Arching time - from old to new

From Mesopotamia to the Walt Disney Concert Hall – from the first arches in buildings, to another meaning of the word arch: playful, joking, teasing, humorous, sly, mischievous, tongue-in-cheek.

Imagine Mesopotamia’s arched structures built 2 000 years before the birth of Christ, in the fertile region between the rivers. Then imagine a building some 4 000 years later in downtown Los Angeles, a tongue-in cheek construction created by architect Frank Gehry, who, arching his eyebrows, designed a structure to resemble a crumpled piece of paper. Perhaps the crumpled, almost destroyed solids of the Walt Disney Concert Hall echo the humor of Disney’s cartoons.

Although the builders of Mesopotamia were the first to use their bricks to construct arches, it was the ancient Romans who applied the technique to a wide range of structures.

Imagine the derelict Colosseum in Rome, or the Milvio Bridge which is still in use today.



Two millenniums later, we can only marvel. Such engineering prowess, such graceful curves meeting up in the sky.

Yet initially, says American consulting engineer Matthys P Levy, the arch was born in the sewer, and later raised to the heavens. He explains in the Nexus Network Journal that “the Greeks relegated its use to underground sewers and never raised an arch above ground. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in a lack of understanding of the mechanics of the materials and the nature of compression and tension.”

Cape Town boasts a memorial fondly known as the Arch for Arch, meaning the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It consists of 14 wooden beams arched to form a dome and reminds one of basketry. On each beam, phrases from the 14 chapters of the Constitution have been engraved.
Famous for his engineering and anatomical drawings, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) said of arches: “An arch consists of two weaknesses which, leaning one against the other, make a strength.”

That sounds a lot like relationships between people. If, say, the arch between two people is that red symbol of love, the heart, then surely that very point where the two halves of the heart meet (that cusp of longing!) is as important as the key stone in an arch. That cusp is the meeting place where two weak humans lean together to make a strength, where two separate flanks bridge into a whole. Perhaps that is why lovers stroll over bridges and attach their love locks to the structure.

Christine Stoman