was Daedalus 'the first architect'?

[solidred]

Just wondering if anyone else has pondered this topic. What I've written below is rather meandering and certainly indecisive... but that's because I'm currently meandering and indecisive. Plus, as architecture is 'my life' (even when not employed as one: it's just a state of being) everything in my life gets drawn into any thoughts I have of architecture. Sex and pretty - are therefore as much about architecture as glazing gaskets. After all, who'd want to make a vocation of glazing gaskets? Hmm... maybe once one got into the details of it; the technological complexities; the philosophical implications of depth-of-gasket etc. I dunno. Here's what I thought the other day, in Malta. Over to you

Night.
Midnight, to be exact.
The terrace bar downstairs, now closed but -
I find a cocktail bar up here on the first.
Coffee is still being served.
There's a cigarette machine and, in this luxurious private enclave
One may smoke indoors.
'Yon Scotch - on the stereo
- whom I generally take for lightweight -
I suddenly like.

So, let's get down to a little thinking. It doesn't do to be on one's own in a place like this and merely stare into space. Of course, without Graves' to hand and no internet, this stuff is from vague memory and so is all, anti-New-Yorker-style, non-fact-checked. But this has its uses. For a start, the jumbled ancient-historical facts of myth - which are jumbled in any case - get to be jumbled according to my own anticipated moves…
A little background.
Ariadne got a thread from someone - king or deity, can't remember - and she gives it to her new bloke who goes on to slay the Minotaur, who is him/itself actually the progeny of some spectacularly dodgy sexual liaison; think Russia's Catherine The Great and her 'fondness' for - what was it? Horses? Well, this was some other queen and a 'celebrity' bull…
Anyway, Ariadne's bloke ends up deserting the poor - on a beach somewhere sometime later but, at this time, the thread both guides the guy to the Minotaur and then leads the way back to the entrance of the labyrinth. In other words, the thread is the route through; the route in and the route out. Magic thread, see…
What does this tell us of what the labyrinth actually was? See, there are already contrasting stories of the original Daedalus-designed labyrinth being something with walls, like a garden maze in which one could or would get lost. Later a fun thing, this walled labyrinth was originally designed to entrap - the Minotaur - in an architecture of confusion. It was a prison simply by virtue of it's open-ended but convoluted configuration. So it was an intellectual sort of prison. But another version of events is more prosaic. In this other version, the labyrinth was nothing more than that plan configuration but as a mere patterned terrace outside the palace, upon which ritual dances were performed. So here, less intellectual architecture of confusion and more intellectual architecture of controlled movement.
Now I stray way off on my own tangent because I'm wanting to use a third idea - the labyrinth as the 'first work of architecture' - based upon both the above notions.
My contention is that the 'first architecture' derived from the movement of mankind from nomadic hunter-gatherer to that of the settled, agrarian collective. However, what will have remained from hunter-gatherer days is the notion of experiencing the natural landscape and one's 'place' in it, in verbal-story form. Present-day hunter-gatherer races, after all, still do this: think of those in Australia or in the Great Wilds of Canada. No doubt in Africa too. My guess, see, is that once settled more-or-less on the one spot, both features of that particular topography and artificial ('Sintetic', my Romanian friends) constructions made of that particular place some particular point in the landscape-existential narrative. We're not talking grain-mills here. We're not talking roofs-over-one's-heads to keep off the rain or walls-around-one to modulate the temperature. We're talking articles of faith; articles of meaning. I mean, why else would someone suggest that a variously roofless maze and/or dancefloor was 'the first architecture'?
Of course, this can lead us into straightforward etymology and the meanings - then and now - of the word 'architecture'. But this is active theory. This isn't moribund historicism or archaeology or even just scholarship. This is highly pertinent. Modernism gave us 'technological construction progress as a way to material function made better and easier'. But even in this, we had Corbusier harping on about poetry and light. There's something about 'extensive horizontality' related to the work of Mies Van Der Rohe. And, finally - my favourite - Aldo Van Eyck writes a page entitled 'There is a Garden in Her Face'.
Sure, people need to be kept warm and cosy. But so do elephants at the zoo. What people need even more is a conception of who and where they are in this Universe. For this, we have stories and their chapter-headings, the latter being what I consider architecture's paramount .. titles of meaning.

[solidred]

Reminds me of my Myspace blogs... no-one ever, ever, leaves any comments

[csintexas]

I guess you are over every ones head here solidred. (particularly on this side of the pond.) I've never met an intellectual architect over here yet and have doubts that there are any, although I think there are a few pretenders.

I have doubts as to whether the average person spends any more than 20 minutes in their lifetime really pondering who and where they are in this Universe. I suspect they are much more like the elephants who just need to be kept warm and cozy.

[lekizz]

Solidred, have you read Simon Unwin's "Analysing Architecture"? He defines "architecture" as "placemaking" at its most basic and, like your musings above, identifies the earliest architecture as the moment mankind settled in one place to make a permanent shelter. I remember seeing a modern photo of a school in the plains of Africa which was basically a very large tree which acted as an open air classroom. The choice of that tree as a location for a school can be seen as an act of 'architecture'.

[JWmHarmon]

There may have been other labyrinths before Daedelus. Here is a web site that tries to establish connections where there may or may not be any. This site popped up in a google search, so consider it random and not the view of JWm.

There are some interesting architectural uses of labyrinths in architecture.

Scroll down to Pan's Labyrinth if you don't want to read the first part.

http://thestygianport.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

Here is a quote from the site:

Prehistoric labyrinths are believed to have served either as traps for malevolent spirits or as defined paths for ritual dances. During Medieval times the labyrinth symbolized a hard path to the God with a clearly defined center (God) and one entrance (birth). The new Cathedral labyrinth patterns were all laid out according to the same basic pattern twelve rings that enclose a meandering path which slowly leads to a center rosette. (12 around 1 theme) The labyrinth is located in the nave of the Cathedral. Aleister Crowley insisted that his student magicians construct their altars with two perfect cubes stacked atop one another, “symbolizing the Great Work... The height of the altar is equal to the height above the ground of the navel of the magician. The altar is connected with the Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s Ark, the nave (navis, a ship) of the Church, and many other symbols of antiquity.”

[csintexas]

I like a simple definition lekizz but have to wonder if a gathering place in itself could be counted. It seems like some order would have to be superimposed on a space.

Well maybe people aren't really elephants but they are very social and it seems to me architecture has a strong social function.

[solidred]

Hey, thanks for your comments guys. It's really useful because I'm trying to thematise a workshop video at present in which the students and I built a labyrinth. As JWmHarmon's quote suggests, there is some confusion over whether the 'first' labyrinth was a floor-pattern for dancing or something where the pattern was extruded up into walls and designed as a place of entrapment. The quote further informs me about the exact nature of the later cathedral labyrinth... the Minotaur becomes God and Theseus the pilgrim!
And Chris, the straightforward version of all this is the contention that architecture was firstly concerned with meaning / ritual and not with practical functions. The labyrinth, suggested as 'the first architecture' - even if it wasn't - provides a route into this discussion. It's relevant today because I think architecture has toppled far too far to the side of 'the economies of function'. As for 'thinking architects' there are a few more than me In fact, much like 'the first architecture', when left to my own devices (like now; unemployed) I use architecture as a means to think rather than concern myself with the latest developments in, say, steel construction technology.

[Arc1tectronic]

No! is the simple answer to that one. And dont no-one dare say it was god either.

[Landy]

My guess is that Daedalus was the second architect not the first...just kidding...!
Solidred cheer up architects are invinsible

[csintexas]

[Arc1tectronic]

The first architect was probably someone who built a simple structure out of wood a temporary structure whilst out on an extended hunting trip perhaps. Eighteenth century theorists thought this to be the case. As for design well it would be ideal to find plans sketched on a cave wall somewhere. Hmm I think I'll just ponder that thought for a while..............

[solidred]

There's this theory - and it may well be untrue - that man is distinguished from animals because they have self awareness and an awareness of mortality. Hence our beliefs in things and, in respect of the latter aspect, our belief in religion. Now, animals are quite happy living without constructing shelters. Why should primitive man have been any different? If what distinguished him from the other animals was a need to make sense of this self-awareness, maybe the first thing he'd build would be something that made sense of his environment?
Of course this is all just speculation. I guess we'll never know. And yes, perhaps it's just my personal psychological needs that find 'the pursuit of the practical' in architectural practice today to be hellishly unrewarding...

[Nold Egenter]

Solidred

I was just about to post my "Little Head" elaboration of the past night into the forum grid, but took it out again, when I became aware that the forum has changed considerably into 'business discussions'.

Then I found your name, and, passing through some of your first entries (of 652!), found your "was Daedalus 'the first architect'?" and decided to re-enter the text.

It is true, we pass difficult times. What we see daily produced by this awful 'become rich or die' - machinery in our daily environment as well as in all four corners of the world is not very stimulating.

The deeper Humanism of earlier times got lost. Surrounded by exploitative tsunamis we are manoeuvred into autistic isolation.

But, maybe there is a potential in trying to understand the fictive values on which this 'pseudo-conservative' world is built and to show - e.g. with a anthropologically supported systematic prehistory - that all these elitarian fictions are built on a lack of retrospective continuity in the transitional field of early cities and states or 'civilisations' and neolithic agrarian village culture. All our cultural concepts in art, religion and philosophy are built on an essentially medieval historism which projects a completely irreal value system of history and tradition, 1st and 3rd world.

The "Little Head" now posted, is an example in this direction.

I am glad to have found you on the list....

Warm regards

Nold