It is something of an axiom that all people are curious – or anxious, which is simply a negative manifestation of curiosity. These experiences are central to being human insofar as curiosity or anxiety indicate belief in and concern for more than we can see or know. “He that in the ordinary affairs of life, would admit of nothing but direct plain demonstration,” John Locke noted, “would be sure of nothing in this world but of perishing quickly.”[i]
John Locke, always the charmer.
Previously I said that space is a fiction constructed of surfaces and time. It is more accurate (though less charming) to say that space and time are abstractions constructed from perceptions of permanence and change on, against, or near surfaces. Space and time, in short, are narratives – useful fictions – and curiosity or anxiety are psychological mechanisms that serve to bring those narratives into being.
The next section (the next three meditations) will focus on the mechanism itself. From there, the conversation will shift to how architects can use these mechanisms to support meaning-oriented architecture. Here, however, in the final entry on issues of surface and relative position in relation to perception, I want to highlight the value of perceptions of change through curiosity or anxiety to the making of meaning, and more importantly to dispel a misconception or two.
Curiosity and its inverse are often thought of as solitary, as forms of alienation, insofar as confrontations with the unknown are always inward and incommunicable. In its initial eruption into consciousness, this is true. This does not mean, however, that we cannot have a shared perception of the environmental causes of curiosity. “What establishes the jointness of the perceptual scenario is that we are looking together at an object in a demonstratively identified location, not that each of us is experiencing its features.”[ii] Moving gradations of light, shifts in perspective or illumination that reveal bits of information, the slow emergence of order after the unspooling of numerous changes, all these will take place in different order and perhaps with different emphasis for each perceiver. Nothing in these differences prevents the ultimate acquisition of a shared narrative. And the minor differences that remain are the source of personal meaning, not an obstacle to shared meaning.
“In chaos lurks great potential.”[iii] I like this line because it is a reminder that the unknown, the complex, the not-previously-confronted, are triggers to curiosity (or anxiety) and our response, positive or negative, establishes the boundaries by which we judge the world as richly textured or frightening, ultimately knowable or impenetrable. Either way, it takes on a role in a story. Italo Calvino writes of Borges and his “potential literature” from this perspective.[iv]Borges made his stories stand outside himself. They were conceived as the works of others. His relation to them was as a critic or re-teller of the story. One effect of this is we, the readers, are doubly distanced from insider’s knowledge of the text because even Borges is conceived as being a latecomer to the narrative. Borges gives us events, not settings. This heightens our curiosity, or anxiety, and allows us to feel the discovery of meaning as a genuine discovery – not as a contrivance preplanned for us.
Architects, at their very best, might make the emergence of space and time in the experience of works of architecture a discovery of equal merit.
[i] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited with an introduction by Peter H. Nidditch, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Book IV, Chapter XI, Section 10.
[ii] Seeman, The Shared World, 76.
[iii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 130.
[iv] Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 50-51.
Architecture is Fiction 