Chapter 1. The World Fabric
Chapter 2. The Microcosmos
Chapter 3. Four Square
Chapter 4. At The Centre Of The Earth
Chapter 5. The Jewel-Bearing Tree
Chapter 6. The Planetary Spheres
Chapter 7. The Labyrinth
Chapter 8. The Golden Gate Of The Sun
Chapter 9. Pavements Like The Sea
Chapter 10. Ceilings Like The Sky
Chapter 11. The Windows Of Heaven And Three Hundred And Sixty Days
Chapter 12. The Symbol Of Creation
Introductory
'Invention,
strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those
images, that have been previously gathered and deposited in the
memory: nothing can come of nothing: he who has laid up no materials
can produce no combinations.'—REYNOLDS,
Discourse II.THE
history of architecture, as usually written, with its theory of
utilitarian origins from the hut and the tumulus, and further
developments in that way—the adjustment of forms to the conditions
of local circumstance; the clay of Mesopotamia, the granite of Egypt,
and marble of Greece—is rather the history of building: of
'Architecture' it may be, in the sense we so often use the word, but
not the Architecture which is the synthesis of the fine arts, the
commune of all the crafts.As
the pigments are but the vehicle of painting, so is building but the
vehicle of architecture, which is the thought behind form, embodied
and realised for the purpose of its manifestation and transmission.
Architecture, then, interpenetrates building, not for satisfaction of
the simple needs of the body, but the complex ones of the intellect.
I do not mean that we can thus distinguish between architecture and
building, in those qualities in which they meet and overlap, but that
in the sum and polarity of them all; these point to the response of
future thought, those to the satisfaction of present need; and so,
although no hut or mound, however early or rude, but had something
added to it for thought's sake, yet architecture and building are
quite clear and distinct as ideas—the soul and the body.Of
the modes of this thought we must again distinguish; some were
unconscious and instinctive, as the desire for symmetry, smoothness,
sublimity, and the like merely æsthetic qualities, which properly
enough belong to true architecture; and others were direct and
didactic, speaking by a more or less perfect realisation, or through
a code of symbols, accompanied by traditions which explained them.
The main purpose and burthen of sacred architecture—and all
architecture, temple, tomb, or palace, was sacred in the early
days—is thus inextricably bound up with a people's thoughts about
God and the universe.Behind
every style of architecture there is an earlier style, in which the
germ of every form is to be found; except such alterations as may be
traced to new conditions, or directly innovating thought in religion,
all is the slow change of growth, and it is almost impossible to
point to the time of invention of any custom or feature. As Herbert
Spencer says of ceremonial generally: 'Adhering tenaciously to all
his elders taught him, the primitive man deviates into novelty only
through unintended modifications. Every one now knows that languages
are not devised but evolve; and the same is true of usages.' It has,
rightly, been the habit of historians of architecture to lay stress
on the differences of the several styles and schools of successive
ages, but; in the far larger sense, all architecture is one, when
traced back through the stream of civilisations, as they followed or
influenced one another. For instance, argue as archæologists may, as
to whether the columns at Beni Hassan are rightly called proto-Doric,
it is a fact to be read as in an open book, that a Greek temple and
an Egyptian temple are substantially at one, when we consider the
infinite possibilities of form, if disassociated from tradition.It
has often been pointed out, how early examples of stone construction
still repeat the forms of the manner of building in wood that went
before, and so is it always. How long the steamship retained
survivals of the sailing vessel, and how the vocabulary of the
coachroad still answers for the railway.What
then, I want to ask, are the ultimate facts behind all architecture
which has given it form? Mainly three: First,
the similar needs and desires of men; secondly,
on the side of structure, the necessities imposed by materials, and
the physical laws of their erection and combination; and thirdly,
on the side of style, nature. It is of this last that I propose to
write; the influence of the known and imagined facts of the universe
on architecture, the connection between the world as a structure, and
the building, not of the mere details of nature and the ornaments of
architecture, but of the whole—the Heavenly Temple and the Earthly
Tabernacle. 'Has anyone,' says Mr Lillie in his "Buddhism in
Christendom," 'puzzled over the fact, that the only modern
representative of the initiates of the ancient mysteries should
occupy themselves entirely with the business of the hodman and
builder; what is the connection between the kingdom of heaven, and
matter of fact mortar, tee-squares and trowels? Esoteric masonry
occupied itself in reality, with a temple built without sound of
hammer, axe, or tool of iron. It was the temple of the skies, the
Macrocosmos, in point of fact.'It
will be necessary, not only to examine architecture in the monuments,
but the contemporary statements which relate to them, the stories
about buildings, and even the mythology of architecture, for such a
mythology there is.If
we trace the artistic forms of things, made by man, to their origin,
we find a direct imitation of nature. The thought behind a ship is
the imitation of a fish. So to the Egyptians and Greeks the 'Black
Ship' bore traces of this descent, and two eyes were painted at the
prow. The custom still lingers on the Mediterranean and on the waters
of China: the eyes are given, it is said, to enable the ship to see
its way over the pathless sea. Tables and chairs, like the beasts,
are quadrupeds; the lion's leg and foot of modern furniture come to
us from the Greeks, and, earlier, they were used in Assyria and
Egypt. Thrones had beasts on either hand, a custom traditionally
followed for thrones, Hittite, Chaldean, or Hindu, that of Solomon,
the imperial throne at Constantinople, or our own Coronation chair.
The Egyptian funeral bier seems like a joke, so frank and unmodified
is the imitation: it looks, as shown on the mummy cases, like a long,
flat-backed lion, tail and all; the example preserved in the Boulak
Museum, has the ordinary parallelogram of a bed, each leg being a
lion's leg; a head is attached to the middle of the front rail, and a
tail, like a pump handle, projects far behind in a great sweeping
curve.Where
else, indeed, should we go for the highest imagination? In the modern
Greek folk stories, the hero usually has three marvellous robes; one
embroidered with the heavens and its stars, the second with the sea
and fish swimming there, the third with the earth in May and all its
flowers. Could anyone produce finer designs?The
commonplaces of poetry, in which the world is likened to a building,
'heavenly vaults,' or 'azure domes,' 'gates of sunrise,' and the
rest, are survivals of a time when the earth was not a tiny ball,
projected at immeasurable speed through infinite space, one, among
other fireflies of the night, but was stable and immovable, the
centre of the universe, the floor on which the sky was built. The
whole, a chamber lighted by the sun, moon, and stars.The
ceremonial of religion during the great building ages in Chaldea,
Egypt, and India, was going through the phase of Nature worship, in
which the sky, the sun, the sea were not so much veiled, as
afterwards to the Greeks, until they became persons, not things; but
open and understood, astronomical observation was closely associated
as part of the cultus.In
all this there is enough to dispose us to receive evidence of a
cosmical symbolism in the buildings of the younger world, and we
shall find that the intention of the temple (speaking of the
temple idea,
as we understand it) was to set up a local reduplication of the
temple not made with hands, the World Temple itself—a sort of model
to scale, its form governed by the science of the time; it was a
heaven, an observatory, and an almanack. Its foundation was a sacred
ceremony, the time carefully chosen by augury, and its relation to
the heavens defined by observation. Its place was exactly below the
celestial prototype; like that it was sacred, like that strong, its
foundations could not be moved, if they were placed foursquare to the
walls of the firmament, as are still our churches—and was it not to
be like the heavenly sanctuary, that Solomon built the temple without
the sound of tool?I
do not necessarily claim that this was the origin of all structures
set apart for a purpose in a sense sacred; nor possibly in every case
was this the first interpretation of some of the symbols. Customs
have many explanations. I claim that, given the idea of a universe
and universe gods, the phase here set out was a necessary one; and as
this stage certainly everywhere preceded the age, when works, worthy
the name of architecture, were produced—buildings which enshrined
ideas—it is here we shall find the formative factor in their
design. And for this there is ample authority; De la Saussaye, in his
comprehensive 'Manual of the Science of Religion' (1891), says 'the
symbolism of temple buildings sometimes seems to refer to the
structure of the world, sometimes to the religious relationship of
men to the gods.'Beginning
with the form of the world in the first chapter, the three or four
which follow, deal with the relation of the building to it as a
whole, and the rest with parts and details.We
need not suppose that temples were a sum of these symbols in all
cases, if in any; but that from this common book of architecture,
each took what he would, little or much, sometimes openly, sometimes
with more or less translation, sometimes at first hand, often as a
half-remembered tradition.The
ritual side of symbolism is entirely neglected here, but there is
ample evidence that sacred ceremony, the state that surrounded a
throne, and the pageant of war, all had reference to the ritual and
pomp of nature; so that man might be one with her and share her
invincible strength. Ridiculous as, at first, it may seem, the
Throne, Crown, and Orb of Her Majesty Queen Victoria can only be
explained in this way: they are all symbols of a God in his temple;
and hereditary kingship has everywhere, as Mr Spencer has shown,
claimed divinity, God descent, and afterwards God consent—the right
divine. As is said in the old Chinese book, the Li Ki (Sac. Books of
E. Vol. 28), 'all ceremonial usages, looked at in their general
characteristics, are the embodiment of the ideas suggested by heaven
and earth; take their laws from the changes of the four seasons;
imitate the operation of the contracting and developing movements in
nature, and are conformed to the feelings of men. It is on this
account that they are called the Rules of Propriety; and when anyone
finds fault with them, he only shows his ignorance of their origin.'Old
architecture lived because it had a purpose. Modern architecture, to
be real, must not be a mere envelope without contents. As M. Cesar
Daly says in his Hautes
Etudes, if we would
have architecture excite an interest, real and general, we must have
a symbolism, immediately comprehensible by the great majority of
spectators. But this message cannot be that of the past—terror,
mystery, splendour. Planets may not circle nor thunder roll in the
temple of the future. No barbaric gold with ruddy bloom; no jewels;
emeralds half a palm over, rubies like an egg, and crystal spheres,
can again be used more for magic than for beauty. No terraced temples
of Babylon to reach the skies; no gold-plated palaces of Ecbatana,
seven-walled; no ivory palaces of Ahab; nor golden houses of Nero
with corridors a mile long; no stupendous temples of Egypt at first
all embracing, then court and chamber narrowing and becoming lower,
closing in on the awed worshipper and crushing his imagination;
these, all of them, can never be built again, for the manner and the
materials are worked out to their final issue. Think of the Sociology
and Religion of all this, and the stain across it, "each stone
cemented in the blood of a human creature." Those colossal
efforts of labour forced on by an implacable will, are of the past,
and such an architecture is not for us, nor for the future.What,
then, will this art of the future be? The message will still be of
nature and man, of order and beauty, but all will be sweetness,
simplicity, freedom, confidence, and light; the other is past, and
well is it, for its aim was to crush life: the new, the future, is to
aid life and train it, 'so that beauty may flow into the soul like a
breeze.'