Could we make a more beautiful cathedral of glass, steel, and concrete?
Medieval cathedrals strike awe. We certainly don’t make things like this anymore — or do we? Cities are intricate structures, but they resemble slime mold.
Can we really build something that competes with these old structures?
Are we really asking ourselves this question? Can we? Of course we can. We can go to the moon, we can put the library of Alexandria in our pockets but medieval architecture is somehow beyond our grasp?
One of the most recent cathedrals is the Sagrada Familia. It’s ugly. It looks like a termite mound. You’d be mistaken for thinking it was built with the pyramids. It looks decayed.
It’s sick and depressed. It’s uncertain and lacks optimism. But it is big and intricate. I’ll give it that.
The ugliness of the whole overwhelms the the intricate beauty that it does have just as weeds choke out flowers.
It’s a monument to the triumph of the ugly over the beautiful.
Now look at the cathedral below. Which of these cathedrals looks newer and more modern to you? Which one looks like a mound of neglect from a lost city and which looks like the proud and joy of an architect’s life’s work?
I’m under no illusion that we should build future cathedrals using the same techniques as they used. This would be unimaginative. We can do much better than the Sagrada Familia with steel, glass, etc. I can sense your disbelief. Can we create beauty with such ugly materials?
Am I proposing more of this?
No.
We lack imagination. We see a material used a specific way, and mentally file it away as a material that can only be used in that way. It’s the artist that creates the art, not the material. The materials are the canvas. The creativity is in the artist. If we want steel to be beautiful, we’ll make it beautiful. If we wanted beautiful concrete, we’d get beautiful concrete.
What people don’t like about modern construction is how cold and lifeless it is. It’s not inviting. It’s imposing. It doesn’t invite you in to explore. It doesn’t create a little world. Even the Sagrada Familia mound of shame has this over modern buildings.
We look around our environment, see a beautiful brick house and think beauty lies in the color, shape, and texture of the brick. Architecture is more than the art of picking the finest berries. Architecture is not just assembly, but a creative act. The whole should be worth more than the sum of the parts. We don’t merely choose, or merely impose our will. We negotiate with the materials. We bring out their best qualities, and hide their flaws. We give the materials new-found ambition . We give beauty to the brick.
We should leave mounds like this to the termites.
And we should leave cold lifeless geometric constructions like this to physics.
We should instead saturate our buildings with something uniquely human or divine. I haven’t seen concrete, glass, and steel used in such a way, but I believe it must happen.