{\rtf1\mac\ansicpg10000\cocoartf824\cocoasubrtf440 {\fonttbl\f0\froman\fcharset77 TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT;\f1\froman\fcharset77 TimesNewRomanPSMT;} {\colortbl;\red255\green255\blue255;} \paperw11899\paperh16839\margl1440\margr1440\vieww10120\viewh14480\viewkind0 \pard\tx565\tx1133\tx1700\tx2266\tx2832\tx3401\tx3967\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6235\tx6802\qc \f0\b\fs32 \cf0 \ Nold Egenter \ -- \fs28 Dialogues into Architectural Anthropology -- \fs36 \ \f1\b0\fs24 ______________________________________________________________________________\ \f0\b\fs36 \ MAD ROOTS: \ THE IONIAN COLUMN\ \f1\b0\fs24 \ ______________________________________________________________________________\ \ \pard\tx565\tx1133\tx1700\tx2266\tx2832\tx3401\tx3967\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6235\tx6802\ql\qnatural \cf0 --Hi. Nice to see you again.\ \ I have been in Berlin for some days. Was interesting. There is a tremendous energy in this city which can be felt.\ \ --I know. I was there about six months ago, but only a short time. Too short.\ \ What impressed me among other things was the Spree island.\ \ --You mean 'Spree-Athens' which they are about to reconstruct now?\ \ Yes, the museums-island. Gigantic. The Bode museum is already finished.\ \ --The Pergamon Museum is still under construction. I have read a report. Lots of problems. \ \ Here I got the prospectus: It took nearly 100 years to build all that, the 'New Museum' (1843-46), the 'National Gallery' with paintings of the 19th century (1862-65), the 'Bodemuseum' with mainly Byzantine art (1897-1904) and the Pergamon-Museum with a collection of mainly Greek antiquities (1904-30). \ \ --Important, maybe: The Pergamon-Museum was the first Architectural Museum of the world. \ \ And, horror story: At the end of the second world war all fell into ashes. \ \ --In some years from now, most of it should be - more or less - as it was. Absolutely crazy. The fascination for antiquities of the 19th century is going into resurrection. Prussian 'cultural property', once famous in Northern Europe.\ \ But, sincerely, one part of my mind is also very sceptical. To some extent it is fairly outdated, I think. What do we need this for? Do we not live in a quite different world today? We have technical problems, energy problems, social problems worldwide. What should we do with Greek gods? What with the Greek order of columns, their order or style, as Vitruvius described them in Roman times?\ \ --On one hand I agree. The Greeks are not the primordial fathers of reason for us anymore, the first enlightenment against the Near Eastern ancient religions as this was recently propagated in an article of the 'SPIEGEL' with much rhetoric efforts. On the other hand the Greeks can also be considered as our European gate towards the global human past.\ \ What? "Gate towards the global human past"? The Greeks? What do you mean with this?\ \ --Our consciousness of the origins of 'culture' is still strongly focussed on the early civilisations in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and the developments which evolved from there. They produced some sort of 'high culture pressure' towards the West, on the Greeks and Romans. Later on the rest of Europe. And further, we are influenced by the history that was built up on this civilisational platform. Taking civilisation as the beginning, its monumental architecture became impressive, its refined art, its luxurious social hierarchies, its impressive empires, its extensive use of script and its knowledge about history, its elaborated cults and religions with its world-creator gods etc.. All this 'sudden out of nothing' transmitted a high image of humans, of high intelligence, of quasi divine creativity, of artful inventiveness, and gifted with philosophical capacity and so on.\ \ Why do you mention all this? It is general knowledge, everybody is learning this at school.\ \ --Just let me finish my concept. \ \ Sorry, my "professor".\ \ --When later these peoples highly convinced of their high civilisational status came into contact with traditional scriptless populations, for instance the Romans in Northern Europe among the German tribes, they called them barbarians, made fun of them, tried to subjugate them, even bragged about how easy it was to put fire to their shabby straw huts as you can see on Trajan's triumphant column.\ \ It created a 'high and low' value system in regard to culture. A value system which goes on into our days. High religion, primitive religion. High art, primitive art. High economy, primitive economy. First world, third world. That is what you mean?\ \ --Yes, exactly. And this creates tremendous tensions. It is a tension which went on and on, and which goes on through our times. Today it has become a multidisciplinary and multicultural problem somehow, the tensions have become manifold and are everywhere, not only in religion and economy, but also in education, in the formation of one's life, in politics, etc.\ \ But can we change this in any ways?\ \ --I think so. It may even be that we have to, on the long run. We suddenly might find out HOW civilisation really evolved. And we might become aware that there were some wrong connections and spatial or temporal misinterpretations. That is one point. On the other we might suddenly understand, that these fictive historistic concepts lead to some sort of exaggerated activities threatening the whole globe with desasters, overheatings, etc.\ \ But, what to do?\ \ It is a matter of cognition. We must try to understand its immanent structure. It is mainly a problem how we interprete history. Particularly in regard to the Greeks and their relation to the Ancient Near East and Egypt, I can see some new path, or method in view of our understanding of cultural processes. With the recent German support of our knowledge of Greek Antiquity, new perspectives for a fairly deep reaching 'One World Theory' can be guessed. That is not an outdated story at all.\ \ One world theory? What do you mean with this?\ \ --As it was mentioned above, our understanding of culture is strongly related to the history of civilisations around the Mediterranean Sea. We consider this higher level of cultural history not only as our own origins, our own history, we consider its structure, its differentiation into religion, philosophy, art, politics, law etc. as generally valid and accept it, live it.\ \ This makes me curious. Where is your 'one world theory' finally in all this?\ \ --The Ionian column.\ \ The Ionian column?\ \ --Germany, in particular Berlin had a highly developed architecturo-archaeological research in the early thirties of the last century focused on the Ancient Near East, Egypt and ancient Greece. Its most important representative was Walter Andrae. With his research about the Ionian column as key figure, he had opened an immensely important new gate towards the Ancient Near East and Ancient Egypt, not only in regard to the monumental dimension of the early city and palace states, but also in regard to the deeper levels of the predynastic agrarian village cultures.\ \ And this can be understood as a step towards a 'one world theory' of culture?\ \ --Exactly. In the view of Andrae the Ionian column is not just an architectonic art form, it is a very complex pluridsciplinary form. Among the Greeks it was a load-supporting part of a building which was serving religious purposes, the Greek temple. Andrae has taken it out of this context and put it into the centre of an evolutionary theory, postulating it originally as a free standing sign and symbol and showing its close relation to Ancient Near Eastern gods, sacred symbols, including their territorial or imperial significance.\ \ Wow, this promises to become very interesting. The Ionian column, originally a deity?\ \ --Not only this. You know how the art historians dealt with the Ionian column explaining it - in sequence of Vitruvius - comparatively with the corinthian and doric 'orders' as some sort of style. In this framework a fairly fancy type of aesthetic terminology was applied to describe the forms of the columns. In addition this terminology implied the questionable artist-art-scheme, the columns were considered as an artist's imaginative creation. Regarding the corinthian column there is a sweet childish legend which explains the invention of the acanthus capital. It proves that the art historians remained stuck in a fairly naive type of reasoning about the history of art.\ \ It is evident, the old song of the capital, that is 'little head' and shaft with 'cannellura' having something to do with reed (note: the only indicator of the factual reality!). For the rest, pure phantasy terms like 'egg-staff', 'pearl-chain', 'torus' etc. Some sort of pseudo-theology of the Ionian column.\ \ --Exactly this was the essential content of the 19th century fascination with classical antiquities. Written history - which was very late already when it was written - provided the platform for what was considered 'truth'. Pure Middle-Age-historism-mentality! The descriptions of Vitruvius were more important than the vision of the object, more important than one's own reflection. But gradually scientific empirism is replacing this naive historism of the art historians.\ \ Aesthetic fascination was an important part of the veneration of classical antiquity. Note the numerous fairly similar archaeological documentations round the Mediterranean Sea. Rome and Winckelmann. All this has provided many historical sites which are vitalising tourism in our times, but in a sense of cultural theory they are no more of great significance today.\ \ --Right. It also shows how culture may fabricate limits of cognition through time-bound pseudo-authority.\ \ Nicely said.\ \ --Let us sum up: Andrae has reconstructed the past of the Ionian column quite differently than the history of art. Based on empirical research and formal comparison and interpreting it as an originally free standing symbol he put it into an evolutionary line which he supported with numerous similar symbols and freestanding stelae of the Ancient Near East and Egypt. A convincing line of development is the result which is finally focussed on the reed bundle sign of the deity Ishtar. Ishtar is at the same time the city deity of Uruk, that is the territorial representative of one of the earliest cities of the Ancient Near East.\ \ I remember vaguely. I think he has even found a detailed plate which shows very clearly that the deity was originally represented by a technically very clearly bound bundle of reeds.\ \ --Yes. He took it very seriously. It is evident, it was some sort of super-crimi-thing. Sincerely.\ \ Conclusion: the Ionian column had a precursor which was a) a deity and b) a reed bundle.\ \ --But, this should not be seen in the sense of primtivism. On the contrary. Reed was like gold, because it emphasised the temporal depth. On the other hand it implies: our modern science of religions should search more on the earth's surface. Human territorial behaviour was an important creator of worldview-values. Maybe Andrae's discovery is, for the theory of art and also for the theory of religion, as important as the discovery of the atom and the related energy.\ \ This implies first that art and religion are somehow closely related. And second, we find the earliest representant of the development in a highly multifunctional condition. It is a sign and prototype of writing as well as a symbol of a deity, and evidently this deity. And further being territorially representative for an early city, as some sort of 'nuclear border', it also has protective implications for this city.\ \ --Correct what you say: the original is not simple, banal, primitive, but highly complex. The simple bundle of reeds has a multidisciplinary complex character. If this is methodologically compared with the atom concept, this is not simply a gag. The whole field of research is similar like in the natural sciences. A primordial empirically objective element is found which allows to understand a lot in new ways. It can be compared to the 'element' in chemistry, or to the 'cell' or the 'gene' in biology. Man had an objective model to interprete the world.\ \ Wow. This is power.\ \ --Enormous power. Of course, similar methods were also used in positivism with social forms, for instance, regarding the term 'family' or economical organisations in relation to the way of life they implied. But this remained fairly vague, did not really touch the so called 'spiritual sciences'. However, that an object is researched over great periods of time in its formal and functional relations and at the same time as a mentally constituting element, this is unique in the humanities.\ \ But, what is the result?\ \ --Seen in the methodological context Andrae has formed a hypothesis which is eminently critical of the archaological method. Many monuments hewn in stone were very late forms. They had their origins in a significant and highly valued or sacred tradition of building or construction of objects, symbols, signs, a tradition - nota bene - which used fibrous plant materials.\ \ In the quantitative sense, unfortunately, only a small, secondary and insignificant tradition?\ \ --Not at all, just the contrary. It was a very large and heterogeneous tradition. In fact a 'soft prehistory'!\ \ That is to say a prehistory which does not show in the archaeological method?\ \ --Exactly. The objects are not durable, are only ephemeral. They soon rot away. If they are considered valuable, and if one wants to keep them through time, they have to be reproduced cyclically in formally stereotype ways. And this seems to have been an important principle of this 'soft prehistory'.\ \ In fact, this makes sense. It could explain why the deeper levels of for instance the predynastic village cultures of the Ancient Near East and Egypt archaeologically do not show any relevant traces. Huts and the whole technical equipment consisted of fibroconstructive objects, thus 'soft prehistory'.\ \ --Right, yes. But huge materials of things which evidently had also a spiritual meaning, like signs of gods, life trees, sanctuaries etc. have come down to us on secondary lines. Andrae and his followers like Heinrich have collected enormous materials related to this hypothesis.\ \ Secondary sources?\ \ --Yes. This means signs and symbols were represented on durable materials either in full plasticity or as relief or scratchings. They thus show clearly their constructive character as architecture in the wider sense as well as their sacred character being part of primitively formed sanctuaries on the cattlebreeder or agrarian level. Often, as in the case of the Ishtar-sign, also their territorial character is evident.\ \ I think I have seen this somewhere. It was the script sign for the Ishtar deity. At the same time it was present in very plastic forms connected with sacred huts in the heardsmen's environment.\ \ --Exactly. Andrae himself has provided such an example where he interpreted the Ishtar sign as the gate symbol of a herdsmen's sacred hut. On the other hand its sign character is clearly shown by archaeological documentations on the earliest Sumerian script (-> Langdon, Falkenstein). It consists of an enormous number of similar fibroconstructive signs, which were scratched into clay plates by priests of Uruk temples. They contain very clearly recognizable forms of goats heads and pots for oil and the like on one hand and heterogeneous fibroconstructive signs which can be interpreted as the specific markers indicating the farmers that have to pay the taxes. When dried and fired, the scratched plates formed the tax register in the central temple of the city. \ \ The earliest script consisted of plant bundles?\ \ --In a certain sense yes. They were the territorial occupation markers of these farmers. Evidently various plants were used and they were highly differentiated by heterogeneous plant materials. Very likely they were considered as local housegods.\ \ Not bad. Close relation between territory, art and religion!\ \ --The high values related to these simple things were due to the fact that they were very ancient and highly efficient. They had created a territorial order on which sedentary life with all its accumulations of products and goods had become possible.\ \ Religious values based on territorial protection?\ \ --I think so. Sedentary life with agrarian production and accumulation of goods was a revolutionary change along the line of cultural evolution.\ \ Enabled essentially by the Ionian column, or, cyclically renewed fibroconstructive demarcations.\ \ --That is it. Andrae tells us that the Ionian column can be taken as an objective tradition to understand the evolution of the human mind.\ \ Man had a structural model.\ \ --Maybe the earliest forms of this tradition were biologically vital.\ \ They were rooted in the ground? Plants still living?\ \ --Exactly. Very likely Bruno Taut, the German architect had his dreams of the 'living building' from such traditions. But this is just an idea.\ \ This implies that these signs must be terribly ancient.\ \ --Very likely they have a very deep history of production. This means that they were made as signs to indicate a path, thus showing only a very limited toposemantic indicator. This can be very early. The practice is also known among our biological predecessors. It appears that the hand was the first tool.\ \ Thus originally the signs were in close relation with spatial orientation.\ \ --I think so. In this sense they could be characterised as signs defining a place in space.\ \ Crazy! Toposemantic function? This remains an essential aspect of architecture until today!\ \ --Exactly. Tradition is something tremendously continuous. What has been formed as a tradition, having created a value, this is handed down conservatively. But there is another aspect which is important. From their earliest stage these signs could have produced a model of cognition.\ \ Philosophy? Theory of cognition?\ \ --Yes. It is well plausible. If such signs are made in natural circumstances, with one grip of the hand, with a small action of binding in an open meadow, something surprising results. The form turns automatically into some sort of a YinYang symbol, a 'coincidence of opposites' object. It shows contradicting categories like stability and movement, artefact and nature, geometry and protruding bush, all united in the same form.\ \ And this stands as a model at the beginning of the human world relation?\ \ --At the same time an elementary type of aesthetics is visible. A defined portion, the stable lower part and a PRO protruding in the upper part. All this is formed without any preconceived idea with a simple grip of the hand. The earliest 'happening' of tremendous consequences! Thus the form represents an elementary type of aesthetic, a formal (not just mathematical) type of PRO-portion, a primordial type of plasticism, of sculpture.\ \ Human cognition started with art, with aesthetics?\ \ --Many natural forms of this world are seen with a preconceived scheme. For instance the tree is usually percieved as a stable trunk in its lower part and a bushy top with protruding branches, twigs and leaves above. Think of children's drawings. It could well be possible that primary phases of human cognition happened in this way.\ \ Formula: O/A1 = O/A2. O/A1 implies the artificial form the perceiver is familiar with and O/A2 shows the natural form discovered through analogy.\ \ --Very good, your 'mathematics' describing the process of 'categorically polar analogies' as discovery of the world. This formula might have created the human brain in a fairly stressy history of discovery.\ \ Created the human brain? Are you mad?\ \ --But, try to think about: early humans had a model to structure the world. They lived in their open nature. And they had signs which could be put into this world with two or three grips of the hand. And in their every day life these signs had important practical meanings.\ \ Nutrition control? Indicating paths? They could be compared with natural forms of the environment?\ \ --If this were so, we could assume that from about 5 million years ago, the age of earliest hominids, such signs became increasingly important, maybe with increasing density around 2 million years ago (homo habilis), thus intensifying the history of our 'cognitive world-relation'. The 'YinYang age'! Or, based on the formula: 'the age of polar analogy'. Its stage of completion would probably parallel the beginnings of language, about 100'000 years ago, the age of 'homo sapiens sapiens'. Tripled size of brain! Seen in this framework the Ionian column would have conserved something which had been of enormous importance to humans, something which in fact founded their culture and enabled it to develop: formally tamed but clearly visible with its stable reed-shaft and its 'capital' of dynamically rolled reed-ears, it conserved the unity of two opposite categories within the same form. 'Coincidentia oppositorum'. Yin Yang! Tension! This column has preserved this principle through the times as harmonious basic structure, as contrast between the dynamically formed above, the ears, and the geometrically formed below, the reed bundle that had been hewn in stone! This tension has even kept into our modern times. In spite of its banal interpretation by the art historians, somehow its cultural value remained active and thus could diffuse the form through the Western half of the world. In the Western world we still find the Ionian column as a part of many buildings which represent high prestige and power.\ \ This is gigantic!\ \ --If you start to do research into this harmonious principle, you become aware that it is everywhere. It dominates art, all arts. Light and shade, above and below. "High and low sounds" in music (Heraclitus). "Heaven and earth"! It can explain why religion is still strong in spite of its antithesis, the sciences. With early formations of empires, that is with the horizontal increase of territorial surfaces from local village units to extended state dimensions, the primary empirically and aesthetically present polar relation of fibroconstructive or monumental deities were interpreted extensively in terms of vertical spatial dimensions. The microcosm's polar or aesthetic structure was projected into macrocosm. It can be called the Akhenaton syndrome. In this sense religion can be understood in new ways as an abstracted remembrance of the fibroconstructive primary form of the 'Ionian column'. Architecture too has developed the polar principle by using the complementarity of gates, doors, openings, windows and arcs, by the horizontal polarity of dynamic access and static place. Throne, court, theatre, concert halls, schools, all correspond to this arrangement. Here too the basic polarities were handed down within sacred architecture e.g. with altar and gate, vertically with human domain and heavenly vaults. It was philosophically vital in many cultures once and even today, as Yin-Yang symbolism and Daoism in Asia, as Om in India. As Ma'at it was found in Ancient Egypt. Heraclitus defended it among the Presocratic thinkers against unifying trends. Under the influence of analytical dissolution into idealistic and empirical lines of Plato and Aristotle we obtained metaphysics, religion, on one hand. And on the other side empirical knowlege, the natural sciences developed. The result was much later defined by Descartes as the great schism of occidental thought. In other words: human thought originally was aesthetically polar and in this sense was searching for the creation of a harmoniously unified world in the sense of the formula of categorically polar analogy: O/A1 = O/A2 = O/An.\ \ I know what you have in mind. Our knowledge, as scientific as it may be, is basically a schism of an originally aesthetic and harmonious worldview and thus remains human projection. Truth is out. No truth possible.\ \ --Not bad. The naive man who, seeing the YinYang symbol, wants to know what white is, what black is. But, it is even worse. We split the world. Mentally and materially. Slowly and quantitatively we are starting to become aware of the potential that the objective conditions of the world do not like our splitting mind to expand endlessly.\ \ Stop. Absolutely clear. I have understood the age-old One-world-teaching of the Ionian column. It makes sense 100 percent to rebuild Spree Athens in Berlin.\ \ --That is what I thought and what I think.\ \ Final conclusion?\ \ --Maybe the term 'architecture' should not be understood merely in the practical sense of 'design', it should increasingly also be used with the meaning of 'architectural research', in the sense of 'trying to understand the human meaning of architecture in its widest sense'. Maybe our brains are full of 'architecture'. Understanding this might shift the priorities of our human lives.\ \ Marvellous, maybe we should celebrate this, with a nice glass of Ouzo. Come on, there is a marvellous Greek bar around the corner. I will invite you.\ \ --Good idea. Let's go.\ \ \pard\tx565\tx1133\tx1700\tx2266\tx2832\tx3401\tx3967\tx4535\tx5102\tx5669\tx6235\tx6802\qc \cf0 ______________________________\ }