Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
The Northwestern Basin in the
Palace of Minos
Rachel McCann.
McCann is Professor of Architecture at Mississippi State University, where she teaches architectural history, theory, philosophy, and design. rmccann@coa.msstate.edu; © 2011 Rachel McCann. Originally published in EAP, vol. 22, no. 3 (fall 2011), pp. 8-10. For the introduction to this essay, go to "selected readings" and the co-authored essay by McCann, Hopsch, and Porter.
The island of Crete stretches about 60 x 250 kilometers. Its boundaries are irregular, and mountain ranges divide the land into discrete pockets. To get from one place to another, one must take a circuitous path, following the contours of the land, encountering and responding to both horizontal and vertical shifts, alternating between panoramic vistas and tightly controlled views.
There is none of the grand axiality that characterizes, for example, the landscape of the Nile Valley. But the Cretan landscape is richly articulated with caves, mountains, groves, and rivers—many of them held sacred. A Cretan would navigate among these sacred places, winding through a series of ever-changing perspectives and foci, with memory and anticipation rather than vision as a spatial organizer.
Mythopoetic cultures typically reflect the complex character of their natural environments. Ecological philosopher David Abram writes that:
each place has its own dynamism, its own patterns of movement, and these patterns engage the senses and relate them in particular ways, instilling particular moods and modes of awareness, so that unlettered, oral people will rightly say that each place has its own mind, its own personality, its own intelligence [1].
Crete’s personality and intelligence are inspired by its meandering paths, changing grades, and shifting horizons. This landscape speaks more of intricately patterned relationships than of hierarchy and order, more of twisting movement than of unobstructed vision. In response, the Minoans’ religion, art, and architecture are all structured around pattern and movement. Their nature religion centered around a kinetic form of epiphany employing dancing, bending trees, jumping bulls, and other dynamic acts in which movement sacralized space. inoan art is full of movement, with figures caught in mid-gesture as animals twist and bend, plant stalks sway, and objects float freely in the air in charged, patterned interrelationships (photograph, below).
Typical of Minoan architecture with its labyrinthine arrangement and ambiguous spatial boundaries, the Palace of Minos echoes the qualities of Minoan art and landscape. Unconcerned with frontality, hierarchy, and discernible order, the palace submerges us within a complex set of spatial relationships characterized by twisting movement and changing viewpoints. The art in the palace complex reiterates the forms of the landscape, while the palace itself reiterates the experience of moving through and interacting with that landscape.
This complex spatial experience, overlaid with religious symbolism, is evident in a sanctuary type unique to the Minoan culture, the lustral basin. Associated with ceremonies of initiation, the basin sanctuary is a sequence of related spaces: a rectangular anteroom enclosed by polythyron (pier-and-door) systems, a main sanctuary, and a depressed basin contained within the main sanctuary and separated by a screen of columns. The Northwest Basin, the oldest such structure in the Palace of Minos, measures 2.56 x 2.45 x 2.0m deep. Vessels found in the ruins were of the type to be filled with unguent or perfume, and it is likely that visitors entering the sanctuary complex used the basin sanctuary for purification rites.
The spatial experience of the Northwest Basin is layered and rich. From the northwest porch, we enter an anteroom through the polythyron system, in which pivoting doors allow the spaces on either side to be separated or joined [2]. This operable system allows the light level in the rooms to be adjusted from darkness to brilliance. In the opposite wall, two adjacent doors provide an incipient polythyron system leading into the main sanctuary. These permeable boundaries are reiterated between the sanctuary and basin, allowing for a great variety in the spaces’ interconnection and shifts in lighting capable of enhancing ritual. The interconnection enhances the potential of the spaces to host a kinetic epiphany, allowing witnessing of the central ritual by layered groups of spectators.The main sanctuary of the Northwest Basin is a rectangular room whose perimeter is pierced by a few clerestory windows and anteroom doors. The basin occupies a corner of the main sanctuary, simultaneously contained within and separate from the main space. The Northwest Basin is situated almost at the very entrance to the sanctuary, its steps directly in line with one of the anteroom doors. It is likely, however, that celebrants formed a winding procession, making a complete counterclockwise circuit around the basin before entering it.
From the top landing, we descend 16 wide, shallow steps in a counterclockwise spiral toward the basin floor, enclosed by gypsum walls retaining traces of the original paint (photograph, below). The basin’s depth accentuates its associations with death, rebirth, and the axis mundi.
Layers of Experience and Meaning
Meaning develops in
the Flesh as an intelligible, embodied response to “the
allusive logic of the perceived world” [3]. The inevitable
gap between language and world gives room for ambiguity and
breadth of interpretation as the phenomenon unfolds.
Meaning, then, is not “sheer signification,” but a fruitful
intermingling of body, mind, and world, in which the sense
of the world orders the sense of language, which in turn
reveals the Flesh’s intelligible content [4].
Initiation involves death and rebirth, leaving one realm and entering another. An initiate descends (dies) and ascends to be reborn with a new identity and a new role in the society. Descent connects one to the powerful chthonic region deep in the earth, allowing one to descend the axis mundi to the root of divine power. As we descend the steps of the Northwest Basin, the solid walls on the right enclose us as if in a tomb. The speckled black “stone” increases the psychological weight of the earth as we descend through it. On the left, in contrast, the otherworldly area of the basin opens up between widely spaced Cretan columns that descend alongside us. The proportions of the basin are close, with room for only one or two celebrants.
In Merleau-Pontyian Flesh, architectural experience is thick with relationship. Surfaces open up and forms realign as we move perceptively through space. From a perceptual viewpoint, descent into the basin gives the feeling that we are passing out of the main sanctuary through a succession of elongated moments. Although the steps are shallow, each perceptually invokes a conscious lowering of one’s horizon, stretching out the interval of descent into 16 discrete moments. The tread width requires two steps to descend one tread, causing us to dwell momentarily and fully at each level.
Once in the basin bottom, we occupy a realm almost completely distinct from that of ground level, but light through framed openings in the upper story gives some spatial overlap. The blue “sky” above, with light streaming in beside it, provides a strong contrast to the stone basin, crowning Earth with heaven and weight with lightness, accentuating both the separation and the relationship of the two realms. During the descent, our focus is on the process of approaching; once we arrive, however, we understand and experience the overlapping presence of both realms.
Movement through the basin sequence is characterized by turns, changing focal points, complex lighting situations, and horizon changes. The spiraling descent into the basin is unparalleled in other sanctuary types, although it reiterates more ancient spiral tomb carvings symbolizing a journey inward toward death and then outward toward rebirth. A natural precedent for this type of movement was the twisting natural paths found inside Crete’s abundant sacred caves.
Opening to the World
Merleau-Ponty asserts
that the space of the body is unlike the rest of space.
Although it is unknowable, it is never neutral; rather, the
space of the body is the “primary here from which all the
there’s will come.” The body is the origin point of
spatiality, irretrievably altering space by its location and
movement within it, and the carnal echo of architectural
space reiterates the way space plays out in relationship to
the origin point of our bodies [5].
Given the Minoans’ artistic and religious preoccupation with their island’s natural features, it is likely the spiraling approaches to the basins were conceived as a series of changing perspectives and focal points resonant with the curving movements necessary to navigate around mountainous contours. And movement through the basin sequence puts us in an ever-changing relationship to the religious truths contained within the lustral basin.
A perceived thing unfolds erratically, in “reflections, mirages, noises and fleeting tactile impressions” that interlace fruitfully with dreaming, imagining, and religious experience [6]. Layered on our own inner dimensions, perceived qualities of a thing become imperatives for interaction and help us to discover the shape of our own inner carnal terrain as our perception activates desires and resonances within us [7]. Perception does not grasp a stable object. Our perception always includes an “horizon” of the unperceived, including latent spatial supports such as light, shadows, and the temporal horizon of reiteration, memory, and anticipation.
With its ambiguous spatial boundaries and the turning and descending movement necessary to enter, the lustral basin sanctuary reiterates the qualities of the entire palace. The boundaries—a combination of solid walls, punched windows, polythyron systems, and columned parapets—are ambiguous and transformable, resulting in a spatial complexity impossible to sum up conceptually. Axis and vista are continually denied in favor of changing viewpoints and multiple foci.
To be understood, the spatial amalgam must be experienced not as a unified object presented to the gaze, but through time and movement. The lack of frontality, the complex organization, the subtle manipulations of light all invite participatory and ambiguous spatial experience. The basin sanctuary’s dialectic between separation and containment resonates with the subtle, complex Minoan cosmos, where nature, too vast, immediate, and complicated to conceptualize, formed the basis of religion.
The complex spatial interrelationships of the basin sequence subvert conceptual hierarchy and heighten corporeal experience, echoing the kinetic nature of Minoan art. Turns, level changes, layers of enclosure, and multiple foci parallel qualities in Minoan art, as we take the place of depicted figures “caught… in the center of an intricate design,… caught in the web of a living world that has indefinite orientation and indefinite multiple relations” [8].
Notes
1.
Abram, D., 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous (NY:
Pantheon).
2. We enter the sanctuary sequence through the northwest porch and exit through a turning corridor with ramps and steps leading upward to the central court.
3. M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1997), p. 200.
4. M. Merleau-Ponty, in D. Taylor, Phantasmic Genealogy, in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, T. W. Busch & S. Gallagher, eds. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 158.
5. M. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, G. A. Johnson, ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993), p. 136, p. 138.
6. A. Lingis, “Phantom Equator,” in Busch and Gallagher, p. 230.
7. Lingis, p. 238.
8. H.-A. Groenewegen-Frankfort, “Arrest and Movement,” in Representational Art of the Ancient Near East (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), p. 196, p. 201.
Photographs:
Fresco with springtime landscape, bronze-age excavations at
Akrotir, island of Santorini, c. 1600 BC.
Top flight of Northwest Basin stairs, looking east (author's photograph).