Christopher Alexander, Pattern Language, and Place Release

Understanding Wholeness and Place with David Seamon A deep discussion surrounding the concept of 'wholeness' and 'place' with David Seamon, a geographer and phenomenologist, and Andrea Hiott, a philosopher. The conversation traverses the work of Christopher Alexander, particularly his book 'A Pattern Language,' and how his architectural theories interconnect with environmental serendipity, phenomenology, and the deeper human experience of being in the world. The dialogue encompasses the importance of understanding place as a dynamic, evolving entity intertwined with human existence, emphasizing the significance of phenomenology, holistic approaches, and the work of scholars like Henri Bortoft and Edward Relph. David Seamon reflects on his lifelong pursuit to understand the integrated phenomenon of place and its impact on human life, advocating for a broader acknowledgment of these ideas in academic and practical realms. #christopheralexander #patternlanguage #pattern #place #placemaking #loveandphilosophy

00:00 Introduction to Pattern Language

00:58 The Significance of Place in Human Life

01:21 Exploring Human Connection to Place

02:36 Philosophical Insights on Space and Place

03:26 Christopher Alexander's Influence

05:41 Understanding Wholeness and Relationality

09:40 David Seamon's Journey and Contributions

12:54 The Role of Phenomenology in Geography

25:56 The Concept of Wholeness in Phenomenology

30:14 Practical Applications of Wholeness

41:24 Introduction to David Bohm's World Tubes

41:48 Exploring Place Processes

43:53 Understanding Place Release

49:02 The Concept of Synergistic Relationality

50:15 Goethe's Influence on Phenomenology

57:07 The Importance of Place in Human Life

01:09:05 Challenges in Academia and Personal Reflections

01:17:20 Recommended Readings and Conclusion

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TRANSCRIPT

Pattern Language with Christopher Alexander and David Seamon

David Seamon: [00:00:00] pattern language is a remarkable effort to facilitate a way of envisioning a place that one wants to make. Pattern language is is a method keeping the whole in sight to begin to see what architectural and environmental parts that whole should be

bring forward

how is it that the world is always present around me? It seemed to be a kind of miracle, you know, that wherever I am, I'm surrounded by a world.

essentially environmental serendipity, that so much of happy things in life happen because of coincidental meetings in place. So you're walking down the sidewalk and you meet an old friend you haven't seen in six months and you go for coffee and something very important happens out of that event.

place release is a [00:01:00] very useful way to get ordinary people thinking about the significance of place in their lives. Because you say to somebody, okay, well, now just think about this for a little bit.

Can you think of a serendipitous event that happened because of place? And it's remarkable what people come up with. It is. You know, so many folks met their significant other this way.

human being is not human being alone. Human being is a human being in place. And If we can recognize this new way of realizing what we are, we realize that an integral part of place is the others in, in the place. So it is a I do think it's a different vision. And I think it's related to what you're attempting to do with your cognitive work. What is your expression?

Waymaking? And that, that's part of it too that who we are is the way we make our way,

that [00:02:00] moment on the plank had to do with realizing that there was a way to see accurately a way of understanding something real and it's that wish to really understand in a real way that's driven me along my entire professional journey.

career.

Hello, everyone. I'm so glad you're here. As, you know, if you've listened to one other episode, any other episode, I'm a little bit obsessed with a few things. And one of those is the way that space in place. Are connected to. Self identity, mind, whatever word you want to put in there. The parameters of our [00:03:00] consciousness, of our cognition, of our emotion. I think about that a lot, philosophically of course, in my work, but also practically in terms of the vehicles we create and the cities we make and things like this. And through that work and research, I came across David seaman some years ago. And his work and we've had some discussions about things, uh, over the years about different ideas of placemaking. This notion of place ballet. And especially about a man named Christopher Alexander who wrote a book called a pattern language, which I hope you've all heard of. And if you haven't, I really highly suggest you check it out. Christopher Alexander was an architect and became something of a philosopher. Uh, I came across him first because of object oriented programming in computer software. Because weirdly, um, But not so weirdly once you dig into it. A lot of that was inspired by some of his ideas.

Andrea Hiott: And he even had this idea of. [00:04:00] Trying to create more holistic or. That's not even the right word to create computer programs. That had wholeness. Uh, which is a very special word. That David and I talk about here. But the root of it all has to do with space and place and the order of that and the patterns of that. For example, when we design a city or we come into a new space and we want to create something in that space, instead of just imposing a bunch of new angles and buildings and containers and parts into that area. What if we sit within a moment and notice it and look at its own patterns because there's already patterns to that space, no matter how natural, organic or. Busy or full of animals or birds or humans.

It is what it, what as it is, it already has some sort of pattern and Alexander's work shows us how to just sort of sit and observe and notice that. And then find a way to dance with it. He doesn't, I don't think he uses the way that idea of dancing, but it feels like that to me of finding the organic or ongoing dynamical [00:05:00] patterns of that space.

And designing with them. It's almost an Akido kind of approach to architecture

and David. Is also talking about place and coming at it, thinking about phenomenology in similar ways that. Everything has a pattern. And there's an awareness and a sensitivity. That we can cultivate. And then we begin to notice that pattern and build with it instead of against it. Um, and it's this idea that. The feeling and the place or the life and the place. Or not. Distinguishable. So it's a very different kind of understanding of space and place. And even of phenomenology is David and I talk about because he introduces that word in a different way in, into geography but the main idea is this word wholeness and. A paper that David recently wrote, I think in March, 2024. Is about. Uh, Christopher [00:06:00] Alexander's work and the way. Of wholeness. And if you all know my work at all, you know, I like this word way. And Christopher Alexander uses it a lot too.

And so does David. So in this paper, The way of wholeness looking at Christopher Alexander's work, David talks about analytic re relationality and synergistic relationality. And to sort of caricature it too much, David does better in the paper. So I hope you'll just read it.

But the analytic is like taking things apart, looking at the parts instead of the process. And the synergistic is more of what I was trying to explain with Alexander's approach where there's a relationality that in synergy and it's ongoing and you can envision places as this interconnected field or vector. Or pattern of intertwined relationships. That sort of gather there in a, in an intimacy. So we talk about that paper and we talk about Alexander and we just talk about what space really is and [00:07:00] what place is for us. David brings up how a lot of people met their partners their husbands or their wives or their best friends, because of some kind of weird serendipity of being in some place at the right time. I met my husband that way too. And, uh, once you start thinking about these moments in your life, you realize how important place is to those memories and also to those events occurring at all. And the deeper you kind of go into the nestedness of it you realize you can't distinguish those events from place. I mean, they were never distinguishable from place uh, and I think Alexander is also trying to get us to do this in a way too. Realize that. There's a kind of presencing of the hole in each part that might even be his term or maybe it's David's term. But. And a lot of the people that I've worked with thought about red worked. Towards understanding. It has to do with holding this seeming paradox of there being a part and a whole. [00:08:00] And, thinking of place and human and being, and beings in general that are that place as not separate but intertwined and david has studied with a lot of people who think about wholeness in a very specific way. And we talk about them and David's continuing in that tradition. And these people aren't people that everyone has heard of in the field of geography, certainly not in the field of philosophy. They're sort of at the edges or what David says the periphery, and he's kind of annoyed by that and I can understand why because as I think Christopher Alexander says himself in some movie or other it's almost like the simplest thing, this kind of message that we are place. And place changes as we change and the experience of place changes as we change our presence. And yet it's like, as Alexander says, and as David says here, I think it's the thing that nobody really is paying attention to. I mean I'm from the United States and you drive down most. Roads there.

And it's [00:09:00] just piles of kind of weird ugly signs. There's not a rhythm and a pattern that makes you feel good. About those places, but there could be. And, uh, I can go into all of Alexander's work, but he really shows how to think about all these places of everyday life and how, if we just took, took a moment and looked at it the way we. Arrange and design things like signs and buildings. We could actually have a very different. Experience of being in the world.

And this translates into our relationships with ourself and others. But I think the important thing is just that. David seaman, who I talked to here. He's a student of these people like Christopher Alexander and Henri Bortoft who try to think about wholeness in a different way. Goethe to the German. Poet playwright.

We talk about a bit here and David Boehm, who I wrote on the early thesis on. There's all these people who are, seem to be trying to give us the same sense of the practice of wholeness of understanding it as [00:10:00] a practice and So David and I try to unpack this more here and mostly we talk about some important terms that help us understand how important places in our lives and how important Alexander's work is. I'm pretty new to it. I've only been really reading him for a few years and there's people who've been reading him for decades, but I hope more and more people will, and also read David's work. Because he's also been doing a lot of good things towards helping us better understand place. So thank you for being here.

I'll link to all this in the show notes, and I hope you're doing really well out there. In this world as you're making your way and that you take a moment somewhere and notice the rhythms around you and dance with them a bit today.

Hi, David. Thanks so much for being on the show today. It's so great to see you.

David Seamon: It's a pleasure.

Andrea Hiott: Today, there's so much I want to talk to you about, but I think I want to focus on or go into it through this paper of yours that was recently published called , Ways of [00:11:00] Understanding Wholeness, Place, Christopher Alexander, and Synergistic Relationality.

So Of all those words let's start with wholeness. Um, that's been a word that's meant a lot to you through your whole career. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about when that word first came into your life and we can go from there maybe a bit.

David Seamon: Well, I grew up in upstate New York, in a very rural part of upstate New York, and being in nature was always very important for me as a child.

And I think my interest in, um, wholeness developed one afternoon in the summer when I was lying on a plank, which went over a small creek, which was next to our house. And I was filled with this question, how is it that the world is always present around [00:12:00] me? In that moment, it seemed to be a kind of miracle, you know, that wherever I am, I'm surrounded by a world.

Now, obviously the world changes, but it's always there. It's like reflections in the mirror, you know, nobody makes them happen. And yet they're instantly there always. It's really quite a magical phenomenon. And I think that's the starting point for my work, wishing to find descriptive ways of understanding what this lived intertwinement, enmeshment, immersion in the world is about.

And, um, over time that led me to a doctorate in geography, because geography as a discipline is a very interesting area of investigation, because it is the study of human [00:13:00] beings in the world, essentially, their relationship to the earth. And, um, it was through Encountering Geography, and I did my doctoral work at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is one of the major centers for geographical research.

And back in the 1970s, when I was doing my dissertation work, there was a young geographer there named Ann Buttimer. And Anne Buttimer became part of a tradition which eventually was called humanistic geography. Now, I don't know, have you looked into that literature? That's a fascinating literature. People like Yifu Tuan and Edward Ralph and Anne Buttermer. And it was Anne, Who introduced me to phenomenology because that was the time in all the social sciences when there was a reaction against quantification and [00:14:00] positivist approach analytic approach to social science research, and there was an effort to move in new directions so you had the Marxism, you had the post structuralism, and what.

took my fancy was phenomenology. And, um, I still remember clearly how awestruck I was when I learned about phenomenology because as a graduate student, one of my most disappointing discoveries was the way these so called researchers and researchers. Manhandled the world, you know, they decided beforehand what independent dependent variables that we're going to look at.

And then they structured the world that they were researching through that predetermined structure, [00:15:00] and it seemed to me so unfair to the world. It seemed to me that so much of social science, especially, was not really finding ways to encounter what experience was about, what meaning was about. what life was about.

Andrea Hiott: So that didn't explain that feeling you had lying on the plank, so to speak, like just to relate it. Yes.

David Seamon: And of course that, that was underlying this feeling that what most social science was getting at was a kind of unreality grounded in the manipulative, Cerebral work of the researcher

Andrea Hiott: is that because let's just that little boy on the plank right having this kind of moment which many of us have had where everything said I had it, I think, how old were you, by the way, when you had that

David Seamon: probably six.

Andrea Hiott: Okay. I think I was a little older but like lying in the yard at night one of my teachers had said for homework you have to go lie [00:16:00] down and look at the stars. And it was that kind of moment like you described, but so as I'm here as you're describing this educational world, if, would they have tried to look at that place and sort of take it apart and put it into bits or something?

Like how would they try to explain that? Experience in a way, because it sounds like it was taking that apart in a way that it was taking the best part of the experience out of it or something.

David Seamon: Well, you see, at that point, geographers were largely focused on the material world. So studying the spatial distribution of language, for example, or studying a particular house type.

Um, but the emphasis was on the world outside the human being. You know, in those days, you were not allowed to talk about how the geographical world could be experienced by human beings. That was very much [00:17:00] a non topic. So phenomenology,

Andrea Hiott: first person experience, you, the idea of being in this, in the world was not.

David Seamon: No. Now, it had started. Okay. As you know, the work in cognitive science, for example, begins back in the 60s.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is when it reached your world, because I've recently, you know, I came at it the other way and found geography and the way that phenomenology is used in that, and it's very interesting for me, but I don't really yet understand when it started there.

David Seamon: Well, in terms of the phenomenological work, what I'm trying to say is that there were important developments before phenomenology came into the discipline in the 70s. For example, cognitive mapping began in the 60s with people like David Stay and Kevin Lynch.

You probably know the early Kevin Lynch work, The Image of the City. So there was a recognition that we had to start looking at values. images, perceptions, [00:18:00] understandings. But it was largely, um, explicit. It was largely cerebral, intellectual, cognitive, that got the attention. And it was only when the so called humanistic work began, people like Yifu Tuan and Edward Ralph and Anne Buttermer, that we began to realize That the range of human experience in relation to environmental geographical place topics was so much more than cognitive, for example, Merleau Ponty and the lived body, and the fact that so much everyday geographical action was grounded in habit and routine.

And as you probably know, that became a major theme in my first book. Book of Geography of the Life World, which was published in 1979 and was a rewrite of my dissertation. So the phenomenological work was so important because it said, you know, [00:19:00] we can look at all aspects of the way that human beings experience, find meaning in, have encounter with, are engaged with.

The environment with place with space with home. And of course, this is another interesting way in which geography is so interesting because it does hold together people in world. In a way that social, that sociology doesn't or psychology doesn't, you know, each of those disciplines, they sever out the person in some way from the world.

Geography is the only discipline, interestingly, that holds the whole structure together. Now there are very few people, there are very few geographers who realize this, but it's true.

Andrea Hiott: , let me stop you there for a second because, you know, as you know, I'm coming from philosophy and cognitive science and.

There's the idea of cognitive being only [00:20:00] in the head is something I don't believe anymore. I believe it's in the body and in the world, but this is something that now still when people hear cognitive, they think it means in the brain. So that's interesting when I hear you speak too, because I think of it as phenomenological, but I just needed to say that as a side note, but it sounds like with geography or what I found, it's starting with the place and environment.

So you And you, instead of starting inside or with the brain on one level or the psychology, you already have the world as part of it. So even though like you're saying, most people haven't linked that first person, the first person is already in it. It's just that people like you sort of started to kind of bring that out or something.

Is that a fair way to say, because I think what you're saying about geography is true, but. It might be hard for people to understand what you mean.

David Seamon: Well, I agree with what you say, of course. One of the curious things about our geographical experience with the [00:21:00] world is that on one hand, as you say, there is a geographical world outside the person.

It's a landscape. It's a topography. It's it's animal life. It's plant life. It's the cultural artifacts that have been constructed in the place. It's all of that. So there is a phenomenology of that world outside the person geographically. But it's also important to understand there's a geographical component inside the person to feel at home, for example, this quality of feeling inside a place that Edward Relph emphasizes so much in his book Place and Placelessness.

So you have this interesting, you know, it gets into your dialectics again. On the one hand, you have the inside. On the other hand, you have the outside. And of course, I'm interested in holding it all together.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I was about to say, this is where the wholeness comes very important, yeah.

David Seamon: [00:22:00] So, if you look at Relph's work, for example, it emphasizes more the outside.

Well, Ted's work is very good because it covers the spectrum, but you can place different researchers in terms of their degree of interest in inside versus outside. But ultimately, it all has to be held together. Now, if we go to Alexander, Christopher Alexander, the architect, his focus, well, at least originally, was largely the outside and figuring out designable aspects.

of the material environment that would strengthen one's sense of place and at homeness. And you see that in his, have you ever looked at his powder language book?

Andrea Hiott: Oh sure, yeah,

David Seamon: but more from coming at it like software

Andrea Hiott: development side.

David Seamon: Well, that's true, but I, , I dunno. This whole software thing I think that's overrated.

But you know, this, let's bracket

Andrea Hiott: that for this discussion. This is a

David Seamon: wonderful little book. Amazing book. Beautiful. Oh, wow. [00:23:00] That's not a perfect edition. And you know, most philosophers, most human scientists don't know this work. I don't understand it. This is one of the most creative efforts done in the 20.

It's not known.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah.

David Seamon: Now getting to philosophy, of course, as you know, in the 2000s, very interesting that you have philosophers like Edward Cayce and Jeff Malpass suddenly doing the philosophy of philosophy. Place through a phenomenological perspective. . So even though the geographers had lost track of it, 'cause they'd gone into post-structuralism and deconstruction and oh, assemblage theory and all that post-structural stuff,

Andrea Hiott: that's more the

David Seamon: reduction part.

So interesting that the philosophers are coming back to place. . And of course, now what we talk about is lived in placement. And that's one way to hold on to the integrity of the dialectic between inside and outside.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, so we already, this is really the crux of it in a way, is the part and the whole and [00:24:00] the different ways of seeing it and the different ways of talking about it.

And I think that's where we're going to get to relating phenomenology and Alexander. But first, maybe, so you came into it and there was, The phenomenology, that side of it appealed to you, but you've also kind of created that, at least from my reading of it, you've sort of brought that into human geography and you have your own way of talking about phenomenology, which is very much linked to play.

So could we look at that a little bit, how did that develop and how did, how do you see that? Like, how do you really think about phenomenology?

David Seamon: Well, of course, you know, I'm seen as a maverick. Many phenomenologists claim that what I do is not phenomenological, and I understand that point of view because I am much more interested in the spirit of phenomenology, and allowing the thing to take you where it takes you.

So, I'm a maverick from that angle now, I'm also a maverick among [00:25:00] geographers because the whole humanistic phenomenological tradition has largely been, um, left to the side today. It's really not, drawn on as, themes like power and and, um, identity and all of these kinds of things have come to the fore.

So, um,

Andrea Hiott: I'm glad you said that because I was trying to get at that because it is a different path. You know, it doesn't, your path doesn't really fit, but at the same time, you're very well cited, well known in architecture and human geography. So actually you did, you have made this path, but for those who are coming from certain traditions, for example, phenomenology in a very, particular way, um, I think it's important that you explain your, what you've come to understand as phenomenology.

David Seamon: Well, as you say, one could say my broadest interest is the phenomenology of wholeness. And that goes back to lying on the plank and [00:26:00] realize this interconnectedness among myself and the world at hand. Now, there's some work in phenomenology on wholeness, but really not very much. The central work on this topic is Henry Bortoff's work, The Wholeness of Nature, and that's a remarkable effort to look phenomenologically at what wholeness is.

Andrea Hiott: Now, can I just say, can I just say a quote from your paper that I just wrote down? Sure. From Bartow, which is talking about holes in parts and that they're present and in intrinsic interdependence and therefore nons, separability, if the whole becomes present when it within its parts, then apart is a place for the presencing of the whole.

This is like incredibly beautiful. If apart is a place for the presencing of the whole. I just had to say that, but you can go [00:27:00] ahead now.

David Seamon: Well, yes. And you realize that way of attempting to understand the whole is much different from the way that most researchers try to understand the whole today.

The whole today continues to be looked at largely in terms of a kind of systems approach where the whole is envisioned as a set of parts and interconnections. Now they create some kind of larger system, but even so, that's the dominant understanding of whole today. And epitome of that would be an engine, yes, or a clock.

I mean, that's the model.

Andrea Hiott: Take it apart, reduce it to its parts. That's how you understand it. Yeah, this

David Seamon: piecemeal approach to wholeness. However, when you read Borthoff, you realize he's talking about some other way of [00:28:00] encountering the whole. And this is very difficult because in trying to learn this way of encountering, in the moment of encountering, the whole is lost.

So it's a very, um, it's a very, it's hard work.

Andrea Hiott: It is hard work. It's hard. Also, we should say, cause it's too easy to go into a kind of mystical place too, because you have the part in the whole. So this is very, this is a theme in philosophy, part holes, and also in bigger kind of themes of, um, how do you talk, you can't talk about the whole without talking about the parts, but you can't talk about the parts without the whole or, Yeah, I think some people think it's too mystical to say everything is a whole in science because we need to think of the parts.

So there's all kinds of arguments about this and actually in religions to how trying to understand a way to talk about that space where you're holding both at once where you know both are not real and both are real and that's the kind of wholeness I think that is this [00:29:00] presencing in the parts. Um,

David Seamon: Yes.

And it is, I would say that Our best guide for moving toward this. different way of understanding wholeness is Borthoft's book. I do recommend that book. It's one of the great books of the 20th century. Sadly, it's not that well known, but it is a remarkable work that can totally revamp one's understanding.

Now, let me say back in the early 1970s, I was lucky enough to study with Borthoft for a while. Oh, well, And Henry you know, Henry had the same kind of impact on me as Ann Buttimer. They were both extraordinary minds and and Henry I saw through Henry that there is another way of encountering.

Now you use the word mystical and it is important right now to say this is not mystical. There's nothing new age about it. [00:30:00] This is quite real and possible if one works. with it. Now let me give an example of what this kind of wholeness is. And that's the example I mentioned earlier to you before we started.

This is from Christopher Alexander's book The Nature of Order, and it's the drawing of, um, Matisse's well, it's a set of drawings by Matisse. Now, can you, can this be seen if,

Andrea Hiott: I can see words, but I don't see the drawing. I can see it now. And I'll also I'll edit in a picture of it right now so you can just talk about it. Excellent. Yep. But I see it now

David Seamon: I want to show this because it does illustrate the quality of wholeness that we're trying to get to.

What we have here is four self drawings that Henry Matisse. did. You know, the artist and sculptor. And Alexander uses this as an example [00:31:00] of the kind of wholeness that he's trying to understand. And what you see here is four different drawings. And if you study each one, you'll notice each one is slightly different, but coming out of these four drawings is some kind of common personality or presence of Matisse.

You begin to feel Matisse's character, and it's that underlying quality. Where all the lines are connected to evoke this sense of presence of Lutice that is the kind of wholeness that I'm interested in studying. Does that make

Andrea Hiott: sense? It makes sense. He calls it a kind of a vector, doesn't he? Or a field effect.

Yes.

David Seamon: Do you mind if I read that? It's so beautiful.

Andrea Hiott: I love it too. No, please read it.

David Seamon: Yes. Alexander says, Wholeness is the overall vector. Now that's lovely because you have this sense of impulse coming [00:32:00] up through the paper, through the lines, evoking the character of Matisse. You see, and it's all there, but you can't catch it.

You can't really grab hold of it, but it is there. You can sense it. You can feel it. You can intuit. Now see, I don't think you can cognize it, you know. It's there. Not with the old

Andrea Hiott: definition of cognition.

David Seamon: No. All right. So wholeness is the overall vector, the overall qualitative structure, the overall field effect of the face.

We see that wholeness is a global thing. Now by global, he means here the whole of the drawing. We see that wholeness is a global thing, easy to feel perhaps, but hard to define. You cannot get the portrait of a person right unless you can see the underlying wholeness. In portraiture, as an architecture, it is the wholeness that is the real thing that lies beneath [00:33:00] the surface and determines everything.

So that's what we're trying to get at. Now, another example of This kind of wholeness is brought forward by the physicist David Bohm when he talks about implicate and explicate order. And as you probably know, his example of the the explicate order of the implicate order is the hologram. Whereas the explicate order is the photograph.

Now, they're very interesting differences here in a photograph, you take a picture of a landscape, and it becomes the photograph on the paper. So if there's a tree in the center of the landscape, you have a tree in the center of the photograph. If there's a stone gate on the right you have that over on the right side of the piece of paper.

So all the parts have their own region. in the whole. Now, [00:34:00] holograms are interesting because every little piece of a holographic plate contains the full image of the thing being presented holographically. So in every part is the whole, you see, and that's another way of framing this difference.

The photograph The old systems approach to the whole, the, um, holograph, this new, what Henry Bortoff calls authentic wholeness.

Andrea Hiott: Are the presencing of the parts, I think, too, you have there's for me, it also speaks to this, um, something that I think about a lot about how we confuse. The model with a dynamic ongoing process.

Somehow with the holograph or the, with the idea of wholeness that we're talking about here, it's still a dynamic process. We're not trying to freeze it and, like a photograph or something. It's, [00:35:00] in a way, what we're trying to do is sort of get a sense of it through sketching it with words, but we're not trying to define it or hold it with those words or images or whatever.

In a holograph these give us ways of understanding that it's dynamic and ongoing. And I think that also speaks a bit to Christopher Alexander and the pattern, that he's describing and the importance of movement. And also it speaks to this, what you've written about with place and placemaking as something that's, um, dynamic and all of the parts presencing within all of the other parts, sort of at the same time, but.

What is, does that sound familiar?

David Seamon: Well of course that becomes the very, very difficult question. How do we make this new approach to wholeness useful? And this is a very hard question. Now I like Alexander because I think he has done that in many [00:36:00] different ways in his work. Back in the 1970s he wrote Pattern Language.

And pattern language is a remarkable effort to facilitate a way of envisioning a place that one wants to make. Let's say it's a, um, a small school for young children. Pattern language is is a method keeping the whole in sight to begin to see what architectural and environmental parts that whole should be.

Bring forward. Um, so, Alexander's work is very significant in, in, in offering one, one model for, yeah. He

Andrea Hiott: does two things for me. I wonder what you think about this. There's a way in which he reminds us of the dynas that it's dynamic and moving, and I think that speaks to your idea of phenomenology trying to, [00:37:00] Keep the holes whole.

I think that's one of your definitions in the paper of phenomenology. And so we can be, um, we can be a point of view within, but we're also dynamic and we're keeping the holes whole. But here's the two things that his work has done for me so far, or there's many, but it introduces the idea of movement as important, the way you move through the space as a movement.

Um, Um, the way the space moves, I mean, you can always flip and look at different ways, but he doesn't just say that, right? Because as you said, it's about how is it useful and how do we not become just mystical, which is fine too, but this is a different conversation. But he kind of mathematizes it. I mean, There's an actual kind of way of systematizing it, but he doesn't stick it to that model, the way that often happens with reductionism, where it's only got to be this one way.

He says it's situated within every environment, all this is going to shift. Does that sound right to you, or is that my own interpretation?

David Seamon: Well, no, I [00:38:00] agree. Certainly interconnectedness through movement is an integral part of what he's trying to generate because, as you're suggesting, one quality of place that keeps places alive is dynamic, particularly people moving in some way.

Of course, not all places can have powerful movement, you know, you want places of rest. When I was writing a geography of the life world, I was, I remember the moment I suddenly realized, Oh my God, you know, you need movement, but you need rest. And important point again, we have another dialectic that has to be held in sight and somehow, um, not regulated, but, um, harmonized.

Yes. Um, No, I mean, it's a different kind of

Andrea Hiott: movement. I mean, you can be moved by a place without the place moving or your body moving. So I think there's a lot of different scales at which movement can be assessed, but [00:39:00] what you're saying is very important. It's not that everything is dynamic and moving in the sense of busy or, you know, with a lot going on.

It's more that it's not. But even when you're quiet and at rest, those, , environments are changing. The light maybe is changing and, you know, there's always something kind of going, but it doesn't, as you point out, importantly, it doesn't mean that you're not resting or it's not busy. Those are important things.

David Seamon: This would be a wonderful dissertation topic. We don't really have a phenomenology of movement in human life, and as you're pointing out, there's such a range of experiential possibility. Now, the only person I know of who's begun to deal with this is Ed Casey. In his which is it? Is it getting back into place?

I think he has a section on that. So it may be the fate of place. Can't remember which one, but he does talk about this there, but there's so much more possibility and richness. And of course, then [00:40:00] you move into the question. Okay. Now how do you manipulate material world? to enhance the quality of movement that you're talking about.

You see, we fall back into that inside outside connectedness again.

Andrea Hiott: Right, or trying to figure out how we can look at it from different positions. We could look at it from the position of the light or, but I mean, that would be a whole other discussion. But yeah, it's, in a way, you're, the phenomenology is opening up a way of doing that, even though it almost seems contradictory.

But once you can allow for the phenomenological experience, you can also start to understand that from other different positions in this room, for example, where we're resting, I'm imagining a Mark, the Mark Rothko chapel for some reason, you know, in this room where we're resting we could from very different positions experience it differently, so to speak.

So there is no. final kind of point of assessment, right? That's a very Bohm kind of idea too. That relates a lot to all of this too. There's a [00:41:00] lot of different levels that, that we could look at these ideas on. But more importantly, is this coming back to your work and how this is a different idea of place,

David Seamon: well, my most recent work has been interested in trying to understand place processually. And this goes back to David Bohm. I don't know if you remember, but David Bohm has these wonderful drawings of what he calls world tubes. And a world tube is a particular situation moving through time.

Andrea Hiott: And he

David Seamon: draws them as tubes. So I thought, well, , we could talk about place tubes how a place changes over time. And that became the key question in my book, Life Takes Place. And you've already mentioned the six place processes. And this became the key question in that book.

Are there interconnected processes whereby [00:42:00] places become stronger, they become weaker, they stay more or less the same? And I identified six of these processes largely through the systematics method of J. G. Bennett, the English philosopher, who is another very important figure in my field. Work, by the way.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but there's place interaction, you're six. Place interaction, place identity. Release. I'd actually like if you talked about place release. I really like that one. Um, place intensification.

David Seamon: On place realization.

Andrea Hiott: Realization comes before, then intensification, then creation. Do I get it?

David Seamon: Yeah. Do. Do you see why I put intensification and the creation last?

Andrea Hiott: Um, I see. I think I always confuse the intensification and the realization. But you realize, and then that is the awareness isn't intensification. And then you also have agency to [00:43:00] create, something like that?

David Seamon: Well, that's part of it. Agency is certainly the key to creation. In place creation, you have people devoted to their place trying to improve it. That's the process. Intensification is interesting because, you know, it provides a place For the material environment to be active in human life.

Because what intensification says is that the way we design a particular situation plays a role in how that situation unfolds. So, um, well, I couldn't say so much about that because most of the courses I teach are about that. Yeah, I

Andrea Hiott: was about to say that would be You don't have to teach it all here, it's too much,

David Seamon: But getting back to release, I'm so pleased that you find that intriguing.

Andrea Hiott: I wonder where that, yeah, could you, maybe you can tell people who have not read it or heard about it yet what you mean by place release.

David Seamon: Well, it's essentially environmental [00:44:00] serendipity, that so much of happy things in life happen because of coincidental meetings in place. So you're walking down the sidewalk and you meet an old friend you haven't seen in six months and you go for coffee and something very important happens out of that event.

Andrea Hiott: People are released more deeply into themselves. Sorry, I just found it on the paper. Place release refers to an environmental serendipity of happenstance encounters. Yeah, people are released more deeply into themselves. This feels like a very good example of serendipity to me. Um, I was just talking with Michael Evan, I don't know if you know his work or something, but he talks about synchronicities as also, and serendipities as also, Probably being more important than we think, just in terms of a really practical, um, yeah, biological understanding of, or being in the place that we're in too.

So I really love this. How did you did that just come [00:45:00] to you or do you, is there some, how did you get there with the serendipity?

David Seamon: Well, of course, this gets into the whole justification of six, processes. And as you may remember, I draw on J. G. Bennett's systematics of the event, and he argues that in any event, and by an event, he means a situation which has continuing significance through time.

It's a very interesting idea, this idea, but I think you can put it in Whitehead, too, but I don't know Whitehead well enough to Whitehead

Andrea Hiott: fits very well with the process, and they're all trying to, again, I think it's like back to what we were saying, there's these ways in which people use language and images to try to kind of say what you can't say or present an image or language, but somehow it, and it again relates to patterning.

of Alexander, you're expressing something that's in the patterning and in the kind of explanation without specifically explaining or [00:46:00] saying it somehow.

David Seamon: Well, and I think place release is a very useful way to get ordinary people thinking about the significance of place in their lives. Because you say to somebody, okay, well, now just think about this for a little bit.

Can you think of a serendipitous event that happened because of place? And it's remarkable what people come up with. It is. You know, so many folks met their significant other this way. Yeah. Including me. So many people, their professional career was determined. I mean, I can see that.

Andrea Hiott: Can you? Yeah, you just did, kind of, in a way, these people that you met.

Yeah.

David Seamon: Well, no, but it's actually the first moment was sitting on the bus going from old campus to new campus and this young fellow was standing in the aisle with his girlfriend and he said, I think I'll go to summer school. And I thought, well, that's a good idea. I never thought of doing that. I went to summer school and lo and behold, guess what course I took my first geography class.

[00:47:00] Geography.

Andrea Hiott: Wow. With a

David Seamon: fellow named Stanley Bloud who happened to be living in the dormitory that summer because he just moved there to become chair of the department and he and I would have dinner almost every night. So he took an interest in me. So he was my first.

Andrea Hiott: Set the trajectory.

David Seamon: I'm just

Andrea Hiott: overhearing something in the bus, right?

And you'll never forget that bus and where you were standing and I think that's, it's very, you're right. It does open up to place as inextricable from all of these other things. We try, we tend to think of it as separate, but. Yeah, something so seemingly small kind of orients your life and I think we can all for a moment sit here and realize actually that probably the most important orientations came from some, something like that.

Some geographical place we were that we just happened to overhear something or someone just happened to say something or whatever.

David Seamon: Yes, and of course that's only one of the processes.

Andrea Hiott: And that's only [00:48:00] one. Because

David Seamon: identity, so much of how we see ourself as being is grounded in the place where we. are. Now, obviously, if you're mobile, that's going to change.

But I think the figure today is still 96 percent of the Earth's population remain in the place where they were born, pretty much 96%. It's a very big rootedness, being at home being in place. It's one of the great stabilizing phenomena of the Earth.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it is. Place identity and how much that becomes your resource and reference without you knowing it in a way.

You're always dipping into that. Well, that was actually a whole other conversation I thought we could have was how that's changed. If it's changing due to things like, you know, virtual spaces and whatever, but that's another thing we have to. to bracket for another time, but actually all six of them are really interesting.

And to go back to the paper and link some of these things together a bit, in the [00:49:00] paper you are talking about what we've been talking about, but, about this idea of wholeness and how it's often approached and what you call the analytic relationality, which is this, I think this way that is more common where we reduce things to their parts and that's kind of how it's done.

But you also have another idea which relates more, I think, to your all these other ideas we're talking about now, which is the synergistic relationality. So what do you mean by the synergistic relationality? Well,

David Seamon: Istic reality is this other way of understanding wholeness that we've been talking about.

And that's why I wanted to show those four drawings by Matisse, because it's that underlying vector coming forward, you know, which is the possibility of wholeness as synergistic relationality. Now the dilemma here is learning [00:50:00] how to see in this new way. This is why Henry Bartolf in The Wholeness of Nature gives so much time to Goethe.

Could I say a bit about Goethe? Yeah, sure. So crucial here.

Andrea Hiott: That was a big influence on you too, right? Yes,

David Seamon: and probably most of your listeners, when they hear Goethe, they think of Faust, they think of poetry, and it is true that Goethe was one of the great poets and playwrights. But curiously, Goethe did a great amount of what he called scientific work.

But if we look back on the work that he did today, we realize that what he was doing was an early phenomenology of the natural world. And When I'm introducing phenomenology to new students, this issue comes up, you know, the student will say, you know, well, okay, you want us to study phenomena, but how do we [00:51:00] know that we're in accurate contact with the phenomenon, and this is a huge dilemma in all phenomenology, you can see too much.

You can read too much into the phenomenon, and let me tell you, there's a lot of phenomenological work like that today, a lot of gibberish, or you don't see enough. So how do you know you're accurately encountering the phenomenon? This is a huge dilemma. And when I'm introducing phenomenology, we start out with some exercises from a book by Goethe called Theory of Colors.

And one of the exercises in that book is looking through a prism at the appearance of colors. And this is a very useful exercise because you see, you have a phenomenon that you can see, but you can't manipulate it. It's there. It's in front of you. So you [00:52:00] have to stay with it. And at first people make up all sorts of concoctions about what they're seeing, you know, I see color around all the objects.

Well, no, you don't. That's not true. So, so you have to begin to. actually look in an active way. This is a very important part of this approach to wholeness, that you have to look actively. And this takes great practice. We're not used to looking actively. So as you begin looking, you begin to realize, well, you know, certain colors seem to be associated with certain edges.

And then you begin to see that certain colors cluster together in these edges, so your darker colors of blue, indigo, and violet, they cluster together. Your lighter colors of yellow, orange, and red cluster together. You don't often see green. You see new, a new color like magenta. So it's really all quite a puzzle, you see, [00:53:00] but you can't, because you, it's there in front of you, you can keep going back to it until you begin to know that what you're describing is an accurate rendition of what you're seeing.

You see, so, so we begin to recognize how difficult it is to study any phenomenon. Now, the other thing that Goethe did in Theory of Color, which is very interesting, he said, you know, once you've mastered what you've seen, and you can picture it well in your head, what I want you to do is to recreate it visually without looking at it.

This is what he called exact sensorial imagination, you see. So, so, so, Everything he's doing is providing a method for moving more and more closely to the actual phenomenon. And that's something which, [00:54:00] frankly, phenomenologists haven't dealt with very well. We have these highfalutin notions like epoche and imagined to variation.

But so often those approaches, which come out of a surreal mostly they lead to a lot of, uh, embellishment and muddle. And I'm much against embellishment and muddle.

Andrea Hiott: Does this have to do with the generative? Because it's a word that's used in Alexander a lot, the idea of the generative aspects and the generative fields.

I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking about The, this generative, intensive, integrative, these words that you use and, but I'm also thinking about just something like awareness and how that practice that you described is in a way getting you to look it's changing your interaction, it's changing the way you're interacting with the place, the object, um, so that it's becoming clear and somehow it's that interaction.

I guess that gets to place interaction too a bit, but it's somehow, there's [00:55:00] something about awareness. I don't know. What do you think about generative and then awareness? How do those? Well, well,

David Seamon: it's true. Alexander too is making the effort to facilitate new ways of looking at design possibilities.

To, to make the environment better for the people who are going to be living in it or using it in some way. Did I lose you? I think

Andrea Hiott: your screen is frozen. Is mine frozen? Well, yeah. I can't see you at all now.

David Seamon: I see your picture. That's all I see.

Cannot start video. Failed to start the video camera.

Please select another video camera in the settings. Sorry, I think the camera is kaput.

Andrea Hiott: It's okay. Why don't you just keep your camera off then?

Maybe it just needs to rest. Yeah, okay.

David Seamon: Okay. Okay.

Andrea Hiott: Um, yeah, but, I do think, I do, yeah, I mean, to get towards yeah, kind of bringing it together a bit, um, Yeah, what do you think about Alexander? What is he trying [00:56:00] to I mean, it's a bit too much to say he's the book and the work is, um, a practice towards better awareness, but it does feel like a practice a little bit in a way of, oh, it is.

Yes. How would you talk about that practice? Well,

David Seamon: it's it certainly He's offering a way to understand in a new way, but as an architect, he's also offering a way to design in a different way, and Alexander believes that the built environment makes a huge difference in human life, that people will become better.

If the designed environment is better and he's quite discouraged by the state of the physical environment today, you know, and you look at downtown areas, you look at suburban sprawl, you get the destruction brought by climate change, we are in a [00:57:00] pickle.

Andrea Hiott: I think I want to just highlight something before we move towards closing, and that is this idea of place and how important it is as a Exactly what you're saying now, um there's, how do I really say this?

There's something about changing our orientation to the way we understand place and realizing that it's a phenomenological experience that has everything to do with health, not only of our inside as individuals our experience as selves, but of our, there's a scaled or a nestedness in Alexander.

And I think in your work too, of yes, there's the phenomenological experience of this body, but also the way it scales to your home and that environment, the room, let's even say, and then the home and then the city and then the neighborhood. And, you know, There's a way in which it touches something like the issues that we're facing as a planet at some point.

And not in a very practical way. And when you look, when you read [00:58:00] his books, also, I think you go towards that a lot. So maybe this moves towards the idea of environmental humility a little bit too. How do you see that? The idea of nestedness and also just, I want to underline this idea of place as an experience and place as something.

Not only like the place release where the synchronicity changes us, but really every aspect of our life is place in a way. And you, that is kind of what you're expressing in a lot of different ways, with place making, place ballet, and there's all these ways you come at it. But there's a feeling of this integrative, this intimacy of everything interacting as place that I feel like is really important and that we haven't drawn out.

Really yet

David Seamon: well, I think what we're pointing toward is a Entirely new way of understanding what human being is. That human being is not human being alone. Human being is a human being in place. And [00:59:00] If we can recognize this new way of realizing what we are, we realize that an integral part of place is the others

in, in, in the place. So it is a I do think it's a different vision. And I think it's related to what you're attempting to do with your cognitive work. What is your expression?

Waymaking? And that, that's part of it too that who we are is the way we make our way, you know,

Andrea Hiott: yeah, I think we're all and many different people from many different angles and it's all needed are trying to do what we've been trying to do in this conversation, which is hold what we've thought of till now as parts, um, and wholes as something that we can't really express because it doesn't fit into either of those categories. It's not that they're opposites either. So we're even trying to open up that space a bit. Um, or do you see analytic and [01:00:00] synergistic? relationality as opposites?

David Seamon: Well, I wouldn't call them opposites. Um, you know, I'm not really interested in analytic relationality because that's really the tradition that I broke free from back in the 1970s when I discovered phenomenology. I do think that analytic relationality does largely dominate the sciences today. Because it's easier to master, it's convenient, it gives one a sense of power that one can mark out the parts of a thing And manipulated and so much of analytic relationality involves manipulating and controlling, whereas, um, synergistic relationality involves the empathy of phenomenology trying to be open to the thing.

Just allowing the thing to be, but doing it with care, doing [01:01:00] it in a directed way that I was suggesting when I was talking about the prism exercises that Goethe offers.

Um, so I don't, I wouldn't call them opposites. I mean, they are opposite in some ways, but there's, they're simply very much different.

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And I guess there's been so much focus on the analytic that you're sort of. Bringing out the synergistic, but there's well, and I think

David Seamon: There are situations where analytic relationality is it's quite good, you know I mean, obviously I immediately think of surgery, you know, and knowing the body if something needs to be removed that's those are the situations where analytic relationality is crucial.

Um, taking care of the wounded, all that kind of thing, you know, where there has to be an understanding of the part that's damaged. So, I mean, I don't want to suggest I'm against analytic relationality. It has its [01:02:00] place. But as McGilchrist says, you know, it's become so dominant.

And of course, he associates it with the poor left brain, which, okay, I mean, I don't go along with that so much because I find it physical is but I like his work. Whereas he associates the so called, um, synergistic relationality with the right brain, yeah? Right. Or the right hemisphere. So, um, you, you see this difference in his work too, though I haven't studied his work that thoroughly as you have.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think he's trying to do something similar to hold the space. Um, I mean, I wrote about it as asymmetrical reconciliation, um, in your environmental and architectural phenomenology because I think. I we can all kind of look at ways we might have expressed it differently or better, but when you look at the bigger [01:03:00] picture, it is, I think, trying to do something similar to open the space so that, yes, there are times we need to.

be reductionist in a way, or look at things, the parts, as parts, even if it's only in our models, but there's a way in which now we have the capacity to look at the synergistic relationality, or the right brain ness, if you want to call it that, whatever way you want to come at it, um, as very important right now in this place that we're in, and as needing nurturing, I guess, Something like that.

And I think you express it with belonging or belonging together, you know, in some of your work. Well, of course,

David Seamon: yeah, that gets us into Heidegger. And, um, that's another interesting way of talking about the difference between these two ways of understanding. Heidegger talks about belonging together where the emphasis is on the togetherness.

Heidegger And he [01:04:00] contrasts that with belonging together, where the emphasis is on the belonging. And ultimately, he suggests that the belonging is more real, because the togetherness happens because there's belonging to begin with. And this is a theme that Henry Borthoff picks up on considerably in, In his writings, and we can go back to the Matisse drawings, you know, there's an underlying belonging.

It's that underlying vector, which we can talk about in terms of belonging, which leads to this presence of Matisse's character.

Andrea Hiott: Yes, I think that you showed the pictures and I think that gives us a good example of how you can't define that vector or that, , field effect, um, by reducing it to the parts, but we know it immediately. And it's similar with the place too you experienced this field effect or this vector or this. synergistic [01:05:00] relationality as the place. There's no separating it. But sometimes we need to separate it into parts to understand it better. And those are just very different processes. And I guess, yeah.

David Seamon: Well, I think we have to be very careful here, but we're not saying that it can never be understood. What we're saying is we have to be very careful about the ways that we find to understand it. So Alexander has developed a whole series of possibilities. His pattern language, his 15 geometrical qualities, um, in my work, I'm arguing that the wholeness of place processually can be understood in terms of those six interconnected processes.

So we are trying to move toward some kind of greater understanding. But the key Is that we have to put the phenomenon first. Yeah, that's the key.

Andrea Hiott: Good point. Yes.

David Seamon: So, let me just say, you know, one, one of the, [01:06:00] one of the reasons we publish environmental and architectural phenomenology is to keep track of this kind of work.

And sadly, The academic realm is very bad about being interested in these alternative ways of understanding, uh, Borthoff's work, for example. I don't understand why the philosophers don't pick up on it, but they don't. There's such hostility toward Borthoff, I suppose, because His original training was not in philosophy, but whatever there's wonderful work going on.

And we try to keep track of that work in the environmental and architectural psych phenomenology newsletter, which has been published since 1990. And as you know, well, you've just published two reviews of the McGilchrist for me. They're quite lovely reviews by the way.

Andrea Hiott: Thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to dig into it, it was good for me.

David Seamon: Yeah, I was so happy because I wanted to discover him and finally I found you.

Andrea Hiott: I love [01:07:00] EAP too. I really think of it, you know, I have this way making and looking at navigability and I really think of it as a, as you said, you're, you've opened up this path and this trajectory that is really important. I mean, keeping this visible, all these different other ways and.

Um, I guess, I want to come back, we have to go now, but I want to come back to you as a little boy in that place, and I wonder if you've It's not that you were trying to answer what That was, but I wonder how you see that experience now after all this work that you've done, um, and I also kind of just want to get a little bit at what's motivating, what motivated you?

Was it that kind of moment, or, I guess I'm trying to get towards this real kindness in a way, um, where you also, in the paper, because I think it's a very beautiful, A really beautiful notion and you mentioned the other before too with um, this humility of who is it, Ralph? Or environmental.

David Seamon: Environmental humility. Yes. So I don't

Andrea Hiott: know. I'm throwing a bunch of [01:08:00] stuff out there, but I want to hear about your how you see that moment that, that started it all. And also what you see this as, really doing in the world.

David Seamon: Well, that moment on the plank had to do with realizing that there was a way to see accurately a way of understanding something real and it's that wish to really understand in a real way that's really driven me along my entire professional journey.

career. I think I can honestly say that I've never written anything that I don't believe in. I've always tried to write from a reality. And I think it's that feeling that there is a reality that, um, that pulls me along.

Andrea Hiott: That's a good way to say it. Have you encountered resistance trying to do that?

Because it almost sounds like [01:09:00] something that's, I think for younger people listening, you know, you want to do that with your life. You want to stay in that real place. And do it, but it doesn't always seem like it fits with academia.

David Seamon: Well, I have Experience resistance and my major advice there is to keep your head down. If you look at my academic career, you know, it's been largely on the periphery of geography, the periphery of phenomenology and philosophy. the periphery of environment behavior research. I've always been on the periphery and I've always sought out others who were on the periphery, like Bob Mugarauer and Ingrid Stefanovic, Anne Buttermer, Yifu Tuan.

There are so many scholars,

Andrea Hiott: though.

David Seamon: You know, in between, and sadly, the in between is largely ignored by the conventional academic folks but I think that's a good thing because it, I've been given the space to do what I can [01:10:00] do, so I don't regret it.

Andrea Hiott: No, and I don't think it's peripheral anymore.

It's just that the time scale is a bit different. So in the moment, there's an inertia in academia that publishes certain things and certain things get prioritized. And, but all those names that you just said, and including yours, um, actually at this stage are very influential and there are these trajectories now.

So you were, Working in an interstitial in betweenness, in your career, bringing in all these, at the edge of all these places, but somehow you sort of sewed those edges into another path, I'd say, with the help of a lot of the people that you've mentioned in this discussion.

David Seamon: Yes, I remember Bob Mugarauer saying once, he said, David, you know, we've got to create our own center.

And I thought, well, yeah, okay, and in a way that, that has happened, though I still think that this work is poorly known. For example, Ian [01:11:00] Ian McGilchrist, you know, none of this work is covered in his writings. Why is that This work is much more important than most of the stuff he covers. I don't even think he knows Christopher Alexander's work, does he?

Now he

Andrea Hiott: does because I told him but I think I know but how can that be you see But I don't think you can blame people for that because we only know

David Seamon: alexander. How can he not know board?

Andrea Hiott: I don't think I didn't either david till I met you I mean, I knew I maybe i'd heard of christopher alexander because of the software thing But you know We can't blame people for what they don't know because you can only imagine from what you've learned and what you know And that's as you've shown largely a matter of all these kind of You Place processes.

And until you get a kind of agency to really start trying to connect dots and patterns that aren't your predictable patterns, it's hard to know what you don't know. I know it's hard to, but you know, this right now we're making a connection and this will, um, a lot of people will now hear about these [01:12:00] people and it spreads fast once it spreads.

David Seamon: Well, yes. I guess the only point I'm making is I still think we're somewhat at the periphery, okay? That's

Andrea Hiott: Okay. Well, you can be at the periphery. That's not a bad place to be. And anyway, the center is everywhere, so it's just, you know, for you, these things are central and that is a center and more people will start to discover that.

Um, so yeah, when that happens, how that happens is But

David Seamon: you see, what puzzles me is that take Bortoff, for example, his work is extraordinary and yet Extraordinary work is not getting the attention. So something is wrong there. People are not really in touch with reality. It gets back to that again.

Andrea Hiott: But you could say that about a lot of the people that have influenced the world. I mean, sometimes you have people who make an influence in their lifetime and immediately, but quite often, I mean, even with a lot of phenomenology. It's it seems like it [01:13:00] is huge to us now, but it's also been a rather peripheral experience until lately.

So,

David Seamon: well, that's true. Yes. But it is curious how folks who to me are pretty much useless, let's say Derrida for example, how people like that get so much attention and yet they're writing nonsense, you see, and yet the good work. Gets ignored. This is what I find disturbing and sometimes I become discouraged about it because I say, you know, people are so readily overwhelmed by embellishment and concoction.

Andrea Hiott: I think there's something about the spectacle and about being, um, this kind of loudness or there's also something about a violence or a deconstructive kind of approach that. I don't know. when you're young gets your attention more than but then I would say it's moving the other way too. I really just think there are waves of [01:14:00] this because I do see a lot of people now wanting the more, um, wholeness approach.

It's just that's a lot harder to talk about and it's much more of a practice. It's easier to talk about reduction and it's easier to show it. So it's, I think the timescale and also just what we're capable of. You know, being able to, with wholeness, you have to be able to hold contradiction and seeming paradox.

And yeah, it's just a different, it takes a different kind of patience and time. I think that's what it gets down to. And you were lucky that you found a community of people doing that early on. So for you, it's felt natural, but a lot of people don't find that early on. They find the reduction.

David Seamon: Yes, well, there are so few communities like that, you know, especially in I do think

Andrea Hiott: there's becoming more, even if it's through something like, you know.

David Seamon: That's encouraging to hear, that's good. Yeah,

Andrea Hiott: I really do think so. And you know, that's why your work is important because all it takes [01:15:00] is people to start looking and then they can find it. That's why you need to leave the trail, as you have. So that's the best we can do, really, and also try to live it in our own lives, I guess.

That's a big way of spreading it.

Which it sounds like you do it's a flowering, an unfolding.

David Seamon: Well, yes, and that really has been my major aim. Just to get this work out there through my writing. And I think I've done a pretty good job of that.

Andrea Hiott: I think you have that's how I found you, you know, so it's working. It's just I didn't want to ask you

David Seamon: that How did we meet?

Andrea Hiott: You know, I was trying to think and I couldn't I honestly don't know how we met but i'm sure I read your book life for the first book. Um, so you

David Seamon: think you sent me an email first I'm sure

Andrea Hiott: I reached out to you because I think I was looking for ways I was having ideas about how this connects to place and cities.

Okay And I think I found you that way. So it's you're present, you know? And I for your work. How did I tell you when

David Seamon: you were doing those reviews?

Andrea Hiott: I have no idea how we got [01:16:00] on. I think just from our discussions, maybe we were discussing. I'm so happy you did them. It's very

David Seamon: nice to have those reviews.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I'm so glad that happened too. I'm definitely glad I found you, and your work, so, and I thank you for it, and you know, just, I would, if, I hope that you can just feel that it is important and not get too discouraged, because yeah, there's a lot of meaning in it, and it's been worth it, and it's still worth it, so.

David Seamon: Well, it's a curious thing, you know, because there is a part of me discouraged, but there's this much more powerful part that says, you know, who cares?

Andrea Hiott: Yeah go with that part. It's good to care a little bit, but look at this. I mean, you have this, you really have this trail of very substantial work and connections and community.

And that's the most that anyone can ever really want. And as you said, you were always doing it from a real place. I mean, that you can say that is really precious, I think, in, in such an environment. That we live in now. So,

David Seamon: well, thank you for saying that.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I really mean it. And I [01:17:00] hope other people hear it and feel inspired to to live their life like that.

But I think we should probably wrap it up. Is there anything we didn't say or touch on that you really want to make sure is in here?

David Seamon: No I would just, could I mention a few of the best works I would suggest that folks read.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah,

David Seamon: please do. And I would start out with Henry Bortoff's. The Wholeness of Nature, which was originally published in 1996.

I would recommend Edward Routh's Place in Placelessness, written in 1976, which was the first phenomenology of place written back in the 70s. I would recommend all of Christopher Alexander's work, but if viewers haven't looked at pattern language, they must look at it. It's really one of the most creative efforts that anyone has ever assembled.

And, um, Then I would recommend the more [01:18:00] recent work on phenomenology of place Edward Casey's Getting Back into Place, which was originally published in 1993, and then made a second edition in 2009, is a wonderful work, as is Jeff Malpas place and experience. There's a new edition of that, which was just published in 2018.

I hope folks might look at my work. Uh, Life Takes Place was published in 2018. There's a very early work, A Geography of the Life World, published in 1979. And then I just published a collection of my past writings. called Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Life, Worlds, and Lived Emplacement. So those are some of the works I would highlight.

Andrea Hiott: I'll put links to all that in the show notes and also in the comments section on YouTube. So people can easily find

David Seamon: it. Environmental and architectural phenomenology. All of [01:19:00] those issues are online. They've all been uploaded. Yeah, it's wonderful open source. I'll

Andrea Hiott: definitely link to that too.

David Seamon: Yeah, I think it's great fun going through those and just amazing what we've covered over the years.

Andrea Hiott: Really, it really is. And I really do think Christopher Alexander is probably the key. I mean, that's, I think that's where people can start getting hooked and really get into this. Cause it, there's so much in that and it really relates to a lot. That's that a lot of people are already interested in right now in this moment.

And it's just a, it's a mind opening way to think of the world. All right. Well, I hope you have a great day. It's

David Seamon: been

Andrea Hiott: lovely.

David Seamon: Yes. Goodbye. Bye.

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: https://www.patternlanguage.com/

More on Christopher Alexander: https://www.pps.org/article/calexander David Seamon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S...

Anne Buttimer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bu...

Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: https://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Natu...

Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology: https://ophen.org/series-377

Goethe's Theory of Colours: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50572...

Kevin Lynch Image of the City: https://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/I...

Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/plac...

Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: https://www.routledge.com/Place-and-E...

Place, Placelessness, Inside, Outside: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51656...

Edward Casey's Getting Back into Place: https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Back-I...

David Seamon Books: Life Takes Place: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/m...

A Geography of the Life World: https://www.routledge.com/A-Geography...

Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Life, Worlds, and Lived Emplacement: https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenolo...

#davidseamon #andreahiott #christopheralexander

www.andreahiott.com

www.loveandphilosophy.com

These are conversations I’ve been having with scientists, artists, & philosophers to understand how our approach to life and cognition might address some of the urgent divides we face today. It started as part of my philosophical (academic) research in phenomenology and neuroscience whereby I elucidate the practice of holding the paradox when it comes to the philosophy and science of mind. By love and philosophy, I mean the people, passions, and ideas that move us, shape the trajectories of our lives, and co-create our wider social landscapes. Partly due to my trajectory in philosophy, embodied cognition, neuroscience & technology, I’m hoping to better observe binary distinctions in our academic & personal lives (science vs. spiritual, mental vs. physical, technological vs. biological). What positive roles have these structures played? How might rethinking these structures & their parameters open new paths & ecological potentials? The Substacks for those who want to go deeper: L & P: https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

We Are Place: The Deep Connection Between Environment and Identity

[00:00:00]

Andrea Hiott: it's almost like the simplest thing, this kind of message that we are place. And place changes as we change and the experience of place changes as we change our presence. And yet it's like, as Alexander says, and as David says here, I think it's the thing that nobody really is paying attention to. I mean I'm from the United States and you drive down most. Roads there.

And it's just piles of kind of weird ugly signs. There's not a rhythm and a pattern that makes you feel good. About those places, but there could be. And, uh, I can go into all of Alexander's work, but he really shows how to think about all these places of everyday life and how, if we just took, took a moment and looked at it the way we. Arrange and design things like signs and buildings. We could actually have a very different. Experience of being in the world.

And this translates into our relationships with ourself and others.