At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.
– Oscar
Wilde, De Profundis
DEFINITION We are delighted, but we are not always delighted. We are furious, but we are not always furious. We are mournful, but we are not always mournful. We call it emotion. She is delighted more often over a wide range of circumstances than others. He is furious more often over a wide range of circumstances than others. They are mournful more often over a wide range of circumstances than others. We call it personality. Thus, personality is a continuum along which individuals vary. [1]
PERTURBATION [2] Personality is partly a question of nature and nurture. On one hand, we are born to be who we are. Genetics take control. On the other hand, nature select genes. We struggle in variation.
[1] Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are, OUP Oxford, 2007-12-01 [2]Perturbation: an alteration of the function of a psychological system, induced by external or internal mechanisms. 3
MEASUREMENT Art is spontaneous, physics is rigid. Psychology is subtle, internal, something in between. However, scientists always have the desire in measuring personality, the desire for category with accuracy. There are at least one thousand terms to describe people’s characters. Some of them are synonyms and some of them are correlative. Most scientists reach a consensus on the Big Five personality traits, also known as the five factor model (FFM) developed by American psychologist Lewis R. Goldberg in 1990. It contains five dimensions in describing personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Everyone has all of the five factors, just as everyone has a height and a weight. Where we differ is the magnitude of the height and the weight, or the score along each of the five dimensions. The architecture of traits is the same in all of us, and only the level of each differ.
ARCHITECTURE TYPOLOGY Everyone sees himself/herself as the most unique individual, just like anyone else. They live in the apartment with the same height of ceiling, the same white walls, even the same Ikea furniture. What if a house has a personality? 4
CONTENT EXTRAVERSION OUTGOING+ ALOOF-
NEUROTICISM ANXIOUS+ EVEN-TEMPERED-
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS ORGANIZED+ IMPULSIVE-
AGREEABLENESS TRUSTING+ HOSTILE-
OPENNESS IMAGINATIVE+ PRACTICAL-
6
OUTGOING She organizes a party every week, for a birthday or for nothing. Talkative, she is always the centre of attention. She told her friend that she took a French course simply because French men are attractive. Besides being a party animal, she is also a workaholic. She loves travel and hiking.
+EXTRAVERSION+
Lower-case letters are simply insufficient to describe her response to her hiking experiences: “I LOVE to take deep breathe for the fresh air!�
9
OUTGOING Her sculptural, vertical house seeks attention. Each room has huge opening.She embraces sunshine from every angle. There is no fixed furniture in her house. She is so energetic that she barely needs a bed.
+EXTRAVERSION+
A climbing wall and steep ladders form her circulation system.
10
ALOOF He is not excited when gets a job and not sad when loses it. He has a stable work, not so wellpaid, but not so exhausted as well. He is deeply short-sighted because he reads too much. Sometimes he watches his goldfishes swimming for hours.
-EXTRAVERSION-
Gardening is his routine on weekend.
13
ALOOF He lives by himself in a unit with an extra-narrow entrance. He cooks in order to stay at home all day. His bookshelves are his walls. The skylight is good for his eyes. He can read on his cozy sofa, in bed, in his bathtub, or on his toilet.
-EXTRAVERSION-
The exterior is clad in mirror so that people won’t notice the building.
14
ANXIOUS She weeps at every sad movie. She visits her doctors more than others and rates her health as worse. She is quick to detect an angry face. She can’t eat and sleep and loses weight rapidly for the littlest thing. She blames herself a lot and thinks no one loves her. She takes a series of different antidepressants. She has suicidal thoughts every now and then.
+NEUROTICISM+
Sometimes she mishears “die” for “dye”, or “pain” for “pane”.
17
ANXIOUS She lives underground. There are long stairs that take her down to her room. Her entrance has its own stair, separate from a public one. She always cooks for herself in case anyone poisons her. Yet she never uses fire to cook.
+NEUROTICISM+
She takes showers instead of baths to avoid drowning.
18
EVEN-TEMPERED He listens more than he talks. When bad things happen, he takes it easy and look at the bright side. He doesn’t expect too much and thus is not easily surprised. He sleeps soundly even under great pressure.
-NEUROTICISM-
He knows that he is imperfect, and he embraces it.
21
EVEN-TEMPERED He has a temple-like place for contemplation. The roof collects rain to water the lotuses inside. There are no walls except the raindrop curtain. No air conditioner, no electricity. He prefers natural light and a breeze.
-NEUROTICISM-
He sleeps when the sun sets.
22
ORGANIZED She always goes to sleep unvaryingly at 10:37 p.m. She reads thirty pages before bed every day. She is punctual for every event. She always crosses the road with the light. She is unable to throw anything away. If she takes time to do nothing, she feels wasteful and lazy. She is highly valued at work because of her attention to detail.
+CONSCIENTIOUSNESS+
She is, however, also the least productive worker in the office.
25
ORGANIZED Her house is rigidly symmetrical. Each room has exactly the same space.Her neighbours have the identical layout. A centeral spiral stair case takes them up. The furniture is made of either concrete or marble. It is unmovable.
+CONSCIENTIOUSNESS+
No windows at all. She prefers a clock rather than sunshine to wake her up.
26
IMPULSIVE He starts things right before the deadline. But eventually he gets through whatever academic and professional challenges he meets. He says to himself “this is my last cigarette� ten times a day. He has several expired gym cards.
-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS-
He never makes plans for travel.
29
IMPULSIVE Randomly stacked geometries form his house. He sleeps in a futuristic egg supported by oblique columns. The directions of the columns follow no rules. He owns an outdoor swimming pool. And he builds himself a diving platform. Sometimes he gets fish in his pool.
-CONSCIENTIOUSNESS-
But they never last more than one week.
30
TRUSTING She gives blood, donates to charity. She returns lost wallets, gives directions to strangers in the street. She is slow to anger and quick to forgive.
+AGREEABLENESS+
She adopts two stray dogs, three stray cats and leaves food on the balcony for birds.
33
TRUSTING Her house looks soft and secure with no sharp angles. She shares her kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom with another. They have a hammock on the roof.
+AGREEABLENESS+
Sunlight filters through the house.
34
HOSTILE He feels that he is more important than everyone else. He does not care to help people. He has no desire to improve on interpersonal relationships. He is not good at decoding the mental states underlying the words.
-AGREEABLENESS-
He finds human company rather boring most of the time and prefers to be on his own, so that he has the freedom to let his thoughts go the way he wants them to.
37
HOSTILE His house has no fixed room or furniture. Ladders thrust vertically and horizontally. The house contains various bizarre geometries.
-AGREEABLENESS-
The interior surfaces are padded so he can punch everything.
38
IMAGINATIVE He loves participating in artistic and cultural activities of all kinds-reading, galleries, theatre and music. He has tried out many different jobs, philosophies, and lifestyles. He challenges social norms. He is on a continual quest for self-expression.
+OPENNESS+
He intends to associate many remote domains, potentially leading to bizarre, improbable beliefs of no practical use.
41
IMAGINATIVE His house seems upside down. He sleeps on the pitched “roof”. He likes to picnic on the flat roof on top.
+OPENNESS+
He exposes his bathroom with a huge, round window.
42
PRACTICAL She takes the same coffee every day. Her schedule is detailed to minute. She enjoys working with numbers. She never steps out her country.
-OPENNESS-
She is resistant to the era of information explosion.
45
PRACTICAL Her cabin is tiny but efficient. She has an enclosed bathroom. She has a nice kitchen with movable dining table. Her living room and studio have huge windows.
-OPENNESS-
All of these are meticulously arranged within thirty square metres.
“TYPE” AS MODEL She is delighted more often than others. He is furious more often than others. We call it Typicality. We are delighted more often than others. They are furious more often than others. We call it “type”. Type is collective delight or fury with varied level. The type developed according to both needs and aspirations to beauty; a particular type was associated with a form and a way of life, although its specific shape varied widely from society to society. [2]
[2] Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1984
BIBLIOGRAPHY Lewis R.Goldberg, The Structure of Phenotypic Personality Traits, American Psychologist, Vol 48(1), 1993, 26-34 Costa, P.T. Jr. & McCrae, R.R. Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) manual, Psychological Assessment Resources, 1992. Thomas A. Widiger,The Oxford Handbook of The Five Factor Model, New York:Oxford University Press, 2017. Daniel Nettle, Personality: What makes you the way you are, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, MIT Press, 1984. Adam Crabtree, Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality, Collins Publishers, 1985 Gerald Matthews;Ian J. Deary; Martha C. Whiteman, Personality Traits, Cambridge University Press, 2003. DeYoung, Colin G.,Quilty, Lena C.,Peterson, Jordan B. "Between facets and domain: 10 aspects of the Big Five". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 93(5), Nov 2007, 880-896 Thomas A. Widiger, Paul T. Costa, Jr. Personality Disorders and the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, c2002.