My name is Sarah Gould and this is my graduate thesis, originally completed in 2013 for RISD's Masters of Landscape Architecture program. Now I've transformed it into a digital medium for all to enjoy. To learn more about me and my work, visit my website.
All original text and images are licensed under cc-by-nc-sa.
theory
what is WONDER?
Wonder is the delight of beholding something unexpected and extraordinary. By being out of time and place, appearing suddenly, demanding our entire attention, and overwhelming our mental capacities, a moment of wonder is set apart from ordinary experience and generates an emotional response. Surprise is essential to wonder, meaning that wondrous phenomena must occur rarely enough that we never have a chance to get accustomed to them. They are also intimately tied to the observer – what evokes wonder for one person in one moment may not do so for another person or another moment. Even a perfectly mundane object can be wondrous when it is seen for the first time, or from a new perspective, or in an unusual context.
Recognition, sequence, and narrative are antithetical to wonder. They rely on memory, ‘the fundamental faculty for an already fully known world of experience… The essence of the moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object’s difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delayed in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.’ (Fisher 131) Equally antagonistic to experiencing wonder is imagination, in which everything is novel and so nothing in particular seizes our attention. This means wonder is an immediate sensorial experience, and often a visual one. We perceive visual phenomena all at once, whereas touch, smell, and sound have more limited bandwidths, making it difficult to achieve the same instantaneousness and simultaneity of sight.
It is easy to think of such overwhelming occurrences as inducing awe as well as wonder. While awe is a similar emotion, and though many use the the words interchangeably, here they are distinct terms. Awe is colored by fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the all-powerful, fear of whatever force seems to be hijacking our senses. Experiences that challenge our mental structures can be terrifying and ‘awful.’ On the other hand, when we want to conflate awe and wonder, we mean awe in the sense of ‘awesome.’ Wonder occurs when we feel joy and curiosity from these experiences instead of fear. This positive emotion leads us to seek an explanation and to recalibrate our sense of the ordinary in order to make sense of the extraordinary. Wonder, in other words, initiates a process.
The first step in this process of wonderment is disorientation: the moment of surprising encounter, when the smooth fabric of expectations breaks, leaving us confused. Awe lets us hang there, but wonder continues. Our impulse upon encountering wondrous phenomena is to explore them further. We stare at them, try to touch them, move around to see them from different angles – attempt to take them in and build up a pattern of sensory feedback. We look for a cause or a mechanism or a reason for this thing outside of normal experience. Strangers caught up in wonder together will spontaneously start to converse and share their knowledge and speculations. When we are disoriented, we try to make sense of things.
The second step, puzzlement, is the act of wondering, the prolonged phase of asking questions – what is that? how did it come to be? why is it here, and now? – and seeking answers through mental and physical engagement. Depending on the depth of the resolution we seek, this can take anywhere from seconds to decades. Puzzlement is both a mental and a physical process; the impulse to dance among the first explosive blossoms of spring is a way of incorporating this unusual event into our experience through sensory exploration. Prolonged, interactive contact with an object or phenomena gives our brains enough data to map, categorize, theorize, acclimatize, and decide how to feel about something new.
This leads to the final step: reintegration, when we find understanding – eureka! – and incorporate this new thing (no longer wondrous) into our mental model of the world. A small example might illustrate this best: a coin is placed in a vase so as to be just out of view, and then filled with water to demonstrate that the coin appears again thanks to refraction. ‘In this tiny experiment the first surprise – seeing the object once the water has been poured into the vase – is a moment of pleasure and wonder, but the second surprise – that this table-top experiment replicates and helps us understand the sky, the stars, light moving through our atmosphere, which we are asked to recognize as a medium like the water in the vase – this second surprise of analogy – is an intellectual one.’ (Fisher 32) Recognizing the larger context as the source of wonder is a moment of wonder in and of itself. It is an epiphany, brought about by an insight into the vast and interconnected nature of the universe.
Wonder differs from jokes and tricks in that understanding what is happening requires a larger frame of reference. The answers we seek about the origins and nature of the wondrous phenomenon are not right at hand. Solving the puzzle requires us to look at large-scale and long-term systems that are typically invisible or taken for granted, like the dynamics of Earth’s orbit or the cycles of water or the quantum nature of light. When these are suddenly revealed at a particular point in time and space, they evoke wonder. A moment of wonder is in fact a window into a complex system as it intersects with the mundane human-scale world. It shows us a tiny part of that system, inexplicable on its own, but it points towards the whole.
looking IN, looking OUT
Wonder does not challenge the structure of the external world, only our understanding of it. Self-knowledge is reframed in light of our unconscious reactions. ‘The “Ah!” moment of wonder is unreflective and immediate. It comes from us almost fast enough to say that it, too, surprises us. We learn a second later that we are already in the state of wonder. In this, wonder is like the other central passions – anger, fear, and grief – in that it involves a discovery about the limits of the will within experience, a location where we can no longer identify ourselves completely with our powers of choice, action, self-direction, and yet these territories of experience outside the will are intimately ourselves, uniquely determined, personal. Wonder begins with something imposed on us for thought.’ (Fisher 40)
Such an imposition removes boundaries between ourselves and the outside world but it also emphasizes our subjectivity, as the external environment triggers emotions in us without conscious control. The observer is tied up in the connection between local wonder and global systems. Within this enlarged context, we are a tiny yet integrated element. It is at once humbling, for we are small; and comforting, for we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. Here again we see how wonder divergences from awe: awe is the same basic experience but without the observer’s intimate (if minuscule) involvement within the larger system.
This makes wonder a primarily interior experience, one that originates in the individual but points outwards to the universe at large. The fabric of reality has not changed, only our experience of it, requiring us to reweave ourselves back into cohesiveness. The Overview Effect is a quintessential example of the power this reweaving can have on the psyche. It is the mind-expanding, life-altering experience of seeing the Earth from space: the pale blue dot. Astronauts (and those who saw the image before it became commonplace) wrap their brains around this rift in normality by reframing their conception of humanity. They see the human race huddling together on one tiny, fragile planet in the vast and cold of space, and for the first time our species can literally see ourselves as a single community undivided by ethnicity or nationality and inseparable from the biosphere. The shift in perspective, the change in scale, the isolation from everything familiar, the sheer rarity of the view – it makes for a particularly profound experience of wonder, one that can isolate astronauts from those who have not shared in it. (Planetary Collective)
Shared experiences of any type are powerful because they form the basis for communication. They are the landmarks of our mental maps, allowing us to coordinate movement, emotion, language, and ideas. (Ackerman) Wonder is especially good for this. A larger perspective places observers relatively closer together. They seem like ants, small and alike, when compared to mountains, geological time, astronomical events, or the emptiness of space.
Ritual and spectacle have long used wonder and its sister awe for their ability to tighten the bonds in a community. (Keltner & Haidt) Rituals create wonder by manipulating phenomena, perception, and cultural symbols – using bright lights, loud sounds, isolation, hallucination, and the breaking of taboos and social conventions. These are meant to take the participants out of society and force them to see it from the outside. The ritual guides them through the puzzlement process, leading to a specific interpretation of the experience that reinforces the bonds and structure of society. The very structure of rituals is analogous to the process of wonderment: all rituals are transitions from one state to another, with a disorienting liminal phase in between. Liminality ‘is a complex series of episodes in sacred space-time’ that playfully re-imagine reality, disrupting assumptions in order to establish new ones appropriate to the participants’ future roles. (Turner)
As participants pass through the ambiguous space between institutional social roles, they become ‘structurally invisible.’ Ambiguities in the structure of society challenge the validity of the rules we live by, and so are avoided and ignored as much as possible. Only the process of ‘undoing, dissolution, decomposition’ can bring about the ‘reformulation of old elements in new patterns.’ This includes, in some rituals, images of monsters – humans with animal heads and the like. What is taken for granted is pulled apart into component parts and rearranged, not to show what is true, but to delineate what is relevant to a particular culture. Participants ‘are alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them… they are taught that they did not know what they thought they knew. Beneath the surface structure of custom was a deep structure, whose rules they had to learn, through paradox and shock,’ wonder and awe. (Turner) By the end of the ritual, the world makes sense again – only through a different worldview. The relationships between the participants, their society, and the physical world have shifted, even if nothing has structurally changed.
Possibilities open up in liminal space-time because it is not bound by the same rules as everyday life. Without roles to play, initiates can simply ‘be themselves.’ Turner calls the communing of people at their most authentic, communitas. The shared experience of wonder within the ritual brings about a harmony in emotion and thought. Communitas is a structureless, and therefore unpredictable and unrepeatable, phenomenon. When strangers are brought together in wonder, there is no social code that applies, and no rules to bind their behavior or keep them from openly interacting.
For the purpose of ritual, though, communitas is not the goal, only an accidental and intermediate state. The real goal is cohesiveness. Awe, thanks to its element of fear, is far better than wonder for reinforcing the bonds of society. Like an enemy at the gates, fear draws people together to seek comfort among themselves instead of drawing their minds out into the world for greater understanding. Keltner and Haidt suggest that the original purpose of the awe was to orient people lower in the social hierarchy towards their leaders. ‘This feeling is likely to involve reverence, devotion, and the inclination to subordinate one’s own interests and goals in deference to those of the powerful leader. Awe reinforces and justifies social hierarchies by motivating commitment to the leader, countervailing self-interested attempts to overturn the social hierarchy.’ (Keltner & Haidt)
RADICAL amazement & sacred MYSTERY
Awe risks turning people away from the puzzlement and epiphany because it suggests that understanding is either unattainable or dangerous. Religious traditions often frame wonderous phenomena as signs of a deity’s omnipotence and our powerlessness – a request for us to resign ourselves to fate – and so we experience them as awe. Spirituality is not always so intimidating, however. Heschel, a Jewish theologian who published in the 1950s and 1960s, theorized on the nature of spirituality, describing wonder – what he calls ‘radical amazement’ – as a way of getting past dogma and approaching the mystery of God.
Heschel describes God and the divine as the paradox where dichotomies dissolve, the ‘ultimate reality’ that creates the very framework for existence. The fact that physical reality pushes back on us assures us that we are not living in our imaginations. It offers ‘resistance to our spontaneous impulses.’ Yet the human tendency to control and systematize the world means that we can lose awareness of reality’s ability to surprise and surpass us. This is the source of all sin: the denial of mystery. ‘The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.’ (Heschel)
A healthy sense of the ineffable means coming to terms with ‘the essential mystery of being as being… something which stands beyond the scope of human comprehension.’ If not comprehension, we can at least recognize that there is a greater reality. While we may perceive most of reality through our senses, wonder requires the attention of our thoughts and feelings as well. ‘Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.’ (Heschel) It is a fractally semiotic act, where every element of the experience points to something else, and we can only face the infinite regress with the acceptance that we cannot grasp it all.
This can be interpreted in a secular way as well. Pascal imagined such depths in the observable physical universe while looking at mites through a microscope: ‘Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world, and on the earth animals, and finally mites, in which he will find again the same results as in the first; and finding the same thing yet again in the others without end or respite, he will be lost in such wonders.’ (Fisher 51)
Compare this to the Hindu hero Arjuna’s experience of the god Krishna: ‘Arjuna saw in that universal form unlimited mouths and unlimited eyes. It was all wondrous… At that time Arjuna could see in the universal form of the Lord the unlimited expansions of the universe situated in one place although divided into many, many thousands.’ (Bhagavad-gita 11:10-13) Instead of being driven to learn more, he submits himself to the will of the god and agrees to fight a war against his brothers.
That Pascal is driven to explore the infinite universe instead of submit to it hints at why science is more often associated with wonder and religious traditions with awe, mysticism aside. Wondering is rewarded with greater knowledge about the world, which in turn places scientists at a new vantage point with an even wider perspective – it is a cycle of wonder and wondering that encourages exploration undiminished by fear, overturning deeper and greater mysteries. Curiosity is the heart of wonder and mystery its driving force. Wonder manifests as a question and opens a door into another world – not a fantastical world, but simply the world as it is rather than the world as we see it through our cultural lens and our personal history of experience.
SOCIETY versus WONDER
Society is founded upon expectations and routines. Our perceptual and mental apparati are severely limited, at least with respect to the entirety of possible stimuli and the inferences that can be drawn from them. So we seek out patterns and shorthands to make our interactions with the world and with each other go as smoothly as possible. Some of the ways we generalize are built-in heuristics, while many others are learned through observation, trial-and-error, and explicit teaching. Our immersion in a social world full of other complex beings leads us to coordinate our understanding with each other so that we are all on the same page, recognizing and responding to the same patterns. Though phenomena are diverse, we are all structured more or less the same; it is this sympathy of perspective that enables social interaction.
It is a necessary and amazing feat to quickly recognize patterns and stereotypes – skipping over the study of their details and components allows us to move to higher levels of abstraction, thought, and analysis. Patterns of light turn into objects, patterns of objects turn into groups, patterns of groups turn into mappings, etc. Perception, then, is not just a matter of seeing what is in front of us, but a participatory process in which we move eyes, head, and body to collect visual information and piece it together in our minds. (Noë) We have the impression of an infinitely detailed, boundless field of view, when this is actually a false impression. Our brains simply assume the world is always at hand, ready to give up details as we need them, details that we gather by skillfully moving through space and time.
This is why we do not notice that our vision is limited and full of holes, including the blind spot at the center of each eyeball and the lack of color vision at their periphery. What we cannot learn from a single glance can be gained by changing our point of view. The feedback we get from this movement informs us about the real nature of things, allowing us to learn the rules of perspective through experience: we know that an elliptical-looking plate is actually circular thanks to our experience of moving around and looking at three-dimensional objects.
Noë describes vision as ‘touch-like;’ not a passive receptor but an active tool used in conjunction with movement and skill to construct a seemingly seamless mental model of the world around us. Quoting Dennet, he says: ‘One of the most striking features about consciousness is its discontinuity… The discontinuity of consciousness is striking because of the apparent continuity of consciousness.’ (Noë 54) Wonder is disorienting because it challenges our impression of seamless and unbiased perception. Perception feels transparent to us, but it is subject to filtering, interpretation, and interpolation at all levels.
One such level is the use of technology to reinforce the patterns that we build in our minds. We play to our expectations in order to avoid constant disorientation. In turn, our experiences and expectations are based on the well-patterned environments we create. That this does not result in a seamless fiction completely isolated from the potential chaos of nature is not for lack of trying. Since we are not perfectly coordinated with one another – we have different points of view, we notice and care about different things – and because unexpected behaviors tend to emerge from complex systems, irregularities arise in built environments that confront us with surprises and challenges. As with all ambiguities, we try our best to ignore and avoid them.
An outsider encounters the city in a state of wonder: the vast scale of its buildings, the entire walls of windows that mirror the sky, the complexity of its water and electrical systems, the number of people coordinated in countless minute transactions… But for those who grow up in the city, these things quickly become the unseen background to everyday activities. They are the water that the urban fish swims in. While we feel wonder keenly as an emotion, there is no corresponding ‘feeling of the ordinary.’ (Fisher 20) Urban monuments only rarely make themselves known to the conscious mind of an adult observer. Such moments happen during alignments of unusual phenomena that catch the eye of the observer precisely because they break the pattern of expectation.
The city and its increasingly sophisticated abstractions allow us to dwell in an artificial world made up of ideas, symbols, and social conventions. As children, the world around us is new, constantly presenting us with challenges to our barely-formed assumptions. The ‘why, why, why’-curiosity of the child is the puzzlement process playing out. Children put things in their mouths, roll in dirt, test social boundaries, all to incorporate new facets of reality into their understanding and to seek out perspectives that make clear the connections between objects or events.
Eventually we piece together a theory of how the world works that fits our experience the majority of the time. This theory must closely align with others in our social network, allowing everyone to coordinate and communicate. It becomes easy to think of the theory as a full representation of reality. Mystery is so rare we forget about it and commit Herschel’s sin. And when something does come around that does not fit, it is easier to ignore than allow ourselves to be confused. But some things are too impactful to ignore, and wondrous phenomena are among them. That wonder is a positive emotion allows us to forgive its disruptive nature, as it presents mysteries so luscious we want to get lost in them.
Initially we may seek an answer within our existing theory. But by the very definition of wonder, the answer lies outside what we already take for granted. A wondrous phenomenon can even reoccur and still evoke wonder, if it is rare enough that we never have a chance to come to terms with it. Our mental models do not need to account for such anomalies in normal day-to-day life, so unless it occurs in a regular, predictable, even permanent basis, we simply forget what the experience is like. A rainbow, for example, is not exceedingly rare, but it is so different from everything else we encounter that we continue to be struck by them time and again. We just cannot get used to the way their colors appear in perfectly ordered shapes in the sky without a material presence. Rainbows cannot be approached or touched; they move as we move; they repel sensory understanding and conventional modes of interaction. We can never reach the end of the rainbow. Such characteristics make rainbows difficult to incorporate into the same patterns as more common things.
Savvy adults know their environment so well they take it for granted. They can get away with not being consciously aware of their surroundings, and there is even a stigma attached to gawking and being amazed at what we consider mundane. Normality is not to be examined closely because it is the foundation for social living; if something is discovered to differ from our assumptions, everything is called into question.
Yet challenging assumptions is exactly what allows change to occur. The gap between expectation and reality is where new connections can be made, both with other people and with the larger environment. Wonder introduces mystery into parts of our world we thought we knew everything about, pointing to systems forever beyond the scope of full comprehension due to our limited perception. Within mystery lies a universe of possibilities that we cannot see when we ignore our own limitations. When we admit the unknown, we become more creative and open to new ideas, our sense of time expands, and our compassion for others increases. (Blackwell) If these qualities seem lacking in modern society, it may be because our cities and ourselves suffer from a chronic lack of wonder. (Dewar)
Wonder is the fool in the king’s court. It periodically and playfully upends the normal so we can reflect on the deeper questions of what reality is made of, what our place is within it, and how we navigate that wider world in our thoughts and our actions. Each city has its own conditions for creating wonder, its unique patterns of environmental phenomena that can be harnessed to introduce surprise and mystery to its residents. Since vision is the most direct route to wonder, I focus on the many forms of light: a whole range of effects can occur as the sun’s rays interact with clouds, waves, walls, and windows. I will look briefly at how some other projects achieve wonder with luminosity, and then turn to my native Pacific Northwest to find a way of evoking wonder in overcast and drizzly Seattle.
intro
Wonder is a process, beginning with an encounter with the unexpected and extraordinary, and continuing into the search for understanding beyond the immediate and well-worn context of daily life. This gives us a new perspective that takes us out of ourselves and opens our minds to new possibilities and new connections with those around us.
As an experiment in creating wonder, I propose a series of interventions that incorporate metal surfaces into overlooked bits of urban structure in downtown Seattle. The surfaces are folded, structured, and positioned to highlight phenomena of light and water that originate in astronomical, hydrological, and climactic systems, transforming them into rare and fleeting moments of wonder.
By embedding them into the city’s fabric, the wonderment process extends beyond any single intervention to enhance our sense of connectedness and our awareness of the wider universe and our small and interdependent position within it.
wonder is the feeling of delighted surprise and confusion upon encountering something extraordinary and unexpected that defies conventional experience and requires a radical shift in perspective to achieve understanding.
puzzlement is the process of exploring something unfamiliar with the mind and with the senses.
epiphany is the realization that a particular moment is the intersection of larger-scale processes and systems.
phenomena is the subjective experience of light, water, temperature, or other natural force or substance.
system is a set of components all in relation to each other, whose emergent behavior is regular but at a scale dwarfing any individual component.
precedent
varieties of LUMINOUS experience
Light is made of photons moving in waves. As these waves pass through transparent and translucent materials – a process called transmission – they can be filtered, split into separate color wavelengths, refracted and bent, or scattered and diffused. This is what makes the soft glow underneath a canopy, the ubiquitous brightness of an overcast day, a rainbow, or ice halos. When light reflects off surfaces, it may be perfectly reflected as in a mirror, or (if the surface is rough or uneven, like a matte white wall or the water particles of a cloud) it may again be diffused. The most spectacular effects come when waves of light interfere with each other, creating the dancing ribbons of brightness and shadow we see near water. Using these phenomena to best effect depends on where you are: regions of the world that get lots of bright, direct sunlight can achieve different effects than those heavily blanketed in clouds. Common conditions can be shaped in unfamiliar ways, and rare conditions can be highlighted to become the focus of wonder.
CLOUD GATE anish kapoor, chicago, il
The distortion of form and perspective in this large, reflective, jelly-bean-like sculpture gives us a new way to look at the world – literally. Like Escher’s spherical self-portrait, the rules of Euclidean geometry are upended, giving way to parallel lines that meet and bend the ground plane up to envelope the viewer. The city skyline, normally forgotten on the horizon, is raised above our heads. The distortions are playful, but because the world in the reflection plays by unfamiliar rules, they force us to look at the familiar through new eyes. Yet prolonged interaction can make the distortions normal again as our brains figure out the patterns. And the iconic nature of the piece calls attention to its own form as much as the reality is re-presents. To encounter it every day is to see it as another mundane piece of the city landscape, a landmark to navigate by instead of a source of new questions.
GRAND CENTRAL STATION new york, ny
Grand Central is designed to be impressive. Its high windows let in shafts of light, the sun rays revealing themselves as they hit the particles of dust floating up from a thousand travelers. In the right conditions, even a daily commuter can be struck with wonder. The large open space is especially impactful for someone who has been sitting in a small enclosed space for hours on end. The ceiling, painted with constellations, acts like a cultural telescope, referencing the heavens beyond its vaults. It doesn’t accurately recreate the night sky, both because stars move and because the painters reversed the image by accident. But its position requires viewers to tilt their heads back and look upwards, participating in as much star-gazing as they will get in a city where the real stars fade against the ubiquitous glow of artificial light.
SUN TUNNELS nancy holt, great basin desert, utah
Nancy Holt frequently uses ‘locators,’ tubes that frame a view when you look through them – like a telescope or a microscope without magnification. Her most famous and magnificent use of locators is Sun Tunnels, a project composed of four huge concrete pipe segments in the middle of the desert. Arranged in a cross, each pair of tunnels is lined up with the solstice sunrise and sunset, one set for summer and one for winter. While the tunnels do frame the distant horizon at all times, when they frame a brief moment on these two particular days every year, they evoke wonder. The tunnels themselves fall away, removing extraneous stimuli and focusing laser-like on this one phenomenon. By precisely orienting objects to significant astronomical events, Holt highlights something not readily evident on a human scale, and so orchestrates an extraordinary experience for the viewer. For the rest of the year the tunnels sit like ruins, as if they exist for their own purpose, disregarding human immediacy. They require humans to reorient to their scope and schedule – that of the seasons they index.
MIT CHAPEL eero saarinen, cambridge, ma
This intimate chapel is full of wonder. Lights reflect off the surrounding moat when it fills with rainwater, into the interior, creating mysterious patterns across the walls. Sunlight streams in through a translucent skylight and bounces differentially off a suspended series of metal planes, fixing a toss of glitter in one moment of time. The natural materials and dim lighting give primacy to these two light-based phenomena, and direct the viewer’s attention outwards, to their hidden sources. We are meant to contemplate the mystery of their presence. Even knowing the technicalities of these phenomena does not diminish the actual experience of them. The beautiful and uncommon qualities of the chapel lead you to radical amazement, that key to spirituality, and to a heightened awareness of the diversity and detail of experience.
CHAPEL OF ST IGNATIUS steven holl, seattle, wa
Steven Holl likes to play with light and color, and in this chapel diffuse glows emanate from unexpected corners. By setting lights and windows between overlapping surfaces and bouncing the light off brightly colored portions of wall, Holl creates phenomena that are rarely experienced elsewhere in nature or in architecture. It is reminiscent of stained glass but using reflected rather than transmitted light. It harkens back to traditional ways of creating holy places while at the same time creating something new to catch people off guard and put them in a better position to appreciate the divine – or at least creative architecture. In a place meant put visitors in an generous and receptive state of mind, the mysterious nature of these pools of color creates an atmosphere of wonder.
WEATHER GARDEN vogt, zurich, switzerland
Located in the Park Hyatt Hotel, a grid of stone slabs transforms a courtyard into a theater of light and water for the guests looking out from the windows above. Each stone is subtly shaped into alternately convex and concave forms in order to pool water. Together they become pixels in an animation of reflection and evaporation. The sequence of rain and then no rain, leaving still puddles – and then sun, leaving bare rock – creates an ever-changing work of art. The landscape architect has made the canvas, making nature into the artist. The power of this work comes when the mechanism disappears, acting as a silent frame for water and light but nonetheless shaping these phenomena into something captivating. In experiencing wonder, as in designing it, the ego falls away as we confront something beyond the domain of the human.
site
SEATTLE washington
Although infamous for its rain, Seattle’s predominant condition for nine months out of the year is overcast – and when it does rain, it is usually drizzling. The cloud cover acts to diffuse sunlight, creating a uniformly bright and desaturated atmosphere. Against this sameness, moments of concentrated, direct light, such as when the sun breaks out, are nearly as wondrous as rainbows. The city is situated between two mountain ranges and numerous bodies of water, yet it is easy for people treading the same path day in and day out under the endless grey skies to tune out from their environment, however rich it may be.
Downtown Seattle is also the hub of commuters’ daily grind. Commuters make the perfect target audience for wonder because they are more absorbed in routine than the rest of us. Placing interventions at key moments in the commuter narrative has the potential to affect the most minds to the greatest degree. With high contrasts and light playing off water, activated by global systems interacting with the local context, these interventions transform a mundane workday into something extraordinary.
Commuter Narrative
Sun Paths
Daylight Hours
Cloud Cover
Precipitation
Dew Point
Wind Speed
Field of Vision
process
mirrors & shadows
To create wonder using luminosity, I set about experimenting with how materials can capture, bend, emit, and respond to light. For Seattle, I needed to look specifically at modulating ambient light, and I hit upon success with metallic surfaces. By curving them into semi-parabolic shapes, radiating star patterns appear. This phenomena works even in the diffuse lighting conditions so prevalent on my site, and is caused by imperfections in the reflective surface. A perfect parabolic mirror concentrates light onto a single point, but in an imperfect one, the rays of light intersect with each other after reflecting to create interference patterns, bands of light and dark, that respond to subtle shifts of position and lighting.
Glass and acetate can also create these patterns when they are curved, though with more subtlety due to their reduced reflectivity. They make up for this by transmitting and refracting light across their transparent surfaces. One intervention I designed to take advantage of this phenomenon was a stories-high sculptural shelter that arced across busy Pine street, next to Macy’s department store. This location was perfect for transforming the experiences of commuters, who would be coming up from the Westlake Bus Tunnel on their way to work. I carefully warped and positioned large plexiglass triangles so that they would cast arcs of light at the entrance to the tunnel when the occassionally-visible winter sun hit them in the morning. I paired this with semi-parabolic mirrors that reflected the arc of light down the escalator into the tunnel below. This way the effects of this morning burst of wonder could radiate throughout the day during the most dismal time of year.
The rarity of this light cascade would keep it from becoming mundane, but the spectacular quality of the sculptures themselves threatened to take center stage. The commercial, mall-like quality of the area made it seem gimmicky. And most problematic of all, the intervention had no ability to refer to larger systems – the structure could not be finely calibrated to achieve multiple levels of meaning, rendering shallow its one wondrous moment.
I returned to metal, which could be folded in precise ways. My next move was inspired by a windowless facade located on the top of a hill and with a view of the harbor. Windowless and covered in posters, I proposed turning it into a fountain. During heavy rains, water would sheet across the surface, and when the sun appeared, it would reflect off the glistening wall of water. Originally intended as a minor intervention, the idea proved so rich with possibility and nuance that I focused my entire attention on it. I looked for patterns of cladding that would interact with phenomena in intriguing ways, catching light at particular angles to reveal seasonal patterns and shaping the flow of water to index regional hydrology.
Things that seemed promising at first ended up being finicky and clunky to construct. Designs meant to modulate water as it streamed past had no interesting effects when I actually applied artificial rain to them with a spray bottle. Pyramidal darts could part streams of water and reflect light from particular angles, but were hard to tile with meaningful variation. Only by continuing to make and analyze did I find a technique that worked well: by folding the bottom of the tiles at an angle, I could both direct water and reflect light from specific directions. I could create larger patterns over the surface of the facade using only three variations – fold angled left, fold angled right, and unfolded. Water runs along the bottom edge of the folded tiles and drips at the final point, allowing longer or shorter runs of the same angle to vary the how strong the streams are. (Unfortunately you cannot cross the streams.)
There are actually three levels of manipulation to work with here: the tiling pattern, the fold structure, and the texture of the surface itself. Individual water droplets will cling to scratches in the metal, so the direction of the scratches can control how the droplets behave. Vertical and diagonal scratches allow droplets to flow down easily, leaving an even reflective sheen across the surface; horizontal scratches tend to stop droplets in their tracks and hold them in place, creating a dew-like effect that can sparkle in the sun; and circular scratches leave patches of both sheen and dew. I could now vary texture to control the patterns that emerge after it rains.
Unpredictable behavior led to frustrations and delight. While I had been looking at how light would create contrasting patterns on the facade itself, I did not expect to see the marvelous patterns cast by the tiles onto the ground below. This is why it proved impossible to work backwards, from desired phenomena to the particulars of the interventions: even very simple moves manifest in a myriad of effects. Sorting these out in order to design with them is a puzzlement process itself.
Since Seattle is already saturated with diffuse light, the direct reflectivity of the metal keeps light concentrated. The flat, folded edges that face in one direction all illuminate in concert, seeming to create a dozen new light sources that glitter as the sun moves. The interference patterns establish a dappling effect normally only seen in direct lighting conditions. And by introducing the element of water, sparkling refraction patterns can appear if the sun does poke its head out of the clouds. Though I choreograph these phenomena, the complex interactions between sun, rain, clouds, and metal mean that the unforeseen possibilities are the most exciting.
design
FACADE second & virginia
PARKING LOT second & pine
PARKING STRUCTURE third & university
BUS TUNNEL university station
PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE western & marion
reflection
Seattle presents particular conditions for creating wonder. Here I developed one language, that of vertical and horizontal metal surfaces whose reflectivity make patterns of light that are unfamiliar in the city’s dull, overcast, rainy environment. Positioned so that their most luminous phenomena occur only a few times during the year, at certain confluences of rare events, they create wonder by revealing natural phenomena in dynamic and unpredictable ways.
Other places will need different strategies. Boston, for example, gets direct sunlight throughout the year. In this case we might introduce diffusion to break from the norm, or employ such effects as dappling and shadow-play that can only occur in direct light. Crisp, cool shadows on pale stone, revealing familiar structures in unfamiliar ways, might be the language for evoking wonder in such conditions. Meanwhile, a place like the desert may already have wonder embedded in its environment, such as the overnight blooming of flowers after a sudden thunderstorm.
This is why cities are the most in need of intervention: we construct them to shield us from the unexpected. Straight streets bounded by sidewalks and corridors of buildings, regularly spaced trees and lights, signs that label everything so as to remove mystery, and the ubiquitous material patterns of concrete, brick, steel, and glass. The urban experience is characterized by predictable narratives with a consistent scale and a fixed perspective. It becomes embedded into memory until we stop seeing the complexities and microclimates that make one place different from another: it is all a variation on ‘city.’ Whatever language is used for creating wonder, it must be something that changes unpredictably and beautifully in response to site-specific phenomena, calling attention to these while at the same time allowing its own form to fade into the background.
I ask two questions of each intervention to keep myself from avoiding mere spectacle: does this intrude on one’s mind and experience in a pervasive way? And, does it extend beyond the immediate situation by tapping into the larger context? As a series, the interventions become the context for one another. The puzzlement process extends beyond a single moment of wonder as experiencers seek to tie the interventions together into a cohesive whole. Yet these are not to be understood so easily, as an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine connected by clever mechanisms. They must be understood within the city at large: an intervention is wondrous here and now because the sun is just visible between those two tall buildings at this time of year, or because the water is flowing in such a direction, or because it rained last night and now the sun is breaking out at last... the epiphany I hope to reach is that the city itself is full of wonder.
The set of interventions is not a small system, complete in and of itself. Seattle residents encounter each piece of the puzzle at different points in time as they go about their regular activities. Each piece evokes probing questions – where did that phenomenon come from? why did it happen now? – that cannot be answered from the immediate context, nor simply by referencing the other pieces. It is a slow game, played over the course of years, that encourages its players to be attentive to the beauty and magic that pervades the city as a whole. Is that another ‘intervention,’ or the light reflecting off a window in a peculiar and wonderful way? My intention is to increase people’s general awareness of the world around them so that they recognize the city as an interplay of large, complex, dynamic systems, that they may become more open to possibilities and connections.
Wonder may seem a strange subject to do a landscape thesis on, but to me it makes perfect sense. Landscape architecture is entirely about creating environments that affect their human and non-human inhabitants. Many landscape issues, such as stormwater management, have well-defined constraints and solution spaces. But trying to evoke a particular mood, such as wonder, requires a more intuitive approach. As someone who relies heavily on her analytical side, I wanted to push myself to build new design muscles while I remained in the academic bubble. I struggled at first to find a topic that was challenging to me personally: it had to be big-picture enough to be inspiring, yet specific enough to tackle in one semester.
So how do I create wonder? The variables at play are too numerous and complex to set down in an equation that churns out wondrous landscapes. Working with such a fuzzy concept forced me to tackle a problem without knowing what the solution might be going in. I had to create my own constraints and then experiment within them. I played with ideas in model, perspective, conversation, and imagination to see if they resulted in the complex, emergent interactions that I was looking for. And as with learning anything new, it was an awkward and arbitrary process at times. But working with wonder allowed me to set aside my inner engineer and find deeper and more powerful modes of designing.
Wonder has profound effects on the mind. When I experience wonder, I feel more engaged with the world. I forget my usual shyness and connect with those around me in the spirit of communitas. The universe seems wide open and inviting, no matter how dismal it was a moment before. Since wonder positively impacts the way we perceive our society and our environment, it should also be integrated into more discrete design problems: for example, why can’t an artificial wetland profoundly move us? Would that not increase our awareness and respect for the systems that sustain us? Can introducing mystery into the fabric of mundane life make our participation in the landscape more meaningful? And what if wonder is not the only thing lacking in our modern environments – what new kinds of spaces do we need to fulfill the entire range of human experience?
acknowledgements
Many thanks to all the wonderful people who helped me with my thesis, especially my thesis advisor, Scheri Fultineer, who always challenged me to push for more; Kaki Martin and Eric Kramer, who asked me the hard questions; and Lili Herman, who taught me how to be messy. Also to the many designers who have shared their time with me for inspiring conversations: Emily Wilson, Jane Androski, Becca Hanson, Maggi Johnson, Kristine Kenney, Karen Kiest, Kenneth Philp, Alissa Rupp, Audrey West, Daniel Winterbottom, Matt Wood, Scott Holsapple, Jennifer Guthrie, Brice Maryman, Tom Haddad, and Laura Drugan. And last but not least, to my fellow classmates, my comrades in arms, who helped fill our studio with madness, love, and cardboard.
