ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY, vol 27, 2016 (2 issues)

Environmental & Architectural

Phenomenology Vol. 27 ▪ No. 1

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ISSN 1083–9194

his EAP begins 27 years of publication and marks the first digital-only edition. Because of this shift to on-line EAPs only, we are reducing the number of issues from three to two—winter and fall. Digital copy allows for two longer issues per year rather than three shorter issues. Readers will note that this first digital issue is 32 pages— considerably longer than most previous paper issues. This issue includes the regular EAP features of “comments from readers,” “items of interest” and “citations received.” We learned the sad news several weeks ago that phenomenological psychologist Bernd Jager, a long-time EAP supporter, passed away in March, 2015. As a tribute, we reprint passages from two of his most noteworthy writings, “Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling” (1975) and “Theorizing the Elaboration of Place” (1983). As a “book note,” we reproduce a portion of an interview with phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey, published in the recent volume, Exploring the Work of Edward Casey, edited by Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald A. Landes. Northern Earth editor John Billingsley reviews archaeologist Christopher Tilley’s Interpreting Landscapes. Longer entries begin with philosopher Dylan Trigg’s commentary that he presented at the special session on “Twenty-Five years of EAP,” held at the annual meeting of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP) in October. In turn, independent research Stephen Wood offers a first-person phenomenology of moving to a new house, including the lived significance of embodied emplacement. Next, anthropologist Jenny Quillien discusses the “sense of place” she experienced while spending three weeks in

www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/EAP.html

the South Chinese city of Guangzhou (also known as Canton), located on the Pearl River. In this issue’s fourth essay, artist Victoria King considers how her sense of artistic creativity has shifted over time, partly because of maturing personal experience and partly because of changes in her lived geography and a deepening understanding of place. Last this issue, architect Gary Coates presents an experiential analysis of a porch he designed for his Kansas home. He contrasts the bioclimatic requirements of this

Winter ▪ 2016

porch design with the much different environmental and climatic requirements of the porch of the house in the Mid-Atlantic state of Maryland where he grew up. Below: One panel from artist Victoria King’s series, Channel Light, which relates to the place ambience of Tasmania’s Bruny Island. King describes the painting as an evocation of “the mesmerizing shimmer of the water of the d’Entrecasteaux Channel.” For other examples of King’s work, see her essay that begins on p. 23.

Comments from Readers John Billingsley is Editor of Northern Earth, a journal focusing on such landscape and place topics as megalithic sites, alignments, and sacred landscapes (see his review of Christopher Tilley’s Interpreting Landscapes on p. 9). He wrote the recent email in response to EAP Editor David Seamon’s editorial on “open access” (fall 2015). Dear David, Good to read your editorial in the latest EAP. I share much of your ambivalence about the shift from paper to online. The greater availability of sources is a massive boon, but quality discernment still leaves a hankering for, say, the moniker of a respected publisher. But then, if such publishers are to survive, they must charge for what they publish. As you say, the price of information in peer journals and their websites is punishing for non-academic researchers and threatens non-institutional research. From my perspective as a non-aligned researcher, I note that things have been getting further out of reach financially over the last 20 or more years. For example, the cost of borrowing a book via the public library from an academic or British-Library source is rising, yet whatever the public library charges for an item, they cannot realistically charge what it actually costs them—£14–£16 per item, I believe it is now. And with public libraries and museums being among the first targets for the local cutbacks demanded by the present government, and increasingly liable to permanent or partial closures, it’s a tough ask. So digital it is, though I find great reluctance to reading on-screen. It’s better with a tablet, so I can squirm and loll about it my seat rather than sit at ergonomic attention at the desktop, but still! —John Billingsley

Items of interest th

The 8 annual conference of the Forum of Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality (ACS) will be held June 23–26, 2016, in New Harmony, Indiana. The theme of the conference is “Utopia, Architecture, and Spirituality.” The conference aim is “to look at utopia as an idea and ideal, real and

imagined, in all of its ramifications for architecture and the built environment, culture, politics, and, especially, spirituality. http://www.acsforum.org/symposium2016/.

The 8th annual conference of the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists (ICNAP) will take place May 26–30, 2016, on the downtown Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona. The theme of the conference is “Phenomenology and Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Inquries in the Lifeworld of Persons, Communities, and the Natural World.” www.icnap.org. The 2016 International Human Science Research Conference will be held at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, July 3–7. The Conference theme is “Life Phenomenology: Movement, Affect, and Language,” but presentations on other topics are welcome. Keynote speakers include David Abrams, Ralph Acampora, Scott Churchill, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and Stephen Smith. http://function2flow.ca/home-7/welcometo-the-35th-international-human-scienceresearch-conference-ihsrc-uottawa-july-37-2016. The 20th annual meeting of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP) will be held October 20–22, 2016, in Salt Lake City, Utah, immediately following the annual meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) and Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS). http://environmentalphilosophy.org/ A symposium, Walking as a Method of Inquiry, will be held July 8–10, 2016, on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. Research topics include embodied pedagogies, landscape as “archive,” and integration of artistic and intellectual modes of understanding. [email protected].

Edward Relph reprint Geographer Edward Relph’s Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (1981) has been reprinted in Routledge Press’s “Revival” series. Relph’s central question is why modern human-made environments, while generally providing me-

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chanical efficiency and material well-being, often invoke a sense of frustration and alienation rather than optimism and attachment. Perhaps the book’s most significant contribution is ethical and relates to what Relph calls environmental humility—a way of living in, being with, and encountering the world where by the “others” of that world, whether things, places, people, or other living beings, are respected just for being what they are and, therefore, are put first and given kindly attention. Environmental humility involves “an appeal for guardianship, for taking care of things merely because they exist, for tending and protecting them. In this there is neither mastery nor subservience, but there is responsibility and commitment” (p. 187). See the sidebar below.

“A sensitivity in seeing” Environmental humility suggests a way out of the vicious circle of using ever more rational practices of management and planning to correct the destructive consequences of rationalistic management and too much planning. It does this, first, by emphasizing the individuality of places, communities, and landscapes, for individuality is not susceptible to analysis and manipulation. It does this also by stressing the need for a sensitivity in seeing that can lead to the development of a compassionate intelligence that respects things and persons as they are. And it does this, above all, by acknowledging appropriation, or the fact that everything has value simply by virtue of its existence and that human beings have an obligation to tend and care for things both non-human and human-made. The use of appropriation and compassionate intelligence and individuality for making environments cannot be precisely delineated because that would reduce them to simplistic formulations like those of the rationalism to which they are deeply opposed. However, it is possible to suggest some of their general implications, for instance, places designed so that they are responsive to the needs of their most sensitive users, especially children and the elderly.

The further implications are more radical and suggest a complete restructuring of ways of designing and making buildings and landscapes so that there is no longer a dependence on specialist advice and techniques…. The likelihood of this actually happening is slight… Nonetheless, it is inconceivable that appropriation could have no effect on what is made and done because any deeply held and clearly thought out understanding must manifest itself in deeds and action. Though environmental humility and its predecessors may never have attained expression on a large social scale, they do constitute ideals that are worth reiterating and adapting as social and environmental circumstances change. In these ideals, there is no room for arrogance based on expertise or for authority stemming from some abstract conceptions of rights; there is equally no room for an unthinking subservience that abandons obligations to specialists; and there is no room for exploitation and unfeeling manipulation of either people or environments. But there is scope for craftsmanship, for autonomy, for being responsible for the environments in which one lives and works… and for guardianship. Environmental humility is not easily practiced nor is it likely ever to achieve a wide-spread expression in landscapes. It is simply an ideal and a possibility worth contemplating (pp. 209–210).

Citations Received Andreas Bernard, 2014. Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator. NY: New York Univ. Press [originally published in German in 2006]. The central question asked by this journalist and cultural-studies theorist is “How much did elevators transform the vertical structure of buildings?” Bernard writes, “While the elevator may at first glance seem a modest innovation, it had wideranging effects from fundamentally restructuring building design to reinforcing social class hierarchies by moving luxury apartments to upper levels, previously the domain of the lower classes. The cramped elevator cabin itself served as a reflection

of life in modern, growing cities, as a space of simultaneous intimacy and anonymity, constantly in motion.” Gernot Böhme, Tonino Griffero, and Jean-Paul Thibaud, 2014. Architecture and Atmosphere. Espoo, Finland: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation. In the last several years, the phenomenon of atmosphere has become a major link between phenomenological research and environmental design. The three essays comprising this volume are written by major figures in the “atmospheric” movement: philosophers Gernot Böhme (“Atmospheres: New Perspectives for Architecture and Design”) and Tonino Griffero (“Architectural Affordances: The Atmospheric Authority of Spaces”); and sociologist and urban planner Jean-Paul Thibaud (“Installing an Atmosphere”). The volume concludes with “A Conversation on Atmosphere,” involving discussion between the three authors and architect Juhani Pallasmaa. The sidebars below include a passage from Böhme’s chapter discussing the significance of atmosphere for architectural design; and Pallasmaa’s comments on atmosphere as a modernist blind spot.

“What counts is how a person feels within a work of architecture….” Seen from the theory of atmospheres, architecture is not a visual art…. [T]he main task of architecture is not the production of sight but of space—that is to say, spaces and location with a certain mood, i.e., atmospheres. [The turn] is toward the question of how a building or a site is experienced by a visitor or an inhabitant. This is a turn to a new humanism—not the one we know from Vitruvius, the one in which a human being is the measure of everything via his body—but one in which everything, particularly architecture, is measured via bodily feelings. What really counts… is how a person feels within a work of architecture or a neighborhood. From here, three maxims for architectural design follow:

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Begin from inside, i.e., from the perspective of the future user or dweller. Do not begin just with a design of the whole building but be aware of details from the very beginning. Concentrate not on bodies but instead on space.

When saying that the main issue of architecture is space and not objects, I do not mean Euclidian space. The architect must always deal with geometry, but only in so far as he is a building engineer. The space considered here is the field of felt space—space as the where of bodily presence. For the architect, a new self-understanding follows from the aesthetics of atmospheres. He is not primarily concerned with the shaping of bodies but with the structure and articulation of spaces. These spaces may be open or closed, they may be narrow or wide, they may be pressing or uplifting. Spaces may have a center and thus a directional orientation; they may fame sights or open to the indefinite. When designing buildings, constructing bodies, and planning places and volumes, the architect at the same time sets “suggestions for movement”—actual movement as when he follows lines and surfaces with his eyes. All these considerations mean that the architect when designing anticipates what sort of lived place he is constructing and how the future visitor or dweller will feel there (G. Böhme, pp. 10–12).

Atmosphere as a modernist blind spot … I would like to make some suggestions as to why the subject of atmosphere has remained such a blind spot for the architects of modernity and for our generation here. One reason is that architecture has been considered a visual art, while atmospheres are multisensory agglomerations of experience. The second is that architecture has been conceived of as an art form of the focused eye, but… atmosphere is something far more vague fluid, and

almost indefinable. So it is not surprising that this subject has not fit within the modern conception of architecture. Modernism has aimed at clarity, while atmosphere is unclear, diffuse, and often without edges. It is something that exists in an emergent rather than a finite state, whereas modernism has aspired to be both permanent and finite. Modernism has been largely antimaterial, the white-painted plaster surface being the ideal of modern architectural expression whereas dense atmospheric experience arises from distinct materiality—this materiality could be that of stone or brick, rain or fog. Modernity resists tradition, whereas ambience and atmosphere often arise from a layering of things, particularly a sense of time and deterioration. These are qualities that have been all but erased from the modern conception of aesthetic ideas…. Last, I would add that some architects whose work I experience as strongly atmospheric have expressed an understanding, or at least an appreciation, of atmospheres in their writing. This suggests that the atmospheres present in the architectures of such figures as Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, or Sigurd Lewerentz are not accidental but the result of a particular orientation in their thinking and feeling. Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, wrote, “Whether people are conscious of it or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with.” The young Alvar Aalto wrote that “most people, but especially artists, principally grasp the emotional content in a work of art. This is especially manifest in the case of old architecture. We encounter there a mood so intense and downright intoxicating that in most cases we don’t pay a great deal of attention to individual parts and details, if we notice them at all” (J. Pallasmaa, pp. 66–67).

Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Krimmer, eds., 2015. Goethe Yearbook 22. Rochester, New York: Boydell & Brewer. Published by the Goethe Society of North America, this edited collection “features a special section on Goethe and environmentalism,” edited by Dalia Nassar and Luke Fischer.” Though many of the chapters appear to impose awkward post-structural interpretations on Goethe’s way of science (which is more accurately labeled a phenomenology of the natural world), there is at least one entry that highlights phenomenological possibilities—philosopher Iris Hennigfeld’s “Goethe as a Spiritual Predecessor of Phenomenology.” Joe L. Frost, 2010. A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments. NY: Routledge. This book provides “a history of children’s play and play environments.” It argues that today “we need to re-establish play as a priority” and “to preserve children’s free, spontaneous outdoor play… and natural and built play environments.” Sam Griffiths and Vinicius M. Netto, eds., 2015. “Open Syntaxes: Towards New Engagements with Social Sciences and Humanities,” special issue of Journal of Space Syntax, vol. 6, no. 1 (autumn). This special issue of JOSS includes several entries relevant to architectural and architectural phenomenology: “Phenomenology of the Movement Economy,” by Lasse Suonperä Liebst; “Roman Neighbourhoods: A Space Syntax View on Ancient City Quarters and Their Social Life,” by Hanna Stöger; “Making Sense of Historical Social Data,” by Nadia Charalambous and Ilaria Geddes; and “Understanding Place Holistically: Cities, Synergistic Relationality, and Space Syntax,” by David Seamon. http://joss.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/. Carmen Hass-Klau, 2015. The Pedestrian and the City. New York: Routledge. This urban planner overviews the design, policies, and politics of “walking and pedestrians.” Topics covered include “the

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fight against urban motorways, the destruction of walkable neighborhoods through road building, the struggle of pedestrianization, and the popularity of traffic calming as a policy for reducing pedestrian accidents.” Real-world examples are drawn from 16 North American cities and ten other urban sites in Germany, Norway, Denmark, and Great Britain. Hass-Klau writes: [This book is a] “declaration of commitment to the historic city centers, the traditional neighborhoods, not only the 19th-century ones but also those suburbs which for some were dreams of a better life. “The destruction that has been inflicted on the urban structure is for me sometimes difficult to bear. Critics will say I am not a realist. I do not mind the criticism because I think we have had too much unreal ‘realism’ and we need more protectors, more people who are on the side of the weaker participants, and that no doubt includes the pedestrian who has very little influence and power to fight against inhuman changes….” (p. xix). George Home-Cook, 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention. London: Palgrave. “The question of attention in theatre remains relatively unexplored. In redressing this, Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening.” The focus is on “four core aural phenomena in theatre—noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion.” The author concludes that “theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres.” L. A. McNeur, 2008. “The Intimate Dance of Being, Building, Body and Psychotherapy,” Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 19–30. This architect and body psychotherapist considers the “interrelationships between emotions and environment… intrinsic to human existence…. The experience of the body moving through space and responding to the built environment on myriad levels simultaneously is an essential aspect of body psychotherapy.”

Bernd Jager (1931–2015) Phenomenological psychologist Bernd Jager died in Montreal on March 30, 2015, at the age of 83. Born in the Netherlands, Jager studied agronomy at the Royal Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Deventer and became an agricultural assistant in West Africa to Albert Schweitzer, whose kindness and intellectual acumen inspired Jager to study psychology, in which he earned a doctorate from Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University in 1967. At the time, Duquesne was a world center of phenomenological research guided by such eminent phenomenological thinkers as Erwin Strauss, J. H. van den Berg, Amedeo Giorgi, and Adrian van Kaam, who was Jager’s doctoral advisor. Many of Jager’s writings encompass important themes relevant to environmental and architectural phenomenology, including sensitive, extended interpretations of relevant lived polarities like dwelling/journey, mundaneness/festivity, and everydayness/extraordinariness. For a partial list of his writings and his essay, “Thresholds and Habitation,” see EAP, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 8–10. For a discussion of Jager’s oeuvre and tributes to his memory, see the special “memorial issue” of the Journal of Metabletica, no. 10 (summer/autumn), 2015 ([email protected]). In memoriam to Jager, we reprint passages from two of his most noteworthy writings: ▪ “Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling,” published in the second volume of Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (pp. 235–260), edited by Amedeo Giorgi, Constance Fisher, and Edward Murray (1975); ▪ “Theorizing the Elaboration of Place: Inquiry into Galileo and Freud,” published in the fourth and last volume of Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (pp. 153–180), edited by Amedeo Giorgi, Anthony Barton, and Charles Maes (1983).

Passages from “Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling” (1975)

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here appears to exist a persistent and deep interrelationship between the themes of intellectual, theoretical, or spiritual effort and those of traveling, exploration, and sightseeing. The very language of intellectual effort constantly refers us to the road. Thus we are said to make progress in our science, that we advance to, or arrive, or are on the way to new insights, that we work toward a new understanding, attempt to reach new conclusions, or hope for a breakthrough, all the while keeping up with the work of others, hoping not to fall behind. Western religious life often evokes the images of a road, albeit a difficult road, to be traversed as preparation for an eternal destination. The ideas of pilgrimage and crusade constantly reoccur in our religious sensibility. A deeper understanding of the journey in its many manifestations as heroic quest, as religious pilgrimage, as diplomatic or commercial venture, as effort at conquest and annexation, as adventure or as tourism, all have bearing on a deeper understanding of our intellectual life…. (p. 235).

journeying start with a divestiture, with a ridding oneself of excess baggage. Closely linked with the ideal of simplicity and clarity is the ambition to hold oneself aloof from one’s surroundings, to guard oneself from an all too ready and uncritical absorption of dominant values. The first divestiture of thought and of travel is that of the comfort of being at one with one’s surroundings, of sharing completely in the beliefs and ambitions of one’s friends and neighbors. Thinking and journeying bring us estrangement. Thales, whose reputation reaches us indirectly through many legends and folk tales, appears to have spurned riches even though he once proved that he was clearly capable of amassing a fortune. He was quite obviously disinterested in the question for fame and money that totally absorbed his neighbors. Of the same Thales, it is said that he lost his way to the market place in his hometown and that he fell in a ditch while studying the sky. In the numerous stories of this kind, the earliest Greek thinkers are portrayed as benevolent strangers who, despite their capacity for keen observations and their obvious intelligence, never seem to understand what hinking and journeying thrive on a everyone else appears to know. They remain few useful and incorruptible proposi- different from everyone else (p. 240). tions and possessions. Thinking and

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he journey is born out of a complex interaction of nearness and distance, intimacy and strangeness, of abundance and constraint. Journeying grows out of dwelling as dwelling is founded in journeying. The road and the hearth, journey and dwelling mutually imply each other. Neither can maintain its structural integrity without the other. The journey cut off from the sphere of dwelling becomes aimless wandering, it deteriorates into mere distraction or even chaos. . . The journey requires a place of origin as the very background against which the figures of a new world can emerge. The hometown, the fatherland, the neighborhood, the parental home form together an organ of vision. To be without origin, to be homeless is to be blind. On the other hand, the sphere of dwelling cannot maintain its vitality and viability without the renewal made possible by the path. A community without outlook atrophies, becomes decadent and incestuous. Incest is primarily this refusal of the path; it therefore is refusal of the future and a suicidal attempt to live entirely in the past. The sphere of dwelling, insofar as it is not moribund, is interpenetrated with journeying….

tended and cared for through constant, gentle reoccurring contacts. Journeying forces [the] round generative world of [dwelling] into the narrow world of the path. The path offers the progressive time of unique and unrepeatable events, of singular occurrences, of strange peoples and places to be seen once and possibly never again…. Journeying breaks open the circle of the sun and the seasons and forms it into a linear pattern of succession in which the temporal world shrinks to a before and after, to backward and forward. Here the beginning is no longer felt to lie in the middle but instead aphe round world of dwelling offers a pears placed behind one's back. the future cyclical time, that is, the recurring makes its appearance straight ahead, making times of seasons, of the cycles of possible confrontation (p. 251). birth and death, of planting and harvesting, of meeting and meeting again, of doing and [crucial] facet of theoretical effort doing over again. It offers a succession of concerns the world of festive initiacrops, of duties, generations, forever aptive, of coming forth, which is the pearing and reappearing. It offers a place apotheosis of seeing and showing. All the where fragile objects and creatures can be The beginning of a new enterprise requires a thoughtful remembrance of whatever supports that enterprise. Here, the first step forward is also a step backward. The traveler can leave behind only that which he has truly faced. Whatever is ignored will come to haunt him as unfinished business and complicate his progress. The traveler faces the ground and the past because it must support him. He equally must come into a heightened presence of whatever and whomever he is to leave behind so that he will receive full backing…. (pp. 249–50).

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great inspired works of literature, of the arts, of religious revelation, and the summit of scientific pursuits belong here. In this world of festive initiative, man sees through showing while he finds the courage to show forth through seeing. In this ecstatic realm of epiphany and parousia, man, world, and the gods achieve their closest approximation and their fullest visibility. The theorist must soon turn, however, and begin his homeward journey. As soon as he turns to leave behind the epiphany to face the region where he started his journey, the theorist has begun the great hermeneutic task of mediating between the sacred and the profane, between the “here and now” and the depth, the height and the distance. Homecoming is a hermeneutic task. Interpretation is itself a homecoming from the awesome and appealing distance (p. 260).

Passages from “Theorizing the Elaboration of Place” (1983)

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he home, the factory, the hospital, the laboratory, the city [do not appear] in the first place as finished material things, as containers of people and their activities. Rather, these buildings themselves make their appearance as a certain embodied grasp on the world, as possible human stances, as particular manners of taking up the body and the world, as specific orientations disclosing certain aspects of a worldly horizon. The first architecture then appears to be that of taking up a particular bodily attitude. Architecture is then at first a certain manner of standing or sitting or lying down or walking. The first logs, the first bricks are the trained limbs of agile bodies; the first foundations of the first building are a series of domesticated movements, of spontaneous bodily actions mastered in habit. Building is at first ritualized, routinized movement that allows a particular access to the world….

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n this view, architecture is a planning and building that codifies and solidifies a certain manner of “remaining nearby,” of dwelling or inhabiting. It follows the lead of the body, the accomplishment of habit and of stance. It is only by thus taking up the melody of the body that architecture in its turn comes to influence the body, comes to accentuate a certain series of bodily possibilities within a certain type of room or building or city, while it relegates at the same time other possibilities in the background. Thus it might be possible to organize a successful dinner party in a chemical laboratory or to have an intimate conversation in an airport, but to do so we must remain constantly detached from, or even in active opposition to, our architectural environment. Like an accomplished choreography, a building shapes our movements and leads us to a certain outlook or assures us a certain grasp. A building is a codified dance, an insistent invitation to live our bodily being in

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a certain manner. And we respond to this invitation by taking up a certain rhythm of walking and breathing, of digesting and thinking and feeling.

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o enter a building, to come under the sway of a choreography, means at the same time to become subject to a certain disclosure. Like a certain bodily attitude, a building opens a particular world of tasks, of outlooks, of sensibilities…. In this intimate alliance with the body, the building itself has become a particular access to the world. I no longer am contained within a thing-like construction, no longer remain within the building as one thing enclosed within another. Rather, I have drawn this building into the sphere of my body. I have appropriated it and have drawn it around me like a coat on a windy day to inspect a certain sight or to face a particular task (pp. 154–156).

Book Note Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald A. Landes, eds., 2013. Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey. London: Bloomsbury [paperback edition 2015]. ACP: In your essay “Between transplantation, whereby I move to a new reGeography and Philosophy” [Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2001], you treat Bourdieu’s concept of habitus while also claiming that we need to consider the body/place relationship as more than merely socially determined, thus leading to the formation of a triad of terms for how the bodily self is engaged with place: habitus, habitation, idiolocality. First, I would like to ask how you came to use the term “idiolocality”?

ESC: I coined this term because

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n the winter 2015 EAP’s “citations received,” we mentioned the publication of this edited collection of essays discussing the seminal work of phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey, well known for his superb phenomenological explications of place and related phenomena (e.g., Getting Back into Place, 2009; The Fate of Place, 1997). At that time, we did not have access to the volume itself, which includes a series of three informative interviews with Casey conducted by the two editors, who both were doctoral students under his direction at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Here, we reprint a section, “moving into place,” that is part of the third interview, entitled “The Reinscription of Place,” conducted by co-editor Azucena CruzPierre (ACP) on March 23, 2012.

I wanted to capture a sense of the local and then to combine and intensify this with the notion of the peculiar or the strange—as in idios in the Greek sense, which implies not only “private” but also “odd”…. I wanted to get a sense of what is peculiar, eccentric, different, about a given place, so that would be the idiolocality or the idiolocal dimension of that place. It’s as simple as that, but for this I needed a special term.

ACP: This helpful distinction continues to appear in your more recent work on borders. In that respect, I would like to see if we could further connect this triad with what you now say about borders and edges. Typically, your accounts of place and of movement through space—whereby you claim we carry with us an evolving sense of self that arises out of our bodily experience of space and place—sound rather fluid and conducive to the postmodern nomadic lifestyles that more and more of us lead. However, I would like to ask you what happens when, for instance, the undelimited horizontal boundaries that you posit are in fact limited borders. Here I think not only of the implantation of borders that close off a given landscape, reinscribing on the bodyself the triad that you speak of, but also of

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gion or place where the landscape appears foreign and perhaps “unnavigable” due to sociopolitical, physical, psychological, linguistic, or other factors, leaving one unable to integrate habitudinally, habitationally, and idiolocally into the new environment. Would this experience shift the balance of the inward permeation and outward expansion of place on the body?

ESC: You’re quite right—all of those terms that you bring up, habitus, habitation, idiolocality, working in and through the body, are really a matter of flow, influx, outflux. There is no neat model whereby to map them. Skin, as a breathing organism, is not only very permeable; it is itself an organ of the lived body. For me, it furnishes a kind of paradigm of what I call a “boundary,” and so the body becomes a kind of operator in its lived environment, an agent that is not only effecting change in this environment, but equally changing and moving itself, and also taking in deeply, being influenced by its entire surroundings. It is often set back. It is not only inspired but also depressed, or frankly discouraged by its idiolocal world… I don’t want to imply that habitation, habitus, happen in some quasi-automatic way whereby the subject simply assimilates whatever it encounters, that all is well, and that all manner of things will be well. No, it isn’t anywhere as easy as that. My analysis typically is about people who are already stationed in a place, dug in, having lived there for a long spell. The implaced bodies I treat are more sedentary than nomadic. Why is that? I think I’m very close to Merleau-Ponty here—to his stance and sensibility that human creativity comes, or at least his kind of creativity came, from a deep immersion in a single setting. In his case, France, and more particularly Paris, very much as in Proust’s case. People like Merleau-Ponty enjoyed a stability of landscape when they were growing up; it was always there for them, a persisting ground that served as a source of inspiration.

Their rootedness there via habitus and habitation allowed them to move beyond its limitations creatively: limitations of class, race, and ideology. This is distinct from coming into a new landscape where the challenges of learning a language, getting to the grocery store, getting acclimated and situated, can be painful and very awkward. In this case, one stops short of habitus, short of habitation; in this circumstance, the idiolocality of the new place comes forward as something very conspicuous: “this is a strange place,” we say to ourselves. So the idiolocality of one’s circumstance is emphasized, whereas the habitus and habitation are only slowly acquired over many months and years—and sometimes never. This is a spatiotemporal analysis of being more or less at home in one’s lifeworld. Here my question is likely to be: What is it like to be a body in a place you know quite well? So I prefer to begin with familiarity of place (or its cultivation), since for me, such familiarity is far from being constrictive; on the contrary, it may become a ground for freedom and creativity itself. I’m thinking here of Stravinsky’s claim in The Poetics of Music that creativity takes place within the constraints of your own environment (including the formal constraints of a given musical genre)…. A fortuitous event can change everything, even if you are not seeking it out: for instance, a fellowship to Paris that took me away from my then deepening roots in Chicago as a graduate student. Here I indulge in personal idiosyncrasy, some of the vagaries of my own life mixed in with my preferred brand of phenomenology seen as on the lookout for forms of abiding connectionism. I privilege that which is well known by me and, more particularly, by my body (my corps connaissant, in Merleau-Ponty’s phrase). I begin by knowing how to navigate my milieu, and only on this basis do I feel I am able to think as openly and as freely as I can. My habitudinal base, instead of choking or

chortling me (as it might for many), is actually the very road into becoming comparatively uninhibited in thought and writing. I was teaching Merleau-Ponty only yesterday, and I came across some marvelous passages that I had never noticed before. In the body part in chapter one, where he says that bodily constraints are not only necessary to being human, but they’re actually a very good thing,, because without them we would have a false freedom, an artificial sense of volatility and flight. The real task is to establish a hard-won freedom beginning from the constraints that you already possess and that are already you. With regard to familial, social, and cultural constraints, Merleau-Ponty says in effect “bring them on!” Short of being shackles, they can be a source of inspiration, or a place for the “respiration of living,” as he puts it in “Eye and Mind.” I think my sensibility gravitates in this direction—toward moving on to different paths to come by gaining a more profound understanding of where we now are. This is a freedom at the edge of our lives, or better as that very edge.

ACP: Given this bent, I can now see how you became so committed to discussing and promoting the idea of place, as opposed to joining the ranks of philosophers who continue promoting the concept of space as central to our experience of the world. You really had to promote place because you were yourself so much implaced wherever life took you.

ESC: I was (and am) a place-o-philiac. Place is at the very top of my list of intrinsically valuable dimensions at any given moment, right up there with people. For me, there is a serious competition going on here between people and places—which does not exclude their intimate relationship. A volume of Santayana’s autobiography is called Persons and Places: this would be just the kind of balance that has held true of

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my life. I don’t think it’s perverse, I don’t think it means I’m inhuman or de-personal, but just crediting place with its own virtues along with those of being human…. Let me come back to a final angle in your… question: how one moves from absolute novelty in the idiolocal to settled habitation. Here habitus is the middle term. It allows for the slow acquisition of reliable bodily postures and movements that themselves allow you to orient yourself in a new place. So it isn’t just a visual or cartographic or verbal matter; it’s your body itself that has to begin to internalize the movements, the know-how, the savoir-faire of how you get from one place to another. As we tacitly map this region—knowing how to get to the butcher, or to the patisserie—habitus slowly buildings a place-specific confidence in one’s orientation, and this is quite apart from explicit thoughts or emotions. You can be dreadfully homesick, and yet your body is nevertheless drinking in that place slowly, imbibing it, creating a reliable reserve at the level of habitus, which seems to me to be the effective tertium quid between one’s dislocated cerebral and one’s emotional self and ongoing habitation. Habitation arrives fully when you can say to yourself, “Well, I’m feeling pretty much at home now” (or at least much more at home). Idiolocality arises with your own first emotional and ideational takes, from being in an unaccustomed place, including one’s original home-place. From this emerges a slow amassment and internalization through the body in the form of habits and actions. Habitation comes to crown this succession—when one is lucky enough for this to happen—and it implicates the entire lived body and the whole place in which you and the environment come into some form of compatibility, some type of collusion or even collaboration, though this is by no means always constructive or peaceful (pp. 187-90).

Book Review Christopher Tilley, 2012. Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities—Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 3. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Reviewed by John Billingsley

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ritish archaeologist Christopher Tilley seeks a kind of empathy with the past—not an archaeology of artifacts and sites so much as one of contexts and connections, embracing psychology rather than materialism. His workplace is not a laboratory, computer desk, or excavations, but a first-person immersion in the physical geography of prehistoric sites—contexts that demonstrate, perhaps more in Britain than elsewhere, that “no predictive model based on one landscape works for another” (p. 460). This claim means no grand schemes replicated as patterns across varying cultures but local monuments for local people with their own local priorities. In this third volume of his “landscape phenomenology” series [see EAP, spring

2015], Tilley puts his approach into extensive practice, linking together various research projects that take the reader on a tour from Wessex to South West England, via the familiar landscapes of Stonehenge to the lessregarded barrows and crossdykes to beach-pebbled hilltops, the sandstones and slates of Devon and Exmoor that evoked such different responses among site-builders, to Cornwall's granite environs that seem to have invoked a supernatural negotiation between land and people from the start. As Tilley tours, he walks, looks, and reflects on what the site-builders might have seen and how they might have construed their surroundings into the visible traces they have left. This manner of interpretation is complemented by more customary archaeological reports with resulting deductions that are almost “Sherlock-Holms”-like. What readers get, in other words, is a kind of guided walk around a large tract of South West England, with our attention directed not just to celebrated places like Stonehenge (which opens the volume and which, because of the intensity of research, may be more vulnerable to revision) and the comprehensive megalithic landscapes of Cornwall, but also to the kinds of sites that are so low-key and impassive that they are often overlooked by “megalith-maniacs.” Tilley argues, for example, that round barrows and cross-dykes—even Exmoor's intimate stone groupings—would have played a synthetic role in how their builders saw and interpreted (and re-interpreted) their homeland, in a creative matrix with the natural landscape. Tilley contends that study of individual sites is of limited value because interaction is multi-layered: “Monuments and places

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are within landscapes, but these landscapes are part of them... Past actions, events, myths and stories are embedded in landscapes” (p. 39). This claim introduces the element of human perception as another layer in the matrix, and in decoding it—or at least attempting to do so—the keywords are metaphor, mimesis and mnemonic.

Water features & landscape [One significant feature of the lived geography of prehistoric places is] water and water courses and coombes or dry valleys in terms of the manner in which they break up and divide the land but also bring it together, acting as both boundary and bridge. Walking along these places in the landscape affords one a completely different [environmental] experience. In an area such as the Stonehenge landscape, one can walk along Stonehenge/Lake Bottom and hardly encounter a single barrow in a landscape filled with them. On the northern edge of Cranborne Chase, the perspective is the same. Springs, confluences, valley and coombe heads are all significant places in relation to the locations of monuments in the chalk and pebble and sandstone and slate landscapes… as is the process of crossing wet or boggy areas…. Places where water collects, falling from the heavens and filling the solution basins of the high tors, were of great significance in the granite landscapes of Bodmin Moor and West Penwith. The coastline, a liminal zone between the sea and the land, was of great significance in relation to the location of monuments in South Dorset, East Devon, and West Penwith but appears to have been of little significance on Exmoore—at least in relation to the locations of the lithic monuments. Part of the significance of the coast… was that it provided a place, sometimes

the only place, where a prehistoric “geologist” (cosmologist) could inspect the rocks, see what was under his or her feet. The coast is a place where the sun may be seen to either rise or set into the sea, die, and be reborn from a watery underworld…. Inland, the manner in which it rises and sets behind hills or monuments on auspicious days of the year, such as midsummer, the equinoxes, and midwinter [can also be an important feature for a site’s lived geography]. Coastal landforms have been the main point of departure for the study of monument location here, but in the future a subtle and more nuanced discussion might be developed in relation to the flows and directions of rivers into the sea, the tides, eddies, sand banks, and currents and their convergence, which have recently been shown to be of great significance in various ethnographic studies. A consideration of seascape, including its formation processes and chronology, needs to be developed to complement an understanding of landscapes. The coast is, of course, significant in that it is here and usually only here that pebbles are found. Thus it is interesting to note that the two largest concentrations of Bronze Age round barrows in England occur on and in the vicinity of chalk hills capped with pebbles. Is this mere coincidence? It may well have been this particular geological combination of dramatically contrasting stones that was of special significance, as opposed to a landscape consisting solely of one kind of rock: chalk, granite, pebbles, sandstone, or slate (Tilly 2012, pp. 461-62).

As well as the temptation to see constructed places as individual entities, a common contemporary perceptual trap is to unconsciously imagine that the prehistoric landscape sprang fully formed into the hands of the mapmakers and didn't take millennia of changing worldviews to evolve. The prehistoric environ is sequential, cumulative and self-referencing throughout history: a barrow, say, makes reference not only to the land and the society that constructs it but also to pre-existing remains perhaps produced by other societies with radically different worldviews. In short, one must picture and hope to understand an evolving palimpsest. Another contemporary misperception of the prehistoric landscape is unconsciously to see it as it is today, whether in its wild state or in careful curation. In returning the human eye to the land, Tilley’s work countermands this reflective hiatus. His fieldwork is “feet-on” rather than “hands-on” and aims to return sites to the founders’ eyes. He attempts to locate insights that would otherwise be elusive “without personal physical experience and knowledge of place... impossible just using a map” (p. 100). There are many fascinating inquisitions in this book, and space allows just one example, involving the East Devon pebble beds—a natural curiosity in that riverine pebbles occur on hilltops. Metaphorically, this unlikely situation as an inversion of the natural order is as obvious today as it no doubt was in prehistory, but I suspect we may be less amenable today in seeing it as a meaningful basis for insight. Tilley, however, chases out an observation of color, sensory perception, nearby archaeological sites, archaeo-astronomy and mythological inference. In so doing the subtly visible landscape becomes the visionary landscape. It is easy for empirical commentators to criticize Tilley's method and conclusions, arguing that deduction about bygone perceptions in the absence of material evidence is immune to external verification and tan-

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tamount to elevating imagination to research. Certainly, landscapes change, monuments decay, artifacts perish, and we have no quantifiable evidence on what symbolically motivated the construction of prehistoric sites. Tilley argues, however, that one thing has not changed significantly over the last several thousand years—the human brain and its sense-making apparatus. If, therefore, human beings are sensitive to metaphor today, then they were also in prehistory. Thus, it is through engagement with metaphor that we might seek understanding of ritual landscapes. Indeed, the sough of metaphor can be heard in the theorizing of a ceremonial route that led to the Stonehenge Riverside Project's discovery of a previously unknown henge between Stonehenge and the River Avon. For many researchers, metaphor has less empirical quantifiability than the wind, and the only understanding of human relationship with place to be trusted is one constructed on solid foundations. In this sense, one might say that Tilley’s phenomenological approach in archaeology offers a homeopathic antidote to empiricist sterility. His method is a horizontal engagement as contrasted with the vertical, layered approach of excavation. His method is also mobile and itinerant rather than static—negotiation rather than investigation, thereby invoking a dialectical socio-political inference. These “horizontal” and “vertical” approaches are complementary, not competitive, and each better with an ear inclined to the other. Tilley’s interpretations of how ancient sites pattern the landscape and what that patterning might imply for lifeworlds not only sheds light on the past but also implicitly illuminates how we see our world today. What is sine qua non is presence. Billingsley is Editor of Northern Earth, a quarterly journal focusing on such topics as megalithic sites and sacred landscapes. www.northernearth.co.uk.

Several Thematic Aspects of EAP Dylan Trigg Trigg is a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy; and at University College Dublin, School of Philosophy. His research interests include phenomenology and existentialism; philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment; aesthetics and philosophies of art; and philosophies of space and place. Trigg’s books include: Topophobia: A Phenomenology of Anxiety (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2014); and The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012). Trigg was an invited speaker at a special session in honor of “25 years of EAP” held at the annual conference of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), Atlanta, Georgia USA, October 11, 2015. The following commentary is a print revision of his spoken remarks. [email protected]. © 2016 Dylan Trigg.

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am happy to be able to say a few words about David Seamon’s work and the legacy of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology. If I may, a few biographical words to begin with. When I was a graduate student at the University of Sussex almost ten years ago, I got in touch with David, having then recently discovered EAP. My graduate thesis was on the relation between memory and place, and one aspect of this research concerned the memorable quality of places such as Starbucks. I wrote to David to express my enthusiasm for EAP and to query whether he might be interested in running the Starbucks piece. He said yes. This was a thrill, but it was also a thrill to enter into a correspondence with David. Indeed, I’ll always be grateful to him for his intellectual generosity and honesty during that time, which was very much welcome. This is also clear enough in the very first issue of EAP, where David invites his then incipient readers to share their own first-hand experience of themes pertinent to EAP, not only in the form of academic papers, but also by way of poems, letters, drawings, and any other expressive format. Certainly, such openness is not a given of academic life. Philosophy arguably needs more of this. Having then met David in person, during an EAP/IAEP session in Chicago, 2007, and then on several other occasions—most recently last month in Rome of all

places—I was happy to discover that presence I had of David in his email—witty, biting, somewhat caustic but also kind and warm—also followed through in person. Around the same time I first contacted David, I was at Duquesne University as a visiting scholar and discovered, within the windowless basement of the library, the archives of EAP housed in the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center. This was, of course, prior to the online access of EAP. For me, this was a fortuitous discovery. I

spent many happy days working through the EAP issues. Now is not the time to recount the chronicles of EAP, which now span 25 years. But if I may, I’d like to single out several thematic aspects of EAP that reflect both David’s singular commitment to the intersection between phenomenology and architecture together with a set of themes that have proven to be central to the field of research more broadly.

Human Experience Human experience is a theme that runs throughout EAP from its inception to its latest issue. The motivation is governed by an approach toward architecture, not as the site of an abstract or academic discipline, but as the foundation in and through which human experience is shaped. Sifting through the archives of EAP, as I have done in preparation for this meeting, I’m reminded of the sheer richness of these themes, as they are articulated time and again in innumerable ways. Already in the second issue of EAP, from spring, 1990, we have a consummate expression of the literally earth-shattering meaning central to the rapport between human experience and architecture in the form of phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke’s reflections on the lived experience of an earthquake. If I may, I’d like to quote a section of Behnke’s ar-

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ticle, which reveals the fluid interplay between architecture, place, and bodily experience: When the earthquake struck, I was at home—a rented cabin in a redwood canyon in the Santa Cruz Mountains a few miles from the epicenter of the quake. When I think back to the event itself, one thing that strikes me is that the world shook as a whole. There was no sense that a geological object, “the earth,” was shaking and, therefore, “causing” other objects “on” the earth to move about violently and erratically. Instead, everything—houses, cars, trees, people, rocks, dirt, water, structures, driveways, and so on—was shaken together by a strong vertical juddering and jolting. The “whole place” shook. Behnke reminds us of the fragile nexus between human life and our surroundings. Our “place” in the world does not consist of being objectively situated against a static backdrop. Nor is architecture an innocuous set of spatial forms tied together in a discrete, autonomous way. Our existence in the world, as Behnke demonstrates, is both local and global at once. To be in the midst of an earthquake is to be confronted with the contingency of much that is ostensibly solid and grounded in our waking lives. Of course, it sometimes takes an event such as an earthquake to forcefully remind us of the often precarious ways in which we are placed in the world. Behnke ends her reflections by asking whether or not phenomenology itself can produce a series of minor earthquakes within us, without risking our lives. She ends, rightly in my estimation, by considering to what extent an outlet such as EAP can provide a source of education and encouragement for being more mindful of the ways in which human experience is mediated and affected by our rapport with the built and sometimes unbuilt world. As she explains,

Perhaps the kind of research an organization like the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Network is meant to encourage can help us to achieve some lucidity about lived place, about the interplay of built word and terrestrial environment, about dwelling wisely on such an earth, without needing this earth to shake us up in order to get our attention.

The Body Just as Behnke’s world is shattered, so it recovers, and it does so thanks to the ability of the body to reorganize the world. Tied up, indeed central, to the focus on environmental and architectural experience is the role the body plays. Reading through EAP, we find countless illustrations and insights that reveal the profound centrality of the

body in the formation of our felt experience of spatiality. Let me cite one especially striking example: philosopher Kay Toombs’ very fine and often moving reflection on bodily illness from the Spring 1997 issue of EAP. Toombs suffers from multiple sclerosis, and as a result must now use a wheelchair for mobility. Toombs’ article, “Illness as a

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Way of the Body,” describes how an accident involving her wheelchair left her not only with physical injuries but also, more critically, with invisible injuries marked by an “immediate, and all encompassing, uncontrollable terror of being in my wheelchair”: My accident severed my moorings in space. I felt adrift in a completely unpredictable and terrifyingly unstable environment. I might, for example, be seated motionless at my desk with eyes focused on the computer screen in front of me when a sudden, inexplicable shift of bodily position would initiate the visual, auditory, tactile, and visceral sensations of catapulting backward toward the ground. As phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty revealed, far from a container that transports us from one point in space to another, the body is the means through which our existence in the world is expressed. We have a clear sense of this in Toombs’ depiction of bodily instability. As the body is put into doubt, so it affects and shapes our experience of the environment itself. Alongside the body, the world becomes unpredictable and hazardous. Critically, in the descriptions offered by Toombs, we are reminded, often urgently, that for each of us there is a specific world. The ill body comports itself in a particular way and finds therein a specific world defined in its rapport with the body. For each of us, there is a particular world—a world often overlooked thanks to the stubbornness of our habits and the ease with which we fall back into the natural attitude. Writings like Toombs’ are needed to restore our awareness, and also our compassion that there exist other ways of being-in-the-world. More than this, the accidents and ruptures we encounter in life, far from being self-contained, instead redefine our relation to even the most secure of places, namely the home. Toombs continues:

Instead of being at home in a relatively safe and predictable landscape that I had learned successfully to negotiate in my wheelchair, I now felt constantly endangered by my hostile surroundings. Flat surfaces menaced since they concealed hidden obstacles, modest curb cuts were breathtakingly steep (so much so that just imagining wheeling up the ramp literally took my breath away). Uneven surfaces were inherently treacherous. Indeed, so ominous was the surrounding world that I found it impossible to venture outside the house in my wheelchair.

The Everyday Alongside drawing our attention to the fragile nature of our being-in-the-world, EAP also reflects upon a certain felicitous nature of space taken up in the everyday. Indeed, one of the reasons that I was so excited when I first encountered EAP was because of its thematic richness and its commitment to actual experiences of places. This continues to foster my commitment to phenomenology and to my admiration for EAP more broadly. As I see it, one of phenomenology’s merits is to attend to the everyday, all too often overlooked. Phenomenology, in its best moments, renews our relation to the everyday. It is a method concerned with cultivating a sensitivity toward place. Phenomenology is a method that can become educational in the best sense of the term, not as a prescriptive set of instructions but as a capacity to restore the meaning of our lived relations with the world. Throughout EAP issues, we find a wealth of illustrations that underscore the lived meaning of the everyday. Elevators, homes, walls, office space, public space, private space, the space of the cyclist, rural space, urban space, preschool space, shopping malls, the space opened up by a radio, remote space, close space, islands, cities, virtual spaces, authentic spaces, the space of steps, cosmic space, secular space, and finally, Starbucks. All these and more fill the pages of EAP. In the latest edition of EAP, an exemplary illustration of this commitment to the

everyday is offered by architect R.M. Sovich in his Bachelardian exploration of the doors and passages in care homes. He writes: One “reads” a door with the entire body. Who has not come upon a door with a push sign when to the contrary the door and handle clearly say “pull”? Many of us have experienced feelings of hesitation at doorways, particularly at the threshold of a patient’s room.” We are fortunate, I think, to have an outlet for this kind of thinking, all too often overlooked by philosophical research that privileges the abstract over the concrete. The marginal and the liminal, the transitory and the ephemeral, far from being insignificant to our lived experience, instead reveal themselves, time and again, as the inextricable fabric in which our complex relations with the world and others are manifest.

an insularity, but to an awareness of other traditions and what they may offer in terms of critical engagement with the phenomenological framework central to EAP’s mission. For example, one thinks of geographer Edward Relph, a central figure in David’s work and in EAP itself. David’s reflections on the 20th anniversary of Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) are worth returning to as they afford a space to reflect upon criticisms directed not simply to Relph’s work but to the phenomenological enterprise itself. These criticisms tend to phrase phenomenology as inward looking, relativistic, conservative, and abstracted from broader social and political concerns. By way of his defense of Relph’s book, David doesn’t suggest a series of already formed and neatly compacted answers to the problems facing phenomenology, but he does reveal that phenomenology is more porous, more open, and more mediated by political and cultural dimensions that are often misunderstood or overlooked by its critics. Moreover, beyond these criticisms, and no matter what intellectual currents confront us, we are, as David reminds us, always already placed in the world: Regardless of the historical time or the geographical, technological, and social situation, people will always need place because having a place and identifying with place are integral to what and who we are as human beings.

Critical inquiry For all its attraction to felicitous instances of dwelling, EAP has always been mindful of its critics. Perhaps the sheer survival of EAP in these uncertain times is due, not to

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EAP continues to be a valuable if not invaluable source of both research and inspiration for those working in phenomenology, architecture, environmental studies, and human geography. Thanks to David’s generosity and to his on-going work, these resources are now available on-line for future generations to discover. I thank David personally for establishing EAP, for his lived commitment to the field of architectural and environmental phenomenology, and for his friendship.

Moving: Remaking a Lifeworld Stephen Wood Wood is an independent researcher in phenomenology and the environment. He studied systematic zoology at the University of Cambridge and has held an honorary fellowship in the Theoretical Physics Research Unit at Birbeck College, London. Wood and his wife recently purchased their first house, and this essay points toward a “first-person phenomenology of moving and making a new home.” [email protected]. © 2016 Stephen Wood.

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n this essay, I explore a personal experience of moving to a new house. I highlight several themes, including horizontality and verticality; loss and unavailableness; action space and wayfinding; and comfortableness and anxiety. These themes mark the challenge of making a new home and draw on parallel experiences of inhabiting, moving, and homemaking in my childhood and at university. The childhood home provides a primordial background—the home made for me in the deeply personal context of family. The experience of university accommodation, designed for its functional anonymity, made me aware for the first time of the demands of making a home in the public world.

The Prospect of Change As I write at the end of September, my wife and I are still living in our old apartment, while friends carry out work in the new house, primarily on the kitchen and living room. Yesterday, my wife and I went to visit after the workers had left for the day. I felt disgust at the sight of the kitchen wall revealed by the removal of the old kitchen cabinets—the badly designed plumbing, the remnants of former installations, and gaping holes in the brickwork. There were moments of tenderness in front of what would be our new bedroom. I felt overwhelmed by the beauty of the study, with its high ceiling and window onto garden greenery. I had lived so long in apartments—my sense of self limited to one or sometimes one-and-a-half levels—that I had lost hope in ever owning a house and returning to a primordial architectural sense of up/down and in/out. It was all too much. I felt claustrophobic and panicked. I had to get out. My wife quickly opened the front door, and I gladly drew breath in the open yard. What was going on? After some reflection, it struck me

that I was experiencing a change as profound as leaving home, where I traded my four-story family house for a student room, but now in reverse. Here, I was moving from a one-floor apartment to a two-story house with garden and garage. I could go up to bed again, come down for breakfast, sit and discuss the day at the kitchen table. My wife would be able to watch TV while I studied upstairs, or I could watch a late film while she went to bed. She could study and listen to my piano playing filtering up through the floorboards, reassured that I am “around,” even if not directly with her. She would be able to telephone her family, knowing that I could no longer hear her. We would be able to respect each other’s privacy and freedom yet remain united in the solidarity of the shared house.

My Childhood Home There were a number of ways that directions impregnated our habitual way of speaking when I was growing up in our Georgian house in Bath:  Going up, particularly to sleep: “Going up to bed.” “Has he gone up yet?” “I thought you’d gone up.”  Coming down, particularly to eat: “She hasn’t come down to breakfast yet?” “Tell them to come down, dinner’s ready.”  Going outside: “There’s sunshine, I’m going out.” “He’s gone out to play.” “Have you taken the washing out?”

the end of the day, my dad would come home and warm his hands on the kitchen radiator. I particularly remember his return early on Fridays. The hand-warming ritual was a way to leave the week of work behind and reconnect with domestic comforts. When they returned home from university, my sisters would sit with my mother at the kitchen table and discuss their lives. I would come down to talk, while my mother prepared dinner. This was an important daily event—to share and debrief, to make sense of what had happened during the day. I remember feeling happy and reassured in our house, knowing that other family members were there too, going about their usual business. The spatial separations made possible by the house—its division into different floors and rooms—allowed each family member to have his or her space but to retain a feeling of solidarity. In contrast, the bedrooms in English 16thcentury houses were all connected and not private places (Worsley 2012, 11). The master and his wife would have their servants sleeping next to them in the same room. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the private middle-class bedroom emerged partly because of the Georgian housing boom. These houses incorporated corridors, stairwells, and circulation spaces. Each bedroom was accessed independently through its own door. Servants were banished to the attic or the basement. The master and his wife would summon them either with a hand bell or through a system of wires that rang a bell in their quarters. When we moved into our Georgian home in Bath, the brass wires were still in place, together with the bells downstairs.

I experienced “up” as a direction toward safety and freedom. My eldest sister’s attic room had a small black-and-white television. After she left home for good, I would stay up late watching TV. This space became my private working area, where I con- Leaving Home jured up fantasies of life on other planets. When I left home for Cambridge Univer“Down” was lived as a direction toward sity’s oldest and smallest undergraduate colsharing, sitting around the kitchen table, and lege, Peterhouse, I lived in a 1960s tower talking over events in the world outside. At

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block, William Stone Building. I found myself in a single room with two floormates. I went up to bed, since I was on the top floor, but I did not come up from anywhere that was part of my lived space. I could not descend to discuss my day with family. There was no “down” to go to. The building’s floors were so nearly identical that one time I was puzzled when my key did not work in “my” door. I pushed it open, surprised to find the young woman who lived in the room below me, sitting at her desk. I had my own room, but it was not permeable. Other than a bathroom, there were no natural liaisons with other necessary functions and interactions. There was the dining hall, the laundry, the music room, and the common room. Each of these functions was housed in a different building—the dining room in the mediaeval hall; the common room in a corner staircase in the old First Court; the laundry in the basement of the modern Fen Court; and the music room tucked away in a nondescript building behind the library. Each room had a different resonance and lacked the unified logic of a house. The beautiful gardens and paths connecting these rooms could not overcome a disjointed feeling. I moved from one outside to another, without being able to stay inside. What of my room, the extent of my inside? Orange curtains and orange bed covers. Orange curtains. White walls. A sink. Bookshelves. A thermostat. Clean, modern, functional, soulless. Difficult to appropriate and lacking in natural charm that might draw one into relationship. Only the garden view provided some beauty but from afar. When I first visited Peterhouse, students offered a tour and explained how the staircase was important, creating a meeting place around the kitchen facilities located there. In fact, they referred to staircases not in William Stone but in the college’s old part. The tiny kitchen on my floor was a potential meeting place for only me and my two floormates, with whom I shared very little. This limited kitchen arrangement did not promote the mixing and serendipitous meetings among a large enough population that might generate an attachment to the place. In addition, cooking regulations were strict. Frying and toasters were banned. There was no oven, just an electric, two-ring stove that took ages to heat. It would be difficult to cook a real meal. More typical food

preparation was heating milk, boiling water for pot noodles, making a quick plate of baked beans or macaroni and cheese. We students were unlikely to have an enriching exchange of culinary tips or to linger for an extended time to get to know each other. On the old staircases, in contrast, the kitchen area was on a landing between floors. Going up to the kitchen, you would meet fellow housemates coming down. Vertical movement brought people together—a natural flow of walking, climbing, or leaping two steps at a time. The body’s stair rhythm would communicate something of the person’s state of mind—energy level, enthusiasm, distress, or good humor. The kitchen was a place of meeting and sharing between residents from different floors. The kitchens of William Stone, in contrast, were for residents of each floor only, and any communication the kitchens generated was horizontal only. Vertical communication was relegated to the elevator, which mostly offered fleeting, casual meetings. Overall, the fragmented, floor-segregated architecture of William Stone reduced and fractured interpersonal encounter and engagement. My sense of self shrank from the characterful, four-story house in which I had grown up to a single, anonymous room.

Verticality According to philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the chief benefit of a house is that it “shelters day dreaming, … protects the dreamer, [and] … allows one to dream in peace” (Bachelard 1994, 6). A good house gives our most intimate feelings and memories a lodging, and “if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams” (8). If a house is sufficiently elaborate in its vertical dimension (“ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic” [17]) and sufficiently enriched with “nooks and corners of solitude” (50), it will allow us to dream. The roof, Bachelard contends, allows our thoughts to be clear, protecting us from threatening, inclement weather. The cellar, in its darkness, takes us out of thought to “the irrationality of the depths” (18). For Bachelard, to truly dwell is to dwell in the imagination, in poetry, and in dreams.

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The modern city and its technology tends to obliterate this poetic dimension, and thus to hinder the ability to dwell: In Paris, there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the big city live in superimposed boxes…. Our abode has neither space around it nor verticality inside it…. They have no roofs and, what is quite unthinkable for a dreamer of houses, sky-scrapers have no cellars. From the street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of the other, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with… stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality. The different rooms that compose living quarters jammed into one floor all lack one of the fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy (26-27). In this description of a Parisian apartment block, Bachelard echoes my experience of William Stone Building. I lived in a “box” superimposed on top of other boxes. The elevator took away the sense of climbing stairs, with their metaphor of “ascension to a more tranquil solitude” (25). The whole arrangement in its horizontality undermined the possibility of lodging memories and inviting dreams. The building was little more than functional technology. Much different was the rich verticality of my family’s house that encouraged a poetic inhabitation—ascending to solitude and to flights of imagination via bedroom and attic; descending to eat, talk, and laugh at the kitchen table. This architecture encouraged a poetic inhabitation, a truer dwelling.

Missing the “Phantom” Sofa We returned to our former apartment to fetch more of our possessions. My wife was in the study where we had not been able to sort out the desk in time for the removal men. She was going through desk contents, so I went to the sitting room to wait for her to finish. As I entered, I was surprised to realize that the room was now empty of furniture, including the sofa on which I had planned to sit. I had entered the objective space of this room but I had not registered the change in phenomenal space.

On one level, I was still inhabiting that objective space as if nothing had shifted. The movers’ “amputation” of the phenomenal space had left a “phantom” sitting room with a “phantom” sofa. The room still belonged to my extended phenomenal body, existing in its former relation to the sofa that provided a comfortable waiting place, since it faced the window and pleasing views of trees. Except the sofa was not there. To use philosopher Martin Heidegger’s term, the sofa was unavailable (Dreyfus 1991). Given that it was missing from its former place, it was obtrusively unavailable, making its presence felt by its absence (79). When things are readily available, they fit without notice into our lifeworld. When I am transparently absorbed in living in my home, sitting, working, walking between rooms, I am simply going about my business and not aware of carrying out any of these actions. Faced, however, with a sofa that is not there, I emerge as a subject who stands at a loss and helpless, wondering why what he expected is not there.

The Kitchen’s Action Space As I began to use our new kitchen, I found I would keep opening the cupboard to the right of the cooking range, looking for utensils and recipe ingredients. In our former kitchen, we had a similar cupboard space that stored saucepans and dishes as well as oil, vinegar, and the like. In the old kitchen, I reached instinctively toward this cupboard most often, and so at first this is where I reached in the new kitchen, even though these items were now in cupboards to the left of the stove. This cupboard situation is another example of Heidegger's unavailableness, in that the new kitchen’s placement of utensils, dishes, and so forth disrupt habitual actions that, in the old kitchen, had been second nature. Unavailableness relates to the integration of equipment in a system of meaningful relations, together with one’s own lived comportment in that system. In learning to inhabit the new but unfamiliar kitchen, I find myself acting deliberately to overcome “obstinate” equipment “refusing” to be in the “right” place (Dreyfus 1991, 72). If the tools I need are conveniently organized and ready-to-hand, I am transparently absorbed in my activity. My movements are fluid and spontaneous with the given space

of action. My body is the expression of the action space, the sedimentation of repeated gestures and experiences confirmed by that context over time (Simms 2008, 42). In the new kitchen, I find myself at first expressing the gestures appropriate to the old kitchen. Via continuing use, however, I learn to inhabit the new space. Importantly, it is possible to accelerate this learning process through thoughtful, experience-informed design. One example is the studies of kitchen layouts by the University of Illinois’s Building Research Council (BRC 1993). The empirical evidence for their design recommendations comes from time-motion and traversal studies. This research group has identified significant kitchen “centers” linked by “lines of force” along most frequently traversed paths between those centers. Centers connected by frequently traversed paths should be placed close together so as to invite and support appropriate kitchen actions: “Arrange the work centers to reduce the amount of walking in the kitchen and to allow work to flow easily from one center to another” (BRC 1993, 7). According to these researchers, the modern kitchen typically incorporates four main centers: refrigerator, sink, food preparation, and cooking range (BRC, 1993, p. 7). Users make the most traversals between sink and range, followed by preparation to sink and preparation to refrigerator. For a righthanded person, the ideal kitchen layout (from user’s right to left) is refrigerator, food preparation, sink, and range, with counter space between each. The kitchen in our new house incorporates a variation on the BRC recommendations—viz., refrigerator, sink, food preparation, and range. When preparing a meal, I feel the relation between refrigerator and sink, as I take out vegetables to wash. Next, I move from sink to preparation center (to chop vegetables) and then to range (to start their boiling). In terms of everyday use, the kitchen is not an objective space but a phenomenal field that draws me into my habitual activities. The user is involved in a system of relations oriented around actions and activities. As activities shift, the relations shift (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 168).

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Making Phenomenal Space In our two-story house, I cannot always fetch things quickly because they may be on the other floor. Going to the bathroom, for example, means going upstairs. In our old apartment, spaces I might have wished separate were always together, whereas, in the new house, spaces I might wish together are apart, on different floors, or perhaps outside, in the garage. My sense of dwelling space still mostly confines itself to the floor on which I find myself; the floor I am not on or the garage I am not in seem as “other” spaces. In this sense, my phenomenal self does not yet fully embrace the whole of the new house, though no doubt it will in time as I involve myself in practical actions like locating luggage stored in the garage, fetching a coat from the walk-in closet, or even going to the bathroom. Via lived experience, I begin to identify with these places, and my sense of phenomenal self expands. Through repeated interactions, an objective space is transformed into a phenomenal space transparently available. A house becomes a home that is part of us and our phenomenal bodies. Repetitive actions and interactions establish taken-for-granted links between person and place. Through everyday actions like cooking, watching TV, or fetching things from the garage, person and place become interwoven and inseparable. In everyday experience, place is transparently available to users, who in turn are unself-consciously identified with and taken up by place via their emplaced bodies.

Finding a Comfortable Nook It is the end of November and the study is still unavailable. Our two sofas are arranged correctly, each facing a window. We have placed our wooden table in the middle of the room and desk and small bookcase in opposite corners. But there are cardboard boxes everywhere, making the room seem like a storage area, a situation that intrudes on our appropriating this space. A pity, for it is the most beautiful room in the house. The need for a library and space of quiet study is not yet being met, and the house feels poorer for it. We are missing a place for creation, reflection, and the separation of activities for which we had originally wished. Now, the day after Christmas, I finally can work in my study. The table with two

chairs is now sittable. We have moved the wireless modem upstairs, where we now watch programs streamed over the internet. The bookcases are in place and books unpacked. At last, I have a permanent place to study and write—where I can leave out papers and books rather than pack them away when it is time to eat or to go out. Bachelard writes that “in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity” (Bachelard 1994, xxxviii). He gives the example of Erasmus, who could not feel at ease in his big house until he had confined himself to a single room: “The dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest” (102). After we bought new bookcases for the study and shelved books, I did not immediately feel at ease. To begin with, the sight of all the books was overwhelming. I was not used to how the books were now arranged according to related topics of interest. This configuration is different from how I had located the books in the old apartment. Certain books that there were nearby are now downstairs in the living room. Folders of anatomical data from my zoology thesis are now reunited with the final copy, itself placed next to my recent phenomenological studies, themselves next to battered natural history projects written as a schoolboy in Bath. In addition, I was made uncomfortable by a ceiling that felt too high and the sight of auto traffic through the studio window. Gradually, however, I became used to the books’ arrangement, taking pleasure in seeing my interests laid out visibly and my study materials ready-to-hand. My wife added curtains that created a soft, intimate light and shielded the traffic. I felt hidden from the press of the world outside. For Heidegger, anxiety is a total disturbance—a total breakdown of our habitual relation to the world (Dreyfus 1991, ch. 10). We catch a glimpse of our true unsettledness. My wife expressed this when she described how, at first, despite all she had invested in our new house, she still just felt being “somewhere” or even “nowhere in

particular.” She would sometimes feel at a loss, with no clear idea of how the furniture should be arranged or how the rooms should work. It is a strange process of “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” to overcome this anxiety and to create a home to which one can become attached. At times, I wondered whether, by arranging my books satisfactorily or by adding curtains, we were not fleeing our unsettledness and covering up a more fundamental anxiety. This is Heidegger’s indictment of the normal “sleeping” state of human beings: That we flee anxiety by acting as if it were not there. Ultimately, however, one must commit to some arrangement and establish some set of habits and ways of coping, in order to be. We must genuinely engage with the world and its conventions if we are to be in the world at all. Refusing the world leads to a state of anxiety none the more authentic for its purity. We must be genuine before we can be authentic. Sorting out my books and papers each time I move, giving books away, disposing of papers—all these simple acts leave room for growth. By “shedding old skins,” I hope for a dialogue between my history and the possibilities of the moment offered by my new surroundings of house and garden. I am obliged to commit to an organization of the possibilities of this place, which reflects who I am at this moment and my vision for the future. Yet preconceived ideas fall away in the reality of making a home, and that reality is better enjoyed and all the more interesting and challenging for it.

Walking into Town How do I get to know the way into town from my new house? Is it a matter of acquiring a “cognitive map”—a representation of the new house in relation to the town? No, not really. Walking is an action, and the memory of the route develops through action. To someone asking, I find myself quite unable to explain directions to a certain place in town, knowing full well I would have no trouble getting there myself. It is through walking and arriving at a certain location that I feel how that location, with its configuration of buildings and other environmental features, invites me to continue in a particular direction. There is no

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need to hold an integrated vision of the whole route in my head. Knowing how to start is the most important step in the process as, afterward, the walk “takes care of itself.” I am reminded of the man who, when asked for directions, replied, “You want to go there. Well, I wouldn’t start from here!”

An Open House The first weekend of January, my sister-inlaw, her husband, and their two young daughters visited us. Five and seven, the girls were fascinated with our staircase and going upstairs to explore a place “somewhere else.” Two weeks later, when my father-in-law and his companion visited, I was struck by how my wife introduced them to our home. She emphasized how her study workspace is separate from the rest of the house. Not only is it upstairs but up a few more steps into the older part of the dwelling. Even if she is working at home, she can come downstairs, take a break or make lunch, “leaving her work behind.” Most recently, we held housewarming parties for friends who had helped us in various ways with the new house. All these experiences help one realize how guests contribute to our appreciating new surroundings. Over these past months, we have established daily routines—rhythms of opening and closing, taking out and bringing in, leaving and returning. We have begun to feel comfortable with our new home. A first phase of home-making is “in place.”

References Bachelard, G., 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Building Research Council [BRC], 1993. Kitchen Planning Standards. Council Notes 12 (1): 1-16. College of Fine and Applied Arts, Univ. of Illinois. Dreyfus, H.L., 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Cambridge: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, M., 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Boston: Beacon Press. Simms, E., 2008. The Child in the World. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. Worsley, L., 2012. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. London: Faber & Faber.

Wordless Walkabouts on a Chinese Campus Jenny Quillien Quillien lives in Santa Fe and teaches at New Mexico Highlands University. Her abiding interest in “place studies” has led her to phenomenology, space syntax, Christopher Alexander’s “patterns,” and a current focus on workspace design. Her books include Clever Digs: How Workspaces Can Enable Thought (2011); and Delight’s Muse: On Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order (2010). [email protected]. Text and photographs © 2016 Jenny Quillien. See p. 22 for photograph captions.

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ometimes, one encounters a place for the very first time and that is literally what it feels like—an encounter—where “something,” a presence, a genius loci, makes itself known. This recognition of “the sentient something” is pre-logical, undocumentable, tacit, personal, even childlike because you are a stranger, and the dull staleness of adult familiarity has given way to naiveté and surprise. Such was my experience when I recently arrived at the Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China, where I was to devote three weeks to learning Mandarin. The first words that came to mind about this “something” were “breathing exuberance.” Over the next few days, as I kept looking around, my thoughts turned to urban theorist Jane Jacobs’ metaphor of street ballet: the “dance” of those relaxed, reliably repetitive, day-to-day interactions that visibly signal healthy human involvement along a city block or within a neighborhood. As I have an abiding interest in the built environment, I was drawn to “staging”—in other words, how construction, gardens, and streets helped or hindered the “ballet.” To learn more, I conducted systematic morning and evening walkabouts that I describe here. I did not study a large area— nothing more than a 20-minute stroll in one direction or another from my living quarters. My limited language skills allowed me to recognize that the campus—approximately a half mile in extent along a north/south axis—was a Mandarin island in a Cantonese sea. I construed my being a functionally “deaf and dumb” foreigner as an advantage: it would keep me both open-minded and focused.

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he Pearl River delta, with Guangzhou city as its pearl, lays flat and steamy hot with river, river arms, tributaries, islands, canals, greens of every

medium, small, and tiny; some prissy, pruned, geometrical, formal; some wildly profuse, bamboo groves and ponds with and without water lilies. All this tropical vegetation furiously grows by day and furiously sheds by night. Light’s first blush arrives with audible, soft, drum-brush swooshes. I’m quickly downstairs and out the door. Sweepers collect the night’s rot of profuse campus gardens and swoosh up human detritus. Even the river has early morning sweeper boats manned by crews with long nets collecting floating debris. Any spot on the “stage floor” oscillates back and forth through a pendulum swing of exhales of discard and inhales of tidy making. Whatever else is going on, you can be sure that somebody is there sweeping.

H hue, myriad textures, abundant luxuriant tangles of rice fields, bananas, mangoes, papaya, snails the size of a human fist, and warm, sensuous, quenching rains. The sheer fertility and growth outpaces a Northerner’s ability to take the situation in: Am I inhaling it, or is it inhaling me? Situated alongside the Pearl River, the Sun Yat Sen University’s urban campus is a handsome oasis of roominess—the ultimate luxury in a dense city of 20 million—yet without an inch of leftover ground. The earliest core of the campus consists of two- and three-story red brick buildings looking faintly like well-to-do English homes, while more modern buildings ripple outward from the center. Much of the campus land divides into “jigsaw puzzle pieces” of gardens, large,

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alf a measure behind the brooms comes the soft-padded mallet drumming of tennis shoes, worn by trim, sportily attired campus joggers taking advantage of early-morning 95 degrees rather than midday 105 degrees. I walk through the North Gate, up a few steps, cross a tree-lined plaza, down a few steps, and reach the gracious, generous river walk along the Pearl. More joggers are here, but they meld into a more general populace. All these millions of people live in small city apartments. The air hangs heavy, sweltering and humid: a spillover to outside public spaces seems sensible enough. Doing their morning stretches, Mom is on the sidewalk in her popsicle-pink seersucker pajamas, Pop in his underwear. The public-toilet attendant walks out from her attached, one-room abode to hang out her wash: blue bra and yellow panties. In another few beats, the “ta mas” (gaggles of grannies) gather for group Tai Chi and gossip. By 7 am the place is soundful. The Chinese speak loudly, yell easily, argue and

fight with grand abandon, play music whether anyone else wants to hear it or not: a demonstrative, “let it all hang out” kind of place. I’m struck by a blurring, a sort of continuum between public and private. With that blurring is an at-home-ness, a physical ease with self, others, and surrounds. People happily plop themselves down anywhere, postures and muscles relaxed.

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irculation-wise, the campus displays a sensitive, sensible fabric of paths that provide an ease of movement from one place to another. These paths range from paved lane to footpath and invariably provide multiple ways to get to any destination. The campus pathway system is complemented by a plethora of nodes for rest, reflection, and conversation. Some of these nodes are in full view, others discretely set back; some sunny, some shady; some open, some covered; places for big groups, places for pairs, places for just one solitary soul to sit with his thoughts. What I found curious, however, is that walking through these nodes upsets no one, even though these spaces were clearly designed as still sites for repose, reflection, and private conversation. The central, multi-purpose campus lane that accommodates the occasional cars, carts, motorized wagons, and bikes also provides, on either side, a delightfully wide sidewalk bordered by fragrant eucalyptus trees, though pedestrians walk as often in the lane as on the sidewalks. On the river walk, families congregate, blocking joggers. There are no patterns of user organization (for example, joggers to the left and families with toddlers to the right; or walking “upstream” on the left and “downstream” on the right). Rather than any spatial order that Westerners take for granted, there seemed to be a sort of “mayhem” with side-stepping at the last second, though this is clearly tempered by a strong awareness of “the other.” For example, a few times when I was walking in the main campus lane, a stranger took my arm and pulled me out of the way of an oncoming bicycle. The cars you can hear, but it is bikes that run you down.

here: The rights of pathway movement reign supreme. All very well done, I think to myself. This is a developing country, and they’ve got it down. My own town of 70,000 can’t figure out the complexity of railroad crossings, but here 20 million people can get around just fine. There are private cars, but they are not really needed. The web of public transportation provides viable options. Subways, public buses, trams, taxis, rickshaws (motorized or not), and a fleet of (apparently illegal) mopeds with rentable back seats move citizens from destination to destination. Bicycle paths actually go places. Different forms of transportation do not interfere with each other. The only pedestrian crossing at street level is at the campus gate; to the right and left along the boulevard are pedestrian bridges that do not upset the flow of vehicles. On the campus side is a raised sidewalk ome mornings I switch to the South seven feet above the Gate where the campus abuts not a street, home to a line river but a wide boulevard. New rules of Korean eateries.

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A meridian of thick green hedges softens the look and sound of a four-lane road. Across the boulevard, the sidewalk sports first a railing, next a line of trees, a tall thick hedge, and only then a wide walkway with all the amenities associated with “livable cities”: shopping street, storefronts open to the sidewalk, chairs for watching the world, crafts people working on the sidewalk (Guangzhou should be named the city of sidewalks). There is a mix of buildings, some large (this area is the wholesale textile district) but mostly small operations, butcher, fruit stand, convenience, liquor, grocers, and repair shops. On the parallel street just behind the boulevard are sewing operations in curious breezeway buildings with sides like garage doors that lift up to welcome every bit of cool air. On the next block is a small pedestrian market. First to show their morning faces are breakfast places and push-cart peddlers with a sort of fry bread. Then small six- and eight-passenger vans arrive and wait, collecting what look like employees living in this neighborhood who work elsewhere. Around 7 am, merchants arrive, opening their shops. Spatial density overlaid with temporal pulsing. It all works. What are the politics and budgeting behind it? Could I get a food cart and peddle morning doughnuts? How do disputes get handled? I don’t know, but it works.

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uring normal business hours, the campus seems a familiar medium to

me: People do their classroom routines and hang out on front steps, in the faculty lounge, patios, and courtyards. There is a roof terrace, but I never saw anyone on it (maybe it’s just too hot in the summer). I stop to observe the student canteen and the staging of food delivery and clean up. The canteen serves lumberjack portions, much goes uneaten, gets dumped into large trash cans, and the remains are then gone through (for what purpose I don’t know— pig farms or compost?). Curiously, The discard activity is more present and “front stage” than the serving. Another example. I lunched at one of the more posh campus restaurants (table cloths, uniformed waitresses) and found myself next to a table of hearty friends who ordered beer, which is not served in rounds where empty glasses are discretely taken away and replaced by full ones. No, a full crate of beer is carried to the table so that, as the meal proceeds, emptied bottles can be tossed in and new ones pulled out. Other customers, without fussing, walk around the crate that blocks the aisle. I do not know what to do with this observation of so little “backroom” staging—but there it is.

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go on evening strolls. Out the North Gate again. The day-boats transporting people and goods give way to the evening pleasure-cruisers offering cool air, drinks, and a skyline of brightly colored lights decking out all the buildings. Activities on the river walk amplify social life. Couples, families, guys watching girls, girls

knowing it: a scene not unlike Mediterranean promenades. My favorite evening performer is a Chinese Andrew Goldsworthy who, with a pail of water and huge brush, practices sidewalk-size calligraphy, the characters evaporating as they are drawn. Sidewalk dance classes are offered. Dance contests draw crowds. I can’t hold conversations with these people, but they look happy. Times are good. People are having a good time. The kid in the dance contest is wearing a brand new gold outfit. Modern China slouches forward to be born. Out the South Gate, down on the boulevard, the morning routine now gets played in reverse. People dawdle with evening street food until midnight, and then the place slows. Other parts of the city never sleep, but the campus and surrounds give way to slumber as the frog population comes into their own. Who knows what starts off a croaking crescendo, but frog song ebbs and flows until dawn. Of course the simple cycle of day and night is just one temporal oscillation. In Mandarin, Monday is called “one day,” and Tuesday, “two day.” Sunday, however, is “big day.” On weekdays, public spaces run about one-third full. You can always find a place to sit, but there are usually other people within sight.

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Sundays ran full “inhale” and activities change. People appeared with musical instruments, and they jammed to their heart’s content. Complex chorus arrangements with big flipcharts were set up. The Chinese love to sing, be it old songs, popular songs, or Chairman Mao marching songs. Improv happened all week, but Sunday was major improv. Eateries provided additional spaces with moveable pots of plants. The number-one piece of street furniture was the lightweight plastic stool (usually of some garish color) for on-the-spot conversation or games of chess. Sunday is bringyour-stool day.

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he building patterns that architect Christopher Alexander presented in A Pattern Language were selected for being supportive to mental health. In the book’s opening pages, Alexander suggests that the ultimate goal in creating built environments should be of moving beyond

they are again, reborn and fresh, the same patterns in a new configuration. I also note a penchant for serial, interlocking edges. Take the boundaries separating campus from river: In order, you have river, railing and boat dock; 20foot-wide walkway; line of trees interspersed with benches; shallower, eight-foot-wide walkway; impenetrably dense swath of trees and vegetation; ramp road leading into campus; bridge over tunnel for cars going under plaza; second small ramp road into neighborhood; another green strip; lane for both vehicles and pedestrians, leading into wide area of outdoor eateries; and, finally, campus fence and gate. Another important place quality relates to a visibility that is tantalizingly dramatic. There is usually a turn in the path, a bamboo grove screen, something just ahead to be discovered. In addition, there is something fractal in the way paths fit inside other paths and nodes fit inside other nodes, repeating in depth from small to large. prose—i.e., thin functional construction—to ne day I venture farther south of the poetry, where multiple meanings and evocsmall pedestrian market just off the ative patterns of “space use” densely overboulevard and quickly fall down a lap. The Guangzhou campus manages this in spades. How, exactly, is this working? rabbit hole into a satanic netherworld. GoThe patterns I see around me are simple, tham. Dark, dank, rank, labyrinths of alleys well-known, and inexpensive—for example, places to sit; places to stroll; places to be near water, be social, be quiet; spaces like verandahs and atria that connect indoors and outdoors. Each pattern seems to have endless renditions, often responding to some minor variation—an outcropping of rock or a tree that is built around rather than bulldozed. Almost everywhere I look in Guangzhou, the built environment affords, protects, invites human well-being. The campus exploits what might be called a kaleidoscopic technique. Inside a kaleidoscope, there are many simple shapes of different colors, which, as the kaleidoscope is turned, become a multitude of changing configurations. On campus, just move your head to glance in a slightly different direction or move a few paces to another spot, and there

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so narrow sunlight doesn’t get through. Jagged corners, tiny Y splits, I am quickly lost in a maze. I am stared at (which never happens on campus or river walk or boulevard). The men give me a startled “What the hell?” look. A couple of women seek eye contact to convey, “Lady, you’re asking for trouble.” It seemed wise not to push my luck. The experience, however, was unnerving. One might say that the campus is an obvious self-contained unit coupled with the ‘bleed’ zone of neighboring services and restaurants clearly part of the campus scene and economy. In venturing south, I went “out of zone,” though this answer does not sit well with me. The campus is guarded, gated, and policed, so guarded from whom, if not Gotham? I think of the campus gardeners who laughed when I photographed them stringing up their hammocks for a mid-day rest. Do they live in Gotham and work on campus? Do the privileges of campus life not take on meaning because of their contrast to Gotham? Yes, they really do. And should we not consider the distinction that philosopher James Carse makes between boundary and horizon? The first is a simple line in the sand, mechanical and exclusive; the second, a neighboring and defining potential, permeable and open to redefinition. Did the clerk at my campus hotel scratch and struggle her way out of Gotham into a desk job, using the campus as a horizon rather than a boundary? Do these questions give depth to the “place ballet”? I would think so.

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he first two weeks of my walkabouts were mostly exploratory, double checking, trying to capture a sense of daily life with photographs. By the third week, I was noticing internal responses. Comfort mostly. Pleasure at becoming familiar with the kaleidoscope of simple, beautiful patterns in the gardens and buildings. An increasing sense of order and a place for me within it.

The breakfast dim-sum stand on the shopping street knew which ones I liked. The woman (grandmother, I’m guessing) and child who came to the same spot every day at 7 am and 7 pm gave me a sense of solidity; we started waving to each other. The restaurant where I often had dinner thought of me as both a source of amusement and pity (one shouldn’t have to dine alone), but we had worked out a routine. My thoughts returned to that first day’s immediate awareness of exuberant breathing. Exuberant I could easily understand: the vegetation, colors, crowds, noise, happy days, and hopeful horizons. But the breathing, the alignment and awareness of my own

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breath with the rhythms of brooms and rain and frogs, the regularities of the day, the comings and goings of campus life—this shared organic experience, this kind of “thoracic” connexity, was a more subtle but fundamental lesson about life itself.

References Alexander, C. et al., 1977, A Pattern Language. Oxford Univ. Press. Carse, J., 1987, Finite and Infinite Games. Ballantine Books. Jacobs, J., 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House.

Photographs p. 18: University campus. Brooms. p. 19: At home on the street in underwear. p. 19: Shopkeeper at home on the sidewalk. p. 20: River walk. Evening time for social promenade. p. 20: Evening dance contest on the plaza. Good times. p. 20: Sunday. Bring your stool and relax with a game. p. 21, upper left: Variation on river walk pattern. Here a smaller canal. p. 21, lower left: Variation on river walk pattern. Old neighborhood. p. 21, bottom: One of many smaller beckoning and interlocking paths. p. 21, bottom right: One of many smaller ‘fractal’ setback nodal spaces. p. 22: Gotham. p. 22: Gardener resting at noon. p. 22: Boulevard sidewalk. A place grown familiar where I often bought breakfast dim sum.

The Imprint of Place Victoria King Victoria (Vicki) King’s love of the natural world is nourished by the two places in which she and her partner John Cameron reside. Dividing their lives between 55 acres on Tasmania’s Bruny Island and the north of England near her son and granddaughter brings richness and complexity to her life that she explores through art and poetry. For more examples of her work, go to: http://victoriakingplaceart.blogspot.co.uk/. [email protected]. Text and images © 2016 Victoria King. For titles of the artwork shown here, see p. 27.

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lace, space, and a sense of belonging have long occupied my art practice, but it took my migration to Australia from England in 1994 for this understanding to become truly personal. I had left home in 1969, picking up my high school diploma before boarding a Greyhound bus in Kentucky for New York City. I associated ‘home’ with family dysfunction, and ‘homeland’ with political dysfunction. It was with a similarly cavalier attitude that I left America for England in 1972 in search of meaning in my life. I returned to painting in my late 20s after my son was born. In many British art colleges in the 1960s, drawing from “life” was dismissed as belonging to a past world order, and new art disciplines had emerged. It required sheer willpower to discover a “life world” in a life room. But one day I experienced an epiphany when my vision shifted and I saw the life model in relationship to the room. The entire space came alive. Oil-encrusted easels stratified the room into an abstraction of unnameable shimmering shapes as late afternoon light streamed in from tall windows like light into a cathedral. I saw space. My focus suddenly changed from looking at the isolated model to seeing the room as a whole. Charcoal marks made only moments before represented a different paradigm. My white paper filled with a different kind of mark-making that integrated my peripheral vision. This experience confirmed the interconnectedness I had previously acknowledged only intellectually. I began to articulate a holistic way of seeing without naming or judging based in a meditative vision that

brought together what had previously been separate in my life: art, philosophy, and spirituality.

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t was only through creating a garden in the north of England that I discovered a personal content for my painting practice, and in the process a sense of place and meaning. I planted, gazed at, and recorded ever-changing nature in differing light and seasons. Color became an overwhelming passion. In Cezanne’s words, I recognized my goal of attempting to go beyond appearances to convey the experience and essence of seeing: Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now open them... one sees nothing but a great colored undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of color. That is what a picture should give us, a warm harmony, an abyss in which the eye is lost, in secret germination, a colored state of grace [1]. Cezanne frequently travelled the short distance from his birthplace of Aix-en-Provence to stand before the majestic Mont St.

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Victoire to manipulate ephemeral “petite sensations” of color and space [2]. Vision and painting were for him a numinous experience. In my small English garden, I made color notations. In my attic studio, I painted evocations of being immersed in what felt to be divine beauty. Within the unexpected juxtapositions of flowering color and profuse growth, I was immersed in a multi-sensory experience that was far more than simply visual. I felt fully absorbed in finding equivalents for being surrounded by the atmosphere of subtle, vibrant colors, textures and fragrances, changing light and seasons. Each day, new possibilities of self-sown harmonies emerged spontaneously. Entering into the garden’s sensual intimacy felt like a natural meditation. Losing my “self” in a microcosm of the interior realms of a flower or merging with the unity of the garden required only the breath of intention. Just as instant blossoms do not arise from a seed packet, paintings have their own processes embedded in time. The nurturing of both requires active contemplation and letting be. At any one time, many paintings are in a dormant stage, some need a gentle nudge and others a severe pruning. Often, paintings with lovely delicate beginnings do not survive. Gradually, my garden paintings became more abstracted. The dense layers of oil pigments, vivid complementary colors, and intensity of individual brush strokes began to feel claustrophobic and oppressive. I wished for greater depth and more breathing space in the paintings, not realizing this mirrored what I needed in my personal life. My

densely planted suburban, herbaceous garden could not give me a natural long view without disturbing the illusion of my being “somewhere else.” I began to experiment with water-based acrylic paints and laid canvas on the studio floor, flooding it with thin stains. The transparent fields of colors and accidental incidents echoed nature’s spontaneity and evoked a transcendental place and spaciousness into which both the beholder and I could merge.

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n 1994, twenty-one years after I had left America for England, I moved to Australia to be with my new partner, John Cameron, a social ecologist [3]. He had previously lived in the United States and UK and, at that stage in his life, was not prepared to move to England. We bought a modest home with a large mature garden, three acres of dry sclerophyll eucalypt forest, and extensive sandstone outcroppings overlooking the Blue Mountains National Park— land once under Dharug custodianship [4]. I immediately recognized beauty in the exotic and native plants and in the land. Flowers were always in bloom, and mist hung in the valleys like in a Chinese screen. Extraordinary wildlife and birds animated the land with color, song, and movement. I felt surrounded by vast space, intimate diversity, and immense presence. Yet perhaps it was Australia’s extremes that allowed me no rest. I felt increasingly “homesick.” I missed my son and a place

whose meaning had been hard won. Gardening had once sustained me, so again I sowed the flowers of my previous passion. Repeatedly, they failed to flourish. There were voracious new predators for each attempt, too little topsoil, even less rainfall, and the sun was far too harsh for tender perennials. I was a gardener in a land where this activity seemed futile and inappropriate. With alarm, I witnessed feral flora and fauna adapting far better than I did. My art practice, too, suffered in the move to Australia. I painted as I gardened, negotiating new spaces with increasing frustration and waning enthusiasm. The landscape held a sense of particularity and power that was too strong for my artistic attempts to convey. It appeared I was not alone. In galleries, the work of non-indigenous Australian artists mimicked “international” art, or worse, were pastiches of the culturally specific dots and lines of Aboriginal art.

At the time, Aboriginal art seemed to disappear into other Australian artists’ blind spots. Cognitive scientists Humberto Maturano and Francisco Varela wrote of this phenomenon:

By existing, we generate cognitive “blind spots” that can be cleared only through generating new blind spots in another domain. We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist. Only when some interaction dislodges us—such as being suddenly relocated to a different cultural environment—and we reflect upon it, do we bring forth new constellations of relation that we explain by saying that we or years, it was only the paintings of were not aware of them, or that we took Emily Kngwarreye, an elderly An- them for granted [6]. matyerre artist from the remote CenIn 1998, I met Barbara Weir, an artist tral Australian outstation of Utopia that inspired me [5]. As I learned more about her from Utopia and niece of Emily Kngwarculture, I became even more anxious about reye, whose mother was Alyawarre and her my studio practice. Art is one of the few father (whom she never met) an Irish worker meaningful occupations available to Abo- on a nearby cattle station. She is a member riginal peoples severed from their tradi- of the “Stolen Generation,” one of many tional lifeworlds. The shimmer of Aborigi- half-caste children separated from their Abnal paintings can mesmerize Western view- original families by cruel government polers of indigenous art on the white walls of a icy that persisted into the 1970s. modern art gallery. While appropriation of other cultures has long been a tool of Western artists, for them to be influenced by the surface shimmer of dots and lines on indigenous artists’ canvases was, for me, suggestive of a colonial attitude.

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When I met Barbara, I recognized trauma in her body language and asked if I could help her or her people in any way. She asked me to write the story of her life and, over the next six years, I sat together with her and Anmatyerre and Alyawarre women friends in the red sand, transcribing their stories as they painted their “Dreamings” and sang ancestral creation songs, often while a kangaroo the men had just killed cooked on an open fire [7]. Theirs is the oldest continuous land-based culture on earth, over 60,000 years old, and kinship connections to the land are profound. I recognized a connection between their embodied engagement with “country” (custodial land) and the culturally specific haptic gestures they made on their canvases. I began to use the term “embodied perception” to describe this more-than-visual sense. Seeing the context in which these artists painted, I came to see how Eurocentric readings of indigenous art and the aesthetic gaze eliminate cultural difference. I discovered what is too often taken for granted: the ground beneath our feet.

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mmanuel Levinas spoke of the nature of the move toward being, toward oneself and others. He contended that this process of relationship occurs “in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerabilities” [8]. In the center of Australia, in a third-world community peripheral to the lives of most Australians, this process began to unfold for me. As I heard the women’s stories and witnessed their embodied connection to land and kin, and their

trans-generational traumas, I saw the suffering that lay behind the mesmerizing shimmer of their canvases. I began to bear witness to my denial of my own ancestors and displacements and to what my affinity with the sublime in art and nature had repressed. Each time I returned to my studio in the Blue Mountains from Utopia, I ruthlessly erased and over-painted canvases that did not convey the sense of presence or embodiment I sought. My artwork was based on the land, but no longer did I feel a sense of place or belonging. The color of my skin represented to me the fundamental inequalities and injustices in the world. My gaze— the foundation upon which I had built my English art practice—had become suspect as I discovered the contested ground of place and history. Even my garden had become ecologically suspect and no longer a solace.

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trip to the United States and England at the end of 2002 provided insights contrary to my expectations. On a trip to Taos to interview the CanadianAmerican artist Agnes Martin, I discovered the remarkable land and indigenous presence of the American Southwest and was humbled by the appropriateness of Martin’s presence there [9]. When visiting my birthplace and family in Kentucky, I felt long repressed emotions that lay to rest some of the issues I had long carried with me. In England, I was delighted to find that my son was involved in a meaningful relationship, and was surprised that I felt claustrophobic in the urban area where I had once lived. The trip affirmed that place making had been discreetly occurring within me in Australia.

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Slowly, a new body of work emerged in my studio as I reintroduced “myself” back into my work. Minimal gestures and colors on my canvases became extremely subtle, echoing those of the bush and my own skin color—a hybrid middle ground between black and white. The canvas “ground” created through multiple erasures took on a new dimension as it became more than space or a void, but a subject in itself. Previously, I had explored the haptic as a means to create art. Now the canvas took on the significance of being a place for my own presence and embodied engagement. I discovered a different “here,” not “there,” vulnerable yet grounded. I realized that place must include the present and past—an embodied relationship with time and space.

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n April 2004, while in a canoe following an elusive White-faced Heron along the shoreline of Bruny Island, Tasmania, we discovered “Blackstone,” a house discretely nestled into eucalypt trees close to the shore. This property was for sale. Within a year, we moved there to begin a new life together. John has written eloquently about his process of place making at Blackstone and, not surprisingly, mine has been very different [10]. After an initial period of bliss, living on 55 acres with inspiring water and shoreline and among remarkable flora and fauna, we found that the remoteness of this place forced previously undealt-with issues to the fore. It has been a precarious journey, one in which our relationship was tested more than once. I began to write poetry to express not only Blackstone’s beauty but to deal with my anger about injustice and the depression

poems and more naturalistic paintings of Poet Paul Celan recognized that “Art, Bruny Island birds [11]. with all its attributes and future additions, is also a problem and, as we can see, one that n 2009, our only grandchild was born in is variable, tough, long lived, let us say eterEngland, and the tyranny of distance nal” [12]. Because of my experience of the once again became unbearable. In 2012, complexities surrounding place affiliation we purchased an English terrace house in an and my art practice, it became a matter of inner city country park nearby, and we now urgency for me to investigate the problems divide our lives between two places that we of art in order to keep creating it. love. Deciduous woodland, three lakes with Come, see real abundant waterfowl, and a river are only a flowers minutes’ walk away from our doorstep, and of this painful world. both John and I are active volunteers in the —Bashō (1644–1694) [13] park. I have created a new garden, one already overflowing with colors, textures, Notes and flavors that delight our granddaughter 1. Paul Cezanne in M. Milner, On Not Beand us. ing Able to Paint, Routledge, 1989 [1950], I have a new studio overlooking the gar- pp. 24–25. den, and color has returned to my paintings, 2. For early Christians, Mont St. Victoire both at Kingfisher Cottage and Blackstone. was a pilgrimage site and still holds a powI now feel a sense of place in both, a sense erful presence in the countryside surroundof grace. ing Aix-en-Provence. Making art for me is a sacred process—an 3. While on a three-month Tibetan Budact of creation, “self-less” and healing. My dhist retreat in France at Lerab Ling, I inart can also be seen as radical action: Every conveniently fell in love. I rationalized the gesture, if consciously made, is an act of difficult decision to leave my 17-year old taking up space, a defiant outward gesture son with his father by reasoning that we that is an affirmation of oneself as an irritant would spend time together in England and within a materialistic society. Australia each year.

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that lay beneath it. The tragic early intercultural history of Bruny Island’s Nuenone people haunted me, and I produced a series of artwork about it. My Channel Light painting series reflects the mesmerizing shimmer of the water of the d’Entrecasteaux Channel. When I walk along the shore, I collect driftwood to make sculptures of birds, and feel a childlike sense of ease for the first time in my life. The birdlife has also inspired a collection of avian

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4. A Polish couple came to Australia after WWII and built the house, and when the husband died the wife sold it to us. Their love of the place was evident in the garden. On our first meeting, she greeted me with words that at the time I misconstrued: “You could be my daughter.” I learned after she died that this elderly couple had kept two secrets. When they left Poland they also left behind their only daughter. I can imagine too well the pain it caused both mother and daughter, who had epilepsy and was not allowed entry into Australia due to harsh immigration requirements. I only discovered their other secret, one far more unnerving, ten years later. Her husband had been and remained until his death a Nazi sympathizer. Knowing that the person who had created the elaborate and beautiful garden terraces once worked in a concentration camp complicated my feelings for the place. 5. An early settler established a cattle station there in an unusually good springtime of rain, not knowing the extremely arid nature of the land. He chose to call it “Utopia” rather than its Anmatyerre name Uturupa, meaning “big sand hill.” Utopia was the first Aboriginal outstation to be granted Land Rights in 1978, and Barbara Weir was instrumental in the process as

she was one of the few Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people who could speak English, a language she had been forced to learn when she was taken from her family to a Christian mission over a 1,000 kilometres away. It took her 12 years to find her family again. 6. H. Maturana and F. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, Shambhala, 1992, p. 242. 7. The women’s stories were published with my essays about Utopia in Emily Kngwarreye: The Person and Her Paintings, DACOU, 2010. The women included the seven Petyarre sisters: Gloria, Kathleen, Myrtle, Ada Bird, Nancy, Violet, and Jeanne; Anna Petyarre Price; Glory Ngala; Weida Kngwarreye; and Emily Kngwarreye. 8. Emmanual Levinas in N. Princenthal, ed., Doris Salcedo, Phaidon Press, 2000, p. 122. 9. I researched the lives and artwork of Agnes Martin and Emily Kngwarreye for my PhD, Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground, University of New South Wales, 2005; available at: http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/unsworks:778. 10. John’s “Letters from Far South” are published in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 2008–2014 volumes.

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Links to his essays and photographs of Blackstone can be seen at: http://johncameronwritingplace.blogspot.co.uk/. 11. Black Stone Birds, Black Stones Press, 2012. 12. Paul Celan in N. Princenthal, ed., Doris Salcedo, Phaidon Press, 2000, p. 114, italics in original. 13. Matsuo Bashō, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, Penguin, 1985.

Artworks by Victoria King p. 1: Channel Light series, oil on canvas. p. 23: Flowering Light, oil on canvas. p. 24, upper left: Eucalypts, watercolor on Fabriano paper. p. 24, upper right: Dusk, watercolor on Fabriano paper. p. 24: Desert Light, watercolor on Fabriano paper. p. 25: Channel Light series, watercolor on Fabriano paper (left); oil on canvas (middle and right). p. 26, upper left: Shorebirds, driftwood and found fencing wire. p. 26, upper right: Vale, Autumn, oil on canvas. p. 26, below: Forty-spotted Pardalotes, oil on wood panel.

Reinventing the Screened Porch Bioclimatic Design in the American Midwest Gary J. Coates Coates is Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University. His books include: The Architecture of Carl Nyrén (2007); Erik Asmussen, Architect (1997); and Resettling America (1981). [email protected]. Text and photographs © 2016 Gary J. Coates.

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hen I was growing up in the Mid-Atlantic state of Maryland in the 1950s and 1960s, no houses had air conditioning. My family survived the hot, humid summers because we had a small (10' x 14') screened back porch. Like many such porches in the Mid-Atlantic region, it was a simple lean-to structure with a poured concrete floor attached to the main body of the house. It was furnished with several comfortable sitting chairs and a four-place dining table. Compared to interior rooms, the porch was well shaded, naturally ventilated, and relatively cool. In the summer heat, we would bring out a large fan. The only activity for which we did not use the porch was nighttime sleeping. When my wife and colleague, Susanne Siepl-Coates, asked me to design a screened porch for our house in Manhattan, Kansas, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, I remembered fondly my experiences with our screened porch as I was growing up. On the other hand, I had a number of objections to the notion of a screened porch in Kansas. I

questioned the usefulness of such a structure in this continental temperate climate characterized by seasonal extremes: summer temperatures often soaring to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and winter temperatures sometimes dropping below zero. Nevertheless, I began designing. My initial sketches mirrored the form of my childhood porch—a simple lean-structure attached to the main body of the house. My design seemed satisfactory but evoked no enthusiasm from me or from Susanne. We put the project “on hold.” When she raised the issue again some years later, I began to explore alternatives without regard to cost considerations or presumptions about what a porch should be. I applied my knowledge of bioclimatic design to the task of making a porch usable much of the Kansas year. As images very close to what we eventually built emerged in my drawings, Susanne and I both became excited. Here, we thought, was a porch that would be a joy to use during much of the year. Susanne developed a plan for a surrounding garden with a variety of outdoor spaces suitable for use at

various times of the day and year. Working together, with the help of a local nursery, we completed a final design. It was only after this final design emerged that I sought to understand why this proposal turned out to be so successful, when several other alternatives had failed. I compared the porch design with my childhood porch in Maryland. I realized that, unknowingly, I had re-invented the screened back porch, remedying typical porch problems and discovering new architectural potentials. Here, I describe five significant differences between the typical screened porch and my Kansas porch design.

1. Size matters Most screened porches are relatively small. I remembered the sense of “cabin fever” I often had as a child, living with the rest of my family cramped in a tiny space all summer. There was no way to escape each other, either physically or psychologically. When togetherness is forced, it becomes a burden rather than a blessing. Because our Kansas porch is so generously sized (approximately 280 square feet), we never feel confined, whether we are using it alone or sharing it with friends.

2. Shape matters In a large, simple room, it may be possible for several people to be present together without physically getting in each other’s way, yet they still might somehow feel they are intruding upon each other. In a more complex space, with alcoves and a variety of overlapping spaces, it is possible for individuals and groups to have their own clearly marked realms while still sharing the larger space. Our Kansas porch incorporates a range of layered, yet clearly recognizable, spatial realms defined by changes in both plan and

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many ways that guests rearrange porch furnishings to make their own preferred groupings. Both the size and the spatial richness of our porch make this flexibility and adaptability possible. Because the plan incorporates a central space with a variety of adjoining sub-areas, the porch does not feel too big when occupied by only one person, nor does it feel too small when occupied by many people. While we might well have anticipated this as professors of architecture, Susanne and I have been regularly struck by this porch quality.

3. Light matters In the typical lean-to porch, the ceiling space is dark and, in summer, filled with trapped hot air. While a ceiling fan can push the hot air down and out, thereby relieving thermal discomfort, there is a sense of darkness overhead and a space lit only from the sides. The butterfly roof of our Kansas porch opens the entire space to the sky, and the carefully designed overhangs shield the sun when it becomes too hot. In addition, warm air cannot collect under the ceiling because of the roof’s “V” shape, which generates a Venturi effect channeling breezes and quickening the south winds that prevail during our hot Kansas summers. One of the least desirable characteristics of the typical porch is its darkening adjoining rooms. To avoid this situation, I placed skylights in the flat roofed portion of the porch next to the windows and glazed door of the existing sunroom. A skylight along the entire north edge of the butterfly roof not only brings daylight into parts of the porch where one might least expect it but also provides light to the trellised fence and garden along the porch’s north side. Rather than darkening the house and garden, the porch and attached sunroom is suffused with a gentle light.

4. View matters section. We are able to shift from one subspace to another to avoid the sun and wind or to find a place more appropriate for a new activity. In addition, we can move furniture to support different uses in different places in different porch locations. In early spring, for example, we move the lightweight café table and chairs, then located in the alcove

adjacent to the rainwater cistern/fish pond, to the alcove at the southern edge of the porch. Here, we sit to catch the low warming rays of the sun. For larger dinner parties, we set up, in the middle of the porch, a larger table made with a door on top of two sawhorses. We are regularly intrigued by the

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The typical porch is placed at the side of the house with a view looking out into a garden. Remembering my childhood porch, I realized that I often felt I was wearing a broad brimmed hat; my view was limited to horizontal vistas offering no visual access to sky or birds in trees.

keeps our cistern/fish pond aerated and alive. Rather than sitting next to a house in a small, dark space, we find that using our Kansas porch is much closer to the experience of sitting under a high canopy shade tree next to a running stream. Because we are surrounded by and immersed in our garden, we can enjoy its fragrances and beauty while having a meal, Because it extends some 24 feet into the reading, or doing nothing but rocking back garden, our porch is immersed in that land- and forth on the porch swing. scape rather than being at the edge. With our butterfly roof, not only is the space filled 5. Micro-climate matters with carefully controlled daylight, but one As was the case with my childhood home, it can watch birds as they fly from limb to is not possible to use most porches in the limb, visiting our several bird feeders as early spring or late fall because the concrete well as the carved limestone fountain that

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floor slab is cold, and the sun does not penetrate the porch space deeply enough to warm either the floor or the porch users. I designed the angles and shading overhangs of the porch’s butterfly roof so that the sun would penetrate the entire space even on the shortest day of the year, December 21. Protected from north winter winds and warmed by a southern sun, we have been pleased by how comfortable the porch can be, even in winter. When sitting in a wind-protected portion receiving full sun, we can use the porch, even when the ambient air temperature is as low as 35 degrees. In summer, the horizontal shading device on the porch’s south side, along with two maple trees at the south edge of the garden, provide solar protection as do several deciduous and evergreen trees to the west of the porch. When summer weather becomes extremely hot, we augment the architecturally enhanced breezes from the south with a floor fan. Because the concrete floor is always shaded in the summer and because,

even in the hottest months, there is a reasonable drop in nighttime temperatures, the porch’s natural ventilation is supplemented by radiant cooling. Eventually, we intend to enhance this radiant cooling by circulating cool water through polyethylene coils already installed in the concrete floor. These coils will be connected to an ondemand water heater that, in the colder winter months, will provide radiant heating. This radiant cooling/heating system will significantly extend the porch’s comfort zone.

Spending time outside Since completing the porch, we have been pleasantly surprised by how often it is comfortable even in the summer heat and winter cold. In the Kansas climate, there are only two or three months when it is too cold to use the porch. Even in the hottest Kansas

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weather, there are at least some portions of the day when we can be outside. Because of the porch, our home life has changed considerably. During a typical day before we built the porch, we were outside only infrequently. Now we spend significant time outdoors during all seasons.

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Environmental & Architectural

Phenomenology Vol. 27 ▪ No. 2

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his EAP completes 27 years of publication and marks the first digital-only edition of a summer/fall issue. Shorter entries in this EAP include “citations received” and a brief obituary of German sociologist Thomas Luckmann (see next column). Longer entries begin with EAP editor David Seamon’s review of architectural historian Peter L. Laurence’s Becoming Jane Jacobs, the intriguing story of how her influential urban study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), came to be written. Egyptian architect and designer Tarek Wagih writes a critical commentary on the work of the controversial Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid, who died this past March. This EAP includes three essays, the first by naturalist Paul Krafel, who draws on the experience of moving a boulder to point implicitly toward a phenomenology of how smaller, order-initiating possibilities can generate constructive, largerscale change—in this case, erosion repair and landscape restoration. Next, independent researcher Stephen Wood continues his first-person phenomenology of moving to a new home, which,

ISSN 1083–9194 in this essay, he considers generatively in terms of six place processes. The first part of Wood’s account was published in the winter/spring 2016 EAP. In the last essay this issue, environmental educator John Cameron writes an eleventh “Letter from Far South,” which focuses on the question of how one’s relationship with place shifts over time. He describes an intensifying experience and understanding of place that he identifies as “a deepening intersubjectivity and field of care.”

Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016) Sociologist Thomas Luckmann died on May 10, 2016, at the age of 88. Born in 1927 in Jesenice/Slowenia, he studied at the Universities of Vienna and Innsbruck and at New York City’s New School for Social Research, where he completed his doctoral work in 1956 under the direction of phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schütz. In 1965, he accepted a professorship at the University of Frankfurt; in 1970, he transferred to the University of Konstanz, where he was Professor of Sociology until he retired in 1994.

Summer/Fall ▪ 2016 Luckmann was one of the most significant figures in German post-war sociology and philosophy. Though best known for The Social Construction of Reality (1966 and co-authored with another of Schütz’s former students, sociologist Peter L. Berger), Luckmann is perhaps most significant to phenomenology because he completed Schütz’s Structures of the Lifeworld (2 volumes, 1973 and 1983), which he finalized by filling out Schütz’s unfinished notes. The sidebar on p. 2 is a description of that work as provided by the on-line version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Below: A photograph taken on May 3, 2016, of Jane Jacobs’s ever-changing New York City’s West Village block, the site of her famous “sidewalk ballet.” Jacobs’s home, 555 Hudson Street, is the dark red three-story building, left, immediately next to the taller, six-story building. At the end of the block, right, is the White Horse Tavern, one significant “third place” that Jacobs highlighted in Death and Life. See the review of Peter L. Laurence’s recently published book on Jacobs, p. 6. Photo by Peter L. Laurence and used with permission.

The social lifeworld After a more general account of the lifeworld and its relation to the sciences, [Schütz and Luckmann’s Structures of the Lifeworld] takes up its various stratifications, such as provinces of meaning, temporal and spatial zones of reach, and social structure. Schütz and Luckmann then comment on the components of one's stock of knowledge, including learned and non-learned elements, relevances and types, and trace the build-up of such a stock. The authors study the social conditioning of one's subjective stock of knowledge and inquire about the social stock of knowledge of a group and different possible combinations of knowledge distribution (generalized and specialized). They consider how subjective knowledge becomes embodied in a social stock of knowledge and how the latter influences the former. In addition, the authors pursue such issues as the structures of consciousness and action, the choosing of projects, rational action, and forms of social action, whether such action be unilateral or reciprocal, immediate or mediate. A final section analyzes the boundaries of experience, different degrees of transcendencies (from simply bringing an object within reach to the experience of death), and the mechanisms for crossing boundaries (e.g. symbols). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schutz/

Citations Received Andrew Crompton, 2013. The Architecture of Multi-faith Spaces: God Leaves the Building. Journal of Architecture, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 474–496. This architect examines “multi-faith rooms,” in which “people of all faiths, as well as those of no faith… time-share a space that takes on one of a set of sacred modalities….” Crompton argues that multifaith architecture typically involves “mundane spaces without an aura whose most characteristic form is an empty white

room.” So that these spaces are not meaningful “in an inappropriate way, they use banal materials, avoid order and regularity, and are the architectural equivalent of ambient noise.” Crompton examines several specific examples of multi-faith spaces and includes a good number of plans and photographs.

Galen Cranz, 2016. Ethnography for Designers. New York: Routledge. Author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (1998), this sociologist and design theorist aims to help “architecture and design students learn to listen actively and deeply to clients and users. Listening is profound and simple, useful to professionals and to all of us as people. This book provides practical tips for applying ethnography to architectural and other types of design.” The book includes many case studies by Cranz’s students at the University of California at Berkeley and helpful drawings and other graphics.

Kenny Cupers, ed., 2013. Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture. New York: Routledge. The 15 chapters of this architectural historian’s edited collection work to demonstrate that “interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the 20th century.” Some of the chapters invoke unfair, post-structuralrevisionist interpretations of behavioral and experiential approaches to design—e.g, the odd claims that Kevin Lynch and Christopher Alexander “produced urban, architectural, and experiential spatial theories which begged to be further rationalized by market forces” or that “Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical aspirations offer the opportunity to connect a commercial intent (a form of consumer-focused avocational education) to a phenomenological experience, using architecture as a medium).” More helpful are chapters that offer more balanced discussions of 20th-century efforts in “architectural psychology”—e.g., “Architectural Handbooks and the User Experience” (P. Emmons and A. Mihalache);

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“Architects, Users, and the Social Sciences in Postwar America” (A. Sachs); and “Designed-in Safety: Ergonomics in the Bathroom” (B. Penner). The sidebar, below, reproduces a passage from Sachs’ discussion of first-generation environment-behavior research.

Better understanding users The concept of the "user" as it developed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s has left a rich legacy, not only the buildings designed based on this approach. Many of the methods developed with EBS [Environment-Behavior Studies] scholars are still part of architectural practice and are gaining momentum in the early twenty-first century with the interest in “evidencebased design.” This is despite the fact that the environmental design approach, like the allknowing expert before it, was eclipsed in architectural discourse by alternate conceptions of knowledge and society. Phenomenological and critical theory, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, placed individuals, their hermeneutic processes, and their interpersonal interactions at the center and describe society as an intricate web or a network rather than a system. In these formulations, the “users’ have almost no shared qualities at all, not even within a group, and any general understanding of human consciousness is impossible before “all ideological and communication ‘distortions’ are eliminated.” The environmental design approach was also questioned from within. Even in the excitement of collaboration between architects and social scientists, scholars and practitioners worried that their expectations and standards of veracity were fundamentally different. In 1971, Russell Ellis, a sociologist at Berkeley, noted that it was easier to describe what will prohibit unwanted behavior than to anticipate how to encourage wanted behavior. This “negative” approach was instrumental in producing knowledge about human behavior, but was restricting as a source of guidance for the creative design process. Ellis’s colleagues at

Berkeley also worried that the environmental design approach did not resolve the problem of professional knowledge but rather exacerbated it, as [Berkeley Architecture professor] Roger Montgomery stated: “The architects’ real new people were not the users and the occupants, but all those who participated in and provided the context for the construction process.” These criticisms are valid concerns, but they do not undermine the importance of the 1960s conception of the user. Ultimately, the “real” user is neither the normative individual, the group-bound user, nor the phenomenological subject, but an amalgam of them all. In times of professional crisis, when architects need to respond to new social norms, attention is temporarily focused on one aspect over the others. These formulations may seem narrow in retrospect, but it is through them that we gain a better perspective of the “user,” and of her corollary, the architect (A. Sachs, “Architects, Users, and the Social Sciences in Postwar America,” pp. 83–84).

Robert Gifford, ed., 2016. Research Methods for Environmental Psychology. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. This environmental psychologist’s edited collection includes 20 chapters that are said to cover “the full spectrum of research methods” in environmental psychology and related traditions like behavioral geography, environmental sociology, and environmentbehavior research. Entries that EAP readers may find useful include Reuven Sussman’s “Observational Methods”; Cheuk Fan Ng’s “Behavioral Mapping and Tracking”; David Canter’s “Revealing the Conceptual Systems of Places”; Daniel Montello’s “Behavioral Methods for Spatial Cognition Research”; Arthur Stamp’s “Simulating Designed Environments”; and David Seamon and Harneet K. Gill’s “Qualitative Approaches to Environment-Behavior Research.” In the sidebar, right, are Gifford’s comments on his selection of “environmental psychology,” rather than some other name, as the label for this broad, interdisciplinary field of research and practice.

What’s in a name? Since the 1960s, several other names for the field [of environmental psychology] have been proposed. Among these are environment and behavior, ecopsychology, and conservation psychology. In fact, the very first conferences that focused on these topics in the mid-1960s used the name architectural psychology. Quickly, however, those involved realized that the field included questions and answers that went beyond buildings to broader concerns with the environment itself, and environmental psychology was chosen as the most appropriate name. This name covers the whole field, from fundamental psychological processes such as perception and cognition of the built and natural environment to the use of everyday space by people, the design of physical settings of all kinds, understanding the impacts on people and by people on natural resources both living and not, and the climate-related behaviors and attitudes. I suppose you can call it what you want to, but I believe that each of the other names represent pieces of the whole…. [I would argue] that we should use the inclusive name environmental psychology for all who are interested, regardless of our personal research interests, partly because it is the most accurate and inclusive umbrella term of all these topics, and partly to avoid the field splintering into even smaller factions, which likely would be followed by oblivion (Robert Gifford, “Introduction,” pp. 7–8).

Stephen Grabow and Kent Spreckelmeyer, 2015. The Architecture of Use: Aesthetics and Function in Architectural Design. New York: Routledge. These architects offer ten examples of “buildings that embody the human experience at an extraordinary level” to demonstrate “the central importance of the role of function in architecture as a generative force in determining built form.” Twentieth-century, buildings that the authors consider include Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Office

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Building, Louis Sullivan’s National Farmers’ Bank, and Louis Kahn’s Trenton Bath House: “Each building is described from the point of view of a major functional concept or idea of human use which then spreads out and influences the spatial organization, built form, and structure. In doing so each building is presented as an exemplar that reaches beyond the pragmatic concerns of a narrow program and demonstrates how functional concepts can inspire great design, evoke archetypal human experience, and help to understand how architecture embodies the deeper purposes and meanings of everyday life.”

Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing, 2014. Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. These historians provide “an authoritative and comprehensive account of the bicycle’s technical and historical evolution, from the earliest velocipedes (invented to fill the need for horseless transport during a shortage of oats) to modern racing bikes, mountain bikes, and recumbents.”

Nigel Hiscock, 2007. The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. This architectural theorist argues that “the historical context of medieval religious architecture suggests that churchmen would have had every reason to express number and geometry in their architecture as part of a programme of intended Christian Platonist symbolism. It will be shown that, in some instances, there is evidence that they did, which in turn indicates that this would also have been the practice in other cases for which no evidence has so far been found. “Accordingly, the investigation will attempt to suggest what symbolic intentions could lie behind religious architecture and art, and how these could have been interpreted by others, whether intended or not. In so doing, care will be taken to ensure that any possible meanings that are proposed can

be supported by literary and documentary evidence, and that the possible means of achieving them fall within the known competence of the parties involved” (p. 8). This work is an important contribution to the phenomenology and hermeneutics of sacred architecture and sacred space. Hiscock’s central argument is reproduced in the sidebar, below and right.

A perceived natural order To summarize, the number theory of Pythagoras and the geometry of Plato’s cosmology, which explained the principles of a perceived universal order, were adapted by the early Church in the form of Christian Platonism and taught in monastery schools through the programme of liberal arts. The need of the Church to teach these truths to its students and to a populace that was largely illiterate led to their transmission in school treatises and their portrayal in religious architecture and art. The evidence of popular culture indicates that some of the rudiments of this teaching were understood by ordinary laypeople, presumably including masons and other artisans involved in the building process, who were able to make simple religious associations with the meaning of numbers and, to some extent, the figures of geometry. It is clear that architects early in the Greek Middle Ages would have been able to receive and implement a patron’s brief, sometimes by way of a drawing or a plan, whilst early in the Latin Middle Ages, some reforming abbots and bishops were regarded as architects of their own building projects and conveyed some form of architectural programme to their builders. They certainly had the means to do this in a way that could include symbolic content, and their builders likewise had the means to implement it. From the twelfth century onwards, architects in the West are depicted beside their building work, taking instructions from their patrons. Before graduating, their apprenticeship had been shared in the lodge with masons who were trained in practical geometry and who commonly used quadrature for devising

their constructional details, work which evidently depended on first receiving the plan and a key dimension from the architect. How the ground plan embodied the patron’s requirements is not known, but it is likely to have been derived from some form of schema provided by the patron or commissioning body. It would have been a relatively simple matter for it to have defined the size and architectural from of the work, the layout and positioning of altars and chapels, the location of the chancel in relation to the nave, along with particular numbers of architectural elements…. The manner of achieving this would have been left to the builders under the supervision of the architect or master builder according to their own practices. This suggests a two-stage process involving a schematic design, incorporating the patron’s programme in some form or other, as exemplified possibly by the Plan of St Gall and Villard’s Cistercian plan; and the constructional design, which was the builders’ work in raising it according to current practice. Thus, the schema might ensure the transmission of tradition, authority, and the unchanging truths of the universal scheme, whilst the constructional design would be progressive, following current practice in building, and current style in the fashioning of details…. Whilst the form might remain constant, along with such meaning as embodied in the form, each [church] was nevertheless built in the style of its day, whether Byzantine, Carolingian, Romanesque, or Gothic… (pp. 48–49).

Marianne E. Krasny and Keith G. Tidball, 2015. Civic Ecology: Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. These authors define civic ecology as the “transformation of broken places.” Examples of broken places include Detroit, New York after 9/11, and New Orleans after Hur-

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ricane Katrina. Drawing on case-study examples throughout, the authors outline “ten civic ecology principles,” examples of which include: (1) civic ecology practices emerge from broken places; (2) these practices foster well-being; (3) these practices provide opportunities for learning.

Patricia M. Locke and Rachel McCann, eds., 2016. MerleauPonty: Space, Place, Architecture. Athens, Ohio: Ohio State Univ. Press. This collection’s 12 chapters, mostly by philosophers, “work to consider how we live and creative as profoundly spatial beings.” In her introduction to the volume, co-editor Patricia Locke explains that the general theme of the volume “is the experience and expression of space on multiple levels, addressing questions central to the work of philosophers, architectural theorists, and readers in a range of creative fields. Contributions include Edward Casey’s “Finding Architectural Edge in the Wake of MerleauPonty”; David Morris’s “Spatiality, Temporality, and Architecture as a Place of Memory”; and Rachel McCann’s “Through the Looking Glass: The Spatial Experience of Merleau-Ponty’s Metaphors.” See Casey’s discussion of MerleauPonty’s “flesh” in the sidebar, below.

Architecture and “flesh of the world” What does flesh and especially the flesh of the world have to do with architecture…? [B]uilt places belong to the world’s flesh, despite their origins in the particularities of human design and their often highly contrived means of construction. I would go further and say that architecture, far from being a merely artificial and conventional factor in human life, belongs intrinsically to the flesh of the world and that, still more radically, it inheres in human flesh—is inseparable from it. To be human is to live flesh in such a way as to exist in a built environment, however minimal (a shelter, a tent) or elaborate (a skyscraper, a stadium).

When not in such surroundings, human creatures miss them, need them, and crave them—hence are always in the process of seeking and setting up built structures of some sort. Whether made from rock or wood, steel or aluminum, such structures are not merely external but are lodged in the world’s flesh—flesh of its flesh—and are part of our own flesh, too, thanks to their incorporation into the daily lifeworlds animated by moving bodies (Edward Casey, 86–87).

Jeff Malpas, ed., 2015. The Intelligence of Place: Topographies and Poetics. London: Bloomsbury. This edited collection includes 16 chapters (one of which is a poem) discussing the concept of place from a range of disciplinary and conceptual perspectives. Contributors include: Edward Casey (“Place and Edge”); Joshua Meyrowitz (“Place and Its Mediated Re-Placements”); Juhani Pallasmaa (“Place and Atmosphere”); Alberto Pérez-Gómez (“Place and Architectural Space”); Edward Relph (“Place and Connection”); and Malpas (“Place and Singularity”). See sidebars, below, for selections from the chapters by Pallasmaa and Relph.

An open sense of place Whatever occurs in a specific place is always implicated in broader geographical and ontological processes. To ignore this is to close the door and shut out the world… An open sense of place connects to our origins and experiences in particular places with the intelligence that understands how these are effected by and influence what goes on elsewhere in the world. Of course, there is always the possibility that [place] can be distorted to ferment the worst sorts of human traits, especially when narrow-minded convictions are reinforced by participation in virtual self-selected communities on the Internet. My view is that an open sense of pace is a concomitant of modern mobility,

multi-centredness, re-embedding and tele-technologies. It promotes shared experiences and an appreciation of diversity. It is increasingly how people everywhere connect with the world. It is also an increasingly urgent necessity for the politics of place beyond place. The emergent world problems of the present century—climate change, persistent poverty in the shadows of excessive wealth, the loss of biodiversity, ragged wars and terrorism, and epidemics of infectious diseases—all have causes and effects on particular lives in particular places yet are spread-eagled around the globe. It is a nice conceit to think that an open sense of place, regardless of whether it is explicitly recognized or called that, might be a necessary condition for mitigating such problems” (Edward Relph p. 200).

The secret power of architecture Today’s urgent call for an ecologically sustainable architecture also suggests a non-autonomous, fragile, collaborative, and intentionally atmospheric architecture adapted to the precise conditions of topography, soil, climate, vegetation, as well as to the cultural traditions of the region. The potentials of atmosphere, weak gestalt, and adaptive fragility will undoubtedly be explored in the near future in the search for an architecture that will acknowledge the conditions and principles of the ecological reality as we as of our own bio-historical nature. I suggest that in the near future we may well become more interested in atmospheres than individually expressive forms. Understanding atmospheres will mostly likely teach us about the secret power of architecture and how it can influence entire societies, but at the same time, enable us to define our own individual existential foothold. Our capacity to grasp qualitative atmospheric entities of complex environmental situations, without a detailed recording and evaluation of their parts and ingredients, could well be named our sixth

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sense, and it is likely to be our most important sense in terms of our existence, survival and emotional lives (Juhani Pallasmaa, p. 151).

Daniel Paiva, 2015. Experiencing Virtual Places: Insights on the Geographies of Sim Racing. Journal of Cultural Geography, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 145– 168. This geographer examines “place experience in virtual spaces, taking the sim racing virtual spaces as a case study and endeavoring to build a bridge between theory and empirics.” The study draws on participant observation and 20 in-depth interviews to consider “the virtual geographies of two sim racing videogames: Gran Turismo and rFactor.”

Aya Peri Bader, 2015. A Model for Everyday Experience of the Built Environment: The Embodied Perception of Architecture, Journal of Architecture, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 244–267. This architect and architectural theorist focuses on a phenomenology of the “lived experience of the built environment.” She argues that “there is insufficient compatibility between the prevalent professional understanding of the perception of architecture, and how architecture is in fact perceived in everyday life.” Her aim is to “investigate the ‘inattentive experience’ of architecture” and “to clarify its structure and components, their interrelationship with physical built environments, and their impact on the userperceiver.” One of her conclusions is that “most of the impact architecture has on users is not a result of focused attention on the architecture object; rather, the object is ‘absorbed’ in a state of habitual indifference.”

Book Review

A New System of Thought on the City Peter L. Laurence, 2016. Becoming Jane Jacobs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Reviewed by David Seamon

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s we move more deeply into the 21st century, urban writer Jane Jacobs’s 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities continues to grow in conceptual and practical significance. One can safely say that this book—a remarkably perceptive picture of how realworld cities work—is the great 20th-century explication of urban experience and situations, continuing to have profound theoretical and practical significance for urban policy, planning, and design. In relation to environmental and architectural phenomenology, Jacobs’s work is central because it can accurately be described as a phenomenology of the city and the urban lifeworld [1]. Methodologically, her major aim was to allow citiness to reveal itself in the course of everyday, taken-for-granted life and to use these firsthand discoveries as a starting point for identifying more general

principles and structures that make the city what it is essentially. Jacobs (1916–2006) came to realize that the most central lived structure of the city is a small-scaled functional and physical diversity that generates and is generated by what she called the “street ballet”—an exuberance of place and sidewalk life founded on the everyday comings and goings of many people carrying out their own ordinary needs, obligations, and activities. In turn, Jacobs identified four key environmental qualities that typically sustain street ballets: short blocks, sufficient density of users, a range in building types, and primary uses—i.e., anchor functions like housing and workplaces. In the last decade, a solid interdisciplinary field of “Jacobsean” studies has developed, and many books and edited collections have been published, discussing Jacobs’s life and work [2]. One superb new addition to these studies is architectural historian Peter L. Laurence’s just-published Becoming Jane Jacobs, which provides a careful, eye-opening reconstruction of the events, experiences, and influences in Jacob’s personal and professional life that led to her writing Death and Life. Laurence explains that he tells “the story of the ‘first half’ of Jacobs’s career” to reveal “a previously underestimated intellect.” He continues: By shedding light on experiences that led to Jacobs becoming one of the most important American writers on cities already before Death and Life, I seek to dispel the stereotype that Jacobs was an amateur when it came to understanding cities and their redevelopment. In contrast to the dilettante whose “home remedies,” as the great writer Louis Mumford called them in anger, were limited to a woman’s view of a local, domestic urban

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routine, I show that Jacobs, who was anything but a stereotypical 1950s housewife and no more of an amateur than Mumford, was a professional writer [on cities and urban development]... Neither accidental nor modest in ambition, a depth of experience was the foundation of Jacobs’s desire to offer a wholly new vision of cities, not some shortsighted “remedies (pp. 6–7). In seven chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, Laurence masterly demonstrates how Jacobs’s personal and professional life, partly via a good amount of serendipity, unfolded in such a way to set the stage for Death and Life, which Laurence summarizes as “creating a foundation of knowledge about how the city works” and “rebuilding twentieth-century planning theory from ground up” (p. 270, p. 271).

Becoming an Urban Expert In chapter 1, “To the City,” Laurence recounts Jacobs’s leaving her hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1934 and moving to New York City, which provided the robust city experiences that would fuel her urban understanding in Death and Life. By late 1935, Jacobs had found success as a free-lance writer, publishing in Vogue the first of four essays on Manhattan’s working neighborhoods—its fur, leather, diamond, and flower districts. These four articles, Laurence incisively demonstrates, bookmarked “the decades between the start of Jacobs’s writing career and her first book on cities.” Laurence sees in these essays the kernel of awareness that would eventually blossom into Death and Life: “Jacobs found the spirit of New York and its hope for the future in these working neighborhoods, where diverse city functions and people lent each other ‘close-grained and lively support’” (p. 29).

In chapter 2, “The Education of a City Naturalist,” Laurence overviews Jacobs’s two years as a fulltime general studies undergraduate at Columbia University, taking courses that would have led to a major in geography if she had finished her degree (which she did not because she had taken too many classes as an extension student and had a weak high-school record that precluded her entrance into the formal undergraduate program). In one of the economic geography classes she took at Columbia, Jacobs read Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s 1925 Medieval Cities Their Origins and the Revival of Trade, which Laurence describes as “one of the single most influential books on her thinking about cities” because it helped her understand how “cities grew and how they failed” (p. 53). In chapter 3, “‘We Inaugurate Architectural Criticism’,” Laurence details how, after working as a writer for the Office of War Information and the State Department during World War II, Jacobs eventually became a journalist and editor at Architectural Forum, a Time, Incorporated, magazine. In the six-and-a-half years that she worked there (June, 1952 to October, 1958), Jacobs “learned to be an architectural and urban design critic” (p. 93). Under the direction of Douglas Haskell, the able but demanding editor of Forum, she rapidly became, “with Haskell’s support, its expert on urban development and, according to him, its best writer on the subject…. Building on Forum’s editorial agenda for architectural and urban criticism, Jacobs turned critiques about architectural functionalism into a new conception of the functional city” (p. 94). Much more interested in practical, working design solutions than in utopian visions like Le Corbusier’s much-lauded “towers in the park,” Haskell and Jacobs both emphasized “a building’s participation in larger contexts: with its users, with the city, with the ‘world’ that they contributed to building through their writing” (p. 98). More and more doubtful about the dominant aesthetic claim that the city should be a work of art, Haskell and Jacobs “came to share a belief

and other users—what she sometimes called “pavement-pounding”: [S]he saw better planning as the result of a habit of thought that stemmed from a curiosity about the “living city.” Walking and good planning, she wrote, “are two sides of the same attitude, two sides of the pavement pounder’s fascination, on an intimate level, with all details of city life and city relationships, of his consuming curiosity about the way the city develops and changes, of his endless preoccupation with the living city, and—at the bottom of it all—of his affection for the city.” As compared to the Olympian planners, who studied statistics and traffic patterns and “then waved their clearance wands,” the pavement pounders were those “who want to change and rebuild the city not out of fundamental disgust with it, but out of fascination with it and love for it” (p. 182). that architecture must be imagined in the ‘real world’” (p. 107). In chapters 4–6 (“Advocating the CityPlanner Approach,” “‘Seeds of Self-Regeneration’ for City Deserts,” and “Urban Sprawl, Urban Design, and Urban Renewal”), Laurence overviews Jacobs’s writings, projects, public presentations, and community efforts that marked her time with Forum, and how these various experiences set the stage for Death and Life, which she began writing in 1958 but did not finish until early 1961. Although originally an advocate for modernist design, Jacobs over time pinpointed major problems with the standard functionalist-modernist approach to architecture and planning. For example, in evaluating one such design for elderly housing, “she criticized the architect for knowing nothing about the ‘people it will house, how long they are apt to live there (he never heard anybody bring that up), whether they bring or would like to bring anything with them, etc. They are numbers, one to a bed, it is a barracks’. Her remarks anticipated the criticisms she would later make of public housing projects then on the architects’ drawing boards” (p. 122). Eventually, Jacobs came to see that a much more accurate and practical approach to architecture, planning, and urban design was direct observation and understanding of particular urban places and their residents

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Creating a Seminal Work In chapter 7 and the conclusion (“A New System of Thought” and “A Vitae Activa and Contemplativa”), Laurence details Jacobs’s experience in writing Death and Life and overviews critical reactions to the book. He begins with a discussion of Jacobs’s article, “Downtown Is for People,” her first comprehensive critique of urban redevelopment and suggestions for constructive alternatives. Against the wishes of Haskell, who wanted the article for Forum, “Downtown” appeared in the April, 1958 issue of Forum’s sister magazine, Fortune, and shortly after was republished in the best-selling The Exploding Metropolis (1958), edited by urban writer and researcher William Whyte, who would later write The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980), another seminal work on the city. “Downtown Is for People” synthesized Jacobs’s growing understanding of how real cities worked and laid out, in preliminary form, topics and themes much more thoroughly developed in Death and Life. Foreshadowing one of its central arguments, she wrote: [A] sense of place is built up in the end, from many little things…, some so small people take them for granted, and yet the lack of them takes the flavor out of the city: irregularities in level, so often bulldozed away; different kinds of paving, signs and fireplugs

and street lights, white marble stoops…. The remarkable intricacy and liveliness of downtown can never be created by the abstract logic of a few men” (p. 240). The professional and public attention given this article played an important role in Jacobs’s receiving a series of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation that would provide the time and financial support for her writing Death and Life. In her book prospectus, she wrote that her aim would be to describe and explain the big city’s “marvelously intricate, constantly adjusting network of people and their activities. This network makes all the unique and constructive contributions of the great city possible; it also makes possible the social controls that have to be effective for people, communities and enterprises within the big city if we are to maintain a high standard (or even a decent standard) of civilization” (p. 252). Though Jacobs originally envisioned that she could complete her book in “about nine months” (p. 252), the project quickly expanded in time and effort and would not be finished until January, 1961, thus taking two years and four months to write, “three times longer than she had expected” (p. 277). Laurence provides an in-depth explication of Jacobs’s writing process, including reasons for delay—originally overestimating the thoroughness of her understanding of the city, learning how to write a book, and fighting urban renewal projects in Greenwich Village and East Harlem proposed by powerful New York City planner Robert Moses. Laurence emphasizes that Jacobs’s role in trying to improve housing in East Harlem was particularly important for her deepening urban understanding. The neighborhood design proposed by the New York City Housing Authority would evict from the East Harlem neighborhood some 900 families, 60 stores, five churches and several factories and warehouses employing local residents, all to be replaced by 21-story apartment towers. Jacobs became involved with an ad hoc group of architects and community representatives to propose a neighborhood alternative: a “mixed-use, mixedbuilding housing model” that would support and invigorate East Harlem’s everyday neighborhood life.

a July, 23, 1959 letter to Chadbourne Gilpatric, associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, she wrote:

In her public presentation laying out this alternative, Jacobs explained that the major flaw of public housing was its “disregard of the social structure of the city neighborhoods, particularly poor neighborhoods. The projects are designed for a kind of sophisticated family individualism, which is beyond the inner resources and the financial resources of their tenants, and which is the opposite of the highly communal and cooperative society among families in the old slums” (p. 265). She wrote to landscape architect Grady Clay (March 3, 1959) that, via the East Harlem experience, I began to see that the most important thing in life in [that neighborhood] was relationships of all kinds among people—that these relationships, many of them very casual, were the means of keeping the peace, of assistance in time of trouble, of squeezing some fun and joy out of the slum, of avenues to opportunity and glimpses of different choices in life, and of any sort of political participation. I saw that many people in east Harlem were of true importance in their circles and had the dignity that comes of having some influence and mastery, however little, on their environment…. I began to get a glimmer of the idea that the workings of the city were based on mutual support among a great variety of things, and that this principle was totally missing from the rebuilt city [of the modernist designers]” (p. 269–270).

A “New System of Thought” For an urban phenomenology, perhaps what is most interesting about Laurence’s account is Jacobs’s gradually consolidating recognition that what her book could be is “a new system of thought” for understanding and thus strengthening cities (p. 274). In

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In my book, I am not rehashing old material on cities and city planning. I am working with new concepts about the city and its behavior. Many of these concepts are quite radically opposed to those accepted in orthodox and conventional planning theory. I think I am proving the validity of these new concepts and giving evidence, from experience in the city itself, which shows that the alternative to ignoring them is not the rebuilding of some improved type of city but, rather, the social, economic, and visual disintegration of the city. I am trying to get theory and practice of city planning and design started on a new and different track…. My contribution is the organizing of these observations and ideas into workable systems of thought about the city, and in indicating the new aims and tactics which planning must adopt to catalyze constructive and genuinely urban city behavior” (pp. 274– 75). Jacobs summarized her new system of thought on the city as “organized complexity,” by which she referred to an intricate place ensemble of environmental elements, functions, and people intimately interacting in synergistic relationship (p. 303). In an earlier letter to Gilpatric (July 1, 1958), Jacobs presented a particularly lucid picture of successful urban places: Within the seeming chaos and jumble of the city is a remarkable degree of order, in the form of relationships of all kinds that people have evoked and that are absolutely fundamental to city life—more fundamental and necessary than safety, to convenience, to social action, to economic opportunity, than anything conceived of in the image of the rebuilt [modernist] city. Where it works at all well, this network of relationships is astonishingly intricate. It requires a staggering diversity of activities and people, very intimately interlocked (although often casually so), and able to make constant adjustments to needs and circumstances; the physical form of the city has also to be full of variety and flexibility for people to accommodate it to their needs (p. 254).

Phenomenologically, what is so central about Jacobs’s understanding here is that the parts of urban place only work together as a whole when they facilitate and are facilitated by an appropriate togetherness of people, activities, situations and environmental elements unfolding dynamically to foster and be fostered by human attachment to a particular sense of urban place. What she provides is a strikingly thorough and grounded description of urban being-in-theworld. One reason why completing Death and Life took so much longer than Jacobs had envisioned was that, only through the effort of writing and rewriting, was she able to locate clearly how citiness actually worked and how various urban elements and processes intermeshed to generate (and be generated by) robust urban districts. In an August 18, 1959 letter to friend Saul Alinsky, also writing a book, Jacobs agreed with what he had earlier explained about his own writing problem: “I’ve got so damned much to say and everything is so interrelated with everything else” (p. 276). A few weeks before, in a July 23, 1959 letter to Gilpatric, she highlighted directly the difficulty of accurately locating and understanding the complexity of parts and whole: “the logic of every part is a portion of the logic of the whole, done in the light of the whole” (p. 274) [3]. In the last chapter of his book, Laurence relates how, three weeks after Jacobs completed Death and Life, the New York City Planning commission released their plan to include her West Village neighborhood in urban renewal and how Jacobs became a major player in opposing and eventually stopping this threat. Laurence ends the chapter with a discussion of reactions to Death and Life, emphasizing the point that

“parts of her inclusive vision of the city were quickly embraced by an ideologically broad spectrum of readers” who ranged from progressive and liberal, on one hand, to libertarian and conservative, on the other (p. 279). He also briefly relates the perspective of Death and Life to some of her later writings, including The Economy of Cities (1969), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and Systems of Survival (1992). Covering these links to her later work, however, is not one of Laurence’s major aims, and clearly that discussion could be pursued further. Also missing is an in-depth discussion of Death and Life’s longer-term impact on urban thinking, planning, and design, and in what positive and negative ways Jacobs’s ideas are regarded academically and professionally today. These criticisms are quibbles, however, since the great value of Laurence’s book is its thorough, year-by-year, writing-by-writing account provided of Jacobs’s serendipitous progress toward creating the great urban study of our time. As he writes, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities was not a book that Jacobs had planned at the outset; she learned about cities by writing it. But she had been writing it for almost thirty years, since her first essays on the city and through her work for Architectural Forum” (p. 280).

Notes 1. David Seamon, “Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities as a Phenomenology of Urban Place,” Journal of Space Syntax, vol. 3 (fall 2012), pp.139–49; David Seamon, “Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology,” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, vol. 4 (2013), pp. 143–66. 2. These works include: Alice Alexiou Sparberg’s Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2006); Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher Klemek’s Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007); Anthony Flint’s Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (Random House, 2009); Glena Lang and Marjory Wunsch’s Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (David R. Godine, 2009); Roberta

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Brandes Gratz’s The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (Nation Books, 2010); Stephen A. Goldsmith, Lynne Elizabeth, and Arlene Goldbard’s What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs (New Village Press, 2010); Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010); Christopher Klemek’s The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2011); Max Page and Timothy Mennel’s Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (APA Planners Press, 2011); Sonia Hirt and Diane Zahm’s The Urban Wisdom of Jane Jacobs (Routledge, 2012); and Dirk Schubert’s Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs (Ashgate, 2014). For a helpful collection of Jacobs’s less known written work, including a sampling of her letters and some of the Vogue articles, see M. Allen, ed., Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (Owen Sound, Ontario: Ginger Press, 1997). 3. On the parts-whole relationship understood phenomenologically, see philosopher Henri Bortoft’s The Wholeness of Nature (Lindesfarne Press, 1996).

Image Captions p. 7: A drawing encapsulating the modernist rendition of the city that Jacobs eventually came to question; note the “sunken road for fast vehicular traffic” (from T. Adams et al., The Building of the City, Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: William F. Fell, 1931; reproduced in Lawrence, p. 17). p. 8: A photograph of East Harlem’s Stephen Foster Houses included in Jacobs’s June 1956 article, “The Missing Link in City Redevelopment.” She wrote: “New Housing developments like this one… take into account little beyond sanitary living space, formal playgrounds, and sacrosanct lawns” (Architecture Forum, June 1956, p. 132; reproduced in Lawrence, p. 217). p. 9: Jane Jacobs at her typewriter, ca. 1961, (Jane Jacobs papers; reproduced in Lawrence, p. 304).

David Seamon is the editor of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology.

Mourning Zaha Hadid Tarek Wagih Wagih is an Egyptian architect and designer. He specializes in contemporary Islamic architecture infusing minimalism and traditional themes. His writing explores the possibility of understanding and renewing traditional concepts in light of current world architecture. [email protected]. Text © 2016 Tarek Wagih.

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aha Hadid is dead. The world’s most famous and only female “starchitect” suddenly died at age 65 at the apex of her career. Dead is a leading figure who thought outside the box, defying all norms. Dead is the Iraqi-born British architect who deconstructed the box, defying all norms. She was a genius with complete mastery of the design tools via which she was able to imagine and build complex, out-of-the-ordinary structures. Is that enough? My answer is no. For the architect, technical mastery and imaginative strength are one thing, but the philosophy that inspires and drives creative work is something else. As much as Zaha Hadid’s designs speak to her architectural mastery, they also speak to her struggle with the natural order of things. Her work expresses a belief in blind progress and technological advancement. Her work projects the fashionable trend of “deconstruction,” a mode of envisioning much different from deconstruction as philosophy. One cannot be a deconstructionist philosopher who believes in progress because the very philosophy of deconstruction calls progress into question. To be progressive is to follow norms and to have a telos grounded in some better future. In contrast, deconstruction defies norms, leaving one in a conceptual abyss. From my perspective, “deconstructivist” architecture is an unsacred blend of progress and rejection propelled by a hectic search for novelty. Zaha Hadid’s work expresses a wild novelty, coupled with a dismissal of tradition and a dissonance with nature. Consider her deconstruction of the box, which remains the predominant form of most buildings. It is true that many box-shaped buildings are lackluster and even boring, but it is also

true that many of the most pleasant houses and many of the most aesthetically powerful buildings are box-shaped. More accurately, however, it is the perpendicular angle that is questioned when “box” is used unflatteringly. The perpendicular angle has two significant features: first, it follows the force of gravity; second, it suggests, by its simple vertical division, a balance between what is present on either side. There is no escape from the perpendicular because the ground on which we build is perpendicular to the force of gravity. This quality is unique to the ninety-degree angle, and even our human bodies stand perpendicular to the ground. In this way, the right angle is the angle of balance and, existentially, the one angle binding earth and sky. It is the angle of the betweenness of earth and sky—a “natural”

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angle derived from the given physical order of things. Through variations on the perpendicular, architects can produce endless buildings, both prosaic and beautiful. The problem is not a limitation of the perpendicular, but an acceptance of the natural order of things. The problem is abiding in a right set of rules. One can argue that even Hadid’s buildings incorporate perpendicular angles, but they struggle to defy the invisible gravitational forces lurking within as structure rises above the ground toward the sky in a more encompassing perpendicularity. Hadid had succeeded in taming–or at least disguising—this perpendicular force, but for what purpose? For the titillating purpose of producing new shapes, defying limits, and making unusual, challenging spaces. But what is novelty? What is progress? What is delight and the unruly architecture her buildings provoke? What if progress and innovation are a myth? The word often used for innovation is “original,” which means “relating to a certain origin.” “Original” intimates a return to some foundational realm lost over time. To refute progress is to claim that all human creation can ever do is to represent— that is, to “re-present” this foundational realm in continuously new ways via renewal. I suggest that renewal is the architect’s aim—not progress and certainly not Hadid’s unsettling novelty. Renewal recaptures the genuine presence sustaining authentic dwelling in and around a building. Designing via renewal is impossible without understanding architectural tradition and envisioning new designs accordingly. This approach to architecture is not historicism or naïve postmodernism. It is not the act of mimicking old buildings or replaying their architec-

tural vocabulary. The aim of an architecture of renewal is not architectural edifice but architectural presence. If architectural renewal has a temporal aspect, it also has relationship to place. Like any other human endeavor, architecture is bound by time and space. We build in particular locations that relate in some way to particular traditions. We consider a building’s geographical context, including climate, landscape, elements of nature, and appropriate building materials and construction methods. How, via renewal, are these various environmental and architectural dimensions to be integrated suitably, even harmoniously, with the place where the building is to be? I would suggest that novelty is another myth that parallels the myth of progress. Some people are greatly drawn to the novel, even if it is kitsch, irrelevant, or even aggressive. Often, today, novelty is described by the ambiguous label “cool.” The architect’s primary aim, however, is not the new or the uncommon. For designers with strong imaginations and technical mastery, novel architecture is easy as Hadid’s oeuvre demonstrates. The more difficult, real kind of architecture relates to renewal, which in turn relates to what one believes. It is always easier to abandon rules or rebel against them than to abide by those rules and, as a result, be truly innovative. Another significant matter is technology, which does not necessarily contribute

to human happiness (as demonstrated by the current consumerist society too often severing individuals from their deeper selves). As a means to an end, technology is not to be celebrated for its own sake or claimed as a signpost of progress. The Alhambra, the Barcelona Pavilion, Fallingwater—these buildings utilize relatively modest technologies yet are some of most stunningly beautiful architecture ever accomplished. Related to technology is nature, which should not be a background of buildings but an encompassing “container” for all architectural work. Buildings should not simply coexist with nature but interpenetrate the natural world, bringing nature inside buildings and bringing buildings outside into nature. A good building incorporates the presence of nature. Nature also teaches about scale. By studying how the natural world draws on a remarkable range of environmental scales, we discover new forms and structural possibilities. Buildings can only harmonize with nature if architects respect and adopt the specific environmental scale of which their buildings are a part. A building that looks like a plant cell under the microscope will most likely not blend well environmentally, if it looks like a building at all! Zaha Hadid claimed to be inspired by nature but, in her jumbling inappropriate environmental scales, she produced buildings that might make sense as microscopic metaphor but appear odd and disjointed at human scale.

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Zaha Hadid was strong enough to realize projects that, for most architects, would be impossible. She fought for what she believed in and serves as an inspiration, especially for young female architects. At the same time, however, her actual buildings demonstrate a way of designing that mostly ignores the presence of architecture. Her designs undermine the authentic ways of building manifested in endless ways throughout human history. This way of building continues to be revealed via genuine renewal, provided we are not distracted by design fads like deconstruction or the myths of progress and technological salvation. I have written this essay as a reaction to the Western architectural press’s exaggerated, deceptive praise of Hadad’s work in recent obituaries. Seduced by her bewitching, out-of-the-world buildings, these writers speak of her architecture as “extraordinary” and “soaring” when, too often, it is rash, indulgent, and impractical (the uncouth walls and violent angles of her German fire station were so vexing that the firemen moved out and the building became an exhibition space!). Zaha Hadid may be dead, but the awkward, inappropriate, self-satisfied results of deconstructivist design continue via the work of architects like Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Rem Koolhaas. May architecture someday return to the call of an authentic architectural renewal

Images p. 10: Zaha Hadid, fire station, Vitra Campus, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1993; photograph by Peter Traub ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VitraFireStation-pjt1.jpg p. 11: Zaha Hadid, Library and Learning Center, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria, 2013; photograph by Peter Hass (note: rust-red building complex on right is the university’s Department 1 and Teaching Center, designed by architect Laura Spinadel, 2013); https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Campus _WU_LC_D1_TC_ DSC_1440w.jpg.

Moving a Boulder Paul Krafel Krafel is a naturalist, educator, and founder of the Chrysalis Charter School, a teacher-led, science-and-nature school in Palo Cedro, California. He is author of Seeing Nature (Chelsea Green, 1998), which describes in much greater detail the style of landscape restoration that Krafel illustrates here. This account originally appeared in issue 84 of Krafel’s newsletter, Cairns. See his website at http://krafel.info/. For a digital subscription to the newsletter, contact Krafel at [email protected]. © 2016 Paul Krafel.

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n old ranch road traverses the upper regions of the California watershed in which I live. The ruts of this road capture the many streamlets of water coming downslope and channel their flow toward the main watershed drainages. As I illustrated in Seeing Nature (1998), I look for places to lead this runoff away from the ruts and onto lower slopes where rainwater can slow down, spread, and be absorbed into the earth. It is hard, however, to find these intervention locations. The old ranch road was shaped by a road grader that scraped rocks and dirt into a berm defining the road’s downhill side. In the backbone of this berm were large boulders that I could not move. I found one likely spot where I might be able to open a narrow channel between two of these boulders but, unfortunately, I was not strong enough to move them alone. A few days later, I returned with a crowbar, expecting that I would easily be able to pry one of the boulders out of place. But I couldn’t. The boulders’ centers of gravity were down too deep; I could lift one of the boulders only an inch. No matter what angle or position I tried, the crowbar could lift the boulder no farther. I did not expect this situation and felt stymied. Eventually, I realized the problem. I was trying to move the boulder with only one pry. I gathered small stones. I pried up the boulder and slipped one stone under. Now the boulder was unable to return to its original position, and I could slide the crowbar underneath a bit farther. I lifted the boulder again, sliding another stone under its other side. I could slide the crowbar even farther in and lift the boulder a bit higher. I continued this action, moving around the boulder, prying from different angles and slipping stones beneath until the boulder’s center of gravity was above the mire into

which it had sunk. Then, with just my hands, I rolled the boulder out of the berm. This process seems a metaphor for how smaller changes can accumulate into a larger change seemingly impossible at the start. Each time I pass this boulder on my “rain walks,” the memory of the “play” of getting it to move inspires a smile. Just as important, the new channel I have cut directs a significant amount of water off the rutted road back onto the gentle slope below. I am amazed by how that downward slope absorbs the stream of water now redirected away from the road ruts. After a month of thirteen inches of rain, the water flowing through the channel spreads out and flows for only about twenty yards until it has all been absorbed into the earth. The ground was thirsty! Before I cut the channel, the water moved as one large flow along the old ranch road’s ruts to the main drainage and probably reached the Sacramento River within an hour. Now, because my intervention breaks it into smaller flows, the water settles in, absorbed by the ground, a mile upslope of the river. Ever since this old dirt road was graded decades ago, this downslope area has been deprived of the small flows of runoff that the road ruts have shunted away. Because of my simple intervention, this downslope area receives runoff once again. I see this kind of “play” with micro-topography as creating possibilities. Runoff that previously contributed exponentially to erosion, carrying soil particles to a lowerenergy state, is now able to rise up through the plants back into the sky to fall again. On its upward way, this water fuels photosynthesis that generates more plant surfaces, allowing the larger landscape to absorb more solar energy into the biosphere so that even more possibilities arise. I am curious to see what over time will emerge in response to my “play.”

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Moving and Ongoing Place Processes Stephen Wood Wood is an independent researcher in phenomenology and the environment. He studied systematic zoology at the University of Cambridge and has held an honorary fellowship in the Theoretical Physics Research Unit at Birbeck College, London. Wood and his wife recently purchased their first house, and this essay continues Wood’s efforts to explicate a “first-person phenomenology of moving and making a new home.” Wood’s earlier essay on the topic was published in the spring 2016 issue of EAP. [email protected]. © 2016 Stephen Wood.

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n an earlier essay, I introduced a firstperson phenomenology of moving to a new house in Avignon, France (Wood 2016). I emphasized the lived significance of embodied emplacement in a new environment’s becoming a home. The present essay is a complement to that earlier work. My aim is to interpret the experience of moving house as an ongoing process. Drawing on David Seamon’s efforts to describe place generatively (2012, 2014), I describe the delicate balance of the six place processes he identifies—interaction, identity, realization, release creation, and intensification. I consider how these six processes conflict or mutually reinforce one another in relation to my experience of making a new home. During the first six months in our new house, my wife and I worked hard to create a home that spoke of us and was comfortable and welcoming. We are a French-English couple and bought the house from an English teacher, who had purchased it from another French-English couple. We realized that the house has existed for many years before us and incorporated a certain “English” ambience that we have tried to respect. When we first viewed the house, a friend who accompanied us was struck by this ambience and told us that the house was for us. He particularly liked the ivy-covered garage with its look of a potting shed from a lost country garden. Other visitors pointed to the sash windows and to the house’s “cottagey” feel. We can see how the house’s unique ambience has guided our efforts for a certain “English” coziness—for example, covering the ground floor’s old-fashioned French tiling with oak or selecting a kitchen woodwork that contrasted with black hob and sink and hinted at a traditional English range. Unfortunately, we had to remove the garage ivy because it had not been cared for properly. Adding to that unfortunate event

was our inexperience in gardening and cold February winds. Our sense of place suffered and our hope of “fitting in” was not as strong as when we first occupied the house. We are proud of our efforts at renovating the kitchen but remain uncertain as to how we might adapt other rooms for our everyday needs. For example, an awkward bedroom niche cannot accommodate our wardrobe with the result that we are still unsure as to how we dispose our clothes. The ground-floor sitting room is pleasant in warmer weather, but a lack of insulation means that we mostly abandon the space in winter. We still wonder if the room would work better for dining. In short, this room is not yet fully part of us, and we are not yet able to appropriate it for its most suitable use. In some ways, the house works well but, in other ways, less so. We feel pleasure and accomplishment but also disappointment and uncertainty. In this essay, I seek to clarify some of the reasons why our experience of the new house has involved so many “ups and downs.” Specifically, I use Seamon’s six place processes as a framework to discuss our successes and difficulties. I consider the six processes in pairs: interaction/identity; creation/intensification; and realization/release. I briefly describe each place process in relation to our “making a home” experience, including responses from my wife, whom I asked a set of questions relating to each place process.

Place Interaction & Identity Seamon defined place interaction as the everyday lived dynamics of a place, including all actions, events, and situations involving contact among people or between people and material aspects of the place. One example is my getting used to our new kitchen, in which I found myself trying out various spatial and environmental relations. On one

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hand, I developed some relations consciously—for example, I reminded myself that we had installed deep drawers for our saucepans so I should look for them there when cooking. On the other hand, other kitchen relations unfolded with minimal conscious attention—for example, a “natural ergonomy” of the space immediately supported particular habitual situations like cutting vegetables next to the range because our glass cutting boards were on either side of the cooktop. In our former home, there had not been space for them there, but now they could have their “natural” place. One variation on these more habitual interactions with place was situations of “trial and error” whereby practices we had taken for granted in our former kitchen remained the same or shifted. Through a lifeworld testing of various interaction potentials in our new kitchen, we have adjusted to the new situation. One might say, with MerleauPonty (1962, pp. 138–39), that the kitchen has “become part of us.” The unfolding chain of interactions whereby my wife and I familiarized ourselves with our new house contribute to our growing attachment to place—what Seamon called place identification. Via this process, there are forged affective links between people and place. In simple actions like cooking, watching television, fetching things from garage storage, cycling to the train station, we and our new place become experientially interwoven and inseparable. Through these continuous interactions, we identify with our house and neighborhood, which become a home. One notes how this this intensifying lived connectedness is pointed to in my wife’s responses to questions I asked regarding place interaction and identity as follows.

Place Interaction Describe a day in the life of this house. What are the interactions that take place, the regular routines? How have these changed since moving in? Have they stabilized or not? Shutters to be opened every morning. Shutters are very important, they protect the house, they block out lights, sunshine. Closing them at night, feeling protected from intruders or from intrusive eyes. Airing the bedroom and other rooms for five minutes in the morning. Important to renew the air. Putting the heating on in the morning, turning it off at night. Taking the garbage bins out, taking them in. Picking up litter that has blown into the garden. Going to the garage, to take the bike into town. Checking that the doors are locked. Routines have settled, taken shape. The study couldn’t be used before, but now it can so its shutters are important. Opening them signals starting the day. Windows are the eyes of the house.

Place Identity What makes you feel attracted to this house? With which aspects do you identify? Which aspects express who you are? Is this house beginning to feel a part of you? If not, what do you think is stopping the process? Fell in love with the gardens, especially the creepers. Sacrificed the overgrown ivy, feel sad, too bare now, orphaned. Hopes of creating something else. Feel the house belongs to the bank. Mortgage interferes with feeling at home. Bedroom and clothes storage are still not working and don’t quite feel right. Wish could organize them better. Books put out—projection of me, my past, my intellectual wanderings. No dining table. Two sitting rooms, one of which is hardly used. Arrangement not what I would like—made me unhappy for a long time. Would like have the dining room next to the kitchen. I feel safe. I feel I can study, work on my project. I come up to the highest room, to the tower. I can separate the daily chores from study, house projects. Looking forward to the garden in the spring. Want it to be a project for both of us. Feel it would help me—

the therapeutic aspect interests me. Not exactly my house—just put there by mistake. Takes me time to feel at home, about a year. Proud to clean the house. Buying things— for example, chairs, garden furniture—has been great. Don’t feel I’ve relaxed yet, despite conscious efforts.

Place Realization & Release Seamon defined place realization as the process whereby a physical environment gains a lived quality of ambience and character— a situation that is slowly unfolding for our new house. One example is my shifting vision of what the sitting room could be. When we purchased the house, the sittingroom walls were coated in rough-plaster relief and painted orange. Because the room was dark, I envisioned its far end as a TV area, with our sofa across the facing wall, opposite the television. Helpful friends replastered the walls and painted them a light rose with the result that light now floods the room and draws attention to the outside garden greenery. When the movers brought in our sofa, they automatically placed it facing the window, an arrangement that immediately felt right. In turn, our beautiful oak sideboard-bookcase found its place behind the sofa and our piano at right angles to it. We had considering making a music room upstairs for the piano but ultimately decided that it should be in the sitting room where I could play and entertain guests. Placing the piano against the wall across from the sitting-room door shaped an open space underlining the value we place on live music and its role in communal gathering. The unexpected result was that the two main axes of the room came into being naturally—sofa to window and piano to door. At least partly, the sitting room realized itself! Seamon also identified place release, which relates to the environmental serendipity that a robust place can evoke. Thanks to the good disposition of space and window in our sitting room, the piano has found its place. I have since played better than ever, discovering new songs and understanding old ones with an unasked-for clarity. I also greatly enjoy my new study that provides a dedicated workspace contributing to an invigorated creativity of thought. In this sense, the strength of place realization has encouraged place release, allowing us to move more deeply into ourselves via unexpected

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moments of insight, understanding, and pleasure.

Place Realization What is it about this house that we can’t change, that has resisted over time? Is this quality strong? Does it need cultivating? Is there something you could point to that expresses the palpable presence of this place? Orientation: Traditionally built, south facing, few windows on the north side, appropriately sized garden with respect to the house. Protects the house from the strong mistral winds, creates a sheltered courtyard. Should respect the intelligence of the original design, not creating openings on the north side. Two houses in one, two logics. High ceiling, tall windows vs farmhouse, smaller rooms. Maybe incorporated older buildings that weren’t meant to be inhabited? The staircase in the middle has been added later. Maybe it was a barn. Bathroom was formerly a bedroom—hence it is large for a bathroom. Large shower, no bath. North wall is a corridor, so the bedroom doesn’t abut the north wall. There is insulating air between the north wall and the bedroom. History: Where the hair salon is now there was formerly a dairy called Le Bon Lait. The shop has existed for a long time. Our occupation is part of a continuity. Location: Within walking distance of the town, proximity, don’t feel far from the city walls. 7–10 minutes on foot, 4 minutes by bike.

Place Release What are the happy accidents that have happened in this house, unexpected pleasures, surprises? What has made you feel more “you” in this place? The cat that came in, even upstairs. We live in the cat’s house. Looking at the rose bush from the kitchen. Working in the study, feeling free to launch my business project. Piano sounds good, has its place. Ivy, but now it’s gone.

Place Creation & Intensification Place creation involves efforts whereby people intentionally intervene in some way to improve place, while place intensification

refers to the active way that physical aspects of place, being one way rather than another, can make that place better or worse. One house example is the movers’ placing a metal TV cabinet beneath the sitting-room window. At first it seemed right there, though it wasn’t usable for the television because of its window location. Unfortunately, the cabinet collected a bric-a-brac of objects, and we never knew what to put in it. Eventually, I removed the cabinet and substituted, under the window, a set of oak shelves that complemented the oak sideboard-bookcase on the other side of the room. The oak shelves made sense in the room and made sense of the room. Both place creation and place intensification are at work in this example. The movers’ placing the metal cabinet beneath the window was an attempt at place creation but turned out to be a poor design decision because of ill-fitting parts that interfered with the room’s ambience. We had not been sensitive to the spirit of the room and had “misread” its needs and ours. Our second attempt at creating place was replacing the metal cabinet with the oak shelves, which contributed to the room’s ambience and enlivened the place experience. These shelves intensified place in a positive way, offering themselves as a means to improve the room’s convenience and beauty. In this sense, place intensification is the test of place creation. If, on one hand, the environmental element undermines place, then it can be judged as unhelpful rather than creative, and the element is best rethought and changed. If, on the other hand, the environmental element strengthens place, it can be judged creative in that it integrates itself into place and contributes to its sustenance.

Place Creation

years ago. Needed more work surface, more light, not convenient. Modern look, more work surface, more cupboards. Removing the overhead cupboards, removing the claustrophobic feel, bringing in more light. Rationalized previous changes, improved the plumbing, brought it up to date. Light, airy, enjoy the view of the garden. Hygienic, removed decking that covered an old septic tank. No risk of cockroaches. Would like a wood stove—so far hasn’t worked. Possible solution to knock through beneath the staircase and put the stove there, with the flue exiting on the north side, reusing the placement of the original stove. Friends and family insist on a conservatory, to be able to benefit from the winter sun and be protected from the mistral wind. But it would disrupt the balance of the garage, garden, and the house. Each takes up one third of the plot.

has cleared dead leaves and sown seeds for a Japanese meadow. In the evening, we frequently sit in the garden and watch the visiting birds. I observed a blackbird singing from the top of a tree next door and, for the first time, associated this bird with its song. Three sparrows squabbled in a nearby tree before flying off to the neighbor’s garden. We laughed at the uncanny ability of the finches to spot recently planted patches and feast on freshly sown seeds. The renewed charm of the garden has been an unlooked-for gift. Our sense of losing the ivy has lifted. We feel able to relate to the garden and to develop skills to tend it. We are understanding the constraints of the garden’s realization—the constraints of drainage, of soil depth, of sun and shade. We have made our first garden purchases—a cherry tree, an eggplant, a camellia, local aromatics—and planted them as our fancy takes us. We wait to see if the Place Intensification earth confirms or opposes our creations. What features of the house, as we have im- Thanks to the garden, life is good and we are proved it, lead us and our guests to live and released into better versions of ourselves. enjoy the house better? Wooden floors downstairs create an inviting References warmth. The contrast of off white tones in Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962. Phenomenology the kitchen and living room—sable, rose— of Perception. NY: Humanities Press. are restful, calming. Seamon, D. 2012. Place, Place Identity, and Seeing our books—our personalities— Phenomenology, in H. Casakin and F. Berdisplayed in the study invite discussions nardo, eds., The Role of Place Identity in with fellow book lovers. Table in the middle the Perception, Understanding, and Deof the study, for special dinners, creates an sign of the Built Environment (pp. 1–25). impression London: Bentham Science. Seamon, D. 2014. Place Attachment and Phenomenology, in L. C. Manzo & P. Garden Coda Now in April, spring has come to our gar- Devine-Wright, eds., Place Attachment: den. Bulbs are producing flowers, buds, and Advances in Theory, Method and Applicasmall leaves are sprouting on the bushes. tions (pp. 11–22). NY: Routledge. The plum tree has blossomed and the wiste- Wood, S., 2016. Moving: Remaking a Liferia was the first in the neighborhood to world. Environmental and Architectural flower in beautiful watercolor shades of pur- Phenomenology, 27 (1), 14–17.

ple. The wild rose with its delicate pink flowers adorns the kitchen window. With warmer weather, we have been working in the garden. I have removed the last remains of dead ivy from the garage wall. A new vine brings forth striking wineFocused on two rooms. Kitchen was not red flowers, and a bushy peony has filled in practical, dark. Erased previous owners’ in- some of the space left by the removed ivy, put on the walls, what was fashionable 20 making the garage wall less bare. My wife How have we actively improved the house? How have we made it more practical and strengthened its charm and attractiveness? Are there any improvements or ideas for improvements that didn’t work and why?

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A Deepening Intersubjectivity Eleventh Letter from Far South John Cameron Retired environmental educator John Cameron lives with his life partner Vicki King, on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state south of mainland Australia. His first ten “Letters from Far South” have appeared in EAP, winter and fall 2008; spring 2009; winter and fall 2010; spring 2011; winter and fall 2012; spring 2014; and fall 2015. [email protected]. © 2016 John Cameron. Artistic works and photographs © 2016 Victoria King.

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he stages of place-making are not always clearly defined, but it seems that the initial phase of establishing ourselves at Blackstone and almost exclusively committing ourselves to a life of custodianship here has ended. We have had a growing involvement in activities on the island that has taken us beyond our single focus of the early years. This sense of an ending prompts to me to ask: In what ways has our relationship with Blackstone changed over the eight years that we have been here?

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e moved to Bruny with high expectations that we would be able to put into practice what we had taught, with high ideals about living a more sustainable, low-impact lifestyle and with high hopes for a quieter, more retreat-like existence. I wrote in my diary in the first month after our arrival: “The place demands it of us, that we lead strong, clean, simple lives.” Some of these aims have been met, but there have also been arduous challenges that we had not anticipated. Living more within our ecological means has entailed a sober assessment of our physical and psychological limitations masked by our enthusiasm for the project. The discipline that would have been required for a contemplative retreat has instead been needed for sustained attention to mind, body, and place while working on the land each day. Paying more attention to the workings of my mind has made me more aware of habitual patterns of thought and attitude that get in the way of deeper relationship with Vicki and with the more-than-human world. The more I let myself become overwhelmed by

what needed to be done at Blackstone and my sense of technical incompetence, the more I saw the land as a never-ending source of problems and tasks rather than as a gathering of living entities with which to engage, and the less emotionally accessible I was to Vicki. When I resisted seeing the weeds that were right in front of me and resented Vicki for pointing them out, I blinded myself to what the land had to show me. I finally admitted to her and to myself that I was in just as much a mess emotionally as the land was physically. I could see the parallel between what happened in the paddocks when the suppression of sheep grazing was lifted and what happened to my mental state when the structure of full-time employment and a semi-suburban lifestyle was removed. The

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result has been a beneficial messiness in both cases, richer biodiversity in the fields and a more open and realistic relationship with Vicki whereby we can both acknowledge our hopes and fears. In this sense, being more responsive to the land has opened up more rewarding opportunities for our life together. Out of our dismay over the grazier shooting wallabies on our land came the rewarding project of providing sanctuary for wildlife. Taking up what the place has offered in physical terms—seaweed and hay for the veggie bed, driftwood for Vicki’s sculptures, earth pigments for her paintings, old fencing materials for reuse—has led to a far more satisfying relationship with the material world than simply being consumers. Taking ownership of the “sod hut” land has given us a more meaningful sense of being custodians. The more I opened myself to the sorrow and past ill-treatment of the land and the Nuenone people, the more I felt the connection between our human frailty and the vulnerability of the place to climate change. The deeper our affiliation with Blackstone, the richer our creative lives together have been, with new avenues for visual and written expression opening up all the time.

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here have also been changes on the land. Last winter was wet and mild, the grass has grown phenomenally and crowded out the thistles. I realized how thick the grass was when I was diverted from my close inspection of the fence by a sudden movement in front of me. A tiger snake had been sunning itself on a branch above the chest-high grass in a gully through which I had been wading, and in its

efforts to escape from my approach, it slid over the top of the grass. It was an arresting sight, reminding me of desert snakes traversing sand dunes in which there is as much sideways movement as forward progress. After my pulse rate settled down again—tiger snakes are highly venomous although they seldom attack—I examined the dense grass at ground level and could understand why the snake had made its getaway over the grass rather than through it. The grass stalks were so coarse they were like a thicket of sticks. I would not want to try to wriggle my way rapidly through them. Nevertheless, I trod more carefully thereafter.

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t has been a mixed story with our planted trees. More than half have flourished in such a good season, but the rest are a painful sight up close. The eucalypts have been savaged, the main stems snapped off or dangling forlornly in half, red sap oozing from the wounds. Aphids, ants, and tiny beetles swarm over the gashes, feasting. The leaves are covered in an amazing assortment of caterpillars, beetles, spiders, and leaf gall insects. I collected one four-inch long Eucalyptus ovata leaf that had fifty-one galls on it covering more than ninety percent of the surface. Some of the trees did not have a single intact leaf left. It took me a while to piece the story together. The trees are now large enough for a possum to climb up to reach the tender tips but not strong enough to bear a possum’s weight. Once a stem or branch broke, wallabies reached up and browsed on the leaves, opening the wound further for sap-sucking insects. The moist and mild season promoted insect growth, and once their natural defenses were weakened, the trees were more vulnerable to attack. The planted areas are by definition some distance away from the native bushland where insectivorous birds, the insects’ natural predators, live [1]. I felt a spurt of rage at the “bloody possums”—it really did look like wanton destruction of my six years of hard work. On reflection, however, I realized that, like all creatures, the possums were merely looking for food. Nature is

not sentimental, and I could not have it both ways. Sometimes the forces in the land could work together to support our endeavors (see letter 6), but equally those forces could combine to broach any weakness in the system.

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had other reasons for shaking my fist at the possums. We noticed that our fruit trees were slow to come into leaf and our newly-planted vegetables were looking distinctly chewed. Then one morning I saw pale grey fur where a possum had clearly got caught in the fence while climbing over it. Reluctantly, we concluded that the floppy fence protecting our fruit and vegetables for several years was no longer working. Months of frustration ensued. I added another thickness of chicken wire. We raised the height of the fence. I put a metal contraption around one tree that the possums had been using as a launching pad to leap over the fence. I put a solar panel and electrical wire around the veggie bed. All to no avail. Every time our fruit trees put out a few new leaves, they would be eaten back and another slender branch would be broken. Local friends nodded sympathetically. “It takes possums a couple of years, and then they work out how to get in. You have to trap them and relocate them. We all do.” It was sorely tempting. The veggie bed had been a source of great pleasure and one of our favorite things to do outside together. Yet possums are part of the wildlife, just as much inhabitants of Blackstone as we are.

Transporting a territorial creature to another terrain was cruel and possibly fatal. Our decision not to trap was confirmed when it emerged that quite a few people on South Bruny were trapping possums and releasing them up north, probably passing on the road North Bruny drivers taking their trapped possums south. Faced with the absurdity of this mass transport, we decided only to plant those vegetables that the possum did not eat, a plan that we are still fine-tuning.

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ortunately, we continue to have wholly unproblematic sightings of Blackstone fauna to keep up our spirits. After lunch one day, Vicki noticed an unusual congregation of cormorants on the shore, and we approached quietly for a closer look. Normally, we would see at most three cormorants emerge from the water at any one time, holding their wings outstretched to dry like ragged black laundry on a crooked clothesline. This time Vicki counted thirty birds sunning themselves on a rock platform, sitting and lying about in a very relaxed fashion. Among them were a Pacific gull and “our” heron (see letter 1). The sight brought a delighted smile to our faces, suggesting an avian tableau that might be entitled, “After the Feast.” I surmised that the birds had entrapped a large school of fish and all had gorged themselves to contentment. One morning I was resting on the steps of the uppermost shed when a peregrine falcon glided above my head, breezed over to the big white peppermint gum on the crest of the slope. He started chattering and kept it up as I worked my way down the fence line, putting in wooden stakes to keep the wires taut. The peregrine began calling “waak, waak, waak,” and I heard an answering “chuckchuck” in the distant sky. Call and response ensued: “Waak-chuckchuck,” “waakchuckchuck.” Male and female falcons met in midair, circled each other, and swooped off westward. I felt exalted by this pair who inhabited the heavens so effortlessly. When I described the experience to Vicki, I associated it with the two of us meeting and inhabiting this extraordinary place.

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n response to our deepening sense of affiliation with the birdlife here, Vicki’s studio practice has evolved further. Her

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driftwood birds have always been accompanied by occasional human-like spirit figures, but she has begun to fuse them into what she calls her “bird-women.” I have been carrying a succession of found-wood sculptures to the top shed because there is no more room in her working studio. There are now several dozen bird-women gathered there, taller than I, and powerful presences neither simply human nor avian but with the qualities of both: spare, focused, soaring yet grounded. Among the paintings she works on currently is a pair of Masked Owls (Tyto novaehollandiae castanops) that stop me in my tracks every time I pass them. Eerie, lit from within, they are distinctly people, while remaining owls. I was struck the other day that they and the bird-women make tangible the phrase “the more-than-human-world.” They eloquently convey the realm where boundaries between species blur, where birds have human-like qualities and vice versa, and people contain all the voices and images of the denizens of the earth they encounter.

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here have also been changes in how we relate to our “familiars,” the creatures that frequent the area immediately around and underneath our house. Tree

martins (Hirundo nigricans) roost in increasing numbers in the rafters above the veranda. The parents skim over our heads in the evening, bringing insects back to their young. Woodland birds flock in increasing numbers to our watering bowls, and a pair of magpies live in the large black peppermint tree above the end of our road, warbling melodiously. Two young Eastern quolls, normally nocturnal animals, started coming up onto our deck while it was still light [2]. I discovered the faint trail that one quoll took to the house through the grass and Xanthorrhea leaves, and a small hole up from under the house where the other lives. Vicki photographed a

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delightful sequence of a little dark quoll exploring my Wellington boot and falling inside. The images were circulated on the Internet, and we had a stream of inquiries from people who never knew that such a marvel as a polka-dotted marsupial cat existed. A family of pademelons (Thylogale billiardierii), small rounded macropods that bounce about like rubber balls, took to grazing each evening on the luxurious grass below the water tank next to our house. An unlikely friendship developed between one of our resident quolls and a young pademelon. One day I rounded the corner to see the two of them leaping about together near the front steps. The next week we heard a strange skittering sound on the veranda and looked out to see the pademelon hopping about on the wooden decking, with the quoll close by, presumably having persuaded his friend to explore this new territory together. As they grew more comfortable on the deck, the pademelon began grazing on our straw welcome mat, and the quoll rubbed its back against the leg of our wooden bench in a very feline manner. These interactions have a very different quality from our earlier wildlife encounters in the field—more do-

mestic and everyday, but still evoking wonderment. We are not trying to tame the quoll or the pademelon, since they are wild creatures with their own will and agency. But we are delighted that they are including us and our home in their habitat. It seems somehow appropriate that, at a time when I am thinking more about human family and place relationships, some of our animal companions are becoming more familiar with us.

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he greatest changes in recent years have been our growing participation in environmental activities involving the whole island. We helped organize BIEN’s first Bruny Island Bird Festival, which was by far the most ambitious event our little group had undertaken [3]. Bruny Island is home to ten of the twelve species of endemic Tasmanian birds, including the highly endangered Forty-spotted pardalote (Pardalotus quadragintus). Being an island with substantial areas of relatively intact native vegetation, Bruny provides good birdwatching opportunities. We wanted to celebrate the unique birdlife on Bruny, so a group of us under the leadership of Marg Graham, the Secretary and a mainstay of BIEN, put together a packed three-day program with birding trips, local wildlife walks, talks by specialists, a gala festival dinner, and bird-kite making for children. Vicki coordinated a bird-themed art exhibition in the Adventure

and its wild inhabitants was spreading farther and farther afield. Our speakers from Birds Australia commented that it was the best regional bird festival they had been to Bay Hall, the main festival venue, and I had and urged us to make it a regular event. plenty of work to do on the festival organizn various ways over the last three years, ing committee. We had no idea how many BIEN has promoted a discussion of clipeople would attend but, with the support of mate change on Bruny Island. I had conBirds Tasmania and Birds Australia, we ducted a survey of islanders’ attitudes tospread the word widely [4]. It was wonderful being part of a team of ward the effect of global warming on island islanders working together for a major envi- life. I wrote up the results in an article in the ronmental event, and the Festival was a Bruny News, the local newspaper. We generated enough interest to organize great success. Severa hundred people from Tasmania, mainland Australia, and even a follow-up workshop covering the likely overseas came to the opening, overwhelm- effects of rising air and sea temperatures on ing the caterers who had prepared a low-key island life. As one of the outcomes, a group of us explored the possibility of installing barbecue. Vicki used her curatorial experience to as- solar hot-water heating on more houses on semble a marvelous exhibition, juxtaposing the island to reduce electricity bills and carphotographs of soaring eagles with intimate bon footprint. After lengthy discussions with suppliers drawings of scrubwrens, funky mosaic sculptures of penguins, luminous oil paint- and installers, we presented our information ings of parrots, and a wealth of children’s and results to a gathering of forty islanders; art. The exhibition generated a calm, cele- twenty attendees signed up for installation. bratory space at the heart of the Festival that I was gratified to see new faces present and manifested the spirit of Bruny, its inhabit- spoke with them at lunch afterward. Wary of the divisions that had been ants, and wildlife. When I was master of ceremonies for the caused by past environmental conflict on the festival dinner several nights later, I looked island, they had avoided other BIEN events out over the faces of islanders and visitors but had been attracted this time because of from afar surrounded by images of birds on the practical focus and sense of collective the walls and had a palpable sense that what effort. A few months later, we received an had started very locally in the love of a place unexpected acknowledgement when a wellknown conservative islander rose to his feet

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during a community meeting and proposed a vote of thanks to BIEN for their constructive efforts. Soon after, we organized an evening in conjunction with the Bruny Island Film Society in which we showed a film about the Transition Towns movement, a community-based response to global warming and peak oil that has spread worldwide in the past seven years [5]. I had been sufficiently interested in the combination of local practical action, fostering resilience and skill-building to attend the first Transition training weekend held in Tasmania, where I found many ideas and group processes in common with Social Ecology. Subsequently, I visited the headquarters of the movement in Totnes in Devon, UK [6].

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fter the film, I outlined what I knew of the Transition movement and my impressions of Totnes. Following, there was a lively commentary on the differences between the old English market towns where Transition was flourishing and a sparsely populated Tasmanian island. While there is a culture of self-reliance on Bruny and to some degree a rejection of consumerism, it is difficult to function without a car on an island sixty kilometers long with very few on-island shops and services and no public transport. Many people were concerned about the lack of a critical mass of concerned citizenry and a dedicated core group to generate public events, coordinate working groups, and liaise with local council and community groups. On the other hand, BIEN was already undertaking some of these activities, such as the solar hot-water project, the workshop on global warming, informal discussions with local council, and involvement in carpooling and food-buying cooperatives. At the end of the evening, we decided to “put our toe in the water” and indicate our interest in joining the Transition Network. I left the meeting with mixed feelings. It had been a stimulating event, but I was troubled by absence of any mention of non-human life. This dimension of the problem was of course implicit in the motivation for action on climate change. I knew that many of our colleagues in BIEN shared our concern

over the already visible effect of warming on Bruny environments and their non-human inhabitants. Part of what I learnined on Blackstone, however, was that human actions are best undertaken in partnership with natural forces, and a place will make it clear what needs to be done if one is quietly attentive to it. It is inextricably part of daily life, extending well beyond questions of general motivation. “It’s not just all about people,” I muttered to myself. Would the evening’s conversation have benefited from consideration of such matters, even if I had known how to introduce them?

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ow that we are entering a new phase of our life on Bruny, involved in many more island-wide activities, I carry with me the questions of what I have learned about place relations from our time on Blackstone so far and to what extent it has relevance for the work of BIEN on climate change and broader environmental advocacy. There is also the question of how I might communicate these various understandings meaningfully. When I began these essays, I understood that Vicki and I were participating in an unfolding three-way relationship with this

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place that had many dimensions— physical, spiritual, affective, and creative. This no longer feels like an adequate description. It does not do justice to the depth and mysterious aspects of these interwoven relationships. Our resident heron has been a powerful if elusive figure in our lives ever since it guided us to Blackstone. The fact that, unlike many other creatures, it has shown no sign of letting us approach more closely is part of its power. There have been many numinous occurrences and a strange alchemy among the rocks, waters, plants, wild creatures, and ourselves while we have been on Bruny. Even the prosaic matter of aligning our efforts with Blackstone’s regenerative forces through observing growth and regrowth patterns has given rise to the feeling that the source of our own vitality is being restored as well, and our mutual partnership is intertwined with partnership with the land. At the same time, however, recent events have shown that there is no room for sentimentality in this venture. The combination of seasonal factors, animal browsing, and insect attacks led to setbacks in our project of restoring trees, just as our sense of wellbeing was sapped.

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f “three-way relationship” is no longer a good description, then what is? Rereading philosopher David Abram has given me a way forward in my thinking. He notes that the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, thought of all interactions between a person and the world that surrounds them as occurring between subjects. In Abram’s words: “That tree bending in the wind, the cloud drifting overhead: these are not merely subjective; they are intersubjective phenomena—phenomena experienced by a multiplicity of sensing subjects” [7]. This perspective is a radical interpretation of intersubjectivity, which usually refers to shared meanings and consensus between people or the process of psychological energy moving between people. An intersubjective space can occur within a group of people working intensely together in which

individual identities and personal boundaries may blur, and a sense of collectively-held purpose and identity emerge. Philosopher Val Plumwood takes the issue further. In her view, “earth others,” as she terms them, are not merely “sensing subjects.” They have intentionality and communicative powers but not necessarily human-like agency and communication.

our lives here have become. The manifold gifts of place continue to flow and grace our lives.

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hat does it mean—agency and the capacity to undertake purposive action that is not necessarily human-like? This is rephrasing a question I have grappled with ever since the heron first “guided” us here. There can be little doubt that, motivated by her own curiosity, the wedge-tailed eagle was investigating me, and I shifted from my human-centeredness when I recognized that I was the object of a large wild creature’s gaze. On a different scale, the Eastern quolls clearly consider us to be worthy of interest now that they have become more accustomed to us. They do not have human-like agency; the power of the interaction comes from their being Other, being non-human. They are approaching us of their own accord, albeit clearly being pleased to partake of our oyster shells and lamb bones [8]. When Plumwood writes of the “etiquette of interspecies encounter” and the “offering of relationship to earth others,” she offers a fruitful way of thinking about relations between species [9]. Leaving aside the vexing question of whether certain species have subjectivity as humans understand it, I think there can be an intersubjective space between people and non-human place inhabitants [10]. If two people are open to each other and to the life around them, with mutual attention and respect over time, boundaries blur; it sometimes becomes less clear and less important which person or creature caused events to occur. A sense of something larger than any one being emerges, a field of care encompassing all inhabitants,

human and non-human, sentient and nonsentient.

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his field of care is a more satisfying description of what has transpired for Vicki and me at Blackstone, which seems not so much a collection of beings and locations but, more so, a nexus of relationships in which we participate and are continually changed. Much of the time we all go about our business as usual, but with a subtly developing feeling of interconnectedness. During pivotal encounters, however, it becomes impossible to say where intentions, actions, and identities of eagles, herons, quolls, humans, wind, and waters begin and end. It is the realm that Vicki evokes powerfully with her paintings and sculptures. I am now ready to relinquish the phrase “three-way relationship” in favor of a “deepening intersubjectivity and field of care” between all who dwell on Blackstone, human and non-human alike. Has our life together been enriched, as Plumwood suggests, by adopting such a “recognition stance” toward nature? Unquestionably so, and not only because we may not have stayed together if it were not for our immersion in the more-than-human world on Bruny. The more we have opened ourselves to a reciprocal relationship with herons, eagles, and the other inhabitants of Blackstone, the richer and more meaningful

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ur resident quolls are becoming bolder. Last week on our veranda, three of us from BIEN had a meeting with the local council environmentalservices manager. We were deep in discussion of invasive weed control when a fawncolored quoll came around the corner, head down, sniffing for anything edible until she came within a foot of us and froze. She stood on hind paws, nose twitching, then scampered away. My visitors were astounded that a normally nocturnal quoll would venture out in the middle of the afternoon, unfazed by the sound of our voices. Several evenings later, she reappeared when Vicki and I were sitting out after dinner. Again, she came within a foot of the table and halted. We exchanged glances and remained motionless as she skittered closer and stood up, putting a paw on my foot that was only clad in a light sock. Contact! It was an edgy sort of contact, delight at feeling that touch of a wiry claw tinged with the knowledge that those razorsharp teeth could make mincemeat of my toes. As the quoll stood up, Vicki noticed small abdominal bumps. Our quoll definitely was a “she” and carrying young in her pouch. No wonder she was so hungry. Our more-thanhuman family is growing. I cherish the fertile intersubjective relationships we have with this place, and I trust that they will continue to sustain and challenge us as they have done ever since we followed a heron in a canoe on the waters of the d’Entrecasteaux Channel.

Notes 1. This is ironic, bearing in mind that the major purpose of planting these trees was to provide food and shelter for the endangered insectivorous birds. Our experience highlights the hazards of intervening in any ecosystem, introduced or not. 2. The Eastern quoll, Dasyurus viverrinus, is a polka-dotted cat-sized carnivorous marsupial that is common in parts of Tasmania, including North Bruny Island but extinct in mainland Australia. There are two color morphs; fawn with white spots, and,

less commonly, black with white spots. 3. BIEN, the Bruny Island Environment Network, began a few years ago when a group of islanders organized an island-wide network for coordinating local environmental activities. I am currently Deputy Convenor of the Network. 4. Australia’s leading bird conservation organization. 5. “Transition” refers to the phased transition to a low-carbon economy via an Energy Descent Action Plan negotiated with local governments and other stakeholders accompanied by efforts toward community resilience. From its base in Totnes, the Transition Network now includes several hundred initiatives in dozens of countries; see www.transitionnetwork.org. 6. In fact, the weekend was facilitated by two Social Ecology graduates. 7. D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (NY: Vintage, 1996), p. 38. 8. Unlike domestic animals, which have

very different types of relationship with humans, based on dependence, interdependence, control, working partnerships, or exploitation. 9. She is not the only prominent eco-philosopher to consider such matters. Freya Mathews writes of “the revelatory effects on individual consciousness of intersubjective contact with the world at large” (For Love of Matter (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 43. 10. Plumwood considers that they do, but philosopher Jeff Malpas argues that they do not (J. Malpas, The Experience of Place, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999, p. 96 and pp. 138-56). There are cogent arguments on both sides of this question, depending upon what exactly is meant by “having subjectivity,” and either claim is difficult to demonstrate or disprove definitively. Ravens, dolphins, and many primates have demonstrated behavior consistent with self-recognition, which is often considered to be part

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of subjectivity, but this interpretation is contested. Surely, there is a spectrum of subjectivity within nature, just as there probably is a spectrum of consciousness.

Images by Vicki King p.16: Tasmania Masked Owls, oil on wood panel, 2015. p.17: “Birdwomen” I, 2015. p.18: “Birdwomen” II, 2015. p.18: Photographic sequence, quoll and boot. p.19, upper left: Swift Parrots, endangered species; oil on wood panel, 2015. p.19, center: Swift Parrots II, endangered species; oil on wood panel, 2015. p.19, upper right: Grey Fantail, watercolor and gouache on paper, 2015. p.20: Crimson Robin, watercolor and gouache on paper, 2015. p.21: Superb Fair Wrens, oil on wood panel, 2015.