Jaap Dawson
CONTAINMENT

Without thinking long or hard, choose three buildings, or towns, or spaces you feel thoroughly at home in.  Choose places you’ve been to, places you’ve felt with your body and with your soul.  Choose places that make you feel glad you’re alive.  Choose places that make you want to be an architect so that you can build similar spaces yourself.

I often ask students to take this simple journey.  Sometimes I ask colleagues.  Asking the question breaks the ice:  it’s not only a way to get to know each other quickly; it’s an exercise that puts us in touch with our authentic experience.  If we’re honest, we forget to ask what other people may think of our choices.  We respond quickly and genuinely. 

Through the years, I’ve heard quite a lot of buildings and places mentioned.  The astonishing thing, however, is that the same places—or places with the same qualities—continue to appear among the choices.  The buildings and towns are almost never new; or if they are, then they are not the places which conventionally appear in magazines for professional architects.  I hear of town squares, of churches and temples.  I hear of gardens.  I hear of villas with unmistakable faces and a clear spatial hierarchy.  I hear very little about styles or famous architects or the supposed spirit of the age.

Why?  What do the buildings and places share with each other?  Why do we feel at home in them?  Do they merely represent nostalgia for a world apparently less complex than our world is now, a world whose relatively simple technologies led to construction spans and compositions directly related to the human body?   Or do our favourite buildings and towns reflect a structure and a need basic to human psychology?

I have asked myself this question over and over again.  And each time I ask it, I get the same answer:  a successful building or town contains us.  I don’t mean they contain us only literally:  we all know that walls are necessary in order to build a habitable room.  I’m talking about containment in a deeper, but no less familiar, sense.  I’m talking about the containment that’s necessary for our psychological development, for our very identities.  We’ve all been there before.

We’ve all been there before because we’ve all been children.  We’ve all survived childhood—more or less.  We’ve grown into adults.  How in the world did we do it?

In the beginning, Winnicott reminds us, we are the world itself, the world around us and the world within us. (1)  We are our mother and her breast, our brother and the beast on our bedroom curtains.  We are light during the day and darkness during the night.  The noises in our dreams are as real and present as the noise a bus makes when it drives past our house.  Is this world a sort of paradise, a single unified experience?

Hardly.  The paradise shatters when our mother leaves the room.  If we’re identified with her, we feel we cease to exist when we can’t see her anymore.  Panic, anxiety, non-being itself come to haunt us.

But we survive.  If our mother is good at her job, she automatically plays a game of hide and seek with us.  She shows her faces to us and then turns away, only to reveal her face again after a few moments.  She has not really disappeared, and neither, we discover, have we. 

At length we learn to distinguish our own face reflected back to us in our mother’s gaze.  What an accomplishment!  What a discovery!  We are Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus, sailing into new territory without falling off the edge of the earth.  And we give names to the new territory.

We name ourselves because we now realise we’re not our mother’s breast or our dream’s monster.  We distinguish the members of our family, the rooms in our house, the day and the night as though we were writing the first creation myth ourselves.  And we are:  we are creating ourselves and our world in our own awareness.

We don’t travel alone, however.  Family and friends accompany us, of course.  And so does our stuffed bear.  We find we can talk with the bear, and that he talks back.  Even more important, we learn to see our bear’s capacity to show different faces:  our mother’s face, our own face, perhaps even the face of the burglar in last night’s dream.  Our bear helps us immensely.  He contains our emerging identity.  He contains our feelings.  The dream may have vanished and our mother may have left the room again, but our bear remains behind to contain our memory of them.

Our bear helps us to play as well.  Once we’re experienced enough to trust playing with the bear, we begin to play with other children.  We recognise a boundary between us:  they have faces different than ours.  Invariably we are so proud and pleased to have discovered boundaries that we breach them.  We get carried away with our own apparent power.  We hit our friends; we hide in a bush when our mother calls us for dinner; we steal our brother’s bicycle.

And then our mother or our father appears, sending us in no uncertain terms to our room.  We fight tooth and nail, convinced we’ve been terribly wronged, but we find ourselves no match for our parents’ power.  We end up in our room, and the door closes.  We hear we may leave the room only once we’ve calmed down.

Our room provides us with the same service, the same knowledge as our bear gave us.  Our room not only contains us literally:  it also contains our feelings, our emotions, our memories.  In a safe and bounded space we play with our wishes, our pride, our hurt.  The room helps them reassemble themselves, makes them manageable again.  We are not, after all, our feelings:  we have feelings.  And when feelings have us, we need the containment the room provides.

Imagine, as we grow older, that we take a fancy to buildings and towns.  We build our own houses and castles with blocks.  We draw them too, with clearly defined lines round the rooms and in the facades.  We determine to become a builder or an architect.

When we enter a contemporary school of architecture, we expect to learn everything we need to know in order to become a master builder.  We know that aspirant writers read everything ever written in their own and perhaps other languages.  Without the tools, without the memories, without the experiences of writers gone before, they can’t develop their own skills, they can’t sharpen their own tools.  The foundation of their play rests on the discoveries of other players, on how they inherited conventions and boundaries and then learnt to breach them in a meaningful way.  We expect a similar presentation of architecture through the ages.  But we don’t get it.  Instead, we get a catalogue of seemingly arbitrary styles which follow each other up as though they were foreordained.  We get odes on construction methods and materials, as though habitable and meaningful human spaces were merely the by-products of ever-increasing discoveries in technology.  We’re left cold, outside the gates that protect the secrets of enduring architecture.

And so we delve into the books on our own.  We visit buildings and towns.  We look for recurring patterns in spatial composition, in construction, in boundaries.  We discover that containment is at root of our need to build.

We discover that buildings not only contain people and animals, an agreeable climate and a microwave oven:  they contain our most precious memories and experiences.  They contain our favourite stuffed bear in all his incarnations.  They contain gods.  They contain God.

But now we’re putting the cart before the horse.  We’ve forgotten to mention what helped us make this discovery about containment.  Our first encounter with architecture school left us in crisis, and the crisis felt just as grave as our memory of ceasing to exist when our mother left the room so many ages ago.  And what do you do when you’re in a crisis?  You seek help.  You talk all night with friends.   You visit a priest you trust.  You try other doctors of the soul and begin to read prodigiously in the young tradition of depth psychology.

We discover that architects and explorers aren’t the only people who make maps.  Depth psychologists do too.  But they have an impossible task because their maps don’t chart visible territories or rooms.  The maps a depth psychologist makes order experiences spatially.  The experiences are the dreams, the complaints, and the awareness of the clients.  The maps are an attempt to make sense of them, not to portray them literally.

The maps which Jung and his colleagues drew catch our eye repeatedly. (2)  We see a circle, not unlike a castle wall.  In the middle of the circle resides what we’ve come to call the unconscious.  Here is where we began when we started to create ourselves, when we started to forge our identities along an inbred path.  Here is where the collective and archetypal themes and patterns and dramas of human life reside too:  they’re far bigger and far deeper than our own conscious experience.  On the outer edge of the circle, right on the castle walls, we see a rather small area marked ‘ego’.  The Latin term doesn’t threaten us:  we know the ego is our conscious awareness—nothing less and certainly nothing more.  And this ego, sitting conveniently astride the castle wall, can look either outside it to the world beyond or inside toward the centre that gave birth to it.

The map intrigues us.  It seems oddly familiar.  We’re curious about the map’s form.  Why have the depth psychologists chosen this form and not another, perhaps linear form?  Is it really true that the ego can look both outside the castle walls and inside to their centre?  The more we plough through the psychological jargon, the more we see a new and credible version of human history—not the conventional history of wars and movements and plagues and building styles, but the history of human consciousness.

We learn that the ego can easily overstep its own boundaries.  We learn that the ego can usurp not only the lands beyond the encircling walls but also the original and contained inner centre.  The ego can, in a word, forget its centre, forget its own history:  it can place itself at the centre, imagining it has the power to control the whole world.  When it does, then ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’ (3)

We reflect for a moment.  Does the ego really behave like this?  Do we behave like this?  If we continue to grow, if we discover ever new territories, why must we remember and revere the centre?  Why do we need to contain our most essential memories?  Why do we need to be humble in order to be ourselves?

The history of architecture gives us the answer.  Without forgetting the map of the ego and its centre, we look again at the buildings and the towns we feel most at home in.  We see the original aedicula—in deepest Africa, in Puglia, in Honduras.  We see a cave with a numinous painting on its far wall.  We see Athena herself at the centre of the Parthenon, the treasured Great Mother who contains the literal treasures of the whole community.  At the centre of the temenos we see the holy scrolls, the Shiva, the Buddha, the consecrated Host.  We look toward the mihrab which reflects an imageless presence back to us.  We stroll through courtyards with fountains in the middle.  Not without trepidation we cross threshold after threshold in the Forbidden City, coming ever closer to the room fit only for the emperor.

Then we move from individual buildings to groups of buildings, to towns.  We see town squares at the centre of communal life.  We see neighbourhood squares at the centre of groups of houses.  Repeatedly we see a cellular structure, and we know that a cell cannot exist without a centre.

We see other centres which make us feel less at home.  We see the Panoptican prison:  here it’s not the holy image or the original memory which occupies the centre, but the prison guards.  They have conquered the centre for themselves in order to assert their power over the prisoners.  The guards behave like inflated egos, without memories, without history:  power and control are their chief goals.

And we see buildings and towns which lack centres altogether.  We see linear cities.  We see, now through our car windows, an endless chain of shopping malls, gobbling up the land, seducing us to buy something that will assuage our alienation.  The more we look at what we’ve built, the more we notice the correspondence between the depth psychological map and the record of buildings and towns.  Both spatial patterns, both experiences, remind us of our inbred need to contain our treasures, to contain our memories, to contain our identities.  A room or a space without boundaries we can feel does not serve us adequately.  Cells with centres provide the building structure which corresponds to our own psychological structure.

We are pleased with our discovery, but we read on.  We want to make sure our discovery will hold water.  When we come to Porphyrios, who assures us that ‘Classicism is Not a Style’, (4), we pause to reflect.  Yes, a building whose elements tell a tectonic story does indeed sooth us, does bring us home, does put us in touch with our childlike wish to make poetry of everything we build.  And yes, we find it reassuring to remember that imitating our image of reality—imitating, in fact, the psychological map of our own experience—can lead to buildings and towns which virtually everyone feels at home in.  But if classicism is really not just a style, what is it in essence?  What does the experience of classicism embody at its core?  Is it relevant to how we build houses and towns now?  Does a classical attitude offer us an alternative to sub-urbanisation?

With this question in mind, we continue to look at buildings—buildings in towns and buildings in books.  Time and again we return to the buildings and theories of Dom Hans van der Laan. (5)  Can they help us delve into the attitude and the essence and the modus operandi which, we suspect, a classical way of building and composing embodies?  The buildings Van der Laan and his colleagues left us do not look canonically classical.  Sometimes they seem to belong to the modernist tradition; at other times they feel rather Romanesque.  Engaging, poetic, tectonic details are often absent.  But something else, something decidedly tactile, is always present:  the wall. Van der Laan travelled through the history of architecture and then proceeded to write his own history.  He looked for examples in history to bolster his intuition, but then he closed his books and began to play with blocks.  His theories and his buildings grew from two empirical sources:  the way we perceive and feel space, and our inbred tendency to build analogies.

From his experiments with blocks, Van der Laan rediscovered the role the wall plays in our experience of space.  For the human body and the human soul, space is not an abstraction.  Neither are its boundaries.  Without a chunk of formed earth to mark off and enclose a space, Van der Laan concluded, we simply can’t feel the space.  It isn’t contained, and neither our we.  Two parallel walls, with holes cut out of them to enable us to feel their thickness sensually, give birth to the room, the primordial spatial cell.  If the walls are too far apart, we swim in the resulting room.  If they’re too close together, we feel constricted, contained too forcefully.  But if only one measure between thick walls can create a space we can perceive authentically, how can we build larger rooms, or even towns, without making them all look like the Mesquita in Cordoba?

Van der Laan answers with jargon:  juxtaposition and superposition.  You don’t have to limit yourself to small rooms whose width is derived from the thickness of their walls.  As long as the essential spatial cell is present in the building, you can leave out the walls which define spatial cells placed next to each other or within larger cells.  The key ingredients are the walls, which make the original cell possible, and the spatial cell itself as building block which generates the whole building.

A basic spatial cell, an essential piece of space which we can feel sensually:  where have we encountered it before?  In buildings and towns we call classical.  The basic cell, with its centre, its boundaries, and its size, orders and generates the building.  No part of the building is unrelated to the generative cell.  The building grows round its centre, even though its centre may not be in the middle of the composition.  It hardly requires a huge leap of faith to remember our original and continuing experience of containment.  Without literal containment, thanks to the walls, the space falls apart.  Without containment on the map of our psychological experience, our ego falls apart, commits the sin of pride, and begins to dominate the world and all who dwell within it.

Containment is the theme.  Containment is a proven way to compose and to build spaces, buildings, and towns whose order and whose poetry we perceive automatically.  Containment is also our own psychological history.  Call it classical; call it inbred; call it God-given:  containment is at once a way of building and an attitude born of human experience.

The circle has come round.  We have uncovered knowledge embedded in our memories of building and in the memory of our own psychological development.  Pattern books and theories may help us rediscover what we already know.  They may remind us we already know how to build towns and buildings in harmony with our own nature.  But they can form no substitute for remembering the attitude that gave rise to them.  The attitude is our need to contain, to contain our memories, our treasures, our holy centres.  A world without a spatial and psychological centre cannot meaningfully contain us.  But a built world composed of recognisable centres can lead to worlds within worlds, all sensually and psychologically adequate.  The centre is the source, and containing it is the goal.

 

 

 

1  D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York:  Basic Books, Inc., 1971).
2  Anthony Stevens, On Jung (London:  Routledge, 1990).
3  W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York:  Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977), pp. 184-185.
4  Demetri Porphyrios, ‘Classicism is Not a Style’ in Andreas Papadakis & Harriet Watson, ed., New Classicism (The Hague:  SDU Publishers, 1990), pp. 19-21.
5  See Dom H. van der Laan, De architectonische ruimte (Leiden:  E. J. Brill, 1983); Richard Padovan, Dom Hans van der Laan:  Modern Primitive (Amsterdam:  Architectura & Natura Press, 1994); Alberto Ferlenga and Paola Verde, Dom Hans van der Laan:  le opere, gli scritti (Milano:  Electa, 2000).