Dismantling Cartesian Modernism

Abstract:

Focusing on the work of the artist Nancy Holt, this essay examines the broader theoretical framework in which her work positions itself against an ocular-centric, primarily vision biased culture, and examines the power structures inherent in engineering, cartography, philosophy, which her work is intended to undermine. Using the 1973 work, ‘Missoula Ranch Locators’ as a case-study, this essay explores how her work has come to question such inherent constructs as ‘North’, ‘South’, etc, but also examines the larger and more problematic cultural manifestations of an increasingly fetishized  aesthetic visual culture and the cartesian framework which perpetuates  such a vision-centered experience of Modernity. Holt’s work, much as this essay, will utilize the theories of phenomenology in philosophy, and architecture to establish Holt’s work as the antithesis of such Cartesian sensibilities, and to suggest her work as providing an experiential/sensory based alternative in modern ontology.

1. Theoretical Framework.

“The dominance of vision over the other senses - and the consequent bias in cognition - has been observed by many philosophers, A collection of philosophical essays, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision argues that beginning with the ancient Greeks, Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality” (p.16).

- Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘The Eyes of the Skin’ (2005).

For Pallasmaa, and those countless other philosophers, cultural critics and theoreticians, who, over the years have warned western society of the inherent dangers of such a ‘vision centric’ culture, the primacy of vision has come to represent one of the greatest struggles in modernist thought; the desire for rational order and it’s inevitable collision course with the actual human experience of self, place, and environment. The last hundred years of philosophical thought, most notably since Sartre and Beauvoir, other similarly inclined schools of thought, ranging from the   psychogeographers, to the Lettrist and Situationists, and most notably, the phenomenologists, all have expressed at length the over-dependence of vision. Still today many of our highest institutions ranging from the scientific community, to governance and even art; our Modern systems of reasoning and the idea of the the rational, are all built upon the foundations forged during the renaissance rediscovery of Greek philosophy; which posited the use of the senses as a means of experience, but most importantly, the primacy of vision as being the purest form of them all. This associative understanding of vision as the highest form of cognition, the old adage ‘seeing is believing’, is problematic in that it colors much of our perception of truth, or reality, as being only that which we see. This over-dependence of vision as a means for testing the ‘truthfulness’, or reality of a situation, image, or experience lends vision an almost trance-like quality. If we can see it with our own eyes, it therefore somehow must be true. Focusing primarily on architecture, Niel Leach’s 1999 book, ‘The Anaesthetics of Architecture’ posits,

“So virulent has been the aestheticization of the world that the only strategy left is one of seduction, the empty, beguiling play of appearances, where critique loses its force and complacency and fascination takes over” (p. 88).

For Leach, the image is merely a facade, behind which no meaning or real depth can be found. The primacy of the eyes and ultimately the supremacy of the image in our modern culture has driven culture to the edge of meaninglessness itself. Continuing further, Leach reminds us of Guy Debord, the founder of Situationist theory, who in his polemical work, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, described the image as,

“The spectacle [that] plays upon all the ‘weaknesses’ in Western philosophy. To this extent, the privileging of sight as the primary mode of perception, and the dominance of a Cartesian rationality that has grown out of this condition, fuel the spectacle itself“(p. 88).

For Debord, as well as his contemporaries, the Cartesian ideal of the rational was highly problematic, attaining even fascistic overtones. If experience is largely perceived to be understood as a singularly visual experience, then with the rise of Cartesian systems of thought coming out of the enlightenment , so too, the absolute constructs upheld as the ultimate forms from which truth might be obtained would similarly be just as image cluttered. Worse still, the rational image, none more so than that of the Cartesian grid, became so highly fetishized, it would mar both the mental and physical landscape of western civilization for years to come; from the bombastic Haussmannization of old Paris, to the terrifying heights of St.Louis’s infamous Pruitt-Igoe. In an essay discussing Marleau-Ponty’s theories of phenomenological experience in ‘Philosophy and Painting’, Robert Burch’s (1993) essay notes, 

“It’s proper fulfillment is not to replace realist “objectivism” with idealist “subjectivism”, but to overcome the subject/object opposition in all of it’s Cartesian formulations, and so to preclude all of the realism/idealism aporias that attend that opposition.” (p. 352)

For Ponty, the very arguments in favor of a cartesian and highly rationalized understanding of the world, of ontological truth, became themselves highly fetishized as per their reliance on an aestheticized and fetishistic sense of vision. Cartesian theory and all of it’s rational accouterment, because of it’s dependence on the image as a means for conveying ontological truth, became itself a fascist system in which anything which did not conform to the Cartesian construct could be summarily dismissed; without the careful study and mindful review one might expect from those actually seeking ontological ends.

2. The Rise of the Cartesian.

With Cartesian ideals arising from ancient Greek principles of logic and truth, along with the privilege of the ocular as a means for verifying those truths, this led to the development of a highly ordered and vision centric approach to the organization of society. In many respects, the enlightenment, for whatever achievements might have arisen out of this period, set the standard for a highly stylized visual culture. Eras past, running as far back as the caves of Lascaux, have always been concerned with imagery. However, since the industrial revolution, the mass production of images has led to a much more aestheticized experience of people's everyday lives. Also developing within this era, the rise of a new soft-power, one of subtle, yet dramatic impact came about with the emergence of engineering. Pier Vittorio Aureli, in his (2011) book, summarized Foucault’s theory on the awesome power inherent within this new profession as a means for territorial organization, but also unspoken control over nature and the very landscape itself,

“The dynamic of exchange prevailed over the singularity of places, and the improvement of infrastructure and mobility became engineering’s most urgent concern”, continuing, “The economic pressure to control the region led to the attempt to scientifically map its features; such mapping produced a new definition of space as a complex of transactions, movement, and services that extended beyond the boundaries of localities, The geography of a region was thus reorganized by these maps in terms of economic control and exploitation, which led to the emergence of engineering as an extremely sophisticated form of state control, beyond the traditional form of military force.”(p.160)

Through the awesome power of man-made manipulations to the landscape, but also even, the cartographic urge to survey and plot out every contour, elevation change, town, and in some cases every citizen, brought with it the idea of site-specificity and unique place-identity to its knees. The gears of the industrial revolution were in no small part greased by the denigration of site specificity and ultimately, the downfall of place-aura. 

This new Cartesian world of quantifiable resources, while plotting the limits of landmass via cartographic survey, ironically seemed to have quite the opposite effect on those for whom these maps were made. The inherent fascist tendencies to be found within the Cartesian grid is in it’s unending sense of vast and expansive sensation of limitlessness. The grid as an aesthetic trope cannot help but be perceptually understood as extending in all directions, x, y, and z-axis ad-infinitum. As Aureli (2011) reminds,

“Civil engineering became a tactic of spatial organization that blended similarities and differences, norms and exceptions, in one total and flexible system of knowledge. The increasing role of the École Polytechnique and Durand’s architectural response to it with his gridded, and thus normative, approach to design are examples of this system” (p.160-161).

With this aesthetic grid into which all land, natural resources and even civil society could be made to either fit into, or made pliably conform to, some more flexible than others; the totalizing grid became the normative approach and ultimately the logic much of western society still relies upon today. The impact of the Cartesian grid and its formation of modernist ideas of purity, balance, and order can be read across history, from the imaginative work of Étienne-Louis Boullée, to the grid-system streets of ghost-towns in the American west, and even to tetris and the rubik's cube. So influenced and ingrained within Western culture has been this visual-centric and idealized gridded system of logic, as Leach (1999), and countless other philosophers throughout history have reminded us,

“One has to conform and subscribe to a predetermined model; the possibility of an active participation in the construction of the lived world has all but been erased.” (p.57)

Anesthetized by the image, seduced by the hidden aesthetics of the Cartesian structure, much of the power inherent in the thinking minds of the individual have been all but been stripped clean, replaced by the anodyne and cadaverous Cartesian sense of modernism as a purely rationalist ideal.

3. ‘Missoula Ranch Locators’ (1973).

Undoubtedly influenced by both the waves of intellectual liberation, beginning in the art world with abstract expressionism, in which the deeply personal interpenetration of the artist and art-object became one; as well as the emergence of perception-altering drugs such as LSD, but most importantly, the cultural and political struggles between authority and the masses during Vietnam-War era America; the work of landscape artist Nancy Holt can be understood as one of the many artists whose work questioned the many normative assumptions prevalent in western culture. Focusing primarily on landscape art, an emergent non-gallery form of experiential art in the 1970s, her work goes further than the simple challenging of the primacy of the white-washed gallery wall as the only proper receptacle for art; those gallery walls which had been the normative system for many artists past. Instead, her work, has a variety of unspoken cross-currents ranging from phenomenology and the re-emergence of site-specificity, existentialism and ruminations on existence, the temporal and ephemerality in art and nature, but also the inflictions and unnatural impacts humans have had upon our environment as we conform our surroundings to our own inherent constructs of place, place-identity, and our associative understandings which arise from our positioning within this perceptual framework of our environments.

While her most famous work, ‘Sun Tunnels’ (1973-1976) may be here most eponymous work, it was her adaptation of a rural Montana ranch into a thoughtful study on Cartesian understandings of landscape, via her work, ‘Missoula Ranch Locators’ (1972), that best describes Holt’s larger theoretical aim; the subtle unsettling of the foundations of Cartesian and rationalist ideologies in the construction of modernist thought and perception. Having broken free from the gallery walls, Holt’s work takes aim at these ideologies in the construction of landscapes, both physical and thought-driven, and as Aureli’s (2011) reminds us,

“engineering [itself] initially was applied not to the city but to the countryside of the territory.” (p.160-161).

By the removal of the artwork from the white walls of the gallery, Holt’s work reminds us of the juxtaposition often inherent in modernist ideas of natural and man-made landscapes. For many, the city is the best identifiable Cartesian system of gridded streets, train timetables, and the commercial and cultural flows of people, goods, and services. However it is exactly the a-priori favoring of the city as the seat of cultural production, which makes the non-urban landscape one of denigrate isolation, and thus, the inherent need for those within a Cartesian system, to structure, colonize and assert their control over it. By locating her work within the remote and desolate regions of a rural Montana ranch, Holt both undermines the privilege of the city, but also the cultural confines of the gallery and their powerful roles as ‘vanguards’ of high-culture. 

The work is accomplished simply enough, though let it not be said rigorous detail or careful surveying techniques were skills Holt lacked; As four vertical metal poles stood at eye-height, each featuring a shorter horizontal pole soldered together, forming an array, charting the four cardinal points of a compass; North, South, East, and West. In this respect, Holt has very clearly and explicitly called attention to the assumed cultural norms many might apply to and experience as their interpretation of such a remote landscape. Whereas the people of the First Nations might experience this exact landscape, their natural homeland, as featuring a variety of territorial and continually shifting reference points; the migratory song of birds, to the path of the sun overhead as their navigation and placement of self within this landscape, for those weaned on Western, Cartesian, ideologies, this landscape is rendered at first legible, and made somehow less terrifyingly remote through the tangible objects, the locators, denoting the cardinal points. Our interaction with these art-objects will prove to reveal an entirely different experience of landscape. The mere physical tangibility of these charted points can be viewed, as Aureli (2011) noted while talking about a similar, yet highly urban situation with Mies’s Seagram Plaza,

“By putting emphasis on the [building] site, the plinth inevitably makes the site a limit for what it contains”, continuing, “Suddenly, and for a brief moment, one is estranged from the flows and organizational patterns that animate the city, yet still confronting them. (p.37).

Holt’s mere physical act of bringing into symmetrical existence these cartographic point, immediately and without question strike a kind of plinth-like interpretation of approach and interaction with these objects. In a way, the plinth of Mies’s Seagram Plaza, which affords the city dweller a slightly removed space in which to break free from the continual flows of the city, all the while still observing these flows, can be seen as having the same effect via Holt’s viewing tubes. The mere physical act of bringing into existence these cartographic ideas into symmetrical existence, immediately and without question strike a kind of plinth-like interpretation of approach and interaction with these viewing tubes. It is through the physical act of gazing into these tubes though, that they deal their greatest and most debilitating blow to this implied Cartesian, linear landscape of North, South, East, and West.

The act of viewing through these tubes induces a curious sensation. Perceptually, we interact within a landscape using the totality of our five senses. If we are allergic, we might find ourselves deliriously aware of our sense of smell. The warmth of the Montana sun, high overhead might cause us to sweat. Our ears might hear the strange songs of the hermit thrush, whose own vocalizations call to mind a sensation similar to that of inhabiting a cavernous metal pipe ourselves as we gaze through this similarly constructed locator. Yet it is the primacy of vision in which we are meant to experience this landscape. Inherently our privileging of sight over the other senses is further exacerbated by the means in which we are intended to experience these locators. What we may perceptually understand from afar, the sense of the expansive and absolute cartographic understanding of this landscape, suddenly these locators begin to imply the inherent limits of the landscape. Referencing Henri Bosco’s ‘Malicroix’, Gaston Bachelard’s (1994) seminole book regarding phenomenology, ‘The Poetics of Space’ reiterated the following,

“There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lends color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless” (p.43).

We find in this text, a juxtapositional reasoning for Holt’s introduction of limits to this landscape. The mere act of our singular-sense-devotional experience of the locators as purely being ocular-centric leaves our ears free to wander. As the visitor gazes through this narrow tube, ahead to the seemingly arbitrary landscape framed ahead, the soundscape surrounding, as well as the variety of other senses all begin to play upon the visitor. Pallasmaa (2005), in summarizing Marleau-Ponty, describes this newfound sensory experience as thus,

“This entire philosophical work focuses on perception in general, and vision in particular. But instead of the Cartesian eye of the outside spectator, Marleau-Ponty’s sense of sight is an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the ‘flesh of the world’, Ponty continues, ‘My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being, which speaks to all my senses at once’.” (p. 20-21).

When these cardinal points stand in symmetric relation to their actual existence in a landscape, suddenly the fetishiztion, and even the aesthetic quality of the image is undermined. While these locators frame the landscape, they do so not as an artist, or even any other individual might wish to aesthetically arrange a landscape by scenic vistas, but instead as the awesome and terrifying absolutes of a Cartesian system might do; making the image and it’s selection a completely arbitrary act. These Cartesian absolutes, North, South, East, and West suddenly melt away in the face of such realizations. We perceive these absolutes as that which they are, mere conceptual grounding points within a larger perceptual framework which has colored much of our understanding of landscapes, both mental and physical. The eye, here in these simple locators, has finally been severed from the experience of place. Holt, has, in effect blinded us, but in doing so, we have been given back our total sensory array of tools in which we might better understand and interact within this new landscape; a landscape of thermal depths, sonal peaks and valleys, and one of new and richly differentiated odorous delights. As Bachelard (1994) remarks,

“Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we will live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall never have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts-serious, sad thoughts-and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence that in one of finality” (p.61).

The eye similarly, for all it’s supposed ontological truth-giving fallacies; when the physical reality of truth, nothing more irrefutable than the vast expansiveness of the Montana landscape; stands framed by these Cartesian systems of logic and rationality, becomes as hollow and cold. We feel this absence, because we feel; with all of our senses.

With this newfound sensation of landscapes, the entire Cartesian framework; useful in theory and harmful in practice; unravels, expanding outward a truly infinite range of possible interpretations of such a landscape. The absurdity of the literal North, South, East, and West now viscerally apparent, the image and all aesthetic attachments become hollow and void as an experience. These Cartesian ideals, the linear cartographic standards appear less as absolutes and more as loosely pliable tools. The most interesting thing about maps is that, apart from those who might collect them or see them for their aesthetic beauty; again the privilege of image over actual experience of a landscape, they are merely a means to an end. Just as a visitor to Nancy Holt’s remote earthworks might utilize the map as a means for positioning and directing themselves within the landscape, the greatest irony of maps is that they are perceived as the sum total survey of a place; yet once the destination is reached, maps are summarily folded up and the real act of exploration begins. One only has to observe the befuddled tourist in order to see this practice in action. What Nancy Holt has done, and is the crux of her work, is given back, as Bachelard’s (1994) might iterate,

“Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions” (p.67).

The experience with Holt’s ‘Missoula Ranch Locators’ (1973), whether theoretically encountered or physically, forces powerful, previously under-spoken questions of power, especially within mapping. The shape of experience suddenly becomes amorphous, like a surrealist landscape, or the face of a picasso portraiture. Human experience, our lives, suddenly do not fit within the linear framework of a ‘timeline’, and instead we are left with the highly personalized and self-constructed interpretation of our world. Furthermore, Holt, much like the work of her peers, Smithson, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, De Maria, etc. dismantles in a larger sense, the constructed identity of urban and rural; forever fuzzing the lines between high and low culture, city as seat of cultural production and rural as denigrate place of cultural abandonment. One only has to look to later waves of artists who migrated west. The town of Marfa, Texas alone might stand as testament to the relocation and decentralization of artistic thought from the confines of it’s previous ivory towers in galleries and urban centers such as New York, or London. Via her ‘Ranch Locators’, the idea of place-identity, but more importantly, place-importance, suddenly expands to become every place. North, South, East, and West are everywhere. They exist as ideals; a cultural framework off of which we might locate ourselves in juxtaposition of other places. Casting off the aesthetic imagery of these Cartesian, and this ocular-centric constructs, we understand the place as being far richer and more sensationally rewarding than previously thought or understood. Instead, geographic places are evaluated on a deeply personal realm and command a heightened sense of renewed physical experience as the only way to truly perceive ontological truth via this renewed physical interaction of the senses within such landscapes.

4. Holt’s Importance, Today.

The work of Nancy Holt is, across a broad spectrum of criticism, a richly rewarding theoretical and also artistic exercise in, what art does best, a critique of inherent cultural systems; exposing the fascistic aesthetic tendency, both explicit and implicit, across the cultural and political landscapes of western culture. Using the cultural systems themselves as a means for extrapolating and underlining the problematic fascistic tendencies inherent in such aesthetically appealing systems of logic and rationality, Holt undermines from within; using the logic of the system itself to cannibalize and undermine these constructs from within.  Her work, though dawning at the close of similar strains of thought, first in the Lettrist, and later Situationist movements; who, as Leach (1999) reminds us,

“Artistic works, comic strips, and advertisements were plagiarized and subverted through strategies such as détournement, which effectively reappropriated them by reversing their perspective. Such strategies were premised on the notion that the most effective way of countering the society of the spectacle was the undermine it from within, using its own internal logic to heighten awareness of the problem.” (p.58)

So too, Holt’s work achieves the similar anti-aesthetic aim of the Situationist movement through this sense that the only way to create impact is to work within such a system, exposing it’s traps and pitfalls in the process. Holt’s work, while seemingly simple to construct, implement, is by no account a simple affair, and by proxy, no less a feat of intellectual prowess compared with the work of her peers. Oftentimes, and at great expense to her credibility as an artist, we are reminded of Holt’s connection to Robert Smithson, who for a number of years has shared the spotlight and perhaps even unintentional credit for much of Holt’s work. Her careful selection of medium, rigorous documentation of process, and ability to convey great theoretical discourses through the use of metal poles, should, make her unquestionably one of the most deeply deserving, and oft-marginalized artists of the land-art and site-specific movements.

Her work can, despite its own Cartesian framework, be potted as a major work within the timeline of both art, but also modernism. Through Existentialism, the Lettrist & later Situationist movements, and the later break from the gallery by land art and site specific artists, a renewing sense of the modernism has dawned. After millennia of vision dominated culture and philosophical systems of thought and logic, which prevail even to this day, an awakening sense of modernism as a new and deeply personal objective experience of the world is influencing culture. With the recent and near totalizing mass proliferation of the internet, new realms of inherent power structures have arisen and have to be challenged. For all its hype of user-made production, this new aesthetic realm of in-between experience, one that is neither mental or physical, but both at the same time, the work of Holt is a refreshing precedent, and staid example of the importance of perception, but also physically lived experience. Taken from Samuel Wagstaff’s conversation with Tony Smith (1968),

“The experience of the road was something mapped out but not socially recognized. I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it” (p. 386).

Submission to / Situationist-Local Studio Zine

Published / Spring 2014

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Notes :

1. For more information on the emergence of these core theories to the birth of modernist theory, see Sadler, S. (1998). The situationist city. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.
2. For a deeper discussion of the role of the the senses in Renaissance though, see Pallasmaa, J. (2005). The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.
3. For a deeper discussion on the role of image production in culture after the industrial revolution, see :Frascina, F., & Harris, J. (1992). Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Art in modern culture: An anthology of critical texts (pp. 297-307). London: Phaidon Press, in association with the Open University.
4. For a more nuanced construction of high and low culture and the problems inherent within such classifications, see:Greenberg, C. (1984). Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In Art and culture: Critical essays (pp. 3-21). Boston: Beacon Press.
5. IMAGE CITATION 1: Archizoom. 1970. No Stop City. [Graphite on Mylar] Retreived from http://www.abitare.it/it/architecture/non-stop-thinking/ also featured in Aureli, P. V. (2011). The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
6.  For more information on the construction of the idea of nature, see, Crowe, N. (1997). Nature and the idea of a man-made world: An investigation into the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
7.  Note: this quote by Leach is a summarization from Sadie Plant’s, ‘That most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age’ (1992). London: Routledge.
8. IMAGE CITATION 2: Nancy Holt. 1974-76. Sun Tunnels. [Sculptural work] Retreived from http://thephoenix.com/boston/arts/133934-nancy-holt-locates-the-cosmos/
9. IMAGE CITATION 3: Nancy Holt. 193. Missoula Ranch Locators. [Sculptural Work] Retreived from http://www.nancyholt.com/
10.  For a deeper, in depth discussion of ‘exception necessary in the production of the normative order’, see Aureli (p.174-176).
11.  IMAGE CITATION 4: Nancy Holt. 1974. Surveying for Sun Tunnels. [Photogprah] Retreived from http://www.artandeducation.net/announcement/nancy-holt-sightlines-at-utah-museum-of-fine-arts/
12. IMAGE CITATION 5: Nancy Holt. 1974. Surveying for Sun Tunnels. [Photogprah] Retreived from http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/nancy-holt/
13.  IMAGE CITATION 6: Nancy Holt. 1974. Missoula Ranch Locators. [view through sculpture] Retrieved from http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/nancy-holt/
14. Corner, James. "The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique & Invention." Mappings. By Denis E. Cosgrove. London: Reaktion, 1999. N. pag. Print.

Print References :

Aureli, P. V. (2011). The possibility of an absolute architecture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Bachelard, G., & Jolas, M. (1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Pr.

Burch, R., “On the Topic of Art and Truth: Marleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and the Trancendental Turn,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 348.

Corner, J. (1999).”The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique & Invention." Mappings. By Denis E. Cosgrove. London: Reaktion, 1999. N. pag. Print.

Crowe, N. (1997). Nature and the idea of a man-made world: An investigation into the evolutionary roots of form and order in the built environment. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Frascina, F., & Harris, J. (1992). Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Art in modern culture: An anthology of critical texts (pp. 297-307). London: Phaidon Press, in association with the Open University.

Greenberg, C. (1984). Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In Art and culture: Critical essays (pp. 3-21). Boston: Beacon Press.

Leach, N. (1999). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Mirti/Abitare, S. (2010, January 25). non-stop thinking | Abitare. Retrieved May 7, 2013, from http://www.abitare.it/it/architecture/non-stop-thinking/

Pallasmaa, J. (2005). The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.

Plant, S. (1992). The most radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age. London: Routledge.

Sadler, S. (1998). The situationist city. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press.

Wagstaff, S. (1995). Conversation with Tony Smith. In G. Battcock (Ed.), Minimal art: A critical anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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