Excerpted from “On Being Moved by Architecture,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Vol. 70, no. 4) Fall 2012, pp. 337–353. By permission of the publisher.
In [his] essay “The Eyes of the Skin,” the architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa … attacks the “ocularcentrism” of much recent architecture and architectural theory [and argues that the appreciation of architecture requires the use of all five senses, including the kinesthetic senses]. In this essay I … explore and extend Pallasmaa’s insights [by showing] first, how understanding and appreciating architecture requires literally moving through and around the work of architecture and, second, how the movements of our bodies that architecture invites induce bodily emotional feelings that help us to understand the work. …
[Modernist architecture] tends to privilege the visual. … The mantra of modernism is that form should follow function and be seen to follow function. Thus, just looking at an external view (or even a photograph of the exterior) of Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette near Lyon in France, we can see where the monks’ cells are located, behind which facades the larger communal rooms are to be found, and where the chapel is situated. …
[Postmodern] architecture … reinforced an “ocularcentric” aesthetic. In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi divided all buildings into two types, the “duck” and the “decorated shed” [see Figure 30.1]. The duck is a building that expresses its function in its form, like the Long Island Duckling building, which is literally in the shape of a duck. On this way of looking at things, La Tourette is simply a duck, although an exquisitely designed duck. … Venturi advocated rejecting modernist ducks and embracing instead what he called the “decorated shed,” which is an even better paradigm of “ocularcentric” architecture. A “decorated shed” is an undistinguished box-like structure, the function of which is announced simply by a sign, such as the sign “GUILD HOUSE” inscribed over the entrance of an apartment building he designed with John Rauch in Philadelphia. Venturi was inspired by the Las Vegas strip, which consists of a series of “sheds” illuminated by garish signage, all trying to catch the eye. His decorated sheds are paradigms of what Pallasmaa calls “retinal” architecture, architecture seen from a speeding car, with negligible concern for any bodily or multisensory experience one might have in occupying such a building. …
By contrast, when Pallasmaa describes much recent architecture as engaged in “an intellectual–artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections,” he probably has in mind the extremes of formal innovation we find in the work of such “starchitects” as Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry. Both design buildings as complex structures with an emphasis on sculptural form, just like the buildings of Le Corbusier …, but instead of form’s expressing function, their buildings often largely ignore the demands of function. Peter Eisenman’s House VI, for example, is highly sculptural and based on a complex grid system. It notoriously ignores how human beings occupy a building. Thus, it has a fat column immediately beside the dining room table, and there is a cleavage right down the building that divides the twin beds in the master bedroom! …
Now, I am not denying that understanding architecture involves an understanding of overall form and function. What I am urging is that this is not enough for a rich appreciation of architecture, and that recent architecture and architectural theory have overemphasized its importance. Broadly speaking, recent architecture has largely appealed to the eye and the intellect, but not so much to the body or how it feels to occupy a building. The creed of modernism is that the function of a building should be visible in its form, regardless of how the building feels to its occupants, while more recent “starchitect” buildings tend to treat space as an abstract geometry rather than as a “lived space” that responds to bodily movement and bodily touch and is the site of human activities that it can foster or inhibit. It is essential to architecture that it be designed to be occupied or lived in, and an adequate aesthetic appreciation of a building requires more than a visual awareness of it. Many of its most important aesthetic qualities are available only to those who occupy and move about in the building, feeling its surfaces, hearing its echoes, and noticing the bodily feelings it evokes. …
To appreciate a work of architecture fully requires not only grasping the structure of a building with the eyes and mind, but also interacting with it, moving through and around it, feeling what it is like to live or work or act in it, to follow its paths, enter its doors, move over its thresholds, pass along its corridors, look out of its windows, and work or play or walk about in its rooms. It is not enough to see or figure out what the building exemplifies or expresses; one has to engage one’s whole body in the process of understanding and appreciation. In this essay I will particularly emphasize the role of bodily movement in our appreciation of architecture. …
Perhaps the most sensitive accounts of architectural experience and appreciation have been given by philosophers and architectural theorists influenced by phenomenology. … [Pallasmaa] follows Merleau-Ponty, who famously emphasized that human beings are “embodied subjects,” [and contrasted] the “objective” body of biology with the “phenomenal body,” our body experienced by us from the inside, so to speak, through which our thoughts and feelings make contact with the world. … [For Merleau-Ponty] there is a difference between the “lived space” of architecture that we experience in and through our bodies and bodily movements, and space as studied by physicists. What matters to architectural experience are the spaces in and around a building as they appear to the person who inhabits it, moves around in and out of it, and experiences its relationships with the surrounding environment.
It seems to me that you do not have to be a card-carrying phenomenologist to see the value in these ideas. It is enlightening to think of architecture as not fundamentally engaged by the intellect or by vision alone. It is true that architecture is—or should be—more than just beautiful or novel or visually interesting or even expressive forms, which can be appreciated by an “outside” observer or by the observer of a photograph or an image of the building in question, and more than just forms that fulfill and maybe express a particular function. Architecture is, after all, primarily to be occupied or inhabited, and it makes sense that the best architecture is architecture that embodies ideal modes of living. As Pallasmaa claims, significant works of architecture “project full images of life”; they create lived spaces that reflect different modes of being in the world: “a great architect releases images of ideal life concealed in spaces and shapes.”…
[G]ood architecture invites or compels multisensory experiences and ways of moving and acting that can be felt in a bodily way by the appreciator. In [Alvar] Aalto’s Villa Mairea [for example] there is interpenetration of outside and inside, enabling ease of movement between the two. The interior is designed so that movement is facilitated from entrance hall to living room to staircase, while each maintains its own character. Of course, as with other arts, our experience of a work of architecture is in part determined by the category we perceive it as belonging to. Entering a Gothic cathedral, I have different expectations from entering a [contemporary] museum, and these expectations color my experience. My own status as “audience” of a building is also affected by context: I enter my own home as an inhabitant and yours as a visitor. I enter a museum as a tourist and a cathedral as tourist or congregant. However, although the specifics of the movements that a building seems to invite may depend on the function of the building, there are certain features of architecture that appeal to universal features of human existence. Even without knowing the history or function of a Gothic cathedral, given the kind of biological creatures we are, we cannot experience the lofty spaces of York Minster without feeling small. And even without knowing the full import of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, as we move through its constricted passages and dungeon-like spaces, it is inevitable that we feel uncomfortably constrained.
In short, architecture presents what J. J. Gibson calls “affordances.” Human beings perceive the environment in terms of “what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.” Thus, a flat, horizontal, terrestrial surface, if “rigid (relative to the weight of the animal)” and “sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) … affords support.” In terms of the man-made environment, chairs afford sitting to human beings; tables afford writing, eating, and so on; and buildings afford shelter. The “usual features” of a human shelter
are, first, a roof that is “get-underneath-able” and thus affords protection from rain and snow and direct sunlight; second, walls, which afford protection from wind and prevent the escape of heat; and third, a doorway to afford entry and exit, that is, an opening.
In short, the environment in general and buildings in particular are seen as affording actions and movement: “a horizontal, flat, extended, rigid surface affords support” to a human being, and permits locomotion, whereas “a vertical, flat, extended, and rigid surface such as a wall or a cliff face is a barrier to pedestrian locomotion,” unless “there is a door, a gate, or a bridge.”… “An affordance … is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. … [It] points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.” Gibson is the founder of what is now called “ecological psychology,” how human beings and other animals fit their environmental “niche,” how monkeys grip onto tree branches, how human beings walk upstairs or catch a ball, and so on. As Gibson says: “The niche implies a kind of animal” with specific abilities suited to the niche, and “the animal implies a kind of niche,” an environment in which a creature with just those abilities can flourish. We might say that good meaningful architecture creates niches and their corresponding affordances.
One might wonder if my emphasis on affordances represents an unwanted return to an “ocularcentric” conception of architecture. It is true, after all, that Gibson emphasizes how affordances look. But when Pallasmaa complains about “ocularcentric” architecture, he is thinking of works that are primarily interesting for their visual appearance independently of any actions that they might encourage. The facade of [Michael] Graves’s [”decorated shed,” the] Portland Public Services Building, for example, looks like a keystone and columns, but it is precisely not “actionable,” as the keystone and columns are (gigantic) flat imitations of the real thing. One traditional notion of “aesthetic contemplation” suggests that in experiencing a work of art, we should not be regarding it with any view to taking action with respect to it: it is inappropriate when in the so-called “aesthetic attitude” to leap onto the stage to try to rescue Desdemona, for example. Instead we should “distance” ourselves from the practical implications of an artwork. But this is precisely not the appropriate way to respond to architecture. In studying architecture we should be experiencing not only spaces, shapes, textures, sounds, and so on, but the affordances of a building, the actions or movements it affords to its occupants. …
[The affordances of a building have emotional implications.] Architecture can arouse … emotions such as fear, anxiety, joy, delight, awe, feelings of constriction and release, feelings of empowerment and hope, feelings of comfort and friendliness, feelings of alienation and discomfort, feelings of confidence or timidity. A beautifully designed building such as Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye presents affordances of clear passage and civilized living. Although Pallasmaa introduces Le Corbusier as an “ocularcentric” modernist, the Villa Savoye shows why this is an incomplete assessment of his work. The Villa Savoye affords to human beings movement in a free, graceful, and measured way through spaces tailored to human motor and other capacities. … [Its] spaces … permit and even encourage not only certain kinds of movement but also certain kinds of dignified, civilized human interaction. …
The Villa Savoye is an icon of modernism, and we can see from photographs, perhaps, how well the building’s forms express a new ideal for how people should live. But moving through those spaces induces affective feelings of comfort and delight that can only be felt by someone who has inhabited or moved through the building and whose own body has been affected by so moving (as well as by touching its surfaces, moving one’s eyes to explore it, and so on). … By contrast, in Libeskind’s Jewish Museum we encounter constriction and a sense of powerlessness: the constricted passageways and dungeon-like spaces are the antithesis of the Villa Savoye’s elegant, light-filled rooms. The building makes orientation difficult and the human visitor feel small and uncomfortable. Knowing that the museum stands in the capital city of Germany as a monument to murdered Jews of course affects how we encounter the building and gives added meaning to our experience. …
[In general, one important way in which architecture can arouse emotions or emotional feelings is] by the way that architecture … invite[s] us to move, in accordance with the affordances [it presents, and in turn these feelings can help us understand and appreciate the work of architecture.] … If a building makes us feel empowered and confident, that tells me something about the building itself. And likewise if it makes me feel small, powerless, disoriented, and alienated. We need to know certain facts about a building in order to understand it and appreciate it, such as its function and cultural role. And we need to have a grasp of its overall form and structure. But there are important aspects of a work of architecture that can only be detected by means of the responses of those who look at it, move through it, and live in or visit it. The actions and action tendencies that a building invites and the emotions that result from acting in those ways can help us to grasp the character of a building and the mode or modes of living that it seems to want to encourage in its occupants. Thus, part of the meaning of a work of architecture can be accessed only through the emotions that it induces. And such emotions or emotional feelings are therefore crucial to the proper appreciation of architecture.