"Only connect! . . .Live in fragments no longer.”
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), ch. 22
‘One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep, ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity’. For days I could think of nothing else and for years I tested all I did by that sentence [...]” William Butler Yeats (cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.51 )
"The existential question, 'Where do I belong?' is addressed to the imagination. To inhabit a place physically, but to remain unaware of what it means or how it feels, is a deprivation more profound than deafness at a concert or blindness in an art gallery. Humans in this condition belong no where." p. 204 *
"David Brower .... ' The places that we have roots in, and the flavor of their light and sound and feel when things are right in those places, are the wellsprings of our serenity'.... Alan Gussow, a conservationist and landscape artist, wrote: 'The environment sustains our bodies. But as humans we require support for our spirits, and this is what certain kinds of places provide . . . . A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment. Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.'" p. 209
"The real “sense” of a place … is twofold. One the one hand, people feel it; on the other, they grasp its meaning…. There is a tendency in modern Western thinking to separate the feelings, symbolic meanings, moral sentiments, and intuitions of a place from the intellectual, rational features. The expressive dimension gets lost in systems of design and management. Places, therefore, tend to lose an old kind of meaning: expressive intelligibility…..
The whole synthesis of located experience – including what we imagine as well as the sights, stories, feelings, and concepts – gives us the sense of place….p. 2
"...the mind includes more than intellect. It contains ahistory of what we learn through our feet. It grasps the world that meets the eye, the city we know with our legs, the places we know in our hearts, in our guts, in our memories, in our imaginations. It includes the world we feel in our bones." p. 213
We need to reocover a way of thinking that ancient people took for granted. The renewal of consciousness implies a restitution of grounded intelligence. We need to experience the world in a radically old way….Let us return to holistic theory – to the archaic theoria that grasped the whole experience of a place. Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview, [p. 3 ends] but it involved all the senses and feelings. Disintegrating this whole experience degrades the intangible, nonphysical, human energies of a place, and a true renewal depends on some recovery of its integrity. Archaic theoria survives hidden in dimly remembered ways of thinking….p. 4 The frame of mind that makes holistic theoria possible is a form of inquiry I call ‘topistics’, or the study of placeways…." p. 5
"To recover archaic theoria means to experience a place as a whole through feeling, imagination, and memory, together with intellect and the senses." p. 204
"haptic perception ... In architecture, which is fundamentally the technique of building places, it is recognized as 'the way the whole body senses and feels the environment.' ... the feeling of buildings and our sense of dwelling in them are the roots of architectural experience.... 'To sense haptically is to experience objects in the environment by actually touching them (by climbing a mountain rather than staring at it)'.... It is a sense of touch that means not just contact with the fingers or the skin but an entire perceptual system conveying sensations of pressure, temperature, pain, and the sense of movement within the body as well as the body moving through space....The sense of dwelling in a house and the ways our bodies get to know the nooks and turns and surfaces of a place depend on haptic feelings.....The body feels the articulations of shapes and surfaces in the world by means of its own inner articulations. Neural receptors in the joints turn them into sense organs, registering geometric relations to the ground and to the force of gravity by the relative positions of the bones. ... as we literally feel the world in our bones. With this elaborate perceptual apparatus, by haptic [p. 134 ends] and dynamic touching, we lay hold of the environment, detecting size and shape, surface and texture, substance and consistency, and relative temperature.... [James] Gibson observes .... 'Active exploratory touch permits both the grasping of an object and a grasp of its meaning'." p.135
"Moral categories, moods, and conditonsof morale helpl to define the qualities of places. A place is good or bad, blessed or damned, happy or unhappy, lively or depressed, exciting or dull. The concept of expressive space means the subjective dimension of located experience. Expressive reality refers to what people feel and think and imagine, just as perceptual reality signifies things they perceive, and cognitive reality, things they understand. ... 'Expressive' means laden with emotional and symbolic features of experience. Both nostalgia and exotic longings represent opposite extremes of imaginary experience. Homesickness presents the yearning for the specific, familiar but lost expressive space. The exotic evokes a feeling about strange and wonderful places we do not know.
Expressive space is not only found but made. Henry Adams wrote eloquently about experience captured in stone, and he showed how the eleventh century built an emotion into the church of Mont-Saint-Michel. Ruskin defined architecture as the emotional power of arranging and decorating buildings: 'Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them contributes to his mental health, power, and pleasure.' ...
Architecture is one element in a larger process I call 'pathetecture'. ... Pathetecture means constructing emotion by building. It is the process of making an expressive space by material means...." p. 143
"In the course of this inquiry, we explored three doctrines. One is the idea of selective support, and I have shown how we build the world we sxuppose by expressing or suppressing specific features of experience.... We build not only to shelter the body but also to support a structure of consciousness. By construction and demolition we ratify meanings we take for granted. As we rebuild the world, we rebuild ourselves. Another doctrine is the idea of mutual immanence. The structure of mutual immanence includes all the effective presences influencing one another that abide together in one place. .... Finally, we considered Plato's doctrine of Place as the active receptacle of shapes, powers, feelings, and meanings, organizing the qualities within it, energizing experience." p. 205
*Eugene Victor Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988
