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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, a 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 Liebeskind's
Copyright 2002 Peter Nesteruk