[Framework Post] Week 4: Bachelard and Spatial Poetics/ Phenomenology.

In reading Leon van Schaik’s introductory chapter to Poetics In Architecture (2002), an appreciation of a call to “move towards an architecture that affects people because it touches their own ‘lost’ knowledge and awareness” (9) can evolve. However, much of van Schaik’s argument in the main body of his text latches on a comparative analysis between an experience of architecture tapping on inner images or “involuntary memories” and through photographs or in fact any form of two-dimensional representation. Whilst the nature of this text as introduction gives van Schaik some creative license to simplify his arguments, the idea that we can “live by images” (8) is not to be taken lightly as a mere representation of something other—namely architecture in this context. The project of photography has moved beyond to grounds way more complex to which such over-generalisation pays no service.

In Architecture and Limits I (1996), Bernard Tschumi sums the overall experience of architecture as a body of knowledge best in his opening:

In architecture, such productions of the limit are not only historically frequent, but indispensable: architecture simply does not exist without them. For example, architecture does not exist without drawing, in the same way that architecture does not exist without texts. Buildings have been erected without drawings, but architecture itself goes beyond the mere process of building. The complex cultural, social, and philosophical demands developed slowly over centuries have made architecture a form of discourse, so there are key architectural statements that, though necessarily built, nevertheless inform us about the state of architecture—its concerns and its polemics—more precisely than the actual buildings of their time. (Tschumi 152)

Phenomenology, no doubt a value-adder to dimensions of one’s experience of architecture as it prizes the bodily sensation as key to this experience, I fear much is at stake if this were a dimension that necessarily has to sit on a pedestal. And an argument loosely centred on an over-simplified comparison between two separate and equally complex creative forms loses credibility, and in turn its reader’s visual attention span.



References:

1. Van Schaik, Leon. “Introduction,” Poetics In Architecture. Architectural Design, vol 72, no 2, March 2002. London: Wiley Academy, 2002. 5-10.

2. Tschumi, Bernard. “Architecture and Limits I.” Theorising A New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 152-155.