Juan Pablo ASCHNER | Associate Professor Director - DEARQ Journal Department of Architecture Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia jaschner@uniandes.edu.co
Abstract
The following paper explores phenomena underlying the meaning of primordial space. It aims to cast some light on certain fundamental aspects of the origins of architecture and rock art that lie concealed or that remain at an unconscious level within contemporary disciplinary practices and experiences of built environments. The narration focuses on two notions that are apparently antithetical: the cabin and the cavern, and that are respectively associated with tectonic and stereotomic systems. The text examines their respective meanings, the phenomena that characterize their spatial properties and their possible durability and readability in recent architectural manifestations.
By means of an interdisciplinary approach, the text falls between the analytic and the literary, in the hope to reenact, through reverie, a current and argued interpretation of the meaning of primordial space.
Key words: Cabin, cavern, primordial space, tectonics, stereotomics, rock art
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
14 Fig. 1: Bison composed of red dots. Grotte Chauvet (Ardèche), France. Aurignacian or Early Gravettian. Taken from: (White 2003, 60).1
Part 1
The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
We know what is outside us from the animal’s face alone: since we already turn
the young child round and make it look
backwards at what is settled, not that openness that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.
We alone see that: the free creature has its progress always behind it,
and God before it, and when it moves, it moves in eternity, as streams do.
We never have pure space in front of us, not for a single day, such as flowers open endlessly into.
Rilke, “The eighth Duino elegy2
1 White, Randall. Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).
2 Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
15 When I think about the cabin from inside the cave my imagination fills with images of brightly lit spaces within an enclosed interior. I realize that the cave resembles the world at night, or a bladder insufflated by an unfamiliar substance. In this gloomy medium, the atmosphere is densely packed; its irregular walls exhibit evocations of the living, and the floor exposes remains of the dead—together they form a microcosmic cavern.
I head outside to where I can unveil the images of those beings that once provided us sustenance by observing those that have endured. The remembrance of the bison that once grazed these fields manifests in the domestic bull; despite the domesticity of this new image, it is preferable to the precedent, that savage and obscure vision of the past, which is as uncertain and turbid as a vision of the future. Since the primitive bison is gone and has left its remnant halo in its domesticated offspring, the animal I now see is not the same as it was but is rather a manifestation of an ever changing or transitive animal. Now that I have seen the bull I may go beyond its image to arrive to that of the bison that is found in the essence of the bull. The bull that I have seen grazing is midway between the primitive bison and the promissory bison that is about to leave my cranial interior through the act of painting.
I lead the vision of the bison towards the interior of the cave—using my head as a receptacle—
and once inside, I expel this vision through the synchronized movement of my hand and the ebb and flow of my breathing. The spectra of those beings that have given us sustenance enter the cave just as a cup leads water to our mouths, quenching our thirst. The bison abandons the envelope of my brain and adheres to the walls of the cave, withdrawing from me as a bull would do while grazing in the field. The resulting painting is not that of the ruminant dweller of my mind, or of the bull in the fields, and even less of the vision of the bison crouching within the essence of the bull. For it is true that from the periphery of this mouth that is the cave the painting of a new bison emerges, and it reveals itself in all its splendor in a drawing in a cave, as a new word lies hidden in a mouth about to open. Painting and speech, cave and mouth come together to engender myths and to enhance the blind narratives of the night. The painted cavern resembles a socket where an eye that had seen great things previously dwelled, or it resembles a skull that once sheltered somber ideas. And so the bison emerges only to fade away untouched by sunlight into the cave that is as round and hollow as an echo. But the reverberation of the image of the bison, once thought to mediate between two simultaneous worlds, now bonds the dreams of human beings from the distant past and from the immediate present, and our ephemeral and dancing shadows converge with the long lasting and static spectra in the cave.
Somewhere between my mind and the bison a sieve is found through which thought transits as it becomes dots and lines. A common and universal grid emerges when dreaming and imagining—
while awake or watching—and mediates between the animal found outside and the one in my mind. In the midst of this becoming of art, a blurry, transient spectrum made out of dots and lines emerges. The animal in movement, once gone, also leaves behind dots and lines.
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
16 Fig. 2: ―tectiform designs, El Castillo cavern, Spain. Final Perigordian. Taken from:
(Varagnac 1959, 131)1
In this “sketch” of the world for the free subject, the cosmetic is the anticipation of the cosmic. The beautiful is not here a quality, intrinsic or extrinsic, subjective or objective, it is more than a quality. Indeed, it constitutes the status and very being of the subject which forms itself and which presents itself in order to (re)present for itself a world of phenomena.
Nancy, “The sublime offering”, p. 312
The bison approaches, is seen, and then parts. To take possession of this image, I transport it to my head and then into the cave, favoring my mind and abandoning my body just as I abandoned the outside. After periods of abstraction, in which I feverishly enjoy the surrounding penumbra, I once again come out to be bewildered by the glaring exterior light; dazzled, I see dots and lines.
Eclipsing the animal, the glare deposes the penumbra and forges, in that encounter of my warm hand with the cold stone, an impression of the animal that I remembered. I fear, though, that the true bison withdraws. The animal moves at great speed towards a world that is unknown to me, and I am eager to follow it, to go after it, to become it in dreams. Painting involves following something that flees. That which I paint has as much of myself as of that which I chase, and it also invokes that which I wish my imagination to overcome. Art is hunting, and from hunting emerges the feeling that reveals the reality of the insatiable hunger of art.
1 Varagnac, André. L'homme avant l'écriture. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1959).
2 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The sublime offering” in Rodolphe Gasche and Mark C.Taylor, ed., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993) 25-53
17 Fig. 3: Large bison in the Grotte Chauvet, France, dated to 30,360 ± 570 B.P. Photo by J.
Clottes. Taken from: (Clottes 2002, 36)1
I must grasp at that which moves in haste. The cavern is a closed hand firmly seizing us like a fist.
We lay in its wrinkled palm that is completely furrowed by the plow of time. In order to retain the animal, as the cave holds me, I mentally move to where the bison would be while the bison in my mind transmutes. When I do find the bison, it is different from the one I visualized while searching.
It gives me the impression of something reduced by its flight to an array of lines and dots. Half way between reality and its imagined becoming, this precarious ensemble of graphic indications of the bison establishes a consensus between that which I desired and its realization. Once painted, I can infer from it the plausible existence of another bison or bull that was unable to manifest itself.
Reality, when strained through a sieve or when it traverses a threshold, generally becomes a mesh of lines and dots. In its transit towards imagination the thick parts are separated from the subtle parts of reality as though it passed through a sifter. This rigorous selection also happens when imaginary phenomena desire to touch or lightly touch the surface of reality. When entering or leaving the cavern, or when opening our eyes in complete darkness, we sift the world and weave an image with what remains from the sifting. In the cavern reality is ultimately abstracted and abstraction is performed ritually.
1 Clottes, Jean. World rock art. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2002).
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
18 Fig. 4: Red and black silhouettes of human hands, some with missing fingers, painted on cave wall, either by direct spitting or by blowing paint through a tube. Grotte de Gargas (Haute-Garonne), France. Photo: A. Roussot Taken from: (White 2003, 14).1
Fig. 5: hunting scene at Lascaux (Dordogne), France. Magdalenian. Photo by Hans Hinz Taken from: (White 2003, 101).2
1 White, Randall. Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).
2 White, Randall. Prehistoric art: the symbolic journey of humankind. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003).
19 Part 2
(…)this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? Melville, Moby Dick, p. 554.1
One of the plausible yet antithetical things that may be visualized from within the cavern is the cabin; much in the same way that it may be possible to think “Adam” after the previous thought of “Eve”. Architecture results from the fertile and fruitful encounter of these two archetypal and primordial spaces. However, architecture has fallen from the paradise projected by this encounter because primordial ideas have remained deeply concealed in materialization. Yet we can still imagine the essence of the cabin in the cavern; we visualize more lines than dots in its constitution. We have, on the one hand, a given cavity of stone and water, and on the other hand, a proposed idea of a skeleton of wood and fire. The thought of the cabin is akin to seeing our own bodies lacking all its flesh and skin. The cavern is skin for our flesh; the thought of flesh for our skin, and being able to mentally deprive this enclosed space of its cover, may bring us to conceive a hut or skeleton. We can foresee what we will all become with death. It may be that with time the cabin will supplant the cave just as the mesh has supplanted the variable spectra of shadows, or just as our skeleton outlasts our flesh.
A tree is uprooted, dismembered, and led into the cave so that it may be consumed by fire. From being a vital, organic and humid entity it turns into an arrangement of inert, straight and dry logs.
It is difficult for the organic to be kept alive when entering the stony milieu of the cave. Losing life or trading it for another sort of existence is common, when crossing the path that leads art from its preexistence in nature to its unnatural abstraction. Through this path, art unveils the peremptory secrets of nature. A tree trunk, for example, will become a column, or a rib, which is a part of Adam—the symbolic equivalent of the cabin— will become Eve —the symbolic equivalent of the cave—. In the presence of a skeleton we may conceive, through imagination, the thought of flesh and skin. And upon the entrance of the tree trunk to the cave we may perceive a penetration of the linear that may influence a thought or dream: from within we may imagine an outside where trunks superimpose. The possibility of a cabin is concealed within a pile of logs waiting for the fire. In the cabin sunlight filters through the slits left between the superimposed
1 Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. (New York: Norton, 2002).
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
20 logs. The cabin, unlike the cave, belongs more to reality than to the realm of dreams because the environment is filtered with greater ease through this human creation. In the cavern the phenomena that inform the surroundings are unable to enter unless they are transmuted. There is a tendency of silence in the cave, and as we abandon silence and perceive greater light and sound we are figuratively replacing the closeness of the cavern for the openness of the cabin. And so we do not experience imagination as a thumb exerting pressure on our thought, but instead as a fingernail scratching it.
How old is the cave? Penumbra provides evidences of its petrified and mineral time drilled and set apart from the vital cycles of organic matter. In the cabin space is witness to the fleeting transit of time; wood ages, molds, dries, rots or catches fire. The cabin is of another time than that of the cavern, a time where a halo of torches, caught in the reiteration of rites, has left an indelible print on the stone. In the cave, bison move with the flames. They come to life heated by the domesticated fire. Before art existed torches had been rubbed against the walls of caverns. In the shadows, neglected by the flames and because of distorted light, humans saw, in the irregularities of stone, the surging of beings resembling those outside. But in the cabin fire must tread carefully.
A longing arson pursues the creation and destruction of the cabin. We have passed from digging the world in the cave to the weaving of the cabin in the world.
Fig. 6: Interior of cabin in Samoa Islands, Polynesia. Taken from: (Guidoni 1977, 206).1
1 Guidoni, Enrico. Arquitectura primitiva. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1977).
21 In the cabin there is clarity of sound and accuracy of features and gestures, and therefore this primordial space celebrates the singularity of each phenomenon and being in the world under the vivifying sky. In contrast, in the cavern there is a vagueness of hearing and a penumbra that amalgamates, which stimulate the cohesion of phenomena and beings in a magma that consolidates itself through isolation. The cavern tends to blur the crisp distinctness that the cabin stimulates. This underworld is a supernatural world. While large herds of bison roam the steppes accustomed to the harsh cold, the cave presents itself as a possibility of physical stillness, mental movement, and warmth. Sheltered in the cave and as a result of the domestication of fire human beings have been able to give birth to art, yet art has been unearthed. If the cavern invokes the outside, the cabin convokes the outside. A mind that is a receptacle and dwelling place of abstraction behaves like a cave. Abstraction in art demands estrangement from the exterior and involvement with the interior. The experience of the cavern may be reenacted by closing our eyes, entering into the night or imagining the night; but even into this exercise the outside is able to penetrate, just as the cool wind, the sound of insects, or the wetness of rain penetrates space. In the cave there is fear for the distant and uncertain and in the cabin there is fear for that which is close and certain; we evoke the cave from the cabin, sometimes with yearning and other times with disdain. In our minds lies an immemorial cavern that is the work of telluric forces that overcome us. The cavern that certainly was not created by us, that preceded us, can once again welcome us within its womb. In the cabin, vulnerable to fire, we recreate a cave for fire in the chimney. In the chimney the cabins of our imagination are burned.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. Yeats. The Lake Isle of Innisfree. P. 391
Through the cabin we return to nature in order to distance ourselves from it through its
1 Yeats, William Butler. The collected poems of W.B. Yeats. (New York: Macmillan, 1956).
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning
22 contemplation. Glaciers melt and human beings are able to abandon the caves and move toward the woods. They no longer require stone dens in a possibly more benevolent world. Art will also return to the world from which it came. Embodied in culture, art can now be made of clay, bones, stones and wood. Straight and stiff elements are needed to serve as prostheses for our organic flaws. The tectonic shelter emerges from the cave as the possibility of a cabin. If in the cavern our dreams and memories were found immersed in a hazy magma, in the cabin they occupy vessels that float on torrents charged with all that we hear and feel as we sleep. The awakenings dissipate dreams, sunlight burns them like lumber set afire and the wind disperses them as seeds over barren fields. The cabin is the architecture of reality, materially ephemeral, while the cavern is the
22 contemplation. Glaciers melt and human beings are able to abandon the caves and move toward the woods. They no longer require stone dens in a possibly more benevolent world. Art will also return to the world from which it came. Embodied in culture, art can now be made of clay, bones, stones and wood. Straight and stiff elements are needed to serve as prostheses for our organic flaws. The tectonic shelter emerges from the cave as the possibility of a cabin. If in the cavern our dreams and memories were found immersed in a hazy magma, in the cabin they occupy vessels that float on torrents charged with all that we hear and feel as we sleep. The awakenings dissipate dreams, sunlight burns them like lumber set afire and the wind disperses them as seeds over barren fields. The cabin is the architecture of reality, materially ephemeral, while the cavern is the