TEASING OUT THE MAGIC

OF (GOTHIC) ARCHITECTURE

Eeva-Liisa

Pelkonen

29

FIGURE 1AWN Pugin, The Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament (1849).

EEVA-LIISA PELKONEN

30

The vital principle [of Gothic architecture] is not the love of Knowledge but the love of Change. It is that strange disqui-etude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wonders hither and thither among its niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied nor shall be satisfied.1

—John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” (1853)

In his 1850s book The Stones of Venice John Ruskin captured the feeling

of awe when inhabiting a Gothic Cathedral by recording, seismically,

as it were, the movements of his “restless mind,” inhabiting its nooks

and crannies with his breathless prose. His ambition to capture the

experience as it unfolded resulted in one of the most vivid architectural

writings of all time, capable of transporting the reader to a different time

and place.

Ruskin’s position in the history of architecture is well known: a critic

of industrial capitalism and its impact on building practices—ma-

chine-made buildings at the service of industrial capitalism rather than

any particular human community. Gothic represented an alternative:

a triumph of dignified human labor and communal effort. Yet, what

concerns us here has less to do with the message of his text than with

its method and style, one marked with immediacy and wonder. Of note,

Ruskin did not simply settle for plainly describing any buildings nor was

he interested in recovering historical facts about their making. Instead,

his quest was to reveal the true “nature” and “character” of Gothic archi-

tecture, which required a different technique: letting oneself be seized

by its mighty presence.

Ruskin’s position was firmly rooted at the intellectual and artistic cul-

ture of his time: he was an empiricist, who believed in cultivating an

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intimate relationship between mind and environment; and, as a realist,

he believed in rendering reality as a fact without complex intellectual

overlays. It would thus be a mistake to consider his innate medievalism

anti-modern, since it engaged the key debate surrounding modern art

and literature: how to overcome conceptual abstractions and represen-

tational strategies of neo-classicism in favor of depicting the real, “as it

is.” Ruskin’s response recalls what Roland Barthes called a “reality-ef-

fect,” based on the pure materiality of the sign—where excessive use of

detail forces the reader to take a close look and never to let the material

overload arrive at a point of closure, absoluteness, or compositional har-

mony. Like life itself, Gothic was complex and never settled into succinct

interpretation. Indeed, when caressing the crevices of a Gothic cathedral

in minute detail with his eyes, Ruskin believed that “the subject of con-

templation is humanity itself.”2 The method is akin to what we today

call hermeneutics, which similarly calls for regaining an unmediated

relationship to the world without intellectual filters, and in so doing,

gaining a deeper understanding not only of the external reality but also

of our own inner selves.

Ruskin’s reading of Gothic was based on verisimilitude: art was consid-

ered a kind of encrypted blueprint of life with all its complexity. Wishing

to gain access to the worlds and destinies embodied in Gothic architec-

ture, Ruskin seemed to believe that even though the walls he was gazing

at could not speak, if only one gazed long enough, the walls could offer

visual clues about these hidden secrets. Importantly, he did not have to

interpret what he saw—the truth was simply revealed to him as pure pres-

ence. The task he set out to perform recalls that of the magi as described

by the early Renaissance scholar Pico della Mirandolla as follows:

[A magi] bring[s] forth into the open the miracles concealed in the recesses of the world, in the depths of nature, and in the

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storehouses and mysteries of God, just as if she herself were their maker; and as the farmer weds his elms to vines, even so does the magus wed earth to heaven, that is, he weds lower things to the endowments and powers of higher things. 3

Delivering an answer to the question of what lies at the heart of the

human condition, Ruskin could likewise be considered a latter-day magi

who believed in the cathartic outcome of such intense psycho-physical

experiences with the material world, thus delivering.

Language played a major role in accessing and delivering the hidden

secrets within the real, and so Ruskin, like others with similar pursuits,

placed a high value on eloquence and rhetoric as a means of digging

deeper in search of the “nature of Gothic,” where only language could

ultimately unlock the complex secrets of the world.

To be certain, Ruskin’s love for Gothic was not simply a personal prefer-

ence but a strongly felt and intellectually held position within modern

culture that can be traced to the Enlightenment. Indeed, since the Age of

Reason, Gothic came to represent a counter position in architecture cul-

ture. Where neoclassical architecture endorsed reason and knowledge,

Gothic called upon feeling and imagination to take reign. And where

neoclassical architecture relied on architecture’s internal logic, Gothic

called for architecture to engage dually with the surrounding world. Even

Abbé Laugier, a fervent advocate of classicism as the norm for all good

architecture, had to admit that:

[I]n spite of the numerable faults [Gothic] architecture had its beauty. Although its most spectacular creations show a coarse-ness and clumsiness in feeling and spirit that is altogether shocking, we cannot but admire the bold outline, the delicate chiseling and the untrammeled grandeur of some buildings,

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which through these qualities display a kind of inimitable recklessness.4

Laugier clearly did not want to engage such “recklessness,” not least

because his emphasis on reason did not allow him to deal with this dif-

ferent kind of beauty.

The advent of Romanticism, accompanied with the love for everything

extraordinary and unknown, changed this. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

for one, was the first to celebrate wholeheartedly the Gothic awe and

translate his feelings to words. Well aware of Abbé Laugier’s condem-

nation of this particular style when writing in 1772, he recalls his initial

response as a state of positive surprise followed by revelation:

So I shuddered, anticipating a misshapen, grotesque mon-ster. But what unexpected emotions seized me when I finally stood before the edifice! My soul was suffused with a feeling of immense grandeur, which, because it consisted of thousands of harmonizing details, I was able to savor and enjoy, but by no means understand and explain. They say it is thus with the joys of heaven, and how often I returned to savor such joys on earth, to embrace the gigantic spirit expressed in the work of our brothers of yore!”5

Goethe’s first move was to deny any a priori aesthetic judgment,

immersing himself in space and recording his experience in a first

person narrative, and, in so doing, pioneering a kind of proto-phe-

nomenological architectural criticism. He can, along with Johann

Georg Hamann (the Magus des Nordens), be heralded as the father

of Romanticism, which was no longer based on conceptual models

and universal truths, but on deeply felt personal encounters with the

real. We must reiterate here how radical this emphasis on subjective

experience was at the time, implying not only an individual freedom

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but also a belief that at the heart of subjective experience lies a trans-

formative power.

Like other lovers of Gothic, Goethe harked back to medieval times in

search of architecture that was conceived as an integral part of the life-

world and its rituals. In the way that it was made and experienced, such

architecture had, in contemporary parlance, both haptic and performa-

tive dimensions.6 Ruskin’s contemporary A.W.N. Pugin captured the

ecstasy of immersing oneself in such intensely haptic environments in

his subsequent book, The Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament (1849), by

integrating and essentially conflating the users of the space into highly

ornamented and materially rich interiors. (fig. 1)

We must be reminded that for Catholics like Pugin, material in this in-

stance can function like a relic—essentially a prerequisite for a religious

experience. In addition to imagining and theorizing a new haptic way

of experiencing architecture, the nineteenth century also gives birth

to a new conceptual apparatus that allowed historians and critics to

identify the non-material essence of architecture with slightly esoteric

words beginning to populate the texts, like “soul” (Seele) and “spirit”

(Geist). In “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin, for example, describes the

act of making as a moment when the “eye of the soul must be bent upon

the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill all the able nerves that

guide it….”7 The word “spirit,” a key word in nineteenth-century Ger-

man philosophy and literature, is particularly telling not least because it

can be translated, depending on the context, as mind, spirit, or a ghost.

Moreover, Hegel famously used it to describe the mindset of different

historical periods, and subsequently to understand and interpret his-

torical events. Operating as a key concept for his aesthetic theory, spirit

referred to an underlying mentality, notion, or striving investment in the

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work, which could not be formulated as a concrete thought or explained

as having a specific semantic meaning. In Hegel’s hierarchy of various art

forms, music held a privileged position as a medium, where the “Spirit

or Soul…ring[ed] forth in the untrammeled immediacy,”8 whereas in

the case of fine arts, these forces had to be mediated through matter

and form.

Since Hegel, detecting the presence of such latent, invisible forces be-

came the main criteria for what qualified as good art and architecture.

Without spirit or soul, the work was considered dead. Romantics, like

Goethe, can be also credited for introducing the notion of “creativity”

to explain the artistic act when a mysterious soul or spirit impregnates

the matter. Goethe relates: “Art is creative long before it is beautiful.

And yet, such art is true and great, perhaps truer and greater than when

it becomes beautiful. For in man there is a creative force which becomes

active as soon as his existence is secure.”9 Goethe thus rejects the idea

that artistic quality or beauty would be based on absolute standards in

favor of art that springs from the very core of human existence. According

to him, only art that made the presence of such inner spirit palpable had

the power to activate the mind of the onlooker. The task of a critic, then,

was to detect the reverberations of the creative soul at hand and translate

these into words—while acknowledging that such quality can never be

articulated into clear concepts and ideas, but only captured, or to put it

in phenomenological terms, as pure feeling and thinking.

The notion of Gothic as a kind of existential representation of human-

ity gains prominence in the discussion surrounding abstraction at

the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, in his 1911 book Form-

probleme der Gotik, the prominent historian of medieval art Wilhelm

Worringer locates the birth of a modern sense of individuality in the

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36

FIG

UR

E 2

Ha

ns P

oe

lzig’s th

ea

tre “D

as G

rosse

Sch

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us,” B

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, 1919

.

EEVA-LIISA PELKONEN

37

Gothic period as follows: “Both in religion as in all … the individual I

becomes the carrier of feeling…there is no question that [the Gotik]

provides the history of modern feeling and thus of the modern art.”10

In his subsequent book, Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer reaches

a verbal crescendo when describing the complex psychological charge

in Gothic architecture:

Gripped by the frenzy of these mechanical forces, that thrust out at all their terminations and aspire toward heaven in a mighty crescendo of orchestral music, he feels himself con-vulsively drawn aloft in blissful vertigo, raised high above him-self into the infinite. How remote he is from the harmonious Greeks, for whom all happiness was to be sought in the bal-anced tranquility of gentle organic movement, which is alien to all ecstasy.11

Without explicitly stating it in this case, the Gothic embodied the soul

of the modern man—always in turmoil, caught between abstraction and

empathy, feeling at once at ease and terrified by the world.

Among the most lucid critics from this period, though often forgotten,

was Karl Scheffler, best known as the editor-in-chief of the influential

magazine Kunst und Künstler. His 1908 book, Der Geist der Gotik, takes

Worringer’s thesis further by treating Gothic as an outcome of a univer-

sal human condition marked by utter hopelessness when facing the mys-

teries of the world. Like Worringer, Scheffler valued the Gothic exactly as

a symbol that made this eternal strife all the more palpable. On occasion,

his prose reads like a Gothic novel where the spirit impregnates the mat-

ter to the point of unhinging: “The stone became immaterial, the weight

became lifted, as it were, the wall became erased, the spatial boundaries

became invisible, and everything resolves into an atmospheric synthesis

[Stimmungssynthese].”12

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Scheffler saw manifestation of this eternal (Gothic) strife in art of

all ages and cultures: the Medieval Cathedral in Riga, Auguste Ro-

din’s sculptures, and Henry Van der Velde’s interiors. Other prime

examples that expressed the strife marked by the desire for power

and control were new building typologies brought by modernization.

He writes how “the restless force towards power, which governs the

whole world, find[s] its fulfillment in storage buildings [Speicher-

bauten], department stores, and skyscrapers, the industrial build-

ings, railway stations, and bridges; in the rough functional form lies

the pathos of suffering, the Gothic spirit.”13 Similarly, when writing

about Hans Poelzig’s colossal theatre in “Das Grosse Schauspiel-

haus” for his magazine Kunst und Künstler in 1920, he discusses how

“through the ‘Gothic’ in him, [Poelzig] strives for the pathos of expres-

sion and hugeness, breaking all stylistic imitation, and leads towards

the new….”14 (fig. 2) Like his predecessors, Scheffler used language to

capture the tender moment when the restless, striving spirit is at the

cusp of becoming visible.

While the rhetoric of the aforementioned lovers of Gothic might

seem irrational and strange to us, it is worth reminding ourselves of

the motivating forces behind their words. Above all, they considered

architecture a symbolic art form, invested with a power to embody

our aspirations and become an integral part of our daily lives, even

offering a promise of salvation. Gothic offered a counter-position to

neo-classicism, which, as Victor Hugo warned, was bordering on an

architecture of irrelevance by receding into a world of self-referential

autonomy. A similar challenge is facing contemporary architecture:

how can architecture overcome its double bond between empty

formalism on one hand, and banal utilitarianism on another, and

regain its focus on what matters most—human experience? For this

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NOTES

1 John Ruskin, Works (New York: J.B. Alden, 1885), 214.

2 John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter from The Stones of Venice (London: George Allen, 1900), 40.

3 G. Pico della Mirandola, “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. E. Cassirer et al (Chicago, 1948), 236–7.

4 Abbé Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (1853).

5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture” from Goethe: Essays on Art and Literature, John Gearey ed. (New York: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986) 7.

6 See Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014) for more discussion about medievalist traits in contemporary art.

7 ”The Nature of Gothic”, 12.

8 Hegel quoted by Jack Kaminsky in Hegel on Art: An Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics, 128.

9 Goethe, op.cit., 8.

10 Wilhelm Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich: Piper, 1927), 123–124. Translation my own.

11 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (Illinois: Ivan Lee, 1995), 113.

12 Karl Scheffler, Geist der Gotik (Insel Berlag, 1917), 92. Translation my own.

13 Ibid., 107. Translation my own.

14 Karl Scheffler, “Das grosse Schauspielhaus” in Kunst und Künstler (1920) 232. Translation my own.

question, the lovers of Gothic can remind us that architecture, like

no other art, has the power to envelope and embody entire lives and

destinies, and even insert some magic into our daily existence.