Bowing at the Lintel

In the Bale Tani of central Lombok, the front door is built—by deliberate village rule—too low for the adult to walk through upright. The entrant must bow. The bow is the architecture’s first effect on the body, prior to any spatial experience inside. The lintel is, in this sense, the building’s most important member: a single beam positioned at exactly the height that compels the genuflection of every guest, every household member, every priest, every tax collector.

Architectural theory has not, on the whole, taken the threshold seriously enough. Walter Benjamin’s Schwellenkunde —“threshold-science”—proposed it as the discipline that modernity had lost: the porch, the doormat, the boot-scraper, the dado as devices that organize the entrant. The Sasak low door is the most concentrated form of Schwellenkunde available. It performs in one element what the Western Christian basilica spreads across narthex, font, screen, rood, and chancel-step. The Japanese tea-room nijiriguchi—the crawl-through entrance—does the same; so does the prie-dieu before the altar. The Sasak case is more democratic. Every entrance of every farmhouse begins with a bow.

The body that bows is a different body from the body that walks in upright. It is a body that has been informed, materially, that the room it is entering is not its own. The host’s room, the parent’s room, the ancestors’ room—at every domestic threshold the genuflection is repeated. To remove the low lintel—as modern Sasak houses sometimes do—is to remove a moral apparatus that was never decorative.

Once inside, the body adopts a sequence of further positions, each calibrated by an architectural fitting. The Western bath has, in its modern form, a single position: the body lies, faintly inclined, in the tub. The Indonesian bath, by contrast, deploys at least six positions, each with its own architectural specification. Standing beside the bak mandi, the upright body with the gayung in the right hand. Squatting—jongkok—heels-down, knees-bent, the position of the traditional Asian toilet and the courtyard. Sitting cross-legged—bersila—the position of prayer, of the meal taken on the floor, of the gamelan musician. Kneeling and bowing under the spout, palms out, head wet. Lying in the Japanese suna-yu or the Korean ondol-floor of the Jjimjilbang, the body at rest on warm stone. The prayer position—hands together at the chest, then raised to the forehead, then released. Six schēmata, in the Greek sense; six “techniques of the body,” in Marcel Mauss’s 1934 phrase.

Each posture has an architectural correlate. The squat assumes a sloped floor and no bench. The cross-legged sit assumes a stone ledge and deep eaves above for shade. The kneeling bow assumes a spout at exactly the right height—a few millimetres too high, and the rite collapses into a shower. The lying body assumes a flat, polished, slightly warm surface at floor level; no mattress; a roof; cross-ventilation. The praying body, finally, assumes orientation—a corner, a cardinal direction, a relationship to the sun and the mountain. The architecture choreographs the body’s choices, position by position. The bow at the lintel is therefore the first of a long sequence of architectural corrections of the body—and arguably its most concentrated example.

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Each posture has an architectural correlate. The squat assumes a sloped floor and no bench. The cross-legged sit assumes a stone ledge and deep eaves above for shade. The kneeling bow assumes a spout at exactly the right height—a few millimetres too high, and the rite collapses into a shower. The lying body assumes a flat, polished, slightly warm surface at floor level; no mattress; a roof; cross-ventilation. The praying body, finally, assumes orientation—a corner, a cardinal direction, a relationship to the sun and the mountain. The architecture choreographs the body’s choices, position by position. The bow at the lintel is therefore the first of a long sequence of architectural corrections of the body—and arguably its most concentrated example.