Metaphor, environmental receptivity, and architectural design
pp. 185-202
in: Gary Backhaus, John Murungi (eds), Symbolic landscapes, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
This chapter illustrates the fundamental potency of the geographicity of language, what Merleau-Ponty has called first language. First language concerns a fundamental connection with gesture, the bodily comportments that express meaning. Metaphor emerges through the imagination and as we have maintained imagination involves both body schema and the virtual body. Through a bodily attunement with new metaphors, an architect translates the gestural component of poetic language into built forms. This requires an embodied resonance between the poetic gestures expressive of the metaphors and the expressive gestures in the design of built space. Intellectualist theories wrongly see metaphor as inspiring cognition, but before any such intellection takes place, the metaphor must induce its poetic potency, a physiognomy that must shape the lived-body of the designer. And then the potentialities of body schema as entertained by the virtual body are given over to the imagination in the design process. It is not thought that directs the evaluation of design, but embodied resonances, the feel that corroborates the sensibilities manifest through the physiognomy of metaphor, a poetic aesthetic.
