ABSTRACT
Transcendent art pursues abstraction as a means of escape from the chaotic, arbitrary, aggressive world around us – aiming, in self-defence, to create an artificial world, under human control. Classical, empathetic art is influenced by Aristotle’s conception of the actual, visible world, as structured from the central point of the contemplating and thinking man. Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library of 1928 is one of the best and most beautiful non-gothic examples of this aspiration. Against Wilhelm Worringer’s sweeping assertion, it represents northern classicism: modern, purist and bare. Scandinavian modernist architects thus used illusion to try to bring out the distinctive, poetic element of architecture through what their contemporaries, the Russian formalists, called the “defamiliarisation of forms”. According to Aristotle, light is the way to achieve the highest degree of abstraction, the knowledge of the substance, discarding what is superfluous.
