8. Tuan (1)

CM Ad on the Williamsburg BridgeOur chants of “more bikes, less cars!” echo down the canyon of Madison Avenue; tourists stop to gawk, cheer and take photos as we ride by. I ring the little blue bell on my bars, and strike up a conversation with the stranger riding next to me. It is August and the warm weather has brought out an unusual number of people—enough to easily span the width of Madison. I’m near the head of the pack and behind me I see a flood of cyclists and, in the distance, a handful of vehicles that haven’t bothered switching to another uptown street.

Every last Friday of the month, bicyclists around the world take to the streets and exercise their right to the road. “We’re not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic” is their key assertion. Often called an “organized coincidence,” Critical Mass has no leadership and no planned route—just a starting time and place. The ride itself moves through out the city based on the decisions of whoever happens to be in the front of the pack.

This particular night, we’ve managed to outwit the NYPD scooter brigade gathered at Union Square by splitting up into groups and reconvening in the middle of Madison Square Park half an hour later. (It is the only NYC Critical Mass I’ve ever participated in that escaped police presence.) The pack stays together only when we all pay attention to our speed—the faster we go, the more distance we must put between us and the person in front of us—and our ability to travel without car interference depends on being a compact group. The short distances between each bicycle feels crowded and, at times, makes me nervous that the person in front of me might hit the brakes, or the person next to me might swerve to avoid a pothole; the low speed, however, guarantees that any collisions would leave both me and my bicycle unscathed.

Tuan writes, “Young Americans… seem to like crowds. Protest marches against social injustice and war arise out of true indignation; yet the young marches surely also enjoy the camaraderie, the sense of group solidarity in a righteous cause, and the sheet pleasure of swimming in a sea of their own kind” (Tuan 63). My experiences of being ticketed (lights, bells and reflectors, oh my!), barely escaping arrest, and witnessing the police literally tackle my friends is not unique; the group rides because of and in spite of unfair bicycling conditions and cyclists at CM possess a shared experience that brings the group together.

Though, because of NYPD presence I have since given up riding CM in New York—really, pedaling as fast as you can away from scooter cops is more tiring than fun—I’ll always appreciate the one time we got away.

CompassIn his chapter titled “Mythical Space and Place” Tuan discusses human relationships to points on the compass: North, South, East, and West. He states, “The United States as a whole is divided up into North and South, East and West. Unlike Australian use of directional terms, regional labels in the United States are not promulgated by central authority; like the regions of mythical space the names and meanings of American regions are acquired in the cours of time, as part of the growing lore and literature of a people.”
American regionality (i.e. Midwesterners, Southerners, Northeasterners, etc.) are still defined by the points on a compass and, like in his interpretation of people in relation to mythical space, Tuan seems to be saying that American “regional people” have created their own mythical spaces based on the regional identity we have created. He even says that the meanings of a region are “part of the growing lore and literature of a people.”
It seems we’re still living in relation to our mythic spaces. Tuan describes the past civilizations—ancient Greeks and the Salteaux Indians—and how they relate to their mythical spaces. For instance, the Salteaux use the compass points to describe a religious belief where the South is the land of the dead, and so on.
Today we do the same thing. Though our beliefs may not be necessarily religious in belief, we do believe in the knowledge of American places even if they are not true. For instance the mythical belief of New Yorkers is that they are unfriendly which isn’t true. We have created mythical spaces in American regions based on legend and lore: all culture exists in the northeast, the south is racist, Midwesterners are freakishly religious. But these are just myths... There’s no way such all encompassing statements like these can be true of all the people in a place. But we have, as Tuan says, created these mythical places for ourselves just as the Greeks and Salteaux did before us.

the Blur Building, built and demolished in 2002, on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland The Blur Building, designed by New York architectural firm DS+R is a cloud on Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. The building, structurally consisting of a 300-foot wide platform with thousands of water-vapor-spraying nozzles, is essentially, as architect Liz Diller puts it, "an architecture of atmosphere." She elaborates: "entering Blur is like entering a habitable medium." Her use of the word "medium" recalls artistic forms such as poetry and painting -- these mediums have the ability to "delight and disturb the senses," and influence a viewer or inhabitant's inner state. Along these lines, Yi-Fu Tuan writes that place is "an object in which one can dwell," but unlike any other place, Blur gives the impression of a "formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless" space. By acting as a sensorial white-out, the building erases all the references that its inabitants are used to depending on for spatial orientation, other than the body's left and right, an gravity's up and down. Blur consumes the skin with water vapor, vision with a sea of white, and hearing with the gentle white-noise-like hiss of the spray nozzles. In its unvarying sameness, Blur diminishes its inhabitants' ability to depend on their experience in detecting changes in smell, touch, sight, and hearing to aid in their navigation of the space. Much like entering Tuan's "warm pale bath," Blur conveys to its inhabitants a "massive feeling." Diller says that, when in the building, "the world is put out of focus while our visual dependence is put into focus." Only when we cannot use our senses do we realize how we depend on them. The scale of the Blur Building also speaks of the influence it has over its occupants. In being the size of a football field, Blur allows its occupants enough space to not feel crowded, in order to facilitate the optimal white-out affect. The effect that the scale and sameness of the space has on its occupants may be perceptually and emotionally overwhelming, but any individual's reaction is dependent on his or her past experience. The Eskimos, who, for example, as described by Tuan, are used to a monotone environment, may have a very different reaction to the Blur Building than a European person. Here is a video of Liz Diller talking about the Blur Building and some other work: 

I couldn't think of an appropriate picture, so here is me, contemplating my right versus left...

In Tuan’s Space and Place, the evolution of spatial organization and the human response to space inspires many interesting insights, as the author simplifies our complicated and unconscious human nature associated with the built environment. He discusses in depth how experience allows for the emotional elevation from space to place, but I think some of Tuan’s more interesting points stem from human’s unconscious experiences and consequential definition of space: notably, the idea of “front” and “back” versus “left” and “right.”

I, for one, have always had issues with my right and left, often finding myself second-guessing what probably should be second nature. But as Tuan points out, these indications are indeed secondary to the primary indications of front and back, thus causing my constant confusion. “Right and left are distinctions I have to recognize. They are means, however, to my end which always lies in front.” And there it is—succinctly put, and so very true. Right and left are directions. Front implies a landmark or conclusion, which is far more important than the mere route.

Another interesting idea that Tuan explored was our adaptation to crowding, and the toll it’s taken on our ability to find intrinsic satisfaction while being truly alone. Indeed, we learn to exist as a culture, in a group which “curtails the enlargement of human sympathy in two antipodal directions: toward one pole, an intimacy between unique individuals that transcends camaraderie and kinship ties; and toward the other, a generalized concern for human welfare everywhere.” This cultural crowding makes it hard to find personal meaning, and could thus naturally lead to justified racism, or, on the other end of the spectrum: social apathy.

In fact—and I’m not exactly sure what the official term is—there is a concept in psychology which relates to crowding justifying apathy…so in essence, if someone is being mugged, the more people who witness this act, the more likely the perpetrator will get off the hook, while on the other hand, if only one person witnesses the crime, the victim is more likely to saved… Safety in numbers tends to hold multiple meanings, according to this idea—both in encouraging responsibility, and giving it up… I digress in this brief interlude of psychology, but it is truly interesting to study both our fear and affinity toward crowding. We like space, but not if it means being alone. So how much is too much? On one hand, we prefer convenience—but convenience, at least up until the age of internet shopping, came at the price of too much crowding. Perhaps that will change now in light of our the heightened accessibility via the internet, but these current contradictions are nonetheless interesting to note…

Moi, Rue de Nesle: par MollyThere are far too many things I want to say about the first half of Tuan’s book. I have long been fascinated by the concepts of space and place, with a particular interest in cities. My concentration focuses on city cultures specifically outlined in film and literature and also how these texts interact with realties and history of a particular city. I tend to focus on Paris and New York. They are my two favorite cities in which I have lived (sorry L.A., where I happen to be at the moment) and therefore have experienced these places in a very different manner than any I have only visited or merely read about. I am reminded of e.e. cummings’ “if everything happens that can’t be done”… When I studied abroad in Paris last spring, I took a course entitled “The Myth of Paris.” My professor seemed to know a superhuman amount regarding Parisian literature (Balzac, Baudelaire, Bréton, etc.), film, and even architecture. She took us on a Victor Hugo themed walking tour beginning, naturally, at Notre Dame and finishing in Place de Vosges (the oldest square in Paris, along the way noting details such as which parts of the same buildings were Medieval and which were post-Haussmann. What the course aimed to uncover were the ways in which Paris, an ever-changing city, had come to be defined through its history books, literature, film, et al. It has a larger than life quality drawn from the synergetic nature of countless conceptions added on top of one another. When discussing mythic space for Europeans, specifically the English, French, and German, Tuan states the following:

“Citizens with any knowledge of their country are seldom at a loss to compare and contrast its two halves in a language that indiscriminately mixes fact with fantasy. Countries have their factual and their mythical geographies. It is not always easy to tell them apart, nor even to say which is more important, because the way people act depends on their comprehension of reality, and that comprehension, since it can never be complete, is necessarily imbued with myth.” 98

I am intrigued by a multi-faceted definition of a historically rich, culturally vibrant, and artistically diverse city such as Paris. There are an unimaginable number of ways to understand and experience the city. Its constant motion only adds to the fuzzy mythic nature of Paris because it appears rather impossible to concretely define any entity that is always changing. Locals, temporary transplants, and tourists all have different knowledge—experiential, literary, etc.—that could answer the question: WHAT IS PARIS? I am trying to figure out if there is a way to even approach defining such complex place.

Sun Ra aka Sonny Blount aka Herman Poole Blount made a mark on the world with his unique twisted, inverted, astral traveled, magical identity. Sun Ra was a moving, breathing, living piece of art, who manipulated language and music in order to create his own universe on planet earth (and possibly beyond it). His words spoke a vision, and his music enabled others to escape with him to a reality beyond that of normal human comprehension. His music was of a spiritual aura, a music that came from an indefinable source, something above the music, above the man. His music could be seen as what Ahmen Abdullah calls a music of the spirit:We define music of the spirit as an art form that defies time, genre and culture…It Comes from within, this music of the spirit, and it likewise enters into the listener; it is complex in its simplicity and simple in its complexity, a music that can be described as an enigma wrapped in a paradox (Pg. 1)Sun Ra’s experimental, at times incomprehensible art and music defied and destructed social constructions. It came from a source out of this world, and yet the paradox, the enigma is, that he could connect to this spirit world, and display its supernatural essence on planet earth.Escape for him was a way of life, an expression of the inner workings of the mind and body, the purest form of identity. Even his name was an escape from the established form of human tradition; a name that matched the creativity and alien being of the man who wore it. Sun Ra to me represents all the knowledge and magic that humans possess but keep away deep in their psyche. Sun Ra let all his energy, feelings, and thoughts flow freely through his art and music. Amiri Baraka said of Sun Ra in his essay Jazzmen:The Weirdness, Outness, Way Outness, Otherness was immediate. Some space metaphysical philosophical surrealistic bop funk. Some blue pyramid home nigger southern different color meaning of hip shit. Ra. Sun Ra…Then they put on weird clothes, space helmets, robes, flowing capes. They did rituals played in rituals, evoked lost civilizations, used strangeness to teach us open feelings as intelligence.Barakas encounter perfectly captures the power and energy that Sun emits. He infects listeners with strange sensations and brings them to his planet. A spiritual planet of improvisation, experimentation, and random intertconnectiveness. A planet that so out there and random; a planet that makes no sense, an illogical planet but built on logical patterns of thought.

Feng Shui HomeWhat makes a house—or an apartment, a condo, a cabin or even a yurt—a home? We can certainly improve our mood by applying Feng Shui, color psychology, and interior design to a designated space, but how far do these tools go in creating a “home” versus just a house? Is the creation of a comfortable space enough? Or is there a lot more to the equation?

Tuan states that “Intimate occasions are often those on which we become passive and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, exposed to the caress and sting of new experience,” and that “Intimate places are places of nurture where our fundamental needs are heeded and cared for without fuss” (Tuan 137).

His statements urged me to reflect on my own sense of home. I live in an NYU dorm right now with my roommate, whom I have been living with for the last two and a half years, but my permanent home, where my parents and siblings live, is in Los Angeles. Even though my dorm is about three quarters the size of just my bedroom in Los Angeles, is clustered, and certainly doesn’t follow the rules of Feng Shui, I call it ‘home’. I wondered why this was, so I had a discussion with my roommate, who also feels like the dorm is (a) “home” to her. We both concluded that it was our relationship that made that space feel like home. It wasn’t a matter of the physical nature of the place, because as a dorm, it was almost transient, just a temporary place, but a matter of having our “fundamental needs heeded and cared for without fuss”. My roommate and I are so comfortable together that we are able to put our guards down… “become passive and allow ourselves to be vulnerable”. So then does that mean that this “sense of place” is highly dependent on our relationship with people within that space? Does a “home” depend on it? My roommate and I started wondering, then how is a home created if one is living alone?

Imagine someone living alone, in a space covered in white walls, without any photographs or art work, but just the essentials of living: a simple bed, kitchen, desk, chair, toilet. Could this be a home for someone, simply created by necessary utilities, ritual, and security (a door with a lock)? Or would this just be a house? In my opinion, it would just be a house.

Our living spaces nourish who we are, buffer us from stress, and provide opportunities both for privacy and for socializing with family and friends, but these things wouldn’t be made possible without familiar surroundings, people, and routines, all providing us with a sense of security and comfort.
We can create a beautiful space by decorating it with things we find aesthetically pleasing, and we can surround the space with objects, such as photographs or souvenirs from past trips abroad, that create a familiar atmosphere and remind us of happy moments in our past.
But is this enough to create a ‘home’, or do we need people that we can put our guard down with living there too? Also, is there a limit to how many ‘homes’ can we have?

The urban soundtrack of any city, particularly a metropolitan one, plays a subtle yet profound role in shaping the characteristics and inhabitability of the environment. A handful of sources have speculated as to the psychological importance of a wide variety of sounds found in any given space and how manipulating and utilizing these sounds could be implemented in the design and overall experience of the built environment. In the essay entitled Experiential Perspective, Yi-Fu Tuan asserts, "Sounds, though vaguely located, can convey a strong sense of size (volume) and of distance." The anomalous characteristics of sound--that it is mnemonic, personal, and transmittable--establishes it as an immensely promising virtual terrain. There has been a fair amount of academic speculation on the subject of sound in the built environment, but little has been contributed in terms of approachable discourse and mainstream application. How can architects and engineers begin to directly incorporate aural stimuli into the design process? "...most people function with the five senses, and these constantly reinforce each other to provide the intricately ordered and emotion charged world in which we live," Tuan states. Taking this into account could greatly broaden architectural practice to include holistic sensory design.

Modernist architecture has obsessed itself with visual transparency. The majority of architectural design and urban planning is generally obsessed with optical aesthetics and the affect that this has on the user, overlooking the powerful influence of other senses. By introducing aural transparency as a design component, architecture becomes exponentially more impactful and gains site specific uniqueness not present in most contemporary transplanted architecture. Amplifying, isolating, or replaying certain sounds gathered from the nearby environment would allow for entirely new experiences to be had by occupants. Swapping or mixing certain noises could produce disorienting even hallucinatory affects. If you don't like the sounds of Shanghai, swap it with the sound of New York. Imagine the different thoughts and experiences that one can have traversing a city listening to popular music. New observations are made and subtleties are realized that may have gone unnoticed without importing alternate sounds. The same could be said for urban soundtracks and the potential of blurring the lines between ones thought process and the sounds of the environment around you. We all become accustomed to various "sound tags" which sometimes even elicit involuntary responses. Hearing a siren, one usually stops the car immediately or pulls off the road. Hearing a gun shot would most likely cause an individual to quickly duck down. Additionally, we use sound recognition to anticipate our own actions. A person riding a skateboard for example may adjust their position of balance based on the sounds and vibrations of different surfaces. If we consider architecture as a truly multidisciplinary field that amalgamates sensory perception, precise sound design within certain spaces could profoundly affect a user’s behavior by facilitating a type of deliberate synethesia in which stimulation of one cognitive pathway leads to automatic experiences in another sensory pathway.

The intent is not to "tune" the world in order to make it sound better. No one can place a monopoly on what "sounds good". But to understand how soundscapes unconsciously but undoubtedly have psychological effects on the behaviors and emotions of inhabitants would be a worthwhile pursuit. One initial goal would be to parametrically model acoustic frequency in select environments, similar to how light is modeled through cities when developing buildings proposals. These sound maps would take into account different times of day, during different seasons, in differing atmospheric conditions throughout the year, and then introducing the flow of people, traffic, and information throughout the spaces. Even further, these models could then be analyzed in comparison to other buildings and open spaces and then re-articulated and transposed into other domains of space. If we consider urban spaces as orchestras, in which each object or building is a unique instrument with differing acoustic qualities, we can begin to postulate how different areas could be "arranged" to produce distinct sonic environments. Certain materials diffuse sound, while others reflect it. Dense urban areas amplify or scatter certain sounds, while vast open spaces allow noises to simply fade away.

Body Odor? Eczema? Gas?She's a sex symbol. What exactly does that mean? According to Tuan us crazy human beings become attached to the abstract by creating symbolic meaning. A nation, a state, a celebrity, a political figure. Why do we attach such symbolic importance to these things even though we have never had a complete sensory experience of them? Tuan writes, " An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the sense as well as with the active and reflective mind" (18). So does that mean that the millions of Americans who proudly support their country are clinging to an intangible concept? If one hasn't experienced the entire nation sensorily with an active and reflective mind, then how does one know what they are really supporting? To be honest, though fascinating, Tuan's writing is at times dense and I find myself lost in contradictions, my own mind tumbling and turning over his theories and hypotheses. I found that his chapter Space, Place and the Child, simplified the rest of his writing for me. It is a lot easier to understand how an adult relates to space and place if we can understand where we began and how we transformed from one to the other. Tuan's explanation of an infant or small child's relationship to space and place goes beyond psychology and child development. He explains how a child begins to attach importance to places and objects and why. The mother is identified as the first "place" recognized by an infant. I believe that the identification of mother as place is probably one of the few times in a human being's life that place and identity will meld on such a level. However this brings up an interesting question of people as places. Not only can humans relate a person very closely with a place, but a person can be a space and place in his or herself. Is this why we create symbols out of people we have never met? Seeing a TV celebrity or movie star in real life is always a surreal experience because we have let ourselves believe that we know something or everything about this person, whereas we forget that we have not had a complete sensory experience of the person. Once we have encountered to celebrity on the street or in a restaurant, we often feel let down, or relieved by the fact that, he or she is just a regular person. In the same vein, we often fantasize about remote or exotic places that we have seen on TV and in tourism brochures, but these brochures cannot give us the total experience of the place - the temperature, the smells and anything else remotely unpleasant that would never appear in a tourist brochure.Mosquitos? Humidity? Sand in your shorts? I think of my own experiences encountering a place or person who had previously been a symbol in my imagination. There is almost a feeling of having been deceived, but by who? We deceive ourselves by not placing enough importance in our senses other than sight. Because the human race is so reliant on our eyes sight, we don't always ask ourselves questions about what something might sound like or feel like or smell like, yet when we are confronted with something that does enable all of these senses, these sensations are surprisingly relevant to our experience. Why do we forget about them?

"Mass."

Though most of our human interaction occurs at emotional grade, there are moments where we react to a person’s physical being. We may find ourselves more at ease when in the company of someone we find comforting, or for no reason at all become suddenly repelled on an anatomical level. The modes of inter-personal physical relationships are fascinating, and these reactions—those that occur on a strictly tangible level—are why Tuan refers to people as “bodies” in chapter 4 of “Space and Place,” entitled “Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values.”

He writes, “The word ‘body’ immediately calls to mind an object rather than an animated and animating being” (34) but for me, the word “body” conjures up images of atoms, floating in space and bouncing off of each other, slowing up and speeding down with changing conditions. Our physical behavior sometimes mimics that of molecules, functioning at the most basic, biological level, governed by our ingrained bodily instincts. We fight over space and share in, when so inclined.

"Torque."

Tuan states that our two modes of physical being are the position we take, and the distance at which we place ourselves from others. As soon as he added the element of axes to his argument, I was reminded of a dance piece I participated in through my dance company. The overall theme of the concert was Transformation, and this one piece, as a subset of that theme, was about physics. The choreographer explored how objects transform through the lens of science, and articulated these changes through movement. The piece was split into five sections, and each focused a different element of physics: velocity, torque, mass, area, and acceleration.

The dancers articulated equal and opposite reactions, combining direction with speed and moving along axes. We behaved as molecules would under varying sets of circumstances. But we also operated independently of each other, operating under the influence of inertia, on a certain trajectory: “Every person is at the center of his world, and circumambient space is differentiated in accordance with the schema of his body” (41). I have included some pictures from the piece for visual correspondance.

"Area."
"Velocity."
"Acceleration."