Seeing Motion Otherwise

Eyes and Legs

For the visually impaired, architectural discourse’s constant assertions about the appearance of buildings and spaces probably take on meanings that differ greatly from those understood by the majority of architects and commentators. But this is only the most obvious of such discrepancies between architectural discourse and impairment. Is a deaf person’s experience of a given space not different from that of someone who enjoys auditory sensation? Probably, as sound contributes to how those who hear understand a room’s proportions, its surfaces, and its relative separation from or openness to adjacent spaces. Does deaf experience have a set of corresponding concepts or language in conventional architectural discourse? A cursory review would have to conclude that, apart from the systematic recourse to visual stimuli in building descriptions, it does not. Articulating such a language would provide substance for Wölfflin’s notion of direct bodily feeling. ⁵

We may hypothesize, then, that scrutinizing design language from the perspective of sensory disabilities can expand the limits of architectural discourse, and by extension the conceptual tools available to those who design the built environment. More senses, however, are only part of the challenge. When Wölfflin cites Goethe, he draws attention to the body’s multisensory capabilities by taking for granted another corporal experience: motion. The experience of a beautiful room should not require sight, but it apparently requires that one move through the space. Motion, like vision, is a facilitating assumption in much architectural discourse.

In this case, we are led through Wölfflin’s “beautiful room” blindfolded. My own preconceptions bring to mind the image of someone walking. This is the notion of normality that John Hockenberry (1995) questions. Hockenberry, an American reporter who is paraplegic, describes his daily Chicago commute between his apartment at the bottom of Michigan Avenue and his office at the top:

Though I rolled in rhythm and wove my way with precision, the presence of a wheelchair in the crowd never seemed as natural to the crowd as it did to me. Where I saw beauty and grace gliding down, others, particularly those walking toward me, saw terror, collisions and serious injury. Going up, where I saw a bracing physical challenge, others saw pain and suffering. (p. 209)

Hockenberry’s observation contrasts two ways of getting from one place to another: by foot or by wheel. But just as an attempt to downplay vision assumes motion, Hockenberry’s criticism of pedestrian-centrism relies on vision to achieve its effect. The seeming normality or abnormality of wheelchair motion is determined by seeing beauty or terror, by seeing challenge or suffering.

In one case, the matter of perceiving architecture assumes motion to oppose seeing and not seeing. In the other case, the matter of a body getting around contrasts wheel motion with leg motion by distinguishing between what we see: rolling or walking.

These remarks on the discursive aspects of the selected excerpts in no way undermine the richness of either Wölfflin or Hockeberry’s texts. They nonetheless allow the formulation of a second hypothesis: It is difficult to articulate an argument for expanded experiential considerations without downplaying another common assumption that itself tends to limit conceptions of what spatial experience could be.

This recurring conflict in architectural discourse is not the fault of architecture or architects alone. It may not even be a problem. Phenomenology has struggled to dismantle precisely those conceptual constructs that dissociate sensory perception from motion. Drew Leder (1990) points out that

the classical distinction between perception and movement is in fact highly artificial, dividing in reflection what is always united in lived experience. [. . .] Perception is itself a motor activity. [. . .] The spatial depth of the perceived world, the experience of objects as there, near or far from my body, is only possible for a being that moves through space. (p. 17)

The unity of sensation and motion in lived perception as described by Leder does not assume an ocular pedestrian. Architectural discourse, however, tends to do so. It fails at the task of articulating the spatial experience of a person who can neither see nor walk. Insights from phenomenology must be used very prudently if we are to avoid inadvertently contributing to a more narrow conception of architectural experience than is necessary or desirable. Very little, if any, design practice uses hearing, smell, or touch to inform decisions. ⁶ When these senses are evoked as design factors, they remain anecdotal compared with the importance of visual considerations. ⁷ Design thinking generally holds together a pair of functioning eyes and a pair of functioning legs. When we discuss architecture, we summon the ocular pedestrian as a witness for assertions about a work’s meaning, functionality, interest, appropriateness, or aesthetic value. Take away the eyes perched on legs walking through a building, and the certainties regarding its architectural qualities evaporate. Removing the legs from the eyes also changes how we think about architecture. This is familiar to designers who must follow accessibility regulations. But the constraints of barrier-free design rarely lead to a critique of conventional ideas about how buildings are experienced.

Perceiving Otherwise

The asymmetry between mobility and sensory disabilities highlights the instability of certain assumptions about lived experience. It is widely accepted that the built environment should allow as much motion as possible. In contrast, architectural design cannot render architecture more audible for those who are deaf. Given architectural discourse’s optical bias, this does not seem to be limitative, assuming that the person in question can see. However, a building cannot better stimulate, through its specific appearance, the retina of someone who cannot see. Design nonetheless plays a role in how that individual experiences his or her environment. The geometry of walls and the alignment of pathways in a building can either facilitate or hinder its occupation by those with visual impairments. The materiality of architecture continues to structure the immateriality of experience, even—or perhaps especially—in cases of sensory disability. In this case, other senses, notably touch and hearing, contribute to seeing otherwise.

Design thinking tends to use the notion of seeing otherwise only with regard to accommodation. For example, orthogonal geometries are encouraged so that those who are blind can navigate as easily as those who can see. Accessibility regulations focus on ensuring that individuals not be excluded. This is interpreted as a demand to modify or add to architecture such that it provides those considered lacking with what others enjoy.

There are other ways to think about how sensory disabilities can modify architecture. Julia Kristeva (2003) proposes that the most ambitious project for society is not simply to respond to needs or to repair impairments but rather to acknowledge that society consists of “different ways of being.” Kristeva argues that we must evolve from a frame of mind in which the objective is to accommodate people with disabilities to one in which different ways of being are acknowledged and appreciated. For Kristeva, the social norm is no longer the reference for interpreting disability. Rather, the measure of our humanity is our “concern with recognizing the particular mode of expression from which emerges a particular being.” She asserts,

The democratic pact, as outlined in the modern conception of disability, is made of this plurality of different beings and lives that call to us with a desire for acknowledgment, and of the recognition with which we make our own humanity. By not wanting to hear others’ calls for acknowledgment, or that of the other in ourselves, we exclude not only them from humanity, but ourselves as well. (p. 32-33, author’s translation)

For Kristeva, the “plurality of beings and lives should be understood first through the specific modulations and adaptations of their expression.” (p. 31) This echoes the call of disability scholars such as Snyder and Mitchell (2001), who argue that reclaiming embodied disability “occurs at the historical intersection of the nondisabled body’s demystification and the disabled body’s reintroduction as the more appropriate paradigm for a mutable humanity” (p. 386). The transition from accommodation to what may be called openness could manifest itself in environmental design as an evolution from prosthetic correction, whether at the scale of the body or the building, to attention to other ways of being. Kristeva calls for considering expressions. I would add that understanding impressions—in the sense of Wölfflin’s “architectural impressions”—is the proper role for spatial design in the evolution that Kristeva harkens. Being otherwise in architecture is a matter of perceiving otherwise, whereby the senses and mobility work together, whatever their conditions.

Interestingly, the return to a phenomenology of disabled embodiment comes after a long period of “dis-incarnation” in disability studies. Snyder and Mitchell (2001) point out that “disability studies has strategically neglected the question of the experience of disabled embodiment in order to dissociate disability from its mooring in medical cultures and institutions,” since medicine’s normalizing tendencies are understood as the basis of society’s able-bodied bias (p. 368). The social constructionist approach to critiquing discrimination based in impairment required that disability be situated in social norms rather than in real bodies. The fear was that grounding disability in biology reinforced the tools and practices that distribute real cases around socially constructed norms (Foucault, 1976/1978, 1976/1995). This counter project “maintained disability studies in its preoccupation with the critique of immaterial bodies” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2001, p. 381). Disability studies downplayed embodiment, often to the point of negation. More recently, however, scholars (Linton, 1998; Paterson & Hughes, 1999) have called for “a return to a phenomenology of disabled bodies that can more accurately mine the experience of disability through meaningful, visceral language” (Snyder & Mitchell, 2001, p. 369). If disability studies faulted on the side of immaterial bodies, architectural discourse faults on the side of idealizing the body through a language inspired loosely by phenomenology. Expanding architecture’s capacity to incorporate nonidealized embodiment into its design discourse is an appropriate pendant to the difficult critical work being done in disability studies to reclaim disabled embodied experience.

In light of this tension between social critique and real embodiment, there is both promise and danger in applying disability criticism to conventional architectural discourse in order to understand spatial experience, like Wölfflin and Goethe, as a multisensory phenomenon. Danger, because disability criticism in architecture tends to focus on accessibility, reinforcing as a consequence the association of unfettered vision and mobility as the standard and unquestioned measure of architectural judgment. Promise, because disability criticism brings to the inner confines of architectural discourse precisely the bodily difference that circumstances have maintained unthinkable: that is, bodily states that, unlike that of the vast majority of architects and architectural theorists, are not characterized by at least average mobility and sensory capacity.

I will attempt here to render a bit of that promise without coming into danger. My aim is not to contribute to the literature whose task is to improve architecture for the good of people with disabilities. Those efforts are of course necessary and laudable. But there is also room to ask how disabled individuals’ different ways of being can enhance architectural thought and, by extension, architecture in general. As Breckenridge and Vogler (2001) point out, “the disabled are ‘good to think’” (2001, p. 353). The direct bodily feeling that Wölfflin refers to does not by definition exclude physical impairments. But the real wager here is that everyone may benefit from innovations in how architects use their understanding of lived experience to generate architectural form.

Ramps and Lifts

Outside Bordeaux, France, on a hill overlooking the metropolitan area that floods the river plain, a novel house defies the convention that associates seeing eyes with walking legs (Figure 1). The so-called Bordeaux House, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, was intended to respond to the needs of a family whose male adult was quadriplegic, able only to operate a sensitive joystick linked to his wheelchair’s motor. The innovation consists of a room-sized hydraulic lift at the house’s center, providing easy movement from floor to floor in the three-storey building (Figures 2 and 3).

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Figure 1.

The Bordeaux House, Floirac, France, Office for Metropolitan Architecture/Koolhaas, 1995-1998. Image courtesy of OMA.

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Figure 2.

The Bordeaux House: Section. Image courtesy of OMA.

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Figure 3.

The Bordeaux House: Partial axonometric of lift. Image courtesy of OMA.

The architect describes the house as three distinct houses linked by a fourth element, the room-sized lift. The lower floor is like a cave dwelling carved into the hill, where a kitchen and a television room provide for “the intimate life of the family” (Koolhaas, 1996, p. 164; Figure 4). The upper house, enclosed in the concrete box beam that seems to float above the hill, contains the parents’ suite and the children’s zone. The third house is sandwiched between the hilltop and the floating box. It is half inside—the living room proper enclosed almost exclusively by transparent glass walls—and half outside—a sort of portico punctuated by a single cylinder that is both column and stairwell. The platform lift that connects the three other levels is described as the father/husband’s mobile room or station.

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Figure 4.

The Bordeaux House. Plans: Lower, middle, and upper floors. Image courtesy of OMA.

The Bordeaux House engages architectural discourse in a way that conventional accessible buildings do not. This is especially interesting because the house is clearly inscribed in the architectural tradition of the 20th-century Villa, a tradition that otherwise does not overtly address impairment.

Dematerializing the main floor’s enclosure recalls Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (Plano, Illinois, 1945-1951), as well as Phillip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949). The lower floor’s cavelike forms recall aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1935-1939), which is literally grounded in the hill. Furthermore, the cantilevered upper floor echoes Fallingwater’s trademark projecting terraces and warm tones.

The Bordeaux House’s central elevator lift is especially interesting with respect to another of Koolhaas’s predecessors, Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier was an adept of what Lars Lerup (2000) calls “sectional technologies”: architectural elements that allow movement from one floor to another and that almost immediately became mannerisms in modernist design. In Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (Poissy, France, 1929), one such device—the ramp—finds its apotheosis as the central element linking three distinct levels. In this way, the Villa Savoye ramp is an antecedent of the platform lift in the Bordeaux House. The elevator room in the Bordeaux House may be understood as Koolhaas’s characteristically wry, tongue-in-cheek, and possibly caustic reply to the ramp-assisted promenade architecturale in the Villa Savoye. Moreover, ramps have become the architectural form most associated with rendering buildings accessible. The symbolic replacement of Le Corbusier’s ramp with an open elevator at the heart of a house occupied by a quadriplegic man is therefore doubly subversive.

Although the ramp and elevator question is familiar to designers engaged with disability regulations, it acquires additional complexity in a Koolhaas work. In his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, Koolhaas (1978) rehabilitates the elevator’s role in revolutionizing architecture, calling it “the great emancipator of all horizontal surfaces above the ground floor” (p. 82). For Koolhaas, the mainstream proponents of modernist architecture neglected this aspect of modern construction in favor of the compositional and plastic considerations that ramps and staircases afford. As though righting a historical wrong that mannerist ramps committed against anonymous elevator cores, Koolhaas puts forward the lift as the rightful progenitor of modern—and not necessarily modernist—architecture.

Considered in the Villa lineage, the Bordeaux House’s platform lift appears to replace Le Corbusier’s image of an athletic body dashing up switchback ramps with that of a body with a severe mobility disability rising and descending along the elevator’s vertical axis. In keeping with Le Corbusier’s general conception of the human body (Imrie, 1999), common discourse about the Villa Savoye assumes that its principal meaning-maker is a self-sufficient ambulant body with normal vision. In contrast, the spatial novelty in Koolhaas’s work is revealed by a body able only to move a finger. The quadriplegic man may see as well as Le Corbusier’s ideal inhabitant, but his eyes travel along a very different path (Figure 5). His house questions the assumption that architectural works are held together by footsteps, or even by wheels rolling along in those footsteps—and this latter assumption tends to dominate how accessibility regulations are integrated into design.

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Figure 5.

The Bordeaux House. Model: Lift in three different positions. Image courtesy of OMA.

There is no reason to limit this observation to vision. What one may see from the platform lift is only one factor in the overall experience. As Malnar and Vodvarka (2004) argue, the countless stimuli emitted by our environment constitute information that “is experienced and recorded as differentials of color, heat, motion, sound, pressure, direction, and whatever else is present and within the range of the senses” (p. 152). Hearing, touch, and smell are also stimulated as one ascends from the lower, dim, hill-ensconced kitchen level, through the vast glass-encased living level, to the upper, top-lit, wall-embraced bedroom level (Figure 6). Air temperature and humidity change as one passes through the floor’s thickness from one room to another. Sound emanating from the occupant and from the machinery behaves differently depending on the presence of partitions and on the nature of their surfaces. Each level provides different types of ventilation and different odors: those of cooking, of upholstery, of the freshly mowed lawn beyond the sliding plate glass enclosure, of books in the study.

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Figure 6.

The Bordeaux House. Model: Upper level. Image courtesy of OMA.

The Bordeaux House demonstrates some of the nonvisual ways that architecture gives form to perception. As in Wölfflin’s example of a “beautiful room,” it achieves this by relying on motion. However, the motion it describes is different from that normally associated with architectural experience. In lieu of the gradually changing line that a walking body traces through a building in most architectural narratives, it provides a straight vertical axis along which a paralyzed body travels through contrasting aesthetic experiences. This invention is related to an insight that Koolhaas elaborates in Delirious New York. Koolhaas notes that the high-rise building, as developed in Manhattan during the first decades of the 20th century, made it possible to encounter a different program—Koolhaas calls them worlds—on every floor. In contrast to the concept of the promenade architecturale advanced notably by Le Corbusier, these worlds were linked not by a sequence of contiguous and related spaces but rather by a viewless box moving up and down in a dark shaft. From this perspective, the contrast and variety among programs is as important as the nature of each program. Similarly, the specific architectural qualities of each floor in the Bordeaux House are less important than the contrasts among them. Koolhaas’s observation in Delirious New York concerns building program as a general category of occupancy. The Bordeaux House draws contrast as a design principle into the realm of multisensory perception.

Access and Experience

Another recent architectural work brings the phenomenon of contrast to its logical end through its peculiar plan and without the help of a machine. In the heart of Berlin, a large plaza-like architectural work constitutes the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Figure 7). Designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman for a competition in 1997, the Memorial was inaugurated in May 2005. It occupies a whole urban block on the street that links the Brandenberg gate with Potsdammer Platz, which also corresponds to the line followed by the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989.

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Figure 7.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Peter Eisenman, 1997-2005. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects.

Eisenman’s project consists of over 2,700 stelae or slabs made of concrete. Each slab measures 95 cm × 2.38 m, with heights varying between 0 and 4 m. The slabs are organized on an orthogonal grid, with lines running north-south and east-west. Each line is a path or alley, 95 cm wide, the same dimension as the short side of each stele. There are 130 such paths cutting straight through the site (Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. One of the 130 straight paths through the Memorial. Note the sloping ground and differing stele heights. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects.

The ground plane is a rolling relief of hills and valleys. The tops of the stelae also create a changing topography. However, it is different from that of the ground, neither mimicking nor mirroring it but rather creating unexpected fields of interference. The result is that each path through the site sinks and rises along continuous slopes, while the slabs surrounding it change heights in a more staccato manner (Figure 9). These interfering topographies are generated through a savvy calculation that includes parameters taken from different grids and lines meeting on the site. ⁸

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Figure 9.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: Sections. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects.

As often happens, the result of this particular design process was not a model of accessibility. The paths in the memorial project possessed slopes that were often more steep than permitted by regulations. Furthermore, the undulating landscape did not provide the flat landings at required intervals that offer a moment of rest. Finally, the narrowness of the paths, although technically sufficient, was not hospitable to people in wheelchairs.

The Zurich-based Swiss Center for Disability-adapted Construction (Centre Suisse pour la construction adaptée aux handicapés) targeted Eisenman’s memorial in the November 2005 issue of its newsletter Info. The article “L’art d’une architecture discriminatoire” claims that “the Berlin memorial illustrates, in a particularly acute manner, discrimination against people with disabilities for purely formal reasons” (p. 2).

The article recounts that it was only after disability activists took legal action that the memorial design was adapted to be partially accessible for wheelchairs. Historical and geographical conditions made the project’s disregard for what by then were considered basic architectural requirements all the more shocking for disability activists. It was just steps away, at number 4, Tiergartenstrasse, that Hitler’s euthanasia program, “Operation T4,” had its headquarters. This program was responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Germans with various types of physical and mental impairments. Disability rights organizations judged particularly distasteful that a memorial dedicated to some of Nazi Germany’s victims be inaccessible to those who share the physical traits of other victims.

Of interest here is the Info article’s evocation of notions from architectural discourse to advance its argument. The article points out that in light of activist demands, the Berlin Tribunal decided that at least 13 of the 130 paths traversing the site would have to meet the accessibility code. Why not more, or all? The Tribunal argued that too much modification would harm the work’s “artistic concept.” The court apparently noted that the paths are not simply functional elements that provide access to the memorial. They constitute an essential element of the “artistic work.” The impression of tightly spaced stelae sitting on a moving ground, through which Eisenman allegedly sought to evoke a sense of insecurity and constraint, presumably depends, at least in part, on the slopes’ otherwise prohibitive steepness. The Info article deduces with irony that the negative effects of depriving the “general public” of this concept were deemed greater than the negative effects of excluding those with mobility disabilities.

Looking at the Tribunal’s argument more closely, we find that it creates a logical conundrum. If the paths do not function as access to the memorial, they do not fall under the provisions of the law. But it is precisely because of their narrow and undulating nature that they are the work, rather than merely its access route. In other words, it is by not meeting accessibility norms that the paths are excused from their application.

This strange bit of reasoning, whereby a path is not a path, betrays some interesting design principles. In particular, it creates a distinction between a path as access and path as substance. Eisenman’s memorial is an extreme case where there seems to be full coincidence between circulation and sense, between movement and meaning. But the Court’s statement implies precisely that, normally, there is a distinction. It opposes two sets of terms: on one hand, access-circulation-functionality, and on the other hand, experience-substance-meaning. At the other extreme from the Berlin memorial, in a situation where the “artistic concept” is eminently not pathlike, the means of getting from one place to another would ostensibly be purely functional, devoid of experiential interest. In contrast, the destinations—for example, the rooms of a building—would constitute the substance of the architectural work. They would be where the architect’s intention is realized through bodily experience, and would presumably not be subject to the constraints of barrier-free design.

This second extreme conceives of circulation space as fundamentally different from what we call program (recall the stacked floors linked by the elevator in Koolhaas’s description of Manhattan towers). The ability to get to a space is distinguished from the ability to occupy that space. Bodily motion is not associated with what we call “experience” but is rather limited to its functional role of getting from one place to another: from the front door to a room, from a lounge to a terrace, or from a bed to a washroom. This conception also corresponds to financial concerns: although the shape, size, and evenness of hallways may be scrutinized to ensure the absence of impediments to movement, the proportion of circulation space to usable space is an important factor in a project’s cost evaluation. Circulation and program—access and experience—are valued differently with regard to their architectural significance.

No empirical differentiation between program and circulation is fully coherent. There is always room for ambiguity. But the distinction operates in architectural discourse, underpinning conceptualizations about how a given building functions and is perceived. Interestingly, this ideal distinction is constantly challenged by real architectural proposals. Many projects from the past 20 years—museums, theatres, transit hubs, libraries—incorporate large ramps or sloping ground as major architectural features. In these cases, we might be tempted to argue that because the bit of tilted ground is part of the architectural concept, and is therefore not simply an access element leading from one space to another, it need not meet accessibility standards. In cases where the circulation is a meaningful part of the work, where access is the experience, is it acceptable that the very form of paths and passageways prevent easy movement?

Rather than take sides in this debate, we might consider its underpinning assumptions. The first question might be this: What is being accessed, and how is it ostensibly accessed?

Returning to Berlin, recall that for the Tribunal, the paths are not on the way to something but rather are that something. It is by experiencing the paths themselves that one accesses the sense of this particularly difficult subject of remembering, that is, memorializing the holocaust. Eisenman (2006) explains how the contrast between the ground plane and the stelae tops achieves this effect:

A perceptual and conceptual divergence between the topography of the ground and the top plane of the stelae is thus created. This divergence denotes a difference in time, between what Henri Bergson called chronological, narrative time and time as duration. The monument’s registration of this difference makes for a place of loss and contemplation, elements of memory. (p. 152)

We might ask if any one path best produces this divergence between perception and concept or if, on the contrary, any path makes it manifest as well as any other. More radically, we might wonder if one must pass by each of the two thousand stelae, on all four sides, from every possible arriving itinerary, to every possible departing itinerary, in order to realize the work’s meaning, its potential, to experience it in an appropriate way for it to be the memorial that it is. Since it is practically impossible for any one person to exhaust the possibilities, the meanders, the turning in circles, the disorientation, is the Berlin Memorial really fully accessible to anyone?

As far as architectural meaning is concerned, the Memorial’s specific configuration brings the conventional way of thinking about access to a critical limit. It reveals another possibility: Architecture need not define singular experiences revealed by a unique path. It could rather create a great potential for making paths. The stelae make perceptible the prospect of seemingly infinite pathways, just as there are infinite routes through a large city’s grid. It is unlikely that visitors try a dozen paths, let alone the 130 straight paths through the Memorial. Rather than choreographing one particular experience, Eisenman’s architectural intervention in Berlin is the armature for countless individual experiences. Notwithstanding the ethical principles that ground disabled access in buildings, this work asks us to reconsider what architectural experience is, and how a work gives access to it.

The Weight of Air

Eisenman (2006) hints at the prospect of nonvisual perception in his comparison between his Memorial and traditional monuments:

The traditional monument is understood by its symbolic imagery, by what it represents. It is not understood in time, but in an instant in space; it is seen [italics added] and understood simultaneously. [. . .]

In this monument there is no goal, no end, no working one’s way in or out. The duration of an individual’s experience of it grants no further understanding, since understanding is impossible. The time of the monument, its duration from top surface to ground, is disjoined from the time of experience. (p. 154)

The contrast is meant to oppose chronological time with what Bergson called duration. This passage also associates vision with architectural experience understood in relation to traditional chronological time. However, it does not specify a mode of perception for the time as duration that the Berlin Memorial ostensibly makes manifest. By implying “direct bodily feeling” as the specificity of architecture as duration, Eisenman opens the way to consider the experience of his project through senses other than vision. Since the paths are not access but are rather the Memorial’s very substance, what would it be like to follow Goethe’s example and “be led through it blindfolded?”

When vision impairments are addressed in architectural regulations, it is as a disability affecting movement. The regulations do not ask that architects convey the beauty, or alternatively the shock, of architecture to those who cannot see. We place grooves in the floor to give cues to the white stick and avoid disorienting curving walls in favor of clear orthogonal spatial distribution. None of this is ostensibly so that those who cannot see can appreciate the architecture. It is rather so that they can get from one place to another without trouble. Here, motion is clearly an enabling assumption. In such cases, architecture is asked to help people who are blind to see otherwise.

The Berlin Memorial expands what seeing otherwise provides as an experience. Taking motion for granted, the grooves for walking sticks found along some of the Memorial’s paths do not ensure only that one gets from one point to another (Figure 10). Like the groove on a vinyl record, they draw a sensitive instrument along a channel whose rhythmic structure and changing amplitudes unfold in time. There are variations in air pressure caused by compression and release as one moves between stelae and through intersections. Heat and coolness alternate on skin as the sun peeks out from behind a stele and disappears again. As the air temperature drops in the descent into the sunken areas, it is akin to the incremental changes in a repetitive Philip Glass composition, drifting almost imperceptibly from one scale to another. The resonance between rhythms in space and those in the body may be related to functions such as the heartbeat, digestion, and respiration (McNeill, 1995). Architecture’s mythology recalls the so-called Xenakis windows in the priory that Le Corbusier designed in 1959 for a Dominican community in Eveux near Lyons, France: The musically determined irregular spacing of their vertical supports supposedly affects breathing as one walks down the passages they flank (Ferro, Kebbal, & Potie, 1987). We need not imagine vision as the only way to sense Xenakis’s musical composition-cum-architecture. Interestingly, Pringle (2005) points out that the “interplay of physical movement, rhythmic spatial experience, and mental life is of course at play in such meditative spaces as cloisters.” (p. 152)

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Figure 10.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Note the grooves for walking sticks integrated into the paving blocks. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects.

From my one visit of the Berlin Memorial, I have a strong memory of the sounds of children playing a few “blocks” over, their invisibility making their aural presence all the more haunting: a remarkable intrusion into an otherwise repetitive promenade. Of course, seeing the stelae change height and envelope me, tower above me at points, and blot out Berlin’s sky while I walk among them was certainly a powerful experience (Figure 11). However, bracketing vision in the Berlin Memorial makes it possible to hypothesize a design process in which modifying architectural form for the eye would be the last step after it has been designed to work with the other senses—that is, as an extra gesture for those who see.

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Figure 11.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Image courtesy of Eisenman Architects.

Openings

Bringing disability into architecture usually raises the question: Can everyone, including those with mobility or sensory impairments, experience this building? The Berlin Memorial helps formulate a different question: To what modes of experience does this architecture lend itself? or, to paraphrase Kristeva: What ways of being does it anticipate and realize? The difference between these two concerns may have a great impact on design practice. Architectural discourse is riddled with descriptions of specific experiences. The focus on what experiences should be had in a given work of architecture tends to dismiss other ways that the work can be understood and appropriated. Furthermore, it almost always depends on an able body. There is a difference between designing to give access to an intention and designing to give access to experience. As an architect, the bodies I imagine are not the same in the two cases.

The Berlin Memorial draws attention to the possibility that meaning may come through changes in perception rather than from instances of perception. This is perhaps what Eisenman means when he contrasts his architectural intervention with traditional monuments whose symbolic content is perceived at once. The Berlin Memorial’s behavior suggests that architecture need not be imagined to represent one idea through its relationship to the body. Architecture could rather be conceived as a producer of sensory effects for their own sake. This orientation requires that architects suspend the habit of associating the sensory effects of spatial configurations with specific meaning, of considering that some experiences are more true to the object than others, and of providing overly focused explanations of their projects.

This is difficult to do with sight, as visible form is charged with significance in Western architectural traditions. Pursuing ways of seeing otherwise is one way to elude the hegemony of signification. Working with the aesthetics of sound is not limited to buildings that host activities requiring special attention to acoustics, such as music venues or libraries. The variations perceptible to the ear in the Berlin Memorial are an example of how sound can characterize an architectural experience independent from performance-oriented criteria or intentions that associate a specific noise with meaning. The contrasts from one level to another in the Bordeaux House demonstrate other possibilities.

A design process nourished by the ways that bodies with different sensory and mobility capabilities develop impressions of architecture could result in environments where we see otherwise through touch, feel otherwise through sound, hear otherwise through vision. It would imagine the differentials and collusions of one sense with another in the space of perception. Updating Wölfflin’s invitation, it would consider how we might hear our way through a room with skin tingling. Although this process need not be only a detour by which we return to the ostensible normal body that walks and enjoys five senses, that body, too, has much to gain from architecture that is conceived otherwise.