A BRIEF SUMMARY OF RESEARCHCONCERNING THE IMPACT OF THE UNIVERSAL

ORDER ON ARCHITECTURE THROUGH TIMEJosh Mullins

BUILDING AT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

“Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not only itself but the second, while the second involves or fulfills the first. The two poles of a figure are separated in time, but both, being real events or persons, are within temporality. They are both contained in the flowing stream which is historical life, and only the comprehension of their interdependence is a spiritual act.” (Auerbach, Mimesis)

The construction of any human dwelling or communal building is ... always an anamnesis, the recalling of a divine ‘institution’ of a centre of the world.

(Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

… what a man requires of his house is conviction that he is, in some sense, at the centre of the universe, that his home mediates between him and all the confusing and threatening world outside; that in some definite place the world is summed up for him in a place which is his, all his shelter and his castle.

(Rykwert, Meaning and Building)

And yet, through all (the variations of a house), there is an unavoidable theme: man comes from the womb, and he must return to the matter from which he came.

(Rykwert, One Way of Thinking About a House)

The cellar is the dark, hidden, irrational part of the house: many peoples buried their dead under their floors or incorporated their bones into the substructure of their houses ... The roof is the head of the house - and since it stands between the inhabitant and the sky, it is also the sky’s surrogate in the householder’s little world.

(Rykwert, quoting Bachelard, Poetics of Space)

In terms of spontaneous perception, man’s world is subjectively centred.

(Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Psace, and Architecture)

The notion of home as centre begins in childhood – it is where you form your first associations, and it is the inside to the world’s outside, the place from which you go to other places and then return. (Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space, and Architecture)

“The double movement of departure and return divides space into two concentric domains, an inner and an outer: the narrower inner is the domain of the house and homeland and from there man advances into the wider outer domain, from which he also returns.” (O.F. Bollnow, Mensch und Raum)

The coffin quite obviously represented a sizeable house. With the appearance of ambitious structures over the tomb, the (coffin) was simply enlarged in scale: the coffin to the mastaba, and again, later, when the mastaba was transformed into a pyramid... (Rykwert, One Way of Thinking About a House)

“The separate elements of a phenomena are most clearly placed in relation to one another…their relationships…are brought to light in perfect fullness, so that a continuous rhythmic progression of phenomena passes by, and never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths.” (Auerbach, Mimesis)

Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relationship between its members, as in the case of those of a well-shaped man. (Vitruvius, De Arcitettura)

Thus in the invention of the two different kinds of columns, they borrowed manly beauty, naked and unadorned, for the one, and for the other the delicacy, adornment, and proportions characteristic of women.

(Vitruvius, De Arcitettura)

A holy tree and a holy stone together in one place is the mostprimitive kind of shrine; the growing and dying joined with the permanent andincorruptible...The tree gives the stone something of its growing, evanescentbeauty – the stone gives the tree something of its density and stability.

(Rykwert, The Corinthian Order)

As the Corinthian order represented the complex of Kore: the underworld, death, resurrection, spring; so the Ionic stood for the world of Demeter, of the mother-goddess: fertility, the earth, plants and animals, and also death and resurrection; and the Doric, the world of Zeus and Apollo, of the order dictated by the sky: justiceand law, cosmic immutability, fate, and prophecy. (Rykwert, The Corinthian Order)

The third order, called Corinthian, is an imitation of the slenderness of a maiden; for the outlines and limbs of maidens, being more slender on account of their tender years, admit of prettier effects in the way of adornment. (Vitruvius, De Arcitettura)

…the ancients often preferred to trust themselves blindly to unpredictable powers and follow their dark hints, than to search out a site which would satisfy the requirements of the theorists. (Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

The choice of the site…a serious matter on which the fate of a whole people depended…was always left to the decision of the gods. (Coulanges)

The erratic forces of nature could only be understood in terms of personality and conciliated in terms of drama.

(Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

[History] began with the foundation of the city, because everything prior to that was of no interest. (Coulanges)

(When the center is reached) a consecration or initiation is achieved. To the profane and illusory existence of yesterday, there succeeds a new existence, real, lasting, and powerful. (Eliade, Comparative Myth)

The augur’s act in drawing his diagram on the ground changed the earth he touched from anywhere to this, unique, and only place…immovable and at harmony with the universe at whose centre it was placed.

(Rykwert, Idea of a Town)

Boundaries are never drawn without reference to the order of the universe, for the decumani are drawn in line with the course of the sun, while the cardines follow the axis of the sky.” (Hyginus Gromaticus)

The ploughing of the land was a hierogamy, a marriage uniting earth and sky.

(Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

The new inhabitants had taken possession of the site and expelled such previous ghostly inhabitants as were unfriendly. They had given it a name and invoked a protecting deity, lit the fire on its hearth and set out the boundaries. (Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

…the essential structure of the rite: divination, limitation, burial of relics, orientation, quarternation, are more primitive than the written history of civilization ... the attraction of these rites could only have been as powerful and lasting as it was if they were fulfilling some definite need, performing some function in the life of the community... (Rykwert, Idea of a Town)

The puzzling thing is not the survival or the transformation of this or that ritual element, but the hardiness of the whole cosmological structure, and the continued dependence on it of people in the most varied conditions and through the most changeable circumstances. It seems to represent an irreducible element, an atom of human experience… (Rykwert, Idea of a Town)

For the everyday Roman, walking along the cardo was walking around the axis on which the sun turned. If he followed the decumanus, he was following the sun’s course. The whole universe and its meaning could be spelt out of his civic institutions – so he was at home in it. (Rykwert, Idea of a Town)

caput mundi

The characteristics of a civilized society fall into disuse, and the vestiges that remain are caricatures at best. The base passions of man, greed and lust, lose every concealing form; they show themselves in the raw and with palpable immediacy. (Auerbach, Mimesis)

When Gregory writes, the catastrophe has occurred, the Empire has fallen, its organization has collapsed, the culture of antiquity has been destroyed. But the tension is over. And it is more freely and directly, no longer haunted by insoluble tasks, no longer burdened by unrealizable pretensions, the Gregory’s soul faces living reality, ready to apprehend it as such and work in it practically. (Auerbach, Mimesis)

(The) emulation of antiquity ... dominated European thinking (from) the beginning of the fifteenth century: the literary, figurative, monumental remains of republican, imperial, or early Christian Rome.

(Rykwert, The First Moderns)

(Antiquity) was timeless teaching which provided a rule but was also validated by the great precedent: golden past. Antique greatness and Holy Writ were its two guarantors, and with their help all significant remains from the past ... must be interpreted. (Rykwert, The First Moderns)

Classical architecture was therefore the only true architecture, not only because it conformed with reason – in the way the ancient authors had set out – but also because it was directly based on divine revelation. (Rykwert, The First Moderns)

…the beauty of everything in the world, as of architecture, consists in proportion; that you might say that it is a divine particle, since it is derived from the body of Adam, who was not only made by God’s hand, but who was made in His image and likeness; that the variety of the orders of architecture proceeded from the difference between the bodies of man and of woman. (Bernini, quoted from 1665)

This poses a problem: if harmony in architecture does not have that unquestioned righteousness which Vitruvius, Scripture, and scholastic as well as neoplastic philosophy had taken for granted, then how is the architect to go about making buildings harmonious and beautiful? And do these terms of praise continue to point his aim? (Rykwert, interpreting Perrault, The First Moderns)

... there would be no present – and that means that there would be no tangible world with all its lushness and inexhaustible riches – if perception did not, as Hegel says, contain a past in its present depth…’

(Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Rykwert, Meaning and Building)

Memory is to a person what history is to a group. As memory conditions perception and is in turn modified by it, so the history of design and architecture contains everything that has been designed or built and is continually modified by new work. There is no humanity without memory and there is no architecture without historical reference.

(Rykwert, The Sitting Position)

We have lost all the beautiful certainty about the way the world works – we are not even sure if it is expanding or contracting, whether it was produced by a catastrophe or is continuously renewing itself. This does not absolve us from looking for some ground of certainty in our attempts to give form to human environment. It is no longer likely that we will find this ground in the world the cosmologists are continuously reshaping round us and so we must look for it inside ourselves: in the constitution and structure of the human person. (Rykwert, The Idea of a Town)

So I am not Vitruvian man, enclosed within a single perfect circle, looking out at the world from my personal perspective coordinates and, simultanously, providing the measure of all things. Nor am I, as architectural phenomenologists would have it, an autonomous, self-sufficient, biologically embodied subject encountering, objectifying, and responding to my immediate environment. I construct, and I am constructed, in a mutually recursive process that continuously engages my fluid, permeable boundaries and my endlessly ramifying networks. I am a spatially extended cyborg. (Mitchell, Me++)

Though our beliefs have changed over time, we share a continuity of experience with those who came before us. The human nature underlying the rituals and ideals that guided their construction of built environment is still with us today.

An architecture intended to address archaeology should evoke the meaning inherent in the historical traces and make that significance relevant to the modern man. The scale of the intervention should be whatever is sufficient to accomplish this feat.

Museums are inherently tied to cultural identity, but functionally they must be designed for a global audience. Ideally, the museum ought to be able to transport visitors to an unfamiliar setting in which locals and visitors alike are exposed to different ways of percieving reality and history.

Schematic Design

Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953. Print.

Mitchell, William J. Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. Print.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Existence, Space and Architecture. London: Studio Vista, 1971. Print.

Rykwert, Joseph. The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983. Print.

Rykwert, Joseph. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Print.

Rykwert, Joseph. The Necessity of Artifice. London: Academy Eds., 1982. Print.

Vitruvius, Pollio, and M. H. Morgan. Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, 1960. Print.

Pérez, Gómez Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983. Print.