Prologue: Noah’s Ark
I
It took Jacques-François Blondel only one and a half pages of theEncyclopédie to dispatch the article “Architecture” that had been commissioned by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert. In just three compact and carefully phrased columns, this celebrated architect, noted for his teaching and publications, began by distinguishing between the different varieties of the art of building before briefly treating its origins, the invention of the classical orders by the Greeks, and the long, drawn-out decline of a practice that, having attained its absolute peak of perfection in Rome under the reign of Augustus, sank into oblivion after the fall of the Empire. Its slow recovery began at the end of an era described by the author as “Gothic,” when Charlemagne undertook to reestablish ancient architecture—though neither he nor the first Capetians, whom Blondel credits with “a great liking for that science,” were wholly successful. Whether they had intended to react against the taste for heaviness imported from the north by the Vandals and the Goths or whether the genre declared by Blondel to be “southern” had been introduced into France by the Arabs, the fact remains that “the architects of those times created the beauty of their architectures by means of a delicacy and a profusion of ornament till then unknown . . . in such a way that architecture, as it gradually changed its appearance, indulged in the opposite excess and became too light.”1 According to Blondel, this was less an interlude than a long period in the wilderness of oblivion; it was, he concluded, “only in the last two centuries [the sixteenth and seventeenth] that the architects of France and Italy had exerted themselves to retrieve the original simplicity, beauty, and proportion of ancient architecture; and it is only since then that our edifices have been executed in imitation of, and following the precepts of, the architecture of antiquity.”2
Antique,ancient (whatever the varieties, variants, or variations may be), but alsoGothic, and evenmodern (a term Blondel avoids defining, but that was nonetheless already current in his day in architectural discourse): these categories did not only correspond to historical periods that succeeded each other following the thread of a strictly linear and irreversible evolution. For language itself—and not only the French—was not content to pitmodern againstancient unilaterally, as we might be led to believe if we take only a cursory glance at the first edition of theDictionnaire de l’Académie françoise dédié au roy, published in 1694. Indeed, what do we read in theEncyclopédie itself in the entry for “modern”? We find that “modern is used in matters of taste, not in absolute opposition to what is ancient, but to what was in bad taste: thusmodern architecture has been used in opposition toGothic architecture, even thoughmodern architecture is only beautiful insofar as it approaches the taste of antiquity.”3 For Blondel’s part, as he characterizes it, the architecture of the first Capetians could well have been held to be “modern,” on several counts, from the moment it opposed the architecture he describes asGothic, a term that contemporaries of theEncyclopédie held to be synonymous with “bad taste.” But if the only good taste was “antique,” then there was no choice but to conclude that a modern architecture could only lay claim to beauty on the express condition of renouncing all novelty that did not overtly revive, in form and even more so in principle, the works of a time “when the arts were brought to their perfection by the fine geniuses of Greece and Rome.”4 Thus, if, chronologically speaking,antique were opposed tomodern in the same way as theold to thenew, then the same reductive division could not be applied in the encyclopedic terms of “good taste.” This reveals an initial contradiction in Blondel’s definition of architecture; a second lies in his characterization of architecture as a “science.”
If science indeed had a place in Blondel’s scheme of architectural history, any “progress” achieved was according to a doubly inverted figure: as a decline for which the only remedy was itself regressive (its sole recourse, in the etymological sense, being a return to the antique) or, better, as the resurgence of the antique in the present, andin the present tense, following the turn of the Italian and French Renaissance, which would have a much greater impact in the Enlightenment, exceeding the limits of the history of taste, whether good or bad—and this on the eve of a revolution that, though representing a catastrophe in the symbolic order, can hardly be said to have shaken up the reign of the so-called neoclassical aesthetic in official building. With the Restoration assured, the newspapers had ample time to assert that taste in France awaited its own Fourteenth of July; the day would come when, in response to those who agreed with Madame de Staël that the revolution in politics could not fail to have repercussions in the literary realm, Victor Hugo would write that romanticism was the French Revolution made literature. But the great upheaval that came to a provisional end with the fall of Napoleon I in 1814 was not only a matter of taste—nor always of the best taste. No one put it better than Karl Marx when he said that the revolution had to adopt first the costumes of the Roman Republic and then of the Roman Empire for its actors to appear on the new stage of history—in a disguise and speaking a language that was certainly borrowed and better suited than the romantic wardrobe to the task and roles awaiting them.5 Architecture was no exception to the rule; 150 years later, Bertolt Brecht would still repeat that the proletariat has a right to columns.
Blondel found proof of the perfection the Greeks attained in architecture in “the three orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, that we inherit from them.”6 The Romans would only produce two others, and although these were merely imperfect imitations of the Greek, in Blondel’s view they still had their “usefulness.” Each of the five orders in fact corresponded to a specific genre of architecture: the rustic, the solid, the intermediate, the delicate, and the composite genres, which express, respectively, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite orders “that together comprise what is most exquisite in architecture.”7 The notion that architecture, like all the arts, has its limits, that it is not open to indefinite progress, and that there would always necessarily be a return to the example of the Greeks and Romans is demonstrated by history, “for we have not been able in France, despite the celebrated opportunities to build over the last century, to compose orders that could come close to the Greeks and Romans; I saycome close, for many talented architects have tried, such as Bruant, Le Brun, Le Clerc, and so on, without being applauded or imitated by either their contemporaries or their successors.”8 But the orders would not have the importance Blondel gave them if they had been reduced to an accepted convention among the specialists of the art. Born of the necessity that first taught men how to build huts, tents, and cabins, architecture would have doubtless developed when these same men, forced as they were “to buy and sell,” and living under common laws, gathered together and managed to make their dwellings “more regular”—the laws of proportion following the conformity to rules and vice versa. If exchange is at the root of societies, then law is at the root of architecture and the regularity that defines it. The ancient authors credited the Egyptians with being the first to raise buildings that were “symmetrical and proportional.”9 As for us, declares Blondel, “we look upon Greece as the cradle of good architecture, either because the rules of the Egyptians have not come down to us, or because what remains of their buildings manifests only a solid and colossal architecture (such as the famous pyramids that have triumphed over time for so many centuries) and that does not affect us in the same way as the monuments we have from ancient Greece.”10
When Solomon undertook to build the Temple of Jerusalem, it is said that he called on Egyptian artists but that it was God himself who taught him the precepts of good architecture. The fact that Blondel raises this discussion without entering into it is significant. Architecture is a matter of rules—but also of affects. The architecture of pharaonic Egypt does notaffect us in the same way as that of ancient Greece; it is in the way it affects us that confirms that, like the laws men have given themselves, the rules to which the art of building should conform have their raison d’être. But just as general agreement is not a necessary condition for the existence of natural rights,11 so too the diversity of historical forms of architecture, their value, their singular charm—perhaps “eternal” charm, as Marx would not hesitate to say of Greek art—and their internal richness to which we gain access through “empathy” is not an argument against the existence of universal norms, which all good architecture ought to respect. The very transgressions of such norms (symmetry, for example) merely bear this out. That one can and should refer to antique architecture as the model of all architecture worthy of the name shows that this art is not controlled by any given society any more completely than by the period in which it is practiced and that architecture is in search of a standard that would allow its productions to be judged on the scale and in the suprahistorical dimension of allegedly “natural” rights. That this model is borrowed from history and corresponds to a precisely dated and localized architecture (that of ancient Greece) changes nothing. This apparent contradiction is merely a consequence of the constraints imposed on an art that (as Viollet-le-Duc would again assert a century after Blondel) obeys eternal principles, independent of the forms that express or betray them.12
In Blondel’s view, the entire merit of architecture consists of “the justness of the proportions and the correctness of the drawing.”13 For the proportions to be considered “correct” or “false” in the same capacity as symmetry, however, we must call on criteria other than those suggested by history—first and foremost starting with mathematical criteria. This would seem to justify applying the labelscience to architecture, as well as the various attempts (to which Blondel himself refers) to treat the art of architecture as a purely demonstrative form,more geometrico. The article “Proportion” in theEncyclopédie does not go quite so far. In relation to architecture, it keeps to Vitruvius’s definition of symmetry, understood as “the relationship [rapport], the suitability [convenance] of the whole and of the parts among themselves in works of taste.”14 Proportion consists in “the correctness [justesse] of the members of each part of a building, and the relationship of the parts to the whole; as, for example, the measurements of a column in relation to theordonnance of the building.”15 But it is also “the different sizes of the architectural members and forms according to how they are meant to appear from their viewing point.”16 We are thus referred back to the division of optics known as “perspective” and, by the same token, to geometry. This is an old problem, which had already held the attention of the Greeks and the Neoplatonists: Can the art of architecture, as the closest of them all to the Idea and that which, more than any other art, presentsle cose alla virtù (to adopt the expression used by Daniele Barbaro in his edition of Vitruvius prefaced by Palladio17), be allowed to deceive itself by all manner of refinements, corrections, and “temperaments” designed to redress errors in meaning by means that are themselves illusionist? Even Plato seems to have taken sides, so quick was he to condemn the artifices of art, starting with trompe l’oeil, which he sees as not far from a kind of “witchcraft.”18 Plato, though, would not have dreamed of accusing architects of not seeking uniformity and harmony for their own sake; he condemns them only in relation to vision, as though the mind could only benefit from the struggle of appearance against illusions and of illusion against appearances.19
It may have been an old question, but it was still relevant in the age of reason (just as it would become relevant again at the beginning of the twentieth century and through to Erwin Panofsky’s work on perspective and its “temperaments”).20 This is attested by the fact that, in a text as brief as the article “Architecture,” Blondel insists on defining what he callsarchitecture in perspective: “We call architecture in perspective that architecture whose parts are of diverse proportions and diminished by distance so as to make the general disposition [ordonnance] seem bigger and taller than it is in reality, as we see in the famous Vatican staircase, built under the Pontificate of Alexander VII from drawings by the Cavalier Bernini.” Proportions are a matter of measurement, but also every bit as much a matter of perspective—and thus doubly a matter of science.
Another term should also be taken into consideration in addition toproportion: that ofcomposition. Of the three kinds of the art of building that Blondel distinguishes—civil architecture, military architecture, and naval architecture—the first, which he defines as “the art ofcomposing andconstructing buildings, for the convenience [commodité] and different purposes of life, such as sacred buildings, royal palaces, and private houses, as well as bridges, public squares, theaters, triumphal arches, etc.,” is the exclusive subject of the article “Architecture.”21 Composition here is what distinguishes architecture from the simple art of building—in other words, fromconstruction as it is practiced in military or naval architecture—though it is no less an integral part of civil architecture. Yet the article “Composition” in theEncyclopédie, which is concerned with composition in painting as well as composition in the rhetorical sense of the term understood as “the order and connection that an orator should apply in the parts of a speech,”22 says not a word about composition in architecture.
The art of building is scarcely better served when it comes to construction, which is somewhat surprising in a work that presents itself as a dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts. Grammatical construction is the subject of an article of over twenty pages, but that is because it relates to the arrangement of words within discourse, and discourse is based on grammatical construction, as is theEncyclopédie itself. Construction in geometry is not overlooked, since it corresponds to “operations that must be performed to execute the solution to a problem,” as well as to lines drawn “either to arrive at the solution to a problem, or to demonstrate some proposition.”23 When it comes to architecture, by contrast, the article says nothing about the various attempts (which Blondel mentions only in passing) to confer upon architecture an appearance of scientificity: that of an art, if not demonstratedmore geometrico, at the very least “reasoned,” as much as theEncyclopédie could be and as Viollet-le-Duc’sDictionnaire de l’architecture française would be. Blondel’s article is limited to defining construction as “the art of building in relation to matter,”24 without amplification, save for references to the articles “Carpentry,”“Masonry,”“Joinery,” and so on.
However well ordered, the article “Architecture” responded poorly to what might have been expected from theEncyclopédie on the subject, considering the space given to that art (or science?) in the historic project of the Enlightenment. The editors seem to have been aware of this: theSupplément, published in 1777, contains two articles that expand the articles “Architect” and “Architecture” with material taken explicitly from Johann Georg Sulzer’sGeneral Theory of the Fine Arts. Both articles are equally flat but, significantly, insist on the social connotations of the art of building and on its potential effects in the cultural realm.
Perhaps we should look for the causes of Blondel’s brevity in the constraints imposed on the contributors by alphabetical order. The article “Architecture” appears even before the article “Art,” which was written by Diderot and intended to serve as a prospectus for booksellers. The fact that the entries in which it would have been possible to take a fresh look at the question of architecture—starting with the article “Composition”—were not used to remedy the problem seems to indicate that neither the author nor the editors felt the need to do so. This, however, should not stop us from taking a closer look, given the surprising fact that nothing is said about civil or military construction in the article “Construction,” whereas more than six pages are devoted to the third kind of the art of building:naval architecture.
II
The relative brevity of the article “Architecture” is all the more surprising if we compare it with the length of anotherEncyclopédie entry that precedes it: the article “Ark” (Arche), produced by the abbé Edme-François Mallet, one of Diderot and d’Alembert’s principal collaborators. As theDiscours préliminaire, or preface, notes, the abbé Mallet was the author of all the articles on ancient and modern history, as well as the articles “Eloquence,”“Literature,”“Poetry,” and (as is only right) “Theology.” When it appeared in theSupplément, the article “Ark” required just a few typographical corrections and the addition of a certain number of titles to an already copious bibliography. Even in the body of theEncyclopédie, it takes up four full pages, or eight columns—close to three times the space reserved for the article “Architecture.” It is clearly not unrelated to architecture, whether in terms of the meaning ofarched, which is naturally joined to the idea of an “ark,” or to Blondel’s taxonomy. The ark of Genesis—that “kind of boat” or “vast floating building” constructed by Noah to protect the various species of animals that God ordered him to take in from the Flood—in effect falls under the heading of the third branch of the art of building that Blondel describes as “naval,” the purpose of which is “the construction of vessels, galleys, and all floating buildings in general, as well as bridges, breakwaters, jetties, rope makers, warehouses, etc., erected along the seashore or at its edges.”25 The space given to this same naval architecture in the article “Construction” corroborates the hypothesis whereby “Ark” and “Architecture” cannot be considered separately in the general economy of theEncyclopédie. If we find the classical definition of the art in “Architecture,” along with a list of its merits, the rules it obeys, and a brief summary of its history, then the article “Ark” that immediately precedes it in the first volume of the work introduces considerations of another order, which take a singularly “modern” turn. Once articulated, the goal of the construction of the ark—nothing less than ensuring the survival of the main species of animals, besides the aquatic animals not imperiled by the rising waters—as well as the design, development, and maintenance, if not management, of such a “floating building” would not have failed to pose a number of problems, both technical and logistical, and their discussion takes up almost the whole article. Although we cannot ignore either the background or the patristics of the article, the fact remains that the abbé Mallet seems to have been less concerned with proving the tale’s authenticity than with exploring what we might call the functional implications of the story of Noah and his ark—an initial foray into what would later be called functionalist thought in architecture.
The abbé Mallet begins by reviewing the information supplied by the text of Genesis and the various hypotheses issued by the church fathers and modern critics regarding the time of construction of the ark, the materials used, and its dimensions. This is, first and foremost, a matter ofscale. If we accept, as tradition has it, that the first men were much taller and stronger than those of today, we can allow that Noah and his three sons, to believe Mallet, would have been up to the job of building a vessel that required the felling of a great number of trees, whether cedars, cypresses, or any other species denoted by the Hebrew wordgopher. But the same cannot be said for the dimensions of the ark indicated in Genesis (6:15): three hundred cubits for the length, fifty for the breadth, thirty for the height. This seems disproportionate to the quantity of creatures and provisions that were to find a place onboard, and it has raised, as the abbé Mallet concedes, many doubts about the veracity of the biblical text. On this point, the scalar argument suggesting that the cubit, which is a human measure, has varied over the course of the centuries in proportion to the height of human beings is weak. It matters little, asserts Mallet, whether the building’s dimensions increase or decrease, so long as they do so relative to the measurements of the people and the animals the ark was supposed to house. Church Fathers Origen and St. Augustine, among others, claimed that the cubit referred to was the geometrical cubit used by the Egyptians, which would make the ark 1,700 feet long—longer than the biggest ocean liners of the twentieth century—dimensions a contemporary of theEncyclopédie could not have accepted. Hence the efforts of a number of scholars, from Father Athanasius Kircher to Isaac Newton, to show that if a cubit were around fifty centimeters, the ark would have been big enough to accommodate not only Noah’s family and the animals in their charge but also a sufficient quantity of provisions and fresh water.
The functions assigned to the ark are clearly set out in Genesis: beyond the eight members of Noah’s family, the vessel was to contain one pair of each of the species reputed to be impure, and seven of the species reputed to be pure, as well as provisions for a year, “which at first glance would seem impossible, but if we work out the calculation, we find that the number of animals was not as great as we had at first imagined.”26 Mallet in fact claims to know of only just over a hundred (from 100 to 130) species of quadrupeds, and as many birds, on top of which must be added, if we hold to the letter of the Scriptures, every creeping thing of the earth—but not the forty aquatic species that were apparently not targeted by the divine malediction and announcement of “the end of all flesh.” John Wilkins, the bishop of Chester, felt that only seventy-two species of quadrupeds needed to be preserved. By Mallet’s own admission, evaluating the ark’s capacity is an extremely difficult thing to do, considering how incomplete were the lists of animals then in existence, especially for the still unexplored regions of the world, and thus how impossible it was to determine the dimensions of the vessel “relative to its use” any more accurately than is done in the Scriptures.
When it comes to the provisions necessary for such an enterprise, the calculation seems a bit easier, even though the parameters are relatively complex. In the case of carnivores, each one would consume a certain quantity of meat that could be measured in numbers of livestock required, but the sheep needed to feed the carnivores would in turn consume a quantity of hay that would decrease as the livestock dwindled. Bishop Wilkins supposed that all the carnivores together could be calculated as equivalent to twenty-seven wolves, plus the space required for their food (which he calculated to be 1,825 sheep). The herbivores, which he estimated as equivalent to 208 oxen, would seem to need 109,500 cubits of hay. Butteo’s estimate went higher, with the carnivores as the equivalent of eighty wolves, which needed to be fed ten sheep a day, a total of 3,650 sheep in the course of a year. With the number of animals destined to serve as feed diminishing every day, we should be able to count on a fixed number of 1,820 beasts in order to calculate the amount of hay needed to maintain them, which would support 1,900 sheep and 120 oxen. If seven sheep eat as much fodder as one ox, for a year’s supply there would have to be 146,000 cubits of fodder.
These estimations might cause some amusement, as might the discussions about the ark’s form, its internal layout, and the administration and management of the whole, which today would be called maintenance. If we are to believe the text of Genesis, it was to God himself that Noah was indebted for the vessel’s specifications: The ark was to be made of wood and reeds (though the Hebrew wordqanim, as we will see, is open to debate) and coated with pitch inside and out; it was to be three hundred cubits long, fifty wide, and thirty high, to be covered with a roof, and to comprise three floors. Even the position of the door was subject to divine instruction, which provided that it be placed at the side. In the eighteenth century, several critics fretted anxiously over this. If we understand the ark to have been a rectangular parallelepiped, then the door would have been better off placed on one of the smaller sides than on one of the longer sides, where it would have risked compromising the balance of the whole and spoiling the symmetry (not to mention that the ark would then have had something like a facade, which hardly seems right for what was ultimately just a great big barge). But if this were the case, then the vessel would have been heavier at one end and would have risked not listing to starboard but sinking at the front or back (if indeed these could be distinguished from one another).
As for the different levels provided in the divine program, commentators generally agree to reserve the top floor of the ark for the patriarch’s family, who would have found themselves with a lot of room, even though they had to share it with the birds and find a place for the household utensils, digging tools, fabrics, grains, and seeds (not to mention a kitchen and space for taking a walk). The middle floor would have served to store the provisions, while the bottom floor housed the quadrupeds and reptiles (or the other way round). To these three floors mentioned in the Bible, some have been tempted to add a fourth: a kind of bilge for storing the ballast and the excrement, which could not be thrown overboard (thus implying that the ark had no opening other than the above-mentioned door, which would have been hermetically sealed for the duration of the ordeal). This same space could have also served as a hull to hold potable water—the water of the Flood, as abundant as it was, not being enough to desalinate the seawater.
But this does not solve the problem of the vessel’s internal layout—a problem great enough to hold Blondel’s attention, as indicated by the fact that he went to some trouble over the article “Distribution.”“Make yourself an ark out of resinous wood,” states the Jerusalem Bible. “Make it with reeds, and line it with pitch inside and out.” The Hebrew wordqanim, “reeds,” is merely conjecture here. The word could also beqinnim, “nests,” to be understood in the sense of “cabins.” This would imply that God himself stipulated the division of the living quarter decks into cells (or, as Mallet prefers, “stalls”), the number and size of which remained to be determined; thus, each pair or species of animal is imagined to have had its own stall—yet it would seem that eight people would have had difficulty in the cleaning and provisioning of such a large number of stalls. To this, the abbé Mallet replied that it would have been far more difficult to take care of 380 animals (not counting those much more numerous needed as fodder) if they were all mixed together.
Such a fable is only a fable if we see it as nothing more than a fairytale defying all plausibility, freighted as it may be (as we read further in the Jerusalem Bible) with an eternal lesson about justice and divine mercy, the malice of man, and the salvation granted to the just. If, on the other hand, we take the program assigned to Noah seriously, along with the many problems commentators have raised in its regard, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that the article “Ark” actually offers a rough sketch (or caricature, perhaps not devoid of humor) of an authentically functionalist approach, one that even goes into detail. Whether concerning the building of the ark, its internal layout, or matters of logistics and accommodation (to say nothing of the problems, never alluded to, of security), there is no problem raised by the critics that is not echoed today in the technical specifications or rules imposed on those in the profession of architecture. We might restrict ourselves to two examples of this. The question of the method of loading the ark, its access, is not unconnected, though within a biblical time frame, to concerns that these days preoccupy those in charge of public access whenever a very tall apartment block is slated for a high-density area or one poorly serviced by public transport. Here, we only have to look at the apocalyptic provisions occasioned in their day by the Pan American Building in New York or the John Hancock Center in Chicago. As for the ark’s internal layout, and in particular the layout of the floor reserved for the menagerie, the question is exactly the same as for the plan: Whether it should be free or otherwise depends on whether we favor having a number of stalls corresponding to the number of different species or prefer instead to regroup the animals by genuses or families. If we take into account the fact that extra space would have become available as time went by and the vegetable and animal provisions were consumed, the best solution would have been to provide removable bulkheads to allow the occupants of the ark to gradually make themselves more comfortable as the cargo dwindled.
Humanity, Marx said, only asks questions it can solve. Following this, Engels held that thehousing question could only be solved by a revolution—which deferred not only the solution to the problem but also the right way of formulating it, thus leaving room only for a critique of reformist utopias in anticipation of the revolution to come. The problems posed by the building of the ark and its maintenance were no more than what humanity was able to solve by relying only on its own strengths, as developed at the time, nor any more than what we would be able to solve today. Thus, Bishop Wilkins, and the abbé Mallet with him, concluded:
The ark, which has been used as an objection to the truth of the Holy Scriptures, here becomes a proof of that truth, since we may safely assume that in the early ages of the world men versed in the sciences and the arts must have been infinitely more subject to error than we are today. Nonetheless, if today we had to match the capacity of a vessel to the mass of animals and their food, we would fare no better . . . for the human mind tends in such a case to wildly exaggerate objects. What would indubitably have happened with the dimensions of Noah’s ark is what happens with the estimation of the number of stars visible to the naked eye; just as we judge that number to be infinite, we would have carried the dimensions of the ark to vast magnitudes and would accordingly have engendered a building infinitely greater than was necessary, sinning more through its excess capacity calculated by the historian than by what those who attack the story claim is its sin of parsimony.27
This development is somewhat surprising, not only for the way it revisits the discussions to find within the doubts raised by the biblical tale proof of that tale’s veracity but also for the argument that springs from this demonstration. No one but God could have conceived the measurements of the ark, for this was a matter ofproportion, both in the singular sense (as Blondel used it) and in the pragmatic, functional sense that Le Corbusier later intended with the example of the ocean linerFrance, built in the 1920s by the Saint-Nazaire shipyards.28 But if the human mind were not adequate to the task, the reason for this was not to be sought in the mind’s inability to manage complexity: the plans and sectional views of the kinds of Noah’s arks represented by the heavy vessels of the East India Company, which one can see in the National Maritime Museum at Port-Louis, France, are proof that the ship owners of the day and their engineers already had a pretty good idea—at a scale, once again, of that time. The problem lies above all in the opposite: in the propensity of modern societies to deal with the difficulties they must faceby excess rather thanby lack and to imagine solutions, to devise projects, to impose tasks on themselves, and to fuel dreams of an exaggerated scope, beyond all proportion, that are ultimately totalitarian. Whereas man, left to his sorry fate, would have designed a gigantic ark that he could not possibly have floated—such as the craft Robinson Crusoe built in the middle of the forest without first working out how he would transport it to shore—God alone was able to take the proper measure of things. Indeed, he himself had ordered and, so to speak, programmed a universal and devastating catastrophe, though one that contained a safety clause, for it was to be a prelude to the regeneration of the human race. As such, it would find an echo in the project of the Enlightenment.
III
The time is long since past when—after the two worldwide catastrophes of World War I and the Russian Revolution—Le Corbusier could cry: “Everything remains to be done! An immense task! And it is so pressing, so urgent, that the whole world is absorbed in this imperious necessity. Machines will lead to a new order of labor and rest. Whole cities must be built or rebuilt in view of a minimum of comfort, the prolonged lack of which might unsettle the social equilibrium. Society is unstable, cracking under a state of things upended by fifty years of advances that have changed the face of the world more than the six preceding centuries.”29 A gigantic task it was indeed, one worthy of “modernity,” one that could not avoid taking on a cosmic dimension. To “an indolent respect for tradition,” the architect was to prefer “respect for the forces of nature” (well represented by the idea of the Flood); to “the pettiness of middling conceptions,” he would substitute “the majesty of solutions following from a problem well posed and required by this century of great endeavors, which has just taken a giant step forward. The land-dweller’s house is the expression of an outdated world of small dimensions.”30
As far as the instability of the times, it was as if the place made for Noah’s Ark in theEncyclopédie was dictated by a premonition of a flood of another kind, which the French Revolution came to represent for the European consciousness. The revolution began with the destruction of the Bastille, that monument of (military) architecture and symbol of the ancien régime, whose end it marked at the same time that it heralded, as Jules Michelet would write, the triumph of “what is outside time, outside the future and outside the past, immutable Right.” This takes us back to theEncyclopédie and the analogy Blondel’s text suggests between the rules obeyed by architecture and the principles of natural Right.Architecture or revolution—the modernist watchword, posed in the form of an alternative or a dilemma—was to translate as clearly as possible the ambiguity of the relations that the art of building, if not architecture itself, has never ceased to maintain with the prospect of a generalized catastrophe: either architecture looks to stave off such a catastrophe by rendering it useless, or it merely aspires to furnish humanity with the means to survive such a catastrophe without too much damage. In the history of the world, the Flood has not only corresponded to a moment of crisis. The rupture of the seawalls put up by God between what Genesis calls “the waters from under heaven” and “the waters from the great deep” signifies a return, at least momentarily, to original chaos: the time to wipe out all flesh, or at the very least all flesh “wherein is the breath of life” and that found itself on terra firma (Gen. 6:17), to the exclusion not only of the animals that move in the water but also of those that move in the air and managed to find refuge either on the water (in the case of sea birds) or on the ark. The evangelists, followed by the church fathers, would not fail to exploit this typology: the Flood prefigured the Last Days just as the salvation granted to Noah and his family prefigured salvation through the waters of baptism.31 Water in this context takes on functions that seem paradoxical, or at least contradictory, for it is both through water that the catastrophe occurred and through water that the inhabitants of the ark escaped that catastrophe. The fact that the covenant between God and Noah had recourse to naval architecture takes on symbolic value here. In the Latin translation the same word,arca (“chest”), is applied both to the ark of the covenant in which Moses enclosed the tablets of the law and to Noah’s Ark, but Hebrew uses two different terms: the wordtebah, which applies to Noah’s great vessel, is found again in the Bible only in relation to the basket made of bulrushes in which the infant Moses is laid when his mother entrusts him to the lifesaving waters of the Nile.32
On Imminent Disaster and Means of Mitigating It
Le Corbusier’s discourse echoes those of professional revolutionaries, even as it occasionally takes on biblical overtones: “My own duty, my quest, is to try and place the man of today beyond harm, beyond disaster.”33 We are a long way, apparently, from the project that could be said to be a part—but only one part—of the avant-garde: the program of a kind of art that, in the words of André Masson, would “explode reality.”34 But if modernity was associated with awareness of a rupture, of a radical break in the continuity of history, as well as with an idea—the program of a fresh start—then the sometimes all-too-real fantasy of the tabula rasa corresponded to another kind of disaster, in the commonplace sense of the term. To start afresh, it would seem there is no choice but to begin by making a clean sweep, by pulling everything down. The difference between a France devastated by World War I and the Plan Voisin was merely one of modality; there were many architects who deplored the twice-missed opportunity that reconstruction represented for the profession immediately after the two world wars and their processions of ruins. The turn that reconstruction took in Berlin after the fall of the wall says enough about the ambiguity that attaches to the notion of “reconstruction” when it is not mitigated (in the absence of any project in good and due form, like Auguste Perret’s program for Le Havre) by thinking that is actively “deconstructive” in the most radical sense of the word: that is, tearing down all presuppositions underpinning the connection architecture tends to maintain with construction in the sense understood by Blondel—namely, the art of building, viewed in its relationship to matter and not just todisegno. Bramante’s ambitious aedilic endeavors, such as pulling down Old St. Peter’s Basilica, and his great aborted projects (at the time of his death, the “new” St. Peter’s rose only a few centimeters above the ground) earned him the nicknamemaestro ruinante. The time had not yet come when, a good distance from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, metropolises would spring up in a matter of a few years from the deserts of the Middle East, much as they did just after the Flood, based on something like a throw of the dice, which is meant to abolish terror, or outsmart it, yet which leaves open the question of the relationship that the art of building might today maintain with some form of thought.
From the invention of the ruins of Pompeii to the erection of a house in the shape of Noah’s Ark35 based on the plans of Margit Kropholler (an architect of the Amsterdam School), the specter of the final catastrophe has never ceased to haunt the imagination of modernity, just as the specter of decline haunted the classical age. The film industry did not wait for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to impose the icon of “the disaster movie” (filme catastrophe): the towering inferno, of which the image of theTitanic standing hull in the air before it sank like a stone is but one variant—the myth of the ocean liner having prevailed for a time over the myth of the ark. But the termcatastrophe does not only have apocalyptic connotations. It can also be understood in a moreextended sense, as in the theory of the same name. This remains as valid in matters of architecture as in others, the mathematical theory precisely described as “catastrophe theory” finding in the art of building a privileged domain of application; a building, a built structure, a “construction,” however provisional, must first stand up, the way a boat must first float and a plane must fly. (“If we built a plane the way we build a house, it wouldn’t fly,” Jean Prouvé liked to say.) A matter of arithmetic, you might say, as long as we give ourselves the means to allow for discontinuity and all forms of rupture, fracture, general instability, and disequilibrium.36 Take a “modern” example, though one that is not without precedent in Gothic or Renaissance architecture (think of the solution Brunelleschi brought to bear on the problem presented by the dome of Florence Cathedral, which took the form of a double brick hull): it turns out that as a tall building goes up it encounters a certain number of “catastrophe points,” which can now be precisely pinpointed, each one corresponding to a threshold beyond which a different structural solution is required. Above fifty stories, the traditional system of concrete construction is no longer open to improvement and must give way to tubular structures that are themselves contained within precise limits. We might agree with René Thom that the set of these catastrophe points, or breakpoints, combined with the set of “regular points” that correspond to a continuous, noncatastrophic development, defines the substrate space of the morphology concerned, on the basis of which objects are produced—in this case, buildings. The fact that morphologies, if not morphogenesis (as Thom calls the theory that aims to account not only for the appearance of forms but also for their emergence and disappearance), are back on the agenda of mathematical science today is an indicator of a major epistemological shift. But it is no less significant that architecture itself seeks to make a return as a theoretical object (and as a domain of objects) at a time when the threat of widespread catastrophe has become so commonplace that we cannot continue pretending to wait for the means to vanquish it through the art of building. How could it be risked, when modern architecture’s own relationship to catastrophe too often takes the form that Le Corbusier meant when, upon discovering New York, he wrote “a catastrophe, but a beautiful and worthy catastrophe”37—though now without an aesthetic effect to redeem the social or ecological mess?
The form of tabula rasa, if not a hole, to which the place known as Ground Zero now corresponds in Lower Manhattan does not invalidate the thesis underlying the organization of articles devoted to architecture in theEncyclopédie. The al-Qaeda operatives hit hard and on target (at least technically speaking), so much so that some people have felt the attackers had some knowledge of the catastrophe points affecting very high buildings. But even if the World Trade Center might seem to take after the Tower of Babel more than after Noah’s Ark, its destruction was not by natural or divine forces but solely by human malice in its most detestable form. Yet architecture will gain no supplement to its soul, or to its existence, by attempting to anticipate the worst, in whatever form that might take—even the threat of a latent apocalypse.
In their own way, the Tower of Babel and Noah’s Ark form a matching pair, even if two distinct and opposed operations are involved. The myth of Babel aims at a kind of advertisement with fundamentally political overtones: any human endeavor attributable to a united community is subject to a limit; past a certain threshold, catastrophe threatens, linked as it is to a change of scale, and that is where the story ends.38 When it comes to the Flood, by contrast, catastrophe takes its place at the beginning of the tale, which is all that is needed to relativize it; whatever the extent of the disaster, the world order was not fundamentally altered by it, not even the classification of species, each one being reduced to a stock that was meant to find a place in the ark, wherein reigned a peace unknown since the Fall. And if Yahweh did not, in this case, find any remedy for his anger toward humanity other than its extermination, then what some take as his good will leave open the possibility of regeneration based on the branch whose survival the ark ensured for as long as the Flood lasted. After forty days, the retreat of the waters marked the start of a new human colony, where the survivors, after seeing to its unloading, abandoned the masterpiece of naval architecture to which they were indebted for having saved them from the disaster and once more got their bearings on dry land, each reinventing, on their own and all together, a new, if still tribal, way of living in this world. The alphabetical order of theEncyclopédie that called for the entry “Ark” to come just a bit before the entry “Architecture” was, in the end, neither fortuitous nor arbitrary. Architecture could only find its placeafter the Flood—or rather, in its stead.