We usually think of human bodies as being left\/right symmetric, and that architecture reflects that symmetry. A house plan can be reversed left-to-right, and the resulting mirrored house will still be perfectly functional, and not seem out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n
But recently, when travelling through Europe, I came upon an exception to this rule. All of the spiral staircases in midieval Europe go up in the same direction. I suspect that you would not be able to find a spiral staircase from the middle ages that spirals up to the left – they all spiral up to the right.<\/p>\n
I’m not talking here about modern spiral staircases, such as you find in fashionable lofts and bookstores. No, I’m talking about the real deal – the spiral staircases built into the round towers that guard the castles of the kings and feudal lords of old.<\/p>\n
The reason is quite simple: human bodies are, after all, asymmetric, in a crucial way. Almost everyone is right handed. And this means that a warrior will fight better while holding his sword in his right hand. An attacker running up a spiral staircase needs to hold his sword in his left hand, because his right hand will be blocked by the large central column of the staircase. Meanwhile, the castle’s defender is able to wield his opposing sword in his right hand. This confers a considerable advantage upon the defender.<\/p>\n
Theoretically it would be possible to build a spiral staircase that goes up the other way, but I suspect such a castle would be overrun rather handily by hostile invaders.<\/p>\n
Can anybody think of other instances where assymmetry in the human form has resulted in assymmetry in our architecture?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We usually think of human bodies as being left\/right symmetric, and that architecture reflects that symmetry. A house plan can be reversed left-to-right, and the resulting mirrored house will still be perfectly functional, and not seem out of the ordinary. But recently, when travelling through Europe, I came upon an exception to this rule. All … Continue reading “Assymmetry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}