Some of you will not be persuaded by what has been said in these posts. For those skeptics who are nevertheless following along, the preceding meditations are built on a fault line. The call to create settings that seem to have the human attributes of mystery or volition or the capacity for calling identities into question implies a worldview of incompleteness insofar as these attributes are never exhaustible or fully describable. The suggestion that we can achieve this goal, on the other hand, through design intent and the designers’ tools of order, duration, and frequency implies completeness – it assumes that the process is rooted in finite and knowable components that merely need to be summed.
I won’t deny the contradiction. In fact, I acknowledge that it runs deeper than the description above immediately suggests. The human attribute that settings must seem to have above all others is that one traditionally designated as consciousness. Regardless of whether we approach the latter from the tenets of materialism or dualism or panpsychism, and irrelevant of whether we think the term ‘consciousness’ represents something real or imaginary, to suggest that one goal of designed settings might be to seem as if they have the quality of something so elusive to the history of human science and thought is (a bit of) a problem.
On the other hand, the preceding meditations have posited J.J. Gibson’s notion of affordances as a potential root of architectural meaning. Gibson, however, makes clear that affordances are not subject to whim or anything as elusive as consciousness. “The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added…it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object.”[i] One free conscious being (whatever that might be) cannot simply decide that a surface is good for walking while another equally free conscious being declares, ‘no, it is not good for walking upon.’ The survival of humanity has been predicated on a common set of affordances, and it continues to be.
If settings are rooted equally in the indefinable, dare we say fickle, qualities of consciousness and, at the same time, subject to shared affordances, which were honed by evolution and still ground human meaning, it is difficult to avoid skepticism. These terms represent an absolute rift. Any bridge between affordances composed via order, duration, and frequency, to one side, and the beautiful vagaries of consciousness and human volition, to the other, must be framed out of stuff distinct from either bank of the divide. It is hard not to be a skeptic on this front.
What happens, however, if we approach the problem of the third stuff from which a bridge can be constructed from the other end. Framing can occur in one of two ways: through design intent or by accident (or a mixture of the two perhaps). For the time being, lets imagine what proceeding by design tells us about this third stuff that bridges consciousness and meanings fixed by evolution.
“All comprehension is imagination,” according to Jean Pouillon.[ii] This is a reasonable summation of the views of most literary and many philosophical figures. It is also a useful thesis for any designer working from the consciousness side of the divide. The challenge to create artifacts that seem to have human attributes is daunting, but it is not insurmountable from this perspective insofar as design is seen here as a prompt to all the individual imaginations in the world. Design understood in this way is akin to illusion. There is no truth or reality – at least none we are concerned to communicate – but there is a mirage, an image, a sense we want others to see, hear or feel.
A designer approaching the problem of the bridge from the side of hard reality has to answer with something seemingly mysterious but ultimately tethered to the facts of the psychological and social sciences: the nebulous idea of creativity. Creativity in design, from this perspective, is the process of moving difficult, seemingly unknown or unfamiliar content into a realm of emotional comfort, joy, etc., (as the design seeks). The contrast between beginning and felt end of this experience can be radical (the work of genius) or normal day-to-day design. “It is establishment of conscious (declarative) connection between behavior and consequences of that behavior (…) that enables us to abstractly posit a desired future, to act in such a way as to bring that future about, and to judge the relevance of emergent phenomena themselves on the basis of their apparent relevance to that future.” Jordan Peterson sums up this line of thought, “what is later story is at first pattern.”[iii]
To restate these positions in slogans, the consciousness-based designer makes a story that causes the observer to imagine a reality; and the reality-based designer makes a pattern which later becomes story understood by observers as fiction or art. These processes are mutually exclusive. But are the resultant artifacts mutually exclusive as well? To answer that, it will help to remove the designer and designerly intentions from the analysis.
That’s next.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 131-2.
[ii] Jean Pouillon, Temps et Roman, (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 45.
[iii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning,179. Italics in the original.
Architecture is Fiction 