Architecture and Sacrament

A Critical Theory

David Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351248778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

David Wang's Architecture and Sacrament considers architectural theory from a Christian theological perspective, specifically, the analogy of being ( analogia entis ). The book tracks social and cultural reasons why the theological literature tends to be separate from contemporary architecture theory. Wang argues that retrieval of the sacramental outlook embedded within the analogy of being, which informed centuries of art and architecture in the West, can shed light on current architectural issues such as "big box stores, " the environmental crisis and the loss of sense of community. The book critiques the materialist basis of current architectural discourse, subsumed largely under the banner of critical theory. This volume on how European ideas inform architectural theory complements Wang's previous book, A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future, and will appeal to architecture students and academics, as well as those grappling with the philosophical moorings of all built environments.

1

Architecture in a World of Originals

“Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture is the earliest architectural theory that has come down to us.” This is a common observation; I just said it in the Introduction. But we presume something when we simplify like this. We presume that Vitruvius had in mind the same sort of thing as, say, Robert Venturi had in mind when he gave us Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture some two thousand years later.¹ Are the objects of Vitruvius’ and Venturi’s attention the same? It is easy to answer yes; both treatises are on architecture.

I am not sure Vitruvius would be as agreeable. At least I am not sure why, under the regime of our postmodernist orthodoxy, we let ourselves get away with this sort of confidence.² We postmodernists insist that our reality – or, more precisely, our realities – are socially constructed.³ This means that any construct we hold to be true is a product of contingent agreements we sign on to; not thanks to any inherent properties of things themselves. Let us say the thing in question is architecture. Under the dictates of social construction, how can “architecture” as understood by Vitruvius two thousand years ago be the same stuff we denote by this word today? Consider Figures 1.1 and 1.2.

Figure 1.1Maison Carrée, Nimes, France. 10 CE. Photograph courtesy of Bob Krikac.

Figure 1.2Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia. Robert Venturi, 1964.

Dating from the first decade of the Common Era shortly after the passing of Vitruvius, the Maison Carrée reflects the Vitruvian resonance between architecture and nature. In turn, “Nature” for Vitruvius is truth and, as such, Nature is the original authority behind architecture:

the ancients held that what could not happen in the original would have no valid reason for existence in a copy. For in all their works they proceeded on definite principles of fitness and in ways derived from the truth of Nature.⁴

Since nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole, it appears that the ancients had good reason for their rule, that in perfect buildings the different members must be in exact symmetrical relations to the whole general scheme.⁵

Without an original, there is no valid reason for the copy. For Vitruvius, Nature is the original because it provides the definite principles of fitness for copies. The human body then mediates between these principles and physical expressions in architectural form. A millennium and a half later, Leonardo da Vinci captured this idea in his Vitruvian Man (see Figure 0.2).⁶ The popularity of this drawing obscures the rationale of the initial vision. By “the whole general scheme” Vitruvius may well have meant just the completed building. But the context, and certainly his interpreters, suggest a larger sensibility. As the Latin West awoke in the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century, then in the cultural flowering of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and then during the Renaissance and its aftermath, the Vitruvian vision was this: “The human figure … interpreted as a mirror of the cosmos: ‘for in like manner the firmament has its length equal to its breadth.’”⁷ So “the whole general scheme,” at least as a long tradition of commentary warrants, was nothing less than the cosmos. To meet the standard of fitness, a building must reflect this cosmic order proportionately. When it does, it participates in “the original.” There are overtones of Aristotle here, for whom the cosmos had a circumference: “We call ‘heaven’ the substance of the extreme circumference of the whole.”⁸ The point is that from Antiquity until the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was no barrier between this earth and that heaven. The two were a single seamless distribution and, for Vitruvius, that distribution indexed to the human form. Architectural excellence emerges when buildings embody this distribution.

Excellent distribution enters the empirical world by way of “symmetrical relations.” Symmetria was something much more mysterious than the bilateral sameness we usually take symmetry to mean today. Art and architecture in Hellenistic times were excellent productions because number and proportion, transcendent measures in a world of flux, infused themselves into those productions to achieve symmetria. The result was kalon, the beautiful. A long line of Greek thinkers, from Heraclitus to the Pythagoreans to Plato to the Stoics, discerned a fundamental Reason (logos) permeating the cosmos, and its expression was by means of proportion, expressions of which were essential to human flourishing. When Plato analogized the art of the weaver to that of the statesman, he said that the commonality between them is “the mean.” Expressing the mean was the purpose of all the arts, so that they can “guard against excess or defect, which are real evils.”⁹ Moral determinations such as beauty, excess, defect, even evil, all embed seamlessly in this proportionate logic on productions of art. Or, put another way, when any production is proportionate, whether it is basket weaving or horseshoe making or statecraft, it is art.

We can define symmetria, then, in this way: the arrangement of the material in front of me somehow rhymes with a transcendent order beyond me, while also rhyming with a moral order within me, resulting in an aesthetic sense of an ordered cosmos to which I belong. Thus the classicist J.J. Pollitt related symmetria to “divine patterns.”¹⁰ Put differently, experiences of symmetria are impossible when limited merely to this-worldly measures of arithmetic quantity. The theoretical logic of the Maison Carree was a participatory one in which the experiencer, upon encounter with the building, enters the embrace of Something Larger by means of an intuited sense of proportion. Centuries later, in a moment of lucidity, Immanuel Kant would echo a sentiment of-a-piece with symmetria: “Two things fill the mind with … increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”¹¹ This was mighty good for Kant because, as I explain in pages downstream, he did his part to muddle up the divine aspect of symmetria.

Figure 1.2 shows the house Robert Venturi designed for his mother. Here an arch is simply a formal gesture “pasted” onto a wall. The keystone at the center is a void, exactly counter to the role of an actual keystone. To the right we see the strip window which for Le Corbusier only some 50 years earlier was one of the five essential elements of modern architecture.¹² Here it is merely one of several window “gestures”; to the left we have windows perhaps from an Andersen catalogue. The bricolage of things comprising the elevation of the Vanna Venturi House illustrates Venturi’s famous dictum that architecture merely consists of “ducks” and “decorated sheds.” When a building’s purpose is “submerged and distorted” by a symbolic form, it is a duck. When a building expresses its purpose by ornamentation, it is a decorated shed. An edifice as germane to Western civilization as Chartres Cathedral, for Venturi, is both a duck and a shed.¹³ ArtNews recently eulogized Venturi, who passed while this book was being written, as “the cornerstone of Postmodern Architecture.”¹⁴ What stands out in this postmodern view is that everything is negotiated representations. Postmodernism never considers the essence of a thing because there is no essence of a thing. A thing is what it is because it is one sign in a system of other signs largely freed from their moorings in original intentions. All meaning, then, is a patchwork of essentially arbitrary agreements. We have come a long way from Vitruvius.

The Structuralist Turn

Animating Venturi’s Complexity is an ideology reflecting the structuralist theory of language. Although with headwaters centuries earlier, structuralism’s systemic impact was first felt with Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916. Figure 1.3 is a diagram I use to explain structuralism to my students. When I say “the cat sat on the mat next to the bat,” speakers of English immediately understand what I mean (provided that I clarify “bat” as the baseball thing and not the thing that flies). But if I say “the zat sat on the qat next to the xat,” it would be gibberish. We understand the first sentence because its signs coherently relate to the innumerable signs comprising the totality of the English language. That totality is a langue (denoted by the dotted blob). The langue is the backdrop against which we understand any singular utterance, or parole. Fluent English speakers do not even think about how a parole (like this sentence) relates to the infinite possibilities of the English langue; that is why they are fluent. But the second sentence is gibberish because it does not relate to other signs in the English langue. For English speakers, “Zat” is as unrecognizable as the Chinese 猫 (mao = cat). It is no wonder Saussure held that the signs of any langue system are arbitrary both written and spoken. There are four general traits to structuralist linguistics: (1) a langue is a purely immanent system of meaning; nothing external to it – nothing transcendent to it – informs a langue;¹⁵ (2) all signs comprising a langue are arbitrary, determined only by practices internal to the system;¹⁶ (3) meaning is completely predicated on how these arbitrary constructs stand in relation to each other;¹⁷ and (4) all meanings within a langue self-transform over time, “requiring no reference to a ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ beyond itself to justify or validate its procedures.”¹⁸ To this fourth trait, consider that “byte” is a new sign unknown to English speakers just a generation or two ago; “mouse” is a sign with meaning added to the one it once had; while “gay” has taken on new meaning since earlier eras; and so on. Immanent language systems continuously self-transform.

This structuralist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Architecture in a World of Originals
• 2 The Loss of Glow: Architecture in an Age of Representation
• 3 A Critique of “Criticalist” Architectural Theory
• 4 Dwelling in the Sacramental Zone
• 5 Sustainable Design in the Sacramental Zone
• 6 Creativity in the Sacramental Zone
• 7 God in the Details: Sacrament and Tectonic Jointure
• Bibliography
• Index