HOW BUILT SPACES MEAN 357useful analytically in suggesting how this takes place. And much as some people are more adept
than others at “reading” nonverbal human behavior, some are more attuned to “reading” built
spaces and other physical artifacts (although enhancing such abilities is possible in both instances).^14
Moreover, it is not just that we experience built spaces and other physical artifacts initially
through nonverbal, physical-kinesthetic means: feeling on and through our bodies the mass and
scale and ambient environment—the “airiness” and lighting characteristics—of the oversized,
glass-paned entryway into the new parliament building; seeing the award plaque hanging on the
wall and perceiving its shape, color, size, and so forth before reading the text. In many respects,
human design of built spaces appears to recapitulate human bodily experience, as noted by
phenomenologists, social geographers, and linguists. Tuan (1977, chapter 4), G. Lakoff and Johnson
(1980), Weisman (1992), and others have remarked on the orientational aspects of language and
their connoted meanings: high-low, up-down, front-back, central-peripheral, and so forth.^15 “These
spatial orientations,” wrote Lakoff and Johnson, “arise from the fact that we have bodies of the
sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment” (1980, 14). To the
extent that acts and language are interrelated, built spaces may “embody” meaning in a quasi-
literal as well as a figurative sense.
Drawing on their work, Casey (1993) notes that the binary character of our bodily structure
establishes a set of dyadic relationships—up-down, right-left, above-below, near-far—in ways that
both arrange and constrain our choices, directions, and movements: “Even as it acts to project a field
of possible actions, my body closes down the prospect of unlimited choice. Hence, it poses to itself
constantly (even if often only implicitly) determinate choices between, say, going forward and re-
treating. Being in the center of things, my body can always move here or there, up or down, this way
or that” (1993, 48; emphasis in original). Reflecting on the observations of key phenomenologists,^16
he concludes that “the directionality inherent in the lived body in place precedes the dimensionality
of inert matter in space” (1993, 50). From a phenomenological perspective, “I am here in/as my
body. You are here, too, in and with your body.... Thus it is by my body—my lived body—that I am
here” (1993, 50–1; emphasis in original). Seeing built spaces as recapitulating our experiences of
our bodies opens paths for analysis, as illustrated in the next section.
Researchers’ understandings of built space draw on human bodily experience in another way.
Because of the nonverbal character of spatial communication (including furnishings and other
attendant physical artifacts), in particular, and because of the highly tacit nature (in M. Polanyi’s,
1966, sense) of members’ knowledge of the meaning(s) being communicated, researchers com-
monly use their own responses—affective, behavioral, and especially kinesthetic—as proxy for
others’ interpretations in formulating provisional inferences about how buildings mean (Yanow
2000, chapter 4). As Casey puts it, we “have reliable orientational knowledge... thanks to our
‘knowing body’” (1993, 52). Van Maanen extends the point further, noting, with respect to eth-
nography, “[T]he self is the instrument of research”^ (1996, 380).^17 It is the orientational character
of the human body, along with its perceptual elements, that lies at the center of the claim that we
come to appreciate built spaces, both as ordinary users and as researchers, through our bodies’
moving in and through those spaces.
Aside from the fact that spatial meanings are communicated nonverbally, several other ana-
lytic categories used in the study of nonverbal communication (e.g., Mehrabian 1972; Weitz
1974) lend themselves to analyzing physical settings. These direct our focus toward:
- the “vocabulary” of design elements and construction materials and the ambient environ-
ment these create (corresponding to the nonverbal categories of physical characteristics,
such as height or body type, and personal decoration, such as clothing, jewelry, etc.);^18