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Solar Evolution
The House of the Solar. Lying between the
realm governed by the ideal and the constellations of the ideal realm. A line
drawn by ontological dividers. The skyline; meeting place of the heavens and
social aspiration; of matter and light. From wall to urban canyon, from the
comfort of earth to glass finitude (the reflective mission of architecture made
transparent) structures rise to the place of the infinite. Eschatologies in
stone; signs that span temporality and eternity.
The solar; a relationship of stone and sky, the path
of the eyes rising up to the cross, the crescent and the stars.
The evolution of sacred inner-space in the
cultures of monotheism is well known. Christianity, through the adoption of the
basilica form, transforms prior tradition by moving away from a temple with
inner sanctum (where the congregation must wait outside) to a hall with the
congregation inside (a tradition maintained in Islam in the structure of the
mosque). Inclusive form replaces exclusive division, hierarchy is displaced
into the interior, the faithful are at least gathered under one roof.
Less well known is the evolution of
architecture's external sites of intense signification (and its consequent
impact on our collective expectations for the built environment). The sacred
communication of architecture has also undergone a sequential evolution, the
results of which are embedded in our nervous systems to this day. In the West
we have become accustomed to the top part of a given building acting as the
carrier of the broader forms of symbolic significance (or the top part of any
lower part, or of any sub-section, as in the entry-portal or window). Our
culture claims its architecture by marking its upper portion; the solar.
Religion (belief priorities in alliance with the State) provides the key signs.
Skylines proclaim their sacred loyalties. The invisible ties of the social are
incarnated in stone in its assault on the heavens.
Hypsosis.
The eye-leading property of light becomes an architectural mimesis; an
exponential curve into flight; the illusion of stones that float.
Yet the western solar does not stand alone.
It is a tale of two traditions (which will, moreover, like lips, like vines,
touch and intertwine). In contrast to the pointed roofs of northern or wet
climate cultures, we find in the flat roof of the South the source of forms
suited to countries which are hot and dry: the Arab and African form (heir to
the Neolithic Near East - point of origin) and the sacred architecture of
Pre-Columbian Meso-America. The cultures
of dry climates find their architectural and symbolic continuity in a plain
solar strip, underscored and so differentiated from its lower portion (in early
forms) by horizontal post holes, drainage outlets and wooden supports. This upper segment acts as a frame for
windows or other apertures to be found in the middle of the building. Lower
down an entrance may find itself enframed by an enfolding middle. Or it may be
some form of representation or scripts that are presented in this way. The solar strip finds its symbolic function
to be that of a framing device.
The line petrified into matter; the gift of architectural
form.
Opposed to the flat form is the pointed
form. The Western, Greek, or Roman (but also Gothic) form is based upon a
pitched roof (at its simplest represented by a tent), often supplemented by
overhanging eves, atop of walls and, in the building's front face, an opening,
an entrance, expandable into a colonnade (the pediment and portico form). A
basic pattern is generalised into a rule for all subsequent architectural
styles; a point of origin theorised by the French architect Laugier - an origin
he regarded as the source of all Classicism in architecture (and so of the
Neo-classicism he championed).
In this way, in the cultures of the North
and the West, the triangle becomes the home of sacred decoration. Above a holy
entrance, a sacred sign (a sign over a door, the basic 'front', the basic
formula of western sacred architecture). Secular forms also will imitate this
formula - even if two hundred floors intervene between entrance and sign. By
contrast, in the cultures of the South and the East, the dry flat-top form
'merely' frames the middle section, their place of the sign, where statues and
other forms of depiction dominate. Minarets and obelisks do, of course, point;
however in contrast to the Gothic style, where everything points, no matter what
its function, it is only doors and minarets that point, mosques as such do not.
(The dome points whilst enclosing a large space. Less like a pediment, more
like a pyramid, its overall rising deixis is often augmented with a sign placed
at its apogee.)
Already,
however, there is the danger of seeing in the binary relationship between the
two kinds of solar, the tension between Christian and Islamic cultural
traditions (a new 'East v West', to succeed the decayed cold war binary of
Capitalism and Communism).
Yet if we raise our eyes to peer over the
horizon imposed by our Indo-European backyard, then we will see that a culture
from the opposite end of the earth arrives to disturb the birth of this new
East/West opposition. China and the Far East, China most especially, with a
long tradition of its own, also use the pointed roof, however the 'pediment'
space, in the West acting as ‘front’, as entrance, porch, the ground of
appearance and reception is now the ‘sides’ of a long-faced building, is
removed to the wings - so pushing sign and decoration up to the solar.
Statuettes of the gods and immortals are found abiding in the roof-tops and decorated
beams of the Chinese solar (and a double roof -in use since before the Han
Dynasty- doubles the beams on display and ‘underlines’ the roof as solar
feature). The more the holier - and the more important the building (count them
on the roofs of the
Proximity
to the sky encompasses a world; with such a plenitude of significance that if
the upper part does not function as an index, a symbol or a feature, then it
will function as a frame. The top edge, whatever form it takes (not least in
its absence) always conveys significant meaning.
Desert architecture is different. Mud
bricks will not survive uncovered in the rain without a branch roof, but in the
baking sun they are ideal building materials. Together with
Desert Architecture. From the antiquity of
the Persian Empire, with its fabled centre,
Two
Variations. (i) Pre-Columbian Meso-American pyramids both point and also
possess flat-topped roofs for ritual practices. The step-form pyramid offers a
compromise of solar styles such that flat-topped buildings too can point. In
the Assyrian Ziggurat (and the Mayan temple) the top edge (whether flat or
jagged) clearly functions as a frame; as an amplification of its own larger
form, giving it outline even as it meets the vertical lines rising up through
the encircled middle. This doubling of the shape adds to the rising effect,
giving a symbolic upward point and rise to the sacred level. These raised
platforms, in the Pre-Columbian pyramid, function as the meeting places of the
gods and men, and so as the site of the sanctification of the elite, their
justification in terms of the sacred. In cases like this it is the entire
building that points and not just the top edge. We find a similar pattern in
the Egyptian monumental pyramid (functioning as a shelter for a tomb, as well
as an external pointer and reminder).
(ii) The second variation is found in South
Indian temples, especially those of the Dravidian style, as exemplified by the
temple town of
Time-lines:
two 'ideal types'; two sacred lineages (two solar genealogies).
(I) The 'flat' genealogy (the House of the
Horizon). The structures of Mesopotamia and
(II) The 'pointed' genealogy (the House of
the
The flat forms of the Near East find a
place in the architecture of the West in the compromise represented by the
evolution of the piano nobile,
simultaneously a floor and a feature (ornamented balconies, and bearer of the
largest windows) framed by the building's top and bottom sections. On the
smallest scale the piano nobile is
found between the vestigial solar top of the palazzo form (or cornice) and the
rougher forms of the entry floor. As in the architecture of the flat form, it
is the middle that is framed (a sign indicating an elevated position in the
social hierarchy). The piano nobile
appears to be an early medieval variation on the Roman high rise concrete
dwellings (the Insulae), which were
known to possess such a floor. With the addition of many levels of intervening
floors, the piano nobile effect,
either moved upwards or disappeared into the curtain wall, a development of key
importance to urban secular architecture and so to late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth century architectural developments (and not the result of an
appropriation by an incipient Modernism of styles from the East and the South,
at that time under colonial rule). However the disappearance of the piano nobile left the solar effect of
the building's top free to dominate the building in symbolic terms. Since the
decorated cornices of the Renaissance, the solar had returned to the flat top
(the Flat Iron Building, New York) as an eye-catching, eye-rising feature -
variations on the pointed top where to be restored in the 1920s and further
developed from the 1970s onwards.
It is often useful to distinguish between
the solar top as top, and the top strip as a frame for the middle. In the first
case the top captures the eye and leads it to itself or further on upwards (in
the last century the middle is usually plain and repetitive, as in the
modernist skyscraper). In the second case the middle is a clearly framed
feature. Information (or its absence, signifying brute massiveness) placed in
the middle is the key source of significance, as in the case of the Egyptian
Pylon and the Mayan Pyramid; although it may also be placed on the top as in
the case of the Roman Triumphal Arch (again, a sign above an entrance) and its
present day avatar, the advertising hoarding.
In addition, the flat-top in modernism becomes a site of symbolic
decoration, precisely in accordance with the pointed tradition to which it is
heir, as such it functions by topping, not framing, the middle section. In this
way, it 'finishes', that is completes, the building as a whole, its skyward
gesture marking out a place for itself in the collective skyline of the city.
Axis
of light: vertical compass; the needle is pointed at both ends. The pull of
gravity and the fall of light are transformed into the rise of architecture and
the lifting of the eyes. What comes down must go up. The fall of light into
gravity's mirror.
The western tradition of secular urban
building appears to run from Roman secular housing apartments (the high rise
and flat-topped Insulae) and similar,
if roofed, early medieval forms through to the Palazzo tradition (Renaissance
to Art Nouveau). A minimally decorated, functional top edge, with the piano nobile as key decorated zone,
evolves into the solar feature from Art Deco to Post-modernism. The proximity
to the sky always lends some significance to a building's top edge. In this way
in the West the framing (top) floor always becomes a solar, even if only a
strip. However if the solar is totally absent, if the gift of the sky is
ignored, then the result is a sense of unfinishedness, the sending out of a
negative signal. Sometimes (at best) the sense of unfinishedness, of pure
functionality, may exude a (dated) science-fiction ambience; but usually the
effect is cheap and throwaway. No solar sacrifice has been performed at the top
of the building to signal its value (and so that of its inhabitants). If such
an economic sacrifice confers identity, then solarless architecture may
properly be said to have no soul.
The present manifestation of the
flat-topped tradition may be found all over the Middle East and
The Western equivalent to this feature and
its effect is the Grande Arche de la
Défense in
Prosopopoeias
in stone, the two towers in
What of modern
Do the creations of Frank Gehry offer a
combination of styles, East and West, modern and vernacular? Or do they
represent a new departure, one bringing to the fore the entropy theme present
in architecture from the 1960's onward (as late-modernism, deconstructivism, or
postmodernism). A theme, moreover, to be found hovering residually in the
background of western culture as 'the ruin'. Gehry's creations seem to combine
the entropic thesis (the illusion of motion, of defying gravity, of being on
the verge of collapse) with massive solar impact. No longer is the sun to be
pointed to, it is to be replaced. In a new answer to a very old tradition Gehry
combines the general pointing of his structures with the capture of light
through reflection. The entropy theme adds a temporal reference suited to the
metaphysics of the twenty-first century as they are influenced by the
cumulative revolutions in physics of the twentieth century and move into the
next millennium. The style is a temple to impermanence, for which the best
medicine is homage. Architecture, visible antidote to entropy, disguises itself
as its sworn enemy (like a ritual inoculation). A Gehry is the true temple to
twentieth century physics, as well as the most radical product of twentieth
century technologies in computer-led alliance. Perhaps the two options
presented here are not mutually exclusive, Gehry's massive sheds appear more
like a deconstructed Pylon (its signs condensed into shining material) than any
other architectural form. In this style
the entire building is suffused with a generalised solar impact (like Libeskind's
War Museum of the North, elegance in a steel shed with a hollow spire).
Reflective metal is an important part of the new twenty-first century solar;
together with the new glass architecture which includes many buildings that
point, are triangular (right-angle), but are not pedimented (Manchester, like
any city successfully rejuvenated during the 1990s, is a good example of these
architectural trends). Whether as eye-catching, bright, reflective, rising,
continuous or differentiated (the features on top of Salford Quays tower) the
new solar continues its tradition to become the key meaning-making feature of
today's architecture. The new metal sheathing incarnates the sublime in
reflective skin, the solar force, reflected, literally in a furnace of glowing
metal, makes of the whole surface a symbolic deixis. A solar temple.
Copyright 2002 Peter Nesteruk