Research developed at Princeton university
under George Teyssot supervision.
THE
DOMESTICATION AND HYBRIDIZATION OF RELIGIOUS RITUALS AND THEIR REPRESENTATIONS
A
GENEALOGY OF INCORPORATIONS AND DISPLACEMENTS OF SPIRITUAL PRACTICE IN THE HOME
TOWARDS MODERN DOMESTICITY IN SPAIN AND THE LATIN AMERICAS.
HOME:
place of rest,
security, the house in which one lives with his family; the habitual abode of
one’s family; also, one’s birthplace.
The disciples went away again to their own
home. —John xx. 10. Home is the sacred refuge of our life. —Dryden.
2. One’s native land; the place or country in
which one dwells; the place where one’s ancestors dwell or dwelt. «Our
old home [England].» —Hawthorne. 3.
The abiding place of the affections, especially of the domestic affections.
DOMESTIC:
Fond of home life and household affairs. Tame or domesticated. Used of animals.
1. Of or pertaining to a nation considered as a
family or home, or to one’s own country; intestine; not foreign; as,
foreign wars and domestic dissensions. —Shak.
2. Remaining much at home; devoted to home
duties or pleasures; as, a domestic man or woman.
3. Living in or near the habitations of man;
domesticated; tame as distinguished from wild; as, domestic animals.
4. Made in one’s own house, nation, or
country; as, domestic manufactures, wines, etc. Home life or devotion to it.
PRIVACY
(prv-s). The quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or
view of others. The state of being free from
unsanctioned intrusion:
a
person’s right to privacy. The state of being concealed; secrecy. 2. A
place of seclusion from
company or observation; retreat; solitude;
retirement.
INTIMACY
n
1: close or warm friendship; «the absence of fences created a mysterious
intimacy in which no one knew privacy»
[syn:
familiarity,
closeness]
2: a usually secretive or illicit sexual relationship
The
appearance of domesticity and the Modern displacements.
Christopher
Reed (1)
declares that the notion of domesticity is a modern concept. Being at home, to
have focus on the family, privacy and comfort as a separate place from the
workplace is a concept developed in the modern age. The intention fo this paper
is to work out relationships between domesticity and the incorporation of the
religion as part of this process. To describe the evolution of the home until
the appearance of domesticity related to religious representations.
On
the one hand, the separation from workplace and living is again displaced by
modern architecture. This is the beginning of domesticity becoming an antithesis
concept for the Modern Movement. In modern world there is no time for this
separation between living and working. Other aspects collaborate to this
disjunction: the modern art, for example was not produced for the home, it seems
was produced for bigger scales.
These domestics supppressions from the modern interior also carried away the
spiritual life from the home, collaborating to make the modern interior more
deprived from interior life.
On
the other hand, for Reed, the term “avant garde” breaks the relation between
domesticity and modernity. This word, derived from military (advanced guard)
means away from home: towards the glory of the battlefield of culture. Being
un-domestic, is being art. The modern was continuously growing the divergence
between domesticity and modernism.
In
the book “Home: a Short History of an
Idea”, Withold talks about the international style as a “cold
storage warehouse cube” as a description of the lack of domesticity in modern
architecture. Le Corbusier himself as the spokesman of modern design, in
“Towards a New Architecture” talks against the
sentimental hysteria cult of the house and establishes that the home should be a
machine for living. W. Benjamin stakes steel and glass aesthetic, as they were
opposed to the refuge and privacy assertion
of individual or family identity. (1)
In
the book Culture of Time Space / The Nature of Space (2)
other
analogies of the transparencies are put into the context of the modern advances
and the relation to the human condition.
“The
X-ray pierced the surface of the
human body and other material screens.... With Edison´s discovery of
fluoroscope in 1896 it became possible to view directly the interior of the
human body in action; who can still believe in the opacity of bodies?”...
The
new paradigm introduced by the trasparency is worked in architecture with the
glass and the steel.
Again
Reed writes that in the 1880´s the inhabitant could lay his trace in every spot of
the traditional home. In The bourgeois house there was a blurring between the
house and its inhabitants, facts that will also affect the relation to the own
interior of the inhabitant and the condition of interiority represented in
exterior things, as objects for practicing spiritual excersices. In steel and
glass homes is difficult to leave a trace and to refer to interiority, both from
physical means to spiritual ones.
Architecture
is transcendent over domestic old design: degenerated, dirt and disease, these
ideas of contrast were very
influential in the avant garde movement to introduce the radical change. The
domestic realm was something from the past, something popular and old fashioned.
The model of the city implied a model of a new man. The modern city man was
energetic, alert, combative, hard thinking,
In the NYTimes appeared a comment about modern design describing the
condition that their art (moderns) must insult anyone who is
spiritually attuned to interior decoration. The ghost of the past
were repressed but returned (in decoration and domesticity) as anyone can notice
in any modern interior that usually cannot support the everyday use without
degenrating the original design in a violent way: common people reject the
condition of adapting their domesticity to the modern interior. They affect
these simple spaces attacking them with many disonant objects, through the
acuumulation of personal belongings in order to conquer certain domesticity. The
Arts and craft ideal joined home and
art associated with domesticity. Their medieval simplicity was seen as old
fashioned for the moderns.
This
paper will try to describe a genealogy of different religious rituals and their
representations at home, until its domestication
on the XIX century interior, then its posterior supression from the modern
interior as other domestic issues. Many rituals were displaced from the
interior, modifying modern life and relations between family in the contemporary
age. What I will try to figure out are how these incorporations and
displacements affects the relation between body, mind, soul and architecture.
I
am curious about the evolution of the domestication of religious rituals and the
incorporations of these rituals into private spaces and their relation with the
body. The selection of the resources for the research had followed the constrain
of the occidental culture using as a column
the Christian religion, even though there are some specific cases of
studies and cross relations with other oriental cultures. The cases of study are
used to explode formal relations and from there to reach other
implications.
....(...)...
THE
PROBLEMS OF DOMESTICATION IN THE PALACE GUELL in
BARCELONA, Spain:
Research
developed at Princeton University with the supervision of Georges Teyssot in
2001.
The altar and organ system are focus in this analysis.
The domestication of the altar and its relation with the organ-the
incorporation of the altar into the main salon, and the disembodiment of
this private altar from its previous edge positioning. Palace Guell’s interior
space is transformed by the incorporation of two public programs. The altar
inside the niche is transformed into a Chapel and the organ becomes part of a
concert hall when a concert is given. They are a unit for the triple height
salon of Gaudi’s Palace Guell, that only measures in total 18 by 20 feet in
plan and 59 feet in section.
In this building, there is a clear work on the evolution of
the problem of a chapel inside a palace. As I described in the section before,
the chapel used to play a very
clear and specific relation in the location in the palace. In this case this
relation is transgressed and we can follow this procedure in the two plans of
the preliminary sketches of the design of the Guel Palace.
The transformation of the altar into a chapel and the organ into an
orchestra represent the palace’s social, public, character. In this sense, the
analysis of the building is itslef artificial, because of the highly blurred
limits of each object, they are a unique system of relations in a formal hybrid
continuity.
About Domestication: the chapel typology, historically was worked out in a
certain peripheral relationship inside the castles and palaces.
Their position implies small degree of public access inside the
palace, which relate to a certain static-private-corner areas within the
palaces. On the other hand, the private altar, used to be
located inside the most private spaces, such as the bedroom. So, in Guell
Palace both the altar and the chapel are being domesticated further, by this
displacement. In Palace Guell, this displacement is towards the main, center,
fluid and dynamical salon.
The altar and the organ become one object and transform the space
into a kind of singularity.
From this incorporation two changes in scale are being developed:
again, the altar becomes a chapel, and the organ becomes part of an orchestra.
Toghether, they become a Church, even a representation of a Cathedral. (a
magical space is also developed due to the special work with the light in the
dome)
This monumentality is allowed through the context of the formal
work in this exchanging of events and functions.
It is a kind of architecture within an architecture. Box inside a box.
The architecture of this space is affected by the furniture: the
altar/organ duality, become the system of the architecture.
At the same time this is an independent organism inside the Palace,
independent both from the Palace and from the main reception hall.
0-The
system of the organ: is an object
developed on the left side of the salon, defining the corner of the space,
articulating this space with the entrance and connection to the formal dining
room of the palace. This relation is articulated by certain discontinuities like
the column, suggesting independence and dependence from the salon.
This organ, an artifact, developed by Aquino Amezcula under the
design and directions of Gaudi is hand-crafted. There is a direct relationship
with the human body, as the organist stands on the keyboard while he
plays—music and body performance are simultaneous.
Also
working a particular relation within body and building by its location and
continuity with the walls of the altar niche and the window showing the
mechanism of the choir and
connecting
visually with the altar for interacting with the ongoing of the mass
celebration.
Gaudi afterwards developed in his project for Sagrada Familia,
enormous chorus-pipes for the organ related to the scale of the huge towers of
the cathdral, by this way he pretended to build a gigantic organ of 12 bell
towers, becoming the organ of the city.
The domestication of a ritual: how it means to have a private mass,
inside a house in relation to a church.
1-The system of the altar (inside the niche) contains a table,
which seems to be very conventional in its proportions, but it helps relate the
altar into the larger salon space.
On the right side of the altar there is a place defined by wooden
walls (small area in plan and section) that plays the role of a confessionary
adyacent to the altar. In this place someone can sit on its bench for praying,
or meet for confession with the priest, facing the altar. Also by facing the
altar, you can see through the window and see the organ pipes and watch the
movements of the organ player.
In the altar place, there is a sculpture behind the table in the
niche, is also big enough to play other relation than the local, being related
by its size to the big salon. There are also other elements in the hall that are
related to the altar, but outside of the niche, contextualizing the event of the
religiosity in the salon, such as the paintings developed at the corners of the
salon, generating a special religious environment.
Together both altar and organ become an autonomous system that
transforms the organization of the space of the salon when social gatherings are
being on.
This
is the reason why, I can argue that this system organ-chapel-confessionary is
working as a machine inside the palace. A machine capable of developing an
artificial
environment,
transforming the domesticity of the palace into a social event of certain
monumentality.
By this means, this
machine can be a set of mechanisms that generates events in the building.
2- Another mechanism
could
be the organ generating the concert-event, as the inclusion of the organ pipes
within the interior section allows for a tall vertical space (triple
height)—where the orchestral musicians can play from a gallery above and a
large audience can be accomodated below.
Another mechanism can be the organ working together with the system
of the chapel. The Chapel being able to set the event of a Mass, by only opening
the doors of the altar, integrating to the triple heigh space, transforming this
space in a sacrate one, playing specific relations of continuity with the copula
and the arches on top, and all the devices that work this continuity, like the
small round openings in the copula bringing light effects (magic environment)
The event of the mass, at the same time plays a specific relation
to the body. The necessity of this event to be played by a Priest that for
instace in attached to this apparatus, he is in-doors of the altar niche worked
as an opening in the wall.
The mass with the adding of the playing the mechanism of the organ, turns this
system into a machine. The articulation of this two mechanism results a sacred
machinery transforming the palace into a real chapel-church-cathedral, relating
minimum details annd forms in different scales of hybridization of the space.
In these set of mechanisms we can describe an intermediate event generating
intermediate situations, like when there is no mass when the altar plays an
original marginal tensed role, while the doors of the altar are opened and the
place is not a chapel, but a reception hall with an altar in an opening in a
wall. In this situation the altar rounds out, and there is another posible way
to work an incorporation of the body to this mechanism, by entering into the
space of the altar and sitting in the very little-ergonomic wooden bench. This
small place works as a very private static place for praying a side of the altar
and both for having a confession or a confident talk.
This mechanism is part of a machine when the organ is played together with one
praying. The body attached to the organ (specific relation human standing over
the machine) playing the music, and the other body inside the cubicle in the
altar space listening to the music coming from the copula (where the pipes of
the choir ends) and not from the window opened on one side of the altar by which
both bodies are related visually.
Machines, in this case are organisms that reach the implicitness in space to
transform the architecture. Mechanism of articulating three parts of a building
into a system of flexible relations. Mechanisms: altar furniture incorporated to
the wall, and an organ developed
specially to its location, are both attached to the architecture.
The “human is in this case a “motor” to this space, it is clearly
developed an articulation with the building to perform the event in this space.
The power of this apparattus is related to both event-functional implicitness
and its strategic location. A different function transforms all the building
structurally from a niche on the wall.
Body and incorporation to the furniture: playing the architecture
with the organ.
Organ and chapel play the architecture of the place.
The body is attached to the architecture in different ways and events.
Attachment to the furniture as am articulation of the wall,
implying architecture development, blurring the limits between what is
furniture, what is architecture, also in the manufacture of the objects.
1 Body-chapel: confessionary typology confronted to the altar figure.
2 Body-organ: the human as a motor of the event of music in this place:
concert!
3 Body-altar: playing the functionality of the chapel as a sacred
transformation of the palace.
Works in the development of sculpture reveals Gaudi working with body
performance and limitations in space and furniture design.
Confessionary is designed to be very adjoined to the body, changing in some
degree the condition of furniture, turning into a problem of continuity with the
body, as an external sculpture surrounding the body. This concept is worked
inside the altar itself, by a built in confessionary kind typology seat on the
right side of the altar.
New boundaries: the shape of an artificial environment of complex social events
and the resulting relations.
Role of the things in the space. Batteries of artificiality or representations
of natural environments.
Artificiality of the event.
Furniture in the living room. Nineteenth Century interior.
The daily life in the Bourgeoisie Industrial leader and a very social man.
Drafting plans: development of the chapel in continuity with the central space,
but adjacent to it articulated by columns.
They, Gaudi and Guell, became enthusiastic about this space while the
developing of the building, that it became a special kind of organism at the heart of the palace.
Preliminary Sketch plan of Gaudi Guell Palace,
Barcelona
Final Plan of Gaudi Guell Palace, Barcelona.
Notice the altar adjunct to the main central space, to the right.
