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As a type of creation that authentically expresses cultural values, architecture is a field that constantly changes, and these changes can become so fast that not only the architectural forms that prevail in a given time might change very quickly but even the selfsame idea of what architecture is can also be affected by very considerable modifications. In the following paragraphs I´m going to address some of the fundamental features of the Eiffel Tower, and then gradually deepen into the more primordial idea of architecture I formerly developed in Operative Traditions IV.
Very likely, the Eiffel Tower constitutes one of the most remarkable cases of the type of transformations that occur in the idea of architecture, both for the public as for architects themselves. The organizers of the 1889 World's Fair claimed that the Eiffel Tower would expose the industrial strength of France to the world, aiming to show the progresses such country obtained in metallurgical techniques and civil engineering. Two years earlier, the French government granted a subsidy that covered less than one-fifth of the construction costs, and the engineer Gustave Eiffel was to provide the rest, the equivalent of €1.3 million. When the digging of the tower´s foundations began, Eiffel affirmed that the construction aspired “to raise to the glory of modern science, and to the greater honor of French industry, an arch of triumph as striking as those that preceding generations had raised to conquerors” (1) The initial phases of the tower´s construction were considered by many as an eccentricity, mainly due to the “cold” and “skeleton-type” aesthetics of the projected structure, and also a lot of discontent emerged due the costs involved in its construction, seeming a radically extravagant enterprise in the minds of prestigious architects, writers, poets, painters and sculptors who were all proud and appealed by the romantic allure of Parisian architectural pearls like Notre Dame cathedral, the Arch of Triumph, the Sainte Chapelle, the Louvre, the Tour Saint Jacques or the dome of the Invalides. The tower initially had no other fundamental use than allowing people to climb up and have a look around, yet the later concessions for restaurants and rental of its 116 antennas generates today a turnover of about €50 million, and the “Dame de fer” (Lady of Iron) is the most visited paying monument in France, beyond the touristic revenue generated by other Parisian architectures like the Arch of Triumph or Notre Dame Cathedral.
The only technical use of the Eiffel Tower is telecommunication operations and the economic added-value of its hostelry businesses decisively relies in the high demand of touristic attraction it succeeds in generating. And even though the 330 meter height of the tower was excellently engineered by Gustave Eiffel, the structure of the tower has no engineering purpose whatsoever, since the installation of the antennas wasn´t the initial goal of its construction in 1887. So, it isn´t too preposterous to affirm that the core architectural value of the Tower Eiffel is that it attracts massive attention, and this might be very much its ultimate function, appeal and beauty for the public. In fact Gustave Eiffel declared to the daily Le Temps in 1887: “The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use”, and even though Eiffel might´ve referred in this quote to the purely utilitarian appropriateness of forms (which I shall explain below by resorting to the Aristotelian concept of substance…), the form and touristic function of the Tower Eiffel actually converge extraordinarily well, since other great architectures engineered by Gustave Eiffel, as for instance the Oporto bridge that exclusively fulfills a civil infrastructural function, receives far less touristic attention than the Tower Eiffel. Hence, this comparison between both of Eiffel´s constructions clearly demonstrates that the paramount function of Eiffel Tower is to attract attention and tourism.
In the field of architecture, the notion of constructing in order to fulfill touristic purposes is a very recent Historical idea, and in this regard the construction of the Eiffel Tower pioneered the attainment of a hallmark in the field, presenting a novel concept that many other constructions followed afterwards. The cultural influence of the Eiffel tower was so wide-ranging that even the prestigious architect Le Corbusier wrote: “The Eiffel Tower has entered the domain of architecture. In 1889 it was the aggressive expression of calculations. In 1900 the aesthetes wanted to demolish it. In 1925 it dominates the Arts Déco Exposition” (2).
Architectures like the Eiffel Tower that ultimately fulfill the function of impacting the public´s eye still maintain however reminiscences of traditional architectures, like the Roman or Gothic, which are also extremely impressive to contemplate. Therefore, one would be inclined to consider that the religious contemplation of divine symbols -which was one of the original purposes of traditional architectures- is also somehow linked to the fascination created by the portentously high Eiffel Tower, as if somehow its 330 meter altitude facilitates a final “communion with heaven”. Besides, one would also be inclined to believe that the Tower Eiffel serves very well as a worldwide center of human gathering, in a rather similar way as how the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain attracted since the 13th century pilgrims from all around Europe.
Hence, we could then guess that the Tower Eiffel represents a modern transposition of the sacred goals that often inspired the construction of pre-modern/traditional architectures, and also the fact that since World War I the Eiffel Tower serves to congregate millions of visitors every year seems to qualify the Parisian construction as an emplacement that religiously brings humans together by their sharing of the same values. But which are such values?... It´s extremely naïve to hypothesize that, at an aggregate scale, visitors are appealed by the techno-science involved in the Eiffel tower´s construction because today there are countless urban-industrial constructions that are technically superb –and even superior to those of Eiffel Tower- yet attract no attention whatsoever... Neither the mode by which the tower´s construction applied modern science induces attraction in the public because there are countless examples of superb scientific applications we handle on a daily basis that attract no touristic attention.... Is it because of its 330m height and portentous size?... Like happens in the case of guys who are very tall and big, also tall constructions tend to appeal to people because they´ve always been linked in the collective mind to the urban centers of political, religious and economic power, so this attribute could have its particular weight in the public attraction induced by the Eiffel Tower, similarly as how famous and popular individuals (politicians, celebrities, etc.) easily attract lots of public attention, not necessarily because of their specific merits or who they are, but because of what they represent. And in this regard, it’s hard to deny that the Eiffel Tower not only represents but, above all, epitomizes tourism in its highest Western expression.
The cultural transposition of medieval pilgrimage into modern tourism also demands the Eiffel Tower tourists to collect a souvenir at the end of the journey, quite like the “Compostela” document that proves that the pilgrims finished the way of St. James. And in the case of Paris, the principal city where the enlightenment cultural revolution took place in the 18th century, a photo of the tourist with Eiffel Tower in the background then shows to relatives and friends that the person who appear in the photo is a “worldly person” who “has gone around”; a person who has enriched his/her life with all the pleasures and highly refined artistic motives that impregnate the City of Lights. “Anyone who´s anyone has visited Paris!!” –as they used to say when I was a kid. Even Superman visited it at the beginning of Richard Donner´s Superman II! And the cultural influence of the Eiffel Tower is so powerful in the collective mind that a lot of guys are troubled by whether placing shelves of books or the Eiffel Tower in the background of their social media selfies.
In spite that the Eiffel Tower is very likely the most influential symbol of modern architecture, the fact that the only actual function of this construction is to attract touristic business might suggest to some that “architecture is dead”, in the same way as how the famous character of Ghostbusters, Egon, affirmed that “print is dead”… This suspicion that “architecture is dead” and that such field of work sold out its art is a suspicion that becomes even more plausible by realizing how the work of today´s prestigious architects is very much devoted to making use of cutting-edge techniques and materials in order to exclusively create visual impact, as the paradigmatic case of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain. Also, today´s so-called “architectural” projects serve very well as a surreptitious way for influential political classes to absorb public funds, in order to gain succulent commissions and reinforce their administrational control over a given economy, as pitifully exposed in the Spanish “Ciudad de la Cultura” (City of Culture), in Galicia –the region I live- which cost almost €300 million -3 times its original budget- a project that presented to the entire world a ridiculous image of Galician politics, architects, engineers and workers, draining massive amount of tax-payer money, and putting a lot of taxation in the real production economy of the region. What might be initially shocking in this case is that the Galician public has happily accepted this massive administrational robbery, to the point we can agree with Nietzsche when the German philosopher wrote: “It seems that all great things, in order to inscribe eternal demands in the heart of humanity, must first wander the earth under monstrous and terrifying masks” (3). The construction forms of the Galician “City of Culture” fulfill no other purpose than exposing a grotesque political/administrational megalomania and pretentiousness that had no positive effect on the economy, education or touristic businesses in the region, and yet –as in Nietzsche´s former quote- these constructions appear to gain the same public attraction as the appeal created in the minds of spectators by the gross and counter-natural bodybuilders who have no athletic ability and demonstrate very poor strength-power/weight ratios. Modern architecture appears to have gone in a same direction, and only its engineering aspects conserve coherence between form and function, as for instance occurs in the air conditioning, electric installations and structural design that building construction technically requires.
Yet let´s still grant this field of work with the benefit of the doubt… It would be very misleading to consider that “architecture is dead” because, deep down, it´s the concept of architecture itself that flied away and was led to other many domains of application, though not necessarily presenting itself to the public with the title “architecture”… It´s important to keep in mind that the most accurate etymology of the term `architecture´ is “organization/integration of techniques”, by always taking into account –as I presented in a former post- that “technique” and “technology” are very different things. In Operative Traditions IV, I present a study of the case of Howard Roark, the architect who is the main character from Ayn Rand´s novel The Fountainhead and in the story narrated by Rand we can also observe how Howard Roark embraces in the 1920s a modification of the concept of architecture that occurred in parallel to a change in the cultural and political values of the American public. Influential sectors, prestigious figures, renowned architects and commissioners constantly accuse Roark´s style of work of being too “engineerish”, in the sense that Roark discarded all superfluous aestheticism in his designs, and was exclusively concerned that architectural form and function perfectly converged in his productions, by integrating the genuine crafts and techniques the U.S. had excellently developed during such times. In spite of all the challenges Roark has to face in solitude, his architectures succeed in having economic added-value exclusively by themselves, and don´t require compensating their financial losses with any touristic businesses or subsidies. What´s more, to an aesthete´s eyes Roark´s productions might appear as too “squared”, “boring”, lacking picturesque decoration and stylishness, as if they were characterized by an “engineerish” touch that resembles the mathematical structuring of Eiffel Tower… And yet Roark´s architectural productions are authentic, or as German writer Ernst Jünger exposed in his early literary works, such architectures are typical… In the same order of ideas I presented in a former post, to prevent a construction project of not ending up as both a financial and energetic dump the techniques employed must correlate to the cultural values present in the organization, so it wouldn´t be too preposterous to affirm that those who judge Roark´s productions as too “squared” and “boring” might be ultimately talking about themselves, and at the end of the day this is one of the great aspects of all authentic architecture: it serves as a mirror of self-recognition.
Even though I recommend you read Ayn Rand´s novel, I´ll briefly explain what is Roark´s point … Today we go to the supermarket and we can buy a type of food that the industry calls “bread”, a type of food that is high in sugars, additives (conservatives, emulsifiers, etc.), and this bread is often sold in loafs that don´t resemble the final forms, crusts, tastes and textures that are spontaneously acquired by traditional modes of bread production, and as the common custom of eating this traditional bread requires it to be fresh and local, it doesn´t either require additives. However, the industry has easily managed to replicate the external crust of traditional bread and sells this product to the consumers as “traditional”, yet still incorporating considerable high levels of sugars and additives that allow the product withstand the industrial processes and to appeal to the appetite of urban-industrial consumers… Interestingly, the same change has occurred with the concept of “architecture”; underlying the aesthetically pleasant neo-classical buildings that are still constructed today there are many synthetics, plastics, alloys and fibers that weren´t available during the times such classical architectures were built in their heyday. So what we have here is a clear case of hilemorphism, that is to say, the assumption that the only function of matter is to fulfill a given form, as if considering that the only function of women is to serve men. In other words, hilemorphism assumes that matter has no say in the development of form and that the dynamics of matter exclusively obey timeless laws (like the Classical laws of Newtonian mechanics). This reductionist thinking about matter is perfectly correlated to the fundamental assumptions underlying the Enlightenment cultural revolution in the 17th and 18th century, which are themselves heavily rooted in the separation established by Descartes´ concept of mass (res extensa) where is eliminated the qualitative aspects of matter, this is, is eliminated the materia prima (oὐσία πρώτη) that is also equivalent to Aristotle’s concept of substance (which isn´t the same as the notion of “raw material” employed in today´s industry). This Aristotelian concept of substance derives from Latin sub-stare (literally means “that which remains beneath”) which in artistic terms express a complex set of subtle interconnectivities and qualitative correlations that dissolve the reductionist boundaries of the elements involved during a creative process. As I show in Operative Traditions IV, when it comes to rather simple architectures that must gain maximum efficacy in their functions (as for instance a brick or bell), we aren´t free to impose an arbitrary form on either the clay or bronze alloy, and ultimately the qualitative aspects of matter is what determine its final optimal form.
If we apply the former explanations to the case of the Eiffel Tower, it´s then rather easy to realize that Gustave Eiffel´s famous construction somewhat compares to the architectural goal of letting “matter sing”, similarly to what Goethe expressed when writing: “architecture is music that has merged into silence”(4)… For instance, the many qualitative metallurgic properties of the iron employed in the Eiffel Tower architecture are the Aristotelian substance that acts as the “interconnecting grid” of all construction elements involved, serving to provide the entire structure with maximum stability under perturbation and stress. It´s simply impossible to erect a 330 meter, 10.000 ton iron structure without this guarantee of stability in conditions of stress, and given a material with specific qualitative properties, there´s one –and only one- form that attains maximum energy absorption (mechanical, chemical, etc.) and stability. So, in spite that the final goal of Gustave Eiffel´s famous construction was to attract international attention, there´s something much more profound about his famous work that carries us to the old operative meaning of architecture.
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In my book Operative Traditions IV, I gradually present to the reader, for the first time in the last century, a pre-modern idea on architecture that was materially developed in the West by the Operative Freemasons. This group of initiated craftsmen and architects quickly lost their cultural and political influence in Europe after 1717, when was founded in London the Great Lodge of the new Speculative Freemasons. This cultural change essentially implied that the “Lux Natura” (light of nature) that the former Operative Freemasons aspired to unveil through craft was substantially modified by the rationalistic concept of “Enlightenment”, which no longer aspires to follow the spontaneous processes of nature´s transformations to their higher symbolic expression, but to project and impose upon nature –and also upon the nature of the human condition- highly abstract, ideological, reductionist and speculative concepts that aren´t mirrored, in fact, by the creative process that take place in the cosmos.
The essential aspect that was lost in this important cultural transformation was the ability of human beings to relate directly to the qualitative aspects of matter. This loss was then compensated with the intellectual ability to express, in rational/mathematical terms, the attributes of matter in exclusively quantitative measurements. The Industrial Revolution that emerged in England in the 1800s would´ve never happened without the aid of this deep paradigmatic change, a change that became mainly justified in the Western minds by the philosophical works of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. Modern science is fully indebted to this paradigmatic change, and still today the concept of the `qualitative´ embraced by modern science is extremely far from the concept of the `qualitative´ embraced by the Operative Freemasons… For instance, my senses can easily distinguish 200g of iron, wood, copper, from alloys such as steel or titanium, but does this mean that I´ve successfully captured their `qualitative´ attributes?... Absolutely not, even in the case I´m provided with their molecular and atomic configurations. This problem is quite the same as if someone in the street recognizes me by my face… Does this imply that such person knows me?... Absolutely not, especially if I don´t even know myself. But one of the great teachings that is inexistent in modern techno-science yet present in operative disciplines (which, as I show in my books, can still today be applied to many domains) is that matter has the potentials to evolve in a similar way as how we, as human beings, also have available the potentials to evolve in our lives towards our highest expression. Quite another thing is if we decide to embrace such potential or not during our lifetimes. But we can be quite assured that if we could have the chance of living eternally (somehow like Bill Murray´s character in the amusing film “Groundhog Day”) we would get so absolutely bored to death about living quantitatively a lot of time with all the quantitative things in the world, that we´d eventually go for the potentials of evolving towards self-knowledge.
The cosmos operates the same way, and I use the term “cosmos” here because, as far as I´ve verified many times the term “nature” tends to be conceptually problematic… To present here this problematic as briefly as possible, a zoologist who has a group of wolves trapped in a cage for behaviorist experimentation might be persuaded to believe that he is researching the “nature” of such wolves, and yet… Who knows more about the wolves, such zoologist, or a biologist like Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente who played with wolves in their congenial environment?... The answer to this question isn´t that obvious, and this is because the interpretation of the cosmos by the zoologist might be already caged in the paradigms of science employed in the laboratory. And yet the cosmos transcends close systems like laboratories and it incorporates wilderness, human civilizations and architectures. In this regard, one of the most pernicious Promethean prejudices of our times is to believe that “humans dominate the earth through machines and technology”. If we look closer, it´s rather the other way around… In the same line of thought as I wrote in a former post, the more human societies exploit natural resources and submit them to rigid techno-industrial transformations, the more these resources become geologically depleted, and this depletion then demands techno-industrial processes to squeeze the depleting resources by increasing efficiency at all levels, an increase of efficiencies that can´t be technically accomplished without also increasing at a mass level the levels of propaganda, mechanistic training in education, human surveillance and the control of the economic processes by massive supercomputers. In other words, such exploitation of the nature is accomplished not only at the expense of diminishing returns in the industry but also at the expense of diminishing human freedoms. As some say, there is no “free lunch”; the “rebound-effect” imposed on human action by the cosmos is perfectly expressed in intergenerational terms, simply by acknowledging that the levels of freedom and wealth enjoyed by the former generations was already taken from the next ones.
Whereas the exploitation of nature by modern industry rebounds in the exploitation of human nature at an aggregate level, an architecture that is constructed based on operative principles of work not only doesn´t exploit nature but also serves as a liberating work for those who participate in such construction. The word operative derives originally from the Latin term Opus/Operis and refers essentially to a type of work that aims to manifest in forms the creative potentials of nature. This discipline demands gaining a first-hand direct contact with the qualitative properties of matter, allowing the craftsmen and architects involved to eventually discover how the affirmation of material quality channels the work processes into stable forms. This channeling of energy is economically fundamental because all autonomous economic organization requires, first of all, being capable of concentrating the energy that the environment dissipates -due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics- into the most stable forms. If such concentration is not accomplished, then such economy is either affected by inflation or requires being financially indebted to external economic powers. However, if such autonomous concentration of work is successfully accomplished then the entire morphogenetic process builds up the State, this is, the most stable architecture that integrates the working skills, techniques and economic activities of the entire region. The State can be materialized in a church, temple, cathedral, palace, etc. and associated to its construction are a complex of ethical principles, human virtues, political principles and custom that are required of everyone involved in the construction, which entails that such type of architecture can´t be built unless the individuals involved also aspire to develop in parallel their own human potentials towards their highest expression.
Today´s idea of State is very often confused with “government” or “State-nation”, and yet the architectural conception of the State I describe in Operative Traditions IV is intrinsically linked to the traditional idea of the State that prevailed before all its modern conceptualizations, such as occurred in the modern case of the Leviathan (Hobbes), the historic-sociologic (Hegel), the idealist-immanent (Kant) and the positivist (Marx) interpretations of the State. The architectural conception of the State allows discovering the technical forces that determine human action in a given population, and if we apply this concept to today´s situation we´ll have to conclude that, beyond all national frontiers, the true architecture of our times is constituted by the worldwide integration of computing networks, transport infrastructures, industrial hyper-production and telecommunication systems… This architecture is the true “building” we all live in… In effect, it´s unrealistic to dissociate the way we live at an aggregate scale from the degrees of freedom imposed by this complex worldwide technical system, and if some Historian in the future aimed to discover what truly characterized humanity in 2024, they´d find much more insight about humanity´s cultural values by observation of such global technical structure than by interpreting the documents, literature and arts published during our times, similarly as how in many museums the way people think is better revealed by observation of their behavior within the museum rather than by focusing in the works of art exposed in such emplacement.
In the 21st century, such architecture has gained a global range of power, well beyond the old State-nation jurisdiction, a power linked to the cybernetic centralization of massive amounts of data on the world´s population and on the economy, and this massive amount of information can only be successfully processed by supercomputing. Obviously, there might be political classes, corporations, administrations, institutions, national governments and individuals that aspire to take advantage of this architectural power for their own interests, but like any other true architecture this one also follows dynamics of self-organization that transcends and integrates all these organizations in its constant quest for aggrandizing power and assimilation of all human action. Just like the famous Death Star of the Star Wars films, this global system is the absolute opposite of the traditional State and constitutes the ulterior development of what Nietzsche referred to in his Zarathustra as the “the coldest of all cold monsters (…) Just see how it lures them, the many-too-many! How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them!”, a system that very efficiently succeeds in channeling all energy sources and in integrating all works, economic resources and techniques available in the world. French theologian and philosopher Jacques Ellul considered this system as “autonomous”, which might suggest that it´s also deterministic and that there´s no margin for human freedom or for directing the system towards human purposes. Is that so?...
As we can all verify, in mainstream media is being promoted a massive concern about climate change, but as I´ve shown in a former post the real problem humanity is facing is that the exponential aggrandizement of today´s global architecture demands a techno-industrial growth that is inevitably crashing against the physical limits of planet earth. Even though this problem isn´t making headlines in the press, high-echelon UN technocrats are already seriously considering it, and in fact on May 2023 was organized for the first time in the European Parliament the `Beyond Growth´ conference that debated the challenge imposed by the earth´s physical limits on the future global economy, but for the most part political leaders, experts and social scientists failed to reveal the underlying cultural factors implicit in such complex poly-crisis. Very likely, the most unperceived factor in these debates is the illusion of control that permeates modern culture, this is, the belief that human action can alter the direction of architectural development, a belief that is as unrealistic as assuming that Gustave Eiffel was free to impose arbitrary forms in his constructions. In our society we tend to delegate a lot of power to politicians, economists, experts, wealthy classes, etc. because they have gained a lot of influence in the realm of public opinion, yet the underlying infrastructures of urban-industrial society that determine our actual lives can´t be directed by such groups, because such infrastructures are extremely complex, systemic and respond to many biosphere conditions that are completely out of human range. The most patent case of this impotency is that there´s no political capacity in the planet capable of returning to the maximum levels (517 Exajoules) of non-renewable global energy production of 2019, of which the global economy directly depends.
However, as a practical contribution to such critical issue an operative understanding of matter presents a radically different vision on such key problem, presenting a series of integral and multidisciplinary perspectives on the connections that exist between personal development and our capacity to envision feasible solutions to this unprecedented global issue, well beyond the limits imposed by ideologies, economic models and the hyper-specialization that permeates scientific research in academia. Obviously, it´s impossible to attain infinite economic growth in a finite planet, but even this obvious physical impossibility is limited by the materialistic understanding of matter that governs modern techno-science. Yet beyond a materialistic understanding of matter exists an operative understanding of matter that shows that material growth can be distilled towards synthetic productions that concentrate the energies liberated by the earth, hence serving all those living beings who participate in such works.
by Miguel A. Fernandez
(1)Braibant, Charles. Histoire de la Tour Eiffel. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1964, p.223.
(2)Le Corbusier. The decorative art of today. MIT Press, Year: 1987
(3)Friedrich Nietzsche. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. 2002. P. 3
(4) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Maxims and Aphorisms. Penguin Classics, 1998, 1133