The Flying Buttress

The arch, which gives its name to architecture, produces an aesthetic form by harnessing practical intellect. This combination of a feeling, difficult to capture conceptually, and an intellectual force, the astute understanding of the play of physical forces, has always appealed to me in whatever field. Modern structural steel came into use in the nineteenth century and produced the first skyscrapers. After that all things became possible in architecture. Quite wonderful buildings still rise all over the world, but the interesting innovations the past produced by limiting the means to wood and stone have become less visible. Good architecture, nowadays, is a matter of money and taste.

My own interests date back to childhood when, at my grandmother’s house, aged four or five, left alone in a living-room-plus-library for a nap, I found a fascinating book of architecture filled with floor plans and architectural drawings—nothing like children’s books—and I fell into a life-long fascination. Later yet once I read a book on the arch—and its absence, for instance—in pre-Columbian American architecture. And then, while in Germany as a soldier, I spent my free time traveling all over Europe to haunt the great cathedrals. The Gothics were my favorites—and these feature that wondrous innovation, the flying buttress.

This drawing of a buttress at the Reims Cathedral is from an album of drawings by Villard de Honnecourt from the period 1230 - 35 obtained from Wikipedia here. This flying buttress has two wings, you might say. The interior of the cathedral is to the right; the buttress is outside under the open sky.

This elegant form came about because architects of that period (roughly the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) wished to build open cathedrals, the interior entirely hollow; “soaring” is often the word applied to capture the feeling we have as we look up into the dark immensities above. To get the open space, the ceiling could no longer be held up by a forest of massive interior columns. But, as a consequence, the weight of the ceiling used to cause the outer walls to push, to cave outward; if this was left uncorrected, the building could collapse. Two possibilities existed to correct this: to build very thick walls with very narrow or no openings at all. But the architects wanted lots of light to enter from without. Therefore they piled masses of stone on the outside of the walls to buttress them—not all the way up to where the windows were, but thickly at the bottom.

The flying buttress emerged later as a deeper understanding of the underlying physical forces developed over time. A flying buttress carries the weight of the roof and ceiling outward, away from the walls, in one or two flights, and lets it rest on the solid ground a distance away from the building itself. The concept of  “pushing against” had to be replaced by the concept of “carrying away.” This gives Gothic cathedrals their unique and wondrous look in which aesthetic values serve the needs of engineering and engineering transcends its function and becomes beautiful. I’ve long cherished this architectural structure as a visible symbol of the body-soul interaction. The next image is that of Notre Dame in Paris. It was begun in 1160 and completed in the 1240s; cathedrals, alas, are never really finished. Notre Dame was one of the first structures to use the flying buttress.
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Notre Dame picture courtesy of Andy Hochhalter here.

Mirrors of Projection

It was in C.G. Jung’s writings that I first encountered the rather useful concept of projection. Jung held that the collective unconscious holds permanent energetic structures he labeled archetypes (“primal patterns”)—an old, old concept with a hoary history… Plato’s ideal, eternal forms were of this category existing somewhere in a transcendental space, the very model and source of all things visible; in scholastic times they were transferred to the mind of God; during the Enlightenment Locke, for instance, brought them back to earth and suggested that archetypes were simply things out in the world that our minds turn into patterns. What goes around, comes around. In the transitional twentieth century, the archetypes go back into our chests, and if we seek to trace them further, we find them in that quasi-divine collective unconscious which was Jung’s reinvention of divinity. They reside there in Platonic silence, energize us, and we project them out into the world. There you have the root of this conception. The archetype of “father” is projected onto leaders, of “mother” on the nanny state, of “evil” onto capitalism, socialism, the red menace, or Muslim terrorism. Jung wisely suggested that people should withdraw their projections in order to mature.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand for a moment with this archetype of the Wise Old Man. Jung thought that the mirrors of our projection take on the energy of the archetype itself, and that, by projection, we thus form god-like entities that rule us in our turn. Not bad when you think about it. The rational way, Locke’s way, is much less exiting. Without the psychic energies that reflect malignly from so many structures of reality, CNN’s coverage of news would become—as it already is for the aware—a crashing bore. If we genuinely saw the reality behind today’s bogey-man, Al Qaida, we wouldn’t get very exited—much as in McCarthy’s day careers and reputations would not have been destroyed had we really looked at communism as it really was. When we don’t see reality, it turns into a mirror. It reflects back what we are.

Okay. But what is your solution, Mr. Darnay? And what does science say about this subject? A solution? I don’t have one. One of our more interesting projections is that the world arrays itself in a series of problem-solution sets, and if we can just get enough people behind us, we can get the problem solved. If this state of affairs troubles you, look for a solution within. Turn off CNN, for instance, or decline to participate in polls. Now as for science… Or should I have capitalized that word?