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3) The Beauty of the Holy City
But notwithstanding the fact it is unbuildable, the holy city is beautiful. Since plate glass was made possible as a building material, architects have striven for an all glass crystalline building. The crystal palace of 1851 by Joseph Paxton opened the possibility of the all glass building. Many German Expressionist painters at the turn of the 20th century, had trained as architects and engineers including Bruno and Max Taut and Erich Mendelsohn. They created designs for an idealised glass-based architectural style, uniting technology and feeling. None were actually built, except Mendelsohn's 1919 Potsdam Einstein Tower and Taut's Glashaus pavilion at the 1924 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. Erich Kettelhut's sets for Fritz Lang's 1927 silent movie Metropolis were visions for a vast steel and glass skyscraper dominated cityscape, which is still globally accepted as the future look of the ideal city. The German Mies Van Der Rohe, came closest to the ideal totally glass building with the Farnsworth house. Libeskind called his recent building for the Royal Ontario Museum “a crystal”. But glass, like jasper needs structure- and the structure makes it look less than a crystal.
Then we found that light and heat pass through the structure of glass, or crystal, but not back out, so the heat load is terrible and you need air conditioning to make it possible to exist in glass buildings. This is one reason why Mrs Farnsworth sued Mies Van Der Rohe. And then they found all methods of powering air conditioning put CO2 into the air and that is not good for the planet. So glass or transparent buildings are still a beautiful unachievable ideal, but recognised as just that, an ideal. It's impractical and even if we could do it, we wouldn't now.
Since before the time when Plato assigned the cube to the element of Earth, architects have loved the cube. In fact it is the perfect architectural shape. Brunelleschi (1337–1446) the first Renaissance architect designed the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Florence, 1419) with a modular cube. Indigo Jones inspired by Palladio created a great hall that was almost a 12m x 12m cube in 1619. Palladio's houses used squares, but he wanted his churches to contain spheres, as this was considered Divine. The sphere fits in a cube and Boullee a French architect 1778-88 proposed a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton which was an 150m sphere on a circular base. A recent building in France designed by the Danish architect Sprekelsen defines a 110m cube, almost: its depth is 108m. In fact, we know Yahweh likes the cube as His dwelling place in the most holy in both the tabernacle and the temple of Solomon's era was a perfect cube.
It should be pointed out that despite its ideal nature, not many buildings contain cubes. Even Sprekelsen's arch is not quite a cube. It so happens that rectangles are more usable. Wall area is desirable and the rectangle delivers more wall area per square metre of floor than a square. Also a decent sized room would produce a very high wall if it was a cube. And, actually, if you wish to orientate a building it helps that one side is longer. Design advice for temperate climates, such as from Sydney to Melbourne and Israel, now says that buildings should be equator facing, or rectangles, with a long side that faces the equator. Even if we wanted to make perfect cubes, there are so many practical reasons why a rectangular form would be preferred.
A more useful proportion than the cube is the 'Golden rectangle', and it is better to have something in addition to glass or crystal as the walls. So a crystalline cube is revered as it is unobtainable on earth. Buildings have practical functions. They must serve client and occupant needs. A good designer is able to both satisfy those needs and design well proportioned spaces. The crystalline cube is so beautifully and perfectly useless that it is a desired ideal. To a non-architect this sounds odd. However, the architect spends so much effort compromising between all the conflicting functional requirements, client wishes and site constraints, that it is a real struggle in many cases to retain anything like a well proportioned space, let alone a primary geometric shape. When the Pharaohs made themselves gods, their architect designed pyramids. The pyramid form was seen as so perfect and the achievement so extraordinary, the architect of one pyramid, Imhotep, was deified. The situation of imperfection was (and is) seen as earthly, as creation is marred also, and imperfect. Therefore, primary geometric forms are seen as heavenly, something that architects could make if we weren't constrained by earthly reality.
The holy city that John saw is the embodiment of all the most beautiful and pure architectural concepts: a perfect un-compromised form, sublimely transparent made from precious material not subject to corrosion or decay and impossible to build. A conceptual city or in other words, an analogy.
Let us compare this holy city to Ezekiel's vision.
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