Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 ARCHITECTURE AND MOVEMENT

The experience of movement, of moving through buildings, cities, landscapes and in everyday life, is the only involvement most individuals have with the built environment on a daily basis. User experience is so often neglected in architectural study and practice. Architecture and Movement tackles this complex subject for the first time, providing the wide range of perspectives needed to tackle this multidisciplinary topic. Organised in four parts, it:

• documents the architect’s, planner’s or designer’s approach, looking at how they have sought to deploy buildings as a promenade and how they have thought or written about it; • concentrates on the individual’s experience, and particularly on the primacy of walking, which engages other senses besides the visual; • engages with society and social rituals, and how mutually we define the spaces through which we move, both by laying out routes and boundaries and by celebrating thresholds; • analyses how we deal with promenades that are not experienced directly but via other media, such as computer models, drawings, film and television.

The wide selection of contributors includes academics and practitioners, and they discuss cases from across the US, UK, Europe and Asia. By mingling such disparate voices in a carefully curated selection of chapters, the book enlarges the understanding of architects, architectural students, designers and planners, alerting them to the many and complex issues involved in the experience of movement.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Peter Blundell Jones is a British architect, historian, academic and critic. Educated at the Architectural Association School, London, he taught at the University of Cambridge and London South Bank University before becoming Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. He is a prolific author on architectural history and theory and he has written monographs on the work of Erik Gunnar Asplund, Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, Günter Behnisch, Peter Hübner and the Graz School. He contributed to and co-edited Routledge’s Architecture and Participation.

Mark Meagher’s research and teaching focus on applications of digital software and devices in design education, data visualisation and fabrication. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. DE LA WARR STAIR 1934–5

Mendelsohn was one of Germany’s most successful Modernist architects before the rise of Hitler, with several large urban buildings to his credit, and the De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill is his only public building in Britain, executed with the help of Serge Chermayeff. He sought to make the external massing of his buildings dynamic to sympathise with the flow of traffic along the street, and he also concerned himself with the experience of people moving through, which reached a peak of expression in his staircases. That at Bexhill is among the best. Long, horizontal terraces open to the sea, but you enter from the other side via a cross-hall. Immediately, the great semicircular stair is visible at the other end, with the sea view beyond, a vertical foil to the general horizontal emphasis. The stair serves as hinge in the plan, and its tower is the climax of the whole seafront. The flights cantilever in concrete from level to level, leaving a graceful sweep beneath which blends into the next floor. The whole stands within a drum of glass treated as an open cage, beyond which, after a narrow gap, terraces project as half-rings supported on four thin columns. Their lipped edges add delicacy, and their balustrades add a further layer. Hanging in the stair’s hollow centre is an elaborate, multi-stage light fitting, and below it a circular celebratory plaque on the floor. The rising balustrades are topped by a round rail that invites the grasp. People choose the stair over the added lift, appreciating its visual drama. The experience is enhanced in reality by one’s movement and binocular vision, which induce interplay in the layers. This stair received Mendelsohn’s most concentrated design effort, and the building is unthinkable without it.

Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Cover image De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill on Sea, by Erich Mendlesohn and Serge Chermayeff, 1934–5, the main stair Source: Photography by Peter Blundell Jones ARCHITECTURE AND MOVEMENT

The dynamic experience of buildings and landscapes

Edited by Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Architecture and movement: the dynamic experience of buildings and landscapes/edited by Peter Blundell Jones, Mark Meagher. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Space (Architecture) – Psychological aspects. 2. Landscapes—Psychological aspects. 3. Walking – Psychological aspects. I. Blundell Jones, Peter, editor of compilation. II. Meagher, Mark, editor of compilation. NA2765.A73 2014 720 – dc23 2014015063

ISBN: 978-0-415-72534-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-72535-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76477-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo and Stone Sans by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 CONTENTS

Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1 Peter Blundell Jones

PART 1 Moving through buildings and landscapes: the designer’s perspective 9

1.0 Introduction to Part 1 11 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

1.1 The classical authors 19 Peter Blundell Jones

1.2 Viollet-le-duc on the medieval cloister 23 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

1.3 Charles Garnier: Le théâtre, Chapter 4, Staircases 25 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

1.4 Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 35 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

1.5 Architectural promenades through the Villa Savoye 44 Flora Samuel vi Contents

1.6 Gunnar Asplund: ‘pictures with marginal notes from the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition’, 1923 50 Translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones

1.7 Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 55 John Sergeant

1.8 Hans Scharoun and movement: the Kassel Project 1952 65 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

1.9 Move to the light 72 David Lea

1.10 Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 81 Peter Wilson

PART 2 Movement as experienced by the individual 91

2.0 Introduction to Part 2 93 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

2.1 The primacy of bodily experience 96 Peter Blundell Jones

2.2 From health to pleasure: the landscape of walking 102 Jan Woudstra

2.3 Architecture of walking 112 Doina Petrescu

2.4 Soundscape and movement 121 Jian Kang

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.5 From foot to vehicle 128 Peter Blundell Jones

2.6 Moving round the ring road 135 Stephen Walker

2.7 The geometry of moving bodies 142 Alan Lewis

2.8 Pedestrians and traffic 149 Ben Hamilton-Baillie Contents vii

PART 3 Movement as social and shared 157

3.0 Introduction to Part 3 159 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

3.1 Space as a product of bodily movement: centre, path and threshold 164 Peter Blundell Jones

3.2 Rievaulx and the Order of St Benedict 172 Translated by Abbot Parry

3.3 Lucien Kroll: the door 177 Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

3.4 The Japanese tea ceremony 178 Lucy Block

3.5 The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 185 Peter Blundell Jones, Jianghua Wang and Bing Jiang

3.6 The automated gardens of Lunéville: from the self-moving landscape to the circuit walk 196 Renata Tyszczuk

3.7 Lauriston School 204 Ann Griffin

PART 4 The representation of movement 213

4.0 Introduction to Part 4 215 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.1 House construction among the Dong 220 Derong Kong

4.2 Movement and the use of the sequential section by Enric Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha 230 Kamni Gill

4.3 From models to movement? Reflections on some recent projects by Herzog & de Meuron 239 Cornelia Tapparelli viii Contents

4.4 Filmic Space: an encounter with Patrick Keiller 244 Peter Blundell Jones

4.5 Diasporic experience and the need for topological methods 251 Nishat Awan

4.6 Open design: thoughts on software and the representation of movement 258 Mark Meagher

4.7 The matter of movement 266 Phil Ayres

Conclusion 277 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

Bibliography 287 Index 295 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 CONTRIBUTORS

Nishat Awan is co-author of the 2011 book Spatial Agency: Other ways of doing architecture. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.

Phil Ayres is an architect, researcher and educator. He joined the ranks at CITA (Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen) in 2009, after a decade of teaching and research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, in London, and completing his PhD in Denmark at the Aarhus School of Architecture. He has also been a partner of sixteen*(makers) since 1998. He is author of the 2012 book, Persistent Modelling: Extending the role of architectural representation.

Lucy Block completed her MA studies at the University of Sheffield in 2011 and was subsequently nominated for the President’s Medal Dissertation Award. She is currently practising with McDowell+Benedetti, an award winning architectural practice based in Central London.

Peter Blundell Jones is a British architect, historian, academic and critic; he holds the position of Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.

Kamni Gill is a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield Department of Landscape and a practising Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 landscape architect, with numerous built designs for residential and public spaces in France, Switzerland and the United States. Before starting her own practice, she worked with Hargreaves Associates, Gregory Lombardi Design and the Bioengineering Group. Her design work has been published in Azure, Landscape Architecture and Landscape Australia.

Ann Griffin is a Director at Meadowcroft Griffin Architects in London, an award-winning architectural, urban and landscape design practice based in Kentish Town, London.

Ben Hamilton-Baillie is an architect, urban designer and movement specialist from Bristol, United Kingdom. He is the director of his own company, Hamilton-Baillie Associates Ltd, where he provides consultancy advice on traffic and urban renewal. x Contributors

Bing Jiang has just completed her PhD on Chinese gates and doors at Sheffield supervised by Peter Blundell Jones.

Jian Kang is Director of the Acoustics Group and Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He obtained his first degree and MSc from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Patrick Keiller is a British film-maker, writer and lecturer. His films include London (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010).

Derong Kong is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture.

David Lea is Principal at David Lea Architects and winner of a RIBA award in 2011 for his Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE).

Alan Lewis is a Research Associate with the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester.

Mark Meagher is a Lecturer at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He completed his MArch at Harvard University and his PhD at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Doina Petrescu is a Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and a member and co-founder of the design cooperative aaa (atelier d’architecture autogéré). aaa’s work has recently been awarded the European Prize for Urban Public Space – Special Mention 2010 and the second place at the Prix Grand Public des Architectures contemporaines en Métropole Parisienne competition in 2010.

Flora Samuel is Professor at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. She is an internationally recognised expert on Le Corbusier and her previous books include Le Corbusier: Architect and feminist, Le Corbusier in Detail (nominated for the RIBA International Book of the Year award 2008), and Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade.

John Sergeant is an architect, former Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 University of Cambridge and Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College.

Cornelia Tapparelli is a practising architect with the firm Kawamura Ganjavian and a research and teaching assistant at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She has worked as an architect and researcher with Herzog & de Meuron and the Swiss Architecture Museum.

Renata Tyszczuk is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Taught Masters Programmes at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. She has an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Architecture and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is a founding member of the Agency Research Centre at the School of Architecture and, together with Professor Doina Petrescu, is the founding editor of Field:, a journal of architecture. Contributors xi

Stephen Walker is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Research at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. He trained as an architect and has worked for architectural and design practices in London and Madrid. He completed an MA in Architecture and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, and a PhD at the University of Sheffield.

Jianghua Wang is at Tianjin University in China and was a visiting fellow at Sheffield during 2012–13.

Peter Wilson is a Principal of the distinguished international practice Bolles+Wilson, based in Münster. In 2009, he received the President’s Prize from the Australian Institute of Architects.

Jan Woudstra is Reader and the principal historian at the Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield. He received his PhD from the Department of Geography of University College London. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The initial material for this book was the lecture series ‘On the Move’, with invited external speakers, held at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture in 2011, under the headship of Professor Flora Samuel, who was also among the speakers and has contributed a chapter. We thank the school and the university for providing resources for that event, and for supporting the subsequent gathering of material, which also included contributions from postgraduate students and the oral and written reactions of the senior students, at whom the series was aimed. Jan Woudstra of our Department of Landscape was involved from the start, helping to provide a broader view, and it was extended yet further by Kate Pahl from Education and Steve Pool and Richard Steadman-Jones from English. Oral lectures do not necessarily make book chapters, and print imposes severe limitations on visual material, and so not all contributions to the lecture series are included, but we thank Florian Kossak, Bing Jiang and Hui-Ju Chang for spirited contributions that enlivened the debate and helped us on our way. Our centre for East–West Studies and its seminar series embraced many discussions about traditional Chinese use of space and contrast with the West, and we thank two visiting scholars, Tan Gangyi and Wang Jianghua for enlightenment about this. We would like to thank colleagues and students in the Digital Design + Performance Group for their comments as the content of the book developed, particularly Chengzhi Peng, Tsung-Hsien Wang and Philip Langley; and David Gerber and Andrew Witt for their contributions of ideas at an

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 early stage of this project. For help with redrawing illustrations we thank Diego Carrasco and Claire Blundell Jones, and, for use of their photographs, Tim Soar, Russell Light and Margherita Spiluttini. Myrtle O’Connor helped with the transcription of lectures, and School Photographer Peter Lathey with the recording of lectures and processing of visual material. For generous cooperation to reproduce material from their archives we thank the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Architekturmuseum of the Technische Universität Berlin, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Lucien Kroll, The King’s Fund, Manchester Libraries, Clem and Anne Louise Fisher, Herzog & de Meuron, and Mathur and da Cunha.

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher INTRODUCTION

Architecture and the experience of movement

Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 00.1 The whole town of Martel, Lot, France, as seen from the south east in 1972 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 00.2 FIGURE 00.3 One of the surviving gates, west side Street in the centre of Martel, next to the Hotel de Ville Source: All three photographs by Peter Blundell Jones 2 Peter Blundell Jones

The chief distinction of the little town of Martel in the Lot, France (Figures 00.1–00.3), is that, having been an important medieval centre, it saw centuries of relative neglect, so that its population by the mid twentieth century was smaller than it had been in the sixteenth.1 Therefore, the town has remained visible as an entity, with old roads leading to original gates, a central marketplace and chateau, tower houses that marked the skyline for prosperous merchants, and a huge church to welcome pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. You can buy postcards of the church and chateau, but the place is best appreciated on foot as an unfolding sequence of experience, in which transition from country to suburb to major and then minor streets is accompanied by progress across thresholds and through layers of fabric, major buildings playing an appropriately dominant role against a background of ordinary ones. Many, if not most, towns were like this before the twentieth century, and their perceived aesthetic merit was often recorded by artists from nearby hills, the towered skyline a matter of local pride. Their organic ordering went largely unrecognised, until Camillo Sitte began to theorise about it in the 1880s, just at the moment when town planning was starting up as a discipline. Simple though his theories were, they depended on the idea of the experience of movement, of how one was drawn to walk down a street by a landmark or by how the square at the end unfolded as an outdoor room (Figures 00.4 and 00.5). Although some of his followers used his principles in new work to great effect,2 the very title of Sitte’s book, Town Planning on Artistic Principles, led to it being relegated under the banner of the aesthetic, and that is more or less where it has remained.3 Meanwhile, cities grew remorselessly, methods of transport changed, and movement, both in cities and within buildings, became dominated by the mechanical disciplines of ‘circulation’, necessary to link the zoned functions famously declared in the Charter of Athens.4 On the street, motor vehicles took over, and traffic planning became the main priority, with one-way streets and ring roads making it necessary to head north to go south, or east to go west, in a counter- intuitive way, so that, at the end of the twentieth century, satellite navigation arrived only just in time to save drivers from total confusion. Outside the city, crossing the country no longer meant moving from town to town, because most towns and villages were bypassed, and motorways followed direct routes despite the topography, so that the inherent logic and long tradition of what Le Corbusier had dismissed as ‘the donkey path’ was lost. In consequence, the landscape was deprived of its old coherence and experienced in an entirely new way. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 00.4 Plan of the centre of San Gimignano, as FIGURES 00.5 presented by Sitte in his book Town Planning Typical sketch from Sitte’s book, showing the of Artistic Principles effect of a tower in Bern Introduction 3

At a smaller scale, experience within buildings changed in a parallel manner. As they grew bigger and more complicated, they were entered by labyrinths of blind corridors, and, as lifts anaesthetised all sense of vertical progression, way-finding became entirely a matter of signs and numbers, or, in desperate cases, of following painted lines on the floor or wall. It now seems ironic that these changes took place against a background of talk from leading architects, more explicit than ever before, about the experience of movement: talk about the excitement of four dimensions, about architectural promenades, about the thrills of flowing space. By contrast, precious little is recorded about the experience of movement in Vitruvius and his Renaissance followers, and yet concerns about sequence and progression are evident in many, if not most, buildings from antiquity and the Renaissance, and also in the so-called vernacular, and so perhaps the lack of discussion is not so much because it was ignored, as because it was taken for granted. Some of the worst experiences of movement in modern life occur at airports – surprisingly, in view of the priority necessarily given to circulation. This is perhaps because the considerable logistical problems tend to be dealt with in an entirely mechanical way, which fails to overcome the need to traverse considerable distances on foot. A particularly grim example is the long underground travelator linking terminals at Frankfurt (Figure 00.6), which offers circulation pure and simple, as if the rest of life has been put on hold. At the other end of the scale is the airport shopping mall, now designed to confuse: a deliberate labyrinth, breaking the rules of efficient circulation to trap anxious passengers hurrying towards their planes and to persuade them to part with their money (Figure 00.7). No wonder Jacques Tati took the airport as the main target for his satire on mechanised life, Playtime, or that Marc Augé has seen airports as the very epitome of the non-place.5 Whether one enjoys the promenade of the street, walking for pleasure in parks and gardens, or the ascent of the ramp in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the experience of movement through architecture and through the larger urban or natural landscape has too often been treated as an ‘aesthetic’ extra, which is perhaps why we put up so meekly with circulation pure and Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 00.6 FIGURE 00.7 Frankfurt airport, the underground travellator Manchester Airport, sales labyrinth 4 Peter Blundell Jones

simple. Too often, the aesthetic is seen as opposed to the useful or purposeful, and yet life is not so easily subdivisible. It is vital to our well-being that we know where we are and where we are going, in both an immediate, literal sense and in a longer-term, metaphorical sense. How these two are connected, this book will gradually reveal.

The four parts This book is divided into four parts, to produce a shifting perspective for the reader. The first, revolving around what Le Corbusier called the ‘promenade architecturale’ (see Chapter 1.5), looks at movement through space as it has been conventionally discussed and interpreted by architects, planners and landscape architects. We offer a relatively short and highly selective survey of this potentially vast subject, with entries chosen for their variety and sensitivity. They reveal a long-standing concern for route and organisation, for progressions in space that are legible, enjoyable, memorable, and above all that make sense. Through their contrasts of place and period, these texts also reveal how much unfolding architectural spaces have to do with changing social habits and assumptions. But the designer as author is seldom dictator, and the inhabitants may not share his or her interpretation, or behave as expected. Besides, ordering and intentions may not be consistent, for the fabric of the city can be created by many anonymous hands, and so-called natural landscapes remain without an author. We ‘read’ all such places nonetheless, for, as with texts, paintings, music, films and other works of art, the environment always has a reader, whose role it is actively to construct an interpretation in finding his or her way, even when none was intended. The second part of this book therefore concerns this process of ‘reading’, and how this is bound up with walking or with other ways of traversing the territory. Critical theory has occasionally gone so far as to dismiss the author altogether, setting the entire responsibility with the reader, and the French Situationists, with their dérives, proved the point by walking routes wholly unintended by planners and unrelated to the inherited hierarchy of the city (see Chapter 2.3), finding unlikely byways and shortcuts, new experiences with new meanings. In this sense, the city is not so much ‘designed’ as ‘discovered’, and constantly rediscovered in different forms as read by the visitor or inhabitant. And movement does not have to be pedestrian, for, if reading of route first takes place on foot, it continues in different forms in the train, the car, the plane. These modern experiences of transition have become increasingly prominent, and walking, once taken for granted, has in many environments become more difficult and even impossible, so that making sense of places on foot as the original or primary

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 experience can be said to have deteriorated. It is hardly surprising, then, that walking has simultaneously become something of a cult and has even been declared an art.6 Although this is helpful in drawing new attention to the experience, it could also add to its perceived distance from everyday life. We argue, in contrast, that walking remains essential: it is the basis of who and where we are, the means by which we gather and separate, by which we first traverse territories and give them definition. Our understanding of space begins with the body, and the body is the first geometer, journeys being also a primary metaphor for the construction of memory and narrative. The second part of the book ends by comparing walking with other forms of locomotion, with the nature of roads and how we perceive them, and with the role of senses other than the visual, such as hearing, including the haptic experience of the body in motion. Introduction 5

Even if the active designer and the reader of spaces are both temporarily individuals, no individual exists in isolation. The third part of the book is about the social, and the way moving through space is shared through rituals, whether in the form of parades and pilgrimages or of our more numerous and mundane daily interactions, which can still be called ritualistic.7 The built environment is organised socially and is full of signals that carry the instructions for social conventions. At the start of Erving Goffman’s classic The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, he describes arrival at a Scottish croft and the preparation of the inhabitant before opening the door to greet the visitor – ‘to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’, as T.S. Eliot put it.8 This example is just Goffman’s introduction to a long series of entries that soon involves his foundational metaphor: frontstage versus backstage. In a restaurant, frontstage is the polite dining room, backstage the kitchen; in a garage, frontstage is the smart office where you pay money to a man in suit and tie, backstage is the workshop where men in greasy overalls disembowel your car. The metaphor can be applied to almost any building complex, differentiating front from back, formal from informal. There must be thresholds of some sort between these kinds of space, and further thresholds into the outside world, to mark divisions and transitions. Entering and leaving are not just physical acts but differentiations of territory, and also the basis of all our metaphors about inside and outside. Therefore, crossing thresholds is a fundamental experience and is tied up cross-culturally with what are metaphorically called rites of passage: birth, initiation, marriage and death.9 Even when thresholds are physical entities, their power and meaning are due to the rules under which they operate. The examples in Part 3 of this book are, therefore, about the relationship between space and social rules, about how buildings and landscapes frame rituals: rituals seen in the broad sense of shared and repeated human activities. Every society requires an established relationship between spaces and rules, with conventions that may be more local or more general. The final part of the book deals with movement by proxy. When we talk about or illustrate movement through space, we need to represent both space and time, through oral or written descriptions, drawings of different kinds, physical models, photography, film or computerised projections. Obviously, such media limit and condition what can be expressed and communicated, and some offer advantages in one direction, some in another. Texts are good for narrative, unfolding in time, but they stress singular experience and fail to describe spaces as drawings can. Maps are always highly selective, tending to prioritise the values of their makers and commissioners and following conventions that are necessarily in some ways exclusive. Plan and section drawings show the anatomy of a built environment but need to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 be read with some skill to put it back into three dimensions, even more to imagine a fourth. Film, at first, seems an ideal medium to transmit what is visible and, at the same time, to allow narrative sequence, but its angle of view is restricted, and it has developed its own set of convincing but deceptive, techniques of cutting and splicing to create imaginary place, aided by clever concoctions of sound that further encourage our suspension of disbelief. The conventions of plan and section have recently been somewhat subsumed in the computer by the three-dimensional model, which predicts the location of every part of a building design on cartesian coordinates with astonishing precision, and brings new efficiency and understanding to the processes of calculation and construction. However, although the model resides reliably in the circuits of the computer, magically available for specialists to work on, it has to be reduced to a visible form to be seen, normally on a two-dimensional 6 Peter Blundell Jones

screen. Plans and sections have, in consequence, become less iconic, while the computer fly- through, adding a fourth dimension, has gained in popularity. It leaves the imaginative skill required by drawings to one side, but gives the odd impression of not having one’s feet on the ground. It also plays into the hands of forms of perception developed and made familiar by the medium of television, creating a virtual world detached from our physical being and lacking all perceptual information apart from the visual, supplemented only sometimes by the auditory. A now rather old and familiar filmic convention illustrates this well: the transporter room of the Enterprise in Star Trek,10 which, as we soon deduce, allows Captain Kirk and his crew instantly to pass from spaceship to adjacent planet. What we generally do not ponder is why they need to go into the transporter room at all, given that they can be picked up from the planet at any point. And if the system works so well, why walk anywhere, and why bother to have doors on rooms? The implied loss of threshold and of self-propulsion here reveals the real passivity of the body as spectator watching the film, while the fizzing away of bodies on the screen is an efficient convention for a theatrical change of scene, avoiding the need for extensive and time-wasting footage about descent to the planet. The experience of movement through space, once seemingly natural, straightforward and inevitable, has been neglected or sidelined in much architecture and planning over the past century, because of the great technical and economic changes that have overtaken our civilisation. There has been a consequent sense of anomie and alienation, a rash of dystopias in the visual arts, and confusion for many about where to be and where to go. At the same time, in many forms of discourse, metaphorical space has taken over from bodily space as if the two were the same, but ‘political space’ does not mean a building or a landscape, and, when people say ‘don’t go there’ or ‘I’m not in a good place’, it is an idea rather than a location that they are avoiding, a state of mind that is troubled. A better understanding is, therefore, urgently needed, and also a shift away from the idea that the experience of movement in buildings or in landscapes might be ‘just an aesthetic issue’. We are by no means against beauty and attempts to increase its occurrence, but we deeply regret its relegation to the margin, to something extra, ‘subjective’, ‘personal’ or merely ‘a matter of taste’. The subjective is often shared, and even taste is a social thing, as Pierre Bourdieu effectively showed in Distinction:11 it is part of a shared reality. We try, in this book, to relate the experience of movement in architecture to larger and more fundamental questions about how we can understand the world, find our place in it and maintain our health and well-being.

Notes Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1 Many places could have served: this one was chosen because it had been studied in detail by Peter Blundell Jones in the early 1970s, also the period of the photos. See ‘The country town’ in Cantacuzino 1975, pp. 41–9. 2 Theodor Fischer in Germany, for example, but also Raymond Unwin, planner of Letchworth. 3 See Collins 1965. 4 The Charter of Athens was the result of the CIAM meeting of 1933: the tenets can be found in Conrads 1970, pp. 137–45. 5 Augé 1995. 6 Richard Long and Hamish Fulton are obvious examples. Rebecca Solnit discusses this in her History of Walking (Solnit 2007); Geoff Nicholson’s book is called The Lost Art of Walking (Nicholson 2010). 7 The Random House Dictionary includes the morning coffee break and handshakes among rituals, and Mary Douglas, in Deciphering a Meal (Douglas 1975), made good case for considering meals in general as rituals. Introduction 7

8 Goffman 1971, pp. 18–19. The T.S. Eliot quotation is from ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot 1920. 9 See van Gennep 1960 (original 1908). 10 The US television and film science fiction series conceived by Gene Roddenberry in 1964 and first shown in 1966, which ran to 726 episodes (Wikipedia). 11 See Bourdieu 1984. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.0.1 Villa Malaparte 1937, by Adalberto Libera, on the coast of the Italian island of Capri overlooking the Mediterranean, a site discussed by Peter Wilson in Chapter 1.10 Source: Photo Russell Light PART 1 Moving through buildings and landscapes The designer’s perspective Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 1

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

We begin this book by looking at movement from the point of view of designers and their apologists, to reveal what they have said about it and what were their stated intentions. The contributions range from traditional works of theory intended to propagate ways of doing architecture to reflective statements by current practitioners, and for convenience we have placed them in chronological order. Being only a quarter of the book, this section can hardly be comprehensive: indeed, it reveals a potentially enormous field that could grow into an encyclopaedic work. Here, we can only dip into this ocean of material, choosing for variety of period and of approach, while also presenting some of the cast of the invited lecture series at Sheffield that first prompted us to undertake the book.1 An obvious start was the earliest book of theory and the foundation of the classical tradition: Vitruvius. In Chapter 1.1, he is considered, along with the writings of his Renaissance followers Alberti and Palladio. Remarkable here is a lack of discussion about the experience of movement, except in terms of the most basic convenience. There is, in contrast, vastly more on the orders and correct proportions. Yet, reading between the lines and adding the interpretations of modern classical scholars, one sees that progress through buildings and awareness of the visual sequences must have been essential. The reasons for the lack of discussion seem to have been twofold: first, that these books were dedicated to advice for the architect on how to achieve a building as a physical object, with all its symbolic and ornamental apparatus,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 and, second, that the standard building types and technology were relatively stable and well established, along with the habits that sustained them, and so the general sense of propriety in the ordering of spaces could mostly go unquestioned. Questions of route and progression must also have been important in medieval buildings, especially in the transitions from the profane to the sacred in Gothic cathedrals, and yet here there is even less specific theory, and one has to read between the lines of The Rule of St Benedict or examine the spatial arrangements from the plan of St Gall to deduce what must have been important.2 The greatest retrospective apologist for medieval architecture was Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, whose ten-volume Dictionnaire Raisonné, with its wonderful engravings, though pragmatic and rational in tone, is still an essential gateway into that world,3 and we reproduce in translation in Chapter 1.2 his description of Cloître, Cloister. Its position 12 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

and squareness are well described, but not so much its essential centrality and echo of the paradise garden. When it comes to the contemplative role of the cloister as refuge from the world and centre of virtue, he resorts to quoting a medieval source, adding an inner sample of earlier history. The beginning of architecture as an academic subject, with attendant detailed theory, belongs to France and the eighteenth century, moving from the Académie Royale to the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Polytechnique.4 The courses at the Beaux Arts grew into a model of architectural education that prevailed worldwide, until the takeover by the modern movement about 60 years ago with its Bauhaus-based courses. The rise of architectural theory so engendered included ideas about movement explicitly described by the word marche, which was used as a critical term in judging the all-important Beaux Arts competition projects from at least 1828. Arthur Drexler explains:

The word marche meant, literally, ‘spot where the foot is placed’, ‘action of placing one foot forward, then the other, to proceed in some direction’, as in the marching of troops. Figuratively, as a ‘manner of proceeding according to a certain order’, it was commonly used to denote the sequence of images in a poem or of action in a novel, the progress of a piece of music or of the moves in a game of chess. . . . It must have denoted the experience of the building under analysis imagined as if one were walking and looking down the principal enfilade. Marche did not mean the abstract layout of the plan, for which the Section d’Architecture used the term parti. Like marche, parti was derived from a common phrase, prendre parti (to take a stand). Parti designated the conceptual disposition . . . whether a theater foyer have a main staircase at the centre or two at the sides. The parti pertained to the architect, the marche to his design, so the Section d’Architecture could note, on the one hand the originality of a competitor’s parti and on the other the grandeur and simplicity of the project’s marche.5

Charles Garnier’s Opéra in Paris is one of the most important products of the Beaux Arts tradition and of Beaux Arts thinking. Built by imperial command, it was also one of the major monuments of its time, and it played a key role in Haussmann’s reorganisation of the city. It further marked the high point in the evolution of opera as a social art and ritual, becoming the international model for the building type. The compelling reason for including the building here is Garnier’s remarkable book Le théâtre, which describes its design and operation and the intentions behind it in great detail, starting with the entries and vestibules and moving on to the lobbies and stairs, before dealing with auditorium and stage. Readers

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 will notice that as much attention is given to the experience of the crowd as to the performance they are coming to see, and that concern for convenience of circulation is more than balanced by an explicit desire to bring about the optimum social ritual. With our limited space, we have chosen as a sample in Chapter 1.3 about half of Chapter 4, Staircases, because the main stair is the very heart and centre of the building. In England of the same period, which had been enriched by the Empire and industry, both financial resources and architectural effort went into the country house, again an elaborate social organism providing stages for persons of various genders and classes to play out their roles.6 It was scrutinised at the end of the century by Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), an attaché to the German Embassy from 1896, who went home to write the best and most detailed history of the period, Das englische Haus, in three volumes, published in 1903 and Introduction to Part 1 13

1904.7 He admired particularly the architects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, presenting their honest simplicity as a nascent functionalism, and after his return he became an adviser to the Prussian government, and then he was the first president of the Deutsche Werkbund from 1910 to 1916. He was simultaneously the successful architect of several country houses in and around Berlin, following the principles established in his famous book, but drawing also on German vernacular and building methods.8 Another book, Wie baue ich mein Haus (How I build my house), published in 1917, was intended for the guidance of clients. It shows concern with room relationships, including how one moves from one room to another, and concentration on the social niceties of a society still dependent on servants. We include as Chapter 1.4 two short chapters, 12 and 13, from the middle of the book, about how the house is approached and about the circulation within it. With Chapter 1.5, we move on 12 years to the modern movement. Le Corbusier merits first place for his explicit description of the promenade architecturale and his exemplification of it in the Villa Savoye of 1929, perhaps his most famous work. Every architect knows the folded ramp at the heart of the house, which leads from the ground-floor entrance to the main rooms of the first floor, then into the outside air and on up to the roof and a framed view (see Figure 1.0.1):9 it engendered half a century of ramp fantasies from other architects. In everyday use, such a long ascent or descent might prove irksome, displacing inhabitants on to the staircase, but its dramatic effect imagined from drawings and photographs, the main means of its dissemination, is unforgettable. As well as demonstrating the conceptual rethink presented by the five points, the Villa Savoye as published represented the interior rather Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.0.1 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye 1929, on the upper ramp Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones 14 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

than the façade as the essential architectural experience, prompting Sigfried Giedion to adopt it as an example of the fourth dimension.10 In our text in Chapter 1.5, Flora Samuel, who has already written a whole book about the promenade,11 sets Le Corbusier’s statements in the general context of his work and theory, adding layers of meaning, as well as noting some of the paradoxes. The Swedish modernist Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) was born the same year as Le Corbusier and initiated a modernist revolution under his influence with the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930,12 but Asplund had already built his more classical Stockholm City Library of 1920–8, with one of the most powerful entry sequences in twentieth-century architecture (Figures 1.0.2–4).13 The building centres on a clerestory-lit circular drum that grows out of a larger cube, and it is entered by an axial staircase penetrating through several layers to the very centre, arriving in front of the librarian’s desk. Asplund had been interested in spatial

FIGURE 1.0.2 FIGURE 1.0.3 Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: view on approach 1921–8: view on the main stairs looking Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones towards the great drum and librarian’s desk Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.0.4 Gunnar Asplund, Stockholm City Library 1921–8: Asplund’s interior perspective of the first project, confirming that this progression was a main concern Source: Asplund Archive, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm Introduction to Part 1 15

sequences from the start of his career, and they occur throughout his work, especially at Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, whose design he shared with Sigurd Lewerentz. However, this article of 1923 does not concern his own work: rather, it examines that of colleagues building at the Gothenburg Exhibition. His critique, written for Sweden’s leading architectural journal of the time, concentrates almost entirely on the effects of the spatial sequence. We make no suggestion of ‘influence’, for the Stockholm Library concept was already long determined. Rather, it is a case of common interests: Asplund was also, in this year, just completing Skandia Cinema, the work of his most dedicated to powers of illusion. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who brought into modern architecture the ‘breaking of the box’, drawing on his experiences of Japan and the shifting, overlapping spaces of traditional East Asian architecture. He also stressed, throughout his career, the great importance of adapting a building to its site and defining the approach, but it is surprising how little mention there is in his writings of the actual experience of movement within buildings.14 Perhaps, godlike, he envisaged the series of possible spatial relationships as a whole, taking it for granted that there was a choice of routes. Nonetheless, in Chapter 1.7, John Sergeant, the long-standing British historian of Wright’s work, finds plenty of progressions that must have been intended, showing how specific examples work.15 That the German modernist Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) was interested in the experience of movement through his buildings is evident from early in his work, with experiments in planning buildings to follow movement flow.16 If his floor plans for the design of a stock exchange in Königsberg of 1922 (Figure 1.0.5) reflect a somewhat literal functionalism, by 1932, with the building of the Schminke House at Löbau, he was using diagonal staircases to control movement in a visual manner and thinking predominantly in terms of experienced progressions of space (Figure 1.0.6).17 Under the Third Reich, he was restricted to designing private houses, which, perhaps because of the style restrictions, brought more concentration on routes and views and planning with skewed site lines. This work paved the way for a new public architecture post-war, which culminated in the famous Berlin Philharmonie of 1963 (Figure 1.0.7), with its extraordinarily fluid foyer dubbed by Frei Otto, ‘room of a thousand angles’, where people parade to see and be seen, and staircases demand exploration. The ideas realised in Berlin had developed through an earlier competition project for Kassel Theatre in 1952, in collaboration with Hermann Mattern, and we include as Chapter 1.8 part of Scharoun’s text describing the competition project. It reveals his concern with movement, not only inside but also outside the building, for the approach and relation to the city were part of the arriving audience’s unfolding visual, spatial and haptic experience,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 which continued through the foyer and into the auditorium. The last two chapters in this section derive from lectures by currently practising architects, invited to describe experiences of movement in their own buildings and in works of other architects that they have admired. David Lea, known for his 1980s buildings at Cirencester Agricultural College and the more recent Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE), designed in partnership with Pat Borer, has long been a proponent of local, natural, low- energy materials, but his work has also always shown a deep concern with site, route, view and the need to admit daylight to every room. In his lecture, he started off describing his experience of route in medieval, Renaissance and oriental examples and then presented a walk through the WISE building, discussing the spaces, views and light. A condensed version, with a reduced set of images, is included as Chapter 1.9. 16 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

FIGURE 1.0.5 Hans Scharoun, plan of Königsberg Stock Exchange, purchased competition project 1922; the flowing lines followed circulation Source: Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

FIGURE 1.0.6 Hans Scharoun, plan of Schminke House 1932; the 26º angle shift due to the site became the inspiration for the diagonal stair, hallmark of all his later work Source: Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

FIGURE 1.0.7 Hans Scharoun, foyer of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Philharmonie Concert Hall, Berlin, 1963 Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Introduction to Part 1 17

FIGURE 1.0.8 Bolles+Wilson, Münster City Library, view into the alleyway aligned on old church spire Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

Peter Wilson, originally from Australia but educated at the Architectural Association in London, set up a practice in Germany with his wife, Julia Bolles. Bolles+Wilson made its name with Münster City Library, completed in 1993, a building greatly concerned with its urban context, even to the point of splitting the accommodation and creating a new pedestrian street that anchors it to the axis of the adjacent Lamberti church (Figure 1.0.8).18 Bolles and Wilson’s work has always been conceived around themes of space and movement, and, as with Lea, the exploitation of views and admission of daylight are managed wherever possible. In his lecture, Wilson spoke of these things in relation to several of their projects, reflecting on the considerable oeuvre so far produced, but, for his written contribution to this book, he reworked a particular strand of the lecture that tied together the Villa Malaparte, Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Mépris that was shot there, the story of Homer’s Odyssey that lay behind it, a house by Bernard Rudofsky, author of the MOMA Exhibition Architecture without Architects, and various other things. He presents many layers of metaphor and overlapping themes, with a refrain about territorial displacement and exile, and life as a journey. Wilson shows us the experience of movement at larger scale and with a longer trajectory, and so Chapter 1.10 makes a fitting conclusion to this section.

Notes 1 An invited lecture series organised by Peter Blundell Jones was held at the Sheffield School of Architecture in 2011, including contributions from Flora Samuel, Florian Kossak, Steve Pool, Richard Steadman-Jones, Doina Petrescu, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, Jan Woudstra, Renata Tyszcuk, David Lea, Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Kate Pahl, Lucy Block, Hui-Ju Chang, Patrick Keiller and Peter Wilson. This was the same format as that which gave rise to our earlier book, Architecture and Participation (Blundell Jones et al. 2005), and we held such themed series over many years. Beside its educational value for the students, it allows concentrated discussion and exchange on the topic, and provides a good springboard for the more permanent record of a book. 2 An elaborate plan of the monastery of St Gall was preserved by accident when the back of the parchment it was drawn on was reused for a legal document. With no substantial buildings surviving, it has yielded crucial evidence about what a Carolingian monastery was like. The plan was known and discussed by Viollet-le-duc, but studied in much more detail in the mid twentieth century by Walter Horn and Ernest Born; see Horn and Born 1979. 3 Viollet-le-duc 1878. 4 An excellent general summary can be found in Saint 2008. 5 Drexler 1977, pp. 163, 185. 18 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

6 See Girouard 1993. 7 Published in German by Wassmuth, Berlin: first English edition edited by Dennis Sharp, The English House, Crosby Lockwood and Staples, 1979. 8 Julius Posener was the principal apologist for Muthesius and activist for the preservation of his houses in the 1960s and 1970s. He edited a catalogue in German, (Akademie der Künste 1977), in which he writes on the rules of the house on pp. 8–9, and made him a central figure in his book From Schinkel to the Bauhaus, Posener 1972. 9 For Peter Blundell Jones’s analysis, see Blundell Jones 2002, Chapter 7, which is entirely devoted to the Villa Savoye. 10 In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion 1941. 11 Samuel 2010. 12 See Blundell Jones 2006, and also Rudberg 1999, devoted entirely to the Stockholm Exhibition. 13 Also arguably the source for Aalto’s entry sequence at the Viipuri Library; see Blundell Jones 2002, Chapter 8, pp. 123–37. 14 See, for example, The Natural House (Wright 1954), where it might have been expected. 15 Sergeant 1976. 16 See Blundell Jones 1995. 17 See Blundell Jones 1995, and also Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones (2012) The making of architectural promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke House, Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 108–24. 18 See Peter Blundell Jones (1994) Brought to book, The Architectural Review, February, pp. 41–50. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.1 THE CLASSICAL AUTHORS

Peter Blundell Jones

As the sole surviving general text from Roman times about how to make architecture, Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture is an obvious starting point for this enquiry, particularly as it was also the model for Renaissance authors such as Alberti, Serlio and Palladio, whose books are definitive for the classical tradition. However, direct discussion of the experience of movement is surprisingly thin among these authors, especially Vitruvius himself, though the benefits of walking in the open air do make a bold appearance in the chapter on Colonnades and walks in Book V:

The space in the middle, between the colonnades and open to the sky, ought to be embellished with green things; for walking in the open air is very healthy, particularly for the eyes, since the refined and rarefied air that comes from green things, finding its way in because of the physical exercise, gives a clean-cut image, and, by clearing away the gross humours from the eyes, leaves the sight clear and the image distinct. Besides, as the body gets warm with exercise in walking, this air, by sucking out the humours from the frame, diminished their superabundance, and disperses and thus reduces that superfluity which is more than the body can bear. . . . Therefore . . . there is no doubt that cities should be provided with the roomiest and most ornamented walks, laid out under the free and open sky.1 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 In his book, Walking in Roman Culture, Timothy O’Sullivan reveals that there is rather more to this than a casual health fad. The Romans considered it important to maintain the proportions of dry and humid in the body as part of gender identity.2 O’Sullivan also discusses at length the importance of walking and talking together for conversation, discussion and advice, and the significance in such a stratified society of the temporary equality between two men walking side by side. He cites Vitruvius’s advice that houses of noblemen should include atria, peristyles and spacious walkways, ‘because in their homes they provide both consultations on public affairs and private decisions and opinions’.3 However, for the most part, Vitruvius himself remains rather pragmatic in tone, as, for example, when advising on passage in and out of the theatre: 20 Peter Blundell Jones

The different entrances ought to be numerous and spacious, the upper not connected with the lower, but built in a continuous straight line from all parts of the house, without turnings, so that the people may not be crowded together when let out from shows, but may have separate exits from all parts without obstruction.4

And similarly: ‘colonnades must be constructed behind the scaena, so that when sudden showers interrupt plays, the people may have somewhere to retire from the theatre.’5 Vitruvius and his successors portray the practical business of being an architect as remarkably broad and all-encompassing, covering matters such as how to determine the quality of a site by examining the guts of animals, how to char the ends of wooden piles or how to build fortifications. However, when it comes to designing buildings, their primary concerns are with the orders and which to apply where, or the relative positions and proportions of rooms according to some numerical formulation convenient for reapplication. A general argument much repeated between them holds that the building should be like a body, well proportioned in its parts, and the use of whole-number proportions with a base of ten or twelve is evidently convenient for transferable prescriptions, whatever its proposed aesthetic advantages.6 But all the classical theorists give the impression that the content and purpose of buildings are well understood and not to be challenged, so that, when movement of persons is mentioned, it is usually, again, in a practical vein. This is Alberti on transitional spaces:

Vestibules, halls and the like places of public reception in houses, ought to be like squares and other open places in cities: not in a remote private corner, but in the centre and the most public place, where all the other members may readily meet: for here all lobbies and staircases are to terminate; here you meet and receive your guests. Moreover, the houses should not have above one entrance, to the intent that nobody may come in, or any thing be carried out, without the knowledge of the porter.7

The final sentence reminds us that, in societies with servants, the gates are controlled by guardians, whom one first encounters on arrival and with whom one must negotiate greetings, which colours the whole experience of a gate. But again, as far as direct mention of walking is concerned, Alberti too remains laconic. Mention does occur fleetingly in his initial definition of architecture in Book 1, Chapter II, where, perhaps surprisingly, he places the division of functions in a house before the provision of shelter, citing the need for places to sleep and cook, so as ‘not to confound public and private matters’. Later, he defines the platform as, ‘those spaces of the buildings which in walking we tread upon with our feet’, and adds that, ‘compartition is that which subdivides the whole platform of the house into smaller

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 platforms, so that the whole edifice thus formed and constituted of these its members, seems to be full of lesser edifices’. He describes apertures as if they are to be cut into walls already built, defining them as, ‘all those outlets, which are in any part of the building, for the convenience of egress and regress, or the passage of things necessary to the inmates’, which is as far as discussion of movement goes in his opening section.8 In Book 1, Chapter IX, following his famous remark about a house being a small city and a city a big house, Alberti deals in more detail with ‘compartition’, stressing that the parts of a building be proportionate like the members of a body, but there is also advice on the relative positions of parts in their order of importance:

To every member therefore ought to be allotted its fit place and proper situation; not less than dignity requires, not greater than conveniency demands; not in an impertinent The classical authors 21

or indecent place, but in a situation so proper to itself that it could be set nowhere else more fitly. Nor should the greatest part of the structure, that is to be of the greatest honour, be thrown into a remote corner; nor that which ought to be the most public, into a private hole; nor that which should be most private, be set in too conspicuous a place. We should besides have regard to the seasons of the year, and make a great deal of difference between hot places and cold, both in proportions and situation . . . And here we should provide, that the inhabitants may not be obliged to pass out of a cold place into a hot one without a medium of temperate air.9

Chapter XIII deals with staircases, which one would expect to involve movement, but Alberti concentrates on slopes and appropriate numbers of steps, advocating frequent addition of landings, so that ‘such as were weak or tired with the fatigue of the ascent might have leisure to rest themselves, and that if they should chance to stumble, there might be a place to break their fall’.10 Again, the emphasis is pragmatic and concerns the constructed object. Andrea Palladio, in his Quattro Libri, gives more detailed descriptions of layouts and is more loquacious about types of staircase, their advantages and elegance, but he is also surprisingly laconic about movement on them, merely remarking in Book I, Chapter XXVIII that:

Great care ought to be taken in the placing of staircases . . . The staircases will be commendable if they are clear, ample, and commodious to ascend, inviting, as it were, people to go up . . . They will be sufficiently ample, if they do not seem scanty and narrow to the largeness and quality of the fabric, but they are never to be made less wide than four foot, that if two persons meet, they may conveniently give one another room.11

Yet Palladio, like Alberti, does show a strong sense of propriety and concern about the correct positions of things, and, as with Vitruvius, the loggia earns special attention. In Book I, Chapter XXI:

The loggias, for the most part, are made in the fore and back front of the house and are placed in the middle, when only one is made, and on each side when there are two. These loggias serve for many uses, as to walk, eat in, and other recreations; and are either made larger or smaller; according as the bigness and conveniency of the fabrick requires; but, for the most part, they are not to be made less than ten foot wide, nor more than twenty.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Besides, all the well-contrived houses have in the middle, and in their more beautiful part, some places, by which all the others have a communication: these in the under part are called entries, and in the upper halls. These places are public. The entries are the first parts, except the loggias, which offer to those that enter the house, and are the most convenient for those to stay in who wait the master’s coming out, to salute or to do business with him. The halls serve for feasts, entertainments and decorations, for comedies, weddings, and such like recreations; and therefore these places ought to be much larger than the others, and to have the most capacious form, to the end that many persons may be commodiously placed, and see whatever is done there.12

One might have expected Palladio to have something more explict to say about the masterly spatial sequences in his beautiful villa at Masera, picked out elswhere in this book by David 22 Peter Blundell Jones

Lea as a prime example of architecture conditioned by the experience of movement (p. 74), but his description is short and understated, more interested in his hydraulic triumph:

That part of the fabric which advances a little forward has two orders of rooms. The floor of those above is even with the level of the court backwards, where there is a fountain cut into the mountain opposite to the house . . . This fountain forms a small lake, which serves as a fish pond. From this place the water runs into the kitchen; and having watered the gardens that are on the right and left of the road, which leads gradually to the fabric, it forms two fish ponds, with their watering places upon the high-road; from whence it waters the kitchen garden, which is very large, and full of the most excellent fruits, and of different kinds of pulse.13

FIGURE 1.1.1 Andrea Palladio, Villa Barbaro at Maser, elevation from Quattro Libri

Notes 1 Vitruvius 1960, p. 155. 2 O’Sullivan 2011, p. 80. 3 Ibid., p. 87, including his version of the Vitruvius quote. 4 Vitruvius 1960, p. 138. 5 Ibid., p. 154. 6 Ibid., pp. 72–3. 7 Alberti 1986 (reprint of 1755 Leoni edition), p. 84. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Ibid., p 13. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 Palladio 1965 (reprint of 1738 Isaac Ware edition), p. 34. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 12 Ibid., p. 27. 13 Ibid., p. 49 (Book II Ch. XIV). 1.2 VIOLLET-LE-DUC ON THE MEDIEVAL CLOISTER

Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc’s ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI au XVI siècle was a crucial source on medieval architecture for the Gothic revival internationally and remains a mine of information, especially for its detailed drawings and engravings, although it has never received a full English translation. It runs from A to Z, ranging from general essays on ‘Architecture’ or ‘Church’ to detailed studies such as ‘Window’ and ‘Chimney’, reporting on surveyed examples, mostly in France. As appreciated in his acceptance by historians 50 years ago as a proto- modernist, Viollet took a predominantly functional approach, fascinated by the operation of weapons and fortifications and the assembly details of structure and construction, so that, although there are entries on ‘Boulevard’ and ‘Chemin de Ronde’, these take circulation in a purely pragmatic sense. However, in Viollet’s definition of Cloister, at the beginning of a chapter that describes a host of examples not included here, the experience of space comes more to the fore, supported by evidence gathered from the literature of the age. Cloître (vol. 3, p. 408) opening remarks:

Court surrounded by walls and galeries established beside cathedral churches or those of colleges and monasteries. Since the beginning of Christianity cloisters were raised in the immediate vicinity of churches. The form of cloisters is generally a square. The abbeys had two cloisters, one next to the west entrance of the church, the other in the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 east behind the apse. The first gave access to refectories, dormitories, chapter house, sacristy, warm room and prisons; it was the cloister of the monks, in which all could circulate. The second was reserved for the abbott, dignitaries and copyists, more retiring and smaller than the other, and built next to the library, the infirmary and the cemetery. The cathedrals all had a cloister attached to one side of the nave, whether north or south, surrounded by the dwellings of the canons, who lived under a communal rule. Often schools were built close to the cloisters of abbeys and cathedrals. From the 11th century the synods were occupied in the enclosure of chapters of cathedrals: ‘It is necessary, say the assemblies, that the priests establish the cloisters next to cathedral churches so that the clerks can live according to the canonic rule, that the priests keep to it, and that they do not leave the church or live elsewhere’. It also declares 24 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

that the refectory and dormitory should be built within the enclosure of the cloister. ‘The diversity of dwellings and offices in the cloister’, says Guillaume Durand, ‘signifies the diversity of the dwellings and rewards in the heavenly kingdom, for “In the house of my father there are many mansions” says the saviour’. And in the moral sense, ‘the cloister represents the contemplation in which the soul fulfills itself, and where it hides itself away, separated from the crowd of carnal thoughts, where it meditates on heavenly blessings alone. In this cloister there are four walls which are the denial of the self, the denial of the world, but the love for brethren and love of God. And on all sides are ranges of columns . . . the base of all the columns is patience. In the cloister the diversity of dwellings is that of the virtues’.1

FIGURE 1.2.1 Section of cloister at Elne, France, as depicted in Viollet’s Dictionnnaire Raisonnée (vol. 3, p. 434). Caption from Viollet’s text: ‘This figure presents the section of the cloister and one external bay. In terms of sculpture, this cloister is the richest of those surviving in this region of France. The original capitals are from the 12th century and even the 14th century ones are works of beauty. The shafts of the columns in the gallery facing the courtyard are covered with sculpture of great delicacy, and the last of the builders tried to follow as closely as possible the style adopted by the architects of the first cloister’

Note 1 The quotations were from Guillaume Durand, probably the younger, who died in 1328 or 1330. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.3 CHARLES GARNIER: LE THÉÂTRE, CHAPTER 4, STAIRCASES1

Translated by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.3.1 Paris Opera, principal façade Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones 26 Translator Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.3.2 Paris Opera, plan at stage level, front and main entrance to bottom, stage to top, aristocratic entrances to the sides. The main stair in its square well is the focal point of the public part of the building; banks of secondary stairs, not made explicit in this version, are in multiple dog-leg flights lying to right and left of the main stair Source: Redrawn from published plan by Diego Carrasco Charles Garnier: Le théâtre 27

FIGURE 1.3.3 Paris Opera, the main stair seen from the right side Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.3.4 Paris Opera, a flight of the main stair from above Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones 28 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

The Paris Opera is Charles Garnier’s masterpiece, but the choice of architect was not a foregone conclusion. Initially, Charles Rohault de Fleury had been commissioned by Louis-Napoleon, but he was displaced in 1860 in favour of the Empress’s favourite Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-duc, who argued for a two- stage competition. This was duly held in 1860–1, and, although Garnier only gained fifth place in the first round, he won unanimously in the second. The foundation stone was laid in 1862, although the building was not completed until 1875, delayed by the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent political changes.2 Garnier followed it up with a book, Le théâtre, which describes the design and the many intentions behind it in great detail, with chapters on arrival, vestibules, foyers and so on, looking at each in turn. We have taken the chapter on staircases as a representative sample, as there experience of movement is of most pressing concern. It was too long to include in its entirety, and so has been edited down to about half, covering the reasoned choices in designing the main stair but leaving out similarly exhaustive treatments of the secondary stairs and stair cage. Garnier wrote in a florid and rhetorical manner and could be rather repetitive, and so the initially direct translation has been subjected to cuts too numerous to mark, although the customary ellipsis does indicate major excisions towards the end. For an appropriate impression, we preserved in full some of Garnier’s more rhapsodic sentences about the ritual of theatre.

Chapter 4 The Staircases Here we touch on one of the most important aspects of organising a theatre, not just for the sake of connections and circulation, but to produce an artistic motif that contributes to the general beauty of the building. With most large auditoria in France and abroad a rational composition of stairs is lacking. There are buildings where walkways are well arranged: the Carlo Felice theatre in Genoa, for example, or the Grand Theatre in Munich, which, on each side of a vast vestibule, develops two great ramps of coloured marble reminiscent of those at the Odéon in Paris. There is also the theatre at Bordeaux, whose stair is famous, and some in new Paris theatres. But taken together, almost all theatres are incomplete in having stairs that are small and mean, no larger than the secondary ones. One has to hunt around to find one’s way, and decorative motifs are often missing. So rather than taking them as models, the architect must regret the inadequacy of existing stairs. It is not just the architect’s fault, for the site is often restricted, the programme too rigid, and one must excuse the artist caught up in his operations, unable to exceed strict necessity when an additional generosity was needed. Ever since primitive theatres, the monuments for theatrical display have shown this inadequacy. Little was demanded because people were easily satisfied, and nobody supposed that, independently of the plays presented, the view of grand staircases filled with people

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 could also be a spectacle of pomp and elegance. Without considering any architectural motif, architects sought only a means to arrive in the hall, yet grand and beautiful staircases were not rare in palaces, museums, and even convents. So lack of artistic creativity was not the problem, but rather lack of resources, lack of space, or lack of will on the part of clients. But now that luxury is extended and comfort sought everywhere, when the departure of the audience is awaited by observers eager to witness an elegant and varied crowd, with today’s facility of communications and the need to satisfy the eyes as well as the mind, the architect faces a need for monumental organisation and large well- placed staircases. In a large theatre there must be no indecision about which route to follow towards entrance or exit, and the motif chosen for effective functioning must Charles Garnier: Le théâtre 29

also be an artistic motif predisposed towards the splendours of the production and the shimmering splendour of the ladies’ dresses. Let us consider the form and placing of the staircases. We must be guided by practical study of crowd movements and by the desire to develop the art at large scale in a sumptuous way. First general layout: whatever your feelings about the principles of equality, it must be admitted that in a theatre one can never make all seats equally good. If differences in quality exist, differences in seat prices follow, which leads in turn to a difference between the comfortable and the luxurious. This vicious circle is unavoidable, so despite doing all possible to avoid complaints, one is obliged to create several categories of seats, which basically divide between ordinary and luxurious. The most rational method to split the crowd is to follow the seats, so the stairs divide into those serving ordinary seats and those serving luxurious ones. The route for each is defined, and confusion is avoided. I am well aware that some pedantic egalitarians will say this initial division disfavours part of the audience, and that the theatre should belong to all without distinction. I am not sure that any great harm is done to them, but if two or three thousand people are made to pass along the same route, that route will certainly be badly encumbered, and if everybody is treated the same, all are treated equally badly. I do not see therefore that it would achieve any increase in dignity. Since nobody is embarrassed to go to the stalls or to the third level boxes, I see no reason why people should be embarrassed to take a route not shared with those going to the first level of boxes. When in the street I walk on the pavement, I do not feel insulted to leave the central carriageway to vehicles: it is a guarantee of security and makes circulation easier for everyone. Dignity is not involved. So in any theatre there must be first of all a staircase for luxurious seats, a stair of honour, if you wish, supposing that it belongs not to the persons who climb it, but rather to the position it occupies. Then there must be other flights leading to secondary seats. This is the principal division, but we must attend to the way fashion influences the quality and value of seats, for if categories change, it is not the same with the stairs. They have to remain as constructed, and since they must be useful however the seats are designated, they must not be too isolated from each other, allowing passage from one flight to another to take place easily. Therefore the grand stair of honour should connect with the secondary stairs, so that people can move easily from one to the other. Moving on to the placing of the stairs, we can assume that the grand staircase should be central, for if set to one side it would serve only one side of seats, and it would constrain persons attempting to move from one side to the other across the crowd in

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the middle. It is obvious that it must occupy the noble place in a building, following the axis of the auditorium, the vestibule, and the building as a whole. With the grand staircase so placed, the secondary stairs should be laterally placed, that is to right and left of the principal stair. I say to right and to left not to right or left because it is advantageous that the large crowd going to the secondary seats is split to avoid crossings and embarrassment at every level, and indecision about which path to take. Furthermore, because in terms of usage any auditorium should be symmetrical in plan, it is logical that its connections also be symmetrical. When services offered are identical, what is found on the left should also be found on the right, and for all these reasons, following common sense as well as study, one must conclude that the stair of honour should take the centre, with secondary staircases to right and left of it. This starting point can be 30 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

further fulfilled by study of the arrangement of flights and ease of communication between different routes, and this we must undertake next. The disposition of flights in the grand central stair can be arranged in various ways, many of which can be effective and monumental. There are four main approaches [partis] under which one can gather all variations; they can be discussed one by one, and this study will show by the variety of their arrangements, that these four partis include almost all grand motifs of stair flights found in practice. The first, offering greatest simplicity, is the straight flight. On arriving at the cage of the stair, one discovers a grand broad ascent and there is no hesitation about where to go. The route is indicated, the way simple, the aspect monumental, the motif frank and accentuated. Leaving enough space to right and to left of the central flight, whether for circulation on the same level or for circulation descending, the cage enlarges, develops, takes on the form of a beautiful vessel, which one can decorate with nobility and splendour. Considering these qualities alone, the big straight stair would be a suitable choice, but one must look beyond first impressions and also study its faults. Following the custom adopted in nearly all theatres, the foyer, the principal galleries for promenade, should be at the level of the first boxes, that is the piano nobile, where one combines luxury with comfort. This means that to pass from the foot of the first staircase to the first boxes, one must ascend the height of the ground floor to the stalls or baignoires,3 then carry on from the level of the baignoires to the first boxes, that is two levels of ordinary corridors. Now, the minimum height of such galleries in a grand theatre is about 3 metres. This is a bit high for the services themselves, but rather low for the galleries and corridors that surround the hall. It is therefore a compromise, and the height of 3 metres is the average that should be adopted, at least for the lower floors. For a monumental staircase of 3 metres where the steps have to be really gentle one must assume a minimum of 22 steps. With each around 35 cm wide this makes a length of more than 7 metres, so whatever the form of the flight, one must allow for this length. Because the central stair rises two floors, it is indispensible that it should serve in its course the first luxury seats, stalls of the amphitheatre, balconies, or baignoires, which are situated half way to the first boxes. There must therefore be a mid-level landing to let people off to right and left. Another landing is needed at the head of the stair, for one of the indispensible conditions of stairs is that they must not finish without a pause before the entrances; this is not only indispensible practically, but also artistically. For satisfactory proportions these landings require as much depth as breadth, so they should be as deep as the width of the stairs. But since a grand central stair is useless

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 unless it allows easy circulation of the crowd, it needs at least five metres of landing, and again this is the minimum. This dimension of five metres must therefore be taken up first with the lower landing, then the middle one, then the upper, adding up to 15 metres; to this add the two flights of a further 15 metres, and it produces around 30 metres in all, without taking account of the wall thicknesses of the surrounding cage. Certainly it is not impossible to construct a staircage of this size, and size alone would give a grand effect, but what is more difficult is to find a site to permit such development. Even given the space, developed at this scale, this motif leads to the inconvenience of separating hall from foyers excessively. The inconvenience is but relative, and might be corrected, but there is another problem that seems yet more significant. A grand central stair ending directly at the corridor of Charles Garnier: Le théâtre 31

the first boxes also pulls the lateral stairs forward and produces a problem of continuity between staircases. For as we saw above, it is important that all staircases inter - communicate, and if they fail in this the fault is felt on every ascension, increasing separation between the connections of seats, an isolation that brings embarrassment. The architect should concentrate on rational and practical aspects before considering any idea of splendour and artistic desire, so if he cannot remedy this fault, he should not hesitate to reject this arrangement which, although furnishing him with a pattern that is easy to study and of a certain effect, commits a significant sin. Art is not complete until the whole programme is satisfied, and, even if it costs the artist a little, he must follow a programme that is both reasonable and reasoned. The second grand pattern of staircase that can be used and has often been employed to happy effect is that of two opposed flights leaving sideways from a grand central vestibule and ending to right and left of the theatre. The Paris Odéon is so composed, and its appearance is monumental. The grand theatre in Munich, already mentioned, follows the same parti with equally monumental effect. This arrangement does not have the same inconveniences as a single central flight, does not push back the foyer too far, and if the lateral stairs are placed at the extremities of the paired flights, communication between main and secondary flights can be easily managed. Also the two opposed flights form so to speak an amphitheatre between them, grouping persons who ascend and descend in a harmonious manner: a double spectacle in which each is at once actor and spectator. In this parti, then, everything seems of good service, and to allow the artistic manifestation every development and prestige, so one can only approve it in principle as a grand and beautiful arrangement. But this too is not without inconveniences, for owing to its size, even its grandeur, it has a disadvantage which must be noted. It goes without saying that I am speaking always of a grand theatre where the foyer is at the height of the first level of boxes, where one has to mount two levels to arrive at these boxes, and where the average height of the corridor to the hall is three metres. We have seen earlier that a single central progression established in these conditions had a development of around 30 metres. With two opposed progressions it needs at least twice the space, for the central vestibule needs at least ten metres of width to answer the needs of the two grand staircases. This gives the whole ensemble of the two flights a total dimension of around 60 metres. But, as the greatest width of hall in which performances remain audible is 40 metres, including the salon of the boxes, it results in people having to turn back from the tops of the flights to rediscover corridors to the boxes.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Certainly, if the vestibules or galleries through which one passes on this route are well disposed and generously decorated, it will be no great pity, and the longest circulation will be made easier. But it is illogical to pass the goal before arriving, and it would be better if the arrival took place where it is most convenient. Nevertheless this little inconvenience does not inflict an irredeemable vice on this grand arrangement, which admittedly fulfils the conditions required for easy circulation of spectators and good architectural order. It is even advantageous that at mid-route, at the level of the baignoires, the doorways placed to the right of the first landing will meet the corridors at a convenient point, and here again logic is satisfied. But another drawback is that the staircases impede circulation from the hall to the foyers, so either one must pass around the edge, or cross above the central vestibule of 32 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

the ground floor. Both cases are problematic, for if one goes round the edge one must leave the boxes, pass along the ascending flight, and traverse the outer landings to go to the foyers. If instead one passes above the central vestibule of the ground floor, the circulation is direct and the goal well indicated, but it does introduce a further inconvenience. If the vestibule of the ground floor is cut off at the floor of the foyer, it divides the collection of stairs in two, so instead of one open cage, wide and monumental, one has two cages distinct and separated, which however grand and well decorated, can never have the simplicity and nobility of a single cage. The motif is deflowered, unity destroyed, and the great artistic advantage of this double arrangement is almost annihilated by this division. There is a third parti sharing aspects of the previous one, which has perhaps a certain advantage. The opposed flights, having arrived at the level of the baignoires, instead of continuing to the level of the first boxes, turn back towards a grand landing placed above the central vestibule. The arrival of the stairs is closer to the boxes, and as the staircase takes less space across the width of the theatre, circulation from hall to foyers is more direct, so the faults noted for the second parti do not apply to this third one. There is advantage here, but communication with the secondary stairs is at the level of the baignoires, so people going to the second boxes leave the upper part of the main staircase at that point. This lessens comfort and the sense of parade for those using the second boxes. Since when one constructs a building all aspects must be considered, even the prejudices of the public, this hindrance has to be acknowledged. Furthermore, when arrival occurs above the ground floor vestibule, it suppresses the grand order of the stair cage as with the previous parti, again producing two distinct cages, which is always a bit mean in comparison with a single grand vessel. One can partly remedy this fault by arranging the arrival of the two upper flights not on a whole floor over the vestibule, but at a landing of the same width as the staircase. In this way, apart from the landing the vessel is open. The two flights lengthen, approach and join, but always within a single space. This arrangement seems convenient if one does not reproach the landing for cutting the architectural order where it is added, and obscuring the wall of the end of the cage from the spectators who arrive and begin to mount the stairs. But the addition of stairs and landing is a real obstacle to free lines of sight, and no matter how cleverly the motif is studied, there is no avoiding that disagreeable addition. I do not claim this fault is reason enough to reject the whole parti, for there are so many ways of composing an artistic arrangement that I cannot deny that the disadvantage might be overcome. I wished only to describe the motif,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 its qualities, and the aspect that presents most difficulties for its artistic arrangement. There remains one more parti, and as it is the one I believed necessary to adopt, it goes without saying that its qualities seemed to me to outweigh its faults. This motif is certainly not new. Examples can be found as far back as the Italian Renaissance, and it has sometimes been deployed in buildings over the last two centuries. It made its reputation with the Grand Theatre of Bordeaux, where that great architect [Victor] Louis gave it a special place. Since then it has remained as a type more or less modified, but which retained the great advantage of being simple and logical. In adopting it for the new Opéra, I hope at least to have given it a more particular character, which I have designed with more suppleness; but its basic parti derives from that first arrangement, which seemed to me to conform most to the exigencies of art and reason. Charles Garnier: Le théâtre 33

I have had no reason to hide its fortunate parentage, and I am more at my ease in making this observation since, whatever parti I had adopted, it would always have been used earlier in some form or other. Types are limited: one cannot help but ascend at the front, at the back, to right or to left, and it is above all in the development of a motif that diversity and originality make themselves felt. Let us now examine this motif and understand the reasons that militate in its favour. The arrangement is simple: on the building’s axis the arriving visitor encounters a great monumental flight of stairs. It rises to a landing in front of a first entrance, then the route divides, one flight rising to the right and the other to the left, both ending in galleries at the level of the first boxes. The form is almost naïve, but despite its simplicity it adapts itself to all requirements. At the top of the first flight a central doorway leads to the baignoires and the stalls of the amphitheatre, and that accomplished, the lateral flights lead on up to the first boxes. Now as the two opposed flights and the landing between them only take about 20 metres, one arrives close to the median part of the corridors for the boxes. Before people reach the end of the two upper flights, the secondary stairs are visible directly opposite. Audience members stopping at the first boxes turn right or left according to the direction they have chosen to climb, while those progressing to the second level of boxes continue straight on. There is again division of the crowd, generous facility of communication, and logical arrival at all seats. These conditions fulfilled, let us see if others are too, and if the communication of the boxes with the foyers is broad and easy. Since the width of the cage scarcely exceeds 20 metres, the galleries of the passage established to each side will align with the middle of the corridors of the hall, to give the greatest average proximity to the seats and proximity to the foyers, all with direct view of the route. There is no embarrassment, no detours to get from hall to foyers, so again the problem seems resolved. We saw earlier that, when two opposed flights were reunited by a central landing, it masked part of the wall. In this case, on the contrary, the two opposed ramps instead of being reunited, extend one another, and the upper landing is removed. As for the intermediate landing, the blocking of the lower wall, being at a far lower level than the landing of the earlier case, and diminishing almost geometrically with height, leaves the door at the bottom almost completely visible, and the lateral flights sloping up to the floor of the boxes do not hide this arrival at all. The walls of the cage are therefore exposed, it is vast and unencumbered, and if the architect decorates it with talent, the motif seems to offer all necessary resources. I sought the inconveniences that could arise from this arrangement, and can honestly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 say I have only found just one. It is that the landing by the doorway to the baignoires, being unable to exceed the width of the steps, is relatively restricted in size, and does not permit more than a single opening on the axis of the main flight. It is large enough for arrival, but one might fear when everybody leaves that it will be a little crowded, made worse by the way people leaving through that opening will collide with those descending from the first level of boxes. This would produce great inconvenience if the principal stair was not complemented by secondary stairs, which well connected, will invite use by audience members coming from the lateral corridors. Only the central crowd will take the main staircase, and since the corridors, like the special doors giving access to the median levels, can be well placed to right and left, one can believe that the middle door will suffice for practical purposes of exit . . . 34 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

There remains only to make some observations on the form of steps. If of rigid and rectangular form, and if the flights ended or turned at right angles, the arrangement would not only lack continuity and grace, but also ease of circulation. One normally walks perpendicular to the nose of the steps, so on arrival at the intermediate landing one has brusquely to change direction. It is therefore essential to give the steps gentle curves that lead naturally in the direction of the flights. To achieve this one must consider the stair as divided between right and left, and trace on the drawing the line one would follow to pursue this route without brusque changes of direction, and so to use this directional line or ‘line of the crowd’ to arrange the steps so that the flights end more or less perpendicular to it. In this way the route can be traced naturally and rationally, and one passes from one flight to the next gradually, without agitation, without hesitation, following a continuous line that is only slightly deflected at the landings . . . Finally, if the grand central stair is a sumptuous and eventful place, if the decorative treatment is elegant, if the animation which dominates the stairs is an interesting and varied spectacle, there will be advantages from which all can profit. If one then places the lateral walls of the stair cage in such a way that they are always open, all persons circulating on every floor can if they wish find interest in the view of the grand stair and the incessant circulation of the crowd. It will be good then to make the vertical walls very largely open to the cage, and to create openings to the large balconies that allow a good position and easy view of all movements taking place on the grand stair. This is rational, practical, artistic, and leads inevitably to a motif that is rich, grandiose and eventful. On each floor the spectators leaning on the balconies decorate the walls and seemingly bring them to life, while others ascend or descend, adding further life. Finally with the addition of cloth and flowing draperies, with many-branched chandeliers, lustrous surfaces, marbles and flowers, colour throughout, one makes of the whole a brilliant and sumptuous composition reminiscent of canvases by Veronese. The light that sparkles, the resplendent costumes, the animated and smiling figures, the meetings and greetings: all give an atmosphere of feasting and pleasure, and without being conscious of the part played by the architecture in this magic effect, all enjoy themselves, in their happiness paying homage to this great art, so powerful in its manifestations, so elevated in its results.

Notes 1 Charles Garnier 1871, Ch. 4, pp. 57–94. 2 Robin Middleton in Middleton and Watkin 1980, p. 244. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3 Literally bathtubs, a particular layer of large, open boxes at the back of the stalls. 1.4 HERMANN MUTHESIUS: WIE BAUE ICH MEIN HAUS

Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

Hermann Muthesius is best known as the author of Das englische Haus, a three-volume study published after his sojourn in Britain that was the best contemporary record of the Arts and Crafts architecture. However, he also designed many houses himself in the Berlin area and was first president of the Deutscher Werkbund, and so a contributor to the modernist breakthrough. His book Wie baue ich mein Haus (How I build my house) of 1917 was intended for the guidance of clients, particularly for those moving out of the city to suburban locations. In its various chapters, there is much concern with room relationships and functions, including how one moves from one room to another, but also concentration on the social niceties of a society that still takes for granted the presence of servants. The two chapters included here are 12 and 13, from the middle of the book, about how the house is approached, and then about the circulation within it. Muthesius illustrated it with line drawings of his own work, which we reproduce.

Chapter 12, The route to the house (Der Weg zum Hause), pp. 107–14 A difficult question that arises in the initial planning of a house is how to make a good entrance. The way one approaches, how one enters, where visitors wait to be received, all this needs the most careful consideration. The entrance does not have to be in the street-front, and can be at the side, but how to enter should never be left in doubt. An entrance at the back is definitely to be avoided. In the case of a large house one

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 must first decide whether a drive for vehicles is to be provided, and if so, there must be room for the vehicles to turn before they leave again. For today’s large and long motor vehicles this is not so easy, as a large vehicle requires the outer radius of the drive to be at least 14 metres, as shown in Figure 1.4.1, and this must be provided even with the house forward on the building line. In this case, though, one can make two gates, one for entry and the other for exit. It is sensible to provide a drive that can take motors for the use of the guests, even if the owner himself uses only a horse drawn carriage. If the house is on a large site and far from the boundary, a porter’s lodge at the entrance is always needed. The porter can then open the gate as the carriage approaches, allowing it to continue on up to the house door. But if the house is near the boundary, 36 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.4.1 Plan of radius for drive

Abb. 75. Vorfahrt zu einem groBeren Hause

the gate can be opened by servants living in the house, although the carriage has to wait as the servant hurries out to do it. A perfect arrival can be obtained with a covered porch (Figure 1.4.2), which allows transition from carriage to house in rainy weather without wetting the feet, but it is an expensive addition only affordable for a large house. If the point of arrival cannot be covered, the best mode of arrival being therefore precluded, it is better to omit such a porch altogether. The whole task will then be made much easier: instead of the main gate, have a garden door, and in place of the elaborate drive, a garden path. As an addition one can build a covered way from the gate to the house, which makes the drive unnecessary. Alternatively one can build a pergola, which when covered in plants at least gives some protection. Planning control demands if the house is a certain distance from the street – usually 30 metres, which is the length of the fire hose – that there must be an entryway, but it does not have to be fully metalled, and a garden gate only 2.3 m wide will suffice. For good supervision of the entrance it is essential that the servants can see the garden gate from the house, and it is usually provided with an electric latch that can be operated from within. It is therefore essential that servants can recognise who has arrived before

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 opening the gate. This issue must be considered from an early planning stage, to assure that the service rooms gain a view of the entrance. But where will the servants be? Often it is the so-called servant’s room that is given easy access to the entrance and overlooks the gate, but this arrangement fulfils its purpose only if the servant remains in his room, which he hardly ever does. He has housework to do, which takes him to the servery or cleaning room, or into the kitchen, and his own room is used only to sleep. Only in great houses like that of a Duke is it possible to have a servant constantly on watch in his room to receive visitors. Therefore it is in all cases better to make sure that the house-door can be seen from the kitchen, the one room where the presence of at least one of the servants is guaranteed. If the kitchen lies not on the same side as the entrance but to the side, a projecting bay can be provided to allow the servants a Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 37

Abb. 76—78. Verschiedene Gestaltung des Eingangs zum Hause

FIGURE 1.4.2 Various entrance arrangements with waiting places for guests, left, and porte cochère, middle

sideways glimpse of the approach. This has the advantage that visitors do not have the feeling of being scrutinised by the servants. It may also be desirable to run a speaking tube from the house to the gate, so that visitors can announce their identity. Once the gate has been opened and the way cleared to approach the house, the visitor proceeds to the house door, where he must ring the bell for a second time. It is most desirable to set the door back a little (Figure 1.4.3), or to provide it with a small sheltering porch to protect the waiting visitor if it is raining. If such a shelter gives more of a feeling than the reality of protection, it nonetheless generates a homely atmosphere and lends the house entrance an inviting impression. To build open steps leading up to the entrance is not recommended, lest in winter they become slippery and cause accidents: a clever designer will usually find ways of accommodating changes of level within the house. The door having been opened and the visitor welcomed, he must wait some minutes before being received: where is this to happen? Precisely in this matter the rules remain rather unresolved in German houses. In blocks of flats the visitor, having handed over his card, has the door off the staircase closed again in his face, or at least reduced to a narrow slot. This always gives the feeling of being

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 neglected, and we have to excuse such bad form as inevitable with the rented flat. But in the case of many one-family houses it is not much better. Here at least care should be taken that the visitor, after the door is opened, is conducted into a small antechamber where he finds a dignified welcome (Figure 1.4.2, compare with Figure 1.4.4). For this purpose the wind lobby can suffice, provided it is well appointed and provided with a seat. This seat is more symbolic than real, for nobody will sit there, but it makes the room welcoming, and conveys the idea that one might spend some time there. When the servant returns, the visitor can be led first into the cloakroom and then to the hall or antechamber. To bring a visitor from the front door straight into the hall and leave him waiting there has the disadvantage that he has in one move penetrated too far, for he still has his overcoat on, and furthermore someone may have been 38 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

mistakenly admitted to the house who should not be there. For there are also commercial representatives whom the house owner would prefer to see in a special room, perhaps in a waiting room or study next to the entrance, or in a dedicated interview room (Figure 1.4.2). As for the cloakroom, it is important that it has two doors, one for entry from the wind lobby, the other for exit to the hall. This is especially needed for social occasions, even with small groups, when the lack will be felt if everyone has to use the same door to enter the cloakroom as to leave it again, for the participants all arrive and depart at the appointed hour, and those entering will bump into those leaving. Some say there should be separate cloakrooms for men and women, but this is excessive for a middle-ranking house. On social occasions a special room can be set aside for women even on the upper floor, in which case they must pass through the hall. The men, having used the facilities on the ground floor, can then await their womenfolk in the hall. The preparation of such a room, in which a dressing table with sewing kit and other items necessary for feminine attire, used during the kind of social occasions which bring women to a house for several hours, also has other advantages; for the special cloakroom with adjacent lavatory remains private from the men. Almost any other room on the ground floor can serve temporarily as a women’s cloakroom, such as a reception room, children’s dayroom or mending room. This double use then needs to be carefully considered during planning. A dedicated women’s cloakroom for social occasions is an extravagance reserved for the cream of houses and those in which entertaining plays the dominant role. In the correct arrangement of wind lobby, cloakroom, lavatory and hall there is yet more to be considered. It is not unusual for a door to lead directly from the hall to the lavatory, so that people sitting in the hall get a glimpse of its interior every time the door is opened. Such a layout can only be considered a design error. Often there is a lack of tact and propriety in our hospitality over the presentation of lavatories, especially when the signs ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ are placed too close together. The lavatory is a room whose presence should never be too obvious, but which nonetheless should be easy to find. Access through the cloakroom is always the best solution. Extraordinarily Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Abb. 79. Geschutzter Hauseingang

FIGURE 1.4.3 Setback of door Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 39

ungefahr im Verhaltnis des wachsendeu umbauten Raumes ansteigen

FIGURE 1.4.4 Plan of house showing whole entry arrangement

frequent too are halls in which coats are hung, an arrangement to be expected in the smallest houses, but too often also found in middle-ranking ones. It is no pleasure to change galoshes or overshoes there, especially with the storage already full of children’s clothes. Through careful planning it is possible to meet this important need in comfort and dignity even in small houses by adding the necessary side rooms. Figure 1.4.2 shows how wind lobby, cloakroom, and lavatory can be assembled even in tiny spaces, but such a concentration is only allowable for very small houses. Hardly less important than the placing of the main entrance is that of the service entrance, which should also be overlooked by servants. Whether it is necessary to decide a special route to the kitchen in planning the site, or to branch it off in laying out the floor plan, depends on the circumstances. An excess of entrances makes the whole plot too public, and it is tiresome constantly to have to open and close too many gates. The back entrance to a house should also have an ante-room to divide it from its first destination, the kitchen. A practical measure is to put a small window in the kitchen door through which supplies can be passed without the delivery boy needing to enter.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The kitchen entrance should lie to one side, so that traffic in and out does not obstruct the owner, but it is sensible not to remove the owner’s supervision entirely. With a large plot it helps to add a service gate to one side or the other. It is best left without a knocker, and kept locked when not in use. Life is much easier for the inhabitants if a single key opens not only the garden gates but the house doors as well. It can even extend to the inner doors, to cupboards and furniture. If this is required it must be specifically ordered from the locksmith, otherwise in the usual thoughtless way each door will have a different key and the owner will find himself laden down by a heavy bunch. This is perhaps the place to say something about the boundary of the plot, even if it belongs more in a book about gardens. Over its design local planners have held a 40 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

great influence. At first they insisted that the boundary should be kept transparent, to lend a ‘villa colony’ a friendly appearance, and only metal fences were allowed. Later wooden fences were permitted. Then along a small part of the boundary a wall was allowed, at first a third, then half of the perimeter. We are moving now towards the return of the old garden wall. The transparent boundary belonged, along with the front garden behind it, to the period dominated by a concern for outer appearance. A welcoming view for the visitor was the priority, for which the house owner was obliged to make sacrifices. For the owner of a country house it is certainly no obligation to lay out his garden for the appreciation of strangers and to live as if on a stage. Despite the planners’ efforts, the general tendency today is to close off the street edge, even if mostly through the planting of thick bushes or a hedge behind the metal fence, which the planners are powerless to prevent. The boundary should be laid out from the first with these considerations in mind. A solid wall has many advantages, though it is expensive. A cheaper alternative is a wooden fence, but the fence-posts can at least be set on concrete bases, for if set directly in the earth they rot in a few years. The connection between timber and concrete can be made by casting iron straps into the concrete. A narrow gap should be left between the post and its base to prevent rot. Wooden fences are cheaper than even the simplest iron ones. The cheapest boundary is the wire fence, but the effect is so horrible that it can spoil a whole house. At best it can provide support for thick planting. In other countries a living hedge has been used with advantage, which also has a pleasant appearance on the street. The best boundary to a property, though, is undoubtedly the garden wall, which should surround the entire plot if the conditions allow it.

12 Circulation within the House (Verkehrswege im Hause), pp. 115–19 Two parties inhabit the house who are well known to each other but belong to different strata of society: the gentry and the servants. An essential task of house design is to allow both parties to move freely as they wish, but to divide the circulation of the gentry from that of the servants, while retaining all necessary connections for the maintenance of domestic life. This basic division is no general rule intended to disadvantage the less fortunate, but is rather something forced onwards by the growing independence of the lower classes. The ancestral relationship, by which gentry and servants ate at the same table, is long past. Today the consciousness of the lower condition would feel such unnatural mixing as more of an imposition than a benefit, and mutual

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 existence without conflict is the goal for which both parties strive. It is therefore important as much for the gentry as for the servants to keep the room groupings separate. Both groups must take care, though, that the necessary connections can be made at every point along the border. The connections of the servants with the gentry part must allow them to go about their daily work, while the reverse connection requires that the lady of the house is able to supervise them in all their activities. For both parties to retain a tranquil life it is essential that the circulation routes of the gentry do not cross over into the territory of the servants, and vice versa. Daily observation reveals that this is constantly where mistakes are made. For example, it is common that servants must cross the hall to open the door, though we try to make the hall into a reception room [Wohndiele], so this results in an imperfect arrangement. The way to Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 41

the front door should avoid the dwelling rooms. But there are greater offences. In the ground plans of Berlin tenement flats there is a room that links the rear service rooms with the front living rooms and also leads to the hall door, the so-called Berliner Zimmer. Here again one finds an arrangement of antiquated origin, which could only have arisen because the Berlin tenement was managed by unsuitable authorities. But what should one say when such crossroads of rooms are built in freestanding country houses, and even published by their authors? To transplant the most questionable error of the Berlin flat can only show a shocking lack of design skill. The fact that in the 18th century the rooms in the linear wing of a castle were usually strung together without an adjacent hallway can scarcely excuse such bungling. The living conditions were then different. It seems they tried to overcome the problem with screens, to make the movements of servants less obvious to those in the room. But it is today an essential principle that every room be enterable from an anteroom or hall. The door cuts off the room from the service side, so is much more important than the doors between the rooms. Only service rooms such as the kitchen or scullery do not need such antechambers, for they are already fully dedicated to service and linked with each other. The room that requires the liveliest traffic to and from the service rooms is the dining room. The laying and clearing of the table, which takes place several times a day, requires a more protracted presence of servants in these rooms. It has therefore become customary for the dining room to be used not as a living room but only for eating, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary. Today’s dining room is in terms of location the most restricted room in the house. Since it needs a close connection with the kitchen, it naturally must be close to the service rooms. When there is a hall in the middle of the plan, it is a good strategy to place the living rooms on one side and the dining room on the other along with the service rooms (see Figure 1.4.5). Then the whole service operation, which can be obtrusive during the laying and clearing Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Abb. 81. Haus mit getrennt liegendem EBzimmer

FIGURE 1.4.5 Plan of house with dining room opposite reception rooms 42 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

of the table, is removed from the living rooms, and crucially the odours are also constrained to the smallest area. Such an arrangement is especially advantageous on social occasions. It means that one must cross the hall when going to dine, but this is no drawback, rather it is an advantage, for it brings the hall, on which much design effort may have been bestowed, more of a central role, and when the hosts are entertaining it makes the progress to table a truly festive event. As for the often-desired direct connection between living and dining rooms, the reason generally given is further use of the dining room on social occasions following the meal. But when the dining room has been cleared and can again be part of the circulation, it can equally well be reached via the hall. In any case the advantages of the separate dining room exceed the disadvantages, which incidentally are more imagined than real. In the design of the house plan the two aspects of dwelling and entertaining intersect easily, but many clients put too much stress on the latter. They are used to city living, and to considering the duties of entertainment first in choosing a dwelling. This concern for entertaining has influenced the design of the house plan in a particular direction, namely the connection of the reception rooms by sliding doors. These doors then only serve their purpose when the house is full of people and it is advantageous to make several rooms, as it were, into one single room. But when the family members are gathered in a small circle, nobody will want to open the sliding doors to the second or third room and so to extend the space: they are more likely to want to make it more intimate. Special consideration must be given to the relationship of both gentry and servants’ territories with rooms for the children. It is not always easy to find a suitable place in the plan for the children’s playroom. It should naturally not be far from the living rooms, but it is also important not to place the source of noise from youthful activity too close to the adults’ reception rooms. A position not far from the kitchen has the advantage of easier service, for there tend anyway to be frequent routine domestic tasks in attending children. But in this matter one is seldom free, for as in other parts of the house, orientation matters, and should be a primary concern. It is most desirable to give the children their own lavatories and even their own entrance. The children’s lavatory cannot always be kept as orderly as a general one that is also used by guests, and it should contain its own wash basin. The consideration of the circulation of servants within their own area is very important. The best functioning of the service area of the house cannot be considered as achieved while things are lacking there. The sequences of service rooms, and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 way they are laid out to lead from one to another, are matters of the first importance in a well laid out house. Here especially the critical opinion of the mistress of the house must be sought. The details of the service rooms will be dealt with later, but something should here be said of the accommodation of servants, that is about their sleeping quarters and day rooms. Obviously it is desirable not to place their recreation rooms too far from their workrooms. And since the servants’ bedrooms are usually in the attic, and therefore far from the work rooms, it is a great relief if a small servants’ sitting room can be placed next to the kitchen for daytime breaks. Then the servants’ bedrooms are merely bedrooms, for a free evening can be spent in the servants’ room. As for those other quarters a difficulty arises if both female and male servants are present. The bedroom Hermann Muthesius: Wie baue ich mein Haus 43

of one male servant can be conveniently placed in the ground floor, with the advantage that the house is better protected from larceny. It is recognised that thefts seldom occur from those houses in which a man sleeps on the ground floor, while thefts are invited if all residents are in the upper floors. The bedrooms for female servants are best placed in the attic close to the service stair. Guest bedrooms in the attic, as often mentioned, must be fundamentally and visibly divided from those occupied by maidservants. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.5 ARCHITECTURAL PROMENADES THROUGH THE VILLA SAVOYE

Flora Samuel

The ‘promenade architecturale’ is a key term in the language of modern architecture. It appears for the first time in Le Corbusier’s description of the Villa Savoye at Poissy as built (1929–31), where it supersedes the term ‘circulation’, so often used in his early work.1 ‘In this house occurs a veritable promenade architecturale, offering aspects constantly varied, unexpected and sometimes astonishing’.2 Taken at a basic level, the promenade refers, of course, to the experience of walking through a building. Taken at a deeper level, like most things Corbusian, it refers to the complex web of ideas that underpin his work, most notably his interest in the relationship between individual subjectivity and collective values. ‘You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the eye. You follow an itinerary and the perspectives develop with great variety, developing a play of light on the walls or making pools of shadow’, the purpose of all this being to help us ‘learn at the end of the day to appreciate what is available’.3 This statement deserves comparison with one by René Guilleré, a contemporary of Le Corbusier’s, who wrote, with regard to jazz, ‘In our new perspective there are not steps, no promenades. A man enters his environment – the environment is seen through the man. Both function through each other’.4 A key issue in the discussion of the promenade is for whom it was designed. What are the implications of designing a route to be perceived one way, when we will all perceive it so differently? This is a problem for the historian who, in describing one experience of the journey, gives expression to only one

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 version. Rather than giving my own interpretation of the promenade at the Villa Savoye, a journey that has been interpreted ad nauseam (Figure 1.5.1) – under the building, up the ramp, out into the garden and up to a window on the landscape – I shall focus instead on whom it was aimed at, clearly not the client alone. To do this, I shall refer to the depiction of the building in Le Corbusier’s carefully curated Oeuvre Complète, as well as the film Architecture d’aujourd’hui by Pierre Chenal (1930), in which Le Corbusier played an instrumental role. It is notable that neither follows a slavish route; they jump about offering a variety of different viewpoints; whether the promenade was one route or several within the same building remains debatable. At the same time, I shall consider the promenade as a means to order information, and Le Corbusier loved order. The art historian David Joselit writes that the promenade is radical Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 45

FIGURE 1.5.1 Diagram of the promenade in the Villa Savoye Source: © Flora Samuel and Steve Coombs

in being a very early example of a ‘format’, a ‘dynamic mechanism for aggregating content’, the World Wide Web being another example. He argues that, ‘what matters most is not the production of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting’. The promenade enables the visitor to make new and individual sense of the information presented by the building. In this way, it anticipates the contemporary art of today, for example Sherry Levine’s Postcards #4 (2000), in that it is not about the objects being seen – which, in the age of mechanical reproduction, are of course 5 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 endless – it is about the multiplicity of possible ways to see that object. Le Corbusier recognised that the building’s meaning is, for each person, in some sense individual. In his writing, he liked to toy with the point of view, leaping from first to third person singular – used to suggest an artificial degree of professional distance – and back again. At the same time, he was intensely aware of narrative stance, of the viewpoint of the individual vis-à-vis the viewpoint of the collective, an awareness that would play an important role in the development of the promenade. Le Corbusier wanted to make frameworks in which people could live out their own lives, while dictating very strongly exactly what that framework should be. It is one of those paradoxes that make his work so very interesting, so expressive of one of the central conundrums of architectural practice: how do you design buildings that allow others to be themselves? 46 Flora Samuel

As Andrew Ballantyne writes, ‘what gives buildings longevity is not what they meant for their designers, but what they come to mean for others’.6 Any discussion of the promenade needs to be prefaced by a consideration of its audience. Le Corbusier’s buildings were incomplete without people.7 They acted as a frame for the human life within. Without this, the promenade does not exist – it is the person that makes it whole, makes it happen. Hence the fact that the photos of the Villa Savoye included in the Oeuvre Complète are taken at eye level, or appear to be. In Le Corbusier’s depiction of the Villa Cook, a mannequin poignantly suggests human inhabitation, creating illusionistic games of scale against its verdant backdrop. In the Oeuvre Complète depiction of the Villa Savoye, items of clothing and equipment – a hat, a set of golf clubs, a pipe – talk of inhabitants unseen.8 When planning a film to be made about the Unité in Marseille, the building itself played an active role in the drama. Built matter was very much alive, working on people at two levels, the first bodily – the idea, Platonic in origin,9 being that affecting the emotions would affect how people think – the second intellectually, ‘for those with eyes to see’.10 Le Corbusier took a great interest in Orphism, which alluded, simultaneously, to an ancient mystery cult and a contemporary art movement instigated by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire.11 Orphism was at the root of multiple world religions, meaning that its symbolism had wide applicability. One dualism at the heart of Orphic religion was the relationship between light and dark, in other words spirit and matter, which impacted on Le Corbusier’s architecture in multiple ways. A clear example is his preoccupation with Jacob’s ladder, the route from earth to heaven.12 The connection between this biblical ladder and the promenade is made clear in the case of the Maison Guiette in Antwerp (1926), where he describes the stair that serves the various floors as being like, ‘the ladder of Jacob which Charlie Chaplin climbs in The Kid’ (1921).13 It is my belief that Le Corbusier’s promenades are plays upon this original topos. In my book Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade, I argue that the Villa Savoye is the exemplification of the Jacob’s ladder route.14 Indeed, Le Corbusier wrote, in the Oeuvre Complète, that it is necessary here ‘to go and find the sun’ in the solarium, which ‘crowning the ensemble’, is ‘a very rich architectural element’.15 This then is the focus of the promenade, which begins in the muted spaces of the entrance and finishes in a blaze of light. Finding the sun, the central message of Le Corbusier’s inner world, is thus central to the narrative of the promenade. Given that the promenade was designed for a multiplicity of different viewpoints, how should we refer to the person who enters the experience? I find myself choosing the word ‘reader’, as it suggests an active role in the interpretation of the building. I take my cue from Guiliana Bruno, who writes of the way in which the architecture can be ‘“read” as it is 16 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 traversed’. Further, ‘As we go through it, it goes though us.’ Reader is the word also used by film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, much admired by Le Corbusier, whose theory of montage occupies the interstices of this account.17 Le Corbusier stated, ‘architecture and film are the only two arts of our time’, before going on to note that, ‘in my own work I seem to think as Eisenstein does in his films’.18 Bruno describes his thinking as, ‘pivotal in an attempt to trace the theoretical interplay of film, architecture, and travel practices’.19 Le Corbusier’s audience is ‘the spectator’ and, ultimately, ‘the human eye’, completely disembodied, floating around the building at a specified height. The eye, for Le Corbusier, is restless and challenging. ‘[It] can reach a considerable distance and, like a clear lens, sees everything even beyond what was intended or wished.’20 David Joselit writes, ‘The architectural promenade gives form to a continuous modulation of vision through movement: Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 47

a now rising, now curving platform along which to proceed.’ Kenneth Frampton evocatively describes this effect as, ‘a topographic itinerary in which the floor planes bend upward to form ramps and stairs . . . fused with the walls so as to create the illusion of “walking up the walls”’.21 The axonometric projection is often used by Le Corbusier to define the elements of a route. As Yve-Alain Bois points out, ‘there is no central point in axonometry; it is entirely based on the notion of permutability, of infinite transformations’.22 In the early drawings, arrows are used by Le Corbusier to indicate designated routes within his buildings, but he stopped using them around 1930; however, Le Corbusier never stopped imagining himself into the spaces of his plans – rough process drawings often reveal traces of fine lines drawn repeatedly, as Le Corbusier’s pencil point went round and round the plan, acting out the motions of daily life.23 These, coupled with the countless rough perspectival sketches that exist of individual events en route within his buildings, indicate the full extent of his preoccupation with lived space and, hence, his interest in film. Pierre Chenal’s movie Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1930) was presented originally with subtitles by Le Corbusier and a soundtrack provided by his brother Albert Jeanneret. It begins with a locating shot of the façade from the ground-level garden, moving up and along the ribbon windows that open on to the living room and the first-floor hanging garden beyond. Referring to the way the eye can pan across the view, Frampton writes of the ‘cinematic effect’ of this window type from the inside.24 Here, it is used in reverse. The view provides a clue as to where the camera will be positioned next, another garden space, the hanging garden itself, where it tilts and pans along and up the ramp to the rooftop solarium, in this way following the promenade from ground to roof. The shot feels full of potential, waiting for human contact to make sense of these abstract forms and spaces. Next, the camera is positioned at rooftop level, looking down on a woman as she comes through the door into the hanging garden and starts walking briskly up the ramp, her face in full view. Then, with a trick of continuity, the woman is seen walking up the same portion of ramp – this time from within the stairwell from which we have just seen her emerge, as though reliving her experience from that angle. With further editorial sleight of hand, the camera then returns to the ramp to catch the woman’s back as she strides up to the solarium window, the fulcrum of the entire house. The emphasis of the shot is on her hand moving along the delightfully curved handrail, which occupies the middle of the frame. The woman, now being filmed from rooftop level, is seen taking a chair and moving it into a position, hidden from us by plants, from which she can appreciate the view from the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 solarium. She settles down to enjoy the ultimate experience that the house has to offer. Then, in an echo of the very first, locating, shot, the camera is positioned back down in the garden, looking at the solarium window from below. From here, it is moved further back into the woods, but it still looks at the same window, a reminder of the viewpoint of the woman, who sits in comfort, unseen behind the frame. Technical constraints are likely to have limited Chenal in the amount of shots that he used. Despite this, the screen geography of the space is extremely clear. The camera angles suggest a sequence of sunny spaces, each leading on from one to other, which are stitched together by the movements of the body. It is impossible, in film, to show a person progressing up a house in one shot; continuity techniques are needed to make sense of the sequences and the changing position of the camera. It is the absence and then presence of the person that make it far more poignant. 48 Flora Samuel

Conclusion Le Corbusier was acutely aware of the multiple subjectivities that might play a part in completing the building. Multiple viewpoints were, after all, central to the creation of the purist canvas, where bottles, jugs and so on can be seen from below, above and in elevation simultaneously. His bêtes noires were the buildings of the baroque, whose undemocratic, perspectival games were designed to be seen from one fixed point, that of king or bishop. Just as postmodern theory gave credence to all viewpoints, no matter how low in status, Le Corbusier’s buildings resist a hierarchy of viewpoint, something that works in counterpoint to the crescendo of light and drama that constitutes his Jacob’s ladder-type promenades. The promenades in his buildings are available to all, whether the rich industrialist or the radiant farmer, but, in the end, the delights of architectural detail as art – spatial games and hidden meanings – are the territory of the rarified few who enter into the club of architecture. I believe, as did Le Corbusier, that buildings can be read in a variety of different ways, depending upon who is doing the reading. We should try to create architecture that allows the readings of others into the fold. Although he might have used all sorts of abstract, didactic, rigid and formal techniques in the evolution of his ideas, techniques that largely deny the fluidity of human existence, he did at least recognise the needs of what he called ‘the individual and the binomial’. Returning to Joselit, ‘Le Corbusier’s topography (and its diagrammatic or permuta tional legacy among contemporary architects) incorporates a concept – and a physical experience – of centrifugal vision, of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari might call “lines of flight”.’25 Perhaps ironically for one who has been portrayed as the arch exponent of modernism and the totalising narratives of truth, Le Corbusier was revolutionary in his deep understanding of viewpoint and its variation from person to person, as encapsulated in the promenade.

Notes 1 ‘Circulation’ is particularly prevalent in Precisions, where a section of a chapter is devoted to the subject (Le Corbusier 1991, pp. 128–33). This was originally published as Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Le Corbusier 1930). 2 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1946, p. 24. 3 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1995a, p. 60; originally published in 1937. Translation from Benton 1987, p. 4. 4 René Guilleré, quoted in ‘The synchronisation of the senses’ in Eisenstein 1977, p. 81; first published 1943. 5 Joselit 2003, p. 48. 6 Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Living the romantic landscape (after Deleuze and Guattari)’, in Arnold and Sofaer 2008, p. 30. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 7 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1943, pp. 134–5; originally published in 1937. 8 Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1995b, p. 26; originally published in 1935. 9 Plato, The Republic III, in Buchanan 1997, p. 389. 10 Le Corbusier 1987, p. 169; originally published in French in 1925. 11 Flora Samuel, Orphism in the Work of Le Corbusier, unpublished PhD thesis, Cardiff University, 2000. 12 See Le Corbusier 1989, p. 8; originally published in 1950. 13 Le Corbusier 1995a, p. 136; originally published in 1937. There are various edited versions of this film, but the 1971 Chaplin-edited version does not contain an image of Jacob’s ladder. There is, however, an extraordinary dream sequence in which Chaplin’s alter ego, the tramp, dreams of his slum home translated to heaven, bedecked in flowers, in which all the people whom he knows have sprouted wings, including the dog. The dialectical nature of these two worlds is then broken down. It is no wonder that Le Corbusier admired Chaplin so much – including him within the images in the Electronic Poem – he played with so many of the issues that Le Corbusier held dear. Architectural promenades and Villa Savoye 49

14 Samuel 2010. 15 Le Corbusier 1995a, p. 187. 16 Bruno 2007, p. 58. 17 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage of attractions’, in Eisenstein 1977, pp. 181–3 (181). See François Penz, ‘Architecture and the screen from photography to synthetic imaging’, in Thomas and Penz 2003, p. 146, for a discussion of the close links between modernist architecture and film. 18 This interview is cited in Cohen 1992, p. 49. 19 Bruno 2007, p. 57. 20 Le Corbusier 1960, p. 175. 21 Frampton 2001, p.79. 22 For Yve-Alain Bois, it ‘functions, in part, to make possible a cinematic reading’, in Sergei M. Eisenstein, Yve-Alain Bois and Michael Glenny (1989) Montage and architecture, Assemblage, no. 10, pp. 110–31 (p. 114). 23 See, for example, FLC 29310 in Allen Brooks, Archive, Volume XVII, p. 462. 24 Frampton 1996, p. 144. ‘I see reflections on the water, I see beautiful boats sail past, I see the Alps, framed as in a museum, panel by panel’, wrote Le Corbusier of his own beleaguered entry for the League of Nations competition (Le Corbusier 1991, p. 48). 25 Joselit 2003, p. 48. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.6 GUNNAR ASPLUND: ‘PICTURES WITH MARGINAL NOTES FROM THE GOTHENBURG ART AND INDUSTRY EXHIBITION’, 19231

Translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones

By 1923, Gunnar Asplund was already a leading figure in Swedish architecture and one of the main authors of the classical revival known as Swedish Grace. He and his colleagues were also the editors of the journal Byggmästaren, for which he wrote this article about the temporary buildings by Ahlberg, Lewerentz and others at the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition of 1923. We include it here because of the attention given to experience of the spatial sequence and its visual effects.

The buildings in the exhibition area are even now being torn down and cleared away, but let us save one complex for memory and for enjoyment. The pictures have not been shown before in this magazine, and the architectural power which gives them value doesn’t end with the summer. The Art and Industry building by architect Ahlberg, the Crematorium Building by architect Lewerentz, and the buildings for the workshop by Lewerentz and Wernstedt were not special for their size or ingenious effects, but because of a certain quality which one would like to believe is today’s and tomorrow’s willpower in our developing architecture. But let us enter. We went past the Art and Industry’s façade which was beautifully located against the greenery under the silhouette of the rock (Figure 1.6.1). It had good restful proportions but the addition of signs and reliefs demanded by the exhibition organisers have reduced its clear rhythm and character: we have stringent demands! In the Interior, however, the given of a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 strong uphill slope has resulted in a clear rhythmic configuration which is the hallmark of good architecture (Figures 1.6.2 and 1.6.3, plan and section). The columned court with its impluvium and the straight long central staircase, up which one circulates with groups of rooms on both sides at increasingly higher levels, is a brilliant architectonic idea. It is practical because of the clear orientation it gives. It is also refreshing and full of good feeling with its diversity, its fountains, its beautiful views of water and sky: note the joyful rest of the columned courts which is achieved by a clear shape, by locating the main entrance not on axis with the staircase but in the corner (Figure 1.6.4), by the peaceful rhythm of the columns and the splashing of the water (Figure 1.6.5). Note the energetic liveliness in the staircase, the enclosed serenity in the exhibition halls (Figure 1.6.6), and you will find that the beautiful change between them in Asplund: Art and Industry Exhibition 51

proportion and character is the foundation to the pleasantness of it all. It is strange that the long staircase does not deter but attracts. Perhaps it was made a bit too narrow. It was difficult because of the crowd to catch the beautiful view, and the round openings in the walls did not really fit with the Egyptian lines of the rest, but the staircase delighted with its directly aligned landings beautifully shaped as octagons and circles. Especially I want to remember the crystal of the fountain and the beautiful terracotta reliefs by Ivar Johnsson (Figure 1.6.7) and the interesting cupola room with the light opening above and with the sculpture of Triton, who greets the incoming light with raised arms (Figure 1.6.8). The room sequence like a string of pearls on the central axis beautifully connects up the exhibition. . . . There was no cold or boring exhibition atmosphere in these rooms but rather a certain bourgeois cosiness. They had fine proportions, tasteful colours, and were cleverly arranged for the exploitation of optical effects. The lighting was exquisite. . . . When we progress further through the doorway under the cupola we find a Jacob’s ladder in the light against us leading up to the plateau of the crematorium (Figure 1.6.9). Here is a clear monumental idea: this staircase with its terraces of graves in the outside air: you really wish you were on your own with an open view, not blocked by the backs of other visitors. The original idea with the rising terraces and the increasing gradient of the staircase augmented one’s expectations. Up at the top on the magnificent plateau one is rewarded with wide views over the roofs like a fairytale city. The building before you has fine proportions and massing but is not entirely convincing as a termination. How would it have been without a building at all, but with the open sky beyond the staircase? Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.6.1 Gothenburg Exhibition 1923, Art and Industry Pavilion by Hakon Ahlberg, main entrance. All illustrations in this section are reproduced from the original Swedish article 52 Translators Berndtsson and Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

S K A L A i : 600

FIGURE 1.6.2 (left) Art and Industry Pavilion, section

FIGURE 1.6.3 (right) Art and Industry Pavilion, plan Asplund: Art and Industry Exhibition 53

FIGURE 1.6.4 In the first hall, looking back to the entrance

FIGURE 1.6.5 First hall on axis, looking towards the main stair Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.6.6 Textile room, largest of the exhibition halls, left side on plan

FIGURE 1.6.7 Fountain and reliefs in the octagon at the top of the tapered stairs 54 Translators Berndtsson and Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.6.8 Cupola room with statue of Triton Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.6.9 Up the final stair to Lewerentz’s crematorium room

Note 1 Article in Byggmästaren, 1923, pp. 273–8, translated by Eva Berndtsson and Peter Blundell Jones in 2002 and shortened to exclude the text on the workshop buildings, which would have doubled the required illustration. 1.7 FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S USE OF MOVEMENT

John Sergeant

‘Ground plan and perspective view of Ward W. Willits’ villa, Highland Park, Ill’, Plate XXV in the Wasmuth portfolio of Wright’s work to 1910, must be one the twentieth century’s most compressed and beautiful renderings (Figure 1.7.1). Wright had developed the aesthetic of a central loggia flanked by twin masses and far-flying roofs in this well-known Prairie house of 1901. He had taken the quasi-sacred pinwheel hearth of his own Oak Park house (1896) and placed it centrally, to disturb and enrich a cross-shaped plan: a form of overpowering horizontality nailed by its chimney into the prairie. It offered a sense of place in contrast to the rush, noise and coal smoke of the Loop; apparent security in the face of contemporary social and technical change: Chicago ‘born in a flash . . .’ in the stark prairie.1 The classical gesture of welcome given by the Willits loggia is firmly rejected by a defensive balustrade, and you must slide along the eastern boundary to the protective shelter of the porte cochère. From your vehicle, you turn left and climb four steps to the front door, still under this great roof (Figure 1.7.2). You are welcomed, there is a seat before you, and you turn into the stair hall, which opens vertically above you. If it is not a personal visit, you enter the reception room to your right, overlooking where you started. Otherwise, you are invited to turn left and mount five broad steps, where progress is blocked by a slatted oak screen, the back of an unseen inglenook seat, but through it is glimpsed a 60-feet (18-metre) vista through dining room to porch and garden beyond. You enter a richly ambiguous space:

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 still within the entry sequence, but unknowingly also in the corner of the living room. You are also in a subspace of its own. You turn left to face the street you have left and spiral around the room, before turning left at the hearth, where the sequence is repeated down the back of the second inglenook seat into the dining room. As you take a seat, you have completed ten turns. In 10 intensive years up to leaving Chicago for Florence in 1910 to complete the drawings for the Wasmuth, Wright probably felt that he had extracted almost every possible variation from his Prairie idiom. In a remarkable series of houses, he had explored every imaginable permutation of plan arrangement, of ambiguously overlapping sequences of spaces, of setting up rooms with respect to hearth, sideboard or staircase, and of gradual movement from public to private territory. At their heart was always a binding and releasing, a grounding at the 56 John Sergeant

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FIGURE 1.7.1 Ward Willitts House, 1901, Highland Park, IL. Plans and perspective. The route processes through reception to the ‘conspicuous consumption’ (cf. Thorstein Veblen) of the dining room via the more informal living room Source: Courtesy The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University). All rights reserved. All drawings in this section are reproduced from the original German book Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 57

FIGURE 1.7.2 Ward Willitts House, diagram of route on plan Source: Drawing by John Sergeant

primitive level of the fire, with an outgoing of windows or loggia: what the historian Vincent Scully memorably called, ‘a womb with a view’. Wright took a remarkable, intuitive leap in realising these projects. The formal properties, the tartan strips of the Froebel grid that the visitor traverses, have been extensively analysed by MacCormac (1968) and others, but they did not remark on the meandering or spiralling movement, which is widely thought to have originated in Wright’s exposure to Japanese culture.2 He did not visit Japan until 1905, but he experienced the Japanese Pavilion, the Ho-o-Den, at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Its symmetrical form suggested an axial entrance, like the Willits House, but this was denied by a rope across the axial steps. Visitors had to move one way, as they always do at world fairs.3 Before 1893, Wright was probably the foremost Western expert on the Japanese print: ikoye-i. By 1905, he had assimilated the seeming simplicity and sense of progressive discovery found in the Japanese building tradition. Wright learned from both tea-house and temple complex. Both have an indirect and shifting approach. In the first, small changes of direction are carefully orchestrated to direct attention to a tree, rock or garden feature; they are indicated by the paving or arrangement of stones and measured to the kimono-encumbered step and wooden clog (see Chapter 3.4, p. 178). It is a sequential process of renunciation, of withdrawal from daily cares, and at small scale. In the second, these changes of direction operate at the scale of landscape, making connec- tions with the world beyond as part of a narrative. A stroll-garden, as at Katsura, is a literal representation of the inner sea, lost memory. Nitschke (1966) has shown how movement over an entire complex is worked into the form of a site, reserving its finest features for places 4 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 of repose or surprise. Kyu-misu-Dera, in the south-eastern hills of Kyoto, is typical (Figures 1.7.3 and 1.7.4). Arrival at a great outer portal leads up the contours and past a glowing-red pagoda. Further up, you may purchase offerings or deposit prayers, before reaching a water basin filled by a cosmic dragon, symbolising and offering cleansing. You continue to find yourself high on a cliff, as if on a stage: to the left is the great Buddha Hall, to the right a view across the mountain towards the distant city. Your feet echo on wood, for a mighty timber platform intercedes between earth and sky. Beyond are three small temples and forest. Below, in a defile, at the foot of a great flight of steps, is a fountain, the purest water in Japan. The temple is dedicated to safety in motherhood; the woods above are wilder, animist: a place of spirits. You descend, drink or collect your water, and traverse the contours to leave by the gate where you arrived. 58 John Sergeant

FIGURE 1.7.3 Kyu-misu-dera Temple, Kyoto, Japan, 1633, on foundation of 798 Source: www.khusley.com Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.7.4 Kyu-misu-dera Temple, plan. Building dispositions are intimately linked to the site, developed organically from walking it. Key: 1 portal; 2 pagoda; 3 Buddha Hall; 4 Shinto shrines; 5 fountain Source: Redrawn by John Sergeant Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 59

Japan 1917–22 The commission for the Imperial Hotel provided Wright with an opportunity for more detailed study and to undertake smaller works, among them the Yamamura House of 1918–23, completed by Arata Endo (Figure 1.7.5). It has not been explored by Wright scholars, but I see it as a crucial link between the movement patterns of his Prairie houses and the subtle interplay with greater landscape of his later work. Sited in Ashiya, the building lies on the urban periphery, south east of Kobe. The Ashiyagawa River gushes down out of the hills, beautifully embanked in diagonally set stone, and the house crowns the ridge above. Wright ran the driveway along the contours up to the top of the ridge, which dominates the view of valley and sea. Poised there, with its service wing set higher, the house is angled to follow the lie of the land. Because of the slope, car arrival is restricted to a small rectangular forecourt, and the building takes the form of a series of single-storey set backs, like a stair up the ridge. The first element, the living room, spans the court, making a powerful threshold marked by four piers, through two of which the view can be glimpsed: opposite, a fountain drops water into a basin, and beside it, the door faces the mountain. The obvious, and grander, manoeuvre for the car to drop off passengers and then continue around the contours was impossible, as Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.7.5 Yamamura House, 1918–23, Ashiya, near Kobe, Japan. Exploded isometric Source: Drawing by John Sergeant. Key: 1 entry; 2 living room; 3 Japanese-style rooms; 4 dining room 60 John Sergeant

the land to the north west drops steeply; instead, it must execute a two-point turn and leave as it came. Garages are elsewhere. On entering, there is only a vestibule, and you ascend, to your left, the first of two stairs. This sets up a spiral that arrives in the reception room, a powerful space, anchored by its fire, aligned to the view, with built-in seats each side, poised above the land, which falls away on three sides. This would surely be enough, but Wright continues. You return to the stair and ascend one more level, stepping this time to the left, up the ridge, where you are confronted by a grand gallery, with views to the north west. It passes along the whole length of a three-room enfilade set three steps higher: Japanese-style rooms, linked by sliding doors and able to serve many functions, including sleeping. They lack paper screens, shoji, but have floor mats, tatami, to bestow a cultural authenticity. You become aware that the gallery is also a kind of internal verandah, engawa, signalling threshold to a Japanese person, a barrier between the boarded exterior and tatami-floored interior, traditionally never crossed without shoes being removed.5 Passing, perhaps hungrily, along the gallery, you ascend a second stair to the dining room, the goal of the promenade. The square table is offset under a pyramidal ceiling, and a loggia overlooks the entire length of the house and ridge beyond. Servants could produce a meal as if magically, for there has been no hint of the service wing hidden behind this highest level. Yet even this is not all, because the composition possesses an architectural coda: after eating, you stroll on to the stepped terraces of the roofs, feel the evening air and observe the sunset.6

Middle age: Los Angeles By the time he returned to America from Japan in 1922, Wright had moved from a design procedure based on grids applied to a site to a more open acceptance of place. The pre-cast concrete ‘textile block’ he developed imposed a three-dimensional spatial ‘net’, which enabled him to negotiate with topography as found, and movement bound the two together. He had carried the mental ‘table’ on which he had learned Froebel’s Gifts to the flat prairies of the mid west career, but it was inadequate for the hilly sites of Los Angeles. The Storer House (1923) typifies these blockwork designs: it stands on a corner of a contour road in the Hollywood Hills. It follows Wright’s new grid cage of 16 16 inch (400 400 mm) textile blocks, extended beneath the ground plane to encounter and discipline topography, which produced an easy rocking motion up to the south-facing terrace. Until smog removed the view, ascending the house meant passing through this ‘textile-matrix’ to gain levels from which to gauge the horizon of distant Long Beach, beyond the great grid of the city.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The desert and Taliesin West Pneumonia and Wisconsin winters drove Wright to the Arizona desert after 1930, and the vegetation and sense of space he found there clearly energised him. Falling Water, a dazzling series of Usonian houses, and Taliesin West followed in short order. His first desert camp, Ocatillo (1927), only survived a season, but was a clear response to new conditions. Wright enjoyed the achievement of a dust-pink boarded compound on a knoll, its 30–60º perimeter adjusted to the contours, canvas-roofed cabins ventilated by flaps, and a central camp fire: ‘my living room is as high as the stars’. He returned, to Maricopa Mesa, and built the second camp, Taliesin West (1938) as his winter home and headquarters for the Taliesin Fellowship, office and school (Figure 1.7.6). Although much altered, its primary design moves remain: Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 61

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FIGURE 1.7.6 Taliesin West, 1938, Scottsdale, AZ. Wright brings the visitor to his door via a promenade that progressively takes you into the place, which was not ‘charged’ before its building. Key: 1 entry; 2 office and Wright’s study; 3 pergola; 4 drafting room; 5 kitchen and dining room 6 loggia; 7 kiva; 8 terminals; 9 prow; 10 borrowed landscape; 11 pictograph rocks; 12 garden room; 13 green garden; 14 apprentices court; 15 service area Source: Drawing by John Sergeant 62 John Sergeant

two alignments, one overlaid on the other at 45º.7 At my first visit in 1969, it seemed a long drive from Phoenix, and a wilder place, part of the choreographed journey by which Wright conjured up his most profoundly grounded project. It uses his ‘terminals,’8 a ‘prow’,9 borrowed landscape10 and the Anasazi prehistory of the place11 to achieve a deep specificity. The result is slow ascent and withdrawal from the urban grid, to-and-fro movement about the complex, release into a withheld vista and then compression through dark to light towards the ultimate goal, his hearth and garden. It has often been analysed, but the most persuasive account of arrival is that of Philip Johnson; whatever we may think of Johnson’s own architecture, it is valuable for being thoughtful, observant and made during Wright’s lifetime.

(Wright) has developed one thing which I defy any of us to equal: the arrangements of the secrets of space. I call it the hieratic aspects of architecture. The processional aspects. I would like to tell you about it briefly. You drive up from Phoenix, about 20 miles out, up a dusty desert road, wondering why you came because it’s terribly hot, and you go up a slight rise. Finally you turn into a particularly dusty, nasty and ill-kept road. But there is a little sign that says ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’. You come to an agglomeration of tents and stones where the car stops. There is a low wall and you realise after you have been there and come back again, that he has been pushing out the spot where the car stops, further and further from his place. I’d like to recommend that to you and to me. The car, of course, is one of the deaths of architecture. It’s out of scale, it makes noise, it doesn’t please the eye. And you cannot, from a sitting position, even look at architecture. It has to be by the actual muscles of your feet. He now makes you walk about 150 feet, until you get closer to this meaningless group of buildings. You’ve seen the plans many times and I’m sure you didn’t understand them any more than I did before I’d been there. As you approach, he starts you off on a slight slope, with the mountains to your left, and so up the first steps you go, away from the buildings instead of toward them. And how he takes your eyes and makes you follow. You go down the steps this way but the buildings are over there. Then the steps turn at right angles and you go between two low walls, very much narrower this time. You have the sensation that you are always changing your point of view on the buildings. You turn, pass his office, you climb four more steps and pass a great stone that he has put there with Indian hieroglyphics on it, which he found on his place. There is no door in sight. There is a tent roof on a stone base but no door; there is nothing in sight. You just begin to wonder. The path takes you down a long walk, about 200 feet perhaps, with this tent room on your right, the mountains on your left. You begin to wonder what is happening when, at your right,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 you pass the tent room, the building above goes overhead. But the view – two enormous piers – and you look again (a trick) through a dark room, a 6-foot room, out onto the terrace of Taliesin West: an enormous prow that sticks out over the mountains. Now you’ve been climbing all this time and you never knew it because you never looked back; but for the first time, you realize you have been climbing and for 90 miles you look across the desert through that darkened hole. And again, of course, the steps start rippling. You go down three steps more and you are pulled out onto this prow of the desert. He calls it his ‘ship of the desert’. That’s where Frank Lloyd Wright is usually standing to greet you with his purple hair, his cape, and you say, ‘Now I’ve arrived at this magic place’. But you’ve just begun your trip. He then leads you through a gold-leaf concrete tunnel that turns three times and you are pushed out into the single most exciting room that we have in this Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of movement 63

country. It is indescribable except to say that the light, since it all comes from the tent above, has infiltered and mellowed. You are just beginning to absorb this room when he opens a few of the tent flaps and this is when it really hits you. You look out – but not onto the desert. You look out this time on a little private secret garden that he has built beyond this room, where water is playing unlike any water in the desert. The plants are 20 feet high in this garden, and there is a lawn such as you have seen only in New England. You say, ‘Now I see what I’ve come to Taliesin for’; you have not. He makes one more turn, two more turns. This time the door is 18 inches wide and you have to go in sidewise. It is entirely an inside room, no desert or garden. One wall is of plants. To be sure, you cannot see them: that is, you can’t see through them, but that gives you the jungle light that comes into the room. There is a shaft of light that comes from 12 or 14 feet above (this is a very high room now). The room is 21 by 14 feet, all stone. One entire length of it is fireplace; on the other long wall is a table and two chairs – and that is where you have come to be. You sit down with Frank Lloyd Wright and he says, ‘Welcome to Taliesin West’. My friends. That is the essence of architecture.12

Movement in a literal sense was a fundamental part of a lifetime that spanned from the pace of a horse to the flight of a plane. Lloyd, Wright’s son, wrote of Kano, Wright’s black saddle horse, and admitted that, ‘Dad kept busy paying fines’ for speeding his customised yellow Stoddart Dayton roadster around Oak Park. Allen Brooks has described how the workforce on the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo arrived at 6.30 a.m. to find neat instructions fixed to all the cabinet work: Wright had travelled by night train from Chicago for his site visit and had arrived in the early hours.13 Ocean liners seem not to have exerted the fascination that they did for Le Corbusier, although Wright recrossed the Pacific from Long Beach to Yokohama and crossed the Atlantic to Rio in 1930, Florence in 1909 and London in 1939. The Taliesin Fellowship made annual migrations between its Arizona winter home and summer in Wisconsin: Wright in his Auburn Cords and later Lincolns, with a retinue of cars and a portable kitchen. His ‘aerotors’ would have taken off vertically to engage with an invisible, three-dimensional grid above the 1-mile matrix of Broadacre City. Movement had the same romance for him as for the rest of his generation; however, I would argue that the slower pace of season and time meant more to him. His autobiography speaks of the smell of Taliesin, wood smoke, pine boughs, wild plum blossom and huge bunches of flowers. He loved the effect of wear on materials, ‘wood best looks after itself’, the oil of the human hand, discoloration from weather, the icicles hanging from the eaves. His ‘In the nature of materials’ articles14 articulate the beauty of patina in metal, the verdigris of copper. There was no attempt to defy ageing, other than through the skill of the architect, by Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 understanding and detailing. Architecture was to be there in the world, but in no way separated from the processes of time.

Notes 1 During Wright’s early career, Chicago went through deep social unrest. See Lionel March (1970) Imperial city of the boundless West: The impact of Chicago on Frank Lloyd Wright, The Listener, vol. 83, no. 2144. 2 Richard MacCormac (1968) The anatomy of Wright’s aesthetic, The Architectural Review, vol. 143, no. 852, pp. 143–6. Nute 1993. Visitors had to zigzag along the heavy roof overhang, peering into, but not entering, the spaces inside. This, and Wright’s substitution of the hearth for the tokonoma, or sacred recess, are documented here. 64 John Sergeant

3 Pilgrims do the same, whether in the 300 BC Buddhist cave temples at Ellora, India, the symbolic revisitation of Jerusalem’s holy places (see Krautheimer 1983) or any number of European cathedrals and abbeys, along aisles around the apse containing the sacred relic, or indeed the haj. Pilgrimage, a physical embodiment of faith, is the primary form of processional movement in architecture. 4 Günter Nitschke (1966) MA: The Japanese sense of place, Architectural Design, March, London. 5 What Wright called the ‘Shinto be-clean’ admonition also marked the threshold: a transition of level from dirty exterior to the fragrant, soft-woven tatami a step above, the surface for sitting or sleeping. Wright had only encountered the Ho-o-den Pavilion at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was not to visit Japan until his Prairie style was established. It was probably ignorance of this Oriental understanding of threshold that allowed him to enter directly from a covered exterior into the interior. 6 This entertainment, ‘walking the leads’, was an important ritual of seventeenth-century England, where the company would take the air after eating to consume sherbets and cordials on the roof. 7 For more detailed analyses, see: Neil Levine, ‘Wright’s diagonal planning’, in McCarter 2005; also John Sergeant, ‘Woof and warp’, ibid. See also Neil Levine, Frank Lloyd Wright and John Sergeant (1997) ‘MA’: Composition and reflex in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4. 8 A square of red concrete is encountered at the start. It acts as a major terminal, key word in Wrightian composition, its counterpoint being the private pool, drawn in the second design, in the Master’s garden. It is inscribed with a poem by Walt Whitman. 9 A ‘prehistoric Native-American petroglyph boulder’ (found on the site), as Neil Levine has pointed out, is placed at the hinge of the great triangular prow that forges south from the living and working quarters and that, he argues, constitutes a new openness and flexibility in modernism. See his ‘Frank Lloyd Wright’s diagonal planning revisited’, in McCarter 2005. 10 The view of the Superstition Mountains, 30 miles away, was presented along the line of approach and beneath a bridge. This was lost when Olgivanna, Wright’s widow, enlarged her bedroom. 11 The second key to the turn south and view through the loggia is the massive stone box of the kiva. In practice, the Fellowship used it for meetings, akin to a monastic chapter house. Unlike the circular Pueblo or Anasazi kiva in the locality, for example at Chaco Canyon, the Taliesin version is square and above ground. However, Wright was clearly recalling it: the four lights set in the floor recall the four columns supporting the Indian original. 12 (1957) 100 Years, Frank Lloyd Wright and us, Pacific Architect and Builder, March, reprinted in Johnson 1979, pp. 193–8. 13 See H. Allen Brooks in Eaton 1969. Transcontinental trains were the means of transport until after the Second World War; not just a convenience, but also an inspiration. The Larkin Building, Buffalo (1904), pioneered air-handling to combat its location alongside a smoky marshalling yard. 14 ‘In the nature of materials’ was the title of Wright’s 1928 articles in Architectural Record and Henry Russell Hitchcock’s compilation of his work, Hitchcock 1942. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.8 HANS SCHAROUN AND MOVEMENT

The Kassel Project 1952

Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

The Kassel Theatre project of 1952, designed in collaboration with leading landscape architect Hermann Mattern, was a milestone in Scharoun’s work but also his saddest loss, scandalously dropped after detailed development and a start on site. It won the competition outright, much praised by the judges, and was developed for construction. Work began on digging the foundations, but then the bases of old fortifications were found, and it was stopped. Meanwhile, the city authorities had secretly developed an alternative scheme by local architect Paul Bode, who had not even entered the competition, and that was built instead. It caused Scharoun, not only the loss of his most important collaboration with Mattern, but also a loss of credibility, for, in justifying their dishonest move, the municipality’s officers claimed technical shortcomings that were, in fact, never put to the test. Scharoun’s contemporary text reveals concern with movement both inside and outside the building, for the theatre’s approach and relation to the city were part of the arriving audience’s unfolding visual, spatial and haptic experience, which continued in the foyer and entry to the auditorium. The extract opens with a discussion of the city’s history and the origins of the square Friedrichsplatz in which the theatre was to be situated.1

The Friedrichsplatz area of Kassel was formerly the zone of negotiation between two clearly laid out city-cells. Naturally the development of this free area was conditioned by topological and technical demands, but it occurred in a period when the necessity of defining such city-cells was still present, along with consciousness of the essential

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 conditions. So the later Friedrichsplatz grew in the ‘void’ left between two individual gestalts: between the medieval town on one side and the Baroque new town on the other, each obedient to the rules of its period (Figures 1.8.1 and 1.8.2). In the formal design of the Baroque town the Duke’s concerns found expression, so in developing what had been the ‘void’, the Duke’s interests became increasingly dominant, that is to say it became a formal part of the Baroque new town, obedient to the new town’s rules. In the establishment of the new boundary, the medieval town was therefore fronted by a stage-set. But the Friedrichsplatz was initially no closed square, for the ducal influence was more a presentation of the Duke’s power over the increasingly managed bourgeois class, which was shown by the ‘suppression’ of the image of the bourgeois medieval town. So begins the tragedy of the square, which in this early condition was 66 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.8.1 Plan of central Kassel in 1742. The medieval town on the right still has its fortifications, and the Baroque new town on the left is identifiable by its grid. Friedrichsplatz is developing between the two, the Ducal palace, later Auepark (valley-park), is bottom right betwen rivers Source: Adaped from period maps available online

FIGURE 1.8.2 Plan of central Kassel in 1835. By now, Friedrichsplatz has been formalised, with classical façades redefining its east side, but it remains open to the south Source: Adaped from period maps available online

just a piece of landscape and a parade ground. This ‘suppression’ also applied to the adjacent Ottoneum [an early theatre], which arose during the period of the Baroque new town, but was in its content more dedicated to the spirit of the medieval town.2 If we wish to remedy the blocking off of the old town, whose layout is undoubtedly of historic significance, the recovery and reintegration of the Ottoneum must also be a priority, which belongs in its essence to the area of the medieval town. The position

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 of the Zwehrenturm [an old city gate tower from the fourteenth century] and the open space formed between the Ottoneum and the Zwehrenturm make an effective prelude to that special and characteristic spatial order, and – following tradition – can exemplify the territory of the medieval city-cell. The creation of a new layout will not be a matter of conserving the falsified wholeness of the square, but rather of finding balance between three contrasting elements: the medieval city-cell, the Baroque new town, and the connection with the landscape beyond. What we mean by the latter needs explaining: the ‘void’ was originally an integral part of the landscape with unbroken visual contact towards the valley. Once this is understood, one sees its elementary essence as a free space with its large dimensions and the fluid treatment of its surface. So a sequence of street spaces leading Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 67

from deep within the town needs to be developed, and the order of these street spaces must be determined in relation to the general layout and the form of the buildings, then further considered in connection with the transition between the square and the valley, permitting recognition of a more dynamic as opposed to static treatment. Although the connection with the dynamic essence of the medieval city has obviously been disrupted, the forming of spaces can still retain something of its essential dynamism, even if this needs to be combined with the gestalt means of a geometric coordination system. In addition, the economic development of the city and its new traffic demands are influences on the development of the square that cannot be ignored: for it is becoming so divided by major roads that its built unity is disrupted. So in place of the old aristocratic order a new ordering must be found. Our time brings interactions between the themes of organic and geometric organisation – a struggle between traditional and landscape-related forces. This leads to a mixed deployment of powers, for on the one hand interrelated focal points must be developed, while on the other axes connected with these foci must be added which are appropriate to our lively but highly problematic period. The landscape provides focal points that are aspects of the Duke’s courtly society. Its structure expresses the social order of those times: it is a place that in the form of landscape-bound organs makes an original lively reference to the functions and the environment. Our new, contemporary, arrangement of place and form (Figures 1.8.3 and 1.8.4) attempts on the one hand to restore the connection with the wider landscape, while assuring that, as the new buildings are added, corrections are made to increase the comparative scale. On the other hand it allows the close connection with the Auepark to be established, in keeping with the new and much broader social function of the park. But while in the eighteenth century a lively interaction of old and new themes made the whole layout attractive and meaningful, the nineteenth century brought this to an end. Hasty technical and economic development – and especially development of the industrial quarter after 1866 – no longer allowed contemporary changes to develop the city’s structure in a responsive and organic manner. With the technical and economic development, the process of making insights about the whole and of finding forms could make no progress. Then, with the return to historically derived forms, concern shifted away from visions of the whole towards narrow-mindedness, seeing only the fragment locked into its own limited situation. It is characteristic of this age that economically important developments are unprecedented in scale and are allotted enormous sites, so that for example a single

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 industrial complex can take up more land than was needed for the entire requirements of a medieval town. But this occurs – as if the overscaled degree of expenditure must be compensated for – at the expense of facilities for the general public. Here everything is very constrained and meanly organised. But, for public buildings too, site boundaries and site areas need to be considered. The landscape is given over to the service of technical developments, just as society and the law have to adapt themselves to technical necessities. And yet valuable structures of a cultural or natural kind could in future be rescued from the arms of this technical–economic development. Our view addresses the relatively narrow area in which decisions might yet be made with some certainty and accomplished within a reasonable time. So it must be understood as a phenomenon of 68 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.8.3 Plan of the intended reorganisation adding the new theatre, by Scharoun and Mattern. This and earlier plans are set out north to top and the rectangle of Friedrichsplatz appears diagonally, the valley of the river Fulda bottom right Source: Adapted from published site plan, original in Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin

FIGURE 1.8.4 (above) Bird’s eye sketch of the whole situation, seen from the west, with the Fulda valley on the right and Friedrichsplatz on the left, dominated by the classical façade of the museum. The lower parts of the theatre were to be terraced into the hill, creating a platform with the valley view, and a pedestrian bridge Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 led over the main road into the theatre Source: From original in Mattern Archive, Technische Universität Berlin

FIGURE 1.8.5 (left) Isometric projection of Friedrichsplatz with the new theatre top left (north is at 8 o’clock) Source: From publication in Bauwelt 3 November 1952 Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 69

the period that the thing redefined as a square had been really a part of the surrounding landscape. It must be understood too, that hand in hand with this narrowing of view went another tendency: single-minded primitive form-making, used as a presentation of power politics. The square was reconceived in terms of the axis. Direct on the axis closing the falsely reconceived square was placed the Wilhelmine Theatre [the previous nineteenth century building]. But it has now gone, and it is again a remarkable phenomenon of our time that we have the courage for a consequent and history-conscious realisation. As the immediate landscape relationships have been destroyed, there is no way to add a screen wall of convincing potency that could bring together Man and Nature, Autonomous and Heteronomous, in a new and tense relation. Here, aesthetic concerns founder under a necessary brutality. Since the Wilhelmine Theatre has fallen, the way is clear to create a new arrangement that reconciles the spatial and landscape givens with expressions of the new social structure. The planner must work as follows: first make an inventory: to investigate the landscape in its surviving worth and to incorporate it in the general frame of planning, to examine the existing and planned developments, to understand historic townscape areas in their living, organic relationships to each other, and to place new elements in relation to them; then, to consider the traffic system in its differentiation and as a technical means at the service of the Gestalt. For the placing of the technically and functionally conditioned through-road is bound to influence the structural form of the city, and if the city is not to be divided and destroyed, decisions must be made as to what is worth keeping and which elements belong together, despite recognising the inherent divisiveness of the task. With the help of the through-road, the rediscovered void that was the square can be divided into three parts: the terrace looking out over the Auepark, which stands on the remains of the old theatre, the road expanded to become a station for cars, and the retained representative square, placed directly next to the old town and centred on the Fridericianum museum (Figures 1.8.4 and 1.8.5). Into it flows the pedestrian street arriving from the station, which leads across the bridge to the theatre, the terrace and the park beyond. Thus do the many demands and essential conditions resolve themselves as if spontaneously. The technical/functional starting point can be solved in a way that organically unites the givens with the set task: the way to intuitive vision is open, and what follows on can take place as Pascal put it: ‘I could not have sought you, Lord, if you had not already found me’.3

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The town planning solution as discussed leads to a clarification of questions of structure and Gestalt on the grounds of overall relationships and immediate conditions. This is one planning process. The other, more specialised, consists of the development of the focal point itself, of the organ developed according to its being [Wesen] and again in response to local conditions. On this issue something must be said of the theatre itself. The large theatre is conceived as an auditorium space, but in such a way that the differentiated conditions of action for the players and spectators in their contingency as Sein und Schein [being and image] are brought together and induced by the formal arrangement to confront one another. The realisation of this interaction also provides the means to create the necessary intimacy. It must free itself from the tradition of courtly representation. In order better to raise the opposition between Sein und Schein [being 70 Translator Peter Blundell Jones

and image] to consciousness, the audience will be brought in not from the side but from the rear. The encouraged intimacy also serves the purpose of bringing the spectator into stronger contact with the acted or poetic event, insofar as this can be done by means of a builderly or spatial kind. The particular meaning of different performances can be expressed through many variations – in quantitative terms by a variable room. By means of the specially altered atmosphere and appropriate handling of scale it will suggest the other situation and so through experience encourage a concurrence of thought . . . [Text on theatre staging omitted] So these aligned conceptions – in spatial and theatrical terms – provide a premise for the presentation of a lively confrontation between the world of Schein [image/appearance] and the world of Sein [being]. Spatial linkages, matters of scale, depth and width – as with the structure as a whole – follow their own being/essence [Wesen]. The guiding of spectators over the footbridge or from the dropping off point in the street below it, then on through foyer and cloakrooms into the auditorium, is not just functional, but serves their experience [Erleben] (Figures 1.8.6 and 1.8.7). All circulation and social rooms are optically connected to each other, while each retains its own identity. The rooms for movement unfold in the core-defining representative spatial progression, which includes foyer, refreshment room and smoking room. The refreshment room Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.8.6 (left) Plan of theatre foyer, revised version, lower level (redrawn and turned to match site plans)

FIGURE 1.8.7 (right) Plan of theatre foyer, revised version, upper level, with arrival off bridge top left (redrawn) Source: Part plans, redrawn by Peter Blundell Jones from originals in the Scharoun Archive, Akademie der Künste Hans Scharoun and movement: Kassel Project 71

faces the front garden, the smoking room the valley, also open to the wider landscape. The enclosed court serves as yet another element to free up and enrich the spatial sequence. The social task of the building is expressed additionally in the use of the theatre as festival site for the city. Therefore, the provision of daylight is included, with help of a skylight, and in front is an ambulatory, along which a promenade can be made in favourable seasons with a view across the valley. The necessary rooms for the artists, administration and business are given their own forms but assembled around a point of communication. The parts of the building are so laid out in response to ground and environment that the natural and the planned can combine in a new unity. To make this evident and understandable a path is intended from the terrace over the back stage and on down into the Auepark. Passage through the buildings seems to me above all an important means of integrating them into society, by visual means, and by passing beyond the visual.

Notes 1 Extracts from a text by Hans Scharoun in Pfankuch 1974, pp. 205–12, first published in Bauwelt 1952, vol. 44, p. 173ff. This translation includes most of Scharoun’s published text and aims at fluency. Not only is one obliged to change the structure of German sentences to make readable English, but one also has to choose between metaphors that lack a precise English equivalent. Scharoun tended to use somewhat abstract metaphorical language, evidently enjoying the ambiguities, but, if translated too directly, it can merely seem vague and imprecise. I have tried to catch its spirit rather than following the original slavishly. 2 The Ottoneum was a small theatre at the corner of the medieval town, preserved today as a museum. It stands at a skewed angle in relation to the Friedrichsplatz, and therefore was seen by Scharoun and Mattern as holding a mediating role [ed.]. 3 This seems to be a German version, if slightly altered, of: ‘Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé’, Blaise Pascal 1623–62, Pensées 553, section VII [ed.]. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1.9 MOVE TO THE LIGHT

David Lea

Let us start with the idea that architecture is first of all the space within, rather than the object we see, as Lao Tzu suggested 2,500 years ago:

Shape clay into a vessel It is the space within that makes it useful Cut doors and windows for a room It is the holes which make it useful1

The fundamental questions for me are:

• How do we form spaces appropriate to their use? • How do we connect these spaces together? • How do we guide and concentrate view and light, so that we wake up to a connection with nature, with the world of nature outside? • How do we bring out the potential drama of the site? • How does this drama unfold as we move through the building, like moving through a landscape?

I will describe some buildings from the past that I particularly like, before discussing these

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 aspects of the design within the context of the Wales Institute for Sustainable Education at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). In the north transept of Wells Cathedral, a stair rises up to the Chapter House, which dates back to 1320 (Figure 1.9.1). You want to follow the footsteps worn into the stone from 700 years of use. They all go to the left, where the handrail is: you tend to swing to the outside of a spiral staircase anyway. The entrance to the Chapter House is up to the right, where the stair divides. As you emerge from the doorway out of the transept, more and more of the roof is revealed, and you can see the structure of the vaults, a preview of what you will find in the Chapter House. As you come up the winding stairs, they seem to build up, like a wave about to break. The Chapter House floor is at eye level as you approach, and you can see, in a very concentrated way, how the central column is rooted in the ground, like a tree. Move to the light 73

FIGURE 1.9.1 View up Chapter House stair at Wells Cathedral Source: Photograph by David Lea

About 130 years later, in the 1480s, the Ryoanji temple was built on the northern side of Kyoto in Japan, at a point where the ground gently rises. The temple contains a famous and beautiful rock garden, and Figure 1.9.2 shows its approach. The route up the gradual steps is very carefully considered. First, there are two steps, then three, and it gets steeper as you approach the entrance. The architect did not expect people to march up there on axis; it was a place to wander up, because you can see that it has been made comfortable, with flat stones, which lead on to steps, and then you end up on gravel. You are expected to stop and think a bit, and then move left and go on up, and the entrance is just at the top, where the white panels are. At that point is a glimpse into the rock garden, of pleasures to come, although you cannot actually enter. You progress further and arrive at a little network of courtyards, much more domestic in scale. That is the living accommodation. You glimpse

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 it before you turn left to regain the courtyard view. Its gravel is raked every day, and the rocks are placed in the most mysterious relationships. You are encouraged to sit on the veranda and meditate. As you think about the rocks, they change their scale and become quite enormous in your imagination. Behind them is a fantastic wall, which is apparently a national treasure, and so nobody is allowed to touch it. It is just a rendered wall, aged in a beautiful way. If you turn through 180º, you can look right through the building, and you see something nice happening to the left, and so you are drawn around to the west-facing veranda. It is a wonderful place to sit. It tells you there is something worth seeing to the left, as you are encouraged to linger. It is well sheltered from the weather, which reveals something of the climate. The scale is beautifully judged: the rail above the sliding screens is a little over 6 ft (1.8 metres), and the extra height above gives the space a sense of generosity and nobility. It has a very 74 David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.2 Ryoanji temple, Kyoto Source: Photograph by David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.3 Villa Barbaro, Maser, by Andrea Palladio Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

human scale, but also a grandeur about it, built with complete simplicity, no decoration at all, and all of clay and plants, and so infinitely recyclable. The view to the west is a counterpoise to the gravel and rock garden, beautiful in the evening, when the sunlight comes through the leaves of the birches to throw dappled light on the moss.2 The Villa Maser, by Palladio (Figure 1.9.3), was built about 1560, part of the redevelopment of the Venetian countryside. Mercantile power was under stress, and wealthy families were turning their attention to their own resources, inspired by the Roman ideal of harmonious living and working on the land. Palladio’s villas were derived from farmhouses. This is actually

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 a very extravagant one: most were much more stripped down, in fact more like farmhouses. Maser is ennobled by symmetrical pavilions and by the porticos used for drying and storing food. It’s on a gentle hill confronting the landscape, and it suggests that you enter in the middle, but you do not. You actually enter down the side, down the porticos. The plan shows how that works. The most important living rooms occupy the central block, and the bedrooms occupy the cross wings. When you go along the colonnades, you see the staircase going up ahead of you to the piano nobile. Once you arrive there, you have a choice: if you walk left, you are up in the air, looking out over the well-farmed valley; go right and you enter a secret shady garden, embedded in the hillside. There is a fountain and a grotto, the source of water for the villa. The bedrooms open on to this completely private space. This villa has quite a wonderful spatial movement, progression and experience. Move to the light 75

The WISE Project WISE was designed and built in partnership with Pat Borer and completed in 2010. It sits in a wooded valley, with its back to an old slate tip. You do not see much from the outside, and the scale is quite low and domestic. It rains a lot in North Wales, and the question is how to handle that, both functionally and poetically. When it was a slate quarry, a reservoir was constructed up the hill to the east, to drive the waterwheel and turn the machinery. We were going to collect the rain as it fell on the roof of the building, channel it from level to level into the courtyard and from there away down into the old waterwheel pit. We found two geometries on the site (Figures 1.9.4 and 1.9.5). One was derived from the existing buildings, and the other from the general line of the old slate tip. The pivot between these two geometries, coupled with the way you rise from one level to the next, was the key point in the layout. When the circular lecture theatre came into its position as a hinge, it made a place around which you could bend these two geometries. Then there was the idea that the first courtyard should be very enclosed and private for the education spaces, whereas the

FIGURE 1.9.4 WISE building: cut-away perspective drawing by David Lea, showing courtyard, round lecture theatre and the intended ramped entry Source: Drawing by David Lea Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.9.5 WISE building: the final section of the building, east to west, showing courtyard with lecture theatre behind and bedroom wings surrounding upper terrace Source: Computer Projection by Pat Borer 76 David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.6 The first in a sequence of eleven photographs following the route from the entrance to the top of the building: entrance court and glass wall on to hall/café Source: Photograph by Tim Soar Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.9.7 View across hall to top-lit wall and stair FIGURE 1.9.8 View through rising to next level door at head of stair, Source: Photograph by Tim Soar courtyard to left Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Move to the light 77

FIGURE 1.9.9 View back across foyer, with lecture theatre to right and court left Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.9.10 Top-lit stair leading to FIGURE 1.9.11 Approaching landing: levels above view of terrace emerges Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones 78 David Lea

FIGURE 1.9.12 Rear windows reveal old quarry face Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 1.9.13 (far left) Corridor leads to seminar rooms Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

FIGURE 1.9.14 (left) Bedrooms approached by open gallery Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.9.15 Bay window in last room looks out to lecture-hall roof Source: Photograph by Tim Soar Move to the light 79

courtyard on the next level would open out into the countryside, along the contours. Generally, we managed to hold on to those ideas throughout the design. An early sketch shows how this might work (Figure 1.9.4). The dotted line represents the back wall of the first room you come to, removed to show the courtyard behind. You can see the movement up to the half-level, up again around the courtyard and then up the main stair to the next level, from which you can look out to the surrounding countryside. At first, we planned the twenty-four bedrooms on a different site, much steeper and with better solar access. They were to be stacked into very narrow terraces, along the contours. A shallow stair would rise to a common room at the entrance level, and then on up to the bedrooms. Each bedroom would have a generous corner window opening into the trees – each bedroom a treehouse. That scheme involved an additional common room and was too expensive, and so, eventually, we wrapped two floors of bedrooms around the courtyard of the teaching blocks. The dining hall and main entrance grow out of the existing restaurant. From there, the route leads up to the foyer, the distributor for the 200-seat, circular lecture theatre and the teaching spaces around the courtyard, and out to the south. Up on the next level, there are offices for the CAT staff and the first floor of twelve bedrooms, then up again are the seminar rooms and the second floor of bedrooms. The journey through the building starts at the entrance court, which is contained on its north side by the restaurant extension. This can be opened out completely in the summer by the big glass doors being slid back. The visitor is welcomed immediately into a big, lively hall. There is a roof light along the back, so that the wall is lit even on a dull day and artificial light is seldom needed, and, when the sun comes out, the wall is illuminated by changing shafts of light (see Figure 1.9.7). The timber columns have entasis: a slight curving inwards towards the top, which makes them feel a little stronger and corrects the somewhat crude appearance of columns with parallel sides. This device has been used more or less wherever anyone has built columns, from China to ancient Greece. The bottom third is vertical, and the column curves in from there to a top diameter one-sixth smaller than the bottom. Those are Palladio’s rules, and they seem to work quite well. You can set it out with a thin and bendy wooden lath. From the entrance, you get a glimpse of the courtyard above and the different levels; you do not see much, but enough to give you an idea of what is in store. A very shallow stair rises to the next level – a ‘float-up’ stair – the shallowest permitted by the building regulations. We wanted to express that by showing the steps, and that is why there is a glass balustrade. At the head of the stair is a door to the left, leading to the first courtyard (see Figure 1.9.8). You see the stair going up to the next level ahead of you, top lit, and then the courtyard to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the left. In the courtyard, water from the roofs cascades from the gargoyles down into the pools and then flows into a slate-lined chasm, the remains of the old waterwheel pit. It is paved with gravel and slate. There are very few plants, just three trees and ferns. You can see the bedrooms up above. Reflections off the water cast constantly moving, rippling light on the walls and the ceiling, particularly in the afternoon. The three teaching spaces around the courtyard are also top lit and full of light. All of them can be opened to the courtyard, allowing teaching with the windows wide open. I often use toplight in my buildings. Just as the courtyard lies to the left of the foyer space, so the drum of the rammed-earth lecture theatre lies to the right, and there is light coming down between the roof and the rammed earth. The wall was made in four separate sections, with gaps between for openings. The three rows of fixed benches are separated by 2 metres, to allow space for tables and 80 David Lea

chairs between them: the theatre can then be used for parties, gigs and wedding ceremonies, as well as lectures. The oculus in the ceiling, the main source of natural light in the space, can be closed by a big, circular shutter, the ‘moon-disc’, which pivots around and eclipses it. The CAT staff wanted a view and a way out into the gardens from the lecture theatre. They do not always use it, but it is nice to have the huge opening into the breakout space and the view of green beyond. The opening can be closed with a vast, curved, sliding door, slatted in the same way as the acoustic panels on the walls. Light from the other openings is controlled by angled slats, so that images on the screen are not overwhelmed. We wanted the projection screen to have a strong presence, like a kind of reredos at the back of an altar, and so we have alternating bands of dark green and white, with a very rich panel below, which has dark green slats against gold, and as you walk past the gold background is revealed. Returning to the foyer, stairs at the end rise up to the light (see Figure 1.9.10) and emerge on to a terrace with a view into the treetops, contained on the north side by staff offices. A left turn at the top of the stairs reveals a close-up view on to the slate tip – spoil from the old quarry – as it cascades down behind the building, focusing attention on the small trees that have established a precarious foothold. The gallery to the bedrooms leads off this space, and it is nice to have to go outside to get there. It does not seem to be any hardship, and people at CAT are quite used to it, but you can imagine that, in some institutions, people would have that glazed in, and then the whole thing would become something different. It would also have to be heated, and so costs would start to rise. The bedrooms are entered through small lobbies that provide a sense of protection and privacy within the room. The rooms look out over terraces and courtyards to the view across the valley. The upper rooms have window seats about 600 mm wide, and the windows can slide right back, so that it is like being on a terrace. On the lower floor, windows are full height, opening on to a landscaped deck. Returning to the head of the stair, a short corridor leads to the seminar rooms. The first two look east, with a close-up view of the slate tip. You don’t get much light off the slate, and so these rooms are mainly lit by a circular top light, which echoes the oculus in the main lecture theatre. As you emerge from these rooms, a little window allows a glimpse across the valley to the hills beyond. At the end of the corridor, a door opens into a larger, higher space. The facing wall is at a slight angle, and so the sun hits it before the rest of the room. Light is a magnet and draws you in. You do not see the window as you enter, only the light on the wall and the window seat going round into the opening. This window place is the culmination of the journey through the building (Figure 1.9.15). You can slide the window open and sit as if on a balcony, and from there you look back on the whole scheme and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 mountains beyond.

Notes 1 Tzu 1963, p. 67 (although Lea cites another translation (ed.)). 2 See the very good article in Architectural Design, March 1966, by Günter Nitschke called ‘Ma: The Japanese sense of place’. ‘Ma’ suggests relationship, and so the relationship between you and me is the place, the space between us. 1.10 ODYSSEUS AND KALYPSO – AT HOME

Peter Wilson

As Vladimir Nabakov once wrote, it is not the conclusion of the story but how we get there that interests us. In the case of Ulysses, the saga of his wanderings, a monumentally frustrated return from Troy to Ithaca, took 20 years. It is a journey that functions as a sort of twelfth- century BC ur-journey template for all subsequent journeying, dictated by the blind rhapsode, to ‘alphabet adaptors’ in the eighth-century BC. It marks a transition, a phase change from oral (bardic) to written narrative – ur-text as well as ur-journey. As topographical description of the unknown coasts and peninsulas of the western Mediterranean, The Odyssey can be read as a preliminary exploration, preceding the seventh-century Greek colonisation of southern Italy: Ulysses as Captain Cook in felt cap (Pilos, his tag). Homer’s Odyssey also served as the navigational chart for James Joyce’s 24-hour journey across Dublin. Joyce’s 1922 text is Ulyssean through its corporeal signifier, Bloom, who opens up the world: he blooms, in a commodious unfolding of alternative words and worlds. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 classic Le mépris (Contempt), a colour-coded film noir, also unfolds around the Odyssey narrative. It was shot in the heroic setting of Curzio Malaparte’s Capri villa, as backdrop protagonist (Figure 1.10.1). Appropriately, the actual Siren Rocks, the Galli, are visible from the mythological stage of the villa’s deck-like roof. As the film unfolds, characters slip in and out of various Homeric guises: Brigitte Bardot turns from Kalypso into Penelope, from black wig to blond bombshell, as she traverses her marital quarters, asking ‘where is the man I married’. Ultimately, she also becomes a siren as she swims off, naked,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 in the direction of the Galli. The German cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler has suggested that, in our media age, that of Hollywood, sirens no longer sing: instead, they abandon their bikinis. Michel Picoli, Bardot’s scriptwriter husband is, like Ulysses, held captive by the nymph Kalypso’s spell, but, in a cathartic homecoming, he reverts to the role of author (Homer). Fritz Lang plays himself, the famous film director, role-jumping at one point into the persona of the Emperor Tiberius, questioning, from the cliffs of Capri, the abandoned Penelope’s fidelity. In the final scene, Godard himself appears on camera, calls for silence and, with Lang, assumes joint command of the set, of the deck of the Villa Malaparte and its wide horizon. The media status of the Capri villa is both catalyst and locus of transition for symbolic transfers; Curzio Malaparte himself metamorphosed from his original name, Kurt Sickert, to his pseudonym and enlarged status as author of what he referred to as ‘A house like me’. 82 Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.1 The Malaparte Villa, Capri, perched on its cliff above the Mediterranean, used as the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le mépris Source: Photograph by Russell Light

This was taken up as the title of Michael McDonough’s 1999 book, which builds on the Villa Malaparte myth with an anthology of echoes: ‘A house like me . . . and me . . . and me . . . and me’.1 The list of mimetic Malaparte egos, all professing a strong associative yearning for the Capri cliff-hugger, includes Bruce Chatwin, Karl Lagerfeld, Tom Wolfe, Philippe Starck, Robert Venturi, John Hejduk, Steven Holl, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Mario Botta, Ettore Sottsass and Arata Isozaki. The last offers us a transcultural interpretation of the name Malaparte, reading it as ‘bad part’, a counter-figure to a healthier Bonaparte and analogous to the Japanese mythological figure of Onamaru – Ogre Boy. Alberto Moravia, Capri resident and author of the original Le mépris storyline, said of Malaparte, ‘I never believed a word he said, even when he was telling the truth’. Ulysses, the guileful trickster, also scraped through with mimicry, cunning and storytelling. There is

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 academic controversy about how much influence the architect Adalberto Libera really exerted on the design of the Malaparte villa: he obtained the building permit certainly, but, when General Rommel passed by on his way to the African Front and enquired if the house was built or bought, Malaparte answered, ‘the severe cliffs of the Matromania, the giant rocks of the Faraglioni, Penisola Sorentina, the blue Amalfi Beach, the shores of Paestum shining behind it, all these scenes are what I designed’. The Ulysses role, of journeyman, suffering hero, adaptive trickster, may provide an analogous role model for today’s ‘star architect’ – journeying to the end of the world, to the underworld even, to Troy to construct a horse, to China to construct a new city, a stadium, a TV station. What did Ulysses construct along the way: a horse, a raft and a bed? From these three modest products we could assume that, like Daedalus or Hephaestus, he was adept in ‘techne’ – the act Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 83

of making wondrous objects to overcome the disorder of the world, objects embodying ‘metis’, the inanimate becoming magically alive, not representing but reproducing life. The Malaparte villa has no clear counterpart in the Odyssey narrative, except perhaps the deck of Ulysses’s ship, which he lost soon after negotiating the Siren Islands and surviviving the Maelstrom. The next 7 years he spent on the island of Ogygia (Gozo), captive under the spell of the immortal nymph Kalypso, Atlas’s daughter – a sex slave in today’s media jargon. We see them both depicted in Arnold Böcklin’s painting Odysseus und Kalypso of 1882 (Figure 1.10.2). Ulysses scans the horizon, suffering, homesick, wrapped in a dark cape, his back turned to the naked seductress, who sprawls daringly across a sensuous red cloth thrown over barren rocks. The same soulful figure we find again in De Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle of 1910, a symbolist homage (Figure 1.10.3), a silhouette migration to a high balcony overlooking a distant Aegean city. Perhaps this is also Ulysses, now back in Greece, where De Chirico spent his childhood. De Chirico is paying homage to his mentor Böcklin and to Nietzsche, who wrote, ‘we suffer to provide the poet with his material’ (‘wir leiden (um) der dichter Stoff zu liefern’). The critic Beatriz Colomina once wrote that the function of building architects is to provide objects (subjects) for the critic to dissect (an echo of Nietzsche). Feasting in the Hall of King Alkínoös, Ulysses sheds tears on hearing the blind rhapsode Demódokos sing of his Trojan feats (The Iliad). The Odyssey reports that:

He sat on the rocky shore and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet scanning the bare horizon of the sea . . . O, I long for home, for the sight of home.2 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 FIGURE 1.10.2 Arnold Böcklin’s 1882 painting Odysseus und Kalypso, redrawn by Peter Wilson after the original in the Kunst Museum, Basel

FIGURE 1.10.3 Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Enigma of the Oracle, 1910, redrawn by Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.4 Ulysses stranded on the rocky shore, drawn after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson 84 Peter Wilson

Böcklin presents a psycho-gram of strained relations. His setting of Odysseus and Kalypso is more like ‘a sea cave where nymphs had chairs of rock and sanded floors’ (Homer’s description of Thresias)3 than Kalypso’s actual domestic arrangements. These were somewhat more commodious than Böcklin’s version, as observed by Hermes arriving with Zeus’s command for the soft-braided nymph to release her captive:

Upon her hearthstone a great fire blazing scented the farthest shores with cedar smoke . . . A deep wood grew outside, with summer leaves of alder and black poplar, pungent cypress. Ornate birds rested and stretched their wings . . . Around the smooth walled cave a crooking vine held purple clusters under ply of green; and four springs bubbling up near one another shallow and clear, took channels here and there through beds of violets and tender parsley.4

The home of the nymph offers sensuous abundance, a Vitruvian comoditas, not present in Böcklin or in the sculptured Ogre Boy stronghold of the Malaparte villa. Another incessant Mediterranean traveller, the one-time Capri resident Bernard Rudofsky, published in the March 1938 Domus, ‘A country house for an open minded woman’, located on the island of Procida adjacent to Capri (Figures 1.10.5–1.10.7).5 Although unrealised, it followed on from two earlier coastal houses, designed in partnership with Luigi Cosenza, the Villa Campanalla Positano and the Casa Ora.6 Rudofsky was an incessant traveller and a lifelong champion of the Mediterranean lifestyle, which he saw as both a healthy and honest version of the modernist aesthetic and an earthy alternative to northern abstraction. The sensuality of Kalypso’s cave would not be out of place in his influential book Architecture Without Architects, a protest against functionalist hegemony.7 The house on Procida was almost contemporary with the Villa Malaparte: it was published in the same month that Adalberto Libera submitted the initial site plan, titled Progetto di Viletta di Proprieta del Sig. Curzio Malaparte, for a building permit – described by Libera’s biographers, Francesco Garofalo and Luca Veresani, as, ‘granted quickly and discreetly through an influential intervention’. The approved design was for an elongated, rectangular building with rusticated base and an upper living room at the outer end of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 roof terrace. Perhaps Libera was distracted by the Esposizione Universale Roma Palazzo dei Congressi construction (he had won the prestigious competition in 1937), or perhaps his assertive client stepped in with disputed additions, such as the tapering staircase (Figure 1.10.8), often referenced to the Little Church of the Annunziata on Lipari, in front of which Malaparte was photographed in exile. In either case, work progressed slowly, and may or may not have been influenced by Rudofsky’s publications. A gender-specific dialectic pairs these built and unbuilt manifestos, the harsh metaphysical poetry of the male egoist clifftop villa finding its counterpart in the commodious atrium house projected by Rudofsky for his future wife Berta Doctor. Both mediate between an idealised occupant and the world, metaphorically using geometry to locate a microcosm of the specific, of individual experience, within the macrocosm (Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and immortals). Rudofsky’s Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 85

FIGURE 1.10.5 FIGURE 1.10.6 Bernard Rudofsky’s evocative image of the (above, top) The essential presence of the villa on Procida, published in Domus, March courtyard – conceptual drawing of the villa on 1938, redrawn by Peter Wilson Procida, redrawn by Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.7 (above) Rooms of the villa with Rudofsky’s allegorical representation of daily life rituals, redrawn by Peter Wilson. The floor of the lady’s bedroom is all bed; the music room has an afternoon divan Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 1.10.8 Villa Malaparte, the external steps leading to the roof terrace Source: Photograph by Russell Light 86 Peter Wilson

atrium composition (although designed by a man) is a woman’s space, prioritising a sensuality not dissimilar to that of Kalypso’s place. For the Libera–Malaparte villa, windows are emblematic, providing views of the majestic Faraglioni rocks and introducing a surrealistic sense of vertigo. Mysterious and sublime large- format glass rectangles (today’s signature of Swissness) conjure simultaneously both danger and refuge, prisons also for the cast of Le mépris who flutter before them, caged within their cinematically prescribed roles (Figure 1.10.9). Conversely, Rudofsky argued, ‘Ancient houses had few if any windows. The only opening deemed appropriate for a room was a door, because it was a passageway’; also, as if in affirmation of his manifesto’s counterpart, ‘stairs don’t belong in a country house. Stairs are the most important requirement of monumental architecture; they should be constructed outside as elements of landscape’. His was an argument for the Pompeian house format – a string of rooms arranged around an open central atrium (Fig 1.10.5–1.10.7). His theme is movement, daily domestic trajectories, from room to room, from within to without. Familiar functional codes are rescripted in his plan, which not only depicts the physical enclosure of walls, but also, with a radical and unconventional graphic invention of sketched allegorical figures, a prescribed choreography of each room, is the template of a sensuous Mediterranean lifestyle (Figure 1.10.7).

Swiftly she turned and led him to her cave, and they went in, the mortal and the immortal. He took the chair now left empty by Hermes, where the divine Kalypso placed before him victuals and drink of men, then she sat down facing Ulysses, while her serving maids brought nectar and ambrosia to her side.8

Such vignettes extend outside: a dog beside the lady of the house, relaxing in a hammock or galloping on horseback across the sand of the adjacent beach. Rudofsky’s isometric sketch of this arrangement (Figure 1.10.5) is one of Mediterranean modernism’s iconic images – advocating an epicurean and sensual ‘comoditas’ (as did Le Corbusier’s sketched vignettes). Gio Ponti, who provided Rudofsky with his Domus platform, once stated, ‘The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky and Rudofsky taught me’. The two collaborated on a subsequent 1938 San Michele Hotel design – a spontaneous hotel, a cluster of houses/rooms to be scattered and invisible in the woods above a precipitous Capri cliff. Paths from the rooms (room of the angels, room of the doves, room of the sirens) converge at the village centre, ‘the residence of the gentleman who manages the place’. Arriving guests leave their clothes in a closet and are equipped with

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 sandals, hats and other necessaries designed by the architects. At this moment, Rudofsky fled Fascist Italy for South America, Japan and New York, his own lifelong Odyssey, which left a trail of exhibitions and open houses, disseminations of the Capri code, unfolding into luxurious green terraces. These include the 1939 Arnstein or Frontini houses in São Paulo and the skeletal garden framework of the Nivola house, Amagansett, Long Island, NY. In September 1950, Le Corbusier also visited this, the house of the artist Constantino Nivola, leaving his usual tag – a mural unfolding over two living- room walls (as he had at Eileen Gray’s Mediterranean-facing Cap Martin villa). On 28 September 1950, Le Corbusier took a lift back to New York with Nivola’s neighbour, Jackson Pollock – ‘A better driver than painter’, commented Le Corbusier. Pollock subsequently drove himself into a tree, no joyous homecoming for a modern arts Agamemnon. Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 87

FIGURE 1.10.9 (left) ‘The cast caged within their cinematically prescribed roles’, drawn, after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

FIGURE 1.10.10 (right) ‘Picoli and Ulysses pass either side of the rooftop wall’, drawn, after Le mépris, by Peter Wilson

Malaparte, like Ulysses, was an exile. Sent by Mussolini to the islands of Lipari (and later Ischia), he wandered and recorded war-ravaged Europe in his magnum opus, Kaputt (1943), before finally coming home to his Capri villa. Like Ulysses, his trajectory was a Gaussian random walk, his fate displacement, his goal return. Ulysses’s return was watched over and orchestrated, as always, by Pallas Athena; it began with the construction of a raft. He:

fell to chopping . . . twenty tall trees were down. He lopped the branches, split the trunks . . . drilled through all the planks, and then drove stout pins to bolt them. . . . He made the decking fast to close set ribs before he closed the sides with longer planking, then cut a mast pole. . . . He drove long strands of willow in all the seams to keep out the waves. As for a sail, the lovely Nymph Kalypso brought him a cloth so he could make that, too. Then he ran up his rigging – halyards, braces – and hauled the boat on rollers to the water.9

Seventeen days he sailed, until vindictive Poseidon, angered that other gods had deemed to end Ulysses’s exile, churned the deep, smashed his craft and threw him in the storming

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 brine to swim to the shores of the island Skhería. Here, Zeus’s daughter, grey-eyed Athena, arranged for Nausikaa to bring the battered castaway to be respectfully received in the court of her father Alkínoös, where Ulysses relates his frustrated homeward journey. Here also he hears the blind rhapsode’s valorisation of his own Troy exploits – experience translated into symbolic fiction, an encounter with a fictional self (re-enacted in the Godard film as the white-suited Michel Picoli and the film’s puppet-like Ulysses actor pass to either side of the Malaparte villa’s rooftop wall, a wedge between film and reality) (Figure 1.10.10). From Skhería, Ulysses is shipped homeward and, ‘put on Ithaka, with gifts untold of bronze and gold’. These Pallas Athena advises him to hide, then to enter Ithaka and even his own house in the guise of a beggar. Approaching his home, Ulysses passes Clearwater, a sensuous spring house (a water house): 88 Peter Wilson

where the people fill their jars. Ithakos, Nêritos and Polyktos built it, [island and mountain names – a topographical anchoring] and round it on the humid ground a grove, a circular wood of poplars grew. Ice cold in runnels from a high rock ran the spring, and over it there stood an altar stone to cool the nymphs, where men going by laid offerings.10

He finds his own home overrun, commandeered by a crowd of suitors revelling in the ‘gracious timbered hall’, competing for abandoned Penelope’s hand, feasting daily on ‘his cattle, oxen and fat sheep, and drinking up rivers of wine’. The arrangement of the house unfolds as Ulysses and son Telémakhos gorily dispatch the interlopers on their own final journey:

The suitors’ ghosts are called away by Hermes . . . bearing the golden wand . . . He led them down dank ways . . . all squeaking as bats . . . all flitting criss-cross in the dark . . . over grey Ocean tides, the Snowy Rock, past shores of dream and narrows of the sunset, in swift flight to where the Dead inhabit wastes of asphodel at the world’s end.11

Ulysses’s house is arranged around ‘the pillared hall’, scene of the slaughter. Here Penelope sat, weaving by day, having promised to choose between suitors when the fabric was finished, unravelling by night (a potent metaphor for the trajectory of culture – a continual reweaving of the same material). At night, she withdraws to her high room (as does the Favorita in the Malaparte villa). Fragmentary details offer clues to the extent of Ulysses’s house, but not to its type or focus:

A distant storeroom where the master’s treasure lay ...... a women’s hall and inner rooms for 50 female slaves ...... the packed earth floor of the pillared hall – Athena watched, in the form of a swallow perched on a black beam in the smoky air under the roof ...... the courtyard of the beautiful house, a courtyard altar – the sanctuary of Zeus ...... outdoors, a court, under the gate, between the round house and the palisade.

Penelope instructs her maid to make up a bed for Ulysses ‘. . . and place it outside the bedchamber my lord built with his own hands’. This stings Ulysses to retort: Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 No mortal . . . could budge it with a crowbar. There is our pact and pledge, our secret sign, built into that bed – my handiwork. . . . An old trunk of olive Grew like a pillar on the building plot, And I laid out our bedroom round that tree, Lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, Gave it doorways and smooth fitting doors. Then I . . . hewed and shaped that stump . . . from roots up Odysseus and Kalypso – at home 89

into a bedpost, drilled it ...... and stretched a bed between – a pliant web of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.12

Here, the DNA of the Mediterranean house is specified, an irrefutable anchoring, the ‘techne’ of making and dwelling, the goal of the journey, or, as Rudofsky argued, ‘homes should be a cultural refuge, the aesthetic backdrop for our passions’. After Odysseus’s 20-year Odyssey, horizon-scanning windows seem less than necessary, for there is no more a distant goal.

Notes 1 McDonough 1999. 2 Homer 1992, Book V, l. 166. 3 Ulysses’s previous stop before Kalypso’s island and where his crew sealed their fate by slaughtering the god Helios’s cattle. 4 Homer 1992, Book V, ll. 65–78. 5 Domus, March 1938, p. 123 6 Domus, 1937, no. 109, p. 265. 7 Rudofsky’s 1970 [1964] book (and MOMA exhibition), Architecture Without Architects. 8 Homer 1992, Book V, ll. 203–8. 9 Ibid., Book V, ll. 251–70. 10 Ibid., Book XVII, ll. 262–8. 11 Ibid., Book XXIV, ll. 1–15. 12 Ibid., Book XXII, ll. 214–27. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.0.1 Path made by human footfall and photographed in autumn, Bamford, Derbyshire Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones PART 2 Movement as experienced by the individual Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 2

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

This second part of the book considers the reader rather than the designer, beginning with the question of how we can apprehend and know space. Peter Blundell Jones lays a theoretical foundation in Chapter 2.1 by pointing out the primacy of bodily experience, the unbreakable link between body and mind, and the way we acquire awareness of space and direction through interaction with the outside world. This involves the essential and constructive role of short- and long-term memory, something normally taken completely for granted, but without which we could achieve no sense of time or space. He goes on to consider bodily movements as the foundation of metaphor in language, starting particularly with spatial concepts such as up and down, inside and out. He then shows how the body finds its place in the world by coordinating innate directions of back and front, left and right, with those given by the planet, understood as cardinal points. This introduction establishes the role of walking as the primary means, not just of traversing space, but also of understanding and knowing where we are and where we are going. Chapters 2.2 and 2.3 then present histories of walking. In Chapter 2.2, landscape historian Jan Woudstra outlines a history of parks and gardens, which were driven by evolving ideas about walking for health and leisure. Initially, this was mainly a matter for the upper classes, underexercised and overfed, and it led at first to the design of places conspicuous in their deployment of power and development of aesthetic intentions, though, with the development of public parks and sports grounds, these places gained a more common ownership and remain

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 essential to the make-up of the modern city. In Chapter 2.3, by contrast, Doina Petrescu is concerned with the urban realm, and not as designed object but as existing accumulation of fabric and ways of life. For her, walking presents a way of taking possession of the city in all its messy vitality, from Baudelaire through the Dadaists and Surrealists to the Situationists, then on to contemporary groups such as Stalker and public works. This moves art out of the gallery into the realm of everyday life and moves architecture off the drawing board. Walking engenders mapping, recording, interacting. It also challenges rights to the possession of territory, and Petrescu applauds the seasonal reappropriation of streets in Madrid for the passage of animals. She presents walking as a critical instrument to test patterns of possession and power, and to challenge those visions of the city that tend to ascribe to it a perceived totality. 94 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In Chapter 2.4, acoustician Jian Kang reminds us that the apprehension of our environment while walking is not only visual but also auditory. Sound tends to be taken for granted, and yet a good idea of its importance can be gained from trying to watch a film with the soundtrack turned down. Not only is the dialogue missing, but also many aspects of narrative that set the scene, sounds that forge necessary links across the visual cuts, and music that sets the mood. So far, quantitative acoustics tends to deal with noise as a nuisance or distraction, but sounds tell us both positive and negative things about our environment and what is going on in it, whether it is the sound of distant church bells, the chiming of the town-hall clock, rushing water, birdsong, the ice-cream van, an emergency siren, footsteps along a passage or a piano being played rather well, somewhere inside an upper window. A qualitative acoustics is needed to deal with the meanings of these things. The remaining chapters in this part deal with roads and traffic, for much of the modern world has been rebuilt for vehicles, even to the extent of making walking undesirable or difficult, and now we learn much of the world by car. In Chapter 2.5, Peter Blundell Jones begins with a discussion of walking as the original way of getting about, noticing Marcel Proust’s use of walks in the laying down of memories and the construction of narratives, and that Proust found this could continue in a carriage. The experience of movement in vehicles is, therefore, not to be denied, but must be considered alongside the development of roads, railways and other infrastructure that has gradually effaced the landscape, ending with air travel, the experience furthest from our Stone Age ancestry. The haptic experience of take-off in a plane is still thrilling, but the speed of flight is hard to grasp, and the sound, smell and temperature of the world outside have gone, while time is distorted, giving credence to the idea that one has left one’s soul behind. Getting to and from the plane is often grim, and the airport has become both a new kind of city and the epitome of the non-place. Roman roads led from one city to another, usually as directly as possible, but the ring road goes nowhere, and there are harrowing stories of people getting lost and going round and round, such as the 82-year-old man reported to have spent 30 hours on the M25 in 2011.1 In Chapter 2.6, Stephen Walker ponders the experience of the ring road, playing with the dual meaning of the word ‘transport’, which can also mean ‘transported with desire (or fear)’, and compiling readings that draw on theories of the sublime. This is a wake-up piece to counter automatic assumptions about the merely technical nature of the ring road, revealing it as something stranger and more mysterious than we thought, but showing it also as the expression of rules and conventions that we, perhaps, take too much for granted. Following on, in Chapter 2.7, Alan Lewis discusses the genesis of a particular ring road, that of Sheffield, as proposed in the 1940s. This case study in the history of British planning

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 reveals how interdisciplinary arguments developed between the city architect, city planner and city engineer, and Lewis shows how the engineer gained the upper hand by pursuing techniques founded largely on scientific ideas about safety and traffic flow. This discussion is prefaced by a Husserlian critique of the precise sciences and their inherent tendency to reduce and idealise. This last piece in this part, Chapter 2.8, derived from a lecture by a current practitioner, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, whose work challenges the hegemony of traffic in the urban realm. He too is critical of the assumptions about safety and speed of traffic flow that automatically favoured vehicles in most twentieth-century planning, and also of the pedestrian environment produced: streets cluttered with ever more barriers, markings and signs, pedestrian movement increasingly constrained. Yet wide streets and big visibility splays only encouraged the traffic Introduction to Part 2 95

to go faster, and controlled pedestrian crossings encouraged drivers to assume the right of way and to ignore people crossing elsewhere. Hamilton-Baillie is a leader in the movement to reverse all this by removing boundaries and signs and giving the street back to pedestrians. In some places where this has been tried, it has resulted, not only in a reduction of the accident rate, but also an improvement in traffic flow. It reveals an urgent need to rethink the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

Note 1 see www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16193588 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.1 THE PRIMACY OF BODILY EXPERIENCE

Peter Blundell Jones

As Alva Noë has amusingly observed, science-fiction accounts about brains in jars soon have to start replacing parts of the lost body, for the brain must be given eyes, ears, a voice, just in order to play its fictional role.1 This would, in reality, not be easy, no one-way cable connection, for the eyes would need muscles to direct the gaze, the voice a larynx, mouth and passage of breath. Not only is the nervous system an extension of the brain, but it deals in two-way traffic, gaining constant feedback from its actions. Normally, too, in these stories, the brain has lived a life, and so it has already accumulated a personality and some memories, but a baby’s brain would require a set of senses and an ability to flex muscles and act upon the world just in order to develop.2 A mind without a body, therefore, makes no sense, even if our ability to think, dream and remember makes us aware of goings on that seem independent of the physical world. René Descartes is usually blamed for the mind–body dichotomy, but, long before him, there existed beliefs in body and soul, well founded in phenomenal experience, that perhaps provided a foundation for this division. Witnessing the death of a close relative, for example, combines mute presence of a lifeless body with feelings of grief and memories of that person, and their aura seems still strongly present. However, the spirit, the personality, all possibility of real interaction, have gone, and so the soul must have fled. Among some African and East Asian peoples, the soul is even thought to leave the body during sleep, which explains for

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 them both the experience of dreams and the absence of consciousness that is witnessed by others. Illnesses too, particularly mental disorders, are attributed to loss of the soul, ritual processes being enacted to encourage its return, such as a mother on the threshold of the house making an offering addressed to the errant soul and urging it to come back.3 Such beliefs are supported by an underlying logic, for they register a world of mental events that seems obviously separated from the physical. Yet much of it is due to our taken-for- granted mastery of time. We possess only the present moment, but we are convinced of continuity with a past that no longer exists.4 Our confidence is not misplaced, for the causal chains we read in the world must have some basis,5 and, if we failed to trust our memories and our ability to locate ourselves in time and space, we could no longer live and act.6 However, we remember only such things as our minds are able to sustain and recall, by transforming The primacy of bodily experience 97

them into schemata, and memory is far from permanent, complete or accurate.7 We can check it against the memories of others, but, as the years go by, comparison reveals that we have retained increasingly diverse accounts, for we re-edit our memories as we recall them.8 We can also check our memories against persisting material records, such as writings, buildings and photographs, which are important precisely because they provide the most seemingly objective evidence, but they too are subject to loss and damage, as well as requiring interpretation. We are embodied, and our lives unfold in sequences of time, consciousness being perhaps the means of linking space with time. Walking involves both: the physical activity requires muscles, balance and rhythms of movement that are largely automatic, but we must know, too, where we are going and manage to find our way, in which all our senses are engaged, not only sight, hearing and smell, but the haptic sense of how we are moving, how our muscles respond to our commands. Our experiences have a necessary but varied duration, for not only must we make full strides just to complete rhythmic movements and retain balance, we also register obstacles ahead – a stile, a tree across the path – and mend our pace accordingly.9 The necessity of retaining short-term duration is starkly exemplified by music: a single note means little, although it is all that we hear in an instant, and so a sequence of notes must be remembered before the pattern of sound can be registered, tested for familiarity and compared with the already known.10 Such durations can be a matter of seconds, as with a single bird- call, but human songs and dances usually have durations of several minutes. They tend to consist of repetitive phrases, and we quickly register structure and variation. Written concert pieces are more extended and complex, but even they are normally broken into movements of 20 minutes or less.11 The Ring Cycle lasts days, but it is driven by the narrative of an over - arching story that can be broken down into episodes. Wagner enthusiasts can both summarise the whole thing and recognise which part of the unfolding spectacle is taking place. Memory seems, therefore, to be involved in different ways throughout our thinking, from the few seconds taken to recognise a musical phrase to the days or even weeks over which a long event unfolds. Long measures of time are anchored to the rotation of the Earth. A long walk, taking days or weeks, may be structured by changing terrain and stopping places for food or rest, but normally it is broken into days, because of daylight and the need for sleep, the brain’s period for transmuting short-term memories into longer-term ones.12 It can also be divided into weeks, but the week is an artificial creation, perhaps the reason it needs so much back- up in Genesis: some societies have a 5-day week, some no week at all. The month, by contrast, is called after, and supposed to follow, the moon.13

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The child’s acquisition of space and direction Our understanding of the world starts with the interaction of body and space. As infants, we build a relationship with the world by making bridges between our senses, so that we see things that we feel, starting with the breast and sucking, exploring with the fingers, and then attempting to crawl about.14 Present from the beginning, even within the womb, is gravity, which causes things to fall, holds us to the surface of the planet, makes it necessary to balance when standing and gives us the vertical axis proved by the primary right angle: that between the plumb line and the spirit level.15 There are also potential axes within the horizontal plane, and, as our eyes develop and vision begins, we differentiate between what is before us and our unseen behind, at first appreciating what it means to be face-to-face with mother 98 Peter Blundell Jones

and other human beings. As soon as we can stand and move around, we have a front and a back, and we move towards or away from things. It is difficult to propel ourselves other than forward, and our eyes are directed to what is ahead: we use them, not for full peripheral vision, as with herbivores on watch for danger, but for binocular vision, to predict depth and distance. We can move our heads to look up, down or sideways, even back over the shoulder, but the normal gaze is straight on, and we are blind to the rear. The approximate symmetry of the body and apparently identical limbs and eyes allow identification of the centre-line as axis of symmetry. Not only we, but also most other animals, insects and birds, are symmetrical in full face, asymmetrical in profile and move forwards on their centre-line. This makes the primary axis, front to back, essentially different from the secondary one, side to side, for there is an expectation that the primary axis must be the axis of symmetry. With animals whose body runs horizontally, such as cats, it is also the spine, linking head and tail to distribute commands. However, the mirror image of the body is only approximate: left is not equal to right. Not only are the internal organs irregularly disposed, but the left side of the face does not exactly match the right, so that a photo of each side added to its reversed double gives us two slightly different faces. More crucially, the limbs of the right side dominate those of the left, the right hand being predominantly stronger and more skilful, the right foot ready to lead off. The limbs are cross-wired to opposite brain hemispheres, which, though inter - connected, have become specialised in different kinds of task, the left to do with language and logic, the right more spatial. Many people are left-handed, and in rare cases the bodily organs can even be disposed to opposite sides, heart on the right, but the majority are right handed, and most, if not all, societies give priority to the right as the side of honour, dexter in Latin producing dextrous. The left hand is sinister, borrowed by English for its negative and uncanny connotations.16 The anthropologist Rodney Needham edited a book on left and right that included an early and fascinating essay by Robert Hertz, who tried to show that right-handedness was culturally constructed, and there is indeed much cultural construction, but based, it now seems, on an underlying biological preference for the right.17 Iain McGilchrist has seen the dominance of right-hand–left-brain as productive of an excessively rational society, which he considers is to blame for many of our cultural ills.18 He shows, at least, what a rich and suggestive edifice of theory can be constructed around this topic. When we stretch out our arms sideways and look forward, our bodily axes are set at right angles, echoing the 90º between horizontal and vertical, and so generating a three-dimensional

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 world. Readers will by now have noticed that, in putting together top–bottom, front–back and left–right, I have extracted the three dimensions of space from the body, following Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘the body as geometer’.19 According to him, the understanding of spatial transitions and inversions also starts with movements of the body, rather than with the abstract Cartesian coordinates that were added later as a cultural superstructure. In addition to the three bodily directions, there is also a fundamental experience of inside and outside. The body develops in relation to an outer world, which is at first that of the womb, which it must leave, the primal experience of moving from inside to outside. The sense of inside and outside gives rise to recognition of the contrast between centre and periphery, and to the familiar notion of things being ‘inside-out’, as a direct parallel to the notion of them being ‘upside-down’ or ‘back-to-front’. The primacy of bodily experience 99

Bodily movements as the foundation of metaphors In and out, and the traversing of thresholds of one kind or another, are fundamental experi- ences reflected deeply in our use of language, for the prepositions we use daily, such as on, in, at, by, over, under, across and through, are all positional and rooted in physical experience, even if much of the time we use them metaphorically. The verb ‘to move’ seems also to start with bodily movement, before we begin to move other things, or even speak of ‘a move’ in chess. So ‘a move’ occurs metaphorically in some more abstract strategy, but it returns to the body when we ‘are moved’, and emotions are also movements. When we speak of progress and regress, literal or metaphorical, the pro- and re- give the directions forward and back, while the gress is transition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made a strong case that much of our language depends on ever larger and more elaborate constructs of metaphors, which are all fundamentally derived from physical experience.20 The word threshold, for example, refers to a door sill and derives from memories of the precious harvest held within the door, but we have temporal thresholds, thresholds of sound, thresholds of pain, thresholds of consciousness, thresholds of life, even thresholds on the computer to enter metaphorical files and folders that we speak of as real. Just as prevalent in everyday usage as the couple ‘in and out’ are the metaphorical uses of ‘up and down’, for we speak of high quality and low quality, of being elevated to the peerage and sent down from university, of rising to a challenge and falling into debt. When you begin to explore the question, metaphors involving height are hard to avoid.21 Concepts of back and front move swiftly on from people and animals to buildings, books, pictures, cars, furniture and just about anything that can have a ‘right way round’. Goffman’s school of space-based sociology revolved around the concepts of ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, which can be applied metaphorically to almost any institution.22 Left and right tend to be more specifically directional, but have acquired a familiar political usage that started with the assembly at the French Revolution, though, long before that, the hands acquired culturally specific social functions and associations, and we still shake hands and eat with the right.23 In many societies, gendered physical spaces have been left/right divided.24 The whole rich framework of increasingly abstract metaphors can thus be seen as taking reference from a foundation in bodily experience. George Lakoff, writing later with Rafael Nunez, extended his language studies to suggest even that mathematics is entirely a metaphorical system.25 All this serves to confirm the primacy of embodied experience, of the body in space.

The body engages the world Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The conquest of the sky is recent in human history. On a Stone Age world initially perceived as flat, the above was seen as another world, from which came uncontrollable forces of light, heat and weather, and it is understandable that people conceived heavenly bodies as controlling agents and sought to address them in prayer. The sky’s movements also gave us our natural division of time by days and years. Below was the Earth, with caves, waterholes and a potential underworld of indeterminate depth. With these earthbound values, it is hardly surprising that, in culture after culture, heaven is up, and hell is down, often with many layers, that temples are on mountains to get closer to the powers above, and that there is a widely understood polarity between the attic and the cellar.26 For the same reason, kings and judges occupy the highest seat, usually on a dais, and shrines and altars are usually up steps, whereas it is tombs 100 Peter Blundell Jones

that involve descent. As regards movements across the Earth, we have already noted that, discounting the limits of topography, the body can move in any direction. However, people must always have been aware of the turning of the heavens together with all the heavenly bodies: sun during the day, moon and stars at night. They provide direction and tell the time, and were read long before clock and compass were invented. The evident east–west axis implied by the solar path is easily demonstrable with a gnomon27 and is complemented by a north–south one marked by the Pole Star, always valued for its stability. Thus, the Earth offers axes that become the cardinal points, which were celebrated and accreted specific values in many early cultures.28 In Chinese Daoism, dating back to around 300 BCE, for example, the cardinal points played a major role in a cosmological system that embraced the whole order of things, but, perhaps surprisingly, the ‘four directions’ were equally present among itinerant native American cultures.29 Delving into anthropological examples, one soon finds concern for orientation to have been almost universal, but the values attributed to directions differed and were culturally specific.30 In a world devoid of roads and yet unmapped – and also less protected from the hazards of weather and seasons – it was important to be able to situate oneself and to find one’s way about. Self-orientation has always been a matter of matching the three directions emanating from the body-as-geometer to the three given axes of the Earth, which is of course what we do when walking with a compass, or even just with awareness of the sun. Journeys have always played an essential part in human life and gave rise to some of our earliest narratives, such as The Odyssey. They also support a host of metaphors, such as ‘I have come a long way’, or ‘I have made headway despite my difficulties’. Life is often seen as a journey, death as a journey of another kind. This theme is further addressed in Chapter 2.5.

Notes 1 Alva Noë 2009. The part about the idea of a brain in a vat is on pp. 10–14, and is reiterated on p. 181. The theme of the book is that consciousness, ‘is achieved in action, by us, thanks to our situation in and access to the world we know around us’ (p. 186). 2 Piaget and Inhelder 1969, pp. 4–13. 3 On the Azande in Africa, see Evans-Pritchard 1937, p. 136. On the Dong of China, see Geary et al. 2003, p. 171. 4 The most compelling evidence is when this fails, as with unfortunate persons with brain disorders, unable to remember what happened a few minutes ago: see Oliver Sacks 1985. 5 But what it is, apart from our readings and interpretations, we shall never know, and the world supports conflicting versions: I follow Kant and the Neokantians on this: see Nelson Goodman 1978. 6 This is an essential point made by Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong (2010). 7 David Lowenthal has put this well: Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The prime function of memory is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present. Far from simply holding on to previous experiences, memory helps us to understand them. Memories are not ready-made reflections of the past, but eclectic, selective reconstructions based on subsequent actions and perceptions and on ever-changing codes by which we delineate, symbolize and classify the world around us. (Lowenthal 1985, p. 210) 8 The classic work on the construction of memory is Bartlett’s Remembering (1932); for a more recent general study, see Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory (2001). 9 On the problem of duration, see Bergson 1916, pp. 99–111. 10 Meyer 1956. 11 The complexity of brain activity in dealing with music is well explored by Oliver Sacks in Musicophilia (Sacks 2007). The primacy of bodily experience 101

12 Hobson 2002, p. 131. 13 Before the age of artificial light, moonlight was necessary to get about, hence the Lunar Men of the eighteenth century. Our year-based calendar leaves the moon relatively unpredictable, but the traditional Chinese calendar follows it precisely, operating on a 60-year cycle that brings movements of sun and moon together again. 14 Piaget and Inhelder 1969, pp. 13–19. 15 Life without gravity is for most of us unthinkable, and weightlessness is achieved only briefly in a falling aircraft. In nearly all science-fiction films and stories, the travellers encounter the same gravity as on Earth, which would be unlikely, but the effect of doubled gravity would be impossible to mimic with human actors on Earth. 16 Even worse in French, for sinistre can signal a catastrophe. 17 Needham 1973. 18 McGilchrist 2009. 19 Bourdieu 1977, pp. 114–24. 20 Lakoff and Johnson 1980. 21 Ibid., pp. 14–21. 22 Goffman 1971. 23 In the French National Assembly of 1789, those sympathetic to the king sat to the president’s right, and revolutionaries sat to his left. Thus, the political division reflects an earlier custom that seated a more highly honoured person to the right of the host, and the right wing, always conservative, gained precedence over the left. 24 For example, gendered sides to the Native American tipi and the Mongolian yurt. 25 Lakoff and Nunez 2000. 26 Bachelard 1969. 27 A vertical stick creating a shadow and, therefore, an arc centred on south, the standard orientation instrument before the compass. 28 Rykwert 1976; also Wheatley 1971. 29 For the cardinal points in relation to Daoism, see Needham 1956. For orientation among North American peoples, see Nabokov and Easton 1989. For a rich case study, see Neihardt 1932/1979. 30 For a particularly elaborate example that is also highly specific, see the vintana of the Betsileo in Madagascar: Susan Kus and Victor Raharijaona, ‘Domestic space and the tenacity of tradition among some Betsileo in Madagascar’, Chapter 3 of Susan Kent 1990, pp. 21–33. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.2 FROM HEALTH TO PLEASURE

The landscape of walking

Jan Woudstra

When the Englishman Richard Ford published A Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), he claimed that, ‘No Spaniard . . . ever took a regular walk on his own two feet – a walk for the sake of mere health’.1 In this, he not only pinpointed cultural differences between the two nations with respect to attitudes towards walking, but also the long-held British belief that walking was beneficial to physical and mental health. As early as the second half of the sixteenth century, there had been a renaissance in the acknowledgement of the health benefits of walking: following classical examples, it was thought to encourage the ability to think, as well as to encourage better physical health. This chapter investigates how a renewed interest in walking affected the design of landscapes, both private and public. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of a walk as a recreational activity in the countryside was somewhat of an enigma, and the main venue for such exercise was the garden. The reason was the condition of roads, dusty in summer and dirty in winter. To provide a firm surface for carriage wheels, good roads were ‘metalled’ with crushed stone or gravel to form hard surfaces. But, whatever the efforts, road surfaces remained a problem, as described by Robert Phillips in his 1736–7 Dissertation on the topic:

Now between wet and dry (for Example, when a Day or two of Rain there succeeds a Week or a Fortnight of dry Weather) the Sun, by drying, makes hard dry Ridges between the Rutts before

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 it can evaporate all the Water in the Rutts, which every Shower of Rain fills again, tho’ it cannot soften the hard Ridges; but then it softens the Bottoms of the Rutts, so that Carriages sink still deeper into them. When the Weather becomes warmer, and the Days longer, as the Rutts begin to grow dry, they grow so stiff and heavy that they make a great difference in the Draught, at least that of one Horse in five. The Wheels go so hard, that when the Rutts are at the deepest, it is so dangerous and difficult to go out of a Track, that Carriages can hardly pass by one another without overturning.2

It is clear that this was a potent mixture, even without the horse and farm-animal excrement that was inevitably mixed in with it. Despite the fact that there was a tradition of leaving space for pedestrians along the sides of high roads, these were frequently soiled also (Figure 2.2.1). The landscape of walking 103

FIGURE 2.2.1 Standard road section Source: J.C. Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Agriculture, 1835, London, p. 568

FIGURE 2.2.2 This patten was tied underneath shoes to prevent them becoming spoiled Source: Sheffield Museum Services

The state of the roads inhibited any pedestrian activity that was not necessary for transport or work related and, therefore, associated with the working classes (Figure 2.2.2). The activity of walking for the upper classes, therefore, took place where dry and smooth surfaces could be assured with gravel walks. Gravel originating from the Kensington and Blackheath areas became famous for the construction of London walks that were primarily found in gardens in the south of the country.

Peripatetic walks Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Some of the earliest surviving gardens of the mediaeval period were in monasteries, as cloisters surrounding courtyards, which, like ambulacrums in academic institutions, must have been intended for contemplation and philosophising. This kind of peripatetic walking – up and down, or round and round – was inspired by reports of Aristotle’s lyceum, where members met in the peripatoi, the covered walkway or colonnade. An ambulacrum was incorporated into the north side of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, which, though without doors, had glazed windows, to provide some comfort and protection from the elements. The openings provided direct access to the garden, so that, presumably with better weather, the walk could continue outside. Here, the pathways were shared with those approaching the plants in order to study them (Figure 2.2.3). 104 Jan Woudstra

FIGURE 2.2.3 Cloisters surrounding courtyards, like those of the ambulacrums in academic institutions, were intended for contemplation and philosophising; examples at Colégio do Espírito Santo, Évora, built 1574–90 Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra

Constitutional walks By the time they were being rediscovered in the second half of the sixteenth century, English spa towns provided another reason for walking. Besides taking the water and the dietary requirements, there was a ritual for walking, sometimes at the beginning of the day or at the end. In 1626, evening walks at Knaresborough were taken ‘into the fields, or Castle-yard’, and provision was generally increased, special walks being created for the purpose. The new walk followed the River Nidd and included the famous Dropping Well, where, according to legend, Mother Shipton, an English prophetess, was born. Such destinations must have contributed substantially to the pleasure of walking.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Walking was considered conducive to health; in his essay ‘Of regiment of health’, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) emphasises the importance of exercise, which included walking in ‘Alleys, enough for foure to walke abreast’. Between 1597 and 1599, Bacon laid out Gray’s Inn Fields, London, for this purpose. It consisted of a series of parallel walks lined with elm trees, with one central, wide avenue and narrower ones to either side. These walks on the edge of the city, with good views northwards, became a popular destination, particularly after the ravages of the plague at various intervals during the seventeenth century, as good air could be appreciated there.3 The issue of walking was also addressed in the redesign of St James Park by Charles II after the Restoration in the 1660s, when he instituted so-called constitutional walks, probably intended as a pun on the Constitution, but meant for his constitution (and that of the Court) instead. The name Constitution Hill, the avenue between the present-day Buckingham Palace The landscape of walking 105

and Green Park, is a reminder of these daily walks.4 The Mall, laid out as a double avenue as part of these changes, also became and long remained a popular destination for promenading. The central avenue was dedicated to the game of pall mall, or paille maille, played with wooden hammers on long sticks. Promenading took place in the narrower avenues on either side of the track, which was fenced off with low boarding. By this time, walking had become so much part of a healthy Puritan life that it was gener- ally incorporated. John Worlidge’s Systema horti-culturae (1677) included two hypothetical designs for walled gardens including walks as the predominant element. One scheme was a circular garden based on foreign models, where the walk that, ‘circundates that Garden is not unpleasant, for that you may walk as long as you please in it always forward without any short turning’. He believed nevertheless that, ‘The Square is the most perfect and pleasant form that you can lay your Garden into’, because this form of garden, with straight walks, was much easier to navigate as a pedestrian (see Figures 2.2.4a and 2.2.4b):

The delight you take in walking in it being much the more as you are less careful: for when you walk in a round or circle, you are more subject to trespass on the borders, without continual thoughts and observations of your Ground.5 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

ab FIGURE 2.2.4 John Worlidge produced two theoretical models for gardens: the circular one (a) was designed so as to enable continuous walking, without the need to turn corners, but the disadvantage over the square garden (b) was that one was more likely to step into the borders Source: John Worlidge, Systema horti-culturae, 1677, London 106 Jan Woudstra

Promenading Although the initial intention of these latter walks may indeed have been for constitutional improvement, as they became fashionable they drew a new audience, more interested in social rather than health benefits. It was here that the tradition of promenading, defined as a ‘leisurely walk, esp. one taken in a public place so as to meet or be seen by others’6 began. The tremendous popularity of the initial walks soon encouraged further examples, designed for this combined purpose of health and social venue. These were the public walks designed for towns such as Liverpool, Bristol, Norwich, Nottingham, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, York, Knaresborough (Figure 2.2.5) and Scarborough, mostly along rivers and planted with avenues of trees. The enduring success of Pall Mall for promenading ultimately ensured its adaptation in the form of the shopping mall.

Bewilderment As the grandest of gardens, conceived from the 1660s onwards, Versailles became a prototype for the baroque garden and was emulated everywhere. It was a landscape designed to impress, as an expression of the power of its owner, Louis XIV. The palace and gardens were conceived on a grand scale to belittle the visitor, who is thereby overwhelmed. The primarily geometric layout encourages the idea that it was conceived to be seen from above, but the full experience could only be had by moving through the landscape. This was normally done on Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.2.5 One of the requirements in spa towns was the provision of public walks; there was an early example along the River Nidd in Knaresborough that incorporated Mother Shipton’s Cave and the Petrifying Well, which was first opened to the public in 1630 Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra The landscape of walking 107

foot, but the walks were wide enough to accommodate small chariots, or roulettes, also. In order to be able to show the gardens to his visitors, Louis XIV provided the programme for a route by which the gardens were to be shown, published as ‘La manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles’. Gardeners would be on hand to change the planting in the parterres even during a visit, to create a different perspective on the return, but mainly they served the turning on and off of fountains as the visit progressed, so that they could all be appreciated.7 One of the main features of the baroque garden was the bosquet, the woody part, referred to in English as the wilderness. Initially, such wildernesses were laid out in the maze-like patterns that also served for the layout of flower gardens; they progressed to simpler geometric patterns and ultimately were designed with winding walks throughout. The idea was an element of surprise. Whereas André Mollet had referred to going to the wilderness ‘for studious Retire - ment, or the enjoyment of Society with two or three Friends, a Bottle of Wine and a Collation’8, the main object in the cooler climate of England was to have a feature where one might be ‘bewildered’ through surprise walks. This could only be experienced by a moving walker. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the formal garden had given way to the landscape park of Capability Brown, but the idea of a garden as the main space for walking predominated, although it was renamed as pleasure ground when conceived in its ultimate form. The main purpose of a garden for walking is emphasised by Thomas Whately in his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which served as a guidebook for the new style. His section ‘Of a garden’ is wholly dedicated to the creation of walks. He noted that gravel walks contribute to the appearance of a garden, and he emphasised the need for the highest standards in their construction and maintenance, noting that, ‘a field surrounded by a gravel walk is to a degree bordered by a garden’, and that many ‘gardens are nothing more than such a walk round a field’. Various guidelines for the creation of walks were provided that were illustrated with a case study of Stowe, noting that:

The whole space is divided into a number of scenes, each distinguished with taste and fancy; and the changes are so frequent, so sudden, and complete, the transitions so artfully conducted, that the same ideas are never continued or repeated to satiety.

This referred to a number of themed walks, which in the case of Stowe were celebrated for the garden buildings and temples,9 which also shaped the iconographical programme of the gardens.10 The general design varied from place to place, affecting both rides and walks. At Blenheim, for example, there was a ride ‘round the park for occasional visitors’ of more than 3 miles

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 around the perimeter of the park and ‘describing a wide circle round palace and gardens, which are casually and advantageously seen through glades in the progress, and exhibiting many magnificent pictures over the park and country round’. It was noted that:

[this ride] has ever been considered as the first of natural charms that BLENHEIM supplies, and as a coup d’oeil and compendium of all the rest; and as it may be taken in a carriage or on a horseback, it is neither accompanied with fatigue or delay. It may be taken in any weather.11

In contrast, the walks consisted of pebbly gravel, ‘of the most beautiful texture and regularity’, which was found to blend ‘utility with ornament’. These walks wound through ‘to the east 108 Jan Woudstra

between rising plantations, and clumps of trees and shrubs in various shapes, at intervals is opened to highly embellished lawn’. The main, or ‘Home-walk’, through the gardens was delightful and ‘sheltered by the winding of its direction from every blast’, and it possessed ‘sufficient variety in every part, with an aspect continually improving’. This walk ‘conducts to a Temple’ – in a ‘diverticle from the principal walk’, the visitor is ‘drawn aside to the contemplation of the FLOWER GARDEN’, which is included within a ‘thick grove’ – past the Palladian gate that forms the entrance to the kitchen garden, back on to the Home-walk and the Sheep-walk and past an open grove, at which point the visitor catches ‘a glimpse of the south front of the Palace, which is thrown into various perspective as we advance’ and various other views to features outside the park etc., providing the whole range of sensory experiences, visually open or closed, revealing views and interesting features and scents and sounds (see Figure 2.2.6).12 These experiences comply with those promoted by William Chambers in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1773) as originating from the Chinese, but which were, in fact, the canon that he would have liked to promote in the design of pleasure grounds. It also affected the directives for walks that express a range of visual and emotional experiences, to be summarised as follows:

• Walks are to lead ‘to all principal buildings, fine prospects, and other parts of the composition’ and in such a way ‘as it were by accident, and without turning back, or seeming to go out of the way, to every object deserving notice’. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.2.6 Walks in the eighteenth-century landscape park were normally incorporated within the pleasure grounds that contained a range of features; this example at Croome Court, designed by Capability Brown in the 1750s Source: Photograph by Jan Woudstra The landscape of walking 109

• The distances between straight and winding walks are to be varied, with ‘closely planted thickets’ to hide and reveal views, to create ‘suspense with regard to the extent, as [well as] to excite those gloomy sensations which naturally steal upon the mind’, and more thinly planted areas. Here, the ‘ear is struck with the voices of those who are in the adjacent walks, and the eye amused with a confused sight of their persons, between the stems and foliage of the trees’. Various walks are unexpectedly turned into the same open spaces, so that, ‘the different companies are agreeably surprized to meet where they may view each other, and satisfy their curiosity without impediment’. • Walks ‘en cul de sac’ are to be avoided in order to prevent ‘unpleasant disappointments’, but if they are necessary, they should always terminate ‘at some interesting object’. • Walks are not to be designed ‘round the extremities of a piece of ground’, with the middle left ‘entirely open’, for though at first glance conceived as ‘striking and noble [so] the pleasure would be of short duration’. In smaller places, it might be appropriate to leave the larger part of the space open but taking care ‘to have a good depth of thicket, which frequently breaks considerably in upon the open space, and hides many parts of it from the spectator’s eye’. The projections of these thickets create variety, because they alter ‘the apparent figure of the open space from every point of view; and by constantly hiding parts of it, they create mystery which excites the traveller’s curiosity’. In places with a greater depth of thicket, recesses may be created for ‘buildings, seats, and other objects, as well as for bold windings of the principal walks, and for several smaller paths to branch off from the principal ones’. This disguises the idea of the boundary, ‘and affords amusement to the passenger in his course’, and, as it is impossible to ‘pursue all the turns of the different lateral paths, there is still something left to desire, and a field of imagination to work upon’. • Crooked walks on flat, featureless land must either be ‘made by art, or be worn by the constant passage of travellers’. In general, unnatural windings must be avoided, and walks must only be turned for some apparent excuse, ‘either to avoid impediments, naturally existing, or raised by art, to improve the scenery’. Striking features for turning aside include a ‘mountain, a precipice, a deep valley, a marsh, a piece of rugged ground, a building, or some old venerable plant’. If ‘a river, the sea, a wide extended lake, or a terras commanding rich prospects, present themselves’, they may be followed ‘in all their windings’.13

This reveals the intricacies and degree of detail with which walks within gardens were considered. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Public walks Acknowledgement of the health benefits of walking and the lack of public facilities for it led, in 1833, to the appointment of the Select Committee on Public Walks that was ‘to consider the best means of securing Open Spaces in the Vicinity of populous Towns, as Public Walks and Places of Exercise calculated to promote the Health and Comfort of the Inhabitants’. The Select Committee found that, ‘the means of occasional exercise and recreation in the fresh air are every day lessened’ with the fast increasing population of towns, and that, despite the fact that some towns had public walks, ‘even at these places, however, advantageously situated in this respect, as compared with many others, the accommodation is inadequate to 110 Jan Woudstra

the wants of the increasing number of people’. As a consequence, the Committee reported in favour of the provision of public walks and open places, ultimately leading to the provision of public parks, which generally incorporated a much wider range of facilities than mere walking14 (Figure 2.2.7).

FIGURE 2.2.7 Tom Browne’s caricature of visitors to Victoria Park, London, emphasises the significance of walking and promenading as a purpose for the laying out of public parks

P ublic Cardens Scalc of Feet BUXT O N. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.2.8 The layout of the Pavilion Gardens in Buxton Spa by Edward Milner, in 1871, emphasised not only the need for walking as a health requirement, but also walking for pleasure, in that the circuitous walks led to and from the bandstand, which was always near enough for the music to be heard Source: H.E. Milner, The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1890, London The landscape of walking 111

Not all ‘public’ parks were freely accessible, and a town such as Buxton Spa reveals the progress of public walk to public park. As in other spa towns, a public walk had been created here, designed by Jeffry Wyatville in 1818, especially for those taking the waters, in an area along the River Wye and then the Slopes opposite the Crescent, which was a topographically challenging site for the infirm, and so there was soon a requirement to embellish the walk along the river, which was executed by Joseph Paxton in about 1850. In 1871, the nearest section to the town was extended with the Pavilion Gardens, designed by Edward Milner. The latter was a public facility open for a charge, and was a good example of combining walks as a health requirement with pleasures. A conservatory to one side enabled an indoor walk during inclement weather, but it also contained a beautiful floral arrangement, tea-drinking facilities and, ultimately, an opera building designed by Frank Matcham, in 1903. Parallel was a broad outdoor terrace, elevated above the rest of the park. The garden itself had a centrally placed bandstand, with circular walks leading to and from it. These would have enabled circuitous walks that could be varied and were never too far from the music for it not to be heard. They would also have provided various choices and combinations of direction, the promenaders also presumably stepping to the music (Figure 2.2.8). The municipal parks laid out from this time on also provided many additional facilities beyond providing for walkers, typically including sports and leisure. Although the latter have long had predominance, because they have organisations to represent them, walking continues as the majority use of public parks today.15 With the current political, social and environmental issues, from obesity to climate change and with respect to the use of the car and home entertainment, the need to promote walking for health has never been greater.

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank David Jacques and Peter Goodchild.

Notes 1 Ford 1845, I, i, p. 52. 2 Phillips 1637, p. 4. 3 David Jacques (1989) ‘The chief ornament’ of Gray’s Inn: The walks from Bacon to Brown, Garden History, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 41–65. 4 Weinreb and Hibbert 1983, p. 194. 5 Worlidge 1677, pp. 16–18. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary. 7 Christopher Thacker (1972) La manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles by Louis XIV and others, Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Garden History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 49–69. 8 Mollet 1672, p. 13. 9 Whately 1770, pp. 206–27. 10 Clarke et al. 1997. 11 Mavor 1793, pp. 96–7. 12 Mavor 1793, pp. 59–85. 13 Chambers 1773, pp. 34–6. 14 Chadwick 1966, pp. 50–1. 15 Greenhalgh and Worpole 1995, p. 42. 2.3 ARCHITECTURE OF WALKING

Doina Petrescu

Walking can be considered as a tool to experience, analyse and represent space in relation to subjectivity. Looking beyond its value as an everyday life activity, artists, philosophers, writers, architects and activists have seen its value as an aesthetic, political and relational practice. We trace this legacy of walking within the emergence of an alternative architecture and urbanism connecting movement, site and subjectivity, suggesting that this is rooted in those artistic practices and civic actions of the modern era that, starting in the nineteenth century, took up walking as an ontological, aesthetic and political knowledge tool. Revisiting some of them, we will ask what the role of walking might be in enabling a more intense experience and more precise reading of the city, how this might change the way we plan and build the city, and what the promise of walking is for future architectural and urban practice. In his book Walkscapes, Francesco Careri suggests that the production of space began with human beings wandering in the Palaeolithic landscape, following traces, leaving traces.1 A slow appropriation of territory was the result of this incessant walking. Taking ‘walking’ as the beginning of architecture, Careri proposes an alternative history: one not concerned with settlements, cities and buildings, but with movements, displacements and flows. It is an architecture that speaks of space, not as contained by walls, but made of routes, paths and relationships. Careri suggests a common factor in the system of representation found in the plan of the Palaeolithic village, the walkabouts of the Australian aborigines and the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 psychogeographic maps of the Situationists. If, for the settler, the space between settlements is empty, for the nomad, the errant, the walker, this space is full of traces: they inhabit space through the points, lines, stains and impressions, through the material and symbolic marks that are left in the landscape. Nomads were perhaps the first alternative urbanists, starting to organise space by tracing routes and paths. This sort of ‘urbanism’ is based on a particular logic: planning with the unknown, planning through experiencing, planning not place, but displacement. Not merely a functional means, walking became an aesthetic frame to discover the world. World literature is full of travel narratives dating back to antiquity, but one could say that walking became a truly aesthetic experience only within modernity. Portraying Paris in the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, and later Walter Benjamin, showed how the modern city provides the Architecture of walking 113

ideal physical and cultural context for the experience of displacement, discovery and wandering.2 Writing about walking as a way of experiencing the city, they identified the emergence of a new urban subject, who walks across the modern city with its numerous facades, streets and displays as if crossing an unknown landscape, not crossing forests, but walls and streets among crowds. They recognised walking as a psychological and cultural experience, a product of the quality of the urban space and the subjectivity of the city dweller. Baudelaire identified a particular figure to express the dynamic physical and cultural condition of the modern city: the flâneur. He is a new type of city user, produced by the crowded condition of the modern city.

So he goes, he roams, he seeks. What is he looking for? With a sure aim this man I have depicted, this solitary person gifted with an active imagination, who is always traversing the vast desert of humanity, has a goal more elevated than that of the pure stroller [flâneur], a more general goal, quite apart from the fugitive pleasure of the moment. He searches for something we can call modernity, for there is no better word to express the idea in question. For him it is a matter of disengaging fashion from a poetic content founded in history, and instead finding the eternal within the transitory.3

With the flâneur, walking becomes a structural practice of modernity, concerned with seizing the ‘eternal within the transitory’.

Walking as aesthetic practice The Dada artists, and after them the Surrealists, also celebrated this aesthetic quality in their organised visits to the city and its outskirts. This was the first time that art rejected the gallery to reclaim urban space. The ‘visit’ was one of the tools chosen by Dada to achieve that transition. Starting in 1924, they organised trips to the open country, discovering the dreamlike, surreal aspect of walking. They defined déambulation as a sort of automatic writing in real space, capable of revealing unconscious zones of space, the repressed areas of the city, in direct correlation with repressed areas of the psyche. The Surrealists continued this practice, organising group visits and meetings in particular urban places. They sought ‘places that had no reason to exist’ and, at the same time, they were also interested in the terrains vagues of creativity. Their narratives, and other aesthetic productions such as found objects, art installations and poetry, described the city in a new way.4 In 1950, the Lettrist International developed the Theorie de la dérive. For the Lettrists, the dérive was different from déambulation; it was not just physical and psychological, but also political and ideological: a deviation, a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 way of contesting. The Situationists pushed the dérive and its subversive dimension further: it became a method to discover and to validate an alternative city, another architecture, not built through axes and frames. It was a way to disorganise and fragment the city through the experience of ‘drifting’, which would allow the psyche to reconstruct it in different ways. Dérive was defined by Guy Debord as not only an artistic but also a scientific practice: psychogeography, ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’.5 The Situationists directly attacked modern urban planning. They championed the pedestrian over the car, criticising the car-produced city and its specific urban forms: parking, highways, suburbs. They criticised the obsession with utility and function and, implicitly, the idea that 114 Doina Petrescu

form should be determined by function: the key principle of modern architecture and urbanism. Contemporary with, and in opposition to the Athens Charter, which stated the principles of modern urbanism, they proposed a New Urbanism, which encouraged the symbolic destruction of modern urbanism and its principles, recommending instead an unmediated approach to the city, through life experience and the invention of new urban practices within the everyday:

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants.6

For engendering ‘situations’, walking was an everyday life practice that opposed the principles of modern urbanism. It was not cars, but pedestrians, walkers, wanderers, who were able to construct situations. In 1957, Constant Nieuwenhuys designed the camp of nomads of Alba as a model, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn drifted into a ‘construction of situations’, experimenting with playful creative behaviour and creative environments. ‘Constructed situation: A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.’7 Nieuwenhuys developed this idea of constructed situations almost literally and reworked the Situationist theory into the realm of architecture, proposing a nomadic city: The New Babylon, a city in which human activity and culture do not relate to use anymore but to uselesness: ‘The new forces orient themselves towards a complex of human activities that extends beyond utility: leisure, superior games. Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends’.8 Such a city also creates other types of user, whose activity is continual movement and play.

Walking as a way of being in the world Contemporary with the Situationists, philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote, in his book Practice of Everyday Life, about walking as an everyday life practice, a practice difficult to define and represent in terms of urban practice, because it is at the same time a fundamental ontological experience: ‘a way of being in the world’.9 For de Certeau, the walking body moves in the city in search of something familiar. He invokes Freud, saying that walking recalls a baby’s moves inside the maternal body: ‘To walk is to be in search of a proper place. It is a process of being indefinitely absent and looking for a proper place’.10 De Certeau writes of ‘the spatial language’ of walking,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 but criticises the way it is representated in the urban cartographies of the time, as they do not represent the act of walking, which is no simple movement, but ‘a way of being in the world’. Difficult to represent also is the banality of the everyday. Walking is one of the most banal experiences, located at ground level of our urban dwelling condition. But it is exactly in this difficulty that the power of walking as critical practice lies. It is owing to the street and the banality of everyday life that walking offers a radical way of conceptualising the city: a way of knowing to challenge the systematic, rationalising and functionalist ideas of the city imposed by the urban planners and managers. Because of its direct contact with the lived environment, walking is both a mode of being in the city and a way of knowing it. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of power, de Certeau finds in walking a form of resistance to distanced and privileged Architecture of walking 115

ways of visualising the city as a unified whole.11 Unlike Baudelaire, de Certeau refers to walking as a mass practice: the ‘“wandering of the semantic” produced by masses that make some parts of the city disappear while exaggerating others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order’.12 It is the ‘forest of gestures’ produced by the walking of the many that opposes the immobility of the city.

Walking as politics There is a history of walking as critical mass practice in political struggles, of which protest marches are a part, one of the most emblematic being the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 28 August 1963. It involved all black civil rights and union leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr, and led to the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was a landmark event for the early civil rights movement, with over 250,000 demonstrators converging on Washington, DC, to attend what became the largest public protest in the history of the United States.13 The power of marching as criticism and resistance has also been used in direct action events and artistic urban protests. Reclaim the Streets, a global movement in the 1990s, was a move to retake public space from cars and commerce for reuse in partying and strolling. It merged the direct action of Britain’s anti-road-building movement with the carnivalesque nature of the counter-cultural rave scene and served as catalyst for the global anti-capitalist movements of the late 1990s. Besides the protest element, its street parties also provided a prefigurative vision of what city streets could be in a system that prioritised people over profit, ecology over economy. The street critical mass anti-capitalist movement took different forms, using creative forms of protest and growing in scale: a global street party in seventy cities occurred in May 1998, coinciding with the G8 summit. A year later, the Carnival Against Capital on 18 June, coordinated by Reclaim the Streets and the People’s Global Action network, saw simultaneous actions in financial districts across the world, from Nigeria to Uruguay, North Korea and Australia to Belarus. In 2000, a carnivalesque mass street action shut down the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, an event that turned into the coming- out party for the anti-globalisation movement.14 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.3.1 Reclaim the Streets, Camden High Street, UK, 14 May 1995 Source: Nick Cobbing 116 Doina Petrescu

Walking as architectural and urban practice Walking is both an urban practice and an alternative mode of urban knowledge. As suggested by the Situationists, it announces the possibility of an alternative urbanism that is more dynamic, more critical and grounded in everyday life. Some contemporary architectural practices are pursuing this, such as Stalker, an architects’ collective in Rome, which was started in 1995 after the architects, as students, had occupied Rome University. One of their first projects was an exploration of Rome called ‘Through the actual territories’,15 which involved combing the uncertain territories of the city in a Situationist vein, making discoveries. As they felt they were re-enacting in a contemporary form transhumance (seasonal pasturage), they called their practice transurbance. It centred on the relation between the transitory urban subject and the city with its territories, but their practice was at the same time an everyday practice, a protest against traditional architecture. It offered a different way of reading and interpreting the city from the point of view of roaming. Not only the group was moving – other forms of movement were discovered latent in these territories: social and economic mutations, nomadic installations, temporary settlements. Along with the walk, they organised broadcasting sessions from the territories crossed, allowing their reading to be revealed and documented in real time. ‘Territory’ is also a political and geographic term, suggesting large-scale spatial politics and notions of power and control. In biology, it relates to spatial appropriation behaviour, defined geographic areas defended by an animal against others. In reaction against this, Stalker proposed another way of reading urban territories: instead of appropriating and controlling them, crossing them. The attempt to ‘control’ territories is a fundamental principle of modern urbanism and probably of Western culture in general. In their tour of Rome, Stalker discovered the emergence of the uncontrolled within the core of a highly organised city that had been based on principles of control and appropriation. Most dynamics would take place at the edge, the margin, the border, on the fringe of defined territorial entities, where rules are softer and ecosystems overlap. Like Dada and the Surrealists, they discovered and celebrated the terrains vagues of the contemporary city. There are many terms for terrain vague: abandoned field, no-man’s-land, vacant lot, wasteland, friche (urban leftover). Walking across the empty plots and the voids of the city was a way to acknowledge abandonment as a form of preserving territories, a way of conserving entropy within the city. Terrain vague is a place of life, an urban wilderness, a way of preserving what has developed in the shadow of human behaviour. There is a connection between disuse and a sense of freedom. Terrain vague tends to be inhabited by species that enjoy freedom, that resist control and domestication: weeds, wild birds and also, sometimes,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 populations wishing to resist the system; it is the emergence of the margin in the centre. Stalker’s practice shows the importance of including the evocative, paradoxical power of the terrain vague in the perception of the contemporary city. Terrain vague represents (some- times literally) the entropic, degenerate, troubled element that is opposed to the authority of architecture. The vagueness of the terrains vagues stands against the planned hygienist vacuity of modern urbanism. Stalker’s urban stroll across the terrains vagues celebrates the city’s resistance to urbanisation. Their walking reveals the city as a process and concentrates aesthetic and ethical questions raised by contemporary society, such as how we can preserve life within the city, and how we can value what is not under our control. Stalker propose precise techniques of observation and mapping: ‘A nomadic research, a mode of capturing the act of crossing without regimentation, ratification or definition of the object examined, so as not to prevent its becoming’.16 Architecture of walking 117

FIGURE 2.3.2 ‘Through the actual territories’, Rome 1996, project by architects’ collective Stalker in Rome to explore uncertain territories of the city in a Situationist vein Source: Stalker

Public works is a London-based art and architecture practice that traces an ancestry in avant-garde practices of the 1970s, by groups such as Archigram, Superstudio, Coop Himmelblau and Bernard Tschumi. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, they built mobile kiosk-like devices – urban toys, as they call them – which were programmed and used by residents in public space. Public works’s projects often take place within the radius of a neighbourhood, which means within an easily walkable distance. Their practice has been a matter of hanging out, engaging in conversations, speaking to people and encouraging them to appropriate space and articulate their ideas about the public realm. Public works suggests that the only way for architecture to meet its users is to go out and walk itself. The architects were also walking, but they were walking alongside slowly moving architectural objects. Walking with an object is more performative than walking alone, as it also changes the role of the walking subject. Meeting someone while walking with an object is different from meeting someone on the walk, as others meet the object first before they meet the subjects. The movement and its meaning are then centred less on subjectivity than on the object’s possibilities. Such experience of walking concentrates on the roaming object and the different relationships emerging from its movement.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 In 2004, at the invitation of the Serpentine Gallery, known for commissioning temporary pavilions by star architects, public works proposed instead a roaming stall within Kensington Park, creating relations between the park’s many users. The Park Products project questioned existing spaces for cultural production and distribution and suggested new ones, which arose through the practice of taking walks in the park and meeting people.17 The outcomes from those meetings – the ‘park products’ – later took on the same mobility, moving again through the park. They joke about their ‘pavilion’, which, in contrast with the usual ones, was conceived as a gathering of people and objects, rather than as an iconic piece of architecture. It was a provocation, making the static institution of Serpentine go for a walk in its own immediate environment. The project reclaimed space through strolling, playing and chatting, but it was also a way to subvert the symbolic value of the profession of architect as normally constructed 118 Doina Petrescu

FIGURE 2.3.3 The Park Products, Mobile Porch, London 2002 project by public works Source: public works

FIGURE 2.3.4 Transhumance at Ferme du Bonheur, Nanterre, 2012 Source: C. Petcou Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 around the idea of building. This is a vital message: the discovery that there are people out there, that space is never abstract and static, but that it always exists in relation to those who use it. For public works, the architecture of walking is a form of relationality. It is a more ecological and democratic way of creating space.

Walking as post-humanistic practice Walking has retained its value as a way of discovering the city. Many cultural and architectural institutions now organise walks with residents as part of their outreach programmes, as a form of pedagogy that aims at teaching architecture in the outside world, beyond the boundaries Architecture of walking 119

of the institution, allowing for informal postures within the learning process. Some civic organisations propose forms of walking derived from old traditions and cultures. In Madrid, for example, after much political and ecological struggle, the migration of livestock through the city has been reauthorised, with the temporary closure of certain streets to cars.18 The ancient transhumance paths pre-existed the city, so that this change restores a historic right. This success also registered the need to see the city from another perspective, to make visible the presence of animals, fellow species that also walk. Such practices allow us better to understand the city as an ecosystem, as a space to be shared with others – animals, plants – and to find new ways of thinking about it, planning it in a more ecological and post-humanistic manner. From this perspective, walking is one of the most resilient practices involved in the servicing of the ecosystem: a form of civic care, of preservation, not just of human otherness but of all ‘more than human’ others – meaning, not only other species, but all of non-human materiality, including bacteria, minerals, air, rivers etc. – ultimately, anything that contributes to our own settlements.19 The architecture of walking offers reflection in open-ended ways: its study opens up the possibility to review existing situations to learn from a city and its practices, rather than imposing preconceived notions of what a city should be. It offers an alternative knowledge of the city, to be shared and performed by many. It bears the promise of a grounded, sensitive and democratic production of space that was always there as a fundamental practice, but that can be rediscovered, preserved and refined by future urban and architectural practices.

Notes 1 Careri 2002. 2 Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris the capital of the nineteen century’, in Benjamin 2002. 3 Baudelaire 2010, p. 12. 4 Breton’s Mad Love is only one of the best-known examples of such creations. 5 Guy Debord (1955) Introduction to a critique of urban geography, in Les Lèvres Nues, vol. 6. 6 Ivan Chtcheglov (alias Gilles Ivain), Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau (1953), reprinted in (1958) Internationale Situationniste [Situationist International], vol. 1. Available online at: www.cddc.vt.edu/ sionline/si/definitions.html (accessed 15 June 2013). 7 Unsigned, ‘Definitions’, in (1958) Internationale Situationniste [Situationist International], vol. 1. Available at: www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html (accessed 15 June 2013). 8 Armando A. Alberts and Har Oudejans Constant (1959) First proclamation of the Dutch Section of IS, in Internationale Situationniste, vol. 3. 9 De Certeau 1984, p. 109. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 96. 12 Ibid., p. 102. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 13 Shepard and Hayduk 2002. 14 cf. Stalker manifesto. Available at: http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm (accessed 9 June 2013). 15 The ‘actual’, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is not what it is (the present) and not what it will be (the virtual), but what it is going to be, what it is in the process of becoming. See Deleuze and Guattari 2004. 16 Stalker manifesto. 17 Park Products is a project by Kathrin Böhm and Andreas Lang from public works, commissioned by Sally Tallant for the Serpentine Gallery, London 2003–4. 18 Every year in November, thousands of sheep cross Madrid during one day, on their way to the South. The event is called Fiesta de la Transhumancia (Transhumance Festival) and is sort of homage to the farming community and the migration of livestock. The migration of livestock to the South has happened for centuries – the weather is warmer in the winter, and farmers move their livestock from 120 Doina Petrescu

the cooler mountainous regions, which soon become covered with snow. The warmer weather of the South allows the livestock to feed on grass during the winter. Until the seventeenth century, there were 5 million sheep crossing the pensinsula twice a year; now, there are only 1 million. 19 These ideas are supported by currents of post-humanist humanities, with representative thinkers such as Val Plumwood from the ecological humanities, or Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and other thinkers on the technology of nature. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.4 SOUNDSCAPE AND MOVEMENT

Jian Kang

This chapter investigates the role of acoustics in shaping the experience of movement in buildings and landscapes. Two case studies, one outdoor space and one indoor space, are used to explore the ways in which sound provides a full and nuanced understanding of one’s environment. The experience of threshold, often articulated in architecture and landscape with material and spatial transitions, is also experienced in large part through changes in reverberation time and levels of ambient noise. Changes in the surrounding materials can transform the sound of one’s own footsteps, and moving through a threshold can suddenly introduce ambient sounds that transform one’s perception of a place. Drawing on extensive research in the quantitative description of soundscapes, the author presents current acoustical research in terms of our understanding of the ways that sound shapes the experience of movement.

Factors shaping our sound experience: sound, space and listener Our sound experience is affected by various characteristics of sound sources. The overall sound level is certainly a critical factor. It is also important to consider the characteristics of the sound spectrum. For example, noise annoyance could be increased with more tonal com- ponents. Moreover, with a given energy summation, noise annoyance may increase with a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 larger amplitude fluctuation or emergence of occasional events. Other factors that affect noise annoyance include regularity of events, maximum sound level, rise time, duration of occasional events, spectral distribution of energy, and number and duration of quiet periods. The movements of a sound source, or listener, can change the relative positions of source and receiver, changing all the above factors correspondingly, which, in turn, will change our sound experience. Sounds that are far away, close up or moving in juxtaposition to a listener may provide different information and thus affect the experience. It has been shown that psycho- acoustic qualities differ between stable and passing sounds. In addition to sound-source characteristics, the acoustic effects of a space are also vital for our sound experience. When sound impinges on a boundary, it may be absorbed partly or totally, or be reflected in one direction or another, and so various sound fields can be formed. 122 Jian Kang

Reverberation time, the time for a relatively loud sound to become inaudible in a space, is an important index for the acoustic environment in indoor as well as outdoor spaces, such as streets and squares. It has been demonstrated that, with a constant sound level, noise annoyance is greater with a longer reverberation. On the other hand, a suitable reverberation time, say 1–2 seconds, can make street music more enjoyable. Whereas, in a regularly shaped, fairly reflective enclosure, the sound field may be relatively even, both sound level and reverberation being consistent across the space, there are spaces offering significant changes in sound level and reverberation, so that, when the listener moves, he or she enjoys a varied sound experience. Compared with visual space, aural space is more spherical and all surrounding, with less feeling of boundaries, and it tends to emphasise the space itself, rather than the objects in the space. Sound provides dynamism, helping people to get a sense of the progression of time and the scale of space and encouraging involvement. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that correlations between sound evaluation and acoustic factors are often not high, whereas non-acoustic factors relating to listeners play a major role. According to Guski, the noise annoyance to inhabitants depends only on approximately 33 per cent of acoustic parameters such as acoustic energy, number of sound events and length of moments of calm between intermittent noises.1 It is important to consider the sound sensitivity of individuals, as well as the meaning of sounds for them. Moreira and Bryan suggested that those with high noise susceptibility might be persons who show interest in and have sympathy with others, have a great awareness of their environment and are intelligent and creative.2 The perception of noise significantly depends on attitude, including fear, cause of noise, sensitivity to noise, activity, perception of the neighbourhood and the global perception of the environment. The effects of various social and demographic factors are also of great importance. For example, the assessment of the sound quality of an urban area depends on how long people have been living there, how they define the area and how much they have been involved in local social life. Expectation is another issue in sound evaluation. In fact, noise regulations are based on an assumption that people expect a different noise environment depending on the quality of the place. Behaviour and habits are important too, including, for example, the opening and closing of windows and the use of balconies or gardens. Season and the time of day may also influence sound evaluation. It has been reported that noise annoyance is greater in summer than in winter, and greater in the evening and at twilight. The idea and experience of an environment are historically conditioned refractions of cultural life. If there were no traffic noise, the soundscape in cities might be filled with church bells, from every direction, day and night. All those factors are related to movement, in terms of time, place and community, for example. On the other hand, people’s attitude

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 could be affected by sounds. For example, it appears that loud noise reduces helping behaviour and induces a lack of sensitivity to others.3

Soundscape on the move: Sheffield Gold Route For centuries, the development of Sheffield was shaped by waterways. In the recent city- centre regeneration, starting in the 1990s, great efforts were made to ensure that the reconnection with the rivers continued to be fostered, and their role in the history of the city celebrated. Waterscapes and squares were embedded into the city for their vibrancy with respect to the history of Sheffield. Along the Gold Route, as shown in Figure 2.4.1a, a diversity of waterscapes was developed. A series of field questionnaire surveys in selected locations Soundscape and movement 123

FIGURE 2.4.1A The Gold Route in Sheffield, showing the waterscape and the city: (1) Sheaf Square, (2) Howard Street and Hallam Garden, (3) Millennium Galleries and Winter Garden, (4) Millennium Square, (5) Peace Gardens, (6) Town Hall Square and Surrey Street, (7) Barkers Pool Gold Route are shown in Figure 2.4.1b.4 Source: Jian Kang Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.4.1B Changes in waterscape sound levels with frequency and time at different locations of the Gold Route, measured at 1 m from each water feature Source: Jian Kang 124 Jian Kang

showed that water sounds are the most preferred sounds in the soundscape.5 Correspondingly, the changes of waterscape sound levels with frequency and time at different locations of the Sheaf Square provides interesting and enjoyable soundscapes. There are a number of water features, and the measurements show that they vary considerably in terms of spectrum and dynamic process. It is interesting to note that the steel barrier efficiently reduces noise from the busy road, as well as generating pleasant water sounds. It is a successful soundscape element, creating an interesting sense of movement in terms of sound source and space. The water features at Howard Street have relatively large dynamic ranges, and the spectra are also rather different from other water features along the Gold Route. Together with the visual effects, the water features greatly enhance the richness and diversity of the waterscapes and soundscapes along the Gold Route. Although the sound of water features is normally pleasant, helping to distract people’s attention from unwanted sounds such as traffic, silent water features in the Millennium Square, with their significant visual effect, can play a similar role. Because of the low sound level, people often turn their attention to such water features, even from a distance, as they move forward trying to hear the sound. Their attention is attracted, producing an effective attention masking. At Peace Gardens, there are two main sound sources, the fountain in the middle of the square and a road with traffic on one side. The transformation of soundscape is demonstrated in Figure 2.4.2a, with a soundscape map showing sound pressure level and overlapping sound fields from different sources. With the movement of a listener, the soundscape changes can be perceived in terms of sound level as well as sound meaning. To further analyse soundscape maps, a comparison of spectra is given in Figure 2.4.2b, with the measurement made close to the sound sources. It can be seen that there are considerable differences between the spectra, and, when moving across the square, a listener can experience a rich soundscape, changing gradually from a water spectrum to a traffic spectrum, for example. The perception of the soundscape is more complicated than just level and spectrum, for the first noticed sound may not be the loudest one; rather, it would be the water sound as a soundmark, based on a large- scale questionnaire survey in the square.6 Schafer (1977) defined sounds as keynotes,

Town Hall Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

/TownyHall Shops Extension (Demolished)

Sound Level dB(A) 155.0 160.0 165.0 FIGURE 2.4.2A >Shopa 170.0 Change of soundscape in the Peace Gardens 175.0 0 10 20 30 40 50m 180.0 Source: Jian Kang Soundscape and movement 125

80 75 70 65 60 55

SPL (dB) 50 45 Urban traffic 40 Fountain in the Peace Gardens 35 Peace Gardens General 30 16 31 63 125 250 500 1k 2k 4k 8k 16k Frequency (hz)

FIGURE 2.4.2B Spectrum comparison between different sounds in the soundscape of the Peace Gardens Source: Jian Kang

foreground sounds and soundmarks.7 Keynotes are in analogy to music, where a keynote identifies the fundamental tonality of a composition, around which the music modulates. Foreground sounds, also termed sound signals, are intended to attract attention. Sounds that are particularly regarded by a community and its visitors are called soundmarks, in analogy to landmarks. The soundscape at Barkers Pool is also rich, and, interestingly, the water feature has distinguishable low-frequency components, as can be seen in Figure 2.4.1b. It is interesting to examine the change in soundscape when moving away from the water feature, as shown in Figure 2.4.3, in terms of spectrum and dynamic sound-level changes with time. The richness of soundscape within a relatively short distance can be clearly seen, which gives considerable scope for soundscape design.

1 m from source

A m from source Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

9 m from source

19 m from source

FIGURE 2.4.3 Change of soundscape when moving away from the water feature in Barkers Pool Source: Jian Kang 126 Jian Kang

Indoor soundscape: long enclosures A common indoor space type that is closely related to movement is the long enclosure, where one dimension is very long, and the other two are relatively short. Such spaces include, not only underground shopping streets and subway stations, but also corridors and concourses in public spaces. In long enclosures, it has been shown that reverberation time generally increases with increasing source–receiver distance, which is fundamentally different from that based on classic formulae, which attribute a single value to the whole space. In terms of sound distribution, fundamental differences between a classic sound field and the sound field in long enclosures have also been demonstrated. That is, instead of becoming stable beyond the reverberation radius, the sound level in long enclosures decreases continuously along the length. Another influencing factor concerns the boundary conditions. For example, between sound fields resulting from geometrical and diffuse boundaries, there are considerable differences. In the case of multiple sources, it has been demonstrated that the reverberation is dependent on the number and position of the sources.8 Those basic acoustic features, in terms of changes in reverberation and sound level, can greatly enhance the sense of movement when a listener is moving through such spaces. The richness and variation in soundscape are further enhanced by the presentation of various kinds of sound source. A large-scale questionnaire survey was carried out in two typical underground shopping streets in Harbin City, China, namely Jin-Jie and Hong-Bo. Figure 2.4.4 shows the first sounds noticed by interviewees. It can be seen that there are considerable differences between the two sites. For example, in Jin-Jie, the most noticeable sound was ‘speech from PA systems’ (31.4 per cent), whereas, in Hong-Bo, the most noticeable sound was ‘speech between customers’ (46.9 per cent). The differences might have

50 45 40 Jin-Jie 35 Hong-Bo 30

% 25 20 15 10 5 0 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Jin-Jie Arguments Footsteps Loud shouting Television Escalators Speech between customers Music from shops Air-conditioning Sewing machines Speech from PA system Speech from PA Music from PA system Music from PA Sounds from plastic bags Shopkeepers’ selling-shouting Sounds from putting goods in order Bargaining (customers and shopkeepers)

Type of sound

FIGURE 2.4.4 Most noticeable sounds in the two underground shopping streets Source: Jian Kang Soundscape and movement 127

TABLE 2.4.1 Evaluation (%) of the acoustic environment and echoing in the two underground shopping streets

Scale Subjective loudness Scale Echoing Jin-Jie Hong-Bo Jin-Jie Hong-Bo –2: very quiet 0.0 0.0 –2: very strong 4.5 2.8 –1: quiet 7.6 11.1 –1: strong 13.6 13.9 0: neither quiet 33.3 30.1 0: neither strong 34.8 30.6 nor noisy nor weak 1: noisy 47.0 51.4 1: weak 31.8 38.9 2: very noisy 12.1 6.9 2: very weak 15.2 13.9

been caused by variations in sound sources and/or in the profiles of interviewees who were paying more attention to particular sounds, but it could also be caused by the effects of sound fields on the propagation of different sources. It is, therefore, important to design the sound fields in terms of sound attenuation along the length, considering the spectrum change due to boundary absorption and diffusion at different frequencies. In other words, improvements in soundscape could be made by better balancing different sound sources in terms of their levels and spectra, and this could be different on a route of movement. It also proved useful to examine the evaluation of soundscape and sound preference in underground shopping streets. Table 2.4.1 shows the evaluation of the general acoustic environment in the two underground shopping streets cited above. Both sites were rated by about 60 per cent of the interviewees as ‘noisy’ or ‘very noisy’. This means that, in such spaces, noise control is still an important issue, for which it is essential to consider the special acoustic features of long enclosures. In Table 2.4.1, the evaluation of echoing is also shown. Fewer than 20 per cent of the interviewees selected ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’, suggesting that, generally speaking, such spaces are not reverberant, and the control of reverberation may not be the top priority in designing the soundscapes.

Notes 1 R. Guski (1998) Psychological determinants of train noise annoyance, Proceedings of Euro-Noise, Munich, Germany, vol.1, pp. 573–6. 2 Naomi Moreira and M. Bryan (1972) Noise annoyance susceptibility, Journal of Sound and Vibration, vol. 21, pp. 449–62.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3 Gifford 1996; Richard A. Page (1997) Noise and helping behavior, Environment and Behavior, vol. 9, pp. 311–34. 4 Jian Kang (2012) On the diversity of urban waterscape, Proceedings of the Acoustics, Joint meeting of the French Acoustical Society and UK Institute of Acoustics, Nantes, France. 5 Wei Yang and Jian Kang (2005) Soundscape and sound preferences in urban squares, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 10, pp. 69–88. 6 Wei Yang and Jian Kang (2005) Soundscape and sound preferences in urban squares, Journal of Urban Design, vol. 10, pp. 69–88. 7 Schafer 1977, 1994. 8 Kang 2002. 2.5 FROM FOOT TO VEHICLE

Peter Blundell Jones

Walking, throughout our history, has been the way to couple the short distances traversed daily at home with longer ones to other places. It is the most basic and natural way of measuring out the ground, and it is hardly surprising that our inherited measures begin with feet and yards (paces) and then jump to miles to make a day’s walk countable: long distances can also be measured in days. Our walking feet register the changing textures of the ground, and covering it step by step informs us of the effort and distance, as well as employing our senses of smell, sight and hearing in the manner for which they evolved. Rain and wind are felt directly, and the sun and stars provide a guide of direction to complement the unfolding of the landscape. We encounter along the way the plants and animals and other people with whom we share our world. Before modern transport, walking was the principal means of getting around, and people thought nothing of covering substantial distances on foot for purposes of daily life. In Lark Rise to Candleford, for example, Flora Thompson writes of children walking 3 miles to school,1 and, in Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, one of his informants reports 4 miles, and a woman walked 20 miles to market once a week, and even 4 miles to a spring for water during periods of drought.2 That was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Walking was also a way of crossing countries and even continents. In As I Set Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee describes breaking out of the narrow routine of rural life in Slad at the age of 19, in 1934: Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 I was going to London, which lay a hundred miles to the east; and it seemed obvious that I should go on foot. But first, as I’d never seen the sea, I thought I’d walk to the coast and find it. This would add another hundred miles to my journey, going by way of Southampton. But I had all the summer and all the time to spend.3

Lee could have taken a bus and then a train, but that would have been expensive, and, at that time of few cars and no motorways, it was still possible to trudge from village to village, finding nourishment and conversation along the way. The land, still farmed by hand, was full of workers who walked about, and so there were tracks or footpaths everywhere. In contrast, walking across the country today is beset with obstacles, the landscape dominated From foot to vehicle 129

by roads crammed with speeding traffic and no sidepath to retreat to, and pedestrians are banned altogether from motorways and railway lines, with few points at which to cross. Repeating Lee’s walk would need careful planning to avoid such obstructions and to enjoy the few rural bridleways that still exist, open for leisure, without constituting a reliable network. In 1974, the film director Werner Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Paris, because his heroine, the film critic and expert on Expressionist film, Lotte Eisner, lay dangerously ill. He undertook this journey as an act of personal pilgrimage that he believed would save her life. He kept a diary, later published as Vom Gehen im Eis, describing his experiences along the way, interrupted by strange encounters, and ironically remarking, ‘Only if it was a film would I take it all as true’.4 The author of Aguirre the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and several documentaries about determined and eccentric people has always been interested in the wild and in human beings struggling against nature, but his walk across modern Europe revealed not just a battle against the winter elements. It was a section taken through a discordant and ruptured landscape, a secret landscape no longer intended to be seen by anyone. This has some parallels with the work of the architect–filmmaker Patrick Keiller (see pp. 244–50), whose Robinson in Space, a modern homage to Daniel Defoe, traverses the British landscape to assemble an unlikely juxtaposition of places and functions that remind us how much of an illusion is the cosy image of old-world Britain that we think we know.5

Orientation and memory Herzog started by picking his way across the land guided by a compass, though he was soon compelled to take detours. We all have to know where we are going, as it is dangerous to get lost, especially if lacking food and water. The modern world’s ubiquitous paths and signposts are recent, as is even the subdivision of the landscape into fields and woods. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter-gatherers, without roads, fields or footpaths, apart from tracks trodden clear by frequent human or animal use. The Australian Aborigines provide an example of such an existence. They survived, before European intervention, in a relatively barren landscape at very low densities, and yet maintained contacts over vast distances through marriage customs that compelled distant alliances and mutual respect. They were able to navigate right across their continent by relying on a socially constructed interpretation of the landscape that was mapped in symbol and performance. It was learned at initiation by the ‘walkabout’, a season-long tour on foot, visiting distant groups.6 The Aborigines’ reading of the landscape identified hills or waterholes as having been formed by ‘Dreamtime’ heroes, giant animals from whom they thought themselves descended, and whom they revered in holy cults. Their

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 mythology, passed down in song, dance and drama, efficiently tied knowledge of plants and animals to their reading of the landscape and landmarks. It was, therefore, both a practical knowledge, concerning hunting, rivals and predators, and a way to map a kind of terrain that would appear to us wild and chaotic. Their uncanny ability to read tracks, to sense direction and to recognise the personal footprints of every tribe member provoked in some European observers the claim that they had ‘a sixth sense’, but it is surely enough to recognise a highly developed, but now unfamiliar, skill. Over the hundreds of thousands of years that modern humans have existed, they have mostly been hunters and gatherers, evolving presumably with this kind of skill to understand and interact with the landscape.7 Knowing where we are is a skill we take so much for granted that it is only when it is lost through brain disorders, or when we travel to very unfamiliar places, or when we try to 130 Peter Blundell Jones

design robots to do it, that we see it as a problem. Yet many of us can fly off to a foreign city, walk the streets for an hour or two and find our way back to our hotel, even without a map. It is more difficult when the cityscape is repetitive, but we are able to pick out representative landmarks and to remember them as a hierarchy and in sequence. London cab drivers are trained to recall an extraordinarily large number of streets, and the brain area involved in such memories expands in consequence.8 A telling feature of spatial memory is that it is used by memory-feat competitors, who set in their minds an image of a remembered building or landscape, and then imagine placing the items to be remembered in its rooms or along its paths, so classifying them in a retrievable way.9 In a similar manner, Marcel Proust, when retrieving his childhood in his famous novel about memory, A la recherche du temps perdu, structured it around a pair of family walks. The title of the first section, Du côté de chez Swann, is usually translated Swann’s Way, but this hardly reveals that it was a walk, and furthermore one of two alternatives:

There were, in the environs of Combray, two ‘ways’ which we used to take for our walks, and they were so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also ‘Swann’s way’ because to get there one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann’s estate, and the ‘Guermantes way’ . . . Since my father used always to speak of the ‘Méséglise way’ as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the ‘Guermantes way’ as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way as two distinct entities, with that cohesion, that unity which belong only to the figments of the mind; the smallest detail of either of them seemed to me a precious thing exemplifying the special excellence of the whole, while beside them, before one had reached the sacred soil of one or the other, the purely material paths amid which they were set down as the ideal view over a plain and the ideal river landscape, were no more worth the trouble of looking at than, to a keen playgoer and lover of dramatic art, are the little streets that run past the walls of a theatre. But above all I set between them, far more than the mere distance in miles that separated one from the other, the distance that there was between the two parts of my brain in which I used to think of them, one of those distances of the mind that not only keep things apart, but cut them off from one another and put them on different planes.10

Proust’s walks were contemplative walks, regularly taken, sometimes with other family members, sometimes alone, but returning generally within a few hours to their starting point.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Accounts of such walks taken for recreation go back at least to classical times, and the idea that walking helps thought as a complement to philosophy was well established among the ancient Greeks, reflected in the very names of the Peripatetics and the Stoics, and even connected with the origins of theory in theoria, ‘a form of travel that was a cross between tourism and pilgrimage’.11 Heine claimed that Kant’s walks were so regular that people could set their watches by him, and Nietzsche castigated Flaubert for sitting at his desk, claiming that, ‘only peripatetic thoughts have any value’.12 Whether it is the exercise or rhythm of the walking that stimulates the brain, or whether the walk helps by charting a narrative parallel to the progress of thought, walking does seem to have had a widespread reputation as an accompaniment to thinking, good conversation and solving problems. From foot to vehicle 131

Travel in vehicles If philosophers ever solved problems on horseback, they have been remarkably silent about it, and the remark of Chinese politician Lu Jia that one can conquer a country on horseback but not rule it from a horse just confirms the contradiction between the active and the contemplative life.13 Concentrated thinking on horseback seems unlikely, as the landscape passes so much faster than on foot, and so much more attention has to be paid to keeping one’s balance and controlling the animal, let alone finding the way and looking for obstacles. Conversation also is more difficult. Being on or in a vehicle progressively removes sense impressions of walking at one’s own speed, cutting off the feedback of the haptic sense of movement and then isolating smell and sound and proximity, but it can at least open a changing view and allow a passenger ease and relaxation. So, vehicles do not necessarily negate the experience of travel: they may even accentuate the sense of progress and the presence of landmarks. Litters and sedan chairs have existed for millennia, and upper-class Chinese houses had special courts and halls for visitors to descend from them.14 Haussmann’s Paris boulevards, smashing through the medieval city fabric, improved policing and communications as intended, but they also made space for the horse-drawn carriage, and for a city thereafter best perceived from the carriage window at the carriage’s pace, a city that simultaneously became larger and more boring to traverse on foot.15 In Britain, the nineteenth-century country house, into which so much imperial wealth was sunk, had lodges to mark the edge of its territory, and the drive to the house was not kept short for ease of pedestrians, but lengthened to increase the impression of the estate seen from a horse-drawn carriage and to allow the unfolding of carefully contrived views. Despite the importance given to his walks, even Proust was not averse to a ride. Having noted the presence of church steeples in the course of his regular walks around Combray, he sees them in an entirely new way when caught out late and given an unexpected lift by the local doctor, in his pony and trap:

At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure which was unlike any other, on catching sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, bathed in the setting sun and constantly changing their position with the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road, and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared nonetheless to be standing by their side. In noticing and registering the shape of their spires, their shifting lines, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the core of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 and to conceal. The steeples appeared so distant, and we seemed to be getting so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure I had felt on seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to discover that reason seemed to me irksome; I wanted to store away in my mind those shifting, sunlit planes, and for the time being to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have gone to join the medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds I had noticed and set apart because of the obscure pleasure they had given me which I had never fully explored.16

The text runs on, and Proust reflects further on the impression, adding a glimpse of the steeples, black against the sky, as he and the doctor begin their return journey. Then, he describes 132 Peter Blundell Jones

how he felt impelled to write of his experience and includes the resulting text on the next page. Sitting up on the driving seat of the trap, beside the doctor, he had a full and constant view forward, without having to keep an eye on the ground and without the interruptions of the bobbing of his head: furthermore, he was higher up for a better view, and the vehicle brought them forward at surprising and unaccustomed speed. That a full ‘Proustian moment’ could arise out of a view from a vehicle reveals the experience as by no means devalued in relation to walking, despite lack of contact with the ground and lack of control of movement. In fact, being conveyed rather than conveying oneself can free the self for a different kind of contemplation. Railway trains linked cities and changed the scale of continents, and also the understanding of time. They allowed hitherto unseen views of the countryside, but they had to stay on their rails, dividing the landscape with a new kind of visual corridor. Even so, the experience could be pleasantly contemplative, even allowing enjoyment of the very detachment it brought. Philip Larkin wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘Whitsun weddings’, about a view from a railway carriage,17 and journeys by rail have often carried a degree of romantic excitement. It is not for nothing that the architect Hugo Häring, writing in the 1920s on the functions of windows, referred to a specialised viewing window for a house as a Pullmanwagenfenster.18 Even though trains have become faster, better insulated and air conditioned, restricting experience to the visual alone, and even though high-speed lines are routed less for view than for straightness and speed, the changing panorama remains impressive. In contrast, underground trains in cities, blind as moles, have reinvented the city as a series of locations that grow out from the places of emergence, so that it becomes a pleasant surprise to discover on foot the point of transition between one station’s territory and the next, reassembling in one’s mind the space of the city. Like ascent in a lift, though, the real distance travelled by tube is difficult to gauge. The advent of the motor car brought a wonderful freedom to choose one’s own path through the city and enjoy it at speed in one’s own time, until too many others started to do the same. It also allowed free touring in the open country, enjoying villages and views, stopping and moving on at will. The term Gran Turismo, shortened to GT, was applied to elegant and powerful cars with which to fulfil this fantasy of mobility and exploration, in desperation recently extended by taking to 4 4s across moor and field.19 For normal roads have become clogged, ordinary driving a bore. Driving is even a risk, for a car requires constant attention to the road ahead and coordination of the controls, and it is dangerous to attempt a phone call, let alone to indulge in contemplation or a reverie.20 The view of the landscape has also deteriorated, for traffic jams prompted the invention of bypasses and ring roads, breaking

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 up the ancient route from town to town. Instead, towns were altogether avoided, to let motorways link cities at headlong speed. They were a wonder for a few decades, but gradually the whole landscape has become knotted up with them, and the old road networks have been broken up and abolished. The direction one takes, heading west to go east or north to go south, is no longer related to the points of the compass, the sun or what we can see and recognise. Just in time, satellite navigation has arrived, so that we need no longer worry about how to get there or what kind of country we pass through on the way, but will it worry us not to know, in the old way, where we are? Within the city, traffic planning caused the divorce of commerce from communication, breaking the relationship that had been the very essence of the city, although, in large cities, pedestrianisation has revalidated progress on foot, while exacerbating problems of parking From foot to vehicle 133

and servicing. The walked city is often now a special enclave of historic fabric, commerce and entertainment, but it has also been artificially reinvented in the form of the shopping mall, a substitute that lacks its uncommercial elements. Pedestrianisation preserves the walker’s rights, but it poses an urgent problem of how and where to rejoin the car, for roads and walkers do not mix, and, where cars arrive, they must be parked, which usually means a desert of tarmac and a lack of clear pedestrian routes, because people have to park in so many different places. Seldom have city parking silos been anything other than bleak storage racks, often portrayed as places of crime, and leaving the architect the problem of making a façade where there is nothing to reveal. As in the train, exciting views can be perceived from aircraft, but people are increasingly less interested in looking out of the windows than at the movie screen now universally provided to ‘entertain’ them. It must be admitted too, that, although the large-scale topography can be breathtaking, making out what is happening on the ground from 35,000 feet while travelling at 500 miles an hour gives only the slimmest degree of contact. Transition into and out of vehicles has never been so protracted as with air travel. Railway stations were the nineteenth- century gates to big cities, but airports lie far outside, becoming the most universal, international kinds of place, and generating some of the largest buildings on earth. They are driven largely by the exigencies of getting you to the distant aircraft, while processing you through security checks and segregating you from unprocessed others, and there has been no easy option but to cover substantial distances on foot. Yet this is not usually a pleasant or an enlightening experience. It seems to lack Proustian moments, and its atmosphere is too urgent for contemplation. Jacques Tati, in his satirical film Playtime, chose it 40 years ago to represent the worst and most confusing aspects of modern life, and Marc Augé has singled it out as a key example of a ‘non-place’,21 and yet airports have become substitutes for the capitals they serve and are rapidly turning into cities in their own right. Let us hope they can yet develop some more convincing delights.

Notes 1 Thompson 1954, p. 184. 2 All these distances include both directions, there and back. Blythe 1972, pp. 36, 50. 3 Lee 1971, p. 12. 4 Herzog 2009 (original German edition 1978) 5 There is also a book: Keiller 1999. 6 Spencer and Gillen 1899. Chatwin 1986. 7 Opinions vary, as evidence is thin, but the consensus is that we had language at least 100,000 years ago, before we dispersed across the globe, that the brain had reached more or less its current size by Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 500,000 years ago, and that we used fire for processing food from about 800,000 years ago. On genes, languages and migrations, see Cavalli-Sforza 2001. 8 See: www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=london-taxi-memory (accessed 3 February 2013). 9 Draaisma 2004, Ch. 7. 10 Proust 1983, pp. 146–7. 11 O’Sullivan 2011, p. 98. 12 Ibid., p. 4. 13 Minister in the Han Dynasty, around 200 BCE; see: www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Han/ personslujia.html (accessed 14 August 2014). 14 For description of an arrival by sedan, see Xueqin 1973, pp. 87, 88. 15 Girouard 1985. 16 Proust, pp. 196–7. 17 Larkin 1964. 134 Peter Blundell Jones

18 Blundell Jones 1999, p. 79. 19 An early 2013 edition of the notorious BBC television programme Top Gear took the new Range Rover, price £72,000, to the Nedava Desert to test it against a military vehicle, the presenters admitting that the 5.5-litre engine was ‘a bit thirsty’, and they drove through a swamp apparently without first checking the depth. Meanwhile, in the Peak National Park in the UK, local residents are trying to stop off-roaders because of the disturbance they cause and the damage that their fun causes to the landscape. 20 In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt provides a whole chapter on driving psychology: ‘How our eyes and minds betray us on the road’, Vanderbilt 2008, pp. 74–101. 21 Augé 1995. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.6 MOVING ROUND THE RING ROAD

Stephen Walker

Filmstrips Photographs of the Sheffield ring road taken by the author in 2011

Downwards we hurried fast, And entered with the road which we had missed Into a narrow chasm. The brook and road Were fellow travellers in this gloomy pass, And with them did we journey several hours At a slow step. (Wordsworth 1805, p. 240)

Two hundred years after Wordsworth, we can continue to hurry fast at slow step, and to enter the road that we had missed, as we try to approach, circumnavigate, bypass or leave

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the city. I want to explore the extent of this continuity, broadening the ways in which the ring road might figure both as a site of actual experience and as one within thought. Although it is usually understood as the product of rationalised planning, the ring road can also be regarded as an instance and a site where rationality is exceeded. I approach it both as a site of sublime experience and as a figure for that experience, drawing on its ambivalent location between city and country, between artefact and nature. Its ability to be traversed in several directions simultaneously can cause theoretical as well as physical discomfort. In common with the sublime nature of Wordsworth’s time, it can elude our perceptual and imaginative grasp, while providing exhilarating transport. This sublime ‘failure’ can be observed anecdotally in real(?) experience on the road, but also in the movement of various attempts by disparate disciplines to pin it down with theory. 136 Stephen Walker

Modes of transport (‘1. Take or carry goods or people; 2. Overwhelm with strong emotion; 3. Cause someone to feel that they are in another place or time’, OED) From its earliest record in fragments such as On the Sublime, a Greek treatise probably written in the first century AD,1 interest in the sublime has long been associated with its ability to transport us, rather than to persuade us rationally. Indeed, the modality of transport has proved to be a particularly enigmatic aspect of sublime experience. Peter de Bolla argues that, not only are the sources of movement many and various, but the transportation that these set in train involves discontinuous movement between states of mind and proves difficult to anticipate or contain: ‘The rhetorical force of “transport”’, he writes, ‘is not confined to the arts of oratory and persuasion; “transport” as a trope not only stands for the heightened sensation of the sublime, it also produces sublimity’.2 The consequences of this irrational and productive transportation have frequently been too frightening to accept, and discussion has been forcibly returned to ‘proper’ objects.3 The possible similarities between the transport available through the sublime and that experienced on the ring road can be approached through a consideration of their spatial and cultural dimensions. Both enjoy a certain slipperiness of spatial location and complexity of cultural claims; sublime transport in both cases can involve a tendency towards excessive production; and both have been subject to attempts by authority to cover over this excess. de Bolla suggests that much eighteenth-century aesthetics can be considered an attempt to bound or limit the power of this sublime trope. Theories of the sublime had to deal with ‘the problem of locating an authority or authenticating discourse . . . Such a discourse’, he states, ‘would need to control the transport resulting from the sublime experience, and to determine the limits of the transportation, from where and to where, with whom and by whom’.4 In his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant asserts that this experience

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 could be delimited – or unified, to use his own terms – when each person, through the exercise of will, puts their own disposition to one side to ‘take a standpoint outside of himself in thought, in order to judge the propriety of his behaviour in the eyes of the onlooker’.5 This movement outside oneself to provide a viewpoint for judgement is a particularly important mode of transport. The tacit assumption is that propriety needs to be measured against previously established rules; the correct viewpoint for judgement is attained by assuming the viewpoint of the ‘creator’. Henri Lefebvre is critical of the ‘lucidity’ predicated on these assumptions, a situation he explicitly links to the planners and urbanists who ‘create’ the ring road:

The fact of viewing from afar, of contemplating what has been torn apart, of arranging ‘viewpoints’ and ‘perspectives’, can (in the most favourable cases) change the effects of Moving round the ring road 137

a strategy into aesthetic objects . . . All of this corresponds only too well to that urbanism of maquettes and overall plans which is the perfect complement to the planning of sewers and public works: the creator’s gaze lights at will and to his heart’s content on ‘volumes’; but this is a fake lucidity.6

Although the arguments used to push through the construction of ring roads are usually made on highly rationalised grounds and according to the logic of a systematising thought, I would suggest that they also provide an instance where the experience of our designed environment opens up to a different reading. Just as eighteenth-century writers on the sublime failed to agree on whether the experience was universal, culturally particular or individual, so contemporary interest in the ring road produces a spread of irreconcilable approaches. Generally, ring roads are without clear definition (unlike motorways, whose requirements are clear in legal terms) and they are awkward to classify. The exemplars would be the orbital motorways, beltways, périphériques or via cintura that can be found around some of the world’s great cities, though many smaller towns are similarly ringed. Although the ring road is not a motorway (designed for high capacity and high speed), it does not provide for frontage access, pedestrians or stopping. This awkwardness about the ring road’s definition is shared by a variety of interested parties, from those involved in their planning through to those minded to analyse how they are used after construction, and again revolves around the issue of judgement. In a discussion of how the engineer establishes criteria for judgement, for example, Gavin Macpherson observes how difficult a task it proves to be: ‘One of the problems faced by the highway engineer is that his creation will normally be required to perform a number of different, sometimes conflicting, functions’.7 A related difficulty of definition is raised by the UK Department of Transport’s criteria for highway link geometry, according to which the ring road would be classified as ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

On the ring road As I’ve tried to suggest, experience of and theories regarding the sublime failed to coincide as comfortably as their theorists might have liked: the right road sought by Burke et al. proved harder to journey along than they would care to admit. It is around this uneasy coincidence that the analogy between sublime objects and the ring road can be pursued. Physically and psychologically, the location of the ring road has frequently been taken as a limit: limit of the city, limit of nature. However, this boundary need be neither complete nor physically peripheral. Though the ring road might be considered a site mediating between city and nature, it can be various things to various people. It allows them (us) to approach, 138 Stephen Walker

circumnavigate, queue, cruise, bypass, reclaim or leave the city. Just as it provides an easy figure for this boundary, it is hard to locate, in a full sense of the term. Despite the various guides offered to aesthetic reflection, the sublime moment always signalled an occasion when reason and understanding were exceeded. Owing to this limitlessness – which might apply to the sheer magnitude of the sublime object, or the ambiguous location of the ring road, being neither whole nor fragment, neither in nor out of the city – it is not possible to identify an object per se that provokes the sublime experience. Nevertheless, in order for our understanding to grasp or determine the experience, it needs to bound or limit that experience in some way. It needs to be objectified, turned into or provided with a sublime object: reason demands it. Limitlessness has been dealt with in various ways, by various theorists. Most feared it. Few asked much of it on its own terms, or sought to explore what might lie beyond. Some dealt with it by developing strategies to bound it: For Kant, there was no sublime object as such, yet, paradoxically, the sublime experience depended upon the provision of some objectivity to move it beyond the ‘mere’ fright provoked by limitlessness. His solution to this theoretical problem was to offer up a ‘super-added thought of its totality’8 – an objectivity on loan to subjective experience – which could allow judgement to step outside and thus complete the experience. On the ring road, one might again observe that there is a requirement for a super-added thought of its totality to make sense of the journey; what is the ring road but a succession of nodes of decision making (turn off, don’t turn off) interspersed with periods of removed transportation, periods of distraction, where the surroundings rarely give anything to the journey by way of features (or indeed distraction) that can sufficiently bound experience to permit judgement? To counter this experience of limitlessness, the ring road frequently offers information from beyond its present, information perhaps to provide orientation, that makes us think we

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 have crossed a boundary, that we have arrived somewhere (Welcome to A . . ., You are now entering B . . ., Twinned with C . . .). These couple with mediations of the thought of totality, thanks to the endless signage that accompanies such a journey; how can we make a judgement based on the experience of simply being there, when what we need are the signs of an objective reality outside or beyond this formless space? In addition to the limitlessness precipitated by the sheer scale and ambiguity of location, the engineering of the ring road’s link geometry undermines another aspect of everyday aesthetic experience, resulting in a need to respond counter-intuitively to demands that we get in the left-hand lane to turn right, head north to go south, and so on. Ring roads are almost by requirement the imposition of a different order of space on the landscape, famously insensitive to ‘place’. Moving round the ring road 139

Off the ring road The sublime operates in conjunction with fear and pain; the spaces of the sublime demand enigma, an advanced decontextualisation to instill the fear that underwrites any sublime experience. It is to the particularities of sublime fear that we must now move. Fear was, for many writers, a central ingredient of sublime experience. The particular nature of this fear was carefully delineated by those seeking to distinguish between the sublime and the beautiful. Sublime fear had to be pleasurable. The ring road offers multiple, simultaneous and possibly conflicting fears. There are fears associated with speed, disorientation, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, GPS navigation, of missing one’s turning, of not seeing it or seeing it too late. Also, perhaps, there is fear of driving, fear of being driven, fear of delay, fear of crashing, fear of others, road rage, fear of engineering. Some fears are associated with the use of the road, whereas others are produced by simply being there – I’m on the ring road and I don’t like it, it makes me scared. Whitlock’s 1971 analysis of fear on the road reports a quasi-sublime fascination in attitudes surrounding road deaths, arguing: ‘Doherty is possibly correct in suggesting that horror fascinates rather than acts as a deterrent to rising road-accident rates.’9 Whether a straightforward fear for one’s own life, on the ring road or in any other situation, would be sufficient as a sublime experience is a moot point. Burke, for example, steered the sublime experience through a middle ground between painless, ‘benevolent’ pleasure (which he linked to feelings of the beautiful) and the simply painful. The sublime pleasure available on this middle ground, he argued, involved feelings of self-preservation, but came with the proviso that these do not ‘press too nearly’.10 Kant, too, qualifies the involvement of fear in his account of the sublime, permitting it ‘only in . . . so far as it does not convey any charm or emotion arising from actual danger’.11 A couple of sections later, Kant is more specific regarding the perception of such danger, arguing that, ‘without the development of moral ideas, that which, thanks to preparatory culture, we call sublime, merely strikes the untutored

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 man as terrifying’.12 Just as the feeling of the sublime was only available to the initiated, so the experience of the ring road is only available to those literate in the ways of road travel; the Highway Code(X) is the letter of this law. Learn the rules of the road and you’ll be OK; you can take your place in that microcosm of society, the community of drivers. Ordinary, physical orientation is no use at these speeds, and familiarity with place provides no guarantee of successful judgement, for such physical referents as personal or communal landmarks do not necessarily relate to the route and may give it an unfamiliar aspect, if they give it anything at all. Speed also mitigates against recognition or comprehension. A different modality of perception is required, for locals as well as strangers. If we are not initiates, we might just get scared. Yet, what happens if we don’t read the book, don’t subscribe to that superadded thought of totality? Are we just left with a scary experience? Such awkwardness might actually point 140 Stephen Walker

to another aspect of sublime experience, available on the ring road and beyond, which reveals another way of using the architecture of our surroundings. It might forcibly reveal the fragmented way in which architecture is consumed; after all, fragments are all we ever get, despite the best intentions of most architects and planners, whose attempts to ‘naturalise’ architecture by unifying it imply a notionally omnipresent view. This fragmented, excessive moment of travel allows us to return, over- or underdetermining the possibilities presented by the road that the planners conceived on uber-utilitarian grounds, to viewing space from afar, conceiving grand schemes for traffic circulation, zoning, high or low occupation density, the green-belt and out-of-town, brownfield and inner-city. Here, the ring road can stand as an exemplar of free movement, not axiality, not Haussmann, not from A to B, not concentricity or annularity, but as a site for and of an inadequate representation that the work of the mind cannot complete. On the road, traffic can exist between memory and fantasy, between use according to the rules (the Highway CodeX) and use not against, but merely without, the rules; this could be a sublime event that the city’s ring road offers. As Virilio observes, ‘to go nowhere . . . now seems natural for the voyeur–voyager in his car’.13 Thanks to its sublime possibilities, the ring road can offer two new experiences: it can be a notional site from which the difference between city and nature continues to be figured, and from which an experience of the sublime might be gained, at least to the extent that this would involve an emotional pleasure brought about by a juxtaposition of forces that can accept oxymoronic components and resist the desire for total comprehension. More importantly, it suggests a broader modality for architectural experience than architects have traditionally been prepared to acknowledge, one that occurs over time, in pieces, involving a mobile relationship between the observer and the observed. All of these experiences, of course, supplement our more straightforward uses of the road. From the depths of an engineering textbook, the following advice on curve geometry seems to offer an appropriate conclusion: ‘A good balance between the demands of horizontal curvature gradient is necessary to achieve economy and Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 aesthetic satisfaction’.14

Notes 1 See Dionysius Longinus, On the Sublime (William Smith, trans.) (1996), in Ashfield and de Bolla 1996. This is reprinted in an abridged version from Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime: Translated from the Greek, with notes and observations, and some account of the life, writings, and character of the author, by William Smith (the second edition, corrected and improved), London, 1743. It is agreed that On the Sublime was written in the first century AD, although Longinus is now believed to have been a Neoplatonic philosopher and rhetorician active during the third century AD. Although the real author is now frequently referred to as Pseudo-Longinus, the majority of texts on the sublime from the eighteenth century onwards attributed On the Sublime to Longinus, a confusion I perpetuate here. Moving round the ring road 141

2 de Bolla 1989, p. 37; italics in original. 3 For example, Kant floats the possibility of an experience where the imagination fails to account for an idea and falls back from this attempt, but nevertheless, ‘in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight’, which he connects with ‘a representation . . . that lets us see its own inadequacy, and consequently its subjective want of finality for our judgement’, but he declines to discuss this situation (‘At present, I am not disposed to deal with the ground of this delight’); Kant 1952 (original 1764), section 26, p. 100. 4 Ibid., p. 37. 5 Kant 1960 (original 1764), p. 75. 6 Lefebvre 1991 (original 1974), p. 318. 7 Macpherson 1993, p. 145. 8 Kant, op. cit., section 23. 9 Whitlock 1971, p. 7. He is citing Terence T. Doherty (1965) Facts versus emotion in traffic safety, Medicine, Science and the Law, p. 5. 10 Burke 1958 (original 1757), Part 1, section XVIII. The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately effect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime. (Ibid.) There is similar stuff on pain and terror in Part 4: see, in particular, section VII, ‘exercise necessary for the finer organs’, where Burke states that, ‘delightful horror . . . which as it belongs to self- preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment’. 11 Kant, op. cit., section 23. 12 Ibid., section 29. 13 Virilio 1991, p. 67. 14 Baston 1968, p. 71. A little later, the authors seem to steer away from the sublime to more beautiful aspirations, suggesting that, ‘curvature and gradient add considerably to the aesthetic value of a road, and when not used to excessively large values make a positive contribution to safety’ (p. 71). Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 2.7 THE GEOMETRY OF MOVING BODIES

Alan Lewis

The idea that towns and cities should be rebuilt along scientific lines, although widely held by British architects and planners during the mid twentieth century,1 was by no means universally supported. The following account explores the nature of a disagreement between Sheffield City Council’s technical officers in the 1940s. At its heart was a dispute about whether the positive sciences should underpin reconstruction efforts, or whether other ideas based on the subjective experience of space had validity. This dispute tells us much about the diverse ways in which movement is conceptualised in architecture and planning. Specifically, in the examples below, we will see how, in urban planning, movement through the city can be considered in terms of the pedestrian’s experience, but it can also be considered in terms of mathematics, particularly in terms of Newtonian mechanics and statistics.

The limitations of science Better to understand the nature of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners, we might consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the positive sciences. In his final (unfinished) book, The Crisis of European Sciences, which was written between 1934 and 1937 and published posthumously,2 Husserl attempted to show that the scientific attitude is a product of history, 3 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 by charting the emergence of ideals of objectivity and rationalism in European philosophy. He admired the achievements of science, but was concerned that the world as described by the sciences does not reflect our actual experience. Galileo was identified by Husserl as the originator of the modern scientific approach to nature, and he wrote of ‘Galileo’s mathematization of nature’.4 Galileo’s innovation was to conceive of the world as ‘a mathematical manifold’,5 as if nature’s secrets were written in a mathematical code that could be deciphered through scientific investigation. Husserl observed that the ‘mathematization of nature’ had continued into modern times, so that ‘numerical magnitudes and general formulae’ became the centre of interest in all ‘natural scientific inquiry’.6 For Husserl, Galileo was ‘at once a discovering and a concealing genius’.7 On the one hand, Galileo discovered ‘mathematical nature’ and ‘the methodical idea’.8 On the other, this ‘mathematical nature’ can ‘be interpreted The geometry of moving bodies 143

only in terms of the formulae’.9 Nature, as described through mathematical formulae, does not reflect our actual experience of the world. Husserl distinguished between ‘morphological essences’, for which there can be exemplars (such as ‘cat’ or ‘government’) but which are not defined in mathematical terms, and ‘exact essences’, which are ideals that can be only approximated in reality and which are mathematical (such as straight lines and perfect circles).10 As exact essences are ideals, they are not given to perception but are conceived in the mind. For worldly phenomena to be made the subject of scientific enquiry, they must be described in ‘exact’ terms, that is, in terms of precise measurements or statistics. This necessarily requires some degree of translation from the morphological to the exact, in a process that Husserl called ‘idealisation’,11 and means that all aspects of the world that cannot be quantified are beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. Consequently, the world as described by modern science is unlike the world as experienced, in that it consists of idealised forms of reality, devoid of all morphological essences. However, as Husserl noted, all too often the descriptions of the world put forward by the sciences are purported to be ‘the true world’.12 The limitations of the scientific approach are unacknow - ledged, and the gap between the world as described by science and the world as experienced is forgotten. Husserl referred to this as: ‘the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday life-world’.13 Husserl wanted to counter this error by providing an account of the sciences that placed them in the broader context of everyday lived experience, in which the scientific viewpoint is incorporated as just one possibility among many. As will be demonstrated below, Husserl’s critique of the sciences helps us to understand the possible source of the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers that started in 1942. Some of those involved in the dispute seemingly prioritised mathematical descriptions of the world over subjective experience.

Urban planning in Sheffield prior to 1942 The two planning schemes at the centre of the dispute between Sheffield’s planners had a complicated genesis.14 Sheffield started as a small market town, before industrial development caused it to expand rapidly from the eighteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the city centre consisted largely of densely populated housing intermingled with polluting workshops. Concerns that overcrowded and insanitary conditions would have an adverse effect on people’s health prompted a number of initiatives, including the appointment, in 1936, of 15

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Sheffield’s first planning officer, Clifford Craven. Among his first tasks was to draw up a planning scheme for the city centre to address the perceived need to separate housing from industry, and to ease traffic congestion, which was becoming a problem as car ownership increased.16 A draft version of this planning scheme was complete by September 1939,17 but the outbreak of the Second World War in the same month temporarily brought planning activities in the city to a halt.18 Craven was sent into the armed forces, and his staff were reassigned to Air Raid Precaution work, leaving only the chief assistant to handle any urgent work.19 Town planning only became a priority again following a severe enemy air raid on the city in December 1940, which caused extensive damage to Sheffield’s centre.20 Within weeks, the city council was inundated with applications for permission to rebuild,21 and it was decided that Craven was needed back in his post as planning officer on a full-time basis.22 144 Alan Lewis

The Diagonal Road Scheme Although damage to Sheffield was not as severe as in parts of London, questions were raised within the city council as to whether the bombing had invalidated Craven’s planning scheme. The council looked to national government for guidance, and, in April 1941, the city was visited by the Ministry of Health’s chief town planning inspector, George Pepler. He asked the city council to consider whether the bombing had created the opportunity to create a better town, and reiterated the sentiments of Lord Reith, minister of works and buildings, to ‘plan boldly but not recklessly’.23 It soon became apparent that Craven was reluctant to make major changes to his planning scheme.24 The amended plan, submitted to the council in late 1941, featured only minor revisions, intended to take advantage of the bomb damage.25 It became difficult for Craven to maintain this position when, in March 1942, efforts to revise the scheme were formalised with the creation of a Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, as an offshoot of the city council’s town planning committee.26 Further pressure came later that year when, in the absence of any visionary new proposals from Craven, the city architect, William Davies, submitted his own proposal to the city council.27 Davies’s proposal, known as the Diagonal Road Scheme, envisaged a new boulevard cutting diagonally across the existing street grid, from the city’s main railway station to the Moorhead shopping district (Figure 2.7.1). A new, 350-foot diameter ‘circus’ was to mark the termination of the new road at the Moorhead. Another new road led from the Moorhead circus to the existing City Hall, aligned with the centre of City Hall’s classical façade. The scheme proposed new buildings, including law courts, a technical college and municipal offices. Essentially Beaux Arts in style, the Diagonal Road Scheme featured formal devices such as axial ordering, regularly shaped spaces and use of symmetry. The aim was to create a sequence of spaces to form ‘a dignified and direct approach, of easy gradient’, from the bus and railway stations to the city centre, thereby enhancing the pedestrian’s experience of moving through the city.28 The formal devices employed were intended to be appreciable by a person ‘on the ground’; Davies emphasised the importance of the vistas to be created, particularly that of the City Hall from the Moorhead circus. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.7.1 The Diagonal Road Scheme Source: Sheffield will look like this when re-planned, Sheffield Star, 20 October 1942, p. 3. © Sheffield City Council The geometry of moving bodies 145

The competition Craven gave his support to Davies’s proposal,29 and Sheffield City Council approved the Diagonal Road Scheme in December 1942.30 However, it did not receive universal support. In particular, the city engineer, John Collie, claimed it ‘falls so short of providing what I considered to be essential for traffic requirements’.31 During the following months, as the technical officers worked to find a way to incorporate the Diagonal Road Scheme into a larger city plan, relations between the officers became so strained that the city council decided they could no longer work together. To resolve the problem, the city council arranged a competition between the planning officer, the city architect and the city engineer, in which an adjudicator would select a single planning scheme for the city centre.32 Herbert Manzoni, Birmingham’s city engineer and surveyor, was given this role.33 The three technical officers submitted their proposals anonymously in January 1944,34 and, in May, Manzoni reported that he had selected a winning entry,35 which was later revealed to be the work of John Collie, the city engineer.36 After some modifications, the winning scheme was adopted by the city council in June. It superseded all previous planning schemes, including the Diagonal Road Scheme.37 Craven resigned his post, and Collie was appointed as planning officer, in addition to his responsibilities as city engineer.38 After further amendments, Collie’s scheme was published in 1945, in a book entitled Sheffield Replanned.39 It included images of a new Beaux Arts-style law courts building, terminating a grand boulevard, to be called New Chester Street. Closer inspection reveals that the 1945 plan did not follow the Beaux Arts model: New Chester Street would not have connected two civic spaces, its other end leading to nothing more than a traffic roundabout. Unlike those in the Diagonal Road Scheme, the civic spaces proposed under the 1945 plan were ill defined and irregular (Figure 2.7.2). The pedestrian’s experience was generally neglected. In particular, passengers leaving the railway station were expected to cross a busy arterial road, before entering a subway tunnel with no visible exit (Figure 2.7.3). This contrasts sharply with the dignified route from railway station to city centre that had been envisaged in the Diagonal Road Scheme. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 2.7.2 FIGURE 2.7.3 Detail of the plan published in 1945, showing The proposed exit from Sheffield’s main the proposed Civic Circle ring road encircling railway station, as seen from the station roof the city centre and the proposed New Chester Source: Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned. Street leading to a new law courts building © Sheffield City Council Source: Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned. © Sheffield City Council 146 Alan Lewis

The geometry of moving bodies So, if the 1945 plan was not intended to enhance the pedestrians’ experience, what were its author’s aims? According to a statement in Sheffield Replanned:

The initial requirement is to produce a road layout which . . . relieves . . . traffic congestion, and removes the danger created by uncontrolled traffic in heavily used streets. Any street layout which does not achieve this has failed in its primary purpose, however attractive or symmetrical it may appear on plan.40

Providing for motor vehicles was given priority over and above the arrangement of space. Motor cars first appeared in Britain in around 1894,41 and by 1938 there were nearly 2 million licensed cars on Britain’s roads.42 This increase led to traffic congestion. For example, in 1938, approximately 1,750 vehicles per hour were recorded as passing along Sheffield’s High Street during peak periods.43 The rising number of cars produced more traffic accidents. The approximately 1,700 road deaths nationally recorded in 1919 more than quadrupled to 7,343 by 1934.44 To address these problems, from 1930 onwards, the Ministry of Transport issued guidance on the design and layout of roads.45 This recommended that fast-moving through traffic be separated from slower-moving local traffic and from pedestrians. One consequence of this segregation was that roads for through traffic, the so-called arterial roads,46 could be designed following different formal rules from those applied to local roads, to enable the arterial roads to accommodate vehicles moving at relatively high speeds. A car travelling through a bend experiences a centrifugal force, which can cause it to skid or overturn.47 The speed of the car and the radius of the curve determine the magnitude of this centrifugal force, and it was understood that this force could be reduced by ensuring that every bend had a constant radius of sufficient magnitude.48 An additional recommendation was that transition curves, which do not have a constant radius, be introduced between straight and curved sections of road, so that the centrifugal force would be applied to the car gradually.49 The resulting geometry, featuring large-radius curves and clearly visible in the drawing for Sheffield Replanned, is different from that used in Beaux Arts planning. It was also believed that, within cities, arterial roads should be laid out using the ‘wheel and spokes’ model of city planning, in which radial roads were bisected by ring roads, so that through traffic could be directed away from the city centre.50 The Ministry of Transport used financial incentives to promote ring-road schemes in the 1930s,51 and Manzoni selected Collie’s scheme precisely because it was the only one to propose a ring road around the immediate centre of the city.52 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Conclusion A number of possible causes for the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers can be identified. Town planning was not yet fully established as an independent discipline, and Craven seems to have been held in low regard by his colleagues. Prior to Craven’s appointment, it was the city engineer’s responsibility to prepare planning schemes, and the dispute was partly about who should wield this power. It was also a dispute between architects and engineers, for Davies, as city architect, found his plan rejected by Collie, city engineer. For Collie, the imperative was to find a solution to the problems caused by the rising number of motor vehicles, an issue the Diagonal Road Scheme failed to address. However, this concern does The geometry of moving bodies 147

not explain why Collie’s team so effectively ignored the pedestrian’s experience in devising the 1945 plan. Perhaps the dispute between Sheffield’s technical officers is best characterised as a disagreement about which forms of knowledge have validity. Collie and his team prioritised an approach to planning based on mathematically verifiable knowledge, such as statistics on traffic density and accident rates, and the forces acting on a vehicle moving through a bend. By contrast, the Diagonal Road Scheme was based on principles that had their origin in the classical world, not in modern science. Collie and his team seemingly did not accept the (morphological) principles on which the Diagonal Road Scheme was based; moreover, they neglected the pedestrian’s experience. Arguably, this is because the rationalistic approach lends itself to design for the movement of motor vehicles. By contrast, the bodily, sensual experience of moving through the city as a pedestrian is not easily described in mathematical terms.

Notes 1 See, for example, Gordon Cherry and Penny Leith on the authors of the Advisory Handbook published by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1947 (HMSO 1947); Cherry and Leith 1986, p. 96. 2 David Carr, in the Foreword to Husserl 1970, pp. xvi, xviii. 3 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 4 Ibid., p. 23. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., pp. 47–8. Also see p. 45. 7 Ibid., p. 52. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Husserl 1982, p. 74. 11 Husserl 1970, pp. 24–8. 12 Ibid., p. 51. 13 Ibid., pp. 48–9. 14 For a more detailed account of these events, see Alan Lewis (2013) Planning through conflict: Competing approaches in the preparation of Sheffield’s post-war reconstruction plan, Planning Perspectives, vol. 28, pp. 27–49. 15 Special Committee re: Town Planning and Civic Centres (1936) First report, 19 June, with City Council Minutes [hereafter cited as Special Committee, Report]; Special Committee (1936) Third report, 28 August. 16 C.G. Craven (1938) Sheffield: The example of the replanning of a central area, Local Pamphlets, vol. 5, no. 3, 042 SQ, Sheffield Local Studies Library, 2. 17 Sheffield City Council (1939) Town and Country Planning Act 1932: Draft Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme. Local Pamphlets, vol. 5, no.14, Sheffield Local Studies Library. 18 Sheffield City Council (1939) Minutes of the Council, 6 September, Sheffield Local Studies Library Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 [hereafter cited as City Council, Minutes]. 19 Planning officer in letter to city engineer, 10 November 1939, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(1), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA655(1)]; Special Committee (1941) Eighteenth report, 21 April. 20 Philip Healy, ‘Sheffield at War’, in Binfield et al. 1993, pp. 243–5. 21 Letter from city engineer to town clerk, 31 December 1940, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(16), Sheffield City Archives. 22 Special Committee (1941) Eighteenth report, 21 April. 23 Ibid. 24 Raids worry planners, but 1939 Sheffield Plan still valid, Sheffield Telegraph, 17 February 1942, p. 3. 25 Special Committee (1941) Twenty-second report, December. 26 Town Clerk in letter to members of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 March 1942, Minutes of the Special Committee re Town Planning and Civic Centres, 21 November 1938, 148 Alan Lewis

CA674(54), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA674(54)]; Special Committee (1942) Minutes, 16 March, CA674(54). 27 Handwritten notes on the first meeting of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 27 March 1942, CA674(54). 28 City architect (1942) City of Sheffield – Proposed revision of the Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme, 19 October, CA674(54). 29 Planning Officer (1942) City of Sheffield – Proposed revision of the Sheffield (Central) Planning Scheme, 19 October, CA674(54). 30 City Council (1942) Minutes, 2 December. 31 City engineer in letter to town clerk, 8 July 1942, CA655(1). 32 Report of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 13 November 1943, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(2), Sheffield City Archives [hereafter cited as CA655(2)]. 33 Ibid. 34 Report of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 8 November 1943, CA674(54); for confirmation of city engineer’s submission see letter from city engineer to town clerk, 1 February 1944, CA655(2). 35 Minutes of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 May 1944, CA655(2). Manzoni actually submitted his own planning scheme to Sheffield City Council, based on John Collie’s scheme. 36 Minutes of the Special Committee re Town Planning and Civic Centres, 12 June 1944, CA655(2). 37 Manzoni plan approved in principle, Sheffield Telegraph, 8 June 1944, p. 3. 38 Town Planning Committee, 4 August 1944, Minutes of the Council, Sheffield Local Studies Library [hereafter cited as Town Planning Committee, Minutes]. 39 Town Planning Committee (1945) Sheffield Replanned (Sheffield: Sheffield City Council). 40 Town Planning Committee, Sheffield Replanned, p. 36. 41 Webb and Webb 1913, p. 240. 42 Hass-Klau 1990, p. 44. The precise number was 1,944,394. 43 Traffic figures for Central Area, 7 December 1943, CA655(2). 44 Hass-Klau 1990, pp. 40, 44. 45 See summary of the guidance issued by the department in HMSO 1943, p. 3; also see HMSO 1930. 46 The term ‘arterial road’ has been used in different ways by different writers. In particular, the Ministry of Transport, in the 1946 publication Design and Layout of Roads in Built-Up Areas, used the term to refer to ‘Roads serving the country as a whole, or a region of the country, and linking up the main centres of population’. Roads in built-up areas were labelled ‘through roads’. I use the term ‘arterial road’ here because it evokes the circulation of blood in the human body, and so encapsulates the notion of a road as a conduit for circulation, rather than a multipurpose space. 47 Batson 1950, p. 41. 48 Edric Tasker (1928) Superelevation, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, vol. LIV, 17 March: 1135; H. Criswell (1930) A simple treatment of superelevation, transition curves and vertical curves, as used on the Great North Road in the County of Rutland, 1925/26, Proceedings of the Institute of Municipal and County Engineers, vol. LVI, no.15, 21 January, p. 820. 49 Criswell, Simple treatment of superelevation, p. 826. 50 Cherry 1974, p. 25. 51 City engineer’s account of meeting with Mr Knight of the Ministry of Transport, 15 July 1937, City Engineer’s Files, CA655(3), Sheffield City Archives. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 52 Minutes of the Special Sub-Committee on Review of Planning, 20 May 1944, CA655(2). 2.8 PEDESTRIANS AND TRAFFIC

Ben Hamilton-Baillie

One False Move and You’re Dead! This alarmingly stark and simple message stands alongside a close-up of a teenager’s feet on the edge of a kerb, on the huge billboards of the 1980s government road-safety campaign poster (Figure 2.8.1). The clarity of the image is enhanced by the absence of any surrounding context – there are no buildings or other people or activity in the background. It is a message about everywhere and nowhere. It was part of an ambitious campaign to improve pedestrian safety by influencing walking patterns and removing children from the threat of traffic, reinforcing the notion of a strong conceptual boundary to separate the world of the pedestrian from the world of traffic. The penalties for transgressing this boundary were severe indeed! The One False Move campaign represents one memorable manifestation of the principle of physical and psychological separation that dominated architecture, urban planning and traffic engineering for much of the twentieth century. The appearance of the motor vehicle in significant numbers during the 1920s prompted a fundamental re-evaluation of the relationship between movement and public space. Traditionally, streets and the spaces between buildings had served the simultaneous demands for both movement and the exchanges and human

FIGURE 2.8.1 One False Move UK road-safety campaign,

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 1980s O N E FA LS E Source: Department for Transport Archives M O V E AND YOU’RE D E A D .

BEFORE YOU CROSS THE ROAD. 150 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

interactions that constitute civic life. For Le Corbusier and other delegates at the CIAM Congress of Athens of 1933, there was ‘no place for the street with its traffic’ in the modern city.1 Nowhere was the principle of segregation of traffic from civic life more clearly articulated and persuasively argued than in the 1963 Traffic in Towns, the report of the committee chaired by Colin Buchanan to advise government policy on urban planning and transport.2 The central conclusion of this influential study called for systematic segregation between pedestrian and vehicular worlds. The pedestrian precinct, overbridges and underpasses, barriers and physical separation emerge as essential components of urban form. It was a message strongly endorsed by government policy and professional institutions in many countries. ‘Segregation should be the keynote of modern road design’ was the first sentence of the UK government’s 1965 Roads in Urban Areas. It seemed a self-evident truth that the requirements for efficient and safe movement of traffic were fundamentally incompatible with the qualities of urban space. Notions of public space and pedestrian boundaries had to be redefined. Hence, the need for the safety campaign to restrain the movement of teenagers – One False Move and You’re Dead! As we approach the second century of motorised movement, our understanding of the relationship between driver behaviour, traffic and the qualities of public space is changing rapidly. The publication in the UK of Manual for Streets 2 in 20103 and the emergence of shared space and integrated streets as design concepts have begun to establish a fundamentally contrasting paradigm for streets and urban spaces, in place of separation and segregation. This chapter looks at some of the theoretical and practical background to this change, and its implica - tions for the relationship between architecture, urban design and traffic engineering. It is a change that builds on a growing understanding of behavioural psychology and the influence of place and context on human interaction and movement, and especially the relationship between drivers and the complex, unpredictable and fragile world of pedestrian activity. Drive a car into Exhibition Road in Kensington, West London, and you will find that, although you are still on the public highway, most characteristics of the familiar urban street have disappeared (Figures 2.8.2 and 2.8.3). Road markings, pedestrian crossings, traffic signals, signs and high kerbs have been replaced by a new layout and spatial arrangement. The diagonal paving pattern of the surface materials continues unbroken from building to building across the street. Boundaries between the carriageway and the pavement are more subtle, and street furniture, lighting and paving combine to create a single, unified space. For the driver, the experience can be slightly unnerving, especially where bicyclists and pedestrians are milling around and where the museums, Imperial College and the other great institutional buildings spill out into the space. As a driver, you have to concentrate and remain alert. Your

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 speed drops, not because of the 20-mph speed limit, but because there is so much to take in. Conventional separation of the carriageway from urban life has vanished, leaving some ambiguity about priorities, ownership and permission. Exhibition Road is unusual. Its recent transformation was the ambitious and expensive outcome of London’s leading politicians’ and the Mayor’s determination to create a street of appropriate cultural significance in this richly endowed corner of the capital. But Exhibition Road is not an isolated example. It represents a more widespread and growing realisation of a new paradigm for traffic in towns. It demonstrates an approach equally relevant for the design, management and maintenance of small, rural high streets and village centres, and reflects an attempt to minimise the adverse impacts of traffic on the economics, social fabric and quality of life, wherever movement and civic life are expected to coexist. Pedestrians and traffic 151

FIGURE 2.8.2 Exhibition Road, London: an experiment in combining traffic and pedestrians Source: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

FIGURE 2.8.3 Exhibition Road, bus and milk float move slowly through a space also used by people Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

The widespread problems associated with traffic and the built and natural environment have been well documented. The Save Our Streets campaign of 20084 reflected the extent to which traffic impact dominates local concerns in almost every neighbourhood and community. Take a walk in almost any urban, suburban or rural settlement, and the immediate experience

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 is dominated and framed, not by the architecture or landscape, but by the signs, signals, markings, bollards, barriers and linear asphalt of the traffic world. Pedestrian movement flows are constrained to limited peripheral space and occasional formal crossing points. As David Engwicht has pointed out in Mental Speed Bumps,5 drivers adopt speeds depending on the degree of psychological retreat of human activity from streets. This establishes a vicious circle, as people withdraw from trafficked space, generating higher speeds and further withdrawal. Reversing this cycle is critical to establishing a less damaging relationship between traffic and public space. The need to re-evaluate the balance between traffic and urban quality reflects much more than concern for aesthetic sensibilities. There is an urgent economic imperative. With the dramatic changes in trading and retailing prompted by out-of-town superstores and the Internet, 152 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

the purpose of many of our streets and public spaces has fundamentally changed. No longer necessary for the functional necessities of trade and distribution of goods and services, town centres have become places that only exist to fulfil higher-order expectations for human interaction and enjoyment. It is no longer possible for towns to exist solely as functional frames for market activity; they have to be able to attract human presence through intrinsic qualities. This change is prompting the search for new ways to reconcile traffic movement with the future purpose of urban space. Development of new techniques and principles for integrating traffic movement into civic life owes much to pioneering work in Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and especially the Netherlands, from the late 1970s onwards. Engineers such as Joost Váhl began to explore new models for residential streets, leading to the concept of the woonerf in places such as Delft, Gouda and Culemburg. In the north of the Netherlands, the late Hans Monderman introduced a remarkable palette of measures for streets and intersections in his position as head of road safety for his native Friesland. Starting with the aim of quieter village centres, Monderman developed a range of techniques that extended traffic engineering to encompass all aspects of landscape, history, geology and architecture. He sought to re-integrate the driver into the normal civilities of the pedestrian world, and, to his surprise, he found that the alterations he made appeared to improve both the safety and efficiency of traffic movement, even when applied to busier urban junctions and high streets. At the core of Monderman’s alterations lie a number of principles that apply an under- standing of the influence of context and place to the experience of movement among drivers and pedestrians. He and his colleagues were unusual as traffic engineers in extending their understanding of the influences on traffic beyond the confines of the highway boundary, to encompass every detail of place, as well as the driver’s perceptions and expectations. They established principles that combined to reduce speeds, create greater driver awareness, inte - grate traffic movement and produce adaptable, efficient public space. Three principles are especially noteworthy. The first concerns the design and presentation of transition points between the higher-speed ‘highway’ and the lower-speed public realm. Rather than placing road signs and nameboards without reference to the architecture, the intention is to create clear, distinctive gateways or entry points to neighbourhoods, towns or villages, through a combination of materials, land - scape, lighting and dimensions that reinforce perceptions of transition (Figure 2.8.4). Measures to highlight changes in scale and a shift from linear continuity towards spatial complexity often require the elimination of centre-lines and road markings, with an introduction of visual

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 narrowing to announce the transition. The identification of transition points requires special attention to, and exploitation of, natural features, such as bridges, notable buildings or changes in the landscape, as these help influence driver awareness and decisions. The second principle involves the application of place-making design to significant reference points along a street, especially to intersections and key junctions. Rather than placing signals, kerbs and highway furniture without reference to the context, the new traffic engineering and place-making draws on the distinctive characteristics and specific geometry of potential spatial landmarks. The elements of successful place-making are infinitely varied, but common characteristics include a focus on some central element (perhaps a statue, lamp or tree), or a simple frame in paving or lighting to define a space. It can be merely the careful positioning of lamps, street furniture or planting. Place-making techniques can contribute to Pedestrians and traffic 153

FIGURE 2.8.4 Skvallertorget, a square in the Swedish town of Norrköping: the paving pattern reasserts the identity of the square as outdoor room Source: Tyrens, Sweden

FIGURE 2.8.5 Drachten, Friesland, Netherlands: coexistence of cars, cyclists and pedestrians Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

the creation of clear transitions and are critical to creating legible sequences that, in the driver’s perception, reinforce the distinction between highways and public space. The third principle involves the relationship between buildings, the activities they generate, and the design and configuration of the street. Establishing a conversation between the traffic environment and adjacent events appears to contribute to more responsive driver behaviour and to lower speeds. Thus, a street running past a church or a pub, a school or a park, a town hall or a theatre will exhibit subtle differences in alignment, materials or arrangement

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 to form a visual and psychological connection between traffic space and context (Figure 2.8.5). This approach marks a notable shift in the analysis and representation of streets. Conventional highway-engineering drawings show streets with little or no reference to surrounding buildings, entrances or visual landmarks, often limited to the formal highway boundary. By contrast, projects such as Exhibition Road and New Road in Brighton have been conceived and drawn as an urban continuum. Building in small clues related to the context appears to improve the response of drivers to the complexity of urban situations, by breaking down the linear anonymity of featureless streets with a series of punctuation marks. The potential for such an integrated approach to street design has implications for a wide range of typical urban spaces, junctions and street types. The disconnected, hostile experience of the ring road, observed by Stephen Walker (Chapter 2.6), could be reconnected to the 154 Ben Hamilton-Baillie

city, while still serving its transport function. The transformation of the former ring road around Ashford in Kent of 2007 is one example. A former one-way, three-lane segregated highway has been returned to low-speed, two-way movement and redesigned to create a rich and varied sequence of places through which the high volume of traffic moves at lower, smoother speeds. Underpasses, signals, barriers, signage and road markings have been removed, and drivers find themselves negotiating their passage through a distinct and, at times, deliberately ambiguous series of boulevards and spaces. The street is no longer a road or highway, although it continues to fulfil its traffic function, with less congestion and fewer serious accidents than before. The monitoring of the first 3 years’ operation revealed a reduction in injuries of around 40 per cent.6 Many observers of this new approach to traffic movement and design speculate on how far the principles might be extended to busier streets and routes. To date, we have insufficient case studies to know the answer. However, there are encouraging signs that the principles of place-making and context-specific street design may help to tackle problems where heavy traffic tends to divide and isolate communities. Poynton, a small market town in Cheshire, is built around a crossroads on the busy route between Manchester and Stoke (Figures 2.8.6 and 2.8.7). Over 26,000 vehicles a day pass through Fountain Place, the name once given to the junction at the heart of the town, fronted by the post office, shops and magnificent church that define the centre. Over the years, extensive traffic signals, multiple approach lanes and highway clutter reduced Fountain Place to a hostile, congested highway intersection, with little human life or economic value. In 2012, the crossroads was reconfigured. Traffic signals were removed, carriageways were simplified, strong entry gateways were created, and a clear spatial identity returned to Fountain Place through new paving materials, planting and lighting. To date, the junction appears to cope more successfully with the volume of traffic and has reduced pedestrian delays. The reduced congestion and low-speed environment are allowing civic activity to return to the town centre. The emerging understanding of this potentially improved relationship between traffic and the built environment has important implications for the relationship between architecture, urban design and traffic engineering. Conventionally, these have been separated into distinct and distant disciplines. Integrated streetscapes require much greater understanding among architects of the constraints, of vehicular tracking, movement patterns and the pedestrian interactions that determine the dynamics of traffic. Likewise, the world of traffic engineering could profit from an ability to exploit and adapt the potential of architecture and place-making to influence driver behaviour and integrate vehicular flows successfully into urban

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 environments. Our understanding of movement and its relationship to space is undergoing a profound revolution. Many of the assumptions underpinning the segregation of traffic from civic life are now being challenged by the evidence emerging from schemes such as Exhibition Road, Ashford and Poynton. Understanding the experience of movement and the influence of context opens an important new field of research and experimentation, one that holds the potential to address the adverse effects of the segregation of traffic from civic life. Low-speed design and close integration with the distinctive characteristics of place may help foster new patterns of urban life and vitality. Moving away from the mechanical, deterministic views of twentieth- century segregation allows a human-centred street-movement pattern to emerge. One false move, and you remain very much alive. Pedestrians and traffic 155

FIGURE 2.8.6 Fountain Place, Poynton, Cheshire, UK: replanning of the traffic route by Hamilton- Baillie Associates Source: Photograph by Ben Hamilton-Baillie

FIGURE 2.8.7 Fountain Place, Poynton, Cheshire, UK: replanning of the traffic route by Hamilton-Baillie Associates Source: Ben Hamilton-Baillie Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Notes 1 Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (1933) 1973. 2 HMSO 1963a. 3 Department for Transport (2010) Manual for Streets 2, CIHT. 4 English Heritage (2008) Save Our Streets. 5 Engwicht 2007. 6 Kent County Council (2011) Ashford three-year monitoring review. R. Bright (internal document). Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.0.1 Spirit path leading to the East Royal Tombs, Qing dynasty, discussed in Chapter 3.5. This view looks back from the second paifang or ceremonial gateway towards the main entrance. The spirit path follows an axial route centred on a special pointed mountain (see Chapter 3.5, pp. 185–95) Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones PART 3 Movement as social and shared Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 3

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In Part 1, we looked at movement from the point of view of the designing architect, and in Part 2, in terms of the individual’s experience and his or her reading of place, but as soon as two or more people are involved, there is a relationship. They must confront each other, cooperate or at very least observe each other, and no human being is viable alone for long, Crusoe myths notwithstanding. Apart from the sick, the occasional prisoner or the Carthusian monk, we all move about, not only making journeys, as discussed in the previous sections, but also changing territory and, with it, our role: academic till 6 o’clock, father and husband at 7. Roles are like theatrical parts, often with changes of dress to match, and tend to belong each to a setting that acts like a theatrical set, offering necessary props. Goffman’s metaphor of frontstage versus backstage was mentioned in the general introduction and is readily applicable to buildings of almost all kinds.1 We are always, to some extent, putting on a show for others, and each setting we inhabit has its rules, explicit or implicit, that we mostly take for granted. It also has a membership: the university, the ticketed train passenger, the family home extended only to invited visitors. Institutions have names associated with familiar building types: school, home, shop, restaurant. Within them are rooms, also named, normally by functional associations, so that estate agents classify dwellings in terms of living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms. Such names also appear on architects’ plans, everyone assuming we all know what they mean.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 These designations carry cultural values and expectations – summed up by Pierre Bourdieu in his concept habitus – which can be defined briefly as, ‘the socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating structures through which the habitat is engaged’.2 That is to say, we each possess a set of beliefs, values and habits that govern our expectations of the world, and that need to mesh with the meanings and arrangements of the habitat, so that the two can reinforce each other. This process of recognition can change considerably from place to place. In Europe, the idea of bed is fairly entrenched, and it is one of very few pieces of furniture explicitly described in The Rule of St Benedict, dating from about 530, which also prescribes that there should be one monk per bed, and they should sleep together in one room.3 In contrast, the Japanese have long held the custom of folding out bedding and sleeping on the floor, so avoiding the need to switch rooms between day and night. In some cultures, 160 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

even the orientation of the sleeping place is important; for example, in Thailand, it has long been unpropitious to sleep with one’s head towards the west, the direction connected with death.4 If such readings of pollution seem strange, we are not free ourselves from such values and expectations, as exemplified by changing attitudes to bathrooms and kitchens in European societies. Defecating in the house was long avoided, but, even after the introduction of sewers and water closets, the lavatory often faced outwards, into the open air. In Dora Tack’s reminiscence of childhood spent in Brixton, London, the family moved in the 1930s to a flat with a fitted bath, but her policeman father refused it, setting a board on top and using it for storage. The filling of a movable tin bath in front of the living-room fire, habit of their previous existence, continued.5 The kitchen has changed greatly with the disappearance of servants, the heightened status of women and the sharing of food preparation, not only becoming larger, more prominent and more central to the house or flat, but also subject to nearly a century of design revolution, involving fitted units and innumerable gadgets. It is now a fashion statement to be shown off to friends, renovated at frequent intervals for change of style, and a key element in selling a house. Taking up the contrast again with Thailand, their traditional vernacular kitchen, along with the washroom, was considered an especially dirty place, set on the side of the deathly west with the lowest floor level.6 In our society, by contrast, it aspires to the allure of being spotlessly clean, not just hygienically but spiritually pure.7 Hosts of both genders cook and are proud of it, and so the kitchen has crossed the boundary to become a polite space, but, even now, nobody shows off their lavatory, even if they ensure it is clean for guests and well provided with paper, soap and towels. It is important for guests to find it and to be able to recognise it when they see it, even when visiting for the first time, because it is embarrassing to ask. There is a symbolic implication here, and nobody who has read Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger can continue to attribute cleanliness to hygiene alone.8 She shows that our attitudes of repugnance and avoidance are every bit as constructed and structured as those devoted to more positive aesthetic matters. Such are the changing territories of everyday life that we move through, only partly cognisant of their implied values. They are differentiated by contrast, and patterns of movement have shaped them, especially kitchens and bathrooms, which sustain endless gestures and postures as bodies go about their everyday tasks. In recent history, these passed through an obsession with ergonomics recorded in government publications such as Space in the Home, which now seem both excessively reductive and socially presumptuous (Figures 3.0.1–3.0.4).9 But who sits where in the living room or at table remains significant, and even more so who sleeps where. These territories still have their rules and membership, which their architecture

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 helps to declare. We must enter and leave, and move between them, crossing thresholds and making appropriate gestures of greeting or parting. For clarity and convenience, all this has been so far described in terms of domestic examples, but the same principles apply to bigger institutions, even to whole cultures. In the chapters that follow, these relationships between space, use and meaning are explored through a wider range of contrasting examples. In Chapter 3.1, Peter Blundell Jones sets out some general cross-cultural principles, concentrating first on the idea of centre versus periphery, and second on linear paths that give direction, generating roads and implicit spatial axes. Taking the example of the Australian Aborigine circumcision ground, a temporary theatre, he shows how a space can be prepared for and defined by social action, so that it becomes both a temporary record of that action and a necessary means of sharing it. He also discusses the inevitability of thresholds, which, Introduction to Part 3 161

6.30 p .m . The evening meal may be the only time during the week when the family sit down together. They may like to eat away from the kitchen area.

7.00 p.m . When Father makes or repairs something, he needs to be out of Mother’s way in the kitchen and where he will not disturb sleeping children.

FIGURE 3.0.1A Space in the Home, government publication of 1963: daily activities on a timeline: 6.30, mother cooks while father relaxes

FIGURE 3.0.1B Space in the Home, 1963: 7.00, Mother serves them all at table

* < Z'5" > < 1 T > *

< 27" X 17" X 3'0" X 17" X 1 '0

FIGURE 3.0.2 FIGURE 3.0.3 Space in the Home, 1963: dimensions to gain Space in the Home, 1972: right and wrong access to the dining table ergonomic movements to enter the room

because they mark changes of territory, are bound to be significant, and extends this to a discussion of their symbolic importance. In Chapter 3.2, to provide an example of how spaces in buildings mesh with rules about

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 use, we set the plan of Rievaulx Abbey alongside selected extracts from The Rule of St Benedict concerned with architecture and place. When read in full, the Rule has – as one might expect – much more to say about roles and correct behaviour, and it is noticeably more explicit about time than space, presumably because timings needed to be dictated, whereas the space of the monastic plan was already given. Where the architecture does appear, one glimpses how it supports and substantiates the rule. The Belgian architect Lucien Kroll was a great pioneer of participation and a believer in the idea that ordinary citizens should be allowed the chance to express themselves through their dwellings. We include as Chapter 3.3 a brief comment from his book Composants (English version, The Architecture of Complexity) of the mid 1980s, which sings the praises of the traditional domestic threshold and laments its deterioration. 162 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In Chapter 3.4, we move to the other side of the world to consider the Japanese tea house, as described by Lucy Block. The tea ritual is highly prescribed, intricate and dependent on consistently polite and correct behaviour by all. The setting, though apparently humble, receives great aesthetic attention, as do the taste and smell of the tea and the character and quality of implements used in its preparation. Dedicated to such a special social purpose, the intimate structure reveals architecture again in a framing role, and, as the rules are unfamiliar, they stand out all the more. Despite the precedence of the host, it is hard to see quite who is putting on a show for whom, as all are suppporting actors. Chapter 3.5, another East Asian example, concerns a monument at large scale. In collaboration with Jianghua Wang and Bing Jiang, Peter Blundell Jones considers the East Qing Tombs, north of Beijing, where the last Chinese emperors were laid to rest. Death is a major rite of passage, all the more so under the influence of Confucianism, and so where the ancestors were placed was of the utmost importance. The special site, chosen for its feng- shui properties, is entered by a spirit path several kilometres long. Few places on Earth show such elaborate progressions and layerings, and, in imperial times, an enormous staff was on hand to protect it, and yet the tombs remained for most people a forbidden place. The question of who is putting on a show for whom here involves heaven and the ancestors. If customs surrounding Chinese emperors seem strange, so do those of eighteenth-century European aristocrats. In Chapter 3.6, Renata Tyszczuk looks at the gardens of the exiled Polish king at Lunéville in France, in which nothing was quite what it seemed, nature gave way to layers of artifice, and roles were reversed in a highly theatrical manner. At a simple level, this parody of a royal court, showing the aristocracy at play, contributed to the inven - tion of the circuit walk with sequentially orchestrated incidents, as described by Jan Woudstra (p. 102), but the many water-driven automata for which it was famed gain darker implications in Tyszczuk’s interpretation, as presaging the arrival of a virtual world. The selections from Garnier and Muthesius included in Part 1 showed spaces held in tension by social rules. Both architects revealed a deep concern for the propriety of their tasks: Garnier occupied with a polite setting for the opera, Muthesius in managing confrontations between master, mistress, servants and guests. We end with a parallel piece by a contemporary architect. It concerns the rebuilding of Lauriston School in Hackney, London, and the problem of the corridor. As famously pointed out by Robin Evans,10 corridors are a relatively recent invention, marking the period in which concern began to shift to circulation pure and simple. It is hardly surprising to find, in one school after another, rules about ‘not running in the corridor’, when there is nothing to do there other than to get to

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the other end as fast as possible. A major innovation of Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry’s Impington Village College of 1937 was the ‘prom’, a wide circulation space also used for social occasions, and, after World War Two, the architects of the Hertfordshire schools tried to develop access spaces between classrooms as secondary teaching areas.11 Hans Scharoun in Germany, in the same period, made a more radical proposal by developing his linking spaces as irregular internal streets.12 By the time of the previous Lauriston School, built in the 1970s, everything had given way to open plan, with loss of thresholds and very little differentiation between class rooms. When designing its much-expanded replacement, Ann Griffin and Philip Meadowcroft were asked to secure the identity of the single classroom, and yet retain the advantages of the open plan, developing access spaces as both inviting and usable. In Chapter 3.7, Ann Griffin retells the story of her dialogue with the staff and pupils. Introduction to Part 3 163

Notes 1 Goffman 1971. 2 This usefully clear formulation was on the Internet, but seems to have disappeared. For his own more contorted explanations and the whole theory, which perhaps suffers in translation, see Bourdieu 1977. 3 ‘For bedding, a mattress, a blanket, a coverlet and a pillow are enough. The beds should be frequently inspected by the Abbott as a precaution against private possessions’ (Parry 1990, p. 87). 4 There is much about specific orientation in Stanley Tambiah, Classification of Animals in Thailand, in Douglas 2003, pp. 127–66. The general principles and continuing significance of these ideas about orientation are confirmed by current work at Sheffield by Supakit Yimsrual. 5 Tack 1992. 6 See note 4. 7 For background history, see Wright 1960. 8 Douglas 1966. 9 Evident in government publications such as Space in the Home, HMSO Publications 1966. 10 Evans 1997, pp. 70–9. 11 Saint 1987. 12 Blundell Jones 1995, pp. 136–51. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3.1 SPACE AS A PRODUCT OF BODILY MOVEMENT

Centre, path and threshold

Peter Blundell Jones

The experience of containment for every individual starts with the womb, and already there must be some haptic sense of being carried about, perhaps even some awareness of mother’s direction of walk; certainly of whether she is active or resting. The womb is the first centre of the child’s world; birth the first crossing of a threshold. Thereafter, mother’s embrace and her breast become centre, then the bed, the room, the house, the settlement or village, gradually discovered from the centre outwards as a nesting series. This idea of centre versus periphery is essential to human beings and basic for architecture, reflected in indigenous buildings throughout the world. The temporary Aborigine shelter was semicircular, centred on the small fire that kept everyone warm in the desert night.1 The Mongolian yurt and the Native American tipi (Figures 3.1.1 and 3.1.2) are circular buildings, again with a fire at the centre, both also with altars to connect with the powers above: the tipi with a square of bare earth to connect with powers below.2 When Native Americans came together in celebration, they would pitch their tipis in a circle, usually in clan order and with some medicine tipis for spirit contacts placed within the ring (Figure 3.1.3).3 The camp therefore had a protected centre of social space, while beyond the ring was the wild, the uncontrolled. When the child starts to crawl, he or she creates a linear path, moving towards or away from things, and confronting other people. This is the beginning of an essential linear principle to complement the central one. The shared path out of the door of the yurt or tipi is the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 child’s introduction to the outside world, but it also changes the space within, generating an implied axis. The place opposite the door is presented most directly to the incoming visitor, and so becomes the place of honour, where the head of the family and honoured guest take their seats. In addition, with both examples, although they come from different continents, the internal space is gender divided, men on the right and women on the left in the case of the tipi, the reverse with the yurt.4 An order of seniority may also be observed, increasing towards the place of honour. Social relationships and hierarchies take many forms, but nearly always carry spatial implications.5 The axis made by the door is usually also orientated so that the dwelling’s entrance faces the rising sun, though there may also be reason to avoid the prevailing wind or, in a communal settlement, to face the centre. But awareness of direction is crucial, as it relates the house and village to world and cosmos; to sun, moon and stars. Space as a product of bodily movement 165

sacred area Altar host place Children of honour Place of or important Honour guests Women’s Men’s Health Senior Couple Side Side bed altar bed M en’s side Women’s side

Square hearth

Men visitors Women visitors Children Children Servants and poor

door

FIGURE 3.1.1 Plan of a Mongolian yurt FIGURE 3.1.2 Plan of a Native American tipi Source: After Faegre 1979 Source: After Faegre 1979

7 8 FIGURE 3.1.3 Plan of a Cheyenne camp: north is top. 9 The numbers 1–10 designate the position 6 of different tribal divisions, A and B the religious lodges of the Medicine Arrows 10 and Buffalo Cap, respectively

5 Source: After Grinnell 2008 [1923]

4 A B

3 2

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 For hunter-gatherers, paths are needed, which become the starting point for roads: shared paths. Landmarks are necessary for finding one’s way and one’s way back, and so awareness of the topography is essential. Passes between hills and places to cross rivers are especially memorable, as are springs and water holes at which one can quench one’s thirst, or places with fruit trees or trees used as medicines, places good for game and places risky because of predators. Only with high densities of walkers is a permanent road generated merely by footsteps, and so, on a thinly populated continent, the way demands more subtle definition, moving from landmark to landmark, perhaps taking advantage of animal trails. But even with as sparse a population as constituted by the Australian Aborigines before European arrival, there was a complete network of known paths right across the continent, which allowed peaceful relation with others, respecting their rights and practices and intermarrying with them.6 166 Peter Blundell Jones

The space of action The central principle, the linear one, or both, are needed to define a space of action. As the child is never alone, this is social from the start and may begin with observations of the comings and goings of others and gestures of greeting and eye contact. As consciousness grows, so does the awareness of the relationships between people’s bodies and the paths they routinely take. In the tipi, for example, people were expected to move in a clockwise direction, and there was a particular order to be respected in the passing around of the pipe of peace.7 The choreography of activities matched the organisation of space, each supporting the other. To put it another way, the space was accompanied by implict rules about its use as understood and enacted by the users. Such rules did not need to be declared explicitly, for they could be learned through observation, but persons charged with the laying out of space (in this case, the setting up of the tent) had to know them. The relationship between space and social choreography has not ceased in modern societies, but it is more complex and difficult to trace and, therefore, perhaps most clearly visible under the most marginal of conditions. The game of hopscotch, for example, is constantly rediscovered in different forms by children across the world. It needs a pitch marked on the ground, against which your footsteps and my footsteps can be measured.8 When we play it together, we recognise that we share knowledge of the rules, and, if it is my first time, I have just learned them from you. In this case, the defined space has just served as a demon - stration, a temporary bearer of knowledge about how space is organised for this purpose. All kinds of game and sport need marked out spaces, as defined by rules of play, and the scale is easily changed, as evinced by chess and chequers. The higher the social status of the game, the more pedantically rules tend to be enacted and space defined, but even children walking home from school can invent a football pitch by marking the goals with their coats and bags, which shows the presence of the shared idea. At the opposite end of the scale – the most definite and defined – is the Greek open-air theatre. That at Epidaurus is among the most enduring demonstrations of a multitude gathering around the few and, thus, of the central principle (Figure 3.1.4). Roundness tends to suggest togetherness and implies equal participation, which is why we talk about round- table discussions, King Arthur’s knights sat at the mythical round table, and the medieval chapter house was round or polygonal.9 Conversely, when a long, rectangular table is used for a meeting, the chairperson tends to occupy the end, which we customarily call the head of table, and this gives him or her added status. In the patriarchal Alpine farmhouse, the father of the family traditionally sat at the end next to God’s corner (the Herrgottswinkel or Coin du

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Bon Dieu), distributing food down the table, with the women on the left and men on the right, in order of age and seniority, and servants at the bottom (Figure 3.1.5).10 Kings, queens and judges preside in the highest seat, on axis at the end of the hall, which seems to be a universal, cross-cultural instance of hierarchy respecting the linear principle (Figure 3.1.6).11 The Chinese emperor in his audience hall, sitting at the centre of the forbidden city and at the culmination of the south–north axis, is an extreme example, following the central principle as well as the linear one, as he is also enfolded in many layers of walls and gates. If, after millennia, Epidaurus exemplifies togetherness, it is sobering to reflect that its construction post-dated the golden age of Greek drama by several centuries, confirming an already long-established tradition. Monuments often have this consolidating and memorialising role and can catalyse the reactivation of the events for which they were intended. So, at Space as a product of bodily movement 167

FIGURE 3.1.4 Theatre of Epidaurus

Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Cult corner Father

Eldest son Mother

FIGURE 3.1.5 Sons Daughters Table places in an Alpine farmhouse Servants Maids Source: After Rapoport 1969 and Weiss Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.1.6 Royal banquet, Guildhall, London, with the Queen and Consort on axis Source: From Thornbury 1872 168 Peter Blundell Jones

Epidaurus, Greek drama is again being presented, to an audience arriving by car and coach. The theatre’s impressiveness lies in the way it is so spatially definitive, and not easily usable for other purposes. Theatre is thought to derive from the social rituals concerned with the harvest, and perhaps it is the choreography of those rituals, of bodies moving in space in a coordinated way, that first defined the nature of the setting.12 This was imagined in Goethe’s romantic reading of the classical amphitheatre, which envisaged people piling up carts and boxes to get a better view.13 A less imaginary and fascinatingly well-recorded example, involving almost no physical architecture at all, is the Walbiri Aborigine circumcision ritual, as witnessed by Mervyn Meggitt during the 1950s.14 The circumcision ritual was the most important social event, involving the whole tribe, as it marked, not only the transition of boys from childhood into manhood, but also the passing on of the tribe’s oral knowledge and their assurance of its continuity. It took place over several weeks, involving a long series of theatrical displays, with cult groups dressed up to present the stories of their Dreamtime animal ancestors. Meggitt includes a diagrammatic plan of the circumcision ground (Figure 3.1.7), marking the positions at which parts of the action took place and fires were lit to illuminate nocturnal performances. The space is just a clearing in the desert, scraped clear of scrub, with a low mound piled around the edge. It is linear and orientated to the setting sun, which symbolises the death of the child. The funnel- shaped east end accommodates the audience of women and children, and there is a sacred centre towards the west, where the actual circumcision takes place. This is sacred and forbidden to women and children, and so people come and go from the east. The choreography of the ritual dances is mostly organised along the central axis, sometimes with dancers appearing alternately from one side and the other to interweave, and, at one point, with a line of actors standing on the central line to pass the sacred symbol of territory above their heads, between their arms. Before use, the space is ritually defined by a man with a sacred board, who runs down the axis from one end to the other, knocking the instrument on the ground at each end. Meggitt gives too much detail to pursue here: the point is that, for this basic theatre to work, everybody must know where to be and what to do, and it is the temporarily

To main camp

North

Initiates’ shelter * Windbreak Fire 1 Fire 2 Fire 4 Place of audience Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Fire 7 Circ site Fire 3 Fire 6

Fire 5

FIGURE 3.1.7 Plan of a Walbiri circumcision ground Source: Redrawn after Meggitt 1962 Space as a product of bodily movement 169

constructed space that coordinates them. Some elder must know how to set it out and instructs the actors, and some children will learn about its use for the first time. Because it is hardly present and soon lost to the desert, its existence is fragile, but, while it exists, it frames the action and mediates between the participants. Without it, they could not organise themselves. It is a suggestive model for the origin of architecture in social order and choreography.

Thresholds The combination of a linear path and a nesting series of layers around a centre necessitates the creation of one or many thresholds: house door, territorial gate, city gate, frontier. The very word points back to the beginning of our sedentary existence, when we started to depend on the precious harvest. Doors and gates have long been places for defining identity and possession, and also for ceremonies of arrival and departure and many other ritual practices involving good or bad luck.15 They are, therefore, always architecturally significant. Doors exclude as well as welcome, and the humble dwelling is in some ways the most exclusive of all, limited to family and invited guests. Even if we reject as archaic practices Black Rod’s ritual knocking on the door of the House of Commons, or a newly appointed bishop’s knocking on arrival at his cathedral,16 respect for the ownership of entries is still almost omnipresent, and nearly everyone in a particular cultural setting is aware of when he or she is trespassing. It is essential to know whether one is in or out of a territory, and how many layers one has penetrated. People can be guided by a written sign or kept out of a forbidden area merely by a flimsy piece of rope. We read these signals automatically. When we enter complicated buildings, we need to register our moves to be able to find the way out, and the sequence of remembered doorways marks the way. Carrying a bride across the threshold is still a familiar idea, and, in many parts of the world, it was thought to ally her fertility with that of the house, to avoid evil spirits or to mark the change in her life.17 Since Arnold van Gennep published his famous eponymous book in 1908, such life transitions have been called ‘rites of passage’, which also include birth, initiation and death.18 On his very first page, van Gennep links the metaphor of passage through life with the physical crossing of frontiers and thresholds, and this idea is widespread in literature, as, for example, with Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the bar’, or Dickens’s device in David Copperfield of a character dying as the tide goes out. Sometimes, rites of passage involve literal thresholds in support of symbolic ones, and again an anthropologist’s example can enlighten. Victor Turner, in his study of Ndembu initiation in Zambia in the 1950s, describes a special temporary gateway – the Mukoleku – made in the bush with two wooden sideposts and a

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 lintel, which novice boys must pass through on their way to circumcision (Figure 3.1.8). It contains no door and interrupts no fence, and so one might call it a purely symbolic gateway, and yet it lies crucially placed on the border between the camp of separation and the actual site of circumcision. It is, therefore, as necessary in marking the prohibited boundary to the sacred site, warning women and uncircumcised males against accidental entry, as it is in registering the transition of the novices. As they pass through it, the boys remove their childhood garments and hang them on it, signifying their death as children, so that, until it decays, the Mukoleku serves as a memorial to this event. However, it also had a prior existence as a gate formed of bodies, for, before the wooden structure was erected, a ritual was held in the same spot in which the novices’ guardians were obliged to crawl through the tunnel of legs formed by the standing line of circumcisers. If, therefore, the Mukoleka was in the 170 Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.1.8 Mukoleku, the ritual gateway for a Ndembu circumcision: the initiates cast off their childhood clothes and hang them in it Source: Drawn by Claire Blundell Jones after a published photograph by Victor Turner 1967

first instance a living gate, it subsequently became a physical gate and then, finally, a memorial of the rite that had occurred. The interchange between space of action, physical threshold and memorial is amply demonstrated.19 In a society living in grass huts, with no developed architecture, the Mukoleku stands out all the more. By contrast, the main tradition of Western architecture has never been short of free-standing symbolic gateways, not least the triumphal arches through which victorious Roman generals re-entered their city, but mostly, these places remember practices long gone. In the Eastern traditions, such gateways are even more prolific, especially in the example of imperial tombs of China considered in Chapter 3.5, in which the numerous freestanding gates may seem at first to contain nothing, but mark once-meaningful transitions across invisible layers of space.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Notes 1 Richard Gould, who lived with the Yiwara in the 1960s, has left a reasonably full description of making one, a process that takes about 2 hours: Gould 1969, p. 19. 2 The tipi is described in detail in Laubin and Laubin 1957/1989. 3 Examples shown and described in Fraser 1968 are derived from Grinnell 1923; the relevant description is carried over to Grinnell 2008, p. 132. 4 This apparent contradiction is common, because, when I enter a space, I may expect more important things to be on my right, but, when I turn around and my honoured guest sits to my right, he is, from the point of view of a person entering, on the left. Bourdieu comments on this in his essay on the Kabyle house, under the notion of ‘the world reversed’; see Bourdieu 1977. 5 Torvald Faegre’s book on nomadic architecture gives numerous variations with plan drawings; see Faegre 1979. 6 Spencer and Gillen 1899. Space as a product of bodily movement 171

7 Laubin and Laubin 1957/1989, pp. 113–14. 8 I remembered this from Rykwert 1976, but cannot find the reference. Wikipedia and allied websites report numerous versions worldwide and possible origins in a Roman military drill, though Chinese origins are also suggested. 9 On the roundness of prehistoric buildings, see Bradley 2013. 10 Reported in Rapoport 1969, p. 54, drawn from Weiss. 11 Dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini pushed it to an extreme to bolster their power, but British democracy in the Palace of Westminister sets queen against speaker on the same axis, following a nineteenth-century interpretation of the balance of power. 12 Wilson 2007, Part 1. 13 Goethe 1970. 14 Meggitt 1962. 15 Countless interesting examples are collected in Trumbull 1896, even if his theory is greatly outdated. 16 On Black Rod, see Bond and Beamish 1976; on Archbishop Welby’s knocking on the door, see: www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21876249 17 A very elaborate version can be found in Bourdieu’s essay on the Kabyle House, Douglas 2003, pp. 98–110. A longer version of this essay was originally included in the Outline (Bourdieu 1977), but omitted from the English version, perhaps because it had already been included in Bourdieu’s more obscure Algeria 1960. 18 Van Gennep 1908: a good introduction to the subject is the essay ‘Rites of passage: Process and paradox’, by Barbara Myerhoff, in Turner 1982, pp. 109–35. 19 Turner 1967, pp.151–279. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3.2 RIEVAULX AND THE ORDER OF ST BENEDICT

Translated by Abbot Parry

Rievaulx abbey was a Cistercian foundation in Yorkshire dating from around 1150–1200 and reduced to a ruin at the dissolution.1 Enough remains though to exemplify a type that developed over a thousand years and later gave rise to the university and the hospital. The famous, accidentally preserved plan of the monastery of St Gall, dating from around 800, confirms in detail that the spatial arrangements had largely been determined by that period, but, of the earlier monasteries, including Benedict’s own of around 500, we know little.2 Rievaulx’s plan (Figure 3.2.1) develops around the cloister, a perfect square, architecturally celebrated, which is at once garden, space of contemplation and circulation (on cloister, see also Chapter 1.2). It is a clear evocation of the central principle, for around it all peripheral elements Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.2.1 Basic layout of Rievaulx Abbey: A: church; B: cloister; C: refectory; D: chapter house Source: After a published plan by English Heritage Rievaulx and the Order of St Benedict 173

accrue. It is no accident that the cloister’s main hierarchically important axes, to east and south, are given to the chapter house as political centre and the refectory as social centre, chapter house taking precedence by sharing the church’s eastward orientation. The church, lying to the north of the cloister, is a clear exemplification of the linear principle, progressing from profane west door, via screens and steps, to the choir and holy altar, site of precious relics, with, beyond, the rising sun and risen Christ. The monks in the choir are separated from the nave and laity and split between the sides, so that they can sing antiphonally. St Benedict repeatedly refers to the antiphon in his correct order of observances, but, in his account, they happen in the oratory, the monks’ chapel, from which the monastic church developed. The sleeping quarters of the monks take the east wing of the cloister at first-floor level, stairs descending to its south-east corner, from which they could process to the church for the given hours of worship.

The Rule of St Benedict The following extracts from Abbott Parry’s translation are presented in the given order of the chapters.3 They are chosen for revealing something of the assumed space of the monastery. We read, for example, of the oratory, where they pray, and which is the site of admission to the order, but is to be used for nothing else; of the dorter, where they sleep in single beds; of the library for books distributed in Lent; of the refectory, where they eat in strict silence; and of the kitchen, where the food is prepared. All these spaces appear in due order in relation to the regulated activities they serve. A need to assemble the whole community in making decisions is also stated, though not assigned a named room. The boundaries of the community are indicated by the range of places a monk might be found, by the treatment of guests, by the need for a wise doorman, and by punishment of wrongdoers, first by excommunication from prayer and meals, and ultimately by exclusion from the community.

Of political decisions

Whenever anything important has to be done in the monastery the Abbott must assemble the whole community and explain what is under consideration. When he had heard the counsel of the brethren, he should give it consideration and then take what seems to him the best course. The reason why we say that all should be called to council is this: it is often to a younger brother that the Lord reveals the best course. (Parry 1990, Ch. III, p. 15)

Of the monk’s demeanour and territory Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The twelfth step of humility is not only that a monk should be humble of heart, but also that in his appearance his humility should be apparent to those who see him. That is to say: whether he is at the work of God, in the oratory, in the monastery, in the garden, on the road, in the field or anywhere else, whether sitting, walking or standing, he should always have his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the ground, and should at every moment be considering his guilt for his sins and thinking that he is even now being presented for the dread judgement. (Parry 1990, Ch. VII, p. 29) 174 Translator Abbot Parry

Of the order of service to God

On Sundays . . . when the six psalms and the versicle have been chanted . . . and all are seated in due order in their stalls, four readings should be read from the book with their responsories, and the Glory is to be chanted only with the fourth responsory. When it begins all should arise with reverence. After these readings another six psalms should follow in order with antiphons and a versicle. After these again four more lessons should be read with responsories. (Parry 1990, Ch. XI, p. 33)

Of the dormitory arrangements

The brethren are to sleep each in a single bed. These beds are assigned to them in order according to the length of their monastic life, subject to the Abbott’s discretion. If it is possible all should sleep in one place, but if their numbers do not permit this, they should take their rest by tens or twenties with the seniors who are entrusted with their care. A candle should burn continuously in the room until morning. They should sleep clothed . . . always ready, so when the signal is given, they should get up without delay and make haste to arrive first for the work of God, but in a gentle and orderly way. (Parry 1990, Ch. XXII, p. 45)

Of the penalty of excommunication

Disciplinary measures should be proportionate to the nature of the fault, and the nature of faults is for the Abbott to judge. If then a brother is found to commit less serious faults he is to be deprived of sharing in the common meal . . . he may not intone antiphon or psalm in the oratory, nor may he read a lesson until he has made satisfaction. He must eat alone after the meal of the brethren. (Parry 1990, Ch. XXIV, p. 47)

Of work in the kitchen

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The brethren should serve one another, and no one should be excused from kitchen duty except for sickness or because he is more usefully engaged elsewhere . . . The one who is finishing his week’s duty does the washing on the Saturday; he should also wash the towells with which the brethren dry their hands and feet. Moreover, he who is ending his week’s service together with him who is about to start should wash the feet of all. The outgoing server must restore the crockery he has made use of, washed and intact to the cellarer, and the cellarer must hand it over to the newcomer, so that he knows what he is giving out and what he is getting back . . . On Sundays, immediately after Lauds, the incoming and outgoing servers should prostrate themselves at the feet of all the brethren in the oratory and be prayed for. (Parry 1990, Ch. XXXV, pp. 62–3) Rievaulx and the Order of St Benedict 175

Of the readings at meals

At the meals of the brethren there should always be reading, but not by anyone who happens to take up the book. There shall be a reader for the whole week, and he is to begin on Sunday. Let him begin after Mass and Communion by asking the prayers of all that God may keep from him the spirit of vanity. The reader himself is to intone the verse, ‘O Lord open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim thy praise’, and it is to be said three times by all. And so, having received a blessing, let him begin to read. There is to be complete silence, so that no whisper nor any voice other than that of the reader be heard there. Whatever is wanted for eating and drinking the brethren should pass to one another, so that no one need ask for anything. (Parry 1990, Ch. XXXVIII, p. 66)

Of lateness in arrival

If at the Night Office anyone arrives after the ‘Glory be’ of Psalm 94, which for this reason we wish to be said altogether slowly and deliberately, he must not stand in his place in the choir but last of all, or in a place set apart by the Abbott for such careless persons, so that they may be seen by the Abbott and by everyone else, until at the end of the Work of God he does penance by public satisfaction. We have thought it best that such persons should stand last or else apart, so that being shamed because they are noticed by everybody, they may for this motive mend their ways. For if they stay outside the oratory, there may be someone who will go back and go to sleep again. (Parry 1990, Ch. XLIII, p. 71)

Of reading books in Lent

In Lent the hours for reading are from the morning until the end of the third hour . . . and during these days everyone should receive a book from the library, which he should read through from the beginning. These books are to be given out at the beginning of Lent. It is important that one or two seniors should be appointed to go round the monastery during the hours when the brethren are engaged in reading, to see whether perchance they come upon some lazy brother who is engaged in doing

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 nothing or in chatter, and is not intent upon his book. (Parry 1990, Ch. XLVIII, p. 78)

Of the oratory

The oratory should correspond to its name, and not be used for any other purpose, nor to store things. When the Work of God has been completed all are to go out noiselessly, and let reverence for God reign there, so that if a brother should have a mind to pray by himself, he will not be disturbed by the ill-conduct of anyone else. (Parry 1990, Ch. LII, p. 82) 176 Translator Abbot Parry

Of the treatment of guests

All who arrive as guests are to be welcomed like Christ . . . The respect due to their station is to be shown to all . . . As soon as a guest is announced he should be met by the superior or by brethren with every expression of charity, and first of all they should pray together, and then greet one another with the kiss of peace . . . When they have been welcomed they should be led to prayer, and then either the superior or someone delegated by him should sit with them. The Divine Law should be read to them for their edification, and after this every kindness should be shown to them . . . The Abbott should give all the guests water to wash their hands, and with the whole community he should wash their feet. (Parry 1990, Ch. LIII, p. 83)

Of admission to the order

The one who is to be accepted into the community must promise in the oratory, in the presence of all, stability, conversion for life, and obedience . . . he must write a petition, calling on the names of the saints whose relics are there . . . and he should place it with his own hand on the altar . . . If he has any possessions, he must either previously give them to the poor, or by means of formal donation give them to the monastery, keeping for himself nothing at all . . . At once then in the oratory, let him be stripped of his own clothes which he is wearing, and reclothed in those of the monastery. The clothes, however, which have been taken from him must be placed in the wardrobe, and kept there, so that if at some later time he should agree to the suggestion of the devil that he should leave the monastery, he can be stripped of the clothing of the monastery before being sent away. (Parry 1990, Ch. LVIII, pp. 94–5)

Of the doorkeeper

At the gate of the monastery, a wise old man is to be posted, one capable of receiving a message and giving a reply, and whose maturity gurarantees that he will not wander round. The doorkeeper should have a cell near the gate, so that persons who arrive may always find someone at hand to give them a reply. As soon as anyone knocks, or a poor man calls out, he should answer ‘Thanks be to God’ or ‘God bless you’. Then with all the gentleness that comes from the fear of God, he should speedily and with Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the warmth of charity attend to the enquirer. (Parry 1990, Ch. LXVI, p. 107)

Notes 1 See Pevsner 1966, pp. 299–307, Waites 1997, Fergusson and Harrison, 1999, and, more generally on monasteries, Braunfels 1980. 2 Walter Horn and Ernest Born made an extensive study of the plan of St Gall and constructed a model (Horn and Born 1979). St Benedict is reported to have written his rule at a monastery he developed in Monte Cassino, southern Italy; see Parry 1990, p. viii. A monastery is still there, but it has been rebuilt several times. 3 The Rule of St Benedict, translated by Abbott Parry and with an introduction and commentary by Esther de Waal, Gracewing, Leominster, 1990 (hereafter Parry 1990). 3.3 LUCIEN KROLL: THE DOOR1

Translated by Peter Blundell Jones

The entrance is the most sensitive place in a dwelling: it gives some idea of the identity of the inhabitants and of whether they want you to know them or not. Not so long ago the window looking on to the street would display a vase, a plant set between glass and curtain, or a statue facing outwards. Even the hem of the curtain was turned inward, the best side being reserved for the street. Front doors had attention lavished on them, protected by a welcoming porch. The letterbox was celebrated, the door knocker a piece of craftsmanship: this is after all the frontier of tactile contact between the outside world and the family. Nothing was abstract, nothing done in a mean or contemptuous way. What has happened to this constructive display of ethnological expression? It is notably absent in the basic modern door with its miserable letter flap in sheet metal and its industrial bellpush. Today it is a relief even to see the scrap of sticking plaster that a doctor has stuck under his bell to inform his patients of changes in his surgery hours!

FIGURE 3.3.1 Lucien Kroll’s drawing of a traditional door, published with this text in his book Composants of 1985 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Note 1 From The Architecture of Complexity, 1986, London: Batsford; translation by Peter Blundell Jones. 3.4 THE JAPANESE TEA CEREMONY

Lucy Block

Anthropological perspectives on ritual are often based on the assumption that ritual can be described as an act that differentiates the sacred from the profane.1 A paradigm of how architecture and landscape can be used to produce a state of enlightenment can be found in the ritual environment of the tea garden, as developed for the Japanese tea ceremony. An important component is its connection with the teachings and beliefs of Zen philosophy, for Zen is integral to the essence of the philosophy of tea, in that it finds the ‘conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life’.2 Through the heightened significance and consciousness applied to one’s actions, the profane act of taking tea is transformed into one of spiritual significance. The way of tea, chado (Figure 3.4.1), is an act of meditation and enlightenment revealing the harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity within.3 Nischke states that:

The more consciousness that is introduced into one’s actions, the more graceful they become. Thus what was usually referred to as the tea ceremony became a meditation, what was known as the tea garden or tea arbour became a temple.4

Zen rejects the world’s outward complexities and embraces an appreciation and awareness for the smallest incidents of life, which can be defined by the notion that, ‘the holy is the 5 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 ordinary, the sacred is the profane’. Zen’s main discipline is that of the attainment of enlightenment, which the Japanese refer to as satori. It is through a wider understanding and awareness of the intricacies of the everyday social routine and mundane acts performed that enlightenment can be achieved. The tea ceremony, chanoyu, is intricately connected with its setting, and this relationship is fundamental to the understanding of the way of tea. Within the ritual of chado, we are confronted with a complex series of actions and symbolic gestures, which culminate in the realisation of the sacred experience. Anthropologists often view ritualised actions taken as ‘thoughtless action’,6 which can be defined as, ‘routinised, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic – and therefore the purely . . . physical expression of logically prior ideas’.7 This method of analysis is referred to as the ‘thought–action dichotomy’, which suggests that ritual action is The Japanese tea ceremony 179

FIGURE 3.4.1 Plan of the double garden and tea house, showing the necessary buildings and important middle gate Source: After plan in Keane 2009, p. 199

without conscious thought and is merely learned behaviour. When considering the way of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 tea from this position, chado demonstrates that it is, in fact, only through the integration of conscious thought with action that enlightenment can be achieved. Any suggestion that these two aspects are distinct within the tea ritual is ineffectual, for, in Zen, experience and expression are one. The symbolism and philosophies embedded within the tea house, chashitsu, and the tea garden, chaniwa (Figure 3.4.1), are vital in the creation of an enhanced mindfulness of one’s self and, thereby, the achievement of enlightenment. The elements within the tea ceremony and its ritual environment are embedded with symbolic devices that impact upon the ritual body. The fundamental feature that achieves this is the transitional route, or roji (Figure 3.4.3), which leads from the profane outer world to the inner sanctum of the tea house (Figure 3.4.2). The journey to the chashitsu is designed to increase the participants’ awareness and 180 Lucy Block

FIGURE 3.4.2 Uchi-roji, the inner garden and the tea house Source: Photograph by Chris Hill Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 FIGURE 3.4.3 Tobi-ishi, the stepping stones that draw attention to your gait Source: Photograph by Chris Hill

FIGURE 3.4.4 Tsukubai, the well of purifying water Source: Photograph by Chris Hill The Japanese tea ceremony 181

consciousness of each action performed. Everyday activities such as walking, eating and drinking, which one would normally perform almost unconsciously, become elevated to a heightened state of awareness generated by the arrangement and devices used within the ritual setting. This feature of the tea ceremony is directly linked to Zen ideologies, fundamental to the creation of the art of tea, in that, ‘the more conscious we are of our daily activities, the more conscious we become of ourselves’.8 A defining element for the ritual environment of the tea ceremony is the emphasis placed upon the threshold. Doors and gates punctuate the progression of spaces leading to the tea house and increase appreciation of the transition from the profane to the sacred. In Japanese Gardens: Right angle and natural form, Nitschke goes on to suggest that, ‘the more barriers that have to be passed on the way to the soan, the tea arbour, the more sacred the site appears’.9 Addressing ritual and sacred space, Eliade considers the threshold in depth, identifying the significance of this device in separating the sacred from the profane. The symbolic emphasis contained leads him to conclude that the ‘threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where these worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible’.10 The first threshold encountered by guests on arrival at the roji-mon is the entry gate, which marks the entrance into the sacred realm of the tea garden. As a signal that the host is prepared and anticipating their arrival, the gate is left partially ajar, a subtle device repeated throughout the journey to the tea house to signify each barrier and the associated invitation to pass through it. The guests proceed to the yori-tsuki, the changing room, where they remove their outside clothes and change into the ceremonial plain kimono, split-toed socks (tabi) and sandals (yori), supplied by the host. This simple act once again signals a subconscious transition into the sacred realm and prepares the participant for the ritual experience. After they have changed, the guests move to the koshikake machiai, the waiting bench, where they sit and contemplate the garden, admiring the flowers and scroll displayed. Once the host has prepared the tea house and is ready to begin the ceremony, he or she walks from the chashitsu, through the garden to the koshikake machiai to summon the guests. The host then returns to the tea house to make the final preparations and leaves the gates to the tea house, the naka-kuguri and nijiri- guchi, partially ajar in anticipation of the guests’ arrival. The principal guest leads the group in a single-file formation through the chaniwa towards the naka-kuguri gate. The chaniwa is divided into two main parts, the inner and outer roji. The area of the chaniwa situated between the roji-mon and naka-kuguri is referred to as the soto-roji. The soto-roji is the mediator between the profane world and the inner sacred space of the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 chashitsu. The aesthetic qualities of the separate areas of the garden are extremely distinct from each other, with the soto-roji more elaborate in design, with rich foliage and planting. The stone pathway, nobedan, is generally more direct, and the structure of the paving stones is more ordered, than those within the uchi-roji. The temporal nature of the roji is dramatically important to the preparation of the ritual body and mind. Nitschke suggests the notion of ‘experiential time’ within the tea garden as a device with which to create the ritual environment and goes on to say that one can ‘expand space by increasing experiential time through the reduction of speed and the obstruction of movement’.11 Through the introduction of winding pathways, stepping stones and obstacles such as the naka-kuguri, the tea garden forces the participants to slow their movement and become more conscious of each step taken. The time spent progressing through particular areas of the garden also subtly increases the 182 Lucy Block

perceived distance from the mundane outer world and thereby enhances the ritual experience of the participant. In addition, the roji is used as a device to cleanse ‘the dust of the world from one’s heart and mind’.12 In The Way Of Tea: A symbolic analysis, Kondo suggests that, with the symbolic nature of ‘the purity, freshness and naturalness of the garden, the transfer of symbolic qualities intensifies’.13 This sensory cleansing is a primary aspect of the intimate connection between Zen and chado, and it is the outer roji’s main purpose to cleanse the senses and remove the defilements of the outer world, creating purity, sei, and tranquillity, jaku, within the ritual body. Rather than denying sensory stimulation, the tea garden and tea house intensify sensory experience through an amplified focus upon such simple acts as contemplating the setting of the tea house, smelling the rich foliage of the garden, listening to the boiling water in the kettle, tasting the tea and handling the utensils. In the Hagakure: The book of the Samurai, Nakano Kazuma states that, ‘when thus all the sense organs are cleansed, the mind itself is cleansed of defilements’.14 Transition from the soto-roji to the uchi-roji is achieved through the middle crawl-through gate, the naka-kuguri. The naka-kuguri is a stand-alone timber wall or fence, with a pitched roof and small, window-like opening. This opening is placed approximately half a metre above the ground, with large ‘trump stones’, or yaku-shion, either side of it, upon which the guests stand as they enter. The gateway measures approximately 1 metre square, so that the guest is required to squeeze and bow while passing through into the inner sanctuary of the garden. This use of threshold is a powerful device to inculcate humility and reverence in the guest, as demonstrated through the chado principle of kei. Upon entry into the uchi-roji, the atmosphere of the garden changes dramatically (Figure 3.4.4). The vegetation is extremely basic – primarily mosses and simple foliage. The aesthetic qualities of this area follow wabi sabi, the appreciation of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is through this concept that jaku, the chado principle of tranquillity, is manifested. Wabi can be defined as a ‘quiet, sober refinement or subdued taste’, whereas sabi is the ‘beauty or serenity that comes with age’.15 When related to the inner roji, the subdued and refined qualities of the arrangement and planting all contribute to this sense of an ‘aesthetic of poverty’.16 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.4.5 Tsukubai, close-up, with water ladle: all the implements must be beautiful and worthy of contemplation Source: Photograph by Chris Hill The Japanese tea ceremony 183

FIGURE 3.4.6 Chado FIGURE 3.4.7 Chaniwa FIGURE 3.4.8 Roji Source: Drawn by Masashi Minagawa Source: Drawn by Masashi Minagawa Source: Drawn by Masashi Minagawa

A fundamental element of the design of the chaniwa as a whole is the consideration of juxtaposition. The contrasting aesthetics and ambience felt within the different spaces enhance the ritual environment of the outer and inner roji. This is demonstrated by Nitschke in the notion that, ‘what is to be empty must first be filled’,17 which suggests that, to achieve the meditative qualities of the way of tea, as evident within Zen doctrine, the consciousness of the transition between the profane and the sacred is vital. Therefore, in contrast to the soto-roji, which focuses on a purification of the ritual body, the uchi-roji’s primary function is to increase the consciousness of the guests’ movements and ritual body. Devices such as the stepping stones (tobi-ishi) (Figure 3.4.6) and water basin (tsukubai) demonstrate this effectively. The tobi-ishi lead the guests from the naka-kuguri to the entrance of the tea house. The stones are arranged in a haphazard formation to elevate the basic act of walking to one of heightened consciousness, which enhances the connection between the ritual body and the natural surroundings of the roji. The final gesture enacted by the guests before entering the chashitsu is the ritual purification performed at the tsukubai, a stone water basin (Figures 3.4.7 and 3.4.8). Tsukubai appear at numerous religious sites across Japan and are used to ritually cleanse the hands and the mouth prior to entering a sacred site or building. In this situation, the chado principle of purification, sei, is once again demonstrated, as the oral and haptic senses are cleansed of contamination.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 It can be suggested that, within the symbolic nature of ‘the purity, freshness and naturalness of the garden, the transfer of symbolic qualities intensifies’, and Kondo goes on to identify that, ‘the ritual ablution with water not only washes away the “dust of the world”, it also metonymically transfers the qualities of water – freshness and purity – to the persons of the guests themselves’.18 The tsukubai is further used to increase the consciousness in the simple act of washing and the actions taken to do so. Tsukubai literally translates as ‘the place where one has to bend down’, and it is this bowing motion that induces the impression of humility and awareness of one’s self. To enter the tea house, the guest must first pass through the final threshold, the nijiri-guchi, a small, crawl-through entrance no more than a metre in height and width. The nijiri-guchi limits the movement of the participant and acts as a device ‘to increase one’s consciousness of 184 Lucy Block

one’s own body, and in addition . . . requires everyone to bow and be humbled, regardless of social status in the ordinary world’.19 Through this simple device, the transition from the rich nature of the garden into the simple, tranquil interior is emphasised dramatically. The psychological effect upon the guest is fundamental, and Nitschke illustrates this through the summation that, ‘what one wants to enlarge, one first reduces experientially’.20 The door is left partially ajar once more, to signal that the host is ready for the guests to enter. The principal guest enters first, removing his sandals, and places them on the stone adjacent to the entrance. The guests follow, with the final guest shutting the door firmly behind them to close off the inner sanctum of the tea room from the outer realm of the garden. The sound of the door closing signals to the host that the tea ceremony can begin. Considering the ritual of the tea ceremony itself, it cannot be interpreted as a single, defining moment; rather, it is a combination of its individual parts and the relative consciousness that these elements induce in the participant, for, ‘by its precise orchestration of sequence and the interrelations among symbols in different sensory modes, the tea ceremony articulates feeling and thought, creating a distilled form of experience set apart from the mundane world’.21 The stages that a participant of chado is led through are precisely orchestrated to provide an intricate sequence of ritual experiences. It is a system of symbols and devices that enable the cleansing of the senses and an increased mindfulness of the self, achieved through a complex combination of mechanisms. It is through the juxtaposition of formality, distinction of the sacred and profane, an intensification of sensory perception, heightened awareness of movement, connection of the ritual body and environment that ultimately culminate in an enhanced consciousness of one’s self. ‘One approaches not a sacred object or space, but oneself; and now the most holy self is the fully transparent or aware one.’22

Notes 1 Eliade 1959. 2 Okakura 1956, p. 52. 3 The tea master Sen no Rikyu (1522–91) set these four terms as the key principles of chado. He is attributed with defining what is considered to now be the ‘way of tea’. 4 Nitschke 1993, p. 76. 5 Ibid., p. 73. 6 Bell 1992, p. 19. 7 Ibid., p. 19. 8 Nitschke 1993b, p. 150. 9 Ibid., p. 153. 10 Eliade 1959, p. 25.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 11 Nitschke 1993, p. 35. 12 Sen 1979, p. 3. 13 D. Kondo (1985) The way of tea: A symbolic analysis, Man, New Series (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute), vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 287–306, p. 301. 14 Suzuki 1973, p. 281. 15 Freeman 2007, pp. 22–3. 16 H. Plutschow (1999) An anthropological perspective on the Japanese tea ceremony, Anthropoetics, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 8. 17 Nitschke 1993, p. 3. 18 Kondo 1985, pp. 287–306, p. 301. 19 Nitschke 1993, p. 75. 20 Ibid., p. 37. 21 Kondo 1985, pp. 287–306, p. 302. 22 Nitschke 1993, p. 75 3.5 THE EAST ROYAL TOMBS OF THE QING DYNASTY

Peter Blundell Jones, Jianghua Wang and Bing Jiang

In traditional Chinese architecture, the making of routes and progressions for ritual purposes was especially elaborate, for the society was rigidly hierarchical and devoted to Confucian concepts of respect for parents and ancestors. In addition, the philosophy of Daoism engendered a great respect for the forces of nature and the way they were considered to manifest themselves in the landscape as flows of energy, qi.1 It is, therefore, hardly surprising that some of the most impressive spatial progressions in China are found at royal tombs. As the emperor, as Son of Heaven, was supposedly able to intercede with natural forces, these are also places where the landscape is most visibly engaged, and the practice of feng-shui is most carefully observed.2 The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty at Zunhua, Hebei Province, north east of Beijing, are relatively late, the earliest dating from 1661,3 but they follow the same general pattern as earlier tombs and have the advantage of being well preserved, and their relationship with the surrounding landscape is still relatively unspoiled. The enormous sacred precinct, of around 2,500 km2, includes five separate tombs for emperors and yet more for queens and concubines.4 Embedded side by side in a range of rising hills at the north end of the site, just in front of the remains of the (by then) long disused Great Wall,5 they are approached by a single sacred way nearly 10 km long, along which a sequence of monuments unfolds (see plans Figures 3.5.1 and 3.5.2 and photo sequence Figures 3.5.3 to 3.5.15). The modern visitor is free to wander, with little sense of the once forbidden and protected nature of the huge site.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The starting point is a broad paifang or ceremonial gate (Figure 3.5.3), with five arches hierarchically heightened towards the centre, largely symbolic roofs carved with imitation tiles and elaborate applied decoration. It is no physical barrier, but it does mark the beginning and centre line of the route towards the tombs, leading north towards the main gate. In China, all ceremonial building complexes were laid out on a more or less south–north axis, including the Forbidden City, for the emperor was regarded as connected with the sun, and his throne had to face south. This resulted in axial progressions for all official architecture, but, unlike Western baroque layouts, the axis was not left open. It had to be closed to the south, often with a screen wall set opposite the entrance. So, south of the paifang, seen axially as one returns (see p. 156), is a lone pointed hill, a propitious gift in feng-shui terms, and the main reason for the choice of site.6 186 P. Blundell Jones, J. Wang and B. Jiang

FIGURE 3.5.1 General plan of the eastern tomb complex, entered centre bottom and leading to several tombs set in the foot of the mountains at the top, showing the roads, monuments and outer wall; north is top (redrawn after a version in the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo)

Walking north, one soon reaches the three-arched and roofed main gate in the boundary wall (Figure 3.5.4 and plan above). This was not fully the edge, for there were three notional

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 boundary layers beyond it, designated with regular coloured stakes in red, white and blue, showing, respectively, the fire buffer zone, the 60-m limit of hunting, and the 5-km limit for fires and mining.7 This is typical of how, in parallel with its obsessive axiality, Chinese architecture stressed progressive enclosure. The main gate is a hip-roofed building,8 built in masonry rendered in royal red, but with doors studded with ceremonial ‘nails’ of royal number,9 and a tiled roof carrying on its hip ends the customary array of protective mythical beasts. The central arch was heightened for passage by the emperor, his route marked on the ground by a raised central path of smooth stone paving, along which he could walk or be carried.10 The gate afforded shelter to guards and a temporary rest for visitors, and just within was a changing pavilion, where honoured visitors could adopt more appropriate attire. The reigning emperor also changed dress between different parts of his ritual visit. The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 187 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.5.2 Detailed plan of the first tomb in the series, that of Emperor Shunzhi, from the triple bridge at the bottom through the sequence of courts to the tomb embedded in the hill at the top (redrawn after a version in Chinese archives). 188 P. Blundell Jones, J. Wang and B. Jiang

FIGURE 3.5.3 First paifang, a purely ceremonial, freestanding gate set axially between the holy mountain and the main gate, which can just be seen through the central arch Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.4 Main gate set in the wall that enclosed the whole complex. The merit pavilion beyond can just be seen through the half-open middle gate Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.5 Merit pavilion, a square building containing a sculpture of a tortoise with a stele on its back recording the virtues of the emperor Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

From the main gate, the next monument is visible on axis about 500 m away (Figure 3.5.5). It is a small square tower, with a double-eaved roof, hipped below, half gable above, doubly symmetrical, with an archway facing each cardinal direction, and standing at the centre of a larger square defined by four stone pylons. It has more protective animals on its ridge and corners and increased decoration of the upper wall. This is a so-called merit pavilion, containing in its raised ground floor the figure of a tortoise, a holy animal in Chinese mythology,11 with an inscribed stone stele erected on its back enumerating the merits of the first Qing emperor, Shunzhi. The tortoise’s head faces back towards the site entrance, its body blocking direct progression. Visitors circumvent it to regain the axis, and then proceed

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 straight until another natural feature intervenes (Figure 3.5.1). This is a low hill lying between entrance and tomb, an earthly organ to be respected, and so the route veers westward to circumvent it, and then swings back on to axis (Figure 3.5.6), all the time broad, horizontal and centred on the emperor’s stripe of raised paving. Distant mountains become clearer, and a long, straight walk opens with paired stone pylons, followed by a sequence of stone figures on each side, first animals, then soldiers and courtiers, as if on parade. There are eighteen pairs, twice the imperial number nine. Ten minutes’ walk brings one to an inner paifang (Figure 3.5.7), the dragon and phoenix gate. It is smaller and more delicate, with three arches this time, the middle again larger than the sides. The gateways are real, and one is obliged to pass through, for there are walls between and to the sides, but no closable doors and no roofs over the openings. Roofs instead sit on The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 189

FIGURE 3.5.6 (top) After the merit pavilion, the route curves to avoid a low hill, and then returns to the axis, now lined with a parade of sculpted figures Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.7 (bottom) The parade terminates at an inner paifang, another ceremonial gate. The mountain range in which the tombs are embedded can be seen behind

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

intermediate walls treated with the centralised tiling patterns normal for a screen wall.12 It serves as an intermediate gate, after which progress is less formal. The ground drops and curves left and right to cross a ceremonial bridge of seven arches, skewed away from the axis but almost in line. Water nurtures life and brings qi, and is also one of the five elements or phases in Daoism. The good feng-shui site has protective mountains to the north and is open to the south, and a river should pass in front. Departing from the bridge, the way runs on, contiguous in its paving with the emperor’s central reservation, but curving with the contours and dividing off at various junctions to approach later tombs. It crosses another bridge over a second small stream, this time with 190 P. Blundell Jones, J. Wang and B. Jiang

FIGURE 3.5.8 After meandering about and crossing more bridges, the route arrives at Emperor Shunzhi’s tomb, always with raised central path for the visiting living emperor Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.9 A triple bridge leads axially to a merit pavilion, again with tortoise and stele Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.10 Behind this, on axis, is the gate to the walled tomb precinct Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.11 Through the gate and on to the main hall, where most offerings are made Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 five arches. The axial route is reasserted on approach to the primary tomb of the site, that of Emperor Shunzhi (Figure 3.5.8). The elaborate walled complex has a sequence of courts, pavilions and halls and backs into the chosen burial hill (Figure 3.5.2). The mountains behind were symbolically interpreted for feng-shui when the location was selected, reportedly the choice of the emperor on a hunting trip. The approach crosses yet another small stream (Figure 3.5.10), this time via three parallel three-arched bridges. After the bridge comes an open forecourt leading to the gatehouse, but the axis is blocked by a second merit pavilion, again double eaved and housing another sculpted tortoise with a stele on its back. Next lies the main gate to the tomb complex (Figure 3.5.10), a five-bay hall with hipped roof and three wooden double doors set half-way across its plan to share shelter between inside and out. It has bracketing, painted decoration and nine rows of nine symbolic nails in each door. There The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 191

are dragon-like creatures on the ridge ends and a full complement of protective animals on the hips.13 As high-roofed walls encircle the tomb, this is the only way in. The gate opens to a large court. On either side stand censers for burning incense and side pavilions for preparation of offerings. On axis is the main hall, set on a platform of nine steps in three flights, the middle the emperor’s route paved with a dragon relief (Figure 3.5.11). This double-eaved, five-bay building was the principal site for offerings to the deceased emperor, and it visually blocks access to the tomb. One circumvents the blind-backed hall

FIGURE 3.5.12 Directly behind the blind-backed main hall, the axis is re-presented with another triple set of gates, here seen from the side as one circumvents the hall to the east Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE 3.5.13 Back on axis and passing through the gate, there is another paifang that frames this shot. In front of us is a stone carved table of offerings, then steps up to the arched tomb entrance. Above, reached from stairs beyond, is the last merit pavilion Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 3.5.14 Passing through the tomb passage, one discovers a final court, with a screen wall signalling the tomb beyond Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones 192 P. Blundell Jones, J. Wang and B. Jiang

FIGURE 3.5.15 Hillside beyond the wall, showing the mound over the tomb, where the living emperor adds ceremonial earth to his ancestor’s grave Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

to rediscover the axis at three roofed gates, approached by separate flights of steps, nine in the middle and eight to the sides (Figure 3.5.12), and to reach them one again crosses a small stream, running east–west. The gates are set in a ceramic-lined wall, each with double wooden doors. They lead to an upper sloping court, where the centre line recurs in a small roofed paifang offering declarations of merit, and then a table of petrified offerings, for the vessels are carved in stone (Figure 3.5.13). A last water channel crosses east to west, curving in to traverse the centre at right angles and then curving out again. A sloping ramp, now without central path, leads steeply up to the single arched entrance and then tunnels through the solid stone base of the last ceremonial building, passing the concealed entrance to the tomb below. It re-emerges in a shallow court, where the emperor’s central paving re-appears briefly, only to plunge beneath a wall blocked by a small roofed screen wall, as if he might pass on through to the tomb (Figure 3.5.14). However, the real continuation is sideways, up ramps to right and left of the court, which lead to the final, double-eaved merit pavilion above the tunnel. From the front of its gallery, one can look back over the whole complex, but a path behind encircles the earth mound of the tomb (Figure 3.5.15), departing on one side to return on the other. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

The Shunzhi Emperor’s entombment Visiting the buildings and walking the spirit path arouse curiosity about how the death rites unfolded, and so it would be rewarding to match the architectural sequence to a single, fully known ritual sequence, ideally that of the emperor’s entombment. However, this is not easily achievable, partly for lack of information, partly because the process was unusually protracted. The Shunzhi Emperor died unexpectedly of smallpox, aged only 23, in 1661, with the tomb decided but not yet built, and so there was a 2-year delay before his interment. After customary mourning of 15 days in Beijing, he was taken with great ceremony to nearby Jingshang to lie in state.14 Following Manchu custom, he was then cremated 100 days after his death, his The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 193

urn remaining in Jingshang.15 Only in the summer of 1663 was it moved to the tomb, and records reveal more about the enormous, week-long public procession from the capital than they do about the entombment. The spirit way was still incomplete, for the main mourning hall was only finished a year or so later, but the paucity of information is also due to the entombment having been a relatively restricted process, carried out by officers of princely rank and unwitnessed by outsiders.16 What we do know is that the procession arrived and waited in the last of the five overnight camps provided along the way, where a tent-like hall housed the revered remains within a rope outer wall with guarded gates. The urn and tablet were retained there for some weeks, offerings being made daily, until the propitious date for transfer to the tomb, calculated by royal mathematicians, arrived. Three days earlier, sacrifices were made to the ancestors, the spirits of Heaven, Earth, the planets, mountains and rivers. The guard of honour was reconstituted, and the high-ranking officers waited outside the doors of the tent, lower-ranking ones waiting outside the gates of the rope fence. Officers of the Rites Department made offerings, while the seals, books and urns of the emperor and his two queens buried with him were transferred to carriages, and the procession set off for the tomb. When they reached the inner gate, behind the yet uncompleted hall, the highest- ranking officers stood inside and the lower-ranking ones outside, and, at a precisely calculated hour, the urns were put into the tomb, and the tomb was sealed. An officer made an offering of three cups of wine before the closed door, and the effigies and mourning bands used in the processions were ceremonially burned. Next day, the officers returned to offer more wine as a farewell.17

Regular memorial visits The interment ritual was but the starting point in the life of a tomb, for the rituals of remembrance continued as if the emperor were still present. His spirit was offered meals three times every day, set out with due ceremony and later cleared away, and, twice a month, at no moon and full moon, came more elaborate observances in celebration of the lunar calendar.18 Yet more elaborate offerings were made at the eight annual festivals and on the birth and death days of the deceased emperor. On days that marked seasonal changes, such as tomb- sweeping day in the spring, either the reigning emperor himself or his representative had to be present, while the meals offered to the ancestor included eighteen main dishes and fifty- six desserts. All this required a considerable staff, and a special yamen, or court office, was set up to look after the tombs, which of course grew in number as the dynasty progressed. By the late nineteenth century, each tomb had assigned to it 130 servants of the Imperial

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Household, 110 soldiers as guards, 120 officers and assistants of the Rites Department and 40 workmen from the Department of Works: in all, 400 persons. All lived in their own camps nearby, the Imperial Household camp within the sacred precinct. In addition, the army kept a force of 3,500 soldiers outside to police the perimeter.19 The climactic ritual occasion was the visit of the reigning emperor, which occurred about once a year and involved a 5-day processional march from Beijing, accompanied by other members of the royal family, distinguished officers of state and an enormous retinue, staying overnight in temporary palaces erected for the purpose. Having arrived along the spirit path, the emperor’s duty was to visit all the imperial tombs in turn, to make offerings and ritual kowtows to his ancestors. In deference to his fathers, he entered the tomb complexes via the east gate, rather than through the hierarchically dominant central one that was normally his 194 P. Blundell Jones, J. Wang and B. Jiang

prerogative.20 His offerings to his fathers and mothers were made, not just in the outer court, at the main hall, where the daily offerings were made, but also in the inner court, in front of the tomb entrance. The tomb remained sealed, but, in an almost private gesture of special deference to his ancestor, the emperor would, as a final rite, ascend the upper mound above the tomb and there distribute some fresh earth, taking care not to disturb his sleeping father beneath. The type and sequences of these ceremonies were well established, and their meanings were understood, controlled by the Department of Rites. They were part of a spatial and symbolic system that applied to all official buildings and even to houses. The latter focused on the ancestral hall, the holy centre as defined by Confucianism, which taught a duty of utmost respect for the father and reinforced the continuity of the paternal line.21 The emperor was effectively the father of the entire society, and so the royal tomb, in its space and symbolism, represented the extreme case of ancestral celebration, justifying all the rest. The demigod emperor could not simply disappear. When he died, in theory, his soul split, one half returning to Heaven, the other half remaining with his body, which had to be returned to the Earth. The influence of ancestors survives even today among ordinary Chinese, who welcome their return during the New Year festival and make offerings to them.22 One need acknowledge no belief in the supernatural to see the value of such shared remembrance: the daily and monthly offerings at the tombs of the Chinese emperors and the annual visit of the emperor himself to kowtow to his father, grandfather and others provided some guarantee of their continuing influence. More essentially, it showed the continuity of the family line and its achievements. The modern tourist is allowed almost everywhere, and tourism has become the raison d’être of ‘world heritage sites’. However, in imperial times, few were permitted even to enter the precinct. As a public spectacle, the annual journey of the emperor from the capital was all that ordinary people witnessed, the tomb site being as ‘forbidden’ as the imperial city. The more privileged you were, the further you could enter, penetrating more deeply into the nesting series of enclosures, through gates and across bridges, towards the sacred heart, which was always clear in Chinese buildings. It might contain the family’s sacred ancestral tablets, the seat of a magistrate, images of the Buddha or even the body, dead or living, of the emperor himself, implying a universal reading of spatial hierarchy. Official institutions were set out on a south–north axis, the central path always reserved for the emperor, his representative or the patriarch. The symbolic treatment of doors, gates and roofs along the way followed a consistent vocabulary regulated by the Department of Rites. Consistency of spatial layout and types of ritual progression across dynasties for hundreds and even thousands of years suggest Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 that these meanings were well established and effective. The tomb and its spirit way were, therefore, not mere memorials, but part of a more universal system of architectural representation. In a society where the emperor was Son of Heaven and the souls of past emperors were a guarantee of continuity, their place of rest was a sacred place, and its architecture was an exemplary model, even if few ever saw it.

Notes 1 Qi is both breath and wind, but also manifest in water, flowing through dragon veins in the mountains. It is an essential concept in Chinese cosmology, but untranslatable. For a good explanation in English, see Needham 1956, Ch. 13, ‘Fundamental ideas of Chinese science’, pp. 216–345 (he uses the spelling chhi). The East Royal Tombs of the Qing Dynasty 195

2 Literally ‘wind and water’, a long-established means of deciding about the quality and orientation of a site, developed from the principles of Daoism but evolved through several schools. For a clear and concise summary, see Schinz 1996, p. 417. 3 See Zhao 2006, pp. 1889–90. 4 The Shunzhi, Kangxi, Qianlong, Xianfeng and Tongzhi emperors, Steinhardt 2002, p. 273. 5 Built against invasion from the north, but the Qing dynasty were Manchu, having invaded and taken over from the north. 6 The south-south-east orientation of the axis in this case is probably due to the alignment between the pointed hill and the hill chosen for the first tomb site, based on optimal feng-shui relationships. 7 Liu 2007, pp. 38–44. 8 In the hierarchy of building types, hips were superior to gables, and double-eaved roofs superior to single. 9 The royal number is nine, highest single number and symbol of the Chinese state. The so-called nails in doors must have derived from construction techniques but became symbolic, consisting of applied wooden bosses. As the number of nails in your door depended on your status and was regulated by the Department of Rites, you would count them. 10 When he was in a sedan chair carried by a minimum of four bearers, but more often eight, sixteen or even thirty-two, the bearers would all walk to the sides, so that nobody would despoil his path, and the presence of a sculpted ramp as the central portion of steps up to a building, usually depicting a dragon, shows the intention that he be carried. 11 The tortoise was one of the four numinous animals, along with the dragon, phoenix and unicorn, respected for its longevity and used for divining, its carapace providing a grid. See Sterckx 2002. 12 The screen wall is a formal device to block an axis, usually with a rectangular field of tiles or a relief of sculpted figures and capped with a tiled roof, real or represented. It can stand outside and opposite a gate, as at many yamens (law courts), and can also be angled to either side of the main entrance, like a funnel in plan. It can also obstruct the axis within an entrance, forcing visitors to go around. In some cases, it evidently increases privacy, but it is also thought to contain the energy or qi flowing southward on the axis. There is no equivalent in Western architecture. 13 A mythological animal chi-wen or chi-wei (literally fish lips or fish tail, or chi’s lips, chi’s tail), son of Dragon. ‘The chi-wen, which like swallowing, are placed on both ends of the ridgepoles of roofs (to swallow all evil influences).’ See Visser 1913, p. 101. More descriptions can be found in Welch 2008, pp. 122–3. 14 The mourning started the day of death, the eighth of the first month in the Chinese calendar, and the date he was taken to Jingshan was the second of the second month, the twenty-fifth day after his death. 15 According to burial rites introduced by Shunzhi himself, first-class princes should be cremated 1 year after their death, other princes, 3 months after. It is not known why the emperor was cremated only 100 days after death. 16 Like the Jesuit fathers, who left the best independent accounts of the public rituals, for example Semedo 1996, Ch. XVI, ‘The funerals and tombs of the Chinese’, pp. 110–24. 17 See Da Qing Hui Dian (DQHD, Collected Statutes of the Qing Dynasty), the 1st version edited in 1684–90, during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor, Taibei: Wenhai Publishing House, vol. 96, 1994, pp. 6390–8; DQHD, the 5th version re-edited in 1801–18 during the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, vol. 36, pp. 44–6, vol. 456, pp. 24–65 (the pages of this single volume); Zhao Erxun, the QSG (Qing Shi Gao, the Draft History of the Qing), Zhi 67, vol.1, pp. 1889–991. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 18 The Chinese had worked out that solar and lunar movements coincided every 60 years, and so were able to manage a complex and shifting calendar, but it was issued by the emperor. He launched the agricultural year and was considered responsible for a successful harvest, as only he could intercede with Heaven. For more information about ceremonies at Shunzhi’s tomb, see DQHD, vols 428 and 523, pp. 1–5 (the pages of this single volume). 19 Xu 2003, pp. 309–19. 20 The central one is called the Spiritual Gate, reserved for the coffin or owner of the tomb (the spirit of the tomb), the east gate is called the Emperor’s Gate, for visiting emperors, and the west is called the Officers’ Gate, for officials. 21 Following the Neo-Confucianism of the fourteenth century, family houses over much of China were dominated by ancestral halls, always set on the south–north centre line to provide the culmination of a series of halls and courts and, therefore, in a clearly focal position; large families even built family temples dedicated to their ancestors. 22 Stafford 2000. 3.6 THE AUTOMATED GARDENS OF LUNÉVILLE

From the self-moving landscape to the circuit walk1

Renata Tyszczuk

And it might have been yet improved by a thought taken from one of the most flagrant perversions of taste that ever was exhibited to publick view. Stanislaus titular King of Poland, and little better than imaginary duke of Lorrain, contrived, at his fine palace of Luneville, in one of the richest and most delightful countries in Europe, full of real pastoral objects and rustic images, to degrade them by sticking up clock-work mills, wooden cows, and canvas milk-maids, all over his grounds; to the no small admiration of the Lorrainers, an honest race, better fitted for the enjoyments of a mild and equitable government, than for the relish of works of taste.2

The eighteenth-century architect James Stuart is discussing improvements to Cavendish Square in London when he calls up the contemporary example of Stanislas, ‘imaginary duke of Lorrain’, and the mechanical and artificial embellishments of his garden at Lunéville. While clearly demonstrating his disdain for Stanislas’ works, he nevertheless goes on to present Lunéville as a model for a more appropriate treatment of rus in urbe, with ‘painted sheep’, a ‘paste- board mill’ and ‘tin cascade’ recommended for the London square, in place of real animals and structures. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Stanislas Leszczynski, father-in-law of Louis XV and twice-exiled king of Poland, enjoyed a curious reputation lodged somewhere between fact and fiction. He appears in Voltaire’s Candide, as one of the ‘forsaken’ kings 3

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 spending carnival in Venice. At the same time, he was busy establishing himself as the king who does good, the roi bienfaisant, in his titular estate of the Duchy of Lorraine and Bar. Stanislas was a prolific writer who corresponded with key Enlightenment figures, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, and whose own work traversed utopian fable, political tract and instruction on agricultural economy.4 He was also renowned for his capricious material creations. These ranged from the invention of the baba-rhum, a rum-soaked pudding, to faux- marbre paintings on glass, illuminations and tricks of light for garden entertainments, as well as mechanical contraptions that included self-propelling boats and a three-wheeled carriage. The garden structures built for Stanislas at Lunéville, none of which has survived, displayed the irreverent and playful use of materials and the borrowing of techniques associated with the theatre and pleasure grounds. So it is no surprise that Lunéville could be compared, at The automated gardens of Lunéville 197

the time, to a ‘painted and corrupt Vauxhall’ and received with both admiration and contempt by contemporary visitors.5 Stanislas’ endeavours in the representational field have mostly been regarded by historians as symptomatic of the games and amusements of a dissolute court.6 Yet he attended to the connections between kingship, Utopia and society with particular sincerity and intensity in his gardens at Lunéville. His efforts to exploit the new Enlightenment conditions to create an exemplary kingdom promoted an as-if domain that was part theatre and part experiment.

Lunéville In 1737, Stanislas had initiated a building programme in the gardens of Lunéville with the construction of the Kiosk, a small pavilion for theatrical entertainments, inspired by his time in Bender, in the Ottoman Empire. From 1741, his programme became more ambitious. He created the Bas Bosquets, or the lower garden, by draining the marshland surrounding the chateau and diverting the river Vesouze. This vastly improved the conditions of the estate and, according to Montesquieu, rendered the air healthy.7 The new land between the river and the canal was then arranged into a series of plots, with cottages called the Chartreuses, a name derived from the dwellings of the Carthusians, an order of monks known as ‘gardeners’ for following their own programmes of cultivation.8 A year later, in 1742, Stanislas built the artificial village of the Rocher, on the opposite bank of the canal. The Rocher was an extraordinary assemblage of eighty-six life-sized wooden automata powered by water, set in a landscape of grottoes. The two ideal villages or miniature kingdoms, the Chartreuses and the Rocher, established an experimental territory in the Lunéville gardens (Figures 3.6.1 and 3.6.2). This was the setting for elaborate theatrical events, scientific demonstrations, game playing and promenades, but also intellectual discourse and an exploration of social status and courtly life.

Chartreuses Each cottage–pavilion of the Chartreuses village consisted of a room for dining and cooking, three further rooms, service pavilions and a small formal garden for growing vegetables, surrounded by trellis walls. The tenants for the cottages were chosen by the king from among his favourite guests and courtiers and would reside there during La Belle Saison, tending their gardens.9 The king would give each of the villagers the honour of hosting him once a month, when he would expect to sample dishes prepared from produce grown and harvested by the courtier–gardeners. He would keep his courtiers in suspense by not giving any potential host

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 more than 3 hours warning before arriving. The whole situation was, of course, staged, with real gardeners, servants and cooks doing all of the work. Stanislas was inspired by Fénelon, author of the Telemaque (1699) and royal tutor, to write his own instructive utopian text, the Entretien, and also to imitate Fénelon’s entertaining theatrical procedures for the instruction of royal princes. In one of his letters to his grandson Louis, the dauphin of France, Stanislas gives an account of the staged rural scenes, infused with affective and political content that Fénelon had fabricated for the Duke of Burgundy’s education.10 The Chartreuses village has the character of this kind of experimental demonstration in a fictional landscape. In scenes strangely reminiscent of Fénelon’s Télémaque, where artisans are transplanted from the city in order to create an agricultural paradise, the courtiers here are transferred from the château and, as forced residents of an ornamental, pocket Utopia, made hostage to a princely game. 198 Renata Tyszczuk

FIGURE 3.6.1 (left) Painting of Lunéville by an unknown artist. One of the Einville gallery panels formerly at the Musée du Château, Lunéville, but destroyed in the fire at the château on 2 January 2003 Source: © Inventaire Général – ADAGP, Musée du Château de Lunéville. Photograph D. Bastien 1990 FIGURE 3.6.2 (right) ‘Carte topographique du Château Royal de Lunéville et des Bosquets.’ Map of the Lunéville estate by André Joly, July 1767 Source: © Inventaire Général – ADAGP, Musée du Château de Lunéville

The role-playing evident in the Chartreuses, with its comic protocol, was endemic to the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 life of the court at Lunéville and calls up the continuity between ludic theatre, the possible reality of a Utopia and psychological experiment. The situations of the Chartreuses overturned the prevailing social order, presenting the king as a guest hosted by his own courtiers, the courtiers in turn taking the place of gardeners and servants in creating a meal for the king. The possible scenarios of the Chartreuses, whereby Stanislas’ mistress could play the role of a dairy maid, or his secretary could be found tending a garden, bear an uncanny resemblance to Locke’s account of the prince waking up in the body of a cobbler.11 Such reversals and role-playing dominated eighteenth-century deliberation on the place of the individual in society, as is shown in concern for the status of the actor in the writings of Diderot and Rousseau.12 Eighteenth-century theatre provided, not only a target for ridicule and satire, but also the vehicle of speculation regarding shifting social orders. The inversions and The automated gardens of Lunéville 199

oscillations of status deliberately inscribed in the topography at Lunéville cannily blurred the distinction between beneficiary and benefactor, performer and spectator, servant and king. As an interlude between political realities and imaginative fictions, the Chartreuses not only serve as a commentary on Versailles, the prevailing model of court life, but also anticipate the later transformation of this model in the Hameau of Marie-Antoinette.13

Rocher On the opposite side of the canal, the Rocher theatre–grotto of automata presented an alternative model of village life: a kingdom of even more exceptionally well-behaved and loyal subjects. This enormous display of automata in an artificial landscape was created for Stanislas by his architect, Emmanuel Héré, and his clockmaker, François Richard (Figures 3.6.3 and 3.6.4). It was an extraordinary example of the Enlightenment attempt to bring nature, society and technology to a single horizon of understanding. The theatre of the eighteenth century provided a context for the progressive blurring of the paradigm, the model, the hypothesis and the scientific or educational demonstration,14 and automata were the celebrated actors of the linked stages of salon, court and marketplace, dominating the cabinets de physique as well as the salles d’expositions.15 In the 1740s, Vaucanson’s flute-player, drummer and defecating duck toured Europe to great acclaim. Such seemingly self-moving things emerged as the central emblem of the mechanistic worldview dominant in the period, but also presaged impending industrialisation and the concomitant transformations of society. With their ambiguous, trans-categorical nature, eighteenth-century automata were tools used to test confusing relationships and were part of an era that probed the very nature of being human.16 The automaton could be didactic – an illustration of human function, or of the dichotomy of mind and matter. It evoked the monotony of repeated acts and witless conformism and provided an enduring metaphor for human foolishness, but, equally, it incited humour, wonder and curiosity. The automaton was deemed capable of supplanting the human model through a haunting resemblance and revealed a deeply flawed humanity. At the same time, human invention and ingenuity were revered for producing mechanical marvels through technical artifice.17 The Lunéville gardens harboured the conflicting meanings of automata in this period: marvellous machines afforded independent motion, as opposed to individuals incapable of independent action or thought. The Rocher was composed of 86 lifelike automata of humans, birds and animals. These were arranged in a series of rural vignettes, of working village houses with waterwheels and windmills, in a carefully constructed rocky landscape of sandstone, minerals and stalactites collected from Mount Vosges and vegetation gathered from the surrounding countryside.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The full-size androids were made of wood, wax and cloth, with heads that were modelled on inhabitants of Lunéville. It is as if Descartes’s illustration of the intellectual nature of judgement, whereby humans might be discovered masquerading as machines, is here brought uncannily to life.18 The captions to Héré’s engraving of the Rocher in the Recueil provided simple descriptions, giving scant detail of the movements or gestures of the various figures, and read almost as stage directions.19 Among automated scenes of village life were a shepherd playing his bagpipes, a peasant carving a piece of wood, a boy pushing a swing, a cat preparing to pounce on a rat that bared its teeth, men working at a forge and, above them, a solitary violin player. There were figures smoking pipes, drinking and singing in a tavern, women making butter and washing linen, a monkey being taunted by a small boy with an apple on a pole and a hermit praying in his cavernous cell. 200 Renata Tyszczuk

FIGURE 3.6.3 ‘Vue et perspective du Rocher.’ Engraving of the Rocher from Emmanuel Héré’s Recueil T1, pl. 22. Source: © Bibliotheque municipale de Nancy

FIGURE 3.6.4 ‘Le château et le Rocher de Lunéville.’ ‘André Jolyou atelier’, oil on canvas, eighteenth

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 century. Inv. 95.731 Source: © Musée Lorrain, Nancy. Photograph C. Philippot

The Rocher was unique, not merely in imitating the mundane activities of Lotharingian village life at full scale, but in simulating the accompanying sounds, smells and textures in a tour de force of artificial effects. The importance of such detail in juxtaposition with physiognomy, physiology, pattern and collection recalls the conventions of travel writing, nascent disciplines of anthropology, botany, humanities and natural sciences, as well as the curiosity cabinet or Wunderkammer. The Rocher’s artificial landscape not only harboured a microcosm of Lorraine, Stanislas’ exemplary kingdom, but presented a microcosm of nature itself. Whenever desired, the Rocher’s agitated scenes of village life could be set in motion by The automated gardens of Lunéville 201

the simple turning of a stopcock. The cries of animals, human voices and automated instrumentals mingled with the thunder of cannon and the lightning of pyrotechnics during spectacles on the canal. The attendant noise helped mask the shuddering and crunching of wooden cogs and wheels. The artificially disjunctive motions and fragmented gesticulations found their counterpart in the movement of tools, farm implements, the cycle of water and the turning of wheels. The Rocher landscape acted as a working diagram of the whole enterprise of irrigating, planting and preparing the land, not only of the gardens in the Bas Bosquets of Lunéville, but of King Stanislas’ greater undertaking in his contrived agricultural landscape of Lorraine. The material transmutations and illusionism of the Rocher and its corresponding ambiguities are thus set against the controlled transformations and industrialisation of a real landscape and society. The Rocher elicits disruptions, distortion of values and a neutralisation of time and scale: it is simultaneously a miniature working village and a giant clock. The dominant characteristic of both the Rocher and the Chartreuses is their presentation of several modalities of the ‘theatre of the world’, theatrum mundi, wherein life’s activities are explored through theatre. Above all, the hydraulically operated village of the Rocher, just like the Chartreuses, indicates the desire to animate, not simply to demonstrate or to know. In the eighteenth century, animation occupied a spectrum that ranged from inherited Aristotelian notions of the soul, anima, in movement and the essence of nature, through mechanics, ‘the clockwork universe’, to theatrical role-playing and the Enlightenment justi - fication of the passions. The self-moving landscape, through recourse to the possibilities of as-if architecture, presents itself alternately as a fantastic playground, serail, model village, farm, monastery and Utopia, where the meanings of culture are at the disposal of a roi bienfaisant as the choreographer of a dramatic and fictional narrative. The creation of fictions, a concern with the synthesis of Enlightenment knowledge and, subsequently, the bringing to life of the whole enterprise, so that everything could be experienced simultaneously, were presented within a synaesthetic version of the world as theatre.

Circuit walk By the end of Stanislas’ reign in Lorraine in the 1760s, visitors to the Lunéville gardens could take part in a ‘circuit walk’ leading round the periphery of the estate, enabling an encounter with the various pavilions and a variety of distractions that might provoke disgust, horror, amusement or delight. Inspection of the Rocher frequently marked both the beginning and the end of an instructive and entertaining journey that took in ‘clock-work mills, wooden cows, and canvas milk-maids’. The visitor could view the curiously unfolding tableaux from

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 village life by following the ambulatory around one cross-arm of the canal, with the cottages of the Chartreuses and attendant activities arranged on the opposite bank. With Héré’s captions in the Recueil acting as a guide to the sequence of the automatic theatrical display, the Rocher readily succumbs to the spectacle of a museum installation, with the paced viewing and spatial perusal of the visitors acting as a counterpoint to the automatic landscape. The circuit walk, as a way of observing, came to dominate the subsequent history of eighteenth-century gardens, and museum culture generally. Under Enlightenment criteria, the landscape, increasingly generalised as nature, is deemed capable of fusing divergent cultural strands and accommodating them in a single field of representation, traversed by a knowing spectator. In turn, this allows landscape and garden to be coerced and stage-managed, with the inclusion of architectural interventions as increasingly introverted and isolated 202 Renata Tyszczuk

vehicles for didactic messages. The landscape becomes progressively more dependent on the courtiers as readers for its actualisation, coinciding with the rise of the novel and idea of the sentimental imagination allowed to wander freely in a conceptual landscape in pursuit of self- understanding. Stanislas’ interventions in the château gardens anticipate the English landscape garden as a group of buildings within a contested topography and also the picturesque tradition as a series of views that acted on the senses, primarily aimed at aesthetic enjoyment and eliciting responses limited to questions of taste. For Stanislas, the appropriation of the surrounding countryside had only been possible as a theatre-like and game-like annexation, given that the actual ‘workable’ territory of Lorraine was disputed, through lack of funds and Stanislas’ own status as ‘tenant’ to Louis XV. Lunéville provided him with a testing ground to explore the mechanical improvements of landscape and society. Its experimental character suggests that Stanislas adopted a strategy whereby the hypothetical aspects of Enlightenment culture could enter into dialogue with the dramatic or mimetic aspects of the traditional culture, as a common domain of as if. The full cultural hierarchy was brought into play within a representational horizon set at kingship. Indeed, the common motif across all of his representational concerns – writing, architecture, mechanics, gardens and theatre – was the vexed status of his kingship, with the Duchy of Lorraine as an as-if kingdom and landscape whose beneficence, justice and productivity were the object of the compromised king’s explorations into the possibilities of ‘good government’. The Chartreuses and Rocher at Lunéville, with their as-if architecture, not only exemplify the ambivalent, unsteady and agitated representations that emerged in this period, but also draw attention to a cultural difficulty that remains a prescient topic for architecture today. That is, the puzzling nature of the continuity between the formation of concepts and the experiential ground, and the corresponding failure to resolve the ambiguity of a potentially non-aesthetic vision of the world. In many ways, the Lunéville gardens anticipate both the demise of the self-moving landscape, with all its inherent complexities, and the advent of autonomous machines, synthetic realism and disembodied information. The transformations of the gardens through their as-if architecture identify the moment when the notion of landscape becomes primarily a phenomenon of the mind. Thereafter, the landscape provides a background, like the paper on which a text is printed or a drawing is sketched, for the play of reason, whose wit and disguises, memories, hopes and fears remain the garden’s most active and moving elements.

Notes 1 This chapter, originally presented as a paper at the Architecture on the Move School Forum series, has Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 drawn on the author’s previously published material: • Tyszczuk 2007 • Renata Tyszczuk, ‘L’utopie architecturale du roi bienfaisant’, in Hatzenberger 2010, pp. 77–106. • Renata Tyszczuk, ‘Nature intended: The garden of a roi bienfaisant’, in Calder 2006, pp. 161–87. • Renata Tyszczuk, ‘Vérité fabuleuse: the Rocher at Lunéville 1743–1745’, in Rose and Dorrian 2003, pp. 200–11. 2 Stuart 1978, pp. 10–12. 3 Voltaire 1980 (original 1757), pp. 240–1. 4 These writings were published collectively towards the end of his life, in 1763, as Oeuvres du philosophe bienfaisant. Stanislas was one of the patrons of the first volumes of the Encyclopédie, but later withdrew his support. Stanislas also published his own compendium of inventions, the Nouvelles decouvertes pour l’avantage et l’utilité du public, Haener, Nancy (n.d.). The automated gardens of Lunéville 203

5 Wiebenson 1978, pp. 11–12; on Vauxhall pleasure gardens, see Altick 1978, pp. 94–6. 6 For contemporary reports on Stanislas’ court in Lorraine, see Luynes 1860–5. More recent works include Boyé 1891, Maugras 1904 and 1906, and Cabourdin 1980. 7 Montesquieu, ‘Souvenirs de la cour de Stanislas Leckzinski’, in Oeuvres completes II, p. 1236. Montesquieu visited Stanislas’ various residences in 1748. 8 In the eighteenth century, this was a popular designation of a pavilion associated with a garden; see Conan 1997, p. 60. Stanislas visited the chartreuse at Sceaux in May 1743; see Luynes 1860–5, vol. V, p. 5. 9 The houses appeared to have been built of brick or masonry, with slate roofs; however, they needed frequent, sometimes considerable, repairs and were periodically dismantled and rebuilt, as the king altered the topography and shuffled the size of the plots afforded to each tenant; see Rau 1969, p. 153. 10 Stanislas Leszczynski, ‘Réponse de Stanislas au Dauphin contenant un plan d’éducation pour les jeunes princes’, Choisies, pp. 213–40. 11 On Locke’s ‘disembodied self’ and his thought experiments, see Taylor 1992, p. 172; also Ricoeur 1992, p. 126. 12 See Sennett 1986, pp. 110–22. 13 Richard Mique, the architect responsible for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles, was originally in Stanislas’ employment and worked under Héré at Lunéville. 14 See, for example, Stafford 1994. 15 On play-acting automatons in this period, see Altick 1978, pp. 57–8. 16 The term automate was introduced into the French language by Rabelais’s carnivalesque epics. See Bakhtin 1984. 17 For a recent history of automata, see Kang 2011. 18 ‘Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons?’ Descartes, ‘Meditations on first philosophy’ (1641), in Descartes 1984, p. 21. 19 ‘DESCRIPTION DU ROCHER QUELE ROY A FAIT CONSTRUIRE AU BAS DE LA TERASSE DU CHATEAU DE LUNEVILLE OU L’ON VOIT 86 FIGURES DE GRANDEUR NATURELLE ET DONT LES MOUVEMENTS SONT SI BIEN IMITEZ, QU’ILS NE PAROISENT POINT ETRE L’EFFET DE L’ART.’ Title of the engraving of the Rocher, Lunéville, from Emmanuel Héré, Recueil des plans, elevations, et coupes tant géometrales qu’en perspective des châteaux, jardins, et dépendances que le Roy de Pologne occupe en Lorraine . . . Le tout dirigé et dedié a Sa Majesté par M. Héré etc. (Engraved by J.C. François), Paris, 1750–3. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3.7 LAURISTON SCHOOL

Ann Griffin

The primary school is a formative experience, socially and emotionally, as well as educationally. As a child’s first main setting outside the home, it acts as a transitional environment, an intermediary in preparing the child for the adult world. Therefore, the range of spaces offered and the movement between them supports the associated spectrum of developing experiences, from dynamic engagement and negotiation with the whole school community, to quiet spaces for focused learning and more personal contemplation and recovery. Lauriston School is in Hackney, in north-east London, and started off as a Victorian board school, but it was rebuilt in the 1970s as a single-storey, modernist building. The Victorian buildings were used as educational-authority storage before being sold off for conversion into apartments in the 1990s. Both school buildings had been models of innovation in their time, for the board school had pioneered a newly invented learning environment at the start of general education, and its 1970s replacement had proposed open-plan learning, with all classrooms as three-sided alcoves, opening off a connecting ring corridor. This promoted a shared sense of endeavour and allowed dynamic expression of each child’s work, but it had become cramped, as demands outstripped provision. One reason was more personalised learning, which increasingly requires smaller, cellular spaces, not anticipated in the 1970s model, owing to an increase in individual, one-to-one teaching. There were also increases in small- group work and pupils in need of extra support, such as reading recovery. Class sizes had

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 increased from eighteen to twenty-two pupils in the 1970s to a threshold of thirty, and further additional space was required for the pupils with disabilities, including specialist support spaces, such as hygiene and health rooms, along with sensory rooms for withdrawal and recovery.1 To double its size and create more pupil places for the growing community, the school needed to be rebuilt. For the new Lauriston, completed in 2010, the staff and governors set a clear vision intended to capture the best of the previous schools’ qualities – their ‘Lauriston- ness’ – while relieving them from the struggle against inadequate space, poor-quality fabric, woeful lack of acoustic control, dismal environmental conditions, with classrooms that overheated in summer and were too cold in winter, and an excessively internalised space, with limited connections to street and city. Despite these problems, the teaching at Lauriston was recognised nationally as outstanding. The staff had developed multiple approaches to Lauriston School 205

learning, engaging pupils through creative project work, often with artist collaboration. They had exploited and benefitted from the open-plan layout to create non-hierarchical links between pupils of all ages, and between the teaching and non-teaching staff:

At Lauriston we see ourselves as a community of learners. Fundamental to our philosophy is the belief that we are all learning all of the time. Learning is not something that happens in a linear way but something that is accessed in different ways at different times. We want the school to be a centre for learning that meets the needs of its community – a school fit for the 21st century and a centre of excellence for the creative and performing arts.2

The words of one young pupil encapsulated both the ethos and the physical condition that we first encountered: ‘Lauriston is one big classroom’.3 The challenge was to create a new building that matched the quality and innovation of the teaching. We (myself and Philip Meadowcroft) won the commission as the only practice that had not designed a new school before, on the basis that we understood this core desire to define and retain the ‘Lauriston- ness’, and that we would achieve its translation into the new, larger school in close collaboration with the whole school community. Together with the school, we developed a dual focus for participation: micro, which explored specific briefing and design issues to ensure that the project was a learning resource for the school, and macro, to develop the rich memory of the site and to promote understanding of the process of change. During the first year of work with the school, we carried out a series of transformation workshops to investigate the history of the site. This allowed children and staff to engage with the rebuilding in a positive manner. Specific workshops were dedicated to each of the historic layers: the rural condition as watercress fields was invoked through a cress-growing project in science week; the product was eaten in a summer-term picnic; and, in the autumn term, the playground was converted into a farm for a day. Later, the site had been developed as terraced housing, and so, in the winter term, a den was built in the playground to recall that setting, with role-play in Victorian costumes. As John Slyce, the school chair of governors, recalls:

During the various presentations, it became immediately clear to all of us on the panel that there was one practice that connected intimately with Lauriston’s ethos as it had evolved and developed – as often against as in agreement with the constraints and conditions of the building, or buildings, it grew out of. Ann Griffin and her team convinced us that they not only understood what we were putting forward as a somewhat complex brief – to preserve the school’s good practice that

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 had emerged from less than ideal, if not a bad, and increasingly failing context – in a new school building that would double its size and intake on a constrained and live site. We also wanted to increase the available play and outdoor teaching spaces.4

Our initial involvement as architects was intensive. With a tight programme set by the target date for the first year of entry, there was no time for prolonged debate. Instead, we approached briefing and design in parallel, as an intensive, full-immersion process. The school invited us in, with complete access for observation and continual enquiry, so that we could understand how Lauriston could operate so well, while hamstrung by such physical limitations. I lived a day-to-day life there for the first 6 weeks, feeding back to the office sketches and proposals based on my findings, observing and talking to everyone in the school community. 206 Ann Griffin

These findings and the initial sketch proposals that grew from them were offered to the school quickly, as part of a developing dialogue. Frequent workshop sessions with staff, pupils and parents allowed reassessment of key aspects, alongside more structured reviews to ensure a formal sign-off process that matched the fast pace of design development. Two key observations revealed competing conditions in the existing school. First, movement through such a small building was a dynamic experience. Every surface was covered with display, and, with no space dedicated to pure circulation, class activity and individual support tuition spilled out into the corridor. This was partly expediency, every nook being brought into service owing to lack of space, and partly owing to the way the creative project work tended to focus around sinks in the corridor. Acting as a communicating device, the corridor of the 1970s school had engendered a sense of belonging and created these non-hierarchical links. It produced ‘a tangible atmosphere that is alive, in a school where we create the future through learning together’.5 Our second key observation was that, despite the school’s ideals of inclusion and open access, its dynamic learning environment was cut off from the local community. Owing to its location as an island block in the middle of the site, there was no easy street connection to extend the school’s use to the wider community, nor did the school have a visible presence on the street. To reconnect the new Lauriston with the community, we radically reorganised the building’s massing, reasserting its civic identity and controlling the transition from city scale to the individual classroom. On the northern boundary of the site, facing the original Victorian school, the new school steps forward to meet the street. It knits together the gap in the terrace of housing with a new community frontage that invites access, and it elevates the main classrooms above ground, as a linear bridge structure running into the depth of the site, which minimises the footprint to free up outside space for playgrounds. Throughout the school, movement was developed as a sequence of street-like forms to create shared territories, where people come together (Figure 3.7.1). Spaces for movement are converted from solely pragmatic circulation into social and creative spaces, usable for teaching and learning, but also promoting a shared dynamic of curiosity and excitement. Movement becomes a process of communication. The first of these internal streets is the main-entrance art foyer, reconnecting the city/community with the school. Paved in the same slabs as outside, it celebrates the school’s ethos as a centre of excellence for the arts, with displays of work lining the walls and suspended from a three-storey light-well that links all teaching levels. The street expands to form a courtyard space for the library. It connects directly into the two halls and provides more protective alcove entrances for the ground- level teaching spaces, devoted to the youngest children. At the south end, the street opens

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 into the playgrounds, bringing views of greenery and outside play into the school’s heart. The placing of stairs was fundamental to the redefinition of space from mere circulation into space for learning and being (Figures 3.7.2 and 3.7.7). The raised, linear treehouse block has three stairs: one to the north, one to the south and one on the centre line, each serving a cluster of four classrooms and so removed from through traffic. Such dedicated vertical access allowed the creation at first-floor level of another internal street, a dynamic shared space linking the classrooms within each cluster. This was intended to create a sense of identity and security for each young child within the larger school. By relieving the connecting areas from their core circulation role, these spaces co-opt corridors into studio- or laboratory-like spaces, to promote free or structured learning in various degrees and to offer shared visibility for every child’s work. Equally important is the inflection of the four classrooms within each Lauriston School 207

FIGURE 3.7.1 (left) Lauriston School classroom wing plan: street at top, with main entrance and hall to right

FIGURE 3.7.2 (right) Sections through staircase, and through hall and classroom wing Source: Drawings by Ann Griffin with Meadowcroft Griffin

cluster, which are formed as two pairs, each angled in plan to close down the corridor width at the outside edges of the cluster, and then to belly out as a more generous expansion of the shared space in the centre (Figure 3.7.3). This redistributes floor area effectively from

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 what would otherwise be a continuous corridor into a precisely configured and spatially contained set of spaces for shared activities. Large sinks encourage shared creative exploration that invites work of all scales, resolving the restriction of the previous school’s small butler sinks, a fault identified by Cornelia Parker: when working with the pupils on a project, she had noted that the scale of the work produced was limited by the scale of the sinks.6 What sustains the success of these dynamic, street-like parts of the school is the range of smaller spaces that offer choice and control for each individual, whether child or adult, to move away from the central focus to various degrees. A number of smaller cellular rooms are distributed about the school, easily accessible from each cluster and each with a different view and orientation. These can be used for structured small groups or individual support, functions lacking in the previous school. Now, reading-recovery sessions have a bespoke space 208 Ann Griffin

FIGURE 3.7.3 Group of four classrooms, with the shared space between them and central sink area Source: Computer projection by Ann Griffin with Meadowcroft Griffin

FIGURE 3.7.4 The sink area as the central point of the classroom group Source: Photograph by Tim Soar

FIGURE 3.7.5 Consultation and resource area

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Source: Photograph by Ann Griffin Lauriston School 209

– ‘the best room in the building’7 – the projected, first-floor glazed corner of the treehouse block, hovering over the entrance, with views to the articulated brickwork of the Victorian school opposite. Less enclosed and defined alcoves offer layers of separation, so that a child can retreat momentarily to a quiet reading corner on the fringes of the main, shared resource space, to be apart yet still within the group, observing until they feel ready to participate. This sense of choice fosters the young child’s developing sense of self and awareness as an individual, as well as being part of the school community. As our designs developed further, we expanded the school participation workshops to try out key elements of the new building, including the shared resource spaces. In the hall, the only large communal space in the existing school, we regularly set up one-to-one mock-ups for staff and pupils of different ages to test proposals. We invited comments about appropriate size, movement flow, ease of use, spatial definition and the likelihood of engagement versus distraction. The range of insights so gained helped us explore more closely which solutions would best fit the new school, both in terms of forecasting immediate use and in considering flexibility for future transformation to support new needs and changes in teaching approaches. Our initial proposals for the big sinks in the shared resource areas was to locate them more as islands in the widest section of the corridors, with shoulder-height storage as a screen to separate off a more defined circulation zone. The pupils were quick to point out that the screen would simply encourage passing children to jump up to look over. The three- dimensional movement mock-up prompted the more successful solution of removing the screen and reclaiming the circulation zone, creating a larger, more open activity area, and this was the version adopted (Figure 3.7.4). This key development transformed the experience and character of the shared spaces: instead of the bespoke sink and activity elements sitting as an island in the middle of the space, they became the space itself, defining its character and its spatial and emotional experience. The use of the shared spaces was developed together with the school, setting a central wet area at the widest point between two smaller dry spaces for quieter activities: one a reading area with sofas and the year-group library, the other a role-play den, set up as an empty alcove lined with full-height grey pin board. This was likened to a large cardboard box, inviting endless recreation, and, when I visit, I enjoy seeing the evolving variety of interpretations, from spaceship, to forest, to World War Two bomb shelter. The flexible, creative learning environment of the new Lauriston has proved highly successful: the clusters provide smaller-scale learning bases within the larger school. They stimulate dynamic communication between all year groups, inspiring curiosity, engagement, shared work and ease of communication, but they allow acoustic separation and containment

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 of any learning space when required. Each classroom has a high-performance acoustic enclosure to ensure that louder groups in the shared resource space do not impinge on quieter, more focused activities, and vice versa. Even so, the doors are mostly left open, to allow and encourage flows of activity between the classroom proper and the shared areas. The classroom screens are fully glazed and were sized to recreate the same expanse of visual connection between the classroom and the shared activity areas as provided by the open-plan alcoves in the 1970s school. Generous areas of glazing and open doors allow views through the classrooms and cloakrooms, creating fluid boundaries between the learning spaces and inviting children to explore and engage in different ways (Figures 3.7.4 and 3.7.5). A child’s understanding of the extent of their world might be thought of as equivalent to the length of view on offer.8 Looking out of the raised learning areas transforms the children’s 210 Ann Griffin

FIGURE 3.7.6 Area for personalised learning Source: Photograph by Ann Griffin

FIGURE 3.7.7 Main Staircase Source: Photograph by Tim Soar Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Lauriston School 211

sense of connection to their world, lifting them out from the relatively insular, ground-hugging condition experienced in the previous school. Each classroom has a full-height window, dropping to the floor with a sense of vertigo that dares children to approach the edge of the space to gaze out to the city and the world beyond. We believe that choice and transition through the learning spaces in the new Lauriston are not just programmatic or pragmatic matters, but meet emotional needs. An individual child’s potential can be extended through more focused tasks, while an agitated child is allowed retreat and calm for readjustment, before rejoining the busy group. If boundaries between classrooms and shared activity spaces are fluid, they are nonetheless defined. The decision to allow the children free movement through the school invites them to move independently in and out of different learning spaces, and to engage in the diverse, child-scaled infrastructure of studio-like settings that promote learning together.

Publications on Lauriston School

• Article by Peter Blundell Jones, Architects Journal, 26 May 2011. • Architecture Today, March 2011. • Special reports on natural ventilation, Ecotech, 25 February 2011. • News of planning submission, Building Design, 7 March 2008.

Notes 1 John Slyce, the school chair of governors: We addressed how an educational ethos developed in a failing building might provide the guide. The stakeholders identified the aim to retain what they referred to as ‘Lauriston-ness’, or the particular meld of school ethos that gave rise to the style of teaching given the premises they were working in where the children were clearly thriving. 2 Heather Rockhold, Lauriston head teacher, from the original school brief, 2007. 3 Pupil’s comment on their experience of the existing 1970s Lauriston, from the original school brief, 2007. 4 John Slyce, oral communication with the architects. 5 Lauriston governors, from the original school brief, 2007. 6 Cornelia Parker, during her collaboration with Lauriston pupils through the Creative Partnerships project, 2006. 7 Reading-recovery teacher, 2010. 8 David Grandorge, school parent, during early consultation, 2007. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.0.1 Herzog & de Meuron: No. 250, An Exhibition, Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland (2004). Tables exhibiting models, mock-ups and samples Source: Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini PART 4 The representation of movement Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 This page intentionally left blank Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.0 INTRODUCTION TO PART 4

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

In the first part of the book, we looked at how designers write about movement and address it in their built work. This part circles back again to focus largely on the designer, emphasising the means employed to analyse and communicate the experience of movement, but, of course, any discussion of movement after the event requires some means of representation, which might include texts about walking and travel, written choreography or reels of film. Oral or written descriptions, sketches, projective drawing, models, film, computer rendering and animation: each provides the designer or witness with specific insights into the experience and communicates their intentions. Each form of representation is partial: it comes with limitations and favours a particular point of view. The bird’s-eye perspective provides a holistic overview that can be intuitively understood, whereas the plan sacrifices this intuitive understanding of space for consistency and precision in measurement. The creative use of tools for representation always requires an understanding of the medium, of its limitations and of the relation between the medium and the thing represented. Robin Evans was a keen observer of this difference between drawing and building:

I was soon struck by . . . the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour, never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors . . . all ended up working on the thing

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 itself which, naturally, absorbed most of their attention and effort . . . The resulting displacement of effort and indirectness of access still seem to me to be distinguishing features of conventional architecture considered as a visual art.1

According to Evans, this indirectness of drawing is also its strength as a tool for design, the means by which the drawing ‘imparts significant properties to the thing it represents’.2 At the same time, the specific limitations of drawing or any other form of representation are an opportunity for confusion and misinterpretation. The distance between the representation and its object is particularly clear in the case of movement and the experience of movement. Unlike the building or the landscape, movement is not a static object: it exists only in the experience or in the effort of describing it. Description is a form of memory, a way of holding 216 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

together the discrete moments involved in the experience of an artefact, a building or a landscape. The types of representation discussed in this book each present particular aspects of movement, retaining traces of essentially ephemeral experience. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of forms of drawing and modelling that use geometric sophistication to provide a precise, reproducible version of the building in three, or sometimes four, dimensions. The rise of descriptive geometry was a nineteenth-century phenomenon, providing a means of presenting a measured view of the building as a series of planes unfolded on to a surface. Descriptive geometry offered previously inaccessible precision in the geometric description of the future building or landscape and seemed to close the gap between the representation and its object:

Only after the 19th century and the systematization of drawing methods could the process of translation between drawing and building become fully transparent and reduced to an equation. The key transformation in the history of architectural drawing was the inception of descriptive geometry as the paradigmatic discipline for the builder, whether architect or engineer.3

As the techniques of understanding and communicating built form became more precise, the translation from representation to building became consistent and rule-based. The idea of equivalence between representation and reality, whether achieved by descriptive geometry or by the use of computer-aided drafting and modelling tools, is a phenomenon enabled through the development of a science concerned with communicating and analysing the future building. The perceived equivalence between the model and the thing modelled is particularly true of contemporary digital representation and implies tacit assumptions about the power and instrumentality of projective drawing. The computer has become a great translator and producer of representation. Capable of generating plan, section, elevation, sketch, perspective and animated fly-through from the same underlying 3D geometry, it blurs distinctions through the ease of generating what were formerly distinct techniques, kept separate through the crafts involved in their making. If the point of view of each type of representation is partial, concealing as much as it reveals, there is a benefit in reclaiming the differences that have always been understood as the basis of design as an art. Each of the articles in this part takes on some aspect of this task, by specifying and clarifying the opportunities afforded by oral description, the section, physical models, film and virtual reality, and simulations. It is a major point of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of man: that the medium itself conveys a message and determines to a large extent how the content it conveys is received. The work of British artist Richard Long offers one example of the importance and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 limitations of representation for understanding and communicating movement. Long’s work has, for many years, focused on walking in the landscape, using multiple media to communi- cate aspects of walks taken by the artist. The walks are described using text, photographs, maps and gallery installations, all of which record them as a means of measuring and under- standing the landscape.4 We have the artist’s word for it that he in fact carried out all the walks presented, with the geometric precision implied in the maps and texts; and we have the artist’s photographs as a record of sculptures built along the way. This way of working allows the artist to describe actions whose result potentially persists over time, such as moving stones, or actions that are entirely ephemeral, such as the linear trace of repeated footsteps in the grass. In all cases though, the walk itself remains inaccessible to the viewer, who must rely on Long’s text, photographs, maps and installations to communicate the actions performed. Introduction to Part 4 217

If we compare our imaginings of Long’s walks with those poetically described by Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways, to take a good recent example, we realise the extent to which these are different kinds of record, but also that the written narrative has lost none of its power, despite the alternatives.5 When it comes to buildings, perception tends to be influenced by the means of representation that was required for construction. However, practical building preceded the appearance of drawn or written documentation, and cultures still exist where oral communi- cation is the primary means for transmitting information about particular buildings and the experience of inhabiting them. In Chapter 4.1, the oral building culture of the Dong people in South West China is described, and it makes a convenient bridge from the social theme of Part 3, because house-building involves a long series of rituals. These inscribe and reinscribe the house in local consciousness, and we see how even the building components are given special significance. For the purposes of Part 4, however, it shows the possibility of building as a social event without architects, and without a set of drawings done in advance, and how, therefore, it is thought about differently. The house is understood more as the result of a procedure, inevitably sequential, than as a predicted and completed entity, and it also becomes an expression of the varied roles and relationships of those involved in making it. In Chapter 4.2, Kamni Gill looks at the ability of section drawings to communicate experience of movement in the landscape, in particular sequential sections drawn each in close proximity to the next. Sections immediately convey an understanding of scale in relation to the upright human form and, unlike the plan, explore a discrete moment in space and time, rather than expressing a complete overview of the whole. As Gill points out in her discussion of Enric Miralles’ drawings for the Igualada cemetery, the sequential section is used, not only to present a prescribed path as a sequence of stills, analogous to a film, but also to reveal the whole simultaneously, through subtle variation in each section. In the work of Mathur and da Cunha, the section is a way to describe boundaries that are always in flux, capturing the ambiguous nature of this landscape through drawing. The physical model offers another means of presenting an interlinking series of spaces in terms of movement. Cornelia Tapparelli, in Chapter 4.3, looks at several recent buildings by Herzog & de Meuron and the role of physical models in imagining and communicating complex possibilities for movement. Unlike the drawing, physical models present the build - ing in three dimensions, but still require skill and imagination to explore the possibilities for movement. Concentrating on the models displayed in three monographic exhibitions, Tapparelli describes several distinct roles of the model in design for the experience of movement.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The medium of film appears to offer straightforward verisimilitude in its presentation of movement as captured by the camera. As described by Patrick Keiller in Chapter 4.4, the very early history of cinema was characterised by short films that presented the world as it lay before the camera, without narrative editing. This phenomenon was identified as the ‘cinema of attractions’ by Tom Gunning, who states that, ‘It is precisely this harnessing of visibility, the act of showing and exhibition which I feel that cinema before 1906 displayed most intensely’.6 Keiller cites the example of the ‘phantom ride’, a popular genre in the first decade of the twentieth century. The camera was attached to a moving vehicle such as a train, carriage or boat, continuously filming the passing scene without montage and without narrative. Keiller explained how he tries to catch something of this directness in his own films. His criticism of montage has to do with the way that, in conventional cinema, one is 218 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

caught up, not only in the artificially produced narrative beloved of producers, but also in an entirely contrived filmic space, blending real locations with studio interiors and welding together actions shot weeks apart. The last three chapters of Part 4 focus on computational media as tools for communicating and analysing movement. Architectural drafting and modelling software tends to mimic directly the procedures and conventions of hand drawing and modelling, concealing the unique contributions of the computer and creating an illusion of continuity between hand-drawing and digital techniques. Although CAD software and 3D modelling applications such as Rhinoceros are based in part on nineteenth-century conventions of projective geometry, they also introduce new computational methods for thinking about and working with the elements of architecture. The ability to model form using NURBS curves allows designers to model free-form geometry with a level of control that was impossible before the development of a mathematical description for this type of curve and a computer algorithm allowing the designer to work with the geometry in real time. Where computer programming is used to create bespoke software for and by designers, it is possible to go even further in pushing the boundaries of representation with methods specific to the computer. In Chapter 4.5, Nishat Awan describes a project that documents the experience of migrant populations in London, using the computer as a tool for discovering relationships within complex networks. Using bespoke software, she analysed a series of walks in a London neighbourhood taken by members of its Kurdish population, describing movement of her subjects from the scale of the street to the geopolitical movements of migrant populations. These movements are described in terms of a network of relationships, a mathematical abstraction created in the computer that results in a new kind of visual representation. Such computational methods record the use of space and negotiation of relationships that traditional means of representation could not encompass, which implies the possibility of a dynamic understanding unrelated to traditional methods of recording architectural space in plans, sections, perspectives, etc. In Chapter 4.6, Mark Meagher considers more broadly the contributions of the computer to the designer’s understanding and communication of movement. Like drawing, the digital model is a tool of understanding and an abstraction that allows work on the imagined future project. Unlike drawing, though, the software used to access and manipulate the digital model is usually designed to reduce the distinction between representation and building. Conventions of architectural animation based directly on film techniques have been used extensively to convey the visual experience of moving through a building or landscape and have been expanded through the practices of gaming. ‘Virtual reality’ offers a range of techniques for

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 creating a sensory experience of digital worlds, and ‘augmented reality’, with data for the other senses, allows an increasingly compelling overlay of digital information about the physical world. Simulation underlies most of these techniques, providing computational tools that anticipate many aspects of the built reality. The most effective techniques in terms of understanding, though, are those that deliberately expose the complex artifice of computational representation and make its inner workings accessible to the designer. Not infrequently, the digital model runs up against current limitations of simulation in terms of real-time representation of material properties in response to the environment. According to Phil Ayres in Chapter 4.7, one response to such limitations is to build a physical model that is reciprocally linked with its digital representation. The digital model, according to Ayres, is best understood through its links with a material model that embodies the physical Introduction to Part 4 219

properties and relationships of the digital representation, an idea that he calls ‘persistent modelling’. This concept of enhancing digital models through live feedback from a material model has been tested by Ayres in a series of installations that substitute messy reality for the solipsism of a purely simulation-based approach. Together, these articles propose a future for communicating movement, one that recognises the unique difficulties of working with and understanding movement as a designer and highlights the particular affordances provided by each technique. Although the importance of digital tools cannot be ignored, their limitations need to be considered and offset by the introduction of new and traditional means of representation.

Notes 1 Evans 1997, p. 156. 2 Ibid., p. 189. 3 Pérez-Gómez, A., ‘The historical context of contemporary architectural representation’, in Ayres 2012, p. 21. 4 Long 1991. 5 Macfarlane 2012. 6 Gunning, T. (1986) The cinema of attraction: Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde, Wide Angle, vol. 8.3, no. 4, pp. 63–70. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.1 HOUSE CONSTRUCTION AMONG THE DONG

Derong Kong1 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.1.1 Dong dwellings at Ji Tang village, in Lingping County, Gouzhou province, China Source: Photograph by Derong Kong

The Dong people are a minority group living in South West China, in a mountainous area shared between the provinces of Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi. Until about 50 years ago, contact with the outside world was severely limited, and they were mainly left to their own devices. As they had no script, it was an oral culture, with much transmission by song. Their building followed a local carpentry tradition that is still prevalent, involving community participation and a series of rituals to mark the progress of a house. House construction among the Dong 221

4

1800.00

Drain

2340.00 2340.00

Bed roam Pigsty

234C jX

Fertilizer Fire place Store roam

Eitranc; Doyvn 2340.00 Wide varenda Fire wood to.oo

±0.00 1800 3580 1950 7330 1440 1590 Drain 6610 1500.00 Ground floor plan First floor plan

FIGURE 4.1.2 Typical Southern Dong house plan. Pan Jiliang’s house built in 1950s at Xiao Huang village, in Congjiang county, Guizhou province Source: Drawing by Derong Kong

Construction of a new house usually happens after October, because then the harvest is finished, people have free time, and there is enough money and food available. The host’s relatives and friends should offer their help freely to the host, and refusal to cooperate is resented, for it is an accepted custom to help each other in daily life, and a mutual obligation is always implied. The building process involves the following roles: host, relative, friend, geomantic master, hand ink master, carpenter, mason. The core man is the host, and the construction process locates everyone’s position in the system, assigning a particular job, responsibility and obligation. The host is the subject who will dwell, physical space is constructed by the hand ink master and carpenter, and spirit connections are imported by the geomantic master. From beginning to end, the host is constantly involved, and so he has a close connection with his house and deep experience of its evolution. The construction process that people join in is impressive, rational and complete: it is easy to remember. Through the ritual process, the meaning and significance of the house are shared

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 and understood, and group participation holds together the small community. Each time the members build a new house, they repeat what the last generation has done, and their memory records events that have happened before. The constructed object helps maintain rules and principles, and construction events are compared, each event becoming a reference for following generations.

The general sequence of construction In our conversations, hand ink master Lu Wenli listed the general procedure of building a house.2 This is also the live project in a Dong carpenter’s education. Carpenters and apprentices at different levels of skill are involved, being assigned jobs at different stages of construction. 222 Derong Kong

Choosing the site First, the site must be chosen. It could be the host’s old site or one bought for the purpose, but, if a fire has occurred there in the last 3 years, a special rite has to be performed before it can be used for building. The host invites a geomantic master to check the orientation and local topography. Taking into account the host’s date of birth, the geomantic master can calculate whether it will bring good or bad luck to the host, and what the best days are for starting the construction and, later, for erecting the structure.

Cleaning up the site Next comes the cleaning up of the site, making it flat. If the site has a difficult topography, its treatment can be arranged by mutual discussion. The host has to hire masons to sort out the site, and there can be a ritual for laying the stone bank.

Design of house The host must invite the geomantic master again to decide the direction of the house. Using a compass, he checks the form of the mountain that the house will be facing. Different hills imply different fortunes. This also involves reference to the hand ink master’s design. Now the design process can begin. Taking into account the particular site conditions, the hand ink master discusses with the host the function, arrangement, size and structure of the house, and whether the site is big enough to allow three bays, and what size each bay could be. They also decide the depth of the house, the distance between columns, the structure of the roof and how many floors the host wants. Then, the plan of the ground floor is settled. The hand ink master has a coordinating system to help him remember the structure. The columns at ground floor are the starting point for the coordinate system. The whole structural system is based on personal construction experience, and so direct experience is the principle to organise and edit the code system. The important thing is that the system be convenient to remember and manage. He can use components as references to mark further components that fit with them. Figure 4.1.3 is an example of a carpenter’s code. The hand ink master next thinks about the vertical assembly and roof structure. At this point, he can figure out the order of a flat frame, called Shan, 扇, or fan, which embodies the key section (Figure 4.1.4). Then he can design tie-beams to connect these frames together and so complete the house structure. A model, or one simple drawing, may be used Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 to explain the design. The hand ink master will also draw the dimensions of components on a Zhang pole, a kind of large ruler, to record the whole design (Figure 4.1.5).

FIGURE 4.1.4 (facing page, top) Typical section of southern Dong house, showing so-called fan of structure. Pan Jiliang’s house built in 1950s at Xiao Huang village, in Congjiang county, Guizhou province 34±5?? Source: Drawing by Derong Kong

FIGURE 4.1.5 FIGURE 4.1.3 (facing page, bottom) Master Lu Wenli’s Zhang This means the third row, pole set against a beam to mark it, 2010 fourth column, fifth tie-beam Source: Photograph by Derong Kong House construction among the Dong 223

1.中柱 Central column 2.边柱

Eave column 13 3 .吊柱 12 Hanging column 瓜柱 4 . 11

short column 4 . 5.千斤妨

Thousand Jins tie-beam 10 6.楼枕 Floor pillow 7 .过间枋 Crossing bay tie-beam 8 .双妨 9

Double tie-beam 7 6 5 9 .槽枯 Grooved tie-beam

10.挑妨 2 1 Hanging tie-beam 11.瓜妨 Short column tie-beam 12.檩子 Purlin 13.椽子 Rafter Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 224 Derong Kong

FIGURE 4.1.6 Drawing of hand ink master Lu Wenli’s new house, with a list of components at the side, 2010 Source: Drawing by Derong Kong

The hand ink master counts the exact number of components and then makes a list of timber and tiles for the project. The host must prepare the material: depending on what property he has, he can take the wood from his own hills or buy it from others. When the site is ready, the hand ink master goes to the site and uses thread, wooden sticks and the Zhang pole to establish the positions of the columns.

Preparing the material The first central column is the starting point, and the host chooses an auspicious day to cut

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the tree. Before they start, the hand ink master has to make an offering to the mountain god for permission, and then they can go ahead, but within strict rules. The woodcutter must be properly dressed, the first three cuts must be clean and sharp, and the tree must fall towards the top of the hill, with a pre-placed support to keep it off the ground. If these rules are respected and all goes well, they can continue the work; otherwise, they have to stop felling and choose another day to start it again. After the first tree is cut down, they use a local kind of fork to lift it and carry it back to the village, and on their way they must not shake the fork.3 More important is that no one should step on or over the cut tree. Then they can collect the rest of the timber, and carpenters are hired to process it into the rough sizes needed for the components. These trees have to be stacked for at least 3 months to dry off, so that there will not be too much warping when the structure is assembled. House construction among the Dong 225

Construction process: making the components After the materials are prepared, the hand ink master performs ceremonies called ‘inviting the wooden horse’ and ‘drawing the first ink line’, and then the preparation of the components begins. The first job is to make columns and to cut the mortises into them. Small bamboo sticks are used to measure the size of the hole, and the corresponding code is written for the tie-beam. Then, if other carpenters make the tie-beams, they can produce exactly the right size of tenon, and the tenon and mortise will fit. The hand ink master draws the ink line and then lets the apprentice reprocess it to finish the work.

Pre-assembling After all the components have been premade, the hand ink master asks the host to erect a scaffold for installing the house structure. The order of assembly is from bottom to top, and from inside to outside. The hand ink master preassembles the flat frame or fan of house structure, called Pai Shan, 排扇.

FIGURE 4.1.7 Carpenters draw ink line and process the component, 2010 Source: Photograph by Derong Kong Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.1.8 Pre-assembling and erecting a house structure at Xiao Huang village, 2010, in Congjiang county, Guizhou province Source: Photograph by Derong Kong 226 Derong Kong

‘Stolen ridge beam’ The central beam on the top of the central column is called the ‘treasure beam’. Before erecting the main structure, every component is premade, except for this treasure beam. It must be temporally ‘stolen’ from others, and cannot be prepared in advance. Tradition dictates that this is required for auspiciousness, as timber borrowed from the other’s hill to become the ridge for the house has the implicit meaning of ‘bringing treasure and blessing’. Stealing the ridge beam is carried out at midnight on the day before the main structure is erected. Four young men set off, one of them carrying a Luban axe,4 one bringing a small bag. The tree and the way to it have already been decided. After reciting some auspicious words, they cut down the tree and also take parts from the top to show that they bring it whole. Fastening a red cloth around the middle of the trunk, they carry it back to the village. Before leaving the site, they must put a red envelope with money equal to the value of the tree on the stump and then light firecrackers around the stump. When the owner of the tree hears the sound, he knows some people are stealing the ridge beam, and so he does not rush to accost them, but lets them take it. After the people have left, he goes to the stump to collect the money and pretends he is angry, scolding them for fun.5

Opening a hole in the beam An offering is made by opening a hole in the middle of the ridge beam, putting in some rice, tea, cinnabar and money, and then using part of the original wood to seal the hole. Next, the bamboo pen used by the hand ink master, two bricks of ink, one brush pen, a Chinese calendar, a copper coin and a wisp of coloured thread are set out over the hole, using a piece of red cloth 1 Chi long (1 Chi = 1/3 metre) and 2 Cuns (1 Cun = 1/3 decimetre or 3.33 centimetres) wide to wrap these things. The four corners of the red cloth are separately nailed into the beam with copper coins, which is called ‘wrapping the beam’. While the hand ink master wraps it, he recites auspicious words. Outside the red wrapping, he places a pair of chopsticks obtained from a successful merchant to pray for an auspicious future. He fastens the chopsticks to the ridge beam with red string.

Erecting the main structure The geomantic master calculates the correct time to erect the house structure. Before this is done, the hand ink master must perform a ritual called ‘dispel evil spirits’, to remind people to pay attention to safety and to obtain a feeling of security. After this, they can erect the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 main structure, connecting adjacent fans of the structural group with tie-beams. Then, they install the short columns and the short-column tie-beams to construct the roof structure, from bottom to top, and from outside to inside.

Raising the treasure beam The geomantic master chooses a propitious day and time, and then the hand ink master performs the ritual for raising the treasure beam to the top of the central columns. A square table with offerings is placed on the site, and there must be a pair of new shoes for the hand ink master to wear when he climbs the structure to install the beam. With all in place, and with the beam on a wooden horse in front of the table, the hand ink master performs the House construction among the Dong 227

FIGURE 4.1.9 Erecting structure and the half- finished house, at Xiao Huang village, 2010, in Congjiang county, Guizhou province Source: Photograph by Derong Kong

ceremony of ‘fête the beam’.6 Then, a rope is attached to each end of the beam, and the hand ink master sings auspicious words. He kills a cockerell, spreading its blood on the beam. Then, two people standing at the top on each side slowly draw up the ridge beam, and firecrackers are let off as a vision of good fortune.7 When the beam has been placed on the tie-beam and the firecrackers have finished, the hand ink master puts on his new shoes and says auspicious words. Then, he climbs the structure, chanting some auspicious words. After he completes the installation of the beam, he throws prepared candy, glutinous rice cake and red envelopes to the crowds. People try to catch these things in a happy atmosphere. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Eating the ‘erecting house feast’ On the day the beam is raised, all the relatives, friends and villagers who come to congratulate and help are given two feasts. One is before the raising of the beam, at noon, and is a normal meal. Later, following the raising, comes the main feast, including all the above people and others who come to celebrate.8 The site of the feast is usually the host’s old house, or a neighbour’s house near the new house. People sing an ‘erecting house drinking song’, and the hand ink master, carpenters and singing master take the main seats as honoured guests. The singing master sings a drinking song to praise the hand ink master’s technique. Then, the singing master sings to the host to offer his congratulations. In return, the host sings to the hand ink master and the singing master to express thanks. 228 Derong Kong

Additional construction Once the main structure is finished, the hand ink master checks the whole structure. The household will ask a mason to install the stone base of the columns. From bottom to top, carpenters install floor, wall, purlins, nailed-on rafters and tiles. Then, they decorate the fireplace room and one or two bedrooms and install the front door. The family can move into the new house, living in an uncompleted house while the rest of the construction is slowly finished. After completion, according to the owner’s requirements, there can be a ceremony to set up the front gate. The door is an important junction of inside and outside, private space and social space, etc.; it divides and connects the spaces of private and social life, allowing passage through from certain space to uncertain space. Its vital position determines its important meaning to the Dong people’s lives and is accompanied by many implications. The door-frame is covered with red cloth, and two door hammers are fixed to the lintel of the door. The door hammers are carved with flowers, decorative linear ornaments or inscribed with two Chinese words, 三 王, on the left and right. Left is ‘three’, here repre- senting Heaven; right is ‘king’, here representing Earth. They write symbols of heaven and earth to pray for a blessing. The top of the door is wider than the bottom, after the saying ‘wide sky, narrow earth’, so that treasure can easily fall from the sky. The wooden tie-beam for the threshold must be stolen in the same way as the treasure beam. The threshold is regarded as ‘the dragon of the gate’;9 it is the tutelary deity of this wooden house. In order to prevent the ‘dragon of the gate’ from escaping, the middle of the threshold has hammered into it an iron nail, because people believe an iron nail can force the ‘dragon of the gate’ to stay, but they cannot use a copper nail, because, in legend, the dragon is not afraid of fire from sky or earth, only of a copper nail hammered into its waist. There is also a ceremony for the front gate. The time to perform it is determined by the ghost master. The hand ink master presides and performs the ceremony. The hand ink master must dress in clean clothing to show respect. Pregnant women are forbidden to watch, because local people call a pregnant woman a ‘person with four eyes’, but the baby in her body is not complete, especially the baby’s eyes, which are not really opened. If the baby has a sight of you or an event, it might cause some danger and harm. A table is placed beyond the door, and on the table are put some offerings. Door panels are put on both sides of the gate, covered with red cloth. After everything is arranged, the hand ink master stands in front of the table and burns incense and paper money. Then, he spreads water and recites words to clean the site, dispel the evil spirits and drive away dirty matter. After this ritual, people set off the crackers and set up the door panels. Then, the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 ceremony is completed.

Moving into the new house When a family moves into a new house, they hold the ceremonies of ‘opening the wealth door’ and ‘lighting the fire to enter the house’; these express a good hope for prosperity. For the ceremony of ‘opening the wealth door’, the host must find a middle-aged man who has good luck, and who also has a son and daughter, to perform as Wealth Star. The carpenter who built the front door plays the mythical carpenter Lu Ban. People stand around them in several tiers to see their performance. When Wealth Star enters the house, the householder approaches him with a smiling face, and Wealth Star speedily extracts from his long bag money House construction among the Dong 229

wrapped with red paper, which he gives to the householder, the so-called ‘gaining wealth’. Master Lu Ban kills a cock and spreads the blood on the door, representing a red, happy event. The money offered means red luck for 12 months. After the host takes it, he respectfully invites Wealth Star and master Lu Ban to sit on the chairs prepared in the central room.10 The host offers them tea and cigarettes. Then this ceremony is ended, but another follows. The next ceremony, a literal house warming, is ‘Introducing the fire into the room’. First, the host must put cooking pots in the fireplace room and place a bundle of firewood in the fireplace. Hot coals are brought from the fireplace of the old house in a fire bowl. After Wealth Star and master Lu Ban have had a rest, the host invites them to light the fire. Wealth Star walks to the side of the fireplace and kneels down, blowing up the fire in the fire bowl to make a flame, and then he lights the firewood and puts it into the fireplace. As the fire flares up, Wealth Star sings a song in praise of this moment. Then, Lu Ban solemnly takes out wooden shavings cut from the main beam, which have been carefully preserved, and puts them into the fireplace. As the fire ignites, everybody, including master Lu Ban and Wealth Star, cheers. Then, they set up iron trivets to support the pot over the flame to cook dishes and make a banquet. Master Lu Ban, Wealth Star, relatives and family members take seats at the table and drink ‘rich and honour wine’ together. So, we see the whole ritual process carried through from the first acts of construction to first dwelling in the finished house.11 Folk dwelling is an integral part of Dong traditional culture, its material form and a carrier for its inheritance and dissemination. The construction and use of a house are key links in this process, and the local carpenter plays a pivotal role.

Notes 1 Derong Kong, current PhD student at the University of Sheffield, from field research in 2010: ‘The Dong oral architecture: Among Dong people in China’. 2 One of my main informants during fieldwork at Xiao Huang village, in Congjiang county, Guizhou province, China, in October 2010. 3 It is a farm tool, like a garden fork with the prongs angled backwards so that it can be used for dragging. Local people call it an iron harrow, Tie pa, 铁耙; it is a widespread farm tool in China, used to dig up soil and clear vegetation. 4 A ceremonial axe remembering the mythical carpenter Lu Ban, supposed author of the Chinese carpenter’s manual Lu Ban Jing: see Ruitenbeek 1989. 5 Fu 1997, p. 182 (not available in English). 6 Ibid., p. 185. 7 Ibid.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 8 Ibid., p. 189. 9 Ibid., p. 191. 10 Ibid., p. 192. 11 Ibid., p. 193. 4.2 MOVEMENT AND THE USE OF THE SEQUENTIAL SECTION BY ENRIC MIRALLES AND MATHUR AND DA CUNHA

Kamni Gill

A section is a measured drawing, an orthographic projection from a line in plan on to a vertical plane. It is a static abstraction of a particular built condition, to be understood in relation to the plan. It shows spatial variation and relationships in level. For the architect Enric Miralles and the landscape architects Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, the section further became a means of exploring the experiential qualities of space and its relationship to human inhabitation. They adhered to the conventions of measured orthographic sections, but redefined them through overlay and repetition to make them expressive of human movement.

Paper and site Miralles practised in Barcelona from 1984 to the time of his death in 2000. He won several key competitions in the 1980s, which led to the formation of his first office with another Spanish architect, Carme Pinos. Several of his projects contributed to his high international profile, including his design for the Igualada cemetery and the Olympic archery range for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. He also taught at several design schools in Europe and the United States, including ETSAB in Barcelona and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Anu Mathur is professor and associate chair of the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and collaborates frequently with fellow

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 professor, architect and planner Dilip da Cunha. Together, they research how the visualization of water might expand possibilities for design practice. The body of their work is presented in three main books, published between 2001 and 2009, on the Mississippi River, the Mumbai peninsula and the Deccan plateau. Both Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha perceived drawing and the space of paper as analogous to site. Miralles frequently equated the act of drawing a line to the act of construction. In an invited talk given during the Wednesday evening architectural lectures at SCI-Arc in 1989, Miralles noted, “the drawn line is anything else but, it is grasping, digging or moving the earth until finally a position deals with the topography.”1 He was describing the process of designing Igualada Cemetery, work he first commenced in response to a 1984 competition for a new cemetery in the Catalan town of Igualada, Spain: “This is how you Movement and use of the sequential section 231

Seccion DD / Section DD

Seccion CC / Section CC

Seccidn BB / Section BB Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

Seccibn AA / Section AA

FIGURE 4.2.1 Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos: Igualada Cemetery, 1984 Source: Redrawn from the original by James Simpson 232 Kamni Gill

get to the space . . . it is trying to find with a pencil a place to put the dead.” The drawing of sections through the landscape of Igualada was for him a movement, a precise excavation that simultaneously shapes earth and experience.2 Mathur and da Cunha have equally suggested that the process of drawing is a process of constructing and reconstructing, particularly in relation to their work on the delta plain of Mumbai. In their book Soak, Mumbai in an Estuary, a detailed visual and textual examination of flood, drawing is no neutral technique. They are critically engaged in how and why one draws plans, sections and traditional maps, and what these drawings suggest about the comprehension of water and land. Mathur and da Cunha decry the insufficiencies of the master plan as a means of recording and responding to ecological processes and human movements. They note:

[The landscapes of Mumbai] call for the use of the section, an articulation that makes depth critical to the fluid relation between land and sea, while their drawing in sequence speaks to the diverse movement between the two. Sections also reduce the significance of boundaries and edges in the landscape, positing instead the horizon which one approaches but never crosses. They call attention to intersecting continuums rather than finite adjacencies. Finally, these landscapes diminish the importance of geographic space, the milieu within which surveyors measure distance accurately from point to point. Instead of space, they call for time, releasing landscapes from being held down to points in space and as such allowing the appreciation of their fluidity.3

Mathur and da Cunha argue that the representational devices of plans and surveys them- selves define a conceptual and imaginative position about water and its relationship to human inhabitation. A plan is concrete in its depiction of water as a channel-confined liquid. A section accommodates its depths: its flow from one kind of containment to another. A plan may enable the conception of a flood, which occupies the land beyond the river’s boundary, but the section enables a conception of water moving, of it falling, flowing and soaking. Mathur and da Cunha’s drawing of the Mumbai peninsula is an accumulation of sections that reconfigure the relationship between water and land. Instead of suggesting mutually exclusive regions of wet and dry, they create a graphic representation of the interpenetration of water and land, where the movement of water is no longer delineated by channel lines, but land instead becomes an open surface, a sponge through which water flows and collects. Their sectional precision shows the uncertainty, the ambiguity, of where the limits are. The black sectional mass in the Mumbai drawing delineates both water and land, with no graphic

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 break between them: there is a refusal to give water a definite edge. The articulation of land and sea is absent and ambiguous, suggesting movement, and so, with their use of the repeated section, Mathur and da Cunha reframe the “hydrological imagination.” It marks a shift in drawing convention from the master plan that characterized colonial and contemporary urban development in India, initiated by Patrick Geddes, who lived in Mumbai.4

Repetition abstraction Both Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha use the section to frame an immediate measure of width and breadth. And, through repetition, they begin to create depth. The sections can be read as individual moments along a trajectory, but also as a whole. The Mumbai sections Movement and use of the sequential section 233 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.2.2 Mumbai sections, 2009 Source: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha 234 Kamni Gill

show a repetitive variation of lines that changes in interval and oscillates between particular topographies and a more universal understanding of the relationship between water and landscape or human figure and ground plane. The measure of human movement is expressed in the quantity of sections and the attention paid to their rhythm and interval on the page. Miralles also systematically repeats sections at dense intervals throughout his projects. He maintains a clear relationship between the sectional drawings and plan and sometimes even rotates them, reflecting a human trajectory. We see this in the preliminary drawings for the Mercat de Santa Caterina, a refurbishment of a nineteenth-century market in Barcelona. Miralles traces a route in plan and then systematically cuts sections at even intervals along it and stacks them, delineating progression along the street. We see this again in the plans for Igualada Cemetery, where the sections appear adjacent to the cut lines along the main route, and in the drawings for chapel and mortuary, where sections are both stacked and rotated in relation to plan, so that the setting out on paper of the sections parallels how the spaces might be experienced through actual movement. The location of the sections on the paper seemingly reflects the directions of one’s gaze, which shifts and turns in response to a path through the cemetery. Miralles’s engagement with human passage is evident in the commentary through which he explained Igualada Cemetery to his audience at SCI-Arc. He notes, “And then you go here to the chapel and it is like this, and then you take a car, and it’s like this and then you are here.”5 His narrative is sequential, and so are his drawings. He repeatedly reworks the standard section, repeating it and overlaying it on plan as if he is, through drawing, moving through the cemetery space. He maintains the conventional, measured relationship of section to plan and even emphasizes it. But, in repetition, he redefines it. Each section marks a shift in inhabitation. The drawings are abstract, and yet the commentary is intimately descriptive: he knows where mourners will descend from cars, how they will walk to the burial site, where the priest will stand. He considers ascent and descent and their relationship with trees. He notes that the siting of the cemetery and lines of his drawings are “an abstraction coming from the fact of walking, of walking and ending and beginning and ending at the river, etc.”6 Miralles is not interested in scenographic drawing: he repeatedly notes in his lecture that perspective

FIGURE 4.2.3 Enric Miralles, EMBT: Mercat de Santa Caterina, 1996 Source: Redrawn from the original by James Simpson Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Movement and use of the sequential section 235

FIGURE 4.2.4 Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos: Igualada Cemetery, Seccion DD / Section DD mortuary, 1984 Source: Redrawn from the original by James Simpson

Secci6n CC / Section CC

Seccion BB / Section BB

Seccidn AA / Section AA

sketches “are not the drawings we do to find form . . . this is just for the client.”7 Instead of

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 proposing a drawing or imagining space from a single view, he uses the multiplicity of sections to convey different experiences of space, as hand, eye and body move through it. Many artists study movement through sequential repetition of a static image. Muybridge is perhaps most notable in his photographic studies of gait. In Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, the repeated overlay of a series of static figural studies conveys dynamic human movement. What is different in Miralles and Mathur da Cunha, however, is that they do not repeat a figure, nor indeed do they make any concession to a scaled figure. Rather, the landscape (building) itself is repeated, and a spatial experience is constructed out of the variations in section. Miralles was concerned with movement through a site, but he also noted in his SCI-Arc talk, when speaking of a redesign for a town hall in Barcelona, “I hate this. To make people 236 Kamni Gill

understand a building through a particular way of moving through it.” He goes on to say that he prefers simultaneity, like in a drawing of Picasso’s, where the face and the back appear at the same time.8 With the town hall, the shifting building profile expresses movement in the built structure. In a similar way, his sequential sections convey simultaneity and possibility as they depict individual spaces, but also their collective impact over space and time. There is an oscillation, an individual pause in space and time, and the accumulated awareness of all the different kinds of space moved through, that gives measure to the memory of one’s passage through space or territory. Miralles thus gives a thickness or depth to the conventional section that demonstrates his conceptual position toward the walker, the building and the site—to space, time and movement.

Ambiguity and overlay The wide range of representational techniques that distinguishes the work of Mathur and da Cunha demonstrates an equivalent interest in human movement across the landscape. They developed an image lexicon, itemizing particular visual methodologies. In the photosection, for example, repeated measured sections are layered with photographs systematically recording variations in wet and dry, rough and smooth or light and dark. In the terrain plot, archival plans and drawings are the ground for sequential sections that determine the rhythm and interval of detailed photographic strips of water, mud or dried clay. The figure is absent in each kind of representation; there is no scale person placed against the background of the landscape. Rather, the drawings can be understood as being seen from the point of view of a person already immersed within the landscape: the observer of the drawing is as much a walker through the landscape as Mathur and da Cunha themselves. They add density to their sequential sections by splicing in photos or historical informa- tion. They combine measure with experience, juxtaposing an abstract measure with a tactile one. They reconstruct the ground of a territory in its experiential force. If Miralles required abstraction to explore topography, built form and movement, Mathur and da Cunha demand complexity. The systematic recording of landscape along a trajectory and its organization in grids create a relational, exploratory field. The assemblage of many instants in time by Mathur and da Cunha creates a non-hierarchical view of the whole and makes their drawings, like the plans and section overlays of Miralles, expressive of simultaneity and ambiguity that seem to parallel the actual experience of moving over the site by foot and eye. For Miralles, building and site blur at Igualada Cemetery. The ground is not something

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 the building is on, but what it is shaped out of. The topographic cut of the route into the cemetery is shrouded under canopies of trees that make it continuous with the surrounding landscape. A place of procession becomes a place of sanctuary and stillness, and a route that descends a slope into the cemetery later also ascends through the height the trees provide.

Here, Miralles creates an ambiguous relationship between figure and ground, through the use of overlapping planes, floating horizontals, sloping walls and dynamic structures, whether in steel, wood or concrete embedded into or piercing through the space . . . relationships such as man–architecture, architecture–site, site–landscape and man–land - scape are forced to redefine themselves within this valley of the dead, in which the cemetery emulates the path of life, both spatially and temporally.9 Movement and use of the sequential section 237

FIGURE 4.2.5 Photosections, 2009 Source: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha

FIGURE 4.2.6 Terrain plot, 2009 Source: Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 238 Kamni Gill

The line Miralles defined by drawing/digging into the site yields a meander and multiplicities. Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha have made conscious decisions to use the section. Their use of this drawing convention, more than written texts, is a means of establishing theoretical considerations that are relational, that see building and ground, or water and soil, as a continuum. In their circumstances, Miralles and Mathur and da Cunha are, of course, sub - stantially different. Miralles worked by competition or by commission to construct buildings. Mathur and da Cunha draw and research alternative approaches to landscape and process. However, their shared concern with simultaneity and multiplicity and similarity in deployment of representational techniques to explore space, movement and time are telling. For Miralles, sections express the relationship between thought and construction, and what he construed about movement through drawings was constructed. Mathur and da Cunha push the boundaries of landscape representation, taking the section as means of “rethinking the meas - ures and possibilities of design in Mumbai.”10 By isolating, abstracting and reassembling the sectional drawing, both managed to reconfigure the spatial experience of movement. The section became a means, not simply of analyzing a physical change in levels, but, through repetition, also a means to record a trajectory of time, experience and motion.

Notes 1 Enric Miralles (March 01, 1989) Enric Miralles. SCI-Arc Media Archive: Southern California Institute of Architecture. Available at: http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/enrique-miralles/ 2 Ibid. 3 Mathur and Da Cunha 2009, p. 8. 4 Ibid., p. 8. 5 Enric Miralles (March 01, 1989) Enric Miralles. SCI-Arc Media Archive: Southern California Institute of Architecture. Available at: http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/enrique-miralles/ 6 Enric Miralles (March 01, 1989) Enric Miralles. SCI-Arc Media Archive: Southern California Institute of Architecture. Available at: http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/enrique-miralles/ 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Zabalbeascoa 1996, p. 24. 10 Mathur and Da Cunha 2009, p. 8. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.3 FROM MODELS TO MOVEMENT?

Reflections on some recent projects by Herzog & de Meuron

Cornelia Tapparelli

Model-making has been a central aspect in the work of the Swiss architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron since its beginnings, as illustrated by the prominence of physical models in several exhibitions of their oeuvre, for example the ones held in the Paris Centre Pompidou (1995), in the Milan Prada Foundation (2001), or in the Schaulager Museum in Basel (2004) (Figure 4.3.1).1 The reasons for their important use of architectural models are certainly multifaceted and complex, and, following a subjective reading, one could suggest a relation between this working tool and movement, namely, the way the architects imagine and foresee people approaching and accessing, moving into and through their buildings. In this sense, the numerous models built by the Swiss firm would illustrate, among other things, the architects’ concern with people moving around their buildings – admittedly a concern that should constitute a central aspect of each architectural project. However, this concern, together with the production of physical models, seems to be suffering a decline, in a time characterised by mainly virtual representation of architecture. This chapter aims to shed some light on Herzog & de Meuron’s exemplary use of physical models, while also constituting a plaidoyer for this working tool and its crucial role in the projection of movement. The Parisian exhibition was conceived by the artist Rémy Zaugg in collaboration with the architects, as shown by a fax sent to the artist by Jacques Herzog on 25 November 1994.2 It contains an image of a Thanksgiving meal, illustrating a series of parallel tables, and the architect writes: ‘Dear Rémy, I have found an image of our exposition in the New York Times’.3

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The exhibition conceived by the artist Zaugg manifests exactly this arrangement: a series of long, parallel tables, punctually interrupted by objects.4 Its final plan contains information about the different architectural projects shown, but also reveals that an important part of the exhibition consists of drawings and other two-dimensional documents, such as photographs or photomontages, with a limited number of three-dimensional models.5 After some exhibitions held at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York (1997) and the Tate Modern in London (2000), among others, the architects again exhibited a part of their oeuvre in the Milan Prada Foundation.6 This exhibition, held in spring 2001, shows the projects developed up to that point by both Herzog & de Meuron and OMA/Rem Koolhaas for the Italian fashion firm.7 The exhibition is again based on a series of parallel tables; however, the important presence of mock-ups, samples and especially working models is this time 240 Cornelia Tapparelli

FIGURE 4.3.1 Herzog & de Meuron: No. 250, An Exhibition, Schaulager Museum, Basel, Switzerland (2004). Tables exhibiting models, mock-ups and samples Source: Photograph by Margherita Spiluttini

remarkable. Finally, in an exhibition organised in 2004 and held in the Schaulager Museum, the use of models becomes even more extensive, without saying that they conspicuously dominate the installation: the tables contain, almost exclusively, models representing different building volumes or envelope materials at multiple scales (Figure 4.3.1).8 For example, the table dedicated to the Prada store in Tokyo (2000–3) contains several cardboard, styrofoam and plexiglass models speculating on possible building outlines; others investigate building structure and envelope.9 The predominance of working models also becomes evident in the vade mecum published for this event.10 The booklet’s plan and the legend show that a large exhibit, entitled ‘Waste and sweet dreams’, consists primarily of building models, and the architects explain: ‘These models [. . .] were always crutches for a design process [. . .] That’s why we always said they were just waste products of a thought process’.11 It becomes evident that, in their exhibitions, the architects show an important number of models as three-dimensional working documents, and two questions arise from this observation: first, can the exhibitions be understood as representing Herzog & de Meuron’s

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 oeuvre in its architectural approach? Second, what is the reason for this keen interest in model- making? Concerning the first, Herzog confirmed, in a conversation with Zaugg: ‘For us, an architectural exhibition must be essentially based on a strong conception, at the same time precise and reflective, which presents and underlines the working method’.12 As the architect reports, an architectural exhibition should represent the working method applied, and, therefore, the abovementioned examples may be understood as representative, not only of their architectural approach, but also of their interest in models as tools and working documents. The reasons that lead to models taking on a central role in the architects’ oeuvre are, however, multifaceted and more complex. First of all, it is relevant to underline that Herzog & de Meuron understand the architectural models, not only as mere tools of representation, but also as an integral part of architecture or the built reality, as they explain: From models to movement? 241

In the end, the decisive factor for us is that every object we create – the drawings as well as the models – in terms of its own image or material structure is part of the resulting work of architecture, inasmuch as it allows the conceptual idea to be experienced rather than merely serve as an illustration.13

In this sense, models explain underlying concepts of the buildings they represent and, at the same time, they permit the experience of their physical, material presence. Yet, following an admittedly more subjective reading of their model-making, one can suggest a relation between the latter and the projection of movement: the numerous models produced by the office certainly help anticipate movement, by individuals, around and into the building. On this note, one should recall that physical models, by means of their three-dimensional nature, enable the perception of depth by architects, with their binocular vision. Furthermore, as objects, physical models also allow people to navigate around them, to take different points of view; in other words, they allow the architect to create a sequence of views, rather than one static view. Taking these characteristics of physical models into consideration, their important role in anticipating movement in and around a building becomes quite obvious. A closer look at three, more or less recent, buildings by Herzog & de Meuron helps illustrate the central role of models in the understanding of their work, but also the relation here established between these models and the anticipation of movement. The library at Cottbus Technical University, a project represented at the Tate Modern and Schaulager exhibitions, was developed and built between 1994 and 2004.14 It is worth pointing out that the architects developed two projects for it: the first, a competition entry submitted in 1994, and the second version, from 1998, developed after obtaining the final commission. To explain the changes the project underwent in the meantime, Herzog & de Meuron produced a series of volu- metric models, some of which they later assembled in a single image, showing a sequence of ten models, going from a rectangular block, to a cylinder, to a sinuously outlined volume.15 This evolution in the building’s outline certainly, and strongly, contributes to distin guishing the built object in its respective context: the curved outline of the library presents a powerful contrast with the surrounding rectangular Plattenbauten typical of the German Democratic Republic. However, the aspect of movement was also a crucial issue in the form-finding process, illustrated by the model series: the diverse outlines proposed would actually imply different movement patterns around, and ways of accessing, the building. Whereas the parallelepiped would likely have led to an orthogonal pattern and the cylinder to a circular one, the last four volumes proposed induce walking along various sinuous lines and they also permit a diversification of the entrance situations. In the final and built version, the latter are

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 placed in ‘concave’ spaces, which seem to ‘embrace’ the visitor when entering the building. It is also in this sense that the architects describe, in a sketch published in their complete works and entitled, ‘The gestural language of the building’, the ‘embracing’ of the main access from the campus, but also ‘the “waist” entrances from two sides’ containing the ‘main access from the old city’.16 These notes, together with the red arrows marked in this sketch, confirm that movement around and access into the building were main concerns in this project and, moreover, were actually a form-defining aspect. However, if the sketch confirms the architects’ concern, the many volumetric models built for this project were also likely to have been a helpful ‘crutch’ in the design process. Herzog & de Meuron describe the Prada store built in Tokyo as an ‘extremely visual, sculptural shape, but also a very simple and immediately recognizable one’.17 The building 242 Cornelia Tapparelli

EG 1,OG 2.0G 3. OG 4. OG

FIGURE 4.3.2 Herzog & de Meuron: VitraHaus, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein, Germany (2006–9). Working models illustrating a promenade through the building Source: Photograph © 2013, Herzog & de Meuron Basel

is located on a side street of a commercial area in the Japanese capital, an area characterised by buildings of rectangular outline. The Prada store distinguishes itself by its ‘crystal’ form, to quote the architects again, or by its irregular pentagonal plan, its continuous vertical section and its roof of differently inclined and outlined surfaces.18 Again, numerous models contributed crucially to the development of this project. They were present in the exhibitions held at the Prada Foundation and the Schaulager Museum, some experimenting with building volume, others concerned primarily with building material envelopes.19 Analysing this project and the models produced, one has to acknowledge the influence of the local zoning law, for, as the architects confirm, ‘the shape of the building is substantially influenced by the angle of incidence of the local profile’.20 If the zoning law restricts the building volume, the numerous models explore the important margin left open for experimentation. It is also in this sense that the architects describe the building volume as an ‘object, shaped by virtual zoning, made simpler, crisper’.21 Besides this local zoning law, the aspect of movement towards, and the access into, the building were the subject of long and intensive reflection, consideration and re-consideration, well documented in the publication Prada Aoyama Tokyo (2003).22 Through- out this design process, models served again as an important ‘crutch’: namely, a series of site models illustrate the architects’ considerations on this subject, as well as an important decision taken in this process. The architects decided to move the building out of the site’s central axis, towards the south corner, a move that permits the ‘luxury’ of an open area or a ‘plaza’ in downtown Tokyo, to quote the authors.23 Through this move, the architects created a more generous entry to the building, some ‘leeway’ in the dense neighbourhood of downtown Tokyo. Moreover, through this move, tested in the models mentioned, the architects influenced the way individuals move towards, around and into the building: upon visiting the Prada store, one first enters the plaza, possibly pausing on one of its benches, and then

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 one walks across and into the building through the main entrance, placed on the lateral façade. If, for the Cottbus Library and the Prada Store, the relation established between the models and the anticipation of movement focused mainly on movement around, and access into, the building, the VitraHaus invites one to develop the argument further, or, more precisely, to the projection of the promenade inside the building, again by help of working models. The VitraHaus was developed and built between 2006 and 2009 for the furniture firm Vitra at their campus in Weil am Rhein, in the south-west part of Germany.24 It functions mainly as a showroom, and the basic element of the building recalls in its section the archetype of a house.25 By a process of ‘extrusion’ and ‘stacking’, these elements constitute a building of complex geometric disposition. Owing to this complexity, the anticipation of movement or the promenade through the building became a challenging task. Again, working models From models to movement? 243

helped resolve the latter: arranged in a series of five, they illustrate first the access on the ground floor and then, subsequently, the stairs towards and the walk through the volumes of the first, second, third and fourth floors (Figure 4.3.2). For the development and verification of this promenade through the building, the model is an ineluctable tool, and this for different reasons: first, it would be difficult to represent the ‘stacking’ of volumes by a mere floor plan. Different colours or tones of grey could eventually explain this matter; however, a physical model is more efficient in the expression of depth through the binocular view of the architect. Further, the model also helps to illustrate the different points of connection between the volumes, and their verification from different points of view. In the case of the VitraHaus, these connection points are crucial, as they contain stairs and elevators and, in this sense, enable a continuous promenade through the building. The question of the working model in the oeuvre of Herzog & de Meuron has elsewhere been further developed,26 and the examples illustrated here may only serve as a starting point for broader and more extensive reflections on models as tools to anticipate movement. With the observations shared, this chapter seeks to invite the youngest, ‘digital’ generation of architects not to underestimate but hopefully to re-evaluate the model as an admittedly basic, yet effective working tool.

Notes 1 Zaugg 1995; see also Celant 2003, 2008, Ursprung 2002. 2 Zaugg 1995, p. 104. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 105. 5 Mack 2000, p. 124. 6 Vischer 1997, Celant 2003, 2008. 7 Celant 2008. 8 See also El Croquis, 2006, vol. 25, no. 129/130, pp. 7, 8, 20, 21. 9 Ibid., pp. 210–11. 10 Herzog and Vischer 2004. 11 Ibid., n.p. 12 ‘Pour nous, une exposition d’architecture doit essentiellement reposer sur une forte conception de base, à la fois précise et réfléchie, qui présente et mette la démarche en évidence’, in ‘De la collaboration: un dialogue entre Herzog et de Meuron et Rémy Zaugg’, in Zaugg 1995, p. 24. 13 Quoted from Philip Ursprung, ‘Exposed experiments: Herzog & de Meuron’s models’, in Elser and Cachola Schmal 2012, p. 52. 14 Mack 2009, pp. 68–73. 15 Fernandez-Galiano 2007, p. 199. 16 Mack 2009, p. 70. 17 Herzog & de Meuron, ‘A house and a plaza’, in Celant 2003, p. 72. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 18 Ibid., p. 70. 19 Ibid. and Ursprung 2002. 20 Herzog & de Meuron (2002) ‘Prada Tokyo’, Architecture and Urbanism, vol. 32, special issue, p. 14. 21 Herzog & de Meuron, ‘A house and a plaza’, in Celant 2003, p. 86. 22 Celant 2003. 23 Ibid., p. 63. 24 Concerning the architecture on the Vitra Campus, see Luis Fernández-Galiano, ‘Ernsthafte Spielerei’, in Fehlbaum 2008, pp. 54–62. 25 See: www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/276–300/294-vitrahaus.html (accessed on 16 June 2013). 26 Philip Ursprung, ‘Exposed experiments: Herzog & de Meuron’s models’, in Elser and Cachola Schmal 2012, pp. 51–6. 4.4 FILMIC SPACE

An encounter with Patrick Keiller

Patrick Keiller, introduced by Peter Blundell Jones

In setting up the lecture series that was the seed for this book, we wanted to discuss the issue of film space, how it differs from architectural space and how it deals with the question of movement. Who better to invite than Patrick Keiller, educated and active as an architect before he became a film-maker, and author of a new kind of film depicting place and architecture in its political context, of which Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins are the best-known examples. Keiller arrived with a bag full of discs to show us samples of his own and other types of film and entered into a fascinating and wide- ranging disquisition about the use of film and the history and theory of cinema, followed by a question session that, among other things, revealed his attitudes to his own work. We recorded the occasion and made a transcript, but it is hard to follow without the visual examples that were the essential core, and it was an oral performance rather than a text. All the same, a number of valuable observations and arguments were made and examples were presented, and, as the topic should not go unrepresented in this book, we have put together this summary. We first looked at brief excerpts from two films, both of which seem to portray place and architecture. I, as host,1 first showed the opening take from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), which runs for minutes and involves a cast of hundreds. The camera, on a mobile crane, starts inside and moves outside, then up and over the street, then down and along it, all the time following the principal actors, with the life of the street flowing around them. It is an extreme case in the history of cinema of complex, continuous movement involving persons, vehicles and the camera, stretching to the limit the capabilities of the crane Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 and lenses. It must have been a nightmare to organise and rehearse, all for the sake of a new sense of realism by eliminating cuts. It gets the film off to a thrilling start, but the view of the camera is not the view of a potential observer, its movement not the possible path of a pedestrian. A second film, chosen by Keiller, was the opening of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972), about a bank robbery conducted in an off-season French Atlantic resort, with the winter waves crashing in. As we ran the film, Keiller pointed out the joins between takes and remarked that, although the exterior shots were evidently authentic, the bank interiors with which they were intercut were quite probably a studio set. So began his series of reflections about the contrivance of cinematic space and the juxtaposition of images: Filmic space 245

Un Flic is more conventional than Touch of Evil in that it begins with what was probably a long take intercut with the opening titles, but mainly because the first location is represented using conventional narrative film montage, so it has reverse angles and multiple changes of viewpoint which together create a representation of the space in which the action takes place. There is not much verisimilitude, and I am pretty sure some of the interiors are sets. So although the exteriors are a real place, the interiors probably are not. One of the reasons I chose it was because it has both. Both Un Flic and Touch of Evil might be regarded as examples of film noir. They are of a similar mood and both very location-based. Melville is perhaps best known in this country for his film Le Samuraï (1967), but I thought this a better example of more-or-less conventional spatial montage, of the assembly of space in film, just to show how people do it. Both films contain examples of the survival of what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the ‘cinema of attractions’, which he argues existed at the turn of the last century, before the advent of what we now recognise as narrative cinema.2 Until the mid-to-late 1900s, films were generally very short, between 1 and 3 minutes long, and consisted of one or more fairly long takes, indeed, many consisted of only one take. They were not much edited, though there is evidence of editorial thinking in some, as the camera sometimes stops and then starts again. This was done for a reason, perhaps because something was in the way. Some films have more than one camera subject, but most have a single subject which persists throughout. It might be somebody singing a song or doing a comic turn, but is as likely to be some sort of topographical actuality. Many are street scenes or what are known as ‘phantom rides’: where a forward-facing camera is mounted on the front of a train, though the term is also used more loosely to indicate a film from a camera set up on a moving vehicle, a boat, or something similar, which might also be facing backwards or sideways. As Gunning points out, after about 1907, people began to edit films in a new way. They had already started joining these attraction films together to make little stories. Sometimes the people who did this were not the film-makers themselves. The film-makers, perhaps, were happy enough just to film actuality because it was such a marvellous thing to do. It was those interested in making money out of the films who started to splice them together; the producers, as they became known. This is allegedly how narrative cinema evolved, and the change in my view was much more fundamental at this stage than the later change from silent to sound. This change of form did not just affect fiction. There were similar things that looked like newsreels, often called ‘topicals’. So by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the form of film had changed. But as Gunning writes, ‘the cinema of attractions

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 does not disappear with the dominance of narrative but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’.3 That is why I think it is interesting to look at these two feature films, because their opening sequences can be seen to be descended from phantom rides and other kinds of early film. I was reminded of all this recently by a review, by John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of technology at the Open University, of Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires. The book is about the Internet, but also discusses the way previous technologies were similarly colonised by large corporations. As Naughton put it: ‘A freewheeling, chaotic and creative industry was cornered by a cartel of vertically integrated corporations which for decades channelled all cinematic creativity through a set of narrow apertures.’4 246 Patrick Keiller

People in the industry did not give up making things like phantom rides, but they had to smuggle them in. I make films which do not fall within the ‘narrow set of apertures’, and as a result I do not make films very often, but I have just made one. It is called Robinson in Ruins. One of the objectives that I had forgotten that I set myself before I made it was that I wanted to make more extensive use of a smaller number of locations, and towards the end of the film that seems to happen. It is a travel film, like most of the films I have made, simply because it is an easy analogy from a journey to a narrative – the films do each have a narrative, partly because they’re trying to find something out, but also because it’s the traditional incentive to go on watching. The film is organised around a map of Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It is the story of an erratic, would-be scholar embarking on a programme of research to investigate ‘the problem of dwelling’. I wanted to explore what seemed to me a discrepancy between, as I wrote, ‘on one hand, the cultural and critical attention devoted to experience of mobility and displacement and, on the other, a tacit but seemingly widespread tendency to hold on to formulations of dwelling that derive from a more settled, agricultural past’. One way into this was to examine the origins of capitalist displacement by looking at the English landscape. My interest in Tom Gunning’s proposition is that it helps explain to me why I make such films. I am perhaps trying to recover something of ‘the cinema of attractions’, though I’m not quite sure what. My films do not really look like early cinema, but they do have some things in common with it. They do not follow the normal tradition of representing architectural or landscape space, even in the way Melville does. Melville manages to make architectural documentaries, even if he does it inadvertently. But I am doing something else, attempting to perform a transformation on everyday surroundings, so I point my camera at unremarkable places in the hope of enacting a transformation upon them. Henri Lefebvre seems to describe something similar. In The Production of Space he writes: ‘The fact is that the space which contains the realised preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible’.5 I understand this to mean that if you look at everyday surroundings in a certain way, with a certain subjectivity, they seem to contain ‘the realised preconditions of another life’, but this space somehow also prevents the revolution, the transformation, actually occurring. It seems to me that in films, the ‘prohibition’ is sometimes suspended. So there is something potentially utopian about film space, though utopian is perhaps not quite the right word. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Keiller then showed us excerpts from Robinson in Ruins, which is structured in months, and he chose to begin with October. He uses a static camera set on a tripod, so that any movement is either what occurs within the frame or the shift from one camera set-up to the next, and the story is held together by the narrator’s voice-over about the fictional Robinson, informing us of aspects of the political and historical background and building a narrative around the place. Within this discip- lined format, the choice and juxtaposition of images are of crucial importance, and he began to reflect on this:

There are two points I’d like to make. The first concerns the attempt, because some locations are intervisible, to orient each view in relation to the others through recurrent Filmic space 247

elements, such as the factory chimney and the railway. The railway appears in three set-ups, the factory chimney in at least two, so you get a kind of reverse angle. First you see a quarry from across a railway line, then from the other side, and this creates a fictional landscape, though perhaps not much like the real one. If there was action it would be easier to interrelate the pictures because people would, for example, walk out of the right side of one and into the left of another, so one would assume that the space in the second picture lay to the right of that in the first, which is the way spatial cues function in played cinema. The other point, which was implied or exemplified by the pictures of the maize harvest, is that a cinematic image covers very little of the normal field of vision, even with a relatively wide-angle lens. Everyday experience involves much more architectural or landscape space than you could possibly depict with a camera, which is why extensive spaces in film are most often assembled through montage. Sound is very important too, because its continuity can imply the proximity of partial views so as to create an impression of a wider landscape.

As well as his own films, Keiller brought along examples of early cinema, mostly views of British cities, that he had included in an installation at the BFI in 2007, interrelating them through a series of maps. He presented several variations of what he had called the ‘cinema of attractions’, the age of innocence of the medium, before the imposition of commercially driven narrative:

The Lumières’ first public screening of films was in December 1895. It was not long before cinematographers began mounting their cameras on things that moved: the first moving-camera film is supposed to have been a Lumière film – which does not survive – photographed by Alexandre Promio from a gondola in Venice in September or October 1896. The first film photographed from a train was probably Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer, an oblique, rearward view of a station platform seen from a departing train photographed, also by Promio for the Lumière company, in January or February 1897. More typical is Through Miller’s Dale (near Buxton, Derbyshire) Midland Rail (1899), a forward-facing view from the front of a locomotive, one of the first phantom rides made in the UK. I am not sure exactly why these films were called phantom rides. I imagine it was a reference to virtuality, but the disembodied point of view, from a place where a person could not normally stand, perhaps suggests the view of a ghost. As far as I know, phantom rides were so called at the time. Through Miller’s Dale is about two-and-a-half minutes long, three takes along the

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Midland railway as it passes through Miller’s Dale junction. It was made by the Biograph Company, photographed by William Kennedy Laurie-Dickson, one of the co-founders of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, who then came to the UK to start up its British off-shoot, the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company. He had previously developed Edison’s motion-picture technology, so is one of the founding figures of moving pictures. The Biograph camera was very big, probably too big to be placed on the front of the locomotive, more likely in its own truck. It photographed at 40 frames a second on to 68-mm film, which is why the best of the surviving Biograph films are so impressively sharp and detailed, and gives you some idea of the technological ambition of early film pioneers. This was by no means a cottage industry, and by no means undercapitalised. The Lumière company, too, had a global reach. 248 Patrick Keiller

What I first found interesting about these films is that so many of the landscapes they depict seem familiar, often not much changed in the 100 years since they were photographed. There are two such films of Leeds, one a street scene with a static camera, in City Square outside the station, another from a tram travelling from City Square along Boar Lane. On the other hand, if you were standing there, you would be aware of a great deal more than is depicted in the film, which is the main reason why film space and architectural space differ. Architecture surrounds us, but films are always ‘over there’ in a rectangle of one of only a few set ratios, the current convention being 16 9. The screen is also flat, another big difference between cinema and architecture – film represents architectural space by creating an illusion of depth. One of the terms one comes across in the early period is stereoscopy, though it was not of the binocular kind. The true stereoscope with an image for each eye was a competitor of the early cinema, but certain film-makers seem to have sought what they called the stereoscopic effect, typically the result of differential parallax. In Through Three Reigns (1922), a retrospective compilation of his early films, Cecil Hepworth refers, in an intertitle introducing Thames River Scene (1899), to ‘stereoscopic cinema’. The film is a panoramic sideways view from a launch moving downstream on the river at Henley. The camera is moving among other boats moving at different speeds, which creates an illusion of depth. More generally, the illusion of depth in cinema, as in photography, seems to be enhanced by contrast, fine detail, and monochrome.

In the final part of his lecture, Keiller reflected particularly on the changing view of space brought about by modernism, as a result of technical advances, developing science, mechanical reproduction and new methods of communication, but he sets in the midst of all this László Moholy-Nagy and the inherent contradictions of his role as film-maker:

Reyner Banham identifies two kinds of architectural space. The transition between them begins towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and continues after the First World War. He refers to the writings of Theodor Lipps and the concept of Raumempfindung or as he puts it in English, ‘felt volume’, a conception of architectural space that we would understand as rooms, streets, squares, etc. He writes that Lippsian space, the ‘felt volume’, was superseded by something eventually defined in 1929 in Moholy-Nagy’s ‘minimum definition’ as ‘space is the relation between the position of bodies’,6 a way of thinking about architectural and three-dimensional space in which

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 there is no container. It is interesting that this concept arose in a period when the solidity of matter had become less certain. A number of comparable transitions occurred at around the same time: for Virginia Woolf, ‘on or about December 1910, human character changed’; for John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism’ was located between 1907 and 1914, while something similar is described by Henri Lefebvre: The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a space thitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract thought, as the environment of and channel for communications; the space, too, of classical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards on the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied forth in western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and town [. . .] Euclidian and Filmic space 249

perspectivist space have disappeared as systems of reference, along with other former ‘commonplaces’ such as the town, history, paternity, the tonal system of music, traditional morality, and so forth. This was truly a crucial moment.7 Lefebvre’s book was first published in 1974. He was writing before people were aware of what was subsequently identified as the postmodern era, during which aspects of the earlier Lippsian concept of space have been revived. Banham’s book was published in 1960, and I do not think that he ever thought that Raumempfindung would return, although it is not altogether clear that it ever went away. Banham identified the second modernist space, the space of the modern movement, as that of Moholy- Nagy’s ‘minimum definition’. Moholy-Nagy was not an architect but he was, among other things, a film-maker, which offers an intriguing connection between architecture and film. His first film proposal, ‘Dynamic of the Metropolis’, was never realised.8 Begun in 1921, it was perhaps intended to be something like Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In his book From Material to Architecture, he formulated the concept of space identified by Banham, for whom an iconic image is a group of seaplanes montaged into an aerial view of a traffic intersection in Los Angeles. Moholy-Nagy’s book was published in 1929, the year of his film Marseille Vieux Port, although this, like his other realised films, is strikingly unlike the earlier film proposal, perhaps because of the limited means available. He described it later: I had a predetermined length (300 m) of film stock, and decided that there was no way to capture a large city in so few metres. So I chose a small slice of the city, the old port, one hitherto unknown to the public due to its bad social circumstances, poverty and dangerous character. I tried to approach it with reportage that was not merely impressionistic; but finally I had to make do with a sketchy picture of the situation, since I was not even able to shoot from some higher point in order to better portray the totality of the processes before me. In this gloomy quarter, when after a long haggle I finally entered an apartment several storeys up, I was physically threatened, and so had to flee.9 The reality of film-making seemed to have got the better of Moholy-Nagy, but it did not necessarily do the films any harm as I wish I could show you. The other thing I would like to say about this transition between the two kinds of film-making is to quote, as we so often do, Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.10 What can Benjamin have meant? What is this ‘dynamite of the tenth of a second’? He must have known that films were photographed at 18 if not 24 frames a second by the time he was writing. I do not think it has to do with frames, but is probably a reference to montage. So, what blew apart the prison world, of offices and furnished rooms, railway stations and factories was not the camera’s fragmenting duration into individual frames. Rather, the dynamite of the tenth of a second is the cut, which brings us back to the narrative cinema at the beginning. He was writing in the era of narrative cinema, and may not have had much experience of early cinema, which by that time 250 Patrick Keiller

was, I think, pretty much forgotten. Most of the people who made the early films had by then given up, often returning to their original professions as instrument makers, electrical engineers and so on.

Notes 1 I added this opening to the reworked version of the lecture, edited jointly by myself and Keiller, and he has asked me to make clear that Touch of Evil was my choice – Peter Blundell Jones. 2 Tom Gunning, ‘The cinema of attractions: Early film, its spectator and the avant-garde’, in Elsaesser, 1990, pp. 56–62. 3 Ibid., p. 57. 4 Guardian Review, 2 April 2011, p. 9. 5 Lefebvre 1991, pp. 189–190. 6 Banham 1960, pp.66–7, p.317. 7 Lefebvre 1991 (original 1974), p. 25. 8 Apparently it was first published in Hungarian. The title is usually written in English. 9 Quoted in programme notes by A.L. Rees and David Curtis for ‘Films by Moholy-Nagy: A medium of plastic expression’, NFT, 29 July 1987. 10 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Benjamin 1973, p. 238. See also Patrick Keiller 2013. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.5 DIASPORIC EXPERIENCE AND THE NEED FOR TOPOLOGICAL METHODS

Nishat Awan

Historically, architecture has struggled with how to represent movement, as it inevitably also encapsulates time, and architectural representation has traditionally remained static.1 However, in order to account for movement within architecture, it is not simply a question of being able to represent dynamic situations, it is also the very nature of architectural space, conceptualised through the constraints of Euclidean geometry, that needs to be questioned. Although space as a concept has exploded in cultural theory, geography and many other disciplines, including also architectural theory, in the practice of architecture it remains a container, bounded and secure in its three dimensions. Movement provokes a crisis in this containerised space. Movement can, of course, occur at different scales – the movement of populations across borders, or the movement of a person across a city street. Often, these two scales collide: a migrant body moving through a street in a European city negotiates both these scales at once, a space that is impossible to define in standard Euclidean terms. As space of this kind cannot readily be represented, the inhabitations that create such spatial conditions remain hidden to the traditional gaze of the architect. Yet, it is not only the (in)visibility of these spaces that is important, but also their operation. Space of this kind needs to be conceptualised as the product of particular sets of relations to notions of scale, time and belonging. It is, therefore, directly related to the production of subjectivities and the often precarious and ambivalent

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 nature of migrant lives. In order to operate with what I shall call migrant space, an approach is required that can switch scales and emphasis, from the intimate to the institutional, from the local to the global, and from systems to bodies. This switching of scale is also related to the way in which change is conceptualised in contemporary society. Whereas traditionally society was considered mostly static, change being thought of as extensive and atypical, in the recent ‘topological turn’ in social theory, change is considered normal and immanent.2 This requires a shift in the way cities are understood. If change and movement are the norm, then the switching of scales and the different modes of belonging that migrants embody must also be understood as part of the course. Multiple and often conflicting subjectivities that encompass staccato modes of belonging, loyalties that are (dis)loyal, the foldedness of time that results from mixing nostalgias with contemporary 252 Nishat Awan

trans-local connections, are becoming more prevalent in all our lives. For migrants and diasporas, these conditions are the result of displacement, but, in a globalised world, such responses do not necessarily require physical displacement. In fact, such modes of inhabiting are typical of a topological tendency in contemporary culture that not only reveals itself in situations relating to notions of home and belonging, but in many other aspects of our social lives.3 In the context of migration, these effects reveal themselves most forcefully in the different ways that notions of belonging, of inclusion and exclusion are affected. The ease with which relations can be made across large distances, yet are fragmented in topographic proximity, is a classic example. These trans-local connections described by Appadurai not only create relations, they also fragment them.4 Often, this fragmentation is only described at the level of social integration, but it is also related to the way in which states are functioning within Europe. On the one hand, economically driven processes are creating pockets of ‘the global inside the national’, through processes of denationalisation;5 on the other hand, the very system upon which modern Europe was constructed is fragmenting. The idea of a contiguous European territory, defined through the Westphalian system of states, was built precisely to create a static and peaceful order, resting upon the idea of inclusion and exclusion as binary metrics and on a notional equality of all states.6 With the power of global capital and the unevenness of development, this idea of equality is being systematically eroded. The faltering of the Westphalian project can, therefore, be related to the new ways in which Europe is being reconstituted through new relations, less dependent on proximity, which also have a profound effect on its diasporic populations.

Topology, surface and mediation Such phenomena require different methods of analysis and intervention, a new understanding of the social. If change is thought of as immanent, we require an approach that is recursive and iterative. Practices of mediation and affect take on important functions, as they are able to negotiate a shifting terrain. Such practices are related to the changing role of the surface in contemporary society,7 where change occurs quickly and is reacted to almost immedi- ately. As Adkins and Lury state, this move to the surface had already occurred in the 1920s in the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer’s description of modern society. In his essay The Mass Ornament, Kracauer describes the appearance of masses through a reading of the Tiller Girls8 as ornamental phenomena. ‘The ornament, detached from its bearers, must be understood rationally. It consists of lines and circles like those found in text books on Euclidean geometry.’9 It perhaps comes

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 as no surprise that Kracauer was trained as an architect. This reductive description of the surface through recourse to three fixed co-ordinates chimed with the description of a mass society where the Tiller Girls became a ‘fraction of a figure’,10 and the audience became spectator. If, in modern society, the surface was Euclidean, Adkins and Lury ask what model of the surface is required in contemporary society. Here, the surface becomes folded and describes a space that is non-Euclidean. For architecture too, the modern project has been a ‘turn to the surface’ that foregrounds questions of mediation, such as the mediation of architecture through the machine, functionality, etc. Adkins and Lury’s question is pertinent for us as well. In this model of a complex and non-linear society, on what type of surface is mediation taking place? The concept of the surface is fraught in architecture; on the one hand, it conjures images of shiny buildings and literally folded and undulating surfaces of Diasporic experience and topological methods 253

installations and plazas. On the other hand, the surface as metaphor is the place where social relations occur. However, following Lury, how can the surface also be thought of as method? The topological tendency described above as the changing role of the surface is simultaneously a concept and a mode of enquiry. In the practice of architecture, it translates into methods that can both represent and intervene in the spatial. These are topological methods. Topology is a branch of modern mathematics, the study of spaces ‘reduced’ to surfaces.11 It is the study of continuity and connectivity through continuous deformations. In other words, topology is concerned with those instances where change and movement do not break connections and relations. Topology has several branches, but the most general is point-set theory, which studies the properties of topological spaces. It is still a contested area, where much of the argument centres around the problem of the continuum, first defined by Georg Cantor as: ‘How many points are there in a straight line . . .’ or ‘How many different sets of integers do there exist?’12 Different approaches to point-set theory provide very different attitudes to this as yet unanswerable question. For some, this is a question of connectedness, or the openness of a set; for others, it is the constitution of the set itself that is problematic.13 For the mathematician Brian Rotman, categories and arrows are more useful than sets, as they are inherently relational, and what is included in a category is defined by external relations. There is no originary or primordial belonging to a set, even an open one, as was the case with the former viewpoint. The definition of such an inclusion is, for Rotman, a diagrammatic problem that must be approached through vectors: ‘in contrast to the fixity of sets and the membership relation, arrows and composition connote movement or transformation’.14 Movement is inherent in topology, described as categories and relations. But, even in thinking of the topological through sets and memberships, what remains is a very different approach to the idea of measurement. As Sha writes: ‘Topology provides an anexact (in Deleuze’s sense) mode of articulation, that does not need numerical measure, equations, exact data, statistics.’15 It is this relation to measuring, a precision that is allowed to remain fuzzy, that is so useful for a way of thinking of space as movement in architecture. As Lury states, in topology, the two properties conflated in Euclidean mathematics, order and value, are brought together in relation to each other:

In the topological thinking of multiplicity, however, ordering and value are brought together without reference to an external measure, but rather by – or in – relations in which the performative capacities of number to order and value are locally combined in different ways to produce spaces more general than those described by Euclid.16

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 What this way of thinking highlights is how value is created. In terms of architecture and urban practice, it asks whose experience is counted and in what way, and what role do devices and instruments have in this counting and measuring? Here, the question reverts to that of the surface. This move to general spaces that may be combined locally but could also have other, more far-flung, connections is exactly the relation of the folded surface, where intensities create moments of opportunity and where movement is the norm.17 What might these general spaces entail for architecture? They point to a way of describing space as viewed from different angles and from different and overlapping points of view. They hint at a way of engaging spaces as having differing values and differing temporalities, of conceptualising spaces and their inhabitations as having the capacity to change. In order to intervene in such spaces, a mode of representation is required that can account for these different 254 Nishat Awan

perspectives, but, crucially, can also make the conditions for relations between them emerge or be proposed. Thus, a central quality of a topological methodology in architecture would be mediation.

Affective methods and the space of possibilities Returning to the ‘impossible’ space defined by the migrant body moving through the city, it is the body’s surface that describes this space. Brian Massumi claims affect entails a different language to bodies that cannot be expressed in words: ‘For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of a living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another’.18 The response of bodies is, therefore, not predetermined but unfolds in time, relationally. In topological terms, this unfolding occurs as points along a line. Time is considered, not as the time taken for an event to happen, but the delay between receiving an affect and the reception of it, or reaction to it. Here, affect is a way of thinking dynamically about, not just bodies in space, but about space unfolding around bodies through their relations and encounters of speed and slowness. As architects, how might we represent this quality that bodies have of creating topological spaces of affect? A project based in the London Borough of Hackney might give some clues. It used the body as a way of negotiating the affective terrain of a contested street,19 with many Turkish and Kurdish shops and businesses (Figure 4.5.1). It was a site of regular protest by Kurdish groups against events in Turkey and, therefore, a highly contested space, differently experienced by people from different backgrounds. The movement of bodies along the street, whether collectively in the form of a protest, or in the habitual exchanges of everyday life, created an invisible terrain of appropriated space that we attempted to map. This movement of the body was represented in a number of different ways: first, as experience, where walking with others was a way of documenting the space; second, as temporality, using information from our conversations that described how the street was occupied and used at different times; and finally, as an exchange between different spaces, from those that we physically occupy to the mental spaces that make connections elsewhere. This last aspect is perhaps the most important, the attempt to represent the fluid connections that we all make across different times and spaces, but that are greater in number and more intense in the case of diasporas. The maps took the information from the original walks (where we went, at what time, the connections made to other places) and encoded them into a three-dimensional point cloud, Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.5.1 Stoke Newington High Street, London Borough of Hackney, 2007 Source: Photograph by Nishat Awan Diasporic experience and topological methods 255

FIGURE 4.5.2 Plan drawing of the walk, mapped using an ANN, 2009 Source: Drawing by Nishat Awan

with the third dimension used for time. An artificial neural network (ANN) was then used to create a relational map of the street that represented each person’s walk as a ‘sphere’ or spatial envelope (Figure 4.5.2).20 ANNs are mathematical models that describe a topological space inspired by the structure and functional aspects of biological neural networks.21 Nodes and connections within a computational system process inputs and create outputs, a representation of the transmission of information through synapses and neurons in the brain. Usually, such programs are used to model complex relationships and patterns in datasets, typically being used for classification. There are a range of different types of neural network that vary in topological organisation and, consequently, in the transmission of data. For this project, a specific ANN derived from ‘the self-organising map’ (SOM) was used, which is typically a two-dimensional map of n-dimensional inputs.22 In cognitive and computational science, the SOM is used as a tool for categorisation, but we took a different approach, based on the observation that, just as in real life the relations between people, objects and spaces are altered as soon as something extra is added or someone else arrives, so the same is also true for a neural network, which is, in essence, a map of relations. It is solely a representation of the original inputs – there is no field upon which inputs are distributed, and, therefore, there can be no categories, only relations. The advantage of using ANNs lies, not in their ability to provide classifications of data, but in their ability to provide approximations of it. In fact, what are mapped are topological relationships, rather than topographic descriptions. In topological terms, then, the ANN acted as a manifold and, combined with the walks, it resulted in an affective method for understanding the city as experience. The dynamic model allowed movement to be represented in overlapping ways and at different scales. It was able to encapsulate the physical movement along the street as a dynamic section, where elevations

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 at the top and bottom of the screen were used as a navigational device (Figure 4.5.3). The specific effects that occur through the displacement of the migrant subject were represented by the green map in the middle, which was produced by the ANN and represented the amount of activity in a particular space over a period of time, as well as the relations made to other spaces. Finally, extracts of conversations and images from the walks were used to create a further layer of information. Using the ANN to represent diasporic space allowed a standard two-dimensional map of the walks to have experience folded back into it. The interface then brought the n-dimensional space of the manifold back into the standard Euclidean space of architectural representation. In this move from three- to n-dimensions and back again, the map looks very different. It is necessarily imprecise, it resists explanation, it suggests a move away from architecture and urban design as problem-solving towards the mediation of open- ended spatial possibilities that allow for multiple perspectives. 256 Nishat Awan

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FIGURE 4.5.3 The interface developed to navigate the mapped walks, 2009 Source: Nishat Awan

Notes 1 Traditional architectural representation has been confined to two dimensions, such as a plan or a section, or to the simulation of a third dimension, for example in perspective drawing. In order to encapsulate movement within this plane, techniques from other disciplines and practices have sometimes been borrowed: for example, from Futurist paintings or from the notation systems developed to draw the movement of a body through space in dance. More recently, the productive relationship with film and animation, has allowed a temporal dimension to be included. (For more on the relationship between architecture and representation, see Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier 2000). 2 Lash and Lury 2007. S. Lash (2009) Afterword: In praise of the a posteriori sociology and the empirical, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 175–87. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 3 C. Lury, L. Parisi and T. Terranova (2012) Introduction: The becoming topological of culture, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 29, no. 4–5, pp. 3–35. 4 A. Appadurai (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy, Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 1–23. 5 S. Sassen (2010) The global inside the national: A research agenda for sociology, Sociopedia.isa. Available at: www.saskiasassen.com/pdfs/publications/the-global-inside-the-national.pdf (accessed 18 August 2014). 6 D.E. Davis (1999) ‘Chaos and governance’, in Political Power and Social Theory, vol. 13. 7 L. Adkins and C. Lury (2009) Introduction: What is the empirical? European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 5–20. 8 A dancing troupe formed by John Tiller that originated the precision dancing technique. Kracauer was fascinated by the dissolving of individuals into one mass unit by the linking of arms and through a militarised aesthetic. Diasporic experience and topological methods 257

9 Kracauer 1995, p. 77. 10 Ibid., p. 76. 11 Here, I use ‘reduced’ as Deleuze would use it in his description of the fold: ‘The simplest way of stating the point is by saying that to unfold is to increase, to grow; whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce, “to withdraw into the recesses of a world”’ (Deleuze 1993, pp. 8–9). This is not a reduction in the colloquial sense, but a reduction that leads to an intensity. 12 K. Godel (1947) What is Cantor’s continuum problem? The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 54, no. 9, pp. 515–25, p. 515. 13 X.W. Sha (2012) Topology and morphogenesis, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 29, no. 4–5, pp. 220–46. 14 Rotman 2012, p. 254. 15 Sha 2012, op. cit., pp. 222–3. 16 C. Lury (2009) ‘From one to multiplicity’, in Ascione et al. 2009, p. 80. 17 Deleuze 1993. 18 Massumi 2002, p. 35. 19 The project was carried out in collaboration with computational designer Phil Langley and as part of PhD research at University of Sheffield, funded by AHRC. For more detailed information on the project, see N. Awan and P. Langley (2013) Mapping migrant territories as topological deformations of space, Space and Culture, vol. 16, no. 1. 20 Sloterdijk and Hoban 2011. 21 In the brain, neurons receive signals through synapses located on the membrane of the neuron. When the signal received is strong enough, the neuron is activated and emits a signal, which can be passed on to another synapse and, if strong enough, can activate further neurons. ANNs are simplified and highly abstracted versions of this process that consist of an input and an output, with the strength of the signal being determined by a multiplier. They are used in a wide variety of settings for their ability to simulate complex, non-linear relationships. 22 Kohonen 2001. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.6 OPEN DESIGN

Thoughts on software and the representation of movement

Mark Meagher

As any student of architecture soon discovers, discussion of an architectural project necessitates some means of representation, all the more so when movement through it is being considered. As will already be evident from the varied contributions in this book, the experience of moving through an existing work of architecture or landscape is influenced by a great diversity of factors that include, but are not limited to, cues found in the physical environment. All the senses are involved in this experience, along with a range of tacit and explicit influences, such as the time of year, the weather and the company of those who share it. As an entirety, the experience remains beyond description, for all attempts to communicate it are selective, each medium having only the capacity to capture specific aspects. Film merges the acoustical element with the visual; measured drawings such as sections capture multiple aspects affecting the spatial quality; and physical models allow the spatial distinctions offered by binocular vision and the possibility of showing material and tectonic considerations. The desire to anticipate the experiential qualities of an imagined building or landscape is certainly not limited to computational media, but this chapter will investigate how software lets us anticipate aspects of architectural experience and decide what kinds of choice we can make. I will consider several techniques for working with and understanding the movement of people using the computer, asking in each case what the underlying relationship is between representation and the reality it aims to communicate. Software is primarily about

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 enabling communication – taking something inchoate and making it clear – and I will consider various attempts at designing architectural software that is intended to fulfil this desire for clarity. The representation of movement provides a demanding test for designers of software, for it comes with in-built presuppositions about the world, about what is important and what can safely be ignored. When choosing a type of software to understand movement, one is obliged to make choices about how the complex reality of experience can be reduced to something quantitatively described and modelled. Most users are unaware of the epistemological predispositions of their digital tools, which are not often exposed to view, for software usually works as a ‘black box’, that is a closed system that can be described without recourse to an understanding of its inner workings. So long as one understands what is Open design 259

acceptable as input, the software will produce an acceptable output. The black-box approach has benefits in terms of usability, and, as long as the output conforms to one’s expectations, there is no need to tinker with settings or customize the behaviour of the model. Only when the model fails to produce meaningful results or to meet necessary expectations must one open up its inner workings, exposing both the presuppositions of the software and the understanding of reality on which it depends. Marshall McLuhan observed that new media tend to adopt the content of those they have replaced, and much design software adopts the metaphors and content of pre-digital forms of representation.1 It is possible, for example, for a designer to use Photoshop without understanding image-compression algorithms, and many of the tools provided, such as dodging and burning, employ metaphors taken from the photographic darkroom. Similarly, early word-processing software mimicked closely the experience of writing on a typewriter, including, of course, the qwerty keyboard designed to avoid mechanical clashes, and computer-aided design (CAD) software initially imitated the process of 2D drafting with a mechanical drawing instrument, such as the drafting arm, mayline or T-square. At first glance, such software appears to serve the simple purpose of translating content from one medium to another, providing a more efficient means of representing and storing the same information. Early adopters of CAD software could hardly have imagined the profound impact their decision would have on every aspect of design, but the limitations of early CAD software have been summarized by John Frazer, pioneer in design computing:

Probably with all the best intentions the computer graphics companies foisted computer- aided design on to a gullible architectural profession . . . The drawings produced were slower and uglier and derived by a most unpleasant and seemingly unnatural process in front of a frustrating screen. The therapeutic pleasure of the manual drawing board process with time to reflect upon what was being produced was lost. The CAD industry had ‘solved’ the wrong problem or at best had bodged a response to a badly stated problem or possibly ‘solved’ a problem which was not a problem at all.2

The introduction of CAD changed, not only the manual activity of drawing a line, but also the understanding of the relation between the act of drawing and the thing drawn (in this case, the imagined building or landscape). CAD shows up the close relation of design process to design outcome, revealing how a tool intended to smoothly move design information from an analogue to digital format had the unintended consequence of transforming the entire design process.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Whereas early CAD software attempted to recreate the experience of pre-digital ways of working, more recent architectural software involved different metaphors. The conventions of orthographic 2D drafting in architecture and engineering were incrementally replaced by techniques of design based on 3D models. The screen still required the flattening of the 3D representation on to a 2D surface, but the process of translation was concealed in the software, rather than explicitly addressed in the making of the drawing. Unlike the physical process of drawing a perspective or an orthographic projection, in which the representation is ‘constructed’ following a set of standard procedures for ‘flattening’ 3D objects on a 2D plane, 3D modelling software presents a (usually) perspectival view of the model that appears more ‘realistic’ than orthographic projection, but obscures the conventions of projection underlying it. Like the drawing, the digital model is an abstraction that allows one to work on the imagined 260 Mark Meagher

project, but, unlike the drawing, the software collapses the distinction between drawing and building, making a highly abstract application of projective geometry appear as a direct manipulation of the thing itself. The fact that 3D modelling is in itself a form of projection based on the principles of descriptive geometry remains fully concealed in most software used to produce digital models, for they focus instead on intuitive operations that reproduce physical modelling techniques, such as carving, lofting and mirroring. This sense of working directly on the building was enhanced by moving beyond the keyboard as interface. The invention of the computer mouse in the early 1960s3 was based on the idea that digital information could be manipulated and handled in the same way as we hold and move physical objects in space. Ever since, the way we interact with digital information on the screen has been based largely on spatial metaphors, and our understanding of digital models assumes that the screen is a window through which we can view and directly manipulate information that is inherently spatial.

Beyond drawing: numerical simulation Although 3D modelling has had a profound impact on the design process by allowing architects to work on a realistic visual representation, the uses of the 3D model to produce and manage data promise an even more significant impact on the way that buildings are conceived. Early CAD software was unable to evaluate the performance of the future building or provide a foundation for evidence-based design decisions, but the integration of numerical simulation in the design process now allows designers to anticipate many aspects of the behaviour and experiential qualities of the building, in advance of construction. Numerical simulation is another form of representation, a way of communicating essential aspects of the design. With some simplification and addition of specific information, the digital model can be used as the basis to evaluate the lighting, acoustical, structural and thermal performance of a building, providing the basis for performance-based decision-making and communication of numerical results to clients in a way that can be intuitively understood. The integration of simulation and virtual reality has also been used effectively as the basis of communicating experience, for example with the Arup SoundLab, where the acoustical qualities of a proposed space are presented audibly to communicate numerical analysis to a non-specialist audience.4 Numerical simulation depends on the addition of data to the 3D model, specifying details relevant to the specific analysis. For example, before performing an evaluation of thermal performance, it is necessary to add data on materials and construction types, as well as assumptions about the types and scheduling of building services, augmenting the 3D geometry

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 with additional metadata to enable a numerical representation of the building’s thermal behaviour. Just as the abstraction of 3D geometry can serve as the basis for a realistic visual representation, so it can also provide the means to approximate aspects of physical performance. Taken together, the multiple functionality of 3D geometry as a support for design decision- making and communication is quite unprecedented. Whereas pre-digital design depended on many different types of representation, such as plans, sections, physical models and graphical ‘simulations’ of views or material and tectonic aspects of the design, the 3D model now provides a single representation that can be used to produce multiple outputs, depending on the type of analysis needed. One such type of analysis is the study of movement. The animated fly-through is a tool provided by most 3D-modelling software packages for simulating the experience of moving through a 3D model. The technique consists of Open design 261

animating a virtual camera along a linear path that approximates the point of view of a person moving through the space. As the name suggests, it is difficult to recreate the experience of walking with this technique, and the result is more often that of flying, a disembodied eye. Fly-throughs are challenged by an ambiguity of scale that one often finds in computer renderings, leaving an uncertain relation of structure to human inhabitation that makes it difficult to understand and imaginatively recreate the proposed experience. In some cases, this is simply the result of unfamiliar geometry:

Whereas the eye has been trained since the Renaissance to appreciate the length, width and depth of rectangular shapes, it is far less accustomed to evaluate the size of smoothly warped surfaces and volumes. Hence the impression that realizations like Asymptote’s HydraPier in Haarlemmermeer, Netherlands, or Zaha Hadid’s BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, are like momentarily landed futuristic spaceships. With spaceships they share a streamlined appearance, and above all an enigmatic scale that appears as a consequence of their non-conventional geometry.5

The ambiguity of scale described by Picon is universal enough in recent avant-garde computational architecture to represent the result of a working method and not merely a stylistic choice. It is, in large part, an outcome of the software and its capabilities. The simulation of human movement is an area of study in itself, focused for example on anticipating the patterns of movement of pedestrians, or the time required for evacuation in case of fire. Such simulations are based on assumptions about aspects of the building that affect pedestrians’ decisions about the best route, constructing a model that includes only these selected criteria. Space Syntax is one well-established method for simulating the influence of the urban environment on pedestrian behaviour, based on a numerical abstraction that describes the degree of connectedness of each zone within an urban context.6 This methodology has been questioned as overly reductive, because it discards information such as building height and land use that could reasonably be expected to have an impact on the choices made by individual pedestrians.7 Importantly for this discussion, the underlying logic on which the results are based, and the accuracy with which the model can be applied, are very difficult for the non-expert to evaluate critically. The communication of underlying presuppositions and assumptions is a central challenge for evidence-based design, and, with simulations, these assumptions tend to be concealed by the software or remain too complex to present to a non-specialist audience. This can be a problem if critical decisions about urban form or landscape or building design need to be made on the basis of such evidence, as they 8 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 often are.

Black box versus open design All this suggests that the way in which the 3D model has been implemented in commercial design software is problematic because it is self-focused, providing insufficient opportunities to test ideas against other types of design representation. The idea behind building information modelling (BIM), the current incarnation of CAD software, is the translation of a data model into a working method, by which the model and its associated metadata become the primary repository of design information and tool for design communication. The intention is that, from the single model, multiple types of representation can be generated to extract different 262 Mark Meagher

types of information for different audiences. We might question whether such an approach to the design process will lead to greater clarity of understanding and communication, or whether, like CAD in John Frazer’s estimation, BIM might turn out to be another bodged response to a badly stated problem. This will depend very much on how BIM software is presented to its users. It could become an inscrutable black box that somehow delivers predictable results only so long as the designer consistently stores all work and ideas and project information in one, monolithic and total, digital representation. Alternatively, the building information model could become an opportunity to creatively rethink the design process and the relation of software to the diverse set of tools that architects and designers of the built environment have always used to understand and communicate the future building. In my opinion, recent history suggests that only the latter option will provide a fluid enough process to capture the richness and nuance implicit in an experience such as moving through a building or landscape. I will now briefly outline what I think this future could look like. In contrast to a method of working that remains enclosed in the abstractions of the 3D model, I would like to suggest what a more ‘open’ design process would look like, and how this could be enabled by software. For the purpose of the argument, I will refer to the opposite of the black box as ‘open design’.9 To start with, we need an approach that recognizes the limitations of each individual software package. This implies a large ecosystem of software, in which each individual package is carefully designed to accomplish its particular task, as well as allowing a high level of interoperability between packages. It implies an understanding of the design process and of the flow of information between software, physical models, material and tectonic investigations, and other forms of design exploration. When software fails, as it inevitably does, there must be sufficient understanding of the underlying mechanics to repair and/or re-invent one’s digital tools to meet the questions at hand. In the case of simulation, this approach could involve methods that permit the designer to test simulation outcomes by running multiple simulations to identify the influence of a given parameter or group of parameters, a method known as sensitivity analysis.10 Software becomes a tool to test multiple ‘what if’ scenarios, as well as testing the accuracy of results. An open design approach also implies a detailed understanding of how diverse compu- tational methods interact with each other and with analogue methods over the course of the design process. The computational design process offers a means to track and understand the stages in design through tacit and explicit logging of design activity and communication. Figure 4.6.1 presents a computer-generated visualization of a design process informed by simulation, which provides insights into the range of design responses to building thermal performance 11 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 data in a parametric design process. This image, presenting changes to a single script over about 24 hours, illustrates the chronological relationship between simulation feedback, modification to building geometry and modification to parametric definitions, providing a detailed understanding of specific aspects of a design process. Although this representation was developed as a research tool, similar visual representations of process have been used to inform designers about the history and authorship of their own designs,12 and to engage a wider audience in a participatory design process.13 It is also arguably the case that an open design process should include the ability to write some software yourself. Acquiring the programming skills required to contribute to open- source projects is outside the interests and skillset of most designers, but the ability to craft simple scripts to accomplish specific design tasks is an ability that any designer can master. In Open design 263

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FIGURE 4.6.1 Detailed analysis of parametric design development with simulation feedback. The visualization presents a record of distinct versions of a design produced during a 24-hour period. The design was produced using scripts: text-based commands for defining geometry, metadata related to simulation and parametric relationships. Script versions are arrayed along concentric circles representing named scripts Source: Julien Nembrini and Mark Meagher 2013

a design culture that increasingly favours the computer as the primary means of design development, writing one’s own bespoke software is an act of creative freedom that supports a critical understanding of software and its relation to various forms of architectural practice. Mark Burry has called for a hybrid design process, incorporating material investigations

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 and full-scale 1:1 models, alongside digital investigations that he calls ‘post-digital’.14 The mixing of digital models with large-scale physical studies overcomes some of the limitations of the 3D model, such as ambiguity of scale and absence of methods for testing material and tectonic implications of formal decisions made in the software. The construction of prototypes at a range of scales can also be helpful as a means of validating simulations of structural perform- ance15 (Figure 4.6.2). Physical models provide an insight into multiple aspects of performance and experience that cannot readily be tested in the digital model, aspects that go beyond purely formal concerns to address a wider range of sensory qualities. These experi ments involve a design process including tactile engagement with materials alongside a sophisticated approach to simulation through generation of digital models.16 This is the approach taken by the ‘persist- ent models’ presented by Phil Ayres in Chapter 4.7 of this book; it is also the approach taken 264 Mark Meagher

FIGURE 4.6.2 Timber fabric module prototype Source: Markus Hudert, IBOIS Laboratory for Timber Constructions 2013

in research laboratories such as the Media and Design Lab of Jeffrey Huang,17 at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. With software of hidden workings, referred to earlier as the black box, it is all too easy to produce and analyse results (geometry and associated data), but very difficult to evaluate one’s results meaningfully in terms of experience, construction or other complex and nuanced aspects. Achieving clarity of communication requires an understanding of the software, including its limitations, and some involvement in assembling the process of design. The experience of movement is particularly resistant to reductive approaches. Being inherently complex, it does not fit well within the context of a totally digital approach. Its successful resolution requires intuition and skill. It benefits from a hybrid approach, from an ‘open’ design process. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Notes 1 McLuhan 1964. 2 J.H. Frazer, ‘The generation of virtual prototypes for performance optimization’, in Oosterhuis and Feireiss 2006, pp. 208–12. 3 W.K. English, D.C. Engelbart and M.L. Berman (1967) Display-selection techniques for text manipulation, IEEE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-8, no. 1, pp. 5–15. 4 Loukissas 2012, p. 47. 5 Picon 2010, p. 125. 6 A. Turner, A. Penn and B. Hillier (2005) An algorithmic definition of the axial map, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 425–44. 7 C. Ratti (2004) Urban texture and space syntax: Some inconsistencies, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 487–99. Open design 265

8 This discussion of simulation is based in part on conversations with Philip Langley, whose presentation, ‘Branch, merge, commit – New forms of open source for designing with BIM’, addresses this topic. See ‘The Bartlett Conference: Pedagogy meets Big Data and BIM’ (June 2013). Available at: www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/latest/events/bartlett-conference (accessed 19 August 2014). 9 The term ‘open design’ was first used by this author in the context of a research project at Harvard University called ‘OpenD’, which involved the visual representation of a design process. See M. Meagher, K. Bielaczyc and J. Huang (2005) OpenD: Supporting parallel development of digital designs, Proc. Designing User Experience (DUX ‘05); and J. Huang, K. Bielaczyc and M. Meagher (2006) Liquid ontologies, metaperspectives, and dynamic viewing of shared knowledge, Proceedings of I-KNOW 2006 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management, pp. 560–7. 10 J. Nembrini, S. Samberger, A. Sternitzke and G. LaBelle (2012) Combining sensitivity analysis with parametric modeling to inform early design, Proceedings of 2012 Symposium on Simulation for Architectural and Urban Design. 11 J. Nembrini, M. Meagher and A. Park (2013) Usage patterns of scripting interfaces for building performance assessment at early design stage, Proceedings of 13th International Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association. 12 U. Hirschberg (2003) Transparency in information architecture: Enabling large scale creative collaboration in architectural education over the internet, International Journal of Architectural Computing, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 12–22. 13 K. Al-Kodmany (1999) Using visualization techniques for enhancing public participation in planning and design: Process, implementation, and evaluation, Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 37–45. 14 M. Burry (2005) Homo Faber, Architectural Design, vol. 75, no. 4, pp. 30–7. 15 Y. Weinand and M. Hudert (2010) Timberfabric: Applying textile principles on a building scale, Architectural Design, vol. 80, no. 4, pp. 102–7. 16 Examples of such a hybrid approach include Burry’s own design studios at RMIT; research laboratories such as Jeffrey Huang’s Media and Design Lab and Yves Weinand’s IBOIS (Laboratory for Timber Constructions) (both at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne); and the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, where the prototypes presented by Phil Ayres in Chapter 4.7 of this book were developed. 17 See Brizzi and Giaconia 2009, pp. 102–4, and N. Zuelzke, T. Patt and J. Huang (2012) Computation as an ideological practice, Digital Aptitudes, Proceedings of ACSA, Boston, MA, 2012. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 4.7 THE MATTER OF MOVEMENT

Phil Ayres

Locating considerations of movement in design For most of this book, movement in architectural design has been considered from the viewpoint of the observer/occupant.1 It is they who are expected to move through the synthesised environments contrived by the architect. Spatial devices such as the route, arcade, corridor, ramp, stair, pier, etc., attest to this. They are generally conceived as static elements, charged with the goal of steering occupant movement and framing socio-spatial practices such as the pilgrimage, the procession, the promenade or the dérive. We might call this approach to the consideration of movement – where the responsibility of movement is attributed to the observer – as anthropocentric. There are notable works that experiment with a different point of departure in which movement is considered as a capacity of the proposition itself. For example, Ron Herron’s ‘A walking city’ (1964) conveys this ambition in the title alone.2 In this visionary proposition and its subsequent iterations, the city becomes itinerant, emancipating itself from geograph - ical fixity. The Maison du Peuple (1935) in Clichy, France, by Lods, Beaudouin, Prouvé and Bodiansky, was a built example, with movable floors: the building fabric was actively transformable to support multiple programmes, in the same location, at different times of day

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 – a densification strategy that establishes synergies between programme, temporality and place. A third example is Brunelleschi’s device for testing the validity of his perspectival representa - tion of the Florentine Baptistry. It incorporated areas of burnished silver on the picture plane that directly reflected portions of the Baptistry’s context, constructing ‘live’ areas of movement within the representation.3 I suggest that the correspondence binding these three examples is a non-anthropocentric concern with movement – that is to say, the three architectural artefacts can be understood as con- cerned with movement arising from sources other than the observer. These three exemplify, respectively, the visionary, the built and the representational – realms necessarily interdepend - ent if one is engaging in the design and realisation of materially dynamic architectures. The experience of our research points to a need to develop synergetic relations between new The matter of movement 267

conceptualisations, new methods of designing, new representational tools and new material systems. This chapter examines these issues through two interrelated research projects developed at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) as part of a broader enquiry at the intersection between architecture (considered as both practice and spatial construct) and digital technologies.

The Persistent Model project The Persistent Model project examines how digital technologies can support new relations between representation and built artefact. The parent project is developed through discrete sub-projects. Each sub-project investigates specific questions by engagement with the development of new design tools and production of full-scale demonstrations, two of which have been completed and exhibited, and a third was under development at the time of writing. The origins of the overarching hypothesis for the project can be located in Stephen Groák’s assertion that, ‘The very conventions of representation also can affect the character of the buildings to which they subsequently give rise’.4 It follows that, if we reconstruct our methods of representation, we also construct the opportunity for realising qualitatively different spaces and places. The project engages three principal areas in which changes to the conventions of representation are considered: the duration of active influence that representation can hold in relation to the represented; the means, methods and media through which representations are constructed and used; and what it is that is being represented. These concerns with representation are tuned towards operating with material dynamics as a principal design driver and their deployment in dynamic architectures – material assemblies with an inherent capacity for movement. Free-form metal inflation is a fabrication process that establishes a dependence between the given boundary profile of a ‘cushion’ component and the material mechanisms at work when the steel cushion moves, under internal loading, from the elastic to the plastic regime. This is where introduced energy starts to become irrecoverable, and permanent forming occurs. As the component is a cushion, the act of inflation increases the cross-sectional area, but, as the pressures involved are low, there is negligible change in the total surface area. Depending on the boundary profile, this leads to self-generating buckling phenomena and a material reluctance to form double curvature. Another point of interest is that the inflation process can be arrested and resumed arbitrarily, allowing components to be partially inflated.5 This segues to the interesting notion of ‘harvesting’ the performance potential of any individual 6

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 component, as required over time. The two projects described below took free-form metal inflation as a starting point for architectural constructs with an inherent potential capacity for movement.

Persistent Model #1 The first full-scale demonstration – Persistent Model #1 – was developed for the CITA exhibition digital.material, held at the ROM Gallery for Art and Architecture, Oslo, in 2010. The exhibi- tion comprised four CITA projects, each offering nuanced perspectives on digital design practice and its role in enabling a new culture of material thinking in architectural design. The four full-scale demonstrations – Reef Pattern, Thaw, Lamella and Persistent Model #1 – showed how 268 Phil Ayres

digital tools can enable extensions to existing material and craft practices and their associated logics of construction. Particular attention was given to designing with material perform- ance as a design driver, and various trajectories of investigation were explored, based on this common starting point.7 Persistent Model #1 explored how digital technologies permit the reconsideration of relationships between representation and realisation. We wanted to know how digital technologies might support continuous feedback between spaces of representation and realisation, and what material system could allow driveable spatial transforms over time. A feedback model would support the ability to incorporate unanticipated transforms in the material system and open the way for further design speculation. Steel cushions formed through low-pressure inflation allowed us to investigate significant spatial movements. These movements started as mechanical transforms at the material level and then percolated through component and assembly to organisations of material and component. Inflation of the assembly began at the opening of the exhibition to dramatise the dynamic process. A significant design challenge was the fact that the inflation process caused the component to deviate from the initial drawings used to cut the profiles (Figure 4.7.1), thereby making preceding representations redundant. The representational question arose of how these transformations in component attributes could be captured as operational and explicit parameters in a design context. In Persistent Model #1, this question was compounded by the fact that the assembly’s constituent components were selectively inflated, causing transforms across hierarchies of scale (from material to component to assembly) and defying our ability to model the result predictively by digital means. A representational model was established alongside the built construct, introducing a feedback loop between the space of design and the space of material presence (Figure 4.7.2). Changes to the physical construct were mapped back on to an abstracted representation, allowing subsequent decisions to be made on the basis of the as-built condition, rather than an idealised condition. The role of the model, therefore, shifted between recording the actual changing conditions and providing the basis for subsequent speculation and specification. The resulting digital construct possessed the qualities of being steered yet unanticipated, both deliberate and tempered by dynamic behaviour of the material (Figure 4.7.3). Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.7.1 The initial profile geometry of free-form inflated metal cushions is a primary determinant of the extent of deviation exhibited under inflation Source: Phil Ayres/CITA The matter of movement 269

FIGURE 4.7.2 Persistent Model #1 presented the digital model and the physical artefact as a linked system in which physical movement under inflation could be mapped back to the space of representation Source: Anders Ingvarsten

FIGURE 4.7.3 The arrangement of the physical assembly

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 at the start of the exhibition is shown on the left, and the arrangement by the end of the exhibition is on the right. The spatial movements resulted from the careful junctioning of components to ‘amplify’ the material dynamics resulting from inflation Source: Anders Ingvarsten 270 Phil Ayres

Persistent Model #2 The opportunity to develop a second project arose out of a successful funding application and the support of the ggggallery™, Copenhagen, which ran an innovative programme of architecture exhibitions at the intersection of experiment and technology. The gallery’s programme, which ran for more than 2 years, focused on architectural research enquiry in which the making of physical artefacts, prototypes and demonstrations was central. Persistent Model #2: dynamic pressure systems opened in February 2013 and ran until July 2013. The exhibition comprised a single, full-scale tensegrity system, approximately 5 m long, 3 m high and 1.5 m deep, like a wall along one side of the gallery. Persistent Model #2 took as its point of departure a more appropriate tectonic logic for inflatable metal cushions. It followed the simple principle that, if the metal cushions were to maintain the capacity to transform though repeated inflations and deflations, the integrity of the membrane needed to be preserved. This led to an avoidance of junctions and metal fixings that puncture the material (bolting, riveting, screwing). We also wanted to expand the vocabulary of inflatables, complementing the hard, irreversible transformations of the metal cushions with soft, reversible ones. Tensegrity structures possess a bounding net of continuous tension in which compressive members are held without touching one another, the whole achieving a state of equilibrium. The tectonic implication is, therefore, that junctions between compression members can be dispensed with. However, this depends how the notion of compression members is defined in relation to specific tensegrity topologies. The planar double-layer topology of Persistent Model #2, adopted from Kenneth Snelson’s Planar Weave of 1960,8 exhibits clear groupings of linked compression members (Figure 4.7.4). However, René Motro defines the notion of ‘set’, and, crucially, discontinuity between sets, as a means of accommodating this type of configuration within the definition of tensegrity systems.9 From a tectonic perspective, this required that we devise a novel means of connecting cushions while preserving their integrity. This was achieved by employing a material dynamics mechanism steered through defined geometry that we had discovered in the earlier project (see Figure 4.7.1). A ‘chevron’ geometry, applied at a reduced scale to the ends of linear bar components, allowed clamping on to a flat steel junction by a process of inflation. This flat, wing-like component also incorporated the junction of the tensile members at geometric node points (Figure 4.7.5). Such tensegrity structures can be considered analogous to inflatable membranes. The analogy holds if a balloon is considered as comprising two components: a bounding envelope that exhibits tensile con- tinuity and the contained air that acts as the compressed component (Motro, 2003).10 Fuller is also clear about this conceptualisation, stating that, ‘Tensegrity structures are pure

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 pneumatic structures and can accomplish visibly differentiated tension-compression interfunc - tioning in the same manner that is accomplished by pneumatic structures, at the subvisible level of energy events’.11 The conceptual congruence between tensegrities and inflatables afforded an understanding that multi-scalar dependencies and relations of similarity could be established between the parts and whole of a materially variegated system – a system of nested tensegrities composed of actively inflated and elastic membranes (foils) and plastically formed membranes with potential for further inflation (steel cushions). In this project, the characteristics of Snelson’s Planar Weave were reconsidered from an architectural sensibility, seeking synergies between structural logic, component demands and material dynamics. Further concerns were issues of skin, local specificity and production of The matter of movement 271 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.7.4 Persistent Model #2 began as an exploration of a more appropriate tectonic for the inflatable metal cushions, in order to preserve their integrity as an inflatable body. The resulting structure was an irregular, double-layer tensegrity Source: Anders Ingvarsten 272 Phil Ayres Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE 4.7.5 A tensegrity node point with ‘soft’ inflatable skin applied. Nodes are the locations where compression and tension members meet Source: Anders Ingvarsten The matter of movement 273

FIGURE 4.7.6 The digital infrastructure developed for the project allowed real-time exploration of variant geometries and supported the generation of fabrication data, in this case defining elements for the production of scale physical models Source: Phil Ayres/CITA

variety through a geometrically irregular expression of the topology. These reconsiderations were examined and supported through a bespoke computational infrastructure with different concerns to those of Persistent Model #1. Where previously the digital infrastructure was tuned to support feedback between the space of representation and the changing states of the physical construct, with Persistent Model #2, the digital infrastructure was tuned towards the exploration, simulation and performance analysis of the geometries achieved with the chosen tensegrity topology. The investigation of irregular geometries required a method of simulation to ensure that the tensegrity could achieve a state of structural stability, or equilibrium. The digital infrastructure also incorporated the ability to generate fabrication data in real time, for the production of scale models or full-scale prototypes (Figure 4.7.6). This link back into physical modelling and prototyping provided a mode of testing through which to calibrate and tune the material dynamics encoded in the digital infrastructure. Although Persistent Model #2 was not designed for active movement, it was nevertheless a dynamic and ‘live’ tensile structure that reconfigured itself to applied loads. As we have developed a proof-of-concept for both the digital infrastructure as design/analysis tool and the material system, future work will focus more directly on controlling shape change through inherent mechanisms of material movement – both elastic (temporary) and plastic (permanent).

Conclusion Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 The two projects described above consider some challenges and opportunities of design practices and the resulting constructs when material dynamics is taken as the main design driver. Enlisting mechanical material behaviours to induce non-anthropocentric spatial movement requires design tools that support an investigation of scalar dependencies. It requires the ability to extrapolate the dynamic spatial and performance implications of differing material organisa- tions. It requires the development of novel tectonic systems, tuned to operate sensitively with dynamics occurring at the material level. It may even require the reconsideration of conventional relations between representation and artefact. The Persistent Model project shows the possibility of models intended to be incomplete, open ended and attuned to being informed by the complexities and dynamics of the material 274 Phil Ayres

world. Although the term persistent model could be interpreted as an aspiration towards seamless model integration, our experience of the two projects has caused us to look critically upon this aim. Our practice is not so much about establishing seamless integration between all aspects of the design environment, as about understanding and articulating the inter- dependencies between modes of modelling – digital and analogue. This suggests establishing an ‘ecology-of-models’, rather than a single, integrated model. Such an ecology would seek productiveness, not only in the correspondences, but also in the gaps and differences, and would certainly offer a clearer strategy for the inclusion of the role that physical models and 1:1 prototypes play. For, in this, and many other CITA projects, the aim has not just been instrumental, but has been a critical starting point through which to inform and calibrate an encoding of material dynamics within our design environments. The project demonstrates a design-led probing of the relationship between representation and the represented. The notion of persistent modelling might be understood as a familiar activity to architectural design if considered as describing an active and iterative engagement with design concerns. However, the persistence in persistent modelling can also be understood to apply in other ways, reflecting and anticipating roles for representation that could support architectures of persistent transformation and movement.

Acknowledgements Persistent Model #1 was funded by CITA and received industry support from Beyer Teknik. The design team was Phil Ayres and Anders Holden Deleuran. Persistent Model #2 was funded by DreyersFond and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. It received industry support from Beyer Teknik, Amcor and Festo. The design team was Phil Ayres, Anders Krogdal Nielsen, Kristjana Sigurdardottir and Roxana Aron.

Notes 1 The notion and scale of movement referred to here are above those concerned with technical detailing. 2 See R. Herron (1964) A walking city, Archigram, vol. 5, p. 17. 3 It is the device itself that is of interest here, rather than the perspectival representation of the Baptistry that Brunelleschi was testing through this viewing tool. The device was a sophisticated construct in which the observer looked from the back of the picture plane, through a hole, to a mirror that reflected the content of the picture plane. The viewing procedure required the observer to be precisely located in front, but looking away from the Baptistry doors. The viewing hole in the picture plane Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 corresponded to the eye height of the observer in ‘real space’. The effect would, therefore, be a representational equivalent of viewing the Baptistry from a point out in the surrounding square, with live movement incorporated into the upper levels of the scene by virtue of the burnished silver areas on the picture plane. Eugenio Battisti provides a thorough analysis of the device, based on a reconstruction and use (Battisti 2002). 4 Groák 1992. 5 See P. Ayres ‘Microstructure, macrostructure and the steering of material proclivities’, in Sheil 2012, pp. 220–37. 6 The notion of ‘harvesting’ performance describes the ability to arbitrarily increase the performance capacity of components if they are not inflated to their material limits. Performance capacity here refers to an increase in bending resistance through an increase in cross-sectional area of the component. The action of ‘harvesting’ would, therefore, assume an initial redundancy – prior inflations remaining below the material limits. The matter of movement 275

7 See Ayres et al. 2012, and P. Ayres, M. Tamke and M. Ramsgard Thomsen, ‘Making a digital-material practice’ in Ng and Patel 2013, pp.125–44. 8 See K. Snelson (2012) The art of tensegrity, International Journal of Space Structures, vol.27, no. 2/3, pp. 71–80. 9 Motro 2003. 10 Ibid. 11 Fuller 1975. Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

FIGURE C.1 ‘Man must travel’. Illustration of a section from the children’s book Adventure of the World by James Fisher 1954: the artwork for the book is attributed to Kempster and Evans, also known to have painted a mural for the Festival of Britain. William Kempster (1914–1976) was probably responsible for this image, as it rhymes with his pictures of 1930s aircraft in London’s Science Museum CONCLUSION

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

One page in a now obscure children’s book of 1954, Adventure of the World, epitomises the excitement of modernity (Figure C.1).1 It shows the landscape of a modern town with distant hills behind, and boxy modernist buildings with generous areas of grass between. It is overrun with every possible kind of vehicle whizzing about: not only cars and trucks on highways, but suspended monorails, aeroplanes and helicopters. The thrill of speed and freedom is presented as the very epicentre of modern life. Consciously or unconsciously, the artists, Kempster and Evans,2 leading illustrators who had been involved in the Festival of Britain, were drawing on ideas from CIAM and the Charter of Athens, particularly the division of the city by four functions and the obsession with sunlight and air,3 but perhaps inspiration came also from science-fiction films such as Metropolis and The Shape of Things to Come. If so, the sanitised view presented to the child lacks the sinister, dystopian moments of those films. A glorious future is depicted, with the new world of gadgets and the relatively new freedom of driving at unrestricted speed on empty roads, or flashing across the landscape in a clean electric train, personal flight still a promise. There seems no limit to economic growth, no end to resources, no oil crisis and certainly no ‘spaceship-earth’. Everest had just been conquered, parts of the globe were still being explored, but the hills and dales punctuated by cottages and steeples continued their cosy existence. The homely landscape of ‘on foot’ was taken for granted, and the walking of short distances remained as essential as it was banal.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Not until 20 years later was Bauen als Umweltzerstörung published by the Swiss architect Rolf Keller (Figure C.2). This picture book for architects was inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and its title translates as Building as Pollution.4 Keller fulminated against the destruction of the Swiss landscape, criticising not only the imposition of the motorways, but also suburban sprawl and the growth of non-places. In a determined swipe against orthodox modern architecture, he showed how the same housing models were being adopted worldwide, and buildings for different functions were all becoming the same. Page after page of before and after showed how places once attractive had been desecrated, buildings always replaced by something worse. For this wake-up call, he naturally selected the worst cases, but the point was well made and reflected widespread experience, coinciding with a wave of conservation, of pleas for a return to ‘meaning in architecture’, and doubts about 278 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

FIGURE C.2 Cover of Bauen als Umweltzerztörung by Rolf Keller, 1973, an architect’s response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

modernism.5 All the same, a growing population had to be housed, better communications were needed for economic growth, health and hygiene had to be improved, and there had to be economies of scale. For numerous reasons, modernist ways of doing things had become inevitable, but they did not have to be done so hastily, blindly, and with such complete priority given to technical and economic imperatives.

Functional efficiency and circulation Movement everywhere in these decades shifted from foot to vehicles, which was seen at first as a liberation. Post-war schools and hospitals were built at the edges of towns on greenfield sites, because there was space to spread out, land was cheaper, and there was the pleasure of a fresh start. In the hospital’s case, quick accessibility by vehicle was helped by its being placed on the ring road. It also suited architects infatuated with the modern movement to be given

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 a tabula rasa on which to compose their sculptural objects, in the manner of Mies or Le Corbusier.6 It is telling that, in the booklet of over 100 pages called Hospital Description, published in 1968 by the King’s Fund to portray an exemplary modernist hospital,7 there was almost nothing about context: no map showing relation to the town to which it belonged, no discussion of how to approach it on foot. The aerial photo shows the small, free car park half empty, today’s parking problems unforeseen. The discussion of movements inside the building is highly selective, great emphasis being placed on the way the ‘running-track’ ward layout allowed maximum surveillance from nurses’ stations. Clean thresholds to germ-free areas such as operating theatres were a high priority, and elaborate flow diagrams show clean equipment being separated from dirty in the basement, but there is almost no discussion of the experience of movement for patients and visitors, nor of way-finding as an issue. The Conclusion 279

report has little to say on the relative positions and hierarchy of departments, not noticing the sharing of the lowest ward floor between psychiatry and gynaecology, for example, nor justifying the chapel on the roof being shared as doctors’ lecture theatre, a displacement of religion by science.8 Nor is the decision to put the mortuary in the most distant basement explained. Servicing was the primary aim, delivery of patients being treated like delivery of heating, hot water, electricity or medical gases. Powell and Moya’s Wycombe General was actually well planned for movement and progression (Figure C.3). The drive swept up to an obvious front door, leading to a double- height foyer with generous reception area and gallery to the next floor, and the way to the inevitable lifts was clear and direct. Although lifts always bring the difficulty of suppressing the sense of vertical progression, the architects did create landing spaces on each level with windows on to the outside world, to let visitors reorientate themselves.9 With its relatively narrow plan, the building allowed frequent views out and daylight (Figure C.4). There was a generous staffroom on the ground floor and a spectacular stair down to the staff canteen. However, in the lengthy Hospital Description, these virtues went undiscussed, so that, in the hospital’s presentation as a model, they could have been, and probably were, missed.

FIGURE C.3 Photograph of the new Wycombe General Hospital by Powell and Moya, published in The Hospital Description, Gainsborough 1968

FIGURE C.4 The lowest ward floor of Wycombe General, given to gynaecology and psychiatry Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016

PSYCHIATRIC WARD GYNAECOLOGICAL WARD 280 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

The treatment of circulation as plumbing was widespread and is even more evident in one of the most prestigious hospitals of the period, the extension of King Edward VII by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall, sited opposite the Houses of Parliament in London and completed in 1966 (Figure C.5). Here, the stacking of floors and central placing of ducts with lifts made for efficient servicing, but the logical counterpart of giving views to patients at the edge was that all else, including teaching and consulting rooms, had to be internal. Corridors became labyrinthine. One would arrive by lift in an artificially lit and ventilated interior, deprived of all natural sense of direction and dependent on signs. There would be several blind, right-angle turns. This was a brand new building, again by ‘good architects’, uncompromised by the alterations and compromises that make most British hospitals even more confusing, but, for that reason, it lays bare the 1960s blind spot. In large and complex buildings, we probably cannot do without signs and numbered rooms, but they do not replace the sense of progression given by the building itself, which is all the more needed in a building that people visit just a few times, as patient or visitor, rather than every day. We need to retain our natural sense of progression just to feel the assurance of being able to retrace our steps, let alone the confidence of finding the place again on the next visit. In recent years, Roger Ulrich in the United States has conducted systematic psychological studies of way- finding in hospitals, showing that people’s confusion wastes endless staff time in redirection, so that bad planning for the experience of movement is inefficient as well as generating increased anxiety among patients, and this disadvantage can be costed.10 This criticism does not apply to hospitals alone. One of the largest and most famous mixed developments in 1960s London, the Barbican by Chamberlin Powell and Bon, is equally guilty. No expense was spared, and its architecture was celebrated as visually exciting, but innocent visitors arrived to find blind corners, lack of hierarchy, difficulties in knowing where they were and which way to go. The main pedestrian deck is so confusing that guidelines

FIGURE C.5 Plan of King Edward VII Hospital extension, 1966, by Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall Source: redrawn by Diego Carrasco after a published plan in Thompson and Goldin 1975 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Conclusion 281

FIGURE C.6 The Barbican, London: painted yellow line as Ariadne’s thread Source: Photograph by Peter Blundell Jones

FIGURE C.7 The Barbican, general plan Source: Plan as published in The Architectural Review, 1970s

in yellow paint have had to be added (Figure C.6). Even within the cultural centre, the proliferation of levels and directions is hard to fathom, but look at the floor plans and there is geometric clarity (Figure C.7). One can imagine that the architects, familiar from the start with the order of their plans, recognised without difficulty where they were in the finished building and so failed to appreciate the problem for other people. One problem was the loss of the old street pattern and clear connections at the edges, for the redevelopment’s planning logic ignored the city’s pattern to follow the grid of the drawing board, the architect’s rational world, which answered claims of standardisation and dimensional coordination. The T-square produces architects’ space, criticised mercilessly by Henri Lefebvre as taking over from space as understood by people in everyday life.11 The architects look down on their plans from

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 above in a godlike manner, but the inhabitants are denied that privilege: they just scuttle around at street level trying to find their way.

The limits of representation The problem is not just drawings, but the more general removal from everyday life that accompanies every means of representation. As was made clear in Part 4, when we need to discuss places and experiences that are not immediately present, some representation is indispensible. Maps and models are helpful in showing us relationships that are not immediately apparent and in allowing experience of changes of scale, from house to city and back. Plans and sections do not necessarily imply a placeless mentality: they can usefully be drawn of 282 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

vernacular buildings that were conceived without them and prove both helpful and revealing, even essential, for study. However, if drawings are used to predict and then execute a new world, their selectivity can easily become geared more to issues of production than to use and experience. The standard drawing sets of the 1960s assumed horizontal and vertical planes at 90º, for example, and preferred to ignore irregular site boundaries, expecting left-over perimeters to be filled with ‘landscaping’. The repeated horizontal floors resulted in stratification, vertical structure limited to a series of shafts, even staircases packed into tubes. Design of non-rectangular forms became difficult and unfamiliar, a challenge to be exploited only in special buildings. As many architects spent a greater proportion of time poring over drawings than within the spaces conceived, they lived increasingly in a world of their own. The problems of being strapped to the grid and the diagram were not universal, for, as we saw in Part 1, there have always been some architects engaged with the experience of movement, and no less so in the modern period. Concern with entrances and staircases, always the focal points, remains. But we have also seen that experience of movement was difficult to discuss and to justify. In the absence of direct experience, it required much imaginative reconstruction through plans, sections and photographs. This is a skill possessed by a limited range of people, and it requires adequate data. Only in specialised architectural books and journals is there normally sufficient space to print the drawings and photographs needed to put the whole story across. Daily newspapers normally rely on a single image, usually an exterior, and, with such limited visual means, progressions of movement can only be carried by verbal narrative. Film and television are not much help, for the camera is seldom used to show an accurate path through a building. It is difficult for technical reasons, but it also offends the conventions of filmic space, as discussed in Part 4. Computer fly-throughs add the third dimension, but usually without adopting the viewpoint of a normal observer, and, as one cannot control the direction of glance or the speed, they seem to run too fast. As with a view from an escalator, one fails adequately to direct one’s attention,12 for on foot one turns one’s head and pauses to look. So, neglect of the experience of movement is due at least in part to difficulties of dissemination, and to the fact that most buildings we think we know exist for us primarily via photographic images. Even experience of buildings visited is displaced in memory by the photos we took to remind us of them.

In car rather than on foot? Outside buildings, we constantly encounter the problem of the car, and the appeal of Venice is as much lack of cars as presence of canals. Cars mean that roads are no longer for

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 pedestrians, and walking along a motorway leads to arrest: in North America, the term ‘jaywalker’ was invented to describe this misdemeanour.13 Even walking beside a country road now feels threatening, and so walkers prefer so-called ‘bridle paths’, where cars are disallowed,14 and in the city pedestrianised streets, but this has meant a restriction of the walker from whole landscapes to limited reservations. Laurie Lee could no longer find his way from Slad to London, for it is increasingly difficult to walk long distances except in national parks, and bridges are needed over road and rail as well as river. We are now nearly all drivers, forcedly so as society becomes increasingly car-dependent. We get behind the wheel even for the shortest and most local trips, and services are increasingly redeployed to suit the driver.15 As congestion builds, roads desecrate the landscape further and blot out the ancient ways, while new ring roads bring more cars and new points of congestion. Our commitment to Conclusion 283

the car no longer means freedom: we suffer accidents, traffic jams, pollution and obesity, as well as the mental tension of driving, which is debilitating.16 We spend much time in the car and a substantial part of our salary on it. As we add daily to planetary carbon dioxide and deplete more than our share of resources, we know it cannot go on. What we could do is walk or cycle where possible and safeguard the walks that exist, particularly the old ways that remember our history. We could reconsider the walk to school, try to source our food locally and use trains whenever possible for long distance, as they require the least energy expenditure per person mile. Besides reducing dependence on the car, we could reduce the priority of tarmac and start making places with a pedestrian alternative. Where highways are inevitable, we should avoid making them into barriers and containers of ghettos, and, where highways turn into streets, we should take a lesson from Ben Hamilton-Baillie (p. 149) by redefining territory, making it clear that it is the car that is there on suffrance, it is for the driver to take care, rather than the pedestrian. We could apply political pressures to refill brownfield sites before violating virgin land, assuring some increased density and some relation between dwelling and social provision. We could demand of developers building new housing schemes that they include some community facilities as a catalyst for neighbourliness, and that, instead of merely calculating the minimum tarmac, they include a public path that goes somewhere, which, when put together with other paths, makes a network for walking. All these obvious things would be on the agenda, were our political system ready to address a term longer than 5 years. In planning buildings, we must recognise how much has changed since the 1960s. We are no longer the prisoners of the component standardisation that threatened to place a grid across the world and make all buildings the same,17 and we no longer pursue the ideal of total flexibility, which denied buildings specific identities while failing to predict changes that actually occurred. Both these things undermined concern for movement and direction and for place-making in general. We now know that ingenious conversions, for example of industrial buildings, can work well and involve less embodied-energy cost than rebuilding, as well as preserving the memory of the place and the pattern of streets. Servicing has become more sophisticated, along with structural prediction, damp-proofing and cladding, so that it need not dictate layout so much, and, although energy conservation has a higher priority, glass technology has advanced, so that substantial areas can still be allowed.18 Developments in insulation leave less need to minimise external surface, permitting the shallow plan, with its blessings of light, air and views, and avoiding the sin of internal rooms.19 Concern about energy use should cause us to question the ideal of steady-state interiors in terms of both degrees and lux: we should appreciate that it is colder in winter and put on a pullover, and

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 recognise that the human eye works from candle light to full sunlight. We should also be more willing to let buffer spaces mediate external temperature and even allow courtyards as transitional spaces.20 All these things can help make movement in buildings more distinctive and varied. With narrow plans, it is easier to make clear progressions and to articulate territories or departments, allowing identification. It remains advantageous to differentiate ground and top floors, the former as place of arrival, the latter as connection with the sky. Lifts may be inevitable, but they do not have to be the primary or only form of vertical progression, for many prefer to climb a storey or two by stair, in charge of their destiny and spared the wait. Fire stairs are compulsory, but, if they are never used, people do not trust them in an emergency, and so including them in the normal run is an advantage, if their protective opacity can be mitigated. 284 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

Architecture framing ritual Phoning while walking down the street and snacking in front of others on trains are commonplace, yet still the world is full of forms, conventions and prohibitions. We may not have sacred places in quite the same way as the Emperor Shunzhi’s tomb (pp. 185–95), but there are forbidden places at every airport, and crossing frontiers remains an intimidating experience. Lucy Block’s detailed description of the Japanese tea ceremony (pp. 178–84) shows how buildings and landscape can set an atmosphere and frame an event, and we see it more clearly because it is unfamiliar, and yet we put on dinner parties of one kind or another, taking care over the food and presenting our homes and possessions in the best possible light: there is even a reality TV programme about it. Is this not in its own way as elaborate as the tea ceremony? We also generally recognise and respect thresholds and remain sensitive about how far we can enter, and so the role of architecture in framing rituals persists, but it is not something formulaic or easily measurable. It depends on each person’s experience and expectation. Buildings and landscapes matter for the construction of memory, as the examples from Proust show. As we are stuck in the present but for the memories we hold, as explained in Part 2, the buildings we visit and revisit locate us, confirming the stability of physical place in general, not just by the way they look, but from the whole experience they offer. When a familiar building is destroyed, it is something of a death, because experience of it can no longer be confirmed or renewed. Moving house can be a trauma, especially for children, sometimes only second in effect to divorce.21 The broken rituals of home have to be remade, local connections re-established, and some things cannot be done the same way. It is not the architect’s job to make the home, even if he or she is obliged to make some primary decisions, for the inhabitants add their possessions and decide the daily programme, but we see from the Dong example, presented by Derong Kong (pp. 220–29), that the making of a house can be the expression of a whole society, with rituals acknowledging the stages of its coming about. In such a case, everyone gets to know what a house is, down to its components and their origins as trees, as well as the symbolic meanings played out in the rituals accompanying construction. The relation between house and society is self-evident, as are the roles of all involved. In modern societies, such complete understanding and ownership are rare, for many people must put up with the dwellings they can rent or are assigned, but they still have freedom of expression in the furnishing and manner of use, and every right to flout the architect’s intentions. Ritual framing is still going on, but it is more complicated and less visible.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Real and virtual Talk of ‘virtual reality’ and ‘reality TV’ tends to focus attention on technologies of increasing sophistication and availability and to fuel that fantasy so well portrayed by Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, where the hero climbs through the cinema screen into another world. But that was just an updated version of Alice’s journey through the looking-glass, and it further reflects a much more ancient ability to suspend disbelief. The ability to engage with an imagined scene, even to the point of feeling genuinely scared or shedding tears, was perhaps exploited by the Stone Age storyteller in the same way as it is for us when we see a good theatrical production or a well-made film. The continuing effectiveness of oral transmission is demonstrated by radio plays, even when heard in the car while driving. This is not a question of ‘realistic’ representation so much as imaginative investment in a shared convention: the Conclusion 285

shower scene in Psycho scares us, not because the filming techniques were ‘realistic’, but because of Hitchcock’s skill in the editing room and clever use of music. Increases in supposed ‘realism’ brought by colour, widescreen, 3D, stereo sound, smells and shaking seats have come and gone, and computer-generated monsters are omnipresent, but often they leave too little to the imagination, and, just because we know the tricks, modern stunts impress less than Harold Lloyd hanging off his clockface.22 We always had a propensity for drama, the ability to imagine another world, but we also usually knew that we left it when we closed the book or walked out of the cinema. What, then, has changed? Mechanical reproduction has broadened our world and made more experiences available for many more people, but it has also diluted them. Little more than a century ago, if you heard music, someone was taking the trouble to play it, and the rich sound of an orchestra could be heard only when a large group of musicians was in the room. The sound went with the event. Now, with music on disc, we enjoy it when we like, but the whole context of its creation is removed, and we do not even know which instruments are being played. Being so easily reproduced, music bombards us everywhere, even when waiting on a phone call. This is an obvious devaluation. Printed books have been around much longer, and we might assume that spreading the word to so many is an undoubted cultural advance, but, as Victor Hugo pointed out in Notre Dame de Paris, ‘ceci tuera cela’: the book will kill the building.23 He meant that the sculpted biblical stories on the front of the cathedral had become redundant since people had been able to read them in the Bible. Certainly, paper records have relieved the burden of material culture in providing mnemonics, just as written signs have taken over in way-finding. Drama has changed even more. Until the modern period, to see and hear a play, you had to be in the room where it was performed, in the presence of the actors. Even if you did not heckle or intervene, you became caught up in the atmosphere and joined in the strong sense of a shared event.24 Then came cinema, with a new intimacy in being able to see the actors’ faces, but with their presence removed and every performance identical. Still, people gathered, and so there was a sense of audience participation, but with television that was removed, and, though it was at first a family event, it has become increasingly private: each person watching their own thing in their own time. The drama is, thus, also released from its specific physical context. Even real physical events can be lifted from their contexts when an advantageous and easy view becomes available through the machine. In recent years, the Last Night of the Proms has grown beyond the Royal Albert Hall to include parallel events in other parts of the UK, all combined in the televisual experience to make that the most complete and, in many ways, primary version. Even actual participants can be seen eagerly jockeying to appear on the screen and wave to relations. Being on TV has become a universal

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 fantasy, being a TV presenter a widespread ambition, and so-called ‘reality TV shows’ the ladder by which ordinary persons enter that virtual space. It’s The Purple Rose of Cairo all over again, but, of course, behind that screen there is no other world. The idea that we might disappear totally into a virtual world rather than living in a physical one is exaggerated, for we need to eat and drink, to defecate and sleep and make love, and, as discussed in Part 2, the ‘brain in a vat’ is hardly a workable concept. Yet it is possible to spend too much time as a passive recipient of television or a disproportionate portion of life on computer games, which, though interactive, develop very limited skills. Not only is this likely to produce a perception of the world biased to the reduced parameters of the system, it can also begin to replace and, so repress, the skills of social interaction. Mechanical reproduction has opened a potential for many more experiences, possibly a wider world, but at the price of reduced quality of perception and less social interaction. The latter is the real 286 Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher

problem, for the drama has always been with us, but it is now much less clear who is putting on a show for whom and where, and what kinds of reality are being constructed in the process. Excessive virtual movement on the screen has become an increasing distraction from actual movement in the world, but the physical world is still where we are and where we relate to each other most essentially.

Notes 1 James Fisher (1954) Adventure of the World, Rathbone Books, London, p. 47. The title page explains: ‘Art by Kempster and Evans. The paintings sum up and interpret the story with emotional impact and scientific accuracy.’ 2 William Kempster, 1914–76, and Barry Evans, born 1923, who together painted a mural at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and made a living as book illustrators thereafter, but have almost fallen off the pages of history. Kempster was educated at Wimbledon College of Art and then at the Royal College. He painted in a Picasso-like manner, but also made accurate colour pictures of 1930s aeroplanes that are now in the possession of the Science Museum in London. The two artists were presumably commissioned by Rathbone Books and must have worked closely with James Fisher on Adventure of the World, as the relation between text and image is close. 3 See Le Corbusier 1973. 4 Keller 1973 (no English-language version). 5 See book of this title by Jencks and Baird 1969; ‘Crisis in architecture’ was declared by the RIBA in a special issue of its journal in 1974. 6 The freestanding Villa Savoye stated the ideal, and photos tended to exclude context even when its role was important, as for example with Erich Mendelsohn’s famous Stuttgart Schocken department store. The Bauhaus stood in glorious isolation, and, although Gerrit Rietveld’s famous Schröder house terminated a row, the other houses were left unseen. 7 Gainsborough 1968. 8 Chapels had been, until the end of the nineteenth century, central to most hospitals; see Thompson and Goldin 1975. 9 Nearly all these enlightened features have since been lost to later space-grabbing conversions: extra offices crammed into landing spaces, division by extra fire compartmentation, the invasion of the ground-floor foyer by private sales outlets, the takeover of the staff lounge for other purposes. 10 R.S. Ulrich, C. Zimring, X. Quan and A. Joseph, ‘The environment’s impact on stress’, in Marberry 2006, pp. 37–61. 11 Lefebvre 1991 (original 1974), p. 361. 12 This was the disconcerting effect of the use of an escalator rather than stairs in the Kunsthaus at Graz by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier: see Peter Blundell Jones (2004) Alien encounter, The Architectural Review, March, pp. 44–53. 13 See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6251431.stm. 14 ‘Bridle path’ means a route taken on horseback and is, therefore, archaic by implication, but the designation may still carry equestrian rights. 15 Jeekel 2013. 16 See ‘How our eyes and minds betray us on the road’, Chapter 3 of Vanderbilt 2008, pp. 74–101.

Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 17 Ironically predicted by the group Superstudio in the 1970s with their ‘supersurface’. 18 See Peter Blundell Jones (2012) Evaluating Kroll’s eco school, The Architectural Review, February, pp. 74–81. 19 See Peter Blundell Jones (2009) Urbanism, city challenges: Sauerbruch Hutton at Sheffield University, Architecture Today, April, pp. 22–31. 20 See Peter Blundell Jones (2011) Wales Institute for Sustainable Education, criticism of new building at the Centre for Alternative Technology by David Lea and Pat Borer, The Architectural Review, January, pp. 035–041. 21 See William Steele and Caroline H. Sheppard (2003) Moving can become traumatic, TLC Journal, Trauma and Loss, Research and Interventions, vol. 3, no. 1. 22 Safety Last, a silent film from 1923. 23 Hugo 1978. 24 The theatre director Peter Brook was memorably eloquent about this in the TV series All the World’s a Stage and other interviews. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Note: Figure references are in italics

Ahlberg, Hakon 50–1 Capri 8, 82 see Villa Malaparte airport: Frankfurt 3; Manchester 3 Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) Alberti, L.B. 11, 19 22 72 Architecture d’aujourd’hui 44, 47 Centre for Information Technology and Architecture without Architects 84, 89 Architecture (CITA) 265, 26, 274 artificial neural network (ANN) 255 chado 178–9, 182–4 Ashford, Kent 154 Chamberlin Powell and Bon 280 Asplund, Gunnar 14–15, 50–1, 53 Chambers, William 108 Auepark 67, 69, 71 chaniwa 179, 180, 181, 183 Augé, Marc 3, 6, 133–4 Chapter House, Wells Cathedral 72–3 automaton 162, 197, 199, 203 Charles II 104 Charter of Athens 2, 6, 114, 155, 277, 291 Bacon, Francis 104, 111 Chartreuses village 197 Banham, Reyner 248–50 chashitsu 179, 181, 183 Barbican 280–1 see also London Chenal, Pierre 44, 47 Bardot, Brigitte 81 Cheyenne camp 165 Barkers Pool 123, 125 see also Sheffield Chermayeff, Serge i Bern 2 cinema of attractions 217, 245–6, 250 binocular vision ii, 98, 241, 258 circulation: airport 3; cloister 23, 172; corridors Blenheim 107 162, 209; dignity of 29; King Edward VII Böcklin, Arnold 83–4 Hospital 280; Konigsberg Stock Exchange 16; Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 Bolles and Wilson 17 see also Münster City method of transport 2, 140, 148, 278; Library Muthesius, Hermann 35; promenade Borer, Pat 15, 75 see also Wales Institute for architecturale 44, 48; room relationships 13, 40, Sustainable Education (WISE) 42, 70, 162; space for movement 206; bosquet 107 staircases 12, 28, 30–2, 34, 206; steps 34; Bourdieu, Pierre 6–7, 98, 101, 159, 163, 170–1 Viollet-le-duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 23 brains in jars 96 cloister 11–12, 23–4, 104, 172–3 Brown, Capability 107, 108 Colegio do Espirito Santo 104 Browne, Tom 110 Collie, John 145, 148 building information modelling (BIM) 261–2, computer aided design (CAD) 218, 259–262 265 see also computer-aided design (CAD) see also building information modelling (BIM) Burke, Edmund 137, 139, 141 see also sublime, Confucianism 162, 193, 195 the Congress of Athens 150 296 Index

corridor: King Edward VII Hospital 280; Guildhall 167 see also London Lauriston School 204, 206–7, 209; long Gunning, Tom 217, 245–6, 250 closure 126; movement 266; railway trains 132; social rules 162; stairs 33; theatres 30–1; habitus 159 WISE building 78, 80 Hackney 162, 204, 254 see also London Cottbus Technical University library 241–2 Häring, Hugo 132 see also Herzog & de Meuron Héré, Emmanuel 199–200, 203 Craven, Clifford 143–7 Herzog, & de Meuron 212, 217, 239, 240, 241, Croome Court 108 242, 243, 288–9, 291 Herzog, Werner 129 da Cunha, Dilip 230, 232, 236 see also Mathur Hortus Botanicus, Leiden 103 and da Cunha Husserl, Edmund 142–3 Dada 113, 116 Daoism 100–1, 185, 189, 194 Igualada Cemetery 217, 230, 231, 232, 234, 237 Das englische Haus 12, 35 see also Muthesius, see also Miralles, Enric Hermann Imperial Hotel 59 see also Wright, Frank Lloyd Davies, William 144 Debord, Guy 113–4, 119 Ji Tang village 220 de Certeau, Michel 114–15, 119 Jorn, Asger 114 De Chirico, Giorgio 83 De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill ii see also Kant, Immanuel 100, 130, 136, 138–9, 141 Mendelsohn, Erich Kassel Theatre project 15, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71 Deleuze, Gilles 48, 119, 253, 257 see also Scharoun, Hans Department of Rites 193–4 Keiller, Patrick 17, 217, 244–5, 247, 249–50 dérive 113, 266 Keller, Rolf 277–8 Descartes, René 96 King Edward VII Hospital 280 Dong 217, 220–1, 223–5, 227–9 Kittler, Friedrich 81 Douglas, Mary 6, 160 Königsberg Stock Exchange 15–16 see also Drachten 153 Scharoun, Hans Drexler, Arthur 12 Koolhaas, Rem 239 Duchamp, Marcel 235 koshikake machiai 181 Kracauer, Siegfried 252, 256–7 East Royal Tombs, Zunhua, Hebei Province, Kroll, Lucien 161, 177 China 156, 162, 186–92 Kyu-misu-dera Temple, Kyoto, Japan, 57–8 Ecole des Beaux Arts 12 Eisenstein, Sergei 46, 49 Lakoff, George 99, 101 Elne 24 Lao Tzu 72 Engwicht, David 151, 155 Larkin, Philip 132 Enigma of the Oracle 83 Lauriston School 162, 204–5, 207, 208, 209, Epidaurus 166, 167, 168 210, 211 see also London Evans, Robin 162, 215 Le Corbusier 2–4, 13–14, 44, 45, 46–9, 63, 86, Exhibition Road 150–1, 153–4 see also London 150, 155, 278 Lee, Laurie 128–9, 133, 247, 282 Fénelon 197 Lefebvre, Henri 136, 141, 246, 248–50, 281 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 feng-shui 185, 189, 194 Le mépris 17, 81–3, 86–7 see also Godard, Jean- Ford, Richard 102, 111 Luc Fountain Place, Poynton 154–5 Lettrist International 113 Frazer, John 259, 262 Lewerentz, Sigurd 15, 50, 54 Libera, Adalberto 8, 82, 84, 86 see also Villa Galileo 142 Malaparte Garnier, Charles 12, 25, 27–9, 31, 33–4, 162 London: Barbican 280–1; cab drivers 130; Godard, Jean-Luc 17, 81–2, 87 see also Le mépris Cavendish Square 196; Exhibition Road in Goffman, Erving 5, 7, 99, 101, 159, 163 Kensington 150–1; gravel walks 103; Gray’s Gold Route 122, 123,124 see also Sheffield Inn Fields 104; Guildhall 167; Kempster, Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition William 276; King Edward VII Hospital Pavilion 15, 50, 51–4 see also Asplund, Extension 280; Lauriston School, Lee, Laurie Gunnar 128, 282; Hackney 162, 204; public works Index 297

117–8; Stoke Newington High Street 218, Opéra, Paris 12, 25–7, 28, 32, 111, 162 see also 254; Tack, Dora 160; Tate Modern 239; Garnier, Charles Victoria Park 110; Wilson, Peter 17; Wright, Orphism 46, 48 Frank Lloyd 63 Ottoneum 66, 71 see also Kassel Theatre project Long, Richard 6, 216 Lunéville, gardens of 162, 196–7, 198, 199, 200, paifang 156, 185, 188–9, 191 201–3 Palladio, Andrea 11, 19, 21–2, 74, 79 see also Lury, Celia 252–3, 256–7 Villa Barbaro, Maser parti 12, 30–3 McLuhan, Marshall 216, 259 Pavilion Gardens 110–11 Malaparte, Curzio 81, 84 see also Villa Malaparte Peace Gardens 123, 124–5 see also Sheffield marche 12 pedestrian 4, 17, 68–9, 94–5, 103, 105, 113, Martel, France 1–2 133, 142, 144–5, 147, 149–52, 154, 244, 261, Massumi, Brian 254 280, 283 Mathur, Anuradha 230, 232, 236 see also Mathur Pepler, George 144 and da Cunha Persistent Model 268–9, 271–2 Mathur and da Cunha 217, 230, 232–3, 235, phantom ride 217, 245–7 236, 237–8 Philharmonie, Berlin 15–16 see also Scharoun, Mattern, Hermann 15, 65, 68, 71 Hans Meggitt, Mervyn 168, 171 Phillips, Robert 102 Melville, Jean-Pierre 244 Picon, Antoine 261, 264 Mendelsohn, Erich ii see also De la Warr Pinos, Carme 230–1, 234 Pavilion plane 4, 60, 63, 94, 97, 230, 233, 256, 259, 266, Mercat de Santa Caterina 233 274 Milan Prada Foundation 239 see also Herzog & Playtime 3, 133 see also Tati, Jacques de Meuron Pollock, Jackson 86 Milner, Edward 110–11 Ponti, Gio 86 Ministry of Transport 146, 148 promenade architecturale 4, 13, 44, 45 Miralles, Enric 217, 230–31, 233–4, 237 Proust, Marcel 94, 130–1, 133, 284 Moholy-Nagy, László 248–50 public works 93, 117–19, 137 Monastery of St Gall, plan of 17, 172 Purple Rose of Cairo, The 284–5 Monderman, Hans 152 Mongolian yurt 165 railway 129, 132–3, 144–5, 247, 249 montage 46, 49, 217, 245, 247, 249 Reclaim the Streets movement 115 Mukoleku 169–70 reverberation 121–2, 126 Mumbai peninsula 230–3 Richard, François 199 Münster City Library 17 see also Bolles and Rievaulx Abbey 161, 172–3, 175 Wilson rite of passage 162 Muthesius, Hermann 12, 18, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, Robinson in Ruins 244, 246 see also Keiller, 162 see also Das englische Haus and Wie baue ich Patrick mein Haus Robinson in Space 129, 244 see also Keiller, Patrick naka-kuguri 181–3 Rocher 197, 199, 200, 201–3 Nanterre 118 roji 179, 180, 181–3 Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 New Babylon, The 114 roji-mon 181 New Road, Brighton 144, 153 Rudofsky, Bernard 17, 84, 85, 86, 89, 117 Nidd, River 106 Ryoanji temple 73–4 Nieuwenhuys, Constant 114 nijiri-guchi 183 San Gimignano 2 Nitschke, Günter 57, 64, 80, 181, 183–4 San Michele Hotel 86 Nivola house, 86 Save our Streets campaign 151 Nunez, Rafael 99, 101 Scharoun, Hans 15–16, 65–7, 68, 69, 70, 71, 162 O’Sullivan, Timothy 19 Schaulager Museum, Basel 212, 239, 240 see also Ocatillo 60 see also Wright, Frank Lloyd Herzog & de Meuron Odyssey, The 17, 81, 83, 86, 89, 100 Schminke House 15–16, 18 see also Scharoun, OMA 239 Hans 298 Encounters

Select Committee on Public Walks 109 tsukubai 183 Sheffield: City Council 142, 144–5, 147–8; Turner, Victor 169–171, 264 Craven, Clifford 143; Diagonal Road Scheme 144–5, 147; Gold Route 122, 123–6; Peace uchi-roji 181, 182, 183 Gardens 123, 124–5; replanning and Ulrich, Roger 280 reconstruction 142–3; ring road 94, 135; Ulysses 81–3, 86–9 see also Odyssey, The School of Architecture 11, 17, 229, 257; Un Flic (1972) 244–5 see also Melville, Pierre Sheffield Replanned 145–6 simulation 218–19, 256, 260–3, 265, 273 Vahl, Joost 152 Sitte, Camillo 2 van Gennep, Arnold 169 Situationists 4, 93, 112–14, 116 vernacular 3, 13, 160, 282 Skhería 87 Versailles 106–7, 111, 199, 203 Skvallertorget 153 Villa Barbaro, Maser 22, 74 see also Palladio, Snelson, Kenneth 270 Andrea soto-roji 181–3 Villa Malaparte 8, 82, 85 see also Libera, St James Park 104 see also London Adalberto and Malaparte, Curzio stairs: De la Warr Pavilion in Bexhill ii; dignity Villa on Procida 85 of 29; East Royal Tombs 191; Gothenburg Villa Savoye 3, 13, 18, 44, 45, 46–7, 49 see also Art and Industry Exhibition Pavilion 53–4; Le Corbusier Lauriston School 206; Le Corbusier 47; Paris Viollet-le-duc, Eugène-Emmanuel 11, 17, 23–4, Opera 12, 27; parti 31–4; Rievaulx abbey 28 173; Rudofsky, Bernard 86; Schminke House virtual reality 216, 218, 260, 284 16; servants 43; spatial device 266; Stockholm VitraHaus 242–3 see also Herzog & de Meuron City Library 14; Vitra Haus 243; Wells Vitruvius 3, 11, 19–22 Cathedral 72–3; Willits Villa 55; WISE building 76–7, 79; Wycombe General 279; Walbiri 168 Yamamura House 60 Wales Institute for Sustainable Education (WISE) Stalker 93, 116–17, 119 15, 72 Stanislaus titular King of Poland, 196 walkabout 129 Star Trek 6 Wasmuth portfolio 55 see also Wright, Frank Stockholm City Library 14 Lloyd Stoke Newington High Street 254–6 see also wayfinding 280 London Welles, Orson 244 see also Touch of Evil Storer House 60 see also Wright, Frank Lloyd Whately, Thomas 107 Stuart, James 196 Wie baue ich mein Haus 13, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43 see sublime, the 86, 94, 135–41 see also Burke, also Muthesius, Hermann Edmund Wilhelmine Theatre 69 Surrealists 93, 113, 116 Willits villa 56–7 see also Wright, Frank Lloyd Taliesin West 60, 61, 62–4 see also Wright, Wilson, Peter 8, 17, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88 Frank Lloyd see also Bolles and Wilson Tati, Jacques 3, 133 see also Playtime WISE Building 75–8 see also Wales Institute for terrains vagues 116 Sustainable Education threshold: bodily movement 99, 164; chado Woodland Cemetery 15 see Asplund, Gunnar Downloaded by [New York University] at 13:58 16 August 2016 principle of kei 182; divisions and transitions Worlidge, John 105 2, 5, 6, 59, 64, 96, 121, 160–2, 204; dragon Wright, Frank Lloyd 15, 18, 55, 56–7, 59, 60, of the gate 228; internal verandah, engawa 60; 61, 62–4, 163 modernist hospital 278; nijiri-guchi 183; ritual Wycombe General Hospital, 279 crossing of 169, 170, 181, 284 Through Miller’s Dale 247 Yamamura House 59 see also Wright, Frank tobi-ishi 183 Lloyd topology 252–3, 257, 270, 273 yori-tsuki 181 Touch of Evil 244–5, 250 see also Welles, Orson Yorke Rosenberg and Mardall 280 Traffic in Towns 150, 290 trains: modes of transport 64, 127–8, 132–3, 136, Zaugg, Rémy 239–40, 243 159, 217, 245, 247, 283–4; railway trains 132; Zen 178–9, 181–3 underground trains 132; electric trains 277 Zhang pole 222, 224