And long after the construction of the Ka’bah, black squares have reappeared in culture as symbols of the infinite, or refractors of our looks. In 1913, a thirty-five-year-old Russian Pole, the oldest of fourteen children, designed the curtain for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun as a black square. It was as if the Ka’bah blocked out Aten. Two years later the designer – Kazimir Malevich – reworked the design as a single black square on a white canvas. The resulting painting became one of the most famous images in twentieth-century art. When Malevich died, mourners carried black square banners, and he was buried under a black square headstone.
In Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey novels, flat black, rectangular monoliths appear throughout the universe and across time. Their inorganic, unweathered forms are clearly built rather than growing. In Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, these stelae are first seen at the dawn of man.
Prehumans cannot stop looking at them. Their unbending immobility, their refusal of referent or function, fascinates. Their dimensions are 1:4:9, the first three whole numbers squared. The rest of the visible world is pitted or detailed; the fact that the stelae are not makes them seem extra-physical, or metaphysical. Even in science fiction, the seen leads to the unseen.
But here is the epilogue to the story of metaphysical looking: people want their gods to be unlike them, but also like them – to be far away but very close. As the Russian icon panel suggested, as well as wanting our gods to be elsewhere, we want that elsewhere to be just over our shoulders and recognisably ours. In this nineteenth-century picture of Jesus Christ, for example, he has his back to the world. He is sorrowful and downcast.
The setting is not the Middle East where Christ lived. The painting is by a Scot, William Dyce, who has chosen to have his subject sit in a very Scottish landscape. The contours and strewn rocks are what we see in the once glaciated Highlands, the colours are those of a Scottish autumn. Dyce’s picture, like many religious images, reassures its audience by saying, He is one of us. He walked where we walk. The road turns back on itself. This is an image of desire too.
How to sum up what we have learnt about abstract thinking? Perhaps with this woman. She is a North Carolinian Hupa, photographed in the 1920s. Her people migrated to where they now live in around CE 1000. Her relevance to our story is that she is a shaman, so all her adult life she has been looking at the spirit world. Abstract looking is her job.
Her looking might have been trance-like; she will have claimed to have had visions of other dimensions where benevolent or malevolent beings are, and will have used those visions to guide her fellow Hupa, perhaps to help retrieve their souls. What is striking is how canny her gaze is. There is no attempt to look awestruck in her face, no reverie. We search in vain, in this photograph, for any sign of exaltation. She stares over our right shoulder, as she will have done to many others. She will have done a lot of abstract looking.
Can we see confrontation in her face? The converse of the divine, in many cultures, is the evil eye. In the Bible (Proverbs 23: 6) it says, ‘Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats.’ In times of minimal medical understanding, it was thought that sickness could enter our eyes from the malign look of another. Such is the power of eye contact that, throughout human history, we have felt that looking can be accursed. The eyes of a goat, for example, can seem demonic. A burning or scathing look can seem to send to its recipient, like a poisoned dart, ill will or fortune. Once looking opens up to the supernatural, it must accept that that realm can be malign as well as benign.
The Hupa shaman could be a distant relative of the baby we thought of at the beginning of this book, now towards the end of her life. In her teenage years, she started to look at other bodies. She became aware of desire and its corollaries, abstraction and god. Her looking had grown up.
Where would it go next, and what would next happen in human development?
It is time to consider the sort of looking that takes place as people live more closely together, in larger groups and more elaborate built environments in which they share, barter, serve and socialise. Their looking becomes more polyvalent in these built places. It is time to focus on urban looking. It is time to enter the built world, to see it rise and fall.
CHAPTER 5
LOOKING AND CITIES: VICINITY AND VISTA
CONSTRUCTION
Chapter 3 was about what a young person saw in their immediate vicinity – their own bodies, objects and their home. As we noted, a house is a cocoon which sits within larger cocoons: neighbourhoods, towns, cities and nations. In this chapter let’s imagine that the young people whose developing looking we have followed are adults now. They are leaving their parents’ homes or the villages of their extended families and heading towards the built world of work, service, romance, discovery, exploration and, often, struggle. They are mobile in the world. Maybe they will have the urge to build? Maybe they are in Asia walking through a Hindu temple? Maybe they are living in a great, historic city? We will explore the broader built environment by first considering individual structures, and then how they combine into the urban mazes that we call cities.
There are 4,416 cities in the world that have a population of at least 150,000 people. For most of human history we lived in villages or tribes a tiny fraction of that size, but industrialisation and capitalism’s hunger for cheap labour forced millions into (often unwanted and unhappy) lives in those 4,416 cities. Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Moscow, Dakar and Manila: modern cities are places of servitude for the many, an iniquity well beyond the scope of this book. But massively increasing cohabitation changed the speed and direction of human looking, and also its nature. Cities became visual thinking. A tree is not an idea, but a Gothic cathedral is.
So what is the story of looking at buildings and cities? How has building facilitated our looking? How has it excited it, controlled it or excluded it? To answer these questions we need to look at the structures of individual buildings – how they raised roofs, made windows and told stories visually – and then consider how they cluster into cities. We have already looked at the simplest, primal buildings – homes. Now we build out from them, to social buildings and beyond.
We can begin by thinking about rhubarb. It was used in China from at least 1000 BCE, was imported along the silk route to Europe, arriving in the 1300s, and made its way to America in the 1820s. In those years and places, its bigger leaves – and gunnera, which is often called ‘giant rhubarb’ – will certainly have been used as umbrellas. A look at their underside reveals why. Their sturdy stalks divide into five branches, which then subdivide several times. Unlike trees, whose branches each sprout numerous small leaves, the rhubarb’s tributaries all support a single canopy. Upthrust is dispersed across an often large surface area – up to a square metre.
Looking at natural examples like this, geometric rock formations and even sea arches, early builders will have started to imagine how a pile of rocks on the ground, or the branches of a tree, could be assembled vertically, in defiance of gravity, to create shelter and internal spaces. The desire to do so seems strong in human beings, for utilitarian reasons and more. In Los Angeles in 1921, a forty-two-year-old Italian American tile mason, Simon Rodia, began building a series of towers that had no purpose as home, meeting place or church. For thirty-three years, working alone, he inserted