Category Archives: Uncategorized

A note in defense of the conclusion of the previous meditation. I’ll keep it short.  Perceptions of settings are fictional and real despite common sensical notions of absolute difference between fictional and real perceptions. The shortest defense of this statement is simply to say that fictional perceptions are real. This can be stated the other way aroundContinue reading “Despite common sensical notions of absolute difference”

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 otherContinue reading “Perceptions of settings are simultaneously fictional and real”

If architectural settings are rooted equally in the indefinable qualities of consciousness and yet subject to shared affordances, as argued above, it is hard not to side with skeptics about our prospects for making spaces perceivable as settings by all or most people. Affordances are invariant. Evolutionarily given. Consciousness is ephemeral, vague, perhaps unreal. ToContinue reading “Or by accident“

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 impliesContinue reading “Through design intent“

Why do most things seem to come loaded with meaning or value? More curious yet, how do so many things that appear pre-disposed to particular meanings still fade into the background on occasion? Early German psychologist Kurt Koffka explained these curious facts by arguing that all things exist as both ‘behavioral’ and ‘geographical’ objects. GeographicalContinue reading “Casting objects as meaningful“

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 inContinue reading “Framing volition“

Let’s start somewhere unexpected. How about magic? Or to be more precise, let’s start with a psychological illusion that underpins many magic tricks called amodal absence. Amodal absence is an illusion that prevents you from seeing, or even imagining, what you don’t expect to see. Vebjørn Ekroll, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, found thatContinue reading “Where protagonists are enabled to act“

First, a note in praise of vagueness. Why do many architects insist not only that works of architecture be generated with specific ideas in mind but that the public understand those ideas in equally specific ways? I am not questioning the value of the former. Nor do I want to imply that the public receptionContinue reading “The world, teeming with events, becomes setting“

One of the many reasons I am enamored of calling architecture “fiction” lies in the affinity between literary and architectural experiences of time and the degree to which authors and architects are responsible for framing or creating those experiences. The two types of creators, of course, differ in the forms that their creations ultimately take.Continue reading “Creates the impression of a plot, a series of events“

Before we can address how fiction-making animals’ encounters with works of composition make them protagonists by choreographing their movements, we must consider the autonomy of those animals. Architecture has a history of assuming a universal subject. ‘If I, the great (formalist, phenomenological, etc.) architect feel or understand a space in a particular way, all people (thatContinue reading “Choreographing their movements“