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/.