Robert Kocik, Proposal for Renovating the Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan

Proposal for Renovating The Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan

by Robert Kocik

GENERAL ISSUES AND IMPRESSIONS

DIMENSIONS

The dimensions of the TFC space are problematic—specifically the ceiling height. Upon entering the TFC room, one’s sense of space tends to waft up to the ceiling and get caught up in all the pipes, sprinklers, light fixtures, conduits and beams. Reinforcing this accent on ascent: all the existing lighting is upward, ceiling-lit. Currently there are too few features (furnishings) keeping one’s feet on the floor. The floor itself, unlike the original hardwood flooring in the hallway, is unattractive. These same dimensions are also responsible for the poor acoustic properties of the room resulting in a limited intelligibility of the voice. A listener in the space is receiving the same sound signal at slightly different times (first as direct sound, then as reflected sound and flutter echoes) which has the effect of blurring the intelligibility of the original signal. Adding furnishings will serve to dampen the reverberative effect. The proposed curtain-dividers are in fact the overall plan for absorbing the wayward waveforms. If for any reason the curtains can’t be installed, attaching short (2’ height) absorptive panels from the ceiling beams in between the sprinkler pipes, would be an effective second choice. Such a system would also serve to lower the ceiling and deflect attention from the mechanical systems.

LIGHTING

Without windows and hemmed in by bordering spaces, the TFC space effects a year-round hint of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Also, the existing standard cool white fluorescent lighting (as studies show) tends to adversely affect children with learning and behavioral problems.

The proposed lighting plan for THC includes the replacement of all existing fluorescent tubes with full-spectrum tubes. There are many arguments for and against the natural daylight effect of full-spectrum lighting. For a number of reasons I would use full-spectrum lighting in TFC. It does render color more accurately and I happen to use color properties in precise ways when I design a space. Color matters so a higher CRI rating matters. Critics of full-spectrum lighting tend to dismiss its benefits as purely psychological. This critique is for me a kind of proof, as I tend to find psyche more potent than scientific data to the contrary. Finally, I believe that the body extracts from light whatever color it needs at any given moment. If the colors aren’t there to begin with, the body can’t draw on them. And full-spectrum lighting, at the very least, carries a fuller color range. These are slight differences, and slight is more.

Treating CP patients with laser acupuncture has produced some promising results. (Apparently, stimulation of different acupuncture points and scalp areas increases blood flow to the brain and other tissues.) I wouldn’t recommend laser treatment but I would install two local, hanging, handmade, dimmable, floor-directed task lights (see drawing) to relieve the diffuseness of the existing general lighting.

COLOR

I can work with the current purplish walls as the base color for the TFC space. On the other hand, the green of the pillars is stifling. Because the pillars impede the flow of the space, trapping energy in the corners, they would best be transformed into positive features. I’d paint them a certain violet, arrived at by glazing (a white base then washed with concentrated violet. The effect would be luminous...like creating photons--the color intense and diffuse at once. (Like a painterly glaze, Taoist ‘inner’ color healing uses 70% white and 30% color, as a rule.) Violet is associated, vibrationally, with neuro-function. Furthermore, violet is the only color that can act like white--carrying the properties of all the other colors. It’s also the only color range that calms as well as blue.

With the TFC space it makes sense to emphasize the neurological and muscular relaxation.

The difficulty, architecturally, with color has to do with duration and intensity. Whether painted on a surface or inherent to a material, a color is constant while we might prefer a change. To feel the potency of a color...to get the benefit...the color must be somewhat intense, yet this same intensity might often be too much to take. Thus the tendency toward use of bland colors and no color benefit. And it’s rarely wise to aim a space exclusively toward one type of use (just as it’s rarely wise...only in an emergency...wise to treat only one organ or physiological system).

Could color be ‘exploratory’ at TFC? If the dividing curtains were double curtains of differing colors, a person in the space could play with proportion and property as an attuning.

Another problem with the space is too little contrast. To address this point, the tables, benches and cabinets would be made of pine with dark wood trim. The lightness of the pine would set the pieces apart from the floor. The dark brown trim would give weight to the space and cut the energy loss to the ceiling. The pine would have a few visible knots, to break the commercial feel of the space and to pick up on the hardwood flooring of the hallway.

A FEW FINAL NOTES

I don’t think something resembling a kitchen area should be the first thing seen upon entering the space. Why change what had originally been an office-type space into a cafeteria. Place one of the soft seating areas in front of the kitchen area, or orient the refrigerator/pantry toward the far wall. The office-desk should be quite mobile. The area between the pillar and the wall seems more like a storage area/set aside area for the desk when not in use. Sitting with your back to the far door is a bit unsettling.

It’s more than a matter of air quality. ‘Respiration’ is the word I end up with. How can entering the room be like learning how to breath? Especially for children with motor difficulties...who have been less able to properly develop the muscles of respiration.

A few plants can’t hurt. Think about a hammock.

Some Notes About The Built-Environment In Relation To The Feldenkrais Method

My role is to provide an environment that helps practitioners and parents take part in the learning process of children with neuromotor difficulties. By focusing on the practical, material needs of The Field Center space, it’s possible to furnish an environment that effectively extends the somatosensory dialogue with which the Feldenkrais practitioner engages a child.

(If only subtly, and perhaps especially when nearly unnoticeably-- even while a built environment is, say, only backdrop for the kinesthetic loop between a practitioner and child--we’re suffused with our surroundings.)

As a body/mind practice opens awareness through movement, so may awareness be opened by means of the built environment. In this way, developmental exploration involves body/mind/built-environment.

The point of increasing the functionality of a space is to encourage concomitant motor learning and neuro-repatterning.

Increased functionality in one area implies fluency in another. Motor and motivation, muscular and manual, material and mental, are correlates, coordinates.

If you’re looking at your hand, it’s hard to reach for an object. Without reaching for an object, it’s hard to know where your hand actually is. If you have to look at your hand as you reach for an object, you’re still disabled.

At some point in every moment and in every movement the proprioceptive opens to and is opened by the exteroceptive. Just as a bodyworker assists motor development, the architect puts in place directed aesthetic information. This architected information, manifest as color, weight, texture, surface, position, configuration, utensil, table, window, etc (all based on the measure and pleasure of the body) is absorbed by the nervous system. The nervous system integrates this information as impetus and motor imagination. As such, a door handle or spoon is part of the extended afferent network, cycling signals back to the nervous system.

Designing an object as that which connects the exteroceptive to the kinesthetic is the work of body/mind/built. Design focused as such increases functionality on all levels.

Functionality, fluency, efficacy and flourishing make up another set of developmental correlates.

Awareness through interaction with the built environment is a matter of attuning and provisioning...and not a matter of challenging and imperiling. Instead of using design to double up or knot up the developmental process (by challenging the challenged), to increase agility body/mind/built seeks novel extremes in accommodation and facilitation. Not only for the benefit of children with developmental difficulties, but for anyone...freedom of movement is always a frontier. And without a sensitively correlated setting situated as far from the obstacle course of coercion as possible, we have no grounds for realizing that we’ve barely begun to function.

Awareness through furnishing breaks the loop of abuse—treating without care things made without care. Once again certain correlates come into play. Attention carefully given to the attention with which a thing is made and presented is, in itself, the acquisition of a new neuromuscular skill. The very perception becomes one’s own making of a thing attentively. This new cognitive skill can then be used to make other kinds of things in other mediums...even one’s own self-image.

Though the pieces I’m proposing for The Field Center would primarily be used by nondisabled adults, they are at once conceived as integral to the exploratory method with which practitioners and parents engage the children.

At the same time, body/mind/built allows the exploratory method to act in reverse, engaging the ‘normally’ functioning adults in their developmental progressions and impairments.

Just as the Feldenkrais Method offers the disabled a motor interchange that normally arises from one’s own movements, body/mind/built offers the nondisabled alternative sensory information that normally doesn’t arise from one’s habitual interactions.

As motor manipulation in the Feldenkrais Method is a way of opening alternative neural pathways, awareness through the built environment sets the scene for more agile spatial responses. Together they form a two-pronged approach for working through and channeling around neuro or motor blockages.

Developmental difficulties reappear once we’ve safely grown up. Perhaps they never really disappeared. Do we continually set the bar of optimal functionality higher, or are we simply less and less able to leap?

If I’m talkin’ motor, must I mean neuro as well?

Am I set in my ways or is my brain literally shrinking? I’m too busy functioning to not develop learning disabilities and communicational limitations. Nose to the grindstone. A kind of transfixed spasticity and wonderpenia.

Aging is itself an insult (in the medical sense). Is aging necessarily a lifelong slide into the porridge of motor loss, sclerosis, and decreased brain plasticity?

Can architecture intercede developmentally? Can it be the discovering of balance? With its sensory information can it supply the gravitational currents that load vertical being with the forces necessary to fully develop?

Body/mind/built is a dialogue between ability and disability.

It’s not the disappearance of function in convenience and competence but the revealing of ways in which we’re constantly facilitated. It is a matter of trying to manifest the grace that sustains us.

Attention through furnishing is a positive neotony, extending the gestation period in which we massively acquire and rewire. It’s the setting that corresponds with the caring for each other which is all we have to ease or abolish the insults.

Gentle is more radical. More at the root of it.

By removing the distance between disability and ability, I don’t mean to diminish in any way the hardship of living with CP or PDD or ADHD. I do mean to suggest that development is lifelong if our works make us aware.

(Perhaps the greatest learning difficulty for the able-bodied is the learning to live with that which a child who has only ever lived with loss of function has always known.)

As I’ve written above, the pieces I’ve been asked to designed would be used primarily by the able-bodied (the normally dysfunctional?). I can imagine more exploratory furnishings (beyond the adaptive equipment geared toward normal functions such as sitting and eating) that would directly engage children with neuromotor difficulties. Pieces that would provide an astute, missing, developmentally encouraging, sensory feedback just as the Feldenkrais practitioner provides a hands-on beaconing, beckoning of innate ability.