Walter Benjamin famously observed that
"Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. . . . Architecture [is] appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception, or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building . . . [Buildings are appropriated] not so much by attention as by habit."
Are places appropriated in a state of distraction? While the expectations and norms of places influence us, we do not normally focus on them; rather we shape our actions and goals in accord with the landscape of possibilities they provide. We look not so much at that landscape as at the goals or objects we see across it. In urging more complex places, then, am I demanding that places should not be lived in a state of distraction?
Suppose, for instance, that we increase the complexity of a simplified place by finding ways to bring out the multiplicity of ways it is appropriated into people's lives, and by building into the place explicit links to the other places and to the processes on which the place depends. These multiplicities and these links may be obvious at first, but will not the attempted complexity fade into the background as the whole place gets experienced in a state of distraction? Is complexity at most a temporary condition?
This objection presumes that complexity must be experienced at the center of a focal awareness. This is not necessary. Places offer landscapes of possibility experienced as structured futures or absences surrounding what is focally present. This happens in the kind of awareness that we have about what one does with a telephone or how one behaves in a parliament building. Increased lived complexity does not require a focal second awareness, but an enrichment in that background that changes the sense of focal objects and activities.
Index
Complexity outline
strategies
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001