The Two Jerusalems: Sacred Space, Utopia and the Contemporary Image

Abstract

This article brings together three texts that follow a single question from the biblical city to the present: how a community projects an ideal order onto the space it inhabits, and what happens to that projection once its transcendent axis is removed. The first part reads the earthly Jerusalem as the temporal and spatial expression of the Heavenly Jerusalem, tracing the model through medieval *mappae mundi* (Ebstorf, Hereford), the cathedral labyrinths of northern France as substitutes for pilgrimage, and the visions of Ezekiel, in which the fallen city is rebuilt according to a divine measure. The second part turns to the Sigma group in Timișoara (1969 to 1981), whose constructivist program, indebted to the Bauhaus and to Buckminster Fuller, produced a secular utopia in which the museum and the gallery replaced the church. The third part is a short parodic dialogue, rewriting the opening of Thomas More's *Utopia* (1516) in the vocabulary of contemporary progressive ideology. Read together, the three parts argue that utopia, deprived of the sacred, tends to return to it. Working paper (preprint). English version of a text first written in Romanian by the author; translated and edited for this deposit, with corrected references. Not yet peer reviewed. Comments and citations welcome; a journal version may follow.