Fragments - An Essay on the Creative Potential of Sleep and Memory

“… I raised my lips to a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.”

Marcel Proust, 1913

Preface

In the writing of this essay, I have encountered a variety of subjects. New findings, a reading of a text, a philosophical conversation, or an inspiring lecture, have all sent me down different paths. Not unlike Proust’s madeleine moment on the page opposite, spontaneous ideas have emerged, each of them interesting enough to warrant individual research.

I settled on the subject of memory and sleep in (the design of) architecture. During my years in architecture school, I always loathed the idea of pulling an all-nighter. Or more specifically, the idea that you could not design architecture without staying up all night. I felt that my brain shut down after 8 pm, which didn’t exactly fit the myth of the hard-working architect. Surely, this glorification of sleep deprivation wasn’t healthy, or indeed productive.

Thus, I wanted to explore the effect of (no) sleep on our ability to think creatively and embody new experiences. How could I use the benefits of sleep on my memory to seek the the sudden and involuntary appearance of recollections—a so-called precious fragment—and use them in my architectural design process? How might the deliberate memorisation and internalisation of architectural experiences create more possibilities for the emergence of these precious fragments?

Consequently, I wanted to explore the space of sleep. The bedroom is an integral part of domestic architecture, but its importance also seems to be receding. Like the kitchen before it, the spatial boundaries of the bedroom are being dissolved. In a modern reality of one-room studios and shared flats, the bedroom – and indeed the bed itself –becomes not only a place for sleeping, but also for working, eating and living. It is hard not to see this development as a symptom of our societal tendency towards neglecting sleep. In this essay, I offer my reflections on the role which architecture plays, or can play, in this condition.

Rune Wriedt

On Voices

In the writing of this essay, the words and images on the paper became as fragmented as the subject itself. Three different characters of text emerged, each contributing with their own identity, forming a whole of the discrete parts. In order for the reader to identify these three voices, they have been differentiated thusly:

The first voice is that of the author. It has intent and purpose, aims to understand by asking questions, juxtaposing statements and theories.

The author is the one who discusses.

The second voice belongs to the specialist, who disseminates the factual and scientific aspects of sleep, memory and creativity.

The specialist is the one who knows.

The third voice is mine. I am often unsure if what I’m doing or saying is even correct. I have doubts and contradict myself. My thoughts drift away and I have a hard time concentrating on one matter at a time.

I am the one who wonders.

Research Poster #01: Precious Fragments

Introduction

“The map of the imaginable world is drawn only in dreams. The universe perceived through our senses is an infinitely small one.” 1

Gaston Bachelard

The following essay is divided into four parts: day , dusk , night , and dawn .

These phases of the Sun’s movement around the Earth have a profound impact on our lives. Not just as temporal measurements to compartmentalise our qoutidian activities, but as catalysts for biological processes in our brain. Processes which attune our circadian rhythm, wake us up in the morning and send us to sleep at night. Processes, without which we would frankly not survive.

Circadian rhythm : from circa, meaning around, and diam, meaning day. The biological clock within our brains, that determines, among other things, when you want to be awake and when you want to be asleep. The light of the sun ‘resets’ this internal rhythm daily, as it is not exactly 24 hours, but can vary dramatically from person to person (hence the circa). Any signal that the brain uses for this purpose is called a ‘ zeitgeber ’ – giver of time. 2

The essay’s first section consists of an introduction to the notion of the reverie, the daydream and the foreign thoughts which suddenly appear in seemingly ordinary, everyday situations. These emergences are discussed through the theoretical lens of Juhani Pallasma’s notion of embodied images and Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the material imagination.

Then follows a discussion of memories, both the persistently invasive and the fleetingly elusive. It delves into the effect of sleep on the retention and storage of learned information, the profound impact of dreaming on problem solving and creativity, and the possibility of deliberately internalising architectural spaces.

The third section focuses on the spatiality of the bedroom and its current state in modern architecture. The reductive view of sleep as unproductive time is juxtaposed to the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation, followed by discussion of the causal relationship between the dissappearing bedroom and the lack of sleep. Night

The essay’s fourth and final section consists of a reflection upon the effects of a design methodology based upon receptivity to precious fragments and intuitive reveries. It will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of seeking to design in a field of indeterminacy, and a contemplation of how this way of thinking could impact architectural design work.

“In knowledge imagination serves the understanding whereas in art understanding serves the imagination.” 3

Immanuel Kant

Reverie : (a state of having) pleasant dream-like thoughts.4

The reverie, or daydream, is a ephemeral experience. Awake, yet lost in a realm of the subconscious. Open to sudden occurences of thoughts, continously emerging in a chain of associations. It is also another way of defining the intuitive approach to creativity. Allowing the making of an architectural drawing to be an open process with no determinate endgoal, no telos. An effort to dream and create within the realm of the material imagination, a concept Gaston Bachelard opposes to the formal imagination.

“Causes arising from the feelings and the heart must become formal causes if a work is to possess verbal variety, the everchanging life of light. Yet besides the images of form […] there are – as I will show – images of matter, images that stem directly from matter.” 5 Bachelard focuses on poetic creation, evident in his choice of words, but one can arguably impose his philosophy unto the creation of architectural space as well. Thus, the spaces that invoke the material imagination are thought up not through reason alone, but are felt through the hand, the heart, the body.

“In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers bloom in matter’s darkness. They already posses a velvety touch, a formula for perfume.” 6

Gaston Bachelard

In the never-ending “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust, the memories compromising the seven volumes of prose are spontaneously triggered by the dunking of an innocuous madeleine biscuit in a cup of tea. This is an example of a so-called precious fragment, an involuntary remembrance which we must struggle to bring into focus. Like Proust’s madeleine moment, it emerges like a sudden burst of inspiration, a reconnection with the previously forgotten, or a seemingly novel intuitive idea, which has been developed subconsciously.

In the house of my grandparents, my grandmother was the one who ruled in the kitchen. But curiously, my grandfather had usurped her reign in one aspect: the

biscuits. They had a ritual of afternoon coffee with a huge selection of biscuits and cakes, especially one type of crunchy oatmeal biscuit which I adored as a child. When I close my eyes, I see the kitchen. I am sitting on the bench by the table, looking at the birds outside the window. It is always summer in my memory.

We all carry archetypal experiential images within us. An image in this sense is not defined as a mere picture, but as “spatialised, materialised and multi-sensory lived experience[s].” 7 These images are connected to a deeper human historicity, carried instinctually in our bodies. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that it is through these embodied images, that we understand and connect to architecture. He states that “[t]he preferred spatial situation combines a sense of protectiveness of the immediate setting (refuge) with a wide vista of the environment providing a sense of control (prospect).” 8 This is manifest in many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house designs, and Pallasmaa argues that the experience of pleasure in such a situation is universally human, transgressing cultural, racial and temporal borders. In order to create an architecture, that does not rely on dazzling visuals or extravagant formal configurations, we must seek to continually connect ourselves to these deeply existential and experientially rooted architectural images which impact our minds and have come inseperable parts of our lives. This is not to say that we should become historicistic in our designs or revert back to millenia-old traditions. It is not a dismissal of the novel and groundbreaking, but rather an affirmation that we unconsciously carry with us the internalised experiences which allow us to create meaningful architectural space.

“[T]he most deeply existentially and experientially rooted architectural experiences impact our minds through images which are condensations of distinct architectural essences. Lasting architectural experiences consist of lived and embodied images which have become an inseparable part of our lives.” 9

Juhani Pallasmaa

Pallasmaa is a strong opponent of what he calls the “hegemony of vision” (elaborated in his book The Eyes of the Skin, 1996). He argues that the one-sided focus on visual perceptions creates a condition of rapidity and following passivity—that our actual capacity for imagination is at risk. Looking at the current output from architectural studios in Denmark (and indeed worldwide), it is hard not to sympathise with his concerns; glossy renderings of extraordinarily happy people and greenwashed skyscrapers blurs the actual image of the architecture and reduces it to a mass produced commodity. In a commercial reality where the influence of the architect is at times reduced to dictating the facade wrapping the same apartment typology repeated ad infinitum, we would be well served re-remembering the architectural archetypes which form the basis for an impressive architecture (understood as spaces that leaves poetic impressions within us).

Ivan Ilich goes so far as to liken our present day accomodation to genderless parking garages, claiming that we “(…) spend [our] days next to a telephone in an office and [our] nights garaged next to [our] cars.” 10 The standardisation of our living conditions must necessarily create an emotional

vacuum inside of us, insofar as the homogeniality of modern dwelling in particular disconnects us from our very humanity. Indeed “[i]mages, archetypes and metaphors structure our perceptions, thoughts and feelings, and they are capable of communicating messages of deep time as well as mediating epic narratives of human life and destiny.” 11 We enter and occupy architecture, but architecture also enters and occupies us.

“Works of art, literature and architecture originate in the body of the maker and they return back to the body through the experience of the beholder/listener/reader of the work, or the dweller of the house, through the mediation of the artistic image. (…) The architectural image is fundamentally an invitation for action; for instance, the floor invites movement and activity, the door is an invitation to enter or exit, the window to look out, the table to gather around.” 12

Juhani Pallasmaa

The human body is fundamental to the design of architecture. Our built environment is the way man enters into a dialectic with the phenomenae of the world, to explore, contemplate and understand it. However, the instrumentalisation of modern architecture into structures built only with the intent (if it can be called intent at all) of economical utility impoverishes both our physical and mental world: the former because of the foregoing of quality in an effort to maximise profit, and the latter because we gradually become used to and internalise the poor spaces to the detriment of our psyche and well-being. For the same reason, it is essential

for architects to travel in search of rich and poetic spaces that we may in turn experience and internalise, spaces that move and touch us, that penetrates into the heart of the existential human condition. Of course we need not limit ourselves to architecture, as the poetic image can be encountered in all artistic disciplines, and the spaces that we create might as well be inspired those works sculpture and poetry that invoke images within us.

Not long ago, I amused myself by looking at the descriptions architectural studios provided of themselves online. It wasn’t a proper survey at all, but I remember that the phrase “architecture in a human scale” was on almost all of the sites. It made me feel a sting of despair for my profession – if the best thing you can say about your architecture is that it is scaled for people, haven’t you failed? Especially when you experience dwellings constructed in the last decades. I lived with three other people for a year in a through-lit, noisy, overpriced, minimally-dimensioned concrete box of 93 m². The view was great though.

“The imagination is not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images that go beyond reality, which sing reality.” 13

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard states that “[t]he individual is not the sum of his common impressions but of his unusual ones.”14 In a time of rapid mass consumption, it is hard not to think that we are desensitised to extraordinary or unusual

impressions; they seem to drown in the fast paced succesion of pictures on our Instagram feeds, to get blurred behind the lenses of our smartphone cameras and to disappear amidst other items in our cramped itineraries. For the student of architecture, a visit to an iconic work of architecture might only result in a scanning of the purely formal properties of the work, when in fact the purpose of the trip had been to internalise the architectural image (understood as the entirety of the spatial experience) in the hope of learning from it. It seems that we must actively choose to immerse ourselves thoroughly in these experiences by investing our most precious resource: time.

“There are […] images that stem directly from matter. The eye assigns them names, but only the hand truly knows them. A dynamic joy touches, moulds, and refines them. When forms, mere perishable forms and vain images – perpetual change of surfaces – are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight; they constitute a heart.” 15

Gaston Bachelard

Dusk

In Greek mythology the Titaness Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses, deities of the arts and sciences 16. Of course, in an ancient society weaved together by myths and oral culture, memory was revered as a crucial skill in order to pass down knowledge from generation to generation. Thus, memory, art and science was closely intertwined, and the narrators of the great epics often invoked the goddess to help them recall all of the details of the recitations. When divine aid failed, certain mnemonic techniques were used instead, but Roman rhetorician Quintilian also stated: “It is a curious fact, of which the reason is not obvious, that the interval of a single night will greatly increase the strength of the memory.” 17 However, where ancient reason failed to explain this curious fact , can modern neuroscience succed?

One of the most important discoveries in sleep research was made in 1952. Eugene Aserinsky and Nathanial Kleitman of the University of Chicago discovered that there were periods of sleep when the eyes would dart from side to side. These phases were accompanied by very active brainwaves – almost like those of an awake person. In between were moments of no ocular activity, where the brainwaves oscillated slowly and regularly. They named the two types of slumber Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) respectively. 18

“Each night, the long-range brainwaves of deep sleep will move memory packets (recent experiences) from a short-term storage site, which is fragile, to a more permanent, and thus safer, long-term storage location. We therefore consider waking brainwave activity as that principally concerned with the reception of

the outside sensory world, while the state of deep NREM slow-wave sleep donates a state of inward reflection – one that fosters information transfer and the distillation of memories.” 19

Matthew Walker

In my gymnasium, we had a student counselor, which none of us particularly liked. I think it was her unwavering cheerfulness which didn’t really resonate with our own dark, teenage moods. In the period before exams, she went from classroom to classroom and gave us advice as to how to tackle stress and do well. One particularly ridiculous advice was not to study the night before an exam, but watch Bridget Jones’ Diary (or a similar film) instead. It was a recurring joke for the rest of my school years. I now know that she was right, perhaps not in her taste in cinema, but in the idea of relaxing and having a good night’s sleep as an integral part of preparation.

The stages of sleep can be illustrated by a hypnogram, showing the 90-minute cycles of sleep that we pass through every night. The majority of our deep NREM sleep takes place during the early hours of the night, while we experience much more of the dream-laden REM sleep in the morning hours.

The orators of classical Rome popularised a technique called the Method of Loci. It utilises the fact that human memory are wired to remember and recognise (architectural) spaces, possibly stemming from our primal need to find our way home. In recent times, the technique has been popularised by the television series ‘Sherlock’ in which the protagonist stores vast troves of information in a mental Memory Palace,

which he can access when needed. Briefly put, the Method of Loci/Memory Palace Technique takes advantage of our superior spatial memory; by mentally placing the object to be remembered along a well-known route or sequence of spaces, they can be easily recalled by visualising the spaces again. This is indeed the preferred technique of the winners of the World Memory Championship 20, who in one of the regular events must memorise the order of a deck of randomly shuffled playing cards as fast as possible. The current record is a staggering 12.74 seconds. But even though we live in a time where memory has become a sport, are we slowly losing our essential memory skills?

German psychologist Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a pioneer in the scientific study of memory, emancipating

The Architecture of Sleep

psychology as a distinct subject, instead of being considered a subset to philosophy. 21 Ebbinghaus introduced both the

infamous “learning curve”, but also the “forgetting curve”, which illustrates the pace at which we forget things over time. He showed how repetition of the items (in most cases arbitrary three-letter syllables with no meaning) within a very short time span, i.e. on the same day, would dramatically improve the recollection of the items even weeks after the initial commitment to memory. The ability to remember was also improved when the subject had had a night of uninterrupted sleep, and recent neurophysiological research has indeed shown the dramatic effects a good night’s sleep has on our memory and our ability to learn.

Today, it seems, our individual and collective memories are under threat. The recent focus on fake news in the wake of the inauguration of American President Donald Trump has shown how much our memories – and consequently our perceptions of reality – are being manipulated. Through rapid bombardment of app notifications and flashing headlines, we are imprinted with unreliable information, and our own cognitive defence mechanisms are bypassed. Paul Virilio, in his essay ‘The Third Interval’, talks about the subject of this instantanousness and the inherent paradoxes: “ Meeting at a distance , in other words, being telepresent , here and elsewhere, at the same time , in this so-called ‘real time’ which is, however, nothing but at kind of real space-time, since the different events do indeed take place, even if that place is in the end the no-place of teletopical techniques.” 22 Seen in the light of the essential connection between memory and architectural space, the prospect of this instantenous atopia is surely a grim vision for the future of our memories.

The Danish word for a remembrance or recollection is erindring. The etymological root of the word is the German Erinnerung, which derives from innaro, the inner, and was first used in its present form by Goethe.23 Erinnerung describes the act of making something internal or internalising

something, supporting the idea that our memory should be viewed as something corporeal, something which is not only accessible through rational thought but actually involves the totality of our senses.

When traveling, I always bring tools for sketching. A notebook with nice, sturdy pages. A rudimentary pencilcase: a few pencils, a small ruler, an eraser, a sharpener. If I’m away for a longer time, I expand my toolkit with water colours, just a dozen different pigments in a small case and two brushes. The best part of using water colours is the time, the patience that it demands. Sometimes I ruin a drawing by mixing in another colour too soon. But still, the act of waiting means that I stop looking and start seeing. When I close my eyes, I can effortlessly recall some images to my mind’s eye – those I have drawn, painted, and stared at for hours on end.

“NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography.” 24

Matthew Walker

Currently, it seems, architects spend less and less time “listening” to these embodied images. Time is money, says the old idiom, but one could go so far as to say that time has now surpassed money to become the most valuable currency, one we must spend very carefully. But it takes

time to remember, to reflect and to consider. Sadly, the privilige of taking our time about something seems to have become a luxury. It is faster to flick together a Pinterest Board with inspirational pictures of visually stunning architecture (built or unbuilt, the pictures are identical). Of course communication through images is a premise in our digital age, but my postulate is that the immediate and unchallenging gratification of a beautiful (digital) picture short circuits the underlying process of creation/making, which in the end is where the (architectural) substance is found. Paul Virilio states that “we are seeing the beginnings of a ‘ generalized arrival ’ whereby everything arrives without having to leave, the nineteenth century’s elimination of the journey (that is, of the space interval and of time) combining with the abolition of departure at the end of the twentieth, the journey thereby losing its successive components and being overtaken by arrival alone.” 25 Then it must be the deliberate journey towards learning that internalises memories, images and makes us commit new things to memory in a continuous process? We experience, we learn and we remember.

Exporative

Drawing #01: Reveries on form, spaces and atmospheres.

“Sleep provides a nighttime theater in which your brain tests out and builds connections between vast stores of information. This task is accomplished using a bizarre algorithm that is biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious associations. […] The sleeping brain fuses together disparate sets of knowledge that foster impressive problem-solving abilities.” 26

Matthew Walker

We can use the allegory of a telescope to describe the difference between our awake and dreaming state: every day, we look through the narrowing end of the lens, not able to capture the cosmos of our memories – but in the dream state, we can apprehend the full constellation of information. 27

In the context of architectural design, the notion of the dream is ever-present, often synonomous with creativity and imagination. Architects ‘dream up’ spaces that didn’t exist to begin with. But research into actual dreams, the one we have when we are asleep, shows that everything we experience while sleeping is rooted in already existing memories, sensations and emotions. Novel ideas stem from new connections being made between preexisting nodes of information, or more dogmatically put: nothing comes from nothing. Perhaps architects should embrace dreaming as a tool in our design toolkit. What use is it to stay up all night scratching your head over a plan drawing

that just won’t come together, when a good night’s sleep might actually make you see things in a different light in the morning? Some times reasonable thoughts just don’t cut it – although who can be said to be reasonable after 4 am? As Gaston Bachelard puts it: “Dreams come before contemplation. Before becoming a conscious sight, every landscape is an oneiric experience. Only those scenes that have already appeared in dreams can be viewed with an aesthetic passion.” 28 The world of dreams is strange, chaotic and refreshingly unknown.

“[W]ithin artistic practice, the possibility of producing something new is not always about the conversion of the now known towards new knowledge, but rather involves the aspiration to retain something of the unknown within what is produced.” 29

Emma Cocker

Research Poster #03: Sleep and Memory

”Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs have all been comprehensively distorted by modernity. […]Midnight is no longer ‘mid night.’ For many of us, midnight is usually the time when we consider checking our email one last time - and we know what often happens in the protracted thereafter.” 30

Matthew Walker

The signals of night and day, and of when to sleep and when to be awake, is communcated by the hormonal messenger melatonin. But melatonin does not generate sleep itself; it only tells the sleep-inducing parts of the brain to get ready. The chemical responsible for ‘sleep pressure’ is called adenosine. It builds up through all of our waking hours, until we must finally succumb to slumber – unless we drink caffeine, which blocks the adenosine receptors in the brain, warding off the natural urge to sleep. 31

My bedroom is also my living room, my dressing room, my atelier and my office. It is the only space that I can call my own, where I can close the door and shut out everyone else. Almost everyone I know lives in these conditions. It has been like this since I was a kid. But the bed has always been the cornerstone of the room, the first thing to get in order every time I moved. I sleep in it, read in it, bingewatch movies in it, have sex in it, eat in it, nap in it, jump in it, work in it, play games in it, take phone calls in it, sort my newly-washed clothes in it.

“In what is probably now a conservative estimate, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2012 that 80 percent of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed.” 32

Beatriz Colomina

The bed—and indeed the space around it—has always been multifunctional. Ever since it was separated from the halls of medieval dwellings, it also served as a private area for dressing, a quiet room to read or write, a place to have sex. Today, in a time when modern housing is built to standards defined by the minimally acceptable, the functionality of the bedroom keeps expanding. Laptops and smartphones makes it possible for many professionals to work horisontally, or just sitting in bed. The question is whether this is really happening because it has become the only viable option? Patrick Schumacher, head of Zaha Hadid Architects, has recently stated that “for many young professionals who are out and about networking 24/7, a small, clean, private hotel room-sized central patch serves their needs perfectly well”.33 The minimum space requirement for a one-bedroom flat in the UK is currently 37 m².

Sometimes, I hate my bed. If I’ve been ill for a couple of days, bedridden, it feels like a 4 m² prison with invisible walls. Everything is too hot. Oversaturated. I have to get up, shake the duvets and pillows and make the bed again. Then I wait for it to cool down before I climb in again.

Adolf Loos’ bedroom for his wife.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-in For Peace. Amsterdam, March 25, 1969.

My Bed, Tracey Emin. 1998.

Sleep and his Half-brother Death

The Dream (The Bed), Frida Kahlo, 1940.

, John William Waterhouse, 1874.

Still from Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli. 1968.

Hugh Hefner In Bed. Burt Green, Magnum Pictures, 1966

Hugh Hefner In Bed. Playboy Enterprises International Inc.

Richard Neutra’s Bedroom in the Van Der Leeuw Research House.

Sometimes, I love my bed. Slipping under the covers and feeling the chill from the fabric. Lying in the silence of the night, the bright light of the full moon shining on my wall. The feeling of tiredness is the best, the knowledge that I will be asleep before I know it.

The Dream (Cropped), Henri Rousseau, 1897.

Etching from Le Belle au bois Dormant, Charles Perrault, 1697.

Noon - Rest after Work (After Millet), Vincent Van Gogh. 1980.

“Sadly, human beings are in fact the only species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep without legitimate gain. Every component of wellness, and countless seams of societal fabric, are being eroded by our costly state of sleep neglect: human and financial alike. So much so that the World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a sleep loss epidemic throughout industrialized nations.” 34

Matthew Walker

Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Such is one of the 12 recommendations for a better sleep put forth by the National Sleep Foundation. 35 Blue light from LED bulbs and screens fool the brain into postponing the natural onset of sleep, while a warm temperature will prevent the body from cooling down effectively. Irregular noises, small blinking lights from devices and the view of a clock can also be prohibitive to a good night’s sleep.

“Industrialization brought with it the eight-hour shift and the radical separation between the home and the office or factory, between rest and work, night and day. Post-industrialization collapses work back into the home and takes it further into the bedroom and into the bed itself. Phantasmagoria no longer line the room in wallpaper, fabric, images, and objects. It is now

within electronic devices. The whole universe is concentrated on a small screen with the bed floating in an infinite sea of information.” 36

Beatriz Colomina ’

It seems the bedroom is suffering the same fate as the kitchen. From being a separate area, where the messy procedure of cooking was hidden away from the guests in the dining room, the kitchen has been absorbed into the undefinable space of the living-sitting-dining-room. And why not, since we spend less and less time actually cooking? In the same way the threshold between sleeping space and living space is disappearing. As previously elaborated, we suffer in terms of sleep duration and quality—the detriments of which are bad enough by themselves—but one could argue that this dissolution of spaces affects us in many other ways. When Hugh Hefner turns his bed into a workstation, he becomes “a sex-worker in the end,” as Beatriz Colomina puts it. 37 In litterature and art, the secluded and private domain of the bedroom has always been synonomous with the erotic. What happens to this image, when the bed is also where you eat, where you watch TV, where you work? In a modern, fast-paced world, the monofunctionality of the bedroom has the potential to be the only everyday space wherein we disconnect, relax and unwind. A realm, where we are perhaps more in touch with our subconscious selves, our thoughts, our desires, our dreams.

“For the artist, to prepare for the unexpected has a dual function. It is the gesture of developing a readiness (for anything), a state of being at the cusp of action, mind and body poised. It is also an act of scarifying the ground, an attempt to create the germinal conditions within which something unanticipated might arise.” 38

Emma Cocker

I often get a little annoyed when I am having a discussion with somebody and they look the matter up on Wikipedia. Knowing the actual facts ruins the fun of wild speculation.

In her essay ”Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected”, artist Emma Cocker discusses the creative power inherent in the state of not knowing. She notes how we are culturally conditioned to append value to that which is measureable and quantifiable, so much so that “ one’s capacity for not knowing might need to be practiced, rehearsed or relearnt ” 39 . Especially because the sensation of being unknowledgeable or stupid is indeed an uncomfortable one. Some modern artists, most famously the surrealist movement, experimented with numerous techniques to create a condition of not knowing the outcome and moving away from a methodology defined by teleological thought.

“For the artist, the question perhaps is how the experience of not knowing can lead towards new lines of flight, conceived as new forms of invention and intervention within reality, rather than performed as an escape from it. Not knowing is not experience stripped clean of knowledge, but a mode of thinking where knowledge is put into question, made restless or unsure.”40

Emma Cocker

Inventor Thomas Edison was a frequent user of what he termed ‘the genius nap’. He would intricately position himself holding two steel ball bearings in his hand above a saucepan. “ At the moment he began to dream, his muscle tone would relax and he would release the ball bearings, which would crash on the metal saucepan below, waking him up. He would then write down all of the creative ideas that were flooding his dreaming mind.” 41 It seems Edison had figured out a manner in which he could exploit the creative potential of his subconscious dream through napping.

Research into this essay, I realised that I probably wasn’t sleeping as much as I should. I was getting seven hours per night on average and a little more on the weekends. At the same time, I felt like I hadn’t really had any dreams for a long time (at least not any I could remember). I decided to give myself the opportunity to sleep an hour more every morning. In the beginning, I just woke up at 6:30 as I was used to, but I forced myself to stay in bed, eventually sleeping for longer. After a while the most magical thing happened – I started dreaming again, every night. It turns out that by limiting my sleep time to 7 hours, I had “cut

Explorative Drawing #02: Reveries on site, circadian rhythms and water.

away” the last cycle of REM sleep. At least that’s what I believe happened. I am just happy to have my dreams back.

“As we enter REM sleep and dreaming takes hold, an inspired form of memory mixology begins to occur. No longer are we constrained to see the most typical and plainly obvious connections between memory units. On the contrary, the brain becomes actively biased toward seeking out the most distant, nonobvious links between sets of information.”42

Matthew Walker

How does one attempt to utilise reveries, dreams and not knowing as a design method? In the scope of this essay, it is an unanswerable question. Ultimately, it can be condensed to a matter of openness and receptivity, a practice of continuously challenging what is known, but also working slowly and deliberately. In architectural design, that might mean working more directly with materials and their phenomenological qualities. Undoubtedly, draughting architecture by the use of computer-aided design changes what and how we create. The digital space has a limitless potential in terms of form, but it is also scaleless and devoid of materials. Perhaps the advent of virtual reality technologies can change this? If one can wear goggles to see digital models in space, why not gloves with haptic

feedback, that allow us to touch? Could a future gadget allow us to hear the creaking of the timber, feel the grain in the concrete or feel the wind on our skin? And would we then start to internalise these non-existing digital simulations?

Pallasmaa’s notion of embodied images suggests that we must take our time to internalise and memorise significant spatialities. The more we do so, we can hope to encounter them again. Perhaps they emerge in our dreams when we are fast asleep, or occur when we are lost in reverie.

“For being is before all else an awakening, and it awakens in the awareness of an extraordinary impression. The individual is not the sum of his common impressions, but of his unusual ones.”43

Gaston Bachelard

Notes

References

Bibliography

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Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture . AD Primers. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2011.

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Web

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References

Images

Bed-in For Peace. Black and white photograph. Amsterdam, March 25, 1969.

Bedroom for Lina Loos. Black and white photograph. Photographer and date unknown.

The Dream (The Bed). Frida Kahlo. 1940.

The Dream. Henri Rousseau. 1897.

Etching from Le Belle au bois Dormant, Charles Perrault. 1697. Explorative Drawings #01-02, Rune Wriedt. 2019.

Hugh Hefner In Bed. Color photograph. Burt Green. Magnum Pictures. 1966

Hugh Hefner In Bed. Black and white potograph. Playboy EnterprisesInternational Inc. Date unknown.

My Bed. Photograph of installation. Tracey Emin. 1998. Noon - Rest after Work (After Millet). Vincent Van Gogh. 1980. Research Posters #01-04. Rune Wriedt. 2019.

Richard Neutra’s Bedroom in the Van Der Leeuw Research House. Black and white photograph. Photographer and date unknown.

Sleep and his Half-brother Death. John William Waterhouse. 1874.

Sleep diagrams. Figures from Why We Sleep. Matthew Walker. 2017.

Standard Bed Sizes. Ernst and Peter Neufert. 1936/2000. Still from Romeo and Juliet. Franco Zeffirelli. 1968.