Overt narratives, architecture of the postmodern era and Disney, and the heavy-handed conceptual overlays of the worst formalisms likely come to mind when the word information is used in connection to architecture. This is unfortunate as it blinds the discipline to its essential nature, if such a phrase as essential nature will be pardoned in this context.
Architecture is information in the sense that it is the conveyance of an idea. Too much ink is spilled, however, on ideas as big ideas or concepts. The ideas that comprise the practice of architecture can be intended to be seen, felt, understood as pure stimulation – that is, as raw sensory intake. When our goal is to draw inhabitants’ attention to those ideas masquerading as mere “stimuli,” we had better understand the mechanisms by which that effect is communicated or received.
First, it is important to draw distinctions between stimulus and information as well as between sensation and perception. Architects, artists and even psychologists tend to portray the first term in each pair as primary, as the essential object of study, and freight those terms with incredibly deep, borderline mystical, import. But what is a stimulus? Gibson goes to some length to separate out the casual use of the term from its rigorous scientific identity as a packet of energy – transmitted here and received there – that is used up in the transfer. A stimulus, in this rigorous sense, is a fleeting occurrence, almost instantaneous, and differs from information exactly as sensation differs from perception: the first term in each pair is utterly distinct and unrelated to the second; the first terms are physical and meaningless while the latter involve mental processing and meaning. Even thinking of stimulus”information or sensation”perception as means”ends relationships (where the arrow indicates a simple, direct causal connection) is an error. The game is lost when the observer or inhabitant becomes overly conscious of the artifice. Is it not the object, objects, or less objectively the sense of place that we want people to experience and not the mechanism that carries meaning?
When we want to design experiences or the potential for such, the mythical pure encounters that late modernism and phenomenology presented as a grail, we have to design the information and perceptions in such a way as to draw attention to stimuli or sensations much as a great plot transforms the possible but random into the probable and meaningful.[i] In short, we have to create characters of surface and experiential qualities but do so in ways that they appear as mere “stimuli” that the observer or inhabitant “just happens” to notice.
How exactly is this done? The answer lies in the power of pre-existing beliefs, the imagination, and placebos.
[i] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 43.
Architecture is Fiction 