Photo by Iwan Baan. Lycée Schorge High School by architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, Burkino Faso, 2015.
When a vigorous nature has not an inclination towards cruelty, and is not always preoccupied with itself, it involuntarily strives after gentleness, this is its distinctive characteristic.
Friedrich Nietzsche
This research explores the power of gentleness in architecture, how an aesthetics of hospitality can be enacted providing what we miss most today: a caring and welcoming world. Here gentleness concerns a quality and capacity to give, not in economic terms, as in the managing of scarcity, but as in generosity.
Gentleness is not simple a delicate, pleasant contact, it is recognizing and accepting the other, the construction of the human and non-human, in their fragility and opposition. Gentleness is a way to relate to the world, it allows emotions and feelings, thought and experience, it is located upstream and affects the very principle of life as deployment. It is open ended. And, gentleness is more than taking care, gentleness is lavished and received with experiment, risk of living and dolce vita. In other words, it has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constrains and intend, how you can dance with enmeshment, can move beyond limiting adversary, can enact, imagine, and dare to create lives of sustained well-being and joy. But be warned gentleness is not about making something cute, what needs to be restored is its greatness, its “warrior” greatness, because as a genuine passion it can act as a liberative force, even a weapon to imagine the world otherwise. As philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle has observed in her book “The Power of Gentleness,” any beginning is necessary rooted in gentleness: the birth; the beginning of love.
As Antonio Negri and Defourmantelle stated love is a genuine passion, a shared construction: ”… it is precisely its open character that is so moving: a feeling of strength, a need to create (…), in other words, a need for communality, sharing, cooperating. In that sense the personal project (of love) is also a political project. It is not enough to want freedom: the point is to make freedom productive.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak of something similar in their thought on the “All Incomplete,” with reference to the “Jus generativity.”Here gentleness concerns a quality and capacity to give, not in economic terms, as in the managing of scarcity, but as in generosity (as in the abundance of the rainforest). With a being with nature, being with trees for example, it is all about experiencing – not a scripted space to make you consume – but all about the experiences of relationships-in-action, a kinship in relation to otherness situated where architecture can play a formative and emancipatory role. Gentleness is here not simple a delicate, pleasant contact, it is recognising and accepting the other, different and shifting (op)positions; the construction of the human and non-human, in their fragility. To Dufourmantelle, and myself, gentleness is a way to relate to the world, it allows emotions and feelings, thought and experience, it is located upstream and affects the very principle of life as deployment.
As I mentioned above the power of gentleness is timely, now that we live in a state of permanent emergency; are confronted with a paradoxical community made up of us all being foreigners Essential to gentleness is its hospitality towards otherness; to be a host, to take the risk of inviting the unknown, taking the risk to invite and be with others in solidarity. To me that cannot go without a redistributing of the sensible, where architecture as medium – through its aesthetic regime – as a critical and projective practice (of equality, care, joy and imagination) can contribute to change, can contribute to emancipate our lifeworld, our being in the world. As Rebecca Solnit recently clarified, following the footsteps of George Orwell’s – Orwell being an emancipatory political journalist fighting in the Spanish Civil war against Fascism – it is about “bread AND roses.” We need bread to survive, and roses should not be missed either, they represent pleasure, leisure, self-determination, interior life, and the unquantifiable. The struggle is not only against owners and bosses seeking to crush workers, or refugees, but against other factions says Rebecca Solnit, of the left who disparage the necessity of things. In that sense gentleness resists a utilitarian ideology in which pleasures, beauties are seen as counter-revolutionary, just bourgeois, decadent, indulgent and that the desire for them should be weeded out and scorned. George Orwell celebrated with Bread AND Roses: the intangible, ordinary pleasures, the joy available in the here and now. In this sense of Bread and Roses, it travels beyond a politics of care, one that is purely focused on utilitarian needs, with Bread and Roses we start to understand that aesthetics as medium – is about a situated politics that comes about through an aesthetic regime, how a materiality (and its ideology embedded within it) as cultural artefact distributing the sensible, does arouse sensations, affects, moods, atmospheres, imaginations and symbolic experiences which makes one relate and interact with the environment one is embedded within. And it is with aesthetics, the expressions of form and content (art, architecture, culture, literature, film, music and alike) we can discover the hidden territories of reality that would stay otherwise inaccessible using only our functional and natural senses. Aesthetics in that sense can pull us out of complacency, make us experience reality anew, see anew, imagine otherwise.
More information on this ongoing research by Roemer van Toorn, can be found at the UmArts Research Centre for Architecture, Design and the Arts website at Umeå University in Northern Sweden. A first version of this research has been published in the EKA Conference proceedings, Tallinn, Estonia, 2023. In March 2024 Roemer van Toorn addressed a public lecture on Revolutionary Love. The Power of Gentleness in Architecture at the UMA School of Architecture as part of the public lecture events UMA Talks at the school of architecture.
