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I. The Everyday Practical Aesthetics
Wieviel Engel sitzen können
auf der Spitze einer Nadel -
wolle dem dein Denken gönnen,
Leser sonder Furcht und Tadel!
`Alle!' wird's dein Hirn durchblitzen.
`Denn die Engel sind doch Geister!
Und ein ob auch noch so feister
Geist bedarf schier nichts zum Sitzen.'
Ich hingegen stell den Satz auf:
Keiner! - Denn die nie Erspähten
können einzig nehmen Platz auf
geistlichen Lokalitäten.
Kann ein Engel Berge steigen?
Nein. Er ist zu leicht dazu.
Menschenfuß und Menschenschuh
bleibt allein dies Können eigen.
Lockt ihn dennoch dieser Sport,
muß er wieder sich ver-erden
und ein Menschenfräulein werden
etwa namens Zuckertort.
Allerdings bemerkt man immer,
was darin steckt und von wo -
denn ein solches Frauenzimmer
schreitet anders als nur so.
Christian Morgenstern
(Dear adventurous reader! Think about "How many angels are able to sit on the
point of a needle?"
"All! will immediatley come into your mind. Because the angels are spiritual
beings. And even a big angel needs no space."
But I say: None!! Because invisible and bodyless angels are able to sit in
spiritual locations only.
Is an angel able to mount a hill? No! Because he is too light. Only human feet
can walk. If an angel wants to walk he has to materialize himself and turn into
a human being. For example into a nice `Fräulein', let's call her
Sugarcate. And when she walks...! It is not just walking!)
1. Miss Sugarcate
When we deal with architecture, we talk about it. We talk about it using
secondary medium, for example plans or pictures. This is only in this way
possible, and we are skilled to re-construct architecture in our mind and to
re-present the primary physical presence from the secondary existence with the
help of language and rationality.
However, this process bears the danger of elevating architecture all too
quickly to an intellectual and spiritual realm and to consider it a spiritual
entity.
I think that this danger becomes more and more real if you think of the
production of postmodern architecture by Jencks or of the production of
deconstructivism through the exhibit in the MOMA or the production of Tschumi's
La Villette by Derrida.
I would therefore like to stress the material presence of the architecture and
the user in this first chapter.
A. Materiality
Men are basically natural physical elements, that is a solid, mechanical,
electrical, chemical, and physiological system. They are integrated in the
general physical structure and cause and effect of physical proceedings.
The physical nature of architecture is fundamental, because man himself is
physical. No angel can sit on the point of a needle. "Because invisible
and bodyless angels are able to sit in spiritual locations only."
(Morgenstern)
It was Hannes Meyer, the third director of the `Bauhaus', who expressed this
basic physical nature in his theoretical and architectural work. He published
the following in the `bauhaus' journal "building is a biological
process, architecture is a biological apparatus to satisfy spiritual and
physical needs" (Meyer 1928, my translation). In another text Hannes
Meyer explaines his understanding of biology and bios; bios, life is in his
opinion "...an impulse to harmony. Growing means striving for the
harmonic consumption of oxygen + carbon + sugar + starch + protein"
(Meyer 1929, my translations).
His sentence is as one-sided and unbalanced as it is fundamentally right. He
refers to the non-transcendentable fundamental essence of human beings.
Men are not autonomous, they are not just beings which are uneffected by the
physical forces of their environment. They are part of their physical
environment. Physical reality is the basis by which existence is made possible.
It commands activity as well as making activity possible.
Architecture is therefore not only a box nor a cover for our body. It is a
system of physical forces, in which man is only one force among others.
The human solid is, like any other physical things, a constituent of a physical
`world' and as such affects its composition. What does this mean?
The human solid can perceive and produce only certain forces, it can perform
only certain electrical and chemical processes and it reacts and acts in a
certain physiological and biological way.
Take for example physical oscillations.Men only react only to a certain range
of all existing oscillations (which is interpreted in a meaningful world as
seeing and hearing). This leaves a lot of physical forces and events out of the
physical man-surrounding system. Therefor the physical world has a genuine
`horizon', a specific structure and it generates a certain physical field of
being, a certain physical phenomenal `world'.
In architecture these are the topics of the civil engineers, of the
physiologist and medical practioners. This is, for example, that a building has
to have an opening to enter it, as well as a window if anybody wants to see
things and activities outside. The weight of a person is important for the load
capacity of the floor, the lung capacity for the volume of a room and the
air-conditioning system. The temperature of a room must lie between 10/15 deg.
C and 40/50 deg. C or the biological apparatus will collapse.
Acoustics (reverberation, sound absorbent coefficient, space effect etc.) as
well as features of the walls (humidity balance, heat balance etc.) are of
fundamental importance for the functioning of the human body and its
well-being.
A particular body always designs a world of its own. Please, consider if you
will the unique world of a blind man or woman or that of a left-handed person.
Modifications of the system of the body can change the world, for example,
through modified quantitative or qualitative abilities experienced as a result
of handicaps or paralysis, poor eyesight or blindness, being very short or very
tall, or being physically fit or unfit.
Let me explain this with the `Frankfort kitchen' which is a prototype for the
`functionalistic' thinking of the 1920s.
Pictures 1a-d: The Frankfort Kitchen
(Click on the pictures for better versions. [0KB,123KB,138KB,6KB])
The kitchen was designed in 1922-26 by Schütte - Lihotsky in connection
with the plans of Ernst May for satellite towns of Frankfort (see e. g. Mohr /
Müller 1984, p. 122/123). The kitchen was one of the most important
dwelling experiments in Germany before World War II. The kitchen existed in
different types from which I will take here only one example.
We are interested here in the meaning of physical order in this room.
In terms of technical dimensions, the room is 3.44 m large and 1.90 m wide. At
the smaller side you find the entrance, at the opposite side a window. A room
must be furnished (in a wider understanding, e.g. a door also constitutes part
of the furniture of a room), unless it doesn't make any sense. Furniture in the
kitchen consists mainly of working tools. Let me take the ironing board as
example.
Picture 2: Ironing Board
(Click on the picture for a better version. [40KB])
An iron and an ironing board are the physical tools which make ironing
possible and facilitate it. In designing particuliar tools, you have to take
into account the kind of fabric and the fashion, how to produce the heat, and
all the physical conditions of man and then you have to develop a specific iron
and a specific ironing board. In our `Frankfort kitchen' the board is installed
behind the entrance.
What kind of physical world is constructed by the physical organization of the
room and the ironing board?
In respect to the physical extensions of the human body it is only possible for
1 person to work in the kitchen (unless you obstruct each other totally).
The ironing board is suitable only for a right-handed person and for a person
of a certain height.
Thus the opposite of the right-handed person is not only the left-handed but
here in this situation it is the wrong-handed. A taller or shorter person would
also be wrong.
The ironing board forces people to face the wall during ironing. It brings men
- more likely women - into a situation in which it is very difficult to talk to
people who are behind him or her or who are in another room.
When analyzing the physical order of the kitchen, we see that the physical
features relating to the physical body are of normative importance for the
specific definition of man or woman.
I hope that I could explain that there is no neutral technical reality which is
independent from physical body of man, yet the physical surrounding of man is a
human world.
I have talked about the physical body of man and shall now go on to explain
what this means. Since the physical body of man is not naturally, biologically
produced, man is not born but produced by others or himself, because his body
is a phenomenal body `embodiment'.
B. Embodiment and the phenomal world
Embodiment is a term used in phenomenology. It means the integration of
external things in a certain way in what is believed to be my own body. It
means the incorporation of things, as well as the projection of the self into
surrounding things, the excorporation of the self. The term `embodiment' goes
back to Husserl, and in the last 5 decades many other philosophers have written
about it. I would like to stress here only the most important points and my own
understanding.
Bodies are produced and developed by people consciously or unconsciously. One
must not necessarily be a bodybuilder. You have a certain hairstyle, some have
a shave some don't, some practice a sport others don't, some eat meat, some
don't, some smoke or drink and others don't. This is work on your body and it
shows.
What makes my physical `me' is not necessarilly identical with my physical
body. Some fat people think that they have an ordinary slim body, on which fat
is attached. Fat is considered a type of clothing, but unfortunatelly it cannot
be taken off like clothing. Their embodiment is in this respect much smaller
than their physical body.
On the other hand a man who wears glasses is only complete in the morning when
he has put them on. In our modern society we are only then complete in the
morning when we have dressed. Clothes change but are extremly important for the
production of the ordinary `me'. You notice this if you suddenly lose all your
clothes, for example in a fire. In this case something of my `me' is lost and
has to be reconstructed with effort and care. It's not a question of simply
buying a certain number of trousers and shirts which could also be done by a
friend or a servant.
If you are dressed, you recognise, that your clothes are part of your `me'
through different sensations. For example, if you are walking in the street you
feel the asphalt directly, not your shoes or even your socks. Socks and shoes
are part of the phenomenal body. They are incorporated in the phenomenal body
or the body is excorporated to them.
Merleau-Ponty explains embodiment using an analogy of a blind man's cane.
After a certain time the use of a cane by a blind man to touch this
surroundings leads to the result that he feels with the top of the cane; i. e.
he doesn't scan the handle of the cane, rather he feels things at the tip of
the cane. In a certain way the blind man has projected a sense organ to the tip
and substitutes seeing with touching.
He has extended his borders up to the tip of the cane or, in other words, he
has incorporated the cane in his phenomenal body.
In doing that, the blind man can `see', but he is limited to the possibilities
of the cane. The cane has a certain length, it can inform him of plastic
characteristics of the touched object and, indirectly by the noises, of the
kind of material. The cane cannot identify colours or temperature. So it is an
instrument which can construct a `visual' world. But a world which is defined
by the constructing instrument.
The cane is an extension of the phenomenal body rather than an extension of the
body.
During these proceedings the physical difference between things and space
vanishes.
Space is no longer a mathematically or physically defined space which is empty,
isotropic and homogenious rather, it has phenomonological qualities (for
details see E. Ströker 1976).
Phenomenal space is never empty, it is constructed by the things. It is always
a world of things in a specific order and with a certain sense. Things have an
excorporated subjectivity and thus they build a phenomenal world by themselves
which could also exist independently from the actual presence of a specific
human subject.
The specific phenomenal sense of a certain place lies in the order of the
things. What does this mean?
Let me explain it with my example, the `Frankfort kitchen' (Merleau-Ponty took
the piano and showed that a skilled piano player must incoporate the spacial
order of the keybord. Due to the pace of the music it is not possible to find
the exact keys in time by visual scanning. The visual information affords only
a certain support.) The incorporated meaning of the built-in ironing board in
this position is to enable the woman to stand during ironing and so to
facilitate the task. You play the ironing board as you play the piano, you
incorporate the order and ist possibilities to act which means you incorporate
the meaning of the things.
In the kitchen, man /woman is defined as a monadic individual, rightly handed
if he /she is right-handed and of a correct or incorrect height.
If you were to speak to somebody you would only say what is absolutely
necessary because no reinforcement or control of speech which is made possible
by face-to-face communication can take place. You would not chat. Alternatives
are not realised, for example the provision of ironing facilities in a common
utility room, where woman can meet and do the ironing together talking about
there problems and so on.
In the Frankfurter kitchen housewifes are excluded frm any extrafamilial social
contact, they are domesticated. Within the family they are even excluded from
family life.
Schütte - Lihotski did not consider that people need space in order to
perform their being, she reduced space and therefore excluded the possibility
of varied activities and social interactions.
The working person turns to a biological working machine.
The kitchen liberates the other rooms from physical work and generates their
character of mere social spaces for intellectual activities.
My example, the `Frankfort kitchen' is a prototypical example of the reduced
understanding of the everyday in the `functionalists' . Body and soul are
considered as being completely separated. The physical body should be minimized
to liberate the spirit.
Actually, the reduction of the physical world is a destruction of the field for
social and individual behavior, a destruction of the possibility to have a
world. Of course, embodiment and the phenomenal world are anchored in the
physical body and in the physical surrounding. But the body is not a neutral,
technical machine, no `technem' (Baudrillard 1968), but a cultural design even
in the smallest biological cell or in the singular atom in which history is
itself presented and on which many people are working.
The embodiment is a medium for having a world. It is a cultural and phenomenal
construction of a world on the basis of its materiality. The embodiment as
medium of having a world gives the conditions of the reality of the world.
There is no real world without embodiment, but - let me stress this - this
doesn't mean that the physical world can be derived from the physical
appearance of the human body. The extensions of an appartment cannot be deduced
from the height of an English policeman, just to mention Le Corbusier's
`modulor'.
C. Senses and cognitions (memory, experience, emotions, recognition,
abstract thinking) and the Intellectual World
Human senses form the borderline between `functionalists' and `artists'.
The `functionalists' consider the senses only as means of transporting
information from the environment to the brain. They are very puritanical and
are against sensual architectural decoration; `ornament is crime' as Loos
said.
For the `artists' the senses are the basis of their work especially the visual
sense. Their aesthetic aims are to invent sensual architectural elements and
thereby to develop human sensibility.
The senses are part of the physical and of the phenomenal body. Sensory
perception is a receptive and a productive activity of `heart and soul', even
the brain takes part.
The senses do have their own needs (The eye for example needs permanent changes
of visual stimulation otherwise it goes blind). The senses enable a wide range
of sensations and feelings, which are part of the phenomenal body. The sensory
aesthetic qualities are qualities of life as well.
The brain has an important role in perception, it constructs and re-constructs
the perceived world. Besides this, people can also remember, create
regularities, plan their futures and operate mentally with abstract
representations in formal ways.
The single object or the concrete action is usually integrated in a context. To
understand a singular item means always to allocate it, to classify it, and to
interprete it. So single experiences and reflections are joined to a more or
less lasting system, to an everyday scientific and - more formally - to an
academic scientific system.
And again, everybody or better said `every body' needs to think. We feel
satisfied, having had the right explanation, having had the right prognosis. We
gain great pleasure in developing new and witty philosophical systems. And we
have a need to do this, for example; why do we write, why do we give talks?
There is no reason to restrict the definition of needs to eating, sleeping and
working. There is no reason to seperate physical being, instrumental and social
interaction and cognition. It is a unit, which is called `practognosis' by
Merleau-Ponty.
2. Interactions between men and things
Now I'm going to study the interaction between the physical and incorporated
subject and the physical and phenomenal world.
A. Objects lurk
"Oh, the object lurks. After breakfast I take place at my desk, I am
refreshed and optimistic; with no presentiment of an enemy. I dip my quill to
start writing. I write; a hair in the nib! So it starts. I cannot get this
devil thing out, I stain my fingers with ink, a spot soaks the paper - I have
to find a new sheet, then a book and so on. In short, this fine morning is
gone. From dawn to dusk, as long there is a human being, the object plans
naughtinesses and malices. ... So all objects lurk, the quill, the nib, the
ink-well, paper, the lamp, cigars, glasses - everything until the moment, when
you are not aware of the danger ... Like a tiger who pounces with one furious
jump on his victim at the first possible moment, such is this damned
object..."
Friedrich Theodor Vischer; Auch Einer. Eine Reisebekanntschaft; 1879
(I am also one of these. A Travel Acquaintance)
Things lurk. Friedrich Theodor Vischer used this notion with respect to his
dissidence from Hegelianism in his story on a Hegelian, who is threatened by
the materiality of the world.
Of course (as Vischer emphasized) the object doesn't lurk in this active and
deliberate way. But throughout my `dwelling' in the physical and phenomenal
world things are forced upon me.
Nobody stops me from walking along a straight line (e. g. a fascist axes) in a
zigzag but I don't usually do it this way. It's not effective but that's not
the point because usually I take the path which winds through a meadow and
don't walk - effectively - in a straight line through.
If I have to iron I could do it on the dining room table(in the Frankfort
flat). But I prefer the kitchen because the ironing board lurks, it coaxes with
the temptation to make ironing much easier. And with a jump it has incorporated
me into its world.
Things demand to be done right. This is not only a social controlled
convention. Things themselves reward you with the success.Things try to catch
me with the promise to make things easier.
B. Dwelling in things
I have already mentioned dwelling in a physical and phenomenal world in
connection with the `Frankfort kitchen' and I have mostly referred to a
singular man or woman. However - as Norbert Elias said - the man, the singular
man, cannot exist alone. Men and women are always in the plural.
From birth to death we interact directly with an alter ego or in a social
field. Men can not be understood as independent from their physical environment
nor can they be seperated from their social world.
The social world is integrated into the phenomenal world, social behavior
always takes place in a physical world or through physical means.
C. The Polyverse of Man
I want to emphasize, that the physical nature, body, incorporation, senses and
cognitions are not separate from each other or organized in strata. They are
aspects, which are all integrated into one another. And they can be in conflict
with each other.
I can mention the well known example of the phantom arm. (This is feeling a
pain in an amputated arm.) Here there is a conflict between the physical and
the phenomenal body.
Or see the difference between the classical history of architecture and the
everyday use of architecture, which shows a conflict between an abstract and
formal academic scientific system and a phenomenal world.
Usually many people are working on different concepts. We live in the
present but also in synchronous and diachronous worlds, in fellow men's worlds
and in the world of our forfathers, which additionally amalgamate.
Usually you have to behave, act and interact in a jumble of the remains of
different historic worlds and of partial worlds developed by others and in your
own unfinished world. Only a dead man can have his unique own world (as Adolf
Loos pointed out in his story `the poor rich man')
Worlds are always in progress, they never finish. Dwelling in the physical and
phenomenal world is always a transformation, a rearrangement and a
reorganisation.
D. Architecture as a game
I have always referred to buildings as the architectural unit. In fact,
the unit is the city. `City' here is understood as agglomeration, for example,
as capital, metropolis, town, village or settlement.
What I want to say with this definition is, that a singular building is not the
basic unit in architecture. Architecture is a configurated unit, which is more
or less differentiated. The city is a configuration of buildings, places,
streets etc. A building is a configuration of indoor and outdoor places, rooms
and floors. A room is a configuration of features and furniture.
To generalize this enumeration, architecture is a static order of things.
To behave and act in architecture means to present architecture. Presence is
the transformation of the static order of things into a structured running
action differentiated into events and durations.
The specific material architecture and the complex action are interrelated in
the way that a playing field is related to a specific game or a score to the
performance of music.
`Play' means that there are not only determining physical laws as well as
obligatory social conventions but also specific performative liberties that
transform the performance into a game, into a unique event.
You can change the whole game, when you break the conventions or when the order
of ist elements is changed (this might even result from a singular event such
as the fall of the Berlin `wall').
C. Engagement and mental distance, attachment and detachment
To succeed with everyday acting I have to act in worlds which are not mine. I
have to attach to strange worlds in order to realize my own. To use the
strange worlds in my sense I have to detach from it as well. But I can also
adopt to strange worlds to detach from my previous world or to develop it.
For my purpose to be realized I have to use things which were specified for
alternative actions. I have to adapt to them to act at all. But undetached
adaptation can also mean complete involvement into another world. Thus the more
I get attached the more I incorporate the alternative world. The more I am
detached the more I remain in my own world, but the danger not to recognize the
thing in question as an helpful tool rises all the more as well.
To act is always `to tinker', to use a term which Levi-Strauss (1979) brought
into academic discussion.
There is much to be said about the everyday. However, I would like to sum up
this part with two remarks:
- The everyday cannot be denounced as trivial and simple. It is apriori not
dull, not perpetual and not against subjectivity. It is not in opposition to
brilliant, innovativ and subjective art. The human everyday is then - if it
suceeds then (and it is liable to failure) and if it is managed with reflection
- possibly the wittiest and most intelligent piece of art man can create.
- The purpose of acting is not to produce a sole and unique harmonic world, not
a one-dimensional everyday (Marcuse 1964). The everyday improves when it is
differentiating or when it consists of more or less seperated or integrated
worlds. Even when my working everyday meets my planned desires completely and
is therefore exactly my own genuine phenomenal world, it needs not necessarilly
should equal the world of my reproduction- and sparetime.
People have always been driven to have more than 1 world and to coordinate
these subworlds to a differentiated net. The working place, the apartment, the
tram and the pubs (Here I mean the places as institutions) are particuliar
worlds woven into a fabric in which the footballstadium, the museum, the church
and the holiday-cottage are integrated as utopian islands. This fabric contains
undifferentiated dark tangles as administrations or hospitals and also
unconscious white spots. Each is a world by itself, a phenomenal world for
myself.
Now I turn to the second part of my talk. Here I am going to consider the part
of art in this complex:
The question is what has this to do with art?
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