Philip Bess’s splendid essay provoked from me a series of semi-related thoughts, semi-related both to Bess’s essay and to one another. If I can counter-provoke Bess into expanding on or rejecting my amateur observations, I will be content.
1. I love Manhattan. In each of the past 15 years or so, I have spent at least one, often two, weekends in The City. I love the crush, the Park, the museums, the marvelous hole-in-the-wall restaurants I stumble on, the Jewish boys who accost me with “Are you a Jew?” and an offer of a Hanukah menorah. There are limits to my pleasure: Park Avenue and Broadway, yes; Times Square, not so much. I never tire of it, because The City never runs dry. Each time I visit, my inner Frank Sinatra belts away my little-town blues.
I love Manhattan’s buildings, not just the ethereal splendors of St. Patrick’s, St. John the Divine, and the hundreds of other churches, not just secular cathedrals like Grand Central, the Met, the Public Library, and other early twentieth-century wonders, but even the newer skyscrapers. Outside the Midtown hotel where I normally stay, I see high-rises topped with plant-filled balconies that put me in mind of Babylon’s fabled gardens. Even buildings that are, in themselves, cold, too-shiny and too-slick monuments of hubris cast shadows and reflect light and so contribute to an awe-inspiring urbanscape. I walk in wonder: How did they build that on that site, crowded as it is on all sides by looming giants? What miracles of plumbing and sewage are hidden in its depths? Much as I try to hide it, I always end up with my chin in the air, mouth agape, revealing myself to be just the Southern yokel I am.
My delight suffers twinges of conscience. Architecture exists for human habitation and activity, I remind myself, and so should be designed on a human scale. Human beings aren’t suited, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, for “creations of pure human will unmediated through natural circumstance.” Billionaire’s Row: That ain’t human scale. I worry I’ve been sucked in and shouldn’t be as enchanted as I am.
And then I hurriedly defend myself. Isn’t St. Patrick’s testimony to human ingenuity and ambition? And St. John the Divine? Of course, the builders wanted to give architectural expression to the majesty of God, but, golly, they sure made a name for themselves in the process. And don’t those spindles at the edge of Central Park represent an aspiration for what Bess calls “a kind of transcendent utopianism”? To O’Donovan’s point: Is it even possible to assert the human will in the design of places without attending to natural circumstance? We may willfully ignore the properties of glass, steel, stone and concrete, and the workings of gravity, but the result will be rubble.
We often hear that architecture should conform to the human scale, but what, after all is the scale of the human? We blast rocket ships to the moon, thousands fly daily from one corner of the planet to the other, and those who don’t travel connect instantaneously with one another. The new World Trade Center towers aren’t built to a human scale: Says who? – given that humans built them for other humans to inhabit (or use as a tax shelter). We can as easily say: This is precisely the scale at which human beings regularly operate.
To this we might add theological buttressing. God became man so that man might become God – Godlike, I submit, not only in holiness and virtue, but in the blossoming of creative capabilities exhibited in technical and artistic achievements. Or, as a gloss: God became man to restore man to the fullness of his Adamic vocation to fill and subdue the earth, glorifying the original Edenic garden into a cosmic garden-city. As Yahweh peered from a great distance at the city and tower on the plains of Shinar, He acknowledged the limitlessness of human potential: “This is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:6). If the Creator Himself marveled at what His greatest creature could construct, why can’t I? If God humbled Himself to exalt man above the angels to share in the Triune communion, what prevents us from building and admiring buildings that glorify man?
2. Then my conscience comes at me again, this time in the Finnish accents of Juhani Pallasmaa. In The Eyes of the Skin, his manifesto on architecture, Pallasmaa assaults the ocularcentrism of Western culture, the “hegemony of the eye” that developed in “parallel to the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.”
That’s not entirely accurate. The real problem is a narrowing of vision. Instead of attending to the full range of the eye’s operation, ocularcentric thought and art obsesses over focused vision: “Focused vision confronts us with the world,” as something set over-against us. Peripheral vision, though, places us in a three-dimensional world, of space around and behind: “The very essence of lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. . . . peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world.” Peripheral vision gives us the sense of inhabiting space.
This has profound implications for architecture. Modern architecture, guided by a dominant concern for focused vision and seduced by the “narcissistic eye,” treats buildings as “a means of self-expression, and as an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections.” Modernism and its stepchildren have produced stunning works of art, but they’ve failed to relate us to time and space, to give these basic coordinates of creation “a human measure,” to “domesticate” these created infinities “to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind.” Too many buildings are designed, Eileen Gray has written, for “the pleasure of the eye rather than the wellbeing of the inhabitants.” Modern buildings thus fail to fulfill the primary purpose of architecture: to carve out human places within the world. The achievements of modern architecture come at the cost of rootedness.
Pallasmaa’s argument covers much the same ground as my Manhattan meander, but with a crucial twist: He reminds me that my experience of Manhattan is that of a tourist, and my evaluation of The City’s architecture is almost entirely visual. After all, I’ve been inside very few of the buildings I pass; I’ve never lived in any of them for more than a few days at a time. The standard of architectural suitability is not merely whether it’s human but whether it’s humanly habitable.
3. Both of my musings culminate with a moral question: Humans can build towers to the clouds; ought they? There is, after all, no straight line from ability to obligation. That scientists can rearrange genes to produce designer babies is no argument at all that it’s good to do so. With architecture, though, I see no obvious boundary beyond-which-not. Stipulate that buildings should tell the truth about man: What sorts of buildings tell the truth of human grandeur without blasphemy? Only cathedrals?
We need an axiom or axioms other than “Build on a human scale” and a limit more specific than “Not willful.” But what axiom I cannot see. I suspect the question cannot be answered without expanding beyond buildings and the ocular to consider, as Philip Bess’s essay does so wonderfully, the ways of life a city encourages, and the ways of life it inhibits. I hope Bess will help me determine, once and for all, if my love for Manhattan is perverse.
Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis.
Philip Bess’s splendid essay provoked from me a series of semi-related thoughts, semi-related both to Bess’s essay and to one another. If I can counter-provoke Bess into expanding on or rejecting my amateur observations, I will be content.
1. I love Manhattan. In each of the past 15 years or so, I have spent at least one, often two, weekends in The City. I love the crush, the Park, the museums, the marvelous hole-in-the-wall restaurants I stumble on, the Jewish boys who accost me with “Are you a Jew?” and an offer of a Hanukah menorah. There are limits to my pleasure: Park Avenue and Broadway, yes; Times Square, not so much. I never tire of it, because The City never runs dry. Each time I visit, my inner Frank Sinatra belts away my little-town blues.
I love Manhattan’s buildings, not just the ethereal splendors of St. Patrick’s, St. John the Divine, and the hundreds of other churches, not just secular cathedrals like Grand Central, the Met, the Public Library, and other early twentieth-century wonders, but even the newer skyscrapers. Outside the Midtown hotel where I normally stay, I see high-rises topped with plant-filled balconies that put me in mind of Babylon’s fabled gardens. Even buildings that are, in themselves, cold, too-shiny and too-slick monuments of hubris cast shadows and reflect light and so contribute to an awe-inspiring urbanscape. I walk in wonder: How did they build that on that site, crowded as it is on all sides by looming giants? What miracles of plumbing and sewage are hidden in its depths? Much as I try to hide it, I always end up with my chin in the air, mouth agape, revealing myself to be just the Southern yokel I am.
My delight suffers twinges of conscience. Architecture exists for human habitation and activity, I remind myself, and so should be designed on a human scale. Human beings aren’t suited, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, for “creations of pure human will unmediated through natural circumstance.” Billionaire’s Row: That ain’t human scale. I worry I’ve been sucked in and shouldn’t be as enchanted as I am.
And then I hurriedly defend myself. Isn’t St. Patrick’s testimony to human ingenuity and ambition? And St. John the Divine? Of course, the builders wanted to give architectural expression to the majesty of God, but, golly, they sure made a name for themselves in the process. And don’t those spindles at the edge of Central Park represent an aspiration for what Bess calls “a kind of transcendent utopianism”? To O’Donovan’s point: Is it even possible to assert the human will in the design of places without attending to natural circumstance? We may willfully ignore the properties of glass, steel, stone and concrete, and the workings of gravity, but the result will be rubble.
We often hear that architecture should conform to the human scale, but what, after all is the scale of the human? We blast rocket ships to the moon, thousands fly daily from one corner of the planet to the other, and those who don’t travel connect instantaneously with one another. The new World Trade Center towers aren’t built to a human scale: Says who? – given that humans built them for other humans to inhabit (or use as a tax shelter). We can as easily say: This is precisely the scale at which human beings regularly operate.
To this we might add theological buttressing. God became man so that man might become God – Godlike, I submit, not only in holiness and virtue, but in the blossoming of creative capabilities exhibited in technical and artistic achievements. Or, as a gloss: God became man to restore man to the fullness of his Adamic vocation to fill and subdue the earth, glorifying the original Edenic garden into a cosmic garden-city. As Yahweh peered from a great distance at the city and tower on the plains of Shinar, He acknowledged the limitlessness of human potential: “This is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them” (Genesis 11:6). If the Creator Himself marveled at what His greatest creature could construct, why can’t I? If God humbled Himself to exalt man above the angels to share in the Triune communion, what prevents us from building and admiring buildings that glorify man?
2. Then my conscience comes at me again, this time in the Finnish accents of Juhani Pallasmaa. In The Eyes of the Skin, his manifesto on architecture, Pallasmaa assaults the ocularcentrism of Western culture, the “hegemony of the eye” that developed in “parallel to the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.”
That’s not entirely accurate. The real problem is a narrowing of vision. Instead of attending to the full range of the eye’s operation, ocularcentric thought and art obsesses over focused vision: “Focused vision confronts us with the world,” as something set over-against us. Peripheral vision, though, places us in a three-dimensional world, of space around and behind: “The very essence of lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. . . . peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world.” Peripheral vision gives us the sense of inhabiting space.
This has profound implications for architecture. Modern architecture, guided by a dominant concern for focused vision and seduced by the “narcissistic eye,” treats buildings as “a means of self-expression, and as an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections.” Modernism and its stepchildren have produced stunning works of art, but they’ve failed to relate us to time and space, to give these basic coordinates of creation “a human measure,” to “domesticate” these created infinities “to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind.” Too many buildings are designed, Eileen Gray has written, for “the pleasure of the eye rather than the wellbeing of the inhabitants.” Modern buildings thus fail to fulfill the primary purpose of architecture: to carve out human places within the world. The achievements of modern architecture come at the cost of rootedness.
Pallasmaa’s argument covers much the same ground as my Manhattan meander, but with a crucial twist: He reminds me that my experience of Manhattan is that of a tourist, and my evaluation of The City’s architecture is almost entirely visual. After all, I’ve been inside very few of the buildings I pass; I’ve never lived in any of them for more than a few days at a time. The standard of architectural suitability is not merely whether it’s human but whether it’s humanly habitable.
3. Both of my musings culminate with a moral question: Humans can build towers to the clouds; ought they? There is, after all, no straight line from ability to obligation. That scientists can rearrange genes to produce designer babies is no argument at all that it’s good to do so. With architecture, though, I see no obvious boundary beyond-which-not. Stipulate that buildings should tell the truth about man: What sorts of buildings tell the truth of human grandeur without blasphemy? Only cathedrals?
We need an axiom or axioms other than “Build on a human scale” and a limit more specific than “Not willful.” But what axiom I cannot see. I suspect the question cannot be answered without expanding beyond buildings and the ocular to consider, as Philip Bess’s essay does so wonderfully, the ways of life a city encourages, and the ways of life it inhibits. I hope Bess will help me determine, once and for all, if my love for Manhattan is perverse.
Peter Leithart is President of Theopolis.
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