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Elsewhere?
Architecture is always
unfinished. Architecture is completed elsewhere.
When we try to realise the
completion of architecture there appear before us two mysterious places which,
as it were, vie for mastery over this process. One is the place of the making of
signs (the place where meaning is made), the other is the place of their
destination, their ultimate designation (the place these meanings point to). The
ends of architecture appear caught in a tension between these two
poles.
Except that there is no
completion. The process of finishing, is always just that, a process.
Architecture is always unfinished (architecture is completed
elsewhere).
Moreover we quickly find that
the two places of architecture's putative completion are themselves, finally,
infinite. Not only residing in stone. Both elsewhere.
Two elsewheres. One seems to
result from an arrangement of matter taken as a marking, whilst the other
appears to reside in the place to which this marking is taken to refer.
Semiotically speaking, matter does not speak, material itself is not a sign -
unlike a word, the figurative meaning of which is considered a sign of a sign
(signified becomes signifier, giving us a second meaning, the semiotic
definition of a symbol). With material, with matter as such, its meaning is
simply whatever its name, or signified, happens to be, and we do not distinguish
between types or levels of meaning; only between function and meaning
(architecture does not have 'second meaning', for most the experience of
architecture is its first meaning, even if, semiotically, this might be called
its 'second' meaning). In architecture, as with things - even those altered
things we call 'culture' - the key differentiation is between the thing
(signifier, also here the means of expression, the material), its function (what
it does for us) and its meaning (signified, which may range over a variety of
semantic fields, from proper name to poetic association). Three qualities then:
the material, its physical use and the use we find for it in the world of signs.
Otherwise put: what it is made from, what we take it as, what we take it for
(matter, use value, sign value).
But these refinements leave us
with only one potential 'elsewhere'; that which lies somewhere in the realm of
meaning. The end product of our architectural experience; our second
'elsewhere'.
Whence then the first? (Or can
it be that it has evaporated in the course of our search for
distinctions?)
We have seen that it cannot
reside in a first signified (indicating the relation of the sign to symbol).
This trail, the trail of meaning, anyway leads us to our second elsewhere, a
mysterious index whose path we have yet to explore. Or could it be that there is
a secret hiding in matter? But
matter does not speak. Where is it that another presence is to be found? A
presence drawn to non-presence as the source of its seeking, a movement towards
the unmoved mover that instigates the movement towards meaning. A presence that
finds in matter a parallel presence beyond function. The placing of desire in
stone.
Again, the two elsewheres.
The first is that which arrives
in response to the invitation of the sign, the call; the answer. An answer that
is always waiting. First. The motive that urges us to take the qualitative step
that takes us beyond the boundaries of the present situation, beyond
architectural symbolism. First. The need is in ourselves; whence the fuel that
stokes the fires of symbolic space, of architecture as sign and, coming full
circle, of our response (what in ourselves answers this call from stone and
glass, the inner voice which invites us to take the step). Before the question,
the answer; before the invitation, the response. Waiting. Source of (the beyond
of) architectural symbolism.
And the second, the beyond (of
architectural symbolism)? The non-place to which that symbolism would point.
That part of meaning, which pointed to, we can not find. And so about which we
can say no more...
(...except
that...)
Architecture finishes with last
things. The end of architecture is eternity. At its best (and often even at its
worst) its lines and relation to the sky lift us upwards, send our eyes to the
heavens. Yet architecture is always also on a loop back to the beginning, back
to its origins, first things; the eternal presence of ourselves. Ourselves, the
makers of signs. Eternity and our present selves. Two ends of the thread along
which are strung our world, the truth of our senses, our beliefs. Our ends,
architecture's ends: our ends, architecture's end. Architecture never finishes
with last things.
There is no point in talking
about matter. Matter just is (even physics changes the definition of matter from
theory to theory and from math to math, eventually evaporating it into
probability and vibration). No
matter. The configuration of matter into space is our concern.
What if we were to speak of
configurations of space then and divide them according to their relations with
themselves: one referring in (self-reference), the other referring out (to a
metaset). One a space that intensifies itself, that declares itself important;
the other a space which indicates a place of greater intensity, of yet greater
importance than itself.
Configurations of space. We may divide space according to our
perception of it as a container, as a solid, a product of the earth, enclosing
air or water (such as a room or a valley). Or as an index; as a solid enclosed
by air or water (spire, mountain, island). Each form gains its increased power
of significance from its relation either to itself or elsewhere, from its
relation to an outside - most significantly from its relation to the sky. This
distinction applies equally to space which is received, found (Nature, place,
objects) or that which is refashioned by ourselves (human culture, built place,
cultural artefacts).
Are there then two kinds of
space? Not quite (this is bit like saying that there are two kinds of matter).
Space must first be valued and hence become place, to have a... place in our
calculations and aspirations (in this sense only are there two kinds of space:
space that remains space and space that becomes place). The value comes from
ourselves; space as such has no intrinsic value. It is of value to us, or to
some other point of view (we, or they, find it so). Better to say there are two
kinds of sign-space, two kinds of place (leaving aside unvalued space: that
which has not acceded to the status of place; degraded place, which has fallen
back into space; or bad place, where it is negativity that makes the place stand
out from the surrounding space - the site of evil as yet unhallowed by its
transformation into a memorial). It is place which appears to us to be like a
room or like an index. However, if it is place (including negative place) with
which we are concerned, it is not just any place that draws our attention here.
It is architecture as place. Not with place as architecture, although much of
what is said will also apply there - 'there' being the place of genius loci or 'the spirit of the place'
(our personification of geography as an explanation of its affective force). Nor
directly with the place of architecture, even if inseparable insofar as its role
in human culture is concerned; its (architecture's) role as the most general
frame of cultural life makes of it a room out which we do not often stray; in
which, therefore first and last things must have their
place.
What more then can we say of
this place, this valued space, which must also include that 'non-place to
which... symbolism would point.' The infinity of the non-place as no-where place
(based only on the prompting of that which would suggest it) appears to be
opposed to that which would suggest it (as sign and thing, deixis and place).
Yet, as the parenthesis in the previous sentence indicates, all we have is its
sign (a sign which may not even belong to it). Belief in a no-where place,
all-important but invisible to the naked eye, is an indispensible function of all belief systems,
ideologies, world-views. It is also a product of the 'all too' human tendency to
posit, almost as a general default, a realm both exterior and anterior to the
one which we inhabit - an exteriority usually, but not exclusively intuited as
being 'above'. This anteriority is usually also a posteriority and an a priori (a larger set than that of our
temporal being) providing us with a temporal designation that is outside of
time, our concept of eternity. Whether perceived as rhetoric or belief (rhetoric
from the 'outside', belief from the 'inside') this 'place' -mental or actual-
plays a governing role in all issues touching on community or 'world' in any
expanded, meaningful, or metaphysical sense (that is, not merely
empirical). Kissing architecture
like the sun, intensifying the symbolic propensity of architecture's topmost
portion (and the tops of its features in general) this symbolisation is perhaps
at its most powerful in architecture that points or otherwise celebrates its
relation to the skyline. It is also that which stands above us - but may be
found to inhere in some manner to all aspects of our artificial urban horizon
(that which stands, or spreads out, before us). This relationship suggests the
term 'solar' as a shorthand representing this complex of meanings. It is here
that the twin sets, finitude and infinity, and temporality and eternity, display
their gilded overlapping in the burnished light that shines down from the realm
of bronze and polished stone, transforming quotidian lead into everlasting
gold.
Finitude /Infinity:
Temporality/Eternity
Finitude; not least in the face
of the infinite, seeking in the infinite the truth of its being. Finitude and
infinity. The former fallen where it is not redeemed in the light of the latter.
The latter existing only through the good offices of the former. The sacred
'here' and 'elsewhere' of our world. Not (in this instance) the opposition of
sublunary existence to the beyond, of the everyday to the marvellous, the
profane to the sacred. Rather, it is the miraculous insistence of the sacred in
the lining of our world that we find revealed in our architecture, soaring in
the blue of its sky. The sacred (our demand for it, our call for what there is
no longer supposed to be any call for - witness the speed with which
rationalists and secularists move to sacralise dates, places, and people, both
in their private lives and as-and-when they approach the shrine of State power).
The infinite perspective is its guise on earth; finitude rests in the palm of
its encircling hand.
Finitude and infinity; a
divided continuum ranging from the present with its current function and
meaning, to the trace of past and future, to the echo of eternity. Two layers of
meaning; the present and its invisible ends (only clouds, dreams floating about
the horizon, windows depicting the future and the past) and the doubling of this
presence into a parallel world with exploded horizons; eternity. (Two ends which
come full circle in the eternal now; ever-present birthplace of the rhetoric of
the outside of time).
Two layers, two ends... two
kinds of architectural sign.
Two kinds of architectural
sign... or better: two kinds of architectural sign-space. One founded upon
interiority; the other upon exteriority.
One is akin to a room, a hollowed form framing empty space (kin to the
special places of Nature, the space become place of genius loci). The other presents itself
as a material presence. If one is an enclosure of space, the other takes the
form of a filling, a feature set apart in space. Of the latter, we are here interested in
the aspect which, regardless of its power to draw vision to itself,
simultaneously points away, points elsewhere, its entire form functioning as a
gesture. Such a presence self-frames when not otherwise enclosed and not only
gathers space around itself but points (figuratively) to a place beyond that
space. Unlike the statue which also self-frames, but which may point away from
itself gesturally, through the deixis of a part (its arm may indicate a
direction) or an elsewhere may be suggested semantically, as the present part of
an extended lexical field (as a deity, allegory, or personification indicates
the realm in which it is reputed to reign). Each space or filling of space may
be further defined by its relation to finitude and its choice of a
beyond.
(I) Interiority; the sign-room. The first
kind of sign-space, the sign-room, a framing of space that bears significance,
is itself further framed by a 'sign-door'. All architectural thresholds are
fraught with symbolism. Entrance
ways are particularly prone to the gathering of meaning as they involve the
crossing of thresholds, real and symbolic, between interior and exterior. Most
significant are those thresholds we must cross in order to enter a space
apparently set aside from the everyday. Such spaces, sign-rooms, framed
extension, have become 'place' and are often also sites of ritual. They may be
the places set aside for ritual, moreover, participation in them may itself
constitute a ritual act. It is in our interaction with them as framed space
(entry, the experience of the interior and exit) that they either are themselves
the space of ritual purpose, or lead one towards those spaces reserved for
ritual ceremony. Doors and arches here function as a sequence of portals, and at
a certain stage their interactive intensification may even suggest the entrance
to another realm (witness the iconostasis of Greek Orthodox
Churches).
Interiors. Entrances. The path
into the enclosure. The passage that leads to the tomb. The altar at the end of
a sequence of rooms. (Like a Romanesque interior, a Russian doll, or a
box-within-a-box, type of space, where each cube contains another, the result:
spatial intensification). Witness also the sequence of chambers in Egyptian
temples, and in Greek (Classical) then Christian places of worship as part of
the passage to the altar, place of mysteries, holy of holies... Follow the
passage to the Carolingian burial crypt, with its entrance and exit passages.
Witness the intense reframing of the space of the crypt in all churches, not
least when one is denied entry and can only stare through some aperture, arch or
gap left between altar and floor, revealing a glimpse of the last resting place
of an incumbent immortal.
The successive ribs and
passages of framed entry portals offers up to us the sequential pulse of an
architectural opening and closing. The pulse of thresholds; the constricting and
opening out of horizons (breath of ritual space). Containment and giddy
liberation succeed one another like a dream of escape. A dream of colossal
hallways. From a climactic corridor of open space we close again into the
columns of the cave; cage of the holy. This is the vision of the inside as
sanctum; realm of incense and smoke. The heavy folds of hangings bringing with
them the curtain of obscurity. Obscure because finite.
The promise abiding at the end
of the finite (the hidden secret soon to be revealed). Spaces end; the house of
the arcane symbol; an infinity of symbols suggesting the timeless beings that
populate the timeless being of the infinite. A transcendental mimesis. Such
spaces are finite, but draw everywhere on the invisible omnipresence of the
infinite which they never cease to suggest. (With ritual this abiding barrier
may finally suggest its own crossing.)
(II) Exteriority; sign-pointers
(architectural indexes). The deflected gaze. Features call us to follow;
eruptions lead the eye. Details. Parts of buildings. Whole buildings in
themselves. Anything that may act as a deixis, the needle of the compass.
Transcendental magnetism: something more is indicated ('there is something
more') but elsewhere. These indicators may take the form of 'fillers'; signs
sitting in frames. Such signs are further divisible into mimetic representations
and part/whole relations; symbols rather than indexes. Such is the role of the
angel in Western art history, companion of the mimetic saint (the latter's
sanctity itself gained by its part relation to the heavenly abode). More cogent
from the point of view of the architectural eye are those signs that point;
compasses whose pole remains invisible, arrows without any discernible target,
indexes of the infinite. A 'filler' framed only the sky, whose lower limit is
the horizon and whose outer-limits are the corners of human vision. A 'filler'
whose paradox is to indicate the void.
Spire, tower, minaret and
pinnacle, indeed the top-most parts of almost any significant structure, speak
to us of larger things, draw us towards weightier matters, point... elsewhere.
It is the top that makes the structure significant; that makes it mean...
ultimately. It is this feature, along with its omnipresent relation with the
sky, that gives an architectural top its 'solar', or social symbolic quality,
that reminds us of our fascination, of our debt even, to an ineffable beyond,
the place of the transcendent, of immutability, of a stone-like certainty,
cast-iron, written in light, written in air.
The eternal. The outside as
ground; rhetorical trope in stone (the hidden secret which is unspeakable, of
which it is forbidden to speak : of which, being unspeakable, one is forbidden
to speak). The infinite. (It is the
unlimited quantity opened by this indefinite deixis that succours the leap into
the realm of infinite difference governed by a quality as absolute as it is
other). The infinite: but drawing everywhere on the omnipresence of the visible,
the finite, without which it could have no purchase on the course matter that is
ourselves. (A relationship formalised in ritual; event where the identity of the
finite and infinite is the condition of human identity).
(III) Combinations. Or it may
be that one is combined with the other such that 'fillers' fit frames or frame
themselves, as when 'pointers' are found in 'rooms' or 'rooms' on 'pointers'
(and finally all fillers and pointers are self-framing; when we see them as part
of the 'solar', when they are framed by the sky - mounted against the horizon
and staged by the fall of light).
When indexical 'pointers' are
found within 'rooms', they are framed by the interior that enfolds them and
their deixis manages to maintain a sky-bound, even abstract, quality. When we find pediments and pinnacles
placed within interiors their index either is felt to pierce the ceiling they
would appear to indicate or they seem to dispense with the last vestiges of
sublunary trappings that may adhere to the space around them and their deixis
becomes infinite. And so the infinite is drawn into finite space and eternity is
present in the sacred places of the temporal.
The finding of enclosures on,
or within, 'pointers' seems mainly to occur in the form of an embedded 'room'
(we are leaving aside the functional rooms, or space that may be enclosed within
buildings that point; these only carry interest insofar as they can be seen from
outside and so carry a symbolic charge). Such spaces are like a theatre, a room
with one wall missing, a open-ended receptacle found embedded within pinnacles;
perhaps visible only by its windows
or apertures, or as slots for tombs - empty post-Reformation niches. Or as the
symbolic, exterior, aspect of the functional look-outs (or 'sound-outs') of
watch-towers, bell towers, and minarets.
The combination of 'room' and
'pointer', of 'frame' and 'filler', is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than
in the ubiquity of the ever-versatile aedicule. Often adapted into some form
of alcove or pinnacle, but always replete with pointed (pointing) top.
Combining pointers with rooms
(I): pointers into rooms. Aedicules
are often found within rooms (as, for example, in the Pantheon,
Combining pointers with rooms (II): rooms
onto pointers. Aedicules are
themselves also found on the exteriors of pointing structures as openings,
windows, niches, as sign-spaces. It is part of the ambiguity of every arch that
it partakes of a pointer, its sense of kinetic upward motion, as well as of a
cover, or top-most portion of a sign-house. Apertures within and without many
forms of structure make the most of this double valency. This is a combination
found, above all, in the entrance, or even in the entry front of a building -
true even of a cathedral West front in its entirety. The public face of a
building (laid open like a book for us to read) gazing out onto an open space or
public square; which (functionally) consists of little more that solar top (a
sign, a pointer) and an entry portal. The first frame in a sequence of frames,
first arch in an ever-intensifying sequence of arches; first indication of a
room, of a space to enter, a place in which the soul may exalt. In which we find
the proper place to exalt. To exalt that which must be exulted. Exalt that which
must be exalted. Part of the route
to the other place pointed-to by the sign outside.
Again (reprise): the place
pointed-to; elsewhere. Invisible; sustained by a faith that begins at home. (No
matter how hard we try to locate its origins
...'elsewhere'.)
Exterior deixis: home (page).
Full circle. Elsewhere. Or else where?
Here. Here and there. Moving
out. Coming back. Knowing when we have reached the limit and are in fact
beginning to go backwards, thinking we are going forwards (but finding ourselves
heading in, instead of out). The art of politics (or at least of the politics of
theory, if not the theory of politics) consists in finding that place, that bend
in the road, the limit (at once historical, metaphysical, temporal) beyond which
the traveller can only return (knowing when 'a single', a 'line of flight',
becomes a return journey). Finding the limit, the rim, the edge of an epoch.
Otherwise. Building a bridge that leads back to where we began. Crossing.
Catching sight of ourselves on the way out.
Architecture; catching sight of
ourselves on the way out.
Copyright 2004
Peter Nesteruk