Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
The Spanish Steps
Rhythm and the Body in Space
Lena Hopsch
Hopsch is Senior Lecturer in theoretical and applied aesthetics in the Architecture Department at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. hopsch@chalmers.se; © 2011 Lena Hopsch. Originally published in EAP, vol. 22, no. 3 (fall 2011), pp. 11-13. For the introduction to this essay, go to "selected readings" and the co-authored essay by McCann, Hopsch, and Porter.
The concept of rhythm is basic in all forms of art, including music, poetry, sculpture and painting. Here, I explore spatial rhythm as a tool for better understanding architecture. I apprehend rhythm as a form of perception that governs the experience as well as the production of artifacts.
In a work of art, rhythm might stand for the expressive contrast between points of balance in relation to an inner movement. Rhythmical movement might be defined as a balanced form with an inner movement. Rhythm is an organizing power as well as a producer of meaning. Both aspects relate to the fact that rhythm activates internalized bodily experiences. Thus follows that rhythmical “meaning” comes out of ideated sensations—the memory of bodily movements and their emotional counterparts.
The experience of being a moving body in space is basic for apprehending rhythm. Performing a dance may be seen as prototype of a rhythmical lapse. A dancing body moves in time as well as in space—the very word “rhythm” is used in regard to temporal as well as spatial courses. The evident example here is the mousiké of ancient Greece—an art form where dance, music, and poetry were performed simultaneously [1]. The rhythms of music, poetry and picture have a common root in the experience of our motions [2].
To read a spatial rhythmic configuration, we need to perceive it as wholeness, a gestalt. Merleau-Ponty talks of “figurative space” and discusses the experience of our own bodies as gestalt [3]. He claims that space perception is related to a corporeal schema, or “body schema,” with “schema” etymologically referring to Greek “shape.” The notion of a body schema can be found within psychology and cognitive science; Merleau-Ponty defines it as “no longer the basic result of associations that build up during experience but a global consciousness of my position in the intersensory world, a gestalt in the sense of Gestalt psychology” [4]. The body schema, or “image” as he calls it, also plays a central role within the cognitive theory of Mark Johnson [5], although he tries to make the body image operational within language, while Merleau-Ponty considers it in more discursive terms [6]. In the theory of embodiment, all aspects of cognition, such as ideas, thoughts, concepts, and categories are shaped by aspects of the body.
From a cognitive perspective, the body image involves self-awareness—for example, our posture in space. According to philosopher Shaun Gallagher, the body schema is used when interacting with the environment [7]. The human ability to evoke rhythm is another cognitive structure needed for interpretation and for orientation in space. The notion of a gestalt, or spatial figure—for example, stair patterns—plays an important role in our consciousness of spatiality and the way we perceive space with all senses. Gestalt psychologists point out how the perception of a gestalt is brought together by “a perceptual field.” Like our body, a gestalt is more than the sum of its parts.
The meeting between body and world is natural as well as culturally and conventionally produced. The rhythmic experience is likely to be found somewhere in the tension between universal, cognitive experience and culturally determined aesthetic conventions. The cognitive factors are specifically the experience of balance, direction, and movement. The conventional factors consist of adequate, historically determined, gestalt patterns—for example the Baroque style of architect Francesco De Sanctis’s Spanish Steps in Rome (1723) with the their attraction and retardation of movements (drawing, below).
In Tune with Stairs
In Phenomenology
of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) discusses
movement as part of the sensorimotor experience of the body.
He emphasizes that human understanding of the world is based
upon bodily perception. According to Merleau-Ponty, we do
not understand a room, for example, just by our intellect
but also by our bodily presence. The body is not just part
of a perceptual field; it is also itself a perceptual field.
The body schema explains how we relate our sense for visual
balance, for example, to the experience of bodily balance.
Body comes before perception, and even vision is born out of
the body: “…it is born ‘as occasioned’ by the body by what
happens in the body; it is ‘invited’ to think by the body”
[8].
Rhythm is multisensory and appeals to our tactile, kinaesthetic, visual, and auditory senses. The stair is an architectural gestalt that appeals to all the senses. The stair meets us as a passage and a sequence experienced over time. Its here-and-now experience coordinates with memories of past experience and what is present. As a mental image, the verticality of the stair is as central in the building as the spine in our body [9]. The movement of the stair leads up and down, symbolically a movement both toward aspects of light as well as down into the unconscious. Physically, the stair is the part of the building that interacts most palpably with our bodies. Visually, the movement is already inscribed as a repetition in construction, which Juhani Pallasmaa describes as “the regular rhythm of the stairs echo[ing] the beating of the heart and the rhythm of breathing” [10].
A stair builds patterns of movements into architecture. A spiral stair calls for a different pattern of movements than a straight stair. Short steps afford a different tempo than long ones that create a strident pace. An open stair makes different sounds than a closed stair, the acoustics of stone and wood differ considerably, and different persons can often be recognized from walking sounds.
The play between stair and floor creates a temporal interchange. One example is De Sanctis’s Spanish Steps, with their sequence of flow—slowing down, flowing, slowing down, and so forth. This series of stair illustrates how a dynamic shape can produce a kinaesthetic experience of motion. Dynamic rhythm—concave form, convex form, concave form—meet kinaesthetic rhythm and motion. When we move on the Spanish Steps, our experience of motility is intensified through the dramaturgy of flow and slowing down that the architect created.
A stairway puts us in motion and makes us aware of our own body’s spatiality through motion. The stair is a point of reference where we really interact with architecture. In Primacy of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes how “the “painter [and the architect] takes his body with him… but that body … is an intertwining of vision and movement” [11].
It is through intentionality that we, as beholders, become a part of the stair’s rhythmic figure. The stair formats directions in space that we can relate to our own bodily direction. As Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, it is only through motion that we can perceive our own body’s spatiality.
Using a stair may give us an experience of beats, a repeated pulse as in music. When a stair meets landing and then a another stair, there might be a certain swing, as in jazz music—a play with changes of movements and tempo, like the different stairs in the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, by architects Brisac and Gonzales. The experience of an interchange points to the experiential quality of rhythm, where a sequence can be read as a situation and activity where the memory of past sequences plays a large part. Langer claims that “the essence of rhythm is the preparation of a new event by the ending of a previous one” [12].
If we return to the Spanish Steps’ flow/slowing down/flow, we find that “the teasing Baroque plays with the attraction and retardation of movements” [13]. This pattern of tension/relaxation and activity/rest is also found within the rhythm of the sculptural contrapposto. One could compare heavy and light drum beats or a poem’s prominent and non-prominent syllables with the possibilities for exciting a rhythmic stimulation. The stair provides this possibility and can be associated with what sculptor Naum Gabo describes as “our desire for real kinetic rhythms passing in space,” something that he claims is satisfied in the experience of dance and theatre [14].The architecture of the Spanish Steps is also a pattern that synchronizes its three flights and three landings (representing the Trinity) and the whole movement from the Berninis’ Fontana della Baraccia to the church Santissima Trinità dei Monti, the end of the pilgrimage.
An Overarching Movement
I have argued here
that spatial/visual rhythm can be defined in terms of flow,
structure, and gestalt. Flow is a synchronization of
tensions and directions in a work of art that creates a
movement in the overarching structure.
To experience a gestalt, there has to be a point of balance through which the whole structure is built. A composition’s flow, however, may be experienced very differently depending on whether or not balance is achieved. In the Spanish Steps, there is the sequence of flow/slowing down/flow contributing to an inner rhythm. Balance is achieved but leads to a new movement. A past/new experience is created. Kinaesthetic rhythms—the viewer’s own bodily experience—catch the play between dynamic rhythms, form relations of the stair, and earlier image memories. These “inner movements” create tensions, aberrations, and exchanges in a perceived gestalt.
Visual/spatial rhythm can be said to signify this experience of balance and motion in an art work. We are aware of architectural qualities like rhythmic, spatial experience because they “awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them” [15].
Notes
1. S. H. Lonsdale,
Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), p. 6.
2. M. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 247; M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987).
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception. (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 114. Merleau-Ponty also discusses “a total awareness of my posture in the intersensory world, a ‘form’ in the sense used by Gestalt psychology.”
4. Ibid., pp. 112-115
5. Johnson, Body in the Mind.
6. Researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind contend that the nature of the human mind is largely determined by the form of the human body. They argue that all aspects of cognition, such as ideas, thoughts, concepts and categories are shaped by aspects of the body. These aspects include the perceptual system; the intuitions that underlie the ability to move; activities and interactions with our environment; and the naive understanding of the world that is built into the body and the brain.
7. S. Gallagher & J. Cole, “Body Schema and Body Image in a Deafferented Subject,” Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, D. Welton, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 131-134.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “’Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, J. M. Edie, ed. (Evanston. IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), p. 175.
9. J. Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. (Helsinki: Raukennustieto, 2001), p. 33; J. Pallamsaa, Rapport från Rytmsymposiet [Report from Symposium on Rhythm], 2006, p. 44.
10. Juhani Pallasmaa, Architecture of Image, p. 33.
11. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 162.
12. Susan K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1953), p. 126.
13. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), p. 159.
14. N. Gabo, “The Realistic Manifesto,” in Read, H. & Martin, L. eds., Naum Gabo Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engraving (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), p. 169.
15. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 164.
Drawing: Giovanni Paolo Pannini, ca 1756-58, “View of the Spanish Steps.”