Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 21
Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology.
Ross T. Smith
Architecture does not stand in isolation from its surroundings or humanity; its integration of interiority makes it valuable to our existential circumstance. In the words of Eugen Fink, phenomenology is “wonder in the face of the world.” It is an attitude of subtle revelation, of sensing by doing which permeates all aspects of working toward and through design. A motivation for exploring this philosophy in teaching design studio is to combine these two synergistic and seemingly complementary modes of engagement – the “integration” of interior architecture with the “being” of phenomenology. This makes phenomenology not simply a methodology, but an approach to being of the world.
In the phenomenological and experiential approach to design studio, the teacher becomes mentor, guide, and provocateur. An important aspect of teaching phenomenology to students of interior architecture is to transform the ways in which they perceive the world and themselves in it, as object, material, atmosphere, and states of transition and ephemerality. We exist, as do all substantive things, in a time-based condition of
becoming, transformation, and dissolution. Our human condition, therefore, is a reflection of the natural and constructed world – one of constant change and impermanence. Phenomenology, as a philosophical theory and experiential learning tool, combined with constructivist and phenomenographic methods in education, offers ways for students to gain the independence and confidence to approach the subjective and often indeterminate process of design.
Architectural education, particularly in design studio, expands students’ perceptions of their capabilities in the world beyond either the current studio or university in general. It emphasizes their own lives, the future of who they can be as an architect or designer, and how they can contribute meaningfully in this rapidly changing world. Teaching and learning architecture is not only concerned with buildings, it is about the creative imagination of interior conditions. Our creativity enables us to conceptualize how the built environment can be interpreted to enhance our lives not as an imaginary landscape, but as imagined propositions for living.
Introducing students to the subtle aspects of our surroundings and how we sense them points out the delicacy of sensory qualities. This encourages them to give more attention to phenomenological appearances and revelations. As acuity and attentiveness develop, we can train ourselves to become attuned to the many new and exquisite moments of our phenomenal sphere. Aspects of a newly revealed world can be wondrous, but it can also be one of panic and insecurity, as evidenced by some students. Some students express these discoveries by saying they have never “seen” the world like this before and are shocked at how they could not have noticed the many subtle aspects of sensory experience. With a heightened level of perception, we can no longer ignore fleeting moments of delicacy, beauty, or pain.
Subtle revelation offers to the close observer many aspects of our previously unperceived world. Students of interior architecture must become highly attuned to their immediate location so they may learn to design environments that enrich the human body and mind. The outcome of a phenomenological and experiential approach to teaching and learning is a
transition to knowing and the transformation and integration of many levels of sensory perception into physical expression. How we perceive and integrate phenomenological and sensory experiences will determine our response and further actions as influenced by them. Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa states:
The duty of education is to cultivate and support the human abilities of imagination and empathy… Education in creativity has to begin with a questioning of the absoluteness of the world and with the expansion of the boundaries of self. The main object of artistic education is not the principles of making art, but the personality of the students and their image of themselves and the world.
Subtle revelation and phenomenology
Phenomenology seeks the truth of reality, as French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty stated, “We must not … wonder whether we perceive a world truly, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive.” In this aspect we maintain in ourselves an openness to the potential of revelation in order to retain the magic and thrill of life. Phenomenology describes our direct contact with the objective and non-objective world; that which is material, immaterial, and ephemeral. Phenomena can present as saturated spectacular events, according to Jean-Luc Marion, or more often be revealed as unsaturated phenomena which are subtle and restrained as faint outlines, vague traces, peripheral glimpses, wafts of breeze, shimmers of light, nuances of color, overlapping soundscapes, or delicate whiffs of scent. The phenomenological tradition asks us for close sensory observation and description; therefore, one needs a poetic language to bring life to the phenomena, sensation, and interpretation. Gaston Bachelard offers refreshing poetics to phenomenology and architecture in an approach that is particularly interiorist. He describes the being of a phenomenologist:
They are immediately conscious of being of and in the world, but the problem becomes more complicated for a phenomenologist of the imagination constantly confronted with the strangeness of the world. And what is more, the imagination, by virtue of its freshness and its own peculiar activity, can make what is familiar into what is strange. With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world. If looked at through the thousand windows of fancy, the world is in a state of constant change. It therefore gives fresh stimulus to the problem of phenomenology.
By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones.
Phenomenology offers a theory and a language to describe the world in a way that behavioral geographer David Seamon refers to as “vividness, accuracy, richness, and elegance.” This presents a clear attitude for students of interior architecture of how they can perceive and express their own direct experiences. Our body is a sophisticated device which is highly attuned to the physical world, and our brain, likewise, has acutely interpretive functions we may not even be aware of. Our immeasurable mind is that part of our existence which deals with the imagination, ephemerality, memory, vague connections between things, intellectualization, and most importantly, the interpretation of phenomena and the myriad sensations that we negotiate. The phenomenographic manifestation of these experiences in written, drawn, photographed, or modeled form is the way architects and designers communicate in specific language with others.
Sensing and perceiving
A deepening awareness of our physical, atmospheric, and ephemeral environments can inform us in ways of design that are exquisite and layered, rather than assuming the obvious or the already known. No object
can be perceived in splendid isolation devoid of all influence. Bodies and objects are revealed through the accumulation of adumbrations and conditionals. Adumbrations are facets of an object in space as it presents itself to you; they are often multilayered and multisensory. Husserl considered adumbrations as “conditional,” in that our perception of an object is conditioned on how we approach it or what it offers us.
An object can be perceived visually, tactilely, aurally, or in combination as a multitude of particular or overlapping sensory adumbrations. It is the multiplication of the facets of single perceptions that become an additive perception of the object itself. Adumbrations appear to us as singular experiences, and depending on the conditions and the movement of our body, we perceive each multisensory aspect of an object or space as confirmation of our understanding of the whole, as a composite of many iterations. An easy, yet direct, exercise for exploring this is stop-motion filmmaking using still photographic images to record a sequence of events, movements, or places. We can comprehend adumbrations as moments of time activated in relation to each other.
Adumbrations are not only visual, they are perceived in all sensory manifestations which combine to comprehend our being of a place: late afternoon sunlight washing across a wall, the smell of garlic cooking in the kitchen, faint music drifting from another room, the warmth on your back from a crackling open fire; with all of these sensory perceptions occurring in unison as you gaze at snow glistening on distant mountains. Adumbrations are not just a list of perceivables but gather to produce physical and psychological qualities. An awareness of the interplay of adumbrational qualities informs us how a designed architectural condition may be perceived by others. In particular, interior space offers a retreat from the vastness of the exterior. It brings us back to the intimate scale of oneself as an individual; a body within a body. Pallasmaa says, “A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one’s body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things. Architecture directs, scales, and frames actions, perceptions, and thoughts.” Multisensory adumbrations are, therefore, essential to our apprehension of physical, spatial things to
build up an image of them whether of an interior, exterior, or building in its entirety. For interior architecture students, the conditional and adumbrational perceptions of space need to be reinforced as ever-present and changeable in the deliberation of subtle architectural design.
Visible/Invisible
The world is not a “lake of nothingness” but a place to be explored and discovered in its depths and differences. When our physical body is introduced to a scene; we are not only looking at objects from many adumbrational aspects as we move around them and as they reveal themselves to us. Our body becomes sensually engaged with the condition of the objects in space which reveal limitless possibilities in perceiving them.
Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion suggests that Martin Heidegger “legitimates the possibility of a phenomenology of the unapparent in general.” Heidegger’s terminology of “showing itself” “from itself” is the announcement of subtle revelation. With all that is visible, there must be other things that remain invisible. Invisibility maintains potential, excitement, and expectation of our oneiric sensibility. The hidden becomes an equally valid phenomenal experience, as is the revealed. We understand that if something is hidden, it must have the potential to reveal itself and vice versa. Expectation, therefore, preempts revelation.
Spatial configuration determines how objects reveal themselves to be present and absent in relation to each other and to ourselves. If we consider adumbrations as revealing and alternating by hiding aspects of an object, then we can extrapolate this to the dialectics of the visible and the invisible, or presence and absence. Considered thus, absence can be regarded as the inverse of presence. Absence, then, is not nothingness or emptiness, but a place of portent, a space available for action, and a space which exists of and for itself. In interior architecture, space is definable yet exists as the presence of absence. Architects and designers make choices in design about spatiality: open space, closed space, surface space, material space, furniture space, object space, sound space, time space, or light and shadow space, for
example. Everything which is introduced or removed reconfigures and redefines spatiality.
Experiential learning
Experiential learning is the physical experience of making and doing which translates thought into action. Experiential learning reasserts the physicality of the teaching and learning experience through embodying design concepts in physical, project-based work. Although phenomenology offers a philosophical theory to encapsulate conceptual studio design, it is the experiential “making by doing” which reinforces the practice of architecture. The processes of active experimentation, risk-taking, and reflective observation combined with abstract and conceptual thought and research reinforce the mode of experiential learning. The preference is an intimate and experiential design studio which encourages the holistic engagement of body and mind as the integration of a psychosomatic partnership. Experiential learning is most effective for students who are strongly motivated to learn. Students must take the initiative to generate their own learning through active engagement with teachers, the environment, and the opportunities and facilities available to them.
The language we need to express our newfound awareness has to be poetic, elegant, sophisticated, and at times, raw and direct. Language becomes the necessary complement to drawing by adding the descriptive and poetic details that drawings merely allude to. Language provides nuance and eloquence to silent drawings and models by providing an appeal to a project. Exploratory and descriptive writing and speaking is a necessary adjunct to studio practice, as is the phenomenographic expression of our experience through movement, writing, drawing, making, photography, and performance. Design studios can develop integrated exercises which reinforce a phenomenological and experiential approach to learning through exploration and discovery. These exercises can be applied at any year level as they establish the orientation of the studio early in the semester.
“Paper Play Things” is a first-year introductory exercise for students to work in pairs. The idea is to make an attachment for the body using only paper. Details, structural form, and strength have to be developed by understanding the qualities of the material itself. At the same time, the final piece of work has to have a simple conceptual or developmental reason that directs it. This is a way to start the semester with a few hours of fun and play while introducing an experiential learning exercise (Figure 21.1).
Photography can be used to concentrate vision on specific details when investigating objects. “Body” and “interior,” as words, create two related foci for the students to explore, conceptualize, and revisualize the physical world through the immediacy of photography. When the photograph is printed and viewed, we often see many more aspects of the close environment than we did at the time of taking the photograph. This reinforces that we do not always see what we are looking at by realizing the importance of acute and subtle attention.
“Blind drawing” is a two-hour drawing exercise which happens in the first week of the semester to introduce the phenomenological approach to the studio. Many high-achieving students can be self-critical and intellectually judgmental of their creative abilities. Drawing by hand encourages students to let go of the perfection and accuracy which are so predetermined by CAD programs. Blind drawing disrupts the intellectual preconception and fear of “not getting it right” that many students face these days due to a lack of hand-drawing practice. The imperfection of viscerally responsive mark making offers the possibility of the unexpected, where a smudge could indicate a certain ephemeral or material quality that may lead to a journey of imagining. Drawing (or any mark making) mediated by the body is a phenomenographic process of transferring thought to paper. For this exercise, the students are blindfolded and directed to draw a variety of sensory perceptions of reality, not objects, but feelings of a thing. The drawings are made with soft charcoal on large sheets of paper. The students sit, stand, move about, crush the charcoal, or smash it into the paper, and draw with their hands (Figure 21.2). Life is a messy business; we do not live in a world of perfections and absolutes – it is one of errors and humorous
mistakes. The blind drawing exercise frees students from visually judging their drawing abilities. It acts as a significant turning point in the studio. Students use drawing to express their intuitions and ideas about design freely, in a direct and uncomplicated manner (Figure 21.3).
Figure 21.1 Paper Play Things. Students: Melike Sena Erden and Muhammed Ali Sisman. First Year Architecture Studio, Abdullah Gül University, Turkey. (2015)
Image credit: © Ross T. Smith
Architecture, says Botond Bognor, is a discipline which “guides and creates the person-environment relationship.”11 It is the design studio which has a predominant focus on the introduction to and the influence of this relationship during an architectural education. It is in this period of education, the actual experience of being in the design studio, during which the teacher has the opportunity to offer students a vast array of cross-disciplinary influences intellectually, physically, and socially. The challenge is to delimit the headlong rush into formalizing and rationalizing human experiences through the strict linearity of computer programs and their seductive operational values. There has become an addictive fascination with what happens on a screen to the neglect and detriment of hand drawing, model making, and other physical forms of material experimentation (exploration, the happy accident, and wonderment of the diverse influences) which could be used in the architectural design processes. There is less connection with the real and immediate as the digital and virtual take the central focal point of many students today. A reemergence of a phenomenological and experiential approach to learning, therefore, shifts students to focus on acts of the body existing in reality.
Figure 21.2 Blind Drawing, Student: Tarık Şengülec, Workshop at Meliksah University, Turkey. (2015)
Image credit: © Ross T. Smith
Empowering students
The commitment of a teacher is to empower students to be freethinkers and questioners, to contribute meaningfully in the architecture of this rapidly changing world, and to be better equipped to tackle the difficult questions of our future environment. Architecture and interiority are often mediators of small problems. This is particularly evident in education and the progressive evolution of the design studio. A conceptual approach to design teaching is a persistent questioning of problems, ongoing research, resolution through reflective insights, and the iteration of ideas and progress. This attitude can
be applied to all design questions to solve problems and gain new awareness no matter the proposition.
Phenomenology expands students’ thoughts theoretically and philosophically to enable them to examine their own perceptions and concepts in architecture. Teaching and learning interior architecture is not only about buildings; it is also about the innovation of our mind. It is one’s creative imagination in response to how we live in this world that enables us to conceptualize and interpret the built environment to enhance our lives, not as an imaginary landscape, but as imagined propositions for living.
Greater sensitivity to our corporeal being reorients us to how we inhabit the interior environment in particular. As recorded in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, Marco Polo said to Kublai Khan:
Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids … But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance… It is our eyelids that separate … but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.12
We comprehend space not only as a volume to inhabit but also as moments of physical and psychological presence. These are qualities which return us to our own body and mind, relinquishing us to drift into reverie and connect with our lived moments of intimacy.
Notes
1 Eugen Fink, cited in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 61. 2 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Lived Space”, in Sensuous Minimalism, ed. Fang Hai (China: China Architecture and Building Press, 2002), p. 188.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 63.
4 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958]), p. 134.
5 David Seamon, “Phenomenology, Place, Environment, and Architecture”, in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter (Manhattan, KS: Kansas State University, Architecture Dept., Fall 2007).
6 David Cerbone, Understanding Phenomenology (Bucks: Acumen Publishing Ltd, 2006), p. 102.
Note: Cerbone gives a description of what Husserl referred to as “conditionals” of perception: “Consider the adumbrational visual presentation of a table. When I see the table I see it from one side, and from one angle… Embedded in our perceptual experience is an elaborate network of conditionals that record possible, but not currently actual, perceptual experiences: if I turn my head, then I will see the corner of the table; if I reach out my hand, then I will feel the surface of the table; if I lean in closer, then I will smell the lemon oil I used to clean it yesterday. These conditionals, which Husserl calls relations of ‘motivation’, are essential to our experience being of or about material objects.”
7 Juhani Pallasmaa, “Stairways of the Mind”, in Encounters, ed. Peter MacKeith (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2005), p. 60.
8 Alphonso Lingis, Translator’s Preface. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Claude Lefort and Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. xliii.
9 Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 7.
Note: Phenomenology is the apprehension and comprehension of phenomena, whereas phenomenography is the expression of that experience graphically or physically as documentation and outward expression of experiential learning. The former could be considered an internalized process whilst the latter an externalized manifestation of the phenomenological process. Phenomenography is the process of recording physically, as drawing and writing, making and building, the outcomes of learning by doing as things which materialized and can be seen, discussed, and reflected upon by the individual or others.
11 Botond Bognar, “A Phenomenological Approach to Architecture and Its Teaching in the Design Studio”, in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, ed. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), p. 183.
12 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 1997 [1972]), p. 103.
