Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design / Correspondence as Self-Altering Along Place-Making Viktorija Bogdanova Tadeja Zupančič Igor Toš Correspondences 281 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design WAYFARING AS THE ‘SOFTBALL’ METAPHOR A person can move on foot from one place to another in three ways: 1. by gazing at (dissolving within) the surrounding as isolated—sep- arated—from the self; 2. by walking with eyes wide closed, concealed in one’s own inner thoughts; 3. by establishing a dialogue with the surrounding through sensorial listening and reflective responsive- ness. Only the third way can be said to constitute a real journey, since the mode of displacement is transformative for both interlocutors: the traveler and the surroundings. This analogy can also be perceived as a metaphor for the research journey, in which human beings gen- erate and integrate explicit and tacit knowledge. The anthropologist Tim Ingold names this journey “wayfaring”: “combining move- ment and attention” in the process of discerning the outside world through inner means of perception and evaluation (2016|2007, 16). In a lecture titled “The Art of Paying Attention” (2017), Ingold illustrates the difference between scientific and artistic approaches. The first approach is compared to the hard-ball-metaphor : a hard ball hits a glass surface until it breaks to pieces. Then, scientists call this “a breakthrough”; they treat reality as a “series of resistant surfaces” which should be tortured to reveal secrets (Ingold 2017). On the contrary, the soft ball “takes the properties of the surface” while the surface deforms according to the intensity of the touch: a kind of “mutual responsive- ness and correspondence” occurs (Ingold 2017). The hard-ball isolates the object of research from reality by violating and devaluating its nature, while remaining rigidly unchanged itself; the soft-ball devel- ops a dialogue with the wider context of the surface, while allowing itself to be modified by the touch. The softball metaphor exhibits ar - tistic practices, but also the “wayfarer” mode of being and research. Why is the softball metaphor important for the artistic dimen- sion in architecture? The softball approach can be named a wayfaring through the design process. It is both sensitive discernment—the un- derstanding of spatial qualities (through experience)—and a poetic reviving of their relevance in a present context (through imagination). Poem-drawing is a syntonic mode of artistic thinking-through-doing Correspondences in spatial design. It works as a softball, a transformative tool that inter- weaves the paths of the wayfarer and the place of research. It cultivates a will to understand a spatial situation in depth and to carefully trans- late spatial values into guidelines for further design development. In research-through-design, it works as a “transducer”: a translator and generator of movements that come together as a “bundling of affects” named “enchantment” (Ingold, 2016). Thus, a spatial enchantment would mean “grabbing” the attention and offering “a path” of that attention that one can follow, in one’s own way, “in an affective correspondence of movements” (Ingold, 2016). It demands wayfarer’s awareness in rec- ognizing an existing chant in the world, which is later translated into an imagined place, pregnant with new enchantment-possibilities. Poem-drawings are knots on the way towards such enchantment, although as processual modes they are works influenced by and/or evoking enchantment in themselves. The aim of this essay is to em- phasize how their epistemological softness encourages: 1. a serious immersion into wayfarer’s embodied/tacit knowledge (not only explicit knowledge) as core factor in design; 2. an integration of what is sensed, felt, known, desired and created through the self, in an authentic way- faring with curiosity and care for the “person-world” 1 interweaving (Seamon, 2000, 5). For that purpose, it is important to stress from the very beginning that we refer to “embodied knowledge” not as the lower part of Polanyi’s pyramid 2 , but as “currents of water flowing around” an “archipelago of islands” – the accumulated data that form a network of static judgements and opinions (Ingold 2016). Hence, embodied knowl- edge is a field of action where poem-drawing allows a vertiginously turbulent review of what is considered “known” and “familiar” . They work like a disturbing “eddy” , or “vortex” (Ingold, 2016) that makes one look at the spatial context of the design task as seen for the first time. KNOWLEDGE THAT GROWS FROM THE INSIDE: INGOLD’S ANTHROPOLOGY AGAINST OBJECTIVITY To understand the relevance of poem-drawing as a wayfaring tool in spatial observation and re-creation, it is necessary to in- troduce the main conceptual guidelines in Ingold’s perspective of what thinking-through-making or research-through-design should contain as modes of understanding the world and the self as an in- herent part of that world. Let us elaborate a few of them by con- textualizing their relevance to the poem-drawing wayfaring. 1 Seamon uses the term “person- world intimacy” as a metaphor for the phenomenological research, according to which the person and the environment constitute an indivisible whole. This implies that the research relies heavily on the person’s attitude, receptivity and responsiveness. 2 Ingold uses Polanyi’s pyramid to visually demonstrate an understanding of tacit knowledge as the underwater part of a sinking pyramid, an immovable static deposit placed under the explicit knowledge (placed above water). He suggests the archipelago metaphor as a more dynamic visual alternative. 283 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design in spatial design. It works as a softball, a transformative tool that inter- weaves the paths of the wayfarer and the place of research. It cultivates a will to understand a spatial situation in depth and to carefully trans- late spatial values into guidelines for further design development. In research-through-design, it works as a “transducer”: a translator and generator of movements that come together as a “bundling of affects” named “enchantment” (Ingold, 2016). Thus, a spatial enchantment would mean “grabbing” the attention and offering “a path” of that attention that one can follow, in one’s own way, “in an affective correspondence of movements” (Ingold, 2016). It demands wayfarer’s awareness in rec- ognizing an existing chant in the world, which is later translated into an imagined place, pregnant with new enchantment-possibilities. Poem-drawings are knots on the way towards such enchantment, although as processual modes they are works influenced by and/or evoking enchantment in themselves. The aim of this essay is to em- phasize how their epistemological softness encourages: 1. a serious immersion into wayfarer’s embodied/tacit knowledge (not only explicit knowledge) as core factor in design; 2. an integration of what is sensed, felt, known, desired and created through the self, in an authentic way- faring with curiosity and care for the “person-world” 1 interweaving (Seamon, 2000, 5). For that purpose, it is important to stress from the very beginning that we refer to “embodied knowledge” not as the lower part of Polanyi’s pyramid 2 , but as “currents of water flowing around” an “archipelago of islands” – the accumulated data that form a network of static judgements and opinions (Ingold 2016). Hence, embodied knowl- edge is a field of action where poem-drawing allows a vertiginously turbulent review of what is considered “known” and “familiar” . They work like a disturbing “eddy” , or “vortex” (Ingold, 2016) that makes one look at the spatial context of the design task as seen for the first time. KNOWLEDGE THAT GROWS FROM THE INSIDE: INGOLD’S ANTHROPOLOGY AGAINST OBJECTIVITY To understand the relevance of poem-drawing as a wayfaring tool in spatial observation and re-creation, it is necessary to in- troduce the main conceptual guidelines in Ingold’s perspective of what thinking-through-making or research-through-design should contain as modes of understanding the world and the self as an in- herent part of that world. Let us elaborate a few of them by con- textualizing their relevance to the poem-drawing wayfaring. 1 Seamon uses the term “person- world intimacy” as a metaphor for the phenomenological research, according to which the person and the environment constitute an indivisible whole. This implies that the research relies heavily on the person’s attitude, receptivity and responsiveness. 2 Ingold uses Polanyi’s pyramid to visually demonstrate an understanding of tacit knowledge as the underwater part of a sinking pyramid, an immovable static deposit placed under the explicit knowledge (placed above water). He suggests the archipelago metaphor as a more dynamic visual alternative. Correspondences Truth Against Objectivity The core value of any research should be the “appeal for truth”, not use- fulness or pragmatic applicability (Ingold 2017). This concept of truth expands beyond the rigid obsession with accumulated data, isolated from the experiential and social context. In a similar manner, Alber- to Pérez-Gómez introduced the term “poiesis” to explain the way in which human beings (unlike animals) adapt to the environment; but this adaptation is always “aimed at more than preserving life” (2006, 6). In research environments that are sensitive to “poiesis” 3 and arts in spatial design, one’s search for truth and one’s tying to the world, should develop as “an antithesis of pragmatism” (Tarkovsky 1989, 40). Thus, the means for finding a personalized way in the creative process constitutes a “meta-language” that helps people “impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others” through spiritual bonding far beyond the level of physical crisscrossing (40). But what is the concept of truth in such a poetical approach to the built reality? According to Ingold, truth is a “unison of imagination and experience” in a “world in which we are alive and the world is alive to us” (2017). As such, truth depends largely on our “full participa- tion” in the world: in order to be truthful, all human knowledge must “grow from the inside” with our “participatory and observational in- volvement” in the places we are moving through (Ingold, 2018). While objectivity outside the self is core value in scientific experiment (aiming to “test” and “trick” the world), re-creation of truth through the self is the core value of the artistic experiment (“an experience enacted”) (Ingold, 2018). This statement echoes Tarkovsky’s rebellion against the abstract notion of order: his poetics of memory and logic of dreams call for ‘associative linking’ and both “affective and rational appraisal” by the spectator, making him “a participant in the process of discov- ering the life” happening in the artwork (1989, 20). Another anthro- pologist stressing this difference in a similar way, is Ernest Cassirer: in his view, while artistic approaches offer an “intensification” of reality, scientific views appear as “abbreviations” of reality (1994|1944, 184). Poem-drawing allows the dialogue between author’s experience and imagination to become core ingredient in discovering the “true” way in design. It disturbs and re-creates both explicit and tacit experi- ence, the memory of emotional experience and creativity in cycles of two (non-linear) phases: moments of enlightenment (duende/epiphany, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity) and peri- ods of “elaboration” of that enlightenment (Carafoli, 2016, 412). What makes poem-drawing an important alternative mode in the search for truth through the self, becomes clear only when it is observed in 3 The process of making, transformation, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before” (Polkinghorne, 2004, 115). 285 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design Truth Against Objectivity The core value of any research should be the “appeal for truth”, not use- fulness or pragmatic applicability (Ingold 2017). This concept of truth expands beyond the rigid obsession with accumulated data, isolated from the experiential and social context. In a similar manner, Alber- to Pérez-Gómez introduced the term “poiesis” to explain the way in which human beings (unlike animals) adapt to the environment; but this adaptation is always “aimed at more than preserving life” (2006, 6). In research environments that are sensitive to “poiesis” 3 and arts in spatial design, one’s search for truth and one’s tying to the world, should develop as “an antithesis of pragmatism” (Tarkovsky 1989, 40). Thus, the means for finding a personalized way in the creative process constitutes a “meta-language” that helps people “impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others” through spiritual bonding far beyond the level of physical crisscrossing (40). But what is the concept of truth in such a poetical approach to the built reality? According to Ingold, truth is a “unison of imagination and experience” in a “world in which we are alive and the world is alive to us” (2017). As such, truth depends largely on our “full participa- tion” in the world: in order to be truthful, all human knowledge must “grow from the inside” with our “participatory and observational in- volvement” in the places we are moving through (Ingold, 2018). While objectivity outside the self is core value in scientific experiment (aiming to “test” and “trick” the world), re-creation of truth through the self is the core value of the artistic experiment (“an experience enacted”) (Ingold, 2018). This statement echoes Tarkovsky’s rebellion against the abstract notion of order: his poetics of memory and logic of dreams call for ‘associative linking’ and both “affective and rational appraisal” by the spectator, making him “a participant in the process of discov- ering the life” happening in the artwork (1989, 20). Another anthro- pologist stressing this difference in a similar way, is Ernest Cassirer: in his view, while artistic approaches offer an “intensification” of reality, scientific views appear as “abbreviations” of reality (1994|1944, 184). Poem-drawing allows the dialogue between author’s experience and imagination to become core ingredient in discovering the “true” way in design. It disturbs and re-creates both explicit and tacit experi- ence, the memory of emotional experience and creativity in cycles of two (non-linear) phases: moments of enlightenment (duende/epiphany, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity) and peri- ods of “elaboration” of that enlightenment (Carafoli, 2016, 412). What makes poem-drawing an important alternative mode in the search for truth through the self, becomes clear only when it is observed in 3 The process of making, transformation, “the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before” (Polkinghorne, 2004, 115). Correspondences 287 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design relation to the objective (conventional) tools of research and design: a knot along the way, where different modes of knowledge are integrat- ed, it offers a reflective view on the journey in a certain site-specific and time-specific moment. Poem-drawing grasps a relevant emotion- al condition, but its contextualization and integration in the design process occurs as a constructive dialogue between the subjective and objective dimension in architecture. Poem-drawings help the archi- tect to observe the design task not as a thing separated from him- self/herself, but as co-creative field of transformative forces moving through him/her, molding the path in each moment of the process. Wayfaring as Attentionality Against Interaction as Intentionality In a lecture in 2016, titled “Training the Senses” , Ingold tries to em- phasize the importance of response-ability as a core skill in wayfaring: a capacity to “go along with whatever is occupying your attention” (2016). Two preconditions for wayfaring are needed: 1. sensitivity in concentrating your attention in deeper levels of reading and interpret- ing the qualities of the place (an eddy, a knot); 2. going along through time, instead of leaping across points (closed circles) with blinded senses. The opposite of wayfaring is interaction: “back and forth” move- ment between “intentional beings” that share energies outside them- selves, using the hardball metaphor (2016). Wayfaring, on the other hand, cultivates a kind of correspondence: “two beings going along together and attending to one another” (2016). While intentionality stems from the representation of things, attentionallity moves through things: it flows through and around them, pervading them with ob- server’s attention and presence. Hence: a self-altering dialogue is being established. It is not only about “corresponding” between the parts included in this dialogue, it is also about differentiating themselves from the other. This process of differentiation resembles Simondon’s or Jung’s individuation process: never complete, always on-going, a life-long transformative process of self-discovery and self-altering. Additionally, there is a difference between the anatomical hu- man body and the body of attention. An illustrative example of the second concept is the process of hearing: “the body is stretching to- wards” the sounds coming from the outside, so it becomes a “bundle of sensations” that spread in different direction, intertwining inside the listening subject (Ingold 2017). This is a much different approach than explaining: “in order to perceive work as art, you have to let it be in you in its presence” , while you, on the other hand, are attend- ing it from the inside by paying attention to that presence (2017). A processual design tool, poem-drawing can cultivate an acute attention and dialogue. It is modifiable according to the innerness of Correspondences the architect, and the time-spatial context of the design task. It meets the core requirement of phenomenological research: the researcher must adapt his instruments according to his or her own truth and the “nature and circumstances of the phenomenon” (Seamon 2000, 11). A poem-drawing helps one prepare his or her being for listening to the current whisper of a specific place on different levels. The design- er corresponds with a place of intervention not only by sensing and contemplating with its appearance from the inside, but also re-imag- ining this whisper in an appropriate future scenario. He is attending the whisper by inhabiting its presence in different time-frames. Method Against Methodology: Integration Against Accumulation of Knowledge Ingold uses the word ‘method’ not in Feyerabend’s connotation - a reductor of “the richness of being” (Feyerabend, 1999). On the con- trary, he refers to “method” as a transformative tool that allows going along with things, taking its shape according to the way the things unfold in the moment of attention. Unlike method, methodology is an “enemy of correspondence”: it works by “keeping distance from things” for the sake of pure “objectivity” (2017). Methodology immunizes the object of attention against (out of) its presence, decontextualizing its ongoing life: the extraction occurs in an insensitive way that leads to an obsessive “superstitious overestimating of naked facts” isolated from their relevance in the real world (Jung 1963, 361). Methodology does not offer any integration of “naked facts”; it accumulates them in an endless assemblage of outwardly articulated conjunctions. Ingold’s distinction between method and methodology leads to analogous distinction between quality and datum. Quality is the way a thing “reveals itself to you, becoming a part of your perception” , whereas datum 4 is the moment when you transform that quality into an abstrac- tion by “dividing a world of process, of flow” (2017). In tracing spatial values, how is it possible to reduce such violation of the life process of the observed phenomenon to a minimum? How to interpret a spatial quality through intuitive wayfaring, avoiding dead ends of abstract notions of order? “Pure objectivity is as illusory as pure transport … This illusion can be sustained by suppressing the embodied experience of place-to- place movement that is intrinsic to life, growth and knowledge” (Ingold 2016|2007, 105). The hardball approach generates this suppression, transforming the “erotic space between the known and the unknown” into a dry assemblage of conjunctions (Perez-Gomez 2006, 69). While observing the poem-drawings of renowned architects, we can understand their design decisions and spatial philosophies in a depth 4 A representation of a phenomenon into an understandable information, a fact, extracted from the wider complexity of its existence. Jung describes how extreme concreticism “sets too high a value on the importance of facts at the expense of the psychic independence of the individual”: it makes one “grow together” with the object of perception as result of non-articulated sensation (1963, 360-361). An extreme abstraction is the very opposite. In spatial observation, a rhythmical balance of abstraction and concretization would mean a rhythm of defamiliarization from and immersion in the environmental problem, a sequence of repetitive “small deaths” of one’s previous conceptions ways of learning to see, think and create (Peterson, 2018, 223). In this context, datum is an inevitable human reduction of reality; its intensity depends on how cultivated is one’s resistance towards extreme abstract or extreme concretistic attitude in reading and translating places. 289 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design the architect, and the time-spatial context of the design task. It meets the core requirement of phenomenological research: the researcher must adapt his instruments according to his or her own truth and the “nature and circumstances of the phenomenon” (Seamon 2000, 11). A poem-drawing helps one prepare his or her being for listening to the current whisper of a specific place on different levels. The design- er corresponds with a place of intervention not only by sensing and contemplating with its appearance from the inside, but also re-imag- ining this whisper in an appropriate future scenario. He is attending the whisper by inhabiting its presence in different time-frames. Method Against Methodology: Integration Against Accumulation of Knowledge Ingold uses the word ‘method’ not in Feyerabend’s connotation - a reductor of “the richness of being” (Feyerabend, 1999). On the con- trary, he refers to “method” as a transformative tool that allows going along with things, taking its shape according to the way the things unfold in the moment of attention. Unlike method, methodology is an “enemy of correspondence”: it works by “keeping distance from things” for the sake of pure “objectivity” (2017). Methodology immunizes the object of attention against (out of) its presence, decontextualizing its ongoing life: the extraction occurs in an insensitive way that leads to an obsessive “superstitious overestimating of naked facts” isolated from their relevance in the real world (Jung 1963, 361). Methodology does not offer any integration of “naked facts”; it accumulates them in an endless assemblage of outwardly articulated conjunctions. Ingold’s distinction between method and methodology leads to analogous distinction between quality and datum. Quality is the way a thing “reveals itself to you, becoming a part of your perception” , whereas datum 4 is the moment when you transform that quality into an abstrac- tion by “dividing a world of process, of flow” (2017). In tracing spatial values, how is it possible to reduce such violation of the life process of the observed phenomenon to a minimum? How to interpret a spatial quality through intuitive wayfaring, avoiding dead ends of abstract notions of order? “Pure objectivity is as illusory as pure transport … This illusion can be sustained by suppressing the embodied experience of place-to- place movement that is intrinsic to life, growth and knowledge” (Ingold 2016|2007, 105). The hardball approach generates this suppression, transforming the “erotic space between the known and the unknown” into a dry assemblage of conjunctions (Perez-Gomez 2006, 69). While observing the poem-drawings of renowned architects, we can understand their design decisions and spatial philosophies in a depth 4 A representation of a phenomenon into an understandable information, a fact, extracted from the wider complexity of its existence. Jung describes how extreme concreticism “sets too high a value on the importance of facts at the expense of the psychic independence of the individual”: it makes one “grow together” with the object of perception as result of non-articulated sensation (1963, 360-361). An extreme abstraction is the very opposite. In spatial observation, a rhythmical balance of abstraction and concretization would mean a rhythm of defamiliarization from and immersion in the environmental problem, a sequence of repetitive “small deaths” of one’s previous conceptions ways of learning to see, think and create (Peterson, 2018, 223). In this context, datum is an inevitable human reduction of reality; its intensity depends on how cultivated is one’s resistance towards extreme abstract or extreme concretistic attitude in reading and translating places. Correspondences 291 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design that goes beyond any methodology or principle (Kulper, Hejduk, Le Corbusier, Van Den Berghe, Holl). They exhibit the architect’s discipline of everyday spiritual growth, life and knowledge creation; they trace the creative process by exhibiting moments of “progressional ordering of reality” (Jarvis 1997, 69 qtd. in Ingold 2016|2007, 91) or as “inte- gration of knowledge along a path or travel” (Ingold 2016|2007, 91). VARIETIES OF SPATIAL WAYFARING THROUGH POEM-DRAWING Poem-drawing can be considered to open intimate windows between the self and the observed phenomenon (architectural or urban setting) because it is, in itself, a “softball” tool which tries to trace life itself, as felt by a wayfarer. Translating the movements of life, which never have a clear final meaning, it aims to “clarify” an experience (felt, desired, designed) by grasping its flow in a creative knot in the design process: “the threads from which it is traced are lines of wayfaring” (Ingold 2016|2007, 104). Depending on the time period in which the poem-drawing appears, it frames the interweaving of different threads of knowledge: the inter- weaving varieties define influential reflections within the design process. Generally, we can distinguish three types of influence: 1. emotive (instead of descriptive) re-reading of the place (cultivating perception through the self); 2. poetic generation of spatial ideas, free from an overtly precise linguistic and visual architectural language; 3. reflective defamiliarization from routine perception – artistic procedure of creat- ing a resonance between otherwise disparate images, enhancing of the perception of the familiar through cycles of distancing from and im- mersing in the design-related problematique. But these “types” – they never occur linearly; more often, we use combination of two or three of them, according to the complexity of the specific Path-finding. Anal- ogously, we exhibit three types of wayfaring through poem-drawing: the design examples via case studies, and the author’s personal works. Re-Reading Places Through the Present Self: Wayfaring as Concretization / Topo-Empathy We use the word “re-reading” to stress the importance of vigilant ob- servation of the place of intervention. It means re-establishment of the tie one has with a place by moving further and closer to it, inhab- iting with fresh senses, fully aware of inner and outer change. Here, poem-drawings work as instants of grasping such inhabitation, trans- formative participation and awareness. They enhance, trace and de- velop two states: being-in-love condition (passionate commitment) and Correspondences 1 Page cover of Journey to the East by Le Corbusier, translated by Ivan Žaknić, reproduced courtesy of The MIT Press 1 293 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design creative-process-condition (interpreting meanings through creating). Both reflect an intensified capacity in the architect to discern and re-create ties, metaphors, analogies between seemingly non-connected qualities. Re-reading places is most intensive at the beginning of the design process: collecting photographs, stories, maps, technical drawings, interviews – the entire body of extracted information that should be filtered through a personal meshwork of understanding. The moment when rough data transforms into relevant knowledge, is when we include empathy as a mode of understanding: seeing through the skin of the users, perceiving spatial entities as human beings (living Otherness), developing a will to understand a spatial problem from different view- points. And, it is not always concerning a spatial design problem: often, architects find journeys, artistic and cultural experiences, books and non-architectural references a source of inspiration that makes them displace their viewpoint and to see the world in the light of the new design task. In all cases, the architect’s inner self is the filter through which the threads of influence interweave and generate meanings that create an order out of what is perceived as a myriad of impressions. For example, Le Corbusier’s “Journey to the East” (2007|1911), [1] is a travelogue of the young architect, a testimony of wayfaring – with- out intention (not design-created observation) but with full attention towards reading the different layers of the environment he moved through. Only later did these notes of interweaved verses and draw- ings become core guidelines of his vision of the new architecture. These early “poem-drawings” can be considered tacit knowledge; their importance became visible when the author translated their spatial qualities in his design solution for the contemporary world. Le Cor- busier himself wrote “…to draw… to trace the lines… handle the volume, organize the surface… means first to look… to observe… to discover” (cited in Bolles+Wilson 2011, 20). The lessons in observing architecture are later applied in his holistic notion of place-making. Another example of re-reading a place is revisiting the memo- ry of emotional experiences related to their past appearance [2]. Jo Van Den Berghe opens a lecture at KU Leuven (2015) by reading a poem dedicated to his grandmother. Then, he exhibits a body of re- search concerning the house in which he grew up with her; since the house does not exist anymore, wayfaring is done through his em- bodied knowledge, lacking any dialogue with the other “users” of the house. By obsessive writing, re-drawing and recreations using working models, he succeeds to recognize spatial fragments that are embedded in his inner self as unconscious patterns that influence each of his designs. Similar research has been made by the author Correspondences in 2018: inspired by Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) (the interweaving of Andrey’s cinematic image and Arseny’s poems), an attempt to inves- tigate the embodied memory of the grand-maternal home was done through poem-drawing (Bogdanova & Zupancic, 2018, 222-234). The re-reading of places can revive historical spatial values through their contextualization in questions of the present. This is important because one cannot trace the values of a place without taking into consid- eration the stories of the people who were interwoven within that knot at different time periods. Here, we are not interested in historical facts or ac- cumulated chronological data; on the contrary, we are interested in trans- lating blind sensations and information into a living relevant ingredient of the present. To create this healthy degree of abstraction 5 , empathy and imagination are needed. As Alberto Perez Gomez has stated, “Whereas history recounts real facts from the past, poetry (fiction or drama) opens up the future by transcending the first order of reference to reality. In other words, fiction reveals what is essential for humans in recognition of our mortality and transcendence, and thus opens up potential realities for culture” (2006, 152). We need to bring mere data into presence by living through the skin of another human, plant, animal, from another time-space. We can have a visionary and hermeneutic approach towards the spatial values that surround us, only if we are able to integrate our own experiences (and dreams), our compassion with others’ experienc- es (and dreams) and the less-human features in our surrounding into a story which is meaningful and understandable as experiential truth. Figure [3] is an example where personal and borrowed memories are integrated with a poetic interpretation of facts in a spatial narra- tive. This is done through the skin of an imaginary character: a young pregnant woman from 1944. The aim is to discern how (and if) spa- tial values could vary through time in the culturally complex place of research: Ohrid city. Simultaneously, poem-drawings were gener- ated from two other co-researchers who developed stories through two other imaginary characters: an old lady in 2084 (dystopian sce- nario) and a 7-year old girl in 2018. By comparing poem-drawings from three time periods, we aimed to question whether it is possible to reveal which spatial qualities remain absolute, timeless, and de- rived from the specificity of a particular site. Figure [3] belongs to the first phase of the trialogues: re-reading the places by wayfaring through the memory of (lived and imaginary) emotional experience. 5 A degree of abstraction that is not to extreme and harmful in the devaluation of the object, that is not ignorant towards its core values, but builds upon their presence in reality. 2 2 Van Den Berghe, drawings excavating the memory of the old home. Screenshots from a lecture at KU Leuven, 05.02.2016 3 A poem-drawing in the first cycle of the trialogues in the research “Tracing Spatial Values Through Poem-Drawing” (Bogdanova, Spasevska and Nikova 2018, 129-143) 3 295 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design in 2018: inspired by Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) (the interweaving of Andrey’s cinematic image and Arseny’s poems), an attempt to inves- tigate the embodied memory of the grand-maternal home was done through poem-drawing (Bogdanova & Zupancic, 2018, 222-234). The re-reading of places can revive historical spatial values through their contextualization in questions of the present. This is important because one cannot trace the values of a place without taking into consid- eration the stories of the people who were interwoven within that knot at different time periods. Here, we are not interested in historical facts or ac- cumulated chronological data; on the contrary, we are interested in trans- lating blind sensations and information into a living relevant ingredient of the present. To create this healthy degree of abstraction 5 , empathy and imagination are needed. As Alberto Perez Gomez has stated, “Whereas history recounts real facts from the past, poetry (fiction or drama) opens up the future by transcending the first order of reference to reality. In other words, fiction reveals what is essential for humans in recognition of our mortality and transcendence, and thus opens up potential realities for culture” (2006, 152). We need to bring mere data into presence by living through the skin of another human, plant, animal, from another time-space. We can have a visionary and hermeneutic approach towards the spatial values that surround us, only if we are able to integrate our own experiences (and dreams), our compassion with others’ experienc- es (and dreams) and the less-human features in our surrounding into a story which is meaningful and understandable as experiential truth. Figure [3] is an example where personal and borrowed memories are integrated with a poetic interpretation of facts in a spatial narra- tive. This is done through the skin of an imaginary character: a young pregnant woman from 1944. The aim is to discern how (and if) spa- tial values could vary through time in the culturally complex place of research: Ohrid city. Simultaneously, poem-drawings were gener- ated from two other co-researchers who developed stories through two other imaginary characters: an old lady in 2084 (dystopian sce- nario) and a 7-year old girl in 2018. By comparing poem-drawings from three time periods, we aimed to question whether it is possible to reveal which spatial qualities remain absolute, timeless, and de- rived from the specificity of a particular site. Figure [3] belongs to the first phase of the trialogues: re-reading the places by wayfaring through the memory of (lived and imaginary) emotional experience. 5 A degree of abstraction that is not to extreme and harmful in the devaluation of the object, that is not ignorant towards its core values, but builds upon their presence in reality. Correspondences 4 Villas in Dali (author’s photograph of the model) 4 Scenery so modest as so hardly constitute architecture. The idea is to create within everyday life this kind of personal-scale openness, a product of individual experience: an accumulation of such mini-landscapes in different places. / Ishigami 2018, 21. Landscapes that were originally here, but never met, mix and mingle with each other. Making a new natural environment, that was not in the original natural environment, without using anything new, and without discarding anything that was here. / Ishigami 2018, 45. 297 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design Translating Place Through the Present Self: Wayfaring as Abstraction / Heuristic Observation By translation of places we mean a metamorphosis from an existing condition to an appropriate design proposal. Wayfaring here occurs as a design-oriented reading of place and aims to conclude with a newly com- posed spatial solution. To do this, a degree of abstraction of the spatial quality out of context is necessary: the defamiliarization phase prevents the observing subject from passively re-thinking the environmental setting. This kind of learning through doing requires an “intensification of all our energies” and our “fullest concentration” in interpreting the perceived qualities into relevant ingredients of the process in architec- ture (Cassirer 1994|1944, 210). “ As soon as we fail to concentrate, and we give way to a mere play of pleasurable feelings and associations, we have lost sight” of the design process as living artwork in itself (210). Whereas in re-reading places a sensitivity towards listening was needed, here the requirements are more complicated – a sensitivity in creational responding is a pre-condition for successful reading. Figure [4] is an example of sensitivity in the search for the beauty in the natural landscape. With minimum interventions between the stone megaliths, Ishigami designed eight villas in Dali: the design proposal was based on a previous painstaking examination of the properties of each stone as a living being. Only small adjustments of the stones were done, whereas the landscape permeates the villas as philosophy of life close to nature. For this project, he uses poem-drawings to express the atmospheres he desires to achieve with the new site-sensitive solution: “Walking the site, physically sensing / small places amid the vast fields of boulders, / manageable, livable spaces were found. / These are joined to form / a single large structure” (Ishigami 2018, 117). Through verses, the archi- tect aims to invite the reader to look at the project by imagining his own wayfaring through the place by encouraging an imagination of the first person experience instead of looking at the drawings two-dimensionally. Another example is Ishigami’s House with plants, a poem-drawing dedicated to that design proposal. Here, the author invites the reader to imagine a never-finished world in which the desire—the imagination of the transformation—brings an awareness of a new concept of archi- tecture: the one that is different from “shelter” that keeps us separated from the world. It softens the border between the inside and outside and allows the nature, the snow, the sun, the rain to become a crucial co-cre- ator of its being. This is one’s way of freeing architecture when dealing with the innumerable demands and challenges of this world: interpret- ing it “more freely” and approaching it “more openly” (2018, 11). The third example of a translation of spatial values into design Correspondences 5a Map of wounded places (tracing paper layer 1) 5b Desired atmospheres (layer 2) 5b 5a 299 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design solutions is the Botanical Farm Garden. A landscape architecture project, it exhibits Ishigami’s obsessive analysis of each tree as an individual, as an “old friend” who changed its place of living in a new meshwork of movements and relations. The task was to relocate a forest (a ho- tel-to-be-built location) in the adjacent meadow, in order to prevent cutting of the trees. Ishigami implements the history of the place by poetic re-thinking of its mythological past through the present: 1. long ago, it was a paddy field and a mossy forest; 2. today, there is a stream and a sluice gate recovered in the new scenario. Hence, a superimpo- sition of “all the layers from past environments in the site’s history” occurs (2018, exhibition guide). A poetization of existing qualities is developed through the sensitive re-thinking through design. The last example of wayfaring through poem-drawing as a translation of site-specific spatial values in an urban design proj- ect is exhibited in [5]. After cycles of trialogues in re-reading Ohrid through three imaginary characters, site-specific spatial values are recognized, and then translated in each of the three design solu- tions; one being the re-thinking of a mahalla street (a pedestrian street in a densely organized traditional urban tissue) as a semi-pub- lic spatial entity that exhibits site-specific ways of human life. Figure [5a] is a map of one of the chosen mahalla streets. Fragments in black “mark structures in decay” , and the pink surfaces are green fragments “framing the pedestrian promenade” (Bogdanova, Spasevs- ka and Nikova 2018, 140). Wounded places are traced and re-created into micro pedestrian squares: “neighborhood markets and semi-open structures as knots of socialization between the neighbors” (140). Figure [5b] represents a possible way of healing spatial wounds through de- sired atmospheres in perspective, section and axonometry: “hanging cradles oriented towards the city scape and the lake, pergolas holding creepers, vines and roses creating a filigree shadow above the benches, bird cottages in the treetops, urban yards and craft-markets connecting the promenade with the lower city visually” (140). The verses exhibit feelings we aim to bring with the newly proposed scenario: “Floating temporary creatures above ground tracks…an invisible corporeality … he took me through a filigree embroidered by porous treetops” (ibid.). Place-Making: ‘Alongly Integrated’ Knowledge of the Inhabitant As inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-hu- man, are wayfarers, and … wayfaring is a movement of self-renewal or becoming rather than the transport of already constituted beings from one location to another. Making their ways through the tangle of the world, wayfarers grow into its fabric and contribute through Correspondences 6 Fragments of Le Corbusier’s “Poem of the Right Angle” (2012/1953) © FLC-ADAGP 6 301 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design their movements to its ever-evolving weave. Ingold 2016 | 2007, 119 It is necessary to stress that wayfarers should be considered “suc- cessful inhabitants” of a place (Ingold 2016 | 2007, 104). They are neither nomads who fail to establish a meaningful tie with a place, nor settlers who tend to “occupy” a place due to their condition of “restricted horizon of a life lived only there” (104). This metaphor by Ingold reminds us of the previously emphasized need of the balanced rhythm of closeness and distance from the object of attention. Therefore, inhabiting would be a condition in which there is a corresponding growth and becom- ing between the wayfarer and the places he / she is stretching towards and through. This means that wayfaring is neither “placeless nor place- bound, but place-making” (104). Proceeding along the discernment of the world through simultaneous self-discovery, the wayfarer “knows as he goes” , so the inhabitant knowledge is “alongly integrated” (ibid. 91). Related to the designers working with poem-drawings as wayfaring “methods” , their inhabitant condition allows coherence between what one feels, knows, remembers, recalls, reads, believes, desires and designs in a certain moment of the creational timeline. This way of daily reconstruc- tion of knowledge through the integration of experience and imagination requires a sensitivity in constructing a theory through design, i. e., a vision of true architecture that is built upon a highly individual (even anarchis- tic) re-evaluation of paradigms, manifestos, or any other mode of collec- tive thinking that harms the freedom of deep thought. Moreover, it asks for a meta-understanding of spatial qualities: an adaptable and trans- formable approach according to the spatio-temporal context of the de- sign task. And finally, it demands looking at, moving through and re-cre- ating of the world “as a project, not as a subject or object” (Jonas, 2018). Figure [6] shows fragments of Le Corbusier’s vision of truth, com- posed by poems and drawings standing close to each other. Although they do not overlap, their systematic distribution in a t-shaped table of content tries to make an order, a personal guideline of architectural behavior which is not ignorant towards the different situations in the time-space reality. The hermeneutic void of his poem-drawings invites the reader to participate in the co-creation of the guidelines; but un- like his “Journey to the East” , here we are faced with a mature critical reflection of his own architectural beliefs and architectural practice. We can find the similar alongly integrated “theory” in John Hejduk’s “Vladivostok” (1989). The book begins with an ekphrasis for Michel- angelo’s sculptures; the main story develops as a text-drawing theater of mythology where the main characters are urban elements animated as human beings; the book ends with a sequence of poem-drawings titled “Eros” , radiating a spiritually pregnant aura. In both cases, when sensing Correspondences 303 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design their prophetic character, we can say that Vladivostok and Poem of the Right Angle have for their authors the significance the Brother Karam- azov (1880) has for Dostoyevsky: a testament for his clearest vision of truth as a holistically reflective thought on all his previous artworks. DOUBTS AND LIMITATIONS – HOW TO MAKE A POEM- DRAWING CORRESPOND WITH THE LISTENER? How does one read a poem-drawing aloud? What kind of per- formance is needed to express loudly the tie between the writ- ten and the drawing fragments? Can a poem be felt when read aloud without looking at the sketches as an inseparable part of it? We experienced these doubts during a presentation and ex- hibition, when asked to read aloud one poem-drawing. Two “difficulties” were present: 1. it is impossible to understand a poem-drawing neither by listening nor by reading if it is decontextualized from the design process in which it has been created; 2. in poem-draw- ings where the lines between verses and drawings intertwine more organ- ically, a delicate slowness in studying the silent piece of paper is required, whereas the verbal performance was almost impossible. This can be seen as a limitation of architectural wayfaring, but it can also be seen as a chal- lenge to discern modes of expression different than the verbal in which a poem-drawing can be shared (dance, performance, pantomime…). Poem-drawing as a processual mode in design can encourage correspondence in co-creation between designer(s)’s innerness and the outside environment in different moments of the design process. But poem-drawing, as a representational mode would demand an even more complex correspondence: the one between the author and the listening audience: “True knowledge can be experienced only through speech; it is never gained forever and must always be reactivated in the present” (Perez-Gomez, 2006, 66). In order to be understood and felt, a poem should be more and less than a poem at the same time: it needs to grow into a correspondent to drawing, a speaking light that reveals what is drawn from a distance. It needs to grow from an au- thentic language of expression and written/drawn communication into a poetically spoken language, a living word that makes the silent grain of wisdom transferable to other wayfarers. Otherwise, the way- faring through the self in the design process will remain unheard, hidden in the silent hieroglyphic symbols. Wayfaring, a lonely process of self-altering through Pathfinding, becomes meaningless if it does not correspond to and interweave with the Paths of living wayfarers. Additionally, the organic birth of poem-drawing involves Correspondences 305 / Wayfaring through Poem-Drawing in Spatial Design emotions, memories, dreams, beliefs, “unmeasurable” spatial quali- ties and generates a chaotic matter without easily visible ties. To be understood in the context of a design process, a rigorously systematic way to exhibit their meaning, importance and placement in the pro- cess is necessary. Otherwise, the wayfaring through poem-drawing could not be explained well enough to be understood as meaningful mode of doing architecture. 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