Cartoon Analysis Guide Use this guide to identify the per.docx

Cartoon Analysis Guide
Use this guide to identify the persuasive techniques used in
political cartoons.
Cartoonists’ Persuasive Techniques
Symbolism
Cartoonists use simple objects, or symbols, to stand for larger
concepts or ideas.
After you identify the symbols in a cartoon, think about what
the
cartoonist means each symbol to stand for.
Exaggeration
Sometimes cartoonists overdo, or exaggerate, the physical
characteristics of people or things in order to make a point.
When you study a cartoon, look for any characteristics that
seem
overdone or overblown. (Facial characteristics and clothing are
some of the most commonly exaggerated characteristics.) Then,
try to decide what point the cartoonist was trying to make by
exaggerating them.

Labeling
Cartoonists often label objects or people to make it clear
exactly
what they stand for.
Watch out for the different labels that appear in a cartoon, and
ask
yourself why the cartoonist chose to label that particular person
or
object. Does the label make the meaning of the object more
clear?
Analogy
An analogy is a comparison between two unlike things. By
comparing a complex issue or situation with a more familiar
one,
cartoonists can help their readers see it in a different light.
After you’ve studied a cartoon for a while, try to decide what
the
cartoon’s main analogy is. What two situations does the cartoon
compare? Once you understand the main analogy, decide if this
comparison makes the cartoonist’s point more clear to you.
Irony
Irony is the difference between the ways things are and the way

things should be, or the way things are expected to be.
Cartoonists
often use irony to express their opinion on an issue.
When you look at a cartoon, see if you can find any irony in the
situation the cartoon depicts. If you can, think about what point
the
irony might be intended to emphasize. Does the irony help the
cartoonist express his or her opinion more effectively?
Once you’ve identified the persuasive techniques that the
cartoonist used, ask yourself
these questions:
What issue is this political cartoon about?
What do you think is the cartoonist’s opinion on this issue?
What other opinion can you imagine another person having on
this issue?
Did you find this cartoon persuasive? Why or why not?
What other techniques could the cartoonist have used to make
this cartoon more
persuasive?
WRITING YOUR ESSAY

STRUCTURE
SAMPLE ESSAY
QUESTION
The period of the 1950s and -60s represented the Cold War
and saw developments in the kind of objects made for
domestic use. Using examples from American and Soviet
design history, explore how these objects reflect the
respective ideologies and values that belonged to their
makers.
The period of the 1950s and -60s represented the Cold War
and saw developments in the kind of objects made for
domestic use. Using examples from American and Soviet
design history, explore how these objects reflect the
respective ideologies and values that belonged to their
makers.
CONSOLIDATE YOUR RESEARCH
TAKE A CRITICAL VIEW
DECIDE ON YOUR ANGLE
THESIS
STATEMENT
• A one- or two-sentence

condensation of the
essay’s argument
• A statement that you can prove
with evidence
A GOOD THESIS STATEMENT WILL
• Express one main idea
• Be specific
• Assert your argument or
put forth a hypothesis
• Be contentious
• Be the result of your critical
thinking after you have
researched
Example 1:
“The aim of this paper is to indicate the role of details as
generators, a role traditionally ascribed to the plan, and to
show that technology, with its double-faced presence of
‘techne of logos’ and ‘logos of techne’ is the basis for the
understanding of details.”
Marco Frascari. “The Tell-the-Tale Detail”
Example 2:
“This essay examines the mobilization of “The Great Wave”
to promote and sell mass-produced goods in the first decade
of the twenty-first century, throwing light on the ways that

this highly adaptive graphic design can mediate between the
local and the global without necessarily referencing
Japanese tradition.”
Christine M. E. Guth. “The Local and the Global: Hokusai’s
Great
Wave in Contemporary Product Design”
Your thesis statement
will be the main idea
that guides you (and
your reader) through
your essay.
During the writing
process, revise it as
needed to make your
focus clearer as your
ideas develop.
INTRODUCTION
BODY

CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
• Interest-catcher
• Background/context
• Thesis statement
PARAGRAPH 1: FIRST KEY POINT
1. Supporting idea
a. Existing theory/quote
b. Analysis
2. Case study
a. Description
b. Analysis
PARAGRAPH 2: SECOND KEY POINT
1. Supporting idea
b. Analysis
2. Case study
a. Description
b. Analysis
PARAGRAPH 3: THIRD KEY POINT
1. Supporting idea
b. Analysis

2. Case study
a. Description
b. Analysis
III. CONCLUSION
1.Synthesis of your argument
(not a summary)
2. Insight on your topic (why it
matters)
STRUCTURE OF THE ESSAY
I. Introduction
A. Interest-catcher
B. Background/context
C. Thesis statement
II. Body
A. First key point (Topic Sentence)
1. Supporting idea
a. Existing theory/
quote
b. Analysis
c. Example
2. Second supporting idea or
case study
a. Description

b. Analysis
B. Second key point (Topic Sentence)
1. Supporting idea
case study
C. Third key point (Topic Sentence)
1. Supporting idea
case study
III. Conclusion
CREATE A DETAILED OUTLINE
Determine the key points which will define your
argument.
Organize your key points & supporting evidence
into a logical, linear argument.
Identify connections between parts of your
argument which may serve as transitions from
one point to the next.
The more detailed the outline, the easier the
actual writing will be.
Tip: When writing, be sure each paragraph
begins with a Topic Sentence that states the
main idea of the paragraph.
And end each paragraph with a sentence that
helps connect that paragraph’s main idea to
your thesis.

• Historical
background
• Quotes
• Case studies
• Visual
references
• Supporting
theories
• Definitions of
key terms
RESEARCH
FINDINGS
=
SUPPORTING
EVIDENCE
Interpret
Compare & contrast
Illustrate

Analyze
Criticize
Define
USEFUL TOOLS TO CREATE
DISCOURSE
Describe
WORKS CITED
wordsdontrhyme (2012) Untitled. [image online] Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/29633210066
[Accessed: 10 Sept 2012].
Dettmer, B. (2012) Modern Painters. [image online] Available
at: http://briandettmer.com/ [Accessed: 09 September 2012].
Fetell, I. (2012) Writing Retreat. [image online] Available at:
http://aestheticsofjoy.com/2012/08/writing-retreat/ [Accessed:
30 Aug 2012].
Fetell, I. (2012) Vibrating color: Jim Lambie . [image online]
Available at: http://aestheticsofjoy.com/2012/07/vibrating-
color-jim-lambie/ [Accessed: 30 Aug 2012].
Humphrey , T. (2012) Maddie on Things. [image online]
Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/26709214815/mad

dieonthings-baker-city-or [Accessed: 10 Sept
2012].
Indiana.edu (2008) Thesis Statements. [online] Available at:
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/thesis_statement.shtml
[Accessed: 31 Aug 2012].
Ito, N. (2012) Untitled. [image online] Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/27577234305/nao
ko-ito [Accessed: 10 Sept 2012].
Kleon, A. (2012) Poem for My Mother. [image online]
Available at: http://www.austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-
blackout-poems/ [Accessed: 30 Aug 2012].
Kruithof, A. (2012) Untitled. [image online] Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/5328383494/subm
ission-anouk-kruithof-ed-love-this [Accessed: 10 Sept 2012].
Nadler, E. (2004) The Erasamoid Contrapticle. [image online]
Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/6758830948/one-
of-ellis-nadlers-lists-of-items-required-for
[Accessed: 10 Sept 2012].
Stephenson, D. (2012) Heavenly Vaults. [image online]
Available at: http://aestheticsofjoy.com/2011/01/transcendental-
aesthetics/ [Accessed: 30 Aug 2012].
Yanko Design (2011) Untitled. [image online] Available at:
http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/11103677019/fro
m-yanko-design [Accessed: 10 Sept 2012].

Prospects for a Critical Regionalism
Author(s): Kenneth Frampton
Source: Perspecta, Vol. 20 (1983), pp. 147-162
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1567071
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Kenneth Frampton 147
Prospects for a Critical Regionalism
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~~~~_ZZ '- _ !: L '
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Luis Barragan, Las Arboledas,
1961.
Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, Volume 20 0079-
0958/83/20147-016$3.00/0
tc; 1983 by Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, Inc., and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E
2019 02:39:24 UTC
1
Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilization and National
Cultures", History and Truth (Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press, 1961) pp. 276, 283.

The phenomenon of universalization,
while being an advancement of mankind,
at the same time constitutes a sort of sub-
tle destruction, not only of traditional cul-
tures, which might not be an irreparable
wrong, but also of what I shall call for the
time being the creative nucleus of great
civilizations and great cultures, that nu-
cleus on the basis of which we interpret
life, what I shall call in advance the ethical
and mythical nucleus of mankind. The
conflict springs up from there. We have
the feeling that this single world civiliza-
tion at the same time exerts a sort of attri-
tion or wearing away at the expense of
the cultural resources which have made
the great civilizations of the past. This
threat is expressed, among other disturb-
ing effects, by the spreading before our
eyes of a mediocre civilization which is
the absurd counterpart of what I was just
calling elementary culture. Everywhere
throughout the world, one finds the same
bad movie, the same slot machines, the
same plastic or aluminum atrocities, the
same twisting of language by propa-
ganda, etc. It seems as if mankind, by ap-
proaching en masse a basic consumer
culture, were also stopped en masse at a
subcultural level. Thus we come to the
crucial problem confronting nations just

rising from underdevelopment. In order
to get on to the road toward moderniza-
tion, is it necessary to jettison the old cul-
tural past which has been the raison d'etre
of a nation? . . . Whence the paradox: on
the one hand, it has to root itself in the
soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and
unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindica-
tion before the colonialist's personality.
But in order to take part in modern civi-
lization, it is necessary at the same time
to take part in scientific, technical, and po-
litical rationality, something which very
often requires the pure and simple aban-
don of a whole cultural past. It is a fact:
every culture cannot sustain and absorb
the shock of modern civilization. There is
the paradox: how to become modern and
to return to sources; how to revive an old,
dormant civilization and take part in uni-
versal civilization....
No one can say what will become of our
civilization when it has really met dif-
ferent civilizations by means other than
the shock of conquest and domination.
But we have to admit that this encounter
has not yet taken place at the level of an
authentic dialogue. That is why we are in
a kind of lull or interregnum in which we
can no longer practice the dogmatism of
a single truth and in which we are not yet
capable of conquering the skepticism into

which we have stepped. We are in a tun-
nel, at the twilight of dogmatism and the
dawn of real dialogues.
Paul Ricoeur
The term critical regionalism is not in-
tended to denote the vernacular, as this
was once spontaneously produced by the
combined interaction of climate, culture,
myth and craft, but rather to identify
those recent regional "schools" whose
aim has been to represent and serve, in a
critical sense, the limited constituencies in
which they are grounded. Such a region-
alism depends, by definition, on a con-
nection between the political conscious-
ness of a society and the profession.
Among the pre-conditions for the emer-
gence of critical regional expression is not
only sufficient prosperity but also a
strong desire for realising an identity. One
of the mainsprings of regionalist culture
is an anti-centrist sentiment-an aspira-
tion for some kind of cultural, economic
and political independence.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has ad-
vanced the thesis that a hybrid "world
culture" will only come into being
through a cross-fertilization between
rooted culture on the one hand and uni-
versal civilization on the other. This para-
doxical proposition, that regional culture
must also be a form of world culture, is
predicated on the notion that develop-

ment in se will, of necessity, transform the
basis of rooted culture. In his essay "Uni-
versal Civilization and National Cultures"
of 1961, Ricoeur implied that everything
will depend in the last analysis on the ca-
pacity of regional culture to recreate a
rooted tradition while appropriating for-
eign influences at the level of both culture
and civilization. Such a process of cross-
fertilization and reinterpretation is impure
by definition. This much is at once evi-
2019 02:39:24 UTC
dent, say, in the work of the Portugese
architect Alvaro Siza y Viera. In Siza's ar-
chitecture Aalto's collage approach to
building form finds itself mediated by nor-
mative typologies drawn from the work of
the Italian Neo-rationalists.
3
Abraham Moles, "The Three Cities", Directions in Art,
Theory and Aesthetics, ed. Anthony Hill (London:
Faber and Faber, Limited, 1968), p. 191.

2
Jan Mukarovsky, Structure, Sign and Function (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 228. Perhaps I
am overstating the case. However, Mukarovsky
writes: "The artistic sign, unlike the communicative
sign, is not serving, that is, not an instrument."
4
O. Bohigas, "Posibilidades de una arquitectura
Barcelona", Destino (Barcelona, 1951). See also
O. Bohigas, "Disenar para un publico o contra un
publico", in Seix Barral, Contra una arquitectura
adjetivida (Barcelona, 1969).
5
See Ignazio Gardella's Casa Borsalino Apartments
built in Alexandria in 1951.
I - _
1 2
J. A. Coderch and Jesus Sanz, Casa Catasus, exterior.
Casa Catasus, Sitges,
Barcelona, 1958, plan.
It is necessary to distinguish at the outset
between critical regionalism and the sim-
plistic evocation of a sentimental or ironic
vernacular. I am referring, of course, to
that nostalgia for the vernacular which is
currently being conceived as an overdue

return to the ethos of a popular culture;
for unless such a distinction is made one
will end by confusing the resistant capac-
ity of Regionalism with the demagogic
tendencies of PopuJism. In contradistinc-
tion to Regionalism, the primary goal of
Populism is to function as a communica-
tive or instrumental sign.2 Such a sign
seeks to evoke not a critical perception of
reality, but rather the sublimation of a de-
sire for direct experience through the pro-
vision of information. Its tactical aim is to
attain, as economically as possible, a pre-
conceived level of gratification in behav-
ioristic terms. In this regard, the strong
affinities of Populism for the rhetorical
techniques and imagery of advertising is
hardly accidental.
On the other hand, Critical Regionalism
is a dialectical expression. It self-
consciously seeks to deconstruct univer-
sal modernism in terms of values and
images which are locally cultivated, while
at the same time adulterating these au-
tochthonous elements with paradigms
drawn from alien sources. After the dis-
junctive cultural approach practised by
Adolf Loos, Critical Regionalism recog-
nizes that no living tradition remains
available to modern man other than the

subtle procedures of synthetic contradic-
tion. Any attempt to circumvent the dia-
lectics of this creative process through the
eclectic procedures of historicism can
only result in consumerist iconography
masquerading as culture.
It is my contention that Critical Regional-
ism continues to flourish sporadically
within the cultural fissures that articulate
in unexpected ways the continents of Eu-
rope and America. These borderline
manifestations may be characterized,
after Abraham Moles, as the "interstices
of freedom."3 Their existence is proof that
the model of the hegemonic center sur-
rounded by dependent satellites is an in-
adequate and demagogic description of
our cultural potential.
Exemplary of an explicitly anti-centrist re-
gionalism was the Catalonian nationalist
revival which first emerged with the foun-
dation of the Group R in the early Fifties.
This group, led by J. M. Sostres and Oriol
Bohigas, found itself caught from the be-
ginning in a complex cultural situation.
On the one hand, it was obliged to revive
the Rationalist, anti-Fascist values and
procedures of GATEPAC (the pre-war
Spanish wing of C.I.A.M.); on the other, it
remained aware of the political responsi-
bility to evoke a realistic regionalism; a
regionalism which would be accessible to

the general populace. This double-headed
program was first publicly announced by
Bohigas in his essay, "Possibilities for a
Barcelona Architecture,"4 published in
1951. The various impulses that went to
make up the heterogeneous form of Cata-
lonian Regionalism exemplify, in retro-
spect, the essentially hybrid nature of an
authentic modern culture. First, there was
the Catalonian brick tradition which evi-
dently dates back to the heroic period of
the Modernismo; then there was the influ-
ence of Neoplasticism, an impulse which
was directly inspired by Bruno Zevi's La
poetica della architettura neoplastica of
1953 and, finally, there was the revisionist
style of Italian Neo-Realism-as exempli-
fied above all in the work of Ignazio
Gardella.5
The career of the Barcelona architect J. A.
Coderch has been typically Regionalist in-
asmuch as it has oscillated, until recent
date, between a mediterraneanized, mod-
ern brick vernacular-Venetian in evoca-
tion-apparent, say, in his eight-storey
brick apartment block built in Barcelona in
the Paseo Nacional in 1952- 54 (a mass ar-
ticulated by full-height shutters and over-
hanging cornices), and the avant-gardist,
Neoplastic composition of his Casa Cata-
sus completed at Sitges in 1957. The work

of Martorell, Bohigas and Mackay has
2019 02:39:24 UTC
tended to oscillate between comparable
poles; between, on the one hand, an as-
sumed brick vernacular close to the work
of Coderch and Gardella6 and, on the
other, their Neo-Brutalist public manner;
this last being best exemplified in the
technical rationalism of their Thau School
built in the suburbs of Barcelona in 1975.
3
Ricardo Bofill, Walden 7, Saint-
Just Desvern (near Barcelona),
1975.
6
A. Siza, "To Catch a Precise Moment of Flittering
Images in All its Shades", Architecture and
Urbanism, Tokyo, no. 123, December 1980, p. 9.
The recent deliquescence of Catalonian
Regionalism finds its most extreme mani-
festation in the work of Ricardo Bofill and

the Taller de Arquitectura. For where the
early work of Bofill (for example, the Calle
Nicaragua apartments of 1964) displayed
evident affinity for the re-interpreted brick
vernacular of Coderch, the Taller was to
adopt a more exaggerated rhetoric in the
Seventies. With their Xanadu complex
built in Calpe (1967), they entered into a
flamboyant romanticism. This castellated
syntax reached its apotheosis in their he-
roic, but ostentatious, tile-faced Walden 7
complex at Saint-Just Desvern (1975).
With its twelve-storey voids, underlit liv-
ing rooms, miniscule balconies and its
now disintegrating tile cladding, Walden 7
denotes that delicate boundary where an
initially sound impulse degenerates into
an ineffective Populism-a Populism
whose ultimate aim is not to provide a
liveable and significant environment but
rather to achieve a highly photogenic
form of scenography. In the last analysis,
despite its passing homage to Gaudi, Wal-
den 7 is devoted to a form of admass se-
duction. It is architecture of narcissism
par excellence, for the formal rhetoric ad-
dresses itself mainly to high fashion, and
to the marketing of Bofill's flamboyant
personality. The Mediterranean hedonistic
utopia to which it pretends collapses on
closer inspection, above all at the level of
the roofscape where a potentially sen-
suous environment has not been borne

out by the reality of its occupation.
Nothing could be further from Bofill's in-
tentions than the architecture of the Por-
tugese master Alvaro Siza y Viera, whose
career, beginning with his swimming pool
at Quinta de Conceicad, completed in
1965, has been anything but photogenic.
This much can be discerned not only from
the fragmentary evasive nature of the
published images but also from a text
written in 1979:
Most of my works were never pub-
lished; some of the things I did were
only carried out in part, others were
profoundly changed or destroyed.
That's only to be expected. An archi-
tectonic proposition whose aim is to
go deep ... a proposition that in-
tends to be more than a passive ma-
terialisation, refuses to reduce that
same reality, analysing each of its
aspects, one by one; that proposi-
tion can't find support in a fixed im-
age, can't follow a linear evolu-
tion .... Each design must catch,
with the utmost rigour, a precise
moment of the flittering image, in
all its shades, and the better you can
recognize that flittering quality of
reality, the clearer your design will
be.... That may be the reason why
only marginal works (a quiet dwell-
ing, a holiday house miles away)

have been kept as they were origi-
nally designed. But something re-
mains. Pieces are kept here and
there, inside ourselves, perhaps fa-
thered by someone, leaving marks
on space and people, melting into a
process of total transformation.6
It could be argued that this hyper-
sensitivity toward the fluid and yet spe-
cific nature of reality renders Siza's work
more layered and rooted than the eclectic
tendencies of the Barcelona School for, by
4
Alvaro Siza y Viera, Quinta de
Conceicad, Matosinhos,
Portugal, 1958-65, plan.
2019 02:39:24 UTC
5
Siza y Viera, Bires House,
Povoa do Varzim, 1976,
elevation.

6
Bires House, plan.
. i4.14 .
taking Aalto as his point of departure, he
seems to have been able to ground his
building in the configuration of a given
topography and in the fine-grained specif-
icity of the local context. To this end his
pieces are tight responses to the urban
fabric and marinescape of the Porto re-
gion. Other important factors are his ex-
traordinary sensitivity towards local
materials, craft work, and, above all, to
the subtleties of local light-his sense for
a particular kind of filtration and penetra-
tion. Like Aalto's Jyvaskyla University
(1957), or his Saynatsalo City Hall (1949),
all of Siza's buildings are delicately lay-
ered and inlaid into their sites. His ap-
proach is patently tactile and materialist,
rather than visual and graphic, from his
Bires House built at Povoa do Varzim in
1976 to his Bouca Resident's Association
Housing of 1977. Even his small bank
buildings, of which the best is probably
7
Siza y Viera, Bouca Residents
Association Housing, Porto,
1977, sketches.

f
I
2019 02:39:24 UTC
9
Raimund Abraham, House with
Three Walls, project, 1972-75.
the Pinto branch bank built at Oliveira de
Azemeis in 1974, are topographically con-
ceived and structured.
8
Siza y Viera, Pinta Branch Bank,
Oliveira de Azemeis, 1974.
7
Emilio Ambasz, The Architecture of Luis Barragan
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976) p. 9.
The theoretical work of the New York-
based Austrian architect Raimund

Abraham may also be seen as having la-
tent regionalist connotations inasmuch as
this architect has always stressed place
creation and the topographic aspects of
the built environment. The House with
Three Walls (1972) and the House with
Flower Walls (1973) are typical ontological
works of the early Seventies, wherein the
project evokes the oneiric essence of the
site, together with the inescapable materi-
ality of building. This feeling for the tec-
tonic nature of built form and for its
capacity to transform the surface of the
earth has been carried over into Abra-
ham's recent designs made for Interna-
tional Bauausstellung in Berlin, above all
his recent projects for South Friedrich-
stadt, designed in 1981.
An equally tactile but more specifically re-
gionalist approach is obtained in the case
of the veteran Mexican architect Luis
Barragan, whose finest houses (many of
which have been erected in the suburb of
Pedregal) are nothing if not topographic.
As much a landscape designer as an ar-
chitect, Barragan has always sought a
sensual and earthbound architecture; an
architecture compounded out of en-
closures, stelae, fountains, water courses,
color saturation; an architecture laid into
volcanic rock and lush vegetation; an ar-

chitecture that refers only indirectly to the
Mexican colonial estancia. Of Barragan's
feeling for mythic and rooted beginnings
it is sufficient to cite his memories of the
apocryphal pueblo of his youth:
My earliest childhood memories are
related to a ranch my family owned
near the village of Mazamitla. It
was a pueblo with hills, formed by
houses with tile roofs and immense
eaves to shield passersby from the
heavy rains which fall in that area.
Even the earth's color was interest-
ing because it was red earth. In this
village, the water distribution sys-
tem consisted of great gutted logs,
in the form of troughs, which ran on
a support structure of tree forks, 5
meters high, above the roofs. This
aqueduct crossed over the town,
reaching the patios, where there
were great stone fountains to re-
ceive the water. The patios housed
with stables, with cows and chick-
ens, all together. Outside, in the
street, there were iron rings to tie
the horses. The channeled logs, cov-
ered with moss, dripped water all
over town, of course. It gave this vil-
lage the ambience of a fairy tale.
No, there are no photographs. I

have only its memory.7
This remembrance has surely been fil-
tered through Barragan's life-long in-
volvement with Islamic architecture.
Similar feelings and concerns are evident
in his opposition to the invasion of pri-
vacy in the modern world and in his
criticism of the subtle erosion of na-
ture which has accompanied postwar
civilization:
Everyday life is becoming much too
public. Radio, TV., telephone all in-
vade privacy. Gardens should there-
fore be enclosed, not open to public
2019 02:39:24 UTC
10
Raimund Abraham, Universal
Corner Building for a City
Block, International Building
Exhibition, Berlin, 1984,

competition project, 1980-81,
model.
11
8
C. Banford-Smith, Builders in the Sun: Five Mexican
Architects (New York: Architectural Book Publishing
Co., 1967) p. 74.
11
Luis Barragan with Mathias
Goertiz, Satellite City Towers,
1967.
gaze.... Architects, are forgetting
the need of human beings for half-
light, the sort of light that imposes a
tranquility, in their living rooms as
well as in their bedrooms. About
half the glass that is used in so
many buildings-homes as well as
offices-would have to be removed
in order to obtain the quality of light
that enables one to live and work in
a more concentrated manner . .
Before the machine age, even in the
middle of cities, Nature was every-
body's trusted companion. . . . Now-
adays, the situation is reversed.

Man does not meet with Nature,
even when he leaves the city to
commune with her. Enclosed in his
shiny automobile, his spirit stamped
with the mark of the world whence
the automobile emerged, he is,
within Nature, a foreign body. A bill-
board is sufficient to stifle the voice
of Nature. Nature becomes a scrap
of Nature and man a scrap of man.8
By the time of his first house and studio
built in Tacubaya, Mexico D.F. in 1947,
Barragan had already made a subtle
move away from the universal syntax of
the so-called International Style. And yet
his work has always remained committed
to that abstract form which has so charac-
terized the art of our era. Barragan's pen-
chant for large, almost inscrutable
abstract planes set in the landscape is
perhaps at its most intense in his garden
for Las Arboledas of 1961 and his freeway
monument, Satellite City Towers, de-
signed with Mathias Goertiz in 1967.
Regionalism has, of course, manifested it-
self in other parts of the Americas; in Brazil
in the 1940s, in the early work of Oscar
Niemeyer and Alfonso Reidy; in Argen-
tina in the work of Amancio Williams-

above all in Williams' bridge house in
Mar del Plata of 1945 and more recently
perhaps in Clorindo Testa's Bank of Lon-
don and South America, built in Buenos
Aires in 1959; in Venezuela, in the Ciudad
Universitaria built to the designs of Carlos
Raoul Villanueva between 1945 and 1960;
in the West Coast of the United States,
first in Los Angeles in the late 1920s in
the work of Neutra, Schindler, Weber and
Gill, and then in the so-called Bay Area
and Southern California schools founded
by William Wurster and Hamilton Harwell
Harris respectively. No-one has perhaps
expressed the idea of a Critical Regional-
ism more discretely than Harwell Harris in
his address, "Regionalism and National-
ism" which he gave to the North West
Regional Council of the AIA, in Eugene,
Oregon, in 1954:
Opposed to the Regionalism of Re-
striction is another type of regional-
ism; the Regionalism of Liberation.
This is the manifestation of a region
that is especially in tune with the
emerging thought of the time. We
call such a manifestation "regional"
only because it has not yet emerged
elsewhere. It is the genius of this re-
gion to be more than ordinarily
aware and more than ordinarily
free. Its virtue is that its manifesta-

tion has significance for the world
outside itself. To express this region-
alism architecturally it is necessary
that there be building,-preferably a
lot of building-at one time. Only so
can the expression be sufficiently
general, sufficiently varied, suffi-
2019 02:39:24 UTC
I ji I
2019 02:39:24 UTC
ciently forceful to capture people's
imaginations and provide a friendly
climate long enough for a new
school of design to develop.
San Francisco was made for
Maybeck. Pasadena was made for

Greene and Greene. Neither could
have accomplished what he did in
any other place or time. Each used
the materials of the place; but it is
not the materials that distinguish
the work...
9
Harwell H. Harris, "Regionalism and Nationalism",
Student Publication of the School of Design, North
Carolina State of the University of North Carolina at
Raleigh, Volume 14, No. 5.
10
Description submitted by Harry Wolf Associates on
September 3, 1982 for the Fort Lauderdale Riverfront
Plaza Competition.
A region may develop ideas. A re-
gion may accept ideas. Imaginations
and intelligence are necessary for
both. In California in the late Twen-
ties and Thirties modern European
ideas met a still developing region-
alism. In New England, on the other
hand, European Modernism met a
rigid and restrictive regionalism that
at first resisted and then surren-
dered. New England accepted Euro-
pean Modernism whole because its
own regionalism had been reduced

to a collection of restrictions.9
Despite an apparent freedom of expres-
sion, such a level of liberative regionalism
is difficult to sustain in North America to-
day. Within the current proliferation of
highly individualistic forms of narciss-
ism-a body of work which is ultimately
cynical, patronising and self-indulgent
rather than rooted-only two firms today
display any consistent sensitivity towards
the evolution of a regional culture which
is both specific and critical.
The first example would be the simple,
site-responsive houses designed by An-
drew Batey and Mark Mack for the Napa
Valley area in California; the second
would be the work of the architect Harry
Wolf, whose work, which has so far been
largely restricted to North Carolina, is de-
signed out of Charlotte. Wolf's sensitivity
to the specificity of place has perhaps
been most intensely demonstrated in his
recent competition entry for the Fort
Lauderdale Riverfront Plaza. The descrip-
tion of this work at once displays both a
feeling for the specificity of the place and
a self-conscious reflection on the locus of
Fort Lauderdale in history.
The worship of the sun and the
measurement of time from its light
reach back to the earliest recorded

history of man. It is interesting to
note in the case of Fort Lauderdale
that if one were to follow a 26 degree
latitudinal line around the globe,
one would find Fort Lauderdale in
the company of Ancient Thebes-the
throne of the Egyptian sun god, Ra.
Further to the East, one would find
Jaipur, India, where heretofore, the
largest equinoctal sundial in the
world was built 110 years prior to
the founding of Fort Lauderdale.
Mindful of these magnificent histor-
ical precedents, we sought a symbol
that would speak of the past, pres-
ent and future of Fort Lauderdale.
... To capture the sun in symbol a
great sundial is incised on the Plaza
site and the gnomon of the sundial
bisects the site on its north-south
axis. The gnomon of the double
blade rises from the south at 26 de-
grees 5 minutes parallel to Fort
Lauderdale's latitude....
Each of (the) significant dates in Fort
Lauderdale's history is recorded in
the great blade of the sundial. With
careful calculation the sun angles

are perfectly aligned with penetra-
tions through the two blades to cast
brilliant circles of light, landing on
the otherwise shadowy side of the
sundial. These shafts of light illu-
minate an appropriate historical
marker serving as annual historical
reminders.
Etched into the eastern side of the
plaza, an enlarged map of the City
shows the New River as it meets the
harbor. The eastern edge of the
building is eroded in the shape of
the river and introduces light into
the offices beneath the Plaza along
its path.
The River continues until it meets
the semicircle of the water court
where the river path creates a wall
of water even with the level of the
Plaza, providing a sixteen foot cas-
cade into the pool below. The map
follows the river upstream until it
reaches the gnomon where, at map
scale, the juncture of the blade and
the river coincide exactly with the
site on which the blade stands.'1
In Europe the work of the Italian architect

Gino Valle may also be classified as criti-
cal and regionalist inasmuch as his entire
career has been centered around the city
of Udine, in Italy. From here Valle was to
12
Wolf Associates, Fort
Lauderdale Riverfront Plaza,
competition entry, 1982, site
plan and elevation.
2019 02:39:24 UTC
make one of the earliest post-war rein-
terpretations of the Italian Lombardy ver-
nacular in the Casa Quaglia built at Sutrio
in 1956. Throughout the Fifties, Valle dedi-
cated himself to the evolution of an indus-
trial format for the Lombardy region. This
development reached its zenith in his
Zanussi Rex factory built at Pordenone in
1961. Aside from this, he was to extend
his capacity for a more richly-textured
and inflected regional expression in his
thermal baths, built at Arta in 1964 and in

his project for the Udine Civic Theatre
submitted one year before. Regionalism,
as we have seen, is often not so much a
collective effort as it is the output of
a talented individual working with com-
mitment towards some sort of rooted
expression.
Apart from the Western United States, Re-
gionalism first became manifest in the
post-war world in the vestigial city-states
of the European continent. A number of
regional architects seem to have had their
origins in this middle ground in the first
decade after the war. Among those of the
pre-war generation who have somehow
remained committed to this regional in-
flection one may count such architects
as Ernst Gisel in Zurich, J0rn Utzon in
Copenhagen, Vittorio Gregotti in Milan,
Gino Valle in Udine, Peter Celsing in
Stockholm, Mathias Ungers in Cologne,
Sverre Fehn in Oslo, Aris Konstantinides
in Athens, Ludwig Leo in Berlin, and the
late Carlo Scarpa in Venice. Louis Kahn
may also be considered to be a region-
ally-oriented architect inasmuch as he
was to remain committed to Philadelphia,
both as myth and reality, throughout his
life. It is symptomatic of his concern for
preserving the urban qualities of down-
town Philadelphia that he should show
the central city area as a citadel; as a sec-
tor walled in like Carcassonne by an auto-
route instead of a bastion and studded on

its perimeter with cylindrical parking silos
instead of castellated towers.
Switzerland, with its intricate linguistic
and cultural boundaries and its tradition
of cosmopolitanism, has always dis-
played strong regionalistic tendencies;
ones which have often assumed a critical
nature. The subtle cantonal combination
of admission and exclusion has always fa-
vored the cultivation of extremely dense
forms of expression in quite limited areas,
and yet, while the cantonal system serves
to sustain local culture, the Helvetic Feder-
ation facilitates the penetration and as-
similation of foreign ideas. Dolf Schnebli's
Corbusian, vaulted villa at Campione
d'ltalia on the Italo-Swiss frontier (1960)
may be seen as initiating the resistance of
Swiss regional culture to the rule of inter-
national Miesianism. This resistance
found its echo almost immediately in
other parts of Switzerland, in Aurelio
Galfetti's equally Corbusian Rotalini
House, in Bellinzona and in the Atelier 5
version of the Corbusian beton brut man-
ner, as this appeared in private houses
at Motier and Flamatt and in Siedlung
Halen, built outside Bern in 1960. Today's
Ticinese Regionalism has its ultimate

origins not only in this pioneering work
of Schnebli, Galfetti and Atelier 5, but
also in the Neo-Wrightian work of Tita
Carloni.
The strength of provincial culture surely
resides in its capacity to condense the ar-
tistic potential of the region while rein-
terpreting cultural influences coming
from the outside. The work of Mario Botta
is typical in this respect, with its con-
centration on issues which relate directly
to a specific place and with its adaptation
of various Rationalist methods drawn
from the outside. Apprenticed to Carloni
and later educated under Carlo Scarpa in
Venice, Botta was fortunate enough to
work, however briefly, for both Kahn and
Le Corbusier during the short time that
they each projected monuments for that
city. Evidently influenced by these men,
Botta has since appropriated the meth-
odology of the Italian Neo-Rationalists as
his own, while simultaneously retaining,
through his apprenticeship with Scarpa,
an uncanny capacity for the craft enrich-
ment of both form and space. Perhaps the
most striking example of this last occurs
in his application of intonocare lucido
(polished plaster) to the fireplace sur-
rounds of a converted farmhouse that
was built to his designs at Ligrignano in
1979.

Two other primary traits in Botta's work
may be seen as testifying to his Regional-
ism; on the one hand, his constant preoc-
cupation with what he terms building the
site, and, on the other, his deep conviction
that the loss of the historical city can only
now be compensated for on a fragmen-
tary basis. His largest work to date,
namely his school at Morbio Inferiore, as-
serts itself as a micro-urban realm; as a
cultural compensation for the evident loss
of urbanity in Chiasso, the nearest large
city. Primary references to the culture of
the Ticino landscape are also sometimes
evoked by Botta at a typical level. An ex-
r ----- I-
-L------ -
II
g L_____C-L
I l
I l
I
l
-1I
;,:Z:'

il
13
Gino Valle, Casa Quaglia,
Sutrio, 1956, section.
14
Casa Quaglia, plan.
2019 02:39:24 UTC
15
Mario Botta, Farmhouse at
Ligrignano, 1978-79.
16
Mario Botta, Casa Rotunda,
Stabio, 1981.
ample of this would be the house at Riva
San Vitale, which refers obliquely to the
traditional country summer house or
rocoli which was once endemic to the

region.
Aside from this specific reference, Botta's
houses often appear as markers in the
landscape, either as points or as bound-
aries. The house in Ligornetto, for exam-
ple, establishes the frontier where the
village ends and the agrarian system be-
gins. The visual acoustics of its plan stem
from the gun-sight aperture of the house
which turns away from the fields and to-
wards the village. Botta's houses are in-
variably treated in this way, as bunker-
belvederes, where the fenestration opens
towards selected views in the landscape,
thereby screening out, with stoic pathos,
the rapacious suburban development that
has taken place in the Ticino region over
the past twenty years. Finally, his houses
are never layered into the contours of a
given site, but rather "build the site"1' by
declaring themselves as primary forms,
set against the topography and the sky.
Their surprising capacity to harmonize
with the still partially agricultural nature
of the region stems directly from their
analogical form and finish; that is to say,
from the fair-faced, concrete block of their
structure and from the silo or barn-like
shell forms in which they are housed,
these last alluding to the traditional ag-
ricultural structures from which the
form derives.
Despite this demonstration of a convinc-
ing, modern, domestic sensibility, the

most critical aspect of Botta's achieve-
ment does not reside in his houses, but
rather in his public projects; in particular
in the two large-scale proposals which he
designed in collaborative with Luigi
Snozzi. Both of these are "viaduct" build-
ings and as such are certainly influenced
to some degree by Kahn's Venice Con-
gress Hall project of 1968 and by Rossi's
first sketches for Galaratese of 1970. The
first of these projects, their Centro Di-
rezionale di Perugia of 1971, is projected
as a "city within a city" and the wider im-
plications of this design clearly stem from
its potential applicability to many Mega-
lopolitan situations throughout the world.
Had it been realized, this regional center,
built as an arcaded galleria, would have
been capable of signaling its presence to
the urban region without compromising
the historic city or fusing with the chaos
of the surrounding suburban develop-
ment. A comparable clarity and appropri-
ateness was obtained in their Zurich
Station proposal of 1978. The advantages
of the urban strategy adopted in this in-
stance are so remarkable as to merit brief
enumeration. This multileveled bridge
structure would have not only provided
four separate concourse levels to accom-
modate shops, offices, restaurants, etc.,
but would have also constituted a new

head building at the end of the covered
platforms. At the same time it would have
emphasized an indistinct urban boundary
without compromising the historic profile
of the existing terminus.
In the case of the Ticino, one can lay
claim to the actual presence of a Region-
alist School in the sense that, after the
late 1950s, this area produced a body of
remarkable buildings, many of which
were collectively achieved. This much is
clear, not only from the diversity of
Botta's own collaborators but also from
11
Vittorio Gregotti, L'Architettura come territoria.
Botta took his notion of building the site from the
thesis that Gregotti advanced in this book.
2019 02:39:24 UTC
~iiw - i- Jm.i, -~ I -
17

12
Tadao And6, "From Self-Enclosed Modern
Architecture Toward Universality", The Japan
Architect, no. 301, May 1982, pp. 8-12.
associations which took place without his
participation. Once again credit is due to
the older generation such as Galfetti,
Carloni, and Schnebli, who frequently col-
laborated with younger architects. There
is no room here to list all the architects
involved, but some idea of the scope of
this endeavor may be obtained from the
fact that the Ticinese "school" comprised
well over twenty architects who were
variously to build some forty buildings of
note between 1960 and 1975.
It is hardly surprising that Tadao Ando,
who is one of the most regionally con-
scious architects in Japan should be
based in Osaka rather than Tokyo and that
his theoretical writings should formulate
more clearly than any other architect of
his generation a set of precepts which
come close to the idea of Critical Region-
alism. This is most evident in the tension
that he perceives as obtaining between
the process of universal modernization
and the idiosyncrasy of rooted culture.
Thus we find him writing in an essay en-
titled, "From Self-Enclosed Modern Archi-
tecture toward Universality,"

Born and bred in Japan, I do my ar-
chitectural work here. And I suppose
it would be possible to say that the
method I have selected is to apply
the vocabulary and techniques de-
veloped by an open, universalist
Modernism in an enclosed realm of
17
Mario Botta and Luigi Snozzi,
New Administrative Center at
Perugia, competition entry,
1971, sketch.
individual lifestyles and regional dif-
ferentiation. But it seems difficult to
me to attempt to express the sen-
sibilities, customs, aesthetic aware-
ness, distinctive culture, and social
traditions of a given race by means
of an open, internationalist vocabu-
lary of Modernism ...12
As Ando's argument unfolds we realize
that for him an Enclosed Modern Architec-
ture has two meanings. On the one hand
he means quite literally the creation of en-
claves or, to be specific, court-houses by
virtue of which man is able to recover
and sustain some vestige of that time-

honoured triad,- man, nature, culture-
against the obliterating onslaught of
Megalopolitan development. Thus Ando
writes:
After World War II, when Japan
launched on a course of rapid eco-
nomic growth, the people's value
criteria changed. The old fundamen-
tally feudal family system collapsed.
Such social alterations as concentra-
tion of information and places of
work in cities led to overpopulation
of agricultural and fishing villages
and towns (as was probably true in
other parts of the world as well);
overly dense urban and suburban
populations made it impossible to
preserve a feature that was formerly
most characteristic of Japanese resi-
2019 02:39:24 UTC
18
15

Tadao And6, The Japan Architect.
16
13
14
18
Botta and Snozzi, Zurich
Railway Station, competition
entry, 1978.
dential architecture; intimate con-
nection with nature and openness to
the natural world. What I refer to as
an Enclosed Modern Architecture is
a restoration of the Unity between
house and nature that Japanese
houses have lost in the process of
modernization.'3
In his small courtyard block houses, often
set within dense urban fabric, Ando em-
ploys concrete in such a way as to stress
the taut homogeneity of its surface rather
than its weight, since for him it "is the
most suitable material for realizing sur-

faces created by rays of sunlight . .
(where) . . . walls become abstract, are
negated, and approach the ultimate limit
of space. Their actuality is lost, and only
the space they enclose gives a sense of
really existing."'4
While the cardinal importance of light is
present in theoretical writings of-Louis
Kahn and Le Corbusier, Ando sees the
paradox of spatial limpidity emerging out
of light as being peculiarly pertinent to
the Japanese character and with this he
makes explicit the second and broader
meaning which he attributes to the con-
cept of a self-enclosed modernity. He
writes:
Spaces of this kind are overlooked
in utilitarian affairs of everyday liv-
ing and rarely make themselves
known. Still they are capable of
stimulating recollection of their own
innermost forms and stimulating
new discoveries. This is the aim of
what I call closed modern architec-
ture. Architecture of this kind is likely
to alter with the region in which it
sends out roots and to grow in vari-
ous distinctive individual ways, still,
though closed, I feel convinced that
as a methodology it is open in the
direction of universality.'5

What Ando has in mind is the develop-
ment of a trans-optical architecture where
the richness of the work lies beyond the
initial perception of its geometric order.
The tactile value of the tectonic compo-
nents are crucial to this changing spatial
revelation, for as he was to write of his
Koshino Residence in 1981:
Light changes expressions with
time. I believe that the architectural
materials do not end with wood and
concrete that have tangible forms
but go beyond to include light and
wind which appeal to our senses.
... Detail exists as the most impor-
tant element in expressing identity.
... Thus to me, the detail is an ele-
ment which achieves the physical
composition of architecture, but at
the same time, it is a generator of
an image of architecture.'6
That this opposition between universal
civilization and autochthonous culture
can have strong political connotations has
been remarked on by Alex Tzonis in his
article on the work of the Greek architects
Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis, en-
titled, "The Grid and Pathway," in which
he demonstrates the ambiguous role
played by the universality of the
Schinkelschuler in the founding of the

Greek state. Thus we find Tzonis writing:
In Greece, historicist regionalism in
its neo-classical version had already
met with opposition before the ar-
rival of the Welfare State and of
modern architecture. It is due to a
very peculiar crisis which explodes
around the end of the nineteenth
century. Historicist regionalism here
had grown not only out of a war of
liberation; it had emerged out of in-
terests to develop an urban elite set
apart from the peasant world and its
rural "backwardness" and to create
a dominance of town over country:
hence the special appeal of histor-
159 Kenneth Frampton
- ;
)
2019 02:39:24 UTC
22 20

19
Tadao Ando, Koshino
Residence, 1981, plan
projection.
20
Koshino Residence, courtyard.
21
Koshino Residence, interior.
22
Koshino Residence, living
room.
19
2019 02:39:24 UTC
17
Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, "The Grid and
the Pathway: An Introduction to the Work of Dimitris
and Susana Antonakakis, with Prolegomena to a

History of the Culture of Modern Greek Architecture",
Architecture in Greece, no. 15, 1981, pp. 164-78.
18
Tzonis and Lefaivre, Architecture in Greece.
icist regionalism, based on the book
rather than experience, with its
monumentality recalling another
distant and forlorn elite. Historical
regionalism had united people but it
had also divided them.'7
While the various reactions which fol-
lowed the nineteenth-century triumph of
the Greek Nationalist, Neo-classical style
varied from vernacular historicism in the
Twenties to a more thorough-going mod-
ernist approach which, immediately be-
fore and after the Second World War, first
proclaimed modernity as an ideal and
then directly attempted to participate in
the modernization of Greek society.
As Tzonis points out, critical regionalism
only began in Greece with the thirties
projects of Dimitri Pikionis and Aris Kon-
stantinidis, above all in the latter's Eleusis
house of 1938 and his garden exhibition
built in Kifissia in 1940. It then manifested
itself with great force in the pedestrian

zone that Dimitri Pikionis designed for the
Philopappus Hill, in 1957, on a site imme-
diately adjacent to the Acropolis in
Athens. In this work, as Tzonis points out:
Pikionis proceeds to make a work of
architecture free from technological
exhibitionism and compositional
conceit (so typical of the main-
stream of architecture of the 1950s)
a stark naked object almost de-
materialized, an ordering of "places
made for the occasion," unfolding
around the hill for solitary contem-
plation, for intimate discussion, for a
small gathering, for a vast assembly.
To weave this extraordinary braid of
niches and passages and situations,
Pikionis identifies appropriate com-
ponents from the lived-in spaces of
folk architecture, but in this project
the link with the regional is not
made out of tender emotion. In
a completely different attitude,
these envelopes of concrete events
are studied with a cold empirical
method, as if documented by an ar-
chaeologist. Neither is their selec-
tion and their positioning carried
out to stir easy superficial emotion.
They are platforms to be used in an
everyday sense but to supply that
which, in the context of contempo-

rary architecture, everyday life does
not. The investigation of the local
is the condition for reaching the
concrete and the real, and for re-
humanizing architecture.'1
Unlike Pikionis, Konstantinidis, as his ca-
reer unfolded, moved closer to the ration-
ality of the universal grid and it is this
affinity that now leads Tzonis to regard
the work of Antonakakis as lying some-
where between the autochthonous path-
way of Pikionis and universal grid of
23
Dimitri Pikionis and Aris
Konstantinides, Garden
Exhibition, Kifissia, 1940, plan
and axonometric.
2019 02:39:24 UTC
19
Tzonis and Lefaivre, Architecture in Greece.

Konstantinidis. Are we justified in seeing
this dualism as yet a further manifestation
of the interaction between culture and
civilization, and if so, what are the gen-
eral consequences? Tzonis writes of
Antonakakis' work and of critical regional-
ism in general that: ". .. (it) is a bridge
over which any humanistic architecture of
the future must pass, even if the path may
lead to a completely different direction.""19
Perhaps the one work of Antonakakis
which expresses this conjunction of grid
and the pathway more succinctly than
any other is the Benakis Street apartment
building completed to their designs in
Athens in 1975; a building wherein a con-
cept of labyrinthine path-movement,
drawn from the islands of Hydra, is
woven into the structural fabric of a ra-
tionalist grid-the ABA concrete frame
which sustains the form of the building.
If any central principle of critical regional-
ism can be isolated, then it is surely a
commitment to place rather than space,
or, in Heideggerian terminology, to the
nearness of raum, rather than the dis-
tance of spatium. This stress on place
may also be construed as affording the
political space of public appearance as for-
mulated by Hannah Arendt. Such a con-
junction between the cultural and the
political is difficult to achieve in late capi-

talist society. Among the occasions in the
last decade on which it has appeared on
more general terms, recognition should
be given to the development of Bologna
in the Seventies. In this instance, an ap-
praisal was made of the fundamental
morphology and typology of the city fab-
ric, and socialist legislation was intro-
duced to maintain this fabric in both old
and new development. The conditions un-
der which such a plan is feasible must of
necessity be restricted to those surviving
traditional cities which have remained
subject to responsible forms of political
control. Where these cultural and political
conditions are absent, the formulation of
a creative cultural strategy becomes more
difficult. The universal Megalopolis is pa-
tently antipathetic to a dense differentia-
tion of culture. It intends, in fact, the
reduction of the environment to nothing
but commodity. As an abacus of develop-
ment, it consists of little more than a hal-
lucinatory landscape in which nature
fuses into instrument and vice versa. Criti-
cal Regionalism would seem to offer the
sole possibility of resisting the rapacity of
this tendency. Its salient cultural precept
is 'place' creation; the general model to
be employed in all future development is
the enclave-that is to say, the bounded
fragment against which the ceaseless

inundation of a place-less, alienating con-
sumerism will find itself momentarily
checked.
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Contentsimage 1image 2image 3image 4image 5image 6image
7image 8image 9image 10image 11image 12image 13image
14image 15image 16Issue Table of ContentsPerspecta, Vol. 20,
1983Front Matter [pp.1-7]Thoughts on a Non-Arbitrary
Architecture [pp.9-20]Process and Theme in the Work of Carlo
Scarpa [pp.21-42]Oppositions: The Intrinsic Structure of Kazuo
Shinohara's Work [pp.43-60]Heidegger's Thinking on
Architecture [pp.61-68]Notes from Volume Zero: Louis Kahn
and the Language of God [pp.69-90]Timeless but of Its Time:
Le Corbusier's Architecture in India [pp.91-118]Architecture
and Morality: An Interview with Mario Botta [pp.119-138]The
Symbolism of Centric and Linear Composition [pp.139-
146]Prospects for a Critical Regionalism [pp.147-162]Tadao
Andô: Heir to a Tradition [pp.163-180]Authenticity, Abstraction
and the Ancient Sense: Le Corbusier's and Louis Kahn's Ideas
of Parliament [pp.181-194]Landscape and Architecture: The
Work of Erik Gunnar Asplund [pp.195-214]Architectural
Authenticity [pp.215-223]
Toward New Horizons in Architecture
Author(s): Tadao Ando
Source: MoMA, No. 9 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 9-11
Published by: The Museum of Modern Art

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A rchitectural thought is supported by abstract
logic. By abstract I mean to signify a medita-
tive exploration that arrives at a crystalliza-
tion of the complexity and richness of the world,
rather than a reduction of its reality through dimin-

ishing its concreteness. Were not the best aspects of
modernism produced by such architectural thinking?
Postmodernism emerged in the recent past to
denounce the poverty of modernism at a time when
that movement was deteriorating, becoming conven-
tionalized, and had abandoned its self-ordained role
as a revitalizing cultural force. Modernist architec-
ture had become mechanical, and postmodernist
styles endeavored to recover the formal richness that
modernism appeared to
have discarded. This
endeavor undeniably was
a step in the right direc-
tion-utilizing history,
taste, and ornament-and
restored to architecture a
certain concreteness. Yet
this movement, too, has
quickly become mired in
hackneyed expression, producing a flood of formalis-
tic play that is only confusing rather than inspiring.
The most promising path open to contemporary
architecture is that of a development through and
beyond modernism. This means replacing the

mechanical, lethargic, and mediocre methods to
which modernism has succumbed with the kind of
abstract, meditative vitality that marked its begin-
nings, and creating something thought-provoking
that will carry our age forward into the twenty-first
century. The creation of an architecture able to
breathe new vigor into the human spirit should clear
a road through the present architectural impasse.
Transparent Logic
Architectural creation is founded in critical action.
It is never simply a method of problem-solving
whereby given conditions are reduced to technical
issues. Architectural creation involves contemplat-
ing the origins and essence of a project's functional
requirements and the subsequent determination of
its essential issues. Only in this way can the archi-
tect manifest in the architecture the character of its
origins.
-~~~S S
A I
Tadao Ando. Church of the Light, lbaraki. View of the
interior. Osaka. 1987-8 9. Photo ? Mitsuo Matsuoka.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~-0
- o -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~0-
Tadao Ando.~~~~~~~~~~~~~t
9

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In envisioning the Chikatsu-Asuka Historical
Museum, Osaka, on a site central to early Japanese
history, I came to realize the vital importance of
establishing an architecture that didn't mar the
grandeur of the existing landscape. Therefore, I
focused on architecture's power to produce a new
landscape, and sought to create a museum that
would embrace the entire landscape within the
scope of its exhibitions.
In contemporary society, architecture is determined
by economic factors and for the most part ruled by
standardization and mediocrity. The serious designer
must question even the given requirements, and
devote deep thought to what is truly being sought.
This kind of inquiry will reveal the special character
latent in a commission and cast sharp light on the
vital role of an intrinsic logic, which can bring the
architecture to realization. When logic pervades the
design process the result is clarity of structure, or
spatial order-apparent not only to perception, but
also to reason. A transparent logic that permeates the
whole transcends surface beauty, or mere geometry,
with its intrinsic importance.
Abstraction
The real world is complex and contradictory. At the
core of architectural creation is the transformation
of the concreteness of the real through transparent

logic into spatial order. This is not an eliminative
abstraction but, rather, an attempt at the organiza-
tion of the real around an intrinsic viewpoint to give
it order through abstract power. The starting point
of an architectural problem-whether place, nature,
lifestyle, or history-is expressed within this devel-
opment into the abstract. Only an effort of this
nature will produce a rich and variable architecture.
In designing a residence-a vessel for human
dwelling-I pursue precisely that vital union of
abstract geometrical form and daily human activity.
In the Row House (Azuma Residence), Suniyoshi, I
took one of three wood row houses and reconstruct-
ed it as a concrete enclosure, attempting to generate
a microcosm within it. The house is divided into
three sections, the middle section being a courtyard
open to the sky. This courtyard is an exterior that
fills the interior, and its spatial movement is
reversed and discontinuous. A simple geometric
form, the concrete box is static; yet as nature partic-
ipates within it, and as it is activated by human life,
its abstract existence achieves vibrancy in its meet-
ing with concreteness. In this house my chief con-
cern was the degree of austerity of geometric form
that could be fused with human life. This concern
predominates in my Koshino House, Kidosaki
House, in other residential works, and in other types
of buildings as well. Geometric abstraction collides
with human concreteness, and then the apparent
contradiction dissolves around their incongruity.

The architecture created at that moment is filled
with a space that provokes and inspires.
Nature
I seek to instill the presence of nature within an
architecture austerely constructed by means of
transparent logic. The elements of nature water,
wind, light, and sky-bring architecture derived
from ideological thought down to the ground level
of reality and awaken manmade life within it.
The Japanese tradition embraces a different sensibil-
ity about nature than that found in the West. Human
life is not intended to oppose nature and endeavor to
Tadao Ando. Koshino House and Studio, Ashiya, Hyogo.
1979-81; Studio, 1983-84. Top: Exterior view of the entry.
Bottom: interior view. Photos C Mitsuo Matsuoka.
10
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control it, but rather to draw nature into an intimate
association in order to find union with it. One can go
so far as to say that, in Japan, all forms of spiritual
exercise are traditionally carried out within the con-
text of the human interrelationship with nature.

This kind of sensibility has formed a culture that de-
emphasizes the physical boundary between residence
and surrounding nature and establishes instead a
spiritual threshold. While screening man's dwelling
from nature, it attempts to draw nature inside. There
is no clear demarcation between outside and inside,
but rather their mutual permeation. Today, unfortu-
nately, nature has lost much of its former abun-
dance, just as we have enfeebled our ability to
perceive nature. Contemporary architecture, thus,
has a role to play in providing people with architec-
tural places that make them feel the presence of
nature. When it does this, architecture transforms
nature through abstraction, changing its meaning.
When water, wind, light, rain, and other elements of
nature are abstracted within architecture, the archi-
tecture becomes a place where people and nature
confront each other under a sustained sense of ten-
sion. I believe it is this feeling of tension that will
awaken the spiritual sensibilities latent in contempo-
rary humanity.
At the Children's Museum, Hyogo, I have arranged
each of the architectural elements to allow congenial
meetings with water, forest, and sky under ideal con-
ditions. When the presence of architecture trans-
forms a place with a new intensity, the discovery of a
new relationship with nature is possible.
Place

The presence of architecture-regardless of its self-
contained character-inevitably creates a new land-
scape. This implies the necessity of discovering the
architecture which the site itself is seeking.
The Time's Building, situated on the Takase River in
Kyoto, originated out of the involvement with the
delicate current of the nearby river. The building's
plaza where one can dip a hand in the water, the
bridgelike attitude of its deck above the current, the
horizontal plan of approach from along the river
rather than from a road-these elements serve to
derive the utmost life from the character of the
building's unique setting. The Rokko Housing pro-
ject was born from attention to an equally singular
site, in this case one pitched on a maximum sixty-
degree slope. Underlying its design was the idea of
sinking the building in along the slope, governing its
projection above the ground in order to merge it into
the surrounding cover of dense forest. This affords
each dwelling unit an optimal view of the ocean from
a terrace provided by its neighbor's roof. Each of my
projects, whether the Chiildren's Museum, Hyogo, the
Forest of Tombs Museum, Kumamoto, the Raika
Headquarters Building, or Festival, Okinawa, results
from an endeavor to create a landscape by bringing
the character of place fully into play.
I compose the architecture by seeking an essential
logic inherent in the place. The architectural pursuit

implies a responsibility to find and draw out a site's
formal characteristics, along with its cultural tradi-
tions, climate, and natural environmental features,
the city structure that forms its backdrop, and the
living patterns and age-old customs that people will
carry into the future. Without sentimentality, I aspire
to transform place through architecture to the level
of the abstract and universal. Only in this way can
architecture repudiate the realm of industrial tech-
nology to become "grand art" in its truest sense.
Hine.s V: Tadao Ando (through December 31) was
organized by Stuart Wrede, Director, Department
of Architecture and Design. This exhibition is the
last of five exhibitions in the Gerald D. Hines
Interests Architecture Program at The Museum of
Modern Art, and is sponsored jointly by Hines
Interests and Yoshida Kogyo K.K.
Tadao Ando. Children's Museum, Himeji, Hyogo. 1987-89.
Exterior view. Photo C Mitsuo Matsuoka.
11
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Contents91011Issue Table of ContentsMoMA, No. 9 (Autumn,
1991), pp. 1-30Front MatterFrom the DirectorDislocations [pp.
1-8]Toward New Horizons in Architecture [pp. 9-11]Pleasures
and Terrors of Domestic Comfort [pp. 12-17]With a Fiddle in
Yidishland: The Making of Yidl Mitn Fidl [pp. 18-22]From the
Archives: Ephemeral Art [p. 23]Modern Masks and Helmets [p.
24]In Brief [p. 25]Members Page [p. 26]Back Matter [pp. 27-
30]

230 Juhani Pallasmaa
JUHANI PALLASMAA(University of Helsinki)
SPACE, PLACE AND ATMOSPHERE.
EMOTION AND PERIPHERAL PERCEPTION
IN ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIENCE
The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes
notice.And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible,we
have already been supporters of the invisible for a long
time.1Gabriele D’Annunzio
Fusion of the world and the mindThe quality of a space or place
is not merely a visual perceptualquality as it is usually assumed.
The judgement of environmentalcharacter is a complex multi-
sensory fusion of countless factorswhich are immediately and
synthetically grasped as an overall at-mosphere, ambience,
feeling or mood. «I enter a building, see aroom, and – in the
fraction of a second – have this feeling aboutit», Peter Zumthor,
one of the architects who have acknowledgedthe importance of
architectural atmospheres, confesses2. John De-wey, the
visionary American philosopher (1859-1952), who alrea-dy
eight decades ago grasped the immediate, embodied,
emotive,and subconscious essence of experience, articulates the
nature ofthis existential encounter followingly:the total
overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in a seizure by
asudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of
entrance into acathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass
and majestic propor-tions fuse in one indistinguishable whole.
We say with truth that a pain-ting strikes us. There is an impact
that precedes all definite recognitionof what it is about.3
1 G. D’Annunzio, Contemplazioni della morte, Milano, Fratelli
Treves, 1912, pp. 17-18. Asquoted in G. Bachelard, Water and

dreams: an essay on the imagination of matter, Dallas,The
Pegasus Foundation , 1983, p. 16.2 P. Zumthor, Atmospheres –
Architectural environments – Surrounding objects, Basel –
Boston - Berlin, Birkhäuser, 2006, p. 13.3 J. Dewey, Art as
experience, 1934 (1987), as quoted in M. Johnson, The meaning
of the
body: aesthetics of human understanding, Chicago - London,
The University of ChicagoPress, 2007, p. 75.
231 Lebenswelt, 4.1 (2014)
This experience is multi-sensory in its very essence. In his book
The experience of place, Tony Hiss uses the notion
«simultaneousperception – the system we use to experience our
surroundings»4.This is, however, also the way we normally
observe, with all thesenses at once. As Merleau-Ponty notes:
«My perception is […] nota sum of visual, tactile, and audible
givens. I perceive in a totalway with my whole being: I grasp a
unique structure of the thing,a unique way of being, which
speaks to all my senses at once»5. Anatmospheric perception
also involves judgements beyond the fiveAristotelian senses,
such as sensations of orientation, gravity, ba-lance, stability,
motion, duration, continuity, scale and illumina-tion. Indeed,
the immediate judgement of the character of spacecalls for our
entire embodied and existential sense, and it is per-ceived in a
diffuse, peripheral and unconscious manner ratherthan through
precise, focused and conscious observation. Thiscomplex
assessment also includes the dimension of time as expe-riencing
implies duration and the experience fuses perception,memory
and imagination. Moreover, each space and place is al-ways an
invitation to and suggestion of distinct acts: spaces andtrue
architectural experiences are verbs.In addition to environmental
atmospheres, there are cultu-ral, social, work place, family, etc.
interpersonal atmospheres. Theatmosphere of a social situation

can be supportive or discoura-ging, liberating or stifling,
inspiring or dull. We can even speak ofspecific atmospheres in
the scale of cultural, regional or nationalentities. Genius loci,
the Spirit of Place, is a similarly ephemeral,unfocused and non-
material experiential character that is closelyrelated with
atmosphere; we can, indeed, speak of the atmosphereof a place,
which gives it its unique perceptual character and iden-tity.
Dewey explains this unifying character as a specific quality:An
experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that
storm,
that rapture of friendship. The existence of this unity is
constituted by asingle quality that pervades the entire
experience in spite of the variationof its constituent parts. This
unity is neither emotional, practical, nor in-tellectual, for these
terms name distinctions that reflection can makewithin it.6
4 T. Hiss, The experience of place, New York, Random House,
1991.5 M. Merleau-Ponty, The film and the new psychology, in
Id., Sense and non-sense,Evanston, Northwestern University
Press, 1964, p. 48.6 J. Dewey, in M. Johnson, op. cit., p. 74.
In another context the philosopher re-emphasizes the
integratingpower of this experiential quality: «The quality of
the whole per-meates, affects, and controls every
detail»7.Martin Heidegger links space indivisibly with the
humancondition: «When we speak of man and space, it sounds
as thoughman stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space
is not some-thing that faces man. It is neither an external object
nor an innerexperience. It is not that there are men, and over
and above themspace»8. As we enter a space, the space enters
us, and the expe-rience is essentially an exchange and fusion of
the object and thesubject. Robert Pogue Harrison, an American

literary scholar, sta-tes poetically: «In the fusion of place and
soul, the soul is as muchof a container of place as place is a
container of soul, both are su-sceptible to the same forces of
destruction»9. Atmosphere is simi-larly an exchange between
material or existent properties of theplace and the immaterial
realm of human perception and imagina-tion. Yet, they are not
physical ‘things’ or facts, as they are humanexperiential
‘creations’.Paradoxically, we grasp the atmosphere before we
identifyits details or understand it intellectually. In fact, we
may be com-pletely unable to say anything meaningful about
the characteristi-cs of a situation, yet have a firm image,
emotive attitude, and recallof it. In the same way, although we
do not consciously analyse orunderstand the interaction of
meteorological facts, we grasp theessence of weather at a
glance, and it inevitably conditions ourmood and intentionality.
As we enter a new city, we grasp its over-all character
similarly, without having consciously analysed a sin-gle one of
its countless material, geometric, or dimensional pro-perties.
Dewey even extends processes that advance from an ini-tial but
temporary grasp of the whole towards details all the wayto the
processes of thinking: «All thought in every subject beginswith
just such an unanalysed whole. When the subject matter
isreasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer
themsel-ves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long
enough to bereadily recalled»10.
7 Ibid., p. 73.8 M. Heidegger, Building, dwelling, thinking, in
Id., Basic writings, New York, Harper &Row, 1997, p. 334.9 R.
Pogue Harrison, Gardens: an essay on the human condition,
Chicago - London, TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 2008, p.
130.10 J. Dewey, op. cit., p. 75.
233 Lebenswelt, 4.1 (2014)
This is an intuitive and emotive capacity that seems to

bebiologically derived and largely unconsciously and
instinctivelydetermined through evolutionary programming.
«We perceiveatmospheres through our emotional sensibility – a
form ofperception that works incredibly quickly, and which we
humansevidently need to help us survive», Zumthor suggests11.
The newsciences of bio-psychology and ecological psychology
actually stu-dy such evolutionary causalities in human
instinctual behaviourand cognition12. It is evident that we are
genetically and culturallyconditioned to seek or avoid certain
types of situations or atmo-spheres. Our shared pleasure in
being in the shadow of large treeslooking onto a sun-lit open
field, for instance, is explained on thebasis of such evolutionary
programming – this specific type of set-ting demonstrates the
polar notions of ‘refuge’ and ‘prospect’,which have been
applied to explain the pleasurable pre-reflectivefeel of Frank
Lloyd Wright’s houses, for instance13.Although atmosphere and
mood seem to be overarchingqualities of our environments and
spaces, these qualities have notbeen much observed, analysed or
theorized in architecture orplanning. Professor Gernot Böhme is
one of the pioneering thin-kers in the philosophy of
atmospheres, along with Herman Schmi-tz14. Recent
philosophical studies, relying on neurological eviden-ce, such
as Mark Johnson’s The meaning of the body: aesthetics of
human understanding15, and neurological surveys, such as Iain
Mc-Gilchrist’ The master and his emissary: the divided brain
and the
making of the Western world16, significantly value the power
of at-mospheres. Current neurological findings on mirror
neurons helpto understand that we can internalise external
physical situationsand experiences through embodied
simulation.
11 P. Zumthor, op. cit., p. 13.12 See, for instance, G.
Hildebrand, The origins of architectural pleasure, Berkeley -
LosAngeles - London, University of California Press, 1999; Id.,
The wright space: pattern &
meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses, Seattle, University of

Washington Press, 1992.13 See E.O. Wilson, The right place, in
Id., Biophilia, Cambridge, Harvard University Press,1984, pp.
103-118.14 G. Böhme, Atmosphäre, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1995; Id., Architektur und
Atmosphäre, München, Fink, 2006; H. Schmitz, System der
Philosophie, Bd. III: Der Raum,2, Teil: Der Gefühlsraum, Bonn,
1969.15 M. Johnson, op. cit.16 I. McGilchrist, The master and
his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the
Western world, New Haven - London, Yale University Press,
2009, p. 184.
Atmospheres in the artsAtmosphere seems to be a more
conscious objective in literary,cinematic and theatrical thinking
than in architecture. Even theimagery of a painting is integrated
by an overall atmosphere orfeeling; the most important unifying
factor in paintings is usuallytheir specific feel of illumination
and colour, more than their con-ceptual or narrative content. In
fact, there is an entire painterlyapproach, as exemplified by
J.M.W. Turner and Claude Monet,which can be called
‘atmospheric painting’, in the two meanings ofthe notion;
atmosphere being both the subject matter and the ex-pressive
means of these paintings. «Atmosphere is my style», Tur-ner
confessed to John Ruskin as Zumthor reminds us17. The
formaland structural ingredients in the works of these artists are
delibe-rately suppressed for the benefit of an embracing and
shapelessatmosphere, suggestive of temperature, moisture and
subtle mo-vements of the air. ‘Colour field’ painters similarly
suppress formand boundaries and utilize large size of the canvas
to create an in-tense immersive interaction and presence of
colour.Great films, such as the films by Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir,
Mi-chelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, are also
steeped intheir characteristic atmospheric continuum. Also

theater reliesheavily on atmosphere which supports the integrity
and continui-ty of the story regardless of the often abstracted
and vaguely hi-nted features of the place or space. The
ambience can be so sugge-stive and dominating that very few
cues of the setting are needed,as in Lars von Trier’s film
Dogville (2003) in which houses and ro-oms are often indicated
by mere chalk lines on the dark floor, butthe drama takes a full
grip of the spectator’s imagination and emo-tions.Somewhat
paradoxically, we can also speak of ‘atmosphericsculpture’,
such as the sketch-like modelled works of MedardoRosso,
Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti. Often it is the atmo-
sphere of the works, as the abstracted sculptures of
ConstantinBrancusi, that creates the unique sense of a singular
artistic world.Artists seem to be more aware of the seminal role
of ambiencethan architects, who tend to think more in terms of
the ‘pure’ qua-lities of space, form and geometry. Among
architects atmosphereseems to be judged as something romantic
and shallowly entertai-ning. Besides, the serious Western
architectural tradition is enti-
17 P. Zumthor, op. cit., title page.
235 Lebenswelt, 4.1 (2014)
rely based on regarding architecture as a material and
geometricobject as experienced through focused vision.
Standard architec-tural images seek clarity rather than
ephemerality and obscurity.When describing his creative
process in the essay The trout
and the mountain stream, Alvar Aalto confesses:Led by my
instincts I draw, not architectural syntheses, but sometimeseven
childish compositions, and via this route I eventually arrive at
anabstract basis to the main concept, a kind of universal
substance withwhose help the numerous quarrelling sub-
problems [of the design task]can be brought into

harmony.18Aalto’s notion of universal substance seems to refer
to a unifyingatmosphere or intuitive feeling rather than any
conceptual, intel-lectual or formal ideas.Music of the various
art forms is particularly atmospheric,and has a forceful impact
on our emotions and moods regardlessof how little or much we
intellectually understand musical struc-tures. That seems to be
the very reason why muzak is commonlyused to create desired
atmospheric moods in public spaces, shop-ping malls and even
elevators. Music creates atmospheric interiorspaces, ephemeral
and dynamic experiential fields, rather than di-stant shapes,
structures or objects. Atmosphere emphasizes a su-stained being
in a situation rather than a singular moment of per-ception. The
fact that music can move us to tears is a convincingproof of the
emotive power of art as well as of our innate capacityto
simulate and internalise abstract experiential structures, ormore
precisely, to project our emotions on abstractly
symbolicstructures.
Recognition of place and spaceThe instant recognition of the
inherent nature of a place is akin tothe automatic reading of the
creature-like identities and essencesin the biological world.
Animals instantly recognize other creatu-res crucial for their
survival, either pray or threat, and we humansidentify
individual faces among thousands of nearly equal
facialconfigurations, and recognize the emotive meaning of each
one onthe basis of minute muscular expressions. A space or a
place is akind of a diffusely felt multi-sensory image, an
experiential ‘crea-ture’, a singular experience, that is fused with
our very existential
18 A. Aalto, The trout and the mountain stream, in Alvar Aalto
sketches, ed. by G. Schildt,Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1985, p.
97.

experience and cognition. Once we have assessed a space
invitingand pleasant, or uninviting and depressing, we can
hardly alterthat first-hand judgement. We become attached to
certain settingsand remain alienated in other kinds of settings,
and both intuitivechoices are equally difficult to analyse
verbally or alter as expe-riential realities.The existential value
of the diffuse but comprehensive gra-sping of the ambience of a
spatial entity, or an entire landscape,can be understood from the
point of view of biological survival. Ithas evidently given an
evolutionary advantage to be instantly ableto differentiate a
scene of potential danger from a setting of safetyand
nourishment. Let me repeat, such judgements cannot be con-
sciously deducted from details; they have to be
instantaneouslygrasped as an intuitive reading based on a
‘polyphonic’ grasp ofthe ambience. This polyphonic perception
and cognition has beenidentified as one of the conditions for the
creative mind. At thispoint, I wish to suggest that the
elementarist idea of perception,imagery and thought is
questionable, if not altogether wrong. Anelementarist approach
to conceiving architecture as an additiveentity of definable and
pre-conceived elements is equally misgui-ded.
Unconscious perception and creative thoughtAgainst the
common understanding, also creative search is basedon vague,
polyphonic and mostly unconscious ways of perceptionand
thought instead of focused and unambiguous attention19.
Alsounconscious and unfocused creative scanning grasps
complex en-tities and processes, without conscious
understanding of any ofthe elements, much in the way that we
grasp the entities of atmo-spheres.I wish to underline the fact
that we have unexpected synthe-sizing capacities that we are not
usually aware of, and, besides,which we do not regard as areas
of special intelligence or value.
19 J. Pallasmaa, In praise of vagueness: diffuse perception and
uncertain thought, Austin,University of Texas Press, 2011 (to be
published). In his seminal books The
psychoanalysis of artistic vision and hearing: an introduction to

a theory of unconscious
perception (1953) and The hidden order of art (1970), Anton
Ehrenzweig argues that inorder to grasp the inarticulate,
unconscious entity of artistic works, we must adopt themental
attitude of diffuse attention. He writes about the ‘polyphonic’
structure ofprofound artworks, that can be appreciated only
through ‘multi-dimensional attention’.Also P. Klee in Thinking
eye (1964) uses the word ‘polyphonic’ in reference to
theessence artistic structure. The perception of atmosphere calls
for similar diffuseattention to this polyphonic phenomenon.
237 Lebenswelt, 4.1 (2014)
The biased focus on rational logic and its significance in
humanmental life is a major reason behind this unfortunate
rejection. Itis surprising, indeed, that more than a century after
SigmundFreud’s revolutionary discoveries, the prevailing
pedagogic philo-sophies and practices continue to grossly
undervalue the entireuniverse of unconscious and embodied
processes. Also architectu-ral education continues to emphasise
conscious intentionality a-long with focused imagery over the
pre-reflective ground of archi-tecture and its experience.We
have traditionally underestimated the roles and cogniti-ve
capacities of emotions in comparison with our conceptual, in-
tellectual and verbal understanding. Yet, emotional reactions
areoften the most comprehensive and synthetic judgements that
wecan produce, although we are hardly able to identify the
constitue-nts of these assessments. When we fear or love
something, there isnot much scope or need for
rationalization.Mark Johnson assigns to emotions a crucial role
in thinking:«There is no cognition without emotion, even
though we are oftenunaware of the emotional aspects of our
thinking»20. In his view,emotions are the source of primordial
meaning: «Emotions arenot second-rate cognitions; rather they

are affective patterns ofour encounter with our world, by which
we take the meaning ofthings at a primordial level»21. He
points out that «emotions areprocesses of organism-environment
interaction»22, and he sug-gests further that situations are the
locus of emotions, not mindsor brains23. «Emotions are a
fundamental part of human mea-ning», Johnson
concludes24.Besides, our accepted understanding of intelligence
isgrossly limited. Recent psychological studies have revealed
sevento ten different categories of intelligence beyond the
narrowrealm of intelligence measured by the standard IQ test.
TheAmerican psychologist Howard Gardner lists seven
categories ofintelligence: linguistic intelligence; logical-
mathematical intelli-gence; musical intelligence; bodily-
kinesthetic intelligence; spatialintelligence; interpersonal
intelligence; intrapersonal intelligen-
20 M. Johnson, op. cit., p. 9.21 Ibid., p. 18.22 Ibid., op. cit., p.
66.23 Ibid., op. cit., p. 67.24 Ibid.
ce25. Later in his book, he suggests three further categories:
natu-ralistic intelligence; spiritual intelligence; existential
intelligen-ce26. I would definitely add the categories of
emotional, aestheticand ethical intelligence in this list of human
cognitive capacities,and I even suggest atmospheric intelligence
as a specific realm ofhuman intelligence. Atmospheric
sensitivity and intelligence iscrucial in all artistic work in order
to sense the integrity of thework.
Atmospheric intelligence – a capacity of the right
hemisphereRecent studies on the differentiation of the human
brain hemi-spheres have established that, regardless of their
essential inter-action, the hemispheres have different functions;
the left hemi-sphere is oriented towards the processing of
detailed observationand information whereas the right

hemisphere is dominantlyengaged in peripheral experiences and
the perception of entities.Besides, the right hemisphere is also
oriented towards emotionalprocesses while the left deals with
concepts, abstractions and lan-guage.It seems that the
recognition of atmospheric entities takesplace in a peripheral
and subconscious manner primarily throughthe right
hemisphere. In his challenging and thorough book on‘the
divided brain’, Master and his emissary, Iain McGilchrist assi-
gns the task of peripheral perception and the integration of
themultifarious aspects of experience to the right
hemisphere:The right hemisphere alone attends to the peripheral
field of vision fromwhich new experience tends to come; only
the right hemisphere candirect attention to what comes to us
from the edges of our awareness,
regardless of the side […]. So it is no surprise that
phenomenologically itis the right hemisphere that is attuned to
the apprehension of anythingnew.27The right hemisphere, with
its greater integration power, isconstantly searching for patterns
in things. In fact its understan-ding is based on complex pattern
recognition28.
25 H. Gardner, Intelligence reframed: multiple intelligences for
the 21st century, New York,Basic Books, 1999, pp. 41-43.26
Ibid., p. 47.27 I. McGilchrist, op. cit., p. 40.28 Ibid., p. 47.
239 Lebenswelt, 4.1 (2014)
McGilchrist also locates contextual understanding, the reco-
gnition of configurational entities and emotional judgement in
theright hemisphere: «Anything that requires indirect
interpretation,which is not explicit or literal, that in other words
requires con-textual understanding, depends on the right frontal
lobe for itsmeaning to be conveyed or received»29. «What the
right hemi-sphere crucially appears to be able to do [here] is to

see the ‘confi-gurational’ aspects of the whole»30. «It is the
right hemispherewhich gives emotional value to what is
seen»31.
Space and imaginationOur innate capacity to grasp
comprehensive atmospheres andmoods is akin to our capacity of
imaginatively projecting the emo-tively suggestive settings of
an entire novel, as we read it. Whenreading a great novel, we
keep constructing all the settings and si-tuations of the story at
the suggestion of the words of the author,and we move
effortlessly and seamlessly from one setting to thenext, as if
they pre-existed as physical realities prior to our act ofreading.
Indeed, the settings seem to be there ready for us toenter, as we
move from one scene of the text to the next. Remarka-bly, we
do not experience these imaginary spaces as pictures, butin their
full spatiality and atmosphere. The same fullness appliesto our
dreams; dreams are not pictures as they are spaces, or qua-si-
spaces, and imaginatively lived experiences. Yet, they are enti-
rely products of our imagination. The sensory imagery evoked
byliterature seems to be a kind of an imaginative sensory
atmosphe-re. The processes of literary imagination are
discussed in ElaineScarry’s recent book Dreaming by the book.
She explains the vivid-ness of a profound literary text as
follows:In order to achieve the ‘vivacity’ of the material world,
the verbal artsmust somehow also imitate its ‘persistence’ and,
most crucially, itsquality of ‘givenness’. It seems almost
certainly the case that it is the‘instructional’ character of the
verbal arts that fulfils this mimeticrequirement for
‘givenness’.32
29 Ibid., p. 49.30 Ibid., p. 60.31 Ibid., p. 62.32 E. Scarry,
Dreaming by the book. Princeton, Princeton University Press,
2001, p. 30.

Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech writer, also points out the
concretenessof our literary imagination: «When I read, I don’t
really read: I popup a beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck
it like liqueur untilthe thought dissolves in me like alcohol,
infusing my brain andheart and coursing on through the veins to
the root of each bloodvessel»33.Also architecture calls for a
deepened sense of materiality,gravity and reality, not an air of
entertainment or fantasy. The po-wer of architecture is in its
ability to strengthen the experience ofthe real, and even its
imaginative dimension arises from thisstrengthened and re-
sensitized sense of reality. As ConstantinBrancusi requests,
«Art must give suddenly, all at once, the shockof life, the
sensation of breathing»34.Experiencing, memorizing and
imagining spatial settings,situations and events, all engage our
imaginative skills; even theacts of experiencing and memorizing
are embodied acts in whichlived embodied imagery evokes an
imaginative reality that feelslike an actual experience. Recent
studies have revealed that theacts of perception and imagining
take place in the same areas ofthe brain and, consequently,
these acts are closely related35. Evenperception calls for
imagination, as percepts, are not automaticproducts of our
sensory mechanisms; perceptions are essentiallycreations and
products of intentionality and imagination. Wecould not even
see light without our mental ‘inner light’ andformative visual
imagination, as Arthur Zajonc argues36.Atmosphere or
ambience is an epic experiential dimensionor prediction, as we
automatically read behavioural and socialaspects – either
existent, potential or imaginary – into the atmo-spheric image.
We also read a temporal layering or narrative intothe setting,
and we appreciate emotionally the layering of tempo-ral traces
as well as images of past life in our settings. We eviden-tly like
to be connected to signs of life instead of being isolated
inhermetic and artificial conditions. Don’t we seek historically
densesettings because they connect us experientially and
imaginatively
33 B. Hrabal, Too loud a solitude, San Diego - New York -

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