Designing for Haptic Happenings

This following report furthers on an earlier blog titled Visualhaptic Types, this is a possible interpretation of how we can alter the dynamics of space to enhance the haptic experience.

Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum is one piece of architecture that concentrates itself on sensory design.

JEWISH MUSEUM, DANIEL LIBESKIND, 2001

The dark chasm of space heightens the bodily senses. The body desperately tries to find itself in space and is deprived of clarity and sense. This notion deprivation is not only felt in the space but in the body.

The labyrinth of leaning pillars destabilizes and unbalances the body in space. The direct tactile reading within the pillars almost completely nullifies the need for the visual sense.  The cold, rough and robust concrete is transferred into the feeling of that space immediately because of the tactile reading of that space.

‘CLARA CLARA’, RICHARD SERRA, 1983

The spatial positioning of the sculpture forces the viewer to go beyond the visual and to touch the corten steel structure. This is due to the experiential quality and the phenomenological affect of the sculpture falling onto the occupant of the space.

A journal by Yves-Alain Bois writes, “the spectator constantly has the strange impression that one wall goes ‘faster’ than the other, that the right and left sides of his body are not synchronized”

Bois, YA 1984, A picturesque stroll around “Clara-Clara”, The MIT press, October, vol.29, pp. 32-62

These two spaces use forms of compression and release architecture to derive sensory connections. Either in a sublime way, such as the Jewish museum or in a finer picturesque way as Serra does, the push and pull of these spaces allows for connections between visual and haptic senses to be made. The direct correlation from visual to bodily sense is cons crewed by the sculpture affecting the way the space is ‘felt’. The dark compressed chasm of space in libeskind’s holocaust chamber takes away all bodily senses. In this space the body desperately tries to find itself and is deprived of clarity and sense. This notion deprivation is felt in the space causing the body to react into a hyper reading of the space. The visual and tactile senses are used primarily as a means of orienting the body in space. The analyses of these types of architecture facilitate ideas in how to enhance the design process and strategize these conceptual beginnings into realized endings. Particularly the use of compression and release architecture is a vital element in this design process.

Compression and release style of architecture is an important tool in the design process as it enables the change of visual perspectives with in a spatial composition that in turn allows for the space to be read from a haptic sense. If done so correctly the compression and release of a said space can portray feeling of tactile surfaces given the value of the visual perspectives effect on the body in space. The phenomenological affect of this can be as simple as corten steel having a cold, hard and therefore hostile feeling.

S1, S2, S3 are experiments of compression and release that investigate how the spatial composition of undulating spaces and surfaces alter the visual perspective to connect to tactile senses. The experimentation of several sections and plans such as these led to a conclusion in the design process.

Architecture moving above and below the datum at various scales (sublime and picturesque) to create moments of compression and release that deepen the experiential quality of space.