Edito n°37 : "Promenade" as sensori-motor dialogue between man and space

Wandering, or « promenade », is a specific walking attitude in which the walkers allows themselves to be open with all their senses to the spatial qualities of the spaces they cross. « Senses » here doesn’t only mean the five traditionnal senses; the word is used following the definition proposed by Berthoz : senses are linked to perceptive functions, they are oriented according to the perceiving subject’s intentional attitude¹. Such a definition allows one to understand the spatiality of a given space as the ensemble of potential « affordances »² it offers, according to the perceiver’s motor abilities. Space becomes morphologically meaningful through the motion it allows us³; it appears to us as a constant invitation to movement, as a partner in a dialogue that takes the shape of a promenade. Ambiance is that part of our environment that informs the spatial dialogue we pursue as motile beings. Promenade, mixing perception and imagination, is an act of meaning-building, needing the promeneur’s « situation competency ».

The theoretical recognition of the role of movement in perception is a recent one. Yet sensitivity to movement is necessarily present in all spatial acts, as well as, although in an indirect, non-thematic way, in all descriptions of spatial acts. We can thus find it where most contemporary discourse on gardens would be less inclined to look for it – in texts on the so-called « French classical garden » written during the 17th and 18th century, such as theoretical treatises or descriptions of walks in the gardens of Versailles.

Reading these texts, promenade appears as a spatio-temporal composition playing with all the senses – sight, hearing, smell, but also sense of movement and of orientation. However, it is not lived as a simple succession of sensory impressions, but as a series of motivated, goal-oriented movements. The garden is perceived as an juxtaposition of « spatial units », clearly delimited and structured, understood as such through the sensory continuities and discontinuities experienced during the promenade, the interwoven patterns of possible and constrained motions allowed by their physical forms, and the regularities that the motion revealed. During their promenade, the visitors build their understanding of the complexe structure of the garden beyond the immediately perceptible scale, using the temporal succession of local spatial experiences and distant views allowed by the axes, together with the visual recognition of places already seen or visited, bodily memory of the path followed, and expectations (which are in part culturally construed).

Studying Versailles as a site for promenade, one encounters the richness and variety of the « morphological strategies » of the garden, that is, the modalities of appearance of the morphological meaning allowed by its physical shape. The spatial polysemy of the garden, actualized through the motor and perceptual choices of the visitors, allows one to consider the « promenade » as a pre-predicative interpretative activity, based on situational intelligence. This is why it is possible to talk about the garden as an « open work »⁴, and « promenade » as an aesthetic quest of morphological intelligibility. Every promenade is an actualization of meaning, that is, a construction of spatial intelligibility, which shapes and completes the garden as a work of art, always and every time differently.

1. A. Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, Harvard University Press, 2000.
2. Word coined by J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
3. E. Straus, The Primary World of Senses: a Vindication of Sensory Experience, London, Collier-MacMillan, 1963.
4. ECO (Umberto), The Open Work, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1989.