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Scales of the Sublime: An Architectural Definition of the Middle East

As far as we know, the Hellenistic notion of THE SUBLIME applied not to nature, but to such works of men which pleased people of different backgrounds and beard repetition and test of time. The modern rediscovery of the sublime as a highly sophisticated aesthetic category was preceded by great inventions and discoveries and by the rise of the Newtonian natural sciences capable of elevating the mind closer to the divine. Consequence of the new, enhanced understanding of the world, the sublime was found in the Scriptures and in the Homeric myths, in wild nature, and in the aesthetic dimension of the natural sciences. Associated with desolation, solitude and danger, and the uncanny awareness of the fragility of the human condition in the immense universe, it was formally expressed first in landscape painting and literature. The beautiful, associated with pleasure and delight, was considered its opposite. Before the embodiment into architectural forms, the new pair-ideas embodied first in the landscape gardening developed around the imitative principle of the picturesque which emphasized the beautiful and addressed the sublime only in details, adding the contrast to the arranged perspective. The sublime and the beautiful were given the philosophical substance by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke saw the beautiful in functions of generation and reproduction, as such manifested in physical attraction, and the sublime in function of self-preservation. Different from the pure horror, the Burkean sublime requires a certain detachment from its cause. It anticipates our reasoning but it does not simply equal the fear from death, pain or danger. It is contrasted, but not in opposition to the beautiful whose opposite is the ugly. Kant criticized Burke’s definitions as based on the empirical exposition. Introducing rational arguments into his transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgements, he moved the sublime and the beautiful from the object observed to our own cognitive capacities. The sublime is to be found not in things of nature but in our own ideas. “It is the name given to what is absolutely great.” While the judgement of beauty involves a relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding, the judgement of the sublime involves a relation between the faculties of imagination and reason, uniting the aesthetic with the moral experience into a rational aesthetic judgement. The sublime involves a mental movement attributed to the object through the faculty of cognition as a mathematical imagination or through the faculty of desire as a dynamical imagination. Hence the two categories of the sublime experience: Mathematically sublime is the feeling of our reason’s superiority to our imagination when confronted with something so large that it overwhelms imagination’s capacity to comprehend it. Such is the view through the telescope. Dynamically sublime is the experience of nature as a fearful power that has no dominion over us, although we have to submit to that dominion. It requires a safe position, such as that of an observer looking at the desert that cannot sustain his life from behind the protective barrier. Thanks to that protection, the object of contemplation can be judged independent of any concepts. From such a perspective, the imitative category of the picturesque may be designed as the opposite to the sublime, especially in an architectural context. While the nature was explained and man-made structures of ever greater size were constructed, new questions arose. The manifestations of the advancing technology replaced nature as objects of the sublime experience. Interested in the transcendental, enlightened rulers, entrepreneurs, engineers and architects, like wanderers, artists and scientists before them, intended to imbue their achievements with moral values and transcendent significance. But as the productivity was becoming the main objective and masses of people the mayor protagonist of the industrialized world, the function of the sublime has changed too. Displaced from the Kantian - Burkean substance, the new, popular, quasi-religious kind of sublime “feeling” was born outside the “Old” Europe, embodied in the progressive sequence of natural and artificial objects that have been continuously replacing each other, increasing the excitement of the masses. The idea that a sublime object is a manifest of reason was preserved, but Immanuel Kant’s universal moral worth was replaced with a sort of technologically aided, productive and materialist faith: in America in the national, in the Soviet Union in the class greatness. The unquestioned fascination with technology manifested most clearly in the Kantian dynamically sublime of the controlled nuclear explosions and the outer space expeditions. Paralleled with the growing awareness of the possible self- destruction, it reached its pinnacle in the heyday of the cold war and ended with the 1970s energy crisis. Periods of the extreme detachment from the immanent reality have been coinciding with great scientific, social, or religious revolutions and with periods of great technological inventions whose application enhanced new, elevated perspectives on our surroundings. The digital sublime might be seen as the ultimate step of the sequence, opening a truly vast field of possible sublime experiences. In our globalized world, physical manifestations of the sublime are acquiring ever greater scales, now extending into the virtual infinite. Kant has pointed out some outstanding works of architecture as sublime: the Pyramids and the interior of the St. Peter’s basilica overwhelm the senses and absorb the observer. Unlike judgements about painting and sculpture, a judgement about architecture can easily be non- conceptual, because representational aspects are not as important in architecture. In his idea, architectural imagination is constrained by its finality, yet architecture has an ability to evoke the sublime. According to Edmund Burke, although limited by clearness and perfection, architecture can deceive our senses and thus suggest the infinite. Division and addition ; rhythm, pattern and repetition work for that cause. Consequently, an architectural object may address the sublime directly, as a latent cause of the sublime emotion in the Burkean, and a trigger of the mathematically sublime experience in the Kantian sense, and/or indirectly, related to the dynamically sublime experience of something else. Beyond the scope of single architectural objects, architectural criteria may also be extended in a sequence of scales onto the vast area where the dynamical and the mathematical aspects of the sublime meet, and, not necessarily confined to the limits of our sight, applied at the geographic scale. Opposite from the view through the telescope into the depths of the Universe, and similar to the view through the microscope because it implies the possibility of infinite close ups, the satellite view to the earth provides the ultimate augmentation of the observation field and the ultimate detachment of the observer. This elevated view from above is the departure point of this experiment in testing the limits of architecture as a discipline which controls and shapes the state of things at the vast territorial envelopment of an entire geographic region: from the landform, down to the object scale. What exactly THE MIDDLE EAST is, it depends on the perspective of the observer. Situated at the tri- continental juncture of Asia, Africa and Europe, it is central to the Old World and to the contemporary, globalized world from many converging perspectives. Its commonly accepted geopolitical definition extends from the Black to the Arabian Sea and from the Eastern border of Iran to the western border of Egypt. The limits of the empires that constituted the Middle East have been expanding and contracting beyond the limits of the region, but it never happened that the entire area was under the same political entity. Two seas are contained within the region: the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The Mediterranean, the Black and the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean surround the region widening the scope, bringing and emitting the cultural influences. From the elevate perspective, one mayor topic comes clearly in focus: the region’s multi-layered human history has been decisively conditioned by its physical shape, the perceivable landform and the abundance of natural riches below its surface. Beside this objective physical form, the great narratives reaching far beyond the borders of this geographic region are central both to the ancient and to the contemporary notions and understandings of the Middle East. The proximity of the desert to the arable land and to the growing metropolises magnifies the actual presence of the exceptional material facts. This sharp contrast between the extremely natural and the extremely artificial has always been the crucial condition of the Middle-Eastern territories. The monotheistic faith came from this horizontal world where the conditions for permanent settlement are not inviting and yet, the humans have always been tempted to raise obelisks and build artificial mountains. In the Sumerian myths, the desert was the primordial menace while the desert nomads saw the earliest big cities and mighty states the embodiments of moral corruption and decay menacing the natural order. The linear time was structured from this prototypical situation of the permanence situated next to the transience, through the sequence of revelations or mythical events, depending on the perspective of the observer. Infected in Judaism and in Christianity by the strong polytheist heritage, the monotheistic idea about the world remains unquestioned in Islam, expressed in the consciousness of the divine unity. The monotheistic idea about nature appears similar to that of the rationalist, Newtonian natural science. The universe is dominated by reason and order and everything in nature has a purpose, explaining the intentions of the creator, a strong idea which has consequences for human interventions in nature, most importantly architecture. If the sublime lies within our reason, Newtonian equations prove our power of reason’s superiority over nature. The daring idea that, conforming to the denial of idols and to the abandonment of representation, an abstract geometric pattern may reflect the cosmic order links the Kantian notion of the mathematically sublime directly with the sublime religious experience. Beyond the visible at the first glance, the close- ups into the satellite view on the Middle East provide an abundance of material facts which provoke sublime experiences. Hence the idea that it is in the aim towards the sublime essence of things, not towards their picturesque semblance, where driving forces of various origins, reasons and beliefs converge, outlining what is specifically Middle Eastern in architecture while referring to some fundamental, timeless and universal questions about architecture at the same time.

the sublime, the beautiful, the picturesque, landform, landscape, city, architecture, natural sciences, Middle East, desert, monotheism, Islamic architecture

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