Rtu-Ritu - Spatial Order - City as Cosmogram

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RTA-RITU - An Exhibition on Cosmic Order and Cycle of Seasons

SPATIAL ORDER

Architecture is fundamental to us as nature and language. For it is only in form and finitude that our limited understanding can image the universe. While periodic and cyclical processes such as planetary oscillations, bio-rhythms, life-cycle rituals give order to temporality in human life, it is architecture that organises the spatial dimension of life.

Can any material entity be, unless it is somewhere ?

Even absence must have a place, and nothingness an enclosure

As seed in the womb, in containment is creation.

Why has the human race built cities since the earliest days of civilisation ?

So that each one may call a place her own.

So that nature’s forms be given the scale of human life, and beauteous forms in structures fashioned by human skill.

For Order

Plan of the King's capital, Zhou Dynasty, Ist millennium B.C.

Plan of a Moghul garden

Symbolism of the centre and periphery according to Hindu thought

Ground plan of Renaissance architecture

Ground plan, Brihadesvara Temple, Tanjore

Ground plan of mosque, Balkh

Tantric Mandala

CITY AS COSMOGRAM

In traditional societies, the city was looked upon as an image of the cosmos. Shaped through human ingenuity, through the conscious use of matter, space, shape and integration of symbols.

The outward order is attained by placing cities in the cradle of nature, riverside, horizon-landmarks, mountains, plateaus, which create natural points of reference with the divine, rooted in the geomantic criteria of spiritual landscape. The inward order is accomplished by providing an appropriate physical and psychical framework. The cities for this reason are a concrete expression of cosmological ideas. Their designs crystallize the ideal aspect of the architectural, artistic, astronomic, astrological, religious and political spheres of life.

Traditional architectural form-temple, town, palace, garden, spatially generates from the centre, conceived as a creative source beyond space and time. Its significance is purely cosmogonic: the creation of the world emanates from the unity of the One and splits into multiplicity. Likewise, sacred architecture expands from the centre, the unmoving point of origin of the cosmos, the umbilical pivot, representing a sphere of unity of the One. The sacred centre is the terrestrial reflection of the central axis of the cosmos, an imugo mudi which unites levels of existence back to its primal source.

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