Archive for February, 2010

Mortality and Immortality:

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Weather Phenomena and the Well-Adjusted Construction in Ancient Greek Poetics

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).

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Japanese Architecture:

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Place as Transition

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.

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‘Down into the Cellar’:

Friday, February 12th, 2010

The Architectural Setting as an Embodied Topography of the Imagination in Two Films of Jan Svankmajer.

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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Expressing Embodiment

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Rachel McCann, Mississippi State University, School of Architecture

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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/.

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The Thinking Body

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

A study of the architectural ramifications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of the human body’s capacities.

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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