WANDERING CONTEXTUALITIES

By the twentieth century the world witnesses an accelerated change in pace and variety of spatial experiences. The invention and spread of transportation vehicles our perception of space transformed in a way that shaped our relations with our spaces. Most crucial vehicles affecting our modes of perceiving architecture and city are namely trains, cars, airplanes and camera. I preferred to mention camera as listing the transportation vehicles because it also provides a kind of transportation different than other, that I will mention later. Those means of transportation changed our cognition of space, time, distance as well as our physical and social boundaries in relation to inhabiting a space.
In his book ‘zoomscape’ Mitchell Schwarzer discusses each of these items in a detailed way. Zoomscape is a concept that is defined by Schwarzer as ‘ a largely optical mode of perception characterized by speed and surface’. As it is clearly understood from his definition, in recent times our perception of spaces mostly depends on speed and surface. For instance as train or car introduces the concept of speed and motion to our cognition of space, airplane or cinema provides a new two dimensional way of perception. All those items mentioned brought up their own modes of experiences and their own architectural viewpoints. Rather than following Schwarzer’s titles directly I will discuss those new spatial perceptions in another division considering particular criteria namely pace, motion, degree of hapticness etc.
First it is crucial to mention the experience of space based on walking as it is the oldest mode of perception of architecture and city. Walking is the most natural and familiar way that we experience our spaces. No matter how much the transportation vehicles are advanced, we will always somehow experience the space on foot. With its slow pace it is maybe the most haptic way of spatial perception. Also wandering around on foot provides us more flexibility as the control of our path completely depends to us. It is freer than following the defined path of a highway, or railroad or a pre-edited camera shot sequence. But it is also restricted with our existing physical and social boundaries. Not like in a movie that we can experience any kind of space without the consideration of social or bodily limits. For instance we can’t experience a detective chase in the backstreets of a city as watching a film-noir. Still, especially for our interior experiences, walking is an irreplaceable experience of architecture or city.
Public transportation vehicles namely buses or trains have many common points in terms of the experience they provide to the wanderer. Although bus and train offer different paces, their most important similarity lays in the limits of freedom they can provide. The wanderer is not a free one as traveling by bus or train. He/she is more close to the experience in Eisenstein’s defined path then Bruno’s site-seer. The same and defined shots and montages through following a route on a highway or a railroad is the only possible experience of that passenger. So he/she is limited with a steady view from the window of a train or a bus and has little chance to arrange own spatial sequence.
However wanderer in an automobile has the freedom to choose the route of the travel and to create a personalized way of seeing. Car travel offers an alluring combination of the freedom of walking and the velocity of train as Schwarzer mentions in ‘automobile’ chapter of his book. Automobile provides variety of viewing angles and orientations; and as a result wandering by car opens up many different and new perspectives of architecture and city. Another contribution of automobile to our perception of space is that by an effect of sequence of film shots, it creates a unified image in our minds. So as driving, we edit our own path of wandering and then we choose the viewpoints through the orientation of the car, and we constitute an image, an experience of the city in our own cognitive maps. In that unified, continuous image of city architecture becomes an inseparable part of our sequence, so it is not perceived as an isolated object. From that point of view, Schwarzer compares the driver to the movie spectator and the images viewed by driver to the moving frames, shots. According to him another similarity between film and automobile is the freedom they both offer as a passage to a new world.
The last transportation vehicle that I will mention as a manipulator of our spatial perception is the movie camera. Cinema offers its spectator an experience that is not bounded with bodily or social boundaries. Although it may display similarities with wandering by car, it allows us to experience spaces that are inaccessible for a car. We may be wandering in a space that belongs to centuries ago, we may be going deep undersea, we may be in a futuristic city or even we may be sitting on the same seat in the movie house. So the spatial experience offered by movie camera enables us to extend beyond our physical boundaries and takes us to ‘elsewhere’ by giving the ‘sensation of displacement’ as mentioned by Kaja Silverman in his article ‘Political Ecstasy’. Silverman defines filmic sounds and images as perceptions rather than representations. As film, itself, is a perception and it inhabits in time, it becomes possible to mediate and identify the spectators through the narration of the film. So the spectator will start to see from the eyes of the camera lens. He/she will be ‘transported’ from himself/herself to the surface of the movie screen, in Silverman’s words; ‘the spectator disappears forever into the cinematic experience.’ Just like the Chinese painter lost in the landscape painting he painted. So the experience will be on the surface of the screen detached from the boundaries of actual space and time.
The concept of zoomscape aroused by Mitchell Schwarzer is a melting pot of various modes of perception of and existing in architecture and space in 20th and 21st centuries. Every mode of transportation defines its own spatial cognition and also its own architectural language. Our conception of time and space is freer than our ancestors with multiple choices provided by different ways of physically and mentally wandering. As a result of this freedom architecture and city is also set free from rigid boundaries. Although architecture seems to become ‘placeless’, it gains a different ‘sense of place’ defined by how we see and experience it. So every perception structures its own understanding of place. ‘The cartographic perspectives and quantitative analyses of the planning profession had little relevance for the myriad ways in which people actually inhabit and regard landscapes’ claims Schwarzer with reference to William H. Whyte. So through ‘the geography of lived and living space’ and our own perceptions and experiences by various vehicles we construct our own maps as Guiliano Bruno’s example of film as a modern cartography. Through all these concepts architecture find a new context which is detached from the usual understanding of place based on ground relation; a new context which is contextualized according to each wandering and experience.
References:

1.Bruno, Guiliano, “ Atlas of Emotions” ,pp.2-71
2.Schwarzer, Mitchell, “ Zoomscape”, “Introduction” pp. 9-29
3.Schwarzer, Mitchell, “ Zoomscape”, “Chapter 2: Automobile”, pp. 71-116
4.Silverman, Kaja, “The Threshold of the Visible World”, “Chapter 3: Political Ecstasy”, pp. 83-121
5.Eisenstein, Sergei M., “Montage and Architecture”, Assemblage, 10 (1989), pp.111-115