Description

The Spatial Manifestation of the Sacred

The Contribution of Ethnology

All religiously inspired activities originate not from a notion of divinity, but from the sacred. Probably the earliest analysis of what constitutes the sacred was made by the English missionary and ethnologist Robert Henry Codrington at the end of the 19th century in Melanesia. The sacred is defined by the terms “mana” and “tapu”, meaning “power” and “prohibition”.

The sacred resides in people or objects, and is a social energy of great power for “good” or “evil” alike. It is a primordial category of higher ambivalence and complexity, a category of sensitivity, a fleeting and intense phenomenon that can never be described in itself but only in relation to a reaction it inspires. The sacred is therefore sacred only in a particular place, at a particular time and for particular people. The French sociologist Roger Caillois came up with an instructive comparison to describe the attraction, repulsion, elation or fear associated with the sacred. In the presence of the sacred, a believer feels the same as a child does in the presence of fire. Unfamiliar with the element, one feels at once a desire to warm oneself and a fear of burning oneself.

The Greek and Latin languages, which differ in this aspect from Hebrew, draw a distinction between an objective and subjective existence of the sacred. On the one hand, it is permanently embodied in particular places, for example in Greek termed “hieros”, in Latin “sacer”; on the other, it is something brought forth by particular people, in Greek “hosios”, in Latin “sanctus”. Catholicism emphasises the “hieros” and “sacer”, Protestantism “hosios” and “sanctus”.

Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade’s Contribution

In the debate on the sacred, the Protestant theologian and indologist Rudolf Otto introduced a new term, that of the numinous, in his book “The Idea of the Holy – On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational” (1917). He defines the numinous as what remains of the sacred once it has been stripped of the moralistic, aesthetic and discursive attributes with which it has been invested. The numinous is the very core of the sacred, the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, that “wholly other”. Over the course of his book, switching back and forth between the religious and the aesthetic, Otto describes how the contrast between “tremendum” and “fascinans” is best brought out through the sublime as a mixture of fearsomeness and beauty. It is for this reason that architecture employs such means as the monotone, the uniform, the edgeless, the endless, light, dark and emptiness.

Exactly 40 years after Otto’s book “The Idea of the Holy”, Mircea Eliade, a Romanian Catholic philosopher, publicist and teacher who later taught in the United States, published his book entitled “The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion” (1957), a short volume that is still influential today, in part due to its accessible language. Eliade’s book is of interest to architects for his concept of “Hierophany”, or the manifestation of the sacred in time and space. Trees, forests, groves, mountains; springs, rivers, lakes, oceans; stones, gorges, grottoes, caves; not to mention the heavens and the sidereal regions: such places were not only revered by ancient cultures for their own sake, but because they were able to manifest what was sacred. True belief – also in Christ – lies in two worlds, in the structured space of the sacred, and in the chaotic space of the profane.

With regard to the phenomenon of the sacred, both Otto and Eliade emphasise the substantial over the functional. Both adopt a tone approaching that of the Revelation; in both a degree of disdain for the non-religious reader is apparent. What each writes about – the “sensus numinis” on the one hand, “hierophany” on the other – can be neither proven nor refuted. One can safely only say that today – given the degree to which society is secularised – no individual, regardless of how religious he is, would claim to have such a sense for the numinous that he could proceed to divide urban space into zones for the sacred and zones for the profane. It would also be possible to argue against religio-centric phenomenology in other ways. If one follows the theological and philosophical line of argument from the 12th to the 21st century that leads from Joachim of Fiore via Thomas Müntzer and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Ernst Bloch and Gianni Vattimo, then secularisation – along with the abolition of the sacred and of transcendence! – does not bring shame upon us, but rather is a permanent process of the deliverance of mankind that began with the “Kenosis,” the renunciation or de-deification and personification of Jesus, as described by Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Philippians.

Michel Foucault’s Contribution

That one can come to a better appreciation of spaces worthy of being called sacred through a lecture given by Michel Foucault becomes apparent only after closer analysis of the French philosopher’s thinking. “Heterotopias” is the name Foucault gives in his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1967) to places that serve as “counter-sites” of society, because there the usual social and cultural conditions are suspended at least temporarily in favour of other uses. In this context, considering that the author might have easily also referred to churches – not just colonies and barracks, but also brothels and cemeteries – the question arises as to whether the sacred encompasses a similar potential for critical distance, resistance and defiance. Does the sacred create spaces outside those of the rational, efficient and increasingly market-driven society? Are there spaces that precede or follow such spaces, or are they just places of transitory stasis, of temporary respite from the insufferable demands of the modern city in an age of increasing consumerism? One way or the other, the sacred remains an intensely if quietly contested “terrain vague”. The market economy creates on the one hand new, simulated sacred spaces; on the other it seeks old, authentically sacred spaces with a view to shaping them to its own purposes, in short to exploit them.

_{The Atmosphere of the Sacred}

“Kunstreligion” and the Romantics

As mentioned at the outset, the experience of passage from the material to the spiritual, that is, the experience of transcendence, is no longer sought in religion but in other areas. This inclination goes back further than the tendencies identified by Thomas Luckmann in the early 1960s. As early as the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, a circle of young German poets sought to place religion and art on equal footing, arguing that, in both, the intensely personal relates to the overwhelming universal in a form of revelation, provoking a “you must change your life” response in the viewer. The Protestant theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher described this stimulation of religious feeling through aesthetics as “Kunstreligion” (art-as-religion). In his writings “On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799), this stirring preacher wrote that “religion and art stand together like kindred beings, whose inner affinity, though mutually unrecognised and unsuspected, appears in various ways.” That art could make people religious was, of course, a false impression. Of the two “spirits”, religion gradually grew weaker and art stronger. No one felt this more decidedly than Friedrich Nietzsche. In his aphorisms entitled “Human, All too Human” (1878) he writes, that the “growth of the Enlightenment” has sown “fundamental mistrust” and discredited religion. Art takes its place: “It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper.”

Atmosphere as Desideratum

With the developments of the 20th century, the talk of “sensus numinis” and “hierophany” has waned in significance and “Kunstreligion” has lost much of its enthralling innocence. There is reason enough to label it a delusion of aesthetes, which ultimately served the propaganda of politics as a repressive “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Similarly, there is reason enough to separate religious and aesthetic experience.Nevertheless the works of Otto, Eliade and Schleiermacher make worthwhile reading for architects. The considerations in their writings of the sacred in space and the function of aesthetics with regard to religion is instructive in the search for an answer to the question: What makes a space in a church into a space of the church?

From a Vitruvian standpoint, the only aspect of relevance here is “venustas”. For a building to be used as a place of religious worship, it seems that it need only exhibit a certain grace – regardless of whether we regard it as holy or not! To use a word that first came about in the 19th century, it should be “sacral”. That is not changed by the experience that the production of atmosphere through architecture often leads to a false sense of pathos and drama, resulting simply in kitsch – partly because on the one hand architects tend to underestimate the subjective-psychic component of atmosphere, and on the other overestimate its objective-physical component. However, only those who view church architecture from a purely functionalist, or, to put it polemically, orthodox Lutheran viewpoint, would deny the role of atmosphere as desideratum.

The Contribution of Art

Let us take a look at art and its means of creating atmosphere, leaving aside for the moment more recent examples of quasi-sacral museums such as Peter Märkli’s La Congiunta Museum and Foundation in Giornico, Switzerland (1992), which resembles an abstract, concrete Roman basilica, or Tadao Ando’s Langen Foundation Museum near to Insel Hombroich (2004), which employs a three stage-approach – an assembly courtyard, a descent into dark depths and an ascent into the light – to create an appropriate mood. Instead, let us examine artists whose work is attributed to Minimal Art, Arte Povera and Land Art. In many cases, their explorations of space, emancipated from functional requisites, produce forms that operate using religious phenomena, sometimes without the artists’ knowledge. Extreme materiality in solid, heavy, opaque chthonic objects on the one hand, or extreme immateriality as loose, light, lucid, spheroid objects on the other: both with the intent of emphatic immersion rather than distanced reception, for engaging with rather than comprehending. Many of these spaces – in Richard Long’s or Chris Drury’s Land Art it is often little more than the making of a place with stones and driftwood – avoid urban contexts and express themselves through earth, water, fire, air and light. If one has to describe them verbally, one might use adjectives such as anonymous, autonomous, holistic, enigmatic, elemental or monumental. All of these places, to quote a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”, oscillate between trace and aura: “The trace is an appearance of closeness, no matter how distant the thing that leaves it behind. Aura is the appearance of distance, no matter how close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.”

Among the spaces that convey something of such closeness and distance, and with them bring forth a semblance of the sacred, there are some with a lot and some with little architecture. With regard to atmosphere and aura, interested architects can learn something from Eduardo Chillida’s cave project for Mount Tindaya on Fuerteventura, Canary Islands (1996), or from James Turrell’s tunnels and caverns in and around the crater of Roden Volcano in Arizona, USA (2006), or from Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s foggy cloud structure that goes by the name of the “Blur Building” on Neuenburger Lake near Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (2002), or from Gerhard Merz’s illuminated pavilion in Hanover’s main freight railway station (2000). The central themes for Chillida are earth and light, for Turrell sky and light, for Diller and Scofidio water and air, and for Merz the intensification of classical modernism in glass, neon, steel and concrete.

Eduardo Chillida’s Cavern in Montaña Tindaya

With a height of 401 metres, Montaña Tindaya, long regarded as sacred, towers over a desolate landscape not far from the Atlantic. In the trachyte of the shallow cone of the mountain, Eduardo Chillida proposed an approximately 80 metre long tunnel leading to a nearly 50 metre long cavern inside the mountain. Two shafts bored from the surface vertically into the mountain were intended to shed both direct and diffuse light, day and night, into the rust-brown interior of the cavern, intensified by its emptiness and silence. Chillida spoke of his project as a sculpture, comparing his work with the creation of megaliths such as Stonehenge or Avebury, which are said to have served ritualistic purposes. The similarity of the cavern projects to pyramids and catacombs is undeniable.

James Turrell’s “Skyspaces”

While in Tindaya, the sun and the moon would have shed their light onto the floor and walls of the terrestrial architecture, illuminating the texture of the stone in all its glory, the space under Turrell’s numerous “skyspaces” serve only to facilitate a view skywards. Floors, walls and ceiling are all uniformly coated with a matte colour. The openings of the “skyspaces” are circular, oval, square or rectangular in form. They are neither shallow boxes nor baroque lanterns, but just frames with thin, sharply defined edges. They create the impression that a section of the atmosphere is present on the ceiling, that the heavens are on earth, that the distant has been brought closer, as if one could touch it with one’s hands. In some respects, a skyspace resembles a “Ganzfeld” (total field), an indistinct homogenous surface of light without focus or contour located in a room utterly free of any other visual or acoustic phenomena. The sensory deprivation of the viewer prepares him for another form of perception: whether in “Elliptic Ecliptic” in Tremenheere, UK (1999), a building made of wood and metal erected on the occasion of the last solar eclipse; whether in “Piz Uter” in Zuoz, Switzerland (2005), a building made of concrete and stone rubble that stands next to the Hotel Castell or in the “Eye of Roden Crater” in the desert landscape of Arizona, USA (2006), a huge complex of nine skyspaces that is regarded as Turrell’s magnum opus.

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s “Blur Building”

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s nebulous architecture has a very different character to the preceding works by Chillida and Turrell: the term “architecture” is hardly applicable to this “building”. Built for the “Swiss Expo.02”, its physical construction consisted of a light steelwork frame raised on stilts above Neuenburger Lake. Measuring 100 by 60 by 20 metres with a smaller lower platform and a larger mid-level platform connected by a stair and lift, it was reachable from the shore via a narrow fibreglass bridge. 31,400 minute nozzles sprayed a fine mist of water, which together with the air over the lake joined to form a fog that enveloped the steel structure entirely in whiteness, which quickly came to be known as a “cloud“ or “wondercloud”. Completely without mass or envelope or any solid form, the “Blur Building” entirely blurs all sensation of left, right, front, back, up and down. “The Economist” referred to it as “Heaven’s Gate”; according to the US journal “Architecture”, Diller and Scofidio had “slipped into the role of God” and brought “a slice of heaven back to earth”. The actual experience of the Blur Building is more like that of purgatory. Enveloped in a thin blue coat, visitors could trek through the mist until finding their way to the “Angel Bar” on the third upper gallery, where they could refresh themselves with expensive pure bottled water from the likes of Perrier and San Pellegrino.

Gerhard Merz’s Pavilion

The last of the projects that experiment with the phenomenon of near and far is a pavilion by Gerhard Merz, built on the occasion of the “Expo 2000” in Hanover’s former main freight station. While Chillida, Turrell, and in a sense Diller and Scofidio, all negate the technical, Merz displays industrially fabricated materials explicitly. His use of large-format glass panes and steel profiles was part of his programme to refine acquired materials, a continuation of the achievements of the 20th century. His pavilion in the old railway building – its ramp functioning as a podium, its hall as baldachin – measured precisely 42.50 by 18.31 by 3.58 metres and was a subtle criticism of the frenzied circus grounds of the Expo. Five bands of light containing thousands of neon tubes immersed the external open pavilion with its 7:3 proportions and the inner closed pavilion with its 5:1 proportions in an almost painfully bright white and greenish light. Visitors wandering along the grey concrete floor of the corridors running along each side of the milky-white, centrally arranged rectangular forms, saw the cuboids through the glass panels of the outer wall first doubled, then tripled. The inner, opaque pavilion appears to force its way into the empty railway station, displacing all signs of work and transport. A product of reflection and transparency, it dips all that is around it – the patches, puddles and cracks on the deserted platforms – in a thin haze. Eloquent observers interpreted the temporary insertion as a celebration of reason, a mixture of rationalism and suprematism, an homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Kasimir Malevich. The dominant insertion presented itself as a secret without a secret. However, its pure emptiness and empty purity also offered more: the semblance of the sacred as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The architecture of the artists presented here embodies the character of shrines and altars. One appears to be in waiting for the celebration of a ceremony. It is this atmosphere that may offer the stray believers – those who avoid the objectification and discipline of denomination – a beautiful, perhaps eerily beautiful domicile. It is this aura that is capable of captivating those who are “religiously musical”, to recall Max Weber’s phrase. The meditative architecture of these “Houses of Stillness” provides an introduction to church architecture. But, however great one’s appreciation of atmosphere and aura is, architects should not forget that a church is not a work of art. No congregation is served by an overly aestheticised compulsion to appreciate the sacred in space, not least given the fact that the notion of the church as a sacred building does not bear theological scrutiny.

Otto Bartning entitled the penultimate chapter of his book “Vom neuen Kirchbau” (On New Church Architecture, 1919), “Sign of the Times”. In it he asks, “Is the longing for sacred buildings perhaps just a longing for architecture, an aesthetic avatism? Will the new church also have a new congregation? Are we perhaps nurturing the seed just for the sake of the skin or do we really want the skin without the seed?” And then, more unequivocally: “Only where a seed is germinating will a skin form organically, only where there is an idea, will a living form arise.”

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.