The maps of the cosmos in late antiquity are geocentric. Man, at the apex of the earthborn creatures, and as a little-cosmos or microcosm, stood at the world's center. The Sun literally moved around the Earth.
I was looking at the Sun while driving my wife to work last week. I remarked, "for how many thousands of years did men look at the Sun, not knowing what it was, thinking that it was encrusted within a heavenly sphere that rotated like a shell around the earth?" My wife remarked that there was a very real sense in which they knew the Sun better than we did, that they were not less wise with regard to it, were wiser in some sense (I can't recall in what sense, exactly, she claimed that they were wiser than we in). I granted her that the ancients looked at the sky more often than we do.
I then mentioned that the distance between the Earth and the Sun is horrifying. Not only are we ex-centric, but the spaces are only conceivable by representing them on a scale comparable to objects within our visual field. It is terrifying to think of such a space, such a Void, between man's world and the Sun that warms it. It is out of scale.
If the arguments regarding cosmology and architecture that I have repeatedly made on this site (see "the Tower and the Wastes" preludes on the right side bar) hold true, then this sense that the cosmos is out of scale with human life will be reflected in architecture. And it is. Modern buildings are out of scale with man's life, and displace him.
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