It turned November and the temperature dropped thirty degrees, all on the same day. Where has this year gone? November’s “Talking Back to Walden” is finally tackling Thoreau’s cabin. It’s been daunting for this architect to hone in on something pithy about houses. So. Many. Thoughts. If you missed October, we considered how trees teach us to let go and let be. You can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
In response to my last post about the cellar’s underworld connections to mysterious realms, a reader gave me a disturbing cartoon by Michael de Adder of the Washington Post. A jagged fragment of wall, a “tip of the iceberg” labeled with the name of a terrorist organization, is the only visible thing in a ruined, smoking landscape above nine subterranean levels of hidden weaponry. It vividly illustrates the continued association of cellars with concealment and death. Though I’m a great admirer of political cartoons, I’ve decided not to share it here. It’s easily found in an online search.
Today, I will elaborate on the cellar’s architecture, from the thick walls that hold back the weight of the earth, to the steep stair that connects the underworld to day-world and beyond. (Links to the full series are at the bottom of this post.)
Cosmos and chaos
A nearly universal language of architecture is that buildings have a base, middle and top. How a building meets the ground and sky is an opportunity to tap into centuries of symbolism. I’ve written before about the powerful sheltering metaphor of the roof.
In archetypal terms, this divides the building into three cosmic realms. The base conceals the mysterious underworld (cellar), the middle is the normative earthly day-world, and the top is the dome of the heavens (attic). The cellar is imagined as a place of darkness and chaos, in opposition to the light of the normative world above. (Insert your psychological narrative of hiding and revealing here.)
In the top plan diagram, a wall delineates order form chaos, inside form outside. This is the typical meaning of a walled city—townsfolk belong inside; strangers, enemies, barbarians stay outside. The second diagram is a section, a vertical slice through a building, revealing the ground plane as the distinction between order and disorder, known and unknown. In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade compares plan and section this way:
“From one point of view, the lower regions can be homologized to the unknown and desert regions that surround inhabited territory; the underworld, over which our cosmos is firmly established, corresponds to the chaos that extends to its frontiers.”1
What’s so fascinating about the cellar is that it literally digs into the earth. It excavates. It carves beneath the foundation and roots a building into the site, aspiring to permanence. Such a claiming comes at a price. This 11th century illustration from an illuminated manuscript of the Book of Revelation portrays the beast of the bottomless pit lurking beneath the ark of the covenant. The chaotic underground threatens the highly ordered and rational world above. The two are separated by the thinnest of lines.
“The beast is roaming about the abbey . . . the great beast that comes from the sea . . . the Antichrist. . . He is about to come, the millennium is past; we await him. . .” (Alinardo of Grottaferrata in The Name of the Rose, pp.157-158)
Verticality, walls and stair
It is from this perspective that Rykwert and Bachelard write of the house. The house, “a vertical being that rises upward, [speaks] to our consciousness of verticality. . . .”2
We relate to architecture as an extension of our own vertical bodies and the awareness of our own polarities of conscious and unconscious. For Rykwert, the structure of the house, as a mating of earth and sky, is a reenactment of a people’s creation myth, a connection of the three cosmic realms.3
The roof’s rationality is contrasted with the cellar:
“As for the cellar, . . . it is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream down there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”4
The sectional development of the cellar depends upon an elaboration of its components: the walls, which have the weight of the earth behind them; the door, allowing access to and from this place; and the stair, the primary instrument of connection vertically to the world of light. Of the walls, Bachelard writes:
“The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them.”5
Locating the cellar outside the house cannot shake these associations. Dug into a nearby hillside, walled in on all sides and arched over with stone or brick, they were covered with at least three feet of earth and sod for insulation. Visiting insects and seeping moisture were reminders of the tenuous relationship between humans and nature. Root crops could be transplanted into the earthen floor during cold months, and closets for storing dairy products gouged into the stone walls or cut from the floor reinforced the entrenchment of the cellar.
The cellar stair occupies a special place in our memories and imaginings of cellars. As Bachelard writes, “We always go down the [stair] that leads to the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember.”6
Henri Bosco’s novel, L’Antiquaire, depicts a stair emerging from lower realms, at the end of wandering countless, subterranean passages symbolizing the underworld: “A very narrow, steep stairway, which spiraled as it went higher, had been carved in the rock. I started up it.”7 He emerges in a tower with a vaulted ceiling, a metaphor for heaven. In contrast to the disorientation of the lower caverns, this new place is clear, intimate and welcoming.
The French Modernist architect Le Corbusier well understood the house as connector of the three cosmic realms. One reaches the rooftop solarium in his iconic Villa Savoye “by three flights of a spiral stair to the cellar buried in the ground under the pilotis. This staircase, a pure vertical organ, fits freely into the horizontal composition.”8
The house is rooted in the ground, the sequence is pure verticality up to the sky. Seen in this respect, Villa Savoye is about emergence, a reenactment of birth, from darkness into light. The actual built villa does contain a small vestige of a cellar, although not as elaborate as in his original sketch. (Budgets, sigh. . . .)
Hierarchy is revealed as the cellar stair plays a secondary role to the main stair. Palladio distinguishes in his treatise between stairs which “lead to the habitation of the gentlemen” and those which serve granaries above and cellars below. The first type must conform to the rules of decorum and disposition, being properly lit and grand. The second is hidden away, circumstantial, ill-lit and cramped.9
Viollet-le-Duc, in his own treatise, relegates the cellar stair to a trap door in the floor of the dining room. It’s reserved for the sommelier to bring fresh wine when needed. It also permits throwing the silver into the cellar in case of a fire.10 Given the massive fireplaces in those great halls, this was a very real danger.
Next week, we’ll encounter the cellar in the social hierarchies of places like Downton Abbeys, then move on to its potency as a symbol of the unconscious.
Read past installments of “Digging into the cellar” here:
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 6: Social hierarchy and the unconscious
Part 7: Knowing and transforming our darkness
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959), p.42.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans.. Maria Jolas. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p;.17-18.
Joseph Rykwert, “One Way of Thinking About a House,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York: Rizzoli International, 1982), p.86.
Bachelard, p.18.
Bachelard, p.20.
Bachelard, p.25.
Bachelard, p.24.
Le Corbusier, “The Plan of the Modern House,” trans. Bruce Abbey, Modulus, the University of Virginia School of Architecture Review (1980-81), p.92.
Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965), pp.48-49.
Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonne de l’Architecture Francaise (Paris: Librairies-Imprimeries Reunies, 1875), p.278.
Having just read Renée Eli’s beautiful understanding of the body, I am thinking about the base, middle, and top as visual analogues of Renée’s living body (the base, I think), lived experience (the middle), and consciousness (the top). Now, back up I go to read more. :-)
I’m reading the cellar posts out of order, and you may have mentioned this in another post, but I’m curious about how the cellar offers both a womb-like safety and a beware-what-lurks here unconscious feeling. Even the verticality of the building suggests a womb, world, and afterworld.