ON THE CLASSICAL SANCTUARY SPACE AND ITS NATURAL CONTEXT: NATURE AS EXTENSION OR CONTAINER?

Even though nature is accepted to be an integral part of classical architecture, there is limited scholarship on this aspect. This paper aims to contribute to this literature with a focus specifically on the transformation of attitudes towards nature in the classical culture and on the influence of this transformation to sanctuary planning. Through an argument focusing not only on architecture, but also on art and literature, it tries to establish an overall understanding of the natural in the classical culture. An earlier attitude towards nature was a result of the mythological tradition, in which the boundary between gods and humans was blurred. Anthropomorphic gods and goddesses, who controlled the human destiny, resided in the nature. So as the boundary between gods and humans were blurred, the boundary between the man-made and the natural was also blurred. In the Archaic Greek literature and art, nature was not depicted as a space or a background, in which the events took place, but it was integrated into the narrative as an extension of the figures integral to them. Similarly, in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, nature does not constitute a background/container, but it is an extension of the man-made, integral to the god’s abode made by humans. In this sanctuary, located at a magnificent landscape endowed with mythological significance, myth, nature and the man-made merge by way of an organizational logic that integrates gaze and movement as its major constituents. This paper attempts to explain this classical phenomenological logic by cinematic concepts. The seemingly haphazard planning of the sanctuary allows for multiple moving/viewing sequences, which can be thought of as multiple montages extending the space and time of the sanctuary to various geographies and times in history. These multiple montages are brought back to here and now through unifying frames resembling establishing shots in filmmaking. By these shots, the man-made is merged with the landscape in a single unified frame. A later attitude towards nature was a result of the philosophical tradition, in which man separated himself from the almighty gods and defined himself as the constructor of his own order through democratization of the polis. As a result of this separation, uncontrolled nature became the container of the mythical, separate from the controlled man-made realm. In Roman landscape paintings rooted in the Hellenistic stage paintings, nature as the realm of the mythical is viewed from behind the architectural screens like in the Sanctuary of Athena at Lindos or the Sanctuary of Fortuna at Praeneste. In these Hellenistic sanctuaries, perspectival concepts could be thought as instrumental in creating a controlled man-made interior that is detached from its natural environment. This interior can be defined as a mathematical abstract construct exercising an obsessive control over how the point of view of the observer should be located in space. The calculated axial spatial organization of these sanctuaries, therefore, contrasts starkly to the psychophysiological space of the Sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, allowing various moving/viewing sequences in full integration with the surrounding nature.