I want to explain the provocative student drawing included in the previous meditation. I also want to introduce another. Before I do, however, it seems necessary to illuminate the value attributed to surfaces in this and the remaining meditations – especially in light of the attention given to materials, material science, and ‘materiality’ in much academic discourse on architecture.
Material science, at least as it has infiltrated design schools, deals with substances. Why, then, the emphasis on surface? Every substance has a surface. And at the ecological scale, surfaces are all that humans see and feel. As Gibson notes: “The surface is where most of the action is.” He illuminates this significance better than most, and here, as elsewhere in these entries, I follow him closely. In fact, I will follow him more closely here than elsewhere insofar as I will restate, in simplified form, his nine ecological laws of surfaces in order to establish what surfaces do and to suggest why they matter – perhaps why they matter more than the material of which they are composed.
According to Gibson, every surface has an inherent or given degree of: 1) persistent order[i]; 2) resistance to deformation – for instance, the surface of a lake provides very little resistance, a sand box substantially more, and a concrete wall an incredible, potentially painful, amount; 3) resistance to disintegration – here, the surface of the lake is more persistent than the sand box; 4) micro-scale order or texture, both tactile and visual; 5) macro-scale order, or shape; 6) orientation toward a source of illumination; 7) absorption of illumination; 8) reflectance of illumination; and 9) reflectance of particular wavelengths, or color.[ii]
These laws are rather factual observations. Of course, the shift from substance to surface doesn’t get us closer to meaning. Things don’t have objective meaning. Meaning shifts with goals. But by understanding the interface of people and things at the scale at which experience occurs – at the surface created by the meeting of substance and medium – we shift the locus of action to an appropriate and appropriately manipulable scale. We see, feel, taste, hear, and smell by contrast. We can perceive “conditional meaning … by observing how behavior (one’s own behavior, or someone else’s)” is transformed by the presence or absence of the thing.[iii] Meaning is, in short, a narrative structure. Acquisition of narrative understanding requires moments of identity (people seem drawn to this person, place or thing) or difference (that person, place or thing’s absence is felt) that operates at the ecological scale of perception.
A quick reading of Gibson’s laws reveals why surface is the ecological-scale classification most important to architects. Law 5, concerning characteristic shape, is particularly important for understanding why surface is more important than substance or space for investigating experience. Surface shape operates at the scale of environmental enclosures and objects. “Obviously, differently shaped enclosures afford different possibilities of inhabiting them. And differently shaped solids afford different possibilities for behavior and manipulation,” as Gibson noted. Coming to terms with the primacy of surfaces allows us to redirect our studies. Despite the extraordinary range of possible configurations, all the resulting shapes surfaces can take can be studied according to their faces, edges, and vertices.[iv] These are concepts we can enact or act through.
[i] Where I use “order,” Gibson uses the term “layout.” I have opted not to use his terminology for the simple fact that “layout” means something different to designers than to perceptual psychologists – and may, in fact, mean something different to each of the various design professions. “Organization” could be substituted where I use order without altering the intended meaning.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 19.
[iii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 34.
[iv] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 24.
Architecture is Fiction 