Ritual and the Architecture of Isolation
What’s at risk as we lose our way inside the broken liminal pathways of shared space?
We are living in a time of displacement.
Trends of remote work and social isolation, fueled by digital tools designed to optimize the efficiency of commercial interactions, were only amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The sudden global awareness of a new level of withdrawal, however, has made the issue of the loss of shared physical space a topic of urgent debate.
It isn’t just the loss of literal physical space that we’re struggling with, of course. We’re also suffering from social deprivation, a withering of the human connections that develop best through face-to-face, in-person interactions. It was with this in mind that I recently began a conversation with David Kepron about the confluence of architecture and ritual design in commercial spaces.
For David, the roots of this convergence date back to his studies under the architectural historian Alberto Pérez Gomez decades ago. David explained, “I began to get very interested in ritual back in the late 80s when I was in architecture school at McGill University, and there was a professor who was hired to chair the History Theory Department or program at McGill named Alberto Pérez Gomez. I used to sit in on his lectures because I found both the philosophy and psychology that he imbued his lectures with fascinating. But he also talked a lot about ritual and ritual participation and the idea that embodied experience was absolutely crucial to our understanding of architecture and that being in places helped us understand, and that architecture was fundamentally about the reconstruction of cultural ideologies, and through the participation in these events, we came to better understand ourselves and our culture and our community and maybe in some strange way our cosmological connection to God or something. And so, ritual has been a real fascination, so much so that in my own book, Retail Revolution, which I published in 2014, I devoted a whole chapter to ritual, and I read a lot about Ronald Grimes, a book called Beginnings in Ritual Studies, where he outlined key components of ritual. I began to sort of pull those together in their relationship to my world then, which was the world of shopping.”
Architecture is the design of spaces, Kepron told me, but as much as it deals with the boards and bolts of the construction process, it works with the more fluid material of human experience. When architects create physical spaces, they foster social roles associated with those spaces, along with doorways that serve as psychological thresholds between social roles.
Unspaces
During the coronavirus pandemic, many familiar doorways have been closed, blocking the thresholds that enable us to remain psychologically and socially fluid. Just when we need to be more adaptable, we have lost many of the pathways of daily ritual transformation that enable us to feel connected to others in a meaningful way. When a coffee shop’s door is closed and locked, we haven’t just lost the ability to grab a frothy latte. We have lost the ability to participate in the rites of communal bonding that coffeehouses have hosted for hundreds of years.
Zoom chats and the hyped-up conference calls of Clubhouse can’t replace these kind of ritualized interactions because they’re events that never really take place. Digitally-mediated events occupy no space at all, not even a liminal space. Devoid of physical presence, they cannot hold our psychological presence. They’re planned, but without any extra room in the schedule for happenstance, for play.
Ritual, with the renewal that it provides, is all about play. Kepron talked about ritualized play helps to keep people attuned to a common understanding of the implicit rules that keep society “Play allows us to shift between personalities,” he said, “and in that enactment of play, we learn a lot. We learn about how to interact with others. We learn a lot about empathy. We learn about empathic extension and how the rules of cultural games or society are played out.”
During the pandemic, our playgrounds have been abandoned. Along with them, we’ve lost the networks guides who once helped us to perceive understand the complex games that underlie the apparently functional interactions of our commercial world. We need these guides in order to make sense of the cultural context of of commercial transactions, Kepron told me. “Guides are needed to help participants understand and apply the meaning inherent in recombined symbols. So, people enter into these ritual environments and you need to have those guides to help people make sense of what they’re seeing now because it may be unfamiliar to them.”
The pandemic unreality of working without being at work, of shopping without ever visiting a shop, is no longer a novel experience, but it remains deeply unsettling. We’ve become chronically deprived of meaning, lost in what could have become a helpful threshold, without guides, without maps, and without any idea of what it’s all about.
“I see here a real existential sort of breaking point or crisis,” Kepron commented, “not just specifically because of the world of the pandemic, but also because if you follow some of the thinking around the pace of change and the moments of significant transformation that are being driven by huge technological advances, that this change is exponential. It’s not a linear equation, faster and faster or the deltas between these significant moments of change are becoming smaller and smaller. So, I’ve often talked about this idea that it seems to me if you follow the mathematics of the pace of change being exponential, we will ultimately become perpetually in the in between in this liminal space, between one significant moment and the next.”
In a well-functioning society, threshold experiences lead us out of the ordinary, everyday structures of our lives, but do so with a purpose, enabling us to transform, and re-emerge in new roles that match our needs with the needs of others. Digital disorientation, along with the prolonged pandemic isolation that has served as the host for hyper-digitization, has stripped our social interactions down to minimally viable transactions, leaving us without clear pathways of meaningful change.
We can’t optimize and automate our way out of this problem, because the crisis we face is a product of the very efficiency we’ve engineered. If we’re ever going to find our way out of the dull nausea of our spaceless, placeless lives, it will be through a reinvestment in the fundamentals of human connection, with the purposeful design of new forms of ritual architecture, giving us room to come back together, to come back into ourselves.
For more on the architecture of ritual, listen to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast of the conversation I shared with David Kepron.
