By Ricky Sallemi
ABSTRACT:
‘Gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time’ according to the great feminist voice, Judith Butler in her 1990 paper Gender Troubles: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Essentially, an identity formed from a pre conceived set of actions and styles which society expects to either be masculine or feminine. Similarly, Magdalena J. Zaborowska argues that sexism and homophobia are what govern gender and identity through the enforcing of spatial relationships. Because of this, architectural language and gender language are able to blend, which allows for these themes of identity and representation to become apparent in architecture. Using Foreign Office Architects design of the Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002) in Yokohama, Japan, as a case study for this paper, it will look at how these themes become apparent in the cannon of architecture. This paper will first explore how the body is represented in architecture using principles from Freud, Filarete and Le Corbusier and ultimately determine what the biological gender would be for the terminal. Secondly, the paper will reveal the conduction of the building’s identity. Using Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, it will look at how society essentially reflects its views onto things; how it’s reflected in the building and how the building reflects it back to us. In conclusion the paper will determine the ultimate truth, architecture is similar to that of a drag performer, whilst the building can be read in one manner, its mannerisms and play of language allows it to appear as something else.
The great feminist voice; Judith Butler, once wrote in 1990’s Gender Troubles: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, that if the body is not a ‘being’ but instead a variable boundary where it’s surface permeability is regulated by politics, culture, gender hierarchy and heterosexuality, then what is left to constitute the ‘interior’ of said surface; what is left to constitute gender? These regulations lead to gender standards that create social fictions such as ‘natural sex’ and ‘real woman’ that over time, has produced the binary relation of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles. Essentially, she finishes stating that gender should be produced through the styling of body and body movements.[1] Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s essay comparing Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project (1927-40) to James Baldwin’s Giovani’s Room (1956) looks at themes of gender and sexuality through a whitewashed lens of American Culture in the early 20th century.[2] She similarly argues that sexism and homophobia are what controls notions of gender and identity through enforcing such gendered spatial relationships of the ‘women’s place in the kitchen’ and the ‘coming out of the closet’ for a gay person.[3] It is here that a cornerstone can be formed; that architectural space can lead to and create notions of gender and identity through representation and meaning.
The Yokohama International Port Terminal by Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects (FOA) (figure 1) was the winning 1995 design for a new pier in the bay of Yokohama, Japan. The project was officially opened in 2002 where it serves as a terminal for the stops of international and domestic cruise ships like the Queen Elizabeth 2 and Crystal Harmony. The building’s design is kept clean and simple allowing the architects to create what was considered a revolutionary design that seamlessly blends the program and structure.[4] But does the design of the building open itself up to a more elaborate system of analysis? The first half of the paper will look at the literal representation of body and how the work of great thinkers such as Freud and Filarete have constructed ways to project the body in architecture. The second half of the paper will look at the metaphorical breakdown of identity and its effect. It will begin by exploring Jacques Lacan theory about the mirror stage which frames the formation of self. It will then look at the formation of cultural identity, as already hinted at in the work of Butler and Zaborowska, to be an influence on the formation of gender. This papers main goal is to show that gender and body representation are important elements of design that should be used as guidance in architectural form.
Projection of Body
The body has been a key focus in the design world across all history according to Ellen Lupton as people like to build and make things that look like them. In her essay Second Skin: new design organics (2006), Lupton discusses the surfaces of objects; from lights, to chairs, and to building materials, acting like skin which allow for a fluctuating understanding of the objects meaning and function.[5] Representing the body in architecture has been a common practice for almost all of architectural history dating back to Vitruvius however Anthony Vidler believes that the practice of architecture is distancing itself further from the body. Vidler’s main argument for the loss of the body in architecture is from his belief that the development of modern, technology dependent architecture has muted the need for a perfect bodily proportion that was prevailing in classical and renaissance architecture. Ultimately it leads to modern architecture being nothing more than simply serving a program of sheltering the body, not incorporating it.[6] However, the body is always prevalent no matter what as Sigmund Freud’s projection can always be drawn and therefore breaks down Vidler’s argument. Freud describes the tradition of body projection as object-surrogates where one thing represents another. For example, the telescope as an eye, electrical circuits as a nervous system and a dwelling as the womb[7].Dating back to the renaissance, Filarete took the idea of body projection and proportion so far to suggest that the openings in built form mimic the openings and cavities of the human body which allow for a path to its proper functions. Bringing this metaphor to the next level, Filarete likens the architect to the buildings mother with the creative process mimicking labour and the buildings construction as the baby growing up.[8] Esther da Costa Meyer however challenges the matriarchal architect in her paper La Donna è Mobile (2000) about agoraphobia and spatial relations. In the paper, Meyer ponders if buildings are nothing more than an empty husk with which we apply repressed pathological behaviour. She presents research showing that agoraphobics create an association with leaving their house as a similar process to being birthed from the womb as according to Freud ‘everyone’s first environment is a woman’. This, she argues, destabilises Filarete’s theory of the mother architect as the building is in fact the mother to both architect and humans in general.[9]
As much as a projection can be made, it can only be read within the right language. As Kari Jormakka writes;
“Symbolism is arbitrary and only functions if the viewer has prior knowledge of the conventions”.[10]
The conventions in this case are those related to gender and therefore the creation of gendered architectural language. For example, feminine words would be holistic, sensual, communal, and interior whilst masculine words would be partitioned, monumental, egoistic, and exterior. Evidence of this behaviour has risen through the notorious social experiment by psychologist Erik H. Erikson where he analysed the play styles of young children and found that boys would construct environments that where external and sported some incarnation of a tower while girls would create a closed internal scene where they would pose dolls. He extrapolated from this that high-low relationships were of masculine thinking and open-closed relationships were of feminine thinking. Playing into Butlers thinking of gender being culturally influenced, Susan Saegert and Roger Hart both argue that the experiment is flawed as the test subjects have been encouraged to play in that manner through social expectations.[11] Regardless, a gender specific building language is no more prevalent than in the work of Le Corbusier.
“The naked man for me is the man who has surmounted himself … a complex of firm and rectangular planes. The naked man for me is architecture. When I no longer make architecture, I see everything as women.”[12]
Le Corbusier is trying to purify the world around him by modernising it through the removal of the primitive. Le Corbusier’s interpretation of built form was that straight, vertical lines were representation of the modern and the masculine while the horizontal and the curve were of female identity, representing the irrational and the primitive. It is these forms that he sees as a disfigurement to the rectilinear planes that form the basis of modern architecture. However it is in this exclusion of the feminine, he desires to return it in the form of art and public space.[13] Interpreting the naked man then, it would seem to be saying that for Le Corbusier, when he is done with creating his orthographic forms, he feels free to rationalise the loose, feminine curves which ironically grace his buildings as quite elegant features.
At the port terminal, an association has been made which compares the building to a complex landscape which has been compared to the nearby park and compliments the bays famous skyline.[14] However its systems of design open it to being an abstract representation of the human body. Working from the outside in, the skin of the building is kept very simple choosing to clad the building in timber, metal, grass and glass. This can create a fairly literal comparison to that of our own bodies. The timber would be representative of the skin, the material that visually comprises the exterior. The grass forms a relation to hair; just like real hair, it grows over time in precise areas, and helps to insulate the body. The metal cladding and features then brings to mind fingernails, being used to cap the undersides of the skin flaps whilst the glass can be seen as eyes that allow passengers to see. Passing through the flesh, the terminal opens itself up to even more projections, the core structure of the building can be a representation of the human spine with its ribbed modular shape of folded steel panels which conform to the curvature of the building, similar to how the modules of the spine curve with the body. On the topic of curvature, the building relies heavily on creating a voluptuous form that blends the program and circulation for the terminal whilst subtlety integrating the civic spaces of the rooftop plaza with the internal, travel related functions inside.[15] Principally, this curving form creates a geometry and language that classifies itself as feminine. The terminal can be simplified to a horizontal box that relies on its curved features, elements that Le Corbusier would write off as primal and absurd. Evidentially, it’s something his Brazilian counterpart Oscar Niemeyer would appreciate.
“It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, create by man. What attracts me is the free sensual curve – the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.”[16]
In bodily form, the Yokohama International Port Terminal is all woman. Its sinuous curves reflect that of the woman or, to be more accurate, the disfigured form of Alexandros of Antioch’s Venus de Milo (130 – 100 BCE), as shown in figure 2. Regardless to this, Freud’s object-surrogate will always trick the mind to draw such connections between body and built form.
Identity of Self
Returning to Judith Butler, she breaks down gender as the workings of sex, a necessary ritual in order for culture to survive and continue. It is the separation however of gender which is what evidently humanises us within the social and cultural environment and leads to the formation of gender ‘roles’, which are a preconceived set of actions that the gender should follow; failure to perform in these roles than result in social embarrassment and exclusion.[17] All things considered, these create mental processes and egos which ultimately create and shape who we are as humans by forging our identities. The mirror has always been used as a metaphor to represent truth and ideals. Because of this, we end up with statements such as a woman being ‘a mirror of feminine perfection’ which initially translates to the woman being presented in a way that reflects the societal views of woman at the time. Dörte Kuhlmann using this knowledge asks if architecture can be a mirror to also reflect the social world, including the gender spectrum and all its roles.[18] The mirror stage, as Jacques Lacan notes, proceeds to suggest the existence of a pre-mirror-stage body that is filled with an internalised drama that surrounds spatial identity.[19] According to Lacan, this stage of development is all about identification, wherein the subject assumes an image which has a predestined effect on them. Again, language is key to this aspect as it reinforces the particular images that the young mind uses to develop itself. This creates what Lacan calls, the ideal I, a form that exudes ego and is prior to any kind of social determination which will eventually lead to subjects formation of self; it essentially is at a discordance with own reality. At this stage the neonatal body begins to forge its relationship with nature and reality however it is hindered by its own incapacities.[20] As Lacan describes;
“The mirror state is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation – and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasises that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopaedic’ form of its totality – and to the finally donned armour of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.”[21]
This statement in short is Lacan highlighting the change from a speculative I to a social I which is based on the subjects influences and ends the mirror stage when the subject forges a link between I and differing social situations.[22]
A manifestation of Lacan’s mirror in architecture then would arguably be the Orders derived from ancient times. Analysing the Orders; Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, it becomes quite apparent that they take on a notion of the mirror stage through their appropriation of society.[23] Because these societal views are reflected in things like columns, they can project a behaviour onto people. Looking at the masculine aspect, the Victorian era produced an interesting character known as the ‘Corinthian Tom’.[24] The name stems from the decoration of the Corinthian column, where the top represents the aristocratic gentlemen of London, followed by the merchants and ‘respectables’, with the bottom is reserved for the lower class workers. The middle of the column interestingly enough is populated by the ‘ramblers’[25]; the Corinthian Toms. Tom is an upper-class man who was rich in not only wealth but charisma, looks and connections; a character that could essentially move anywhere in the city of London and strived for a life of pleasure. This character would ramble through the city, choreographing gendered space through the socialisation at venues which were perceived as male exclusive, creating an exclusion of women and putting them on sidelines and being treated more like a decoration to the urban landscape creating a play on power through spectating.[26] The characterisation created an identity for the men at time based on social discourse, they were reflecting society’s view of them but then by proxy, created a harsh image for women of objectification and exclusion.
The final mirror for self-reflection, gender, and identification is culture and can be seen in a convent. Possibly influenced by religious doctrine, it is the spaces themselves that give the identity to the nuns and create a culture of withdrawal. Pierre Bourdieu uses the term ‘habitus’ meaning to him, learned ignorance, to describe the construction of gender identity through a material culture. It evidently determines how men and women are either brought together or kept apart whilst also representing sexuality and the body.[27] The convent does this through segregation of the nuns from the community and the community from the nuns via games played in architectural form. The main play however is optical, design of convent chapels allow for nuns to be hidden behind ornate screens keeping their identity concealed. Ornamentation plays a key cultural link, unlike the woman attending the sermon, the nuns object to gregarious ornamentation on their bodies but what is lost is evidently picked up in the architecture.[28] Returning to the notion of the social mirror is Petra Blaisse and her writings on the Casa da Musica. In her writings, she makes an interesting point to romanticise the local culture. In the text she describes the building process of the rough and tumble workers.
“Inside, barely lit but warm, booted workmen with dark and light skins, heavy eyebrows and very blue eyes ate their lunch at long wooden tables. Breathing out the smell of fish and garlic and listening to melancholy music, they prepared for the next shift: moulding and pouring, filling, fencing, scraping and weaving, folding, sawing, welding, cutting, measuring, aligning; carrying enormous bundles of rods, planks, cables, pipes, packs and tools on shoulders, climbing up and down scaffoldings, balancing on planks bridging puddles and air – apparitions of men at work in the windy wet misty cold that clouds in from the sea.”[29]
This statement alone alludes to the seaside landscape of Porto and its people, but in the context of construction, suggests a relation to the structure of the building. As much as the men endure the environment during the processes of building, so must the building during its lifetime. This mentality of cultural identity follows through with the internal finishing’s for the curtains. Blaisse writes;
“I remember my mother and other women covering their hair with white or black lace before entering church with those special expressions that only mass brings- about: alternating between serenity, grief, concentration, boredom, dozing off until the singing brings everyone back to life.”[30]
This continues to tie a cultural link into the building by relating back to the community and creating a reference to her childhood. Creating these cultural links allow for architecture to contain a local identity, which is then able to impart the society views on those who visit the building.
Personal identity is a construct that’s dependent on the context of ones place in the societal landscape; if this is then true, how can this logic be applied to the Yokohama International Port Terminal. Historically, the area that the site is located was the only place where Western seamen were first allowed to dock their boats.[31] The site therefore is already loaded with an unfamiliar cultural identity to Japan and with it being an international passenger terminal, tourists that arrive, are treated foreign to the culture of Japan and vice versa. The buildings hybrid shape plays with this alien identity by making users reconsider how space is used through its integration of the civic programming; effectively making the building a mirror which reflects the passenger’s identity in Japan. Strangely however, a personal identity can be formed still for the building itself. Irénée Scalbert describes the topographical roof structure of the terminal as;
“If lawns, flowers and trees are deemed acceptable only for mothers and babies in prams, their negation in the form of timber or steel, or even mud! – a macho substitution of the artificial for natural – is best suited to ‘real’ men and to architects in love with ‘toughness’”.[32]
She questions the gender of materials through dual relationships; man-made versus nature, hard versus soft, male versus female. This duality disrupts the body as established in the first section of this essay, in essence, questing the gender ‘role’ of the terminal. For example, if the building form suggests femininity but the materiality suggest masculinity what exactly then is the identity that is being presented. Other parts of the building design also suggest masculinity, it’s monumental as it lies afloat on long, concrete piles that keep the pier in place, and it’s rectilinear in nature with a strong axial presence in an attempt to make a symmetrical design; these relationships being shown in figure 3. The buildings own identity of self is a confliction between these dualities presenting itself as both male and female, or, male with a female body. The terminals identity then is liken to that of a drag performer; a drag king, that blurs the boundaries of the oppositional gender typology.
Gender of Architecture
Gender can be a precarious topic to discuss, to some its twofold; your either male or female, to others, there’s a whole spectrum of genders influenced by self-identity and sexual preference. As Judith Butler states, ‘gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time’[33] and that’s exactly what is shown through Foreign Office Architects Yokohama International Port Terminal. Using the literal body, Freud’s object-surrogate theory allows for an understanding of creating bodily projections on to mundane objects which ultimately leads to a summation of the terminal being of feminine origin. The metaphorical idea of self and identity is captured through the reflection of Lacan’s mirror theory as to how self is perpetuated through an absorption of images. This then leads to an understanding of the Ancient Greek orders and a look at cultural identity through romanticism of context. The final conclusion to be drawn is that the terminal is a drag king, a woman who performs as a male, mocking their idiosyncrasies. Extrapolating from this analysis, architecture can have a gendered body, however the language of design opens buildings up to presents themselves in other manners; fundamentally all buildings are drag performers. All in all, Coop Himmelblau sums it up best, that architecture doesn’t need a literal incorporation of the body, it just needs to celebrate and embrace what makes us human.[34]
LIST OF CITATIONS (BIBLIOGRAPHY)
[1] Ellen Lupton, “Second Skin: New Design Organics,” Entry Paradise : new worlds of design (2006).
[2] Anthony Vidler, “The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture,” AA Files, no. 19 (1990).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Esther da Costa Meyer, “La Donna È Mobile,” in Gender and Architecture (New York ; Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
[6] Kari Jormakka, “The Flesh in Stone,” in The Gender of Space : Aalto Vs. Pietilä : Designing in Finnish : Designing on Slopes, Datutop (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 2001), 38.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Barbara Hooper, “Urban Space, Modernity, and Masculinist Desire: The Utopian Longings of Le Corbusier,” in Embodied Utopias : Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2002), 57.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Judith Butler Judith Butler, “Excerpts from ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’,” Gender space architecture an interdisciplinary introduction (London: Routledge, 2000).
[11] Magdalena J. Zaborowska, “From Baldwin’s Paris to Benjamin’s: The Architectonics of Race and Sexuality in Giovanni’s Room,” in Walter Benjamin and Architecture (London ; New York: Routledge, 2010).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Irénée Scalbert, “Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama International Port Terminal,” AA Files, no. 30 (1995).
[14] Scalbert, “Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama International Port Terminal.”
[15] Farshid Moussavi, “Hybrid Identities: Mutating Type,” Log, no. 10 (2007).
[16] David Kendrick Underwood, Oscar Niemeyer and Brazilian Free-Form Modernism (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 119 – 20.
[17] Butler, “Excerpts from ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’.”
[18] Dörte Kuhlmann, “Speculum Mundi,” in The Gender of Space : Aalto Vs. Pietilä : Designing in Finnish : Designing on Slopes, Datutop (Tampere: Tampere University of Technology, 2001).
[19] Vidler, “The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture.”
[20] Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits : A Selection (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977).
[21] Ibid., 97.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Jormakka, “The Flesh in Stone.”
[24] Jane Rendell, “Ramblers and Cyprians: Mobility, Visuality and the Gendering of Architectural Space,” in Gender and Architecture (New York ; Brisbane: John Wiley & Sons, 2000).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Helen Hills, “Architecture as Metaphor for the Body: The Case of Female Convents in Early Modern Italy,” ibid., 74.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Petra Blaisse, “Curtain as Architecture: Casa Da Musica, Porto, Portugal 1999-2005,” Inside outside (2007): 365.
[30] Ibid., 374.
[31] Scalbert, “Foreign Office Architects: Yokohama International Port Terminal.”
[32] Ibid., 87.
[33] Butler, “Excerpts from ‘Subversive Bodily Acts’.”
[34] Vidler, “The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post-Modern Culture,” 3.
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