Photo by Bee
Felton-Leidel
It’s Easter Sunday, a day for Christians to celebrate
the rising of Christ and for others to likewise celebrate renewal as spring
reaches full bloom. One of the symbols we traditionally associate with the
holiday is the Easter egg.
According to Wikipedia, the Christian
custom of Easter eggs started among the early Christians of Mesopotamia, who
stained eggs with red coloring “in memory of the blood of Christ, shed at His
crucifixion.” A further association between eggs and Easter arose during the
Middle Ages as a result of the fact Catholics were prohibited from eating eggs
during Lent but were allowed to eat them when Easter arrived. Today, people joyfully
color and decorate Easter eggs to mark the holiday, albeit often absent much of
their religious association.
Architects have long been fascinated by the
perfect form of eggs. Perhaps it’s the extremely complicated mathematical calculation used to describe their shapes that captivates us.
Or maybe it’s the egg’s mystical power as a symbol of fertility, resurrection, the Earth, good luck, and
wealth.
Regardless of why we find avian ova so
interesting, the following assortment of eggs-cellent links to web pages celebrating
ties between architecture and Easter eggs is sure to please:
Easter
Eggs for Architects and Architecture Lovers
For several years in a row, the ArchDaily website invited
architects and designers to submit the wittiest, most creative, and inspired
Easter egg designs. The most recent set I could find dates from 2017, so I’m
not sure if their Easter Eggs for Architects and Architecture Lovers remains a
regular fixture when the holiday rolls around each year. Nevertheless, the collection from 2017 is truly amazing. Check it out:
Five Architectural Easter Eggs Hiding on Gothic
Cathedrals
Aside from the specially decorated examples we’re
all familiar with, Easter eggs have another connotation: as messages, images,
or features hidden within a video game, movie, or another medium—such as
architecture—waiting to be discovered. The sculpted figures adorning the great
gothic cathedrals were most often of an ecclesiastic nature. Sometimes though,
they were playful and capricious, as the examples you’ll see in the Atlas Obscura article below
certainly are:
8 Eggs-travagantly
Egg-Shaped Buildings for Easter
A
number of contemporary architects have seemingly just discovered the potential
of the egg-shape, as the examples collected by Inhabitat would seem to attest:
How
Architects Cracked the Egg: Ovoid Buildings Through the Ages
Finally,
here’s a link to a piece by Jonathan Foyle for the Financial Times
describing how eggs represent nature’s most resolved work of architecture and
how the symbolism for birth and rebirth they embody has inspired architects
through the centuries:
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