Unnatural acts
Sherban Cantacuzino
The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology Of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World Joseph Rykwert (Faber and Faber £14.00)
The influence of the ancient world on our ?Iv!) has been continuous and pervasive; °111, as Fritz Saxl once remarked, 'it was °WY in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries that classical antiquity was revived without a recurrence of religious Paganism and its demoniac powers which exerted their influence upon life beneath the heavens'. It could not have been otherwise in the Age of Enlightenment, or in the ce, ntorY of scientific discovery which folowed it. If the twentieth century is witnessI,ng a reaction—and Professor Rykwert's u001( is clear evidence of this—it also continues to be affected by a mode of thinking which no longer satisfies. Architects and town-planners, for example, have corne to believe that the creative process of (I.e. sign can be reduced to a science, while art historians have become so obsessed with derivations that they are no longer capable °f appreciating either the object they are c.°ntemplating or the creative force behind !t. Professor Rykwert provides a telling instance of a recent study of Cameroon housing, 'a model of lovingly recorded which never once mentions the tn2Yth0logy surrounding building or even ,!te songs sung by the builders. For the ndation of towns, he declares, used to be Pased on elaborate ceremonial. It is this rnualistic, religious and symbolic role of ItY building which forms the subject of his tOook arid which gives it importance at a
e when planners are mainly concerned with such quantitative considerations as providing an adequate infrastructure or correctly projecting population growth.
Professor • Rykwert's principal sources are the images offered by such archaeological discoveries as the bronze mirror (c. 400 BC) portraying the haruspex Kalchas divining over a sacrificial liver; and the writers of classical antiquity, especially Ovid, Pliny the Elder, Plutarch and Varro, who is quoted extensively on foundation rites. An essential part of these rites, the author observes, was drawing the diagram of the templunt 'to set the general order of the sky in a particular place, with the augur at the heart of it. This was accomplished when the great temple of the sky was first condensed into the ideal form of the augur's diagram, and then projected on to the tract of land before him by the ritual formula.' The diagram was always circular and quartered, but the building which came to represent it and which gave its name to what we now call temples, was always rectangular. This is just one crudely oversimplified example—another is the derivation of urbs from urvo, plough round, or from orbis, a curved thing, a globe, the world—of the author's etymological excursions. The ritual of founding a city, once the auguries had been taken, began with the ploughing of a furrow round the bounds; the digging of a inundus—a ditch filled with the remains of sacrificial victims, fruit and earth over which a fire altar was placed; and the quartering of the site by two intersecting co-ordinates, the cardo or the axis round which the sun turned and the decuinanus which followed the sun's course. To the Roman, says the author, 'the whole universe and its meaning could be spelt out of his civic institutions—so he was at home The conjectural nature and the complexity of the subject, the sheer density of thought, make this a fascinating but difficult book. With blazoning erudition Professor Rykwert marshals his evidence and compiles argument upon argument, so that the ample index becomes an essential aid for cross-reference. It is only in the last pages, for example, that we find an illuminating psychological clue to the ritual of town foundation. 'Every act of building,' states the author, 'is necessarily an act against nature. .. When you choose a site you set it apart from nature. However frail your structure the act of choosing a site for it, of setting it up is different from the animal's choice of nest or lair. A man knows that he is doing it, the animal does not. Therefore the setting up of it, and the choosing must also contain the act of explaining the action of the actor, and also—since it is in some way an action against nature—of justifying it.' And about Cain, the first city founder: 'The first fratricide is the first founder of cities. The Rabbinic legends tell of the blight which Abel's death brought on the whole of nature. Ownership and blight : the farmer's curse. As Cain was, so Romulus is the fratricide founder; there are parricide founders, like Theseus, and child-murderer founders. Town foundations always seem to carry the burden of guilt. That is another reason for the ceremonial structure which I have described.'
The book concentrates mainly on Etruscan, Roman and Greek towns. The foundation of Rome—the myth of Romulus and Remus—pervades every chapter, but the author moves backwards and forwards in time with references to Babylon, Mesopotamia, Constantinople, Sforzinda and Paris, among others. En a late chapter, 'The Parallels', he provides Indian, African, Amerindian and Chinese analogies. Like the temp/urn or th labyrinth, the mandala is a diagram of universal order and a 'prophecy' of the building or town. Even today the Hausa in northern Nigeria retain an elaborate cosmological system to which they relate their standard, orthogonal town plans. The foundation of Maradi in 1946 was accompanied by the sacrifice and burial of four puppy heads, which were merely a substitute for an older ceremony that required the local grandee to sacrifice his own children.
This is not, of course, to advocate a return to infanticide, but merely to stress that town building is an art richly overlaid with symbol. The decline of religion and the consequent loss of ritual has impoverished art, and therefore town building and all architecture. Though we have lost all the beautiful certainty about the way the world works, Professor Rykwert argues, we are not absolved from finding some ground of certainty in our attempt to give form to human environment. And he bids us look for this ground inside ourselves: 'in the constitution and structure of the human person'.
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