💡 Digging into the cellar, part 1
If the eyes are windows to the soul, what part of us is the cellar?
Hello from Maryland. This change of seasons has me in an autumnal spirit of turning inward. Today introduces a three-part series on the nature of an overlooked, and very interior, architectural space: the cellar. Maybe you’re thinking, surely we have transcended the need to even have a cellar, let alone write posts about it. I plan to prove otherwise. (Links to the full series are at the bottom of this post.)
This month’s installment of “Talking Back to Walden” will continue the theme of turning inward and letting go. I’ve decided to post it on 15 October, instead of this Sunday. To be honest, it needs more time to simmer. If you missed the first “Talking Back to Walden” you can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
Great literature, painting, dance, music and all the arts carry cultural meaning. Architecture is no exception. Before we design anything, architects must understand the historical and psychological context of our medium, from the broadest scale of city, forest, field, oceanfront or lakeside, to the forms and materials of columns, beams, walls, floors, roofs, doors, windows and stairs. As part of this legacy, the very spaces in which we live our lives are loaded with symbolism.
For example, call to mind the bedrooms you have known, or that you have seen in film, literature, and painting. To design for rest, privacy, dreaming and awakening, we consider the bedroom as a space of intimate inward-turning, of pleasure or even the occasional retreat into illness or madness. We can’t consciously plan for all the human lives a room might accommodate, but we’re aware of the hidden, subtle, unconscious aspects of our medium.
Even the radical modernist Le Corbusier, like all architects before him, did not create in a void. He reinterpreted the culture as he found it.
“The return to origins is a constant hum of human development and in this matter architecture conforms to all other human activities. . . .The return to origins always implies a rethinking of what you do customarily, an attempt to renew the validity of your everyday actions.”1
So, how do architects learn about our culture in order to contribute and reinterpret? It takes a lifetime of noticing and practice. Starting in school, we study theory and we analyze buildings, which I demonstrated in this post. In one seminar called “Speculations,” we read and discussed architectural and cultural theorists, from the ancient Roman Vitruvius to the Renaissance architects Palladio and Alberti, from Enlightenment guys like Viollet-le-Duc to the pre-modernists Heidegger and Semper, and on into contemporary writers like Eliade, Eco, Bachelard, Colquhoun, Rowe, and Rykwert.2
Our only deliverable was a deeply researched paper on the iconography of a room or architectural element of our choice. We hunted for examples in literature, painting, philosophy, psychology, and, of course, architecture. We excavated the physical and the metaphysical. The practical and the poetic. We studied examples that solve problems and make meaning, both.3
I chose the cellar. Other people wrote about the kitchen, living room, bedroom, corridors, dining room, hall, attic. My fiancé at the time lived in another city, and the guy I was officially not falling in love with (nothing to see here, folks) chose the attic. I’ll pause here while you imagine the hot mess that all became.
Yes, you read that right. My now-husband of several decades has an affinity for the attic and I for the cellar. Read into that polarity all you want. It’s very on-brand for both of us.
For the next few posts, I’ll look at the cellar, from the practical storage of objects and memories, to its more freighted aspects as a place of seclusion, refuge and secrecy. Also, madness. And evil. Oh, and also death. Can’t have a cellar without some of that.
Here’s the roadmap I plan to follow:
Parts 2 and 3: Origins, birth and death, timelessness
Parts 4 and 5: Chaos, order, and vertical hierarchy
Parts 6 and 7: Psychology and the unconscious
We moderns stash our stuff in refrigerators, climate-controlled wine closets and self-storage facilities. Some of us live in high-rise apartments that don’t even have a cellar. Why speculate on the many cultural associations of a dank, moldy room that most of us with any sense avoid? Dear reader, buckle up. We’re going to enter a realm shrouded in mystery and emerge with rich psychological treasure.
The cellar will never leave us because the cellar is within us.
Thank you for stopping by. I found a whole bunch more cartoons but maybe I’ll show some restraint and — what’s that you say? One more?
Meanwhile, over on the Building Hope Chat, I’ll start a thread to ask what room of the house you most closely identify with and why.
Here’s the full list of “Digging into the cellar”:
Part 2: Where we encounter deep time, birth, death, and a return to origins
Part 3: Finding refuge, permanence and timelessness
Part 4: Leaving the known world behind
Part 5: Cosmos, chaos, walls and stairs
Part 6: Social hierarchy and the unconscious
Part 7: Knowing and transforming our darkness
Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1981), p.192.
Funny—I didn’t notice at the time they were all men. I’m glad things have changed, at least a little.
That grad-school paper would not have been possible without the brilliant tutelage of our professor, Robin Dripps.
I can tell you're having fun with this! My bedroom, growing up was in our refinished basement. Everything was built in, including my bunkbeds my parents designed after the Amtrak sleeper car. That room features heavily in my coming of age memoir, Strings Attached. Thanks for bringing me back there - and the autumn swirl shagcarpet.
Thinking of Joseph Cornell making his art, his life's-work, in his mother's basement. It was the place he dreamed his dreams.