An Ecumenical Exchange

Rarely in our travels have we passed a cathedral we did not at least briefly visit. Thus many years ago, on a trip to California—which also took us down to San Juan Capistrano—we stopped in Garden Grove, CA on the way back and spent part of a mid-week morning visiting the Crystal Cathedral and its environs. Wondrous weather. Glass and light all over. Virtually no one about. 

This morning I learned that this church, built by Robert H. Schuller, founder of the Reformed Church in America, and famed for his Hour of Power television show (which we quite often watched) has become the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, now named Christ Cathedral. The legal transfer of ownership took place November 17, 2011—but the facility was leased back to the Reformed Church for a while. That church performed its last services there on June 30, 2013. Thereafter the congregation, has been occupying, yes, a Catholic church once known as Callistus; its new name under the Reformed Church is Shepherd’s Grove. Let’s call that an ecumenical exchange and ignore what history certainly shall—the bankruptcy and all the rest. Deep digging into the history of any cathedral will bring that sort of thing into focus, but time overlays it with a more pleasing patina. The image is Wikipedia’s (link).

Schuller founded the Reformed Church in 1955; the cathedral was completed in 1981—and, as is the case with such structures, saw further additions and changes; and those are still going on.

Reading about this exchange, memories of other unusual houses of worship rose—suggesting that church construction, and at striking scales and splendor, has not disappeared. Far from it. The first church we attended in America—or, rather, tried to attend—was Saint Francis of Xavier in Kansas City. Three of us children travelled there by street car—like on our first or second Sunday in the United States. It was a famous church, referred to as the Fish Church. Alas we did not speak English very well yet. They stopped us at the door—and it took quite a while to understand that we couldn’t go in because my sister, Susie, was bareheaded—she should have had a scarf over her head. Here was a new Catholic rule we knew nothing about. Saint Francis Xavier was built in 1949—thus two years before we arrived. I got to know the church quite well later because it was right next door to Rockhurst College, a Jesuit school, and served as the locus of college services. The images that follows are from Wikipedia (link); the second shows the “fish” shape.

Here in the Detroit region, the most striking house of worship, at least for members of this clan, is the synagogue of the Conservative Jewish Community, Shaarey Zedek. It is quite easily seen from superhighway I-696 where it intersects with super-artery Telegraph Road. A splendid structure. I show it from the front and from the side; it was built in 1962. For quite a long while the family business, Editorial Code and Data, had its offices on Telegraph, in the Onyx Building yet, itself something of a minor jewel. We saw Shaarey Zedek every day, approaching and leaving by night. These days Brigitte and I sometimes glimpse the structure on our way west to visit Monique and John. I bring the image courtesy of Docomomo, an international group dedicated to the conservation of modern architecture (link).

Low-Cost and Expensive Phrases

Readers of this blog interested in architectural detail probably know that our house has an arched extension (link). Nice but humble, just a brick-arch. Coming from the Old World as we do, we call that a port-cochère. In the local speech it’s just a car port—and never mind the arches. So which is it? One of these phrases is expensive, the other is low-cost.

The answer to that came the other day. A huge beam that supports the roof over this structure (built in 1929), rotted out at one end and partially collapsed. Thank the Lord what remains of it still holds the roof. Sparrows had also burrowed into the rotten wood and built a nest inside it—but we didn’t know that until this dramatic event. I found a significant pile of rotten wood and black dust there one morning after a particularly energetic rain.

The repair will soon be underway—and will run about a couple of thousand. From this we learned that until the damage took place some 84 years after the house was built, this facility was just a humble car port. But now, after it’s fixed, it will have become a much more expensive port-cochère.

The Rise of the Arch

The virtue of the true arch, whether used for an opening into or a hollow space within a structure, is that in ages before steel came into use as a weight-bearing member, the arch could make a wider opening and/or a greater hollow than any other form of support, be that columns holding the horizontal lintel of a gate or supporting a roof. And the secret the ancients discovered was that stone is easily cracked and broken when weight above it causes it to stretch (tensile force) but resists weight much more effectively if the weight causes it to compress instead (compressive force). For this reason, before the discovery of the arch, huge temples were forests of tall columns, not much more than 10 feet apart—although nicely aligned.

The earliest arches, known also as false arches, emerged as far back as the second millennium BC. They attempted to reduce the tensile stress on bearing members by extending the supporting columns stepwise into the opening, as shown by the illustration of this early kind of arch, known as a corbel. Corbelled arches predate the true arch by two thousand years and are found all over the world, including ancient South America.

The Etruscans invented the true arch, also shown as a diagram. By using wedge-shaped stones, they converted tensile stresses on the stone from above into compressive stress, so that the force exerted on the stone is transferred laterally to the columns—as shown in the illustration. The Romans learned the art, perfected it, and then applied it with enormous exuberance to every kind of building, including enormous aqueducts. The true arch was solidly in place by the second century BC. The later flying buttress (mentioned on this blog here) is an extension of the principle that manifests in the arch.

In contrast to stone or brick steel stretches easily under weight while retaining its integrity. When steel beams began to be deployed as weight-bearing members in the nineteenth century, the functional role of the stone arch was diminished. Not that such did not continue to be built—indeed they still are. The massive deployment of steel in buildings is, of course, the consequence of plentiful supplies of cheap fossil fuels. As these sources of energy are exhausted, the arch, no doubt, will once more become an important technology—the enabler of generous interior space.

I bring this post today by way of illustrating a point I made yesterday about technology. Technology cumulates even as large social structures decay, die, and others are then born in turn. The corbelled arch survived the decline and fall of Sumer and Akkad; the Roman arch survived the decline and fall of Rome and may rise in the future. How the old is passed on to the present is illustrated neatly in two YouTube videos. The first is titled “How I Build Stone Arches,” by Mike Haduck (link). It’s hands on. Amusingly, it illustrates how modern and ancient technologies cooperate—when Haduck uses an electric saw to shape his stones…and then consults an old book that illustrates arch-building early in the twentieth century. The second, “History of Visual Technology: Stone Construction and the Arch,” presents an excellent tutorial on the fundamentals involved in this art—and how it has evolved over time (link). The arches closest to our house? Why, they are part of our house (built 1929). We walk beneath them each time we go somewhere.

The stresses in matter can, by careful observation, be made to harmonize beautifully. The stresses in large aggregates of people—not quite so effectively. But the human experience is highly layered. As we leave the upper levels where the compressive stress of union and the tensile stress of freedom are most visibly in conflict, great constructs eventually give way—while at lower levels useful tooling is never quite lost even if knowledge about it thins out and has to be recovered from old books using Xerox machines.

To this, as a card-carrying word-maven, I need to add a caution. Architecture does not have its roots in “the arch.” In that word the root is archon, the Greek for “master” or “chief”—chief builder. The arch has its root in the Latin arcus; it stands for the “bow.”
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Images from Wikipedia link for the corbel and link for the true arch.

Spires

One barely sees the old spires pointing at the sky unless by chance the landscape opens from an unexpected angle. Brigitte has weekly swim sessions at a middle school called Parcells, and while she swims I go on walks. Returning from that jaunt a while back, I suddenly saw the old brick spire, a dead volcano, as it were. We’ve gotten well acquainted since that time, and I nod to the old thing as to someone of my own generation. The times have passed us both, but we’re both still around.

Middle schools don’t get much glory, and therefore it took me an arduous forty minutes finally to pin down its age. Parcells Middle School saw its completion in 1948 when, presumably, King Coal still had something to say about the heating of large buildings. Back then stacks were high so that the wind could carry the smoke ever to the east around here. Today the smoke is gone, but as I return to Parcells on foot from my walks, I start to see five, six black birds as I draw nearer sitting on the smoke-stack’s rim enjoying the great view from up there. They just sit and, sometimes, rustle their wing feathers.

Does this spire point to the past—or to the future? Who knows. But it’s pointing up, which, come to think about it, is the right direction, either way.

On Walls

Years ago now—many—I happened to rise very early and, turning on the television (something very rare, but it happened that morning) I chanced across a lecture broadcast by the University of Missouri aimed at distant learners who rose before the light to get an education.

The professor used photos and art to illustrate changes in architecture over long historical periods in Europe, specifically walls: their absence, appearance, rising height, growing thickness, and flourishing infestation of metal and out-jutting rock-work on top to deny access to those who would enter uninvited. Over time, centuries. The lecture also featured windows in the same way. The professor showed a Roman villa circa 40 AD with a stupendous, generous frontage reminiscent of trophy homes in a modern suburban super-rich neighborhood—and then progressed forward in time. Windows at first grew smaller; next they acquired iron bars; next they appeared ever higher up, beyond the reach of a tall man’s outstretched hand; next, up there, they narrowed, ever more, until at last they had become mere slits sufficient to spy attackers and to aim arrows at them as they advanced. Thus these architectural forms evolved, from imperial Rome to the High Middle Ages, when architecture began very gradually to change again. Windows opened, as it were; and walls diminished.

I watched in absolute fascination. Of course, of course, I kept saying to myself—delighted by the obvious. Slowly but surely architecture will reflect the actual state of society. When cracks appear in the social order, life goes right on, but increasingly those who are able to enclose themselves do so ever more.

Years later—not quite so many viewed from today—a conference took Brigitte and me to Anaheim. Yes, we visited Disney Land. And after that, on a whim, we decided to drive south to San Juan Capistrano using I-5. Along the way we saw many, many walled and gated communities atop flat rises in the landscape, clearly visible from the highway, not least their gates. Seeing them I remembered that lecture, heard by pure chance. And I thought of it again today thinking of the riots in Britain.

The picture I am showing, from Wikipedia (link), was actually built in the early sixteenth century in Santo Domingo, the Americas—but it has such a wonderful name, Fortaleza Ozama, that I could not resist.

Nests of All Kinds

They rest, float, hang. They’re scraped, found, dug, hung. They’re formed of pebbles, sticks, living plants, horse-hair, reed, stalks, mud, anything at all. They are often reinforced, wedged between branches, carved out of living cactus plants, and suspended or glued using spider-silk. Most are hidden or carefully camouflaged; in some the bird seals itself in and is fed by its mate through a slit. Some are rudely appropriated from groundhogs—and some the most visible feature of the landscape as you look up—or of the urban skyline in a town, provided of course that its population tolerates birds. More on that in a moment. My subject is Avian Architecture, the title of a new book (June 2011) by Peter Goodfellow, just recently published by Princeton University Press. Brigitte saw a review of it intriguing enough so that we bought a copy then and there. It has given us great pleasure and we recommend it to anyone interested in the natural world—and as Sidney Lanier once put it, in the greatness of God:

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God.
         Sidney Lanier, The Marshes of Glynn

Goodfellow is a retired English Teacher, birdwatcher, and author of other books on birds. Avian Architecture has wonderful pictures but is much more than a coffee-table book. First, it’s short, 160 pages. Then it is organized into twelve chapters—each one about one of the major categories of nests. Goodfellow divides his chapters into an introductory text with illustrations, a spread with “blueprints” that lay out the schematics of the nest-type under discussion. Next comes a spread on materials used and special features. Then follow case studies of different species, in all manner of environments, and how they deploy this type of nest. Fascinating stuff. And, indeed, one cannot help but wonder about the creation of such marvelous ways of hatching eggs and raising chicks.

We grew up in Europe in smaller towns and therefore grew up with stork nests. My first experience of one was in Tirschenreuth, in Germany, where a nest sat on top of Tirschenreuth’s famed church, Mariä Himmelfahrt (Mary’s Assumption). A stork nest was evidently continuously present on that church since the nineteenth century, although not always on the church’s roof. It now has its home on the roof of the vicarage, as shown in the photograph. You may have to click on the photo and then enlarge it to see the nest well. Sometimes humans participate in nest-building too. This particular stork’s nest has a steel platform installed there with some effort, using a fire-engine crane, in 2009, to give the storks (they arrive unfailingly in Spring) a better home.

To show another kind of highly visible nest, the picture on the left shows the suspended nests of the Crested Oropendolas. They are black birds, with blue eyes, yellow beaks, and have a long, vividly yellow tail. Goodfellow classifies such nests under the category of Hanging, Woven, and Stitched Nests and covers them in wondrous detail in Chapter Eight. The one I’m showing is a sub-category called the woven pendulous basket. It is three feet long and seven inches wide at the bottom. You will find a detailed blueprint in the book. The photograph I’m showing, however, comes courtesy of the Trinidad Birding website here.

The Original Paradise

During my walk yesterday, just supervising Winter’s rapid retreat, I came across a green door in a wall. A modest house, a proportional wall, a pleasing door. The photos show the exterior and then the space the walls contain. I was pleased, struck, and memories arose, quite curious memories, memories of the time long ago when Brigitte returned to school and we became life-long students of biology. If this sounds like a non-sequitur, be patient. We used to sit around endlessly and talk about the cell, and I can still hear Brigitte saying: “In the beginning, there was the wall!”

Yes. The first assertion of life’s presence is the cellular wall. It carves the first ever private space out of the vast chaotic random. The wall of the cell, to be sure, is already a very complex something, but it is a final something, a triumph! Closure, you might say. At the same time it’s the beginning of something destined to become enormous and always magical. Life. Or at least its manifestation in the order of matter.

Long before the cell came into my conscious view, architectural enclosures had already fascinated me—the Roman atrium, the courtyard, the vast hollows of cathedrals. Humanity’s first habitation was in Paradise, and it had pleased me to discover that that word derives from the original Persian words for surrounded and wall, pairi and daeza: the walled garden.

The rest of my walk turned into a contemplation of this very basic subject, the inner and the outer—and I examined every enclosure for its meaning. Low, decorative walls easy to see over spoke of a desire to define but yet to invite eyes to admire. Bald wire fencing told me to say out—and that I would be closely observed as I passed. If they were further thickened by hedges, the wire meant to keep out animals; it was the job of the hedges to block intrusive human eyes. Wrought-iron proclaimed the presence of money, the stature of the owner, sometimes high taste. Tall solid walls always proclaimed that two realities exist—one within and one without, and the within is sacred.

Inside and out. Another pair in the endless duality. But these enclosures also emphasize that those two are never equal. It must have been a dark day indeed when Adam and Eve, heads bent, had to pass through that gate east of Eden.

The Eaves are Dropping

An eave is the over-hanging portion of a typically slanting roof. The roof slants in order to carry water as quickly as possible away from the structure before—water is like that—it will soak in, collect, seep down, and begin the slow process of returning the house to nature. The over-hang, the eave, of course, is there to protect the outer walls of the house. And this almost self-evident architectural innovation has had some interesting legal and linguistic ramifications.

The eave goes way back. I’m told that Greek Doric temples featured an eave, but the Ionic temples did not. The latter collected the water in grooves and spewed it out through the gullets of stone lions; these lions, in turn, are the original of our gargoyles (for more see here). Now with eaves present the water simply drips down to the ground. And the area into which the collected raindrops fall is called—and this is a noun—the eavesdrop. The Latin for it is stillcidium, derived from stilla or drop. And the Romans saw this drippage happening around Etruscan temples. The legal ramifications arose around this disgusted exclamation: “I don’t want your roof dripping on my property.” In Roman times this produced laws preventing owners building structures right up to their property lines. You had to keep back a ways. And in the Anglo Saxon legal canon the limit was 2 feet from the boundary—so that the owner had to suffer his own dripping.

Now to the linguistic aspect. First, our word derives from the Old English yfesdrype, yes, eaves and drop. But the ramification comes from the fact that the area itself, the eavesdrop region on the ground, is rather narrow, shaded by the roof, and very close to the wall. A person quietly standing there, on the eavesdrop, especially close to an open window, ideally further camouflaged from the outside by big bushes put next to the house, could, listening hard, overhear things that he or she might not otherwise hear. And thus we have the transformation of something that once was a noun into a verb. We have Google. And we also google, don’t we? I googled all this using Wikipedia and Online Etymology Dictionary. The illustration—it's best to make things very clear—is courtesy of home-roofs.com.

Meaningful coincidence? Yesterday I read, in a marvelous old novel, The White Woman, a crucial episode where Marian Halcomb, co-heroine of the novel, spends a couple of hours listening to a conversation, during a downpour, hiding on the eavesdrop and getting very wet and cold. Her resulting illness is a hinge in the plot. And this morning, suddenly, Brigitte looks at me and says: “You know? Eavesdrop? That’s lauschen in German. How did we get the word in English? The eaves dropping? What is all this?” — It’s a Ghulf Genes post, Brigitte. That’s what it is.

Fashions in Words

Words turn fashionable and then fade; they also undergo gradual changes in meaning. This occurred to me this morning jotting notes—because, long ago, I used to call my diary entries “neurotic writings.” Today it occurred to me that “neurotic,” and its root “neurosis” have gone out of fashion. In the 1950s, 1960s you heard the world all the time. Back in those days the word “hysteria” still carried a palpable linkage to its origin in “hysterical,” thus “of the womb,” thought to be a female “neurosis” arising from a dysfunction of the uterus. Hysterical laughter is uncontrolled—and therefore disorderly.

Now neurosis is as old as the United States. It was coined by a Scottish doctor William Cullen in 1776. It stayed happily hidden in the medical lexicon until Freudian psychiatry launched it into popular speech in the 1920s; by mid-century it was a pop word; since then it has almost disappeared. The dictionary calls it “a functional nervous disorder without demonstrable physical lesion.” This makes the word very handy and entirely dependent on how we define “disorder.” In a society where you’re supposed to be chatty, cheery, jolly, and adaptive—social, active, with-it, and grabbing the gusto—a moody, dark, questioning, and solitary temperament could and was labeled neurotic even when everything in the environment, viewed rationally anyway, would indeed strongly support a gloomy view. Has the world changed—or has language? Are more people quite naturally a lot more alert and questioning now that the credit card has maxed and the job’s gone by-be-bye? For a lot of people now looking outward produces a quite natural caution—and to give this stance the mildest label of “mental disorder” may not be fitting any more.

My favorite instance of a word that has changed value-tone is “gothic.” It used to mean rude, barbaric, backward but has now gained a more positive meaning. We no longer think of gothic cathedrals as forbiddingly ugly and of Rococo as divine. And lots of us these days use the phrase “modern architecture” much as the Baroque Era used the word gothic—with a face suggestive of revulsion—especially when it’s super-added to a venerable Renaissance structure by some hysterical architect known by only one name.

Public Art

A comment by Brandon on public art in the context of a library—see the post on “Libraries” below—reminded me of the delights I once experienced reading a book by Thomas Wolfe entitled From Bauhaus to Our House. The book is about architecture—and Thomas Wolfe at his best. It was published in 1981. I saw excerpts of it in Harper’s magazine and then, delighted, rushed to buy my own copy.

To become an architect had been my earliest childhood ambition. I used to have to take naps in my Grandmother’s formal living room. It was virtually unused and had a lot of books. Left to myself I used to sneak books from the shelf. One of these was an architectural tome filled with floor plans and drawings. It became a great favorite of mine, a book I consulted daily—and this before I'd even learned to read… As for my calling in life, things worked out differently, but my interest in architecture has remained. It was Tom Wolf who labeled public art the “turd in the plaza.” But reading that phrase, to be sure, was but an incidental pleasure to finding my own views of modern architecture acidly echoed by Wolfe’s theme, which was a critique of modernism in its architectural expression. I loved every word of it… The book is available from Amazon here.

Cultural Landscape

The word in German (Kulturlandschaft) has just a little more bite, but to explain that fully would take up space. People who really possess multiple languages so that these manifest spontaneously in the head experience this problem now and then. The same word in another language simply conveys much more or has an extra dimension, what sometimes people astutely call a resonance.

When I first came to America I felt alienated because the architecture was all wrong. Leaving town I always had a sense of liberation, of once more being home, of breathing properly again. Soon we moved to another house, across from what we called Guillam Park (in Kansas City). Near us, easy walking distance, was the Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery; it topped a hilly region surrounded by upscale but tightly clustered and massively tree-shaded residences. The Gallery rapidly became for us a focus, shrine, object of weekly pilgrimages. From up there, on its stately terrace facing South, our eyes could sweep over expanses of cultivated gardens and lawns—and in the far, far distance, but visible, stood Midwest Research Institute (the arts and the sciences, as it were, arrayed face to face). Little did I dream then, in my edgy teens, that someday I would work there.

The picture here presents a view of one corner the Gallery in the distance, but as seen from MRI. In the foreground is the Volker fountain. It features St. Martin of Tours on horseback—a figure who looms very large in our family in many ways, not least in that he forms part of our “noble” name: Darnay of St. Martin. A charming feature of this fountain is the figure of a naked angel, a young boy, high a-top a pole, playing a flute but holding it the wrong way around—and wearing a wrist-watch. MRI isn’t visible but is behind the photographer.

Very nice. But this area, the Nelson Gallery raised, science in the flatlands, this imprint of culture, was, alas, just one of a few pocketses (as Gollum in Lord of the Rings would have it) in an otherwise theme-less and sometimes ugly, vast spread of structures, buildings, parking lots, and billboard-bearing thoroughfares. By contrast any small town in Europe—and especially in Italy, say—has another imprint difficult to capture analytically. But you sure as hell know that now you’re looking at a cultural landscape. Everything fits it. Everything proclaims its presence, somehow. It is the look of Christendom. (The next shot I owe to Michelle’s site, here.)

Back in those days I didn't understand the matter fully. In those days I used the labels Europe and America, and I assumed that Europe had culture and America lacked it. But many years later I received the needed corrective. We set out from Paris by car to drive to Tours. Yes. Our family’s links to St. Martin are densely woven. Having finally left the city behind, we began to pass through a landscape that—oh, my God—looked just like America, in general and in detail, and worst of all, in spirit. And I realized the truth. What I called Kulturlandschaft was simply the past, its traces still shaping the wax of matter from another time. And what I beheld in the United States, and increasingly everywhere, is the shape of values current in Modernity. The old persists—but it has become the achievement of small groups or individuals. “The sea of faith was once, too, at the full…” (Coleridge).