The legacy of real architecture is that it can affirm aspects of sensibility that otherwise might lie fallow, unsuspected. Chartres draws into salience the faculty of awe that in our secular age might never be awakened. An eighteenth-century drawing room makes one aware of one’s innate dignity, which might easily be forgotten in the age of the mall. The correlation between architecture and interior life allow us to relive past visions by simply entering the architecture those visions produced.
In a similar way, there was for me a correlation between the architecture of my family history and my inner life. In both something was hidden. In the beautiful environment of the family past, there was a magnificent figure who had gone out of control in ways destructive to those on his course-including his family-and ultimately to himself. Behind my memories of a blissful childhood in a beautiful place, there were also destructive forces that were blind and out of control, but unacknowledged. Yet to this inner truth and all its ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of family history to me. It made my hidden experience resonate, and by so doing delivered to me a whole self.
The family architecture also taught me how short time is, how close the generations are, how powerfully lives reverberate down through the structure of family, deeply affecting each other. This is the other part of the imperative to go back into the architecture of time, for with our response to those reverberations, whether witting or unwitting, we in turn create the unseen structure within which our children must live.
….I designed a tour for myself of Stanford’s architecture. My cousin Pamela was interested too, and joined me. With a little over a quarter century separating us, we were the oldest and the youngest of Stanford’s great-granddaughters. As it happened we both had red hair, as Stanford did, though mine was partially grey by this time and Pamela’s was a strawberry blond, quite unlike Stanford’s chestnut. Even so, this redness underscored the cat’s cradle of inter-generational connection: the tightness of it and the physical reality of it.
We started on a June morning in the area of small streets in downtown Manhattan where Chinatown and Little Italy intermingle. On Grand Street, a modest thoroughfare with narrow sidewalks further narrowed by stands of fruit and exotic vegetables, we came upon the magnificent and monumental neoclassical façade of the Bowery Savings Bank. The bank, completed in 1895, was the first of the firm’s neoclassical works to come primarily from Stanford’s hand.
….Inside, the bank was a world in itsef. The gilded and coffered ceiling had a skylight at its centre, with panes of deep yellow glass…The freestanding columns were of ochre marble with red and black veins, and in combination with the skylight they gave the room a sombre golden glow. The volume of cubical interior was made semisolid by that glow.
…After we had taken in the attributes of the building, Pamela remembered that she needed money. Looking around, Pamela spotted a cash machine against a far wall, and she set out toward it. As I watched her walking away from me across the mosaic floor, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, no longer paying close attention to the aesthetic features of the architecture. In a sense, I was off guard and, suddenly, the old fear set in. That quality in Stanford’s interiors which had caused me to avoid them in the past enveloped me, like a perfume triggering an allergic reaction: a swelling in the chest near the throat, a pressure of tears behind the eyes-and, above all, fear. The source of the fear was the very geniality of the architecture; its delicacy, its glow, its enspelling seductiveness.
Immediately, Pamela’s vulnerability was appallingly apparent. She looked so white, soft, and trusting as she performed her pedestrian chore. In an emotional reflex of aversion I mentally pushed her away. Horrified by my impulse I then searched for its source. At first there was blankness only, erasing even the bank. Then, out of the depths of forgetfulness rose the scene in the dark behind the barn. It was not really even a scene; there was no mental image-just a visceral acknowledgement of something very bad happening in the dark. With this acknowledgement my aversion left me and instead I found myself working strenuously to bring that scene out of darkness into the bank-to have in one worlds the disparate realities of our family life.
Within the magnificent enclosure of the bank the scene behind the barn seemed almost nonexistent. Even the space behind the barn seemed two-dimensional, paper-thin, conceptual. It was difficult to conjure particulars of a moment in a place-leaves stirring, clouds passing in front of a moon-or to sense the solidity and contours of the ground, much less to see the spot as a part of geography, as a location coextensive with other locations that could be pinpointed on a map. It was difficult to see it as a spot that existed in a continuous time, so that you could say of it the next day, ‘This is the spot where such-and-such happened last night.’ In that two-dimensionality, it was especially difficult to imagine a whole body, lungs rising and falling, much less two bodies and violence.
So unreal in the family environment had the event behind the barn been that William could confidently laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t rape you again.’ The dense texture of the family was, for him, no more constricting than the beam of moving light that had fleetingly passed over him and his crime. But there in the bank the image of that moving beam turned, in my kind, into bars that caged the event like a beast. The bars of light gave me a purchase on the scene that allowed me to pull it out of the place of forgetfulness into the solidified golden light of the Bowery Savings Bank, where the bars dissolved and the scene in its three-dimensional reality was present-a rape.
Every aspect of the bank interior-the sure proportions, the sensuous, well- chosen marbles, the pilatsters, the columns-was working toward the effect of the whole, an effect of elegance, strength and authority. This was an architecture of stability and security, of lawfulness, of instititutional justice. The scene behind the barn was unlawful and uninstitutional, without justice, without any kind of elegance or aesthetic: it was the whirlwind. So there it was: The whirlwind in the calm-the very quality that I had felt in Stanford’s architecture for so long brought out of its lair. The familiar serenely beautiful environment in which there was terrifying danger, except that now the danger was seen. And the fright felt.
Afraid, I walked across the mosaic floor toward Pamela. It was a transformative passage, though one I had made before-in the meeting with my sisters-and one I would make again. This is a journey that is made in increments. One cannot easily break the habit of looking for protection to that which is powerful. One cannot in one motion cast one’s lot with the unprotected. One cannot in one day learn to see sanctuary and strength in that.
There was, I knew, a word for every little turn and variation in the highly articulated environment of the Bowery Savings Bank. The realm of experience that linked Pamela and myself, in contrast, has for most of human time been outside the architecture of civilisation as we understand it. But our experience is not, in fact, outside the architecture. It is in it, and always has been. It is embedded in the materials of the shelter that we have made for ourselves. We therefore cannot know ourselves truly without seeing where there is terror in harmony; without registering in our marrow a coldness that may feel like warmth or violence that presents as lust for life. We try to see these things not to demolish but to strive toward whole world, because an unwhole world is ghostly: no matter how beautiful it might be, no connection is possible there. We do this not to place blame but to make connection possible. We do this to live.
From The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard.
Meditation
In a similar way, there was for me a correlation between the architecture of my family history and my inner life. In both something was hidden. In the beautiful environment of the family past, there was a magnificent figure who had gone out of control in ways destructive to those on his course-including his family-and ultimately to himself. Behind my memories of a blissful childhood in a beautiful place, there were also destructive forces that were blind and out of control, but unacknowledged. Yet to this inner truth and all its ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of family history to me. It made my hidden experience resonate, and by so doing delivered to me a whole self.
The family architecture also taught me how short time is, how close the generations are, how powerfully lives reverberate down through the structure of family, deeply affecting each other. This is the other part of the imperative to go back into the architecture of time, for with our response to those reverberations, whether witting or unwitting, we in turn create the unseen structure within which our children must live.
….I designed a tour for myself of Stanford’s architecture. My cousin Pamela was interested too, and joined me. With a little over a quarter century separating us, we were the oldest and the youngest of Stanford’s great-granddaughters. As it happened we both had red hair, as Stanford did, though mine was partially grey by this time and Pamela’s was a strawberry blond, quite unlike Stanford’s chestnut. Even so, this redness underscored the cat’s cradle of inter-generational connection: the tightness of it and the physical reality of it.
We started on a June morning in the area of small streets in downtown Manhattan where Chinatown and Little Italy intermingle. On Grand Street, a modest thoroughfare with narrow sidewalks further narrowed by stands of fruit and exotic vegetables, we came upon the magnificent and monumental neoclassical façade of the Bowery Savings Bank. The bank, completed in 1895, was the first of the firm’s neoclassical works to come primarily from Stanford’s hand.
….Inside, the bank was a world in itsef. The gilded and coffered ceiling had a skylight at its centre, with panes of deep yellow glass…The freestanding columns were of ochre marble with red and black veins, and in combination with the skylight they gave the room a sombre golden glow. The volume of cubical interior was made semisolid by that glow.
…After we had taken in the attributes of the building, Pamela remembered that she needed money. Looking around, Pamela spotted a cash machine against a far wall, and she set out toward it. As I watched her walking away from me across the mosaic floor, I shifted my weight from foot to foot, no longer paying close attention to the aesthetic features of the architecture. In a sense, I was off guard and, suddenly, the old fear set in. That quality in Stanford’s interiors which had caused me to avoid them in the past enveloped me, like a perfume triggering an allergic reaction: a swelling in the chest near the throat, a pressure of tears behind the eyes-and, above all, fear. The source of the fear was the very geniality of the architecture; its delicacy, its glow, its enspelling seductiveness.
Immediately, Pamela’s vulnerability was appallingly apparent. She looked so white, soft, and trusting as she performed her pedestrian chore. In an emotional reflex of aversion I mentally pushed her away. Horrified by my impulse I then searched for its source. At first there was blankness only, erasing even the bank. Then, out of the depths of forgetfulness rose the scene in the dark behind the barn. It was not really even a scene; there was no mental image-just a visceral acknowledgement of something very bad happening in the dark. With this acknowledgement my aversion left me and instead I found myself working strenuously to bring that scene out of darkness into the bank-to have in one worlds the disparate realities of our family life.
Within the magnificent enclosure of the bank the scene behind the barn seemed almost nonexistent. Even the space behind the barn seemed two-dimensional, paper-thin, conceptual. It was difficult to conjure particulars of a moment in a place-leaves stirring, clouds passing in front of a moon-or to sense the solidity and contours of the ground, much less to see the spot as a part of geography, as a location coextensive with other locations that could be pinpointed on a map. It was difficult to see it as a spot that existed in a continuous time, so that you could say of it the next day, ‘This is the spot where such-and-such happened last night.’ In that two-dimensionality, it was especially difficult to imagine a whole body, lungs rising and falling, much less two bodies and violence.
So unreal in the family environment had the event behind the barn been that William could confidently laugh and say, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t rape you again.’ The dense texture of the family was, for him, no more constricting than the beam of moving light that had fleetingly passed over him and his crime. But there in the bank the image of that moving beam turned, in my kind, into bars that caged the event like a beast. The bars of light gave me a purchase on the scene that allowed me to pull it out of the place of forgetfulness into the solidified golden light of the Bowery Savings Bank, where the bars dissolved and the scene in its three-dimensional reality was present-a rape.
Every aspect of the bank interior-the sure proportions, the sensuous, well- chosen marbles, the pilatsters, the columns-was working toward the effect of the whole, an effect of elegance, strength and authority. This was an architecture of stability and security, of lawfulness, of instititutional justice. The scene behind the barn was unlawful and uninstitutional, without justice, without any kind of elegance or aesthetic: it was the whirlwind. So there it was: The whirlwind in the calm-the very quality that I had felt in Stanford’s architecture for so long brought out of its lair. The familiar serenely beautiful environment in which there was terrifying danger, except that now the danger was seen. And the fright felt.
Afraid, I walked across the mosaic floor toward Pamela. It was a transformative passage, though one I had made before-in the meeting with my sisters-and one I would make again. This is a journey that is made in increments. One cannot easily break the habit of looking for protection to that which is powerful. One cannot in one motion cast one’s lot with the unprotected. One cannot in one day learn to see sanctuary and strength in that.
There was, I knew, a word for every little turn and variation in the highly articulated environment of the Bowery Savings Bank. The realm of experience that linked Pamela and myself, in contrast, has for most of human time been outside the architecture of civilisation as we understand it. But our experience is not, in fact, outside the architecture. It is in it, and always has been. It is embedded in the materials of the shelter that we have made for ourselves. We therefore cannot know ourselves truly without seeing where there is terror in harmony; without registering in our marrow a coldness that may feel like warmth or violence that presents as lust for life. We try to see these things not to demolish but to strive toward whole world, because an unwhole world is ghostly: no matter how beautiful it might be, no connection is possible there. We do this not to place blame but to make connection possible. We do this to live.
From The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family by Suzannah Lessard.
Meditation
The image above suggests the counterpart in human biology of the architectonic grandeur that galvanises Lessard’s reflections on the interaction in her mind between architectural form and individual and family history.The cave like shape constituted by the curves of the hips as they frame the prominent vaginal lips take the mind back to evocations of relationships between caves, as early dwelling places of the human race, from which we emerged to construct our own shelters, and the vagina as a biological cave, from where we emerge to begin the journey of this life, as well as with correlations between these images and the earth as cave of absorption, where the body enters into death, and, to look at it optimistically, perhaps leaving the spirit to ascend to other spheres or even to return to the world through the creative depths of the vagina.In the cave of the womb we are nurtured, through the cave of the space between the legs are we conceived, and through that same uterine darkness, charged with energies, do we enter the world.Watch over us,you of the double caves!
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