Structures stand out from Nature. Embodying both geometry and arithmetic they exhibit pure space and time - the conditions of perception of which these branches of mathematics are the sciences.
Under constructioin and when disintegrating they confront us with the frightening transcendence of limits manifest by infinitude and remind us of what major religions and philosophies teach - the impermanence of all things temporal and spatial.
The artistic depiction of such buildings can, through aesthetic distance, occasion a positive experience of the existential threat they embody, a redeeming experience accompanied by simultaneous pain and pleasure, and while pictures aspire to beauty, the comforting representation of wholeness, they can perhaps gesture beyond and constitute a kind of “recollection of the sublime in tranquillity.”
