place(less): place and identity in a globalised world

1

INTO THE DEEP WITH ARGUS' NIGHT OF PHILOSOPHY 2016

Place and Identity in a Globalised World

PLACE(LESS)

Schedule

Welcome and Opening 20.00

20.15

21.15

Lectures:

Julia Bennett - on place and belonging

Jasper Coppes - on identity, landscape and art

Jacob Voorthuis - on philosophy, place and identity

Round Table Discussions:

Join a table, have a drink and enjoy a discussion!

22.15

untill 00:00

General Debate:

Moderated by Nelson Mota

Debate panel:

- Julia Bennett - Jasper Coppes- Jacob Voorthuis- Mark Pimlott - Bart de Klerk- Jurrian Arnold - Alper Alkan

Drinks

3

This year's Night of Philosophy is concerned with the topic of place. Its general connotation has expanded beyond the discipline of human geography to merge with architecture's praxis. Place is now, and has ever been, part of our practice: the site of a building, dwelling, historical memory. Place forms the ground of the architectural practice - quite literally.

Deeply embedded in the rhythms of our everyday lives, place is often taken for granted. As the way we relate to place changes through time, this echoes the ways we construct identity with respect to that what surrounds us. Places somehow play a very intimate role in our lives; the landscapes of our youth, the spaces where we grow up, the moments of joy are as memories often intertwined with places.

In our globalizing society, technology, mobility and multiculturalism have established a hybrid and dynamic relation to place. Therefore we search for a deeper understanding of place and how it has meant, means and could mean. How is the social connected to the spatial? How are history and daily routines embedded in place?

Guided by a philosopher, artist and a sociologist, we search for a deeper understanding of place. At this night we would like to address these questions and leave with more questions unanswered.

Daniel BremmerEli DorsmanHana MoharRosanne le RoyArthur SchoonenbergChristian Maijstré

Introduction | The Committee

Jacob Voorthuis lectures in the philosophy of the built environment at the TU Eindhoven. With a special interest in the relationship between spatial practice and design, his research is concerned with the possibility of judging designs and design decisions from the perspective of a developing ontology of use, the attempt to remodel our conception of use and the useful in design thinking. Jacob graduated in 1988 in Art History at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, specialising in Art Theory and Aesthetics. In 1996 he defended his doctorate which attempted to confront the subject of architectural design and its role in society with philosophical analysis.

Jasper Coppes is a visual artist living between Amsterdam and Glasgow. His practice unfolds around the transformation of spaces – through precise gestures and détournements that challenge the definition and function of sites. While rooted in active field research, Coppes explores the material and immaterial conditions that shape such spaces. He creates large-scale architectural installations but also engages in conversations with other artists in the form of texts, films and sculptures. His works are often positioned as silent obstacles, in need of activation yet perpetually present.

Coppes graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2008 and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2010 and 2011. He also holds an MLitt in Fine Art Practice from Glasgow School of Art. Besides his artistic practice he is a freelance writer; part time tutor at the KABK – Royal Academy of The Hague, and guest artist at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and the ABKM - Academy of visual art in Maastricht.

Biographies

5

Julia Bennett is senior lecturer in sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests focus on belonging, community, identity and place. She is particularly interested in how elements of belonging and community are passed on between generations, which was the focus of her PhD. She is currently investigating connections between landscape and identity, in particular English identities. Her interest in landscape revolves around nature/culture distinctions, posthumanism and notions of the Anthropocene.

Nelson Mota (moderator) is Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology. He holds a professional degree in Architecture (1998) and an advanced master on Architecture, Territory and Memory (2006) from the Department of Architecture at University of Coimbra (Portugal) and a PhD (2014) from Delft University of Technology. He is a founding partner of the architectural office comoco arquitectos, winner of the Portuguese National Prize for Architecture in Wood in 2013. His doctoral dissertation “An Archaeology of the Ordinary. Rethinking the Architecture of Dwelling from CIAM to Siza” focuses on the relationship between vernacular social and spatial practices and the architecture of dwelling. He regularly contributes articles to architecture magazines, essays to academic journals, and papers to conferences. Since 2013 Nelson collaborates as guest scholar with The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design. He is production editor and member of the editorial board of the academic journal Footprint.

Milano I (1996)

Indetermination permeates all disciplines and social relations, it is the category of our time: continuity, universality, and predictability of phenomena have been swept away by modernity. We have seen the rising of new categories such as ambiguity, uncertainty, possibility, and probability. Auge’s concept of supermodernity is the manifestation of a profoundly changed society that abandoned the old beliefs in order to embrace a new vision. The acceleration of history is due to the overabundance of events and informations which brought old certainties to a sudden dissolution. According to Auge’s vision, the three characteristics of this new social structure are also the anthropological premises of non-places. First, is the speeding up of communications and the constant bombardment of images of places, different from the one we are located in, a process to which we are forcedly subjected. Second, a shrinking of the planet due to time-space compression. Lastly, an increased sense of individualism in people that compromises their social relations. Non-places are not necessarily bad per se, but rather deficient in several aspects that commonly belong to what we call place, such as the relation with identity. Non-place is a neutral definition, a scientific term used to describe a condition that is the outcome of supermodernity and is the opposite of place, it “derives from the opposition between place and space.”1

A place is concerned with identity, it is relational, historical and where our memories reside, it is familiar to us. Place defines our own being, while simultaneously being a manifestation of a certain culture or milieu: space is socially constructed. The concept of place, or τόπος (topos), was already addressed in early Greek philosophy by Aristotle and related to the existence of the subject in a place, “what is not is nowhere - where for instance is the goat-stag or the sphinx?”2, therefore what is, is always somewhere. The powerful conception of existing in a place as an inviolable law of existence itself was then replaced by the rational understanding of the place as a site, a mere location positivistically intended as a set of coordinates. The meaning was voided and abstracted, a scientific reduction that didn’t allow place and identity to relate as two parts of the same whole.

This year’s Night of Philosophy is concerned with the topic of place(less). Its general connotation has expanded beyond the discipline of human geography to merge with architecture’s praxis. “Place” is now, and has ever been, part of our practice: the site of a building, dwelling, historical memory.

1. Marc Augè, Non-

places: Introduction

to an Anthropology of

Supermodernity (London,

Verso, 1995), 79.

2. Edward Casey, The Fate

of Place: A Philosophical

History (London, University of

California Press, 1998), 51.

Place(less) ARGUS Monthly Paper #10

9

Only Heidegger with his spatial ontology of being-in-the-world gave back a metaphysical value to the place.3 Any action that we make is always in relation to a “where”. The sense of place that we constantly experience is inborn in any human being as part of a physical world that we live in, it is the primordial ground of being.

On the other hand, a place is fixed, while identities can be multiple and variable in time, a global and promiscuous identity is being created in the same way individual identities are being destructed and their integrity compromised. Sense of place is usually referred to as a local feature, it starts with a significant demarcation that defines a boundary. By means of pointing out the other, and excluding the different, one starts to define himself as a human being with an area of influence: the wall of the city were first drawn by the act of ploughing the earth for the foundations. The definition of an identity, hence a place, and vice versa, relies on exclusion rather than inclusion.

Geographer Doreen Massey, from an anti-Heideggerian perspective, proposes a new kind of globalized and inclusive sense of place. It is based on interaction and connection, a fluid form of placeness.

“While Kilburn may have a character of its own, it is absolutely not a seamless, coherent identity, a single sense of place which everyone shares ... If it is now recognized that people have multiple identities, then the same point can be made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can be either, or both, a source of richness or a source of conflict.” 4

Local identities struggle to resist a globalized society that acts as a pushing force towards a broader definition of place that goes beyond the local scale. As architects, we will have to take a position, in favor or opposition, to this massive change of scale, with a full understanding of its implications on societal structures. Place and architecture are related, since buildings, like human beings, cannot physically exist out of a context which is directly related to the culture that has produced them, hence identity. Nowadays perceived loss of ideals and lack of clear directions to follow can be interpreted as a reaction to the utter abandonment of the place.

“We can conclude that in the world of supermodernity, people are always, and never, at home.”5

3. Kim Dovey, Becoming

Places: Urbanism/

Architecture/Identity/Power

(New York, Routledge, 2010), 4

4. Ibid, 5.

5. Marc Augè, Non-

places: Introduction

to an Anthropology of

Supermodernity (London,

Verso, 1995), 109.

Place(less) ARGUS Monthly Paper #10

Brussel B (1994)

IntroductionPlace has often been overlooked or taken for granted in social research (Massey, 1994: 119; Casey, 1996: 33) but it is, nevertheless, always there: people are always somewhere. It is taken as a priori, given and therefore static, whereas society is changing, dynamic (Urry, 2000: 133). Local places are seen as irrelevant, because now we live in an homogenous global world where ‘local’ infers a sentimental attachment to history (Appadurai, 1995: 214; Massey, 1994: 5). Here I shall argue that that places are not a priori, but are created interactively. Beginning from Heidegger’s (1971) Building, Dwelling, Thinking I will explore how places ‘gather’ leading to an examination of the entanglement of local places and local life stories. Having established place as a thoroughly social entity the contrasting ideas of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ will be scrutinised showing how the particularity of place is connected to its people and their practices. Using case studies from my research in Wigan as illustration I will show how building gathers both landscape and peoplescape; building brings together neighbourhoods; building leads from place to place. Places are not merely an effect of human agency but are created performatively as material intra-activity (Barad, 2003), not merely a backdrop to the performance of human or social life.

What is a place?Place is a point of interrelations in space and time (Massey, 1994: 5; Casey, 1996: 37). In Building, Dwelling, Thinking Heidegger uses the example of a bridge to illustrate this. The bridge is built between two previously unconnected banks of a river, with people unable to cross between them. Once the bridge is there it acts as a passage and leads people from one side to the other. But it also gathers people to this location: people come because there are other people and a market may develop – providing food and other provisions for the travellers. Over time a town may emerge on these two banks of the river, a place, milieu, is created.

Life flows (Ingold, 2008), movement and action are at the centre of everyday life. Places are (merely) pauses in the flow where lives can become entangled, such as at the bridge. Place and

Familiar Places, Everyday Lives: Places as Gatherings Julia Bennett

13

Familiar Places, Everyday Lives: Places as Gatherings Julia Bennett people are thus inseparable in terms of their mutual history

or biography. One of the problems of place in research, partly because of this integration into the whole life, is that it can be hard to see. Because places are not specific points on the globe or necessarily defined by objects, built or natural, they can be invisible. The place of an annual carnival will only manifest itself during the period of the carnival and will be another place for the rest of the year (Degen, 2010). Whilst the objects in a place can be observed, just as the people can be, the viewpoint of the observer, especially if an outsider, may well miss what is there for local people, such as the street corner where men gather to talk and smoke (Blokland, 2001: 273). Places, like people, can have multiple identities simultaneously. People whose lives are thus entangled, as shown here, incorporate aspects of the place, the history of the place, into their everyday lives, their dasein - ‘way of being’ - or belonging.

Places are defined by people and their practices and simultaneously the place defines people in it and informs their practice. In defining people, places create what Appadurai (1995) terms ‘local subjects’. Places are specific and the things in them, including the people, are part of that specificity (Casey, 1996: 31), This is what makes the local and this is why place should be taken into consideration and indeed often is, without being stated: in talking to people we ‘place’ them by asking ‘where do you work?’, ‘who do you know?’, where do you live?’ (Stewart, 1996: 148). Only by acknowledging place as an equal part of the triad of people, place and practice (Ingold’s (2000) ‘taskscape’) can a fully embodied account be produced: ‘neither body nor place is pre-cultural’ (Casey, 1996: 46) and culture, or practice, is always and already embodied and emplaced.

Heidegger’s dasein (being there, in place) is often assumed to imply fixity and stasis as opposed to becoming which involves progress (Massey, 1994: 135-6) but I feel this is at odds with the interactive creation of places through building, cultivating and gathering. The building of the bridge does not create a bounded place consisting only of the pillars and archway of the bridge itself but opens up the banks of the river, has the potential to join the places on each side of the river and to gather to itself its own specific locale. Cultivation (another form of building) is an opening up of the world to its potential. Place as an event can never be static; place as interrelations cannot be bounded or fixed. In gathering, places are productive of everyday life.

It is through an analysis of research into daily lives in Wigan, a large town in north west England, that I will show how mundane, everyday sites gather and become eventful. My participants kept photo diaries for a week detailing the places they visited, and during our post-diary discussions we talked about the places depicted in the photos. Three exemplars will serve to illustrate that i) the places that have the most importance in our lives may be the most ordinary and overlooked; ii) places have biographies which connect us to our past and our future; iii) all places are necessarily locally specific.

The Mundane PlaceDuring our post-diary discussion, Janet’s photos helped her to think about connections in her life that would usually be considered too mundane for discussion. Janet chose this Spar petrol station (Figure 1) as one of the places included in her diary that she is most attached to. This attachment is through her friend, whom she has known for over thirty years. For Janet (52), when she undertakes the ordinary task of buying petrol for her car, she is also visiting her friend who works in the garage.

That’s the garage, that’s there because I go a lot and one of the assistants I’ve known for, how long have I known [her]? I’ve probably known her thirty years! ... then her children and my children and you know. I’ve been going to that garage since I passed my driving test.

(Janet’s post-diary interview)

It is in these un-thought-about connections to places that a deep-seated belonging to place can begin to be explored. Here worlds of past and future are invoked due to the implicit continuation of the relationship: ‘I go a lot’. Janet and her friend who has worked there for many years, are fully immersed in the place through their ongoing relationship with the place and each other, as part of the rhythm of their everyday lives (Bennett, 2015b). People who live nearby come here on a regular basis although no-one lives (dwells) in this building. This garage has a similar function to Heidegger’s bridge: it is also implicitly a way of connecting places through providing fuel for transport and enabling a road network. The garage gathers.

Familiar Places, Everyday Lives: Places as Gatherings | Julia Bennett

Figure 1

15


Storytelling placesPlaces also gather memories, an important part of the identity of a person. A place ‘remembers’ through retaining traces of previous buildings (Stewart, 1996: 148) but people also remember through places (Bennett, 2015a; Bonnett & Alexander, 2012). Memories are fluid images open to reinterpretation (Nora, 1989) creating a dialogue between past and present, a narrative where people, place and culture are all part of the story. In ‘placing’ people (who are you?) we ask them to tell us a story of their lives – the past and perhaps the future. Places as events are also narratives.

Val (65) has lived in or close to Leigh (a part of the local government area of Wigan) all her life. This is what Val said about the photo of Bradshawgate in Leigh (Figure 2) at her post-diary interview:

Leigh. Looks funny when you take its photograph. You’d think, my God, if you’d gone for a day out you’d think let’s go somewhere else but you don’t see it really. This big red building used to be the Co-op1 and both my parents worked for the Co-op, not this one but you know the whole Co-op movement and that’s how they met. Yes it isn’t beautiful but it’s the people, the people are very nice, they’re very friendly, it’s got a sense of community, we’re very lucky.

Leigh, the place Val has lived for most of her life, generally slips into the background of her consciousness but looking at a photo brings it to her notice, this unusual perspective making it look ‘funny’, or odd. The material aspect of place is crucial here because “the materiality of objects embodies the past experiences and relationships that they have been part of, and facilitates some kind of ineffable contact with those experiences and relationships” (Jones, 2010, p. 189). That is, through remembering the building as the Co-op, Val keeps both the memory of her parents alive and the memories connected with the building itself. Places are inalienable from those who have inhabited them previously, including our past selves.

As well as this building, Val told me the history of most of the buildings in this and other photos, where the cinemas used to

Figure 1

Figure 2

1. Co-op is the common

form for the Co-operative

movement that gives

members a share of the

profits.

be, the shop where she bought a pram for her children. There are both personal connections to these places and at the same time she is telling me the history of Leigh as a place through her own biography. This history is told here through personal stories linking to the wider world. Here everyday life as ‘flow’ (Ingold 2008) moves between past and present. As with Janet’s picture of the garage above, taking a photo of Leigh makes it ‘look funny’ to Val, and gives her a different perspective on the buildings: she hadn’t told me of her parents meeting through work at the Co-op during her biographical interview. It is perhaps only through creating places as objects, ‘things’ for Heidegger, created here through the camera lens, that we can ‘see’ how places impact on our daily lives (Strangleman, 2012; c.f. Barad 2003).

The local and the globalPerhaps, ironically, it is the advance of the global that has indeed brought the local back into focus. The global and the local are positioned as opposing concepts: the global is disembodied, powerful and progressive; the local is physical, weak and static. In fact, ‘the global’ exists only in rhetoric, not in reality. There is no place that is global, or rather all places are connected globally (Tyler, 2012). Nothing can be abstracted from the physicality of a local place: a global business may have plants in different countries around the world but each of these employs local people and contributes to, and is affected by, a local way of life, a local culture (Knowles, 2015).

The idea of the global stems from an objective, external view of the world seen from space. Ingold (2000: 210) contrasts this to an image of the world as a sphere within which we reside. The global perspective ‘is seen to be both real and total’ whilst the view from inside the sphere ‘afforded to beings-in-the-world (that is, ordinary people) is regarded as illusory and incomplete.’ (Ingold, 2000: 211). Viewing the world as a globe, something outside ourselves, enables us to appropriate it as an object. As an object, the world is occupied by places; we can draw them on a map and label them. But once inscribed on this globe change becomes difficult, places in this sense are indeed static and entirely divorced from their people. The sphere, in contrast, allows people to in-habit places. The view within the sphere is a view centred on a particular place and shaped by that place, we are part of the world (Barad, 2003).

Val looked after her grandchildren while their parents worked


17


and regularly took them to McDonald’s as a treat in the past. During the week of her diary took her youngest granddaughter there:

Val: McDonalds… that’s the one we go to.

Me: It could be anywhere, I know McDonald’s that look exactly like that.

Val: That’s right, this is the 13b, you know, plan 13b if you’ve got so many square yards. Well, we used to pick the boys up from nursery, that’s right so we’d have [granddaughter] and … that was the nearest place really so we’d come back and go there, so we got to know the people in there, they liked going there for their lunch … so at one time we were going every week. Now we go occasionally, because the children just love McDonalds and they do a nice cup of coffee these days …

Me: So you actually got to know the staff in there did you, they don’t have such a quick turnover?

Val: No, in fact, we took [youngest granddaughter] in the other week … the girl who used to wipe the tables down … she used to come and say ‘hello little chickadees’ to the children and blow me she came and said ‘oh you’ve got another little chickadee’ …

Through multiple visits, Val has created this ‘global’ space as part of her life-story, and that of her grandchildren. Because the same woman is still working in this particular local place we can see how it gathers local people in the same way as the garage (Figure 1) discussed above. Although McDonald’s is built to a standard pattern (here the 13b) inside it becomes a part of this particular local place. Augé (1995) refers to places as ‘thick’ places or ‘thin’ places. Each of these descriptions implies that there are fewer sociologically interesting relations in a ‘thin’ or ‘non’ places than in a ‘thick’ or ‘anthropological’ place; but this is misleading: all places are the locus of multiple specific interactions meeting only at that location and in turn producing new effects. Places are not ‘self-contained’, no place is bounded

Figure 3

and social connections will, if traced to their end, or beginning, travel through many different places. Each being the local place for that particular interaction, gathering to it the local landscape.

ConclusionBeginning from Heidegger’s premise that places gather (1971) I have attempted to show how local places do indeed gather together stories and memories and these help to constitute ‘places’ in the wider sense of a setting for daily life. As Ingold (2000: 199) shows, place is where we are, where daily life takes place. Constituted through mundane tasks, places are where people ‘attend to one another’ (Ingold, 2000: 196). Each place becomes a place through the interactions of people with each other and with the landscape, and with other places, over time. Place and people are thus inseparable in terms of their mutual history or biography.

The examples used here have demonstrated how places gather: a place is not static and unchanging but is a part of life: constantly evolving and becoming. People build as part of being human and in so doing create places which are cultural and specific, located and local but also a part of wider social relations around the world and through time.

References

Appadurai, A. (1995) The production of locality. In R. Fardon (Ed.), Counterworks Managing the Diversity of Knowledge 204 - 225 London: Routledge.

Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. (J. Howe, Trans.) London: Verso.

Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (3): 801 - 830

Bennett, J. (2015a) Narrating family histories: Negotiating identity and belonging through tropes of nostalgia and authenticity Current Sociology doi:10.1177/0011392115578984

Bennett, J. (2015b) ‘Snowed in!’: offbeat rhythms and belonging as everyday practice Sociology 49(5)

Blokland, T. (2001). Bricks, Mortar, Memories: Neigbourhood and Networks in Collective Acts of Remembering. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 25 (2), 269-283.


19


Bonnett, A. & Alexande,r C. (2012) Mobile nostalgias: connecting visions of the urban past, present and future amongst ex-residents Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1 - 12

Casey, E. S. (1996). How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time Phenemenological Prologomena. In S. Feld, & K. Basso (Eds.), Senses of Place 13-52 Sante Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Degen M. (2010) Consuming Urban Rhythms: Let’s ravalejar In T. Edensor (Ed.) Geographies of Rhythm 21 - 32 Aldershot: Ashgate

Heidegger, M. (1971) Building, Dwelling, Thinking. Retrieved April 28, 2008, from pratt.edu: http://pratt.edu/~arch543p/readings/Heidegger.html

Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Abingdon: Routledge.

Ingold, T. (2008) Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world. Environment and Planning A, Volume 40: 1796 - 1810.

Jones, S. (2010) Negotiating Authentic Objects and Authentic Selves: Beyond the Deconstruction of Authenticity. Journal of Material Culture , 15 (2), 181 - 203.

Knowles, C. (2015) The Flip-Flop Trail and Fragile Globalization Theory, Culture and Society, 32 (7–8), 231–244

Massey, D. (1995) Places and their Pasts. History Workshop Journal , 39, 182-193.

Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nora, P. (1989) Between Memory and Histoy: Les Lieux de Memoire. Representations , 26, 7-24.

Stewart, K. (1996) An Occupied Place. In S. Feld, & K. Basso (Eds.), Senses of Place (pp. 137 - 165). Sante Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Strangleman, T. (2012) Picturing Work in an Industrial Landscape: Visualising Labour, Place and Space Sociological Research Online 17 (2) 20

Tyler, K. (2012) Whiteness, Class and the Legacies of Empire UK: Palgrave Macmillan

Urry, J. (2000). Sociology beyond societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century. London: Routledge.

Praha CZ (1991)

Through the centre a straight avenue with two marked lanes and two lines of rails that lies at the bottom of the wooded slope is flat and long and extends out of sight towards the horizon. Tall metal posts with lights are evenly spaced along both sides of the avenue. Cables are stretched between the posts and over the avenue. Two tram cars connected to each other are on tracks in the centre of the avenue. The tram is coming from the distance perhaps a distant place and going to some other place perhaps distant. There are no other cars or trucks or trams on the avenue. There are pavements along both sides of the avenue for walking without people. To one side of the avenue is the wooded slope with cottages and houses and chimneys and smoke and clearings and paths and tracks and roads and poles and hanging cables and people. To the other side of the avenue is another place.

To the other side of the avenue of the scene freestanding trees fully catching the sun’s light in a valley with shallow slopes and villas between the trees on lawns with three or four storeys with many windows and large entrances and portals and porticos. The freestanding trees and the villas are all separate from each other and not connected by a wood or paths or cables hanging between poles.

Some of the villas face the avenue. How the villas relate to each other or to roads or to trees or to the ground is not visible from where the wooded slope the avenue and the valley of villas can be seen. Some of the villas face the avenue and are evenly spaced. The avenue passes by this place and by the first place and between the two places and they are quite separate from each other and from the road which is also like a place.

In the distance beyond the villas the horizon of hills dark with the sun behind them and the chimney central with a plume of smoke dark. Against the hills very large apartment buildings or towers which look very small as they are distant and arranged in order evenly spaced and many of them and their forms made clear by the sun’s light. Beyond them and very large and central to where all of this is seen and bound together by the hills and each part being all together and next to each other and seeing each other and looking at each other is the chimney.

And each part of this place is in this place at the same time in different times or ideas of time at the same time. And in each

A Scene (1995) | Mark Pimlott

23

part of this place there are or may be different ideas about the world about how to be with each other about customs. And in each part it may be thought that the ideas in that place are better or replace or improve on the ideas of the other parts of that place and the parts of that place that came first which is maybe progress. In each part of this place the house may be this and then that and then something else. And the land may be there and then this and then that and then not known. And the group may be these and then others and then not known but known of. The things that are used are useful and then not useful and then things which are useful and not useful and things which have become useless and then things which are useful and not useful and useless and not known and unknown.

But then all these somehow stay together. The known the unknown the useful the this the that the useless the unknown the known like this like that then unknown. Connected to each other with words and being able to speak to each other even if this cannot actually happen or if it is not possible to know the different worlds different ideas then this connection can be imagined or believed in or invented and this may be necessary.

This made up handed down invention that is words and language may be necessary in the face of history in the face of greater fictions and plans which are indifferent to each who lives and works in their place and looks out of their place to other places. And their place may be connected to other places by words by hanging cables by avenues by accidents by forgetting by death by birth by nothing.

Lódz PL (1994)

Two joints articulate the division of the Andes, as it moves northward across the Putumayo basin. The “knots” of Pastos and Almaguer, disentangle the thick thread that comes all the way from Tierra del Fuego into three distinct claws, obviously named Western, Central and Eastern cordilleras.

I come from a Valley which hovers a full kilometre above sea level, between two of these ranges. To the west, beyond perpendicular Farallones as high as four thousand meters, lies Balboa’s ocean.

As a child I crossed these mountains many times, atop the ridge, travelling to places with revealing names. Tocotá,1 la Paz,2 el Diamante,3 and el Carmen,4 spoke about the memories, hopes, ambitions and beliefs of the people who dwell amid the tropical fog forests.

Paired to these names was the figure used to name non-places.5

Random stops in our way were simply named “shadows” – the term used more as a verb than as a noun. Tired or thirsty, men would request that we “shadow.” If conditions were proper and comrades agreed, middle-of-nowhere-ness would turn into a stop, and change under the fleeting density of a few or many horsemen.

Old tree shades weren’t obvious stations for the travellers. Steep slopes, swampy riverbeds and narrow paths were obviously not subject to “shadowing,” either; but empty plains, soft hills and barren plots, with little spirit and even less beauty, could host the pack, on serendipitous grounds.

The transfer of a physical reality to a temporary practice, as in the move from the protective shadow that is turned by use into an action with socio-spatial consequences, reveals the workings of the architectural mind.

Mediating between an original situation and an abstract memory of that situation (changed many times by use) remains the word, unchanged, as an anchor.

This article has previously been published on writingplace.comPhoto by the author

(to) Shadow | Jorge Mejía Hernández

1. Pre-Columbine name, with no

clear translation.2. Peace3. The Diamond4. After Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, in

Catholic devotion.5. Not exactly in Auge’s terms.

I don’t have much to add to the idea of place. I shall instead concentrate on the word identity whereby places become this place. There is a problem with the word identity and it is a problem of metaphysics; that is, of the way we speak usefully about things like that. Identities, like buildings and mathematical sums and geno- and phenotypes, are constructions, and all constructions are real in their effects. Identities matter, they have real effects. But they are rather wild as constructions go. Contingencies of this happening to be here and that happening to be there cause couplings of the strangest kinds in the strangest places and at the strangest times. If a man is seen carrying a hammer he becomes ‘the man carrying the hammer, or as they would say in Jamaica: the hammerman. Only if an identity has the chance to construct and reconstruct itself over time do we achieve a stable and rounder identity, such as Jack or Jill who will have a whole range of nuanced properties, constituting a biography if you will. Identities construct themselves in the beholder, and begin with first impressions moulded by expectations and experience. It is because designers can imagine how people will construct an identity that we can take account of that and anticipate on that in the design. Gustave Eiffel knew what he was doing when he wanted to make a splash at the World Exhibition

On Philosophy Place and IdentityJacob Voorthuis

29

On Philosophy Place and IdentityJacob Voorthuis

of 1889. My image of the Eiffel Tower, however is mine, and mine alone and its identity is based on my scanty first-hand experience of the structure together with a great deal of stories about it and images of it. So what happens when someone tells me a story? When somebody tells me the Eiffel tower is such and such. I shall ponder that, and in pondering that, the identity of the Eiffel tower reconstructs itself in my own stories of it. Is there then nothing that is abiding about an identity? Well yes, lots. As I said, identities that have the good fortune to construct themselves on the basis of real familiarity to become stable and worthy treasures of memory. Moreover, the stories told and the images produced by being able to experience the thing itself may well abide and so create a commonplace so that we all have a comparable images and stories of the thing. In this way the Eiffel Tower is a commonplace, a story shared by many. The Eiffel tower as it stands there and as it is pictured in countless images and told about in countless stories abides, and as Heidegger so eloquently puts it: the thing gathers its world to it and becomes the protagonist and mis-en-scene of countless stories and thoughts.

But however commonplace and iconic the identity of a thing becomes, this does not lessen the truth of the fact that its identity has to be constructed and reconstructed in my mind and your mind, enriched and impoverished as it is affected by the communicated constructions of others who tell me stories, of my own experiences with my girlfriend and later, my child.

Now what happens when someone uses a sentence like: “I want this building to have an identity”? It might be a client talking to an architect. Suddenly it is not a building or design for a building that is the objective of the architect but a special kind of building or design, namely one boasting a built-in identity. To ask for such a thing is a form of logique interdite, a forbidden logic. Should the client be so brash as to ask us something like that we would have to conclude that the client did not mean to say ‘I want some identity rather than none’ because identity is not to be had by the pound. Things have an identity by virtue of being conceivable and perceivable. So we must assume that he meant: I want this kind of identity rather than that. And if that is true we can calm down and no longer worry too much. It now becomes a business of trying to extrude a picture of your client’s desires and to exceed them beyond his wildest expectations. For that you need not be experts in identity but to be good architects.

You, students of architecture, are yourselves working upon your various identities, constantly reconstructing them by learning, working and, I should hope, playing hard. At the end of your master and your BEP you will have achieved an identity as architects. And most of you will have gone further to identify yourselves as architects with a special set of norms, values, and skills. This identity will be valuable to you. Clients will come to you and say “I want a building and you must design it for me, and I want it to be like this.” And in that request the client will identify himself in his wishes. With a bit of luck he will want the kind building that you want to design. And if he doesn’t you need to take care not to sell your soul for the sake of your career.

I think you can begin to see where I am going with all this. The point is that you will design identity no matter what. The question must be what kind of identity you want. And it is here where the gap between the intentions of the designer and the people undergoing your design often widens to reveal a deep and bridgeless chasm. They will make of your building what they will. And most of them are not very good at constructing nuanced identities. Your building will get stuck at the level of their competence in judging these things. What to do?

Becoming an architect is becoming wise in the field of architecture. Wise people, says Philippa Foot, a great philosopher, are people who know good means to good ends. The best means to good ends are in fact the classical concerns of the architect: the pleasure of a view, the convenience of a route from a to b, the comfort and commodity of a room, the joy of entry, the surprise of a turn, the spectacle of a staircase, the scenography of sequence, the calm of good proportions, the touch and texture of materials, the beauty of orderliness. In other words identity will take care of itself. To sculpt it, just concentrate on designing a building that may be modest and simple or spectacular and extravagant, but always excellent and a joy to use and at that point you will achieve your identity as an architect by creating buildings full of people happily going about their business. Thank you.

On Philosophy Place and Identity | Jacob Voorthuis

31

On Philosophy Place and Identity | Jacob Voorthuis

Ronco Sopra Ascona CH

Wassenaar NL (1998)

When I opened my laptop to start writing this text I read that the coming year will be the hottest year ever. The previous one was the wettest in 45 years.

These warnings travel to me with the speed of light, faster than the sun, but are much colder. What are we to do with these cybernetic predictions? Don’t they eradicate any possibility for an unknown and more optimistic future? On the other hand, what are we to do with the confident solutions offered by a technocratic, capitalist, system that prevents us from facing the negative consequences of our behavior?

While I dwell on these thoughts and questions, every year the waves of the ocean crush more deeply into the British shores. Rivers expand beyond their borders. Muddy water eats away the edges of the Island both from within and from without. ‘For geologists this is a feast’, my neighbor downstairs told me, proudly showing new acquisitions from the Sahara. ‘We can pick up new specimen of fossils in between the rubble of houses that have slid from their cliff, or collect rare stones from the earth that has been exposed under the tarmac of devastated roads’. My neighbor has his house filled to the brim with pieces of Earth and traces of life on the planet from centuries ago. Surrounded by such geological marvels one starts to wonder. What relevance do the disastrous events that are taking place at present have in

| Jasper Coppes

At the end of May this year a small group of enthusiastic explorers, including cinematographer Casper Brink, sound designer Malu Peeters, archaeologist Daniel Lee and myself, set out to walk through the Flow Country. This relatively unknown part of Northern Scotland is subject of much recent debates around climate change and national heritage. During our walk we would document our presence in the landscape. The document would become as much a biography of the land as an autobiography of ourselves – our human presence as an archaeological layer in this vast expanse of peatland. It would be an attempt to capture the simultaneous emergence of identity and place.

Some weeks before our departure I attempted to formulate some of the thoughts around this expedition and to place them within the wider context of environmental concerns. I was interested in considering the references in the text not only as conceptual approaches to our journey; they also brought forth the idea that making such a journey would be an act of reading, of survey, terrestrial reconnaissance, of scanning the surface of one of the last wildernesses of Europe. The following text is an excerpt from that piece of writing (the full text can be found online at: http://envirohum.com/writingspace/2016/4/11/anthropology-of-presence)

35

this light? How do we, as human beings, relate to these global environmental occurrences? How do we make sense of the wave of gloomy information that reaches us each day? How do we respond to the acute physical reality that we so easily ignore the next? To be sure, the quickening process of erosion exposes not only new layers of sedimentary rock, but also the fragility of our human dwelling on earth - and perhaps it has a third effect as well; the erosion of the mind.

If we want to counteract the erosion that is taking place at present, brace ourselves against the force of corporate culture, we will have to rewrite its dominant narratives. But I’m not that sure if novels, articles, and pieces of literary criticism will develop a ‘better story’ than the one our daily lives provide. Rilke made quite a big deal out of stating that the European poet relies too much on only one of the senses, and in very varying degrees. I’d say we go outside and let the scent of a garbage heap, the texture of mud and the taste of the oceans inform our inner writing-pad, fuel the machine with new impressions. I don’t really know where to go next either, but instead of struggling with our desire for, or inability of, transcendence I'd rather focus on what is there, right at my feet. Let’s focus on transformation. Real, material, palpable trans-formation: from primordial slime to consciousness, from mineral to mind, from luminous idea into impenetrable black ink - from book to mountain boot. An ‘Anthropology of Presence’, whatever that might mean, may be a better idea than Tom McCarthy allows himself to believe [in his most recent novel Satin Island]. I’m going out, and take that as a proposition. Who wants to join?

photo by Jasper Coppes 2016 of 'The Unknown' by Kenny Hunter

Paris F (1990)

photo by Jasper Coppes 2016 of 'The Unknown' by Kenny Hunter

Scenes of migration flash into our living rooms through our television screens. For us, to search for a theme of the Night of Philosophy1 meant to search for a theme where architecture and philosophy intersect, to look somewhere between the praxis ( the doing) of architecture and the logos (the thinking) of philosophy. Philosophy preeminently concerns the contemplation of the ordinary; that which seems to be without any preconceptions. We were moved by these images and compelled to think about their meaning. What would it be like for those refugees to be forced to leave their places? Are our own notions of place as obvious as we’d like to think? What does it mean to reside, what does it mean to dwell? Even more so, is place not fundamental to architecture as well? This dialogue seeks to explore the notion of place.

A: Let’s start by asking: What is place?

A: What you describe is an idea of place that is common within architecture. A place is formed by the demarcation of space, perhaps with the architectural archetype of the pit or open fireplace. In my opinion, place also has to do with a bodily, or physical, presence. Don’t you think that, from a physical perspective, one can say: “I have been here before,” or: “this is the place I live”?

A: When thinking about place, it is remarkable to include the digital realm like that. But don’t we need to know more about what place could mean, before we wonder about the digital or virtual? We all have our own experiences and memories of place from which we

B: Good question. I think the simplest definition would be ‘space that is defined’ or ‘distinct space’. When defining space, it ceases to be infinite. But who defines space and why?

B: I have been asking myself that for a while now. At first I understood place as having to do with ‘embodied experience,’ influenced by writers such as Pallasmaa,2 but I have come to doubt this as a precondition for place. I still think that place stems from a bodily way of thinking, since it is a spatial way of thinking. Space is primarily experienced from the body. Sense of space roots in movement. From childhood on, we explore how our body relates to our surroundings; by crawling through a room we become aware of its dimensions, when we stumble we distinguish hardness and softness.3 However, I don’t think that place needs to be physical. Could we experience place in websites, apps or digital 3D-models?

Thoughts on Place | Eli Dorsman and Arthur Schoonenberg

39

can depart. I‘ll illustrate this by means of a personal memory. A s a child, I always had a special connection to the house where my two brothers and I grew up. We turned the place where we lived into a kind of fantasy world, imagining our rooms as kingdoms ruled by stuffed animals. The hallway connecting our rooms became an i nterstitial space where our worlds met. I think that, upon return, I would still be able to see these spaces in the same way. In this way memories or stories seem to be related to place.

A: That’s an appealing thought, especially in the way you relate place to identity. Some philosophers see this creation of identity as a continuous and active process that we collectively share.5 To illustrate this, we could use the example of the monument as a physical remembrance of the past. These monuments remind us of the stories of the past and they show, as it were, the sediments of the shared lives of our predecessors. It’s this place where these stories and our different individual perspectives can be shared and adjusted. The presence of others is essential to this as well, as a multiplicity of perspectives and stories make up the past. Maybe this is how we form our common identity - as a dynamic process of writing and rewriting. How we relate to place as an individual might be similar, I suppose.

B: Such a beautiful example. I love the way children attach qualities and stories to space so creatively and make p laces i n this way. Something, I think, we still do in later stages of life. I can imagine you performed a certain role in these worlds, that you had a certain place there. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which we relate to place. As a child, my brother and I would play with matchbox cars in the living room. The occasional collision caused us to organize our activities: making rules for who goes where, what goes where and who gets what. Whenever I entered the living room, I was reminded of my role or place in the world that we created together. Is this what happens at holy places, or public places, too? Places make you aware of the way you relate to the people and things around you, and give you a place within the world of stories and rules that you created together.4

B: Indeed, we perceive the same shared world, but from a multiplicity of perspectives. Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher from the 20th century, argues that this condition relates us and separates us at the same time.6 I think we can see this as a spatial process in which we continuously position ourselves within a shared world and at the same time expose our differences through our particular positions. This is how we shape our society and identity. Aged places remind

A: Yes, the other seems to threaten our collective or national identity. But it is peculiar to see identity as such a vast and fixed notion, especially considering the fact that the modern nation state is an invention originating from around the 19th century.7 The collective identity is probably not as fixed as one might think. Also, an extended and fixed definition of your identity can be dangerous, I believe, just as much as a strong attachment to place can be. By considering something ‘ours’, it by definition becomes something that is not ‘theirs’. We should be cautious in mystifying our sense of place, appropriating it, or sanctifying it in such a way that we take away all open space for common life. You could see this for example in the city of Jerusalem, where - throughout history - peoples have been fighting to define this specific place as theirs.

A: In history we can see an instance of both this openness and closedness in Medieval Spain as Jews, Muslims, and Christians were living together. Although this period is often seen as the Golden Age for Jews in Europe, even this history is marked by violence and oppression. What occurred during this time was that Jewish identity and Muslim culture became intertwined in such a way that it established a shared cultural and visual language; synagogues were built based on the standard plan of a mosque and the Jewish community spoke Arabic as well. It was not only a place they shared, but a culture or identity that had a mutual openness to it.

us of this process. Perhaps, when time passes, this process makes a place grow increasingly important to us, as well as specifically defined; while the demarcation of our identity becomes sharper, the exclusion of others becomes stronger. Isn’t this now becoming clear, regarding the way people react to the refugees?

B: I agree. I think the way we relate to place changes continually. The proportion in which exclusion and acceptance, closedness and openness take place, changes over time.

B: This open way of relating to place is apparent in the modernist movement as well. The start of the 20th century was characterized by a strong belief in a world community.8 Motivated by an utopian dream of universality, the modernists strived for an architecture and urban design for everyone.9 Now, the limits of this openness are apparent: not everyone could recognize themselves in the meaningless homogeneity that it brought about. While these spaces predominantly expressed hope and optimism for the future, they no longer reminded you of your place in history and the world.

41

The utopian homogeneity of modernism contrasts strongly with the atopian10 heterogeneity that we - being influenced by migration, technology and mobility - seem to move into. We live in a society with a multiplicity of identities that root in places around the world, yet exist next to each other. Internet and television make for a distanced experience of place. In addition, spaces seem to condensate to places on a temporary basis, during events for example. What seems to be necessary in this situation, is a certain openness for differences in place, culture and identity, and a certain sensitivity for a non-competitive diversity of simultaneous ‘places’ that take place on the same spot. This sensitivity and openness is outstandingly present in fiction, in the small stories that resonate on every street corner.

2. Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and writer of a.o. The Eyes of The Skin and The

Thinking Hand3. See for an example Yi Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, The Perspective of

Experience. Also Merleau-Ponty writes about the bodily experience of space..4. Merleau-Ponty draws in his Phenomenology of Perception a distinction

between geometrical space and anthropological space, the latter of which is

the scene of an experience of relations with the world on the part of a being

essentially situated ‘in relation to a milieu’. 5. A beautiful article on this is written by Leichter, called: ‘Collective Identity and

Collective Memory in the Philosophy of Paul Ricœur’6. We owe this idea from her book The Human Condition. Hannah Arendt was a

political philosopher.7. In philosophy related to Fichte with this conception of ‘Volk’ and to the

Romanticism of Von Herder with the term ‘Volksgeist’8. In the first peace conference (1899) The Hague was even appointed to

become the World Capital of Internationalism. See K.P.C. de Bazel’s urban

design drawing (1905).9. See the manifesto of ‘De Stijl’, the Dutch modernist movement, or the

writings of Bakema, the Dutch architect.10. From the Greek atopos. Whereas utopia refers to a better ‘place’ that is

outside of our world or non-existent, atopia is not fixed by definitions or

qualifications. It is a (free) place, without established norms. It is multivocal,

multiplicitous.

ARGUS Architecture Student Association

ARGUS is the Architecture master Student Association of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. ARGUS is directed by master-students that are involved on a part-time basis. The current form of ARGUS is based on the resurrection (restart) in 2010, as ARGUS had been disbanded in 2008 as the fire had burned down the old building and all data.

Our aim is to provide students with extra-curricular activities expanding their horizons in architecture and fields of study closely related to architecture, by means of excursions, lectures, workshops, debates, symposiums, etc. Every month, Argus issues a sheet of paper focused on a certain topic. Connected to this paper is a lecture or movie. Other events that were organized by Argus are the Venice Biennale excursion, the Night of Philosophy and new this year will be the PhD-day and an exhibition of final products of master projects.

Because ARGUS is based upon student initiatives, we are always looking for new input and ideas. So, if you have a great idea, don’t hesitate contacting us!

MoTiv: Into the Deep

MoTiv is a Centre for personal development in education and business at the Delft University of Technology. The centre aims to challenge professionals and students, on personal reasoning and motivation to stimulate personal and professional growth. MotiV has been involved with the event, since the first edition of the Night of Philosophy; their philosophical and personal approach to collective matters, have proven to be insightful.This year’s involvement has resulted in the participation of their ‘Into the Deep’ initiative, therefore Bart de Klerk and Jurrian Arnold will be attending the event and engage in the discussion by sharing their thoughts and position on this years subject of Place(less).

‘Into the Deep’ is an initiative involving multiple events, organised around the topic of investigating one’s incentives and motivations in a professional environment. During the event Bart de Klerk and Jurrian Arnold will especially be present in the round the table conversations, in which a focus will lie on personal perception of Place(less) and the effect on professional implementation within this subject.Topics like professional identity, meaning, and sources of inspiration are underlying this focus and will also be discussed at these tables. And since MoTiv’s aim is on personal reasoning and motivation, personal reflection and joint sense making will be stimulated.

About us

www.argus.ccARGUS Architectural Student Association

place(less): place and identity in a globalised world

Documents