Inspired by O.G. Rose Conversation Episode #86 w/ Samantha Willman
How buildings reflect the history of thinking and “becoming human,” not just provide shelter
I always love learning from Sam Willman, and I enjoyed her recent discussion with Michelle on the intricacies of how architecture and space shape cognition and our very self-understanding, and so deep is this transformation that we rarely notice its occurrence. Ms. Willman made a fascinating point that when we grow up constantly in rectangular rooms, walking down tight hallways, and the like, then we grow up and develop with a profound sense of shape and space that generations in the past didn’t so intricately experience. If children were raised mostly outside, experiencing space as profoundly “open” versus mostly “inside,” where space is defined by walls, children may develop a very different understanding of geometry and “space” in general.
I
Space shapes language, which shapes thought, and if a “home” is mostly a rectangle with walls, then when we discuss “philosophy needing to help us find a way home,” we will design a very different philosophy then if we associate “home” with “an open field” (a point that suggests “Clearing” by O.G. Rose, a short work inspired by Andrew Luber). Even more so than language, which in itself seems unavoidable (though there have been examples of isolated children not encountering language), we cannot not be influenced by an experience of space, and that experience organizes our very understanding of the world. And yet we often go through our days not thinking about how our spaces design us (paying attention to our words is rare enough, let alone an even more abstract layer of geometrical space): where architecture and design are ignored, so are ignored mechanisms which shape the very foundations of our thinking. On this topic, see also Ontological Design by Daniel Fraga, which brilliantly explores and elaborates on relevant considerations.
Ms. Willman at one point noted how the prevalence and spread of Phenomenology coincided with the invention of the automobile, and wondered if the two informed one another, because the automobile makes us experience a world where scenes shift and change around us while we sit stiffly and hardly move. Experience and “embodiment” seem more divisible, which in turn might make it easier to both consider “experience to experience” and “disembodied thinking” (which seems to define the 20th Century). Yes, there were horses, buggies, boats, and chariots before the car, but all of these required significant physical exertion to work, and also the speed of the vehicle was much less. The fact the scenery moves by us quickly could perhaps be a reason why the spread and popularity of Phenomenology occurred in the 20th Century, but hard to say.
II
Sam made a fascinating point on how architecture and construction are perhaps not merely matters of shelter and survival, but also matters of “sheltering the future” and “using space to represent time.” Yes, obviously humans need shelter to survive, but why do people go to all the trouble to design buildings aesthetically versus be done with them once basic needs are addressed? Well, Sam suggested that perhaps it is because buildings aren’t just about survival but also about keeping something alive? Mainly, the moment of time in which the building was built, and the idea which was had in the moment in which the building was constructed.
Memory is hard to record in general, and if only books are written, then only a single kind of memory can be passed down, mainly memory of propositional knowledge. For sensations, visual notions, images, and the like to be passed through the centuries, then something more than “written history” will be required, and in this case what is needed is “built history” (it isn’t only in books that cultural heritage is stored).
We are generally taught how to read text, but what does it mean to “read architecture?” How do we learn the skills of reading buildings? That was a question I found myself asking while listening to Sam Willman, and though that question likely requires a book to answer, it doesn’t seem possible for us to even start addressing the question unless we believe there is a meaning in architecture we might try to understand and comprehend. Ms. Willman provided angles and considerations that would give us “reason to think” that there is meaning articulated by architecture that is worth trying to become literate in, and if we fail to learn this ability, there is some amount of “cultural and cognitive history” that we will not be able to understand or translate, and thus it will be lost (we’ll only see buildings as “places of shelter” versus “examples of texts”). In the sciences, the scientists today must stands on the shoulders of those who came before them (if every scientist started from “first principles” and “the ground floor,” no progress would ever be made in the sciences); considering this, in failing to learn “architectural literacy,” regarding “cultural and cognitive history,” there might be some degree of this mistake that we today make.
Ms. Willman noted that architecture allows an accumulation of cognitive achievement in the form of visual and built structures, which is to say architecture embeds ideas into the sights of our lives. It places the achievements of humans creativity and genius in sight as opposed to hidden away in books, where the ideas can be found but not readily and only in a textual form. Text is abstract, and not something the human mind easily grasps, but sights, shapes, and buildings are comprehended by even children. To design is help “keep ideas with us” in ways that books do not, for books cannot “ontologically design” us like can things (to allude again to Daniel Fraga’s work). This isn’t to say books cannot change us, but it is to say books are not as “at hand” as are the things of our lives. If we do not realize this, we will likely not learn how to “read” things, and we will not be intentional about design. As a result, we might be designed in ways that lack our input.
III
I wonder if architecture is the most religious artform, for it’s impacts and influences on our lives are discreet, like the guardrails in which a car drives, versus say the map a driver uses or steering wheel a driver turns. It is said sometimes that Atheists in the West “dream Christian dreams,” which whether true or false, captures the notion that religion shapes us in ways that we don’t even recognize as religious. In this way, architecture seems similar: people who disown modern conveniences or Capitalism still end up “defining ‘rest’ according to couches” (to make a point inspired by Mr. Fraga’s book) — the influence of “things” is inescapable. And as it is reductionistic to say that religion “is just about getting to heaven,” so it is reductionistic to say that “architecture is just about shelter” — discreet and profound, much more is at work.
Religion shapes and impacts our experience of time, and Christian theology (for example) considers a distinction between “Church time” and say “clock time,” as well as “kairos” and “chrono” — on and on. If Ms. Willman is correct that architecture expresses an effort to capture time in space, this would only further suggest the overlap between religion and architecture. Ms. Willman also made the point that when we walk between pillars, the structures tend to be evenly distributed, which creates a rhythm (sense of time) that is very distinct from if we walk in a forest, where there is no “spacial rhythm,” for trees grows here and there and rather randomly. Thus, we can have a very different sense of time in a forest than in a city, and similarly ascribing to a certain theology can impact how we think about days and years.
In addition to space expressing time, Ms. Willman made powerful points on how architecture expresses forms of human cognition and apprehension before humans can directly express or articulate that cognition. Ms. Willman noted how we see “Cartesian space” in architecture years preceding Desecrate, suggesting that perhaps many of our abstraction notions in say mathematics or philosophy could be like the sheet music of Beethoven’s 9th compared to the symphony itself: perhaps more than we realize is a transpositioning of architecture, versus say architecture be built out of mathematics. Hard to say.
IV
Ms. Willman discussed other fascinating topics — “Are technologies spaces?”; “Where is outside and where is inside?”; “What is the difference between ‘escapism’ and ‘retreat?’ ” — and I loved when she said that the person who built her grandmother’s kitchen will never know what he gave her. That was powerful, and what Sam said is something I hope to remember. Ms. Willman noted that we build our cognitive developments, that in “the language of buildings” we can read the history of mind’s development and evolution, from the general to the particular of a granddaughter cooking with her grandmother and having her worldview and outlook forever shaped tenderly.
Architecture can express how we think before we understand how we think, and learning to be “architecturally literate” might involve learning how to understand the movements of intelligibility on their way to moving from the implicit to the explicit (to use the language of Dr. Filip Niklas on Hegel). Humans often overstate how much they know, and words can be “red herrings,” distracting us from the truth, so what’s “explicit” isn’t always what’s most accurate or reliable. But if we’re to think beyond the explicit, that requires us to learn “the language of the implicit,” and this is a skillset we rarely realize exists, let alone realize its something we can and should learn. Listening to the brilliance of Sam Willman though, I feel inspired to learn to read the language of the buildings that have shaped my life.
.
.
.
For more, please visit O.G. Rose.com. Also, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Instagram, Anchor, Facebook, and Twitter.
