Control

I found myself staring at a skyscraper the other day. Not the twisting bulbous form characteristic of a supramodern construction, but the boxy gridded depthless surface of a glass enclosure. Made possible by the industrial revolution, this building is among a typology that is symbolic not only of the prosperity and corporate identity of post-depression economic recovery, but also of the historic divide between rationality and emotionality. The Cartesian duality introduced in “The Discourse on Method” reached its penultimate representation in the form of the mid-century modern skyscraper. The building takes the form of an entirely rational construction. Highly-standardized grids control the image of the building. The highly machined components of the building necessitate an architecture in complete juxtaposition to the environment in which sits. Its standardized, boxy grids are not experienced anywhere in nature. The intangible content is no less perceivable. Clearly in such a building there is no expectation of individuality, in fact the building’s image drives home the ideology of a socially unified inhabitation.

“Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings,” (Pallaasma, p. 11). Architecture should in some way provide something to the society and culture for which it is built, and really it shouldn’t be limited to ‘significant’ buildings. Any buildings should contribute to a person’s embodied being in the world. Modernist architecture, while it clearly furthered the belief of a split of rational and emotional being, it was also interested in the individual. The difference is that the architecture of Modernism, while it may not necessarily have arisen this way, is primarily an architecture of control. “A culture that seeks to control its citizens is likely to promote the opposite direction of interaction, away from intimate individuality and identification towards a public and distant detachment,” (Pallaasma, p. 49). Modernism explicitly chooses not to participate in the development of the inner soul of a person, rather it forces the collective into a state of constant supervision. As Pallaasma goes on to say in the same passage, consistently high levels of light can function as mental torture. High levels of light can also serve to provide a system of surveillance. An architecture of control necessarily eliminates low levels of light providing an evenly distributed high level completely dependent on electricity and divorced from the dimension of time recorded by the sun. From a very functional point of view the over-abundance of light makes it possible for those in charge to keep tabs on everybody at all times. In Panoptic perfection, the presence of the light assumes the role of the all-seeing eye which removes the necessity for someone to be physically present. Interestingly now that workers are increasingly performing their jobs from home or other remote locations, what has taken the place of the all-seeing eye?

If the goal of architecture should be to participate in the development of the human soul, then what are the architectural techniques that can do so? Modernist culture leaves no space for withdrawal from the surveillance, providing no opportunity for a person to find oneself or to develop a voice in a culture which is dependent on constant transfer of information and never-ending communication. The Modernist use of materiality reinforces a distancing of one’s emotional being from one’s physical being.

The eye is the organ of distance and separation, wheras touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy, and affection. The eye surveys, controls and investigates, whereas touch approaches and caresses. During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close of the distancing sense; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy. (Pallaasma, p. 46)

We can logically conclude from this paragraph that emotional experiences necessitate a blocking of vision or more specifically confusing the perception of depth and distance. Fundamentally this differs from the confusion provided by glass in architecture. First there is no tactile experience connected with glass. What is seen in the reflection has an entirely different tactility when experienced in real life. While the reflection of ourselves in a pane of glass may be physically intimate, there is an ethereal distancing of imperceptible range. The mind’s experience of reality is separated from the body’s place in the world. Second, if the glass offers little reflection, it then objectifies whatever is beyond. The world beyond the glass is flattened to an image in the plane of the glass. No sound, touch, smell or taste is transferred to the body. Imagine experiencing a shark behind a pane of glass. The body’s experience is completely divorced from the natural experience of being in water with a shark. The emotional response required for survival in the presence of a shark is lost in the creation of an image of that shark. To the importance of shadow, darkness fundamentally requires certain heightened emotional states. When vision is deemphasized, the other senses pick up the slack in detecting potential dangers whether it be a predator or some other environmental danger. Shadows provide depth and record the dimension of time. Darkness elicits emotional response, some of which are tied fundamentally to survival.

The specifics of the use of transparency and reflection, light and shadow, and a unifying grid of similarity are the contributing factors to the Modernist control of the soul. Is there a contrasting point of view which uses these architectural techniques in an attempt to provide an embodied intelligent being with a soulful point of view? Could it be that Le Corbusier’s famous quote, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light,” is the thing that sets him apart from the Modernists? I am searching for the characteristics of architecture which provide emotional experiences. The link between emotion, rationality and the soul lies in architecture that provides an embodied experience of the world through the senses. There is a lacuna between emotional and rational thought as seen through the eyes of Modernism. What is the architecture that fills the lacuna?