Professional Documents
Culture Documents
of
the
Terror
Time
KARSTEN
HARRIES
I
BUILDING
to be a domestication
of space.
59
-l
raSi-
Boymans-van
Museum
_!.
eu
,Rotterdam
,
"The Tower
ofBa1~
bel, c;.16
HARRIES
I
IN GENESIS
60
but
HARRIES
III
How
CAN
ARCHITECTURE
BANISH
"Hell"
5. Bachelard, p. 7.
6. Bachelard, pp. 5-6.
7. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and
History (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959), p. 76.
is the will to devaluate time. . . . Like the mystic, like the religious man in
61
HARRIES
IV
'/ai
TO T;]/
??/r\
62
forms. They are to endow what he builds with that aura of reliability that
seems to protect against time.
We still experience the power of such forms. Take two lines: one
dashed off, restless, resembling handwriting;the other a circle, constructed
with the aid of a compass. The two stand in very differentrelationships to
time. The formerhas directionality;we can speak of a beginning and an
end. The latter gestures beyond time; in its self-sufficientpresence it comes
as close as a visible form can to the timeless realm of the spirit. Essentially
the same contrast is established by the facades of two churches of the South
German rococo: the almost songlike beauty of the one associates, while the
MARRIES
simple geometry of the other dissociates, beauty and time. The latter places
us on the threshold of neo-classicism, which represents a returnto Platonism. That passage from the Philebus, from which more than one modern
artist has drawn rhetoricalsupport, comes to mind:
I do not mean by beauty ofform such beauty as that of animals or pictures,
which the many would supposeto be my meaning; but, says the argument,
understandme to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid
figures which areformed out of them by turning-lathesand rulersand
measurersof angles;for these I affirmto be not only relativelybeautiful, like
other things, but they are eternally and absolutelybeautiful, and they have
peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasure of scratching.And there are
colors which are of the same character,and have similar pleasures.
Our fascination with the organic beauty of animals and the beauty of
pictures or imitations is contrastedwith the peculiar pleasure we take in the
beauty of inorganic, geometric forms. Their beauty belongs to the spirit, not
to the body, which in its creation is likely to prove a hindrance:try to draw
a circle or make a sphere-the hand will need aids, such as a compass or
more complicated tools.
Plato helps us to understandthe perennial appeal of such bloodless
beauty. In the Symposium,which has determined the course of much subsequent aesthetic speculation, beauty is defined as the object of eros. Man is
said to be fundamentallyan erotic being because he exists in time, yet he
belongs to and desires being. Desiring, yet lacking being, we are haunted
by dreams of a plenitude, a satisfactionthat our present temporalsituation
must deny us; by dreams of an escape from time. Beauty promises an
answer to such dreams. When overwhelmedby the insistent presence of the
beautiful, we rememberour true home, are reminded that we really belong
to being ratherthan to becoming. According to Plato, man is essentially
spirit, and the spirit is not subject to time. Time cannot touch man's
essence. Given this ascetic Platonic aesthetic, the language of beauty is the
language of a timeless reality in which the spirit feels at home because it is
of the spirit. To create a beautiful object is to link time and eternity; to
construct a beautiful building is to help make man'sdwelling a repetition of
a more essential being-at-home, denied to him by his body, which subjects
him to time. That the embodied self cannot take comfortin such beauty is
evident. It dreams of a home in time, demands the redemptionratherthan
the devaluation of temporalreality.The facade of MariaSteinbach hints at
such redemption.
Pilgrimage Church of Maria Steinbach, 1750
Maria Steinbach, Germany
architect unknown
63
HARRIES
V
THE ARCHAIC
WILL TO DEVALUATE
as
the artist's will to create works strong enough to still time. The key to the
profound pleasures of the beautiful has thus long been sought in its power to
render time unimportant by recalling us to a reality that transcends time, by
presenting epiphanies of true being. Few today would be willing to accept
the identification of Plato's timeless forms with true being. If the human
spirit feels at home with geometric forms, is it not because it has created
64
them? Alberti thus called Narcissus the inventor of painting. Faced with a
hostile world, the artist finds solace in a narcissistic preoccupation with his
own self and its power to escape the tyranny of time.
Such a view is implicit in Kant's determination of the beautiful as the
object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. Interest is necessarily directed to the future, shadowed by the terror of time. Only the disinterested
person will experience what presents itself to him as a plenitude. As Kant
points out, part of such an experience is indifference to the existence of a
particular object. Schopenhauer suggests that to aesthetic perception it does
not matter whether it is this tree that is seen or its precursor that bloomed a
thousand years ago. Past and present appear to fuse. "We celebrate the
Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still."'0
Michael Fried aligns himself and modernity with what is essentially the
same view when he suggests that the authentic art of our time strives for
presentness, where presentness is understood to require that the artist
create objects that defeat their own objecthood through the strength of their
shape. "It is as though one's experience [of modernist painting and sculpture] has no duration-not because one in fact experiences a picture by
Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all,
but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest." Once again
what is sought is redemption from the terror of time. In Fried's words:
"Presentness is grace.""
While Fried's discussion focuses on what he terms "modernist" painting and sculpture, he insists that it be extended to all the other arts. But
what would it mean for architecture to defeat or suspend "its own objecthood through the medium of shape"? Would a modernist architecture not
have to be an architecture that through the strength of its pictorial or
sculptural form suspends itself as a structure to be entered and explored?
An architecture that for the sake of presentness renders itself uninhabitable? To the extent that we understand aesthetic experience not as recollection of a timeless reality, but as an experience that is as if it had no
duration, beauty will have to be at odds with the requirements of dwelling.
On this modernist view the beautiful lifts us out of the life world, out of
HARRIES
VI
THAT
SUCH
A MODERNIST
CONCEPTION
OF BEAUTY
must lead to
65
MARRIES
66
HARRIES
VII
MICHAEL
FRIED
WOULD
NO DOUBT
OBJECT
to my association
of
January/February
1978, p. 70.
67
HARRIES
68
Approachedwith no reverenceor historicalawe, ruins arefrequently exceptional spaces of unusual complexitywhich offerunique relations between
access and barrier,the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal,
groundplane and wall. Such are not to befound in structuresthat have
escaped the twin entropicassaults of nature and the vandal. It is unfortunate
that all great ruins have been so desecratedby the photograph, so reducedto
banal image, and therebysofraught with sentimentalizinghistorical awe.
But whetherthe gigantic voids of the Baths of Caracalla or the tight chambersand varying levels of Mesa Verde,such places occupya zone which is
neitherstrictlya collection of objectsnor an architecturalspace.'
This returnfrom ideally self-sufficient, timeless objects to space and time
puts into question any view of architectureas the domesticationof space.
Intended is not so much a domesticationas a liberationof space, and this
means, also, of time. The terrorof time, it would seem, is awakened rather
than banished.
The built ruin is the most obvious counterimageto an architecturethat
seeks to defeat the terrorof time with comfortingimages of permanence.
The decision to build a ruin or to give to buildings a ruinous look betrays a
crisis of confidence in the architect'sability to provide shelter. Such ruins
offer occasions for reflections on the vanity of human building and the sublime power of nature. Human constructionhere appears to surrenderitself
to space and time. Somethingvery much like this can also be said of Robert
Morris'screations. I would suggest the following analogy:the presentness
sought by Fried is to that sought by Morrisas the beautiful is to the sublime. And just as Fried can appeal to Kant to support his understandingof
modernism, so can Morris, althougha differentsection of the Critiqueof
Judgment becomes appropriate:the "Analyticof the Sublime."
No more than Kant'sunderstandingof the beautiful does his understanding of the sublime lead to an inhabitable architecture. Morriswants
not the comfortsof enclosed and domesticated space, but masses that
appear on the verge of "sliding out into space," returningus to the mystery of the presencing of things, in which the experiencing self is always
copresent. Domesticationof space implies a domesticationof self. The
presencing of things, which is at the same time their continual "sliding out
into space," lets the self returnhome, not to a home in space, in the world,
but home to its essentially free and homeless self. That self is not subject to
time and calmly contemplates its terror.
HARRIES
VIII
WILLING
POWER,
WE YET
LACK
POWER;
demanding
security, we
69