The thread of the virtual movement from Wölfflin to Lynn

All of the buildings move under the effect of physical forces of the Earth. Unperceivably, but they move. Some of them are also designed to move to perform their functions. However, most of them look absolutely still. Nevertheless, architects, critics, and historians of architecture often borrowed terms from scientific disciplines to describe a building or parts of it as if actually moving. Since the antiquity, artistic literature is full of ‘dynamized’ descriptions of artwork virtually set in motion to enhance the narrative quality of the communication, but in architecture this happens only from the end of 18th century onwards. In particular, since the end of the 19th century, a sequence of scholars and architects – Heinrich Wölfflin, Colin Rowe, Peter Eisenman, and Greg Lynn – have been developing a series of analytical and design tools that were used to introduce (or to enquiry) time and motion in architecture, whose different forms are here presented, classified and discussed.