The Sensible, The Creative. Towards a better Urbanism. Gustavo Wierman (4413792), Axel Buysschaert (1352385)
ABSTRACT This paper discussed the importance of creativity, drawings and sensitivity in the urban design process. By connecting works by a handful of authors and artists, ranging from Christopher Alexander to Auguste Rodin, we made an attempt to address the issue of complexity not only of the city but also of human kind more generally. The aim was to better understand the intangible part of the city, the realm where we believe the most complex elements live, which are extremely difficult to address in the design phase, and that make the city a more interesting and stimulating place for human relations, closer to the profile of the "semilattice" addressed in this work. We concluded that this complexity is impossible for designers to fully understand and that an approach should be made to give the inhabitants and users of the city the chance to fill in the missing gaps with their own sensibility and imagination. Keywords: Semilattice, Sensibility, Emotions, Sketching, Inner world, Participative process, Urbanism.
INTRODUCTION Semilattice In Christopher Alexander’s “A City is not a tree” the author describes an experiment involving remembering four objects and then ordering them in your mind. He states that every individual will have a specific way of grouping these objects, and this is the only way a person can group them at a time. Furthermore, he points out that it is impossible to think of all the different possible arrangements at the same time, and this is one of the reasons why designers tend to plan cities in the form of a “tree”, since they cannot achieve the complexity of the “semilattice” in a single mental act. (Alexander, 1965) In order to explain this, further information has to be given about these two terms; how they interact with each other and what their position is within the design. The definition of these two terms stems from the same article by Alexander. The paper states that: “The semilattice axiom goes like this: A collection of sets forms a semilattice if and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, the set of elements common to both also belongs in the collection. … The tree axiom states: A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection either one is wholly contained in the other, or wholly disjoint.” (Alexander, 1965) Alexander exemplifies the workings of a semilattice by describing the system in the corner of Hearst and Euclid streets in Berkeley. He talks about the interactions of different elements that work together on different levels. These elements consist of everything from a drugstore, to people, to the electric impulses in the traffic light. When these elements work together and overlap each other, creating infinite possibilities of arrangements, the complexity of a semilattice is achieved. This
complexity, described by Alexander, can also be perceived in the drawings of the famous American cartoonist, Will Eisner. Eisner achieves this complexity by giving life to the changing elements, the people, the smells, the sounds, within an unchangeable receptacle, the city. In the meanwhile, in the academic world, emotions are frowned upon. Or as described by Cotrell: “However, many people who have the potential to develop more effective critical thinking can be prevented from doing so for a variety of reasons apart from a lack of ability. In particular, personal and emotional, or ‘affective’, reasons can create barriers.” (Cottrell, 2005) Ruben Alves, in his book “Variações sobre o prazer” deeply criticizes this characteristic of the academic world, claiming that intuition is not accepted because we cannot logically trace its origins. “The ‘digression’ to which I am surrendering myself is prohibited in a knowledge (academic) text. Knowledge texts prohibit the authors to surrender to confessions about the ways and waywardness of their thoughts before reaching their destination of knowledge. What is required from a knowledge text is that the author has to make a thorough sterilization of their materials. All that does not concern the straight path, which leads to the conclusion of the initial problem, should go to the trash. Thus, the unsuccessful experiences, mistaken assumptions and errors go to the waste bin of oblivion. It is as if they never happened.”(Alves, 2011) Still there are also people that advocate the use of personal drawings. In the paper by Barbara Tversky: On Abstraction and Ambiguity, she explains that maps are a prototypic example of visualizing external spaces for people to read. They integrate and abstract the most important pieces of information in a view from above for people to use in different situations. But she also claims that this clarity is not always a wanted effect. She notes that the details provided by these maps, for example CAD drawings, are too precise and lock in decisions that are not yet ready to be made. She then continues to explain that the ambiguous nature of sketches are, because of what they are, much easier to think about. Finally she states that sketching provides the room for innovative and thus also creative thinking because they provide a way to put your thoughts somewhere else to free up the mind for other considerations, these drawings help adding a critical mindset because you can re-draw them over and over in different ways. (Tversky, 2015) Research Question From that, we wonder if the city is too complex and unachievable for the critical thinking and academic research in urbanism without considering the subjective and intangible (sensible). This leads us to our research question: How can we incorporate several mental acts, instead of just one, to create a thinking mechanism that can process such complexity? We think that drawing and the abstraction within those drawings are the key to unlocking the potential of subjectivity and emotion within creativity, because they allow the designer to reflect critically on very specific elements. We think it is not possible to achieve this level of complexity on our own, and the only way to get close to this level is to allow for more participatory processes in the design.
Examples In order to further explain the statement presented in this paper, we have several examples to provide in which the semilattice principle is well represented in a way that normal mapping would not be able too. The first example presented will be from Will Eisner, who in 1978 popularized the term Graphic Novel and changed the way comics at that time were drawn. In this graphic novel A contract with God he draws the life of his main protagonist describing the events unfolding in his life (Eisner, 2006). The city and the street in which the story takes place takes is a crucial part of the scene. In order to properly set the stage for the drama, a very convincing city life is needed in order to get a convincing story and conveying the emotions within. He overlays the different emotions and objects and mixes them in a way that can be compared to the principle of a semilattice. It overlaps the physical and the emotional much like a well-designed space brings up emotions to the people in that space. In his final graduation project entitled TamanduateĂ: Utopia de um rio urbano (utopia of an urban river), Danilo Zamboni designs his utopian view of an urban river and its surroundings. Using expressive drawings, he can translate not only the objective purposes of the project but also the daily life, and small details that are more related to the impalpable and sensible aspects of the city. One is really drawn into the picture, smelling the trees, feeling the breeze in your face, hearing the noises of the people and the water as they pass by. All this elements have a huge intrinsic value that are very hard to grasp objectively.(Zamboni, 2010) Both Zamboni’s and Eisner’s drawings are great examples for they transmit the complexity and subjectivity of the cities under discussion in this paper. In addition to the concrete elements of the city, the smells, the sounds and human relations overflow the paper, bringing the viewers into the image and allowing them to create their own experience, complex and unique in themselves.
Fig. 1. Rhythm (2006)
Fig. 2. Downtown Smells (2006)
Fig. 3. Uptown Smells (2006)
Fig. 4. Example of imaging used in Zamboni’s project (2010)
Fig. 5. Example of imaging used in Zamboni’s project (2010)
The same relation between object and observer happens in Auguste Rodin’s (genius French sculptor) unfinished statues, such as his torsos or The Walking Man that allow the observer to create their own forms and stories. When questioned about this works, Rodin said that undoubtedly, the intertwining of The Kiss is very beautiful. However, he did not find anything in this group. It is a topic discussed with frequency, according to the scholastic tradition: a complete subject in itself and artificially isolated from the world around it; It is a bibelot carved according to the usual formula and retaining the attention strictly on the two characters, instead of opening wide horizons to reverie. Meanwhile, in The Walking Man, Bourdelle describes Rodin’s creative process: “This body’s head? This concern does not exist! In my work, the head is everywhere: make all of your pieces alive! If you know where the life of the forms is, thinking will create all the missing pieces.” (Rodin et al., 2001) Curiously enough, Rodin aspired to receive academic recognition of his work, but was never accepted by the main school of fine arts in Paris.
Fig. 6. The Walking Man by Auguste Rodin (1907)
It is possible to resume the previous examples by quoting Ruben Alves, when he says that the importance of a conversation lies on the thoughts that it brings not in an achieved conclusion. He says: “A psychoanalysis session is a conversation and not a lecture. If there is something forbidden in a knowledge (academic) text is the suspension points. The suspension points indicate that the walk has not reach its end. They show a path to be followed. The suspension points are what give life to a conversation: they are the permission and the invitation for the other to state their thoughts.” (Alves, 2011) Emotions as tools to draw Through drawing and creativity, we will be able to visualize complexity better within a new dimension of urban planning. Where every emotion, sound, taste, views and smells are together at one point of time and that drawing a situation for a plan uses a selection from that single collection which shows the human aspect within the translation of the city design by a designer. Stimuli To further argument this idea we can look at Goldschmidt’s paper Ubiquitous Serendipity: Potential Visual Design Stimuli are Everywhere: in this text it is explained how there are two main factors in creative processes, and especially in designing with stimuli. How the brain controls memories and the preparedness of the designer. Memories cannot be fully controlled, they will focus and unfocus based on the stimulations they receive. The preparedness is based on the expertise of the designer in the field of which he or she is designing or based on the visual literacy the designer has and which he can access whenever he wants. Finally she says that a heightened sensitivity to new stimuli as they show up is incredibly important to the designers (Goldschmidt, 2015). This means that a designer trained and experienced has the possibility to tap into the resources at will to use and alter as he or she sees needed in order to fulfill the design requirements. Critical Thinking However, how does this fit into critical thinking principles, where emotional and subjectivity are frowned upon? In Critical thinking skills: developing effective analysis and argument by Cottrell it’s stated that critical thinking is an analytical and evaluative skill that uses mental processes and that people’s critical thinking skills can be held back by personal and emotional reasons (Cottrell, 2005). The link can be made that using subjectivity and emotional skills to go from a tree model to a semilattice model would be impossible because of these affective reasons creating barriers that block the process as a whole. This paper wants to argue against this way of thinking and proposes that the sketch and therefore personal and emotional reasoning is in fact crucial in this process. It provides a visual representation of these feelings, making them explicit for the viewer and the artist and becoming a method to critical thinking, by supplying arguments and questioning other decision within the understandable.
CONCLUSION Internal world When we look at all the information from the sources above, a link can be made to answer the research question. An argument has been made which claims that a trained designer has a mental library consisting of all the stimuli they have gathered in their lives. They are trained to absorb more and process more than others and therefore have better access to this mental library as well. In order to access this library, emotions and subjectivity play a crucial role because they link to specific points in the library system. An important tool to convey these emotions and visual images to other people is through sketches for both the designer and the person reading the image. For the designer it is a tool to reaccess the mental library through emotions and for the reader it is to see the subjectivity and the images accessed by the designer. It works as an extra stepping-stone to prevent the ambiguity of emotion when presented directly without any extra aid, it makes the message explicit. The strength of a good sketch is also that it conveys information that can be layered; it can visualize the workings of a semilattice by overlaying different mental actions within one image. These images can show emotion, subjectivity, physical attributes and other qualities you would not get from the abstraction of a map. We must use this sensible part (subjective, metaphysical) together with the theoretical and academic part. Creativity adds the sensible with the knowledge and transforms it into a more complex creation – as Kant said: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind� (Kant and Guyer, 1998). The difficulty lies in the fact that the semilattice is not achieved in a single mental act so, to approach it, one needs to add thought and sensibility, and the problem is that sensitivity opens, expands the mind, and it is intrinsic to man the fear of infinitude (unconscious) and chaos. Therefore, in the design process, it is important to try to create a place that favors relation, and do it in a way that subjectivity is stimulated for all the senses - smell, temperature, sounds and intangible things (sensible). It creates an atmosphere and the observers have space to create their own experience - creating space. These interactions are essential for human existence and must be part of the planning process, for that is what gives soul to the place; the thing itself (the city) is dead. Even when sensibility and subjectivity are taken into consideration, the far too great level of complexity in the semilattice is still unachievable in the design process, the Urbanist has to deal with frustration and the intrinsic fear of chaos and infinitude (unconscious) and be able to leave space for others to complete the design. By using sensibility and tools such as participatory processes, more design tools can be created with these principles. Plans and designs will be much more like an Eisner drawing, the suspension points of Alves or a Rodin torso statue, unfinished, where inhabitants, in a much more democratic way, are invited to dive in, to create their own history.
LITERATURE ALEXANDER, C. A city is not a tree. Architectural forum, 1965. 58-62. ALVES, R. A. 2011. Variações sobre o prazer: Santo Agostinho, Nietzsche, Marx e Babette, Planeta. COTTRELL, S. 2005. Critical thinking skills: Developing effective analysis and argument, Palgrave Macmillan Basingstoke. EISNER, W. 2006. A contract with God, WW Norton & Company. GOLDSCHMIDT, G. 2015. Ubiquitous serendipity: Potential visual design stimuli are everywhere. Studying Visual and Spatial Reasoning for Design Creativity. Springer. KANT, I. & GUYER, P. 1998. Critique of pure reason, Cambridge University Press. RODIN, A., ARAÚJO, E., VILAIN, J., NORMAND-ROMAIN, A. L., JUDRIN, C., PINET, H. & ESTADO, S. P. P. D. 2001. Auguste Rodin, A Porta do inferno: exposição realizada na Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, de 7 de outubro a 9 de dezembro de 2001, Pinacoteca. TVERSKY, B. 2015. On abstraction and ambiguity. Studying Visual and Spatial Reasoning for Design Creativity. Springer. ZAMBONI, D. 2010. Tamanduateí - Utopia de um rio urbano. Final Graduation Project, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP).
ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. EISNER, W. 2006. In: Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City, WW Norton & Company. p. 81
Figure 2. EISNER, W. 2006. In: Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City, WW Norton & Company. p. 272 Figure 3. EISNER, W. 2006. In: Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City, WW Norton & Company. p. 273
Figure 4. ZAMBONI, D. 2010. in: Tamanduateí - Utopia de um rio urbano. Final Graduation Project, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP). p. 124-125
Figure 5. ZAMBONI, D. 2010. In: Tamanduateí - Utopia de um rio urbano. Final Graduation Project, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAUUSP). p. 132-133
Figure 6. Rodin, A. The Walking Man (1907) At: http://www.museerodin.fr/en/collections/sculptures/walking-man (Accessed on 23/06/2015)