Building and

of

the

Terror

Time

KARSTEN

HARRIES

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.

Perspecta:The YaleArchitecturalJournal, Volume19

0079-0958/82/190058-12 $03.00/0

59

-l

raSi-

Boymans-van
Museum

_!.

eu

,Rotterdam
,

"The Tower
ofBa1~

"The Towerof Babel," c. 1564

Pieter Breugel the Elder (1528-1569)
Museum Boymarts-van Beuningen, Rotterdam
58

bel, c;.16

HARRIES

I
IN GENESIS

"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.

60

WE READ THAT MAN ATE of the tree of knowledge,

but

not of thatof life. The conditionof fallenhumanityis shadowedby death.

Notonly is manvulnerableand mortal,but he knowsof his mortality,knows
thatall thatnowis and all thatstill awaitshimwill someday be past. And
so will everythingthathe mightleave behind:children,friends,works.The
pastwill overtakeeverypresent."Manconsciouslydrawseveryhournearer
his death;and at timesthis makeslife a precariousbusiness,even to the
manwhohas not alreadyrecognizedthis characterof constantannihilation
in the wholeof life itself. Mainlyon this account,manhas philosophiesand
could haveaddedartand, moreespecially,
religions."'Schopenhauer
architecture.
Shelterpromisesprotectionfromtime'sterror.Tofeel shelteredis to
havebanishedfeelingsof vulnerabilityand mortality.Bachelardappealsto
the wayan animalfindsprotectionin its hole or burrow:"Well-beingtakes
us backto the primitivenessof the refuge.Physically,the creatureendowed
witha sense of refugehuddlesup to itself, takesto cover,hides away,lies
snug, concealed."2OrconsiderFrankLloydWright'scelebrationof "the
integralfireplace."Wrightspeaksof beingcomfortedby "thefireburning
deep in the solid masonryof the houseitself."3His houseswerebuiltto
grantsuch a sense of comfort.
Weall knowsimilarcomfortsand architectural
devicesthatpromise
them. Butwe demandto be shelteredin a strongersense. FranzKafka's
nevercompletedstory"DerBau,"whichcan be translatedeitheras 'The
Burrow"or "TheBuilding,"helps to remindus of this. Kafkatells the story
of an animal-we are not told whatkindof an animal-which, to secure
itself, constructsan elaborateden;yet in spite of all its effortsit neversucceeds in makingitself feel secure. Suspecteddangersoutstripwhatever
defensesthe animalcan construct.Unableto possessthe world,it tries to
withdrawinto its artificialenvironment.It intendsto replacenaturewith
artfulconstruction.Butthe threateningoutsidecannotbe eliminated.The
reasoninganimalof the storyis, of course,a figureforman, whoseanxious
anticipationof whatmaythreatenhim leads to franticbuildingand planning. Yetthe resultscan neversatisfywhatis demanded.Technologyand
constructionincreaseratherthandiminishthe terrorof time.4

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;a building that presents itself as an imitationof divine
building can claim to give temporalexistence its propermeasure and foundation. 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

"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.

is the will to devaluate time. . . . Like the mystic, like the religious man in

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

'/ai

), have remained "primitive"and

part
fd4as
of
a timeless order that assigns
ou
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
of the spirit a refuge from the terrorof time. Think of Le Corbusier'sfable of
ONLY

TO T;]/

the origin of building: his primitive builder insists on simple geometric

??/r\

"A Primitive Temple" from

Vers Une Architecture, 1927
Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

62

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
dashed off, restless, resembling handwriting;the 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

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.

9. Plato, Philebus 51.

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

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

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

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

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 transformationof architectureinto painting;

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.
At issue is the transformationof architectureinto a merely aesthetic presence, a transformationthat at least since the eighteenth century has fascinated 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:
I remembera 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 unpenetrablesoul. 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

"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

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?

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-objecthas removed
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.

16. Ibid., p. 76.

"Untitled," installation of wood

and mirrors, 1977
Robert Morris
The Portland Center for the Visual Arts,
Portland, Oregon

68

Approachedwith no reverenceor historicalawe, ruins arefrequently exceptional spaces of unusual complexitywhich offerunique relations between
access and barrier,the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal,
groundplane and wall. Such are not to befound in structuresthat have
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.

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