- Beverley D’Silva
- BBC Culture
26 minutes ago
Photo credit, Getty Images
From Neolithic times to more recent skyscraper architecture, the infinite spiral is a mysterious symbol that has influenced artists, thinkers and designers for millennia.
They are found everywhere: in the structure of the snail’s shell, in pine cones, in our fingerprints; in the snail-shaped staircase of the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or inside and outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York, USA; in the narwhal’s tusk or even the unicorn’s horn; in the contortions of our galaxy and in the double helix of our DNA.
The spiral is one of the oldest geometric shapes in human history – there are rock carvings of these symbols dating back to the Neolithic period – and it is also one of the most common motifs in the nature, which is observed in the flow of runoff water and in the eye of the cyclone.
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Nature is full of helices and spirals, from seashells to galaxies to our DNA.
There are several types of spirals, such as the logarithmic spiral, discovered by Albrecht Dürer in 1525, the Archimedean spiral, named after the Greek mathematician of the 3rd century BC, the Fermat spiral, the helix and the vortex, to name a few.
Spirals are ubiquitous in human structures in art, design and architecture, whether secular or religious – such as the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq, which dates from the 9th century, or the spiral staircase of the Vatican Museum.
And this mesmerizing form is in vogue today, with the imminent launch of what promises to be an iconic new skyscraper in New York. The Spiral is a 66-story structure that soars skyward at 66 Hudson Boulevard in Manhattan.
The cost of its construction, including the purchase price of the land, was $3.2 billion and, at just over 300 meters, it is one of the tallest buildings in the city. . Open-air green terraces meander around the building – atriums twice as high on each floor, according to the information, form “a unique hybrid that intertwines into a continuous green path” in an upward spiral.
Dominyka Voelkle, of architecture firm BYG NYC, which is responsible for La Spirale, told the BBC that the building had “a very striking profile – modern and exclusive, but with a lot of ‘old New York’, reminiscent of skyscrapers with stepped setbacks, like Rockefeller Center”.
The biophilic design of La Spirale – which provides access to outdoor space and improves indoor air quality – is at the origin of this collaboration. “The design will help occupants find tranquility in a busy environment – and the greenery is there to soothe or provide an invigorating break,” says Voelkle.
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Construction of the Spiral skyscraper in New York is expected to be completed in 2022. Terraces will surround the building on its exterior face.
Trees and other plants were “acclimatized” in the field before being transplanted into Manhattan’s harsher climate until final planting. If they do well and thrive, The Spiral will be “the first of its kind and the largest vertical garden in the world”, says Mr Voelkle.
Symbol of “control and freedom
Artists of all eras have been inspired by spirals. Leonardo da Vinci used spirals in many of his designs, such as those of molluscs, not to mention his double helix spiral staircase at the Chateau de Chambord, France.
Singaporean contemporary artist Chan Hwee Chong, meanwhile, illustrates famous paintings, including Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, using a continuous spiral line.
For French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, spirals were more than a symbol of play. They became an integral part of her psyche, representing the cycle of birth, life and rebirth – and sometimes represented the motherhood in her work.
Ms Bourgeois, now deceased, recalls that the spiral (as a powerful and sometimes violent symbol) impressed her from an early age and influenced her work in the family carpet restoration business in Paris.
“The spiral is important to me,” she said in 1994. “It’s a twist. As a child, after washing the rugs in the river, I would turn them over, twist them, contort them…then I dreamed of my father’s mistress. In my dreams, I wrung her neck.”
Mr Bourgeois said he liked the spiral, which “represents control and freedom”.
The spider is another motif frequently used by the artist. Her monumental spider-like steel sculpture, called Maman, dominated the Turbine Room of London’s Tate Modern Gallery, which had just opened in May 2000. Another metal spider by Louise Bourgeois remained exhibited for more than 20 years in the marquee of Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo.
The spirals and spiders appear on a larger scale in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, which features Bourgeois’ art on fabric. The exhibition includes a sculpture, Woman in a Spiral (a motif she has revisited several times), in which a woman’s upper body is captured in a spiral, as if she were the prey of a spider giantess. Bourgeois described the drawing as “a secretion, like a thread in the spider’s web”.
Katie Guggenheim, curator of the exhibition, comments that the artist did psychoanalysis for about 30 years, which influenced her throughout the eight decades of her career. “In fact, some of his works seem to spiral out of control and spiral into madness,” she points out.
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For the artist Louise Bourgeois, the spiral represents birth, life and rebirth.
One work that uses the symbol of the spiral in nature is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Platform, a giant spiral-shaped environmental artwork that measures 4.5 x 4.5 thousand meters. Built with 6,000 tons of basalt from a jetty on the Great Salt Lake in Utah in the United States (where it will certainly be destroyed by erosion), it reflects Smithson’s fascination with entropy.
“It can perhaps be observed as a collective cultural symbol of the emergence of the feminine,” according to the artist’s website, which points out that “the spiral runs counter-clockwise, towards the ‘unconscious.”
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung, known for his work on symbols, archetypes and the collective unconscious, wrote: “the spiral in psychology means that when you spiral, you always pass through the same point where you were before, but never exactly the same; always below or above, inside or outside, so that means growth.” Jung visualized the unconscious process as moving “in a spiral around a center, which gradually becomes narrower and narrower, as the characteristics of the center become more and more distinct”.
‘Energy Serpent’
Fascination with consciousness and the psyche in the West arguably contributed to the growing interest in meditation and yoga from the 1960s, such as the practice of kundalini yoga, in which the spiral plays a key role.
“Kundal”, in Sanskrit, means spiral or coil. It indicates a serpent of energy that spirals through the chakras.
In alternative medicine, the spiral represents connectedness with the divine. In Vortex Therapy, or VortexHealing, a spiral of divine energy is believed to flow through the heart to manifest as healing and transformation.
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The spiral appears in Hitchcock’s film ‘A Falling Body’ and also in the scene from the cartoon ‘Mogli, the Wolf Boy’ which shows the snake Kaa hypnotizing the main character.
Also around the 1960s, psychedelic art used spirals and kaleidoscopic patterns to suggest the effect of hallucinogenic drugs and altered consciousness.
The influence of psychoanalysis is clearly seen in films such as Vertigo (1958). Its director, Alfred Hitchcock, uses spirals to suggest the “downward spiral” of its protagonist Scottie’s madness.
From the opening credits, a swirling spiral in a stylized eye hypnotizes us, while, on the film’s poster, the silhouette of a man falls into a well of psychosis. A spiral staircase awakens Scottie’s vertigo and the soundtrack, composed by Bernard Herrmann, was “built around circles and spirals – of fullness and despair”, according to director Martin Scorsese.
Spiraling or concentric eyes are also a sign of madness or hypnosis, as in the strange scene where the serpent Kaa from the cartoon Mogli – The Wolf Boy hypnotizes the main character to eat him.
Captivating and enigmatic
The spiral served a noble purpose in 1963, giving its name to a collective of African-American artists in New York, the Spiral. It was created as a direct result of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, led the same year by Martin Luther King Jr.
Led by artists Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Charles Alston and Hale Woodruff, the 15-member collective wanted to discuss how African-American artists should respond to the changing cultural and political landscape of the United States. They chose an Archimedean spiral because, “from a starting point, it moves outward, encompassing all directions, but constantly upward.”
Painter Emma Amos, the only woman (and youngest member) of Spiral, died in 2020. But the group is still celebrated: fashion designer Duro Olowu described in Vogue magazine how he was “captivated” by the colors vivid and bold of Amos’s art and her “ability to powerfully challenge sexism and racism…by addressing sexism, racism and stereotypes about black feminism, her paintings offer the kind of resilience and optimism for the change that is so important right now.”
The new creative director of French luxury fashion house Chloé, Uruguayan designer Gabriela Hearst, recently chose a spiral-shaped logo to identify her most exquisite exclusive pieces. “Spirals are all the rage,” Vogue magazine commented, “a nod to circularity, perhaps? Nothing is a coincidence in Hearst’s world; helices are the most coveted motif in next season.”
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The spiral is often present in sacred spaces, especially in the Vatican
Astronomer Edward Hubble classified galaxies into four shapes: elliptical, lenticular, irregular – and spiral. And of all the galaxies discovered by scientists to date, most are spiral galaxies, defined as “twisted collections of stars and gas, often beautifully shaped” by space.com.
The Milky Way itself – where our solar system is located – is an “elegant spiral structure, dominated by just two arms that encompass the ends of a central bar of stars”, according to NASA’s Science site.
Spirals are ubiquitous, enduring and endlessly fascinating, but they are also enigmatic. Perhaps that is why they serve up interpretations that are, in Jung’s words, “cosmic.”
Like black holes, they remain one of the mysteries of life.