Pyramids, Christmas Trees, and Cathedrals

The following was written by Dawie Coetzee, an architect from Cape Town, South Africa.

It occurred to me a while ago that the predominant movement of mind involved in

modernist design is that of magnification; that is, of conceptualizing

a very small object and then proposing that it be produced at a much

bigger size. The modernist preoccupation with simplicity really lends

itself to the practice of building scale models, especially models at

a very small scale; except that the model itself becomes the end

product of the design process, and the final building a mere

representation thereof. The modernist designer strives to produce

buildings that are magnified-scale models of architectural maquettes.

I might conjecture that the unwitting cause of this tendency is the

association of the maquette with the design professions, and the

consequent implication that a building that looks like a big model

does so because it was designed by an architect rather than a farmer

or military engineer, and moreover by the sort of architect who is

conscious enough of design to take the trouble to build scale models.

The result of this quest for glamour and prestige is that it

transfers the product from the realm of practical (or indeed any

other) consideration to that of the aesthetic. The more obvious the

hand of the designer, the greater the demand that the work be judged

as art and only as art. It is an effect that lies at the root of

current "designerism", with all its implications of labels and the

commodification of thought, through to third-world labour conditions,

etc., in that the intellectual or "artistic" origins are emphasized

to the exclusion of the physical or practical origins of things. (It

is as if physicians were invited to consider their patients' coughs

only in terms of timing, cadence, delivery, finish, and not in terms

of what might be diagnosed from them. I can see a circle of doctors

at a bedside, politely applauding every so often and trying to appear

very suave to one another.) It goes far in explaining the elaborate

chronolatrous shrug that is the characteristic gesture of the design

professions, ludicrously fashion-conscious as they are, today.

It arises, of course, from the desire of people to be thought

superior to their neighbours, that is, from the Deadly Sin of Pride.

It is therefore not surprising that we find the most graphic example

of the magnification so typical of modernist design, though

historically removed from modernism, in the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

It is quite reasonable to say that no tomb has any business being

that big, not even the tomb of an extremely important person; but

that is not quite the point. The point is that a pyramid is really

much too small to serve as a tomb for anything larger than a Jelly-

Baby (I trust that the rest of the world also knows that disturbingly

sarcophagus-shaped sweetmeat). In fact, divorced from any empirical

experience of scale, a pyramid is barely big enough to serve as a

coffin for a Jelly-Baby. Think about a pyramid, and it should be

quite obvious that it ought to be about two and a half inches tall.

What heinousness of pride did it not require to build pyramids of the

size the Pharaohs built?

The result of this inflated simplicity is a sort of inscrutability,

the implication that the Pharaohs were up to something far

too "advanced" for common folk to understand, an implication that

should be familiar to anyone exposed to architecture-as-art. As

cultural artifact or, if you wish, as cultural artifact roughly

triangular in elevation, I am wont to contrast to the pyramid the

Christmas tree. As inscrutable as is the pyramid, so immediately is a

Christmas tree understandable to any child. And because it is thus

understandable by those His disciples thought unworthy of approaching

our Lord, but of whom He said, "suffer little children, and forbid

them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven", a

Christmas tree is of very little use as an expression of "good taste"

and cultural superiority. Indeed, if one's Christmas tree is not a

paragon of "bad taste", being garish, vulgar, and obvious, one isn't

doing it right.

If it is possible to translate the innocent fascination that anyone

who is honest with themselves finds in a Christmas tree into

architecture, it is achieved in the Gothic cathedral. The same wealth

of busy sparkle, which invites our sustained alert gaze, is found in

the interior of the Sainte Chapelle at Paris, for instance. But there

is another aspect that renders what A W N Pugin called "pointed or

Christian architecture" the perfect antithesis of the pyramid: for

all their vastness, one cannot escape the idea that the great

cathedrals ought to be even greater; that they have been mercifully

scaled down for our benefit.

I think there are two factors that bring this about. First, where the

tendency of the modernist and the pyramid-builder, and indeed the

Classicist, is towards magnification, the medieval impulse is towards

multiplication. Gothic elements have a proper size in relation to the

human body, and cannot be enlarged and reduced arbitrarily. If one

needs to build a bigger building it is necessary to use a greater

number of elements rather than the same number of bigger elements.

Consequently, the bigger the building, the greater the complexity,

the result of which is that the individual elements appear smaller in

proportion to the composite. And because we relate the elements to

ourselves both by absolute size and by proportion, the result is an

impression of immensity reduced.

Second, and in apparent contradiction with the first, is the medieval

practice of "micro-architecture", in which rood screens appear as

miniature west façades and reliquaries as miniature basilicas. I do

not believe the contradiction to be real: it indicates a sensitivity

to scale that is ever conscious of the proper sizes of things, even

when things are presented at another size. Thus, if a reliquary can

imply a proper size greater than its actual size, cannot a cathedral

do the same?

"Micro-architecture" is perhaps an extreme example of the tendency

that medieval architecture has of throwing up little bits of order in

unexpected places: little pockets of symmetry disposed asymmetrically

in relation to one another. Such distribution of order is thoroughly

Distributist in spirit. If there might be such a thing as a

Distributist architecture, I suggest that it would be difficult to

achieve except by consideration of medieval architecture. What say

you?

Dawie Coetzee