Trace it to the Tusci

This post derives from what began as a funny wake-up dream. In it I was back in the Army, but in my dream-army, soldiers moved about on skateboards. Then, quite suddenly (and this can happen in dreams), there was a radical change in uniforms—but I did not get the word at once. As I was skateboarding down a hall, an oddly dressed Chaplain stopped me, forbade me to use my skateboard, and accused me of atheism. Obediently I bent down, picked up my skateboard, and went outside on foot. Big surprise. All soldiers now wore black boots and breeches, the breeches held up by leather suspenders that formed an X across their chests; they wore leather jackets and shakos on their heads. These were American soldiers? Surely not! But there they were. Instantly I knew I was in trouble—but I still had three years to serve. What to do?  I would desert, I thought! The thought was strong enough to wake me up.

Dreams usually resolve into a dominant thought, therefore I waited for that thought to announce itself. And in a moment it came. “There are worse things than decadence—and fascism is one of them.” I was reading the paper minutes later and saw, without surprise, that the Cossacks are seeing a rebirth in Russia (front page, bottom fold). Yes, without surprise. Sometimes one dreams the immediate future. And the immediate past: and the fasces of fascism fit into yesterday’s discussion of heraldry.

The Tusci of my title inhabited north-western Italy when the Romans arrived, and Tusci was the Latin rendition of their name, the Etrusci a variant. Their realm is till called Tuscany; Florence is its largest city. The bundled rods, sometimes with, sometimes without an ax embedded in the center, was their symbolic creation and, probably, the oldest political symbol in the Western world.

It is an ambiguous image, to be sure. Through unity, power. How that unity is achieved—that is the question. For all I know it might have been one of the earliest images of rule by the people. Meanwhile, gradually, it has become ever more associated with unsavory dictatorship, fascism, in that “rods,” certainly in nature, do not cling like that. You need straps to hold them so tightly.  And the tighter the bands, the stronger the unity. Further, fear is a very efficient restraint. Realm after realm, as it has risen in power, has used the symbol in one way or another, not least ours. We find crossed fasces in the U.S. National Guard’s insignia; they feature spears rather than axes at their center. And a close look at the Lincoln Memorial shows Abe Lincoln seated in a chair fronted on either side by fasces. As for me, I prefer the Phrygian cap.

I must dream on, of course, Benito, but I certainly hope that some of my dreams will not come true.

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My source is Wikipedia (link). The National Guard insignium comes from the National Guard (link).

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.