The Architect as Magician

Albert C. Smith, Kendra Schank Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138326712
• eBook ISBN: 9780429831447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Architect as Magician explores the connection between magic and architecture. There is a belief that a greater understanding of the meaning of magic provides insights about architecture and architects' design processes. Architects influence the effects of nature through the making of their buildings. In an analogous condition, magicians perform rituals in an attempt to influence the forces of nature. This book argues that architects could gain much by incorporating ideas from magic into their design process.

The book demonstrates through historical and current examples the important influence magic has had on the practice of architecture. The authors explain how magic helps us to understand the way we infuse architecture with meaning and how magic affects and inspires architectural creation.

Aimed at architects, students, scholars and researchers, The Architect as Magician helps readers discover the ambiguous and spiritual elements in their design process.

1 Introduction

Figure 1.1 The Building of the Temple Begun, Author: Unknown, PD US expired.

The Architect as Magician proposes that architects can enrich their design processes by examining the traditions of magic. It suggests that many architects have lost essential elements by eliminating the ideas of magic from their architecture. This loss is important because concepts of magic may provide architects with crucial analogies and metaphors needed to enchant a building’s inhabitants and aid in an understanding of inspiration and creativity. Partially responsible for this loss has been a disenchantment brought about by science and rational thinking that is evident in modernity, leading to a gradual decline in mystery and magic.¹ In contrast to disenchantment, since the seventeenth century most philosophers define enchantment as the residual, subordinate “other” to modernity’s scientific, rational, secular and progressive side.² Some, such as the historian Jason Josephson-Storm, have questioned the emergence of disenchantment, labeling it as a “myth.” He takes the position that the belief in magic or mysticism did not decline in the West.³ Moreover, many theorists of disenchantment, including the sociologist Max Weber, were well aware of modern magical and occult movements and engaged with them.⁴ Neither Weber nor the social anthropologist James George Frazer envisioned a rigid divide between rationality and magical thinking, and they did not describe a need for “re-enchantment” to undo disenchantment.⁵ Josephson-Storm believes we should reinterpret Weber’s idea of disenchantment as referring to the sequestering and professionalization of magic.⁶ The political theorist Jane Bennett also challenges the disenchantment of modernity thesis put forward by Weber. Her work points to new sources of enchantment in our lives today. She describes a wide range of sources of enchantment, such as in nature, but also in modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. Bennett notes that enchantment offers us a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life.⁷

Although historical examples establish that enchantment has been continually evident in architecture, the discussion will propose that architects need to pursue enchantment in their work. Architects need to understand that to enchant means to exert magical influence upon, to bewitch, lay under a spell; also to endow with magical powers or properties; to charm, delight, enrapture.⁸ For architects, magical enchantment engages concepts of wonder, myth, ritual, the divine and the spiritual, and is demonstrated by the phenomenological experience of architectural space.

The art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote about how once a constructed shelter could keep the rain out and offer protection from predators, early humans turned their interest to keeping ghosts at bay and establishing a connection to the heavens.⁹ All of these threats to humans were understood as forces of nature. It has been the architects throughout history who have attempted to control these forces. In an analogous condition, it is the primary purpose of magicians to use their skills in an attempt to influence natural events. In describing the foundations of societies’ belief in magic, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote:

Early man seeks above all to control the course of nature for practical ends, and he does it directly, by rite and spell, compelling wind and weather, animals and crops to obey his will. Only much later, finding the limitations of his magical might, does he in fear or hope, in supplication or defiance, appeal to higher beings: that is to demons, ancestor-spirits or gods.¹⁰

It is possible to understand the similarities between Malinowski’s view of the evolution of magic and Gombrich’s writing on the beginnings of architecture. While the objectives of magicians and architects can be compared, recently there have been suspicions about connecting the two. This suspicion may be because, in contemporary society, magic is often viewed as the art of illusion primarily used for entertainment. Such magic is demonstrated by a performer, usually dressed in a tuxedo, pulling a rabbit out of a hat. This study is not envisioned to discuss the sleight-of-hand of the illusionist nor advocate for occult practices, but rather the magical practices that have offered architects the possibility of controlling the natural world through mystical, paranormal or supernatural means. The work considers magic in relation to architecture by considering the critical components of magic such as enchantment, the spiritual, rituals, and imagination, and concludes with concepts of re-enchantment that may guide architects’ design processes and infuse their architecture with greater meaning.

Figure 1.2 A Witch Casting Spells, Source: Wellcome, CC-BY-4.0.

A historical definition of magic involves the art of producing the desired result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure control of these forces of nature. Magical skills originated as an attempt to make order out of chaos, as early humans attempted to rationalize a confusing and seemingly indefinable universe. This notion, namely that to define the elusive effects of how we, as humans, inhabit the world, remains a large part of our search for meaning. This discussion argues that architecture and magic function in a similar manner. When architecture offers more than mere shelter, we recognize that it, like magic, can also participate in the search for defining and representing the cosmos. In effect, such a search may have emerged from humans’ desire to materialize the immaterial and is not unlike the initial stages of architectural design, or any creative process. The exploration of magic in comparison to architecture is not interested in developing prescribed rules for design or construction but instead will provide ways to learn more about architects’ design processes through a greater understanding of the traditional meaning of magic.

I

The discussion of magic in relationship to architecture is approached from two interconnected perspectives: humans’ attempt to control their natural environment through traditional magical practices, and their appeal to divine intervention to affect change. These two areas are of particular interest to this study because they are the primary ways in which architects engage magic.

In the past, people have called upon magicians to evoke ritual and superstition in an attempt to control the things they cannot, or to forecast future events. Since “Rites (ritual acts) are eminently effective; they are creative; they do things,” humans who feel unable to control the impacts of nature have traditionally found ways to act rather than accept fate.¹¹ The actions usually resulted in cause and effect (at least some of the time) that resolved a crisis. Thus, “magic is essentially the art of doing things, and magicians have always taken advantage of their know-how, their dexterity, their manual skill.”¹² In doing so, magicians attempted to improve the lives of their communities that involved their environment. These activities included affecting ritual to cure diseases, provide sustenance for the community, or assist in protecting their dwellings. The anthropologist Sir James Frazer wrote that Natural or Practical Magic, under a category of Sympathetic Magic, follows laws of Similarity or Contact or Contagion.¹³ With the Law of Similarity, he references the concept that “like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause.”¹⁴ The latter purports “that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.”¹⁵ Frazer differentiates these two concepts by writing that the Law of Similarity may be called Homeopathic (using models or ritual to affect future events in an attempt to control nature) and the Law of Contact or Contagious Magic (the magic that secures objects or talisman thought to be empowered). In other words, the ritual was derived from magical activities that replicated the desired effect. In some cases it worked, and the rite was magically connected through contact to effect a change in the environment.

The second type of magic attempts to connect and understand the divine power...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Origins
• 3 Foundations
• 4 Shift
• 5 Loss
• 6 Return
• 7 Conclusion
• Index