Witold Rybczynski has a lovely musing on the architectural qualities of symmetry at slate.com this week. He details the long history of architectural symmetry, and notes its commonality, especially prior to the twentieth century–Hindu temples, Chinese pagodas, and Gothic cathedrals all express themselves spatially in mirror geometries. (He also links to the wikipedia entry for symmetry, which is astonishingly good–glossing symmetry’s role in mathematics, the sciences, religion, social interactions, pottery, music, aesthetics, and games.)
Perhaps most interestingly, Rybczynski explains the symmetry fallout from modernism, with it suddenly not fashionable and uninteresting in architecture. Comparable, then (by giant leap) with the history of formal poetry in America–a type of symmetry all its own–and Pound’s pounding in the early part of the 20th century to “break the pentameter.” If there’s a connection here–a possible symmetry between the history of architecture and verse–then Rybczynski recognizes the problem of sacrificing order for disorder, and we can extrapolate:
“Yet today’s expressionist fashion demands architectural asymmetry at any cost. That’s a shame, since architects sacrifice one of their art’s most powerful tools (not all architects–Norman Foster and Renzo Piano often use symmetry to great effect). Without occasional symmetry, all those angles and squiggles start to look the same. The hyperactive geometry of Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Denver Art Museum, for example, can quickly become tiresome. The fey asymmetry of SANAA‘s much-heralded New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York loses its impact after several viewings.”
One could argue a similar exhaustion comes out of hyper-experimental verse; despite what the poet stands to gain, something is irrevocably lost. So then there’s the rub, in a nutshell–modernism ditched the old organizing principles for the sake of art; but art that avoids an organizing principle merely for the sake of avoiding an organizing principle risks its purchase on the imagination. It doesn’t stand the test of time; and returning to it is ultimately a bore. It doesn’t teach us how to care about it.
Rybczynski ends his mini-essay by effectually “zooming out” and taking the long view of symmetry:
Why is architectural symmetry so satisfying? As Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing demonstrated, it reflects the human body, which has a right side and a left, a back and a front, the navel in the very center. Du Sautoy writes that the human mind seems constantly drawn to anything that embodies some aspect of symmetry. He observes that “[a]rtwork, architecture and music from ancient times to the present day play on the idea of things which mirror each other in interesting ways.” When we walk around a Baroque church, we experience many changing views, but when we walk down the main aisle–the line along which the mirror images of the left and right sides meet–we know that we are in a special relationship to our surroundings. And when we stand below the dome of the crossing, at the confluence of four symmetries, we know we have arrived.
I think, one might argue, that the same is true if you happen to find yourself inside a particularly powerful sonnet. You’re in a special relationship to your surroundings. Symmetry is animal–and what we recognize in it, Rybczynski seems to be saying, is ourselves.