A Healing Journey
By Carey van der Zalm

The ultimate meaning of any building is beyond architecture; it directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being.
—JUHANI PALLASMAA (1)

“Healed Outcomes” is a symbolic issue for The Site Magazine. It marks a break from our past and the numeration we have used for the last twenty years, and initiates our first series. This series will be published over the next three years and each issue will build on those preceding to explore how architecture can address today’s most pressing challenges. This first issue has long been in the works. Influenced by our discussions with Juhani Pallasmaa, who writes, “We are in constant dialogue and interaction with the environment, to the degree that it is impossible to detach the image of the self from its spatial and situational existence,” (2) it was clear to us that the inextricable relationship between space and consciousness was a natural starting point for any ongoing discussion about architecture’s role in the world. Without question, the offering of spaces for individual and collective healing is a role that architecture has maintained over time and across cultures.

As you explore the research, essays, fictions, and design projects featured in this issue, you will notice that none directly address COVID-19, although many pieces discuss issues that have run in parallel with the pandemic. COVID-19, we thought, would offer a lens limited by current events on a theme that we see as foundational. So instead, the discussions focus on topics that have overlapped with a need for healing for quite some time: race, gender, inclusion, decolonization, public and digital spaces, addiction, spirituality, economic exploitation, and ecological destruction. These are some of the topics that will be addressed regularly in our forthcoming series.

Our contributor Pete Bernard, an Algonquin Healer, tells us that when you occupy a healing space your consciousness and everything you do is infused into the space and all of the things that exist within it. With his teachings in mind, we have created this issue understanding that healing and architecture are journeys. Both include the experience and the encounter of form, where form can be represented by many things: your body, other bodies, a building, a piece of furniture, a work of art, a magazine, a language. But these journeys are not only about form; inherent and essential to them is the experience and encounter of the space in-between forms. More broadly, the space in-between all things, at all scales. Formlessness. Because we engage with form, first and foremost, using our physical body, sensing formlessness can be bewildering. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes his experience of “the inbetween” as “not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.” (3) A unity of the senses allows perception beyond the physical. In Kisho Kurokawa ‘s The Philosophy of Symbiosis, the in-between is contradiction in cohesion. Formlessness is not about opposition, "us vs. them." Instead it's duality, "us and them," or, more profoundly, unity, "us/them." Kurokawa explains that each and every part must be expressed within the whole, otherwise it cannot be fully experienced. For him, it is the unity of all things that allows for a perception beyond the physical. In either case, to be fully engaged with a space, the body must sense the metaphysical: the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a space.

We conceived of “Healed Outcomes” as a healing journey in and of itself. This issue is an encounter of physical form with the opportunity to consider all of the spaces inbetween: the space between yourself and the author, each page, each work, each image, each letter, and the realities described. For the first time ever, we recommend reading this issue in the order it is presented, so that you can move from pieces rooted in the physical toward those increasingly metaphysical. To support you along this journey we have provided three guiding points throughout the issue. They are offered to facilitate an experience of formlessness, essential to a healing journey, which includes the setting of intention (creating an aim or plan), experiencing a shift in consciousness (moving through a liminal space that expands our sensory thresholds), and moving toward an outcome (something that follows what has come before, and makes space for what is to come).

—Carey van der Zalm

Endnotes

(1) Juhani Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 11.
(2) Ibid, 64.
(3) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, USA: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 48

Bio

Carey van der Zalm is an Architect, AAA, creative director and a graphic designer. Carey’s main practice is focused on the integration of healing and architecture. As well as designing healing spaces, she has designed and published several books and magazines relating to these topics.