the synthesiser alone, the crossed numbering laying the two sides out as a small symmetrical grid. It is a grid rather than a progression, and 2/2 completes the symmetry more than it enacts the method. The LP also cuts an endless process into fixed sides with fades, so the release form contains the knowledge rather than enacting it at every point.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very nearly entirely. The cut edge is the knowledge: a scissors line has no hatching, no modelling and no second thought, so line and colour arrive together, which is what the work discloses. The flat gouache is the knowledge: unmodulated planes read as colour itself, not as coloured things. The separate sheet is the knowledge: each plane is a placed object, and the balance of the turn is the balance of placed objects, which brushwork would have to imitate. The scale is the knowledge: a body’s reach, a wall’s surround. Paint the design in oil and much survives as design, but the edge, the flatness and the sense of each plane as a thing apart go. Held below the top because some of this the other large cut-outs of 1952 and 1953 know too.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Nearly everything goes. The flag fills each support, so there is no figure and no ground, and the object is the image. The stack is the second knowledge: three supports built one on another make the painting a thing with thickness and edges, and the reversed diminution, the nearest flag the smallest, inverts the logic by which pictures make space and turns illusion out into the room. Encaustic is the third: because each stroke sets as it is laid, the surface records every touch, and a mechanical emblem is visibly made by hand. Reproduced, the work loses the relief and the wax and becomes a diagram of three flags. Held below the top because part of what the form knows, the flag as painting, Flag already knew.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. Its knowledge is comparative, and only the grid makes comparison an act of the eye: nine towers under one light at one scale, so that what differs is only form. A single picture, however fine, knows a building; the grid knows a type and its variation. Change any condition of the form, colour, dramatic light, an oblique angle, a figure for scale, and the variable leaks back in and the knowledge goes. The photograph’s claim to have been there guarantees the vernacular: these were built, by someone, somewhere named. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. Held below 9.0 because a little of what is known, the claim to sculpture and the rescue of the disappearing, is carried by title and context more than by what the eye finds.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
This is the work’s strongest claim. Change the form and nothing remains: the melody alone is a pleasant tune, the rhythm alone a drill. What the work knows, that unchanging growth ends in rupture, is said only by the form, by a crescendo held for a quarter of an hour and broken in its last bars. The single modulation is the form’s one sentence, and it can be uttered only because nearly all of the work has stood in C. Form here is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Held below the top because the form is one idea: it carries what the work knows completely, but what it knows is a single proposition, and a form that knows one thing is a lesser instrument than one that knows many.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Romans could almost be a treatise with an address at each end, and the collection is a form imposed by later hands. But the letter is the instrument of what most of the letters know. They are authority exercised in absence, the writer absent in body and present in spirit (1 Corinthians 5:3), and their knowledge is relational. Philemon’s plea, which turns a slave into a beloved brother without a command, can exist only as a letter to one man read before a household church. The fool’s speech of 2 Corinthians 10 to 13, a boast of weakness in a fool’s voice, needs a hearer who has wounded the writer. Romans’ diatribe, with its imagined objector and its refusals, is dialogue inside a letter. High where the form knows; middling in Romans’ long argument and in the frame of a collection the writer did not make.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
In much of the work the form is the knowledge. The list is the instrument of a humanist plenitude: the world is more various than any system, and the catalogue says so by not stopping. The Tiers Livre is the best case: a man consults one authority after another and hears none, and no other shape could know that. The mock chronicle turns a giant’s genealogy and education into a parody that is also a programme; the voyage makes each island one folly of the age; the Fifth Book closes the quest the form demanded. Held down because the shape was found over thirty years rather than given: Gargantua retells Pantagruel’s plan, the giants’ size changes with the needs of the scene, and several island chapters are containers that any frame could hold.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Where the form works, it is the knowledge. Myshkin’s presence makes people speak the truth about themselves, and the scandal scene, everyone assembled and everything said, is the form of that power: Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday, the evenings at Pavlovsk, the Epanchins’ reception. The narrator who loses confidence in the last part is itself a form of knowledge, since no one can explain Myshkin, including the voice that tells his story. But the form is also loose where the knowledge does not require it: the six months’ gap, subplots carried and dropped, a close that reports Aglaya’s fate at second hand. Change the structure of the scandal scenes and the book loses what it knows; change the serial looseness and it loses nothing. Hence a figure below the great formal novels.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The form knows what the subject knows. Melancholy is the black humour, and the engraving is a world made only of black line on white ground: the face is darkest where the humour is, and every grade from that black to the bare paper of the sky is cut by hand. The sheet is held close and scrutinised, the posture of the woman over her instruments, and as a multiple it sends one unresolved image into many studies. In a painted panel colour would warm the cold field. Held below 9.0 because a drawing or a painting could also carry the crowded emblematic field; the print intensifies the knowledge rather than being its sole instrument.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. The double album is the instrument of one claim: that the band’s music is all of this city’s music at once, and only a record of nineteen songs in eight idioms can show that. The plenty is the meaning. The sequence is counted here, once: the alarm of the title first, the disclosures of side two closing on Clampdown and The Guns of Brixton, the outlaws and the cheat’s death on side three, and side four ending in Revolution Rock, a cover played as a party. The limit: the songs are complete in themselves, the order could be reshuffled with modest loss, and the close on Train in Vain, added late, shows how far the shape was arrived at.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops being able to say what it knows. Johnson known through summary is the Johnson of Hawkins; Johnson known through scenes of talk, set in dated order so that habits, fears and opinions recur and accumulate, is a living man. The annalistic frame gives the life as time, and the dramatic scene gives it as presence; together they are the instrument of the knowledge, and the reader learns Johnson as Boswell did, by acquaintance. The form is also partly a container. The letters, the lists of works and the controversies sit in it as matter stored rather than shaped, and the chronology is weakest exactly where the biographer’s own presence fails, before 1763 and at the death.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The double plot is the argument: told singly, Gerald and Gudrun’s story is a tragedy of will and Birkin and Ursula’s a romance with a lecture in it; paired, each is the other’s measure, and both answer one question. The episodic form is the instrument: each chapter is a single crisis under an emblematic title, “Rabbit”, “Moony”, “A Chair”, and meaning passes between them by recurrence, the mare to the rabbit to Gudrun, the water to the snow. The repetition is form where it builds a crisis by approach and return. Held below the top where argued dialogue makes the form a container, and because the Tyrol, with Loerke, half leaves the double plot for a third story.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the building stops knowing what it knows. The court of four iwans is how the congregation finds its direction: the larger qibla iwan leads to the dome and the others answer it, so that orientation is lived by the body crossing the court. The hypostyle of equal bays is how the congregation is held as equals; the dome chamber is how the line of prayer is made a place. The relation of the low, many-domed field to the two great domes is the relation of the many to the one, built. Held below the summit because later halls, madrasa rooms and some of the precinct’s edges are containers more than instruments of that knowledge.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The story is shaped as a conversion told from the outside of a man who cannot explain himself, so the viewer learns Terry’s interior through behaviour, the glove, the birds, his hands in the taxi, and not through speech; the performance and the location photography are the instruments of that knowledge, not its dress. The confession drowned by the whistle is the form making the point that truth on this waterfront is spoken where it cannot be heard. Kaufman’s grey, crowded frame makes the community’s pressure physical, so that conscience is a man standing apart in a packed image. The cost: the hearing and the sermons carry in words what the form had no need of.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Substitute a closed shaft of the same height and the ascent becomes a ride in the dark. Here the lattice keeps the city in view the whole way up; the lifts climb along the curve of the legs; one learns the structure by rising through it, and the city by watching it fall away. The form makes going up a tower an experience of the structure and of the city at once, which the observation towers that followed seldom manage. Held lower because the purpose it serves is thin: to rise and to look. The stages are terraces with restaurants and shops; at the top, what the visitor does could be done from any height; and the second use, transmission, asks only for a mast. The form changes wholly how a short purpose is lived.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? In large part. The broad, eight-arched crossing makes the congregation one body under one dome and gives a reformed liturgy of preaching and gathering its centre; the long nave keeps the procession and ceremony of state, thanksgiving, funeral and jubilee, that the cathedral still serves. The three shells make the building two things at once: an interior proportioned for the gathered people and an exterior proportioned for the city, a room and a landmark. Held below the highest marks because the junction of nave and dome, imposed by the refusal of the centralised plan, makes part of the form a container for two purposes, and the screen walls show a form shaped for the eye.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The form is the instrument of much of what the work knows. The frieze makes the picture read as a sequence, right to left, from the wind to the god, so that a process is told in one instant. The shallow plane and the dark wall of trees put every figure against one ground, which is why the grove reads as a realm outside time rather than a place. Near life size puts the viewer at the edge of the meadow, at the height of the figures, and the line that carries every contour of veil and limb is the means of the grace the picture discloses. Substitute deep space and the figures would become actors in a landscape. Held below 9.0 because much of it would survive translation into tapestry.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Each side runs from hard rock to its longest track, and the two closers answer each other, ascent against flood, the record’s two forms of the sublime. Change the form of Stairway and it stops knowing what it knows: the climb from acoustic to electric is the argument of a song about turning from illusion to a higher road, and played at one tempo it would say nothing. Levee knows its weight through its slowness and its room sound; Black Dog’s stop-start call and response is the form of a man calling after desire. What holds it: elsewhere the record lays its modes side by side, and three tracks are containers for riffs.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
In the major stories the form is the knowledge. “A Madman’s Diary” set in two languages says what no single register could: the classical frame is the voice of the cured and of the order, the vernacular diary the voice that saw, so the form itself enacts the madman’s reabsorption. In “Kong Yiji” the narrator is the boy who poured the wine and laughed with the customers, telling it twenty years later without much remorse, so that the reader stands where the tavern stood, a spectator. The mock biography of Ah Q, with its fussy chapter headings and a grand reunion that is a beheading, turns a genre of honour into a record of humiliation. What holds it here is the book as a whole: as a sequence it is an arrangement rather than a form, and the lighter pieces could be moved without the book knowing less.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows, which is that this life does not accumulate: every night promises a revelation and every dawn returns the same man. Only repetition without consequence can say that; a plot would make the nights lead somewhere. Seven times a night runs into a dawn that undoes it, and that shape is the instrument. The frame, sky to sea, with the words lost to noise at both ends, makes the last scene a return rather than an end. Steiner and Paola alternate as two ways out, and both are shut. Held below the top because an additive form does not compel the order of its middle: the castle and the miracle could change places without the film knowing less, and there the form is a container.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two parts are the book’s argument. The North of the first part is a place of property, inertia and the dead, of Macon Dead, Not Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital, and Milkman cannot walk straight there, with one leg shorter than the other; the South of the second strips him of his suit, his watch and his car, and the form shifts from chronicle into quest and from summary into scene. The novel’s knowledge is shaped like the song it decodes: it has heard its own key on the first page, when Pilate sings of Sugarman under the agent’s leap, and does not understand it until the last chapters. The leap that opens the book is answered by the leap that closes it: failed flight, then flight. Held off the top because the first part is built as an accumulation of family histories, told in long retrospective monologues by Macon and Ruth, more than as a form that knows; it could be reordered without loss.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Put a conventional opera house on the point and the city loses its image, the public loses the plateau, and the visitor loses the procession: up the stair from the city, under the roofs, and out at the interval into foyers that face the harbour through the shells’ raised mouths. Going to a performance is lived here as an ascent to the edge of the land, and that is the form’s doing. The building has changed how the city lives its harbour. But inside the halls, where the purpose is served, the form changes little: the rooms would be the rooms in any building, and the smaller hall, given to opera only after the brief was changed, was for decades a cramped stage and pit.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Put a closed dome over this plan and the church stops knowing what it knows: the light would come from a visible drum, the heaven would be a ceiling, and the claim that the source of light lies beyond the structure would be gone. The form shapes how worship is lived. The congregation stands in a compressed, dim, richly worked space and looks up into a structure that seems to dissolve, so the lifting of the eyes that the liturgy asks is built into the room; the bowed bays hold the visitor at the centre rather than inviting him to the edges. Held below the top because the high altar sits in a second room, and the place of the rite and the place of the vision are less resolved than the vision.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A rectangular chapel would give the holy spot an altar at one end and a nave to face it; here the spot is the centre, the building turns round it, and everyone outside sees one whole reliquary of stone. The form knows the place as a centre in a way no hall could. The crypt below and the opening over the spot put the visitor at the source, the building rising from it. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge is mostly seen from outside: the interior is too small to live the idea, and the peristyle, the most expressive part, cannot be walked with ease. As a lived room the building is slight; as an instrument for knowing a place it is exact.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a third-person chronicle and much of what the book knows is lost. The child’s perception survives in the adult’s sentence, double, so that the reader sees the Murdstones as the child did and as the man now does at once. A life told by its owner is shaped by what he cannot see in himself: his blindness to Agnes, his part in bringing Steerforth to Yarmouth. The four retrospects, in the present tense, make memory itself a formal element: time stops and the narrator stands among his past. Held below the top because the form is less an instrument in the second half, where the first person carries plots David witnesses at a distance, Emily’s flight and rescue, Annie’s vindication, the exposure of Heep, told to him or watched by him, and its knowledge thins.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The objective narration, which shows and withholds comment, is the instrument of its justice: Bazarov and Pavel must be weighed without an author to tip the scale, and the refusal to tip it is the disclosure that both are partly right. The circuit of visits, which returns to Maryino, makes the hero a guest everywhere and at home nowhere, and each return shows what has changed in him. The doubling is formal and meaningful: two fathers, two sisters, two friends, and two loves, Arkady’s for Katya, which takes, and Bazarov’s for Odintsova, which does not; and at the end a double wedding set against a single grave. Held off the top because the short novel of portraits is Turgenev’s established container, and parts of this book, Pavel’s past and the satirical pair, sit in it rather than work through it.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The knowledge is that the painter’s work stands at the centre of a society divided in two, and the frieze says it by placement: the long horizontal makes a social order a row, the centre makes the maker its axis, the divide makes a judgment. The near life-size figures put the viewer in the studio as one more visitor, standing where the art lovers stand. The canvas within the canvas is a landscape, so that nature is the one thing in the room being painted, and painting out of doors becomes the content of an indoor picture. As a written manifesto the argument survives and the presence does not; as a smaller canvas it becomes a genre scene. Held lower because the space does not fully cohere: figures are set from separate studies at uneven scales and lit from no common source, and whether that collage is the knowledge, a world assembled in the mind, or a want of time cannot be settled.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The second-person opening is an instrument: the chronicler takes “you” into the annex past the burdock, nettles and wild hemp, and so makes the reader the visitor who can leave, which is exactly Ragin’s position until it is not. The withdrawal of that voice into a flat third-person history mimes the doctor’s withdrawal from what he sees. The paired histories set the two men in parallel before they meet, so that their dialogue is between two lives and not two positions. The length is right: long enough for a man’s slow erosion by inertia, short enough that the reversal falls in one stroke. Held below the top because the dialogue chapters carry more of the argument in speech than the form needs.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The compression of a life into seventy hours is the argument: Jordan comes to think that a whole life can be lived in three days, and the form makes it so, setting the near present at nearly real time and opening it to retrospect, Gaylord’s, the father, the grandfather, Pilar’s town, so that the past is gathered into the hours before the bridge. The two sentences on the pine-needle floor close the circle. The rendered Spanish is form as knowledge: the reader is kept inside the band’s speech as a guest, the way Jordan is. The Andrés chapters make the form carry the irony: the message that could save the band moves slower than the attack. Held below the top because the middle could stand in a different order and the love chapters are a container more than an instrument.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The three places are the argument: a commons, an aristocrat’s keep and a farmhouse, each a social order, passed through in the order the film’s thought requires. The staging carries the class lines inside the frame: Renoir and Matras use depth and a moving camera to hold many men in one shot, so that the officers’ talk, the guards and the furniture of class share the image, and a cut is rarely needed to say who belongs with whom. Language is form: at the farm the viewer stands where Maréchal stands, outside German and then slowly inside it. The cost: the first movement’s episodes could be arranged otherwise, and the form governs more by its places than by moment-to-moment necessity.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Put the same offices, chapels, monks and tombs in a walled compound on the plain, laid out in courtyards, and the work loses most of its claim: that the ruler lives above his state as the bodhisattva above the world, that the way to him is an ascent, that his predecessors are at the core of his house. The form changed how the purpose was lived. Officials and supplicants climbed to government; the Dalai Lama appeared high on the mass, seen from below; pilgrims passed through dark chapels on a circuit past the tombs and circled the hill at its foot. Held below the top because much of the interior is the standard Tibetan room, a grid of pillars under a flat roof, repeated; there the form is container more than instrument.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narrator turns everything into theory and aphorism, so the world reaches the reader already mediated, and the noise of the title enters the narration itself: the litanies of brands and the lines that begin “The TV said:” arrive unattributed, as ambient sound does. The three parts are the argument’s shape: a long part of ordinary dread, a single unbroken chapter for the event, a long part of private aftermath, so that the public catastrophe sits at the centre and resolves nothing. The family’s talk is a second noise, children trading facts and misinformation in one stylised cadence, the domestic version of the radio. Told in the third person, the book would lose its deepest irony, that its narrator is a symptom of what he describes. Held off the top because the chaptered novel is inherited, and Part III’s plot could be told otherwise without much loss.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the use changes. The chevet sets the shrine at the head of a ring, so that kings are buried where pilgrims walk round a saint and the ambulatory becomes the procession of the dynasty. The raised crossing and sanctuary make the coronation a rite seen from four sides, with the pavement under it; a basilica without that theatre would make it an audience. The tall nave makes the national dead a procession from the west door to the screen. The Lady Chapel, a church at the end of the church, gives a later dynasty its own vessel and an order of chivalry its stalls. Monastic office, coronation, royal burial and national commemoration have been carried without structural change. Held below the top because the monuments were fitted into the form rather than given form by it.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses most of what it knows: strip the mosaics and the basilica is a plain hall of reused columns; put the programme in a centralised church and it loses the walk from the Creation to Christ, which only the long plan makes. The breadth of the sanctuary sets the thrones of king and archbishop facing each other across the choir, under the images that state their claims: the politics of the building is its section. In the cloister, paired columns, each pair different, make the monk’s circuit an inexhaustible repetition. Held below the top because the nave is an ordinary basilica of its region and century whose meaning is applied to its surfaces, and the join of Latin body and Byzantine head is resolved by the gold rather than by the structure.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the cycle knows goes. Fresco on the walls of the court makes the factory a place one stands inside, as the workers stand inside the Rouge; a set of canvases would show the plant, and the court encloses the viewer in it. The facing main walls put the viewer between the engine and the body, at the point of their union. The walls are read as a cosmology, origin on one side and departure on the other. The Renaissance division into registers and predella is the instrument of the argument, the earth and the races above, the process in the middle, the small scenes below, not a frame for it. Held below the top because the court was a given space, built as a garden court and not made for the cycle, and its proportions and doors set limits the cycle works around rather than through.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much goes. Low relief on wall slabs, read along a wall and up through registers, makes the hunt a procession the visitor walks beside, so that the court passing in the palace stood to the king’s arena as the spectators on the hill did. The shallow relief, with contour carrying almost everything, gives the lions’ musculature as line and lets the empty stone round them read as open ground and as silence. The registers allow cause and sequence: release, combat, death, rite. A painting, a free standing group or a text could not hold both the continuous band and the stacked sequence, nor the viewer moving along the wall. Held below the top because the register divisions are the palace’s standard, and much of the long band is laid out to fill rather than to mean.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows, which is character as motion. Each person is a way of moving set to music: Juliet’s running scales, the Nurse’s lumbering gait, Mercutio’s capering and broken rhythms, Tybalt’s thrust, the friar’s stillness. The ballet’s form, a public of dancers out of which two bodies separate themselves, is the instrument of the drama’s knowledge that love is a withdrawal from the dance of the city: the balcony pas de deux follows the ball. Recast as opera, the lovers would speak; as a concert suite, the order goes. Held below the top by the work’s own life, since the suites carry large parts of it into the concert hall and lose little force there, and by divertissements that are form as the genre’s habit.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. Built freestanding, al-Khazneh would be a Hellenistic pavilion; cut into the rock it is a door into the mountain, permanent and unapproachable from behind, a building that is all face. The mask is the knowledge: the dead are given a front in the language of the world and an interior of plain stone. The basin enacts its argument as a plan, the living city on the valley floor ringed by the cliffs of the dead, with water threaded through both; the theatre cut through older tombs shows assembly and the dead in one section. Held below the top because the break between front and chamber also reads as form used as a container, and the masonry city’s part in the plan is now largely inferred.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the Republic is lived differently. Put the Great Council in a set of chambers and the patriciate no longer sees itself as one body, sitting under one ceiling and voting in one room: the hall’s size is the constitution made spatial. Close the arcade and the square no longer passes under the state’s floors; the ground arcade was where patricians met and canvassed, the life of politics going on at the palace’s foot. The thresholds and stairs make rank a matter of route and height, and the bridge makes justice and punishment one passage. Held below the top because large parts of the form are a container, the courtyard fronts and many interior rooms, and because since 1797 the shell has carried a museum, which shows its endurance more than its compulsion.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. As a first person memoir it would lose the narrator’s lyric distance and the counterpoint between the narrator’s English and the characters’ speech; as plain third person realism it would lose the frame, which makes the whole tale an act of speech to a listener, the very thing Starks forbade. The book’s point is that Janie comes to her voice, and the form enacts it: the narration, standard at the start, takes in more of the idiom as her voice grows, until on the muck the free indirect passages are hers. The cost falls where the form should culminate. At the trial her speech is reported and withheld, and elsewhere the narrator sometimes glosses what the form has already shown.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its form is drift: once the first raft is lost the expedition cannot go back, and the film takes the current as its structure, so that time passes as distance downstream and nothing chosen alters the direction. The camera stays mostly at water level, so the bank is always far and unreadable, which is the conquest’s own way of knowing. The diary gives each stage a date and a sober entry while the image grows stranger, until the diary stops. The ending, a circle around a raft turning in place, states the form last: the journey ends as rotation. Held below the top: the drift is sometimes slackness passing as form, and the voice-over is the least worked element.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of the knowledge goes. The dream is the instrument: it licenses the absence of cause, so that the logic of words governs events, and the book’s knowledge, that language rules sense and that adults’ rules are words obeyed as if they were things, is shown only because events follow words. The frame works: the book opens on a child bored by a book “without pictures or conversations” and is itself almost all conversation, and it closes with the sister translating each noise of the dream back into the farmyard, which tells what the dream was made of without explaining it. The parodies need verse, since the joke is the deviation from a remembered metre. Held off the top by the episodic middle, whose order could change in places without the form saying anything different, and by a coda that is form as frame more than form as knowledge.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The title is the form’s argument: cuttlefish bones, what the sea throws up, white, light and emptied, the residue of a living thing. The short poems of the title section are such residues, each compressed to one perception and one turn, and that brevity lets them claim a negative knowledge without a system. Put “Non chiederci la parola” into a prose essay on the limits of poetry and it becomes a manifesto; in twelve lines whose rhymes refuse to settle it enacts its refusal. The harsh rhyme of “muraglia” on “bottiglia” is the aridity heard. The order of the book records the coming of the voice, from the musical early pieces to the long late poems; the arc is real, but less necessary than the single poems.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. The triptych opens and closes: closed, the giant bears the child; open, the bearing unfolds across conception, presentation and death. The programme lives in the hinge. The tall format of the central panel makes the descent a vertical fall that the eye completes downward toward the altar, and figures at life size or larger set the body within reach of a kneeling worshipper. The diagonal is the knowledge: the composition is built on the fall of the sheet, so that the descent is carried by the form rather than shown inside it. Held below the top because the wings, in their own frames and register, are separate pictures that the programme links rather than one field the form compels; the Raising of the Cross, painted continuously across its three panels, used the triptych harder.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The priest is seen first from outside, in Tench’s eyes at the port, a shabby little man missing a boat, and only gradually from within; the reader meets the saint as the world met him, as nothing. The alternation of the priest’s chapters with the chapters of onlookers (Tench, the Fellows, the lieutenant, the mother reading Juan’s life) makes the form itself the claim that grace works unseen and is recorded wrongly. The fourth part keeps the death off the stage: the execution is a noise and a fall glimpsed from a dentist’s window, and a boy who had admired the lieutenant’s gun spits on it and opens the door to the new priest. Even the missing name is formal: there is no name for the hagiographers. What holds the axis there: the chase could carry other matter with less loss than the top requires, and the middle of the flight is episodic.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
In the best stories the form is the knowledge. “Hills” told from inside Jig, or with the operation named, would know what she feels; told as it is, it knows that the two cannot say what the story is about, and that the man’s words are the instrument of the pressure. “The Killers”, told almost entirely in dialogue and from no one’s mind, knows evil as manner: the gunmen are funny, and the comedy is the horror. “In Another Country” is told in the first person by a narrator who knows he is not one of the hawks, and the first person is the confession. As a book the form is looser. The stories are not bound by interchapters, and the order, sport near both ends of the first half and the war returning at the close, is a sequence, not an argument. The stories’ forms stand at the top; the book’s at less.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the knowledge changes. The head alone, without a body, says the head is the person. Life-size says this is a human being, not a god or an emblem. Copper, a red metal that shines when polished and that was precious, says that what the face holds is meant to outlast flesh. The holes along the hairline and about the mouth say the head was dressed, with hair, beads or a veil: the metal is not the whole image as used but its permanent core, completed in perishable material, and the form records its own ceremony. The striations put a pattern over the face without interrupting its modelling, so social marking and individual flesh share one surface. Held at 8.6 because the uncertain use of the heads leaves part of what the form knows beyond recovery.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the place knows changes. In a house of courtyard and wings the guest moves round a closed space; here arrival is a straight line through the door into the centre and out to the land, so reception is lived as progression and revelation. The salon turns the gathered company to face the garden together under one dome, and the enfilades let the eye run the length of the house as the axis runs the length of the land. The hidden canal turns a walk into a discovery staged for the walker, and the return gives the house back as an image. Held short because the suites on either side live as any great house of the period lives.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge, twice over. The skinny quatrain is a narrow shaft that goes down rather than along, so that each poem reads as a dig, the eye descending through the lines as the poems descend through peat and history. Set the bog poems in blank verse and they lose their quality of excavation and their refusal of discursive argument; the stanza is what keeps the moral judgment withheld and then sudden. And the split into two parts is itself what the book knows: the mythic part cannot say the plain thing, the plain part cannot hold the deep thing, and the poet stands between them. “Whatever You Say Say Nothing”, in rhymed slack quatrains of reported cliché, enacts the tight-lipped speech of its place. Some Part I poems use the stanza by habit rather than need.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the church loses what it knows. Close the screen with a wall and the monks become a separate chapel, the lay church and the choir no longer one space; put the choir in front of the altar, as older monastic churches did, and the doge’s visit and the congregation’s view are blocked. The form makes the community’s liturgy visible to the laity and the laity’s worship audible to the monks: a common life lived through a veil. The broad crossing and presbytery make the state’s visit a ceremony in the body of the church, not a guest’s attendance. The two-scale front is the section turned outward, so that the city reads the church from across the water. Held below the top because Il Redentore shares much of this knowledge and carries the screened choir further, and the nave is lived as any aisled nave is.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a keep with a courtyard and the court is lived differently: the prince would have stayed within his walls. Here he moves from a public courtyard by a grand stair to state rooms, from them to private apartments, a garden on the roof of the service floor, a study and a loggia over the landscape. Each step narrows the company and widens the view. The ramp brings the horseman from the market without dismounting; the towers put the stair where the view is; the studiolo makes withdrawal a form of display. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge is uneven: the lower works and the later storey serve need more than they shape a life.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived, more than in most museums. The sequence is the instruction: from the open square, up the steps, into the shadow of the colonnade, up the stair with the city behind, then into the rotunda, where the visitor is made ready, by a room of one shape and one light, for what follows. Give the front a temple portico and the museum stops being a public place and becomes a monument; remove the rotunda and the visitor enters the collection straight from the street. The building knows that seeing art is a passage from the city into another order and back, and the view from the stair hall completes the circuit. Held below the top: the galleries round the courts are serviceable rooms whose form says little, and with the painted walls lost, part of the sequence is now read rather than lived.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the room stops knowing what it knows. Give it a proscenium and a changeable scene and it becomes any later theatre: the audience looks through a frame at a picture, not at a wall of the city with the city beyond it. Give it a semicircle and an open sky and it is a ruin restored. As built, audience and frons share one architecture of columns and statues, the colonnade of the cavea answering the orders of the frons, so that spectators sit inside the play’s city rather than before it, and every entrance is an arrival from a street. The limit is the converse: the fixed scene that is its knowledge confines it, and the form has served later use by being kept, not by adapting.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the worship changes. A temple with one entrance and one image is approached; this one is gone round. Enter from any quarter and the way leads not to a centre but round one, and the form teaches that the centre is not entered: the core is solid, and the Buddhas stand at its surface facing out. The double corridor separates narrative from presence, story on the outer ring and image on the inner. The hidden light makes the image a thing revealed rather than displayed. Substitute an open hall and that knowledge is lost. Held below the top because the porches, the longest parts of the plan, serve access and ceremony more than what the temple knows.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The sequence, counted here once, carries an argument: side one opens on the public world and moves at once to escape and play; sides two and three turn inward to the couple, through flirtation, sex, settling, the crossing of sex and jealousy; side four turns to faith, then to the crowd, then to devotion. World, body, self, God, community, love: the double album’s range is the claim that one appetite runs through them all, and a single album could not make it. The pitched voice is form as knowledge, a song about wanting to be a woman’s friend sung in a voice moved toward a woman’s, and the live track set between The Cross and Adore makes the sacred communal before it becomes personal. Side two shows the record’s assembly, its order more a run of grooves than an argument, and some middle tracks are containers more than instruments; the fault is local, and across the four sides the form is the instrument of what the record knows. Held from the top by that side.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The investigation is the form of disillusion: the viewer learns who Harry is by a thriller’s method, as Holly does, so the charm is felt before it is judged, and the doorway lands only because the form has withheld him. The tilted frame is the knowledge that this world is off its axis, held so long that the viewer stops noticing. The zither, light and dancing over murder, is the city’s charm sounding over its rot. The last long take carries Anna’s verdict in duration alone. The cost: the comic set pieces sit in the form as relief rather than as instruments, and some of the style decorates rather than knows.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The confession is the instrument: told in Neff’s voice to Keyes, the film knows the crime as Neff knew it, a plan that seemed exact and was not, and knows from the first scene that the plan failed, so every step is heard as evidence against him. The dictaphone makes the confession a claim filed with the company, the last form Neff fills in. The light makes the knowledge visible: drawn blinds, dust hanging in the shafts, a sunlit Los Angeles dark indoors. The last scene closes the form on its addressee, and the confession turns out to have been a love letter. What holds the figure: the voice-over sometimes tells what the image has already shown, and the Lola and Zachetti strand is container, not instrument.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form, a vaulted or trussed hall of the same size, and much is lost that the building knows. The crowd under a single hung roof, the light running down the ridge onto the water or the court, the entry at the crescent’s tips that brings people in along the edge of the bowl rather than through a wall, and the whole hall drawn taut over one assembly: these are the form’s doing, and they make a sporting event a gathering under a sky rather than in a shed. The small hall makes the same knowledge circular. What holds the axis: once seated, the knowledge is chiefly overhead, and the stands and floor would serve in many halls; and the change from pool to multipurpose and ice use loosened the plan’s fit to swimming without loss of meaning.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The songs are made to be circled: a few chords, a bass line answering the voice phrase by phrase, a voice free to repeat, stammer and extend. That form is memory returning to a place, and a three-minute song with a chorus could not say it. The sequence is counted here, once: two sides of near-equal length, genesis and aftermath, with the long songs set as pillars (the title track opening, “Cyprus Avenue” closing side one, “Madame George” at the centre of side two) and the bare “Slim Slow Slider” to end. What holds the axis down: strings added afterwards by another hand sometimes sweeten rather than serve, “The Way Young Lovers Do” breaks the form, and edits and fades made after the takes fixed part of the shape.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The form is repetition under command: the Processing questions repeated until the answer changes, the wall and the window walked until the words wear out, the drill of staring, the ride at a chosen point. The film’s own structure is that conditioning seen from outside, and it fails as the conditioning fails: the narrative drifts as Freddie drifts and will not take the shape of a cure. The close-up at 65mm makes the face the field of the contest, so that the film’s events are changes in a face. The last third loosens into an order a dream could have, and the form cannot certify which of its last scenes are his imagining, which is part of what it knows. Held below the top where the society scenes could be arranged otherwise without loss.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the set loses much of what it knows: that the concerto, the contest and cooperation of voices, is a principle and not a scoring. That needs six different groups. One concerto could show a solo against a band; only the set shows that any assembly of ranks can bear the same law. Within each, form follows forces: three groups of three make the ritornello a passing of one figure through a body, the cadenza of No. 5 is a form that lets the accompanist out, and the canon of No. 6 makes following the material. Held below the single designs of the concert desk because the order is a collection’s and No. 1’s dances stand outside the concerto principle.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the court loses its way of being a court. Put the stair in a side well, as many palaces do, and the ascent becomes a means; here it is the main event, and the guest learns his place by climbing into the world the prince claims to order. Remove the white hall and the imperial hall has no threshold; move the imperial hall off the garden axis and the reception no longer ends at the centre of the house, over the garden. What the building knows, that rank is a passage and power a revelation in stages, it knows through sequence and section, and the ceiling cannot be seen whole except by making the climb. Held at 8.6: the knowledge is concentrated in one route, the apartments are enfilades like other enfilades, and the Hofkirche enriches worship more than it changes how worship is lived.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the canvas knows goes. The near-identity of the two faces carries the claim that the division is within one person: a written statement could say it, but only an image can show one face twice and let the difference lie entirely in dress and in the state of the heart. The frontal, symmetrical pair at life size makes the viewer the third person on the bench, met by both gazes at once. The vessel is a drawn line, and its path, from portrait to arm to heart to heart to lap, is the argument, readable only as a line across a surface. The near square holds the two as equals. Held below the top because the canvas reads nearly whole in reproduction and at small size: the emblem, not the painted object, carries most of the knowledge.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. At figurine scale an army is an inventory, a toy of power, as the later miniature armies of the Han show. At life size the figures stand at the viewer’s height, and the viewer is among them, or above them looking down into a grave, which is the form of the work as it now stands. Made singly, a figure is a portrait; massed in formation, it is a unit; the meaning is the tension between the two, and only this form, a standard body and an individual face in a disciplined order, can hold it. Burial is form too: an army made to be unseen states that the state’s order needs no viewer. Held below the top because the single figure is a weaker vessel than the mass, and much of the knowledge lives in the formation rather than in each made thing.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the museum stops knowing what it knows about its city. The atrium sits below the street and opens toward the river; the circulation turns the visitor out over the water and back to the town, so that each passage between galleries is also a reading of the site. The three kinds of gallery make a claim about art in three conditions: orthogonal rooms for the historical collection, irregular rooms for living artists who want a room that answers, and the long hall for the large sculpture of the late century, a room no ordinary museum could have held. Put the programme in a neutral block on the same site and that knowledge is lost. What holds the axis: the irregular rooms can contest the works shown in them, so the knowledge is civic more than curatorial.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is the stillness of contemplation, and the form is a frieze: the figures laid parallel to the plane, the tomb set square to the viewer, the groups balanced either side of it, so that the eye reads the picture left to right as the shepherd reads the letters. Turn the composition into the diagonal of the earlier version and the meditation becomes an event, which is what that canvas is. The shadow can exist only in a picture, a flat mark on a flat stone in a flat image, and the picture is itself an inscription read by a viewer. Held below the top because a close variant, a print or a relief, would carry the knowledge with little loss: the picture’s size and surface are not part of what it says.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Make the katholikon a four-column cross-in-square and it stops saying what it says. The saint’s crowd would stand among columns; the dome would sit over a central bay, not over the whole naos; and the programme would lose the continuous ring of feasts in the squinches, which turns the passage from earth to heaven into a band seen entire from the floor. The form is the instrument, for the liturgy and the cult at once. Galleries and narthex shape how the church is lived, dividing the community and the visitors by level and by threshold. The joining of the two churches is weaker as form: the passage and the tomb make it work, but the pair is less one form than a cult’s arrangement of two.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. At about life size, hung above a standing viewer, the canvas seats the viewer in the lowest tier of the amphitheatre, close to the table: one is a student, placed to see. The single high light is the argument. It falls on the mind, at the brow, and on the work, at the hands and the wound, and leaves the witnesses in the dark, so that light ranks knowledge. The black of the frock coats and the tiers makes the red the only colour, and the blood carries what a text would have to say. In a print, as Eakins’s own replica for reproduction shows, the scene survives as an illustration; what goes is the scale that places the viewer and the red that makes the hand the centre. Held below the top because the confusion of the patient’s body, a matter of drawing, interrupts the form’s clarity at its centre.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The film’s argument is that a man must be returned to the weight of the earth and of time, and its duration is that weight: the stream held in one shot until the weed in the current becomes a thing seen. The three-part shape, Earth, the station and the Earth that is not Earth, is the argument’s shape, and the last pull-back rereads the whole film in one movement: what was home is an island the ocean has made of memory, as the station’s corridors have been filling with things of the Earth. The home film is memory made a medium. Held below the top because the alternation of colour and monochrome keeps no law, and Berton’s testimony is told as a document where its content could have been carried otherwise without loss.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute a northern basilica of three aisles and the building can no longer say most of what it says: that the church is one room for one congregation under one voice; that the Church stands in this land as a walled power; that the sacred is entered from the side, up a stair, through a gate. The internal buttress is the form’s instrument. It makes the outside a rampart and the inside a series of chapels in one move, so the double speech of the building, severity without and devotion within, is a single structural decision. The later choir changes how the room is lived, a church within the church, the canons closed off from the laity: it deepens the citadel’s logic and cuts the single room the shell compels.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses its knowledge. Told in the third person, Pozdnyshev’s theory would be the narrator’s and the book a tract. Told as a monologue in the dark to a stranger who barely speaks, the theory is a murderer’s confession, and every general claim must be weighed against the man making it. The form makes the book double: it argues chastity with full force and shows the argument as the scaffolding of a crime. The carriage conversation, where the lady’s love match and the merchant’s patriarchy are laid out before he speaks, makes his voice an answer to society and not a private rant. The railway carries the time: one night, ending at a station. Held below the top because in places the monologue merely contains the sermon, and there another form would lose little.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Lower the vault to Amiens, thicken the piers, wall the triforium, and the choir becomes one more great choir; its knowledge, of a space pressed to the limit at which stone and light can hold a vessel up, lives only in this proportion and this thinness. The form also knows, as it stands, what the unbuilt nave means. A visitor enters a fragment from the side, and the cathedral is lived as a head without a body, all choir and crossing, the eastward pull of a Gothic church compressed into a few bays and the liturgy held in its most intense part only. Held below the top because much of the present form was not chosen: the doubled bays, the stop to the west and the missing tower are imposed by failure and want.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The introduction hands the manuscript over and lets Jim add “My” to its title page: the form is the book’s argument that Ántonia exists for us only as one man’s possession and memory, and the reader is asked to watch the possessive as well as the woman. The episodic books are memory’s shape, vivid, separate, kept for their light; the gap before Book V, twenty years in a page, is how a life is remembered. Ántonia’s seduction and the birth of her child reach Jim and the reader at second hand, through the Widow Steavens, which is the form’s honesty: he was not there. The books move from land to town to city and back to land, the georgic cycle. Held below the summit because Book III loosens the instrument, and because Cather’s shortening of the introduction in 1926 shows the frame was still being adjusted.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The vertical sheet is the first instrument: it lets the near motif run the height of the frame while the distance sits small beyond it, so that the viewer stands where a body would stand, behind the post or under the branch. Turn it horizontal and the view returns to the prospect it left. The woodblock is the second: graded colour gives the skies of dawn and dusk that carry the hour, and flat fields and a keyed line make the cropping read as design, not accident. The series is the third, since a city cannot be a year in one sheet. Held below the top because that third instrument is only partly load-bearing: sheets are bought, seen and remembered singly.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. Put these songs in the samba-canção form of the day, the large orchestra and the projected voice, and they say the opposite: that feeling is shown by being displayed. The short song, sung once at the level of speech over one guitar, is the instrument of the claim that restraint carries intensity. The form also sets voice and guitar as two lines in counterpoint, the voice anticipating or trailing the beat the guitar keeps, so that the swing lives in the gap between them. The sequence, counted here once, is the weaker part: two singles and later sessions gathered, all new songs on side one and old into new on side two, a case made but not an arc built.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses much of what it knows. The arch of the first movement is grief as accumulation and subsidence: a lament that grows from the lowest register until it fills the strings, gives way to a voice, and sinks back to where it began. Recast as a through-composed setting, the Lament would lose the sense of centuries of grief beneath it. The stasis of the second movement is the cell: a few chords, little motion, the voice the only thing that moves. The strophes and ostinato of the third are the folk song’s own form, a mother’s song repeated as a rocking. Held below the top where the form is closest to a container: the downward half of the arch and the length of the last movement’s ostinato are permitted by the form rather than required.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the picture knows goes. Its knowledge lives in a suspended instant: the bird neither dead nor saved, the hand on the valve neither opening nor closing, the cage neither lowered nor raised. Painting alone holds that undecided moment still for as long as anyone looks, and makes the viewer the one to whom the lecturer turns. A narrative would have to say what happened next; the picture’s meaning is that it does not. The single hidden source of light is the form of the subject: illumination is the experiment, and each face’s share of the light is its share of the knowledge and the grief. Held below the top because a print after it carries much of that knowledge, losing colour and scale more than meaning.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its question is whether a person has an inside visible to others, and the form is the instrument of the question: we see Nana from behind, from the side, through a window, at the edge of a pan that leaves her and returns, and the film grants her face in full chiefly when she looks at another face, Falconetti’s, or talks with Parain about speech. The tableaux, each announced, make her life a series of stations written before she lives them, which is what her life becomes. The catechism in voice turns her into a case. Told as a continuous melodrama with access to her feelings, the film would claim the inside it doubts, and know less. Held below the top because some devices are taken up in one tableau and dropped in the next.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The tone is the instrument: deadpan comedy and sudden, artless violence held in one register, so that the viewer laughs at the manners and is not let off the killings, and learns that both belong to one world. The strands are cut so that Marge enters late and slowly, after the violence has accelerated, and her pace is the film’s judgment on theirs. Deakins’s whites, snow and overcast sky merging, make the land a blank on which people are marked small and legible. The true-story card is formal: it makes the absurd seem a record, and the film’s refusal to heighten keeps the claim plausible. Held below the top because, outside its tone and its delayed heroine, the film uses the crime film’s cross-cutting and pursuit well rather than remaking them.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses its knowledge. The life is shown to an observer, Clarence, before the crisis, so that the viewer holds the whole ledger while George sees only the failures; then the unborn sequence takes him away, and the viewer, who has watched every deposit, sees each withdrawal. The form is the argument: worth that cannot be seen from inside is made visible by being removed. The retrospect’s gathering of small sacrifices (the trip, college, the honeymoon, the job offer) makes the bridge inevitable, and its length is what lets Pottersville carry so much. What holds the figure is the frame: the heavenly scenes are a container, told as starfields that speak, and the closing crowd is the conventional happy ending, so the knowledge the structure earned is partly cashed by convention.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book is built as its house is built: Edgewood is a compendium of styles, larger inside than out, and the novel is a compendium of modes, domestic chronicle, fairy tale, Hermetic romance and political allegory, that opens inward. The omniscient narrator, who knows the end and speaks in the family’s own idiom of the Tale, is the instrument of the book’s central knowledge, that its people live inside a story told about them. A close third person on Smoky alone could not know that, and a first person could not hold the generations. The orrery and the Art of Memory are models of the book inside the book. Held below the top because the form loosens in the Eigenblick and Hawksquill strands, told nearer to conventional plotting, where the design is a container more than an instrument.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Give the court a single block, a palace of enfilades with a façade on a square, and the knowledge of sovereignty by withdrawal is lost: there is no gate to stop at, no court to wait in, no garden in which the ruler is present and unseen. The bent axis, the porticoes along which officials ranked themselves at the Council, the Audience Hall pressed against the Gate of Felicity, the Harem’s passages that ran the sultan’s private way to the Third Court: the form is how the purpose was lived, and the ceremonial was written for this plan. Held below the top: much of the Harem is the result of fire and accretion, and the Fourth Court is loosest where the ruler was freest.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses its knowledge. The chapters titled by place move through a life by its rooms and cities; the chapters titled by date count down a plot by its calendar. One is a biography and the other a clock, and their alternation makes the reader feel two orders approaching without contact until they meet on one day: coincidence and design converging, the book’s claim made by its form. Branch, set inside the countdown, makes the form also a statement about knowing: the novel we read is what his archive cannot become. The Author’s Note completes it, placing the whole as imagination. Held below the top because the strands meet earlier and more often than the design implies, Oswald being in contact with the plot’s agents for much of the last part, so that the convergence is more gradual than the form promises; and because Branch’s sections are few and thin for the weight the form puts on them.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The record’s claim is that the fragile human is held inside something vast, and its form is exactly that: a thin, cracking voice inside a wall of drums, keyboards and choir-like pads. Sung by a strong voice to a guitar band, these songs would lose their meaning, which is in the disproportion. The sequence is counted here, once: from public heroism, through private rescue in The Spiderbite Song and Waitin’ for a Superman, to dying in Feeling Yourself Disintegrate and rest on the roof, a course that matters. The Spark That Bled changes song in mid-track and enacts its title. Held from the top: most songs are verse and chorus inside the swell and would stand alone, the swell is one form applied twelve times, and the two remixes break the ending the sequence earns.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that this world cannot be stepped out of. The long take at Theo’s shoulder never cuts away to a safer place or a commanding view: the viewer must stay in the car while Julian dies and in the street while the shells land, and must take in the world as Theo does, in passing, at the edges of the frame. The form makes the disclosure, a catastrophe lived as continuous routine, the cages at the station seen from a train window. Told in cuts and inserts, with the politics explained, the film would know less. Held below the top because the form is used at its fullest in the set pieces while the scenes between are conventionally cut: it is the instrument in part, not throughout.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Within the members, form is the instrument of the knowledge. The Emperor variations know what they know because the form is a cantus firmus passed between voices: make them variations that ornament the tune, and the tune is no longer held whole by each player. The canon of No. 2 is the form of law as play; the first movement of No. 6, variations that end in a fugue, turns a single theme into counterpoint before the ear; the Alternativo makes a scale a form. The charge is the unit. Six quartets in sequence know no more than six quartets apart, and the set’s form is a container.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is three small enclosed rooms, each wrapped on every surface, each entered through its own door, with a bench filling the floor. Put the same scenes on an outer frieze or a run of stelae and the work stops knowing what it knows: inside these rooms the viewer is enclosed by the court, the battle and the rite at close range, with no outside. In the middle room one enters into the battle and turns to find the arraignment, and the stepped platform on the wall is a stair of the kind of building one stands in. The rooms lie side by side, not in a line, so that the argument must be left and re-entered, and the registers carry the order of the court in their tiers. Held below 9.0: the small rooms and the benches make full viewing awkward.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The frame is the knowledge of memory: the title song returns at the end as a reprise, slowed and broken, so the remembered place comes back changed, and the record ends where it began, unable to stay. The two numbered pairs know the same thing. Half Light I and II, and above all Sprawl I and II, a song of return in the flat streets answered by a song of flight to the mountains, are memory’s doubling, the place seen twice. The length mirrors the sprawl it describes. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top because between the frame and the pairs most songs are standard rock songs that could stand in another order, and the length mirrors its subject by accumulation more than by design.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and something is lost, though not everything. The bridge knows one thing completely: that water moving by gravity alone must hold its level across a void. The stacked arcades are that knowledge drawn in stone, height divided into tiers, load carried pier on pier, the narrow channel riding the top, and the river arch says where the floods go. The second life shows the form’s capacity, for the same tiers carried a road for centuries. Held below the higher figures because the purpose could be served by another form: Roman engineers crossed valleys elsewhere by inverted siphons in pipe, and a lower crossing on another route would have brought the same water. The water arriving in Nîmes is not lived differently because of this form.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, and the other exposures of the visit are the experiment: the same woman, the same children, the same tent, and they know a family in a camp; this frame knows a condition. The closeness is the knowledge: the place is cut away, so the woman stands for every place. The turned faces are the knowledge: the children have none, so the mother bears all the looking. The still instant is the knowledge: a hand halfway to the mouth, a thought not finished, held. A painting could hold the Madonna but not the dirt under the nail as fact; a film would let the hand drop. Held below the top because the form is a portrait within a known genre, and part of what it knows the genre knew.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the poem loses what it knows. The quatrain is the instrument: each is a moment complete in itself, rising on the third line to a question or an exception and falling back to the rhyme it began with, so that the form enacts the argument that every reasoning returns to where it set out. Blank verse or a continuous stanza would supply the connective the poem must not have; the gaps between stanzas are the life’s discontinuity, the separate cups. Over the separate moments the sequence of a day lays the one arc that is certain, dawn to dark. Held below the top because the same form also makes some stanzas interchangeable, which a form wholly fused with its knowledge would not allow, and because the first edition’s tighter arc shows the form doing more with less.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Make the square a rectangle and the cathedral becomes one front among four; the splay makes it the terminus and opens the two views that bring the setting of the town into its centre. Turn the palace’s loggias to the street and the relation to the land is gone. Raise the nave above the aisles and the cathedral becomes a Tuscan basilica; the hall makes it the single luminous room its patron wanted. The paving grid lays the perspective on the floor and measures the square for anyone who crosses it. Use is changed by form: the square is a room to stand in, oriented, not a crossing. Held below the Villa Rotonda (8.9) and the Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) because the bishop’s palace and the town hall carry their part of the knowledge by position more than by form.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a single canvas or a mural and most of what the work knows goes. The series form is the migration: one panel after another, the figures moving almost always in one direction, the count itself the size of the event, so that a viewer walks the sequence as the migrants travelled. The caption makes each panel a sentence and the whole a book that can be hung, a history read in order. The method is part of the knowledge: one palette carried across sixty panels at once, so that each panel is a part of a body and none is a picture alone. Held a step below the top because the caption sometimes does work the form could have done, and a few panels illustrate their sentence rather than require it.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of the knowledge goes. Told in the third person, this would be a comic novel of manners about a neurotic bachelor. Told as it is, to an analyst who does not answer, the form is the condition: a man who must narrate, justify and accuse without end, who turns every memory into a bit, and who cannot hear himself because he is performing. The section titles parody the forms that could not hold him: a Reader’s Digest feature for the mother, a blues for the family, a title of Freud’s for the Gentile women. The last line reframes the whole: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” The confession was a preamble, and the joke is on a speaker who thought he had arrived somewhere. Held a step below the top because inside the monologue the sections are more episodic than formal, and the frame does its deepest work only at the two ends.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived. The bridge puts the office between and above the two schools, and a visitor crosses the road inside the institution. Hall, stage and canteen were made to open into one another, so that the stage faced either the audience or the diners, and the school’s festivals and its stage workshop had a room built for them. The studio block puts living over eating, beside the hall and a short walk from the workshops: a student’s day is drawn in the plan. The workshops, seen from the street through glass, make work public. Substitute a symmetrical block and the community becomes a corridor of rooms. Held below the top because parts lived badly in their form: the glass made the workshops hard to heat and to cool, and the vocational school wing is a conventional classroom block in modern dress.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that killing has become impersonal, and it is known through the form: the flat, even light that singles no one out; the smoke over the victims’ faces; the squad seen from behind, a row of backs and rifles; the absurd closeness of the muzzles, which no realist staging would allow and which makes the act a matter of reach rather than aim; the wall that turns the space into a shallow stage. Paint it as Goya did, with a lantern, a lifted white shirt and a face, and the work knows Goya’s thing, the martyr and the brute machine. The Boston canvas, warmer and looser, in Mexican dress and open landscape, is a controlled experiment, and it shows the final form carrying the accusation. Held below the top because the onlookers on the wall and the slope at the upper right are conventional.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops being able to say what it says. Close the grid of the entrance front into a wall with windows and the frame no longer appears as the building’s truth; it becomes an office block in marble. Replace the glass-block ceiling with a solid floor and the hall is a dark room in the middle of the plan, the offices round it look into nothing, and the claim of visibility collapses. Shut the row of doors and the square is outside again. The form is the instrument of the political idea and the architectural one at once: the frame shown, the solid cut, the inside opened to the outside. It falls short of the top because the use lived in the form was narrow and has gone; the rally that was to complete the hall is not a life the building sustains.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Made as a talkie, the worker would speak and argue, and the film would become a social drama with gags. Its knowledge is that in this world the machines and the bosses speak and the worker does not, and that his only answer is the body and, at last, a song in no language. The form is pantomime against a mechanised soundtrack, and the opposition is the content. Every routine is a body meeting a mechanism, the line, the feeding machine, the gears, the skates, the open floor, and comedy becomes the instrument of the analysis. Held short of the top by the second half, where the girl’s story runs in conventions of silent melodrama that the form carries rather than requires.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses what it knows. Put the band and strings of the earlier records behind these songs and the isolation becomes a picture of isolation; here it is the condition of the making itself, one voice and one guitar in a room. The brevity is the same instrument: songs that stop as soon as they are said disclose a speaker who cannot go on talking. The sequence is counted here, once, and it bears load: the title song’s one added colour opens the record and is never repeated, each side closes onto the bare form, Parasite’s descent sits late, and From the Morning is placed last so that the record ends on rising. The guitar figures carry as much as the voice. Several songs would survive another setting nearly whole, and that holds it below Low and Kind of Blue at 9.0.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that looking does not secure the thing seen, and the form puts the viewer through it: we search the prints with the photographer, see the hand, the gun and the body when he does, and are left with him when the evidence is gone, holding one grainy print that, someone says, looks like one of Bill’s abstract paintings. The film is a sequence of surfaces, and its last shot completes it by erasing the man from his own frame and leaving the grass. A novel or a radio play would lose exactly this. Held below the top because outside the darkroom, the park and the coda the form is a day-in-the-life drift that a different film could have used.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute prose for the comic and much is lost. The masked face that never changes expression, drawn against shifting shadow, is how the book makes V an idea and not a person: he is read only by posture and light, and the same mask on Evey at the end can therefore carry the same meaning. With no thought balloons, every character stays opaque except where a found text opens them, Surridge’s diary and Valerie’s letter, so the form decides what can be known. Panels cut in parallel across London show the state’s organs at work at once; the dominoes falling across a sequence and a cabaret song printed as sheet music are formal choices with meaning. Held off the top because much of the story could be a film, and became one, and the colour of 1988 sits on drawings made for black and white.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The highest of the four axes of form and argument. Change the form and what the book knows goes. The knowledge is that these people cannot or will not say what they feel; the form is a narration that will not say it for them. Brenda’s affair is shown almost wholly in telephone talk, gossip and arrangements, and the death is reported by people saying the wrong thing in the right voice. Put the same story into an interior novel and it becomes a sad story about a bad wife; told from outside, it becomes a judgment on a whole manner of living. The chapter titles carry knowledge too: English Gothic three times, as the house goes from home to illusion to the cousins’ inheritance, and two houses of ruin set against each other in Proust’s manner, Beaver’s and Todd’s. The ending repeats Hetton in the forest: a man held in a house by a habit of reading.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Put the court on the ground and it becomes a yard. Put the chamber at grade, facing outward, and the council becomes an office. Replace the dim stair with a lobby and the ascent, which is the building’s account of civic authority, disappears. Put the shops in a separate block and the court loses the plinth that lifts it. The section is the instrument: commerce below, the commons in the middle, decision above, each reached through the last. Even the two stairs carry meaning in their form, one urban and hard, one rural and soft, so that both the village and the wood are admitted to the court. Here plan and section are the knowledge.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Largely, yes. Put the same programme in a new building on a cleared site and the knowledge that leisure here takes place in the shell of labour is lost; close the hall into rooms and the mixing of reading, play and talk ends; replace the bridges with one slab and the sports become a facility rather than a climb across the city air. The form changes how its purpose is lived: the street admits anyone from Rua Clélia with no threshold of display, the theatre’s facing banks put the audience in sight of itself, and the unglazed openings make the courts half outdoors. What holds the axis: some of the knowledge is carried by programme and furniture, and the towers’ interiors are conventional stacked courts.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told in order, the story is a love triangle under occupation that ends in an accident. Told as variations, it becomes an inquiry: the same moment, Tereza at the door and the six fortuities that brought her, is turned over from two sides, and the reader learns that a life lived once cannot be tested, which is what the book means by lightness. The order of the last two parts is the decisive instrument: by announcing the deaths in the sixth part, in a letter Sabina receives, the book makes the idyll of the seventh weightless and heavy at once, as the opening essay said a life must be. The dictionary form of the third part makes misunderstanding structural, and the essayist’s voice is the medium of the knowledge. Held off the top because some essays could be moved without loss, and the sixth part is looser than its neighbours.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Put the palace on the plain and the ascent, the work’s account of what a king is, vanishes. Put the garden on the rock and the doubled life of pleasure below and refuge above is lost. Straighten the boulder gardens into the symmetry of the water gardens and the passage from made order to natural order, which the climber lives in sequence, disappears. The king and his court moved through a graded order from water to stone to sky, and every visitor still does: the sequence is the instrument. The ruin weakens its end, where the summit palace, the goal of the ascent, survives only in plan; the form is now strongest at the base and in the climb.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The tableaux, centred and frontal, set the family in fixed positions like figures in an illustration, and the fixity is the knowledge: these are people who stopped at the moment of their early fame. The unchanged costumes, Richie’s headband and tennis shirt, Margot’s fur coat and barrette, Chas and his sons in red tracksuits, state arrested lives without a line of dialogue. The book and the narrator place the story outside the family, as something told about them, which is what fame did to them. The distance lets grief show without being milked, and when it breaks, on the bus and in the bathroom, the break means something. The cost: some decor is style for its own sake.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The knowledge is in the texture: three lines at once, none subordinate. Put the bass back on four beats to the bar and “Solar” becomes an ordinary minor blues; take away the room and the record loses its proof that this was done live and once, before a talking audience, without the studio’s second try. The sequence, counted here once, carries a frame: LaFaro’s “Gloria’s Step” opens and his “Jade Visions” closes, so that the record begins and ends on the bassist’s music, and the dirge stands second, early, setting the tone. Held from the top: the sequence is an assembly after the fact, side two sets its two long medium tempos side by side, and the frame is the producer’s rather than the work’s own law.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. Put the kings in separate pavilions and the dynasty becomes a set of individuals; put them under one great roof without chambers and it becomes an institution with no persons. The row of identical chambers under one continuous roof says both at once: these are many, and they are one. The extensibility is the form’s knowledge: the building knows that the line continues, and its open ends were where the future was to go. The terrace gives the rite its ground and makes the hall the backdrop to an act. The king came by the east, stood on the terrace and faced his fathers’ doors. Held below the top because much of this knowledge depends on the rite, which lies outside the unit.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, for the knowledge is in the palette. A record that says feeling is landscape, old and violent at once, is built from strings that hold like ground and beats that crack beneath them, with the voice the only thing that crosses between. Played by a band, these songs would be love songs; here the lover’s quarrel sounds as weather and rock. The sequence is counted here, once: the four string-led tracks give the land, the second half moves through glitter, accusation and lightness to the eruption of Pluto, and All Is Full of Love is the aftermath, its quiet a consequence. The form enacts the meaning on most tracks. Immature and Alarm Call are containers more than instruments, and the second half’s middle is looser than the first, which holds it short of Low’s 9.0.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The two panels are earth and heaven, and the hinge between them is the threshold the Child’s gesture and the king’s gaze cross: on a single panel the meeting would be a scene; on two it is an approach, a petition and an answer across a divide. The form is portable and closable. Shut, it shows the king’s emblem and his arms, his public face; opened, it shows his private claim. Its small size makes it an object held near the face by one viewer at prayer, and its meaning is that intimacy. The gold and blue are the substance of a heaven made of precious matter. It stands below the top because a single panel or an altarpiece wing carried the presentation of a patron almost as well.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very largely. What the work knows is the continuity of body and space, and only sculpture, walked round, can know it: from the side the flanges are wake and flame; from the front they close into a narrow pillar; at three-quarters they read as planes turning in light. The knowledge is in the passage between those views, which a painting cannot give. Boccioni’s own Dynamism of a Cyclist and Dynamism of a Soccer Player state the same idea flattened into a field, and lose exactly the continuity the title names. The armlessness, the blocks and the lean are each the form of a knowledge. Held below the top because the knowledge is one idea, and some of the form, the plinths and the repeated flare, serves the idea’s statement rather than its discovery.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is time as a teenager lives it: an endless present in which nothing happens and everything is felt, a night spent waiting for the night to begin. The form is that knowledge. One span of about eighteen hours is carried by an ensemble whose threads cross in cars, at the Emporium and under the moon tower, so that no one owns the night; the camera drifts from group to group as attention drifts at a party; the talk runs on past its use; the music is heard as the characters hear it. Plot it, with a goal and a climax, and it stops knowing. What holds the axis: the hazing and the fight lend borrowed teen-film beats, and the two closing cadences shut more firmly than the drift would.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The straw is the knowledge: gold and fuel in one, hair and field in one, and it ages, so the material carries the poem’s antithesis as a property of itself rather than as a picture of it. Paint the straw instead and the work becomes an illustration of a line of verse. The absence of figure is the knowledge too: the woman is only her hair, the one attribute the poem gives her, so the German ideal appears as an attribute without a person, which is what the poem says it is. The black laid over the tips makes the gold become ash in one passage of the hand. Held below the top because the wide field is Kiefer’s convention of these years, and the ground does less than the straw and the black.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. The meaning of the hand in the thigh is that stone gives. In paint the same image is an illustration; in bronze it would read as modelled clay, soft from the start. Only carved marble can show the impossible, a hard block made to yield, and so make the viewer feel the pressure as a fact about matter rather than a depiction of one. The scale puts the viewer at the height of the action, and the free figure in space makes the struggle a sequence walked through. Held a step below the top because the form serves virtuosity as much as meaning: the brilliance of the surfaces partly stands between the viewer and what is being done, and some of the round is less necessary than the rest.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the house loses what it knows. The cylinder makes every room a centred room lit from an arc rather than a wall. The lattice makes the window part of the structure, so that light falls through the thickness of the wall in many small portions rather than through one opening, and the rooms are lit as no rectangular house of the time could light them. The studio’s knowledge is its light, and its light is its form. The shared sleeping room gives the family’s night a ceremonial shape; the stair turns in the joint between the cylinders, and rooms are entered at their edge. Held below the top: in the lower rooms the form is borne more than used, and the household could have lived much as it did in an ordinary plan.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The same songs in their studio versions are short, conventional rhythm and blues sides; set inside the show, without silence between them, with the hall audible and the band taking its cues from the singer, they become stations of a single rising act. The four short songs are compressed so that the long ones can open time: the form is a ramp, then two plateaus, then an exit. The audience is part of the form, and the listener hears the hall respond and is placed inside it. What holds the figure: the form was the revue’s before it was the record’s, so the album captured a form more than it made one, and the medley is a shape inherited from the stage.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that this man is nothing but what he does, and the form is built from duration and silence so that we watch him doing it: the key tried, the plate changed, the coat and hat set right, the wound cleaned, each at the length of the act. With speech and motive the film would become a story about a killer; without them it is the condition itself. The near-monochrome is the same knowledge in colour, a world with nothing in it to want. The ending completes the form, the one procedure whose purpose we do not see until it is over. Held from the top because, between the opening and the last movement, the middle third uses the police procedural’s inherited grammar.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work loses most of what it knows. What it knows is that beauty in a body is a line laid over the body, and that the line is visible only in a still, flat, uninterrupted surface. The finish hides the hand, so that the line reads as the thing itself and not as drawing. The long canvas lets the contour run across almost the whole width, which a squarer format would weaken. The near absence of shadow keeps the figure a silhouette of light against the blue, so that the distortion reads as rightness until one looks again. In sculpture the distortions would be monstrous from other sides; the fixed point of view is the condition of the illusion. Held below the top because the grisaille version shows that much survives the loss of colour, and the props could be exchanged without loss to the form.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the chapter is lived differently. In a long vaulted chapter room of the mendicant kind the friars sit in two facing rows down a hall. Here they sit round a centre, on a bench that is the base of the order, under the Apostles, facing the dome and the altar, so that every voice in council is placed in the apostolic circle and under one heaven. The room shows itself whole from any seat; nothing is hidden, and nothing is above anyone but the dome. To sit there is to be placed within a proportion. Held below the top because the form’s knowledge is the Old Sacristy’s, applied to assembly, and because the portico adds a front the room’s idea does not need.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses nearly all it knows. Its subject is a collapse no one in it can narrate, and its form is wordless music that admits speech only as documents: set as songs, the voices would become a singer’s opinions; here they are evidence found in the ruin. The sequence argues. The first movement describes the ruin, the second goes down into the street and hears the end preached, and the third, titled for providence, climbs, falls silent and ends in a loop, refusing an ending because the condition has none. The crescendo is the second instrument. What holds the figure is the third movement, where the build and release, used again, becomes in parts a container and the length is not wholly compelled.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The diptych is the instrument: the viewer watches Weronika live and die, and then watches Véronique with knowledge she does not have. What she can only feel, the viewer holds as fact, and the gap between her intuition and the viewer’s knowledge is the film’s subject made into its structure. Told in parallel and cross-cut, the two would become a puzzle; told with an explanation, the knowledge would become a plot. The look binds the halves into one world: Idziak’s golden and green filters hold Kraków and France in the same light, and the music crosses from the dead to the living. At the end the puppeteer’s two marionettes put the form into the story. What holds it below the top: the French half borrows a mystery’s grammar, clues, a tape, a meeting, that the form did not need.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the work knows changes. Its knowledge is the clash of two orders, the geometric order of perspective and the disorder of a fight, and that clash exists only in the construction: the lances laid on the lines of recession, the fallen man foreshortened as a solid, the horses reduced to rounded volumes, the armour faceted like the mazzocchio studies the painter is known for. In prose a battle would be a battle; here it is a battle made to sit still for its measurement, and the stillness is the meaning. The three long fields add the frieze, so that time is laid out in space as in a chronicle. What holds the axis below the top is that the spatial system does not run through the whole field: the hills are built on another plan.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
What the frieze knows it knows as a frieze: that a symphony’s argument can be laid out in space and taken in time, by walking, and that the struggle of the Ninth is an order of stations with silence between them. Put the programme on one canvas and the time goes; longing, trial and fulfilment would be seen at once and the walk would be lost. The bare ground is part of the instrument, and so is the height, which makes the heavenly fields look down and the visitor look up. The flat line knows that these are emblems of states of soul, not bodies in a world, and the gold marks where the sacred is. Held below the top: the form stands in its room only by reconstruction, without the statue it led toward, and the second wall’s middle would say the same in another form.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes, story by story. The book knows that the mind is made of borrowed language, and its instrument is a close third person that takes on each mind’s idiom entire, so that the reader thinks for a page in the parents’ rule system or the diarist’s aspirations and feels the limit from inside. “The Semplica Girl Diaries” could be told only as a diary addressed to future readers, because the horror lies in what the diarist records without seeing; told from outside, it would be an allegory. “Exhortation” is a memo, and its threat lives in the memo’s cheer. “Escape from Spiderhead” uses the drug names and the protocol to show a consciousness administered. The variety of instruments is the argument. Held below the top because some forms repeat their effect, and the linked meaning of the whole is thematic rather than formal.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the figures know is lost. In marble the extended arms would need struts and the head support, and the pose would have to close. The bronze allows the open stance, the arms free of the body, the whole weight resting on a single foot of metal. The faces, finished in materials other than the bronze by the published accounts, take colour and wet light, and with them the sense of a man looking. The scale puts the viewer under the gaze. Reduce the figures to a drawing or a copy and they become types; at this size, in this metal, they become persons. Held a step below the top because the form carries no further layer of knowledge beyond the living body: it is the instrument of presence, superbly, and of little else. The lost arms and armour are not charged here.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The slow lateral pan on a fixed axis looks at the house as the house looks at Cleo: steadily, at a distance, never entering her. The wide frame sets her small in deep space while the family’s drama happens, and keeps the city, its bands, vendors and aircraft, in the same field as the household, so that history arrives as sound before it arrives as event. Without close-ups or a score, the viewer must see the labour the family does not. Told in ordinary coverage with music, it would be a family’s break-up with a maid in it. The cost: what the film knows of Cleo’s mind it cannot say in this form.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about memory’s editing is built of old song forms heard through distance: the doo-wop and the rock and roll are not pastiche but recollection, the shape intact and the detail worn away. The blurred voice, set into the mix rather than in front, is part of this: a remembered voice, not a present one. Desire Lines enacts the escape from memory into motion, and its coda is the only place the record looks forward. The sequence is counted here, once: from Earthquake’s waking into the past to He Would Have Laughed’s grief, the record moves from a general haze to a particular loss. The haze is one device, applied to every song, and Sailing, Memory Boy and Fountain Stairs sit in the form without enacting it.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much is lost, because the carpet knows what it knows by lying on the floor. The lamps hang for someone standing at one end, and their unequal sizes make that end the place to stand. The inscription is read from the end where it lies, so the reader stands at the threshold the couplet names. The pile density is the instrument of the curvilinear drawing: a coarser knot could not hold the pendants or the scroll. As a painting or a tile panel the sanctuary would hang on a wall and the threshold would vanish. Held below the top because much of the design was conceived on paper and moves to the floor with its sense largely intact.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows: that a love affair, once over, exists as memory reworked. Alvy walks with Annie and Rob into the house under the Coney Island roller coaster and watches his family; the adult Alvy sits in his first-grade classroom and argues with the teacher; he and Annie stand in her past and comment on her earlier boyfriends. Memory is a room he can enter and cannot change. The subtitles under the balcony talk are the form at its sharpest, what is said and what is meant running at once. The play rehearsal near the end restages the breakup with a reconciliation, and the film’s own act becomes visible: art revises what life refused. Told in linear scenes, the story would be a slight romance. The limit: many sketches are container rather than instrument.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The form changes how its purpose is lived at nearly every step. A resident walks a long lit corridor to a door, then steps up or down half a floor into a cell lit from both fronts: the passage is common, the room private, and the change of level marks the threshold. The K flat’s double-height room makes a small family flat feel generous and gives the household one shared vertical space. The bridge makes dinner a walk to a common room. Substitute a corridor block of identical flats with full kitchens and the building no longer knows what it argues. What holds the axis: the communal half of the form went unused within a decade, and the cells, made for a reformed life, were refitted for an ordinary one without much resistance.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The unattributed speech means the reader must work out who speaks and what is being claimed, as a court must, and the voices crowd one another as suits do. The documents are the knowledge itself: the judge’s opinion shows the law thinking well; the deposition shows the law drawing out a man’s life in questions he cannot answer; and the play, read inside the record of a suit over whether it was stolen, is weighed as evidence and as art at once, so that the question the court must decide, what is original and who owns a story, is put to the reader’s own judgment. The form is the instrument. Held off the top because the stretches of domestic quarrel between the documents use the method as habit, where it confirms rather than discovers.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because what it knows is escalation past control, and the sequence is that escalation. The sequence is counted here, once. Side one is songs, tightening into the slow burn of Dirt; side two adds the horn, and with each track the song form gives more ground, until L.A. Blues has none. Tracks lengthen from under four minutes toward eight, and the saxophone divides the halves exactly by side. The sound is form as well: a band heard as one body, a voice in the room rather than above it, so that the subject, the body past restraint, is also how the record sounds. What holds it below the top: the first three tracks are close in shape and could be reordered without loss.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. The knowledge is that a person may be seen as an arrangement and that the seeing is itself the relation. Paint the same sitter in three-quarter view, modelled, coloured, with an expression, and the picture becomes a portrait of a pious old lady, and what it knows of distance and regard goes. The profile is the instrument: it denies the viewer her gaze and gives her as silhouette. The near-monochrome makes the person and the wall of one stuff. The wide format makes the body a block in a field rather than a presence before us. Held below the top because the form has one inflection, narrower than what Las Meninas at 9.6 or The Large Bathers at 9.2 know.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Here the picture is strongest. The decalcomania is not a container for the subject; it is the subject. Paint pressed and torn away leaves exactly the structure of corrosion, fungal growth and coral accretion, so that the making enacts what the picture knows: ruin is a process that happens to matter by itself, without design, and what remains of human form must be found in it, as Ernst found his figures. Substitute a conventional painted ruin, of the eighteenth-century kind or a Romantic battlefield, and the picture would lose its claim that the world is not broken by a hand but decomposed by a chemistry. The panoramic format adds the claim of a continent. Held below the top band because the figures are painted on a different principle from the land.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the knowledge is in the treatment. A record about joy surviving only as memory is built so that every element is a memory: voices cut from their songs and pitched until they are no longer anyone’s; beats that recall the dance’s swing and omit its drop; crackle laid over digital sound, so that new music arrives already worn. Cleaned and quantised, the same material would be garage, and pleasure; here it is pleasure remembered. The sequence is counted here, once: the short pieces between the rhythms make the record a walk. The middle tracks share one form, and the sequence holds a state more than it turns.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge. A white horse on white paper is made of the ground: the contour is the only thing that separates the animal from emptiness, so the line is the horse’s energy, tight at the neck and chest, broken and bristling in the mane, braced in the forelegs. Light ink wash models the body without colour, and the creature is volume and light at once. Substitute colour on silk and a full setting, as in later court horse painting, and the horse becomes a portrait of a possession; confined to line, wash and blank paper, it is a force held in a field of nothing, as it is held by the post. The small field, drawn close around the body, sets the viewer at tether’s length.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. Cast the eight sheets in steel or acrylic and the serial order survives, but the argument against it goes: what the work knows is that the order is held by material that sags, drips, curls and lets light through. Laid on the floor the sheets are remnants; hung flat on the wall they are paintings, which the work is at pains to say it is not. Hung edge on, they make the viewer walk among them and see each as a body of uneven thickness, the light passing more through some parts than others. Even the decay belongs to the form, which was chosen knowing it. Held below the top because the count and the exact spacing could change without the work knowing less.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. As a gallery object a cast of a house would know about space; on its site, as the last of its terrace, it knows about this house and this street and their erasure. As a carving or a model it would represent a house; as a cast it is the house’s own impression, every mark indexed to the lives that made it. Permanent, it would be a memorial; temporary, it enacts the loss it records, and the demolition completes the form it would otherwise only describe. The inversion is the instrument: the space lived in made the thing that cannot be entered. Held below the top because the temporariness was a condition of the commission as much as a choice, and the cast of one room in Ghost already knew much of it.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. As a narrative painting, a lamb at the foot of a cross or in the arms of the Baptist, the animal becomes a sign within a story and the confrontation is lost. As an emblem with attributes, the symbol would be read before the creature was felt. The still-life form is the instrument: it sets the lamb before us as the bodegón sets a jar or a quince, and so makes the sacrifice present now rather than told. The ledge doubles as altar and table; the dark erases every context but the viewer’s attention; the small scale makes it an object for private prayer, sacrifice faced alone. Held below the top because the form is borrowed whole from the bodegón.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Make the head frontal and the instant is lost: the turn over the shoulder is the knowledge that this is a moment and not a likeness. Give her a room, a table and a window, as the interiors do, and the encounter thins into a scene; the empty ground is what makes the viewer the only other presence. Make the canvas large and intimacy becomes display; at about 44 by 39 cm the face is near life-size and the distance is that of someone close. Paint the edges with a line and the breath leaves the face. The format, the turn, the blank ground and the lineless modelling are together the instrument. Held below the top because the tronie format was given and shared, and the head against darkness was already known to the tradition.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what does the work stop knowing? A painted vanitas, a photograph, a film of the same case: each shows death, and none makes it happen in the viewer’s presence. The work knows what only a live system in a sealed case can know: that this death is now, that it will go on after you leave, and that you stood outside it watching. The glass is the instrument of that knowledge. It makes the process visible and the viewer safe, and so makes the viewer a witness; the partition with its holes makes a passage, so that birth and death are two rooms and a life is the crossing between them. Form is the knowledge here, not its container. Held below the top because the cube’s geometry, load-bearing as containment, is borrowed, and its proportions could change without loss.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
What the work knows is that the body is seen at the distance of a photograph and possessed again in paint, and the form carries exactly that. Paint it sharp and it becomes the academy nude; leave it a photograph and the touch, the size and the colour go, and with them the claim that painting can still hold a body. The blur is not a veil laid over a finished image: the soft transitions are the image, so that the figure seems to emerge rather than to be outlined, as a thing remembered does. The life size turns the descent into an approach toward the viewer’s own place. The colour separates the canvas from the grey documents of the year before and makes the subject flesh rather than record. Held below the upper band because the composition, crop and viewpoint, is the camera’s, and a different framing of the same figure would know nearly the same thing.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the house knows is lost. The turning entrance, under the words Entrez lentement, makes arrival a slowing and a concealment. The main room is several rooms by the hour: a divan alcove, a place to dine, a space opening entire to the terrace when the shutters fold back. The guest’s room is made so that a guest can live apart, with their own access and washing. Shutters that slide, fold and pivot set the house to the weather rather than sealing it against it. The furniture is the form at the scale of the hand, tables that rise and swing, cabinets that open from two sides. Held below 9.0 because much of that hand-scale work is now copies, and the frame and envelope are conventional for their moment.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that this connection exists in suspension, outside ordinary time and outside speech. The form is jet lag made into structure. Days and nights blur; scenes begin late and end without resolution; the two are framed against glass, over a city they cannot enter, so the hotel’s isolation is the image. Japanese is left untranslated, so the viewer shares the incomprehension rather than being told of it. Music carries what dialogue will not. The withheld whisper is the form at its sharpest, the one thing the film knows and refuses to say; heard, it would become a plot. This is the highest of the twelve axes. Held below the top because the comic set pieces return to sketch grammar for a share of a short film.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and almost everything the series knows goes. The margin is the knowledge: without it the field is a window, with it a thing bounded, and what the series knows is that boundary. The single edge is the knowledge: two fields meeting, not one floating on another, so that the picture holds a limit rather than an apparition. The opposition of surfaces is the knowledge: a dense black over a brushed, moving grey, weight over breath. The scale is the knowledge: a body before a field of its own size. Soften the edge and it returns to the classic manner. Held below the top because the format lies close to a horizon picture, which it must resist rather than transform.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The overlapping of states is the knowledge: a body as a series exists only because the planes repeat and slide over one another, and painted once, in one position, the figure would be a mannequin on a stair and know nothing of time. The monochrome is the knowledge: in colour the states would separate into figures, a crowd; in brown they are one body. The upright canvas is the knowledge: tall and narrow, it is a stairwell, and the diagonal is the fall of the stair. The lettered title belongs to the form, a word over an image that contains no nude. Held below the top because the faceted plane is a borrowed vocabulary, and part of what the form knows, Cubism already knew.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the figure knows goes. Carved in the round at hand size, it is made to be held and turned: the volumes are known by the palm as much as by the eye, the back is worked as fully as the front, the buttocks and the rows of the head carried all round, and no single view exhausts it. Without feet it cannot stand; it lies, is held or is carried, and that is what it is for. Make it a relief, as at Laussel, and it gains a wall, a place and a fixed view, and loses its portability and its turning. Make it larger and its relation to the hand is lost; make it a drawing and its weight goes. The facelessness is form, not omission. Held below the top because the content survives some change of material, as the ivory and ceramic figures of the type show.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very largely. The soft edge is the knowledge: a hard-edged rectangle is an object on a ground, a feathered one is a light or a breath, and the canvas knows presence only because its edges do not close. The thinness of the paint is the knowledge: layered washes let the ground and the underlayers show through, so that the colour seems lit from within, where a dense opaque surface would make the same colours into planes. The scale is the knowledge: Rothko wrote in 1951 that he painted large to be intimate, to place the viewer inside the picture. The white centre, cool between warm fields, makes the field balance on a pause. Held below the top because the form is the format’s, and much of what it knows the sibling canvases know too.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The work’s strongest axis, with The Imperishable. Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. A photograph of a Buddha facing a monitor that shows a photograph of the Buddha is a picture of the idea; the live feed is the idea. Liveness makes the loop real and endless, puts the viewer’s own body into the image when he steps between camera and figure, and makes the figure’s stillness a thing seen happening, moment by moment, rather than a fixed state. A painted or carved version could not say that the image is continuous with its object; a film loop would be a recording, the opposite of the claim. Held below the top because the configuration, once seen, is fully grasped: the form is the instrument, but a short one.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses almost everything it knows. Told forward, it is a revenge thriller with a twist, and Teddy’s use of Leonard and Leonard’s self-deception are facts reported. Told backwards, the viewer begins each scene as Leonard does, without its cause, and judges Natalie and then Teddy on evidence the next sequence revokes. The form is the instrument of the knowledge that memory is a set of notes and that trust follows the notes. The forward strand completes the design: the one place time runs straight, it carries the lie that the meeting of the strands exposes, and the last scene shown is the first in time, so the film ends at its cause. What holds it below the top: the device also manufactures suspense, and some of its yield is the pleasure of the puzzle.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely, almost to the limit of the axis. The painting knows one thing, that a regular structure can be made to undo itself in the eye, and knows it only through this form: the alternation of black and white, which gives the greatest contrast and so the strongest after-effect; the progressive narrowing, which turns a flat grid into a recession; the fold set off centre, which makes the surface seem to turn rather than sink; the near square, which lets no direction dominate but the one the progression imposes. Change the values to colour, regularise the widths or centre the crease, and the knowledge is gone. Held a step below the top because the form is a system, and part of what it knows the system would know at another size or rate.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and nearly all the knowledge goes. In colour the fruits would be persimmons, ripe or unripe, described; in ink they are degrees of presence, and the tonal sequence that is the work’s argument exists only because ink on absorbent paper can run from black to nothing. The brush is the knowledge: each fruit appears laid in one or a few strokes that cannot be corrected, so the image shows its making as decision. The empty paper is the knowledge: without a ground line the field becomes the space of attention, not a table. The small size is the knowledge: the sheet is held as an object is. Held below the top because the form is the received abbreviated Chan sheet, perfected here, not devised for this content.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Change the form and the album loses much of what it knows. The instrument is the long song whose verses parade figures while a returning line passes judgment: in “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Queen Jane Approximately” and “Desolation Row”, each new verse becomes another count of one indictment. Print the words and the voice goes, and the voice is the knowledge: the drawl, the sneer and the sudden tenderness carry what the words withhold. Strip the band and its lurch goes, the organ arriving a half-beat late like the disorder the songs describe. Held below the top: the sequence is shaped once, by the acoustic closer placed last, and the blues numbers are containers.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The split of electric and acoustic sides is the record’s argument made audible: the first side meets the world with a band and laughs at it, the second leaves it alone with a guitar. The forms inside the songs carry meaning too. It’s Alright, Ma is a litany, its strophes piling indictment on indictment over one guitar figure until the refrain’s quiet assent (“only bleeding”) lands as endurance; Subterranean’s breathless list enacts the noise it mocks; the 115th Dream’s false start and laughter frame the dream as a take. The sequence is counted here, once: comic refusal, then vision, then farewell, with Baby Blue the compelled end. Held where it is because most songs would stand alone unchanged, and side one’s order could be shuffled without loss.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The seven parts are a descent and a rising: the book begins at night going down and ends in morning sun going up, and that shape is what it knows about the year’s hope and its loss. The alternation between the corons and La Piolaine is the instrument of the class argument. The crowd chapters, the meeting in the forest and the march, are built as mass scenes in which the point of view moves through bodies rather than minds, and that is how the book can say what a crowd is. Charged: the point of view is largely Étienne’s or the narrator’s, and the free indirect method does not reach the Maheus’ interiors as it reaches his; la Maheude, the book’s moral centre, is seen more than entered.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows, but not all. What it knows is that a life is the time a game with death allows, and the chess frame gives that knowledge its shape: every episode is a move, and the knight’s last move is the only free one. The pictures carry what the speech cannot. They are composed as church painting, frontal, in strong light against sky or stone, so that the wall painted in the church becomes the closing shot, and the film turns its story into the painting it showed being made. Held below by the stage it began on: the confession, the inn and the castle are scenes of speech a theatre could hold with little loss.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is montage: short scenes in many places with no act structure, and that form is what the play knows. Power here is not held in one room but spread across monastery, tavern, border, Polish court, battlefield and square, and only a form that jumps between them can show that the throne is made in all of them, so that the inn and the cell decide what the Kremlin cannot. The mixed verse and prose carries the play’s social order: the tsar and the boyars speak pentameter, the tavern and the soldiers prose, and Pushkin breaks the rule at will. The close shows the form at work: a stage direction stands where a cheer is expected, and one line of form changes what the play knows. What holds it here: the montage also gives the loose links charged under The Inevitable, and at times the play moves by the chronicle’s sequence rather than by the form’s necessity.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The book form is the instrument of much of what the work knows. The calendar is turned in the hand, page by page, so the reader passes through the year at the year’s pace and comes back to it. The lunette sets the heavens literally above the month on the same leaf, and the arched top makes every month a small world under its sky. The scale is that of private devotion and private possession: the duke owns the seen world twice, as land and as book, and the minuteness asks the slow look of one reader. Painted as panels, the cycle would become a set of views; painted on a wall, the possession would go. Held below the top because the Hours’ miniatures sit in the book as a book of hours requires, and because the book was left unbound and unfinished, its present order partly the completers’.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Substitute an embankment of earth and rock, as at Fort Peck in the same years: the river is stored and the turbines turn, and the work knows nothing it could show. The curved concrete wall makes the force visible. The arch states the canyon’s part in holding the water, the bare face states the mass, and the crest, set between two states, makes the walker cross the river on the thing that stopped it. Kaufmann’s plain treatment is the instrument: by removing ornament he let the form teach, and a dam built to store water became a place people visit to see what a state can do. What holds the axis: for the irrigator and the city the form changes little, and in the powerhouse and towers form follows machinery.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows, which is that in a made world nothing can be told from the surface. The procedural is an inquiry into images: Leon’s photographs searched by the Esper, Rachael’s photograph of a mother who is not hers, a test that reads the iris. The viewer stands where Deckard stands, unable to tell who is made, and the Final Cut carries that doubt to the hero: the unicorn reverie and the origami at the door say that another man knows his dreams. Without narration the world comes only through image, and the man is as opaque to us as the replicants are to him. The density of the frame is how the film knows a city. Held below the top because the grammar beneath is the inherited detective plot, used rather than remade, and the reverie that completes the form is a late insertion into a structure built without it.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The opening sentence states the form’s principle: “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.” The book is a dossier, and the dossier is the knowledge: no single observer is trusted, Ai’s misreadings are set beside Estraven’s own account of the same days, and the tales and the field report give the reader what neither narrator can. Told as one third-person narrative the book would lose its central discovery, that Ai has been wrong about Estraven from the first chapter and the reader wrong with him. On the ice the two accounts alternate and converge. Held below the top because several documents sit at chapter breaks more for texture than for argument, and the alternation is looser in the middle.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is plurality. Cut to a single album of the strongest songs, it would be a fine collection; as thirty pieces in every idiom, it is a band dissolving into four and the field of popular music laid out at once. The juxtapositions carry meaning: “Blackbird” beside “Piggies”, “Julia” closing a side of jokes and fragments, “Helter Skelter” against “Long, Long, Long”, “Revolution 9” giving way to “Good Night”. The sequence, counted here once, is made with care: quiet pieces close three of the four sides, and the arc from “Back in the U.S.S.R.” to “Good Night” is real. Held short of the top: several songs could change places or leave without the form noticing.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The eight chapters from outside enact the knowledge that respectable society, gentlemen who keep silence and make it a rule not to ask questions, cannot see what its members are, and reads every sign as a scandal of the ordinary kind: blackmail, forgery, a disreputable heir. The two documents then move inward, from a witness who dies of what he saw to the man himself, and the last chapter enacts the dissolution of the self in its grammar. Jekyll writes of Hyde in the third person, then breaks, “He, I say”, “I cannot say, I”, and closes with the self ending as the pen is laid down: “I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.” What holds the axis there is that the form depends on a secret its own fame has spent, and that the statement explains more than the form needed it to.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form of “Todesfuge” and it stops knowing what it knows. The entries of subject and countersubject, the refrains returning in shifted order, the absence of punctuation that lets the voices run together, are the form of the camp itself: a repetition commanded from outside, in which the prisoners’ “we” and the master’s “he” are bound in one measure. A prose account would lose the knowledge that the order was also an art. “Corona” knows love as time in a closed circle, the crown of its title, broken open only by its last line; “Espenbaum” knows grief as a litany. In the lesser poems the form is the period’s free-verse dream lyric, and could be other.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows. A treatise would argue the same propositions; the oration does something a treatise cannot. It addresses Parliament as Isocrates addressed the Athenians, so that the speaker is a free citizen advising his sovereign assembly, and the epigraph states that condition as the work’s own: “This is true liberty when free born men / Having to advise the public may speak free”. And it is printed unlicensed, so that the speech is itself the act it defends. That doubling, an oration never spoken and a pamphlet published against the law, is form as the instrument of knowledge. Held a step down because the order of parts is the handbooks’ own, and the long first head is form as container.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a longitudinal church and the purpose is lived otherwise. In a nave the king would head a procession; here he stands at a centre, under a dome, in his own church, distinct from his soldiers’ and joined to it only at the altar, so that rank is lived in space. The hidden light makes worship a looking up through an opening into a sky the room does not contain. In the building’s later life the form changed what it knows: Visconti cut away the centre of the floor, so the centre is a void, and to see the emperor one stands at the rim and looks down; the walk round the well is the rite. The round chapels, now tombs, make a ring of the dead. Held below the top: the corner chapels are loosely tied to either purpose, and the north opening, now glazed, no longer works as intended.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the garden forgets what it knows. Flatten the site and water no longer has a path; turn the descent into a level parterre and the hero’s ascent and the river’s fall vanish together. The garden is known only by moving through it, terrace by terrace and sound by sound, and the cross-walk is literally the shape of the myth of the waters running to Rome. Form changes use: one does not stroll here, one climbs and descends, stops at stations, walks behind water. What holds the figure is the palace, a converted convent whose rooms are frescoed boxes, whose form would not much change what the work knows. The reversal of the entry is a loss to the sequence, weighed under The Imperishable.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses part of what it knows. The verse captions announce each outcome, so the scenes become experiments whose result is given and whose mechanism is shown: the form is the method of Galileo’s own science, look and see why, and it asks the audience to do what the court philosophers of the fourth scene refuse to do. Thirty years in fifteen scenes let appetite and age do their work on a man. The inverted chronology at the end sends the book over the border while the man is still a prisoner, so that the work survives its maker’s betrayal. Held where it is because much of the play’s power, the old man at the window with his goose and his hidden manuscript, is gained by identification, which the epic frame was meant to forbid.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows: that gods and men are made of the same matter and can be wounded by the same iron. The drawn image does what a photograph could not without division. The curse is a drawn line that moves; the god’s footprints bloom and wither in the same frame; the wolves and boars carry faces and speech without becoming costume; the forest is painted in a density that makes it a world and not a set. The episodic quest is the form of Ashitaka’s knowing, since he learns each side by entering it. What holds the figure is that the narrative form is the adventure film’s, journeys and raids and a siege, and much of it is container rather than instrument. Retold as a live-action epic, the film would lose its gods; retold as another kind of animated story, it would lose less.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the church stops knowing what it knows. Put the relic at the end of a dark barrel-vaulted nave and the walk loses its movement to light; take away the narthex and the threshold where the mission is given becomes a door; shorten the nave and the pilgrimage becomes a visit. The pilgrim learns what the church means by walking it in order, and the order is made of light: a dim narthex, an evenly lit nave, a bright choir. Held below the top because the clearest knowledge, the mission to the nations, sits in the portal’s sculpture and could stand on another church, and because nave and choir meet at a join.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form carries the knowledge. Because the book begins at the end of fifty years, the reader waits as Florentino waits, and the long middle is felt as duration: the scale is the content, a love measured in years, months and days, and the counts in the text, “cincuenta y un años, nueve meses y cuatro días”
“fifty-one years, nine months and four days”, are the book’s own measure. The narration passes freely among Florentino, Fermina, Urbino and the town’s gossip, in long paragraphs with little dialogue set apart, so that no single heart owns the story and the two loves are given equal weight. Told in Florentino’s first person it would be a seducer’s apology; told in Fermina’s it would lose the irony that judges him. The circle from Pentecost to the river and back to the counted years makes the ending a return. What holds the axis there is that the frame is a familiar device, and the middle’s episodic form is the container of a catalogue, not its instrument; changing it would cost less than changing the form of Anna Karenina or Infinite Jest.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the relics would be on display rather than at a destination. The chevet places the Magi at the end of a long ascent of space and light and makes the pilgrim’s circuit round them the shape of the choir. The five aisles make the nave a hall for a city and its processions, not only a passage to the altar. The height above so narrow a vessel makes the body small before the relic and the altar. The form has carried its purpose through seven centuries of liturgy and into the modern crowd. Held well below the top because it is the type’s form, a French cathedral’s knowledge put to a German purpose, and the west towers add more to what the building means than to how its use is lived.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what it knows goes. Two faces give two crowns and two realms that cannot be seen at once, held in one stone: the unity is physical, not stated. The well framed by the wound necks makes the object’s use part of its meaning, since what is ground there is ground inside the bond of the two beasts. The registers are themselves the order the object claims; their ground lines are the law the disorder below them breaks against. Hierarchic scale is the argument of rank, made visible as size. Held below the top because the content could be carried, with real loss, by a macehead or a wall relief, as in fact it was: the two-faced palette is the best vehicle for it, not the only one.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Played as a straight drama of thieves and police it would be a crime comedy; played as an opera, the feeling would carry the audience over to the lovers’ side. The form of numbers split from scenes, sung to the house and announced by boards, is the instrument of its knowledge: it holds the audience out of sympathy long enough for the economics to show. The three finales are opera’s form of resolution turned to argument, and the third is the knowledge itself, the happy ending staged as an ending, so that the audience sees the convention it wanted. What holds the axis is that the instrument is unevenly applied: the love duets ask for the feeling the form is built to withhold, and the spoken scenes are often conventional comedy. The form governs the numbers more than the whole.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses what it knows. A correct court would say nothing about the order; this court says that the order can be known well enough to be mocked, and the knowledge is in the fabric. A conventional painted chamber would show the fall of the giants; this room, its corners rounded away and its painted masonry coming down over the doorway, makes the visitor live it, and its purpose, homage to the emperor who had been received in the house, is lived as fear. The progression of rooms makes a prince’s day a sequence of moods: horses, love, wind and fortune, eagles, and then judgment. Held below the top where the form is a container: the outer fronts and much of the circuit carry their decoration rather than being changed by it, and rest is barely shaped by the plan.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. As single portraits these are fine pictures; as a typology they know something no single portrait can: that persons in a society can be compared, and that the comparison is the disclosure. Every element of the form serves this: the same frontal address, the same daylight, the same distance, the same plain sharpness, so that difference between sitters is difference of life and not of style; and the order of the portfolios, which turns comparison into an argument about the social whole. Photography’s claim to have been there gives the faces their evidence; a painted typology would be an opinion. Held below the higher figures because the maker never fixed the final form, and only Antlitz der Zeit stands as his completed one.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A museum behind a portico is entered by ascent and permission; this one is entered from a sloping square, down to the doors, with the crowd. The visitor’s movement is put on the outside of the building and given the city, so that going to see art is also seeing Paris, and the escalator became one of the city’s public streets. The library’s open floor, free to all, made the building a daily place for students and the unemployed as much as a monument. Held lower by what the form did not carry inside: the column-free floor, the end the whole section was bent to serve, was divided into rooms like rooms in any building, and since 2000 the climb to the top has been sold with the ticket.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the Octagon to a square crossing and the church stops knowing what it now knows: that the long nave arrives at a centre gathering the whole width of the building under a lantern of light. Here the form makes the centre a room and the room the meaning. The Lady Chapel’s form, a wide unaisled box walled in carving, makes devotion to the Virgin a matter of being surrounded by her story. Elsewhere the form is the received form of a great Benedictine church, serving well without becoming knowledge: the nave would know the same things in another elevation. The form is the knowledge at the centre and a vessel elsewhere.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute live action and the film cannot say that the spirits are as real as the parents, or that transformation is the ordinary law of the world: pigs, a mouse, a dragon, a heap of rubbish that is a god. The drawn image carries the knowledge that the material and the sacred are made of the same line. The form is also a shape in space and time: the building as a vertical order of labour, upward to Yubaba and downward to Kamaji, and long quiet intervals, ma, between the busy sequences, by which a child’s sense of time is given. Held at its figure by the middle, whose plotting is in a looser form than the beginning and the end and could be told otherwise without loss.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is the relation of the immanent to the transcendent. The handheld camera, close and unsteady, binds the film to bodies, rooms and weather, and makes a world in which God is not visible. The tableaux, still, coloured and scored, are the only places where another order shows, and they stand outside the story. The chapters give the shape of a book of hours or a saint’s life. The bells bring the second order into the first, and the form is completed by that breach. In the composed manner of Europa Bess’s faith would become a stylised figure; in plain realism the miracle could not happen. Held below the top because the handheld grammar is slack in places, used as texture where it does no work, and the songs are partly decoration.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
For the imperial palace the form changed how its purpose was lived: the axial approach, the court of appearance, the round vestibule and the hall beyond made an audience a passage through thresholds, and the walls made retirement a garrisoned life. For the town the test is stronger. The enclosure’s two streets are still its two streets; the peristyle is still its square; the gates are still its entrances; the substructures hold its market passage and public halls; families live in the thickness of the defence, their windows cut in Roman masonry. Put another form round this life and it would be another life. Held from the top because the residence’s own purpose is lost with its upper rooms, and the town’s form was not designed.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form of “Goblin Market” and the poem stops knowing what it knows. The goblins’ cry, “Come buy, come buy”, the tumbling short lines and the lists that run on past need are the sound of the temptation: the reader feels the market’s rush before the poem judges it, and the verdict depends on that complicity. In blank verse or a regular stanza the appetite would become a description. “Up-Hill” is the second proof: its quatrains of question and answer enact the soul’s anxious enquiry and the calm reply, so that the form is the faith. “Remember” turns at the volta exactly where the speaker turns from asking to be remembered to releasing the beloved. Elsewhere the ballads are conventional vessels and the devotional pieces fill serviceable hymn measures: the form is the knowledge in the book’s best third, and a container in the rest.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building stops knowing what it knows. A regular temple on a levelled terrace would have had to bury, cut away or exclude the marks, the tomb and the tree; this form knows the place by fitting it. Each porch is shaped to what it serves: the north porch, tall and deep, a grand door at the lower level to the oldest sanctities; the east porch, the front of Athena’s house at the upper; the south porch, a marker and a balcony, its figures turned toward the Parthenon and the procession. The visitor approached each sanctity from its own side and level, and the form made that approach. Held below the top: the interior where this knowledge was lived is lost, and the exterior distributes it among parts more than it gathers it into one figure.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The disproportion is the instrument: the long, unhurried Clairton hour against the sudden cut to fire, so that the war is felt as the town feels it, as rupture without passage. The return repeats the opening places, the bar, the house, the mountain, the trailer, with the people missing or changed, and the repetition carries the knowledge that home is the same place and not the same world. The hunt comes twice, the roulette twice, the church twice, and the doubling is the film’s argument about what war makes of rite. Held below the top because the middle movement is built as a thriller’s set pieces rather than in the governing form, and Nick’s Saigon story is told by an ellipsis that reads in places as a gap.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. Its knowledge is control, and its form enacts control: riffs locked to the downstroke, tempo changes executed as commands, a band that never loosens. The title track is the clearest case. Verse and chorus hold at speed, the clean middle section gives the addict his moment of lucidity and longing, and the return of the riff is the master taking him back; told as a ballad, the song would lose the grip it describes. Sanitarium’s passage from clean verse to full force is the inmate breaking out. The sequence is counted here, once, from assault to revolt. The template is inherited, and two songs would say the same in another shape.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The form carries the knowledge. Told in scenes and dialogue the story is a costume romance with a historical ending; told as perception, through a camera that wanders and voices that ask rather than state, it becomes an account of encounter as seeing. The change of narrator at the hinge, from Smith to Rolfe, is the change of love made formal, and England is framed in symmetries the forest never had, so the form registers exile. Two costs hold it well below the top. The elliptical form costs the film its middle: the passage from captive to Rebecca, on which the second half depends, is told too briefly to be known, so the form drops what its own story needs. And the shape was rebuilt between versions, so the macro-form is in part an arrangement of the knowledge rather than the knowledge itself.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The record’s stance, not caring and caring too much under it, lives in the form: two guitars each playing one fixed part, interlocking like gears, so that no one shows off; drums that never vary; a voice pushed behind a filter, present and withheld at once. The brevity is the stance too, songs that stop before they could plead. Played clean, slow or orchestrated, these songs would be complaints; played this way they are a pose with feeling leaking through. The sequence is counted here, once: a slow, questioning opener, a run of short songs in one stance, and a shouted close that drops the pose. Held from the top because the middle of the sequence is a set of songs, and one frame repeated eleven times is a container as often as an instrument.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing what it knows. The stepped wall is the instrument by which a low temple becomes visible: it breaks sunlight into a sequence of lit and shadowed faces, and the figures change through the day. The horizontal bands make the act of worship, the clockwise circuit on the platform, into a reading, the epics unrolling at the pace of a walk. The twin plan makes the pairing of king and queen a matter of where one stands. Set the same carving on a plain cube and it becomes a museum wall; build the same plan in brick and the knowledge of the surface is gone. Held from the top because the form as it stands is the base of a fuller one.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about escaping a hurt into a dream is made of sound as refuge: the layered guitars build a space large enough to vanish into, the voice is set inside the wall rather than in front of it, and the swing from hush to flood enacts the swing between withdrawal and overwhelm. Soma is the clearest case, a quiet confession that the band drowns. Disarm, which leaves the guitars behind, knows what the wall does not: that the wound has a source. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on the loudest building of the wall and closes on a lullaby, the dreamer falling asleep. Held short of the top: Rocket, Quiet and Geek U.S.A. are containers, and Silverfuck’s length is permitted, not compelled.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The structure is the title: a pursuit without rest, in which every escape opens another battle, and the jump of sixteen years shows the struggle passing unchanged to the next generation. The score’s relentless figure makes time a pursuit. The hill road is the form at its strongest: on a road built of crests the pursuer is unseen until near, the viewer shares the hunted’s partial sight, and the danger lies in what the land hides, a knowledge only the form could give. The VistaVision frame holds whole streets in the raids, so the town is a body rather than a backdrop. What holds it at the figure: the middle uses the comic manhunt’s inherited grammar, well rather than newly, and the prologue’s montage tells more than it forms.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the picture loses most of what it knows. With Christ large and central, the inherited form of the subject, it would say that he is seen; with Christ small and deep in the perspective and the masks pressed forward, it says that he is not. The perspective is the argument: the crowd moves toward us down a street that narrows to him, so that the viewer stands where the next rank of the parade will be, inside the mob and in its way. The mask is form as knowledge, a face that is all surface with nothing behind it. The paint, laid on in slabs, makes faces and banners one substance. Held at 8.5 because the stand at the right and some of the upper banners are composed as additions, and the top third reads as a frieze set onto the street.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the body knows goes. The frontal head at about life size, on a panel the size of a face, looks straight out; laid in the wrappings it was the face of the body, seen where the face had been. Encaustic is part of the knowledge: wax holds pigment with depth and sheen, so that flesh looks like flesh under light, and what is kept is precisely the look of living skin. A sculpted bust would keep the form and lose the colour and the gaze; a drawing would lose the presence; a profile would refuse the address. Held below the top because the format is a convention of the practice, not invented for what it knows, and the full form, panel and mummy together, survives in only a minority.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The form changes how the house is lived at every step. Arrival is a passage under the canopy into a hall below the main floor and a rise of a few steps into the living space, so that one enters a landscape, not a room. Sitting, reading and listening are separated by floor, shelving and the grouping of columns, so that a family and its guests are together and apart at once. The garden is lived from inside, through the dining room and the covered terrace, and the evening ends in heat and water at the far side of the yard. Substitute a white box on a grid and almost all of this is lost: the house would know the free plan and not the forest. Held below the top because the binding of columns and the mixing of claddings change how the house looks more than how it is lived.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The book’s claim is that a man is many and that each partial view of him is a fiction, and its form is three partial views: the editor’s decent bewilderment, Haller’s fevered record, the Treatise’s cool diagnosis, none sufficient, each correcting the others. The Magic Theatre then turns the theory of the many selves into a stage on which the pieces can be set up and played again. Make it a single first person and the book loses its irony against Haller; give it a realist close and it loses its thesis. Held below the top because the Treatise’s explicitness lets the form explain itself, and because the theatre’s doors are an episodic frame that could hold more scenes or fewer.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The work knows what it knows as this oblong read in one direction. The time of love is laid out as space: the eye walks from the herm down the slope to the boat, and in doing so passes through persuasion, rising and departure, so that a sequence becomes a single view. A painting can hold the stages at once, and the backward look of the woman at the hinge works only because the earlier stage is there for her to look at. The width is compelled, and the distance at the left gives the sequence somewhere to go. Make it a narrative series or a stage scene and the simultaneity goes. Held below the top because the Berlin version tells the same content differently without losing the knowledge.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The episodic road is the knowledge that these lives have no home and no plot: they move, perform the same act in each square and move on, and the viewer feels the repetition as Gelsomina does. The chain act, unchanged from the first square to the last, states Zampanò’s stasis. The theme passes from the Fool to Gelsomina to a stranger to Zampanò’s ear, so that the one thing that survives her is a melody and the score becomes the plot. The ellipsis before the coda lets him learn of her death as the viewer does, by chance and late. Held lower because the middle episodes sit in the form as stations, not steps, and could be reordered with small loss.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses its meaning. Told in order, it would end with Butch riding off on a dead man’s chopper, named Grace, and Vincent’s death, two thirds through the story, would be a punchline. Reordered, it ends on Jules’s choice and on Vincent alive, walking out of the coffee shop beside him, a man the audience has already seen killed; the form makes the difference between the two men the last thing the film knows. The chapter cards make the work a book of stories, and the prologue split from its epilogue frames the whole as one morning’s chance of reprieve. Scenes the length of conversations are the form of the criminal’s idle time. Held from the top because within each section the form is conventional, and the reordering, load-bearing as it is, is one move rather than a form worked through every scene.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The form is part of what the film knows. The episodic chain, one incident leading sideways into the next, is the shape of a child’s life seen from inside, where no adult explains how a lie at school becomes a cell at the police station. The camera at the boy’s height and on his side, in streets and stairwells too narrow for a crew, gives the viewer his position. The interview, shot frontally on the boy with the questioner unseen, makes the viewer the questioner and keeps the adults absent as voices. The freeze frame does the decisive work: substitute an ending that resolves, capture or reconciliation or rescue, and the film loses its knowledge that nothing is decided for him. Held lower because the middle third’s form is a container.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. It is cast as a liturgy, and its knowledge is that an act can be a rite rather than a choice: Thomas’s death is shaped as the women’s worship, not as a drama of suspense, so the action that would be climax in a history play is an offering. The two passages of prose are the formal argument. The sermon is prose because it is the one moment Thomas speaks to the congregation as their priest; the Knights speak prose because their reason is the reason of the secular world, which has no verse. The Fourth Tempter turns Thomas’s own words on acting and suffering back on him: form doing the work of meaning. Held at its figure because the static centre also limits what the play can know about its hero.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a naturalistic form, or keep the verse, and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that the story is a recurrence: a ghost’s tale on a ruin, a man riding in circles, a wheel, a lord who kills as his lord killed, a chorus returning. The frame and the circles carry that, and nothing else in the film states it. The Noh form carries a second knowledge: Asaji’s stillness against Washizu’s thrashing is the film’s whole account of the marriage, will without motion against motion without will, a fact of staging rather than of dialogue. What holds it: the battle and siege passages are in the common grammar of the period film and would survive in another form unchanged, and the messengers are a convention of the stage carried over rather than remade.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that past and present, living and dead, man and animal share one plane and one tempo. The long fixed takes give the ghost and the living the same duration, so Huay’s arrival is not an effect but a guest. Episodes made in older Thai manners make past lives into past cinemas, so form carries reincarnation itself. The dream drops motion when the film shows a future that has stopped. The ending, where Jen and Tong are both seated and leaving, makes doubled lives a matter of the frame. Held below the top because the formal scheme is not wholly legible on the screen, and some episodes read as plain realism rather than a chosen past.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely, yes. Thought as bodily effort is known only through a body in the round, whose twist must be walked round and whose weight bears on stone: in a painting the crossed elbow is an oddity of pose; in bronze it is a torsion felt in the spine. The surface carries the knowledge, the light breaking on the lumps of muscle as attention breaks on a problem, the hollows holding shadow where the figure closes on itself. The metal matters too: dark, heavy bronze, weathered outdoors, is the weight. Held below the top because the enlargement adds size without adding form. The large figure knows what the small one knew, and the change of scale alters its address, a public monument seen from below, more than its knowledge. The best of the form was found in the door.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. In live action Totoro is a costume and the Catbus an effect; drawn, they share the same line, light and weight as the farmhouse and the rice, and that sameness is the film’s claim that the spirit world is part of the visible one. The form teaches through tempo: the long holds, Mei crouching over tadpoles, the wait at the bus stop, make the viewer keep a child’s time. The episodic, seasonal construction is the instrument of the disclosure: the dread arrives inside an ordinary day, as it does for children. What holds it at its figure is the last movement, where the Catbus as rescue turns to a more conventional form of resolution than the rest, and the instrument becomes a container.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The hanging scroll in a set gives each creature its own vertical field and its own season, and the ensemble, hung round the triad, makes a congregation; an album or a handscroll would make a book to be turned, and the creatures would no longer surround the Buddha or the viewer. The silk and the back-painting are part of what the work knows: colour laid on the reverse softens and fixes the front, so that the whites and the plumage glow from within, which is how ordinary creatures are made to look radiant. The vertical governs the compositions: the phoenix and the peacock rise up the pine, the fish swim down the silk as though seen from above. Held below the top because in the form as now shown, a sequence on a gallery wall, the scrolls know nearly as much one by one as together.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building can no longer say what it says. Take away the taper and the stacking loses its fit: the apartments would be too deep, the offices too narrow, and the tower would read as a slab with no reason in its shape. Take away the expressed diagonals and its claim, that its height is earned and visible, goes with them, and its economy too. The form is the instrument by which a hundred storeys of mixed life are made possible and shown. It changes how purpose is lived as well: the sky lobby, the shared amenities halfway up and the parking inside the building make a resident’s day vertical. Inside the floors the form is less felt: an office here lives much as one elsewhere, save for the diagonal across a window and the view.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses what it knows. A tower with a central core on this site could house the same bank, but it could not put the street under the banking hall, could not ring the hall with visible working floors, could not draw daylight down through the middle, and could not offer floors free enough to be replanned again and again, which the bank has done. The form changes how banking is lived there: one enters by ascent, sees the institution at work in section, and works on floors grouped in hung zones, each a smaller building under its own truss. The form is the instrument of the building’s idea of openness. What holds the axis: the office floors, excellent space, say nothing the frame has not already said.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the title track stops knowing what it knows: that one theme read at two tempos is two things and one, and that the corners are the content. Smooth the head into thirty-two regular bars and the claim goes. “Pannonica” knows its subject through the celeste; on piano alone it would be a lovely ballad, not a portrait. The solo standard knows Monk by subtracting the band. The sequence, counted here once: two new pieces on side one, the hardest first; side two moves from portrait to solitude to an old tune refitted, outward from the most demanding composition toward release. Held: the order reads as a programme of contrasts more than as an argument, and the blues is close to a container, holding whatever its soloists bring.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. In a courtyard house the household lives round a court on one or two floors, and rank is a matter of distance along a range; here it is height, and every movement of a guest of rank is a climb through the house, past the hall and the family’s floor to the state rooms. The axial hall makes arrival a passage through the centre, not a turn at the end. The glass makes the top floor a room of light from which the estate and the county are surveyed, so that the owner’s view of her lands becomes part of her standing. Four centuries have shown that the form can be read by anyone walking it. Held below the top because the lower floors live much as any great house of the period, and the form’s knowledge belongs to the state floor more than to the whole.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that two people who have hurt each other can see each other only across a barrier. The form moves from silence to speech and from the widest frames to the smallest room, desert, then house, then booth, a stage on which one person sees and the other does not. The Super 8 film prepares it, a past that can be watched and cannot answer. The second booth scene completes it: the story told by a man who will not face the glass to a woman who cannot see through it, until the light is turned. In ordinary shot and counter-shot the scene would lose the knowledge that they can be honest only when unseen. Held below the top because the first two movements use the road film’s inherited grammar, beautifully, rather than a form remade for this subject.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. The scale, taller than a person, puts the body before the threshold rather than the eye before a picture of one. The close value of rectangle and ground makes the opening appear only with time and in low light, so that the form is the slow disclosure. The upright frame makes the field a doorway, and the cycle makes the doorways a room, enclosing the viewer with thresholds that do not open, which is what the work discloses. Reduced to one canvas, or to a reproduction, the dark becomes a flat brown and the room goes. Held below the top because the form was never fixed: the room it was made for was never hung, and the cycle reaches its form only where a room of its canvases is assembled, as Rothko assembled nine for Tate. Below The Rothko Chapel (9.4), the room he was able to build.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is that restriction makes force. With no bass guitar, the riff of Seven Nation Army, a guitar pitched low, must carry both bottom and melody, and the space left makes every entry of the drums an event. The stop and start of the Bacharach and David cover depends on two players able to drop to nothing at once. The plain drumming leaves the guitar exposed, so each riff stands bare. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens on its emblem, turns at the cover, centres on Ball and Biscuit and ends on a joke. The limit is a second half that is additive, its order open to change without loss.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Entirely. Put the same water at the bottom of a plain shaft with a pulley and the building loses its whole knowledge: that reaching water is a passage, made on foot and in stages, with the body cooling and the light failing, past the gods, to a sacred end. The form makes a household chore a rite and the fetching of water a pilgrimage; the pavilions make each level a station, and the climb back with a full pot a return to daylight. The form is the instrument. Held below the top because the instrument now plays without its note: with the tank dry and the upper storeys lost, the reflection, the chill and the crowd at the water are inferred, not met.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because its subject is excess and its form is excess. A record about an appetite that cannot stop is built of tracks that run long, pile voice on voice and add another movement after the song has ended. Runaway is the strongest case: the single piano note says everything with one key, and the coda that distorts the voice beyond language is the confession words cannot finish. The sequence is counted here, once: fantasy and boast, then the devil’s party, then confession and dissolution, the record lengthening and slowing as it falls, the last voice a stranger’s. The crowd of guests is form too, the star surrounded. The middle is a container more than an enactment.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because the knowledge is in the relation between surface and subject. Built as it is, every chord placed and every horn line burnished, Deacon Blues becomes a song about a man for whom even failure is an aesthetic, and the sound is the dream he lives inside. The title track opens into a long instrumental passage and does not return to its opening as a pop song would: the form is the escape it describes. The sequence is counted here, once: side one runs from a lover lost to a refuge to a self-mythologising loser; side two, opened by the bright artifice of Peg, turns on two returns. The arc is loose, and Peg and I Got the News are contained rather than enacted.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Munro’s long story knows what neither the novel nor the conventional story knows: how a life looks when its decades are seen at once, the connecting years left out, so that a single afternoon or a single act stands against forty years and is revalued by them. Told as a novel, “What Is Remembered” would supply the marriage between the adultery and the memory, and lose its finding, that memory works in the gap. Told as a story of one scene, the title story would end with the girls’ prank and lose the marriage. The leaps in time are the instrument of the disclosure about chance and revision. Held off the top on the unit: a collection is additive, its nine stories stand in an order that could be another, and the form is the author’s general form, not one invented for this book.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Make the stupa a hall that can be entered and it no longer says that the sacred is a centre one cannot enter and must go round. Remove the hill and it is no longer the mountain at the centre of a city. Close the platform and the circuit, with its posts and shrines, cannot be walked, and the knowledge that worship is movement round a fixed point is lost. The form changes how its purpose is lived: the pilgrim climbs from the city in the half-dark, comes out into the light, and circles under the gold. Held below the top because the governing form is the type’s, and the terrace is placed by donation, not by design.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. As an anthology the tales are a miscellany; inside the frame each is a speech act whose consequence is a life, and the nesting enacts the deferral it describes, since the listener inside each tale is a judge with power to kill: the jinni, the king of China, Harun’s sword over Ja’far in the Three Apples. The dawn-break makes time the antagonist, cutting the sentence where the king must spare her to hear its end. The form is the argument of the close: a thousand and one nights of listening change Shahriyar, and the three sons born in that time prove that time has passed and a life been made. Held below the top because for long stretches the frame is only a formula at the night’s end.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Its thesis is that truth reaches us only through vestures, through symbols; its form makes the reader do exactly that, looking through the Editor’s English, through Teufelsdröckh’s German, to a soul known only from scraps in bags. The irony of the frame is the instrument by which Carlyle can say what he believes without asserting it in his own name: the Everlasting Yea is reported, doubted and defended, and so reaches the reader as something won rather than preached. The disorder of the six bags enacts the opacity of another life; the Editor’s labour to assemble a biography is the book’s argument about how any soul is known. Charged: the same frame licenses the longueurs of Books I and III; the form explains them but does not need them.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, in the slideshow. Projected in sequence, the pictures pass and cannot be held, which is the work’s knowledge of time and loss; the music sets the love song against the bruise, so that the viewer hears what the subjects told themselves while seeing what happened; and the sequence makes each picture of tenderness a premonition of harm. The diary form is the claim of truth: these were taken in the life, not staged. As a book the work loses the music and the passing and becomes an album leafed back and forth, still strong, a different knowledge; as framed prints it becomes a group of fine colour photographs. Held at 8.5 because it is famous chiefly through the second form, and the sequence has been changed many times.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. As a written list or a chart, the genealogy loses the ground it is written on, and with it the blood: the claim that the myth is hung on a real place and real deaths needs a landscape. As a landscape without names it is Friedrich, and the forest is innocent again. The work knows what it knows only as both at once: a deep perspective and a flat inscribed surface in one field, the names floating in the picture plane while the path runs back through it, so that the myth sits on the place and not in it. The burlap reads as earth and as sacking, a poor cloth for a grand subject. Held below the top because the two registers, which the form needs, do not fully fuse: the names can read as written on the picture rather than in the wood.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Ada’s voice is not in words. The form is made of the not-said: the heroine silent, her speech carried by a child who edits and lies in translation, so that every exchange passes through a third party with her own interest; the piano as speech, played by the actress, so that the music is the character speaking rather than a score commenting; touch as language, from the lessons to the stocking to the hand on Stewart’s back. Dryburgh’s palette divides the worlds. What holds it at 8.5: the voice-over, prologue and epilogue both, explains what the film had already shown, and the Nelson coda is filmed as a container for an outcome rather than as the form’s own conclusion.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The first person in the present tense, with no memory and no judgment, puts the reader inside a consciousness that gives a suit and a murder the same weight. Told in the third person, or from outside, the book would become a satire about a killer; as it stands, the reader is made to share the levelling and, worse, the boredom. The catalogue is the instrument: when the killings arrive, the reader has been trained to skim inventory and finds himself skimming horror. The ambiguity of the end, Owen said to be alive in London and an apartment where killings were done cleaned and offered for sale, is form too: in a world of surfaces even atrocity cannot be verified. Held off the top because the chaptered diary is loose, and many chapters could stand in another order.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The alternation of dream and war is the knowledge: the title promises a childhood, and the film shows that it exists only in the dreams, which the war cuts off each time with a noise or a death. Told straight, as Bogomolov told it, this is a brave scout’s story; in this form it is a child already killed in everything but his body. The coda completes the form: the waking story ends in an archive, in a photograph and a file, and the last image is a dream, so the only childhood left is the one the film has kept. Held below the top because the birch wood and the dugout talk are conventional scenes the form carries rather than uses.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because its knowledge is the drill. Call and response, the oldest form of the music Fela inherited, joins a leader to a community in church and village; here it becomes the parade ground’s command and reply, joining a sergeant to bodies without will. The repetition is the zombie’s motion, the fixed riff the march that cannot stop, and the fast tempo makes obedience compulsive and funny at once. Set as a ballad these words would be a complaint; set as Afrobeat they make the listener perform the condition they mock. The sequence is counted here, once: soldier then follower, side answering side. Side two’s house form and side one’s long solo, permitted rather than required, hold it short of the top.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The distich is the instrument: the long hexameter that reaches out and the shorter pentameter that falls back give the cycle its rhythm of desire and rest, of looking and touching, and the book’s claim that antiquity is known through the body is made in the ancient body of verse. Its best-known image is the form knowing itself: the poet counting the measure of the hexameter with his fingers on his beloved’s back. In rhymed stanzas these poems would be a modern lover’s songs; in the couplet they are a citizen’s return to Rome. Held below the top because, once taken, the elegy form is a container across the middle pieces, where the allegories would sit as easily in another measure.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that the world is breaking and the creatures with it, and it is known as fracture: the faceted plane, the shafts of light that are also blows, the animals cut by the same lines that cut the trees and the sky. Paint the same deer and boars in the earlier rounded manner under a stormy sky and the picture becomes an illustration of a disaster; here the disaster is the structure of the picture. The colour is form too: red as matter and violence cutting through the blue of the spiritual animal is the argument in colour. Held at 8.5 because the faceting is partly a manner applied across the plane, and in places the form decorates the catastrophe rather than enacting it.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is the meeting of the hand and the machine, and its form enacts the meeting: drum machine and live drums together, sequences under a bass that plays melody, a voice placed small and close inside the pattern. Played by the band alone, these songs would be post-punk; played by the machines alone, they would lose the warmth that is their finding. The sequence is counted here, once: from played songs into sequences, through their meeting, and back to the guitar band at the end. The alternation is a balance more than an argument, and two tracks would say the same in another shape.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The knowledge of Halleluhwah is in its length: cut to five minutes it is a good groove, held to eighteen it is a state, and the editing that joins takes into one continuous span is the form that makes the state. The sequence is counted here, once: four near-equal sides go from song to groove to ritual to collapse and return, so that the double album is the instrument of the descent rather than its container. What holds it below the top is the second disc. Aumgn and Peking O enact dissolution, but partly by being shapeless, and a form that argues formlessness by losing form is weaker than one that shows it; stretches of both serve as container rather than instrument.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the evening is lived differently. In an ordinary theatre one passes from the street to a seat; here going to the opera is a procession, through vestibule and avant-foyer, up the stair in view of the balconies, and at the interval out into the Grand Foyer and onto the loggia over the avenue. The form makes the audience visible to itself, which is the purpose as the building understands it. The pavilions make arrival an expression of rank. The back of house, as large as the front, made it a working institution, with stage, workshops, rehearsal rooms and, for a century, the ballet school under one roof, and the form has carried a change of use from opera to dance without strain. Held below the top by the hall: a conventional horseshoe, where many seats in the boxes see part of the stage.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that exclusion is a way of looking. The camera frames Emmi and Ali through doorways, banisters, the bars of a stair rail and the frames of windows, holding them small inside rectangles while others look at them; neighbours and colleagues are set out in tableaux, staring, before anything is said. The long static takes make the viewer stare too, and the audience’s gaze is enlisted in the town’s. Told in close, mobile, sympathetic coverage, this would be a love story with villains; in this form it is a study of the look that makes the outsider. Held below the top: outside the framings and tableaux much of the grammar is plain and functional.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses most of what it knows. The knowledge lives in the cross-cutting and the matching: the camera passes through the tree’s interior to the mill; the colours of the two worlds, cold blue and grey at the mill, amber and red in the tasks, bleed across the line instead of holding it. The decisive formal fact is that the film never settles whether the kingdom is real. The chalk door lets her out of a locked room; Vidal, in the labyrinth, sees her speaking to no one. Without that undecided double form the refusal is a child’s delusion or a fantasy’s reward; with it, a moral act whose truth does not depend on the kingdom. The cost: the war film alone is a conventional form.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as nine short films, Carver’s stories would remain nine stories of private failure. Cut together, the film knows what none of them knows: that the commentator’s family, the waitress, the cop and the pool cleaner live within a few miles and touch one another only by accident, a car in a road, a body in a river, a phone line. The cross-cutting is the instrument of that knowledge, not its container. The overlapping sound does the same work in the ear: everyone speaks, few are heard. The earthquake completes the form, the one event every strand receives at once, and it shows how little it changes. Held from the top because some crossings are coincidences of convenience.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the end is already in the beginning. The recurring dream is the instrument: the airport death is seen before it is known to be a death, and each return fills it a little, so that the viewer’s knowledge grows in the shape of Cole’s and arrives where his life ends. The cross-cutting of times makes the asylum and the future rhyme, so the film argues by form that the two powers deciding his sanity are one. The red herring is formal too: the viewer follows Cole into the wrong conspiracy, as Cole does. Held below the top because the kidnapping, the road and the hotel are thriller sequences filled rather than shaped by the loop.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Mostly yes. Lead is the knowledge: books that cannot be read, a weight the shelf must bear, the metal of Saturn and melancholy in the alchemical tradition, and a poison. Painted books could be read as images; these can only be stood before. Real glass, really broken, is the knowledge: the breaking happened to the material, and its remains lie on the floor the viewer shares, so the work’s fallen world is the viewer’s ground. The vertical is the knowledge: the infinite at the eye’s limit, debris at the feet, the descent along the body’s own axis. Held below the top because the library is a type Kiefer used before and after for other subjects, and because the labels put into words what the form might have carried.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and some of what the film knows is lost, not all. The frame makes the audience the doctor, hearing a confession that is also a seduction. Dressmaking is the film’s figure for itself: a message sewn into a lining where only the maker knows it, and the film hides its pact the same way until the omelette. The sound of eating carries the struggle as only sound can, and the score sets the whole as romance while the plot moves toward poison. Held at the figure because the substance would pass into a novel with less loss than most films of this rank: Taxi Driver, whose form is one man’s perception, stands at 8.8.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The knowledge is serial: a life is a sequence of places through which money passes, each ruining a little more, and only separate pictures can show this, since each scene is a room or a street that holds the man for a moment and lets him go. The interval between scenes is part of the meaning: what happened between the arrest and the marriage, or the tables and the prison, the viewer supplies, and the supplying is the moral reading. The engraving is part of the form too: a print for many, reversed from the painting, legible at arm’s length, captioned with verses. Sarah at the edge of five scenes is a thread no single picture could carry. Held below the top because each scene is composed on a stage plan, and much could be told almost as well in a novel.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The external narration is the instrument: because the reader is never inside Spade, it cannot be told, through chapter after chapter, whether he is honest, whether he wants the bird, whether he loves Brigid, whether he will sell anyone. The reader is put where Brigid, Gutman and the police are, reading a face, and the last chapter’s decision lands with a force it could not have if his thoughts had been given. A man known only by what he does is a man whose code is the whole of him; the form is the knowledge. The dialogue-led construction, scene after scene of negotiation in hotel rooms and apartments, makes talk the book’s action and lying its medium. What holds the axis at 8.5 is the plot shape the method rides on, the inherited mystery of a death, a hunt and a disclosure, used with mastery rather than remade.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the house loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that a deep, narrow lot can be lived as continuous light and movement rather than as a corridor of rooms, and that knowledge exists only in the split plan, the central well and the half levels, which make every passage through the house a short ascent toward light and give each room a view across the well to another. Remove the offset floors and the stair becomes a service; close the well and the middle of the house goes dark again. The iron’s form matters as much: cast, curved and branching, it lets support become openness. Where the axis stops short: the street front, new in idiom and in its bay, is still a front on a party wall row.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. Carving is the knowledge: the figure was found in the block by taking away, and its kinship with the land is a kinship of material, stone that was once ground made into a body that is ground. The bedding of the Hornton stone, brown streaks in the green, runs with the forms, so that the body seems laid down as strata are. The void and the pose are knowledge too: horizontal like the land, raised on the elbows to look over it. Cast in bronze the same form would know less, its surface without strata; enlarged to the scale of the later bronzes it would become a monument, not a presence on a terrace. Held below the top only because the knowledge is one, carried at one register.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. At easel size the procession would be a pattern seen from outside; at six metres beside a passage it is a movement the viewer walks with, and the knowledge is bodily: the rush is felt as a pace. The horizontal format is the knowledge. A frieze reads in time, and with no point of rest this one cannot be held as an object, only followed. The uprights stand at about human height, our size without being figures. The canvas, portable and chosen against the wall, is what let the work outlive its hall. Held below the top because the site gave part of the form, and because the knowledge has not yet passed wholly into technique: part of the image is still drawn rather than enacted.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Put the flowers on a dark ground and the canvas becomes a fine flower piece in the Dutch line, and the disclosure that one colour can hold the whole is lost. Paint the heads thinly and the seed heads cease to be matter: the impasto is how ripeness and decay are made physical rather than depicted. Remove the outlines, which bind each head and the vase in a darker contour after the prints, and the yellow on yellow collapses. The single blue line is the form’s one concession to contrast, and it is load-bearing. The Munich canvas, the same kind of flowers on a blue-green ground, knows less. Held below the top because the format is ordinary, and the arrangement is a still life’s, transformed in key but not remade.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a column grid and a core for the tubes and the building can no longer say what it says. The floors become ordinary offices, the light no longer falls through the section, the openness closes round a core, and the drift that is the building’s thesis has nowhere to run. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: the free, uncentred field is made by the tubes and the plates, not furnished into a container. Held at this mark because the knowledge is concentrated in the frame. The floors as lived, the library and the galleries, could largely be set in another building without much loss to what they are.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work can no longer say most of what it says. As a photograph the hall is a record, the very photograph it came from; the painting knows what it knows by turning that record into matter. Paint and paper act out the ruin: the room is burned not by a depicted fire but by the surface itself, crusted, torn and blackened, so that the image of the building and the destruction of the image are one act. The scale sets the viewer at the threshold, in the place the architecture assigned a visitor, and makes the pull of the axis bodily. The perspective carries the regime’s own way of seeing into the picture, where it is shown working. Held below the top because the borrowed drawing does part of the work the form claims.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, and the controlled experiment exists. The Deluge painted on glass, its motifs still visible, knows a story of the Flood; this canvas knows the Flood as force. That knowledge, that a catastrophe can be shown as the collision of colour and line and that its destruction and renewal are one rhythm, exists only as this unobjective field. Restore the objects and it becomes a picture of a flood. Reduce the scale and the viewer stands outside the event. Remove the counterpoint of blurred and hard and the renewal goes. Held below Broadway Boogie Woogie (9.1) for two reasons: the vestigial motifs are a residue of the earlier form, which the picture neither needs nor abolishes; and part of what the form knows is said more fully in the painter’s essay than in the paint.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The book knows that a life like Grainier’s is lost to record, and its instrument is a chronicle that summarises: decades pass in a sentence, a working season in a paragraph, and the reader sees a life as history would see it if history looked, from outside and in brief, with the great event and the small given the same flat weight. The order is not strict: the book opens in 1917, reaches back to the childhood and forward to the death, so that the life is gathered as memory gathers it. The uncanny is told in the voice of the fact, so that the wolf-girl cannot be set apart from the logging camp, and Grainier’s half-belief becomes the reader’s. The turn at the end to a first-person witness hands the lost era to a survivor who saw its last light. Held off the top because the summary sometimes thins scenes the form could have opened.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly entirely. The knowledge is the instant, and it is known only as speed: thin paint, the ground left visible, each boat a few strokes, the reflection a ladder of short dashes laid across the direction of the water so that it breaks as reflections do. A finished marine of the same view would know a harbour; this canvas knows a minute of seeing. The near-equal value of sun and sky is form as knowledge too: the light is felt as colour, not as brightness. Held below the canvases above 9.0 because the haze at the left is less a form than the absence of one, and the thinness that carries the instant in the water carries less in the sky above the sun.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows, because the knowledge is the method. A record about the archive and about coming after is made entirely of the archive: every sound was already a record. Replayed on live instruments, the parts would lose their ghostliness, and the meaning with it; the crackle, the mismatched rooms and the voices from other decades are the content. The long forms are built by accretion and removal, as a digger adds and discards records, so the shape enacts the search. The sequence is counted here, once: the Transmissions frame it as a signal received. The sketches sit as a mixtape’s filler, not as parts of the form.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. What the canvas knows, closeness without contact in an ordered city, lives in its geometry: the post that splits the field into two unequal worlds, the level heads that make every walker an equal unit, the perspective that pulls the square away as the couple come forward. A smaller canvas loses the couple’s arrival at life size, and with it the viewer’s place on the pavement. A broken Impressionist touch would dissolve the cool, exact surface that makes the order felt: the finish is the system. The unity of grey is chosen, not given. Held below the top because the same knowledge is carried, in another key, by the painter’s Le Pont de l’Europe, and some of it would survive a large print with loss rather than collapse.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because its subject is the delay before the last words, and the delay is the form. The long preludes make speech arrive late and reluctantly: in Alone the voice enters only when the weather is full, and in Endsong it waits more than half the track, so that the last song is mostly the time before it is sung. The sequence is counted here, once: an ending announced, a vow, two songs of strife, grief at the sixth place, a self-accounting in All I Ever Am, and the long close, twice the length of most. That shape is an argument, not an arrangement. What holds it is the middle. A Fragile Thing is a conventional song form that knows no more for being here, and the build before the voice, repeated in four tracks, is container as well as instrument.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. The knowledge is of a body as a trace held for a time by the ground, and the form is exactly that: an outline made in the land, at a body’s scale, in a material the place supplies, given to weather and recorded once. Cast it in bronze and it knows permanence, the opposite. Paint a figure in a landscape and the ground stops being the bearer. Stage it before an audience and it becomes theatre; these were made mostly alone, for the camera, and the solitude is part of what they know. The form even knows its ending: fire, tide and rain complete the piece. Held below the top because the record, the only form now met, is in places a casual slide that does not carry the knowledge as the event did, and some members could be exchanged for others without loss.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The frieze is the knowledge: a long horizontal seen square has no vanishing point to lead the eye down the street, so the row is held whole and nothing happens next; a view in perspective would make it a street to walk down, and the stillness would go. The cropping at both ends is the knowledge: the row runs on past the frame, so this stretch stands for a city of such rows. The low raking light is the knowledge: paint holds one hour exactly and for as long as one looks. The absence of figures is the knowledge: one passer-by and the picture becomes a story. Held below the top because a photograph of the street at that hour could carry much of it.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Entirely. What it knows is an instant no eye retains and no painter witnesses: the body between standing and lying, the gesture that has not yet become a fall. Goya’s executions and the battle pictures of the academies reconstruct death; only the shutter can claim to have been there, and the claim is the knowledge. The blur, the grain and the unheroic framing are part of it: the form says this was not composed, which is what the image means. The form is the instrument and not the container. Held at 8.5 because its knowledge depends on a premise the form cannot prove, and the dispute shows how much of what the image knows is trust in the medium rather than something the frame secures.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. The sheet knows that the public world arrives as fragments of print and can be cut, and only a montage of actual reproduced photographs can know that, because its material is the material of the world it attacks. Painted, the figures would be caricature, a hand inventing likenesses; here the faces are the press’s own, and the critique is made with the evidence. Rotated pieces, wheels and diagonal sweeps make a form that will not settle, the knowledge of a republic that had not settled. At more than a metre the sheet is a field to travel, not a page. Held below the top because parts of the field could take another arrangement, and some meaning lives in the title.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the museum knows? Almost entirely. Light the galleries artificially and the paintings stop changing with the day; the visitor’s time in the room stops being weather. Make the building a monument and the visitor arrives as a pilgrim, not a neighbour. Show the whole collection and the act of attention becomes an inventory. The leaves are the instrument of the building’s knowledge, not its container: the encounter with a work there, alone, in a soft light that shifts, is the thing the building was made to know. Held below the top because that knowledge is narrow in compass, a change in how art is seen, and the plan that orders the visitor’s movement is a corridor with rooms, conventional where the section is not.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work knows much less. In bronze it would be a monument, permanent and to that extent a celebration; in sugar, at the refinery, in the weeks before demolition, it is a commodity in the form of the person whose labour made it, standing where the commodity was made, and dissolving. A sugar coating over a carved core makes refinement a skin, which is the point. The boys of molasses and dark sugar, the rawer product, soften and fall in the summer heat, so that time and climate perform the wasting of labour. Temporariness is form here, not loss. Held below the top because much of what the work knows travelled at full strength in a photograph, and the polystyrene core, a necessity of scale, is making the knowledge does not use.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The picture knows that a surface can hold a life. The frontal crop sets the façade on the picture plane, so that painted brick and painted canvas almost coincide and the house’s weathering is read as the painting’s facture; a deeper view, or the whole building with its roof, would make a townscape of it and lose that identity. The two passages are the only ways in, and they are dark, so inner life is glimpsed, not entered; the figures are small and turned away, so attention passes to the walls that hold them. The cabinet size keeps the viewer at a passer-by’s distance across a narrow street. Held below the top because the form refines a known format rather than inventing one.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the work can no longer say what it knows. Show the photographs and the prohibition is broken; paint them as pictures and the painter takes the witness’s images for his own; paint an abstraction under the title alone and the covering is a gesture with nothing under it. Only an image made and then buried keeps both the duty to look and the refusal to show, and only in the physical layering of one surface over another. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. Held below the top for one fact: the knowledge lies in what cannot be seen, so the visible form does not carry it unaided. It needs its title and the record of its making to be read as what it is.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
After its survival, this is the work’s strongest axis. Change the form and it knows nothing. Described in words, a cup covered in fur is a joke; made, it is a sensation of the mouth that the body cannot refuse. The form is the instrument. The fur must be on a cup and a spoon, not a plate or a knife, because those are the things that meet the lips; it must be laid smoothly so that the vessel stays legible as a vessel, which is what makes the transgression felt; it must be pale and short so that it reads as skin rather than costume. It does through touch imagined by sight what only an object can do. Held at 8.5 because the knowledge, once felt, is one thing, and the photograph carries much of it without loss.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The map is already flat, so the canvas does not picture it: it is a map, painted, as the flag paintings are flags. Paint a picture of a map instead, a sheet lying on a table in space, and the coincidence of sign and support is gone, and with it the claim that the painting and the given thing are one object. The free brushwork against the fixed borders is itself the knowledge: in a form where the lines held, nothing would show how thin the convention is. The stencils are the knowledge too, printed capitals made by hand, the given lettering of the shop and the school. Held below the top because much of what the form knows was known by the form of the flags, and because the size serves the work without being required by it.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and the knowledge goes. The work knows that a landscape can be seen into being, and it knows it only as wet ink on absorbent paper, where each stroke spreads, settles and cannot be corrected: the medium’s irreversibility is the decisiveness the image shows. A landscape in mineral colour, or a careful ink in Shūbun’s manner, would show the same village and know nothing of this. The hanging scroll matters too: the landscape low, the writing above it, so that the painting is read as the ground from which the words rise, framed as testimony. Held below the top because the relation of image to text is the format’s convention, not this work’s invention.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and the work stops knowing almost everything it knows. Raise the division into a wall and it is a monument, seen from a distance, read at once, outside the viewer; sunk into the floor it is invisible from far off, found only near, below the eye, by the feet as much as the eyes, and the viewer must lower himself to read it. Cut it straight and it is a design; as a crack it seems to have happened to the building. Make it uniform and it is a line; the widening gives it time and direction. Line it with plain concrete and it is a fault; the fence makes it a border. Held below 9 because the knowledge, once found, is single: the form gives one reading, not an unfolding one.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the book ceases to exist. Told in the third person, or by Poirot, or by any other character, it would be an ordinary detective story with an unlikely culprit. What it knows, that the reader has been deceived by the voice he trusted and that the deception was made of true sentences, lives only in a first-person account written by the murderer as a record of the detective’s failure and turned by its last chapters into a confession. The form is the weapon and the evidence at once. The chapters are built so that the narrator’s omissions sit at the joins, and the Apologia rereads the book from inside its own form. Held below the top because the achievement is concentrated in the frame and a few sentences: the long middle of interviews and minor mysteries is the genre’s ordinary form, and any narrator could carry it.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Change the form, and something is lost, though not everything. The form is the claim: that a convict’s conscience and the history of France are one drama, and that one soul’s march from evil to good is the movement of the age. The alternation of story and essay is the instrument of that claim, and the coincidence plot is the form of providence: the same few people meet at Montfermeil, in the Gorbeau house and at the barricade, because the book believes the world is ordered. Told as a plain novel of a convict, it would know less. But many of the digressions could be cut without the plot knowing less, and in those stretches the form is a container rather than an instrument. That is what holds it here, next above the lowest of the twelve.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is the method: one dream set down, then taken apart phrase by phrase in associations that run into the dreamer’s life, then reassembled into a thought. Change the form, give the theory without the analysed dreams, and the book loses its evidence and its demonstration; Freud’s own short version, Über den Traum (1901), shows how much thinner the argument becomes. The book also enacts what it describes. Freud breaks off analyses for discretion and says so, so that the text has a censor of its own, and its secondary revision shows in its seams. The movement from the single instance of the second chapter to the apparatus of the seventh is an argument from surface to depth made by the order of the chapters. Held at 8.4 because the survey and the accreted catalogues are container rather than instrument, and eight editions have made parts of the form an archive.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and some knowledge goes. The arrangement by the shape of memory rather than of time, the first year given whole and the rest compressed, is itself a disclosure: in prison time is eaten, and the one year remembered is the year before habit closed over the narrator. The circling among types, feasts and institutions, with no plot to carry it, is the condition of men for whom nothing will happen; the escape (II.9) is the only plot the book allows, and it fails within days. The frame does real work: a dead man’s notes from a dead house, published by a stranger. Held lower because the frame is not sustained, the wife-murderer vanishing and the narrator Dostoevsky in all but name, and because in the essayistic passages the form becomes a container for argument that would read the same in an article.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
In its first half the form is the instrument of the knowledge. The slow chronicle of childhood is the argument that the past binds: begun with the grown Maggie, her refusal of Stephen would read as scruple; because the reader has lived through the jam puffs, the rabbits, the hair, the gypsies and the ruin, the past has weight and the refusal is knowledge. The retrospective narrator, dreaming by the mill at the opening, makes the whole a memory and lets the essays stand as part of the form, and the river runs from the opening plain to the flood as form and as figure. What lowers the figure: the three-volume proportion was not mastered, and a providential flood answers a question the realist form had held open. A different ending would change what the book says, a sign of the form’s force and of its strain.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The double form is the instrument of the argument: a self closed on itself and a self opened to a people, told side by side and meeting in one man who serves both and belongs at last to one. Change the form to a single strand and the book cannot say what it says, that Gwendolen’s salvation lies in learning that she is not the centre, a lesson enacted by the book’s moving its centre away from her. The opening in the middle makes the form the knowledge as well: Gwendolen is judged by a stranger’s eye before she is known, as she will be judged. The epigraphs set each chapter in a wider frame of thought. Held at this figure because the joining of the strands is managed by sympathy and coincidence, and the seam shows.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and parts of what the work knows go with it. Remove the parasol and the High Court is a block of offices in the sun; with it, the court is a shaded, ventilated open house of law entered beneath one roof. Remove the hypostyle and the hyperboloid and the Assembly is a hall; with them, the legislators pass from a dim forum of many columns into one room under a vessel of light. These forms have carried their uses for six decades. What holds the axis: the form that matters most to the meaning, the plain, does not govern how the state is lived. Officials arrive by car at the backs of the buildings, the public is kept out, and the meeting of powers across the ground is a diagram, not a place inhabited. The Secretariat is an office slab in a climatic screen, and changing it would change less.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
At the west a different form would change everything. The screen of rods is the knowledge that stone can read as light and as depth; put a plain wall of sculpture in its place and the front loses its meaning. The spire’s open tracery, with the sky seen through it, is an ascent that stays transparent, and its stairs make the body’s climb part of what it says. In the nave the glazed triforium and great windows make the wall a lantern, form the instrument of the light. Across the whole, form and use are less fused than in a church of one campaign: the east end and nave are a Rayonnant church of the type, and the west block, the city’s as much as worship’s, is a different statement grafted on. The belfry stage hides more than it tells.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is the tale told on the gallery: episodes, each a trade, passed from mouth to mouth, often through Ratliff, who is the community’s intelligence and is beaten by Flem in the end. Change it to a continuous dramatic plot and the book loses what it knows: that Flem is known only by report, as a thing the hamlet tells stories about and cannot see into. The division into four books maps an argument: Flem, Eula, the loves of the long summer, and the peasants as victims. What holds the axis down is that some joins remain the joins of stories: chapters that introduce again what was told before, and episodes, the goats among them, whose form is the anecdote’s rather than the novel’s.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form carries the knowledge in its main lines. A novel of apprenticeship told by a narrator who knows more than the apprentice, and who lets the reader see the Tower watching Wilhelm before Wilhelm knows it is there, makes error visible as error while it is being lived; a first-person confession could not, and the sixth book shows by contrast what a self formed by introspection alone becomes. The indenture handed to Wilhelm puts the book’s pedagogy in the book as an object. The inset songs give the figures of longing a form the prose cannot. Held in the middle eighties because the form slackens: the closing books trade the slow growth of the first five for revelations and pairings arranged like a comedy’s last act.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The single first-person narrator matters: Kelvin cannot know whether Harey is a copy or a mind, and neither can the reader, who has only the man who made her. The alternation of the closed station and the open library is the book’s instrument. The station’s corridors, the blood on Gibarian’s door and the locked cabins enact a knowledge that is private, guilty and close; the library, its volumes and its schools, enacts a knowledge that is public, accumulated and empty. The pairing knows what neither part knows alone, and the ending, a man alone on a dead formation, completes the thought. Held lower because parts of the form are a container: the library is delivered as Kelvin’s reading, a frame that carries exposition more than it knows anything by being a frame, and the mystery structure of the first chapters is borrowed machinery.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the central knowledge goes. The historical chapters are framed as Stencil’s productions, so the form knows what a straight historical novel could not: that the coherence of the century is a construction of the person who needs it, and that the paranoid and the historian are one figure. Stencil speaks of himself in the third person, which makes the seeker one of his own impersonations. The alternation of the two lines makes structural the opposition of horizontal and vertical, drift and quest, the inanimate in the street and the inanimate in history. Held below the top because the episodic present line is often a container rather than an instrument: its scenes could be reordered or cut, and the form there carries mood more than knowledge.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Each side is a set of short, closed songs, mostly under three minutes, ending in a long open piece where the form stops containing and starts to drift: the record knows the threshold by building one at the end of each side. Light My Fire is a pop song that opens into duration; The End is a song that dissolves into rite. Inside the long pieces the form is the instrument: the fixed vamp under the solos, the drone that lets the spoken passage happen at all. Break On Through’s single-figure drive and The Crystal Ship’s brevity suit what they say. The short songs between the doors are mostly ordinary rock and pop forms, interchangeable in order among themselves, but their closedness is part of what the record knows: the room has to be closed for the door to mean anything. The form bears load throughout, and most at the ends of the sides, which is what holds it from the top.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses part of what it knows. The first instrument is the single title over a chronological order: the conflict of reality and desire is shown as a life’s process, and the shifts of manner, pure, surrealist, elegiac, meditative, are its stages rather than changes of fashion. The second is the late form: an unrhymed line close to speech, which lets the poem argue, and the address of the self as “tú”, which splits the poet into the one who suffers and the one who judges. The dramatic monologue lets the exile speak as Lazarus or as a figure from history and so see himself. Held at 8.4 because the whole is cumulative rather than designed as one structure: the sections were made as separate books and joined, and some poems in the exile books would say much the same in another form.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form carries knowledge in two ways. First, the double strand: Becky’s rise and fall against Amelia’s fall and rise, crossing at Brighton and Brussels and again at Pumpernickel, is an argument about two kinds of self-interest that a single plot could not make. Second, and more original, the narrator’s withholding. Was Becky guilty with Steyne? The book asks and does not answer. Did she hasten Jos’s death? The last plate answers with an image, the text with a lawyer’s reticence. The showman who claims to own the puppets and then declines to see inside them is the form of the book’s knowledge: in the Fair nobody is known from within. Held at this figure because the serial form loosened the instrument: the Pumpernickel numbers and the narrator’s late entry as a character are improvisations the form tolerates rather than requires.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional front with two towers and the church loses its statement: it would be a fine votive church, not the emperor’s vow made legible as world history. The facade is the instrument of that knowledge. The oval does work of its own: a longitudinal oval fuses the centred room of the dome with the processional axis of a nave, and the fusion is lived, since one enters on the long axis and is drawn to the altar while held under the dome. The stucco glory, with no picture, makes the altar a vision rather than an image. What holds the axis: facade and body are two forms that do not depend on each other, and the knowing is split across them rather than carried by one.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The form is a series of prefaces, not designed as a book; its unity is the booksellers’ list, and the threefold pattern of life, character and criticism is a convenience Johnson does not always keep. But the form carries what the book knows. Its claim, that a poet’s work is to be read with and against the life and judged by one standard, is enacted by the passage within each major life from what the man did to what he was to what he made, each colouring the next; the Pope shows it most clearly, the small, ailing, scheming, devoted man and then the poetry of correctness. The chronological series turns the judgments into a history without a separate history being written. A treatise or a set of memoirs would lose the joining. The minor lives do not take the form fully.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Three novels named for three streets, spanning three generations, with unnarrated gaps between them. Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The dense, nearly daily time of the first volume is the old order’s stillness; the accelerating time of the third, where years pass in a chapter and the old die between paragraphs, is the knowledge that the order has gone. The street titles make place the measure of time. The omniscient narration, moving through the house, is the instrument of a book whose subject is the household as one organism. Held where it is because these are the means of the realist chronicle generally, and much of the content could be carried in another chronicle shape with less loss than in the works where form is the knowledge throughout.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the claim changes. Lay the Salian dead in a modest church, or in a centrally planned mausoleum, and their memoria becomes private. The longitudinal basilica at this scale makes it a public assembly: the graves lie where the whole church faces, and every procession and every mass passes over them. The crypt gives the sacred a cellar of its own beneath the dynasty’s choir, so that relics, kings and altar stand on one vertical. The vaulting changes how the room is lived: the bound system turns an even arcade into square bays, and the space is measured in great units. Held there because the form is a perfected basilica, much of whose knowledge a basilica already had.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and part of what the record knows goes: it moves from Brown Sugar’s swagger through the frayed middle of each side to Moonlight Mile’s road, and the slide from appetite to wreckage is carried by the order. The mixing of idioms is part of the knowledge: country, blues and soul side by side show the band as heirs and tourists at once, and Dead Flowers knows what it knows because it is a country song, its cheer set against its subject. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking enacts its form, a song dissolving into what happens when nobody stops the tape. What holds it: most tracks would stand alone, and two are containers for a style.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
What the painting knows that a description cannot is the force: a body dragged against its own backward look, which exists only in the counterweight of Venus’s lean and Mars’s stride on one surface, and the movement from left to right in which the viewer reads time, the temple opening, the march, the ruin left behind. The broad horizontal is the instrument of that sweep, and only painting lets the flesh of Venus, the most beautiful thing on the canvas, sit exactly where the loss happens. The cost is documented: Rubens wrote out the content figure by figure in a letter, and the letter conveys most of what the picture says. What it cannot carry, the pull and the light, is why the figure stands where it does.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is the knowledge more than it first seems. A retrospective first person, written long after, tells the island; inside it the journal, written at the time, tells the first months again, so that the same days appear twice, once as they were lived in panic and once as the converted old man understands them. The journal ends when the ink is gone: the form runs out with the means. The inventory, the ledger of evil and good, the calendar post and the lists of what was saved are the form of a self made by keeping account. Tell it in the third person and the man who makes himself by recording himself is lost. Charged: off the island the form is plain chronicle, and the double telling is not worked as a structure beyond its first use.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is much of the knowledge. The book is a book of letters, and the letter is the only way this poet now reaches Rome: 1.1 sends the book in his place, and 3.1 has the book speak as it arrives and is refused by the public libraries, so that the exile of the man is repeated as the exile of his text. The couplet, the measure of love play, carrying grief, is itself the argument of 2.354, that the Muse and the man can differ. Withholding names is a formal act with knowledge in it: naming would endanger the named. Held off the top because the collection is additive, the poems of Books 3 to 5 able to stand in other orders with little change in what they know, and because Book 2 would say most of what it says in prose.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building can no longer say what it says. Put the nine dedications under one domed volume, in a Byzantine cross-in-square, and the commemoration becomes a set of altars in a hall. The cluster makes each feast a separate tower visible from the square, so that the victory stands legible as a calendar in stone. The form also governs how the purpose is lived: worship in small, separate sanctuaries reached by galleries and stairs, and the great act of the building a procession round it and into it from outside. Held at 8.4 because the form’s knowledge is delivered mostly to the eye from outside, and the interior, which the purpose of a church would put first, is the part the form serves least.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The life is told in order, and it ends in a vision that the reader takes for the narrative until the waking. Because the vision is told in the same realist manner as the ministry, chapter after chapter and year after year, the reader lives the temptation as Jesus does, accepts its reality, and loses it with him on the cross. Announce the vision as a vision and the book no longer knows how plausible, and how good, the refused life is. The prologue, in the author’s voice, frames the whole as one man’s spiritual exercise, so that the form is offered to the reader as the struggle it describes. Held where it is because before the vision the form is mostly a container: a sequence of Gospel episodes retold in an order the Gospels gave, whose shape another telling could carry. The instrument works fully in the last tenth, and the rest of the book is built to make it work.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and see what the building stops knowing. The chapter house knows the chapter as one body gathered about one centre: replace the pier and octagon with a rectangle and it is a committee room. The stair knows procession and ascent. The retrochoir knows the passage of pilgrims and clergy round the eastern chapels as a space without a fixed bay. The nave’s level band sets the pace of the procession toward the crossing, and the scissor arches now frame the choir beyond them as a stage. Held below the top by the west front, the building’s largest statement, a screen whose form is largely independent of the church behind it and could front another.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
In the best poems form is the knowledge. The Yeats elegy says three things in three metres: the report of a death in loose long lines, the argument about poetry in paragraphs close to blank verse, and the charm of its third part in trochaic quatrains whose ritual return is the healing fountain it asks for. “Musée” is shaped like the painting it reads, the eye moving from the foreground to the corner where the legs vanish. “Refugee Blues” makes statelessness sound like a lover’s complaint the world will not hear. “Miss Gee” uses the jaunty ballad as cruelty’s instrument, and the cruelty is part of what the poem knows about how a society looks at a dying spinster. But the book’s own form, three parts sorted by kind, is a filing arrangement, and many lesser poems would say the same in another stanza.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Put this matter in a novel and it loses its knowledge. The drama without a narrator means no one judges the visions: there is no voice between Anthony and the procession, so the reader is tempted as he is, and the book’s scepticism is enacted, not stated. The stage directions, in an impersonal present, give hallucination the standing of fact; the speeches give each heresy its own sincere voice. The single night ending at dawn makes the history of belief one ordeal of one man. The ending works by the form: the last word is a stage direction, Anthony resumes his prayers, and nothing says whether that is victory or habit. Charged: the processional form is also a container, into which the matter of Flaubert’s notebooks is poured, and in the fourth and fifth parts it stops changing what the book knows.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and parliamentary life is lived differently. The Commons as an oblong of facing benches, too small for its members, makes debate a confrontation across a floor and a full house a crush; a semicircle would make it an assembly of blocs, and the rebuilding of 1950 kept the oblong for that reason. A vote is lived as a walk through one of two lobbies, counted at the doors. The Central Lobby makes access a place: the citizen waits there to see a member. The royal axis makes the sovereign’s relation to Parliament a passage that stops at the Lords. Held below the top on two counts: the facing benches are inherited from St Stephen’s, kept rather than made, and the bulk of the building, its corridors and offices, is an awkward, ill-serviced workplace that its form does not illuminate.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the church loses its knowledge of hierarchy. The stepped pyramid is the order of the court and of heaven given as mass. A single great room or a single dome would not set the prince between nave and vault, nor carry the worshipper from the dim edge to the lit centre through a sequence of bays. The galleries change how worship is lived: the church is entered through enclosing layers, the city’s Christians within, the court above. The form changes what the purpose is. Held below the top because the many spaces fragment the whole, much of the church being aisle and gallery from which the centre is glimpsed rather than held, and because the Baroque exterior states the inner steps less plainly than the first face did.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the complex can no longer say what it says. Put the towers on separate lots with ordinary entrances and the civic room disappears; fill the plaza and the tower becomes an office block. The form is the instrument of the knowledge: a city block lived as a sequence, garden, steps, plaza, lobby, concourse, train, rather than as a set of addresses. Its use proves it: some ninety years of people with no business in the offices walking through, sitting by the gardens, watching the rink, passing beneath the buildings in the concourse. The slab carries the same logic upward, its shape being what it is to work in it. Held below the high band because the office floors, the bulk of the complex by area, are lived as offices anywhere are; the form changes how the ground is lived more than the building.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much is lost. Told in the third person, or from Willie’s side, this would be the story of a demagogue; told by Jack, it is the story of the man who served him, who supplies the facts that kill, and whose education is the book’s true action, as he says himself in substance. The retrospective first person lets Jack disclose his ignorance at each stage while the narrating Jack knows the outcome, so that the form is the movement from the Great Twitch to the acceptance of responsibility. The Cass chapter is formally necessary: it is the past Jack could not read when he was young and must now read. The charge is the plot’s machinery, the paternity and Tiny Duffy’s telephone call, which is melodrama and would work in another vessel.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narrator imagines Coleman’s life from outside and says so, and the form enacts the book’s subject: a man’s identity is a story told by others, and the truest telling is still an invention. The withholding of the secret until the second part puts the reader inside the college’s error: we judge Coleman on the evidence offered, as Athena does, and are then shown what we did not know. The movement into the minds of Les Farley and Delphine Roux gives each persecutor a logic from within. The five parts close on a funeral and a frozen lake, the shape of a tragedy. Held off the top because much of the novel is a container for argument, and the passages in Delphine’s mind and the impeachment arias could be cut or moved without the form losing its knowledge.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
In the best songs the form is the knowledge. Bad withholds a chorus and lets one figure build for six minutes, so craving is the shape of the song. MLK is a lullaby in form, so an elegy for King becomes a putting to sleep. On the title track the blur is a way of remembering: fire seen at a distance, not described. The sequence is an instrument: a departure toward a distant light opens the record, an instrumental with no voice opens the second side, and a lullaby for a dead man closes it. Pride, Wire, Promenade, Indian Summer Sky and Elvis Presley and America are containers; give them other forms and they would know much the same.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and something is lost. A Kalinga temple on a plain plinth would be a house; this one is a passage. The worshipper climbs onto the sun’s car, enters the hall in the chariot’s body and faces west toward the image, while the sun, entering at the east door, comes the same way. The form makes the rite a procession with the god rather than a visit to him. The open dance hall sets the offering of music before the car, as though the car drew it on, and the musicians on the roof carry the offering into the air. The form is the knowledge of a solar cult and a solar kingship. Held below the top because that purpose can no longer be lived: the hall is sealed, the sanctuary roofless, the worship ended, and the form now teaches its meaning from outside.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose changes. In a closed quadrangle in the valley the abbey would face inward, the life of prayer sealed from the world. Here the house is entered as a sequence of courts toward a sanctuary that faces out, and the order’s claim, to stand between the realm and heaven, high above the river, is lived as passage and as view. The terrace puts the community and its guests where landscape, church, learning and rule meet; the procession from gate to altar is the plan. The form has carried monastery, school, guest house and residence for three centuries, and visitors now cross it on the same axis. Held below the top: the monks’ daily life is lived in wings like those of any great abbey, and what the form knows is chiefly the abbey’s face to the world.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? In large part. The handscroll is held and unrolled by one reader at arm’s length, a stretch at a time, text first and then picture, so the encounter is private and paced, as the reading of a tale in the women’s quarters was. The removed roof, fukinuki yatai, is a form of knowledge: the viewer sees what the figures cannot, and commits the intrusion the novel’s narrator also commits. The steep diagonals carry the eye with the unrolling and against it, and the decorated paper sets the words as objects of the rooms’ refinement. Held a step below because each scene is a single tableau: the scroll’s power to unfold time is used between scenes more than within them, where Along the River During the Qingming Festival (8.8) uses it throughout.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narration is in the third person but owned by Sabbath’s voice, slipping into his speech, his imagined interlocutors, his self-prosecution and his self-defence; the dead speak in it as easily as the living. The form is theatre: the novel is Sabbath’s last performance, and the reader is its audience, made complicit by laughter in what it is asked to judge. Told in a detached third person, the book would be a case study of a degenerate; told in the first person, a confession with a confessor’s bias. As it stands it can be inside him and see round him at once. Time folds back without warning to the 1950s, to his youth at sea and to the war, so that the past arrives as it arrives to him. Held off the top because the form’s moves recur, and stretches of riff are containers for performance rather than instruments of knowledge.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A brick pagoda, the usual Liao answer, is a solid one walks around. This one is hollow and was made to be climbed, storey after storey, each a hall with its group of images and a balcony on the plain, so that the ascent through the doctrine is a bodily act. The concealed storeys add what only this form knows: between each visible realm, a dark braced interval, passed through and not shown. Held at 8.4 on two counts. The form’s knowledge is shared with every storeyed pagoda; and the climb it exists for has long been closed, so that knowledge is now legible more than lived.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The work knows what it knows through the painted hall. The narrative wraps the walls without frames or a beginning, so the visitor stands inside a continuous world of lives, as samsara is continuous, and finds stillness only at the shrine door. Daylight from the door reaches only so far, and the walls were seen in part by lamplight, a passage at a time. The great Bodhisattvas flank the doorway between the lived and the transcended. Put the same stories in framed panels or a scroll and the immersion, the unbounded time and the threshold all go. Held below the top because the four halls do not use the form to one end: the cycles answer wall space and patron as often as meaning, and the threshold is strongest in cave 1.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The form is the instrument of the criticism. The play does not describe the two styles; it makes them audible and then tests them with stage machinery. Aeschylus ruins every Euripidean prologue by tacking on “lēkythion apōlesen”
“lost his little oil-flask”, and one repeated half-line exposes the slack, interchangeable syntax of the Euripidean opening. The scales on which lines are weighed turn Aeschylus’ heaviness, his chariots and corpses, into literal weight. The lyric parodies imitate the stretched, repeated syllables of the monody and the Aeschylean refrain. The agon, a fixed form of the genre, is made to do what a treatise could not: let an audience judge with its ears. Held below the top band because the first half’s form is the stock comic journey and does less of this work.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. A narrative would tell the end; the letter cannot know it, and the moment fixed before the catastrophe is the form’s chief instrument. The letter is also addressed and futile: Penelope asks Ulysses not to write back, Ariadne writes from an island with no messenger to a man on a ship, Dido to a man already gone. The writing becomes the subject, and the woman made the author of her own story is what the form says. The double letters add what the singles lack, a reply, and Helen’s answer shows persuasion working on her as she resists it. Held off the higher figures because in the weaker letters the form holds the complaint without adding to it, and the frame repeated fifteen times becomes at times a container.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Set on the ground, the museum would be an object to be looked at, not a gate to be passed under, and the dome would be seen after the exhibits rather than before and through them. The sequence is the knowledge: the visitor first sees the ruin framed, then enters the record of what made it, then comes out onto the axis again. The raised body changes how the building’s purpose is lived: memory is held above the ground, and the ground is left to the dead and to the public. The cenotaph’s low arch keeps the eye at the height of the far ruin. Where the form is merely container, in the exhibition floor and the louvred box seen frontally, the figure is held below the top.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much is lost. The printed texture is the knowledge: the rock and ground come from paint pressed and pulled, a granular, accidental, organic surface no brush plans, while the man is made by line and wash, by the hand that plans. The opposition of the measured and the unmeasured is in the making, two processes on one sheet. The wide format lets the body fold along its length and the dark spread behind it. The size, a sheet held close, makes the circle on the scroll small enough to require a bent gaze from the viewer, which repeats his. Held below the top because a painting could carry the image, losing that duality of process but not its meaning, and much of the knowledge is in the pose, which any medium could hold.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the mosque knows? Yes, in the way prayer is lived. A basilica draws the body down a long axis to one end; here the rows are wide and shallow, so the many stand nearly equidistant from the qibla wall, and the hall knows the congregation as a line, not a procession. The T-plan then lets one axis carry the ruler’s and the imam’s authority without breaking the rows. The forest of columns makes the hall one room and many places, so that a man may pray alone in a bay or among thousands, and the court takes the overflow on Fridays and feasts under the sky. Held below the top: the form is shared by a whole family of mosques, and court and tower stand side by side more than as one figure.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record knows less. Its knowledge is possession, and its form is the improvised piece that passes from speech into chant into song as the speaker is taken over: Birdland and Land are built so that the words seem to arrive under pressure, and a fixed, rhymed setting would lose the sense of a self made in the act. Gloria’s form is its argument, a cover entered and overwritten, a male song taken from inside. The sequence is counted here, once: two sides in parallel, each with its long piece third, moving from a refusal of redemption to a lament, from laughter to quiet. What holds it: Redondo Beach, Free Money and Break It Up are containers rather than instruments, and the sides run parallel more than they develop.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The figures at about life size and full length, in a wide shallow field, stand before the viewer as a row of persons, and the viewer stands where they look; by one reading that place is a mirror Goya is painting from, so that we take the painter’s place and the royals look at themselves. That arrangement exists only in a large canvas hung before a standing viewer. The brilliance of the cloth against the plainness of the faces is a matter of paint, loaded strokes on silk and thin ones on flesh; in a print or a drawing the costume no longer outshines the person, and what the picture knows goes. Held below the top because the frieze is the commission’s form as much as the picture’s, and a different row would say much the same.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The closed room is not a setting but the argument: unity of place enforced by nothing visible, so that the viewer, like the guests, looks for the wall and finds only the convention of the shot. The doubled entrance and doubled toast teach the eye in the first minutes that time in this house loops, and the release cashes the lesson exactly. As prose the premise would be an allegory with a key; as a play, a parlour piece with a curtain. On film the barrier is the cut that never comes, and the cathedral repeats the form at a larger scale. What holds the axis here is how much lies between those joints: through the long middle the vignettes stand in an order loose enough to change without loss, and there the form holds its matter rather than knowing it.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses its central knowledge. The temptation is not marked as a dream. It is shot with the realism of the ministry, it lasts long enough for a marriage, a death, children and decades, and the viewer lives in it as Jesus does, at ease, until Judas arrives. The form makes the viewer tempted: we want him to have the house and the children, and the return to the cross is felt as a loss before it is understood as a victory. A novel can narrate this; only a continuous realist image can let it pass for life. The voice-over, a man narrating his own fear, binds us to his body throughout. Held below the top by the middle, where the form is the inherited sequence of Gospel episodes and the knowledge would survive another form intact.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. Stone carved nearly in the round gives the rib cage as volume: the hollows are real hollows that hold shadow, and light moving across them makes the starvation tactile, a structure the eye can feel round. Stone gives permanence to a body at the point of dissolution, so that the form states the paradox the content holds: the most perishing of bodies in the least perishing of materials, stilled for good at its extremity. The frontal seat, made for a shrine or a stupa niche, places the devotee before the figure as before the ascetic himself. Painting or narrative relief could tell the episode, and Gandharan reliefs did, but would lose the presence of the body as an object. Held below the top because the frontal devotional format is the school’s standard, adopted rather than invented for this knowledge.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The moving camera is the border: it crosses and recrosses lines without a cut, so that the viewer feels the two countries as one space before the plot has said so. The low angles make Quinlan monstrous and then, held long enough, pitiable. The interrogation in Sanchez’s apartment, one long take crowded with people moving through small rooms, makes the frame-up a matter of who stands where, and when. The recording sequence is the form of the knowledge: Quinlan is undone by his own voice played back, and the echo off the bridge is what betrays the wire. The intercutting restored in 1998 holds the two lines against each other as the memorandum describes. The cost: the motel line’s form is pulp rather than instrument, and the connective scenes by another hand sit inside it as seams.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the film knows goes. Its knowledge is of time under threat: that a fight lasts the length of the looking before it, and that men are measured by how long they can hold a gaze. That is carried only by the dilation of duration, by the alternation of landscape and extreme close-up, and by a score composed to be played into the scenes, in whose main theme each of the three men has his own cry. The three freeze-frame captions make the film a demonstration of its title, and the circle at Sad Hill is the form made literal: three points, no sides. The middle episodes could be told in a conventional western’s grammar without loss: form as instrument in the great passages, container in the links.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Close the axis with a central domed block, and the hospital becomes a palace of the ordinary kind, its own centre and its own end; what it knows, that it stands as the frame of a view and of an approach from the sea, is lost. Bring the domes together, and the hall and the chapel cease to be two acts of one community answering each other across a void. The paired domes over the two communal rooms, the colonnades leading the walker to the view and the river front addressed to shipping are the instrument of the building’s meaning, not its container. Held below the top because the courts themselves, the wards and ranges, are a conventional form that could change without changing the work.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is that the human is small, slow and open inside systems indifferent to it, and the form enacts this. The long delay before anything happens makes the crew’s ordinariness the ground the creature breaks. The creature is seen in parts and never whole until the end, so that the body’s openness becomes the viewer’s. The ship is filmed as a set of enclosed rooms whose geography the viewer never masters, and sight stays with the crew, with no cut-away to the creature’s point of view or to the company. What gives: the form is the classical suspense form, perfected rather than made, and its last movement, shuttle, suit and airlock, is a conventional resolution another film could have used.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Put the god in a single cella and the devotee merely arrives. Here he is brought inward through rising zones and then walked round the god in a narrative circuit, and the building knows its theology through that movement. The pairing of each god with his mount across the court makes the court a field of regard, the mount looking at its lord and the visitor between them. The cross plan of the Shiva temple sets the god’s family at the quarters, so the circuit meets them in order. Held below the top at the rim: the rows of the second court give the mandala its extent but change little of how anything is lived, a perwara being the token of a shrine more than a place of worship, and the outer court is empty ground.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The present tense is Rabbit’s condition: a man who lives in sensation, without a usable past or an imagined future, given in a tense that has neither. Told in the past, the book would judge him from a distance it has not earned; in the present, the reader runs with him and is implicated. The close third person, confined to Rabbit’s senses for most of the book, makes his blindness the reader’s, and the departures from it, to Ruth and above all to Janice, break the confinement where his blindness costs most: the drowning cannot be seen by Rabbit, and so it is seen by her. The structure of flights and returns is the knowledge that he can neither leave nor stay. Held off the top because the departures in point of view are few and somewhat abrupt, and long middle stretches use the form as a container for observation.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The serial masquerade, in which the reader cannot tell whether one man or several is at work, puts the reader in the passengers’ place: the book asks for the reader’s confidence in its own figures and teaches the cost of giving it. The single day and the single boat make a closed world in which every transaction is repeated in a new key. The chapters on fiction turn the question of trust on the novel itself, so that the form argues what the matter argues. The open ending is not incompleteness; the book is whole as published, and the open door is part of the design. Charged: the second half’s long dialogues are a container as often as an instrument, and in the Winsome and Egbert chapters the form that was knowledge in the masquerade becomes a vehicle for an argument that could be made in another form.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the viewer cannot tell what is broadcast from what is perceived. From the whipping tape onward Max’s hallucinations are shown in the grammar of his waking life, with no marker, no dissolve and no change of lens, so that the audience stands where he stands and comes to doubt the image as he does. The ending makes this the content: the television shows Max shooting himself, and then he does, so that the image precedes and authors the act. Told with a stable frame, this would be a thriller about a drug; told this way it is about the medium that tells it. The cost is that the form is otherwise a genre thriller’s, and the late exposition steadies a frame the first hour unsettled.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that memory has no single viewpoint, scale or direction, and it is known through a form that refuses all three: the milkmaid seen through the animal’s skin, houses inverted, the self and the beast at one size, the field cut into planes so that each scene has its own space. In one perspective the same objects would be a farmyard with a man in it, an anecdote; in words the simultaneity would be lost, because the picture gives the whole remembered village at once, as memory does. The colour is part of the knowing: a green face is a face as felt, not as lit. Held below the top because the Cubist faceting is at times a container for the content rather than its instrument: the planes divide the field more than they think.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much is lost. The all-over field with no ground and no sky is the knowledge: there is no outside to the forest, no place from which to see it as landscape, and so the viewer cannot be a tourist. The fusion of figure and stalk says that the people and the land are one substance, which no figures set in a landscape could say. The gouache is part of the knowledge: thin, quick, matte colour with the paper showing through gives the flicker of light through leaves and the quality of an apparition; in oil the figures would weigh and stand apart. Held a step below the top because the vertical frieze of mask-headed nudes is an inherited form.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Yes, and in use. Replace the path and the drum with a front door and a lobby, and the museum ceases to be part of the city’s ground: no one would cross it on the way to Urbanstrasse, no one would stand in the open drum without a ticket, and the knowledge that a museum may be walked through and lived round without being entered would be gone. The enfilade round the drum makes a visit a circuit of rooms with the open centre felt at every turn, the old and the new collections joined as one walk. The veneer and the fallen stones make the fabric itself say what the building knows about stone and time. Held at 8.4 because the entrance hall and the services are ordinary under their dress, and the galleries, well made, do what good top-lit rooms do anywhere.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely, yes. In the round and at life size the figure occupies the viewer’s own space: one walks round a dying man and cannot see him whole from any one place. The composition is a low pyramid in collapse, the right arm its last vertical, so that the form itself is the time remaining. From the front he turns his face down and away; from his left he has already gone into his own weight. A relief or a painting would show the moment; the free-standing figure makes the viewer stand by it. Held below the top because much of the knowledge is carried by the face and the arm, which a drawing would keep, and because the low base, with its frontal emphasis, suggests a preferred view.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The cycle was made as large pictures shown to listeners while the story was told: the image is public, held at a distance, meant to be read across a room by a gathering. That is why the compositions are bold, crowded and legible at a glance, why the extreme moment is chosen, why colour is strong. Bound as a small book for a single reader, the same episodes would have to become another kind of painting. The cloth and the scale belong to that purpose, and one sheet holding a whole incident is what lets Persian pattern and Indian volume share it. Held below the high eights because the order of episodes is the romance’s, not the painters’.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The form is the argument. A man who knows love only from books reads a book, dreams the book’s sequel and wakes to read again: the frame says that the knowledge of love on offer is bookish, and the dream shows the books contradicting each other. The proem states the method in its lines on “olde bokes” and “newe science”, old books and new knowledge. The parliament, with its order of speaking by kind of bird, enacts the comedy of procedure: motion, counter-motion, the call to get on. Change it to a single lament or a plain allegory and the poem can no longer show competing kinds of truth. Held off the top by the joins between the three borrowed blocks, which are felt.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the series knows? Much of it. In colour the pit would be a report: ochre and red earth, a blue sky, specific and of 1986. In black and white the mud and the skin are one substance and one tone, and that sameness is the knowledge that these men are made of what they dig. The deep tonal range, holding detail in the shadowed terraces and in the lit rim at once, lets the mass read as thousands of individuals and not as texture. The series form is itself an instrument: the wide view says the mass, the close view says the man, and only the alternation knows that the mass is made of men. Held below the top because the timelessness the black and white confers lifts the scene out of its year, its economy and its politics.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The saturation is not decoration: a voice and guitar recorded too close and too loud are the sound of feeling that cannot be held at a distance, and the record knows that grief and love for the dead come in that register or not at all. The sequence, counted here once, is a cycle: a childhood house, the creed, the boy in the jar, then the war, sex and death, the ghost, a wordless lament, and the boy again at the end, who now lets go. The Two-Headed Boy pair frame the last two-thirds; the instrumentals stand as breaths, one in each half. Oh Comely’s unbroken length enacts its subject. What holds it short of 9 is that the links between songs are thematic, not musical: several could change places without the record knowing less.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The form is the single suspended instant, and it is the knowledge. A narrative in any medium bound to time must resolve: the ship arrives, or the sharks win. The painting cannot, and Homer makes that limit the point. His assurance to his dealer that the man would be saved stands outside the picture, which keeps him undecided for as long as anyone looks. The long horizontal lays the perils out along the horizon, so that the eye travels from death to deliverance and back across the man’s averted head. The diagonal of the hull across the swell holds the boat in mid-tilt. Held below the top because the form is a fine instance of a received picture-type rather than a new one.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The frieze, more than twice as wide as tall, is the knowledge: a line, a strap, a load, read left to right and back again, so that the eye’s passage along the men repeats their labour. The diagonal from the barge at the rear right to the leader at the front left gives the advance and its slowness. Painting holds the faces at once and side by side, every person in one instant, which a poem could not give together and a photograph of the period, with its long exposures, could not have caught in the pull. The pale light is the heat, and the heat is the cost. Held below the top because the content could be carried, with loss, in a smaller canvas of the same arrangement, and because the landscape is a setting more than an instrument.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the crossing is lived differently. A semicircular arch at this span would raise the road some eighteen metres, unclimbable for carts, or need ramps longer than the bridge; a run of piers would narrow the river and be carried off in flood; solid spandrels would dam the water and load the soft banks. The low arch makes the bridge almost part of the road, a gentle rise and fall, and the openings make it a structure the flood passes through rather than strikes. Form and use are one. Held below the top because the knowledge carried is of one kind, how to cross a river, and the deck between its balustrades is lived much as any road bridge’s is.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses its one knowledge: that loss is a duration, not an event. Sixteen songs at one slow tempo, in one hour, are the form of a night that does not end, and no single song can say it. The 12-inch LP made it possible, and the record is built to its length: eight to a side, the title song first, the singer’s own lyric last. Denial (“Glad to Be Unhappy”, “I Get Along Without You Very Well”) and memory (“I See Your Face Before Me”, “Last Night When We Were Young”) alternate as they do in sleeplessness. Riddle’s charts belong to the form, the orchestra at the edge of hearing so that the voice is alone. Inside each track, though, a standard is set as a song, and nothing is shaped by the whole.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form, an obelisk of equal height or a statue on a plinth, and what the monument says is lost: not only the gate and the passage, but the knowledge that the thing stands as its own weight requires, the line of force made visible. The catenary is the content. The triangular section makes the arch change with the observer’s movement and with the sun, so that it is lived differently from every point on the riverfront and in the city. Use is changed by the form too: the trams tilt inside the curve, and the ascent becomes a passage through the body of the gate, from one foot to the crown. What holds it: the form says one thing fully, and the use it shapes, the ride and the slot windows, is brief and cramped, an appendage to the figure.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Farce of disguise is the instrument: only by putting Joe into two costumes at once can the film show one man as the seducer of a woman and as her confidante, and let him learn from the second what the first is doing. The crosscut of the tango and the yacht is the form thinking: two seductions, one true and one false, run in parallel, and the comedy lies in which is which. The ending is the form’s last proof: every disguise is dropped except the one the film refuses to resolve, and Osgood’s reply leaves the form open where a lesser farce would close it. Turn the farce into romance and the film loses what it knows about costume and desire; turn it into satire and it loses its absolution.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. A procedural that never closes is the instrument of its knowledge: the viewer is led, suspect by suspect, to want a confession as much as the police do, and is made complicit in a certainty the report at the tunnel then refuses. The tonal form is also the knowledge: farce and terror alternate because the era’s policing was both, and to remove the comedy would make the detectives villains and the film a thesis. The epilogue completes the form: the procedural’s question, who, is answered by “그냥 평범해요” (“Just ordinary”), and the camera’s last subject is the detective’s face, turned on the viewer. Held below the top because, outside the ending and the tonal braid, the grammar is the police film’s own, well used rather than remade, and the middle runs on an inherited rhythm of suspect and interrogation.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The fades to black are its knowledge of a consciousness slipping in and out: each scene ends as Blake’s awareness ends, and the audience, like him, wakes into a new place without passage. The black and white strips the West of its postcard colour and makes forest and village one ashen world between living and dead. The tempo of a man bleeding out is the film’s clock; a conventional chase cut would turn a dying into an adventure. Neil Young’s score, laid against the picture, is a voice the film cannot be told without. Held from the top because the comic episodes are formally looser than the death they frame: there the form contains rather than knows.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is to be looked at. Demme and Tak Fujimoto shoot the interviews and much else in near-frontal close-ups, the speaker looking almost into the lens, so that the viewer stands where Starling stands and receives the gaze she receives; Lecter’s stare and Chilton’s leer reach the viewer directly. The glass wall of the cell, in place of bars, makes the exchange a matter of faces and reflections. The doorbell cross-cut turns the viewer’s trust in editing into the film’s own trap, and the night-vision passage hands the gaze, as a weapon, to the one man she cannot see. Held below the top because outside those systems the grammar is the procedural’s, well handled rather than remade, and Gumb’s scenes are staged by a more mannered rulebook.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and see what the centre stops knowing. Put the same programme in a single building, a box or a pavilion of galleries, and it loses three things: that Kanak culture is a settlement and not a collection, a set of houses along a path; that the place’s wind and light belong inside the building; and that the culture it houses is still being made, which only the open shells say. The form is the instrument of that knowledge in the cases, the walk and the grounds. What holds the axis: the low range, where most of the use lies, is a container of ordinary rooms under the shells’ image, and much of what visitors do happens in space whose form says little.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form: the same rooms in a villa of rendered walls or historical dress would hold the same family, but they would stop saying what the house exists to say, that the life within is a single composed work and that the house is weightless, a surface rather than a stronghold. The edging does that work everywhere, inside and out: it turns slabs into fields and corners into lines, and makes the building legible as drawn. The hall shapes how the house is lived, a place one crosses and is seen from the gallery; the music room’s stage makes performance a domestic room. Held below the top because the private rooms are lived as any fine rooms are, and the massing’s asymmetry is picturesque rather than compelled.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Told straight, it is the rise of a start-up. Told through two depositions, the founding exists only as contested testimony, each scene of friendship already evidence in a suit, and the viewer sees the betrayal before the friends do. The cutting between conference room and dormitory makes every promise made at Harvard a liability years later. The prologue’s speed, two people talking past each other at once, is the form of the whole: Mark always answering a question one ahead. Held below the top because the depositions are a frame more than a demonstration: the flashbacks are given objectively, not bound to a witness as Kane’s are, and the two suits rarely make the past uncertain. The form organises the knowledge; it does not quite become it.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose fails. A single wall with a keep, the older Frankish type, must be held everywhere at once and falls when it is breached; here the form lets a modest garrison fight in depth, each line overlooked by the one behind it and the attacker exposed between them. The ramp makes entry a sequence the defenders control. The plan also lives the order’s double life: chapel and hall stand inside the inner ring, so that the convent is literally what the walls exist to hold. Held below the top for two reasons: the form is accreted over several campaigns, the inner ward wrapped by a later outer ring and then by Mamluk building, and its knowledge is mostly of one thing, defence.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes with it. The rectangle of four courts with its octagonal crossing is the instrument by which a state is made visible as one ordered body from a single point; replace it with a courtyard palace or a string of wings and that knowledge is lost. The telescopic axis is the instrument by which the house becomes a way of seeing the land as governed: the visitor walks through the building and arrives, on the same line, at the view of the cascade. The staircase turns ceremony into movement, an ascent to chapel and throne on one level. The form is less fully the knowledge in the outer fronts, which could have been otherwise without loss, and in the apartments, whose sequence and later decoration are conventional.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and ask what the picture stops knowing. The centred low sun, the channel of water running down in perspective and the framing wings are the knowledge: the eye is drawn down the corridor into the light, and the departure is felt as a pull toward the vanishing point. Recast the subject as a frieze of figures, as an embarkation might be treated by a painter of figures, and the picture would know about a queen, not about leaving into light. Recast the light from the side and the threshold vanishes. Form is instrument here. The charge is that the wings are a formula carried from picture to picture, so that part of the form is container rather than knowledge.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses most of what it says. Put the same programme into a cathedral of thick walls and small windows and it becomes a painted church; here the history of salvation is not hung on the wall but is the wall, and the worshipper’s whole field of vision is enclosed in it. The glazed triforium is the decisive member: by lighting the middle storey it makes the enclosure continuous from arcade to vault, so that the form, not the iconography alone, says that the church is made of light. The ambulatory and chapels make the liturgy spatial. Held at 8.4 because the form is a received one perfected rather than found, and because the choir enclosure in the nave closes the view east and runs against it.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The pastiche is the instrument: a book arguing that history is a fiction written by interested hands is told in the very voice of the period’s histories, with forged documents, partisan journals and a narrator who apologises at the end for his liberties, so that the form performs the claim. The journals of Smith and Burlingame, given in installments, enact the recovery of the past as the recovery of lies, and Burlingame’s birth is assembled from them as a historian assembles a past, from interested witnesses. The three parts trace a fall and a return: England, the province that fleeces, the estate earned. The verse shows the poem of praise turning into the satire that history kept. Held below the top because the picaresque frame is also a container: the middle part’s episodes could be reordered, and the exchanged identity, repeated often, becomes a mechanism.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told continuously, in the classical manner, White’s novel would be a crime picture about a man ruined by a woman. Broken, it becomes a film about a man who can live only in fragments of what he has read, and a woman who lives in a present tense he cannot enter. The split voice-over is the instrument: the two narrators share the telling and cannot agree on it. The chapter breaks, the comic-strip inserts and the codes of colour are the hero’s consciousness made into cinema. The form also knows its end: the flight runs out of road at the sea, and the image dissolves into the horizon. Held below the top because some devices are applied rather than required, and part of the collage would serve any Godard film of those years.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Set the same moments on the same road in moving pictures: the girl runs past and is gone, the scream has a before and an after, and the soldiers’ walk is one tempo among others. The still arrests her at the instant of open arms and open mouth and will not let her pass; what the photograph knows, that this child is still running and still burning, depends on its being one frame. Black and white makes the smoke a wall and the burned skin a tone rather than a wound in colour, which keeps the image looked at rather than looked away from. Held below the top because the form is the ordinary form of the news photograph, its knowledge given by the instant more than shaped by the maker.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and what is known goes. Frontality and the icon’s symmetry make the figure a devotional image to be faced, not a scene to be watched; the viewer stands where the devout stand before a Man of Sorrows. The literal painting of a metaphor, a real column drawn with an architect’s clarity inside a real torso, is the knowledge: only an image can hold a spine that is a broken column as a seen fact rather than a figure of speech. The small scale is the retablo’s and the hand mirror’s, so the confession is made at the distance of one person. The smooth, enamelled surface keeps the horror from turning expressive. Held below the top because much of the meaning would pass to a drawing or a print.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Make it all in colour, or all in black and white, and the passage from a drab world into a vivid one and back cannot be shown; the film’s whole ambivalence, that it tells the girl home is best while showing the audience that Oz is more alive, lives in the colour. Remove the doubled casting and Oz is a separate place, not Kansas dreamed, and the farmhands at the bedside at the end mean nothing. Remove the songs and the companions have no means to say what they lack, since each declares himself in a song that is his whole character. The form is the instrument, which is unusual in a studio film. What holds it: the city stretch is revue in form, and its numbers could be exchanged for others without the film knowing less.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is like to be Benjamin: walled in, watched, unable to act. The camera is the instrument. He is framed through glass, behind the aquarium, inside the diving mask, against Mrs. Robinson’s bent leg; the long lens holds him in place as he runs. The summer montage, where cuts carry him between the pool and the hotel room with no change of expression, is the knowledge itself: the affair and the idleness are one state. The ending refuses to cut away, and the length of the shot discloses what dialogue could not. The cost is the second half, where campus shot and reverse shot and a chase cut for momentum slacken the instrument until the church.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Yes, at the point that matters. Put the first scheme’s canopy on the building and the public stands beside the parliament, not above it; put a reconstructed Wallot dome on it and the building says empire restored; put a closed roof on it and the chamber is lit by lamps and the public kept outside. The dome over the chamber, open to anyone who climbs, is how the building knows the relation of people to parliament, and the stripped walls are how it knows its past. A visit is lived as an ascent over the debating floor and a descent past it. What holds the axis: the offices, the faction rooms and most of the working building would know the same thing in another form, and the inherited exterior frames the new knowledge without being changed by it.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Much. The equal finish is the knowledge: because the drowning face is given no more focus than a nettle, the world’s indifference is seen rather than said. Paint the subject with Romantic chiaroscuro, the figure lit and the bank sunk in shadow, and the picture knows pity instead, a lesser and more common thing. The horizontal format lays the body along the stream and gives the water no depth to go into; she is held on the surface as the dress holds her for a while. The brightness of the bank lets a dying scene read as a summer day. Held below the top by a join: the light on the figure and the light on the bank are not, to every eye, one light.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much is lost. In relief or painting the scribe at his roll is a common motif and states the office; in the round, at this scale and with inlaid eyes, the figure occupies space before the viewer and meets him, and that encounter is what the work knows: that an image can attend. The crossed legs make the body a closed pyramid from knees to head, the kilt a table, the man and his work one shape. The colour gives the materials of a living man. Painted limestone, softer than granite or diorite, allows the softness of the torso, which carries the meaning of the office. Held below 9 because a second figure of the type in a harder stone keeps much of what it says.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two voices are the argument. The third-person chase knows nothing of meaning and moves by consequence; the first-person monologue knows only meaning and arrives after every consequence. Told as a chase alone, the book is a thriller whose hero dies; told as Bell’s memoir alone, it is a lament. Together they show a man always one scene behind, and the form puts the reader where Bell stands: Moss’s death is learned as Bell learns it, at a motel already taped off. The italic openings move from report toward confession, and the last chapter gives the book over to Bell entirely, which is how it reveals that his story was the subject all along. Held below the top because the chase sections, taken alone, are not formally unusual, and the alternation is regular rather than progressive until the end.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The dot laid in layers is the instrument: each pass covers and reveals the one before, so that the field shows growth over ground and the restricted design under a public surface in the same act. Make it a map of signs and it becomes the Papunya diagram, knowledge set out rather than lived. Make it smaller and the country becomes a sample. Give it a horizon and the viewer stands outside the land the painting puts him in. The continuous field across four panels is the form of country without an edge. It is held below the top because the same form serves a great many of the painter’s canvases of 1991 to 1994, and because the division into panels, compelled by the making, is not used by the image.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is the absorption of a person into the ornament of her station, and only this form holds it: modelled flesh set against flat leaf, so that the eye registers two physics in one figure and reads the body as surviving only at face and hands. Paint the gown in oil and the absorption becomes a costume; paint the face flat and no person is left to be absorbed. The square holds the gold round her without a horizon. The metal is the form, not the colour of the form: leaf behaves in light as no pigment does, and the picture’s sacral and monetary claim is made in actual gold. Held below the top because the ornament’s internal design is less necessary than its presence: the form knows its central thing completely and its particulars less.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Put a third person in place of Charles’s journal and the book loses most of what it knows. The Hartley of the novel exists only as a figure the reader reconstructs against the narrator’s account; the book’s truth lives in the gap between what Charles writes and what his own reported scenes show. The form also carries time: the “Prehistory” is written in calm, before the summer’s events, and the “History” is told after them, so that the narrator’s prose itself shows the damage. The “Postscript”, titled “Life Goes On”, turns the form on itself: Charles, back in London, keeps writing, resolves to change, and is visibly the same man, and the book’s last judgment on him is made by form rather than by statement. The cost is length: the form permits the sprawl as well as compelling the knowledge.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Substantially. The wires are real copper, physically joining real fragments to a real board: the gathering is enacted in matter, not depicted. In reproduction the wires nearly vanish and the work becomes a picture of a pyramid; before the canvas they are its drawing. The relief makes the painting ground and burial site at once, with things lying in it rather than painted on it. The scale puts the viewer at the foot of a monument. Held below the top because the pyramid’s frontal perspective and the burnt architectural setting are a form Kiefer used for other buildings in other canvases of the decade: part of the form is a container brought to this content.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing its subject. In painting the scene would be one view and one instant; in the round the instant is held while the viewer moves, and the near kiss is near from every side and resolved from none. The crossing reads as descent and rise from the side, as an enclosing ring from the front, as one sweep of back and limb from behind: the form distributes the meaning round the object, which the fable in words cannot do. The polish of the flesh against the rougher rock is the difference between the living and the stone she lay on. Held below the top because the group keeps preferred views, and from some angles the knot of limbs reads as arrangement rather than knowledge.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and ask what the building stops knowing. Widen it to the proportions of a Kievan church and the figure in the landscape is gone: the church would sit in the meadow instead of standing over it. Strip the arcade and the reliefs and the wall loses the scale by which the eye reads its height. Take away the mound and the dedication’s image, protection over the flood, loses its ground. The form carries the meaning: a guardian figure, upright, alone, white, over water. Held below the top because the interior is a standard four-pier liturgical space, unchanged by the outward idea, and the lost gallery altered how the form was approached.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. Substitute a four-legged truss and the tower stops saying that a curved surface is made of straight lines, that stiffness can come from the double curvature of a net, and that so little steel can rise so high; substitute a guyed mast and it says nothing at all. The structure is the whole statement, and the form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. The other half of the question for a building is how its purpose is lived, and a mast’s purpose is lived by few: the form let the antenna rise lighter, cheaper and more open to the wind, and let the tower be raised from within itself. A real change, and a narrow one.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The knowledge is in the distortion of scale, which only a depicted body can carry: in words the giant foot is a description, here it is a weight the viewer stands under, the foot nearest and largest and the head farthest and smallest, so that the eye climbs the body as it climbs a statue or a mountain. The smoothed modelling, volume without texture, makes the body vegetable and of one substance with the cactus; a naturalistic surface would make it a deformed man. The few colours make it national without a flag. Held below the top because the emblem survives a loss of paint: the drawing after it in the Revista de Antropofagia kept it well in line alone.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of the knowledge goes. As a painting the scene would be a genre picture of emigrants, composed and therefore claimed; the photograph knows that these divisions were there, at that instant, in a real ship, and that the shapes were found and not imposed. That is its whole argument about modernism and about fact. The vertical format stacks the decks and lets the gangway cut the frame. The photogravure carries the knowledge too: ink in a plate, a deep and even tonal scale, a print that could be published and shared in a journal rather than a unique exhibition print. Held below the high 8s because much of what the image knows survives a small, coarse reproduction, as its circulation proves.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A continuous memoir would have to narrate time, and time at Teishi’s court ran to exile and death; the miscellany, discontinuous and without chronology, keeps every moment at its own height, and its silence about the fall is a property of the form, not only a choice. The list is the second instrument: a category with its members is a judgment held open, so the world is known as a field of discriminations rather than a sequence of events. The mixture of kinds is the third: a scene of the Empress’s wit beside a list of hateful things makes the court’s grandeur and its irritations one texture. Held off the top because the order is not secured: the Maedabon and Sakaibon lines rearrange the sections by kind, and the work survives it.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. The three-book shape is the cosmology made structure: the ground in The Boroughs, the upper town in Mansoul, and the inquest that gathers them in Vernall’s Inquest. The chapters of the first and third books are scattered across centuries and persons and then shown to touch, so that the reader comes to hold the district as the dead hold it, all its times present at once; the change of style from chapter to chapter is the change of consciousness across the centuries. A family saga told in sequence could not say that time is a block in which every moment stands. Held off the top because the middle book leaves that instrument for a linear adventure in one register, and because many chapters within the frame could be reordered or cut without the form losing its argument.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. Painted, the same pepper would be a still life in the line of Chardin or Cézanne, and its claim would be the painter’s invention. The photograph knows what it knows because it carries the claim that this was there: a real pepper, bought in Carmel, had this form, and the eye did not invent it. That indexical claim is the instrument of the disclosure, form found and not made. The contact print matters too: no enlargement stands between negative and print, so tone and sharpness are the negative’s own, at the scale of the thing. Held below the high 8s because the image travels well at the size of a page.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The magnification is the knowledge: at natural size this is a botanical plate, and the disclosure of attention is gone. The cropping is the knowledge: with a border of ground round it the flower is an object seen from outside; cut by the edges, it is a space the viewer is inside. The gradation is the knowledge: the dark is reached by degrees, so that blackness reads as depth and not as a flat silhouette, and the threshold the painting is about is made of tone. The upright format lets the descent run from a pale top to a black base. Held below the top because the form is shared with the series, and this canvas sharpens the series’ knowledge by its dark rather than founding it.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the wall knows goes. In the round it would be a sculpture among objects; frontal and shallow, it is architecture to be faced. In any colour but one, the fragments would be read as what they were, chair, crate, newel post, and the transformation of refuse into order would collapse into a display of refuse: the single black is the instrument of the knowledge. Smaller, it would be a cabinet, private and held; at over three metres it is a facade, public and imposing. The cells must be real depths with real shadows, which a painting of the wall would lose. Held below the top because some of the knowledge is portable to the sister walls, and the irregular grid could take other arrangements.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and most of what the work knows is gone. At life size and against nothing, the horse is met as a presence the viewer must stand up to, body to body; in a landscape at cabinet size the same horse would be a fine portrait of property. The bare ground makes the animal the only reality, removes the hour, the season and the place, and turns the picture from record to apparition. The twist of the head toward us is the form of the relation: the viewer is the only other being in the work. Painting alone can hold the rearing instant still for as long as one looks. Held below the high band because the anatomy and the animal’s individuality are also stated in Stubbs’s engraved plates and smaller portraits.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. Replace the single high arch with a level bridge on piers and the crossing ceases to be an event: the climb to the crown, the pause there with the river beneath and the town on both hands, the descent to the other bank, all depend on the arch carrying the road on its back. One does not pass Stari Most so much as go over it, and the ridged paving makes the body feel the gradient at each step. The arch is also what makes the dive possible, so the form is the instrument of the town’s chief rite. What holds the axis: the form knows one thing, and the passage it shapes is a few dozen steps.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and much is lost, because what the canvas knows lives in three decisions. The transparency is the knowledge of coexistence: painted opaque, the discs would stack and hide one another, and the picture would know hierarchy instead. The dark ground is the knowledge of space: on white, as in his Bauhaus watercolours and prints, the circles are figures on paper; on this clouded dark they are bodies in a depth. The square removes direction: no up, no down, nothing to fall, which a cosmos requires. In oil the dark ground has a body that a print loses. Held below the top because the form largely restates, at full strength, what the circle studies of 1923 to 1926 had already found.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Almost wholly, and there is a control: the same act was filmed by Vo Suu for NBC, and the film was broadcast. In the film the shot passes in a moment, the body falls, blood runs; it is horrifying, and it is not this image. The still is the one form that holds the instant of death open, the face at the impact, for as long as the viewer can bear to look; the knowledge of the work is the stopping of that instant. As a painting it would be an invention; as a written account, a report. Black and white strips the street of its colour and holds the image to gesture and face. Held below the top because the form is the medium’s ordinary form, used as any press photograph is used.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Cast one actress, and Conchita becomes a woman with a character, capricious or calculating, and the film becomes Louÿs’s, a study of a cruel woman; with two, she becomes a place in a man’s mind, and the knowledge is about him. Remove the frame, and the account loses its partiality: this is a man’s case for himself, told to strangers who are entertained, and Conchita on the train is the one person present who could contradict him. Remove the bombings, and the obsession loses the world it ignores. The form is the instrument at three levels. What holds the axis here is what lies between them: the episodic body inside the frame is plain linear narration, inherited grammar well used, its episodes interchangeable, and the device works from the casting more than from the cutting or the camera.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. The knowledge is in the arrangement in space. The painting is horizontal, so it is ground and not view; the goat stands on it, so the art of the wall becomes a pasture an animal inhabits; the tyre circles the body, so two found things become one figure. A painting of a goat with a tyre would know none of this. A goat with a tyre on a plinth would lose the claim on painting. The second state, with the upright canvas behind, showed that keeping the wall kept the two apart. The casters make it an object among objects. Held below the top because the platform’s collage is in part interchangeable.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely, since it has nothing but form, and what it knows is tension between kinds of form. The soft halo on the black circle is set against hard edges everywhere else, so the canvas knows two kinds of edge, atmospheric and drawn, and their meeting. The open ground lets each form act as a single voice, where a filled field would make a texture. The diagonal opposition of the heavy round pole at the upper left and the sharp angular pole at the lower right is the counterpoint; turn the horizontal field upright and the polarity becomes a fall rather than a tension across. Held below the top because much of the vocabulary is common to the canvases of 1923 to 1926, and in the middle order another arrangement of small forms would change little of what is known.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that Max lives his life as a production. The curtains that open on each month make the film one of his plays; the clubs montage is his own prospectus; the flat, frontal compositions are stage pictures, so that the world looks as Max would stage it. The form then carries the change. The war is staged as Max’s revenge plot and fails as theatre fails when its audience is real; the last play turns his staging outward, giving parts to Margaret, Magnus and Dirk, seating Blume and Rosemary together and dedicating itself to the two dead. The closing curtain is drawn by the film, no longer by Max. The cost: the Grover Cleveland and barbershop passages return to plainer grammar.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Change it and the picture loses its knowledge, which is stiffness: the frontal, symmetrical, close-cropped double portrait in which two people present themselves to be looked at and give nothing away. Loosen the facture into Impressionist touch and the guardedness dissolves; turn the figures toward each other and the household becomes a story; open the space and the pair stop being a monument and become a scene. The upright compression of the panel, the repeated vertical forms and the borrowed devotional format are the instrument of the meaning. Held below the top because the knowledge the form carries is narrow: it makes one kind of statement, with great precision.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The frieze is the knowledge: a march across a wide field from left to right, the child small within it, the movement unending. The viewpoint sits near her height, so that the frame cuts the men where she would see them, at their bodies; the cropping is her view and the state’s anonymity in one decision. The mob stands outside the frame on the viewer’s side, which only a picture with one fixed station can do; a film or a crowd scene would show them and let the viewer off. A photograph of the day shows the marshals’ faces and makes them men. Held below the top because much of the knowledge survives the passage to a page and a poster.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a masonry hall with large windows and the purpose fails: the palms could not have been kept. Here the form is the instrument of the use more than in almost any type of building. Every surface admits light and the curve distributes it; the height sets the stance of the visitor, below the palms on the floor and among them on the gallery, so that a plant is seen from root to crown. The heat and damp are made by the closure of the form and lived by the body, and arrival is a passage from English air into the tropics through a single door. The form also changed how a public garden is lived, making botany a destination. It knows one thing, a climate and its plants, and the iron’s corrosion in that very climate was the form’s own weakness.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. In natural colour the man becomes a particular beggar in a particular street; the blue takes him out of the street and into a condition. The one warm area, the guitar, carries the argument that his music is the last warmth left in him, and that argument is made in colour, not in drawing. The fold of the body into the upright field is the form of confinement, and the elongation is the form of the spirit: shorten the limbs and the figure is merely thin. Held below the top because the form is in large part the period’s, applied here rather than found here: the same blue and the same elongation carry other subjects in the same months.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the work knows goes. The knowledge lives in the silhouette, and only a life-size, full-length, tall format on an empty ground can make a woman into a shape the eye reads before it reads a face. The near-frontal body with the strict profile head is a formal paradox that is the content: she is wholly shown and does not look back. The colour reduced to three notes makes her skin the light of the picture. A bust, a group, a setting or a frontal gaze would make a different and lesser statement. Held below the top because the image carries almost as well at reduced scale and in reproduction, and because the long skirt is format more than form.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The voice-over of the letters joins two places the plot keeps apart, so that the marriage is the film’s real body and the prison and the farm are its two halves; a trial film told from the dock would lose Fani, and with her the cost. The hidden life of the title is the inner one, and only an interior voice laid over outward labour can carry it: the act is invisible, the voice is heard. The untranslated German makes the state an order of sound rather than of argument, which is what the refusal declines to enter. Held below the top because this form is its maker’s general instrument, applied here rather than found for this matter: the same lens bends a bishop’s study and a judge’s chamber as it bends a meadow, and the voice sometimes says what the image has already shown.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the eye which looks for the strong man will miss the stronger. The film is shot and cut so that the viewer watches Phil, as everyone in the house does, and reads Peter as Phil does, a victim in the making. The pieces of the murder are filmed as Peter’s oddities, not as plans: the gloves, the rabbit and the hide are given no music of menace. The chapter cards divide the film into the time of a slow procedure. The withheld knowledge is released only after the death, in the doctor’s word and in gloved hands sliding the rope under a bed. Told straight, it would be a thriller. What holds it below the top: the Rose chapters are filmed in a more conventional mode.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
At its best the form is the knowledge. The work argues that word and image together make worlds, and argues it in the one medium where word and image are made together. Render the ascent in prose and the teaching survives while the knowledge, which lies in the changing manner of each sphere, goes. The Tarot issue cannot be paraphrased: its claim that the cards tell one story is made by drawing them as one picture. The last issue makes the reader the operator of the magic it describes. In long stretches the form is the container: the opening arc is told in the grammar of an ordinary action comic, the hiding and pursuit of the last third could be told in any form, and in the ascent the captions often carry what the pages already show.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because what it knows is accumulation. A collective builds from one line to eight players in unison, and the build is the content: the solidarity the titles name is enacted by instruments joining. Mladic keeps its theme while the mass grows around it, so the same melody heard thin and heard pulverised is the piece’s argument about force. We Drift layers small interlocking figures until they become one surge. Played as five-minute songs, these pieces would keep their tunes and lose their meaning. What holds it lower is that the form is not compelled throughout: the band issued the drones on a separable seven-inch, and in the plateaus of We Drift length is permitted rather than compelled.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. As the photograph it reproduces, it would be a private keepsake, with no distance and no address. As a portrait painted from life or from imagination, it would assert a judgment, heroic or accusing, which this picture withholds. The painting from a photograph knows that the uncle is available to the descendant only as an image, and an image already made by someone else, for the family. The blur knows that this image cannot be brought into focus, neither sharpened to accuse nor cleared to mourn. The grey knows that the picture is a record, not a scene. Held below the top because the form is the method’s, shared with many canvases, and part of what it knows the method knew already.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is a collision of three things in one place: a name, the colour it is lettered in and the colour it lies on. That collision exists only in paint; said in a sentence it is a remark, seen it is a check the eye cannot avoid. The stencil matters: a mechanical, impersonal letter set against the hand’s stroke, so that two kinds of making meet as two kinds of meaning. The all-over format matters: no centre, every name equal, the eye kept moving and never allowed to settle on one verdict. The size lets the field be taken whole and then read word by word, two acts the work sets against each other. Held below the top because part of the form is a method that transfers: the colour-name works that follow run the scheme again, and much of the knowledge survives the transfer.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film stops knowing its main thing, that civilisation is a costume on an animal. Live action could not dress foxes in suits and make their wildness felt; computer animation would smooth away the matter. Here the puppets are made objects, their fur stirring between frames, so the wild is in the material while the manners are in the costume and the diorama. The flat staging, rooms in cross-section and burrows in elevation like an anthill, makes the world a made thing seen through glass, and the eruptions of animal behaviour, the gobbling, the snarls, the flick into a fighting stance, break the frame’s decorum from within. The handmade surface also gives the comedy its texture of things owned and coveted. The cost: the farmers’ plot is told by the form more than known through it.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Printed small in a comic, the panel is the thing the painting is about, not a painting about it; the knowledge exists only in the transfer to canvas, by hand, at size. The dots made by hand are the knowledge: a machine’s mark made by a person, showing the mass image as made. The diptych is the knowledge: the split turns a single panel into a duel and gives the shot an interval to cross. The scale is the knowledge: enlargement makes the convention visible as convention. Held below the top because the content of the panels is largely given by the source, and the form’s knowledge is the same in the other war paintings of these years.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The form is the knowledge, and the axis is the film’s highest. The camera is held to Curtis’s experience and the dreams arrive unmarked, so the viewer cannot tell vision from waking until he wakes, and in the second hour stops trusting the waking scenes too: the condition of the man is given as the condition of watching. The withheld storm makes the audience share a waiting he cannot explain. The shelter turns the form inside out: a real storm, a real siren, and the question becomes whether he can open the door, which is whether he can trust the world. The coda puts the vision into other eyes. Told as a case history from outside, the film would know only a diagnosis. Held from the top by the middle, where long stretches are ordinary coverage.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The cut is the knowledge: a line incised through gold is an opening in the light onto something beneath it, so the grid is made of absences of gold, and the measure of the field is literally drawn out of it. Painted lines would lie on the surface and the relation would be lost. The gold is the knowledge: it makes the field a light that moves with the viewer, so the even grid is seen inside a surface that is never even. The square at body scale is the knowledge: no direction dominates, the field is met face to face, and it reads as exact structure close to and as haze at a distance. Held below the top because the hand-ruled grid at body scale the series already knew, and the title carries a part of the meaning the form does not.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows. It knows constancy against change, and it knows it because the figure does not change while everything around it does: the saxophone ages through it, the strings come and go, the organ rises. Cut the record into songs, vary the figure, or give Sanders a conventional solo structure, and the meaning, a promise held across time, is gone. The continuous span of about forty-six minutes is the instrument: the climax means what it means only after the long vigil. The sequence is counted here, once. What holds the axis below the highest marks: the movement divisions are partly index points, and the arc is inherited rather than invented.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. In oil the coat would be modelled as mass; in pen or engraving it would be line and hatching, and Dürer’s own engravings show what that knows and what it cannot. Watercolour washes give the warm body of the fur and its depth; bodycolour laid hair by hair over them gives each hair as a separate stroke of light, so that the coat is known at once as a mass and as a field of particulars. That double knowledge is what the work knows. The paper ground, left as no place, removes setting, so that the creature is known only through itself. Held below the top because a finished drawing in coloured chalks or a fine panel could carry much of the same knowledge: the best instrument, not the only one.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the work loses most of what it knows. As a photograph or an anatomical drawing the body is an image, and the knowledge that this is a real cow, dead, here, at one’s own height, goes. As one tank with the whole animal there is no inside and no division; as one cut animal without the calf, no mother and no child. The form is the instrument: the cut plane is a window, the glass shows and seals, the gap makes the viewer what stands between the halves, and the parting of the pairs is the second division. Held below the top because the vitrine is inherited and shared, and the label gives much of what the work knows before one enters.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. Paint the same shapes in opaque oil on a primed ground and the picture loses its one proposition: that colour can be in the canvas, not on it, with no separation of image and support. The bare canvas is not a frame for the colour but its light, and only an unprimed ground can give that. The size lets the field be entered by the eye and read as open space rather than as an object on a wall. The floor method, the colour poured and spread from above, is legible in the shapes of the pools. Held below the top because the charcoal belongs to an older form, a drawn landscape laid under the new one, which the form did not need.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows changes almost wholly, because its knowledge is in its material. In vinyl it is the toy; in bronze or marble it is a monument to a toy and loses the joke of breath; painted, it loses the mirror and with it the viewer; without the seams it loses the record of what it was. Only polished steel holds all of it at once: weightlessness rendered as weight, a surface that cannot be looked at without being looked into, a cheap thing made at the cost of a precious one. The blank face is form as instrument, the place where a face would be becoming the place where the beholder’s appears. Held below the top because the shape is found, not made, and much of the argument travels through photographs and the price.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is the contrast between the instant and the enduring, and it is carried by two kinds of making set side by side: an even field with no visible stroke for everything that lasts, and small strokes, lines and dots for the one thing that does not. Paint the picture in one manner and the contrast goes, and with it what the picture knows about time. The square knows something too: no direction dominates, so the board’s diagonal and the splash it ends in are the only movement. The bare border knows that this is an image of an image, a print held at its edge. The scale knows the body: the splash is about the size of what it records. Held below the top because the house and palms, drawn as a stage set, could be another set without loss.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and most of what the work knows goes. A photograph of the room would give the light and the back but not the grey the painter makes of everything, the softening by which walls, dress and floor are brought into one tone so that the sunlight alone is allowed to be other. A narrative in prose or film would set the woman going and end the stillness that is the knowledge. The small size makes the viewer a single watcher at a doorway, close to the room and outside it. The light lies on the floor in the shape of the window, so that the room’s geometry is shown twice, once in paint and once in light. Held below the top because the form is a manner that serves many canvases.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the work loses most of what it knows. With a contrasting middle, or as variations, it would know grief as something that turns and concludes; the arch with one summit and an open end knows it as one continuous pressure that breaks and is not resolved. The silence after the climax is form doing the knowing. The string orchestra adds what the quartet cannot: mass at the summit, and a sound sustained without breath or decay for a line that must not stop. Held below the top because the music lives as quartet, string orchestra and choir with its knowledge intact, and the sequential climb is nearer a container.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
In the strongest songs the form is what the song knows. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” sets a death wish to a lilting major tune with strings: the happiness of the form is the speaker’s, and without it the song would be a lament, which it is not. “I Know It’s Over” grows by accretion and never releases, because nothing will change, and “Never Had No One Ever” refuses harmonic relief for the same reason. The sequence counts: nation to buried self on the first side, comedy to the light on the second, grief alternating with comedy as the form of the voice. “Vicar in a Tutu” and “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” are containers for a joke.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The morality’s external voices, the two Angels, set beside the soliloquy, make the play’s question formal: are these voices outside him or his own? The form keeps both answers in play, and the predestinarian doubt the play is known for lives in that doubling. The last hour is the form’s great stroke: twenty-four years compressed to an hour, the hour struck on stage at eleven, at the half and at twelve, so that the verse itself runs out of time and breaks into half-lines and cries. The Chorus’s moral is a container the verse overflows, and the gap is meaning. Held below the upper band because the episodic middle is the Faust Book’s container, not the play’s instrument: its scenes could be reordered without altering what the play knows.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Another form would change much of what the book knows. The divan, the poet’s collected book divided by kind, lets Goethe hold love, wine, wisdom, complaint, history and paradise in named compartments under one mask, and the mask is the knowledge: a self that is one and double needs a form in which one poet writes as another and is answered by a third voice. The Suleika book’s dialogue is its own argument, since the beloved answers in a woman’s voice and in part in her own verses. The prose Notes complete the form’s claim that East and West must be explained to one another. Held at 8.3 by the looseness of several books, whose poems could change places with little loss, and by Notes attached more than fused.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The short chapters are tableaux, often leaping years between them; history arrives as a sequence of scenes rather than a continuous life, so the cycle of rulers is felt as recurrence and not as development. The narration grants the marvellous and the documented the same standing, and that equality is the method’s knowledge: the slaves’ sight is never corrected. Ti Noël at both ends, a witness who acts little and endures everything, makes the book a life as long as the cycle. Charged: he is absent for long stretches; the European episodes are joined to the frame by theme more than by form; and the close turns from tableau to statement, handing its meaning over in a sentence rather than holding it.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the songs stop knowing what they know. The pursuit in “Hellhound on My Trail” is in the rhythm: the broken treble and the irregular bars are the inability to rest. In “Come On in My Kitchen” the slide finishes the voice’s lines, a dialogue between a man and an instrument that speaks for him; in “Crossroads Blues” the slide is the voice’s echo on an empty road. With no band to keep time, the bar stretches to the breath, and that freedom is the sound of one consciousness. The sequence, counted once, is weaker: neither chronological nor built, though it ends on a true close. Several sides on one accompaniment model show the form as habit as well as instrument.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the book knows? In large part, yes. A continuous narrative could not do what the sequence does: the book knows America as fragments that a vision must span, and the form is a span, separate poems held between two arches, with a day and a westward and backward journey as its cables. The marginal gloss beside The River sets the train’s advertising against the land’s silence on the page itself; Cutty Sark’s typographic counterpoint sets a drunk sailor’s talk against a vision of clippers; The Tunnel runs the commuter’s ride as a descent. There form is the instrument. But the weaker poems, the ballad of Indiana and the loose paragraphs of Quaker Hill, are in forms that know nothing their content does not state, and the architecture is legible more from Crane’s letters than from the sequence.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The form makes the Passion a route, as no other form would. The pilgrim enters, finds the Stone of Unction before the door, climbs to Calvary, goes down to the chapels below, walks the ambulatory past the chapels of the Mocking and of the Division of Raiment, and ends at the tomb: the Gospel walked under one roof. The rotunda round the Edicule makes the Holy Fire possible as it is. And the partition among the communities makes the division of the churches something a visitor passes through, door by door. What holds it: the Constantinian sequence from street through atrium and basilica to the tomb is lost, the entry is sideways, and the form knows its purpose by accretion.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
In “Sylvie” the form is the knowledge. The confusion of tenses is the confusion of the women; retold in order, the story would lose what it knows, that the three are folded together only in memory. In the sonnets the closure of the form is the form of the obsession it holds. But the book’s own form, a miscellany of nouvelles under a conceit, with a verse appendix, is a container. “Jemmy”, “Corilla” and “Émilie” could be reordered or dropped and the volume would know the same things. Credited for the two works whose forms are their instrument; charged for the frame that holds them.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Much of the knowledge lives in the form. The army is never seen and is felt at every exit: a play built on an offstage mass is the way to show leaders governed by a crowd. The chorus are women from Chalcis come across the strait to gape at the ships, spectators of war’s glamour, and their catalogue of heroes is the glamour the play then costs out. The rhythm of reversals, letter and counter-letter, Menelaus’s change, Achilles’ pledge and failure, Iphigenia’s turn, makes the form an argument about decisions that do not decide. Her passage from spoken supplication to sung monody to sung procession enacts her passage from the house to the altar. Held down because the stasima are lightly attached.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form: a Lodi octagon in a walled court would house the grave, but the visitor would come to a tomb, not into paradise. Here the form makes the visit a passage: through the gate, along the causeway beside the water, up the plinth, and into a room where the dead lie at the centre of four ways. The ninefold plan lets the cenotaph be circled through the chambers round it, and the plinth makes the household’s graves part of the emperor’s house, so that the form changes how a dynasty buries and remembers. Held lower because the interior knows less than the exterior: the rooms round the centre and the upper storey are passages and voids more than lived space, and the true grave, the object of the building, is hidden in a chamber few enter.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The epigraphs are the book’s best formal idea. Every chapter is headed by a document written later, by the Princess Irulan or from the “Manual of Muad’Dib”, so that the reader reads the legend before the event and watches the event become the legend. The first sets the double time of the whole: “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” Change that and the book loses its knowledge of how history manufactures a saint. The appendices and glossary do the same work from outside, presenting the world as a field of record rather than a backdrop, and the omniscient narration, moving between plotting minds within a scene, is the right instrument for a contest of schemes. What holds the axis is that much of the form is the container of an adventure, and the three-book shape sags where Book Three compresses: the jihad the epigraphs prepare is left largely outside it.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Put a conventional stadium, a domed hall and a pool hall on the site and the Games lose their character: the park becomes a group of objects, the visitor passes from building to building by gates and forecourts, and the state has a monument. The roofs make the venues and the paths one ground under one veil, entered from the grass on every side, and that is how the Games and the park have been lived since: a crowd walking out of the stadium onto the slopes, a swimmer looking up through a net to the sky. The form is the instrument of the openness it claims. What holds the axis: under the roofs the venues are used as any stadium, hall and pool are; the game is played on a bowl the roof barely touches; and the form changes how the place is seen more than how its purposes are done.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops saying what it says. Without the multiplied colonnades the interior would lose its quality of a space always opening into more space, which is how it holds a city at once and lets each part of the congregation find its own aisle and altar. Without the banding the surfaces would lose the continuous line that binds column to wall to façade and makes the whole one fabric. Without the gallery façade the threshold would be a wall, not a screen of light and depth that tells the city what the inside is. The form is the instrument of what the church knows: that it stands at the meeting point of a Mediterranean world. Held at 8.3 because the joined transepts and the dome are solutions more than revelations.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form’s one great decision bears the weight: the novel ends in the poems, and the prose turns out to have been the life from which they came. Change that and the book stops knowing what it knows, that a life lost to history survives as art, that the winter at Varykino, the candle and the Moscow years become “Winter Night” and “August”. The second decision is the coincidental plot: lives cross by chance across the whole of Russia, and the form says what the book believes, that providence works through accident and history’s design is not the real one. Below that the form is often a container. The episodic middle could be arranged otherwise without loss, and the passing of years in Book Two is told in summary that another shape would have served as well. A book whose crown is formally necessary and whose body is in parts conventional.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Drawn, the body can do what a live body cannot: Tetsuo’s arm assembles from debris, his flesh spreads through the stadium with the logic of a nightmare, and the metamorphosis is continuous with the line that draws the city, so that the city and the body are one material that power deforms. In 1988 no live-action film could have shown this, and the knowledge, that a body cannot hold the power it is given, belongs to the form. The drawn city also lets every surface be designed, so that the whole film is one made world. Held well below the top because the narrative form is the action film’s: chase, capture, escape, rampage, showdown. The compression of the manga lives in that form without being shaped by it, and the film’s structure could be told otherwise without loss.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute an ordinary Eixample block and much of what the house knows is lost. The courtyards make arrival a passage from the street into a well of light, not a door and a stair. The free plan, set out on pillars, lets each flat be drawn round light and view rather than round walls. The roof is a place to be walked, not a lid, and the attic’s arches are the shape of its undulation. The form changes how the city meets a building more than almost any house of flats in Europe. Held lower because it changes less how dwelling itself is lived: within the flats the rooms bend to the curves without the curves serving the life, and what the form knows is seen most fully from the street, the halls and the roof, the parts least lived in.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Where the form is the knowledge, it is entirely so. “Del rigor en la ciencia” must be a paragraph presented as a citation, because its subject is the map that grows to the size of what it maps; at length it would refute itself. “Borges y yo” must be under a page, because it is a page that does not know who writes it. The epilogue turns the miscellany into the drawing that becomes a face, and offers the book’s disorder as a self-portrait: a real formal idea, and it lifts the unit. Held down because the idea is announced at the end rather than built through the order, and much of the verse would mean what it means in any other collection: “Ajedrez” and “El reloj de arena” lose nothing read alone.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the worship changes. A figure set in the open, or in a wide hall seen from far off, is an object. Here the walls stand close and the roof low over the halo, so the image is met as a presence: approached from below, walked round, too large to be taken in from any one place. The building places the visitor at the figure’s knee. The axial approach makes the encounter an arrival, through gate, guardians, court, lantern and doors, so that the figure is reached rather than merely seen. What holds the axis is that the narrowing of 1709, which produced the close encounter, was forced by want of timber and money rather than chosen for it: the form’s knowledge is partly an accident of reduction.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the film knows changes in two places. First, the delay: by withholding killing for most of its length and making each death slow or squalid, Davey in the canyon and Quick Mike in the privy, the film makes violence weigh, so that the speed of the last scene is felt as a reversion. Second, the frame: the title cards, from the point of view of the dead wife’s mother, set the whole story inside a family’s ignorance of it; she never learns why her daughter married him. Beauchamp is the form’s inner mirror. Held below the top because, those choices apart, the grammar is the studio western’s, plainly used, and the frame does not govern the middle.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows: that stage and life are one continuum for Dieyi and two worlds for Xiaolou. The form makes this visible. The performances are not interludes; each staging of the title opera marks the state of the pair, and the camera passes between the painted face and the face beneath, so that the paint is the self and its removal a loss. The frame in 1977, the two in costume in an empty hall, makes the whole chronicle a rehearsal, and the last action closes the play inside the film. The training scenes use the opera school’s rhythm, chant and blow, as editing. Held at its figure because the body of the film fills the chronicle melodrama’s inherited grammar well rather than remaking it.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The form is the performance in the room: a head arrangement built around Franklin’s piano, a rhythm section that follows her, and a lead voice answered by other voices. Change it to written charts and strings, the form of her Columbia records, and the record can no longer say what it says, because the authority it discloses is made by a woman leading a band from the keyboard and a choir from the lead. The sequence, counted here once, adds a frame: the private claim of “Respect” at one end and the public hope of “A Change Is Gonna Come” at the other. The middle is less shaped. Side one runs from a blues ballad to a light cover to two slighter songs of Franklin’s own without much argument, and the frame is placed more than built.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The record’s form is a service, sermon, profanity, confession, sacrifice and hymn, built so that the profane and the sacred stand in one sequence, and the live recording beneath the last three tracks carries meaning: a congregation is heard behind the hymn. When Doves Cry’s missing bass is form as knowledge in one song, where what is absent is the content. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side passes from the sermon through love to obsession and Darling Nikki’s degradation, the second from the father’s wound to sacrifice, display and the hymn. Held below the top because most of the songs would stand alone, Take Me with U and Baby I’m a Star are containers for the film’s needs, and the frame is set by the first and last tracks more than enacted between them.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of what the building knows is lost. Set the church in a town street, as most English cathedrals were, and the close’s statement of a liberty apart is gone: the green, the wall and the gates make the community’s separateness a fact of space. Take away the spire and the church no longer governs its landscape, and the axis the plan points upward is lost. The double transept and the ambulatory shape the liturgy’s movement: stations, a separate choir crossing, a procession round the east end into the Trinity Chapel and out through the cloister. The chapter house puts the canons in a ring round one support. Held below the top because the nave’s elevation could be another English nave’s without the building saying much less.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. A plotted novel of this material would have made Suttree’s life a story with a climax and a moral; the episodic form says the life has no plot, that it is days, that the river carries everything past and returns nothing. The unnumbered sections, running into one another, are the river’s form. The italic frame, addressed to a “Dear friend” and closing on the huntsman, sets the whole as a vision of a city of the living and the dead, and makes a departure the only exit the form allows. The density of the prose is the instrument of attention, the refusal to let any discarded thing go unnamed. Held off the top because the form is in part a container: the middle takes episodes by accretion, and another order of them would not change what the book knows.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. Put the villa on one axis, a palace on a plan, and its knowledge goes: that a life can be lived as a journey through separate places, each its own world, entered by turning. The form makes leisure a sequence of arrivals; the island makes solitude a moat; the hidden service ways make an emperor’s household two cities, one above and one below. The form does not contain the programme of a collected world; it is that programme. What holds it: the use of most rooms is unknown, so how the form changed the life in them is inferred from the plan, and the episodic plan admits parts whose form tells nothing particular.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. The painting knows what it knows by putting the dead and the living into one light and one space, at near life scale, before guild members who would stand where its sitters stood; the viewer becomes the next attendant at the table, and the surgeon at the top who looks out confirms the place. The diagonal of the corpse against the pyramid of heads is the argument: the horizontal of death, the rising mass of the living who examine it. Told as an engraving or a description, the hierarchy of attention would survive, but not the colour of the corpse, the difference between dead and living flesh, which is the painting’s knowledge. Held below because the faces turned for recognition are a content the form serves rather than transforms.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. The cross of halls and the central stair make the keep a building of convergence: every lodging opens on a hall, every hall on the stair, and the movement of the court passes through one point where all can see it. The four equal lodgings give each great person a suite of his own, turning the single household of the hall into a set of private establishments under one roof. The terrace makes the roof a room for watching the hunt and for being seen. A castle of the Blois kind knows none of this. Held lower because the form was little lived: the king seldom came, and the lodgings were never filled as designed.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge changes. Set the same buildings on the valley floor among the villages and the capital becomes one place among others; on the summit the form makes rule a matter of elevation and view. The closed plaza, entered by few ways and ringed by raised platforms, makes assembly a spectacle watched from above and from the edges. On the North Platform the colonnaded hall and the sunken patio behind the stair grade access, the most restricted spaces set highest. The temple, patio and altar groups make worship a sequence of approach. What holds the axis: the superstructures are lost, and how the spaces were used is inferred from the plan, so the claim that the form is the knowledge is credible but not fully shown.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the festival changes. The sequence of colonnade, open court, covered hall and shut room is what the building knows about the god and the king: that the divine is approached through a staged narrowing, in public first and in secret last. A centralised plan, or a single great hall, would not let a carried barque move from the city into hiding, nor let the people see the king in the court and lose him inside. The colonnade’s height, out of proportion to the court behind it, makes the procession itself the subject of the architecture. Held below by the front: the Ramesside court repeats the role of the sun court, and the bend, however explained, is form adjusted to circumstance rather than form as instrument.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a closed masonry box for this form and the work can no longer say its chief thing: that the music of a people belongs in the light of its own city, not in a sealed court of sound. The glass walls and the skylight make the hall change with the day and the season; a concert at noon and one at night are held in two different rooms. The union of glass, tile, sculpture and ironwork under one frame is the form of the claim that the crafts of Catalonia could make a palace together. The stair of rising light makes the approach part of the hearing. Held short because the national programme lives in figurative sculpture that could change without changing the form, and the extension’s rooms do not share the form’s knowledge.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes with it. The trio form is the instrument: the interlock of guitar, bass and loose drums makes unrest felt as rhythm, and Thin Thing’s figure, which seems to turn back on itself, is anxiety heard rather than said. Played by a studio ensemble or programmed, the songs would lose the grip that holds them, and the grip is the meaning. The pairing of The Same and The Opposite at the head of the record is a formal idea. The sequence is counted here, once: it alternates loud and quiet, tight and spacious, with the television song placed early as a jolt and Skrting kept for release. Held back because Free in the Knowledge and the string tracks are containers more than instruments.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. Were the heroine’s death the climax, the play would be a tragedy of sacrifice; set a third of the way in, it makes the survivor the subject. Were the ending tragic, the play could not ask whether the restoration undoes what Admetus learned. The hinge is hospitality: Admetus hides the death to keep the law of the guest, and that act, which his father and the servant call shameful, is what brings Alcestis back. The form joins grief and comedy in one house so that each tests the other. Held below the top because the comic and the tragic halves are set side by side in blocks more than worked into each other, and the joint shows at Heracles’ entrance.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the building knows? For the loggia, largely yes. Put the foundling hospital behind an arcade of heavy piers or behind a closed wall and its claim, that charity is a public order ruled by reason, is lost. The open bays make the institution visible from the square, the bays of equal measure make the visible thing a proportion, and the steps make the proportion a threshold. The colouring is part of the knowledge: grey for what measures, white for what is measured, so that the order can be read by anyone crossing the square. What holds the axis: the form is concentrated in the front. The life of the hospital, the nursing, feeding and raising of children, is lived in halls and cloisters that are orderly but are not the instrument of what the building knows.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The form carries knowledge in three ways. The narration sits with Joe Chip and knows no more than he does, so the reader shares the half-lifer’s condition: one reads a world in decay without knowing that one is dead, and the regression of objects is experienced before it is explained. The epigraphs are the second instrument. Each chapter opens on an advertisement for Ubik, a beer, an instant coffee, a salad dressing, a razor, a hair tonic, a bank, a stomach remedy, and the reader takes them as satire until the last, where the same name speaks as God; the form makes the commodity and the sacred one word and lets the reader discover it. The closing turn to Runciter’s point of view is the third, reversing the whole frame in a page. What holds the axis there is the plot’s machinery, the bomb and the corporate rivalry, a container the content could leave without great loss.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The play knows that fate arrives through a sequence of reasonable acts, and it knows it by the sequence: seven pairs, each a sound decision, the seventh the only decision left. The devices teach the audience to read signs, so that when Polynices’ shield bears Dike the sign must be read against its bearer, as Eteocles reads it. The scout’s eyes and Eteocles’ interpretation divide the knowing between two voices, which is the play’s subject: what is seen, and what it means. The lyric frame, terror before and lament after, holds the city’s body around the ruler’s reason. Charged for the transmitted close, which changes the form’s question at the last minute, and for the slack opening.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the place knows changes. An open pavilion let the tree be the centre; a stupa would have made a relic of it. Here the building stands east of the tree and turns its image east, so the pilgrim who enters faces the Buddha as he sat, with the tree behind him, and must leave the building and go round it to reach the tree. The form knows the event as a sequence: approach, encounter, circling, return to the source behind the image. The tower, seen for miles, makes the unmarked place findable. The form has proved what it carries, read as one thing by pilgrims of every Buddhist school. Held lower by the interior: a small cell and an upper chamber that do little with the volume of so tall a tower.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. A day’s journey forward in space is a journey backward in time, so a life is reviewed in the time it takes to drive the length of a country, and the road enforces order: the past is met in the sequence the geography gives it. The device of the old man present in his memories is the knowledge itself, that the past can be watched and not entered, and that he was always a spectator of his own life. The dreams, which judge him, and the road, which shows him the living, converge at Lund. Tell it as a biography and the simultaneity of the old man and his youth is lost; tell it as pure dream and the living witnesses are lost. The cost recurs: the voice-over and the spoken verdicts state what the form already holds, and the instrument is made to explain itself.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute a long Gothic nave for this plan and the building can no longer say what it knows: that a parish is one body, gathered round a preacher in one warm room under one crown of light. The central volume under the tower makes the congregation an audience and the interior a single place rather than a sequence; the short arms and their galleries bring the farthest seat near the pulpit. The form is the instrument of the worship it was built for. The heavy masonry changes how the church stands in the city more than how it is used within. What holds the axis down is the chancel of 1938, which turns the east end toward a more altar-centred liturgy than the room was shaped for, and the porch, which adds a processional entrance the plan did not need. The form absorbs both without being remade.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the park stops knowing what it knows. Level the hill and straighten the roads, and the knowledge that a city’s edge can be built as an extension of its ground is gone. Replace the serpentine bench with a straight parapet and the square stops being a room of many rooms. Set the hall’s columns on a regular modern grid without their Doric weight and the market loses its sense of a temple underground. The form governs how the place is used now: people sit in the bench’s bays and talk in groups, walk in the shade of the viaducts, gather on the terrace as in a theatre. Held below the high band because much of the park outside the core is paths and planting of ordinary form, and because the form was made for a use it never served.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the work knows changes. The portal’s animals are cut into the wall planks themselves, running across the board joints, so that the carving is not hung on the wall but is the wall. Make the church of stone, with a carved tympanum, and the knowledge goes: that the old art could be kept by lifting it whole, plank by plank, from one timber building into another, a knowledge only a building of boards can hold. The raised central room on its staves shapes how the purpose is lived: a small congregation stands within a ring of posts under a lifted roof, close to the altar and to each other. Held at 8.3 because the later refitting, pews, windows and pulpit, changed how the interior is lived, and the form inside speaks less fully than it does at the door.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The form is a countdown, and it knows what the film knows: that the detectives are inside someone else’s calendar. Day cards count down a week whose end, Somerset’s retirement, is fixed before the film begins, and whose plan is the killer’s. Days of rain and a last day of sun make the form a drama of revelation: the city that hid everything ends in a light that hides nothing, and the one thing still hidden is the box. The withholding is formal too: the murders are seen as aftermath and photograph until the last, so the only killing witnessed in the present is the detective’s own. Held at its figure because large parts of the form are the genre’s, not the film’s: the procedural finds, the chase, the briefing rooms. Change them for any thriller’s and the film would know the same.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work stops saying what it says. As a hall or a walled garden, the dead would lie in a place; under this dome they lie at a centre, the four recesses turning every approach toward them and the crypt below making the room a double world. The form changes how the tomb is lived: one enters a gathered space, walks round the cenotaphs as round a still point, and goes out under a dome that stands for them over the city. The drum and outer shell make the tomb a public sign that never closes; the dead are present to the whole city, not only to those who enter. What holds it: the outer figure and the inner room are two forms, joined by structure but not by experience; from inside, the dome the city sees cannot be sensed at all.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? At the joint, yes. Set the new church on the ruin’s axis or on its site, and the building could no longer say that the destruction is kept and life goes on beside it; take out the glass and the two churches stop being seen together; turn the windows to face the nave and the revelation on turning back is lost, and with it the reading of the walk as a return. Worship is lived differently here: services move between the ruin and the nave, and the open-air church is in use. Where the form is a container: the nave’s volume, the chapels and the exterior could be exchanged for others of the period without much loss to what the place knows, and the long plan was taken from the brief and the type.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses what it knows. A tomb that founds a city must be seen from the whole plain, and the height and the crown of minarets are the instrument of that claim, not its container. Inside, the single undivided octagon, with the grave as its focus and the galleries as a ring of watchers above, makes the burial the measure of the room. The galleries do structural work and change how the place is lived: one walks round the dead at two levels and looks out from the tomb onto the land the dynasty ruled. Give it a basilican or courtyard form and it could no longer say that one man’s grave is the centre of a world. Charged: the mortuary hall and the overlaid surfaces add matter the governing form does not shape.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that private and public time were one clock. The chronology is strict, and the radio carries public history over private scenes, so that the viewer hears the nation and watches the woman and has to join them. The final explosion falls on the commentator’s cry of victory: the joining is made by the form, not stated. Ballhaus frames Maria through doorways, behind glass, in the prison corridor, in rooms seen from other rooms, so that she is always placed in a structure she does not own. Two explosions bracket the film. Held from the top because the scenes between the brackets are classical studio melodrama, well made and inherited, and the coda of negatives is added rather than grown.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the purpose would be lived otherwise. Under one span the whole station is a single room: every train and platform is seen at once, and arrival is into a hall, not along a corridor of canopies. The hotel turns the hall’s end into a place in the city, a building that is a destination, not a shed’s end wall. The work of 2007 proved the form’s capacity: the warehouse became the floor of arrival, and the long international trains stand under a roof the Midland’s trains never filled. What holds the axis: the hotel’s form contains its use more than it shapes it, the same rooms serving as hotel, offices and hotel again; the extension, where most domestic passengers board, is a canopy whose form knows nothing of the shed’s; and retail shapes the concourse as much as the vault does.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The first person is the instrument of the con: the reader sees only what Self sees, and Self sees almost nothing, so the reader must learn to read past him, as Self cannot. The suicide note as frame says at the start that the narrator will not survive in the form he has, and turns the whole into evidence. The entry of the author changes what the book is: the trap Fielding sets for Self is mirrored by the trap the novelist sets, and the reader is made to feel which is worse. A paradox is built in: a man who cannot read speaks in prose of great literary power, so that the voice is his and not his, money speaking through a mind it owns. Held off the top because the middle is episodic, and several sections could stand in another order.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much of the knowledge goes. The picture knows what it knows because painting holds both halves at once: in a text the wild comes before the cultivated or after it, and the order is a verdict; on the canvas they are simultaneous, and the line between them is where the viewer stands. The panoramic width makes the valley a land rather than a place, and the high viewpoint makes the viewer an owner of the view before he knows it. The painter’s small figure, turned outward, makes the frame part of the argument. Held below the top: the core opposition could pass, with loss, into a print or a written account of the lookout, as the travel writing of the day did, and the panorama was a received form, not a found one.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the fort knows? Largely, yes. Put this court on the plain inside a curtain wall and the knowledge that the ruler lives above the city, visible from all of it and reachable only by an ordeal, is lost: the form is the instrument of rule. The jali makes seclusion a way of seeing, the zenana’s life lived behind a screen that is also a window. The turning ascent makes arrival a procession and a defence at once, so that every guest and every enemy is taught the order of the state by the path. Where it holds: inside the crown the rooms are lived much as in other Rajput palaces of their reigns, and the museum now lives the building as a sequence of galleries.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. The statue knows what it knows in the round, a little over life size, standing before a viewer it addresses: the gesture needs a body in the viewer’s own space, and the claim that the ruler is the canon of the human needs the Polykleitan stance carried out in three dimensions. The cuirass puts the world on the body, so that the cosmos and the man are one object; on a relief panel or a coin the event and the cosmology survive, but they no longer belong to his chest. The carved surface, once painted, lets the reliefs be read at close range and the figure at a distance, two scales of address in one object. Held below the top because the breastplate’s programme can be stated in another medium with little loss of what it knows, and has been, on coins and gems.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
In its working life the form was the knowledge. The building knew the flow of goods, the daylight of its floors, the separation and linking of three processes, and a change of form would have changed how a day of labour was lived. That is a high claim. The change of use is weighed here, and it costs something. As converted, the open floors take offices and studios well, which proves the flexibility of the frame; but the bridges cross the road carrying nothing, and the stepped blocks mark processes that no longer happen. The form remains legible as an instrument whose purpose has gone, and what it knows of work is now held as record rather than lived.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. The irregular, constantly turning riffs are the sea’s motion; the drums play across the beat like weather across a hull; the short songs are sightings, the long one the voyage, the coda the aftermath on land. Played in steady four-square metre the record would lose the sense of an element that cannot be predicted, and without Hearts Alive it would lose its single sustained form, the passage from pursuit to release. That is form as instrument, purposeful at both ends. What holds it below the top is the middle: the eight short songs share one shape, and Island and Naked Burn could change places with little loss.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the castle knows changes. Approach is lived here as exposure: the visitor, as the attacker would have, walks away from the keep to reach it, under walls and loopholes, through gates that narrow and turn, so that the defence is learned by the body before it is understood. The connected keep group makes the summit a closed fortress within the fortress, with its own court and its own water. The keep shows the lord’s standing to the whole plain, and within it is a last refuge and an armoury. Since its purpose ended the form has taught its own use to everyone who walks it. Held below the top because the palaces, where the castle’s daily life was lived, are lost.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The two halves are the knowledge: the same man in two worlds, each showing the falseness of his place in the other, so that the structure is the class line and his failure to stand on either side of it. Episodic drift is the shape of a life lived as leaving. The film has no climax because Bobby cannot have one, and the nearest thing is addressed to a man who cannot reply. The final long take, the camera staying with the station and Rayette after he has gone, carries the verdict in duration and position alone. What holds it: between these, the scenes run in the inherited grammar of observed behaviour, used well rather than made.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops knowing much of what it knows. Its knowledge is of the god’s house as set apart and enduring, and of an order that makes a building one law. Lighten the peristyle, to Ionic or a wider Doric, and the claim of weight and permanence goes; take the colonnade away and the house no longer stands in its own grove and shelter; open the cella to the crowd and the religion it discloses is another. The two-storey interior makes the cella a nave, a space ordered for the image rather than for people. Held lower: so much of this is the type’s that it would survive nearly whole in another Doric temple of the same rank, and the cella as lived must now be rebuilt in the mind.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would another form change how the purpose is lived? Yes, widely. The garden is built to be walked: the corridor, the causeways, the bridges and the hill paths are a sequence in which views open, close and are framed, and that sequence is the knowledge, not its container. The borrowed view of the Western Hills is form doing what nothing else can: it makes the land beyond the wall part of the garden. The court quarter at the east gate puts audience in a garden, so that rule is lived as retirement and retirement as rule. The lake makes the hill a façade and the hill makes the lake a stage. As a public park the same form has carried a different use without strain. Held below the top where the form is a collection of scenes, each of which might stand elsewhere.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. The trough plan makes worship a matter of approach and circuit: the worshipper enters from the long side into a narrow aisle, faces a platform that fills the inner bay from end to end, and walks round a company of images rather than up to a single one. The low ceiling over the aisle and the higher ceiling over the sanctuary rank the spaces. The terrace and the western front make arrival a climb toward the hall, with the setting sun on its face. The exposed frame lets the visitor see its order overhead. Held below the high eights because the form is the type’s: what is this hall’s own is its completeness and its site.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The crime is an offence against records, a register, a certificate, a date of travel, a name on a stone, and the novel is itself a file of records whose question is whose record is believed. Marian’s diary is the hinge: the one place in the house where a woman speaks freely is read and annotated by Fosco, and the form performs the violation the plot describes. The gaps between narrators, Fairlie’s petulant evasions and the servants’ partial views, are how the conspiracy hides and how it is found out. Held below the top because in the Third Epoch Hartright’s narrative becomes an ordinary detective’s account and the testimony frame thins to a device, until Fosco’s confession, given under duress, reclaims it.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. In a studio “Folsom Prison Blues” is a song about a prisoner; here it is a song sung to prisoners, and the cheer at the Reno line is the knowledge, not decoration. “25 Minutes to Go” needs the room for its jokes to land as dread, and “Greystone Chapel” means what it means because its writer is listening. The sequence is counted here, once: side one moves from the crime through labour, longing and the gallows; side two from mail from home through the comic release to wife and son, stripes, the execution dream and the chapel. Held short of the top by the middle of side two, which serves the show’s pacing, and by the edit, which makes the form partly Johnston’s.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The form is the building, and the building is the knowledge. The three viewpoints sit at three heights, so the structure of the novel is a section through the tower: told from one floor, the book would lose its claim that the order is vertical and total. The circular frame turns a narrative of collapse into the description of an achieved state. The last page does not end a crisis; it shows a man at home in what the first page showed. The enclosure is formal law: the reader almost never leaves the building, and the outside world thins as it thins for the residents. Tell it singly from Laing, or move it out into the city, and the work can no longer show complicity at every level at once. Held below the top because the alternation of the three men is mechanical in places, and the essayistic paragraphs often carry the knowledge in a form that could stand outside the novel.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form, a frame and a thin skin, or the same mass in rusticated stone under a cornice, and the north half can no longer say what it says: that its form is the record of its weight. The flare at the foot, the thinning of the wall upward and the cavetto top are the knowledge itself, and a viewer learns how masonry carries by looking at it. The bays change how the offices are lived, each room taking light from three sides of a shallow projection, and the corridor along the ground floor makes the building a street. Held below the highest marks: the south half puts the same content in a different form, so that the one work says its knowledge twice, once truly and once by imitation; and the office floors behind the wall are the ordinary forms of their time.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much goes. The page is made to be held close and turned in an album, read figure by figure and line by line, so that the hierarchy is discovered by the eye moving down the left edge from emperor to painter: the order of rank becomes the order of reading. The verses frame the image and say what it says, word and image on one surface, as a mural or an oil could not hold them. The European devices are pressed into the flat, gold, patterned Mughal page, and the friction between them is part of what the picture knows: a court that collects the world and orders it. Held below the top because the same programme could be carried by another page with other figures, as the reign’s other allegories show.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The comedy is the instrument of the indictment: the viewer laughs at the scheduling of the apartment as Baxter does, and so is implicated when the bed it schedules holds a dying woman. The turn at Christmas is not a change of genre but a disclosure of what the farce was. The widescreen frame is used to know: Trauner’s forced-perspective office makes Baxter interchangeable, and the narrow, cluttered apartment is the one space he owns and the space he has sold. Keys and floors make the hierarchy spatial, and the ending keeps feeling in the idiom of the comedy, spoken as a game of cards. What holds it: much of the first act is a well-filled comic container rather than the instrument, and the score frames feeling more than it knows.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Put the restaurant under a flat slab on columns and see what is lost: the rising edges, the light entering where the roof is highest, the openness to water and sky on every side with no wall bearing, the sense of dining under a canopy that hardly touches the ground. The form makes a meal an occasion under a lifted roof by the water, and makes the structure itself the thing the visitor comes to see. That is the form’s doing. What holds the axis: the form serves the purpose in mood and openness only. The workings of a restaurant, its kitchen and service, are indifferent to the vault, and the enclosures and fittings set under it, altered to an extent not established, temper the openness the form proposes. The form serves the structure’s knowledge more than the use’s.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Put the same flats in street blocks on the old ground and almost everything goes: the hush of the courts, the water under the windows, the walk to the concert along a deck above the traffic, the gardens enclosed from the City. The form makes the purpose lived as retreat within a city, and residents live it so: the long views over the lakes, the balconies planted as gardens, the bells of the church across the court. The sawtooth balconies give every tower flat a corner open to the light; the theatre’s rows, each with its own doors, make a seat into a room. Held below the higher figures because the same form makes the estate hard to enter and to cross.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the city stops knowing what it knows. Spread the same households over the wadi in low courtyard houses and it loses its defence, its shade, its refuge from the flood and, above all, its social shape: the vertical ordering of a family’s life and the visible ranking of families by height. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The density makes the street a shared and shaded corridor; the height makes the roof the private outdoor world; the one wall makes the city one body. Held below the top because the form, though compelled and expressive, is a type repeated rather than a single form worked to its limit, and the knowledge lies in the aggregate rather than in any one composed space.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Being another person is given as a point of view: an iris-shaped, slightly blurred frame, Malkovich’s breathing and voice heard from inside, the hands at the edge of the frame not one’s own. That is cinematic knowledge: the viewer is placed where the customers are placed. Casting Malkovich as himself is form, not gimmick, since the claim about celebrity needs an actual famous face to be occupied, and his stiff marionette walk as Craig takes him over puts the possession in a body we can watch. The flat photography keeps the marvel ordinary, a product like any other. The cost is the conventional dramatic shape and the well-made scenes a stage could carry.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and prayer is lived otherwise. A basilica sends the body down an axis to an end; a central dome gathers it under one height; here it is set in a line among lines, in shade that is the same everywhere, facing a wall that runs the width of the building. The form knows the community as a horizontal multitude and the sacred as a direction, and makes the court the place where that multitude meets sky and water. It has shown what it can carry: Fatimid and Mamluk additions, a hospice, ruin and restoration, without losing its sense. What holds it: the knowledge is the hypostyle type’s more than this building’s, and the form extends by repetition, so that a bay more or less would change nothing it knows.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of what the record knows is lost. Its form is the sound-system session made into an album: no fixed singer, voices passing the track among a crew and its guests, the music built from other people’s records and played back slowed. That form is the knowledge, a city’s culture as collage, many voices and many sources made one by a law of tempo and space rather than by a frontman. Recast as a band record with one singer, the claim is gone. The sequence is counted here, once: the warning of Safe from Harm, the sweetness of One Love, the crew at rest in Blue Lines, the height at the centre, the wheel at the close. What holds it: the middle is loosely ordered, and Daydreaming and Lately lie side by side in one mode.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. Its knowledge is that a subject can be present and veiled at once. Make the motifs legible and the canvas becomes an apocalyptic history painting, saying its theme instead of sounding it; remove the traces entirely and it becomes a pure abstraction, losing the steer the veiled motifs give. The halfway state is the knowledge. The horizontal format gives the passage from left to right its duration, so that the eye reads the field as a sequence, which a square or upright canvas would not; the light ground lets the colour float. Held below the top because the improvisation is loose by design: the form is the instrument at the scale of the whole, and in parts of the dense left only its container.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The form changes how dwelling is lived. One arrives by a street in the air and a door of one’s own, not a corridor; one lives in rooms lit on three sides, with views in several directions; one steps out into a garden on the neighbour’s roof, private from the street and from the dwellings above. Substitute a slab or a tower for the same number of dwellings and almost nothing the complex knows survives: the garden, the light, the house as a distinct thing in a heap of houses. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. Held below the top because it serves part of its purpose less well: the upper streets stayed passages, with little of the shared life promised; some deep boxes are dark at their centres; and the form could not house ordinary incomes at the cost it entailed.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work stops knowing most of what it knows. As a book of 1,038 lives it would be a reference; as thirty-nine portraits on a wall, a gallery of the famous. As a table it is a hospitality never given: places set, seats empty, guests invited too late. The triangle with no head makes the guests equal; the floor makes the famous stand on the many; the runners are worked in the needle techniques of each guest’s era, so that the history of women’s labour is carried in the stitches rather than stated; the plates rise into relief across the centuries, so that the argument about emergence is made in the material. That is form as the instrument of knowledge. What holds it from the high band is the plate itself, repeated thirty-nine times: its central form is a fixed emblem applied to each guest, a sign rather than a form that thinks.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The Dōjinsai’s knowledge is its form: the four and a half mats fix the distances between bodies, the desk fixes where one sits and where the light falls on paper, the shelves fix where an object is set to be seen. Put the same activities in a larger hall with furniture and they become another life. The Kannon-den’s stacked manners are knowledge too: the change of window, door and floor between the storeys is how the building says that the bodhisattva sits above the dwelling. The axis stands highest after survival. It stops short of the upper marks because the pavilion’s form is largely its model’s, and the knowledge, however exact, is held in a narrow compass.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. Here underwriters sit at their boxes on one open floor and on galleries over it, brokers move between them on escalators in view of the whole market, and the floor is read as a single trading body under daylight. The towers free the office floors and keep the core out of the market; the section lets the market grow or shrink by floors. Put a conventional block with a central core and a trading hall in its base in its place, and the market loses its height, its galleries and its sight of itself. Held lower: the trading hall was already the form of the earlier buildings, the offices above live as offices anywhere, and the planned growth of the Room has run against a market moving to screens.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. What the picture knows lives in paint as matter: the ray’s interior is laid in a loaded, worked impasto with glazes, so that pigment becomes wet flesh and flesh becomes pigment, and the kinship of the eaten body and the painted surface is the work’s knowledge. A print or a drawing would keep the composition and lose the flesh, which is most of the meaning. The large format puts the ray at or near life size and the viewer at the ledge, within reach of the knife; reduced to a cabinet piece the dread would go. The composition carries the sense: the hung vertical between the cat’s diagonal and the vessels’ stable mass makes the fish both centre and victim. Held below the top because the arrangement is partly additive, three groups on one ledge, and the right side’s form says less than the centre’s.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The fire in one unbroken take is the clearest case: an irreversible act given in irreversible time, with no cut to soften it or to let the viewer step away. The long takes make waiting, praying and keeping a promise into time endured. The drained colour, and visions that pass into monochrome without a marker, leave the viewer unable to say where waking ends, which is the film’s own question about whether the war was real and the sacrifice needed. Told as a cut drama with the war made certain, it would become a parable with an answer. Held well below the top because the first part is staged as a filmed play, long conversations in rooms, a form any chamber drama could use, a container more than an instrument.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what the picture knows goes. Its knowledge is chromatic: the claim that the body is no more than, and no less than, the light around it is made only by a colour that crosses from tile to skin to water without changing its law. A drawing or a print would keep the configuration and lose the knowledge. The steep viewpoint and the long format carry the second meaning: the body laid flat across the width, enclosed by the rim, is what makes the bather also an effigy, and an upright format would lose it. Painting’s power to hold a remembered state still is the content of a picture made from memory. Held below the top because the bath pictures show the same knowledge in several forms and formats, and this canvas is one instrument among its siblings.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a modern box for this form and the house can say none of what it knows: its knowledge is in its form and in nothing else. The gable is the argument that convention carries meaning; the split is the argument that a whole can be made of conflicts; the deformed centre is the argument that use and symbol fight and that both must be housed. Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In part. Arrival is made oblique: one enters the recess frontally and the door turns one aside. The stair is lived as a squeeze past the hearth, and the upper room is reached as a small event. But a widow’s daily life on one floor of kitchen, living room and bedrooms is lived much as in any good small house. The form changes how the house is read more than how it is inhabited, and the axis is held there.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and the work loses what it knows. As a box with a frame it would be one more modern chapel; the vault makes the congregation sit inside a single continuous figure, enclosed and lifted by one gesture, the wall turning into the roof over their heads without a joint. The rear vaults make the sanctuary a lower, denser zone, so that movement toward the altar is felt as a compression. Outside, the form tells how the church is to be lived in its setting: as an object in the landscape, met across water, its back as much a front as its front. Held below the top because the liturgical plan under the new shell is conventional: the form changes how the church is seen more than how worship within it is lived.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. As a painting the two girls would be a commission or a caprice, and their likeness the painter’s doing; the photograph knows what it knows because it carries the claim that these two children stood there, so the difference between their faces is a fact of nature, not of art. As a moving image the difference would flicker and pass; the still holds the fraction of a second in which the twins diverge, and fixes it for scrutiny. The square holds them in balance; a horizontal frame would set them in a room, a vertical one would separate their heads. The even light makes the surface even, so the faces read as evidence. Held below the top because the form is the photograph’s common instrument used with perfect fitness, not one the work invents.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. The elegiac couplet is not a container here but a subject: 1.1 makes the limping pentameter the sign of love’s conquest of epic, 2.1 and 3.1 stage the choice of metre as the choice of a life, and 3.15 takes leave of the metre as of the love. The knowledge that passion in this genre is formal performance is carried by a couplet whose closure enacts the clinch of each argument: the end of the pentameter delivers the turn, poem after poem. The sequence carries knowledge too, in the diptychs and in the place of 3.9 among the late poems. Held off the top because much of the middle of Book 2 uses the form competently without adding to what it knows, and the single-situation elegy repeats one shape.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the rank is lived differently or not at all. In one great hall all would see the ruler at once; here each is admitted to a depth, and standing is felt in the body as distance walked and doors passed. The echelon makes every hall a corner on the garden and each step a turn, so that the palace is never seen whole from within and a further room is always known. The raised floor makes the seated ruler’s eye level a rule of building. The paintings change with the room’s use. Even the corridor floors, which sound under foot, make the passage a place where one is heard. Held below the top because, the ceremony ended, the form carries visitors and no other use.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The form changes how its purpose is lived, wholly. To sleep, cook, read and receive in one glass room is to live in the landscape and to be seen in it, and the room’s knowledge, that the house is a way of seeing, cannot survive in any other form. Substitute a walled house and nothing of the claim remains. The pair adds to this: to send guests across the court to a brick box whose round windows look away is to live the difference between being host and being housed. The form also limits the purpose. There is no privacy without the trees and the estate, and no second person can live here as the first does. The form is the knowledge, but the knowledge is held in a narrow use, and the room’s freedom depends on the closed building beside it.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Entirely. Substitute a conventional campus, a teaching block, a library and hostels set apart on lawns, and the work can no longer say what it says: that the institution happens between the rooms. The corridor as street is the instrument of the campus’s knowledge. Its widths, its openings to courts, its crossings at different levels and its shade are the means by which the chance meeting the institution wants between its faculty and its students is made. The form is the content. It stops short of the highest marks because the rooms themselves, classrooms and offices, are conventional: the knowledge lives in the connective system, not in every part.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the picture knows goes. The high viewpoint is the knowledge: the viewer looks down on the pair as they look down on the basin, so that the viewer’s attention repeats theirs and looking becomes an act of care. The upright format stacks the composition from the bent heads through the striped lap to the foot and the basin at the bottom, and the eye travels the path of the gaze. The flat patterns of carpet and chest press the modelled figures forward into a shallow space, and the room closes around the act. At eye level, or as a soft Impressionist sketch, the pair would be a mother shown to us, not a task we are drawn into. Held below the top because the print of the same subject says much of it.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the building knows? Largely, yes. Substitute floor plates under a uniform ceiling and the library loses its claim, that the stable and unstable parts of an institution should be separated and each given its own space. Break the Books Spiral into floors and the collection becomes again a set of departments rather than one sequence. Remove the open floors and the public city has no room in the building. Form is the instrument of the programme, and the programme is how the library is lived: one walks the Dewey sequence, one enters the Living Room from the street without passing a desk. The costs: the skin’s diamond pattern is indifferent to what it encloses, and some of what the form knows has proved awkward in use, in wayfinding above all.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The rail as a diagonal barrier makes the viewer a latecomer on the floor of the hall, outside the table; a frontal arrangement would make a portrait. The crop at the right edge, halving the green face and pushing it toward us, is the form of the disclosure: the face arrives from outside the frame as from outside the party, and only a fixed edge can do that. The strip proves the claim from the painter’s side. He changed the form, and what the picture knows changed with it, from a record of friends into an image of the hall’s solitude. Held below the top because the table group could be carried almost as well by a lithograph or a drawing.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the life it houses changes. A square earth building has corners, and corner rooms are worse rooms; the circle makes every household equal by geometry. The ring makes the clan mutually visible: every door opens on the common court and every passage through the gate is seen, so the form is an instrument of watch and belonging as well as of defence. The rings set the living at a measured distance from the dead and turn every room toward the hall. The household’s column of rooms, ground to roof, makes each family a slice of the whole. What holds the axis is that this knowledge belongs to the type, and the inner rings add degree rather than kind.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows goes with it. Seen in profile, as ships were usually drawn, the liner would be long, elegant and passing, a thing seen; seen bow on from the water it is tall, advancing and overwhelming, a thing undergone. The viewpoint is the knowledge. The upright sheet, taller than it is wide, is made into the shape of the bow, so that the format of the poster and the form of the ship coincide; the graded tone gives volume to the one object and leaves everything else flat, so that the hull is the only body in a world of planes. The lettering beneath makes the name the ground the ship stands on. Held below the top because the form is that of a single impression, and a photograph from the same viewpoint could say some of it.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a hall on level ground and the building stops being able to say most of what it says. The worship is changed by the form: one comes out of the god’s house to make the offering, rather than going further in, and the offering is made before the world, at height, in weather. The stage made the hall a place of public performance and public vow, and gave the city the leap and the proverb; neither is possible in another form. The open substructure makes the structure part of the approach: the pilgrim walks beneath the god’s platform before climbing to it. Held below the top because the sanctuaries and the worship hall are a common form that the stage transforms only at its front.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
A different form would change what the work knows. Its knowledge is distance felt by a body, and the form is the instrument: the high horizon makes the field a climb; the view from behind and above puts the viewer at her back and denies her face, so her state is read through her back and arms; the tempera, laid in fine dry strokes, makes each stretch of grass a quantity of labour, so the panel’s slow making matches the crawl it shows. Move the horizon to the middle and the house comes near; turn her to face us and the picture is a portrait, not a direction of desire. Held below the top because the house is rendered in the same even, descriptive manner as everything else: the form knows less at the goal than on the way to it.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the window stops knowing what it knows. Made figurative, it becomes one more window with a story to read; made a single colour, or a designed abstract composition, it loses the claim of an order no one composed, and the even radiance in which no area outranks another. The square module is the knowledge in a second sense: it is at once the oldest unit of leaded glass and the pixel of 2007, and the window lets both readings stand in the same squares. The grid also yields to the stone, cut at the curves of the heads, so the form is visibly an answer to its frame. Held below the top because the form, though it is the instrument, is a known instrument applied rather than one found in the making of this work.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is comparison, and the long horizontal field is its instrument: modes of representation set side by side at one scale, so that the eye passes from painted word to standing word, to shadow, to sample, to cast, and is made to ask at each step according to what it reads. The objects must be real and fixed: the standing letters know something about words that painted letters cannot, because they throw actual shadows on a painted ground. The hinged canvas must be a hinged canvas; an image of the elder in plain view would lose the act of hiding. Held below the top because the field is in part a sequence, and some elements could shift along it without the work knowing less.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and nearly everything the work knows goes with it. Make it matt and it is a large bean. Make it flat and it reflects without bending, and the city is a postcard rather than a fold. Close it beneath and there is no inside, no omphalos, no answering hollow. Leave the joints and the mirror becomes a building clad in panels. The knowledge, the city and the self as one changing image, the viewer’s position as the condition of what is seen, lives in the curvature, the finish and the arch together; the form is the instrument. The scale belongs to it too. Held below the top because the precise outline is underdetermined, and because much of what the work knows is the general knowledge of a curved mirror, which this form exercises superbly but did not invent.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. What it knows exists only in the body of a visitor in that hall under that light: the drained colour of one’s own hand, the doubled height, finding oneself small on the ceiling among others. A photograph keeps the image and loses the knowing, which is why the record, however famous, is not the work. The hall is part of the form: the turbine hall of a power station, a building made for energy, given a sun. Held below the higher marks because the form is a configuration of effects that could be set in another large room with a loss of degree rather than of kind, and because the mist and its cycle are less bound to the knowledge than the mirror and the light.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because it knows how a sound feels as it is heard. The bending pitch of Who Sees You is the content, not a container; a straight-tuned version would know nothing. The voice set as one layer in the mix is its account of intimacy. Is This and Yes removes guitar and drums so that the absence is heard, and Nothing Is makes repetition the form of its force. The sequence runs from drift to plainness to velocity, hinged on the keyboard track, and the arc is real. What holds it short is that the thirds are also layers of a long making, and If I Am and New You are near containers.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. A plotted film about the arbitrariness of social law would have to argue through causes, and causality is exactly what this film holds to be a convention. The relay makes the argument structural: the viewer, waiting for the captain’s story, the nurse’s father or the dying man’s illness to pay off, feels the expectation of consequence as a habit and has it broken a dozen times. The frame completes the form, and the camera’s plainness gives the impossible and the ordinary one manner. What holds the axis: the chain admits episodes whose places could be exchanged, and the form tolerates slack it could have refused.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is in large part the knowledge. A portal is a threshold; a portal that cannot open makes the threshold permanent. Leaves without ground or horizon are the instrument of the hell they show: nothing stands, everything falls or rises, and the passage from low relief through high relief to figures in the round gives the work a gradient from matter to mind. Recast it as separate groups, or in Florentine compartments, and it loses what it most knows: that no frame contains suffering. Held here because the form was never resolved by its maker. The configuration is accretive, the frame is more conventional than the leaves it holds, and the plaster fixes one state of a moving form.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The chronicle in chapter units, each a turn under a couplet title and closing on a hook, is the form of a history that does not end with its heroes: the reader is carried past every death to the next chapter, and that carrying is the book’s knowledge that the realm goes on. The opening sentence and the closing unification make the cycle the form itself, and the verse set into the narrative, a later poet’s praise, weighs each event after it is lived. What holds it here: the chapter unit is the storyteller’s convention, used for every kind of matter alike; within a chapter the form often merely records; and after chapter 104 the whole sags, the cycle requiring the matter while the form does not reshape it.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The chronicle form, the life of a realm told from its founding to its fall in a line of tales, is the instrument of the argument: only a book that has shown the fellowship whole across hundreds of chapters can make its ending the loss of that whole, and the long middle is the weight the end lets fall. The prose carries the rest. Its flat, paratactic report, which gives the deed and withholds the inner life, makes the tragedy one of acts and consequences that no character can step outside to judge. Told as a lyric romance or a novel of feeling, the book would know the lovers better and the fellowship less. Held lower because the episodic middle is more container than instrument.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the building knows? In parts, everything. The chapter house is a form that is its content: a round of equal seats about one pier, the chapter as a body. The Angel Choir’s square end and its great window are how the saint’s house is lit and closed. The long plan with its double transept and many-altared eastern arm is a form for a liturgy of processions, stations and chapels, and a French chevet would change how worship moves. But much of the form is the English cathedral type, and the building as a whole is an accumulation: put another front in place of the west screen and the church behind it would know the same things. The form is the instrument of knowledge in two places and its container elsewhere.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses part of what it knows. The episodic chain is the form of cultivation: the road does not progress by a plot but by trials, each the same and each a little different, and the repetition is the knowledge that the self is not tamed once. The number eighty-one, the audit in chapter 99 and the last tribulation added on the road home make the arithmetic of the path part of the meaning. The storyteller’s frame, each chapter breaking off with a summons to the next, carries the road forward, and the verse set in at landscapes and battles holds the reader at a pause that marks each stage. What holds it here is that the form also permits: much of the content could be told in another order or another number of episodes, and a shorter book in the same frame would know nearly the same things. The form is an instrument, not quite the knowledge.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The third person held to Bigger, so close that the reader knows nothing he does not know and feels the minutes with him, is the instrument: told from outside, Bigger is the newspapers’ rapist, and the book’s argument is that he cannot be seen from outside. The thriller form of the first two books makes the reader complicit, hoping he will not be caught, and that complicity is the finding. The three titled books are a true form, condition to act to judgment. What holds the axis is Book Three, where the form turns from the experienced moment to the trial of an argument, spoken by Max in a register Bigger cannot share. The last interview recovers the instrument.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The form carries knowledge. The frame of sceptical professional men at dinner makes the tale a hypothesis put to an audience, which is the book’s method throughout: in 802,701 the Traveller builds and discards theories as a scientist does, and the reader is placed with the guests, weighing two strange white flowers and a battered machine against incredulity. A single traveller’s single voice, ignorant on arrival and learning by inference, discovers the future where the utopia gave a guided tour. The order of the journeys, from the garden to the shore, is an argument about time: social evolution first, then cosmic death. Held below Heart of Darkness, whose frame is the knowledge itself, because here the form is a sound container more than a necessity at every point, and a third-person telling would lose less than the top of the axis asks.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The discontinuous paragraph, in which each sentence stands unsupported by the last, is the doctrine performed: a prose that relies on each sentence’s own authority, contradicts itself when the next sentence requires it, and asks the reader to recognise rather than be persuaded. “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day” licenses the very method by which the book is written. “Circles” is the best fit of form and knowledge: its paragraphs widen in scope as its subject does, and its closing turn, “I am only an experimenter”, unsettles everything it has asserted. What holds the axis: much of the book would say what it says as treatise or sermon, and in “Prudence”, “Love” and “Art” the lecture shows through and the form is a container.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Within each essay the form is the knowledge. The hedge, the “quizá”, the footnote that undoes the thesis, the chain of citations that rehearses the history it describes: a skeptic’s argument cannot be put into a treatise without becoming dogma, and the brevity enacts the claim that a few metaphors are enough. “Nueva refutación del tiempo” knows what it knows only by its turn: the argument against time is spent in time and ends in a man who is its river. The book as a whole has no such form. Its order is not an argument, and a reader can enter anywhere. A collection whose order could be shuffled is scored on its parts; the parts are strong, and the whole that holds them is what keeps the axis at this figure.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses its claim that Bohemian kingship is held of the saint. In the medieval parts the form is the instrument of that claim. The coronation route through the side door, past the saint’s chapel, makes the kingdom’s ritual a passage through the building’s geometry; the crown’s chamber above the grave makes custody spatial; the busts in the triforium place the dynasty in the church’s body, above the liturgy; the ring of chapels makes the choir a royal necropolis round the altar. The nave of the completion lives as any great cathedral nave lives, for processions and the congregation. The form is the instrument of the knowledge in the east and the south, its container in the west.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the building knows? Much of it, yes. Take away the banding and the cathedral stops being the city’s colours worn by the Virgin’s house; the civic religion is in the masonry, not in a flag. Take away the floor and the passage from Hermes to the dome stops being something walked. Build the choir on level ground and the baptistery under it disappears, and with it the font below the altar. Above all, complete the Duomo Nuovo or clear its remains and the building no longer knows its own limit: the unfinished wall holds a meaning no complete church could hold. Held here because so much is carried by surface and programme laid over a basilica that could have carried another, and the crossing’s geometry is not made the instrument of the whole.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its form is the forced choice. The plot is a chain of dilemmas the Joker sets: unmask or watch people die; save Rachel or Dent; blow up the other ferry or be blown up. The cross-cutting that holds two places in one moment makes the viewer choose with the characters and learn the cost. At the two addresses, Batman arrives at the wrong one because the Joker lied, and the cut is the lie. The film knows that every rescue in it is also an abandonment, and its structure is how it knows. What holds it below the top: much of the rest is the inherited grammar of the large action thriller, interchangeable in its parts, and the climax in the Prewitt building could be any film’s.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and some of the knowledge goes. The cathartic form, a quiet verse building to a full-band climax and a guitar coda, enacts the record’s claim that pain is carried until it breaks out; Black and Alive know what they know through that build. The instrumental figure that opens and closes the record frames it as one passage. The sequence is counted here, once: the first half moves through a son’s damage to the public catastrophe of Jeremy; the second, after Oceans, darkens and closes on Release, the address to the father, which is right. Held well from the top: the songs are conventional rock songs whose form would serve other words, the sequence is front-loaded, and the second half’s order is arbitrary.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses its central claim, that one law runs through all of a life: the claim needs breadth, and the panorama is how it knows it. The sides are shaped. Side one moves from the a cappella law to the sacred, to the ghetto, through an instrumental, to the music’s ancestors; side two is childhood and love, ending in pain; side three is the family and then history; side four goes out into other languages, to the vow and to the star. Inside the songs form carries meaning: the string pastiche, the long crescendo of “As”, the dark ostinato. What holds it: within the sides the order is often exchangeable, “Contusion” is a bridge more than a stage, and the extra disc is an appendage the frame does not require.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. Forts and a field army make a frontier of points; the wall makes it a line, so that a raid becomes a breach, a garrison a stretch of crest, and a soldier’s life a tower and its neighbours, seen by day and signalled by night. The passes gather trade and tribute at known gates, so commerce with the steppe was lived through the form. Today the form is lived as a road on the crest: the visitor walks the line, climbing and turning. Held below the top because the form knows the frontier and little else, and because the frontier was lived as much through trade, bribes and raids through gaps as through the line.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The joining of chronicle and Passion is the knowledge: the first half’s loose, crowded, comic form is the life of the occupied city, and its sudden breaking at Pina’s death is how the film knows what occupation does to that life. The second half closes in, from street to cell and torture room, and the narrowing is the world reduced to the body. The rough grain belongs to what the film says, the image of a city filmed while it was still that city. The costs: the Gestapo interiors are staged in a theatrical register the form adopts rather than justifies, and Renzo Rossellini’s score underlines what the image already carries, so that some of the form is container rather than instrument.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The form changed how government was lived, and still does. A government shut inside a fortress, with a single door and a platform outside it, held office as custody: the priors enclosed, the citizens called to the piazza by the bell and addressed from the ringhiera. The form made the relation of governors and governed spatial, inside and outside, high and low, the guarded door and the open square. Palace and piazza are one instrument, and the building’s angle to the square and its off-centre tower order how the space is entered and seen. Inside, the Salone gave the Great Council a room the size of its numbers. Held short because much of the interior is form as container, and the platform that completed the relation is gone.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and what is lost? The expedition is the instrument: by confining three men with a hoard, the film turns the sociology of property into a chamber play, and the shape out and back, poverty to gold to dust, makes the end return to the beginning with nothing added but knowledge. The prophecy in Tampico is formal too, turning the suspense from whether into how. The camera, mostly unobtrusive and at eye level, keeps the men equal in the frame until Dobbs begins to watch the others across the fire, and the compositions pull apart with the partnership. Yet the form serves the knowledge rather than becoming it. The story could be told as a novel, as Traven told it, and keep most of what it knows, and the figure says so.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The form is vertical and choreographic. Above and below are its grammar: the gardens and the stadium high, the machines lower, the workers’ city lowest and the catacombs beneath, so that the plot is a series of descents and ascents and the flood rises through the whole order. The masses are drawn as geometry, wedges and columns, and the workers’ crowd in the Furioso keeps the same shapes when it turns to destruction: the form knows that the mob is the shift change gone the other way. The three movements are named as music and paced so. What holds it: the share of the film that is container, the melodrama of father and son, the Thin Man’s pursuits and the intertitles that carry the thesis, any of which another form could carry without loss.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a fortress-palace of enclosed halls and the reign stops being able to say it is open. In the palace the open pavilion on its terrace makes court life a passage from court to court, air and view rather than closed rooms; the raised throne and the window of appearance set the emperor before his people at a distance fixed in stone; the Diwan-i-Khas makes audience a crossing to a centre. In the mosque, the colossal gate and the vast court make the congregation of a capital, and the saint’s tomb within binds the dynasty’s worship to a living cult. Held lower because the purposes the palace was made for lasted fourteen years, several are not known with certainty, and much of it now carries its knowledge only to a visitor who reconstructs it.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. A passive narrator who cannot act, around whom others’ testimonies gather, enacts the book’s claim: the self is reached only through other people’s stories, and a man who does not know his own history must be told it by an old soldier he does not know. The well is the form made literal: the narrator must stop, go down, sit in the dark and wait, and the book’s long stillnesses are that waiting. The embedded forms are chosen to their matter: the war arrives as spoken testimony and a letter, the occult as monologue, the end of the marriage on a computer screen. Held off the top because Book Three was added to a form that had closed, and its new apparatus accretes; and because the frame could hold a different set of testimonies without the work knowing much less.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Each side opens on its strongest riff; side one passes from appetite to devotion, and side two closes in the blues it came from. Change the form of Whole Lotta Love and it stops knowing what it knows: riff, collapse and return is its knowledge, desire as a pressure that breaks form and reassembles it. The light and heavy alternation of What Is and What Should Never Be and Ramble On is meaning, the dream and the waking world set as two volumes, and Heartbreaker stops its song for a solo that stands outside it, the stopping the point. What holds it: elsewhere the frames are inherited, and the order was assembled from sessions on the road.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The parallel cutting is the knowledge that the two men are one kind: told from either side alone, the symmetry would be a claim rather than a perception. The scale bears it too, since the cost of the code is shown only by time spent in the homes it empties. The widescreen frame carries meaning, setting figures small against glass walls, ocean and city lights, so that solitude is composed rather than stated. The meeting is staged in shot and reverse shot with no two-shot of consequence, and the closing frame of two hands holds what the film has withheld. Held below the top because the marriages and the procedure use the inherited grammar of the crime drama well rather than remaking it.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form, and what is legible goes. A ring of figures facing inward makes those inside it an assembly, watched by stone presences and drawn to a centre held by two larger ones. In a line or a hall the figures would process or address; in a ring they surround. The form is the instrument of that knowledge, and the T-pillar, support and body at once, knows something no carving on a wall could: that the building is made of persons. What holds the axis: whether the form changes how its purpose is lived cannot be answered, because the purpose is lost; whether the enclosures were roofed is unsettled, so even their light is unknown; and the rectangular rooms of the younger layer show the form thinning rather than deepening.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form of the Casamiento and Coloquio and the knowledge goes. A cheated, diseased ensign, deceived by a woman’s show of wealth, tells a story whose truth depends on whether he too deceives, then hands over a dialogue of dogs that cannot have happened; his friend reads it, grants its art and does not believe its event. The frame is the book’s teaching about fiction: what is false in fact may be true in invention. Rinconete’s plotless visit is the instrument of its disclosure, since a plot would have made the thieves a story instead of a society. Vidriera’s three parts are the argument. Held below because the romances use the novella as a container for plots that could be plays, and several became plays.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The silent image makes Orlok a thing seen and not heard, a presence all body and shadow, and the shadow on the stair can act where the body does not. The crosscutting across hundreds of miles, Ellen waking, Orlok turning from Hutter, Hutter’s ride home racing the ship, makes desire and dread one current through space, which a line of narration could not do. The tinting is part of the knowledge: blue for night, and the morning’s colour at the end. What holds the axis: the chronicle frame and the titles from the Book of Vampires carry knowledge the image should carry, and the fourth act’s lecture and chase are container rather than instrument.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The form is the gap between sound and matter: songs of unemployment, prison, divorce and a dying town set to bright, driving arrangements, so that the listener is made to cheer what the words mourn. Played as on Nebraska, these songs would know their despair; played as here, they know also how a society sings over its losses, and the title track’s misreading is what the form was built to risk. The sequence is counted here, once: side one from the veteran’s roar to the whisper of I’m on Fire, side two from a vow of friendship to the closing town, the record ending in quiet after eleven loud songs. In Cover Me and I’m Goin’ Down the brightness is lightness, not method.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? For the minaret, nearly everything. A slender round tower of the eastern kind would call as well; it would not hold the city as a square shaft does, rising unbroken from the ground to the lantern, the same mass from every side and a different face to each, one sign to every quarter and its own face to each. The ramp makes the tower a building to be climbed rather than a pillar. In the hall, the T plan and the transept make the congregation’s rows a body facing one way, honour and light gathered at the qibla end under the muqarnas; a domed central hall would make the same prayer a gathering round a centre, and would know another thing. What holds it: the hall’s knowledge is largely its type’s, refined here rather than found.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and see what is lost. The front knows what no flat front could: that the saint, not the window, is the opening of the church, and that the building presents a person to the street. The round towers drawn back make the front a curved stage for that image; square towers would make it a wall. Inside, white field and gilt carving direct worship toward the pulpits and the chancel, and the painted ceiling turns the nave from a lidded box into a room under heaven. Held at 8.2 because the volume is the received type and could be exchanged for its neighbours’ without loss of what this church knows: the knowledge sits in the frontispiece, the carving and the ceiling, not in the space.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Put this content in another form, a Gothic hall-palace or a Renaissance block, and what is lost is a way of living: the court as a room open to the sky, the body moved by a bent passage from the world’s eye into seclusion, the day lived between shade and water, the king seen only at the joint between public and private. The palace knows its climate and its etiquette through its plan, and the form has carried later lives: the empire’s office, an emperor’s wedding, a modern crown’s residence, a stream of visitors. The complex knows its own history through form: the walk from the Patio del Yeso through Pedro’s courts to the gardens is the sequence of who held Seville. Held below the top because the later storeys change the proportions of the courts they sit on.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Inside the songs, form carries knowledge. Fake Plastic Trees is built as its subject: a bare acoustic voice that swells toward a full arrangement and collapses, the climb toward the real thing and the fall back into the fake. Just climbs by chords that keep stepping up and never resolve, the trap made audible. Street Spirit’s arpeggio circles without escape and fades rather than ends, enacting the dissolution it names. The sequence is a frame, from the damage of Planet Telex to the departure of Street Spirit, and the record could neither begin nor end otherwise. Between them the order is that of a strong song collection, placed for pace, and much of the middle would know the same in another order.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses what it knows. Put the hall at street level behind a court and the meaning of rising out of trade is gone; strip the tiles to whitewash and the room becomes an ordinary small domed mosque of its decade, competent and forgettable. The tiled walls change how prayer is lived: it happens inside the garden, and the eye, which in Sinan’s large mosques is drawn upward through a cascade of semidomes, is held here at the level of the body, among the flowers. The octagon gives a room that is nearly undirected, so the mihrab wall takes direction from surface rather than structure. The limit: the tiles clothe the architecture rather than articulating it.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived. The two palaces stage two conceptions of the office: the closed, inward court of the old, where the pope’s chamber and the treasury share one tower and the cloister turns its back on the city; and the open, processional court of the new, where a great stair climbs to the chapel and a window gives onto a court made for the crowd. The passage from the Cour d’honneur through audience and stair to chapel is a sequence of rising rank, and the fortress skin makes every ceremony an act behind walls. Held below the top: the seam between the campaigns is an accident of succession, and the whole does not say one thing.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the thing beneath the surface is worse for being unseen. The camera is set at the waterline, half in and half out. The underwater point of view, travelling among the swimmers’ legs to Williams’s two notes, makes the viewer the predator and the motif its body, and the barrels make the invisible measurable. The two movements are the knowledge in form: on land, men argue about what is under the water; at sea, the boat shrinks, the land disappears, and argument gives way to the animal. A film that showed its shark from the start would know something smaller. Held below the top because, past those devices, the form is classical narrative well used: the second movement is plotted as an adventure, and the explosion closes it by convention rather than by the form’s own logic.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the castle loses what it knows: the relation of cloister, palace and fortress, an order of vowed brothers that governed a state from inside its rule. Put the palace outside the convent, or the convent outside the walls, and the building would say that monastery and power were separable, the opposite of what the Order claimed. The sequence of baileys makes the hierarchy walkable: one is admitted by degrees to the centre where the community prayed. The refectories, warmed and vaulted, give the common life of the brothers and the hospitality of the prince rooms of distinct and legible character. Held below the top because the Lower Castle is more additive than instrumental, and the form grew over a century and a quarter.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the way the purpose is lived changes. A closed mausoleum or a domed rotunda would hold the figure and turn the visitor inward, away from the city; the open long front turns remembrance outward, toward the seat of government. The steps, wide and high, are a podium that became a speaker’s platform and a grandstand: the form, open, raised and facing a great public ground, made the memorial a place of assembly and petition as well as of homage. The three chambers make the visit a sequence, the presence and then the words. Held below the top because the peristyle and attic do little to how the place is used.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The narration stays outside the boy almost always: his thoughts come as acts, silences and dreams, and that reticence is his code made into a method. A reader told little of what he feels must judge him by what he does, as the judge in Texas must. The unmarked dialogue lets the boys’ laconic talk run into the narration, so that speech and land share one register. The Spanish left untranslated puts the reader in Coahuila as an outsider who follows some of what is said, which is what the boy is. The four phases give the shape of a romance cycle, garden, fall, descent and return, and the book’s knowledge is that the cycle does not close. Held off the top because the quest-and-return frame is inherited and could carry other contents, and in the love story the reticence starves what it should hold.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The form is the essay as portrait: a figure, a temper, a single impression drawn out in long, qualified, cadenced sentences that hold a perception without closing it. The method of the Preface, to discriminate the impression and find its virtue, is enacted in the prose rather than applied by it. The sentences trail their qualifications as the impression trails its changes, and the Conclusion’s argument about the flux is carried in a syntax that will not settle. Put the same content into a treatise or a history and it can no longer say what it says: that the critic’s sensibility is the instrument and the evidence at once. The charge falls on the book as a whole, a sequence of occasional essays given a frame and ordered by the chronology of its subjects rather than shaped as an argument; the Winckelmann study, the earliest written, sits where history puts it, though its place before the Conclusion works.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much of what the canvas knows goes. Its knowledge is that these people are made of what they eat and work, and painting faces, potatoes and walls in one mud green and brown says it without words; a cleaner, more various palette would deny it. The lamp as the only light gives the picture its subject, the meal as an island of warmth in a dark that is also the season and the poverty. The girl’s back closes the circle and keeps the viewer outside it. The lithograph shows the cost of another form: reversed and in black and white, it says the same thing less, and the study says it more loosely. Held below the top because the coarse drawing is partly form and partly failure.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is that the past survives as fragments, snapshots and portraits, never as a whole, and the form is fifteen near-equal miniatures, an album in the old sense, a book of pictures, opened by a manifesto and shut by a song that distrusts pictures. Recast as a rock opera with a plot through the village, the record would claim a continuity of the past it is built to deny. No song outstays a snapshot, and the one long track is the one figure that refuses to stop. The sequence is counted here, once: the frame carries more knowledge than the inner order, and the middle of side two could run otherwise with little loss.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived otherwise. A low platform or an enclosed hall would hide the rite; this form shows it. The plaza becomes an audience, the stair an ascent watched by the city, the doorway at the top the place where the living king met the dead one above the people’s heads. The temple’s smallness is part of what the form knows: the sacred is reached by few and seen by all. The pairing across the plaza sets the dead king and the figure honoured in Temple II face to face over the living. What holds the axis: the form knows the rite from outside, and its interior teaches little; and the use it shaped ended in the ninth century, so what the form changed is now read from a ruin, not lived.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived. Arrival is made an act: the member crosses the water, leaves the city and enters shade. Rank is lived in plan: the house sits at the centre and highest, the rest of the institution stepping down round it, so the order of the place can be read from its roofs. The verandahs make circulation outdoor and shaded, a parliament of galleries and courts rather than corridors. Substitute a single block on dry ground and the separation, the procession, the scale of the pavilions against the water and the climate answered in section are lost. What does not change: the chamber, the core of the purpose, is a sealed hall of the ordinary type, and debate is lived there much as in any modern chamber.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a form and much goes. The emptiness of the ground is the knowledge: set the troupe in a fairground or before a tent and the picture becomes genre, an episode; on this field it becomes a condition. The spacing is the content: five figures in a loose arc that does not close, gazes that do not meet, and a gap of bare ground between the group and the woman that the eye must cross and cannot fill. The scale makes the figures life size and puts the viewer on their ground. A smaller canvas or a narrative would keep the subject and lose the silence. Held below the top: the smaller Rose Period studies of the same people carry much of what it knows.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would another form say the same? A prang of moderate height in plain stucco would still be Meru. What this form alone knows is the cosmology made climbable and made to shine. The steepness of the stairs makes ascent a labour and a risk, so the mountain is known by the body that climbs it. The porcelain makes the mountain a jewel, the heavens visible as light on a surface, and ties that heaven to the river trade that brought the ware. The group of five makes the quarters present to anyone who walks the platform. Use is part of the form: the tower is circled, climbed and seen from the water. Held lower because the solid mass gives no interior, and an image known at a distance is more replaceable than a room.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses what it knows. A terminal of finger piers cannot say that departure is one gathering in one room; a flat roof on columns cannot say that the building is held up by the same pull and balance as flight. The section makes the hall a single space with no interior support, legible from any point, and the leaning piers make the structure visible as the work. The form changed how the purpose was lived, for a generation: one walked a short way and sat in a lounge that carried one to the aircraft. The charge is that the form’s purpose has partly gone from under it: the hall serves now as headhouse and screening hall to a system it was designed to make unnecessary, and the form still says the earlier thing.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the building can no longer say most of what it says. The single material is the knowledge: a church of the common people built of common brick, every surface the same, no part raised by finer stuff. Plaster it, add glass and carving, and the folk church becomes ordinary Lutheran Gothic. Lower the front and it no longer stands for the village church raised to the scale of the nation. The form also changes how the purpose is lived: the bright, bare, uniform room turns the congregation toward the sound of its own singing and toward the light, which is what a Grundtvigian service is. The charge is that the Gothic section is borrowed, not found: the nave would hold a service much as any long Gothic nave does.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? For the ensemble, yes. Set the three madrasas in a row, or in separate streets, and the work can no longer say that the city’s centre is a room walled by colleges, open to the south, its three gates addressed to the crowd in the middle. The form shaped how the purpose was lived: a student passed from the open square through the portal into the enclosed court, from the market’s noise to the school’s order, in a few steps. Tilya-Kori’s joining of college and Friday mosque is a real fusion of use in one form. But put another plan in place of the cell-and-iwan court and teaching would have gone on much as before: the type is the region’s, and each interior is lived as any madrasa of its kind. The ensemble’s form is the instrument; each building’s is in part a container.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. The retrospective first person makes James a man who reads his own past as he reads a country’s risk, fluent and blind at once. The four landscapes, island, mountain, desert and prairie, carry the movement outward from the expatriate enclave to the sources of the cult and then home to the American interior, and to a child. Above all the close: the book hands its last pages to Tap’s prose, misspellings kept, so that after three parts of adult fluency the language is renewed by error, and the form answers the cult’s perfect matching of letters with a living imperfection. That ending is the book’s knowledge, not its container. Held below the top because the middle could stand in another order, the dinners and the trips largely interchangeable, and because Owen’s long account of the cult is relayed in conversation where the form might have made it happen.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. For two thirds of its length the camera holds to Kate’s knowledge: she is told little and driven where she is driven, and the viewer learns what the operation is when she does, in the tunnel. The sound does the same work, a pressure under the image that tells the body what the mind has not been given. Then the form breaks on purpose. In the tunnel the film leaves Kate, shot in her vest and left behind, and follows Alejandro into Mexico. That change of point of view is the argument made structural: the conscience is removed from the story once its signature is secured. An omniscient form would lose the knowledge that the observer is an instrument. Held from the top because the handover is also a seam, and outside it the grammar is the procedural’s.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told from Dickie’s side or from Marge Sherwood’s, or by a narrator who could judge, it would be a story about a murder. Told from inside Tom without relief, it is a story about complicity, because the reader must want Tom to survive in order to go on reading him, and the form makes that wanting unavoidable. The suspense is the moral instrument: every near miss, Marge at the door, Freddie on the stairs, the policemen at the palazzo, is engineered so that the reader’s relief is Tom’s. In few genre novels is the form so nearly the knowledge. What holds the axis there is that the instrument is single: one point of view and one engine of suspense, sustained rather than developed, and used in the last chapters as it is used in the middle.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes in large part. The didactic frame is the instrument of the irony: a poem that teaches love as one teaches ploughing says by its form that love is a technique, and makes its reader a pupil in a school whose master is plainly a rogue. The couplet, a long line answered by a short, is the right instrument for balance and the deflating second thought: Quid magis est saxo durum, quid mollius unda? / dura tamen molli saxa cavantur aqua (Book 1), what is harder than stone, softer than water? yet hard stones are hollowed by soft water. The three-book mirror, men, men, women, is the form’s argument for symmetry. Held off the top because the inset myths sit in a container: their form is the epyllion’s, and some stand elsewhere, retold in the Metamorphoses.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the building knows changes. Set the same court on level ground among the streets and the mosque becomes a large enclosure in the city; on its platform it is the city’s high place, and the congregation, looking out over the gates, sees itself above its own trades. Turn the axis from the fort and the dialogue of palace and mosque is lost. Reduce the three gates to one and the city no longer converges on it from three sides. The open court, rather than a domed interior, makes the congregation itself the building’s principal volume: the form is the instrument of a communal knowledge. The prayer hall, by contrast, could take another form with little loss.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. As a pendant made for the king’s body the object is a mother’s protection carried by her son, and that is what it knows; as a free-standing portrait or a brass head it would be a commemoration only. The material is meaning: ivory, a royal monopoly, its whiteness the colour of Olokun and of ritual purity, so the substance itself claims the sea’s wealth. The scale is that of a thing carried, not displayed, a face made to be seen in movement in a ceremony. The openwork crown can be carved at this fineness only in ivory. Held below the top because the idealised calm of the face the court’s brass heads also know, and some of the form’s force now reaches us only as a museum object behind glass.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. As a painting the scene would be a Romantic nocturne of a familiar kind; it knows what it knows because it is a photograph, carrying the claim that this light fell on these crosses in this minute, once. The single exposure is part of the knowledge: the grace on the dead is shown as an event, not an arrangement. The tonal scale is the instrument, from the paper white of moon and crosses to the near black of the sky, and a grey print states less. The proportion of the frame is the knowledge of scale. Held below the top because the form is the ordinary view camera rectangle, travels well at the size of a page, and changed with the printing.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form: a girder viaduct on heavy piers, or a lower route with a shorter bridge and long descents. The road would still be carried, and the drive across would change little, so in its purpose the form’s knowledge is partial. What the form alone knows lies elsewhere: the lightness with which the crossing is made, the valley left open under a few slender supports, the forces made visible as a line of piers running on into masts through the deck, and the bridge as a figure the region lives beside every day. That is a real change in how the crossing is lived by those below it. What holds the axis: those who use it, the drivers, live its form least, and the screens keep the gorge from their sight.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows: that a marriage is lived in time, in intervals, and that what happens between the scenes is as decisive as the scenes. The six parts are separated by months and years the viewer does not see, and the weekly broadcast made the audience live with the couple across those gaps; the duration is the knowledge. The close-up makes the face the place where the marriage is fought, and the restriction to two people in a room makes every third party, Paula, the children, the new spouses, present only as talk, which is what they are to the marriage. The work itself shows the limit. A cut of a little over half the length keeps much of what the series says, and the dialogue carried well enough to the stage for its maker to direct it there: the content is not bound to this form alone.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The decisive formal fact is that the container is the couch: the dead lie in the bed of the feast, and the feasters lie on the dead. A banquet painted on a tomb wall, which Etruria also made, says that the dead feast; this object says that the dead are the feasters, here, with their remains beneath them, and only a vessel in the round can say that. Modelling at about life size makes the couple present in the tomb as bodies, not as pictures, and painted terracotta gives them a warmth of skin that stone would cool. Held below the top because the shift of scale at the waist is the type’s convention more than the work’s knowledge, because the lower half is form as container rather than form as instrument, and because a smaller urn of the same design, as later Etruria showed, could carry the content with loss.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building stops being able to say what it says. Set the same rooms on the bank and the house is one more Loire château; it is the placing in the river, and then the bridge and gallery, that make the river the building’s axis and make living here an act of crossing. The form changes how the use is lived: one dines, dances, convalesces, as the wounded did from 1914 to 1918, or crosses the Cher in the same room. The block’s plan, a corridor with rooms to either side and a straight stair, is itself a modern ordering of a house, rationalising circulation as the spiral stair and the run of tower rooms did not. Held lower because the block’s form is largely its type’s, and the gallery is an added room rather than one form governing the whole.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. As an open street the route from the Duomo to the Scala would be a passage between shops; under glass it is a room, entered and lingered in in any weather, so that walking through the city becomes being in its salon. The octagon makes the crossing a place: people stop, meet, sit at the cafés, turn on the bull. The cross gathers four directions into one centre, collecting the city’s movement and releasing it. And the form has shown what it can carry, shops, cafés, offices, flats, hotels, political crowds and tourists, without ceasing to be what it is. Held from the top because the form governs the passage and the crossing more than the rooms: behind the fronts, the shops and the floors above are lived much as in any Milanese block of the period.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The form knows what the book knows. A retrospective first person by the friend who left, begun because the other has cut herself out of the photographs and removed every trace of herself, makes the whole book an act of possession: Elena writing Lila so that she cannot vanish, and placing herself at the centre while she does it. Put it in the third person and the envy, the self-justification and the doubt about every judgment of Lila are gone. The cast list by family at the front, like a nineteenth century novel’s or a parish register, says the subject is the quarter and not two girls only. The two part headings move the story from myth to commerce. Held below the high eights by a middle that often summarises where it should enact.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and the record loses what it knows. Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand state a feeling the words cannot reach, and only the long two-guitar passage, the lead circling while the rhythm guitar holds the floor, can say it: cut them to four minutes and the brooding becomes a hook. Each side begins short and bright and ends in a long passage, so the record twice moves from song to search. The ragged recording is formal, not careless, the drift of tuning and timing the sound of men thinking together. What holds it: Round & Round and The Losing End are forms the record merely contains, and the parallel plan of the sides is set rather than developed.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the museum knows? Yes, and the change would be large. Take away the Turbine Hall and the museum loses what it is known for knowing: that art can be met at the scale of a city, in a room that holds thousands, free. A genre of commission, a single work made each year for the hall, exists because of this one room, and its works could not have been made for any other. The ramp makes entry a public descent rather than a ticketed passage. The bay windows and the bridges make the visitor in the galleries an onlooker of the crowd below, so that the museum sees itself. What holds the axis: the galleries, which most visitors use most of the time, would keep what they know if they were moved to another building. The form is the instrument at the hall and the container elsewhere.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the work loses most of what it knows. As a painting or a sculpture, man and coyote would be a symbol; as a statement, an argument. Only as an action in duration, with a live animal whose behaviour cannot be scripted, can the work find out whether trust is reached and how long it takes, so that the outcome is real and not represented. The insulated journey is form too: the refusal to see the country is an act, not an image. Held below the top because the work survives only in record, and the record is another form, an edited film and selected stills that turn duration into emblem; and because much of what the form knows has to be told beside it to be known at all.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The form carries the knowledge. The murder told in the first sentence turns a mystery into a study of complicity: the reader, knowing the end, watches the circle close, and the suspense becomes his own fascination with a group he knows to be murderous, which is the narrator’s flaw made the reader’s experience. The first-person retrospect, cultivated, wistful and evasive, is Richard’s character and his alibi; he narrates as a man who still longs for what destroyed his friends, and the elegance of the telling is itself the longing for the picturesque. The two books are the argument: Book I the approach to the act, Book II its long poisoning, the tragic shape of hubris and nemesis made into the novel’s architecture. What holds the axis off the top is that the second book’s form is the conventional aftermath and investigation novel, which could be told otherwise without much loss, and that the older narrator rarely judges or contradicts the younger, so the frame is not used as fully as it allows.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is the world as a child stands in it. The camera is held, for much of the film, at a child’s height: adults are torsos, legs, a ring of keys at a belt, and the only adult face shown in full for most of its length is the mother’s, who belongs to the children’s house. When Keys at last appears whole, kneeling beside Elliott, the form has made his face a disclosure. The sympathetic link makes inner states bodily, drunkenness, illness, a shared dying, so the film can show a boy’s grief without speeches. Daviau’s backlit haze makes the night suburb a place of possible visitation. Held from the top by the last act, where the chase and the set piece override the child’s-eye law.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the first movement loses what it knows: that love can exist as attention without language. WALL-E and EVE have only names, gestures, eyes and sound, and the film lets them court in that medium, so that what passes between them is shown as the attention itself, not reported. The earth is silent and the Axiom talks without pause, and the contrast is the argument: the humans have voices and screens and do not speak to one another; the robots have neither and do. The camera too carries meaning, with lens flare, shallow focus and pulls of focus borrowed from photography, so a world of machines is seen through the habits of a human eye. Held below the top because from the middle of the ship section the form becomes the inherited grammar of the animated adventure, well used rather than remade, and what the silence knew is restated in dialogue by the Captain.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The frame is the instrument. A prologue in which persons vanish into a crowd and an epilogue in which a leader’s face stands for his followers’ faces enclose a middle in which one man tries to keep his face from being seen, and fails. Bill leaves the book before its end, dying unidentified while the narrative passes to others, and the leaving enacts the thesis that the author has gone out of the story. The third person, moving among four minds, keeps any one consciousness from governing, which is the book’s picture of a world in which the solitary voice no longer holds the centre. Held off the higher reaches because the middle could be told in another order without loss, and the debates of the second part are content set in dialogue, not knowledge made by form.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The narrator is a minor character and a survivor, so the history is a witness’s: Rocket knows the story because he could not leave it and was never at its centre. The loops, the motel told twice, the apartment’s chain of owners, the prologue returned to, make the estate’s history a set of stories passing through the same places and objects, as property and guns pass through the same hands. The change of grade and camera across three periods makes the decline visible as a change of air, the knowledge that the order hardened by stages. Held below the top: the chaptered narrator is inherited grammar, used very well, and parts of the form are style laid over the content.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. What the figures know is held in the hollow modelled head: the eye pierced through into the interior, so that the look is literally a dark opening into the figure. Clay, built and then carved, permits the geometric cut of the lids and the fine incision of hair and beads; stone or wood would give another face. The size of the head against the body is the figures’ statement about the person, and it cannot be changed without changing what they say. Held at 8.2 because the form is a shared convention more than an instrument shaped to one knowledge, and because in the fragments, which are most of the body, the whole figure’s form is often lost.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute colour and a standard frame and the film loses its central knowledge: the gap between the city as remembered and idealised, which black and white and the wide frame give it, and the small, self-serving conduct of the people inside that image. The form is that irony. Gordon Willis’s compositions often let a conversation run on with its speakers out of frame or in silhouette, so that the city and the dark hold the screen while the people talk; the form says their words matter less than they think. The Gershwin score does the same work, setting the characters’ muddle against the confident romance of an earlier city. The redrafted first chapter makes the film’s own shape a draft. The limit: the middle runs on a conventional alternation of scenes whose form could be otherwise without much loss.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? Partly, and that is the difficulty. What the work knows can be said in a sentence, and the other readymades say much of the same sentence: a bottle rack is also chosen, not made. What only this form knows is the offence. A urinal, the one object a polite exhibition could not show, put to a society that had promised to show anything: the choice of this object is the test, and a shovel or a bottle rack would not have been refused. The turn onto the back, which makes the fixture a figure, and the painted name are also only here. But the knowledge is not visual, by the maker’s own principle, and the work survives a change of its object, as the replicas show.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form and much goes. The handscroll is unrolled an arm’s width at a time, so the viewer meets each passage of text and then its scene, precept and then case, in an order the hand controls. That is how an admonition is received: in turn, at the pace of reading, by one person at a table. The form lets the scroll end on its own author: the last scene shows the Instructress writing, the admonition in the act of being made, so that the reader who has unrolled the whole arrives at the one who addressed it. The line is a second form, an even stroke that makes every figure equally present and equally restrained, which is the decorum the text asks for. Held below the top because screen and album carried the same subjects with loss of sequence more than of knowledge.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the village stops knowing what it knows. Replace the terraced block with separate houses, and the family loses the roof of the house below as its yard and the community loses its single body. Replace earth with stone or brick, and the yearly return of labour to the wall, by which the people renew their tie to the place and to one another, ends. Replace the ladder and hatch with a street door, and the house stops being a fortress and a hive. The form is the instrument of a way of living, and the doors and windows added later show it bending to a changed life rather than discarded. Held below the top because the form is the type’s, reached by many hands over centuries, and its knowing is collective rather than worked out in this one plan.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and much goes. The panel knows the man through surfaces, fur, velvet, gold, skin and paper, each a different resistance to light, and it is the agreement of those surfaces that makes the person credible. Oil on a smooth panel, worked in thin glazes, lets the stubble and the pile of the velvet be equally present. The half length behind a ledge sets the man at arm’s length: an audience, not an encounter across a room. The drawing at Windsor knows the face as well and the office not at all, since collar, sleeves and fur are colour and matter. What holds it: the form is not the instrument of a further knowledge, and the content could live in another fine portrait of the type.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional terminal and the traveller loses the passage: the rise from curb to window in one space, the lounge set down before the aircraft, the bridge over the hall, the turning tube before the gate. Departure was lived here as one continuous movement through a shaped volume, not a sequence of rooms, and the form is what does it; the building knows what flying felt like at its start, and a box could not say it. Waiting is changed too: the sunken lounge makes the crowd an audience for the field. Held lower on two counts. The form served its purpose briefly, unable to take the passengers, baggage and security of later decades. And as a hotel lobby it now shapes arrival at a hotel, well, but not what it was made to know.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. As a painting it would be one image of flight among many. As a film the jump would end, the tarpaulin or the ground would appear, and the act would become a stunt with an outcome. As a performance before witnesses it would be a man jumping onto a mat. Only the still photograph can hold the body at the top of the arc indefinitely, and only a photograph carries the claim to have been there that the montage turns against itself. The newspaper extends the knowledge: the image is news, and the news is false. The single frame is the instrument by which the leap is never completed. Held below the top because the deceit lives in the account of the making more than in the print.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the memorial knows? Almost entirely. Put the same purpose into a figure or a wall of names and remembrance becomes looking at something. Here it is walking in a field, alone, in a body that cannot see far, the ground unsteady by a degree. The form makes memory individual and physical, every path different and none of them leading anywhere, and it makes the memorial part of the city’s daily life: crossed, sat on at the edges, entered at night. The rooms below turn the abstraction into names, and the coffered grid overhead binds the two. Held at 8.2 because what the form knows is not specific to its purpose, and the same field would know it as a memorial to another crime or as an installation; and because the play the field invites is a failure to govern how its purpose is lived, as well as an openness.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that the epic now exists as names, marks and erasure, and the form is that knowledge: writing on canvas, in graphite and crayon that can be rubbed out and written over, by a hand whose speed is visible. A battle painted in the old manner would know the opposite, that the war can be seen. The cycle is knowledge too: the war is walked through, side against side, from shield to shades, so that sequence and confrontation are made bodily. The open ground is the forgetting the names float on. Held below the top because the sequence could be shuffled in places without loss, and some canvases carry their part chiefly by title.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and what goes? The picture knows stillness, and knows it as painting does: the boat held for ever a few lengths from the landing, never arriving. Rachmaninoff’s tone poem is the controlled experiment: to carry the image into music he had to give it motion, a five-beat oar stroke, and it became a voyage, with a struggle in it the picture refuses. The frontal, nearly symmetrical composition, the island set square like a facade, is the form of a threshold: the viewer stands where the boat is going and faces the same closed door. Held below the high eights: the centring is close to an emblem’s formula, and the same knowledge passed nearly unchanged through five versions of different sizes and supports.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the building knows goes. The rhythm of twelve bays a side is the procession: the eye and the body move at the pace of the arches. The clerestory over the colonnades sets the light above the crowd and on the path, so that the room is lit as a way and not as a hall. The apse closes the axis and holds the altar in a lit shell. When Fontana walled up windows, the room lost what its form was made to do with light, and the restorers’ reopening gave it back; that loss and return show how much the knowledge depends on the form. Held below the top because the form is the type’s form, carried out with exceptional clarity: what this building knows, every good basilica of its kind knows in part.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because what it knows is a timescale. A record about beginning is built of pieces that begin from almost nothing and take minutes to arrive: Svefn-g-englar’s pinging keyboard stands a long while before anything else enters, and the arrival is its subject. The sequence runs from a brief opening through the long rising songs to a close slowed toward stillness. What holds the figure is one shape repeated: in the middle, in Flugufrelsarinn, Hjartað hamast and Olsen Olsen, the form is nearer a container the songs are poured into than an instrument each requires.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows: that sound film is a joining of voice and body, and that the join can be made to sing or made to lie. A comedy of the talkies without songs could tell the plot; only a musical, where the voice is lifted into song and the body into dance, can show the joining at its height and at its failure in one film. The numbers that matter are instruments. “Moses Supposes” turns elocution into rhythm; “You Were Meant for Me” shows romance made with studio machines and still felt; the title number is sound and image in perfect accord, set against the preview, where they come apart. The cost: the ballet is a revue set in the plot, form as container, and the montage illustrates rather than knows.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows longing as a shape in time: a song that swells and does not break, held at a slow sway until the swelling is the feeling. A tighter Lazuli or a dry voice in Myth would know a different and smaller thing. The doubled voice, weather rather than speaker, is itself the record’s account of a self dissolving into what it misses. The sequence is counted here, once: three ascents, a slack middle, the warmth of Wishes and On the Sea, and Irene as the long ending, its silence and coda enacting the paradise that ends and returns. That close is formal knowledge. Held from the top by the middle, where songs contain the mode rather than carry it.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is in the separate, equal canvases: thirty-two units of one size, each an item, so that the set is a catalogue and its hanging a display of goods. Paint the cans on one canvas, as the many-can canvases of the same year do, and the work knows mass rather than choice. Paint one can and it knows the object, not the range. Print them and the irony of the hand imitating the machine is lost; this set knows that the look of a printed thing can be made by a person. Held below the top because the arrangement is not fixed by the maker, and because much of what the work knows survives a change of form, as the later silkscreens and screenprint portfolios show: the idea travels well outside this object.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Another form would change what the work knows. As a drawing it would be a caricature: a sketch of a woman with f-holes is a cartoon, and knows nothing about the real. What this work knows depends on the photograph’s claim that this body was there before a lens, a particular woman; the marks sit on that claim, neither on the skin nor wholly off it, so that one surface holds two orders of reality, the recorded body and the written sign. That ambiguity is the work’s knowledge: the body is real, and a mark makes it a thing. The citation of Ingres works because photography can borrow a painted pose and lend it the weight of flesh. Held below the top because the knowledge travels nearly whole in reproduction and in description; the form is the instrument, but a small one.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The division into two halves is the knowledge: the canvas knows opposition only because it is built as two masses facing each other across a field, with red between. The fit of colour to form is the knowledge: a yellow that is upright and angular, a blue that is round and soft at the edge, so that colour and shape say the same thing and the painting is the proof of the theory rather than its illustration. The edge is knowledge too: hard lines at the left, a graded halo at the right. The horizontal format sets the halves side by side. Held below the top because the small forms are carried by the form rather than required by it, and part of what it knows the theory knew already in words.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. What it knows is that for these two people talking is living and working at once, and that the trade crushes whatever is slower than it: Bruce, Mollie, Earl Williams. The form is speed and overlap, and the knowledge is in them. The audience cannot follow every line, as Bruce cannot, and the speed itself sorts the characters into those who belong in the room and those it runs over. Slow the film to a stage tempo and it becomes The Front Page with a change of sex; play it in a wider world and the single room, where a hanging and a remarriage share a rolltop desk, disperses. What holds it below the top: the camera records the room more than it shapes the knowledge, and the instrument is almost wholly the sound.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would another form change what the building knows? Yes, nearly throughout. Put the same programme in a block with a front door and an enfilade of galleries, and the museum stops being a place one crosses, stops letting the visitor compose the exhibition, and stops placing the library, the workshops and the café in the same ring of glass as the street. Here the form is how the purpose is lived: entering from any side, the visitor meets art as one meets buildings in a town, one box after another, each with its own height and light, and the courts give the pause between them. The moving boundary of free and paid zones lets the building alter its own social shape with each exhibition. What holds the axis: the circle as such knows less than the field of boxes it encloses, and some rooms are general white galleries whose form tells their contents nothing particular.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the knowledge goes with it. The horizontal format, unusual for a single bust, leaves room beside the head, and that room, empty but for the plant, is where the isolation is made. The off-centre, tipped placement and the cut at the lower edge make the figure’s tension a fact of the picture rather than a mood described. The contour, drawn as much as painted, is the instrument of the face’s wariness: it hardens at the jaw and the eyes and softens nowhere. The plant answers the head in colour and in rhythm, round husks against an angular skull and hair. Held below the top because in a drawing much of this survives: the painter’s line would carry the head almost as well on paper, losing the colour more than the knowledge.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. Its knowledge is that a body is substance, and it knows it because the paint is substance: flesh built in thick, worked layers of white and earth colours, so that the surface has weight where the body has weight. A photograph of the same woman on the same sofa would show the body and lose the time of its looking, the months of sittings the accumulated paint records, and the equality of attention by which skin and worn fabric are painted with one patience. The life size makes the viewer stand before a person, not a picture of one, and the horizontal format is the body’s own. Held below the top because much of the knowledge is carried by the image in reproduction, as its fame shows, and the same form serves the painter’s other pictures of the sitter nearly as well.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The cutting does not mark the passage between the tower and the house: Adam steps out of one and into the other, the light shifts, and the film never explains, so the audience holds his grief as he does, as a place one simply goes. Reflections in glass, windows and mirrors double the figures throughout and keep the question of what is real in the image rather than in the plot. The parents being Adam’s age or younger is a decision of form that carries the knowledge: a man meets his parents as peers, and the conversations a child cannot have become possible. The ending rereads the whole Harry strand in the form itself. Held from higher by the club passage, which borrows a stock grammar of delirium, and by a revelation that works partly as a device.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. The joke and its meaning live in one instant at the top of an arc: a moment later the slipper falls and the view closes. Painting alone can hold that instant still for as long as anyone looks, so that the viewer keeps the lover’s place; the commission asked for exactly this, an image to be possessed. The pendulum of the composition, low left to high centre to low right, is the triangle of the story, and the light, falling only on her, does the work of narration. The cabinet scale makes the viewer a single watcher rather than a public. Held below the top because the content could be told almost as well in a print or a drawing, with loss of colour and touch more than of knowledge.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the living room loses almost everything it knows. The knowledge is in duration and in the life of the creatures: the painting hatches, the room fills and empties over weeks, and the viewer stands inside a cycle rather than before an image of one. No painting, film or photograph carries that; the work is known only by being in it during its run. The pairing is formal knowledge too: the same support, the canvas, made birthplace and grave. Held below the top because the second room, taken alone, is a form painting has always had, the insect in the still life and the specimen on a board, and because the two-room plan that carries the argument must be found again at every showing.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. Make it a video and the gaze is not returned; make it shorter and it is a pose; let her speak and the encounter is a meeting; make the sitter a performer and the public is spectator again. What the work knows, that attention is given and received in time by one body to another, can only be known in this form: duration, silence, two chairs on equal footing, an open queue. The removal of the table proves it from inside, since with nothing between the chairs the form became more exactly itself. Held below the higher band because the form is in large part that of Nightsea Crossing, and because the knowledge is simple and complete at the first sitting.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Almost wholly. Its knowledge is bodily and spatial: that the self is placed inside the infinite, not shown it. A painting of a starfield shows; a projection surrounds; only a closed mirrored room with a floor of water puts the body in a field with no wall and no floor and then shows the body to itself, reduced to a point. The water, the mirrors, the darkness and the door are the instrument. The photograph is the proof by failure: the image of the room circulated by millions is a picture of lights and a person, and what the room knows, the loss of the boundary and the fall of the floor, is gone from it. Held below the top because the form is the series’ form, and this room’s field changes the register more than the knowledge.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Does the form change how the purpose is lived? In the tower, yes: a minaret kept as a belfry makes the hours of the Christian city ring from the Almohad call, and the ramps make the ascent a walk. In the court, yes: the faithful still enter by the mosque’s gate and through its garden. In the church, partly. The coro and the Capilla Mayor set in the middle of the great hall make it a precinct within a city, the chapter singing enclosed while chapels, altars and the public move round it, many liturgies at once, and the five aisles serve that. But the form that carries it is the Spanish cathedral type, not this building’s alone, and the Renaissance rooms add to the work rather than change it.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Make the church an aisled basilica with a clerestory and it stops saying what it says. The hall makes the congregation, the monks and the royal tombs one room under one canopy, with no hierarchy of nave and aisle: that unity is the knowledge the building holds of a single realm under one providence. The cloister’s form, deep arches, tracery screens and a recessed upper storey, is how the monastic day was lived here, in shade around light, and an open arcade would mean less. In these two spaces the form is the instrument. Elsewhere it is container: the long front could be another palace front, the main chapel any classical choir, and the emblems would read the same on other bodies.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Substitute a basilica and the purpose is lived otherwise. In the hall the people stand among the piers, not below a lit vessel of the clergy; the space is broad, dark and continuous, and processions, guild altars and private devotions go on side by side, as in a covered city square. The piers with their saints make devotion a walk among intercessors. The tower beside the church rather than before it makes the building a landmark from every quarter and leaves the west portal low and close, an entry from the market rather than a ceremonial front. The roof makes the cathedral one object to the city. Held below the top because the form inside is the hall type’s, and the junction of nave and choir and the two unequal towers show campaigns joined rather than one form knowing one thing.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? It did. The household is turned inward on the courtyard, so that reception, business and family life meet on one ordered square, under an antique arcade, and climb to the piano nobile; the street is kept at the length of the bench and the rough wall. The corner loggia, while open, put the family’s transactions in public view and made the house a civic place; its closing changed that life toward the princely. Substitute a medieval palace and the family loses its claim of order and antiquity; substitute an open villa and it loses the fortress. Held because the Medici rooms survive mostly in record.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the film knows changes. Because the Matrix is a program with rules, the action film’s usual physics, wires, impossible leaps and slowed time, becomes the subject: every stunt is an argument about belief and law. Bullet time is the clearest case. Slowing the world while the camera moves at speed through it puts the viewer inside Neo’s perception at the moment his perception changes; the effect is the knowledge, not its ornament. The colour of the two worlds tells the viewer where they are without a word. The dojo is a lesson in epistemology staged as kung fu (“I know kung fu”): knowledge downloaded, then shown to be insufficient until believed. The cost: in the instruction movement the theory is spoken, and could be lifted out whole as a lecture.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. A rectilinear compound of daga, however large, would make rank a matter of size; here it is a matter of material, permanence and concealment, and the approach to the ruler is lived as a passage between walls or a climb among boulders, not as an axis toward a facade. The curving walls admit no frontal view: one is always beside the building or within it, never before it. On the hill the rule of the place is lived as the rule of the rock. Held at 8.1 because the form as it stands is the shell of the lived form: the houses, courtyards, platforms and roofs that made the enclosures habitable are gone, and their division is reconstructed, not seen.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record knows less, because its knowledge is in tempo and weight. A record about death imposed from outside is built on riffs that arrive like machinery, on sections that switch without transition, and on long instrumental passages that hold the listener in the wait the words describe. The title track’s middle and Fade to Black’s turn from ballad to heavy close enact their subjects. The sequence is counted here, once: two mirrored sides, each moving from speed into length, the first ending in the self’s death and the second in a god’s waking, a plan that gives eight songs one arc. In Trapped Under Ice and Escape the form serves without enacting.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what is lost is, above all, the light. The film knows what it knows through Toland’s low-key images: the dark house where Tom and Casy find Muley by a candle, faces lit from below or half lost, the farewell held almost black. That these people are being pushed out of sight is carried by their being shown at the edge of sight. The road, a sequence of stopping places each worse or less certain than the last, is the instrument of the knowledge that there is no arrival. Where the form weakens it becomes a container: the camp passages and the closing speech in the truck could stand in any decent studio picture, their matter delivered rather than embodied.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Where the form is the knowledge, it is wholly so. The landing’s means, the handheld frame, the staccato image, the sound that drops when Miller is concussed, the withholding of any establishing shot until the bluff is taken, make the soldier’s not knowing the content, and no other form could say it. The Ramelle battle carries that knowledge into a single bounded space whose layout is learned as the men learn it. Change the form of the middle and less is lost: the march, the arguments and the confession would serve a play or a novel nearly as well. The frame is the film’s formal claim, a memory placed in an old man’s face; but the old man is Ryan, who was not on the beach, and the form promises a remembering it cannot hold. That fracture is the chief cost.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows, which is what genius looks like to the one man who sees it and cannot share it. Everything is filtered through Salieri’s telling: Mozart is never alone with the camera except where Salieri imagines or reports him, and the music is presented as Salieri hears it, so that the audience is made to listen with envy. The frame of a confession to a priest who cannot follow it is the form’s sharpest stroke, showing a church unable to hear what the musician heard. Held at the figure because much of this is the play’s form transposed, and the film’s own addition, the opened world of courts, theatres and streets, is often container rather than instrument; the operas are reproduced with care more than made to think.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses part of what it knows. What it knows is that the traveller carries one self into new country, and the cyclic form is the instrument of that knowledge: the first movement’s horn theme recurs, altered, in each movement, and the finale’s coda makes the old theme and the new sound together. The Largo’s chorale is form as threshold, the remote D flat reached through a passage of chords that sounds like a door; the Largo’s broken close is form making loss audible. Held down because the sonata frames of the first movement and the finale are containers more than instruments, and the finale’s recalls are placed more than earned.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the building knows changes. Substitute a brick shed with a dressed front and the hall stops saying that the factory itself, in its own structure, is the monument; substitute a bare engineer’s shed and it stops saying that production deserves monumentality at all. The form is the claim. It changes how the purpose is lived as well: the leaning glass and the long uninterrupted span give the shop floor daylight and one undivided space, the crane runs its whole length, and the work proceeds in a hall that announces itself to the street. What holds the axis near 8.0 is the gable, whose corners are a container for the meaning rather than its instrument: the one place where the form presents what the structure does not do.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The first-person retrospective voice is the instrument: Marlowe tells a story whose end he knows, and the telling is coloured by the betrayal, so that the warmth of the early Terry chapters is already grief. The detective plot is not a container but the shape of the argument, since the solution, Eileen and Paul Marston and the two murders, is what turns a debt of friendship into its refutation: the case solved is the friendship ended. The two cases interleaved make the reader live Marlowe’s sense that his life is being run by people with money and no centre. Held near 8 by the slack of the middle, where the form loosens into episode, and by a late scene of explanation that delivers the knowledge in statement.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses its sense. With one choir and one transept it would be an ordinary basilica pointed at its altar. The double ends give it two centres, founder and community, death and the daily office, and the nave becomes the field between them rather than a road toward one goal. The square makes the whole space legible as one measure, so that walking the nave is counting it. The marked-off crossings give each end a room of its own, which is how two communities, Lutheran above and Catholic in the crypt, can live in the building at once. Held below the top because the form shapes meaning more than use, the monastic life it ordered is long gone, and much of what it knows is grasped in plan more than in the body.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A full and continuous life would have to tell the marriage and the madness, and would stop being what this is: the knowledge of a man who can hold his past only by choosing it, scene by scene, in the light of what he loved. The outline, the digression, the cheerful surface and the silences are the instrument of that knowledge, and the closing image, light at night, intermittent, more intense than the stars, is the form’s own figure. Against it, much of the looseness is not shaped but merely loose; the issue in parts shows in chapters that end where the instalment ended; and the short, crowded chapters of the third volume show a form under strain from without, which is charged here.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a rectangular hall for the rotunda and the books and readers lose little; the reading would go on. What the building would stop being able to say is everything it says to the town: that the library is the centre, seen from every side, a thing apart from any one college, a gift standing alone. In use the form does change how reading is lived. The upper room gathers readers in a ring under one light, round a void, the gallery above; one is always aware of the whole room and of the others in it, which a hall of rows does not give. And the square exists as a space because of the building: it is shaped as a ring round it. The form is knowledge held in the town more than in the room.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The form knows the journey, and the sequence is counted here, once. The first suite sits at the exact centre, track four of seven, so the Russian episode is the record’s core; the longest piece comes last, so the return is a culmination rather than a coda. Within The Czar the music changes register at each of its four turns, from stealth through flight to martyrdom and a rising spiral, and the form enacts the plot. The interlocking guitars and Dailor’s leading drums make the riffs narrate: a figure from early in The Last Baron returns transformed before the end. Played as a set of songs, the record would keep its riffs and lose its passage. What holds the figure is the five shorter songs, which are songs rather than stations and could be reordered without much loss.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. The Count never speaks for himself: he is known only through other people’s records, so that the evil is constructed by the community that defines itself against it. The assembly of the papers is the plot. The turn against the Count comes when Mina types and collates the separate diaries, and knowledge pooled becomes the weapon. The record is itself threatened, since the Count burns the manuscripts and the phonograph cylinders, so that the form is fought over inside the story. Held off the top: the voices of Seward, Harker and Mina lie close together; the conceit strains, as when a phonograph diary records long dialogue word for word; and the form serves the suspense more often than the knowledge.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
In the best poems the form is the knowledge. The lulling stanza of “The Garden of Proserpine”, short lines, paired double rhymes and a falling close, is itself the sleep it praises; change it and the poem loses its argument that rest is sweeter than hope. The long line of the “Hymn” carries the weight of a civilisation going under; cut it to pentameter and the scale goes. The litany form of “Dolores” is its blasphemy. Against this, the book’s music is often a medium that would carry any content, and the same anapaestic surge serves love, politics and grief alike; the poems to Landor and Hugo, the songs of revolution and the ballads would know no less in another form. Eliot’s objection, that the sound outruns the object, is answerable for the best dozen poems and not for the book.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the building knows changes. An inward-turning block, closed to the street, entered from one side, with the sacred at the far end of the axis and a circuit round it, makes the approach a progress round and in, from light to dark and from crowd to image. Put the Jowo in an open hall and the temple no longer knows that the holy is reached by going round. Read outward, the same form organised the city: the Barkhor exists because the temple is a centre to be circled. The form is the instrument, not the container. Held where it is because the accretion of centuries blurs the instrument in places, with upper halls, side chapels and offices that the circuit passes rather than requires, and because its force depends heavily on the use that animates it.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the canvas knows goes. Painting gives the stillness: a carriage in motion held in an instant with no event in it, so that waiting itself is the subject, which a narrative could only describe. The frontal composition puts the viewer on the bench opposite, a passenger among them, and the crowd faces us over the heads of the three, so that the viewer is inside the arrangement. The breadth of the handling is the anonymity: the faces at the back are reduced to tone and the three in front given substance, so that finish itself ranks attention. Held below the top because Daumier carried the same composition in watercolour and in another oil, and the railway in lithographs, with much of the knowledge kept.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the work loses some of what it knows. The ritornello form is the instrument of its one thought: the season is the returning tutti, constant, and its events are episodes that break across it and are absorbed. In Spring’s first movement the birds, the stream and the storm come and go, and the ritornello says the season stays. The solo violin, one voice among many, fits the countryman inside the weather. The form bends where the programme asks: Summer’s first movement breaks into fragments, its Adagio is split by Presto thunder, Winter’s ritornello is built from stacked dissonance. Held lower because elsewhere the form is a container: Spring’s finale and Autumn’s outer movements would fit another poem.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told as a plot, Titta’s coming of age or his father’s arrest, it would be the story of one family under Fascism. Told as a year of episodes without a protagonist, with townspeople stepping out to address the camera and mocked for it, it knows that the town is the subject, that it lives as gossip and spectacle, and that history passes through it as one season among seasons. The cycle is the knowledge: the year returns to spring, and nothing has changed except that the mother is dead and Gradisca has gone. The studio artifice belongs to the form, memory shown as made. Held at the figure because the episodic form that makes the knowledge also admits episodes the knowledge does not need, and there the form is a container.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The form knows what the content says. A man kept in constant motion has no self but the one imposed on him: the route, from the crowded Oak Bar to the empty prairie to the edge of a monument, is the instrument that strips Thornhill of office, mother, name and alibi, and the widescreen frame is required by the crop duster, whose meaning is the empty horizontal field. The mixed tone is not decoration: it says that the state’s game is a farce played with real knives. The coda’s cut, from a hand on the cliff to a hand on the berth, makes the argument in one splice. What holds the axis is the route’s looseness: many of its episodes are interchangeable within it, and there the form is a container rather than an instrument.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge depends on the noir form being the prison. Shot in the genre’s idiom, with a city of permanent night, costume of no exact period and a detective plot, it can reveal that idiom as manufactured, and the audience’s recognition of the genre becomes the citizens’ false memory. The tuning sequences, in which architecture moves, make the instability of the world visible as no other medium could. Told as straight science fiction in a future city, the film would be a conspiracy thriller and lose its argument. What holds the axis: the theatrical cut’s rapid cutting and its prologue press a film whose meaning needs slow discovery into a chase.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? Largely yes. Put the company into a single proscenium house behind a classical front and the theatre’s society would begin at the box office. Here the strata and the open foyers make the building a place one passes through, lingers in and looks out from, so that theatre-going is lived as part of the city’s public life. The Olivier’s open fan makes a performance a gathering in which the audience is present to itself, and three houses side by side make the range of the repertoire a visible fact of the plan. What holds the axis: the form knows unevenly; the Lyttelton is a good proscenium room another building could contain unchanged; and the Olivier, which knows the most, is the hardest room in London to stage in.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. The form carries much of what the record knows. The reverberant room, the drums played as lead and the voice pushed to its limit are not a container for the songs: they make the distance and the strain the songs are about, and a dry, close production of the same songs would lose the sense of a man calling across water. The sequence carries an arc, from the late night of the opening song through the vow of In the New Year to the hush of Red Moon and the slow songs of settling, so that the record moves from the end of one life toward another. What holds the figure: the second half does not develop what the first establishes, and its order could change with little loss.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and see what the building stops knowing. Centralise it and the road to the saint is lost: the faithful would stand round a centre instead of walking toward a heaven at the end of the axis. Shorten the nave and the apse is met, not approached. Darken the clerestory and the mosaic, which lives by daylight from its own windows and those of the nave, goes dead. The form is the instrument: the long processional volume, the even rhythm of the columns that sets a pace, and the raised apse over the grave are how the building teaches that the community goes to heaven by way of its martyr. Held below the top because this knowledge is the type’s, shared by any well-made basilica, and because the loss of the marble has made the nave what it now is, a bare corridor to the picture, sharper than was meant.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The low viewpoint from inside the yard, among the stones, is the work’s argument: the viewer stands where the masons stand and looks across at the finished church. Raise it to the bird’s eye of the prospect and the yard becomes a detail of a map. The division into a shadowed foreground and a sunlit distance is the form of the thought, the labour and the made. A painting is the right instrument: a print would lose the light, and a description would lose the simultaneity of yard and church. What holds the figure at 8.1 is that the form, though fitted, is the conventional oblong of the view: the knowledge is carried by viewpoint and light within an inherited format rather than by a form invented for it.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows changes much. Its knowledge is that surface and interior are seen at once, and the instrument is a drawing that does not distinguish them: the same black line draws the outline of the face and the wiring inside it, at the same speed and weight, so that the eye cannot keep skin and skull apart. A careful anatomical rendering would separate the layers and lose the claim; a smaller canvas would lose the confrontation, a head larger than the one who looks. The rawness of the mark is not a manner laid over a content: it is how the head is opened. What holds the axis is that parts of the ground and of the inner tangle could be otherwise without the work knowing less.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The knowledge is time in the body: what it is to watch a person change by increments, each stage worse and each one lived with. The form is that sequence, staged in makeup from Jeff Goldblum’s face to the creature, with the loft as a fixed theatre in which each change is measured against the same furniture, the same pods, the same woman. The pods are the form at its sharpest, two chambers that take apart and put together. The cabinet of discarded parts is a form inside the form. What holds the figure: the closing movement, the abduction and the fusion, reverts to a monster film’s form, and there the instrument becomes a container.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is the uncertainty of the slight: is the remark about Tiger Woods, the arm squeezed, the compliment on the physique, only awkwardness, or something worse? The horror form, in which the viewer reads every small wrongness as a sign and the hero is told he imagines it, is the instrument of that knowledge. The genre’s paranoia becomes the experience of a Black man in white company, and the genre’s confirmation becomes the disclosure. The camera stays with Chris, and the viewer suspects what he suspects, in his order. Told as drama, the film could not say that the suspicion was right. Held off the top because, once the truth is reached, the last act is the genre’s inherited machinery, well used rather than remade.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. The knowledge is spatial: who stands near whom, who is enclosed and who is outside, seen at once on one strand under one light. The single moon gives every figure a shadow of the same length, a democracy of night that the dance itself refuses, and that contrast is something only a painted, lit space can say. The scale, figures at or near life size, puts the viewer on the sand at the edge of the dance, where the woman left out stands. The matt, heavy acrylic makes bodies into masses, which is the picture’s view of them. Held below the top because another arrangement on the strand could carry the scheme, with some loss.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? For its public life, everything. Put this programme in a box with a forecourt and the knowledge that the opera is common ground is lost: it is carried by the slope, by the absence of a front door one must pass, and by the fact that the walk up the roof and the walk to the hall are separate paths to one building. The foyer, under the slope and open to the water, makes going to the opera a matter of light and harbour as much as of the performance. The form is the instrument of that knowledge. What holds the axis: the form knows the civic part well and the opera only by adjacency. The hall is a received horseshoe, and another received type in its place would change the performances little and the building’s knowledge not at all.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Put the same rooms and kivas on the mesa top and the community loses its bound: no roof of rock over all, no single enclosure, no stepping of court, dwelling and store up a slope to the shelter, no view out across the canyon from a village hidden from above. The alcove makes the community one body under one cover, and the kiva roofs, made into courts, make the sacred the ground of daily work. Use was lived through form: people moved over roofs, down ladders, across courts that were ceilings. Held below the top because the form accumulated rather than being designed; its knowledge lies in the relation of village to alcove more than in the village’s own order.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The red is not decoration: every interior is in its shades and the fades are to red, so that the house becomes the inside of a soul and of the body failing within it. The white of the dresses and of the bed against it sets each woman as a figure against her own interior. Each memory opens on a face, half lit, so that the past enters through one consciousness at a time and the film becomes a set of rooms in one house. The clocks and whispers put time and the unsaid into the walls, and the diary gives the dead woman the last word. What holds it here is that the codes, red for the soul and the face before each memory, are applied as a system, and at moments read as code.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that people in a city pass each other by inches and minutes. The diptych is the instrument: two near-loves, the second beginning in the moment the first brushes past it, so that the viewer learns that any stranger in the frame could carry another film. The voiceover’s precision about time, the expiry dates and the numbers instead of names belong to it; so does the step-printing in which the lovers are sharp and the crowd is weather, and the songs that loop as obsession loops. Told as one interwoven plot it would become a romantic comedy. Held below the top because the first story’s form is partly arbitrary, a genre exercise whose shape the second does not need, and because the diptych states its knowledge by juxtaposition more than it builds it.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the house loses what it knows. Set the living room back from the edge, or wall it, and the life of the house, cooking, eating and sitting at the brink with the city as the room’s fourth wall, is gone; turn the L the other way and the pool no longer lies in the open angle between privacy and view. The form changes how the purpose is lived at every hour: the day passed in light and in sight of the city, the night inside a lit glass box over a lit grid. The steel and glass are not a container for a house that could be built otherwise on another lot; the knowledge is the form. What holds the axis at 8.1 is that the form says one thing, and says it largely through one corner of one wing. The bedroom wing is a good plain house.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the work knows something else. In bronze it is a war memorial; in polished stainless steel, a corporate logo; at human size, one of the artist’s gallery figures, inward and solitary. At twenty metres, in rusted, rib-built steel, it knows that the body of the place is industrial labour, and that a body can be a landscape. The ribs carry the knowledge most: they are the structure, and they read at once as the hull of a ship, the ribs of a body and the strata of the hill. The weathering is part of the form; the figure changes colour with rain and season, and is meant to. Held at 8.1 because the body, enlarged from a cast and smoothed of features, is the least worked part of the form.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the painting knows? Largely. The scale is the knowledge: at life size or below the body would be looked at; above life size and seen from beneath, it looks down, and the viewer’s judging gaze is made physically small. Paint laid thick and worked with the hand in the flesh makes the flesh a material as heavy as what it shows; a photograph at this size would show the same body and lose that equivalence. The text, scored into the wet paint, must be in the paint and must be backwards. Held below the top because the inscription could be another passage, or none, and the canvas would know nearly as much, and because the stool and the ground are carried with less necessity than the body.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The first-person voice is the instrument: the narrators think in the idiom of their employers, procedural, upbeat and evasive, so that the system the book exposes is found inside the mind that tells it. Told in the third person, the stories would show exploitation from outside and lose their finding, that consent is spoken in the victim’s own words. The displaced near future is the second instrument: moved a step from the present, the workplace shows its logic without the cover of the ordinary. The short form fits lives seized at the moment their arrangement fails. Held off the top because a collection is additive: the stories share one shape and could stand in another order, and “Bounty” stretches the voice over a length its form does not compel.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the film knows is lost. The long takes bind the viewer to Stone’s continuous time, with no cut to relieve the danger; a camera without a floor makes disorientation the condition of viewing; the passage into the helmet and out again makes the shift between the cosmos and the person a single motion. The rule that sound comes only through contact makes touch the film’s way of knowing, and the 3D is composed as depth and debris, not ornament. These choices are the instrument of the ordeal. Held lower because what the film knows beyond the ordeal, grief and the choice to return, is carried by conventional means, dialogue, a monologue to a stranger on the radio and a vision, and could be told in another form without loss.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much of what the picture knows goes. Its knowledge is the gathering as an experience, and three choices make it. Where the viewer sits: the table runs in from the lower edge, the still life is nearest, and Caillebotte’s chair is turned toward the viewer’s side, so the viewer is placed at the table as one more guest. The crowding: overlapping figures make the press of a full balcony, where a frieze, or groups with air between them, would show a party from outside. The touch: one feathered handling binds faces, glass, cloth and leaves, so the light is shared and the company with it. Held below the top because much of this would survive a smaller canvas or another arrangement, and because the group at the back right is so compressed that the form there stores figures rather than knowing anything with them.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The form is the interlock: two guitars that rarely double each other, Kessler’s clipped and repeating figures against Banks’s chords, a bass that plays melody rather than root, and drums that drive straight and dry. That interlock carries what the record knows, that the body and the pose speak in different voices; set the songs in a common rock arrangement, bass under guitars and voice on top, and the warmth would go and only the distance remain. The sequence is counted here, once: an organ prologue, three hard songs, a long middle, shorter songs and a closing diminuendo, the record lengthening and slowing as it goes. What holds it is that the songs share one template closely, and the sequence is more a well-ordered set than an arc the songs require.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses its central knowledge, that the industry’s form swallows any content, this film’s story included. The film is shaped as the thing it describes: it is the pitch it ends on, a story about an executive who kills a writer and gets away with it, given the happy ending he demands. Habeas Corpus is the same demonstration in small, and its reversal tells the viewer what is being done to Mill’s story as it happens. The opening take, talking about long takes while being one, makes the frame a commentary on itself from the first minute, and the overlapping sound turns the studio into a field of half-heard deals in which a murder is one more conversation. What holds it: the thriller of the middle hour runs on conventional grammar, filled rather than turned.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The train is the society and the narrative at once: a line with one direction, where every door opened is a step up the order and the only way out is forward or through the wall. The frame is shaped by it, the tail in narrow, low, grey depth and the front widening into colour, light and space, so that class is felt as compression and release. The windows give the outside only as view, a death the passengers have agreed to look at. The ending breaks the form, the line cut and the train overturned, and the break is the film’s last thought. Held at its figure because the front cars are a sequence of rooms more than an instrument, and in the engine what the form has shown is then told.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form carries what the film knows. Told in order, this is the story of a woman framing her husband. Told as a diary the audience trusts and then learns to distrust, it makes the viewer one of the people taken in, and puts the film’s own images among the lies: the flashbacks are photographed as memory and turn out to be Amy’s authored record, so the camera itself has performed for us, as the press and the couple perform. The day counts give the procedural its clock, and the change of narrator at the turn is the change of genre. One shot opens and closes the film, framing all of it as Nick’s question about what is inside her head. The costs are counted in full: the structure is the novel’s transposed, and in the second half the form loosens into a more ordinary cross-cut thriller, carrying the plot after its knowledge has been delivered.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and the best songs lose what they know, because the form that carries the knowledge lives inside them. Norwegian Wood’s waltz and sitar set an affair in a cool, slightly foreign room, holding the distance the words keep. In My Life’s slow ground and sudden baroque solo set memory in an older music. Nowhere Man begins unaccompanied, a voice with nowhere around it. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is a good order: Drive My Car opens on a joke and a groove, Norwegian Wood announces the new manner, side one closes on Michelle, side two turns on Girl and In My Life. What holds the figure: it is the order of a collection, elsewhere the song form is a container, and the record ends on its least considered song.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. Three films, each closing on a halt rather than an end, make the audience carry the burden across years as the characters carry it across a continent. The intercutting of the second and third films is the instrument of one real knowledge: the small errand and the great war are one action, decided at the mountain and only defended at the gate. The cross-cutting at the end, Frodo and Sam on the slope against Aragorn’s “For Frodo” at the Black Gate, is form doing that work. Elsewhere the form is a container: the battles could run longer or shorter without changing what the films know, and the codas are sequenced, not shaped. The Fellowship of the Ring has the most necessary shape; The Return of the King the strongest convergence and the weakest close.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The form knows something in two places. The third chapter crosscuts, line by line, the Controller’s lecture to the students, Lenina and Fanny in the changing room, and Henry and the Assistant Predestinator in the lift, until the voices interleave like the whispered lessons of sleep-teaching: the montage is the conditioning, and the reader is conditioned by it. And the war of languages is formal. The state speaks in slogans and rhymes, “A gramme is better than a damn”, “Ending is better than mending”; the Savage speaks only in Shakespeare; two kinds of speech carry two kinds of soul. Elsewhere the form is a container. The tour, the long debate in Peacock’s manner and the shifts of the third person among Bernard, Lenina and John could give way to an essay or a dialogue with much of the knowledge kept, and the late chapters with the Controller nearly are one.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In part. The rotunda makes the public’s way into the legislature a passage through a common hall: the citizen enters at the centre and turns to one chamber or the other. The two fronts give the state its stages: inaugurations were held on the east front through 1977 and on the west front since 1981, the dome behind the oath. The rotunda receives the dead of the state, and lying in state there is a rite the room makes possible. Substitute a palace block without dome or rotunda and the building would stop saying that the assembly is the centre of the polity. But legislative business is lived much as in any chamber: Walter’s halls are interior boxes lit from above, and the older chambers whose form did shape debate, the Old Hall famous for its echoes among them, were given up.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. The form is a sketchbook, and the sketchbook is part of what the record knows: songs cut short, fragments left as fragments, a voice that wavers and is not fixed, so that a record about the fragility of feeling is itself fragile. After the Gold Rush knows its vision through its form, three panels with no explanation between them, the logic of a dream. Southern Man’s two guitars enact its argument as a quarrel. What holds it: most of the record would say what it says in another order and another arrangement, the two fragments close the sides as accidents rather than forms, and the sides do not answer each other.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and the house knows less. The D faces the winter sun and turns its back to the cliff and the north; the terraces make the house a stand round its own plaza, where the gathered community sees itself and is seen; the cardinal walls tie every assembly to the sun’s calendar. Put a compact block or a scatter of hamlets in its place and the knowledge of centre, sky and assembly is lost. Use is lived through the form: gathering, storing and ceremony are put into one figure. Held at 8.0 by the interior: the ranks of small dark rooms show little of this intelligence and could take another arrangement without the work saying less.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The form is the first person of a witness who saw one corner, and the book knows that its form is its argument. What Orwell can claim to know is what he saw from the parapet and from the roof, and the whole charge against the press rests on the authority of that limited sight. Change it to a history and the book loses its proof, for a history could only weigh reports against reports. The order, the front, then the city, then the flight, makes the reader live the turn from comradeship to suspicion before it is explained. The cost is the political chapters, which interrupt the witness form with analysis and can be placed elsewhere, as later editions placed them. That they can be moved without ruin shows that this part of the book is container, not instrument. Held at 8.0.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and what is lost? For the monument, almost everything: a Palladian block of the same size, ruled and reticent, could not make arrival a triumph or make the house read as a citadel across a valley. The approach over the bridge and into the court is lived as a ceremony of victory, and the axis from hall to saloon makes the Duke’s reception a procession toward the painted peoples of the world. For the dwelling the form is lived against: the distances, the kitchens in their court, the cold enfilade of state rooms, the family pushed to the east apartments. Three centuries of use have shown that the form can be lived in, but it has been lived around as much as through. The figure credits the form as the instrument of the monument and charges what it costs the house.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and some of the knowledge goes, chiefly in the frame. The record is built between two large productions: it opens in the storm and closes in the settlement, and the passage from one to the other is what the record knows, that the hope of a decade ends not in rescue but in a bargain with need. Inside the frame the songs are a band’s set: blues, country, two rockers, a ballad, a long jam. Midnight Rambler is the one track whose form enacts its subject, its tempo changes staging the predator’s approach; Love in Vain slowed and recast, and Country Honk as the hit turned inside out, are forms that comment on their sources. The sequence is counted here, once: framed, but the middle could be reordered without loss, and most songs would mean the same alone.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and what the walls know changes. Straight walls of the same stones would be a rampart; the saw-tooth line makes the wall a rhythm and a set of faces, each salient presenting the next, so that the approach is a sequence of confrontations with mass. The three tiers turn the hill into a stage seen from the plain and make the esplanade a theatre, which is how the place is still used. The polygonal fitting carries the meaning of the state as an order of unlike parts held tight. Held at 8.0 because, with the summit gone and the use unknown, the form can be shown to know how the walls are approached and seen, not how the whole precinct was lived.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much goes. What the picture knows is that the dreamer and the dream occupy one moment and one room, and that we see both while she sees neither. Painting alone can hold that simultaneity still: in a text the demon arrives in sequence; on the canvas the sleeper, the weight on her and the horse at the curtain are given at once, as the dream is felt at once. The horizontal format lays her body along the whole width, so that she is the ground the visitation stands on, and the one light makes her the only thing fully seen. Held below the higher band because the content passed to the mezzotint with little loss; the red curtain and the white gown add force but not knowledge.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The form is the pursuit: a sequence of escapes each closed by the machine’s return, so that the viewer learns in the structure what Reese says in words, that it will not stop. Each apparent end, the shots to the chest, the crash, the fire, is broken by a resumption, and the last breaks the human form itself. The time loop is the second shape: the story ends where Reese’s began, with the photograph, and the form closes on itself as the paradox does. Made as an investigation or a war film, the material would lose the felt inevitability of the future. What holds it from higher: those two shapes apart, the grammar is the action film’s inherited grammar, used with great economy rather than remade, and the flashbacks are conventional inserts.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The masque form knows things a play or a dialogue poem would not. The work ends where every masque ends, in the presentation of the masquers to the great persons in the hall, and here the convention is the meaning: the children pass through the wood of the world and are returned to their father’s house as tried, so the occasion becomes the moral. The chair, a stage image, carries what the debate cannot: a mind free in a body bound. The turn from blank verse to song marks the descent of grace, since Sabrina comes in song, not argument. But large parts are speeches whose form is indifferent to their stage, and the Brothers’ debate would lose little as a dialogue poem. The form is instrument at the frame and at the rescue, and container in the middle.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. The form is a pageant interrupted by confession: the civic songs, with their fanfares, chapter titles and choirs, are broken by intimate ones sung close to the microphone over banjo or piano, and the knowledge, that the citizen and the sinner are one person, lives in that alternation. Gacy follows the Exposition’s white city at once; Casimir Pulaski Day follows Chicago, and the sorrow is sharper for the euphoria. The titles are part of the form, putting the irony into print beside music that is never ironic. The sequence is counted here, once: wonder at the open, the founding crime, the exposition, the confession, the long middle of fancies, then the tower and the exit. Held below the top: the middle third’s order is permitted rather than compelled, and several interludes are containers for a joke.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, that the world’s plots do not need you. The shaggy-dog structure is the instrument: each lead the Dude follows opens a larger story, kidnapping, embezzlement, pornography, nihilists, and each collapses, while the bowling alley returns between them like a refrain in which nothing changes but the league’s draw. The Stranger’s frame sets the whole as a tall tale told at a bar, so that the slackness is placed rather than accidental. Phrases pass from mouth to mouth, “will not stand” from Bush to the Dude, and make speech itself the medium of the joke about borrowed conviction. Held at the figure because much of the incident inside the collapsing plot has the form of the sketch, several scenes would play in another order, and the dreams sit apart from the form more than they serve it.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the monastery loses much of what it knows. The enclosure makes monastic life literal: the world is outside a wall, and for centuries the way in was to be drawn up through it, so that entry was an act of acceptance by the community. The church set against the bush makes worship a facing of the holy place, and the chapel behind the apse makes the holiest room a place of the old covenant held by the new. The density inside the walls is the form of a self-sufficient community that cannot spread. Put an open monastery on the plain and the knowledge of keeping a holy place under threat is lost. What holds it at 8.0 is that the church interior, taken alone, could be another basilica’s.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and the city’s knowledge changes. Courtyard houses that turn their doors to the lanes and their blank walls to the streets make a city public in its arteries and private in its cells. A drain that runs from the house into the lane makes hygiene a civic act: the form knows that one household’s water is the street’s concern. The Bath’s form, sunken, stepped at both ends, enclosed, sealed with bitumen, makes immersion a thing entered and left in order, before others. Give these functions open sewers, a river bank and houses fronting the main street, and the city would say something else. Held at 8.0 because much of this is the shared form of Harappan settlement, and the Lower Town varies less purposefully, block for block, than its finest parts.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
In the best tales the form is the instrument of the knowledge. “The Call of Cthulhu” enacts its first sentence: the narrator correlates a sculptor’s dream, a police inspector’s raid on a cult and a sailor’s log, and the correlation is the horror. Told as one straight narrative, the tale would lose its finding, that knowledge itself is the danger. At the Mountains of Madness is a report written to stop an expedition, so that its form is a warning; “The Shadow Out of Time” turns on the document found at the end. The narrator who resists what he knows makes the reader do the knowing. Held at 8.0 because across the body the form hardens into formula, and the italicised last line, “it was a photograph from life” in “Pickman’s Model”, is often a mechanism rather than the form thinking.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the shrine knows goes. It knows that the god is approached by stages, that splendour grows with nearness to power, and that it falls silent at the grave. Laid out on flat ground, or gathered into one hall, it would lose the procession through gates by which the visitor, shogun or pilgrim, re-enacts submission. The joined plan does the same work in small: worship hall and sanctuary are one building, but joined through a lower room floored in stone, so that the god is near and still withheld. Where the form matters less is the surface, whose ornament could carry another programme without changing what the building knows. The festivals still move through the form.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The journey there and back, with the return home given chapters of its own, is the argument that the small person is changed by the wide world and must come back to the small one; a tale that ended at the mountain would not know it. The point of view is held close to Bilbo, so that the world is met at a hobbit’s height, and the battle of the five armies, seen by him until a stone strikes his helm, is the book’s judgment on war: the hero misses it. The rise of register, from nursery comedy to siege and death, is the form of a growing up. Held off the top: the narrator’s asides are a container more than an instrument, and the episodic middle could stand in other orders without the knowledge changing.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building loses what it knows. Put this programme in a rectilinear hall and its claim, that forms grow from one another and a gathering place can be an organism, is gone entirely, because the doctrine is carried by the modelling and nowhere else. The ascent from the west door to the hall is lived as a transformation, and that is the purpose the building serves. Two things hold the figure at 8.0. The great hall, where the purpose is most fully lived, is the least formed part of the work, a conventional auditorium whose finish came in later campaigns; and the east end takes its form from the stage machinery, not from the idea. Where form is the instrument, at the west front, the stair halls and the terraces, it reaches higher than this mean.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? In the open hall, yes. Its openness, its raised plinth and its piers that sound when struck make it an instrument of the performance it housed; put a closed hall in its place and the temple loses its knowledge of worship as public spectacle and music. The chariot’s form is its whole meaning: a car that cannot move, holding the god’s mount before his door. The axial sequence teaches approach by moving the body through it. Elsewhere the form is less bound to what it knows: the subsidiary halls are serviceable pavilions of their period, and the enclosure is a type rather than a discovery. The form is the instrument at the centre and a container at the edges.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The form is the radio record, and in the best songs the form is the claim: a record that says the pop song on the radio saves ordinary lives is made of pop songs fit for the radio. Rock & Roll is a song about a song, whose own build is the rescue it describes; as a ballad or a drone it would know less. Sweet Jane’s two chords are its plainness, and its plainness is its argument for plain lives. The first side has a shape, and the close is placed with intent, the long last song opening the record outward. Held from the top: two lead voices that never become a form, and a second side that runs as a set of borrowed manners, a container more often than an instrument.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the building would know less. The city’s banquet takes place in a court, not a hall: guests descend a stair into a brick space that reads as the open air, and the building teaches by that descent that the civic feast is a public occasion. The arcade on the lake makes the hall’s relation to the city a relation to water and light rather than to traffic. The sequence from the open court through the roofed court and up to the gilded and the timbered rooms shapes how the citizen passes from the public to the deliberative. Held where it is by the dress: the sources could be exchanged without changing what the plan says.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. As a single-storeyed hall in one manner the building could not show three authorities in order; set back from the water it could not be doubled. The form is the instrument of both. Its upper storeys were made to be climbed and looked out from, over a garden seen from above as a world in small, and its ground floor runs out over the water to boats: the form changed how a ruler received and was seen. That living was brief. Since 1408 the pavilion has been the relic hall of a temple, a use real and continuous but closed to the visitor, and the form now carries a view rather than a life inside it.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
In the best stories the brevity is the knowledge. “El libro de arena” can know the infinite as an object only because it is short: a longer tale would explain it, and its terror depends on its stopping. “El espejo y la máscara” knows the ascent of poetry through its three-part form, the fairy-tale triple that makes the third term fatal. “El otro” is a dialogue of two speakers who are one man, a form that can exist only as a short scene. The collection adds less. Its order means something, the double first and the infinite last, the self at the opening and the world at the close, but the middle is an assortment, and nothing in the book’s form changes what “El soborno” or “Avelino Arredondo” knows.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a square castle with corner towers and the building loses what it says: the centrality, the equality of every face, the absence of a front and a back but for the portal’s slight priority, the figure as crown. Form is the knowledge here more than in most buildings, since no surviving programme of use carries a content apart from it. The ring of rooms makes the occupant pass through each one and come back to the start, a way of living the figure, and the court gathers every room to a single centre. But what the form does to a life inside it is inferred, not documented, and rooms all alike give the form little to articulate within.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows depression as weight, and weight is its form: downtuned guitars, slow tempos, meters that lurch a beat early or late so the body never settles. Fell on Black Days in an even, settled meter would know less; The Day I Tried to Live’s lurching bars are its argument, every attempt at forward motion tripping. The sequence is counted here, once: it carries a descent, opening on the wish to drown and closing on a death, with Black Hole Sun’s prayer at the centre and 4th of July’s dread just before the end. Held from the top by the middle of each half, where Mailman, Head Down, Kickstand and Fresh Tendrils follow by variety rather than necessity.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that nothing can be known about anyone but what they say and do in front of Spade. The camera is bound to him in nearly every scene and never enters a head; Brigid’s motives, Gutman’s history and Spade’s own feelings are given only as speech and face, and the viewer stands where Spade stands, weighing a performance. The rooms are the form: a handful of sets where people bargain, so that the film is a series of negotiations, each with its terms, and the last is the longest. Edeson’s framing works for it, Gutman shot from below and filling the frame, groupings that shift as alliances shift. What holds the axis: the binding apart, the grammar is the studio’s, used with great economy rather than remade, and the stage play is never far below the film.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and what is lost? The six-foot scale changes what the picture knows: at that size the weather is an environment the eye enters, the far meadow a distance the body measures, and an ordinary place is given the standing of a subject. As a cabinet picture the same motif would be a pleasant view; the claim the work makes, that this is enough for great painting, is carried by its size. The method is the form’s second part: a full-size oil sketch, then the finished canvas, so that the broken touch of outdoor work is carried into exhibition finish. The format puts the weather above the labour as the governing fact. Held at 8.0 because the composition, dark masses at the sides framing a lit distance, is the inherited coulisse of the classical landscape, and because finishing for the Academy tempered what the sketch knew.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The form changes how the purpose is lived, in two ways. The contrast of plain shell and inner density makes entry a passage from the world into a carved interior: the worshipper does not see the temple and then enter it, but enters an inside that has no outside. And the ring of cells with its ceilings turns circumambulation, the rite itself, into a progress through a sequence of different carved heavens, each before its own image, so that the form multiplies the presence of the jinas in the act of walking. Substitute plain ceilings and the ritual continues, but the knowledge that worship is offered inside a heaven of the donors’ making is lost. Held below the top because the form is the type’s, shared by many temples, and the later temples carry it without deepening it.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the building knows? In part, yes. The carving and the porch frieze gathered at the east, the deepened east porch and the siting on the brow of the hill make a temple that faces the Agora: make the plan symmetrical, or set the building in a sanctuary away from the city, and it stops being the gods’ house over the working city and becomes a temple in general. The ring of columns, whole on every side, is the form through which the god’s house is known as a house among men, open and walkable. Against it: most of the form is the order’s and would carry the same knowledge on another hill, and the use it shaped, the approach to the image, is gone under a Christian vault.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and a good deal changes. The roll is a passage: unrolled in one direction, it carries the dead man’s progress from tomb to judgment to the presence of Osiris in its own direction and in the procession inside each scene. Word and image are one fabric: columns of text stand over the figures and name them, so that the image is labelled as testimony and the text placed as speech. The form is function too, a roll made to be placed with the body, accompanying the passage it shows. Held at 8.0 because the same content stands on tomb walls and coffins with little loss of meaning, and the order of spells and vignettes within the roll is partly conventional rather than compelled by its argument.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The parallel cutting between brothers and Rangers is the instrument of its central knowledge, that the law and the outlaw are mirrored pairs: two men in a car on the same empty roads, ribbing each other, the Ranger and his half-Comanche partner, the ex-convict and the father. The wide frame of empty land is the economic argument made visible: quiet towns, signs for debt relief, oil pumps in the fields. The robbery plot is the form of the debt, money taken from the bank to repay it. The cost: part of the form is the genre’s container, well filled rather than turned into knowledge; the Rangers’ investigation is procedure, and much of what the film knows is also said in words.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Scale is the instrument: figures set tiny against dunes and rock, the human made small by the planet and the crowd, so that when Paul is lifted by the crowd at the council the film’s grandeur is the seduction it describes, and the viewer feels the pull the argument warns against. The infrared monochrome of Giedi Prime makes a world without colour or warmth, a form for a culture without mercy, and the black sun is a sign drawn from the form itself. Sound carries the worm and the Voice, a doubled and lowered tone, and the thumper’s rhythm is the desert’s pulse. Told in standard coverage, the film would become a plot about a war. Held below the high band: the narrative grammar is conventional, and the fraud of the prophecy is carried more by dialogue than by form.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is waiting: slow entrances, space left in the arrangement, long forms that hold back their release. April 5th is built almost of rests; Time It’s Time withholds its full sound for minutes. Played fast and full, these songs would state the same longing and would not make the listener wait as the record does. The sequence is counted here, once: each side runs from a long opening through a quieter piece toward its close, and the whole moves from a doubted lesson to a long choral release, winter to spring. Held short because three songs work as conventional singles, where the form contains more than it enacts.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the lived purpose changes. A bridge of open parapets would make crossing the Arno a walk in view of the water; this one makes it a walk through a street, so that the river is felt rather than seen until the gap. The shops turn passage into lingering, and for six centuries the bridge has been a place to stay in rather than only to cross. The corridor changes what a crossing is for one person: the prince crosses the same river above, without touching the street, and can look down into it. Set the corridor beside the bridge on piers of its own and the knowledge of power laid over commerce is lost. What holds the axis is that the arches themselves know little that another good bridge would not, and the shops take the ordinary form of a medieval shop row.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The episodic chain is the knowledge: a man who can attach to no one is shown as a series of encounters, each ended by him, and a plotted drama would have to give him a cause or an arc the film denies. The rehearsed and improvised method yields speech that is the character’s thought rather than a writer’s, and that speech is the disclosure itself. The handheld prologue, cut off from all that follows, makes the first sight of Johnny an act he never accounts for. Against it, the domestic strand at the flat runs on a more conventional dramatic form, with entrances, a villain and a crisis, and that half of the film could take another shape with less loss.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. A platform mound shows the ruler above the people, seen; the compound hides him, unseen. In the compound the subject’s experience of power is the walk itself: one door, a court, a turn, an audiencia where someone decides whether you go further, storerooms you pass but cannot reach. The form does not house the administration of goods; it is that administration, made into routes. The burial platform inside the walls makes the dead king’s continuing possession something lived by those who still serve the compound. The form knows what Chimor was. Held below the higher bands because the city as it stands no longer performs this: the routes are partly lost in ruin, the visitor’s path through Tschudi is laid out by its restorers, and the knowing is read from the plan more than lived in the walk.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Told in order, as a man who kills his wife, goes mad and imagines another life, it becomes a twist thriller with a clinical label. Told as it is, the viewer lives the fugue: the cut from Fred to Pete comes without explanation, the new world is sunlit, and the viewer is relieved before he is suspicious, which is the dreamer’s own relief. The Madison house, rooms whose corners vanish into black, is a mind that will not look; Pete’s world is lit evenly because it is a lie; the loop is the knowledge that the escape returns to its source. What holds the figure: the middle movement’s form is borrowed genre, used more than remade, and the film stays in it longer than the knowledge needs.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The form changes how the purpose is lived at several points. The separation of the two pavilions across a court makes going to work a short walk out of doors and keeps the house a house. The double-height room with the loft over the rest gives one frame a large room and small ones, so that the life inside has a public scale and a private one. The skin of clear and translucent panels makes the light and the trees part of every room. And the neutrality of the frame makes the interior’s accumulation possible: a richer architecture would have competed with it. Substitute a timber or masonry house and much survives, the gathering, the work, the pairing; what the form alone knows is the lightness of the shelter against the density of the life. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that the form is permissive more than formative: it hosts more than it shapes.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute a painted or posed form for the same content and the image can no longer say its main thing: that this happened, unrehearsed, in a fraction of a second, in the middle of a battle. The charge of staging, which followed the image for decades and which its maker answered for the rest of his life, is the proof that the form is the knowledge: the image’s authority rests on its having been caught. The instant also carries the blur of motion, the imbalance of the trailing figure and the half furled flag, an act in progress that no painter would have composed so unresolved. The bronze shows by contrast what the photograph knows. Held where it is because light, tone and grain are not where the knowledge lies; it lies in the instant.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Yes, in three things. Entry is lived as a descent from the open court into a lit hall, and the glass keeps the sky and the palace in view from the floor below, so that the visitor stays oriented in a building that had no centre. The court is lived as a square with a figure at its middle, crossed by people who never go in. And the old fronts are seen anew, through the glass and beside it. Put an opaque pavilion there, or the entrance in one wing, and each of these is lost. What holds the axis: the hub gathers the museum’s crowds at one point, so the form now makes arrival a wait in a queue and a press at a stair; and the hall’s knowledge is the pyramid’s, the rest of the concourse a well-made but ordinary space of distribution.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows. Its knowledge lives in a contrast: the satin of the title and the setting against a voice worn to the grain. Put the same voice with a trio and the record becomes a document of decline; put a young voice with these arrangements and it becomes the easy listening it resembles. The form is the instrument of the disclosure. The sequence is counted here, once: twelve ballads in one mood, opening on a confession and closing on an ending, the quicker step of the last the only formal event in the order. That order serves more than it enacts, and the charts, interchangeable from track to track, carry the contrast without shaping it.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the bridge knows goes. An arch or a girder bridge across the gorge at this height would have needed piers in the gorge or a far heavier structure. What the suspension form knows is that the way can float, held from above, and the crossing is lived as that: the slight give of the deck, the open drop, the chains rising at each end to the towers and dipping to the deck at mid span, so that the walker passes through the curve of the forces. No other form gives that crossing. Held from the top by two things: the towers’ massive portals are a received masonry form rather than one the structure asks for, and the use, a road for cars under a weight limit, is lived as any toll road is.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses its central knowledge, because the knowledge is the conversation. Issued as three solo records, these songs would be complaints, a prophecy and a consolation; set in one sequence, the writer changing on every one of the ten joins, sung by one band over a rhythm section that never changes under them, they become a quarrel and a reconciliation in a single sound. The sequence is counted here, once: side one closes on Songbird, a benediction; side two opens on The Chain, the oath, and ends on Gold Dust Woman, a warning. What holds the figure: the songs inside it are conventional verse and chorus, and You Make Loving Fun to Oh Daddy follows by alternation more than by argument.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The purpose is to keep water at height, and the form is that purpose drawn in stone: the level channel on top, the ground’s fall measured by the growing arches below, so that the gradient, invisible in a buried pipe, is made visible to everyone. Another form, a siphon, a tunnel or a solid embankment, would carry the water and would not say this, and an embankment would cut the town in two where the arcade lets it pass through. That second part matters: the open arches made the ground beneath a square and a crossing, and the town has lived under and through its water supply for its whole history. What holds the axis is that the form knows one thing completely and no more; it changes how the water’s passage is seen and the ground beneath is lived, not how water is used.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and much goes. The figure knows its subject through marble in the round at over life size. The spiral can be had only by walking round it; the contrast of skin and folds is a contrast of carved surface and cut shadow that paint or relief would flatten; the drapery’s precarious hold is credible only in stone, where weight is real. As it stands, the armless form is a knowing of its own: the shoulders end, and the body becomes a column of turning masses. Held below the top because the form served a type: the same pose in bronze or in another marble would know most of what this one knows, and much of what this object now says comes from loss, not from form chosen.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Watson’s narration is the instrument. A narrator who sees, records and does not observe lets the reader hold every clue and still be surprised, and lets the book show reasoning as a gap between two minds. Told in the third person, or by Holmes, the stories would lose their finding, that intelligence is visible chiefly to the one who lacks it. The short form is matched to the case: one problem, one hearing, one solution, the client’s statement set at the centre as testimony to be read. Held off the top because the form is the same in all twelve and frames the plot more than it thinks, and the long statements of clients, Hatherley’s and Violet Hunter’s among them, run as set pieces in a borrowed voice. A form fitted to its content, not one that is its content.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The form carries the knowledge in three ways. The two discs, Left and Right, a descent and a climb, make the record’s one argument structural: the way out is through, and the through takes a whole disc. The alternation of song and instrumental makes the instrumentals the places where the self cannot speak, so that when the voice drops out, in Just Like You Imagined and La Mer, the music says what words have failed to. And figures recur, the piano of The Frail returning under The Wretched, so that the length is woven rather than piled. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top: the double length is partly permitted, and several songs on Right could change place or go without altering what the form knows.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The two halves are heaven and hell: the first a closed, cool, still room, where the camera holds groups in wide compositions and the window shows the city as a picture; the second hot, mobile and crowded, where the city is entered and the house becomes the thing seen from below. The order is the knowledge: the viewer lives the decision at its own length before learning what the city costs, and the rich man’s choice is judged by the hell it was made above. In the house the wide frame is the instrument, Gondo, his wife, his secretary, the chauffeur and the police held in one frame and their loyalties read by where they stand. The glass of the coda gathers the film’s law into one image. What holds the figure: the long middle is the procedure’s inherited container, well filled, and through most of the second half the form knows less than either end.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much of what it knows goes. The knowledge is in three decisions: the close crop that presses the three into one mass; the dark, shallow ground that gives them no room and no place; and the flat saturated colour of the cloth set against softly modelled faces, so that the bodies are almost pattern and the faces alone are inward. That last opposition is what the picture says: the dressed, arranged, decorative person, and the withdrawn face within it. A narrative scene, a deeper space, a photograph or a lighter palette would each lose it. Held below the top because her other group pictures of these years carry nearly the same knowledge, and because in parts of the lower half the form is the container, not the instrument.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the building stops being able to say most of what it knows. In a concrete box under a tin roof the same three classrooms would teach the same lessons, but the building would no longer say that the children’s comfort, the village’s labour and the local earth are one thing. The form changes how the school is lived: rooms cool enough to concentrate in through the hot season, a shaded outdoor room between each pair of classrooms, a roof that keeps the rain off the walls so that the walls can be earth. The method of making is part of the form, its dimensions and members chosen so that untrained hands could make them. The limit: the classrooms themselves are ordinary rooms, and the form’s knowledge sits in the section, not in plan and space.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? Largely, yes. The hemicycle’s curve binds the market to the forum: flatten it and the two become neighbours rather than one composition, and the market’s answer to the exedra is lost. The terracing makes the building a section of the hill; a block on level ground would know nothing of the cut it holds. The street inside makes it a quarter rather than a structure: one walks a Roman street through shops, in the open air, several levels up a building. The Great Hall’s vaults give commerce its hall. Where it yields: the upper blocks take their forms from the site rather than from a meaning, and the shop rooms are a container any arrangement could hold.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? In its main claim, yes. Because the hall is a tunnel through the solid with glass at both ends, a concert there knows the city outside it; put the same room in a closed shoebox and that knowledge is gone. Because the rest of the house is carved round the hall, every route through it brushes against the hall, looks into it or over it, and going to a concert is a passage through a mass rather than an arrival in a lobby. Form is the instrument of the building’s argument about the music house. The costs: the faceted outside, which is what the city knows, could be changed with little loss to the rooms, and the secondary rooms are a sequence of finishes more than a sequence of forms.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its knowledge is in the pressure of the sound against the voice. The arrangements are dense, layered and often murky, and the baritone sits low inside them; that is the condition the songs describe. Terrible Love enacts it most fully, opening buried and ending in flood. Afraid of Everyone puts the fear in a repeating drum pattern, and Bloodbuzz Ohio’s rolling toms are the homeward pull. The sequence runs from that murk through the gathered fears to a hymn that turns private pressure into common song. In the middle the form matters less: four songs hold one mood, and their order could change.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the book’s knowledge goes, more completely than in most novels of its kind. The first person present gives no distance: the narrator does not know what he does at night, so the reader cannot know, and the late discovery is the reader’s as well as his. The refrains are the form of a mind in pieces: “I know this because Tyler knows this” is said for chapters before it can be heard as literal. The chapters are cut short and set out of order, beginning at the end and folding back, like the frames Tyler splices into family films. The “I am Joe’s” voices, organs speaking in the first person as if they were the man, are the joke on which the book stands. Told in the third person, it would be a thriller about a cult. Held back because the device carries much of the weight once, and the middle chapters are conventional episodes.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Changing the form would change what the building knows. Set the same halls and images in a courtyard on the valley floor and it can no longer say that the sacred is reached by leaving the ground, that the three teachings are joined by one precarious passage, or that the hermitage lives at the edge of the void. Use is changed by the form as much as meaning: worship is a passage in single file along a face, climbing, with the body’s fear part of the approach, and a shrine is entered from a ledge, not a court. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. What holds the axis is the interiors, standard shrines that would say the same anywhere, and a chain that could be longer or shorter.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that truth between people arrives slowly, awkwardly and in shared time. The long take is the instrument. In the café both women stay in frame, side by side, with no cut to faces or reactions, and the viewer watches the recognition happen to both at once. The barbecue table is held whole, so that the revelation lands on everyone together. Against this stands the counterform of the sittings, short, posed and cut, every face arranged for the camera: the posed image against the endured. Told with conventional coverage, it would become an adoption melodrama. What holds the figure: the middle hour crosscuts in ordinary grammar, and the score at times does the takes’ work.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows changes a great deal. Cast the seeds and the knowledge of labour goes. Heap them and they are a commodity in a warehouse; spread them level and they are ground, a plain, a population, and the viewer stands above the field as a state stands above its people. Make them large and the single seed is a sculpture rather than a unit; at life size each is a thing for the hand, which is the scale of the discovery. The form is the instrument. Held at 8.0 because the visual form is given rather than composed, a level spread with no arrangement for the eye to learn; the number is the hall’s; and the body on the field, part of the design, held for two days of a run of about seven months.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the film knows? In large part. The near-unity of time and place makes the bank a stage and the street its auditorium, so that the knowledge that the event has become theatre is carried by the form: the cut between the sweating interior, where people come to know one another, and the open street, where they are only images. With no score, the crowd’s roar and the telephone’s ring do the work music would do. Night turns the register from farce to intimacy, and the airport, the first open space, moves the action from the city’s theatre to the state’s, where no crowd watches. What holds it: the siege told in sequence is partly given by the event, and the telephone scenes could take other forms with little loss.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the book stops being able to say most of what it says. Its comedy lives in the gap between Bertie’s account and what the reader sees: Bertie reports his own plans as masterstrokes, records Jeeves’s reserve without understanding it, and tells the story of his own defeat without grasping that it is one. Told in the third person, or by Jeeves, the gap closes and the joke goes. Jeeves is kept outside throughout, never shown from within, and his opacity is the condition of the ending, which only works because neither Bertie nor the reader has been let into the plan. The instrument is exact. Held at its figure because what the form knows is chiefly comic knowledge: it carries precisely what it carries, and that is narrow.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. Its subject is being alone among people, and the sound is that condition: a voice set back and doubled as if speaking to itself, arrangements bright and crowded around it, drums so compressed they seem to press on the ear. The crowd recording under Keep On Lying is form as content; the coda of Sun’s Coming Up, which leaves the singer behind and lets the guitar go on alone, is the record’s last word given without words. What holds it short of the higher rung is that Endors Toi, Elephant and Music to Walk Home By would sit as easily on another psychedelic pop record: there the form is a container, well made.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because it knows distance as sound. The reverb and the open room are the content: a dry, close production of the same songs would make them plain rock songs and lose the sense of a life heard from far off. The voice, set high against a thin band, is the strain the record means, not an ornament on it. The sequence is counted here, once. It runs from “Juveniles” to “Lisbon”, from youth’s claim to the far city, turning at “Stranded” and quieting in “While I Shovel the Snow” before its close, and the arc is felt. What holds the axis: the middle of the sequence serves more than it enacts, and several of its songs could stand in another order, or alone.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that these separate lives are one condition, and the form says it by cutting between them until they rhyme: Earl and Jimmy on their beds, Frank and Claudia refusing their fathers, Stanley and Donnie at either end of one injury. The prologue teaches the viewer to read the cross-cutting as meaningful; the sing-along shows nine people in nine places sharing one state; the frogs, falling on every strand in one sequence, make the convergence physical. A single-protagonist film could tell any of these stories; it could not say the injury is general. What holds the axis here is that the film does not leave its form to say it: the narrator argues the convergence in words the cutting has already made, and scenes held past their length slow the rhymes.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The form carries much of the knowledge. A day spent mostly in a vehicle that hardly moves makes the argument about time: the market runs at the speed of light on the screens while the car crawls at the pace of a funeral, and the gap between them is the subject. Benno’s confessions, written after the event and set within the day, mean that the reader knows the end before Eric does, so the narration enacts the foreknowledge his watch will show him; Eric’s visions of himself a moment ahead are the form compressed into an image. Held off the higher reaches because the stations could stand in another order, a form that permits episodes rather than compels them, and because every voice in the car is one voice, which the form does not need.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute ordinary coverage and the film loses what it knows. The unbroken take makes stage and backstage, theatre and street, one continuous space, so that Riggan is never off: there is no cut in which he could rest or be someone else, and no place outside performance. Time folds inside the take, nights passing in a pan across a sky, so that the days are felt as one sleepless state. The single break comes at the gunshot, when the performance ends in the real, and the film then cuts: the form registers the event. The drum score, keyed to footfall and nerves, makes the take a pulse. Where the form holds less: the take is also a display of making to be admired for itself, and in the long corridor passages it is container as well as instrument.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and see what the poster stops knowing. Set the same figure in a broad format and the icon is lost: the narrow, near life-size column makes her a standing presence in the street, actress and statue in a niche at once. Print her in strong primaries and the solemnity goes; the muted gold is the liturgy. Remove the arch and she is a costumed woman, not an image of veneration. Name, title and theatre are lettered into architectural bands, part of the shrine: the advertisement is the reliquary. The form is the instrument. What holds the figure below the upper band is that the knowledge is not large: the form carries one idea fully, not a complex one.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. The attenuated limbs, the arm held clear of the hip and the thin legs bearing the weight are what cast metal allows and terracotta does not: in fired clay those limbs would break or thicken. The knowledge the work has, a body at ease in itself, lives in that openness, in the gaps between arm and body and between the legs. The small scale makes it a thing held in the hand and turned, and the pose changes as it turns, from the akimbo front to the long side. The bangles exist as cast rings, weight on the arm. Held at 8.0 because the form is not complex: one attitude, which survives tolerably in a photograph, without the round.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Here the form carries the knowledge. Change the room into a cabinet on a wall and the work loses what it knows: that you are inside the pharmacy, a customer in its order, standing where the remedies face you on every side and the insect-killer hangs over your head. The walk-in form turns a proposition about belief into the experience of being surrounded by its objects. The exactness of the replica is formal knowledge too: the room is close enough to a real dispensary that the frame of the gallery flickers, and the question of what is art and what is shop is put by the form, not stated beside it. What keeps the figure from the top is that the form is borrowed whole from its type. The knowing lies in the transposition, and the transposition is one move.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows changes nearly wholly, since its knowledge lies in the contradiction of its form and its matter. In rubber it is a balloon; at small scale it is a souvenir, as the later porcelain editions show; without the mirror finish it is a cast of a toy, a sculpture in the old sense, and the room and the viewer leave it. The form is the instrument: a membrane that seems a breath thick, made of a metal that will outlast its makers, at a size that turns a gesture of a child’s party into a monument. And the form was made, not cast: the pinches, creases and slight sag of each twist are rendered to the eye’s belief. Held at 8.0 because much of the argument reaches its public intact through a photograph and a price.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The form carries the knowledge more than the story does. The chapter titles, each a place and a target, give the procedure its grid, and the meaning sits in the gap between the grid and what happens in it. The voice against the image is the instrument: the man says one thing, the camera shows another, and the film knows what he does not. The split sound does the same work from the other side: in his ears The Smiths fill the frame and the world goes quiet, and when the film steps out we hear the room he is ignoring. Substitute a third-person thriller and the irony goes, and most of the meaning with it. What holds it at its figure: the form, once set in Paris, is repeated rather than developed, and the later chapters apply it without deepening it.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The architecture is part of the knowledge: ten books that take down and twelve that build; origins, course and ends, so that the book moves as history moves, from the sack of a city in 410 to the city without end, and closes on the eighth day. Cast as a summa or a dialogue, it would lose its sense of a pilgrimage through time. But below the plan the form is loose. It is a treatise grown by instalment; whole books could change order or proportion without changing what the work knows, and the digressions show the container more than the instrument. Against a novel whose double plot is its knowledge, as in Anna Karenina, or Augustine’s own Confessions, whose form is its finding, this is a plan that carries an argument rather than a form that thinks.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. What the record knows, that one voice holds the rocker and the ballad, the black song and the white, lives in alternation, and the form enacts it: the opening run sets “Blue Suede Shoes”, a ballad, “I Got a Woman”, a ballad, and side two runs fast and slow to the fast end of “Money Honey”. Put the shouters on one side and the ballads on the other and the record stops saying that one voice holds both; it becomes two records. Placing “Blue Suede Shoes” first is a decision with meaning, another man’s hit of the moment taken over in the first two minutes. What holds the figure below 8.0: side one closes on two Sun ballads as if filling a side rather than shaping it; the change of room between the Sun and RCA tracks is heard and not used; and most tracks stand alone, as the extended-play records cut from the same tapes show.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The form is the road: five parts, four crossings and a coda, the shape of compulsive return, each part a departure and an arrival, and the last, a few pages long, the motion stopped. The long sentence, clause after clause joined by “and”, carries the speed the book knows; told in slower and more ordered prose, the work would lose its knowledge of what the speed is for and what it covers. The retrospective first person, written by a Sal who already knows the ending, lets elegy shadow the celebration from the first line: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up” is the voice of someone looking back. Charged: the episode is a container more often than an instrument, and many could be reordered or exchanged with little loss; and the shape of the parts was in part imposed by editing, so the published form is not wholly the instrument of the knowledge.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Part of the form is the knowledge. The juror who recognises the accused makes the theme structural: judge and judged in one room, and the court’s procedure the frame of a man’s memory. The movement east is a living shape too, from the courtroom to the prison, the étape and the barracks, each step down closer to the people the court disposes of, the narrative moving in step with the prisoners. Change that form and the book loses its descent. But in the second and third parts the form loosens into a container: chapters of exposition, the visit to his estates, the Petersburg rounds, where the episodic tour could be reordered or cut and the book would know the same. The ending leaves the form altogether for commentary on scripture. That holds the axis second lowest of the twelve.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? The purpose is crossing, and a cantilever bridge or a plainer suspension bridge, such as Strauss’s own first scheme, would carry the same traffic. But this form changes how the crossing is lived. The road passes through the towers rather than beside them, so the crossing is a passage through portals; the sidewalks, part of the design from the first, make the bridge a public walk across the strait, one of the great promenades of any city; the single span leaves the water open, so the crossing is always over the ocean’s mouth and not over a run of piers. The colour makes the structure visible in fog, safety and sign at once. The daily use of a highway is lived much as on any bridge, and the figure stays below the buildings whose form remakes their use.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The tower’s knowledge is in its form. A tower is the only shape in which a claim on the sky can be made, and this tapering, fluted, banded shaft, with the conqueror’s names cut into it, is the claim. Change the fluting to plain cylinders, as was done above, and the tower loses much of its force; make it a dome or a gate and the statement changes entirely. But the form shapes little of how a purpose is lived. The call to prayer was not shaped by it, and since 1981 no one enters it. It is a thing looked at, and its living form is the form of an emblem.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes with it, but not all. The form carries incantation: long strophic verses over a repeating guitar figure, so that each song is a meditation rather than a drama, and the listener is held inside a slow repetition as the singer is held inside his obsessions. The Stranger Song’s unchanging figure enacts the gambler’s patience. The sequence is counted here, once: an invocation, portraits of rivalry and shelter on side one, leave-takings opening side two, and a bitter end whose collapse into wordless noise turns the record’s restraint inside out. Against it stands the substitution test: these songs pass whole into other arrangements, and the versions of Suzanne by Collins and by Nina Simone keep most of what it knows. The form is a fit vessel more than the instrument of the knowledge, and that holds it under 8.0.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The impersonal tableau, a sequence of great scenes seen from outside, with the persons given in gesture and costume rather than in thought, is the instrument of the book’s one deep knowledge: that this world cannot be entered from within, that its gods and its cruelties have their own law, and that the modern reader can only look. Tell it through a sympathetic consciousness and that knowledge goes. But the form is also a container for long stretches. The campaign chapters are sequenced by chronicle, not by the form’s necessity; the love plot is too thin to bear the weight the ending puts on it, so that Salammbô’s death at the sight of Mâtho’s heart is asserted rather than prepared; and the alternation of tableau and campaign is a rhythm more than an argument. The floor is met with room.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once. It has a shape: it opens on the machine pulse and closes on it, and between them the songs pass from the seeker’s longing in Bargain through music as grace in The Song Is Over and Getting in Tune to the hidden self of Behind Blue Eyes and the disenchanted crowd of the closing track. Within songs the form knows things. Baba O’Riley’s long instrumental opening is the wasteland before the voice; Won’t Get Fooled Again’s collapse to the machine alone enacts the revolution that brings back the old order; Behind Blue Eyes withholds the band until the anger it hides breaks out. But the record is a collection cut from a larger form, another order of the same songs would change less than it would on a record built whole, and My Wife and Love Ain’t for Keeping sit by placement, not by form.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the work knows? Yes, in the part that survives. Put the god’s house on the ground and the separation of god from city is lost, and the ascent as the way of approach with it: this form makes worship a climb, visible to the whole city, converging from three directions on one gate. The batter makes the mass read as a body that will not fall. What holds the axis lowest of the formal three is what the form now knows only in part. Its use ended more than two thousand years ago and is not recorded in detail; the shrine where the climb arrived is gone, so the form knows the ascent and not its end; and a solid mass has no interior in which to shape a life.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The prose is the instrument: the reader receives the world as Case does, overloaded and unexplained, with things named before they are understood, and the book knows the flood of information by making its reader swim in it. The simstim passages are formally exact: Case riding inside Molly’s senses, passive in a body not his own, puts the argument about body and mind into the point of view. The heist fits a world in which every act is a contract and every person is hired. Held below 8 because much of the structure is the thriller’s and could be borrowed, so that the noir plot could be told with little of the knowledge lost, and because the form’s speed is bought with clarity at the climax, where the reader cannot always follow what the run in Straylight is doing.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part. The knowledge is that an education happens between the lessons, and the record is framed so: songs placed like lessons in a day at school, the classroom talk heard at their edges, the student absent from the roll call and present in every song. The two modes of the one voice carry the argument: rap for the world, in Lost Ones, Doo Wop and Final Hour; song for the self, in Ex-Factor, To Zion and the title song. The sequence is counted here, once: anger and loss, then the child, then the public sermon, then injury rehearsed, then the city and faith, to self-possession in the title song and prayer in the coda. That sequence is held by its frame more than built. The middle run could stand in another order without the record knowing less, the classroom talk supplies a shape the songs do not require of it, and the coda loosens the frame. The two voices are the instrument; the order of the day is closer to a container.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Change the scale and largely yes. Enlarge Banteay Srei to the size of a royal temple-mountain and the carving that is its knowledge would become ornament seen from a distance; the worshipper would no longer stand at arm’s length from the stories of the gods. The form makes the temple an object to be beheld closely, a building of the reliquary’s kind, and that changes how worship there is lived. Below the scale, though, the form is the standard Khmer arrangement of towers on a platform within enclosures, a container for the knowledge more than its instrument; libraries and gopuras could stand otherwise without loss. The choice of scale is credited and the conventional plan charged.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The sequence is counted here, once, and at its ends it changes what the record knows. The record knows that the blues is a ladder from the self to history: it opens on the body, voice and handclaps, and closes on judgment, and the order is the argument. Move “Strange Fruit” to the middle and the lynching becomes one sorrow among others; put “Sinnerman” anywhere but last and the record loses its verdict. The bare setting of the first track is the form of its claim, and the length of the last is the form of its trance. Held short by the middle: tracks 3 to 7 could stand in another order, and the climb the ends imply is not taken step by step.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and some of the knowledge goes. The record moves like channels found and left, a summer flicked through: a rich kid’s afternoon, a crack house, Egypt, a cab. The drift is part of the meaning, a consciousness that cannot settle on one life because the one it wants is withheld. The two-part form of Pyramids is knowledge, a myth and its present in one track, and the voice’s turns into falsetto carry what the words will not finish. The sequence is counted here, once: the confession of Bad Religion comes late, after the sketches have shown the world it must be spoken in, and Forrest Gump answers it before the end. The drift is also a looseness: most songs would stand alone or in another order, and the short pieces are a container rather than an instrument.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? The axial sequence does: arrival is a passage from piazza through the dark vestibule into the light of the court, and every visitor, prince or petitioner, lives the family’s order in that order. The courtyard galleries make the household’s circulation a promenade round an open centre; the rooms toward the piazza let the family appear to the city at the central window under its arms. Substitute a Florentine block of rusticated stone, or a palace with an order on its front, and much of this stays: the house of a great family round a court. What this form adds is the scale and the axis to the river, and the axis is now cut.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The double role is the form of the argument, and the passage from pantomime to speech is its knowledge: Hynkel’s voice is noise, the barber’s body is eloquent, and the film ends by giving the silent man speech so that speech can be redeemed from the dictator. The gibberish German, the mock headlines and the Lohengrin under the globe are form doing the thinking: what a regime sounds like, and what it wants. Two things hold the figure. Much of the film is made as a sequence of self-contained routines whose form is that of Chaplin’s comedies in general, not of this argument; another routine in place of the pudding or the buffet would change little. And the speech, the film’s culmination, abandons the comic form rather than completing it, so that the work’s knowledge at its end is carried by a statement any form could carry.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses most of what it knows. The posse cut with rotating verses and no chorus is the clan’s form: Protect Ya Neck and Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ show that nine voices can be one body without a leader, which a solo album or a group with a singer could not say. The rough loop is the place: under C.R.E.A.M. the piano’s worn surface is the ruin it describes. The film dialogue binds the sequence into a rite of entry, from the opening challenge to the Conclusion. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is loose: Protect Ya Neck, the founding document, sits tenth; the reprise restates rather than closes; the skits interrupt more than they articulate. The form knows most track by track, and the album as a whole knows less than its best tracks, which holds the figure just below 8.0.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
In two movements form is the knowledge. Mars cannot be stated in a regular metre: the limping five is the machine, and the ostinato is what force is. Neptune cannot end any other way: the fade, the chorus repeating one bar until it is lost, is the claim that the last planet is not reached but dissolved into. Saturn’s alternating chords are a clock, and its form is the clock stopping. The cost is the suite form itself. Seven character pieces in a row make a gallery, and a gallery’s frame contains rather than thinks. Mercury and Jupiter would say much the same in another order or apart, and the argument is carried by the two ends and the fifth movement more than by the whole design.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and ask what the church loses. From outside, everything: its knowledge is the converging mass, a parish raising itself into one sign visible across the water, and in a plain log church that knowledge is gone. The refectory at the west, low and broad, is where the parish met and ate, so the form also holds the social use of the building. From inside, less. The worship is lived in a low room under a painted sky, before an iconostasis, and the same liturgy would be lived the same way under a plain hipped roof. The form shapes how the church is seen far more than how its purpose is lived, and the axis asks both.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and some of the knowledge goes. The braided strands, from a Colonel’s operation to a private soldier’s patrol, show the war from above and below at once, and the reader, like the agency, holds more pieces than any character and still cannot see the whole. The year headings make time the governing measure: the war is a span that corrodes, not a plot that resolves. The Colonel’s card archive, which Skip spends years ordering, is the form seen inside the book, a mass of fragments that promises a pattern and yields none. Held below the higher reaches because the chronicle is a roomy and general form, the same knowledge could be carried in half the length with fewer strands, and the Houston strand stands beside the main one more than it is fused to it.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the life is lived differently. The suite of library, cabinet and bedchamber, opening one into another, with the bed in an alcove open to two rooms, makes the day of a scholar who reads, writes and sleeps in one continuous space: the house’s most original idea of dwelling. The hall as a museum makes arrival an encounter with the natural history and the peoples of the continent. The terraces make the walk to the pavilions a walk over the work, and the dumbwaiters make dinner a meal without servants seen: the form is the instrument of the concealment the house knows. Held below the top because the upper floors are lived in spite of the form, with low windows, cramped stairs and a dome room left as a store, and because much of the plantation’s life went on in buildings of ordinary form.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because its argument is partly its plainness. A record that claims that after irony one can again say simple things says them in short songs of conventional form, guitar, bass, drums and voice set legibly in front: the form is the reclaimed sincerity. Beautiful Day enacts it most fully, its muted verse and released chorus being the movement from ruin to joy the words name, and Walk On’s litany is form as shedding. Sequence is counted here, once: from a public declaration of joy through four losses to a private benediction. Held from the top: across the second half verse and chorus are a container, and the singles placed first serve the release as much as the argument.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The form knows something. Zorba is never given from inside; he is known only through the man who cannot be him, and the book’s knowledge depends on that distance. Told by an omniscient narrator, Zorba would be a picaresque hero; told by the man of pen and paper, he is what that man lacks, and the reader sees the lack in the act of seeing the man. The shape of a disciple’s memoir of a dead master, sealed by the letter that reports the death, makes the book a kind of secular gospel, written after the master is gone, and that is why the narrator’s failure to cross over is its truth rather than its flaw. Held a step down because the middle is loose: the tales and meditations could be reordered without loss, and the episodic chain does not carry meaning as the frame does.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the building stops being able to say most of what it says: a history museum in a smooth stone box cannot be the ruin it houses. At the wall, the form is the instrument of the knowledge. Whether the form changes how the purpose is lived has a more divided answer. If the route is as published, a dark passage, a court and a terrace looking back over the district built on the villages, a museum visit becomes a climb through memory toward a view of the present, and that is a real change. But the galleries, where most of the visit is spent, are scored as ordinary museum rooms; nothing on record credits them with more. There the form contains rather than knows.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses some of what it knows. The narration withholds as Woo-jin withholds: the viewer is held in Dae-su’s ignorance, then in his memory, which is exactly what fails. The flashbacks to Evergreen High School put the grown Dae-su in the corridor beside his younger self and beside Woo-jin and his sister, so that memory is a place he walks through, and the window he looked through is the frame the film keeps returning to. The fifteen years as one compressed passage make time itself the cell. The ending, hypnosis offered as the cure for knowledge, completes the form: a film about remembering closes on a man choosing to forget. Held at the figure because much of the formal display, split screens, a subway line drawn over the city, the ant, decorates rather than knows, and the penthouse reverts to telling.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In front, yes. Every house has the same prospect and the same sun; the curve makes the residents one body, seeing and seen, on the pavement and on the lawn; the ha-ha gives possession of a view without a wall, and the town’s edge is lived as country. The Georgian round of walking, seeing and being seen had its stage built into the front of its houses. Substitute a straight terrace and the equal prospect, the embrace and the theatre are lost. Behind the door, no: each house is lived as any good terrace house of its decade, front and back rooms on a stair, and the order runs across its floors without regard to them. The form changes how the street and the view are lived, not the house.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? At the street, yes: the display window set in ornament makes the walk past the store a passage past framed pictures, and the corner door gathers the crowd off both streets into one entrance. The light that floods the sales floors through the wide windows is the form’s gift to shop and shopper. Put a masonry wall with punched windows in its place and the store loses its daylight and its street; put a classical front in its place and it loses the argument of ornament against grid. But the life inside, aisles and counters on open floors, was lived as in any store of the frame, and since 2007 the interiors have been remade for other tenants. The form knows its street more than its interior.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? At the ground, yes. The lifted block and open court make arriving at an office a passage through public space; the pedestrian walks beneath the building, and the corporation’s footprint is felt as an absence of wall. In the slab, the thin plan puts every desk near the glass, and the sealed, air-conditioned skin makes the office a controlled interior of even light, a way of working the building helped make normal. The roof terrace gives the workers an open room. What holds the axis: above the ground the office floors are lived much as in the curtain-wall towers that followed, so what the form knows inside became the knowledge of a type; and later decades of security and use have strained the plaza’s meaning.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. The flat, unmodelled sign on an open ground is the knowledge: a modelled fish would be a fish in a room; a fish drawn as a sign is a thought present in a room, and that presence is the picture’s subject. The dispersal across the whole field is the knowledge of hallucination, which has no centre and no single point of attention. The room of wall, floor and window is the knowledge that the dream is lived in an actual place, the poor studio, which is why the picture is not yet the open fields of 1925 to 1927. Held below the top because the content could be carried, with a loss of colour more than of knowing, in a drawing, and because this canvas fills a form found across several canvases of those years.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. A record about feeling carried through machines and memory is built from samples and replays of old records, filtered so that each loop opens and closes like a recollection surfacing, with every voice processed. Played by a band with plain vocals, Something About Us would be a soft ballad and know nothing of mediation; Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is its form, a phrase cut into syllables and recombined. The sequence is counted here: the anthem, love songs and toys, the grave Veridis Quo, a guest voice face to face, then a party that goes on too long. The arc from celebration to fatigue is legible, but felt more than built, and High Life and Short Circuit follow by contrast rather than need.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute another form and much goes. The two faces of a single object cannot be seen at once: war and peace are present together and never in the same glance, and one passes from one to the other by turning the thing in the hands. That is the object’s thought made physical. The registers, read upward to a ruler who breaks the top border, make the social order a direction of reading; as a single scene the hierarchy would be shown, not travelled. The inlay bears meaning too: precious stone from far mountains and shell from the sea, assembled into a picture of tribute. Held below 8 because the form is in part a reconstruction and its use unknown.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
On the last track the form is the instrument of the knowledge. Diminuendo, open interval, crescendo: written, then unwritten, then written again, so that the soloist’s freedom is framed by the orchestra’s composition, and what the record knows, that a public can lift a performance, can only be known in the open middle. Put the interval first or close it after six choruses and that knowledge goes. The sequence serves it, counted here once: a suite to establish the band, a slow feature to quiet the room, then the long build, the climax placed last. The suite is a container, its parts exchangeable for other festival numbers. And a form that claims to be one night is in part a later day.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? In most of what matters, yes. Put the hall on the ground and concert-going loses the ascent through the store, the pause on the Plaza above the port, and the sense of hearing music at the top of the city’s oldest trade. The Plaza turns a ticketed institution into a public place used every day by people who never enter the hall. In the Grand Hall the form is the instrument: no seat far from the stage, the steep terraces making the audience visible to itself and close to the players, the milled lining shaping a sound heard as clear and close, sometimes unforgiving. What holds the axis: the room’s knowledge belongs mostly to the vineyard type; the hotel, the flats and the parking are contained, not formed; and the warehouse below is a brick mask over car parks, its form kept as image while its interior is replaced.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses most of what it knows, which is the body’s time: how long a crawl takes, what cold does, how near breath and blood come. Cut for coverage, lit in a studio and shot from a distance on long lenses, the same story would become an adventure watched from outside. The long takes that will not cut away from the mauling, the hunger and the river are the argument, and the wide lens at the face makes the audience keep the wound’s duration. Held off the top by the frame around the ordeal: the revenge plot is told in a thriller’s grammar, a dying captain, a pursuit, a fight on a riverbank, and the visions are set in a form borrowed from elsewhere. The form knows the body better than it knows the moral question at the end.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Substitute a developmental form and the work loses part of what it knows. Its claim is that nothing develops: delight turns, it does not grow, and the wheel comes round. Material transformed and resolved would deny that claim; stanzas repeated without transformation and ostinatos that circle and do not arrive are the claim made audible. The return of no. 1 as no. 25, note for note, is form as knowledge. The cost is the interior. The three parts follow the seasons and the day loosely, but within them the numbers could be reordered without changing what the work says, and the staging that would give the tableaux their bodies is seldom given. The frame is form as instrument; the middle is closer to a container.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The two halves of the city are given in two styles: Jack’s world of glass, the high apartment and the studio, in cold, ordered compositions; Parry’s world of stone, under bridges and in basements, in wide lenses, tilted frames and low angles that bend the city toward fable. The intrusions of the Red Knight break the realism as the trauma breaks Parry’s mind, so that the viewer sees what he sees and cannot dismiss it. The waltz in Grand Central gives his love as he perceives it. The doubled structure is the instrument of the film’s knowledge that the healer and the healed exchange places. Held below eight because in long stretches the form is container, a romantic comedy shot as such, and the caper borrows the fantastic look without its inward need.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The two discs are two worlds: the first the reflective age as a party, loud and lit and surface; the second the underworld of the Orpheus songs, slower, more synthetic, more private. The Night Time reprise is the hinge, the party heard from below, and a record about reflection is built to mirror itself, in paired titles and a reprise. The dance form argues as well: a record asking whether connection survives display makes its listeners dance in public. The sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top because the form is in places a container: the middle of the first disc is a run of songs in different idioms with no formal reason for their place, and several tracks run as long as the groove permits rather than as long as they know.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. A record whose claim is that the simple forms are the true ones is made quickly by two people, with no bass and short songs, and the making enacts the claim: the austerity is the argument, not its wrapping. Played by a full band with a polished production, We’re Going to Be Friends would be sentimental and Fell in Love with a Girl ordinary; here the exposure of two players is what makes them sincere. The sequence is counted here, once: it opens with a house left and closes, in This Protector, with a piano and a voice at the hearth, moving from leaving home to keeping one, with Little Room as the hinge at track six. What holds the figure: the middle and late sequence is ordered by contrast more than by necessity, and a few tracks are containers of the manner rather than instruments of it.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much is lost. The closed pyramid and the ring of arms are what the picture knows: a bond that encloses two people and shuts out the room. Painting at or near life size holds the two faces still at the apex for as long as one looks, and the plain ground removes every circumstance, so that the form abstracts a particular day into a permanent state. The child’s outward look is the form’s one opening, the hinge between the closed embrace and the public that looks at it. Held below the top because the knowledge could be carried nearly as well by another hand in the same scheme, or by a print after it: the form is borrowed from Raphael, and what is the painter’s own is the surface, the flesh and the gaze, more than the structure.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Where the form works, it is the knowledge. The suspense makes the viewer complicit: to want the mission to succeed is to want Alicia in Sebastian’s bed, and the film knows it. Point of view is hers where it carries knowledge: Devlin seen upside down from her pillow, turning as she sits up; the cup and the faces blurring as the poison takes her. The close-up of the object is the instrument of trust, the key, the bottle and the cup the places where faith and betrayal become visible. The staircase gives the moral order a vertical. What holds the axis is the share that is container: the agency scenes and the back-projected exteriors, told in a scene grammar any thriller would use.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute a tower of stone or fired brick of the same height and the building stops knowing what it knows. In mud the form carries the knowledge that the work is never finished: the taper and the timbers are how an earthen tower stands and how it is kept, so that its upkeep is part of its form rather than a hidden service. The form also governs how the purpose is lived: the call is made from a height the town can see from its streets. The axis is held below the low eights by the prayer hall, whose form would change little in another material or plan, and is credited with little of its own.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form is Ellis’s knowledge. The camera stays near his height and his errands; Mud is known as Ellis knows him, by his stories, and the audience learns the truth about Juniper and the man Mud killed only as fast as Ellis does, so that the adults’ romances are first believed and then disbelieved. Geography is form: the houseboat, the island, the town and the motel are four stations on the river, and Ellis’s journeys between them are the plot; his move to town at the close ends the form. Told from Mud’s side, the film would be an outlaw picture and would lose the boy’s discovery that the man he loves is lying to himself. What holds the axis: the hunters are shown in scenes Ellis cannot see, and the climax and coda leave his point of view for genre’s.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows belonging through the sound of many voices in one room. The harmony is the community, and the reverberation is the hall that holds it. The song forms are the instrument too: “Ragged Wood” and “Quiet Houses” do not return to their beginnings, so that each song is a passage, a walk through country rather than a circle. The sequence is counted here, once. It opens at sunrise on massed voices and closes on “Oliver James”, where the band falls away and one voice is left; that arc, from the many at morning to the one alone, is the record’s shape and its meaning. What holds the axis: the middle four tracks follow by contrast more than by necessity.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? On the front, entirely. Put the same women behind a plain wall with a few windows, or in an open gallery, and the building can no longer say what it says: that to see without being seen was the whole share of the city these women were given. The form is the knowledge, and it changes how the purpose is lived: each watcher has her own projected seat and her own frame on the street, the lattice softening the light and passing the air. Held below the higher bands because the form knows one thing intensely and the rest of the building knows little. The courtyards and the rear are the ordinary palace architecture of their day, and the rooms are passages serving the screen rather than places with a life of their own.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The horizontal frieze is the knowledge: a procession needs a long field, and a vertical canvas of the same forms would stack them as a totem, not a cortege. The scale is the knowledge: at the size of a hand the ovals are signs, at the size of a body they are presences, and the viewer is placed among the mourners. The absence of figure is the knowledge: a depicted funeral would particularise a grief the canvas holds as general, and lose the claim that abstraction can carry history. The visible drawing is knowledge too: the forms were searched for, and the mourning is shown being made. Held below the top because the form is the series’, fixed before this canvas, and much of what it knows the format knew by 1950.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the picture loses what it knows. The knowledge is the veil: a transparent barrier one can see through and cannot pass, laid in thin whites over the child, so that the child is literally seen through it. In a drawing or a print the veil would be a line; in an opaque handling it would be a wall. Paint makes it what it is, and the crossing of two diagonals, the gauze falling and the gaze descending, is the meaning: closeness and distance at once. The dark dress against the whites is the second instrument, the mother as weight and the child as light. What yields: the background and the canopy are rendered conventionally, serviceable rather than knowing.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: a world in which fate is objective. Long, unhurried takes keep the camera in the same space as the violence and refuse the cut that would grant a modern distance; visions are set in the same frame and light as the farm, so the Valkyrie has the reality of the sheep pens; the music is drones, throat-singing and percussion, not heroic themes. With modern psychology and ordinary coverage it would be a thriller about a traumatised man. Held below 8.0: the form is fixed early and applied evenly, and Gudrún’s reversal is carried by performance, not by the film’s own means.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the film stops knowing much of what it knows. The affectless delivery, the narration in a voice that reports cruelty as weather, the symmetrical frames of the Hotel’s rooms and dining hall, the existing music laid over hunts and dances as if over documentary: together they make a world in which feeling can be expressed only as a statement of rule, which is the film’s knowledge. Played naturalistically the premise would be a sketch; played this way, the audience laughs and is then shown that it laughed at mutilation. The two-movement shape is the argument’s shape, a regime and its mirror. Held below the higher figures because the form is fully set in the first act and then repeated rather than developed, and the narrator’s identity, once revealed, is lightly used.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Much would go. Its knowledge is the knowledge of an instant that was not posed. A painting of this embrace would be a picture of victory, a poster; the photograph is evidence that it happened, here, to these two, on this afternoon, and that is the source both of its joy and of its later trouble. Only the camera could hold the dip at its lowest point with the faces behind turning at the same moment. The black and white is part of it: it reduces the square to the contrast of two uniforms, so that the shape reads at the size of a stamp. Held below 8 because much of what it knows survives in another frame of the same event, and because its knowledge is the snapshot’s, not a form found for this content.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Substitute another form: what does the work stop knowing? Paint the bed, or photograph it, and the index goes: these are the stains, not images of stains, and the work’s claim is that it is the remains, as a relic is. Hang it on a wall, as Rauschenberg did, and it becomes a picture; on the floor at its own height the viewer stands over it as over a body, as one stands over a sick or a sleeping person. Put it in words and it becomes a confession, a made thing with a voice; the bed has no voice, only what was left. These are what the form knows. Held below 8 because the arrangement is in part interchangeable, reinstalled differently over the years, and because much of what it knows reaches its public intact through photographs, which shows how much lives in the idea of the real bed.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The repetition is the instrument: the audience learns the day as Phil does, so that the second meeting with Ned Ryerson is funny, a later one tedious, and the last an embrace. The editing makes the loop teach. Early repetitions are played nearly whole, later ones cut to a single gesture, so that ellipsis carries a passage of time the film never states. The same act done again is a gag, then a trap, then a discipline: the piano lesson repeated until it becomes music. Told as a linear redemption, the film would lose its argument that change happens in the same circumstances. What holds it below 8.0: the release is given by the romance, not by the loop’s own logic, and the last act tilts from instrument to container.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The gate, rather than a banner, a wrapping or a canopy, is the instrument: a frame set across the path at the path’s width, so that each gate measures the walk it stands on and the whole set draws the park’s plan, and the walker cannot see the work without moving through it. The panel, stopped above head height and free at the hem, makes the wind visible and turns a still frame into a moving ceiling. One colour against the bare trees of February, the month chosen for leafless branches and low sun, lets the line read from above. The impermanence is form too. Held below 8 because the unit is repeated without development: the knowledge is complete after a few hundred yards.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and the knowledge goes. With a score, an interior life or the larger campaign, it would become the story of a mission; held in near real time to a house and its street, it knows what the men knew and no more, which is its claim. The blast is the hinge of the form: what comes before teaches the room’s order, what comes after shows it lost. The testimonial frame is the form’s justification: a memory made by those who kept it for one who lost it, and the absence of a single point of view is its honesty. What holds the figure below 8.0 is that the form is finally that of reconstruction, which does not choose its shape as a work of art chooses it; the second half’s length is the event’s, and there the form records more than it knows.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Change the form and much of what the record knows stays: its songs are separate objects, each sealed in its own arrangement, and played in another order or as singles they would know what they know now. Within songs, form carries real knowledge. Billie Jean’s form is its meaning: a groove that never resolves, a bass line circling under a voice that keeps denying, the tension structural. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ builds pressure by accumulation and releases it in the chant, and Thriller is a short horror film in sound, with its creak, its scream and its monologue. The sequence is counted here, once: it moves by tempo and mood, the second side the stronger run, and makes no argument. A form that enacts on two or three tracks and serves on the rest.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute a different form: the same mosaic on a different block, or the same block in glass. In the second case the work can no longer say what it says, because the blind stack is what makes the tower a book. In the first, much survives, since the iconography would read on any closed volume of the size. That asymmetry is the finding. The closed prism is the instrument of the codex reading; its proportions and hard, unbroken edges let each face read as one sheet. The base is a container: its glass and plan do not change how one reads, and do not answer the tower above. Borrowing and reading in a hall under a mural never seen from inside is changed less by the form than the way the building is seen.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The form carries knowledge. The fourteen years in the dark, given in a few chapters, and then the long, slow, almost leisurely execution in Paris make the reader live the patience of revenge, and the book’s last words state the form’s own law. The disguises, Busoni, Lord Wilmore, Sinbad and the Count, make the reader an accomplice who knows what the victims do not, so that the Paris chapters are dramatic irony sustained over hundreds of pages; that irony is how the book knows its hero’s power and his isolation. The serial’s mosaic of households, each with its secret, shows a society knit by hidden crimes. Held at this figure because much of the form is the market’s: the length and the chapter shapes are the feuilleton’s, not the knowledge’s.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Change the form and what is lost? The image of the republic is lost entirely, and with it how Brazilians see their legislature: a pair of bowls on the news every night, a sign known to every citizen. The terrace, when open, made the roof of the state a place to walk on, and the two forms give each house its own room under its own figure, so that the two houses are lived as two. But inside, the rooms change how deliberation is lived little more than a well-made modern chamber anywhere; the bowl and the dome are not felt as the space of debate, and the work of the institution is done in towers and annexes of ordinary office plan. The form serves the image more than the use.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Does the form change how the purpose is lived? For the offices, little: floors round a core, windows in limestone, much like any tower of its decade. For the public, a great deal: the form makes the building a thing one ascends, and the ascent and the view are lived by millions each year as the meaning of the building. And the form is the knowledge of its economics: the narrowing section, the core sized to the height, the single shaft read at once as the measure of how high a building could go and still pay. Substitute a different form and the building loses its claim to be the type of the skyscraper; the offices lose nothing. The form is the instrument of a programme of height and speed, not only of an image, and it clears the Coherence Floor with room.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Substitute round towers in plain stone and the castle still defends, still governs and still dominates the town, but it no longer says what it was built to say: that Edward’s rule is the return of Rome. In that respect the form is the knowledge. In another the form is a container: the life inside, the court, the hall and the business of the principality, was planned but never built, so the form never shaped how that life was lived. The shooting galleries are the one place where form and use are one, the soldier’s work cut to the shape of the wall he stands in. The axis credits the outside and the galleries, and charges the empty wards.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and the purpose changes. A church with a Gothic front would be a friars’ church where a lord is buried; this one is a lord’s mausoleum in which the friars once prayed. Arrival through a triumphal arch makes entering a procession. The flank makes the passer in the street walk beside the court’s dead, so the building’s use reaches out of doors and into the town’s daily traffic. Inside, the chapels, each carved to a programme, make a visit a passage through the planets, the arts and the virtues to the tombs. What holds the axis down is that form and use part company at the wall: inside, the life of the church is the old nave’s, brick and timber, and the shell knows nothing of it; and the culminating form that would have governed the whole visit is absent.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In part. The five aisles and the enormous floor make the cathedral the city’s room: processions, the Ambrosian rite, the archbishop’s great occasions, a coronation, a crowd of the whole city. The roof changes what a cathedral is for those who climb it: it is walked as no northern cathedral is, and the city is seen from its sacred summit. But put the northern section in place of the Milanese one and the worship inside would be lived much as before. The form is the Gothic cathedral’s at very great size, and the front’s mixed idiom tells the visitor nothing the interior needs.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
As built, the form changed how its purpose was lived. The bath ceased to be a room and became a district, a day’s circuit through halls of rising heat and splendour, with reading, walking and games joined to washing; put a row of bathrooms in its place and the bather loses the city of leisure. The ring of circulation round the axis let thousands move without crossing. But the unit is the ruin, and the ruin’s form lives a narrower purpose. It is walked as a ruin and used as a stage, and in neither does it shape the life as the baths did: the opera uses the caldarium’s piers as scenery, not as a hot room. What the form knows is legible in plan and lost in use.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
In the best poems the form is the knowledge. The sestina’s rotation of six words, each stanza taking its end words from the last in a fixed retrograde order, is the form of an obsession: the poem knows its fixation by being unable to say anything but those words in new order, and the canzone on five words tightens the cage. The canzone stanza, which Dante held in De vulgari eloquentia to be the noblest lyric form, gives Tre donne and Doglia mi reca the length and articulation an argument needs; a sonnet could not carry them. But the axis asks of the work scored, and the work has no authorial form: change the editors’ order and the book knows nothing different. The great poems would stand far higher alone; the absence of a book holds the body here.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In its central point, yes. The knowledge that these songs belong to the singer, and to everyone, exists only as performance in a foreign setting. Sung over steel guitar and fiddle they would be country records by a Black singer, a curiosity; set for big band and strings they become standards, and the record shows that a setting can translate a repertory without changing its words. The sequence is counted here, once: band and strings alternate, side one runs from comic loss to Born to Lose, side two from Worried Mind to the long ache of I Can’t Stop Loving You, and the record closes on a joke as it began. Held: the alternation is a programme of contrast more than a form, and most songs could stand in another order, or alone.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the record knows? Partly. The sequence is counted here, once. The two-sided plan is the instrument of one thought: the march out of Babylon on side one, and on side two the life the march was for, love, play, rest and the gathering of One Love. Reverse the sides or mix the songs and the record says only that its maker wrote political songs and love songs. The title track’s form is its knowledge: the march is a vamp because a people’s movement does not resolve within a song, and the length enacts it. Natural Mystic fades in because the prophecy was already sounding. Held lower because most songs inside the plan are in a common form, verse and chorus over the one-drop, and could be exchanged among the band’s records without loss to what they know.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a closed European palace and much of what the fort knows about rule is lost. The court was lived as approach: a visitor passed the gate, the bazaar, the drum house and the outer court before arriving below the throne, and the form made rank into distance and time. The raised throne made the emperor a framed image; the daily appearance to the people, the darshan, from the river side made the wall itself the instrument of a rite. The terrace of open pavilions made the private life of the court a life of water, breeze and filtered light. Held lower because only part of this stands: the public sequence is legible from the Lahori Gate to the Diwan-i-Am, but the form that governed household and harem is gone, and the river side faces no river.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The three parts follow the fire. “The Hearth and the Salamander” sets home and fire-engine side by side as the two shelters of the order. “The Sieve and the Sand” is the attempt to hold reading in a mind that cannot keep it, made literal on the subway, where Montag pours the Bible into a sieve against the jingle for Denham’s Dentifrice. “Burning Bright”, Blake’s tiger, burns the house and then turns burning into light. The form is a conversion narrative, and the knowledge it carries, that the mind must become the book once the book is gone, is enacted by an ending in which men are their texts. An essay or a satire without a convert would lose the claim that a person is where reading survives. What holds the axis is that the conversion form is inherited, and much of the knowing is carried by speeches that could sit in another form unchanged.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The chain of set pieces, each closing on peril and opening on the next, is the instrument of the hero: Jones exists as a body that improvises, and the form proves it by giving him no rest; his “as I go” is the film’s whole method. The form carries the joke that defines its world, the swordsman’s display answered by a single shot, which lands only because the chain has taught the viewer to expect a fight. The ending is the form’s best act: after two hours in which skill solves everything, the only right action is to shut one’s eyes, and a form that has prized doing is answered by not looking. What holds the figure: within each act the set pieces could be reordered without change of meaning, and the form serves knowledge chiefly at the close.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The form carries knowledge in two places. The confinement to one café makes a world in transit visible as one room, through which everyone must pass and where every transaction is watched. The placing of the flashback at the centre, inside Rick’s drunken night, makes memory the wound the present must close. The airport, the one exterior of weight, is a stage set in fog, so the departure is a passage out of the film’s world as well as the city’s. What holds the figure is that the form is the play’s form: much of what the work knows would survive in a well-made stage version, and the film’s own means, Edeson’s light, Steiner’s quotation of the anthems, the camera moving through the room, intensify rather than constitute what it knows.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The form knows something. The narrator is a savant held prisoner in the thing he came to hunt, and the reader is placed with him at the window of the salon: the sea is seen through glass, from a closed room, in electric light, at the pleasure of a host who will not let him go. The log, with its dates and positions, makes the impossible verifiable; the captivity makes the encyclopedic voyage tense. Give the narration to Nemo, or to an omniscient voice, and the book loses its central knowledge, that the captain cannot be known from inside his own ship. Make the voyage voluntary and the ice and the ending lose their force. Held below 8 because the stations within the voyage are arranged more than formed: their order is the order of the itinerary, and most could be shuffled within an ocean without loss.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In the hall, yes: a room with no fixed walls and light from above let the society design each exhibition as a whole, walls, hangings, furniture and works together, and so its shows, the Beethoven exhibition of 1902 above all, became total works rather than hangings. Substitute a gallery of fixed rooms lit from the side and that practice is impossible. In the entrance block, yes in another way: the closed mass and single door make arrival a passage from the city into a precinct. Held below 8.0 because the two halves know different things and are joined, not fused: the temple governs the approach, the hall governs the use, and the visitor crosses from one to the other at a line.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Put a plain curtain wall on the south block and the building ceases to say anything about its subject: the screen is the instrument of its knowledge, and the light inside is the institute’s thesis lived. Put a straight block on the quai and the dialogue between the river city and the southern screen is lost. To that degree the form knows. But the use inside is not changed in kind by the form: a library is a library on these floors, and the museum has been rehung within an envelope indifferent to it. And with the diaphragms idle, the form’s living part, its answer to the sun, has for long been a still picture of an answer. The knowing is concentrated in the skin.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? At the sea, yes. Put the east sanctum inland, behind a forecourt and a gateway, and it stops being the god’s house that the sea alone approaches. The tall, slender proportion of the east tower, slenderer than later Dravida towers, is how the building holds its own against the horizon of the sea; a squat tower would vanish into the shore. What holds the axis is the whole. Three shrines on one axis with reversed approaches are the product of circumstance and perhaps of sequence; the visitor comes in from the landward west, round the smaller shrine, and the meaning of the eastward turn is grasped as a fact of plan rather than lived in a procession that discloses it. The living form is in the tower and its orientation, not in the complex.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The form is the double perspective: a child who sees without understanding, and the grown woman who tells it and lets the gap stand. Much of what the book knows depends on it. The rape charge reaches Scout as words she does not grasp; the mob is seen as hats and faces in the dark; Boo is assembled from rumour, gifts and a blanket until he is a man behind a door. Told in the third person, or by Atticus, the book would become a legal melodrama and lose its argument that seeing a person is learned slowly. The two parts know something too: Part One’s game of making Boo a monster is Part Two’s trial in miniature. Held below the top because the voice is not strictly governed: the adult’s diction and knowledge leak into the child’s scenes, and the form carries the speeches as much as it shapes them.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and something is lost. The centralised hall, nearly square and open on four axes under one dome, makes the congregation a single body: rows parallel to the qibla wall run unbroken across the full width, and no nave orders the worshippers toward a sanctuary. The forecourt, enclosed and nearly as large as the hall, holds the overflow at Friday prayer and the ablution before it, so that the approach is part of the rite. The six minarets and the stepped domes make the building’s rank legible across the city, which is what it exists to say. But the form knows what the Şehzade knew; the piers keep the hall a ring round a centre; and much of what it says is carried by quantity and surface.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute another form and the purpose is lived differently. The frontal temple on a podium, approached only through its porch, makes worship an ascent toward a closed and hidden room, and makes the god’s house the head of the civic square. A Greek temple with columns all round on a low base, approachable from every side, would place the same cult among the people; a hall would make the people its interior. So the form carries what the building knows about authority and worship. Two things hold it. Much of what the form knew depended on the lost forum: the temple was made to close a colonnaded court, and standing free in a square it is a monument rather than the end of a space. And the cella, altered for later uses, no longer carries the form’s knowledge.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the tower knows? Outside, entirely: put the floor area in a box and the plaza, the wind led round the body, the slender figure seen down the lanes and the sign on the sky are all gone. Inside, in part. The spiralling lightwells join floors into tall, stepped voids, so that people on one floor see others above and below, and daylight reaches deeper into a round plan than into a deep box; the domed top makes the summit a room, not a plant floor. But office work inside is lived largely as in any tower of its date, on floors round a core, and multi-tenancy since 2007 has partitioned what was planned for one owner’s staff. Form as instrument of the figure and the light.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that its people are small inside powers larger than they can see. Scale is the instrument: figures set as specks against cliffs, hangars and dunes; ships descending in silence; a camera that rarely gives a person dominion over a space. Sound joins it: the Voice rendered as a doubled, bodily tone, the desert’s hush making the worm felt before it is seen. Paul’s visions, cut in without warning and in another texture, make the future an intrusion on the present, which is his condition. What holds it is container: politics carried by brief exposition, an episodic flight, and a shape set by where the book was cut.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The sequence is counted here, once. The record is shaped as its title promises, a night’s bill at the theatre: an overture of rage, a run of turns, a long serious piece at the head of the second half, the showpiece last but one, and the national anthem as the house closes. The frame is meant and it carries knowledge: everything here is performed, and the record knows the self as theatre. Within tracks form is often the instrument. Bohemian Rhapsody’s form is its content; the canon of The Prophet’s Song makes the prophet’s isolation audible; Good Company’s imitation band sets its life in the past. What holds the figure is the first side, where most tracks contain a manner and could stand in another order, or on another record.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? Partly. Its knowledge, that the Passion belongs to many traditions at once, is carried by its texture: each piece is a meeting of players from different traditions over a shared electronic ground, and an orchestral or single-tradition setting would lose it. The title track is the strongest case, a qawwali voice and a Western boy soprano in one line. The sequence frames a long wordless middle between Gospel titles at the two ends, and the close is placed with intent. What holds the figure: the form remains a suite of short cues, many of which could be reordered without loss, and the two reprises are a soundtrack’s habit rather than the album’s argument.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The single day is the instrument: there is no time for any adult to catch up, and the speed of the young, a fight, a death and a family in thirty hours, is the knowledge that their crisis outruns the world built to receive it. The width of the frame is used for distance between people, parents and son at opposite ends of a stair or a room, the three children drawn close in the drained pool. The tilted frames in the Stark house render the household’s instability as space; Jim’s red jacket and his father’s apron carry meaning as colour. What holds the figure: much of what the film knows is also said in words, and the form deepens the knowledge more than it constitutes it.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows, because its central knowledge is set in a contradiction between sound and word: a drum that marches and a voice that refuses to march. Sunday Bloody Sunday is the purest case, and New Year’s Day repeats the method, a bass figure of near-mechanical insistence under a love song sung in crisis. The dry, close sound of the whole is a war sound. The sequence argues: public war at the start, private surrender in Surrender, the psalm at the end, the question binding first to last. What holds it is that the method lives fully in two songs, and The Refugee, Two Hearts Beat as One and Red Light are songs in containers.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Its knowledge is carried by recorded song: three escaped convicts become a band by accident, their record travels without them, and the voice on the radio is what wins Everett his fortune and his pardon, so the story is the life of a recording and the film a recording of recordings. The picaresque road gives the South as a sequence of performances, revival, rally, campaign and ballyhoo, and the amber grade turns a green summer into a sepia memory of a place that never quite existed, which is the film’s attitude to its history. A straight period drama would have to state that politics is entertainment; this one performs it. Held by the frame: in places the Homer is arbitrary, another epic would serve, and the order of the episodes is not the form’s knowledge.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the hall knows? In the room, yes. The vineyard plan, the choral seats behind the orchestra taken by the audience when the chorus is absent, the fir surfaces and the absence of boxes make a concert intimate and communal, the players heard close and seen from behind as well as before. The glazed foyers and the garden make concert-going an entry from the street, though most still arrive from the garage below. Put the programme in a shoebox and the room’s sound and its society change. What holds the axis: that knowledge belongs to the vineyard type, and the form the building is known by, the steel, knows little the purpose needs. The form is the instrument of the room and the container of the hall.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The sequence is a broadcast. The record opens by tuning in, slogans heard as if between stations, and moves from track to track as a set of channels in different idioms, from lounge and techno to hymn and country gospel. That heterogeneity is the instrument of the knowledge: a record about a self flooded with offers is built as a flood of offers, and a smoother form would know less. Numb is the strongest local case, its loops and unmeeting voices being its argument, and the close is placed with intent. What holds the figure is the middle: tracks six to nine follow one another by contrast more than by necessity.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The withheld face makes the viewer a paying customer: we want to see what the fairground crowd and the doctors want to see, the film makes us wait, and then it shows him to a nurse’s scream, so that our curiosity is indicted before the story judges anyone else’s. The black and white sets Merrick in the age of the medical photograph, which is how the historical man survives, and the industrial sound puts the hospital and the theatre inside the same machine as the fair. But the test is not sustained. Once Merrick has been seen, the form settles into a well-made melodrama, and for most of its length the film is a biography of a kind man told in the usual way.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. What it knows is that a mind can hold a whole neighbourhood in one breath, and the form is the dense verse, sixteen bars and more of internal rhyme with almost no hook, over a short loop that never resolves. In N.Y. State of Mind the first verse runs long with no chorus to release it, and the pressure of the place is the pressure of the form; the short repeating loops are the city’s sameness. The sequence is counted here, once: a beginning, a night, a morning, a grant of the world, a retrospect, letters to the absent and a close on pure skill, over two near-equal halves. Side two’s order is looser, and Halftime and One Time 4 Your Mind contain skill more than enact the knowledge: the form is the knowledge in the verse and in the strongest tracks, and nearer a container across the sequence. That holds it below the eight.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and what is lost? The two triangles make study and display neighbours across one line, each with its own entrance: a form of the institution’s double purpose. The court makes a visit an orientation and a return: one sees the bridges, towers and stairs from below, chooses, climbs and looks back down, so the museum is lived as a place one is inside rather than a route one follows. The concourse makes the two collections a single visit. Substitute a box and the visit becomes a corridor. What holds the axis: the triangular galleries are awkward for hanging and for circulation, the tower rooms are reached as afterthoughts, and the court, the form the building is known by, contains the art more than it knows anything about it.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. A record about fear sold by institutions is made inside a church and given the church’s instrument, so that the organ of Intervention and My Body Is a Cage is both the voice of the institution and the voice of the self pleading against it; a dry, secular sound would know less. The sequence is counted here, once. It opens in a mirror and a storm, moves through the sea songs of the middle, turns to escape in Windowsill and No Cars Go, and closes not with escape but with the body as cage, so that the flight the tenth track promises is answered by the eleventh. That ending is the record’s best formal stroke. What holds the figure is the middle, where three songs follow by shared imagery more than by necessity and another order would cost little.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge is the coexistence of violence and grace, and the form that carries it is the song that breaks into another song: Hand of God from ballad to pulse, White Elephant from threat to hymn. Played as songs of one mood each, the record would be a set of dark songs and a set of tender ones; built this way, the turn happens inside the hearing, without warning, as catastrophe does. The sequence is counted here, once: the agitated tracks gather in the first half and the slow ones in the second, so the record moves from the event into its aftermath, and Balcony Man answers Hand of God. Held back because the second half’s songs are containers more than instruments.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows. The sequence is the alphabet’s, and it works: Burn the Witch opens and True Love Waits closes because of their letters, an outward blow giving way to a private sinking that ends on a plea. The arbitrary order can be heard as a form of letting go, a refusal to arrange the loss into a story, and the record’s two ends bear that hearing out. Inside the songs the form carries more: Daydreaming’s descent and reversed close are its knowledge, and True Love Waits stripped to layered pianos is a different song from its live life. What holds the figure is the middle, where Ful Stop or Identikit would stand anywhere.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is how a system looks from inside to those who run it. The two voice-overs are the instrument: men who explain everything, the odds, the skim, who watches whom, and understand nothing of what will destroy them. The narration’s managerial confidence is the measure of its blindness, and when Santoro’s voice stops the form itself shows the system’s cost. The montage repeats the casino’s chain of surveillance, so the viewer watches as the house watches. Held at the figure on two counts the film cannot escape. The form is largely inherited from Goodfellas, well used rather than remade; and in the long middle the narration becomes a container, telling what the image already shows, so that for a stretch of the film the form carries the matter instead of knowing it.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Another form would change what the sheet knows. Drawn directly in pen, the angel would be a sharp caricature; the transfer line, blurred and granular, makes it seem to surface rather than be drawn, a figure half present, as if printed from memory. That is the sheet’s knowledge: the sacred arriving worn and at one remove. The frontal, nearly symmetrical stance of an icon is set against the sliding eyes, and the conflict between the icon and the glance is the instrument of its unease. The small scale belongs to it: an image to hold close. What holds the axis is that much of what the sheet knows survives in a line reproduction; the wash ground gives the aura but supports rather than constitutes.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The episodes are the knowledge: each begins with her hope intact, so the form enacts the renewal the film is about, and a continuous melodrama would make her a victim learning a lesson, which is what she is not. The two waters make the cycle visible. The hypnotist sequence seats the viewer in the laughing audience, so that the film’s later tenderness is earned against the viewer’s own laughter, and the look at the lens turns the last judgment over to the person watching. The costs are counted in full: the episodic form permits Lazzari’s night, whose length is the form’s indulgence, and realism and fable sit side by side without fusing.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. The panel is a long field and the bull is the length of it: the format is the animal’s stretch, and the empty blue ground makes the act float, shown free of any place. The three figures at horns, back and tail turn one image into a sequence read across the field, so that painting, which cannot move, shows a movement through time; a single figure or a frieze of separate episodes would lose it. Colour serves the reading: the bull’s dark mottling against the pale bodies, the red and white bodies against the blue. The border adds the sense of an arena without being specific to it. Held below 8 because the same act is told nearly as well in ivory and on seals, and the form is a workshop form.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form is the instrument. The affectless delivery is not a mannerism laid over the story but the condition the story diagnoses: these people have anaesthetised their speech, and the curse is the one thing their speech cannot process. The camera’s height and distance, wide lenses and overhead angles in stairwells and corridors, make the family specimens under a law above them; change to a close, warm, psychological form and the film no longer knows that the law is impersonal. The sacred music, placed against suburban rooms, makes the frame a rite. What holds it below the top: the form’s knowledge is given in full in the first twenty minutes and then repeated rather than deepened, and by the last movement the manner is applied as much as it is required.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form knows something: the creature’s set pieces and the human story are one structure, built on a rhyme. The film opens with a pilot who will not fire at the creature and closes with the same pilot flying into it, and the plane he would have died in is the plane he lives through. The creature comes when Shikishima’s guilt is greatest and is defeated when he consents to live. Told as drama without the creature, the film would lose the scale of what the guilt is about; told as spectacle without the drama, it would lose the knowing. What holds the figure: much of the form is the conventional alternation of disaster and domestic scene, the domestic scenes framed and played as television drama, so that the knowledge sits in the rhyme and the set pieces rather than in the grammar of the whole.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form is the fable: a simple action under a stated rule, that each visit will cost a finger, carried out to the letter in a closed place. Make it a realist drama of two neighbours with their psychology explained, and the film loses what it knows, that the feud has its own logic, independent of the men’s wishes, as a war has. The tragicomic register is part of the form: the laughter makes the audience complicit in the escalation until the donkey dies, and then stops in the same frame. Held below the top because much of the film’s knowledge could survive on the stage, where its dialogue would carry most of the weight.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The form is a convergence: separate witnesses on three continents and in one Indiana town are drawn, without knowing why, toward one place, and the structure is the drawing. Change the form and the knowledge changes. In a novel the five tones would be a description; the film’s discovery is that the visitors’ language is music and light, and its climax is understood by the audience exactly as by the scientists, by hearing. The montage of signs, each a fragment left unexplained, makes Roy’s ignorance formal. The household is shot crowded and loud, talk over talk, the television on, children shouting, and the last act is nearly wordless: the passage between them is the passage from the world to the sacred. What holds it at 7.8: the scientists’ half of the film is told in briefings and explanation, a conventional form the rest has outgrown.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and much goes. These are pieces to be held and moved. Every figure is kept within the section of the tusk or tooth, with no projecting limb to break: the form of a thing made for the hand, so that the society shown is a society one can pick up and move against another. The seated king and queen are blocks, the standing warder a column, the pawn a stone with no figure at all, and rank is drawn by form as much as by attribute, descending from throne to horse to foot to faceless block. As statuettes on a shelf they would be small sculptures of social types; as chessmen they are an order in play. Held below the eights because the form is the game’s, inherited and filled.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The form is the sober illusionism of a framed oil portrait, frontal, full of plausible daylight, and that form is the instrument. Because everything is painted with the same neutral conviction, the floating apple is not a dream but a fact of the same order as the coat. Put it in a collage or a photograph and the apple becomes a trick; give it an expressive handling and it becomes a vision. The upright portrait format is also what makes the concealment an offence, since the format promises a face. What holds the axis below the top: the knowledge would survive a change of size, of background or of colour, and the painter carried the motif through variants without losing its sense.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Substitute a different form and a good deal goes. The picture knows what it knows by the relation of a near life-size painted body to a standing viewer: the elbow comes toward us, the brim and the low viewpoint set the eyes slightly above ours, and the expression can exist only as an instant held still for as long as one looks. A written description of a confident young man in lace says almost nothing of this. The contrast of handling is part of the form: the embroidery built with deliberate precision, the face and collar with quicker touches, so that the finery is fixed and the person is alive. Held below the higher band because the form is the portrait’s inherited one, intensified rather than remade.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and what the work knows changes a great deal, because its knowledge is in its substance. In glass, crystal or paste it is a souvenir, and its claim on value, and on the relic, collapses. Without the teeth it is a jewel; without the life-size cast it is a charm. The form is the instrument: real platinum, real stones and a dead person’s real teeth, at the size of a head held in the hand, as Hamlet holds Yorick’s. Held below 8 because the visual form is given, not made: the shape of a skull, cast and covered evenly, and the eye learns little from the arrangement once it has grasped the covering. And the argument reaches most of its public through photographs and a price without loss, which shows how much of it lives outside the object.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. As a painting the image would be a minor exercise in colour-field landscape; it knows what it knows because it is a photograph, carrying the photograph’s claim to have been there, which the erasure turns against itself. As a small print it would be a postcard; the scale makes the river a wall and the viewer a figure before it. The parallel bands are the knowledge of order: a landscape reduced to strata is a landscape administered. The invisibility of the alteration is the instrument of the second disclosure. Held below 8 because much of what the work knows travels at the size of a page, as its fame shows, and its knowledge of construction lives in the account of its making more than in anything the eye finds.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The still frame is the instrument: action halts on the image a character takes, so the war is seen twice, as event and as photograph, and the gap between them is the subject. Jessie’s black-and-white frames, made on film, mark the apprentice’s eye forming in the medium of the dead masters. Sound is the second instrument: a quiet so complete on the road that the first shot cracks it, and songs laid over killing so that the audience feels the anaesthetic the photographers have taken. The last image, soldiers grinning over the President’s body held as a print, is the argument in its own form. What holds the figure is the siege, where form gives way to coverage.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes, because it knows size through sound: the stacked synthesisers, the compression that makes the mass press on the ear, the voices sunk so deep that they become part of the weather. Run Into Flowers as a plain guitar song would know only its melody; its meaning is the scale of the arrangement around a small voice. The close needs its length, since the knowledge is in the accumulation. The sequence is counted here once: Birds’ short ascent, Unrecorded’s statement, a middle of drifts and interludes, and the long end. The arc holds at its ends and sags in the middle, where the form becomes a container for pieces that could be reordered without loss: a form that is the content at its peaks and arbitrary in its interior.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The form knows something. To begin in flight, and to let the audience learn the boy’s nature at the rate his pursuers do, makes the viewer share Roy’s condition: committed before understanding, acting on faith in a child whose meaning is withheld. The night drives, shot dark and quiet, make the boy’s need for darkness the film’s own medium, and the turn from night to the dawn in the field is the formal hinge on which faith becomes sight. Told as an explained, linear story, the film would lose its knowledge of what it is to serve someone you do not understand. What holds the axis: at the end showing replaces withholding, and the last movement could belong to any film of its kind.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Outside, everything: the Atomium’s whole statement is its shape, and no other form could say that this is the iron crystal and that it can be entered. The form is the instrument of the knowledge, not its container. The other half of the question, for a building, is whether the form changes how its purpose is lived, and here it does so more than an emblem usually does: to visit is to travel bond by bond between atoms, up an inclined tube, through a sphere, along another tube, so that the route is the model experienced from inside. What holds the axis is that the spheres, once entered, do not use the form; the living form is the passage, not the room.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows, which is how the world feels to Barry. The anamorphic frame sets him small in large empty spaces: the warehouse, long corridors, a supermarket’s aisles, a wide street at dawn. Sound is the instrument: a crash without warning, phones that ring like alarms, Brion’s percussion and pump organ rising with his panic and settling when he plays the harmonium. Colour carries feeling, his blue suit against warm rooms, flares across the frame, Blake’s interludes where feeling outruns narrative. Told with stable sound and centred frames, it would become a plot about a shy man. Held where it is because the Utah plot and the brothers’ attacks return to genre grammar for a large share of a short film. There Will Be Blood, whose order of silence and speech is the knowledge throughout, stands at 8.8.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Told in order, it would be a love story with a sporting finish; told as a match into which thirteen years break, every rally becomes a sentence in an argument about who owes what, and the audience reads each point as the characters do, with history inside it. The form is the knowledge above all in the last minutes: the tell at serve means nothing without the past, and the embrace in the air resolves the triangle without a word because the structure has taught us to read play as speech. Held below eight because the nested flashbacks are at times arranged for withheld information more than for meaning, and the dating titles do work the form could have done.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the work knows? On the street, everything: dress the frame as stacked arcades and the building no longer knows that it is a stack of identical cells, or that the stack is one thing. The form is the instrument of what the building discloses. But the question for a building is whether its form changes how its purpose is lived, and here the Wainwright is weak. Office work inside was lived as in any office building of its date, on floors round a light court, by windows between piers; the base does not stage the entrance, and the attic houses services. What the form changed is how a tall building is seen, and how a city of such buildings looks: a knowledge of image more than of use. It clears the floor of 7.0 with room.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? In part. The Spanish arrangement, the coro set in the nave and joined to the sanctuary, the processional aisles running round it and the chapels opening off them, makes worship a circulation round a sacred enclosure rather than an approach down an open axis, and makes the chapter’s office the hidden centre of the church; open the nave and the building would say something else about who stood nearest the altar. The breadth and the heavy piers make the interior a forest of stone in which the gold of the retablos appears in glimpses, which is how the building teaches. What limits the axis: the sequence of styles in the elevations records the length of the campaign, not an idea the form required.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and something is lost. The book knows what it knows through the sentimental contract with the reader, in which feeling is evidence and the reader’s tears are the first step to the reader’s act, and “Concluding Remarks” states that law outright: what every individual can do is “see to it that they feel right”. The double plot is knowing form too: the north line and the south line part from one farm and make freedom and martyrdom two results of one sale, and the alternation keeps both alive. Held where it is because much of the form is container rather than instrument: the sermons could be cut without the book knowing less, the late recognitions are the stage’s machinery, and the New Orleans chapters are a set of debates in dialogue that a tract could also carry.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would changing the form change what the bridge knows? Make it of stone and it says nothing it now says. Make it in the form a later iron builder would choose, a flatter and lighter arch or bolted segments, and it would know more about iron but lose its knowledge of the passage from one craft to another. The form is the instrument of a kind of knowledge, but a transitional and partly involuntary one. As a crossing, the form changes little in how the use is lived: one walks over it as over any arched footbridge, the deck rising and falling. The open frames are where form and knowledge meet best, letting the structure be read as iron.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute another form and see what changes. For the Malwiya, everything: a square tower with an inner stair would announce the mosque, but would not show the ascent, would not make the climb the figure, and would not read as one gesture from every side. There the form is the knowledge. The mosque proper is weaker. A hypostyle is a container whose knowledge, an equal congregation in rows facing one wall, is the same at any size, and here its one distinctive claim is scale. And the use whose living the form would shape left with the roof: the enclosure shows the outline of how worship was lived, not its form in use. A living form at the tower, a precinct outline at the mosque.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. A narrator in the voice of a news documentary opens and closes it, so that the whole story is a broadcast, and the last line lands because the form has been television all along. Beale’s appearances are shot as broadcasts, on sets and through monitors, and his death becomes one picture among others on a bank of screens. What holds the figure is how much of the film is a container for speech: a large share of it would keep most of its knowledge on a stage, and the Schumacher affair takes the form of the studio melodrama and fills it rather than using it.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Substitute a conventional form and something is lost in how the house is lived. In the light well, tile and windows distribute daylight so that a low flat is lit as a high one. On the main floor, walls, doors and ceilings curve so that rooms flow into one another, and the bay brings the avenue into the salon. In the stair, a continuous carved handrail runs like a spine. The form knows something about dwelling: that a house can be shaped to the body’s movement and to light. What holds the axis is that this knowledge reaches the family’s floor and the common spaces, not the upper flats, and that the front, the form the building is known by, changes the street more than the life behind it.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses much of what it knows, because the knowledge is in the sound. A claim of refusal is built of a voice that will not sing a line straight and a wall of guitars that leaves no space: set to an acoustic guitar or a long arrangement, these words would be complaint, not contempt. The narrow form, short and loud and at one pressure, is the instrument. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is the weakness. It holds four singles of a year among new songs: Anarchy in the U.K., the first statement, sits second on side two, and Holidays in the Sun opens because it was the latest single. Each side makes an arc and the close is placed, but the album is assembled more than built.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Outside, yes: put the same offices in a glass slab on a lawn and the statement that government is open, tiered and part of the city’s ground is gone. Part of the form also changes how the purpose is lived: one walks from the plaza on the level to the public counters, the brick floor continuing, and the council chamber is entered as a distinct place, not a room on a corridor. But the axis asks whether the form serves the life, and here it divides. The section that reads clearly from outside reads confusingly inside: entrances hard to find, levels that do not join as the face implies, a hall more impressive than usable. The plaza meant to gather citizens scattered them across a bare, windswept slope until it was remade.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The form is a long fuse and then a siege, and it carries part of the knowledge. The first hour’s slowness, all checklists, banter and hardware, is what makes the collapse of that hardware mean something; open with the creatures and the film can no longer say that confidence is the danger. The cutting between the monitors and the nest, the confinement of the siege and the two clocks of the last movement hold the audience inside the marines’ sense of time, and then inside Ripley’s. The limit is substantial. The form is that of the well-made action thriller, and much of what the film knows would survive another shape: the maternal story above all is carried by scenes that could stand in any form, and the form is more a vehicle than an instrument.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? In part. Exchange the lotus for another nine-sided dome and the worship would be housed the same, the plan’s knowledge, open from every side with no focus of authority, carried intact, as it is at Wilmette. What would be lost is the building’s address to its place: the form says the faith is at home in India and speaks the region’s oldest sacred sign, and that knowledge exists only in this form. The form also changes how the visit is lived. One walks round the water and is drawn to the nearest door, not to a front; inside, the light comes from the flower’s tip, and the room is lived as the bud’s interior. Against that, the outer two rings are form the hall does not use, and the halls beneath them are residual.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The sound itself is form: render Xtal or Ageispolis in clean studio fidelity and the distance, the sense of something kept on tape and remembered, is lost, and with it much of what the record discloses. The loop-based construction, a few figures held and slowly added to, is the instrument of the reverie; Tha knows what it knows only at nine minutes. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is the weakness. It is a selection, not an arc: a strong opening pair, a breath placed fifth, a break in the middle, then a second half ordered more by what was to hand than by design, and a record that stops after Actium more than it ends. Below Low’s 9.0 and m b v’s 8.3.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the bridge knows? Partly. A suspension bridge or a cantilever at this site would cross the same water and carry the same traffic; what it would stop saying is the thrust of the arch carried visibly into the sandstone at both ends, so that the crossing reads as the two shores pushing against each other and holding. The through-arch shapes how crossing is lived: the deck runs under the crown, and the traveller passes through the structure rather than over it. The wide single deck, train, road and foot side by side, makes the bridge a street over water, not a viaduct. Held to the middle of the band because the crossing would be lived almost as it is under another form, and because the pylons stand outside the form’s logic.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The narration is the instrument: Red tells the story, so the film knows Andy as Red knew him, from outside, and the escape is concealed from the viewer because it was concealed from the teller. When the poster tears and the tunnel opens, the viewer learns in one moment what nineteen years were for, and that recognition is the film’s knowledge of hope as a thing kept hidden. The span is made by the cell’s three posters and the ageing of faces; time is the medium the men serve. What holds it: much of the knowledge is spoken, in voiceover and in Andy’s speeches about hope, and the classical continuity is a container as often as an instrument.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the stadium knows? In part. The continuous saddle bowl, tightening at the long sides, makes the crowd one body round the track, and the absence of a main stand removes the grandstand’s hierarchy: the stadium is lived as a ring, not a front. The shell makes arrival a passage through a thicket of steel into a ground that is neither outside nor inside, the public concourse between lattice and bowl, and that changes how the crowd gathers and disperses. Replace the shell with a cantilevered roof and a curtain wall and the bowl keeps its sport and its crowd; what is lost is the porosity, the night image and the threshold zone. What holds the axis: a stadium’s use is largely set by its type, and the form it is known by speaks more to the city than to the event inside.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the temple knows? For the core, yes: the narrowing, darkening, rising sequence is how the temple knows the approach to the goddess, and a hall or an open court in its place would empty it. At Philae the form knows the island as well. The asymmetric court and the pylons out of line make the visitor turn and adjust, so that the procession is lived as a path among things already there rather than a ruled axis, and the precinct reads as a sacred island, not a temple on a platform. That is the form as instrument. But much of the instrument is the type’s, and the accreted gates, kiosks and lesser temples are containers more than knowledge: the whole is a gathering more than a single shape.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses a good part of what it knows. The haze is the meaning: a voice half inside the mix, synthesisers blurred into strings, tempos slowed so that a song hangs rather than moves. Love seen as a dream is carried by a sound that is dreamlike, and that is a real fit of form to knowledge, sustained across the whole record. The sequence is counted here, once: four chapters, each with its own arc, issued one at a time and then joined. Held back because the song forms are conventional and would mean the same on the band’s other records, the chapters are a frame of release more than an argument, and the whole does not build toward its close.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the record knows less. Played with more chords, more skill or more variety, No Fun would describe boredom instead of being it, and I Wanna Be Your Dog would lose the obsession that only a riff repeated without development can carry. Repetition is the instrument of the knowledge. The sequence is counted here, once, and it is weaker. The two sides mirror each other in plan, a song of the year or of boredom and then a song of desire, but side one spends half its time on We Will Fall, and side two runs down through three lesser songs to Little Doll, which closes nothing. The record ends because the songs have run out, not because the form arrives anywhere.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. The double-album scale is the claim: the record knows a self that wants everything at once, and an edited single disc would know a more composed and less overwhelmed self. The sequence is counted here, once. The day and night halves give the length a direction, and the placing has good moments: the piano overture straight into Tonight, Tonight; Porcelina set to sink the first disc before Take Me Down closes it; By Starlight and Farewell and Goodnight easing the second to sleep. Held short: inside each disc the order is largely a programme of contrast, loud, soft, loud, rather than an argument, and many songs would mean the same in another place. The form suits the content more than it produces it.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and some of what the building knows is lost, not all. Its form is first a silhouette: a white, domed, centralised mass with a tower, legible as one sign at the scale of the city. Put a Gothic basilica there and the meaning shifts: a spire points, where a dome crowns and gathers, and the claim becomes a French medieval one rather than that of the universal Church, Roman and Byzantine. The stone that whitens with weathering is penance kept clean, and that is used. Inside, the adoration is focused under the dome and the Heart in the apse. Held below 8.0: the interior changes worship no more than any domed church does, and the agglomerated parts could be rearranged without loss of what they say.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the girl and the killer are one person divided. The doubling is the instrument: every pair, the beds, the Charlies, the detectives, the suspects, the attempts, the church scenes, rhymes the good with the corrupt, so that the viewer reads the girl against her uncle in every scene and her victory is her refusal of the likeness. The early revelation of his guilt turns a mystery into a moral education, and the library crane is the form at its sharpest. What holds the figure is the share of the film that is container rather than instrument: the detective plot, with its survey ruse and its second suspect, is filled rather than used, and the romance with Graham obeys the studio’s form more than the film’s.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The form carries much of what the film knows. Two regimes of image hold the knowledge, a present in rain, night and drained colour and a past in warm light, and the cut between them is the grief itself; set the story in an ordinary photographed city and the revenant becomes a vigilante, the mourning a programme. The song-cut sequences, Eric’s rooftop guitar and the montage of the payments, make the soundtrack an inner voice. Miniatures and painted skies make Detroit a necropolis rather than a place, and the form says that this is the land of the dead. What holds the figure: much of the form is borrowed from its source and from its era’s music video, and the action scenes, cut fast and close, could be changed with little loss.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The form carries knowledge. The letter to the Headmaster, written by a retired schoolmaster patronised in a farewell tribute, makes the whole book a claim by the minor character to his own story, and the form is the argument of the title: the man everyone took for a supporting part writes the play from his side of it. The retrospective voice, ironic and exact, is the man’s character, and his reticence is the measure of what he has repressed. The six parts follow the stages of a life and of a faith. Held below the top because much of the content could be told in another form with less loss than the highest marks require: the letter frame is set up in the opening pages and then largely forgotten until the end, and for long stretches the book is a conventional memoir novel.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the present is made of the past’s small acts. The form is the mirror: scenes of 1985 recur in 1955 with the roles shifted, Biff bullying George at a desk and then at a counter, the same courthouse square run down and new, Marty’s band too loud for one judge and too strange for another room, the same knock on George’s head. The viewer learns the parents’ adolescence by recognising it against their middle age, which only this form gives. Held lower by what lies outside the mirror: the grammar is the studio comedy’s, cut for momentum and clarity, used well and not remade, and the coda states what the mirror had already shown.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The form carries real knowledge. The record is cut into two titled halves, I and WE, and its argument is the passage from one to the other. Run the songs in another order or without the division and the record loses its one large claim, that the cure for the solitary self is the plural. The numbered suites serve this: Age of Anxiety and End of the Empire are each one movement of the I, and The Lightning is built in two parts so that the turn happens inside a song. The sequence is counted here, once. What holds the figure is the second half, whose tracks follow as variations on one warm mode, and a title song too slight for the destination the design names.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The form is reading. The film is cut by passages of a book shown as text and spoken by its reader, and its story is about a man who has made himself out of a book. The cards are not chapter heads but the voice by which Ghost Dog governs his acts, and the film asks its audience to read alongside him. The books passed from hand to hand, Akutagawa’s Rashomon and the Hagakure itself, carry the same form into the plot; the cartoons the mobsters watch are their scripture, crude and violent, and the form sets it against his. Remove the cards and the doubled screens and the film loses its knowledge that a code is a text a person chooses to inhabit. Held below the top because the cool, minimal manner sometimes contains the content rather than becoming it.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? The arrival does: the triangular lobby takes the corner on the diagonal, and the elevators, each cab finished differently, make the rise from the street a passage through a decorated room. And the form changed how a corporation and a city are seen: the building made the skyscraper a sign known at a glance, so that the name and the shape became one. But office work inside is lived much as in any tower of the period, on floors round a core, by windows punched in brick. Substitute a plainer crown and the offices lose nothing. What the form knows is the image of the enterprise, and the image is everything to the building’s fame and less to its use. It clears the floor of 7.0 with room and the Universal Minimum narrowly.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? The arrival would change: the arcade lobby makes entry a passage through a nave, and those who work in the building cross a sacred plan to reach their desks. The form changed how a company and a city are seen, the name of a chain store become a figure on the skyline. But office work inside was lived as in any tower of the period, on floors round a core, by windows set between piers; give the shaft a classical costume and the offices lose nothing. The base and light court are the common pattern of the speculative block. What the form knows is the image of the enterprise and the ceremony of entry, which is much for its fame and less for its use. It clears the floor with room, and the Universal Minimum by a tenth.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Would another form change what the book knows? In the best essays, yes. Ellison’s essay is improvised in the manner he credits to jazz: it states a theme, departs, returns through anecdote and memory, and arrives where a treatise could not, because autobiography, Oklahoma, Tuskegee and Harlem, is part of the proof. “The World and the Jug” is a reply whose force is its form, a man answering a critic in the first person, the polemic itself showing the freedom it claims. But the book as a form is a collection, and the collection adds little. The three parts and the introduction could be rearranged with small loss, and the interviews hold their content as a container holds it. The pieces have living form; the book that holds them has less, and the axis stands between the two.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Would a different form change what the building knows? For the front, yes. Put the railway’s offices in a classical block and the building no longer says that the railway is a church and the company a power that blesses movement; the form is the instrument of that claim. It does less for how the purpose is lived. The passenger meets the building at the booking hall and then passes into sheds whose form owes little to the front, and the daily experience of the terminus, the crush of the suburban platforms, is lived in spaces the front does not shape. Head building and station are joined as a façade and a yard more than as one living form.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In part. Offices in a triangle are lived differently: rooms that taper, the offices at the tip with windows on three sides looking up and down two avenues, the sense of working in the bow of the city. And the form changed how the crossing is lived: the building turned a gore into a place, the head of Madison Square, so that the square, the avenues and the tower are known together. For most of its floor area, though, the use is that of any office tower of 1902, rooms along corridors behind punched windows. Put a lower or blunter building on the lot and the city loses an image, the tenants a few views. The form knows the site and the street more than its use.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Change the form and what does the film lose? Some things are bound in. It opens in mid-action and from below, and its galaxy at war is first seen at the height of its smallest servants, two droids. The crawl and the wipes make it a chapter of a serial, an episode the viewer joins late, and that frame carries the knowledge that this world existed before the film and goes on after it. The worn surfaces say what no line says, that the Empire’s order is new and the frontier old. Beyond that, the form is the adventure picture’s inherited grammar: cross-cutting between the rescue party and the command, the race against a deadline, the battle intercut with the war room and the clock. Told as a novel, the story would lose its spectacle and much of its pleasure, but little of what it knows: a container well filled more than an instrument.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? In part, plainly. A university housed in one building, with students living in the wings and teaching, the library, the assembly hall and the rectorate at the centre, is lived as a city: entered by one door, ordered by one axis, climbed to one head. The form says that learning is held together and held from above. Substitute a campus of separate buildings, as the university in fact later added around it, and the building can no longer say that the university is one body under the state. That is real knowledge in the form. Against it: the teaching rooms and residences are lived much as in any institutional block of the period, on long corridors, and the tower’s height adds little to learning. What the form knows most strongly is the image of the institution; its daily use is lived inside it rather than through it.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Where the form is achieved it is the instrument of the knowledge. The section in which employees turn pages, the clock and the ventilation noted between them, is tedium given as experience, not described. Lane Dean’s chapter makes the reader sit the afternoon. The interview sections give the Service as many voices answering one question, which is what an institution sounds like. The Author’s Foreword makes the fiction claim the status of a document, so that the book about tax returns becomes itself a return. But the whole is an editor’s mosaic. The form that would have bound these pieces, which Wallace’s notes suggest involved things about to happen that never quite do, does not exist as made. What stands is a set of achieved forms inside an arrangement that knows nothing by being arranged.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? For the image, everything: a plain tower would say nothing of force, of motion, of a new physics, and the form is the content of the building’s fame. For the purpose, little. The light runs the same path in any tower telescope; the astronomers’ working life, in the laboratory and the rooms of the rear wing, is lived much as in any small observatory, and the curves are outside it. The entrance is the one place where the form changes how the purpose is entered: one climbs into the base of the figure and the stair rises within it. The section, a vertical shaft over a horizontal laboratory, is real form, and it carries the axis above the Universal Minimum. But the form is the instrument of the building’s meaning more than of its use; the floor of 7.0 is cleared with room, the minimum narrowly.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form, and what can the building no longer say? Replace the glass and the open corner with brick walls and punched windows and the factory would still work as a factory: its daylight poorer and its claim about labour gone, its plan and use what they are. So the form is the instrument of the building’s meaning about work and modernity, and not of how the work is done; the purpose is lived in a plan the form did not make. In the main block the form does change the life inside it: floors flooded with light, the workroom made continuous with the outside, the worker seen from the line. That lifts it above the plain shed. But a front grafted onto a settled plan cannot reach the band in which form and content cannot be prised apart, as they cannot in Villa Savoye’s route.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and some of the knowledge goes, because the form doubles every song. Each track carries two titles, one adult news and one nursery rhyme, and that doubling is the record’s argument: the same event heard by the citizen and told to the child. The sequence has a shape. It wakes with a plug and a dreaming voice, rises to There There at the centre and ends with the wolf at the door, and the private songs, Sail to the Moon, I Will and Scatterbrain, are set as pauses inside the alarm. What holds the figure is the second half, a run of strong single tracks more than a passage, and an electronic cluster whose songs do not answer one another.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and part of what the work knows is lost, part not. The rhapsody, a free sequence of episodes and cadenzas, is the form of the variety bill and the city street: one thing after another, each turn announced, the soloist stepping forward between numbers. Recast as a sonata-form concerto, as Gershwin’s Concerto in F (1925) partly tried, it would lose that discontinuity, which is its subject. The 1924 band scoring is form too: saxophones, banjo and muted brass place the work in the dance hall, and the 1942 symphonic dress keeps the notes and loses part of that placement. What holds the axis is Bernstein’s point: in the middle third the joins are convenience, and the form there is a container.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form and part of the knowledge goes. The scripture form is the argument: a sacred text whose origin is undecidable shows what a sacred text is. The disclaimers, the cover-letter, and a Posttape that its own Postscript calls spurious, with a footnote on the Postscript, make authority itself the subject. The university as cosmos is a form that knows something: to put salvation in the vocabulary of examinations is to show a culture that has made learning its religion. The two volumes and the three descents enact the dialectic of the opposites. Held in the middle sevens because the episodic matter inside the frame is a container more than an instrument: most encounters could be reordered, shortened or exchanged without the book knowing less, and the one-to-one mapping of the allegory holds much of the content at the level of code rather than form.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Would a change of form change what the work knows? Outside, in part. The closed quadrangle and the continuous order make the palace one body facing out, and the different fronts make it know its site, river and square. The ceremonial way from staircase to enfilade to throne and church shaped how the court lived, and it survives. Inside, the form has been changed again and again, by Catherine’s architects, by the fire, by Stasov and Bryullov, by the private apartments of the 1890s and by the museum, and the work has gone on knowing roughly the same thing. The facade is largely independent of the rooms behind it. The form is the instrument of a display more than of a way of dwelling.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and what is lost? Make it square and Pisa keeps a beautiful campanile in its idiom; the cylinder’s gain is a figure without a front, which suits a tower in a meadow seen from every approach. The use, bells, a lookout and a climb, is not lived very differently because of the galleries, which most visitors never step onto. The form that does change experience is the lean. The tower is known through the body, by its pull on the stair, and the curve of the corrected storeys records two centuries of builders arguing with the ground. That is form as the instrument of what the work knows; it is the knowledge of a defect, not the makers’ design.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the record knows? In the songs, yes: the meaning of Rusty Cage and Slaves & Bulldozers is in their changes of tempo and metre, and a straighter form would know less of pressure. Outshined’s lurching riff is the self-contempt its words state. Across the album, less so. The sequence is front-loaded, about 39 per cent of the time in the first four tracks, and after Searching with My Good Eye Closed the order is permitted: Mind Riot, Drawing Flies and Holy Water could be shuffled without changing the argument. Face Pollution and Somewhere release the pressure with intent, and New Damage closes slow and low on purpose.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Would another form change what the work knows? On the west, entirely. There the rite is lived as a climb between the rain masks into a mouth; give it another stair, or a temple with a plain door, and the act of entering the mountain is gone. The burial of earlier temples within the later mass makes the building’s age part of its form: a form that did not enclose would not know its own past. Against this, the summit sanctuary does little the form needs. Temple V is a small Puuc room that could crown any pyramid, and the east face is a conventional stair to it. And the form is in part the history of its making rather than the instrument of one knowledge; the oval may be as much consequence as choice. The west face earns a high mark; the whole earns less.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Substitute another form and something is lost. The axis carries what the work knows: a summer residence lived outward, family and court passing from rooms to parterre to hill, the day ending at the Gloriette with the house below and the city beyond. A palace on the summit, as first drawn, would have lived its power as command; this one lives it as retreat with a view of command, which is what Maria Theresa’s court made of it. Inside, the enfilade of the state rooms orders reception, the cabinets and the mezzanine let the household live behind it, and the Great Gallery gathers ceremony in one hall. Held near the margin because much of the palace is container rather than instrument: rooms that could be arranged otherwise with little change.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The jarring montage, flash frames of archive war film and medieval battle cut into the hunt, makes the community’s violence a reenactment of a national picture of itself, which a plain telling would state and not show. The frozen kills, held from many angles at once, give each arrow the weight of a rite. The two crossings, one led by the father and one by the son, are form doing argument: the rhyme of the two shapes is how the film says that the second journey undoes the first. What holds the figure is that much of the form is container: the Erik episode and the Alpha set pieces could be told in any action grammar, the break at the end belongs to the trilogy more than to this film, and the phone image serves immediacy more often than meaning.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its form is a live session in one room: a shifting company of singers and players, takes kept loose, talk and count-ins left in, the ensemble regrouping track by track around Compay Segundo’s armónico, Eliades Ochoa’s guitar, Ferrer’s voice and González’s piano. That form is the instrument of the disclosure. The tradition is shown as a company, and age as a present tense, because nothing was assembled after the fact that could not have happened in the room. The sequence is a tour of genres, son to danzón to bolero to trova, with the two danzones placed fourth and thirteenth as hinges. What holds the figure is that the songs are containers, older forms carried in unchanged, and another selection from the same week would know much the same.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the bridge loses one thing no other form would give: the crossing is shared in time between river and road. Put a high-level bridge in its place and the East End climbs a long ramp; a tunnel keeps the river for the masts, but the city loses its view and its gate; a swing bridge sets a pier in the channel. With bascules the road is lived as a thing that may open, and the lift becomes part of the city’s experience of its river. In their present use the walkways let visitors stand inside the structure. What holds the axis: the towers are a container in the plain sense, steel and stair clad in a style the purpose did not require; the walkways’ first purpose failed in use; and the form says almost nothing through its stone that it does not say through its steel.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The ladder of escapes, each answered by a harsher act, is the form of a will tested to the end, and the repetition is part of the knowledge: the viewer comes to want Luke to run again, as the men do, and so shares the hunger that consumes him. The coda in Dragline’s mouth turns the film into the legend it has been showing being made. Conrad Hall’s camera makes the bosses an instrument of form: Boss Godfrey’s mirrored glasses, the man with no eyes, watch from behind the gang in shot after shot, the law as a gaze that does not speak. What holds the figure: the camp episodes are container rather than instrument, and the religious meaning is placed on the form by image.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In its frame, much. The knowledge, that cruelty at every scale is one act, is carried by the sequence, counted here once: school at the start, the home and the slaughterhouse at the end, and between them songs of desire and exclusion that show who receives the blows. A different order would make it a collection. The form works in sound as well: the title track puts the noise of the slaughter before the voice, so that the listener hears before being told. Elsewhere form is container more than instrument. The middle songs could be resequenced with little loss, and the rockabilly and funk are exercises the argument does not need. “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” alone is its form wholly.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Would another form change what the book knows? In part. The comic form is the instrument of its knowledge in one real way: laughter is what certainty cannot survive, and the book makes its reader practise the deflation it recommends. The footnote, a second voice that undercuts the first, enacts the doubt of the Ephebian philosophers against the single voice of the Quisition. The god as a tortoise is a comic image that is also the argument: a god made small by belief withdrawn. Held below the top because much of the comic form is the series’ house manner, brought to this book rather than found for it; the same matter told as a straight fable or a conte would lose texture but keep most of what it knows.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Substitute a conventional cultural building, a box with a portico, and the approach is lost: no plaza that becomes a wall, no passage under a lifted edge of the ground into a lobby that continues it. The lobby is lost with it, a white interior without corners in which circulation is a landscape rather than a corridor, and the sense of standing inside the ground’s own fold. That is the form’s doing, and it changes how arriving and gathering are lived. What holds the axis is that the purposes the building serves are served in rooms the form does not reach. The galleries and the museum would be the same rooms in a box, and the auditorium’s timber bands continue the lines without changing how a concert or a congress is heard or seen.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses its argument. Told in order, from the slum to the studio, it would be a melodrama of rags to riches. Told through the interrogation and the questions, it becomes a case about knowledge: what a poor man can know, and how he came to know it. The form makes each memory evidence, and the viewer stands where the inspector stands, first doubting, then convinced. The handheld, tilted camera makes the city a pressure on the boy, and the cutting between the studio’s blue light and the slum’s colour sets two Indias side by side. What holds the axis is the share that is container rather than instrument: once the frame has made its point, later questions serve the plot, and the last stretch leaves the case for a chase and a reunion.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The form knows things. The light is the instrument: daylight thin and grey, night blue and almost colourless, interiors lit as by candle, so that seeing is itself rationed and the dark is the larger country. The withholding of Orlok’s face through his first scenes makes the audience share Thomas’s inability to look at what he has contracted with. The cutting between Ellen in Wisborg and Thomas in the castle binds the two by one nerve, so that her fits answer his feeding. Make it a lit, colour, conventional horror picture and it loses its argument that the century cannot see what it fears. What holds it: much of the form is the period picture’s container done very well, the structure is the source’s, and the middle alternates conventionally.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely. As the photograph it was drawn from, it is a news picture of a senator listening at a panel; reduced to four flat tones, it is an icon, because the stencil removes the contingent, the moment, the setting and the skin’s actual colour, and leaves the type. The palette replaces flesh with the national colours, so the person and the nation are made of one stuff: that is the form doing the thinking. The multiple is part of the form, since a work meant for every wall is made in a manner that survives cheap printing, small size and a sticker. Held where it is because the form is a known one, applied rather than invented, and what it knows can be stated in the word at its foot.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Would another form say what this one knows? As a poster the slogan survives and the work does not. What the wall knows is that the warning belongs where the drug is: on the street, in the public’s own space, unasked, at a scale the highway cannot avoid. The two-faced handball wall is the instrument, a court for play under a sign of what is taking the players, and a face turned to the city’s traffic. The orange is a decision of form, legible at speed against brick and asphalt, and the pictographic line is the form of a language anyone can read without literacy. That is a high fit. It is held below 8 because within the field the frieze is generic Haring, and a different arrangement of the same pictographs would know the same thing.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? At its frame, a great deal. The knowledge, that the force is held and not lost, lives in the withholding of the scream until the last minutes of Mombasa; move the scream into the third track and the record knows nothing it did not know before. Mombasa’s own arc, acoustic guitar and quiet voice to full attack, compresses the album’s argument into one song. Neptune Raining Diamonds at the hinge is a formal choice that works. The sequence is counted here, once. What holds the figure is the middle: the songs from In Blur to The Gnashing share one shape and could stand in another order.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and something is lost. The film’s knowledge is that a machine becomes a creature, and that is told in movement, which animation commands as live action could not. Roz’s body is designed for change: the long limbs and stiff, clicking motion of the first act give way to a gait learned from the animals, and her hull takes on moss, dents and scars across the seasons, so that the image itself records the learning. The painted island is the other half of the form, a living surface in which her clean hard edges are the one thing that does not belong, until it does. Held from the top where the form is only container: the dialogue scenes and the climax could be any studio feature’s.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The poster knows one thing, that the address is to you, singly, wherever you stand, and only a still image at the scale of a person, frontal and facing the street, with eyes and finger aimed outward, can say it. A painting in a gallery would be looked at rather than looking; a film would move the eyes off you; words alone would lack the face. The foreshortened finger comes out of the sheet because the sheet is flat. The lettering reads as speech, weighted to the pronoun. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. What holds it in the sevens: the knowledge is narrow, and the form was found by another before it was Flagg’s.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Substitute two straight towers for the loop and the building loses nearly all its image, and its claim that the institution is one continuous process. The overhang sets management above, joining the two halves of the work; the base gathers the studios; the circuit was meant to let departments that once stood apart see and pass one another. How much of this is lived is not established. A large organisation tends to move by lift within its own tower, and whether the public route, the form’s most radical claim on use, runs as a regular part of the building’s life could not be confirmed. What the form demonstrably knows is the image of an institution, and that is less than the form proposed. The axis meets the Universal Minimum exactly.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? For the city and the nation, yes: the pair is how Kuala Lumpur is known and how Malaysia presented itself, and the gate figure is unthinkable as a single tower. For those who work inside, less: the floors are lived much as in any office tower of the decade, round a core, behind banded glass, the star giving the plan points and lobes but not a different way of working. The bridge is the one element lived differently, as passage and as escape between two buildings at height. Substitute a square plan and two separate towers, and the offices lose almost nothing; the city loses its sign. The axis meets the Universal Minimum exactly.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Change the form, and what is lost? The purpose the form serves best is the image: put a rectangular tower of the same height in its place and the city loses its sign and the world its tallest figure. For the people inside, the form does some work. The three wings give apartments and hotel rooms light and long views on three sides; the setbacks give terraces, and floor plates that grow smaller and rarer as they rise. But life inside is lived much as in any luxury tower of its period, round a core, behind glass, reached by lift. What the form knows is height itself, and it knows it exactly: the taper shows how a building must thin as it climbs. That knowledge is real, and it is narrow.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form and see what is lost. Make it a solid stupa and the building can no longer be climbed, and so stops being the place where a poet stands above the capital or a graduate climbs among his cohort. The Chinese tower form turned a reliquary into an inhabited height, and that is how its purpose is lived; the square plan and the regular diminution make the ascent a measured progression. What holds the axis is the interior, shaped no further than stairs and floors, the openings the same on every face and storey, and a meaning of the climb supplied by custom and poetry more than built into the sequence.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Would substantially changing the form change what the building knows? In the plan, yes. The mirrored chambers about a single hall make the two houses equal and joined, and the procession from the square up the great stair to the Dome Hall brings the assembly into the nation’s centre before it divides into its houses; change that plan and the building no longer says what it says about the constitution. The river length makes the legislature a public face of the city. In the dress, no. The Gothic of the elevations is costume: another style would have housed the same use and stated the same plan, and little of how parliament is lived in these rooms depends on it. The form is instrument in its plan and container in its dress.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
In the last act the form is the knowledge. The ridge sequence, carried by motion, landscape and music with almost no speech, knows that the losses on the frontier are beyond what anyone in the film could say: put into dialogue, the deaths of Uncas and Alice would become explanation, and the film would stop knowing what it knows. The same holds for the wordless love of Uncas and Alice, told in glances across the action, and for the opening hunt, which states the film’s physics before its plot. Elsewhere the form is more container than instrument. The fort and the village carry their meaning in speeches a play could carry, and the romance of Hawkeye and Cora is told in the conventional grammar of the studio love story, close shots and a swelling theme.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Does the form change how its purpose is lived? The purpose was a solitary king’s daily life inside the legends, and the form carries it: he passed from his living room, painted with Lohengrin, through a grotto into his study, painted with Tannhäuser; he could climb into the Throne Hall as into a church of his own kingship. Change the form and that life cannot be lived; the rooms are the instrument of the fantasy, not its container. What holds the axis: the instrument is mostly scenery and painting laid on rooms of ordinary plan, a residence stacked floor upon floor round a stair, and much of what the rooms know would survive on the walls of another house. The use they were made for lasted a few months; since then they have been lived as a sight.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Change the form, and in its best places the record knows less. Losing My Religion is an ostinato with no release and a voice circling it, and the circling is its anxiety; Country Feedback’s slow, unresolved drag is the end it describes. The sequence is counted here once. It is placed with care at the close: Country Feedback, desolate, and then Me in Honey, forgiving, so that the record ends on an answer rather than on the wreck. Elsewhere the order serves more than it enacts. Radio Song’s complaint opens a record that is not about radio; the two Mills songs and Shiny Happy People are placed for contrast; most songs could stand in another order or alone. A strong collection with a shape.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The episodic shape is the knowledge that nothing happens: each block ends where it began, and a plotted film would have given the men the progress the film denies them. The collective narrator, a “we” with no face, makes the group the subject and lets one of the drifters tell it, with the fondness and the self-excuse that implies. The seasons do the work of plot, and the last shot passes through the beds of men who have not moved as one of them leaves. But the narration is often a container, filling in what the image already knows, and the late episodes, Natali and the variety show, are placed in sequence, not required by it. The form is the instrument at the frame and the close, and a container for much of the middle.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The form does work. The roving third person, slipping in and out of each member of the family, is the instrument by which the book shows the three of them reading one another wrongly, and Danny’s gift makes that form literal: the child who can read minds hears what the narration shows the reader. The hotel’s voices enter Jack’s inner speech in the same italic as his own thoughts, so that possession is rendered as a change in the texture of a mind. The five-part arc, from the interview to closing day to the snow, is the siege shape the matter needs. Held at the threshold because the form is mostly the genre’s container: take away the italics and the roving viewpoint and much of the knowledge survives in a film or a play, as a famous film shows; and the parenthetical inner voice is used so often that it becomes a habit rather than an instrument.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part. Its knowledge, loyalty and loss carried through a half-heard voice, lives in an arrangement in which the words are a strand in the weave rather than its message: Stipe sung low and slurred, Mills and Bill Berry singing counter-lines that cross him, Buck’s arpeggios carrying the melody the voice will not. Harborcoat makes that the whole song, and a mix that put the words forward would say something more ordinary. The sequence is counted here, once: the first side moves from crossing voices to the apology and the drone, the second from brisk songs to Camera’s grief, Rockville’s plain speech and the road out of Little America, which leaves the record in motion. The order serves well; it enacts little, and most songs could change places.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Would another form change what the building knows? In the visit, yes. The bands make looking at art a matter of walking, choosing and turning back, and the atrium makes the institution a crossing place where every level is seen at once. Put the programme in rooms and the visitor’s freedom and the public crossing are gone. In the use, the form fights its content. Art hung on a curved, sloping concrete wall, or on a partition built against it, is shown by the building rather than in it, and exhibitions have repeatedly been designed against the galleries. The form is the instrument of the building’s knowledge of movement, and the container, at times the adversary, of what it exists to show.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Change the form, and what is lost? A prism of the same height with the same uses inside would lose the fit of floor plate to use, and it would lose the light: the inclined planes and the clear glass put every floor at the edge of the sky, and the fissures give the upper floors winter gardens and air. The gallery exists because the taper made a floor small enough to circle. But much of what the tower knows would survive another form. The offices are offices, the hotel is a hotel, and the life within is that of a commercial building. The form is the instrument of the figure and of the view, lived most fully by those who see it from outside, and for most of its use it is the container.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? In part. The knowledge lives in the full length at life size: the boy must stand as tall as the viewer and as tall as a Van Dyck lord, or the role he wears is not a role; cut to a half length, the costume becomes a curiosity and the stance is lost. It lives also in the touch. The satin is made of strokes that dissolve close up, so the splendour is visibly a performance of paint, as the costume is a performance of rank, and that correspondence is the form doing work. What holds the axis is that ground, sky and tree are a container, the full-length portrait’s usual apparatus, exchangeable without changing what the picture says.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? In part. The knowledge is in the collision of two modes on one surface: a figure with a high, smooth, photographic finish and a ground that is flat, graphic and without light. That collision puts the man in no place at all except his origins, and only a painting can hold it, since a photograph would give a real garden and a real depth. The life size and the forward lean put the viewer at conversation distance with a president. The vines in front of the chair are the form’s one move against its own layering. Held at 7.5 because much of what the picture knows travels at the size of a page or a screen without loss, and because the figure’s handling would serve as well on a plain ground.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. Its knowledge is in its dynamics. Auto Rock knows the climax inside the calm because the piano figure does not change while the band rises; in another arrangement it would know only that loud follows soft. Glasgow Mega-Snake knows force as a beginning rather than a reward, and that depends on its placing second. The compression argues too: the build is shown as a unit, repeatable and finite. The sequence moves between poles, quiet and violent, rather than along an arc, and closes on the heaviest weight. What holds the figure is that much of the middle could be reordered without loss, and that the quiet pieces contain a mood more than they are its instrument.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The form is the chronicle of a household in short chapters, each a scene and a lesson, and its main formal idea is the two-part shape: one year of girlhood, then the years of marriage and death. In the first part the sisters are seen as a single body; in the second they are separated one by one, so that the form enacts what the book knows about the end of childhood. The pilgrim frame gives the first part an instrument, the domestic made into a journey. But much of the form is a container. The chapters could be reordered within each part with little loss; the narrator’s address to her young readers is a convention; the second part’s letters, journal and European chapters are devices of convenience. Made a single continuous novel, the book would lose its episodic warmth and little of its knowledge, and that holds the axis below the general level.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? In part, yes. Prayer here is lived at the sea’s edge, the ocean heard against the wall and seen from the esplanade; with the roof drawn back, the hall becomes open ground under the sky, so that the old opposition of covered hall and open court is resolved in one room; and the scale makes the great feasts a national gathering on one ground. Put the programme in an inland hall of the same arcades and much of that goes. But the hall itself, its arcades, galleries and qibla wall, would be the same room inland, and the ornament, the form the building is known by, changes little of how prayer is lived. Much of its use is now as a monument visited on tours, which the form serves as spectacle. The form is the instrument of the site and the container of the hall.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The sequence is counted here, once. The form serves the knowledge in two ways. The songs are short, fast and full of stops and changes of tempo, so the record has the nervous, sped-up time of a night out, and Dancefloor and Riot Van are the evening’s pulse made audible. And the sequence runs from afternoon to small hours to the next day’s judgment, ending on the one long track, whose slow opening and wordless close give the record the distance it needs to see itself. Longer, more spacious songs would lose the argument about speed and display. What holds the figure is that most songs could stand in another order, or alone.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Does the form change how the church’s purpose is lived? Partly. The church as the city knows it is lived through its form: the tower is the point from which every walk in Reykjavík takes its bearing. The nave makes worship a matter of the long axis, the height and the light, and in a hard, tall room the organ and choir are its natural use; the church has long served as a concert hall. But the service itself is lived much as in any large Lutheran nave: set it in another long, tall, plain room and little changes. What the form knows most fully is the church’s place in the city and the nation, its sign, more than the life within. It clears the floor of 7.0 with room and stops short of 7.5.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part. The knowledge, a self pulled between an audience and its own privacy, lives in an alternation: full songs in which the band gives the crowd what it came for, broken by fragments in which the singer turns away. The sequence is counted here, once. The first half runs from leaving through the public quarrel and two private songs to the short fury of Whipping; Pry, To breaks it; Corduroy, Better Man and Immortality carry the second half toward exhaustion, with the collage as the record walking out of song. The package says the same: a body examined. What holds the figure: the fragments break the record without each knowing why they break it where they do, and most of the songs could stand alone.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Change the form and the record loses part of what it knows. Its knowledge, one unease passing through many idioms, lives in the form of a cabinet of short songs in different manners; one long mood, as on the earlier records, could not say that dread wears many faces, cheerful ones among them. In single songs the form is the meaning: the withheld entry of Push, the cramped, breathing arrangement of Close to Me, the brisk major-key frame of In Between Days around its regret. The ends are placed with intent, but most of the inner songs could stand in another order, and the variety is more display than argument.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the work knows? Considerably. In black and white the eyes would be merely pale, and the charge of green against red would go, and with it most of the force: colour here is not added information but the instrument of the gaze. As a painting it would lose the photograph’s claim that this child exists and looked at this camera, which grounds everything it discloses and the later story of finding her. Wider, with the place in view, it would become reportage, and the face would be one fact among many; the tight crop turns a refugee into a presence. What holds the axis is that the form is a standard one, the head and shoulders portrait, used well rather than shaped to the content, and much of what the image knows survives at postage stamp size.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? Outside, yes. A straight prism at this height would lose the tower’s answer to the wind and its place in the trio, which turns from Jin Mao’s tiered pagoda through the World Financial Center’s sliced prism to a spiral. The twist is how the tower knows its weather. Inside, the double skin makes the atria, and the atria are meant to make each zone a neighbourhood with a public room, a sky lobby where one changes lifts and meets others: a real change in how a supertall is lived, where it works. But the office floors are ring floors round a core as in any tower, the atria are thinly used by report, and the skin is a second building standing off the first. The form knows the wind and the city more than the life within.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Change the form and something real is lost, though not everything. The hidden meters are the record’s best formal idea: songs that feel like a steady walk but keep stumbling a beat early or late, which is how a man who keeps up appearances while slipping would sound. The low-mixed voice inside full arrangements makes the speaker a figure half drowned in his own surroundings, and the record knows it. The sequence has a shape: an opening of guilt and diagnosis, a long middle of attachment and drift, and a close in two slow, plain songs that do not resolve. But the middle is a list more than an arc, and most of its songs could be reordered with little loss. Several tracks are containers for good songs, not forms that think.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Change the form and the work loses a good deal. The knowledge the paintings carry, that Santa is a real man who might be in your house tonight, is made by the form: oil realism at near life size, warm artificial light, broad wet strokes that read as fur and skin at magazine scale, and the frontal gaze that meets the reader on the page. Render it as a cartoon and the believability goes, and with it the work’s claim. Held well below the top because the form is the inherited form of the illustrated advertisement and the society portrait, used rather than remade, and because across the body it does not develop.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Withholding the robbery puts the viewer where the robbers are, with fragments only. The placing of the “Mr. Orange” section is the decisive choice: the viewer learns that Orange is the policeman about two thirds of the way through, while White still trusts him, so suspense turns to dread and every earlier tenderness between them is read again. Told in order, the film would be a heist with a twist; told this way, it asks what loyalty is worth when one side of it is invented. The near real time of the warehouse makes the bleeding a clock, and the commode story, written, rehearsed and performed in the scene it describes, is the form in small. The diner and the White section are container more than instrument.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
At the scale of the song the form is the knowledge: the two-minute song, with its single turn at the bridge, is what lets If I Fell’s caution or I’ll Be Back’s indecision be stated and left unresolved; lengthen them and they would say something else. At the scale of the album the form is arbitrary. The sequence is counted here, once. The title chord must open, and I’ll Be Back closes well,; Things We Said Today darkens the second side at its centre. Otherwise the order follows the film on the first side and fills the second, and the songs could be reordered or exchanged with no loss of what the record knows. Heard as thirteen singles, it would change little: that holds the figure.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Outside, almost everything. Put a slab on the beach in its place and the statement of a city stepping out to sea is gone, and with it the hotel’s whole proposition of arrival across water. The island and the bridge change how the purpose is lived more than an emblem usually does: to stay there is to be removed, approached and received. The V plan and the atrium shape the suites’ life too, every room facing the sea on one side and opening on the other to the great void. What holds the axis is that the form’s two strongest elements, the mast and the sail, do nothing for those inside: the sail is seen from within only as a pale wall closing the atrium, the mast not at all, and the suites, double-height and lavish, would be the same rooms in another tower.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The studio Mexico City is the instrument: a city that is plainly a set is a city seen by a man who lives in his own fantasy, and the anachronistic songs place the feeling outside its period, as desire is. The ghost hands are the form’s best invention, a device that says what Lee cannot. The shift of register after the border, from bar comedy to travelogue to jungle vision, follows the drug and the need, so that the form changes as Lee’s hope does. What holds the axis: the division into parts separates more than it shapes, the journey is a container of incident, and the epilogue’s dream logic is announced rather than prepared, so that the last form arrives as a change of film more than as the necessary end of this one.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
The sequence is counted here, once, and it holds the axis among the lowest of the eleven. Within the title song form is knowledge: a strophic narrative ballad, verse by verse from memory to schoolyard to conviction, in which the plain return of the frame is the child’s steadiness; set it in another form and the song stops knowing its calm. “My Blue Tears” depends in the same way on its bareness. At the level of the album the form is the customary one. The title song leads; “A Better Place to Live” closes on hope, placed with some intent; between them the order serves rather than enacts, and the two Wagoner songs, set together at the end of side one, read as accommodation more than design.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Change the form and what does the building stop knowing? Strip the domes and the decoration and a Regency house with two large end rooms remains, and its life of dining, music, receiving and the private suite would be lived as in any great house of the period. The form changes how pleasure is lived in one sense: every room is a stage. The dinner under the dragon, the concert under the shell ceiling, the passage through the painted glass of the Long Gallery are made events by their setting, and that is the building’s knowledge. But it lives in the surfaces more than in the spaces, and the spaces could be redecorated in another manner without the plan changing at all. Above the floor of 7.0, without margin to spare.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The form is the sequence: the long naturalist approach, the camera and the cutting kept plain and observational, so that when the supernatural enters it enters a documentary world; the slow medical procession is the form of a mother’s hope running out. Sound is the second instrument: the attic, the voice, the cut-off silences, the hard jumps from quiet to noise. What holds the axis low: most of the form is the realist grammar of its decade, well used rather than remade, so that much of it could be exchanged without loss; the strands of Chris, Karras and Kinderman are cut together by alternation rather than joined by necessity; and the prologue sits beside the film as its own short piece.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In part, and in its best places much. The knowledge here, a defiance shadowed by doubt, lives in an arrangement of surface and depth: bright, driven singles set beside slow pieces where the polish thins and the voice is left alone. Renée’s length and stillness are its meaning; It’s My Life’s brightness over a pained voice is its meaning. The sequence is counted here, once. Side one runs from the first album’s manner through the hit to the still centre and on to the title track; side two opens on the quiet Tomorrow Started and returns to brisk songs. That order serves more than it enacts, and most of the songs could stand in another order, or alone: a collection with a shape, not a form that is the knowledge.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Substitute another form: what would the building stop knowing? Some things. The court and its pools make worship an act of gathering under the sky at a size that turns a crowd into rows upon rows, and the long approach under the arcades past water prepares the visitor for the hall. The form carries two uses at once, prayer and visit, and manages them by routes and hours. But much of it is a container of inherited types rather than an instrument of new knowledge. Put the same programme into the Mughal mosque it follows and what is known of worship is much the same; put it into another eclectic idiom and little changes but the surface. The domes and minarets could be rearranged without changing how prayer is lived. The form serves its purpose well and states it largely by quotation.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
The form does real work. The stencil makes a silhouette, so the girl has no face and anyone may stand in her place; two values, black and red, put the whole weight of meaning on the one coloured thing; the drift of the balloon upward and away turns a flat wall into a small space of distance and of time. On the wall the form knew more: the public stair, the passer-by, the words. Paint the figure modelled in oil and the image loses its anonymity and its speed; change the colours and the heart no longer rules it. What holds the axis is that the form is also the form of a logo, chosen as much for its reproducibility as for what it knows: on a tote bag it says almost exactly what it said on the wall.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Almost entirely. The work is its form, and its use is the experience of moving through that form: climbing flight by flight, turning at landings, seeing other climbers opposite and above across the bowl. Change the bowl to a tower of stacked decks and the work stops being a crowd made visible to itself. The purpose, climbing and seeing, is lived through the shape, and the axis clears its floor of 7.0. What holds it there is how little the form knows. It shapes one experience, which the first ascent exhausts; and the openness that is the source of that experience was also the source of its danger, so that the form now has to be partly sealed to be used at all.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The black and white is the Motorcycle Boy’s sight, a world without colour with the sound turned down, and the film imposes it on everyone in it, so that Rusty James lives inside his brother’s perception without his understanding. The fish are the one breach, and the end turns on them. The clocks and skies make the form a measure of time running out; the score keeps time under the action. Told in colour and plainly, as The Outsiders was, the material would be a story of a gang and a family. The binding is loose, though. The camera stays mostly with Rusty James, not his brother, and the style is laid as surface over scenes, the school and Patty, that the form does not need.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the work knows? Outside, yes: put a straight glass corner on the same block and the relation to the bridge, the river and the turreted row, and the whole statement of movement, are gone. The form is the instrument of what the building says to the city. But the axis asks also how the form changes the way its purpose is lived, and the purpose is offices, now also hotel rooms, a gallery and a restaurant. The pinched glass tower makes awkward rooms, and the staggered windows serve the river front, not the rooms behind them. The rooftop restaurant under the mesh crown is the one place inside where the form is lived and the corner seen from within. The form knows the city and little of the rooms, and the figure stands at the line.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Would a different form change what the building knows? In part. The SkyPark makes the roof a ground: guests swim, eat and walk fifty-five storeys up with the city for their horizon, and the public stands on a prow over the bay. That life belongs to the form, and nothing else could give it. The two legs and the atrium change how a hotel room meets its city, a glass wall leaning over the water on one side, the full-height atrium on the other. But most of what happens in the towers is hotel use in shallow slabs that any tall hotel would give. Substitute three plain towers with a rooftop pool and the hotel stops knowing very little; the city would lose its picture. The form is the image of the work, and its instrument only on the roof.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Would changing the form change what the record knows? In its best places, yes. Clocks is a song about time that cannot be halted, built on a piano figure that never halts; a ballad version would know less. The Scientist’s late band is its meaning, the plea gathering force too late. Amsterdam’s withholding and release enact a breakout the words only hope for. The sequence is placed with intent at its ends: a public opening, the four strongest songs early, a looser middle, a dark title track and a release. What holds the figure is the middle and the method: most songs fill one shape, verse low and chorus raised, and tracks six to nine could be reordered with little loss.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
The sequence is shaped with intent, and it is counted here once. Hello opens with a few bars of Wonderwall before the noise breaks in, so the record begins by announcing a return. The two untitled fragments, cut from one jam, divide it into three movements; the dawn of Morning Glory precedes the second; Champagne Supernova closes on the sound of the sea with which it began, a frame that gives the record an ending rather than a stop. That is form serving the record’s one knowledge, the lift and the comedown. What holds the figure on the floor is that the frame holds songs that could stand in another order or alone, as four did as singles, with the best-known front-loaded and the middle run by alternation.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Would a different form change what the work knows? In its essentials, yes. A cast banana is a sculpture that stays; only a real one makes the owner buy the material anew and makes the certificate the work. Duct tape, not a pin or a frame, makes the attachment look temporary and cheap, which is the argument about cost. A wall at a fair, not in a gallery, makes the price part of the form. So the form is the instrument of what is said. Held at the floor and no higher because the visible form is almost arbitrary within those terms, any banana, any angle, any strip; because the knowledge can be stated whole in a sentence; and because the work reaches most of its public as a photograph, without loss.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Would changing the form substantially change what the work knows? Something, and that is real. Give the tower another plan and another top, and its footprint and its parapet lose the measures of the lost towers; the square turning into its own rotation is the one figure by which the shaft knows what it is, a memory taken up and turned. But the axis asks also how the form changes the way the purpose is lived, and here the purpose is lived as any office is lived: deep floors round a core, a lobby, elevators, the same working day in a different tower. The podium changes how the street is lived, and for the worse: a blank wall at the height of a seventeen-storey building where a ground floor should meet the city.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Change the form and the film loses something in two places. The opening take is the instrument of a knowledge: an unbroken space in which Edward holds every element, the kneeling lords, the sparring heir and the siege engine, so that the order Bruce will break is felt as one continuous fact before it is named. And the climax is built so that the ground decides: the trenches and the bog take the English cavalry, and the camera, staying low in the mud with the men, makes the outlaw’s war the land’s war. What holds the figure: between those two the form is largely the genre’s container, shot and countershot in councils, a montage of flight, a crosscut execution, and another competent grammar would carry the same knowledge.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Would changing the form change what the film knows? In part. The episodic, drifting shape is the life of the three men, a plan that keeps losing its thread, and the cold-storage robbery, the one passage cut and staged for precision, is exactly where the plan fails: the form rhymes with the knowledge. The deadpan playing, comedy pitched at the level of earnest speech, keeps the men lovable; played broadly they would be fools, played with menace, crooks. The slow motion at the end changes the meaning of what precedes it. But much of the film is shot plainly, in a Texas daylight any comedy of the decade might have used, and the motel stretch could take another shape without loss. Form here serves more than it knows.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Would changing the form substantially change what the work knows? Outside, yes: hang a glass curtain wall on the same block and its whole statement, that a public building should be a figure and should speak, is gone. But the axis asks also how the form changes the way the purpose is lived, and here the answer is for the worse, or not at all. The office floors are ordinary floors round a core; the pattern of small square windows set the light inside instead of following the work done there; the lobby before 2020 was low and dim, the reverse of the threshold the keystone promised. The renovation made the inside more usable, and that is credited to the work as it stands, but by making it more like any sound office building, not by letting the form speak within.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Substitute another form and ask what goes. Painting holds the dance still at one instant, so that the wind never finishes and the rain never comes; the long horizontal holds the four figures on one band against an empty field, which gives them their isolation. Those are real gains of the form. But the picture’s knowledge moves into other forms almost without loss, and its own history is the evidence: it lives chiefly as a print, a card and a poster, and loses little in any of them, since its force is in the arrangement and the idea rather than in the paint. As a film still or a magazine illustration it would say nearly the same thing. The medium is the container more than the instrument, held above the floor by the stillness of a dance against a moving sky.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
Change the form and the film loses one thing it knows. The opera within the film is the instrument: a Sicilian revenge staged as art while the real revenge is carried out in the boxes and corridors, so that the distance between spectacle and act closes on the steps outside, when the curtain is down and the daughter dies. That is the last half hour. The rest is inherited grammar, competently worked: the trilogy’s frame of ceremony and intercut killing repeated, and a first hour that is a run of scenes with no form of its own. The director’s own re-edit of the same footage, thirty years on, shows that the frame of the film was not settled in its maker’s mind. The axis falls below its floor of 7.0.