Lecture on Architectural Psychological Basis by Lenka

Architectural Psychological Basis of Architecture

INTRODUCTION • Mankind is unique, that’s what humans have always believed and followed though it might not be false too but if humans think they are unique compared to the other species existing on this planet earth, then they are liable to many things and have much more responsibilities on their shoulder for its well being & future generations. (e.g. Christian belief - everything was created of people, people and the nest creation) • In the same way an architect is liable to his / her creations which will be used, seen, breathed & lived in by its users for the present and the future.

• Architecture is a responsible profession. Choosing and deciding, where a morally correct choice presides over a more bene cial one. Architects need not to preach everywhere about their actions unnecessarily, but directly follow it into their everyday work. Ignoring to act, is like not following by your own rules which are somewhere unsaid and unwritten but they very much exist visibly or invisibly, in whatever way one may perceive it.

INTRODUCTION • Hans Jonas tries to explain that the aggressive barbarism of development and technology in the name of evolution is a looming threat over the earth and its other inhabitants, which the human race seems to have forgotten, or perhaps is least bothered about. Although it is a compelling responsibility of the Homo Sapiens to adhere to the laws of nature, their notorious tampering with the planet is a grave they are digging for themselves. • Architects have the power and should purposely play a key role in maintaining the coexistence of the planet and it’s all other users including us human beings together. Architecture begins with Art, but it is not as exible as art to a lot of extent. • For example we are free to listen the music we want, choose to see a drama or not see it at all, but once a building / structure is made it becomes the part of that area and helps to develop the character of the area. It is there for many years to come and also nobody can avoid it, one has to see it and affects the character of the area, even if they like it or not. Such big is the impact of architecture on our society. Therefore we architects need to understand the psychological & physical impacts of architecture.

• Architecture is a human science. All this chaos in and around the world, has its most tangible impact on the built environment. Buildings eventually are a re ection of the times that we are living in and they display these disparities right in your face. Design is a byproduct of the current happenings around us. Therefore, the design should be created by not only considering all the phycial reperucussions but also the psychological affects it will have on the place, people, users, nature, for the coming future generations.

Architecture is (applied) art. It is created for people to perceive and use it. Psychology, on the other hand, is the study of human experience and behavior. One of its branches is environmental psychology, which relates theenvironment to human experience and behavior. Today, the environment is primarily designed or at least inf luenced by people, and dominated in turn,by architecture. According to Evans and McCoy, we spend 90 percent of our time in architecture (Evans/McCoy 1998: 85), and the remaining ten percentalmost entirely in its immediate proximity.

Unlike the subject area of psychology, the subject area of architecture is tied to evaluation. Architecture is considered to be Baukunst - the art of building and construction. But who decides on the criteria of inclusion and exclusion in this case? Architecture as a discipline is much older than (scienti c psychology). And knowledge of human nature has always, varying in depth and thematic focus, been considered an expertise crucial to the design of architecture. The added value of architectural psychology in the interdisciplinary discourse is its scienti c content - methods, perspective.

Architecture conveys itself through perception and interaction. But to make this communicable in the sense of Latin communicare - to make common, share, bring to common use and re exible - in the sense of Latin animum re ectere - to turn the mind or the thougths back or away a language and sign system is required, a system that is preferably equally shared by all participants of communication and re ection, and that at best offers terms for all communicable and re exive contents.

Architecture is a form of human expression, portraying the psyche of the collective or individual designer. The father of analytical psychology Carl Jung describes a building architecture as a structural diagram of the human psyche that conceives and creates. It is an established fact that art and architecture offers a vehicle for conveying our deepest unconscious thoughts of human being.

CARL GUSTAF JUNG

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychotherapist and one of the early followers of Sigmund Freud. In the latter period, Jung developed major theoretical divergence and their personal and professional relationship was broken. Jung’s work has been in uential not only in the eld of psychology but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and religious studies. He talks about two kinds of unconscious in a human being: personal and collective. The collective unconscious carries a lot of ancestral memories, probably many common elements we see in all humans. He also talks about archetypes which are images and thoughts which have universal meanings across cultures which may show up in dreams, literature, art or religion. Jung believes symbols from different cultures are often very similar because they have emerged from archetypes shared by the whole human race.

CARL GUSTAF JUNG • Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) is essential for theory of architecture for his honesty, courage and intuition, by these characteristics he surpasses, as an architect must, the boundaries of academical science. The work with Jung is created by his answers to the challenges of society and challenges of the era. For us could be most inspirational - the problems of soul of a modern human: • „At the in uence of scienti c materialism, according to Jung, everything that could not be seen with our eyes and be touched by our hands, became questionable, had bad reputation, because it was suspicious for its metaphysics. The vertical of European spirit was intersected by horizontal of modern consciousness. This consciousness was not growing in the sense of height but in width, geographically and in global opinion.

• The substituting of metaphysics of spirit for metaphysics of matter, which happened in the 19th century, is intelectually a delusion. But psychologically, it means a revolution of global opinion: The whole world of then changed into the world of daily. Seemingly it seems to a naive reason all invisible (as for an architect - the space) and the inner becomes visibly outer and by so-called reality everything is de ned. (Jung, Základní problém současné psychologie, Atlantis 1994, str. 11-14).

• For concrete architecture, we can derive philosophy of psyche and spirit, which can be imagined as an epiphenomenon of space. De nite, concrete, not made-up, but matter-offact. Our general consciousness has grown in width and distance but only spatially, not temporarily, otherwise we would have had much more lively historical sense. • For concrete output we can use didactical knowledge, that the one that starts to sense Fromm and Jung by his spirit (psyche), can base their work-professional philosophy and consciousness of architecture as consiousness of epiphenomenon of space and consciousness of beauty, and also in gifts - honesty, equity, justice, courage, cautiousness, and believable obligatory work resilience. • To physical and naturalistic standpoint, all of the spirit (psyche, mythos…) - spirit of place genius loci, spirit of time - genius tempori and epiphenomenon - spirit of space merging of place, thing and time, occurs as an illusion, which is according to Jung an essential problem of nowadays psychology. According to this theory it is also a problem of contemporary architecture: • Architects prefer to work antagonistically - either - physis or spirit is the ideological standpoint.

• This way we can design in harmonic artistic way.

HANNAH ARENDT

Hannah Arendt was a humanist thinker who thought boldly and provocatively about our shared political and ethical world. Inspired by philosophy, she warned against the political dangers of philosophy to abstract and obfuscate the plurality and reality of our shared world. She ercely defended the importance of the public sphere, but she was also intensely private and defended the importance of privacy and solitude as prerequisites for a life in public. Embraced by liberals and conservatives, she also enraged and engaged interlocutors from all political persuasions.

HANNAH ARENDT • (1906 v Kaliningrad – 1975 New York) • In the Life of the Mind (I. díl, str. 31) she shows, what is the nite limit for living beings - is de ned by space as life expectations and the dimension of experiencing life. According to her - the Phenomena (also phenomenon of architecture) have to have reasons, that are not phenomena. • Based on Arendt’s thinking this is generalization of reason and way of how natural things for architecture grow for arché and as a phenomenon they enter our world form the dark origin. Only now, this origin is given more realness, then the things that only appear to us and vanish after time. According to Arendt, science will never answer this - how and why this or that is, because a scientist also belongs to the world of phenomena.

• For architecture it stands in the sense of criticism of only scienti c approach to this profession and the imagination of in nite progress, that was brought to light by functionalist ideological modernism.

• This principle of arché is according to Arendt modernism based theory and science has neglected it. According to Aristotle, we are missing a moment of surprise (wonder) - aporein, through which people realize their nescience of things and phenomena, that can be known. This way we can see the real and not only functionally practical physis, but also in the sense of thing the sense of arché-tecture, as a theme of psychologically spatially pictured art. • The phenomenon of architecture has to have a reason that is not a phenomenon, it then has to be factually understandable, although the transcendental object, the one we are intentionally interested in, of certain characteristics of type of building - and beyond things that are de ned by ction. The ction that feelings are led to one side and the seemingly objective scienti c physis on the other side.

• To be able to de ne the possibility of architectural subject, one needs to stand in the spirit of Arendt against the only functional and stienti c apparatus, that appears as a subject covered in outside, it is necessary to advance in opposite spirit - towards the spatially understandable inside, that only has veri ed function. The phenomenon of architecture based on the psychology of Jung, Fromm and Arendt has to ontologically mean something different than the building itself, but and a transcendental subject comes from the analogy of building to analogy of phenomena of things in this world.

HANNAH ARENDT

SPATIAL IMAGINATION • From another theoretical re ections derived from psychology there is productive imaginations, that are based of reproductive imagination. It comes from classical philosophy, in the sense of obtaining a time element. • In the word knowledge - (in the sense of know and get to know) the vision (in the sense of idein and from that to see and then know - to have seen) • In architecture we rst see and then we know. For architectural learning it means that all thinking comes from seeing and from haptic, frenetic experience. (Fronesis - practical wisdom, originally heart then mind, ratio) • At the same time, no experience itself is able to give us the sense of architecture. The psychological (spiritual) approach (spirit of place, time and space) is not limited by ctional ideas but is based on metaphors derived from the seen factual experience - from seeing, perceiving and we call it : • Spatial imagination

• This imagination is connected to the temporal perception of architecture - in the spirit of genius tempori it can make the absent present, to work with past but also with future, but only if the spirit of architecture becomes a not looking down phenomenon, which comes form it, and at the same time it turns away from the calling of present of the daily.

It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols, wisdom is a return to them. C.G. Jung

• Everybody is looking for happiness in life but also in professional life, there for every architect must on his intellectual way towards architecture go through this, so they can nd their professional happiness not built on marketing and business, to nd their own time and place. It is our choice where we want to go. • Architect should not only nd joy in material world, or in urbanism in desire for power, for money, for attraction, and sensical experience, but these things drive us away from our unconsciousness - architectural reality through the perception of unconsciousness. • In the moment when we dive into the world of archetypes - mythos and logos we enter the eld of unconsciousness. A human living only on the level of esh is usually dreaming in archetypes.

• A tree allegory - Tree must grow and become adult (just like ego of a human) in order to blossom (human psyche in enlightenment) and then bear fruit. (Also in professional life)

ARCHETYPES AND ARCHITECTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

ARCHETYPES AND ARCHITECTURAL PSYCHOLOGY • The consciousness of architecture is based on arché - archetypal unconsciousness, that a nowadays human looking for material and sensical experiences, hardly knows that exists. • People that we are supposed to work for as architects, are losing their natural roots and are often in insolvable con icts that we can see in their living on this earth - in housing - and with their personal issues, psychological instability and stress. • In the past, people regularly repeated archetypal rituals, which use was to connect with ones unconsciousness and to create support for daily consciousness and daily life.

• Archetypes are typical gures, motives, scenarios and existing knowledge, that allows us to safely go through our unconsciousness to truly understand and experience our real essence.

ARCHETYPES AND ARCHITECTURAL PSYCHOLOGY • Archetype is an inward or spiritual organ present in everyone of us and there is no rational substitute for it. • If archetype is not presented in a dream, it does not mean, that we do not have it in ourselves. • According to Jung, a human is born with a set of archetypes, set of patterns responsible for our experience and formalization of pictures emerging in our mind. Archetypes are saved in our unconsciousness and are not easy to imagine, because archetype is not a picture. The picture is a result of the work of the archetype.

Sources • http://www.apex1design.com/?page_id=48 • google.com • Prof. Hrůša’s lectures - translated to English • What is Architectural Psychology? - Alexandra Abel • Architectural Psychology - Prof. S.T. Janetius