In:
Art History, Wiley, Vol. 20, No. 2 ( 1997-06), p. 238-267
Abstract:
This article investigates the spherical form and its derivatives (ribbed dome, tumulus, grotto) in modern public architecture in terms of the interrelationship of gendered metaphors and the representation of political identities. Starting with Boullée's Temple of Nature/Reason of 1793, it follows the use of these architectural bodies as metaphors during the French Revolution. The smooth sphere, invented by Boullée for the Newton Cenotaph to signify in stereometric abstraction a scientific cosmos, then became a signifier for the Nation, marking the androcentric universality of a new ‘sovereign’– the People – that excluded women. The grotto signified the ‘other’ of revolutionary reason, linked to the symbolical field of a female earth/vulva. Grotto and tumulus then became part of memorial architecture in the nineteenth century as images of national mother earth to which the fallen hero returns. In the 1920s and 1930s sphere, tumulus, grotto and ribbed dome reappeared, representing the enemy systems of mass democracy, Fascism and revolutionary Russia. As images of totality they are nonetheless constructed within the fields of signification that are shaped by the symbolic order of gender difference. Has the degree of metaphorical gender polarization observed in these architectural ‘discourses’ something to do with the fundamentalist tendencies of collective identities?
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0141-6790
,
1467-8365
DOI:
10.1111/ahis.1997.20.issue-2
DOI:
10.1111/1467-8365.00057
Language:
English
Publisher:
Wiley
Publication Date:
1997
detail.hit.zdb_id:
1495342-0
SSG:
9,10
