Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Edited by Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, and Phillip James Tabb © Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez and Phillip James Tabb 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez and Phillip James Tabb have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Architecture, culture, and spirituality / [edited] by Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez and Phillip James Tabb. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-4171-3 (hardback) - ISBN 978-1-4724-4172-0 (ebook) - ISBN 978-1-4724-4173-7 (epub) I. Spirituality in architecture. 2. Architecture and society. I. Barrie, Thomas, editor. II. Bermudez, Julio Cesar, editor. III. Tabb, Phillip, editor. NA2540.A6125 2015 720.T08-dc23 2015011906 ISBN 9781472441713 (hbk) ISBN 9781472441720 (ebk - PDF) ISBN 978I47244I737 (ebk - ePUB) Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited, at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DTI IHD Contents List of Figures vii List of Tables xi Notes on Contributors xiii Foreword by A Iberto Perez- Gomez xvii 1 Introduction Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, and Phillip James Tabb PART I: BEING IN THE WORLD 2 On Architecture, Divinity, and the Interhuman 15 Michael Benedikt 3 Encountering Significance: Architecture, Place, and Heidegger's Gods 27 Randall Teal 4 Phenomenology of the Architectural Extraordinary and Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy 39 Julio Bermudez PART II: SACRED, SECULAR, AND THE CONTEMPORARY CONDITION 5 The Sacred becomes Profane 59 Michael J. Crosbie 6 An Aesthetic and Ethical Account of Genms Toe/ . 71 Hyejung Chang 1 Neophilia, Spirituality, and Architecture 83 Paul Tesar PART HI: SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENTS 8 A Home in the World: The Ontological Significance of Home 93 Thomas Barrie 9 Symbolism and Myth of Mountains, Stone, and Light as Expressed in Sacred Architecture 109 Anat Geva Narrating Chichen Itza: Storytelling, Disagreement, and Second Naivete at the "City of the Sacred Well" 123 Lindsay Jones vi Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality PART IV: SACRED LANDSCAPES 11 Space, Object, and Encounter 139 Rebecca Krinke 12 Regarding Sacred Landscapes and the Everyday Corollary 149 Dennis Alan Winters 13 Sacred Landscapes: The Threshold between Worlds 165 A.T. Mann PART V: SPIRITUALITY AND THE DESIGNED ENVIRONMENT 14 Secular Sacredness in Place Creation: A Case Study and Analysis of Serenbe Community 181 Phillip James Tabb 15 Experiencing the Architecture of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent 199 Rumiko Handa 16 Wonder, Wisdom, and Mastery in Architecture 211 Prem Chandavarkar 17 From Within: On the Spiritual in Art and Architecture 221 Nader Ardalan Index 239 From a book entitled Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality: Essays on the Experience, Significance, and Meaning of the Built Environment, edited by Thomas Barrie, Julio Bermudez, and Phillip James Tabb (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), pp. 123-136. Chapter 10 Narrating Chichen Itza: Storytelling, Disagreement, and Second Naivete at the "City of the Sacred Well" Lindsay Jones The pre-Columbian pilgrimage destination and now archaeological-tourist site of Chichen Itza owns innumerable distinctions. Not the largest of ancient Mayan sites nor, by any assessment, the most architecturally beautiful, Chichen Itza is, and has been for the past several hundred years, the most high-profile and oft-visited of Mayaland ruins. Forever located on a main Yucatan thoroughfare, the long-abandoned city figures large in the accounts of 16th-century conquistadors and priests, 19th-century antiquarians, and 20th- century archeologists, including those who, from the 1920s through to the 1940s, made this the base of operations for a huge Carnegie Institution of Washington initiative to explore the entire Mayan zone. More recently and at present, the great Maya capital, the least pristine and most "Disneyfied" of Mesoamerican mins, continues to be the object of on-going excavations and major reconstruction efforts in parts of the ancient city that remain hidden from all but the most intrepid tourists.' All this activity has likewise had irreparably destructive effects so that, ironically enough, the Maya site that has received the greatest outlay of resources and attention remains among the most poorly understood and thus most hotly contested. Still there is disagreement about even the basic outline of Chichen Itza's history, and the current literature suggests a growing disparity of views rather than anything like an emergent consensus. Not surprisingly, then, among all Mesoamerican sites, these built forms have also inspired by far the richest, and still-fast-growing, oeuvre of stories. Indeed, arguably, a foremost attribute of the monuments of Chichen Itza—as the very quintessence of what I've termed "the autonomy and superabundance of architecture"^—is their enduring proclivity to evoke narrative. In this case, persistent historical uncertainties have the sometimes salutary, invariably revealing effect of opening space for creative story-telling and/or myth-making. That is to say, virtually every visitor to the ruins—Mexican or foreign nationals, casual or seriously studious, spiritually inclined or simply on a holiday fiirlough—feels inclined and entitled to pick out, or maybe make up, a story that accounts for the enormous and distinctive monuments. The primary means of "making sense" of these pre-Columbian buildings nearly always entails proposing a plotline about them. And though stories of Chichen Itza are enhanced by a sense among both tellers and listeners that the narrative more or less matches actual past events, it becomes clear fairly quickly that, among this ever-unfolding catalogue of creative compositions, historical accuracy is far more an exception than the rule. Departing from that basic premise, this essay has an asymmetrical three-part agenda.^ First, I briefly narrate a heartfelt story about the pivotal role that this place and these buildings, the focus of my Ph.D. dissertation, have played in shaping my own scholarly and personal outlooks. The second part, which will constitute the lion's share of this written version, is a roughly chronological inventory of a whole series of what might be termed Chichen Itza "meta-narratives" insofar as these are stories about the stories that many others have told about this place. Additional contenders for inclusion on that list are abundant in the extreme, and students of the site may find mine a somewhat eccentric collection of usual suspects along with a few less likely voices. Nonetheless, these different renditions of Chichen Itza's past represent, in a sense, competitors for the approval of contemporary visitors to the site, the great majority of whom operate without the technical knowledge that would enable a rigorous evaluation of the competing accounts. And thus by showcasing the very wide range of alternative accounts, and providing a little back-story on the respective narrators, I set a stage for the third section, which presents some tentative reflections on two sorts of illusions that, I contend, are required for a rewarding visit to the so-termed City of the Sacred Well. 124 Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Figure 10.1 For decades, the ruins of Chichen Itza have been the Mayaland's foremost tourist attraction, and thus a quintessential venue for the creative storytelling of guides, scholars, and visitors Source: Photograph courtesy of Lindsay Jones. Flctive and/or Real Conquests: From Pre-Columbian History to the On-going History of Ideas In the 1980s, when, as a graduate student, 1 first began to take a special interest in Chichen Itza, 1, like so many others, accepted with little skepticism the very widely-circulated notion that the site, located in the northern Maya zone, owed its oddly Mexican architectural style to a historical circumstance that was variously termed "the Toltec Conquest of the Maya" or "the Mexicanization of Yucatan.'"' Permutations on the storyline of this infamous invasion (a handful of which 1 will mention below) are abundant in the extreme." Nonetheless, in the simplest scenario, at some point, maybe around the 10th century, the Toltecs—who were third-rate artists but first-rate warriors—came marauding out of central Mexico, perhaps led by a great priest-king named Quetzalcoatl, into the Yucatan Peninsula where they encountered the Mayas—who were first-rate artists and religious thinkers, but diffident warriors. Given this great disparity in talents and dispositions, the bellicose Toltecs bullied and bashed the gentle and cerebral Maya and, so the story goes, forced them to build in the north sector of Chichen Itza a bigger and better version of their home capital at Tula. This narrative frame, albeit fleshed out in innumerable different ways, appears in nearly every 20th-century synthesis of Mesoamerican history. And though (or actually because) the ballyhooed resemblance