Vagueness, beauty, order, duration, and frequency. These concepts support the creation of scenes where protagonists can act. It is easy to imagine, at least as a description, that a proliferation of qualities merge to create a vague beauty, and coupled with attention to order, duration, and frequency in architectural composition this beauty would result in spaces understood as potential scenes. But this imaginative description relies on the fixed, given, plannable. How are these concepts and the scenes they create capable of framing volition itself – volition which is, by definition, unique, based on free will, and often unexpected?
To restate the above, how does the ossified order of composition support freedom of human action?
“Equilibrium and posture are prerequisite to other behaviors.”[i] We are animals evolved to fill the niche that the earth provides. The ground grounds us. “Behavior affords behavior.”[ii] J.J. Gibson’s thought is valuable to thinkers of experience because he constantly challenges the oppositional duality of people and place. Human and environment always exist in relation.
When it comes to the ossified order of composition as something to be overcome in pursuit of freedom of action, Gibson’s ideas are doubly important. They represent a direct challenge to conventional architectural thought. Three examples will suffice for the moment: “what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their qualities.” (I take this to mean that we see things for what they allow us to do/what we can do with them before we notice how they look or feel per se). “Phenomenal objects are not built up of qualities; it is the other way around.” (The convoluted arguments that gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists construct to explain how we convert shape, color, texture, etc. into meaningful objects are artifacts of seeing the problem from a philosophical tradition of holding disinterested aesthetic perception as a higher or purer form of perception than interested/instrumental perception – anyone who thinks about perception from an evolutionary perspective will see the flaw in such privileged thinking). And finally: “meaning is observed before the substance and surface, the color and form, are seen as such.”[iii] (This last quote flips the world of architectural theory on its head; things come with meanings and attention to the so-called phenomenal qualities emerges after).
These three quotes undo most architectural theory of the last century. And it isn’t just Gibson or subsequent perceptual psychologists who believe these ideas. The great novelist Milan Kundera echoed Gibson’s ideas about meaning when he wrote, “the world, when it rushes toward us at the moment of our birth, is already made-up, masked, reinterpreted.”[iv] Gibson and Kundera not only challenge conventional wisdom about perception, but they also simultaneously obliterate the meaning of the question ‘how does the ossified order of composition support freedom of human action’ and open new avenues for addressing it.
They obliterate the question insofar as the world of affordances, pre-interpretated as it is, is that against which humans act. Without settings, understood as settings, the idea of acts of volition is nonsensical. Furthermore, Kundera extends Gibson’s thought about meaning and notes that the “curtain of pre-interpretation” behind which we are born must be torn by the novel (or other work of composition) for any novel (or work of art) to be worthy of that title.[v] In order to act within or against a setting, the narrative of the ossified order of composition must offer affordances that work against pre-interpretation: affordances of vagueness and beauty framing volition, perhaps. What that means, if it means anything at all, will be the topic of the next three meditations.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 123.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127.
[iii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 126.
[iv] Kundera, The Curtain, 92.
[v] Ibid.
Architecture is Fiction 