Retreat, Withdrawal, the Intensified Inside

Photo by Jane Palash on Unsplash

Given our current shelter-in-place, COVID-19-plagued world, my immediate reaction upon rediscovering the following excerpt from the late Bill Kleinsasser’s self-published textbook SYNTHESIS was an overwhelming sense of forlorn poignancy. He certainly never imagined coping with the necessary isolation and stress associated with physical distancing mandates. When he wrote about retreat, withdrawal, and the necessity of time alone, it was in response to our default condition—a “normal” existence during which such occasions are too often rare or absent. Today, the circumstances require an unprecedented degree of withdrawal many people are struggling with. As social beings we like to connect and touch and be close to others, opportunities denied to us by the pandemic. We’re compensating by focusing on reaching out and checking on the well-being of others. We’re learning how to carry on.

Notwithstanding the current state of affairs, Bill’s observations about our psyches’ innate need for time away from it all—for time to individually ponder one’s place in the world from a location that is undeniably safe, comforting, and personal—are on point.

The Need to Retreat

People frequently need to be alone. In what is often a complex, relentless, or hostile world, one’s sense of balance, security, and self-respect cannot be maintained without this opportunity. People must have time and place to pause, to assimilate, to reflect, to wonder, to daydream, to remember. Daily life can become unbearable without these recuperative opportunities.

Sometimes the need to retreat is very great. Automobiles provide a widely used form of retreat. We can retreat into ourselves. It is possible to retreat even when surrounded by people and noise—if we have sufficient focus to withdraw.

People “retreat” in many ways. We often form cocoons around ourselves. We dream and fantasize. We can retreat by means of concentration (even when surrounded by activity). We retreat in groups. We go away (physically).

Built places can provide opportunities for retreat if they are made right. Usually the most successful places for retreat are those we just discover—not the ones with “retreat place” painted on them, but those private hideaways or secrete places we have found that are just the way they need to be, just where they are needed. People need to have lots these places around and they must be made just right.

The idea of aediculation is very important in regard to retreat and withdrawal. Aediculation is a very old idea meaning the act of making super-secure (usually miniature) places inside other places; making them in a way that the juxtaposition of smaller and larger places is dramatized or intensified.

Some examples of aediculated places:

• A small place on the edge of a cliff
• The open cockpit of a plane or car
• A treehouse
• A playhouse (of any kind)
• An eave in an attic
• A bay window (especially if it really overlooks a bay)
• A balcony
• The space under a table that a child chooses to play in

Some of the characteristics that successful place for retreat apparently must embody are:

• Identity as places
• A seemed defensability
• Super security—and enclosure
• Appropriate scale—the presence of the rightsized space for the occasion and circumstance
• Intensity—strongly felt contrast between place and setting
• Controlled connectedness—filters, switches, layers, etc. that give an individual the opportunity to modulate his[her] exposure by establishing different places to be.
• Overlook on activity
• Dead-ended-ness
• Personal meaning—magic of some kind, a memorable, special quality
• Personal meaning by means of the softness of the place—its imprintability, its capacity for being changed by those who occupy it
• A capacity for presenting something different (or apparently different) each time one goes there
• Material, textural, or symbolic richness—a capacity for stimulating the sense
• Effective surprise—a capacity to alert one to unexpected patterns

Retreat can happen by projecting oneself into something: an aediculation, especially a symbolic one, or into an order or a narrative presented, and become part of it for a while.

It would be helpful if the built environment contained many places that provide privacy, security, and solitude. It would be helpful if such places could occur in all parts of the built environment: in homes, in working places, in public spaces, outside as well as inside, etc.