Computers, Architecture and the Sun

This text takes a plunge into speculations justified by few scientifically established fact. Based on educated guesswork it will convince the reader of the fact that architecture and computers are both descendents of the sundial. It will furthermore argue that something we would now call programming, was a necessary derivate language that accompanied the progress of computational devices and architecture. Mythology won't tell us if hardware predated software or if it was the other way around, but it does tell us what was the primeval archetype of human culture: the sun.

The sun is the original input from which everything on earth begot form. The sundial is a piece of hardware, a physical structure carefully designed to render the movement of the sun into measurable units. At first, the shift from day to night marked the only undeniable indication of the existence of something as transparent as time. The sundial conceptualised time, enabling humans to talk about it in clearly defined terms. Once the sundial was in proper operation, it could be used to calibrate derivative devices like the hourglass, and like this, one benefit of the sun crept into the night.

It is self-evident that the evolution of time-keeping devices from the sundial, to the hour-glass, to the mechanical clock, to the analogue calculators of the 18th century, finally led to the difference engine of Charles Babbage. The difference engine although never completed, is without doubt the direct precursor of the programmable modern computer. Ada Lovelace was its programmer.

The sundial might be hardware, but the way meaningful information is derived from it, is the first instance of programming: If (shadow>line): equinox. The next step was the development of a formal language in which calculations based on data, accumulated after years of sundial observation, could be extrapolated. The first program recreated and analysed the movement of the sun. The runtime of this program might well have been an animation of the sun drawn in the sand. Abstraction of time had given to man the power to simulate the future.

Magic came before programming, programming came before mathematics, but the goal was always the same: to manipulate causal relationships in some sphere of extra-human intelligence. The sun, after all, was the first power towards which the celestial programmer directed his spells. Programmers executed spells in a self-defined medium and slowly these spells turned into code, into mathematics. But at least as late as Pythagoras the difference between programming, magic, mathematics were impossible to tell.

Once man had time at arms-length it radically improved experimental knowledge about the optimal time for sowing and harvesting. The importance of the sun-dial in ensuring the availability of food alone is enough to see why the best minds of a tribe were allowed to be specialists, working full-time on the improvement of its accuracy. People in the stone-age were no better than we are now. They too thought that bigger is better. Like our particle-accelerators, the sun-dials became giant architectonic structures.

The pyramids were erected to house the dead-body of the earthly sun-gods, that we know for sure, pseudo-science informs us that the positioning of the pyramids and the positioning of the doors indicate their simultaneous function as sundial. The same can be said about Stonehenge which also is suspected to be an enormous sundial, a single purpose computer consisting of a meticulously positioned cluster of rocks. Once programming was settled in its own right, it could be used to compute things other than the future position of the sun. Architectural theory confirms that architecture, which is not to be equated with 'just' building, started as spatial programming in pre-defined units of encapsulated spaces, according to geometric principles of universal order. Some of the most impressive buildings can be reduced to a few lines of instructions.

Italian renaissance was the last period, at least in Europe, in which the primeval relationship between the sun and architecture was revived. Some of the biggest Italian cathedrals, like in Bologna, were equipped with a hole in the roof and a meridian-line at the floor to record with the utmost precision the position of the sun in the firmament during the year. This data was needed to reliable determine the exact length of year, which was key in computing the exact day of Easter decades in advance. The cathedral of Pienza is the best example of an entire building designed as sundial. The shadow of the roof indicates the time and the day on the grid on the square in front of it. Here architecture is intangible from its computing power, programming informed the proportions and shape of the building.

Time (and every device that sublimated it) is not the only abstraction of the sun that led to a wide range of applications. A similar story could be written for fire. Fire, once under human control, brought the heat of the sun into the night. This power led to an entire different line of technological progress, starting with the ability to boil food, and ending with nuclear energy. In this last line of development, solar power, and especially the rhetoric's behind it, is an interesting reminder of the fact that we are in the end, still struggling with making the most of the sun.