Archimago: Ancient Greek Kosmos and Craftsmanship

The mural below, located at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, really got me thinking about the ancient Greeks, their architecture, and our contemporary architecture. In the scene depicted we can trace a genealogy of ideas directly from the physics of the cosmos, through the ancient Greeks, through the cathedrals of Europe, and finally (by logical extension) to us and that very building. The legacy of the Greeks loomed large in architecture for hundreds of years. The history of early Western architecture is a tug of war between groups who advocated either "ancient" stylistic conservatism or "modern" stylistic innovation.

What remains of the Greeks in our commonplace architecture today? To be sure, their works and their legacy are still discussed by architectural critics and scholars, but can we see anything of their ideas in architecture that's not designed by top architects? For a Euro-American civilization that prides itself as being the intellectual descendants of the ancient Greeks, is there anything significant of the Greeks in our commonplace everyday architecture?

Indra Kagic McEwen, in Socrates' Ancestor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), offers an alternative way to look at Greek architecture and partially answer the question of their legacy. McEwen conducts an examination of the philosophical origins of Greek architecture during their Pre-Classical Period (roughly 800 - 500 BCE), arguing for an intimate relationship between architecture, craftsmanship, and kosmon. Kosmon is a "rhythm or order" that is revealed through the works of expert artisans (McEwan, 42). The act of making conducted by the demiourgos, or Greek artisans, showed the divine in the universe.

This is reflected in a number of crafts, especially weaving and shipbuilding. In a fascinating analysis (McEwan, 98 - 120) she argues that the famous Greek peripteral design we all know (think: Parthenon) draws heavily on the perceived eurythmia of ship construction and the construction of the vertical Greek loom. To summarize, she posits that the Greek temple was an amalgamated manifestation of the craft forms (such as the ship and the loom) that revealed divine beauty.

So what's left of that in us? I took a random sampling of photos of buildings in and around NYU and Washington Square Park. On the surface, the conception of order and rationality that Renaissance Europeans interpreted as being central to Greek designs is very prominent. Western architecture, from colonial styles to Modernist designs, seems to have kept a rational and ordered (though not always symmetrical) form that's certainly valued for its austere nobility (especially in this selected university setting). And yet in the final photo there are some fun examples of precise expert craftsmanship just under the surface. Perhaps as a culture we do not perceive craftsmanship on a philosophical/religious level but we certainly value it on a practical level. The rigorous facade system in the final image reveals that our practical reverence is still pushing the boundaries of our technical prowess.