Architecture

On Poetry and Space

September 6, 2021 by Cheryl Wilder

There is no shortage of cultural and global issues to be part of right now. I donate, volunteer, and support. But I’m constantly at odds with where to put my public service energy, often becoming overwhelmed by all the options*.

I also get sidetracked, wondering if the space where others live inspires or suppresses them? I can’t help but consider: Can examining our spaces–our homes and communities–change our relationship with them? Does that change help the common good? Since 2016, my answer keeps coming back as yes.

Writers are told to follow their obsessions.

I’ve written posts on poetry and space. Posts that barely scratch the surface of how I think about the topics. I need more dedicated time to weave these threads together. Next week, I start a grant application, that, if awarded, will fund research on poetry, space, and architecture. (Friend and writer Rita Lewis is helping me.) I’m also giving a seminar on the subject in October.

When I first researched architectural space, I saw a pattern. Historians and architects couldn’t describe the space created by the built environment. Instead, they turned to poetry, as some of us do when we want to understand what we cannot see. The pattern was revelatory to me. Poetry and architecture touched a core identity I struggled with: the idea of home. I felt others could benefit too.

Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, writes, “Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.” And Louis Hammer, in “Architecture and the Poetry of Space,” writes, “Every building is a palimpsest on which are written countless poems of space.” People are inhabitants. As inhabitants, people create poems. You’re in a poem right now. What does that poem say?

*Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement

If you get overwhelmed when it comes to public service, read Stanford University’s Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement. From the website: “The Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement describe a range of possibilities by which we can make a contribution to the common good.” Then take a survey that might help you find your path to civic engagement. It was built for students, but anyone can take it–no data is recorded.

On Home

February 23, 2020 by Cheryl Wilder

In his book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski says, “Before the idea of the home as the seat of family life could enter the human consciousness, it required the experience of both privacy and intimacy, neither of which had been possible in the medieval hall.”

The first time I encountered the concept of privacy was after my parents’ divorce. Mom moved, with my sister and me, from our three-bedroom house into a two-bedroom duplex. My sister and I shared a small bedroom that neither of us spent much time in except to sleep. As a seven-year-old, I was excited to have sleepovers with my big sister. At the age of eleven, she did not feel the same way.

We moved again, into a two-bedroom townhouse, and Mom gave my sister and me the master bedroom. With more space to move around, my sister hung sheets to divide the room in two, demanding her privacy. I couldn’t understand why she was so insistent on separating herself from me.

Then one day, she moved her stuff into our garage, leaving me in the large master bedroom with mirrored closet doors. Now nine years old, I would listen to Madonna’s first album and dance in front of the mirrors singing at the top of my lungs, “You just keep on pushing my love, over the borderline.” When I danced, I made sure to touch every piece of open floor space. I reveled in my privacy.

The Stuff of Home

What keeps me glued to the subject of home is it’s relation to the awakening of our interior selves. Rybzynski says this:

“Words such as ‘self-confidence,’ ‘self-esteem,’ ‘melancholy,’ and ‘sentimental’ appeared in English or French in their modern senses only two or three hundred years ago. Their use marked the emergence of something new in the human consciousness: the appearance of the internal world of the individual, of the self, and of the family. The significance of the evolution of domestic comfort can only be appreciated in this context. It is more than a simple search for physical well-being; it begins in the appreciation of the house as a setting for an emerging interior life.”

The word “home” in western culture comes from the Old Norse word heima, meaning “at home.” In its inception, the word encompassed the house and the household: dwelling, refuge, ownership, affection, the overall feeling of the place.

When I think of building self-esteem or self-confidence, the words used to define the meaning of heima make sense to me.

I am my own shelter; when I turn inward, there is a refuge.
As a source of affection, I am kind to myself, and therefore, self-reliant in times when I feel lonely.
I am confident when I feel ownership over my body, emotions, and thoughts.
In high school, I asked Mom for a scale. Her answer: “It’s not how much you weigh but how you feel about yourself.” She taught me to trust my overall feeling of the place. The place was me.

When I work to feel at home within myself, I simultaneously work on how I feel in a room, in a house, with other people, and in society. To build a home within me is to build a home within the world. I take refuge, affection, dwelling, and an overall feeling wherever I go. As my body changes with age, illness, or injury, it’s like moving into a new house; I learn the quirks of the structure; I make changes to represent the old me in a new space.

Privacy

My sister and I never had to share a room after the townhouse. I soon lost the large bedroom when we moved again, and never regained one of that size. But it taught me the power of space, solitude, and how to make my surroundings reflect my interior self. Not that I understood that intellectually at the time. But I carried the ideas with me thereafter; that room shaped a piece of my identity.

Intimacy

Intimacy, well that’s something that took longer to understand. Privacy is a physical construct. Walls of a house create a boundary between public and private. We go home and shut the door. If you share a room with your sibling, you hang a sheet.

But intimacy? The close familiarity of another person. As I reflect on childhood, that’s not so easy to pin down. Togetherness, affinity, confidentiality; how fickle those words feel in my adolescent memories. I had closeness with friends and, yes, felt attachment to my family. But when I look for a moment that awakened my awareness of intimacy, I think of my first comfortable silence.

I was a sophomore in high school. My neighbor’s bedroom was in the attic of his house and it had a skylight. He was two years older and whenever I went to hang out, his room was full of other friends. But one weeknight I went over and it was just the two of us. We talked, and then lay on the floor looking at the stars through the skylight, in silence. We weren’t touching; I only knew he was there by his presence. I felt my mind stop, like it does in meditation.

It’s easy for a teenager to feel pressure in high school; stress stems from so many different places. In the privacy of my neighbor’s room, all exterior influences were shut out. Inside the intimate moment that we created, I felt no coercion from him and no pressure from myself. I was at ease; present.

Moving my body across every inch of carpet in a childhood bedroom taught me the importance of having my own space and solitude; the comfortable silence taught me power in the space between two people.

I mentioned last month that it was ten years ago when I came to the idea that home is the space between two people. And it makes more sense today. A comfortable silence might be one of the more intimate exchanges between people; it’s an experience of refuge in both self and other.

Is there any better place to dwell?

On Making

August 30, 2019 by Cheryl Wilder

doll house front door and window with missy piggy on motorcycle and baby chick in doorway — I am soft tissue not load-bearing wall / though we both carry weight / of the not-yet known.

A work of art… is not a living thing… that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of human fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once. And you look for it, and though you know it you must hear it again. Though you know it you must see it again. Truly, a work of art is one that tells us that Nature cannot make what human’s can make.
Louis Kahn

To Make

I first heard the above quote in the movie, My Architect: A Son’s Journey. It’s a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn, an illegitimate son of the deceased architect, Louis Kahn. There’s many reasons I recommend watching the movie. But there’s one compelling aspect I want to touch on here: how the movie illustrates the complexities of life as an artist.

There’s failure. The need to make something out of nothing. To find beauty in chaos. More failure and the push to keep going. And yes, achievement. But one of the more complex topics the movie covers is sacrifice. What is the cost to throwing one’s life into creating art?

From the artist’s perspective, what is the cost to not throwing one’s life into creating art? Yet, the artist has to live in the world with everyone else, and to some of those people, the artist has responsibility. So, how does an artist find balance in life, with so many day-to-day factors to consider?

A Work of Art

I don’t have the answer for how to find balance as a working artist. Just like everyone else, artists need to traverse those decisions themselves, based on their personal lives and artistic goals. (If you want strategies, there’s plenty of resources and I am happy to share my own in future posts. Let me know if this appeals to you. For a couple examples on my process and struggle for balance, go here and here.)

What I do know, is that artists need to make things. Whether those things are as small as poems or as large as buildings.

When taking what Kahn says, “A work of art…[is] the making of a life,” it is easy to see how sacrifices are necessary and important. To make a life is no easy feat. What is sacrificed is the hard part. But this is what artists do in the process of making, decide what to keep and what to let go, all for the sake of the work. So how can that skill translate in life?

Again, there is no easy answer to that question. Perhaps the one thing to remember is that the work of art needs space made for it, just like bringing home a newborn baby or puppy. It’s a household affair. Routines will be adjusted, expectations changed. And since artists are the primary caregivers of their work, the capacity to extend themselves will be challenged, until maybe some of them won’t see what’s fallen out of reach.

Disclaimer

Louis Kahn died in 1974, and therefore, used the accepted terminology of “man” to represent humankind. I’ve taken the liberty to change “man” to “human” in his quote to reflect updated terminology, without changing his sentiment.

On Experience

May 4, 2019 by Cheryl Wilder

When I created my Facebook account in 2008, I felt daunted by the About Me section. Full disclosure: I’m not a natural at this sort of thing. I overthink. I doubt. Rinse and repeat. Not knowing what the world of Facebook would eventually entail (I joined to keep up with friends from graduate school), I summed myself up in one sentence and moved on: I’m an experiential junkie.

That statement is still true. I’m predominantly a kinesthetic and visual learner. I prefer to jump into the messiness of learning by process. To squeeze essence from a moment and make something new with it.

It’s also true, that I grow increasingly interested in the expression of experience through writing, and the study of experience through architecture and web design. When I have time of my own, I do more of the studying and expressing than the physical doing.

In the Name of Customer Service

My service industry career began at the age of 14 with my first job as a busgirl in a family-owned steakhouse, and ended at the age of 32 as a bartender in a neighborhood pool hall. Customer service has a direct in-the-moment focus on caring for someone else’s experience. What I do now (with the exception of client relations) is quite different than customer service, yet I always have the experience of others in mind.

While writing a poem, I’m motivated by someone reading it 100 years in the future. This helps me revise until the poem is clear and concise. Until I’ve fully expressed an idea or feeling or experience.

What I learn from studying architecture is no different. One aspect of design is to consider–and in many cases heighten or add meaning to–the experience of occupants based on the function of the building.

In web design, the practice of incorporating experience is plainly called, User Experience (UX). It sounds simpler than it is to implement, though I could say this about writing and architecture too.

On What Comes Natural

I recently attended a poetry reading where someone (who doesn’t write) asked if I was always thinking about writing, possibly taking notes in my head as we spoke. I understood where he was coming from, the image of the writer with the proverbial notebook. But I answered, no. That’s not how I process.

When I’m out “in the world,” I prefer to immerse inside the experience of it. If I’m lucky, I’m not thinking about anything. I’m simply being.

When I get in the car, that’s a different story. I take notes right away or wait until after a silent car ride where the experience can work its way through my head.

Full immersion is natural for me though of course it also takes effort to sustain. Distraction is so flashy. Responsibility, weighty at times.

I love what I do because I easily and happily become immersed in the work. Which is why I struggle with Facebook, and other in-the-moment social media outlets. I enjoy keeping up with friends, family, and local events. But for me to have fun and be in my natural and preferred state, I would have to immerse myself, which comes at a high cost to my creativity–I don’t have an abundance of time and extra brain space. And I simply can’t afford it.

On Space

April 5, 2019 by Cheryl Wilder

It’s been a few years since my last visit to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, designed by architect I.M. Pei. Honestly, it’s been too long since I sat in the presence of any well-designed building. I believe buildings that evoke the present moment are magical. The experience inspires me to be something more than myself.

And that’s one of art’s gifts, right? To hone a moment so acutely that a person believes there is no other activity she should be doing but listening / watching / reading / experiencing that charged moment. Architects, like other artists, are intent to create and enhance human experience.

Architect and writer Witold Rybczynski talks about the design process in his book, The Most Beautiful House in the World. At one point he says, “The designer slices through reality.” There’s not much to add to that statement. It is pure poetry.

And yet, Rybczynski describes what I attempt in my own work as a writer, to slice through what I believe to be true, and to make something new out of what I find. I’d even say I aspire to make something habitable. I connect the most with writing when I can make myself at home within it.

One cool factor of architecture is that people are inherently active participants. At the gallery, I get to walk up staircases, stand at the edge of a particularly sharp corner, feel smaller or larger (depending on the mood I bring with me) to the central atrium where, as a visitor, I feel central to the design.

In its simplest form, architecture harmonizes math, poetry, and nature. When it’s executed well, I feel the vibration of its musicality. I sense it waiting for me to sing.

On Poetry and Space

*Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement

On Home