Architecture Beyond Experience

ADVANCE PRAISE A Copernican Revolution in architecture is accomplished in this book, relocating the experiencing subject— today's assumed center of gravity—into a constellation of non-concentric orbits, connections, and alignments that are equally social, spatial, and environmental, which is to say architectural. As engaging as it is erudite, the text adduces evidence from domains we tend to keep apart—religion, perceptual psychology, and philosophy for example—in order to deepen our understanding of architectures we thought we knew, works by figures like Aldo van Eyck, Louis I. Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, and Le Corbusier, as well as some of our contemporaries, Frank Gehry especially. Humanist in its ethics, although post-human in its approach, this book is delightfully readable, unquestionably profound, and strikingly original.

– David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, author of Architecture Oriented Otherwise Michael Benedikt has travelled far to communicate the ancient, animistic dialogue of I -You as it occurs in the "person" of Architecture, in the secret life of buildings. Architecture Beyond Experience is a profoundly scholarly and ethically unselfish work. Architecture's epistemological foundations, Benedikt argues, are found neither in its technical facticity nor in its staging of experiences, but in its fictional salutations, whispered and overheard.

– Peter Waldman, University of Virginia, author of Lessons from the Lawn: The Word Made Flesh: Dialogs Between Citizens and Strangers On rare occasions a book comes along that moves our thinking about the built environment in a new direction, and Architecture Beyond Experience is such a book. In an era in which architecture has become a part of the “experience economy” (as well as the concentration-of-wealth economy), Michael Benedikt reminds us that the built environment is not just about private aesthetic experiences, but about social ethical relations—among things and rooms as well as people. What matters is not what a building says of or does for me, but what a building says of or does for all, including itself by way of example.

– Thomas Fisher, University of Minnesota, author of The Architecture of Ethics A compelling and beautiful book, full of insights. How is architecture humanistic and post-humanistic at once? What is the agency of objects, sentient creatures and buildings? Using Martin Buber’s notions of ‘I-It’ and ‘I-You’ and Michael Graziano’s theory of consciousness, Benedikt articulates a lucid attack on the solipsism behind architecture's participation in the Experience Economy. From isovists to the ‘fabric of glances’, ‘m-branes’ and ‘presence fields’, the inventor of ‘isovists’ and ‘isovist fields’ crafts intricate webs based on visual connections among rooms, objects and people. Architecture Beyond Experience presents a refreshing view of architecture as dialogical and relational, giving priority to the life of buildings as well as to the life of the people inside and around them.

– Sophia Psarra, University College London, author of The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination Michael Benedikt has long helped us understand how buildings frame co-visibility and, by implication, the ways in which we interact with others. Here he argues that if the spaces of a building have integrity of form and construction, if they communicate their relationship to each other as deliberately as they do their individual constitution, then they are more likely to support bonds between people that are more deeply felt and more formative of character than purely instrumental. This philosophically fundamental assertion becomes all the more compelling for being presented through new descriptive concepts, beautiful analytical diagrams, and carefully selected case studies. Architecture Beyond Experience is a courageous and sparklingly original book, one that affirms the power of architecture to go beyond the production of novel images and even memorable experiences to embody the moral and aesthetic underpinnings of our relationships to each other and the physical world.

– John Peponis, Georgia Institute of Technology, co-founder and leading scholar of 'space syntax'

This exhilarating journey through recent architectural theory shuns the self-indulgent solipsism to which phenomenological approaches often fall prey, as well as the wilder speculations of "object orientation."

In going "beyond experience," Benedikt paradoxically offers a new and deeper understanding of experience: rather than being the prime object and outcome of architectural design endeavours, experience is allowed to emerge as a property of the relations being acted out between works of architecture themselves, their components, and the bodies and behaviours they house.

– Jonathan Hale, University of Nottingham, author of Merleau-Ponty For Architects This momentous publication transcends the narrow framing of phenomenology in architecture as the domain of enriching spatio-sensory stimulation in the cause of augmenting personal experience, in order to reach for phenomenology's neglected communicative aspect: the realm of interpersonal relations. It does this marvelously with an enlarged, quasi-animistic definition of what a "person" is, a "thing" is, and a "room" is.

The book is highly enlightening in its treatment of philosophers of the interpersonal, such as Martin Buber, as well as in its treatment of certain art movements, such as performance art and Mono Ha. It presents novel objects of study for designers, such as "isovists," “the fabric of glances,” "m-branes," and “the order of shoulders,” and it ends by providing new understandings of certain canonical modern buildings—buildings the simple experience of which was always only a beginning.

– Jin Baek, Seoul National University, author of Architecture as the Ethics of Climate Benedikt’s provocatively-titled book is an important and timely argument against “experiential” architecture, which is designed to stimulate unique and personal experiences, and for “relational” architecture, which is designed to foster relations among the people who inhabit it. Benedikt focuses on what buildings do to affect and engender relationships, and on how rooms are first and foremost the settings for encounters with others. By calling our attention to the "fabric of glances” that occurs in any room with more than one occupant, Benedikt artfully reminds us that the relationships and interactions that take place within architecture are its principle reason-for-being.

– Robert McCarter, Washington University in St Louis, author of The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture Michael Benedikt has earned a reputation as one of architecture´s most profoundly original thinkers and with Architecture Beyond Experience he has created a foundational, boldly ambitious, and deeply lyrical work.

Richly textured, light-handedly erudite and a joy to read, this book weaves metaphysics and everyday life, broad theory and its practical applications, old wisdom and current empirical science to pursue the question of what a humanist, yet post-anthropocentric architecture might look like in the twenty-first century. It is a book to be enjoyed, pondered and – with its deep insights and rich set of references—returned to repeatedly. As case studies of his relational theory, Benedikt´s close readings of buildings by Louis Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, Aldo van Eyck and Frank Gehry will almost surely change the way you see those works. They might even change the way you see architecture itself.

– Michael Merrill, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, author of Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out Wow—what a book! Benedikt builds on his impressive work on architectural realism, deconstruction, cyberspace, value, creativity and ethics with a timely, “post-phenomenological” treatise on the magic of design. In Architecture Beyond Experience, he casts buildings as sentient beings and rooms as relational subjects that crackle with social electricity. Rejecting the enticements of the neoliberal experience economy, Benedikt instead poses ontological empathy as the most effective (and affective) way for architects to operate humanely in a burgeoning posthuman world.

– Jon Yoder, Kent State University, author of Widescreen Architecture: Immersive Media and John Lautner

CONTENTS Introduction

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PART ONE Locating the Sacred

1 Tetsugen

1

2 Sacred Space

2

3 From Spirituality to Solipsism

4

4 Solipsism Succeeds

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5 Solipsism’s Expression in Architecture: Experientialism

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6 The Buddhist Solution?

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7 Martin Buber and I-You

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8 Michael Graziano: Consciousness is Social

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PART TWO The Fabric of Glances

9 The Story of Architecture

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10 A Critique of Environment & Behavior Studies

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11 Two Ways of Thinking About Architecture Relationally

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12 The Social Logic of Space

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13 From Optic Arrays to Isovists

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14 From Isovist Fields to the Fabric of Glances

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15 Presence Fields and the Order of Shoulders

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16 Formations

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17 M-branes and the Phenomenon of Theater

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PART THREE Architecture Beyond E xperience

18 Buildings as Being(s)

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19 Rooms in Relation

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20 Rooms in Motion

134

21 Aldo van Eyck: Photography, Relation, and “The Between” 146

22 Carlo Scarpa and the Power of Two

177

23 Learning from Lou

195

24 Toward Architecture in the Second Person

222

25 Coda: Three Short Takes

248

Footnotes

261

Glossary

302

Acknowledgments

308

310

Image Credits

INTRODUCTION

I

INTRODUCTION

F YOU ARE AN ARCHITECTURE STUDENT a few years into your study and especially interested in design, then you are the primary audience for this book.

If you are an architect or teacher of architecture interested in theory, or more broadly, contemporary design philosophy, then you too are the primary audience for this book.

If you are reader of art and cultural criticism, ethical theory, esthetics, psychology, or religious philosophy, you are very much invited to these pages, as is anyone interested in fostering better relationships between people, and between people and their physical surroundings.

Architecture Beyond Experience is an interdisciplinary work in the service of one goal: the bringing about of a more relational, “posthuman” and yet humanist strain in architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much architectural production (and the larger economy’s too), which is the making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences.

The result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around.

I argue that it’s time to find a deeper basis for making and judging architecture, a basis which is not personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational from the start.

I use the word relational to describe an architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are beings. When they are architecture, they teach as well as protect; they exemplify; they tell us who we were and who we want to be; they deserve respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are social-relational values, values that go beyond self-centered, experiential (sometimes called “phenomenological”) ones. Such relational values have been suppressed in part because architects have joined the Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-center the profession.

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STRUCTURALLY, THE BOOK is divided into three parts.

Part One, Chapters 1 through 8, lays out the philosophical and cultural case of architectural “relationism,” which I also call “architecture in the second person.”

Part Two, Chapters 9 through 17, presents concepts and design tools for architects who wish to refine their understanding of the visual structure of the world, how people and things and rooms communicate, how they relate in space, and what “relate” means.

Part Three, Chapters 18 through 25, applies the findings of Parts One and Two to works by modern masters like Le Corbusier, van Eyck, Kahn, Scarpa, and Gehry. It looks at photography and at two contemporary art movements. It concludes with a discussion of the relational, humanistic architecture being developed in the work of certain younger firms.

As a literary creation, Architecture Beyond Experience strives to have a cumulative narrative and discursive flow to it, one that might be thought of as a river that can be entered and exited at many places. The beginning of each Part marks the beginning of a tributary. The beginning of each Chapter marks a good putting-in point, a quay, while section breaks are places to stop for a while. At the risk of taking the metaphor too far: the river deepens and widens as it goes, carrying ever more traffic from upstream; and it ends in an estuary of sorts, with islands and wheeling birds. The Notes, which are expanded online, offer scholarly support and glimpses of other river systems.

Here, then, is a field guide, chapter by chapter: PART ONE: LOCATING THE SACRED Chapter 1. Tetsugen. This one-page story of a Zen master teaches the superiority of action over doctrine and of compassionate relation over private experience.

Chapter 2. Sacred Space. I argue that the desire to make buildings that could engender a near-religious experience in some part of them has long been central to architecture. Any insight into sacred space, or into how divinity is understood today, will apply more broadly than to the design of religious sanctuaries. It could help us understand why many high-design buildings look the way they do. It could help us see where the proclaimed-great architect’s claim to extra-personal, extra-political authority comes from. More importantly, it could identify which conventions we might want to re-examine or challenge.

Chapter 3. From Spirituality to Solipsism. The belief that experiences of the divine, or of enlightenment, are private is the result of living in age that believes that all experiences are private. Living in worlds literally and neurologically centered on ourselves, subjectivity reigns by necessity. Our own experiences are all that we can know about with certainty. The philosophical name of this doctrine is solipsism. Descended from Descartes, solipsism has echoes in modern, westernized Buddhism along with Protestant doctrines of self-improvement and Romanticdemocratic ideals of individualism. A troubling consequence of the mixture is the belief that an enlightened life means a life of maximum self-realization and self-actualization through gratifying, even “educational,” private experiences.

Chapter 4. Solipsism Succeeds. Solipsism did not become a viable option in philosophy. But it took root in the new science of psychology. Psychology would stand at the gates of experience. It would observe observation itself: how we sense, choose, think, feel, and tell stories. It would offer an objective account of subjectivity. It became science of mind and brain focused on individual perception, performance, and happiness, based on the empiricist premise that experience, to all human intents and purposes, is reality. Chapter 4 also explores the impact this worldview has had on contemporary life, chiefly through what Pines and Gilmore call The Experience Economy.

Chapter 5. Solipsism’s Expression in Architecture: Experientialism. The centrality of human experience entered the field of architecture through several doors, one being phenomenology, as propounded by Rasmussen, Labatut, Arnheim, Giedion, Norberg-Schulz, Lynch, Pallasmaa, Holl, Harries, Perez-Gomez, Leatherbarrow, Mallgrave, and my earlier self. On the “phenomenological” view, architecture’s superiority over mere building lies in how richly it appeals to

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PART TWO The Fabric of Glances

9. THE STORY OF ARCHITECTURE, IN INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

T

he Story of Architecture is a triumphant one: from mud huts to skyscrapers.

Technology has been key. And yet historians looking at centuries during which technological innovation was slow can discern early from late buildings in a given period, as well as early from late buildings in the life of a given master-builder-architect, this by the relative sophistication of the later work: the complexity, the ambition, the refinement, the solution to problems of size, geometry, structure, and finish, all driven by the urge to explore the potential of their art.

And occasionally whole new building types have emerged. Canonical examples are the railway station in the nineteenth century and the airport in the twentieth.

In wealthy countries one sees progress at a finer scale: higher standards of building safety, hygiene, and privacy; more efficient lighting, heating, cooling, and people-moving systems; stronger and longer-lasting materials; higher-precision componentry, taller structures, longer spans, faster construction, cleverer engineering.1 Computers in the hands of visionary architects have enabled unprecedented geometrical freedom, while in the hands of commercial architects they have offered significant advances in productivity: the ability to “turn out” larger buildings at higher speed with greater accuracy and/or fewer staff.2 Many feel that something important has been left out or behind by architecture’s progress.

Human scale? Solidity? Public function? Livability? Legibility? Ties to the past? Ordinary people’s affection? Propose these and you might be accused of elitism, i.e., wanting to maintain the kind of architecture that has long been the province of old money—pleasant, private, spacious, composed, tall, clean, gardened, not-new, and far from commerce—even though you might want this for everybody. You might also be accused of nostalgia for postmodernism, that culture-wide movement which, in architecture, spanned the years roughly between 1965 and 1990. Postmodern architects took a kinder view of classical architecture and its literary themes

37

Figure 11.3 Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp, Le Corbusier, 1954; (a) west side, (b) main entrance, (c) interior, showing pews and windows.

PART TWO THE FABRIC OF GLANCES

and non-hierarchical, and where the entire plan (except for work areas and administration) is intended to be visitable without doubling back. They are also found in European villas before and around the 18th century, and are typical of classical architecture and city plans world-wide.

Whether tree-like or ringy, moving a single door from one location to another can effect profound change in the social order. For example, one could move the door-to-outside from J to M in Figure 12.2(b). Were that move done quietly at night, confusion would reign in the morning; and revolution would soon follow.

In Room-to-Room relations, one can also meld tree and ring plans and use socially-enforced rules to assign some people to the tree-like part and some people to the ringy part. For example, in the design stage, the black and red links of Figure 12.3 can be assigned to use by staff/servant people, or use by professional/served people, or the other way around, and the choice yields radically different architectures in result, not to mention different social orders. Why? For one, because “professionals” get bigger and better-lit rooms than “staff” do, regardless. For another, the pattern of communication is different in each case.

Figure 12.4 shows a “squirrel path” (my term) across two tree-like networks. Squirrel paths can be followed by people of the lowest status (like janitors) and the highest status (like CEOs or emergency personnel), all of whom can move about a building as they please. Squirrel paths can also be formalized by providing secondary doors between adjoining rooms at the same level of the hierarchy.84 With considerations like this in mind, and not much more, Kahn’s simple dictum that “a plan is a society of rooms” takes on surprisingly complex significance.

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WITH THE ADVENT of universal mail service, telephones, radio, TV, the Internet, and smartphones, a much denser and freer social network exists today than once did. There are still rules, however. There are asymmetries and there are gatekeepers; there are trees and rings; and there is selectivity: not everyone has everyone else’s phone number or hashtag or email address. As a result, some people are better connected than others, and variably so at one, two, or three removes, for example on Facebook with “friends” and “friends of friends” and on Twitter, with “followers” and followers of followers.85 Despite this, life lived within the slow-to-change constraints of physical, architectural space retains much of its power to affect behavior, maintain relationships, and govern feelings. Why? Because physical, architectural space—the inanimate world of Rooms and doors and Things—is where we gather, eat, drink, touch, taste, breathe, sleep, smell, bleed, and heal. It’s where we make eye contact and body contact. It’s where we see and hear each other with almost perfect visual and acoustic fidelity and so can avail ourselves of nuanced information, unconsciously produced and interpreted. Physical, architectural space is where we travel and where we wait.86 It’s also where the social order can put its all-too-real hand on our shoulder.

Now, the freedom to link rooms is greatly increased by permitting a certain kind of “room” into the vocabulary of buildings, namely, the enclosed passageway or corridor, especially when combined with the tunnel, staircase, and elevator. These permit the connection of non-adjacent rooms without, themselves, needing to be rooms or outdoors. They are rather like the wires on circuit boards that join processors, or the pipes in factories that carry fluids to machines.

Corridors allow a certain, quasi-biological kind of order to enter the architectural realm, namely, “circulation systems” that serve rooms the way arteries and veins carry oxygen and other supplies to, and waste away from, muscles, nerves, organs, and other complex tissue.

Figure 12.3 Servant or Served?

Figure 12.4 Squirrel Paths.

Figure 17.1 Peter Eisenman, House VI, plan (1972–5).

Figure 17.2 Eileen Gray, E. 1027, plan (1926–9).

Figure 17.3 Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersection (1975).

Figure 18.1 (a) Statues on Easter Island; (b) Salk Institute, La Jolla, California; Louis Kahn, 1965.

Figure 18.3 (a) Arnold Schwarzenegger circa 1975; publicity photo; (b) Leicester Engineering Building, Leicester; Stirling and Gowan, 1959.

Figure 18.2 (a) Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee; publicity poster; (b) “Fred & Ginger Building,” Prague; Frank Gehry, 1996.

Figure 18.4 (a) Twyla Tharp, scene from Dance is a Men’s Sport Too, 1980; (b) original poster for West Side Story; (c) Columbia Medical School Vela Education Bldg., NYC, Diller, Scofidio & Renfro w/ Gensler, 2016.

23. LEARNING FROM LOU

S

CULPTURE AS AN ART TRANSFORMED significantly over the course of the twentieth century. It went from making mostly human- and animal-like figures in the first part of the century, to making objects that varied so widely in size, substance, and degree of abstraction that many of them seemed locked in a struggle to break out of thingness itself, and out of whatever “Art” is.

On this spectrum, the sculptures selected for Sonsbeek Pavilion as well as for Museo di Castelvecchio were more traditional. Both structures presented artworks that were conventional in material and roughly human in scale, even at Sonsbeek, where the art was avowedly Modern.

And this made it easy for us to treat them—the sculptures, that is—as Things with a concentrated and creaturely presence. Architecture played a supporting role. Buildings provided the shelter, the light, and the field of play as beautifully as they could, but the sculptures and the museumgoers were the main protagonists in the play of relationships.184 But we also began to question that assignment of roles. In appreciation of Scarpa, for example, we noted that many of his architectural components have a concentrated presence of their own, such as the stair treads at the Olivetti showroom, and the sarcophagi, aquasanteria, and lectern at the Brion tomb. We noted how, at Castelvecchio, the statue of Cangrande was held up on an abstract arm and hand with a tray, itself as much sculpture as architecture. And we recognized that the raw concrete-block walls at Sonsbeek had a presence of their own. A purely isovistic, sight-and-circulation analysis would have read those walls simply as vision-stoppers, as view-controllers, and motion-regulators, even “space makers.” We had to see them also as agents, as bodies between which we felt ourselves pressed, or bowed to, or waved past.185 I also remarked on the Pavilion’s human attribute of modesty.

To fill out a relational theory of architecture, however—a theory which would necessarily also be an object-and-relation, or onto-relational, theory of architecture—we must offer case studies of buildings that are not only places to display Things or to stage human activities.186 Buildings are unique kinds of Things themselves: large, immobile, rigid, heavy, material, mostly hollow, rule-bound, long-lived, owned, navigable, storied, made and evolved, and inhabitable. Buildings have looks. They are usually found in group formations. And when they are architecture, they are marked by a generosity of being we find admirable and relatable.

This is why the words and works of Louis Kahn appear in almost every chapter of this book. For in Kahn we recognize an architect who tried to “put it all together,” an architect who more-or-less told us that what he was after was sublime onto-relationality (if I might put such a word in Kahn’s mouth) and not simply the solving of problems, or the making of spaces and experiences. Having experiences, for Kahn, is a by-product of, not the point of architecture. For Kahn, People, Rooms, and Things desired “to be (in order) to express.” To express what? The fullness of their Being, not ours. This is the “ontological” aspect of onto-relationality. They also had a desire to relate to each other beyond the I-It relation of mutual usefulness, to the I-You relation of acting on the recognition of the fullness/complexity/evolvedness of the other.

Kahn was not shy about discussing his ethico-religious motivation. First, he was a panpsychist and a Romantic. “I would say that the desire to be to express,” he wrote, exists in the flowers, in the tree, in the microbe, in the crocodile, in man. …

Only we don’t know how to fathom the consciousness of a rose. Maybe the

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consciousness of a tree is its feeling of its bending before the wind. I don’t know.

But I have a definite trust that everything that’s living has a consciousness of some kind, (no matter how) primitive.187 Second, Kahn was an animist: I t’s natural to me to give consciousness to a room, as though the dimensions of a room, and you in it, have a rapport. No speaking is involved, just a rapport…

I like to think that the room is a living thing. The work of art is the making of a life.

I want to give to the wall a consciousness… All living things have consciousness.

A leaf wants to be a leaf. I do not say a wall wants to be a wall in the same sense that a leaf wants to be a leaf. You must install this prerogative into the wall, because the wall is not a living thing…(but doing so is) a way of revering that which comes out of Man…That which is made, in my mind, is given a consciousness. It not only is a wall. It wants to be wall. It is proud to be a wall.188 These beliefs inspired Kahn to offer Kiplingesque fables whenever he could, accounts of architectural origins redolent with personification and relationality:

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

T he wall…enclosed us for a long time, until the man behind it, feeling a new freedom, wanted to look out. He hammered away to make an opening. The wall cried “I have protected you.” And the man said “I appreciate your faithfulness, but I feel time has brought change.” The wall was sad, (but) the man realized something good. He visualized the opening as gracefully arched, (as) glorifying the wall. The wall was terribly pleased with its arch and carefully made jamb.

And the opening became part of the Order of the Wall.189

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Kahn made up many such ‘second way’ relational stories, as well as narratives of buildings helping People relate to each other (i.e., promoting ‘first way’ relations). Staircases, he explained, should have landings halfway up them with window seats and reading matter so that older people, when accompanied by younger ones, could take a needed rest “for a reason.”

Kahn followed the science of his day. He loved science. But he loved fairy tales too, myths and allegories that transmit the kind of wisdom that thoughtful scientists recognize just as poets do. One such wisdom is that not everything true is quantifiably true; that what is unquantifiably, “immeasurably” true is what creative people are called to express in concrete works like poems, equations, books, and buildings. These are “quantifiable” up to a point, and must be in order to happen, but their purpose is to put us in mind of the remaining Immeasurability of the world, not to try to eclipse or supplant it.

Some might call Kahn’s “Immeasurable” the Transcendent, the Beginning, or Beyond; or God, or Brahman, or Tao. Kahn also spoke of “Order,” “Silence,” and the “Treasury of Shadows” depending on how he was thinking through (or lecturing about) a particular project at the time. And in agreement with van Eyck, Kahn honored the Realm of the Between.190 Did all these capitalized words refer to the same thing in Kahn’s mind? We don’t know. Kahn was not a systematic philosopher.191 He was a keen listener, musician, and poet however, prone to making oracular statements that made him sound sometimes like a Neoplatonist (eternal Form

Figure 22.3 Brion sarcophagi from meditation pavilion.

Figure 22.4 Brion sarcophagi.