The Babel Fiasco (Part I: It Stalks Us Like A Black Dog)

Genesis 11:1-9

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel —because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

The Tower of Babel stalks us like a black dog.

Through Judaic scripture we will explore the idea that architecture is pervaded by the story of what I’ll call The Babel Fiasco.

The tower was undertaken by the people to “make us a name” – to manufacture identity and self-pride.  In Hegelian terms “this community was at the same time both the aim and the content of the work”.  Let’s say, as Hegel did, that the tower is a beginning (as opposed to an origin) for architecture; we’ll begin like him, but for other reasons.  Not to rediscover the arche of artistic activity (Hegel), rather to trace a wandering line through the practice of architecture – to follow an Ariadne Thread, developing the idea of failure / equivocation / doubt in architecture… and maybe a few other things along the way.

Failure/Equivocation/Doubt

These words are approximations of the same thought.  This thought pervades architecture, this thought pervades the manufacture of meaning.  The idea that the manufacture of meaning is impossible, perhaps even absurd pervades The Book of Ecclesiastes.  It is Ecclesiastes that provides the framework for understanding the crisis of meaning so often lamented by those attempting to control the function of meaning.

The Babel Tower is a ‘failed’ project; a fiasco.  It fails because communication fails – the people “left off to build the city”, leaving Babel, the rough beast, blank and pitiless as the sun to slouch through history, born and reborn in the edifices of architecture, a fiasco that continues through the ongoing project of architecture.

Part II: Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is Utterly Meaningless