An Assortment of Not-Rights

Here is my Lit Crit midterm paper because I did not exhaust my brainpower to not post it here.

Phenomenology, the Architectural Body, and Free Fall: How does Perception affect the Individual’s Relationship with a Space?

The architectural body perceives everything around it relative to itself- that is, as a designer, the purpose of the space around the body is only a suggestion to its use. Madeline Gins and Arakawa state, in Notes for an Architectural Body, that “The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined,” (68). The way we perceive varies from body to body; physically, where we stand impacts this. Visually and mentally, our life experiences denote the way a space creates an environment for the user, despite it being the same literal space. Borders blur based on the individual and their lives within the room, and this idea can be attributed to the concept of phenomenology. 

Phenomenology can be attributed to a variety of philosophers, and varying definitions circulate. Two particular views that are relevant to this idea of the architectural body are Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s philosophies. Martin Heidegger, through phenomenology, explores the idea that the way we interpret the instances in our lives is with reference to the world around us. The breakdown of our experiences are a product of the exterior world. Merleau-Ponty claims that perception is emphasized through human interaction and experience – this is the opposite of Heidegger’s view, being that our view of the exterior world is a result of our experiences. However, both are true. Perception is circulation, ricocheting back and forth between one another to create an experiential bubble that we travel within throughout our lives. And so, a comprehensive definition, and somewhat more modern: “Phenomenology … the ultimate source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings,” is stated by Paul B. Armstrong in the Johns Hopkins Guide for Literary Theory and Criticism entry. He elaborates: “Language and interpretation are not stable, closed systems for phenomenology, because meaning, like experience, is endlessly open to new developments.” This ties into architecture, directly, in that despite it being a way of housing and visual beauty, architecture, when stripped to its essence, is a study on perception and the movement of a body through a space through circulation: the architectural promenade. 

Architecture can be taken very literally. This is where the boundary starts, and there is where the boundary ends; these all happen to be man-made concepts, and thus the user is given control of where a boundary starts and ends, or perhaps even nature (i.e. rain creates mud, blurring a border). The only constant would be our body, moving through space. Arakawa and Gins, thus, through the idea of boundaries, explores the idea of experience and, more importantly, choice. 

The process of perception can be observed through a particular concrete activity: free fall(ing). Hito Steyerl, in her lecture In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, uses freefall to explain that it is the only place that allows a defiance of gravity. The vacuum of air in which you fall through becomes void of bias through an artificial feeling of stability through an ever changing landscape. 

“As you are falling, your sense of orientation may start to play additional tricks on you. The horizon quivers in a maze of collapsing lines and you may lose any sense of above and below, of before and after, of yourself and your boundaries… This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon. And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space.” (Steyerl).

In those initial moments of free fall, we are free from the physical effects of the Earth – feeling the fall, the pull of the ground – and find ourselves in this limbo state (despite the fact that we are actually falling), where the “horizon line” becomes an ever changing entity as you lose sense of direction. It could be above us, as if we are falling upwards to the horizon, and this line, infinitely changing, brings us to choose where the horizon is, and what direction we are falling, regardless of the actual horizon being something predetermined. “All that emanates from a person as she projects and reads an architectural surround forms an architectural body that moves with her, changing form depending on the positions she consumes. A person’s capacity to perform actions is keyed to layout and composition of her architectural body,” meaning that our position is what determines a position for a structure, and thus every structure is different to the observer. 

Real world implications can be derived from Hito Steyerl’s lecture, and that is that through our varying perceptions can also come a method of manipulation. She explains that “while all these developments can be described as typical characteristics of modernity, the past few years has seen visual culture saturated by military and entertainment images’ views from above.” Taking satellite imagery as an example, due to its political implication as an example, the horizon line’s meaning changes from where the photo is taken. Satellite images are taken from the bird’s eye view, which was established on scientific and geographical purposes, but when military surveillance photos of certain locations are revealed (and not images of any other sort) the lack of elevations, horizon line, or changing structural elements, becomes dehumanizing whether or not it is intentional. We become indifferent to the plights of the land displayed. Another reaction could be uneasiness, being conditioned to the connection of the military and the specific style of imagery. The use of perception to manipulate the purpose of a space and image becomes related to the idea of a free fall in its use of the horizon (or lack thereof).

Diller Scofidio and Renfro are a firm that often play with theatrical lighting and dramatic installations in a space to emphasize phenomenology’s implication in architecture. Deep Blue Sea is a performance, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, performed in a visual environment created by DS+R to connect text from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. using video and lighting, the stage becomes an immense, immersive screen. The Vulture comments on DS+R’s presence in this piece: 

“The visual metaphor twists in your mind, sometimes menacing, sometimes gentle. Does the spotdark represent a moment of privacy in this operating-theater brightness? Or is it like a shadow of an unseen boulder, just before it hits? Whenever the spotlight toggles to circular shadow, the now-unseen Jones starts speaking forward, quoting from Moby-Dick.” 

The piece is performed in Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall, which itself is an enormous hall, but the use of lighting, the blurring of borders, creates an infinite nature to the space – where does it start? Where does it end? Through this, we are truly centered in space. Arguably, the eyes are most integral to perception – light from the sun connects with our cornea to create colors and shadows, a powerhouse of feeling, an establisher of memory. Of course, hearing, touch, and smell are important – to someone blind or visually impaired, even more so (their perception is rewired for their phenomenology). The Deep Blue Sea becomes reminiscent of a ‘rule’ by Gins and Arakawa: “If organisms form themselves as a person by uptaking the environment, then they involve not only bodies but domains, spheres of activity and influence.” Through the art of dance and congregation, the collective phenomenology, or experiential message, is emanating throughout the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall, with DS+R’s theatrics as an additive feature, echoing the dancers’ movements. Light, an intangible object, becomes something of essence through human creation. 

Chaotically but not lacking in organicism, perception can be tied together through products of human creativity and the science present in nature, and even through the human desire to understand what makes us exist (in a space, or even to live). To try to decode it is why we try to take in knowledge, and in a more simpler, specific bracket, why the body is the center of a spatial experience [and not the designed space], is why we are.

Works Cited

“Deep Blue Sea.” DS+R, dsrny.com/project/deep-blue-sea. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.

Gins, Madeline, and Shūsaku Arakawa. Architectural Body. Univ. of Alabama Press, 2002.

Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Shaw, Helen. “Bill T. Jones’s Deep Blue Sea Includes Everything and the Kitchen Sink.” Vulture, Vulture, 30 Sept. 2021, http://www.vulture.com/2021/09/dance-review-bill-t-joness-deep-blue-sea-at-the-armory.html.

Steyerl, Hito. “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” Journal #24, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.