The Twin Flames Architecture & Poetry-part 1

Poetry and architecture have been dancing in my head for months.

They're two potential friends, who should obviously be introduced, but somehow never end up at the same party.

Instead of wandering the halls confused about where to start writing, I decided to begin with the most obvious connection - genius loci - the Latin term for the spirit of place.

I dare you to find an architect who hasn't spent a solid semester learning about it.

It's often referenced as how architecture responds to the site's distinctive atmosphere, character, or essence.

Isn't that what poets do too? They grasp atmosphere and the spirit of place before conscious analysis kicks in. They feel the emotional resonance of a landscape before they can name it?

This is how spaces - architectural and poetic - transform from raw material into meaning.

As I dug deeper into how poetry and architecture connect, I kept circling back to the same question: Are poets and architects aligned in their method of discovering the spirit of place?

Gmail shortens emails in awkward places. Read . It’s better.

While researching I found Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa who has written about this very thing, sort of.

In his The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses he writes:

"We grasp atmospheres intuitively through the unfocused, peripheral parts of our vision, which perceive overall mood before details."

I love this. Mood before details.

He goes deeper, arguing that architecture should engage what he calls "haptic vision" - seeing with our entire body, not just our eyes.

Walk into a cathedral, a subway station, your grandmother's kitchen, and you know how it feels before you can explain why.

Turns out, a Scottish poet had been practicing this before Pallasmaa theorized it.

Shepherd had been disappearing into the Cairngorm Mountains, walking the same paths over and over, season after season, learning the mountain like a lover learns a face.

She was practicing haptic vision, the feeling of things. Her roaming found places that held consciousness which she witnessed atmospherically first, feeling the genius loci through her entire body, before her mind could analyze it.

This is genius loci as lived experience. Better known as what happens when you stop trying to possess a landscape and start letting it possess you.

We grasp atmospheres intuitively through the unfocused parts of our sight, like peripheral vision.

Or as we might say today, the architectural power of throwing some serious side eye at a space.

Here’s one by A.R. Ammons' 'Corsons Inlet' that reads like a field guide to peripheral vision, a poet walking the same New Jersey shore repeatedly, letting 'eddies of meaning' surface naturally.

Now we're going heavy into architectural concepts. Brace yourself.

In 1973, Ricardo Bofill was driving around the Catalan suburbs on the outskirts of Barcelona when he discovered an abandoned cement factory- a vast, partially ruined industrial complex of silos, tunnels, and machine rooms.

Bofill described his attraction to such places. "I liked to stroll through the industrial waste sites and through this no man's land, where the city is torn apart, where old brick chimneys punctuate the anarchic struggle between the fields and blocks of concrete."

This is exactly what German philosopher Gernot Böhme theorized in Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Space- that atmospheres create "ecstasies of things" where objects extend beyond their physical boundaries to affect us emotionally.

Bofill was feeling the atmospheric pull of La Fábrica, his future studio and home.

He moves his Taller de Arquitectura (Architecture Studio/Workshop) into what is today, La Fábrica , bringing multiple disciplines on-site to collaborate and experiment together.

By uniting "engineers, sociologists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, filmmakers, writers," he was engaging multiple perspectives simultaneously- like having peripheral vision for architecture.

His workshop became his laboratory for atmospheric architecture, design that prioritizes the creation of specific moods and emotional experiences over purely visual or functional concerns.

Environments that engage all the senses through light, material, texture, sound, and spatial rhythm. It’s monumental.

Ricardo Bofill left us in 2022 at the age of 82.

Today, Bofill's work continues through his multi-national, multi-discipline architecture team.

In Ouidah, Benin, his team is designing a university campus, Seme City- the first eco-city in Benin that will eventually house over 30,000 students, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

Light, pattern, locally sourced materials, and spatial rhythms emerge from West African genius loci as the masterplan centers on a network of shaded pedestrian pathways.

The surfaces invite touch and the materials connect to place and local climate.

Their grand scheme is the 15-minute city- a walkable city where residents can access most daily necessities groceries, work, healthcare, education, parks, and entertainment within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from home.

The proof is in the feeling.

Walk through La Fábrica's concrete corridors, the silos, the landscaping, radiate atmospheric presence.

Move through Seme City's planned pathways and you'll experience the same embodied architecture, but rooted in Beninese landscape and culture - sustainable, adaptable, and resilient.

This is what fifty years of atmospheric architecture looks like.

Architecture is embodied experience that changes how you exist. And so is poetry.

The spaces that move us most, whether built from concrete or words, work the same way.

They invite you to live deeply and surrounded by the spirit of place.

Future Seme City (rendering/video)

Back to Nan…

That’s everything for today friends.

Ricardo Bofill, Pablo Bofill, Gestalten (edited by): Ricardo Bofill (New Edition):Visions of Architecture, Poetic spaces, surreal structures and dramatic visions. The extraordinary career of Ricardo Bofill is collected in this monograph, which reveals his inspiring approach to architecture, and to life. Ricardo Bofill is one of the 20th century's most unique architects and radical visionaries. His visions for urban and communal life challenged preconceived notions of shared space and proposed alternative styles of living.

Dominque Serrell, Michèle Champenois: Ricardo Bofill: Les Années françaises/ The French Years, Dominique Serrell directed the Taller de Arquitectura Ricardo Bofill in France from 1975 to 1983. She was at the heart of the Les Halles project, as well as most of the Taller's projects in France. In 1983, she set up the Terres Nuages agency, which assists a number of now internationally renowned designers in their career development, including Andrée Putman, Olivier Gagnère, Elizabeth Garouste, Eric Schmitt, Sylvain Dubuisson and Christian Louboutin.

Nan Shepherd, Robert McFarlane (introduction), Jenny Odell (afterword): The Living Mountain, This masterpiece of nature writing by Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into “the high and holy places” of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world of spectacular cliffs, deep silences, and lakes so clear that they cannot be imagined. As she walks through clouds, endures blizzards, and watches the great spirals of eagles in flight, Shepherd comes to know something about the hidden life of this remarkable landscape—and also herself.

A.R. Ammons: Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems, Consisting of some of his best early work, including such strikingly inventive poems as "Jungle Knot," "Coon Song," "Four Motions for the Pea Vines," and the title piece, this volume provides incontestable evidence of Ammons's rapid early growth as a poet, of his ever-broadening range and deepening perception. Corsons Inlet, like Ammons's Tape for the Turn of the Year, shows clearly his remarkable originality and, more important, his lavish and unique poetic gifts.

Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Explore the relationship between architecture and the sensory experience with the fourth edition of this groundbreaking work. First published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin is a classic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching question why, when there are five senses, is one single sense--sight--so predominant in architectural culture and design? With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically, the subject is all the more pressing and topical since the first edition's publication. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the suppression of the other four sensory realms has led to the overall impoverishment of our built environment, often diminishing the emphasis on the spatial experience of a building and architecture's ability to inspire, engage and be wholly life enhancing.

Gernot Böhme (author), Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (edited): Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Space, There is fast-growing awareness of the role atmospheres play in architecture. Of equal interest to contemporary architectural practice as it is to aesthetic theory, this 'atmospheric turn' owes much to the work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces brings together Böhme's most seminal writings on the subject, through chapters selected from his classic books and articles, many of which have hitherto only been available in German. This is the only translated version authorised by Böhme himself, and is the first coherent collection deploying a consistent terminology. 

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