How did the river valley embodied in Duncan Hall
come to be?
Outram explains it by relating it to a common mythic heritage.
When early civilizations set out to colonize, they sent
forth a raft or an ark. The raft carried
people, fire, and civilization. It would float
until it struck new land. At that point, the
colonists would use the transported fire of
their old home to start the fire of their new
home. They had, in effect, moved their
civilization, their ideas, their fire to a new
land. The raft would decay or break up,
but the essential elements"people, ideas,
and fire, or energy," would persist.
The roof structure of a classical building
recalls this raft structure; in fact, its
supporting members are often called
"rafters." A decking on the rafters
supports a pyramidal roof or "pyre." In
Outram's architecture of ideas, this
superstructure, or entablature, represents
that mythical raft. Thus, above the column
capitals, we find the
blue logs of the raft.
They are still dripping wet; the swirls
remind us of the chaotic waters of the
flood. Above the logs, we find a green
"saddle" that is the deck or table
(entablature) upon which the ark rides. It
is colored green because, in the raft, it is
the lifespace, the level where people can
actually live. On the table rests the
pyramid of the raft, containing civilization,
ideas, and fire.
The raft of computational engineering
rests on a field of columns, impaled on
Texas' alluvial plain. In Outram's myth, it
came to rest on a mountain. The act of
impalement opened a hole deep in the
mountain's core into which the flood
receded. As the water rushed out, it
eroded the interior into the river valley,
revealing in the process the orderly
hypostyle of columns. On the exterior, we
see the geological striations of the eroded
stone-a faint reminder of Outram's
myth.
(Notice that this myth makes the
hypostyle a natural feature of the site, rather than
a grid imposed on the site by Outram's discipline or
his imagination. The organization of the building is
somehow an organic property of the site.)
The classic vocabulary of architecture
uses the word "entablature" to describe
that part of the building above the
columns. The word appears to derive
from in-tablatum, meaning a table or
planked surface. The tablinium was a
room where one kept pictures, painted on
wooden planks. Thus, we can envision the
entablature as a table on which one places
ideas, mediated by text or pictures. The
ideas are visible on the outside, where
openings appear at the high windows and
terraces, or where a ceiling coffer
protrudes upward into the ark. In the
Main Hall, the ceiling reveals some of
these ideas, with its iconic representation
of the birth of consciousness.
This founding myth also explains the ceiling of
Martel Hall. Viewed from the ground floor, the
vault of the ceiling is a window into the lean-to
that rests on the raft of Duncan Hall's roof.
Since that primitive shelter on the raft holds
the people's fire, their texts, their civilization,
the ceiling should show those things.
Thus, Outram has inscribed on the ceiling (in the
lean-to of Duncan Hall's raft)
a cosmological myth--indicative of the great ideas and traditions
carried on the raft of migration.
