Movement is the ideal. The quip goes, the best posture is the next posture. Welcome to ArchiNect sessions one to one. I'm Amelia Taylor-Hockberg, and this week, February 8, 2016, I speak with Gailin Krantz, architecture professor at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design.
Krantz specializes in the Alexander technique. If you're not familiar with the technique like I was in a few weeks ago, Krantz will explain. It has to do with how humans move and physically fit into the world. Before coming to Cal, I think teach architecture.
Krantz got a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. And her pedagogy of architecture and furniture is primarily about how humans occupy designs and how social hierarchies can emerge from those conventions. Alright, let's hear from Gailin. So, Gailin Krantz, you teach architecture at UC Berkeley.
And part of your pedagogical focus relies on something called the Alexander technique, which I'm not sure that many of your connectors are already familiar with that, but I'd like to ask you, how are you sitting right now? I'm in a lounge chair by Peter Oppsick called Gravity. You can look it up online. G-R-A-V-I-T-Y.
Alright, so we'll get an image of that for the show notes for people who don't automatically aren't automatically familiar with that. But I was wondering, can you give me an understanding for someone who's never heard of the Alexander technique? I've heard of it described as a kinesthetic educational system, but I'm not so sure someone might automatically know exactly what that actually comes to. So, how would you describe the Alexander technique?
I describe it as a system of posture and movement designed by an individual with the last name of Alexander, Frederick Matthias Alexander, an Australian who was a Shakespearean reciter at the end of the 19th century, and he would lose his voice only when he performed, and no doctor could help him, so he figured since it only happened when he performed, there must be something that he was doing, so he set up a system of mirrors and watched himself for many years and discovered that he was unconsciously tightening the connection between the head and the neck. And the Alexander technique starts out paying attention to the quality of movement and tension and lack of tension between the head and the neck, and then it moves its way through the whole body to create better alignment and better movement, and that requires some mental changes. So, it's psycho-physical. Alexander liked the word self to stand for the unified psycho-physical being, so it's for the whole self to use his language.
So, the idea that if you are aware of your own body's orientation in space, you are more mentally present in space as well. Yes, well, it's just that if you're going to change unconscious holding patterns, you end up having to get to know your psyche in a new way. So, it's not just though, if I'm aware, I'll be better. It's more like, well, why am I slumping?
Why am I tense here? What is going on? What am I actually thinking, feeling, fearing, et cetera? So, you have to end up doing a bit of almost, you know, self-analysis.
The technique practically is used by people in the performing arts who want to move more expressively. That's dancers, musicians, actors, and singers, and then it's also used by people who are in pain who want to figure out how to move more efficiently, so as to get over their pain. For example, you have back problems, and it turns out that you are tensing, maybe your shoulders, unconsciously, individually, and it would be sort of like with the car as if you were trying to put your foot on the gas in the brake at the same time. So, we figure out where we're putting our foot on the brake and figure out how to stop doing that.
And since some of those things are unconscious, that's why you end up having to do a little bit of internal psychological work. And so, how do you apply this kind of practice to teaching architecture? Well, we move through space with bodies and architectures about creating spaces, and then we end up going into, through a passage way, looking out a window, sitting down, somewhere, usually a chair. So, I start out, I start out actually with the feet and the problem of constraint on the feet from shoes.
That's a big cultural and design problem. And then I move to the chair and the whole issue of how do we sit? If we sit in a chair that is seemingly well designed, but perhaps misguided, we end up with rounded spines, with pelvises in the wrong position, which means the spine doesn't hold right, which means the head and neck connection isn't right, which means your head is canceled, you're in front of your spine, so you have to do a lot of extra muscular work, so you're in pain. Most office workers are in pain.
And that's not a strictly architectural problem, but it is a design problem that we don't, we have a misunderstanding of what's the best way to be still to do work, to do clerical work in particular. Would you say the Alexander technique is in any way somehow at odds with other understandings of ergonomic standards and how we should be best positioned to perform given tasks in, you know, habitual activities? Yes, it is at odds with the assumption that the only way you can sit is in a classic right angle seated posture. If you look at the graphic standards, they still show this right angle between thigh and trunk, and that's a fantasy.
That's a fantasy that no one lives up to. And there's good reason that we don't live up to it. It's actually stressful to the lower back. Turns out if you sit a little higher with your knees, then significantly lower than your hips, what's called in by NASA, the neutral body posture, all that strain is taken off to the lower back.
But it turns out that if we're going to sit for clerical work and computing and so forth at this higher height, then we have to have our desks raised up and our dining room tables raised up, counters raised. And so culture being rather conservative and interlocked. If you change one piece, you end up having to change other pieces so it doesn't promote that. So the ergonomics industry is stuck in the standard model of the right angle seated posture, so they're trying to figure out how to make it a little better within a fundamentally stressful alignment.
And nowadays, they've, last 10 years, they've been some exciting research come out in the last five years on the metabolic problems associated with sitting, not just the structural and biomechanical problems, but actual metabolic problems. When you don't move, your pancreas doesn't produce an enzyme that your liver needs to deal with fats. So without that enzyme, undigested fats go into the bloodstream, setting us up for premature death from all causes, heart attack, stroke, cancer. And this holds true whether or not you go to the gym.
It's the absolute number of hours that you sit that creates these metabolic problems. So because of that research, the ergonomics folks have kind of said, well, maybe we really do need sitstand workstations. So now you can buy treadmills and standing desks workstations. So then you also are involved in some of the creation of designs that are built on the Alexander techniques, such as for designing your own set of chairs and such, is that correct?
I have never marketed anything like that. I do have, I designed a lounge chair that's kind of a take off of the Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand Lounge Chair of 1925. They did it in wood with metal springs and I put an aluminum well on a metal frame. And I asked myself, could we do the same thing in a hard and unyielding material like wood?
So I played around with that and did that and exhibited that chair or lounge chair. In 2011, there was a public art show called Seat that was held at Fort Mason here in San Francisco. And so I have designed that, designed Enville and I designed another small chair that I've never put into production at all. So I mainly look for what's happening in the market and see what, you know, keep encouraging the code ones.
Peter Opsick is a good one and Martin Keene, who's done something called Focal Upright is a good one. And there's a new one, his name, his skin issue, his name is, well, his surname, his last name is J-A-L-K-A-N-N. I think that's pronounced Joel Kennan. He's produced a chair called Solly, S-A-L-L-I.
And he's known informally as Vessy, his first name, V-E-S-S-I. It's a contraction of two hyphenated first name. Anyway, those are three that I'm keen on right now. And so I just try to applaud, you know, what the good guys are doing out there.
Maybe someday I'll put something on the market, but not yet. So presumably the Alexander technique, at least as I understand you, it starts in individuals' ability to simply control their own body and their understanding of their own presence in space. How does this grow into a larger sociological understanding of people in space and then later on designing for those people in space? Is it kind of like a once you understand how you, the individual, can be more helpful and efficient of using your body in space than you get a better understanding for how space itself should be organized to cater to that?
Or how humanity moves around space and therefore how to cater to that type of movement? Or how does it grow from the individual out to the larger society? Well, I think the most general answer to your question is the authority moves from external to internal. So you trust your own experience and you realize that if you hurt when you're seated, then probably the likelihood is that there's a lot of other people that are going to hurt too.
So then you start trying to figure out, okay, what kind of situation will I not hurt? First, there's better alignment. You don't sit so that your head juts forward to eat or to read or to talk on the phone or to compute or any of those tasks. And what would it mean not to have your head jut forward?
You'd have to do a lot of rethinking of the chair itself. You wouldn't have a backward can't to the seat. You wouldn't have lumbar support low down at the pelvis. You might have some back support at the crossover between the lumbar and the rasic curves.
You wouldn't have any kind of neck head support that thruster and excessively forward. You would have your neck lined up over your spine so that it gets support from the lower spine. I mean, neck is far to spine, but often we let the neck go way forward because the neck doesn't have ribs to keep it back so it can slide forward against its own interests. Really?
It wants to be lined up over with the rasic and lumbar vertebrae. So you need to redesign the chair to support correct alignment. That's the first thing. Correct alignment.
And then that means most likely giving up the right angle seated chair. So now you're in a perch or you're in a lounge chair. Note the connection here between the perch position, which is halfway between sitting and standing with an outest and nice. It's called neutral body posture and the martial arts.
It's called the horse. Maybe like a chair pose and yoga, but with support a little bit. No, it's a little more angle. This is really halfway between sitting and standing.
A flexed knee. Gotcha. And then if you rotate that in space, just rotates it to the horizontal. You get a lounge chair.
You can see that in your mind's eye. So your knees are still flexed, but your head is up, but you're reclining. You're almost reclining. You're not quite flat, but you're not sitting either.
Okay, so then, so first place, eliminating all this stuff about chair design that makes people lose correct alignment. Then that means most likely introducing these new furniture types with higher work surfaces. So then you're redesigning workflow and social relations around tables and dinner and TV and all that. And you might want to lie on the user floor more actively because then you can lengthen your spine rather than collapse it.
For true rest, it's good to go horizontal and let the spine lengthen, not go to the coffee shop and drink coffee in hopes of getting more energy. And it's better to lie flat on something firm than to collapse into a C-shaped spine on a big coffee beanbag chair or even just a puffy regular armchair. Keeping the floor available, using higher surfaces. Now, if you're using the floor, you suddenly then you change architecture because you want to see out the windows and those are 18 inches high.
Windows are geared to a person who's seated 18 inches off the floor, which is the standard chair height in the West. But if you're like in Japan and you use the floor, then guess what? The window goes down a lot lower. So you do change architecture when you start thinking about allowing the body to use this full range of healthy postures.
The way you're describing this makes it sound like there's an ideal form for any person's body to be in any given time. And based on their movements and their positioning and whatever their activities are, that there's a way they can be positioning themselves and moving through space that is ideal. I'm glad you asked me that because it gives me an opportunity to say there is no perfect posture. As a species we're designed for movement.
We have ball and socket joints. There's no flat places that line up where you don't have to do any muscular work to hold a position. We always have to do a little work to hold any position except line flat out. And what we want to do is move that work through the system.
So movement is the ideal. The quick goes. The best posture is the next posture. So you really want to design a room to have at least, let's say, five or six ways to work.
Or to socialize not just one position. You want to use the floor, various stand up surfaces, perching surfaces, lounging positions. You want to be able to sit cross-legged, kneel, lie down, raise your hands. My assignment in my class goes first issue that is not anatomically harmful but still fashionable.
Then a chair and after they encounter all the improbabilities and impossibilities of conventional chair design, we move to the design of a room interior that supports the body in five or six different ways. So there is no perfect position and we all vary a little bit. Our joints are actually, some of us have like hip sockets where the top femur bone of the thigh goes into the hip. Goes into a little dish called an acetabulum.
And even that has different shapes so some people can rotate. They're like more than other people. Just there is variation. But nonetheless, the question of the ideal is still with us.
The ideal is to not overly strain, overly work one posture at the expense of all the others. And certainly not to be collapsed. So I also want to ask about your background academically because you have a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. And from there went perhaps not directly, but now you teach architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
How did you make that transition? What was it in your sociological research that then led you to architecture? I specialized in what I call the social use of space. And I studied the history of ideas about urban space in the instance of public parks.
And I designed a public playground in the city of Chicago. And with that academic interest in some design experience, I was of interest to schools of architecture at a critical point in history when true that I go had been blown up as being socially unacceptable housing in St. Louis. So schools of architecture were thinking, oh, maybe we should have some social scientists around to help us think about the social aspect of design, of architectural design.
And there I was with a theoretical focus on space, some practical experience. And so I taught at School of Architecture at Princeton University for four years and then moved to Berkeley, where I've been ever since. Architecture was my dream application of thinking about the social use of space. And there it is.
Can you describe briefly how that has been elaborated and developed in the US? Because that's a huge, very drastic transition set of time in the latter half of the 20th century of taking not only what was happening in sociological and ethnography research in particularly in Chicago as a city, but also just in the US of what was happening in the 60s and trying to understand different social hierarchies in urban spaces and in public spaces. And how sociological research has done so much and has developed so drastically in those last decades. So how do you teach your students to have this attention to sociological research and investment in how important to inform their designs?
How do you teach them to have those values? Well, I teach a large junior level introductory course called social and cultural processes in architecture and urban design. And I teach concepts that come out of, you know, person environment theory. And then I teach, I teach concepts that come out of, you know, person environment theory.
And then I teach, you know, I teach, you know, research in the university of science, you know, research in the university of science. And then I teach research in the sciences. So I teach, I teach research in the science level introductory course called social and cultural processes in architecture and urban design. And I teach, I teach concepts that come out of, you know, person environment theory.
And then I teach research methods. And then I teach applications to major architectural problems. So let me retrace that for you concepts would might include density, crowding, privacy, personalization, territoriality, wayfinding, those kinds of things. And then we look at, well, how do you study something like that?
You can observe, you can, or you can ask, and you can ask either on paper, which is a questionnaire or a structured interview, or you can just ask informally in face-to-face interviews, or you can look at archives of decisions to understand decisions people made in the past, policy makers, designers, planners, government officials, etc. And usually committed their thinking process to paper in some way, either in a plan that you can learn to read or in words, reports and documents, and sometimes statistics of how many crimes occur in a certain place, or how many times people fall down in a certain kind of a stare. You know, there's all kinds of research techniques for learning how people are interacting with the environment physically and psychically. And you can study things like urban imagery, just study films and see what people, you know, how filmmakers are representing cities as scary or interesting and fabulous, or, you know, like what's the range.
What do people think of a certain building, like Trans-America building in San Francisco when it was first built was reviled, and now it's a major, you know, cute symbol of the city, and you can find it in telephone covers and, you know, all that kind of thing. We use every kind of evidence that there is. We use written archival, talking to people, observing people, and we use the self also, like introspection. Like, what do I feel walking here?
Am I scared? Why am I scared? Why am I happy? Why do I feel at peace here, more at peace here than somewhere else?
You know, so we use every method that has ever been invented. And then we talk about, well, let's look at some examples of how this works out in real professional life. So we might look at housing, public housing, low-cost housing, co-housing, container, shipping, radical ecological housing, and then we might look at hospital design and how wayfinding is so key to hospital design. So, you know, in hospitals, we know that research on color is important.
The wayfinding issues are very important in hospitals because hospitals keep growing with technology and they get us new wing and another new wing and then a wing on top of the wing. And so wayfinding becomes, has become very problematic in contemporary hospitals. We look at schools, so hospitals, schools, houses, offices, the modern workplace. And there's some of the stuff on body conscious design, of course, comes up in all of these.
It's a component of the more general concern for how social processes are forming the base of design. So, just as one last question before you wrap up the interview. Can you give me some advice or share some advice with our listeners to students in particular, to make sure students who may be coming into architecture more from a direction of formal interest and designing objects in space and understanding spatial orientations more so than a body oriented thing and more of a formal oriented thing? Can you give any type of advice from your own particular academic background and focus on the Alexander technique to guide them through their education?
Well, it's tough because their professors are very often committed to the kind of bootcamp style of working hard in studio and being up all night, which is not very body friendly. So I guess maybe the simplest advice I could give is many of your time so that you can sleep eight hours. That would be a big one. Well, it's right there best.
It's definitely always a pie in the sky opportunity, unfortunately. Yeah, I think it's actually immoral and horrible, but it's what you do when you want to brainwash people as you sleep to drive them. And then you can make them think that the shape of something is all that matters. Shape does matter.
You know, the sculptural component of architecture is really important because that's where you integrate and make seamlessly smooth all the myriad of functions that a place, a building, an object, hold. You want to make it look whole and seamless and easy. But if you want to innovate, you have to code the underlying purpose so that you can make something you can respond to people's needs in some new way. So besides formal beauty, I know that innovation is also prized by formalists.
And I think the secret to formal innovation is close observation of social patterns as they're constantly morphing. Kaitlyn, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for taking the time. You're welcome.
Thank you for your interest. Thanks for listening to our Connect Sessions, One to One with Gaelyn Krantz. Donnie LoBoynoff edits the podcast and Matt Scaling's composed our music. Myself and Paul Bichunya are the producers of One to One.
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