Abstract

The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenological nature and aesthetic interpretations of contemporary architecture as a representation. Technological progress influences the experiments in architecture embracing new aesthetics and thereby the emotive and sensorial aspect of representation. New technologies are shaping the formal and material possibilities of creation by introducing the “digital” into the physical environment. “New” seems to become the paradigmatic condition towards the projection of technological meanings about architectural representation. In the context of technological development and its transitory aspect, this paper intends to evaluate how technological advances affect the dichotomy between the subject of representation (architectural space) and the object represented (architectural tectonics).

As “buildings have turned into image products” (Pallasma 1996, 30), it is paramount to go beyond the image of architecture rooted in its purely formal and/or material representation and to explore the immaterial potentialities of architecture. Digital technologies reconfigure architectural thresholds by emphasizing the phenomenological properties of architectural space (senses of the invisible). The concept of representation takes here a very particular direction by seeking to liberate the perceptible potentiality of architecture rather than be encased as a new technological standard of conception and production.

The manner in which one apprehends the novel logics of architectural representations entails a radical change in perception and understanding of physical space – hence an aesthetic experience of architecture that flags the issue of the temporality of architectural representation. Referring to the generative phenomenology framework this research will raise the following questions:

Are digital technologies providing the new potentiality about the representing rather than the represented? How does “new” and technological architecture exemplify the ability of perception? If architecture creates the environments of instantaneous perceptions, does Hursserl’s “back to the things themselves” entail re-thinking temporality and intersubjectivity of architectural space? From a phenomenological perspective, does architecture then become a permanent experimentation of subjective representation?As a case study, this paper will conduct a comparative analysis of the works of: Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio, François Roche, Lars Spuybroek, Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito and Louis I. Kahn.

Author biography

Joanna Wlaszyn is an architect and researcher, member of ACS Laboratory (Architecture, Culture et Société) at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais / ENSAPM in Paris. Currently enrolled in the PhD program, her research fields include: the phenomenological approach to contemporary architecture, the aesthetic relationship between art, architecture and technology, with a particular focus on the experimental architecture and its technological modes of , reception and representation.

Phoebe Giannisi PhD.,Architect, University of Thessaly, School of Architecture, Lecturer

Abstract

The paper discusses the phenomenology of weather phenomena as a metaphor for mortality in Homeric poetry and ancient Greek architecture. Homeric similes in the Iliad compare elements of landscape in moments of extreme tension (as objects of weather phenomena influence), to the heroes’ bodies during battle. Just as the result of the martial combat, so the outcome of the encounter between weather, especially wind and rain, and men or landscape elements is never certain. It can result to either death and destruction or life and resistance.

In the similes, the landscape elements range from natural such as a rock or a tree, to human produced such as walls, towers or ships derived from stone or wood. A multiple metaphoric association is in place, consisting of different acceptances of bodies: the human body, a natural element’s body, the body of a construction and finally the body of the poem itself. Weather, mainly water, becomes thus the symbol of destructive natural and divine forces threatening to death whatever is the product of humans.

The key notion in Greek epos (Iliad) representing resistance to destruction and death is coherence, the perfect junction of parts, rendered by words relative to the root *ar, having the sense of “fitting, , arranging, attaching, connecting, joining, uniting, articulating, being in accord with, being adjusted”, a semantic range of words adjacent to “harmony”. Resistance to weather (thus immortality) is a quality of the well-adjusted construction. That is meant as perfect articulation of body parts, words and myths, construction parts. For the ancient Greek temples, the iconography of their upper structure, can be analyzed as a visual rendering of the combat between human artifact and weather forces, mainly water.

As for the poet, he places himself in the side of immortality because of the immateriality of its composition. By contrasting his product to the material building constructions, he assumes for the superiority of his craft which assures memory (immortality) without being subject to deterioration due to time and weather.

Biography

Phoebe Giannisi. Born in Athens, Greece. Architect (National Polytechnic School of Athens, 1988). Ph. D in Langues, Histoire et civilisations des Mondes anciens (Université Lyon II- Lumière, 1994). Lecturer at the School of Architecture of the

1University of Thessaly at Volos. Member of the group for actions in the city “Urban Void”. Books: Classical Greek Architecture, (with ?.Tzonis), Flammarion, 2004 (also in French and German) and Récits des Voies. Chant et Cheminement en Grèce archaïque, Grenoble, 2006. She has also published three poetry collections in Greek (1995, 1997, 2005).

Michael Lazarin, Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Faculty of Letters, Professor

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Abstract

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For the Japanese, ultimate reality is transiency; continuous presence is an illusion. For this reason Japanese architecture emphasizes transitional, intermediary zones. Two architectural elements where this emphasis can be seen are the engawa veranda ( ) and the hashigakari bridgeway ( ) of the Noh stage. Given the Japanese emphasis on the temporal dimension of architecture, literary poetics is useful for an appreciation of these phenomena. This paper relies primarily on Martin Heidegger’s “… Poetically Man Dwells …” and 22nd generation Noh actor Komparu Kunio’s The Noh Theater to give a phenomenological description of these two elements.

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Author

Michael Lazarin was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1950. As an undergraduate, he was a double major in mechanical engineering and philosophy. He received a Ph.D. from Duquesne University in 1980, with a dissertation on Heidegger and Hölderlin, directed by Father Andre Schuwer. He taught literature and philosophy in China from 1982-84 and since then in Japan. Lazarin teaches Western literature and art history at the undergraduate level at Ryukoku University, a 370 year-old Buddhist university in kyoto. His graduate seminar is a three-year rotation of Aristotle’s Poetics, Nietzches’s Birth of Tragedy, and Heidegger’s poetics.

Dagmar Motycka Weston, University of Edinburgh

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Abstract

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The work of the well-known Czech filmmaker and artist Jan Svankmajer is informed by is surrealist preoccupation with the primary phenomena of embodiment, experience and the imagination. He believes that he apparently inanimate things and places that we encounter in the given world have a life of their own. Having witnessed certain events, and been touched by people in different psychic states, they accumulate memories which they are then able to communicate to us. He always emphasizes the most primary senses — in particular touch and hearing — above vision, and delights in obliterating the artificial boundary between “inner” and “outer” experience, between reality and dream. Svankmajer often portrays the architectural settings in his films — the always-animate world in which is stories are played out — as the echoes and extensions of his characters’ landscapes of the imagination, so that in some cases they almost become characters in their own right. In doing this, he is intuitively alluding to the presence of a latent world, in which human experience and imagination are situated. As with the topography of dream, the structure of places within the stories is often disjointed and disorientating. In his use of architecture, Svankmajer is particularly attuned to deep symbolic archetypes — the dark cavern, the tower, the theater of the world — which are part of the latent world. The paper briefly examines Svankmajer’s thematic sources — particularly  Mannerism and Surrealism — for their understanding of the mysterious and animate nature of the experiential world. It then interprets the structure of Svankmajer’s topography in two of his short films, Into the Cellar and The Fall of the House of Usher. Throughout, the author draws on her acquaintance with the filmmaker.

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Author biography

Dr. Dagmar Motycka Weston was born in Prague. She qualified and practiced as an architect in Toronto, before taking up postgraduate studies at the Architectural Association and the University of Cambridge. She teaches architectural history and design at the University of Edinburgh. She believes that architecture must be situated in culture and understood in reciprocity with the humanities. She is interested in ways in which the history and philosophy of architecture can fruitfully inform contemporary design. Her current research interests resolve around the issues of modernity: embodiment, spatiality, the loss of the symbolic tradition, and efforts to restore meaning in architecture through metaphor. Dagmar has written widely on the various conjunctions between Surrealism and architecture. Her current research project is a book on the theme of the artist’s and architect’s studio and personal museum in the early 20th century as a matrix of creativity.

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Abstract

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“Expressing Embodiment” examines the architect’s expression of lived experience through architectural design. It examines the potential for embodied engagement to transform existing models and habits of spatial representation and posits the deeply philosophical nature of architectural interrogation.

The marks of spatial representation layer the “quasi-presence” of imagined space onto lived spatial experience, and imaginative inhabitation is a central facet of the phenomenal unfolding of architectural design. Yet the quickly assumed indexical certainties of conventional spatial representation may easily short-circuit the work of imagining  embodied experience. Maurice Merleau Ponty asserts that “we must seek the space and its content together” [1] by addressing the depth, latency, and thickness of space as modulated in relationship to the body. The measured and exact aspects of architectural representation can easily give an appearance of completion that surpasses its depth of embodied thought and thus substitute “complete” representation for the work of inter corporeal imagination. We face an important challenge to critically enframe the exciting possibilities of contemporary representation within a larger attitude of corporeal engagement.

In spatial representation, the architect transforms imagination into percept, using the drawing as an abstracted perceptual stand-in for imagined space. The disciplined, intentional, imaginative inhabitation by an architect allows her to “perceive” the unfolding of a space as spatial representations become imagination’s placeholders in an emerging design. Subjectivity fluxes as the architect operates in the interstices between perceiver and perceived, alternating between seeing (as designer) and beeing seen (as imagined occupant of the emerging space).

The drawn line is a “mode of seeing” in which the architect “breaks apart habitual modes of seeing … and presents the invisible traces of the visible that the ordinary perceiver tends to ignore.”[2] In doing so, she gives the world to us in a new and fresh way,[3] moving beyond habitual modes of spatial interaction to present a perceptually engaged mode of inhabitation.

In working to manifest lived space, the architect becomes philosopher. According to Merleau-Ponty, “the painter [and, by extension, the architect] who struggles with the question of depth, of light, has already plunged  into the cardinal question of ontology.”[4] In doing so, the architect “breathes out’ this world that [she] has ‘breathed in’ with [her] body”[5] and thus comes as close as it is possible to come to illuminating the depths of our embodied existence — raising the possibility that philosophy’s questions about our most fundamental relationships within the flesh are in essence architectural.

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[1] Maurice Merleau Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1993, 140-1 (Merleau Ponty’s italics).

[2] James B. Steeves, Imagining Bodies: Merleau Ponty’s philosophy of Imagination. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004, 58-9.

[3] Jenny Slatman, “L’invisible dans le visible: Vers une phénoménologie de l’eikôn,” Merleau Ponty aux frontières  de l’invisible, Les cahiers de Chiasmi Internacional, numéro 1, textes réunis par Marie Cariou, Renaud Barbaras, et Etienne Bimbenet, 2003, 241 (my translation)

[4] Slatman, “invisible,” 243.

[5] Slatman, “invisible,” 237, drawing from Merleau Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit, 32.

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Author biography

Architect, architectural historian, and theorist Rachel McCann, Professor at Mississippi State University, holds an M.Phil. in Architectural History and Criticism from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Histories and Theories of Architecture ate Architectural Association in London. Dr. McCann teaches architectural history, theory, and design at Mississippi State University. Her research, inspired by French phenomenologist  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, investigates the full-body engagement of Architecture. Her writing on Merleau-Ponty and architecture has been published in Architecture and Civilization; Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations; Intertwinings: Merleau-Pontian Reflexions on Body, World, and Intersubjectivity; and writings in Architectural Education: EAAE Prize 2003-2005. Her studio teaching won a 2007 ACSA Creative Achievement Award. She is convenor of the 34th Annual International Merleau-Ponty Circle Meeting (September 2009, http://www.caad.msstate.edu/merleau-ponty. For more information, visit http://caad.msstate.edu/rmmccann/.

Karan August, Victoria University of Wellington

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Abstract

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Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect’s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist’s more critical approach. By these means phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between firsthand or subjective experience and generalized or abstracted accounts of experience.

Through this paper I examine the implications of Maurice Merleau Ponty’s description of embodied space. I extract an account of human spatial experience implicit in Merleau Ponty’s writings. My focus concerns the body’s manner of inhabiting space with intentionality and without reflection — a capacity I label the thinking body and conceptually divide into two aspects: form and function. I then analyze how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice.

I find that the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa’s description of the phenomenological experience  of space is incompatible with Merleau Ponty’s. By necessitating a faculty of reflective thought for the experiencing of space is non-reflective being-in-the-world. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa’s account points towards an architecture that prioritizes sensory experiences synthesized by the mind. The design focus of Merleau Ponty’s philosophy leads the architect to consider the continuous process of creating spatial situations through the interaction of the thinking body and that-what-is-independent-of-it. In other words, rather than fundamentally altering the conventional architectural understanding of human experience, Pallasmaa’s account merely shifts the design emphasis from catering to the eye to catering to the five senses, while maintaining the dominance of the mind over the body.

As I consider built architectural spaces in light of Merleau Ponty’s implicit structure of the human experience of space I signal a simple design premise for how architects can cater to the thinking body.

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[1] Merleau Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York, NY. (110,138)

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Author biography

Karan August is a Guest Lecturer and Tutor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Following a year interval in Florence, she moved to New Zealand to pursue the Epicurean ideal of happiness; i.e., good friends, good food and good wine, in a garden. After a gardening apprenticeship ran its course, Karan returned to academia and received her Masters in Architecture with distinction from Victoria University of Wellington in 2009. Her current research is at the intersection of Merleau Ponty’s metaphysical structure of human space and artistic ornamentation as a political act.

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Robert D. Hermanson, Professor Emeritus College of Architecture and Planning, University of Utah

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Abstract

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Beginning with the Enlightenment human endeavor has shifted from a philosophy based on what Mortimer Adler calls First Order questions to that of the empirical sciences emerging as the dominant mode of inquiry. While Positivism emphasizes the sciences as the only knowledge of reality, other movements have emerged that challenge this authority, among them the movement known as Phenomenology. In contrast to the Positivist emphasis on pure objectivity, Phenomenology strives to address events that appeal directly to our consciousness, our sensorial reading of the world. In doing so it strides multiple disciplines and worlds.

Architecture, a synchronic phenomenon, and film, a diachronic one, find mutual correspondences as a result of the experiential and the sensorial. Beginning as separate disciplines, and with specific notions of perception and space/ time based on their particular technologies, the two disciplines have grown increasingly together. As Juhani Pallasmaa observes:

” These two art forms create and mediate comprehensive images of life. In the same way that buildings and cities create and preserve images of culture and a particular way of life, cinema illuminates the cultural archaeology of both the time of its making and the era that it depicts.” 1

These two cultural expressions as mutually related attributes of spatialness and the experiential, form a part of the present cultural condition. Questions emerge, however. What is surface? Is it the surfaces we see on the film screen that evoke greater depth, literally, but also metaphorically, than even architecture itself? Likewise, what is depth? Is it the architectural expressions of volume ( and meaning ) now compressed onto glass screens and surfaces that seemingly deny its depth? Within this milieu I argue that there exist contradictary conditions redefining the meaning of phenomenology itself 2 as they pertain to the present zeitgeist. Such conditions and interpretations of their meaning form the basis for this paper.

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1 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001).

2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ( New York: HarperOne, 1962).

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Author biography

A graduate of the U. of Minnesota, B. Arch. and the U. of Pennsylvania, M. Arch, a registered architect in the State of Oregon and a recipient of several AIA design awards I have practiced for several years in Minnesota, Utah and Oregon. As a Professor of Architecture at the U. of Utah for 27 years and now Professor Emeritus, my areas of study have included design, theory, and interdisciplinary studies including dance, literature, music and film. I have presented papers at several international and national conferences focusing on interdisciplinary studies, theories of re-presentation, pedagogy, and media theory. An invited visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional del Literal in Santa Fe, Argentina I focused on a pedagogy related to film and architecture as examples of migratory phenomena. I am presently developing studies related to phenomenology and a re-examination of the role of the sublime in architecture.

These sources from which I call us a whole. From there, thinking how we are connected with the matter and all living beings. How do we feel the field, such as stone and wood. I like this practical example: the water. We know that water in the springs of the mountain comes from the stone, years of condensation and compression factors allow free water to form a spring, flowing later in the creation of a line of water (rivers or lakes). Looking to a stone in naked eye, will be difficult to perceive where is the water, but we can see microscopically observing the particles that make up the molecular structure of stone, a material aspect of this reasoning leads me to believe that in the man, we know that we are composed of 80 % water, but do not see it, because our molecular structure is different, our structure only contains water in a different way. Therefore we are not so far from the stone or water. Being this close so microscopic, far from the visible and perceptible by the human eye, but how is not so far from our senses react to what we make up with which surrounds us?

Recently I watched a study by a Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto on the effect of thoughts on water, the study was composed of the following, he took six samples of water from a spring, samples analyzed later the molecular structure under the microscope, after investigating, he asked a Zen monk to bless a water sample, then examined the sample again noticing that was taken aback by the change in the molecular structure of water, the crystals had won a new order and, all with a gesture of consciousness of a human.    Surprised at the findings, he suggested in handling each of the other samples with a thought on an emotion, love, pain, happiness, grumpy. He put a label on each sample and waited until the next day. After analyzing each of the samples all had changed its molecular structure, incredibly under the emotions of love and happiness created a new order nice and clear while pain and evil crystals had been deformed and gain a dirty color .

The question that arises in this experiment is that we are composed of about 80% water so, in which way the power of thought can have on our body and even more about the materials what surrounds us; because like the water is a living structure, stone and wood and many other materials are living elements in their own density. How can the subject of materials influence the mind and body both irrationally nad rationally. And how the architect as a craftsman in the field can create a space with such matter.

From this point of scientific departure, still rather vague, but promising, I attempt to jump deeper to the understanding of being, quite apart from our physical makeup, we have a conscience. By understanding the philosophy, psychology and sociology, we have tried to understand how we form the consciousness of our being, in which steps is emancipated the man on his thinking. The ontological issues we face … who we are, where we come from, …. Lately, what we are doing here! To try to answer in my case, my questions in the second row (first science) in seeking the answer to the philosophy that we are concerned, the matter or the object (material, built or not) of a particular experience. Apart from the knowledge Is put a meditation on the Cartesian doubt a point of departure, and the first data of absolute knowledge awareness -> acquired by experience / experiment <-> and a reflection on it.     Looking to suspend the trial of the matter, but describe the experience of the matter (since I leave the trial for the physical science). Thus the phenomenon of what is given will be aware, and we hold to feel or remember in the course of our existence. I remember the Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, to look for the relationship between man and space with those who best describes (not rationally but emotionally, the result of a past experience stored in consciousness), the poet.

The poet describes the space as it is not, but how we feel, the phenomenology of man in space as common as the house, the attic, the drawer and the handle of a door, images of everyday life that the particularity of being, consists in all the senses stored in our mind. This experience makes up the magic that has the influence of space on our being, notions of protection, comfort, room, the origin to the formation of our consciousness. We can not remember the first steps of our house, although it is curious that when I climbed the steps back as we always have while you lived there, we do not think, just react, or how we put out to open the handle, makes us remember how many times we went through that door, and incredibly in a deeper sense, as a smell, a keen sense back to the memory in a metaphysics as the first place we inhabit, a place that has made known to the protection of time and external phenomena.      Knowing the magic of the place, matter and man, how the architect has a phenomenal power to create spaces with an area for a matter of conscience. The order establishing the creation of a liaison between man and nature, the function that is attributed to an architectural object, easily seen, the threshold of what is not noticeable … the spatial dimension and material that affects the senses, the phenomenon we live without thinking that we live in a metaphysical level to which we are not aware on a daily basis for what unites us is more than we think.

Francisco c.p. Vasconcelos

This is our attempt to gather a conversation with architects and/or phenomenologists, which we have encountered in the A+P conference in Kyoto at 26-29 of July 2009. The objective with this ‘blog’ is to create a discution group, where we can exchange our views and opinions about all related to architecture, phenomenology and society.

We have attended to the A+P meeting with the schoolar point of view, and with the interest of our master researches. It was an excellent occasion for us both to be in touch with the so diverse views and themes on architecture and phenomenology; but we also felt that there was few time to engage a discussion, as well many things that somehow, we all had to say !

So we remembered to create this space in which we will express our points of view and the fields of research, hence we wanted to invite all of you to participate, not to reply, being just a reader. We want to support this website, so that, all of you can participate as authors as well.

We live in globalized world, and so distant ones of each others, so we intend to support this blog for a virtual space in where we can all write and read what everyone is thinking. The objective is to bring together a community that already exists, but with the A+P meetings being in every 2 years, it would be great that we could share and discuss Architecture and Phenomenology together, helping each other, what is our goal we think, is to be bether professionals in serving the society.

Anabela Martins and Francisco c.p. Vasconcelos

[08/10/2009]