ORNAMENT AND SUBLIME | FOLD | MONUMENT

Ornament/Architecture/Sublime ORNAMENT AND 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

15 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.

Figure 6. Mark Foster Gage Architects. Khaleesi Tower.

There are countless architectural works that can be labelled as producing sublime effects and affects, too many to mention here, considering it is beyond the scope of this essay. That aside, the role of ornament in creating such sublime effects in undeniable, whether the hyper-ornamentation of Rococo decoration and Mark Foster Gage’s projects, or the under-ornamentation of more stark expressions of the sublime such as Etienne Boullee’s Cenotaph for Newton which relies on sheer scale more than anything to affect a sublime response.

Burke’s language highlights the experiential dimension of the concept of the sublime, which can be applied in many ways to architecture. Returning to the Baroque and Deleuze’s notion of ‘the fold’, the layering of ornamentation in Baroque architecture produces not only an infinitely undulating surface or element but relates to Burke’s ideas on astonishment and the sublime. That is, for something to be considered sublime it does not necessarily have to be objectively beautiful. Here we can access a gateway to exploring architecture that engages Deleuze’s fold to elicit sublime responses beyond the conventional characterisation or dependency on beauty and artistic quality. This discovery leads us to questioning the role of conventional ornament in producing said sublime effects. But before we can investigate this idea further, we must understand the Modernist perspective regarding ornament, with attention to its supposed rejection.

Figures 7 & 8. Etienne Boullee. Cenotaph for Newton.