Architecture and the developmental “anatomy” of history:
I was a sculptor before I turned to observations such as these in this book. I’ve always been struck by how architecture’s more monumental physical expressions are similar to sculpture in reflecting not just functionality, or even some abstract sense of beauty, but how, at the time and place of their creation we are coming to hold reality. Appreciating deeply how this is so requires that we engage experience from the kind of body intelligence a sculptor necessarily draws on. The following observations are excerpted from The Creative Imperative:
A fascinating place to observe the creative metamorphosis that give us the “rise of civilization” is the evolution of architecture, particularly architecture that is regarded by the people of its time as in some way sacred or special. In modern times, people often assume that architecture’s changes through time are products largely of invention, of what we had become capable of building. More accurately, particular shapes move us when they speak from how we are coming to experience and shape reality as a whole. Similarities noted below not only cut across cultural traditions, they reflect patterns found everywhere at parallel stages in culture.
In earliest pre-history (early Pre-Axis), the most common ritual dwelling was the earth itself. The “medicine” of early stone age people—drawings and ritual objects—has been found most often in the deep recesses of caves. It was apparently these caves, and such sites as sacred wells and burial mounds, that were the most common places for the shaman’s “discourses” with the primordial powers of nature. Sculpturally, the sacred forms in this most archetypally feminine of periods were spherical containers and gentle mounds.
With the beginnings of Early-Axis sensibility, attention began to shift upward. Ritual spaces increasingly became ritual structures, and these structures specifically places for conferring with the heavens. The neolithic stone circles of Europe provide some of the earliest examples, while the pyramids of Egypt and meso-America are somewhat later, and the temples of early Grece and the ritual dwellings of the classical East—Buddhist stupas, Hindu temples—somewhat later still. The architectural mass remains in secure juxtaposition to the earth’s belly, but now there is a clear verticality. Worshippers stand below and gaze upward.
Approaching Middle-Axis times, place of worship increasingly reflect an equal structural affinity with Above and Below. The domes of the Byzantine period very nearly balance in their upward might the weight of the foundation and sanctuary beneath. In the uplifted towers and high rounded arches of Romanesque architecture, we see the first gestures toward real ascendant preeminence, a statement made fully manifest by the last centuries of Middle-Axis culture in Europe in the Gothic cathedral’s surging buttresses and poetic spires.
With the beginnings of Late-Axis culture, we find two important architectural themes. The first is the continuation of upward movement. The second is the secularization of the ascendant. The most powerful gods of industrial high culture reside in the material realm, not the church. The culminating form of this period is the skyscraper. With its glass and steal purity, it is a perfect monument to objectivity and rational abstraction.
With Transitional times, we have taken one further step. The skyscraper continues to have an important place, but it is joined by an even more ascendant image: the spaceship. The spaceship is a ritual dwelling in which humans not only contemplate the heavens, they inhabit them.
Looking ahead? We see beginnings of further steps. The postmodern sensibility in architecture questions Late-Axis orthodoxies and makes at least a start at entertaining esthetics from earlier times. The worst of postmodern architecture presents little more than a hodgepodge of influences. But the best can bring together diverse esthetic in truly striking and inspiring ways. I think immediately of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or John Utzon’s Sidney Opera House.