January 21, 2021

Performing

(Using)

“The best designs are those that dissolve into behavior.” Naoto Fukasawa “At the level of the symbolic, architecture is a machine that produces meanings.” Levi Bryant

“…The first French windows were used in the early hotels of Paris.  Once you entered your hotel room the first thing you were inclined to do was to open the window.  The French “door” - which has two outward swinging leaves - required you to grab the latch of each leaf and swing them out and away from you.  The designer of that simple window just required you, on your first visit to Paris, by the simple motion you just performed by opening your hotel window, to embrace the city of Paris.  In a word, amazing.” (Enck)

Falling in love with places and spaces is integral to our temporal human embodiment. Sometimes the architectonics of place love us in return and demand that we reciprocate. Integral architect, civil engineer, and entrepreneur Ed Enck describes how integral architecture invites us to intra-enact (Barad) a full embrace of life. In his quote above, Enck points out that architecture, in inviting the fullness of the human dimension, is a perfect “window” for understanding Integral theory because its quadrants, levels, lines and types all refer back to sentient, intentional being.  How you relate to the space you are inhabiting, how you relate to other beings and things there, how you feel there, what you do there, and what you think there, conspire to determine whether a designed place goes beyond considerations of program to invite and even elicit vital enactments.

Designing is agential and (intra) enacted. Every designed act carries on designing indefinitely. All experiences of architecture are intra-enacted moment-to-moment as the poetics of architectural intentions meet material physicalities and aesthetic configurations, the fittednesss (or not) to human bodies and the fittedness (or not) to diverse, multivalent purposes and programs. Yet although all experiences of architecture —and in fact all experiences— co-arise as four fundamental dimensions of experience: the subjective, the intersubjective, the objective and the interobjective — they may or may not have been consciously designed to reveal these inexhaustible and infinitely subtle intra-relations.

Designing agency fundamentally is a negotiation with co-arising phenomena. The practice of architecture, being an art + science of systems at all scales, is inherently predisposed to integrative approaches. Yet the generic vacancy of architecture for “ideal users” is testament to the fact that architectural practice can be partial or non-integrative. But what exactly do we mean by integral in the context of the built environment? Consciously making space for co-enactments of lived experience sets an integral architecture apart from architecture per se. We can identify spaces, places, artifacts and environments as integral when they take into account the multidimensionality of experience in configuring situations that elicit awareness and participation in real time.

For a big unpack of meta-theory tailored to the worlds of architecture and design check out Peter Buchanan’s superb 11-part series of articles entitled “The Big Rethink” that appeared in the Architectural Review between 2011 and 2013. Note in particular the articles mapping Integral theory and Spiral Dynamics onto contemporary practice in architecture such as “Part 3: Integral Theory”, “Part 5: Transcend and Include the Past”, Part 7: Places and Aliveness- Pattern, Play and the Planet”, and “Part 10: Spiral Dynamics and Culture”

Integrative designed artifacts include the behavioral, material and human factors dimensions of performance but go way beyond the strictly behavioral, physical and “user-centered” to actively integrate the four dimensions of experience. It includes temporal experience design. It includes structures and materials. It includes responsive systems. It includes human factors. It includes spatial, behavioral, energy and material efficiencies. It includes the material, sensual, excessive, erotic and aesthetic self. In balancing and negotiating configurations of these multivalent and often contradictory constraints, it also mediates real-time experiences that are enact-able somatically as head, heart, hara, and hand to mindfully, wholeheartedly, instinctually and handily enact aliveness in place.

Media theorist Corey Anton writes eloquently about “a world by and for hands” and the phenomenology of the lived-body in the enactment of intentionality in Selfhood and Authenticity. “… The lived-body, through pre-thetic motor intentionality, comprehends entities according to the comportments it maintains toward them. This implies that bodily and handy movements, as they are lived-through, are not simply or merely behavior. Rather, a non-theoretical comprehension is woven into them. To move is to inscribe the world with meaning and significance. In reaching, grasping, holding, in running toward or running away, in lifting up and over, or in bringing intimately near, a lived-through comprehension, a choreographing of non-theoretical significance is accomplished (Polanyi, 1966; Thayer, 1997)” (Anton, 36).

Writing this I hope to convey the vacancy of contemporary architecture and design focused exclusively on objective and performative metrics. Such anonymous non-places are partial, hollowed out, and lacking heart intelligence about the bodily knowledges, feelings, states, relationships, and enactments being afforded or foreclosed. Nobody’s home. The dance, the negotiation of the architectonics with the co-arising of phenomena is unskillful. Designs enact human values in and through our bodies. Integrative architectonics embody the consciousness of the architectural team, its values and its intentions. What we cannot embody, we cannot as an architect or designer invite.

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