EMANUELE LUGLI: What I’m talking about is not just, like, the making of measurement standards, but also the making of a form of consciousness that makes us believe that two things, as long as they have the same size, they’re supposed to be identical. And because, at the end, any idea of identity, of sameness, are fantasies, the only thing we’re left with is this kind of anxiety that makes us search for something that gives us the promise that sameness can be accomplished.

I am Emanuele Lugli. I am the author of The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness, and I am an assistant professor in art history at Stanford University.

I was doing some research on medieval architecture, and I was very interested in questions of labor and the organization of workers. And I just wanted to know how they built cathedrals. How did they lay down the pavement stones for squares? So I started looking at a lot of archival material, and all these documents were about measurements. So I tried to find out what measurements they were using and I couldn’t find anything. And that’s how the book came about: as a way to answer kind of like super basic questions. You know, what kinds of measurements were architects, city planners, and politicians of the Middle Ages using it to construct our cities?

I quickly realized that this was not enough because the measurements, rather than being architectural tools, they were really political tools. So I really had to start looking into the political and especially the legal documents that serve to legitimize the measurement standards that were used at the time. I had to look at philosophical discourses on the need for universal measurement systems. So, somehow, while writing this book, my whole ideas of what a space is kind of changed. In fact there are only a few chapters that talk about urban space and measuring in architecture. And I make no distinctions between the large scale of fields and cathedrals, and the kind of miniature scale of tailoring.

The book really talks about peculiar objects, because there are incisions of measurement standards in stones. And the stones—you can still see them today if you go to a lot of European, and especially Italian cities—they’re usually installed on the facades of cathedrals, churches, and often also city halls. So, I started writing a history about that. Why this measurement standards had to be displayed in the open, how people related to them. And then I realized that the way they dealt with measurement standards was fairly different from ours. Today most measurement standards, the official ones, are kind of like kept in safes in the center of well-guarded institutions, usually in remote locations. And so I had to find out why they started guarding them. Why we went from, like, a mode of dealing with measurements where everything was public and in the open to something where measurements were—well, kind of became invisible.

So the book starts from the modern period, the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and it kind of looks back at the history of these measurement standards. And then it jumps backward, and it shows what was going on before the modern systems, and everything that modern systems have raised, which is exactly what was codified in, well, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.

Measurements are very peculiar because somehow they enforce a particular idea of power on the territory and on space. Think about the fact that in most medieval communities, but also early modern communities in Europe and elsewhere, measurement standards were based on the king’s body. They were using the foot of the king. The pied du Roi in France was used up to the French Revolution. Measurements, therefore, kind of tell you something about not just the object you’re measuring but about the authority that legitimized the form of measuring. And, in fact, measurement is a form of description; they’re telling you a way by which you can describe something like a field or, like, a piece of cloth.

Now, in a way, for the people who use the metric system, the descriptions are related to earth, because the meter was originally measured so as to be a fraction of the earth’s meridian. And that story is very well known. It’s an idea of objectivity—the idea that the earth is universal for all the people on the planet, and therefore, by taking a fragment of it, we would produce descriptions that are universal and democratic. Also that is a fantasy, because the earth is not a perfect sphere, and it’s slightly squashed; the various meridians are different.

One of the things that totally fascinated me about the history of measurements is how laborious they are; in the sense of how laborious it is to implement them, right? When you create a new measurement systems, you have to convince the whole population to start using them. And it’s only when the whole population uses that particular standard that it becomes invisible. It becomes familiar. When the meter was implemented in Italy in the nineteenth century, basically they decided to re-school all Italian citizens. They made the studying of measurements a compulsory topic in elementary schools, but it also forced all the grownups to go back to school on weekends to learn how to use the new measurements. And because the task was herculean—it was enormous—they asked for the help of priests so they could preach how to use the new measurements. Which is interesting for me, because it kind of blurs this positivistic divide between the secular, which is objective, and the religious, which gestures towards the incommensurable, the divine.

There is a story from a fourteenth-century novella of all the problems that a kind of nouveau riche goes through in order to get a mantle. In the Middle Ages, you just don’t buy a mantle off the rack. You have to go and buy the cloth, and then it has to be tied and prepared and washed in order to get it done. But the story is a story of how this person is being constantly deceived through measuring. So everyone is measuring the cloth, you know, different ways. So at the end, he thinks that he bought enough material to have an imperial cape. But he ends up with a very short mantle that cannot even cover his shoulders.

From the very beginning of the history of measurements, let’s say between the twelfth and the thirteenth century, there is this idea that measuring actually is not the transparent activity it thinks it is. And in fact, we have a lot of friers telling people, be careful, watch out. And even today, scientists don’t measure things once; they measure things multiple times, and then they produce an average. And the thing that they average is kind of more accurate in all these various instances of measuring. But the fact that the average is a fiction is never really spelled out. The average, does not exist. No single measuring produced that average. Because measurements can only give us a promise of sameness, we have to replace them with better lies.