If architectural theories driven by ideas of pure or direct or at least relatively unmediated relations of the senses to works of architecture aren’t necessary or particularly useful, what is? It is easy to disparage, but harder to discover or invent new ways of working.
Most architectural theory and criticism can be classified in two broad categories: descriptive or modal. Practiced at its best, it moves back and forth but it seldom blurs the line between those types or emerges as something else entirely. This is due to the inherent contradiction of quantities and qualities (this object is made of materials 1, 2, and 3; those materials have properties a, b, c, and q). This contradiction has a long history in both philosophy and science. It is so engrained and intuitive that we cannot help but imagine the world dualistically. There are objective facts and subjective experiences – things or characteristics we are or have, on the one hand, and things or characteristics we need or want, on the other.
Narrative begins when a subject desires something or some state of affairs. But what sounds like a glorification of qualities or pure subjective experience over objective quantities and facts isn’t dualistic in fiction. Fiction IS the world. People and places exist through narratives that, at the same time, exude qualities and experiences. Works of fiction, in other words, build truth worlds inside themselves that, at their very best, alter what we think of as the objective world outside. Walker Percy mines Ernst Cassirer on this point: “We cannot know anything at all unless I symbolize it. We can only conceive being, sidle up to it by laying something else alongside,” and sums it up a bit later: “The essence of metaphorical truth and the almost impossible task of the poet [or architect] is, it seems to me, to name unmistakably and yet to name by such a gentle analogy that the thing beheld by both of us may be truly formulated for what it is.”[i]Formulated, not revealed. Truth in Percy’s worldview emerges by qualitative comparison (laying something else alongside) and gentle ontological categorization (to name unmistakably).
What lessons might we take from this for creating a practical theory that proves objective/subjective distinctions aren’t necessary and, more importantly, helps make architecture that overcomes such distinctions? The purpose of architecture is neither to confuse or bewilder (although the proliferation of avant-garde works and praise for them would suggest otherwise) nor to offer such well-worn tropes that the work disappears into the undifferentiated ground of familiarity (as witnessed in the homogenizing efforts of stylistically planned communities, mandated Classicisms, and lowest common denominator contextualisms). Works of architecture, like poems and novels and paintings, are best when somewhere in the middle. Exemplary works of art not only allow us to formulate what it is but aids us in formulating the truth of neighboring works that we did not quite conceive before. Finding that sweet spot, however, between the radically novel and the well-known is difficult and requires that we understand the cognitive models[ii] of the mediators – not architects but the knowing humans who will experience and inhabit our buildings.
[i] Percy, Message in the Bottle, 72-3.
[ii] See George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: what categories reveal about the mind, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 12-13, for a primer on cognitive models and category formulation.
Architecture is Fiction 