In these meditations, there are no rehearsals of established architectural styles, or of the litany of established architectural theories, or of the theorists who founded or currently trade in them. Academic trivia, particularly the architectural variety, is not invoked here as starting point nor as framework nor as proof. The topic at hand is complex enough without obfuscation, although its statement is so simple as to seem trivial or perhaps the beginning of a joke: a person walks into a bar or barn or basement, experiences it, and experiences the experience itself as significant or important or meaningful. How does this happen? What has just occurred? How much of the experience of an experience as meaningful is predictable by the architect, how much is malleable, and what responsibility does he or she have for deploying or not deploying this knowledge, manipulating or not manipulating the end result, in the making of architectural forms and spaces?
These are profound questions, perhaps the ultimate questions for architecture. They are asked occasionally but never resolved by quoting obscure passages from Plato or Aristotle or referencing the latest findings in neuropsychology derived from fMRI scans. That is not to suggest that historic observations and scientific analysis aren’t useful but that they serve primarily as macro- and micro- boundaries to the study and remain orders of magnitude removed from the meaningful experience of experience itself, or the experience of meaning. Philosophic and scientific languages thrive only at the margins of any discourse other than their own. They fail at the center.
Attempts to answer these questions suffer from erudite obfuscation and its opposite – that is, the tendency to trivialize the experience of experience as a topic utterly too abstract or so hopelessly enmeshed in personal history or pop psychology or nostalgia or some combination to be pursued with rigor or pragmatic value. Here, architectural discourse retreats into comforts of the easily knowable or provable – the fetishization of technologies and methods of fabrication, on the one hand, or enamorment with societal statistics and data-driven design on the other – where issues of value or significance or meaning are postponed as judgments to be appended by future historians or theorists. A trivializing form of pragmatism, really.
Both tendencies, erudition and trivialization, need to be set aside as they are dismissive of non-architects (i.e., nearly all of humanity) and their lived experiences. It is not acceptable to claim that the outcomes of erudite research or trivial pragmatism may ultimately serve the general public. Almost any form of research or any other activity conducted in the world may eventually serve the common good. The strategies of both erudition and pragmatism perform a disservice to architects and the profession insofar as they hide the experience of experience as a value unto itself, worthy of study and dissemination in language that all architects can understand and from which they can begin to build meaning-oriented practices leading to meaning-oriented buildings and communities.
Architecture is Fiction 