EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Meaning in Architecture

The theory presented on this website, that there is meaning in visual art hidden from view but plainly apparent to a creative mind, is paralleled in architecture by the little-known idea that buildings can have meaning too. Today we are so convinced that architecture is functional and sometimes decorative that we generally do not even think about a hidden meaning as in poetry. In a 1988 book, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, George Hersey demonstrated that important elements of ancient Greek architecture are visual transformations of the various stages of animal and human sacrifice and that these meanings continued to be used by one architect after another, generation after generation, down to the present day. The animal’s teeth, for instance, are now the dentils of a frieze while the rope that bound a victim’s feet became the cavetto (rope-like) moulding of a column base. Columns themselves represent the human body. Even today, these elements and others continue to be used in arrangements that make sense.  

While the discovery that architecture means something is of interest in itself so is the actual meaning Hersey discovered. “Sacrifice”, he explained, “is essentially the transformation of an animal [through smoke] into a god and then the further fusing of that animal-god with the worshippers.” This attempt to turn practitioners into a god is similar to how, in art and literature, later mystics (prophets, poets and painters included) demonstrate their own theophany, the fusion of their self with God. In both worlds, classical and Christian, the goal of life is either fusion with the cosmos or with a true, more permanent reality beyond sight. 

A second book worth reading on this subject, the meaning of architecture, is John James’ The Master Masons of Chartres (Sydney: West Grinstead Publishing) 1990, first published in 1982. Historians had long conjectured that the mish-mash of styles in Chartres Cathedral was the result of various, sequential building programs and were always amazed that such variety could harmonize so beautifully. Instead, by determining which masons built which sections of the cathedral, he learnt that the parts, so different in style, had been built simultaneously, each master mason responsible for his own section. Most importantly, from an art historical perspective, is his discovery that sacred geometry underlies the construction of the building, some of which is so mystical in content that he believes it to have been part of a secret tradition handed down between the masons and kept secret from the patron. Sacred geometry or gematria is a form of geometry in which sayings or texts are transformed into number. By using these numbers in the dimensions of the building, the masons allow later initiates to translate them back into words.