Body, Ritual, and Place: Advancing Their Chronotopic Interrelationship in Design Praxis and Pedagogy Through an Exploration of Juxtaposed Surfaces, Threshold Sites of Dialogic Encounter, and Collage

Echoing philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, an ‘intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships,’ our work explores the interrelation of the body, ritual, and place as a chrontopic site of design and pedagogy. This exploration reaffirms architecture’s grounding in people, their inhabitation of place, and spatial form, an interrelatedness too often underexamined within
architectural education. First positioning ritual thematically, our discussion addresses three interrelated issues: the role of juxtaposed ritual surfaces in activating the body, ritual and place; the potential of ritual surfaces as threshold sites of dialogic encounter; and collage as a medium to investigate and communicate the interrelationship of body, ritual and place. Our exploration has been advanced through ‘the “migratory” cross-disciplinary drift of the Bakhtinian method,’ bringing together architecture, cultural anthropology, the fine arts, and philosophy. Simultaneously, through action research we critically examine our design pedagogy in work with Master of Architecture students. Our critical examination of this pedagogy, which intertwines the subject matter and method
of our study, brings together thinking and acting, reflective of ritual’s potential as a simultaneity of socio-cultural product and process.5 Emergent is a greater recognition of an interrelatedness of body, ritual, and place and their potential as a site of design pedagogy.