There has long been a rich discourse in art history on the relationship between word and image, body and soul, life and death, representation and abstraction. In this piece, I step away from architectural dogma to explore these themes with a lighthearted approach. Join me as I delve in, purely for the joy of it.
Borges’ “The God’s Script”
One of the most famous stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, “The God's Script“ tells the story of Tzinacan, an Aztec priest imprisoned next to a jaguar. From the patterns in the jaguar’s fur, Tzinacan discovers a fourteen-word formula that, if spoken, would grant him omnipotence. “To say it would suffice to abolish this stone prison, to have daylight break into my night, to be young, to be immortal, ... to reconstruct the pyramid, to reconstruct the empire“ (8-9). However, Tzinacan decides not to utter the formula, for the knowledge has erased his sense of self, and with it, his desire for power or freedom.
Language, abstracted from the corporeal, concrete, and material through characterization and classification, brings light and order to the world, liberating humanity from fear and frustration. However, Tzinacan's story illustrates the divine and overwhelming power of language while also revealing the fear, frustration, and futility that can come with possessing such power. Language determines, clarifies, and unifies our understanding of the world, but through this very process of determination, clarification, and unification, limits our perception and expression, and eventually obliterates our selfhood and individuality. The story aligns with the Structuralist belief that humans come into existence through language and are thus confined by its rules. To some extent, to name is to normalize, to define is to limit, and to classify is to control. Through abstraction, we lose touch with the material and corporeal—the flesh and bone of things. Truth no longer resides in reality itself but in the distance created by abstraction, construction, and reflection of that reality.
Interestingly, the story touches on the relationship between words and immortality. As Michel Foucault points out in “What is an Author?”, writing is a way to ward off death. Shakespeare romanticizes this idea in Sonnet 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive [his] powerful rhyme. . .” The soul aspires to outlive the body through letters, and the immortality of words transcends life’s fleeting nature. History itself is a discourse—words construct our collective memory and subconscious, yet also leave us vulnerable to deception, distortion, and manipulation.
2. The Tower of Babel
Men of a unified, monolingual humanity decide to build a city and a tower tall enough to reach heaven, seeking to make their name, mark their achievement, and prevent their scattering. Their ambition, however, angers God, who punishes them by confounding their language and scattering them across the world. In his illustration, Northern Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel bases the architecture of Babel on the Roman Colosseum, a symbol of hubris and persecution. The decaying city of Rome, along with the frantic activity of engineers, masons, and workmen, reflects the vanity, futility, and transience of human endeavor and earthly efforts.
The Tower of Babel can be compared to the soaring Gothic cathedrals and modern skyscrapers, not only for their emphasis on height and vertical dimension but also for their technical achievements in structure and construction—as symbols of wealth and pride, collective endeavor and consciousness, identity and ideology, and as demonstrations of the political and economic power of the church, monarchy, nation, or civilization at large. While Gothic architecture aims to evoke the presence of God, the story of Babel suggests that such pursuits may challenge and offend God, as they centralize human power—even when attributed to divine authority. Once considered barbarous, Gothic architecture was re-evaluated and revived in the 19th century as a symbol of national identity and achievement. Throughout history, people have romanticized cruelty, humanized inhumanity, and celebrated the toil and suffering behind beauty and grandeur. Thus, depreciating Gothic architecture for its aesthetics or appreciating it solely for its visual impact is inappropriate and overlooks its deeper significance.
Today, people are no longer interested in pursuing or producing the effect of God. Nonetheless, the construction of skyscrapers demonstrates men’s collective ambition and the centralization of ideology, money, and power of a society or nation. For instance, the CCTV tower in Beijing designed by Rem Koolhaas serves as a representation of the official media and the financial and political power of the central government. It is, admittedly, an impressive building—its design, by the media and for the media, creates an iconic structure, further enhanced by engineering feats. That said, while vertical spatialization and the concept of the vertical mega-city could offer solutions to urbanization pressures, the solution paradoxically dissolves the very idea itself. In my subjective opinion, eventually these fancy skyscrapers will be considered as crude and overbearing, much like Gothic architecture once was, before their status and significance are once again re-established as the edifice of collective achievement.
3. Fractal and Self-Similarity
In Bruegel’s depiction, the Tower of Babel spirals upward with forms that resemble self-similar structures, an aspect also reflected in Gothic architecture’s repetitive and hierarchical motifs. The fractal-like arrangement of these designs may be inspired by nature, emerge from technical experimentation and engineering solutions, or symbolize social, political, or theological hierarchies.
Nature exhibits fractal-like qualities, and fractal graphics are commonly used in computer simulations to replicate natural patterns. If architecture indeed imitates nature, its fractal elements provide compelling evidence. These motifs evoke a sense of growth and life because in nature, living forms develop through self-similar patterns. What’s particularly intriguing about the fractality of Gothic architecture, however, is not just its imitation of nature, but the inherent “nature-ness“ of its structural system. According to Nicola
Coldstream, the precepts obeyed by Gothic architecture are structural, technical, and geometric. The medieval architects focus on construction and craft rather than aesthetic rules and convention (27). The forms of Gothic architecture, resembling the life and growth of nature, reveal the raw energy and brute force of material fabrication. Nature has its own mechanics and systems of growth and decay, and so does architecture. Material and structure possess an innate force, universal to both natural and human creations. A building, like a living body, comes to life through this force. Medieval craftsmen not only demonstrated their technical and engineering mastery but also allowed architecture to express its own “free will“, embodying the physical and the corporeal. Without the constraints of aesthetic convention, they embraced the material and the carnal, which is why the Gothic, in a sense, feels vulgar and barbarous.
Aesthetic standards may draw inspiration from nature, but only as abstractions, reflections, or discourses on it, rather than as direct imitations or reproductions of its carnal effects. Representation is different from reproduction. To maximize and materialize the effect and experience of God is not an effective way to represent God—this is a distinction I will explore further later. Additionally, architects should always control the material force and exercise some Sprezzatura—effortless mastery—when it comes to construction. In a sense, the medieval workmen are both masters and slaves of their technical achievement. Today’s architectural practice often breaks aesthetic conventions, focusing on structural potentials and visual effects—which seems to me “Gothic“. However, much of contemporary art is non-representational and non-narrative. It is about the material. When it comes to geometric and material fabrication, as well as computer graphics and computational design, they should be scientific rather than artistic, functional rather than decorative, logical rather than luxurious. KD-tree, for example, reminds me of Mondrian’s paintings, but it’s an algorithm for solving spatial problems, not a work of art.
4. Self-similarity and Uncanny Doubling
To me, Gothic architecture is saturated with construction anxiety. It may seem far-fetched to suggest that medieval architecture reflects a collective subconscious projection of natural reproduction and sexual repression. However, it makes more sense to discuss doubling and self-similar structures in the context of the surrealist and modern art movements in the industrial and postindustrial age—when such expressions were enhanced by machine reproduction and the development of photography. Doubling, recursion, and self-similarity are common techniques in both visual and dramatic arts. There are many examples: the play-within-a-play in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, painting-within-a-painting in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, city-within-a-city in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, film-within-a-film in Federico Fellini’s Eight and a Half, and dream-within-a-dream in Inception (2010)—so much so that this technique has become a cliché. Doubling is not the same as symmetry, and reproduction is not reflection, although their results may sometimes overlap. The former is carnal, irrational, and automatic, with a sense of instability and infinity, whereas the latter is abstract, rational, and refined. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, provides a semiotic interpretation of doubling. He defines Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state“ and emphasizes the notion of “objective chance“. Though I won’t elaborate further here, it is no coincidence that motifs of doubling and photography permeate the surrealist movement.
To some extent, doubling and recursive structures symbolize sexual and subconscious release and repression. Especially in the mechanical age and during times of war, there is a parallel between industrial and human production, as well as deconstruction. Many artworks from this period embody a sense of confusion, anxiety, and obsession, suggesting the machine’s control over, and deconstruction of, the human mind. It is not surprising that Piranesi’s famous depiction of stairs is set in a prison. Similarly, in the modern age of confusion and chaos, it is unsurprising that writers like Kafka—whose work is filled with imagery of staircases, gates, corridors, movement, and stasis—would imagine an architecture of the unsettled, the transient, the ambitious, and the uncanny. Some artists and philosophers such as Francis Bacon and Gaston Bachelard, explore the dramatic effects of a single room, merging the subjective with the objective interior. Architecture in art and literature becomes a projection and representation of human fears, desires, and confusion.
Nevertheless, doubling is a powerful technique when executed with some Sprezzatura. Doubling the experience of reality allows us to transform nature into a sign, framing, isolating, and converting reality into representation. Per Barclay’s installations effectively use reflective surfaces to extend vertical, virtual space. His reflective and symmetric installations evoke a sense of calm.
Every historical period engages with a central conflict or dialogue. In the mechanical age, the conflict is between the original and the copy; in the information age, the dialogue is between the real and the virtual. Reflection mediates both.
5. Art in the Past vs the Present
Generally speaking, art in the past was focused on the soul, representation, and narrative, whereas modern and contemporary art is non-representational, material, and corporeal. As Boris Groys, a prominent art critic, points out, art used to be about metanoia, “that is, a transition from an inner worldly to otherworldly perspective, from the perspective of the mortal body to that of the eternal soul.” Today, we hold that God is dead, and we no longer believe that “a metanoia—that is, the achievement of a meta position in relation to the world—is possible.” Instead, we have another kind of metanoia—“a heteronoia, an anticipation of the body’s rather than the soul’s destiny in the afterlife” (The Immortal Bodies 345). Thus, in other words, art in the past was about spiritual immortality, or the immortal soul; in the present, art is about material immortality, or the immortal body. Groys also highlights the linguistic ascesis in contemporary artworks. He argues that modern, autonomous artworks “do not even want to say that they are artworks, but present themselves merely as ‘specific objects,’ which have no depth, no interior, no content, nothing hidden or concealed, and are in their essence just as they present themselves: you see what you see” (The Border between Word and Image 98). In other words, artworks today convey the message of the material, whereas in the past, they conveyed the message of the spiritual. As a comparison, architecture in the past was spiritual and narrative, whereas in the modern period, it focuses more on construction, function, and the message of material and the “specific object”.
6. Finally, on Representation
For me, it doesn’t matter whether an artwork centers around a lie or the truth, the body or the soul, the subject or the object, as long as it’s executed well. It’s less important to debate ideology than to examine the corresponding methodology. As I mentioned earlier, maximizing and materializing the effect and experience of God is not an effective way to represent God—this is why I don’t appreciate Gothic cathedrals. My idea of perfection lies in the combination of Raphael and Caravaggio. When it comes to the spiritual, the best way to represent something in its extremity is to define its central conflict and then find its opposite. The world is conceptually non-Euclidean—everything, when pushed to its extreme, becomes its exact opposite. Thus, it’s most effective to represent God as human, death as life, and everything as nothing.
The most famous line in The Graveyard by the Sea, written by Paul Valéry, is: “The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!” I love the imagery of the wind—strong and vital—rising in the graveyard. The maximum effect of death is life. Another example is Rothko, who, on an empty canvas, carefully frames a maximum of blankness, representing a miniature existence devoid of scientific illusions and artificial organisms. The best representation of all meanings and narratives throughout history, both in and beyond the world, is nothingness. In the Christian representation of God, Renaissance naturalism and humanism surpass Medieval geometric and planimetric schemes, as well as the elongated forms and exaggerated expressions of the Baroque. To depict Christ’s suffering and transformation through natural serenity is what Hegel considers the higher way to express spiritual depth and profundity. Ultimately, to design is to plant an idea, and when you plant an idea, you automatically plant its opposite.
Works Cited
Coldstream, Nicola. “‘What we now vulgarly call the Gothic,’” in Medieval Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 22-53.
Groys, Boris. “The Border between Word and Image.“ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 2, Mar. 2011, pp. 94-108.
Groys, Boris, et al. “The Immortal Bodies.“ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 53/54, 2008, p. 345.
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