Visuality for Architects

Architectural Creativity and Modern Theories of Perception and Imagination

Branko Mitrovic

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813933962
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

What is more important in architectural works—their form, shape, and color, or the meanings and symbolism that can be associated with them? Can aesthetic judgments of architecture be independent of the stories one can tell about buildings? Do non-architects perceive buildings in the same way as do architects?

For the greater part of the twentieth century it was common to respond to these and similar questions by relying on psychological theories asserting there is no innocent eye, that we think only in language, and that human visuality results from preexisting, conceptual knowledge. Dramatic breakthroughs in philosophy and psychology over the past two decades, however, have shown us that human visuality functions for the most part independently of conceptual thinking and language.

This book examines the ways in which new theories of human visuality create a different understanding of architectural design, practice, and education. This new understanding coincides with and supports formalist approaches to architecture that have become influential in recent years as a result of the digital revolution in architectural design.

1

ARCHITECTURE: FORM OR STORY

Here is a situation well known from studio design reviews in architecture schools. A talented student presents her work. She has spent much time resolving spatial and visual issues, the composition of spaces and the façade, the vistas created as one moves through the building. The scheme is a thoughtful response to the brief. She is hoping that the critics’ comments will enable her to learn more about spatial and visual composition and the various strategies that she could have employed to make her building look better. At the same time, she is mildly dissatisfied with her studio professor: for the past six weeks he’s been shying away from helping her with the visual and spatial problems she has been so passionately engaged with. More precisely, he looked bored every time she tried to discuss what the building looked like and how its spatial and visual qualities could be improved. But now at least, in the review, she hopes to get a more engaged response to her visual and spatial interests from this group of critics. And yet, even during her presentation, she notices the same lack of interest on their faces.

A short silence follows her presentation. The guest critic, who feels obliged to say something, comes up with a question: “Well, what is your theoretical position? I mean, your architectural question?”—one of those formulations that guest critics use when they feel obliged to help the student. Yet, for the student, the question is unexpected: it does not pertain to visual issues, the kind of problem that motivated her work. A theoretical position ultimately consists of statements one believes to be true or false—it does not pertain to what the building looks like. Although well intended, the critic’s question redirects discussion away from her spatial and visual interests. Noticing the student’s perplexity (she’s got excellent grades in her theory courses, but how can reading Derrida help you decide about the color of the façade, or the shape of the window), another critic tries to save the situation by providing guidance: “What is the meaning of your building? After all, all architecture is an art imbued in meaning. Tell us in what sense your building is indexical?” Again a question that is irrelevant to what she was trying to achieve! How could meanings, ideas associated with a building have anything to do with, for instance, the visual problems that result from aligning spaces? While she is pondering this, her own studio professor, whose boredom by this time has turned into irritation, comes up with another question of the same kind: “We are asking, what is the meta-narrative for your project?”¹

It is hard to imagine that the review can take a good turn from this point on; the critics will sit and try to be polite for another couple of minutes, but that is all. Nevertheless, the review is bound to make a strong impression on the students watching it. What they learn is that the only thing that matters is the narrative they can tell about their building. Many of them have come to study architecture assuming that it is a visual art; they now learn that the decisive aspect of design is storytelling. In the theory class they have already been told that everything is a text. Seeing the main thrust of this review, some students will busily try to concoct a narrative that will get them through the review when their time comes. A minority may stick to their old beliefs and risk a bad grade. A couple of students are likely to grow cynical: aren’t these critics merely trying to impress each other by asking questions that sound intellectual? The dean is watching from the back, some of them have noticed; isn’t the part-time studio professor who asked the question about “meta-narrative” merely trying to make impression in order to get a permanent job in the school? Isn’t all this intellectualization, after all, merely indication of the critics’ intellectual insecurities? Psychologically perceptive students may well come to that conclusion.

In fact, one should avoid being unfair to the studio critics. Antivisual biases in contemporary architectural culture have a long history. The critics’ attitudes were formed during their education and reflect the theoretical positions that have been widespread in architectural thinking for the past twenty years. The same tendency to base design on stories that can be told about architectural works is common in contemporary architectural practice as well. Here it is strengthened by the fact that in order to get commissions, architects often have to explain in words their design decisions to their clients. Sometimes they (are expected to) invent stories about what the building represents. But should such stories be mere tools to get commissions, or should they (and can they) really drive architectural design? For instance, in the eighteenth century a famous French architect proposed designing the house of a sawmill owner in the shape of a saw blade and the house of a well-traveled person in the shape of a terrestrial globe. His equally famous colleague and compatriot argued that the walls of a law court should be shaped in the fashion of the tablets of constitutional law.² These historical examples certainly have their modern counterparts. Some years ago I was present at a lecture where a prominent New Zealand architect described how he had designed a building placed near water in the form of a fish. It is hard to resist the impression that facile symbolism of this kind mainly reflects the architect’s opinion of his clients—that he regarded them as shallow enough to find such explanation appropriate. But if this impression is true, then it would follow that he thought the same of his colleagues to whom he delivered the lecture, which is hard to believe. At the same time, he was obviously an intelligent man, and it was equally hard to believe that he himself took such crude symbolism seriously. I left the lecture puzzled about his genuine beliefs and intentions. In any case, architects need to get commissions, and it is extremely hard to avoid banality when design is driven by storytelling.

One should also bear in mind that it is impossible for architects to base the full range of their decisions about spatial and visual properties of the buildings they design on the stories they can tell about these buildings. Simply, it is impossible to fabricate enough stories to explain and justify all the decisions that need to be made about shapes, proportions, colors, composition of spaces, openings, penetration of light, and so on. A genuine belief that narratives can drive design can only result in the neglect of many of these considerations. It cannot fail to result in disregard for the visual and spatial properties of our built environment. Arguably, this is indeed what is going on, as can be evidenced by the visual and spatial qualities of our cities. Architects may need to tell stories in order to sell their designs to their clients—but problems start when they convince themselves that such storytelling can indeed account for the totality of relevant design decisions. My point in this book is that in both academia and the profession, this belief derives from the theoretical positions imported from other disciplines. It was not spontaneously created by architectural academics and practitioners. Nevertheless, very few architectural academics are aware of the origin of the assumptions on which they base their teaching. Practitioners who have been inculcated with these assumptions during their education have hardly ever had their origin explained. Let us therefore start by considering, in this chapter, how our current situation came about.

SEEING AND SEEING AS

It is certainly reasonable to doubt that the suppression of visual concerns in architecture could be possible at all. How could the architectural profession or academia suppress visual issues, considering that architecture is a visual discipline—often considered to be one of the visual arts? True, architectural works do have some properties that can be described only verbally (you can only state in words the function or explain the symbolism of a building). Nevertheless, it is certainly the visual presence of architectural works that dominates our everyday lives. It is hard to believe that disregard for visual aspects of architectural works could seriously become a major trend in architectural education or the profession. Yet, it is true that reviews like the one described above are common in architectural schools. Discussions of the narratives associated with buildings, the symbolism and concepts they express (as opposed to the discussion of their shapes or colors), dominate both architectural education and the profession. In the English-speaking world at least, it is hard to find architecture schools where students hear lectures about, for instance, the visual problems involved in staircase design or the composition of spaces. (Early in the twentieth century it was common to publish textbooks for the courses that taught such topics to architecture students, but such publications are nonexistent today.) One may try to explain the situation by saying that it is hard to teach and judge architecture on the basis of something so elusive as visual preference. It may be suggested that in an era when everything is considered relative and uncertain, judging architectural works on the basis of the narratives, concepts, or meanings associated with them provides a certainty that purely visual judgments do not have. But this explanation hardly suffices. Why should one expect to evaluate narratives and concepts associated with architectural works with greater certainty than the works’ visual qualities? Why would preference for a certain story about a building be less elusive than preference for its shape?

In fact, much bigger issues are at stake. Architecture does not live in isolation from its intellectual and cultural environment. If antivisual biases are going to be credible among architects, architectural academics, or theorists, this can happen only if such views are based on and derive from assumptions that are credible in the society in which they live.

Consider, for instance, the assumptions that one must make when complaining about anti-visual biases in architectural education or practice. This complaint makes sense only if one believes that some properties of architectural works are visual (such as shape or color) while others are conceptual and better described in words (such as function or symbolism). If one is protesting about privileging one of these aspects, one must believe that they both should be given appropriate attention. Additionally, one must believe that visual properties are not reducible to conceptual ones. Otherwise, the complaint would be pointless. The complaint therefore implies an understanding of human perception that one could call here commonsensical: the view that we must first perceive things in order to recognize what they are. You can’t know what you are looking at before you’ve looked at it; you must see a thing first in order to recognize what you are seeing. If this is so, then what we see is independent of how we (subsequently) classify it, or the words with which we name it.

During the twentieth century, this commonsensical understanding of human perception was challenged and dismissed on various grounds by psychologists, philosophers, and art historians. The alternative view, which came to dominate the understanding of human visuality, was that perception is inseparable from recognition, that it is impossible to see without classifying (conceptualizing) what you see, that all seeing is always “seeing as.”³ The philosopher Marx Wartofsky said once that, according to this latter view, it is wrong to think that “in order to hit you, I must be able to see you.”⁴ Rather, what happens is that “if I see you, it is because I want to hit you.” In other words, classification must precede or at least coincide with perception. Applied to architecture, this means that there are no visual properties of architectural works that are not ultimately derived from the ideas we associate with these works. Visual perception of buildings is merely a result of the knowledge and beliefs we already have about them. It is this view that still lingers, often implicitly and unconsciously, in much of contemporary discussion or writing about architecture. It pervades architectural education and hovers over the output from intellectually minded architectural offices.

REJECTING THE VISUAL

Arguably, whenever a visual artist feels compelled to explain the merits of his or her work by telling a story about it or stating what it means, symbolizes, or represents, he or she assumes that purely visual properties are not enough to justify the work. In other words, that the work cannot stand on its own. Such explanations are motivated by the belief that one needs to describe the work additionally, to state in words the ideas that should be associated with the work. In what follows I will call such a view conceptualism. It is opposed to formalism, which assumes that works of art and architecture should be judged on the basis of their purely visual and formal properties, independently of the ideas, concepts, or beliefs we associate with these works or stories we can tell about them.

The domination of conceptualism in contemporary architectural thinking is not just an accident—it derives from important intellectual developments in other disciplines that have shaped the understanding of architecture for the past fifty years. The critics in the studio design review described above did not ask just any questions; their questions reflected the views that are common today about what is important in architecture. Such views have not just happened to be widespread. They are a result of a series of specific influences that have affected architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. Conceptualism is not dominant because it is the only way to think about architecture; it is dominant because it has historically emerged as the dominant view. In order to understand the current situation, it is important to look at the history of why architecture is predominantly judged conceptually nowadays.

Originally, the idea that perception is inseparable from conceptual thinking became popular among visual artists in the early twentieth century.⁵ Before World War II, a number of German right-wing philosophers and art historians advocated it, and they often combined it with the view that every mental activity, including perception, is a result of one’s membership in a group, such as a nation, race, or culture.⁶ Some of them argued that members of specific groups can only perceive what is meaningful for those groups;⁷ others that perception is ultimately ethnically determined and that, for instance, a Japanese and a European perceive differently.⁸ Through the so-called phenomenological tradition in architectural theory, and the writings of such authors as Christian Norberg-Schulz, this kind of position subsequently exercised a huge influence on English-speaking architectural academia after the 1960s.

After World War II, such ideas ceased to be merely philosophical theories and became subject to experimental elaboration by American psychologists. In 1947, in a groundbreaking experiment, the psychologists Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman examined the ways in which the value that people attribute to physical objects affects their perception.⁹ The psychologists’ hypothesis was that the greater value one attributes to something, the bigger this thing will visually appear to that person. This may sound like a strange proposition, but Bruner and Goodman tested it by examining schoolchildren’s perception of the size of American coins. The children were asked to adjust an iristype opening on a mechanical device to the size of different American coins. In some versions of the experiment, the children were asked to do ...