The Complex Unity of all things.

For many architects the drawing of a reflected ceiling plan can quickly turn into a monotonous task of illustrating hundreds of standardised components on a homogenous 2 dimensional surface.

David Stephenson however in his monographic book ‘Heavenly Vaults’ reveals the art of the reflected ceiling with powerful images of Gothic vaulting from ancient stonemasons and monastic orders. These magical compositions read like oriental graphic devices used for centring the mind. Indeed the architectural experience would have had exactly that effect coupled with the visceral effect produced by the soaring heights of these structures.

With the religious iconography generally obscured, these images become a reminder of the vast well of human potential that exists and upon which we build our society today. The structures, serve as pointers for all humanity and not achievements in the name of a single domination or clan. The elevated patterns guide us towards the complex unity and interconnectedness that lies inherent in all things. They are the result of deep insight from our ancestors who have left behind these structures as expressions of the sublime.

Saul Steinberg's Metaphor for Consciousness

When talking about the great Saul Steinberg I should really focus on his incredible Architectural cartoons and illustrations that depict how architecture is animated, occupied and brought into existence through its occupants. However I may leave that for another post. Instead I wish to use a particular illustration of his as a metaphor and musing for the cognitive mechanisms at play when we experience a piece of architecture (or anything for that matter).

The above illustration depicts a visitor in an art gallery looking at a painting by Georges Braque. Above the visitor is his thought bubble containing the stream of mental imagery that is provoked upon seeing the painting. ‘Braque, baroque, barrack’ begins a stream of consciousness that evolves into a set of highly personal references and ideas. It is interesting to consider that this stream is happening continuously as we perceive our external reality. Ideas, past experiences and references are all deeply interwoven instantaneously and unnoticed into our perception of the external world.

This is our subjective experience which is often mistaken for an objective reality. This simple cartoon is a reminder of how we are in constant dialogue with our surroundings - mapping ideas and meanings onto external stimuli which in turn alter the meanings we imbue them with. It also reminds us how we can cloud our own perception, with unfettered images and random meanings, which to us feel of significance even if it is to the detriment of the moment of experience.

Aldo Van Eyck's insight into the Unchanging Condition of Man

"It seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the mind’s interior as a continuum. If they are not, the artifacts we make will be without temporal depth or associative perspective…. Man after all has been accommodating himself physically in this world for thousands of years. His natural genius has neither increased nor decreased during that time. It is obvious that the full scope of this enormous environmental experience cannot be combined unless we telescope the past…. Architects nowadays are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either hinders, runs after, or at best keeps up with. This, I suggest, is why they tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike a sentimental antiquarian attitude toward the past as much as I dislike a sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians and technocrats have in common), so let’s start with the past for a change and discover the unchanging condition of man."
—Aldo Van Eyck

Entropy Designs

I have spoken fondly before of buildings that are on the brink of collapse, decaying and unloved. Their decline is attributable to the second law of thermodynamics which asserts that entropy always increases, thus inevitably reducing man’s attempts at order. This universal law of impermanence is a force that is constantly shaping Architecture, our cities and the cosmos. As architects we can ignore the irreversibility of time resulting from this law, or acknowledge it as a critical dimension in which architecture exists.

Joseph Gandy, the troubled genius draftsman, often depicted the impermanence of architecture through paintings of Sir John Soane’s buildings as ruins. Although this may have been a fashionable picturesque trend of the time to romanticise Soane’s built works, the effects of contemplating architecture’s impermanence and perpetual move towards higher entropy structures can be poignant and insightful to us as designers.

Gandy’s famous painting of Soane’s Bank of England immortalises the building as a timeless ruin. As well as representing the architecture in a dramatic, evocative perspective, these paintings can also pose questions relevant to today’s construction industry concerning the lifespan and future usage of our current building stock.

Contemplating our modern buildings as ruins is not a popular trend, perhaps as it is difficult to envisage modern construction materials aging as gracefully as the classical palette. However acknowledging that our buildings will always move towards higher entropy structures (i.e. -they are time based) means we can design with this movement in mind. The process of becoming a high entropy structure is one of interaction between building and environment: both human behaviour and the natural world.

Resisting this interaction is short sighted; designing with it opens up possibilities for holistic and deeply sustainable ideas. Flexible, adaptive and responsive buildings that willingly change with time can be conceived. Existing unused and unloved buildings can be re configured and re used. Beginning with the end in mind might not be as pessimistic and is it first appears but rather a liberating tool for architecture.

Mr Zumthor's Pritzker Prize Acceptance Speech

Thank you. It’s a wonderful moment, of course, to get such a prize. There was a journalist, a couple of weeks ago back in Switzerland, asking me: “Now that you’re getting the biggest prize in architecture, will this change your life?” Then I said, “Of course not.” And then I added, “Maybe, I don’t know.” Maybe something will change, but I would like to say it wouldn’t. So, I’m a little bit older now—a couple of weeks older—and something has changed a little bit. Let me try to explain.
As you just heard, when I was a boy, there was no architecture. There were architects. Some of them my father liked, some of them he didn’t like. But architecture didn’t exist. Only later looking back I asked myself, was there architecture in my life? At first I thought, “I don’t see anything.” Perhaps just our house… But architecture? A school? I grew up in a village, in a town five kilometers outside of the city of Basel. So, I looked around, and there was not much. Keep in mind that this is me later looking back. And then all of a sudden, one Saturday evening, we took the little train and went to the movies. Then I started to remember there were all these movie theatres in the streets, and they had a beautiful kind of feeling. They had a beautiful feeling when you got in. There was a really marvelous world of kitsch, really marvelous. And when you went down to the bathroom, the colors were yellow and black. And then all of a sudden, I realized there were this and that, and the balustrades, which had polka dots—polka dot kind of holes—and so on. So, I imagined that this must have been architecture. It was something special. And then later, I remembered that once a year we went to a monastery, a baroque church, nearby. And there were monks singing Gregorian chants in this beautiful Baroque church. Architecture. And then—this was the best—at the end of the service, the family always went down into the rocks, and you came to a very small chapel built or excavated in the rocks. There were a lot of candles and those typical smells and all these things. Architecture! Architectural atmosphere! So, I was glad to discover it. There are other things, of course. But I was glad to discover there was architecture in my youth. I just didn’t know it.

A little bit later—10 years or 15 years—all of a sudden I decided that I wanted to become a real architect, which was sort of a lonely decision in the kitchen. And I started to do my work. I started to enter competitions. I won a competition. I did my first two buildings. The two buildings started to grow. And I remembered at the time we looked at these two buildings, Annalisa and I. I got really depressed. It was terrible. I saw the buildings, and I could see the models of the buildings. This was terrible. I could hear the architectural discussion of the time in my buildings. This was the last time that this should happen to me. The last time that I’m not being myself.

So what is this being myself? It is interesting that in these buildings, which gave me this headache, heart ache, there were things I liked, such as things that did not come from a magazine or from a discussion that I can talk about with somebody. Rather, this is me! What is this “me”? Of course, I don’t know exactly. But I can try to explain a little about the process of what I feel when this happens, when I have the feeling “this is me.” Maybe those of you who play tennis, you know. You have to concentrate on the ball. If you start to think just for a moment, “Oh, my friend is looking at how I play,” then you are lost, right? You have to keep this total concentration on what you want to do. This is one thing. The other thing is you have to be loose. Now, I’m talking about myself. I should say I have to be loose. I go to the place. I listen to the client. I walk around. I hang around. I’m not going to do research.

When I start to do research, I’m really bad. This I know from studying. No research. You are just hanging out, listening, feeling, having the place resonate a little bit. And then all of a sudden, ideas come naturally. I don’t know when and where. I think this is a very natural process. Everybody—all of you, all of us—we experience this. And what I discovered was that when I have these feelings, it is like being a boy again. All of a sudden, I think this is me when I was 10 years or 12 years old. I’m dreaming. I’m there and something comes to me, but it’s not, of course, naïve dreaming. Everything, which is part of my biography, is there. But it’s not there as a research product or as reference material. It went into me, as part of my life. Then it comes out from somewhere—from my emotions or whatever, my feelings.
So, I’m at the same place as at the time when I experienced architecture as a boy without knowing it. This is what I love. These beginnings, these moments of the beginning. And then comes the really hard task when I have to take care that nobody destroys my first image. Because, as you know, we’re doing a job as architects. We are surrounded by politics, by laws, by money, by clients who have weak moments, and all these things. Sometimes people want to take away or harm my image, my baby. So, this needs a little bit of persistence. Maybe that’s where my reputation comes from that I’m a stubborn guy, which I’m not, of course.

As I get older, I think I got some kind of a… I’m sort of secure that I can do this—be a boy, and in being a boy and dreaming, doing something. Then I say, “When I like it, you will like it, too, because I’m not so special.” Now comes this moment when I get this prize. And I think now, and I start to feel that dreaming becomes even easier. Maybe I can. You help me to go on dreaming even stronger. Thank you.

[Ctrl C Ctrl V] a Reality

(As featured in Matzine 09)
In this article I would like to consider the humble [ctrl c ctrl v] copy paste function, as both an analogy to the practice of architecture and to the process of cognition that allows us to interact, perceive and experience architecture. As designers we quickly realise that the design process is iterative and recursive. It consists of repeating a process with a desired outcome at the end in mind. We like to communicate this process as a linear from A to B to illustrate clarity of thought. However useful it is in explaining ideas to clients and alike (and it would be so much easier if design was like this), it is not a good model to illustrate how design really works.

The repetition in design is cyclic in nature, with new iterations being informed from the lessons learnt from the last. This process as a whole can be seen as a continuous feedback loop: an evolving copy paste function.

This cyclic iterative process never stops. Once a piece of architecture has come into physical reality, the iterative and recursive strategies that bore its inception continue to operate through the acts of cognition and experiences of individuals who use, occupy, and perceive the built work.
Designing no longer resides solely with the architect, but is something that we all do continually beneath our conscious awareness. Our cognitive and perceptive faculties construct our reality in a way akin to design and it happens moment to moment. Each new experience is informed from past experience as we copy paste from memory into the present, thus ‘designing’ our reality to fit with our belief systems, cultural background, preferences and psychological makeup. Gordon Pask illustrated this process in his ‘Conversation Theory’.

The Myth of Design

“We ‘converse’ [metaphorically] with everything in our environment. We ‘offer our views’ as we act,re-act and think. The environment ‘speaks to us’ in
the sense that we interpret it. We respond to what we hear and see and feel, in an exchange that has the structure of a dialogue in language.” – Paul Pangaro

Seeing Architecture as part of a cognitive conversation presents it as a dynamic and time based phenomenon that relies on the unique construction of the observer. Pask considered architecture as one of the fundamental conversational systems in human culture.

His ideas from cybernetics imply that we are observing beings, who construct our view of the world through interacting with it through conversations. This dialogue is a looping process of iterative and recursive creative cognitive acts.

As architects we design not just isolated buildings but growing, evolving and learning systems that perpetually interact with its inhabitants both serving them and influencing their behaviour. The inhabitants’ behaviour in turn animates and activates the building in a complex reciprocal relationship. Architects now must consider this relationship in their work and include provisions for the evolution of their design through future use.

It was Pask’s desire for architecture to refine this dialogue through technological advances into interactive environments that would engage with their inhabitants, learn about their behaviour and adapt accordingly.

It is also important to consider the interaction between the designer and the system he designs. Pask viewed the architect as controlling the construction of a control system, explaining that design was the ‘control of control’ thus putting the designer in the same role as his system except at a higher level in the organisational hierarchy.

Through recursion and iteration Architecture can be viewed as an enabler of collaboration, where conversation and the interaction between clients, users, builders and architects is highly important and as a time based phenomenon dependant on the unique construction of an observer.

Our friend copy paste is not just a convenient tool on our personal computers, but it is born from our deep cognitive acts of perception that ‘copy paste’ our reality into our experience of the now.

Geometric Hypnotism : The Secret life of Eugene Andolsek

I love tales of a lone obsessive secretly and unknowingly creating masterpieces for no other reason than satisfying the desire to make them. I also have a love for artwork that assists facilitating hypnotic modes of consciousness (I think the two generally always go together). So upon discovering the extraordinarily intense, vibrant and trance inducing drawings of Eugene Andolsek I was even more enamoured when I heard the humble story about the production of these stunning images.

Eugene was a discontented stenographer for the Rock Island Railroad who spent over 50 years quietly producing these captivating images of geometric complexity and radiant colour at his kitchen table. His images were never displayed or exhibited to anyone, and Eugene himself did not have any interest in them after the joy of creation had concluded. For years these intricate gateways into altered states lay dormant in Eugene’s closets and draws. As Eugene retired from his working life, failing eyesight and ill health forced to him into the care of a retirement home. It was here a care give, first fell under the spell of Eugene’s visual hallucinogens and quickly brought them to the attention of the director of the Andy Warhol Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Soon after this exposure Eugene’s works were included in the exhibition ‘Obsessive Drawing’ at the American Folk Art Museum New York.

For me the images are cathartic and alchemic. Visually they resonate something primitive, connecting with ancient cultures and indigenous tribes who understood the importance of such images as tools for spiritual growth, wisdom and connection with the divine. The everydayness of their production only adds to their spiritual significance by reminding us ‘that is better to have travelled well than to arrive.’