Anam Cara

WHEREAS SCULPTURE SEEMS LIKE STILL DANCE, THE SHAPES OF architecture have been compared to ‘frozen music’. Architecture is one of the most public and permanent stages on which a culture displays its understanding of beauty. Much of our sense of the beauty of an ancient culture derives from the ruins of their architecture. In its Greek roots, the word ‘architecture’ literally means ‘weaving of a higher order’. A whole world-view is woven through and becomes visible in great architecture. The shapes of our dwelling places have always inspired human creativity. Of all the inhabitants of the earth, the ones with the most complex and reflexive interiority also have the most complex dwellings to reveal and shelter interiority.

Beautiful architecture like Chartres Cathedral elevates the soul and mirrors its heritage and possibility. Yet architecture can also reveal some of the secrets that lie at the heart of beauty. When architecture manages to mirror the inner order of nature, the result is frequently beautiful. We respond intuitively to the order, harmony, proportion and rhythm that great architecture incarnates. The creative architect pulls his design from that concealed order which underlies all difference and fragmentation. Yet we are easily deceived by nature: simply because it is always there, we become blind to its intricate and dynamic weave of structures and how it works through laws that are simple yet profoundly subtle. As Claude Bragdon says: ‘We are all participants in a world of concrete music, geometry and number; a world of sounds, odours, forms and motions, colours, so mathematically related and coordinated that our pygmy bodies, equally with the furthest star, vibrate to the music of the spheres.’ Beautiful architecture in its design enters into this rhythm of order and renders it visible in the proportions, tensions and harmonies of building.

Goethe said: ‘A noble philosopher described architecture as frozen music . . . we believe this beautiful idea cannot be more aptly resurrected than by calling architecture music that has merged into silence.’ One of the most exciting contemporary architects who manages to make that music flow is Santiago Calatrawa. His brilliance lies in his mastery of art, sculpture, architecture and engineering combined with an incredible ability to express all of these competencies in his works. He shows a profound understanding of the principles of natural order that are inherent in beauty. The result of course is that Calatrawa overcomes the false division between integrity and function, between beauty and use. His buildings and bridges function wonderfully but they also become huge, new presences of beauty in their environments. People look up and see matter that is usually staid and still completely embracing a soul-elevating design which dances.

Etched as they are against the stillness, shapes that dance can evoke great beauty. Yet the stillness is never absolute: in waves and particles light is the continual dance which adorns the countenance of the earth with colour. Music too breaks the silence and the stillness through waves of sound. These are the vital thresholds where the wonders of beauty arise. The angel of these thresholds is the imagination.

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MAGINATION:

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EAUTY’S

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NTRANCE

Beauty as an explosion of energy perfectly contained.

RICHARD HOLMES on Coleridge’s concept of beauty

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EANNALACH

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