These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

Does the above constitute an insight into the enigmatic statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings?

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I believe so. But, before we get to that, there is a distance to be walked, so to speak. What struck me most about the above description of the staircases was the sense of dread that I felt emanating from these words (was it the dread of being “sucked in” by the other worlds? The fear of the permanent state of non-control that was implied? I don’t know.) What was also remarkable was the fact that these words, and others in the notebook, absolutely, though unintentionally, destroyed all the foundations of the Vitruvian notions of beauty and order that we are so accustomed to, that are so ‘natural’, almost like a fatality. I remember hearing that the French magazine Paris-Match once voted Beirut ‘the ugliest city on the Mediterranean’, and I could imagine the French reporter walking around and brushing shoulders with the notebook’s author, each seeing the same things, and yet so differently. What I mean is that, while the eyes of the architect in question were opening issues up for scrutiny and questioning, the reporter of Paris-Match was forcing these issues to a closure, or what seemed to be a closure from his perspective.

At one point, for instance, the author wonders why the axis of symmetry in buildings, when it existed, was always a vertical axis (later on, I found out that he already knew, and that his question was only rhetorical). He then went on to talk about the visual ambivalence created by what was probably an involuntary horizontal axis of symmetry in some of Mies van der Rohe’s constructions. After that, he started a series that began with “what if?” One of them, for instance, was to ask what would happen if the axis of symmetry was tilted 20 degrees to the left or to the right. It was theoretically conceivable, of course, but would it still remain an axis of symmetry? And, more importantly, what would the resulting building be, what would it resemble? The question of resemblance is of central importance to this issue. The axis of symmetry had to be vertical because – at least in the humanist architectural tradition inherited from the Renaissance – architecture was analogous to the human body, to the perfect human body that was shaking of centuries of being put to shame by the system of thought prevailing in the Middle Ages. The theoretical writings of the Old Masters of the Renaissance, from Alberti to Palladio and Leonardo da Vinci, confirmed this analogy between body and architecture, and turned the human body into an authoritative foundation for architecture.  However, it seems that, since then, there has been a gradual loss of that body from architecture, until it became clear, in the modern architecture of our modern times, that the premises of architecture are to be found in a high degree of technology and specialization. So, why is our mysterious author preoccupied with the human body to such an extent?

If we think again about tilting the axis of symmetry a few degrees to the right or left, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The easiest and least interesting one would be a building that seems to be partly embedded in the earth on which it is built. But, that would be in sharp contradiction with the fact that the axis of symmetry’s main function is to give balance to the building. In that sense, the two parts created by the axis have to be not only identical, but of equal value. Clearly, the two parts of a partly-buried building are not, and cannot be, equal. That would leave us with the only logical conclusion possible for tilting the axis of symmetry: to remain balanced, the building itself has to be ‘dismembered’, opened up, and each mass, each detail, would find its balancing equivalent a little farther up or down. That is not a simple thing, and it introduces new problematics that architecture has to deal with – especially if the axes are, as it usually happens, multiplied in one building (a building with, say, two axes of symmetry, one in the plan and one in the façade).

The body as authoritative metaphor loses its centrality

it cannot fix or stabilize. Rather, its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morselated, the broken.

This body is not simply an inversion of the classical ideal body, not only the act of turning that body (and all the concepts that are based upon it) on its head, like at medieval carnivals, for instance. It carries with it an irrevocable loss – the loss not only of that holistic body, but also of what used to hold it together, and the world that had been built around it.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Part I here.