Architecture Beyond Experience by ORO Editions

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

Also by Michael Benedikt For an Architecture of Reality Deconstructing the Kimbell Shelter: the 2000 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture God Is the Good We Do God, Creativity, and Evolution: The Argument from Design(ers) Edited, with contribution(s): Cyberspace: First Steps CENTER 4: Buildings and Reality CENTER 9: Regarding the Proper CENTER 10: Value CENTER 11: Value 2 CENTER 12/13: The Good Building/Pressing Style CENTER 14: Landscape Urbanism CENTER 15: Divinity, Creativity, Complexity CENTER 16: Latitudes CENTER 17: Space & Psyche CENTER 18: Music in Architecture / Architecture in Music CENTER 19: Curtains CENTER 20: Latitudes Vol. 2 CENTER 21: The Secret Life of Buildings CENTER 22: A I R

CONTENTS Introduction

VIII

PART ONE Locating the Sacred 1

Tetsugen

2 Sacred Space

3 From Spirituality to Solipsism

4 Solipsism Succeeds

5 Solipsism’s Expression in Architecture: Experientialism

6 The Buddhist Solution?

7 Martin Buber and I-You

8 Michael Graziano: Consciousness is Social

PART TWO The Fabric of Glances 9 The Story of Architecture

10 A Critique of Environment & Behavior Studies

11 Two Ways of Thinking About Architecture Relationally

12 The Social Logic of Space

13 From Optic Arrays to Isovists

14 From Isovist Fields to the Fabric of Glances

15 Presence Fields and the Order of Shoulders

16 Formations

17 M-branes and the Phenomenon of Theater

109

PART THREE Architecture Beyond E xperience 18 Buildings as Being(s)

119

19 Rooms in Relation

125

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

Image Credits

310

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.

VIII

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

INTRODUCTION

our senses and to our bodies. This doctrine, which I call experientialism, has shaped modern architectural training, discourse, and practice. Whether in pursuit of multisensory spectacles, or of places of simplicity and poise, architects have joined the Experience Economy. Chapter 6. The Buddhist Solution? Resistance to architecture’s complicity in the commercialization of experience has led many thoughtful designers to look to monastic Buddhism as a model for how to achieve personal equanimity for their clients if not also themselves by strategies of exclusion, simplification, and purification. I argue that there are ways of dealing with the hurly-burly of life other than “rising above” it on the one hand, or embracing it mockingly on the other. The idea is to locate divinity (to put it most boldly) in the esthetics of genuine and ethical engagement—of people with each other, of people with buildings, and of buildings, rooms, and things with each other. The vocabulary to describe such relations is sorely lacking. I turn to the philosopher Martin Buber to help provide one. Chapter 7. Martin Buber and I-You. Chapter 7 introduces the philosophy of Martin Buber. Until now, Buber has not been as significant an influence on architecture as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. For Buber, the attitude of a human being toward another being can be I-It or I-You in nature. I-It attitudes, and the relationships that follow from them, are instrumental and practical. I-You attitudes and relationships, by contrast, open us to the fullness of the other’s being, although the whole is never disclosed. According to Buber, “using” and “experiencing” are always I-It in attitude. “Meeting” and “encountering” are I-You in attitude. I-You-ness is the source of genuine ethicality and of “the life of the spirit,” which life surpasses in value a life dedicated to the having of spiritual experiences. The chapter begins to suggest how architecture—conceived of as an assembly of people, things, and rooms—can successfully mingle I-It and I-You relationality. Chapter 8. Michael Graziano: Consciousness is Social. Graziano, a neuroscientist, has demonstrated how the possession of conscious self-awareness depends logically, neurologically, and socially on entering into relationships with other, animate and inanimate beings. It is by turning the ability to interpret and predict others’ behaviors back upon our own behaviors that people develop self-awareness. Cognitive scientists like Alva Noë are correct: the mind is extended into the physical world; we think with the animate and inanimate world before we think about it. The implications of this for architecture are as subtle as they are considerable. If “awareness is a construct of the social machinery of the brain,” as Graziano writes, then moving from experience to relationship as the basis for design represents a deepening of the entire project of architecture.

PART TWO: THE FABRIC OF GLANCES Chapter 9. The Story of Architecture. Opening Part Two, this chapter introduces some historical context. Where has architecture been? Where is it going? The largest question is normative: how should architecture respond to what is likely to be a more technologically-mediated, wealth-unequal, and politically divided future? The answer suggested by Part One is that architecture should promote ethical and esthetic relationality, among objects as among people, in the cause of life-giving life. A commitment to doing so would free architects to draw on architectural history without discomfort or irony. It would add relational intelligence to what architects already know about space, light, nature, technology, efficiency, and money. It would encourage us to pay attention to the middle ground between The Individual and Society. And it would help us find nobility-ofpurpose in all building types: domestic and civic, cultural and commercial, modest and grand.

Chapter 10. A Critique of Environment & Behavior Studies (EBS). EBS is a research discipline combining psychology, social science, and architecture. Despite fifty years of conferences, journals, books, and classes, EBS has had little effect on architectural education and practice. Why? This chapter explores four explanations: 1. There’s something wrong with architects, 2. EBS tells architects only what common sense already recommends, 3. The connection between the finer points of architecture and ordinary people’s happiness is loose, and 4. The I-It mindset of EBS researchers is alien to that of designers. All four explanations are reasonable and result from a single cause: the absence of a theory that links architecture to the social-psychological realm at the right levels or with the right tools or language. This is what we are attempting. Chapter 11. Two Ways of Thinking About Architecture Relationally. This chapter starts from Explanation 3 above. People watch people far more closely than they do buildings. Knowing how person-to-person social relations are supported or thwarted by the physical environment is what I call the ‘first way’ of thinking about architecture relationally. The ‘second way’ of thinking about architecture relationally starts with examining the nonliteral meanings of the phrase “people in buildings.” After a brief discussion of craftsmanship, I develop a conception of social relations as existing between inanimate objects. In a novel take on animism, I propose that I-It and I-You relations are possible for all parties: People, Things, and Rooms (note: now capitalized). I cite Gibson, Varela, Noë, and Manzotti’s extended mind theories; also, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory. I give special attention to the Object-Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman because of the influence it has had on artists and architects in recent years, and because OOO is helpful to the relational project being pursued here. Chapter 12. The Social Logic of Space. The move from philosophy to design requires specialized vocabularies and mapping tools. The next six chapters seek to provide them. Chapter 12 introduces the pioneering configurational research of Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson. “The ordering of space in buildings is really about the ordering of relations between people,” they wrote, and applied network theory to Rooms. We see how Louis Kahn’s gnomic dictum that “a plan is a society of rooms” becomes operational: how the organization of rooms—and therefore also of buildings, streets, etc.—maps onto a city’s social structures by actively encouraging and constraining if not completely controlling ‘first way’ relations along the spectra of privacy and exposure, power and service, visitation and inhabitation, solidarity and estrangement. Where Hillier and Hanson’s work led to the development of “space syntax” and a focus on the layout of whole towns, research with “isovists” (see Chapter 13 below) led to closer study of squares, buildings, and rooms. Chapter 13. From Optic Arrays to Isovists. Building on perception psychologist J. J. Gibson’s concept of the “optic array,” isovists isolate information in the optic array pertaining to the set of distances from any given point to the nearest opaque surfaces in every direction. Four decades of research have shown isovist theory to be useful in predicting human spatial behaviors and preferences. This chapter introduces readers to the isovist measures like area, occlusivity, and drift, and to isovist measure fields, both of which are used later in the book to illustrate ‘first way’ and ‘second way’ relationality. Because isovist vision is more like sonar, radar, or touch than pictorial vision, seeing the world “isovistically” introduces us to another, in many ways more ancient, way of being. Chapter 14. From Isovists to the Fabric of Glances. Among the innumerable rays of light that fill the space of a Room there are “lines of regard” skittering between the people, animals, and things that look at each other. If these lines of regard left a visible trace, then over time they

INTRODUCTION

would fill the room with web-like fabric, which I call “the fabric of glances.” The fabric of glances is a new object, a subset of isovists, and can be studied. It can help explain the sense in which artifacts and inanimate objects “regard” us and each other, both filling out and shaping the fabric of glances. I offer several illustrations representing the fabric of glances. Chapter 15. From the Fabric of Glances to Presence Fields and the Order of Shoulders. Chapter 15 offers two more constructs derived from isovists and the fabric of glances. Presence fields are maps of the probability density distribution of glances passing through a given space at a given time, given its features and inhabitants. Presence fields demonstrate how relationships make the space they need. I offer illustrations of how small, archetypal conversation circles increase in size, and an analysis of an actual cocktail party of fifty people. The design of an ideal seminar or conference room is then presented based on the laws discovered. Human anatomy is such that the shape and brightness of human presence fields is determined largely by the orientation of people’s shoulders. Hence “the order of shoulders.” Exceptions to the order of shoulders occur only in cases of emergency, deception, or artistic expression. Chapter 16. Formations. This chapter focuses on the configurations of human bodies that we call formations. Calling on the ‘first way’ and the ‘second way’ relations introduced in Chapter 11, I note that there are three occasions on which ‘second way’ formations in particular come to life: during the design process, during the construction process, and during the life of the finished building. Examples of all three are given, with special attention given to the artificial formations engendered by the presence of cameras and screens. I examine how certain formations encourage or discourage I-You relations. One such formation—shoulders at right angles and about a foot apart—is identified as conducive to I-You. I consider how the same order might apply to buildings and rooms themselves. Chapter 17. M-branes and the Phenomenon of Theater. “M-branes,” an abbreviation of “mental membranes,” are the virtual surfaces caused by the environment that differentiate generalized space into two or more regions—regions through which, across which, and into and out of which sound, physical objects, and lines of sight may pass, but in which different kinds of events are going on. These goings-on socially constrain behavior in the regions. They also constrain the kinds of glancing and gazing people may do inside them and between them. The artful production of m-branes is how architecture, historically, has organized ‘first way’ relations. M-branes make theater possible, but, more intimately, they make control possible over the way we present ourselves to each other in everyday life (pace sociologist Erving Goffman). The signature “move” of recent modern architecture has been to de-stabilize or eliminate m-branes. I explain why this is not a good thing.

XII

PART THREE: ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE Chapter 18. Buildings as Being(s). This chapter, like Chapter 9, draws back in perspective. It begins by identifying the four competing metaphors that have governed modern architecture: Architecture as Machine, as Language, as Organism, and as Landscape. To these, a fifth is added, although its history is in fact longer than the other four: Buildings as Being(s). Instigated by recent developments in ontology, neuroscience, cultural criticism, and art theory, the Buildings as Being(s) metaphor represents the rise of a refreshed and “post-human” humanism in the 21st century. The core of the chapter shows how and why the Buildings as Being(s) metaphor is inherently ethical, in part because it exposes the realm of ‘second way,’ I-You relations to the act of design. The chapter ends with images of buildings by Le Corbusier, Stirling, Kahn,

Gehry, and Diller & Scofidio, each image paired with its barely-concealed, anthropomorphic, animistic origin. Chapter 19. Rooms in Relation. Recalling Scott’s Architecture of Humanism and Vischer’s theories of empathy, Chapter 19 begins by strengthening the case for thinking of Buildings, Rooms, and Things as having human-like character and being arranged in formations. I then focus on Rooms. What makes a room a Room and not a Thing (and vice versa)? How are Rooms adjoined? What does the manner of their connection imply for the People in those Rooms and for the Rooms themselves? What happens when “space” is divided in kind and use, but without m-branes? Have we understood Adolf Loos’s raumplan in practice? Or Kahn’s society of rooms? How does sacredness enter the picture? Can Rooms take an I-You attitude to each other? Given a revised architectural ontology, what really are doors, walls, and windows? Chapter 20. Rooms in Motion. Rooms are in motion—or rather, want to be, as a manifestation of their independent being. I discuss how we know what direction a Room wants to go in, and the problems that arise when its motion is internally conflicted or externally frustrated. Various Feng Shui-like solutions have been proposed, among them treating buildings like ships or boats (I cite works by Le Corbusier and Bjarke Ingels, and the Streamline style of Mendelsohn). Rooms without windows are unfortunate for several reasons, only one of them being their unnatural light. Orientation is a major factor: the need to prevent rooms from spinning, or drifting free of their “moorings.” Here, isovist analysis is decisive. We show why yards and courtyards help orient us even when walled. Kahn’s Dominican Motherhouse project shows him taking the art of Room orientation and motion to new heights. Baroque architecture shows how motion in the vertical direction is enhanced when it happens through horizontal m-branes. Chapter 21. Aldo Van Eyck: Photography, Relation, and “The Between”. This chapter examines the relational strengths of van Eyck’s work. It begins with an appreciation of how photography can be used to capture attitudes and relationships. Van Eyck used it this way, in emulation of Henri Cartier-Bresson and the ethos of street photography. The chapter then turns to van Eyck’s understanding of relationality through “configurational design” (his term). Kahn’s work, alternatively, demonstrates formations. Van Eyck had studied Martin Buber and thus valorized “the Between.” But the Between can be interpreted spatially and conceptually. The spatial Between is important but relatively easy to treat with tools like isovists, m-branes, and so forth. Conceptual (or categorical) betweenness is trickier, and I suggest that van Eyck did not manage it well. In fact, prefiguring Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, van Eyck set a generation of architects off in search of tension-ridden, neither-nor and both-and solutions to design problems. Nonetheless, van Eyck’s most successful realized project was the Sonsbeek Sculpture Pavilion in Arnhem, where both kinds of betweenness work together. The chapter ends with a study of van Eyck’s relationality at Sonsbeek, illustrated by original, computer-rendered isovist and presence fields. Chapter 22: Carlo Scarpa and the Power of Two. Art objects have greater presence than objects of use or support. They generate I-You attitudes of respect, care, empathy, and insight toward them, as well as, somehow, from them. Few architects are able to operate at this level, i.e., to make an entire building a work of art. Scarpa was one of them. This chapter offers an animistic and relational reading of Scarpa’s stairs at the Olivetti showroom in Venice, his Brion family tomb in San Vito d’Altivole, and his Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, where I show how the statues and rooms interact with us and each other. Although these buildings are well-known to students of architecture, they have not been appreciated using the techniques and terms

XIII

developed in this book. The chapter closes with a Coda about Scarpa’s relevance to our very changed profession. Chapter 23. Learning from Lou. Louis Kahn, a panpsychist and a Romantic, frequently turned to personification to explain his buildings: their “desire to be to express” the fullness of being of every entity, including themselves. I ask architects to give Kahn’s mysticism further consideration. He had read Buber. The chapter starts with an account of grouping, counting, and subitizing (which describes our rapid and unconscious grouping and counting of six or fewer elements). Kahn groups, counts, and subitizes to make every building a ‘second way,’ I-You dialogue between beings. His “societies of rooms” are typically couples, triples, teams, ensembles. Five of Kahn’s works are examined in relational terms: the Philadelphia City Planning Commission Row Housing Study in Philadelphia, the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building in Dhaka (including a remarkable digital interior simulation rendered by architect John Szot), and the unbuilt Dominican Motherhouse in Pennsylvania. I discuss how Kahn’s achievement might be translated into future practice without producing stylistically Kahn-like buildings. Chapter 24. Toward Architecture in the Second Person. This chapter offers three studies of how, in principle, ‘second way’ I-You relations might be embodied in new architecture. The first study examines how performance art enacts ‘second way’ I-You relations. I then focus on Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present (MOMA, 2010), using presence fields to illustrate its architectural implications. The second study examines the art movement called Mono-Ha (“School of Things”), as practiced by East Asian artists like Kishio Suga and Lee Ufan. Here, inanimate objects address and/or depend on each other in resonant, performance-art-like ways. The third study, entitled “Frank Gehry’s Conviviality,” points out the performance-art quality of Gehry’s work and how it draws on Mono-Ha’s version of ‘second way’ relationality. (No claim is made that Gehry is aware of the connection.) Chapter 25. Coda: Three Short Takes. Architecture Beyond Experience ends in appreciation of three projects by younger-generation architects. The first of the three projects is called 4 Vigas (“4 Beams”). It is the gravesite designed by the Paraguayan architect Solano Benitez for his father, on his father’s land east of Asuncion. The second is a prize-winning design for the Omaha Tribal Interpretive Center and Museum, unbuilt, by the Nebraskan-born architect, Vince Snyder, who worked for Gehry. Where Benitez’s design is raw and abstract, Snyder’s is allusive and animate without being postmodern or experientialist. Thirdly, we look at several works by MOS Architects, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample. Both are admirers of Robert Venturi and descended from OMA. I focus on their Krabbesholm Hojskole in Skive, Denmark.

INTRODUCTION

FROM THE PROJECTS PRESENTED in the Coda, from the many works of modern masters treated in earlier chapters, and, of course, from the theory of relationality presented in this book, I invite students, teachers, and practitioners of architecture to triangulate their own attempts at “architecture beyond experience,” their own approaches to “architecture in the second person.”

XIV

PART ONE Locating the Sacred

1. TETSUGEN

ETSUGEN DOKO WAS A ZEN MASTER who lived from 1630 to 1682. As a young man, he resolved to publish the Buddha’s teachings (sutras) in Japanese. At the time, they were available only in Chinese. The book was to be printed with wood blocks in an edition of 7,000 copies—a huge undertaking. Tetsugen began by traveling and collecting donations. Wealthy sympathizers would give him a hundred pieces of gold now and then, but most of the time he received only small coins. He thanked each donor with equal gratitude. After ten years, Tetsugen had enough money to begin. At just that time the Uji River overflowed. Famine followed. Tetsugen took the money he had collected for the books and spent it all to save people from starvation. He then began raising funds again. Several years later an epidemic spread across the country. For the second time, Tetsugen gave the money he had collected to suffering families, and again he began traveling for the book. After twenty years he finally had enough money. Translation done, the printing began. Tetsugen died the following year. The blocks that produced the first edition of sutras in Japanese can be seen today at the Ōbaku monastery in Kyoto, Japan, where parents tell their children that Tetsugen made three books of sutras, and that the first two books, invisible though they are, surpass the third by far. Thus ends the story as it is passed down.1 Interesting to note is that the book begins with the Prajnaparamita, or “Supreme Wisdom” sutras, the primary teaching of which is that all things perceived are illusory.

2. SACRED SPACE

PART ONE LOCATING THE SACRED

HEN ARCHITECTS TALK ABOUT SACRED SPACE, they’re likely to recall the holy sites they’ve experienced or the sanctuaries they’ve designed or the handful of secular buildings they’ve visited where, for a while, time seemed to expand, or the sensation of space was intensified, and they felt connected to an order both human and larger. Architects understand nonetheless that different kinds of sacred spaces serve different spiritual goals and different religious communities. There is the silence and simplicity sought by monastics, created by cloisters and walled gardens, by cabins and chapels in remote locations. There is the bustle and ceremony preferred by more gregarious believers: song-filled tents, radiant temples, cozy synagogues, echoing cathedrals, chandeliered and mat-filled mosques. For some, the spaces offered by art museums border on sacred. There, in rooms clean, lofty, and hushed, in galleries bathed in soft light and surrounded by mysterious depictions and artifacts, one can indeed begin to feel buoyed, swept up, by the efforts of generations of artists to transport people beyond whatever is selfish or practical or hasty in their lives. For others, only nature can provide truly sacred space: a mountaintop, say, or a wilderness, where on a grassy plain under a starry sky one might sense the earth rolling silently through an infinite universe and imagine Jacob—a Jacob, anyway—dreaming of angels ascending and descending, and, in the morning, calling the place Beth El, the House of God. In all these examples the primary experience to be had is not of architecture, however, or of the place as such. The experience sought is that of the divine, or God, described most ecumenically perhaps as that universal, infinitely wise, and absolutely authoritative Who, or What, or Process behind all events, moving them toward more complex forms of what can only be called goodness. Needless to say, different places are differently conducive to the experience of divinity. None are able to cause it in a reliable way, such that one might arrange things thus, stand in this spot, and watch the gates of heaven open.2 This is the stuff of movies. By the same token, it takes a rather distinct theology to be able to encounter divinity in banal, indifferent, or unhealthy environments, unless He/She/It appears as a salvific figure or force reversing those very qualities. On the face of it, the profession of architecture is not much occupied with sacred spaces. The bulk of architects’ work in this day is decidedly secular: office buildings, hotels, schools, libraries, apartment buildings, houses, and so forth. Clients ask for efficiency, style, ingenuity, and profitability in their buildings—for firmness, commodity, and delight, to use Vitruvius’s categories—not for “sacredness.” Nor are architects as a group especially religious. But I would argue that most architects interested in design as an art, i.e., as an activity over and above problem-solving, are in fact preoccupied with making space(s) sacred nonetheless, and not just in the ethical/salvific action sense mentioned earlier. This preoccupation is why, given the chance, architects will inflect almost every building they design with the very gestures one associates with “spiritual” buildings. They will raise ceilings higher than necessary and cause light to enter, usually from the sky, in ingenious ways. They will make plans that “bring people together.” They will design meditative gardens (preferably with running water) and multiply thresholds to inner sanctums. They will open the building to majestic and/or idyllic views while suppressing evidence of the building’s internal organs (mechanical and electrical services), excretion (sewage, garbage), material inputs (loading docks, service doors), and dirt (dust, grease). Cleanliness is next to godliness. They will want their buildings to last forever

and perform miracles of structure (most often, levitations) and of materiality (lustrous concrete, invisible glass) as though to induce doubt that the laws of physics and entropy apply here, to this building.3 There will be no mistakes, no cracks or gaps, no tools or accessories left lying about. Mathematical symmetries will abound, either in preternatural orderliness and purity, or in computer-aided adoration of nature’s leafy complexity…these, together with an acute awareness that the direction up, when not clearly utilitarian (as with an access ladder), connotes elevation in more senses than one. We might also include the natural tendency of architects, across nearly all building types and styles, to specify the most precious materials they can, to create virtual shrines out of recesses, to set artworks just so, to call for high levels of craftsmanship and other shows of devotion from both contractor and client, and to publish photographs of their building’s tallest, most vertiginous spaces and most imposing contours seen in the rarest of lights: the “accidental” beam of sunshine, the Edenic turning of day into night.4 Here I am proposing that the desire to sacralize space, to make buildings that could engender a near-religious experience in at least some part of them, permeates the profession of architecture. Church, temple, and mosque provide the model, or Nature does—which is to say, nature seen all but religiously. If this is true, then whatever cogent thing can be said about divinity and our experience of it today will apply more broadly than just to the design of religious sanctuaries. That "cogent thing" may help us understand why many high-design buildings look the way they do, be it in agreement with or objection to historical conventions of sacralization. It could help us see where the proclaimed-great architect’s claim to extra-personal, extra-political authority comes from: I mean, the knowing of what should be built. More importantly, it could identify what precepts about being human in this world—precepts that guide much cultural production as well as motivate contemporary architecture—could stand reexamination.

PART TWO The Fabric of Glances

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

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

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.

can read Le Corbusier’s definition of architecture less as a tribute to mass or form or even light, and more as a tribute to arrangement using anthropomorphic, animistic, ‘second way’ relational logic. We see anthropo- and zoomorphic relation-making in Le Corbusier’s buildings, especially his later ones. 45 At Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, for example, recall the resemblance of the roof to a nun’s hat or seashell or boat seen from below. 46 We need not decide which it is. The three chapel-towers are hard not to see as three, cowled nuns with fronts, backs, and sides and Miro/Klee-like faces. They stand in ritual relation to one another at the building’s entrances: the two juniors stand back-to-back at the rear, while the senior is stationed like a mother-teacher at the front, surveys the other two, and sees to it that the children at her feet enter the sanctuary in an orderly fashion. Figure 11.3 And note how the famously scattershot windows in the thick eastern wall—each window different and hand-painted—are arrayed like parishioners in pews, i.e., in apparently-random, self-chosen places, facing the same way, each shining with his or her own light. It’s as though each parishioner had a window-angel looking down on them, while the Madonna, in silhouette from her own window on the southern wall, presides over all. In winter, mid-way through Sunday morning services, I have seen a bar of sunlight cross in front of the altar from audience-right to audience-left. For ten minutes or so the priest passed in and out that bar of light, making a crescent of his face and then retreating into the gloom, leaving behind his illuminated breath. Or notice the windows on the east elevation of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Boston (which is similar to his Mill Owner’s Building in Ahmedabad). On the west elevation, they inspect approaching visitors, while on the east they seem disinterested. An entrance ramp scoops us up from the streets and on to the open lap of the building, rather like a Henry Moore recumbent figure, where, protected on both sides, one is curiously, maternally, in the building already. Or note the three iconic skylights over the side chapel at Le Corbusier’s Dominican monastery at La Tourette, each straining like a puppy from a basket to see a different part of the world, and all three watched over by the Modigliani-like mother or shepherd figure of the bell tower. Figure 11.4 Such forms sustain other readings. Their ambiguity is deliberate. Architecture is an art that mixes metaphors, the very same set of forms flipping unstably between several different but deeply related readings. This is not a mistake. This is how works of architecture avoid falling into Disney-like depictions of what they are not while evoking what they most deeply are: ancient formations of beings. Le Corbusier’s animism was measured. 47 Striving for “eyes which see” and “objects which speak,” he said this to students: L et me recall that man of ours, seated at his table. (H)e has just gotten up and walked through his rooms. He listens to the language spoken by the objects around him, his companions, the witnesses to his aspirations. Arranged in his home like a beautiful thought, they speak to him as he moves about. The furniture, the walls, the openings to the outside, this cozy den where the minutes, hours, days, and years of a life unfold, all speak to him.48, 49 He might have added “...I-You.”

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.

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.

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

Figure 22.2 Entrance to Brion tomb from village cemetery.

Figure 22.3 Brion sarcophagi from meditation pavilion.

Figure 22.4 Brion sarcophagi.

arms of a lyre. Their bottom surfaces are curved so that they might (in our imagination) roll closer yet. No merged circles here, just tension, desire, equality, love, under a large and unifying arch like someone who has thrown themselves over the two to protect and grieve them. Figure 22.4 The embellishment of each sarcophagus rivals Bernini’s. Within his own modern and abstract geometrical language, Scarpa conveys both respect and adoration. Scarpa knew them personally, and Giuseppe’s and Onorina knew each other in the most real ways possible.169 Scarpa’s own grave is nearby. It is difficult to find: in a crook between the chapel and a secondary gate. He is buried standing up, as was his wish. The stone, laying down, was designed by his son and architect, Tobia.170 When describing the Brion cemetery, it’s hard to avoid the sequential, experientialist mode of description critiqued in Chapter 5. Scarpa, the exhibit-designer, makes it easy for architecture writers and camera-toting students alike to ignore the fact that treating Brion as a sequence of lovely experiences is fundamentally narcissistic. Indeed, in architectural education circles, the Brion tomb is a poster-child of experiential design.171 I have tried to downplay this aspect of the design, and play up its relational, ontological side; the idea that being at Brion is being with and among beings already “experiencing” each other. Should the reader go on to contemplate the chapel (it is open to the public, and can be approached separately), I would ask them to pay attention to the Chinese-style “moon-gate” between the chapel foyer, or narthex, and the chapel proper. In shape, no larger opening can be made between two rooms with so strong, so timpanic, an m-brane.172 On the left, as though lodged in a crack in a cliff, a Carrara-marble, holy-water fount (or acquasanteria) offers itself like a pearl, lit by a stained-glass sun of roughly the same size above it and to the right. Wall, fount, and high window are poised in reenactment of Exodus 17:5-6.173 A narrower window of clear glass, not visible from the chapel, provides light from the right. Draw closer and the fount will reveal twinned and tiny golden basins pressed into the porcelain-like surface. We recognize the double-circle immediately, but this time it is Euclid’s vesica piscis exactly. Next to the basin is an arced and sliding bronze lever, its serrated fingerprint ready to touch our own and slide away the basin’s copper cover. Figure 22.5 (a) and (b) The lectern now waits. It is a Room-occupying object: crafted, solid, bronze, glowing, wholly occlusive.174 In front of it, the floor is inlaid with aluminum and marked in a black-and-whitestriped stone pattern to show the proper formation: how to stand in address of its radiant presence and the priest behind it. The whole composition is turned at forty-five degrees to the Room, as though to face the font and narthex, but not entirely, not subserviently. Whom does it address? Not you. And not even the aquasanteria, although they align. I think this is a mystery. Figure 22.6 Above this lectern, two square and serrated clouds overlap, half combined. Two. One is centered over the lectern and admits sunlight. The other is centered over the room and is dark.175 3. The statues and sculptures at Museo di Castelvecchio Like Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, an earlier project, the program of Castelvecchio was to restore and remodel a several-hundred-year-old building to serve as a museum of medieval art, chiefly sculpture. As we saw in the last chapter with van Eyck, the program “sculpture museum” lends itself to a relational, dialogical treatment. Scarpa, like van Eyck, subscribed to the art-curatorial idea, then in vogue, that exhibitions should not lay out works of art en masse, as though presenting their

185

owner’s treasure-trove, but rather should show fewer pieces and hope for—design for—the serial and more serious appreciation of single works by individuals or small groups. No reciprocation from the art was imagined. Nor was the idea much floated that artworks engaged each other with a gaze structure and body language of their own. It took an animist architect like Scarpa to demonstrate that idea. Less than fifty pages on Castelvecchio does it an injustice. Here I want to focus on the relationship of the sculptures (statues, really) and paintings to us, to the building, and to each other. And rather than repeat the kind of isovist- and presence-field analysis offered of Sonsbeek in the previous chapter, I offer an excerpt from a remarkable gaze and isovist-based study of the second floor of the building by Gianna Stavroulaki and John Peponis.176 At Castelvecchio, they observe: v isitors are drawn to recognize that statues have been so positioned that their relationship is retrospectively made to appear not incidental to their constitution but virtually “acknowledged” in their posture and orientation. In short, the gaze is the device that makes positioning appear deliberate. The visitors’ own positions, however, are not directly involved in these relations of entailment between the positioning and the orientation of statues. Where the gazes of more than two statues intersect at the same point, the manner in which statues virtually acknowledge each other is entirely dependent upon the visitor occupying the point of intersection and noticing the convergence of the gazes. Thus, in the second case, the embodied experience of the visitor is the device that mediates the virtual acknowledgement of the statues’ spatial relationships. The gaze of the visitor and the gaze of the statues become part of a single spatial configuration of shifting reciprocity. By implication, the body of the visitors and the bodies of statues partake in the same network of reflexive composition, the same space punctuated by directed or intersecting gazes. (My emphasis.)

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

IN THE NEXT PASSAGE, Stavroulaki and Peponis discuss the fabric of glances (“intersecting gazes”) and presence fields (“presence”) at Castelvecchio:

188

I n the sculpture galleries, visitors are so immersed in the field of intersecting gazes, (our “fabric of glances”) that they come to understand sculpture as a construction of space projecting from bodies and defined according to their surfaces. Works of art cease to be mere isolated or bounded objects and become generators of spatial qualities that can almost be entered, that are appreciated not only through seeing, but also through moving. Conversely, architectural space is defined as a field of co-awareness and co-presence, literal and virtual, sustained through the presence of people, and also sustained through the presence of art. (My emphases.) Figure 22.7 (a) and (b) STAVROULAKI AND PEPONIS ALSO DESCRIBE what every visitor notices: how Scarpa presents paintings on the first floor. Many are not hung on walls, but instead are mounted on free-standing easels near, and at right angles to, windows equipped with sunlight-diffusing scrims. This lights

Figure 22.7 (a) Plan of second level of Castelvecchio, from Stavroulaki and Peponis (2003), showing statue gaze directions, (b) isovist area field and statue presence fields, overlaid.

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

Figure 24.12 Frank Gehry, Ray and Maria Stata Center, Cambridge (2004), (a) court view, (b) interior street, looking up.

Figure 24.13 (a) outside UTS seminar room (on left), (b) looking through gap between “sleepers” into seminar room, (c) UTS exterior brickwork, looking up.

shells/wings/sails of glass, still looking like a sketch and simply detailed, were brought into being by a pure love of life. Figure 24.14 (a) and (b) I have not presented a theory that explains Gehry. I have tried, however, to point out the performance-art quality of his work and to discuss that quality’s debt to ‘second way’ relationality. Gehry treats Things and Rooms like People or living things, starting famously with fish; and he does so differently from other modern humanist architects. The longing of such architects is the same, however. It is to create a world in which large numbers of people love and admire the buildings they live among because they—the buildings—are in fact lovable and admirable. For Gehry this means buildings that, although built with great care, project sprezzatura; buildings that, although seductive of surface, radiate intelligence; buildings that, although supportive of human relations, enact and exemplify them too. Such buildings might well be addressed as You.

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

246

Figure 24.14 (a) MPK20, interior, (b) Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, east elevation.

25. CODA: THREE SHORT TAKES

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

n these final pages, we will look at three, more-recent examples of post-experiential, relational architecture, ones that might point the way forward. My account will draw on isovists, m-branes, presence fields, OOO, animism, counting, photography, the Between, and the I-It/I-You relations between People, Things, and Rooms…all the elements of the theory we have developed in the previous chapters. The first of the three is called 4 Vigas (“4 Beams”). It is the gravesite designed by the Paraguayan architect Solano Benitez for his father. The second is a prize-winning design for the Omaha Tribal Interpretive Center and Museum, unbuilt, by the Nebraskan-born architect, Vince Snyder. Where Benitez’s design is raw and abstract, Snyder’s (who worked for Gehry) is allusive without being postmodern, animate without being effervescent. Thirdly, we look at several works by MOS Architects, who are admirers of Robert Venturi and descendants, but not disciples, of OMA. I focus on their Krabbesholm Hojskole in Skive, Denmark. I close by inviting students of architecture to triangulate their own attempts at “architecture beyond experience” from the projects presented in this chapter, from the work of the modern masters treated in eariler chapters, and, of course, from the theory of relationality this book puts forward.

248

1. IN PARAGUAY, roughly forty miles east of Asuncion, there is small town called Piribebuy. Solano Benitez lies buried in Piribebuy, on the grounds of his family’s vacation home. His tomb was designed by his son and namesake, Solano Benitez, who is one of Paraguay’s leading architects and principal of the firm, Gabinete de Arquitectura. Like the Brion tomb, this tomb is sculpture-become-architecture, or architecture-become-sculpture—in any case, a monument. And we remember Adolf Loos’s claim that a building’s claim to being architecture, no matter its function, depends on in its ability to bring to mind the themes of transience and eternity. The younger Solano spent ten years designing and then building his father’s monument, which he calls 4 Vigas. Completed in 2000, it consists of four, reinforced concrete beams (vigas), straight and horizontal in the long-dimension but modeled in section, arranged into a thirtytwo-foot square with open corners. Each beam, which is around three-and-a-half feet deep, is supported by a single column close to one end. Each beam is technically a double cantilever therefore, a “T,” whose horizontal arms hover at a minimum of a foot above the rising and falling ground beneath it.301 The gravestone itself is a concrete panel in the center of the square, with a bench beside. There’s more. The inside surfaces of the four beams are lined with mirror. When one enters the square, therefore, and sits beside the grave, one finds oneself multiplied out to a leafy infinity in every direction, the beams gone and replaced by a horizontal bar of space worthy of a science fiction movie. The plan of 4 Vigas has affinities to the Moroccan grave discovered by Aldo van Eyck, as well as to The Artist is Present. Since there are many sacred spaces, world-wide, composed of a square of roughly this size, it is not the choice of geometry in plan alone that makes these three examples sacred. What makes them sacred is what they do relationally, and this in turn depends on how they were designed (and made) as Things with fronts, backs, and sides, with interiors, postures, and attitudes, arranged into formations based on the longing to connect with something or someone in an I-You way.

Rather than describe the Moroccan site again (see Chapter 23), or Abramovic’s MOMA installation (see Chapter 24), let us let Benitez describe 4 Vigas in his own words. We can compare and contrast it to the other two spaces in our minds’ eyes: Mirrors (on) the inside of the beams blur…the edges of the structure and magnify…the presence of the landscape…When one enters the square, one brings the landscape along. Once one sits in the middle, the mirrors become centrifugal, multiplying the images and reproducing them over and over… To think about the feelings my kids would experience when visiting their grandfather’s grave was to understand the problems one meets when facing death. Our culture has taught us to understand death as a tragedy, and only shows us the painful side of death. My spirit lives inside of me and my body is the limit that separates my soul from all the rest. The only exception I discover is the mirror, because in a mirror I am there, outside of myself, in a plane of equality and simultaneous existence with everything. Maybe, in the mirror, we have a machine that would help us stay in contact with the people we love, or with the loves we did not have…, or with those who are no longer with us. Everything that is repeated over and over again finally becomes sacred. This is why soccer on Sundays, or having lunch with my mother is sacred. Throughout history we have learned that through repetition the possibility exists of staying in contact with the sacred. When you enter the square (of 4 Vigas) in a sad mood, the square multiplies your loneliness. …But it takes only one or two of my children to enter the square to have a thousand of pieces of life repeating itself everywhere. The relationship of children with the place is natural: they understand that in life, as in the mirrors, a part of them is another life that repeated itself (in them), and so it is eternal and sacred. Here is my son with his feet on the ground; in the mirrors he is floating, like he lives in my dreams.302 Benitez avoids biblical references, but they inform 4 Vigas nonetheless.303 The mirrors at 4 Vigas do not work exactly like the mirrors would on the four walls of any room. They are set outdoors, in nature, at exactly seated height. The beams they attach to float and disappear when you are in the square—making echoes in space, fault-lines in the jungle—while from the outside they are as finite, solid, and opaque as a temple fragment or a piece of ancient infrastructure. But it’s not the beams’ two-sided nature that does the trick—mirror on one side, fern-imprinted concrete on the other. It’s the square they form out four distinct presences, four magical if short guardian angels with their arms (wings?) outstretched and circling in a pinwheel pattern, and it’s our knowledge that this is the grave of a patriarch, built by love for him and for his grandchildren. No one of these facts or features makes 4 Vigas the sacred space it is. All of them together do. And they do that by the relationships they bring into being, Person-to-Person, Solano-toSolano-to-Solano, and all the others too, I-You.304 Figure 25.1 2. AFTER 1850, the American drive westward intensified, engulfing and displacing Native American populations without apology. There was no resisting “manifest destiny:” there was no resisting western civilization’s advance across the continent by means of industry, money, superior arms,

249

Figure 25.1 Solano Benitez, 4 Vigas, Piribebuy, Paraguay (2011) (a) view at seated height, (b) isovist from central position, from black (not seen) to red (seen multiply).

and the privatization of property. And these four processes depended in turn on the spread, begun a hundred years earlier, of “scientific” I-It attitudes toward Things and People alike. The cultures of America’s indigenous peoples were, by contrast, animistic and naturebased. For them, humans were animals and animals were humans, capable of addressing each other across the divide. Every living thing, and every “inanimate” thing too, had spirit within, especially the Things (and kinds of Things) that had been singled out by ancestors for their medicinal benefits or ritual, consciousness-altering powers. To be sure, Native American cultures privileged human life over animal and vegetal life, and the lives of the members of their own tribe over the lives of the members of others. Hierarchies based on age, gender, and heredity were maintained; and they knew conflict, stress, and war. But they lived, I think it reasonable to say, in an I-You world of encounter more than Europeans did, then as now. The I-It attitudes of European colonizers not only robbed First Nation peoples of their ways of life, it dismantled the very mode of consciousness that went with them. Consider the reverence of the Omaha people of Nebraska for Umon’hon’ti. “Umon’hon’ti” is a several-hundred-year-old, ten-foot long, cottonwood pole, straight, tapering from about three inches in diameter at its base to about one inch at its tip, and with a complex leather cuff laced around its center of gravity. To the Omaha, Umon’hon’ti is sacred.305 Its name means “the Real Omaha (one).” Indeed, the pole is a person of sorts, properly referred to in the third person as “he” and not “it,” and addressed in the second person as “you.” In ways beyond understanding, the welfare of the Omaha people depends on the welfare of Umon’hon’ti, and the respect shown the Omaha people depends on the respect shown to Umon’hon’ti. His proper posture is neither lying down nor standing up but inclined at a forty-five degree angle and braced by a slender, forked branch, about two thirds of the way up. Figure 25.2 In 1888, the Omaha people, in dire straits, allowed Umon’hon’ti to be removed to Harvard’s Peabody Museum for safekeeping, along with many other sacred artifacts. A hundred and one years later, in 1989, Umon’hon’ti was returned, along with all the other items.307 A period of optimism followed, culminating in a plan to give Umon’hon’ti pride of place in a new museum in Nebraska, one that ennobled, preserved, and transmitted Omaha culture. The architect asked to draw up those plans was a Harvard- and Princeton-educated Nebraskan, Vincent Snyder, who had worked for Frank Gehry, and before that, Michael Graves, and now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. What the Omaha people got from Snyder was more than a couple of renderings to raise money with. They got a study in animistic modernism rivalling Le Corbusier’s.308 Snyder’s design for the Omaha Tribal Interpretive Center and Museum (OTICM) won several national design awards. Snyder located it along a bluff that overlooks the Missouri River and the Omaha’s ancestral lands to the east. In shape, it echoes both types of traditional Omaha dwelling: the winter sod home with its back to the cold west wind, and the summer pole-and-hide or pole-and-canvas tipi, which was transportable in order to follow buffalo herds.309 Snyder replicates neither building-type exactly; he puts them into a dialogue that changes and saves both. The OTICM also expresses the Omaha tribal division into two clans, the sky clan, whose members look after all things ceremonial, and the earth clan, whose members do everything else, and so he shaped the building into half earth half sky.310 Regrettably, the Omaha Tribal Interpretive Center and Museum is not built.311 Figure 25.2 A relational analysis of the OTICM goes beyond simple, pictorial resemblances to ask what the building is doing and what relationships it is instating at a deeper level. The lower section of the OTICM performs the role of mother-body, ribbed, tailed, moving

251

PART THREE ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE

Fig 25.2 Umon’hon’ti, with collage of clips from “The Return of the Sacred Pole”(1990).306

Figure 25.3 Omaha Tribal Interpretive Center and Museum in Nebraska (2002, unbuilt), Vince Snyder (a) plan (b)…(c)…(d).