The great benefit of thinking in terms of surfaces instead of the planes of abstract geometry is that the former provide us with a world we know or at least can know. The latter, on the other hand, offers only empty volumes, ephemeral lines, and coordinates in space. From surfaces, we gain corners and edges, the ground and horizon, open environments and enclosures, detached and attached objects, etc. You get the picture. These entities have names we all share and by which we understand our roles as animals within environments. We don’t, for instance, conceive of ourselves holding cylinders measuring 3 ¾” in length and 3 ¼” in diameter (9.52 x 8.25 cm). Instead, we hold coffee cups. Most importantly, these named surfaces locate us and from them we begin to describe variously scaled habitats as places. “Places,” as Gibson noted, “can be named.”[i]
The acquisition of names is part of the way in which surfaces gain value or meaning, but only one part. Surfaces appear to us across a continuum of experiential knowledge ranging from the so-routine-that-we-do-not-pay-attention-any-longer (as is often the case with a stretch of road we drive daily) to the shockingly novel (an experience so outside our expectations that we do not have any idea how to evaluate, much less categorize it as belonging to a class of established entities or events). While there is value to exploring both extremes of experiential knowledge, the path is well-trodden on both ends. Phenomenologically driven architects and theorists, such as Holl and Zumthor and their lineage, have plumbed the depths of the everyday or routine. Formalists, Greg Lynn and Zaha Hadid and their descendants, have pushed the limits of the novel. The long middle of the path is little explored, and all the richer – like a well-established language in which almost no literature has been written.
Between things so well known that we tend to ignore them and things so exotic that we are stupefied in their presence lies the realm of things with the potential to fascinate. This is the realm toward which both great novelists and magicians aim. Milan Kundera celebrated Tolstoy’s ability to activate this realm by extoling his use of the commonplaces of “interior monologue” or “stream of consciousness” to record more than the routine but also “the decisive moments of [Anna Karenina’s] life” – namely her suicide.[ii] Magic, on the other hand, utilizes pseudoexplanations to charge the everyday with the magical power or mystery. Gustav Kuhn explains it this way: “The role of the magician is to create a scenario in which you believe that the pseudoexplanation is the only possible cause of the event.” This is relatively easy, according to Kuhn, for two reasons: first, the human mind seeks relationships of cause and effect even when presented with pairs of unrelated facts or images; second, causal relationships, even where reasonably proved to exist, cannot be seen but instead must be inferred.[iii]
What draws novelists and magicians together is their understanding and use of readers’ or viewers’ expectations to achieve this middle ground between the prosaic and novel. Expectations establish the ground for surprise: A stream of consciousness account of a young woman’s life will be filled with the mundane. A woman we see being closed in a box will be there when the box is reopened. When the woman kills herself or has vanished, the world is thrown into question. In the first example, the woman is recast as a tragic figure, with all the attendant literary meaning, under the direction of a literary genius. In the second, the woman has been acted upon by magic or, if one follows the waving hands, by a magician of immense power. In both cases, success requires us to posit a fiction and half-believe it.
This is the ground any meaning-oriented task must plow. And if the inference isn’t clear, “architecture” and “architect” can replace novel and literary genius or magic and magician in these lines without altering the meaning.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 29.
[ii] Kundera, The Curtain, 23.
[iii] Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 32.
Architecture is Fiction 