Architecture is a Verb

Sarah Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000342659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Architecture is a Verb outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice in several important ways. First, it acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment. Second, it understands human action in terms of radical embodiment—grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition: imagining, thinking, remembering—in the body. Third, it asks what a building does —that is, extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, how they shape thought and action. Finally, it is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human/building interactions.

Written in engaging prose for students of architecture, interiors and urban design, as well as practicing professionals, Sarah Robinson offers richly illustrated practical examples for a new generation of designers.

1
Situated Poetics

Where are you right now? At this very moment, what do you touch, smell, taste, hear and see? Are the sounds around you distracting or pleasing? What about the light? Is it soft or harsh? And the air? Is it moving or is it stale? Do you want to breathe it, to bring it inside your body? How you are has very much to do with where you are and with the particularities of your situation. This is so obvious that we take it for granted—but let us pause for a moment to notice what is so very ordinary. Consider the daily experience of light: the light that makes its way through your window not only warms your skin, it expands the space around you, making both it and you feel a little larger. The light shifts your mood and regulates your hormone levels, tuning your body to seasonal and cosmic rhythms. The light not only enters your space, it enters your imagination, unveiling the hidden, inviting you to trace its path. Without your awareness, your mind begins to fill in the shadows the light has brought newly into relief. The light carries your mind along with it, tugging your attention towards the opening, tempting you to seek the source of this sure and quiet power. In this instance, is it clear where your mind is? Is it in your body, in the window or travelling along with the light? What is outside and what is in? Is it clear where you end and the world begins?

When asked where the mind is, the philosopher John Dewey said if he had to locate it anywhere, he would locate it in the situation.¹ And he used this word in its original sense. The verb situate is rooted in the words ‘to settle, to dwell, to be at home.’ If it seems difficult to imagine your mind being situated in a place that is technically on the other side of your skin, think for a moment again about where you are sited at this moment—your position, your posture. The way you are seated right now releases a cascade of physiological shifts in your body; every gesture has its chemical signature that conditions how you feel. And how you feel influences how you think, directs what you notice and ultimately contributes to what you do. So, again, is your mind located in your skull, in the nervous bundle housed inside your spinal cord, in the arch of your posture, in the back of the chair that supports that arch, in the ground that supports the chair—or does it thread through all of these?

Something as simple as experiencing light or positioning your body has important implications for design, whose full import requires that we “not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small,”² as Virginia Woolf insisted. To fully acknowledge the untapped potential of what is so seemingly humble and patently mundane means reevaluating what is appropriate to the enduring practice of architecture. All of our actions are interactions. Our actions do not take place in isolation but are influenced and modulated by our situation. “The use of typical situations as a primary vehicle of design is a new departure towards an approach that may be best described as situational or as a new poetics of architecture,” wrote Dalibor Vesely. And the proposition of using typical situations as the basis of a new design approach is more remarkable than it might initially seem. We now know that our movements and postures shape the way we think and feel, and that these movements are afforded by concrete situations. Changing the variables of the situation means changing our possible movements and actions. If each of our movements elicits subtle but cumulative shifts and gauges the way we engage in our lives, imagine the impact that the compounding of those changes might have on our moods, behaviours and cultural habits. Our buildings structure, choreograph and sediment our actions to materialise our collective cultural values and social practices. Yet we architects, intoxicated with our grand schemes and over-arching plans, have missed the radical potential of what is commonly thought small.

Almost 20 years ago, Vesely clearly articulated the corrective to this neglect: “Restoring the practical nature of situations as a primary vehicle of design enables us to move away from inconclusive play with abstract form and functions.”³ This directive subjects the broadly misinterpreted dictum ‘form follows function’ to a new level of rigour. Once detached from the concrete fabric of practical life, form was hollowed of meaning and fetishised as an end in itself while function was split from its raison-d’être in the body and relegated to the domain of technological manipulation. Architects’ fascination with games of abstraction is symptomatic of the same conceptual errors that mired disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences in fruitless debates pitting mind over matter and nature versus nurture. Yet such disputes have since been laid to rest. New insights in the cognitive and neurosciences have collapsed the lines traditionally drawn between the natural sciences and the humanities, grounding them both in “corporeal matters of fact.”⁴ Finally giving the body its due has shifted the worn ‘I think, therefore I am’ that privileged the mind over the body to the engaged ‘I can, therefore I am’—locating intelligence in the mutual interaction between body, mind and world. Restoring the practical nature of situations means coming to terms with the full implications of the fact that “inhabited space transcends geometric space,”⁵ as Bachelard insisted. The space beyond our skin is a field of possibility—tempered and conditioned by the possibilities it affords for action. Indeed, architectural space is the matrix of situated human action long before it is structured geometrically. It is finally time to accept that architecture is not merely a testing ground for novel forms or arbitrary theories but is and has always been the very fabric of human becoming.

Architecture’s Resistance

Though its humanist role has been obscured over the course of the last two centuries, in the long haul of human development, architecture has undoubtedly served as the topological and corporeal ground of interpersonal, cultural and social practices. Here again, let us consider what is most mundane, what is most common to human experience: we are born of the body and we are born incomplete. The fact that the way we move—that we walk upright—had the combined cause and consequence that we are born before we are physiologically prepared and so must complete the last quarter of our gestation outside the womb. Our utter dependence on our surroundings is without parallel in the natural world: most mammals can run, walk and swim within hours of their arrival into the world. While they are protected from their surroundings through the thickness of their skin, our very survival depends on the receptivity and fragility of ours. Our nervous system wraps us outside and in, and our life depends on the sensitivity and integrity of the succession of envelopes in which we are surrounded. This nascent vulnerability—the fact that we simply cannot exist outside a constructed envelope—is, at the same time, the very reason that we have become human in the first place. We become human only in the arms of another. Whether held by human arms or the support of an incubator, human life develops in the nested interactions that take place in a succession of constructed envelopes. To say that we have coevolved with our buildings is to grossly understate the deeply intertwined, developmental nature of our transactions with our surroundings. We are who we are because of the innumerable ways we have mutually shaped and interacted with our dwellings. And I do not mean this in a strictly functional sense—our very existence has depended upon extending ourselves not only physiologically, but also psychologically and socially through the medium of our constructed habitat.

Recognising the profound role that environmental factors play in shaping cognition is the major catalyst bridging disciplines whose knowledge bases were formerly opposed. This research is critically relevant to architectural practice, especially since it is our business to structure the environment in which we now spend 95 percent of our lives—the built environment. And our unique position between the natural sciences and humanities makes it all the more opportune. After all, our position between disciplines underlies our long-standing habit of uncritically adapting theories to suit our needs regardless of the sources or nature of the knowledge. So, it is particularly puzzling why architects have been so slow to integrate this new knowledge base which is actually directly relevant—and potentially revolutionising—to our practice. Perhaps this resistance stems from two interrelated sources that both have to do with architecture’s unique capacity to integrate different dimensions of human experience.

At its most profound level, the character of architecture—like that of matter itself—is resistance. Most of the habits of our daily life, which architecture structures and activates, take place at a preconscious level. We take these mundane practicalities for granted. Habit “wears grooves,” as Dewey put it, freeing our energies for other pursuits. These patterns of living are deeply resistant to change because they have very concretely shaped who we are. Neither our bodies nor our buildings are merely the accumulation of building blocks, whether we call them cells or bricks, but the dynamic concretion of kinaesthetic capacities and performances. The astronauts of NASA, when freed from the constraints of gravity, still insist on eating around a table, even though food floats from their plates. This configuration stabilises not only their body, but their mental state. This pattern of activity has shaped our body and our appetites and cemented our relationships. Our deep evolutionary history freshly awakens in the present every time we enjoy a meal. “In every culture a series of things is taken for granted and lies fully beyond explicit consciousness of anyone,” writes Hans Georg Gadamer, “even the greatest dissolution of traditional forms, mores, customs, the degree to which things held in common still determine everyone is only more concealed.”⁶ We are largely unaware of our interdependence with our environment for the same reasons that other animals are unaware of theirs—because it operates unconsciously as our extended body. The importance of that which is most vital is disclosed by the fact that it is very literally overlooked. We tend not to notice the mesh that supports us until it is ruptured, just as we do not appreciate the background of good health until we fall ill. The colloquialism ‘to fall ill’ is very revealing in this regard; we fall from our tacit means of support.

The Possibility of an Integrated Approach

Yet, this richly embodied embedded experience, the formative process of daily life that both gives rise to buildings and is then shaped by them, is not recognised much less attended to because the intentions of architecture are oriented elsewhere. The narrowed contemporary vision of architecture as a profession positioned within and judged according to the criteria of technical disciplines is unequipped to deal with such humble realities. I use the word humble here in its etymological sense, as it derives from humus and its shared origins in the words soil, human and humour. This loss of humanity has gradually eroded the practice of architecture to the extent that we are now calling for a ‘human-centred’ architecture. If human beings are not the central interest of our practice, then who—or better, what—is the flash dance of vanity, the production of commodity, the ceaseless fodder that must feed the capitalist machine? We all seem to agree, as Vesely did, “that the goal of architecture is life,”⁷ but we fail to fully understood that technology and instrumental rationality are only a means—a means which determines the specific ends which can be effected. Our quasi-religious belief that technology will ultimately save us mistakenly assumes that modern society can and will undergo a technological transformation in toto. This totalising vision does not recognise that different levels of reality undergo different rates of change commensurate to their evolutionary histories and constitutions. We assume the wholesale adaptation to the levelling imperatives of technological progress without acknowledging that such means and methods operate on different strata of consciousness at varying rates and in differing ways. Deeply embedded and slowly accreted cultural habits and practices are immune to transformation through technological means alone. The crux of the problem, as Vesely explains, is this:

That the articulation of cultural life is directly linked with conditions that remain relatively unchanged, while at the same time the path of culture that is open to technological transformation has changed radically, creates tension and eventually a deep void in the very heart o...