In the second section of ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty describes what goes on in the act of making paintings – an intertwining of body and world that also serves as the model for perception in general. There are a number of ways of understanding this process of intertwining, all of which involve notions of mutual exchange. One idea is that of ‘material displacement’ between the body of the artist and the medium of expression, in other words: “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.” (1964, p. 162) One could therefore argue that whether or not a painting takes on a recognisable resemblance to objects in the world, it will always contain some reference to the body of the artist who made it, implied by the traces of the movements involved in its construction.

Another way of understanding this according to Merleau-Ponty is to think of it as a kind of ‘mutual visibility’ between artist and world. This reciprocal process of ‘seeing and being seen’, or ‘touching and being touched’ is for Merleau-Ponty one of the essential ingredients of perception in itself, and he seems to see in painting a vivid demonstration of this process taking place. As artists are ‘moved by’ the world (both physically and emotionally) both their response to, and recording of, this experience also involves a ‘movement of’ the world – rearranging some of its material elements into a new configuration that we call a work of art. Paintings could therefore be seen as a natural by-product of a painter’s way of being-in-the-world, a way of grasping and registering its effects on the artist, at the same time as communicating these effects to others. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, a process whereby for the painter: “..vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’.” (1964, p. 178)

Richard Long’s early work “Line Made By Walking” is a simple but powerful example of one kind of encounter between the body of the artist and the materiality of the world. As a record of the artist’s movement in – and of – the world, the line of footprints in the grass could just as easily be described as ‘the artist seen by the world’, as ‘the world seen by the artist’.

‘Speaking Speech’ and ‘Spoken Speech’:

In a short footnote to the essay ‘Eye and Mind’ (1964a, p. 172, n. 22) Merleau-Ponty mischievously asks why there is no ‘universal language’ of images: “Why then do we not methodically produce perfect images of the world, arriving at a universal art purged of all personal art, just as the universal language would free us of all the confused relationships that lurk in existent languages?” As Merleau-Ponty has described elsewhere, perhaps most notably in the essay “On the Phenomenology of Language” from 1951, these ‘confused relationships’ are in fact intrinsic to the ability of language to communicate meanings at all, given that each of us has a unique point of view on the world, and no two experiences – even of the ‘same’ object – can ever be identical. This inherent vagueness or slippage in the relationship between signifier and signified has been well-documented in twentieth century linguistic philosophy, and likewise Merleau-Ponty posits what we might call a ‘deficit and surplus’ model to explain how language works. As human perception can never fully capture or ‘exhaust’ the world that we encounter, we could say that the world continually ‘transcends’ our experience of it. Likewise, any of our attempts to describe our experience – for example in spoken, written or visual form – will always fall short of capturing the full felt richness of the experience as it happened. But despite the apparent inadequacy of any of the ready-made signifying ‘codes’ to capture the uniqueness of the moment, there is also a benefit to this mismatch between feeling and thought, or between idea and expression. Because each of the available signifiers also carries within it a memory of meanings and nuances accumulated over the history of its use, it will also – as if by accident – communicate more than the speaker, writer or artist themselves ever intended. This is one reason why ‘thinking out loud’ can help us understand and process complex experiences, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, “..my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought.” (1964b, p. 88)

Building on this principle Merleau-Ponty then begins to develop a mechanism by which innovation can take place in language, as a way of getting around the problem of having to rely on existing significations in order to be clearly understood. To do this he draws a distinction between what he calls ‘spoken’ and ‘speaking’ speech, where the former refers to the more familiar and well-worn forms of conventional everyday language. By contrast, ‘speaking speech’ describes the more challenging and rarefied patterns of poetic and literary expression, where we often experience a sense of estrangement from conventional meanings as if the writer is deliberately playing with the possibilities of the medium itself. Sometimes this can literally involve reconfiguring and distorting existing forms of expression as a way of capturing, and to some extent actually producing new levels of meaning: “It is just this process of ‘coherent deformation’ of available significations which arranges them in a new sense and takes not only the hearers but the speaking subject as well through a decisive step.” (1964b, p. 91)

Merleau-Ponty describes this process as a kind of ‘renewal’ of language, necessary to retain the vitality of the medium itself in the face of the overly conventionalised habits of everyday communication, which he claims ultimately cut language off from its origins in experience. It could also be argued that with any embodied medium of expression these deformations of form are in fact unavoidable – a natural by-product of the vagueness and slippage inherent in the processes of ‘encoding and decoding’. That is, perhaps any attempt to reproduce even commonplace  forms of expression will always be less-than-perfect, leading to ambiguities of meaning even where none was intended. Whether these (deliberate or accidental) distortions are seen as useful and meaningful deviations from existing forms of expression will determine whether they acquire a lasting value and live on to become part of the ever-expanding lexicon of available significations:

“Each act of philosophical or literary expression contributes to fulfilling the vow to retrieve the world taken with the first appearance of a language, that is, with the first appearance of a finite system of signs(..) Each act of expression realizes for its own part a portion of this project, and by opening a new field of truths, further extends the contract which has just expired. This is possible only through the same ‘intentional transgression’ which gives us others; and like it the phenomenon of truth, which is theoretically impossible, is known only through the praxis which creates it.” (1964b, p. 96)

References:

Merleau-Ponty, M., (1964a), “Eye and Mind” in The Primacy of Perception, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159-190.

________., (1964b), “On the Phenomenology of Language”, in Signs, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 84-97.

Acknowledgements:

This text was prepared for a workshop on Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind” at the University of Nottingham in March 2013, convened by Komarine Romdenh-Romluc and Derek Hampson. It is part of a collaborative project on The Phenomenology of the Image initiated by the School of Fine Arts, University of the Creative Arts, Canterbury, and supported by the Sense of Space group at the University of Nottingham.

In the first of four engagingly intimate personal case-studies that form the major part of the book, Otero-Pailos considers the career of French-born and Beaux-Arts trained architect and academic Jean Labatut (1899-1986). After establishing the first PhD programme in architecture at Princeton University in 1949, Labatut is credited with the creation of a new academic archetype: the ‘architect-historian’, someone trained first as a designer and only later as a scholar. It could be argued that the schism that resulted from this is still with us in academia today, in the tension that often exists between trained architects who go on to study history and art-historians who study art and then later specialise in architecture. In Labatut’s time the field was dominated by the latter in the shape of figures such as Nikolaus Pevsner and Vincent Scully.

Labatut was also well known as a practitioner in the area of both exhibition and church design, where his success was born of an interest in both the experiential and communicative aspects of architectural space. Having previously worked as a French army artist camouflaging ships during World War I, he was particularly attuned to the visual effects of movement in three-dimensional space. Within the narrative of the book Labatut is most notable for the academic lineage that he established at Princeton, supervising students who went on to become key figures in the rise of postmodernism in North America such as Charles Moore and Robert Venturi. Princeton at this time was marked by the strong influence of phenomenological and existentialist ideas, partly through its popularity with students from catholic schools and colleges – the key places of academic sanctuary for what were seen as dangerously left-leaning philosophies during the McCarthy-led purges of the 1950s. Chapter 3 looks in detail at the career of Charles Moore, whose PhD thesis on ‘Water and Architecture’ was directly inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s series of writings on the metaphorical significance of the archetypal four elements. [2] Moore went on to produce perhaps the key text introducing phenomenological ideas to architectural students in North America, Body, Memory and Architecture, written with his teaching colleague Kent Bloomer and published in 1977. [3]

Prior to this, as discussed in the following chapter, Christian Norberg-Schulz had also moved to America, taking up a teaching post at MIT where he came under the influence of Rudolf Arnheim, Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch. Although his first book Intentions in Architecture from 1965 [4] was mainly reliant on Gestalt psychology, his mature and more influential writings were based on the idea of Genius Loci, or spirit of place, inspired by the later work of Martin Heidegger on the poetic practices of dwelling. Throughout these publications Otero-Pailos points to a growing reliance on the use of visual images – both photographs and diagrams – to carry the main thrust of the narrative. Perhaps inspired by his teacher Sigfried Giedion’s famous use of the twin-slideshow lecture, this shift comes to fruition in the full-blown photo-essays of the 1979 book Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, where the images attempt to engage the reader in a more directly visceral and embodied encounter. [5]

Recalling Labatut’s interest in the visual effects of camouflage, and Charles Moore’s use of anamorphosis and supergraphics in his 1960s house interiors, the notion of what Otero-Pailos calls ‘surplus experience’ becomes a key theme in the final chapter. In the writings of Kenneth Frampton (b. 1930) this idea also takes on a political significance, as part of his redefinition of what constitutes a work of architecture, as distinct from mere building. For Frampton what distinguishes the former is the capacity to engage with a public realm beyond the immediate confines of the individual building, offering something extra to the wider polis that exceeds the narrow technical and functional requirements of the architect’s programmatic brief.

In biographical terms Otero-Pailos traces these concerns back to Frampton’s early upbringing and the influence of his father’s work as both a building contractor and a joiner. Allied to his later reading of the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt – particularly her key distinction between (essential) labour as mindless toil and (surplus) work as self-realisation – Frampton attempts to identify an intrinsic connection between what the critic Fredric Jameson has described as the ‘tactile, tectonic and telluric’ dimensions of architectural experience. [6] In each instance Frampton suggests that architecture is able to offer the user something extra, a connotation of ‘excess’ or overflowing that might threaten the established order. Through its exaggerated materiality and its articulated tectonics the building invites a heightened level of sensory engagement which emphasises the importance of the here-and-now. Likewise in its suppression of generic imported technologies and forms in favour of locally sourced alternatives. Clearly a ‘regionalist’ approach is implied here in this relation to the specifics of place, but to what extent it really deserves to be called ‘critical’ is still left open to debate.

While this idea of excess could be accepted as political in the ‘weak’ sense – suggesting some kind of generalised disruptive force aimed at destabilising the status quo – it is perhaps more difficult to substantiate the claim that it is also political in the strong sense, in terms of promoting a specific political programme like two of Frampton’s early sources of inspiration: the progressive politics of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s. Unlike, for example, the work of Russian cinematographer Dziga Vertov whose celebration of the tectonics of film also tried to educate the novice director in the practicalities of movie-making, it is less clear what new freedoms are meant to follow from Frampton’s much-vaunted ‘architecture of resistance’. [7]

My own reading of Frampton’s preoccupation with the ‘critical’ as a bridge between the private realm and the public, involves the phenomenological idea that individual subjectivity actually emerges from collective experience. Echoing the Bakhtinian notion that all individual voices are originally abstracted from dialogues, [8] this idea provides another link back to phenomenology via one of Merleau-Ponty’s final statements. [9] In describing the ‘flesh of the world’ as that primordial realm of collective subjectivity from which we gradually learn to identify ourselves as individual embodied subjects, Merleau-Ponty also reminded us that there is nothing immediate about so-called ‘immediate bodily experience’. If even embodied experience involves the acquisition of skills and habits in learning how to perceive the world around us, this process must inevitably take place within a social and cultural framework that always exists before us. To understand experience we therefore cannot simply begin with the sovereign individual ‘reaching out’ towards the world – we must at the same time begin with the socio-political world ‘reaching in’ towards the emerging individual.

It is here perhaps that we can redefine the ‘critical’ as the point where the ethical and the aesthetic begin to coincide, by recalling an idea that I remember once hearing Peter Smithson declare in a lecture: “A building’s first responsibility is to the fabric of which it forms a part.” To which I would want to add: a fabric both physical and social.

References:

[1] J. Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
[2] G. Bachelard: The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. A. C. M. Ross, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. E. R. Farrell and C. F. Farrell, Dallas TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 1988; Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. E. R. Farrell, Dallas TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 1983; Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. K. Haltman, Dallas TX: Dallas Institute Publications, 2002.
[3] C. Moore and K. Bloomer, Body, Memory and Architecture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1977.
[4] C. Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.
[5] C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1980.
[6] F. Jameson, “The Constraints of Postmodernism”, in The Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 189-205.
[7] K. Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. H. Foster, Seattle WA: Bay Press, 1983, pp. 16-30.
[8] M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
[9] M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”, in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 130-155.

Acknowledgements:

I am grateful to Roger Connah for suggesting the term ‘critical phenomenology’ (Personal communication, Terrazzo del Giardino, May 2012)

In a recent lecture at the University of Nottingham, David Leatherbarrow (University of Pennsylvania) set out what might be called – in an echo of his Philadelphia neighbours Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown – a ‘gentle manifesto’ for a not-too-complex-but-just-a-little-bit-contradictory approach to contemporary design. [1]

In a typically precise and measured delivery, and in language of exemplary clarity, Leatherbarrow set out to identify a productive middle-ground between what he sees as the currently fashionable extremes of ‘sense and non-sense’ in contemporary architecture. In a more direct reference to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty the paper began by suggesting that non-sense should not be seen as something to be avoided, per se, but rather as a stage that must be passed through both in design and everyday experience: a necessary condition of the ‘beginning of meaning’, rather like the body’s pre-reflective ‘grip’ on the world that forms the basis of our subsequent attempts to understand it intellectually.

On one side of the equation Leatherbarrow pointed to three design approaches that suffered from an excess of rationality, showing examples of buildings that seemed to have been slavishly determined by either technical, historical or environmental factors. These included: Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre – a ‘highly serviced barn’; a Sicilian town destroyed by an earthquake and reconstructed stone-by-stone; and a ponderous piece of ‘green architecture’ which seemed to offer little except free energy. All of these approaches he claimed were guilty of neglecting broader cultural concerns. That is, where the rationality of the particular system (whether constructional or conceptual) appeared to override the rationality of the larger human project.

On the other side, and perhaps more surprisingly, Leatherbarrow took aim at some currently fashionable design preoccupations, again under three headings but this time more aesthetically oriented. The first was the ‘expressionist’ approach of Frank Gehry’s so-called iconic architecture, embodying a radical dislocation of space, structure and skin; the second was the minimalism of an Ando or a Pawson; and the third was the ‘sensualism’ of Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building. In each case the question was posed as to whether the private enjoyment of the designer had closed off any meaningful engagement with a wider public.

In an attempt to find a middle-way between the ‘too clear’ and the ‘not clear enough’, Leatherbarrow then took us on a brief but thoughtful tour of the Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn’s Hedmark Museum. Remarking on the sensitivity of the architect’s combination of new-build and restoration, Leatherbarrow delighted in the way the visitor’s journey was choreographed through the museum, providing a subtle narrative of unfolding experiences through a succession of walkways, ramps and bridges. This is a project that I once heard Peter Cook approvingly describe as a classic example of a ‘delving’ building, interrupting his lecture to mimic the route of the main walkway by leaping sideways across the stage. What it brought to mind here was another aspect of sensory experience that David Leatherbarrow did not develop in any detail, one which lies somewhere in that other middle-ground in architecture between the macro and the micro scales. In the space between the ‘iconic’ flourishes of Gehry’s napkin-sketch formalism and Carlo Scarpa’s often indigestibly forensic detailing there is a level of thinking that architects are notoriously reluctant (or ill-equipped) to explore – the ergonomic scale of everyday interaction between buildings and the bodies of their users. Ironically this is an area that is often left for other ‘experts’ to deal with, whether via the pseudo-scientific strictures of the New Metric Handbook or the prosaic pie-graphs of ‘post-occupancy evaluation’. But here, I would argue, is where architecture really begins to make sense, in the realm of what the psychologist James J. Gibson referred to as the ‘affordances’ offered by it. [2]

As Gibson – along with Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger before him – described, we navigate through the world as a structured field of possibilities for action, within a framework of motor-perceptual expectations based on our previous bodily experiences. This ability is based on the range of bodily skills that we begin to develop in the first few years of life, by a combination of imitation and trial-and-error much as we learn to speak our native language. As we continually refine these ‘bodily schemas’ through the course of our everyday dealings with the world, we are constantly striving to match our behaviour to what seems to be ‘called up’ by our situation. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described in the concept of the habitus, the body is therefore able to act as the mediator of physical, social and cultural forces, which all become ‘encoded’ in patterns of behaviour that constitute a repertoire of responses to the world around us. [3]

A common criticism of phenomenology is that it appeared to want to return us to a time of a supposedly meaning-rich ‘primal oneness’, a time before our apparent alienation from the world brought about by the ‘modern project’. By contrast, it could also be argued that phenomenology today, in all its contemporary manifestations, allows us to confront the process by which meaning itself arises, and to consider this emergence historically across three different timescales: firstly, the phylogenetic (relating to the species, drawing on evolutionary psychology, cognitive archaeology, systems theory and cybernetics) [4]; secondly, the ontogenetic (concerning the individual, and drawing on developmental psychology); and thirdly in the experience of ‘the present moment’ as we perceive the world unfolding around us (drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, including the new techniques of brain-imaging). This last idea suggests that at each moment we effectively re-stage the historical emergence of meaning out of our embodied interaction with the world, and it is this process that phenomenological description attempts to help us grasp, as it “seek(s) a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason in a world not of its making..”. [5]

To return to the opening theme of the talk regarding the role of meaning in architecture, there was a final piece of advice that signalled a progressive and forward-looking message: wherever we try to situate ourselves as designers along the spectrum between sense and non-sense, we should at least be always aiming to ‘expand the limits of what had previously seemed sensible’. [6]

References:

[1] R. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
[2] J. J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances”, in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986, pp. 127-143.
[3] P. Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices”, in The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, pp. 52-65.
[4] See, for example: E. Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of the Mind, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2007.
[5] M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. L. & P. A. Dreyfus, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. x.
[6] D. Leatherbarrow, “Sense and Non-Sense in Contemporary Architecture”, lecture presented at Dept of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, 6 March 2012 (sponsored by T&G).

Tim Ingold likes to rough-up the edges of things. As an anthropologist he’s more interested in people than architecture-as-such, but whether he’s talking about objects, buildings or bodies, the boundaries between them soon become fuzzy. In a way reminiscent of the philosopher David Hume’s idea of the self as a ‘bundle or collection of different perceptions’ [1], as well as Daniel Dennett’s definition of the self as a ‘centre of narrative gravity’ [2], Ingold represents a ‘thing’ (as distinct from an ‘object’) as a bundle or tangle of intersecting lines. The idea that things are much more usefully conceptualised as fleeting concentrations of ‘materials in movement’, rather than fixed and stable entities, is one that Ingold also attributes to the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, [3] as well as the nineteenth-century German architect and writer Gottfried Semper.

In a recent lecture at the University of Nottingham [4] entitled “The Conical Lodge at the Centre of the Earth-Sky World” Ingold enlisted support from the unlikely trio of Semper, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze in defence of a redefinition of architecture: from building-as-object to building-as-process. He began with a description of walking inside a tent-like pavilion structure, a vertical fabric enclosure with an opening at the top. Isolated from the immediate landscape, with no views out in the horizontal plane, Ingold described himself slowly becoming conscious of two intersecting conditions – the haptic sense of the earth beneath his feet and the optical attraction towards the light of the sky above. Referring to the first two elements of Heidegger’s famous ‘fourfold’ (from the essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”) [5] Ingold suggested that all architecture is in fact (or perhaps ought to be) a more-or-less articulate intertwining of these two essential elements: rather than simply on the ground and under the sky, it is actually embedded within the thickness of the boundary between.

He found support for this idea in the nineteenth century historical writings of Gottfried Semper, specifically in his 1851 publication on “The Four Elements of Architecture”. [6] In contrast to the spatial typologies prevalent at the time, Semper’s radical innovation was to create a typology of construction processes – suggesting that architectural form, structure and ornament all have their origins in four canonical ways of making: stone-cutting, ceramics, carpentry and weaving. Out of these four techniques the basic spatial ‘elements’ of architecture have emerged – stone platform, fireplace, timber roof and woven walls, the latter being the most controversial as it relegated the solid wall to a lightweight hanging screen. For one of Semper’s other recent interpreters, Kenneth Frampton, these four elements could be further reduced to two, given the tectonic opposition between the subtractive processes of clay-moulding and stone-carving, and the additive techniques of timber-framing and textile weaving. Frampton also interpreted these tectonic processes in terms of their formal and emotional qualities, suggesting that the first two earth-bound techniques find their counterpoint in the skyward tendencies of the space-capturing roof and screens. [7]

Not content with this distillation Ingold then attempted another, resolving these two forces into a single organic process, creating a useful metaphorical link between the ‘dead matter’ of the building and biological life itself. He likened the act of building to the way a plant draws up nourishment from the ground while at the same time reaching upwards into the sky to capture nutrients from the air. While reminding us of Heidegger’s notion of the boundary as not where something ends but rather ‘begins its presencing’ [8] Ingold also referred back to the idea of the living thing as a transitory bundling or ‘gathering’ of productive forces. More profoundly perhaps there is also an opportunity for us to read this metaphor in reverse, if we consider architecture as the place where a process of unbundling might also occur. I am thinking here of the heuristic function of the building as a means for what Heidegger referred to as ‘revealing’ – a place where, out of the processes of making, narratives are opened up and played out in terms of the spatial, social and intellectual opportunities offered by it.

In a distant echo of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh of the world – that primordially ‘confused’ condition out of which our ideas of subject and object gradually emerge [9] – Ingold’s lecture offered a hint that architecture itself might provide one of the fundamental conditions-of-possibility for our coming to understand the otherwise inscrutable phenomena of the ‘elements’ of earth and sky.

References:

[1] D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 1, London: J. M. Dent, 1911, p. 239.
[2] D. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 418.
[3] G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, “The Smooth and the Striated”, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 474-500.
[4] T. Ingold, “The Conical Lodge at the Centre of the Earth-Sky World”, lecture presented at Dept of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, 21 February 2012 (sponsored by T&G). See also: T. Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather”, in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, pp. 115-125.
[5] M. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York: Perennial Library, 1975.
[6] G. Semper, “The Four Elements of Architecture”, in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and W. Herrmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 74-129.
[7] K. Frampton, “Rappel a l’Ordre: The Case for the Tectonic”, Architectural Design, vol. 60, no. 3-4/1990, pp. 19-25. Reprinted in K. Frampton, Labour Work and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design, London: Phaidon Press, 2002.
[8] Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”.
[9] M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”, in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 130-155.

“What are the characteristics of knowledge derived during the production of the built environment?” [1].

McCleary claims that by picking up a tool and acting on the world we are not only achieving effects – getting things done – but also, and more importantly, learning something new. Like a space-probe prodding the surface of an unknown planet or a blind person navigating a street with the aid of a stick, by extending ourselves outwards into the environment we are also drawing information in, all the time building up a richer picture of what’s going on at the mutable interface of body and world.

The tools that Heidegger labelled ‘ready-to-hand’ [2] are those that can most easily be incorporated – quite literally – into an extended body-image, stretching our sensory surfaces into prosthetically expanded selves [3]. As well as gaining knowledge of the tool itself, in a way that we would never do if we simply stared at it, by putting the tool to work we also learn about our own bodily capacities. More importantly, as McCleary argues, we also learn something about the world THROUGH these bodily extensions, hence they become ‘transparent’ to us in that  - with sufficient practice – we almost forget that we are wielding them. By contrast McCleary claims that many of today’s high-tech tools have become ‘opaque’ and inscrutable devices. By removing or automating processes traditionally carried out by hand, these ‘black-box’ technologies deny this kind of direct bodily engagement, often reducing it to the reading of dials and pushing of buttons. His examples include the use of power tools like band-saws and sit-on lawnmowers which while amplifying efficiency also reduce the kind of direct tactile feedback and learning about the materials being worked on which is the by-product of physical effort.

The idea that we experience the qualities of materials through their physical resistance to transformation was usefully explored by the American philosopher John Dewey in his book Art as Experience [4]. He described how we can only become aware of ourselves and our abilities by reaching out and interacting with the world around us, and that the character of what we encounter depends on the degree to which it pushes back. This notion of physical resistance as a key element of a material’s tectonic identity could also be expanded to help understand how we engage with whole building elements and spaces. Here a paradox appears in relation to our usual assumptions about successful functional arrangements: if we only become consciously aware of our tools when they fail to perform as expected, is it also the case that we only really notice our surroundings when they frustrate our attempts to inhabit them?  Heidegger captures this experience nicely in describing the moment a tool breaks down in the process of using it, when it suddenly ‘shows up’ again in our conscious awareness as it shifts from ‘ready’ to ‘present-at-hand’. In McCleary’s terms this could also be described as a shift from transparent to opaque, as we go from experiencing world at the ‘cutting edge’ of the tool to simply experiencing the tool itself as a ‘useless’ object.

One conclusion to be drawn from this is that a seamlessly functioning ‘transparent’ architecture would actually result in a ‘building without qualities’. By contrast, it is interesting to recall attempts by architects to find a balance between transparency and opacity by deliberately disrupting conventional patterns of use – as with Peter Eisenman’s famously divided double-bed in House VI which he described as “…extending the possibilities of occupiable form.” [5]. If it is true that learning takes place only as we push against the boundaries of familiarity, perhaps it is useful to rephrase McCleary’s opening question in relation to environments that stimulate and provoke. It may now be more useful to ask: what kind of knowledge is produced in the occupation of the built environment..?

References:

[1] P. McCleary, “Some Characteristics of a New Concept of Technology”, Journal of Architectural Education, Fall 1988, Reprinted in W. Braham & J. Hale (eds) Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005, pp. 325-36.
[2] M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, New York: Harper Collins, 1962, pp. 98-107.
[3] For some recent experimental evidence of this phenomenon see: S. Yamamoto & S. Kitazawa, “Sensation at the Tips of Invisible Tools”, Nature Neuroscience, 04 September 2001, pp. 979-80. I am grateful to Peter Stockwell for pointing out this connection.
[4] J. Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Perigee Books, 1980, [1934], pp. 59-60.
[5] P. Eisenman, House of Cards, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 169. See also the analysis by Andrew Benjamin: “Eisenman and the Housing of Tradition” in Architectural Design, 1-2, 1989.

Galleries 1 and 2 are occupied by DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency) a three-person art and architecture collective based in Palestine. Called ‘Common Assembly’ the work in the show is not the most immediately accessible – my advice would be to forget that it’s an art exhibition and treat it as a more-or-less factual presentation. A series of videos, models, portfolios and installations explore some of the fascinating conflicts and tensions affecting everyday life in this seemingly endlessly fought-over region.

The first piece in the show consists of video interviews with lawyers, surveyors and residents trying to deal with the unexpected and often terrifying consequences of a felt-pen line drawn on a plan: the boundaries around the Palestinian territories agreed as part of the 1996 Oslo Accord. When blown up to life-size this narrow borderline swells to five metres wide,  leaving a substantial strip of disputed land in a state of permanent legal isolation. Many people now find themselves in properties straddling this dubious boundary, not least of which is the now abandoned Palestinian parliament building – the subject of an impressively large-scale 3-D installation in the double-height Gallery 2. This work consists of a cross-sectional slice along the territorial borderline which cuts through the main debating chamber, with the floor plane apparently supported on a grid of vertical strings that dramatically exploit the height of the space. The strip as built is clearly not five metres wide, so presumably it has been re-scaled to suit the length of the gallery, although it does still highlight the broader issue of the problematic relation between the plan and reality – whether the ‘project’ in question is an architectural drawing or a political agreement.

In Galleries 3 and 4 Thomas Demand’s framed photographs are neatly lined up on the walls. Entitled ‘Model Studies’ the images are large-scale blow-ups of John Lautner’s designs for luxurious American houses – preserved in a series of models held in the Getty collection in Los Angeles. The work is interesting, but perhaps predictably unspectacular. As with ‘Common Assembly’ there are some curious ambiguities evident in the images caused by the dramatic changes in scale. Tiny details of ragged cutting and careless glueing are blown up to heroic proportions, and some take on a level of abstraction and seductive pattern-making reminiscent of cubist collages.

Interestingly the glass doors between the two galleries allow some useful comparisons of scaling between the near and distant photographs - reinforcing the link with the boundary-line scaling issues explored in the work of DAAR. This is certainly a challenging show, but overall a worthwhile experience - and it’s backed up by a substantial programme of invited speakers as well as other gallery activities.

The show runs from 28th January to 15th April 2012.

The Pokia

With the semester one marksheets still smouldering in the fireplace, yesterday it was back to the lecture room to start all over again – this time on 5th year/masters module ‘Rethinking Architecture’ (which should really be called ‘Rethinking Technology’ – a long story..). Not sure why they gave us a room big enough for 160 when there are only seven of us in the class, including me, but it certainly gave the ideas room to breathe. Let’s hope next week we’re back in the Dept around a table, as seminars are meant to be.

With definitions of technology out of the way – including a first draft of Heidegger’s notion of a world opened up by technology – the main focus of the session was on housekeeping: how to get through the multiple ‘paywalls’ of the university’s clunky (and soon to be defunct) WebCT system, and once there what to do with the riches to be found within. At least everything is up to date in there now, so we’re ready to get started. Next week it’s ‘Technology and the Body’ where we start with Tim Ingold’s handy aphorism: ‘A tool, in the most general sense, is an object that extends the capacity of an agent to operate within a given environment’. (1993: 433).

Ingold, T. (1993) ‘Tool-Use, Sociality and Intelligence’, in Kathleen Gibson and Tim Ingold (eds), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 429-45.

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