Systemising Spatial Affects In the Search of the Ontolotical Class Encompassing the Experiences of Movement and Architectural Space

Systemising spatial affects. In the search of the class encompassing the experiences of movement and architectural space.

In principle, the leading question of this research is how architectural environment affects the bodily movement on one hand, and the other hand, how the movement evokes spatial affects—the sense of space. And while this investigation deals with subtle, often pre-verbal experiences and aims at the opening of the design practice towards the diversity of such experiences, its methodology includes also their analysis and systematisation. This paper presents the emerged method of creating such classification, along with the knowledge gap it closes, its relevance for the research process, the possibility of its empirical verification and contextualises it with other established classifications of affects.

What did I systemise and why? While the crucial (although implicit) role of the body in the perception and imagination of architecture is widely recognised in architecture theory (cf. Ballestrem, Mallgrave, Pallasmaa, Bachelard) often the used notions of embodiment are not pragmatic—either they are philosophical and too wide to be instructive for the architectural practice, or they are empirical and thus too narrow and reductive. This points to the gap in pragmatic knowledge, the missing links between the embodiment theory and concrete actions in architectural practice. The research on these links began with a coincidental observation, that the older texts such as Empathy Theory or Bachelard’s Poetics of Space evoke in me strong spatial imaginations and evident bodily feelings—that is states, which I was used to experience rather during the movement practice than reading. The assumption arose that these spatial imaginations are, to a certain degree, physical processes, processes related to the bodily movement, rather than purely mental ones. This observation initiated the further text analysis—extracting all the passages, which describe bodily movement (or can be interpreted as such) from the texts which themselves actually theorise spatial and architectural experience. I was interested in what is the movement aspect of these spatial phenomena and whether it is possible to induce these spatial phenomena not through an elaborative literary narration but through a guided movement. Accordingly, I coded and provisionally categorised the collected passages and translated them into movement instructions. I re-interpreted the language of space theory as the language of movement instruction. (Fig. 1)

How did this theoretical research become pragmatic? The conducted translation allowed the practical testing of how movement-mediated Empathy Theory affects the design processes of architecture students. For example, the translation of Bachelard revealed several essential movements, which might evoke the sense of space of a house—for instance the codes ‘hiding’, ‘focusing’ and ‘separating’. ‘Separating’ encompases the movements leading to the solitude, separation from the world. The code ‘hiding’ seems also to have as similar spatial meaning, although with a different nuance. The code ‘focusing’ facilitates the movements of directing one's attention to a single point, which becomes then the centre of space. Bachelard exemplifies this spatial quality with a candle in the middle of the table, or the warm hearth in the centre of the house. Other codes seem to repeat throughout the spaces described by Bachelard—for instance, the codes ‘grounding’ and ‘inner immensity’ seem to be a kind of iterating, underlying activities which have been categorised as ‘meta practices’. The sensing or imagining of the force of gravity, the relationship with the ground persists throughout Bachelard’s work, as well as the act of directing the one’s own attention towards the bodily inner space—understood as the mirroring of the outer, architectural or environmental space. Further codes derived from Bachelard are ‘resting’ and ‘occupying the hollow’ which seem, however, to be a different category, preliminarily labelled as ‘daily life moments’. Altogether, this initial systematisation, although rudimentary, allowed for testing of the method with students by assigning them the task of imagining and designing an intimate space for rest in a public space.

What other theoretical texts did I sample and why? In a similar manner, I analysed the works of Robert Vischer and Heinrich Wölfflin. (Fig. 2, 3) I chose these authors because the style in which they argument—oscillating between the early experimental psychology and anecdotic personal reflexions, is evocative and often draws on personal experience rather than on highly specialised laboratory observations (as it is the case in e.g. neuroscience-informed architecture theory). Thus, their argumentation style seems to be more applicable to general architectural practices, that is practices not specialised in interdisciplinary research. However, with the growing number of codes, a coherent, overarching categorisation became challenging and prompted ontological questions: What is this that I am trying to categorise? Is this a classification of movement or classification of spatial experiences? Is this a twin class of movement-and-space experience? Or, is there an appropriate single class encompassing them both? What is actually a sense of space? Is it a sensation? A feeling? An emotion? What kind of affect am I dealing with? These questions are still open.

Which established systematisations could help here and serve as templates? One recent systemisation of architectural experience is Alban Janson’s and Florian Tigges’ ‘Fundamental Concepts of Architecture. The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations’. 1 The work recognises such phenomena as personal spatial ‘bubble’ and its extension and thus seems to be close to the research object of this study, it describes the architectural experience from the perspective of the user, not the designer and thus lacks the instructive, creative and pragmatic potential. (cf. ibid 5-6) Being architecture theory, it lacks also precision in movement analysis, understandably. This purpose serve, in turn, the established systems of movement analysis such as those of Laban, Bartenieff, Cohen, or Stark Smith, which however do not address the architectural space and its design, at all.

Which systemisation could be the most appropriate template? Remarkably, a number of notions used by empathy theorists is similar or identical to those used by movement theorists—notions such as ‘resisting the gravity’, ‘balancing’, or ‘bodily centre and periphery’, etc. This suggests the possibility of embedding the Empathy Theory within the more comprehensive, contemporary movement theories and systematisations. Accordingly, in the next step I will align the codes derived from the Empathy Theory along the main themes of established movement analysis systems.

What further applications (beyond the scope of this study) of such systemisation can we speculate about? Another example of the categorisation methodology is the affect theory and the universal emotional expressions observed and systemised among others by the psychologist Paul Ekman. 2 Similarly to Ekman, who was able to systematise the diversity of human facial expressions by identifying six basic emotions, I am interested in the foundational research of systemising the diversity of spatial bodily impressions and identifying the corresponding basic spatial affects. Such systematisation might lay the foundation of propaedeutic sensory training for architects – analogous to the aural training in music pedagogy, which aims at sensitising the ear of the music student in order to sense and analyse the corresponding musical affects. 3 The composition experiments with master students, which finalise this doctorate try to illuminate whether such training, that is the bodily sensitisation towards the basic spatial affects (such as expansion and shrinking or balance and imbalance) can help students expressing these qualities better in their architectural compositions. If this approach succeeds, it might educate future spatial sommeliers - experts in tasting and critical judgment of spatial qualities.