Architecture plays an important role in calibrating our relationships with each other and with the variously scaled networks in which we are enmeshed.
But we shouldn’t think of architecture as just a system of impersonal boundaries. They are actually very personal; these boundaries are very close to our being. As Juhani Pallasmaa has put it, “architecture is the art of reconciliation between ourselves and the world, and this mediation takes place through the senses.”[1] Architecture is at the forefront of our confrontation with the cosmos and should be treated with care.
Architecture has always been close, but as technology increasingly bridges the gaps between the individual and the environment, the design of architecture becomes almost an act of surgery. At the end of the 19th century, Le Corbusier imagined the house as a machine to assist our living. This was a metaphor that represented the machine as separate – a sort of servant to our autonomous humanity. As Anthony Vidler pointed out, the metaphor is changing. Architecture now should be thought of as being much closer to our being than that – as a sort of prosthetic.[2] And indeed, as such visions as the mental control of household appliances via EEG sensors come to materialization, this is no light metaphor – architecture is prosthetic. We are architectural cyborgs.
Now here’s an interesting exercise: If we for ourselves an image of a student in their room at their computer . . . what do we imagine the rest of their room to be like? The room is dark, lit only by the light emanating from the monitor. The student has lost track of time, as David Greenfield, theorizer of the Internet as narcotic, has suggested that he might.[3]
I imagine that the room is largely empty and I imagine that it is a mess. With the amount of attention paid to the world accessed through the windows on their computer, the student has less attention to focus on the environment in immediate spatial proximity to them. As the phenomenon of continuous partial attention causes us to pay less attention to the world about us, it matters a lot less what it looks like. As William James apparently said, our “experience is a narrow thing, bracketed by our own editorial decisions. And it is likewise important to keep in mind the trace that our experience leaves on what we attend to. By observing the space of our hypothetical student, dazed and lost in (or is it on?) the Internet, it is evident that it is not the room that has been experienced; it lacks the trace of dwelling. But, and here is the hope for architects, maybe, the more attention we pay to crafting this immediate level of experience, the room, the more it will have the capacity to bring us back into the present place and moment.
Certain aspects of new technology – the possibilities of haptic interfaces, of a new orality, of mixed-reality, and of the mobility that arises from miniaturization – offer hope of counteracting the alienation from our environment encouraged by so much of our technology. Architects can help wage this battle both by engaging the mind and the body simultaneously and particularly by engaging the body. We need to break through what Mark Kingwell has called the “legacies of abstraction”[4] of the Enlightenment and the ensuing Modern period and ground our expanding phenomenological ecologies in the here and now. Although hearthless, we need to put the rest of architecture to use as we embody ourselves in place.
Perhaps this is why there has been such a resurgence in recent years in interest in the phenomenological understanding of the world amongst architects. As ocular-centric technology has tended to increase our alienation from the ecologies immediately about us, architects such as Juhani Pallasmaa have yearned to reconnect us with them. Perhaps ‘slow architecture’ like that recommended by Peter Zumthor, with its careful attention to dimension and material could be a means of doing this.
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