Gymnasium

Gymnasium (pronounced jim-ney-zee-uhm)

(1) A building or room designed and equipped for indoor sports, exercise and physical training or education.

(2) A public place or building where Ancient Greek youth took exercise, equipped with running and wrestling grounds, baths, and halls for discussions and lectures.

(3) In continental Europe (and most common in Germany) a classical school providing education for those preparing for university (often initial capital letter).

1590-1600: From the Latin gymnasium, from the Ancient Greek γυμνάσιον (gumnásion, from gumnazein) (exercise; school), from γυμνός (gumnós) (naked), the connection owed to the tradition in Antiquity of Greek athletes training (and sometimes competing) naked.  The use in the German education system (as the noun Gymnasium) dated from the mid fifteenth century, the spelling in Hungarian being gimnázium, in Lower Sorbian gymnazium and in Polish gimnazjum.  The plural form in German is Gymnasien.  In English, gymnasium was adopted with the meaning “a place of exercise”, reflecting the Latin gymnasium (school for gymnastics) and the Ancient Greek gymnasion (public place where athletic exercises are practiced; gymnastics school).  The familiar modern clipping (gym) was in use by 1871 as US student slang and is now almost universal in both conversational use and commerce.  The adjective gymnastics (of or pertaining to athletic exercise) actually predated the noun, noted as early as the 1570s and was from the Latin gymnasticus, from the Ancient Greek gymnastikos (fond of or skilled in bodily exercise), from gymnazein (to exercise or train).  Gymnasium, gymnast & gymnastics are nouns, & gymnastic is a noun & adjective, gymnasial & gymnastical are adjectives and gymnastically is an adverb; the noun plural is gymnasia or (the more common) gymnasiums although the most commonly used plural form is gymnastics.

Lindsay Lohan: Gymnastics in the gymnasium.

Although historians have relied on deductive reasoning rather than documentary evidence in tracing the structural evolution of urban spaces in Ancient Greek (certainly prior to the classical era), it’s thought the original gymnasiums were something like an open sports field, a place devoted to youth exercising and training for sports and combat.  As the education systems developed, school building began to be added in places close to the gymnasium and in the way words in language develop associatively, the area as a whole came to be the gumnásion, physical training being thought just one aspect of the curriculum.  In the German states, from the mid fifteenth century, the name was adopted for high schools (emulating the use in Latin), institutions then something of a novelty and the nod to the Classical world reflected the veneration for the era (or at least an idealized construct of it) which was a feature of the Renaissance.  In English, the use has always been restricted to a sub-set (ie certain (usually indoor) events) of athletics although in the nineteenth century, gymnastical was used as adjective (of or relating to schools) and a gymnasiast was a student at such an institution.  The legend is the Greeks held that men training and competing in a state of nakedness was good for body and soul, but the archaeological evidence seems to suggest the many paintings of the events (with the athletes always depicted at an angle which permitted some modesty to be preserved) were a product of the Renaissance imagination.  This is unsurprising because so much of the art and historiography of Antiquity created as the West "discovered" the Classical world was an idealized version, reflecting the veneration in which the era was held.

Early activewear: Sala delle Dieci Ragazze (Room of the Ten Girls), a first century AD mosaic in Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily.  For whatever reason, it was a later addition, added atop what's thought to be a conventional geometric mosaic.  

What the men seem usually to have worn was a kynodesme, a learned borrowing from the Ancient Greek κυνοδέσμη (kunodésmē) (literally “dog tie”) which was a thin leather strip which served to restrain the foreskin, this preventing exposure of the glans, something which would have made the sporting activities easier to perform by limiting intrusive (and even painful) movement.  For the same reason, women competing in their own events wore a type of bra, depicted in surviving contemporary art in a style which would now be called a bandeau.  So, it's probably a myth that in the ancient Olympic Games (τὰ Ὀλύμπια) (ta Olympia; held at four year intervals at the sanctuary of Zeus in Olympia) the athletes were naked (although doubtlessly it was common during training) and definitely a myth the bra was invented in the late nineteenth century.  To the west there was later pragmatism.  Although the public schools of England were much taken with the classics and took especially to sporting competitions, the alleged tradition never caught on the playing fields of England where it tends to be colder than the Mediterranean.

Lindsay Lohan in the gym, Planet Fitness Super Bowl Commercial, 2022.

Ephemeral

Ephemeral (pronounced ih-fem-er-uhl)

(1) Lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory.

(2) In biology, a short-lived organism (usually defined as a life-span less then twenty-four hours) as with some flowers, insects, and microscopic life.

(3) In geology, pertaining to a usually dry body of water which fills for brief periods during and after rain.

1560s: From the New Latin ephemerus from the Ancient Greek ἐφήμερος (ephḗmeros), the more common form of ἐφημέριος (ephēmérios) (of, for, or during the day, living or lasting but for a day, short-lived, temporary), the construct being ἐπί (epí) (on) + ἡμέρα (hēméra) (day).  Originally from the medicine of antiquity as a descriptor of diseases and life-spans (lasting but one day), the extended sense of "transitory" is from the 1630s.  The evocative phrase from the Medieval Latin, memento mori, translates as "remember that you will die".  Synonyms are: short-lived, fleeting, transitory, short, temporary, brief, fugitive, transient, volatile, episodic, evanescent, flitting, impermanent and fugacious.  Ephemeral is a noun & adjective, ephemerality is a noun, ephemerally is an adverb and ephemeric is an adjective; the noun plural is ephemerals.  An ephemeron (ephemera the plural) is "a temporary thing"

Ephemeral art

Ephemeral art, as a defined movement, dates from the work of the Fluxus group in the 1960s.  Originally a platform created to disseminate political messages and critiques of materialist capitalism, the genre developed from the merely ephemeral to the concept of auto-destructive art in which objects existed only for the purpose of their own destruction.  It was perhaps the purest and most original art of the high cold war.

Recreation of Gustav Metzger's auto-destructive installation (1960), exhibition Art and the Sixties: This was Tomorrow, Tate Gallery 2004.

John Sharkey (1936-2004) and Gustav Metzger (1926–2017) were most influential in the development of Auto-Destructive Art and best remembered for the Destruction in Art Symposium in 1966 although the first public demonstration of Metzger’s concepts was at the Temple Gallery, London, in June 1960.  Metzger preferred to describe auto-destructive art as “a public art for industrial societies” and for the installation used in 1960, he hid himself behind a pane of glass covered with a white nylon sheet.  As the exhibition began, he used a brush to apply a hydrochloric acid solution to the fabric and as the material dissolved, creating a swirling, glue-like coating on the glass, he slowly became visible through the holes.  The presentation also included waste in plastic bags and models for auto-destructive sculptures. The work was re-created in 2004 by the Tate Gallery for the exhibition Art and the Sixties: This was Tomorrow.

Table (circa 1958), one of Gustav Metzger’s non-ephemeral works.

Metzger’s had first discussed his concept of auto-destructive art in a manifesto issued in November 1959.  In this statement, he emphasized how the most robust, and apparently durable, mechanically-manufactured objects (and those in which he though society was vesting a dangerous faith) ultimately would degrade and eventually disappear, a process which humans might delay but not prevent.  A second volume of his manifesto followed the next March in which he elaborated, explaining that auto-destructive art existed to highlight society’s obsession with destruction and the damaging effects of machinery on human life.  Although he didn’t reference it, there were elements in the manifestos which echoed the warnings of the dangers inherent in an uncritical faith in technology made by Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) in his final address to the court at the end of the Nuremberg trial.  As well as carrying an anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist message, in the context of the early years of the Cold War the anti-nuclear tone of Metzger’s auto-destructive art was blatant.  His views never changed but, after taking the concept to a natural conclusion of public interest, his work assumed more conventional forms although the political agenda remained, addressing the troubles in Northern Ireland, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, terrorism and climate change.

Photographers can emulate ephemerality even without post-production editing by using light to "overwhelm" the focus: This is a three-frame spread of Lindsay Lohan being photographed at the point of photoflash.

Albert Speer and the permanence of the ephemeral

Nuremberg Rally, 1934.

Of all that was designed by Albert Speer (1905-1981; Hitler’s court architect 1934-1942), little was built and less remains.  Although he would later admit the monometalism of the Nazi architectural plans was a mistake, his apologia was always tinged with the regret that in the years to come, all he was likely to be remembered for was his “immaterial lightshow”, used as a dramatic backdrop for the party rallies held at the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg.  Compared with what, had things worked out, he’d have been able to render in steel, concrete, marble and granite, Lichtdom (cathedral of light) was of course ephemeral but it’s undeniably memorable.  Speer created the effect by placing the Luftwaffe’s (the German air force) entire stock (152) of 1500 mm (60 inch) searchlights around the stadium’s perimeter and maximized the exposure of the design by insisting as many events as possible be conducted in darkness, the other advantage being the lighting disguised the paunchiness of the assembled Nazis, many of whom were flabbier than the party’s lean, Nordic ideal, something which anyway was suspect, one joke spread by the famously cynical Berlin natives noting that empirically a better description of the Nazi ideal was "as blonde as Hitler, as fit as Göring, as tall as Goebbels and as sane as Hess".

Nuremberg Rally, 1936.

Few though were unimpressed by Lichdom.  Sir Neville Henderson (1882-1942; UK ambassador to Germany 1937-1939), the UK’s admittedly impressionable ambassador described the ethereal atmosphere as “…both solemn and beautiful… like being in a cathedral of ice.”  History though has preferred “cathedral of light” and brief views are captured in Hans Weidemann’s (1904-1975) Festliches Nürnberg (Festival of Nuremberg; a 1937 propaganda film chronicling the 1936 and 1937 events) which is mercifully shorter than Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) better-known works although the poor quality of the film stock used can only hint at the majesty achieved but the use of Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) as a musical accompaniment helps.  Riefenstahl actually claimed she suggested the idea of the searchlights to Speer and a much better record exists in her film Olympia (1938) which documented the 1936 Summer Olympics at which the technique was also used.  Architects had of course for millennia been interested in light but apart from those responsible for the placement of stained glass windows and other specialties, mostly they were concerned with function rather than anything representational.  It was the advances the nineteenth century in the availability and luminosity of artificial light which allowed them to use light as an aesthetic element not limited by the time of day and thus the angle of the sun.

Speer had plenty of time to reflect on the past while serving the twenty years in Berlin’s Spandau prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity, a sentence he was lucky to receive.  His interest in light persisted and with unrestricted access to the FRG’s (the Federal Republic of Germany, the old West Germany) technical libraries, he assembled close to a thousand pages of notes for a planned book on the history of the window in European buildings, musing on variables such as the cost and availability of glass at different times in different places, the shifting cost of the labor of glaziers & carpenters and market interventions such as England’s notorious “window tax” which resulted in some strange looking structures.  Ever drawn to the mathematics he’d in his youth intended to study until forced to follow his father into architecture, he pondered the calculations which might produce the changes in “what value a square meter of light had at different periods” and what this might reveal beyond the actual buildings.

It was a shame the book was never written.  He recalled also the effects he applied to the German pavilion he built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, bathing it at night with “…skilfully arranged spotlights.  The result was to make the architecture of the building emerge sharply outlined against the night, and at the same time to make it unreal... a combination of architecture and light.”  It was at the Paris event the German and Soviet pavilions sat directly opposed, something of a harbinger and deliberately so.  He was nostalgic too about the Lichtdom, thinking it recalled “a fabulous setting, like one of the imaginary crystal palaces of the Middle Ages” although wryly he would note history would remember his contributions to his profession only for the ephemeral, the “…idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life is a chimera, an immaterial phenomenon.”  Surprisingly, for someone who planned the great city of Germania (the planned re-building of Berlin) with its monumental structures, the news that all that remained in the city of his designs were a handful of lampposts (which stand to this day) seemed something almost amusing.  In all his post-war writings, although there’s much rejection as “a failure” of the plan of Germania and the rest of the “neo-Classical on a grand scale” which characterized Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) vision of representational architecture, it’s not hard to detect twinges of regret for the unbuilt and sometimes he admitted it.  As he was contemplating a return to the drawing board upon his impending release, he noted: “Although I have had enough of monumental architecture and turn my mind deliberately to utilitarian buildings, it sometimes comes hard for me to bid goodbye to my dreams of having a place in the history of architecture. How will I feel when I am asked to design a gymnasium, a relay station, or a department store after I planned the biggest domed hall in the world?  Hitler once said to my wife: ‘I am assigning tasks to your husband such as have not been given for four thousand years. He will erect buildings for eternity!’  And now gyms!”  As things transpired, not even a gym was built and he instead wrote his history in text.  Of that piece of curated architecture, some were fooled and some not.

Lichtdom

Lichtdom (pronounced lish-dumm)

A visual technique using light to emulate large-scale architecture.

1934: The construct of the German Lichtdom was licht + dom (literally “cathedral of light”).  Licht (variously light, effortless, freely, easy, free; luminous; eye, clear, sparse, bright, light, shiny, light colored; distinct, plain, obvious, explicit, lucid, straightforward) was from the Middle High German lieht and the Middle German līcht), from the Old High German lioht, from the Old Saxon lioht, from the Proto-West Germanic leuht, from the Proto-Germanic leuhtą, from the primitive Indo-European lewktom.  The descendants include the Dutch licht and the English light.  The obsolete alternative spelling was Liecht.  The colloquial uses include describing candles and (in hunting), the eye of (especially ground) game.  The usual plural is Lichter but Lichte operates as a plural when speaking of candles.  Dom (cathedral; church; big church building; dome, cupola) was from the French dôme, from the Italian duomo, from the Latin domus (ecclesiae (literally “house (of the church)”)), a calque of the Ancient Greek οἶκος τῆς ἐκκλησίας (oîkos tês ekklēsías).

Nuremberg Rally, 1934.

Of all that was designed by Albert Speer (1905-1981; Hitler’s court architect 1934-1942), little was built and less remains.  Although he would later admit the monumentalism of the Nazi architectural plans was a mistake, his apologia was always tinged with the regret that in the years to come, all he was likely to be remembered for was his “immaterial lightshow”, used as a dramatic backdrop for the party rallies held at the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg.  Compared with what, had things worked out, he’d have been able to render in steel, concrete, marble and granite, Lichtdom (cathedral of light) was of course ephemeral but it’s undeniably memorable.  Speer created the effect by placing the Luftwaffe’s (the German air force) entire stock (152) of 1500 mm (60 inch) searchlights around the stadium’s perimeter and maximized the exposure of the design by insisting as many events as possible be conducted in darkness, the other advantage being the lighting disguised the paunchiness of the assembled Nazis, many of whom were flabbier than the party’s lean, Nordic ideal, something which anyway was suspect, one joke spread by the famously cynical Berlin natives noting that empirically a better description of the Nazi ideal was "as blonde as Hitler, as fit as Göring, as tall as Goebbels and as sane as Hess".

Nuremberg Rally, 1936.

Few were unimpressed.  Sir Neville Henderson (1882-1942; UK ambassador to Germany 1937-1939), the UK’s admittedly impressionable ambassador described the ethereal atmosphere as “…both solemn and beautiful… like being in a cathedral of ice.”  History though has preferred “cathedral of light” and brief views are captured in Hans Weidemann’s (1904-1975) Festliches Nürnberg (Festival of Nuremberg; a 1937 propaganda film chronicling the 1936 and 1937 events) which is mercifully shorter than Leni Riefenstahl’s (1902–2003) better-known works although the poor quality of the film stock used can only hint at the majesty achieved but the use of Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) as a musical accompaniment helps.  Riefenstahl actually claimed she suggested the idea to Speer and a much better record exists in her film Olympia (1938) which documented the 1936 Summer Olympics at which the technique was also used.  Architects had of course for millennia been interested in light but apart from those responsible for the placement of stained glass windows and other specialties, mostly they were concerned with function rather than anything representational.  It was the advances the nineteenth century in the availability and luminosity of artificial light which allowed them to use light as an aesthetic element not limited by the time of day and thus the angle of the sun.

Speer had plenty of time to reflect on the past while serving the twenty years in Berlin’s Spandau prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity, a sentence he was lucky to receive.  His interest in light persisted and with unrestricted access to the FRG’s (the Federal Republic of Germany, the old West Germany) technical libraries, he assembled close to a thousand pages of notes for a planned book on the history of the window in European buildings, musing on variables such as the cost and availability of glass at different times in different places, the shifting cost of the labor of glaziers & carpenters and market interventions such as England’s notorious “window tax” which resulted in some strange looking structures.  Ever drawn to the mathematics he’d in his youth intended to study until forced to follow his father into architecture, he pondered the calculations which might produce the changes in “what value a square meter of light had at different periods” and what this might reveal beyond the actual buildings.

It was a shame the book was never written.  He recalled also the effects he applied to the German pavilion he built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1937, bathing it at night with “…skilfully arranged spotlights.  The result was to make the architecture of the building emerge sharply outlined against the night, and at the same time to make it unreal... a combination of architecture and light.”  It was at the Paris event the German and Soviet pavilions sat directly opposed, something of a harbinger and deliberately so.  He was nostalgic too about the Lichtdom, thinking it recalled “a fabulous setting, like one of the imaginary crystal palaces of the Middle Ages” although wryly he would note history would remember his contributions to his profession only for the ephemeral, the “…idea that the most successful architectural creation of my life is a chimera, an immaterial phenomenon.”  Surprisingly, for someone who planned the great city of Germania (the planned re-building of Berlin) with its monumental structures, the news that all that remained in the city of his designs were a handful of lampposts (which stand to this day) seemed something almost amusing.  In all his post-war writings, although there’s much rejection as “a failure” of the plan of Germania and the rest of the “neo-Classical on a grand scale” which characterized Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) vision of representational architecture, it’s not hard to detect twinges of regret for the unbuilt and sometimes he admitted it.  As he was contemplating a return to the drawing board upon his impending release, he noted: “Although I have had enough of monumental architecture and turn my mind deliberately to utilitarian buildings, it sometimes comes hard for me to bid goodbye to my dreams of having a place in the history of architecture. How will I feel when I am asked to design a gymnasium, a relay station, or a department store after I planned the biggest domed hall in the world?  Hitler once said to my wife: ‘I am assigning tasks to your husband such as have not been given for four thousand years. He will erect buildings for eternity!’  And now gyms!”  As things transpired, not even a gym was built and he instead wrote his history in text.  Of that piece of curated architecture, some were fooled and some not.

Tribute in Light annual commemoration, New York.

Dramatic though it was, the exact effect Speer achieved in the 1930s is so tainted by its association with the Nazis that few have attempted to recycle the motif although one pop-star used the effect as a visual backdrop in 1976 when he was going through a right-wing phase which he chose later not to mention.  Isolated or clustered beams are however often used and one display is an annual “Tribute in Light” to commemorate the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  It demonstrates the way the play of light can be used; depending on conditions, the light can bounce off the clouds, creating a very different effect than that afforded by a clear sky and it’s possible to render in those clouds a virtual oculus.

Tribute in Light annual commemoration, New York: The oculus effect.  Note the circling birds.

One problem with high intensity light the Tribute in Light has high-lighted is the way temporarily it messes each year with the migration of hundreds of thousands of songbirds.  The memorial uses 88 focused spotlights, the beams of which reach some 6¼ miles (10 km) into the sky and are visible from as far away as sixty miles (100 km).  Traditionally, the display was illuminated from dusk to dawn but of late it’s been switched off for twenty minute intervals in deference to the songbirds which in mid-September make their long flight from their breeding grounds in Canada's boreal forests to their winter homes in the southern US, Mexico, and Central & South America.  They fly mostly by night and it’s thought they’ve evolved to navigate by the stars but, unfortunately, are much attracted to light.  The Tribute in Light having more light than anything else at altitude, the display seems to confuse the birds and it was noted the death toll from birds crashing into New York windows increased every 9/11.  Observers found there was also an element of sound involved, the birds in the light issuing the call associated with distress, this tending to draw more songbirds to the light.

Tribute in Light annual commemoration, New York: Songbirds caught in the light.

Researchers used radar to quantify the effect.  Typically, the skies within a ¼ mile (400 m) of the un-illumined memorial contained around 500 birds but when lit, within 20 minutes, there were almost 16,000.  Extrapolating the data, it was estimated some 1.1 million migrating songbirds had been affected between 2008-2016, even accounting for the lights since 2009 having been shut-off for twenty minutes whenever volunteers count more than 1,000 birds in the beams.  It’s thought the death–toll from birds crashing into buildings is relatively low but there’s concern also the creatures are compelled to expend energy when circling the site, burning up vital energy needed for their long flights.  Shutting off the lights is thought to allow the birds to re-focus on their guiding stars to find their bearings and continue the migration south.  Bird lovers would prefer searchlights not be used at all and some sites have agreed not to use them during the migration season but there’s obviously much sensitivity around the 9/11 commemoration.  Human development of the built environment has for a long time influenced the migration path, the radar data confirming birds disproportionately choose to fly over cities, the researchers referring to the “almost magnetic pull of birds to light.”  We need to remember that it’s their planet too.

Fragment from Olympia (1938) with Lichtdom.