Grace and Gravity

Architectures of the Figure

Lars Spuybroek

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350020825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds-and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the "paradoxical machine" of grace reveals its powers, a point where we "cannot say if we are moving or being moved". Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources-monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils-with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers.

1 THE GRACE MACHINE

Of the Figure and the Gap

Grace and Figure

How do we live well? If there is one fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds, it is probably this one. There have been about a million different answers, half of which have come from religion and almost the same number from philosophy, not forgetting the multitude of aesthetic, psychological, therapeutic, hedonistic, practical, and pragmatic answers. Too many answers, appearing in every possible combination. Taking out the last word and reducing the question to “How do we live?” would make it infinitely easier to answer and would undoubtedly involve the bare cataloging of all the necessities of the various domains. None of them would offer any clue whatsoever to what “well” might mean—its definition can never be provided by a domain as such. Yet without exception, we apply the word to everything we do. We can drive a car and drive it well; we can cook a six-course meal and cook it well; we can lead a company and lead it well; we can take care of a difficult problem and do it well; we can run a marathon and run it well. We can do ordinary things extraordinarily, and extraordinary things far less well—either way. And when we have done something well, we can be fairly certain that next time we will probably be unable to repeat the act. There are no manuals for doing things well, as there are for doing things right. Taken literally, doing something right means doing it measured against an external standard, a ruler, a straight line divided up into proper increments telling us what is too little and what is too much. Certainly, there exist powerful external reasons for doing things, both causes and ends. We might be doing things “because” or “for”; however, to do something well we must employ an altogether different, internal measuring technique, which we denote as “the way” we do things, relying on a rhythm, a pace, a course, or a fluency while still incorporating those causes and ends. In doing something well, the cause, the end, and the way of doing something are so intricately intertwined that we cannot separate them without destroying the effect of each on the whole.

Every single day, we find ourselves driven by a massive range of motives: we can do things out of sheer playfulness and relaxation, or spurred by a sense of moral duty, or as is more often the case, motivated by compensation, forced by physical necessity, or driven by hidden psychological desires or needs. And though all these variations—the spontaneity of play, the burden of duty, the effort of work, the necessity of nature—will play a prominent role in our analysis, none can tell us how to enact them as never before. This is undoubtedly an awkward statement, since it paradoxically implies that we have done that act a thousand times before and this time could be the best instance of it. We need to be cautious here: though such a process of instantiation singles out an act as unique, it does not necessarily mean we are looking for excellence. While excellence is continuous with a form of striving, that is not in itself its purpose. Doing-well or living-well does not involve a need for perfection. In its constant dealings with obstacles, it can never take form in a purified state; its constituent parts are always diverse and full of contrasts. What we do and the way we do it might diverge. To do something well, we must often act against the very nature of the action, similarly to the technique of counterpoint in music. For instance, to play well, we should not act as if we are doodling; on the contrary, we should take the game completely seriously or else there is nothing at stake. As they say in football, it’s life or death. And conversely, we can only do our duty as if we are playing tennis, since we would completely fail at a difficult task when doing it strenuously. Likewise, we can only do our work well if we find relaxation in it, and attend to necessities as if they sprout from freedom. How often do we not follow our desires as if they are our own ideas? Doing something well, then, means giving things a twist or a turn—the form action takes when we do several things at the same time. When driving well, we maneuver smoothly between slow- and fast-moving traffic, accommodate the behavior of others, and operate without making abrupt changes. And when cooking that six-course meal, we time the preparation of one course to occur while the other is simmering on the stove and a third has been baking in the oven for hours. In these realms of action, the notion of turning and twisting can be interpreted quite literally, as actual curves left behind by a body moving in space. But the turn goes beyond mere pliancy and flexibility.

When we turn play into seriousness, or duty into ease, the turn is figurative, not literal. This concept of the turn goes much further than curvature and smooth movement between edgy obstacles, and undoubtedly further than a naïve opposition to the straightness of doing things right. It is made up of motion and activity, naturally, yet the movement in itself does not follow the way things take a turn. Our concrete movements are fed by a motion that is both larger and more abstract. The turn is larger than its agent. It is as much born out of a situation as it is initiated by an individual, and it is as much a figurative movement as it is concrete. In fact, it would be more correct to say the figure of the turn stands by itself, and stands out as a figure that has been released from its origin rather than remaining attached to it. Doing something well, then, would be better described as a lessening of control than as an increase in it: a letting-go and a letting-happen more than a making-happen. Later on, we will have an opportunity to study examples of people who felt less present as events unfolded, especially in cases when things were going well—and the latter expression speaks for itself, suggesting that when one is doing well, things are too. In this sense, the figure of the turn should be perceived as a thing, and shelving it automatically under the category of motion, gesture, or action will not suffice. In its figurative mode, the turn is not so much a movement between objects as it is the turning of movement into an object and, conversely, the turning of an object into movement—a reciprocal, symmetrical formula that will emerge as the central thesis of this chapter.

Before our discourse starts to sound like an embarrassing misconception of quantum mechanics, we should hasten to point out that this fundamental vagueness of object and act has a history going far more deeply back in time than anything modern. In fact, its history winds through so many different periods that we cannot say exactly where and when it started—thousands of years ago, at least. From the perspectives of numerous disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, theology, and aesthetics, the notion of doing well has been denominated as grace, a deviously complex term with linkages to gratitude, gracefulness, and gratification as well as favor, pleasure, beauty, and much more. The briefest way of defining grace would be to say it is movement that exceeds its agent, though admittedly such a cryptic definition calls for extensive elaboration. Grace is in many ways such an elusive concept that in each of the above-mentioned disciplines it carries a completely different meaning. One explains it as an efficiency of mobility, another as an infinite power of transcendence, still others as mere good manners, and some as acquired customs and habits. It is all of these and none. Grace is both the quality of the act and the movement that carries that act: in other words, it is both of and beyond the individual, anchored as well as unanchored, immanent as well as transcendent. How can this be? Certainly, for that reason it might seem a troublesome term for some, but studied more closely, the history of grace will not only prove comprehensive, but will demonstrate to be especially illuminating when viewed as a conceptual history. The further back we go, the more it will adjust later notions of itself. And though it has as many religious connotations as aesthetic, moral, and social ones, this history will show that none of these domains is able to conceptually claim the ground on which we can explain the effects on the others.

Grace and Gift

Nonreligious readers will quickly associate the term “grace” with gracefulness, an aesthetic term that seems to originate in a bygone age when elegance and convoluted formalities regulated public behavior, or when now-forgotten treatises on sculpture emphasized tentative gestures and a soft expression of the flesh.¹ Religious readers, on the other hand, will immediately recall the singing of “Amazing Grace” or recognize the term from Sunday-school discussions of sufficient and efficient grace, signifying the ultimate source of generosity and goodness. However, neither the wholly aesthetic nor the solely religious, even in its social or moral guise, can claim the powers of grace for itself. Actually, things are far more confounded: all these neatly distinguished domains of human endeavor become more and more inextricably tied up with one another the further back we trace the term’s history. It would be impossible to understand the Judeo-Christian enterprise of institutionalizing a superhuman grace without acknowledging that the idea has aesthetics at its core. And, conversely, it is as impossible to accept the aesthetics of grace without understanding it as involving at least some form of transcendence. Generosity and goodness, however, are by no means terms that should be associated only with monotheism; we encounter them in as fundamental a form in the period when a myriad of gods populated the heavens, namely in ancient Greece.²

At that time, grace was denoted with the Greek word charis (pronounced with a fricative “h”, as in the German Bach), and the concept played a central role in politics, love, friendship, competition, and battle as well as religion. It is a word we encounter in many forms in the epic poems of Homer, Pindar, and Hesiod, and in the hundreds of written works that constitute the classics. Today, we still find charis in words like “charity” and “charisma,” to name just two derivations. Yet to properly understand the concept of charis, we will have to expand our study even further and go beyond that of the ancient Greeks, since charis is deeply rooted in gift culture, which in turn precedes Greek history by thousands of years. And it is not exactly clear—nor, perhaps, that relevant for our present purposes—whether those roots lie in the Indus valley, in Minoan Crete, or with the nomadic tribes living north of ancient Greece; probably in all three. Of course, gift cultures were and still are spread all over the planet, with the gift constituting a fundamental form of exchange in which aesthetics, sociology, economy, and religion are undifferentiated. We will not be going into all the intricacies of gift exchange; what matters for our discussion is that charis conceptually originates in gift exchange, and that we will only be able to fully grasp the meaning of grace once we understand the gift.

The English word “grace” is derived from the Latin translation of charis, gratia, and we encounter it in various forms related to gift culture: for instance, as “gratitude,” or thankfulness; “gratification,” the pleasure of receiving; and “graciousness,” a form of giving. In commentaries it is usually explained that charis is derived from the old Greek word for pleasure, chara.³ Such a connection would start to explain not only why the exchange of goods as we find it in tribal gift cultures cannot be unambiguously forced into social or economic models but also, and more importantly, why it took on the chiefly aesthetic connotations charis had in ancient Greece. The social as a concept...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Grace Machine
• 2 Foot Space and Hand Space
• 3 Caves and Chests
• 4 Figurate and Spectral Architecture
• 5 Grace and Gravity
• 6 Automata and Thaumata
• 7 Jumpology and Falling
• 8 The Stone Reckoner
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• 1
• Copyright