The thesis tries to investigate the relationship between our environment and our subconsciousness by means of the concepts of place and myth.
In the 5th century B.C. Archedamos of Thera decorated a cave not far from Athens and left inscriptions. In these he describes himself as being taken by the nymphs and must have spent his whole life there cultivating and decorating the cave. It is a very early example of how people are seized by a place and relate it directly to the mythological and transcendental images that indwell them. In classical antiquity, this was well established: The belief in something that is there, as a force directly connected to the place, and was there before the man who cultivated the place.
Norberg-Schulz writes that the intense light, the clear air, and the diversity of the Greek land led to landscape and places being characterized as "anthropomorphic gods "; that they acquired a human personality, that the places or the forces that prevailed there were personified and thus "became the manifestation of a particular god. " Norberg-Schulz attributes this to external circumstances. The question this essay wants to investigate, however, is whether we all carry within us, subconsciously and collectively, certain "images" of places and landscapes.The moment we actually see "images" of these places, we must irrevocably engage with them and make this connection between the actual and the transcendent. According to Erich Fromm, we use places in our subconscious quite self-evidently to express feelings. Places are, one might say, part of the vocabulary of our subconscious. We already carry these images of places within us (The stream, the clearing, the cave, the rock, etc.) and realize that there are very clear feelings attached to these images of places. Not knowing when and if at all one has ever been in a clearing. Let's assume, also in Plato's sense, that we carry these archetypes within us. Archedamos will have seen this cave and thought to have found a very exact "image" of the "picture" with which his subconscious works. This leads him to become addicted to this place, as the cult of the nymphs also provided him with the necessary bridge between the environment and his own self.
Myth, then, influences not only our natural environment, but also our built environment. On the basis of the analysis of place and myth, the paper tries to indicate a new field of tension in architecture.
In the 5th century B.C. Archedamos of Thera decorated a cave not far from Athens and left inscriptions. In these he describes himself as being taken by the nymphs and must have spent his whole life there cultivating and decorating the cave. It is a very early example of how people are seized by a place and relate it directly to the mythological and transcendental images that indwell them. In classical antiquity, this was well established: The belief in something that is there, as a force directly connected to the place, and was there before the man who cultivated the place.
Norberg-Schulz writes that the intense light, the clear air, and the diversity of the Greek land led to landscape and places being characterized as "anthropomorphic gods "; that they acquired a human personality, that the places or the forces that prevailed there were personified and thus "became the manifestation of a particular god. " Norberg-Schulz attributes this to external circumstances. The question this essay wants to investigate, however, is whether we all carry within us, subconsciously and collectively, certain "images" of places and landscapes.The moment we actually see "images" of these places, we must irrevocably engage with them and make this connection between the actual and the transcendent. According to Erich Fromm, we use places in our subconscious quite self-evidently to express feelings. Places are, one might say, part of the vocabulary of our subconscious. We already carry these images of places within us (The stream, the clearing, the cave, the rock, etc.) and realize that there are very clear feelings attached to these images of places. Not knowing when and if at all one has ever been in a clearing. Let's assume, also in Plato's sense, that we carry these archetypes within us. Archedamos will have seen this cave and thought to have found a very exact "image" of the "picture" with which his subconscious works. This leads him to become addicted to this place, as the cult of the nymphs also provided him with the necessary bridge between the environment and his own self.
Myth, then, influences not only our natural environment, but also our built environment. On the basis of the analysis of place and myth, the paper tries to indicate a new field of tension in architecture.
LEER