Richard Sennett
Modern dreams of absolute freedom are inevitably in search of an escape velocity - a rate of speed at which we become isolated from the relationships that define our environment. At an extreme perpetual movement can be as much a means of self-imprisonment as liberation. Speed works symbiotically with the prioritization of visual attention to flatten our experience of the world. Traveling at a certain velocity our surroundings are reduced to a projection on the surface of a windshield or screen. In these instances what we see is no more real to us than images received through a television screen. A speeding automobile, where interior temperature, sound, smell and touch are artificially controlled, is a capsule through space and time. By facilitating an overwhelming amount of visual stimulus while simultaneously protecting the body, speed produces an intoxicating sense of release.
With full appreciation for the pleasure that acceleration and speed produce we cannot ignore the fact our pursuit of an escape velocity is directly connected to the major social and environmental crisis of our time. American Culture’s absolute prioritization of automobile travel has physically destroyed hundreds of cities in order to produce an instantaneous landscape of temporary convenience that will almost certainly become obsolete even more quickly than it was carelessly constructed. The problem is not that we drive, but that we have made it our primary means to navigate and experience the world. Instead of designing communities for the long-term benefit of human beings we have engineered a perpetual movement system according to the parameters of a 3,000 pound piece of steel and plastic.
Peripheral Vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators.
Juhani Pallasmaa
Of our primary senses, vision is the most susceptible to alienation. Though our capacities of sight allow us to percieve something literally miles away, our ability to hear, smell, touch and taste something requires increasing levels of intimacy with the stimulant itself. Vision is the easiest sense to turn-off, divert or distract. Closing our eyes to eliminates our sight, but its almost impossible to avoid the smell, sound feel of something without removing ourselves from contact.
For these reasons vision is unique among our senses in its ability to receive an accelerated rate of stimulation in a technologically advanced world. It is often said that the average person alive today receives more information in a single day than a person two hundred years ago encountered in an entire lifetime. The vast majority of this information is received as visual stimulus and digital mediation rather than direct experience. One individual might be exposed to literally thousands of advertisements, icons and instances of visual noise in a single day. Our senses of smell, touch and taste are rarely engaged by comparison, especially in the sterilized spaces of modernity. Indeed, popular technologies like television and hand-held computing devices typically require a degree of focused attention that often compromises our situational awareness. In this context, vision is utilized not to confirm our physical situation but to isolate us from our actual location through a transference of our minds to a virtual-digital realm. As a result of the apotheosis of vision, and particularly our capacity to be distracted, our other sense modalities are often neglected to the point of atrophy.
The scale of abstracted experience that our technology facilitates is grossly out of proportion with our actual capacity to relate to environmental information. Our technological ability has out-paced our organic sense-ability (sensibility). As a result we increasingly consume the world as passive spectators with privatized perspectives instead of active and engaged participants in common realm.
The flattening of our wordly experience into a series of disconnected images naturally encourages visual iconography that is often wildly out of proportion with our other sense modalities. When vision integrates us with our surroundings it adds to a total body experience by allowing us to anticipate the stimulation of our other senses. We thus anticipate touching something that appears smooth or coarse just as we await the smell of a flower or the taste of food. Color and lighting conditions inspire warm or cold feelings. The interplay of light and shadow may make us feel exposed, protected or intrigued. In this case, our sense of sight is a means of anticipating our physical contact with the world.
Contemporary (flattened) imagery often neglects the symbiotic relationship between vision and the other sense modalities. The result is a gross manipulation of associations related to scale. For example; a bird’s eye rendering of Zaha Hadid’s Performing Arts Center in Abu Dhabi gives us the visual impression of a delicate, seamless object that we are meant to understand in its totality as an isolated icon. Through her use of elegant forms and natural visual motifs Hadid’s design primarily attempts to appeal to what Edmund Burke would have called as a sense of beauty. In reality this beautiful object would be constructed at such a gargantuan scale that our impression of it would be completely transformed. A 20’ x 100’ glazed opening that mimics the fractal pattern of a leaf cannot possibly produce the same sense of delicacy that characterizes the natural object. Due to the realities of both construction and weathering long sinuous forms cannot possibly maintain the same seamless quality as a small molded object. While it is understood that there are no straight lines in nature it is equally true that the world produces no seamless curvilinear forms at any significant scale. Ultimately this confusion of scale produces a kind of ambiguous thing, neither as beautiful as the object that inspired it nor as stimulating as a total sensory environment.
The awkward nature of this proposal can be easily percieved in the physical model. Compared to the fabric of the city, or Jean Nouvel's immediately adjacent proposal (screened Dome covering smaller rectangular volumes in the second image below), Zaha Hadid's performing arts center looks more like a giant, threatening sea monster attacking the coast than a great work of architecture. Zaha repeatedly produces wildley out of scale designs that would be much more pleasing as the small beautiful objects that they are. For this reason she has always been a better artist and furniture designer than an architect.
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| Rendering of Zaha Hadid's Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center (Inhabitat) |
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| Hadid's performing arts center visible at top, Jean Nouvel's museum at bottom (Image source) |
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| Zaha's Architecture as a beautiful piece of jewelry for Audrey Hepburn |
Hadid’s
Performing Arts Center is only one instance in a long line of contemporary
confusions of scale. In another example, Foreign Office Architects barrow the
nearly microscopic imagery of grass blades or braded twine as inspiration for their
reconstruction of Ground Zero. In this case the image of an object that is only
perhaps three inches long has been blown up to a series of towers over ¼ of a mile in
height. Once again, associations of delicacy cannot possibly be maintained at
such a large scale. The image is thus alienated from this world. The object,
should it ever be built, would be dehumanized as a kind of horrific, disorienting
monster. In either of these examples the concern is not that the architect
manipulates associations of scale, for this has been part of our discipline
from the beginning. The question is whether the alienation of an image from its
implied reality is an intentional commentary or an unconscious symptom of a
flattened world.
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