Excerpt from: Architecture Beyond Experience by Michael Benedikt

ARCHITECTURE BEYOND EXPERIENCE MICHAEL BENEDIKT Hal Box Chair in Urbanism The University of Texas at Austin

Applied Research + Design Publishing San Francisco | Los Angeles | New York | Hong Kong 2020

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

Dedicated to my wife and muse, AmĂŠlie Frost Benedikt, and to students of architecture everywhere.

Published by Applied Research and Design Publishing, an imprint of ORO Editions.

Gordon Goff: Publisher www.appliedresearchanddesign.com info@appliedresearchanddesign.com Copyright © 2020 Michael Benedikt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Author: Michael Benedikt Book Design: Tenderling Design Project Manager: Jake Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-943532-89-6 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China.

AR+D Publishing makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications.

As part of this goal, AR+D, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations.

Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.

Cover image: Green Sea Turtle at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. Photo by author. See page 23.

CONTENTS Introduction

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PART ONE Locating the Sacred

1 Tetsugen

1

2 Sacred Space

2

3 From Spirituality to Solipsism

4

4 Solipsism Succeeds

7

5 Solipsism’s Expression in Architecture: Experientialism

13

6 The Buddhist Solution?

17

7 Martin Buber and I-You

21

8 Michael Graziano: Consciousness is Social

31

PART TWO The Fabric of Glances

9 The Story of Architecture

37

10 A Critique of Environment & Behavior Studies

40

11 Two Ways of Thinking About Architecture Relationally

43

12 The Social Logic of Space

57

13 From Optic Arrays to Isovists

65

14 From Isovist Fields to the Fabric of Glances

79

15 Presence Fields and the Order of Shoulders

91

16 Formations

97

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

23 Learning from Lou

195

24 Toward Architecture in the Second Person

222

25 Coda: Three Short Takes

248

Footnotes

261

177

Glossary

302

Acknowledgments

308

310

Image Credits

INTRODUCTION

I

INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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STRUCTURALLY, THE BOOK is divided into three parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 Solution? 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.

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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

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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.

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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”.

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

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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.”

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