Architecture Beyond the Visual

Architecture has been conceptualized to a large extent in visual terms. Due to its long alliance with art history and visual mediums, architectural history has contributed to the persistence of the notion of architecture as the domain of sight, and its own proclivity for centering on the visual has made it emit a whole range of other realms in which buildings partake. This ocular-centrism has had a profound impact on notions of the subject/ user both architecture and architectural history have crafted.
Combining readings in architectural history and critique with analyses of design, this seminar will parse how the visual emphasis has been articulated in architectural discourse and practice, and examine attempts to overcome it by centering on other sensory modalities in architectural experience in the context of materiality, technology, and culture. The course will also address the spatial experience of the disabled, whose understanding requires parting with the primarily visual mode of conceptualizing architecture.

Photo: Wheelchair user is stretching her arm at her maximum reach to grasp an object on a shelf. Photo, 1955-60.
Source and Copyrights: Handicapped Homemaker Project Records. Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library


Syllabus 

Week 1 (February 23): Introduction
Reading:

• Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia, "Introduction"  in Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds), The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception, pp. 7-23.

Week 2 (March 2): The pervasiveness of the visual approach to space and the historical development of the hierarchy of senses
Readings:

• Sandy Isenstadt, "Introduction: Spaciousness, History of a Visual Effect" , "The Production of Spaciousness"  in Sandy Isenstadt, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-class Identity, pp. 1-13, 59-83.

• Constance Classen, "The Witch's Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to modernity"  in David Howes (ed.), Empire of Senses, pp. 70-84.

• Alberto Péréz-Gómez, "Claude Perrault and the Instrumentalization of Proportion"  in Alberto Péréz- Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, pp. 17-47.

Week 3 (March 9): Architecture and photography
Readings:

• Mary Woods, part of "Introduction " in Mary Woods, Beyond the Architect's Eye: Photographs and the American Built Environment, pp. XVII-XXIV.

• Claire Zimmerman, "Photographic modern architecture: inside 'the new deep '', The Journal of Architecture, 9:3, 2017, pp. 968-991.

• Claire Zimmerman, "Introduction", "Bildarchitecturen: Architectural Surface, circa 1914 " in Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century, pp. 1-47.

• Franziska Brons, "Photographic Premises: Notes on the Exposure of Interiors around 1900 " in Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Beate Sontgen (eds), Interiors and Interiority, pp. 261-277.

Week 4 (March 16): Critique of the hegemony of sight in architecture
Reading:

• Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses , pp.11-77.

Seminar Week (March 23) : NO CLASS

Week 5 (March 30): Touch/the haptics
Readings:

• Simon J. Bronner, "The Haptic Experience of Culture ", Anthropos, Bd. 77, H. 3./4. (1982), pp. 351- 362.

• Maire Eithne O'Neill, "Corporeal Experience: A Haptic Way of Knowing ", Journal of Architectural Education, 2001, pp. 3-12.

• Olivier Massin, Drederique de Vignemont, "Unless I Put My Hand into His Side, I Will Not Believe: The Epistemic Privilege of Touch ", in Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds), The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception, pp. 165-187.

• Freyla Hartzell, "The Velvet Touch: Fashion, Furniture, and the Fabric of the Interior ", Mark Taylor (ed.), Sensory Engagement, pp. 139-153.

Week 6 (April 6): Air, temperature, and olfactory sensations in relation to technology and science
Readings:

• Laurent Stalder, "Air, Light, and Air-Conditioning ", Gray Room, Summer 2010, No. 40, pp. 84-99.

• Wulf Böer, "Synthetic Air ", Future Anterior, Volume XIII, Number 2, Winter 2016, pp. 77-101.

• Wolfgang Kemp, "A Room with a Temperature: On Some Interiors of the 1830s/40s and the Discovery of Energy Laws " in: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Beate Sontgen (eds), Interiors and Interiority, pp. 247-260.

• Jim Drobnick, ''Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture " in David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 265-280.

Easter Break (April 13): no instruction at ETH on that week

Week 7 (April 20): Senses as connected: hypersthesia, intersensoriality, synesthesia, sensescape
Readings:

• David Howes,"Hypersthesia, or, the Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism " in David Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, pp. 281-304.

• Rodolphe el-Khoury, "Introduction to The Little House: An Architectural Seduction " in Mark Taylor (ed.), Sensory Engagement, pp. 166-178.

• Daniela Babilon, "Sensory Entanglements: Smell and Synesthesia " in Power of Smell in American Literature: pp. 279-293.

• Barry Smith, "Tasting Flavors: An Epistemology of Multisensory Perception ", in: Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds), The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception, pp. 29-52.

• M. Fulkerson, "Sensory Interactions and the Epistemology of Haptic Touch ", in: Berit Brogaard, Dimitria Electra Gatzia (eds), The Epistemology of Non-Visual Perception, pp. 53-75.

Week 8 (April 27): The environment and its physiological and psychological impact on the subject
Readings:

• John Sadar, "The Healthful Ambience of Vitaglass: Light, Glass and the Curative Environment " Architectural Research Quarterly, Vol. 12, No 3⁄4, 2008, pp. 269-281.

• Fae Brauer, "Intimate Vibrations: Inventing the Dream Bedroom " in Anca I. Lasc (ed.), Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, pp. 29-46.

• Paul J. Young, "Looking Inside: The Ambiguous Interiors of La Petite Maison " in Paul J. Young, Seducing the Eighteenth-Century French Reader: Reading, Writing, and the Question of Pleasure, pp. 55-81.

• F. Kiesler, "On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design " in William W. Braham, Jonathan A. Hale (eds), Rethinking Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory, pp. 66-79.

Week 9 (May 4): Movement, ergonomics, labor, and designing for the disabled
Readings:

• Leslie Land, "Counterintuitive: How the Marketing of Modernism Hijacked the Kitchen Stove ." Arlene Voski Avakian, Barbara Haber (eds), From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, pp. 41-61.

• V.K. Kool, R. Agrawal, Extracts on ergonomics and anthropometry  in V.K. Kool, R. Agrawal, Psychology of Technology, pp. 68-83.

• Robin Veder, "Walking through Dumbarton Oaks: Early Twentieth-century Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and Kinesthetic Experience of Landscape ", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, no.1 (March 2013), pp. 5-27.

• Anna Myjak-Pycia, "Home as an Aid: Domestic Design for Disabled Polio Survivors ", Journal of Design History, 2021, pp. 1–24.

Week 10 (May 11): Methods of accounting for the non-visual: challenges and opportunities
Readings:

• Daniela Babilon, "The Olfactory-verbal Gap: Literary Strategies to Describe Aroma " in Daniela Babilon, The Power of Smell in American Literature. pp. 295-8.

• Sabine von Fischer, "A Visual Imprint of Moving Air: Methods, Models, and Media in Architectural Sound Photography, ca. 1930 ." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76, no. 3 (September 2017), pp. 326-348.

• Inga Fraser, "Body, Room, Photograph: Negotiating Identity in the Self-Portraits of Lady Ottoline Morell " in Anne Massey, Penny Sparke (eds), Biography, Identity, and the Modern Interior, pp. 69- 85.

Contact

Dr. Anna Myjak-Pycia
A. Chiara Gloor