Building and the Terror

of Time

KARSTEN HARRIES

I

BUILDING HAS BEEN UNDERSTOOD to be a domestication of space.

To domesticate space is to tame it, to construct boundaries that wrest place from space. Such construction receives its measure from our need to control

the environment. Control should not be understood here too narrowly: it is

not just a matter of creating an artificial environment that offers protection

against an often unfriendly world; as important as physical control is psy-

chological control. Inquiry into the origin of architecture leads thus not only to the need for shelter, but also to the need to control space through sym- bols. It is homelessness that lets man build; the terror of space provokes him to creation. Joseph Rykwert's claim that the biblical description of

paradise is incomplete in that it has nothing to say about a house must

therefore be rejected. In paradise man was at home and knew his place; in

that bounded garden there was no need for a house. Only the fall, which

cast man out of paradise and forced him to toil on cursed ground, brought with it the necessity of building. Human work now had to remedy the

deficiencies of nature. Only now did space require domestication. Building had to furnish Ersatz for what man had lost. Every house may be consid-

ered an attempted recovery of some paradise. Talk of architecture establishing place by the construction of bounda-

ries in space suggests a quite traditional distinction between arts of space and arts of time, between formative and expressive arts. The distinction has

a certain obviousness; yet our experience of space and our experience of

time are too intertwined to allow us simply to accept it. Thus, if we can

speak of architecture as a defense against the terror of space, we must also

recognize that from the very beginning it has provided defenses against the

terror of time. A history of architecture could be written using this as its

guiding thread. The following remarks are first notes toward such a history.

Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, Volume 19

0079-0958/82/190058-12 $03.00/0

59

-l

_!. . -

raS - i- C

"The Tower of Babel," c. 1564

Pieter Breugel the Elder (1528-1569)

Museum Boymans-van , e u ,Rotterdam

"The Tower of Ba1~ bel, c;.16

Museum Boymarts-van Beuningen, Rotterdam

58

HARRIES

"Saturn Devouring his Children"

Francisco Goya (1746-1828) Museo del Prado, Madrid

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The

World as Will and Representa-

tion, tr. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 1,

p. 37.

2. Gaston Bachelard, The Po-

etics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas

(Boston: Beacon, 1969),

p. 91.

3. Frank Lloyd Wright, The

Natural House (New York:

New American Library, 1970),

p. 32.

II IN GENESIS WE READ THAT MAN ATE of the tree of knowledge, but

not of that of life. The condition of fallen humanity is shadowed by death.

Not only is man vulnerable and mortal, but he knows of his mortality, knows

that all that now is and all that still awaits him will some day be past. And

so will everything that he might leave behind: children, friends, works. The

past will overtake every present. "Man consciously draws every hour nearer

his death; and at times this makes life a precarious business, even to the

man who has not already recognized this character of constant annihilation

in the whole of life itself. Mainly on this account, man has philosophies and

religions."' Schopenhauer could have added art and, more especially, architecture.

Shelter promises protection from time's terror. To feel sheltered is to have banished feelings of vulnerability and mortality. Bachelard appeals to the way an animal finds protection in its hole or burrow: "Well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the creature endowed

with a sense of refuge huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies

snug, concealed."2 Or consider Frank Lloyd Wright's celebration of "the

integral fireplace." Wright speaks of being comforted by "the fire burning deep in the solid masonry of the house itself."3 His houses were built to

grant such a sense of comfort.

We all know similar comforts and architectural devices that promise them. But we demand to be sheltered in a stronger sense. Franz Kafka's never completed story "Der Bau," which can be translated either as 'The Burrow" or "The Building," helps to remind us of this. Kafka tells the story of an animal-we are not told what kind of an animal-which, to secure

itself, constructs an elaborate den; yet in spite of all its efforts it never suc- ceeds in making itself feel secure. Suspected dangers outstrip whatever defenses the animal can construct. Unable to possess the world, it tries to withdraw into its artificial environment. It intends to replace nature with artful construction. But the threatening outside cannot be eliminated. The

reasoning animal of the story is, of course, a figure for man, whose anxious

anticipation of what may threaten him leads to frantic building and plan- ning. Yet the results can never satisfy what is demanded. Technology and construction increase rather than diminish the terror of time.4

4. See Walter Biemel,

Philosophische Analysen zur

Kunst der Gegenwart (The

Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,

1969), pp. 95 ff.

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HARRIES

III How CAN ARCHITECTURE BANISH the terror of time? Bachelard

suggests that we comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.

Buildings grant such comfort to the extent that they are experienced as

repetitions of enclosures linked to memories of untroubled living. To speak of memories is to imply that paradise is more than just a dream, that be-

ing at home is more basic than homelessness. Challenging thinkers like

Heidegger, Bachelard insists that "life begins well, it begins enclosed,

protected, all warm in the bosom of the house." But is Bachelard's oneiric

house more than the product of dreams born of the terror of time? Is it also

a house we remember? This is, however, not to question the claim that

deeply rooted in our being are dreams of an original being-at-home, of the

original, the essential house, which personal and cultural experience will

schematize in ever different ways. Remembered houses receive their aura

from this first house. So does a house we build or just move into. "After we

are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come

back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the

way all Immemorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness."" What is recalled is thus not simply the past, but an idealized past over

which time has no power and which so fuses with the present that it

redeems it, too, from the tyranny of time.

In related fashion "primitive" cultures have tended to interpret human

building as a repetition of divine building, of the cosmogony. Cosmos im-

plies order that assigns to man and to things their proper places. The

interpretation of what is as constituting a cosmos allows the individual to

feel at home in the world. Building can help to establish or to reinforce

such interpretation; a building that presents itself as an imitation of divine

building can claim to give temporal existence its proper measure and foun-

dation. Construction rites invite such readings, helping to endow the

builder's work with an aura of reliability. The ground of such reliability is

sought in a reality untouched by the ravages of time in which the conse-

crated building participates. "A 'new era' opens with the building of every house. Every construction is an absolute beginning; that is, tends to restore

the instant, the plenitude of a present that contains no trace of history." Linear time and its before and after lose their power. A higher reality becomes present in the building in a way that lifts the burden of time. "In

the last analysis, what we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes

is the will to devaluate time. . . . Like the mystic, like the religious man in

general, the primitive lives in a continual present. (And it is in this sense

that the religious man may be said to be a 'primitive'; he repeats the ges- tures of another, and through his repetition, lives always in an atemporal

"The Garden of Earthly Delights," 1503-04 Detail of right wing of triptych, "Hell"

Hieronymus Bosch (1462-1516) Museo del Prado, Madrid

5. Bachelard, p. 7.

6. Bachelard, pp. 5-6.

7. Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and

History (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p. 76.

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HARRIES

8. Ibid., pp. 85-86. present.)"8 Once again dwelling is understood as repetition. Primitive ar-

chitecture invites such repetition by claiming to be itself a repetition. The

traditional symbolism of temple, church, or house, whi j tablishes a par- ticular building as a repetition of some divine arc t those wor-

shipping or dwelling in it participate in a t Isac!etypalattern.

IV '/ai ONLY TO T;]/ ), have remained "primitive" and

continue to under ou fd4as part of a timeless order that assigns both place and ne an existence, can we still call on such

symbols to defeat th'trerror of time. Our reason has to stumble over sugges- tions of a reconciliation of time and eternity, of a dwelling that is both in

time and yet unburdened by time, timeless, eternal. Must reason not deny us the comfort derived from dreams of a return to the land of Motionless

Childhood, of myth and fairy tale? Are the "fixations of happiness" that

claim to illuminate life not sources of a false light? Is the turn to a reality

beyond time not in fact a flight from reality, a turn to illusion? But reason,

too, dreams of homecoming and of a home not subject to time. What we can

call perennial Platonism is the attempt to discover in the atemporal reality of the spirit a refuge from the terror of time. Think of Le Corbusier's fable of

the origin of building: his primitive builder insists on simple geometric

forms. They are to endow what he builds with that aura of reliability that

seems to protect against time.

We still experience the power of such forms. Take two lines: one

dashed off, restless, resembling handwriting; the other a circle, constructed

with the aid of a compass. The two stand in very different relationships to

time. The former has directionality; we can speak of a beginning and an

end. The latter gestures beyond time; in its self-sufficient presence it comes

as close as a visible form can to the timeless realm of the spirit. Essentially the same contrast is established by the facades of two churches of the South

German rococo: the almost songlike beauty of the one associates, while the "A Primitive Temple" from

Vers Une Architecture, 1927

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)

62

??/r\

MARRIES

simple geometry of the other dissociates, beauty and time. The latter places us on the threshold of neo-classicism, which represents a return to Plato-

nism. That passage from the Philebus, from which more than one modern

artist has drawn rhetorical support, comes to mind:

I do not mean by beauty ofform such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid

figures which areformed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and

measurers of angles;for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like

other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful, and they have

peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the pleasure of scratching. And there are

colors which are of the same character, and have similar pleasures . 9. Plato, Philebus 51.

Our fascination with the organic beauty of animals and the beauty of

pictures or imitations is contrasted with the peculiar pleasure we take in the

beauty of inorganic, geometric forms. Their beauty belongs to the spirit, not

to the body, which in its creation is likely to prove a hindrance: try to draw

a circle or make a sphere-the hand will need aids, such as a compass or

more complicated tools.

Plato helps us to understand the perennial appeal of such bloodless

beauty. In the Symposium, which has determined the course of much subse-

quent aesthetic speculation, beauty is defined as the object of eros. Man is

said to be fundamentally an erotic being because he exists in time, yet he

belongs to and desires being. Desiring, yet lacking being, we are haunted

by dreams of a plenitude, a satisfaction that our present temporal situation

must deny us; by dreams of an escape from time. Beauty promises an

answer to such dreams. When overwhelmed by the insistent presence of the

beautiful, we remember our true home, are reminded that we really belong to being rather than to becoming. According to Plato, man is essentially

spirit, and the spirit is not subject to time. Time cannot touch man's

essence. Given this ascetic Platonic aesthetic, the language of beauty is the

language of a timeless reality in which the spirit feels at home because it is

of the spirit. To create a beautiful object is to link time and eternity; to

construct a beautiful building is to help make man's dwelling a repetition of

a more essential being-at-home, denied to him by his body, which subjects him to time. That the embodied self cannot take comfort in such beauty is

evident. It dreams of a home in time, demands the redemption rather than

the devaluation of temporal reality. The facade of Maria Steinbach hints at

such redemption. Pilgrimage Church of Maria Steinbach, 1750

Maria Steinbach, Germany architect unknown

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HARRIES

Parish Church of St. Vitus, 1768

Egling, Germany Franz Anton Kirchgrabner

10. Schopenhauer, p. 196.

11. Michael Fried, "Art and

Objecthood," in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 136,

145, 147.

V

THE ARCHAIC WILL TO DEVALUATE TIME reappears transformed as

the artist's will to create works strong enough to still time. The key to the

profound pleasures of the beautiful has thus long been sought in its power to

render time unimportant by recalling us to a reality that transcends time, by

presenting epiphanies of true being. Few today would be willing to accept

the identification of Plato's timeless forms with true being. If the human

spirit feels at home with geometric forms, is it not because it has created

them? Alberti thus called Narcissus the inventor of painting. Faced with a

hostile world, the artist finds solace in a narcissistic preoccupation with his

own self and its power to escape the tyranny of time.

Such a view is implicit in Kant's determination of the beautiful as the

object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. Interest is necessarily di-

rected to the future, shadowed by the terror of time. Only the disinterested

person will experience what presents itself to him as a plenitude. As Kant

points out, part of such an experience is indifference to the existence of a

particular object. Schopenhauer suggests that to aesthetic perception it does

not matter whether it is this tree that is seen or its precursor that bloomed a

thousand years ago. Past and present appear to fuse. "We celebrate the

Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still."'0

Michael Fried aligns himself and modernity with what is essentially the

same view when he suggests that the authentic art of our time strives for

presentness, where presentness is understood to require that the artist

create objects that defeat their own objecthood through the strength of their

shape. "It is as though one's experience [of modernist painting and sculp-

ture] has no duration-not because one in fact experiences a picture by

Noland or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all,

but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest." Once again

what is sought is redemption from the terror of time. In Fried's words:

"Presentness is grace.""

While Fried's discussion focuses on what he terms "modernist" paint-

ing and sculpture, he insists that it be extended to all the other arts. But

what would it mean for architecture to defeat or suspend "its own object-

hood through the medium of shape"? Would a modernist architecture not

have to be an architecture that through the strength of its pictorial or

sculptural form suspends itself as a structure to be entered and explored?

An architecture that for the sake of presentness renders itself uninhab-

itable? To the extent that we understand aesthetic experience not as rec-

ollection of a timeless reality, but as an experience that is as if it had no

duration, beauty will have to be at odds with the requirements of dwelling.

On this modernist view the beautiful lifts us out of the life world, out of

64

HARRIES

reality, carries us to a man-made paradise that, like every paradise, has no

need for a house. Man now turns to beauty not to illuminate temporal reality so that he might feel more at home in it, but to be relieved of it: to abolish

time within time, if only for a time.

"The Enigma of the Hour," 1912

Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) Gianni Mattioli Foundation, Milan, Italy

VI THAT SUCH A MODERNIST CONCEPTION OF BEAUTY must lead to

dreams of an uninhabitable architecture is apparent. With Schopenhauer a

look of uninhabitability becomes thus a mark of the beauty of a building.

Consider the following passage:

Above all else, the beautiful in architecture is enhanced by the favour of light, and through it even the most insignificant thing becomes a beautiful object. Now if in the depth of winter, when the whole of nature is frozen and stiff, we

see the rays of the setting sun reflected in masses of stone, where they illumi-

nate without warming, and are thus favorable only to the purest kind of

knowledge, not to the will, then the contemplation of the beautiful effect of

light on these masses moves us into a state of pure knowing, as all beauty does .12 12. Schopenhauer, p. 203.

Giorgio de Chirico was to make of such descriptions a recipe, a recipe,

however, not for building, but for painting. This is no accident: beauty, as it

65

MARRIES

"Man and Woman in the Cathedral," 1955-56

David Smith (1906-1965) Gift of Mrs. Frederick W. Hiles

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

is here understood, invites the transformation of architecture into painting; that is to say, it demands its de-realization. On such a view all beautiful

architecture is picturesque in a sense that remains related to, but goes far

beyond, what has traditionally been called the picturesque in architecture.

At issue is the transformation of architecture into a merely aesthetic pres-

ence, a transformation that at least since the eighteenth century has fasci-

nated architects, sculptors, and painters.

Just as de Chirico repainted what is fundamentally the same picture over and over, so he liked to retell what is essentially the same experience. The following account is characteristic:

I remember a vivid winters day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned

supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then

I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window pos- sessed a spirit, an unpenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes,

motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which

pours down on us without love, like perfect song. A bird was warbling in a

window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men

to create certain strange forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators.13

I am not interested here in de Chirico, but in what by now has become

a quite common kind of revelation. Its occasion may be three American

flags strangely visible and forlorn in the evening sky above the New Haven

Green or the back of Sterling Memorial Library transfigured by a late sun

into a moving presence. It is not difficult to come up with similar examples.

Especially significant in the cited texts is the celebration of isolation and,

associated with it, of the dissociation of light and love, of light and life. The

rays of the winter sun are frozen, as is the land they illuminate. Schopen- hauer adds the claim that architecture, illuminated by loveless light, moves

us as all beauty does. If we accept this, we have more than just examples of

a particular and strange kind of aesthetic experience. Rather, we are led to

the very essence of the aesthetic. By implication, this means that aesthetic

sensitivity is inseparable from a certain morbidity, a Schopenhauerian tae-

dium vitae, and from an inability-or is it an unwillingness?-to love, which welcomes the cool clarity of loveless light. Or is Schopenhauer inter-

preting the essence of beauty in terms of his own personal, or perhaps

cultural, perspective? Is it necessary to think that beauty is in fundamental

opposition to time?

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HARRIES

VII MICHAEL FRIED WOULD NO DOUBT OBJECT to my association of

what he terms modernist art with de Chirico, whom he mentions among those artists whose preoccupation with time lets them become theatrical and

places them in opposition to modernist sensibility. I wonder, however,

whether an artist or a critic who seeks grace in presentness is not also

preoccupied with time. In this connection it is interesting to compare Fried's

use of presentness with that of Robert Morris, who is criticized by Fried for

his theatrical literalism. Unlike Fried, Morris emphasizes the temporality of

aesthetic experience and of the art work. "What I want to bring together for

my model of 'presentness' is the intimate inseparability of the experience of

physical space and that of an ongoing immediate present. Real space is not

experienced except in real time. The body is in motion, the eyes make

endless movements at varying focal distances, fixing on innumerable static

or moving images. Location and point of view are constantly shifting at the

apex of time's flow."' Like Fried, Morris wants to suspend or defeat the

objecthood of the object, but this move beyond the object would appear to

lead in a very different direction. While Fried would let the strength of the

object's shape defeat its objecthood, Morris wants to return the object to

space and time. "Anytime the object has become specific, dense, articu-

lated, and self-contained, it has already succeeded in removing itself from

space. It has only various visual aspects: from this side or that, close up or

farther away."L" Since real space, as Morris points out, is not experienced except in

real time, this also means that the work-of-art-become-object has removed

itself from time. The more self-contained the object the better it succeeds in

defeating the terror of time. One could point out that as long as an object is

experienced in a particular situation, as one thing among other things,

including the observer, this defeat must remain incomplete. If this is right, Fried's celebration of presentness may be understood as a call for a more

rigorous attack on the terror of time, in which, to gain victory, one must be

willing to pay the price of reality. When Morris speaks of presentness, on

the other hand, he seems to envision an art that challenges the denseness of

objects in order to open to us the mystery of space and time. The connec-

tion between this mystery and the enigmas that fascinated de Chirico is

apparent. Fried is right to link the two.

13. Giorgio de Chirico, "Mys-

tery and Creation," Theories

of Modern Art, ed. Herschel

B. Chipp (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of Califor-

nia, 1969), p. 402.

14. Robert Morris, "The

Present Tense of Space," Art

in America, January/February

1978, p. 70.

15. Ibid., p. 73.

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HARRIES

Given his attempt to open objects to space, Morris's fascination with

ruins comes as no surprise.

16. Ibid., p. 76.

"Untitled," installation of wood

and mirrors, 1977

Robert Morris

The Portland Center for the Visual Arts,

Portland, Oregon

Approached with no reverence or historical awe, ruins are frequently excep- tional spaces of unusual complexity which offer unique relations between

access and barrier, the open and the closed, the diagonal and the horizontal,

ground plane and wall. Such are not to be found in structures that have

escaped the twin entropic assaults of nature and the vandal. It is unfortunate that all great ruins have been so desecrated by the photograph, so reduced to

banal image, and thereby so fraught with sentimentalizing historical awe.

But whether the gigantic voids of the Baths of Caracalla or the tight cham-

bers and varying levels of Mesa Verde, such places occupy a zone which is

neither strictly a collection of objects nor an architectural space.'

This return from ideally self-sufficient, timeless objects to space and time

puts into question any view of architecture as the domestication of space. Intended is not so much a domestication as a liberation of space, and this

means, also, of time. The terror of time, it would seem, is awakened rather

than banished.

The built ruin is the most obvious counterimage to an architecture that

seeks to defeat the terror of time with comforting images of permanence. The decision to build a ruin or to give to buildings a ruinous look betrays a

crisis of confidence in the architect's ability to provide shelter. Such ruins

offer occasions for reflections on the vanity of human building and the sub-

lime power of nature. Human construction here appears to surrender itself

to space and time. Something very much like this can also be said of Robert

Morris's creations. I would suggest the following analogy: the presentness

sought by Fried is to that sought by Morris as the beautiful is to the sub-

lime. And just as Fried can appeal to Kant to support his understanding of

modernism, so can Morris, although a different section of the Critique of

Judgment becomes appropriate: the "Analytic of the Sublime."

No more than Kant's understanding of the beautiful does his under-

standing of the sublime lead to an inhabitable architecture. Morris wants

not the comforts of enclosed and domesticated space, but masses that

appear on the verge of "sliding out into space," returning us to the mys-

tery of the presencing of things, in which the experiencing self is always

copresent. Domestication of space implies a domestication of self. The

presencing of things, which is at the same time their continual "sliding out

into space," lets the self return home, not to a home in space, in the world,

but home to its essentially free and homeless self. That self is not subject to

time and calmly contemplates its terror.

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HARRIES

VIII WILLING POWER, WE YET LACK POWER; demanding security, we

yet know about the fundamental precariousness of our existence. Unable to

make our peace with time, we also cannot make peace with ourselves for we

cannot dissociate time from our embodied existence. Nietzsche seems to me

right when he points to "the spirit of revenge," which he defines as "the

will's ill will against time and its 'it was,"' as the deepest source of our self-

alienation. The history of aesthetic speculation testifies to that spirit, grow-

ing in intensity as man finds it more and more difficult to interpret Nature as

his home and takes it upon himself to defeat the terror of time with his own

constructions. To use a more traditional vocabulary: The dream of the en-

gineer or the artist as god, able to deliver us from the terror of time, is a

dream born of pride. It is with good reason that the Bible places building in

an ambiguous light. Cain, condemned to be "a fugitive and a wanderer on

the earth," is said to have built the first city; but the heavenly Jerusalem,

too, is a city. The Tower of Babel is the archetype of all structures raised by

pride to guard against the dispersal threatened by space and time. Consider

Bruegel's painting: attempting to dominate space and time, the vast tower

testifies to man's power, but also to his impotence and to the terror of time.

Even as building continues, what has already been built decays and returns

to landscape-Kafka's building animal comes to mind. The tower is, how-

ever, not the only architecture in the painting: there is also the much less

ambitious architecture of the surrounding city. Against the tower itself mod-

est shelters nestle much as buildings may nestle against some city wall or

church in a medieval city. Here we have, not monuments, but buildings that

speak of a very different, less antagonistic relationship to time. They hint at

possibilities of dwelling born of a trust deeper than pride. Such trust

demands determinations of beauty and building that do not place them in

essential opposition to time.

"Le Desert de Retz," 1782

La Maison de M. de Monville

A Chambourcy, France

69