Social Science Research Council

"The Kinesthetic Impulse: Space, Performance, and the Body in German Architecture, 1880-1914"

At MIT, I have been researching various aspects of European modernisms from the eighteenth century onwards. My current work studies the artistic discourse of German-speaking countries between 1880 and 1914, a period during which a new kind of aesthetics based on perceptual psychology was formulated. My SSRC-funded research in Germany and Switzerland will examine the architectural culture of this formative period from the perspective of kinaesthesia, defined in the course of the nineteenth century as a sixth sense that enabled the perception of bodily movement. Developed within the natural sciences and employed with increasing frequency within a variety of European texts and practices, the concept of kinaesthesia referred to the capacity of the human body to sense itself through the activity of its own muscles. As such, it provoked important philosophical discussions. Collapsing the age-old distinction between mind and body, the concept of kinaesthesia dispersed consciousness to the peripheries of the body by granting motor activity a primary role in determining the operations of the mind. In the particular field of aesthetics, discussions revolved around movement, rhythm, and, above all, Raum (space). In fact, it was out of this context at the end of the nineteenth century that the concept of space emerged to become a central term of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. Studying this period through the lens of kinaesthesia thus allows us to understand the genealogy of some key terms of aesthetic modernism as well as implicit agendas that these terms would transmit from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. My strategy to understand this complex history is to focus upon specific moments: the work of the scientists Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the re-invention of the Baroque style at the turn of the century, the theory of effect devised by August Endell (1871-1925) as well as Emil Jaques-Dalcrozes (1865-1950) eurhythmics and Adolphe Appias (1862-1928) spatial theater are pivotal moments that I am studying.