Designing houses as if body/human life mattered Dr Rena Czaplinska-Archer

Principal

Rena Architects

2B Lucknow Street Willoughby NSW 2068

Design and drawing teacher

at the Faculty of Architecture Sydney University

Australia

mail@rena.net.au

www.rena.net.au

Key words Ecology, sustainable living, body thinking, wellbeing, RSVP Cycles

1 Introduction „if more of us could contact the natural world

in a directly experiential way,

this would alter the way

we treat our environment,

ourselves and one another“

Anna Halprin [1]

Green and sustainable design talks about the protection of natural resources, about designing

in harmony with nature. We must remember that we are nature too. Before we start designing

we study and observe the natural and built environment. We look at the context, read about

history, take note of ecosystems, geology, rain and wind patterns and analyse different layers

of information. But this is not enough. We must not forget to engage our bodies, our

collective communities. We need to engage our senses and learn to listen with our bodies. Our

senses are our built in instruments, they speak through sensations and feelings. They connect

us with our creative awareness and intuition. “We need to think with sensations in our

muscles” ~ Albert Einstein.

As an architect I am interested in body conscious design and see awareness through

movement as the key component of my architectural practice. In the 70’s I was drawn to the

architecture of James Stirling and in my PhD research discovered movement as a design tool.

But afterwards I did not know what to do with it. It was in the mid 80’s when I was introduced

to Halprin‘s RSVP [2] cycles and became involved in experiential research focusing on the

relationship between body, movement and space when the ideas integrated and made sense to

me. This had a profound effect on the way I practice and teach architecture and placed me on

the path of ongoing somatic training in various movement modalities including yoga,

Feldenkreis, Art/Life process, B-MC and continuum. In teaching design and drawing I often

use awareness through movement and B-MC exercises.

Deep ecology and system theory [3] provides a good philosophical and scientific framework

for body conscious design. It points out that we are part of the earth ecosytem and not separate

from it. It recognises the interdependent nature of human and non-human life. It‘s core

principle is the belief that, like humanity, the living environment as a whole has the same right

to live and flourish. This leads to a deeper connection with life, where ecology is not just seen

as something ‚out there‘, but something we are part of and have a role to play in. It promotes

community participation in design process and experiential learning. Seeing ourselves as

being part of earth‘s living systems – constantly moving, evolving and adapting - we become

aware that all life is movement.

Pic 1 mothering is a grounding experience Pic 2. Scoparia Place by Rena Czaplinska 1996, a passive solar

connecting us with the body and courtyard house is an organic, economical architecture,

vulnarability of life. Photo by author. immersed and in tune with the breath of nature

When starting a new project, we often return to the same questions. How do we design places

to support wellbeing? What does wellbeing mean, how does it feel? Can designing in

harmony with nature have a healing effect and create healthy homes?

This is not a new question. Two thousand years ago, Hippocrates wrote about it in his famous

medical work on Airs, Water and Places. He gave the first public recognition that man’s life,

in sickness and in health, is bound up with the forces of nature, and that nature, instead of

being opposed and conquered, must rather be treated as an ally and a friend, whose ways

must be understood, and whose voice must be heard. [4] The question is how to do it? Not by

ignoring it, dominating it, or being afraid... I believe we need to turn around and face the

reality of our vulnerable humanity.

1 Crisis in the sustainable world

The way we practice architecture today is increasingly based on a virtual reality of computer

screen images, which leads us away from a bodily experience. In his book Eyes of the Skin,

Finnish professor of architecture, Juhani Pallasmaa [5] warns us that “human behavior and

construction have become dangerously detached from their ecological context” and wants us

to reawaken our sensory awareness and reignite our architectural design intuition. Focusing on

visual literacy and intellectual understanding is important but current over-emphasis on the

intellectual and conceptual dimensions in architecture contributes, according to Pallasmaa, to

the „disappearance of its physical, sensual and embodied essence. It undervalues our

physical bodily presence by ignoring the senses.“

Computer images flatten reality using perspective view. It easily creates photographic images

that focus on the photogenic qualities of space and make us outside observers. But in reality

we experience architectural space through peripheral vision, an unfocussed gaze. As we move

through space it encloses, enfolds us, embraces. We can be aware of space with closed eyes,

our senses can listen and respond.

Pic 3 New York street photo by author. Pallasmaa reminds us that „Buildings and cities are experienced through

our bodies, through multi-sensory channels; the visual aspect is only one part of it.“

In the meantime, everybody is talking about sustainable design. Everybody is involved in it.

Politicians, architects and academics are studying and implementing the growing scientific

and technical knowledge. Despite everything the experts claim to know about sustainability,

today’s knowledge society is in crisis.[6] We face recurring disasters in every domain:

climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken and these

problems are exacerbated by the fact that the experts in charge of technology are not

restrained by the lessons of experience. In Between Reason and Experience, leading

philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg [7] wants us to come back to our senses to our

experiencing bodies and calls for an urgent need to balance reason—scientific and technical

knowledge—with experience.

2 Coming to our senses

Rising stress levels in our society seems to create widespread apathy and lack of sensory

awareness. Absent minded, we do a lot of looking but it is surprising how little we actually

see, hear, smell, taste or feel. For years we can walk down the same street and never quite see

it, although our eyes are open. We spend a lot of time “out of touch” with the surrounding

reality. We tend to see only what we want to see or hear, depending on the story we are telling

ourselves.

According to Jon Kabat Zinn [8], director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of

Massachusetts Medical School, most people live their lives not present in their bodies. He

advocates waking up by coming to our senses and invites us to become aware of our

relationships to our bodies and our communities.

3 Architecture and the body

The human body has to be at the centre of architectural thinking. Much of what we know, the

body of knowledge comes from studying the human body. How it moves, walks, rests and

dances. Knowledge of the body and how it occupies and inhabits space is fundamental to

understanding how to design space around it. The apprehension of space is instinctive, a

corporeal experience; before thinking it or defining it, we feel it. Space is not outside of us,

we live in it, in the space of our bodies.[9]

Pic. 4 Waverton House by Rena Czaplinska

„A building is encountered; it is approached, confronted,

related to one’s body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things.

A building is not an end in itself;

it frames, articulates, structures and prohibits.

Architectural space is a lived space rather than physical space,

and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability”

Juhani Pallasmaa “ Eyes of the skin” [10]

The old view of the body was based on mechanistic metaphor. Students of medicine studied

bodies and body parts by looking at human corpses. This view did not help to understand the

living processes. Viewing the body as an object or as a working machine helped to ignore it.

This metaphor has also been used in architecture since the 1920’s when Le Corbusier talked

about housing as a machine for living in. Functionalism was born and with it a rational,

efficient way to improve housing and city living for the masses. We developed housing

standards and measuring tools for assessing comfort levels. Mass production, prefabrication

and marketing was born. We became preoccupied with industrial technology, efficiencies, and

economies. This thinking is still with us even though we may not be aware of it.

Today new science is changing the way we view the human body. The old mechanistic model

is being replaced by somatic model which sees body as a dynamic and intelligent living

process in constant movement. This includes constant adaptation not in isolation but in

response to environmental constraints, including environmental, social, and emotional factors.

In the somatic model, the body is seen as a tensegrity structure [12] with flexible and spacious

connections responding to the gravity field of the earth. Expanding and contracting with

every breath the body is constantly moving, changing and adapting while remaining balanced.

According to Ida Rolf [13], one of the leaders of somatic disciplines and the founder of

structural integration (Rolfing), our bodies change and adapt in response to environment we

create. How we live and move in our bodies influences the way we think and how we see the

world.

Pic. 5 Kenneth Snelson's Needle Tower (1968), example of tensegrity structure [11] Pic.6

Parrallel discoveries in neuroscience acknowledge movement as a key stone of learning

process. Developing somatic awareness and somatic thinking is becoming recognised as a

tool for awakening design intuition in design education. The growing field of somatic

education offers training in embodiment, awareness through movement and experiential

human anatomy.[14]

4 Time for Drawing – Time for developing the listening eye through

„Embodied Vision“

For years architectural education has been dominated by teaching methods focusing on

computer technologies, while ignoring the phenomenal world. The instant gratification of

working on a computer screen engages only the visual sense of sight. In contrast, drawing and

sketching engage the whole sensing body. They teach us to be present, still, and receptive.

Engaging the body develops our haptic, aural and kinaesthetic senses and grounds us in the

present moment. After years of teaching design to architecture students, I became frustrated by

the absence of sensory awareness training and the consistent lack of basic drawing skills

exposed by many students preoccupied with new computer technologies. When years ago I

was invited to try my hand at teaching drawing and sketching to architectural students, I

accepted enthusiastically, hoping to make a difference.

As a practicing architect, I have no problem with teaching perspective or axonometric

drawing.

It was not about that — it was the question of teaching sensory awareness which challenged

and excited me. For sensory awareness expertise and guidance, I turned to Anna Halprin, one

of the most influential and radical movement artists of the 20th Century. I have been a student

of Halprin movement method for more than 20 years and have used it since the early 80’s in

enhancing my own drawing and designing skills. In developing the drawing class program, I

started from the assumption that we are all creative — that is, initially we can all draw, see

and feel. I believe that in the process of socialisation and education, our natural drawing and

sensing abilities become blocked. We don’t see, feel, sense what is in front of us any more.

The drawing program I developed addressed unblocking the senses whilst simultaneously

developing drawing skills. It evolved into what I call the ‘Embodying Vision’ program [15],

which combines drawing practice with mindfulness of the body, movement and body-mind

centering exercises. Through opening up perception, becoming aware of space, tuning the

body and training the hand, the course is really about learning to see, feel and listen. But why

are these skills so important for architects?

When an average person is asked what architects do, they usually say architects draw.

Designing is often considered to be the same as drawing. But why do architects draw?

Professor Tom Heneghan, in an opening speech to the Architecture 09 exhibition of

drawings suggests that doing a sketch is like talking an idea for a walk:

“Like the dog, the sketch will often… lead you to a place that takes you by surprise –

which you didn’t, in the least, expect. The ideas in one sketch will trigger others, and a

chain reaction leads to a conclusion that often

appears to have simply come out of the ether because the thought-process that got you

there is too complex, contradictory and tangled for even you to see as a whole, or to

explain.”

Drawing, especially easy and messy, scribbly sketching drawing allows to play with chaos and

ambiguity, explore, helps to think and feel, allows for new insights to emerge. It engages

intuition and allows the body to connect with imagination, space perception and sensory

awareness — crucial ingredients of the design process.

The Embodying Vision teaching method incorporates drawing practice and discussions, as

well as movement and body-mind centering exercises which accelerate the learning process by

releasing tension and dissolving self-conscious and inhibiting attitudes. It fosters sensory

awareness that enhances the architect’s understanding and appreciation of the total

environment. Students learn the joy and beauty of intuitive drawing skills. They become

experts in scribbling — taking ideas for a walk. Later they are introduced to traditional

constructed drawing techniques. The integration of intuitive and constructed drawing skills

combined with an emphasis on awareness through movement brings dynamic and inspiring

results. It empowers exploration, self-discovery, and sensitivity to one’s environment.

Through gradually unblocking the creative skills, the Embodying Vision method is really

about learning to see, listen and feel.

Pic. 6 In the drawing studio we study life by focussing on drawing from the human

figure and skeleton.

"The journey of discovery lies not in seeking new horizons but in opening your eyes” Marcel Proust

5 Designing houses as if bodies/people mattered

Designing sustainably as if bodies and people’s lives mattered is not about new materials, new

technologies and new forms. In my view it is more about changing our attitudes from

mechanistic and reductionist to somatic and holistic, offering a life-affirming approach based

on new science and receptive attitude to our intuition and feeling responses. By coming to our

senses and becoming aware of our relationships to our bodies, our communities and our

environment, we can flourish as individuals and as families, living in individual dynamic

balance (health), and in collective dynamic balance (healthy communities), which honour our

differences and optimize our mutual creativity.

We can choose life.

We can meet our needs without destroying our life support system. We can grow sufficient

food, ensure clean air and water, and generate energy through solar power, wind and biomass.

To choose life means to design and build a life sustaining society, homes, cities. We can

choose life and wellbeing, study it and experience its dynamic nature mindful of the way we

sense, feel, respond and react. We need to use our minds and we need to use our creative

intuition.

Fundamental to this design approach is to work from direct experience, trying to feel and

understand the issues through prolonged empathetic looking and direct contact [16]. It is

about adopting a receptive and respectful attitude to our own feeling responses, allowing for

design to emerge.

Sea Ranch a ten mile long development on the coast of California [17], offers one of the best

examples of ecological design. It was a result of a holistic approach to making places,

developed in the 1960‘s by Anna Halprin and her husband, an architect Lawrence Halprin.

Together they have been investigating the relationship between the body, movement, arts and

the environment and have developed a model for harnessing collective creativity called RSVP

Cycles [2]. It includes people, the environment and the arts as equal partners of design

process. Unlike the linear problem solving model of traditional design approach - which sees

life as static and assumes that a perfect solution can be found – the RSVP model is

participatory and cyclical. It sees life as ever changing. It focusses on people as participants,

not as objects or inert receipents of products. RSVP model creates space where we can tap

into into our body wisdom and into our intuition while respecting the environment and

integrating our scientific and rational thinking

Pic. 8 Sea Ranch windbrakes, housing and detail

“Our most difficult task was to find a way

for people to inhabit this magnificent

and natural system in numbers

without destroying the very reason

for people to come here”

Lawrence Halprin

Ecological design ideas also resonate in the work of the Australian recipient of 2002 Pritzker

Prize in architecture, Glenn Murcutt [18] who aims to make his buildings like musical

instruments. They respond to light, to movement of air, to views, to the need for comfort.

Like musical instruments they produce the sounds and tones of the composer. “But I am not

the composer.” Murcutt says. “Nature is.” According to Murcutt designing in harmony with

nature allows nature to be the composer. “The light and sounds of the land are already there

as are the human needs. Our job as designers is to listen, to be aware and to discover the

ideas, not to design them.”

Pic. 9 Glenn Murcutt Arthur Boyd Education Centre at Riversdale, bedroom wing. Photo by author

Our responsibility as architects is to come back to our senses and to tune our bodies. Drawing

and somatic training may provide these skills and experiences.

“Going home/Body thinking

I have been and still am a seeker,

But I have given up asking questions to the stars and books;

I have begun to listen to the teachings

My blood whispers to me”

Herman Hesse

Literature 1. Halprin Anna : www.annahalprin.org

2. HALPRIN, L. RSVP Cycles, Creative Processes in Human Environment 1969,Georg

Brazilier,Inc., New York

3. MACY, J.,BROWN,M. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World 1998

New Society Publishers, Canada

4. McHARG,I., Design with Nature 1969, The Natural History Press, Garden City, New York

5. PALLASMAA, J. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses John Wiley@Sons Ltd,

England 2005

6. MOBBS, M., Sustainable House, University on NSW Press, 2010

7. FEENBERG, A., Between Reason and Experience, Essays in Technology and Modernity, MIT

Press, 2010

8. Kabat-Zinn, J. Full catastrophe living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress,

pain, and illness. Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1991

9. FERGUSON GUSSOW, S, Architects Draw. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2008

10. PALLASMAA, J. . ibid

11. FULLER, Buckminster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Fuller

12. MEYERS, T. , Anatomy Trains, Churchill Livingstone 2009, http://www.anatomytrains.com/

13. ROLF, I, Rolfing and Physical Reality, Healing Arts Press, Rochester, Vermont, 1978

14. Bainbridge Cohen, B., Sensing, Feeling and Action: The experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind

Centering. The collected articles from Contact Quarterly dance journal 1980-1992, Contact

Editions, Northhampton, MA, 1993

15. CZAPLINSKA-ARCHER, R., Coming to Our Senses: Why Architects should learn to draw,

Architecture Bulletin, Sydney, November 2010.

16. Hall, S., Pallasmaa, J.,Perez-Gomez, A. Question of Perception: Phenomenology of

Architecture, William Stout Publishers, San Francisco, A+U, 2006 Japan

17. HALPRIN, L: Sea Ranch, Diary of an Idea.

18. MURCUTT Glenn: Architecture Foundation Australia www.ozetecture.com