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title
Latent Continuities: Architectural knowledge and the heuristic tension of Indwelling
Author
Ionas Sklavounos
Abstract
In his theory of Tacit Knowledge Michael Polanyi introduced the concept of Indwelling, to explain the role of habit and skill in practice-based knowledge, but also to describe a heuristic tension that underlies all forms of knowing. Such a tension, Polanyi tells us, unfolds from the ‘depths’ of our biological being to the ‘heights’ of ideas and cultural values. The premise of this essay is that the spatial (and temporal) metaphor of Indwelling is hardly an accident: human consciousness is opened to knowledge primarily through our physical engagement with the world, marked by both space and time. The hypothesis is thus formed of architecture as a discipline studying precisely such tacit processes of (In)dwelling, in search of correspondences between ‘thick’ levels of bodily disposition and ‘thinner’ levels of intellect and imagination. To pursue this hypothesis, I turn to the example of a two-month apprenticeship in traditional stonemasonry, that took place in 2019 in Greece, entailing the reconstruction of a particular type of dry-stone cobbled pathway, called kalderimi.
Prelude
It’s Sunday, and yet the construction site is packed with people. In the centre are the musicians, surrounded by a ring of dancers, around whom a rather peculiar feast is unfolding. Some are diving into the goat stew prepared by the locals, others are trying their hand at splitting rocks, and yet others have devoted themselves to the pleasures of artistic stone cutting: beneath the beating drum and the clarinet, chisels resound as they needle their way into stones to bring out figures of all sorts: an ornamental motif, a sycamore leaf, an arched bridge. Wandering about, it’s hard to resist the idea that such seemingly disparate activities – or are they aspects of life? – have always played a role in craft knowledge; a knowledge that, as craftspeople say, cannot really be taught but rather needs to be stolen.
A knowledge of latency
In The Tacit Dimension (1966), Michael Polanyi suggested that not all kinds of knowledge can be encoded in theories or formulas, valid as they may be. Building on Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between ‘knowing-that’ and ‘knowing-how’, Polanyi explained that many forms of practice-based knowledge are not amenable to full verbal expression; furthermore, to some extent, this is true for all kinds of knowing. In this book, Polanyi also introduced the notion of indwelling as a key concept for discussing how knowledge operates. In a nutshell, this term emphasised the importance of habituation and skill in cognitive processes, of engaging with a subject in practice, in many ways beyond its cerebral examination: ‘it is not by looking at things but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning’. 1 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 18. In the fields of architecture and design, this emphasis on habit, skill, and experience has often been seen to offer a valuable lens for approaching the particular, performative knowledge of practitioners. However, less attention seems to have been given to the way in which Polanyi further elaborated this concept by referring to a heuristic tension developing between what he called ‘lower’ levels of pre-conceptual kinaesthetic experiences and ‘higher’ levels of meaningfulness.
In the history of architectural thought, the idea that buildings establish such a communication between ‘lower’ strata of reality and ‘higher’ levels of ideality seems to go way back; philosopher Karsten Harries points to the biblical story of Jacob’s Ladder, connecting earth and heaven, as one of the preeminent allegories that inspired builders and architects. 2 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). From a similar perspective, one of the few architectural theorists to refer to Michael Polanyi and his stratified understanding of consciousness was Dalibor Vesely, who argued that it is precisely this tension between embodied perception and imaginative articulation that is key to understanding the capacity of architectural works to act as catalysts of meaning. 3 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). Drawing from developments in cognitive sciences, Alberto Pérez-Gómez recast this idea by describing architectural works as sites of attunement, as places that help human beings partake in a communicative movement from pre-reflective awareness to reflective wonder. 4 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
The question I ask in this essay is how can architectural knowledge move deeper into this mediating ability of the built environment, in theory and in practice? The assumption behind such a question is that there are discrepancies between the theorising of architects and their actual practice that impede this knowledge of mediations. Moreover, there is a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, practitioners employ this knowledge in tacit ways, an awareness of which may hold insights for both practice and theory.
An apprenticeship
The case study I propose for such an enquiry is an apprenticeship in traditional stone masonry, which was organised by ‘Boulouki – Itinerant Workshop on Traditional Building Techniques’ 5 In Greek, boulouki means ‘gaggle’, ‘travelling group’; a word evoking the journeying companies of stonemasons and craftspeople. in autumn 2019. As a member of the organising team, I followed closely the implementation of this programme aiming to reintroduce Greek and Balkan craftspeople to the almost forgotten building technique of kalderimi – a particular type of drystone cobbled pathway, built for hoofed traffic. To this end, the apprenticeship undertook the reconstruction of the kalderimi that leads to the historic Bridge of Plaka (Epirus, Greece), which at the time was also being reconstructed following its collapse in February 2015.
My reading of this project develops in two interlacing threads. The main thread presents three Patterns of Activity that run through the apprenticeship: starting from the routines of daily labour, passing through the hours of concentrated work, and reaching what could be described as moments of concerted action. 6 Evidently, here I draw on the thought of Hannah Arendt and her distinction of Vita Activa into three fundamental categories: the perpetual Labourrequired to sustain life as biological existence, the Work of erecting a shared durable world, and the Actions that set in motion chains of events with unforeseeable ends. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). Following Paul Ricoeur, I read these concepts less in terms of political science and more in the light of a ‘philosophical anthropology’ aimed at identifying historically enduring features of the human condition. Paul Ricoeur, “Action, Story and History: On Re-Reading the Human Condition,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 60–72. The aim here is to trace how such activities play complementary roles in constituting the tacit knowledge of builders, especially around the ability of the built environment to mediate between physical dispositions and discursive or imaginary dimensions. Thus, a second, more detailed thread weaves in and out of the fabric of the work, seeking how the latter comes to encompass or anticipate such mediations.

Figure 8.1: Keeping watch at the Bridge of Plaka c. 1900.
Labour and the establishment of an ‘extended body’
or Forming a chain
The morning by the river is chilly, the fog thick until the sun rises a little. Tucked into his jacket and covered by his jockey hat, apprentice Nikos T. sits by the door of the warehouse and smokes. When he sees me arrive, he smiles playfully and teases me, suggesting I am late: ‘you’re a hard man to wake up, aren’t you?’ I unlock the door and we enter the storeroom, while more come to pick up their tools: shovels, pickaxes and hoes, crowbars, chisels and hammers, lifting buckets and wheelbarrows, as well as a few pieces of kermes oak, an unrivalled tool if you want to strike a stone hard without breaking it, to wedge it in between others. Around that time, one may also hear the rumbling sound of 6 cubic metres of river stone as it spills out of the truck bed.
Warming up, getting to know
The stone we use for the kalderimi is collected by the municipality’s bulldozer from the nearby tributary of the Arachthos River. The worksite road that was opened to accommodate the big restoration project of the Bridge of Plaka also allows our truck to reach us and bring building materials. Still, the reconstruction of the old pathway presents the fundamental difficulty of non-accessibility by vehicles. Either because it is narrow and steep, or because heavy machinery would destroy the surviving parts of the dry-stone structure, in most places the transport has to be done by ourselves. Hence, the municipal truck empties the stone at the pathway’s accessible edges, and every morning the group starts by transporting them – hand over hand – to the spots where the crews will be working. Someone takes a position next to the pile, and the others spread out along the path.
This process helps the bodies to wake up and the mind to orient itself to work, while providing the ground for the first exploratory talks of the day, allowing us to wind each other up. Someone woke up feeling wary, while someone else might be overly cheerful. Together with kinetic coordination, the socialisation carried out in this collective performance helps to establish what might be described as an extended body: ‘a new dynamical whole emerges through bodily interaction and interbodily resonance’. 7 Such a more-than-verbal communication is discussed by C. Tewes et al., focusing on how emotions are ‘intentionally directed toward other persons but are also simultaneously expressed by internal bodily reactions … and body postures, gestures and facial expressions that are directly perceivable in social interactions and lead to interbodily resonance’. Christian Tewes, Christoph Durt, and Thomas Fuchs, “Introduction: The Interplay of Embodiment, Enaction and Culture,” in Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. Durt, Fuchs, and Tewes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 4. And indeed, the emergence of an ‘interaffective space’ seems to take place more actively here, in the coordinated carrying of stones than, say, in the hours of concentrated work. Ιt is this ‘mere’ labour that provides a first locus of immersion in gesture and language, situating all participants (every body) in the same register of embodied communication, through which craft knowledge is already shared.

Figure 8.2: Lifting and carrying the stone, feeling its weight and shape, talking about (and around) it. The material is never in isolation.
The one who bends down to pick up the stones and pass them on to the next is under the greatest strain, but also bears the responsibility of selecting the most suitable pieces from the pile. As the chain unfolds, comments are made about whether the material is good enough. Craftsmen may keep a stone aside because it seems to fit the spot they are currently working on; other pieces may be discarded before they reach the end, since it’s obvious they are no good; then the comment may be heard loud enough to reach the first and draw their attention. ‘Oi! What are you having us carry?’ One thus notices how this manual transport is also a process of sorting, in which the available material is filtered and sorted by many hands. Equally important, however, is that this quality control also constitutes a demonstration of knowledge, first by the leading craftsmen and then by the apprentices. Thus knowledge is simultaneously activated, calibrated, and passed on, while it is shared by many without becoming explicit through texts, diagrams, or numbers. And this is possible precisely because the sorting is carried out in plain sight; 8 For a critical rediscovery of the importance of vision in processes of embodied and local knowledge see Cristina Grasseni, ed., Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). because all are involved in the same task, at the same time, even as they hold different status and position in the work.
Work and the pursuit of discernment
or Breaking in Groups
‘All right, that will do!’ echoes from the end of the chain, and this means that a large pile of stones has now gathered at the location that had run out. Movement begins to wane, the chain breaks, and the boulouki splits into crews working at different heights of the path, each under the guidance of an experienced stonemason. Yet some do not follow the others, but find some shade near the pile and arrange their tools there, among which are chisels of all kinds and ‘masons’ squares’ to cut stones regularly. These are the chisellers. Their task is to ‘read’ the rough stones and decide which are fit for what purpose, in terms of size and shape, but also of their condition (e.g., whether they bear signs of a vulnerability). Thus, slowly but surely, worked stones are piled in different groups, to be used for the different structural parts of the kalderimi: cornerstones that delineate the sides, thick boards that serve as ‘brakes’ for the sloping sections – the so called ‘selvages’ – and, of course, the infill that provides the main floor of the path.
Discernment in Craft and Architecture
As chisellers deliver individual elements, master-masons set the structural frames and apprentices fill them, they are all called upon to interpret – and that means to rework – the material, according to a range of concerns: for example, stones need to go deep into the ground, but in a way that brings their flat faces up to form the surface of the floor; the latter should not present any potholes or bumps, while providing the right slope for rainwater drainage; and the whole needs to be woven densely together. This layered complementarity is probably what leads instructors and apprentices to describe the building of the kalderimi as a ‘puzzle’. But it is a puzzle of which the pieces are not yet complete, thus calling for an inventiveness that moves between combining the available pieces and reworking them to fit together appropriately. 9 Such processes of thinking-through-making, where ‘the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work’, have been systematically explored by anthropologist Tim Ingold. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 6.
In this I recognise a mentality that is essentially oriented to harvesting the potential of ‘given’ conditions, starting from the properties of matter and extending to the natural and cultural context. The enduring effectiveness of this attitude may be felt by recalling how Michelangelo claimed to identify sculptural forms latent in raw blocks of marble in Carrara, or how Leon Battista Alberti traced the very origins of sculpture in recognitions of formal features in yet untouched mater. 10 Julius Henrik Lange and Karl Johns, “Michelangelo and Marble (Copenhagen Gads, 1876),” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2021): 1–27. Such ideas point to the notion of discernment, which emerged in Early Modern Europe to describe ‘the ability of perceiving the secrets of nature and art’, encompassing meanings of judgment, ingenuity, and taste. 11 Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, eds., Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts (New York: Routledge, 2017). Stretching across artisanal and scholarly cultures – from Italian art literature on discerzione as ‘judgment of the eye’ to religious discourses on good and evil spirits, discretio spirituum – this concept appears suitable to illuminate the entanglements between material and intellectual speculation, practical and theoretical modes of interpreting the world.
By the same token, it allows me to move deeper into a related architectural skill of perceiving how particular conditions invite certain structural and formal responses. Indeed, over the course of the apprenticeship, discernment expanded from the technical aspects of the kalderimi to how it can form part of wider formal structures and thus be more effectively integrated into the cultural landscape. Interestingly, this movement from a narrow technical view to a broader architectural perspective was driven by attempts to respond to problems that initially seemed ‘secondary’ as they appeared to be either ‘too practical’ or ‘merely aesthetic’ in nature.
The steps (and the hackberry tree)
One such case was where the path meets the rural settlement of Plaka, taking the form of a linear staircase flanked with lateral walls, and where, about halfway up the slope, a side wall had collapsed from the growth of a hackberry tree. If attention was initially focused on material and technical specifics, a secondary question also arose, which was how to deal with the tree’s intrusive presence. Drawing on his experience in other projects, craftsman Dimitris F. suggested interrupting the wall in order to allow for the tree to grow, and thus also frame it ‘as décor … as we do in gardens’. This idea was further developed when the loose parts of the wall were removed, revealing the large roots that had brought it down.

Figure 8.3: The steps before the reconstruction. The collapsed wall can be seen on the right and the ruined house at the top.
The particular shape the root system had taken inspired the building of a small bench around it, letting its lower part pass through (Fig. 8.4). The building of a bench seemed apt as we were, after all, in the middle of the staircase – and half way to the bridge – where one often wants to rest. Also, from this point, one has the opportunity to observe the ruins of the first house of the settlement, revealing itself at the top of the steps. I suggest that such framings of the tree, the roots, and the house led the team of builders to gradually identify this part of the path as a ‘ritual ascent’ to the settlement of Plaka. In its turn, this sense of arriving at a focal point marked by human presence was further enhanced by embedding a carved stone depicting a human face – a symbol traditionally standing for the builders themselves 12 Ronald Walkey, “A Lesson in Continuity: The Legacy of the Builder’s Guild in Northern Greece,” in Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, ed. David Seamon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 129–57. – on the penultimate step of the staircase, next to the house.

Figure 8.4: Pursuing discernment.
In this sequence of gestures, one may see how the builders came to discern an underlying web of relations between different dimensions of the landscape, and how they worked with it to weave connections across inorganic and animate matter, practical uses and visual transitions, symbolic images and cultural narratives. The sculptural form seems significant in this respect: the horizontal placement of the human face and its embedding in the floor tend to evoke associations of sleep, burial, and descent to the ground. Such a sense of presence in absentia fits with the main meaning of this symbol, pointing to the travelling companies that would leave a place once their work was done. But it also conveys a sense of unearthing. As the sculpted figure gestures equally in the directions of immersion and emergence, it resonates with the kinaesthetic experience of ascent and descent, intrinsic to the formal structure of the staircase. At the same time, it also acts in concert with the rising and deepening presence of the tree, with the sitting body and its rising gaze, the house becoming a ruin and yet still standing. 13 For an in-depth analysis of the ways in which ‘natural symbols’ such as horizontals and verticals are impregnated by ‘conventional symbols’ which in turn connect to fundamental texts or narratives of a community or culture, see Karsten Harries, “Representation and Re-Presentation,” in The Ethical Function of Architecture, 118–33; Harries, “The Voices of Space,” in ibid, 180–200.

Figure 8.5: The builder’s face sculpted by Theodoros Papagiannis.
Action and the emergence of stories
or Gathering in circles
The idea of installing carved stones on the path to the bridge was borrowed from another landmark of Epirus, which we visited on one of our daytrips. Specifically, it came from the nearby thirteenth-century monastery of Tsouka, where in the floor of its courtyard we met two reliefs, bringing together two archetypal rivals: a snake and a scorpion. 14 Μαρία Τσούπη, “Εκκλησιαστικά Και Κοσμικά Λιθόγλυπτα Στην Ήπειρο. Τέλη 18ου-20ου Αιώνα. (Πανεπιστήμιο Ιωαννίνων, 2004). Having this in mind, we asked a renowned Greek sculptor, who comes from the area and has studied its building tradition, to carve a few stones of this kind to be embedded in the kalderimi. The stones we received were indeed carved with motifs used by the folk builders of Epirus: a human face, a bird on a cypress tree, a cross between the sun and the moon, and a snake similar to the one in the monastery.
The placement of these reliefs along the path prompted the team to identify focal points that could be associated with the sculpted figures. This process was informed by activities and experiences that were not overtly related to the building project: talks, hikes, feasts, and the stories that come with them encouraged builders to perceive the landscape as an assembly of multifarious events, and attend to its individual aspects as parts of a latent plot. As this narrative sensibility merges with technical knowledge, it reveals to the builder the possibilities of a more encompassing interpretation of the work at hand. And in this, the role of iconography proves to be pivotal. As we saw in the case of the steps framed as a ‘ritual ascent’, so too in other parts of the path these figures helped individual elements of the site to be seen in the light of narrative and thus to ‘come under one roof’ to form a scene. Nevertheless, the potency of figurative representation can be observed – perhaps even more clearly – in the shaping of that part of the path where the gifts of the sculptor were notused, but instead the stone mason took over.
A perilous passage
It was the most uncomfortable part of the path. No traces of the old kalderimi were anywhere to be seen, only paving from the 1990s, now in disrepair: thin slabs had been roughly applied with cement over the soil, while below, the slope had been eaten away by the rain, causing part of the floor to collapse. The broad lines of our approach here were clear from the start: tear up the slabs, build a retaining wall on which the new structure can safely stand, and apply the paradigmatic type of kalderimi. A seemingly minor question that arose was how to handle the free side of the reconstructed pathway, whose highest distance from the ground exceeded three metres. Extending the retaining wall upwards to form a parapet was always an option, but it would mean that much material and several days of work would be spent on the wall, while our main task was the floor.

Figure 8.6: The ‘perilous passage’ before and after the reconstruction.
The answer was provided by craftsman Kostas T., who suggested placing arkades: the upright stones traditionally used in Balkan stone bridges to mark their lateral boundaries (Fig. 8.1). Interestingly, this ‘scenic’ conception seemed to tie in several concerns: first, it set a rudimentary boundary that, if anything, pointed out the dangerous height. Second, it allowed us to demarcate the pathway without building another four cubic metres of wall. Third, as this was the path leading to the Bridge of Plaka, the appearance of arkades referred to the landmark and in a way anticipated it. What’s more, this insight sparked technical investigations as to how the arkades could be fixed without the use of binder mortar. The carving of the stones in an ‘L’ shape (Fig. 8.7) is an innovative detail manifesting the interplay between narrative and technical imagination. Finally, the carved forms were emphasised by the placement of a rough rock (originally located just beyond) at the lower end of the slope, also allowing to further guide movement to the safe side.

Figure 8.7: The emergence of stories.
From scenes to acts
Through the above, one can observe the decisive role of narrative in establishing interplay between ‘thick’ levels of materiality, bodily movement, and practical use towards increasingly ‘thinner’ levels of symbolic understanding and imagination. In terms of construction, the insight of a scene serves as a catalyst by encouraging a comprehensive interpretation of the site, which then feeds back to it. In terms of reception, it provides the work with a potency that goes beyond the intentions of its makers, as it opens it up to wider webs of relations. Thus, the point would not be to seek the content of a single story or plot, but rather to appreciate how a narrative sensibility and a tendency towards figuration enables builders to endow space with a certain disposition or agency. 15 On figurativeness and the ‘animation’ of architectural work in the nineteenth century, and particularly in Gottfried Semper, see Caroline A Van Eck, “Figuration, Tectonics and Animism in Semper’s Der Stil,” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 3 (2009): 325–37. In the case of this apprenticeship, this appears to have happened in two main ways. First, through the apprehension and treatment of the work as a set of scenes that recall human action. Second, by understanding and presenting the work itself as a ‘living’ and, in a sense, acting presence. As a narrative sensibility permeates individual aspects of the work, it animates it as a whole: floors open up to reveal the faces of builders, and walls make room for trees; benches let roots pass through while inviting the passerby to sit and catch their breath; rocks transform into protective pillars to attend them as they cross a perilous passage.
Building Insights between the practical and the symbolic
The question tended to be raised among apprentices as to whether the carrying of stones should be part of training for craftspeople, or whether chores of this kind should be taken up by ‘someone else’. As organisers, we invoked the history of customary practices of mutual aid, through which the mountain communities of Epirus shared the burdens of subsistence and of building in particular. Of course, while such examples of communal cooperation may inspire a modern participatory ethos, they also raise questions about the nature of such participation within the fixed hierarchies of so-called traditional societies where, indeed, the assumption of drudgery would often reveal who was (not) qualified as a craftsperson. 16 On gender identities, production processes, and social institutions in pre-industrial societies, see Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). However, one should not fail to note that in the modern context, especially from the nineteenth century onwards, strong – albeit different – tendencies developed to separate ‘mere’ labour from the wider cultural life. In architectural debates, the fierceness with which architects such as Adolf Loos preached the strict separation of the private domain of the house from the public realm of the city may be seen to reflect a deeper and more general tendency to radicalise the tension between practical and symbolic engagements with the world.
Highly revealing in this regard is the contrast between two prominent streams of architectural thought that developed in the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: one centring on the study of human behaviour and everyday practices, and the other on sensorial perception and the importance of vision. 17 Following Tom Avermaete, one may want to frame these strands of architectural thinking as the epistemes of ‘praxeology’ and ‘phenomenology’. Tom Avermaete, “A Black Box? Architecture and Its Epistemes,” in The Tacit Dimension. Architecture Knowledge and Scientific Research, ed. Lara Schrijver (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021), 69–82. Inclined to take the subject of architecture as either a user or an observer, such frames of thought tend to be seen in opposition. Yet common blind spots become evident once we note how they both assume a subject moving on standard trajectories: whether it is about changing vistas or ergonomics, the world is thereby framed as a (rather lonely) milieu to navigate or to use, but not to be disturbed. In stark contrast to such static movement, the dynamic stasis of the human chain provides an essentially engaged way of being in the world – one that is inextricably tied to the tasks of its formation. What comes to the fore when we look more closely to the chain of people is the collective fundaments of world building. And indeed, it is between ‘praxeological’ emphases on everyday practices and ‘phenomenological’ studies of multisensory experience that architectural attitudes arose, time and again, with a keen interest in contexts where the making, use, and perception of the built environment are enacted by the same groups or people: from so called bidonvilles, to vernacular settlements, to reclaimed urban spaces.
In similar ways, antagonism between frames of thought that adhere to the generalising function of Type and those that insist on the irreducible particularities of Place often restricts architectural knowledge between taxonomic understandings of typology and a countervailing emphasis on the special features of place resisting classification. 18 José Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 (1978): 23–46. However, as the steps and the hackberry tree testify, one may look for a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between Type and Locus, one that moves beyond ‘rationalist’ accounts of architectural knowledge and ‘romantic’ defences of place to discern the potency of contexts. In this, the role of figurative representation (bildliche Darstellung) is key, as it helps to unlock the communicative and affective power of the built environment. Yet again, such possibilities are often hampered by the ongoing radicalising of tensions, which in the twentieth century also yielded the conflict between modernist recuperations of Tectonics and post-modern ‘semiological’ or ‘scenographic’ approaches. 19 Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel À l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” in Labour, Work and Architecture (London: Phaidon Press, 2002), 91–103 The builders’ impulse to treat their work both as a scene of human action and as an acting presence beckons towards overcoming this impasse.

Figure 8.8: The snake and the pathway.
Overcoming the antagonisms in which architectural thought so often finds itself presupposes a willingness to discern continuities between its different schools, but also a certain belief that behind what the different architectural ‘epistemes’ reveal to us, lies a larger latent world. 20 Dalibor Vesely, The Latent World of Architecture: Selected Essays, ed. Alexandra Stara and Peter Carl (New York: Routledge, 2023). In such an attempt one might be assisted by earlier understandings of architecture as driven by a ‘primordial urge to strike a beat, to string a necklace, to decorate “lawfully”’. 21 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33. Coming from the ambivalent nineteenth century, such a conception retains an idea of the architectural project as a privileged site for the merging of different rhythms of human life and different pulses of the more-than-human world, thus inviting builders and architects to listen to such different voices and practice their attunement.
Bibliography
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- Walkey, Ronald. “A Lesson in Continuity: The Legacy of the Builder’s Guild in Northern Greece.” In Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, edited by David Seamon, 129–57. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
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- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 18.
- Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
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- Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
- In Greek, boulouki means ‘gaggle’, ‘travelling group’; a word evoking the journeying companies of stonemasons and craftspeople.
- Evidently, here I draw on the thought of Hannah Arendt and her distinction of Vita Activa into three fundamental categories: the perpetual Labourrequired to sustain life as biological existence, the Work of erecting a shared durable world, and the Actions that set in motion chains of events with unforeseeable ends. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). Following Paul Ricoeur, I read these concepts less in terms of political science and more in the light of a ‘philosophical anthropology’ aimed at identifying historically enduring features of the human condition. Paul Ricoeur, “Action, Story and History: On Re-Reading the Human Condition,” Salmagundi 60 (1983): 60–72.
- Such a more-than-verbal communication is discussed by C. Tewes et al., focusing on how emotions are ‘intentionally directed toward other persons but are also simultaneously expressed by internal bodily reactions … and body postures, gestures and facial expressions that are directly perceivable in social interactions and lead to interbodily resonance’. Christian Tewes, Christoph Durt, and Thomas Fuchs, “Introduction: The Interplay of Embodiment, Enaction and Culture,” in Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World, ed. Durt, Fuchs, and Tewes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 4.
- For a critical rediscovery of the importance of vision in processes of embodied and local knowledge see Cristina Grasseni, ed., Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010).
- Such processes of thinking-through-making, where ‘the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work’, have been systematically explored by anthropologist Tim Ingold. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), 6.
- Julius Henrik Lange and Karl Johns, “Michelangelo and Marble (Copenhagen Gads, 1876),” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2021): 1–27.
- Sven Dupré and Christine Göttler, eds., Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts (New York: Routledge, 2017).
- Ronald Walkey, “A Lesson in Continuity: The Legacy of the Builder’s Guild in Northern Greece,” in Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, ed. David Seamon (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 129–57.
- For an in-depth analysis of the ways in which ‘natural symbols’ such as horizontals and verticals are impregnated by ‘conventional symbols’ which in turn connect to fundamental texts or narratives of a community or culture, see Karsten Harries, “Representation and Re-Presentation,” in The Ethical Function of Architecture, 118–33; Harries, “The Voices of Space,” in ibid, 180–200.
- Μαρία Τσούπη, “Εκκλησιαστικά Και Κοσμικά Λιθόγλυπτα Στην Ήπειρο. Τέλη 18ου-20ου Αιώνα. (Πανεπιστήμιο Ιωαννίνων, 2004).
- On figurativeness and the ‘animation’ of architectural work in the nineteenth century, and particularly in Gottfried Semper, see Caroline A Van Eck, “Figuration, Tectonics and Animism in Semper’s Der Stil,” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 3 (2009): 325–37.
- On gender identities, production processes, and social institutions in pre-industrial societies, see Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
- Following Tom Avermaete, one may want to frame these strands of architectural thinking as the epistemes of ‘praxeology’ and ‘phenomenology’. Tom Avermaete, “A Black Box? Architecture and Its Epistemes,” in The Tacit Dimension. Architecture Knowledge and Scientific Research, ed. Lara Schrijver (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021), 69–82.
- José Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 (1978): 23–46.
- Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel À l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,” in Labour, Work and Architecture (London: Phaidon Press, 2002), 91–103
- Dalibor Vesely, The Latent World of Architecture: Selected Essays, ed. Alexandra Stara and Peter Carl (New York: Routledge, 2023).
- Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 33.