03: Architecture +

Perception

Kelp, Ortner, Pinter, Haus-Rucker-Co: Environment transformer

project 1968
ESM: ARCH3421
TU832/3
 vision
hearing
touch
taste
smell
muscular
movement

The Co-ordination of the senses: Descartes

Laws of vision

Ocular stereometry
Sensitivity of the
retina
Adaptation of the iris
Angle and precision
of sight
Vision

Photoreceptors
on the retina:
rods
cones
ganglion cells
 Circadian rhythms

Japanese midget submarines in drylock at Kure, 19 Oktober 1945

Our visual system remains too limited
to tackle all of the information our eyes
take in.

And so our minds take shortcuts. Like

betting for the best horse in a race, our
brain constantly chooses the most likely
interpretation of what we see.
Perceptual theories in architecture
Theories of Perception: Gestalt
Neutra VDL Research House
 Visual perception
+ experience, knowledge
and expectation

Claude Nicholas Ledoux: Besancon Theatre

The Doubting of St Thomas, Caravaggio
 Palazzo Punta di Diamanti, Rome
Rasmussen ‘Experiencing Architecture’
‘Active touch is an exploratory rather than a merely
receptive sense. When a person touches something with
his fingers he produces the stimulation as it were. More
exactly, variations in skin stimulation are caused by
variation in his motor activity. What happens at his
fingers depends on the movements that he makes….’

Gibson, JJ, 1962, ‘On Active Touch’

‘My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a
large whole at a glance; but I feel the parts, and my
mind puts them together. I move about my house,
touching object after object in order before I can
form an idea of the entire house… my mind is full of
associations, sensations, theories, and with them it
constructs the house. The silent worker is
imagination, which decrees reality out of chaos.’

Helen Keller, 1908

Theatre at Epidauraus
‘The rain of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the
spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden
with a thousand palpitating odors from earth, grass, and
sprouting leaves. The air of midsummer is dense,
saturated, or dry and burning, as if it came from a
furnace. When a cool breeze brushes the sultry stillness,
it brings fewer odors than in May... The avalanche of
coolness which sweeps through the low-hanging air
bears little resemblance to the stinging coolness of
winter.’

Helen Keller, 1908

Ways of walking…
Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait
was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they
too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking
fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the
cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The
positions of the arms and hands while walking form a
social idiosyncracy, they are not simply a product of
some purely individual, almost completely psychical
arrangements and mechanisms. For example: I think I
can also recognise a girl who has been raised in a
convent. In general she will walk with her fists closed.
And I can still remember my thirdform teacher shouting
at me : 'Idiot ! why do you walk around the whole time
with your hands flapping wide open?' Thus there exists
an education in walking, too.

Marcel Mauss, 1934, ‘Techniques of the Body’

Walking: the habitus of the body being upright while
walking, breathing, rhythm of the walk, swinging the
fists, the elbows, progression with the trunk in advance of
the body or by advancing either side of the body
alternately (we have got accustomed to moving all the
body forward at once). Feet in or out. Extension of the
leg. We laugh at the 'goose-step'. It is the way the German
Army can obtain the maximum extension of the leg, given
in particular that all Northerners, high on their legs, like
to make steps as long as possible. In the absence of these
exercises, we Frenchmen remain more or less knock-
kneed. Here is one of those idiosyncrasies which are
simultaneously matters of race, of individual mentality
and of collective mentality. Techniques such as those of
the about-turn are among the most curious. The about-
turn 'on principle' English-style is so different from our
own that it takes considerable study to master it.
Marcel Mass, 1934, ‘Techniques of the Body’
Sucking in the belly,
throwing back the
shoulders, and stiffening the
overall alignment constitute
and effective model for
inhibiting sensual impulses.
A body thus shaped over
years of training becomes
an effective tool for national
policies, unlikely to resist
commands at inappropriate
moments..

Hanlon Johnson ‘Body:

Recovering our Sensual
Wisdom (1992)
15th century upper-class Venetian women
Descent. Nothing makes me so dizzy as watching a
Kabyle going downstairs in Turkish slippers
(babouches). How can he keep his feet without the
slippers coming off? I have tried to see, to do it, but
I can't understand.
Alexander McQueen ‘Armadillo shoe’
Nor can I understand how women can walk in high
heels. Thus there is a lot even to be observed, let
alone compared.

Marcel Mass, 1934, ‘Techniques of the Body’

 ‘Being able to hear
through our feet…
providing you are
standing on surfaces,
such as floorboards,
that conduct
vibration.’
 ‘our first masters of
philosophy are our
feet, our hands and
our eyes…’

‘It is to teach us to
believe much and
never to know
anything.’,’

Illustration from ‘Émile’

Rousseau
‘We perceive not only with the eyes, the ears or the surface
of the skin, but with the whole body… a more literally
grounded approach to perception should help restore touch
to its proper place in the balance of the senses.’ Tim Ingold
Ecology of the senses
JJ Gibson
 Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to
watch my feet.’

A.A. Milne, 1936, ‘When we were very young.’

 ‘ The bias of head over heels
influences the psychology of
environmental perception in
[another way].. destination
orientated travel.. Encouraged the
belief that knowledge is integrated
not along paths of pedestrian
movement but through the
accumulation of observations taken
from successive points of rest…’

Tim Ingold, ‘Being Alive’

Kinaesthetic experiences…
Children swinging around a lamp-post, Dublin, 1953
Ekaterina Tikhoniouk
Casa Malaparte
 ‘… 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.’’

Kenneth Frampton
Roof top house, Tezuka Architects
Fuji Kindergarten, Tokyo, Tezuka Architects
Ways of sitting…
Complesso di Giulia Felice summer
triclinium with cascade fountain
‘... The mechanics of ingestion?
The beneficial effect on the
digestion is obvious, since the
stomach works best when it is not
compressed.’

Rudofsky, P, Now I Lay Me Down to

Eat
 ‘Sensate reality’

Sight is routinely insulated from sound, and touch and other

human beings’

Richard Sennett ‘The Conscience of the Eye’

Chapter house Well’s Cathedral
Baths at Vals, Zumptor
rAndom International ‘Rain Room’
I would just as soon have long arms: it seems to me
that my hands would tell me more about what
happens on the moon than you can find out with your
eyes and your telescopes; and besides, eyes cease to
see sooner than hands to touch. I would be as well off
if I perfected the organ I possess, as if I obtained the
organ which I am deprived of.

Diderot 1916, p77

The ‘animal gaze’
 Sensory ecology

‘Every organism inhabits a world

that is the sum total of all the
information being received and
processed by that organism’s
nervous system.’

‘Umwelt’: Jakob von Uexkull

(1909)
Comparison of a Mimulus flower under
both white light (left) and UV light (right)
The Deserted Village, Bob Kingston
Penguin Pool at London Zoo, Lubetkin
Agnes Denes, 1982, ‘Wheatfield – A Confrontation’
Agnes Denes, 1982, ‘Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landf
Downtown Manhattan, with Agnes Denes Standing in the Field’
MaHouse, Marc Fornes
A’Bodega, Cubus
Dancing Tree, Singing Birds, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP
‘People that use buildings live at a
location that is physically close to nature.
This can serve as a springboard for
transcending the dichotomy of manmade
things and nature, and help nurture a rich
relationship between people and nature.
Therefore, as architects, we observe trees
with an unprecedented level of detail. Our
designs are tailored to the unique
behavior of trees, and to how the
branches, leaves and roots grow. This
approach is similar to how landscape
gardeners perform their work. There are
many architects that assume the site is
vacant, and generally perform design
work in a design studio far from the site.
However, we carefully and closely observe
the environmental conditions of the site,
and do everything we can to formulate a
design that responds to and complements
the site.’ Nakamuru
Nature… does not produce… nature does not labor… one of
its definining characteristics [is] that it creates. What it
creates, namely individual ‘beings,’ simply surges forth,
simply appears.. Nature’s space is not staged...

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974: 70

Marx wondered whether a spider might be said to work… Is it
aware in any sense of what it is doing? It produces, it secretes
and it occupies a space which it engenders according to its
own lights: the shape of its web, of its strategms, of its needs.
Should we think of this space of the spider’s as an abstract
space occupied by such separate objects as its body, its
secretory glands and legs, the things to which it attaches its
web, the strands of milk making up that web, the flies that
serve as its prey, and so on? No this would be to set the spider
in the space of abstract intellection, the space of discourse…
thus preparing the ground too inevitably for a rejoinder of the
type: ‘Not at all! It is nature.. Which governs the spider’s
activity and which is responsible for … the spider’s web with
its amazing equilibrium, organisation and adaptability...
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974: 173-5
Oase No. 7 Hans-Rucker-Co, 1972