Spencer Heath Archive

Item 860

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath on the road between Baltimore and New York.

December 1, 1955

White envelope has items 860 – 867.

Ancient architecture of Assyria and Egypt, Babylonia, all had a very strong tendency towards rectangularism. It suggests pure utilitarianism with little or no aesthetic element in it, element of the inspirational, appealing to the aesthetic faculties. And I think we should expect that to characterize conquerors. Conquerors have very utilitarian purposes, not socially useful but politically useful, and a jail is much more useful to a political power than is, you might say, a cathedral, or a shrine, or any of those things that came into the world so conspicuously with the Renaissance — in addition to purely political architecture.

Where people have political motivation, that is, they hunger for power over their fellow men, that is for them a utilitarian purpose, and it is best served by rigidities rather than by flexibilities. The free spirit is flexible. The conquering spirit and the subdued or subjugated spirit is rigid. And as that spirit reflects itself in architecture, we have the rectangular, straight-lines system, and in the other, built upon the /free spirit/, we have some element of inspiration, some element of reminiscence of beauty, some suggestiveness of something above and beyond ourselves.