This past week while in Memphis visiting my family I was pleased as punch to again have the opportunity to give a presentation on Architecture and Church History to Seventh Graders at a nearby Catholic school. Last year I did the same, only via video-conferencing. No matter what they tell you, there’s still no technology quite like the real thing of a classroom.
Anywho, the presentation went well, but I came nowhere near finishing in 45 minutes. Afterwards, (because in Seventh Grade, when the bell rings… the bell rings) I was able to stay and visit with the majority of each of the Church History classes that day (broken into 5 blocks). Each class had its particular interests, questions and enthusiasm for various aspects of architecture and history, but what stuck around in my mind at the end of the day was the ensuing conversation we had about a question one of the students asked…
You see, I started out talking about the Greeks—everything seems to go back to the Greeks, for better or for worse. I noted in the presentation that Greek temples like the Parthenon exhibit a slight (or sometimes rather pronounced), but clearly calculated, curvature on their surfaces (columns, stylobate, etc.). This is called “entasis”. Now, I was taught that entasis was used to ‘correct’ what the Greeks observed to be an optical illusion: that straight lines, depending on thus and such, can appear to the eye to be curved concavely. As a remedy, the Greeks, so I learned, designed a slight convex curve into their stylobates and columns. Likewise, elements placed together at regular interval can appear unevenly spaced at their ends and so the Greeks corrected this by actually spacing the last two columns closer together at the end of a colonnade… and so on and so on—extensive geometric proportions and mathematics were clearly integral in the design of Greek architecture. Furthermore, the Parthenon is situated on the Acropolis in such a manner that when viewed from the Propylaea it can be observed from the ‘perfect’ perspective such that the depth of the building and the width appear equal despite their obvious difference. Suffice it to say, the Greeks were highly interested in precision, detail and hardly noticeable effects.
Why? That was the question the student asked. Why was this so important to them? Well, I suppose we can only conjecture, in the end, as to why these seemingly insignificant things ‘mattered’ so much to the Greeks. It seemed, someone observed, that the Greeks were a bit OCD (obsessive compulsive, that is, not Discalced Carmelites). My answer was, OK, we can think about it that way… but there’s bound to be a lesson in all of this. Turns out, the lesson I found was that of “Why is architecture, art, beauty, anything like it, important anyway?” And what better question to ask at what better place than here?
My answer was simple, but I still stick by it: the Greek’s so-labeled obsession with ‘getting it right’ might be taken in several ways, but I chose to point out that their emphasis on entasis (1) gave an insight into what was most important to them. Greek philosophy, namely Plato, gave us the One, the Good and the True… the transcendentals, the ‘attributes’ of God… to which we can add beauty because, as St. Thomas Aquinas will direct us, that which is good is pleasing to ‘apprehend’ (i.e., behold, see, hear, experience) and thus beautiful. Now, beauty is a heavily-charged word, but at this point all we need to hang onto is that beauty is related to the transcendentals—those things which we seem to be able to legitimately say that God is. (God is one, God is good, God is true… and likewise, God is beautiful.)
All of this means, for the ancients, beauty was of the gods, beauty was something for the gods. What appears to our modern minds as OCD-piety was likely to be seen by them as the appropriate reverence due toward all things divine. In other words, entasis matters because the gods matter. The art (music, poetry, great literature, sculpture, architecture, etc.) of a culture tells you what is important to that culture. That’s a no-brainer, I know.
Now, art is important—it is intrinsically human (but, for an interesting discussion, read this)—and it expresses the deepest desires, fears, hopes, dreams and values of a person, a community, or an entire society. Thus, that which we do as artists, as imitators of the one true Creator, is fundamental to what it means to be who we are and to express that and develop in understanding that. It seems right, meet, and just, in fact, that we might be so interested in the intricacies of the things that we do.
Just as ornamentation, in many ways, has been seen as superfluous in the past century-or-so, we can look back at the detail of the ancients and think “wow!” or “why?” or we can say “Why not?” I question and struggle with my modernist training that says ornamentation is anathema. I see that the modernists had their own obsession for straight lines and perfect curves, perfectly aligning window shades and soffit corners. But I’ve also visited a few Modernist buildings—one of my preferred Modernists, Rudolf Schindler and his King’s Road House come to mind—and they are imperfect. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater leaks like a sieve, Corbu’s Villa Savoye was a nightmare in a rainstorm, and the King’s Road House couldn’t keep an ice cube warm in the winter time it has so many cracks and gaps and holes. Their detail is different, but it is ornamentation in its own right.
After all, a bird can make a nest, a termite can build a mound, a gopher can burrow a hole, an ant can dig a tunnel, but only man can build a monument, sculpt a gargoyle, paint a battle scene, make a movie about aliens, or sing an anthem to the abstract concept of a nation or a god. God, I am beginning to believe, truly is in the details. Perhaps not in the way that the die-hard modernist might say, but rather, because detail, intricacy, even superfluousness, is at the heart of humanness. Ornamentation and all the trappings of human life that can appear to be ‘ornamental’, ‘traditional’, or ‘excessive’ speak precisely to what it means to be human: to be able to contemplate the ‘extras’—and by ‘extra’ I mean what goes beyond our daily bread, what goes beyond bread and circus, what goes beyond commuting, texting, and drinking, what goes beyond simply functioning, and into thinking, believing, laughing, praying, and loving.
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(1) That’s right, I just rhymed using the word ‘entasis’.
