Taking Place

Alita Cha-Am.

Sometimes the more abstract and vessel-like landscape is the one we can enter, with a view into a distant landscape that is picturesque and irregular.  So this seems like a reversal of the pattern that places the messy real where you are and the abstract ideal where you aren’t.

Unless you transpose the qualifications “messy” and “abstract” and allow that the idealized part may be the part that’s messy and picturesque.  That idea is especially present in cultures like ours, where nature has assumed a sacred position, its sanctity measured in large part by its (seeming) removal from human habitation and influence.  The renaissance plaza, enacting our rationalism and obeying our laws of perspective, is foreground.  The natural landscape is the pure and inaccessible ideal (even is we have to build it ourselves).

The empty center matters in part because we are accustomed to regarding the center, and whatever is put there, as important.  It’s right there in the language:  You can be central, or you can be marginal.  Open up the center, and everything around it is set into tenuous stability or into motion.

into tenuous stability . . .

. . . or into motion

The center also matters because it’s not just the hole in the doughnut, it’s the space in the jar.  If a place is a vessel, it’s subject to the ways we perceive vessels.  And vessels are odd.  The point of a vessel is the space within it.  The vessel is just the hard shell that makes that space useful.  (Remember that when you drop a cast-iron pot on your foot.)  The solid part of a vessel has its own attributes - heavy or light, conductive or insulating, clear or opaque, pretty or ugly, portable or fixed - but they’re all about the space within, or at least about mediating our relationship to the space within and its contents.  

A bowl of soup, or a vase of flowers, or a box of macaroni; these things are complete, all happily chugging away doing what they’re meant to do.  But take away the soup, the flowers, and the macaroni.  The first thing you notice is that the vessel itself becomes much more prominent.  The second thing is that it’s incomplete.  The empty vessel is attached, implicitly, to something that isn’t there, and that gives it a different emotional quality.  An empty place can be mournful or spooky — think DeChirico — or it can be happily anticipatory — think the Esplanade, at dawn, on the fourth of July.  

So to create a vessel-like place that starts and stays empty is an interesting thing to do.

Frozen Pool, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C. 2004

photograph by Lyle Gomes

Here’s my overthinking:

1. As Deb suggests, empty spaces are not only more “clean,” or uncluttered, than spaces full of people, but more idealized, or abstract, as well.

2. We are wired to pay attention to people. For us to give a space itself our attention, it helps a lot to take the people out of the view.  (That’s why we should forgive architectural photographers for taking pictures of empty buildings and empty landscapes.)

3. And yet, seeing people in a space also aids our perception of it.  They give us cues not only to scale, but to the physical and cultural character of the space.  Without people, the space is not only more abstract and more visible, as noted above, but a little more mysterious.  We don’t have all the information we might like to (especially if human-scaled items like furniture are absent, or the materials are unfamiliar) and we become more alert to other cues — and yet still unsatisfied.

4. Another way we perceive spaces, whether actual or pictorial, is by imagining ourselves within them. In Body, Memory, and Architecture, Bloomer and Moore wrote “with a 1930’s ziggurat building such as the Chrysler Building . . . we can imagine scaling, leaping, and occupying its surface and interstices.”  It’s easy to imagine ourselves in a space if there are already others there.  As with our impulse to find a “scale figure,” the impulse to project ourselves inside a space is thwarted, leaving us with a small inarticulate itch.

5. Complementing all of the above is the sense in which an empty space can, aside from standing out for its quiet emptiness in a full and noisy world, capture the sense of a dramatic pause, a moment of suspension.  It has something in common with the space between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s fresco, or the moment before the Lachrymosa in Mozart’s Requiem, or a ball at the top of its arc, neither rising nor decending for a moment that lasts no actual time, or a soap bubble, or Stevens’s jar in Tennessee, or the charged internal space when people form a circle.  In our normal comfort-seeking lives, we fill that space with a table or a campfire; the empty circle is reserved, usually, for a sacred or solemn occasion set off from ordinary life.

6. Baseball.  Here the field is not empty; in fact it loses some of its charge after the game.  But when it’s occupied, it’s occupied in a highly regulated, geometric, and ritualized way.  Another sacred space.

7. Mianne calls it frustration; I’ll call it tension.  I think it’s a big part of what makes things interesting.  The thing that’s not quite right and completely right both at the same time.  We are drawn to faces that aren’t perfect, stories that leave questions unanswered, music we half-remember, words we half-understand.  To use the marketer’s term, I think that unresolved quality can make a thing “sticky.”  What’s understood and fulfilled is over; what’s mysterious and incomplete is

There’s my overthink.  I bet there are plenty of good examples (or counterexamples) in religious architecture, and natural landscapes, and art, and everywhere else.