The gunnera and rhubarb leaves and Simon Rodia begin to explain the creativity of building and the kind of looking that ensues. When the Egyptians or the Greeks wanted to raise a roof, it was straight and usually horizontal, and held up by verticals – columns. The results, such as the Parthenon or the temples at Paestum, were often exquisite mathematical structures, but then came the Romans. They noticed that lintels and roofs fell down, and realised that they did so because the central point, between two columns, took most of the load. So the Romans started to use semicircles of stone, rather than straight lintels, on top of their columns; the load was equally dispersed and the arch was born. Most of the Roman viaducts and aqueducts in Europe are built with arches.
Islamic architects were so enamoured of arches that, for example, the Mezquita in Cordoba is a forest of them. The curves were even painted with keystone wedge stripes, as if to say, Look how this works. The painted stripes made the engineering seeable.
The Mezquita is beautiful, but needed a lot of columns and is therefore cluttered. As people came together in covered structures to barter, worship or wash, they needed the internal space to be more open. Builders and engineers devised flying buttresses, braces on the outside of buildings which would take some of the weight, thereby requiring fewer columns inside. Notre Dame in Paris is like Cordoba attenuated, and made of lace. Its flying buttresses on the outside have allowed height and detail to become part of the religious interior. Our eyes are forced upwards, but also stopped more often by tracery and ribbing. Semicircular arches have become semi-ovals, and the thin columns resemble the undersides of rhubarb leaves. The god looking we saw in the previous chapter was incubated in cathedrals like this one.
From flat-roofed Greek temples, to Roman arches, to Gothic filigree: engineering and design was making looking more elaborate. Looking in this building is not a matter of mere function – finding where the exit is, seeing where the priest will conduct mass, etc. – it is like looking at the sky, or clouds. Notre Dame is built to make our eyes soar, make us feel small and see grace or God or abstraction in the patterning, the fall of light, the overall visual activity, which overwhelms.
The fact that the walls were not bearing all of the weight also meant that they could be pierced and glazed, to let in daylight. The windows in Notre Dame are of filigreed detail, but simple fenestration can be seen in wall paintings of buildings as far back as ancient Egypt and Assyria. Such wall piercings allowed residents to glimpse oncomers, and harsh weather outside. Soon they were affording other types of looking too. Our story began with a glimpse through a bedroom window, out to a tree against the dawn sky, and we have noted that a room with a view sells or rents for more than one without, but windows in buildings have not always been placed to maximise the pleasures of the z-axis. Many older cottages on the Celtic fringe of Europe, like the Scottish one below, seem indifferent to the view, or to turn aside from it out of displeasure or familiarity. If you were outside working the land all day, you had had your eyeful, so did not need your windows to give onto the vista.
As steel became a more frequently used building material, as what was required to hold up a roof became visually smaller, and as the idea of enclosed living declined amongst architectural modernists and urban elites, so windows started to win the battle with walls. Instead of being something that was beautiful, structural and fortifying, a wall was something that was in the way, that blocked the view. Glass spread across the façades of commercial, retail and residential buildings, resulting in a structure such as Philip Johnson’s Glass House, built in Connecticut in 1949.
It was like a Bedouin tent with all the flaps rolled up. Every direction was a looking direction. In it, living was looking. Seeing was a regal thing. The richer you were, the more that you could see. In the Scottish cottages at night, you could look at the flickering flames in the fire; in Johnson’s house you saw the wind in the trees. At dawn, everywhere he looked, he saw a sight like that with which this book begins. One unintended consequence was that, at night, with the lights on inside and darkness outside, as he moved around all Johnson could see was himself reflected in the windows, so he installed under lighting in the trees to make the outside more visible.
Raising roofs and inserting windows created new types of looking, but so did walking through a building. In China from the 1100s BCE, isolated walls called yingbi were built either in front of or behind the main entrances to palaces and the homes of the well-off. This one is in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
There is a doorway behind it, but its specific purpose is to stop us looking. As people lived together in greater numbers, things were built to occlude looking. As light travels linearly, yingbi killed off eyelines, but not only that. Their purpose was also to prevent bad spirits, which also travel in straight lines, from entering the building. They were the brick equivalents of the talismans that repel the evil eye.
Yingbi also acted as visual deferrals. As buildings blocked formerly clear views, architects began to manipulate the new route to seeing that their structures afforded. Where Notre Dame was, mostly, a single, long cavernous central space, in Asia especially, such one-off sight lines were less prized. Instead, looking in some Asian buildings became a series of reveals, each taking us closer to the centre of the structure. This Kailasa temple in Ellora, India, is dedicated to Shiva, whom we saw earlier, dancing the world into existence. Completed around CE 765, it took seven thousand stonemasons 150 years to build.
Worshippers enter on the far left of this image, through a low gopuram, a decorated tower. As they move into the building, left to right, they cross a bridge and then into the second, larger, chamber, which is higher than the first and surmounted by four lions, symbol of the four noble truths. The feeling is of having a visual story unfold, an ascension, walking from confined to more open, in and out of darkness. Heading onwards they climb more steps and come to the tallest structure, on the right here, built on a base of stone elephants, with its rising tower, shikara.
This is what it looks like inside:
Massive square columns shoulder the vast weight of the overhead structure and frame the final, holiest of holy, chambers, the vimana. Our walk through the building has been a series of suspenseful looks. Everything here directs our eye to the vanishing point of the image – the low, wide, dark column in the background. It is the lingam, the phallus of Shiva, the symbol of his creativity, which sits on a circular base with a groove at the front, the yoni, the symbol of the female goddess, the divine mother. The eyes of Hindus and non-Hindus alike widen when they see this remarkable object, the potent destination of an architectural procession, all the more striking when you hear that the building was not constructed – it was chiselled out of the solid mountain rock, in the way Michelangelo sculpted David.
The room containing the lingam and yoni is a destination room, a fetishised room. It is the sort of place that construction seemed to be aiming for: spiritual, anticipated, imagined, revealed. From flat roofs to windows to the Chinese screen which made us want to see what was behind it, the building created the desire to see. The Kailasa temple multiplies and layers this process and, in its single structure, tells us something about how