The Master and His Emissary is a book I read halfway through, got mad at, and didn’t pick back up until nearly a year later, once I had matured.
When I originally came across it, I wasn’t yet exploring the critical question of this series: “Why is our architecture so damn ugly… and getting worse all the time?” But upon delving deeper into this subject, I couldn’t not return to it. It held too many answers.
There’s no doubt the book is exceptional. I knew that even on the first pass. It’s incredibly detailed, expansive in breadth, and yet highly cohesive. Author Iain McGilchrist is, as you might expect, quite impressive himself. Just a few of the institutions on his credentials list include Oxford, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He’s a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar rolled into one.
But that didn’t mean I was required to like his book.
Originally, I felt that McGilchrist obviously favored one way of thinking over another and, as such, was slandering the world I lived in unfairly. But as I began to really look at the world I was living in (which has been one consequence of writing this series), I started to see that his analysis, hard to hear as it was, matched up. And I couldn’t unsee it.
So there I was, returning to a book I had previously written off, discovering treasures I didn’t want to find.
Your experience reading this article may feel similar. I hope it does.
Today, we’re delving into the structure of the human brain, how that structure has influenced our thought patterns over time, its link to major historical movements, and how those movements have affected the world concretely—for our purposes, in architecture.
Saddle up, dear reader. We ride through the heart of the labyrinth today.
What does brain structure have to do with architecture?
For a series exploring problems in architecture, delving into the structure of the human brain may seem like an odd diversion at best. But what I hope has been made clear from my previous posts on this subject is that architecture is not just architecture.
Architecture is the physical embodiment of our cultural values.
Structures as massive as buildings take incredible amounts of time, money, dedication, and coordination to build. More than that, they tell our story. Looking at a civilization’s collective buildings, we can literally see what was most important to that culture.
This point is not unique to societies of the past. It is as true today as it has ever been.
So the question becomes: how, then, do collective values form?
As it turns out, our brains have a lot to do with it. After all, the brain is “where mind meets matter”1, and we use our minds to shape the world we live in. And one of the most obvious things one notices when looking at a brain is that it has two hemispheres: the right and the left.
This structure, McGilchrist argues, has profound implications for how the world has developed from ancient times to the current day.
There are two worlds in your brain.
While there is significant overlap in the functions of the brain hemispheres, McGilchrist argues that the experiences each side delivers are — nearly literally — worlds apart.2
We’re not talking about the hokey concept of “lefties” vs. “righties” that has been popularized by business consultants and marketers the world over. The reality is much more complex. That said, to make this post short enough and easily understandable, I am going to have to do some summarizing. Grab the book if you want the details.
The basics of the neuroscience are thus:
The right hemisphere is the side of holistic thinking, of experiencing the world as it is, of broad attention, of religious feeling. (Think: feeling, relationships)
The left side is that of abstraction, representation, parts-form-a-whole, categorization, and manipulation. (Think: mechanical, tools, mapping)
Essentially, the two hemispheres pay attention to the world in different ways. The right sees broadly in scope, taking in the full context; the left is more narrow, aloof, and analytical, primarily concerned with our personal needs.3
Below is a 2-page table with a simple breakdown of each hemisphere’s “specialties”. You don’t need to study these too hard (for the sake of this article), but a quick overview may give you a better feel for how they differ.
Why do we care about these distinctions at all? Well, as it turns out, “the nature of the attention one brings to bear on anything alters what one finds.”4 Meaning: how we pay attention determines what we see. And further:
attention is inescapably bound up with value… . [The type of attention we exert] brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.5
And, as we have already discussed, our values directly impact what we create, what we build.
If we want to change our architecture, it seems we must change the way we pay attention to the world.
Who’s the master?
To be sure, the unique perspective of each hemisphere is invaluable, and you need them both. The brain is split for a reason.
But McGilchrist’s conclusion isn’t even-handed.
His argument boils down to this: throughout history, a war has been waging in our brains between the right and left hemispheres for primacy, and the wrong side is increasingly and currently winning.
If you ask a modern person which side of the brain is more equipped to lead the other, they’d probably answer “the rational side” — often meaning the left hemisphere. The Enlightenment, from which the modern Western world is birthed, prized this quality perhaps above all others. Consider the Scientific Method, which isolates one variable and holds all others constant so that variable may be better understood. The ability to abstract a thing from its context, understand it, and then ultimately control that thing is a hallmark of left-hemispheric thinking.
But McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere is actually better suited as the “emissary” of the right hemisphere, which is the “master.”
His grounds for this assertion are complex but extremely compelling.
Take for example that the right hemisphere is the alpha and omega of our attention. Because it pays broad attention to the world, it is the hemisphere responsible for bringing us new information. That information then gets sent to the left hemisphere for “processing,” to be understood rather than experienced. Ideally, that information then gets returned to the right hemisphere, where it is re-integrated back into our experience of the world.6 Ultimately, the left hemisphere is doing the bidding of what the right hemisphere has deemed important. The right hemisphere sets the direction; it is the true master.
And that’s just one justification. To take another potent illustration, the below picture (reproduced by me) shows what can happen when a person experiences a stroke in the brain that causes a condition known as “hemi-neglect.” Hemi-neglect results in a person not “noticing” a particular field of attention, even though the visual system isn’t impaired.7
In this example, patients with right-hemispheric stroke (and thus having a fully functioning left hemisphere) could not reproduce a drawing from a template (image left) in its entirety. They could only draw the right side of the picture (image right) because, somewhat confusingly, each hemisphere specializes in the side of the body opposite it.
That’s fascinating, but even more so when coupled with this contrast: in patients with a left-hemispheric stroke (with a fully functioning right hemisphere), this same phenomenon does not occur. Hemi-neglect in the right hemisphere might narrow the field of what is perceived, but it still presents a united picture of both the left and right sides of space. It gives the patient a coherent picture of the world, even if a bit diminished.
So what’s happening here? It seems that, when a patient is dependent upon the left hemisphere alone, they often focus so intently on the right field of attention that they do not notice what is on the left side.8
Functionally, they are blind to half of what exists.
How do we know our best architecture was under the direction of the right hemisphere?
It seems that, on a societal level, we are now suffering from a form of left-hemispheric hemi-neglect. Hyper-focused on the values of the left hemisphere — such as the self, correctness, control, and what we can know without a doubt — we’ve become blind to what all of those things are really for: relationship with others, with The Other (the values of the right hemisphere).
But without the brain scans of people long gone, how can we know for sure that ancient thought patterns differed? Well, if my last post didn’t convince you that our ancestors approached the world much differently than we do, then I hope McGilchrist can.
The second part of his book is dedicated to proving this point, going through the art, history, philosophy, architecture, poems, writings, and any other evidence the cultures left behind to make the case.
And let me tell you: the evidence is substantial.
History from the Brain’s Point of View
McGilchrist describes the arc of history as a sort of pendulum swinging between the right and left hemispheres for priority. And if you’re wondering how an individual’s preference for one hemisphere could manifest itself as a cultural phenomenon, simply consider how imitative human beings are. In fact, “thinking about something, or even just hearing words connected with it, alters the way we behave and how we perform on tasks.”9 While the brain may not have changed much structurally over this time, how we use it certainly has.
As such, broad cultural movements give us some of the most potent evidence that the war is taking place.
From this basis point, we launch our investigation into our past — in the hope that we may better understand where we are today.
The Ancient World
We begin our study of the battle of the hemispheres in ancient Greece, often considered the birthplace of the Western world.
To hear McGilchrist tell the story, archaic Greece (as far back as the 7th century) displayed a remarkable expansion of both right- and left-hemispheric thinking simultaneously.10 This development resulted in the immense amount of treasures from their society that are revered to this day. This “balance” (where the hemispheres function in a right → left → right priority sequence that we previously discussed) can be seen in things such as portraiture, the direction of writing, and philosophy, to name just a few.
Portraiture during this time became much more emotionally expressive, unlike ancient paintings which were more stereotypic and inexpressive. There was even a tendency to paint the left side of the face. Both of these features favor the right hemisphere (or RH), which prefers to see the individual over the category and specializes in the left side of the body.11
Early Greek was written from right to left, and before that, most language was written vertically. This, too, is favored by the RH.12
Philosophy bloomed. There was a desire to explore (an impulse from the RH) analytic philosophy, theorizing about the State, mapping, and observation of the natural world (favored by the left hemisphere, or LH), a marriage that gave rise to empathy, imaginative and metaphoric language/art, humor, and irony (demonstrating a return to the RH).13 The primary philosophers of this time saw life as in a perpetual state of flow (RH), the exception being Parmenides, who would help turn the tides in the left hemisphere’s favor later down the road.14
It was not until Plato, from the 5th century onwards, that the left hemisphere seemed to really take the reins. Where the above examples began with the right hemisphere, eventually, they moved to left-hemispheric priority.
You can actually see this shift in the direction of writing. As the centuries continued, writing began “alternating direction line by line,”15 until in the fourth century, “all forms of Greek were being written left to right.”16
Philosophy shifted from understanding the world as being in an ever-changing state of flow to that of stasis. It was Plato, influenced by his predecessor Parmenides, who held that “knowledge must be unfailing and general” and that “we cannot know things that are changing or particular”.17 Remember: the left hemisphere loves to isolate things from their context. This viewpoint had a huge impact on the direction of Western philosophy thereafter.
Under Roman rule, we see a very similar pattern. McGilchrist puts the high point of much of Rome’s works near the year 1 AD. Just a couple of examples will suffice here:
Literature: Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius and Catullus wrote within 50 years of each other,18 all of whose writings have great evidence for a right-left hemisphere alliance at this time.19
Preference for Detail: There was a preference for realistic detail in the arts like portraiture, landscape, and still life. (RH)20
But he notes that, as Rome’s reign continues, it prefers “ever more rigidly systematized ways of thinking, suggestive of the left hemisphere working alone.”21 For example:
Similarities of Towns and Cities: Under Roman rule, even primitive locales were “faithfully corresponding to a model which hardly changed over time and place,” receiving transplanted cultural goods that were “always identifiably the same.”22
New Comedy: The Old Comedy typical of Greek culture was replaced by a new, stereotype-driven comedy.
Portraiture: In Late Antiquity, portraiture became much more generalized, symbolic, and distant, rather than its previously lifelike attention to proportion based on nature and the human body.23
Overall, compared to archaic Greece, “Rome’s greatness depended more on codification, rigidity and solidity than it did on flexibility, imagination and originality.”24
So how did architecture fair during this shift from right to left hemispheric priority? The beauty of Classical architecture (birthed in early Greece) gave way to a more imperial, imposing Roman architecture in late antiquity. McGilchrist quotes Hans Peter L’Orange’s Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman Empire here:
The free and natural forms of the early Empire, the multiplicity and variation of life under a decentralized administration, was replaced by homogeneity and uniformity under an ever-present and increasingly more centralised hierarchy of civil officials.25
I particularly love McGilchrist’s analysis here, which aligns wonderfully with Christopher Alexander’s observations about the nature of beauty:
In Classical art and architecture, form had not been something added on by the artist from without or above, but rather brought forth from ‘deep within the object itself’. There was an organic beauty which pervaded the whole conception and could be found in its smallest detail: ‘in the same way that the individual type of a living being determines the form of each single part of it, so the principle for the whole structure of the classical building is contained within each single element of it.’ The phrase reminds one of the way in which, in living forms, the structure of DNA within every cell contains information about the whole organism, or of the fractality of organic forms.26
Late imperial Roman architecture separated the “part” from the “whole” so much that, when they conquered a locale and raided its buildings for spoils, they would sometimes even use the bottom of a column as the top of another.27 The previous sensitivity for harmony and wholeness seen in so much earlier Greek and Roman architecture gave way to a disconnected, rigid, and ultimately worse version of its former self.
The best, most admirable architecture of this period came from when the right hemisphere was primary, and we see a deterioration in architectural sensibilities when the left hemisphere became dominant.
The Renaissance and the Reformation
McGilchrist skips over the medieval ages (which, for our purposes in architecture, is more than a shame) and goes straight to the Renaissance, which he views as great a leap as that of early Athens, and still has lots for us to learn from.
In the Renaissance, we see the achievement of a “necessary distance” that had been previously lost, where the right and left hemispheres work properly together, resulting in achievements such as Shakespeare’s plays and Dowland’s complex, melancholy music.28
Conceptually, the left side of the body (again, associated with the RH) became associated with beauty, truthfulness, and fragility. Portraiture again came to emphasize the left side of the face, and the light source would also often be coming from the left.29 Even more so, the body itself began to be seen as potentially spiritual, rather than simply a prison for the soul, as it had become in the aftermath of Plato.30 Art was viewed as a divine gift rather than as an invention (as it would later come to be viewed),31 “a spiritual revelation of what lies in nature”.32 Beauty in the world was “an indicator of something beyond”.33 In fact, McGilchrist goes so far as to state that “the Italian Renaissance [was] the greatest outpouring of religious art in human history”.34
All of these indicate that the right hemisphere was in its rightful place as master during this time.
But in the Reformation that came after, we see a return to left-hemispheric dominance. The Reformation was set off by Luther’s historic Ninety-Five Theses that he nailed to the doors of a church. Extremely interestingly, though, McGilchrist sees Luther himself as a proponent of right-hemispheric thinking, not as an enemy of it. The movement that he set off, however, did not actually support those values. McGilchrist explains beautifully:
[Luther] was himself tolerant, conservative, his concern being for authenticity, and a return to experience, as opposed to reliance on authority. His attitude to the place of images in worship and in the life of the Church was balanced and reasonable: his target was not images themselves (which he actually endorsed and encouraged) but precisely the functionalist abuse of images, images which he thought should be reverenced. Yet despite this, he found himself unleashing forces of destruction that were out of his control, forces which set about destroying the very things he valued… .35
You can see the left hemisphere’s domination in the proceeding Reformation through the movement’s robust iconoclasm, its over-emphasis on the Word, and — concerning our favorite theme of architecture — the church’s interior structure.
Iconoclasm, or the destruction of religious imagery, was rampant under the reigns of the Reformation. Statues were literally being decapitated. McGilchrist explains this impulse as an:
“inability to accept the ambiguous or metaphorical, and because of a fear of the power of the imagination, images were objects of terror. Statues had to be reduced to ‘mere wood’. … To see that ‘mere’ wood can partake of the divine requires seeing it as a metaphor, and being able to see that, precisely because it is a metaphor rather than a representation, it is itself divine. … This is the difference between the belief that the bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ, and the belief that they are in some important sense the body and blood of Christ”.36
Images were only adornments that aided in understanding the meaning of something, “a meaning which could have been better stated literally.”37
This led to words themselves being understood as objects. Common sayings such as “The word of the Lord shall endure forever” became “VDMIE”, an acronym from the Latin, which could then be held up as a sort of talisman for the sacred to attach itself to.38 Religious pictures were replaced with written texts (they were sometimes literally written over)39.
And thus, words replaced images in full.
In doing so, the focus became about ‘proclamation’ of the word versus a ‘manifestation’ of the divine.40
And, as is often the case, these mental movements became concrete in the changes in the architecture of the time. The culture’s most important building, the church, shows these changes most violently.
The altar, previously the focal point of the church, gave way to the pulpit, from which the preacher would teach. “The pulpit was now situated far above the heads of the congregation near the roof of the church”,41 with the congregation arranged in geometric order below. In the Roman Church, movement, walking, and processing were all encouraged and incorporated. In the Reformed church, the “chairs are everywhere the most visible feature … enforcing stasis and system”42 in “neatly placed symmetrical ranks on the floors which are laid out like graph paper”.43
All of these changes point in one direction: that of the left hemisphere.
McGilchrist wraps up his analysis of the Reformation with a single sentence that, coming from a Protestant background myself, is now burned into my brain:
“In essence the cardinal tenet of Christianity — the Word is made Flesh — becomes reversed, and the Flesh is made Word.”44
The Enlightenment
Known as the Age of Reason, it will be no surprise to you that McGilchrist classifies the Enlightenment as the period most influential to the ushering in of modernity and the left hemisphere’s dominance in our modern life.
He starts by clarifying the use of two related words:
Reason, which is like “common sense” and is “flexible, resisting fixed formulation, shaped by experience and involving the whole living being”,45 is associated with the right hemisphere.
Rationality, which is “more rigid, rarified, mechanical, governed by explicit laws”, is associated with the left hemisphere.46
Traditionally, reason (RH) was considered superior to rationality (LH); this is largely because all rationality is based, initially, in intuition, in reason.47 It is not until the Enlightenment that this hierarchy gets flipped on its head.
In the 17th century, we find a reversal of Renaissance values and a narrowing of concerns.48 Truth in philosophy was only to be found in abstract generalizations, in theories that were universal and timeless.49 This paved the way for the Scientific Revolution, which for all its power, has its blind spots, too (which are just now being recognized by our culture).
But let’s focus first on the Enlightenment’s most consequential philosopher and thinker: Descartes.
It is Descartes’ name, more than any other, that I have come across in my research (both in McGilchrist, as well as Alexander and others) as the name upon which the modern viewpoint is built, so it’s worth taking a little time to tease out exactly what he espoused about the world.
In quick summary, Descartes believed that “science will make us ‘the lords and master of nature’”50 and that it is only those things that we “conceive very clearly and very distinctly” that are all true.51 This contrasts sharply with the Renaissance view, exemplified by Bacon, that nature is “many times subtler than our senses or our understanding”.52 Descartes’ extreme rationality led him even to doubt the existence of his own body,53 and thus came his ever-famous: “I think, therefore I am.” He viewed the body and the senses as a path toward error, not truth.54 Knowledge of the body was not self-evident through intuition but constituted by the intellect.55 This worldview permeated him so deeply that he describes “looking out of his window and seeing what he knows to be people passing by as seeming to him nonetheless like mere machines, wearing hats and coats”.56
If reducing humanity to a machine sounds familiar to you in today’s day and age, now you know why. We are still steeped in a Cartesian view of the world.
The disturbing thing about this particular viewpoint dominating our culture is that it results in a host of not-so-pleasant downstream effects. I’ll name just a few.
When you are detached from your body, you become detached from your affective engagement with the world. We experience the world through our senses; without them, we experience the world as a representation.57 The human goes from an active participant in the world to a passive observer.58 It’s no surprise, then, that the concept of boredom arose during the 18th century.59
In a Cartesian world, certainty and clarity become paramount, meaning that metaphor, art, poetry, and anything else that requires creativity gets downgraded to “adornment that shows the [artist’s] skill, or entertains, or aids flagging attention, rather than as an indispensable part of understanding.”60 The job of art then becomes the job of, say, graphic design or marketing (as I know only too well) — to flag someone’s attention with sensationalism or boldness or clarity, but certainly not to connect us deeper in our humanity. Art and metaphor become “simply another way of stating literal truth”, or worse, they undermine truth entirely.61
The Enlightenment also saw the reign of the virtue of Equality, which has both its good and bad sides. Here the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution is laid, where objects must be “widgetized” and made equal, substitutable, repeatable.
Bureaucratization begins to flourish. Friendship becomes “a sort of association of labour” and caring for someone becomes “the bureaucratic provision of what is called ‘care’, at the same time that the network of private and personal bonds and responsibilities in communities …is eroded.”62 Tocqueville saw that society would devolve into “a new kind of servitude which ‘covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules … till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which government is the shepherd”.63
It’s hard, 200 years down the road of Enlightenment thinking, for that analysis to not feel searingly true.
And, of course, the Enlightenment also birthed capitalism, which at the beginning of this series, I praised and made a case for. The next frontier for my writing will be to do a deep dive into capitalism to understand it at a level I have hitherto not achieved. But suffice it to say that McGilchrist describes capitalism as a “large-scale, rootless, mechanical force” in the culture, which, had I not been familiar with his work beyond that statement, I would’ve dismissed. But now, knowing the depth of his work and its resonance in me, I can’t so easily do that. But we’ll return to this issue at a later date.
Let us consider again our principal investigation: architecture. One would expect architecture to completely degrade amidst the great force of the Enlightenment, but McGilchrist actually quotes architecture as among the best of the period’s art.
If architecture is a physical embodiment of cultural values, how is that possible?
His argument is thus: architecture, like music, is so inherently implicit that it is “least available to being hijacked into the world of explicitness.”64 And though the Enlightenment was the greatest age in European architecture, that architecture is largely based on the principles of the Italian Renaissance architects.65
In fact, he views nearly all the great works of any medium in this period — contrast Reynolds with Michelangelo, Johnson with Shakespeare — as rebellions against “all the theoretical baggage of the Enlightenment when faced with the enormity of experience”.66
I would add a further detail regarding architecture: the Enlightenment was such a massive leap into left-hemispheric thinking that architecture, being the slow art form that it is, could not transform itself so quickly as other works. But the groundwork for our current predicament was laid here, in the Enlightenment, where a focus on a nearly uncanny symmetry and stasis reigned.67 Think of our box apartments, the endlessly repeating floor design, and perfectly clean and straight lines, none of which occur so perfectly in nature.68
All of this and more (which I plan to document in a later article), is preferential to left-hemispheric thinking.
So while the Enlightenment enjoyed beautiful architecture based on the Renaissance masters, given enough time, our architecture did transform to embrace Enlightenment values. This is only too clear by simply looking around at our often-monstrous, machine-like modern city.
Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution
The inevitable swing back toward the right hemisphere came in the form of Romanticism, which may be better defined as “a whole disposition towards the world … a how” rather than a definite, limited number of beliefs about something.69 Interestingly, McGilchrist actually views Romanticism as an extension of Enlightenment thinking as, right-hemisphere fashion, the best ideas of the Enlightenment were included in the Romantic movement.
The Romantics recognized that rationality and the mind could only get you so far, that more truths lay outside the grasp of reason.70 They realized that experience had much to teach us and sought out the “authentic ‘presencing’ of the world”71 over our mental maps of it, the re-presentation. They saw that the universal could be found in the particular, “not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable.”72 In this, the body and the senses once again became a proper home to the mind and spirit73 — a fusion that could not be so easily split as Enlightenment thinkers had purported.
The breakthrough of the Romantics, McGilchrist says, was seeing “the essential connectedness of things”.74 This discovery meant that when someone stands in awe of something great — be it God or the vast beauty of nature — they don’t stand apart from that thing; rather, they partake of it.75
Evidence for this viewpoint comes in many forms. For example, landscape art was the high art of the period, focusing on depth, perspective, and the transitional.76 Facts were contextualized always by relationships. “Understanding, then, is not a discursive explanatory process, but a moment of connection”77 between us and everything else. It was understood that objects permeate us, and likewise, we permeate objects. This relational understanding of the world resulted in the deep longing evident in much Romantic poetry, as longing is always about the drawing together of two things.78 In contrast to the Reformation’s beheading of statues due to them being “mere wood”, sculpture in the Romantic era was often seen as so intensely beautiful that it “came to life” for both the sculptor and viewers.
Rather than life being sucked out of objects, life was breathed into objects.79 In this way, Romantic artists imitated the Creator.
But, as we have seen many times now, this worldview was not to last. A Second Reformation was coming that would give birth to the Industrial Revolution.
This movement took the form of Materialism, a worldview in which everything can be reduced to physical phenomena, where what is physical is the only reality that exists.
Materialism “was explicitly based on a view that science is the only foundation for knowing and understanding the world”.80 Anything spiritual was denied, and matter was elevated to the highest spot in the hierarchy of understanding. But, of course, the divine was simply replaced by a new god: science. Science was explicitly described as a religion and scientists as “priests of nature”.81 “But these ‘priests of nature’ did not honour nature herself so much as the human capacity to control nature, and to make it apparently graspable by rationalism alone”.82
Where in the first Reformation it was the Word that dominated, in the second, it was Matter.83 Their unity was unintelligible.
The Industrial Revolution
The author claims that “the left hemisphere’s most daring assault was the Industrial Revolution.”84 He even goes so far as to claim that the world that the Industrial Revolution birthed — the world that we now live in — is a concrete manifestation of “the left hemisphere’s own likeness”.85
Our world has become a representation.
What do I mean by that? I’ll give a quick example: we’ve replaced wooden desks with plastic desks made to look like wood. The plastic desk is a representation of the wooden one, not the real thing itself. We use the plastic desk over the wooden desk for many reasons, but prime of which is this: control. It’s easily wipeable, we don’t have to struggle with varying wood types and grains when building it, and we can make it as thick or thin as we want.
Control is the modus operandi of the left hemisphere.
Just look around you, and you’ll see the same pattern nearly everywhere, in both the physical and digital worlds. Many of us hardly come into contact with anything real at all. And for all the convenience that control gives us, the more we control something, the more deadened it becomes.
On a plastic-wood desk, the lighting hits the desk the same way everywhere. There is no variation across the “grain”. The desk does not creak in response to our weight as we lean on it; it stands silent instead. Our relationship with the desk through our senses (sight, sound, touch) has been dulled. It has lost a considerable amount of life.
And we have the Industrial Revolution to thank for that.
With the Industrial Revolution, tools and mechanisms dominate, which is what the left hemisphere prefers to work with. “[It] would make machines that make machines, self-propagating parodies of life that lack all the qualities of the living … certain, fixed, man-made”.86 Goods became identical, interchangeable, and mechanically produced.87 “The subtle variations of form that result from natural processes would be replaced by invariant forms … perfect circles, rectilinear forms such as the straight line, the rectangle, the cube, the cylinder”.88
Our cities increasingly became “rectilinear grids of machine-made surfaces and shapes, in which little speaks of the natural world”.89 Growing isolation, virtuality, exploitation, pollution, and excessive management began to hold sovereignty over people and place and “created a largely insubstantial replica of ‘life’ as processed by the left hemisphere”.90
The Industrial Revolution is precisely what paved the way for our current predicament in architecture. But before I point out all the specifics, we’ll walk through the modern and post-modern times. There is such a seamless connection between the Industrial Revolution and the modern movements that to analyze it twice would be to repeat myself.
The Modern and Post-Modern Worlds
How best to describe the modern age? Where even to begin? The enormity of the changes that have occurred since the Industrial Revolution seems too vast to cover here. And indeed it is.
And yet, we must try to get a handle on it — or really, just a sense of it — still. That has been the point of this whole investigation, of course.
The modern age has seen the proliferation of bureaucracy, a disenchanted world “free” of spirit and soul, where globalization sweeps away the unique sense of identity that had previously grounded peoples and locales. “Real things and experiences are replaced by symbolic tokens; ‘expert’ systems replace local know-how and skill with a centralized process dependent on rules. The result is an abstraction and virtualization of life.”91
Globalization is aided by enhanced mobility, ensuring “a permanently changing population, who do not necessarily have any prior attachment to the place where they now find themselves.”92 For all the benefits of mobility, I believe this one point alone has much to do with the degrading of our homes and city spaces.
Social bonds have fragmented. Humans become like machines;93 just ask anyone in a corporate job if they regularly feel like “a cog in the machine”. More and more people don’t “touch grass” all day, consumed with plans, management, and procedures.94 This is not even to speak of the recent AI movement.
Relativism comes about, “an uncertainty and multiplicity of points of view”, which effectively either emphasizes a particular perspective and its limitedness or attempts to transcend those limits by holding multiple viewpoints simultaneously.95 With the post-modernism that follows comes the emptying of meaning;96 everything is self-referential. Nothing is based on anything real, only what we’ve determined to be useful.
We see the rise of a capitalism and consumerism that understands human relationships to be little more than utility and competition.97 Did your heart delight at that description? Perhaps you are a socialist. But you, dear socialist, are a modern man, too. “Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.”98 Often pitted as enemies, the two economic systems are actually rooted in the same underlying view of the world: that of scientific materialism.
Perhaps all of us Moderns — capitalist or socialist — have something to learn. Or rather, we are missing some crucial perception. And if we miss it, the consequences are undeniably dire. Let us not forget that it is this materialist viewpoint, combined with many of the left hemisphere’s other preferences (control, certainty, optimism about the future) that can be called culprits of the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
This is a bleak picture I have painted. There are, of course, many good things, too. People are not starving (rather, we suffer from obesity). Women don’t die in childbirth nearly as often, and our children most often survive, too. People are literate (mostly), and the vast openness of our society at large has opened up avenues for exploration that were previously unthinkable. That and so much more. None of these are trivial. I don’t deny any of these very, very good things.
But there’s no doubt that, before, I was in denial about “the bad” of our society. I did not realize that everything comes with a cost. What that cost is and how much we’re paying is something we are still finding out.
But most of us feel it. Something is very, very wrong.
We see it in the art. Modern art is characteristically flat but also excessively detached and often grotesque. Take Robbe-Grillet’s ‘The Secret Room’, a “story” that is simply detached descriptions of a woman’s corpse “as it is”.99 Or take Duchamp’s urinal. Or Carl Andre’s pile of bricks.100 Take Cubism, Pointillism, Dadaism, Absurdism, Surrealism, Minimalism, Functionalism.101 “Modernist art appears to mimic the world as it would appear to someone whose right hemisphere was inactivated.”102 Faces are oft distorted, dislocated, often to the point that they don’t look like faces at all.103 The ability of art to “interpenetrate” the world and our minds into the Other beyond — allowing us to see new perspectives, new realities — has been degraded. It must shock or “make a statement” — even if that statement is that everything is empty, empty, empty.
(Just like in the Enlightenment, however, there are artists that transcend their medium, their time, using it to touch the ineffable once again. Picasso, Matisse, and Stravinsky, for example, “sweep away the precepts of modernism itself”.104 Poetry, too, is alive and well — Frost, Yeats, Eliot — likely due to the freedom that modernism allows.)105
But what seems to have happened in modernism, what McGilchrist puts forth, “is that the modern world is the attempt by the left hemisphere to take control of everything it knows so that it is the giver to itself of what it sees … a role hitherto … reserved for God.”106
Where are we now?
We have tried to be the makers of our own reality, preferring our own map of reality to reality itself. But when the GPS says “You’ve Arrived” but you’re standing in an open field, not the bookstore as intended, it’s time to admit that the game is up. You need to look out the window or, dear God, ask someone for directions, to get where you need to go.107
After beginning this journey — questioning why our architecture is so dehumanizing — almost two years ago, I believe I have decided to look up from the map and out through the window.
And what I see is — sadly — a vast, robotic, consuming decline.
The next few paragraphs will be a bit… depressing. But read through this last portion, the analysis of our current architecture, and I promise I will add some lines of hope. You’ve made it this far, anyway. All is not lost, because awareness of the problem, an investigation into it, is the first step to fixing it. And it starts inside each one of us.
So here we go.
The slow, sad slide into the state of our modern architecture began most prominently with the values of the Enlightenment, was amplified by the tools of the Industrial Revolution, and was justified by our scientific materialist and then post-modernist viewpoints.
Put more succinctly, we’ve lost sight of God, replaced Him with a truncated view of ourselves, and stunted everyone and everything in the process. The show is now in full force.
In a world modeled on the mechanical, everything becomes a tool. Our homes, our families, our work, ourselves. The famous modernist architect Le Corbusier “famously reduced the rich concept of ‘home’ to that of ‘une machine a habiter’: a living machine.”108
Our architecture is showing us the emptiness of our own culture and philosophy.
Pulling now from Christopher Alexander’s works, our current built environment has resulted in a lack of freedom. He defines lack of freedom as thus:
Lack of freedom is loss, from whatever source, internal or external, of the ability to act appropriately.109
Our buildings — as currently constructed — do not allow us to be fully human, fully ourselves. They create “so many small stresses in ordinary matters that people cannot pay attention to what needs to be done”.110
Let’s focus on one target: mass-produced apartments. These apartments are often the size of entire blocks, with endlessly repeating rooms (perhaps there are a few variations) that are not in context to the land and buildings around them or to each other. Often, there’s no real opportunity for people to interact naturally; rather, when the impulse arises, it’s frustrated by no space to linger except in the echoey, empty hallway, or perhaps only in the highly curated “gathering spaces” that most people never (or rarely) use. There is certainly no good opportunity for a daily, habitual crossing of paths that is so important to human existence.
That’s just one tiny example. I could list hundreds.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have buildings created just for image. Think of the overly flashy McMansions you’ve probably seen in very wealthy neighborhoods. Or the brutalist museum you may have in your city. These buildings were not created to make people comfortable, more themselves. They were created by an image in someone’s mind in order to impress, not by an honest accounting of the land, the space, and how it might best work for the people who are to inhabit it.
Perhaps the Biblical injunction not to worship images could be evoked in this matter, as well.
I could go on and on, and I’ll do a deep analysis in the future of modern/post-modern vs. traditional architectural features and elements, but I want to point to one major question: Is it any wonder, really, why we feel despair in our landscape? In our homes?
McGilchrist says the following concerning modern and post-modern art, but I believe it equally applies, if not more so, to our architecture: “We stand or sit there solemnly contemplating the genius of the artwork, like the passive, well-behaved bourgeois that we are, when we should be calling someone’s bluff.”111
I feel this statement in the fire of my stomach. It clenches and gnaws at the truth of this statement.
We must admit: “Beauty is not just whatever we agree to call it, nor does it go away if we ignore it. We can’t remake our values at will.”112 (And please, if you’d like to argue this point, read article two, where I make a case for the objectivity of beauty).
When quantity replaces quality; when utility becomes paramount, replacing all higher values with itself; when the sense of awe and wonder is deliberately undercut113 — our buildings begin to lose both their magnificence and their humility… until they are small, sad little boxes for the plebeians to live in and ugly, unbalanced, flashy, ego-filled mansions for the ruling class. But no one gets the truly magnificent. Not even churches.
This is the will of the left hemisphere when gone unchecked.
An analysis of geometry sheds some more insight here.
The left hemisphere loves straight lines, not curves or circles. It can approximate a curve, however closely, only by the expedient of laying over more tangents. No straight lines are to be found in the natural world. Everything that really exists follows a series of curved shapes to which the logical products of the human mind can only ever approach tangentially — flow, once again, reduced to a series of points.114
Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occassioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.”115
The right hemisphere, in contrast, prefers circles.
This reflected the shape of the cosmos, the universe, and ultimately of the Divine. The idea that God is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere has a long history.116
Even in the Christian West it is a curious fact that representations of the cosmos, long before there was any idea of the roundness of the earth or the curvature of space, tend to be represented in the curved roundness of the ceiling of the apse, or of the dome of the church, or of the tympanum over the great west door, rarely on the flatness of a wall.117
This idea of the circle — really, the center — keeps popping up for us, doesn’t it? (See article three.)
Perhaps it is no accident that the heart is in the center of the body.
“What ultimately unites the three realms of escape from the left hemisphere’s world which it has attacked in our time — the body, the spirit and art — is that they are all vehicles of love.”118
How so?
Each of these realms is inherently relational. Through the body’s senses, we experience the world beyond us. Through the spirit, we learn openness, receptivity, and surrender. Through art — real art — we cultivate a deep attention that connects us to beauty and each other.
And in reconnecting with love, we reconnect with God, for: God is Love.
We cannot lose God, we cannot lose love, we cannot let any lesser value — utility, profit, control, image — become the value that we primarily operate our lives and thinking by. It will blind us, diminish our lives significantly, and damn the earth.
We cannot place the highest in second place and expect to live in a world that is conducive to human flourishing. We must open our eyes and see the whole picture, right-hemisphere fashion.
We were meant to walk with God. We must return to Him still.
Author’s Note: The Need for Practicalities
When I began this journey, I thought I would talk about the impact of cars, or regulation, or the economy, or just losing aesthetic sense in general. I didn’t expect it to take me down to the bottom, through the labyrinth, into the heart of humanity itself. I thought I would hand over to you some very practical, understandable reasons for why our architecture sucks so badly. I would wrap up this series and start a new one, happy I had solved some mystery, at least a little bit.
But I have handed over to you a beast. An animal mangled, struggling, and in need of emergency surgery lest it die.
I ended with the need for love.
For God.
I hope you do not roll your eyes at me. I did not mean to make it so.
But it seems it is where everyone who looks deeply into something — anything, as far as I can tell — ends up. McGilchrist is not a Christian (to my knowledge), and yet he admits:
The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos … for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien, [but rather] engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful … but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process.119
Alexander, too, finds his way to the spiritual. I have not read his very last book yet, but it is called The Luminous Ground; from the title alone, you know it contains thoughts on the numinous. There is a chapter called “The Face of God”. Whether he ends up with Christianity, Buddhism, or some other more nebulous idea, I cannot say as of yet. But one thing is clear: if you dig deeply enough, as I have tried my best to do, you find your way to considering life, its meaning, love, and God.
But is love a practical solution? Most would say no, and honestly, I’d agree with them.
Forgive my overt Christianity here, but that’s the story of Jesus: we need a model so we can see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears what love in physical form looks like. How it plays out in practice (hence: being practical).
In the style of William Blake:
Therefore
God becomes as
we are, that we
may be as he
is
In my own life, I can say that I did not know what humility was until I watched intently someone who was truly humble. I had to pay the proper sort of attention to see it at all. To teach my daughter what kindness is, I must show her what kindness looks like in the one thousand little ways it manifests. I must be kind for her to learn it, imitate it, and exemplify it herself.
That’s why striving to be the hands and feet of God is so important.
So, practically: how do we actually begin to change our architecture??
Well, friends — that’s an adventure for another day. Suffice it to say I will be striving to answer this question in my own life, documenting it in the coming articles.
Now that we’ve gone through the same crazy philosophical rollercoaster, join me as I try to answer this question in my home, in my city.
If this last journey is any indication, it’s sure to be… illuminating.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 1.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid., 44-45.
Ibid.
Ibid., 251.
Ibid., 259.
Ibid., 257-258.
Ibid., 276.
Ibid., 259-260.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 276.
Ibid.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 289.
Ibid., 290.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 292-3.
Ibid., 290.
Ibid., 292.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 306.
Ibid., 305.
Ibid., 312.
Ibid., 310.
Ibid., 311.
Ibid., 312.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 314.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 318.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 319.
Ibid., 321.
Ibid., 322.
Ibid., 321.
Ibid., 323.
Ibid., 330.
Ibid.
Ibid., 331.
Ibid., 324.
Ibid.
Ibid., 328.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 333.
Ibid., 332.
Ibid., 333.
Ibid.
Ibid., 334.
Ibid., 336.
Ibid.
Ibid., 318.
Ibid., 332.
Ibid., 346.
Ibid.
Ibid., 340-341.
Ibid., 341.
Ibid., 342.
Ibid., 343.
Ibid.
Ibid., 352.
Ibid., 354.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid., 355.
Ibid., 357.
Ibid., 363.
Ibid.
Ibid., 361.
Ibid., 360.
Ibid., 367.
Ibid., 371.
Ibid., 382.
Ibid., 384.
Ibid.
Ibid., 383.
Ibid., 386.
Ibid.
Ibid., 387.
Ibid., 386.
Ibid., 387.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 390.
Ibid.
Ibid., 392.
Ibid., 429.
Ibid., 398.
Ibid.
Ibid., 390.
Ibid., 401.
Ibid., 397.
Ibid., 401.
Ibid., 415-416.
Ibid., 414.
Ibid.
Ibid., 410.
Ibid., 422.
Ibid., 402.
Iain McGilchrist, The Channel McGilchrist Podcast, episode 1, “The Hemispheres and the Means to Truth,” January 2024
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 416.
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life (Berkley: The Center for Environmental Structure, 2002), 374.
Ibid., 374-5.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 442.
Ibid., 443.
Ibid.
Ibid., 477.
Ibid.
Ibid., 488.
Ibid., 499.
Ibid., 445.
Ibid., 441-442.
Late to the party, but I really enjoyed this and the whole series. I appreciate McGilchrist a lot and am trying to get my head around all the implications of his thought and research. On the subject of whether or not he's a Christian, did you see the statement below from him?
"I am a shamefully poor Christian, but in my own way I think I can say devoted. I came from a casually irreligious family; but was in my teens so captured by the depth of meaning I found in the liturgy, the story and sayings of Christ and of some of his saints, as well as in the prayers, the music, the poetry, the art and the architecture of Christianity, that I intended to follow the contemplative life and enter a monastery. In any case, I didn’t – probably wisely … but the enrapture has never waned. At this end of life I can only cast myself on the mercy of God, no doubt like many another, believing he understands and accepts me, frail as I am.”
So much to ponder! I can see the effort put into this, thank you.
"Our world has become a representation" really struck a chord - fake wood that supposed to look like wood really does make me feel uneasy. Even fake plastic grass that is "easier to maintain" i.e. control. I'm neither an economist, architect nor a carpenter or gardener for that matter, but why can't we "mass produce" quality craftsmanship? Not even to mention the photo of that apartment block in Fort Worth. It could just as well be anywhere in the world. What I appreciate (appreciated?) about parts of the world is the architecture has (or now perhaps had) a localised flavour - now these mass-produced apartment blocks and estates are being built voraciously in the name of "scaled convenience". We were and are amusing ourselves to death (a la Neil Postman) and now we're conveniencing ourselves to death? Not arguing for deliberate inconvenience, but surely the pendulum is swinging too far as you allude to?
Apologies for the rant, but I can even see this playing out on the tip of Africa; however, I remain hopeful.