by Joddy Murray
Texas Christian University
What Kolatan's question points to is the work of space as symbol. How does space come to mean? Space is largely a non-discursive symbol system, a visual absence that is sensed, manipulated, and rhetorical. It must be, in sum, part of the new work of composing.
The terms discursive and non-discursive provide another way to talk about symbolization, or language. Susanne Langer's main claim in Philosophy in a New Key (1967) is that humans are capable, even practiced, at much more than communicating discursive information in sequence.
By including all symbol systems as a legitimate part of our repertoire of language, the tools available to any composer become complete, no longer limited to convey merely the "facts of consciousness" (p. 36). Space constructs meaning non-discursively.
Anne Cranny-Fancis reinforces the cultural and spatial aspects of multimodality by describing the landscape of multimedia as the "cartography of contemporary meaning-making" (2005, p. 5). What I like about this description is the focus it creates on meaning-making in three dimensional space. Creating texts made of several modes and media is nothing new, but thinking of writing and composing as a kind of cartography implies just how much contemporary writing is not simply the alphacentric literacies of verbal language on paper: not just the application of an alphabet. Cartography acknowledges space and the graphical metaphors employed in that space. Cartography acknowledges writing in the era of multimodal composition. Architecture is the act of composing with space.
"Architecture creates the semblance of the World which is the counterpart of a Self. It is a total environment made visible. Where the Self is collective, as in a tribe, its Word is communal [. . .] And as the actual environment of a being is a system of functional relations, so a virtual 'environment,' the created space of architecture, is a symbol of functional existence." (Langer, 1953, p. 98-9).
The type of non-discursive text discussed here is perhaps one of the most ambiguous, the most ineffable. Like talking about the rhetorical use of silence in a speech delivered orally, or discussing the impact of white or blank space in hypermedia texts, the focus here is on the most allusive of non-discursive text: space. Specifically, the meaning symbolized by area and volume: of the invisible, of the unseen.
The new work of composing includes space. It includes space as a symbol that carries meaning. "A written text is a structure in space that also implies a structure in time: in some sense writing turns time into space, with a written text being like a musical score" (Bolter, 2001, p. 99).
As our living and working spaces have changed, so has the articulation of these spaces: from the cubicle to the penthouse suite, architecture refines and promotes cultural hierarchies, social status, and class identity.
Space as text is paradoxically both visual and haptic: it signifies while remaining largely invisible and untouched.
That is, the skin registers volume on its own, without (or even despite) the help of the other senses.
We experience volumes through our skin; our bodies help us read space. Space has its own set of appeals based on how our bodies "read" our environment.
Consequently, architecture is text; cities and towns are collections of these texts, and they produce and distribute non-discursive meaning.
Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” (1976) analyzes the cityscape of New York is a similar fashion:
To be lifted to the summit [. . .] is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. one’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators [. . . ] His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. (p. 92)
For Certeau, the act of walking down the streets and alleys of the city is an act of writing: “they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (p. 93). That is to say that the city itself becomes a text in our viewing of it as well as in our experience of it. The collected buildings, even the icons representing mass consumerism itself, become non-discursive texts in the context of space, as do the actual paths we make while navigating them.
Composing with space creates an architectural product that, to one degree or another, is rhetorical because it is based on the appeals that are taken from images created by our various senses. We perceive the architect's use of light and shadow, the walls and curvatures of its form, the volume and mass of its centers, and even the lived-experience of a structure that is alive or dead.
When a building works, when the world enters the blissful state which makes us fully comfortable, the space itself awakens. We awaken. We and our plants and animals and fellow creatures and the walls and light together awake. In order to make it possible to have an idea like this, we need to understand space as a material which is capable of awakening. (Alexander, 2002, p. 439)
From the cool, modernist lines of Philip Johnson, to the smooth, curvilinear surfaces of Frank Gehry, architectural spaces are articulate non-discursive texts.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, upon seeing Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, Johnson himself expressed the non-discursive and affective quality possible while composing with space in this way: "Architecture is not about words. It's about tears, and love."
Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, says something similar: "Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination" (1994, p. xxxvi).
To walk into a space is to walk into composed text. To the extent this text is composed for an audience, to the extent that it reinforces and/or reflects cultural attitudes and values, to the extent that it is composed to move us emotionally, such space is rhetorical.
Virtual environments, digital media, even the locus of traditional (print) texts: each requires we compose with the invisible, ineffable, and sometimes ephemeral affordances of space.
Alexander, Christopher. (2002). Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life. The nature of order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe. Berkeley, CA: The Center for Environmental Structure.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1958, 1994). The poetics of space: The classic look at how we experience intimate places. Maria Jolas, trans. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing spaces: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Mahwah: NEA Publishers.
Cranny-Francis, Anne. (2005). Multimedia: Texts and contexts. London: Sage Publications.
Certeau, Michel de. (1976). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: U of California Press.
Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of grammatology. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Frederick, Matthew. (2007). 101 things I learned in architecture school. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kolatan, Sulan. (2003). Blurring Perceptual Boundaries. The state of architecture at the beginning of the 21st century. Bernard Tschumi and Irene Cheng, eds. New York, NY: Monacelli Press.
Langer, Susan K. (1957). Philosophy in a new key: A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Langer, Susan K. (1953). Feeling and form: A theory of art. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Vega, Yvette. (Producer). (2005). Charlie Rose - A conversation with architect Frank Gehry. Retrieved February 20, 2012, from http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1072