Transcendence and interiority in architecture : a study of Hagia Sofia, 532-537

The late historian Robin Evans, takes up the debate symbolised between Wblfflin, proposing that meaning is directly accessible through the form of a building, and Wittkower, arguing that meaning lies behind the form of architecture, in other texts and ideas. The focus of their argument is the centralised church of the Renaissance, which holds a special place in the history of architecture for all three historians. Evans' argument makes detours into the histories of theology, geometry and mathematics attempting to find how architecture participates with these fields. He concludes that architecture, in its singular artistic physicality "suspends our disbelief in the ideal", offering a world that does not reflect culture, in all its fullness, but rather supplements culture's incompleteness. Architecture, like art is able to resolve that which in society and in other fields remains a contradiction, giving a picture (albeit fictional) of a harmonious and unified order. Does architecture aspire towards transcendence, if so, what is transcendental value in architecture? In this essay I want to turn to Hagia Sofia (Istanbul, 532-537), a church that marks the beginning of a Christian empire relocated to the East of Rome, in Constantinople, built one thousand years before the Renaissance churches; and a building that symbolises the shift towards a domed centralised form, away from a basilica form. Hagia Sofia is an architecture, observed and described in an almost devotional manner, as though addressing the architecture of the church is equivalent to a pious person addressing the church itself, and more significantly, addressing the Divine figure of God, through the architecture of the church. What role does Hagia Sofia play in the kind of artistic mastery that Evans is proposing?

Hagia Sofia (532–537AD) : a study of centrality, interiority and transcendence in architecture

The study by Robin Evans of the centralised churches of the Renaissance explores the idea of centrality, and argues that architecture does not simply invest in one geometric centre. Evans’s analysis makes detours into the histories of theology, geometry and mathematics attempting to find how architecture participates with these fields. In a footnote, he suggests that architecture in its singular artistic physicality ‘suspends our disbelief in the ideal’, offering a world that does not reflect culture, in all its fullness, but rather supplements culture’s incompleteness. This idea reiterates psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Kristeva that qualify the notion of transcendence with the psychoanalytic concept of transference. Architecture, like art, is able to resolve that which in society and in other fields remains a contradiction, giving a picture (albeit fictional) of a harmonious and unified order and wholeness. In this essay, I turn to Hagia Sofia (532–537AD) in present-day Istanbul, a church that marks the beginning of a Christian empire relocated to Constantinople, East of Rome, and built one thousand years before the Renaissance churches discussed by Evans. Hagia Sofia is a building that symbolises the shift towards a domed centralised form, away from a basilica form, and a building that develops an innovative interior. Hagia Sofia is usually observed and described in a devotional manner, as though addressing the architecture of the church is equivalent to a pious person addressing the church itself, and more significantly, addressing the Divine figure of God, through the architecture of the church. Its influence on Islamic mosque design has been noted. What rôle does Hagia Sofia play in the kind of artistic mastery that Evans is proposing, and what other dimensions of centrality and transcendence in architecture are offered by a study of Hagia Sofia?

Australians' organic food beliefs, demographics and values

Purpose – To examine consumers' beliefs about organic foods and their relationship with socio-demographics and self-transcendence (universal, benevolence) personal values.

Design/methodology/approach – A random questionnaire-based mail survey of 500 Australian (Victorian) adults (58 per cent response) was used. The questionnaire included items on organic food beliefs, the importance of self-transcendence values as guiding principles in life, and socio-demographics. Statistical analyses included cross-tabulations of organic food beliefs by socio-demographics and multiple regression analyses of positive organic food beliefs with personal value and socio-demographic items as the independent variables.

Findings – The majority of participants believed organic food to be healthier, tastier and better for the environment than conventional food. However, expense and lack of availability were strong barriers to the purchasing of organic foods. Generally, women were more positive about organic food than men (e.g. women were more likely to agree that organic food has more vitamins/minerals than conventional food). The personal value factor related to nature, environment and equality was the dominant predictor of positive organic food beliefs, followed by sex. These predictors accounted for 11 per cent of the variance.

Research limitations/implications – A survey response bias needs to be taken into account. However, the response rate was adequate for reporting and differences in age and education between participants and the Victorian population were taken into account in data presentation. Future understanding of consumers' use of organic foods will require the inclusion of a fairly extensive set of potential influences.

Practical implications – Communication appeals based on psychographics may be a more effective way to alter consumers' beliefs about organic foods than those based on demographic segmentation.

Originality/value – To the best of one's knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between personal values, socio-demographics and organic food beliefs in a random population sample. This study is relevant to producers, processors and retailers of organic food and those involved with food and agricultural policy.

Technological disadvantage of the digital age

Debates continue about the relative benefits, costs and risks of the diffusion of computer-based technologies throughout society and schooling. One area that has received considerable attention is gender equity. Early work on gender and computers focused on differences between male and female access and use (e.g. Huff, Fleming & Cooper, 1992; Kirkman, 1993; Morritt, 1997; Nelson & Cooper, 1997; Sofia, 1993), with concerns focused on the potential for girls to be disadvantaged. In some respects, it is arguable that problems of gender equity in schools with respect to computers have been overcome. For example, in a small study I conducted in two New Zealand senior primary classrooms in 2003, I found that both boys and girls were motivated to use computers and appeared to have equal opportunities to access computers in the classroom. The students in my study expressed a belief in the importance of using computers, and this belief can also be discerned from educational policy and media coverage.
In this paper I argue that, although gender by itself no longer appears to be a source of disadvantage in terms of access to and use of computers in schools, many questions about technology, schooling and power relations still remain unanswered. I present two alternative viewpoints on the new digital age. First, I explore Melanie Stewart Millar’s (1998) analysis of digital discourse as one which reproduces the power of white, middle-class, educated, well-paid males, and excludes anything else it considers ‘Other’. Second, I review arguments that the digital age has provided sites for the transcendence of traditional hierarchies and inequalities (e.g. Spender, 1995). I conclude that, despite the discrepancies between these two viewpoints, both concur that technological disadvantage will exacerbate any existing inequality that might result from intersections of identity categories, such as, gender, ethnicity, age, and socio-economic status.

Sveta Bogorodica (The Church of the Holy Mother), Zavoj, Macedonia : writing about an insignificant vernacular building

Sveta Bogorodica (Church of the Holy Mother), Zavoj, is a small church built in 1934 in a village in the Republic of Macedonia. It presented a quintessential architectural division between a richly ornamented interior and a pure white formal exterior. The paper will examine the question of tradition in relation to architecture. What of the formal Byzantine architectural tradition is inherited in this folk vernacular church building? Secondly, tradition as an inherited liturgical ritual and ceremony. How are these two forms of tradition autonomous or intertwined, and how the question about transcendence in architecture pursued in the 2005 paper on Hagia Sofia might be understood within the parameters offered by this church building, will be explored in the paper .

Portals of the mind

The idea of a gateway or portal to another world is common in myth and fantasy, and, obviously, far older than the use of the same notion in computing. While computing portals take researchers to other domains of data, the use of portals in myths is often far more complex. In creation myths, the passing of portals has immense consequences for humankind, as in Adam and Eve's expulsion from their carefree existence in the Garden of Eden (unleashing the world's woes upon their descendants), and in the carrying away of Persephone by Pluto into the Underworld (leaving a legacy of cold and sunless months each year). In other types of myths, and in the fantastic tales they have bequeathed, portals provide heroes with strange and wonderful adventures, and with experiences that leave heroes irrevocably changed. This article will now explore these types of portals in more detail.The idea of a gateway or portal to another world is common in myth and fantasy, and, obviously, far older than the use of the same notion in computing. While computing portals take researchers to other domains of data, the use of portals in myths is often far more complex. In creation myths, the passing of portals has immense consequences for humankind, as in Adam and Eve's expulsion from their carefree existence in the Garden of Eden (unleashing the world's woes upon their descendants), and in the carrying away of Persephone by Pluto into the Underworld (leaving a legacy of cold and sunless months each year). In other types of myths, and in the fantastic tales they have bequeathed, portals provide heroes with strange and wonderful adventures, and with experiences that leave heroes irrevocably changed. This article will now explore these types of portals in more detail.

Technological efficacy: a new identity category

Debates continue about the relative benefits, costs and risks of the diffusion of computer-based technologies throughout society and schooling. One area that has received considerable attention is gender equity. Early work on gender and computers focused on differences between male and female access and use (e.g. Huff, Fleming & Cooper, 1992; Kirkman, 1993; Morritt, 1997; Nelson & Cooper, 1997; Sofia, 1993), with concerns focused on the potential for girls to be disadvantaged. In some respects, it is arguable that problems of gender equity in schools with respect to computers have been overcome. For example, in a small study I conducted in two New Zealand senior primary classrooms in 2003, I found that both boys and girls were motivated to use computers and appeared to have equal opportunities to access computers in the classroom. The students in my study expressed a belief in the importance of using computers, and this belief can also be discerned from educational policy and media coverage. In this paper I argue that, although gender by itself no longer appears to be a source of disadvantage in terms of access to and use of computers in schools, many questions about technology, schooling and power relations still remain unanswered. I present two alternative viewpoints on the new digital age. First, I explore Melanie Stewart Millar’s (1998) analysis of digital discourse as one which reproduces the power of white, middle-class, educated, well-paid males, and excludes anything else it considers ‘Other’. Second, I review arguments that the digital age has provided sites for the transcendence of traditional hierarchies and inequalities (e.g. Spender, 1995). I conclude that, despite the discrepancies between these two viewpoints, both concur that technological disadvantage will exacerbate any existing inequality that might result from intersections of identity categories, such as, gender, ethnicity, age, and socio-economic status, and that in this digital age, technological efficacy is arguably a new identity category.

Beyond God the father : the metaphysical in a physical world

[No Abstract]

African heart, Eastern mind : the transcendent experience through improvised music

[No Abstract]

Generic architecture in religious worship

The research established that the architectural outcome is often determined by functional needs of the denominational group and more importantly the way they experience transcendence: becoming either an outwardly visible, devoted sacred space or one that denies architectural expression and becomes an ostensible virtual sacred space.

Beyond

Using the metaphor of transcendence in his work Beyond, Daniel Armstrong takes us to other-worldly experiences via the anecdotal behaviours of people using a telescope. Each person looking into the telescope reveals more about themselves through their physical viewing behaviours than the universe they are attempting to look at or into. Armstrong’s work examines that infi nite and unsettled space between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘what might be out there’.

Consumption and the meaning of life

Through an analysis of data from depth interviews with modern American consumers, we examine whether and how individuals quest for life’s meaning through consumption. Our analysis identifies three worldviews that are differently related to the experience of transcendence through consumption. A rationalist worldview is revealed as being unrelated to such a pursuit. It contrasts two magical worldviews held by most informants in which consumption objects are infused with supernatural and metaphysical beliefs that animate life’s meaning for them. Our discussion highlights how recognition of magical worldviews contributes to consumer theory, methods, and concepts of investigation.

Monumental vision : a confrontation with the image of the Eternal Return

"Monumental Vision” is a nuanced summary of Nietzschean nihilism and the Eternal Return as rite of passage for free subjects and as condensed image of speculative intelligence proper. Utilizing Gerhard Richter’s “Sheet 692” from Atlas, a series of photographs of the mountains and lake at Sils Maria, Switzerland, as summary judgment of the limit imposed by this condition on all systems of representation, this form of vision discloses the chiasmus embedded in consciousness itself. In constantly revisiting Sils, the very location where Nietzsche “suffered” the vision of the Eternal Return, Richter has engaged repeatedly this origin for what has come into his work via Nietzsche – that is, an elective veil that refuses all compromises with transcendence until such is merged with immanence.

As situated amidst modernist “ideology as intellection”, and subsequent nascent forms of anti-modernism, the Eternal Return as image also signals the return of the Kantian “aesthetic-teleological” synthesis in non-discursive or purely visual agency. As an elective form of aesthetic vision, and as image of time insofar as it registers an overwhelming externality (Other) that nominally swallows and empowers the subject at once, this excoriating sense of universal praxis underwrites artistic and architectural production of the highest order, renegotiating concepts of the paradigmatic.

Utilizing Georg Simmel’s late work on Rembrandt (1916) and his encounter with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), the essay suggests that by the 1920s the avant-garde premises of modernism had already come under attack by an ahistorical and synoptic vision here denoted “monumental vision,” which also contains the imprint of eschatological time (invoking a schism present in rationality as such). The two readings of this image perpetrated by Karl Löwith in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, 1935), or the cosmological and the ethical, while considered irreconcilable by Löwith, have since the 1960s been recalibrated through the figure of the event to pose possible scenarios out of the stalemate of the confrontation between Self and Other (ipseity and alterity) buried within this image as limit. In this manner, the image of the Eternal Return stands at the boundary between two forms of time (or two worlds) and signals the irreducible confrontation present in speculative thought and the necessity of closure through an aesthetic vision that produces a unitary field for all creative acts.

Notably, Nietzsche’s startling vision from Zarathustra suggests that the limit imposed by the Eternal Return is also a mask for an austere condition within subjectivity closely resembling the conundrum of Fichte’s I facing I, or thought turned toward thought itself (absolute subjectivity as cipher for Being). In Alenka Zupančič’s reading, in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003), the Eternal Return effectively contains a secret formal function that grinds all “error” to dust – a highly suggestive interpretation that also neutralizes the schism introduced by Löwith between the cosmological and the ethical.