In-Between: Architectural Drawing and Imaginative Knowledge in Islamic and Western Traditions

Hooman Koliji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317117698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Contemporary technical architectural drawings, in establishing a direct relationship between the drawing and its object, tend to privilege the visible physical world at the expense of the invisible intangible ideas and concepts, including that of the designer's imagination. As a result, drawing may become a utilitarian tool for documentation, devoid of any meaningful value in terms of a kind of knowledge that could potentially link the visible and invisible. This book argues that design drawings should be recognized as intermediaries, mediating between the world of ideas and the world of things, spanning the intangible and tangible. The notion of the 'Imaginal' as an intermediary between the invisible and visible is discussed, showing how architectural drawings lend themselves to this notion by performing as creative agents contributing not only to the physical world but also penetrating the realm of concepts. The book argues that this 'in-between' quality to architectural drawing is essential and that it is critical to perceive drawings as subtle bodies that hold physical attributes (for example, form, proportion, color), highly evocative, yet with no matter. Focusing on Islamic geometric architectural drawings, both historical and contemporary, it draws on key philosophical and conceptual notions of imagination from the Islamic tradition as these relate to the creative act. In doing so, this book not only makes important insights into the design process and act of architectural representation, but more broadly it adds to debates on philosophies of the imagination, linking both Western and Islamic traditions.

Part 1

Between Sense and Imagination

SYNOPSIS

A sensory, imaginative, and reflective experience, the architectural drawing is nurtured by all of these human cognitive faculties. The imaginative world associated with the drawing has attracted much attention in recent decades. The fields of arts and architecture have noticed a rise of interest in exploring the notion of imagination through new lenses as they can relate to the creative act of representation. Part 1 brings into this on-going discussion a new perspective: conceptualizing the notion of imagination through the lens of non-West (Islamic) art and architecture. What type of human faculty is imagination? How does it relate to the visualization and making? How did imagination become philosophized? How did it gain a noetic value? And how did it differentiate itself from that of “fantasy”? What did it mean for the creative act, and in particular for architectural drawings? Moreover, how this discussion is pertinent to pre-modern Western philosophy and contemporary culture is a central focus of this investigation.

Part 1 discusses this matter and lays a foundation for understanding the notions of imagination and drawing in the context of non-West architecture; it also discusses the ways in which it informs contemporary practices of design drawing.

PREAMBLE ON IMAGINATION

During the medieval and Renaissance periods, the notion of imagination was central to the philosophical schools of Islam. The imagination was regarded as a perceptive organ complementary to the reason and the senses, sometimes recognized as a distinct ontological realm. In philosophical terms, this perceptive faculty mediated between the reason and the senses, and was capable of introducing the human to higher levels of transcendental understanding.

Worldly imagination,¹ or imagination as a realm of existence has been discussed in a variety of ways throughout Islamic thought, whose metaphysics reached a culmination in the writings of Islamic mystics. Islamic mysticism, known as the Sufi tradition—with leading figures associated with orthodox theology and philosophy—discusses the world of imagination as a realm of being. It is within such a context of mysticism that the idea of mundus imaginalis or the imaginal world was first introduced and elaborated in the mid-thirteenth century. This notion came to prominence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and beyond in the writings and representational arts of the eastern Islamic scholars. The imaginal world is an ontologically real world linked to the essence of an individual. In religious terms, the imaginal is the realm in which angels take form, and corporeal beings become spiritualized. It is also a realm of very subtle matter, spiritus. Henry Corbin, a French Heideggerian philosopher of Islamic thought (1998), provides insight into the imagination as magical production of an image, and the image as “magical body or mental body” as incarnation of the thought and will of the soul.

In more general terms, the imaginal world is the realm of subconscious human dreaming on the one hand, and active awakened imagination on the other hand. It is within this world that human imagination exceeds its psychological function and gains noetic value with cosmological attributes. These multiple realms of imagination and the world of the imaginal, with their potential power of bringing true knowledge of the divine and the invisible to the human, immensely impacted Islamic art and architecture. The beginning notes in the Risala Mimariya, an early seventeenth-century Ottoman architectural treatise, is an indication of the significance of such invisible knowledge:

Let there be endless thanks and numberless praises of that God who created men, who opened the door of the palace of wisdom, who in accordance with the command “Be! And it is. … “²

The divine knowledge as a palace of wisdom becomes accessible to the human by the worldly imagination serving as its door.

The imagination relates to the architecture in both psychological and cosmological levels. One is the level of inception, the stage in which the architect conceives the architecture. Another level—when architecture is absorbed—represents the process by which the inhabitant understands the presence of architectural space. Both of these levels are vitally present in the architectural representation. In the context of this study in which geometric drawings are discussed, it is essential to contextualize our discussion of imagination with respect to the striking parallels that exist between major historical shifts in theology and the visual culture in the Islamic world, as seen in its geometric drawings. It is also important to trace the influence of Western thought on Islamic philosophy and sciences as they both directly and indirectly influenced the geometric mode of representation, known as girih. This concept is also known to the West as “arabesque,” a mode of representation (i.e., visual pattern) that widely shaped Islamic visual identity despite its historical and geographical varieties.³

Largely regarded as the “Golden Age” of Islamic philosophy and sciences, the ninth to twelfth centuries are characterized by scholars who remarkably reconciled and developed the hitherto ancient Greek sciences and philosophy in the Islamic realm. It was during this time that a centralized scholarly institution known as Bayt al-Hikmat,⁴ House of Wisdom, came into being with the aim of translating Greek and Persian texts to Arabic. During this period, Islamic philosophers sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle in their religious-oriented philosophy. Plato’s theory of forms, in which forms such as the beautiful were introduced prior to the object, were weighed against Aristotle’s rejection of that theory, who argued that shapes and objects were intertwined—a dichotomy that seemed to later reappear in the works of many Islamic thinkers. Discussions on the notion of imagination and its intermediary and meditative functions during this period were highly influenced by the perspectives of Plato and Aristotle through Neoplatonism.⁵ The following is a brief review of the evolution of the imagination in Islamic philosophy from early Islamic thinkers, prior to the prominent mysticism of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, who elevated the role of imagination to a cosmic level.

Imagination: Intermediary Faculty

The intermediary role of imagination was discussed by nearly all early prominent Islamic philosophers since the ninth century, all of whom shared the fundamental belief that the imagination belongs to the internal faculties of the soul. I will focus on one, Ibn Arabi, in the next section in detail. This section provides an overview of the development of the idea of imagination prior to that time.

Al-Kindi (801–873) was a leader among the early scholars of this era who spoke of imagination. He was active with other scholars who engaged in editing and paraphrasing translations of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic texts and commentaries into Arabic. Ivry (2008) considers that al-Kindi’s views on what we call “psychology” seem to be mainly formed by an “acquaintance with paraphrases made of De anima, the Theology of Aristotle, Plotinus’ Enneads, and the Book of the Pure Good, an abridgement of Proclus’ Elements of Theology.”⁶ His treatise On Dream and Sleep seems to have been influenced by Aristotle’s Parva Naturalis, three linked treatises On Sleep, On Dreams, and On Prophecy in Sleep. Al-Kindi’s account in his treatise follows Aristotle by “invoking the same physiological processes to explain sleep.”⁷ However, it departs from Aristotle in that he recognized the brain as the “the primary organ” of the body—not the heart. Following Aristotle, al-Kindi associated dreams with sleep. Adamson (2011) reports on al-Kindi’s belief “that dreams occur when we are sleeping because the senses are no longer active, and the imagination has free rein to conjure up forms on its own.”⁸ Unlike Aristotle, who seems to be skeptical about prophetic dreams, al-Kindi is enthusiastic about them. According to Adamson, al-Kindi even explained “the various types of dream, with their accuracy determined by the physical state of the brain. But despite the physiological aspects of al-Kindi’s account, the fundamental explanatory work is done by the incorporeal soul, which ‘announces’ its visions of the future to the imagination.”⁹ For al-Kindi, the soul was immortal and maintained its independence from the body. In his magnum opus, On First Philosophy, he highlighted the mechanics of perception as advancing from the sensible object (via the sense organs) to the faculty of “common sense,” which to him is a combination of the imagination and memory. He mentions the process of sensory perception: “It [sensory perception] is that the forms of which are established in the imagination, which conveys them to the memory; and it [the sensible object] is represented and portrayed in the soul of the living being.”¹⁰ Later he articulated the function of the imagination as both “abstracting and presenting images apart from their matter.”¹¹ Al-Kindi’s interpretation of imagination rests in both the psychological and the physiological levels. His idea of the rational soul and its role in prophetic dreams—even though it opens up the possibility of an existing realm of imaginal beings—does not seem to have portrayed a comprehensive framework of a theory of imagination. However, it should be noted that al-Kindi’s observations on imagination as a power to add potentiality to the world, which connects him to later mystics’ and even contemporary thinker’s accounts of imagination, is the “worldmaking” attribute of imagination:

As it is possible through the imagination for something to be continually added to the body of the universe, if we imagine something greater than it, the continually something greater than that-there being no limit to addition as a possibility the body of the universe is potentially infinite, since potentiality is nothing other than the possibility that the thing said to be in potentiality will occur.¹²

Aside from his work on the perceptual and psychological role of the imagination, al-Kindi’s significant contribution to the notion of imagination is found in relating it to potentiality and the possibility of creating things. This is a notion well-familiar to the architectural design in the sense that imagination is in search of potentialities and possibilities for their occurrence in different appearances.

Al-Farabi (870–950), who was known as “the Second Teacher” after Aristotle, was highly influenced by Aristotelian thought. Unlike al-Kindi, he considered the heart as the “ruling organ” of the body, which was assisted by the brain and other organs. Ivry explains that in al-Farabi’s view, “The heart provides the innate heat that is required by the nutritive faculty, senses and imagination.”¹³ Al-Farabi, akin to Neoplatonic thought, recognizes three hierarchical cognitive realms of intellect, imagination, and sensation, which are concomitant with each other.¹⁴ Therefore, for example, while sensation could immediately react negatively or positively to some precept, the imaginative and intellectual faculties in turn would have an ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Imaginative Drawing and the In-Between
• Part 1 Between Sense and Imagination
• Part 2 Between Idea and Thing
• Part 3 Between Inside and Outside
• Epilogue: The Window of Drawing
• Appendix: Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Index