ORNAMENT AND Ornament/Architecture/Sublime SUBLIME | FOLD | MONUMENT Where the fold is potentially concerned with more tactile expressions or revelations (such as in music), sublime refers more to the overall experiential qualities of an object or space. As architecture is concerned with space-making and -shaping, we can identify moments of the sublime in architecture. While the concept of the sublime has been characterised in varying ways over time by authors such as Longinus, Burke, Boileau, Freud and Kant, it can be crudely summarised as an overwhelming feeling drawn out of something complexly beautiful to the point of potentially being terrifying. 15 Saint-Girons outlines that the sublime is often concerned with the beautiful, but goes beyond it: “whereas the beautiful creates calm satisfaction … the sublime is troubling and involves a stirring of the entire being.” 16 Concerning nature, Burke outlines the relationship between the sublime and astonishment: “the passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, where those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of soul, in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror.” 17 He goes on to conclude that “astonishment…is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree.” 18
Baldine Saint-Girons, "Sublime," in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin, et al. (Princeton University Press, 2014), 1092-3. 16 Ibid., 1094. 17 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1776), 41-2. 18 Ibid., 42. 15
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