Ceilings and Dreams

The Architecture of Levity

Paul Emmons, Federica Goffi, Jodi La Coe, Paul Emmons, Federica Goffi, Jodi La Coe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351065849
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world confronts enormous challenges, and almost all of our thinking, debating and decision-making takes place under endless ceiling grids. Quantitative research establishes that spaces with taller ceilings elicit broader, more creative thoughts. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology: they have become the blind spot of modern architecture. The twenty essays in this book look across cultures, places and ceilings over time to discover their potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is a key to unlock the architectural imagination.

Ceilings and Dreams aims to correct this blind spot and encourages architects and designers, researchers and students, to look up through writings organized into three expansive categories: reveries, suspensions and inversions. The contributors contemplate the architecture of levity and the potential of the ceiling, once again, as a place for dreaming.

1

FROM BELOW UPW ARDS

An introduction to Ceilings and Dreams

Paul Emmons

Where is the place for dreaming in the twenty-first century? All agree that the enormous challenges our world now confronts will require innovative approaches. Yet inspiring environments are rare and almost all of our thinking and decision-making takes place under claustrophobically low, endless grids of acoustic ceiling tiles. While many innovative thinkers have attributed their creativity to the inspiring environments they occupy, today we create few of those places.¹ Quantitative research stipulates that when in spaces with taller ceilings, people “tend to think more freely, more abstractly” and have bolder, more creative thoughts.² Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and thrive overhead. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology, but by looking across cultures and through time, we can rediscover the ceiling’s potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is the beginning of architectural intention and imagination. The contributors to this book have turned their gaze upward to understand the presence and contemplate the potential of the ceiling as a place for dreaming.

In the Renaissance, room height was determined as a harmonious proportion of a room’s length and width.³ A recent visitor staying in one of Palladio’s more modest villas with a nineteen-foot ceiling explains his temporal attunement to the space: “at night, with candles on the table, the ceilings disappeared altogether, and it was like being outside.” ⁴ By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, healthy ceiling heights were codified in hygienic regulations for light and air.⁵ Tall ceilings afford sustainable benefits like providing a place for hot air to rise above inhabitants on warm days, containing larger volumes of fresh air and allowing the penetration of natural light deep into a room. As such, an 1889 building handbook describes the height of the principle story of a typical city dwelling as twelve to fifteen feet.⁶

The principle of “minimum existence,” an overriding early twentieth-century concern, asserted that ceiling heights above human reach are inefficient and wasteful; so, modern architects like Le Corbusier advocated low room heights of 2.26 meters (7′–4″), which he accurately called “containers of men.”⁷ The squat, now ubiquitous 8′–0″ (2.44 meters) ceiling itself leads to a greater need for electrical and mechanical surrogates for natural light and air that contribute to the transformation of ceilings into systems. This, combined with acoustical issues of low ceilings, encouraged the development of gridded acoustical tile ceilings. The ceiling has become the under-surface of a plenum filled with engineering systems above it. Despite important exceptions, modern dwellers learned not to look up, compressing and depressing our bodily senses and mental activity.

Prior to the era of minimum existence, in 1864, architect Robert Kerr describes spaciousness as a benefit of taller ceiling heights in houses unlike the “oppressive contractedness” that makes one “instinctively stoop” and “even lie contractedly in bed.” In a spacious home, even if modest in plan, “mind and body, the spirits, and even the self-esteem of a man seem to expand and acquire vigor under the simple influence of elbow-room.” The “loftiness of ceilings,” Kerr writes, is an important element in the “cheerfulness” of a house.⁸ At the beginning of the twentieth century, German architect Hermann Muthesius’s study of the English house describes middle-class houses as having surprisingly low ceilings, which he says with some shock are a height of only 3.05 meters (approximately ten feet) – today considered exceptionally tall.⁹

FIGURE 1.1 Ceiling of Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Painted by Robert Streater (c.1667–69). Gilded wooden cords cover canvas joints.

In addition to hygiene, taller ceilings also provide psychosomatic benefits. They offer ample viewing opportunities for elaborate iconographic ceilings. The Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University (1669) by Sir Christopher Wren was built primarily for student final exam disputations with an enormous ceiling subdivided by gold ropes to look like an ancient Roman velarium or awning to shade spectators. Artist Robert Streater painted personifications of Truth and Learning descending from heaven to join the Arts and Sciences (including Lady Architecture) on billowing clouds in order to expel Envy, Rapine and Ignorance (Figure 1.1).¹⁰ One can only imagine the impact that dramatically colored overhead scene has upon students defending their theses. Exquisite ceiling ornaments and paintings tell stories that inspire, challenge and entertain those below by promoting contemplation, remembrance and daydreaming.

In this book, dreams are understood broadly as imagistic thought, including reveries, oneirisms, fantasies, musings, daydreams, visions, insights, wishes, pipedreams, hallucinations, nightmares, prognostications and prophecies; spanning from nocturnal to diurnal, sleeping to waking and personal to visionary. Lucid dreams are the source of much innovative thought.¹¹ Innately aligned with ceilings, the place of dreams is overhead. A dream is not infinitely distant; it takes place nearby. Representations of dreams across time confirm their proximity over the dreamer’s head. Raphael’s fresco of Joseph’s biblical dream on a domed ceiling in the Vatican Loggia (c. 1515) shows the dream within a circular bubble hovering a short distance above Joseph’s head. Modern cartoons continue the long tradition of showing thoughts and dreams in bubbles above characters’ heads.

Ancient dream theorists categorized different types of dreams. Greek physician Herophilus in the third century BCE identified four sorts of dreams: god-sent, natural clairvoyant, chance and wish-fulfillment.¹² Sigmund Freud explicitly related his analytical approach to Herophilus’ wish-fulfillment dreams.¹³ Chance dreams are the result of accidental causes, often related to what one ate for dinner, whereas god-sent dreams are extremely rare, immediate flashes of fully formed actual future events. Most relevant here are the natural clairvoyant dreams that foretell of possible future events but are indirect, requiring interpretation, known as oneiromancy or divination through dreams. Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino identified seven ways to induce prophetic dreaming: sleep, fainting, melancholy, chastity, well-balanced constitution, solitude and surprise.¹⁴ Divinatory dreams, as the fourth-century Ionian philosopher Synesius suggested in De insomniis, enable vertical travel to “make contact with higher spheres.”¹⁵

In the ancient world, when suffering people were seeking a cure, they appealed to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, through incubation or sleeping in his temple. After performing rites of purification, by sleeping in the temple, they receive god-sent dreams. For dream incubation, place is all-important; the person does not have a dream; rather, the dream visits the person. By sleeping in his temple, Asclepius would visit his patients in their dreams. The next morning, patients retell their dream to a priest who then interprets it to prescribe a cure.¹⁶ The practice of incubation continued into Christian times with the devout sleeping in churches to receive divine dreams.

Insightful dreams can be the result of good ceilings, but dreams are also often the origin of architectural designs. Especially in the Middle Ages, prophetic dreams describe building sites and architectural designs.¹⁷ In the late twelfth century, for example, the monk Gunzo reportedly receives a dream providing divine direction for the proportions and dimensions to build Cluny III, one of the first Gothic cathedrals.¹⁸ Prophetic dreams as bridges to future realms endow envisioned actions and events with authority deriving from a greater reality. In this sense, dreaming is not opposed to the real; rather, dreams are part of a foretold reality.

Divinatory dreams have revealed utopian designs to architect-seers across many cultures and time periods. Foundation myths often identify the architect/builder with the gifts of a dreaming shaman.¹⁹ In 1840, American artist Thomas Cole painted The Architect’s Dream for his architect friend, Ithiel Town (Figure 1.2).²⁰ An architect, reclining on a stack of enormous books atop an aged colossal column, is in front of the range of architectural history, bathed in glowing light as if all new – an Egyptian pyramid, a Greek temple, a Roman bath and a Gothic cathedral. Upon seeing the large painting, Town refused to pay for it (payment was primarily to be in architectural books from his extensive collection) and Cole chose to keep it in his study for the rest of his life. Although primarily a painter, Cole called himself an architect and designed, among other buildings, a Gothic church and the Neoclassical Ohio Statehouse. Cole presents the architect’s imagination as mantic or prophetic dreaming. The painting’s foreground has a proscenium arch with a billowing curtain drawn back to create a frame within the frame like a dream within a story. The architect is reclining with his eyes shut, as if sleeping, but his head is held up, as if awake. His tools are at his feet but he holds onto a drawing. This figure characterizes the body of a person who is having a vision, like shamanic flight where the soul travels, leaving behind the immobile body. Cole, who was aware of the tradition of ecstatic visions, recorded in 1838 that he “took a trip to Arcadia in a dream.”²¹ The same radiant light of the background of the painting illuminates the architect’s forehead, where the imagination was said to be located. Louis Sullivan similarly describes the architect:

FIGURE 1.2 Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream (1840). Oil on Canvas, 53″ × 84″. Toledo Art Museum.

The dreamer-man becomes the seer, the mystic, the poet, the prophet, the pioneer, the affirmer, the proud adventurer … that super-manipulator who materializes his d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• 1 From below upwards: an introduction to Ceilings and Dreams
• Reverie
• Suspense
• Inversion
• Index