(PDF) ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY (winter/spring 2024)

ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGY (winter/spring 2024)
Environmental &
Architectural
Phenomenology
Vol. 35 ▪ No. 1 ISSN 1083–9194 Winter/Spring ▪ 2024
This EAP begins 35 years of publication sustainable, real-world communities. life even today existentially grounded in
and includes “items of interest,” “citations Second, philosopher Jeff Malpas pro- geographical aspects of the world.
received,” and one “book note” highlight- vides an extended version of his remarks Quillien’s essay intimates that a phenome-
ing the new edition of pedagogue Max van for a memoriam event at the University of nological reconsideration of Semple’s re-
Manen’s Phenomenology of Practice. Washington, Seattle, devoted to the work markable work is long overdue and partic-
There follow reviews of four books: psy- of the late philosopher Robert Mug- ularly relevant as climate change becomes
chotherapist Iain McGilchrist’s The Mat- erauer, who died in 2022. Referring to a ever more prominent.
ter with Things (reviewed by cognitive sci- theme central in Mugerauer’s work, Mal-
entist Andrea Hiott); architect Lisa He- pas emphasizes the importance of a care- IHSR Conference
schong’s Visual Delight in Architecture ful, critical rethinking of belonging, home, We’ve just learned that the 41st -annual In-
(architect Susan Ingham); architect How- and being-in-place. ternational Human Science Research
ard Davis’s edited collection of Early and Third, Jenny Quillien provides a pene- Conference (IHSRC) will be held at west-
Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alex- trating phenomenological reformulation of ern Long Island’s Malloy University
ander (anthropologist Jenny Quillien); the ideas of early-twentieth-century geog- in Rockville Center, New York, June 9–
and Christopher Alexander’s Production rapher Ellen Churchill Semple (1863– 13, 2024. The conference theme is “Ad-
of Houses (EAP Editor David Seamon). 1922), too often portrayed unfairly as an vancing International Human Science Re-
This last review complements architect environmental determinist claiming that search: Creating Gracious Space.” This
Howard Davis’s report in this EAP issue human actions and history could be re- group sponsors one of the few conferences
on a recent event celebrating the self-help duced to the active, regulative power of the actually interested in doing real-world phe-
housing experiment that he, Christopher physical environment. Quillien demon- nomenology rather than generating dense
Alexander, and others conducted in Mexi- strates that, in fact, Semple’s understand- philosophical discussion. A wide range of
cali, Mexico, in the mid-1970s. Sponsored ing of the people-environment relationship professions and disciplines are repre-
by a local arts organization, this gathering was subtle and illustrated aspects of human sented, and the EAP Editor strongly recom-
featured presentations mends the event. These
on Alexander’s work conferences are always a
and offered tours of pleasure because one is
some of the houses and with a group of like-
experimental buildings minded colleagues who re-
designed and built at the vere real-world phenome-
Mexicali site. nological method. Con-
This EAP includes tact: Judith James-Borga:
three essays. First, ar-
[email protected]
chitect Gary Coates has
graciously allowed us to Left: A portion of the resi-
include the new preface dential courtyard of one of
to his Resettling Amer- the experimental buildings
ica, an edited collection envisioned by architect
originally published in Christopher Alexander
1981 and now reprinted and described in The Pro-
in Routledge’s “Re- duction of Houses (1985);
vival” series. This book see architect Howard Da-
was one of the first to vis’s report of a recent
detail the earth's devolv- event in Mexicali celebrat-
ing environment and to ing Alexander’s experi-
illustrate examples of ment—p. 23. Photograph
by Howard Davis and used
with permission.

This short film, “Revitalizing creeks and
Items of interest streams,” illustrates how one can use sim-
Eco-phenomenology
ple rock-detention dams to revitalize Eco-phenomenology is a recently
Because of the fluid conference situation,
creeks and streams. The focus is the Tur- emerged discipline that aims to con-
we are not providing specific information
key Pen Watershed, of the Chiricahua structively re-articulate the relationship
on 2024 events. Readers should check or-
Mountains in southeastern Arizona. The of phenomenology with natural sci-
ganization webpages for dates, procedures,
film reviews a 30-year case study that ex- ences based on the assumption of a sit-
and virtual, real, or hybrid formats. In the
amines the remarkable success of low- uated and embodied subject. The field
past, we have regularly covered the follow-
tech, low-cost natural rock dam construc- is not only confined to attempts to en-
ing conferences:
tions in dryland watersheds. An interesting gage in a dialogue with natural sci-
Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality
example of careful understanding and ac- ences (e.g., Böhme & Schiemann).
Forum (ACSF);
tion illustrating a mode of implicit phe- Classical concepts of phenomenology,
Back to the Things Themselves!
nomenology that allow the natural world such as physis, earth and sky, fourfold
(BTTTT!);
better to be what it is and can be. (Heidegger, Held), fūdo (Watsuji), and
Environmental Design Research Asso-
ciation (EDRA);
preted in the light of present environ-
Interdisciplinary Coalition of North
Biologist Christoph Hueck is organizing mental issues.
American Phenomenologists (ICNAP);
a program of international cooperation Maurice Merleau-Ponty is particu-
International Association of Environ-
among researchers involved with Goe- larly influential for phenomenologists
mental Philosophy (IAEP);
thean science, which can be described as committed to environmental issues
International Human Science Research
one early proto-phenomenology of the nat- (Toadvine, Abram, Berleant), but other
conference (IHSR) [see front page];
ural world. The website for this effort is: phenomenological approaches might
International Making Cities Livable
www.goetheanism.online. The aim is greater be equally inspiring, for example, Gas-
conference;
cooperation among researchers and a pro- ton Bachelard’s theory of elements,
Society for Phenomenology and Exis-
posed international conference to be held Mikel Dufrenne’s ontology of a poetic
tential Philosophy (SPEP);
in Stuttgart, Germany, in July 2025. To nature, Eugen Fink’s cosmological phi-
Society for Phenomenology and the Hu-
gauge interest in this possibility, Hueck or- losophy, Heidegger’s phenomenology
man Sciences (SPHS).
ganized a Zoom conference on October 21, of care and concern, and so forth. Rele-
The Architecture, Culture, and Spiritu- 2024, in which some 30 interested re- vant in this context are also the phe-
ality Forum (ACSF) has recently searchers participated. To be able to watch nomenology of place (Relph, Casey,
launched a new website that features a this event, contact Hueck for a permission Seamon) and the New Phenomenology
news feed, recent research, and publica- link:
[email protected]
. of atmosphere (Schmitz, Böhme,
tions archive. The site is configured to Hasse, Griffero).
The present “call for papers” con-
maximize search-engine optimization Call for Papers ceives eco-phenomenology in the
(SEO), thus providing more accessible and
speedy web searches. https://acsforum.org.
Eco-Phenomenology broad sense of the plethora of experi-
Editor Mădălina Diaconu has sent out a ences that are related to dwelling on
request for article contributions to a special Earth (oikos) but specifically welcomes
2025 issue of Studia Phaenomenologica, a subjects related to the present environ-
peer-reviewed international review of phe- mental crisis and possible contributions
Atmospheric Spaces is a research group nomenological research sponsored by the of phenomenology to mitigate it. Be-
and website that studies atmosphere from a Romanian Society of Phenomenology. The yond enriching the sphere of phenome-
phenomenological and aesthetical point of nological approaches, we are interested
deadline for submissions is March 30,
view. The platform gathers news, events, 2024. Article manuscripts should be sent to in raising the question of how the phe-
and publications related to the topic and re-
[email protected]
(subject nomenological emphasis on experience
lated themes with the aim of establishing title: Studia Phaenomenologica 2025). can contribute to a critical environmen-
an informational network and research https://zetabooks.com/library/journals/studia-phae- tal philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.
community. Atmosphere is described as “a nomenologica/. Possible topics include:
sensorial and affective quality widespread Because the “call for papers” is so thor- ▪ Analyses of sensuous dimensions
in space. It is the particular shade or tone ough and accurately portrays the wide crucial for the experience of the en-
that determines the way one feels his/her range of ways in which phenomenological vironment but hitherto having re-
surroundings. Air, ambiance, aura, cli- work relates to environmental and ecolog- ceived little attention (e.g., the sense
mate, environment, genius loci, milieu, ical concerns, we reproduce, in the sidebar, of temperature, the experience of
mood, numinous, Stimmung, Umwelt—a right and next page, the full description. electricity, magnetism, echo-loca-
vague sense or power, without perceivable tion, the place-making and place-
and discrete boundaries ….” https://atmos- disrupting capacity of odors).
phericspaces.wordpress.com/.

▪ Eco-sensitivity and the new every- fragile (Waldenfels, Wiesing, oriented environmental philoso-
dayness in the Anthropocene. This Böhme, Rosa). Analyses of moods phy, ethics, and aesthetics?
includes negative experiences re- that come to the fore in the present ▪ Phenomenology of sustainability
lated to pollution and toxic atmos- environmental context: anguish, and care. How are material things
pheres, as well as dysfunctions of nostalgia and mourning, shame, experienced along the axis desire-
sensitivity: abnormal place experi- guilt. use-discard? Can the category of
ence (Fletcher’s “dystoposthesia”) ▪ Poly-temporal structures and new “thinghood” be extended to raw
and the general discomfort caused experiences of temporality: The materials (resources) and leftovers
by exposure to chemical sub- value of ephemerality and the of consumption? How can waste
stances. “celebration of finitude” (Wood); challenge the phenomenological
▪ The disenchantment of landscape. rhythmicity and periodicity; the horizon of signification and value?
Experiences of landscape beyond “natural” resonance between body Can the regeneration and restora-
contemplative constitution rhythms and natural rhythms, but tion of environments become a
(Smuda), Romantic fusion also their increasing dissonance at subject of phenomenological anal-
(Schmitz), and topophilia (Tuan). present due to technology and cli- yses, and can phenomenology’s
What happens when the “lived mate change (light pollution, dis- concern with everydayness inte-
landscape” (Waldenfels) becomes turbances of seasonality. grate practices of care (mainte-
uninhabitable? Experiences of de- ▪ Analyses of ecological art and en- nance, repair, recycling) (Saito)?
serted, haunted, devastated, nu- vironmental art, place-making ▪ Stepping beyond anthropocen-
clear, and in general uncanny practices in architecture, land- trism. Can phenomenology ac-
(Trigg) “landscapes.” scape/city planning and everyday commodate the nowadays wide-
▪ The subject’s immersion in the at- life. spread requirement to overcome
mosphere or being sky-bound. Ex- ▪ Deep time and intergenerational an (if not epistemic, at least moral)
periences of weather phenomena experience. Traditionally, phe- anthropocentric perspective? How
and meteo-sensitivity have been nomenology focused on immedi- can its first-person account cope
occasionally described by human ate individual experiences; how- with the present tendency to ex-
geographers (e.g., Craig) but have ever, climate change is a diffuse tend agency beyond human sub-
only seldom drawn the phenome- “hyper-object” (Morton). Slow de- jects?
nologists’ attention (Ogawa, Di- cay, remote pollution, or invisible ▪ Eco-phenomenology, critical phe-
aconu). contamination transcend the expe- nomenology, environmental activ-
▪ Environmental experiences in non- riential evidence and the horizon ism. What is “critical eco-phenom-
Euro-American contexts. How do of hic et nunc perception, engag- enology” (Toadvine)? Can phe-
environmental factors such as cli- ing the memory of losses and the nomenology, understood as a
mate and vegetation, but also cul- fear of future destruction. How praxis of critical reflection, be
tural traditions and beliefs, modu- can phenomenology account for converted into a resource for ac-
late the category of landscape? middle- and long-term develop- tion, resistance, and empower-
Does the understanding of land- ments that require comparisons ment? Does its awareness-raising
scape change in tropical forests or between generations? Can it inte- function have a transformative po-
during the arctic winter? Are the grate collective memory and even tential beyond academic circles?
“sentient landscapes” (Cruik- the deep time that is crucial in ge- Can its emphasis on the subject’s
shank) in the indigenous cultures ology and climatology? Can the unavoidable bodily emplacement
compatible with the legacy of phe- experience of temporal sublime enhance the general sense of inter-
nomenology? Can the sources of (Toadvine, Brady) motivate eco- connectedness?
phenomenographies be extended friendly patterns of thinking and
to traditional ecological behavior?
knowledge? ▪ Orientation towards the future.
▪ Phenomenology of crisis, threat, Phenomenology has often been in-
loss, and precariousness. Has the fused with hermeneutic analyses,
ecological crisis contributed to the while the environmental crisis re-
recent shift of emphasis away quires visionary thinking and con-
from the subject’s intentionality? structive alternatives. Can tradi-
The “pathic” subject (Hasse) is re- tional phenomenological concepts
sponsive and vulnerable, subject (e.g., Heidegger’s “projection”) or
to contingent encounters, being af- phenomenological interpretations
fected by the resonance with an of imagination support a future-
environment that appears itself as

or ivory carvings that worked as toggles to
Citations received fasten the cords of medicine or tobacco
his arms and shoulder and neck show
the effort: every muscle concentrates
Nisha Botchwey, Andrew L. pouches. One of the netsuke is an ivory on the blade. There is another of a
hare with amber eyes (image, below), thus cooper working on a half-finished bar-
Dannenberg, and Howard the book’s title. De Wall tells the story of rel with an adze. He sits leaning into it,
Frumkin, 2022. Making how these netsuke, originally made by framed by it, brows puckered with con-
Healthy Places: Designing adept craftsmen or skilled amateurs, be- centration. It is an ivory carving about
and Building for Well-Being, came collector items and eventually part of what it is like to carve into wood. Both
Equity, and Sustainability, 2nd a family collection that moved from Paris are about finishing something on the
to Vienna to Tokyo to London. De Waal subject of the half-finished. Look, they
edn. Washington, DC: Island describes the original collector, a cousin of say, I got there first, and he’s hardly
Press. his great-grandfather, who aimed to under- started (pp. 13–14).
stand the first wave of Japonisme as it be-
Edited by health-science researchers, this
came popular in Paris in the 1870s. This
volume includes 27 chapters, mostly by so- Thomas Fuchs, 2021. In De-
experience allowed this man to collect, “to
cial planners and health professionals, cov- fense of the Human Being:
turn looking into having and having into
ering such topics as water, food, safety, air Foundational Questions of an
knowing” (p. 39).
quality, physical activity, mental health,
transportation, schools, social capital,
A prescient ac- Embodied Anthropology. Ox-
count of the im- ford: Oxford University
presence of nature, workplace and residen-
portance of things
tial planning, and so forth. Most of the en- Press.
in human life and
tries emphasize health and safety; environ-
in understanding This philosopher and psychiatrist calls into
mental design is given considerably less at-
family and world question the advancing technologizing of
tention. This health-science perspective is
history. lifeworlds. Instead, he offers an embodied,
important but is usefully complemented by
overviews emphasizing applied design and interactive account of human being
placemaking, e.g., Matthew Carmona’s A brindled wolf and whereby “we are neither pure minds nor
Public Places, Urban Spaces (2022). tumbling acrobats brains but primarily embodied, living be-
There are 264 netsuke in this collec- ings in relation to others.” In defending hu-
Victor Counted, Haywantee tion. It is a very big collection of very mans as they are and not what science and
Ramkissoon, Laura E. Cap- small objects. technology would make them be, Fuchs
I pick one up and turn it round in my discusses several potentially threatening
tari, and Richard G. Cowden, developments to which he devotes a chap-
fingers, weigh it in the palm of my
eds., 2023. Place, Spirituality, ter each. These developments include neu-
hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it
and Well-Being: A Global and is even lighter than ivory. You see the roscience; transhumanism; digitization; ar-
Multidisciplinary Approach. patina more easily on these wooden tificial intelligence; robotics; and construc-
London: Springer. ones: there is a faint shine on the spine tivism (the perspective that meaning is no
of the brindled wolf and on the tum- more than an illusory, deceptive construc-
The 16 chapters of this edited volume offer bling acrobats locked in their embrace. tion of subjective reality).
“a wide overview of the complex links be- The ivory ones come in shades of Fuchs writes: “[T]he image of the human
tween place, spirituality, and health.” Con- cream, every colour, in fact but white. being that we consider to be true ultimately
tributors consider “the spiritual dimensions A few have inlaid eyes of amber or determines how we deal with ourselves
involved in the person/place relationship horn. Some of the older ones are and with others … Humanism in the ethi-
and its influence on health practices, be- slightly worn away: the haunch of the cal sense therefore means resistance to the
haviors, and community level outcomes.” faun resting on leaves has lost its rule and constraints of technocratic sys-
markings. There is a slight split, an al- tems as well as to the self-reification and
Edmund De Waal, 2011. The most imperceptible fault line on the ci- mechanization of humans. If we conceive
cada. Who dropped it? Where and of ourselves as objects, be it as algorithms
Hare with the Amber Eyes, il-
when? or as neuronally determined apparatuses,
lustrated edition. NY: Farrar, then we surrender ourselves to the rule of
Most of them are signed—that
Status and Giroux. movement of ownership when it was those who seek to manipulate such appa-
finished and let go. There is a wooden ratuses and to control them socio-techno-
Written by an eminent British ceramicist, logically … The defense of man is, in this
netsuke of a seated man holding a
this memoir is organized around one group respect, not only a theoretical task but also
gourd between his feet. He’s bending
of craft objects that benchmarks his fam- an ethical duty” (p. 8).
over it, both hands on a knife that is
ily’s history—a collection of over 200 Jap-
half into the gourd. He is hard at work,
anese netsuke, practical, fine-grained wood

William Fulton, 2022. Place include Matthew Carmona (“Research- Embodiment, Enaction, and
and Prosperity: How Cities ing Urban Design Governance”); Emily Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Talen (“Transect-Based Coding: A Meth-
Help Us to Connect and Inno- odology”); Vikas Mehta (“Exploring Press, pp. 25–46.
vate. Washington, DC: Island Streets as Places for Social Change”); Kim Philosopher Dermot Moran is one of the
Press. Dovey (“From Place to Assemblage: finest interpreters of phenomenology, and
Meanings and Morphologies in Urban De- here he provides an excellent discussion of
This urban planner and former mayor of sign Research”); David Seamon (“Phe-
Ventura, California, envisions vibrant ur- intersubjectivity and intercorporeality as
nomenological Research Methods and Ur- identified by Husserl and extended by
ban places that “create better chances in ban Design”); and Maria Lewicka (“Re-
life for everyone.” Largely drawing on his Merleau-Ponty. Moran writes: “for Hus-
searching Place Attachment”). serl, the constitution of the social world is
own personal and professional experi-
ences, Fulton aims to illustrate how the two deeply connected with the constitution of
Annika Lems, 2018. Being- the body and the constitution of others in
interconnected themes of place and pros-
perity “lie at the heart of what a city is and, Here: Placemaking in a World empathy. How precisely the sense of the
by extension, what our society is all of Movement. Oxford, UK: common world (both the social world of
about.” All 19 chapters in the book were Berghahn. persons and the objective world of scien-
originally published elsewhere in venues tific ‘mere things’) is constituted is an
dating from 1998 to the recent present. This anthropologist describes the life- enormous and extremely complex chal-
worlds of three middle-aged Somalis liv- lenge for Husserl” (p. 43)
Susan Ingham and Or Et- ing in Melbourne, Australia. Her focus is
“the interrelated meanings of emplacement Dermot Moran, 2018. What is
tlinger, 2023. Teaching
and displacement in people’s everyday the Phenomenological Ap-
Wholeness in Architectural lives.” She considers “the refuge as a met- proach? Revisiting Inten-
Education: Advancing Chris- aphor for societal alienation and estrange- tional Explication. Phenome-
topher Alexander’s Teaching ment.”
nology and Mind, Vol. 15, pp.
Legacy through the Building
Maxine E. Miller, 2023. Place 72–90.
Beauty Program. Journal of
Architecture and Urbanism, and Being: A Psychological
Moran considers “the main features of
Vol. 47, Issue 2, pp. 125–34. and Phenomenological In- the phenomenological approach, focus-
quiry. Summerland, CA: ing on the central themes of intentional-
These architects describe the “Building Pacifica Graduate Institute, ity, embodiment, empathy, intersubjec-
Beauty” post-graduate program in archi- doctoral dissertation, Clinical tivity, sociality and the lifeworld.” He ar-
tecture, grounded in the work of architect gues that phenomenology is “a holistic
Christopher Alexander. A central program Psychology.
approach that rightfully defends the role
aim is understanding “what makes the This clinical psychologist examines place of subjectivity in the constitution of ob-
physical environment beautiful, and how and people’s relationship to place from a jectivity and recognizes the inherent lim-
beautiful environments can be created to- multi-disciplinary perspective, including itations of all forms of naturalism, objec-
day.” See the poster on the “Building the psychological and phenomenological tivism and scientism.”
Beauty” program on p. 47. Also, see: literatures. The author highlights several
beauty-online. tic considerations of place attachment and homemaking: Everyday do-
relationship to place; the necessity of a mestic life in times of rising
Hesam Kamalipour, Patricia greater inclusion of ecological or environ-
Aelbrecht, and Nastaran Pei- energy prices, Uppsatser Kul-
mental considerations in therapeutic treat-
mani, eds., 2023. The ment; an enhanced understanding of the turgeografiska institutionen,
Routledge Handbook of Ur- variance of people’s experience of place.” Uppsala universitet. Mas-
ban Design Research Meth- teruppsats i geografi/kultur-
ods. London: Routledge. Dermot Moran, 2017. Embodi- geografi.
ment, Enaction, and Culture:
“Recent research in both geography and in
Edited by three urban designers, this hand- Investigating the Constitution neighbouring disciplines argues that we
book includes 52 chapters arranged around of the Shared World. In Chris- need to pay more attention to the cultural
five themes: agency, affordance, place, in- toph Durt, Thomas Fuchs, and symbolic significance of home in order
formality, and performance. Contributors to understand domestic energy consump-
and Christian Tewes, eds.,
tion. In this thesis I consider how ideals of

home are renegotiated in times of in- of being part of a shared societal effort. By This geographer considers women's inti-
creased energy prices. By focusing on the finding a new, less energy-intensive rou- mate, embodied relationships with river
experiences of the body-subject, I describe tine the participants interact with their waters and explores how those relation-
how ideals of home and the flow of energy home in new ways and ascribe their home ships embolden local communities' re-
interact in people’s everyday homemaking new meanings. These new routines be- sistance to private run-of-the-river hydroe-
practices. come a way to creatively engage with and lectric power plants in Turkey. The con-
“I build my analysis from a combination reflect on long entrenched embodied ideals ceptual focus is “a body-centered, phe-
of semi-structured interviews, walkalongs of home.” nomenological approach to women's envi-
and photo-elicited interviews with people ronmental activism …”
living in detached houses in Sweden. Alt- Özge Yaka, 2023. Fighting for
hough often producing feelings of stress, the River: Gender, Body, and
rising energy prices also allowed the par-
ticipants to ascribe their home new mean-
Agency in Environmental
ing and to feel a sense of connection to oth- Struggles. Oakland, CA: Univ.
ers. Often the participants express feelings of California Press.

Book Note
Max van Manen, 2023. Phenomenology of Practice, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.

incorporating “examples of phenomeno- methods for doing real-world phenome-
logical essays and excursions on ordinary nology. One of the best portions of the
and extraordinary topics” (2023, p. i). book (also included in the first edition) is
One result is a considerably longer van Manen’s discussion of five existen-
book: 498 pp. vs. 411 pages of the earlier tials—i.e., integral lived dimensions of
edition. The original book included no di- lifeworlds, regardless of a person or
visions, but the new edition is divided group’s specific personal, social, cultural,
into three parts: “ways of understanding or historical situation:
phenomenology”; “protagonists and prac-
tices”; and “methods, research, writing.” 1. Relationality, or lived others: the lived
Both editions have 14 chapters, though ti- connections we maintain with other
tles and content are mostly different in the human beings, including bodily co-
new edition. presence and interpersonal encounter;
If we contrast some title headings, we 2. Corporeality, or lived bodies: how
have chapter 1, 1st edition: “phenomenol- such bodily qualities as upright pos-
ogy of practice” (11 pages); chapter 1, 2nd ture, corporeal habituality, degree of
edition, “doing phenomenology” (40 ableness, and so forth, contribute to
pages); chapter 2, 1st edition, “meanings human experience;
and methods” (26 pages); chapter 2, 2nd 3. Spatiality, or lived space: the ways
edition, “samples of phenomenological that people experience and know the
texts” (69 pages); chapter 3, 1st edition, spaces and environments in which
“openings” (16 pp.); chapter 3, 2nd edi- they find themselves;

ublished ten years ago in 2014, tion, “on the meaning of meaning” (16 4. Temporality, or lived time: how we ex-
the first edition of this book pp.). These varying titles and chapter perience time, including chronologi-
aimed to provide “access to phe- lengths indicate considerable topical and cal and historical sensibilities;
nomenological thinking and re- structural shifts in the new edition. One 5. Materiality, or lived things: the im-
search in a manner that shows, in a reflex- could argue that there is much about this portance in human experience of
ive mode, what the phenomenological at- revised publication that makes it a new things, which work in a wide range of
titude is like” (2014, p. 19). book. ways to sustain, improve, or under-
For this new, substantively revised edi- Though considerably reworked and ex- mine situations and events.
tion, this pedagogue’s aim remains in tended, van Manen’s text remains one of
place, though he has largely rewritten and the most useful introductions for encoun- Interestingly, in this new edition, van
revised much of the text, particularly by tering phenomenology phenomenologi- Manen adds a sixth existential that he
cally and for learning about practical identifies as technology, or lived technics:
the taken-for-granted attitude “that most
of us take toward technology in our lives

as tools and techniques.” Van Manen their philosopher colleagues to prac- meanings of lived or inceptual experi-
asks, however, if we are “taking our cy- tice phenomenology in a manner that ence (the primal phenomena and
borgian existence for granted” and, if so, is understandable to non-philoso- events as given in or as conscious-
“How?” (p. 414). phers. But ironically even some of ness) (pp. 25–26).
Overall, this volume is a valuable intro- these philosophers, wittingly or un-
duction to the nature of phenomenology wittingly, do not seem to know how
and phenomenological method as one can to follow their own advice and not
better identify, understand, and describe
human life and real-world human experi-
raise the unnecessary threshold of
“As a manner or style”
comprehensibility by remaining as
ence. We include four excerpts from the Everyday experiences that are com-
much as possible jargon-free for gen-
book below. mon tend to be experienced in a
uinely interested readers (pp. 4–5).
taken-for-granted manner. But what is
the everydayness of daily life? When
Phenomenology starts with we speak of matters of everyday life,
experience Practicing direct description
we tend to think that such matters are
[T]he practice of “doing phenomenol- simple and less worthy of our aca-
To do phenomenology on the things, demic attention. We are more inter-
ogy” is thinking and seeing our world we must turn to the things that matter
phenomenologically. And to think ested in things that are exotic and less
and attend to our experience of them. common. And yet, phenomenology
phenomenologically is to be swept up Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that this
in a spell of wonder about the origi- shows that the quotidian everydayness
means that we must begin by awaken- of daily life experiences is much less
nary meaningfulness of this or that ing the basic experience of the world
phenomenon or event as they appear, simple than we tend to think.
and by practicing a “direct descrip- In everyday life, we are able to en-
show, present, or give themselves to tion” of this world in which we live
us in experience or consciousness. In gage in our daily practices because
and that lives in us: they are to a certain degree habitu-
the experiential encounter with things
and events of the world, phenomenol- The efforts [of phenomenology] are ated, repeatable, common, reproduci-
ogy assists us by directing our gaze concentrated upon re-achieving a di- ble…. Husserl reserved the notion of
toward the regions where understand- rect and primitive contact with the “natural attitude” not just to point at
ings, emotions, meanings, and feel- world … it also offers an account of the taken-for-grantedness of everyday
ings originate, well up, and percolate, space, time, and the world as we thinking and acting. For him, the nat-
through the porous membranes of past “live” them. It tries to give a direct ural attitude is manifested in our natu-
existential sedimentations—then in- description of our experience as it is, ral inclination to believe that the
fuse permeate, infect, touch, stir us, without taking into account its psy- world exists out there, independent of
and exercise a formative and affective chological origin and the causal ex- our personal human existence. The
effect on our being and becoming. In planations that the scientist, the histo- challenge for phenomenology is not
this sense, phenomenology tells us rian, or the sociologist may be able to to deny the external existence of the
who we are. provide (Phenomenology of Percep- world, but to substitute the phenome-
Doing phenomenological research tion, 1962, p. vii). nological attitude for the natural atti-
is making intelligible the originary tude in order to be able to return to
meaningfulness of experiential phe- Giving a “direct description” of expe- the beginnings, to the things them-
nomena and events that we explore in rience is not a narratively reporting, selves as they give themselves in
a methodological phenomenological copying, or providing information lived-through experience—not as ex-
manner though written texts. This about something. Rather, to describe, ternally real or eternally existent, but
need for intelligibility is a characteris- to compose, a description, is to write as an openness that invites us to see
tic of phenomenology as a mode of (unravel or uncover) what remained them as if for the first time.
inquiry and as an intellectual disci- hidden or concealed. Doing phenome- Heidegger warns us against a reli-
pline. Phenomenology starts with ex- nology on the phenomena means tak- ance on method, yet he and others de-
perience. But some current phenome- ing up the attitude of immediate and scribe phenomenology in terms of
nological discourses are so rooted in direct seeing and practicing an atten- method: “Phenomenology is only ac-
academese and technical philosophi- tive awareness to the things of the cessible through a phenomenological
cal vocabulary and argument that they world as we live them rather than as method,” says Merleau-Ponty (Phe-
are virtually unintelligible jargon, we conceptualize, categorize, or theo- nomenology of Perception, 2012, p.
even to well-educated readers. This rize them. Direct description is mak- xxi). How do we reconcile these
has led some philosophers to urge ing existential sense of the originary claims? It appears that these scholars

are warning against reducing phenom- that can express and communicate sense perceived the world in a feeling
enology to a set of standard strategies these understandings. Pathic texts or emotive modality of knowing and
and techniques. Merleau-Ponty refers need to remain oriented to the experi- being …. We have an implicit, felt
to method as something like a way of ential or lived sensibilities of the life- understanding of ourselves in situa-
thinking and feelingly understanding: world. For example, experiential sto- tions, even though it is difficult some-
“phenomenology allows itself to be ries provide opportunities for evoking times to put that understanding into
practiced and recognized as a manner and reflecting on practice …. worlds.
or as a style” (2012, p. xxi). So, it The term “pathic” implicates forms A phenomenological text should
may be best to think of the basic of expressive understanding that we never be read merely for its explicit
method of phenomenology as the tak- call empathic and sympathic. Empa- meaning. The pathic sense of the text
ing up of a certain attitude and prac- thy and sympathy are usually dis- is directly related to the meaning that
ticing a certain attentive awareness to cussed as certain types of relational phenomenology attempts to evoke.
the things of the world as we live understandings that involve imagina- The pathognomy of a text refers to its
them rather than as we conceptualize tively placing oneself in someone signifying power to express deeper
or theorize them, and as we take them else’s shoes, feeling what the other emotive meaning. But the pathog-
for granted. “Do phenomenology” as person feels, understanding the other nomic aspects of text cannot be expli-
a reflective method is the practice of from a distance (telepathy) or, more cated in straightforward conceptual
the bracketing, brushing away, or re- generally, to be understandingly en- terms. Pathic meaning is something
ducing what prevents us from making gaged in other people’s lives. that is part of the experience of lan-
primitive or originary contact with the But these relational linguistic no- guage in everyday life. We experience
primate concreteness of lived reality. tions also open up ways of thinking the pathic sense of a text when it sud-
(pp. 27–28). about expressivity and forms of un- denly “speaks” to us in a manner that
derstanding that are more mantic than validates our experience, when it con-
semantic. No doubt, there are various veys an evidential understanding or
forms and modalities of pathic under- truth that stirs our sensibilities.
The pathic standing. But the first important point It is much easier for us to teach
The notion of the pathic is useful in is that the terms empathy and sympa- concepts and informational
understanding how phenomenological thy suggest that this understanding is knowledge than it is to bring about
text produces a certain kind of non- not primarily gnostic, cognitive, intel- pathic understandings. But herein lies
cognitive understanding: pathic lectual, technical—but rather that it is, the strength of a phenomenology of
knowledge that corresponds to a indeed, pathic: involving the emo- practice. It is through pathic significa-
pathic acting. The etymon of the term tions, the body, the poetic, the pa- tions and images, accessible through
pathic is the Latin pathicus. And the thetic, and the pathically inspired …. phenomenological texts that speak to
etymology (dating back to 1600s) of The term pathic derives from pa- us and make a demand on us, that the
the noun pathicism and the classical thos, meaning “suffering and also pas- more noncognitive dimensions of our
pathicus includes patience and passiv- sion.” Pathic expressiveness is not to professional practice may also be
ity …. The Oxford English Dictionary be confused with pathic expressive- communicated, internalized, and re-
currently defines pathic as: “Involving ness. And yet, phatic comes from flected upon. For this we need to de-
feeling, perception, or intuition, rather phanein, to show oneself, to appear. velop a phenomenology that is sensi-
than cognition or deliberation.” So there is a phenomenological sensi- tive to the thoughtfulness required in
In this book, the notion of pathic is bility to phatic expression that pre- contingent, ethical, and relational situ-
used to the extent that the act of prac- sents a person’s presence to others. ations (pp. 185–87).
tice depends on the sense and sensual- The phenomenological notion of
ity of the body: personal presence, re- pathic and phatic words and expres-
lational perceptiveness, tact for know- sions raises the question of the limits
ing what to say and do in contingent and possibilities of the communicabil-
situations, thoughtful routines and ity of language ….
practices, and other aspects of In a larger life context, the pathic
knowledge that are in part pre-reflec- refers to the general mood, sensibility,
tive, and yet thoughtful—full of sensuality, and felt sense of being in
thought. the world …. The pathically tuned
If we wish to further study and en- body recognizes itself in its respon-
hance such pathic dimensions of prac- siveness to the things of our world
tice, we need a convocative language and to the others who share our world
or break into our world. The pathic

Book Review
Asymmetrical Reconciliation
Andrea Hiott

Iain McGilchrist, 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking
of the World. London: Perspectiva Press.

here is mainly the second and third parts called “the coincidence of opposites” and
of the book. what McGilchrist discusses under that
The second reason I begin with this same phrase in the book’s third part.
event relates to something Caradoc King Asymmetrical reconciliation relates to a
(who I did not know before this evening) dynamic realizing that is not about “one”
said to me that night—namely, that Iain or “two” but is an illumination of process.
McGilchrist’s work helped Phillip Pull- Part one of McGilchrist’s book is
man “reconcile” himself. As Pullman has largely like the earlier Master and His
expressed elsewhere, reading McGil- Emissary. He begins with neuro-psychol-
christ gave him a new angle on attention, ogy and gives evidence to demonstrate
demonstrating the extraordinary differ- that the left hemisphere is reductive and
ence in perception possible for one mechanizes the body’s encounter with the
The universe is asymmetric and I am body—what is characterized by world. In dramatic contrast, the right
persuaded that life, as it is known to us, McGilchrist’s differentiation of the left hemisphere allows for attention with that
is a direct result of the asymmetry of the and right hemispheres of the brain. encounter so that one can experience it as
universe or of its indirect consequences. As Caradoc described it, Pullman was a process, or what is often referred to as
—Louis Pasteur at the London event because reading holistic awareness.
McGilchrist had helped him to perceive In the book’s next two sections,

t was a cold London evening, some the world differently. McGilchrist had McGilchrist shifts to epistemology and
time at the end of November 2021. I been able to open a space for Pullman to concludes by discussing a kind of revital-
sat beside Caradoc King, the agent “stay with the contradiction,” something ized sacredness. This last section has
and good friend of the author Phillip prescribed by the American philosopher much in common with writers, like Watts,
Pullman, who sat in front of us on stage, Jacob Needleman, quoted by McGilchrist who consider spiritual practice. Though
as did psychotherapist and author Iain in his book: he is careful not to side with any religious
McGilchrist. We were there for the re- or spiritual tradition, McGilchrist speaks,
lease of The Matter with Things: Our Stay with the contradiction. If you stay, in this last section, of Geist, spirit, and
Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmak- you will see that there is always some- consciousness. Throughout his argument,
ing of the World, a two-volume encyclo- thing more than two opposing truths. The he suggests that we should let ourselves
pedic work from the author of The Master whole truth always includes a third part, be guided by the right rather than the left
and His Emissary, a book I reviewed in which is the reconciliation (p. 1343). hemisphere. In the book’s final section,
the winter-spring 2023 EAP. McGilchrist we gain a sense of what this guidance
had been working on the new book for This effort of reconciliation is what I might mean in practice.
over a decade, and this event was its take as the book’s overall message, ex- By the end of the book’s second section
premiere. pressed in multiple ways throughout the on epistemology, we have been given a
I begin with this moment for two rea- two volumes, and one I describe here as knowledge basis for why the neurophysi-
sons. First, this event occurred almost ex- “asymmetrical reconciliation”—not “rec- ological distinction between right and left
actly two years ago, so it has been a long onciling opposites” but reconciling by hemispheres has philosophical and prac-
time since I read the first part of this way of them. Noticing opposites with a tical merit. In this second section, he
1,500-page book, having started it on my particular sort of attention is reconcilia- deepens our understanding of representa-
way back home to Berlin after the event. tion of the sort Pullman experienced. It tion, a theme that continues in the rest of
Luckily, the first part of the book focuses does not mean changing what is per- the book.
on neuropsychology and parallels argu- ceived of as opposites into similarities; What he explains here more thoroughly
ments in his previous book, discussed in rather, it means changing one’s level of than in Master is that the left-hemisphere
my earlier review. As a result, my focus perception. This is what Alan Watts stance is dangerous for what it overstates

in the world relative to representation, one actively performed by the subject” bring a glimpse of our higher, inner pos-
which for McGilchrist does not refer to (p. 1587). sibilities” (https://www.pulse-berlin.com/jacob-
the neuroscientific concept of mental im- needleman/). The contradiction is necessary
ages in brains but, rather the world pic- The point is that there is no original resistance; as McGilchrist explains, there
tures and images that human beings cre- synthesis because the melody was whole is never a valley without a mountain, or a
ate to articulate, communicate, and share from the start. Any synthesis only appears wave without a trough (p. 1339). He
their discoveries and stories—for exam- after we have broken music into nota- quotes Heraclitus:
ple, alphabets and languages as well as tional representation to then hold it stati-
books, artworks, films, mathematics, and cally in place as melody. To say that mu- Graspings: wholes and not wholes, con-
so forth. sic is its notes is to reduce music to the vergent, divergent, consonant, dissonant,
representation we created to bring our at- from all things one and from one thing

s I understand McGilchrist, he is tention to it in a partial way. But the music all (p. 1335).
speaking about any created sym- itself does not depend on this piecemeal
bolic representations of the hu- formulation. Via quotations like this, McGilchrist
man world, whether paintings, music, Another helpful example is film, which aims to portray a nested, fractal manner of
websites, equations, models of atoms, and is a matter of many momentary images understanding closer to the natural world
the like. He is concerned about what these that, when run together at high speed, and closer to the right brain’s aware-
representations become in the left-brain look continuous. Picturing the situation ness—a grasping that means to touch but
understanding that dominates our way of via the left hemisphere, people too readily also to understand via reconciling what is
seeing the world today. think of life as a film in which they can asymmetrical. McGilchrist expresses this
We too often function like left-hemi- locate and pinpoint relevant parts. To experience as a whirlpool of matter and
sphere beings that reduce everything we think that life is atomistic and that we consciousness (p. 1567).
encounter to secondhand representations must find and isolate its parts is a left- Holding opposites means under-stand-
only. We are similar to those creatures hemisphere mistake because we are ap- ing that what you hold are not really op-
chained in Plato’s cave who no longer plying a representation model to what is posites, just like music is not its notation
know there is a real world outside. They not representational: Film is a representa- or film a series of images. It is this disso-
only see the shadows on the walls, and tion. Life is not. nance that allows the nested, fractal posi-
these shadows are assumed to be reality. Experience cannot be stopped and tions that appear asymmetrical but are in
We forget that the images we make— started or broken into parts. Yes, it can be fact inseparable and not to be judged as
even our fMRI brain images—are not the represented so that we better understand two. The situation is much like trying to
things themselves but only partial, frozen it. We must move beyond the representa- divide the human body’s front and back.
snapshots of an ongoing process of lived tion, however, to return to actual experi- Or trying to impose the left hand on the
experience that can never be fully repre- ence. The great mistake is to confuse rep- right. These situations can never be rec-
sented. resentation with what we’re trying to un- onciled precisely because their portions
This process is dynamic so that, as soon derstand. coincide.
as any part of it is represented, that part is We have substituted the map for the ter- At first, paradox may seem a problem
already changed. Still, to take these snap- ritory such that we are in danger of no to solve. In Chapter 16, for example,
shots (for example, to write music out in longer attending to the territory, to life it- McGilchrist provides several examples of
notation) is a helpful left-brain effort and self—to the real world. This is the pri- how each hemisphere would solve a par-
not to be disregarded. What we must do is mary plea of the book, as I read it, a hope ticular paradox. Take Dichotomy: the
to refine and distinguish between the real that we will let the right brain in and no- hare beats the turtle no matter how much
world and secondhand representations. tice, in the words of McGilchrist, “the dif- one might reduce the space between them
To make this point, McGilchrist provides ference between representations of expe- (p. 1066). Still, it is clear that we cannot
several quotations from the German phi- rience and experience itself” (p. 1439). get back to where we started and know it
losopher and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs, for the first time without the left hemi-
for example:

In music, as in the living world, change
is permanent, stasis is transitory. “What
is perceived,” writes Thomas Fuchs, “is
T his lived difference between repre-
sentation and experience relates to
“the conciliation of opposites.”
Needleman explains that, by sitting with
the contradiction, “sometimes the veil is
sphere of resistance.

B y the last part of his book,
McGilchrist has demonstrated
that paradox is only a way to
not a sequence of discrete tones but a dy- lifted for a moment, and you get a tiny awaken one’s attention within a process
namic, self-organizing process which in- glimpse through those protective illusions that is difficult to spot without such re-
tegrates the tones heard to create a mel- … if you have courage, you can stay with sistance for the very reason that this pro-
ody … It is an automatic synthesis, not that and look at it closely—and that can cess is already what one is moving within.
The realization beyond opposites does not

10

dissolve them because they were never we have a choice about which hemisphere where she is developing the philosophy
there. In other words, the reconciliation is we hope to prioritize and in so doing, of Way-making, a new understanding of
asymmetry. about what kind of world we want to nur- embodied, emplaced cognition that inter-
The most important thing we gain from ture. This approach means staying with prets mind as continuous with naviga-
McGilchrist’s text is to look at ourselves the contradiction until we get a glimpse of tion. For more information,
more honestly, to reconcile ourselves, something else. see www.loveandphilosophy.com. andre
which is to say, to approach ourselves
[email protected]
. © Andrea
with a new sort of attention. As expressed Andrea Hiott has degrees in philosophy Hiott 2024.
by Pullman and others, there is value in and neuroscience and is doing her doc-
how this explication allows us to realize torate at the University of Heidelberg

11

Book review
Susan Ingham

Lisa Heschong, 2021. Visual Delight in Architecture: Daylight, Vision, and View. London:
Routledge.

the effects of daylight and views on human Recent studies suggest that disruptions
life. She weaves together several diverse in circadian rhythms are a significant cause
areas of research with her own decades- of some sleep disorders and other health
long studies and observations to make a challenges. Robust circadian rhythms not
compelling case for the necessity of day- only result in better sleep but also support
light and views to increase and maintain better metabolic health, better memory for-
our physical and mental health and to pro- mation, and better emotional resilience.
vide visual comfort and delight. Getting a daily dose of daylight boosts our
Heschong’s central premise is that good vitality and helps maintain a healthy circa-
daylighting and window views are not just dian rhythm, though today most Western-
optional amenities nice to have if the ers spend ninety percent of their time in-
budget allows. She contends that daily ac- doors, and access to daylight is much more
cess to daylight and views are essential to restricted.
our physiological and cognitive health. She Heschong describes recent scientific dis-
emphasizes that more attention should be coveries demonstrating that many other
given to window sizes and placements in hormonal, cognitive, and bodily rhythms
buildings. are in sync with circadian rhythms, includ-
In addition to physiological and cogni- ing mind wandering, or “Default Mode
tive benefits, Heschong demonstrates that Network” (DMN). Studies have shown
the presence of well-designed windows that we spend forty-seven percent of our
waking hours “mind wandering” or in

s a practicing architect living and views can help shape and reflect dis-
and working in Seattle, Wash- tinct cultural perspectives. Good daylight DMN, often in very short bursts of time of
ington, I place high importance design has the potential to create more uni- which we are not consciously aware.
on the size and placement of versal transcendent experiences, well illus- Rather than being a negative attribute,
windows in my design projects. In the Pa- trated by the view of Earth from the win- researchers have discovered that “Mind
cific Northwest, windows are often quite dow of an orbiting space station. wandering is associated with rich internal
large due to Seattle’s mild climate, north- activity that often entails contemplating fu-
ern latitude, and many overcast days (Seat-
tle is the cloudiest large city in the lower
48 states, sometimes experiencing over
300 overcast days per year). Stunning
C overing a broad range of fields in-
cluding physiology, cognitive psy-
chology, neuroscience, aesthetics,
architecture, urban design, environmental
ture goals and/or thinking about the self”
(p. 70) This mental activity is focused on a
person’s internal state and is closely con-
nected with insight and creativity:
views are plentiful in this hilly city sur- science, and cultural anthropology, He-
rounded by mountain ranges and bodies of schong divides the book into four main A steady rhythm of mind wandering im-
water. Maximizing both light and views is sections. The first section, Prediction, plies that it is a basic function of the
standard practice in my design work. “outlines the physiological mechanisms of brain, very much like sleep, where inter-
When I began reading architect Lisa He- our circadian, visual, and cognitive sys- nal processes are attended to, in prepara-
schong’s Visual Delight in Architecture: tems and their relationships to daylight and tion for the next round of outward sensing
Daylight, Vision, and View, I thought I un- view” (p. 6). Heschong explains the im- and activity (p. 73).
derstood well the value and importance of portance of several biological rhythms
“Daylight, Vision, and View” but was mis- closely connected to daylight and views Other positive associations attributed to
taken; My knowledge and experience is and impacting human health directly. mind wandering include increased self-
just one piece of a much deeper knowledge The first is circadian rhythm, our inter- awareness, working memory, and incuba-
of how daylight and views are integrally nal genetic clock that helps predict the tim- tion of problem solutions and creative
connected to human health and well-being. ing of day versus night. Our bodies are bi- thought.
In her book, Heschong outlines a com- ologically programmed to be awake and Is it possible to harness this largely sub-
prehensive, multi-disciplinary portrait of feel more vital during daylight hours and to conscious rhythm of mind wandering to in-
rest at night in sync with Earth’s rotation. crease our creativity and power of insight?

12

Heschong suggests that looking out win- Heschong’s example is the Phoenix Cen- phasizes the need for variation and a coher-
dows to a view can easily trigger our minds tral Library where architect Will Bruder ent balance of light and dark rather than
to go into DMN: designed special skylights for the main uniform lighting throughout.
reading room: One well known example is Frank Lloyd
I know that, personally, when I am look- Wright’s incorporating low, dark entrance
ing out my office window, there is a A diffusing skylight sits above each col- halls in his house designs so that, when one
ninety-nine percent chance that my mind umn that supports the space frame struc- passes from the low, dark entrances into
is wandering: I stare, let my mind blur, ture spanning the vast space. However, the main dwelling spaces, they seem much
and answers to all kinds of unasked ques- set into each skylight dome there is one lighter, brighter, and larger than they actu-
tions just bubble up unbidden” (p. 72). small circle of clear glazing that lets a ally are. I use this perceptual device in my
small beam of sunlight into the space. The own work in entrance rooms and in dark,
When I designed my own office 15 years location of this clear circle is such that at narrow hallways that lead to bedrooms that
ago, I designed large corner windows next exactly noon on the summer solstice, the feel brighter and larger than they would
to which I placed my desk so I could easily sunbeam strikes the top of the column, otherwise.
look outside. I was not aware of the bene- making it seem to burn with the intensity
fits of mind wandering at the time but in-
stinctually knew I wanted to be able to look
out to be able to do my best creative work.
of the sun. At that moment, the reading
room lights up with more than the usual
delight and transforms into an observa-
tory for our place on Earth and in the
H eschong next discusses con-
trasting qualities of light for dif-
ferent cities and regions, mostly
arising because of latitude, weather pat-

I n the book’s second part, Perception,
Heschong explores the human sensory
experience: How we learn to see, how
visual perception shifts with age, and day-
light aspects linked to vision, including
larger solar system (p. 113).

Having worked with Christopher Alex-
ander and his colleagues at the University
terns, and the surrounding landmass, con-
text, and regional landscape elements, in-
cluding physical shapes and materials. For
example, the many overcast days in Seat-
of California, Berkeley, I was pleased that tle, coupled with its northern latitude, fa-
color, shadow, sparkle, and glare. She in- Heschong mentioned pattern No. 159, cilitate a soft quality sometimes called
cludes valuable information on how to de- “Light on Two Sides of Every Room,” “oyster light.” The dark green of evergreen
sign for daylight in buildings to maximize from Alexander’s seminal A Pattern Lan- trees, the dark inky blue of water bodies,
visual comfort and delight, as well as what guage, as an excellent way to mitigate spa- and the light icy mountain blue all contrib-
content and qualities of window views are tial glare. I use this pattern in most of my ute to the singular “cool tone” color feeling
most meaningful for building occupants. projects, as I find that windows on two of the place. To harmonize with this re-
The challenge for architects and design- sides make a dramatic difference in the vis- gional place palette, I often recommend to
ers is to size and place windows so that ual comfort of most medium- and large- my clients that they paint their houses a
both the interior daylighted environment sized rooms. If a project’s budget is tight darker red, terra cotta, or burnt orange to
and exterior views are both optimal for cre- and I can only modify one element to im- complement the natural landscape’s greens
ating places to work and live that nourish prove a room, I will most likely add or en- and blues.
the occupants’ physical and mental health. large windows, preferably following Heschong concludes the book’s second
This section of the book is densely packed “Light on Two Sides of Every Room.” part with a focus on views outside win-
with astute observations, research study re- Although Heschong makes no mention, dows. There are certain types of landscapes
sults, and readily applicable tips. Pattern No. 223, “Deep Reveals,” also ad- and views that people gravitate toward, in-
I especially appreciated Heschong’s dresses the glare problem. This pattern pro- cluding sky, trees, birds, pathways, water,
practical explanations about how color, poses thicker window frames that can be mountains, and distinctive landmarks. The
shadow, sparkle, and glare can be used to splayed at an angle toward the room inte- sky changes frequently and, in observing
design comfortable daylighted spaces. For rior so that there is a more gradual transi- it, we gain knowledge about the weather
example, the presence of shadows allows tion of natural light along the splayed edge, and satisfy our appetite for circadian stim-
us to better perceive three-dimensional more smoothly connecting the bright out- ulus. Birds and trees connect us with na-
space, while sparkles or highlights balance side with the darker inside walls and thus ture, and paths and people connect us with
the shadows and make objects appear more mitigating glare. others in the city. Landmarks provide im-
vivid and three-dimensional (though too Heschong does not refer to other Pattern portant emotional anchors reminding us
much sparkle in a space can quickly be- Language patterns relating to light quality, where we are in the world, and “water may
come uncomfortable glare). For retail dis- though most align with Heschong’s argu- be the most universally treasured compo-
plays, Heschong recommends a combina- ment. For example, No. 135, “Tapestry of nent of views” for its reflectivity, its con-
tion of diffuse and clear skylights at a pro- Light and Dark,” and No. 252, “Pools of stant state of change and motion, and its
portion of 10:1 for an optimal balance of Light,” directly relate to the importance of connection to nature and wildlife.
diffuse light and sparkle, without glare. shadows and the differentiation of light in I once rented office space in downtown
Strategically introducing sparkle is one a space. For both patterns, Alexander em- Seattle where I could look out to Puget
way to add visual delight to a daylit space.

13

Sound and the Olympic Mountains. I focuses on three environments—schools, percent did not include windows. The rea-
watched ferry boats and the sun setting retail stores, and offices—and describes soning was that, to minimize residential
over the snow-capped mountains. I espe- studies that demonstrate improved aca- costs, students would pay less rent for a
cially appreciated the cargo ships anchored demic performance, increased retail sales, small windowless room. Fortunately, there
in the bay, plying the Seattle-Asia trade. and enhanced worker productivity. was enough protest from students, staff,
Seeing them waiting to unload made me Broadly, these improvements are substan- and local officials that the project was
feel more connected to the wider world. tial, mostly in the seven to thirty percent scrapped, though the idea continues, and
My mind would wander and expand, link- range. windowless dormitory rooms have been
ing me to the planet and distant shores. There are also health benefits relating to built at the University of Texas, Austin
In relation to window views, Heschong views and daylight as demonstrated by one (Daniel Roche, “University of California
highlights layering light as a design device study indicating that office workers sitting abandons plans to build “windowless
to create visual comfort and delight. Win- by windows complained less about their dorm” Munger Hall”, The Architect’s
dow views can be manipulated in various physical environment and were less critical Newsletter, August 9, 2023).
ways to regulate desired degrees of pri- about other aspects of their office situation. UT student Joan Miro reports on the UT
vacy, sun/glare/heat control, and undesira- Relevant here is the research of Roger Ul- Austin windowless dorm rooms in The Ar-
ble views. Movable elements such as rich, who examined differences in recov- chitect’s Newspaper, October 14, 2022:
shades, blinds, curtains, and shutters allow ery rates for hospital patients based on win-
individuals to better control their visual dow views. One group of patients looked The benefits of natural light on people’s
comfort. out to a brick wall, while another group general well-being—not to mention its
Also useful are perforated screens, lat- looked out to trees; this second group had preventive effects on such mental health
tices, exterior fins, and frosted or obscure a faster recovery rate. conditions as depression, anxiety, sleep
glass. Alexander’s pattern No. 238, “Fil- Heschong explains that daylight and disorders, and stress—are well docu-
tered Light,” describes the delight in look- views of nature are also associated with mented. Students may not be fully aware
ing out a window through the leaves of a pain reduction, partly because daylight ex- of the health ramifications when they sign
tree, or through tracery or leaded glass. In posure can help increase levels of seroto- leases for apartments with windowless
my work, I have designed stained glass nin: rooms, but many have shared their
windows, rice paper screens, and other “dreadful experiences” after the fact.
window coverings to create filtered light Findings indicated that patients in rooms Most speak about trying to avoid spend-
for particular rooms, especially bathrooms. with more sunlight reported less pain and ing time in their room, but there is no es-
Heschong correctly asks, however, “At stress, and took 22% less analgesic medi- cape. [One student reported that] “From
what point does the veil create as sense of cations, resulting in a 21% of medication the moment you wake up, it is a very con-
imprisonment instead of protection or priv- costs (p. 275). fusing and anxious experience.” [Another
ilege?” (p. 175). She studied children in a student commented that] “Waking up
classroom with windows that included se- If these findings are correct, then every morning in total darkness never
curity features like perforated metal shouldn’t all hospitals be required by code fails to create anxiety, which is a terrible
screens and scratched, yellowed plastic se- to provide patient rooms with a view of a start to each day” (Joan Miro, “Window-
curity glazing, both of which appeared to garden, trees, or other natural elements? less dorm rooms are proliferating, exac-
have a negative impact on the children’s Unfortunately, building codes move in the erbating a growing student mental health
learning experience. opposite direction. To increase safety from crisis. They should be banned” (excerpt
I recently stayed in a modern, upscale the threat of fire, building codes (including from a letter to the editor, The Architect’s
London hotel room where the floor-to-ceil- the International Building Code [IBC] Newspaper, October 14, 2022).
ing window was frosted glass except for which is the predominate code used in the
the top few inches by the ceiling. This glass US) almost always require buildings to be Another student’s experience corrobo-
was used to block out an unpleasant view fully sprinklered. The IBC has recently al- rates research linking depression with the
of an industrial landscape, but not being lowed new exceptions for escape window absence of natural light: “While being in
able to see out made me feel trapped. I kept requirements if a building is fully sprin- my windowless room, I have experienced
looking up to the clear top glass to try to klered with the result that some building symptoms of depression and fatigue quite
look out, despite the gritty surroundings. I types—for example, dormitories and often. It is very hard to get motivated, al-
felt a general sense of unease when I was apartment buildings—are no longer re- most to the point where you feel trapped”
in the room, despite the upscale amenities. quired to have a bedroom window to be (ibid.). This comment parallels research
code compliant. findings relating to the negative impact of
Recently at the University of California,

I n the book’s third part, Motivation, He-
schong concentrates on case-study
metrics demonstrating real-world ben-
efits of views and good daylighting. She
Santa Barbara, developer Charles Munger
planned to build a twelve-story-high stu-
dent dormitory with 4,500 individual stu-
dent dorm rooms for which ninety-four
circadian-rhythm disruptions. One hopes
that the extensive press coverage of the
Munger Hall saga acts as a catalyst for re-

14

vising the IBC to once again not allow win- drawing of the view, incorporating the Seattleites can be heard asking, “Is the
dowless dorm rooms, this time to preserve window frame and all details outside, an mountain out?” If it is, they make a point
the physical and mental health of the stu- effort that provided him a better feeling of catching its view.
dents rather than solely for fire safety. sense of what it was like looking out “his” In addition, this iconic view of Mt.
window. This experience was inspiration Rainier conveys a transcendent quality:
nother major theme of Heschong’s

A book is the impact of urban design
on a building’s daylight and views.
Building size and orientation are depend-
for his The City Out My Window and Win-
dows on the World, two books based on in-
terviews with writers and artists about the
view they see when they look out their of-
“Views often provide a connection to the
history of a place, and the promise of con-
tinuity with the future, resulting in an ex-
pansive sense of time.” (p. 349). Looking
ent on property lines, setbacks, building fice or studio windows. Pericoli then at “the mountain” reminds me it has been
heights, block structures, street layouts, paired their thoughts with black and white there for thousands of years and, in some
and urban open spaces. She discusses the drawings of the respondents’ windows and form, will be there for thousands more.
importance of voids in the urban fabric— views, creating a uniquely personal “view Millions of people, past, present, and fu-
for example, parks, public squares, bodies portrait.” ture admire Mt. Rainier just as I do; I feel
of water, or even courtyards within houses a sense of connection with the landscape
or apartment building—that can help to in-
crease opportunities for daylight and
views.
Desirable views are often those that look
I n the book’s last section, Heschong ex-
amines Meaning, which relates to how
daylight, view, and visual environment
can support and enhance more universally
and with the sweep of historical and geo-
logic time.

out across a void, such as New York City’s
iconic line of apartment buildings that face
Central Park along Fifth Avenue. In the
mid-twentieth century, Copenhagen ex-
transcendent experiences. She discusses
the power of iconic visual experiences that
can reinforce cultural meanings of a
place. Her examples include the direc-
T hroughout the book, Heschong
makes persuasive arguments sup-
ported by research to demonstrate
the fundamental importance of daylight
and views as an essential aspect of healthy
panded from its historic central core as a tional shaft of light in the Pantheon; the re-
series of long “fingers” that reached west- flected, red-tinged light inside the tunnel human habitats. She strongly advocates for
ward, alternating between built areas and of torii gates at the Fushimi Inari Taisha the inclusion of daylight and view as an es-
green space creating more access to day- shrine in Kyoto; and the vertical stained- sential ingredient of daily life, as it affects
light and more views of nature. As a result, glass windows in the Saint Chapelle our physiology, health, creativity, produc-
Copenhagen is considered one of the chapel. tivity, and sense of community and place.
greenest and most livable cities in the I immediately thought of the placement She concludes by contending that im-
world. of structures in relation to the angle of the proving daylighting and views in buildings
One of the most fascinating sections in sun on important dates like the equinox— is a multi-disciplinary endeavor that relies
the book for me is Heschong’s discussion for example, Stonehenge, the Egyptian on coordination between many professions
of views evoking a feeling of ownership pyramids, Machu Picchu, and Chichen including research scientists, design pro-
and belonging, both personally and collec- Itza. Heschong draws on Chinese and Jap- fessionals, building code officials, law-
tively. When author and illustrator Matteo anese gardens as sophisticated examples of makers, academics, employees, and resi-
Pericoli moved from his New York City creating and manipulating views to fabri- dents. She lists practical ways to increase
apartment, he realized he would never see cate environments of beauty and delight knowledge and implement better daylight
the rather ordinary view from his home of- grounded in specific cultural meanings. and view solutions for buildings and envi-
fice again. He had looked out that window Heschong also illustrates how iconic ronments. These possibilities include:
thousands of times as he had worked there views can become treasured components ▪ Conducting coordinated research stud-
for seven years: of landscape, triggering emotional bonds ies across disciplines for increased un-
for neighborhoods, cities, and countries— derstanding;
I remember looking once again at the for example, the sight of the Eiffel Tower,
view and was struck by a bewildering ▪ Mandating access to daylight and views
Golden Gate bridge, Mt. Fuji, Sydney in building codes;
feeling of loss. “I can’t leave this be- Opera House, or Taj Mahal. She also men-
hind!” I told myself … Without my know- ▪ Rehabilitating older buildings, espe-
tions less well-known markers of collec- cially those built before air-condition-
ing it, that view had become my most fa- tive ownership and belonging as illus-
miliar image of the city. It had become ing, so they respond better to daylight-
trated, for example, by Seattle’s imposing ing and views;
mine. And I would never see it again (p. 14,000 foot high glacier-covered Mt.
244). ▪ Implementing a LEED-type awards
Rainier. Since Seattle is often cloudy and program for excellence in daylighting
overcast, Mt. Rainier is not always visible and views;
Pericoli photographed the view before but a stunning sight when it does appear,
he moved, but the images didn’t capture ▪ Teaching the importance of daylighting
always looking different because of the and views in design curricula;
the feeling of the view he remembered. He light, time of day, cloud cover, and season.
then created a detailed black and white ink

15

▪ Coordinating with urban planners and not received the attention and publicity studied in the Building Process Area of
zoning code officials to maximize urban they deserve. Visual Delight in Architec- Emphasis, directed by architects Christo-
voids and green spaces, ensuring that ture is a brilliant first step in teaching oth- pher Alexander and Hajo Neis. Ingham is
lot and building orientations are advan- ers how to shape worlds where every per- a founder of “Building Beauty” in Sor-
tageous for good daylight and views; son can work, live, and heal in a healthier, rento, Italy, a post-graduate architecture
▪ Ensuring that users can control light more humane built environment. program based on the design principles of
and glare in their work and living envi- Alexander. See the poster for the program
ronments. Susan Ingham, AIA, is a practicing archi- on p. 47. © 2024 Susan Ingham.
tect in Seattle, Washington. Her firm,
These strategies are multi-faceted and KASA Architecture, was founded in 2004
involve multiple disciplines, which may be and specializes in residential design. While
one reason that daylighting and views have an architecture student at Berkeley, she

16

Book review
Jenny Quillien

Howard Davis, 2023. Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander: Thinking,
Building, Writing. London: Routledge.

Radical readers, we go into a bookstore and leave
About one third of the entries might be la- with a book: a tidy, typically rectangular
beled radical ideas that went nowhere. object, nice and clean, with well-defined
They were so anathema to established edges. The computer download process is
vested interests and the way things nor- a bit different, but we are still delivered a
mally get done that these ideas died a swift tidy, crisp, finished product.
death. Though perished they may be, they It is all a bit like the birthday cake para-
are also full of irrefutable common sense, chuted down onto the table as a Voilà. The
good thinking, and signposts to sanity. A cake arrives divorced from the kitchen
few examples of the kinds of questions bowl with the leftover icing and all those
considered: messy cooking pans. As an example, con-
sider Alexander’s A Pattern Language
▪ If you want to revolutionize the currently (APL), often referred to as “the Bible.” We
bungled way we put roofs over our heads can’t change it, add, subtract, or correct.
(and leave a lot of people out in the rain) We take it as it was delivered: that’s the
all you need are the arithmetic skills of a way books are. But, back in the kitchen, are

oward Davis has done the Al-
12 year old and a bit of homespun self- the leftovers. The finished APL left behind
exander readership a huge fa-
interest. Did you really want that finan- alternative thoughts about how to go about
vor in assembling this collec-
cial straight jacket of a 30-year mortgage pattern work, more fluid, more adaptable,
tion of short and mostly un-
(and pay for your house three times where we could add, subtract, and correct.
known writings. I have some misgivings
over) when you don’t have to? Davis has salvaged those thoughts and
about the title because, although it is totally
▪ Who do you think is better placed to en- included a number of other bowls of tasty
accurate, it might convey a feeling of dis-
dow your new house with some real leftover icing. For example, I boldly sug-
carded, old, or unfinished pieces of sec-
Tender Loving Care, the guy in overalls gest that the leftover (i.e., left out) chapter
ondary importance that we can skip. We al-
who builds it or the white shirted CAD from Alexander’s 2012 Battle for the Life
ready have more reading than we can keep
guy who visits the site once? and Beauty of the Earth has more practical
up with, don’t we?
▪ If you were the urban planner for low- hope than the rest of the delivered book.
Davis’s labelling is equally accurate:
cost housing in a hot steamy climate,
“unpublished chapter,” “submission to a
local newsletter,” “transcripts of a conver-
would you (a) possibly consider the Oh! Now I get it!
breezes in how you lay out the buildings; Again, about a third of the entries. These
sation,” “notes from a seminar held in
and (b) possibly consider giving people writings have a particular quality: The
1967,” and so forth. Sounds important, we
a little outside space to raise a few chick- topic is single and focused. Simple declar-
think to ourselves. Let’s dive right in.
ens and fix their old trucks? ative sentences are presented without
Davis has sensibly organized the writ-
▪ Have you ever seen anything more le- flourish. The voice is quiet: there is no per-
ings in three parts:
thally boring than standard office furni- suading going on.
▪ The large and small details of every- ture? It is a straightforward task to have Personally, I read these entries as mo-
day life; exquisitely bespoke office arrangements ments where Alexander had to stop and
▪ From the center to the universe; that suit you and your available square pick his way through some kind of obstacle
▪ Theory into building. footage. in his reasoning. Pen and paper were his
▪ If you wanted to tell the entire software thinking tools. He chose practice exercises
For this review, I take an opposite tack. industry to pull up its damn socks, how that are banal and minimal—just enough to
Since Davis is academically appropriate would you go about it? clarify the situation to his own satisfaction.
and softspoken in his editorial commen- When he is done, he is done.
tary, I will be opinionated and extreme. I Delicious leftovers The relevance to the reader is that Alex-
offer an alternative grouping, different la- About one third of the pieces could be de- ander never retraces all these thinking-it-
bels, and another sort of commentary. scribed, metaphorically, as “leftovers.” As through-steps when, later on, he writes a

17

longer and ultimately better-known piece. Forces generate form Weights and strings locate an elevator on
Access to these smaller background writ- In natural systems, this is literal. Example. an office floor. Again, too limited. For ex-
ings can greatly enhance our understand- When wind blows over sand, it forms wave ample, lighting is ignored.
ing—for example, a short entry Alexander like ripples because of five forces: (1) the
wrote in 1966 entitled, From a set of forces windward slope catches more grains and Common to all methods: All methods must
to a form. I select this item because, just grows; (2) the wind carries grains an ap- obtain form from the interaction of forces.
before I read it in Howard’s book, I had proximately constant distance; (3) the They must establish a common ground
botched two conversations. Perhaps if I wind gathers more grains on the windward where the forces can interact. In numerical
had this short essay under my belt, I might slope and, carrying them the same dis- methods, all forces are expressed as nu-
have done a better job. tance, irregularities are repeated one “path merical variables and the number system
In one, I failed to convincingly explain length” downwind; (4) as grains land, they provides the common ground. In analog
to a new colleague the significance of push others, causing creep. Small grains methods all tendencies are expressed as ac-
forces in pattern work. My colleague had are carried beyond the crest, leaving larger tive forces, and the physical analog is the
listened politely and then given me one of grains to accumulate on the crests; (5) on arena of interaction.
those OK Whatever shrugs. In the other the crests, wind velocity is higher, blowing
botch, a person new to patterns had intuited off small grains and leaving heavy ones. New formulation of question
that patterns were potentially powerful but In complex man-made systems, this pro- Given a set of forces with no restriction on
asked, “What exactly is the difference be- cess is not literal but metaphoric. For ex- their variety, how can we generate a stable
tween a pattern and a set of instructions?” ample, people want to escape noisy neigh- form with respect to all of those forces?
His question was well-founded, because bors. If the house doesn’t allow it, they Relational method
often (particularly in the programming close the bedroom window and make the Determine as abstractly as possible, the
community and PLoP conferences) people room stuffy. They turn up their own radio. physical relations that each tendency is
can’t distinguish a pattern from a set of in- They become angry. Forces may be impo- seeking. Then combine by fusion these in-
structions. Let me provide an overview of tent and render the system unstable. dividual abstract relational implications to
the 1966 paper and then return to my generate a form.
botched conversations. The argument goes New formulation of question: Given a sys-
tem, how can we assess the forces that act For example, Alexander works through
like this: the case of placing a highway in Massachu-
upon it and arise within it? Given a set of
Question: Given a set of needs, how can we forces, how can we generate a form that is setts. He reviews 26 forces, such as, for
generate a form that meets those needs? stable with respect to them? instance, the reduction of earthwork costs
that will provide a flat terrain. Alexander
Answer: There are three ways. Review of numerical methods then proceeds with a fusion through super-
Numerical methods: most common but too Each force can be represented by a one-di- imposing maps from each force and its
simple for environmental design. mensional numerical variable. One seeks sought form.
Analog methods: common but also too minimization (or maximization); the others Turning to a second example, Alexander
simple. are held constant and called constraints. considers forces within a family.
Relational methods: unexplored but prom- Equations of inequalities relate the values ▪ Force 1. Each person has hobbies and
ising. of the different variables to the configura- wants a place where things can be left
tion of the system and to one another. out to be readily accessible.
Underlying problem: The concept of need There is an algorithm that defines the con- ▪ Force 2. Mom wants the communal ar-
is faulty: unobjective, too narrow, ignores figuration in which the chosen force eas to be kept tidy for visitors.
other factors, does not give any indication reaches its minimum (or maximum) value ▪ Force 3. Family members want to be to-
of a form that will satisfy it. under the constraints provided by the oth- gether.
ers. For example, the Mitchell theorem can Fusion suggests a form of “sitting room
Possible solution: Try force as an invented be used to minimize the weight of a struc- with alcoves.”
motive power that summarizes some recur- ture but does not take into account trans- Returning now to my two ineffectual
rent, inexorable tendency to seek another portation choices or maintenance needs. conversations. Had I been armed with this
state. Applicable to humans, i.e., if we Numeric methods to minimize movement 1966 essay; I could have better explained
want to read, we turn on the light. Applica- in a hospital layout ignore conditions that forces in the first conversation. I could
ble to physical and mechanical realms, i.e., speed up a cure. have explained why Alexander had found
heat flows across a temperature gradient. Most human forces cannot be optimized the prevailing vocabulary (constraints,
with a single one-dimensional variable. needs, numeric and analog reasoning) to be
Requirements: We look to the exact cir- inadequate tooling, and therefore why he
cumstance under which the force arises. Review of analog methods takes the concept of a force and forges it to
What are the exact conditions that the force Forces of a second-system model the his needs of versatility and relatability. I
seeks? forces of the first system. Example. could have gone on to explain how these

18

burgeoning thoughts about forces and rela-
tionships would grow into investigations
of pattern languages, complexity, gener-
ated structures, unfolding, and beauty.
With the second conversation, a useful
moment could have been spent thinking
about instructions versus a set of forces,
each of which is whispering to us the form
that will satisfy it. A sand dune doesn’t
come about because of instructions. It
comes about as a resolution of forces play-
ing out their destiny.
With human affairs, things may be more
metaphorical but essentially are the same.
We gravitate to ROOMS WITH LIGHT
ON TWO SIDES because it is in our nature
to want to see clearly and not fatigue our
eyes with the glare of one directional light.
We hang out in and create for ourselves
FARMHOUSE KITCHENS because Mom
wants to prepare dinner, the kids have
homework and do better with a table for
schoolbooks, cookies and milk, and a
pinch of supervision. Phideau, the dog,
wants to be where everybody else is, and
Aunt Nelly doesn’t mind peeling the pota-
toes if gossip can be shared.
The forces beckon us toward a kitchen
form that embodies the desired af-
fordances, i.e., those conditions that the
forces are seeking. Patterns, unlike instruc-
tions, are about understanding forces that
generate form to increase the density of
happy relationships.
I’d like to thank Howard Davis for his
generosity of time and spirit in assembling
this compilation. It is a great resource for
the community.
In his edited collection of Alexander’s unpublished and early writings, Davis includes
An anthropologist by training, Jenny several early patterns not found in the published Pattern Language. Besides “Barber-
Quillien worked for six years with Chris- shop politics” (a portion above), other patterns that Davis reproduces are “Paths inter-
topher Alexander on the manuscript of his rupt roads,” “All services off arena,” “Corridors that live,” and “Buildings surround
The Nature of Order. See her essay, p.37, open spaces.”
on the anthropo-geography of geographer
Ellen Churchill Semple. jennyquil-
[email protected]
. © 2024 Jenny Quillien.

19

Book Review
David Seamon
Christopher Alexander, with Howard Davis, Julio Martinez, and Donald Corner, 1985. The Production of
Houses. NY: Oxford University Press.

local university to be architect/builders so that of course they must have the
who helped families plan and build their power to make design decisions while
dwellings. they are building and must have an ac-
Over time, there are bureaucratic and tive relation to the conception of the
governmental problems. Ultimately, only building, not a passive one (p. 74).
five of the 30 houses are finished. These
houses look like a connected set of thin, Alexander contends that the building
vaulted breadboxes wrapped around a process must be made more alive and hu-
central outdoor courtyard turned away mane so that people will become more ac-
from the street [drawing below]. tive and reach higher parts of themselves
Though the complete project was not through envisioning, designing, and
finished, the building process described building. The result might be not only a
in Production provides a significant more pleasant architectural environment
model for practically achieving self-help but people who are more confident and
housing. The project points to one poten- self-actualized:
tial way whereby, through hands-on de-
sign and construction, people develop We therefore propose to replace the me-
skills and self-confidence: chanical building operation of present
systems of production with a more hu-
It is axiomatic for us that the people who man operation in which the joy of build-
build the houses must be active, mentally ing becomes paramount, in which the
and spiritually, while they are building, builders have a direct human relation to

n all his work, architect Christopher
Alexander (1936–2022) argued that
modern architectural design has
been severed from everyday life and
genuine human creativity. The needs are,
first, a conceptual means for thinking
about environmental and place concerns
in a holistic way; second, a practical
method by which thinking and designing
can be integrated with building.
Production of Houses is one of the best
examples of Alexander’s remarkable ef-
forts to create a more humane built envi-
ronment. His focus is low-income hous-
ing in Mexicali, Mexico. The aim is to
build inexpensive but comfortable homes
that families design and construct them-
selves.
With support from regional and local
authorities, Alexander contracted to build
homes for 30 families. He and his design
team hired architectural students from the

20

the work itself, to the house, to the place families to help them solve any design or a real-world arrangement best for all in-
of the houses, and to the people that the construction problems. The result, claims volved.
houses are for, and in which the families Alexander, is that the house is no longer a In Mexicali, the families met at the site
themselves may enter in, as much or as manufactured object but early one morning and used wooden
little as they want to, in the process, so stakes to determine lot arrangements and
that the building process as a whole be- a thing of love, which is nurtured, made, shared common space. Although there
comes a record of achievement, a human grown, and personal …. The building is were difficulties—e.g., some families
struggle to be remembered, a memory, a shaped in a human way where its shap- wanted the same plot location—an agree-
moment of life, which will remain in the ing is a human act, related directly to the ment was eventually made with the five
houses, once occupied, a process which familiarity and to the men and women houses arranged as a “cluster”—i.e., a
will continue, in the years that follow, in who actually build it …. All this requires group of homes sharing common land un-
the slow improvement, growth, and that houses be treated as unique, sepa- der their control. Alexander points out
maintenance of the same houses—and in rate things, each one built according to that the effort that goes into making a
which, above all, the houses take their its own special nature; and this requires house cluster is human effort: “It lies in
place in the community as part of a liv- in turn that the architect have an amount the human process by which a group of
ing process, a source of life, which of time available which is inconceivable people come to know each other, work to-
spreads life into the life of the society (p. in today’s mass housing projects (p. 67, gether, trust each other, and together
298). p. 70). make their world” (p. 127).
Next, each family participates in the
The largest portion of Production de- The physical heart of this engaged layout of individual homes, the aim of
scribes the process of building the five building process is a system of decentral- which is to help each family design their
Mexicali houses; this process is marked ized building yards, one or more every house in such a way that it “becomes a
by seven aspects, each described in its few blocks and each responsible for genuine life base, a place for the heart, a
own chapter: buildings in the local neighborhood. Un- place in which the family, as a unique be-
like today, where construction is nor- ing in society, may be anchored and nour-
▪ The architect-builder; mally carried out by large, remote corpo- ished” (p. 165).
▪ The builder yard; rate firms, such building yards would re- To envision the houses, Alexander’s
▪ The collective design of common turn construction control to the locality team worked closely with each family,
land; and give people a more active interest in using a housing pattern language that the
▪ The layout of individual houses; their community. team had written before design and build-
▪ Step-by-step construction; For Mexicali, the builder’s yard was the ing began. The families were asked to
▪ Cost control; first structure constructed by Alexander study this pattern language, which incor-
▪ The human rhythm of the process. and his team of architects. It became the porated 21 patterns such as “northeastern
seedbed of manufacturing building outdoor space,” “positive garden space,”
All these aspects of the building pro- blocks and for storage, a place to instruct “long, thin house,” “main entrance,”
cess are masterfully detailed in the book. the families in construction, and to exper- “half-hidden garden,” “front porch,” “bed
The first aspect of the process is the ar- iment with untried building technologies. alcoves,” “natural doors and windows,”
chitect-builder, who oversees the build- Without this yard, Alexander claims, and so forth (see list, next page).
ing operation. Alexander points out that, the project would have quickly collapsed This pattern language allowed the fam-
in modern housing-production systems, because it would have been without a cen- ilies to produce the specific house they
no one person is responsible; rather there ter: “The yard was the physical and spir- hoped for, each one essentially a variant
are a series of officials, architects, engi- itual starting point for the whole process, of the basic house type described by the
neers, contractors, and so forth who have and it remains so throughout the process 21 patterns. The families worked with
no thorough sense of the needs of people of production” (p. 112). these patterns in the order of larger to
and site. Once the building yard was complete, smaller, and Production devotes consid-
In contrast, Alexander calls for a new Alexander’s next step was to establish erable discussion to the relative success
kind of “master builder” who has com- contact with interested families (achieved the five families had with each of them.
plete charge of no more than a few dozen through a local credit union) and lay out For example, all the families were suc-
houses at a time and therefore can deal di- the collective design of common land, cessfully able to locate effective “main
rectly with families’ design wishes and typically done by some impersonal gov- entrances,” but none took advantage of
construction problems. In the Mexicali ernmental process. Instead, Alexander “couple’s realm”—a pattern that called
project, these master-builders were Alex- sought to have families lay out their own for a private part of the house creating a
ander, associates, and the student-archi- neighborhood via talking together, reach- separate domain for husband and wife.
tects, who worked side by side with the ing agreements, and thereby working out

21

Pattern Language for Houses is based on his procedure of step-by-step On the other hand, the sense of commu-
Northeast outdoor space construction whereby costs can be geared nity that Alexander hoped would be facil-
Positive outdoor space to each of these operations. itated by sharing the common space join-
Long thin house The last aspect of the building process ing the five houses spatially did not hap-
Main entrance
Half-hidden garden is human rhythm, and here, again, Alex- pen. The families had built fences around
Front porch ander points out how building can be- their lots and withdrew from neighborly
Intimacy gradient come a creative act in which people grow interaction. As one of the families ex-
Common areas at the heart and discover new parts of themselves. plained,
Farmhouse kitchen
Couple’s realm This rhythm is described in terms of five
Children’s realm aspects probably important to any group It didn’t work well because the families
Back porch effort of creation: first, that people work were not well chosen. There was a prob-
Sequence of sitting spaces together a definite hour every day; sec- lem when company came over because of
Bed alcoves
Bathing room ond, that each family contribute at least the other families. One particular family
The shape of indoor space some physical labor; third, that something took over the communal space and there
Light on two sides of every room definite be completed each day; fourth, was no privacy. So we didn’t usually use
Closets between rooms that people help each other with the more the porch …. All the families ended up
Structure follows social spaces
Columns at the corners arduous operations; fifth, that there is a closing themselves off (p. 90).
Natural doors and windows celebration at the end of every operation.
The effectiveness of this way of work- Alexander’s Mexicali experiment was
Turning to step-by-step construction, ing is captured poignantly in Alexander’s only partially successful. The failure to
one notes Alexander’s development of a description of the celebration following create a sense of neighborhood and com-
system of building operations to be per- completing of the houses’ foundations: munity through shared labor and common
formed one after another. For the Mexi- space was particularly disappointing. Yet
cali houses, there are 23 procedures, Last night, at the fiesta which the five Production can be seen as a remarkable
which include: (1) lay out stakes; (2) ex- families had to celebrate the completion achievement, particularly in its success
cavate and neutralize soil; (3) place cor- of the foundation, Jose Tapia came up to for implementing a simple, stepwise pro-
ner stones; (4) place wall foundations; (5) me and told me in words of almost inex- cess whereby laypeople could envision
prepare building slab; and so forth. These plicable warmth and fervor that this was and design their own dwellings.
operations are applied to match the fam- the most wonderful process he had ever Production offers a practical, reproduc-
ily’s design for their house. When carried experienced; that he had only the desire ible pathway for home building that deep-
out correctly, these 23 operations produce to work more; that he wanted to help the ens people’s sense of themselves and
a structurally sound building without the other families complete their houses; makes them feel more alive as persons.
need for construction drawings. that when the group of five houses was The Mexicali project is a bright beacon
Again, Alexander claims that this self- finished, he wanted to help other families for others attempting self-help housing.
help method of building is much more re- have the same experience; that it was an
honor and a wonderful thing for him to References
warding personally and communally than Alexander, Christopher, Corner, Donald, Davis,
conventional construction methods that be part of this process; and that he
Howard, and Martinez, Julio, 1985. The Produc-
rely more on standardized building com- wanted to thank me from the bottom of tion of Houses. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
ponents assembled in the same mechani- his heart, over and over again—and that Alexander, Christopher, Fromm, Dorrit, and Bossel-
cal way time after time. Alexander argues words could not adequately express his man, Peter, 1984. Mexicali Revisited, Places,
feelings …. (p. 310). 1(4): 76–91.
that this method of construction is crea- Davis, Howard, 1999/2006. The Culture of Build-
tive, since it “produces things which were ing. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
ltimately, Alexander’s aim to
not known before they were done …. The
building grows slowly, step by step, the
way a living organism does—with no
contortions having to be made along the
U build 30 houses fails, though the
five house are completed and oc-
cupied by the end of 1976. In a 1984 arti-
David Seamon is EAP editor. An earlier
version of this review was published in
Impressions, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1986), pp. 20–
23. There follows co-author of Production
way” (p. 226, p. 229). cle in Places, Alexander and colleagues
The sixth aspect of the Mexicali exper- describe a visit back to the five families Howard Davis’s report on a recent event
iment is cost control, which involves the seven years later. Their report concludes celebrating the Mexicali experiment—see
matter of how houses quite different in that, overall, the families were happy with next page. His account indicates that Pro-
design can be constructed at reasonable their houses and looked back on the build- duction continues to be studied today as
cost. Alexander’s method of cost control ing experience as an important time in an important model for self-help residen-
their lives. tial design and construction.

22

Notes on a Visit to “El Sitio” in Mexicali, Mexico
May 18–20, 2023
Howard Davis

Davis is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon. He is author of The Culture of Building (1999); Living Over the
Store: Architecture and Local Urban Life (2012); and Working Cities: Architecture, Place and Production (2020). In this EAP, we
review his just-published Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander (2023)—see p. 17. Davis worked with Alexan-
der for several years and co-authored with Alexander, Julio Martinez, and Donald Corner, The Production of Houses (1985),
which tells the story of the five owner-built houses that are the focus of the event described below. For a review of the book, see p.
20.
[email protected]
. Text and photographs © 2024 Howard Davis. Captions for photographs are on p. 28.

was invited by architect In 2002, his family moved
Andrea Torreblanco to par- out on request of the school of
ticipate in a three-day event architecture, which entered
in Mexicali organized by into a new arrangement that
INSITE, a local arts organization turned the complex into a local
(https://insiteart.org/). health center. Now in his early
The event was on the site of 30s, Pastizal did not return to
the project that I worked on as El Sitio until about a year ago,
part of a group led by Chris Al- when he began work on repav-
exander. The event focused on ing the courtyard (the com-
that project. Many of the plex’s inner courtyard that has
INSITE members are from the the bedrooms around it). He
region that straddles the Mexico- pulled up the concrete or con-
California border, including the crete tiles that had been put
cities of Mexicali, Ensenada, Tijuana, and also from Tijuana, Guadalajara, Monter- there (not the brick in the arcade that is still
San Diego. INSITE is composed of artists, rey, and other places in Mexico including there, but the center of the courtyard itself),
architects, curators, writers, and others in- Mexico City), students know about the and made stone-like tiles that are individu-
terested in connecting art with the land- project, visit it in their first year, and re- ally shaped and colored. Pastizal is a very
scape and places of this region now bi- main interested in it. (Not all of them, but gentle, sweet person, spiritually connected
sected by the border wall. (That odious many, according to the chair of the school, to the natural world. He explained how the
wall is abundantly present as one gets near Alejandro Peimbert.) stone tiles come out of that spirituality. Af-
the physical border between Mexicali and Pastizal Zamudio, an artist, spent the ter he left home, he spent time in Califor-
Calexico.) first ten years of his life living in the exper- nia, (and still spends time there every
After receiving the invitation, I accepted imental buildings, beginning in 1991. His year). He read about Chris and studied his
immediately, seeing the event as an oppor- father, an architect, was invited to teach at work. Somehow, Pastizal’s personal his-
tunity to revisit the place and project that the UABC architecture school, and was of- tory helped spark this three-day event.
had such a big impact on my early career. fered the experimental building complex The other central person in my visit, be-
I flew to San Diego on Wednesday, May as a house for his family, in return for tak- yond the wonderful leadership of Andrea
17, and was met at the airport by Michael ing care of the buildings.
Krichman, the U.S. Executive Director of
INSITE. We drove across the desert, on the
American side of the border, to Calexico
where we crossed into Mexicali.
“El Sitio,” as the site of the project is
generally known, has an important, almost
mythic, status among the leadership of
INSITE and the architecture school at the
Universidad Autonoma de Baja California
(UABC). According to the chair of the
UABC architecture school (which now has
1300 students not only from Mexicali, but

23

Torreblanca, INSITE’s Director of Curato- least once, and
rial Projects, was Felipe Orensanz. He is a some kind of
Mexico City architect assembling a book foam insulation
on the El Sitio project that Don Corner and has been sprayed
I both contributed to, along with Peter on the roofs.
Bosselmann and Dorit Fromm. I’m not There have been
sure whether Felipe was affiliated with only a few
INSITE before this event was planned, but changes to floor
he attended and was instrumental in con- plans. The loggia
necting INSITE with the El Sitio project. now has walls on
Other invited participants included a both sides and has
well-respected architect from Mexico City, been divided into
Alejandro D’Acosta; an architect from Ti- two rooms—a larger room used as a com- After so many years, I was surprised and
juana, Rodolfo Argote; A.J. Kim, a plan- munity center for elderly people, and a pleased that the buildings were so familiar
ner; Georgina Cebey, an art historian; smaller room used as an office. to me. (It did not hurt that I lecture about
Teddy Cruz, from Tijuana and San Ysidro, Across the courtyard, the rooms are still the project and show slides of it almost
who I was very glad to meet again after he there, with one tiny change—the room at every year.) There were some tiny things
visited our architecture department at the the end of the common room, closest to the that I did not remember—the exact posi-
University of Oregon some 15 years ago. bedrooms, is now accessed only from the tion of some of the doors and windows, for
Event attendees participated in a series outside rather than also from the common example; or the fact that we had put a guest
of well-organized presentations and public room itself. But everything else in project room between Chris’s room and the office;
conversations, each of which attracted be- plan is exactly as it was when built. It or the exact layout of the common rooms.
tween one and two hundred people. The seems as if the underside of the vaults has But these were small lapses of memory,
program began at 5 pm, following a day of been changed in some cases, with the wood particularly after 41 years (I think I last vis-
tours of Mexicali in the morning, lunch to- lath removed and replaced by different ited in 1982). When I first walked in on
gether (once tacos at the house of art col- wood of the same dimensions but in a Thursday afternoon, the overall feeling
lectors; once at a Japanese restaurant that square rather than diagonal/diamond pat- was as if I had been there yesterday.
had an art gallery upstairs, with some won- tern. One of the best things about the event
derful contemporary art relating to the re- Currently, the buildings are being used was that the place was alive—with people,
gion around Mexicali; and once at a restau- by a local health center, sponsored by the energy, creativity. The INSITE people set
rant with Mexican food in a historic movie Faculty of Nursing at UABC. Julio Mar- up a terrific venue for the nightly events of
theatre), and a siesta in the afternoon. We tinez’s room is now a patient examination the three-day program. At the center of the
traveled around Mexicali by bus; our main space with scales, examining table, storage gathering space was a long wooden table,
guide was the architecture chair Alejandro cabinets, and so forth. Chris’s room seems surrounded by wooden bleacher seating,
Peimbert, who knows the history of the to be a place for children, with colorful and yellow fabric overhead, held up with
city. painting on the wall. I’m not sure about the thin ropes and pulleys on a metal frame, to
The other person at the event with a di- others. help shade the proceedings. This gathering
rect connection with Chris was Michael When Pastizal lived there with his fam- space was to the east of the experimental
Mehaffy, who participated in a public con- ily, his parents’ bedroom was Julio Mar- buildings; it seems as if the land retained
versation on the second evening, and tinez’s room; Pastizal lived in Chris’s by the university after our team left the
showed two videos about Chris, including room; and his two sis-
a series of interviews and Ruth Landry’s ters shared Don’s room.
1991 film, “Places for the Soul.” Michael The family used the big-
discussed larger philosophical issues re- ger common rooms for
lated to Chris’s work. Mehaffy’s “high- kitchen and living
lights” film of the Mexicali event is avail- rooms, with pets living
able at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiBttF- in the courtyard. Pasti-
4TWE. zal has very happy
memories of living in
The Experimental Buildings the house as does his
The project’s experimental buildings still mother, who I also met.
stand, intact and in relatively good shape She told me that she
after almost a half century. The original thought the house was
windows and doors have been replaced, at like paradise. Everyone
liked the roof vaults.

24

project included about 30 or houses, the original walls and
40 feet of space to the east of roof vaults were visible from the
the buildings. outside, along with various addi-
The main courtyard of the tions that had been made.
project, with the loggia on Members of three of the five
one side and the stair- original families are still there: in
case/common rooms on the Emma Cosio’s house, two of her
other, was also covered with sons; in Julio Rodriguez’s house,
a fabric shade. The whole his daughter and widow; and in
place, ordinarily a neighbor- Makaria Reyes’s house, mem-
hood health center that usu- bers of her family (I don’t know
ally must be rather quiet, took which ones). The families of
on a kinetic energy that ex- Lilia Duran and José Tapia are
tended the life of the court- no longer there, but their houses
yard to the boundary between are. With the help of Pastizal, I
the site and the houses to the visited the Cosio house (twice)
east. and the Rodriguez house.
Indeed, this energy went beyond that would sell for two hundred dollars. He told Pastizal and I saw the Cosio house on
boundary, as I experienced it. I was intro- me that in a neighboring colonia there are two successive days. On the first day, we
duced to a man who lived in a house just to houses with roof vaults like the ones we met one of Emma’s sons, who said he was
the east of the site, right across the metal did at El Sitio. I asked him if he could pho- four years old when the house was built.
fence. He is an artist, who works with tograph them with his cell phone and send During that visit, we did not go into the
found, used materials, and he invited me to them to me. He said he would, but I have house, but talked in the space just outside
come to see his work at his house. We were not yet seen the pictures. the front door at the edge of what was orig-
ready to leave, so I declined his invitation. My present, positive feelings about the inally the common space shared by the five
He disappeared, but then turned up again experimental buildings have to do with the families. Large portions of what had been
about ten minutes later, and asked me to fact that they indeed have energy, having the private courtyard and the shared com-
come over to the fence. He had placed one found different uses over several decades. mon space (but now seemingly belonging
of his objects there so that I could see it. It The place was, first of all, our experiment; to the Cosio house) were covered, and
consisted of a wooden chair without its then, for me, a home for a couple of much of that whole area was in shade.
back, with the body of a guitar in place of months; then a field station for the archi- Emma’s son gave us some information
the seat, the neck of the guitar instead of tecture school; then, about ten years after about the neighbors, and I asked him if the
the chair back, and a light bulb-and- we left, the home of Pastizal and his fam- neighbors got along. He said yes, very
lampshade at the top of the guitar neck. He ily; then a health center, which it remains much so, and that they played cards every
said that this three-dimensional collage presently; then and now an experimental week. On the second day, we met a differ-
site for Pastizal; now also a venue for ent son, who invited us into the house.
INSITE to experiment with various physi- There seemed to have been some interior
cal changes and improvements. changes, but nothing major; the original
Through these different uses, there have plan and structure were still there.
been small changes to the buildings, but The most heartening experience was in
these modifications happened as the build- the Rodriguez house, which we visited last,
ings remained more or less the same, on the Saturday, in the early evening just
“true” to their initial design and intention. before Teddy Cruz’s talk. Julio’s daughter
answered Pastizal’s knocking and cheer-
The Houses fully invited us into the house. She intro-
The five houses were also all there, though duced us to her mother, Julio’s widow,
there had been many more changes to them who seemed quite frail and somewhat be-
than to the experimental buildings. Ma- wildered. She said little during the visit
karia Reyes’s original house was not rec- that lasted about a half hour.
ognizable from the outside, but I was told The daughter was very open; one of the
by one of her neighbors that her original first things that she was proud to show us
vaulted house was still present behind and was a wall covered with family photo-
below all the additions that had been made graphs, including one of Julio as a young
to the house. This was the only house that man. I told them how much Julio was
had a second story added. In the other four liked, about his cheerfulness during the

25

project, and how he seemed to be that exists only as a particu-
the glue that held the group of fam- lar, economically-driven en-
ilies together. tity in the world. Mexicali is
The house was in beautiful a place that is the center of
shape. The family had turned the many people’s lives, of liv-
courtyard facing the street into a ing things that are in various
living room with a concrete-slab states of life and stress, of in-
roof, leaving the house with no terpretations made by artists
outdoor space except for two nar- and writers, of a place with
row strips on the inside of the site enormous potential as it con-
used for service, storage, and dry- tinues to grow—potential
ing clothes. There was a modern that is beginning to be dis-
bathroom and tiled floors all over covered and acted on.
(I did not see any evidence of the
original red-oxide-dyed concrete Final Thoughts
floors anywhere on either side of the street) in their houses is the most important posi- And finally, after all this time, what are the
and a relatively new kitchen. Everything tive result of any project in housing pro- results of the project and what did we learn
was spic and span, and clearly the house duction. from it? I note three lasting results: first,
was well taken care of and a source of fam- the experimental buildings and houses
ily pride. It seemed as if Julio’s positive The Place of Mexicali themselves and how they changed the peo-
and cheerful spirit was still present. During the time we worked on the El Sitio ple in and around them; second, The Pro-
project, our everyday connections with the duction of Houses and the work it has in-
After our design team completed the pro- world in Mexicali outside the Colonia Ori- spired; third, how this project changed me,
ject, we felt that the satisfaction people had zaba had to do with those places linked to who worked on it for over a year.
with their houses was the most successful the project itself and our daily lives: mate-
outcome, so talking to the families in the rials-supply houses, the bank (I was in 1. The houses and the families
houses today, along with Pastizal and his charge of finances and material flows in As mentioned above, the families were
mother, was gratifying. The common land the project), the architecture school at generally pleased with their houses and re-
had problems; we built five houses rather UABC, places to eat and buy food, the gate main so today, at least those who still live
than the 30 originally planned; and the at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. there. During the year that the houses were
builder’s yard never developed into a con- We were certainly aware of the landscape being built, I never talked to the families
tinuing institution to help build the city. around us; of the difference in water supply about where they were then living, or what
But our book, The Production of Houses, between the two sides of the border and the house meant to them. I did not conduct
has inspired many people. And it is argua- how that difference affected agri-
bly the case that the satisfaction of families culture; the fact that Mexicali was
founded just before the beginning
of the twentieth century; the immi-
gration of Chinese people to the
city; continuous attention to the
state of the weather. Somewhere, I
have a picture of a grain elevator in
the Imperial Valley with a painted
marker on it about 30 feet up the
side, saying “SEA LEVEL.”
What my recent visit did, thanks
to INSITE, was to expand my
awareness of Mexicali and the
meaning of that place. This aware-
ness was amplified by the imping-
ing presence of the border wall and
the destructive impact it has on a re-
gional ecology that includes people
and other living things.
For me, the city of Mexicali is no
longer only a large, hot, dry city

26

interviews when the families
had moved into the houses. But
various reports and the fact that
the families stayed in the
houses and changed them sug-
gest that they did, individually,
have an increased sense of
power and agency because of
the houses and the fact that they
had built them.
The houses are complex as
products as well as processes
and need to be looked at with
generosity toward the idea of
the need for serious investiga-
tion in housing production—
about which this project turned
out to be important to many
people. The idea of developing
a building system that was in-
expensive, but at the same time
workable by people without construction an entrance directly from the street. That matter of housing production, remain sub-
experience, led to the particular building factor, along with the fact of ten children ject to debate and reinterpretation.
system and its details. living in that one house, meant that the out-
By many standards, the system used in door space originally intended for the five 3. The project’s effect on my career
Mexicali is rough, with details that do not families communally was taken over by In architecture school at Berkeley, I was al-
stand up as they should over time. But the the one large family alone. I don’t see the ready interested in the idea of the building
ceiling vaults give a sense of increased project as a fair test of the idea of common culture; my final paper in Spiro Kostof’s
space to small rooms, the families were land and shared outdoor space. seminar on the history of the architectural
able to be precise with the layouts and In other words, the question of whether profession was a proposal for further study
gained a sense of agency because of their the project was a “success” or “failure” is of the history of the relationships between
construction experience. We were insistent too simplistic a question and too much fo- architects, contractors, and builders. The
about not using drawings during design cused on interpreting the project as a set of Mexicali project began to make these rela-
and in not moving corner stakes to make five architectural objects rather than as a tionships real for me, and I went on to do
room for oncoming construction. (This last dynamic architectural experiment working research on the subject, ultimately writing
rule led to an overly complicated founda- to facilitate at-homeness. The Culture of Building, which was pub-
tion detail.) lished 23 years after I left Mexicali. My ex-
Significantly, Chris’s later projects used 2. The Production of Houses perience in the Mexicali project was also
a combination of direct, full-scale, on-the- Most people who have read The Produc- an important step toward my interests in
site decision making with drawings and tion of Houses have never visited the pro- vernacular architecture and informality in
models—with arguably better results. For ject. They should not be faulted for that nor the Global South, leading eventually to a
the Mexicali project, we spent many weeks faulted for wanting to learn from a project project in India and many travels in which
modifying the blockmaking machine so that has both flaws and strengths. Many I visited vernacular and traditional envi-
that we could retain at least some clay-soil people have been positively influenced by ronments as well as informal urban settle-
content in the blocks. This led to rooms Production, precisely because it is not lim- ments. I teach about these subjects at Uni-
that are a little cooler in the extreme heat ited to the project itself but lays out a series versity of Oregon.
of Mexicali than rooms made of standard of principles and ideas intended to counter There are two more project-specific
concrete block. But this effort also led to what was largely, in the twentieth century, ideas that I came away with and developed
delays in the start of house construction, a mind-numbing, top-down, money-driven in the years after the Mexicali project. One
contributing to the project stopping at five approach to housing production. is the need for respecting the existing
houses instead of achieving the 30 origi- The main ideas described in the book are building culture in a place—in this case,
nally planned. more important than the details of the pro- the existing building culture of Mexicali,
The idea of common land did not work, ject. Those main ideas by themselves, even if at the same time one is skeptical of
though I believe the reason was that Emma which to us represented the heart of the certain aspects of it and the buildings it
Cosio’s house was “land-locked,” without tends to produce. I believe that if we had

27

made a point of understanding and respect- References p. 26: Stair leading to roof of experimental
ing the reality of that culture and intro- Alexander, Christopher, Corner, Donald, buildings.
duced innovations gradually, the project Davis, Howard, and Martinez, Julio, p. 26: Structure built for May 2023 event;
might have continued and would still be 1985. The Production of Houses. NY: note fabric shades.
functioning today as a real, alternative pro- Oxford Univ. Press. p. 27: Attendees watching video of Chris
cess of housing production within this area Alexander, Christopher, Fromm, Dorrit, Alexander.
of Mexicali. and Bosselman, Peter, 1984. Mexicali
The second project-specific idea is most Revisited, Places, 1(4): 76–91.
significant for me personally and involves Davis, Howard, 1999. The Culture of
respecting the reality of people’s lives. The Building. NY: Oxford Univ. Press.
family members who qualified for loans to
build their house were all government Captions for photographs
workers, some highly skilled and others p. 23: Main courtyard of experimental
less so. But they knew how they wanted to buildings; arched entry on far wall and
live and what they wanted for their chil- shade fabric above.
dren. And according to Emma Cosio’s son, p. 23: View of houses; Lilia Duran’s, right,
they now get along as neighbors. and Makaria Reyes’, left.
The idea that housing production at a p. 24: Jose Tapia’s house in foreground;
large scale needs to respect these human Makaria Reyes house, now two-story,
realities is one of many big challenges of right.
our time. That need is always in my mind p. 24: Entrance to main courtyard of exper-
when I teach and write about housing— imental buildings; room built as taco
and it got there in the first place because of stand at left.
my participation in the Mexicali project. p. 25: Outdoor area, Emma Cosio’s house.
p. 25: Covered passage from main court-
My sincere thanks to Andrea Torreblanca,
yard to residential courtyard of experi-
Michael Krichman, Carmen Cuenca,
mental buildings.
Monserrat Sanchez, Felipe Orensanz,
p. 26: Main room in experimental build-
Alejandro Peimbert and, not least, Pastizal
ings.
Zamudio.

28

Resettling America: Energy, Ecology, and Community
Preface to the Reprint Edition (2023)
Gary J. Coates
Coates is Professor of Architecture Emeritus in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University. He is recognized as a
leading voice in the movement to create socially, technologically and ecologically sustainable buildings, towns, cities and biore-
gions. His Resettling America: Energy, Ecology, and Community was first published in 1981 by Brick House Publishing and has
just been reprinted in Routledge’s “Revival” series. Here, we reprint the new preface Coates wrote for this reprint edition.
[email protected]
; © 2024 Gary J. Coates.

was a belief that could only be held America as part of a transformation of the
by a “madman or an economist”). entire planetary human ecology. Through
I detailed the “ecology of scarci- their ideas and works, leading authors and
ties” being generated by the routine activists described how we could:
operation of the existing political
economy, including the availability ▪ de-structure our sprawling cities and
of fresh water; the accelerating de- suburbs into an interconnected pattern of
pletion of finite sources of energy self-reliant urban districts and livable
and minerals; the progressive, irre- neighborhoods;
versible degradation of the earth’s ▪ reconfigure our centralized fossil fuel-
major biological systems, (includ- based energy grid into a network of de-
ing a stable and livable climate); centralized grids powered by varied
and escalating patterns of violence sources of renewable energy;
within and among nations. I con- ▪ create rural new towns situated within
cluded that we needed to begin the agro-ecological landscapes;
transition to a society in which hu- ▪ establish new ways to own land in com-
man needs are met without dimin- mon and manage living ecosystems
ishing the prospects for future gen- within circular, bioregional economies;
erations. ▪ establish new contemplative communi-
Since this cascade of crises even- ties that would allow for the integration
tually comes home to roost in the of spiritual beliefs and practices and the
places where we live and work, I ar- mindful care of the earth.
gued that the great task before us is
to create ecologically sustainable and Taken as a whole, both in theory and
life-enhancing buildings, towns, cities, and practice, the book demonstrated that it is
biologically and socially diverse biore- necessary as well as possible to integrate
gions, powered by the same renewable en- our architecture, agriculture, and the pat-
ergy flows that sustain all other life on the tern of human settlements gracefully and
planet. I therefore called for the resettling sustainably within the energy flows, mate-

n this transdisciplinary collection of America based on this vision and the rial cycles, and biological rhythms of the
first published in 1981, I argued that principles of equity, social justice, cooper- natural world, while creating life-enhanc-
our fossil fuel-based urban-industrial ative community, and the recognition of ing, place-based human communities.
civilization is fundamentally and the inherent sacredness of all creation. At the time Resettling America was pub-
structurally flawed. Our entire way of life Following economist Kenneth Bould- lished, I assumed that we were on the brink
is based on reductive, materialistic values; ing’s dictum that “what exists is possible,” of making such radical transformations
an inaccurate understanding of the nature nothing was proposed in the book that was and that this book could help to catalyze a
of reality; and institutionalized forms of not illustrated by practical examples. Case broader movement in that direction. I be-
exploitation of the earth and many of its studies were chosen that: (1) embodied the lieved that the envisioned changes offered
peoples. This civilizational form is based new paradigm outlined in my own essays a way to avoid or mitigate the social, eco-
on the necessity for infinite economic and introductions; (2) would remain in- nomic, and ecological catastrophes toward
growth on a finite planet (a premise that structive and inspiring over the many dec- which we were headed; and that these
economist Kenneth Boulding once said ades that would be necessary to resettle

29

changes offered an historically unique op- earth’s biodiversity continues to plummet. cooperatively to create a society that serves
portunity to create a more humanly-scaled, It is difficult not to see that the entire plan- the purposes of life and honors the sacred
sustainable society. Since the business-as- etary web of life is already unraveling in mystery out of which all things arise and
usual path seemed so unthinkable, the complex, unforeseen ways. We are living disappear.
choice seemed clear. during an unprecedented era of ecological
With hindsight, it is obvious that I com- collapse, societal instability, and spiritual
pletely underestimated our compulsive malaise, which threatens the continuation
commitment to the addictive, self-destruc- of human civilization as well as all the liv-
tive rituals of the consumer society and the ing world as we have known it.
enormous power of existing institutions to It is within this increasingly urgent and
resist change. As it turned out, we did re- existentially threatening context that Re-
settle America but, rather than in the ways settling America is being rediscovered by a
called for in this book, we created the most new generation of academics, architects,
sprawling, inherently unsustainable form landscape architects, planners, environ-
of human settlements ever conceived or mental activists, and concerned citizens,
constructed. many of whom have urged me to find a
It has become clear that we have, along way to get the book back in print.
with other fossil-fuel dependent nations, Rather than being a program for averting
destabilized the planetary climate system the crises we face, the book is now under-
to such an extent that large parts of Amer- stood as a prophetic text, decades ahead of
ica and the world will become uninhabita- its time and more relevant than ever before.
ble in this century. In the decades and cen- By providing a strategic vision, as well as
turies ahead, rising sea levels, mega- offering practical means for creating a sus-
droughts and deserts, and extreme weather tainable society worth sustaining, it is my
events will produce millions of climate ref- hope that Resettling America will continue
ugees around the world. to inspire and instruct those brave enough
Already we are living through the sixth to honestly face the ecology of crises that
great era of species extinction, and the now surround us, and bold enough to work

30

Belonging, Home, and Place
Critique and the Task of Retrieval
Jeff Malpas
Malpas is an Australian philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Tasmania. His books include Place
and Experience (2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2018); Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (London: Blooms-
bury, 2021); and In the Brightness of Place: Topological Thinking with and After Heidegger (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2023). This
essay is a longer version of a talk presented at the 2023 Annual Symposium for the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary
Ph.D. Program in Urban Design and Planning and Ph.D. Program in the Built Environment, on May 19th, 2023. The symposium
theme was “Space, Place, and Belonging”; the event was dedicated to the memory of philosopher Robert Mugerauer, who died in
2022.
[email protected]
. © 2024 Jeff Malpas.

f Bob Mugerauer’s many im-
portant contributions, the one
that has engaged me most
closely over recent years is his
idea of place and being-in-place, any criti-
cism of one invariably tends to involve all
three, even if only implicitly.
Thus, when geographer John Wylie, for
T here are three main lines of critique
evident in the literature concerning
attachment or relatedness at issue
here. The first and foremost in many ac-
weighty 2008 volume, Heidegger and example, insists that “a landscape cannot counts is the idea that place is tied to exclu-
Homecoming, one of several works in be a homeland,” he is not only refusing a sion: If identity is tied to place, then the af-
which Bob explored aspects of certain way of understanding landscape, firmation and preservation of identity re-
Heidegger’s thinking [1]. This volume but his critique also encompasses the un- quires exclusion of others from that place.
takes up ideas of belonging and home that derstanding of place [2]. The second is the idea that place is tied to
that are central to the later Heidegger and Here, my aim is to work through some of a problematic form of determinism: If
that are, in my terms, essentially topologi- the arguments and claims that arise and to identity is tied to place, then this makes
cal in character. As such, they are tied to set out reasons why it seems to me that, far identity dependent on that which is
notions of place and being-in-place that are from abandoning these ideas, the task of bounded, and so already determined, on
significant well beyond Heidegger alone. their rethinking and retrieval remains an that which cannot be changed, and to the
Heidegger and Homecoming is thus a ma- absolute necessity—a necessity even for determination by which one can only sub-
jor contribution both to Heidegger scholar- the possibility of any critical engagement mit. For some writers, Emmanuel Levinas
ship and to the larger project of what I call with them. Indeed, my claim is that these being one, this is especially problematic
philosophical topology. notions have never really been abandoned since it makes the human subservient to
The ideas of belonging, home, and place at all and that the commonplace language place. The third is that the connection of
or being-in-place that are at the center of of abandonment has led to their uncritical identity to place involves an essential nos-
Bob’s volume run through the entirety of acceptance in other forms. talgia: If identity is tied to place, then this
his work just as they run through mine. My discussion has three parts: first, a ties identity to a certain mode of temporal
Those ideas have, in one form or another, brief survey of the main lines of argument orientation, specifically, to an orientation
been the focus for much critical attention typically directed at the notions at issue that privileges the past and refuses to en-
over the last 50 years or more from many here; second, an exploration of the reasons gage with the future.
other thinkers. why ideas of belonging, home, and place What is centrally at issue throughout the
That attention has frequently been so remain necessary; third, a discussion of the general form of critique evident here,
critical, however, that it now seems to be task of the retrieval of the ideas at issue. across many different writers, is the char-
assumed, in some quarters, that these ideas Much of the critique of belonging and acter of place as tied to boundary and
are irretrievably problematic such that they home comes to devolve, whether implicitly boundedness whether the boundedness of
cannot have any real role in contemporary or explicitly, onto the critique of place— oneself by place, the boundedness of the
discourse. The sort of criticism at issue belonging and home typically being under- other, or the boundedness of the past as
here is sometimes more directed at one of stood as notions that presuppose a certain against the supposed openness of the fu-
these notions than another—at belonging relation to place as the basis for identity. ture. Such boundedness is understood as
or home, for instance, rather than place as Put simply, when who we are is taken to be essentially exclusionary and restrictive and
such—but since all these ideas are so determined by where we are, to where we giving rise to politically regressive and
closely interconnected, and since both be- belong, then such place attachment or xenophobic forms of thought and action.
longing and home are indeed tied to the place relatedness is taken to give rise to
various problematic consequences.

31

The critical engagement with place is thus be seen to be tied to boundedness, exclu- lematically exclusionary and even oppres-
identical with the critical engagement sivity, determinacy, or the past, or, indeed, sive and violent forms of thought and ac-
with boundary. to belonging or home in any strong sense. tion. One only needs to look to the rhetoric
Thus, a writer such as Doreen Massey can of many contemporary right-wing politi-
“Boundary” or “bound” as it appears here argue for a “progressive” sense of place cians, but also to the more generalized
is more or less the same as horizon or limit. although it turns out that the notion of rhetoric around Brexit in the UK, to see
This meaning is etymologically as well as place at issue for her is a sense of place that how ideas of home can enter into reaction-
semantically distinct from the other senses is little more than the idea of a contingently ary politics. The startling way the language
of “bound” associated with ideas of being delimited domain within a spatially ex- of “homeland” became part of the political
tied to or being tied by, springing forth, or tended field [5]. vocabulary of governments across much of
heading toward. The lines of argument at issue here re- the English-speaking world after 9/11 also
The idea of boundary is not an additional garding place as exclusionary, as nostalgic, reinforces the sense in which “home” can
notion over and above the idea of place but and as determinate and determining are ev- readily become associated with xenopho-
is intimately tied to it, at least so long as we ident in the work of many different writers bic insecurities and repressive forms of
do indeed treat place as a sui generis notion and thinkers: perhaps most notably in the governmental control.
with an irreducible content of its own. The work of Levinas, but also Theodore Yet the mere fact that the language of
ideas of topos and chora that are Greek Adorno (both of whom formulate their ar- home, belonging, and place can indeed
precursors to the contemporary idea of guments in direct opposition to function in this way, although it may tell us
place combine two notions—dimensional- Heidegger); in the work of Doreen Massey a great deal about the prevailing political
ity and boundedness, so that the former as well as David Harvey, two of the most and cultural climate that currently obtains
arises on the basis of the latter. The bound- prominent figures within geography; in ar- and that has a direct impact on the ways in
ary is that which gives room to that which chitectural theory, in the work of such which language is used, actually tells us
appears within it. thinkers as Hilde Heynen, David Leach, very little about the terms or notions that
This idea of place is not only evident in and Mark Wigley; and also being elabo- are themselves in play here. And that there
Plato and Aristotle but is also evident in rated across other disciplinary domains in may be a disjunction between the way
more recent thinkers such as Georg Sim- ways that draw on a variety of theoretical terms and ideas are deployed and what is
mel [3] and, most famously, Martin frames from critical theory to psychoanal- really at issue in those terms and ideas, is
Heidegger (whose thinking on this matter ysis, feminism to post-modernism, Marx- itself part of the very ground for the possi-
is partly indebted to Simmel) and whose ism to liberalism. Such critiques are now bility of critique.
own thinking of place, especially as it em- so commonplace that in some fields they Moreover, a too narrow focus on partic-
phasizes the idea of boundedness, is so of- have become almost taken-for-granted. ular uses of ideas of home, belonging, and
ten the target for many recent critics of place, especially as they occur in a contem-
place [4].
If we treat place as more or less inter-
changeable with space, then place need not
be understood as tied to boundedness
simply because space is not so tied (or, at
T here is another line of argument that
also appears in the discussion of
these notions, especially the idea of
place or being-in-place, namely, that such
ideas are at odds with the character of the
porary context, can readily obscure the
ubiquitous nature of such ideas. Notions of
home and belonging are no more the exclu-
sive preserve of conservatives than notions
of freedom or justice are the exclusive pre-
least, not intrinsically). And it is common- globalized, dynamic, interconnected con- serve of progressives. Such ideas have
place for place to be understood in this way temporary world. In other words, the as- been drawn upon, and continue to be
in contemporary discourse. Place is thus sumption is that these notions are not only drawn upon, by groups and individuals
most often understood in terms of space, fixated on the past in problematic fashion, from across the political spectrum.
which almost always means taking place to but that they belong to the past. This is Even in pre-Second World War Ger-
be a modification of physical extension. something to which I shall return, since many, often taken to be exemplary of a po-
When place is understood, as it often is, as what is at issue here is directly tied up with litical milieu in which home, belonging,
identical with some spatial location or area, the convergence between certain key ele- and place have a central and problematic
the demarcation of which is essentially ments in the critique of place and the in- role, one can find those notions being
contingent, then the boundedness of place creasingly spatialized modes of ordering drawn upon by both conservative and pro-
also becomes contingent, just as place also characteristic of the contemporary world gressive figures over time and even at one
becomes contingent. and, as I noted earlier, directly connected and the same time (this is particularly no-
The possibility then arises of an emp- with contemporary globalized, technologi- table, for instance, in the case of Wil-
tied-out notion of place that is no longer cal capital. helmine Germany as well as the Germany
seen as problematic, simply because it is There is no doubt that the language of of the inter-War years). The contemporary
no longer a notion that carries any special home, belonging, and place has frequently situation is little different. Moreover,
content of its own and certainly need not been deployed in ways tied up with prob- across this breadth of uses, one can find ex-

32

amples of these notions being used in rela- No matter how much we claim to be able emplacement, though it is one that is fun-
tion to both forms of exclusion and inclu- to “deconstruct” the self, the fact remains damental to all the others).
sion. that it is necessarily implicated, at the most This is not a point that applies only to the
The ubiquity of the language of belong- basic level, in the structure of action and self but to the mind, consciousness, mental
ing, place, and home is itself something perception. Without a capacity to distin- content, even to agency and sentience in
that is worthy of attention, since it reflects guish self from environmental context, in- general. Moreover, this idea of the em-
how entangled these terms are with every- cluding from other agents, there can be no placed character of the self and of exist-
day language. That they are so is a direct possibility of directed action or even of any ence that is articulated in contemporary
reflection of their centrality. In this respect, integrated perceptual engagement with cognitive science as well (and, I might add,
belonging, place and home are no different things nor of deliberation and judgment. In in various forms of “externalism” as devel-
from other key notions, such as justice, phenomenological terms, the self is part of oped within analytic epistemology, philos-
truth, and the good, that figure prominently the necessary structure of intentionality. ophy of language, and philosophy of mind)
in social and political discourse as well as Similarly, in terms of empirical cognitive can be argued to already have been adum-
elsewhere, in ways that spread across the science, the self is a necessary part of the brated in earlier work in ethology, psychol-
entire political spectrum. It is because no- structure that makes cognition possible. ogy and, especially, phenomenology.
tions of home, belonging, and place are so The ideas of home and belonging are Thus, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, from
central that they are also so frequently ap- both directly connected to the idea of the 1927, already sets out a form of external-
pealed to in a range of political contexts. self. They are terms that relate to the way ism or “topologism” (if we use this as a
And that they are central in this way is a in which the self is articulated in the world. term to capture the focus on place and be-
direct consequence of the necessarily This is especially the case if one under- ing-in-place) in its idea of Dasein as “be-
placed character of life and existence. stands the self, not in terms of some under- ing-in-the-world”—which, even in 1927,
lying “substance,” but rather as a nexus of Heidegger was connecting to the idea that

T his brings me directly to the second
part of this discussion—the central-
ity or even necessity of place and so
too of notions of belonging and home. Ra-
ther than being notions that we can simply
action and reflection both internally and
externally articulated—a complex, dy-
namic unity of attitudes and dispositions as
well as comportments and behaviors. The
has come into English as “dwelling”
(Wohnen, sich aufhalten). This idea also
has connotations of “home” and of “be-
longing” (especially through notions of fa-
self is, by its very nature, even when un- miliarity and habituation), although it is
pick up or put down—as if they were derstood purely formally, a mode of differ- worth noting that, also in 1927,
simply tools lying around—the notions at entiated existence. As such, the self is con- Heidegger’s account of being-in-place
issue here arise out of our existing being- stituted through both its connectedness to does not exclude its potential “uncanni-
in-the-world and are reflective of the char- the world and to others and by its differen- ness” and its potential “unhomeliness.”
acter of that being. In other words, they tiation from the world and from others. It is this idea of self and existence as nec-
constitute already extant phenomena rather Home and belonging both refer to this essarily emplaced that is developed in
than merely being elements in or artefacts structure of identity, connection, and dif- more detail in Heidegger’s later work and
of certain ways of talking or thinking. ferentiation. There are as many different in the work of a series of phenomenologi-
Part of what comes into view here is a forms of home and belonging as there are cally oriented thinkers over the last cen-
point about the very nature of philosophi- different modes of articulation of the self. tury. And the centrality of place here—and
cal reflection and the way retrieval might These modes vary according to environ- of associated notions such as home and be-
be part of such reflection, and this is a point mental context, historical background, and longing, as well as embodiment—can be
to which I shall return. But for the moment, social and cultural situatedness. The latter seen to reflect the inescapable character of
what I want to do is briefly to explore the give rise to the contingencies of the self, existence as always an existence in the
way that ideas of place, belonging, and but that there is a self and that it has a cer- world but also worked out in terms of spe-
home connect with other key concepts, of tain structure that is realized in and through cific places and spaces, through specific
which perhaps the most salient is that of those contingencies is not contingent but forms of home and belonging, and at the
the self. necessary. same time is differentiated from the world.
If we treat this term in a purely formal

sense and without yet offering any substan- s soon as one grasps the idea of the Existence is this emplacing and belonging,
tive account of what it might be, then the self as extended into the world— which is also a differentiating.
self is that which is referred to, in the first to use the language of contempo-
instance, by the first-person pronoun, “I.” rary 4-E cognition as embodied, embed- As it is fundamentally active (a theme that
As such, it is also, therefore, a certain locus ded, enacted, and extended—then one runs through all of these thinkers and ap-
of agency and perception, and ultimately, must recognize the self as necessarily em- proaches including both the phenomeno-
of deliberation and judgment, that also fig- placed also (4-E cognition is actually un- logical and the cognitive scientific and an-
ures, to varying degrees, in such action, derpinned, I would argue, by this fifth E of alytic), so the character of the being-in-
perception, deliberation, and judgment. place at issue here is always dynamic and

33

negotiatory and cannot therefore be under- the positive and productive sense of place in a university lecture hall in a place like
stood in terms of any simple deterministic and being-in-place that emerges so Brussels or London.
structure. strongly in much of the thinking over the Belonging, home, and place name con-
Moreover, this being-in-place is almost last century. temporary problems not because these no-
always understood as indeed tied to bound- It is this positive and productive sense tions retain an illegitimate currency, but ra-
edness, or more generally, to finitude. In- that also underpins what is at issue in the ther because of the problematic relation to
deed, one of the great insights of many of fundamental role of notions of home and place that has emerged as a key feature of
the most important currents of philosophi- belonging. That role is one that can be the contemporary world. The homeless-
cal thinking in the twentieth century, clearly discerned in the analysis of cogni- ness and displacement that is now such a
though it has its roots in the eighteenth and tion, of action and perception, of mental common feature of societies around the
nineteenth (including, I would argue, in content, of memory (an especially im- world, and which is evident in refugee
Kant) is the idea, especially evident in her- portant topic regarding place that deserves camps and border zones, is present on the
meneutic thinking, that it is precisely a more extensive discussion of its own), of streets of almost every major city, and is a
boundedness, which is also to say, being- knowledge, and of the self in general. continuation of colonialism and racism, a
in-place, that makes possible cognition, result of war and political disruption as
knowledge, existence, rather than being
merely restrictive of them. Such finitude is
tied to facticity—to the “always already”
character of existence—and it is this that
I n these comments I have not provided
a fully worked-out argument for the
necessity of place, although I have
done so elsewhere [6]. And neither have I
even tried to show how the sort of funda-
well as being one of the products of glob-
alized capital. These phenomena are a
problem precisely because they concern a
lack of home and a disruption in place. And
underlies the stereotypical criticism of this is not merely about a lack of physical
place-oriented thinking as nostalgic or mental account of being-in-place, belong- shelter but more centrally relates to the ab-
backward-looking. ing, and home that is at issue here would sence of the conditions that enable the
But the recognition of facticity is just the play out in terms of the more concrete anal- flourishing of life and existence and that
recognition of the historicality of existence ysis that might be undertaken from the per- enable the sense of identity and of belong-
and so of the necessary historicality even spective of specific disciplinary inquiries. ing that contributes to a sense of commu-
of the future, as well as of the character of Instead, my aim has been limited to nity—even of a pluralistic community.
existence as always something given to showing why it might be that ideas of be- Rather than the ideas of belonging,
one rather than being that which one longing, home, and place cannot be aban- home, and place being antagonistic to plu-
simply creates or over which one can exer- doned, even though those notions may of- rality and difference, they provide their
cise mastery. ten be misused. I have also pointed to how necessary preconditions. Indeed, the idea
This recognition of facticity also in- those ideas can be seen to be grounded in of a pluralistic community cannot be the
volves an awareness of the inevitable char- both phenomenology and analytic thought, idea of a community that effaces home or
acter of existence as permeated by the ex- as well as in the empirical investigations of belonging, but rather one that gives home
perience of fragility and loss, and it is this cognitive science and we might also add, to a plurality of different homes and forms
that is the ground for the very real nostal- in the topological-oriented thinking evi- of belonging. Plurality presupposes differ-
gia, the melancholia, that belongs with the dent in many other disciplines including, ence, but difference is precisely what is ar-
experience of being-in-place, of being in for instance psychology, sociology, and ticulated through the different modes of
the world, of belonging to the world, even history. being-in-the-world that are worked out
of being “at home.” Similarly, the knowledge of indigenous only in and through different places, differ-
To be emplaced is to be given over to a societies and their experiences in the face ent homes, different identifies and belong-
world to which one belongs but which does of colonialism also draws attention to the ings.
not belong to one, a world to which one is intimacy of the relation between identity, The problem is not the existence of dif-
subject but which is not subject to one, a life, and existence, and the places in and ference or of the boundedness that is a nec-
world that always exceeds any experience through which life, existence, and identity essary part of difference and the working
or articulation of it—ideas that are power- are formed and shaped—something articu- out of difference, but rather the refusal of
fully evident in indigenous traditions lated in Australian indigenous thinking boundedness and the denial of the mutual-
around the world, and also present in mod- through the idea of the “Dreaming” as it is ity that itself belongs to differentiation. Far
ern thought and culture in many different often referred to, somewhat misleadingly, from being merely exclusionary, place,
forms, but which seem almost entirely ab- in English. Thus, Wylie’s claim that “a and so the boundary with it, opens up the
sent from the formations of contemporary landscape cannot be a homeland” is rather possibility of inclusivity, of plurality, of
political and economic life. more difficult to make in-country to an in- difference, which is always an inclusivity,
Already, near the beginning of Western digenous audience in Australia (say in the a plurality, a difference, that appears in and
thinking, Aristotle reiterates what he takes Ananda country of Uluru or the with respect to concrete places, in and with
to be a common claim to the effect that to Bininj/Mungguy country of Kakadu), than respect to our own place and so our own
be is to be emplaced and this idea captures relatedness to the world.

34

If the boundary, like place, is productive presuppositions, its own “ground.” Such there seems little reticence in asserting the
in the sense I suggested earlier, then that critique often operates through the repeti- problematic ethical and political content
productiveness applies both to what is tion of standard topes and assumptions, that is supposedly intrinsic to these no-
within and what is without the boundary. like those regarding the character of place tions—a claim that is itself implicitly onto-
The boundary is that which establishes the as invariably given over to exclusion, to logical in character, a claim about the very
possibility both of differentiation but also determination, and to the problematically character of those notions as such, about
of communication across difference nostalgic, and with little or no regard for their fundamental character, rather than
(which is why the border, the bounding the sort of considerations sketched earlier. merely concerning particular instances of
path or limes, hence the liminal, is such an One reason for this is tied up with the their deployment. If critical engagement is
important place). It is thus that every discursive insularity and internalization of to be more than mere polemic—if it is to
boundary connects at the same time as it much contemporary critical discourse, be part of a genuine attempt at thinking—
disconnects—a point that is also made by with the result that discussion frequently then it must involve reflection both on the
Simmel. remains within the circles of engagement phenomena at issue and the framework of
This idea is reflected in the character of established by familiar texts and theoreti- the thinking from within which those phe-
places as always entangled with other cal positions. Critique thus becomes a nomena are approached.
places, both within the place and without. purely textual practice rather than a genu- This is a familiar hermeneutic point: To
To be emplaced is not to be merely stuck inely reflective engagement with the issues paraphrase Gadamer, all critique is a form
within a single enclosed space—to use an at stake (which is not to say that the en- of self-critique, and all critique must take
example Walter Benjamin employs, as if gagement with texts is unimportant, but the form of a dialogue in which something
one were enclosed within a hard shell—but only that one cannot remain entirely “in- is at stake and in which what is at stake
rather to be embedded within a complex of side” the text alone). But associated with must be given space to appear in its own
places. this is a tendency for that insularity and in- terms. There is an ethical imperative to cri-
Every place opens to other places—just ternalization also to be reflected in the tique that emerges here that follows from
as the boundary of the horizon beckons one prior assumption of a ideological or polem- the way critique is embedded in its place
toward other places that lie beyond—and ical positions, and so the critical engage- (and, in fact, I would argue that ethics itself
every place opens up to other places within ment with an issue or idea becomes simply is only understood properly when it is un-
it—even the most familiar place is thus ca- expressive of a certain politics rather than derstood as tied to place).
pable of revealing new discoveries within showing how, for instance, a certain polit- To attend to what is at stake is also to at-
it (something made very evident in ical response might emerge as a conse- tend to the character of that phenomenon
Bachelard). Far from being determinate quence of what is at stake and as appropri- and so to enter into what is ultimately a
and determining, the place and so also the ate to it. form of ontological inquiry ultimately
boundary is what opens up to the indeter- Directly connected with this is a further founded in the being of things. And that, of
minate at the very same time as it allows a tendency to refuse consideration of what course, is a large part of what I was talking
certain limited determinacy that occurs in might be termed the ontological in favor of about earlier in relation to place, identity,
the very placing of things, here, in this a focus on the affective and discursive (in- and self—my focus was on the character of
place. cluding the textual). Suspicion of ontology place and the self, on what they are, rather
has a long history in the social sciences, es- than merely what is said about them.

I t is because of the necessity of place
that the retrieval of place—that is, its
rethinking and recollection in the face
of its forgetting and refusal, is such an im-
portant task. Even the attempt to assert the
pecially, where the ontological, usually
identified with the metaphysical, is con-
trasted with the empirical, the variable, and
the contingent.
The task of retrieval, understood as hav-
ing this ontological character, is not some
esoteric practice predicated on a special
kind of access to an otherwise hidden “es-
Sometimes the eschewing of ontology is sence,” but is rather a matter of re-thinking
need for the abandonment of place takes defended by a sort of Rawlsian argument what we already think we know in a way
place from within its own place and on the concerning the plurality of conceptions of that attends to what is actually at issue and
basis of an existing orientation to the world the good but, in fact, most contemporary to the phenomena that draw our attention
and to thinking. All thinking and critique critique, especially inasmuch as it aligns it- in the first place. And such retrieval is es-
begin somewhere. The question is whether self with a broadly “progressivist” agenda, pecially important when the phenomena in
they attend to where they begin and is not at all agnostic in this way but holds question are indeed as central to life and
whether they attend to the boundaries that to very clear conceptions of the good, even existence as are belonging, place, and
make such critique possible (leaving aside if not always made explicit, as these might home.
its viability). be played out in the domain of the political
One of the problems with much of the
recent, contemporary critique of place is its
refusal to attend to its own place, which
means to attend to its own boundaries and
(one might argue that this is true, to some
extent, even of the Rawlsian position).
Moreover, when it comes to the critique
of notions like belonging, place, and home,
T he topological ideas at the crux of
my discussion here are central to
critical inquiry because they are
themselves part of the very structure of

35

thought as they belong to the structure of managerialist, and the technological, at the spatialized mode of engagement that char-
being-in-the-world. This is an ontological same time as it also reinforces and draws acterizes contemporary thought and prac-
claim that is eminently defensible and that together all of these. tice is in direct conflict with the topological
cannot be dismissed simply by any blanket If we refer to this spatialized mode of structure on which it depends—a topolog-
dismissal of the ontological in general. world-formation, in which everything is ical structure that it both obscures and for-
But these ideas also have a key role in drawn within the same all-encompassing gets.
terms of the attempt to engage critically and ultimately reductive system, as “tech- It is the retrieval of that structure and the
with our contemporary situation—our con- nology,” then we may perhaps recognize it task of re-membering and re-collecting
temporary place. This was suggested ear- as essentially the same phenomenon that is what it entails that is the real challenge for
lier by my brief comment on the character often at work in the progressivism that we contemporary critique. It is a task that, as
of homelessness, in its various forms, as a have inherited from the Enlightenment, Bob Mugerauer describes it, does indeed
worldwide problem that goes beyond, even which seeks to free human being from any involve a form of homecoming. Funda-
while it includes, the problem of physical sense of being limited by its situation, mentally, it is a matter of coming back to a
shelter. But it isn’t just the loss of home whether historical, geographical, or onto- place that we never really left.
that makes these notions so significant. logical.
The history of modernity as a worldwide This escape from place is precisely the Notes
phenomenon is a history that is itself escape into the unboundedness of space. 1. R. Mugerauer, Heidegger and Home-
closely tied up with topological and spatial But this escape is an escape into the purely coming, Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
structures and developments. One might quantitative, the numerical, the managea- Press, 2008. Also see his Heidegger’s
even say that modernity has its origins in ble, the monetizable. The philosophical Language and Thought, NY: Humani-
the separating out of place from space. embodiment of this idea of escape is essen- ties Press, 1988; Interpretations on Be-
This process has taken various forms. It ap- tially that given in Cartesianism and its half of Place, Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
pears in the history of ideas, a history well- many offshoots, since what characterizes 1994; and Responding to Loss:
elaborated in Ed Casey’s work, in terms of Cartesian thinking is precisely the privileg- Heideggerian Reflections on Literature,
the development of a notion of physical ing of space over place. But among many Architecture, and Film, NY: Fordham
space that is not dependent on any notion of the contemporary critics of place, one Univ. Press, 2015.
of boundedness but is instead tied to the finds a similar privileging of space that 2. See J. Wylie, “A Landscape Cannot be a
idea of homogenous, isotropic extensional- also replicates the structures at the heart of Homeland,” Landscape Research 41
ity or dimensionality and of place as en- contemporary managerialist, technologi- (2016):1–9.
tirely secondary, being merely the idea of cal, globalized capitalism—structures of 3. See G. Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in
a location or area within such an extended unbounded connectivity, of what Simmel on Culture, D. Frisby and M.
domain. Heidegger refers to as an unbounded en- Featherstone, eds., London: Sage, 1997,
This spatialized way of understanding is framing or positioning. pp. 170–74.
tied to the quantitative and the numerical. This is true, ironically, even of those 4. See J. Malpas, Rethinking Dwelling:
It is evident in the character of contempo- writers, like David Harvey and, to some Heidegger, Place, Architecture, Lon-
rary science as predicated on quantitative extent, Doreen Massey, for whom the cri- don: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 171–77, for
and numerical analysis (those disciplines tique of capitalism has been so central. It is more on Simmel and Heidegger on place
that resist such quantification running the the rejection of any sui generis idea of and boundary.
risk of appearing irrelevant or “unscien- place that facilitates the critique of place 5. For example, see D. Massey, “Power-ge-
tific”); in the character of modern organi- that is evident in the work of such thinkers. ometry and a Progressive Sense of
zations as subject to purely “managerial- But that rejection is also fundamental to the Place,” in Mapping the Futures, J. Bird,
ist” modes of operation that are themselves possibility of modernity as it is manifest in B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and
centered around quantitative, numerical, both intellectual terms and in terms of the G, L. Tickner, eds., London: Routledge,
and increasingly automated systems; in the socio-economic and political. 1993, pp 59–69.
transformation of social relations through The underlying problem with the spati- 6. Most notably in J. Malpas, Place and
systems of personalized, electronic com- alized mode of world formation evident Experience: A Philosophical Topogra-
munication and exchange, based around here is that, despite its seeming effacement phy, London: Routledge, 2nd edn., 2018.
the computer and mobile phone, and in- of place, it remains ontologically founded,
cluding media platforms such as Twitter no matter its claims to the contrary, in the
and Facebook; and through the structure of same topology that I described earlier. The
globalized corporate or oligopoly capital- Aristotelian dictum that to be is to be em-
ism that is itself intimately entangled with placed remains no less true in 2024 CE
the quantitative and the numerical, with the than it was in 350 BC. Consequently, the

36

Ellen Churchill Semple’s Anthropo-Geography
A Rediscovered Voice in the Study of Place
Jenny Quillien
Quillien’s abiding interest in “place studies” led her to phenomenology, space syntax, and the work of Christopher Alexander. She
is currently on the board of the Sustasis Foundation and divides her time between Amsterdam and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Author
of numerous articles, her books include Clever Digs: How Workspaces Enable Thought (2011); and Delight’s Muse: On Christo-
pher Alexander’s Nature of Order (2010).
[email protected]
. © 2024 Jenny Quillien.

The earth has set man his tasks and at the him tasks, directed his thoughts, con- moments. At what points other readers will
same time whispered hints for their solu- fronted him with difficulties that have feel that delightful clink of the nickel drop
tion. strengthened his body and sharpened his will depend on their experiences and trav-
—Ellen Churchill Semple wits, given him his problems of navigation els. I can only convey a few of mine as il-
or irrigation, and at the same time whis- lustration.

pearl of a read has emerged pered hints for their solution. She has en- Sometimes I found myself exclaiming,
from the deadly dungeons of tered into his bone and tissue, into his mind Oh, why, Yes. Of course! as a geographic
out-of-print: Influences of Geo- and soul. truth, which I had very dimly perceived but
graphic Environment by geog- On the mountains she has given him leg never articulated, came galloping rapidly
rapher Ellen Churchill Semple (1863– muscles of iron to climb the slope, along into focus. For example, we all recognize
1932), first published in 1911 and dormant the coast she has left them weak and flabby that mountains block and plains invite
all these many decades, has been resur- but given him instead vigorous develop- movement. That’s all well and good, but
rected and reprinted. The twofold aim of ment of chest and arm to handle his paddle Semple demands that we think it through.
this essay is, first, to promote knowledge or oar. In the river valleys she attaches him As I thought through my abundant time
of the book’s existence through a rather to the fertile soil, circumscribes his ideas spent in the south of France, I realized that
personal review; second, to apply Sem- and ambitions by a dull round of calm, ex- I had known that the Italians were our cul-
ple’s ideas in a case study of a specific ge- acting duties, narrows his outlook to the tural cousins. I had known that the local
ographic region that is dear to my heart. cramped horizon of his farm. patois simply ranged by degree from pure
Up on the windswept plateaus, and the French to pure Italian as one made one’s
Part 1. A personal book review boundless stretch of the grasslands and the way around that coastline. I had known
Nothing less than a page turner was this ra- waterless tracks of the desert, where he that trade with Italy was easy and our
ther weighty slab of a book—no pictures roams with his flocks from pasture to pas- shared kinship oiled communication.
and 600 pages. A few lines taken from the ture, and oasis to oasis, where life knows Of course, I also had known that the
preface give a taste of the author’s topic, much hardship but escapes the grind of mountains, particularly the Alps, which
style, and ambition. drudgery, where the watching of grazing separate France and Italy, were quite high
herd gives him leisure for contemplation, but really not formidable. Thanks to multi-
… Man has been so noisy about the way he and the wide-ranging life of a big horizon, ple, navigable passes—natural highways
has conquered nature and nature has been his ideas take on a certain gigantic sim- as it were—one can traverse the Alps with-
so silent in her persistent influence over plicity, religion becomes monotheism, God out too much ado.
man, that the geographic factor in the becomes one, unrivaled like the sand of the I had also known that this was not the
equation of human development has been desert or the grass of the step, stretching case with Spain. The Pyrenees are certainly
overlooked .... The importance of the geo- on and on without break or change. less high than the Alps, but they form an
graphical element in the history of human Chewing over and over the cud of his unbroken, unbreachable wall from the At-
development is that it is a stable force. It simple belief as the one food of his unfed lantic to the Mediterranean. Historically,
never sleeps. The natural environment for mind, his faith becomes fanaticism, his big entry and infiltration of the Iberic penin-
all intents and purposes is immutable in spatial ideas, born of that ceaseless regu- sula has been from south, and that, as the
comparison with other factors. lar wandering, outgrow the land that bred saying goes, Africa begins at the Pyrenees
… Man is a product of the earth’s sur- them and bear them legitimate fruit in wide [1]. Because one does not go through the
face. This means not merely that he is a imperial conquests. mountain wall of the Pyrenees, what trade
child of the earth, dust of her dust, but that does take place between Spain and France
the earth has mothered him, fed him, set As I turned the pages, I found myself ex-
periencing the pleasures of a range of aha!

37

is by sea with ports that have grown up on phenomena protected Ethiopians from col- the lurching from war to war and the recip-
either side of the barricade. onization. rocal claiming of lands on the other side.
Sometimes the sweet clink of the nickel Sometimes the aha! came as a surprise. And if a mighty nation controls a river,
drop was not Oh, why, Yes. Of course! It Really? and I would read a passage twice then it wants very much to control its
was more a moment of feeling startled and to make sure I understood. Here is Semple mouth, the ports, the sea, and beyond. Only
then the sudden view of a new perspective. on oceans: as a second-best will it entertain the possi-
For example, as a child in school, I had bility of a weak nation at the mouth of the
learned of the American war of Independ- If we compare the Atlantic and Pacific river as a way to stall off a rival nation from
ence, the 13 colonies, and the vying for oceans in respect to the rivers, we find that taking over.
power between the British and the French. the narrow Atlantic has a drainage basin As I now live in Amsterdam, at the
I had not realized until Ellen Semple of over 19,000,000 mi.² as opposed to the mouth of the Rhine, I know full well that
brought it to my attention that, with more 8,660,000 mi.² of drainage area com- the Dutch are there only on the sufferance
densely populated and concentrated colo- manded by the vastly larger Pacific. The of the Germans and the French and that
nies with many navigable rivers, the Brits Pacific is, for the most part, ringed by when push comes to shove, as it did in
had a decisive advantage over the French, mountains, discharging into the ocean only World War II, they don’t stand a chance.
who were far too widely dispersed to get mad torrents or rapid broken streams. The WWII Liberation Day for the Dutch is a
their military act together. Atlantic, bordered by gently sloping plains solemn affair with no cocky victory songs.
Or, to return to Spain for a moment, it of wide extent, receives rivers that for the They had been creamed in short order and
had eluded me that the high dry central most part pursue a long and leisurely others had to come to their rescue.
plateau with Madrid in its middle had, course to the sea. Therefore, the commer- In the vein of rules of thumb, cogno-
again and again, experienced the greatest cial and cultural influences of the Atlantic scente of place literature will not fail to no-
difficulty in maintaining political control extend from the Rockies and Andes almost tice the kinship between Semple’s ap-
over the numerous and varied populated to the heart of Russia, and by the Nile proach with that of patterns as developed
areas around its coastal periphery. So, of Highway to even invade the seclusion of by Christopher Alexander and organized
course, why be surprised that the history of Africa. complexity as developed by Jane Jacobs.
Spain shows us that a heavy-handed and Through the long reach of its rivers, And note, once again, that the publication
muscled arm of authority will be a standard therefore, the Atlantic commands a land date is 1911, long before either Alexander
recourse for keeping disorder and disinte- area twice as great as that of the Pacific, or Jacobs were a twinkle in their parents’
gration at bay. and by reason of this fundamental geo- eye.
Sometimes the aha! was farther afield, graphic advantage, it will retain the histor- I would like to quote Semple at some
simply taken on good faith without much ical preeminence that it so early secured. length on these matters so that the reader
personal experience to go on. I know just a The development of the World Ocean will can fully appreciate the similarities and,
little something of Hinduism, had read sec- mean the exploitation of the Pacific trade perhaps, as I do, see that the re-discovery
tions of the Mahabharata, followed Arjuna, from the basis of the Atlantic, the domina- of Semple’s work allows us to significantly
Krishna, and the great family feuds of In- tion of the larger ocean by the historic peo- enlarge the scope of current pattern work,
dia’s national literature. I had even been a ples of the smaller, because these people particularly in integrating the built envi-
few times to the Indian sub-continent. have wider and more accessible lands as a ronment with its geographic underpin-
Semple points out that India has little in the base of their maritime operations [2]. nings. Consider this passage:
way of seaports and that the Himalayas
close it off from the north. Geographically, Laws, patterns, Investigators in this field [anthropo-geog-
India seems to hang down like some kind and organized complexity raphy], moreover, are prone to get a squint
of purse with strings. Anybody and any- Semple offers us numerous laws, or per- in their eye that makes them see one geo-
thing that falls into the purse would likely haps we should say, more simply, rules of graphic factor to the exclusion of the rest;
stay there and stew in its own juice. This thumb. The reader is always offered Sem- whereas it belongs to the very nature of
struck me as congruent with the somewhat ple’s own examples and then can turn to physical environments to combine a whole
introverted stories starring Ganesh, Sita, his or her own experience. Consider this group of influences, working all at the
Rama, or Hanuman. example: same time under the law of the resolution
Or, for another example, I took on good of forces.
faith that Africa, aka the “dark continent,” Rivers unite the peoples of their basin, and In this plexus of influences, some oper-
could have its “darkness” to some extent it follows as a corollary that rivers do not ate in one direction and some in another,
explained by the fact that its coastal areas make good boundaries [3]. now one loses its beneficent effect like a
are narrow, the rivers unnavigable, and it medicine long used or a garment out-
rises as a sharp continental plateau. One The Rhine has long been the line of de- grown; another waxes in power, rein-
simply does not enter Africa that easily. I marcation between the French and German forced by a new geographic factor which
did know from my own travels how these and has done so rather badly if we consider has been released from dormancy by the

38

expansion of the known world, or the pro- graphic elements in the problem and ig- dwarf many previous advantages of its Eu-
gress of invention and of human develop- noring the rest. The physical environment ropean neighbors [5].
ment. of a people consists of all the natural con-
… The law of the resolution of forces ap- ditions to which they have been subjected, My book review is that of a strong rec-
plies in geography as in the movement of not merely a part. Geography admits no ommendation. Of formidable scope and
planets …. The analysis of these interact- single blanket theory. The slow historical depth, Semple’s work is an eye-opening
ing forces and of their various combina- development of the Russian folk has been journey taking the reader around the globe.
tions requires careful investigation. Let us due to many geographic causes—to excess It lends a wealth of insights and wisdom
consider the interplay of the forces of land of cold and deficiency of rain, an outskirt and a sharper, more critical eye to current
and sea apparent in every country with a location on the Asiatic border of Europe events as they unfold. Throughout the book
maritime location. In some cases, a small, exposed to the attacks of nomadic hordes, is a way of thinking—an attentiveness to
infertile, niggardly country conspires with a meager and, for the most part, ice-bound the forces at play and how they will find
a beckoning sea to drive its sons out upon coast which was slowly acquired, an undi- resolution—that can strengthen any audi-
the deep, as another with a wide territory versified surface, a lack of segregated re- ence interested in place, patterns, the phe-
and a generous soil keeps its well-fed chil- gions where an infant civilization might be nomenology of place, place politics, or
dren at home and silences the call of the cradled, and a vast area of unfenced plains place design.
sea [4]. wherein the national energies spread out The more passive reader can simply sit
thin and dissipated themselves. The better back and enjoy the ideas and the examples
The reader could pick any one of possi- Baltic and Black Sea coasts, the fertility of given. A somewhat more engaged reader
ble examples for the first pattern (let’s call its Ukraine soil, and location next to wide- can do that and then, in addition, conjure
it SONS TO SEA) of an ungenerous land awake Germany along the western frontier up their own experiences and memories for
that drives sons away along with a sea that have helped to accelerate progress, but the consideration. But can we apply Semple’s
draws them: how about Ireland, Greece, or slow-moving body carried too heavy a anthropo-geography to an unexamined ter-
Norway? I’ll pick France for the second drag. rain? What if we put Semple in conversa-
pattern (STAY HOME) where the soil is … Owing to the evolution of geographic tion with other voices in the study of place?
rich and well-watered, the wine fine, and relations, the physical environment favor- To this experiment I now turn.
the cheese excellent. able to one stage of development may be
In other passages, Semple reads a bit averse to another, and vice versa. For in- Part 2. Case study of the shaped
more like a precursor to Jane Jacobs. The
reader may recall that Jacobs took urban
stance, a small, isolated, and protected world
habitat, like that of Egypt, Phoenicia,
planners to task for misjudging the nature Crete, and Greece, encourages the birth History is geography set in motion.
of their job. A place, such as a city or even and precocious growth of civilization; but —Johann Gottfried Herder
a small city park, cannot be considered a later it may cramp progress and lend the
simple design problem with just a few var- stamp of arrested development to a people The unexamined terrain chosen for inves-
iables. Nor is it a design problem amenable who were once the model for all their little tigation is that of the lost-in-time Anasazi
to methods of statistics. Rather, like the bi- world. Open and wind-swept Russia, lack- homeland and their abandoned dwellings.
ological sciences of growth, ageing, and ing these small, warm nurseries where Na- A few preliminary questions and answers
death, it is a problem of organized com- ture could cuddle her children, has bred will help orient the reader.
plexity where a dozen or a few dozen vari- upon its boundless plains a massive, untu-
ables are at play. Miss a variable and you tored, homogeneous folk, fed upon the What does Anasazi mean?
fail, and these variables can change. Here, crumbs of culture that have fallen from the The term refers to peoples and a way of life
again, is Semple: richer tables of Europe. in the American Southwest that existed
But that item of area is a variable quan- roughly from 200 AD to a rather abrupt
Skepticism as to the effect of geographic tity in the equation. It changes its charac- end around 1300 AD. Political correctness
conditions upon human development is ap- ter at a higher stage of cultural develop- now demands that we forego the term
parently justifiable, owing to the multiplic- ment. Consequently, when the Muscovite Anasazi and use the clumsy textbook-ish
ity of the underlying causes and the diffi- people, instructed by the example of west- mouthful Ancestral Puebloans instead.
culty of distinguishing between stronger ern Europe, shall have grown up intellec- Frankly, Anasazi is better. It’s more pre-
and weaker forces on the one hand, as be- tually, economically, and politically to cise in its designation of place, people, and
tween permanent and temporary effects on their big territory, its area will become a relationship, since it was taken from the
the other. We see the result but find it diffi- great national asset. Russia will come into Navaho who wandered into the southern
cult to state the equation producing the re- its own, heir to a long-withheld inher- Rockies during the fourteenth and fifteenth
sult. itance. Many of its previous geographic century after the abandonment. The term
But the important thing is to avoid seiz- disadvantages will vanish, like the diseases means something like ancestors of our en-
ing upon one or two conspicuous geo- of childhood, while its massive size will emies.

39

The Navaho kept a wary and respectful
distance from the ghost-ridden ruins left by
old pueblo peoples—and there was never
any love lost between Navaho and Pueblo
of any century.

How does the Anasazi homeland fit into
Semple’s framework?
In the frame provided by Semple, we are
examining a geography of refuge: a harsh
land distant from generous lands and natu-
ral highways where goods and ideas travel
with ease and fruitfully mingle. Geogra- The main geological feature: the Colo- John Powell’s proposal for future state
phies of refuge have historically been rado Plateau. boundaries. Source: https://canyonol-
sought by remnants of peoples who might Source. Wikipedia. ogy.com/powell-grand-canyon-water-in-
enter the safety of difficult terrain from dif- the-west/.
ferent directions, each remnant bringing
page] provided by architect Vincent Scully
their own language and gene pool.
of what he called “The Shaped World.”
The Anasazi homeland fits the bill. A
tortuous high-altitude terrain of isolation What is the geography of this place?
and confinement sheltered different groups In strict geographic and geological terms,
of different origins and languages, some the Anasazi homeland is the Colorado Plat-
Aztecan, some Keresan, some Tanoan. eau proper and some surrounding areas of
Paucity of arable lands and scarcity of wa- highly broken or folded strata of mesas,
ter forced limited community life. Geogra- buttes, hogbacks, cuestas, and rift valleys.
phy heavily imposed its problems to be Throw in a few volcanoes and lava flows
solved and limited their solutions: From Early societies studied by archeologists. here and there. To the northeast, the Rocky
that arose a similarity in habitat and coping Source: https://thefurtraper.com/home/ Mountains formed as crust folded, frac-
mechanisms. anasazi/source.
tured, and warped. To the southwest, lie
ell, one of the great early American explor- the “kicked rug” landscapes of the basin
Where, exactly, is this place? ers of the Southwest, had submitted a pro- and range.
Well, therein lies an interesting discussion. posal for state boundaries based on the The Colorado Plateau itself is highly un-
Maps, like foreign words, can invite us to area’s scarcest resource: water. That would usual: multiple layers of flat-lying sedi-
perceive in new ways. The interested make for taking into account at least one mentary rock lifted to 7000 feet and then
reader will, most often, be directed to the significant variable. cut deep into canyons by rivers and further
most inane of (ir)relevant maps, that of the For Powell, each state, conceived as eroded by wind and flash floods. The lay-
Four Corners area where four state bound- matching a natural watershed, would be, ers shift from the red of dried blood, to
aries meet, a map that was indubitably by boundaries alone, encouraged to engage brick, to watermelon rose, to salmon, to
drawn up in a distant and unconcerned in good stewardship. What a different cream, to ochre, to ash, to black. Some lay-
Washington by uninformed bureaucrats. southwest we would have today if Powell ers (particularly the one the color of dried
had been taken seriously. I can just imag- blood known as the Morrison formation)
ine the poignant conversation that could are rich in the remains of life—fossils, di-
have taken place between these two geog- nosaurs, oil, and gas.
raphers, Powell and Semple. The rock is dry. The sun hot. The rare
The interested reader might also be di- color is green. It seems strictly ornamental.
rected to a map of the Colorado Plateau, Tiny patches, occasional skinny lengths of
the dominant geological feature of the creek bottom land. Mountain summits of
Anasazi homeland. Archeologists might pine. Canyon water from hidden seeps
offer another map, given their interests in where drops accumulate in a fringe of
The Four Corners.
pre-literate cultures of North America. green humidity. The textures meander
What a map includes, promotes, and ig- from razor sharp lava flows to baby but-
The boundaries correspond
Source. world atlas.com to nothing nores will forever determine our thoughts tock smooth slick rock to endlessly
sensible. And these bureaucrats had a bet- and decisions. For this reason, and for oth- combed strands of pastel hair through
ter option on the table. John Wesley Pow- ers to be further explained, my own prefer- wavy slot canyons. The shapes in this
ence goes to a hand drawn sketch [next Shaped World are compact and endlessly

40

varied: square mesa tops, two-thousand-
foot ravines, hoodoos, hillocks of shapely
breasts, symmetrical cones of ash, towers,
and craters.

What would anthropo-geography tell us
about culture in such a land of asylum, as
expressed in political systems, built envi-
ronments, or artistic endeavors?
Ellen Semple notes:

Political dismemberment …. Lack of cohe-
sion due to the presence of physical barri-
ers impeding intercourse is the inherent
weakness of mountain peoples …. areas of
isolation … are regions of much labor and
little leisure, of poverty today and anxiety
for the morrow, of toil cramped hands and
toiled old brains ….
The Shaped World as seen by Vincent Scully; includes the Colorado Plateau and areas to the
Never more than a small cord, because east along the Rio Grande and South. Source: Pueblo: mountain, village, dance 1989.
the simple, monotonous savage economy
permits no concentration of population, no members increase or its savage supplies ularity. For our case study, if we supple-
division of labor except that between sexes, decrease even a little [6]. ment Semple’s generalities with particular-
and hence no evolution of classes. The ities provided by relevant archeologists,
Although these pointers stand as broadly frequently working on all fours in dusty de-
common economic level of all is reflected
applicable, Semple flies high and main- tails to bring to light a bone or broken pot,
in the simple social organization which
tains a helicopter view. Anthropo-geogra- we obtain a finer-grained image.
necessarily has little cohesion because the
phy only takes us so far. Our case study, The Shaped World shows an overall pat-
group must be prepared to break up and
and perhaps all other case studies, call for tern of what Semple called “small cords”
scatter into smaller divisions when its
more, and call for a different level of gran- that break up and scatter, mini-advances,
mini-retreats, mini-abandonments, mini-
returns. A deep dive into the archeology of
Cedar Mesa by David Roberts [7] shows
nothing before an arrival about 200 AD; in
400 AD, they walked out; around 650, they
come back; they leave again a hundred
years later; return in 1100; and in 1300 are
part of the mass exodus.
Small waffle gardens of corn, beans, and
squash supplement hunting and gathering.
Dwellings, for the most part, are round pit
houses, kivas, and some small, above-
ground rectangular rooms, most frequently
for storage. If we think that how we build
our dwellings is any indication of how we
see ourselves and our relationship to the
world, then we are in a cultural mind set of
unity with nature, and the shape of our
homes echoes the shapes of the larger sur-
rounding geography [drawing, next page].

Can case studies feedback and enrich
general theories?
Perhaps the better contribution this case
study can make to the discussion of an-
One face of many in the Shaped World. Bears Ears, Utah. Photo by author.

41

of the built environment is the reappear- redemption. Here is Scully on the cliff
ance of cliff dwellings. Looking way back, dwellings:
there was some very early and primitive
use of adaptable overhangs in the first cen- … Men cannot stand up to the sky and the
turies, then the idea seems completely for- earth in the Southwest, at least not without
gotten for a thousand years, and then re- a technology that tends to destroy nature,
Mesa Verde, pit house, section. A typical which did not become a problem in the
dwelling echoes the contours of the sur- surfaces in the twelfth century.
rounding land and blends in with it. Source: Why? The first thought is safety, for area until modern times …. In Chaco … the
Pueblo: mountain, village, dance 1989. why else would you do it? I have myself house was enclosed in the constructed
gingerly made my way up slick rock and a shell of wall, upstanding and abstract in
thropo-geography is less in how it devel- form—thus very much a man-made shape
hand and toe “ladder” to reach a small
ops and illustrates the general guidelines and one that was compulsively elaborate,
well-hidden overhang with a built-in pro-
provided, but in the lessons offered when even precious, in its structure.
tective wall and a nearby equally well-hid-
mankind ignores the guidelines. In the cliffs of Mesa Verde, the walls are
den granary that still contained corn, a bit
We’re talking here of what we can sur- entirely gone, and the great house as a
worse for the wear and the rodents, but still
mise of goings-on from the third to the thir- whole has no man-made shell whatsoever.
there. With bone-marrow certitude, I de-
teenth century in the Anasazi homeland. A The earth provides it now. The towers of
clare that no woman would make that
lot of it is conjecture. A lot of it involves the house probe up and the kivas probe
climb with a jug of water or a toddler un-
disagreements among specialists, but it down. This is the true magic of the houses,
less she were absolutely and totally scared
seems safe to say that from the nineth to a complex highly evolved, and abstracted
out of her wits. If fear has a smell (and I
the twelfth century, the Chaco canyon area urbanism all slipped back into the earth as
think it does), it still lingered in the air.
saw the rise of a have-more and have-less in some mad modern scientific dream.
But the defense thesis, certainly for the
society—as indicated by dwelling size, The shapes and sounds of rituals had to
larger cliff dwellings, is problematic [9].
burial artifacts, and indications of nutrition have been profoundly intensified in the set-
First of all, they are not easy to defend and
in bone remains. ting. There is surely a true delirium of
vulnerable to attach by ambush. Indeed,
A fairly elaborate road system and trade man-made geometry in the cylinders, cu-
these dwellings are traps and with their
items of turquoise, macaw, and shell indi- bes, and towers, but the ultimate order is
timber roofs were fire traps: definitely not
cate an extensive sphere of influence. the caverns, and to its pre-existing shape
where you would want to be if, in these old
Buildings, now of finer masonry, were the human geometry must eventually con-
days as in historic times, setting fire to an
clearly oriented to cardinal directions as form. The masonry at Mesa Verde that was
enemy village was standard procedure.
well as to key features within the land- solid and dignified, becomes more rough
Additionally, the cliff dwelling is worse
scapes. Astronomical markers indicate a and slapdash as time goes on and resem-
than useless if the task is to ward off raids
thoughtful cosmology. Water control sys- bles the rubble and mud of modern pueblos
on the mesa top, the fields, or on the gran-
tems were in place. Population increased [11].
aries (assuming that raids on food supplies
beyond what the land could carry.
seem more plausible than organized war-
Then, there was hell to pay. Telltale The Anasazi peoples, having failed at
fare).
traces of the thirteenth century indicate a redemption (or, at the very least, at find-
A radically different look at the cliff
sad, vicious saga of collapse: resource ex- ing dinner) moved out of their homeland
dwellings is proposed by architect Vincent
haustion, malnutrition, stress [8], fractur- and moved on. No doubt broken-
Scully, who became enthralled with the re-
ing and scattering of groups, aggravation hearted. Perhaps wiser.
gion, the pueblos, and their culture. Es-
by long drought, mutual raiding, and may-
chewing the obvious and practical question
hem.
of defense in a time of turmoil and strife, Part 3. Personal postscript
People left the area en masse. They seem Semple was intrigued with the relationship
Scully speculates that psychic malaise
frequently to have just walked away, mov- between landscape and mindscape. Lands
could be the reason for moving to the mid-
ing mostly south and southeast to new of refuge, however, did not command
dle of the earth. He writes:
spots or to join existing groups. Some much of her attention: her only comment
places, such as Chaco itself or Mesa Verde Perhaps it was mankind’s first holy con- about this mindscape was that of anxiety.
show few traces of violence but much mal- scious attempt to reach back out, or down, As provided in her above description of
nutrition. Other sites, along McElmo creek to mother Earth, his first major philosoph- “mountain peoples,” she suggests that
in southern Colorado, for example, tell of ical leap, or regression, not to separate lands of asylum are “regions of much labor
mass murder and, some will argue, canni- himself from nature but to attempt a firmer and little leisure, of poverty today and anx-
balism. Not a good time. Definitely not a grip on more of it [10]. iety for the morrow…” Precarious living
good time. naturally leads to worry. Will the rains
Of these last difficult decades, a notable, For Scully, man had broken, as it were, come? Will the hunt yield meat? Will the
arresting, and dare I say, haunting feature the rules of anthropo-geography, royally corn last the winter?
shot himself in the foot, and had attempted

42

and secondly, outside and beyond it, capa-
ble of any number of unexpected effects
upon others, able to endow themselves with
a thousand meanings and inhabiting the
time of the watcher, or perhaps eternity
alone.
… The dance is like an order of form not
rigid but taking shape from its own inner
dynamics and therefore full of accident
and variety within the ritual frame that
calls it forth. Infinitely particular it can be,
and even casual, but it is inexhaustibly fer-
tile, both in disciplined force and resource-
ful device, because it is passion that moves
it and the cooperative rhythm of a whole
people that gives it form [13].

… The dances themselves I believe to be
the most profound works of art yet pro-
duced on the American continent. They call
up a pity and terror which only Greek trag-
Cliff Dwelling. Canyon de Chelly. 11th Cen- Cliff Dwelling. Canyon de Chelly. 13th Cen- edy rivals, no less than a comic joy, at once
tury. Photo by author. tury. Photo by author.
animal and ironic, that suggests the pre-
Personally, I sense much anxiety in the by nature and partly by themselves. All hu- cursors of Aristophanes [14].
modern pueblo and would easily assume man construction involves the relationship
anxiety in the former Anasazi world: an ab- between the natural and the man-made …. That is quite a statement for Scully to
solute need for rituals to be performed and In historical terms, the character of that make. The most profound works of art yet
performed precisely, lest a false move pro- relationship is a major indication of the produced on the American continent. I
voke bad luck. For example, when a choice character of a culture as a whole. It tells us have attended a few of the dances when the
had to be made during COVID, elders at how the human beings who made it thought public was allowed. Not always, but once
the Zuni pueblo opted to maintain ritual, of themselves in relation to the rest of cre- in a while there would be a dancer with the
including cramped togetherness in the ation. Are they, in their view, unique in the talent of a Vaslav Nijinsky, undergoing
kiva, rather than postpone their need to en- scheme of things, or have no such concep- metamorphosis and becoming the deer or
act their part and beseech the world to do tion? Do the buildings contrast with the the butterfly. I was lucky enough to be in-
its part. forms of the earth or echo them? [12]. vited to Zuni Shalako. Shalako goes on and
To develop this line of thought, consider on all night and all the next day, with anx-
the observations of Scully, who is eloquent … The environmental function of Hopi ar- iety, testing every fiber of those who take
in his take on the modern pueblo building chitecture is not to provide complex inte- part; exhausted or not, one mistake, one
and the pueblo art of communal ritual rior spaces or a variety of individually ex- missed step, brings all into question. As
dance: pressive buildings but instead to use build- art, these pueblo dances plomb a depth of
ings to frame a plaza in which ritual humanity that Santa Fe’s traditional Friday
The pueblos are American and purists, dances can be performed and from which night art gallery openings never dreamt of.
hopeful, reasonable, and hard. Something they can be watched. In Hopi buildings, the In that, I would have to agree with Scully.
true and clear, massively unsentimental, human scale is precise so that the buildings
runs through all their works, and this is, at become an exact frame for ritual. The en- Up to date
bottom, the relationship between man and vironment frames the act …. The case study proper ends with the aban-
nature that they embody and reveal. In this … these dances … directly form human doning of homeland at the end of the thir-
they occupy a clear position in relation to behavior and distill, in the architecture of teenth century by the Ancestral Puebloans
the fundamental problem of human life: their natural and man-made spaces, a when the survivors limped out of the hills
how to get along—which means in the end sculptural and pictorial essence of human in their respective language groups, headed
how to live and die—with the natural world action and of the structure of human south and southeast, and are now, so many
and its laws. thought. They, like all works of art, flesh generations hence, in Hopi, Zuni, Acoma,
It is the fundamental architectural ques- out at least two realities and live in two Taos, and so on. It seems only fair to com-
tion as well because the environment in- kinds of time—first in that of their people, plete the story and bring things forward to
habited by human beings is created partly modern times.

43

Shortly after the abandonment of the authority, no matter what the race or coun- and the uniformed park ranger. These pro-
homeland, the Navaho came, by dribbles try or epoch” [17]. fessionals claim that they have an oxymo-
and drabs, into the Shaped World. With This land was too remote and too insig- ron of a job: They must protect the sites
their dispersed habitat and pastoralism, nificant for Mexico City or the Catholic and educate the public. If you want to pro-
they took to pockets of more open land and Church to bother with these settlers. Left to tect the sites, so their argument goes, the
took to a lifestyle of raiding the pueblos for their own devices, the Hispanic communi- best thing to do is exclude the public. The
stashes of corn and beans. Raiding is the ties made up their own laws for home rule, latest coined word among those in-the-
natural thing to do would be the comment put their own (rather dark) spin on Cathol- know is touron: a combination of tourist
of Semple: the desert makes them do it. We icism, and many a Hispanic man fathered and moron.
know about the Navaho’s attachment to the his children with a Pueblo wife. The
land through historical records and mod- crypto-Jews among the settlers professed Aesthetics and wholeness
ern-day commentary. Consider Medicine Christianity but continued to quietly do Although my mind boggles at Semple’s ac-
Man John Begay, speaking to author some of their own things, such as make un- complishments, I am perplexed by what
Douglas Preston: leavened bread at certain times of the year. she left out. There is, in all her 600 pages,
But after a while, deprived of their re- nary a line about aesthetics. Should aes-
“You have the Bible, we have the land. The sources and authorities, they couldn’t re- thetics be a natural part of anthropo-geog-
land is our book. The four sacred moun- member why. The remote and discon- raphy or should it be, as Semple provides,
tains … are what maintain bὀzbὀ or bal- nected Shaped World shaped them as well. strictly a reflection on geographic af-
ance in the world. Everything we have as a Whites came, not because anyone fordances?
people came from those mountains. They thought the location a choice morsel but, I chose this place as my case study be-
give us our physical and mental health. propelled by Manifest Destiny, it lay be- cause I love it so much. I revel in its senso-
The give us long life and happiness. Every tween any place important and what they rium of shapes, textures, silences, smells,
day, when I pray, I think of those moun- did want, which was California. There its mesmerizing beauty—-a surround of
tains just pouring blessings and health into were miners and Mormons and railroad abstract art with insane colors, minimalist
the Navajo people. You find your origin in men and then oil and gas: an economic lines, and subtle complexities. But are my
words, and we see our origin in those showcase of Joseph Schumpeter’s creative feelings relevant? “When we look at a
mountains. They exist so we exist. If some- destruction, one economic technology roll- landscape”, says Robert McFarland, “we
day they die, we die too [15]. ing over the previous one. do not see what is there, but largely what
Unlike the Navaho who stringently we think is there. We attribute qualities to
Who, among Whites, took the Navaho avoided Anasazi ruins, and the Hispanics a landscape which it does not intrinsically
relationship to the Shaped World most se- who seemed to find them of little interest, possess—savage-ness, for example, or
riously? The military. Take as an illustra- the Whites did mess with the ruins. Some, bleakness, and reevaluate accordingly”
tion the comments of a certain Commander like the colorful Weatherill brothers, were [18]. In a similar vein, Simon Schama de-
Carlton of Civil War days who was as- enthusiastic, curious amateur archeologists clared, “landscape is a work of the mind.
signed (by his boss Kit Carson) the duty of working with the ideas and tools of their Its scenery is built up as much from strata
ending the pesky Navajo marauders who time. Excavating sites with the Weatherills of memory as from layers of rock” [19].
galloped off with military horses and sup- was the Swedish scientist Gustaf Norden-
plies. He wrote that it was the land that pro- skiöld, who had come to New Mexico’s
vided all to the Navajo: “They will never be high country to cure himself of tuberculo- Dry wash, truck tracks
crushed until they are ferreted out of the
haunts, and hills, and hiding places of their
sis but caught the archeology bug instead.
He shipped back to Scandinavia two rail-
in the riverbed
country and transferred to a distant reser- road cars full to the brim with found treas- Coiled sand pinyon
vation under the eye of the Army” [16]. ure and provoked the first American legis-
On the heels of the Navajo, Hispanic set- lation curbing theft and removal.
Sea bottom
tlers worked their way north from Mexico.
They took to the small patches of river bot-
The Mormons of Blanding, Utah, get du- Riverbank
bious recognition for having runs-in with
tom for subsistence farming. But consider the new laws and holding on to the idea Sand dunes
how it is the Shaped World that shapes
them and not the other way round. Semple
that a shovel for recreational grave digging
was a normal part of a family picnic. There
The floor of a sea once
reminds us more than once that geography still are the run-of-the-mill scoundrels again.
works less by sudden force than by long,
slow erosion. “It is the persistent effect of
looking for a pot or a mummified body that
might sell.
—Gary Snyder, The
remoteness which counts,” she writes. “It On the whole, however, nowadays is the Back Country
is the long reach which weakens the arm of heyday of the entrance ticket, the museum
displays, the state employed archeologist,

44

What I see in the Shaped World (whether And, finally, there is the delicate and years to come. Not least with the force in
there or not) is aloofness. Unlike Hol- subtle question of wholeness. Although I the sun.
land—where I spend much of my time and would strongly contend, as I did in the first North American Indian architecture, on
where the Dutch quite literally made their section, that Semple allows us to ground the other hand, whether because builders
surrounds themselves and in their own im- more firmly our thinking about habitat and are less “developed,” less powerful, con-
age—this land is not me and does not care inhabitant, and that she both precedes and siderably wiser, or merely more practical
about me. Unrequited love. I love it and it strengthens place authors such as Christo- than their conquerors, has for many centu-
couldn’t give a tinker’s damn about my pher Alexander on patterns and Jane Ja- ries been concerned with nothing less than
love. I sense quite deeply its distance and cobs on organized complexity, I don’t the cosmic theme: celebrating a vast hu-
disinterest and its corollary (whether there sense in Semple much of a sensitivity man and natural concordance, oneness,
or not) of appropriate and inappropriate be- about wholeness. She does offer a plethora and peace—the same for relentless Apache
havior. of reflections on boundaries but not on the raiders as for the farmers of the pueblos.
I feel appropriateness in this landscape whole, which is bound. Perhaps, especially in the case of the
to be about time. This is a land of eons and My choice of case study does not readily Pueblos, this is so in part because they
eternity carved into its cliffs and caverns. elucidate the question either. Vincent have seen it all before: the failure of re-
Its shapes are the traces of its time. There Scully, again, offers some insight. The map sources, the desolation of the earth; the
comes with that a natural hierarchy to be that he proposes isn’t of a place clearly death of the proud towns—and then their
respected. The long-lived pine tree suffers framed. On the ground it is the same: the patient, humble, indomitable resurrections
the idiocy of the short-lived squawking jay. Shaped World has no official or informal …. [20].
The mountain suffers the pine tree. Man- boundary markers. It is a whole, but a sub-
kind rates only slightly above the jay. It’s tle one revealing itself slowly and only to I’ve walked and contemplated much of
best for him to construct his nests with a those with patience and attentiveness. One the Shaped World. I’ve walked many of
nod to eternity and go with the flow. learns to feel the edges. the places left by the Old Ones. I have sat
The Ancestral Puebloans built with Driving north out of Albuquerque one quietly in spots untrampled, dusty, undis-
adobe mud bricks that melted back. Their must climb La Bajada hill and that always turbed, and also in sites prepared for public
stone walls tumbled. Their wattle and feels to me like a steep entranceway. Going consumption. I have sometimes com-
wood had their own limited time horizon. on the east-west highway 140, if you dare mented to friends and colleagues who love
All that is well and good, as is Hispanic vil- take your attention off the speeding trucks, this land as I do: You know, the unexca-
lage mud brick and Navaho hogan. Even you might sense that you are skirting some vated unmarked ruins are one kind of
the modern trailer has some wisdom about large breathing body just to the north. place, but when you visit the parkified ar-
its relevance. What jars is plastic grass and Many segments of the Shaped World have cheological sites with the swept paths, the
metal siding with pretenses of longevity been kept intact because they are reserva- explanatory panels, the shelved artifacts,
and supremacy or the almost comic 15- tion land, national forest, or parks. Other each object catalogued and numbered, the
floor towers of hotel chains in Page, Ari- segments have been injured through indus- place seems dead. It went sterile. The
zona or Moab, Utah. trial drilling and oil fracking. There is the ghosts have gone. You know what I mean?
Moab, by the way, is now a verb. To curious history of Los Alamos and the My friends nod vigorously, Yes, Yes,
moab or not to moab, that is the question. Bomb made in the Shaped World, but only they say, We know exactly what you mean.
There is a bumper sticker made by the not- because Oppenheimer came camping here Well, it is—in some ways—comforting
so-distant town of Bluff which reads: Do as a boy and remembered its remoteness that they know what I mean but, the prob-
not moab Bluff. Moab was an abandoned and beauty. lem is that I don’t know what I mean. After
Mormon settlement and then an abandoned The pueblos, modern and ancient, are all, what is a ghost? I don’t know what a
uranium mining operation. It now offers one with the land, indeed, part and parcel ghost is. I sometimes feel in these un-
neon lights and delights to tourons: sushi of it. Here is Scully on the topic, and the touched places that there is a presence, a
bars, karaoke, latte take aways, sporting operative word is oneness: sentience. I am aware of it and it is aware
goods new and used, and ATV rides of me.
through the sandstone cathedrals. Might as European architecture has come to ex- I also find I have increasing problems
well roller skate with a boom box through plore multiple themes, many of them hav- with my own kind of people—the pedi-
Chartres. What are they thinking? Or are ing to do with the victorious exercise of hu- greed scholars. Sure, it’s easy enough to
they not thinking at all? It just isn’t appro- man energy and with dominating the dismiss the scumbag pot hunter and the
priate. If Moab provokes sardonic laugh- world. A glorious architecture, yes, and tourons out moabing, but I’m finding that
ter, to contemplate the HUD housing on counting many victories, but now clearly professional excavation and analysis
reservations is to weep: such levels of in- required by mortal necessity to exhibit a equals autopsy. There are reasons to do it;
sult, tawdry ugliness, ignorance, and deep renewed reverence for nature’s realities information to be gleaned. But it is, at the
inappropriateness. and to explore ways for decent interaction same time, a dismantling of a whole, a
with the earth and its forces in the crowded

45

Anasazi culture. Calories could be accurately as-
sessed and serve as a stand-in for energy consump-
tion. For example, how many extra calories did it take
for a woman to bring a pregnancy to successful birth.
How many calories did a man expend walking ten
miles cross country versus ten miles on a road. Ma-
sonry work on a second story requires more calorie
expenditure than on a ground level. As the hunting
and gathering brought in fewer and fewer calories,
they depended increasingly on corn which required
more and more hard labor to produce. The Anasazi
had, in a word, eaten themselves out of house and
home. The title of his book, Anasazi America, lets the
reader know that he is making a parallel between the
demise of the Anasazi and the pending demise of
America.
9. Cordell, 1976.
10. Scully, 1989, p. 24
11. Scully, 1989, pp. 26–27
12. Scully, 1989, p. 4
13. Scully, 1989, p. 212.
14. Scully, 1989, p. xiiii.
15. Preston, 1995, p. 129.
16. Preston, 1995, p. 195.
17. Semple, 1911, p. 13.
18. Gulliford, 2022, p. 14.
19. Gulliford, 2022, p. 355.
20. Scully p. 306.
21. Bortoft, 1996.

References
Bortoft, Henri, 1996. The Wholeness of Nature. Edin-
Balcony House Mesa Verde. Still untouched and complete with ghosts. burgh: Floris Press.
Photo from 1891 taken by Gustaf Nordenskiöld. Source: Mesa Verde National Park. Conner, Mary Ellen. ed., 1995. Colorado Plateau:
The Story behind the Scenery. KC publications (na-
breaking apart of connections, an estrange- Notes tional park books.com).
ment and reification of parts. 1. Africa begins at the Pyrenees. The phrase is most Cordell, Linda, 1976. Anasazi Nucleation for De-
Henri Bortoft, the British philosopher of often attributed to Dominique Frédéric Dufour de fense: Reasons to Doubt an Obvious Solution. Boul-
Pradt. His account of France’s dreadful experiences der, CO: Univ. of Boulder Press.
science who had a lot to say about whole- during the then-recent Peninsular War, Mémoires his- Gulliford, Andrew, 2022. Bears Ears: Landscape of
ness, makes a distinction between inau- toriques sur la révolution d’Espagne (1816), contains Refuge and Resistance. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah
thentic and authentic wholes [21]. Inau- a sturdy exposition of the substance behind the slo- Press.
thentic wholes are the inaccurate recon- gan: It is an error of geography to have assigned Lekson, Stephen, 2014. A History of the Ancient
Spain to Europe; it belongs to Africa: blood, man- Southwest. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Re-
struction of parts that were never separate ners, language, the way of life and making war, in search Press.
to begin with. Maybe that is what we are Spain everything is African. The two nations have Preston, Douglas, 1995. Talking to the Ground. NY:
doing: running around making inauthentic been mixed up for too long–the Carthaginians who Simon & Schuster.
wholes. came from Africa to Spain, the Vandals who left Spain Roberts, David, 1996. In Search of the Old Ones: Ex-
for Africa, the Moors who stayed in Spain for 700 ploring the Anasazi World of the Southwest. NY: Si-
To walk the Anasazi homeland is to years–for such a long cohabitation not to have con- mon & Schuster.
walk a land of refuge. It also is to walk a fused the race and customs of the two countries. If the Scully, Vincent, 1989. Pueblo: Mountain Village
land where the laws of anthropo-geogra- Spaniard were Mohammedan, he would be com- Dance, 2nd edn. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
phy were ignored and where climate pletely African; it is religion that has kept it in Eu- Semple, Ellen Churchill, 1911. Influences of Geo-
rope. graphic Environment. NY: Henry Holt; reprint, The
change, in the form of drought, brought a 2. Semple, 1911, p. 318. Perfect Library, 2018.
final blow. It is a place to acknowledge a 3. Semple, 1911, p. 334. Stuart, David, 2014. Anasazi America: Seventeen
major and tragic reset in human history. It 4. Semple, 1911, p.18. Centuries on the Road from Center Place. Albuquer-
is a place to pay respects to ghosts. There 5. Semple, 1911, pp. 20–21. que, NM: Univ. of New Mexico Press.
6. Semple, 1911, p. 550.
is another Navaho word, Nahodishgish, 7. Roberts, 1996.
which, if I understand it correctly, means 8. David Stuart (2014) worked out an ingenious sys-
something like: some places are better left tem for a more careful study of the demise of the
alone.

46

47

Questions relating to environmental and architectural phenomenology (from EAP, 2014 [vol. 25, no. 3, p. 4])
Questions relating to phenomenology Can there be a phenomenology of the two laws of What are the most pertinent environmental and ar-
and related interpretive approaches thermodynamics, especially the second law claim- chitectural features contributing to a lifeworld’s
and methods: ing that all activities, left to their own devices, being one way rather than another?
What is phenomenology and what does it offer to tend toward greater disorder and fewer possibili- What role will cyberspace and digital technologies
whom? ties? Are there ways whereby phenomenological have in 21st-century lifeworlds? How will they
What is the state of phenomenological research to- understanding of lifeworld might help to reduce play a role in shaping designed environments, par-
day? What are your hopes and concerns regarding the accelerating disordering of natural and human ticularly architecture?
phenomenology? worlds? What impact will digital advances and virtual real-
Does phenomenology continue to have relevance ities have on physical embodiment, architectural
in examining human experience in relation to Questions relating to place, place ex- design, and real-world places? Will virtual reality
world? perience, and place meaning: eventually be able to simulate “real reality” en-
Are there various conceptual and methodological Why has the theme of place become an important tirely? If so, how does such a development trans-
modes of phenomenology and, if so, how can they phenomenological topic? form the nature of lifeworld, natural attitude,
be categorized and described? Can a phenomenological understanding of place place, and architecture?
Has phenomenological research been superseded contribute to better place making? Can virtual worlds become so “real” that they are
by other conceptual approaches—e.g., post-struc- Can phenomenology contribute to a generative un- lived as “real” worlds?
turalism, social-constructionism, critical theory, derstanding of place and place making?
relationalist and non-representational perspectives, What roles do bodily regularity and habitual iner- Other potential questions:
the various conceptual “turns,” and so forth? tia play in the constitution of place and place ex- What is the lived relationship between people
Can phenomenology contribute to making a better perience? and the worlds in which they find themselves?
world? If so, what are the most crucial phenomena What are the lived relationships between place, Can lifeworlds be made to happen self-con-
and topics to be explored phenomenologically? sustainability, and a responsive environmental sciously? If so, how? Through what individual ef-
Can phenomenological research offer practical re- ethic? forts? Through what group efforts?
sults in terms of design, planning, policy, and ad- How are phenomenological accounts to respond to Can a phenomenological education in lifeworld,
vocacy? post-structural interpretations of space and place place, and environmental embodiment assist citi-
How might phenomenological insights be broad- as rhizomic and a “meshwork of paths” (Ingold)? zens and professionals in better understanding the
cast in non-typical academic ways—e.g., through Can phenomenological accounts incorporate a workings and needs of real-world places and
artistic expression, theatrical presentation, digital “progressive sense of place” argued for by critical thereby contribute to their envisioning and mak-
evocation, virtual realities, and so forth? theorists like Doreen Massey? ing?
What are the most important aims for future phe- Can phenomenological explications of space and Is it possible to speak of human-rights-in-place or
nomenological research? place account for human differences—gender, place justice? If so, would such a possibility move
Do the various post-structural and social-construc- sexuality, less-abledness, social class, cultural attention and supportive efforts toward improving
tionist criticisms of phenomenology—that it is es- background, and so forth? the places in which people and other living beings
sentialist, masculinist, authoritative, voluntarist, Can phenomenology contribute to the politics and find themselves, rather than focusing only on the
ignorant of power structures, and so forth—point ideology of place? rights and needs of individuals and groups without
toward its demise? Can a phenomenological understanding of lived consideration of their place context?
embodiment and habitual inertia be drawn upon to
facilitate robust places and to generate mutual sup- Questions relating to Covid-19:
Questions relating to the natural port and awareness among places, especially Will demands of Covid-19 have a lasting impact
world and environmental and ecologi- places that are considerably different (e.g., differ- on physical places and bodily sociality?
cal concerns: ent ethnic neighborhoods or regions)? Can social media and virtual realities effectively
Can there be a phenomenology of nature and the Can phenomenology contribute to mobility, the replace face-to-face presence and physical places?
natural world? nature of “flows,” rhizomic spaces, the places of Will human beings return to physical place and
What can phenomenology offer the intensifying mobility, non-spaces and their relationship to mo- firsthand intercorporeality once the pandemic
environmental and ecological crises we face to- bility and movement? ends?
day? Can human life really survive if people lose their
Can phenomenology contribute to more sustaina- Questions relating to architecture and direct lived relationships with other human beings
ble actions and worlds? environmental design and policy: and an entrenched physical involvement in real-
Can one speak of a sustainable lifeworld? Can there be a phenomenology of architecture and world places?
What is a phenomenology of a lived environmen- architectural experience and meaning? Does the crisis of Covid-19 demonstrate the cen-
tal ethic and who are the key contributors? Can phenomenology contribute to better architec- tral phenomenological principle that human be-
Do the “sacred” and the “holy” have a role in car- tural design? ings-are-inured-in place? If that inurement col-
ing for the natural world? For places? For life- How do qualities of the designable world—spati- lapses, is human life in risk?
worlds broadly? ality, materiality, lived aesthetics, environmental
Can phenomenology contribute to environmental embodiment etc.—contribute to lifeworlds?
education? If so, in what ways?

48

Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology
Published digitally twice a year, EAP is a forum and clearing For additional themes and topics, see the preceding page,
house for research and design that incorporate a qualitative ap- which outlines a series of relevant questions originally pub-
proach to environmental and architectural experience, actions, lished in the 25th-anniversary issue of EAP in 2014 (vol. 25, no.
and meanings. 3, p. 4). Beginning in 2016, EAP is digitally open-source only.
Current and back digital issues of EAP are available at the fol-
One key concern of EAP is design, education, policy, and ad- lowing digital addresses:
vocacy supporting and strengthening natural and built places
that sustain human and environmental wellbeing. Realizing that https://ksu.academia.edu/DavidSeamon
a clear conceptual stance is integral to informed research and http://newprairiepress.org/eap/
design, the editor emphasizes phenomenological approaches http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522 (archive copies)
but also gives attention to related styles of qualitative research.
EAP welcomes essays, letters, reviews, conference infor- Readers who wish to receive an email notice when a new issue is
mation, and so forth. Forward submissions to the editor. electronically available, should send an email to the editor with
that request. Though EAP is now digital, we still have produc-
Editor tion costs and welcome reader donations. A limited number of
Dr. David Seamon, back issues of EAP, in hard copy, 1990–2015, are available for
Architecture Department $10/volume (3 issues/volume). Contact the editor for details.
1088 Seaton Hall, 920 17th Street
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506-2901 USA Copyright Notice
tel: 785-317-2124;
[email protected]
All contents of EAP, including essays by contributors, are pro-
tected by copyright and/or related rights. Individual contributors
Mailing address retain copyright to their essays and accompanying materials. In-
300 South Delaware Avenue terested parties should contact contributors for permission to re-
Manhattan, KS 66502 USA produce or draw from their work.

Exemplary Themes Open Access Policy
▪ The nature of environmental and architectural experience; EAP provides immediate access to its content on the principle
▪ Sense of place, including place identity and place attachment; that making research freely available to the public supports a
▪ Changing conceptions of space, place, and nature; greater global exchange of knowledge.
▪ Home, dwelling, journey, and mobility;
▪ Environmental encounter and its relation to environmental Archival Policy
responsibility and action; EAP is archived for perpetual access through the participation
▪ Environmental and architectural atmospheres and ambi- of Kansas State University’s New Prairie Press in CLOCKSS
ences; (“Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) and Portico, man-
▪ Environmental design as place making; aged through the Digital Commons Publishing platform. New
▪ Sacred space, landscape, and architecture; Prairie Press also participates in LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep
▪ The role of everyday things—furnishings, tools, clothing, Stuff Safe). Once published, an issue’s contents are never
interior design, landscape features, and so forth—in sup- changed. Archival copies of EAP are also available at Kansas
porting people’s sense of environmental wellbeing; State University’s digital archive, K-Rex (see links above).
▪ The progressive impact of virtual reality on human life and
how it might transform the lived nature of “real” places, Note: All entries for which no author is given are by the EAP
buildings, and lifeworlds; Editor.
▪ The practice of a lived environmental ethic.

49