The uncanny way of architecture

the uncanny way of architecture academic researc vs design intelligence

Itzik Elhadif

School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

Every architectural school must periodically question itself and review what it has inherited from previous generations by asking the following questions: What is architecture? What is its significance? How should it be taught? How should it be made? How are topics chosen, and why is one topic chosen over another? The question of what is essential and what is secondary in the curriculum is hardly ever concerned with purely technical matters. It often arises from significant changes in the worlds of theory and practice, relating not only to the necessity of a certain topic but also to preparing students for reality. If you ask the faculty members – especially those in administrative positions – about certain types of academic content, they will most likely say they are essential and that removing them would be unthinkable. Sometimes we do things simply because we are used to doing them, because they have become habit or, perhaps, because they create a sense of continuity with the past. The question is not just what the topics are and in what measure each should be taught, but also what the relations between theory, practice and research should be, and to what degree they prepare us for technological and cultural changes. Still, to me, the methods and tools of the creative act that integrate existing practical knowledge and research remain something of a puzzle. The obvious fact is that the lecturers want their students to study and appreciate architecture, its inherent applicability, its intellectual properties and the beauty it embodies.

Practical Skills Versus the Discovery of New Knowledge: Linear Versus “Open Source” Process

An architecture student acquires theoretical knowledge as well as professional skills. Most schools practice more or less the same linear studio stages even if the order and combination of each year is different. The first year constitutes the fundamentals, the basics of design practice and thinking. The second year covers the first stages of planning and designing. The third year usually includes more complex problems, such as urban scale or the demands of multi-layered

Figure 1 John Hejduk “Wall House” (1973) originally designed by John Hejduk in the 1970s. Build in 2001 in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands.

thinking. The fourth year integrates the previous phases and culminates in the final project. Though summarized somewhat superficially, this is the normal progression. Each stage consists of the development and acquisition of existing professional knowledge, skills and conventions and the attainment of new forms of knowledge, usually understood as research. It seems

Figure 2 elevation and plan of “The House without Rooms” by Raimund Abraham (1971)

that there is a difference between the discourse of architecture as providing solutions or addressing problems and a more integrative, though not necessarily Aristotelian, way of thinking. In other words, it is the difference between solving a problem and reformulating it into a new way of thinking.

In some instances, architecture is perceived as a broader field, as a means of examining things and not just constructing them. There are, for example, John Hejduk’s (Hejduk, Kellner, Steketee, 2007) fascination with the genesis of symbols and his reference to “the house” in the wall house (1968/1973) (Fig. 1) or Raimund Abraham’s (Ambrham, 1996) spatial concepts of dwelling in his house without rooms (1996) (Fig. 2). Quite a few architects inquire into space, walls, shelter, dwelling, light and other aspects of architecture. In the course of their studies students encounter instructors and new bodies of knowledge at two main levels: the first is the level of knowledge and experience of the instructor, acquired through research and practice. The instructor is perceived as an expert advisor through which students acquire existing knowledge. This is first order knowledge: Knowlege —> Instructor Research —> Student Second order knowledge is the result of collaborative work between the instructor and the student in the context of the studio, which leads to the creation of new knowledge through design research:

New Knowledge = Instructor Research + Student Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch (1979) distinguish between these two types of new knowledge. They discuss the phenomenon of duration, the process of changing human actions, how change occurs and how one can initiate and execute it. They distinguish between spontaneous processes, first order change processes and second order change processes. The ‘first order’, which seems to be intended mainly for the student, is new knowledge within a given framework. The new knowledge of the “second order” originates from outside a given framework, intended for the student and instructor alike. Though certainly every good project involves ‘thinking outside the box’, the curriculum is built on a scale that varies between the acquisition of recognized knowledge, professional skills and mediation (all of the first order) and reflections about them (of the second order). The dominance of each of the orders is evident at the end of the student’s process of architectural training. The less work on skills, the more room remains for new knowledge, and vice versa. In today’s generation the question remains, to what extent does the critical discourse practiced in the studio become inherent in the student’s practice? Or, in the words of Brunelleschi, to what extent can a person enter the world of architecture “with his own voice”? Quite a few students learn that on an academic level architecture is limited to arguments based mostly on an arbitrary authority – i.e. the lecturers – and not necessarily applicable to life outside the studio. During conversations with instructors I sometimes hear «I am not a theoretician but a practitioner». This

betrays the prejudice that if you engage in theory your creativity is inferior and vice versa. Needless to say, it would be ideal to integrate the two. One can always practice mindless art or artless theory, and one should beware of both. Moreover, as one thinks about methodology and studio work, one wonders if there might be a way to replace the linear curriculum with a set of changing problems posed by a mentor or adviser. These studies, as well as the studio work, can be an ‘open source’ process, a certain democratization of information. Rather than organizing architectural study in a linear hierarchy of problems of size and complexity, each with particular and critical fields of interest, architecture could become a means of creation and existence. It is, if you will, thinking of architecture as an array of issues conceptualized by and open to communication with other intellectual fields. Alternately, it may be described as a less centralized system that deals with changes and the creation of new, second order knowledge. By operating outside a given framework from the outset, the student finds his or her own way of approaching the world of meaning in architecture.

Interaction Between Academia and Practice and the Problematic of Defining the Act of Creation

Meaningful professional dialog is necessary in our time, characterized as it is by growing social conflict and uncertainty. A question worth asking is: What kinds of interaction exist between academia and practice? Since the nature of practice is usually the realization of ideas and existing methodologies, I would like to suggest that, despite the prevailing view, the role of the academia – beyond training and imparting skills – is to provoke innovative research approaches, theoretical issues and concepts, even if they cannot be directly translated into concrete results (previously referred to as the second order). Academia is there to open doors of understanding and provide tools for asking challenging questions, which in the long term may support practice. In this manner, however, part of the learning activity is not directly purposeful, since it undermines the contemporary neoliberal rationale that research should lean toward the practical. While in many other fields research is conducted in a lab – a bubble that exists trans-nationally, closed and inaccessible to anyone who is not an expert – in architecture, our ‘lab’ is the studio. Our language is not ‘scientific’, and it is theoretically available to everyone. More importantly, the role we presume to play is not just to reveal new information but also to create a discourse and product with value to society as a whole. Since we question cultural and spatial baggage and perceptions of reality, we reflect, through material production, a change to cultural aspirations. I argue that architectural research— and for that matter humanistic and social scientific research —is as valid as research in the natural sciences. Even if architectural research in particular moves

Fig.3: Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1895) Fig. 4: This particular photo of Pollock is one of the more widely used.

Namuth’s photos given by far the best view of Pollock’s techniques, which are covered in the article (photo by H. Namuth)

slowly and, therefore, is perceived to lack purpose in the practical, classic sense, it is a form of research that asks not only how to create a place but also how to create meaning, how to establish space and reality by means that cannot necessarily be explained by pure logic or scientific rules. Unlike other types of research, a characteristic of research in architecture is the acceptance of a certain degree of subjectivity as a tool for measurement and critical analysis. Research in the creative fields usually aims to examine things in order to accumulate knowledge based on practice and on decision-making. During the creative process a combination of tools and content is ‘selected’ from a range of infinite possibilities (∞ = 1). The presentation and documentation of these selections at every stage, alongside the insights obtained and applied, constitute state-of-the-art research. Since we often put more emphasis on the final response to a research question than on the process that led to it, we are usually inconsistent about that process. I want to go back to the meaning of ‘selection’. Some argue that intuition can be used as a method of selection and recognition of a wide and often unexpected range of modules (Topal, 2006). For example, Rafael Moneo in his essay on Typology (Moneo,1978) argues that composition is the main mechanism for thinking and decision-making in the spatial arena.

Based on increased recognition of the limitations of the methodological tools at our disposal, I believe that what we do is produce a hybrid of positivist and interpretive worldviews. This constitutes an interim mediation between diagrams and intuition, or what I call a sort of ‘learned intuition.’ Alternately, we may perform a decision-making process that aims to be completely rational. In historical examples, this would be akin to the Italian rationalists or the extreme German functionalists. A relatively more recent case is Joshua Ramus’s description of OMA’s design process for the Seattle Central Library (Ramus, 2007). He describes the process as rational to the extreme, even bordering on the absurd: a development process that had no clearly stamped author. It appears that the purer this method is, the more easily it could be categorized as a classical research methodology. However, in creative work the process maybe more varied. This may be illustrated by comparing one of Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire paintings (Fig. 3) to Jackson Pollock’s explorations of color fields (Fig. 4). Cézanne paints the same object over and over again (about 80 times) in order to refine and test the method. Pollock completes a piece of work in one fell swoop evoking an automated act of creation. In the act of creation in general − and architectural creation in particular − there is from the Latin intuir, meaning knowledge from within. Intuition was generally avoided by self-respecting scientists, who feared accusations of engaging in new age speculation rather than serious science. However, contemporary cognitive scientists consider intuition as a set of non-conscious cognitive and affective processes. The outcome of these processes is often difficult to articulate and is not based on deliberate thinking. But it is nevertheless real and (sometimes) effective (Pigliucci,2012). If the human mind is compared to a lake into which different streams flow, some of these streams originate from internal springs but most of them come from external sources. The lake is formed from their convergence in a delicate balance of creativity. Learned intuition is in an intermediate state and most closely describes how we operate. This type of intuition comes from habit and experience. In fact, it comes from insight based on information, even if it is not always possible to follow the mental process. As Pascal said «The heart has its reasons which reason knows not ». Learned intuition is situated in the intermediate area of different world perceptions. In Eye and Mind(Maurick, 1964), Merleau-Ponty looks into an intermediate area between the sensory and the intellectual, between the inside and the outside, between the subjective and the objective. In other words, learned intuition originates in an uncanny place that is difficult to grasp with certainty. This intermediate area is a concrete field, Merleau-Ponty argues, although it is invisible to the eye. It is a place in which wonder occurs, turning the world into something meaningful and substantial. It is where one must recognize

Architectural Thought

Architectural Practice Architectural Research Practice

Teaching Thought

Research

Architectural Teaching

Arrow scheme 1 and arrow scheme 2.

that the occult is an integral part of the unconcealed − the ‘visible of the invisible’, if you will. A work of architecture contains countless fields of information that function simultaneously, the boundaries and the knowledge they contain merge into one another. It is reminiscent of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system for training actors in which one does not play a character but is the character. The actor must therefore ask «What does the character want to be?» This is someThoughtPractice what similar to Louis Kahn’s question to a brick: “What do you want, brick?” Another example of merging may be seen in the in Parade written by Jean Cocteau, composed by Erik Satie and with costume and scenery design by Pablo Picasso. Parade is not exclusively theatre, painting or muResearchTeaching sic. It is rather a hybrid of all three. Similarly, architecture is a performance composed of many fields, hence the difficulty in measuring it coherently. Here we may recall another quote from Kahn, “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable”(Saul-Wurmann, 1986). I understand architectural research as the ability to engage in methodical reflection on the world. It is a way to revisit the past, while understanding the intuitive, intellectual, aesthetic and social mechanisms that activate us. Attempting to demonstrate this notion structurally, I would say that the core of architectural action takes place between architectural thinking and teaching, on the one hand, and practice and research, on the other (arrow scheme 1). These reciprocal relationships can be understood through an even more complex three-dimensional form. The phenomenon of architectural action is located in the space between two rings, one inside the other (arrow scheme 2).

Fig. 1 Wall House 2, originally designed by John Hejduk in the 1970s. Build in 2001 in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. (Author: Wenkbrauwalbatros) Fig. 2 Elevation and plan of The House without Rooms by Raimund Abraham (1971). Source: Architectural Design Unit at Greenwich University run by Caroline Rabourdin and Luke Olsen Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (ca. 1887), Courtauld Institute of Art collection,National Gallery of Art source Fig. 4 This particular photo by Namuth is one of the more widely used Namuth’s photos of Pollock given by far the best view of Pollock’s techniques, which are covered in the article