"The taste of the apple lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself," Jorge Luis Borges once said. The taste is not something inherent in itself; its experience is the result of an encounter. Similarly, emotions are not contained within architecture, but are only felt through the encounter of the body with the space, when it becomes a place. How does the environment affect how we feel? This is the question that drives the duo of artists and filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine in their latest endeavor, the book "The Emotional Power of Space," which will be released on May 17th in an event preceding the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.
The duo seeks a comprehensive understanding of the issue by interviewing twelve architects from diverse contexts, bringing forth intriguing viewpoints. "We understood that the way we sense and perceive is so deeply rooted in the climate and the culture in which one grew up. That’s why we wanted to gather in this book voices of very different nationalities, cultural backgrounds but also generations," say the authors, who talked to Álvaro Siza, Anne Holtrop, Bijoy Jain, Boonserm Premthada, Jacques Herzog, Juhani Pallasmaa, Junya Ishigami, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Smiljan Radić, Tatiana Bilbao, and Terunobu Fujimori.
The geography of emotions is, to some extent, irrational, and the difficulty of addressing the topic lies precisely in the risk of subjecting it to the rigidness of rationality. The authors' challenge was to find a language that allowed the necessary mobility of ideas to deal with something so strongly related to instinct and intuition. “Translating into words something you feel is extremely complex. We had to fight against the rationality of language, which is so strong, to find a way of asking questions that would open the field of emotion and memory rather than lead to a cold, conceptual analysis,” they say.
By resorting to the emotions and memories of their interviewees, Ila and Louise aim to explore a geography that is unknown to them, and along the way, they find poetic interpretations about architecture and spaces that sometimes dismiss functionality. “In an architecture of poetry, functions should not be defined by meaning," says Ryue Nishizawa. “It is really in the relations between the structural and the immaterial that something happens," the architect concludes.
But, despite being immaterial, emotion does not prescind from human experience. Jacques Herzog says that "the drama of architecture is that without people nothing works. Crucial to our work is the idea that architecture is a kind of stage for human performance." In some ways, this echoes Juhani Pallasmaa's view that "the most important sense in architecture is the existential sense. We face architecture with our sense of existence", without which the spatial experience is incomplete and emotions cannot be entirely felt. Architecture is not a noun, but a verb that tells us where to go, suggests sensations, and imposes behaviors. It is a synesthetic and bodily experience that necessarily involves exchange. "Whenever I enter a space, immediately the space enters me. Architecture is an exchange. I am not looking at architecture, but rather I find the architecture in me," concludes Pallasmaa.
To investigate how spaces can affect how we feel and relate to the world, one needs sensitivity to the atmosphere of places. To understand a little more about this and about the book "The Emotional Power of Space," we spoke with Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine:
Romullo Baratto (ArchDaily): People, places, and spaces have been the subject of your work with films for more than 20 years. Where does the interest in emotions come from?
Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine: I think we started to dive into the questions of how culture shapes perception, sensibility and emotions towards space when we met Mr Moriyama to shoot the film we did with him (Moriyama San, 2017). For us, something very powerful happened at that moment. I think it was the first time we met someone who had such a level of sensibility towards what surrounds him. He is a man who lives in total symbiosis with his environment and constantly looks for the best balance and harmony with it. He totally amazed us when we understood that, based on the topic or the atmosphere of a book or a piece of music, he will choose the place in his house that he thinks is the most suitable to stay in. Everything he does seems to be defined by this search for the right tuning between his body, the space, the very moment and his actions. And it all happens very naturally. It’s like he has in mind a sort of emotional cartography of his house as he moves around it through the day. That was for us a great revelation because it’s rare to find people with such a level of attention to space.
RB: I myself am a great enthusiast of interviewing people — so much so that I have interviewed you both twice before. Why did you choose to talk about emotions and spaces through interviews?
B&L: As you well know, conversation is probably the best form of exchange to get to a certain degree of proximity and spontaneity through a relaxed and friendly relationship with someone. This is something we like very much. We have worked with this approach through all our films, I would say. In the process of this book, the main difficulty we faced was to figure out how to talk about emotion – which by definition is such an irrational feeling – without freezing it, without subduing it. That was the real challenge. The potential contradiction of dealing with something so closely related to instinct and intuition through a rational and analytical approach was very real. That’s why the kind of language we were using was such a big concern for us, precisely to avoid that risk. Translating into words something you feel is extremely complex. We had to fight against the rationality of language, which is so strong, to find a way of asking questions that would open the field of emotion and memory rather than lead to a cold, conceptual analysis. That’s why we gave such emphasis for instance to emotional memory, which is probably the true antagonist of conceptual discourse.
RB: The people you interviewed have very different backgrounds and interests in the field of architecture. How did you choose them?
B&L: Through this book we do a sort of world tour of sensibility, which helps us understand how much sensibility is deeply related to our environment, in a broad sense. As discussed with Juhani Pallasmaa in the book, we understood that the way we sense and perceive is so deeply rooted in the climate and the culture in which one grew up. That’s why we wanted to gather in this book voices of very different nationalities, cultural backgrounds but also generations.
RB: For you, how does space affect what we feel?
B&L: Let’s say that it’s the topic we have been working on since our first film, but each time from a slightly different angle. The film we are currently finishing, which we have shot in the rehabilitation center for physical handicap and brain injuries Herzog & de Meuron built twenty years ago in Basel, explores precisely how the quality of space can actively contribute to the healing process of patients. The building itself becomes part of the therapy! What we try to investigate through this film, but in all the others as well, is to enlighten how much all the components of our living environment have a determining impact on our behavior, but also our psychological and emotional state, in either negative or positive ways.
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The book launch is scheduled for May 17th at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, where Ila and Louise will engage in a conversation with Jacques Herzog and Tatiana Bilbao, discussing key topics explored in the book.
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