Ask yourself, what is a city? To be more specific, what and where exactly is the city you live in? ‘What’-type questions typically result in lists – in this case, buildings, streets, sidewalks, institutions, histories, communities, beliefs, leaders, etc. ‘Where’-type questions lead us to point, or look up GPS data, or reference distances to other places. But where and what exactly is your city? It is all of these things and more, and yet it is not exactly any of these either. Every city is somehow physical and phenomenal but, also more. It is referential.
This is true of all types of settings: physical and phenomenal but more completely referential. Perhaps then, it is reasonable to say settings are conscious affordances. But even if this is correct, it tells us about the intrinsic nature of settings only. In this case, perception – the how-it-appears and what-it-does – is more important than what-it-is. “What animals need to perceive,” as J.J. Gibson notes, “is not layout as such but the affordances of the layout.”[i]
The question is complicated by a general misunderstanding of perception. Some literal misperceptions of perception have been addressed in preceding meditations. Others proliferate. Gibson, for instance, long ago challenged the commonsense notions of depth perception and form perception. Instead, he argued, we see surfaces (when they provide structure for the eye in terms of differing rhythms, orders, densities of texture, etc) and we see sequential transformations not forms.[ii] That’s it. Magician Gustav Kuhn, who is a careful student of perceptual psychology, is particularly interested in change blindness. According to Kuhn, change blindness (which is exactly what it sounds like) is rooted in two facts: “First, unless we attend to things in our surroundings, we simply do not perceive them…. Second, people vastly overestimate their ability to notice things.”[iii]
“The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”
Marcel Proust[i]
[i] Quoted by Milan Kundera, The Curtain, 96.
The lesson is perception is very incomplete. We don’t completely experience cities, depth, forms, changes … or anything else. Where then does the sense of completeness come from? It comes from the pedestrian walking the city, the pilot looking for depth, the sculptor carving for form, the spectator eager for change, the booklover reading for truth. Perceptions of cities, depths, forms, changes, truths, and even settings within which these are found are emergent phenomena drawn from the real but not exactly real. Better stated, perceptions of settings are simultaneously fictional and real.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 150.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 140-143.
[iii] Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible, 137.
Architecture is Fiction 