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Whenever I
go inside a massive Gothic cathedral in Europe a part of my
mind asks whether or not one could enclose a baseball field.
The basic impact of the architecture is of enormous,
limitless height stretching high up to the sky, a prayer in
stone to the heavens above. Looking down from the sky one
would see an immense building in the shape of the cross of
Christ. The Catholic mass is a sacrifice recalling the
sacrifice of Christ so a cathedral laid out in the shape of
a cross is a perfect structure for a mass. Lines drawn from
the top of any Christian cross to the ends of each arm and
then continuing at a 45 degree angle to join the
top-to-bottom line further down at a 90 degree angle produce
a shape in the form of a baseball diamond. Inside a
cathedral it's clear that there's enough height for a
major-league pop-up and you could drive a baseball a pretty
good distance lengthwise, but there would be no room for a
left and right field. So in my travels I found no space in
cathedrals for a baseball field but at least I discovered
that their basic form is related generally to the baseball
diamond.
The Indians
who lived in the ancient cities of Mexico and Central
America tried to connect their lives to the planets in the
heavens above. Teotihuacan near Mexico City, the greatest of
their cities, has within it great pyramids of the moon and
sun. The pyramids, built around 400 AD, are ancient
sky-scrappers, mountains constructed in the city itself that
elevated men who climbed their steps to the level of the
heavenly planets and the Gods. The pyramid of the sun at
Teotihuacan is built in the four-sided, quadrangular shape
extremely common in Indian sculpture and architecture. It is
oriented, like the Gothic cathedrals, towards the four
cardinal points and has four stepped platforms at different
levels with stone walkways along the edges. The walkway at
the very top has four straight stone paths along the edges
of the pyramid about 20 feet wide and about 90 feet long.
The paths meet each other at right angles and in the center
there is a raised area that was probably the site of an
ancient temple. The great pyramid of the sun at Teotihuacan
has thus at its summit, immemorially preserved in stone, the
same diamond design and the same dimensions that were used
more than 1400 years later when the baseball diamond we use
today finally became universal. |
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