Everyday Liminality

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Everyday Liminality

Brozowski, Brodrick

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10429/2058

Date: 2020-09-10

Abstract:

Throughout life one is presented with moments of heightened experience, but they are all connected by a seemingly infinite amount of in-between moments. The combination of these in-between moments creates a concept of everydayness, or typical routines lived through day in and day out. These routines construct and assign a sense of intelligibility to the lived world. Growing from infant to toddler and through childhood one constructs intelligibility of the lived world. It is how one learns and makes sense of what they experience in the world. Without that intelligibility, life would simply be chaos. Living through these everyday routines one finds that their mind can be easily distracted and floats adrift. The routine activity happens so frequently that it becomes mundane and no longer requires one’s undivided attention. Their mind travels back and forth in time, remembering past events or thinking ahead to what the future holds whether it be the day ahead or a more rewarding payoff. They become so quickly fixated on small details, what’s ahead or behind them, that they forget to pay attention to the entire picture as it lies before them. This unmindfulness, while not always viewed as positive, is an unavoidable byproduct of one’s lived experience. It provides an escape from constant perceptual experience. Within the built environment experienced daily, opportunities for unmindfulness present themselves frequently as liminal spaces. These spaces are neither here nor there. They truly are in-between spaces. They can be as small as a peep hole or as large as the night sky. They influence our behaviors and promote the unmindful drifts of those that visit them in their search for meaning in the lived world.

Description:

Everyday Liminality is a discourse which investigates liminal spaces within the built environment; more specifically, how they relate to us and influence our perceptions. However, before arriving at this concept, the thesis was aimed at investigating the relationship between architecture and cinema. Thorough research was performed dissecting articles and essays by philosophers, architects and prominent film theorists, such as Sergei Eisenstein. The thesis looked not only at theories behind film and its relationship to architecture, but also some of its more technical aspects. The history of storytelling and its implementation within architecture was briefly explored as well as techniques used by cinematographers to visually tell the stories of their respective directors. While not much of this information found its way into this main body of work and eventual thesis, it did have a large influence on how qualitative investigation studies were performed and captured using a camera to produce short films used as a medium for conveying and investigating conceptual ideas, answering questions, and posing new ones. Those initial investigations served as steppingstones which led to the discovery of Cinematic Aided Design by Francois Penz. Penz, a professor of architecture and the moving image at the University of Cambridge, has been investigating and teaching the intersection of architecture and cinema for over two decades. In Cinematic Aided Design he forms a relationship between cinema and architecture through the concept of everydayness. He references numerous philosophers and architects who have written on the subject; but most prominently, he reflects on the theories and writing of Henri Lefebvre. A French philosopher and sociologist, Lefebvre, is best known for his theories and critique of everyday life. His essay, The Everyday and Everydayness, served as reference and inspiration for the foundational concepts explored by this thesis. Lefebvre asks, “Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary?” (Lefebvre, 1987). Through the study of everydayness, one can start to recognize the foundation and connections it provides in life. Everydayness hosts a mundane nature, but it can have varied effects on how one might perceive their relationship with time. Therefore, the thesis first explains different concepts of time and attempts to understand our perceptions of it to assist in understanding everydayness and the concepts that follow it. Understanding one’s perception of time, specifically how it relates to their everydayness, unmindfulness reveals itself as byproduct. Everydayness in its very nature is repetitive, to the point that one is no longer required nor captivated enough to pay full attention to the task at hand or surrounding environment. The mind is, perhaps unintentionally, allowed to drift or become distracted. This unmindfulness can translate to one’s perception of time in two distinct results of either acceleration of stagnation. After understanding the possible variations of perceived time, the essay On Slowness, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, lends insight to how one perceives the built environment. As architects they understand that no two experiences of a space can be the same because of all the distractions that circulate and come unfiltered into one’s mind. These distractions, and their resulting unmindfulness, happen most often during those routine times or as we travel through in-between spaces. Neither here nor there, Marc Augé refers to these in-between spaces as non-places. Augé, a French anthropologist, coined the term to describe these spaces that lie as contradictions to anthropological places. Just as the space is clean of any history, relation, or identity, its users assume a collective identity, being stripped of their personal one, unconsciously offering it to the powers that govern these spaces. Broadening Augé’s term, this thesis finds its focus on liminal spaces. These spaces are central in connecting the places one travels to, day in and day out. Augé has recognized that these spaces have expanded as civilization has grown. Recognizing their expansion, a better understanding of how they work in relation to human behavior could imply the necessity for more strategic execution in the placement and design of these spaces in order to achieve design and user experience goals.

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