Arresting the ravages of time: Neoclassical architecture, with reference to some Neoclassical houses in Mytilene, Lesvos

This paper examines Neoclassical architecture, with special attention to some Neoclassical houses in Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece, with a view to articulating the spatio-temporal implications of its characteristic spatial modulations. It is argued that, as the epithet, “Neoclassical”, suggests, its emphasis on geometric forms of a certain kind instantiates an assault on time, and concomitantly an attempt to escape from time’s ravages, in contrast with different kinds of architecture, for example that of the Black Forest farmhouse discussed by Heidegger, which embraces time and mortality. The latter is accommodated by Heidegger’s notion of “the fourfold” – earth, sky, mortals and divinities – and the purpose of this article is to show that, in the light of Karsten Harries’s related interpretation of Neoclassical architecture, it fails to provide human beings with the orienting compass embodied by “the fourfold”, except in instances where tell-tale deviations from Neoclassical principles occur. The work of Harries on Neoclassical architecture serves as a valuable guide and backdrop for the interpretation of selected Neoclassical houses in Mytilene. Harries traces the significance of Neoclassical buildings to the funerary and monumental architecture of antiquity, demonstrating that the secular Enlightenment found in these instances suitable models for an architecture that would no longer locate assurances of immortality in Gothic or Baroque church architecture, with its emphasis on verticality. Instead, it would look for a different kind of assurance in the face of the terror of time and death – that provided by the emphasis on a balance between verticality, horizontality and sublime monumentality of Neoclassical architecture, which promises the individual reassuring participation in a greater totality, such as the nation, or even a universal community beyond this. This analysis is brought to bear on some Neoclassical houses in Mytilene, but not without attention to some revealing deviations from the paradigmatic rules – deviations which show the reassertion of humanising temporal values.