Concepts as tools

March 12th, 2009 § 1

 

Often we hear the terms, designer or architect, not only referring to the traditional senses of those terms…individuals working in their respective fields of design and architecture…but as the “designer of a bill” or “architect of the treaty.” These usages acknowledge our contribution and the role of our disciplines as greater than aesthetic and technical ones. These usages acknowledge that a big part of what we do involves forming concepts, organizing information based upon those concepts and delivering this ordered information purposefully to others. Concepts deliver information with a point of view and clarity. Concepts are powerful and with power comes responsibility. 

The clearest way to make this point is by looking at maps. Think of all the many views of the world given in maps. Each projection has a bias…has accuracies and inaccuracies and each creates different perceptions of the world. 
The Mercator projection is accurate only at the zone surrounding the equator. Notice how it distorts the land mass towards the poles…that is because the longitudinal lines that normally converge on the globe at the poles, when flattened through the cylindrical projections of the Mercator…become parallel. 

mercator-projection1

Alternately, the Peters Projection preserves size but distorts shape…look at India and Greenland…and their relative size on the Mercator vs. the Peters Projection. 

gall-peters2

Clearly the Mercator Projection, which is one of the more commonly used projections, (which is why it doesn’t look strange to us) favors North America and Europe. In the Peters Projection, which is accurate in terms of size, Africa looks huge compared to what we are accustomed … compared to the conceptions that formed our perceptions of the world. Imagine how these different concepts of the world affect perception…the battles that are planned.. the policies made… and treaties that are signed. If we think of what we do that way…that our concepts of the world are powerful tools that can affect perception and policy and the human condition…would it change what we do, how we teach and what we make?

Ground Rules for Navigating the Creative Process

January 4th, 2009 § 9

I have come up with the following ground rules for navigating the creative process:

1. The creative process holds internal guides for a project’s development and guides an individual’s growth as well.

2. Only by committing yourself to the authority of the work can you develop as architects.

3. You can get stuck in thought if you aren’t making at the same time. Or one can make mindlessly if one is not thinking while making. If making is simultaneous to thinking, instead of proceeding or following thought, one imbues material at hand with intelligence.

4. Listen and converse with the intelligence in the objects you make; a conversation of reflection, conceptualization and critique.

5. Architecture is the science of the unique and unrepeatable. Principles are formed out of the conditions, content and forces of the situation of each project.

6. Problem making is essential to problem solving because the definition of a problem sets in play the direction and momentum of its solution.

7. There is a power to limits.

8. The whole cannot be seen from a single point of view.

9. Words are essential to developing a consciousness of the creative process…an intimate felt experience of a “material language.”

10. Everything is connected, somehow; from the astronomical to the metabolic.

On Spatial Cognition …or spinning three dimensional objects in one’s head

December 7th, 2008 § 29

Girls are not supposed be at good at spinning three dimensional objects in their heads. I was told early on that I was an exception to this “rule.” As a child I received the second highest score in the country on an exam that required figuring out which three dimensional shape was formed by a flattened pattern. Now, I am no scientist. But I have my own personal experience that could point to both nurture and nature making the difference. My father is an architect and an artist. At a very early age he had us drawing from life. My sisters and I would sit around an arrangement of fruit, a coffee pot and a vase and draw and paint it. My being the youngest, I joined in on the activity at a very early age. So that is the nurture explanation. Here is the nature explanation: My father is an architect and artist. Architects are pretty good at spinning three dimensional objects in their heads and I have his genes. Like I said I am no scientist, so I am not sure what measures are used to create this perception that girls have poor spatial cognition. But I have a great deal anecdotal experience with male and female 19+ year olds working with challenging spatial problems for the first time. As a professor of architecture at RISD, I have been teaching the first semester core design studio since 1989 and I have been the primary author of the curriculum since then. The problems we give require many more aspects of spatial cognition than the intelligence test I referred to…the one requiring matching unfolded patterns with their corresponding three dimensional counterparts. Our problems involve complex three dimensional geometries, that each student must construct and represent through precise measured drawings. There are roughly 90 to 100 students taking this class each year, and I teach a section of about 12-14 students. That is about 1500 students who I have witnessed taking this course and 208 of my own students that I worked very closely with. (This is accounting for two sabbaticals and two years away teaching in Rome) That is a lot of direct observation with spatial problems and the step by step development of tackling them by both young male and female students. I have not and do not experience a difference in spatial cognition that falls on gender lines. Which leads me to a great teacher of mine, Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, who wrote the book, The Mismeasure of Man. In this book, Gould uncovers the biases that intelligence tests are based on throughout history and how the data from these tests were consistently misused. I’d like to quote from the introduction here:

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.

I’ve been thinking about this quote and my own experience with the stereotype that threatens the hopes of young women in excelling as architects or engineers. That is because Obama has decided to make Lawrence Summers, someone who has, in my opinion, falsely identified the limits that women face from the outside as “limits that are lying within”. He was the president of Harvard who received a vote of “‘no confidence” after a lecture he gave on his hypotheses of why men outnumber women at the high end of excellence in the science and engineering fields. Summers’ hypotheses were, as he stated in his famous talk: #1 “the high-powered job hypothesis”…or the idea that women tend to have a distaste for positions that are highly demanding; #2 due to fewer women having an aptitude at the high end than men, that would suit them for these positions and #3 due to different socialization and patterns of discrimination. He goes on to say that these three are also presented in the ranking order of their importance in contributing to this discrepancy. Because there is a lot of press attempting to cleanse our memories of what happened at Harvard and who Summers is, I encourage you to read his own words by clicking here. Apparently, my link to Summers’ comments is broken & Harvard pulled the transcript of his remarks from their website. That is o.k. because I have a copy of his transcript which I will post on a new page. Look at the column to the right for a transcript of his remarks.
January 8, 2009…I found another online source…The link above should now work

Parametrics?

November 22nd, 2008 § 0

kynarowing1
When I row, I am very aware of the exchange of energy and limits. If I row at a high rating, or the number of strokes per minute, it becomes more difficult to drive with my legs as hard as I can at a lower rating. If I row at a high rating, and drive hard with my legs, I move faster, but I can’t continue this way for very long. At really high ratings, technique starts being compromised. If I use a lower rate, called a “steady state, ” technique can be maintained, and as a consequence, the boat stays balanced and I feel like I can row forever. Even if I make a switch as subtle as changing the oars I use, for a slightly lighter oar, I feel as though I have more energy. If I use a lighter oar, it takes less energy to turn my arms around from the finish, but the lighter oar contributes less to balance. (The oars in rowing act like a pole does for a tight rope walker)

All these shifts in the timing, the application of power, the dimensions and placement of equipment, or body positions, contribute to a give and take of another, corresponding aspect of rowing. Rowing is an interactive system that connects the conditions and limits of water, boat, oars, and rower. It is a great example of parametrics.

Now “parametrics” is one of those made-up words that architects use. It is used to refer to the “measure of parameters” and, I would add, the interrelationship of the limits in any given project. Some examples:
Shrink the budget and then there is pressure to decrease the size of the building.
Build less and you can improve the quality of construction.
Make a span bigger and the load on the structure increases
Give more space for one function and less is available for another.

This is a simplification…there are inventive ways of overcoming the typical consequences that one parameter has on another. And the key to being inventive with limits is being able to make the interconnections between one limit and another palpable. In rowing, these exchanges are palpable, felt, with plenty of feedback of the consequences. In architecture, the consequences of the exchange of limits can be made evident once built, but this is too late and could be catastrophic. So, the key is to measure, model and draw the interrelationships of limits throughout the design process.

…more on gathered objects

November 19th, 2008 § 0

knots6
Knots are gathered objects.

Gathered Objects

November 19th, 2008 § 4

Intelligence gets embedded in objects….through the process of design and fabrication. A quick illustration of this can be seen by going to the source of “gathered objects”—objects that gather themselves up: skein of yarn, cord of wood, ball of string, bales of hay. By comparing the order of gathering in each of these examples, an order becomes apparent that is functional, that has a geometry that is specific to it, that holds itself together and gives it an overall form. A ball of string is wound on a ball winder that changes its inclination as is spins…gathering the string in a spiral of great circles which simultaneously build up the ball and holds the previous loops on. The logic of a cord of wood is starts from where it is coming from. The way a tree grows creates grain that runs along vertically, setting up how a tree is felled, cut into log lengths and then split by an ax between those grains, resulting in the wedge shaped logs that interlock when stacking. The way hay is gathered depends upon where it is going and how it will get there. Hay stacks stay put where they were stacked by hand. Square bales that were gathered by a mechanized baler are small enough to be lifted by hand and stacked for transport or sheltered storage. Round bales have a smaller surface area to volume ratio than square bales and are less susceptible to damage from wetness. Although they are too large to lift by hand, in some areas they can be left outside until they are consumed.

Design intelligenceS

November 10th, 2008 § 0

flock-of-birds3

Welcome to design intelligences….a gathering post or posts of thoughts on the creative process…observations on the particular and magnificent forms of intelligence that it engages…ideas on permitting oneself to return again and again to the clearing that induces wonder.

What is intelligence?
By intelligence I mean how we take information in, process and project it back out… sometimes dissected and better organized by analysis, sometimes reduced to its essential kernel by deduction, sometimes brought out with a clearer coherency by comprehension and all of the possible combinations of the above and more. But our particular intelligences, our proclivity, our natural and intuitive faculty of gathering and projecting, especially for the artist, can fall outside of these recognized and measured forms. And we know it when we see it, (or hear it, sense it), at a very early age.

I remember once seeing a little girl, no older than 3 years of age, on the hand of her father walking into a coffee shop. She was distracted by the presence of a guitar sitting on the table of a customer….and wandered off to stare at the musical instrument. Her father came up right after her and explained to the owner of the guitar that his daughter was musically inclined. The guitarist picked up the guitar and played a simple chord. The little girl started to jump up and down, ecstatic. It was obvious that she could hear the language of the notes in the chord…that they spoke to her with such instantaneous clarity that she felt joy. Harmonic scale didn’t need explanation… the ordered sound was intuitively, deeply and physically comprehended. She has a natural musical intelligence.

I remember similar experiences for myself. My father is an architect and an artist. He had my two sisters and me drawing and painting for as long as I could remember. We would set up still lifes and draw them. I remember the pleasure of engaging spatial cognition, of taking the information that I saw with my eyes and transferring that to a page through my mind. I remember the silent conversation with what I was developing in my drawing and how it evolved and made more sense, or not, over the life of the drawing.

I once did an etymological search for the roots of the word intelligence. The dictionary presents two aspects of its definition: perception and discernment. Perception comes from the root: percipere meaning “to take hold of, feel..” Discernment comes from discernere which is “dis-apart” and cernare “to separate”…and so it is about a bringing together disparity to make certainty. These meanings stem from the Latin roots, inter, meaning “amoung” and legere which means “to gather..” And so, the meaning of intelligence: perception and discernment can be seen in terms of legere or gathering. Gathering through the senses, through the eyes, hands ears, etc, in the form of perception, gathering to bring together to discern and gathering to speak and reason through words. And I gather is the colloquial usage today. Other colloquial expressions reveal that there are many ways of knowing. “I reckon,” “I got it,” “I figure,” “I see,” are used interchangeably with “I know.” And it is interesting to think about what we are saying when we use these expressions. Reckoning has to do with “counting,” and “recounting,” or telling a story…gathering through numbers or words. I got it is stating that we have possession of what is needed to know or understand. Figuring has to do with shaping or giving form to; a coming into being through form. And I see expresses perception as the vehicle for knowing.