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Solar Myths (Anthropomorphism & Architecture)
The Anthropomorphic Fallacy: buildings are like
people. Yet buildings do not resemble people, nor do they behave like people;
although anyone innocently perusing the reflexive history of architecture might
be forgiven for thinking so (Rykwert). It is not a
question of mimesis, but of function; and not just of physical function - the
interaction of material with human physiology - but symbolic function; the
meaning of buildings to those who dwell within them or within their orbit.
Anthropomorphism and mimesis are cognitive processes lead by tautology; if one
looks for similarities one will always find them. Yet these strangely
convenient similes explain nothing and inspire nothing; rather they are brought
on after the event to justify or explain - yet without ever explaining why (humanist vanity and a circumscribed
imagination are but two contenders for this lack of
cogent response). If we are looking for answers to the question why in the field of architectural meaning, then we must look to
the relationship of architecture with belief, desire, recognition as part of
the larger urban context, and to the relation of these in turn with the basic
forms of the human field of vision (different in every cultural actualisation).
Horizontals and verticals, eye-raising (hypsosis), the direction of light in relation to the source
of light, perspective and proportion (and in the grouping of meanings, top,
middle and bottom, the three key parts or layers of the urban experience);
these are the building blocks of architectural meaning.
Buildings are not people (despite architectural theory
from Palladio to Corbusier, the anthropomorphisation
of Golden Sections and other theories of proportions). Yet buildings do have
faces - those complex sign-giving systems we learn to read from birth. Moreover
the face of a building is rarely on its head. From the Egyptian Pylon to the Institute du Monde
Arabe (Paris), from Islamic calligraphy on the
body of the mosque to the Christian palazzo tradition -where the face usually
takes the form of the piano nobile- the face of a building is usually found in its
midriff. Architecture signifies on its stomach (in cases where a building only
has two parts, entrance and sign, such as the pediment and portico tradition of
classical Europe or the temple form in China and the Far East, such buildings
are, and not only in the preponderance of the symbol, top heavy). The sense of
the top of a building is normally reserved for an upward pointing or touching
which combines architecture with sky and skyline, always a sacred relation
connoting a given culture's relation to the sublime. The top, or solar portion
of a building, is (in Christian architecture at least) more akin to the crown
of thorns on top of its face. This part of a building, be it point or line,
draws the gaze upwards and does not look back at us as does the middle (as in
the case of the windows or loggia of
the piano nobile
or the signifying face of a cathedral West Front with its staring statues and
its stories to be read like an illustrated book). The opposition of spire or
minaret to watchtower or lookout only carries this distinction further upwards.
Architecture: if we live and work within its walls
then when without we read its public face. Like a consciousness faced with its
other(s), caught up in the constant deciphering that makes up our social being,
architecture resembles the interpersonal self/other relation insofar as it is
an inescapable aspect of our symbolic life and insofar as its importance to our
survival demands that it maintains a suitable set of expressions - a book of
stone whose predictions are to be read by all. Architecture may be said to
constitute the real tablets of stone of collective meaning. The architectural
face offers a co-incidence of symbol and function (of symbolic and material
function) key beliefs incarnated in the mirror of matter - a reflection of our
thought processes and the metasets that guide
them. Only on this level, that of the
inscribed body as signifying face, can the anthropomorphic fallacy be granted
some credit - and then only as effect rather than cause - as the product of our
means of comprehension (the symbolic aspects of our built environment as a
by-product of our attempts at self-comprehension). Everything not owed to
architecture's sheltering function is a sacrifice to the realm of signs.
The same may be said of that other great
anthropomorphic influence in human life: God. (Made in the image of man;
rationalised as the inverse of this process - with the result that we believe
ourselves to be the inferior copies). The personification of the divine is
understood as an infantile - or foreclosed- aspect of intellectual development
by many religious traditions. Desperate thought falls back upon its own
cherished self-image as the source of final understanding. All comprehension
becomes a mirror relation, a self-regarding metaphor - like our science fiction
which stubbornly finds human forms wherever it boldly goes (literature and
poetry especially rely upon this trope, whether in the form of crude
personification or in the guise of a more subtle prosopopoeia).
Architecture may indeed reveal the face of God, but not as a copy of the human
face, rather as the accretion and repository of ideals and limits, as the
aesthetic relation to last things. Gesture too does these things. As buildings
reach for the sky so they render society's heroic self-image. As buildings draw
down the sky so they delimit its fiery horizons. As buildings frame the sky so
they frame the human. Whether as face or gesture, the built environment clothes
finitude in the garb of infinity. (In this sense even secular architecture
contains the imprint of the holy visage, the motion of the blessing hand: in
the world of meaning there is no secular architecture).
(II) Buildings are not pillars (Sullivan). Equating
the palazzo form with the classical pillar was designed to permit decoration
whilst denouncing decoration; to embellish physical functionality with symbolic
functions by arguing for their fundamental nature. Yet the architect himself
suggests that to be the bearer of a culture's more important collective
meanings is a fundamental part of architecture's nature, that communication is
a part even of its most basic social function. Architecture always exists as
sign, in addition, or even prior, to its role as shelter. Furthermore pillars
are not people (anthropomorphism again). Although they can be made to look like
people (or is it people that look like pillars)? Over and above the history of
the caryatid, this analogy appears to be particularly true of the proportions
adopted for nineteenth century Historicist pillars, with the proportions of the
lowest segment suggesting the demarcation between leg and body. But despite
historical antecedents (the fluted lower portion on some classical pillars and
their imitations in the Renaissance) these are new proportions which arrive
with nineteenth century Historicism (for example, Rome's Piazza del Popolo in its final form, Vienna's Ringstrasse,
Haussmann's Parisian Boulevards and similar forms in every major European city
from Porto to St. Petersburg). But these proportions have a very different
point of origin, one based upon an increasing scale and distance, of
grandiosity and the demands of an expanding point of view. Magnificence, the
need to be impressive, to be the mirror of the
(III) Buildings are not male sexual organs (are not
phallic - at least, not always). Not all buildings are found standing alone,
whether in fact or in theory (an anthropomorphic synecdoche -part for whole-
also a figure without ground). The individual building: tumescent stone;
standing apart from those that touch one-another. Immediate proximity expresses
the opposite or complementary metaphor in a sexual-figurative binary which
nevertheless encompasses the truth that many sacred buildings do stand out and
stand up, whereas many secular, that is private dwellings discretely touch.
Beyond these figures lie the aesthetics of trans-building; an aesthetics of
three parts, transferring from vertical to horizontal the dominant axis of
description; the vertical remaining as a symbolic deixis
drawing upon gravity and light for its force. Architecture does indeed touch
itself (as we might say moving from Freud to Irigaray
in our strategic use of metaphor), but the important lines of contact are no
longer those of legal entities, units of ownership, or ground rent, but those
of the horizontal layering of the urban environment (not possession but
perception dictates the lines of division). The lines of meaning run across
buildings (and are operational even in buildings said to 'stand alone', beyond
the building is its context, beyond this is the context of our architectural
memory). The three parts of experienced architecture owe a large part of their
significance to their relationship with temporality. Temporality and
extra-temporality in architecture represent between them the twin poles of a
mode of life, a way of being, a society and its conception of itself (with a
future and a past, as well as a present) complete with a meta-set of sacred
elements, its sanctified universal exterior and support; that part of every
culture, every belief system, of every means of making a 'world', that relies
upon 'eternity' as its safe haven and anchorage, a place set aside untouched by
the storms of sublunary contingency.
Buildings are not penises (with apologies to Freud and psychoanalysis)
although, as we have seen, they may be phallic, whether in their actual form or
in the form of the theoretical edifice used to trace their silhouette. The
confluence of the figures of 'heads' and 'standing alone', suggests that the
(not only) Western ideology of independent masculinity as model for human
consciousness may not be far away.
(IV) Buildings are not egos. Self-sufficient.
Monuments to individualised consciousness. Fruit of humanistic endeavour,
motivated only by rational self-interest; the fundamental unit of the
Enlightenment. The second form of standing alone transposes the synecdoche up
into the realm of prosopopoeia - with ego psychology
as the modern method for the making manifest of the spirit. This reprise of the
anthropomorphic synecdoche in architecture, like the masculinist
model, ignores the collective role of language, culture and social life.
Marlboro man is offered as the poster equivalent of a deracinated (neo-)
liberal ideal (actually neo-conservative in content), as of its manifestations
in architecture and their apologists. The burnt offerings of materials and
health reveal the truth of the sacrificially supported identity that coughs
behind the bravura of independence. Autonomy and civil rights confused; freedom
(and profit) put before responsibility (if not defined against it); pioneer
self-sufficiency obviating the need for welfare provision. Always the negated
relation to the Other as ground for the identity of the Same. Like the
late-comer who, ignoring all context, obscures a view or skyline, or clashes
with the neighbouring style(s) of the street or square. Or the space cleared around a tower block
(where the connections to others of its kind are invisible, like language or
radio waves, or are hidden underground).
(V) Buildings are not their origins. A skyscraper does
not contain the hidden traces of the cave or the tree. Architecture is not a
tent made from branches and leaves which has somehow forgotten itself,
forgotten its origins (and so fallen into inauthenticity)
and which now requires, as a condition of cure, a return to this basic form -
though much architecture may have begun in this way (such is the vision of Laugier, the French theorist of classical architecture).
Ultimate origins rarely have anything to do with present experience. Unless
yoked together under the sign of metalepsis - a
figure where distant cause is taken for present effect - and then the reference
to occluded origins as occult revelation conveys more information about the
source of the information proffered than the source either of architecture or
of its modes of meaning.
Copyright 2002 Peter Nesteruk