Representations of Gigantism in Art and Architecture - Essay Example

 Representations of Gigantism in Art and Architecture Size is one of the first impressions that one gets of a building, or a painting, or a sculpture, because our visual sense is generally the one that works over the greatest distances. However, size is also quite relative, even within the same viewer. When I was a young child, I remember visiting my grandparents’ three-story house, which also had a basement. The corridors and stairways never seemed like they were going to end. The back yard yawned away from the house, with enough room for a badminton net, and seemed quite cavernous. This, of course, was from the perspective of a four-year-old boy who lived in a townhouse with his parents and had a brick patio instead of a backyard. Several years ago, I drove by that house for the first time in years. Yes, the house was still three stories, but it was very narrow: it looked more like a grain silo than a mansion. The yard was somewhat larger than most around it, but was not the vast landscape that I remembered from my time around it as a child. It did not seem appreciably more spacious than the blocks of row houses that had grown up on some of the other blocks. Clearly, there was a great deal of difference between objective measures of the house’s size, such as square footage and number of stories, and subjective impressions of the same building. And so it is with architecture designed for the public. In the United States, the White House was designed to serve as a mansion for the nation’s President. It was designed to be impressive in terms of size and stature, befitting the importance of its chief occupant. However, it is far smaller than the castles that held the reigning monarchs of the nations of Europe in the same era in which the White House was designed. While the office of the Presidency was supposed to come with a great deal of prestige, it had far less privilege and entitlement associated with it than the inherited titles of royalty that were, in the early 1800’s, the most common form of government. One word that is used to refer to a particular degree of size is “gigantic.” Small children use this word when they see blimps up close, or skyscrapers, or magical characters in cartoons. Objects (and beings) of such excessive size are beheld at once with wonder and fear, a combination which sometimes is described with the word “awe.” There are several ways in which the concept of the gigantic can engage the senses. As was referenced in the opening anecdote, there is always a sense of comparison that goes on in defining the gigantic – and this sense is always accompanied by a stark sense of contrast between the size of the viewer, and the normal objects with which the viewer is generally familiar, and the size of the object in question. The idea does not have to refer to a static object, of course: the ways in which the genie Aladdin assumes such gigantic proportions in the popular Disney movie has much more to do with the swirling, undulating motions that the genie makes, than with the actual size that the genie ends up having. It can have to do with the scope of a story, not just the size of a particular painting’s frame. When it comes to architecture, the idea of the gigantic goes back almost as far as recorded human history itself. The Old Testament refers to an early attempt to build a tower that would reach all the way to God, also known as the Tower of Babel. This happened not too many generations after, according to the narrative, God sent a worldwide flood to exterminate the sinful population of the earth, with the exception of one man and his family. When the Tower of Babel was under construction, according to the narrative, God intervened and made each worker speak a different language from the ones around him, and the resulting confusion led to the scattering of cultures around the Near and Middle East and, eventually, the world. However, as the early empires developed, such as the Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian, gigantic buildings were constructed to demonstrate the power and wealth and, at times, the at least semi-divine status of the ruler. In the twentieth century, no leader sought to revive the mores of ancient cultures in his attempts to reach world domination than did Adolf Hitler. His aim, of course, was to bring into existence the Third Reich, modeled in many ways on the glory of ancient Rome. However, because Romanization was not part of the German experience, the architecture that Hitler developed was more in the neoclassical style, and also took in more of the Greek tradition than the Roman: part of the Aryan myth was that the Greeks were the racial ancestors to the Germans (Scobie 1990, p. 92). His counterpart in Italy, Benito Mussolini was able to easily capitalize on the legacy of Roman greatness in his own architecture, but Hitler had to be somewhat more creative in establishing the myth of Greek ancestry and staying somewhat away from the complete acceptance of Roman styles, because of the memory that the German had of overthrowing the Roman Empire. One of the earliest buildings that Hitler set about erecting for the glory of his empire was the Deutsche Stadion, the focal point of the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Hitler’s idea was to hold all of the Olympic contests in this stadium, with all of the subjected nations of the world being forced to send their athletes to Germany every four years. This foreshadowed Hitler’s desire to rule the world years before he ever stated that goal explicitly (Scobie 1990, p. 80). While Hitler’s inspiration was the Roman Colosseum, the Deutsche Stadion dwarfed the Colosseum in size: this was but one of many instances in which Hitler took a world-famous monument as his inspiration and then built something much larger to show German superiority (Scobie 1990, p. 91). The Nazi Party held that architecture would have three primary roles in its bolstering of their imperial order: stage, symbol, and the didactic. Architects were supposed to design buildings that served a particular function but also had a larger idea in mind. One example of this was the House of German Art. It did house art, but it also demonstrated a form, style and design reflecting the Aryan ideas. As a result, what might have been another museum instead took on a secondary role, acting also as a sort of temple dedicated to the kind of art that was acceptable in Germany (Helmer 1985, p. 22). One aspect of Roman architecture that Hitler did feel comfortable emulating was the use of colossal size to intimidate the viewer. As Albert Speer said, “The Romans built arches of triumph to celebrate the big victories won by the Roman Empire, while Hitler built them to celebrate victories he had not yet won” (Scobie 1990, pp. 133-34). The Nazis designed and erected a number of military memorials on the eastern border of the Reich. This was similar to the Roman practice of building trophies and memorials on its borders both to celebrate, but also to serve as a warning to those who thought of attacking. Wilhelm Kries’ Soldatenhalle is an example of this trend. The purpose of this building was to advance the Third Reich’s glorification of war, the self-sacrifice of the true patriot, and the courage that goes into any struggle. The primary architectural elements of the Soldatenhalle were Roman. The main hall had a barrel vault, and the crypt underneath had a groin vault. The generals shown in that crypt in effigy were intended to make up a modern pantheon. The bones of Frederick the Great, the great Prussian leader who was said to have started the development of greatness in Germany, were also to be put into this crypt. In the perspective of hindsight, people have viewed the gigantic dimensions of Hitler’s architecture as signs of his own megalomania, if not outright dementia. However, at the time when they were built, Hitler had strung together some amazing victories, some through the use of military and power and some through the mere use of intimidation. It is true that the Roman Empire lasted for centuries and was vastly more successful than Hitler’s attempt at world domination. However, when Augustus Caesar was embarking on the first of the great Roman building campaigns, he had no more skins on the wall than Hitler – it was simply the result that turned out differently. When Speer was working to bring Hitler’s dreams onto blueprints, he demonstrated none of the skepticism than he would later in his memoirs (Scobie 1990, p. 136). And so if Hitler’s plans for world domination had indeed come to fruition, it would have been reasonable to expect a worldwide building campaign much like what the Romans erected throughout their own empire. The idea behind this architecture comes from a confident sense of entitlement to rule over others. As Vergil wrote in Aeneid, “Remember, Roman, to exercise dominion over nations. These will be your skills: to impose culture on peace, to spare the conquered and to wear down the proud” (6.851-853). This line of thinking was quite parallel to the ideas expressed in Nazi propaganda before the Second World War. Hitler believed that the German cities of his own time did not have any central public monuments, or any area of focus for communal life. His ideal city was to be of moderate size, in keeping with the pre-industrial values of the Nazi Party. Such buildings as the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum were, for the Roman people, signs of the empire’s strength. Hitler wrote that “[a]rchitecture is not only the spoken word in stone, it is the expression of the faith and conviction of a community, or else it signifies the power, greatness and fame of a great man or ruler” (Helmer 1985, p. 111). In his speech entitled “The Buildings of the Third Reich,” given in September 1937, he asserted that the Third Reich’s new buildings would not only show the authority of the Nazi regime, but also give “gigantic evidence of the community” (Scobie 1990, p. 79). And so when the general plans for the redesign of Berin were announced, in October of 1937, they were based on Roman planning ideas. Speer designed a city was a major north-south axis, joined at right angles by a major east-west axis. On the north side of this intersection was planned a gigantic forum of about 35 hectares. Around this forum would sit several buildings of the most immense dimensions, both physically and politically: there would be a huge, domed Volkshalle on the north side, Hitler’s new palace on the south and west sides, and the new High Command of the Armed Forces building on the east side. The forum inside those buildings was designed to contain one million people. The design of this forum was copied for future cities that the Germans would occupy, but with smaller dimensions. The purpose of this forum was to create a sense of maiestas imperii (the Majesty of the Empire). As one might expect, the role of the gigantic in city planning does not only have to do with buildings. A great deal of city planning has to do with how to accommodate a huge number of people in a relatively small geographical place. During the past three decades, cities have moved from being merely industrial centers to also serve as the command centers of financial empires, which lead to an entirely different form of infrastructure and development. These cities now may contain multiple centers instead of just one, with urban areas seemingly glued or Legoed together instead of carefully designed and planned. Throughout the world, there are now over twenty mega-city regions, each of which containing more than ten million people. There are almost 450 city regions that have over one million people. If you consolidate these 470 areas, they have over one billion people, or about 20% of the entire population of the earth, in a percentage of the earth’s surface that is far smaller (“Size”). Over time, the largest twenty areas will continue to become denser, developing into regions that contain as many as 50 million residents, if not even more. These dense regions will have a significant impact on global climate change and the ecological balance of the entire planet. Tokyo is currently the most populous of these mega-city regions. Its major time of expansion came in the years directly following the Second World War. Almost half of the city has been built on landfill, which has filled in part of the Tokyo Bay in order to make room for all of the new people. This may sound somewhat risky, but the Japanese government has already implemented policies to ensure only the most modest of growth rates, and these policies are helped by the low Japanese birth rate. However, the likelihood of earthquakes throughout Japan makes this mega-city a risky place to live. This has not deterred, though, the 34 million residents of the area have placed their trust in it. The density creates traffic so intense that 80% of all business commuters use public transportation to go to work, rather than use the crowded highway system. The Tokyo city planners are looking to maximize the efficiency of the area by creating even denser clusters of development near the city center and gentrifying the waterfront by Tokyo Bay (“Size”). Mexico City, as a mega-city region, has about half of the population of Tokyo (18 million), but has increased tenfold in population and area since 1940. This area generates over 25% of Mexico’s wealth each year, luring people in from the rural parts of the country to work. Mexico City faces more administrative hurdles than does Tokyo. Both the Federal District and the State of Mexico – independent governing entities – have administrative boundaries in the city, which makes the coordination of infrastructure and city services a sometimes maddening tale of red tape and administrative infighting that leaves the residents as the true losers. This confusion has led to loopholes in such areas as law enforcement: groups of bandits have felt so free to rove the city without being arrested for their crimes that a cadre of private-security firms has sprung up, and the wealthier residents have built gated compounds around their residential neighborhoods and the commercial properties where their businesses are based. Also, the Mexican government promotes the use of cars instead of mass transit, which has led to dreadful air quality, and incredibly high levels of traffic congestion (“Size”). Sao Paulo is the financial capital of Brazil, and has an area the size of Los Angeles and Shanghai. Since 1950, the population has doubled, including a 9.2% growth rate in the last decade. The boundaries are in a constant state of fluctuation, with the city pushing into the tropical Tiete river valley. The haphazard, unplanned growth has had the result of having squatter settlements end up being very close to the high-rise buildings populated by the very rich. Six million cars drive around the streets of the city, and just over half of the population uses their own private transportation wherever they go. The result has been traffic giving people in the suburbs four-hour commutes, and resulting in dreadful air quality. The squatters’ residences have threatened the cleanliness of the city’s water table, which threatens the water supply and sewage system for the entire mega-city region. What would the subways of Tokyo, and the smog of Mexico City, and the immensity of the Deutsche Stadion have in common? While Hitler’s architecture was designed with intentional grandeur in mind, the various responses of the different mega-cities to the challenges of highly dense populations also show the diverse levels of quality and wealth available to those planners. The cultural value of utilitarian efficiency is part of the Japanese way of thinking, and this efficiency has taken the form of tiny apartments, huge projects for mass transit development and improvement, to keep people moving in the gigantic city. In contrast stands Mexico City, where the corruption from the oil industry keeps the government behind such ideas as driving one’s own car in a city of 18 million. The oil profits may indeed go up, but the quality of life will decline, as anyone who has looked at the smog on Mexico City’s skyline can attest. And so a city like Tokyo demonstrates a greater sense of power and victory over its obstacles than a place like Mexico City. The gigantic also has its place in performing arts. While a small child walking through the Deutsche Stadion or seeing, from above, the vast transportation networks crisscrossing Tokyo, it is performance art that generates the most visceral response. While architecture can generate emotional responses, performance art fascinates us on a level that architecture cannot reach. The earliest forms of entertainment that a child can experience come in the form of stories told by those raising us. As young children, we imagine the details of those stories in our minds while our parents tell them to us, and performance art is one way that those stories can visually come to life. Cirque du Soleil was one of the first examples of performance art to take the traditional stage and expand its boundaries in a number of directions, creating a number of innovative shows that have impressed audiences worldwide. “The Sultan’s Elephant” is another example of taking the boundaries of the stage and giving them unprecedented scale. The stage consists of a moving elephant that goes throughout the city, rather than being in one place. It is forty feet high and weighs 42 tons. As it moves through a city, a group of puppeteers and circus acts performs alongside it, narrating the story of the Sultan who dreamed of a little girl, and set out to find her with an elephant who could travel throughout time. The day before the show begins, a crashed “flying saucer” is found in the city where the performance takes place, and, the next day, the elephant emerges (“The Sultan’s Elephant”). As one might expect, this is quite an expensive production. The budget, just for the London performance, was said to be £1 million. Because of the distances traveled by the show, such various organizations as the City of Westminster, the office of the Mayor of London, and the Arts Council of England all had to sign off on various parts of the performance. When the spaceship “crashed” and did actual damage to the surrounding pavement, people walking by were astonished, because they had not read of the coming show, or did not associate the crash with the show that was to begin the next day. On the same day that the elephant arrived, a giant marionette came out of the “crashed” rocket; the marionette was the girl that the Sultan had seen in his dreams. The girl then met up with the elephant. Afterward, the elephant wandered around a city square, while the marionette rode around London on the top level of a double-decker bus. The next day, the elephant made it to Trafalgar Square, where it rested and had lunch. The marionette rode a crane to sit on top of the elephant’s trunk. A parade went back to the Horseguards Parade ground, and the sultan was on top of the elephant with a group of dancers. On the last day came the Grand Finale. The marionette climbed into the rocket, which “took off” from the ground. However, after the smoke cleared, the rocket was still there. When a crane moved in and took off the top of the rocket, though, there was no marionette: the girl had traveled in time again (“The Sultan’s Elephant”). As one might expect, this performance required significant cooperation from the local authorities. Each morning, a police escort accompanied the trucks bringing the marionette and the elephant to its early-morning sites. Many stoplights and lampposts had to be removed temporarily so that the elephant could pass through (“The Sultan’s Elephant”). And so what was the purpose of all of this infrastructure? How is this gigantic performance art any different from any other romantic story on the cinematic screen, or told in verse? The primary difference has to do with the communal spontaneity of such an event. While many of the viewers were likely well-informed about the event and its particulars, in a mega-city such as London, a vast number of the viewers’ introduction to the piece came not on a program or on a radio advertisement, but in seeing a gigantic elephant wandering down the street, or watching a sixteen-foot-tall marionette parade through the streets, or seeing a spaceship crash into the ground not far away. It brought Londoners together in a way that no stage musical could, and no television show could. The theme of a man pursuing his love so wholeheartedly was placed on the largest of all screens for an immense public to see, to sympathize with, and to enjoy. And so one last purpose for the gigantic is this: to evoke visceral truths about a community. Hitler’s storm troopers would not have welcomed a whimsical elephant bearing a love-struck sultan any more than today’s British would welcome a leader promoting world conquest. The gigantic evokes these truths and publishes them in such large letters that the whole world takes notice. Works Cited Helmer, Stephen, 1985. Hitler’s Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Scobie, Alexander, 1990. Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. “Size.” 2007. Accessed 28 July 2007 online at http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/globalcities/size.shtm “The Sultan’s Elephant.” 2007. Accessed 28 July 2007 online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sultan%27s_Elephant Read More