packaging matters

The point is that we don't really understand the role expectations play in the way we experience and evaluate art, literature, drama, architecture, food, wine--anything really. The packaging, the social environment, the narrative surrounding the product matter a lot.

Expectation is an important part of the way we experience music. Joshua Bell told me that it takes an appropriate setting to help people appreciate a live classical music performance. The listener needs to be sitting in a comfortable, faux velvet seat, and surrounded by the acoustics of a concert hall. And when people adorn themselves in silk, perfumes and cashmere, they seem to appreciate the costly performance much more.

“What if we did the opposite experiment?” I asked. “What if we put a mediocre player in Carnegie Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic? The expectations would be very high but the quality would not. Would people discern the difference would their pleasure be quashed?” Bell thought for a moment. “In this case,” he said, “the expectations would triumph over the experience.” Furthermore, he said he could think of a few people who were not great violinists but received wild praise because they were in the right environment.

Across many domains of life, expectations play a huge role in the way we end up experiencing things. Think about the Mona Lisa. Why is this portrait so beautiful, and why is the woman’s smile mysterious? Can you discern the technique and talent it took for Leonardo da Vinci to create it? For most of us the painting is beautiful, and the smile mysterious, because we are told it is so. In the absence of expertise or perfect information, we look for social cues to help us figure out how much we are, or should be, impressed, and our expectations take care of the rest.

Alexander Pope once wrote: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To me, it seems that Pope’s advice is the best way to live an objective life. Clearly, it is also very helpful in eliminating the effects of negative expectations. But what about positive expectations? If I listen to Joshua Bell with no expectations, the experience is not going to be nearly as satisfying or pleasurable as if I listen to him and say to myself, “My god, how lucky I am to he listening to Joshua Bell play live in front of me.” My knowledge that Bell is one of the best players in the world contributes immeasurably to my pleasure.

As it turns out, positive expectations allow us to enjoy things more and improve our perception of the world around us. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get.

- Dan Ariley

form follows fun

Some people think architecture is on the verge of losing its function and becoming art. Consider the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Instead of following Mies van der Rohe (form follows function), many architects today are following Frank O. Gehry (form doesn't matter as long as it's creative and gets attention).

Prada Store (Tokyo)

When I went to Tokyo and I saw this store, it almost felt like I was in a world-class museum--but instead of art clothes were on display.

To make a fashion flagship in Tokyo, it is no longer enough to create a shop interior, no matter how exquisite. To stand out in this shifting seascape of an environment, you need to build something on the scale of a supertanker, or even an artificial island. Herzog and de Meuron’s six-level Tokyo store for Prada is exactly that. It created a new building type: part billboard, part architectural gift wrapping. It’s a landmark that holds its own in the context, but also makes its own context. The architects have piled most of the store into a little five-sided tower with a pointed top that stands close to one corner of the site, leaving the rest open as a public plaza. Given the cost of land in this city, it is a generous, even profligate, gesture.

The tower has a tail, a ribbon wall that unwinds around the edge of the site, protecting it from its neighbours, but without being hostile to them. It bulges open at one end to provide access down a flight of steps into the basement. The finish for this tail is remarkable. A skin of living green moss sprouts through square blocks to create a vaguely Aztec pattern. This gives a clue to what the building, with its multilayered references to natural materials and organic forms, is about. Its material qualities, which range from rough to smooth and tight to loose, give the building its distinctive character.

The tower has four different types of glass: some flat and transparent; others, in the changing rooms, etched for modesty. Some windows push outward, while others are sucked in, as if the building were breathing. The same themes shape the interior. The ceilings are perforated metal, into which a series of larger black holes has been inserted, drawing the surface smoothly inward to make way for the lights. In the corridors, the lights go the other way, marked by dollops of silicon gel bubbling outward.

If the exterior is wet and mossy, the interior demonstrates an almost perverse interest in mixing hairy surfaces with viscous finishes. Some display racks are sheathed in pony skin, others are coated in silicon. There are display tables in molded see-through fiberglass, and some are filled with fiber optics like jellyfish tentacles.

In the basement, the floor is the same raw oak that Herzog and de Meuron used for Tate Modern. But on the upper levels the floors vary between lacquered steel for stairs and a vulnerable ivory-coloured carpet that even the infinitely careful and patient Japanese have trouble keeping spotless.

- Deyan Sudjic

Picasso > Le Corbusier

It is a curious paradox that even the most materialist of us tend to value what might be called the useless above the useful. Useless not in the sense of being without purpose, but without utility, or at least with not much of it. Manolo Blahnik makes shoes that are harder to walk in and a lot more expensive than a pair of plimsolls, though they might be rather more helpful as part of a courtship display. A Ferrari attracts more attention than a Volkswagen, but is hardly a practical means of urban transport. And, at a more fundamental level, while art is useless, design is useful. So Picasso is a far more central figure to the culture of the twentieth century than Le Corbusier, and Guernica, if it were ever to be sold, would command a far higher price than the Unite d’Habitation.

- Deyan Sudjic

monument

Dan Flavin - "monument" for V. Tatlin 1/5 (1970)

objects of beauty

While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.

Owning such an object may help us realize our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

- Alain de Botton

Curiosity - Travel

In June 1802, Humboldt climbed up what was then thought to be the highest mountain in the world: the volcanic peak of Mount Chimborazo in Peru, 6,267 metres above sea level. ‘We were constantly climbing through clouds,’ he reported. ‘In many places, the ridge was not wider than eight or ten inches. To our left was a precipice of snow whose frozen crust glistened like glass. On the right lay a fearful abyss, from eight hundred to a thousand feet deep, with huge masses of rocks projecting from it.’ In spite of the danger, Humboldt found time to notice elements that would have passed most mortals by: ‘A few rock lichens were seen above the snow lines, at a height of 16,920 feet. The last green moss we noticed about 2,600 feet lower down. A butterfly was captured by M. Bonpland [his travelling companion] at a height of 15,000 feet and a fly was seen 1,600 feet higher.’

How does a person come to be interested in the exact height at which he or she sees a fly? How does he or she begin to care about a piece of moss growing on a volcanic ridge ten inches wide? In Humboldt’s case, such curiosity was far from spontaneous: his concern had a long history. The fly and the moss attracted his attention because they were related to prior, larger and—to the layman—more understandable questions.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, ‘Why is there good and evil?’ ‘How does nature work?’ ‘Why am I me?’ If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about, the role of peat in the Thirty Years’ War.

The chain of questions that led Humboldt to his curiosity about a fly on the ten-inch-wide ledge of Mount Chimborazo in June of 1802 had begun as far back as his eighth year, when, as a boy living in Berlin, he had visited relatives in another part of Germany and asked himself, ‘Why don’t the same things grow everywhere?’ Why were there trees near Berlin that did not grow in Bavaria, and vice versa? His curiosity was encouraged by others. He was given a microscope and a library of books about nature; tutors who understood botany were hired for him. He became known as ‘the little chemist’ in the family, and his mother hung his drawings of plants on her study wall. By the time he set out for South America, Humboldt was attempting to formulate laws about how flora and fauna were shaped by climate and geography. His seven-year-old’s sense of inquiry was still alive within him, but now it was articulated through more sophisticated questions, such as, ‘Are ferns affected by northern exposure?’ and ‘Up to what height will a palm tree survive?’

On descending to the base camp below Mount Chimborazo, I Humboldt washed his feet, had a short siesta and almost immediately began writing his ‘Essai sur Ia geographie des plantes’, in which he defined the distribution of vegetation at different heights and temperatures. He stated that there were six altitude zones. From sea level to approximately 3,000 feet, palms and pisang plants grew. Up to 4,900 feet there were ferns, and up to 9,200 feet, oak trees. Then came a zone that nurtured evergreen shrubs (Wintera, Escalloniceae), followed, on the highest levels, by two alpine zones: between 10,150 and 12,600 feet, herbs grew, and between 12,600 and 14,200 feet, alpine grasses and lichens thrived. Flies were, he wrote excitedly, unlikely to be found above 16,600 feet.

Humbolt’s excitement testifies to the importance of having the right question to ask of the world. It may mean the differencebetween swatting at a fly in irritation and running down a mountain to begin work on an ‘Essai sur la geographic des plantes’.

Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don’t come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve. There is usually nothing fixed to them at all; when there is something, it tends to be the wrong thing. There was a lot fixed to the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, which stood at the end of the long traffic-choked Carrera de San Francisco, but it hardly helped me to be curious about it:

The walls and ceilings of the church are decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings, except those in the chapels of saints Anthony and Bernardino, which date from the eighteenth century. The Capilla de San Bernardino, the first chapel on the north side, contains in the centre of the wall a Saint Bernardino of Siena preaching before the King of Aragon (1781), painted by Goya as a young man. The sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.

The information gave no hint as to how curiosity might arise. It was as mute as the fly on Humboldt’s mountain. If a traveller was to feel personally involved with (rather than guiltily obedient towards) ‘the walls and ceilings of the church decorated with nineteenth- century frescoes and paintings. . .‘, he or she would have to be able to connect these facts—as boring as a fly—with one of the large, blunt questions to which genuine curiosity must be anchored.

For Humboldt, the question had been, ‘Why are there regional variations in nature?’ For the person standing before the Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, the question might be, ‘Why have people felt the need to build churches?’ or even ‘Why do we worship God?’ From such a naive starting point, a chain of curiosity would have the chance to grow, involving questions such as ‘Why are churches different in different places?’, ‘What have been the main styles of churches?’ and ‘Who were the main architects, and why did they achieve success?’ Only through such a slow evolution of curiosity could a traveller stand a chance of greeting the news that the church’s vast neoclassical facade was by Sabatini with anything other than boredom or despair.

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

The risk is compounded by geography, in the way that cities contain buildings or monuments that may be only a few feet apart in space but are leagues apart in terms of what is required to appreciate them. Having made a journey to a place we may never revisit, we feel obliged to admire a sequence of things which have no connection to one another besides a geographic one and a proper understanding of which would require a range of qualities unlikely to be found in any one person. We are asked to be curious about Gothic architecture on one street and then promptly fascinated by Etruscan archaeology on the next.

The visitor to Madrid, for example, is expected to be interested both in the Palacio Real, an eighteenth-century royal residence famed for its chambers decorated with lavish rococo chinoiserie by the Neapolitan designer Gasparini, and—a few moments later—in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, a whitewashed gallery devoted to twentieth-century art, whose highlight is Picasso’s Guernica. Yet the natural progression for someone deepening his or her appreciation of eighteenth-century royal architecture would be to ignore the gallery altogether and head for the palaces of Prague and St Petersburg instead.

Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter.

Towards the end of his life, his South American adventures long behind him, Humboldt complained, with a mixture of self-pity and pride, ‘People often say that I’m curious about too many things at once: botany, astronomy, comparative anatomy. But can you really forbid a man from harbouring a desire to know and embrace everything that surrounds him?’

We cannot, of course, forbid such a thing; a pat on the back feels more appropriate. But our admiration for Humboldt’s journey may not preclude our feeling a degree of sympathy for those who, even in the most fascinating cities, have occasionally been visited by a strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home.

- Alain de Botton

Abstraction - Empathy

Why do we change our minds about what we find beautiful? In 1907 a young German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer published an essay entitled ‘Abstraction and Empathy’, in which he attempted to explain our shifts from a psychological perspective. He began by suggesting that during the span of human history there had been only two basic types of art, ‘abstract’ and ‘realistic’, either one of which might, at any given time in a particular society, be favoured over the other. Through the millennia, the abstract had enjoyed popularity in Byzantium, Persia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Congo, Mali and Zaire, and it was just then, at the opening of the twentieth century, returning to prominence in the West. This was an art governed by a spirit of symmetry, order, regularity and geometry. Whether in the form of sculpture or carpets, mosaics or pottery, whether in the work of a basket weaver from Wewak or that of a painter from New York, abstract art aspired to create a tranquil atmosphere marked by flat, repetitive visual planes, the whole being free of any allusion to the living world.

By contrast, Worringer noted, realistic art, which had dominated aesthetics in the Ancient Greek and Roman eras and held sway in Europe from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century, sought to evoke the vibrancy and colour of tangible experience. Artists of this stripe strove to capture the atmosphere of a threatening pine forest, the texture of human blood, the swelling of a teardrop or the ferocity of a lion.

Jacques-Louis David - Oath of the Horatii (1785)

The most compelling aspect of Worringer’s theory — a point as readily applicable to architecture as it is to painting — was his explanation of why a society might transfer its loyalty from the one aesthetic mode to the other. The determinant lay, he believed, in those values which the society in question was lacking, for it would love in art whatever it did not possess in sufficient supply within itself. Abstract art, infused as it was with harmony, stillness and rhythm, would appeal chiefly to societies yearning for calm societies in which law and order were fraying, ideologies were shifting, and a sense of physical danger was compounded by moral and spiritual confusion. Against such a turbulent background (the sort of atmosphere to be found in many of the metropolises of twentieth-century America or in New Guinean villages enervated by generations of internecine strife), inhabitants would experience what Worringer termed ‘an immense need for tranquillity’, and so would turn to the abstract, to patterned baskets or the minimalist galleries of Lower Manhattan.

Kasimir Malevich - Black Circle (1913)

But in societies which had achieved high standards of internal and external order, so that life therein had come to seem predictable and overly secure, an opposing hunger would emerge: citizens would long what its advocates lack as about what they like. We can understand a seventeenth-century elite’s taste for gilded walls by simultaneously remembering the context in which this form of decoration developed its appeal: one where violence and disease were constant threats, even for the wealthy — fertile soil from which to begin appreciating the corrective promises offered by angels holding aloft garlands of flowers and ribbons.

We shouldn’t believe that the modern age, which often prides itself on rejecting signs of gentility and leaves walls unplastered and bare, is any less deficient. It is merely lacking different things. An absence of politesse is no longer the prevailing dread. In most Western cities, at least, the worst of the slums have been replaced by clean, well-charted streets. Life in much of the developed world has become rule-bound and materially abundant, punctilious and routine, to the extent that longings now run in another direction: towards the natural and unftissy, the rough and authentic — longings that bourgeois households may rely on unrendered walls and breeze blocks to help them to assuage.

- Alain de Botton

"We damn well better."

Harper's (1979)

Pyramid

Pyramids, whether the vast, great Pyramids of Egypt or I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris, or even a tiny pyramidal paperweight, exude a sense of strength. Nothing, after all, can knock over a pyramid. If nothing else, it is stable. But it is also easy to identify and easy to understand. There is no mystery to a pyramid, at least as a pure geometric form. But for almost everyone the pyramid has the added advantage of a deep well of associations. A pyramid is Egypt, if you want it to be, and even if you do not share the ancient Egyptians’ belief that the gilt - covered point at the top could make manifest the sun god Ra as it reflected the morning sun, you cannot fail to feel that all pyramids somehow connect you to ancient civilization.

M. Pei quite ingeniously took advantage of these associations when he designed the glass pyramid that was constructed in 1989 to serve as a new entrance, and effectively a new symbol, for the Louvre in Paris. A structure of glass and steel in the middle of the courtyard of the Louvre seemed, at first, like the least appropriate thing imaginable. It was not only introducing modernity to a sixteenth-century space, it was bringing a quality of sleekness and an aesthetic that we might associate more with industrial design than with a former royal palace in France. But Pei defended his design on the basis of the ancient lineage of the pyramid. It was, he argued, not a modern shape at all but one of the oldest and most basic shapes in architecture; he was only building it out of modern materials.

Pei turned out to be right. The glass pyramid and the old wings of the Louvre that surround it coexist with a remarkable degree of ease. The pyramid creates an elegant punctuation mark in the middle of the courtyard; the rest of the Louvre provides a perfect backdrop for the light, airy presence of the pyramid. Not the least of the reasons the Louvre pyramid turned out to be successful is that, to return to Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s ways of looking at things, it represents lightness amid heaviness, and transparency amid solidity. The pyramid works well also because of its size, which is big enough to hold its own in the large courtyard and serve as a fitting entrance to the vast museum, yet small enough not to overpower the older buildings. And the precision of Pei’s detailing helps as well, by making clear that the pyramid, for all its stylistic difference from the rest of the Louvre, represents continuity in the sense that it, too, is an exquisitely wrought, one-of-a-kind object, the farthest thing in the world from a mass-produced, contemporary commercial building.

You could not say that about the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, designed by Veldon Simpson, which also has a glass pyramid, executed with none of Pei’s finesse. The Luxor pyramid, which encloses a set of fairly conventional hotel rooms around an open atrium, is sheathed in a nondescript, brown-tinted reflective glass, making the building indistinguishable from a commercial office building but for its shape. The space in the center of the Luxor is awkwardly laid out; the clarity that the pyramid promises from outside is not delivered within. The fact is that pyramid are not particularly practical forms for most building functions, which is why there are few of them around that are not monuments of some kind. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre is only an entry pavilion leading to an underground lobby, and so it had few real functions. It could be open and transparent, a pure, abstract shape in glass like the Apple cube in front of the General Motors Building, also an entry pavilion. But at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the notion of the design was to create a casino hotel with an Egyptian theme, and the architects had to accommodate all kinds of conventional functions, many of which they couldn’t fit at all and had to relegate to adjacent, boxy wings.

The pyramid was used as an iconic symbol and as a container for a portion of the hotel’s rooms and public spaces, but the constraints of its shape were such that it would have been impossible to put the entire hotel and casino into it unless it were to be built at a size so gargantuan as to make no sense, since most of the space in the middle would have gone to waste.

- Paul Goldberger

U.S. Custom House

The Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House is a building in New York City, built from 1902 to 1907 by the federal government to house the duty collection operations for the port of New York. It is located near the southern tip of Manhattan, next to Battery Park, at 1 Bowling Green. The building is now the home of the New York branch of the National Museum of the American Indian as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The building was designed by Minnesotan Cass Gilbert, who later designed the Woolworth Building, which is visible from the building's front steps. It is a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style, where public transactions were conducted under a noble Roman dome.

Sculptures of four of the continents, Africa, Asia, Europe, and America, by Daniel Chester French, flank the Bowling Green entrance and above the sixth story, there are sculptures representing the great commercial and seafaring powers of world history:

Africa

Daniel Chester French's sculpture of "Africa" shows the continent to be mysterious, shrouded in unknowns and a rich past. The "sleeping continent" was just beginning to emerge in the early 1900's when French made his sculptures of the "Continents." Africa" is seen as the only nude of the four continents, in keeping with the stereotype of tribal peoples who did not wear much clothing. "Africa's" right arm rests upon Sphinx of Egypt, her left arm on a sleeping African lion.

Asia

Daniel Chester French's sculpture of "Asia" shows the continent sitting motionlessly, representing the place where so many religions were born. She holds a scepter of a poppy bloom (at the time, parts of Asia were well known for their opium trade) and a statue of an eastern deity in her lap. Behind her right shoulder, a cross is emerging, representing the beginning of the Christian missionary effort in Asia. While it is not possible to see in this photo due to the angle they were taken, "Asia's" feet rest upon a stool which sits on human skulls, indicative of the many people killed in slavery and through forced labor.

Europe

Daniel Chester French's sculpture of "Europe" shows both its ancient history, noble past and colonial conquests. "Europe" strikes a noble pose, seated on a throne decorated with a frieze from the Parthenon in Athens, representing the history of ancient Greece. "Europe's" right hand is resting on the bow of a ship with a lion's head, symbolizing the conquests of Europe during the age of discovery.

America

Daniel Chester French's sculpture of "America" is rich in imagery reflecting both North and South / Central America. The striking figure of "America" is the most active of French's "Continents," seeming ready to leap out of her chair, hair blowing in the wind. "America" is seated on a throne, her right foot on the head of Quetzelcoatl, the plumed serpent from Central and South American Indian cultures. A torch in hand, her left arm is pulling her cloak over an image of "Labor" which is rolling a wheel of progress. Peering over "America's" right shoulder is an American Indian in head dress, and sheaves of corn, symbolizing, in French's words, "the American idea of Plenty," are across "America's" right knee.

Looking at French’s beautiful sculptures, we can infer his beliefs regarding the four continents of the world – Africa, dead asleep with an glorious past forgotten long ago; Asia, sitting motionlessly in a meditative state - waiting to be awoken perhaps; Europe, noble and regal, but her right hand holding tightly to her throne; and finally America – young filled with energy and idealism ready to take the new century by storm.

Twin Cities

One of Christianity’s central themes may be traced back to Jesus’ choice of career. The carpenters of Galilee practiced a semiskilled but insecure and rarely lucrative trade, and yet Jesus was all the same, in Saint Peter’s phrase, “the right hand of Heaven:’ the son of God, the king of kings, sent to save us from our sins. That someone could combine within himself two such different identities, being at once an itinerant tradesman and the holiest of men, forms the basis upon which the Christian understanding of status is built. Every person possesses, in this framework, two wholly unrelated types of status: the earthly kind, determined by occupation, income and the opinions of others; and the spiritual sort, meted out according to the quality of the individual’s soul and his or her merit in the eyes of God after the Day of Judgment. One might therefore be powerful and revered in the earthly realm, yet barren and corrupt in the spiritual one. Or one might be like the beggar Lazarus in the Gospel of Saint Luke, who had only rags to his name while glorying in divine riches.

In The City of God (A.D. 427), Saint Augustine explained that all human actions could be interpreted from either a Christian or a Roman perspective, and that the very accomplishments that were esteemed most highly by the Romans—amassing money, building villas, winning wars and so on—counted for nothing in the Christian schema, in which a new set of concerns, including loving one’s neighbors, being humble and generous and recognizing one’s dependence on God, offered the keys to elevated status. Augustine’s figure for these two value systems was a pair of cities, the City of God and the earthly City, which he described as being, until the Day of Judgment, coexistent but separate. One might thus be a king in the Earthly City but a mere manservant in the heavenly one.

Nine centuries later, Dante would flesh out Augustine’s ideas by providing a detailed accounting of who would end up where in that ultimate twinned embodiment of the Christian hierarchy: Heaven and Hell.

Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights (1504)

In the Divine Comedy (1315), he enumerated no fewer than nine different circles of Hell (with seventeen distinct rings), each one reserved for a particular kind of sin; and set opposite those, ten spheres of Heaven, each the province of a specific virtue. The religious hierarchy resembled a distorted or inverted version of its secular counterpart. Dante’s Hell was home to a wide range of individuals who had enjoyed high status during their life on earth: generals, writers, poets, emperors, bishops, popes and merchants, all now stripped of their privileges and enduring extreme sufferings as punishment for having offended God’s laws. In the fourth ring of the ninth circle of Hell, Dante (touring the place with Virgil) hears the screams of those who were powerful but treacherous when alive, now being chewed in the mouths of the three-headed giant Lucifer. In the first ring of the seventh circle, the poet finds himself by a river of boiling blood in which Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun struggle to stay afloat while, from the riverbank, a group of centaurs fire arrows over their heads to force them back under the sickening froth. In the fifth circle, an array of angry, prominent leaders whose tempers once cost the lives of others languish in a swampy, fetid cesspool, choking on mud; and in the third circle, excrement rains down upon those who used to be gluttonous.

Gustave Dore - The Thieves Tortured by Serpents (1861)

The liturgical discrepancy between heavenly and earthly status promised believers a way out of an oppressive, one-dimensional vision of success. Christianity did not do away altogether with the concept of a hierarchy; its contribution was, rather, to redefine success and failure in ethical, nonmaterial terms, by insisting that poverty could coexist with goodness, and a humble occupation with a noble soul: “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” according to Saint Luke, a follower of that impecunious carpenter from Galilee.

But far from merely asserting the superiority of spiritual over material success, Christianity also endowed the values it revered with a seductive seriousness and beauty, accomplishing this in part through the magisterial use of painting, literature, music and architecture. It employed works of art to make a case for virtues that had never before figured prominently—if at all—in the priorities of rulers or their subjects.

For hundreds of years, the talents of the finest stonemasons, poets, musicians and painters—whose predecessors had been called upon to celebrate the triumphs of emperors and the blood-curdling victories of legions over barbarian hordes—were directed towards praising such activities as giving alms and showing respect for the poor. The glorification of worldly values never entirely disappeared in the Christian era—there remained plenty of palaces to alert the world to the charms of mercantile or landed wealth and power—but for a time, in many communities, the most impressive buildings on the horizon were those that honored the nobility of poverty rather than the might of a royal family or corporation, and the most moving pieces of music sang not of personal fulfillment but of the torment of the Son of God, who had been, in the words of Isaiah 53:3, quoted in Handel’s Messiah (1741),

despised and rejected of men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye and at the forefront of the public mind.

In the four centuries between approximately 1130 and 1530, in towns and cities all over Europe, more than a hundred cathedrals were erected, their spires coming to dominate the skyscraper, looming above grain stores, palaces, offices, factories and homes. Possessed of a grandeur that few other structures could rival, they offered a venue in which people from every walk of life could gather to ponder ideas that were, at least in the context of the history of architecture, highly unusual: ideas about the value of sadness and innocence, of meekness and pity. Whereas a city’s other buildings were designed to serve earthly needs—housing and feeding the body, allowing it to rest, manufacturing machines and implements to assist it—the cathedral had as its unique functions to empty the mind of egoistic projects and lead it towards God and his love. City dwellers engaged in worldly tasks could, during the course of a day, on seeing the outlines of these great massings of stone, be reminded of a vision of life that challenged the authority of ordinary ambitions. A cathedral such as Chartres, whose spires soar 107 meters into the sky (the height of a thirty-four-storey skyscraper), was understood to be the home of the dispossessed, a symbol of the rewards they would reap in the next life. However ramshackle their present physical dwellings, the cathedral was where they belonged in their heart. Its beauties reflected their inner worth, as its stained glass windows and coffered ceilings made vivid the glory of Jesus’ message to them.

Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing the Earthly City or its values, and yet if we retain some distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than merely important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion that for centuries lent its resources and prestige to the defense of a handful of these of extraordinary ideas regarding the rightful distribution of status. It was the genius of the artists and craftsmen who worked in the service of Christianity to give enduring forms to its ideals and to make these real to us through their handling of stone, glass, sound, word and image.

In a world where secular buildings whisper to us relentlessly of the importance of earthly power, the cathedrals that punctuate the skylines of great towns and cities may continue to furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit.

- Alain de Botton

Vietnam War Memorial

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., designed by an actual refugee from that war, Maya Lin, bears no resemblance to any previous war memorial. It is a long, relatively low, black marble wall that zigzags its way along one side of the park that links the U.S. Capitol building with the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on this stark wall are the names of Americans who died in Vietnam. Since its unveiling, this memorial has become the most profoundly emotional of all Washington places, eclipsing even the solemn cemetery at Arlington and the themed monuments to our greatest Americans. The Vietnam War Memorial is perhaps the first successful built environment that represents the unrepresentable. It exists between the grim reality of too many deaths on one side and the anguish of military survivors or relatives of the deceased on the other. No image, no picture, no video, no music—in short, no simulation—can present the agony of that war; the stark wall alone represents the unrepresentable.

John Cage - 4′33″ (1952)