CHAPTER 3
NEUTOPIA: A FEMINIST THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE
Introduction
The image of home, an architectural structure and
psychological space, evokes both the personal need for
images of shelter as well as emotional memories of the
family. Our memories of the past are embedded in the
material forms of architecture, creating a fourth dimension
of time and space as we travel back home in our daydreams.
Malcolm Quantrill writes in his book, _The Environmental
Memory_, "Architecture serves as a memory system for ideas
about human origins, a means of recording understanding of
order and relationship in the world, and an attempt to grasp
the concept of the eternal cosmos which has no fixed
dimensions, with neither beginning nor end" (11).
He points out that the framework of architecture is not
simply a visible reality. There is an invisible,
metaphysical, or ritualistic order in architecture which is
constructed by the culture's mythology, that is, through its
poetic memories and imagination. Quantrill calls these
hidden or fourth dimensional elements "not immediately
apparent in the form" (xiv). Of all art forms, architecture
serves as the most symbolic preserving instrument. Its
magic determines the interrelationship of things; it
determines whether or not we live in discord or harmony with
nature. F. David Martin declares, in his book _Art and the
Religious Experience_, "architecture sets forth the
iconicism of a world."
In this chapter, I will attempt to explore the way
"home" is an archaic as well as modern archetype. The
question is, whether the persistence of this archetype in
its present form, which has persisted since human beings
moved outside the caves, will lead to the downfall of our
"civilization" and the likely extinction of our species.
According to Tulio Inglese, Director of the NACUL
Institute, [NACUL stands for nature and culture]
architecture is composed of three words. The first stems
from _arche_, which means primal or prototype, a model from
which all others are created. It is assumed that the model
is the epitome of the good, the perfection of a design from
which others can follow. Inglese understands the essential
nature of architecture to be spiritual. He states, "_Ure_
is from the Greek work for substance or matter. Spirit and
matter, one of Paolo Soleri's favorite dualities, is joined
by the word technology" which is derived from the Greek word
techne. The word "architecture" can then be read as Spirit-
-Making--Matter. Inglese believes architecture "holds the
secret to the next important step in evolution" (2). It is
also important to note that when using "arch" as a prefix it
means to rule. No wonder architecture, the grandest art of
all, is so intimately united with history! Subsequently,
the way the built environment is designed rules our
relationship to it and thus our lives.
Frank E. Wallis, in his book _How to Know
Architecture_, calls architecture "man's most self-revealing
record of his struggle upward from barbarism to the complex
civilization of today" (4). He even states that the need
for shelter resulted in the birth of science which he
defined as the development of our reasoning faculties in the
use of constructive applications (7). For this reason, he
says, the study of architecture must also be the study of
human progress. The question arises: is our Faustian sense
of progress, the lust for more and more power, the worship
of mechanical order, rationalism, predictability, control,
and financial profit--at the expense of what is imaginative
and alive--healthy for our civilization? As I breath the
air from this polluted planetary abode, it would seem not!
By studying the history of architecture one must also
study the structures of power which have used the collective
or private material surplus and labor force used to
construct the built environment. In other words, the study
of space is an enlightening journey throughout time. In the
introduction of _Restructuring Architectural Theory_, Marco
Diani and Catherine Ingraham write,
One could say that architecture does not draw its
authority from some pre-established structure of
materials or technique, or from some given structure of
artistic meaning, but from the power granted to it by
philosophy. Thus architecture builds, over and over,
philosophically endorsed ideas of home, city, place--
inscribing them in space much as a scribe records the
words of an absolute ruler. From this viewpoint,
architecture is a deeply conservative force that keeps
what is philosophically, politically, and ideologically
"proper" in place. From the vantage point of language,
architecture thus evaporates, or melts into political,
social, linguistic, philosophic analysis (2).
Diani and Ingraham declare that architecture, together
with philosophy, is the "only constructive practice, even in
theory" (6). The generalized knowledge, wisdom, and
overarching vision needed to understand the power
relationships of the past in order to use our imaginations
to create an ideology for the future, makes architecture a
perfect subject for Future Studies. The future only exists
in our beliefs and imagination. By building an alternative
vision of bioregional ecocities we break out of the
conservative inertia of the past and bring a new meaning to
the word "edification." Consequently, one can say that
education prepares the proper edifice or, in other words,
education leads to architecture. Diani and Ingraham state,
"We do not have a theory of cities that instructs us how to
think." The purpose of this chapter is to help us become
clearer as to which architectural direction we must turn in
order to survive and flourish in the next millennium.
The Division of Space
Architecture has been known as the "mother of the
arts," the cave/womb of creation. The image of womb denotes
a female image of architecture, though now in the
post-modern world, the symbol of power is not only
represented by the more matriarchal form of the private
residence, but also represented in the skyscraper/erection,
the patriarchal image of the world.
Dorothy Dinnerstein in her book _The Mermaid and the
Minotaur_ asserts that it is in the home were mother-
dominated child-care occurs, the place where children are
first introduced to the cultural value systems of female
authority. Infant child-care keeps women bound to the home
in their so-called primary role as mothers, and allows
fathers to be free to pursue their prestigious positions as
the policy-makers and world-builders. Dinnerstein contends
that mother-child bond, i.e., the cross-generational bond,
is felt to be sacred by society. This worldview visualizes
women in the form of Earth Mother whose infinite fertility
can be infinitely exploited.
Dinnerstein's book explains the meaning of the old folk
tale--the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--by
pointing out how our traditional sexual arrangements of
mother as homemaker and father as commander-in-chief,
maintains neurotic symbiotic patterns of malaise between the
sexes which are "_buttressed_ by societal coercion."
External forces instituted by men exclude women from
affecting social change, putting them into a subservient
role, which in many cases, women accept voluntarily. In
other words, both women and men fear the life-force which
women as bearers of life and culture possess. This fear
keeps apart the split in our communal sensibility. To break
free of these arrangements is "the central thrust of our
species' life toward more viable forms" (10). Dinnerstein
continues,
The harsh truth is that no societal compromise which
changes other features of woman's condition while
leaving her role as first parent intact will get at the
roots of asymmetric sexual privilege. It is one thing
to want change in the educational, vocational, and
legal status of women; it is quite another thing to
start tampering with Motherhood (76).
Making History
Dinnerstein points out the mother-infant bond is the
most universal, fundamental, and biologically hardy tie that
we have. She believes that the nucleus of our structural
imbalance, which keeps women from history-making roles, is
the strength of the mother-infant bond and the weakness of
the father-infant bond. She declares, "We lean heavily on
the reliability of this bond; yet it is part of a
congenital deformity that we must now outgrow before it
kills us off" (97).
Dinnerstein puts forth that the maternal bond maintains
itself for two reasons. First, women because of "socially
sanctioned existential cowardice," remain out of the spot-
light as a result of their refusal to accept the primary
responsibility which the historical role demands. Women
succumb to a secondary role of enjoying the privileges of
male achievements by becoming a "nurturant servant-goddess"
who is the witness of male historic action. The woman
becomes the Other, who is incapable of defining herself or
establishing her own sovereignty, and so, validates the male
reality in which he is the Subject.
Secondly, because women are the bearers of life, they
play the impressive role in the reproduction of the next
generation and the physical continuity of the species.
According to Margaret Mead, the woman is then content to
leave the making of history to the realm of the male domain
in order to counterbalance her vital function, and to give
him the self-respect he needs in order to maintain his
sexual vigor which she is dependent upon.
However, Dinnerstein thinks that, while Mead's account
rings true in the traditional balance of power, there is
more to the story of male-female neurotic co-dependency. If
I am reading Dinnerstein correctly, she believes that what
Mead leaves out of the story is that the heroic and noble
deeds of men are nevertheless "trivial and empty, ugly and
sad." The traditional male role of laborer, which woman has
needed to maintain the productivity of society and to build
the roof over her head, denies men intimate and emotional
ties to the forthcoming generation. Man's self-esteem,
social status, and affection from women is then determined
by the accumulation of money and private wealth, materials
which are not alive in carnal flesh, where as, in raising a
baby, the pleasure-principle of the living flesh needs love
and playful joy in order to survive. Therefore, man is
largely left outside the intimate circle of love, and, since
love is not permitted in the competitive world of business,
love and work are separated into two different realms of
existence.
In the end, the cross-generational bond between the
infant-mother lives on in the flesh, whereas, the energy
that has consumed the male lifetime is merely a handful of
abstractions, interest rates, and monuments to the dead.
This could suggest that the reason why men have been fixated
on the worship of the dead and the forces of war is because
they have played no positive part in shaping the future.
The reason for male transcendence that divorces itself from
the earthly immanence is caused by a lack of paternal
bonding. The transcendental concept of patriarchal
religions, which believes heaven is a place after life and
earth is a place of exile, is caused by man's inadequate
relationship with the future. And so, his lust for the
ownership of women and children compensates for the
deficiency of his lacking both inner meaning and a
connection with the future. By developing an economy in
which his wealth is passed on to his heirs as a way to
connect with the immortality of the next generation, man has
attempted to fulfill this lack.
Man's envy of the womb could be the reason why, for the
most part, women artists have been left out of art history.
Since man could not physically give birth to offspring, he
denied women her ability and right to give birth to
spiritual offspring. He would be the artist/prophet, not
her. Women were refused access to male-dominated art
schools. Even in the 16th Century when the times demanded
that women could no longer be excluded from the academy,
women where still denied the right to paint the male nude
body. In their book _Women Artists: A Graphic Guide_,
Frances Borzello and Natacha Legwidge write, male "students
were told that the most important painting--history
paintings--were those with serious subject matter taken from
the Bible and classical myths and they were taught the
skills for producing them" (31).
Women, on the other hand, were taught to focus their
artistic visions on domestic concerns and were guided in the
direction of making crafts. Women were relegated to second-
class citizenship in the class structure of art. They were
to hold the "less prestigious areas of teaching--in schools,
colleges of further education and polytechnics, and in the
applied and decorative art departments of the art schools"
(117). The traditional male artist used women for his
muses, for his models, and for his daily servants, while
women were brought up to believe that they must subdue their
creative drives because their first responsibility was for
the care of others. It was man's role to be artist/hero;
it woman's role to testify to his sexual prowess. Borzello
and Ledwidge write,
No one gets up and boos in the opera house when the
tenor sings that Woman is fickle or barracks in the
theatre when Shakespeare writes that Woman is like a
child, or feels anything but Awe In Front of Art when
Titian paints Eve as a wily beauty luring an utterly
innocent Adam. But when Elena Samperi painted her
feeling about Man in Madonna (1980), showing him as a
miniature adult in a schoolboy cap endlessly sucking
and biting at the breast, there was a deafening outcry
about female bitchiness and hatred of men (140, 142).
It could be explained that male suppression of the
pleasure principle in his world of business and art is a way
of punishing women from denying him access to love and
immortality. Unable to see a way out of his incestuous bond
by understanding the forces of romantic love, man then
sought rebirth through his mother which resulted in his
infantile behavior. He created the symbols which
transcended and denied the ultimate fate of the body, death,
in order to connect back with his omnipotent mother
believing she was his way to rebirth. This explains the
myth of the resurrection of Christ which reverses the
natural cycles of life and death. In Christian mythology,
Christ is raised from the dead without needing the female
body to be reborn, denying the function of the Crone's
regenerative erotic powers in his rebirth.
In order for men to deny their empty and pitiful life
stories, they needed to mythologize their superiority over
women, a condition which women, who are trapped in these old
gender relations, accept in order to hide their maternal
advantage. However, Dinnerstein asserts, that other women
are more apt than men to challenge the sexual status quo
because they perceive themselves as flawed, whereas men do
not. The problems of the world have been attributed to
women, and so, it is she who feels it is her moral duty to
correct the situation. Because woman is seen by the female-
raised men as the omnipotent mother who will always forgive
his infantile behavior and personal faults, women have only
one recourse: to withdraw their love from man, when he fails
to understand the female perspective. But doing so puts man
in a superior economic and social position since, as a
result of his separation, he has more power in the business
realm. It might also mean that the woman remains child-
free, unable to become part of the matriarchal power. Thus,
she becomes the "old maid" who is given little, if any,
chance of directly influencing the next generation.
She, then, must enter into the labor force of the male
social structure to compete with him on his terms for
economic security and social prestige. In the case of the
female artist, who she has been denied her own tradition,
she must compete with the old male masters on their terms
instead of having her artistry valued for its intrinsic
worth. She has had no direct heirs to her wealth, nor have
there been any great monuments built to her in her name, not
that she would want them. Since women artists have been
denied a position within art history, they have been denied
a chance of achieving immortality through their own cultural
offspring. Hence, woman is left out of the collective
remembrance. She may even become the evil "witch."
Women who do remain a part of the matriarchal-
patriarchal social structure are forced into a permanent
child-parent relationship with their spouse. Dinnerstein
writes,
She thus carries the moral obligations of the parent
while suffering the powerlessness of the child. Man,
conversely, carries parental powers while enjoying the
child's freedom from moral obligation. He has the
right, like the child, to remain unaware of,
uninterested in, her point of view even though
nurturant awareness of it is in his case within his
intellectual reach. This means that he is encouraged in
a kind of moral laziness which stunts his growth: his
capacities for empathic emotional generosity (like
woman's capacities for enterprise) atrophy through
disuse. He is allowed to remain childishly
irresponsible for embracing her perspective, and
childishly entitled to her parental nurturance and
forgiveness, while enjoying parental power to defend
himself, to discipline her if she offends him, to place
practical constraints around her destructiveness if she
tries to hurt him (236).
Creating a Balanced System of Child-Rearing
The struggle of the feminist movement has been to make
the matters of the private sphere the central theme in
public dialogue and debate. Until recent times, issues of
domestic violence, such as incest, child abuse, wife beating
and rape, went unacknowledged since women and children were
perceived by society to be the private property of men who
were outside the protection of law. In a _Boston Globe_
article entitled, "Male Sense of "Owning" Women Blamed in
Abuse," Lynda Gorov reports that the sense of owning women
is still a factor in domestic violence. She quotes
Christine Butler, director of the Suffolk Battered Women's
Advocacy Project,
As much as we give lip service to changing gender
roles, men's sense of entitlement is engrained in
society. If we were really honest with ourselves, we
would admit that we haven't made any dramatic changes
except on a superficial level.
There has been a silent conspiracy in society not to touch
the sacred cow of the American home as if it were a taboo
which no one dare to speak. Boys are still trained to
believe that women are their servants, and girls are still
conditioned to acquiesce to male expectations. Boys are
raised to believe that women don't live separate lives and,
instead, that the purpose of women's lives is to care for
their own needs. Advocates know that creating more laws
protecting women from male abuse, providing more police
protection for women against men, giving more court-ordered
counselling for abusive males, and making additional
shelters for abused females will not stop the property-
owning value-system responsible for the violence. In _The
Second Stage_, Betty Friedan writes,
I keep having the feeling that in _the house_--the
space time, physical, concrete dimensions of what we
call home--is somehow the basic clue to where we have
come, and were we have to go in the second stage. It is
that physical, literal house--or its lack--that somehow
points to the heart of our problems, that keeps us from
transcending those old sex roles that too often have
locked us in mutual misery in the family (281).
Dinnerstein believes the exploitation of nature will
continue to plunder human and natural resources until there
is an equal balance of the early rearing of children by both
female and male child-care workers. In order for the sexual
arrangements to be altered, the dualities between the home
and the workplace, inner space and outer space, the subject
and the object, spiritual and material, must come to an end
by building a new communal architecture which is life-
enhancing.
The patriarchal revolution attempted to create a more
balanced system of child-rearing by acknowledging the
significant role males play in the reproductive process.
Instead of liberating himself from the mother by accepting
death and romantic love, man has imprisoned her in his
unconsciousness, suppressing her from the powerful social
position which she once occupied.
In _The Image of Mother in Ivory Coast Art_ by B. Holas
and _The Revolution from Within_ by Gloria Steinem, both
authoresses explain the different stages of the creation
myth in Africa. In the beginning, the female figure was
"responsible for the conception and organisation of the
world." In her womb was the heaven and earth, all of life
and death. In later myths, the figure became bi-sexual and
reproduction occurred parthenogenetically. As time passed,
the deity became to be seen in two separate bodies: female
and male. The first couple proceeded to set up a household,
the basic configuration of the village society itself. The
goddess began giving birth to male sons who began to worship
the son. Eventually, the sons became the consorts of the
goddess. As they gained more and more power, the figures of
the goddess shrank in size until their sons began to tower
over the female figures. Finally, the goddess played an
invisible role as she became the throne which the male gods
sat upon. And so, the male view of reality. The female
experience became invisible.
The Wall around Paradise
The word "paradise" was a Persian word _pairi-daeze_
which meant a "beautiful garden fenced-in." The Old
Testament poets first used the word and it spread throughout
the "civilized world" (LaChapelle 1978, 15). As the story
goes, the garden of Eden was the Creator's private domain.
Nevertheless, God allowed Adam and Eve to share it with Him,
to live a life of pleasure in peace with all nature as long
as they obeyed Him. However, when Eve disobeyed His word by
tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, their membership
at the "Garden Club" was evoked. Consequently, God
constructed a wall around paradise to keep Adam and Eve out.
William McClung explains in his book, _The Architecture of
Paradise_, that after the Fall, paradise on Earth is
represented as always "enclosed by natural and artificial
barriers" (24). He says that this iconography expresses the
disconnection between nature and grace as well as the
phenomenal difference between open and enclosed space.
Elsewhere Malcolm Quantrill writes, "The ideas of
shelter, of house, of hearth, and of home reflect man's
struggle to regain some of the protective features of the
Garden. On the other hand, the cultivated garden which
extends habitat out into the uncultivated wilderness is but
a _memory_ of man's original relationship with nature" (21).
And so, it evolved that the woman in the fenced-in garden
was nothing more than a domestic servant, a slave to her
husband, a prisoner in his "baby trap." Also noteworthy is
the fact that in Egyptian hieroglyphics the symbol for
"mother" can also stand for "house" or "town." The ancient
Chinese character for "mother" is the same symbol for slave;
all women in ancient China were considered mothers. As
Dutch artist Aldo van Eyck noted, "The city is a big house,
the house a small city." Consequently, we live in a city
designed on slavery.
Ancient Totalitarianism: Chinese Architecture
The ancient symbols for mother indicate that the
archetype for house may not have change since the beginning
of time. If we look more closely at ancient Chinese
architecture, we can see that this may indeed be so. It
seems to be that there is really no "Western" or "Eastern"
civilization. Europe and Asian cities were built upon the
same foundations. Marija Gimbutas in her book _The
Civilization of the Goddess_ states, "The earliest
civilizations of the world were, in all probability,
matristic "Goddess civilizations" (324). Megalithic
monuments in various forms from the Neolithic Age have been
found not only in Western Europe, but in Korea, Japan,
Sumatra, Borneo, and India. In Lionel Casson's essay "Who
Raised the Megaliths?," he writes, "The Asian menhirs and
dolmens closely resemble the European in their shape and
construction, and in their use as tombs, but they are
generally smaller and more recent, dating from as late as
the seventh century A.D." (43).
This could explain way the Chinese structures use the
same concepts of the column and the roof as in the Greek
civilization. Both patriarchal cultures may have been built
as a way of suppressing the prehistorical culture of the
Goddess. The patriarchal revolution became a tyranny when
it suppressed the wisest and darkest powers of the female
religion, as personified by the Crone, while permitting the
mother and her transcendent son to copulate and over-
populate the land through their infantile relationship with
one another. The incest religions of the patriarchal era
have plagued the world with the dysfunctional family.
Patriarchy is a global culture which must be restructured
globally in order for the human race to recover its lost
heritage: the natural sovereignty of womankind.
Let us now look at a perfect example of patriarchal
culture: ancient Chinese architecture. The excavated site
of the Chinese village, Barpo, was built some 6,000 years
ago. It was composed of three areas: the pottery kiln, a
residential area, and necropolises. After the age of
tribalism, historians maintain that "civilization" began
with the beginning of the class society and the construction
of the wall. In the Chinese language, the written word for
city is _Cheng_ which means "wall". Within the walls of the
city, state government controlled the political, economic
and cultural functions of the people. Laurence G. Liu
relates in his book _Chinese Architecture_ that During the
Xia Dynasty there was a saying, "To build city to protect
the emperor, to build wall to watch the people" (Lui 41).
As with the plan of the Western city the grid system and
symmetrical design prevailed, even though, there is no
indication that the Chinese were aware at this time of
European city design.
The capital city was designed in a large block with the
palace at the center which symbolized the concept of the
"round sky and square earth." The symbolism of the square
represented a sense of order for the ruling class:
obedience and subordination. High, wide walls, towers above
the walls, and moats around the city and palace not only
served to give the Emperor a sense of protection, but gave
the people the sense that the Emperor was unapproachable.
To further disempower the people, public squares were not
part of the city design. The open space outside of the
palace and governmental offices expressed the status of
wealth and power of the state, but public assemblies in such
places were discouraged. Liu writes,
The only natural place for gatherings was within the
halls of large houses or in the courtyards between the
halls: the lack of public gathering areas indicated
that in the autocratic system of ancient China there
was no place (or reason) for individuals to express
their political opinions (34). In Western cities, from
ancient Greece and Rome till the present day, the city
centre has always contained the agora, forum or squares
for the circulation and exchange of ideas of the
people. Squares were created from democratic ideology,
symbolizing the civil and religious rights of the
people. In ancient China, these rights were non-
existent (53).
Confucianism taught that social harmony would reign as
long as the Emperor practiced an autocratic benevolence
towards the people and the people gave him their complete
obedience and respect. The emperor was worshiped as if "he
could pray to the Gods on the people's behalf" (Liu 34).
Scholars played an important role in the palace since the
emperor called upon them to assist in the prayers and
sacrifices. Altars and temples became an integral part of
the palace devoted to both heaven and earth and to the
cycles of nature, hero, and ancestor worship.
The Chinese house, the basic unit of the city, was
built as a microcosm of the Confucian worldview reflecting a
balance of ancestral worship and respect for authority.
Enclosing the house was a high wall to ward off theft and
fire, giving the occupants a feeling of seclusion and family
privacy. Confucius believed universal harmony was
represented in the code of ethics within family
relationships. Family piety was considered to be the source
of one's happiness.
The elder was the head of the family. Within the
gerontocracy, the male was the ruler. Children were
obedient to their parents. In order to pay respect to one's
ancestors, the elder son was decreed to perform the
sacrifices in veneration to the dead. These ceremonies to
honor the ancestor gave the heir and the ancestral temple
social status which helped insure political stabilization.
Confucians maintained that harmony within the family and
with nature would result in the health and fortune of the
household.
The Industrial Revolution and the Home
In pre-industrial societies the kinship networks did
not divide life rigidly into the areas of homelife and work-
place. Ann Oakley explains in her book, _Woman's Work_ that
in the pre-industrial home, "there was no differentiation
between cooking, eating, and sitting rooms. The hall, that
is the entrance to the home, was the centre of domestic
activity: there the family cooked, ate their meals, and
relaxed together" (Oakley 23). Mary Ryan notes that in
colonial times the family household was the center of
economic activity, social welfare, and affection. She
concludes this environment produced people whose
personalities integrated both expressive and economic
skills.
The division between the home and the workplace
intensified during the industrial revolution. Gradually
economic production moved out of the household and became
separated from personal relationships. Griselda Pollock in
her book, _Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and
Histories of Art_, discusses the work of British social
historians, Catherine Hall and Lee Davidoff, who showed that
in "the formation of the British middle class in Birmingham"
the city was "literally reshaped according to this ideal
divide" (68). Men could moved freely between the two
realms, but women were not welcomed in the masculine realm.
They were supposed to occupy only the domestic sphere. Her
role was to be the good mother and wife; his was to be a
good citizen.
In her essay, "The Feminization of Love," Francesca M.
Cancian writes, "this division of labor gave women more
experience with close relationships and intensified women's
economic dependence on men. As the daily activities of men
and women grew further apart, a new worldview emerged that
exaggerated the differences between the personal, loving,
feminized sphere of the home and the impersonal, powerful,
masculine sphere of the workplace" (697). The wife and
children became completely dependent on the husband/father
for economic support and social prestige.
The word "family" originated in ancient Rome. The
family included not only the nuclear family, but also the
slaves and relatives which comprised the household.
Only in recent times did family come to be defined as the
nuclear group of parents and children. According to Jessie
Bernard, in her book _The Future of Motherhood_, in addition
to being a new institution, the nuclear family is a peculiar
creation of the affluent society. Along with it came the
separate, isolated single-family house which was built to
guard the family against the hostilities of the outside
world. In the capitalist world, women became the chief
buyers of consumer products to keep the household well-fed.
Bernard writes,
In order for the mother to perform her sheltering and
protective function she herself had to be protected
from the outside world, isolated from it, immured in
a walled garden...Protected, sheltered, isolated,
safe within the walls of their gardens, women as
mothers became the repositories of all the humane
virtues. It was the mother who made the home a school
of virtue (11-12).
Before industrialization, women were too valuable as
productive workers to be given the time to solely stay at
home and raise children. Bernard points out that the family
is no longer a source of happiness and virtue from the
cruelty of the outside world, if it ever was! The
patriarchal concept of romance is simply a way in which man
can buy a life-long wife, or one could say a legal
prostitute, in exchange for a life-long roof over her head.
The duality between work and love in the patriarchal
worldview sees the feminine principle as solely associated
with sex, fertility, nature, matter, unconsciousness, and
the earth. She is the omnipotent mother who provides the
amoral, greedy infant with protection, warmth, and milk.
The home was her place of control and authoritarian power.
Bernard points out, "for non-believers it was a "secular
temple," "the place for social altruism." Bernard writes,
"Practically all of the thinking in law, theology, and the
social sciences has, in fact, had at its core the fact that
women bear children. The institutional structure of our
society is based on that rock bottom fact" (25). And the
structure of the family as well as the city is the house.
The Connection-Separation Question
Since the industrial revolution the home has not been
associated with work, but with family, and this certainly
explains why mothers have remain unacknowledged and
untrained laborers. As Oakley states, "Our language
contains the phrase "family man," but there is no
corresponding phrase for women. It would be socially
redundant: the family means women" (60). She further
argues that "the family defines one's identities." For
Oakley, the belief that the traditional family unit is
responsible for childrearing shapes our personal identities.
This brings us to the point of discussing the
observations made by Nancy Chodorow, Lillian Rubin, and
Carol Gilligan that girls identify with their mothers and so
do not go through the stage of a separation from her as boys
do with their fathers. This means that the morality of
girls is centered around issues of relationship and
connection while men are valued for their autonomy and
individualism. These two contrasting ways of viewing
reality--separation from others and connection with others--
can also be seen in context to the division between the
workplace and the home.
Some anti-feminist men have argued that women's
inability to separate is biologically determined. Because
of this, women are unable to be the subjects of social
analysis and are incapable of becoming historical actresses.
In other words, a woman's body prevents her from entering
into the male world of culture and so she must remain in her
home, her "supreme cultural achievement" (Hekman 1990).
However, Gilligan's theory of moral development
attempted to show how girls have been socialized to carry
out certain traditional roles and because of this
socialization have developed a social ethic of care and
compassion. These qualities of maternal attachment have not
been recognized as important and so have had little impact
on society, whereas the male qualities of separation and
individualism, and the resulting objective science and
rationalism which they produce, are generally acknowledged
and rewarded.
It is believed that the mother's unconditional love for
her children and her children's love for her provides her
with meaning in life. Women are conditioned to think that
"care and empowerment of others is central to their life's
work" (Belenky 1986, 48). A woman must look to others for
her self-knowledge. Hence, she identifies herself by the
way others define her. Her inner experiences are discounted
in favor of expert opinion. The man's meaning is derived
from providing food and shelter for the family unit. He is
the thinker and builder. This explains the two different
styles of love between the sexes: the masculine style which
is characterized by practical and instrumental assistance
and by sex and the feminine style of love which is
characterized by verbal self-disclosure and emotional
closeness (Cancian 709). So arise two different
epistemological orientations: "a separate epistemology,
based upon impersonal procedures for establishing truth, and
a connected epistemology, in which truth emerges through
care" (Belenky 1986, 102).
In children's play the use of space also illustrates
the difference of gender socialization. In Ellen Perry
Berkeley's essay, "Architecture: Towards a Feminist
Critique," she quotes Erik Erikson regarding, "the analogy
between the sex differences in play configurations and the
primary physiological sex differences, that is, in the male
the emphasis on the external, the erectable, the intrusive,
and,...in the female, on the internal, on the vestibular, on
the static, on what is contained endangered in the
interior."
However, critics of Erikson, such as Susan Saegert and
Roger Hart, said that Erikson should have observed, that
early on, girls are encouraged to decorate dollhouses and
play out social events inside imaginary interiors while boys
are encouraged to play outside and build structures.
Saegart and Hart's research indicates that it is the
socialization of children by adults, reinforced by peer
pressure, that encourages the traditional female and male
roles which are then acted out in play.
The spatial range of girls and boys is clearly
different, and, because of this difference, girls are denied
a certain exploration and manipulation of the environment.
Their spatial abilities lack confidence from lack of
experience. The inhibition among girls to structurally
visualize the environment affects other fields of inquiry.
Jon. J. Durkin in his paper, "The Potential of Women,"
thinks that the aptitude of structural visualization is
necessary for not only designing architectural place, but is
also critical for medicine, physical science, engineering,
city planning, mechanics, etc.
Saegert and Hart noticed that sexual difference in
spatial ability is not apparent until the age of eight.
However, by adolescence, boys are far ahead of girls in
spacial aptitudes. By adulthood spatial abilities are found
in 50% of all men, and 25% of all women (Berkeley 269).
Saegert and Hart describe the spacial situation between men
and women in terms of the driver of a car and a passenger.
They write, "The driver is allowed decision-making,
experimentation, and self-directed learning of the
environment, while the passenger can only suggest and
observe" (Berkeley 269). Women are trained to accept the
built environment the way it is, not to question spacial
relationships, and be the submissive, passionate homemakers
or office workers.
After reading _In a Different Voice_ it was not easy to
ascertain if Gilligan is advising women to simply recognize
and celebrate our ethical difference from men or if we
should attempt to change the archetypal patterns of social
and structural behavior. Cancian comments on Gilligan,
Chodorow and Robin's moral development theory,
by arguing that women's identity is based on
attachment while men's identity is based on separation;
they reinforce the distinction between feminine
expressiveness and masculine instrumentality, revive
the ideology of separate spheres, and legitimate the
popular idea that only women know the right way to
love (Cancian 697).
Women and the Architectural Profession
Dores Cole's book, _From Tipi to Skyscraper_, is an
enlightening story in women's history about women's entry
into the profession of architecture in the United States.
She begins by discussing life in the tipi of the Great
Plains Indians. Women were responsible for deciding the
tipi village's location, its construction, and its set-up.
It was the perfect structure, both "beautiful and
practical," for the nomadic people. If necessary, one
person could set it up.
This was quite a different experience for the caucasian
woman who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and
had no control over the construction of the house. For her,
life was private. She was limited to two domains: the home
and the church, but her church work was tied to the home.
Since she was engulfed and often overburdened with domestic
duties, she was forced to turn her attention to
legitimatizing housework to make it into a domestic science.
One of the main advocates of this movement was Catherine
Beecher who began to investigate "architectural and
scientific knowledge necessary for running a household"
(54).
Other woman, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret
Fuller, Clara Barton, and Charlotte Forten Grimke, ventured
beyond the home and strove to enter the political,
intellectual, and spiritual realms of life. Nevertheless,
the professional fields which women preferred to enter were
teaching, nursing, and social services, the professions that
had traditionally been performed at the house. However, it
was the Civil War which really caused women to break out of
the house and demand more powerful social positions. Cole
writes,
The havoc wrought by the Civil War alone was enough to
make women realize that the domestic domain was not
isolated from exterior influences. A woman could
organize her home, beautify her house, and instruct her
family--but none of these accomplishments could save
her men and children from the sorrow of war (54).
Because of the war, women were permitted into professions
which had previously been closed to them, not because social
attitudes had changed, but because the war necessitated it.
After the war, women were no longer satisfied with their
position in the domestic domain. The war had not only
served to free the negro slaves, but it also worked to free
white women from their servitude. Still, women preferred
fields in the social services. Cole writes, "Through social
services a woman could continue using her practical skills,
but on a larger scale, and, hopefully, influence more than
just her own family and servants. In this sense her domain
encompassed the city, and her family became the entire
citizenry" (57).
Nevertheless, the social service fields separated women
from men. They were outside the home, but still not
integrated with men. Their professional fields were not
given the same kind of social influence, social status, and
financial rewards as the traditional male domain. The
desire to work together with men on an equal basis drove
thousands of women and men to explore alternative life-
styles. Many people left conventional society for the
utopian communities which had become numerous during that
time.
Designing architectural space was now becoming a
possibility for women. Women could apply their practical,
every-day knowledge of the built environment to designing
communal housing. The male architects of conventional
society were chiefly interested in style. They were
designing public buildings and private dwellings in
monumental terms, reflecting the direction of the academy.
It was a real struggle for women to be accepted into
architectural schools. For one reason, in the 19th century,
business was not considered the proper profession for women,
and architecture was as much of a business enterprise as it
was an art. The social service professions were not
considered business activities and so were not a legitimate
profession for a cultivated lady. Also, it was unthinkable
for a married woman to have a job outside the house because
of the objections from both husband and social conventions.
So feminists of the time often refused to be engaged in the
institution of marriage.
Charles Atherton Frost was the dean of the Cambridge
School, the first architectural school for women. Dores
Cole's account of the school's short history is a moving
story about Charles Frost who had faith in the abilities of
women as architects. But even with such training, women
architects had difficulty becoming part of the design teams
of America. Women who went into independent practice
usually had small offices and received contracts for
domestic architecture. The other alternative for them was
to be accepted by the men who owned larger architectural
offices. The Cambridge School graduates made an attempt to
enter these firms, but found it very difficult to work one's
way up the corporate ladder by starting out as draftswomen.
The only other way was to marry an architect and become his
business and sexual partner.
Once inside the male hierarchy, the fundamental problem
arose: is there a feminist architecture? Have women simply
been indoctrinated with the male perspective? Have the
schools trained women to perform male tasks? In his book
book _The Male Attitude_, Charles W. Ferguson writes, "The
creature who finishes the curriculum in our schools and
colleges is thoroughly indoctrinated in male traditions,
methods, and values and is bound to speak from the male
point of view, whether he(she) knows it or acknowledges it"
(Cole, 115).
The masculine curriculum based on the epistemology of
separation, results in the systematic dehumanization of both
females and males through the loss of the feminine. In
_Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice,
and Mind_, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy,
Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule write, "In an
educational institution that placed care and understanding
of persons rather than impersonal standards at its center,
human development might take a different course, and women's
development, in particular, might proceed with less pain"
(209). It seems clear that this different course would be
towards building a more communal vision of architecture
based on the interconnectedness of all life. In 1941,
Charles Frost wrote about the traits he saw in the female
students at the Cambridge School: "she thinks clearly,
reasons well, and is interested in housing rather than
houses; in community centers for the masses rather than in
neighborhood clubs for the elect; in regional planning more
than in estate planning, in social aspects of her profession
more than in private commissions" (97). The nineteenth
Century woman architect wanted both marriage and a
professional career.
The lack of opportunities for women could explain why
so many trained female architects drop out of the
profession, opting instead for the role of wife and mother.
Cole says that women who do remain in the profession almost
never make it into the upper echelons of the decision-making
ranks. She describes the pyramidal structure within the
large architectural firms as the main reason for the
blockage of change within the system. The one on top who
does the hiring and firing is the principal, or has several
partners. They do the hiring and firing of employees, decide
firm policies and goals, oversee the projects, and are the
businessmen who gain the new commissions for the office.
Next come the associates who make sure the policies are
carried out. Then down the ladder are the project managers,
the project captains, and designers. Under them are the
draftsmen. Secretaries rank in authority and pay with
draftsmen, and finally office boys are on the bottom.
Even though for a project to come to successful
completion cooperation is required from everyone involved,
the system does not reflect this interdependency since
principals and associates are the only permanent firm
members and receive the highest pay. Promotion is
determined by one's administrative and managerial
achievements rather than on one's architectural knowledge
and skills. Cole writes,
Principals choose the associates, and no one becomes an
associate--no matter what co-workers might think of him
or her--without the approval of the principal. The
system is based upon patronage: this unavoidably
inhibits the expression of opposing views and
eliminates as well any kind of experimentation or
innovation contrary to the principal's wishes (127).
In this system, there is little opportunity for the
lower-echelon staff workers to make suggestions about the
projects which they are working on. According to Cole, if
associates make too many suggestions without a response they
are likely to find themselves without a job. And by the
time young architects with fresh ideas make their way up the
corporate ladder, they have had to compromise their ideas so
much that their minds become biased by old, erroneous
assumptions.
Cole calls the pyramidal office structure "detrimental
to all people involved from principal to office boy." She
points out that, for a nation who prides itself on its
democratic structure, architectural firms are far from being
democratic. Not only are the principles alienated and
isolated from other principles in other firms because of
firm rivalry, they are also delineated within the firm.
Cole believes that because of this lack of working together,
architecture will continue to lose its social meaning and
value. And so, the collapse of architecture and
civilization is assured.
Likewise, in the visual arts, it is the art managers,
gallery owners, and museum directors who have control over
the "art world." The power lies not with artists or
architects, but with the money-makers who sell the objects
or blueprints, and the built environment most certainly
reflects this view. The modern artist is seen as the
alienated and autonomous genius whose primary concern is to
produce sellable art objects. Separated from others and
from creativity's creative source, he feels hopeless to
create change, and so, refuses to take responsibility for
the future of the world. The industrialist of the ninetieth
century, realizing there was a major spiritual crisis going
on, sought to compensate people's emptiness and lost of
meaning with free enterprise and the cult of money. Now,
money is worshipped, while artistic merit, having the power
to heal the world, remains largely ignored. Those who get
promoted by the arts establishment are often not the most
gifted artists.
However, in Suzi Gablik visionary book, _The
Reenchantment of Art_, she explains how the old ways of the
art world are breaking down as artists are redefining their
social roles which are attuned with the ecological paradigm.
Gablik believes this paradigm has a metaphysical basis. She
writes, "Transformation cannot come from even more manic
production and consumption in the marketplace; it is more
likely to come from some new sense of service to the whole--
from a new intensity in personal commitment" (26). In the
new ecological framework, the building of relationships
become the basic intention of both art-making and world-
making. The reality of the interconnectedness and
interrelatedness of all things makes the artists into a co-
creator with others who are involved in the birth of
Neutopia.
Summary
In this chapter we have seen how the built environment
of patriarchal civilization is the same for both the "East"
and "West." We have suggested that the suppression of women
is due largely to men's lack of connection with the intimate
bonding with the next generation. If it is the female's
role to be the primary child-care worker and man who is
acknowledged as the artistic hero, then it is not difficult
to see why we have a world where women have no voice in
constructing the built environment. Woman is captured in an
inferior social position and imprisoned in an ugly and
destructive architectural structure.
CHAPTER 4
ARCHITECTURAL ARCHETYPES
Introduction
We have now explored the psychological and political
divisions between the sexes that have divided spacial
relationships into two different domains which deny communal
arrangements. Let us proceed with our architectural study
by asking the following questions. What are some of the
ideas expressed in art and architecture in primitive and
archaic cultures? Are there symbols which run through all
races, societies, and countries? Are there architectural
principles which builders all over the world need to follow
in order to achieve a harmony between nature and culture?
W. R. Lethaby writes in _Architecture, Mysticism, and
Myth_, "The main purpose and burthen of sacred
architecture--and all architecture, temple, tomb, or palace,
was sacred in the early days--is thus inextricably bound up
with a people's thoughts about God and the universe" (2).
Lethaby says that, when one looks back at history, all
architecture is one: The Greek temple and the Egyptian
temple are one. He declares the ultimate facts behind all
architecture are: 1. the similar desires and needs of
people; 2. the side of structure which is imposed by
available materials; and 3. the side of style and nature
(Lethaby 1975, 3).
Our Earliest Dwellings
Otto Rank writes that our earliest dwellings "were
natural caves in rock caverns or underground caves" (166).
According to architectural historian, Auguste Choisy, the
force which drove people into shelters and caves was the
onset of the Ice Age. The use of fire made it possible to
inhabit the cave without the threat of dangerous animals.
"Home" became a particular space occupied by a related group
who huddled around the sacred fire; it was more than a
"house" because people felt a psychological attachment to
it. It was a place safe from wild animals and the cold.
In the cave, it is speculated that people lived in a
dormitory or doss-housing fashion. As the glaciers
retreated north, the warmer weather may have brought people
back outside to look for shelter, or maybe the human
population had outgrown the natural cave structure, and so
were forced to begin building shelters.
In _Man the Homemaker_, D.C. Money writes, "The homes
of our earliest ancestors were usually based on some form of
simple, temporary shelter, such as that made by using a
framework of branches, propped-up so as to shield the family
group from wind or sun" (13). In Mesopotamia, the oldest
shelter which has been discovered is a hole dug in the soil.
The soil was dried to brick hardness. This house even
predates earthenware pottery (Mumford 1967).
It is believed that the first inspiration for the shape
of houses and the first idea of architectural space came
from the cave, since they were built semi-circular.
Evidence suggests that houses were frequently rebuilt which
indicates that they were "occupied temporarily, and that the
inhabitants were still partly cave dwellers" (Gardiner 1974,
3).
Then came the little hut, composed of a roof and
columns. The hut was one of our first works of architecture
and includes the elements from which all architecture is
derived. Thus, the cave was eventually abandoned.
The Primitive Hut
Life in the primitive hut gave people structural
privacy for individual nuclear families, and a place to
gather private possessions. The author of _Evolution of the
House_, Stephen Gardiner states that this longing for
privacy and property is instinctual and necessary for the
development of individuality. He writes, "a man will look
after his hammer because the hammer is useful to him; or a
woman will take good care of her jewelry because it may
enhance her social position or make her appear more
attractive" (4). We can see the patriarchal bias in
Gardiner's thinking about private property when he says that
men are the workers and woman gain social positions through
their physical beauty, even though, archaeologists have
surmised that it was Neolithic woman who first invented
agriculture, not man, the hunter. As she was inventing
agriculture, he was busy taming the wilderness, that is,
collecting the natural resources needed to make the material
possessions necessary for trade. In the ancient Goddess
tradition, when male deities finally appeared, they were
associated with the wilderness. Man became identified with
taking from the natural world in contrast with woman who
became identified with motherly giving and the storage of
grain. Norman O. Brown writes, "Taking is a denial of
dependence, and thus transforms the guilt of indebtedness
into aggression; and the masculinity complex, the obsessive
denial of femininity, is inherently aggressive" (280).
Women, the givers of life, were the first workers in
the fields. Matrilineal towns and cities in Sumer and,
later, in Egypt grew up as a result of food surplus caused
by the agricultural revolution and the invention of the
container. Modern scholars now agree that the gynarchic
settlements predate the pastoral nomads.
One conjecture of how the pastoral culture evolved from
the earlier settlements is that bands of marauding males,
who had rejected the supervision of their mothers, were
banished from the food producing villages. In order to not
starve to death, they were forced to kill animals and eat
their meat. In Elizabeth Gould Davis' book _The First Sex_,
she speculates that the eating of meat over time produced
larger penis sizes than the vegetarian males who stayed with
the settlements. The female agriculturalist may have found
this irresistible, inviting the hunters back into the
settlements. Davis writes in her book _The First Sex_, "It
is possible that the women of the old gynocracies brought on
their own downfall by selecting the phallic wild men over
the more civilized men of their own pacific and gentle
world" (96).
The two distinct cultures of the farmer and the
shepherd are represented by the story of Cain and Abel. In
the Biblical tale, the Ramites, the nomadic shepherds,
overthrew the peaceful goddess-worshipping agricultural
communities in the Near East. As a result, asserts Davis,
the first historical dark age ensued. And so, the ancient
gynocratic civilization was destroyed by the shepherd kings
of the Hykos. The intellectually superior Philistines were
finally conquered by the shepherd king David.
In the Book of Genesis, the hero of the story was Abel,
the keepers of the flocks. To the authors, the villain was
Cain, the settler who tilled the soil. According to Davis,
the account of the murder was a total contradiction of the
facts since it was the Abels, the uncivilized shepherds, who
had killed the civilized husbandmen, the Cains. She
believes the story reflects the changeover from the time of
the peaceful and nonviolent age of the Goddess civilization,
to the barbaric patriarchal age of God's domination. One of
the principles of the Goddess tradition was not to cause
physical injury to any living creature. By accepting Abel's
meat offering while refusing Cain's offering of the "fruits
of the ground," the new male God was asserting his law of
killing and violence over the ways of the land. Davis
concludes, the war between the "agricultural pacifist and
the beast of prey" began.
Another way of looking at the story, according to
Quantrill, is that history and the beginning of civilization
is initiated with a murder and a city. With the building of
Cain's city, which he named after his son, Enoch, paradise
became the eternal longing of humanity. The city was now
the polis protecting its citizens from the wilderness where
fugitives and wanderers lurked in the "untamed darkness."
Quantrill writes, "With Cain's city there came into
existence a more complex structure than the simple concept
of hearth and habitat; and with it primitive man's basic
need to protect himself from the elements and untamed nature
was extended into one that recognized interdependence and
its helpmate organization" (Quantrill 1990, 26).
The Trap
In _Ritual and Response in Architecture_, Malcolm
Quantrill says that our primitive ancestors adopted nomadic
habits in order to survive, moving around in search for
food. When pastoral people finally settled, giving up the
"joys and hazards of the nomadic" life, turning hunting
lands into lands for tilling, their relationship with nature
began to conquer and suppress the natural orders (Quantrill
1974, 117). Quantrill feels that modern people wish to
readopt this nomadic life style, but the political and
economic systems inhibit us. We are trapped in a democracy
of "no-choice". Quantrill writes,
In seeking structural innovations for the remaining
two decades of this century the performance
specification which must be applied is the controlled
balance of nature; the objective is a return to "the
Garden of Eden," with the restoration of Man's full
enjoyment of ordered nature. In this sense innovation
of built-form must be seen as the key to environmental
engineering (117).
In Dora June Hamblin's book, _The First Cities_, she
states that "the sedentary life does not necessarily require
agriculture: in an ecological niche of high natural
production, a family can settle there and feed themselves
just by gathering, as if they lived in the Garden of Eden."
(Hamblin 15). But as the population grew the nomadic life-
style became impossible. The natural environment could not
support the population without agriculture. The population
settled because they either had the choice of joining with
their neighbors in food production or fighting among each
other over the food sources. When their second generation
expanded into not-so-fertile areas, public services emerged
to provide the means for irrigation, commerce, and religion
to people in the poorer regions. The city became a
fortress. Hamblin writes, "Once defense and population
concentration had come along, there was an urgent need for
control--somebody to run the city, to make decisions. A
barely perceptible ruling class grew accreted to itself the
power and prerogatives of control. Priests and shrines
multiplied" (Hamblin 19). The temple was the first communal
property. It became the sacred place to make offering to
the unexplainable force of nature which provided the means
for food.
The Structures of Power
The nomadic hunter who didn't like field work, adopted
the arts of herdsmanship when he realized he could tame
animals, fatten them up, and then slaughter them. The
trading of cattle became one of the first forms of exchange.
The villagers wanted the protection of their crops and
children from wild animals which the hunter provided.
Farmers welcomed the grazing of animals on their fields
since their manure help to fertilize the pastures. However,
it is conjectured that the benevolent role of the hunter as
protector became corrupted by his lust for power. He
demanded "protection money" which became a one-sided
transaction. In fear for their lives, the peaceful
Neolithic villagers gave into his demands. He became more
dangerous than predatory animals as he began to slaughter
his fellow human beings, and so, his ascent into power began
(Mumford 1967). He became the king, warlord, lawlord, and
landlord.
Here begins the unhappy marriage between the hunter and
the gatherer, the co-dependent relationship of agriculture
and the domestication of animals. As Daniel Hillel observed
in a series of lectures given at the University of
Massachusetts, the plow has killed more than the sword. In
terms of long-term survival, the salt from irrigated
agriculture eventually makes soil unfertile. Mumford writes
in _The City in History_,
The city, then, if I interpret its origins correctly,
was the chief fruit of the union between neolithic and
a more archaic paleolithic culture. In the new proto-
urban milieu, the male became the leading figure, woman
took second place...Woman's strengths have lain in
their special wiles and spells, in the mysteries of
menstruation and copulation and childbirth, the arts of
life. Man's strength now lay in feats of aggression
and force, in showing his ability to kill and his own
contempt for death: in conquering obstacles and
forcing his will on their men, destroying them if they
resisted (27).
Psychologists such as Norman O. Brown believe the new
economic surplus achieved through the agricultural
revolution caused our civilization to become fatally
neurotic as the death instinct took over the instinct to
live. The city cut itself off from nature as it annihilated
the wilderness. As a species, we have not yet been able to
create a society which fairly distributes the stored-up
energy. With no communal goal in mind, people are in
competition with their neighbors to gain as much of the
surplus wealth as possible, since in a capitalist
civilization, it is private wealth which brings one social
status and a sense of immortality. Money lives on when the
body dies.
The Goddess Civilization
For thousands of years, Neolithic goddess-worshiping
villages had no need for weapons of war. They were advanced
toolmakers, but instruments of murder can not be found at
these excavated sites. According to Mumford, the
egalitarian communities of the Neolithic Age were too small
to have launched an attack on their neighbors to gain
territory or riches. Instead, they developed a culture of
peace which worshiped the Great Goddess. However, as
Mumford noted from his study of strongholds and castles,
warfare most likely started not with one community fighting
against another, but with one forceful and coercive class
fighting against its own peasantry.
The architectural landscape of villages also changed
with the union of the paleolithic and neolithic cultures.
Masculine symbols of straight lines, phallic towers, the
obelisk, the rectangle, and geometric plans began appearing
with the beginnings of mathematics and astronomy. The
worship of the cycles of life and the myths surrounding love
and pleasure were repressed. Mumford observed, "It is
perhaps significant that while the early cities seem largely
circular in form, the ruler's citadel and the sacred
precinct are more usually enclosed by a rectangle" (27).
Around 8000 B.C., bricks were being made from dried mud
to be used in constructing buildings. By 7000 B.C., the
first rectangular plans appear. According to Gardiner, the
break from the semi-circular form "marks the beginning of a
true structural consciousness that is related to simplified
building methods" (Gardiner 1974, 6). The rectangle
provided the possibility of the wall which could be
"analyzed, taken apart, reduced to separate pieces, and then
"put back in a wholly different form." The wall meant that
individual houses could be built.
The First Temples
According to William H. Desmonde, our first places of
worship were among the holy groves of trees which were
believed to be the places were the deities lived. The
deities were thought to express themselves through signs and
oracles. A branch from the sacred tree became the scepter,
the magic wand of the artist/magician who was responsible
for the natural powers and their occurrence. Wearing a
crown made from the branches of the sacred tree was
"evidence that an individual had entered into the deepest
possible communion with the deity, and it was unthinkable
for a person to reside at a ritual without bearing the
symbol" (Desmonde 1962, 94). To appease the deities, the
artist/magician gave them food offerings. In order for the
food to not be found and eaten by someone it was not
intended for, the places where the food was offered to the
deities were kept secret, located in the forest, somewhere
opened to the sky. Upright stones took the place of trees
which means that they could be rearranged for particular
rituals and the making of altars. Then, because of the
forces of the weather, a roof was added to the temple so
that ceremonies could be conducted regardless of the
weather. From these structures, the first villages were
constructed.
According to Marija Gimbutas, in her book _The
Civilization of the Goddess_, the houses of Old Europe were
clustered around the theacratic, communal temple. The
temple did not function as a house of the dead, but as a
center for the arts, community activities, and other
matrilineal functions which were integrated into everyday
life. To them, Gimbutas says the "secular and sacred life
are one and indivisible."
There were two basic kinds of temples: one type for
rituals of death and renewal, and the other for the Goddess
who protected life, health, and the family. The Neolithic
Goddess-worshipers developed a sacred script that was two
thousand years older than the Summerian script devised to
keep accounts of administrative and business transactions.
This script is found only on religious objects. Gimbutas
writes,
The presence of a sacred script in Old European
cultures is consonant with the stage of development. At
the time in which this script was in use, east central
Europeans enjoyed metallurgic industry, a high degree
of architectural sophistication, extensive trade
relationship, a remarkable sophistication, and
specialization in the craftsmanship of goods, and an
increasingly elaborate and articulated system of
religious thought and practice (309).
One purpose of language is to take us to a place beyond
language, to the silent ecstasy of life. This evolved state
of mind could have been the purpose of the sacred script of
the Neolithic Goddess-worshipers. Was this script a poetic
language? Was it indeed women who invented language? If
so, it suggests that this poetic language provided the
guidance so that the basic human needs of the community
members were met on an egalitarian basis without the use of
an accounting system. The sacred script could have provided
a blueprint for the builders of the megaliths over the many
centuries of their construction.
The society was guided by a "queen-priestess, her
brother or uncle, and a council of women as the governing
body" whose reign was determined through the religious
symbolism surrounding their lives (xi). Religious
symbolism, created within the individual, ruled the hearts
and minds of the people so that perhaps something like a
clairvoyant understanding of daily events took place. There
was no conception of individual money nor emphasis on
material possessions. Everyone had an important role to
play, whether it was in the inward direction of art or the
outward direction of mathematics and astronomy. Life was to
be enjoyed. People contributed to society by doing what
they loved to do in cooperation with the organic-cosmic
order.
Gimbutas asserts that archeological evidence suggests
that there was no sexual dominance of one sex over the
other, but there was a balance of social respect between
them, what she calls a "matristic partnership". In
matristic societies, honor, inheritance and descent are
traced through the mother. In Neolithic times, Gimbutas
thinks that men were not subjugated. Through analyzing some
of the Neolithic grave sites, it has been determined that
elderly religious women received the most social respect.
Also honored were girls who were "members of a hereditary
line of priestesses." The materials found in the grave
sites of queens or priestess do not represent the
accumulation of private wealth, as in the later tombs of the
ruling aristocracy of Egypt, but they were more of a
symbolic nature. Men, in certain villages, who were
successful in trade and craftmenship also received grave
goods, but there is no evidence that they ever achieved the
rank of rulership or were given the right to vote.
Some villages buried the bones of dead, after they had
been excarnated by leaving the bodies in open towers for
birds of prey to devour, underneath the platforms of their
living houses. However, the bones found are that of women
and children, not of men. According to Gimbutas, this
symbolized the important role women and particularly girls
played in the society. Many Neolithic graves were egg-
shaped; bones were placed in a fetal position to symbolized
rebirth. The tomb was the place to be reborn in, the womb-
cave of the Goddess of Death and Regeneration. In some
villages male bones have not been found and so they must
have been buried outside the village settlement.
The impression I have of the goddess civilization is
that it honored both life and death. However, the exclusion
of men from positions of leadership within the religion does
not create a formula for a happy relationship between the
sexes. Because he was excluded from religious leadership, I
question if man was given the opportunity to learn the
sacred script of the goddess religion and therefore, denied
a role in contributing to the text in a way which would
indeed give it full erotic fulfillment. It seems apparent
that in goddess traditions there also were established
gender roles: woman took care of the children, managed the
agriculture and attended to the religious rituals, while men
built the houses and temples.
Men were made to feel inferior to women since they
were not the bearers of life and so developed an unconscious
resentment towards women. Through the breeding of animals,
man came to understand the importance of the male sperm in
the procreative process and he began to gain the knowledge
of his individual existence in separation from the mother
goddess. Eventually, his resentment of the mother's power
resulted in an attempt to overthrow her reign. As the cult
of motherhood began to dominate over the powers of the
Crone, the part of the Great Goddess responsible for death
and regeneration, the war between life and death began.
With the development of male domination, man reversed
the social conditions by making cruel laws and customs
against women. Moving to the other extreme, man no longer
worshipped the forces of birth, but the cult of death. The
biblical story of Abraham and Isaac represents the change
from worshiping the fruit of the womb, to Abraham's
sacrifice of his own son to prove his obedience to the word
of God. Marilyn French summarizes the story _In Beyond
Power_ by saying, "power is being asserted as superior to
nature, killing as superior to giving birth" (91).
A false aristocracy, based on power gained from
material possession, was then established through the work
of the sleight-of-hand magician. When the death cult
overturned the religion of the Great Goddess, magical tricks
of deception were used to enslave the people by following
the dictates of kings, priests, and eventually, the money
lords of the ruling elite. A sublimation of eros also
occurred, and, with it, the alienation of labor as the
sleight-of-hand magician waved his pseudo-alchemical wand
over gold and silver. He declared gold to be the sun, and
silver to be the moon, and the two joined together in holy
matrimony to establish the royal household of the nuclear
family. Magical entertainers then suppressed the messages
of the true magicians/artists who had an inner connection
with the life-force. The peasants were coerced into
bringing gifts of surplus food and precious metals to the
newly established patriarchal temples so that they would be
forgiven for their sins. The priests told them that only
through repentance would their souls be able to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven.
Language, then, became a neurotic compromise between
operational (reality) principle and the erotic (pleasure)
principle. Poetry conformed to the reality base rather than
die off altogether. Male dominated language and a male
defined reality attempted to suppress the poetic essence.
This essence makes language the most powerful instrument in
changing our perceptions so that we began to live by an
"erotic sense of reality" and the holistic life-style it
creates.
The divorce of eros from the body was the foundation of
the rationalist world-view which divided subject from
object, making man the subject of history and woman the
object of his conquest of nature. This subsequently lead to
the realm of physics becoming the supreme scientific
knowledge and biology subservient to it. Since woman was
seen to be stuck in the biological realm, she was unable to
transcend her biology to be able to partake in the so-called
masculine higher levels of reality to be found in physics.
Brown writes,
As modern civilization ruthlessly elimates Eros from
culture, modern science ruthlessly demythologizes our
view of the world and of ourselves. In getting rid of
our old loves, modern science serves both the reality-
principle and the death instinct. Thus science and
civilization combine to articulate the core of the
human neurosis, man's incapacity to live in the body,
which is also his incapacity to die (303).
In her book _GAIA: The Human Journey From Chaos to
Cosmos_, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris wonders how far the organic
world view would have progressed by now if biology had been
considered the basic science, not physics. If the case was
reversed, as Dr. Sahtouris believes it should be, this would
mean that physicists would have had to fit to their
discoveries into the "organic, live universe," instead of
the mechanical universe.
Archetypal Theory
In _A Modern Theory of Architecture_, Bruce Allsopp
discusses the two basic architectural archetypes: 1) the
audicule and 2) the trilithon. He states that neither the
domestic cave nor the temple became our archetypes, but that
the primitive hut--the _aedicule_--became the archetype of
the house. Standing stones, mounds, or trees--the
trilithon--became our archetype for monumental structures.
The aedicule is a symmetrical domestic enclosed space,
the "home of man or god: the house, the shrine, the temple"
(Allsopp 63). There are three parts to the aedicule: the
room which is the personal and family place, the porch which
is the transition place to the outside, and the roof which
makes an enclosure and keeps out the rain. The roof is the
most important part of the aedicule. The pitched roof is
the basic design for all people living in heavy rainfall
areas of the world. Allsopp contends that the aedicule is
the symbol of the family: a pair of humans and their
offspring; it is the smallest communal and economic group.
Art historians state that the primitive hut is the most
"natural and essential" architecture, as natural and
essential as the tortoise's shell or the bird's nest.
Allsopp says it is not a symbol of personality or
individuality. Aedicule is for the living, whereas the
other archetypal form, the trilithon, is for the dead.
The trilithon is composed of two posts and a lintel;
it is monumental and non-enclosing. It is a freestanding
door way. Allsopp thinks that the trilithon is a
commemoration of the dead. The trilithon evolved from a
series of the sculptural symbols: the single sacred column,
the menhir, the phallic cone, and the pyramid. When the
audicule is surrounded by trilithons the classic temple is
created as monument and home of a goddess or god, ancestress
or ancestor. After the fall of the Great Goddess
civilization and the rise of the patriarchal religions, the
temple was built as a structure of the ideal, although not
of an ideal of the earthly domain, but to the world to come.
With the reign of the death cult, came the practices of
human and animal sacrifices said to please the gods.
Whereupon, the reign of terror began.
Let us now go back to the beginnings of community.
Mumford surmises that the dead were the first ones to
receive a permanent dwelling place. A cavern, a collective
barrow, or a mound marked by a cairn of stones housed the
dead. The gatherers and hunters returned to these marked
spots seasonally to worship their ancestresses and
ancestors.
According to Mumford the city of the dead antedates the
city of the living. Therefore, the core of the living city
is the monument to the dead which means that the trilithon
is older than the aedicule. The homes of our past are the
necropolis of civilization. Dinnerstein summarizes Norman
O. Brown,
Civilization is an attempt to overcome death...This
incapacity to die, ironically but inevitably, throws
mankind out of the actuality of living, which for all
normal animals is at the same time dying; the result is
denial of life...The distraction of human life to the
war against death results in death's dominion over
life. The war against death takes the form of a
preoccupation with past and the future, and present
tense, the tense of life is lost" (119).
Dinnerstein explains how the denial of death makes us
incapable of the joys of life. The joys of the flesh rot in
the grave sites of our individual bodies, as the desire for
love is denied. We live with "the illusion that in
exercising competence we can exert absolute power over
everything that matters. If we feel that there exists no
precious thing that we must inevitably lose, no real pain
that we cannot hope to prevent, then we can re-establish in
fantasy the omnipotence we originally knew" (Dinnerstein
1976, 122). This infantile omnipotence for connecting back
with the mother occurs when we fail to individualize.
Megalithic Architecture
Bruce Allsopp discusses another main idea in
architecture: the tensile, structural "home" of the nomad,
the tent, the suspension bridge or tipi. He states that it
lacks a powerful symbolism because it has to be held and is
dependent. Also, it was not easily defendable. John
Michell also gives a nomadic picture of the pre-historical
world in his book _City of Revelation_. People lived by the
canon of a cosmology which was embodied in "native laws,
customs, legends, symbols and architecture as well as in the
ritual of everyday life" (Michell 1972, 26). He believed
groups of nomadic or pastoral people would come together in
a particular place to play out their cosmology through
fertility rituals and seasonal gatherings. On many of these
places, such as Stonehenge, sacred rocks were arranged.
Michell discusses the function of the megalithic temple
in ancient times. The temple was seen as the body and
spirit of life; it was a living organism. It was
structured in terms of a heavenly or cosmic order; its body
was the deity of the macrocosm and the microcosm--the body
of the people. It was "the magical control centre of all
life on Earth" (59). The temple was "itself a canonical
work, a model of the national cosmology and thus of the
social and psychic structure of the people" (26). The
temple was the center of government and all discussions
which influenced the people occurred. The people believed
that they would receive supernatural guidance in their
decisions at the temple. The plan and place of the temples
were decided by astronomical, geometrical, numerical, and
geological considerations, such as where the field of
terrestrial magnetism were fused between earth and the
forces of cosmic radiation. In other words, it was supposed
to be a place of the union between cosmic and terrestrial
forces. Before the temple there was a split between earth
and heaven, religion and science. It was the deities who
taught people the divine art of government and gave the
temple as a reference of its order. It was believed that
arts and sciences came through divine revelation and that
they had to be nourished from the same source in order to be
kept alive. This source was preserved inside the temple.
Michell believes that the temple holds the key to the
secrets of lost primeval harmony. He writes, the "ancient
dream of the divine order translated to earth is an
essential characteristic of the human race" (28).
Gerald Hawkins, in his book _Stonehenge Decoded_,
hypothesizes that the people of the Neolithic Age possessed
a collective, cosmic vision of the divine order which
inspired them to haul such massive the rocks to the high
points of the plain so that there would be a clear view of
the horizon. There they constructed a gigantic astronomical
observatory, as accurate as a modern computer in calculating
solar and lunar eclipses. The predictions of cosmological
events gave the people a sense of cosmic time as well as the
cycle of terrestrial events which determined the time of the
enactment of certain rituals, ceremonies and festivities.
It was a place for music and dance, fertility and funerary
rituals, and, perhaps, games and sports.
Since it was through the megalithic architecture which
the divine art of governance was perceived, there emerged a
leisure class of holy people, both mystics and scientists,
who were excused from the labor of everyday life. Their
task was to observe the position of the moon and sun, and to
design and direct the architecture, rituals, and ceremonies
in honor of the forces of life. Gimbutas writes,
Henges, truly gigantic works of construction, served a
vital purpose and are products of the communal effort
of large groups of people. Clearly such large scale
work had to be based on a society's social and
religious system. The ability to organize communal
work on a grand scale is one of the chief
characteristics of the culture of the megalithic
builders (341).
She says it should not be forgotten that the megalithic
architecture was religious. They were public monuments to
life, death, and regeneration. These monuments were works
of love, the products of a people's dedication to collective
work and communal property. Every member of the community
perceived the divine order and had "a body of shared
aspirations" (Blake 163). It was the basic education of the
community which held the people together. Ortega y Gasset
wrote that "order is not a pressure which is imposed on
society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up
from within." The Neolithic builders of the megaliths
understood the organic-cosmic order from within and so were
able to create a landscape of art, utility, and vision.
Vincent Scully, in his book _The Earth the Temple And
the Gods_, puts forth the observation that the archaic
temple sites were not haphazardly placed. Temples were
built to express a spatial concept with the surrounding
landscape the "meaning that was felt in the land" in
recognizing the deity as a natural force (3)." The place
itself was holy, even before the temple was built upon it.
This meant that the landscape and the human-made environment
created a whole ritualist experience, an experience where
man's part is defined and directed by the sculptural
masses of the land and is subordinate to their rhythms
(11). This created a balance between the built
environment and the natural, between "nature and the
human will" (7).
One of the most moving accounts of this philosophy
between the sacred landscape and the built environment is in
Patrick Nuttgen's book _The Landscape of Ideas_ where he
describes the palace at Knossos. He explains that the...
movement of people entering the palace at Knossos was
labyrinthine... The approach led to a court, thence by
the propylaea to the main columnar hall, to the next
court and so on to the dark cave-like shrine of the
goddess. The movement from light to dark to light to
dark is part of the labyrinth that has become the myth
(32).
The passage way to the palace had a profound psychological
effect on people. The spacial experience of the labyrinth
made people part of the movement from light to darkness
symbolizing the natural forces of life, death, and
regeneration. Experiencing, even if only symbolically such
fundamental forces connected these people to the basic
religious mythos of the Goddess civilization.
Gimbutas explains how the Cretan palaces were not built
by kings for the purpose of administrating his rule, but
were "palace temples where elaborate religious rituals took
place within a theacratic system" (345). According to
Gimbutas, she goes on to say that the henges were not like
the monuments to the dead which later appeared after the
"secularization of life began in Britain with Indo-European
chieftains," for the chieftain's monuments were based on
individual ego, pride in the self and private wealth, rather
than built for communal purposes. This lack of communal
vision lead to the use of slave labor to construct the
monumental architecture of the secular times. Order was
imposed from without.
The loss of collective vision meant that the people
were severed from a sense of the organic-cosmic order. Time
no longer was measured by heavenly events and the cycles of
nature, but was measured linearly as if the universe was a
heartless machine. Inner knowledge of the universal self
and finding one's role within the cosmic web of life was
disregarded and degraded in favor of the scientific
worldview which had no need for the rituals and ceremonies
which the cosmic religion had provided. Entertainment, the
pleasing of the senses, dominated over inner reflectiveness.
The internal experience which causes one to feel empathy for
others and to grow from such experience was stunted as
entertainment, in all its pornographic forms prospered. The
administrative-business language of the Sumerians suppressed
the poetic script of the Great Goddess. With the
unification of the astronomical priesthood and the
enterprises of the kingship, scouts and missionaries were
sent out to prospect the land for metals, minerals, and
peoples in hopes of increasing their power, wealth, and
followings. Their vision was fragmentary and myopic, and so
the built environment became disconnected from the
landscape. At the henges, the places for the fertility
rites became the places for human sacrifice. In the
patriarchal worldview, sacred texts and the making of sacred
art were no longer open to women. Architecture did not take
account of the natural landscape, but was blind to the
surrounding environment. Land was no longer viewed as
sacred. The monotheistic worship of the sun prevailed over
the worship of the moon. The terms of the scale of justice
became lopsided. Rationalistic ways of knowing tried to
smother the immanent ways of truth. The clairvoyant world
community of the Neolithic people was now virtually
destroyed. The erotic, playful, energy flow between people,
as well as the cultivation of the human soul, were now
turned towards personal aggression. The lust for power and
material possessions, team sports, and organized murder in
the form of crime and war dominated people's consciousness.
In W.B. Crow's essay "The Mistletoe Sacrament," he
describes a sport practiced on the occasion of a death. The
performers of the game were divided into two groups. Then a
struggle between the two teams for the dead body took place.
The game evolved so that the skull of the deceased took the
place of the body which was to be kicked in a goal or was
the object of combat. The struggle for the object
symbolized the new dualistic world-view of the patriarchal
religions: the struggle of light and darkness for the
spirit of the deceased. Football, polo and other team
sports may have originated with this practice, but now,
these modern sports have lost their pseudo-religious
significance (Crow 54).
The Column
Allsopp's theory about the archetypes is sexist in that
"the single column is the pole of the tent, the symbol of
paternity, the support of the roof, the patriarch. We
cannot begin to understand the history of architecture if we
think the column is just a structural expedient" (Allsopp
1974, 59). Otto Rank thought the column was more that a
structural expedient; it was a "partial expression of the
collective ideology which led to the establishment on Earth
of the heavenly and the divine--in other words to sacral
temple-building" (176). The erecting of the column could be
seen as the first separation between the sacred and the
secular, earth and heaven, the macrocosm and the microcosm,
woman and man. This separation may have been the first
great battle between the sexes, resulting in our symbolic
fall from Eden. The column marks the beginning of
civilization which is also the starting point of the
exploitation of the land which if not reversed will cause
our extinction. Was the column the first idolatry which
became built, the foundation for the emergence of
patriarchal religions and the belief in a transcendent sky
god detached from nature?
Or was the erection of the column a critical attempt by
men to separate from their mothers in order to build their
own identities? If the column was indeed a revolt against
the mother then the spacial revolution by their sons went
too far suppressing the rights of women and relegating them
to the role of Mother Earth. The intellectual and spiritual
powers of women to interpret and guide people by divination
and prophecy through the process of death through
divination, prophecy, and death, resurrection, and
transformation were suppressed. Without these powers, a new
social order can not be envisioned to foster a world of
creative partnerships. A sense of the whole was lost, as
well as our precious balance with nature. Amos Rapoport
writes in his book, _House, Form, and Culture_,
The desanctification of nature has led to the
dehumanization of our relationship with the land and
the site. Modern man has lost the mythological and
cosmological orientation which was so important to
primitive man, or has substituted new mythologies in
place of the old. He has also lost the shared images
of the good life and its values, unless he can be said
to have the shared image of no image (126).
Norman O. Brown proposes that the anxiety of the modern
age is caused by our anxiety to separate from our protecting
mother. Jeremy Rifkin, a disciple of Brown's, reports in
his book, _Biospheric Politics_, that humanity has evolved
from "a state of undifferentiated oneness with the Earth to
a detached self-aware isolation from her." Now that men
have reached a state of independence and self-awareness,
they must build a new relationship with nature and woman
which is both unified and interdependent. Rifkin writes,
"biospheric security is based on a reconciliation of the
death instinct with the life instinct and helps establish a
balance between separation and oneness, independence and
dependence, detachment and participation" (325).
In an essay entitled, "Masculine Bias and the
Relationship between Art and Democracy," Georgia C. Collins
writes that human beings are capable of experiencing both
forms of consciousness, immanence and transcendence. She
says that we feel transcendence "when we become conscious of
ourselves as "I" who am capable of a freely chosen self-
direction. We are conscious of thou when we realize our
vital connection with the group of all living things "whose
safety and value depend on our ability to accommodate
interests beyond our own."
She goes on to say that a healthy adult combines I and
thou. However, she points out that the behaviors, values
and attitudes in "Western" democracies give transcendent
"masculine" qualities favor over "feminine" immanence.
And so, we can see the three forms of sexism arising which
J. R. Martin outlines as: 1) the exclusion of women from
positions of power; 2) male and female stereotyping; and, 3)
the devaluing of "feminine" characteristics in society. The
question remains whether or not, as the columns of "Western"
civilization begin to rot and fall apart from the industrial
pollutants released into the atmosphere, will the cycle of
love once again bring about the death of one epoch and the
birth of a new one?
Summary
In this chapter we have searched for the origins of the
city and discovered the two basic archetypes in
architecture: the domestic enclosed space of the aedicule
and the monumental, non-enclosing structure of the post and
lintel, the trilithon. We have seen how the dysfunctional
co-dependent relationship between the feminine
agriculturalists and the masculine-meat eaters evolved.
In such a society women became second-class citizens and men
controlled the natural resources. This prevented the
natural insight of the culture of love to conduct its long-
term vision of survival. Instead of building heaven on
earth, patriarchal incest religions built temples to the sky
gods resulting in the rape of the planetary resources.
