Italo Calvino tells a story of emperor Charlemagne’s enchantment. The story follows Charlemagne’s abdication of responsibilities due to his overwhelming passion for and devotion to a young German girl. This blindering passion and devotion shift to the girl’s corpse after her untimely death. He has the body embalmed and placed in his bedchamber. Suspecting magic, the Archbishop of Turpin discovers and removes an enchanted ring from beneath the corpse’s tongue. Charlemagne’s passion and devotion follow the ring and are transferred onto the archbishop – clearly an unacceptable state of affairs. Finally, the Archbishop discards the evil ring in the depths of Lake Constance where Charlemagne’s passion and devotion also come to rest.
Calvino tells this story as an entree into the subject of “quickness” or, in other words, the linked movements of narrative. He is interested in the way the disparate elements or characters – in this case, an emperor, a girl, the court, a corpse, an archbishop, and the lake – appear as a cohesive collection. The ring is, of course, the narrative talisman that links cause and effect and tethers the pieces together into something like a plot. Calvino adds that the ring is also the protagonist, a visible sign that connects all other parts.[i]
Consider now, in what may seem a heavy-handed analogy, the disparate aspects of visually perceiving architecture. Generically, following Gibson, we can classify visual perception into two parts: stimulation by light and stimulus information carried by light. Sensations of light leading to manifestations of light is another way to express this two-part process. (A similar stimulus-reception model can be constructed for all the senses, but I will limit the discussion to vision for the sake of brevity.) Architects and theorists, particularly but not only the architectural phenomenologists, have imbibed this model for more than a century. There is a whole Holy Roman orthodoxy built into architectural education extoling the virtues of light itself and masses in light as its subject. Gibson points out, however, that this formulation embodies a contradiction: on the one hand, light itself can never be seen, only its effects on things are visible; on the other hand, light is the only mechanism by which we see – and, in a manner of speaking, it is the matter of vision.
Any hypothesis or model that embodies a contradiction is false – as the law of noncontradiction states. So, something is wrong in the standard stimuli-effect model, at least as it is casually employed by a lot of architects and educators. The resolution is no great mystery. The contradiction resides in confusing or blurring the distinction between sensation and perception. We mix up the mechanisms of perception with perception itself. “We do not perceive stimuli,” Gibson observed, “all we ever see is the environment.”[ii]
Architects’ and architectural educators’ focus on the sensory world for more than a century has diminished our understanding and appreciation of the perceptual world. Perception is an afterimage, an aftereffect. It is the totality of plot in Calvino’s story. To the extent that light exists in the story of perception, it is akin to the enchanted ring. Perception is not of light but is often about light. Light is a device, a protagonist, that links and unifies but only after it has been discovered and named. When we leave the mute terrain of sensation, we enter the wordy world of narratives and competing valences. The world comes into being. Architecture comes into being. And only then does the world and the architecture in it get interesting.
In order to understand one another, as philosopher Richard Heck notes, it is “not preservation of reference, but knowledge of reference” that matters.[iii] That is why it is important for architects to gain clarity on what perception actually is. Only then can we act according to what it can do. Perception is stimulus information, in Gibson’s words. But perceptual information does not have to seem to be informational. Architecture, in part, is informational fiction. In large part, in fact. At its best, however, it is information not perceived as information. And this is where architectural phenomenology’s fetishization of stimuli actually matters.
[i] Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 31-2.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 48-9. The latter quoted phrase occurs first in the text.
[iii] Richard G. Heck, “The Sense of Communication,” Mind 104, 1995 (413): 98.
Architecture is Fiction 