Advisor: João Masao Kamita
Dissertation: The Eternal Instant: Architecture and the Sublime
Defense date: 23/06/2021
Abstract
Humans have always sought to outline their nature. Within the contact of
reality our consciousness forms and may find the desire to transcend. We can be
understood as a creature split between two conflicting natures: a tension between
the flesh and the spirit, the hand and the mind. It is possible to deviate from asce-
ticism and through aesthetics understand ourselves not in opposition but as a dia-
lectical pair perhaps capable of synthesis. Concreteness as a path to the ethereal.
And so the human expresses himself through art, field of aesthetic categories. The
Sublime is the one that channels this state of tension. The Sublime can be seen as
an attempt to express the inexpressible – in its works there is a sense of greatness,
reverence, wonder, fear, courage. So in huge architectural structures human tries
to touch the beyond but the beyond is not there to be touched, because if matter
allows the journey it also limits it. What we find then is not transcendence but
overcoming. From the height of the built structure we discover the true measure of
our abilities, bypassing ourselves, knowing ourselves. We find expression and
authenticity. I study the anguish of the conflicted human and his attempts, through
architecture, to reach the Sublime. The Tower of Babel, the Gothic cathedrals, the
cosmological revolution, romanticism, the individual restrained in the industrial
city, aesthetic regeneration, the society of performance, the end of transcendence,
mountains and its temples of crystal contemplation. The search for meaning and
our unlikely redemption.