Welcome to Your World by Sarah Williams Goldhagen

Author:Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Perception for Action: Surfaces Activate Imagination

When we left off our approach to the Salk Institute, our ears were attuned to the gurgling water feeding its fountain. Ever attuned to changes in the surroundings, we instantly turn our attentions to the movement and sound of the channel fountain’s water. As we make our way into the plaza proper, the water piques our curiosity; from there, Kahn orchestrates a composition that draws us in and encourages us to explore it. The plaza’s linear channel of water that stretches toward the horizon reads not as a line on a plane, some abstract geometric composition, but as a vehicle bearing embodied meaning. In our human experience of space, lines mark paths, define boundaries, and articulate the edges within and between objects, materials, and spaces. Our eyes follow the path of this watery trough—which the scientists who work at the Salk call the “line of light,” aptly capturing the channel fountain’s dynamism, its glistening flow—to the vanishing point in the Pacific’s horizon; immediately thereafter, we imagine our feet pacing out that path, walking alongside its line, heeding its directional call. Finally, our feet follow the path that our eyes staked out. So just the sight of this channel fountain initiates a succession of responses that encapsulate how we come to “feel” experiences in our physical surroundings. Our nonconscious perceptions and sensory faculties work together, intersensorily, and these all collaborate with our imagined motor responses. Little wonder that the artist Paul Klee described the act of making a drawing as “taking a line for a walk.”

To reach the center of the plaza, we must descend several steps so shallow that we might barely register their existence, especially as we are focusing instead on other visible and audible enticements. At the steps’ terminus, a bench running nearly the entire width of the plaza impedes our forward progress; to circumambulate it we must deflect our axis, which in turn shifts our perspective of the adjacent office-tower blocks. Now we see them at an oblique angle. Quite suddenly, our mental image of this entire complex—a static, symmetrical arrangement of geonic prisms framing the horizon—disassembles before our scanning eyes. Those initially blank, monolithic concrete prisms pull apart, open up. Now the facades break into a porous rhythm of shadowed apertures and lightly incised planes. More: rather than sitting heavily on the ground, the staircase-office blocks seem perched lightly on top of it.

The walls of these staircase-office blocks resemble post-and-lintel structures that contain small private offices arrayed around an open-air dogleg staircase. Initially the Salk complex laboratories seemed like heavy, load-bearing monoliths slung low along the coastline; now those same buildings present as vertically oriented blocks, rising tall. In contrast to the complex’s initially symmetrical, easily apprehended arrangement, now the floors of these towers stack in irregular dimensions. A tall bottom floor supports two shorter intermediate floors. An especially stretched top story caps the composition, its extra heft and height seeming to press these staircase-office blocks down, anchoring them into the ground.

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