Reading List
Spatial Therapy is the continuation of a centuries-old dialogue
between architects, designers, artists, writers, philosophers, farmers, geographers and more. Together we have explored what it means to experience space both passively and actively and have found ways to manipulate spaces to achieve a desired effect.
These ideas have lived in me for years, but not until I started finding supportive literature was I able to put language and form to my practices. Anyone looking to expand their understanding of how humans and other species experience and manipulate space may find these titles helpful.
House as a Mirror of Self
Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home
by Clare Cooper Marcus
Clare Cooper Marcus conducts a series of interviews with people from various backgrounds. They are encouraged to describe their current living spaces and their personal history of home as a concept. This introspective read is a journey through many worlds, through peoples’ personal galaxies - a celestial neighborhood tour if you will.
This is the first book I came across that successfully merged home design with psychology. I was ecstatic to learn that I wasn’t the only one who saw the homescape as a portal to the inner world.
Sacred Space
Clearing and Enhancing the Energy of Your Home
by Denise Linn
Denise Linn taps into her Native American heritage to bring forth this guide for working with the subtle energies in the home. This resource offers practical advice on how to incorporate the elements of nature and mystical sciences like numerology and feng shui into home design. While reading this book, I began to understand just how meticulous a person can be when curating a home.
belonging
a culture of place
by bell hooks
belonging changed everything for me. Before I found the book, I was rightly under the impression that most literature in the field of place making is written by white authors. At last, I found an account of experiential space told through the lens of a black woman living through the tension of being black in America. This series of essays by bell hooks examines the ways her home state of Kentucky permanently influenced the way she explores the rest of the world. She searches endlessly for a new place to call home before finally landing back in Kentucky - her place to rest.
These poetic reflections guided me as I wrote about my own journey away from my place of birth and into my inner home.
homeplace
a site of resistance
by bell hooks
While black people are often subject to living conditions that are at worst inhumane, home is one of few places we can exhale. As part of a compilation of essays in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, homeplace is bell hooks’ commentary on the ways that black women have historically made it their business to curate living spaces that uplift and empower the family, despite constant discrimination and violence outside the home. hooks admits that sexist, racist, capitalist ideology has a way of seeping into the black home. This essay is a call to action, urging black people to take back control of the narratives that live inside their spaces.
Four Huts
Asian Writings on the Simple Life
translated by Burton Watson
This book reads like a series of diary entries, each written by a different poet. For their own reasons, the four narrators chose to retire (whether temporarily or permanently) from city life and retreat to the wilderness. The poets describe their living environment the way only a poet could. These short, reflective pieces juxtapose meditative solitude with the dense political backdrop of the time.
Space and Place
The Perspective of Experience
by Yi-Fu Tuan
Space and Place is Topophilia matured. One quote encapsulates the subject of this book: “An object or place achieves concrete reality when our experience of it is total, that is, through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind.” Yi-Fu Tuan ventures through abstract and concrete realities using the full spectrum of experience of various types of spaces as a filter. By investigating the ancient virtues of cultures worldwide and giving them meaning in today’s society, the author succeeds in distilling high concepts so that they’re digestible to the reader.
This book connected many dots for me as I continue to build out the theory of Spatial Therapy and envision ways to apply these theories in the coming years.
At Home on the Earth
Becoming Native to Our Place
edited by David Landis Barnhill
Since its inception Spatial Therapy has explored ways the concept of home can be mobilized and accessed anywhere on the planet. At Home on the Earth is just that: an exploration of the countless ways people cultivate relationships with their inner homes, their constructed homes and the planetary home shared by all. This anthology introduced to me the idea of bioregionalism, the idea of organizing land masses not according to political jurisdictions, but to the natural shifts in climate, habitat and landscape.
Healing Spaces
The Science of Place and Well-Being by Esther M. Stenberg
This research-heavy book forced me out of my introspective bag and deep into my scientific bag -- a place I don’t go often. Finishing this book was a necessary challenge as it presented scientific evidence for the tenets of Spatial Therapy. Dr. Esther M. Sternberg focuses her lens on the hospital as this is an environment where one’s healing can be linearly tracked. She takes the reader on a sensory journey, discussing the ways stimuli in the environment are received by the brain and the body. Outside the hospital, gardens, labyrinths and cities are also explored.
The Poetics of Space
The Classic Look At How We Experience Intimate Places
by Gatson Bachelard
Phenomenology [the study of experience, imagination and consciousness] was a term I had to get familiar with to embark on the reading of this book. Gatson Bachelard uses prose and poetry to explore the way consciousness comes alive in the spaces it occupies.
Poets will enjoy this prosaic tour through the nooks and crannies of the world including corners, closets, nests and chests. Of particular interest to me was the transition between the chapter on “Miniatures” and the chapter on “Intimate Immensity.” The polarity of these phenomenons as related to the lived experience iss skillfully woven by the French author.
Topophilia
A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values
by Yi-Fu Tuan
Topophilia is Yi-Fu Tuan’s attempt at “order[ing] in some way the wide variety of attitudes and values relating to man's physical environment” (Preface, Space and Place). The book reads almost like a historical report and I can admit it didn’t hold my attention. I do, however, understand the importance of acknowledging the infinitely mercurial nature of perception. Social values today are ridiculed by tomorrow. What brings a person pleasure this year can cause them severe discomfort by the next. This book is a reminder that perception, a fundamental building block of reality, is not only subject to change, it’s guaranteed to change again and again.