Architecture and Silence

Christos P. Kakalis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429795190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book explores the role of silence in how we design, present and experi-ence architecture. Grounded in phenomenological theory, the book builds on historical, theoretical and practical approaches to examine silence as a methodological tool of architectural research and unravel the experiential qualities of the design process.

Distinct from an entirely soundless experience, silence is proposed as a material condition organically incorporated into the built and natural landscape. Kakalis argues that, either human or atmospheric, silence is a condition of waiting for a sound to be born or a new spatio-temporal event to emerge. In silence, therefore, we are attentive and attuned to the atmos-phere of a place. The book unpacks a series of stories of silence in religious topographies, urban landscapes, film and theatre productions and architec-tural education with contributed chapters and interviews with Jeff Malpas and Alberto Pérez-Gómez.

Aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and researchers in architectural theory, it shows how performative and atmospheric qualities of silence can build a new understanding of architectural experience.

Part I

Performativity

1 Hesychasm, silence and the stillness of Mount Athos

The chapter explores the role of silence in the topography of Mount Athos, a semi-independent peninsula in northeastern Greece and a world heritage UNESCO monument since 1988. In it a male monastic community is organized in a network of different structures ruled by 20 coenobitic monasteries. Entrance regulations enhance the clarity of the boundary between the inside and the outside, allowing only a specific number of male visitors to enter and interact with the natural landscape, the architecture and the ascetic life. The Athonite topography thus acquires a character of a distant, sacred/other place in which ascetics seek to practise hesychasm, a way of life based on the dynamic combination of silent prayer and communal rituals.

The relief of the peninsula is mainly mountainous.¹ Plains are rare and small in area, and the coasts are extremely rocky and steep. These conditions of geographical isolation have led to a primitive, untouched landscape inhabited by ascetics searching for solitude.² Gradually, a network of huts (kalyves), cells (kellia), sketes and 20 coenobitic monasteries was organized on Athos (built during the middle and late Byzantine period).³ In the fourteenth century Mount Athos became an important centre of hesychasm, which was intensively followed by most of the Athonites. Since then, Mount Athos has always been considered as an active field of hesychast practice in which hermits and coenobitic monks seek salvation through prayer and where pilgrims visit to contact its religious character.⁴

The unique conditions of this environment raise a number of questions that the chapter seeks to answer. What is the role of embodiment in the experience of sacred places? What is the role of silence and communal ritual in the peninsula? How are the constant repetition of the same actions, silent prayer and the journey of the outsider reflected in the organization and embodied performance of the Athonite landscape? Dealing with these questions, this study develops a new interpretation of the embodied topography of Mount Athos through the significance of silence in it.

The individual and collective experience of the Athonite landscape therefore relates to a number of different levels of familiarity experienced in a spatio-temporal field of diverse discourses. The religious qualities of monastic life interact with the temporary experience of the strangers. Today, not all visitors to Athos are pilgrims. A number of different motivations lead travellers there. People of different nationalities and religions decide to visit this ‘other’ place and spend some days interacting with the landscape. Monks and strangers are engaged in a dynamic process during which physical and psychical, material and immaterial, built and unbuilt are not experienced as different qualities, but rather as equal components. While the aim of this chapter is not to examine in an ethnographic, anthropological way how the visitors interact with the Athonite landscape and the activities in it, it takes their presence into consideration. Besides material from observation and interviews (of monks and visitors) conducted during the last seven years, the chapter traces the experience of the landscape also in published narratives of people that went there during the last 50 years.

Through its connection to prayer, silence emerges as a key and meaningful quality of this topography that carries intense religious meanings also interrelated to the communal rituals. ‘Hesychasm’ derives from the Greek word for calmness or tranquillity (ησυχία – hesychia), and it is based on the ceaseless repetition of the Jesus Prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, the sinner’). By the repetition of this 12-word phrase, the prayer may be used any time, whether the individual is alone or with other people. Its simplicity allows it to turn easily inward, leading to the desired stillness that is considered to be a path towards God with intense transformative qualities. Hesychast practice is therefore based on a cyclical temporal division, as the aim of the ascetic is to be gradually immersed in a ceaseless repetition of the Jesus Prayer and also use his body in accordance with this. The knots of his prayer rope, his komposchoini, help him to constantly repeat it. Counting the knots in their hands, the monks repeat the prayer, dividing the time according to these repetitions and being engaged in a prayerful condition. Pilgrims may also use a prayer rope, but it is not obligatory for them. Active participation in communal rituals and practice of silent prayer are interconnected in an ascetic life that greatly influences the formation and experience of architecture and landscape, opening also to the interpretation of the visitors.

The cave, the cell and the stasidi

The origins of hesychast silent prayer go back to fourth century, and it was mainly developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This is the period when the relevant psychosomatic techniques also evolved. For hesychast writers of this period, such as Nikiphoros the Hesychast, St Gregory of Sinai, and St Kallistos and St Ignatios Xanthopoulos, this technique has three main components: body posture, control of breathing and inner exploration. Therefore, the ascetic should sit at a low stool in an almost foetal position, while he may control his breathing either as a preparatory exercise or connected to the recitation of the prayer. Moreover, concentration on the physical heart (region and beating) embodies the possibility of a deeper relationship to God, opening the way to a communication with Him (theosis).⁵ This posture is related to the Old Testament’s descriptions of the life of Prophet Elijah, who is said to have prayed with his face lowered between his knees. The aim is the ‘constant supervision of the whole psycho-somatic man’ and his transformation. The scope of the hesychasts is the addiction to constant prayer even while their body is doing some everyday tasks.⁶ While traces of this technique still exist on Mount Athos, it is not compulsory, and there have been different attitudes to it in the history of hesychasm.⁷ Nevertheless, it underlines the importance of the body in hesychast life.

The theologian Kallistos Ware, trying to approach the meaning of hesychia, thus talks about an experienced silence working at different levels, from the more external to the more inward. In particular, the hesychast/hermit has to define his spatial relationship with other human beings and seclude himself in places of solitude, such as the caves of Mount Athos’s desert (First Level: Hesychia and solitude). A monk who is a member of a coenobitic community has the ability to depart from it and practise the silent prayer in his cell (Second Level: Hesychia and the spirituality of the cell). Having demarcated the outward framework of their spiritual struggles, both hermits and monks seek to ‘confine their incorporeal within their bodily house’, striving to discover ‘the ladder that leads to the Kingdom of God’ (Third Level: Hesychia and the ‘return into oneself’).⁸ A characteristic definition of hesychia that describes this journey of the individual from the exterior to the interior and his heart is given by Ierotheos Vlachos:

[Hesychia is] the peace of the heart, the undisturbed state of the mind (nous), the liberation of the heart from the thoughts (logismoi), from the passions and the influence of the environment; it is the dwelling in God. Hesychia is the only way for humans to attain theosis. External quietness is helpful so that humans can reach the noetic hesychia.⁹

In this context, Athonite monks believe that silence has two interconnected levels: the external and the internal. The former is the one that the individual can listen to, relates to the elimination of intense (idle) sounds as well as the orchestration of repetitive sonic rituals, and is reciprocally interconnected with the inner one. For them, external silence results in internal silence, and at the same time, through the benefits from the internal, the external is re-interpreted. During the moments of the desired theosis the monks argue that the individual ‘goes beyond even the boundaries of its own body’. The Athonite monks also use the word ‘grasp’ to describe this state, something that includes a sense of forcible detachment from the mundane/monastic sphere and underlines the intensity of the experience. The aim of the ascetic is to return back to the mundane sphere, transformed. Already having a theosis experience makes every next attempt a more directed movement, based on the mnemonic recollection of a previous ‘illumination’:¹⁰

At the moment of theosis, the ‘rapture’ as it is called, the individual goes beyond the limits of his body, beyond space and time. He lives in a condition of a vibrating voiceless presence, an ecstatic situation. It is only through silence that this peak event can be expressed.¹¹

Therefore, one can speak of three different modes of Athonite hesychast silent prayer, depending on the way it is practised: a more ‘structured’ individual one, one shared between the members of a monastic community during rituals, and a freer one practised spontaneously during the course of the whole day (a state of constant inner invocation that may also happen during the communal rituals). Through the more ‘strenuous’ and structured practice of silent prayer the ascetic aims to acquire the constant invocation of the prayer that follows him during his daily life, giving a sense of order and stillness to his interaction with the world. Interestingly, these modes of silent prayer influence individuals’ perception of the environment and its design and organization. Constant invocation of the prayer may result in a sense of detachment from the mundane world, a gradual movement towards the interior of the self and preparation for the possible communion with the divine, something that can be also supported by body posture (foetal, kneeling, prostrations) and breathing.

These levels of hesychia illuminate the role of silence in the Athonite topography. Silence demarcates the personal sphere of the monks, who prefer quiet places such as the desert or their cells. They try neither to talk nor to hear more words than necessary. Silence is not similarly perceived in all the parts of the peninsula.¹² Hence, whereas silence in the desert is intense and mainly atmospheric (mostly connected to ‘natural’ phenomena and for some outsiders even ‘unbearable’), in the case of a coenobitic monastery silent prayer is mixed with the different phenomena found in it, suggesting a different aural-scape in which human and atmospheric silences are dynamically incorporated.¹³ Silent prayer is shared between different individuals who seek to constantly practise it. Communal rituals and the spaces in which they take place are also organized to allow for this shared invocation to keep happening. In the case of the monastery, the monk is simultaneously alone and an active member of the community, something that leads to a dynamic combination between the structured and freer practices of hesychast prayer, being also reflected, as we will see, in architecture and natural landscape.

In this context, part of the mountainous environment of the Athonite peninsula, caves, play an important role in the topography, as hesychast life in them has been one of the forms of monastic practice on Athos for more than a thousand years. They are the pores of a deserted mountainous rough relief whose dynamics attracted ascetics possibly even during the seventh century, opening as an ‘antilandscape’ that, according to Veronica della Dora, embodied qualities of negative (or apophatic) theology. It is the absolute ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Performativity
• Part II Communication
• Index