By way of conclusion, I present an experimental piece of distinctly architectural anthropology. This workshop was presented as part of a residential workshop for the Knowing from the Inside research group, where the production of knowledge by creative practices from art, architecture, design and anthropology was examined. This example formed part of a wider investigation into the nature of lines, making them material in the form of coloured twine.
The project challenges the ways in which anthropology is done, and this collaborative experiment co-produced some modest knowledge about the relationship between homes, dwelling and memories.
For this exercise, a group of participants (5 in number) were given a 100-m-long ball of twine15 and, using the nearby forest, asked to design a house based on their memories.16 Participants were asked what this idealized dwelling needed in terms of its accommodation and arrangements; how can the terrain and natural features be used or appropriated to represent this imagined house; and how might we collaborate with one another in this 1:1 scale design process?
After an introduction drawing on literature, including parables by Gaston Bachelard and Italo Calvino,17 participants were asked to consider the following archetypal elements:
Threshold: most often thought of as doors, but including a wide range of possible ways of passing from one spatial condition to another. How are such transitions managed and marked?
Garden: in the house of our memory, is there a garden? What are our memories of gardens, from childhood play through to the careful long-term tending of plants and invitations to animals to share that space. Gardens can be modest balconies with plants in containers, or idyllic protected spaces. The temporality of the garden is an important feature.
Windows: the placement of windows features strongly in the imagination;
the aperture captures a view: rendering a kind of image from reality.
Hearth: whether an actual fireplace or another focal point, the hearth as a concept is the centre of the home, a gathering point. This suggests that the home is a gathering of people as much as it is a physical structure, a shelter.
Kitchen: the preparation of food often features in our discussions of the home, and the kitchen is a centre of activity. The kitchen is often considered in temporal terms in line with the main meals of the day.
Bathroom: a closed and private space, often the only place in the home that is fully private. It remains a practical space, of course, and the processes of cleaning are compounded in some cases with the relaxation of bathing or the invigoration of a shower.
Attic: a hidden area devoted to storage, often filled with objects we only use seasonally – or simply cannot bear getting rid of. The attic is rarely visited, but figures in the imagined house strongly, featuring in Bachelard’s archetype as well as a presence in fiction outweighing its importance to everyday life. The attic is quite different to a cupboard, so the role of storage is not its primary one in the subconscious.
Cellar: if the attic is rarely visited, then this is further compounded in the case of the cellar. The subterranean qualities of this space are important and, whilst much modern house building eliminates such spaces, increasing density in our urban centres has necessitated the use of such spaces for fully fledged dwellings.
Whilst we have earlier been suspicious of Le Corbusier’s machine analogies for homes, Mary Douglas describes the home as a ‘memory machine’ in an evocative discussion of home:
Each kind of building has a distinctive capacity for memory or anticipation … The home makes its time rhythms in response to outside pressures; it is in real time. Response to the memory of severe winters is translated into a capacity for storage, storm windows, and extra blankets; holding the memory of summer droughts, the home responds by shade-giving roofs and water tanks. (1991:294)
In this account, the home is also an economy of relative efforts between family members and draws an interesting comparison with the hotel in Douglas’s account:
The idea of the hotel is a perfect opposite of the home, not only because it uses market principles for its transactions, but because it allows its clients to buy privacy as a right of exclusion. This offends doubly the principle of the home whose rules and separations provide some limited privacy for each member. (1991:303–304)
This experiment is a direct appeal to the houses and homes of our memories, enacting these through a simple drawing task in an environment rich with affordances (Figure 3.3): a forest with different ground conditions, inclines, trunks and branches, rocks and leaves. The home is romanticized and idealized to an extent, but the exchange of stories and memories enabled a practical engagement with the rooms of the house and, crucially, how these connect up: the circulation, the composition, the relationships between spaces.
The task clearly draws upon Gaston Bachelard’s classic text The Poetics of Space18and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities – both texts perennially popular with architects due to the spatial possibilities presented therein. The task was framed by a brief reading describing the city of Ersilia (Calvino, 1974:76), a city of traces represented by an accumulation of colour-coded threads which represent bonds of blood, trade, authority and agency. The process itself is both a negotiation and exchange of stories. Discussions of spaces from participants’ remembered houses included unusual or unlikely uses of space. The duration of long-term and short-term occupation featured
FIGURE 3.3 Photographs from the 100m House.
strongly in descriptions, narratives filling the space left by the sparse nature of the representation afforded by a 100-m-long ball of twine. The means of representation encouraged an abstraction and efficiency in representation. The transformative nature of the line in space as inscribing a boundary, denoting interior and exterior, thresholds, windows and promontories demonstrated a sophistication in the interaction between memory and context. Extant features such as an abandoned camp fire, fallen tree branches and the topography of the site were all used descriptively.
Our collaborative house of the imagination made use of the existing topography, a steep incline taking the place of stairs. One contribution suggested the landing as an important space where, in a cramped terraced house, a small private space had been carved out. Elsewhere, a break in the foliage stood in for a window framing a view of the sea (where in reality the view was of the Perthshire hills). This was accompanied by a feature representing a jetty into a body of water, a particularly happy memory for one participant. Spaces of agreement also existed, a tree stump became a kitchen table where families would assemble, and more intimate enclosed spaces were defined further up the hill, representing bedrooms.
The construction of the house at 1:1 scale was physical and embodied:
rooms were paced out and related to the size of our bodies. Distances indicated by numbers of steps, arm spans, indications of height and space overhead: each of the bodily coordinates of left/right, ahead/behind, above, below, were all imagined through demonstration. Dwelling is an embodied activity after all, and reminding ourselves of this when it comes to design is crucial: we inhabit spaces, they become extensions of the human body to the extent that we often reach for things without looking: practiced movements in the kitchen are disturbed when a well-meaning guest has washed up and put things away in the ‘wrong’ place.
Another group who were taking part in a material collection exercise organized by another facilitator happened upon the resulting house with it’s bay window, jetty out to the sea, hearth and threshold, stairs and landings:
so they were taken on a tour, buying in to the fiction of a home that we had created collaboratively and imagined into being.19
Notes
1 Focusing on gendered space as well as the sensorial and experiential aspects of home.
2 In this title, Miller addresses the concept of home with regard to material culture studies.
3 Buchli gives an account of the intervention of the State in the home in Soviet Russia, noting the extent to which the state would specify appropriate furnishing and decorations for the home. This was consistent with the promotion of the Soviet Union’s opposition to bourgeoisie ways of living.
4 Describing the contemporary Japanese home in relation to its storage and display functions.
5 Most notably, Margarette Schütte-Linotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen design of 1926, charted as part of a wider cultural history of the kitchen by Kinchin (2011).
6 See Levi-Strauss (1963:279).
7 There are exceptions of course, and there is suspicion or derision of individuals who might live in this way as affected or poseurs, presenting an unachievable image of how to live to lifestyle magazines or other outlets to display an ‘ideal’ home.
8 A detailed exploration of this issue can be found in the work of Victor Buchli (2000, 2002) on Soviet-era housing.
9 As with all things, there are regional and other variations to this.
10 For more on this, see Japanese architect Arata Isozaki (1986) who discusses the floor orientation of Japanese traditional architecture.
11 See Goodwin (1993). For an architectural case, the literature surrounding the place of Katsura Rikyu (Gropius et al., 1960; Ponciroli, 2004; Ishimoto, 2010;
Lucas, 2018a), an Imperial villa on the edges of Kyoto. The villa was famously visited by early modernists, including Bruno Taut, whose account of the planar geometry proved highly influential. Japanese architects have also noted the influence of Katsura alongside the Ise Shrine as foundational to Japanese architecture in a manner equivalent to the Parthenon’s influence in Europe (see Isozaki, 2006).
12 See Chapter 5 of this volume as well as Mauss (2002[1954]), Hendry (1993) and Sansi (2015). The Gift. London: Routledge.
13 It’s important not to misrepresent Ingold’s work as explicitly Heideggerian here, however, as he has significant divergences from Heidegger’s hard distinction between human and animal dwelling (2011:11). The greater influence on this aspect of Ingold’s thought are the environmental psychologist James Gibson and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Movement is implicated directly in the perception of the environment by Gibson’s reckoning, and the entire organism is engaged in finding the useful affordances that environment has to offer.
14 For better or worse, of course, as modernism has a great many benefits over what came before it and represented an attempt at democratization of architecture.
15 This gave the experiment a fixed duration: we were to continue until the 100 metres of twine were used up, unfurled as a single strand without cutting or splitting.
16 The experiment was part of an event discussing pedagogical methods in a practical setting, posing alternative ways of knowing and mobilizing the idea of learning as understanding in practice. The residential event, at Comrie
Croft in Perthshire, Scotland, was part of the ERC Advanced Grant project Knowing from the Inside for which the author is an associate researcher.
The so-called KFI Kitchen included a wide range of activities designed as alternative forms of attention: introverted attention, extravert attention and social attention. My aim here was to investigate how forms of drawing could inform anthropology, moving the discipline away from the idea that ethnography is the sole form of valid investigation.
17 Bachelard (1992 [1958]) and Calvino (1974).
18 Bachelard (1992).
19 The artist Do Ho Suh, in his work Home within Home within Home within Home within Home of 2013, created 1:1 scale replicas of several homes he had lived in. These replicas are made from carefully detailed textiles, hung from the ceiling and nested within one another. The work is designed to be walked into and around, engaging the visitor to the gallery in a multisensory embodied experience of the spaces and their relationship with one another.
Introduction
Continuing the discussion of building typologies through anthropological theory, this chapter addresses the museum. One of the most contested spaces in postcolonial literature, the museum represents a process of accumulation and display, often with its roots in historical plunder or domination. Whilst this is not always the case, examples of colonial artefacts’ presentation in museums equip us with many transferable theories to less contentious materials.
Anthropologists often deal with the problematic nature of indigenous communities’ relationships with Western collectors. These relationships can become embedded over time to produce a market for goods once produced for specific cultural reasons: as in the case of the Malanggan funerary sculptures described by Suzanne Küchler. The trajectory towards deliberately produced artworks providing a financial lifeline to marginalized communities complicates the narrative of Orientalism described by Edward Said. This trajectory or biography continues the thread of material culture studies from the chapter on the home, but with greater political implications.
Rather than document a museum building itself, I have chosen here to work with examples of buildings which have themselves entered collections.
This sharpens the discussion of the status of the object, as one defence of the postcolonial critique of museums is that the building itself is mute, and it is the acquisition policies of curators that are in question. By discussing buildings which have themselves been decontextualized, made safe, interpreted and displayed, it becomes apparent that the status of a building can alter radically from its original functions. This argument can be extended towards
4
Museums and Architectures
of Collection
other practices of building re-use and conservation and opens up a debate about the ruptures inherent in such re-categorizations. Rather than avoid such status shifts altogether, I would instead propose greater recognition and acknowledgement of the process being undertaken, deliberately designing it in to the display rather than studiously avoiding it.