Adumbration

Definition

Adumbrations (Abschattungen) are Husserl's term for the perspectival facets through which an object is given to perception — never all at once, always from a side, an angle, a condition. Smith's studio formulation: "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." Via Cerbone's gloss (Smith's note 6), the conditional structure is a network of counterfactual perceptions — "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" — the relations Husserl calls "motivation": "Embedded in our perceptual experience is an elaborate network of conditionals that record possible, but not currently actual, perceptual experiences."

Two theses carry the concept into design. First, accumulation: "No object can be perceived in splendid isolation devoid of all influence. Bodies and objects are revealed through the accumulation of adumbrations and conditionals… It is the multiplication of the facets of single perceptions that become an additive perception of the object itself" — each multisensory aspect "as confirmation of our understanding of the whole, as a composite of many iterations." Second, gathering: "Adumbrations are not just a list of perceivables but gather to produce physical and psychological qualities" — Smith's example stacks the registers ("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… as you gaze at snow glistening on distant mountains"). Adumbrations are also temporal: a stop-motion filmmaking exercise shows "we can comprehend adumbrations as moments of time activated in relation to each other."

The design consequence: "An awareness of the interplay of adumbrational qualities informs us how a designed architectural condition may be perceived by others" — the adumbration as the unit of designed perception, essential to interior architecture "in the deliberation of subtle architectural design."

Key Thinkers

• Ross T. Smith — the studio translation: adumbrations as "facets of an object in space as it presents itself to you," multilayered and multisensory; the stop-motion and adumbrational-list exercises; the design warning that conditional and adumbrational perceptions of space are "ever-present and changeable."
• Edmund Husserl — the founding doctrine (via Cerbone): Abschattungen as the manifold of perspectives; "conditionals" and "relations of 'motivation'" as the network of possible perceptions embedded in any actual one.
• David Cerbone — the analytic reconstruction (Smith's note 6, Understanding Phenomenology, 2006): the table's adumbrational presentation and the "if I… then" network.
• Juhani Pallasmaa — the architectural equivalent: "A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one's body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things" — the building as an object whose adumbrations are staged by movement.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the lived-body ground: perception as the body's "gearing" onto the world (see lived-body), the conditionals' embodiment.

Related Concepts

• Perception — the general concept: adumbration is its Husserlian mechanism.
• Lived Body — the perceiving subject: "depending on the conditions and the movement of our body, we perceive each multisensory aspect of an object or space."
• Subtle Revelation — the attitude trained by adumbrational attention: the unsaturated facets as revelation's ordinary register.
• Atmosphere — what the gathered adumbrations compose: multisensory perceptions "occurring in unison" as the place's ambient quality.
• Optic and Haptic Perception — the sensory modalities among which adumbrations distribute: "An object can be perceived visually, tactilely, aurally, or in combination."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the concept's studio exposition: the definition ("facets of an object in space as it presents itself to you"); Husserl's "conditionals" via Cerbone's "relations of 'motivation'"; the additive perception thesis; the garlic/sunlight/fire/snow gathering; the stop-motion exercise; "a body within a body" as the interior's adumbrational privilege.

Open Questions

• Husserl's adumbrations are constitutive of any object-perception; Smith's examples are affectively saturated ("the smell of garlic cooking," "warmth on your back"). Is the design-relevant adumbration a perceptual universal or an affective art — and can the "physical and psychological qualities" they "gather to produce" be designed directly, or only hoped for?
• Smith's stop-motion exercise treats adumbrations as "moments of time activated in relation to each other" — is the adumbration then fundamentally temporal (a frame) rather than spatial (a side)? The Cerbone table is spatially conditional; the film is temporally sequential. Which model does architecture design for?
• If "everything which is introduced or removed reconfigures and redefines spatiality" (see visible-invisible), every design act redistributes adumbrations. Can the adumbration function as a design unit — the thing interior architecture actually draws — or is it irreducibly a property of the perceiver, not the plan?