Fugitive Impressions: Design and the Ephemeral
By Mallory Scott Cusenbery

"One of the big problems with architecture is that it must both exist and be quickly forgotten; that is, lived spaces are not designed to be experienced continuously."
--Jean Nouvel

Introduction

In her book Break, Blow, Burn, Camille Paglia describes poetry as the "methodical working out of fugitive impressions." This phrase, an unlikely mixing of the disciplined and the fleeting, can be used to illuminate another idea: the relationship between architecture and the ephemeral. The ambitions of architecture can be expanded--beyond a common functional and commercial focus--to create dynamic armatures for the situational, the evanescent, and the phenomenal. By harnessing this broader role, architecture can build an important bridge between static objects and the intimacy of personal experience.

"Ephemeral," in this case, does not describe the qualities of the architectural object itself, which is assumed to be permanent, but instead refers to the ineffable qualities surrounding the object's solidity. Our environments are constantly tempered by transient moments and events--light and shadow-play, breezes, random sounds and smells--most of which fall below our normal threshold of awareness. However, when these moments are gathered, amplified, and harnessed in a conscious and evocative way, they rise to another state of authority, bringing with them added layers of significance. Our responses to these moments--through reverie, reflection, or heightened sensory engagement--provide a personal and intimate relationship with the spaces hosting these transient events. These spaces provide a meta-awareness of the fleeting and provide a process for us to attribute meaning to this awareness. They give significance to fugitive impressions.

These moments of heightened awareness are triggers that inspire us out of a passive relationship with our environment. Environmental numbness, a symptom of over-stimulation and over-saturation, renders the subtle as un-see-able. By raising awareness of the ephemeral, architecture helps reengage the marginal and nuanced qualities of environments.

However, invoking and harnessing the ephemeral is complicated, because the relationship between the "methodical" and the "fugitive" is tenuous: the two qualities can easily cancel each other out if their relationship is deterministic. Instead, creating a symbiotic relationship between the two is more effective, one where the primary object defers to the delicateness of the transient. The way that the fleeting impression emerges into our consciousness is then similar to what Gaston Bachelard, in his description of our reception of a poetic image, calls a "sonority of being": "Very often, then, it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation . . . that I think we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image." The architect harnessing the ephemeral, like the poet in Bachelard's quote, "speaks on the threshold of being," working to capture this reverberation. The symbiotic relationship necessary for this to occur can be found through a number of approaches.
Apprehending . . .

One such approach is to introduce a quite-ness and mutability of form as a way to amplify the ephemeral, capture it, and raise awareness of its presence. In this role, spatial characteristics become the conduit for an appreciation that may not have been triggered under other circumstances.

The artist James Turrell employs this approach in his numerous "Skyspace" projects. A Skyspace is a freestanding enclosed chamber constructed to heighten viewers' acuity. "I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some way gather it, or seem to hold it," Turrell says. In the design of these architectural spaces, the light captured is from a direct view of the sky itself: Turrell designs his installations with an opening in the ceiling, revealing a framed view of a portion of the sky, freed from distractions or any clutter of environmental details that may otherwise compete for one's attention. The carefully detailed knife-edge of the opening in the ceiling makes the room appear to have no thickness or volume, which serves to flatten the view of the sky and heighten the visual intensity of the circular opening. The environment of the Skyspace rooms become a device for the apprehending what would otherwise have been a transient moment; anything passing by the opening--the flight of a bird, movement of a cloud, gradation of the color of the sky--is amplified in significance.

Alexander Calder's mobiles, created during the mid-20th century, similarly apprehend transient conditions--air movements, object shadows--and use them to animate large physical objects. His delicately balanced hanging constellations of colorful panels, objects, or wire-drawn figures all move gently, spurred on by subtle air movements. The fleeting compositions that are created by the moving elements are constantly shifting in an ephemeral choreography. The shadows that these pieces cast on adjacent walls become equally monumentalized, embodied with an apparent mass as significant as the floating object itself. This apprehending of almost imperceptible forces (breezes), formalized through the object's shifting relationships, projected onto adjacent surfaces, creates a transient monumentality using the subtle palette of the ephemeral.

Transcribing . . .

The works by both Calder and Turrell are indicative of an approach to creating objects/spaces that--through their mutability and receptivity--heighten a viewer's awareness of transient events. It is possible to take this relationship a step further, whereby the fleeting is then recorded and translated into a new and independent symbolic form. The amplifying of the passing influences is achieved by giving them a replacement language, one more easily seen and comprehended. The evanescent source may or may not be easily apparent, but the new form is defined by appropriation of the dynamic quality of these triggers. Through physical and symbolic analogy, the new object provides a transcription of the fleeting.

The architect Toyo Ito's "Tower of Winds" is one illustration of this approach. This 70-foot-tall, freestanding perforated aluminum tower, located in a bustling area in Yokohama, Japan, is equipped with thousands of lights that illuminate when triggered by ambient sounds and the movement of the wind. This dynamic visual choreography is sparked, like Calder's mobiles, by environmental ephemera that may have otherwise have gone unnoticed. Unlike the Calder pieces, however, Ito's design translates these events into a new visual language, a transcription of the fleeting into a dynamic event. Another illustration can be found in the "Cherry Blossoms" installation by Antenna Design, exhibited in 2003 as part of the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum triennial. In this case, the trigger for the transcription of ephemera is the movement of people around a cylindrical, towering digital projection screen in the center of a grand staircase: as people traverse the staircase, cherry blossom graphics are data projected onto the tower, appearing in numbers that transcribe the level of activity around them. In the translation of passing events into a new visual form, both the Ito and the Antenna works use ephemera as a compositional trigger, similar to a composer appropriating individual sounds into a organized piece of music.

...and Embodying Indeterminacy

"I think that good architecture can do this . . . a process of disappearance, of controlling disappearance as much as appearance."
--Jean Baudrillard

The next step on this path is to address objects that attempt to embody the qualities of ethereality themselves. Beyond strategies of apprehending the fleeting, or transcribing it into a new visual language, is the ambition to become ephemeral. This approach diffuses static objects through indeterminacy, blurring the boundaries of the object, and merging experience and environment into a seemingly boundaryless continuity. Baudrillard continues, "When you stand in front of the buildings, you see them, but they're invisible to the extent that they effectively counteract that hegemonic visibility, the visibility that dominates us, the visibility of the system, where everything must be immediately visible and immediately interpretable."

This embodied indeterminacy can occur at the skin of architecture. Jean Nouvel, in the Cartier building in France, removes enough of the traditional orientation devices that optically define objects--corners, opacity, perimeter, edges, volume, boundaries--that the building becomes diffuse, ethereal, insubstantial. Nouvel introduces similar diffusion in the recently completed Barcelona tower, Torre Agbar, in a visual act of dispersion that contradicts the distinct objectness of its supporting form, confounding our sense of the scale of this large building. From the outside, the evocative treatment of the facade takes on the quality of a hallucination, like a wave of heat rising from the Spanish city and distorting our distant view; from the inside of the building, simple devices such as mirror-reflective jambs in the windows create a continuous horizon, multiplied in every direction, deemphasizing our perception of the building's presence and igniting our awareness of the surroundings. Broadening the role of a building's skin, the architects Herzog & de Meuron--in the deceptively simple copper facade of San Francisco's new de Young Museum--create an illusion of movement and pulsation through artful embossing and perforations of the skin. The overlaying moiré patterns and the sinuous shadows of the protruding/receding copper buttons create a visual flow like water running across the building, resulting in a remarkable lightness and visual transience on an otherwise solid and opaque box. In all these cases, the space of the building skin creates the experience of diffusion.
Indeterminacy can also be embodied by dropping environmental experience into a liminal zone. An environmental work such as Max Neuhaus's sound sculpture for Times Square occupies a territory that is so subtle, so understated, that it barely appears above the threshold of our perception. On a pedestrian island at Broadway and 46th Street, Neuhaus has created, in his words, "an invisible unmarked block of sound...its sonority a rich harmonic sound texture resembling the after ring of large bells." As an unlikely sound for the bustle of Times Square, most who pass through it will dismiss it, however, "those who find and accept the sound's impossibility...usually claim the work as a place of their own discovering." Always at risk of being missed in the loud and raucous urban environment, the ephemeral nature of the piece is its strength, and the fleeting sense of discovery and transformation of perception is its poetry.

Why the Ephemeral?

"Design always has a relationship and close need with states of life, it is not just a fact of form."
--Ettore Sottsass

By activating concrete form with transient incidents, architecture can create a bridge between abstract externalized physical objects and the intimacy of personal experience. In harnessing the ephemeral, design does more than simply call attention to the fleeting: it engages the personal. The intimate pleasure that arises through discovery, surprise, sensory alertness, and expanded awareness provides a connection to the individual that form alone cannot. In a related description of the relationship between the creative act and life itself, Gaston Bachelard says that artistic creation ". . . is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent." Amplifying the ephemeral around us can contribute to this "increase in life."

The path is one of engaging the designed environment as a catalyst to transcend one-dimensional experiences and activate a personal relationship to architecture. In addition, it is sometimes necessary to replace experiences dulled in our contemporary urban environments. Olafur Eliasson, whose body of artistic work focuses on harnessing the ephemeral, suggests, "In some respects the history of cities is the history of how they're represented and most of the time this is done by accentuating the classical, monumental structures that suggest power. The way we experience public spaces is more to do with the way representation and iconography influence our senses and our habits of seeing. A lot of people see urban space as an external image they have no connection with, not even physically." In describing the effect of one of his ephemeral projects on people's perception of the city, Eliasson also describes the greater ambition of designing with the transient: "I wanted to make it present again, get people to notice its movement and turbulence. For a few minutes there it was 'hyper real.'"

This "hyper reality" describes fugitive impressions apprehended, transcribed, and embodied for the purpose of bridging to the individual. It is life pumped into the static body of form.

Sources:

Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baudrillard, Jean and Jean Nouvel. 2002. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Neuhaus, Max. Times Square. 1992. Dia Center for the Arts. http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/neuhaus/#links

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Interview: Ettore Sottsass. Domus 887, November 2005.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. Conversation between Olafur Eliasson and Hans Ulrich Obrist. http://weboeliasson.dyndns.info:8080/PDF/Conversation_HUO_OE.pdf

Paglia, Camille. Break, Blow, Burn. 2006. New York: Vintage Books.

Welchman, John. Olafur Eliasson: Meant to Be Lived in (Today I Am Feeling Prismatic). Domus 884, September 2005: 88.

Whittaker, Richard. Conversation with James Turrell. From Works + Conversations #2. http://www.conversations.org/99-1-turrell.htm

Mallory Scott Cusenbery, AIA, is an architect and design principal at RossDrulisCusenbery Architecture, Inc., in Sonoma, California, and cochairs the LINE editorial board.
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