The Beautiful Necessity, Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture - Tapa blanda

More and more science is coming to recognize, what theosophy affirms, that the spiral vortex... both in its time and its space aspects is the universal archetype... -from "Changeless Change" First published in 1910 and updated in 1922-this is a reproduction of that second edition-this is architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon's exploration of art as an "expression of the cosmic life." And what a glorious exploration is it. The essay titles hint at the lyricism of Bragdon's prose: · "The Art of Architecture" · "Unity and Polarity" · "Changeless Change" · "The Bodily Temple" · "Latent Geometry" · "The Arithmetic of Beauty" · "Frozen Music" Accompanied by lovely and informative line drawings, these essays constitute a master class in the philosophy of art, beauty, science, and the intersection of all three. Other works by Bragdon available from Cosimo Classics: More Lives Than One, Architecture and Democracy, Episodes from An Unwritten History, and A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension). American architect, stage designer, and writer CLAUDE FAYETTE BRAGDON (1866-1946) helped found the Rochester Architectural Club, in the city where he made his greatest mark as a building designer with structures including Rochester Central Station, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the First Universalist Church; he also designed Peterborough Bridge in Ontario. In later life, Bragdon worked on Broadway as scenic designer for 1930s productions of Cyrano de Bergerac and Hamlet, among others.

Let us apply this key to the subject of art, and to the art of architecture in particular, and let us see if by so doing we may not learn more of art than we knew before, and more of theosophy, too. The theosophic idea is that everything is an expression of the. Self, or whatever other name one may choose to give to that immanent unknown reality which forever hides behind all phenomenal life, but because on the physical plane our only avenue of knowledge is sense perception, a more exact expression of the theosophic idea would be: Everything is the expression of theS elf in terms of sense. A rt, accordingly, is the expression of theS elf in terms of sense. Now, though theS elf is one, sense is not one, but manifold, and so there are arts, each addressed to some particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some particular quality or group of qualities of theS elf. The white light ofT ruth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty, in which the various arts are colors, each distinct, yet merging one into another, poetry into music; painting into decoration; decoration becoming sculpture; sculpture, architecture, and so on. In such a spectrum of the arts each one occupies a definite place, and all together form a series of which music and architecture are the two extremes.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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