Beams of Light: Looking at Architecture

"The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on the west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to climb. From the edge of this platform, the eye plunges down, two hundred and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean, as the tides recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a restless sea, which even we tourists can understand and feel without books or guides; but when we turn from the western view, and look at the church door, thirty or forty yards from the parapet where we stand, one needs to know what this mass of encrusted architecture meant to its builders, and even then one must still learn to feel it. The man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow prematurely young. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres Henry Adams (1-2) To know Mont-Saint-Michel as Henry Adams would wish us, we not only need to transport ourselves to eleventh century France but we must also don the cloak of Norman sensibilities. As Ralph Adams Cram wrote in the preface to Mont-SaintMichel and Chartres, (1905), in order to fully understand these buildings we should merge ourselves in a long-dead time. Henry Adams would want us to "get our minds into the condition" to enter through the portals of the church and by doing so understand it in its own time, in its own unique locale and as its own citizens would have known it (Adams vii). His effort in writing this book which explores these two buildings in great depth is as heroic as its subjects and his masterwork treatise is as much of a cultural treasure as are Mt. St. Michel and Chartres Cathedral. To develop the frame of mind to know these two buildings or, as a matter of fact, any building constructed in any time period in any part of the world would, following Adams' proviso, require an equally heroic effort. But is developing this frame of mind at all possible for the student of architecture? Or are there far too many buildings, far too many cultures and far too many understandings? Since few of us are able to command both the patience and the intellectual rigor of a Henry Adams, could there be other ways that we can come to know a building? Certainly there are buildings that we regularly experience in our every day comings and goings which ought to afford us similar opportunities. Although not as monumental or as revered as MontSaint Michel or Chartres they are still buildings and, as ethnographer Clifford Geertz reminds us, "flecks of culture" in their own right (Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, 6). And since most buildings that we might come into direct contact with lie around the corner, down the street or up the freeway they are much more accessible for our study. There is little doubt that we each come to know buildings in our personal and unique ways. While these unique points of view might, to some degree, enlighten each and every one of us, these individual experiences do little to add to the shared knowledge about those buildings in particular. One building will provide the stage for an infinite number of experiences and memories. Yet when we make the effort, we can gather some of these personal views into more generalizable views, views that, like the Normans of eleventh century France, we momentarily share in common with others in our culture. But what are some of the ways of looking at a building that we might share in common with others? Most conventional techniques for studying a building center around its more concrete, measurable (and some might say, objective) characteristics. For instance, we can analyze a building in order to reveal its structural system, that composition of columns, beams, walls and foundations which resists the variety of forces and loads to which a building is exposed. We can also observe how the spaces are organized and examine what kind of activities or functions occur in those spaces. We can compare the historic style of the building to other buildings in the same style in order to find commonalties as well as subtle innovations. …