Patterns & Metaphors

Structures and engineering works

Template:
This class of symbols includes the largest man-made non-mobile artifacts. Preeminent symbols in this class are buildings, including homes, huts, cottages, castles, office buildings, factories, public buildings of all types (hospitals, schools, city halls, etc); entertainment and sports structures including stadiums, theatres, gymnasia, playing fields, baths; religious buildings including cathedrals, churches, chapels, mosques, stupas, temples, pagodas, shrines; tower-like structures, including lighthouses, windmills, smokestacks or incinerators, and monolithic urban buildings, residential, commercial or both. Other special structures appearing in symbolism are palaces, prisons, museums, mortuaries, libraries, port facilities, customs houses, airline terminals and airfields, universities, congress halls or auditoria, stock exchanges, banks, department stores, railraod stations, petrol (gas) stations, post offices, telephone and telegraph facilities, public archives, and zoos. Also in this class of symbols are bridges, walls and roads. Cities, towns, villages, vineyards, pastures, gardens and other enclosures such as sacred precincts, cemetaries, park lands and planted fields are related. Included also are dams, reservoirs and canals.
Metaphor:
High roads and cross-roads are well-known symbols of decision. Comprehensive structures such as buildings and towns may represent the totality of the personality. This is true also of formally landscaped gardens often presented as an image of the soul or inner life of the self. Various utopias and lost cities symbolize order, nationalism and regimentation. They include Atlantis, Thule, and **** or Shambhalla. Some places represent Paradise or purity, and the Garden of Eden; some fecundity, as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Viciousness is represented by Sodom and Gomorrah. Heavenly or perfect cities have been represented by Jerusalem, Rome, the inner Peiping, etc. Ruins and ghost towns represent loss, abandonment, decay or sudden destruction. Famous symbolic ruins include Pompeii and Herculaneum and the walls of Jericho and the city of Troy. Some buildings represent brutal power, as the Pentagon or the Kremlin, or repression, as barbed-wire enclosed concentration or refugee camps.<