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The haptic fusion with space and place surpasses the need for
physical comfort and the mere desire to touch. Bachelard recognizes
the desire for a total merging of the self and the house through a
bodily intertwining as he writes: Indeed, in our houses we have
nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up
belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those
who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. 13 The pleasure
of curling up also suggests an unconscious association between the
images of room and the womb; a protective and pleasurable room is
a constructed womb, in which we can re-experience the
undifferentiated world of the child, the forgotten infant concealed in
our adult bodies. Todays architecture, however, tends to offer mere
wombs of glass for us to inhabit.
We see the depth, speed, softness and hardness of objects
Czanne says that we see even their odour. If a painter wishes to
express the world, his system of colour must generate this indivisible
complex of impressions, otherwise his painting only hints at
possibilities without producing the unity, presence and unsurpassable
diversity that governs the experience and which is the definition of
reality for us14, Merleau-Ponty writes emphatically. In developing
further Goethes notion of life-enhancing art in the 1890s, Bernard
Berenson suggested that when experiencing an artistic work we
actually imagine a genuine physical encounter through ideated
sensations. The most important of these ideated sensations
Berenson called tactile values.15 In his view, the work of authentic
art stimulates our ideated sensations of touch, and this stimulation is
life-enhancing.
In my view, also a profound architectural work generates similarly an
indivisible complex of impressions, or ideated sensations, such as
experiences of movement, weight, tension, texture, light, colour,
formal counterpoint and rhythm, and they become the measure of the
real for us. Even more importantly, they become unconscious
extensions of our body and consciousness. When entering the
courtyard of the Salk Institute in LaJolla, California, couple of
decades ago, I felt compelled to walk directly to the nearest concrete
surface and sense its temperature; the enticement of a silken skin
suggested by this concrete material was overpowering. Louis Kahn,
the architect of this masterpiece, actually sought the gray softness of
the wings of a moth16 and added volcanic ash to the concrete mix in
order to achieve this extraordinary mat softness.
True architectural quality is manifested in the fullness, freshness and
unquestioned prestige of the experience. A complete resonance and
interaction takes place between the space and the experiencing
person. This is the aura of a work of art observed by Walter
Benjamin.17
SPACE AND THE SELF
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NOTES
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Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 46.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: An Outline of a Theory. New York: Carol
Publishing Co., 1993, 9.
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems1923-1967. London: Penguin Books,
1985. As quoted in Sren Thurell, The Shadow of A Thought The Janus
Concept in Architecture. Stockholm: School of Architecture, The Royal
Institute of Technology, 1989, 2.
As quoted in Eric Shanes, Constantin Brancusi. New York: Abbeville Press,
1989, 67.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. New York: Vintage
Books, 1988, 57.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New Psychology, in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston: Northwestern University,
1964, 48.
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976, 51.
Relph defines the notion as follows: Existential outsideness involves a
self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement, an alienation from people and
places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world, and of not
belonging.
Joseph Brodsky, Less than One. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986,
124.
As quoted in David Michael Levin, editor, Modernity and the Hegemony of
Vision. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1993, 14.
Ashley Montague, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New
York: Harper & Row, 1968 (1971), 3.
Kent C Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture. New
Haven and London: The Yale University Press, 1977, 44.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swanns Way, translated
by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin. London: Vintage, 1996, 4-5.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969,
XXXIV.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cezanness Doubt, in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and
Non-Sense. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1991, 15.
Bernard Berenson, as quoted in Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human
Significance of the Skin, Harper & Row, New York, 1986, 308-309.
Somewhat surprisingly, in my view, Merleau-Ponty objects strongly
Berensons view: Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he
could hardly have been more mistaken: painting evokes nothing, least of
all the tactile. What it does is much different, almost the inverse; thanks to
it we do not need a muscular sense in order to possess the voluminosity
of the world []. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, The Primacy of Perception,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1964, 166.
I cannot, however, support this argument of the philosopher. Experiencing
the temperature and moisture of air and hearing the noises of carefree
daily life in the erotically sensuous paintings of Matisse or Bonnard one is
confirmed of the reality of ideated sensations.
As quoted in Scott Poole, Pumping Up: Digital steroids and the Design
Studio, unpublished manuscript, 2005.
See, Walter Benjamins Philosphy: Destruction and Experience, edited by
Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. London and New York: Routledge,
1994.
Hall Mildred Reed, Hall Edward T., The Fourth Dimension in Architecture:
The Impact of Building Behaviour. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1995.
Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking. In David Farrell Krell,
Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco,
London: Harper & row, Publishers, 1997, 334.
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