FERN HOCKLEY-TELLES
N0483444 - Interior Architecture + Design
SENSES + PERCEPTION:
How are we interacting with architecture so that it moves us?
By supposing that architecture as a whole, and only as a whole, is what has the capability to move us, we assume that individual details such as the materials used to construct it, do not and cannot affect us emotionally. However, I cannot conclude that this is the answer to a phenomenological architecture, since materials carry such important qualities, particularly sensory qualities, which are fundamentally connecting to our emotions. From understanding how we interact with our architectural environment, we can begin to question how materials have the capability of affecting us.
Firstly, as noted by many phenomenologists, to experience architecture is to actively sense it, however, not simply through our one dominant sense in judgment, vision, but with every sense of our being. It is obvious that with materiality all senses have a role, as Pallasmaa has noted in ‘Questions of Perception’, ‘a building is encountered – it is approached, confronted, encountered, related to one’s body, moved about’ (Holl, 2007, p.35), however when we come into contact with architecture and materials we perceive much more than just appearance, sounds, smell, taste, or texture; we perceive mass, orientation, scale, even gravitational pull: ‘architecture makes us aware of the depth of the earth.’ (Holl, 2007, p.37)
Merleau-Ponty ‘I perceive in a total way with my whole being…I grasp a unique structure…a unique way of being…’ (Pallasmaa, 2014, p.231)
At the London exhibition Sensing Spaces, though the exhibits were designed with a range of different forms and materials, what people responded to emotionally in the structures was in fact the ability to participate, immerse themselves in architecture and interact with it. One of the pieces asked users to add to the structure, ‘waiting for [people] to keep building it’ (Clark, 2014), which exhibition curator, Kate Goodwin, explained is ‘not just having the "practical and functional" in mind, but actually how the architecture might address the human spirit’ (Clark, 2014).
Secondly, from primarily sensing and then using architecture, we make a connection or memory that can become associated to its particular material, and this is then recalled as we re-encounter a similar matter ‘What we perceive is what we already know, essentially, as we are programmed to seek meaning in all sensory information that we receive… [it] is a result of interplays between past experiences, including one’s culture and the interpretation of the perceived.’ (Anon., 2015) So, part of the reason the interpretation and emotion of materials is so subjective is due to the fact that we have all had different experiences.
How we subjectively perceive materiality, is summed up quite simply by Adam Denais who wrote in ‘The Psychology of Materials’:
‘The beautiful thing is that as we experience materials, we subconsciously catalog definitions to these materials. Now imagine the brick wall again. In that split second of recognition one also subconsciously remembers every experience had with brick:
How it felt rough against your skin when you leaned against the wall during school.
Definition: Brick is rough.
How you visited Rome and witnessed the structures of the past Roman civilization.
Definition: Brick is strength.’
(Denais, 2015)
Peter Zumthor also reflects on this notion of materiality as the tactile form of phenomenology that elicits memory, the ‘memory-laden mood’, in his books, ‘Atmospheres’. Like Denais, he highlights the fact that our perception of a space, our reaction to it, happens instantaneously without us processing the details or information before us:
‘I enter a building, see a room, and - in the fraction of a second - have this feeling about it.’ (Zumthor, 2006, p.13)
Despite this, some people that may have the same thoughts and experiences associated with a material as others cannot experience this same depth of emotion in connection with a space. This could be down to the different ways in which humans can view architecture, influenced by our upbringing and education, and specifically the requirement of a particular manner of perception: peripheral vision. This ‘fragmented percept of the world’ (Pallasmaa, 2014) increases our ability to have a phenomenological experience, as it ’integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space making us mere spectators.’ (Pallasmaa, 2012, p.15) Though not scientifically proven to be more accessible or prominent in certain people, there is a possibility that it is easier for people with a more artistic and less technical nature to avoid direct focus on details.
To further add to the complexity of human interaction with an architectural environment, is to also raise the integral role of situation. The application of senses and our perception must surely be affected by the other changeable and interactive elements within the surroundings, for example, other people. In a concrete space where we can aimlessly wander alone, it is most likely that we would have a completely different response were that same space filled with hundreds of people. Human activity, or in a more atmospheric sense, the way humans endow a room with a certain mood, ‘an awareness of human lives that have been acted out… and charged them with a special aura’, (Zumthor, 2010, p.26) will affect experience. So, when considering how a material will engage with and move users, an architect should also understand how the users will engage and move around the materials:
‘[materials] can assume a poetic quality…although only if the architect is able to generate a meaningful situation for them, since materials in themselves are not poetic.’ (Zumthor, 2010, p.10)
