Both Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds provide profound frameworks for understanding Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter challenges the traditional dichotomy between human and non-human realms, suggesting that all entities – animate and inanimate – possess vitality and agency. Kant’s division between the phenomenal world (what we perceive) and the noumenal world (what exists independently of perception) reveals the inherent limits of human understanding. Together, these ideas illuminate Shepherd’s exploration of the Cairngorms, particularly her depiction of the intricate relationship between human perception and the natural world.

If the whole truth of them is to be told as I have found it, I too am involved. I have been the instrument of my own discovering.

In Shepherd’s account, the Cairngorms are not a static backdrop but a dynamic force, actively shaping and being shaped by human experience. Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter offers a lens to view this reciprocity – the mountain is not merely observed but participates in a mutual relationship with those who engage with it. For both Shepherd and Bennett, materiality is neither inert nor lifeless: it possesses vitality and agency, weaving humans and the natural world into an interconnected web of existence.

How could we imagine flavour, or perfume, without the senses of taste and smell? They are completely unimaginable. There must be many exciting properties of matter that we cannot know because we have no way to know them.

Shepherd’s reflections resonate with Kant’s assertion that the noumenal world – the realm of ‘things in themselves’ – is ultimately unknowable, as human understanding is bound by our
sensory and cognitive faculties. While Shepherd acknowledges the profound effects of the mountains on human perception, she also accepts that their true essence remains elusive. The mountain’s inherent nature resists complete intellectual grasp, revealing the limitations of human knowledge.

Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.

Rather than resisting these limitations, Shepherd embraces them, recognising the gap between knowledge and experience as integral to her engagement with the natural world. This perspective reflects her journey of discovery, shifting from a self-centred view of the mountain’s impact on her to a reverence for the mountain’s intrinsic being.

at first I was seeking only sensuous gratification … I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect upon me … But as I grew older, and less self-sufficient, I began to discover the mountain in itself

This evolution shows a shift in Shepherd’s perspective – from perceiving the mountain as a source of sensory stimulation to appreciating its intrinsic value. Her narrative moves beyond the pursuit of perceptual mastery toward a mode of comprehension rooted in an embodied engagement.

when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony… I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.

Shepherd suggests that overcome the dichotomy between knowledge and experience requires an epistemological shift: one rooted not in intellectual abstraction but in physical, embodied engagement. Through motion, rhythm and breath, she reveals a journey into Being itself, where understanding is mediated by the body’s attunement to the vitality of the landscape. This synchronisation between body and environment becomes a pathway to transcendent knowing, uniting self and mountain in a shared existence.

[All quotes are from The Living Mountain]

‘Sua Maestà,’ I say. Then I bow and close my eyes.

Gran Sasso d’Italia, ‘Your Majesty,’ is not just a mountain. She is a magnificent and omnipotent entity, a deity that has watched me grow up and offered me comfort when I needed it. Whenever I stand in her vicinity, I offer a salute. I am filled with gratitude for the chance to walk on such a powerful presence, always feeling Her protection surrounding me.

Reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, I reflect myself in its lines. It is not about ‘conquering’ the summit, but about experiencing the mountain in its totality: exploring its valleys, listening to its sounds, and immersing myself in its natural rhythm, creating an intimate mental connection with it.

It is not by taking the mountain on the whole that it is understood, but by long, intimate hours with a particular locality.

This made me think of how I stop at the foot of Sua Maestà, how I share a sandwich with the stray dogs that inhabit Her, or how I lie down on Her meadows to breathe fresh air. Although the Scottish Plateau did not see me grow up as She did, in those few hours I explored it, I immediately found mental calm and a sense of belonging to something greater. The mountain is a living entity, a space that is shaped and transformed by light and time. It is not just nature, but a silent teacher that shows us how to slow down and listen.

And maybe this is exactly what we, as architects, should learn: to slow down, to stop thinking we have to build big, and to listen and connect deeply with the places we analyse and study. Maybe we shouldn’t be so frantic, and we shouldn’t give so much importance to money, the summit, but rather give importance to people, their wills, their feelings and their story, the intimate hours that we spend in the valleys.

The mountain is not a place to which you go. It is a place you become.

The description of the Cairngorm Mountains in The Living Mountain speaks directly to my soul, as someone who only feels complete with mountains around. When I read the book before visiting Scotland, it could just as well have been a description of a region in Switzerland. However, when exploring the National Park, I realized that the stunning views, the mystical atmosphere, and the climate gave the Scottish Highlands a completely different character on the outside. Yet, on the inside, there is the same sense of security that I feel in the Swiss mountains, and Nan Shepherd captures it so beautifully.
The emotions one feels in a mountainous region, however, seem to be the same:

In that stillness, in that silence, the mind becomes clear.

For Nan, for me, and for so many others, the mountains are a place to escape the world, a place of solitude, even in densely populated countries like Switzerland. A place where you feel so small that nothing else matters, where you can forget all your struggles and worries, where there are no responsibilities.

The mountain is a place where time does not pass in the usual way, where a moment can last an eternity and an eternity can vanish in a moment.

At its core, The Living Mountain conveys that true understanding and connection with nature arise not from dominance but through a quiet harmony and reflective stillness. This insight resonates deeply with the work I’m pursuing this semester in Studio Caruso, where we are exploring the themes of remoteness and identity in the Swiss Alps.

Though the landscapes of the Swiss Alps and the Scottish Highlands differ in many respects, both find strength within their sometimes unforgiving climates, protected from human domination by their rugged and demanding nature. These places reveal the potential for humans and nature to coexist and flourish in mutual respect. In her writing, Shepherd immerses herself in the sensory depths of the landscape: the play of light, the textures, the sounds, and the shifting hues—all elements that also guide our thinking when shaping spaces and architecture. She reflects on the ways in which seasons alter and breathe life into the mountains, shaping how people build their connection to the land in response.

The Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands, though geographically distant, reveal a shared essence shaped by natural rhythms and seasonal cycles that connect land and inhabitants. These landscapes offer a model for architecture that respects the land as an active partner, embodying its quiet strength and resilient beauty. The Swiss Alps and Scottish Highlands might not be so different after all.

One uses a word when describing the phenomenon of having experienced something in the past that is happening to the self in the now. It is called déjà vu. I have never been to Scotland nor its mountains, but as I read Nan Shepherd’s book, I strongly believe that I fell into this state of mind; a recollection of my own experiences while hiking. It almost felt like hallucinating, but I quickly realised that this increasing pulse within the text was proof of a living mountain.

The painterly description of time, space, and practical context struck me the most. There is no light without darkness, no sense without nonsense, no movement without constancy. Nan beautifully opens the gate to her own worldly sensations, a spectacle unperceived without the reader’s sensual memory.

The Cairngorm mountains in the heart of Scotland inhabit my dreams, a constant provocation. This is perhaps because I have never been in the area long enough, or with enough energy perhaps, to make the long preparatory journey that a walker must make before arriving. Instead, Nan Shepherd’s account of her observations made during many days spent over a lifetime on the plateau, in the recesses, surrounded by water in all its manifestations, frame my imagined experience. Her writing is poetic because it is empirical, her eye and all her senses so sharp that it is possible to see and hear more than would be perceived if you were actually there.

The manuscript was written during the second world war, but it lay more than thirty years before it was published. Today, my feelings about Nan Shepherd and her writing are not unique, and she is a Scotswoman celebrated. Her face appears on the Scottish five pound note.

In a recent conversation about the book, the question came up around how its subject could be related to architecture. Aside from the usefulness of her approach to the physical world as a means to understanding the many facets of a site, her writing raises pertinent questions around man’s position in the world and its contingent nature that underlie any questioning of what role architecture, as an imaginative relationship with the wider world, can play in constructing our present.

Deborah Levy is a British novelist, playwright and poet. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the granddaughter of working-class Lithuanian Jewish immigrants on her paternal side and an upper-middle-class English family on her maternal side.  Her father, Norman Levy, was a historian and a member of the African National Congress. He lived under a banning order from the Apartheid government from 1964 until the family fled to London in 1968. To cite her: “the first nine years of myself were made in southern Africa; I had made the rest in Britain”. Levy’s memoir on writing, gender politics and philosophy is composed of three volumes: Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021).

The jumping-off point for Things I Don’t Want To Know, the first in the trilogy, is George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’. Therein, Levy shares her reflections on claiming the contested territory that is writing as a young woman. I understood this process to involve actively maintaining one’s own strangeness with respect to the expectations placed on women in society.

Speaking about the woman who runs the small hotel in the mountains of Mallorca where Levy has gone to write after the end of her marriage, she points out:

Maria was one of the few women in this Catholic village who had neither married nor had children. Perhaps she was wary of these rituals because she knew they would ultimately exploit her. Whatever, it was clear that she had other projects in mind. She had designed the irrigation system that watered the citrus orchard, and of course the ambience of this inexpensive, tranquil hotel was designed by her too. If it mostly attracted solo travelers, it was possible that Maria had quietly and slyly constructed a place that was a refuge from The Family. (p.19/20)

Since childhood, writing has for Levy been a means not only of grappling with her experience of otherness but also a means of escape. In other words, writing gave and seemingly continues to give her a sense of mobility. The following passage recalls a conversation she had as a young child with a nun in Johannesburg,

She had told me to say my thoughts out loud but I had tried writing them instead. Sometimes I showed her what I had written, and she always made time to read everything. She said I should have told her I could read and write. Why hadn’t I told her? I said I didn’t know, and she said I shouldn’t be scared of something ‘transcendental’ like reading and writing. Transcendental meant ‘beyond’, and if I could write ‘beyond’, whatever that meant, I could escape to somewhere better than where I was now. (p.108/109)

Having realized this potential of writing to go elsewhere in one’s mind, Levy also recalls writing as a tool for exploring her feelings of exile from South Africa upon arrival in England.

‘England’ was an exciting word to write. My mother had told me we were in exile and would one day return to the country of my birth. The idea that we were living in Exile and in England terrified me. When I told my new friend Judy (who was born in Lewisham) that I didn’t really want to live in Exile, she said, ‘Yeah, I’d be scared shitless too.’ (p.125/126)

The following passages about her lacking sense of entitlement in England to voice her needs or desires as well as her impression of being in disguise strongly resonate with my own experiences of arriving in London as a young child. Without a matured sense of self, not having gone through the full process of individuation, I felt the pressure to absorb everything from my new environment as though it were a matter of survival.

There were certain things about England that I still couldn’t quite grasp. One of these ungraspable things occurred right here in the café. The greasy spoon cook, who was called Angie, always gave me bacon that I considered raw. It was as if he put it on the hot plate to make it warm but not actually to cook it. […]  I did not feel like I could ask Angie to cook the bacon for longer because I did not live in England — I lived in Exile — and reckoned this was the way things were done in the country that was my host. (p.126/127)

‘I can’t fall apart because I’ve never fallen together.’ This was something my teenage hero had written, or words that meant something like that — the man whose blank stare I practices in front of the mirror. I reckoned that every time Andy Warhola painted a tin of American soup it was his way of escaping from the brown flat fields of Eastern Europe where his parents were born. Every single tin of clam chowder got him nearer New York and away from living in Exile with his mother in Pittsburgh. […] I was interested in Andy because I reckoned, I was a bit in disguise too. (p.127/128)

Growing up, the ambiguity around seemingly straightforward concepts such as the ‘English’ progressively reveals itself to Levy. I would add that my now default relationship to otherness — where to be other is the norm — was formed in multicultural Camden, where we first went to school with my sister. I have found that such a position makes it easier to hold my sense of belonging to and strangeness in multiple contexts without seeing it as a weakness.

English people were so kind it was unbelievable. I loved my new country and wanted to belong to it and be as English as Angie, though it occurred to me she might not be entirely English because I had heard her talking in Italian to the man who owned the greasy spoon. (p.132)

By the time I got to bed, I felt weird and shaky. I had lived in England for six years and was nearly as English as they come. All the same I had come from somewhere else. I missed the smell of plants I could not name, the sound of birds I could not name, the murmur of languages I could not name. Where exactly was southern Africa? One day I would look at a map and find out. That night I lay awake all night long. I had so many questions to ask the world from my bedroom in West Finchley about the country I was born in. (p.149)

Later in the book, she goes back to reflect on her stay at the Mallorcan hotel and the significance of Maria’s character. Her being away from where she should be as a woman according to social norms is portrayed as voluntary exile from patriarchy, an image that I found particularly compelling. Her subsequent comments about this exile not being the place of her, or more broadly speaking of women’s desires, are nonetheless unsettling. I will continue to mull over these.

It occurred to me that both Maria and I were on the run in the twenty-first century, just like George Sand whose name was also Amandine was on the run in the nineteenth century, and Maria whose name was also Zama was looking for somewhere to recover and rest in the twentieth. We were on the run from lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our desires too probably, whatever they were. It was best to laugh it off. The way we laugh. At our own desires. The way we mock ourselves. Before anyone else can. The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves. It doesn’t bear thinking about. (p.158/159)

In reference to Virginia Woolf’s well-known emphasis on women writers having a space of their own to focus on their creative work, in the closing paragraphs of Things I Don’t Want To Know, Levy hints at the changing needs that accompany the growing freedom of movement that (some, admittedly very fortunate) women have access to today.

That spring in Majorca, when life was very hard and I simply could not see where there was to get to, it occurred to me that where I had to get to was that socket. Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa. (p.163)

In The Cost of Living, the second book in the Living Autobiography trilogy, Levy returns to the theme of freedom as a destination. She reflects on her constant longing to make a home considering the constraints it places upon women.

The moody politics of the modern home had become complicated and confusing. There were many modern and apparently powerful women I knew who had made a home for everyone else but did not feel at home in their family home. They preferred the office or wherever they worked because they had more status than being a wife. (p.111/112)

Another passage in the book that resonated with my long-held representation of my family’s move to London from Bratislava when I was a child as an overwhelmingly exciting opportunity takes places at St Pancras station. Waiting to board a train for Paris to attend the French publication of her novel Swimming Home, Levy realizes to what extent her sense of uncertainty when arriving in London from South Africa as a child had long stayed overwritten, presumably to diminish the charge of anxiety around it.

As I listened to announcements of cancellation and arrivals, what came to mind, out of the blue and into the orange London dawn, was the train that my family had boarded just after we arrived at Southampton docks from South Africa in 1968. This train was going to take us to Waterloo station. I had been sitting next to my brother, and in the aisle seats opposite us were our mother and father. We were all looking out of the window at ENGLAND. I had always told myself that this was a happy train ride. Yes, the story I had told myself was that we were laughing and chatting and eating crisps. I realized that morning at St Pancras International that the train rife to Waterloo had been a terrifying journey. I was nine years old. Where were our things? Where were my clothes? My toys? Where was our stuff? The furniture from our family home? Where were we going to love in England, anyway? Would I go to school somewhere? We had not been chatting and laughing at all. I had anxiously read the name of every station on the way to Waterloo. My mother’s hands were shaking when she showed the conductor our rail tickets. My father was looking out of the window. My mother was looking at her children. That is where I was before. (p.154)

To conclude this short plunge into Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy, I will cite two passages from Real Estate, the last volume. Both capture ways in which I  have come to claim  —  more or less explicitly depending on the occasion  — my Englishness, my subsequent French-ness and only recently — curiously —  my Slovak-ness. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the latter coincided with writing a piece on architecture as myself today in Slovak.

We made our way to the Aligre market, stopping to look at a stall of African masks. The vendor begged me to buy at least two masks because he said he was cold and needed to get back to Africa. We laughed, but I did not ask him where in Africa, nor did I disclose that I was born in Africa too. The subject of where we are from in mostly not a two-second answer. It is a long conversation, maybe an endless conversation. I often left the African part of my biography out of conversation all together even give minutes wasn’t going to do it. (p.181)

I re-read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughing and Forgetting and began to understand the magnitude of his exile from Prague to Paris, the huge endeavor of learning another language, and actually thinking in that language when alone in the bath. Kundera had claimed his French identity. He described himself as a French-Czech novelist. It was a shock to realize all over again that I was part of the trail of writers who had made the long journey from their home country of birth to somewhere else. (p.233)

On the occasion of Mindy’s Cyberfeminism Index tour, the WWA editors Emilie Appercé and Jaehee Shin met with her at the Zurich University of the Arts to exchange about the evolution of her project since she launched the website in 2020 and the future of the index, which now exists in both digital and physical form. The interview was recorded and was the object of the first episode of The Author Speaks. The podcast can be listened to here. Mindy comments on ‘Testo Junkie’, one of the books she recommended in her personal Collection.

I like this book, Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado, because it’s representative of this idea of our bodies as technologies and how they are almost embodiments of social constructs that we have to reexamine and explore and in many ways change. Within the Cyber Feminism Index book, there is a lot of examples of how body modification or hormone hacking has been a part of this ethos of hacker culture. So for example, Mary Maggic’s open source estrogen, or Klau Kinky’s guide punk. These are all different modes of how we can think about not only the body as a technology, but how technologies can transform human bodies. This is a nice feedback loop unto itself, too. It is interesting because, gender is a societal construct. I just went to the Pippa Garner show at Kunsthalle Zurich today, and she writes how gender transitioning is a very 21st century idea because we didn’t have the technological or scientific tools to do this in a previous era. That made me think, what are ways that these transitions might have been able to occur in the past without tools? I think this goes more into consciousness and representation. So if your physical body doesn’t matter, then there are no prescribed notions for how you have to behave in a social construct. Maybe that removes the need to adopt an appearance. That might be reflective of a certain societal conditioning. So I think this was very interesting to me in that exhibition because Pippa Garner is also very proudly using pronouns depending on where they were in their lives. So they don’t consider it dead names. They consider it like, from these years, I was a he, and then from these years, I was a she. It feels like a tender way of reflecting on your life’s history. It’s a beautiful show. I think for me, the Testo Junkie thing is very present now, even if that was written, what, 10 plus years ago?

 

Episode Four of A Book I Love was chosen by Linda Sjoqvist and Paul Grieguszies, the conversation can be listened to here:

Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that underpin everyday life in Nigeria.

The book is structured around three contrasting houses: the formality and oppression of narrator Kambili’s childhood home, a compound house in Enugu, and her family’s home in their ancestral town of Abba, and the comparative freedom and spontaneity of her Aunty Ifeoma’s flat in Nsukka. Ifeoma is a lecturer at the University of Nigeria, and although her way of life offers a new model to Kambili, ultimately Ifeoma and her children are forced to emigrate to the United States. The lives of these two families are played out in kitchens, living rooms and dining rooms, but most of all in gardens, in the spaces beyond the interior where the dual forces of the harmattan and the rainy season drive the cycle of growth and decay onward at a furious pace. Here, nature continually invades the interior, whether it is through the sickly-sweet scent of blossoming frangipani trees, the red airborne dust brought by the dry Harmattan winds or the bees that bump against the mosquito netting on Kambili’s bedroom window, the rustling of the coconut fronds that wakes her from her dreams.

Adichie’s rich and immersive descriptions of interiors, gardens, climate and the changing seasons serve to situate fictional events within a world so tangible that it is hard to leave it behind even when the book is finished. Her domestic settings in particular unfurl to reveal the hidden structures of class, religion and power that underpin everyday life.

King Kong the fictional giant monster resembling a gorilla? King Kong the anti-hero? Not here. Despentes invites us to consider King Kong without sexual attributes, a metaphor of power (he is still King), but of a sexuality that predates the distinction of genders. King Kong beyond the female and beyond the male, indeed, if anything, a link: man/animal, adult/child, good/bad, primitive/civilised, white/black.

But King Kong girl will choose another type of protection, that of the hypernormed heterosexuality, of the fit, of the civilised man who wants to touch the bestial and feel terrified as long as it is safe, as long as he does not lose control, as long as he remains within society and its dictates. King Kong yes, but only in chains. So much so that when he breaks free, and unleashes his power in the city, he is punished with death. And King Kong girl remains a prisoner.

And it is against that form of civilisation that has relegated women to a subordinate position that Virginie Despentes lashes out in this book that seems to burn in your hands as you read it. It explodes with the violent charge of words, a violence claimed by Despentes right from her ‘Baise-moi’. Because Despentes is angry, against society, against conformism, against the idea of femininity that wants women attentive, composed, pretty, cultured but not too much, domesticated and tamed, against the phantom that disturbed Virginia Woolf intent on writing, the Angel in the House.
Despentes claims power for women, the virile category par excellence. The book is read in one breath, we race to know where we can go. And Despentes pushes us to the end, to that ‘I want it all’.

Feminism is revolution. This is about blowing it all up! she says.