Review: Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design, by Zeynep Çelik Alexander

Abstract

Zeynep Celik Alexander Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 336 pp., 10 color and 99 b/w illus. $55 (cloth), ISBN 9790226485201 How do we know what we learn in an architecture or design school? How does visual or other instruction engaging the bodily senses inform the teaching of design as a creative yet iterative, pattern-making process? And what are the epistemological mechanisms that have historically supported such pedagogical practices converting bodily movements, tactile sensations, color tones, and sound signals into painted images, concrete artifacts, and built spaces? In Kinaesthetic Knowing , Zeynep Celik Alexander examines the methodical construction of such knowledge by describing the codification of psychological intuitions into a pedagogical system that has perpetuated itself in design schools over several generations. For decades now, modern architecture has been criticized for its orthogonal logic, disembodied rationality, and overconfidence regarding the power of the mind. Celik Alexander counterargues that twentieth-century art and architectural historians, practicing designers, and visual arts pedagogues drew from the anti-intellectual aesthetics of bodily movement, psychological impulse, and feeling to produce new experiential subjects who drew, built, and shaped artifacts with a presumably natural propensity unmediated by critical reason. She compellingly demonstrates how such an ostensibly unfettered form of creativity was harnessed into didactic regimens, rules, and principles solidified by modern design institutions in early twentieth-century Germany, including the Bauhaus and its epigones in the United States and other parts of the globe. Traversing aesthetics, epistemology, and design education, Kinaesthetic Knowing expands the notion of Gestaltung from the formation of modern artifacts to the shaping of human subjects and the restructuring of areas of knowledge, including scientific and design techniques and their interrelated histories. One of the book's many feats is that it makes the history of psychological aesthetics relevant again for the study of architectural history. Celik Alexander describes not simply an “aesthetics from below”—that is, an aesthetic system informed by the physiological capacities of subjects and material …