Pop!tech Lecture

“A strange thing happened about 20 years ago, very early on in my career as a teacher. I gave a group of students this painting by Paul Klee, called Polyphonically Enclosed White, and I asked them to build the third dimension using only white glue and white museum board. One of the students, John Schroeder, decided that he would assign different heights to each colored rectangle. He couldn’t tell me why he was doing this…but there was something about his sense of purpose that made me step aside and watch. He worked through the night and built this object and when he was done he held it up to the indirect sunlight coming from the north side of the building. This is what he saw. He had somehow osmotically channeled the work of Paul Klee.

I am showing you this, not to mystify things… in fact….there is a good explanation of why the light is refracted in this way given the differing sizes and heights of this cluster of tubes. But there isn’t an easy explanation of how John arrived at this idea. This is what interests me: how we get there…or how we navigate the creative process.

I have been surprised and awed by the imagination many times since then. It has made me think I am an atheist and believe I am not. This dilemma draws me into the creative process in my teaching and my work.

How an artist gets to a discovery or invention is mystified in our culture…it’s outside the umbrella of words like “talent” or “genius.” These words keep us from seeing what is at work and keeps it in the periphery and not to be depended upon. I like to call talent or creative abilities, intelligences. One of the most important intelligences for an artist is sensibility. “Sensibility”—keen intellectual perception—not the optics of the eye or capacity of the sensory organs—but how we take this information and form a concept of the world and our place it. Sensibility is on the cusp between percept and concept…which is at the heart of intelligence.

And comes from legere… which is the Latin root for gathering…and if we look at the colloquial usages for ways of knowing…they are much more rich and varied than what is measured on an SAT …I gather, I reckon (counting or recounting as in telling a story), I figure (giving shape to), (I get it), I see (how we see things shapes what we think of them), I grasp (the intelligence of the hand) (I understand.)

Let me give an example of what I mean by that. If you were to pick up a piece of paper and hold it in one hand as if to read from it….many of you would grasp it between your thumb and your 2nd and 3rd fingers, forming a curved folded plane. There is a lot of intelligence in this gesture. By sensing properties of the paper in your hand, you’ve configured it and have in fact increased its effective depth and enabled it to cantilever. So in this simple intuitive gesture is a structural and functional solution.

This is an example of a learned ability that seems so “natural” that we forget it was learned: An ability to extend our minds into the world through touch and material.

In developing ideas, we use materials very much like an artist’s term for material: a medium or something that goes between: that resists and conducts like electricity. Stubborn material “talks” back, disrupts the monologue of intentions and goes between the preconceived idea and the revealed idea, leading one on a path to discovery.

We choose materials and properties that are analogous to the questions we have.

Such as sand casting done by a former geologist who wanted to see if geologic processes could be employed in large scale construction.

bottle of ink as a pendulum is used in drawing the organization of an observatory

Friction of a thread and a magnet that hoa needle in tension for the study of the tension in a space for living and working

These material geometries do not need translation because they already are in the world, shaped by forces. Metrics is necessary to translate the scale and from one material to another which is necessary in order to construct.

I call this process of working with material in finding, forming and developing ideas, “material reasoning.”
So material matters…a lot. It comes from the word “Mater” for Mother.

Pattern comes from the word Pater or father.
What are patterns? Observed logics, reoccurrences of what is and what could be. Connections made in what otherwise maybe unintelligible. Our hands and eyes find patterns when drawing from life.
We can pattern a material’s behavior and how it performs.

The word “matrix” comes from the word for womb. (Matrix is where material and pattern are married.) It is a generative order that hold the whole.

A diagram launches a project, a sketch that holds together everything that is known about the project and can absorb what is coming.
The sketch for the design of a chapel started with the Church’s need for growth, an aspiration for their existing church to breathe, and a given footprint from a master plan.

The diagram gained insight as a kind of accident. We kept forgetting to put the spire on the model of the existing church…or it kept getting knocked off. So I thought, “what is a spire anyway?” and looked the word “spire” up in the dictionary.

I found that the word, “spire,” comes from the Latin root, “spirare,” or “spirit.” “Spirare” is also the root of “inspire,” “respire,” and “spiral,” a geometry that is always expanding and contracting like breath.

At the same time, we were starting to work on the chapel’s design, with the narrowing trapezoidal plan and supporting walls.

We found that if the ceiling’s geometry is square to each supporting wall, instead of being a compromised geometry inbetween the two walls, the lines of the geometry continue to spiral around like a string wrapping the space. This became a convincing order for the design of the chapel: the geometry of setting the structure, windows (or light), and acoustic fins (or sound).

Now looking back at the facades of the historic churches…the ones that were merged in forming the church you can see something that is very interesting.

The Phenix Church has its structure out of sight, within its skin of siding. The Hope Church has its structure poking out from the skin of siding and its roof looks like it’s sucked in. It is as though the two churches where inhaling and exhaling: the body carving a cavity, the skin taut, revealing structure on the inhale and the body and skin relaxing on the exhale.

A diagram gathers the conditions, content and forces of a project from its origins through its development.

Search engines gather for us. The founders of Google, stated that “if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, you’d be better off.” And that he and his partner’s ambition for “perfect search engine” would be one that could understand exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

My ambition is the opposite: Creativity….is not in knowledge but in the way towards knowing. Discovery is about arriving somewhere other than where you wanted or expected. And invention is moving outside of what is known.

I developed the 1st semester curriculum for the architectures at RISD. This class is posed to be a foundational studio—but I see it as A-foundational. I expect the students to reach for the ground to find that it is not there. Problems are given that in essence take away the established ground for reasoning and for making decisions that they may have come in with. There is no methodology given, or a priori theory. We do start with a bit of inspiration in the form of cellular structure seen through a microscope. Students are asmensional sketch of a kind. We ask them to make a set of joints. Joints are important …they articulate meetings….material to material; wall to wall; inside to outside; public to private; here to there. Architects call these articulated meetings, tectonics. If there is a definition of Architecture it would be that “Architecture establishes relations.” And tectonics is the syntax, the grammar for expressing relations.

The students make matrices that have distinct behaviors which are a product of the behavior of the material and the articulation of the joints. Through making and questioning their making they slowly accumulate a temporary ground of their own…a raft of a kind: a ground for reasoning and developing structural and spatial ideas. There is no room on their raft for preconceptions and other baggage.

We make a shift of material from wire to paper; from line to plane and mine it for its structural possibilities.
I do not take the uncertainty out of the project’s beginning. Nor do I attempt to cap the outcome.

Dwelling in uncertainty is key to growth and moving beyond the known through the imagination.

Creative, process are two words neither of which are creative and both are more processed than process.

I think of it as cohering entropy. A creative work makes its own necessity by cohering what wasn’t before and now we don’t want undone. Cohering by recognizing connections from the astronomical to the metabolic, by putting together what precedes, follows and is next to: coherence gathered, and meaning made.”