Placebos? Beliefs? Imagination? Yes. The shift toward the use of data in architectural research – manifest in gaze-tracking devices, fMRI scans, ArcGIS mapping, etc. – combined with the ongoing modernist faith in architecture as a tool of truth, justice, etc. (decried in the “Reading Between the Lines” essay under “More” on this blog’s header) blind us to the reality of anything that doesn’t seem wholly grounded in objective fact and instrumental notions of betterment. This combination of biases render many of the processes that underpin of experience as so many subjective asides to “real research.”
No one who has read this far is likely to agree with that strand of architectural research. He/she/they are likely to know that imagination and beliefs are as much parts of the totality constituting experience as any physical artifact and more so than quarks, atoms, and cells or aggregated data at a far different scale. She/he/they are also likely to guess that placebos, more specifically the fact that humans are susceptible to having their reality altered by a literally untrue but strongly held belief, might be thought of as a viable tool to use beliefs and imagination against logic and understanding. The perception of sensation (in itself, an oxymoron) or the experience of raw sensory intake (also an oxymoron) are placebo effects – and powerful ones indeed for designers. To the strategic list of placebos, altered beliefs and charged imaginations, I’d add economy, rhythm, and metaphor as tactics for achieving oxymoronic experiences.
Placebos, of course, have medical value in dealing with conditions for which there is no actual cure. If the mind believes that it is getting a treatment that alleviates pain, for instance, the sufferer often reports a reduction in pain experienced. Distinctions here between true and false or real and unreal don’t make a lot of sense. There is a belief fostered, a magical artifact offered, and an imagination that creates experience. For the unattainable ends of perceiving stimuli or for the emergence of a pure seeing that forgets the name of the thing one sees, architects cannot simply build things that are difficult to name. The things with which architects work are already named. And novel configurations of these “cry out to be named,” as psychology Roger Brown so aptly put it more than half a century ago,[i] and quickly succumb to the looks like mechanism in which they are conceptualized, compartmentalized, and packed away as mundane knowledge.
Novelists face a similar problem. Literature is literally words composed in such a way that people surpass the words toward an experience. Authors of the world’s great literary works don’t invent new words or languages or subvert the whole of grammar to achieve these ends – the greatest certainly didn’t and don’t. Instead, they work through language utilizing economy, rhythm, and metaphor to supersede language. The first two techniques or tactics are straightforward. If you want to minimize a reader’s attention to words on a page, use as few as possible to convey the story and avoid novel or difficult terms that become highly figural or focus attention on themselves. The words you do use should be deployed in a structured way – repeated sounds, ideas, pace, lengths of paragraphs or punctuations – so that the reader feels so at home in the text that the artifice can fall away.
These two tactics – economy and rhythm – are easy to translate into architecture. More will be said about these later. Metaphor is a more difficult concept, both in literature and architecture, so I will use the remaining space here to open the idea to further exploration.
Walker Percy extols the virtues of misnamings, misunderstandings, and misrememberings as “accidental stumblings into poetic meaning.”[ii] Note he does not advocate unnameable, incomprehensible or things that eschew the past or established categories. He praises, instead, the way in which metaphor “is wrongest when it is most beautiful” (and one assumes most beautiful when most wrong), by which he means the more successfully radically divergent things are connected, the more mental translation work we have to do and the more we are subsequently rewarded.[iii] Novels that connect things we have not previously understood as connected places us firmly in the fertile middle ground of translation.
The possibility of having readers overcome the words of novels so that they believe they experience the world itself or inhabitants believe they experience the sensation of materials and light inside buildings are analogous. Both involve beauty operating as the thing itself. Marilynne Robinson, quoting Karl Barth on Calvin’s understanding of the Eucharist, reinforces this point: “Those who take in the language of the sign truly take the thing signified.”[iv] Her discussion of Calvinism is worth the digression for those interested. This is not to propose a religious understanding of experience but the opposite: literary understanding underpins all experience – a fact that many religions have incorporated into their traditions. Architecture that seeks to create pre- or non-linguistic experiences must go through language to beauty.
[i] Roger Brown, Social Psychology, (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 478.
[ii] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 65.
[iii] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 66.
[iv] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 60.
Architecture is Fiction 