The architecture of dreams

I am up and out of bed but struggling to feel like I am awake, and therefore struggling to begin writing my essay. I am hoping that an informal post about my ideas might help to navigate me out of my blurry haze and into the realms of essay. Comparing the architecture of dreams to the architecture of Gothic Cathedrals to assert the centrality of contemplative culture to Medieval religion, if I didn't feel so tired I would be very excited about my essay. In other words, the dream vision in the medieval period was not the privileged experience of saints, martyrs and starving mystics but was the universally encouraged experience of the masses. The design of Cathedrals, as George Henderson writes, is a manipulation of our senses which comes to define our religious experience. Incense, hymn, prayer, the taking of the Eucharist; religious practice is rich in sensory material which engages the participant but the space in which scents, sounds and thoughts echo is also important.

‘The mental associations, liaisons, meanderings to and fro, ‘ambivalences’, asides, sprawl of the pattern, if pattern there is- these thought-trains (or, some might reasonably say, trains of distraction and inadvertence) have been as often as not initially set in motion, shunted or buffered in to near sidings or off to far destinations, by some action or word, something seen or heard, during the liturgy.’ David Jones

Notre Dame, Paris

'The ambivalence of late-Gothic architecture is immediately obvious in the silhouette of buildings. Long since conditioned not to commit themselves to any formal accent unless they can balance by its opposite, Gothic architects even attempted a fantastic and ingenious compromise between the two poles of being and non-being. A Gothic building cannot simply stop, it has to fade away. Hence the familiar flurry of curves and spikes, by which the physical presence is gradually withdrawn and the dense material mass is dissolved into the empty air.' George Henderson, Gothic

Contemplating the facades of Gothic cathedrals we have our own sense of fading in to the air, of rising up from our corporeal bodies and receding in to the heavens. The facade guides viewer and dreamer in to the realms of 'non-being'. It introduces us to a sensation, which once inside, will overwhelm us.

St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

I was recently speaking to an architectural photographer who taught me something that I didn't know. To take photographs of buildings you need a special focusing lens which prevents the strange receding angles that your average digital camera struggling with the enormities of architectural perspectives resorts to. However in the contexts of Henderson's remarks the effect becomes entirely appropriate.

St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

'the triforium itself is glazed, so that the whole area above the arches of the main arcade and between the shafts which rise uninterrupted from column base to vault springs becomes a shimmering sheet of glass, articulated by the slender vertical mullions , and impregnated with sunlight.' Henderson

Describing a particular cathedral, Henderson captures the effect of combinations of light and highly articulated design to provide revelation. The vaulting of cathedral ceilings leads us upwards in to the heavens of the religious construction. The dream, just like the cathedral, has a complete architecture which encloses us and encompasses us within the meditation. As we enter the portals and arches of Cathedrals we move in to a different level of consciousness. The design of entrances which tell stories Purgatorial, Hellish or Heavenly and are inscribed with warning such as that of Dante's Inferno 'Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch' intrate', facilitate the movement between exterior and interior and the reflexive states.

Stained glass window, St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague

Stained glass 'had to appear to be weightless and shot through with visible energy,' writes Henderson describing the window in terms comparable to the dream vision; a sensation of weightless energy. Looking through the window we are drawn in to an alternative visionary world where things are expressed in image, type and symbols, where tableau are familiar and yet strangely vivid. Countless medieval visions begin with a light through a window, an illumination which opens up a parallel perspective.

Cave church, Budapest- particularly interesting for ideas about mystics and affective piety.

In the Revelation of St. John, Chapter 21 the Holy city of Jerusalem, a vision of heaven, is described:

'and had a great wall and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon [...] and on the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates...and the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth...And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits...And the building of the wall it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones.'

This description of Jerusalem reads like an architectural plan; offering measurements and the construction along an axis. The specificities give the architect an ideal to aim for, so that the emulation of Heavenly Jerusalem in Cathedral plans became a genuine possibility. Paradise, etymologically, is a walled garden and so religious buildings themselves become gestures towards paradise, or at least spaces in which the contemplation of paradise is sensorily encouraged. Each Cathedral becomes a vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem brought down to earth.

Anyway there is an outline of a few ideas, time to actually write the essay!

Le Corbusier's City of Tomorrow

Walking the city has somehow wandered in to the realms of town planning in my second dissertation. In 1924 Le Corbusier published The City of Tomorrow, an architectural polemic against the modern city and proposing a new Contemporary city. I love Le Corbusier's book because of its scrapbook quality; architectural plans are combined with photographs, aerial views of towns and sketches.

‘A TOWN is a tool.
Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us; their degradation wounds our self-esteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us.’

As the world was changing; with war, industry, and traffic, architects and town planners believed that the city needed changing too.

New York :Congestion, a damning condemnation.

Hausmann's restructuring of Paris meant that it was the ideal space for new plans and aesthetic debates. Corbusier wants the city to combine green space with functional, efficient networks of labour.

But Corbusier's city appears to me to be just another kind of a machine, with skyscrapers that 'thwart our souls' and our green spaces by looming above them. The women in my dissertation walk the city, map human emotion upon it and react against such drastic destruction and restructuring. After all isn't human emotion more like the labyrinthine palimpsest of London than the open boulevards of Paris?

Leonora Carrington- Labyrinth

ARTchitecture for the Art Gallery

Perhaps it is just that my eye has only recently become interested in architecture, but the space in which art galleries were housed in Barcelona amazed and excited me as independent works of art.

Eventually the old streets of art shops and restaurants spilling out on to the pavements opened out to the Placa de Angels, an open space of art and a clear white light. MACBA is the Museum of Contemporary art in Barcelona and commands a whole square of converted spaces. Richard Meier was the American architect responsible for the main building, famous for his rationalist designs and his use of white, this is a blinding construction.

'Abstraction allows architecture to express its own organizational and spatial consequences, it permits the creation of space without confusing its volume with any superimposed system of meaning or value.' Richard Meier

I spent forever in awe, circling and encircling as I held my camera up to the sky and framed new shapes, discovered hidden geometries. The building frames and channels light, patterning, creating and distorting, utterly absorbing. Its great white surfaces obliterate the sun and draw everything towards it. I was genuinely captivated and wonder if it is that I have never seen architecture like this before, or that I have just never noticed it?

Here is an amazing video, which expresses the detailed abstract qualities of the building:

Here are some of the other impressive gallery buildings I saw.

Crowned by a barbed wire sculpture, Antoni Tapies designed the building which now hosts his gallery himself. The wire called 'Cloud and Chair' is supposed to adjust the difference in height between the Foundation and the buildings which surround it.

In 1975 architect Josep Luis Sert completed the building for the Joan Miro Foundation and modern art gallery. It was conceived as an open space and the white surfaces, broken by courtyards, do open up spaces. The highlight is the low roof which is open to the public to explore the sculptures which spill out of the museum.

When I went nobody seemed to be going out on to the roof, but I pushed through the tinted doors and escaped in to the sun to explore. Nobody stopped me and it felt liberating!

Barbican, beautiful, bleak

My friend was a little bit late to meet me and so I found myself with some time to 'explore Barbican architecture'. I found myself wondering whether the Barbican was beautiful or bleak in the grey rain. The housing estate which surrounds it and the centre itself is a complex of towering layers of concrete, fountains, water features which all enclose. High walks, stairwells and sheltered passageways all confuse your sense of direction. If it is not beautiful, it is certainly impressive.

Wikipedia tells me that the centre was designed by Chamberlain, Powell and Bon in the Brutalist style. Brutalism emerged in 50's and 60's and took its name from the French Beton Brut or 'raw concrete'. The Barbican is 'raw concrete', testament to a time when concrete inspired awe and wasn't the symbol of Post-War hopes degrading to bleak council estates. The Barbican is built in an area which was badly bombed during the Second World War and is a solid attempt at regeneration. I think my sense is more that it was beautiful once. Now housing the YMCA and London flats it feels entirely at odds with the wet, wet water gardens and aquatic plant-life.

Valparaiso, hopes of getting to Chile

>Drifts and Derivations was a small exhibition I stumbled upon in the Reina Sofia, Madrid at the beginning of the summer. At first it appeared as a visionary idea for a dissertation, I showed everybody the exhibition leaflet and planned trips to South America as research and gasped with the beauty of it all, but eventually it just became the inspiration for the kind of dissertation I wanted to write. Anyway, I have been thinking of what I would like to fill my gap year with and teaching in South America seems to be a strong option, a friend recommended Chile and now I have discovered that there are teaching positions in the port city of Valparaiso. Amongst my notes from the exhibition I have scribbled next to the annotation 'Valparaiso School', 'If only I could go to South America!'. Somehow all of this now seems to be prophetic coincidence, I have a forgotten motivation for travels in South America.

Remember to click on the images for a larger view!

'the relationship between public space and collective life' was the idea that struck me, the Valparaiso School used architecture to create spaces which encouraged a particular kind of lifestyle. An artistic Utopialand was made possible through the aesthetics of everyday life. Valparaiso thinking lives by the maxim that an artistic philosophy can inform a way of life.

The 'poetic acts' which are recorded in two of these images suggest that the experience and activity of humans leaves a visual and artistic trace. That everything which man might do is an act of artistic creation. The marked sand records the journey of the people in celebration of the inauguration, but the school took this idea further producing contraptions which would purposefully leave an artistic mark behind.

Here we find art which has its own geography and topography, it occupies and manifests itself in physical space rather than just visual form. It has is its own immanence within 'place' and landscape. The emerging forms of modern architecture in South America were professing and selling a lifestyle. Drifts and Derivations was a brilliant exhibition, a window in to concepts, movements and ideas. Perhaps I will choose to apply for teaching positions in Valparaiso, and sit in town squares dreaming that I am living the architect's and the artist's vision.

Awesome Beauty

Of all art forms perhaps our exposure to architecture is the most subconscious and the easiest to ignore. One day somebody tells you that Giles Gilbert Scott designed your university library and suddenly you see connections, the development of a legacy which up until that point you had absolutely ignored.

A picture of the Cambridge University library from the Telegraph website. Few people agree with me, but when I am inside I feel like I am in a great naval ship, climbing green-steel staircases in to the depths of its labyrinthine underbelly. I can see why people are intimidated by this building, as a copyright library it holds (or at least has to access to) every book ever printed in the UK. The classification system has descended in to a chaos of algorithms and there are hundreds of books you have to request. However if you have a real, deep passion for anything, the UL has the means of satisfying it. I have spent hours looking through hand-printed books from the St. Dominics, Golden Cockerel and Ditchling Presses or tracing a finger over the inky signature of an idol. But this is all a little off topic, the contents of the library have distracted me!

Building immense structures that embody the wasteland of industrialised England, Gilbert Scott's architectural creations are distinctive and strikingly recognisable. Filling landscapes and devastating them with their power; the Tate Modern, Battersea Power station, Liverpool Cathedral are just a few. All of these buildings would have been inconceivable once, but as plumes of smoke rise in to the air and the Thames is filled with freight ships, these structures rise out of the contemporary imagination.

A picture of the Tate Modern from the Tate website. This emptied/converted factory carries the perfect message about the movement of Modern art and its reclamation and re-designing of the past. The Tate's vast, echoing Turbine Hall is a space designed for experiments and confrontations.

On a train journey to West Dulwich I tried to steal photographs of the iconic Battersea Power Station through the windows as we passed. This is one of the nuclear photographs I captured before rushing away. Borrowed by Pink Floyd for their album cover, the power station still remains deserted, an awesome shell on the London landscape.

While doing a little research for this post I discovered that Liverpool Cathedral is also one of Scott's masterpieces. When I was at school I put together a small sketchbook of churches, cathedrals and religious architecture for an art project. Greedily absorbing interiors and exteriors as I travelled. Liverpool Cathedral was one of those marvellous discoveries you accidentally stumble upon, I remember dragging my dad in to see it after we passed it in the car.

Gilbert Scott's buildings are contemporary icons, you could dismiss them as ugly, but for me they have an awesome beauty comparable to that fear or the modern, ever-changing world.