CHAPTER 3 NEUTOPIA: A FEMINIST THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE Introduction The image of home, an architectural structure and psychological space, evokes both the personal need for images of shelter as well as emotional memories of the family. Our memories of the past are embedded in the material forms of architecture, creating a fourth dimension of time and space as we travel back home in our daydreams. Malcolm Quantrill writes in his book, _The Environmental Memory_, "Architecture serves as a memory system for ideas about human origins, a means of recording understanding of order and relationship in the world, and an attempt to grasp the concept of the eternal cosmos which has no fixed dimensions, with neither beginning nor end" (11). He points out that the framework of architecture is not simply a visible reality. There is an invisible, metaphysical, or ritualistic order in architecture which is constructed by the culture's mythology, that is, through its poetic memories and imagination. Quantrill calls these hidden or fourth dimensional elements "not immediately apparent in the form" (xiv). Of all art forms, architecture serves as the most symbolic preserving instrument. Its magic determines the interrelationship of things; it determines whether or not we live in discord or harmony with nature. F. David Martin declares, in his book _Art and the Religious Experience_, "architecture sets forth the iconicism of a world." In this chapter, I will attempt to explore the way "home" is an archaic as well as modern archetype. The question is, whether the persistence of this archetype in its present form, which has persisted since human beings moved outside the caves, will lead to the downfall of our "civilization" and the likely extinction of our species. According to Tulio Inglese, Director of the NACUL Institute, [NACUL stands for nature and culture] architecture is composed of three words. The first stems from _arche_, which means primal or prototype, a model from which all others are created. It is assumed that the model is the epitome of the good, the perfection of a design from which others can follow. Inglese understands the essential nature of architecture to be spiritual. He states, "_Ure_ is from the Greek work for substance or matter. Spirit and matter, one of Paolo Soleri's favorite dualities, is joined by the word technology" which is derived from the Greek word techne. The word "architecture" can then be read as Spirit- -Making--Matter. Inglese believes architecture "holds the secret to the next important step in evolution" (2). It is also important to note that when using "arch" as a prefix it means to rule. No wonder architecture, the grandest art of all, is so intimately united with history! Subsequently, the way the built environment is designed rules our relationship to it and thus our lives. Frank E. Wallis, in his book _How to Know Architecture_, calls architecture "man's most self-revealing record of his struggle upward from barbarism to the complex civilization of today" (4). He even states that the need for shelter resulted in the birth of science which he defined as the development of our reasoning faculties in the use of constructive applications (7). For this reason, he says, the study of architecture must also be the study of human progress. The question arises: is our Faustian sense of progress, the lust for more and more power, the worship of mechanical order, rationalism, predictability, control, and financial profit--at the expense of what is imaginative and alive--healthy for our civilization? As I breath the air from this polluted planetary abode, it would seem not! By studying the history of architecture one must also study the structures of power which have used the collective or private material surplus and labor force used to construct the built environment. In other words, the study of space is an enlightening journey throughout time. In the introduction of _Restructuring Architectural Theory_, Marco Diani and Catherine Ingraham write, One could say that architecture does not draw its authority from some pre-established structure of materials or technique, or from some given structure of artistic meaning, but from the power granted to it by philosophy. Thus architecture builds, over and over, philosophically endorsed ideas of home, city, place-- inscribing them in space much as a scribe records the words of an absolute ruler. From this viewpoint, architecture is a deeply conservative force that keeps what is philosophically, politically, and ideologically "proper" in place. From the vantage point of language, architecture thus evaporates, or melts into political, social, linguistic, philosophic analysis (2). Diani and Ingraham declare that architecture, together with philosophy, is the "only constructive practice, even in theory" (6). The generalized knowledge, wisdom, and overarching vision needed to understand the power relationships of the past in order to use our imaginations to create an ideology for the future, makes architecture a perfect subject for Future Studies. The future only exists in our beliefs and imagination. By building an alternative vision of bioregional ecocities we break out of the conservative inertia of the past and bring a new meaning to the word "edification." Consequently, one can say that education prepares the proper edifice or, in other words, education leads to architecture. Diani and Ingraham state, "We do not have a theory of cities that instructs us how to think." The purpose of this chapter is to help us become clearer as to which architectural direction we must turn in order to survive and flourish in the next millennium. The Division of Space Architecture has been known as the "mother of the arts," the cave/womb of creation. The image of womb denotes a female image of architecture, though now in the post-modern world, the symbol of power is not only represented by the more matriarchal form of the private residence, but also represented in the skyscraper/erection, the patriarchal image of the world. Dorothy Dinnerstein in her book _The Mermaid and the Minotaur_ asserts that it is in the home were mother- dominated child-care occurs, the place where children are first introduced to the cultural value systems of female authority. Infant child-care keeps women bound to the home in their so-called primary role as mothers, and allows fathers to be free to pursue their prestigious positions as the policy-makers and world-builders. Dinnerstein contends that mother-child bond, i.e., the cross-generational bond, is felt to be sacred by society. This worldview visualizes women in the form of Earth Mother whose infinite fertility can be infinitely exploited. Dinnerstein's book explains the meaning of the old folk tale--the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world--by pointing out how our traditional sexual arrangements of mother as homemaker and father as commander-in-chief, maintains neurotic symbiotic patterns of malaise between the sexes which are "_buttressed_ by societal coercion." External forces instituted by men exclude women from affecting social change, putting them into a subservient role, which in many cases, women accept voluntarily. In other words, both women and men fear the life-force which women as bearers of life and culture possess. This fear keeps apart the split in our communal sensibility. To break free of these arrangements is "the central thrust of our species' life toward more viable forms" (10). Dinnerstein continues, The harsh truth is that no societal compromise which changes other features of woman's condition while leaving her role as first parent intact will get at the roots of asymmetric sexual privilege. It is one thing to want change in the educational, vocational, and legal status of women; it is quite another thing to start tampering with Motherhood (76). Making History Dinnerstein points out the mother-infant bond is the most universal, fundamental, and biologically hardy tie that we have. She believes that the nucleus of our structural imbalance, which keeps women from history-making roles, is the strength of the mother-infant bond and the weakness of the father-infant bond. She declares, "We lean heavily on the reliability of this bond; yet it is part of a congenital deformity that we must now outgrow before it kills us off" (97). Dinnerstein puts forth that the maternal bond maintains itself for two reasons. First, women because of "socially sanctioned existential cowardice," remain out of the spot- light as a result of their refusal to accept the primary responsibility which the historical role demands. Women succumb to a secondary role of enjoying the privileges of male achievements by becoming a "nurturant servant-goddess" who is the witness of male historic action. The woman becomes the Other, who is incapable of defining herself or establishing her own sovereignty, and so, validates the male reality in which he is the Subject. Secondly, because women are the bearers of life, they play the impressive role in the reproduction of the next generation and the physical continuity of the species. According to Margaret Mead, the woman is then content to leave the making of history to the realm of the male domain in order to counterbalance her vital function, and to give him the self-respect he needs in order to maintain his sexual vigor which she is dependent upon. However, Dinnerstein thinks that, while Mead's account rings true in the traditional balance of power, there is more to the story of male-female neurotic co-dependency. If I am reading Dinnerstein correctly, she believes that what Mead leaves out of the story is that the heroic and noble deeds of men are nevertheless "trivial and empty, ugly and sad." The traditional male role of laborer, which woman has needed to maintain the productivity of society and to build the roof over her head, denies men intimate and emotional ties to the forthcoming generation. Man's self-esteem, social status, and affection from women is then determined by the accumulation of money and private wealth, materials which are not alive in carnal flesh, where as, in raising a baby, the pleasure-principle of the living flesh needs love and playful joy in order to survive. Therefore, man is largely left outside the intimate circle of love, and, since love is not permitted in the competitive world of business, love and work are separated into two different realms of existence. In the end, the cross-generational bond between the infant-mother lives on in the flesh, whereas, the energy that has consumed the male lifetime is merely a handful of abstractions, interest rates, and monuments to the dead. This could suggest that the reason why men have been fixated on the worship of the dead and the forces of war is because they have played no positive part in shaping the future. The reason for male transcendence that divorces itself from the earthly immanence is caused by a lack of paternal bonding. The transcendental concept of patriarchal religions, which believes heaven is a place after life and earth is a place of exile, is caused by man's inadequate relationship with the future. And so, his lust for the ownership of women and children compensates for the deficiency of his lacking both inner meaning and a connection with the future. By developing an economy in which his wealth is passed on to his heirs as a way to connect with the immortality of the next generation, man has attempted to fulfill this lack. Man's envy of the womb could be the reason why, for the most part, women artists have been left out of art history. Since man could not physically give birth to offspring, he denied women her ability and right to give birth to spiritual offspring. He would be the artist/prophet, not her. Women were refused access to male-dominated art schools. Even in the 16th Century when the times demanded that women could no longer be excluded from the academy, women where still denied the right to paint the male nude body. In their book _Women Artists: A Graphic Guide_, Frances Borzello and Natacha Legwidge write, male "students were told that the most important painting--history paintings--were those with serious subject matter taken from the Bible and classical myths and they were taught the skills for producing them" (31). Women, on the other hand, were taught to focus their artistic visions on domestic concerns and were guided in the direction of making crafts. Women were relegated to second- class citizenship in the class structure of art. They were to hold the "less prestigious areas of teaching--in schools, colleges of further education and polytechnics, and in the applied and decorative art departments of the art schools" (117). The traditional male artist used women for his muses, for his models, and for his daily servants, while women were brought up to believe that they must subdue their creative drives because their first responsibility was for the care of others. It was man's role to be artist/hero; it woman's role to testify to his sexual prowess. Borzello and Ledwidge write, No one gets up and boos in the opera house when the tenor sings that Woman is fickle or barracks in the theatre when Shakespeare writes that Woman is like a child, or feels anything but Awe In Front of Art when Titian paints Eve as a wily beauty luring an utterly innocent Adam. But when Elena Samperi painted her feeling about Man in Madonna (1980), showing him as a miniature adult in a schoolboy cap endlessly sucking and biting at the breast, there was a deafening outcry about female bitchiness and hatred of men (140, 142). It could be explained that male suppression of the pleasure principle in his world of business and art is a way of punishing women from denying him access to love and immortality. Unable to see a way out of his incestuous bond by understanding the forces of romantic love, man then sought rebirth through his mother which resulted in his infantile behavior. He created the symbols which transcended and denied the ultimate fate of the body, death, in order to connect back with his omnipotent mother believing she was his way to rebirth. This explains the myth of the resurrection of Christ which reverses the natural cycles of life and death. In Christian mythology, Christ is raised from the dead without needing the female body to be reborn, denying the function of the Crone's regenerative erotic powers in his rebirth. In order for men to deny their empty and pitiful life stories, they needed to mythologize their superiority over women, a condition which women, who are trapped in these old gender relations, accept in order to hide their maternal advantage. However, Dinnerstein asserts, that other women are more apt than men to challenge the sexual status quo because they perceive themselves as flawed, whereas men do not. The problems of the world have been attributed to women, and so, it is she who feels it is her moral duty to correct the situation. Because woman is seen by the female- raised men as the omnipotent mother who will always forgive his infantile behavior and personal faults, women have only one recourse: to withdraw their love from man, when he fails to understand the female perspective. But doing so puts man in a superior economic and social position since, as a result of his separation, he has more power in the business realm. It might also mean that the woman remains child- free, unable to become part of the matriarchal power. Thus, she becomes the "old maid" who is given little, if any, chance of directly influencing the next generation. She, then, must enter into the labor force of the male social structure to compete with him on his terms for economic security and social prestige. In the case of the female artist, who she has been denied her own tradition, she must compete with the old male masters on their terms instead of having her artistry valued for its intrinsic worth. She has had no direct heirs to her wealth, nor have there been any great monuments built to her in her name, not that she would want them. Since women artists have been denied a position within art history, they have been denied a chance of achieving immortality through their own cultural offspring. Hence, woman is left out of the collective remembrance. She may even become the evil "witch." Women who do remain a part of the matriarchal- patriarchal social structure are forced into a permanent child-parent relationship with their spouse. Dinnerstein writes, She thus carries the moral obligations of the parent while suffering the powerlessness of the child. Man, conversely, carries parental powers while enjoying the child's freedom from moral obligation. He has the right, like the child, to remain unaware of, uninterested in, her point of view even though nurturant awareness of it is in his case within his intellectual reach. This means that he is encouraged in a kind of moral laziness which stunts his growth: his capacities for empathic emotional generosity (like woman's capacities for enterprise) atrophy through disuse. He is allowed to remain childishly irresponsible for embracing her perspective, and childishly entitled to her parental nurturance and forgiveness, while enjoying parental power to defend himself, to discipline her if she offends him, to place practical constraints around her destructiveness if she tries to hurt him (236). Creating a Balanced System of Child-Rearing The struggle of the feminist movement has been to make the matters of the private sphere the central theme in public dialogue and debate. Until recent times, issues of domestic violence, such as incest, child abuse, wife beating and rape, went unacknowledged since women and children were perceived by society to be the private property of men who were outside the protection of law. In a _Boston Globe_ article entitled, "Male Sense of "Owning" Women Blamed in Abuse," Lynda Gorov reports that the sense of owning women is still a factor in domestic violence. She quotes Christine Butler, director of the Suffolk Battered Women's Advocacy Project, As much as we give lip service to changing gender roles, men's sense of entitlement is engrained in society. If we were really honest with ourselves, we would admit that we haven't made any dramatic changes except on a superficial level. There has been a silent conspiracy in society not to touch the sacred cow of the American home as if it were a taboo which no one dare to speak. Boys are still trained to believe that women are their servants, and girls are still conditioned to acquiesce to male expectations. Boys are raised to believe that women don't live separate lives and, instead, that the purpose of women's lives is to care for their own needs. Advocates know that creating more laws protecting women from male abuse, providing more police protection for women against men, giving more court-ordered counselling for abusive males, and making additional shelters for abused females will not stop the property- owning value-system responsible for the violence. In _The Second Stage_, Betty Friedan writes, I keep having the feeling that in _the house_--the space time, physical, concrete dimensions of what we call home--is somehow the basic clue to where we have come, and were we have to go in the second stage. It is that physical, literal house--or its lack--that somehow points to the heart of our problems, that keeps us from transcending those old sex roles that too often have locked us in mutual misery in the family (281). Dinnerstein believes the exploitation of nature will continue to plunder human and natural resources until there is an equal balance of the early rearing of children by both female and male child-care workers. In order for the sexual arrangements to be altered, the dualities between the home and the workplace, inner space and outer space, the subject and the object, spiritual and material, must come to an end by building a new communal architecture which is life- enhancing. The patriarchal revolution attempted to create a more balanced system of child-rearing by acknowledging the significant role males play in the reproductive process. Instead of liberating himself from the mother by accepting death and romantic love, man has imprisoned her in his unconsciousness, suppressing her from the powerful social position which she once occupied. In _The Image of Mother in Ivory Coast Art_ by B. Holas and _The Revolution from Within_ by Gloria Steinem, both authoresses explain the different stages of the creation myth in Africa. In the beginning, the female figure was "responsible for the conception and organisation of the world." In her womb was the heaven and earth, all of life and death. In later myths, the figure became bi-sexual and reproduction occurred parthenogenetically. As time passed, the deity became to be seen in two separate bodies: female and male. The first couple proceeded to set up a household, the basic configuration of the village society itself. The goddess began giving birth to male sons who began to worship the son. Eventually, the sons became the consorts of the goddess. As they gained more and more power, the figures of the goddess shrank in size until their sons began to tower over the female figures. Finally, the goddess played an invisible role as she became the throne which the male gods sat upon. And so, the male view of reality. The female experience became invisible. The Wall around Paradise The word "paradise" was a Persian word _pairi-daeze_ which meant a "beautiful garden fenced-in." The Old Testament poets first used the word and it spread throughout the "civilized world" (LaChapelle 1978, 15). As the story goes, the garden of Eden was the Creator's private domain. Nevertheless, God allowed Adam and Eve to share it with Him, to live a life of pleasure in peace with all nature as long as they obeyed Him. However, when Eve disobeyed His word by tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, their membership at the "Garden Club" was evoked. Consequently, God constructed a wall around paradise to keep Adam and Eve out. William McClung explains in his book, _The Architecture of Paradise_, that after the Fall, paradise on Earth is represented as always "enclosed by natural and artificial barriers" (24). He says that this iconography expresses the disconnection between nature and grace as well as the phenomenal difference between open and enclosed space. Elsewhere Malcolm Quantrill writes, "The ideas of shelter, of house, of hearth, and of home reflect man's struggle to regain some of the protective features of the Garden. On the other hand, the cultivated garden which extends habitat out into the uncultivated wilderness is but a _memory_ of man's original relationship with nature" (21). And so, it evolved that the woman in the fenced-in garden was nothing more than a domestic servant, a slave to her husband, a prisoner in his "baby trap." Also noteworthy is the fact that in Egyptian hieroglyphics the symbol for "mother" can also stand for "house" or "town." The ancient Chinese character for "mother" is the same symbol for slave; all women in ancient China were considered mothers. As Dutch artist Aldo van Eyck noted, "The city is a big house, the house a small city." Consequently, we live in a city designed on slavery. Ancient Totalitarianism: Chinese Architecture The ancient symbols for mother indicate that the archetype for house may not have change since the beginning of time. If we look more closely at ancient Chinese architecture, we can see that this may indeed be so. It seems to be that there is really no "Western" or "Eastern" civilization. Europe and Asian cities were built upon the same foundations. Marija Gimbutas in her book _The Civilization of the Goddess_ states, "The earliest civilizations of the world were, in all probability, matristic "Goddess civilizations" (324). Megalithic monuments in various forms from the Neolithic Age have been found not only in Western Europe, but in Korea, Japan, Sumatra, Borneo, and India. In Lionel Casson's essay "Who Raised the Megaliths?," he writes, "The Asian menhirs and dolmens closely resemble the European in their shape and construction, and in their use as tombs, but they are generally smaller and more recent, dating from as late as the seventh century A.D." (43). This could explain way the Chinese structures use the same concepts of the column and the roof as in the Greek civilization. Both patriarchal cultures may have been built as a way of suppressing the prehistorical culture of the Goddess. The patriarchal revolution became a tyranny when it suppressed the wisest and darkest powers of the female religion, as personified by the Crone, while permitting the mother and her transcendent son to copulate and over- populate the land through their infantile relationship with one another. The incest religions of the patriarchal era have plagued the world with the dysfunctional family. Patriarchy is a global culture which must be restructured globally in order for the human race to recover its lost heritage: the natural sovereignty of womankind. Let us now look at a perfect example of patriarchal culture: ancient Chinese architecture. The excavated site of the Chinese village, Barpo, was built some 6,000 years ago. It was composed of three areas: the pottery kiln, a residential area, and necropolises. After the age of tribalism, historians maintain that "civilization" began with the beginning of the class society and the construction of the wall. In the Chinese language, the written word for city is _Cheng_ which means "wall". Within the walls of the city, state government controlled the political, economic and cultural functions of the people. Laurence G. Liu relates in his book _Chinese Architecture_ that During the Xia Dynasty there was a saying, "To build city to protect the emperor, to build wall to watch the people" (Lui 41). As with the plan of the Western city the grid system and symmetrical design prevailed, even though, there is no indication that the Chinese were aware at this time of European city design. The capital city was designed in a large block with the palace at the center which symbolized the concept of the "round sky and square earth." The symbolism of the square represented a sense of order for the ruling class: obedience and subordination. High, wide walls, towers above the walls, and moats around the city and palace not only served to give the Emperor a sense of protection, but gave the people the sense that the Emperor was unapproachable. To further disempower the people, public squares were not part of the city design. The open space outside of the palace and governmental offices expressed the status of wealth and power of the state, but public assemblies in such places were discouraged. Liu writes, The only natural place for gatherings was within the halls of large houses or in the courtyards between the halls: the lack of public gathering areas indicated that in the autocratic system of ancient China there was no place (or reason) for individuals to express their political opinions (34). In Western cities, from ancient Greece and Rome till the present day, the city centre has always contained the agora, forum or squares for the circulation and exchange of ideas of the people. Squares were created from democratic ideology, symbolizing the civil and religious rights of the people. In ancient China, these rights were non- existent (53). Confucianism taught that social harmony would reign as long as the Emperor practiced an autocratic benevolence towards the people and the people gave him their complete obedience and respect. The emperor was worshiped as if "he could pray to the Gods on the people's behalf" (Liu 34). Scholars played an important role in the palace since the emperor called upon them to assist in the prayers and sacrifices. Altars and temples became an integral part of the palace devoted to both heaven and earth and to the cycles of nature, hero, and ancestor worship. The Chinese house, the basic unit of the city, was built as a microcosm of the Confucian worldview reflecting a balance of ancestral worship and respect for authority. Enclosing the house was a high wall to ward off theft and fire, giving the occupants a feeling of seclusion and family privacy. Confucius believed universal harmony was represented in the code of ethics within family relationships. Family piety was considered to be the source of one's happiness. The elder was the head of the family. Within the gerontocracy, the male was the ruler. Children were obedient to their parents. In order to pay respect to one's ancestors, the elder son was decreed to perform the sacrifices in veneration to the dead. These ceremonies to honor the ancestor gave the heir and the ancestral temple social status which helped insure political stabilization. Confucians maintained that harmony within the family and with nature would result in the health and fortune of the household. The Industrial Revolution and the Home In pre-industrial societies the kinship networks did not divide life rigidly into the areas of homelife and work- place. Ann Oakley explains in her book, _Woman's Work_ that in the pre-industrial home, "there was no differentiation between cooking, eating, and sitting rooms. The hall, that is the entrance to the home, was the centre of domestic activity: there the family cooked, ate their meals, and relaxed together" (Oakley 23). Mary Ryan notes that in colonial times the family household was the center of economic activity, social welfare, and affection. She concludes this environment produced people whose personalities integrated both expressive and economic skills. The division between the home and the workplace intensified during the industrial revolution. Gradually economic production moved out of the household and became separated from personal relationships. Griselda Pollock in her book, _Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art_, discusses the work of British social historians, Catherine Hall and Lee Davidoff, who showed that in "the formation of the British middle class in Birmingham" the city was "literally reshaped according to this ideal divide" (68). Men could moved freely between the two realms, but women were not welcomed in the masculine realm. They were supposed to occupy only the domestic sphere. Her role was to be the good mother and wife; his was to be a good citizen. In her essay, "The Feminization of Love," Francesca M. Cancian writes, "this division of labor gave women more experience with close relationships and intensified women's economic dependence on men. As the daily activities of men and women grew further apart, a new worldview emerged that exaggerated the differences between the personal, loving, feminized sphere of the home and the impersonal, powerful, masculine sphere of the workplace" (697). The wife and children became completely dependent on the husband/father for economic support and social prestige. The word "family" originated in ancient Rome. The family included not only the nuclear family, but also the slaves and relatives which comprised the household. Only in recent times did family come to be defined as the nuclear group of parents and children. According to Jessie Bernard, in her book _The Future of Motherhood_, in addition to being a new institution, the nuclear family is a peculiar creation of the affluent society. Along with it came the separate, isolated single-family house which was built to guard the family against the hostilities of the outside world. In the capitalist world, women became the chief buyers of consumer products to keep the household well-fed. Bernard writes, In order for the mother to perform her sheltering and protective function she herself had to be protected from the outside world, isolated from it, immured in a walled garden...Protected, sheltered, isolated, safe within the walls of their gardens, women as mothers became the repositories of all the humane virtues. It was the mother who made the home a school of virtue (11-12). Before industrialization, women were too valuable as productive workers to be given the time to solely stay at home and raise children. Bernard points out that the family is no longer a source of happiness and virtue from the cruelty of the outside world, if it ever was! The patriarchal concept of romance is simply a way in which man can buy a life-long wife, or one could say a legal prostitute, in exchange for a life-long roof over her head. The duality between work and love in the patriarchal worldview sees the feminine principle as solely associated with sex, fertility, nature, matter, unconsciousness, and the earth. She is the omnipotent mother who provides the amoral, greedy infant with protection, warmth, and milk. The home was her place of control and authoritarian power. Bernard points out, "for non-believers it was a "secular temple," "the place for social altruism." Bernard writes, "Practically all of the thinking in law, theology, and the social sciences has, in fact, had at its core the fact that women bear children. The institutional structure of our society is based on that rock bottom fact" (25). And the structure of the family as well as the city is the house. The Connection-Separation Question Since the industrial revolution the home has not been associated with work, but with family, and this certainly explains why mothers have remain unacknowledged and untrained laborers. As Oakley states, "Our language contains the phrase "family man," but there is no corresponding phrase for women. It would be socially redundant: the family means women" (60). She further argues that "the family defines one's identities." For Oakley, the belief that the traditional family unit is responsible for childrearing shapes our personal identities. This brings us to the point of discussing the observations made by Nancy Chodorow, Lillian Rubin, and Carol Gilligan that girls identify with their mothers and so do not go through the stage of a separation from her as boys do with their fathers. This means that the morality of girls is centered around issues of relationship and connection while men are valued for their autonomy and individualism. These two contrasting ways of viewing reality--separation from others and connection with others-- can also be seen in context to the division between the workplace and the home. Some anti-feminist men have argued that women's inability to separate is biologically determined. Because of this, women are unable to be the subjects of social analysis and are incapable of becoming historical actresses. In other words, a woman's body prevents her from entering into the male world of culture and so she must remain in her home, her "supreme cultural achievement" (Hekman 1990). However, Gilligan's theory of moral development attempted to show how girls have been socialized to carry out certain traditional roles and because of this socialization have developed a social ethic of care and compassion. These qualities of maternal attachment have not been recognized as important and so have had little impact on society, whereas the male qualities of separation and individualism, and the resulting objective science and rationalism which they produce, are generally acknowledged and rewarded. It is believed that the mother's unconditional love for her children and her children's love for her provides her with meaning in life. Women are conditioned to think that "care and empowerment of others is central to their life's work" (Belenky 1986, 48). A woman must look to others for her self-knowledge. Hence, she identifies herself by the way others define her. Her inner experiences are discounted in favor of expert opinion. The man's meaning is derived from providing food and shelter for the family unit. He is the thinker and builder. This explains the two different styles of love between the sexes: the masculine style which is characterized by practical and instrumental assistance and by sex and the feminine style of love which is characterized by verbal self-disclosure and emotional closeness (Cancian 709). So arise two different epistemological orientations: "a separate epistemology, based upon impersonal procedures for establishing truth, and a connected epistemology, in which truth emerges through care" (Belenky 1986, 102). In children's play the use of space also illustrates the difference of gender socialization. In Ellen Perry Berkeley's essay, "Architecture: Towards a Feminist Critique," she quotes Erik Erikson regarding, "the analogy between the sex differences in play configurations and the primary physiological sex differences, that is, in the male the emphasis on the external, the erectable, the intrusive, and,...in the female, on the internal, on the vestibular, on the static, on what is contained endangered in the interior." However, critics of Erikson, such as Susan Saegert and Roger Hart, said that Erikson should have observed, that early on, girls are encouraged to decorate dollhouses and play out social events inside imaginary interiors while boys are encouraged to play outside and build structures. Saegart and Hart's research indicates that it is the socialization of children by adults, reinforced by peer pressure, that encourages the traditional female and male roles which are then acted out in play. The spatial range of girls and boys is clearly different, and, because of this difference, girls are denied a certain exploration and manipulation of the environment. Their spatial abilities lack confidence from lack of experience. The inhibition among girls to structurally visualize the environment affects other fields of inquiry. Jon. J. Durkin in his paper, "The Potential of Women," thinks that the aptitude of structural visualization is necessary for not only designing architectural place, but is also critical for medicine, physical science, engineering, city planning, mechanics, etc. Saegert and Hart noticed that sexual difference in spatial ability is not apparent until the age of eight. However, by adolescence, boys are far ahead of girls in spacial aptitudes. By adulthood spatial abilities are found in 50% of all men, and 25% of all women (Berkeley 269). Saegert and Hart describe the spacial situation between men and women in terms of the driver of a car and a passenger. They write, "The driver is allowed decision-making, experimentation, and self-directed learning of the environment, while the passenger can only suggest and observe" (Berkeley 269). Women are trained to accept the built environment the way it is, not to question spacial relationships, and be the submissive, passionate homemakers or office workers. After reading _In a Different Voice_ it was not easy to ascertain if Gilligan is advising women to simply recognize and celebrate our ethical difference from men or if we should attempt to change the archetypal patterns of social and structural behavior. Cancian comments on Gilligan, Chodorow and Robin's moral development theory, by arguing that women's identity is based on attachment while men's identity is based on separation; they reinforce the distinction between feminine expressiveness and masculine instrumentality, revive the ideology of separate spheres, and legitimate the popular idea that only women know the right way to love (Cancian 697). Women and the Architectural Profession Dores Cole's book, _From Tipi to Skyscraper_, is an enlightening story in women's history about women's entry into the profession of architecture in the United States. She begins by discussing life in the tipi of the Great Plains Indians. Women were responsible for deciding the tipi village's location, its construction, and its set-up. It was the perfect structure, both "beautiful and practical," for the nomadic people. If necessary, one person could set it up. This was quite a different experience for the caucasian woman who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and had no control over the construction of the house. For her, life was private. She was limited to two domains: the home and the church, but her church work was tied to the home. Since she was engulfed and often overburdened with domestic duties, she was forced to turn her attention to legitimatizing housework to make it into a domestic science. One of the main advocates of this movement was Catherine Beecher who began to investigate "architectural and scientific knowledge necessary for running a household" (54). Other woman, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, Clara Barton, and Charlotte Forten Grimke, ventured beyond the home and strove to enter the political, intellectual, and spiritual realms of life. Nevertheless, the professional fields which women preferred to enter were teaching, nursing, and social services, the professions that had traditionally been performed at the house. However, it was the Civil War which really caused women to break out of the house and demand more powerful social positions. Cole writes, The havoc wrought by the Civil War alone was enough to make women realize that the domestic domain was not isolated from exterior influences. A woman could organize her home, beautify her house, and instruct her family--but none of these accomplishments could save her men and children from the sorrow of war (54). Because of the war, women were permitted into professions which had previously been closed to them, not because social attitudes had changed, but because the war necessitated it. After the war, women were no longer satisfied with their position in the domestic domain. The war had not only served to free the negro slaves, but it also worked to free white women from their servitude. Still, women preferred fields in the social services. Cole writes, "Through social services a woman could continue using her practical skills, but on a larger scale, and, hopefully, influence more than just her own family and servants. In this sense her domain encompassed the city, and her family became the entire citizenry" (57). Nevertheless, the social service fields separated women from men. They were outside the home, but still not integrated with men. Their professional fields were not given the same kind of social influence, social status, and financial rewards as the traditional male domain. The desire to work together with men on an equal basis drove thousands of women and men to explore alternative life- styles. Many people left conventional society for the utopian communities which had become numerous during that time. Designing architectural space was now becoming a possibility for women. Women could apply their practical, every-day knowledge of the built environment to designing communal housing. The male architects of conventional society were chiefly interested in style. They were designing public buildings and private dwellings in monumental terms, reflecting the direction of the academy. It was a real struggle for women to be accepted into architectural schools. For one reason, in the 19th century, business was not considered the proper profession for women, and architecture was as much of a business enterprise as it was an art. The social service professions were not considered business activities and so were not a legitimate profession for a cultivated lady. Also, it was unthinkable for a married woman to have a job outside the house because of the objections from both husband and social conventions. So feminists of the time often refused to be engaged in the institution of marriage. Charles Atherton Frost was the dean of the Cambridge School, the first architectural school for women. Dores Cole's account of the school's short history is a moving story about Charles Frost who had faith in the abilities of women as architects. But even with such training, women architects had difficulty becoming part of the design teams of America. Women who went into independent practice usually had small offices and received contracts for domestic architecture. The other alternative for them was to be accepted by the men who owned larger architectural offices. The Cambridge School graduates made an attempt to enter these firms, but found it very difficult to work one's way up the corporate ladder by starting out as draftswomen. The only other way was to marry an architect and become his business and sexual partner. Once inside the male hierarchy, the fundamental problem arose: is there a feminist architecture? Have women simply been indoctrinated with the male perspective? Have the schools trained women to perform male tasks? In his book book _The Male Attitude_, Charles W. Ferguson writes, "The creature who finishes the curriculum in our schools and colleges is thoroughly indoctrinated in male traditions, methods, and values and is bound to speak from the male point of view, whether he(she) knows it or acknowledges it" (Cole, 115). The masculine curriculum based on the epistemology of separation, results in the systematic dehumanization of both females and males through the loss of the feminine. In _Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind_, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule write, "In an educational institution that placed care and understanding of persons rather than impersonal standards at its center, human development might take a different course, and women's development, in particular, might proceed with less pain" (209). It seems clear that this different course would be towards building a more communal vision of architecture based on the interconnectedness of all life. In 1941, Charles Frost wrote about the traits he saw in the female students at the Cambridge School: "she thinks clearly, reasons well, and is interested in housing rather than houses; in community centers for the masses rather than in neighborhood clubs for the elect; in regional planning more than in estate planning, in social aspects of her profession more than in private commissions" (97). The nineteenth Century woman architect wanted both marriage and a professional career. The lack of opportunities for women could explain why so many trained female architects drop out of the profession, opting instead for the role of wife and mother. Cole says that women who do remain in the profession almost never make it into the upper echelons of the decision-making ranks. She describes the pyramidal structure within the large architectural firms as the main reason for the blockage of change within the system. The one on top who does the hiring and firing is the principal, or has several partners. They do the hiring and firing of employees, decide firm policies and goals, oversee the projects, and are the businessmen who gain the new commissions for the office. Next come the associates who make sure the policies are carried out. Then down the ladder are the project managers, the project captains, and designers. Under them are the draftsmen. Secretaries rank in authority and pay with draftsmen, and finally office boys are on the bottom. Even though for a project to come to successful completion cooperation is required from everyone involved, the system does not reflect this interdependency since principals and associates are the only permanent firm members and receive the highest pay. Promotion is determined by one's administrative and managerial achievements rather than on one's architectural knowledge and skills. Cole writes, Principals choose the associates, and no one becomes an associate--no matter what co-workers might think of him or her--without the approval of the principal. The system is based upon patronage: this unavoidably inhibits the expression of opposing views and eliminates as well any kind of experimentation or innovation contrary to the principal's wishes (127). In this system, there is little opportunity for the lower-echelon staff workers to make suggestions about the projects which they are working on. According to Cole, if associates make too many suggestions without a response they are likely to find themselves without a job. And by the time young architects with fresh ideas make their way up the corporate ladder, they have had to compromise their ideas so much that their minds become biased by old, erroneous assumptions. Cole calls the pyramidal office structure "detrimental to all people involved from principal to office boy." She points out that, for a nation who prides itself on its democratic structure, architectural firms are far from being democratic. Not only are the principles alienated and isolated from other principles in other firms because of firm rivalry, they are also delineated within the firm. Cole believes that because of this lack of working together, architecture will continue to lose its social meaning and value. And so, the collapse of architecture and civilization is assured. Likewise, in the visual arts, it is the art managers, gallery owners, and museum directors who have control over the "art world." The power lies not with artists or architects, but with the money-makers who sell the objects or blueprints, and the built environment most certainly reflects this view. The modern artist is seen as the alienated and autonomous genius whose primary concern is to produce sellable art objects. Separated from others and from creativity's creative source, he feels hopeless to create change, and so, refuses to take responsibility for the future of the world. The industrialist of the ninetieth century, realizing there was a major spiritual crisis going on, sought to compensate people's emptiness and lost of meaning with free enterprise and the cult of money. Now, money is worshipped, while artistic merit, having the power to heal the world, remains largely ignored. Those who get promoted by the arts establishment are often not the most gifted artists. However, in Suzi Gablik visionary book, _The Reenchantment of Art_, she explains how the old ways of the art world are breaking down as artists are redefining their social roles which are attuned with the ecological paradigm. Gablik believes this paradigm has a metaphysical basis. She writes, "Transformation cannot come from even more manic production and consumption in the marketplace; it is more likely to come from some new sense of service to the whole-- from a new intensity in personal commitment" (26). In the new ecological framework, the building of relationships become the basic intention of both art-making and world- making. The reality of the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all things makes the artists into a co- creator with others who are involved in the birth of Neutopia. Summary In this chapter we have seen how the built environment of patriarchal civilization is the same for both the "East" and "West." We have suggested that the suppression of women is due largely to men's lack of connection with the intimate bonding with the next generation. If it is the female's role to be the primary child-care worker and man who is acknowledged as the artistic hero, then it is not difficult to see why we have a world where women have no voice in constructing the built environment. Woman is captured in an inferior social position and imprisoned in an ugly and destructive architectural structure. CHAPTER 4 ARCHITECTURAL ARCHETYPES Introduction We have now explored the psychological and political divisions between the sexes that have divided spacial relationships into two different domains which deny communal arrangements. Let us proceed with our architectural study by asking the following questions. What are some of the ideas expressed in art and architecture in primitive and archaic cultures? Are there symbols which run through all races, societies, and countries? Are there architectural principles which builders all over the world need to follow in order to achieve a harmony between nature and culture? W. R. Lethaby writes in _Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth_, "The main purpose and burthen of sacred architecture--and all architecture, temple, tomb, or palace, was sacred in the early days--is thus inextricably bound up with a people's thoughts about God and the universe" (2). Lethaby says that, when one looks back at history, all architecture is one: The Greek temple and the Egyptian temple are one. He declares the ultimate facts behind all architecture are: 1. the similar desires and needs of people; 2. the side of structure which is imposed by available materials; and 3. the side of style and nature (Lethaby 1975, 3). Our Earliest Dwellings Otto Rank writes that our earliest dwellings "were natural caves in rock caverns or underground caves" (166). According to architectural historian, Auguste Choisy, the force which drove people into shelters and caves was the onset of the Ice Age. The use of fire made it possible to inhabit the cave without the threat of dangerous animals. "Home" became a particular space occupied by a related group who huddled around the sacred fire; it was more than a "house" because people felt a psychological attachment to it. It was a place safe from wild animals and the cold. In the cave, it is speculated that people lived in a dormitory or doss-housing fashion. As the glaciers retreated north, the warmer weather may have brought people back outside to look for shelter, or maybe the human population had outgrown the natural cave structure, and so were forced to begin building shelters. In _Man the Homemaker_, D.C. Money writes, "The homes of our earliest ancestors were usually based on some form of simple, temporary shelter, such as that made by using a framework of branches, propped-up so as to shield the family group from wind or sun" (13). In Mesopotamia, the oldest shelter which has been discovered is a hole dug in the soil. The soil was dried to brick hardness. This house even predates earthenware pottery (Mumford 1967). It is believed that the first inspiration for the shape of houses and the first idea of architectural space came from the cave, since they were built semi-circular. Evidence suggests that houses were frequently rebuilt which indicates that they were "occupied temporarily, and that the inhabitants were still partly cave dwellers" (Gardiner 1974, 3). Then came the little hut, composed of a roof and columns. The hut was one of our first works of architecture and includes the elements from which all architecture is derived. Thus, the cave was eventually abandoned. The Primitive Hut Life in the primitive hut gave people structural privacy for individual nuclear families, and a place to gather private possessions. The author of _Evolution of the House_, Stephen Gardiner states that this longing for privacy and property is instinctual and necessary for the development of individuality. He writes, "a man will look after his hammer because the hammer is useful to him; or a woman will take good care of her jewelry because it may enhance her social position or make her appear more attractive" (4). We can see the patriarchal bias in Gardiner's thinking about private property when he says that men are the workers and woman gain social positions through their physical beauty, even though, archaeologists have surmised that it was Neolithic woman who first invented agriculture, not man, the hunter. As she was inventing agriculture, he was busy taming the wilderness, that is, collecting the natural resources needed to make the material possessions necessary for trade. In the ancient Goddess tradition, when male deities finally appeared, they were associated with the wilderness. Man became identified with taking from the natural world in contrast with woman who became identified with motherly giving and the storage of grain. Norman O. Brown writes, "Taking is a denial of dependence, and thus transforms the guilt of indebtedness into aggression; and the masculinity complex, the obsessive denial of femininity, is inherently aggressive" (280). Women, the givers of life, were the first workers in the fields. Matrilineal towns and cities in Sumer and, later, in Egypt grew up as a result of food surplus caused by the agricultural revolution and the invention of the container. Modern scholars now agree that the gynarchic settlements predate the pastoral nomads. One conjecture of how the pastoral culture evolved from the earlier settlements is that bands of marauding males, who had rejected the supervision of their mothers, were banished from the food producing villages. In order to not starve to death, they were forced to kill animals and eat their meat. In Elizabeth Gould Davis' book _The First Sex_, she speculates that the eating of meat over time produced larger penis sizes than the vegetarian males who stayed with the settlements. The female agriculturalist may have found this irresistible, inviting the hunters back into the settlements. Davis writes in her book _The First Sex_, "It is possible that the women of the old gynocracies brought on their own downfall by selecting the phallic wild men over the more civilized men of their own pacific and gentle world" (96). The two distinct cultures of the farmer and the shepherd are represented by the story of Cain and Abel. In the Biblical tale, the Ramites, the nomadic shepherds, overthrew the peaceful goddess-worshipping agricultural communities in the Near East. As a result, asserts Davis, the first historical dark age ensued. And so, the ancient gynocratic civilization was destroyed by the shepherd kings of the Hykos. The intellectually superior Philistines were finally conquered by the shepherd king David. In the Book of Genesis, the hero of the story was Abel, the keepers of the flocks. To the authors, the villain was Cain, the settler who tilled the soil. According to Davis, the account of the murder was a total contradiction of the facts since it was the Abels, the uncivilized shepherds, who had killed the civilized husbandmen, the Cains. She believes the story reflects the changeover from the time of the peaceful and nonviolent age of the Goddess civilization, to the barbaric patriarchal age of God's domination. One of the principles of the Goddess tradition was not to cause physical injury to any living creature. By accepting Abel's meat offering while refusing Cain's offering of the "fruits of the ground," the new male God was asserting his law of killing and violence over the ways of the land. Davis concludes, the war between the "agricultural pacifist and the beast of prey" began. Another way of looking at the story, according to Quantrill, is that history and the beginning of civilization is initiated with a murder and a city. With the building of Cain's city, which he named after his son, Enoch, paradise became the eternal longing of humanity. The city was now the polis protecting its citizens from the wilderness where fugitives and wanderers lurked in the "untamed darkness." Quantrill writes, "With Cain's city there came into existence a more complex structure than the simple concept of hearth and habitat; and with it primitive man's basic need to protect himself from the elements and untamed nature was extended into one that recognized interdependence and its helpmate organization" (Quantrill 1990, 26). The Trap In _Ritual and Response in Architecture_, Malcolm Quantrill says that our primitive ancestors adopted nomadic habits in order to survive, moving around in search for food. When pastoral people finally settled, giving up the "joys and hazards of the nomadic" life, turning hunting lands into lands for tilling, their relationship with nature began to conquer and suppress the natural orders (Quantrill 1974, 117). Quantrill feels that modern people wish to readopt this nomadic life style, but the political and economic systems inhibit us. We are trapped in a democracy of "no-choice". Quantrill writes, In seeking structural innovations for the remaining two decades of this century the performance specification which must be applied is the controlled balance of nature; the objective is a return to "the Garden of Eden," with the restoration of Man's full enjoyment of ordered nature. In this sense innovation of built-form must be seen as the key to environmental engineering (117). In Dora June Hamblin's book, _The First Cities_, she states that "the sedentary life does not necessarily require agriculture: in an ecological niche of high natural production, a family can settle there and feed themselves just by gathering, as if they lived in the Garden of Eden." (Hamblin 15). But as the population grew the nomadic life- style became impossible. The natural environment could not support the population without agriculture. The population settled because they either had the choice of joining with their neighbors in food production or fighting among each other over the food sources. When their second generation expanded into not-so-fertile areas, public services emerged to provide the means for irrigation, commerce, and religion to people in the poorer regions. The city became a fortress. Hamblin writes, "Once defense and population concentration had come along, there was an urgent need for control--somebody to run the city, to make decisions. A barely perceptible ruling class grew accreted to itself the power and prerogatives of control. Priests and shrines multiplied" (Hamblin 19). The temple was the first communal property. It became the sacred place to make offering to the unexplainable force of nature which provided the means for food. The Structures of Power The nomadic hunter who didn't like field work, adopted the arts of herdsmanship when he realized he could tame animals, fatten them up, and then slaughter them. The trading of cattle became one of the first forms of exchange. The villagers wanted the protection of their crops and children from wild animals which the hunter provided. Farmers welcomed the grazing of animals on their fields since their manure help to fertilize the pastures. However, it is conjectured that the benevolent role of the hunter as protector became corrupted by his lust for power. He demanded "protection money" which became a one-sided transaction. In fear for their lives, the peaceful Neolithic villagers gave into his demands. He became more dangerous than predatory animals as he began to slaughter his fellow human beings, and so, his ascent into power began (Mumford 1967). He became the king, warlord, lawlord, and landlord. Here begins the unhappy marriage between the hunter and the gatherer, the co-dependent relationship of agriculture and the domestication of animals. As Daniel Hillel observed in a series of lectures given at the University of Massachusetts, the plow has killed more than the sword. In terms of long-term survival, the salt from irrigated agriculture eventually makes soil unfertile. Mumford writes in _The City in History_, The city, then, if I interpret its origins correctly, was the chief fruit of the union between neolithic and a more archaic paleolithic culture. In the new proto- urban milieu, the male became the leading figure, woman took second place...Woman's strengths have lain in their special wiles and spells, in the mysteries of menstruation and copulation and childbirth, the arts of life. Man's strength now lay in feats of aggression and force, in showing his ability to kill and his own contempt for death: in conquering obstacles and forcing his will on their men, destroying them if they resisted (27). Psychologists such as Norman O. Brown believe the new economic surplus achieved through the agricultural revolution caused our civilization to become fatally neurotic as the death instinct took over the instinct to live. The city cut itself off from nature as it annihilated the wilderness. As a species, we have not yet been able to create a society which fairly distributes the stored-up energy. With no communal goal in mind, people are in competition with their neighbors to gain as much of the surplus wealth as possible, since in a capitalist civilization, it is private wealth which brings one social status and a sense of immortality. Money lives on when the body dies. The Goddess Civilization For thousands of years, Neolithic goddess-worshiping villages had no need for weapons of war. They were advanced toolmakers, but instruments of murder can not be found at these excavated sites. According to Mumford, the egalitarian communities of the Neolithic Age were too small to have launched an attack on their neighbors to gain territory or riches. Instead, they developed a culture of peace which worshiped the Great Goddess. However, as Mumford noted from his study of strongholds and castles, warfare most likely started not with one community fighting against another, but with one forceful and coercive class fighting against its own peasantry. The architectural landscape of villages also changed with the union of the paleolithic and neolithic cultures. Masculine symbols of straight lines, phallic towers, the obelisk, the rectangle, and geometric plans began appearing with the beginnings of mathematics and astronomy. The worship of the cycles of life and the myths surrounding love and pleasure were repressed. Mumford observed, "It is perhaps significant that while the early cities seem largely circular in form, the ruler's citadel and the sacred precinct are more usually enclosed by a rectangle" (27). Around 8000 B.C., bricks were being made from dried mud to be used in constructing buildings. By 7000 B.C., the first rectangular plans appear. According to Gardiner, the break from the semi-circular form "marks the beginning of a true structural consciousness that is related to simplified building methods" (Gardiner 1974, 6). The rectangle provided the possibility of the wall which could be "analyzed, taken apart, reduced to separate pieces, and then "put back in a wholly different form." The wall meant that individual houses could be built. The First Temples According to William H. Desmonde, our first places of worship were among the holy groves of trees which were believed to be the places were the deities lived. The deities were thought to express themselves through signs and oracles. A branch from the sacred tree became the scepter, the magic wand of the artist/magician who was responsible for the natural powers and their occurrence. Wearing a crown made from the branches of the sacred tree was "evidence that an individual had entered into the deepest possible communion with the deity, and it was unthinkable for a person to reside at a ritual without bearing the symbol" (Desmonde 1962, 94). To appease the deities, the artist/magician gave them food offerings. In order for the food to not be found and eaten by someone it was not intended for, the places where the food was offered to the deities were kept secret, located in the forest, somewhere opened to the sky. Upright stones took the place of trees which means that they could be rearranged for particular rituals and the making of altars. Then, because of the forces of the weather, a roof was added to the temple so that ceremonies could be conducted regardless of the weather. From these structures, the first villages were constructed. According to Marija Gimbutas, in her book _The Civilization of the Goddess_, the houses of Old Europe were clustered around the theacratic, communal temple. The temple did not function as a house of the dead, but as a center for the arts, community activities, and other matrilineal functions which were integrated into everyday life. To them, Gimbutas says the "secular and sacred life are one and indivisible." There were two basic kinds of temples: one type for rituals of death and renewal, and the other for the Goddess who protected life, health, and the family. The Neolithic Goddess-worshipers developed a sacred script that was two thousand years older than the Summerian script devised to keep accounts of administrative and business transactions. This script is found only on religious objects. Gimbutas writes, The presence of a sacred script in Old European cultures is consonant with the stage of development. At the time in which this script was in use, east central Europeans enjoyed metallurgic industry, a high degree of architectural sophistication, extensive trade relationship, a remarkable sophistication, and specialization in the craftsmanship of goods, and an increasingly elaborate and articulated system of religious thought and practice (309). One purpose of language is to take us to a place beyond language, to the silent ecstasy of life. This evolved state of mind could have been the purpose of the sacred script of the Neolithic Goddess-worshipers. Was this script a poetic language? Was it indeed women who invented language? If so, it suggests that this poetic language provided the guidance so that the basic human needs of the community members were met on an egalitarian basis without the use of an accounting system. The sacred script could have provided a blueprint for the builders of the megaliths over the many centuries of their construction. The society was guided by a "queen-priestess, her brother or uncle, and a council of women as the governing body" whose reign was determined through the religious symbolism surrounding their lives (xi). Religious symbolism, created within the individual, ruled the hearts and minds of the people so that perhaps something like a clairvoyant understanding of daily events took place. There was no conception of individual money nor emphasis on material possessions. Everyone had an important role to play, whether it was in the inward direction of art or the outward direction of mathematics and astronomy. Life was to be enjoyed. People contributed to society by doing what they loved to do in cooperation with the organic-cosmic order. Gimbutas asserts that archeological evidence suggests that there was no sexual dominance of one sex over the other, but there was a balance of social respect between them, what she calls a "matristic partnership". In matristic societies, honor, inheritance and descent are traced through the mother. In Neolithic times, Gimbutas thinks that men were not subjugated. Through analyzing some of the Neolithic grave sites, it has been determined that elderly religious women received the most social respect. Also honored were girls who were "members of a hereditary line of priestesses." The materials found in the grave sites of queens or priestess do not represent the accumulation of private wealth, as in the later tombs of the ruling aristocracy of Egypt, but they were more of a symbolic nature. Men, in certain villages, who were successful in trade and craftmenship also received grave goods, but there is no evidence that they ever achieved the rank of rulership or were given the right to vote. Some villages buried the bones of dead, after they had been excarnated by leaving the bodies in open towers for birds of prey to devour, underneath the platforms of their living houses. However, the bones found are that of women and children, not of men. According to Gimbutas, this symbolized the important role women and particularly girls played in the society. Many Neolithic graves were egg- shaped; bones were placed in a fetal position to symbolized rebirth. The tomb was the place to be reborn in, the womb- cave of the Goddess of Death and Regeneration. In some villages male bones have not been found and so they must have been buried outside the village settlement. The impression I have of the goddess civilization is that it honored both life and death. However, the exclusion of men from positions of leadership within the religion does not create a formula for a happy relationship between the sexes. Because he was excluded from religious leadership, I question if man was given the opportunity to learn the sacred script of the goddess religion and therefore, denied a role in contributing to the text in a way which would indeed give it full erotic fulfillment. It seems apparent that in goddess traditions there also were established gender roles: woman took care of the children, managed the agriculture and attended to the religious rituals, while men built the houses and temples. Men were made to feel inferior to women since they were not the bearers of life and so developed an unconscious resentment towards women. Through the breeding of animals, man came to understand the importance of the male sperm in the procreative process and he began to gain the knowledge of his individual existence in separation from the mother goddess. Eventually, his resentment of the mother's power resulted in an attempt to overthrow her reign. As the cult of motherhood began to dominate over the powers of the Crone, the part of the Great Goddess responsible for death and regeneration, the war between life and death began. With the development of male domination, man reversed the social conditions by making cruel laws and customs against women. Moving to the other extreme, man no longer worshipped the forces of birth, but the cult of death. The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac represents the change from worshiping the fruit of the womb, to Abraham's sacrifice of his own son to prove his obedience to the word of God. Marilyn French summarizes the story _In Beyond Power_ by saying, "power is being asserted as superior to nature, killing as superior to giving birth" (91). A false aristocracy, based on power gained from material possession, was then established through the work of the sleight-of-hand magician. When the death cult overturned the religion of the Great Goddess, magical tricks of deception were used to enslave the people by following the dictates of kings, priests, and eventually, the money lords of the ruling elite. A sublimation of eros also occurred, and, with it, the alienation of labor as the sleight-of-hand magician waved his pseudo-alchemical wand over gold and silver. He declared gold to be the sun, and silver to be the moon, and the two joined together in holy matrimony to establish the royal household of the nuclear family. Magical entertainers then suppressed the messages of the true magicians/artists who had an inner connection with the life-force. The peasants were coerced into bringing gifts of surplus food and precious metals to the newly established patriarchal temples so that they would be forgiven for their sins. The priests told them that only through repentance would their souls be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Language, then, became a neurotic compromise between operational (reality) principle and the erotic (pleasure) principle. Poetry conformed to the reality base rather than die off altogether. Male dominated language and a male defined reality attempted to suppress the poetic essence. This essence makes language the most powerful instrument in changing our perceptions so that we began to live by an "erotic sense of reality" and the holistic life-style it creates. The divorce of eros from the body was the foundation of the rationalist world-view which divided subject from object, making man the subject of history and woman the object of his conquest of nature. This subsequently lead to the realm of physics becoming the supreme scientific knowledge and biology subservient to it. Since woman was seen to be stuck in the biological realm, she was unable to transcend her biology to be able to partake in the so-called masculine higher levels of reality to be found in physics. Brown writes, As modern civilization ruthlessly elimates Eros from culture, modern science ruthlessly demythologizes our view of the world and of ourselves. In getting rid of our old loves, modern science serves both the reality- principle and the death instinct. Thus science and civilization combine to articulate the core of the human neurosis, man's incapacity to live in the body, which is also his incapacity to die (303). In her book _GAIA: The Human Journey From Chaos to Cosmos_, Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris wonders how far the organic world view would have progressed by now if biology had been considered the basic science, not physics. If the case was reversed, as Dr. Sahtouris believes it should be, this would mean that physicists would have had to fit to their discoveries into the "organic, live universe," instead of the mechanical universe. Archetypal Theory In _A Modern Theory of Architecture_, Bruce Allsopp discusses the two basic architectural archetypes: 1) the audicule and 2) the trilithon. He states that neither the domestic cave nor the temple became our archetypes, but that the primitive hut--the _aedicule_--became the archetype of the house. Standing stones, mounds, or trees--the trilithon--became our archetype for monumental structures. The aedicule is a symmetrical domestic enclosed space, the "home of man or god: the house, the shrine, the temple" (Allsopp 63). There are three parts to the aedicule: the room which is the personal and family place, the porch which is the transition place to the outside, and the roof which makes an enclosure and keeps out the rain. The roof is the most important part of the aedicule. The pitched roof is the basic design for all people living in heavy rainfall areas of the world. Allsopp contends that the aedicule is the symbol of the family: a pair of humans and their offspring; it is the smallest communal and economic group. Art historians state that the primitive hut is the most "natural and essential" architecture, as natural and essential as the tortoise's shell or the bird's nest. Allsopp says it is not a symbol of personality or individuality. Aedicule is for the living, whereas the other archetypal form, the trilithon, is for the dead. The trilithon is composed of two posts and a lintel; it is monumental and non-enclosing. It is a freestanding door way. Allsopp thinks that the trilithon is a commemoration of the dead. The trilithon evolved from a series of the sculptural symbols: the single sacred column, the menhir, the phallic cone, and the pyramid. When the audicule is surrounded by trilithons the classic temple is created as monument and home of a goddess or god, ancestress or ancestor. After the fall of the Great Goddess civilization and the rise of the patriarchal religions, the temple was built as a structure of the ideal, although not of an ideal of the earthly domain, but to the world to come. With the reign of the death cult, came the practices of human and animal sacrifices said to please the gods. Whereupon, the reign of terror began. Let us now go back to the beginnings of community. Mumford surmises that the dead were the first ones to receive a permanent dwelling place. A cavern, a collective barrow, or a mound marked by a cairn of stones housed the dead. The gatherers and hunters returned to these marked spots seasonally to worship their ancestresses and ancestors. According to Mumford the city of the dead antedates the city of the living. Therefore, the core of the living city is the monument to the dead which means that the trilithon is older than the aedicule. The homes of our past are the necropolis of civilization. Dinnerstein summarizes Norman O. Brown, Civilization is an attempt to overcome death...This incapacity to die, ironically but inevitably, throws mankind out of the actuality of living, which for all normal animals is at the same time dying; the result is denial of life...The distraction of human life to the war against death results in death's dominion over life. The war against death takes the form of a preoccupation with past and the future, and present tense, the tense of life is lost" (119). Dinnerstein explains how the denial of death makes us incapable of the joys of life. The joys of the flesh rot in the grave sites of our individual bodies, as the desire for love is denied. We live with "the illusion that in exercising competence we can exert absolute power over everything that matters. If we feel that there exists no precious thing that we must inevitably lose, no real pain that we cannot hope to prevent, then we can re-establish in fantasy the omnipotence we originally knew" (Dinnerstein 1976, 122). This infantile omnipotence for connecting back with the mother occurs when we fail to individualize. Megalithic Architecture Bruce Allsopp discusses another main idea in architecture: the tensile, structural "home" of the nomad, the tent, the suspension bridge or tipi. He states that it lacks a powerful symbolism because it has to be held and is dependent. Also, it was not easily defendable. John Michell also gives a nomadic picture of the pre-historical world in his book _City of Revelation_. People lived by the canon of a cosmology which was embodied in "native laws, customs, legends, symbols and architecture as well as in the ritual of everyday life" (Michell 1972, 26). He believed groups of nomadic or pastoral people would come together in a particular place to play out their cosmology through fertility rituals and seasonal gatherings. On many of these places, such as Stonehenge, sacred rocks were arranged. Michell discusses the function of the megalithic temple in ancient times. The temple was seen as the body and spirit of life; it was a living organism. It was structured in terms of a heavenly or cosmic order; its body was the deity of the macrocosm and the microcosm--the body of the people. It was "the magical control centre of all life on Earth" (59). The temple was "itself a canonical work, a model of the national cosmology and thus of the social and psychic structure of the people" (26). The temple was the center of government and all discussions which influenced the people occurred. The people believed that they would receive supernatural guidance in their decisions at the temple. The plan and place of the temples were decided by astronomical, geometrical, numerical, and geological considerations, such as where the field of terrestrial magnetism were fused between earth and the forces of cosmic radiation. In other words, it was supposed to be a place of the union between cosmic and terrestrial forces. Before the temple there was a split between earth and heaven, religion and science. It was the deities who taught people the divine art of government and gave the temple as a reference of its order. It was believed that arts and sciences came through divine revelation and that they had to be nourished from the same source in order to be kept alive. This source was preserved inside the temple. Michell believes that the temple holds the key to the secrets of lost primeval harmony. He writes, the "ancient dream of the divine order translated to earth is an essential characteristic of the human race" (28). Gerald Hawkins, in his book _Stonehenge Decoded_, hypothesizes that the people of the Neolithic Age possessed a collective, cosmic vision of the divine order which inspired them to haul such massive the rocks to the high points of the plain so that there would be a clear view of the horizon. There they constructed a gigantic astronomical observatory, as accurate as a modern computer in calculating solar and lunar eclipses. The predictions of cosmological events gave the people a sense of cosmic time as well as the cycle of terrestrial events which determined the time of the enactment of certain rituals, ceremonies and festivities. It was a place for music and dance, fertility and funerary rituals, and, perhaps, games and sports. Since it was through the megalithic architecture which the divine art of governance was perceived, there emerged a leisure class of holy people, both mystics and scientists, who were excused from the labor of everyday life. Their task was to observe the position of the moon and sun, and to design and direct the architecture, rituals, and ceremonies in honor of the forces of life. Gimbutas writes, Henges, truly gigantic works of construction, served a vital purpose and are products of the communal effort of large groups of people. Clearly such large scale work had to be based on a society's social and religious system. The ability to organize communal work on a grand scale is one of the chief characteristics of the culture of the megalithic builders (341). She says it should not be forgotten that the megalithic architecture was religious. They were public monuments to life, death, and regeneration. These monuments were works of love, the products of a people's dedication to collective work and communal property. Every member of the community perceived the divine order and had "a body of shared aspirations" (Blake 163). It was the basic education of the community which held the people together. Ortega y Gasset wrote that "order is not a pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within." The Neolithic builders of the megaliths understood the organic-cosmic order from within and so were able to create a landscape of art, utility, and vision. Vincent Scully, in his book _The Earth the Temple And the Gods_, puts forth the observation that the archaic temple sites were not haphazardly placed. Temples were built to express a spatial concept with the surrounding landscape the "meaning that was felt in the land" in recognizing the deity as a natural force (3)." The place itself was holy, even before the temple was built upon it. This meant that the landscape and the human-made environment created a whole ritualist experience, an experience where man's part is defined and directed by the sculptural masses of the land and is subordinate to their rhythms (11). This created a balance between the built environment and the natural, between "nature and the human will" (7). One of the most moving accounts of this philosophy between the sacred landscape and the built environment is in Patrick Nuttgen's book _The Landscape of Ideas_ where he describes the palace at Knossos. He explains that the... movement of people entering the palace at Knossos was labyrinthine... The approach led to a court, thence by the propylaea to the main columnar hall, to the next court and so on to the dark cave-like shrine of the goddess. The movement from light to dark to light to dark is part of the labyrinth that has become the myth (32). The passage way to the palace had a profound psychological effect on people. The spacial experience of the labyrinth made people part of the movement from light to darkness symbolizing the natural forces of life, death, and regeneration. Experiencing, even if only symbolically such fundamental forces connected these people to the basic religious mythos of the Goddess civilization. Gimbutas explains how the Cretan palaces were not built by kings for the purpose of administrating his rule, but were "palace temples where elaborate religious rituals took place within a theacratic system" (345). According to Gimbutas, she goes on to say that the henges were not like the monuments to the dead which later appeared after the "secularization of life began in Britain with Indo-European chieftains," for the chieftain's monuments were based on individual ego, pride in the self and private wealth, rather than built for communal purposes. This lack of communal vision lead to the use of slave labor to construct the monumental architecture of the secular times. Order was imposed from without. The loss of collective vision meant that the people were severed from a sense of the organic-cosmic order. Time no longer was measured by heavenly events and the cycles of nature, but was measured linearly as if the universe was a heartless machine. Inner knowledge of the universal self and finding one's role within the cosmic web of life was disregarded and degraded in favor of the scientific worldview which had no need for the rituals and ceremonies which the cosmic religion had provided. Entertainment, the pleasing of the senses, dominated over inner reflectiveness. The internal experience which causes one to feel empathy for others and to grow from such experience was stunted as entertainment, in all its pornographic forms prospered. The administrative-business language of the Sumerians suppressed the poetic script of the Great Goddess. With the unification of the astronomical priesthood and the enterprises of the kingship, scouts and missionaries were sent out to prospect the land for metals, minerals, and peoples in hopes of increasing their power, wealth, and followings. Their vision was fragmentary and myopic, and so the built environment became disconnected from the landscape. At the henges, the places for the fertility rites became the places for human sacrifice. In the patriarchal worldview, sacred texts and the making of sacred art were no longer open to women. Architecture did not take account of the natural landscape, but was blind to the surrounding environment. Land was no longer viewed as sacred. The monotheistic worship of the sun prevailed over the worship of the moon. The terms of the scale of justice became lopsided. Rationalistic ways of knowing tried to smother the immanent ways of truth. The clairvoyant world community of the Neolithic people was now virtually destroyed. The erotic, playful, energy flow between people, as well as the cultivation of the human soul, were now turned towards personal aggression. The lust for power and material possessions, team sports, and organized murder in the form of crime and war dominated people's consciousness. In W.B. Crow's essay "The Mistletoe Sacrament," he describes a sport practiced on the occasion of a death. The performers of the game were divided into two groups. Then a struggle between the two teams for the dead body took place. The game evolved so that the skull of the deceased took the place of the body which was to be kicked in a goal or was the object of combat. The struggle for the object symbolized the new dualistic world-view of the patriarchal religions: the struggle of light and darkness for the spirit of the deceased. Football, polo and other team sports may have originated with this practice, but now, these modern sports have lost their pseudo-religious significance (Crow 54). The Column Allsopp's theory about the archetypes is sexist in that "the single column is the pole of the tent, the symbol of paternity, the support of the roof, the patriarch. We cannot begin to understand the history of architecture if we think the column is just a structural expedient" (Allsopp 1974, 59). Otto Rank thought the column was more that a structural expedient; it was a "partial expression of the collective ideology which led to the establishment on Earth of the heavenly and the divine--in other words to sacral temple-building" (176). The erecting of the column could be seen as the first separation between the sacred and the secular, earth and heaven, the macrocosm and the microcosm, woman and man. This separation may have been the first great battle between the sexes, resulting in our symbolic fall from Eden. The column marks the beginning of civilization which is also the starting point of the exploitation of the land which if not reversed will cause our extinction. Was the column the first idolatry which became built, the foundation for the emergence of patriarchal religions and the belief in a transcendent sky god detached from nature? Or was the erection of the column a critical attempt by men to separate from their mothers in order to build their own identities? If the column was indeed a revolt against the mother then the spacial revolution by their sons went too far suppressing the rights of women and relegating them to the role of Mother Earth. The intellectual and spiritual powers of women to interpret and guide people by divination and prophecy through the process of death through divination, prophecy, and death, resurrection, and transformation were suppressed. Without these powers, a new social order can not be envisioned to foster a world of creative partnerships. A sense of the whole was lost, as well as our precious balance with nature. Amos Rapoport writes in his book, _House, Form, and Culture_, The desanctification of nature has led to the dehumanization of our relationship with the land and the site. Modern man has lost the mythological and cosmological orientation which was so important to primitive man, or has substituted new mythologies in place of the old. He has also lost the shared images of the good life and its values, unless he can be said to have the shared image of no image (126). Norman O. Brown proposes that the anxiety of the modern age is caused by our anxiety to separate from our protecting mother. Jeremy Rifkin, a disciple of Brown's, reports in his book, _Biospheric Politics_, that humanity has evolved from "a state of undifferentiated oneness with the Earth to a detached self-aware isolation from her." Now that men have reached a state of independence and self-awareness, they must build a new relationship with nature and woman which is both unified and interdependent. Rifkin writes, "biospheric security is based on a reconciliation of the death instinct with the life instinct and helps establish a balance between separation and oneness, independence and dependence, detachment and participation" (325). In an essay entitled, "Masculine Bias and the Relationship between Art and Democracy," Georgia C. Collins writes that human beings are capable of experiencing both forms of consciousness, immanence and transcendence. She says that we feel transcendence "when we become conscious of ourselves as "I" who am capable of a freely chosen self- direction. We are conscious of thou when we realize our vital connection with the group of all living things "whose safety and value depend on our ability to accommodate interests beyond our own." She goes on to say that a healthy adult combines I and thou. However, she points out that the behaviors, values and attitudes in "Western" democracies give transcendent "masculine" qualities favor over "feminine" immanence. And so, we can see the three forms of sexism arising which J. R. Martin outlines as: 1) the exclusion of women from positions of power; 2) male and female stereotyping; and, 3) the devaluing of "feminine" characteristics in society. The question remains whether or not, as the columns of "Western" civilization begin to rot and fall apart from the industrial pollutants released into the atmosphere, will the cycle of love once again bring about the death of one epoch and the birth of a new one? Summary In this chapter we have searched for the origins of the city and discovered the two basic archetypes in architecture: the domestic enclosed space of the aedicule and the monumental, non-enclosing structure of the post and lintel, the trilithon. We have seen how the dysfunctional co-dependent relationship between the feminine agriculturalists and the masculine-meat eaters evolved. In such a society women became second-class citizens and men controlled the natural resources. This prevented the natural insight of the culture of love to conduct its long- term vision of survival. Instead of building heaven on earth, patriarchal incest religions built temples to the sky gods resulting in the rape of the planetary resources.