There is a picture in a book called ‘Eye and Brain’ by Richard Gregory of a baby in a room and the floor is chequered in black and white. On one half of the floor there is a sheet of glass, and the exposed piece of glass is edged in a plastic strip, the other half is just the chequered floor covering. The baby is placed on the half of the floor which is not covered by glass, and left to crawl around, but no matter what encouragement the baby is given it will not cross the glass. The baby perceives the glass as being another plane and therefore will not risk crossing it in case it were to fall. This is an example of the way that our brain can trick us into believing that a situation is not what it seems.
The fact that we are preconditioned through our own personal histories means that when we enter into a space the way we read it often depends on the emotional connections that we assign to given aspects of the experience. For the baby the glass was understood as a step or a stair from which it would fall and this translated to emotions would mean an accident and the subsequent hurt. Any grown up would be not be fooled by this illusion. When we can gain control of our senses then we are able to judge situations clearly. No matter what our history is we will always have preconceptions, and interpret things in a personal way, our own set of transcripts running in our brains at any given moment. That said if all of these transcripts with all their different stories could be expressed in terms of physical objects, we would all be carrying literally loads of baggage, with each object relating to another ad-infinitum.
This is kind of related to what I am reading at the moment, Sexuality and Space edited by Beatriz Colomina, Her paper is titled The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. The book talks about architecture of the 20th century. It especially focuses on the idea of gendered spaces, be they perceived, photographic or physical, and how spaces were designed for use with both, the male and the female in mind.
It goes further on to describe the way spaces were even designed with exclusivity in mind, separating the man and the woman by assigning each space that they would naturally gravitate towards, for arguments sake the kitchen for the woman and the garage for the man. It also goes on to say that because it was mainly men studied architecture, buildings were mostly designed by men, for men and by men for women. Which meant that the architects would often design with themselves in mind, not addressing the need to transcend the space in between. Although somewhat contentious this is an idea explored in the book.
In this essay she compares the architecture of La Corbusier (1887 -1965) and Adolf Loos. (1870-1933) Loos is obsessed with an architecture that looks inwards, focussing on the design of the interior.
“The house does not have to tell anything to the exterior, instead all it’s richness must be manifest in the interior.” (pg. 94)
Using the human ‘gaze’ as a tool, Loos is able to control the perception of space. Putting the spectator at odds with themselves due to the way the building (Loos) dictates movements. With this aspect to his architecture Loos becomes the invisible hand that guides the movement within his spaces.
"Like the placement of the "theatre box" at the periphery of the Müller House, from which a view of the exterior demands a view through the interior, the inhabitants of Loos's houses become both actors and spectators. Loos locates architecture at the mirror stage, at the threshold between the pre-castration comfort of the womb and the subsequent tension of split-subjectivity. Indeed, in the Moller and Müller Houses, the male space--the library--is positioned apart from the household traffic, whereas the female space--the upper room--not only concludes but overlooks a sequence of social spaces. The female figure thus becomes the guardian of the private. Colomina further notes the proximity of mirrors to doors in Loos's Tristan Tzara house, which recalls the framed mirror hanging against the window at Freud's studio in Berggasse 19. Both function to conflate inside and outside, where the reflection in the mirror is also a self-portrait projected onto the external world."
Extract from: The Mask of Architecture. Christoper Ho. Performing Arts Journal 19.3 (1997) 107-110
In Colomina's essay she shows Corbusier’s photographic advertisements for his own houses. There is an interesting paragraph where Beatriz Colomina analyses these photographs.
“We could accumulate more evidence. Few photographs of Le Corbusier’s buildings show people in them. But in those few, women always look away from the camera: most of the time they are shot from the back and they almost never occupy the same space as men. Take the photographs of Immeuble Clarte in the Oeuvre complete, for example. In one of them, the woman and the child are in the interior, they are shot from the back facing the wall; the men are in the balcony, looking out, toward the city (figure 26). In the next shot, the woman, again shot from the back, is leaning against the window to the balcony and looking at the man and child who are on the balcony (figure 27). This spatial structure is repeated very often, not only in the photographs but also in the drawing of La Corbusier’s projects. In a drawing of the Wagner project, for example, the woman in the upper floor is leaning against the veranda, looking down at her hero, the boxer who is occupying the jardin suspendu. He looks at his punching bag. And in the drawing Ferme radieuse, the woman in the kitchen looks over the counter to the man sitting at the dining room table. He is reading the newspaper. Here again the woman is placed “inside,” the man “outside,” the woman looks at the man, the man at the “world.” Extract from: Sexuality and Space, The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism. Beatriz Colomina pg. 104
This shows that spaces, gendered or otherwise can be designed in a way so as subtly affect the emotional experience of the spectator. I find it especially interesting to see the way women were marginalised in such a way that excluded them from engagement in the more serious world of men and their newspapers. Looking at space with this psychological twist highlights interesting things, including architecture and politics, when considering monumental architecture like palaces or the ‘Houses of Parliament’ you have to wonder what were the motivating choices behind the designs.
I find this image from a recent exhibition (‘Psycho Buildings’ The Hayward Gallery 2008) really amazing. It is eerie and dreamlike, making 'possible' out of 'impossible'.
“The space I’m interested in is not only a physical one, but an intangible, metaphorical and psychological one. For me, space is that which encompasses everything. So in that sense, one could say that my art looks at diverse forms and media through the prism called reflection on space.” Do Ho Suh, *1962 Seoul, South Korea
http://www.tba21.org/program/current/63/artworks/555?category=current
Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
