The Appearance of Architecture

In the pantheon of Greek antiquity, architecture came first. The eldest of the primordial deities to emerge from the spinning cauldron of chaos was Gaia, or Earth, who in the great religious tradition of virgin births herself bore two fatherless sons—being Pontus, the sea, and Ouranoss, the sky. Today we call Ouranoss “Uranus,” ironically now meaning not our own sky but rather the seventh planet from our sun—one that isn’t even a sky-like gas giant at all but rather a mere ice-giant doppelganger. It’s important to note the genealogical calculus surrounding Ouranoss, who came into existence far before the more commonly known standard-issue Greek gods that we know today, and even before their predecessors, the Titans. In this, the sky (Ouranoss) thus precedes both time and beauty, the former his son, Kronos (Time), and the latter his daughter, Aphrodite (Beauty),—who herself was birthed from the foamy mess of Ouranoss’s castration at Kronos’s gelding hands, which is altogether another story.

Eventually, upon the mating of Kronos with his own sister, Rhea (Earth), we get something starting to resemble architecture—a daughter. She was known as Hestia, goddess of the hearth, being not only fire but the architecture that contained it. Unknown to most, Hestia was actually born first of all the Greek gods—as the oldest sibling of Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, and eventually the youngest child, Zeus. Today we know this genealogy in reverse order—Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, and poor forgotten Hestia—not because that was the order of their birth but rather for the order in which they were regurgitated by their father, Kronos, after he ate them immediately following their births. That is to say, without culinary infanticide of Kronos, along with Aphrodite, Hestia, goddess of architecture, would have been the first among the gods. That is to say that, were it not for Time, Architecture and Beauty would have, as the two eldest siblings, ruled the world.

This already tricky family genealogy is made even less comprehensible by three millennia of additional confusion, and yet there seems to be a consensus today that architecture has something to do with beauty, and something to do with time—but the linkages, confusing as they were from the very start, have been mostly lost to both time (again), and accordingly, contemporary interest. To further confuse issues, we are no longer allowed to discuss beauty in contemporary academic parlance, and instead typically use the distant and more sanitized term aesthetics, a word with so many meanings across culture as to be nearly meaningless. All of this requires some clarification.