Towards a poetic condition in architecture

Abstract

This article proposes an alternative architectural genealogy in which the development of modern and

contemporary architecture is traced not through stylistic shifts, but through changing conceptions of human

experience. Beginning with montage theory in early twentieth-century art and film, the article follows a trajectory

through movement-based architecture, event-oriented spatial practice, and contemporary explorations of

perception. Drawing on the work of Malevich, Eisenstein, Wright, Le Corbusier, Tschumi, Eliasson, Turrell, and

Pallasmaa, the article argues that architecture’s most significant contemporary task lies in the cultivation of

presence. Here, the poetic is not understood as an expressive or symbolic layer, but as a condition in which

space supports sustained human attentiveness, bodily orientation, and psychological equilibrium. Presence is

positioned as both an experiential and ethical dimension of architecture, suggesting that architectural

responsibility today lies less in formal innovation than in the careful calibration of environments that shape

perception, well-being, and everyday inhabitation.

1. Introduction: Rethinking Architectural History Through Experience

Architectural history is commonly organised around styles, movements, and formal ruptures. While this

approach remains useful, it offers only a partial account of architecture’s development. Alongside the formal narrative runs another, quieter lineage—one concerned less with objects than with how space is perceived, inhabited, and remembered. Over the past century, architecture has gradually shifted its centre of gravity away from form as an autonomous entity and toward the human subject as an active participant in the production of meaning.

This article traces that alternative trajectory. Rather than treating architecture as a sequence of stylistic positions, it follows a conceptual line in which meaning emerges through perception, movement, event, and ultimately presence. The argument unfolds through a series of historical and theoretical moments, beginning with montage theory in early twentieth-century art and film, and concluding with a contemporary understanding

of the poetic as a condition of architectural presence.

The central research question guiding this inquiry is: How can architectural presence be understood as a theoretical and ethical continuation of montage-based and event-based spatial thinking? By reframing poetic architecture as presence rather than expression, the article seeks to contribute to architectural theory by clarifying the role of perception, embodiment, and responsibility in contemporary spatial practice.

2. Montage and the Activation of Meaning

The conceptual origins of this trajectory lie outside architecture. When Kazimir Malevich presented Black Square in 1913, representation was reduced to the point of disappearance. The painting referred to nothing beyond itself. Meaning no longer resided in depiction but arose through perception and encounter. This moment marked a decisive shift away from art as representation and toward art as experiential condition.

This insight gained methodological clarity through Russian Constructivism and early film theory. In the work of Lev Kuleshov and Sergei Eisenstein, montage became a technique through which meaning emerged not from isolated images, but from their sequencing. Two images placed together produced an effect neither carried alone. Montage, in this sense, remained incomplete until the viewer entered the equation.

What changed was the role of the subject. The observer became an active participant in the construction of meaning. Art ceased to be a closed composition and became a framework in which interpretation, attention, and temporal engagement were required. This shift laid the conceptual groundwork for later developments in architecture, even if its implications were not immediately architectural in form.

3. Movement and Architectural Time

Architecture absorbed montage thinking indirectly, primarily through the incorporation of movement and time.

In the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, space was no longer conceived as a static volume to be apprehended at once, but as a sequence unfolding through bodily progression. The Guggenheim Museum in New York reveals itself gradually through descent and rotation. Villa Savoye relies on the architectural promenade to establish spatial coherence. In both cases, architecture resists immediate comprehension. Space asks for time. Meaning emerges through duration, orientation, and bodily movement

rather than through frontal composition.

Later, Rem Koolhaas sharpened this approach by foregrounding spatial juxtaposition and temporal contrast. In projects such as the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, architecture operates through abrupt transitions, ramps, and overlapping conditions. Space is edited rather than composed. Experience is produced through sequence, tempo, and contrast, echoing cinematic montage at an architectural scale.

At this point, architecture becomes inseparable from the moving body. Space takes shape through attention and duration. Architecture no longer exists solely as an object, but as an event unfolding in time.

4. Event and the Limits of Openness

Bernard Tschumi extended this logic by loosening architecture’s hold on meaning altogether. In Parc de la Villette and his writings on event, architecture appears as a framework for actions, programmes, and chance encounters. Use and interpretation carry as much weight as form. Architecture becomes a matrix of possibilities rather than a determinate composition.

This openness introduced a productive instability. Architecture no longer dictated experience, allowing space to accommodate complexity and contingency. Yet this position also revealed a conceptual limit. When architecture restricts itself to enabling events, it withdraws from responsibility for how spatial conditions shape those who inhabit them. Space becomes permissive, but its effects remain largely unexamined.

Event-based architecture thus represents both an expansion and a suspension of architectural responsibility. It opens space to life while remaining largely indifferent to the experiential consequences of that openness.

5. From Event to Shared Presence: Olafur Eliasson

A subtle shift occurs at this threshold in the work of Olafur Eliasson. His installations move attention away from action and toward awareness. Light, fog, colour, and reflection are used to heighten perception rather than to provoke reaction. The emphasis lies on how space conditions attention, often in a shared and collective manner.

In works such as The Weather Project, experience unfolds quietly. Visitors gather, linger, and observe themselves observing. The work does not demand response or interpretation. Instead, it establishes a sharedstate of attentiveness in which perception becomes relational. Eliasson’s contribution lies in reframing architecture as a medium that shapes collective awareness. Space no longer hosts events. It conditions presence. Architecture, in this reading, acts upon how people sense together

rather than upon what they do.

6. Presence as Perceptual Condition: James Turrell

James Turrell pushes this condition further by reducing architecture until perception itself becomes the primary material. In his work, light defines volume. Boundaries soften. Depth becomes uncertain. Architecture withdraws until seeing becomes the central experience.

In Skyspaces and the long-term Roden Crater project, physical form recedes. What remains is a heightened awareness of perception itself. The viewer inhabits a perceptual condition rather than encountering an object. Seeing turns inward. Awareness slows.

These environments demonstrate that architecture can operate without emphasis or gesture. Their influence is felt through calibration rather than expression. Space acts directly upon the nervous system, shaping orientation, calm, and attentiveness beneath the level of conscious interpretation.

7. The Body and the Ethics of Presence: Juhani Pallasmaa

The phenomenological thinking of Juhani Pallasmaa provides the ethical grounding for this trajectory. Architecture, Pallasmaa argues, is experienced through the entire body. Touch, sound, temperature, weight, and memory shape spatial understanding long before conscious thought intervenes.

If architecture affects us at this pre-reflective level, it cannot be understood as neutral. Spatial conditions regulate attention, orientation, and emotional balance continuously, often without notice. This recognition aligns with contemporary discussions in neuroarchitecture and environmental psychology, which emphasise how subtle variations in light, acoustics, scale, and rhythm influence well-being and inclusion.

Pallasmaa’s contribution reframes architecture as an embodied and ethical practice. The body is not a user to be accommodated, but the primary site where architecture unfolds. Responsibility follows influence.

8. Poetic Architecture as Presence

Within this lineage, the poetic does not emerge as an expressive category or stylistic ambition. It appears as a state. Poetic architecture names the moment when space allows the human subject to be fully present.

This presence is quiet and sustained. It does not rely on intensity or spectacle. It is supported through precision, restraint, and care. Light endures rather than dazzles. Materials age without distraction. Spaces remain legible under use.

The poetic is found where architecture neither overwhelms nor withdraws. It holds attention gently. It allows people to remain. Presence cannot be produced directly. It can only be made possible through careful calibration and duration.

9. Conclusion: Toward an Architecture of Sustained Attention

This alternative architectural history does not reject modernism or the avant-garde. It continues their inquiry under altered conditions. What began as an exploration of sequence and form now reaches toward presence and responsibility.

Architecture reveals its deepest effect not in moments of intensity, but in what it allows to persist. After movement and event, something remains. As the poet Rolf Jacobsen once wrote, there is a stillness afterwards.

That stillness is not an absence. It is presence.

In recognising presence as a poetic condition, architecture reclaims its capacity to support human life not through expression alone, but through sustained attentiveness, care, and ethical responsibility.

Methodological Note

This article employs a critical-theoretical and interpretive methodology, combining historical analysis with phenomenological readings of architectural and artistic practices

Photo: Hans-Petter Bjørnådal