Interpretation in Architecture

Design as Way of Thinking

Adrian Snodgrass, Richard Coyne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415384483
• eBook ISBN: 9781134222636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Drawing on cultural theory, phenomenology and concepts from Asian art and philosophy, this book reflects on the role of interpretation in the act of architectural creation, bringing an intellectual and scholarly dimension to real-world architectural design practice. For practising architects as well as academic researchers, these essays consider interpretation from three theoretical standpoints or themes: play, edification and otherness. Focusing on these, the book draws together strands of thought informed by the diverse reflections of hermeneutical scholarship, the uses of digital media and studio teaching and practice.

Part 1

Play

The first version of Chapter 1, Architectural hermeneutics, appeared in 1991 under the title Is Designing Hermeneutical?, though it was not published until six years later.¹ Prior to the time of writing, we thought the debate about whether you could, or needed to, apply the methods of science to study in architectural design had receded, and no longer provoked interest. Philosophers of science had already established that the contingent, cultural and contested workings of the humanities provided a better ‘model’ of the methods of laboratory science in any case. Architectural practice had long decided that there was no need to appeal to science to legitimate its activities, and the studio teaching method, with its open-ended, dialogical and materially-based practices, had reasserted itself as a highly respected model of education.²

But there was another factor that influenced design research. In 1991 optimism about the computer was at its zenith. Preoccupied with its technical agenda, with little time or inclination to absorb the wider debates or work out their implications, it was an easy matter for computer-oriented researchers to fall into the simple research formula: a science of design.³ Unaware of the regressive nature of this move, a return to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century positivism, and bolstered by the confidence that comes from a positive programme able to attract research funding, at least one university department changed its name to the Department of Architectural and Design Science.

Counter to this regressive scientism, the hermeneutical explanation of studio practice was welcomed by design studio colleagues as a liberating, productive and rigorous explanation of design. But some colleagues were suspicious of design science being taken as an appropriate target. Who still believes in a science of design? This essay was designed to hit hard. It focused on a particular text that had currency in computer-oriented studies, and that represents a prevalent design research genre. We were able to demonstrate how entrenched the position of positivist science had become, its anachronism, and the ways that it occluded the humanistic-orientation of a commonsense characterisation of design as ‘reflection in action’.

Our initial target, the science of design, is still a relevant opponent. It is still usual to equate the terms ‘research’ and ‘science’, and even subsume research within science. For example, UNESCO has a ‘global scientific committee’ charged with identifying ‘overriding, global issues and challenges in the areas of higher education, research and knowledge’ (http://portal.unesco.org). If appeals to science are outdated then why do we still have ‘scientific committees’ dealing with the general matters of education?

Views about research are changing, and without fanfare. In the United Kingdom there are now eight major government-sponsored research funding councils, supporting science, medicine, engineering and the social sciences. The latest funding body is the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that explicitly encourages, and funds, art and design practice as modes of research, and creative works, exhibitions, designs, buildings, compositions and performances as research output.⁴ In its documentation and practice, this research council seems genuinely led by a desire to assert subject matter, approaches and methods that come from within the arts and humanities, without needing to draw on the authority and techniques of science. This triumph, however, exposes another imperative, that of economic benefit. Though science is on the outer, art and design claim legitimacy through the size, growth and profitability of the ‘creative industries sector’, an issue we address in Chapters 4, 5 and 11.

Although we set positivist science as our primary opponent in Chapter 1, this was not its main point. Rather, the chapter elevates play, and a rehabilitation of the play element of design, as a rigorous object of study. Contemporary architectural theory now largely ignores the vast literature on systems theory and design methods against which we argued in this essay. We use design science as a springboard. From it we plunge into the more productive metaphor of design as play, and the whole apparatus of hermeneutical inquiry. We concur with Huizinga, the theorist of the game, that play underpins all of culture, and provides the meaningful basis for work.⁵

To suggest rigour in the context of play brings to light the constraints of play, or the rules of the game. We detected confusion among design researchers on the characteristics of rule. Artificial intelligence had reached design studies and was at its peak by the time this essay appeared. There were those who sought to codify the rules of ‘design languages’, and rules for design decision-making. We also detected a quasi-liberalism developing around the metaphor of the rule. Rules don’t need to be constraints. Designers can make up their own rules. What can be more liberating than that! In Chapter 2, Playing by the rules, we examine the rule from the perspective of interpretation theory, which in turn draws on its legacies in the writings of Aristotle. A rule is archetypically a statement, written down or memorised, that accounts for nothing without its skilful application. In so far as design participates in rules, it occurs at the coalface of application. The chapter serves to introduce the hermeneutical account of virtue ethics, and how it implicates design.

Donald Schön provides a helpful account of the early interest in creativity that sparked so much systems-oriented research in the 1950s. The race was on to produce the most creative workforce, and to be the most creative nation. Creativity held the key to economic success. The quest for creativity has taken several turns since then. Researchers interested in computational methods sought to strengthen their discipline by appearing to take on the really difficult problems. Computers and computational methods can be deployed to solve puzzles, arguably to solve problems, perhaps to undertake routine design tasks, but the ultimate challenge is raw creativity – cutting-edge innovation, and solving problems that are not yet properly formed. On the one hand this move towards creativity demonstrated confidence, but it also indicated a profound insecurity. Paradoxically, creativity is easier to deal with as a research topic than producing systematic methods to solve practical and real problems, such as the design of a cost-effective and energy-efficient office building. It is a simple matter to judge the failure of a goal-directed system, or theories of goal-directed instrumental reason. Creativity is another matter. It is open-ended, wasteful and often misses the mark. In computational terms it has random generation on its side as an acceptable method. Creativity provides the dual benefit that it purports to deal with issues of consequence, and yet widens the field for a more speculative kind of research, less driven by the necessity to produce economic results.

This move to creativity was not futile. Another success to claim was applicability in the world of art, design and performance. Artists, composers and designers are good at adopting tools, techniques and materials from all quarters. It matters less to artists that the algorithms at their disposal have validity as models of human cognition, and they are probably not interested in handing their own procedures over to a computer in any case. The creative professions have benefited from being brought on board by the design scientists. In Chapter 3, Creativity as commonplace, had its origins at a conference entitled ‘Creativity and Cognition’. It seeks to show that creativity is a commonplace in all areas of human endeavour, even the ‘simple’ matter of interpreting a text. There is, after all, no simple model of reason to which we need append creativity, as something warranting special attention. Neither is there anything particularly serious, which we need to embellish with the extraneous concept of play.

Figure captions

(clockwise from top left)

1–5 The design studio as a site of interpretation. Architecture: School of Arts, Culture and Environment, The University of Edinburgh. Work by students of Adrian Hawker

Chapter 1

Architectural hermeneutics

Is designing hermeneutical?¹ It is commonly supposed that design activity can be described, codified and explained in terms of an algorithmic logic model derived from language theory. The model, exemplified in the work of Stiny, Knight, Mitchell, Kalay and Coyne et al., has been the basis of much research in architectural design methodology and CAD.² Mitchell gives an elegant description of the model.³ With reference to nineteenth-century formal-pictorial positivism, and the twentieth-century logical positivism of Carnap, he asserts that design can be described in words that make up a critical language and such word descriptions can be formalised using the notation of first-order predicate calculus. Design worlds, he says, consist of ‘graphic tokens which, like words, can be manipulated according to certain grammatical rules’. He sees design processes ‘as computations in design worlds with the objective of satisfying predicates of form and function stated in a critical language’.⁴ Mitchell specifies that there are three main parts to this model:

First … the relationship of criticism to design may be understood as a matter of truth-functional semantics of a critical language in a design world. Second … design worlds may be specified by formal grammars. Third … the rules of such grammars encode knowledge of how to put together buildings that function adequately. Thus the relation of form to function is strongly mediated by the syntactic and semantic rules under which a designer operates.⁵

He asserts that ‘the first step in precise formulation of a design world is to specify the primitives (kinds of elementary graphic tokens) out of which designs may be assembled’.⁶

This model presupposes that the process of designing is analogous or equivalent to the process by which we use language; that the process can be described in terms of primary tokens (for example, geometric shapes) which equate to words; and that these primary elements can be manipulated according to grammatical rules so as to build up coherent structures in the same manner that words can be combined in accordance with the rules of logic to form meaningful sentences. The model derives from a positivist theory of language, which relies for its cohesion and integrity on the concept that verbal atoms (words) correspond to objects in the real world. These primary verbal tokens combine to form larger information segments such as sentences. To be meaningful, say the positivists, these combinations of verbal tokens or word atoms must be assembled according to the rules of formal logic. If they do not conform to these rules they are meaningless and the statements they convey are false.

In the following we shall attempt to show the limitations of this view of language, a view which underpins many prevailing assumptions concerning the nature of the design process, in particular those which make appeal to logic, formal systems and the computational paradigms of artificial intelligence.

Positivist concepts of language

The positivist concept of an exact and determinate language made up of symbols that correspond to a unique set of atomic facts traces back to Plato. He speaks of the ‘weakness of the logos’,⁷ by which he means that spoken language is treacherous, that it has a tendency to slip out of our control so that meanings disappear into the thickets of ambiguity, self-contradiction and paradox.⁸ Ordinary spoken language is unequal to the task of representing reality; it does not directly correspond to its referent. Ordinary language must be replaced by a system of signs that corresponds exactly to the structure of what is. To control our thinking we must resort to a system of signs that can be controlled, a formal language that always behaves according to the dictates of logic. For Plato, the paradigmatic expression of such a language was the language of mathematics; the ideal language for thinking is one in which words function like numbers. In this way, ‘the word, just like the number, becomes the mere sign of a being that is well-defined and hence pre-known’.⁹ Only statements expressed in such a formal language could lay claim to certainty.

The logical positivists attempted to formulate a ‘language of science’, constructed on the base of mathematical logic. Their aim was to define a precise, certain and meaningful language that is clearly demarcated from meaningless pseudo-sentences.¹⁰ They based their enterprise on the concept of logical atomism, the notion that words have a direct correspondence to things that are discrete, explicit and determinate; that words and what they stand for are like atoms or primary elements; and that words, as primary elements of language, can be brought together in logical sequences to form statements that are meaningful because they are certain, possessing a truth that can be tested against the rules of logic and against the things or facts they represent.

These efforts culminated in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,¹¹ the definitive exposition of the positivist theory of language, in which he specified just such a precise and perfect language, one which would escape opinions, purposes, values and intentions. All subjective notions and purposive meanings were banished from the domain of concrete experience. He maintained that ‘the ultimate constituents of the world are a unique set of atomic facts whose combinations are pictured or mirrored in the relations among symbols in a logically perfect language’, that ‘the world can be described completely by knowing all these atomic propositions’, and that ‘there is one basic use of language: to convey information’. It follows that ‘all language which conveys information is exact and determinate’.¹² The Tractatus thus defines the world in terms of a set of atomic facts that can be expressed in logically independent propositions. Everything can be expressed in the formal language of logic: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.’¹³

Wittgenstein’s critique of positivist concepts of language

With the appearance of the Tractatus the positivist position seemed invincible. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, it was wholly demolished, defeated not so much by attacks from outside, but from within. Positivism self-destructed. It fell apart under the self-reflexive impact of its own criteria. The most potent of these internal assaults came from Wittgenstein himself, who turned his immense critical talents to an analysis of his own earlier thinking, dismantled the Tractatus and consigned to irrelevance the positivist notion that atomic units of language correspond to realities in an objective world.

Wittgenst...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Preface
• Architecture and coherence
• Part 1 Play
• Part 2 Edification
• Part 3 Otherness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index