Looking at U.S. Architecture through ‘Feminine’ Aspects Essay

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From ancient times, philosophers like Plato have developed the concept of the ‘Feminine’ as the weaker side of creation. The earth/ matter is feminine and the mind/ creativity is masculine. The poet, John Donne writes in ‘Aire and Angels’ that women are incomplete, passive matter/body and the male mind, is the divine/active/complete force behind creation. The binaries of male/female as strong/weak, active/passive mind or will force/ silent matter, presence/ absence was fixed till the Structuralist era of criticism. However, the Post-Structuralist era broke with all these binaries, making identities relative rather than fixed. The Feminist movement and the Post-Modernist movement are thus born in tandem in the U.S. in the 1960s-1970s. Kate Millett’s ‘Sexual Politics’ and Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ were texts of breakthrough potential in terms of subverting the notions of the female/the feminine and the feminist in social, economic, political and cultural arenas. Thus, Feminism looks at art, architecture, sculpture and literature in its unique way. (Kim-Shyan, 469)

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The Female view of Architecture

The scholarly article in question, Deborah Fausch’s ‘The Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History—Towards a feminist architecture relates to a feminine viewpoint of architecture. She critiques the concepts of architecture as it is exclusively seen as a ‘male’ thing that is fixed in terms of space/time and cannot be perceived aesthetically except by sight. The quotes given above are about a different way of ‘feeling’ architecture. A building is a work of art and it is not completely sensed with the visual which is a limited way of seeing. Fausch chooses to subvert the traditional ways of appreciating and critiquing architectural monuments.

History has always perceived women as the ‘body’ or ‘matter’. According to Simone De Beauvoir, woman was seen as ‘mulier utero’—‘a womb’. (Jones, 115-119) Thus, she automatically becomes silent, her presence is not to be felt, she is blind to the intellectual aspects of the world. She is emotional/irrational/bodily. She feels and understands everything not through her weak mind but her instincts and her bodily senses, thus to be treated with contempt or fear. This was the reason for the Western world’s disdain for ‘matter’. (Miles, 203)

Fausch argues that since architecture applies the body with mind, the idea with the matter, the rational and the abstraction, there can be a feminine aspect of architecture, which uses all forms of ‘body knowledge’ to create a ‘second world’, as has been quoted by Hannah Arendt. This will go against the traditional, historical view of the ‘idea’ being superior to the ‘matter’, going against Rene Descartes’ claim that the purest form of being was in the mind. As the eye was the metaphor for the mind in Enlightenment philosophy, Fausch claims that the feminine view of architecture would rely on other senses of the body to feel the ‘matter’ of architecture. She believes that the spatial concept perceived by the eye is relative and at times, faulty. In fact, modern technology has ensured connections beyond the eye and so, the eye becomes an unreliable, bodiless source of vision. Thus, the Feminine, sensual appreciation of architecture is an essentialist strategy. (Fausch, 426-433)

Mario Botta’s house at Cadennazo is cited by Fausch as an example of late-modernist architecture that is built on the lines of being ‘tangible’ and ‘visible’ in photography. She rejects this kind of obviously ‘male’ architecture and moves on to Le Corbusier’s monuments like the chapel he built at La Tourette. The unique part of this dark, high, oblong chapel is that its architecture must be perceived as reverberations of sound and movement of one’s body along and inside the chapel, rather than appreciate its beauty only by sight. Thus it will need a ‘feminine appreciation. (Miles, 203) Fausch also states the example of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran Memorial in Washington D.C. which is startling in its non-visibility. The actual monument lies in the middle of a flat lawn in the capital and just as one gets shocked on coming across an unexpected grave, so also the sudden appearance of the black wall is shocking. It looks like an ugly gash on the face of the neat, manicured lawns. However, its presence is infinite, as opposed to the linearity of the lawn. The names of the soldiers and the martyrs are engraved on the black wall and the visitor is drawn to feel the poignance of the monument by touching those names. It almost feels like a visit down to the graves of these soldiers. Fausch cites the example of a similar architectural piece in the Forty-Third street down to the United Nations Plaza in New York. There is an enframing site of a marble panel that has the Old Testament verses carved on it. This provides solace and a strange feeling of sorrow as one realizes that the hope of these peaceful words is in vain in the present world. Thus, according to Fausch, the relation between motion and emotion; words and movement is discovered in architecture. (Fausch, 426-433)

Welcome Park and Franklin Court at Center City area of Philadelphia built by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown are the next examples of ‘bodily’ architecture, presented by Fausch. Copley Square in Boston and Western Plaza in Washington D.C. are other pieces of architectural parks by the same architects. They are famous for their designs of presenting the history of a place in miniaturizations. (Miles, 203) Welcome Park is built on the site of William Penn’s house, ‘Slate Roof House’. Thus, Welcome Park has been designed to show the miniature map of historic Philadelphia. The plan cannot be appreciated by photographs or by sight alone. One has the eerie sense of becoming a hyper-identity a s one walks beside the miniaturized houses, trees, the statue of William Penn and the colorful mural at the end of the park. Visitors to the park have to see and feel the history of the area even as they ‘walk on the map’. The roads change from concrete and red-sandstone to marble and the textures need to be experienced. Also, the body is involved in perceiving essentially ‘visual’ and ‘word’ signs like the road names. The road names are made part of history as they are carved onto the roads which the visitors walk on and even in the reproduction of the river with waves drawn on the roads. Thus, just as the Greeks believed in using the body- ‘rhyme, rhythm, song, dance and story’ for a complete, unified experience of the world, Welcome Park also suspends our sense of spatiality and awareness by using the kinetic, the visual and the projective in making the postmodern individual ‘enter’ into history. (Jones, 115-119)

Franklin Court, named after the illustrious Benjamin Franklin, is situated in Market Street, just a few blocks away from Welcome Park. It is a row of brownstone houses that were the original houses that Franklin let out for rent, behind which is Franklin’s house, turned into a museum. Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown have not touched the landscape, except by building two oversized ‘ghost’ houses of smooth, gray-white metal channels. One resembles a child’s doodling of a house, with a chimney and a pitched roof. This ghost house is roughly on the site of Benjamin’s mansion that strangely disappeared without trace. The second ghost house is set between the brownstone houses of Market Street and Franklin’s house. (Wekesser, 116)

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Fausch narrates how these ‘ghost’ houses seem like cartoons in photographs but when one enters the park and moves towards these houses, we see the actual stone foundations of the historical house on the site and a series of markers act as ‘words’ narrating the history of the place. Also, it is strange and poignant to walk down the seventeenth-century gardens and the houses in which there are quotations of the seventeenth-century dwellers who describe the idea of entering the ‘New World’ of America. Thus, again, a bodily sensation is required to appreciate the ‘dead’ but not ‘absent’ voice of lost history. Fausch cites other examples of U.S. architecture that can be sensed with the ‘feminine’/the ‘imaginal’/the ‘sensuous’/ the ‘instinctive’. She uses the essentialism of the woman as the ‘body’ to disrupt the ‘masculine’ disregard for matter but does not rely entirely on ‘bodily’ perception as the truth. She merely suggests an ‘alternative’ history of architecture, prioritizing ‘matter’ over ‘mind’. (Fausch, 426-433)

Works Cited

Fausch, Deborah. “The Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History, Toward a feminist architecture”. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Amanda Jones. London & New York: Routledge, 2005. 426-433.

Jones, Sandra. ‘The use of female sexuality in Australian alcohol advertising: public policy implications of young adults’ reactions to stereotypes’. Journal of Public Affairs, 9.9, (2009): 115-119.

Kim-Shyan, Fam. ‘Controversial product advertising: perceptions of three generational cohorts’. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 7.6, (2008): 461-469.

Miles, Angela. Feminism: from pressure to politics. NY: Black Rose Books, 2008.

Wekesser, Carol. Feminism: opposing viewpoints. NY: Greenhaven Press, 2005.

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