On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

An article published in the Guardian Weekend last Saturday (18.10.08) looked at the peculiar and often overlooked psychology at work inside our homes:

After having relished open-plan living for years, the author admitted freaking out because of the absence of doors in the loft she just moved into – a reaction that seemed natural when put to an anthropologist’s vision of primitive human needs of seclusion and sociability, which doors (and walls!) are central to fulfilling.

Because housing design is taken for granted, Peter Carolin, a former professor of architecture, argues that “we’ve subsequently lost our sensitivity and awareness of psychological issues. This is because our houses and flats have become more commodities than homes – ‘buy to let’ has furthered this trend. We’ve lost the ability to be shelter makers.” We’ve lost sight of the basic functions of a house, which is to provide safety, shelter and privacy. Fire, used for warmth and cooking, is also a strong symbol of sociability.

Johnny Grey is at the forefront of new research into the relation between human psychological needs and how they’re met in housing. “Anything that’s in peripheral vision demands more brain action. Sharp edges or corners might cause anxiety, however subliminal, because we think of them as things to avoid.” Likewise, he discovered that things that are happening behind us increase adrenaline levels; “That’s why tables in restaurants where you can sit with your back to the wall fill up first”.

In his book A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander argues that low window sills (30 to 50 cm, so that you could sit at the window) aren’t a luxury but a necessity, because they allow us to look out and still see the ground. A room deprived from window space seldom allows you to feel fully comfortable or at ease, keeping you in perpetual unresolved conflict and tension. In contrast, long views out of the window means that we know where we are and therefore feel more comfortable.

Windows of the mind [article from The Guardian]

À la fois entrée dans la ville et porte ouverte au voyage, la gare est un lieu chargé d’affects aussi bien collectifs que personnels :

La gare est d’abord le symbole physique et allégorique de la terminaison du chemin de fer dans la ville. Mais les gares matérialisent aussi les noeuds et carrefours de notre existence, nos histoires fragmentaires et stratifiées :

« Peu de bâtiments sont assez vastes pour y retenir la résonance du temps. Dans la gare comme nulle part ailleurs, des hommes convergent pour un moment, débutant ou achevant d’innombrables voyages, prétextes a des retrouvailles ou des adieux, et l’on peut y retrouver, en un seul instant, un tableau entier de la destinée humaine. »

Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1934.

La gare a une importance symbolique caractéristique dont la psychanalyse rend compte : elle est au commencement de nos entreprises matérielles, physiques et spirituelles ¹. Elle est le point d’arrivée ou de départ de l’aventure, vécue ou mythique ; C’est un lieu de passage par excellence, et lieu du passage : Seuil physique et initiatique du voyage, c’est le lieu du « franchissement » dans la Recherche proustienne.

La gare et son architecture sont puissamment investies par toute la symbolique du voyage, avec ses perspectives d’aventures, d’évasion ou de mise à l’épreuve tour à tour promises par les noms de destinations inconnues ou chargées de sens. « Derrière ses arcades, derrière ces places, s’étendent ces horizons lointains et lourds d’aventures » (De Chirico, Hebdomeros).

Baudelaire était ainsi saisi par le charme de ce monde suburbain ; Sa Poésie des départs et des arrivées – la chorégraphie des trains en gare, son climat de fébrilité, l’affichage des tableaux, la magie blanche des noms de villes qui sont attendues, rêvées – tout cela lui permettait de voyager sans bouger. La gare pourvoit au dépaysement, au changement de perspective, attribuant des significations nouvelles – la dialectique de l’ici et de l’ailleurs, du dehors et du dedans. Elle relie l’éphémère relatif du voyage à une impression durable.

William Powell Frith, The Railway Station, 1862.

¹ Jean Chevalier in Jean Dethier, Le Temps des Gares, Centre de Création Industrielle, 1978. p.11

On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.

The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.

Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.

Spanning above the original row of ticket booths in the Gare de Lyon, La Grande Fresque is a remarquable ode to train travel and early tourism that doesn’t get much notice, hidden by pillars and faded away by time. The fresco was probably painted at around the same time as the newly built station (1900s); I suppose it must have been commissioned as a kind of gigantic tourist brochure of the time, an advertisement for the train company operating the station, or as a visual guide to the attractions encountered along the journey, holding promises of blue skies, idealised and picturesque towns and countryside of meridional France.

The fresco is composed of 17 postcard-like panels, each representing a region traversed by the PLM (Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée) on its way to Italy. Albeit it forms a continous strip of land, the landscape has been condensed and stitched around the cities passed-by on the journey, and distances have been shortened between each point of interest. Each town or region is represented or characterised by a recognisable building or architectural style featuring prominently in the middle of each panel – to dissipate any ambiguity, their names have even been placed in a cartouche topping the painting. The linear nature of the painting has pushed some odd shifts into the geography of the places it purports to represent, such as Montpellier featuring between Nimes and Marseille [which, funnily enough, is also a feature of the 3D environment I developed for Memory / Territory], or the same sea coast apparearing on both sides of the land.

Beyond the actual representation of the landscape, I find this fresco interesting because it also encapsulates quite rightly the collective imaginary and evocations that are often associated with these places, built through direct or indirect experience, encompassing a rich, sometimes naive assortment of elements, including Architecture, topography, local myths or other personal and imperceptible affects. Symbolically, the fresco can be read like Matthew Paris’ Itinerary Map, a roadmap depicting stage points along the journey to the Holy Land – train travel being here the vehicle of contemplative ascent; but literally, the painting also transports the passer-by as if he were sitting through the train journey, watching the landscape scrolling through the window as he walks by.

Histoire de la Gare de Lyon [french]

Crédit photos Jean-Paul Foitet. http://www.lesgares.com/

Sculptor Richard Wilson teamed up with engineer Price & Myers to slice an oval into a derelict office building facade that revolves alarmingly above the heads of passers-by in Liverpool.

full article on bdonline.co.uk