Italo Calvino celebrated poet Giacomo Leopardi’s evocation of the moon. Its light. Calvino states that Leopardi could “cast the light of the moon on the whole poem” in just a few lines, or “project upon it the shadow of its absence.”[i] This is powerful but mysterious description. More importantly, Calvino’s description evokes the magic of which poetry is capable – and to which I would add architecture – namely its radiating and illuminating effect.
Poetry and architecture are forms of fiction. Both communicate via language and light – incorporating illumination both literal and conceptual. Affect, as noted previously, operates by novelty. Few things, however, hold our attention long. The source of the problem is that we tend to see the world of things, objects, tools and buildings, at a generic level of resolution – the conceptual big picture.[ii] Walker Percy again diagnoses the problem, this time in his essay “The Loss of the Creature” where he describes a person viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time, who opts to photograph it instead of confronting it:
The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex…. He waives the right of seeing and knowing and records symbols for the next forty years. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and future.[iii]
One has to be careful to avoid reading the above as some call to return to Kantian appreciation as a blank, cow-like stare, or any other phenomenological derivative that reduces experience to non-linguistic or non-conceptual perception. Seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, and tasting are all forms of communication to the self in the realm of meaning – the narrative realm of what is at stake. Magic, novelty, the sense of awe that the Grand Canyon might conjure is a narrative in the present. This is the crux of Percy’s observation.
It is important not to miss the communicative aspect of this narrative in the present. We tend to romanticize ourselves as alone when we experience things, particular wonders of nature like the Grand Canyon, or the moon. But there is always an implied or imagined communicator. We look at the Grand Canyon and we attribute it variously to “the forces of nature” or “mysteries of the universe” or “Mother Nature.” Gods and religions have their roots in this human tendency to always attribute experiences to some creator, whether he/she/they exist or not.
If the awe we feel in front of the Grand Canyon is communicative, how much more so is the experience of a poem or building where we can be certain that an author exists, or once did? “Communication is successful not when hearers recognize the linguistic meaning of an utterance, but when they infer the speaker’s ‘meaning’ from it.”[iv] Part of the success of an architectural or poetic effect is derived from our sense that we understand the architect’s or poet’s intention – whether we do so correctly or not.
Like the moon in the hands of a poet, the material of communication available to architects are surfaces in light. And like the moon, our surfaces are primarily illuminated not radiating. Illuminating is different than radiating. The sun and stars, artificial lights, and some luminous materials are the only surfaces that can be describing at radiating. Illumination usually has a prevailing orientation, but the ambient light that makes up the bulk of visible light comes from all directions due to the scattering reflections off the ground, the sky, and, most important to architects, the surfaces we build. This centers us, thinking and observing animals, in the ecological world (even if the world of physics and similar hard sciences see us as largely irrelevant). With illumination, we see barriers which quickly are understood as fixed (walls) or operable (doors). Or seemingly fixed or operable. These can appear opaque and hard, or translucent, soft, rough, etc. The architect like the poet communicates a meaning that has no need to conform to truth. Like the surface of the moon itself, architectural surfaces can be rendered as radiating even if, in truth, they merely reflect. And in so doing we have the potential of casting the light of the moon on the street or projecting upon it the shadow of its absence.
[i] Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 24.
[ii] Roger Brown, Social Psychology: the second edition, (New York: Macmillian, 1986).
[iii] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 47-8.
[iv] Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: communication and cognition, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 23.
Architecture is Fiction 