Spaces, bodies and sensitivities
Paying attention to the notion of spatiality as an operating concept to decipher the history of architecture, city, and territories, brings to the foreground the objective qualities of lived places – qualities that are dimensional, geometrical, tied to light variations, but also subjective, of a psychological nature that takes roots in the theories of Auguste Schmarsow, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer. In his interpretation of architecture as Raumgestaltung, Schmarsow insisted on the “sentiment of spatiality” while directing the critic’s attention (and the artists’ preoccupations) as much on spatial values tied to the object as on the sensory experience of the observer who experiences these values by a tactile and optic exploration of the architectural space. This notion is at the root of the attention placed on systems that articulate the observer’s experience, systems such as thresholds that mark the passage between places endowed with different qualities, trompe-l’œils, physical and visual transfers that activate “spatial effects,” or the question of framing, or of the dissolution of the frame (Wölfflin). A question then poses itself regarding the modalities of analysis that aim to grasp this complexity that is particularly marked in works that are at the crossroads of architecture and visual arts (particularly painting and sculpture). From a methodological standpoint, the word “painting” should not be replaced by “building” but we should question the architecture project as a particular figure that has its own rules and structure.
Interactions between architecture and the arts
Artistic avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Modernist groups (Bauhaus, De Stijl, etc.) and protagonists such as Le Corbusier, Max Bill, André Bloc, etc., proposed an idea that asserted itself throughout the century, that of the interaction between the arts as well as the research for and elaboration of artistic expressions where different artistic fields merge. This relationship has already been the subject of many studies but we wish to focus more precisely on interaction as a phenomenon that constitutes the fertile principle of project design. The aim of Groupe Espace (1951) or MAC/Espace (1955) was to form synthesis sites to create collective transdisciplinary work. The research project “Discovering André Bloc’s œuvre and figure (1896-1996),” on which LéaV worked for three years and which was the object of three international conferences, aimed to understand Bloc’s role in defining the architecture-sculpture category and organic architecture in the production of architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. The upcoming research project on “Pierre Székely and arts of space” aims to evaluate the French-based Hungarian artist’s contribution. He approached the architectural project through a plastic angle and his project is thus an extension of our research results from our work on Bloc.
As crossings between the arts and architecture occur more and more in the disciplines of design and graphic design, we have collaborated with the ENS Paris-Saclay to establish co-directions of doctoral dissertations and partnerships on research projects. The project “Problemata. Digital platform for the diffusion of research results in the history of design, critical writing, and design studies” (led by the ENS Saclay’s design department, in partnership with LéaV, in the context of the MSH Saclay’s call for projects) contributes to the recounting of interactions between architecture and interior spaces, including urban interstices, by opening a digital platform for the bilingual (French-English) publication of writings about design written by researchers from our network, but also by designers. The project “How to read the publication Aujourd’hui, Art et architecture” studies this publication’s sixty issues in order to analyze the role this periodical played in diffusing models and ideas that relate to the synthesis of the arts.
Interior spaces: an approach through the prism of ambiances
Interior spaces have often revealed themselves to be places of experimentation for different professional actors who work on the same project (architects, artists, decorators, interior designers, designers…). In between several partial histories (that of architecture, art, design, interior design, decoration, habitat, evolution of taste and society, etc.), interior spaces have often been approached through thematic monodisciplinary perspectives that have not taken into account the epistemological complexity of the approach to space. Investigating space though the notion of ambiance allows us to study physical spaces through the prism of immaterial elements such as light, sounds, and other elements that participate in the sensory dimension of spaces. Stimmung aims to generate tactile sensations, synesthesia, emotions regulated by variations in natural or artificial lighting, the presence of works of art (focal points), systems that create suggestive atmospheres. To summarize, the polysemous notion of spatiality leads us to consider twentieth-century architectural interiors as places of sedimentation that reveal different intentions. The research project “Milanese interiors between architecture and visual arts (1946-1973)” rightly interrogates the complexity inherent to these places through an interdisciplinary approach, with the help of multiple critical tools that will be at the heart of the international conference “Ways of approaching interior spaces. Interdisciplinarity and methodologies” scheduled in 2019. Finally, the concept of “intermediality” is an opportunity to widen our research on ambiances by introducing the relations between media, systems, and the receptive values of subjects. Intermediality was first defined in 1966 in artist-writer Dick Higgins’ “Statement of Intermedia” and can serve as a starting point for research at the crossroads of different kinds of visual arts that all relate to spatiality. We thus propose to experiment new research methods by correlating approaches that are complementary. If a methodological approach to ambiances can bring substantial elements to understand our relationship to our environment (how we perceive it and the reactions it elicits), bringing together concepts and methods will allow us to investigate new fields of analysis.
New technologies serving a sensitive approach to spaces
Our perception of our environment can elicit strong corporeal sensations such as vertigo, drifting, or the feeling of being inside or outside of an experience. Consequently, the environment contributes to the expression of emotions such as familiarity, safety, identity, as well as universal ones such as joy, fear, pleasure, disgust, pain, anger, etc. Emotion makes up our corporeal and mental reality. It emerges from the deepest part of our being and sometimes relies on archetypes that relate to an unconscious experience. As a projection of our identity on our environment, this reality takes the form of concrete images and palpable forms that are recreated within us subjectively but that are also transmissible.
The research project “Moving forms. On the skillful capture of the architectural work in the twentieth century” (Formes émouvantes. Sur la captation savante de l’œuvre d’architecture au XXe siècle) aims to go beyond the difficulties involved in addressing the observer’s implication in processes of “interpretive cooperation” with the architectural or artistic text, especially when it produces strong emotional effects (such as pathos, embarrassment, or disorientation) through the staging of ambiguities or spatial illusions that aim to mobilize the observer’s senses and mind. New methods of analysis that aim to study the relations between “moving forms” – figures of the affective, emotional, and mental sphere – and the observer/interpreter have developed and rely on research in the fields of cognitive sciences, neurosciences, semiotics of passions, perception, and image, as well as on practices in tensive semiotics. Methodological systems borrowed from these disciplines are tested on a corpus of architecture-sculpture work that either has a morphology that bears the mark of the architect-artist or is at the threshold of different disciplines (André Bloc, Pierre Székely, Chanéac, Alberto Ponis, etc.) Here, empirical and theoretical approaches are complementary.
This area of research if coordinated by Annalisa Viati Navone.
