Because architects went from building monuments to God and creation to building monuments to their own narcissism. Notre Dame (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Notre-Dame-de-Paris) was meant to be pleasing to God. And by implication, to man, because man was created in the image of God. Boston City Hall wasn't meant to be pleasing to anyone. It's more important to "make a statement" than to make something that is beautiful and uplifting.
Public buildings historically had a religious significance, and architecture as a field was intertwined with religion. The current british parliament building, for example, is built in gothic revival style, which arises from religious architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture
Yes, but it’s design and memorialization to her are deeply intertwined with religious significance: http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2013/12/th... (“According to Muslim tradition on the Indian subcontinent, women who died in childbirth are regarded as saints. Shah Jahan had all the more reason to revere his beloved wife as a saint when she died giving birth to their fourteenth child. The design of the Taj Mahal reflects the legacy Shah Jahan wished to create for his deceased wife, not only as deceased royalty, but as a saint. Our experience of the Taj and its gardens is not only about grief for a beloved wife, but a foretaste of the paradise that awaits the righteous and a premonition of the final Day of Reckoning as it is described in the Quran.”)
It was built by people who feared God and wanted to build something lovely in his sight.
You can't bullshit a bullshitter. I'm a practicing Catholic. We've been putting Jesus, Mary, and Exuperius of Toulouse on things for a millennium to Christian-wash monuments to vanity. The Taj Mahal is about the Mughal emperor's bae, not about Allah.
I'm not saying Notre-Dame de Paris is a monument to the ego of Pope Alexander III. But the Taj Mahal is not a monument to the glorification of God. You're not going to win this argument.
Nah. The Taj Mahal was 100% an extravagance, built by the architect of the Peacock Throne. I stand by everything I wrote here, and every implication you might draw from it. I do not "conjecture", but rather assert, that these are expressions of narcisissm.
And, fine. Whatever. The Taj Mahal is cool. But try to host a Notre Dame football game there. You can't do it. Ad majorem Dei glorium.
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(the drinking thing is weird, but I'm watching the A24 "Stop Making Sense", which reliably keys me up, so if you regard that as an intoxicant, govern yourself accordingly.)
This is not a good architectural fight to pick! Even if I was oot mah chicken, I'm pretty sure I could defend the claim I made upthread about the Taj Mahal.
Can’t a man who commissioned the construction of an approximately $24 million (roughly adjusted for inflation) bejeweled golden throne be the same man who is capable of expressing grief over the loss of perhaps the only other living being he ever loved (sure, I mean, perhaps because she posed no threat to the aforementioned throne) through the construction of a complex (comparatively less extravagant than the throne, in way that could argue on behalf of his modesty in his intent) in which is situated a masjid (a building which in and is of itself is waqf—a property free from corporeal possession) worthy (albeit not at all in need) of appreciation as a building that stands as part of a monument that exemplifies a beauty that transcends self-interests?
Maybe not.
But there’s other ways to go about expressing how this cannot be the case than by using vogue terminology that strips the issue of life or by viewing it through a lens skewed by one’s own criticisms against monuments to vanity attributed to their own faith or by what a person more astute in architecture than me may allege, an address against the Shah’s motives that distracts us from a historical context that is not at all unique to the topic at hand (the influence that religions had on the architecture of public spaces).
And for the record, a man leaves a trail of more than wit and foes when he has a nose for good debate.
I want to rebut this but "adjusted for inflation" makes this argument so funny I don't think I can credibly come back at you. What am I supposed to say here? Well played.
Doric columns on all new civic construction! It is settled.
