Rumah Konsep Industrial

Trend desain rumah industrial terus menanjak, baik untuk penggunaan rumah/residensial hingga untuk kafe atau bisnis. Supaya tidak salah pengertian, yuk cek dulu apa itu rumah desain industrial berikut pro dan kontra dari konsep interior yang menarik ini.

Apa itu Desain Rumah Industrial?

Desain rumah industrial mengacu pada konsep yang to-the-point alias bebas ribet. Inspirasi dari sebuah rumah industrial juga erat pada gaya mentah seperti yang sering terlihat di pabrik, pergudangan atau struktur industri lainnya. Detail pada rumah industrial sering menggunakan bahan batu bata, metal atau material daur ulang lainnya dalam aspek arsitekturnya. 

Dari segi dekorasi atau furnitur, rumah industrial tetap bisa menggabungkan antara elemen yang berkesan tua dengan yang baru. Tetap ada benang merah utama yaitu kesan modern yang unik dan nyaman pada akhir desain rumah industrial. 

Saat mendesain rumah industrial, berikut adalah karakteristik yang harus hadir supaya style ini terasa maksimal dan efektif :

Material 

Untuk bahan rumah industrial, kalian akan jarang menemukan bahan mewah seperti kain sutra atau berudu. Bahan yang hadir umumnya punya sifat tangguh, tahan pakai dan punya daya daur ulang yang fungsional. Furnitur antik dari bahan kayu, aluminium, batu dsbnya sering menjadi pilihan utama, terutama jika ada kesan distressed atau usang. 

Warna

Untuk desain rumah industrial, palet warna akan didominasi dengan nuansa netral, misalnya abu, hitam dan putih. Sesekali ada gradasi warna yang kelam dan maskulin, tetapi kalian tetap boleh menghadirkan warna terang yang kontras supaya hasil akhirnya tampil indah - misalnya melalui lukisan atau karya seni. 

Siluet 

Garis lurus dan struktur tegas sering menjadi ciri khas bentuk desain rumah industrial. Namun bukan berarti rumah industrial tidak boleh menghadirkan kurva indah atau pola abstrak. Yang penting, aplikasinya harus tepat dan tidak berlebihan.

Dekorasi

Penggunaan aksesoris atau dekorasi termasuk jarang di desain rumah industrial, karena ada tema minimalis yang bersih dan rapi yang harus dipertahankan. Elemen dekor jumlahnya minimal tetapi atraktif dan sukses mencuri perhatian. 

Kelebihan dan Kekurangan Desain Rumah Industrial 

Banyak yang menggemari desain rumah industrial karena beberapa kelebihan berikut :

Cukup terjangkau, karena jauh dari kesan mewah yang serba elegan. Perabot daur ulang dan elemen desain low-budget lainnya bisa diterapkan di desain rumah industrial. Penggunaan dekorasi juga tidak berlebihan, sehingga kian menghemat pengeluaran. 

Penuh karakter dan unik. Kontras antara modern dan usang bersanding secara harmonis menjadikan desain rumah industrial hadir lain daripada yang lain. 

Ramah lingkungan, karena pendekatan yang menggunakan bahan daur ulang, minim cat, dan tidak selalu membutuhkan sistem perapian yang boros bahan dan tenaga. 

Leluasa dan nyaman. Desain rumah industrial menekankan pada ruang dan kesan adem yang bikin betah. 

Sedangkan dari segi kekurangan pada desain industrial antara lain tantangan menghadirkan kesan berkelas bermodalkan bahan- bahan yang berkesan usang. Sering kali, aransemen yang salah malah membuat rumah terlihat murahan. Selain itu, idealnya, rumah industrial membutuhkan space yang lebih luas supaya tidak terkesan kaku. 

Konsistensi adalah kunci saat menghadapi tantangan pada desain rumah industrial, sehingga seorang desainer harus ekstra hati- hati dalam perencanaan hingga eksekusi final. Pencarian bahan dan dekorasi juga mungkin lebih sulit, tetapi tentunya hasilnya juga akan sangat memuaskan bila ditekuni hingga tuntas. 

Architecture and Phenomenology

[first draft of a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, edited by Duanfang Lu and to be published by Routledge, London, tentatively in 2018; © 2017 David Seamon and not to be cited without permission; comments and corrections welcomed; reply to  triad@ksu.edu]

Architecture and Phenomenology

David Seamon

Department of Architecture Kansas State 

rising in continental Europe at the start of the twentieth century, phenomenology is a way of understanding that emphasizes the description and interpretation of human experience, awareness, and meaning, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted

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dimensions (Moran 2000; van Manen 2014). The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–

1938) was the founder of phenomenology, which he envisioned as “the descriptive, non- reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and intersubjective life of consciousness” (Moran 2005: 2). Over time, other European philosophers, including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), shifted their phenomenological explications beyond “consciousness” toward related philosophical topics such as the nature of human being, the various modes experientially by which human meaning arises, and the central role of bodily presence and action in human life. Examples of questions relevant to architecture that might be explored phenomenologically include the following:

▪     In what ways does architecture nurture or disrupt human life, whether via everyday, ordinary experience or via intense, extra-ordinary encounter?

▪     How do qualities of the designable world—materiality, spatiality, tectonics, aesthetic qualities, and so forth—contribute to human well-being and aesthetic sensibilities?

▪    How does the design of a particular building play a role in sustaining or undermining the

lives, actions, and needs of that building’s users?

▪     Have the everyday uses, experiences, and meanings of specific buildings and building types (e.g., places of residence, work, education, worship, incarceration, and so forth) changed over historical time? How are those uses, experiences, and meanings alike or unlike for different places, cultures, lifeways, social groups, and historical eras?

▪     What impact do advances in digital technology and virtual reality have on the lived nature of architecture and real-world places?

▪    If virtual reality is eventually able to simulate “real” reality entirely, will this shift

radically transform the lived nature of places, buildings, and everyday human life?

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the

descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos

2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and natural attitude. Second, I overview the thread of theoretical and practical events whereby architects and architectural thinkers became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and architectural theory: (1) lived embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I suggest what value phenomenology might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

The Nature of Phenomenology

The phenomenologist’s primary aim is to strive for a mode of openness whereby the phenomenon studied can be understood and described in an accurate, comprehensive way unencumbered by any pre-given theoretical, speculative, or common-sense points of view. One of Husserl’s descriptions of phenomenology was “back to the things themselves,” by which he meant setting aside personal, societal, ideological, and conceptual understandings, assumptions, and prejudices so that one might offer the phenomenon a supportive venue in which it can be known most clearly, appropriately, and thoroughly (Moran 2005: 9–17).

Most broadly, phenomenologists direct this mode of openness toward generating clear-sighted explications of concrete human experience and the lived reality of everyday life. Using the word “lived” in phrases like “lived reality” or “lived experience” may seem tautological, since, obviously, experience is always lived. For phenomenologists, however, “lived” is an integral descriptor because it “announces the intent to explore directly the originary or prereflective dimensions of human existence: life as we live it” (van Manen 2014: 28). “Lived” in this sense refers to the wide-ranging spectrum of human experiences, meanings, situations, and events—the mundane or exotic, the dull or penetrating, the unquestioned or surprising. How, for example, do we experience the everyday buildings of our ordinary lives and are there moments when we experience those buildings in a deeper, more memorable way (Pallasmaa 2005)? What delineates experientially the special moment when we encounter a great architectural work, and might such exhilarating moments of architectural engagement be better understood by drawing on phenomenological principles and methods (Bermudez 2015)?

Phenomenologists claim that human consciousness, experience, and action are always intentional—i.e., necessarily oriented toward and finding their significance in a world of emergent meaning. Human beings are not just aware but aware of something, whether an object, living thing, idea, feeling, environmental situation, or the like.. As described by Merleau-Ponty (1962: xvii), the distinguishing feature of intentionality is that “the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there.” The concept of intentionality leads to a central phenomenological claim crucial for

understanding human experience: that human beings are always already inescapably immersed and entwined in their worlds (Casey 2009; Moran 2011; van Manen 2014). How, phenomenologically, do we describe the way in which, existentially, selves and world are reciprocally related and mutually dependent? How, phenomenologically, do we locate and understand the complex, multivalent ways in which we, as human beings, are intertwined, intermeshed, entrenched and submerged in the worlds in which we find ourselves?

The everyday, intentional structure through which human-immersion-in-world unfolds is what Husserl identified as the lifeworld—a person or group’s day-to-day world of taken-for- grantedness normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon: “As conscious beings, we always inhabit—in a pre-theoretical manner—an experiential world, given in advance, on hand, and always experienced as a unity” (Moran 2005: 9). One aim of phenomenological study is to identify and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of the lifeworld, which always includes spatial, environmental, and place dimensions. Unless it shifts in some unusual way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our lifeworld, which we assume is the only way that life can be. This typically unquestioned acceptance of the lifeworld is what Husserl called the natural attitude, a mode of awareness “that obscures itself and remains unknown to itself. It is an attitude with blinkers on, as Husserl often said” (Moran 2011: 69). Because of the natural attitude, any lifeworld is transparent in the sense

that it is normally tacit and just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal situations and events more or less regular (Moran 2005: 9–17; 2011; van Manen 2014).

In applying the concept of lifeworld to architecture, one realizes that there are the individual lifeworlds of all users associated with a building as, at the same time, there is the more complex lifeworld of the building itself generated by those individual lifeworlds. The lived dynamic and character of the building’s lifeworld may support or interfere with the individual lifeworlds housed within that the building (Seamon 2017). Later in this chapter, I make further reference to architectural aspects of lifeworlds, but first I delineate how, beginning after World War II, phenomenology came to have significance for architects and architectural thinking.

The Development of Architectural Phenomenology

The progressive influence of phenomenology in architecture is a complex narrative involving several different disciplines, professional efforts, and intellectual events. Beginning in the 1940s, philosophers working phenomenologically explored a wide range of themes implicitly relevant

to architecture. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) demonstrated how the lived body plays a key role in human spatiality (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015), and Heidegger (1952/1971) contended that human-being-in-the-world is always human-being-grounded-in-place, especially as that place sustains and is sustained by engaged caretaking—what Heidegger identified as dwelling

(Sharr 2007; Malpas 2006; Mugerauer 2008). Other thinkers produced phenomenological studies that incorporated architectural topics directly. In Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1957/1964: 8) delineated a research focus he called topoanalysis,” the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” In Sacred and the Profane, phenomenologist of religion

Mircea Eliade (1957/1961) examined hierophany, the lived ways that spiritual reality can break through into lifeworlds, including through place and architecture. In Human Space, phenomenological philosopher Otto Bollnow (1963/2011) developed a phenomenology of space as experienced, including the lived dialectic between “the wide world” and “the security of the house.”

In the late1940s and 1950s, architects became interested in phenomenology directly. In his book- length historiography of architectural phenomenology during this post-war period, architectural theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010) highlighted several key figures, beginning with the Italian modernist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909–1969), who promoted “some of the earliest contacts between architects and phenomenologists” and gathered around himself  “a small but influential group of young European architects… who explored phenomenology as an

intellectual framework for rethinking modernism” (2010: xxiv). Another key figure discussed by Otero-Pailos is the French-American architect Jean Labatut (1899–1986), who saw phenomenology as a conceptual tool for envisioning innovative designs arising from and aiming to enhance human experience (2010: 35–40). For example, Labatut designed a series of architectural and environmental works that generated a sense of participatory exhilaration and architectural sacredness through visual, acoustic, and tactile encounter. One such effort was Labatut’s “Lagoon of Nations,” a 1,400-nozzle fountain designed to create a nightly spectacle for the 1939 New York World’s Fair (2010: 40–57).

As founder of the first American Architecture doctoral program at Princeton in 1949, Labatut played a critical role in promoting architectural phenomenology academically (2010: 95-99). One of the most influential doctoral students under his direction was American architect Charles Moore (1925–1993), who completed in 1957 one of Princeton’s first Architecture dissertations, which focused on a Gaston-Bachelard-inspired “Water and Architecture.” Frustrated that, at the time, architectural scholarship was largely controlled by architectural historians, Moore (and

Bloomer 1977) worked “to legitimatize a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essence of buildings experientially” (2010: 100).

In the transformational 1960s, academic and professional interest in architectural phenomenology continued, partly via the development of “environment-behavior studies” (“EBS”), an interdisciplinary research and design field that became an important component of many American, Canadian, and British architecture programs in the 1970s and early 1980s (Sachs 2013). Identified variously as “architectural psychology,” “behavioral geography,” “environmental psychology,” or “human factors in design,” this movement was driven by the work of such innovative thinkers as architects Christopher Alexander (1964), Kevin Lynch (1960), and Oscar Newman (1973); anthropologist Edward Hall (1966); psychologist Robert Sommer (1969/2007); and urbanists Jan Gehl (1987), Jane Jacobs (1961) and William Whyte (1980). Though much of the EBS research was positivist, quantitative, and limited to the cognitive dimensions of architectural and environmental behavior, thinkers like Alexander (et al.

1977) and Jacobs (1961) produced work that was qualitative, interpretive, and implicitly phenomenological. Also appearing during this time were the writings of so-called “humanistic geographers” like Edward Relph (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1974). Strongly influenced by EBS but drawing directly on phenomenological concepts like place, rootedness, dwelling, and placelessness, these geographers provided one academic reference point for later phenomenological efforts examining architectural embodiment, environmental atmospheres, and architectural design as it might facilitate place and place making (Casey 2009; Malpas 1999; Mugerauer 1994; Shatzki 2007).

One important architectural theorist considerably influenced by EBS was the Norwegian

Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000), who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played a crucial role

in keeping phenomenology in sight for architects. Like Rogers and Labatut before him, Norberg- Schulz sought to re-conceptualize how architects understood architecture, partly through phenomenological reformulations of the work of EBS researchers like Kevin Lynch and Edward Hall. Norberg-Schulz aimed for “a return to the roots of modernism by visualizing the self- renewing origin of architecture,” which he located in foundational lifeworld patterns and structures such as lived-space, home, at-homeness, and environmental ambience (Otero-Pailos

2010: 146). In his first major phenomenological work, Existence, Space and Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1971: 14, 37), he contended that a comprehensive architectural understanding requires “a theory where space is really understood as a dimension of human existence…” Architectural space, therefore, is best envisioned as “a “concretization” of existential space.” In his many later books and articles, he explored the architectural and environmental dimensions of human “lived space,” including place (Norberg-Schultz 1988, 2000a), dwelling (Norberg-Schulz

1985), and sense of place and genius loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980).

Particularly because of Norberg-Schulz’s work, architectural interest in phenomenology continued through the 1990s into the 2000s, though the perspective began to be challenged in the

1980s by newer conceptual approaches, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminist and critical points of view (Mugerauer 1994; Otero-Pailos 2010, 2012; Parella 1988). Although these and other “cutting-edge” perspectives have come to dominate architectural theory today, consequential phenomenological work continues to appear, including the writings of

philosophers Edward Casey (2009), Karsten Harries (1997), Jeff Malpas (1999, 2006), and Robert Mugerauer (1994, 2008); and architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow (2002), Rachel McCann (McCann and Locke 2015), Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009, 2016), Alberto Pérez- Gómez (2016); Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010, 2012), Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989), and Dalibor Vesely (2004). At the same, time, the design work of such eminent architects as Alvar Aalto, Tadao Ando, Stephen Holl, Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Dyke, and Peter Zumthor has come to be associated with an explicit or implicit phenomenological sensibility (Hale 2017; Holl, Palasmaa,

and Pérez-Gómez 1994; Malgrave and Goodman 2011: 210–214; Norberg-Schulz 2000b; Rush

2008; Sharazi 2015; Sharr 2007).

In describing architectural phenomenology as it is practiced today, architectural theorists John Macarthur and Naomi Stead (2012: 127) wrote that the approach “proposes to explain directly how the spaces we inhabit make us feel.” Otero-Pailos (2012: 136) extended this understanding when he defined architectural phenomenology as “the study of architecture as it presents itself to consciousness in terms of so-called archetypal human experiences, such as the bodily orientation of up and down, the perceptions of light and shadow, or the feelings of dryness and wetness.” Highlighting the perceptual, sensuous, and affective aspects of buildings and architectural experience, these two definitions of architectural phenomenology are a useful starting point, though it is important to recognize that phenomenological research can probe other relevant dimensions of architectural experience. For example, other recent phenomenological studies

have examined such topics as environmental wholeness (Alexander et al. 1977); pre-reflective and symbolic languages of architectural experience and meaning (Alexander 2002–2005; Harries

1997; Janson and Tigges 2014); and the phenomenological contribution to cognitive science, particularly in relation to architectural behaviors, aesthetic sensibility, and environmental wayfinding (Hale 2017: 50–54; Mallgrave 2013; Mallgrave and Goodman 2011: 229–230; Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015).

In short, phenomenology continues to be an important conceptual and practical force in contemporary architecture and architectural theory. To illustrate this claim, I highlight two phenomenological topics often drawn upon in architectural thinking today—environmental embodiment and architectural atmospheres.

Environmental Embodiment and Architecture

Environmental embodiment refers to the lived body in its unself-conscious perceptual awareness as it encounters and coordinates with the world at hand, especially its environmental and architectural aspects (Casey 2009; Pallasmaa 2005, 2009; McCann and Locke 2015; Mallgrave

2013). Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) contended that the taken-for-granted foundation of human experience is perception, which he interpreted as the typically unnoticed, immediate givenness of the world undergirded by a lived body that is conscious of, acting in, and experiencing a world that automatically reciprocates with familiar pattern, meaning, and contextual presence. Merleau- Ponty argued that perception incorporates a lived dynamic between the body and world such that aspects of the world are understood because they instantaneously evoke in the lived body their corresponding experienced qualities. For example, one “sees the springiness of steel” or “hear[s] the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the rattle of a carriage” (1945/1962: 229, 230). Through bodily perception, we immediately engage with and are aware of the world because it immediately engages with us to offer a reciprocating, pre-reflective sensibility and signification.

In the last several years, there has appeared an expanding body of studies considering what Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception might mean for architectural thinking and design (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015; Rush 2008). Central here is the work of Finnish architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009), who drew partly on Merleau-Ponty to argue that much contemporary architectural design is dominated by sight with the result that buildings

may be striking visually but have largely lost any expression of plasticity and multivalent sensuousness. For Pallasmaa (2005: 71), architects must aim to “create embodied and lived existential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world.” He argued that “Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings” (2005: 11). He found examples of such rich, afferent design in the buildings of architects like Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor (2005: 70–71).

More recently, Pallasmaa (2009) examined the relationship between the lived body and the process of architectural design. He contended that architectural education today places too much emphasis on cerebral and verbal knowledge at the expense of embodied processes, particularly the importance of the hand in envisioning and actualizing design possibilities:

Architecture is… a product of the knowing hand. The hand grasps the physicality and materiality of thought and turns it into a concrete image. In the arduous processes of designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, a vague inkling that it eventually turns into a sketch, a materialization of an idea (2009: 16–17).

To argue for the continuing importance of the hand in architectural design and fabrication, Pallasmaa reviewed the lived quality of craft and the importance of manual tactility in architectural drawing whereby the hand is in a “direct and delicate collaboration and interplay with mental imagery. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the thought… (2009: 91). In this sense, the process of drawing is a “pulling out” in which the hand “feels the invisible and formless stimulus, pulls it into the world of space and matter, and gives it shape” (2009: 92). Pallasmaa contrasted this embodied way of designing with architecture’s current emphasis on digital technology, which differs from previous design instruments because it largely unfolds in an abstract, mathematized space that bypasses the “direct haptic connection

between the object, its representation, and the designer’s mind” (2009: 95–96). Pallasmaa argued that computer-aided design is a valuable architectural tool but should not be introduced in design education until students have first mastered hand drawing and physical-model making: “[T]he computer probably cannot do much harm after the student has learned to use his or her imagination and has internalised the crucial process of embodying a design task” (2009: 99).

Environmental Embodiment, Body-Subject, and Place

Merleau-Ponty also demonstrated that, besides its more passive perceptual dimension, the lived body incorporates a more active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject, or pre-reflective corporeal engagement expressed via action and typically in sync with the spatial and physical environment in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962). Emphasizing that everyday, taken-for-granted actions and behaviors are grounded bodily rather than cognitively, Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962: 138–139) wrote that “Motility… is not a handmaid of [cognitive] consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed

a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body towards an object, the object must first exists for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the ‘in-itself’.”

Integrally related to the lived body, body-subject, and environmental embodiment is the phenomenological concept of place, which can be defined as any environmental locus that draws human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009, Malpas 1999, Relph 1976, Seamon 2013). In discussing the lived relationship between place and environmental embodiment, the phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey emphasized that “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places

belong to lived bodies and depend on them” (Casey 2009: 327). Through corporeal actions and encounters, individuals contribute to the constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions and encounters contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification with that place. In short, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other” (2009: 327). This interanimation of lived bodies and places is significant because the habitual, unself-conscious familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for- granted involvement with place.

Drawing on the concepts of environmental embodiment and place-body interanimation, phenomenological researchers have considered the spatial and environmental versatility of the lived body as expressed in more complex corporeal ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography (Casey 2009; Jacobson 2010: 223). One such ensemble is body routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim, for example, preparing a meal, mastering the use of carpentry tools,

building a stone wall, and so forth. Another such bodily ensemble is time-space routines—sets of more or less habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for example, a getting-ready-for-work routine, or a Sunday-afternoon-going-to-the-park routine (Seamon 2013).

Particularly pertinent to architectural design is the possibility that, in a supportive spatial and physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines converge and commingle in time and space, thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble identified as place ballet—an interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment such as a well-used office lounge, a vibrant city plaza, or an exuberant urban neighborhood (Jacobs 1961; Oldenburg 1999). A major phenomenological question is how environmental design might generate thriving place ballets, whether at architectural or wider environmental scales (Alexander et al. 1977; Jacobs 1961; Seamon 2013).

Atmosphere and Architecture

In the last several years, the phenomenon of atmosphere has become a major topic in architectural and phenomenological research (Borch 2014; Böhme, Griffero, and Thibald 2014; Griffero 2014, 2017; Pallasmaa 2016; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Zumthor 2006). Atmosphere refers to the ineffable architectural presence and ambience of a building that make it unique or unusual as an environment and place. Several phenomenological philosophers have linked atmosphere with

feelings and the tacit emotional tone of environments, spaces, or places. Gernot Böhme (2014:

43, 56), for example, explained that atmospheres involve “a spatial sense of ambience” and the “total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of an environment or place. Tonino Griffero (2014: 37) defined atmospheres as “spatialized feelings” and “the specific emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.” One important lived aspect of atmosphere is its ambivalent, liminal quality: it belongs to neither the experiencer nor the situation experienced; it varies in its lived intensity, for different experiencers in the same moments and for the same experiencer in different moments. As Böhme (1993: 122) explained:

[A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities…. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike [and] belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings, and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space.

Several architects and architectural theorists have examined the lived relationships between atmosphere and buildings. Alban Janson and Florian Tigges (2014: 26), for example, claimed that atmosphere is “the expressive force through which a situation that has been engendered by architecture seizes us in affective terms all at once and as a totality.” In proposing atmosphere as a creative vehicle for an architecture that is more than “pictorial image,” Alberto Pérez-Gómez

(2016: 21, 24) contended that “good architecture should be primarily concerned with creating the moods appropriate to positive emotions that support ethical human action….”  In asking why some buildings seem more pleasurable, enticing, or comfortable than others, Peter Zumthor (2006: 13) argued that one defining feature is atmosphere: “I enter a building, see a room and— in a fraction of a second—have this feeling about it.” Zumthor (2006: 10, 19) described atmosphere as “a beautiful natural presence” and the “magic of things, the magic of the real

world.” Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defined atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation. It provides the unifying coherence and character for a room, space, place, and landscape….” In proposing that all buildings,

whether prosaic or monumental, project some degree of ambience and mood, Pallasmaa (2016:

132–133) went so far as to suggest that atmosphere, rather than visible building form, is usually the most important dimension of architectural experience for non-architects and the lay public: “All buildings, monumental or commonplace, ritual or utilitarian, create atmospheres through which we experience the world and ourselves. This unconscious orientation and articulation of mood is often the most significant effect of a space or a building. I believe that non-architects sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas attention to visible form implies a distinct intellectual and theoretical position.”

Atmosphere, Natural Symbols, and Architectural Archetypes

If architectural atmosphere is as important as Pallasmaa claimed, then two provocative questions arise, the first of which is whether there are heuristic means whereby one might become more

sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere. Can we, asked Pallasmaa (2014:

29) generate “a deepened sense of materiality, gravity, and reality?” A second related question is whether architectural atmospheres can be created directly?  Can architects and other responsible parties “bring about the conditions in which atmospheres of a particular character are able to develop” (Böhme 2014: 58)?

In answering these two questions, the phenomenological work of philosopher Karsten Harries (1988, 1997) and architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989) offers helpful guidance. Focusing on the visceral, pre-reflective, bodily aspects of environmental experience and meaning, both thinkers developed revealing conceptual languages for becoming more alert to architectural atmospheres. Harries proposed a “natural language of space” (Harries 1997: 125) that draws on natural symbols—normally taken-for-granted, experiential qualities integrally associated with essential qualities of human nature and life, for example, lived qualities of materiality, of weight, of light, of temperature, of direction, of sociability, of privacy, and so forth. Harries suggested that the experiential structure of any natural symbol incorporates some manner of lived binary—for example, experiences of moving or resting, lying down or standing up, sensing lightness or heaviness, or feeling inside or outside. In his work, he explored such natural symbols as vertical and horizontal, up and down, light and darkness, and down, and inside and outside.

One example is Harries’ explication of how the lived binary between verticality and horizontality arises from the upright human body’s postural uprightness as it exists in lived relationship with the earth’s horizontal plane (Harries 1988: 40–45; 1997: 180–192). There is the vertical’s anchoring power of dwelling and rootedness existing in tension with the mobility and the horizon’s lure of open spaces. There is the vertical’s skyward movement toward sacredness and spiritual presence, which contrasts with the horizon’s expression of material extension and worldly success. Different cultures, historical eras, and architectural styles express the vertical- horizontal tension in a wide range of ways but, whatever the particular manifestation, it “presupposes an understanding of the meaning of verticals and horizontals inseparable from our being in the world” (Harries 1988: 45).

As an interpretive means for pondering Harries’ natural symbols as they might be actualized in specific buildings, one useful guide is Norwegian architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Archetypes in Architecture, a phenomenology of architectural experience as encountered through the lived body and originally his doctoral dissertation done under the direction of Norberg-Schulz (Thiis- Evensen 1989). Thiis-Evensen’s aim is to understand “the universality of architectural expression”; his interpretive means is what he called architectural archetypes—“the most basic elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof (1989: 8). He argued that the lived commonality of floor, wall, and roof is their making an inside in the midst of an outside, though in different ways: the floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within and around; and the roof, through over and under.

Thiis-Evensen proposed that a building’s relative degree of insideness and outsideness in relation to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through what he called the three “existential expressions” of architecture: motion, weight, and substance (1989: 21).  Motion refers to an architectural element’s lived sense of dynamism or inertia—i.e., whether the element seems to expand, to contract, or to rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the element’s lived sense of heaviness or lightness, and substance involves the element’s lived sense of material expression—whether it seems hard or soft, fine or coarse, cold or warm, and so forth. Using examples from architectural history as descriptive evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate lived language arising from and describing the corporeal and sensory dimensions of architectural experience and meaning.

For example, he discussed stairs as one kind of directed floor and explored how a stairs’ material and spatial qualities of slope, breadth, form, and relative connectedness to the ground contribute to varying sensuous and bodily experiences of motion, weight, and substance (1989: 89–113). Thiis-Evensen’s architectural interpretation offers one inventive heuristic means for detailing the tacit, pre-predicative perceptual relationship between experiencers and the built world (Seamon

2017).

Both Harries’ natural symbols and Thiis-Evensen’s architectural archetypes provide perceptive architectural languages that offer discerning interpretive means to locate and understand less effable, unself-conscious, haptic qualities that contribute to a building’s architectural atmosphere. In turn, an awareness of these normally tacit, taken-for-granted architectural qualities might help architects better to envision an appropriate “fit” between what a building

needs to be lifeworld-wise and what it might be as a field of ambient presence. As this discussion of architectural atmosphere indicates, a large portion of architectural experience is pre-cognitive, corporeal, and hidden from conscious awareness. In this sense, the insightful languages of

Harries and Thiis-Evensen bring direct intellectual attention to architectural qualities and situations that are otherwise unspoken and concealed in the natural attitude of architectural experiences and meanings.

Architecture, Architectural Phenomenology, and Virtual Worlds

For the future of architecture, the question of virtual worlds becomes increasingly pressing, both theoretically and practically. If virtual places, including virtual buildings, come to be experienced as “real” as their real-world counterparts, does this development mean the eventual demise of many “real” places and “real “buildings as we currently know them? On one hand, there is the optimistic argument that virtuality can extend real reality and improve and amplify the real world in ways impossible before its availability. In envisioning long-term trends that he claimed will revolutionize human life in the next thirty years, futurist Kevin Kelly (2016: 216) included virtual reality and suggested that, within a decade, virtual-reality displays will be so “real” that users will think they are “looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be

bright—no flicker, no visible pixels. You will feel this is absolutely for sure real. Except it isn’t.” Kelly (2016: 229) contended that, in three decades, virtual reality will be as commonplace as cell phones and used to play “virtual sports,” perform in “virtual plays,” and visit “virtual places” and “virtual historic sites” that are so “real” that the user entirely forgets that they are not:

Cheap abundant VR will be an experience factory. We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t readily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet…. Or to cheaply experience something expensive, like a flyby of the Himalayas.

On the other hand, there is the less sanguine argument that virtual reality too readily fabricates experiences that might seem real but could never fully happen in actual lifeworlds. For example, phenomenological philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992: 87–102) identified several lived qualities via which virtual reality facilitates distortions, reductions, or embellishments of real reality when recast virtually. One such embellishing quality is pliability, the ways that virtual reality can generate virtual objects and experiences impossible to be had in real reality (for example, the virtual ability to fabricate, reshape, or destroy virtual buildings and places at will). Borgmann also highlighted brilliance, the facility of virtual reality to highlight and enhance an experience’s attractive features and de-emphasize or eliminate any uninteresting, unpleasant, or irrelevant dimensions (for example, virtual places that are always “picture perfect” and never deteriorate, become soiled, or expose untoward or unkind aspects of human life).

Borgmann (1992: 96) pointed out that, underlying these lived aspects of virtual reality is the more basic existential principle that the real world “encumbers and confines.” Though virtual reality may superficially seem real, it can readily escape from and replace the lived messiness of real lifeworlds with more convenient, vivid, or fantastical situations that require no stakes, answerability, or efforts of will. On one hand, virtual reality holds extraordinary promise in that

it may become a welcome means for repairing a good number of the world’s problems. Who, for example, needs an automobile if she can simply put on her virtual headset and “go to” her virtual workplace, grocery store, or favorite recreation place? Who needs a real house, place of worship, or vacation destination if all these “places” and “experiences” might be produced virtually? On the other hand, virtual reality may involve potential risks and problems, including time wasting, titillation, addiction, and withdrawal from most things real. Why make the efforts that an encumbering, confining real world necessitates if virtual reality can provide ease, pleasure, and enhanced vividness without the downside of demands, exertions, obligations, or consequences?

I end this chapter with virtual reality because phenomenology offers singular insights as to its benefits, limitations, and experiential impacts. Phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, intentionality, body-subject, environmental embodiment, place, and atmosphere identify integral constituents of any human experience, whether of the past, present, or future; whether

real or virtual. Human beings are always already immersed in their worlds, even if that immersion becomes virtual. Understanding the many lived dimensions of human-immersion-in- world, including its architectural aspects, is perhaps the most central aim, responsibility, and value of phenomenology broadly and of architectural phenomenology specifically.

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Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology: Depictions of London Place Settings in Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing

[pre-publication version of a chapter prepared for Atmospheres and Aesthetics: Plural Perspectives, Tonino Griffero and Marco Tedeschini, editors. London: Palgrave, 2019; please do not quote without permission of the author]

Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology:

Depictions of London Place Settings in Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing

David Seamon

F

or describing and understanding atmospheres, phenomenology is one of the most

helpful conceptual and methodological approaches. Most broadly, phenomenology examines human experience, particularly its less obvious, unnoticed, taken-for-granted strata, of which atmospheres are an integral part because they are difficult to locate

precisely either as a lived presence or as a rendered description. In its full acceptance of all aspects of human experience, including the less readily and tangibly present, phenomenology provides a grounded, workable means for identifying and explicating atmospheres.1

In this chapter, I focus on a phenomenology of atmosphere as related to place. By “atmosphere,” I refer to a diffuse ineffability that regularly attaches itself to particular things, situations, spaces, and environments—what philosopher Gernot Böhme (2014: 8) describes as a kind of “spatially extended feeling,” and philosopher Tonino Griffero (2014: 36) characterizes as the “emotional quality of a given ‘lived space’.”  By “place,” I refer to any environmental locus gathering experiences, actions, events, and meanings spatially and temporally (Seamon 2018: 2). By this definition, places range from a favorite sitting place or room to a building, neighborhood, town, city, or region. Following phenomenologists of place Edward Casey (2009) and Jeff Malpas (2018), I assume that place and place experience are an integral part of human life.

“Place,” writes Casey (2009: 15-16), “belongs to the very concept of existence. To be is to be bounded by place, limited by it… Place-being is part of an entity’s own-being.”

In considering the lived relationship between atmosphere and place, I draw on three works by British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013), who regularly in her writing offers lucid accounts of place atmospheres in London, the city she emigrated to from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) shortly after World War II.2 Before I examine specific place atmospheres in Lessing’s writings, I overview the lived relationship between place, atmosphere, and sense of place.

Place, Atmosphere, and Sense of Place

In relation to place, atmosphere refers to the invisible character that makes an environment singular and confers on that environment a specific presence and ambience (Borch 2014; Böhme et al. 2014; Griffero 2014, 2017). Böhme (2014: 96, 56), for example, links atmosphere to place when he writes of “spaces with a mood” and “that total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of a place. Similarly, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defines atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation.” Böhme and Pallasmaa’s descriptions of atmosphere point toward its remarkably complex, experiential constitution. Atmospheres are nebulous, elusive, mutable, and therefore never fully graspable or describable. They cannot be identified by vision alone but incorporate a wide range of lived qualities that include sound, smell, tactility, emotional

vibrations, and an active, indeterminant immanence of things, spaces, and environmental qualities.

In many ways, place atmospheres are related to “sense of place,” “spirit of place,” or genius loci—the unique ambience and character of a place, for example, the “London-ness” of London or the “Tuscan-ness” of Tuscany (Relph 1976: 63-78). As with discussions of atmosphere, explications of genius loci regularly focus on an ineffable environmental presence impossible to locate or describe precisely or completely. For example, British novelist Lawrence Durrell (1969: 157) characterized genius loci as “the invisible constant in a place,” and Norwegian architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz (1980: 10) contended that genius loci gives “life” to places. American writer Henry Miller spotlighted the indescribable atmospheric core of place experience when he explained his reaction to a fellow American who asked the writer why he lived in Paris: “It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets” (cited in Sciolino 2016: 47).

Place Atmospheres in Lessing’s Four-Gated City

As one procedural means for explicating qualities of place atmospheres more exactly, I examine several descriptions from Doris Lessing’s writings, beginning with her 1969 novel, The Four- Gated City (henceforth City), which depicts the emigrant experience of a young Southern Rhodesian woman named Martha Quest, who arrives in battle-scarred London immediately after World War II (Lessing 1969). A major theme of City is the difficult process by which

newcomers find their place and make a home in a strange and unfamiliar environment (Seamon

1981). Martha has come to London, partly to find out who she is and, at least for a time, to be someone different from the person she was in Southern Rhodesia.

As one narrative means for highlighting the potential worlds in which Martha might find her place in London, Lessing draws on the contrasting atmospheres of several place settings that Martha encounters in her first few months in the city. The first of these place settings is a small café located in London’s working-class South Bank neighborhood and run by elderly couple Jimmy and Iris. When Martha first takes lodging above this small café shortly after arriving in London, she sees this place as nothing more than one of “millions of little shops, each one the ground floor of an old house” (Lessing 1969: 8). As she works part-time behind the counter to pay for her lodging above the café, however, Martha become aware of its unique, imposing atmosphere:

It was jolly in the café; people coming in knew each other, knew Iris and Jimmy. They had shared, many of them, their childhood, their lives. They had shared, most of them, the war. And they had opened their hearts to her…. What people actually said in that café was the least of what they were able to convey (Lessing

1969: 11-12).

In the several weeks she works in the café, Martha comes to see that its atmosphere involves a daily rhythm that begins early in the morning at five, when Iris opens the café unofficially to lorry drivers who live in nearby boardinghouse whose landlady won’t feed them so early. Between five and eight, the café is “a scene of bustling, steaming intimacy” (Lessing

1969: 75). As Martha sits in the café one morning, ready to begin employment in another part of

London, she registers the atmosphere of this place: “The air of the small steam box which was

the café vibrated with interest, tact, sympathy—friendship, in short…” (Lessing 1969: 4). As she leaves the café for the last time, she looks through the “dim muslin” that screens the café windows and notes how the interpersonal exuberance within sheds “warmth onto the pavement” (Lessing 1969: 77).

In contrast to the vibrant, supportive atmosphere of Jimmy and Iris’s café is the dull, conforming ambience of Baxter’s, a traditional London restaurant to which lawyer and acquaintance Henry Matheson invites Martha to inquire about her working for his law firm. Martha walks to the restaurant in a heavy rain and enters with wet hair and damp coat, greeted by a man “in shabby dinner clothes and sleeked-down dandruffy hair…, already disapproving” (Lessing 1969: 24). The place is “muted, dingy, rather dark” with “dull-flowering wallpaper.” None of the furnishings have “any sort of charm or beauty” but are chosen for the ready way

they “melt into this scene.” As Martha studies the restaurant more carefully, she realizes that “things were expensive” and “money had been spent… to keep the restaurant exactly as it had always been: in an expensive shabbiness, dowdiness…. But Henry didn’t care, he was at home cozy with his kind” (Lessing 1969: 25). Later, a female acquaintance takes Martha to lunch at a restaurant called Fanny’s, which is a less elegant version of Baxter’s, with the same kind of food, “but plainer, without sauces, and much cheaper.” The restaurant is decorated with “dull floral curtains and wall paper of a pinkish floral design” (Lessing 1969: 81). Martha senses intuitively how both restaurants relate to a specific social-class standard of which she is uncertain she

wishes to be a part: “[S]omewhere behind both was a country house, or a large farmhouse: the country, at any rate, with centuries of a certain kind of taste behind it. If Fanny’s and Baxter’s had to do without paint or new curtains for fifty years, they would still present themselves to the world with impermeable self-esteem” (Lessing 1969: 81).

Eventually, Martha finds a home in London when she goes to work as a live-in secretary for Mark Coldridge, a part-time novelist and prosperous entrepreneur living in a commodious Georgian townhouse in upper-middle-class Bloomsbury, an elite neighborhood that, even after the recent war, “had the unity of its original design: houses, terraces, grassy squares full of old trees” (Lessing 1969: 88). Here, Martha notes, “one thought of the beauty of London” rather than its tattered post-war ugliness. Martha is taken to Mark’s house by left-wing Labor-Party

organizer Phoebe Coldridge, Mark’s former sister-in-law and a sister of one of Martha’s Southern Rhodesian friends. Lessing describes Martha’s first encounter with Mark’s house, which, from the front door, appears claimed by the trees and plantings of the square near which it is located. Standing in the house’s hall, Martha realized that, for the first time in her life, “she

was in a setting where, if she chose to stay, there would be no doubt at all of how she ought to behave, to dress. She had always resisted such a setting, or the thought of it. If she took this job, then it must be for a very short time. She felt attacked by the house—claimed” (Lessing 1969:

88-89).

At first, Mark mistakenly assumes that Martha is the young female applicant he does not wish to hire because of her political connections with Phoebe. He directs Martha toward an off- hall parlor that is a “long, subdued, beautiful room which looked as if no one had been in it for months” and feels like a “no-man’s land or defensive area” (Lessing 1969: 90). Unsettled by the awkward, unused quality of this room, Martha prepares to decline the position and leave. “No. Wait,” Mark exclaims, suddenly realizing that she is not Phoebe’s young protégé and making it clear to Martha that he had chosen the discommodious room “to put off, or intimidate” this other female applicant. He studies Martha, and she studies him: “He was looking at her more closely. She stood, to be inspected; examining him. But all she felt was: Here are claims. Not only from him… but from the house, the furniture—even this area in London” (Lessing 1969: 90). Mark takes Martha upstairs to a small first-floor room full of papers, books, and “comfortable clutter.” The informal surroundings make it easier for Martha to be at ease. After some deliberation, she accepts his employment offer. As she goes to bed her first night in her new London home, she

closes her eyes “on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a short time. A couple of months….” (Lessing 1969: 104).

Ultimately, Martha remains as Mark’s employee for much of her adult life, and the major portion of City depicts the shifting fortunes of the Coldridge house and family as largely seen through Martha’s eyes. Several years after her first meeting with Mark and now responsible for and attached to the life and residents of the house, Martha walks upstairs and gives attention to the various rooms and their contrasting atmospheres marked by their contrasting occupants— Mark; Francis, Mark’s son; and Paul, Mark’s nephew and a neurotic adolescent whose mother committed suicide and whose father, a nuclear scientist and Mark’s brother, fled to the Soviet Union as a Russian spy:

She went up the stairs, through a house separated with the people who inhabited it, into areas or climates, each with its own feel, or sense of individuality: Mark’s rooms, unmistakable, even with o ne’s eyes shut, even with sound shut off, because of their atmosphere of something closed in, enduring, stubborn; Francis’s room which was kept as it had been for years—a boy’s room, with cricket bats and butterflies in cases… ; then Paul’s area—but even the flight of stairs that approached Paul’s floor emanated electric storm, for here not even silence, or sleep, could be the quiet of peace. Even from the street, raising one’s eyes, one

expected that the apertures of the third floor would shoot out a baleful blue ray, was surprised to see a pair of neat and pretty windows, in the pattern of windows that opened the tall narrow house to the light (Lessing 1969: 352).

I choose these narrative examples from City because each illustrates the powerful ways in which both effable and ineffable environmental qualities sustain a unique sense of place—the jovial robustness of the café; the intentional blandness of the two restaurants; the imposing solidity of the Coldridge house; the contrasting ambiences of its upstairs rooms as radiated by their occupants’ disparate personalities. All these examples involve specific environmental settings evoking dissimilar atmospheric presences that Lessing deftly pinpoints by the phrase “climates, each with its own feel, or sense of individuality.” In turn, she specifies the “feel” and “individuality” of these “climates” by more exact sensuous and emotional descriptors such as “jolly,” “intimate,” “shabby,” “dull,” “comfortable,” “enduring,” “stubborn,” “electric,” and “baleful.” At least partly, these less perceptible qualities arise via features of the material and fabricated environment but, at the same time, Martha senses and feels these settings in her own unique way because of her personality, her personal and cultural history, and her acute corporeal, emotional, and intellectual sensibilities. Lessing’s descriptions illustrate how place atmosphere is an “in-between” phenomenon grounded in lived qualities of both experiencer and environment experienced. As Griffero (2017: xiv-xv) explains, “atmospheres exist ‘between’ the object (or rather, the environmental qualita) and the subject (or rather, the felt-body).”

The “London-ness” of London

In other writings, Lessing offers narrative descriptions of London as a place unto itself. These accounts illustrate how one’s place sensibilities shift over time and indicate that, with experience, practice, and changing life events, one may better empathize with a specific place and cultivate a self-understanding that is more comprehensive, accurate, and attuned to that

place. In Lessing’s writings, this shift in self-understanding is highlighted in City and in her 1960

In Pursuit of the English, a journalistic account of her first year in London (Lessing 1960;

henceforth Pursuit).

When Lessing first arrives in England in 1949, she is thirty years old and a struggling writer with a three-year-old son. She has emigrated because she wants to and “can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to come to England” (Lessing 1960:12). Encountering this strange new

place as a newcomer, however, she dislikes England at first and questions her decision to leave her homeland: “The White Cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The Thames looked dirty. I had better confess that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me to be a city of such appalling ugliness that I wanted only to leave” (1960: 12). In time, both Lessing and Martha Quest come to appreciate London for its “London-ness,” and an important guide for this progressive understanding is London “insiders” like café proprietor Iris,

who introduce Martha to less visible qualities of the city and help her to become a London “insider” herself. Iris has an exhaustive, generational knowledge of her local South Bank neighborhood, and she initiates Martha in this knowledge as they regularly walk the neighborhood together. When she accompanies Iris through the bomb-damaged South Bank streets that are her home, Martha sees “in a double vision, as if she were two people: herself and Iris, one eye stating and denying, warding off the total hideousness of the whole area, the other, knowing it in love” (Lessing 1960: 10).

In time, both Lessing and Martha Quest come to admire London and appreciate its uniqueness as a remarkable urban place. Perhaps the most compelling description of this affectionate way of seeing is Lessing’s account of standing on the National Gallery steps and looking out at Trafalgar Square, to which she has been taken by her friend, Miss Privet, another London insider:

It was a wet evening, with a soft glistening light falling through a low golden sky. Dusk was gathering along walls, behind pillars and balustrades. The starlings squealed overhead. The buildings along Pall Mall seemed to float, reflecting soft blues and greens on to a wet and shining pavement. The fat buses, their scarlet softened, their hardness dissolved in mist, came rolling gently along beneath us, disembarking a race of creatures clad in light, with burnished hair and glittering clothes. It was a city of light I stood in, a city of bright phantoms. But Miss Privet was not one to harbour her pleasures beyond reasonable expectations. For ten minutes I was allowed to stand there, while the light changed and the thin clouds overhead sifted a soft, drenching golden atmosphere.

Then she said, “Now we must go. It’ll be dead in a minute, just streets” (Lessing 1960: 229-30).

As with the earlier atmospheric descriptions relating to interior place settings, one recognizes in these South Bank and Trafalgar depictions how the experience of place atmosphere can shift over time and how environmental and human qualities contribute significantly to place atmosphere. Particularly with the help of London insiders, Lessing and Martha Quest gradually gain a deeper, more inclusive engagement with the city and see it more as it is in itself rather than as

they imagine, expect, or demand it to be. In this sense, they empathize with London in its “London- ness” and discern atmospheric qualities that are accurately a part of London itself rather than a less accurate projection distorted by personal preconceptions, presumptions, or frustrations.

Because her medium is writing, Lessing can only describe her immersive experience of Trafalgar Square in words that mostly incorporate environmental elements and sensuous and affective qualities. Underlying these depictable features, however, is the ineffable wholeness of

place as atmosphere. As we as readers envision Lessing’s experience imaginatively and vicariously, we are transported to the invisible dimension of Trafalgar Square’s presence even if we have never

visited this place ourselves. Lessing’s account illustrates how a unique place atmosphere is

grounded in geographicality—the term that French historian Eric Dardel (1952) used to identify the specific lived qualities of a place evoked by geographical qualities like weather, climate, topography, vegetation, light qualities, water features, human-made elements, and the like (Relph

1985: 21). These geographical qualities are the environmental foundation of a particular place, but atmosphere is its integrated presence via place-as-place (Relph 1985: 25-26; Seamon 2018: 25-26).

The Lived Complexity of Place Atmosphere

One of Lessing’s most encompassing illustrations of the lived complexity of place atmospheres is her short story, “Dialogue,” a title meant to be ironic, since the unnamed narrator experiences a personal struggle as to how she is to encounter and understand the world in which she finds herself (Lessing 1978). Is she to experience the world sensuously and emotionally, or is she to know it only intellectually and secondhand? Is the lived core of human being heartfelt communality or cerebral detachment? As the story opens, the narrator stands on a London street corner watching an elderly woman buying potatoes from a vendor who is part of a bustling street market. Nearby, a music store broadcasts opera music onto the sidewalk, where two disheveled teenage boys partake in “earnest conversation” (Lessing, 1978: 10). A bus stops to discharge passengers, one of whom passes and says, “What’s the joke?” He winks, and the narrator realizes she is smiling, filled with a sense of well-being bolstered by the communal liveliness of the familiar street:

This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thick drift of a cloud across pale blue sky…. A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly, she looked at the world “love,” which

her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen…. (Lessing, 1978: 368-69).

The foil to this sensuous, emotionally-grounded awareness of place is the cold, cerebral situation that awaits the narrator when she reaches her final destination: former lover Bill’s apartment in a ten-story high-rise that hovers over the vibrant street scene. This building is “narrow and glass-eyed,” many floors higher than the “small shallow litter of buildings” below, probably soon to be demolished because they are not “economical” (Lessing 1978: 367). The high-rise building is economical, replacing on its corner lot, “three small houses, two laundries, and a grocer’s” (Lessing, 1978: 367). For over an hour, the narrator lingers at the foot of the tall building, fortifying her sense of self by imbibing the lively street scene. She has promised Bill a visit because he is terminally ill, apartment-bound, and “one of the solitary ones” (Lessing 1978:

371). She rides the elevator to the top floor, rings Bill’s door, which he opens and directs her into the living room. She takes her usual place on a long, benchlike settee, covered with a red blanket. He sits in “his expensive chair which looked surgical, being all black leather and chromium” (Lessing 1978: 369) He is challenged by the openness of the room, which is large, high, and with an outer wall that is mostly window. Looking out from this window to the city below is “a release” for the narrator, but the view is “a terror” for Bill, who prefers the dim enclosure of his tiny bedroom, “always darkened by permanently drawn midnight blue curtains, so that the

narrow bed with the books stacked up the wall beside it was in a suffocating shadow, emphasized by a small yellow glow from the bed lamp” (Lessing 1978: 369).

The narrator’s dilemma is transitioning between Bill’s solitary, intellectual world above and the convivial, life-filled world below. Why, she asks, does she continue to visit this man who refuses to accept that her love of life is real? Why does she deliberately forsake the “happiness… she left in the streets”?

Was it because she believed the pain in this room was more real than the happiness? Because of the courage behind it? She might herself not be able to endure the small dark-curtained room which would force her most secret terrors; but she respected this man who lived on the exposed platform swaying in the clouds (which is how his nerves felt it) (Lessing 1978: 370).

During her visit, she and Bill debate the relative merits of sociability, kindness, and comfort (the narrator’s point of view) vs. loneliness, self-interest, and anguish (Bill’s). As they disagree, the narrator closes her eyes and makes herself remember “with her flesh, what she had

discarded… on the pavement—the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables…. a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes….” (Lessing, 1978: 374). Their conversation reaches an impasse, and the narrator leaves but cannot shake the painful perplexity with which Bill’s attenuated, ungenerous world fills her. As she returns to the street, the exuberant sidewalk life that gave her energy before is now unfamiliar, and “the hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a source of pain.” Everything seems hostile and there is “a flat black-and-white two- dimensional jagged look to things” as “the tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her” (Lessing, 1978: 377).

By chance, her hand pulls a leaf from a hedge, and its piquant aroma renews her sense of life: “A faint, pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which… seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the sense of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in” (Lessing, 1978: 377). Though in the background she still senses the dark tower, “immensely high, narrow, terrible,” she also feels the sustaining energy of the street:

She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her (Lessing, 1978: 377-8).

Environmental Ensemble, People-in-Place, and Common Presence I end with Lessing’s “Dialogue” because this short story points to the complex lived ways in which environment, people, and atmosphere intertwine via place and place encounter. Elsewhere (Seamon 2018), I have argued that place and place experience can be understood via the relationships among three components: environmental ensemble, people-in-place, and common presence. The environmental ensemble refers to the material and environmental qualities of place, both natural and human-made, and is more or less equivalent to Dardel’s geographicality mentioned earlier. Although any specific place’s environmental ensemble is singular, it is an essential contributor to atmosphere because it is the material ground for place experiences and place events. In turn, people-in-place relates to the human worlds associated with a particular environmental ensemble and includes the human experiences, actions, meanings, and situations integral to the place, whether habitual and usual or reflectively planned and out of the ordinary. Via people-in-place, the atmosphere of place is encountered and known, though as Griffero (2014, 2017) points out, this awareness may be ignored, misread, distrusted, taken-for-granted, hidden from one’s conscious awareness, or lost sight of over time.

Overarching both environmental ensemble and people-and-place is the less visible component of common presence, which refers to the material and lived “togetherness” of a place impelled by both its physical and human qualities. The common presence of a place has bearing on its degree of “life” and environmental wholeness (Alexander 2002–2005). I suggest that the relative “togetherness” of entities in space buoys an environmental “common presence” that emerges as a sensible quality shared by the entities (including human beings) that are a part of that space (Seamon 2018: 88). Common presence relates to the ways that the degree of spatial togetherness of a place, engendered through both its environmental and human components, contributes to is relative character and singularity, including less comprehendible and accessible aspects like atmosphere and sense of place.

In Doris Lessing’s place descriptions, one sees how each of these three place components plays a role in place atmosphere. On one hand, there are physical and spatial qualities of the environmental ensemble that set the material ground for the particular atmosphere: the café space, the restaurants and their furnishings, the Coldridge house, the Trafalgar setting, the geographical fabric of London. On the other hand, there is a specific person-in-place—Martha

Quest, Doris Lessing, or the unnamed narrator—who “tunes into” these place settings and makes contact with less tangible qualities, sensibilities, and feelings that, in sum, mark place atmosphere. In turn, this place atmosphere is one lived expression of common presence as it gathers up and integrates human and environmental elements spatially. In City, Lessing refers obliquely to this gathering, indwelling quality of common presence when she writes that “People in any sort of communion, link, connection, make up a whole” (Lessing 1969: 221). It is the degree of wholeness, shaping and being shaped by the spatial “togetherness” of the specific constellation of environmental ensemble and people-in-place, that defines the common presence of place (Seamon 2018: 90). An integral aspect of this common presence is the range of atmospheres supporting and being supported by the particular place.

References

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Arias, R. (2005) Theatricality, spectacle, and the flâneuse in Doris Lessing’s vision of London, Journal of Gender

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Griffero, T. (2017) Quasi-Things: The paradigm of atmospheres. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lessing, D. (1960) In pursuit of the English. New York: Popular Library.

Lessing, D. (1969) The four-gated city. New York: Bantam. Lessing, D. (1978) Stories. New York: Knopf.

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Pallasmaa, J. (2014) Space, place, and atmospheres. In C. Borch, ed., Architectural atmospheres (pp. 18-41). Basil: Birkhäuser.

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Relph, E. (1985) Geographical experiences and being-in-the-world. In D. Seamon and R. Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. Sciolino, E., (2016) The only street in Paris. New York: Norton.

Seamon, D. (1981) Newcomers, existential outsiders and insiders: Their portrayal in two books by Doris Lessing. In

D.C.D. Pocock, ed., Humanistic geography and literature (pp. 85-100). London: Croom Helm.

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Seamon, D. (2018) Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds and place making. London: Routledge. van Manen, M. (2014) Phenomenology of practice, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Wick Sizemore, C. (1989) A female vision of the city: London in the novels of five British women. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.

1 Useful introductions to phenomenology include Finlay 2011; Moran 2000; van Manen 2014.

2 For discussions of Lessing’s oeuvre, see Brazil et al. 2018; Rascheke et al. 2010. On Lessing’s portrayal of London

in her writings, see Arias 2005; Seamon 1981, 1993; Wick Sizemore 1989.