Boundaries

At the recent lecture about killing bacteria at the Royal Institute, I was somewhat alarmed by a diagram of a cell wall, rather like the one included left. The alarm arising from the fact that the cell wall was a complicated affair which needed constant maintenance, 24 by 7, to keep it in working order, maintenance which could easily be disturbed by chemicals pumped out by passing bacteria. But no working order and the cell died. With thanks to Sinauer Associates (see reference 2) for the illustration, the cell wall of something getting impulsed by a neuron.

An alarm which plays into yesterday's musings about vaulting in churches. Into today's musings about boundary zones more generally.

Back in the ice age when we used to live in caves, our living space was just a hole in the rock. For some reason which I don't quite understand, in a cave one does not think of the ceiling of the cave as being a boundary between the inner space one is in and somewhere else.

Then we moved onto huts with thatched roofs, with the thatch placed directly on the rafters, visible from both above and below. With all kinds of grot accumulating in and dropping down from the thatch over the years. Maybe it was all this grot which got on the lady of the house's nerves and she prodded her man into putting something between her and her thatch. She needed a stronger separation of the inner space and the outer space, without the constant reminder of stuff dripping in from that outer space. Perhaps that is the change from the cave, the boundary zone has become man made and fragile, rather than many feet of rock.

But we want to try and recreate the illusion of the cave, perhaps a Freudian would say the womb, and create an inner space from which or in which the outer space more or less vanishes. So we craft the inner space with ceilings and perhaps with elaborate plaster decoration. On can see the same progression when the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, rather than the roof. One starts off with simple floor boards on top of rafters, with both boards and rafter visible from below. Maybe one can see up through the cracks between the boards. Maybe the boards creak and maybe one is all too aware of people, perhaps unknowns, perhaps from a quite different household, tramping around above. A first step is to paint the underside of the boards white. But this is not enough and one is soon nailing lathes onto the bottom of the rafters and plastering the thing over. Cocoon restored.

The same forces are perhaps at work in the churches we talked about yesterday, churches which go to a lot of trouble to hide or at least to soften their roofs as seen from below. But there are some large buildings which go to rather less trouble, and I am thinking here of the large sheds from which we buy our DIY stuff and the large sheds called railway stations (and, indeed, of the large Parisian churches from the nineteenth century which are rather like railway stations in their construction). Here we really can see the thatch, as it were; the skin between us and the world outside is only millimetres, if that, thick. Is it the facts that these spaces are so large and that the ceilings are so far away, that we do not mind? Plus the softening afforded by the more or less complicated steel work supporting the skin of the roof, the steel equivalent of all the wooden trickery of the roof of the great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. I associate here to the steel work holding up the ceiling of the Ottawa railway station (see reference 3). Looking at the picture again, perhaps the eye is taken away from the ceiling by the large windows around the side.

Which opens up a whole new ball game. Why are we happy with socking great windows when we go to such bother to disguise our roofs? Does is come down from the fact that rain comes down, in the main, rather than across?

Clearly time for breakfast.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/bugs.html.

Reference 2: http://www.sinauer.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/station-spotting.html.