Juhani Pallasmaa imagines architecture as a beautiful thing with which we commune and form relationships. “A work of art functions as another person,” he writes, “with whom one unconsciously converses. When confronting a work of art we project our emotions and feeling on to the work.”[i] There is something comforting in this description. Perhaps it’s the idea that art and architecture are companions who prevent us from descending through loneliness into solipsism and depression. Artifacts join us in living in the world – perhaps, I should say ‘living the world.’ On the surface, Pallasmaa’s ideas promise to allow us to go through language toward beauty on our way to deep, edifying, pre- or non-linguistic experiences of being at home in, and one with, the world.
Phenomenology is the broad umbrella term employed, inappropriately perhaps, for such ideas in architecture circles. And it’s unclear whether it can deliver on its promise. As a tool of practical use, phenomenology is, admittedly, a dead horse I enjoy pummeling. But understanding why it falters as a design tool is itself instructive for the thesis of architecture as a form of fiction. Phenomenology, and architectural phenomenology as a narrow subdiscipline, focuses on individuals. These theories correctly observe that lone perceivers generate perceptual knowledge through experience with and attention to objects and materials in the world. This is fine as far as it goes. But objects and materials are not in dialogue with individuals and, more importantly, experience and attention are never truly solitary. The experience of spaces or places is always already shared experience. A communal experience among people, Walker Percy wrote, “… the metaphor [in this case, of “space” or “place”] arises from the symbolic act in which the emotional cry of the beholder becomes the vehicle by which the thing is conceived, the name of the thing.”[ii]
Understood as social and shared, whether with others who are literally there or just remembered or even imagined, architectural experience is different than the diagrammatic notion of individual-meets-thing. Spaces and places experienced as “spaces” or “places” are instances of perceptual common knowledge[iii] – and such knowledge is always already communicative. Phenomenological approaches to architecture miss this. They tend to imagine the senses as little homunculi, multiplying the mind-body at numerous levels – my skin communicates with works of art; my eyes, nose, mouth, ears too – instead of synthesizing or uniting. Individual sensations proliferate in lonely dialogue with objects, resulting in a theory that is less than comforting. And, in my opinion, useless.
To be fair, the dead horse above isn’t phenomenology, per se, but a common construal that pervades architectural education and criticism. Serious phenomenologists like Paul Ricoeur bridge body and mind, private and public, biology and culture. Ricoeur bridged phenomenology and hermeneutics, or experience and interpretation. He understood that we are constructed social beings. As such, we operate in narrative time as opposed to real time (whatever the latter might naively be supposed to be) and, as such, our experience of works of art and architecture are dictated, to a very real extent, by the social narrative. “Whether the story explains the existing order or projects another order, it posits, as a story, a limit to every purely logical reformulation of its narrative structure. It is in this sense that our narrative understanding, our understanding of the plot, precedes any reconstruction of the narrative on the basis of logical syntax.”[iv]
Plot is a kind of structure through which placebos, beliefs, and the imagination can work. And to this, we shall return.
[i] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: architecture and the senses, (New York: Wiley, 2012), 69.
[ii] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 69.
[iii] Seeman, The Shared World, 55.
[iv] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 47.
Architecture is Fiction 