Part I | It Stalks Us Like A Black Dog



Genesis 11:1-9

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The Tower of Babel stalks us like a black dog.

Through Judaic scripture we will explore the idea that architecture is pervaded by the story of what I’ll call The Babel Fiasco.

The tower was undertaken by the people to “make us a name” – to manufacture identity and self-pride. In Hegelian terms “this community was at the same time both the aim and the content of the work”. Let’s say, as Hegel did, that the tower is a beginning (as opposed to an origin) for architecture; we’ll begin like him, but for other reasons. Not to rediscover the arche of artistic activity (Hegel), rather to trace a wandering line through the practice of architecture – to follow an Ariadne Thread, developing the idea of failure / equivocation / doubt in architecture… and maybe a few other things along the way.

Failure/Equivocation/Doubt

These words are approximations of the same thought. This thought pervades architecture, this thought pervades the manufacture of meaning. The idea that the manufacture of meaning is impossible, perhaps even absurd pervades The Book of Ecclesiastes. It is Ecclesiastes that provides the framework for understanding the crisis of meaning so often lamented by those attempting to control the function of meaning.

The Babel Tower is a ‘failed’ project; a fiasco. It fails because communication fails – the people “left off to build the city”, leaving Babel, the rough beast, blank and pitiless as the sun to slouch through history, born and reborn in the edifices of architecture, a fiasco that continues through the ongoing project of architecture.

Part II | Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is Meaningless

“Beginning to think is beginning to undermine” Albert Camus

In thinking about the Babel fiasco the mind turns quickly to the Gothic cathedrals of europe. These behemoths of Christendom retain the memory of the tower of Bablel and the ensuing fiasco.

Buttressed and encrusted, they strive upward (though not so much in Italy), representing a belief in the necessary and intrinsic relationship between the plane of experience and the realm of the infinite. However, it is the hermeneutic content of the cathedrals that point to a radically different understanding of the vertical building project. The cathedrals are born out of a hermeneutic theology, they stem from an understanding and interpretation of scripture. It is this hermeneutic content that is of interest here.



Hermeneutics transcends correspondence, transcends translation, in meaning to find the fractured ground of the propositional.

Let’s take a leap and look at The Book of Ecclesiastes. It is Ecclesiastes that provides illumination into the recesses of the gothic mind; an aging Solomon, the great temple builder of the Old Testament, opens his treatise on life with the words “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is Meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Solomon is lamenting that meaning cannot be found in the stuff of life, cannot be found on “the plane of experience”.

Solomon’s temple had been the house of God and yet Solomon invokes the silent God, a God who deals the cards but is apparently absent from the structure of life and meaning Solomon is attempting to form: “God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” (Ecc. 5:2)

Strangely, amongst The Preacher’s cantakerous musings on the nature of existential meaninglessness he beseeches the reader to fear God, to keep their oaths and measure their words.

Here Solomon both affirms the accountability of man to God while negating the direct presence of God in the narrative of human history. He places God in His heaven and men and women on their earth. He implores the people to be silent, to stand only in awe of God – he can only say “much dreaming and many words are meaningless.” (Ecc. 5:7)



To stand in awe and in silence is placed in counterpoint to the plethora of meaningless words and dreams. The dreams of men and women must be punctuated by an understanding of their ultimate failure. the Gothic cathedrals are the built personification of Ecclesiastes following Babel. They have, built into their fabric, the idea of the temple as a fragment of the New Jerusalem (heaven come to earth) and the impossibility of manufacturing meaning on earth.

Part III | Knocking on Heaven’s Door



We pick up Ariadne’s thread at the West central portal of Rheims cathedral (c. 12410). It is surrounded with a legion of apostles, saints, angels, church fathers and even the Virgin and Christ Himself.
The portal is no longer populated by the pagan demons of the Romanesque, rather it has become a vision of the sacred. The door to the cathedral becomes, in the High Gothic period, the Portal Coeli, the Gate of Heaven. The Gothic Cathedral becomes a fragment of the New Jerusalem – Heaven on Earth – the portal ushers in the pilgrim to this fallen portion of heaven. We see, here, a departure from the biblical, and Augustinian, dichotomy between the “breath of life” and “dust of the ground” as evidenced in Chartres (c.1194).
Erwin Panofsky writes in Gothic Architecture & Scholasticism,

The infinitely more lifelike – though not, as yet, portrait like – High Gothic statues of Rheim and Amiens, Strassburg and Naumberg … proclaim the victory of Aristotlianism. The Human soul, though recognised as immortal, was now held to be the organising and unifying principle of the body itself rather than the substance independent thereof.

There is something of the idea of transubstantiation in this. The doctrinal concept of the transubstantiation asserts that in the Eucharist, “…the enire substance of the bread and wine is converted into the entire substance of the Body and Blood of Christ; only the appearances (or accidents) of the bread and wine remain.” The profane becoming sacred – only the appearence or ‘accidents’ of stone remain, the populace of the portal comes alive; the door is the Gate of Heaven. But the cathedral remains but a piece if the New Jerusalem, remains ‘profane’. We see this as we begin to explore the cathedrals themselves.

Part IV | Hermeneutic Buttress

…at Gloucester Cathedral (c. 1332) we see a superadjacency that is contradictory in scale and direction: the enourmous diagonal buttress intersects the plane of the delicate order of arcades in the transept’s wall.

Robert Venturi, Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture.


Such a violent adjacency suggests a curtailing of the ever-upward rhythm of the fragile elements in the transept; it is as though the plane of experience is making itself known amongst all this striving for infinity. It is the violence of this juxtaposition that could be called the hermeneutic line, a reminder of the Augustinian dichotomy of an earlier time. The “dust of the ground” is flung in the face of man’s attempt to manufacture the sacred. The diagonal buttress is profane; it reminds us that the delicate order, though suggesting the divine, are also profane. The Gothics, with Ecclesiastes and the Babel Fiasco in mind, must resist even the earthly idea of perfection. Even as they approach the manufacture and personification of meaning as the Christian understands it (the attainment of heaven on earth), the Gothic turns away. Sensing Babel and the shame inflicted by God for the manufacture of name-making.

Thus the great negating strike of the diagonal buttress. Given the rhetorical flourish of the delicate order, one would expect a discreet structure held away from the fine lace of the transept. Instead we witness a vicious attack, intersecting, slashing the finery of the vertical.

Part V | The Hermeneutic Surface



It is this hermeneutic line that becomes an arc/surface in the Peterborough fan vaults. The extraordinary vaults of the Peterborough Cathedral (c.1201) were, in fact, built early in the 16th Century. The hermeneutic surface of the vaults describe a fully comprehensive three-dimensional projection, not the simpler variety restricted to two-dimensional slices. The fans spread, such that the quatrefoil gaps are nearly eliminated, thereby enclosing the space of the cathedral. It is here, perhaps, that we see the precursor of Leibniz’s statement that there can never be “a straight line without curves intermingled.” Deleuze’s discussion of the folds in the soul also come to mind for we see, in the vaults, a cavernous porous world constituting more than a line and less than a surface.

While symmetry remains, despite the transformation of the inflections in the surface, the line of symmetry is no longer flat, no longer residing on a “favoured plane of projection,” rather symmetry courses along in shallow waves, slicing through the splayed lips of the pouting fans”. This, then, is how we can think of the hermeneutic line/arc/surface/ fold of the Gothic soul: in approaching the perpendicular, the Gothic must turn from perfection and infinity back to the enclosed world.


Standing in Westminster Abbey, looking heavenward, we seek clarification – not from the God of the Gothics – but in the hope of resolving the hermeneutic space of the cathedral. at last, in the Henry VII Chapel we find the total inversion of the Gothic upward mobility. In the vaults of the nave the fans are hung, pendant-like, from the ceiling. They drip with the memory of babel – turning away from the heavens in a coruscated landscape.

Robin Evans writes of the chapel “there are few creatures as pathetic as the swan that sang while dying, and there are few buildings that solicit so much pathos as the Henry VII Chapel playing itself out.”

The Henry VII Chapel at Westminster is at the extremity of Gothic aarchitecure. It is not a summit, rather, it is an apotheosis. As Peter Kidson writes “It leaves the impression that there was very little left for anyone else to do afterwards”

Part VI | The Cathedral of Erotic Misery



We tread toward Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (KdeE), Ariadne’s thread in hand, along the narrow corridor of a house in Hanover. Not without some apprehension, we follow the art critic Rudolph Jahns:

“we entered the column itself through a narrow door, which was more like a grotto… there were grottoes of various types and shapes, whose entrances were not always on the same level… I then experienced a strange enraptured feeling. This room had a very special life of its own. The sound of my footsteps faded away and there was absolute silence. There was only the form of the grotto whirling around me.”

Die Kathedrale des erotischen Elends or Merzbau was the life work of Kurt Schwitters, an artist of the radical avant-garde in Germany between the wars. Kurt called it a column.

He also called it a Kathedrale. Schwitters’ Kathedrale begins with a column – the highly mutable First Day Merz-column.



The column rises from a rectangular base it holds a myriad ‘offerings’ that reach their zenith at the death mask of his infant son, Gerd. The base is adorned with several of Schwitters’ earlier collages, one of which is entitled The First Day Collage. The collage is an intriguing addition, it contains several extra-textual references to religious and/or esoteric art including winged Renaissance putti and the folds of fabric from the virgin mother’s clothing in a Stefan Lochner painting, Madonna in Rose Bower (c. 1448). The image is replete with a host of seraphim and cherubim, angles at the cloth of the Blessed Virgin.

A significant figure of the collage is a column, a visual device in the manner of a literary trope it is made up of a “…composite (columnar) form-shaft, fluted capital, and an animal bust, apparently a lions head, perched on top.” Next to the column stands an angel who reaches out to touch the column. It is this collage that gives us our first clear evidence of the themes that would guide the development of The Cathedral of erotic Misery.



Kathedrale… the use of the word is not incidental. Schwitters avoids concentrating on the direct representation of the Gothic – as in the Gothic Revival of the 19thC. Rather he seeks the underlying discourse projected by the cathedrals; he incorporates their hermeneutic content into the body of his kathedrale/column. It is this hermeneutic streak that allows Schwitters to explore and, indeed, transubstantiate the profane into the sacred within the many layers and grottoes of the KdeE.

The Kathedrale is an attempt to apprehend the mystical underpinnings of space and form. Elizabeth Burns Gamard, in her book on the Merzbau, suggests that the German word Aufbau is fundamental to our understanding of the design arts in Germany during the early years of the 20thC. Aufbau reflected the search for primary origins. Literally, the term means “of building,” conceptually, however, the term refers to the construction, organization and structure of living systems. We are here reminded of Hegel’s reading of the Babel Tower as being a living system where the “community was at the same time both the aim and the content of the work.”

The Dada-Constructivist Hans Richter describes how the Kathedrale pulsed with the stuff of the world, with the profane refuse of his community. “he cut off a lock of my hair, put it in my hole. A thick pencil, filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity. In others there was a piece of a shoelace, a half smoked cigarette, a nailparing, a piece of Doesburg’s tie, a broken pen. There were also some odd (and more than odd) things such as a dental bridge with several teeth on it, and even a little bottle of urine bearing the donor’s name. All these were placed in the separate holes reserved for the individual entries. Schwitters gave us several holes each, as the spirit moved him [...] and the column grew.

The poignant memoir describes Schwitters’ friendship caves. Much like the small prayer chapels in a Gothic cathedral the caves and grottoes are meditations on Schwitters’ friendships. The profane object captured from an individual is transformed into a sacred object – a reliquary – like the body parts of saints. Stored, adored, and adorned as if they contained the very essence of the individual – the ‘grotto saints.’ This is Schwitters at his alchemical best; like lead into gold or water into wine, Schwitters takes the profane and transubstantiates it into the sacred. Thus, the grottoes become like the Porta Coeli of the Gothic Cathedral, they are like a myriad of gates into heaven, no longer singular but ever multiplying like the Hathedrale itself, for the KdeE was not staatic but emerged like a spatial palimpsest, layer on layer built upon another. In order to transverse it one needed an Ariadne’s Threead with which to find ones’ way. The Kathedrale/Column in this way can no longer be the ever heavenward will to eternity but becomes the labyrinth residing within the column. The successive layers become memories of Schwitters’ attempts to negotiate a path through the chaos of his existence. In a bid to understand this idea we turn to Gilles Deleuze and his understanding of the spontaneous line extracted by Paul Klee, a close associate of Kurt’s. For Klee, according to Deleuze, the point is not firm but moves alsong an inflection such that one “will never be able to fix upon a certain precise surface in a body”. Similarly the Kathedrale undermines the normative categories of measurable space and time by creating spatial and temporal dimensions that, through the intense interplay of symbology, superadjacency , and form is immeasuable. The inflection of our line through the Kathedrale and through architecture is the pure Event of the Line but for now it is not in the world; it is the world itself, or rather it si the beginning, as Klee used to say, “a site of cosmogenesis,” “a non dimensional point” “between dimensions.”

It is this principle of the KdeE that prevents us from finding a vector through its space. We are weightless in the heavy space of the immeasurable, we are unable to find a point of rest. We se infinite variation – not due to the form of the KdeE but because it functions as a living system, itself a discreet fragment of the world beyond its walls.

It is in this way that we understand the prohibitive aspects of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery. For Schwitter was protective of his Merzbau, few were allowed in and fewer still explored the layers of its deep space (six layers deep in places). Kurt even whitewashed the windowpanes from the inside. For Schwitters, the KdeE is both a refuge from the worl and the reflection/personification of it.

Thus schwitters acknowledges the Babel Fiasco, he begins with a column and builds a labyrinth, fighting to find a way into heaven. There is a twofold recognition: in the first, a hope for the eternal and in the second a recognition of the worldy.

The KdeE truly becomes an erotic misery in a glimpse of the last diorama, in Schwitters’ own words:

Shiny-fissured objects set the mood. In the middle is a couple embracing: he has no head, she no arms; between his legs he is holding a huge blank cartridge. The big twisted around child’s head with the syphilitic eyes is warning the embracing couple to be careful. This is disturbing, but there is reassurance in the little bottle of my own urine in which Immortelle [everlasting flowers] are suspended.

This is the Post-Babel Family, a picture image of fear and impotence, the syphilitic child warning the lovers in the very act of a hiopeful union. It is rare indeed that a bottle of your own urine might be thought of as a reassurance.

Part VII | The Forbidden House



With thread firmly in hand we now take a turn into the Barcelon Pavilion. It , like the child with syphilitic eyes, reminds us to be careful. The pavilion does not represent failure / equivocation/doubt; it manufactures it.

The Barcelona Pavilion is a Doric temple.

We don’t look at Doric temples anymore. If we do, we see columns. this is not what the Greeks saw. The Greeks saw an image of the discontinuous, of the disintergrated. They saw past the columns, past the proportioned mass of the building, to the cella; where god lived. The Doric temple was the house of God, a house that did not admit visitors. The Doric columns are a screen; a prohibition doubled by the base.

The Barcelona pavilion is a Doric temple.

It is canonically composed: cella, stylobate, and columns. Here the Doric order is grotesquely deformed in having outgrown the stylobate (as observed by Jose Quetglas).

There is a problem here, of course. Mies did not design the stand of columns, rather they pre-date the pavilion, the forbidden house; they stood as a monument to the spatial dislocation. Mies, however, was a master of the collage. In his many compositions he shows a lust for assemblage, for difference and for the discontinuous. In particular the aplique of the landscape on the surface of a window. The world in abstraction. The pavilion is a built collage.



In the architecture of Mies van der Rohe we find an obsessive suppression of the vertical. Even in his skyscrapers there is the desire to prevent the vertical from impacting the expression of the horizontal. The Glass Skyscraper of 1920-21 is like the stylobate of a temple, an elevated platform – alien to the ground of the viewer – stacked infinitely. The vision is not vertical, rather an affirmation of the horizontal, a gradual piling, one upon another.

At the lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-1951) Mies superimposes I-Beams over the structural pillar thereby negating the vertical, condemning it to shadow (we are here reminded of the buttress at Gloucester).

The pavilion is an affirmation of the influence of the Babel Fiasco is Western architecture. The pavilion affirms the event in its understanding and acknowledgement of the will to the vertical and is an exception from the will in its insistant negation of the vertical and the struggle for eternity.

The building turns in on the view, at once containing and expelling them, it does not (like Virgil) guide the pilgrim through purgatory to another realm.

The Barcelona Pavilion is an enclosed space.

“The pavilion encloses nothing but space and yet does so geometrically rather than in a real physical manner. There are no doors and yet each room is but imperfectly enclosed, on three sides, by for instance, three walls. More often than not these walls are great, continuous planes of glass which only limit space partiallyt. In some of these walls the glass has been tinted a sombre, neutral colour, and they reflect both objects and people in such a way that what you see on the other side of the glass and what you see reflected on its surface seem to blend together. Some rooms, which are ceilingless, are veritable demi-courtyards in which space is limited only by three walls and by the horizontal surface of the water in the pool, and yet where space is ‘conained’ by geometry”

NM Rubio in J.Quetglas, Fear of Glass, Barcelona, 2001

Nicolau M. Rubio’s shrewd description of the pavilion tells us that it “encloses nothing but space” that it can never be filled. The pavillion can never be filled, not because it is imperfectly sealed but because of its materiality. The Barcelona Pavilion is made of reflections. The path we take through the pavilion leads us on into a landscape of infinite depth – the panes of glass, their transparency and reflection, the walls of veins and stone and their reflections, the silent chorus of columns and their reflections. When we arrive the building vanishes, as we move, the building escapes. The building is replete in kaleidoscopic finery – the veined marble is quartered, becoming a reflection of itself – the image of narcissus.



Mirrors impoverish rooms, the more crowded a room becomes the greater the mass of the impassable mirror and the emptier the room will be. The building becomes a stage set in which the crowd are the players but the set makes their image, their names, irrecoverable; it deprives them of their place and condemns them to wander like derelicts. It is the antithesis of Babel, or rather, it is the recurrence of the event, the building manifests the event rather than being subject to it. This is why a Miesian plan is anathema to the building. What is the plan of a mirror? What is the plan of a Miesian Wall? A plan is a section through the vertical plane but the vertical is not possible with Mies, there are no walls in the Forbidden House, only mirrors.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote a letter to Philip Johnson in which he says, in reference to the Pavilion, “Some day let’s pursuade Mies to get rid of those damned little steel posts that look so dangerous and interfering in his lovely design.” There was no need for Wright to go to the effort, Mies did not need convincing. The columns are masked in reflectivity. They, like the wanderer, impoverished by reflection.

However, they do serve a master. The cruciform pillar is machine for defining space. The pillars form immaterial tangencies that define imaginary space that can never be arrived at. Unlike the heavy space of the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, the space of the pavilion is weightless – the space is defined by the extended tangents of the cruciform columnm especially so as they define a series of empty boxes each discreet from the other while beckoning the wanderer from ghostly box to ghostly box. The mirrored stone that segment the spaces defined by the columns further confuses the spaces, preventing a reading of the whole. The columns become harbingers of the discontinuous.

There is one pillar that stands alone. In the throne room, by the black carpet, like a sentry it forbids entry despite the emptiness. It is this centre that both attracts and repels us as we travel throught the pavillion. We find oursleves standing,waiting unable to step onto such hallowed ground, repelled by the centre which cannoth hold. This is not a unifying whole, the pavillion cannpt resist consuming itself. Thus, behind us, we find the hope of another centre – a shining, radiant backlit wall – at last (we think) another Porta Coeli, behind which must be the centre to which we can hold. We are mistaken.



The wall may be the only source of light but it is encased in white glass, not reflective but placed amidst a sea of concavities; our hectic path brings us upon wall upon wall, we cannot reach the white centre – there is no access to the other side, as the apostle Paul wrote, “God dwells in a light to which there is no access.”

So we continue to crisscross our thread, hurrying now for we feel hot on the trail, entering and re-entering rooms from which it seems someone has just left. The labyrinth is getting the better of us, our prey will never be found. It is only when we stop, perhaps back on the edge of the black carpet, that we realise we are our own prey; it is ourselves we have been chasing. The pavilion, cruel in reflection, forces us to leave just as we arrive, passing the mirror and thereby emptying it. We come to the end and the beginning of Ariadne’s Thread and all we find is ourselves.