Building and of

the Time
HARRIES

Terror

KARSTEN

I
BUILDING HAS BEEN UNDERSTOOD to be a domestication of space.

To domesticate space is to tame it, to constructboundariesthat wrest place from space. Such constructionreceives its measure from our need to control the environment. Controlshould not be understoodhere too narrowly:it is not just a matterof creating an artificialenvironmentthat offers protection against an often unfriendlyworld;as importantas physical control is psychological control. Inquiry into the origin of architectureleads thus not only to the need for shelter, but also to the need to control space throughsymbols. It is homelessness that lets man build; the terrorof space provokes him to creation. Joseph Rykwert'sclaim that the biblical description of paradise is incomplete in that it has nothing to say about a house must thereforebe rejected. In paradise man was at home and knew his place; in that bounded garden there was no need for a house. Only the fall, which cast man out of paradise and forced him to toil on cursed ground, brought with it the necessity of building. Human work now had to remedy the deficiencies of nature. Only now did space require domestication. Building had to furnish Ersatz for what man had lost. Every house may be considered an attemptedrecovery of some paradise. Talk of architectureestablishing place by the constructionof boundaries in space suggests a quite traditionaldistinction between arts of space and arts of time, between formativeand expressive arts. The distinction has a certain obviousness; yet our experience of space and our experience of time are too intertwinedto allow us simply to accept it. Thus, if we can speak of architectureas a defense against the terrorof space, we must also recognize that from the very beginning it has provideddefenses against the terrorof time. A history of architecturecould be writtenusing this as its guiding thread. The following remarksare first notes towardsuch a history.

The 19 Journal, Volume Perspecta: YaleArchitectural 0079-0958/82/190058-12 $03.00/0

59

-l

_!.

raS i-

Boymans-van Museum

eu

,Rotterdam ,

"The Tower of Ba1~

bel, c;.16

"The Towerof Babel," c. 1564 Pieter Breugel the Elder (1528-1569)

Museum Boymarts-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 58

HARRIES

I
IN GENESIS
WE READ THAT MAN ATE of the tree of knowledge,

but

"Saturn Devouring his Children" Francisco Goya (1746-1828) Museo del Prado, Madrid

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 1, p. 37. 2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 91. 3. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: New American Library, 1970), p. 32. 4. See Walter Biemel, Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 95 ff.

of is not of thatof life. The condition fallenhumanity shadowed death. by and knows Notonly is manvulnerable mortal,but he knowsof his mortality, thatall thatnowis and all thatstill awaitshimwill someday be past. And that so will everything he mightleave behind:children,friends,works.The drawseveryhournearer consciously everypresent."Man pastwill overtake his death;and at timesthis makeslife a precarious business,even to the of annihilation this character constant manwhohas not already recognized on and in the wholeof life itself. Mainly this account,manhas philosophies could haveaddedartand, moreespecially, Schopenhauer religions."' architecture. Shelterpromises fromtime'sterror. feel shelteredis to To protection havebanishedfeelingsof vulnerability mortality. and Bachelard appealsto the wayan animalfindsprotection its hole or burrow: in takes "Well-being us backto the primitiveness the refuge.Physically, creature of the endowed witha sense of refugehuddlesup to itself, takesto cover,hides away,lies Or celebration "the of snug, concealed."2 considerFrank LloydWright's integral fireplace." Wright speaksof beingcomforted "thefireburning by in the solid masonry the houseitself."3 houseswerebuiltto of His deep grantsuch a sense of comfort. Weall knowsimilarcomforts architectural and devicesthatpromise them. Butwe demandto be shelteredin a stronger sense. Franz Kafka's nevercompleted "DerBau,"whichcan be translated eitheras 'The story Burrow" "TheBuilding," or helps to remindus of this. Kafkatells the story of an animal-we are not told whatkindof an animal-which, to secure an it itself, constructs elaborate den;yet in spite of all its efforts neversucceeds in makingitself feel secure. Suspecteddangers whatever outstrip defensesthe animalcan construct. Unableto possessthe world,it tries to withdraw its artificial into environment. intendsto replacenaturewith It artfulconstruction. the threatening But outsidecannotbe eliminated. The animalof the storyis, of course,a figureforman, whoseanxious reasoning of him anticipation whatmaythreaten leads to franticbuildingand planand ning. Yetthe resultscan neversatisfywhatis demanded. Technology construction increaserather thandiminishthe terror time.4 of

60

HARRIES

III
How
CAN ARCHITECTURE BANISH

the terrorof time? Bachelard

suggests that we comfortourselves by reliving memories of protection. Buildings grant such comfortto the extent that they are experienced as repetitions of enclosures linked to memories of untroubledliving. To speak of memories is to imply that paradise is more than just a dream, that being at home is more basic than homelessness. Challenging thinkers like Heidegger, Bachelard insists that "life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house." But is Bachelard'soneiric house more than the productof dreams born of the terrorof time? Is it also a house we remember?This is, however, not to question the claim that deeply rooted in our being are dreams of an original being-at-home, of the original, the essential house, which personal and cultural experience will schematize in ever differentways. Rememberedhouses receive their aura from this first house. So does a house we build or just move into. "Afterwe are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorialthings are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness."" What is recalled is thus not simply the past, but an idealized past over which time has no power and which so fuses with the present that it redeems it, too, from the tyrannyof time. In related fashion "primitive"cultures have tended to interprethuman building as a repetition of divine building, of the cosmogony. Cosmosimplies order that assigns to man and to things their properplaces. The interpretationof what is as constitutinga cosmos allows the individual to feel at home in the world. Building can help to establish or to reinforce such interpretation; building that presents itself as an imitationof divine a can claim to give temporalexistence its propermeasure and founbuilding dation. Constructionrites invite such readings, helping to endow the builder'swork with an aura of reliability.The groundof such reliability is sought in a reality untouched by the ravages of time in which the consecrated building participates. "A 'new era' opens with the building of every house. Every constructionis an absolute beginning; that is, tends to restore the instant, the plenitude of a present that contains no trace of history." Linear time and its before and after lose their power. A higher reality becomes present in the building in a way that lifts the burden of time. "In the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes
is the will to devaluate time. . . . Like the mystic, like the religious man in

"The Garden of Earthly Delights," 1503-04

Detail of right wing of triptych, Hieronymus Bosch (1462-1516) Museo del Prado, Madrid "Hell"

5. Bachelard, p. 7. 6. Bachelard, pp. 5-6. 7. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p. 76.

general, the primitive lives in a continual present. (And it is in this sense that the religious man may be said to be a 'primitive';he repeats the gestures of another, and throughhis repetition, lives always in an atemporal

61

HARRIES

8. Ibid., pp. 85-86.

present.)"8 Once again dwelling is understood as repetition. Primitive ar-

chitecture invites such repetition by claiming to be itself a repetition. The traditionalsymbolism of temple, church, or house, whi j tablishes a part ticular building as a repetition of some divine arc those worshipping or dwelling in it participatein a t Isac!etypalattern.

IV
ONLY

'/ai
TO T;]/

), have remained "primitive"and ou fd4as part of a timeless order that assigns continue to under both place and ne an existence, can we still call on such symbols to defeat th'trerrorof time. Our reason has to stumble over suggestions of a reconciliation of time and eternity,of a dwelling that is both in time and yet unburdenedby time, timeless, eternal. Must reason not deny us the comfortderived from dreams of a returnto the land of Motionless Childhood, of myth and fairy tale? Are the "fixationsof happiness" that claim to illuminate life not sources of a false light? Is the turn to a reality beyond time not in fact a flight from reality, a turn to illusion? But reason, too, dreams of homecomingand of a home not subject to time. What we can call perennial Platonism is the attemptto discover in the atemporalreality fable of of the spirit a refuge from the terrorof time. Think of Le Corbusier's
the origin of building: his primitive builder insists on simple geometric

??/r\

forms. They are to endow what he builds with that aura of reliability that seems to protect against time. We still experience the power of such forms. Take two lines: one the dashed off, restless, resembling handwriting; other a circle, constructed with the aid of a compass. The two stand in very differentrelationships to time. The formerhas directionality;we can speak of a beginning and an end. The latter gestures beyond time; in its self-sufficientpresence it comes as close as a visible form can to the timeless realm of the spirit. Essentially the same contrast is established by the facades of two churches of the South German rococo: the almost songlike beauty of the one associates, while the

"A Primitive Temple" from Vers Une Architecture, 1927 Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

62

MARRIES

simple geometry of the other dissociates, beauty and time. The latter places us on the threshold of neo-classicism, which represents a returnto Platonism. That passage from the Philebus, from which more than one modern artist has drawn rhetoricalsupport, comes to mind: I do not mean by beauty ofform such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would supposeto be my meaning; but, says the argument, understandme to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which areformed out of them by turning-lathesand rulersand measurersof angles;for these I affirmto be not only relativelybeautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutelybeautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasure of scratching.And there are colors which are of the same character,and have similar pleasures. Our fascination with the organic beauty of animals and the beauty of pictures or imitations is contrastedwith the peculiar pleasure we take in the beauty of inorganic, geometric forms. Their beauty belongs to the spirit, not to the body, which in its creation is likely to prove a hindrance:try to draw a circle or make a sphere-the hand will need aids, such as a compass or more complicated tools. Plato helps us to understandthe perennial appeal of such bloodless beauty. In the Symposium,which has determined the course of much subsequent aesthetic speculation, beauty is defined as the object of eros. Man is said to be fundamentallyan erotic being because he exists in time, yet he belongs to and desires being. Desiring, yet lacking being, we are haunted by dreams of a plenitude, a satisfactionthat our present temporalsituation must deny us; by dreams of an escape from time. Beauty promises an answer to such dreams. When overwhelmedby the insistent presence of the beautiful, we rememberour true home, are reminded that we really belong to being ratherthan to becoming. According to Plato, man is essentially spirit, and the spirit is not subject to time. Time cannot touch man's essence. Given this ascetic Platonic aesthetic, the language of beauty is the language of a timeless reality in which the spirit feels at home because it is of the spirit. To create a beautiful object is to link time and eternity; to construct a beautiful building is to help make man'sdwelling a repetition of a more essential being-at-home, denied to him by his body, which subjects him to time. That the embodied self cannot take comfortin such beauty is evident. It dreams of a home in time, demands the redemptionratherthan the devaluation of temporalreality.The facade of MariaSteinbach hints at such redemption.
Pilgrimage Church of Maria Steinbach, 1750 Maria Steinbach, Germany architect unknown

9. Plato, Philebus 51.

63

HARRIES

V
THE ARCHAIC WILL TO DEVALUATE TIME reappears transformed as

the artist's will to create works strong enough to still time. The key to the profound pleasures of the beautiful has thus long been sought in its power to render time unimportant by recalling us to a reality that transcends time, by presenting epiphanies of true being. Few today would be willing to accept the identification of Plato's timeless forms with true being. If the human spirit feels at home with geometric forms, is it not because it has created them? Alberti thus called Narcissus the inventor of painting. Faced with a hostile world, the artist finds solace in a narcissistic preoccupation with his own self and its power to escape the tyranny of time. Such a view is implicit in Kant's determination of the beautiful as the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. Interest is necessarily directed to the future, shadowed by the terror of time. Only the disinterested person will experience what presents itself to him as a plenitude. As Kant points out, part of such an experience is indifference to the existence of a particular object. Schopenhauer suggests that to aesthetic perception it does not matter whether it is this tree that is seen or its precursor that bloomed a thousand years ago. Past and present appear to fuse. "We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still."'0 Michael Fried aligns himself and modernity with what is essentially the same view when he suggests that the authentic art of our time strives for presentness, where presentness is understood to require that the artist create objects that defeat their own objecthood through the strength of their shape. "It is as though one's experience [of modernist painting and sculpture] has no duration-not because one in fact experiences a picture by Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest." Once again what is sought is redemption from the terror of time. In Fried's words: "Presentness is grace."" While Fried's discussion focuses on what he terms "modernist" painting and sculpture, he insists that it be extended to all the other arts. But what would it mean for architecture to defeat or suspend "its own objecthood through the medium of shape"? Would a modernist architecture not have to be an architecture that through the strength of its pictorial or sculptural form suspends itself as a structure to be entered and explored? An architecture that for the sake of presentness renders itself uninhabitable? To the extent that we understand aesthetic experience not as recollection of a timeless reality, but as an experience that is as if it had no duration, beauty will have to be at odds with the requirements of dwelling. On this modernist view the beautiful lifts us out of the life world, out of

Parish Church of St. Vitus, 1768 Egling, Germany Franz Anton Kirchgrabner

10. Schopenhauer, p. 196.

11. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 136, 145, 147.

64

HARRIES

reality, carries us to a man-made paradise that, like every paradise, has no need for a house. Man now turns to beauty not to illuminate temporalreality so that he might feel more at home in it, but to be relieved of it: to abolish time within time, if only for a time.

"The Enigma of the Hour," 1912 Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan, Italy

VI
THAT SUCH A MODERNIST CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY

must lead to

dreams of an uninhabitable architectureis apparent. With Schopenhauera look of uninhabitabilitybecomes thus a mark of the beauty of a building. Consider the following passage: Aboveall else, the beautiful in architectureis enhanced by thefavour of light, and through it even the most insignificantthing becomesa beautifulobject. Now if in the depth of winter,when the whole of nature isfrozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflectedin masses of stone, wherethey illuminate without warming, and are thusfavorable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will, then the contemplationof the beautifuleffectof light on these masses movesus into a state of pure knowing, as all beauty
does .12
12. Schopenhauer, p. 203.

Giorgiode Chirico was to make of such descriptions a recipe, a recipe, however, not for building, but for painting. This is no accident: beauty, as it

65

MARRIES

is here understood, invites the transformation architectureinto painting; of that is to say, it demands its de-realization. On such a view all beautiful architectureis picturesque in a sense that remains related to, but goes far beyond, what has traditionallybeen called the picturesque in architecture. of At issue is the transformation architectureinto a merely aesthetic presthat at least since the eighteenth century has fascience, a transformation nated architects, sculptors, and painters. Just as de Chirico repainted what is fundamentallythe same picture over and over, so he liked to retell what is essentially the same experience. The following account is characteristic: a I remember vivid winters day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme.Everythinggazed at me with mysterious,questioningeyes. And then I realizedthat everycornerof the palace, everycolumn, everywindowpossessed a spirit, an unpenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionlessin the lucid air, beneaththefrozen rays of that wintersun which pours down on us without love, like perfectsong. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that momentI grew aware of the mysterywhich urges men to create certain strangeforms. And the creationappearedmore extraordinary than the creators.13 I am not interested here in de Chirico, but in what by now has become a quite common kind of revelation. Its occasion may be three American flags strangely visible and forlornin the evening sky above the New Haven Green or the back of Sterling MemorialLibrarytransfiguredby a late sun into a moving presence. It is not difficultto come up with similar examples. Especially significant in the cited texts is the celebration of isolation and, associated with it, of the dissociation of light and love, of light and life. The rays of the winter sun are frozen, as is the land they illuminate. Schopenhauer adds the claim that architecture, illuminated by loveless light, moves us as all beauty does. If we accept this, we have more than just examples of a particularand strange kind of aesthetic experience. Rather, we are led to the very essence of the aesthetic. By implication, this means that aesthetic sensitivity is inseparable from a certain morbidity,a Schopenhaueriantaedium vitae, and from an inability-or is it an unwillingness?-to love, which welcomes the cool clarity of loveless light. Or is Schopenhauerinterpreting the essence of beauty in terms of his own personal, or perhaps cultural, perspective? Is it necessary to think that beauty is in fundamental opposition to time?

"Man and Woman in the Cathedral," 1955-56 David Smith (1906-1965) Gift of Mrs. Frederick W.Hiles Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

66

HARRIES

VII
MICHAEL FRIED WOULD NO DOUBT OBJECT

to my association

of

what he terms modernistart with de Chirico, whom he mentions among those artists whose preoccupationwith time lets them become theatrical and places them in opposition to modernistsensibility. I wonder, however, whether an artist or a critic who seeks grace in presentness is not also preoccupied with time. In this connection it is interestingto compare Fried's use of presentnesswith that of Robert Morris, who is criticized by Fried for his theatrical literalism. Unlike Fried, Morrisemphasizes the temporalityof aesthetic experience and of the art work. "WhatI want to bring togetherfor my model of 'presentness' is the intimate inseparabilityof the experience of physical space and that of an ongoing immediate present. Real space is not experienced except in real time. The body is in motion, the eyes make endless movements at varyingfocal distances, fixing on innumerablestatic or moving images. Locationand point of view are constantly shifting at the apex of time's flow."' Like Fried, Morriswants to suspend or defeat the objecthood of the object, but this move beyond the object would appear to lead in a very differentdirection. While Fried would let the strengthof the object's shape defeat its objecthood, Morriswants to returnthe object to space and time. "Anytimethe object has become specific, dense, articulated, and self-contained, it has already succeeded in removingitself from space. It has only various visual aspects: fromthis side or that, close up or farther away."L" Since real space, as Morrispoints out, is not experienced except in real time, this also means that the work-of-art-become-object removed has itself from time. The more self-contained the object the better it succeeds in defeating the terrorof time. One could point out that as long as an object is experienced in a particularsituation, as one thing among other things, including the observer, this defeat must remain incomplete. If this is right, Fried'scelebration of presentness may be understoodas a call for a more rigorousattack on the terrorof time, in which, to gain victory,one must be willing to pay the price of reality. When Morrisspeaks of presentness, on the other hand, he seems to envision an art that challenges the denseness of objects in order to open to us the mysteryof space and time. The connection between this mystery and the enigmas that fascinated de Chirico is apparent. Fried is right to link the two.

13. Giorgio de Chirico, "Mystery and Creation," Theories

of Modern Art, ed. Herschel

B. Chipp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1969), p. 402. 14. Robert Morris, "The Present Tense of Space," Art
in America, January/February

1978, p. 70.

15. Ibid., p. 73.

67

HARRIES

Given his attemptto open objects to space, Morris'sfascination with ruins comes as no surprise. or Approachedwith no reverence historicalawe, ruins arefrequently exceptional spaces of unusual complexitywhich offerunique relations between access and barrier,the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal, that have groundplane and wall. Such are not to befound in structures escaped the twin entropicassaults of nature and the vandal. It is unfortunate that all great ruins have been so desecratedby the photograph, so reducedto banal image, and therebysofraught with sentimentalizinghistorical awe. But whetherthe gigantic voids of the Baths of Caracalla or the tight chambersand varying levels of Mesa Verde,such places occupya zone which is neitherstrictlya collection of objectsnor an architecturalspace.' This returnfrom ideally self-sufficient, timeless objects to space and time puts into question any view of architectureas the domesticationof space. Intended is not so much a domesticationas a liberationof space, and this means, also, of time. The terrorof time, it would seem, is awakened rather than banished. The built ruin is the most obvious counterimageto an architecturethat seeks to defeat the terrorof time with comfortingimages of permanence. The decision to build a ruin or to give to buildings a ruinous look betrays a crisis of confidence in the architect'sability to provide shelter. Such ruins offer occasions for reflections on the vanity of human building and the sublime power of nature. Human constructionhere appears to surrenderitself to space and time. Somethingvery much like this can also be said of Robert Morris'screations. I would suggest the following analogy:the presentness sought by Fried is to that sought by Morrisas the beautiful is to the sublime. And just as Fried can appeal to Kant to support his understandingof modernism, so can Morris, althougha differentsection of the Critiqueof Judgment becomes appropriate:the "Analyticof the Sublime." No more than Kant'sunderstandingof the beautiful does his understanding of the sublime lead to an inhabitable architecture. Morriswants not the comfortsof enclosed and domesticated space, but masses that appear on the verge of "sliding out into space," returningus to the mystery of the presencing of things, in which the experiencing self is always copresent. Domesticationof space implies a domesticationof self. The presencing of things, which is at the same time their continual "sliding out into space," lets the self returnhome, not to a home in space, in the world, but home to its essentially free and homeless self. That self is not subject to time and calmly contemplates its terror.

16. Ibid., p. 76.

"Untitled," installation of wood and mirrors, 1977 Robert Morris The Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Portland, Oregon

68

HARRIES

VIII
WILLING POWER, WE YET LACK POWER;

demanding

security, we

yet know about the fundamentalprecariousnessof our existence. Unable to make our peace with time, we also cannot make peace with ourselves for we cannot dissociate time from our embodied existence. Nietzsche seems to me right when he points to "the spirit of revenge," which he defines as "the will's ill will against time and its 'it was,"' as the deepest source of our selfalienation. The history of aesthetic speculation testifies to that spirit, growing in intensity as man finds it more and more difficultto interpretNature as his home and takes it upon himself to defeat the terrorof time with his own constructions. To use a more traditionalvocabulary:The dream of the engineer or the artist as god, able to deliver us from the terrorof time, is a dream born of pride. It is with good reason that the Bible places building in an ambiguous light. Cain, condemned to be "a fugitive and a wandereron the earth," is said to have built the first city; but the heavenly Jerusalem, too, is a city. The Towerof Babel is the archetype of all structuresraised by pride to guard against the dispersal threatenedby space and time. Consider Bruegel'spainting: attemptingto dominate space and time, the vast tower testifies to man's power, but also to his impotence and to the terrorof time. Even as building continues, what has already been built decays and returns to landscape-Kafka's building animal comes to mind. The tower is, however, not the only architecturein the painting:there is also the much less ambitious architectureof the surroundingcity. Against the tower itself modest shelters nestle much as buildings may nestle against some city wall or church in a medieval city. Here we have, not monuments, but buildings that speak of a very different, less antagonisticrelationshipto time. They hint at possibilities of dwelling born of a trust deeper than pride. Such trust demands determinationsof beauty and building that do not place them in essential opposition to time.

"Le Desert de Retz," 1782 La Maison de M. de Monville A Chambourcy, France

69