Читать книгу The Story of Looking - Mark Cousins - Страница 13
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 5
LOOKING AND CITIES: VICINITY AND VISTA
CONSTRUCTION
Chapter 3 was about what a young person saw in their immediate vicinity – their own bodies, objects and their home. As we noted, a house is a cocoon which sits within larger cocoons: neighbourhoods, towns, cities and nations. In this chapter let’s imagine that the young people whose developing looking we have followed are adults now. They are leaving their parents’ homes or the villages of their extended families and heading towards the built world of work, service, romance, discovery, exploration and, often, struggle. They are mobile in the world. Maybe they will have the urge to build? Maybe they are in Asia walking through a Hindu temple? Maybe they are living in a great, historic city? We will explore the broader built environment by first considering individual structures, and then how they combine into the urban mazes that we call cities.
There are 4,416 cities in the world that have a population of at least 150,000 people. For most of human history we lived in villages or tribes a tiny fraction of that size, but industrialisation and capitalism’s hunger for cheap labour forced millions into (often unwanted and unhappy) lives in those 4,416 cities. Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, Moscow, Dakar and Manila: modern cities are places of servitude for the many, an iniquity well beyond the scope of this book. But massively increasing cohabitation changed the speed and direction of human looking, and also its nature. Cities became visual thinking. A tree is not an idea, but a Gothic cathedral is.
So what is the story of looking at buildings and cities? How has building facilitated our looking? How has it excited it, controlled it or excluded it? To answer these questions we need to look at the structures of individual buildings – how they raised roofs, made windows and told stories visually – and then consider how they cluster into cities. We have already looked at the simplest, primal buildings – homes. Now we build out from them, to social buildings and beyond.
We can begin by thinking about rhubarb. It was used in China from at least 1000 BCE, was imported along the silk route to Europe, arriving in the 1300s, and made its way to America in the 1820s. In those years and places, its bigger leaves – and gunnera, which is often called ‘giant rhubarb’ – will certainly have been used as umbrellas. A look at their underside reveals why. Their sturdy stalks divide into five branches, which then subdivide several times. Unlike trees, whose branches each sprout numerous small leaves, the rhubarb’s tributaries all support a single canopy. Upthrust is dispersed across an often large surface area – up to a square metre.
Looking at natural examples like this, geometric rock formations and even sea arches, early builders will have started to imagine how a pile of rocks on the ground, or the branches of a tree, could be assembled vertically, in defiance of gravity, to create shelter and internal spaces. The desire to do so seems strong in human beings, for utilitarian reasons and more. In Los Angeles in 1921, a forty-two-year-old Italian American tile mason, Simon Rodia, began building a series of towers that had no purpose as home, meeting place or church. For thirty-three years, working alone, he inserted bottles, broken shells and porcelain into seventeen growing structures of steel rods and wire mesh, the tallest reaching thirty metres. When he had finished, aged seventy-five, Rodia left the site, moved to another part of California, and never returned to what became known as the Watts Towers.
The gunnera and rhubarb leaves and Simon Rodia begin to explain the creativity of building and the kind of looking that ensues. When the Egyptians or the Greeks wanted to raise a roof, it was straight and usually horizontal, and held up by verticals – columns. The results, such as the Parthenon or the temples at Paestum, were often exquisite mathematical structures, but then came the Romans. They noticed that lintels and roofs fell down, and realised that they did so because the central point, between two columns, took most of the load. So the Romans started to use semicircles of stone, rather than straight lintels, on top of their columns; the load was equally dispersed and the arch was born. Most of the Roman viaducts and aqueducts in Europe are built with arches.
Islamic architects were so enamoured of arches that, for example, the Mezquita in Cordoba is a forest of them. The curves were even painted with keystone wedge stripes, as if to say, Look how this works. The painted stripes made the engineering seeable.
The Mezquita is beautiful, but needed a lot of columns and is therefore cluttered. As people came together in covered structures to barter, worship or wash, they needed the internal space to be more open. Builders and engineers devised flying buttresses, braces on the outside of buildings which would take some of the weight, thereby requiring fewer columns inside. Notre Dame in Paris is like Cordoba attenuated, and made of lace. Its flying buttresses on the outside have allowed height and detail to become part of the religious interior. Our eyes are forced upwards, but also stopped more often by tracery and ribbing. Semicircular arches have become semi-ovals, and the thin columns resemble the undersides of rhubarb leaves. The god looking we saw in the previous chapter was incubated in cathedrals like this one.
From flat-roofed Greek temples, to Roman arches, to Gothic filigree: engineering and design was making looking more elaborate. Looking in this building is not a matter of mere function – finding where the exit is, seeing where the priest will conduct mass, etc. – it is like looking at the sky, or clouds. Notre Dame is built to make our eyes soar, make us feel small and see grace or God or abstraction in the patterning, the fall of light, the overall visual activity, which overwhelms.
The fact that the walls were not bearing all of the weight also meant that they could be pierced and glazed, to let in daylight. The windows in Notre Dame are of filigreed detail, but simple fenestration can be seen in wall paintings of buildings as far back as ancient Egypt and Assyria. Such wall piercings allowed residents to glimpse oncomers, and harsh weather outside. Soon they were affording other types of looking too. Our story began with a glimpse through a bedroom window, out to a tree against the dawn sky, and we have noted that a room with a view sells or rents for more than one without, but windows in buildings have not always been placed to maximise the pleasures of the z-axis. Many older cottages on the Celtic fringe of Europe, like the Scottish one below, seem indifferent to the view, or to turn aside from it out of displeasure or familiarity. If you were outside working the land all day, you had had your eyeful, so did not need your windows to give onto the vista.
As steel became a more frequently used building material, as what was required to hold up a roof became visually smaller, and as the idea of enclosed living declined amongst architectural modernists and urban elites, so windows started to win the battle with walls. Instead of being something that was beautiful, structural and fortifying, a wall was something that was in the way, that blocked the view. Glass spread across the façades of commercial, retail and residential buildings, resulting in a structure such as Philip Johnson’s Glass House, built in Connecticut in 1949.
It was like a Bedouin tent with all the flaps rolled up. Every direction was a looking direction. In it, living was looking. Seeing was a regal thing. The richer you were, the more that you could see. In the Scottish cottages at night, you could look at the flickering flames in the fire; in Johnson’s house you saw the wind in the trees. At dawn, everywhere he looked, he saw a sight like that with which this book begins. One unintended consequence was that, at night, with the lights on inside and darkness outside, as he moved around all Johnson could see was himself reflected in the windows, so he installed under lighting in the trees to make the outside more visible.
Raising roofs and inserting windows created new types of looking, but so did walking through a building. In China from the 1100s BCE, isolated walls called yingbi were built either in front of or behind the main entrances to palaces and the homes of the well-off. This one is in Beijing’s Forbidden City.
There is a doorway behind it, but its specific purpose is to stop us looking. As people lived together in greater numbers, things were built to occlude looking. As light travels linearly, yingbi killed off eyelines, but not only that. Their purpose was also to prevent bad spirits, which also travel in straight lines, from entering the building. They were the brick equivalents of the talismans that repel the evil eye.
Yingbi also acted as visual deferrals. As buildings blocked formerly clear views, architects began to manipulate the new route to seeing that their structures afforded. Where Notre Dame was, mostly, a single, long cavernous central space, in Asia especially, such one-off sight lines were less prized. Instead, looking in some Asian buildings became a series of reveals, each taking us closer to the centre of the structure. This Kailasa temple in Ellora, India, is dedicated to Shiva, whom we saw earlier, dancing the world into existence. Completed around CE 765, it took seven thousand stonemasons 150 years to build.
Worshippers enter on the far left of this image, through a low gopuram, a decorated tower. As they move into the building, left to right, they cross a bridge and then into the second, larger, chamber, which is higher than the first and surmounted by four lions, symbol of the four noble truths. The feeling is of having a visual story unfold, an ascension, walking from confined to more open, in and out of darkness. Heading onwards they climb more steps and come to the tallest structure, on the right here, built on a base of stone elephants, with its rising tower, shikara.
This is what it looks like inside:
Massive square columns shoulder the vast weight of the overhead structure and frame the final, holiest of holy, chambers, the vimana. Our walk through the building has been a series of suspenseful looks. Everything here directs our eye to the vanishing point of the image – the low, wide, dark column in the background. It is the lingam, the phallus of Shiva, the symbol of his creativity, which sits on a circular base with a groove at the front, the yoni, the symbol of the female goddess, the divine mother. The eyes of Hindus and non-Hindus alike widen when they see this remarkable object, the potent destination of an architectural procession, all the more striking when you hear that the building was not constructed – it was chiselled out of the solid mountain rock, in the way Michelangelo sculpted David.
The room containing the lingam and yoni is a destination room, a fetishised room. It is the sort of place that construction seemed to be aiming for: spiritual, anticipated, imagined, revealed. From flat roofs to windows to the Chinese screen which made us want to see what was behind it, the building created the desire to see. The Kailasa temple multiplies and layers this process and, in its single structure, tells us something about how old cities work visually. But what about cities in general? How did the individual structures we have looked at combine to make them? Highly planned urban spaces often have avenues or a grid system which afford long sight lines, but many of the cities that we are about to look at either evolved in less planned ways and so have less geometric structures or, from the start, were intended to deflect or inhibit our gaze, to make us keenly anticipate our glimpse of a royal palace or sacred cathedral.
LOOKING AT EIGHT CITIES
A building creates looks; clusters of buildings rather more so. Hunting is glancing, so is being out on the street. Our eyes move perhaps thirty times when we cross a road, hundreds when we go to a bus station to buy a ticket and find out where to board. Cities increased the density of looking. So what is a city? They are the most complex planned systems we have made, within which unplanned systems operate. They are millennia-old inorganic and organic patterns (like Davros in Doctor Who) which vary greatly according to latitude, geography and political system. What, however, are their essentials and constraints? To find out, let’s consider eight remarkable cities: Babylon, Rome, Baghdad, Esfahan, Yokohama, Metropolis, Astana and Pripyat. Each is from a different period in history. Together they reveal aspects of the monumental, clustered, disorientating, collective, voyeuristic, anonymous, dazzling, religious, imagined, futurist and destroyed looking that urban life affords.
BABYLON
Imagine, first, that it is the year 570 BCE. We are at the north end of the vast alluvial plane of the Tigris-Euphrates Delta, fifty-nine miles southwest of present-day Iraq. We have been travelling south all day, in scorching heat. We begin to climb a 200-metre-long limestone-paved road, the beginning of the Processional Way of perhaps the greatest city on earth, a city state that would be imagined long after its fall. The sun is in our eyes but we can see, ahead of us, backlit, a monumental, fortifying structure that seems to block our path. To our right, stretching to the ancient Euphrates River, are hanging gardens, stacked like a theatrical ziggurat, and lined with bitumen and lead to prevent the moisture and roots of the massive fruit trees that adorn them from breaking down into the layer below. They are one of the wonders of the world.
We pass a line of 120 ceramic lions, then step into the shade of the fortification and see this.
The Gate of Ishtar, the goddess of love and war, built five years earlier (this is it rebuilt, half size, using many of its original tiles, in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin). The gate is covered with lapis lazuli moulded brick tiles and edged with gold trims, the colour combination that we looked at in Chapter 1. As we walk towards it we have to crane our necks to see its top and then, looking downwards again, come eye to eye with one of the lions.
Its face sits proud from the monumental wall. We enter and discover a tumult, imagined here by the movie director D.W. Griffith in his film Intolerance.
We are in Babylon. The city state dwarfs us. We do not know where to look. Griffith wanted us to be overwhelmed by this film set of Babylon, as we have been by the real city. This is epic looking. Gateways and figures are magnified. Merchants, citizens, slaves and pilgrims jostle. They have places to go in this vast city, which contains thousands of routes and journeys. Ladies in red dresses walk under parasols carried by servant girls. Shadows are coloured from the reflections of the tiles, like those in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We walk for almost a kilometre, then turn right into the temple of Marduk, the protector god of Babylon. According to the king who oversaw its construction, he ‘covered its wall with sparkling gold, I caused it to shine like the sun’. We see this burnish, but as we walk into the evening, and as the air cools, we also see a designed city, a secular city, social hierarchies like those glimpsed by the Indian man people-watching at the Kolkata crossroads, libraries of learning, canals along which sailing boats laden with spices cast shadows within flickering reflections, and structures that speak of political power. In Christian mythology, Babylon was a symbol of prostitution and decadence, and its famous Tower of Babel came to mean verbal confusion. There should be an equivalent word for visual confusion – ‘vabel’, perhaps? Babylon was a Mecca of vabel.
Such an experience, such cluster living, was addictive. That is the first element of city looking: it is cluster looking, vabel looking. In the ancient world, the logical result of settled living was a distillation of such living. More and more people moved in together, if ‘in’ means behind the protective walls of citadels.
ROME
Instead of our day on the Processional Way in Babylon in 570 BCE, if we found ourselves climbing the steps of the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome exactly 650 years later, we would be about to see this.
The Colosseum. There are no photographs of its original spectacle, of course, but Ridley Scott’s film Gladiator, designed by Arthur Max, researched it carefully and imagined it well, picturing it as another epic space, lit by shards of light. On taking our seats in it, it would be no surprise if we felt vertigo. The largest amphitheatre ever built, on misty days the far side of its vast ellipse is invisible from its near side. Weather happens within it. It held 50,000 people, a town in a building. And it was paid for, in part, by selling the treasures of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem that the Romans had looted a decade earlier.
What this image makes clear is that the Colosseum was a seeing space. It was curved, and had no internal walls or columns such as those in the Mezquita, so that everyone could see. Such places are sometimes called auditoria, but the Colosseum’s primary purpose was looking rather than listening. It was a videodrome, a place for voyeurs. Fifty thousand pairs of eyes all looked inwards. People flocked there, the rich at the bottom, the poorer further up the structure, to indulge in collective looking, and to do something transgressive and even repulsive: to see animals killed, nine thousand of them in the Colosseum’s inaugural games. There was groupthink in this, and a kind of visual hysteria, a blood lust which introduces into our story unedifying looking. It is often said that Christians were fed to lions in this building. There is not conclusive proof that this happened a lot, but what did happen here is enough to note that looking, like other aspects of human life, can be a weakness as well as a strength. That is the second aspect of city looking – its oppressiveness. The cluster judges.
BAGHDAD
When to choose not to look, and what if we do not make that choice? The desire to look, as we will see later, can damage the person who experiences it.
Six hundred and eighty years after the opening of the Colosseum, a city was founded that would outdo Babylon or Rome. Northeast of the former and on the Tigris River, its basic plan was remarkably like that of the Colosseum – a perfect circle, a radically innovative city design.
And, like the Colosseum, Baghdad too was a videodrome. Under the CE 786–809 aegis of its greatest patron, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, it became the place in the world that most aimed to dazzle the eye. Funded by vast tax revenues from the Abbasid Empire and trade from its key position on the Silk Road, it had banking and legal systems, but also pageantry and ostentation. Henna and rosewater were sold in its bazaars. The lavish mansions of its wealthy citizens housed Chinese porcelain. Thousands of gondoliers ferried the well-off along the great Tigris River and the city’s canals: Venetian journeys of flickering and double-bounced light. ‘My story is of such a marvel,’ claims one character in One Thousand and One Nights, the great story cycle set here, ‘that if it were written with a needle on the corner of an eye, it would yet serve as a lesson to those who seek wisdom.’ The same could be said of Baghdad.
In the era of Harun, Baghdad was a city that not only looked inwards at itself, but outwards to the world. Scholars gathered there, and amongst the greatest was the polyglot medic and scientist Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who wrote thirty-six books and translated 116 more. Born in CE 809, Hunayn travelled abroad, learnt Greek and rendered classical texts by Plato, Aristotle and many others into Arabic, thus protecting their insights from the neglect, or worse, of the European Dark Ages. In such a visual city it comes as no surprise that one of Hunayn’s best original texts was The Book of the Ten Treatises of the Eye, a celebration of looking – he argues that sight is the greatest of the senses – and a meditation on how eyes work. In this image from the book, the eye is in section; the outside world is below, the inner world of the brain is above.
In Hunayn’s conception, pneuma – a kind of circulatory air – travels forward from the brain, along the red curving lines in the image, enters the eye from the back, causes the pupil to dilate, then travels out, into the air, encounters the object that is seen, which reshapes the pneuma, the new shape travelling back to the eye and allowing the object to be seen. This sounds fanciful today, yet neuroscience’s discovery that more back-to-front brain activity happens when we look, than front-to-back, means that Hunayn was metaphorically, in part, right.
In its golden age, Baghdad, the largest city in the world, housed an estimated 1,200,000 people. By the beginning of the twentieth century its population had dropped to 145,000. This grew rapidly when the city became the capital of Iraq. Oil income boosted construction in the 1970s, but war in the 1980s, political authoritarianism and corruption, and then invasion and more war in the new millennium, brought the city to its knees. The lenses of the world’s reporters were trained anew on the suffering of the videodrome.
The storytelling of Kailasa, the Processional Way of Babylon, the circle citadels of Rome’s Colosseum and of Baghdad: the kinds of looking that these afforded – suspenseful, clustered, oppressive, learned – give us a developing sense of looking in cities. In more recent centuries, our visual sense has continued to be shaped by architects and urbanists.
ESFAHAN
‘Esfahan is half the world,’ say the Iranians. On the four-hour drive from Tehran, your eyes get accustomed to desert landscapes, dusky-yellow and red earth, glaring sunlight and wide vistas. The city’s outskirts are industrial, noisy and polluted. The unclean air removes whites and blacks, making the street scene shades of grey. At its centre, the city opens out into one of the largest squares in the world, and at its southern edge there is a grand portal to the Emami mosque, completed in the early 1600s. It leads to dark, enclosed, echoing chambers which turn you and your eyelines right and left, and then there is this reveal.
On the left, a sublime iwan, or framed pointed-arch entrance, is covered with glistening haft rangi – seven colour – tiles, including Iranian and Turkish blue, black, white and gold. The blue sky echoes the deeper of the blues. The iwan’s form is reminiscent of the flat, but highly decorated, façade of Notre Dame in Paris. It stands proud of two stacked colonnades of similar shaped niches, and when your eyes follow those you notice that the pattern is repeated on all four sides, as if four Notre Dames stand facing each other. But walk to the centre of this inner courtyard and the reflecting pool makes the four look like eight, and the gold-blue glisten shimmers in the water. The overall effect of these 18 million bricks and 475,000 tiles is to create an illusion: this space looks aquatic. There are Koranic verses and descriptions of the five pillars of Islam (prayer, giving to the poor, profession of faith, fasting and pilgrimage), but as well as traditional, the aesthetic is modernist. This mosque is a colour field, redolent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting or one of Yves Klein’s meditations on blue. A place like this reminds us that Islam has its mystical strain, practised by Sufis.
The designers of the Emami mosque drew on Islamic design and architectural traditions, refining them and simplifying them in some ways, to create a visual experience of great equilibrium. The aim was contemplation rather than sensation. The geometry and restrained colour, the lack of figurative decoration, gave a sense that the city beyond, with its everyday living, had been erased or muted.
To the other types of looking we have seen in buildings and cities, we can therefore add sanctuary looking, the feeling of the cloister, the uninterrupted, contemplative place. Cities that were built within a small time frame, such as Brazil’s capital Brasilia, are also able to plan a spatial regime from scratch, so that little interferes with the overall visual scheme. But in most urban spaces, randomness, unpredictability and the specifics of everyday life scatter any original visual purity that there was, and successive ideas about buildings and society jostle for attention. This was a product of the cluster of ancient cities, but it is also visible in more recent examples.
YOKOHAMA
Some city looking is timeless. Take this image, for example, from a Japanese film, Pale Flower.
How unlike a blue sky or the savannah, or even the Emami mosque this is. Three trees poke up into an otherwise built world – the city of Yokohama. There is no empty space here. Everything fights with everything else for our attention. Foreground and background have similar weight. Do we look at the arch at the far end of the bridge, or the people walking towards us, or the cars on the left, or the shaded window on the right, or the electric cables running through the image? There is so much to take in.
Types of concrete had been used in building construction since the 6000s BCE; the Romans added horse hair and volcanic ash to it, and used it in structures like the roof of the Pantheon in Rome. Concrete was sculptural; it allowed buildings to be shaped in new ways. Asian cities have higher average population densities than Western cities, so things are more visually crammed and layered; you could say that they are the most city-like of cities. After taking in the clutter in this built environment – the directions, actions, attractions – our eyes might land on one of the thirty people, and we might imagine where they are going. As well as the quantity of things to look at, we can see ideas here. An arch is the sign of a threshold; it tells the residents that they are moving into a new neighbourhood. The buildings look onto the river and the three trees, giving views of them. Nature is something to be arrived at, to be directed towards. And this intersection shows that the city is designed to be moved through in different directions and at different speeds: the strolling walker, the car driver and the riverboat user, bringing goods into or through the city, all coexist. Their speeds are not separated into different zones. Our Japanese city (the film’s opening scenes suggest that the setting is Tokyo, but it was actually shot in Yokohama because the latter has narrower lanes and looks more like a maze) extends our sense of how we look in cities. To suspense, cluster, oppression and learning, add randomness and simultaneity.
Director Masahiro Shinoda says that Pale Flower was influenced by the French writer Charles Baudelaire, whose reaction to cities we will encounter in the nineteenth century. And we will look at tall buildings when we get to the twentieth century. Cities have always been imagined before they were built. Babylon did not need a gateway as extravagant as its one dedicated to Ishtar. Baghdad did not need to be circular. In each case a form and scale were envisaged, then the city was built to fit that vision.
METROPOLIS
Cities, then, have always started as future things. In 1927, this was the future.
It is a moment from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. An aeroplane flies between buildings, walkways connect the top of structures. It is still busy and multidirectional, like the Japanese city, but now life has become airborne. Living and travelling takes place in the sky. City life has some of the lightness of air. Yet Lang’s film was a hierarchical city and a critique of cities. Its story tells of worker exploitation and revolt. One character imagines another as the whore of Babylon, and a club is called Yoshiwara, after Tokyo’s sex district. Metropolis folded into itself ancient cities, Japanese cities and modernism.
ASTANA
And here is another city of vistas and fantasy visuals, dreamt up by moviemakers.
Except it wasn’t. It is Astana in Kazakhstan, built from scratch in the last twenty years, as audacious as Baghdad or Babylon’s gates, and as much a product of commerce – here, oil revenues. One of Astana’s functions is to be seen, to make our eyes boggle. It has a White House with a turquoise cupola and a golden spire. Behind it is a bird’s nest stadium and a vast tilted bowl building. On either side of this image, huge golden cones reflect everything, in case we have not seen enough. Tiny cars in the foreground, which look like toys, give us the scale. There is ancient looking here, and curved materials only possible in the twenty-first century, and the joys of symmetry and a touch of Las Vegas. Astana wants us to want to see it. And don’t we? Our composite city has the future in it too.
PRIPYAT
But the future eventually becomes past. What will Astana look like when it falls into ruin, like Babylon did? Something like this place, perhaps, Pripyat in Ukraine. Like Pompeii, it was abandoned, because of the explosion of Unit 4 of the nearby nuclear power plant, Chernobyl.
Above, at the time of the city’s construction, we see clean, new public buildings, organised in blocks. Neatly planted roses bloom. Order, power and beauty. In the bottom image, thirty years after the city was abandoned because of radiation, trees and bushes have seeded themselves in the concrete plazas. They look young and beautiful, and cast shadows in the evening light. Where once thousands of people went about their daily business, now almost no one does. The city is quiet, and returning to what it was before people, the Soviet Union, nuclear scientists, town planners, utopians, cold warriors and young families all imposed their will upon it. It has become an un-city.
For centuries we have been fascinated by abandoned and destroyed places, their abandonment telling us what we have lost. There are many books and websites on the subject. What do we see in them? The way we were, perhaps, a threnody or human hubris, or the fact that the present order is the disorder of the future? Pripyat is an image of mortality, of change, of the parade moving on, and – in its specific case, of course – jeopardy.
DESTRUCTION
Pripyat was not destroyed, but many of the greatest built things have been. Our human response to this is not simply to lament the destruction. If Notre Dame fell, our media would be saturated by images of the fall. Large buildings contain in them vast amounts of potential energy – all that lifting of stone high up, into the air – and we can, in our minds’ eyes, picture the release of that energy into something more kinetic.
It seems always to have been so. In the Chauvet caves in the Ardèche in France there are russet, erupting, spray-like wall paintings, from around 36,000 years ago, which are probably depictions of a volcano hurling lava into the sky twenty-two miles northwest of there. We can imagine its eyewitnesses being terrified but dazzled by these ancient fireworks, by their scale, energy and ferocity. Thirty-six millennia later, on 18 July CE 64, the Emperor Nero is said to have watched from a distant hill, with aesthetic pleasure, the burning of Rome, during which an estimated two million citizens lost their homes.
Just fifteen years later and less than two hundred miles further south, on 24 August CE 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted, creating imagery like the paintings in Chauvet’s caves. The smoke and ash cloud was twenty miles high. Pliny the Younger said that it was like a vast pine tree. It buried local towns under three metres of pumice. Visually, the event has recurred in Western culture. There are hundreds of paintings of it, and it was restaged in early silent films and again, in recent years, with the advent of computer-generated 3D imaging.
The destruction of cities, the urban apocalypse, had grotesque appeal to the imagination of conquerors. In this twelfth-century illustration from a Spanish manuscript, an angel flies over burning Babylon.
As Babylon symbolised sin to Christians, the manuscript illuminator, who was adapting an eighth-century image by St Beatus of Liébana, sees the burning as a cauterisation or punishment, yet the licking tongue flames seem not to damage the glorious city. Its minarets, domes, tiling, gardens, vases and horseshoe arches are intact. The artist cannot bring himself to destroy the city so, instead, represents it stacked, geometric and haloed with fire.
Jump forward to 13 February 1258 and we find the videodrome’s circle citadel in flames. The Mongols raped and looted in the once great city’s concentric streets, smashing or stealing what Chinese porcelain remained. They seized thousands of scholarly books by Hunayn and others, which had been collected over half a millennium, and threw them into the Tigris. The ink turned the river black, a striking image of mourning for lost learning. The destruction of this symbol of Arabism was relished by the city’s enemies, but it, too, haunted the mind’s eye.
We could go on. The earthquake and tsunami that destroyed much of Lisbon on 1 November 1755 led the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau to argue for a return to rural life and peasant values; maybe all those people living at close quarters in cities were only asking for trouble? One hundred and twenty-eight years later, one of the most startling natural visual events in history occurred. A volcano west of Java erupted, creating a smoke cloud twice the height of Mount Vesuvius’s. The ash that entered the atmosphere reduced global temperatures in the coming year and made sunlight refract or scatter in more extreme ways, thus intensifying sunsets and creating new visual patterns in the sky. Thousands of miles away, in Oslo, the painter Edvard Munch saw these and painted them in the background of his disturbing, highly chromatic The Scream. And at 11.58 a.m. on 1 September 1923, a massive earthquake in Japan devastated Yokohama and lit fires in Tokyo’s wooden buildings, which spread like a forest fire. Over 100,000 people died, and most of Japan’s great silent films, its moving image memories, were lost in the blaze.
Compared to these tragedies, the loss of life in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was attacked on 11 September 2001 was small, but New York is psychologically closer to white Westerners than most cities in the developing world and is the new Babylon, and so the atrocity was all over our perma-news, and there is no need to reproduce an image of that day here. 9/11 was the millennial Krakatoa, its imagery seared. It had its meaning – the awful deaths of 2,996 people – and it had its seeing. Later in our story we will come to unseen dying.
Our chapter on building and cities comes full circle. We started with a rhubarb leaf, considered how the visible worked in eight urban places, and ended with 9/11. Everything built must fall, but in the period before it does, a building and the city to which it contributes affords engineered, contemplative, clustered, oppressive, educative, random and future looking. The present order is the disorder of the future.
