Architectural Anthropology

Exploring Lived Space

Marie Stender, Claus Bech-Danielson, Aina Landsverk Hagen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000398397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book prompts architects and anthropologists to think and act together. In order to fully grasp the relationship between human beings and their built environments and design more livable and sustainable buildings and cities in the future, we need new cross-disciplinary approaches combining anthropology and architecture. This is neither anthropology of architecture, nor ethnography for architects, but a new approach beyond these positions: Architectural Anthropology.

The anthology gathers contributions from leading researchers from various Nordic universities, architectural schools, and architectural firms as well as prominent international scholars like Tim Ingold, Albena Yaneva, and Sarah Pink – all exploring, developing, and innovating the cross-disciplinary field between anthropology and architecture. Several contributions are co-written by architects and anthropologists, merging approaches from the two disciplines in order to fully explore the dynamics of lived space.

Through a broad range of empirical examples, methodological approaches, and theoretical reflections, the anthology provides inspiration and tools for scholars, students, and practitioners working with lived space. The first part focusses on homes, walls, and boundaries, the second on urban space and public life, and the third on processes of creativity, participation, and design.

Part I
Home, walls, and boundaries

Edited by Claus Bech-Danielsen and Marie Stender

From an architectural-anthropology point of view, a home is not to be understood as a mere physical object – a building. Le Corbusier’s well-known phrase, “The house is a machine for living in”, needs to be reinterpreted, in order to understand how this machine takes part in the social world. It now becomes important to study what home does, and it no longer makes sense to consider the home in isolation from the individual residents as well as the society it is a part of. Home is to be understood as a personal relation between house and residents, and it has to do with emotions and feelings that occurs when the residents become attached to the place they live in. The residents develop their home, while at the same time the home shapes them.

Cross disciplinary research in the field between architecture and anthropology thus study how the built environments of the home interact with the everyday life of residents. This brings a focus on how social relations, dwelling and bodily being-in-the-world is mediated by walls, façades, and other physical boundaries in architecture. In classical architecture the walls and the façades were seen as solid and static frameworks around the home. There was a clear division between the two sides of the walls, and doors and windows were designed to mark a clear zone of transition between the spatial entities of the two sides. In contemporary architecture a more dynamic spatial perception is developed, and a liquid conception of space is promoted – walls are increasingly transparent and the boundaries are in constant transformation reflecting and reinforcing social and cultural developments.

Boundaries between home interior and outside space dissolve due to liquid spatial concepts and transparent architecture, and boundaries between private and public change and might seem blurred. However, the boundaries play a pivotal role in housing architecture, as they define private versus shared space and mediate social and cultural interaction. The five chapters in this part deal with walls, windows, balconies, railings and other boundaries to explore the socio-material dynamics at play in the built environments of homes and to understand how boundaries are both keeping us apart and connecting us.

Chapter 1, written by Sandra Lori Petersen, focuses on the experience of one specific wall, the bedroom wall in the flat of a woman named Liva. Liva is exposed to faint sounds from her neighbours, keeping her awake at night. The author consults an architect, acoustician, and engineer who all find the noise to be a problem connected to the material properties of the wall. Liva, on the contrary, blames herself for finding it so difficult to handle the nuisance. The chapter presents a binary categorization in the perception of neighbour noise as being the fault of either the resident or building. Through the concept of viscous porosity, a third position is suggested, investigating the similarities and entanglements between Liva and the wall, showing how each shapes the other.

In Chapter 2, Marie Stender and Marie Blomgren Jepsen take us to the very edge of domestic boundaries in a study of Copenhagen balconies. The chapter explores how balconies intervene in the social relationship between city dwellers by adding new angles of exposure and new surfaces for contact. Differences between neighbours become increasingly manifest as material boundaries become blurred. As architectural attributes, balconies affect the social forms of urban housing and city life, enabling new ways of behaviour, and challenging the norms of co-existing on the boundaries between private homes. The authors compare balcony façades to social media, arguing that they expose those who live behind them and that such exposure entails both possibilities to stand out and social pressure to fit in.

Chapter 3, by Turid Borgestrand Øien and Mia Kruse Rasmussen, focuses on the indoor climate of the home. The two authors argue that architectural anthropology can contribute to the understanding of indoor environments by exploring the complex, multisensory entanglements between people, materials, and meanings through the micro-scales of everyday life. In this light, different properties of the outer walls of the home appear: Walls are both keeping in and keeping out. We sometimes open windows in the walls to remove unhealthy indoor air, whereas at other times we need the walls to be an airtight shelter from unhealthy indoor air (e.g. because of pollen). Sometimes, the walls are the very reason for the unhealthy indoor climate, for instance, when mould and microbes grow on the inside walls.

In Chapter 4, Laura Helene Højring and Claus Bech-Danielsen focus on homelessness and homeliness. Using collages as a part of their research method, they study how home is perceived to someone who is or has recently been homeless. The two authors conclude that, to the people who are homeless, the feeling of home is not always connected to a dwelling. ‘Home’ is not always something bound by walls but can also relate to an urban space, to being with friends and one’s dog, or to specific activities and daily routines. The chapter also demonstrates that home in a dwelling is not necessarily a safe haven. To some people who are homeless, a dwelling can evoke feelings that are contradictory to home, and they might even perceive a dwelling as a trap or a prison.

The incarcerating dimension of walls is further explored in the final chapter of Part I, by Runa Johannessen and Tomas Max Martin, Chapter 5. With an empirical focus on a prison and a deportation centre on a small island, they explore the archetypical boundaries of the wall and the island. Both walls and islands can be viewed as sheltering the domestic from the public or the wild, yet both also hold an intrinsic and particularly brute violent potential in their capacity to domesticate people forcefully against their will through exclusion and enclosure. The chapter demonstrates that walls and islands not only protectively frame the domesticity of homes and communities, but like other barriers and boundaries, also serve to exclude and marginalize as a way of protecting normality.

1 The viscous porosity of walls and people

Sandra Lori Petersen

On the third floor of a five-story building in central Copenhagen that dates from 1901, Liva lives with her partner and their two children. Everyday sounds, party sounds, and sexual sounds frequently seep into their 75 m² flat from their downstairs and upstairs neighbours, while the sound of traffic and construction work seep in from the outside. Liva, who is going through a period of intense stress, finds these sounds overwhelming. Yet what disturbs her the most are actually the faint sounds of what she assumes to be a couple, lying in bed, quietly talking to each other. Every night, as Liva lies in her own bed, these sounds come through the wall next to her. “It feels like an itch,” she says, explaining:

I try to ignore it, like I tell my kids to do if they have a mosquito bite. […] [The neighbours] talk in a quiet way – there is nothing to complain about – but [the sound] is more annoying to me than for example music would be, because it is private.

Liva keeps earplugs next to her bed, but they hurt her ears, and she tries to avoid using them. Instead, she breathes calmly and attempts to soothe herself and think about something else, “But it doesn’t work,” she says. Every evening, she hopes it will be quiet, but every evening the sounds seep through her wall anew.

This chapter is based on Liva’s account but also informed by the accounts of how other flat-dwellers experience the sounds of their neighbours as disturbing noise. The accounts draw on fieldwork among occupants of multi-storey housing in Denmark, as well as professionals in the Danish building and housing sectors.¹ For the purpose of this chapter, several accounts of occupants’ experiences with neighbour noise were read by and discussed with an architect named Søren, an engineer specializing in sustainable construction called Lau, and an acoustician named Rasmus.² My initial motivation for asking Søren, Lau, and Rasmus to participate in this experiment was to gain a better understanding of their professional approach to the relationship between occupants and buildings through their readings of these accounts. As I describe below, our discussions showed me that, to Søren, Lau, and Rasmus, the sole issue at stake was the wall; as a consequence, they valued only the elements of the account that allowed them to learn more about the wall as real knowledge. My conversations with them allowed me to access the wall in ways I would not have been able to using only my anthropological approach and Liva’s experiences. Hence, their response to Liva’s account, their interpretation of the drawings of her home, and their characterization of their personal professional approaches allowed me to engage with the material properties of the wall and to consider the relationship between Liva and the wall, rather than solely considering it from Liva’s perspective. “Do things speak?” asks Martin Holbraad (2011) rhetorically, reflecting on recent tendencies in anthropology towards an emancipation of things that, in his view, runs the risk of treating them as almost human. Things do speak for themselves, he asserts, but the challenge is to hear their voice over the noise of what we say about them (Holbraad, 2011, pp. 11–12). A way around this, he suggests, is to conceive of things as concepts, defining them based on what our interlocutors say and do with them. This would lead us to a better understanding of ethnographic things (ibid., p. 12). Through Søren, Lau, and Rasmus’s descriptions, the wall became an ethnographic thing to me.

In this chapter, I explore how built environments and human subjects are deeply entangled with each other. Through the specific example of Liva and her bedroom wall, I wish to explore what we can learn about both humans and built environments through this entanglement. Liva appears to be a critical case with respect to noise nuisance, since she describes the stress she suffers from as closely related to her sensitivity to noise. When considered together with the building she lives in, which is old and poorly sound-insulated, Liva’s sensitivity is particularly interesting to me, because it exposes the intimate connections between the occupant (Liva) and the building she occupies. Liva’s sensitivity enlarges connections that are omnipresent, but difficult to grasp because of the subtle ways in which they find expression.

Instead of seeing built environments as composed of disparate elements, architectural critic Sarah W. Goldhagen (2017) calls for an understanding of the city as an integrated whole. Goldhagen addresses architects and other professionals of the building sector in particular, since – she argues – they tend to consider disparate elements of the built environment independently from each other in their design and conceptual processes. As a result, Goldhagen states, they overlook the numerous ways in which people in the city experience these elements as informing, contextualizing and shaping each other.

Implicit in Goldhagen’s call is an understanding that people who inhabit the city do not merely experience built environments; indeed, they not only partake in constituting their environments, they are themselves shaped by them. Architect Juhani Pallasmaa describes how, for an architect, the process of designing a building includes the gradual internalization of its surrounding landscape, its functional requirements, and other characteristics (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 71). To Pallasmaa, designing a building is a bodily process that communicates with the body of the person who will later use or even inhabit the building (ibid., p. 71).

I find Pallasmaa’s approach particularly interesting, because he places sensuous engagement at the core of his work. He describes how the human body relates to buildings through processes that internalize space and knowledge by imitating buildings through multifaceted sensory engagements. These engagements merge with personal memories and imagination in ways that sometimes allow people to experience resonance and even rootedness within built environments (Pallasmaa, 2012, pp. 22, 71–72). As we shall see in this chapter, in Scandinavia, we tend to inhabit our homes in a way that makes the internalization processes quite intense, and thus our homes often become closely connected to our experiences of intimacy and personal identity (Gullestad, 1992).

Inspired by Pallasmaa’s understanding of the relationships between buildings and humans, I am interested in the relation between Liva and her wall. I move beyond the interface between the two and into their respective textures and dynamics. In this way, I get to learn more about both Liva and the wall: rather than describing how Liva perceives the wall, I explore the ways in which they can form each other. To undertak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword by Tim Ingold
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to architectural anthropology
• The method of architectural anthropology: six suggestions
• PART I: Home, walls, and boundaries
• PART II: Urban space and public life
• PART III: Processes of creativity, participation, and design
• Afterword: engaging architectural anthropology
• Index