The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  And then Muhammad ascended from the rock through the seven circles of heaven and was shown the heavenly throne. When he was finished, he returned to the Western Wall, and mounted Al-Buraq, and flew back to Mecca. The ring to which Muhammad tethered his miraculous beast is still there. It was uncovered in the 1930s, and Muslims named the wall in honor of the winged horse who had borne the prophet.

  Some seventeen years after Muhammad’s night journey, his successor Omar captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. The citizens sent a proud message out of the gates to their conquerors: “Bring us your caliph, and we shall give him the keys to our city.” And so Omar, who was a humble, pious man, donned his goat’s-hair shirt, mounted his camel, and waited for the Byzantine patriarch Sophronius to emerge from the city in clouds of incense and stiff golden robes. “Show me your city,” said the caliph; and not without trepidation the patriarch led him through the streets to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, where he invited him to pray. “I will not pray here,” said Omar, “lest I encourage my brethren to do so as well. You can keep your church. We shall not build our mosque here. Take me to Al-Aqsa.”

  The patriarch was perplexed, for he did not know what Al-Aqsa was. “I want to see the mosque of Daoud,” said Omar. The patriarch thought he understood. He led the caliph up to Mount Zion, where King David is buried, but the caliph was not satisfied. “I will not pray here,” said Omar. “Take me to Al-Aqsa, as I said. Take me to the mosque of Suleyman.”

  “The temple of Solomon?” asked the patriarch. “But it is cursed and cast down. We leave our rubbish there in order to win merit in heaven.” Omar nodded, and they went down to a place where the houses and the lanes were built against a mighty wall. The gateway in the wall had been blocked with all sorts of refuse; but Omar had his men remove it, and he made Sophronius go before him, scrambling up over the fallen stones onto the empty plateau above. Omar picked up a handful of dust and threw it over the wall to purify the desolate spot. Then he saw a low outcrop of rock that protruded from the filth littering the site, and he walked toward it. “This is where it happened,” he said. “We can pray here.”

  Omar retreated to speak to his advisers. Among them was a certain Kaab ibn Ahbar, who had had once been a Jew. Ibn Ahbar told Omar the stories he could remember about the ruined mountaintop, and he reminded him that before Muhammad had chosen Mecca he had instructed Muslims to turn to Jerusalem in prayer. “Build your mosque to the north of the mountain,” ibn Ahbar suggested, “so that when we pray we can face the new qibla and the old at the same time.” But Omar turned on him. “Are you not a true Muslim?” he said. “Let us place the mosque to the south of the mountain, so that when we pray we face only Mecca. Mecca alone is the true qibla of the faithful.”

  Omar’s workmen began to build their Noble Sanctuary on top of the ruins of the Temple of the Jews. They almost succeeded in covering it completely, but in two places its remains are still visible. The living rock enshrined in mosaic splendor under the gilded dome and the crumbling stones of the Al-Buraq Wall remind both Muslim and Jew that, like it or not, the glory of the Lord belongs to and eludes them both.

  IN THE YEAR 70, more than five centuries before Omar picked his way through its antique ruins, Titus, son of the emperor of Rome, met with his generals to decide what to do with the Temple of the Jews. They were reaching the end of a long and bloody campaign. They had captured most of Palestine and, indeed, most of the city of Jerusalem; but the rebels were holed up inside the temple and showing no signs of surrender. Some of the aides, a general present at the meeting related, “insisted that they should enforce the law of war” and destroy the building that the rebels were using as a fortress. “Titus replied that even if the Jews did climb upon it for military purposes, he would not make war on inanimate objects instead of men, or, whatever happened, burn down such a work of art: it was the Romans who would lose thereby, just as their Empire would gain an ornament if it was preserved.”

  But things didn’t happen quite as Titus had planned; he hadn’t reckoned with the tenacious attachment of the Jews to their temple. His troops forced their way through the outermost walls that surrounded the sacred enclosure; but the Jewish rebels, instead of surrendering, retreated from the outer Court of the Gentiles into the Court of the Women. When the Romans fought their way into the Court of the Women, the rebels retreated into the Court of the Israelites. And when the Romans overran the Court of the Israelites, the Levites among the rebels retreated into the Court of the Priests, and the Jews who were not Levites fought to the death where they stood—refusing to retreat lest they defile the holy sanctuary of their temple.

  When the Romans forced their way into the Court of the Priests, they found that “around the altar the heap of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the sanctuary steps poured a river of blood.” And they saw that the few rebels who were still alive had climbed up onto the roof of the temple, whence they bombarded the Romans with missiles torn from the building itself. The Romans were so enraged that, despite Titus’s prohibition, some of them set fire to the shrine.

  As the flames licked around the building, Titus observed that the Jews themselves did nothing to put out the fire, and he knew the battle was over. He walked into the temple, past the seven-branched candelabrum on the south side and the bread of sacrifice on the north, and up to the golden chains that veiled the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the Shekinah. He wanted to see the thing that the Jews were prepared to die for, the thing they would rather destroy than surrender. He wanted to see if all the stories about the Holy of Holies were true. They were. There was absolutely nothing there.

  AFTER HE HAD defeated the rebels, Titus had the Jews rounded up and locked into the ruins of their temple, where eleven thousand of them died as they waited to hear their fate. Some starved to death; some were slain by the soldiers. Others, who were strong, were taken to the mines in Egypt; but the tallest and most beautiful were taken to Rome for the triumph. You can still see them there: they are carved on the Arch of Titus in the ruins of the Forum, bearing the sevenbranched candelabrum of the Temple of God up to the temple of Jupiter the Greatest and Best.

  The Jews who survived were exiled and scattered across the face of the earth. Their temple had been cast down; but every year on Passover, wherever they were, as they celebrated their ancient liberation from slavery in Egypt, they turned to one another and said, “Next year in Jerusalem.” They still do.

  And they have for centuries, for the Israelites have long been in exile, and they have long yearned for Zion. Abraham, the father of them all, had left the city of Ur with its mighty ziggurat and followed the calling of the Lord into the land of Canaan. Having left his ancestral temple behind, he offered his only son Isaac in sacrifice to the Lord on an empty mountaintop. When his grandson Jacob wandered out into the wilderness, he laid himself down to sleep on the same empty rock, and he witnessed the angels climbing a ladder from earth to heaven. The Temple Mount has been a sacred place to the Jews, they say, from time immemorial.

  But while they have nursed affection for this place, the Jews have also long rejected any notion of a material god of stone or wood or gold who might demand a physical home. When the sons of Jacob were in exile in Egypt, they were forced to build the idolatrous temples of the Egyptians, and they longed to return to the empty mountain where their ancestors had communed with the divine. They went out from Egypt, just as Abraham their forefather had left the idolatrous ziggurat of Ur behind him; and they worshipped an immortal and invisible being, who told them:

  I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

  Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

  Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.

  Their God led them out into the desert, and to transport the laws he gave them, the Israelites made a portabl
e ark, carried on two poles and hung with the dyed pelts of rams and badgers. At night they would erect a tent over this ark, and the Shekinah would rest there until morning, when she would lead them again out into the wilderness in the form of a pillar of fire and cloud.

  Eventually, after many trials, the Israelites returned to the empty mountain where Abraham had offered his sacrifice and Jacob had seen the angels climb between earth and heaven. King David danced before the ark as it was carried up to its final resting place. His son Solomon prepared to build a temple to house it, sending to Lebanon for cedar to build the roof and to Sheba for spices to burn upon the altar of the Lord.

  But the Lord, who had roamed the empty desert as a pillar of cloud and flame, and who had forbidden his people to make an image of him, was somewhat ambivalent about Solomon’s temple. He spoke to the king, saying, “Concerning this house which thou art in building, if thou wilt walk in my statutes, and execute my judgements, and keep all my commandments to walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee, which I spake unto David thy father: and I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.”

  It was only a conditional promise—more of a warning, perhaps—but Solomon went ahead and built his temple. His successors filled it with splendors so copious that prophet after prophet warned them against their vanity, reminding them that the Lord did not want their hecatombs and their vain ceremonies.

  When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?

  Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies . . .

  Four centuries after Solomon had built it, the temple was sacked and the Israelites were sent into exile in Babylon. There they sat down and wept for what they had left behind, saying: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” And when they returned from exile, they rebuilt the Temple of God.

  It was a poor affair built amid the ruins of lost Jerusalem, and so it was refurbished under King Herod the Great, who made it larger and more magnificent than it had ever been in the time of Solomon. The Jews were so concerned that the sacrifices and rituals of the temple would not be interrupted during the construction that Herod had to assemble all the building materials on the spot before work began, to reassure his people that the building would be completed as he planned. Not a single day of worship was missed during the century it took to renovate the temple, and the Jews proudly said to one another, “He who has not seen the Temple of Jerusalem has never seen a beautiful building.”

  It was a moment of hubris. Titus destroyed Herod’s temple within a few years of its completion. After it had been destroyed, the Israelites said to one another that God must have forsaken them because they had not walked in his statutes and executed his judgments. God had been a pillar of fire and cloud that swirled in the empty desert, and he had forbidden his people to imprison him in a form of any kind. The Israelites had built him a home, a vessel for the formless Shekinah, but they had ended up worshipping the temple they had made rather than the divinity it contained. The Temple of the Jews had begun as a building, but it had become an idol.

  GO TO THE Western Wall any Friday evening, look lost, and you may be invited back to someone’s house for the Sabbath meal. At precisely eighteen minutes before sundown, two candles are placed on the dining table and lit. The father of the house blesses his family, and then everyone takes a glass of wine, which is also blessed; and then the family wash their hands. The father blesses the two loaves of plaited bread that have been laid upon the table, and then everyone sits down to eat the Sabbath meal.

  It is a simple ritual, but it’s an ancient one, which has been handed down, Sabbath after Sabbath, from the rituals of the temple. In fact, it is the temple itself, whose vanished walls are reconstructed in the laying of the table with candles, bread, and wine. Rabbi Isaac de Luria wrote a poem about it in the sixteenth century.

  To southward I set

  the mystical candelabrum,

  I make room in the north

  for the table with the loaves.

  . . .

  Let the Shekinah be surrounded

  by six Sabbath loaves

  connected on every side

  with the Heavenly Sanctuary.

  The Shekinah appears every Sabbath eve and then flits away until she reappears the next week, as ephemeral as snow. The boundary of the temple that was built to house her, on the other hand, has become an architectural idol, the idolatry of which has led to its own ruin. The ownership and the archaeology of the Wailing Wall, the Kotel, the Al-Buraq Wall—call it what you will—has become an insoluble problem, whose fixed terms of offense and revenge are as hard and as heavy a burden as stone.

  That is to take the short-term view of the dreaming architect, to whom buildings appear fixed and permanent. Over time, the wall, like all of the buildings whose secret lives have been recounted in this book, has been ruined by barbarians, appropriated by different faiths, and copied by the faithful. Its story has been retold in Hebrew and Latin, Arabic and English. It has been excavated and restored in prophecies and has become a tourist spectacle. It has been evolving for centuries, and in all likelihood it always will be.

  All of this has taken place in the blinking of an eye. Like all architecture, the Western Wall is nothing more than a miraculous blizzard that will have turned to rain by morning.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION: THE ARCHITECT’S DREAM

  page

  4 “The cloud-capp’d towers”: Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 4, scene 1.

  5 “an assemblage of structures”: William Cullen Bryant, Funeral Oration Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole, Delivered before the National Academy of Design, New York, May 4, 1848, http://books.google.com/books?id=OL4UAAAAYAAJ.

  6 “the problem of fixing standards”: Le Corbusier, Vers un Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (Academy Editions, 1987), p. 133 (first published 1923).

  8 “Full fathom five”: Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 1, scene 2.

  8 “there are large palaces”: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (MIT Press, 1982), p. 27.

  10 “When a place is lifeless or unreal”: Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 36.

  10 “just as a flower cannot be made”: Ibid., p. xi.

  10 “Anyone can be creative”: Quoted in Jane Milling and Graham Ley, Modern Theories of Performance (Palgrave, 2001), p. 57.

  11 “No building is ever perfect”: Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p. 479.

  11 “we assume we are going to transform it”: Ibid., p. 485.

  THE PARTHENON, ATHENS

  17 “Make your house ready”: Roy George, The Life of Proclus: Life in Athens (1999), http://www.goddess-athena.org/Encyclopedia/Friends/Proclus/index.htm.

  19 “There is a sort of bloom of newness”: Plutarch, Life of Pericles, trans. John Dryden, http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/pericles.html.

  20 “No one is to go to the sanctuaries”: Quoted in Michael Routery, The First Missionary War: The Church Take Over of the Roman Empire (1997), chap. 4, http://www.vinland.org/scamp/grove/kreich/chapter4.html.

  24 “A fortunate shot”: Quoted in Helen Miller, Greece through the Ages (Dent, 1972), p. 12.

  26 “It is very pleasant to walk the streets here”: Quoted in John Tomkinson, Ottoman Athens II, http://www.anagnosis.gr/index.php?pageID=218&la=eng.

  26 “Take away everything that you can”: Comte de Choiseuil Gouffier to Louis Sebastien Fauvel, quoted in Brian Cook, The Elgin Marbles (British Museum Publications, 1997), p. 71.

  27 “To enter freely within the walls of the citadel”: Ibid.

  28 “In amassing these remains of antiquity”: Quoted in ibid., p. 82.

  28 “Yo
u have lost your labour”: Quoted in ibid., p. 83.

  28 “Cold is the heart, fair Greece! that looks on thee”: George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 15 (1812), www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/chp10th.htm.

  32 “a charming midsummer night’s dream”: Quoted in Mary Beard, The Parthenon (Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 100.

  32 “Your majesty stepped today”: Quoted in ibid., p. 100.

  THE BASILICA OF SAN MARCO, VENICE

  41 “Rome is no longer in Rome”: Quoted in Charles Freeman, The Horses of San Marco (Abacus, 2005), p. 2.

  54 “these barbarians, haters of the beautiful”: Nicetas Choniates, Historia Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, trans. Bente Bjørnholt, vol. 11 (De Gruyter, 1975), http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/byzmodgreek/Z304/NicetasSignis.htm.

  56 “The murder of the commander of the Libérateur”: Quoted in Freeman, The Horses of San Marco, p. 193.

  AYASOFYA, ISTANBUL

  64 “For the glory and elevation of the Romans”: Constantine VI Porphyrogenitus, De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae, quoted in http://homepage.mac.com/paulstephenson/trans/decero.html.