Some philosophical traditions lead us astray. The inherited Kantian wisdom that aesthetic perception is disinterested, for example, has wrought all sorts of nonsense in its wake. Sometimes, however, seemingly banal platitudes are correct. All perception is an illusion, in a manner of speaking. We do not see directly the information that enters the retina, for example, but instead we hypothesize and narrativize from that information to create the world of experience. I offer this preamble in part to hold the illusion vs. reality debate at-bay. At the same time, and at the risk of seeming disingenuous, I assert again the illusory character of the perceived world in order to address the last meditation’s essential query: can architecture contribute to its own disturbance? That is, can it trigger an event within itself?
Such questions ostensibly move us out of our heads, from the subjective to the objective. Given that changes in the environment constitute an event is a reasonable summary of the previous meditation, it is fair to ask why I reassert the illusion/reality dichotomy or reintroduce the subject in a discussion of objects. The short answer to these questions and the query above is this: an architecture that can trigger an event is one capable of suggesting change. It is an architecture that is firmly an object, but the unspoken end of the preceding sentence – suggesting change to ____ – is where perception and its subjective, illusory character merge with matter.
Kundera once claimed, “García Márquez’s poetry has no relation to lyricism, the author is not confessing, not exposing his soul, he is not drunk on anything but the objective world, he lifts into a sphere where everything is simultaneously real, implausible, and magical.”[i] Architecture capable of suggesting change is an ambition akin to that of the works of Gabriel García Márquez and just as worthy of pursuit.
Before we get to filling in the blank of “suggesting change to ____” lets consider the first word of that expression. Suggestion is … anticipated information, to use Ricoeur’s previously quoted phrase. As with great novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude, suggestion and anticipation, the implausible and the magical, emerge in the foregrounding of time in experience. Time matters insofar as it is the realm in which objects and subjects co-exist. An event, most simply, is a figural moment in time.
Physicists and philosophers debate the nature and intricacies of time. I’ll leave objective time to them. For the subject, time is rendered as tense. Perceived variations in tempo or rhythms of time are not direct translations of characteristics of time, per se, but rather fluctuations of tense that, in turn, are imperfect fictionalizations or unconscious inferences of the flow of time into personal histories. Weathering (using materials that evidence their age) and juxtapositions of styles are often touted as architecture’s contribution to perceptions of time. These, however, are more allusions than contributions – or, more accurately, allusions to sweeping passages of time.
To be clear, material weathering and stylistic allusion are potentially valuable tools in the overall search for meaning-oriented practice. For a work of architecture to cause a disruption in its own formal array, however – that is, for an object to trigger perceptions of tense in subjects – surfaces or places understood as different from one another must be presented in an order or sequence that highlights their inherent difference. Perceived change, in other words, is a threshold experience for an interested observer.
[i] Kundera, The Curtain, 82.
Architecture is Fiction 