Architectural Design and Imagination Presented at the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ), Newcastle, NSW, 2010

Associate Professor Harry Margalit The University of New South Wales

Abstract Whereas it is a truism that architectural design requires imagination, the specific role that imagination plays is dealt with less clearly in writings on architectural design. Drawing on a selection of architectural theorists, this paper argues that there has been a tendency in recent years to divide architectural design into rationally verifiable parts, and those that are difficult to verify or evaluate rationally. Using philosophical categories of imagination, this paper argues that it contributes to design in specific ways due its unique characteristics. The paper then introduces Piagets notion of intelligence as the means by which imagination acts upon reality. Because this notion of intelligence is a unitary one, it emphasises the common aspects of rational and social validation of architectural values. Thus by stressing the interplay of imagination and intelligence in the act of designing, the paper seeks to arrive at a view of architectural design which bridges the divide between what Yehuda Kalay terms the quantifiable and non-quantifiable aspects of architecture.

Introduction Imagination, according to the philosopher Leslie Stevenson, can be categorised into 12 conceptions. In Stevensons formulations these range from the simplest form, wherein imagination is simply the ability to think of something not presently perceived, but spatio-temporally real, through to more complex formulations that engage with aesthetics.1 In this sense, design engages with many of his conceptions by definition, since it is intimately involved with imagining things that are not perceived but that also carry cultural and aesthetic meaning. The operations of design may deal with these on a daily basis, but architectural design theory has struggled with categories of imagination, especially the validation of the architectural imagination. Certain aspects of design, such as planning or responses to specific criteria, are dealt with more easily, but other areas within design which incorporate

aesthetics or cultural context have proven trickier to both theorise and to render instrumental in the sense of describing how to do them. This paper begins with a selective survey of architectural theorists to highlight these theoretical successes and failures. It will then introduce concepts from developmental psychology and philosophy to propose a more inclusive model of the relationship between imagination and design, in particular one which ties the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of design together.

Models of architectural designing In the 1960s, according to Geoffrey Broadbent, Few new buildings really pleased the users and the architectural profession as a whole was viewed with considerable suspicion by the society it was supposed to serve.2 For Broadbent, this provided the impetus to launch his extended inquiry into architectural design published as Design in Architecture. Broadbent adopted the emerging methods of quantifying aspects of human behaviour, and turned to the human sciences to see if they could clarify the process of design. He provided an extensive list of those sciences which might be useful to architecture, ranging from Anatomy to Sociology. But of particular interest here is his attempt to describe all aspects of architectural design in terms which render them capable of rationalisation. To his credit, he attacks the problem aware of previous efforts which have dismembered architectural design, such as the attempts at standardisation by Hannes Meyer in 1928: Thinking of building in functional and biological terms as giving shape to the living process leads logically to pure construction3 Indeed, Broadbent is at pains to include a survey of creative techniques as a distinct and thoughtful chapter. He also categorises architectural form as deriving from 4 methods: pragmatic, iconic, analogical and canonic. Of these, the use of analogy seems most appealing to Broadbent, given the latitude it allows in the invention of form by insisting only on the loose rules of analogical correspondence.

Thinking about imagination within the parameters he set, and acceptance of the necessary iterative shuttling inherent in architectural design, is a hallmark of Broadbents writing, and has aided the popularity of his work. Nonetheless it remains marked by the bifurcation of the design process into that which can draw from a scientific or quantifiable approach, such as space planning or environmental control (or indeed certain creative techniques), as opposed to the harder to pin down cultural content of an architectural work. Broadbent, perhaps not surprisingly given that he was concerned with a certain view of architecture that coalesced

around invention, seems little concerned with the cultural criteria through which the validation of the architectural imagination is effected.

The problem was thrown into sharp relief by work undertaken by John Gero and Thorsten Schnier and their collaborators at the University of Sydney. The team isolated specific graphic characteristics from the work of Piet Mondrian and Frank Lloyd Wright, using a technique modelled on genetic engineering. Having isolated these characteristics, they showed that these could be recombined to produce hybrid graphic patterns.4 The effect is convincing at first sight in that the particular contributions of each artist seem evident, but the starting premise remains the cultural value accorded to both Mondrian and Wright, a judgement whose workings are opaque, and of limited interest, to the researchers.

The interaction of architectural design and computing is more imaginatively surveyed by Yehuda Kalay in his Architectures New Media.5 Kalay divides design into four intertwined phases: problem analysis, solution synthesis, evaluation, communication.6 Of the synthesis phase, he states that

It is not a rational process, for despite Louis Sullivans famous proclamation that form follows function, no such causal relationship has ever been found (at least not in architecture) between form and function. Instead this is an intuitive step, in which the designer finds an arrangement of forms, materials, views, orientations, lighting conditions, and other elements that come together into a holistic ensemble, where the parts support one another and have an intrinsic structure of their own.7

This acceptance of the limited rationality of the design process is predicated on a view of the rational as conforming to a discernible causal chain, made possible by the view of design as essentially purposeful and hence capable of achieving well-defined goals.8 This enables Kalay to postulate that in order to overcome the limitations of problem analysis, which is a rational phase, designers rely on intuition and creativity. In the evaluation phase, Kalay divides its operations between evaluating quantifiable qualities and evaluating non-quantifiable qualities. This schism runs through all the attempts to describe the process of design cited above.

Imagination in Design If approached from the standpoint of imagination, then the schism is less evident. Following Stevenson, one can apply a number of the conceptions of imagination he indentifies to architectural design. For example:

2) The ability to think of whatever one acknowledges as possible in the spatio-temporal world 9) The ability to sensuously appreciate works of art or objects of natural beauty without classifying them under concepts or thinking of them as useful 10) The ability to create works of art that encourage such sensuous appreciation

To this could be added 5) The ability to entertain mental images, and 12) The ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of life.9 In discussion of the imagination, then, the difference between quantifiable and non-quantifiable qualities has less meaning because both can conform to common broad conceptions of imagination, such as expressed in 2) and 5). They serve to tell us something about the functioning of architectural design rather than the imagination. Even the introduction of terms such as rational and irrational is of limited use here, since the most rational design also involves the imagination insofar as it entails thinking of something not presently perceived, even if that is a mathematical relationship.

Imagination, when viewed in this way, is fundamental to design but is nonetheless described in a way that is too basic to shed much light on its operations. Its relationship to creativity is almost a truism, as the philosopher Berys Gaut notes, but this elision too invites closer examination. Gaut frames the question thus: if the creative imagination exists, can we say anything about how it works, perhaps revealing something about its characteristic forms or modes of operation?10

For Gaut creativity is not simply the production of something original, but it is also used as a value-term, which refers in people to a kind of excellence or virtue.11 He fleshes this out into the kind of making that involves flair in producing something which is original (saliently new) and which has considerable value. The introduction of the term flair here denotes intentionality, to distinguish this making from accidental or mechanically made uniqueness. Gaut distinguishes between two modes of creativity, one passive and one active. The former

exists anecdotally in moments where deep consideration of a problem yields a solution which seems to emanate from unconscious processes, as in the celebrated claim of Friedrich von Kekul, whose discovery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule came to him in dream of snakes swallowing their tails. The latter, which is more relevant to architectural design, involves the subject using their imagination as part of creating. For Gaut imagination is peculiarly suited to be the vehicle of active creativity...because of the kind of intentional state that it is.12 Here he contrasts imagination with belief and intention:

Imagination lacks the intrinsic ends of belief and intention. To imagine something is, as we have seen, not to be committed to its truth or falsity...Nor does imagination involve a commitment to performing an achievable action...one can try out different views and approaches by imagining them, without being committed either to the truth of the claims or to acting on ones imaginings.13

In answer to how the creative process works, Gaut turns to Immanuel Kants aesthetics. He posits the centrality of metaphor in prompting originality, although this still begs the question of the requirement of virtue, that is the creation needs to be exemplary. For Gaut metaphor-making is a paradigm of creative imagination, for in good metaphors an imaginative act brings together two otherwise disparate domains, and in so doing invites us to look at some object in an original yet apt fashion.14

The resonance with Broadbent is clear here. Although Gaut uses the term metaphor, and Broadbent analogy, both rely on associations which are neither strictly causal nor determined, and thus facilitate originality. Yet this begs the question of the functioning of metaphor and analogy themselves. They may fulfil the condition of being scientifically untestable, and hence non-quantifiable, but is their presence sufficient to constitute good design, and in what way do they lend virtue to design?

Put simply, the approach of Broadbent, for example, might consider an admirable piece of architecture in view of its verifiable integration of the categories of interest that it addresses planning, utility, even metaphor. But it is unlikely that these categories would be the subject of an evaluation by Manfredo Tafuri, for example, who would in all likelihood be more interested in the historical continuities and tensions that inform the work.15 Broadbents categories may not, in addition, be sufficient to describe which buildings will win national

architecture awards, since the criteria may be partly verifiable and partly a reflection of national aspirations in other words, part form and part content.

Although it may appear hard to bridge, in reality the divide between form and content is transcended in the act of designing, and one could argue that a good critique would also be able to incorporate both. It seems that the divide is exaggerated when we place academic demands on the act of analysis: the positivist verification of form and the historicist verification of content are grafted onto specific analytic traditions. And there are, of course, others which evaluate architecture from viewpoints such as the phenomenological or perceptual, to name just two.

Can criticism and validation of buildings deal with the form/content divide as easily as designers do? The process of architectural design employs the imagination in proposing and refining things not yet in existence. But the virtue buildings display must be generated on a broader field yet, one that orders their aptness or quality to enable us to say one building is better than another. This quality seems to elude poetics, analogy and metaphor in any prescriptive way, although we can say that one poetics is more evocative than another, or that one analogy is more apt than another.

What might this broader field look like? It would need to incorporate a unified model of thinking, one that allows for both the creative process involving imagination, as well as the critical thinking that allows for evaluation of the non-quantifiable aspects of design, to use Kalays term. Here I propose the concept of intelligence, or rather a particular (and perhaps unfashionable) view of this concept, as a defining structure of this higher-order field. The view of intelligence I am proposing to use derives from the stark pronouncement by Piaget that Intelligence is an adaptation.16

Intelligence The nature of intelligence continues to be problematic, despite decades of investigation into the workings of the mind. Grasping it, in the first instance, proves elusive despite its ubiquity. Jean Piaget sketches out a view which is notable for its scope: Only intelligence, capable of all its detours and reversals by action and by thought, tends towards an all-embracing equilibrium by aiming at the assimilation of the whole of reality and the accommodation to it of action17 The ambition of Piagets view is particularly useful if we pursue an idea of

intelligence that is not reductive, in the sense that it sells short the very attribute devoted to its uncovering. This ambition to understand but not to limit is analogous to the philosopher John Searles project to defend the profound nature of consciousness against a biological reductionism.

Searles project rests on the question: Howcan we make our conception of ourselves fully consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry and biology? For Searle, this problem or set of problems is the most important problem in philosophy, and indeed there is a sense in which, in our particular epoch, it is the only major problem in philosophy. 18 For Searle, attempts to explain consciousness in terms of neural relationships can only succeed if we accept that the quality of consciousness occurs at a higher level than the working of neural networks:

The two crucial relationships between consciousness and the brain, then, can be summarized as follows: lower level neuronal processes in the brain cause consciousness, and consciousness is simply a higher level feature of the system that is made up of the lower neuronal elements. There are many examples in nature where a higher feature of a system is caused by lower level elements of that system, even though the feature is a feature of the system made up of those elements. Think of the liquidity of water or the transparency of glass.19

The issue has been thrown into sharp relief by the rapid development of computers within an evolutionist paradigm. The power of computers enables researchers to set up simple evolutionary rules and watch them unfold through myriad iterations. This modelling can give rise to the confusion described by Searle:

The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both cases.20

The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for intelligence. The development of computational forms of intelligence, in a limited sense, should not be taken as intelligence per se (nor should computational emulations of design).

Intelligence and Design The act of designing, and the coherence of the designed object, seems to work against ideas of intelligence that are fragmented or multiple.21 The synthesizing work of designing admits to many manifestations of intelligence, but this is different to many intelligences. Jacob Bronowskis statement (cited by Kalay) that design is the epitome of intelligent behaviour opens another reading: that design is a manifestation of intelligence that reveals the structure of intelligence.22

This can be gleaned from some of the most basic formulations offered by Piaget of intelligence. In The Psychology of Intelligence he offers a slightly different phrasing to that cited above. He states that If intelligence is adaptationadaptation must be described as an equilibrium between the action of the organism on the environment and vice versa.23 Thus It is the most highly developed form of mental adaptation, that is to say, the indispensable instrument for interaction between the subject and the universe when the scope of this interaction goes beyond immediate and momentary contacts to achieve far-reaching and stable relations.24 Furthermore, we can say that behaviour becomes more intelligent as the pathways between the subject and the objects on which its acts cease to be simple and become progressively more complex.

The means of moving from immediate and momentary contacts to far reaching and stable relations, following Gaut, is the imagination. In this sense it is an operation of intelligence, a means by which the greater objective of these relations can be brought into existence even though they have no spatio-temporal existence when they are conceived. Piaget did not engage specifically with imagination understood in this way he associates it with childhood fantasy, a form of thinking which recedes in formal adult thinking. For Gaut, however, imagination is a key element in creativity, a highly valued form of adult thinking.

A key point here is that the forms of imagination that are pertinent, in fact crucial, to creativity aid accommodation to reality, that is rational thinking. We see no tension between rationality

and creativity in the sciences or in art, where creativity has the highest social value. The accommodation they foster is of the highest order: the difficulty in design theory has been in describing how this value is founded.

The dilemma outlined in the first part of the paper, that between the verifiable aspects of design laid out by Broadbent, for example, and the social imprimatur represented by acts such as architecture awards, are both aspects of the functioning of intelligence and subject to the proviso that intelligence recognises itself, that is its operations of verification work easily across both these spheres. Piaget casts even wider in stressing the unity of intelligence:

What common sense calls feelings and intelligence, regarding them as two opposed faculties, are simply behaviour relating to persons and behaviour affecting ideas or things; but in each of these forms of behaviour, the same affective and cognitive aspects of action emerge, aspects which are in fact always associated and in no way represent independent faculties. 25

The study of architectural history underlines this. Architectural history, or any historical analysis or proposition related to buildings, relies on a trans-historic identification, a recognition of intelligence concretized. The meaning or significance we ascribe to buildings in history relies entirely on an archaeology of intelligence in order that the results be intelligible. (This is a further argument against the idea of discrete intelligences: it seems doubtful that Howard Gardners seven intelligences, for instance, would be recognised as distinct at points distant in time from ours.)26

The problem of historical interpretation lies astride the hard-to-locate line of the historicity of intelligence versus its ubiquity. Clearly the flowering of intelligence, as evident in architecture, is profoundly of its time. Yet the contemporary observer is capable of resonances with the original makers, particularly within traces of a shared cultural tradition.27 Here we see the workings of imagination, understood in this sense as the capacity to project a set of relationships into a past on the basis of artefacts as evidence. And the product of this research, perhaps a book, will be subject to the scrutiny of a reader who may be more or less convinced, as the last stage of a series of intelligences reflecting upon each other. As Patrizia Lombardo wrote at a time of re-evaluation of architectural history:

History can be weak or strong: weak when it is a collection of references put together almost at random, strong when it is the understanding of the interferences and interventions between different levels of reality. History can be the whimsy of using ornaments that recall past styles, or the tragic knowledge of our condition in the world.28

Putting Imagination to Work Whereas there are many types of imagination, in mature thinking those that are key to creativity are not associated with simple fantasy. Mature imagination is well aware of its relationship to reality. That it is different to belief or intention gives it a particular responsibility because it can range so freely. In mature thinking the value of imagination, I propose, is established through recognition of its responsibility to reality, acting through creativity.

Creativity it is often victim to misconceptions. It is a highly structured activity, and subject to intricate mastery of a range of relationships and rules before it can flourish. James Kaufman and John Baer stress this:

The results from music and the visual arts have been consistent in demonstrating the important role of expertise in innovation. Even the renowned composers and visual artists whom we have examined required years of what can fairly be called practice, before they produced breakthrough works. Thus, the demands of expertise are seen even at those high levels of achievement. Furthermore, in many cases creative breakthroughs have been built on the content of expertise.29

The creativity of architecture is an extension of everyday acts of resolving dilemmas, aestheticizing ones surroundings and considering the sequence and success of how things are put together. Creative architecture is these elevated, within a context of expertise, but it does not involve a distinctive faculty that is either present or absent. The discussion of what constitutes a good piece of architecture is the recognition of both expertise and creativity in the sense of inflection, composition, organisation or balance, to list just a few criteria. This discussion is not limited because it revolves around the mutual recognition of intelligence, and as such the judgement is predicated on the assertion of the understanding and insight of those making the judgement. Thus an act of criticism is underpinned by the implied

intelligence of the critic as expressed in the critique an act that requires reference to the workings of critique as well as those of architecture.

In summary, then, the social value of creativity rests on the critical recognition of an imaginative act cognisant of its responsibility to establish far-reaching and stable relations between a subject and the universe.

Conclusion (or how is this useful to architectural judgement?) Writings on architectural design have a tendency to divide the act into two distinct parts those elements of design that can be described as discernible using terms and understanding drawn from the sciences, including those described as the human sciences, and those that rest more on a cultural understanding but which have a social value based on their creativity. The exercising of intelligence, it has been argued, encompasses both the judgements required to create a culturally validated piece of architecture are no less an expression of intelligence than those required to create a well functioning one.

The summary offered above is intended to take this observation one step further. If the duty of the critic (or a designer exercising their critical faculties) is to argue for the validity of a particular work as an expression of intelligence, then the argument is framed not as an evaluation based on different intelligences but in terms of historically honed modes of argument. The contribution of theory, for example, teaches how a work of architecture may be critiqued using terms and scales derived from the political realm, or the economic, to cite but two.

Critique cannot be reductive in the sense of limiting its terms as a matter of its operation. Intelligence manifests across all terms because it strives towards Piagets mature accommodation of action to reality in all possible ways. The mature imagination has the capacity to work with action and reality in a projective way, that is with materials and relationships not immediately evident or perceived. This allows the iterative play of relationships that is central to design, without committing the resources and effort required to make the design real until a set of relationships is established by the designer, and decisions made accordingly.

To return, then, to Kalays quantifiable and non-quantifiable aspects of architecture. The first yields to evaluations which are established through specific branches of knowledge whose internal relations appear stable, such as mathematics. The second yields to evaluations whose internal relations are historically complex. Each building is a particular manifestation of these, brought into a unity by the breadth of the designers imagination in projecting relationships and imaginatively assessing these. A good critic can delineate these, and compare them through an act of imagination to other possible relationships. If found wanting, then the building is of limited interest. If the building manifests relations of the highest order, then the architecture gathers the interest of the viewer in a moment of both social validation and the pleasure of intelligence recognising itself.

Endnotes 1 Leslie Stevenson, Twelve conceptions of imagination, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43 (2003), 238

259. 2 Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture, (London: David Fulton, 1988), xi. First published in

1973. 3 Meyer, cited in Broadbent, Design in Architecture.

4 See Thorsten Schnier and John S Gero, From Mondrian to Frank Lloyd Wright:Transforming

Evolving Representations at http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgero//publications/1998/98SchnierGeroACDM.pdf, accessed 6/04/10. 5 Yehuda Kalay, Architectures New Media: Principles, Theories and Methods of Computer-Aided

Design, (Cambridge, Mass., : MIT, 2004). 6 Kalay, Architectures New Media, 10.

7 Kalay, Architectures New Media, 11.

8 Kalay, Architectures New Media, 5.

9 Stevenson, Twelve conceptions of imagination, 238.

10 Berys Gaut, Creativity and imagination, in B. Gaut and P. Livingston (eds), The Creation of Art, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 149. 11

Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 149. 12

Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 159. 13

Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 160. 14 Gaut, Creativity and imagination, 165. 15

See, for example, Manfredo Tafuri, Introduction to Theories and History of Architecture in Joan Ockman (ed), Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 450-455. 16

Jean Piaget, The Origin of Intelligence in the Child, (London: Penguin, 1977), 15. 17

Jean Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1960), 9. 18

John Searle, Consciousness and Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. 19

Searle, Consciousness and Language, 9. 20

Searle, Consciousness and Language 16. 21

As expounded by Gardner, for example. See Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 22

Kalay, Architectures New Media, 1. 23

Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 7. 24

Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 7 25

Piaget, The Psychology of Intelligence, 6. 26

See Gardner, Frames of Mind.

27

On teasing out this key relationship in art scholarship, see Suzi Gablik, Progress in Art, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). She writes Piagets view is that cognitive structures are built up progressively from the historical as well as from the psychological point of view: historically speaking, these structures may be either invented or discovered by particular individuals, but they then become integrated into a single intellectual organism 33. 28

Patrizia Lombardo, Architecture as an Object of Thought in Marco Diani and Catherine Ingraham (eds), Restructuring Architectural Theory, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 81. 29

James C. Kaufman and John Baer, Creativity and Reason in Cognitive Development, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 29.