While in Madrid, I had the experience of collaborating with volunteers from ONCE1 who were not architects, and who were blind. The project was to design a school for blind children. The experience was impactful; outside of the code of relief patterns which speak silently to the blind, I learned that their critique of architecture, that is relevant to us all, is its bias for the eye. The disposition of architects leans so heavily towards the visual that the other senses are marginalized. What maybe began as an anthropomorphic conceit of serving man’s eye may well perversely outgrow him, with the advent of the ubiquitous camera; serving solely the image, the way man looks from the outside. The phenomenologists, therefore, answer a question they did not know the blind to be asking. Is there a way to expand our consideration of architecture (and the world) beyond the visual2? Merleau-Ponty’s writings are especially relevant to this question, as he deals expressly with the body. His non-hierarchical conception of the senses undoes this bias that theoreticians (and architects, artists, Instagrammers) have for the visual.
It is interesting to compare this inclination to that of Le Corbusier, whose primary concern is expressly for the visual.3 The output of his apparently ‘humanist’ ambition is Le Modulor,4 manifests as a two-dimensional standard of what a man5 ‘universally’ looks like. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s worldview is one of dissolution of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’6 where, as ‘beings in the world’ we cannot maintain the “idea of the object as an in-itself and of the subject as a pure consciousness.”7 The implications of such conceptions of the self, of the body, are as universal as they are personal. My experience of my body is my own, but the human experience of being embodied is universal. This conception of humanity is quite relevant to contemporary reconsideration of inclusion—inclusion of the other, the marginalized, the environment—and in fact offers an avant-garde conception of history that is really very humanist. It is one concerned with the causes and effects of human action which are both passed down and inherited between people. This conception of the world and how it is experienced offers a potential alternative for architects who wish to cease the promotion of the visual as both the output and method of their works.
1 ONCE is Spain’s largest foundation which raises funds and provides services to the blind.
2 We may substitute here for visual: detached, abstract, rational, dualist…
3 Le Corbusier, The Modulor and Modulor 2 (Basel/Berlin/Boston, SWITZERLAND: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2000), 26.
4 Le Corbusier, The Modulor, 50.
5 Implicit in this output, of course, is a sympathy for a male-oriented worldview. see: Agrest, Diana I. Architecture from without: Body, Logic, and Sex (Assemblage, no. 7, 1988).
6 Jonathan Hale, Merleau-Ponty for Architects (Routledge, 2016), 23.
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), 334.