Thinking about how we are in the world and at the same time how we behold, experience and shape our world is of all times. The relationship, or lack of it, between the Mind and the Body is a recurring theme in this, strongly influenced in the Western world by the Frenchman René Descartes (1596-1650). Known for his statement Cogito, Ergo Sum -I think, therefore I am- he pushed for a separation of Mind and Body. Although this separation has, of course, been debated, modified and doubted, it is nevertheless taken for granted by many that the body is nothing but the material bearer of the dominant mind.
Yet, dualistic systems of mind and body were questioned in Western thought since the late 19th century. Martin Heidegger argued that a priori knowing precedes being in the world. And Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasised that our embodied mind feeds and shapes our view of the world through our bodily actions in the world. A realisation has emerged that the artificial separation made between a cultural (mental) and a natural (bodily) world is no longer tenable. This insight is increasingly supported by recent insights from phenomenology and discoveries in scientific (neurological) research.
How do body and mind relate in architecture, our slow and sluggish muse? To be more precise, how about architectural design, education and the architectural experience? There, the role of the body, as well as other not directly mental, rational activities, remains only a subordinate position.
In Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi's (1944) thinking on architecture, design and construction, this relationship between the mental (concept/design) and the experiential (space/physical experience) plays a central role. For him, they are two incompatible processes that can never exist simultaneously. Researching the essence of architecture, he introduces the principle of transgression. In transgressive action, you go beyond the boundaries of the usual to reach new insights. One of Tschumi´s advertisements from his series Advertisements for Architecture, shows an image of the Villa Savoye by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier in an advanced state of decay, with the text below the image:
The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is. Architecture only survives where it negates the form society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it.
Each advertisement, published in the 1970s, was a manifesto, confronting the separation between the immediacy of spatial experience and the analytical definition of theoretical concepts. Transgression, in Tschumi's case, means breaking the rules, an act that goes against a law, a rule, or a code of conduct without denying that rule. For Tschumi, the rules of architecture, which have often become oppressive dogmas, are obviously at stake. The division between body and mind is one such boundary that one cannot think away, but can be redefined or moved.
We, the guest editors of this SAJ edition, believe that active action can encourage the crossing of these established boundaries. By active action, we mean an action in the sense of a moving doing, an actual moving, a non-sublimated action that takes place alongside or before, or after, indispensable thinking. In our role as architects, teachers and researchers, we have always worked with transgressive methods. We found that for us purely cognitive mental designing, thinking and experiencing, does not suffice, does not feel natural and is certainly inadequate to achieve holistic architectural experience, discourse, and design.
In the joint writing of this text, following a retrospective, surrealistic cadavre exquis method (also a transgression), some of our ultimate spatial, bodily spiritual experiences emerged. Like a spatial daydream, in the non-dormant reality that emerged from walking through Le Corbusier´s et Pierre Jeanneret´s Maison La Roche while filming with a primitive super-eight camera, and looking through the camera lens. Was it the camera that made this experience of transcending feeling and consciousness possible? It was an ultimate feeling of being in space, which could be effortlessly revived when watching the Maison La Roche film afterwards.
The strange thing about the denial of the body in space in architectural practice is that we all live and ARE in space. So, why distance ourselves from that experience of being when we think about space and design space? Why sublimate rather than activate space? An active, contextual, performative, intervening design strategy offers the opportunity to connect, the apparent impossibility of, concept and spatial experience. Not a thought transgression, but an action transgression. What boundaries are there to cross? Perhaps we still know the boundaries too little and need to look for them. Seeing them, feeling them, naming them and then of course.... cross them!
From these questions and our curiosity, we have proposed this call for papers. In addition to the theme of thinking and being, explicitly we want to address the transgression in the transformation of existing space and the reuse of buildings. In an era of climate change and circular concepts, the reuse of buildings plays an increasingly important role. Indeed, not demolishing is the right decision to counter the climate crisis. We think the usual reuse methods are spatially conservative in most cases, often dialectical in their juxtaposition of old and new. It neglects the possibility of thinking about architecture beyond the familiar concepts of space and forgets the innovative possibilities of designing from the body in space. Can Tschumi's transgression methods help us think beyond traditional approaches? What if we cross the boundaries of thinking and acting? What are the speculative, artistic results we have yet to see?
In these collected texts, the authors, each in their own way, explore transgressive options for arriving at architecture. This journal discusses different views that relate to the recognition, interpretation and deployment of directing and receiving relationships between space, body and mind.
The body sometimes needs little time but can just as easy needs more time to position the place, the task, and yourself in the process. In I Was Hanging Around at the Dawn of Things. ReichRichter shows that the body can be used as a design tool and a source of experience. Feedback and Reciprocity appear to be more important than speed and straightforwardness. The idea that architecture arises in a series of links in a fixed order, in which abstractions noted by the thinking architect are transformed into matter that is experienced as space and can be reproduced in images, is called into question here. The sequence can be changed at will, steps can be skipped, and architecture can be found and created in each link.
In the design process, the architect generally works, from an idea to the drawing, towards the execution. This is also how it is taught in architecture schools. The boundaries of this dogma are strictly guarded. Transgressions in Teaching Architecture: A somatic Approach to a Small House Conversion Project by Tijana Vojnović Ćalić, Katja Vaghi, Anja Ohliger questions this method and shows that there are other methods of arriving at a design.
Post-modernism came to dominate society in the second half of the last century, and with some delay, from the 1980s also took over architecture, often in disguise. Parallel to this, an increasing disconnectedness emerged between the architect with his or her ideas and the reception of this architectural thinking (or its absence) in society. The architect's ideas and the experience of his buildings by visitors, who do not know or share his views, have less and less common ground. Ophelia Mantz writes in Matter transgression that the DIY movement can be seen as a way of placing yourself in the world, which, in the age of ecological transition, enables new economic and production models, but also questions the connection between designer and user.
In Permanent Transformation Rob Hendriks also describes the relationship between architect and user in the work of Lucien Kroll and the difficulties many people have dealing with Kroll´s legacy that should be in permanent transformation but in fact, permanently has to resist a tendency of freezing and taking out the dialogue between building and users. Lucien Kroll was a contemporary of John Habraken and in his study the field credo that is published in the journal, Habraken calls for contingent dialogue and change.
‘In the post-historical experience, truth becomes replaced by the aesthetic and rhetoric experience. As the ground of truth is lost, aesthetics takes over, and everything turns into pure aesthetics; technology, economics, politics as well as war.’
In a critique of the aestheticization of architecture, in line with Pallasmaa's quote above, Marija Cacic in Aestheticization in contemporary architectural discourse: the dualism of staged and authentic argues for considering spaces and life (the user of the space) in conjunction and not going for an aesthetic experience without the physical experience. The architectural duality of architectural space and the dominance of the visual are juxtaposed in this paper.
Only a building that is materially present in tangible materials and visible proportions can be experienced. Without physical contact, you can understand an architect's overall image mentally, but you cannot feel it physically. Let alone test it against your aesthetic taste because you can't argue about taste as long as you can't physically taste it: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Just as the visitor has no access to the building without his physicality, the building without materiality has no eloquence for the visitor.
In Representing the universe of abstract painter Jozef Peeters. How to perform the intervening design strategy of his modernist flat by Selin Geerinckx and Els De Vos seek ways to convey the spatial experience, and the underlying concepts, of Jozef Peeters' no longer existing flat. The exhibition created for this purpose offered visitors a dual embodied experience of the flat. New insights became visible through the act of (dis)folding Peeters' interior through space, object, and body.
“The taste of the apple (…) lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way (…) poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of the book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.”
In dance and martial arts, learning through the body is the only way. In Aikido, for example (a Japanese martial art), one does not learn techniques for the sake of technique; it is not about form. The essence of aikido is 'formlessness'. Through experiencing, and practising with the body, you learn to become familiar with it. In many architecture schools, teaching architectural form is central. But what if we use the experience of the body to penetrate into the essence of architecture? The new key to the success of architecture lies in an approach, which understands architecture as building an extension of the human body and soul. That key lies in the direct interaction between user and space in the transformation processes of existing buildings and in designing buildings that aim at an adaptable environment continuously in transformation. And the architect? The architect is just one of the users.
Not a thought transgression, but an acting transgression. So, which boundaries are there to cross?
michel melenhorst and eric de leeuw