The Symbolic Sources of Some Architectural Elements

Abstract

SYMBOLIC interpretations of architectural forms and elements have properly become generally suspect, chiefly owing to periodic outbursts in the last twenty or thirty years of random bright ideas, inspired usually by toopopular psychoanalytic theses. Architectural historians might understandably reject the very possibility of symbolism almost sight-unseen after reading, for example, a solemn asseveration that the nave of a Gothic cathedral represents the womb of the Virgin. Moreover, behind such rather recently engendered suspicions of symbolic architectural interpretations there are also widely established materialistic and evolutionary assumptions which have been influential in architectural history for some three-quarters of a century. In this mode of thinking the dome, for instance, may be explained as originating in the natural roof of a reed hut, which presumably would have been roughly hemispherical, or by others in the beehive form of primitive mud huts. Then from this proposed initiation by material and technical circumstances, the historian's imagination reconstructs the dome's subsequent gradual evolution, entirely in terms of building problems. This is an application of the Marxian theory of history: determinism by economic conditions, in the inclusive sense of available resources, current skills and practical needs; and like all applications of this dogma, it represents a partial truth rendered false by overexpansion. In the creative activities of evolved human beings, material possibilities do not exercise the tyranny of cause, but only condition, more or less, the execution of purpose. Even more fallacious is the modernist promotion of the Marxian formula from cause to norm, the attempt to substitute for architectural design mere structure in terms of technical and functional minima. This exaggeration of Marxian categories, which has become a creed in some of the most intensely anti-Marxist centers, is, by an odd anomaly, repudiated today in the very kingdom of Marxism, the U.S.S.R. An historian equally free of pseudo-psychoanalytic fancies and of Marxian prepossessions (conscious or subconscious) will look for origins of architectural forms in the total complex of cultural matrices from which they emerged, and thereby will come to realise that certain basic architectural factors go back in origin and, to a greater or lesser degree, in development, to periods in which symbolism was a fundamental technique of practical thinking. Not only were the scheme and values of life patterned according to a mythic theory of the universe and its origins, but functions and facts were construed to accord with the current picture of the cosmos. Symbolism was a kind of insurance: success depended on cosmic conformity, and this held for architecture as it did for agriculture, medicine and the hazards of travel and trade. This architectural symbolism was, therefore, not arbitrary or individual; it was controlled by an extensive coherent and mandatory system of ideas. Symbolic architectural forms were only one of many expressions of the very grammar and syntax of life. The primitive cosmic speculations which determined the original symbolic architectural elements were a spontaneous product of the most elementary type of intellection, analogical thinking, aimed at solving Man's abiding primary problems-first sustaining, then expanding and enriching life. Only a substantial volume can trace the whole story from its faintly visible opening in megalithic culture (perhaps earlier), down through the ages and across the world; but meanwhile, a summary may, even at the risk of seeming unsubstantiated, somewhat counteract present anti-symbolic prejudices. Man bestirred himself to proto-scientific, pre-philosophic thinking in order, first, to eat. As a start he had to recognise the relation of plant growth to weather and water, whether provided directly as rain, or less directly from melting snows or the rise of rivers. This involved recognising and timing the seasonal cycle. Sky observations, both day and night, afforded the only measures for annual time as they had for diurnal time, and also gradually gave some PHYLLIS ACKERMAN, Professor of Cultural History, The Asia Institute, was trained in philosophy. She applies just as rigorous an approach in examining problems of iconography.