‘Gesture’ as a Subject of Doctoral Research in Architecture: Evidence-based Intuitions on a Complex Relationship

1. Introduction

This paper is reflecting this author’s PhD research, which was completed and defended successfully in December 2022 at the National Technical University of Athens, School of Architecture, in Greece.^[1] Arguably, it was ‘not a normal PhD’,^[2] as it addressed a subject that was very hard to pinpoint in a structured and epistemologically concrete manner, especially since the academic framework of Architecture itself either relies heavily on borrowed epistemologies to substantiate its claims, or falls into the category of what Groat & Wang refer to conveniently as “Logical Argumentation”.^[3] It also took this researcher 22 years to finish (!), which is by no means a normal timeframe to do one’s doctoral thesis.

The project came off from a genuine question: while the notion of ‘gesture’^[4] lies ubiquitous in the discourse of Architecture, studies around it are revealed to be fairly diverse in context and rather shifting from what we’d normally expect as premises for Architectural Theory. In fact, although the term does tend to be used rather freely in various architectural descriptions,^[5] research about it usually borrows its conceptual and methodological framework, as well as its scope of interest, from fields external to the discipline; such as Cognitive Research, Anthropology and Social Studies, History and Historiography, or Philosophy. This does not lay far from a behavior most familiar to Architecture,^[6] but it still leaves an urgent question waiting to be answered: if these approaches describe a ‘gestural’ entity that is structured exclusively within their own conceptual and /or philosophical frameworks, are we still referring to an idea of ‘gesture’ that is universally understandable, or are we actually referring to different entities that lay claim to the term ‘gesture’ legitimately, albeit in different terms? Oddly enough, empirical evidence or scholarly publications alike have shown that scientists, scholars, or even plain practitioners, present themselves confident about knowing ‘what gesture is’—but arguably without really taking into consideration ideas or conceptual formulations from a point of view that is exterior to their own argumentative premises.

2. ‘Gesture’ as a subject of research in Architecture

This combination of blind certainty and fundamental disregard about external viewpoints on the same (?) subject created the main drive of this author to pursue a PhD on the topic. Following the meticulous collection of evidence that connected ‘gesture’ to arguments relative to the field and practice of Architecture beyond reasonable doubt, the question that rose ultimately was whether there was indeed a meaningful hidden matrix^[7] laying behind all these scattered instances, that informed and engulfed them into a meta-level survey; and, if so, whether we could we speak of it as a single overarching entity in its own right.^[8] This idea made sense, not only from an empirical standpoint (i.e. that it really doesn’t make sense to discuss a manifest reality of the field from within a conceptual and epistemological in vitro),^[9] but also because we found consistent evidence that ‘gesture’ tends to evade deterministic ontological classifications and prescriptive behavioral modelling, acting more akin to a ‘black box’ which only yields meaningful results after the event that makes them meaningful is actualized.^[10] In the end, our 22 years’ worth of research showed that gesture can be studied as a factorial entity that exists in a virtual state, where the product of Architecture is yet to be materialized, and an actual state all the same, where the ‘gesture’ of architecture takes part in a discourse that develops around an actualized end result.^[11]

Quite fittingly, Architecture itself can also be shown to be a non-deterministic field of research that oscillates between theory, practice, and historical evidence, as well as between grounded arguments and intuition—namely, an actual state and a virtual state.^[12] In analogy with gesture, it also appears consistently throughout history to establish itself upon fundamental questions on human condition and the construction of meaning;^[13] spanning from Vitruvius’ Ten books on Architecture “(…) as the promulgator of canonical rules and paradigmatic form”,^[14] all the way to Architecture’s claim towards autonomous expression and artistic merit,^[15] or genius and authenticity.^[16] With regard to ‘gesture’, the Modern era—as it evolves from the exaltation of the avant-garde onwards—stays consistent to the theme as a means of externalizing architectural meaning, as it does not negate the rhetorical quality of Architecture (or, at least, the exploitation of that potential by several theorists and practitioners in the discipline),^[17] nor does it stray from the perpetual questioning and critical restructuring of fundamental meanings to satisfy its existential agony.^[18] Similarly, per Manfredo Tafuri’s critique, ‘gesture’ can be seen arguably as a meaningful legitimizing factor for his “timeless, a-historical Gallery of Famous Buildings”,^[19] as it has been found to stand often for a self-sustained ‘feat’ of Architecture.^[20]

This problem of legitimization ultimately becomes really important if one means to outline Architecture as a reference field for their research on ‘gesture’. Indeed, the enormous variety of theoretical approaches born out of contemporary architectural practice demonstrate that, far from a universal theory of pluralism, what is considered valid these days depends largely on one’s frame of reference and their own special interests.^[21] To that end, Daniel Charles argues that the only certain universal condition is indeed ‘this inescapable necessity’, which is inscribed in the very name of Architecture:

Architecture comes from the Greek archè, the beginning, the commandment, or the principle, and tektonikos, the carpenter or builder; and, as it happens often, the conjunction of the two words inflects the meaning of each to give rise to an unexpected overall meaning: archè makes “tecture” more than just a building.^[22]

An ‘archè’ is not building per se, it is always a supplement that turns tectonics into Architecture. Oddly enough (or, maybe not?), here we find a most enticing reference to gesture mirroring the idea, through the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Architecture is a gesture. Not every purposive movement of the human body is a gesture. Just as little as every functional building is architecture. (MS 126 15r: 28.10.1942) ^[23]

In principle, Wittgenstein’s aphorism^[24] evokes the essential nature of Architecture by connecting it to the essential nature of gesture. Structurally, the phrase works through its distinctive function: it proposes to show us what architecture is, by telling us what it is not. There are several other implications to this quotation, especially within the context of the essentialist aesthetics of the era, as well as Wittgenstein’s own personal involvement with Architecture for the purpose of designing his sister’s Palais Stonborough in Vienna, of which several ideas seem to show up on the way towards his Philosophical Investigations.^[25] And yet, we cannot escape the fact that gesture assumes here the role of a legitimizing ‘Archè’, one that we can see repeatedly on several occasions once we interpret all these ‘gestural’ characterizations we find widespread on architectural discourse^[26] for their normative function.

Figure 1.Palais Stonborough, Vienna (1928); L. Wittgenstein και P. Engelmann, architects. Source: Leitner, 2000, p. 57

Charles argues further that this is a necessary condition for transcending the mythic element of the cosmos and creating a world that carries semantic weight. As he says, once given an order of origin, “the world is ready to be seen (…) [as] theory: a spectacle”.^[27] This creates a homogeneous space—Charles uses the term ‘Agora’—which is by definition available to all who participate in the activity of seeing it and acknowledging it.

The Archè, as “beginning and authority devoid distance”, offers a fixed point of reference around which space, as a field of relations, consists in a grid of images that refer to an archetypal “to make visible” (theory, history). Thus, a unification of knowledge is achieved; a coherence: an isonomy. Architecture can be seen therefore as “a unity of isonomic relations, offered to display (as a spectacle, as a representation), and in which we are offered to see, immanent, an efficiency without the separation of an origin” (D. Payot). We are far from the “simple house” we originally assumed: the Archè satisfies this order, through a display and a spectacle (appearances), and an imputable origin—that is, as a triple complement [of the word tectonics].^[28]

It is therefore conceivable to develop a valid and academically grounded inquiry around an ‘Architecture of Gesture’, provided that we can find sufficient amount of evidence to spur such a discourse. Thankfully, the world is rich of such tokens; it’s just that people will most often take them for granted and rather build further arguments upon them, instead of questioning their fundamental relationship with Architecture first.

3. ‘Gesture’ as a legitimizing factor in Architecture

As it so happens, the problem in developing a doctoral thesis is that it needs to be backed by credible evidence that validate the question at hand. While this requirement felt incredibly daunting at first, it ultimately proved beneficial to our survey. Indeed, out of a plethora of references to ‘gesture’ within the context of architectural discourse, very few select paradigmatic cases fulfilled the criteria we set for the purposes of clarity, within our methodological framework:^[29] This necessary distillment of evidence proved fortunate, as it revealed ‘gesture’—consistently and beyond reasonable doubt—as a point of origin towards the creation of a certain value that is attached to instances of Architecture.

As we discussed earlier, tokens of this sort were found in extremely diverse fields. Each in their own right, created a universe of notions and ideas that arguably established the question of a relationship between ‘gesture’ and Architecture in vivid, albeit manifestly different colors. For the purposes of classification, this evidence was distinguished between those that refer to a discourse that develops within the actual process of design, namely before the actualization of the end product of Architecture, and those who refer to a discourse that develops after the actualization of that product, usually within the context of a narrative that extends to the point of a metaphysical quality or myth.^[30] Even so, ‘gesture’ was constantly found to act as a token of validity, be it in terms of functional creativity—e.g., in the case of face-to-face collaboration in design meetings and gestural imprints on architectural sketches—or narrative interpretations on the themes of ‘genuineness’, ‘originality’, ‘exercise of power’ or ‘aesthetic affect’.^[31] Not only so, but it also looked persistently to evade fixed prescriptions and translations, as if it were, in and of itself, the source of value, born out of some sort of mystical or elemental condition that supports the creation of meaning. As a result, our critical interpretation of our findings created an evident difference between the notion of “theme”, used to describe the function of ‘gesture’ within a specific context, and the notion of “value”, which was used to describe a persisting mechanics where ‘gesture’ is shown as important for the creation of meaning in Architecture.

Figure 2:PlaceholderFigure 2. « (…) Pleine main j’ai reçu / Pleine main je donne ». Excerpt from the poem «Offre» by Le Corbusier. Accompanying lithograph on the opposite page (shown above), also by Le Corbusier.1955:144-5

The premises of contraposition between those two classifiers, eventually solved for this author the mystery why architect and academic Federico Soriano chooses to explain ‘gesture’ to the reader of the Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture by referring directly, and without any other contribution of his own, to an excerpt from a lecture Federico Garcia Lorca gave in 1928 on poetry:

The imagination of men has created giants to attribute the construction of great caverns and enchanted cities. Reality has later shown that these great caverns were really made by a drop of water. By the pure drop of water, patient, and eternal. In this case, as in so many others, reality wins. More beautiful is the instinct of the drop of water than the hand of the giant. The real truth beats the imagination in poetry, that is, imagination itself discovers its poverty. Imagination logically attributed to giants what seemed like the work of giants; but scientific reality, poetic to the extreme and outside of logic, puts truth in the clean, perennial drop of water.

Because it is more beautiful that a cave is the mysterious whim of water, linked and ordered by eternal laws, than the whim of giants that have no more reason than imagination.^[32]

Same as with a doctoral thesis, the reader needs to do some work in order to decipher Soriano’s argument; the text itself does not provide for normative descriptions, as one would expect to find in a Dictionary entry.^[33] The title of Lorca’s lecture is “Imaginación, Inspiración, Evasión”, which manifestly translates to “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion”. In his argument, Lorca presents the poets’ resort to imagination as an evasion from the true poetic nature of reality. Imagination draws from reasoning; therefore, it is delimited by one person’s capacity for theorizing within a certain context. Ultimately, this becomes a feeble attempt to bring reality down to one’s own measure; to impose human order onto the true nature of the world, to make it manageable. Of course, nature—in this case—stays agnostic to this very human reaction of fear against what’s inconceivable. But, at the same time, it also remains laid bare before our eyes, to see and grasp for its own merit. Reality, in its purest form, is shown to be more poetic than a poet’s imagination; therefore, the poet is invited to rid themselves from fear and draw inspiration from what’s truly beautiful.^[34] If we take Soriano’s entry at face value, ‘gesture’, within the context of Architecture, is like that.

4. Conclusion

The concept of ‘gesture’ seems to occupy a particular position in the discourse of Architecture as an idea that serves to validate the ‘truth’ of an architectural work, while also maintaining its position as an inescapable embodied practice that manifests during its production. This notion has been examined in this author’s doctoral thesis both in terms of an actual aspect of cognitive action that architects exhibit during the design process, as well as a constitutional narrative that relates to the finished product of architecture.

If we were to examine, however, ‘gesture’ as a singular entity in the context of these instances alone, it would create an unmanageably diverse field of study with a suffering epistemological clarity. At the same time, it simply does not make sense to claim that all of these instances substantiate ontologically different entities of ‘gesture’, especially since all of these manifestations consistently tend to reveal shared traits and functional mechanics, including a most evident disregard for normative or prescriptive definitions. This suggests the potential of ‘gesture’ to be considered, in and of itself, as an autonomous entity.

For the purposes of this paper, we attempted to show ‘gesture’ as a legitimizing factor in the discourse of architecture, especially with regard to an elemental quality that we generally found attached to it, either on its own or within the context of Architecture. Furthermore, once we consider that Architecture itself makes for a variable framework of reference, same way as ‘gesture’ concretizes itself upon the circumstances and context of its manifestation, we proposed it could be argued that not only ‘gesture’ can be thought of as an archetypical entity within the field of Architecture but also that Architecture can be conceived of and discussed in terms of ‘gesture’, very much like a recto-verso understanding of the two entangled entities. Such being the case, the benefit of doing research on ‘gesture’ upon these terms would very much inform our understanding of Architecture in general, as the same would also apply vice-versa.

To this point, we maintain that Architecture can serve as an exemplary field of reference, given that its practice and documentation can fluctuate most freely between cognitive action and narrative, physical tokens, and ideas. Within these premises, it makes sense to argue that theoretical research on ‘gesture’ with regard to its relation to architecture—in our case at a doctoral thesis level—not only creates a genuine and original contribution to knowledge, but also informs our understanding of architectural discourse on the subject at a most fundamental level.