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| All below collages are created by Christina Fez-Barringten |
Metaphoric axioms affecting many
disciplines” (C) [2]
By Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com
bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
Abstract:
Twenty eight
dominant axioms and 54 sub-dominant axioms (total of 82) are evidence of the case that architecture
is an art resolved that architecture was the making of metaphors
because it (architecture) made metaphors, personified by metaphor stasis’ two technical and conceptual dimensions. Both are valid separately and even more usual
in combination. But how do these two work,
and, how does this knowledge benefit design, use and evaluation of built works?
The axioms were derived by examining Andrew Ortony’s Metaphor and Thought’s evidence and works by Paul Weiss, William J.J.
Gordon and the Yale lecture series titled architecture as the making of
metaphors. . Prior monographs were steeped in deductive reasoning since there
was no new information (evidence) pertaining to metaphors. Therefore the
previous articles included analyzing and explaining the syllogism:
- Art [G] is the
making of metaphors
- Architecture is
an art [G]
- Therefore
architecture is the making of metaphors.
Without evidence
we could do little to reason why art [G] is the making of neither metaphors nor
why architecture is an art.
Since 1967 I
proceeded to analyze the presumptions and find its many applications. This new
information by Andrew Ortony first published in 1979, provides evidence to
support inductive reasoning and to this end each axiom is its own warrant to
the inferences of the above syllogism and the answer to question of why
metaphor is the stasis to any of the syllogism’s claims and implications.
Biographical note: (88 words)
Columbia
University coursework in behavioral psychology under Ralph Hefferline and
others in voice Linguistics, Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and
Master of Architecture from Yale University where I was mentored in metaphors
and metaphysics by Dr. Paul Weiss. For research I founded the New York City
not-for–profit corporation called Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments.
In addition to
authoring over fifteen published monographs by learned journals I have spent 20
years in Saudi Arabia and have written a book containing pen and ink drawings
on perceptions of 72 European cities.
Institutional affiliation:
Global University ;American Institute of
Architects; Florida Licensed Architect; Programming Chairperson for the Gulf
Coast Writers Association; National Council of Architectural Registration
Boards; Al-Umran association of Saudi Arabia, American Society of Interior
Designers; and founding president of Architects International Group of the mid-east.
Deriving the multidiscipline axioms from metaphor and thought [1] evidence
Axioms about metaphors influencing many
disciplines” [2]
Observations:
Architecture is the making of metaphors is itself a metaphor bridging “architecture”
and “metaphor”. Since we are making metaphoric use of both linguistic and conceptual metaphors it behooves us to provide
evidence, inferences and warrants supporting this claim; as a resolution this
metaphor contains claims that buildings are to architecture as written and
spoken vehicles (books, poems, novels, essays and letters) are to linguistics
and may be conceived of as conceptual metaphors.
The evidence of language may be varied,
macro or micro. We warrant that as mathematics the source can be translated
from numbers and formulae so may the observations, assumptions, conditions,
operations, ideal and goals be translated into targets and then designs. As the words of a “play” may spoken to be “played”
so a design is expressed when it is constructed. When the constructed work is
occupied it is tantamount to the audience appreciating the play. In sheltering,
the building comforts while in being
read literature also comforts but the building actually can be inhabited and
house inhabitants unique to shelters; so
this is the difference which is neither analogous and the difference which
makes the work of architecture unique and not a analogous to literature. Not to
leave the comparison off balance a novel may be carried and put on a shelf
while a building cannot. Building is occupied in fact while the reader is
occupied in mind.
Architecture, the word is itself
a metaphor bridging “master” and “builder”: from arkhi-
"chief" + tekton "builder,
carpenter". Master was a title of citizen ship, authority and high status
while builder was all of the skills associated with carpentry where merchant
places of business with residences were constructed by carpenters under a
master carpenter. The very acts of the architect as the arbiter between owner
and contractor and the metaphor of the contract documents bridging ideas to
reality are metaphoric.
As words, grammar, phonetics, literature, dictionaries, and encyclopedias
are the vocabulary and tools of writing
and speaking so are mechanical, electrical, plumbing and structural
engineering, materials, structural elements, building systems, manufacturers
catalogs, history of interiors, history of architecture (beams, cables, columns, flooring, roofing,
wall materials, lights, wires, ducts, etc.) the vocabulary of designers.
The writer and the designer both devise
the choice of words, construct sentences and paragraphs to express, explain
some ideas, create some mystery, and romance while the designer contrives his vocabulary
of elements to reify the program. The completed building speaks through its every
part. Its volume, spaces, shape, form, and height with proportions, shades and
shadows, reflections, inner and outer spaces, sequence of spaces, planes and
internal and external volumes.
The building is the ensemble of
the actors of the play reciting their parts, the musicians in the orchestra
playing their pieces all led by a conductor who interprets the composer’s
composition as the general contractor interprets the contact documents. Today
we have computers which can translate words into three dimensional building
models and translate the model to drawings and specifications. This application
of this analogy was not even conceivable when we began this study in 1967.
Forty years from now the possibilities seem endless but leading to expanded
metaphors and use of metaphoric thinking. However, between then and now I have
been asked by software giants to discuss architectural terms so they could build
tools for architects to design. Computer Aided Design, Master Spec, Modeling is
the results of such conversations.
Most cognitive
linguistic research [E] on metaphor (such as architecture as the making of
metaphors) may be characterized as theory building, in which concepts and
hypotheses are developed about the nature of conceptual metaphor. To be sure,
such theories have empirical underpinnings, in that their authors are careful
to collect many linguistic and architectural examples that corroborate our
theoretical constructs. To put this slightly differently, these are theories
meant to be put to the test in empirical research. In that respect, they are
not like the hermeneutic theories of philosophers [E].
[F] What makes our present comparison about metaphor unique
is the important distinction that has been drawn between conceptual metaphors
or metaphorical concepts on one hand (as “architecture as the making of metaphors”),
and linguistic metaphors on the other hand (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; our lecture
series was in 1967).
The former (concepts) refers to
“love is war” and “love is Journey” while the latter is actually "linguistically"
in nature as Weiss’: “Richard the Lion hearted”. Metaphorical language, consisting
of specific linguistic expressions, is but a surface manifestation of realization
of conceptual metaphor. Conceptual metaphors are systematic mappings across
conceptual domains: one domain of experience, the target domain (architecture).
In short, the locus of metaphor is not a language at all, but in the way we conceptualize
one mental domain in terms of another (Lakoff 1994:43) is precisely what we do
when we bridge architecture the making of metaphors with building and literature 8.0.
The contemporary Theory
of Metaphor: a perspective from Chinese by Ning Yu [F] says that it can be that architecture is the making of
Conceptual Metaphors (not literal) - This occurs where the metaphor or
extension of meaning from one object to the other is not in the words (building)
themselves but is the mental image. The words (or in the case of architecture
the shapes, forms, materials, etc) are prompts for us to perform mapping from
one conventional image to another at the conceptual level. Nevertheless, according to
Webster linguistics is the scientific study of natural language from where metaphors emanate and is also both
art and science and we can say that what
can be true for linguistics may also be true for non-language (conceptual) expressions including art; if art then all of
its subsidiaries and what may be true of any one of them may also be true for
them all.
In fact there have
been many important art movements such as the Beaux Artes and the Bauhaus that
also believed there is correspondence of these forms with one another. We can
do this because language is any set or system of such symbols as used in a more
or less uniform fashion by a number of people, who are thus enabled to
communicate intelligibly with one another.
Linguistics it the
study of any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like
used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc.: the language of mathematics; sign language. We extend this to
include non-spoken language (concepts) and that art is conceived as a means of
communicating thought such as mathematics, sign language, etc. While or
metaphor of architecture to metaphors is conceptual many of its applications
find linguistic metaphors helpful.
Semiotics, for example, is a related field concerned with the
general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists
study the use of language in artistic literature.
Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology,
speech-language pathology, informatics,
computer science,
philosophy,
biology,
human anatomy,
neuroscience,
sociology,
anthropology,
and acoustics.
No scientific study of architecture as arts is known, particularly in the industrial
age when business and not aesthetics dominates. In a time when aesthetics dominated
the making of architecture aesthetics and the art of modeling a building into a
particular form of art prevailed. Witness the debates in books like The
Fountainhead and the plethora of arts [G] with architecture that flourished
under the kings of Europe. The building, interiors and decoration were all commissioned
as arts and expected to be aesthetically pleasing.
It undoubtedly is true that while the goal of ordinary language
is to communicate, the primary goal of architecture is “shelter” and of art to
entertain, educates, beautify and decorate). Actually the main purpose of the architect
is to be an arbiter between owner and contractor as the owner’s surrogate and
what the architect actually produces is not the shelter but the documents from
which the shelter will be built. This distinction is relevant since the
language of architecture is his documents (plans, sections, elevations, specifications,
scale models, etc).
The work of his design is habitable shelter so we can presume
the built outcome for this metaphor whether built or not, whether on drawings
or the real thing.
While it is true that a bi-product of architecture’s shelter
is that which expresses in a system of symbols, such as character sequences,
combined in various ways and following a set of rules, communicating thoughts,
feelings, or instructions, architecture’s
primary goal is to shelter by accommodating programmatic specifics peculiar to
its needs and necessities. It is not only to communicate (express) but to shelter.
In most of today’s contemporary architectural programs there would be little on
aesthetics. Thankfully there are noteworthy exceptions which fill the pages of architectural
journals.
It is for this
reason that why till now architects have not been trained to think of their preferred
choices of forms, patterns, structures, material, sizes and spaces responsible
to impart any message, implication, thought or emotion. In fact, aside from
mere pomp, pride, monumentalizing, trophy, corporate symbol, works of architecture stops there at
“imparting”, commentating or symbolizing not trying to teach educate, specify
and instruct but simply shelter.
However, there is
no doubt that spaces, proportions, colors, textures, dimensions, sequence of
spaces, planes in space, etc control , support and guide human behavior; they do so by depending on predicting human
responses and behavior within a multidimensional world where they respond and
act and not converse using words. My own study of behavioral psychology
preceding my serious study of design gave my every later choice a possible
predilection toward human behavior which other designers seemed not to be
aware.
Yet, they were
able to successfully design but the consequences of their decisions to express
anything were not considered.
Architecture is
the making of metaphors, but more, it is
also so-called “body language”; it makes metaphors, poetry,
music, dance, ballet, etc. its is widely expressive but it does not converse
hearing and responding as in normal human conversation. Conceptual Metaphors (not literal) occurs where the metaphor (or
extension of meaning from one object to the other) is not in the words
themselves but is the mental image. The
words (or in the case of architecture the shapes, forms, materials, etc) are
prompts for the user to perform mapping from one conventional image to another
at the conceptual level. We find works which “welcome”, “open up”, “close”,
“reject”, “turn-in”, “introvert”, “explode”, “shout”, etc. As the building shelters it entertains by
getting and holding inhabitants attention, it welcomes and provides the
opportunity to be fed, diverted, and amused. It is the place preferred to do
one or another act as opposed to being and doing similar things outside. Metaphor is a figure of speech, not an architectural
style, building term , kind of building- type but a condition of its creation
and use, but it is not normally what architecture is.
I say normally
because there are exceptions as monuments, exhibits, some public buildings;
building which may house one thing but try to communicate something else. The
White House and Capital buildings are good examples communicating the US
strength by the referent forms and unity with the trusted past to contain its
operations. The White House is the home of the revered first family whiles the
Capital the place where our revered congress transacts its business.
Works of architecture
as metaphors may be more onomatopoetic, then a full sentence, may be grasped
intuitively as analogy than overtly, may be sensed but never understood, may be
used but never seen, and may be ignored, condemned and obliterated with less
concern that of its human counterpart or preserved and worshiped as an icon as
a landmark .
As a landmark it
communicates a history of what people have done in that place, a period of
time; demarks a context and as a metaphor communicates its past in terms of
itself. It marks time, space and place; and the human epoch. Conceptually it
converses about the things it marks in terms of its designed characterization,
its mere age or method of construction (they don’t make them like that
anymore).
While both the linguistic,
conceptual and architectural metaphor makes the strange familiar, it is the
architectural and artistic that identifies our position in society and is the
emblem of who we are. We are not the metaphor but our experience of it is as
real as anything else we know. As we perceive it, the metaphor is our virtual
reality. It contains our identity, signs and signals. Its' vocabulary, symbols
and characters are symbiotic. The metaphor itself is symbiotic and our relationship
to the metaphor is symbiosis. The metaphor is a change vehicle. It transforms
and it is a transformer. It works internally between its' elements and upon us
as we complete metaphor.
It is completion
that users and audience participate in the ultimate creation of any metaphor. A
work of literature, book, and play, novel may have similar affects but they are
more then communicating but communication in a certain way. By the way the
Latin for "transfer" is "metaphor".
It is no wonder
that my own study linking metaphors to architecture in the realms of cognitions
should be parallel with important developments in cognitive linguistics. This includes
conceptual metaphors based on the idea that
form-function correspondences are based on representations derived from embodied experience and constitute the
basic units of language. (We are the sum total of all that has gone before us).
So basic in fact that they may easily be the same basis as they are for architecture.
This is at the heart of our presumption, that we can make metaphoric use of the
term metaphor as for linguistics as for architecture. For any one work there are two metaphors: the
concept and the manifestation of the concept. Richard the Lionhearted is the manifestation
while the concept of the commonplace linking Richard to the Lion is understood
without being visible. When we hear the voices of singers, the sounds of musician,
the tones of speakers and the quality of a manifest metaphor we encounter the
presence of other human beings. The essence of this presence authenticates our
identity and we transfer their realty to our own.
Dedication:
My
childhood quest was, and, still is today, to learn why building and streets are
the way they are? I dedicate this latest
monograph to fellow-seekers in the hopes that some of my latest findings may be
the answers to someone’s similar questions. I’d roam the streets looking but what I saw
became mnemonics for my life and answers which I did not recognize. Now we have a new way of understanding works
of architecture as creating and seeing them with a new vocabulary, and with a
new vocabulary the potential for a new architecture. Seeing in a different way
can bring about different outcomes. As a
summary I have listed the below axioms in the hope they may index my monograph
to be a useful tool to students (including myself), design professionals,
professors and scholars, writers and of course, ourselves, as users.
This monograph is to once again do what Dr
Paul Weiss suggested, that since we are borrowing a term normally associated
with linguistics we turn to their respective scholars for understanding of the
metaphor so that we can find a metaphorical use of the term to explain how
architecture is the making of metaphors. So readers will find that I have
faithfully quoted applicable texts form their dissertations and applied them to
architecture and architectural ideas. I have not tried to further prove or
disprove their points except as they explained architecture and my previous
understandings of metaphors (based on over forty years of this study). Let not
the amount of time misdirect you as much of it has been spent in other pursuits
including my own field as an architect and educator. Having researched and written so much I
believe there is still so much I do not know and understand, and hope that others may find this work a
mere foundation for more learned study, particularly in yet to be newly defined
fields of scholarship. My quest was answered when I discovered that metaphors
were why things are they way they are and perceived to be the way they are
because of metaphors.
Justification:
Since this
monograph primary audience is scholars related to the making of built metaphors
I first present the architectural axioms followed by the *footnotes evidence of
science from which the axioms are derived.
This I do with
roman numerals for the axioms and later numbered footnotes for the evidence of science
and sources. One can apply anyone of these axioms and sub-axioms to a design
project and, hopefully, watch as it changes the paradigm of outcomes.
The evidence is based
on the authorities of the following disciplines:
*Philosophy, Linguistics,
Psychology, and English.
*Urban Studies and Planning,
Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Experimental Psychology, *Psychology and
Opinion Research. * Special Education, Social Policy, *Learning Sciences, and *Education
and Applied Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.
Axioms (shown in Roman numerals)
are self-evident principles that I have derived out of A.Ortony Metaphor and Thought[1.0] and accept as
true without proof as the basis for future arguments; a postulates or inferences
including their warrants (which I have footnoted
as 1._._ throughout).These axioms are in themselves clarification,
enlightenment,
and illumination
removing ambiguity where the derivative reference (Ortony) has many applications. Hopefully, these can be
starting points from which other statements can be logically derived. Unlike
theorems, axioms cannot be derived by principles of
deduction as I wrote: "The metametaphor
theorem" published by Architectural Scientific Journal, Vol.
No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University. The below axioms define
properties for the domain of a specific theory which evolved out of the
stasis defending architecture as an art[G]
and
in that sense, a” postulate" and
"assumption" . Thusly, I presume to axiomatize a system of knowledge
to show that these claims can be derived from a small, well-understood set of
sentences (the axioms). “Universality,
Global uniqueness,
Sameness,
Identity,
and Identity abuse”
are just some of the axioms of web architecture. Francis Hsu of Rutgers writes that “Software Architecture Axioms is a worthy
goal. First, let's be clear that software axioms are not necessarily
mathematical in nature”.
Furthermore, in
his book titled The Book of Architecture Axioms Gavin Terrill wrote: “Don't put your
resume ahead of the requirements Simplify essential
complexity; diminish accidental complexity; You're negotiating
more often than you think ;It's never too
early to think about performance and resiliency testing; Fight repetition;
Don't Control, but
Observe and Architect as
Janitor”. In “Axiomatic design
in the customizing home building industry published by Engineering,
Construction and Architectural Management; 2002;vol 9;
issue 4;page 318-324 Kurt Psilander wrote
that “the developer would find a tool very useful that systematically and
reliably analyses customer taste in terms of functional requirements (FRs).
Such a tool increases the reliability of the procedure the entrepreneur applies
to chisel out a concrete project description based on a vision of the tastes of
a specific group of customers. It also ensures that future agents do not
distort the developer's specified FRs when design parameters are selected for
the realization of the project. Axiomatic design is one method to support such
a procedure. This tool was developed for the manufacturing industry but is
applied here in the housing sector. Some hypothetical examples are presented”. Aside
from building-architect’s axioms directing that “form follows function”; follow
manufacturers requirements and local codes and ordinances, AIA ( American Institute of Architects) standards for
professional practice architectural axioms are few and far between.
28 dominant Axioms:
Axiom I. In making a habitable conceptual
metaphor, after assimilating the program, the very first step in the design
process is to develop a “parte’ (a communication directed to the merits (outcome)
of the design process) …it’s the [B] resolution of the argument supported by
claims, inferences, evidence and warrants) It is a “top-down” approach later
followed by designs which meet the parte. The parte may follow the design
process and be presented to sell the product.
Of courses this parte would have to
converse with the parte of the street, neighborhood and township with all the
social, political, and legal matters pertinent to such an undertaking. The generative metaphor is “seeing” -as, the
“meta-pherein” or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives from one domain of
experience to another. You build one thing in terms of another where the other
is the model, and, what you build is the application. It is the “ideal” of the
proposed design. While architects may initially state an ideal, it most likely evolves
and even radically changes by the time the design process yields an architectural
configuration (building manifestation).
Once achieved the “parte” (concept/gestalt)
manifests and can be articulated. [1.1]
Axiom II. 1.2.1 Peculiarization, personalization and
authentication are required for a metaphor to live. This too is the way the
user metaphorize the using process, the user and the work empathize. In this is the art of making metaphors for the
architect of public works. His metaphor must “read” the cultural, social and
rightness of the metaphor’s proposed context. Whereas a dead metaphor is one
which really does not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it does not really
“get thoughts across”; “language seems rather to help one person to construct
out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica, or copy, of someone’s else’s thoughts”. I say: “Dead-in, Dead-out” and “you are what
you eat” ; designs without concerns for scale, hierarchies, scenarios, surprise,
delight, vistas, etc will be “dead”.
They are “techne”
driven engineering a building without architectural concerns. Such a work is a
techne driven design where craft-like knowledge is called a ‘techne.' It is
most useful when the knowledge is practically applied, rather than
theoretically or aesthetically applied.
It is the rational
method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a building design. Techne is actually a system of practical
knowledge. As a craft or art technê is the practice; of
design which is informed by knowledge of
forms such as the craft of managing a firm of architects where even virtue is a
kind of technê of management and design practice, one that is based on
an understanding of the profession, business and market.. Technai are such
activities as drafting, specifying, managing, negotiating, programming,
planning, supervising, and inspection; by association with these technai,
we can include house-building, mathematics, plumbing, making money, writing,
and painting. So much so that the study and practice of design is devoid from
the humanities and downplays theories of architecture developing rather the crafts,
skill and understandings needed to engineer, plan, sketch, draw, delineate,
specify, write, and design.
Axiom III. 1.2.2/1.2.3 Geometry of urban blocks and the location
of building masses that reflect one anther is a scheme to sharply define the
volume and mass of the block and experience of city streets (Vincent Scully). In
New York City the grid and this insistence on buildings reflecting the geometry
of the grid is a metaphor of city-wide proportions.
The streets are
defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and tightness of the cubes and
rectangles to the city plan. In this way the metaphor of the overall and each
building design no mater where it’s location on the block; no matter when or in
what sequence the metaphoric constraint of appropriateness or zoning formulas,
all lead the ideas to flow from one to another architect.
Furthermore, the
reader is able to “appreciate” (to value is to attach
importance to a thing because of its worth) the street, its geometry, limits
and linearity as an idea on the 1.2.2/1.2.3
conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the reader. 1.2.2/1.2.3 A conduit is a
minor framework which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and
feelings to flow, unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient
space between human heads. Irregardless
of the details the overall concept is “transferred “from one to the other,
irrespective of sub-dominant and tertiary design elements.
Axiom IV. Building shapes and forms
tend to reflect common geometry; building types tend to share common
facilities; building code use designations influence the selection of applicable
code requirements, architecture, forming clusters and community spaces create
opportunities for neighborhood identity and nurturing cultural identity. 1.3“It's a strange thought,
that culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things, that instead of
culture shaping the architecture, architecture shapes the culture.
Axiom V. If the facade of a building is
designed in one order of architecture you can presume the other parts are in like
arrangements where the whole may be of that same order including its’ plan, section and details
because of mapping and channeling one idea from one level to another. Frank Lloyd Wright designed his prairie
architecture with dominant horizontal axis thrust to his structure as common to
the horizontal axis of the land upon which the building sat.
In geometrical
formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common elements where
fit, coupling and joints occur. 1.4
Metaphor maps the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”. 1.4.1 for example, the “superimposition
of the image of an hour glass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of
their common shape”. As before the metaphor is conceptual; it is not the works
themselves, but the mental images. In this case Metaphor is a mental image. “Each
metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” In acting it is called
a” handle” where your whole character’s peculiarity is remember by one acting
device (accent, slang, twang, wiggle, walk, snort, etc) ;in architecture the
building’s roof top, cladding, silhouette, interior finishes, lighting,
gargoyles, entrance, rounded corners, etc.
Axiom VI. Since metaphor is the main
mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract
reasoning: 1.4.3 what is built is first thought and conceived
separately from building as thinking and conceiving is separate from the
outward expression, so metaphor is a process and architectural metaphor is a
process and what we see is what the process issues; not the manifest metaphor.
Axiom VII. The metaphor-building
clarifies our place, status and value.
As Metaphor is the main mechanism
through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning so
works of architecture inform our social, psychological and political condition.
Axiom VIII. 1.4.4 Much subject matter, from the most
mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor.
The metaphor is engrafted with knowledge about the state of contemporary
technology, scientific advancement, social taste and community importance, even
an anonymous Florentine back ally’s brick wall, carved door, wall fountain,
shuttered windows, building height, coloration of the fresco.
Axiom IX. The architects process and
what is assembled may or may not correlate; likewise what we perceive of what
we see is not necessarily what we think or believe we have seen. As thought,
poetry, song, etc architecture is both precise around the technique but vague
about the cultural, psychic and social bridges. Yet architecture is rich with
its icons, classic silhouettes, orders of architecture, styles and periods. 1.4.5 Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.
It is the difference between the thing and what we perceive. Our perception of
the building is the metaphor while the building is the evidence of the design
process and the keys to unlock our mind.
Axiom X. 1.4.6 Metaphorical language (building) is a surface
manifestation of conceptual (program, design and contact documents) metaphor.
The built metaphor is the residue, excrement, product and periphery of the deep
and complex reality of the building’s creative process and extant reality. As we
don’t know the inner workings of our car and yet are able to drive so we can
use our building. What we design and what we read not the metaphor but a
surface manifestation of the concept metaphor. A concept which we can only know
as well as we is able to discern metaphorical language. The construction and
the metaphor beneath are mapped by the building being the manifestation of the
hidden conceptual metaphor. To know the conceptual metaphor we must read the
building.
Axiom XI. 1.4.7 Through much of our conceptual system is metaphorical;
a significant part of it is non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is
grounded in non-metaphorical understanding.
Our primary
experiences grounded in the laws of
physics of gravity , plasticity, liquids, winds, sunlight, etc all contribute
to our metaphorical understanding often the conceptual commonality accepting
the strange .
Axiom XII. The whole of the conceptual metaphor
is designed in such a way as to clarify, orient and provide “concrete”
reification of all the design parameters into a “highly structured’ work; a
work which homogenizes all these diverse and disjointed systems and operations
into a well working machine. 1.4.8
Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured
subject matter in terms of a more concrete, or at least, more highly structured
subject matter. A structured building is a structured subject offering access
to relatively abstract and unstructured subject matter. Hence architects translate their architectural conception
from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled
drawings and then to real-life full-scale multi dimensions conventions
consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors, windows,
stairs, etc).
Axiom XIII. Sifting through the program the architect seeks the
“commonality” between the reality and experience to make the metaphor. Mapping
is only possible when he knows the “commonplace”, the commonality, the
characteristic common to both, the terms that both the source and the target
have in common in which the mapping takes place. The architect’s design agenda
and the user’s requirements find both their commonalities and differences.
As the architect
structures his program, design and specifications he simultaneously structures
the metaphor of his work of architecture. Architecture consists of program
specifics where the conditions, operations, goals and ideals are from
heretofore unrelated and distant contexts but are themselves metaphors “mapped
across conceptual domains”. Architects translate their
architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two
dimensional scaled drawings and then to real life full scale multi dimensions
conventions consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors,
windows, stairs, etc).1.4.9 As
maps are the result of cartographers rendering existing into a graphics for
reading so is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the reader renders
understanding from one source to another. As the cartographer seeks lines,
symbols and shadings to articulate the world reality so the reader’s choices of
heretofore unrelated and seemingly unrelated
are found to have an essence common to both the reality and the
rendition so that the metaphor can be repeated becoming the readers new vocabulary.
As the reader can describe the route he can identify the building.
1.4. 10 Each mapping (where
mapping is the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent
elements of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts
come from source domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor
is to know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing.
The same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences. For example, reception
area to receive people, doors and door frames, columns as vertical supports,
parking spaces for cars, Iron and stained glass design patterns, and typical
design details appropriated for a given building system.
1.4.11 Aside from articulating
a program architects carry-over their experiences with materials, physics, art,
culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form a metaphor.
Identifying conditions, operations, ideals and goals are combined to form
plans, sections and elevations which are then translated in to contract
documents.
Later the
contractors map this metaphor based on their schemes of cost, schedule and
quality control into schedules and control documents. It is not until
equipment, laborers and materials are brought to the side that the metaphor
starts to form. Once formed the only
evidence for the user (reader) are the thousands of cues from every angle,
outside and inside to enable use and understanding. An informed user can read
the building’s history from its inception to opening day. 1.4.11 The scale of habitable
metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure and his surroundings
as measured, proportioned and sensed. It is dramatically
represented by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is based on the correlations of ideal human
proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.1.4.11 It seems that onomatopoeic are metaphors and can be onomatopoeic (grouping of words that imitates
the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as
"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz",
"bang", or animal noises such as "oink", "moo",
or "meow"). In this case an
assemblage instead of a sound.
As a
non-linguistic it has impact beyond words and is still a metaphor. Then a
metaphor is much more than the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its
constituent constructions, parts and systems.
The buildings’ very existence is a
metaphor and may not be valued much more than an onomatopoeic. 1.4.12 Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in
every day experience and knowledge. Mapping and making metaphors are
synonymous. The person and not the work make the metaphor.
Without the body
and the experience of either the author or the reader nothing is being made.
The thing does not have but the persons have the experiences. As language,
craft, and skills are learned by exercise, repetition and every day application
so are mappings. Mappings are not subject to individual judgment or preference:
but as a result of making seeking and finding the commonality by practice.
1.4.13 A conceptual system contains thousands of
conventional metaphorical mappings which form a highly structured subsystem of
the conceptual system. Over the year’s
society, cultures, families and individuals experience and store a plethora of
mapping routines which are part of society’s mapping vocabulary. As a potential
user, when encountering a new building-type, such as a hi-tech manufacturing
center, we call upon our highly structured subsystem to find conceptual systems
which will work to navigate this particular event. 1.4.11 Architecture as a surrogate is accepted at face
value. As a surrogate (a work of architecture) is "a replacement that is
used as a means for transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may
not be a part”. Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the program, designs and
contractors a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters and occupies the
habitat with him having formulated but not articulated any its characteristics.
Yet it works. “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of two sides to a surrogate,
the user side and the context side (from which the user is absent or unable to
function). “ Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit for ourselves. “We
have that ability”. “None of us is just a person, a lived body, or just an
organism. We are all three and more. We are singulars who own and express
ourselves in and through them.
As Weiss proclaims
that we cannot separate these three from each other so that it follows that we
may find it impossible to separate us from the external metaphors. Inferences
that are not yet warranted can be real even before we have the evidence.
Metaphors are
accepted at face value and architecture is accepted at face value. Accustomed to
surrogates architecture is made by assuming these connections are real and have
benefit. Until they are built and used we trust that they will benefit the end
user. Assembling the ambulatory we assume the occupancy, frequency and
destinations. We each are surrogates to
one another yet fitted into one message. When this passage had been used as
read as had been other passages, corridors and links. Like a linguistic, the
building stands, like a great, stone dagger, emphatic
against the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis
and is strongly expressive.
Axiom XIV. Elegant architectural
metaphors are those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and
reinforce one another. Contemporary architects wrapping their parte in “green”,
“myths” and eclectic images” are no less guilty than was their predecessors of
the Bauhaus exuding asymmetry, tension and dissonance as were the classics and
renaissance insisting on unity, symmetry and balance. The architect’s parte and
the user’s grasp of cliché parte were expected and easy “fill-in” proving the
learned mappings, learned inference trail and familiarity with bridging.
1.5.1 People ascertain the
deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by filling in terms
of an implicit analogy”. A unique building metaphor may be reckoned by its
apparent similarity to another from a previous experience. As a grain silo is
to a methane gas plant and to oil tank storage, what may be implicit are the
shapes, appurtenances, and locations. 1.5.2 We see the architectural
metaphor, we read its extent, we synapse, analogies and metaphorize absorbing
its information, contextualizing and as much as possible resurrecting its
reasons for creation.
The architectural
metaphor only speaks through its apparent shape, form, volume, space, material,
etc that the concepts which underlie each are known to the user as they would
to a painting, poem, or concerto. 1.5.3 Architecture is often
more suggestive and trusting rather than being pedantic; it leads and directs circulation,
use recognition while abstracting shapes and forms heretofore unknown but
ergonometric. Furthermore as
observation, analysis and use fill in the gaps users inference the locations of
concealed rooms, passages and supports; the user infers from a typology of the
type a warehouse of expectations and similes to this metaphor from others. In
this way there are the perceived and the representations they perceive which
represents when explored and inert what we call beautiful, pleasurable and
wonderful. Upon entering a traditional church in any culture we anticipate
finding a common vocabulary of vestibule, baptistery, pews, chancel, and choir
area including transepts, chapels, statuary, altar, apse, sacristy, ambulatory
and side altars.
1.5.4 So while architecture is
the making of metaphors and architects are making metaphors, their works,
though metaphoric, are not themselves the metaphors but the shadow of the
metaphor which exists elsewhere in the minds of both the creator and the user,
and, it is there that the creator and the user may have a commonality (not
commonplace) . Ideally, if I design my own house, decorate my own room there will
likely be that commonality. If an architect is selected from a particular
neighborhood his metaphor will likely be sympathetic (common) to the culture of
the area. Or, a concerted effort on the part of the design team to assemble the
relevant and commonplace information. 1.5.5 Architects make a
spatial representation in which local subspaces can be mapped into points of
higher-order hyper-spaces and vice versa is possible because they have a common
set of dimensions.
Architects
organize broad categories of operations and their subsets seeing that they are
different from each others so as to warrant a separate group and that their
subsets fit because they have common operational, functional conditions,
operations, models and object is. Hotel
front and back of the house operations; Hospital surgical from outpatient and
both from administration and offices are obvious sets and subsets.
Axiom XV. Shelter and its controlled
creation contains sensual ,graphic and strategic information fulfilling shelter needs by real
deed rather than words of hope and future expectations. The building and not
its metaphor is direct while its metaphor is indirect and being the sticks and
stones of its manifestation. Yet the metaphor may be explained with language it
would not accomplish the buildings shelter metaphor. The shelter prototype and
its incarnation is itself indirect since its referent is obscured by contextual
realities. 1.6.1 There
is a difference between the indirect uses of metaphor verses the direct use of
language to explain the world.1.6.2
The distinctions and relationships between micro and macro metaphors and the
way they can inform one another is as the form of design may refer to its
program, or a connector reflects the concept of articulation as a design
concept.
Where articulation
is being jointed together as a joint between two separable parts in the sense
of "divide (vocal sounds) into distinct and significant parts" or
where an architect parses the program and reifies words to graphic
representations bringing together desperate and seeming unrelated parts to join
into parts and sub parts to make a whole.
Axiom XVI. The two domains of the
building and its context may have analogies that relate to both. The site and
the building will absorb a high amount of pedestrian traffic. Both are
ambulatories and both guide and protect the pedestrian. Like a building
metaphor’s common elements with an uncommon application the common connects to
the unfamiliar and the architect is able to find a way to bring them together
and the user discovers their relevance. The neighborhoods walkways and the
access to and through the building are analogous. As a child a Kresge 5 and 10
was built as a huge and wide corridor diagonally connecting Westchester Avenue
with Southern Boulevard thus saving lots of steps, time and distance but
providing a wonderful weather-free comfort- zone cutting through this block.
The joining corners of the two avenues were filled with shops facing their
streets which we could alternately frequent as an alternate. Alleys in big cities and Munich subway
shopping malls are also examples of these design analogies, called galleries,
alleys, mews, etc. 1.7.1
Metaphors work by “reference to analogies that are known to relate to the two
domains”.
Axiom XVII. A work of architecture has integrity
if the whole and the parts share the same architectural vocabulary with respect
to its building systems, materials and design philosophy. In a building with
dominant 90 degree, cube and squares we do not expect to find plastic, curved
and circular elements. (Not that there aren’t many successful introductions of
unlike geometries) On the other hand if we can reason these differences we
still would question this disparity to the expression of that incongruous relationship
in the final work .For this reason we have design juries, inspections and
rejects of design and doing the course of construction, to stop a part or
incongruity between the design and the construction and between a part and the
whole.
Buildings designed
to be seen from the highway or visited for a fleeting moment are designed with
one set of expectations while a home, terminal, office, etc may be more
elaborate and scaled for scrutiny. A built metaphor with all of its
metaphorical baggage call to mind another meaning and corresponding set of
truths. The metaphor is not part of the building but is made from those
meanings. The meanings of one and the meanings of another may be similar so
that the other comes to mind. 1.8.1
A “problem of the metaphor concerns the relations between the word and sentence
meaning, on the one hand, and speaker’s meaning or utterance meaning, on the
other”.
“Whenever we talk about the metaphorical
meaning of a word, expression, or sentence, we are talking about what a speaker
might utter it to mean, in a way it that departs from what the word, expression
or sentence actually means”. The complaint against Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fifth Avenue
Guggenheim Museum was the inferior quality of the concrete pours resulting in
uneven and mottled surfaces. The design and the expression are often
incongruous and out of the control of the architect. Such work’s often are
carried out with contractors selected prior to the design beginning and are part
of the design process. 1.8.2
What are the principles which relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical
utterance meaning” where one is comprehensive, complete and coordinated while
the other is merely an incomplete scanty indication of a non specific.
1.8.3 How does on thing remind
us of another? The basic principle of an expression with its literal meaning
and corresponding truth-conditions can, in various ways that are specific to
the metaphor, call to mind another meaning and corresponding set of truths”. Unlike
a legal brief, specification and engineering document a work of architecture
with all its metaphors tolerates variety of interpretations, innuendo and
diverse translations.
Axiom XVIII. Building style and decoration
are often adaptations of a former and existing building emphasizing economic
and financial status, quest for status, adaptations to local common ground of
knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. Choice of structural, building systems,
building height and color are often in the vernacular of the building use
(office, residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) and the zoned and neighboring
fashion. 1.9.1
Explaining tropes (turn, twist, conceptual guises, and figurations) ‘Human
cognition is fundamentally shaped by various processes of figuration”. “The
ease with which many figurative (Based on or making use of figures {abounding
in or fond of figures of speech: Elizabethan poetry is
highly figurative} of speech; metaphorical: figurative language) utterances are comprehended are as often
been attributed to the constraining influence of the context” ………..Including
“the common ground of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes recognized as being
shared by speakers and listeners (architects and users (clients, public). One can say one’s speech is affected; affected
by peer pressure and the urge to communicate and adapt. Medieval German, French
and Italian cities are replete with merchant building’s roofs configured,
elongated and attenuated to be higher than others. Near the Rhine, Germany’s
Trier is a fine example.
Axiom XIX. A habitable metaphor is not
meant for the user to fully, continuously and forever recall all that went into
its’ production. The fact that the roof silhouette was to emulate a Belvedere
in Florence, windows from a palace in Sienna, and stucco from Tyrol is lost
over time.
Even, the design
principles so astutely applied by the likes of Paul Rudolf, Richard Meier, or Marcel
Breuer may be unnoticed in favor of other internal focuses. These many design considerations may be the
metaphor that gave the project its gestalt that enabled the preparation of the
documents that in turn were faithful interpreted by skilled contractors and
craftsman. Yet at each turn it is the affect of metaphor and not necessarily
its specifics that make a good design not a great work of architecture or a
working metaphor. 1.10.1”
A metaphor involves a nonliteral use of language”. A non-literal use of
language means that what is said is for affect and not for specificity. At each
moment in its use the metaphor may mean different things, least of which may be
any intended by its authors.
Axiom XX. Matching, copying and
emulating the design of other buildings or adapting the design of one to the current
project is adapted to the more familiar. In the Tyrol offices are often housed
in larger chalets with it all the roof, hardware, doors and flower boxes of the
more typical residence. The new building is made to appear like the others.
Often the signature of the original dominates the new. There is no attempt to
hide the emulation. Users will easily transfer their experience from the
familiar old to the emulated new. Appreciation is when a metaphor as an
abbreviated simile (a figure of speech in which two unlike things are
explicitly compared, as in “she is like a rose.”) designed to appreciate
similarities and analogies.
1.11.1 In psychology
“appreciation” (Herbert (1898)) was a general term for those mental process
whereby an attached experience is brought into relation with an already
acquired and familiar conceptual system (Encoding, mapping, categorizing,
inference, assimilation and accommodation, attribution, etc).1.11.2 Miller sites Webster’s
International Dictionary (2nd edition): “a metaphor may be regard as
a compressed simile, the comparison implied in the former being explicit in the
latter. In the making the comparison explicit is the work of the designer and
reader”.“In principle, three steps: recognition, reconstruction, and
interpretation, must be taken in understating metaphors, although the simplest
instance the processing may occur so rapidly that all three blend into a single
mental act.” When we face a new metaphor (building) a new context with its own
vocabulary is presented, one which the creator must find and connect and the
other which the reader must read and transfer from previous experience.
Axiom XXI. Buildings in one group often
have more known versions than others. In one city exposed wide flanged steel
structures may be preferred to the reinforced concrete in another. In Dubai and
Qatar High rise and multi story and iconic are synonymous and know to represent
commerce buildings. Iconic is the trigger for all the rest. High and rise used
together recalls how the elevator and quest for grated real estate earnings encouraged
the higher number of floors per single zoned building lot. 1.12.1 Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization
in cognitive science, where some
members of a category are more central than others. For example, when
asked to give an example of the concept furniture,
chair is more frequently cited
than, say, stool.” I asked a
New Yorker to give an example of an office building and they answered the
Empire State Building it would be because of its height, and reputation, In
fact the office building and not the “church “building shape has come to be a
metaphor of the city. New York is an office building city. I can see only a
flash glimpse and I will know it is Manhattan.
1.12.2 Their metaphor
“cigarettes are time bombs” cigarettes are assigned to a category of time
bombs, what the time bomb being a prototypical example of the set of things
which can abruptly cause serious damage at some point in the future.”1.12.3 “Metaphors are
generally used to describe something new by reference to something familiar
(Black, 1962b), not just in conversation, but in such diverse areas as science
and psychotherapy. Metaphors are not just nice, they are necessary. They are
necessary for casting abstract concepts in terms of the apprehendable, as we
do, for example, when we metaphorically extend spatial concepts and spatial
terms to the realms of temporal concepts and temporal terms”. Most designers of
shelters are predisposed to the geometry of the rectangle and its variations (with
exceptions of amorphic and ergonometric) and present the completed design as
its offspring and/or compounded variations. The built variation certainly
refers to its base and vice versa. It is not just nice but necessary; otherwise
it could not be built. Most building types and classical orders from Egypt,
Greece and Rome to the skewed iconic towers of the emirates hearken back to
their essence as a kind of rectangle.
Axiom XXII. Without have an apriori
parte a design may evolve until a final design is achieved which is no more
representative as whole from any other building of its type. Escarlata
Partablela of Toledo brought me, a picnic lunch and her guitar to a small
mountain across from her city. She urged
me to sketch while she serenaded. After a while I noticed her wry smile as she
scanned my sketches and when I noticed how familiar they looked she confessed
that she had sat me down on the very spot El Greco sat to sketch “View Of
Toledo”.
Arab “tentness”
and “home-sweet-home” map basics from the “home-sweet-home” to the Arabness to
make all the bits and pieces be understood.
Architects choose building elements
from catalogs and in the most metaphoric circumstances designs elements form
scratch. Metaphor buildings may or may not be composed of element metaphors and
buildings which are analogies may of or may not have elements designed
metaphorically. However, it is less likely that an analogues design will
contain metaphorical elements.
Architects and clients begin their
conversation by finding both the abstract and commonplace to condition, model, and
purpose and describe the operations. Selecting existing commonplace and
choosing special design is determined by which can be analogous and which do
not exist.
1.13.1 Much of architectural
making of metaphors is a matter of mapping, diagramming and combining to
conclude the validity of combining and matching unlike materials, shapes, &
systems. In this way any one of the metaphors and the whole system of bridging
and carrying over is metaphoric.1.13.2 Metaphor is reasoning using abstract
characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight forward extension of its use
in commonplace reasoning.1.13.3 “In processing analogy, people
implicitly focus on certain kinds of commonalities and ignore others”.1.13.4
An analogy is a kind of highly selective similarity where we focus
on certain commonalities and ignore others. The commonality is no that they are
both built out of bricks but that they both take in resources to operate and to
generate their products.1.13.5 On the creative architect’s side: “The central
idea is that an analogy is a mapping of knowledge from one domain (the base)
into another (the target) such that a system of relations that holds among the
base objects also holds among the target objects”.
On the user’s side
in interpreting an analogy, people seek to put objects of the base in
one-to-one correspondence with the objects of the targets as to obtain the
maximum structural match 1.13.6
“The corresponding objects in the base and target need not resemble each other;
rather object correspondences are determined by the like roles in the matching
relational structures.” 1.13.7
“Thus, an analogy is a way of aligning and focusing on rational commonalities
independently of the objects in which those relationships are embedded.” 1.13.8 “Central to the mapping
process is the principle of “systematicity: people prefer to map systems of
predicates favored by higher-order relations with inferential import (the Arab
tent), rather that to map isolated predicates. The systematicity principle reflects
a tacit preference for coherence and inferential power in interpreting
analogy”. 1.13.9“No
extraneous associations: only commonalities strengthen an analogy. Further
relations and associations between the base and target- for example, thematic
consecutions- do not contribute to the analogy.”
Axiom XXIII. More often than not
designers are influenced by the existence of similar types than to re-invent
themselves from scratch. Architects design by translating concepts into two
dimensional graphics that which ultimately imply a multidimensional future
reality. She tests the horizontal and vertical space finding accommodation and
commonality of adjacency, connectivity and inclusiveness.
It is the commonplace and not the abstract
necessity that communicates more readily. The architect is challenged to imbue
in the design the more subtle analogy then the obvious. 1.14.1 Interaction view” of metaphor where metaphors work by
applying to the principle (literal) subject of the metaphor a system of “associated
implications” characteristic of the metaphorical secondary subject. These
implications are typically provided by the received “commonplaces” (ordinary;
undistinguished or uninteresting; without individuality: a commonplace person.); about the secondary subject: ‘The
success of the metaphor rests on its success in conveying to the listener
(Reader) some quieter defined respects of similarity or analogy between the
principle and secondary subject.” 1.14.2 Metaphors simply impart
their commonplace not necessity to their similarity or analogous.
Axiom XXIV. Architectural metaphors are
all about names, titles, and the access to that the work provides for the
reader to learn and develop. At its best the vocabulary of the parts and whole
of the work is an encyclopedia and cultural building block. The work incorporates
(is imbued with) the current state of man’s culture and society which is an
open book for the reader. The freedom of both the creator and reader to dub and
show is all part of the learning experience of the metaphor.
However objective, thorough and
scientific the designer the design tools the work gets dubbed with information
we may call style, personality, and identity above and beyond the program and
its basic design. It is additional information engrafted into the form not
necessarily overtly and expressly required. Dubbing (imbuing) may occur in the
making of metaphors as a way in which the design itself is conceived and
brought together. Dubbing may in fact be the process which created the work as
an intuitive act. Imbuing is often what distinguishes the famous from the
ordinary architect and the way the architect dubs is what critics calls the art
[G] of architecture. 1.15.1“Dubbing”
(invest with any name, character, dignity, or title; style; name; call) and “epistemic access” (relating to, or
involving knowledge; cognitive.).
“When dubbing is abandoned the link
between language and the world disappears”, adding a sound track to a film is
the best use of the word where the picture remains but the experience of the
whole is changed. Now we have both
picture and sound. Today’s works of architecture are minimal and only by
dubbing the program can functionally superficial non-minimal features be added However, the
architect’s artistry (way of design, proportioning, arranging spaces,
selections of materials, buildings systems, etc. can be dubbed to enhance an
otherwise “plain vanilla” solution.
Axiom XXV. Climbing the stairs of a
pyramid in Mexico City or a fire stair in a high rise is essentially the same
except for the impact of its context and what the stair connects (create and
base) and the object on which the stair ascends and descends.
Little old ladies in the tiniest
Italian village can tell in the minutest detail all about every building, street
and area. She has learned and passed on the “knowledge” from her ancestors and
is as trained as its creators but in a totally different way. Hers is the act
of perception and reader who must recreate and challenge her memory and
recollections. She does not have to work at design but at reliving and
imagining the design process to find the details and the whole of the building
and its social, political and chronological context. Structural engineers design from the top down
so as to accumulate the additive loads to the consecutive lower members and
ultimately the foundation which bears it all.
Conceptual design
and first impressions both begin with the general and go to the
specific.Architecture combines and confirms the secular (of this time), “how things
really are” with the gestalt of personal, social, community and private
importance. If art is the making of metaphors and it has no real use then how
significant is architecture with both “reality” and fantasy/ imagination
combined and confirmed by its very existence. 1.16.1 Pylyshyn explains: “…………….consider new concepts
as being characterized in terms of old ones (plus logical conjunctives)” 2.0 As
William J. Gordon points out we make the strange familiar by talking about one
thing in terms of another. Pylyshyn: "On the other hand, if it were
possible to observe and to acquire new “knowledge” without the benefit of these
concepts (conceptual schemata (an underlying organizational pattern or
structure; conceptual framework) which are the medium of thought. 1.16.2 “Knowledge” would not
itself be conceptual or be expressed in the medium of thought, and therefore it
would not be cognitively structured, integrated with other knowledge, or even
comprehended. Hence, it would be intellectually inaccessible”. In other words
we would not know that we know. Where knowing is the Greek for suffer, or
experience. This was the Greek ideal proved in Oedipus; “through suffering man
learns”; we know that we know. Therefore, when we observe that architecture
makes metaphors we mean that we know that we know that works exists and we can
read authors messages. We learn the work.
1.16.3 Pulling from three
dimensional and two dimensional means
and methods, from asymmetrical and symmetrical, and from spatial and volumetric
design principles the architect assembles metaphor metaphorically by
associating and carrying-over these principles applying to the current program to
lift and stretch the ideas into space and across the range of disassociated
ideas and concepts making a new and very strange metaphor unlike anything ever
created yet filled with thousands of familiar signs and elements that make it
work . 1.16.4 About the
difference between words (which are limited and specific to concepts
Pylyshyn notes: “…in the case of words
there is a component of reason and choice which mediates between cognitive
content and outward expression.
I can choose what
words I use, whereas I cannot in the same sense choose in terms of which I
represent the world.” So architects and readers deal with materials,
structures, systems and leave the concepts to a variety of possible outcomes. 1.16.5 About a “top-down
strategy” called “structured programming” in computer science allows for a
point of entry into a the development of a new idea where you begin with an
idea and after testing and developing that idea bringing everyday knowledge to
bear on the development of theoretical ideas with some confidences that they
are new either incoherent nor contradictory, and furthermore with some way of exploring
what they entail. 1.16.6
Explaining this approach as a “skyhook-skyscraper" construction of science
from the roof down to the yet unconstructed foundations” describes going from
the general to the specific in and decreasing general to an increasing amount
of detail and pragmatic evidence, referents, claims and resolutions. 1.16.7 “The difference between
literal and metaphorical description lies primarily in such pragmatic
consideration as (1) the stability, referential specificity, and general acceptance
of terms: and (2) the perception, shared by those who use the terms, that the
resulting description characterizes the world as it really is, rather than
being a convenient way of talking about it, or a way of capturing superficial
resemblances”. 1.16.8
Pylyshyn asserts that: “metaphor induces a (partial) equivalence between two
known phenomenons; a literal account describes the phenomenon in authentic
terms in which it is seen.
Axiom XXVI. Modern architecture wants
to express the truth about the building’s systems, materials, open life styles,
use of light and air and bringing nature into the buildings environment, not to
mention ridding building of the irrelevant and time worn cliches of building
design decoration, and traditional principles of classical architecture as
professed by the Beaux-Arts movement. For equipoise “Unity, symmetry and
balance” were replaced by “asymmetrical tensional relationships” between,
“dominant, subdominant and tertiary” forms and the results of science and
engineering influence on architectural design, a new design metaphor was born.
The Bauhaus found the metaphor in all the arts, the commonalities in making
jewelry, furniture, architecture, interior design, decoration, lighting,
industrial design, etc.1.17.1
“Analogical transfer theory (“instructive metaphors create an analogy between a
to-be-learned- system (target domain) and a familiar system (metaphoric domain
Axiom XXVII. Metaphorical teaching
strategies often lead to better and more memorable learning than do explicit
strategies which explains why urbanites have a “street smarts” that is missing
from sub-urban; they actually learn from the metaphors that make up the
context. Of course this is in addition to the social aspects of urbanity which
is again influenced by the opportunities of urban metaphors: parks, play
grounds, main streets, broadways, avenues, streets, sidewalks, plazas,
downtown, markets, street vendors, etc. When visiting new cities in another
country one is immediately confronted with metaphors which create similarities
as interactive and comparative as we seek to find similarities and differences
with what we already known in our home context.
Visiting, sketching and writing
about over seventy European cities I noted the character and ambiance of each
and the differences between one and another. Each metaphor was of the past’s
impact on the future with the unique design of crafts, building materials, and
skills that were peculiar to their times but were no enjoyed in the present. In
this context there are the natives who experience these metaphors all their
lives and the visitor who is fist learning the lesson of these metaphors. Both
experience these in different ways.
The native knows
the place and comprehends both the old and the new knowledge domains whereas
the visitor the very same metaphor may be interactive, creating the similarity
under construction. The visitor (this is my word) may “well be acquiring one of
the constitutive or residual metaphors of the place (this is my word) at the
same time; same metaphor, different experiences. 1.18.1 “Radically new knowledge results from a change
in modes of representation of knowledge, whereas a comparative metaphor occurs
within the existing representations which serve to render the comparison
sensible. The comparative level of metaphor might allow for extensions of
already existing knowledge, but would not provide a new form of understanding.
Axiom XXVIII. Many architects can make
metaphors to overcome cognitive limitations and resort to graphics rather than
language to explain the metaphor. Metaphor as a design act serves as a graphic
tool for overcoming cognitive limitations.
As most artists their language is beyond speech and to the peculiar
craft of their art of which their practice and exercise develops new capacity
and opportunity to teach and express thought outside of the linguistics but is
nevertheless perhaps as valuable and worthy.
Architects both compose the program
and reify its contents from words to diagrams and diagrams to two dimensional
graphics and three dimensional models to reify and bring- out (educate) the
user’s mind and fulfillment of unspoken and hidden needs.
Needs which many
or may not have been programmed and intended; the metaphor is the final
resolution until it is built and used. Then it is subject to further tests of
time, audience, markets, trends, fashions, social politics, demographic shifts,
economics, and cultural changes. 1.19.1Metaphors have a way of
extending our capacities for communications. 1.19.2 “Speech is a fleeting, temporarily linear means
of communicating, coupled with the fact that that, as human beings, we are
limited in how much information we can maintain and process at any one time in
active memory, means that as speakers we can always benefit from tools for
efficiently bringing information into active memory, encoding it for
communication, and recording it, as listeners, in some memorable fashion.” 1.19.3 Metaphor is the
solution insofar as it encodes and captures the information:” transferring chunks
of experience from well –known to less well known contexts; 1.19.4 The vividness thesis,
which maintains that metaphors permit
and impress a more memorable learning due to the greater imagery or
concreteness or vividness of the “full-blooded experience” conjured up by the
metaphorical vehicle; 1.19.5
and the inexpressibility thesis, in which it is noted that certain aspects of
natural experience are never encoded in language and that metaphors carry with
them the extra meanings never encoded in language. One picture is worth a
thousand words and how valuable are the arts as makers of who we are as a
people, society and time. 1.19.6“The
mnemonic (intended to assist the memory)
function of metaphor as expressed
by Ortony’s vividness thesis also points to the value of metaphor as a tool for
producing durable learning from unenduiring speech
Footnotes to the 28 dominant Axioms:
Using the below book’s compendium
of relevant scholars the analysis follows:
1.0 Metaphor and Thought: Second Edition
Edited by Andrew Ortony: School of
Education and social Sciences and
Institute for the learning
Sciences: North Western University
Published by Cambridge University
Press
First pub: 1979 Second pub: 1993
1.1 Generative metaphor:
A perspective on problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. SchonIn his paintbrush
as pump discussion as a metaphor claims that by attaching to the paintbrush the
way of a pump the researchers were able to better improve the design of the paintbrush
as an instrument which pumps paint on the surface. By describing painting in an
unfamiliar way they were able to make what was already somewhat known dominant.
They now saw the brush as a pump. Before then they seemed to be different
things now they were the same. To arrive at this conclusion they had to observe
the working of the brush and make the observation and then apply it to the
mechanism. The paintbrush was now seen as a pump and the act of painting,
pumping. Schon refers to this a generative metaphor. The generative metaphor is
the name for a process of symptoms of a particular kind of seeing-as, the
“meta-pherein” or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives from one domain of
experience to another. This process he calls generative which many years
earlier 2.0 WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric Way of Knowing and 2.1 Paul Weiss
called associations.
In this sense both
in interior design and architecture after assimilating the program the very
first step in the design process is to develop a “parte’ (An ex parte
presentation is a communication directed to the merits or outcome of a
proceeding …it’s the resolution of the argument consisting of claims,
inferences, evidence and warrants to the inference) .It is a “top-down”
approach later followed by designs which meet the parte. The parte may follow
the design process and be presented to sell the product. Commercial retail shops maximize both visual
and physical access to their merchandise by the use of glass and positioning
entrances convenient to potential shoppers’ paths of travel. Attached or
detached the idea of the shop as a flickering flame and welcoming transformed
shops prior image as formidable container into which one ventured for surprise
and possible revelation.
With this is in
mind designers of malls extend this accessibility to nodes on highways and
close to their prime markets. Commercial retail is no perceived as an attractive
recreational experience and as such provides shoppers with a secondary perception
of the metaphor, shoppers now “carry-over” from play, rest and relaxation to
fulfilling their needs and necessities. Michael Angelo in Qatar is designed in
a Renaissance style with a huge domed entry, shop facades and themes of the period,
with paintings, sculptures and decoration reminding patrons that they are as
royalty and in the lap of luxury. This was also adopted by the Loews theatre
chain when all of their theaters were decorated with red velvet wallpaper, huge
mahogany, Tudor chairs; chandeliers, plush Aubusson rugs, beautiful crystal and
porcelain lamps and accessories. During the depression and recovery patrons
would come and spent the day in the theater (Palace was not just the name of
one of the down town theaters but its description) to not only see the movie, but buy refreshments
and lounge in the many beautiful parlors and lounges.
In the middle of the
twentieth century William Levitt revolutionized and created the home building
business as an industry applying mass production of the home ideal containing
what the Park Ave penthouses had; built in closets, complete kitchens with
dishwashers, and an even better, an attached garage. Not only that but every
single house was identical so that all were part of a harmonious single minded
community. It was called Levittown, the miracle suburb on Long Island that
opened the way for the middle class to move out of New York City.
They came to
escape crowded and own their own home, cook with their own appliances, mow
their own lawn. They had GI loans in hand, babies on the way, and a ‘50s brand
of pioneering spirit.Similar stories can be told of the way the modern office
building was catapulted by the invention of the fly –wheel elevator by Otis and
the conversion form iron to steel for building structures to increase real
estate profits in as many as there are layers by building office space in
layers up to the sky as zoning, elevator and engineering would allow.
4.0 WWW; “In
Europe the Grand Central Railroad Terminal were built and then a clone brought
t to New York City as part of the Park Ave Manhattan Development project
including ten underground floors bringing freight, shopping, auto parking, etc underground
and into the center of the city providing a hub extending from the thirties up
to the nineties under Park Ave. This grand scheme was only partially carried
out but forever transformed Park Ave from a boulevard of swanky three story
mansions to a sophisticated high rent district of high-rise residences.
The first Grand
Central Terminal was built in 1871 by shipping and
railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. A "secret" sub-basement known
as M42 lies under the Terminal, containing the AC to DC converters used to
supply DC traction current to the Terminal designed
to replicate the galleried hall of a 13th-century Florentine palace. The train shed,
north and east of the head house, had two innovations in U.S. practice: the
platforms were elevated to the height of the cars, and the roof was a balloon
shed with a clear span over all of the tracks. In order to accommodate
ever-growing rail traffic into the restricted Midtown area, William J. Wilgus,
chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad took advantage
of the recent electrification technology to propose a novel scheme: a bi-level
station below ground. Arriving trains would go underground under Park Avenue, and proceed to an upper-level
incoming station if they were mainline trains or to a lower-level platform if
they were suburban trains. In addition, turning loops within the station itself
obviated complicated switching moves to bring back the trains to the coach
yards for servicing. Departing mainline trains reversed into upper-level
platforms in the conventional way. Necessity being the mother of invention
burying electric trains underground brought an additional advantage to the
railroads: the ability to sell above-ground air rights
over the tracks and platforms for real-estate development. With time, all the
area around Grand Central saw prestigious apartment and office buildings being
erected, which turned the area into the most desirable commercial office district
of Manhattan”.
In each
of the above instances a metaphor was created by attaching another concept to
the primary function. Once the projects were thought of in that added way the
metaphor was born and under it the many metaphorical spin-offs and sub
metaphors. Not to mention the metaphor of the Empire State and the overall
iconic image of Manhattan and it’s New York State. Even today when we say New
York we mean downtown Manhattan. The city is” being pumped” by its metaphors.
3.0 “Argumentation:
The Study of Effective Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky
of Northwestern University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of
Chantilly, Virginia
1.2 The conduit
metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language: by Michael
J. Reddy.
1.2.1 A dead
metaphor is one which really does not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it
does not really “get thoughts across”; “language seems rather to help one
person to construct out of his own stock of mental stuff something like a replica,
or copy, of someone’s else’s thoughts”.
The landscape is replete with an infinite
number of inane replicas which render readers dull, passive and disinterested
(How many times will you read the same book?)
Mass housing, commercial office buildings and highways are the main offenders
leaving the owner designed and built residence, office, factory, fire station,
pump house, as unique and delightful relief’s in an otherwise homogenized
context. The reader stops reading because it is the same as before. Not reading
the copy yet seeing the copy and the collective of copies focuses rather on the
collective as the metaphor as the overall project which also may be “dead”.
In its time, Levittown’s
uniqueness and the sub-structures sameness were its’ metaphor. It was alive and
today still lives as new residents remodel upgrade and exhume their “dead” to
become a “living” metaphor.
Disregarding this,
the architects of public housing created dead metaphors and blamed the lack of pride
of ownership for their failure. In
revitalization teams of revivalist have discovered there is more than turf and
proprietorship. Peculiarization, personalization and authentication are
required for a metaphor to live. In this is the art of making metaphors for the
architect of public works. His metaphor must “read” the cultural, social and
rightness of the metaphor’s proposed context. In modern architecture no one was
better able than Phillip Johnson in his Seagram Building and Museum of Modern
Art (MOMA). Johnson's early influence as a practicing architect was his use of
glass; his masterpiece was the Glass House
(1949) he designed as his own residence in New Canaan, Connecticut, a profoundly
influential work.
The concept of a Glass House set in a landscape with views
as its real “walls” had been developed by many authors in the German
Glasarchitektur drawings of the 1920s, and already sketched in initial form by
Johnson's mentor Mies. The building is an essay in minimal structure, geometry,
proportion, and the effects of transparency and reflection. Johnson was the
head of my Yale thesis jury and my primary design associate on a project in
Puerto Rico and when I returned to Manhattan he invited me to work with him on
the design of Roosevelt Island. Defining
the operation of metaphor Reddy says that 1.2.2 “a conduit is a minor framework
which overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow,
unfettered and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between
human heads. There are also individual pipes which allow mental content to
escape into, or enter from, this ambient space. Thoughts and feelings are
reified into an external 1.2.3 “idea space” and where thoughts and feelings are
reified in this external space, so that they exist independent of any need for
living human beings to think or feel them”.
This most closely resembles works of architecture and what goes inside
and outside works. “Somewhere we are peripherally aware that words do no really
have insides (“it is quit foreign to common sense to think of words as having
“insides” ……………major version of the metaphoric which thoughts and emotions are
always contained in something”) In his examples one can see a variety of
putting ideas onto paper meaning that the ideas are out of the head of the
creator and onto paper to be read and then transferred.
Architecturally
this is best reflected in the example pointed out by Vincent Scully describing
the geometry of urban blocks and the location of building masses that reflect one
anther is geometry to sharply define the volume and mass of the block and experience
of city streets. The streets are defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and
tightness of the cubes and rectangles to the city plan. In this way the
metaphor of the overall and each building design no mater where it’s location
on the block; no matter when or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint appropriateness,
zoning formulas, all lead the ideas to flow form one to another architect. Furthermore,
the reader is able to “appreciate” the street, its geometry, limits and
linearity as an idea on the conduit from the architect, through the metaphor
and to the reader.
Likewise a visit
to the Tyrol will immediately locate the conduit of design style as practically
all chalets, houses and villas have identical roofs, walls, balconies, windows,
flower boxes and doors. The conduit dominates and connectors builders,
designers, contractors, suppliers and buyers. That conduit is the dominant theme that unites
all the villages.
Interior
decoration in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the middle of the twentieth century was
dominated by wall to wall drapes, cornices, valences, upholstered furniture
covered with slip covers, ketch and bric-a-brac figures and “charkas” known affectionately
as “Bronx Renaissance”. The conduit that connected these outcomes were are
system of city-wide gift stores, national
gift market, central fabric suppliers and workshops and the heroic
drapery hangers (of which I was one) completed their work. 1.3 In Programs and Manifestos on
20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad' writes: 1.3.1 “It's
a strange thought, that culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things,
that instead of culture shaping the architecture, it is the architecture (the
environment) that shapes the culture. I
would guess it makes sense after some amount of years....maybe its in cycles: At
first, culture creates the architecture, x years pass by, and then the
architecture-environment modifies the culture. Then new modified culture
creates new architecture, etc.
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?”
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?”
The affect of the metaphor on other
metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit which
leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.
1.4 The
contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff,
About novel images and image
metaphors he quotes 1.4.1 Andre Breton’s “My wife……whose waist is an hourglass”
he says …..”By mapping the structure of one domain onto the structure of
another”, “This is a superimposition of the image of an hour glass onto the
image of a woman’s waist by virtue of their common shape. As before the
metaphor is conceptual; it is not the works themselves, but the mental images. Here,
we have the mental image of an hour glass and of a woman and we map the middle
of the hourglass into the waist of the woman. The words are prompts for us to
map from one conventional image to another”.
Lakoff concludes that “ all metaphors are invariant with respect to
their cognitive topology, that is, each metaphorical mapping preserves
image-schema structure:” Likewise when
we look at the geometrical formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note
those common elements where fit, coupling and joints occur. We remember that
which exemplified the analogous match.
This observation of the metaphor
finds that the commonality, commonplace and similarity are the chief focus of
the metaphor. As Frank Lloyd Wright designed his Prairie architecture with Dominant
horizontal axis thrust to his structure as common to the horizontal axis of the
land upon which the building sits.
Thus the two
horizontal axes, the land and then the building were wed by their commonality
of horizontality. In a city of sky scrapers architects parallel their new
shafts with those adjacent to with space between to form the architectonic of
verticality, canyons and shafts where the commonalty of all the vertical shafts
bind them together. The red tile roofs of the Italian Riviera, California’s
Mission Architecture are other such examples of commonalities, commonalities which
are synonymous with their identity and expected class. We note the 90 degree
angles and shape that slide into one another. We note the way like metals,
clips and angles fit; the way ceiling ducts are made to fit between structures
and hung ceiling, etc.
While it is less
possible to spontaneously imagine the way we could relate the human form to a
building when we circulate through its halls, rooms and closets its
accommodation to our needs and necessities; to our self preservation and the
maintenance of the building become apparent. We can map the building structure
to ours by finding the one commonality amongst all the others. Very often we will
hear someone say this place is” me”. The common image has been located and the
fit made. Describing generic specific
structure he notes that they are under the Invariance Principle and concludes
that the way to arrive at generic-level schemes for some knowledge structure is
to extract its image its image-schematic structure. This is called the Generic is Specific
Structure. He adds that it is an extremely common mechanism for comprehending
the general from the specific. So what you can deduce for part you can assume
is true of the whole.
So if the facade of building is in
one order of architecture you can presume the other part are in a like
arrangement and that the whole is of the classic order including its plan,
section and details. What are involved here are mapping, channeling and one
idea from one level to another.
1.4.2 According to
Lakoff plausible accounts rather than scientific results is why we have conventional
metaphors and why conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings than
another. An architectural work
establishes its own vocabulary which once comprehended become the way in which
we experience the work, finding its discrepancies and fits and seeking the
first and all the other similar elements. We do judge the work as to have Consistency,
integrity and aesthetics. Buildings which do not have these characteristics do
not work as metaphors. The relevance of
studying architecture as the making of metaphors is to provide practitioners,
owners, and mainly those that shape the built environment that they have a
somber and serious responsibility to fill our world with meaning and
significance, That what they do matters as in this first of Layoff’s results
(Please note the application of Layoff’s vocabulary, definitions and descriptions
related to linguistics metaphorically applied to architecture): Summary of
results:
1.4.3 Metaphor is
the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract
reasoning. For example, as this is so
for linguistics(spoken or written), then I infer that it must be true for non
linguistics ,and I give as evidence the built habitats and their architectural
antecedents, being as how what is built is first thought and conceived
separately from building as thinking and conceiving is separate from the
outward expression . Whether it is one or thousands public cultures is
influenced, bound and authenticated by its’ metaphors. Not withstanding
“idolatry” the metaphors are the contexts of life’s dramas and as our physical
bodies are read by our neighbors finding evidence for inferences about social,
political and philosophical claims about our culture and its place in the
universe. One of many warrants is recognizing,
and operating the front door of a castle as we would the front door of our apartment;
another warrant is the adaptive uses of obsolete buildings to new uses as a
factory to multi- family residential uses, etc. We see the common space and
structure and reason the building codes written to protect the health , safety
and welfare of the general; public can
be applied and the found to be re-zoned to
fit the new uses in the fabric of the mixed-use zoned area; “comprehend
abstract concepts (building codes, design layouts, and building codes) and perform abstract reasoning”. (Design and
planning).
1.4.4 Much subject
matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can
only be comprehended via metaphor. Even an anonymous Florentine back ally’s
brick wall, carved door, wall fountain, shuttered windows, building height, coloration
of the fresco. 1.4.5 Metaphor is
fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature. After many years living in
Saudi Arabia and Europe and away from Brooklyn I visited Park Slope. I saw the stoops ascending to their second
floors, the carved wood and glass doors, the iron grilles, the four story walls,
the cementous surrounded and conventionally pained widows but what I saw was
only what I described. I did not recognize what it was; it was all unfamiliar
like a cardboard stage setting. I did not have a link to their context nor the scenarios
of usage and the complex culture they represented. I neither owned nor
personalized what I was seeing. All of this came to me without language but a
feeling of anomie for what I was seeing and me in their presence, years later I
enthusiastically escorted my Saudi colleagues thorough Washington, DC’s
Georgetown showing them the immaculately maintained townhouses. I was full of joy,
perceptually excited but my colleagues laughed and were totally disinterested.
These were not their metaphors and they could hardly wait to leave the area to
find a good Persian restaurant to have dinner. They, like my self years before
did not see what I saw and more relevantly did not “get-the-concept”. Both of the above anti-metaphor cases were conceptualized
without words as would be positive cases of metaphor.
1.4.6 Metaphorical
language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor.
As language is to speech so are
buildings to architecture where each has a content and inner meaning of the
hole as well as each of its parts. As each word, each attachment, plain, material,
structure had first been conceived to achieve some purpose and fill some need. Hidden
from the reader is the inner psychology, social background, etc of the man when
speaking and the programming deign and contacting process from the reader of a building
metaphor. As in completing an argument
the reader perceives the inferences with its warrants and connects the evidence
of the seen to the claims to make the resolution of the whole, all of which are
surmised from the surface.
1.4.7 through much
of our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is
non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical understanding.
The science of the strength of
materials, mathematics, structures, indeterminate beams, truss design,
mechanical systems, electricity, lighting, etc. are each understood
metaphorically and there precepts applied metaphorically but often random
selections, trails and feasibility are random and rather in search of the
metaphor with out knowing it is or not a metro and fit to be part of the
metaphor at hand. On the other hand we may select on or another based on non-metaphorical,
empirical test and descriptions of r properties. We then try to understand the
metaphor in the selection, its commonality, how it contributes to the new application, how its has properties
within itself which are alone strange and unrelated yet when couple with the
whole or part of the created metaphor contribute to metaphor.
From example in
the last 20 years store front's tempered glass has been enhanced, thickened,
strengthen and is now used in large quantities frameless curtain walls on
private and massive public properties. A non-metaphorical building product with
one used in one context has been taken out of a non-metaphorical understanding
of properties and use to apply to another. Our primary experiences grounded in the laws of physics of gravity , plasticity, liquids,
winds, sunlight, etc all contribute to our metaphorical understanding often the
conceptual commonality accepting the strange . In Belize, faced with a an
unskilled workforce and the government wanting fancy houses for its government
staff I choose a plethora of pre-engineered building components form non
architectural catalogs as gigantic drainage
pipes , sawn in half and used for roofs and in Tennessee relocated the
country look of indignities building with US Plywood's "texture
1-11". 1.4.8 Metaphor allows us to understand
a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter in terms of a
more concrete or at least more highly structured subject matter. Owner occupied specialized works of
architectural metaphors may begin with long periods of research, observations,
and analysis ; conclusions and redesign and re-thinking of existing or utility
of new systems; setting our system feasibility, pricing and meeting budgets,
palling and programming, diagramming and design of sub systems and systems but
when complete the metaphor is accessible, usable and compatible.
The whole of the metaphor is
designed in such a way as to clarify, orient and provide “concrete” reification
of all the design parameters into a “highly structured’ work, a work which homogenizes
all these diverse and disjointed systems and operations into a well working
machine. Building types such as pharmaceutical, petrochemical laboratories,
data research centers, hospitals, space science centers, prisons, etc are such relatively
abstract unstructured uses which only careful assembly can order. Faced with
both housing and creating identify the Greeks and the Romans derived an Order
of Architecture which we now call the Classical order of Architecture.
A classical order
(originally derived from Egypt) is one of the ancient styles of building design
in the classical tradition, distinguished by their
proportions and their characteristic profiles and details, but most quickly
recognizable by the type of column
and capital employed. Each style also has its
proper entablature,
consisting of architrave, frieze
and cornice. From the sixteenth century onwards,
theorists recognized five orders.
From its inception
design professionals will look outside of their field and the field of the
proposed project to find organism, technologies provides a conceptual handle as
the inner working of microchips, mainframes, submarines, rockets and jet
propulsion, circus, markets, battleships and air-craft carriers, etc. Long before the use of computers after faced
with a complex way of teams of service clerks communicating on the phone,
accessing and sharing files and instantly recording all transactions I invented
a huge a round table where all clerks would be facing the center where would be
sitting a kind of “Lazy Susan” . I choose the Lazy Suzan because of my
experience in Chinese restaurants and selling Lazy Suzan’s as a young sales
assistant in a gift store in the Bronx. As a result of the overall design of
which this was one part the company’s business increased and prospered. One of
the executive vice presidents befriended me and late went on to head the New
York Stock Exchange. The installation was a success and was used until the
company closed its doors many years later.
Layoff’s
observations emphasize the instinctive, impulsive and intuitive nature of the
architect’s metaphor that takes place in its creation and use. 1.4.9 Like the onomatopoeic metaphors Lakoff’s
mappings of conceptions override the overt spoken and descriptive and rely much
more on Mnemonics (something intended to assist the memory, as a verse or
formula) . However, for Lakoff the assistance comes from something much more primordial
(constituting a beginning; giving origin to something derived or developed;
original; elementary: primordial forms of life) to the
person’s or societies experiences. These become the matrix (encyclopedic) of
schemas (in argument; the warrants {where a warrant is a license to make an
inference and as such must have reader's agreement} supporting the inferences
(mappings) where in the metaphor becomes real). In this way the reader maps,
learns and personalizes the strange into the realm of the familiar. The reader
does so by the myriad of synaptic connections he is able to apply to that
source. Hence architects translate their
architectural conception from philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc into two
dimensional scaled drawings and then to real life full scale multi dimensions
convention consisting of conventional materials, building elements (doors,
windows, stairs, etc).
As maps are the result of cartographers rendering existing
into a graphics for reading so is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the
reader renders understanding from one source to another. Doing so mentally and
producing a rendition of understanding (as a pen and ink of a figure) not as a
graphic but a conceptual understanding. Reader
sees in a critical way the existing culling through and encyclopedia of referents
to make the true relationship; the mapping which best renders the reality; the relationship
which informs and clarifies as the map the location, configuration and
characteristic of the reality. As the
cartographer seeks lines, symbols and shadings to articulate the reality so the
reader choices of heretofore unrelated and seemingly unrelated are found to have and essence common to both
the reality and the rendition so that the metaphor can be repeated becoming the
readers new vocabulary .
In fact architects
do the opposite as graphic renditions are made of synapses between amorphic and
seemingly desperate information. Yet the process of mapping is no less intense
as architect review the matrix of conditions, operation , ideal and goals of
the thesis to find similarities and differences , commonalities, and potential
for one to resonate with another to make a “resolution” on the experience of a
cognitive mapping which becomes the metaphor, parte and overwhelming new
reality.
The new reality is the target of the source and finally can
be read. In the case of the birth of an
infant metaphor readers may find a wide variety of source information which is germane
to their own experience. Before the
public ever sees the constructed metaphor Building Officials, manufactures,
city planners, owners, estimators, general contractors, specialty contractors,
environmentalist, neighbors and community organization frost read the drawings
and map their observations to their issues to form a slanted version of the
reality. Their mappings are based on the warrants which are their licensed to perform.
Each warrant will support a different mapping (inference) and result in its own
metaphor. In effect each will see a kind of reality of the proposed in the
perspective of their peculiar warrant, where license is permission from
authority to do something. It is assumed if one gets permission it has met the
conditions, operations, ideal and goals of the proposed metaphor. Mapping is
critical at this read to assure that the architect’s rendering of the program
is faithful to the cognitive, lawful, physical and legal realities. It s like a map which gets tested by scientist,
navigators , pilots and engineers before they build a craft to use the map, or
set out on a journey using the map.
Before the contracts
start committing men and material the metaphor must map and be the metaphor
meeting all expectations. Before
building, the suppliers, contractors and specialist make “shop drawings” to map
the metaphor and present the graphic evidence that they can fill their claim to
build for compensation. The architect’s
team now gathers reviews and coordinates all of these warrants to assure their
mappings do not interfere, nullify but additively contribute to the reifying of
the source to the target and build the final product, on time, on budget and
within the allowed schedule. After
opening the public users have the opportunity to map any and all the
information that is superficially available form the shell, to its nuts and
bolts. Many enjoy reading the project while it is being constructed to read the
work and conceptualize the final form the bits and pieces they observe, mapping
a single task to its final outcome and so forth. So the mapping of construction
by onlookers, contractors is all part of the mapping process.
Like a landscape
artist [G] who gathers for the chaos of the nature into select5ed items to organize
into the canvas so that the viewers will find what he saw and reconstruct so
the architect and the user map their reality into a metaphor. In this way the
conception of the map is the metaphor and what is made by the cartographer is a
"graphic" to simplify the chaos to find the commonality. Sifting
through the program the architect seeks the “commonality” between the reality and
experience to make the metaphor. Mapping is only possible when we know the
“commonplace”, the commonality, the characteristic common to both, the terms
that both the source and the target have in common that the mapping takes
place. As the architect structures his
program, design and specifications he simultaneously structures the metaphor of
his work of architecture. Architecture consists of program specifics where the conditions,
operations, goals and ideals are from heretofore unrelated and distant contexts
but are themselves metaphors “mapped across conceptual domains”.
As the architectural
program the mappings are asymmetric and partial. The only regular pattern is
their irregularity, and, like a person
can be read and understood, once one is
familiar with the personality and character, vocabulary and references, and of
course the context and situation of the work
the work can also be read and understood. About Lakoff, In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive
metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain,
in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity
in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). A
conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The
regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which
often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the
mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.
This
idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first
extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work 1.4.9 Metaphors We Live By. Other cognitive
scientists study subjects similar to conceptual metaphor under the
labels "analogy"
and "conceptual blending."
Lakoff continues: 7. / 1.4. 10 Each mapping (where mapping is
the systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements
of the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from
source domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor is to
know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing.
The same idea of
mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical
reasoning and inferences) is a fixed set of ontological (relating to essence or
the nature of being) correspondences between entities in source domain and
entities in target domain.
1.4.11 *LOVE IS A
JOURNEY
LIFE IS A JOURNEY
SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS ARE PLANTS
LOVE IS WAR
* 1.4.11 From
Wikopedia on the www.
1.4.11 There is a
list of over 100 schemas in many categories about basic human behavior, reactions
and actions. These schemas are the realms in which the mappings takes place
much the same as the inferences in arguments have warrants and link evidence to
claims so do these schemas, architects carry-over their experiences with materials,
physics, art, culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form metaphor.
Identifying conditions, operations, ideals and goals are combined to form
plans, sections and elevations which are then translated in to contract documents.
Later the contractors map this metaphor based on their schemes of cost,
schedule and quality control into schedules and control documents. It is not until equipment, laborers and
materials are brought to the side that the metaphor starts to form. Once formed
the only evidence for the user (reader) are the thousands of cues from every
angle, outside and inside to enable use and understanding.
The latter half of
each of these phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and
requires the reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract
concepts of love or organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the
conceptual metaphor is used. Operationally,
the work’s entrance is the first clue about the sequence of experiences
of the metaphor taking us to the anticipated lobby, then reception followed by sequences
of increasingly private (non-communal) and remote areas until reaching the
terminal destination. The very size, context and location is couple with theme of parks, gated communities,
skyscraper’s roof tops and cladding becoming a metaphor. The very outer edges
of a metaphor portend of its most hidden content. Once we understand the
metaphor and the mapping from the context to the form the mapping continues
from entrance to the foyer and mapping from the context and cladding to every
detail. We carry-over and map the metaphor as we delve deeper into its content
and inner context always mapping the first to the current metaphor.
In linguistics
and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics
that understands language creation,
learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition
in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First,
it denies that there is an autonomous
linguistic faculty in the mind; second, it understands grammar in terms
of conceptualization; and
third, it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.
Therefore the metaphor of architecture is inherent
not in the media of the building’s presence, parts or bits and pieces but in
the mind of the reader and that the articulation of the metaphor as thinking
and third that our use of the metaphor increases our know ledge of the metaphor
and reading metaphors comes out of practice.
The more we view paintings, ballets,
symphonies, poetry, and architecture the better we become at their
understanding and its metaphor further dwells in the reader while the building
and its parts exist with out being understood. Extrapolating: the writer of the speech is as the architect
and the speaker is as the reader of the metaphor where the metaphor can only be
experienced to be understood. Walk
though an unlit city at night and feel the quite of the building’s voices
because the readers have no visual information and with access to the closed buildings
the metaphor is a potential with being a reality. Yet the potential for
cognition does exist and is real but is not understood apart from its
experience. 1.4.11 Humans
interact with their environments based on their physical dimensions,
capabilities and limits. The field of anthropometric
(human measurement) has unanswered questions, but it's still true that human
physical characteristics are fairly predictable and objectively measurable.
Buildings scaled to human physical capabilities have steps, doorways, railings,
work surfaces, seating, shelves, fixtures, walking distances, and other
features that fit well to the average person.
1.4.11 Humans also interact with their environments based
on their sensory capabilities. The fields of human perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact sciences, because
human information processing is not a purely physical act, and because
perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences, experiences,
and expectations, so human scale in architecture can also describe buildings
with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient lighting, and
spatial grammar that fit well with human senses. However, one important caveat
is that human perceptions are always going to be less predictable and less
measurable than physical dimensions. 1.4.11 Basically the scale of habitable
metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure and his
surroundings as measured, proportioned and sensed. It is dramatically
represented by Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man
is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described
by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, representation of the human figure encircled by
both a circumference encapsulating its feet to its outstretched fingertips
where the whole is then encased in a square.
This scale is read in elevations,
sections, plans, and whole and based realized in the limited and bound
architectural space. These spaces and their variations of scale are where the
reader perceives the architectural metaphors of compression, smallness,
grandeur, pomposity, equipoise, balance, rest, dynamics, direction, staticness,
etc. In his Glass House, Phillip Johnson extended that space to the
surrounding nature, making the walls the grass and surrounding trees, St.
Peter’s interiors is a Piranesi space. (The # # #Prisons (Carceri
d'invenzione or 'Imaginary Prisons'), is a series of 16 prints produced
in first and second states that show enormous subterranean vaults with stairs
and mighty machines. 1.4.11 Piranesi
vision takes on a Kafkaesque,
Escher-like
distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in
volume, but empty of purpose. They are cappricci
-whimsical aggregates of monumental architecture and ruin). Many of my pen and
ink drawings were inspired by the Piranesi metaphor. In St. Peters the spaces are so real that they
imply the potential for all mankind to occupy. The scale of the patterns on the
floor are proportional to the height and widths enclosing the space they
overwhelm the human figure as does the Baldachino whose height soars but is well
below the dome covering the building.
The metaphor is instinctively
perceived, mapped and sorted by mnemonic schemas as is New York’s Radio city Music
Hall designed by my former employer Edward Durrell Stone and the entrance to
the Louver by IM Pei. The surrounds of offices and shops by Michael Angelo
feature window and door proportionally designed to man’s scale and perfectly
mitigate the universal scale of the 1.4.11 Piazza did San Marco (St. Marks Plaza). Recalling
the plazas of Italy Stone designed and I developed the State University of New
York in Albany which featured metered arches, columns and pilasters on buildings
to mitigate the various scales of both the large and small plazas.
I remember my interview for the job
where Bob Smith, his office manager proudly entertained Mr. Stone and his board
with an array of my portfolio, covering all four walls of his executive conference
room.
The project gave
me the opportunity to plan, design and details many plazas, monumental and
convenience stairs as well as the way they would be enclosed and encased to demark
the plazas, plinths, terraces and porticos of the galleries and circulation
areas. Like Radio City this project was a grand public works metaphor recalling
the Parthenon, Rome, Venice and the many tiny urban villages I had visited
including Lucca, Sienna, Florence, etc.
1.4.11 The below
is where human scale in architecture is deliberately violated:
# For monumental effect. Buildings,
statues, and memorials are constructed in a scale larger than life as a
social/cultural signal that the subject matter is also larger than life. An
extreme example is the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, etc.
#For
aesthetic effect. Many architects, particularly in the Modernist
movement, design buildings that prioritize structural purity and clarity of
form over concessions to human scale. This became the dominant American
architectural style for decades. Some notable examples among many are Henry Cobb's
John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei's
work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe's
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. # To serve
automotive scale. Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from
roadways assume a radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish
about 3 objects or features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a
100-foot (30-meter) length of department store can perceive about 68 features;
a driver passing the same frontage at 30 mph (13 m/s or 44 ft/s) can perceive
about six or seven features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and
shallow, readable at a glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage
with bigger letters and fewer words. This
urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los
Angeles in 1920.
# =Wikopedia on the www.
8. / 1.4.12 Mappings
are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body and in every day experience and knowledge.
Mapping and making metaphors are synonymous. The person and not the work make
the metaphor. Without the body and the experience of either the author or the
reader nothing is being made. The thing does not have but the persons have the
experiences. As language, craft, and skills are learned by exercise, repetition
and every day application so are mappings. Mappings are not subject to
individual judgment or preference: but as a result of making seeking and
finding the commonality by practice.
Architects learn to associate, create and produce by years of education
and practice while users have a longer history approaching and mapping for use
and recognition. Yet new metaphors are difficult to assimilate without daily use
and familiarity.
Often the owners of new building
will provide its regular occupants with orientation, preliminary field trips
and guided tours. Many buildings restrict users’ access by receptionist, locked
doors and restricted areas.
It is not hard to experience a
built metaphor as it is an ordinary fixture on the landscape of our visual
vocabulary. It has predictable, albeit peculiar and indigenous characteristics
the generic nature of the cues are anticipated.
9. /1.4.13 A
conceptual system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings
which form a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system. Over the year’s society, cultures, families
and individuals experience and store a plethora of mapping routines which are
part of our mapping vocabulary.
As a potential
user when encountering a new building type such as a hi-tech manufacturing
center we call upon our highly structured subsystem to find conceptual systems
which will work to navigate this particular event. Another example is as a
westerner encountering a Saudi Arab home which divides the family from the
public areas of the house as private. In the high tech building doors will not
open and corridors divert visitors away form sensitive and secret areas. In the
Arab home the visitor is kept in area meant only for non-family members and
where the females may not be seen. There is a common conventional metaphorical
mapping which uses a highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system.
There is a similarity and an ability to accept and the constraints. The metaphor or the work of architecture
includes each and every nut and bolt, plane and volumes, space and fascia, vent
and blower, beam and slab, each with there mappings parallel to operational
sequences, flows representations, openings and enclosures so that they operate
in tandem and compliment one another. The conventions come from the experiences
of doors that open, elevators that work, stairs that are strong, floors that
bear our weight, buildings that don’t topple, and basic experiences that prove
verticality, horizontality, diagonals, weights of gravity, etc.
And finally Lakoff concludes the structure
of metaphor claiming that:
10 / 1.4.14There
are two types of mappings: conceptual mappings and image mappings; both obey the
Invariance Principle. “A. Image metaphors are not exact “look-alikes”;many
sensory mechanisms are at work, which can be characterized by Langacker’s focal
adjustment (selection, perspective, and abstraction); B. images and
Image-schemas are continuous; an image can be abstracted/schematized to various
degrees; and C. image metaphors and conceptual metaphors are continuous;
conceptual metaphorical mapping preserves image-schematic structure (Lakoff
1990) and image metaphors often involve conceptual aspects of the source image.
(“All metaphors
are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each
metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” Likewise when we look at the geometrical
formal parts of an architectural metaphor we note those common elements where fitting,
coupling and joints occur), again this simultaneity of ideas and image operating
in tandem where we see and know an idea simultaneously; where the convention of
the architectural space and the metaphor of the conception converge.
Image mappings in architecture finds schemes
from a repertoire of superficial
conventions except in a Japanese or Arab house where we are asked to sit on the
floor or eat without knives and forks or find no room with identifiable
modality of uses, or a palace with only show rooms where living is behind
concealed walls. A hotel’s grand ballroom is both a room in a palace, a place
for royalty, we must be one of them, yet a congregation of guests in black ties
and gowns are contemporary and family celebrating a wedding. Incongruities
merge in continuous and seamless recollections.
# 1.4.11 In cognitive linguistics, the invariance principle is a simple
attempt to explain similarities and differences between how an idea is
understood in "ordinary" usage, and how it is understood when used as
a conceptual metaphor.
Kövecses
(2002: 102) provides the following example based on the semantics
of the English verb to give.
She gave
him a book. (Source language)
Based on the metaphor CAUSATION IS TRANSFER we get:
(a) She
gave him a kiss.
(b) She
gave him a headache.
However,
the metaphor does not work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in:
(b') She
gave him a headache, and he still has
it.
(a') *She
gave him a kiss, and he still has it.
1.4.11 The invariance principle offers the hypothesis
that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that remain
coherent in the target context. The components of meaning that remain
coherent in the target context retain their "basic structure" in some
sense, so this is a form of invariance.
Architecturally, users encounter a habitable
metaphor with their experience engrafted in a particular mapping inherent in
their catalog of mappings. This mapping has its own language , vocabulary say
of the way doors, windows floors, stairs and rooms names work and the user brings
this vocabulary into, the target metaphor, say a new office building. Of course there will be all sorts of
incongruities, similarities and differences. However this principle points out
that the office building vocabulary will retain its basic structure. This means
that while the vocabulary the user brings to the target from the source will be
unchanged still keeping the images of doors, windows, etc as they were in the residential
the office will be unchanged and unaffected. For example when an architect
designs a bank from his source in the size, décor and detail of medieval great
hall the target of banking with all its vocabulary of teller windows, manager’s
carols, customer’s areas, vaults, etc will not change into medieval ways of
serving, storing and managing the business.
When I designed a
precinct police station for Bedford Stuyvesant ( a section in Brooklyn) I brought the community, park
and community services onto the street and public pedestrian sidewalks while
housing the police offices, muster and patrol functions to the back and under
the building. While the building
metaphor is now a community service police station mapping components of
meaning from the source language of user and community friendly, human scale,
public access and service which remained in the target police station. The vocabulary
of all the police functions remained coherent, perceived and understood and did
not vary. The problem is particularly interesting when the metaphor of a
shopping mall with commercial retail shops brings its language to a target
context of a hotel with service support. The front and back of the hotel, the
rooms and maintenance and the transience of guest will remain coherent,
overlaid with malls covered, circulation and service area. The separated spaces
will face the ambulatory and be separately accessible to visitors. Such a combination
you can see art work in airport terminals being open shops and passenger circulation
to a common metaphor. The airport is still an airport but an airport with a
mall. The Munich subway and underground shopping center are another such
examples. Underground subway language, structures, ventilation, circulation is
sustained while being influenced but not overriding the source.
1.4.15 Of the
eight aspects of metaphor Lakoff describes the two most applies to architecture
which is: Our system of conventional metaphor is “alive” in the same sense that
our system of grammatical and phonological (distribution and patterning of
speech sounds in a language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation.)
rules is alive; namely it is constantly in use, automatically, and below the
level of consciousness and Our metaphor system is central to our understanding
of experience and to the way we act on that understanding. 1.4.11 It seems that onomatopeics are metaphors and can be onomatopoeic (grouping of words that imitates
the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as
"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz",
"bang", or animal noises such as "oink", "moo",
or "meow") ? In this case an assemblage instead of a sound. As a non-linguistic it has impact beyond
words and is still a metaphor. Then a metaphor is much more than the sum of its
parts and is beyond any of its constituent constructions, parts and systems, its very existence a metaphor.
1.4.11 Before his
death at 101 years of age completed a book called "Emphatics," about
the use of language. Dr. Weiss worked in
the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which addresses questions about
the ultimate composition of reality, including the relationship between the
mind and matter. He was particularly interested in the way people related to
each other through symbols, language, intonation, art and music. Emphatics, (2000),
which considers how ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship
with a second dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or
grounds for the first. 1.4.11 "Surrogates," published by Indiana
University Press. Weiss says that: “A surrogate is "a replacement that is
used as a means for transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may
not be a part”. Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the program, designs and
contractors a shelter and trusted habitat. The user enters and occupies the
habitat with him having formulated but not articulated any its characteristics.
Yet it works. “It makes sense, therefore, to speak of two sides to a surrogate,
the user side and the context side (from which the user is absent or unable to
function). “ Each of us uses others to achieve a benefit for ourselves. “We
have that ability”. “None of us is just a person, a lived body, or just an
organism. We are all three and more. We are singulars who own and express
ourselves in and through them. In my early twenties I diagrammed a being as “”appetite”,
“desire” and “mind”. I defined each and described there interrelationships and support
of one another. Metaphor is one and all of these and our first experiences of
sharing life with in to what are outside of us.
As Weiss describes
our mother, language and other primary things we too ascribe like relations with
objects and even buildings assigning them the value from which we may benefit
and which may support. As Weiss proclaims that we cannot separate these three
from each other so that it follows that we may find it impossible to separate
us from the external metaphors. Inferences that are not yet warranted can be
real even before we have the evidence. Metaphors are accepted at face value and
architecture is accepted at face value. Weiss:” It is surely desirable to make
a good use of linguistic surrogates” “ A common language contains many usable
surrogates with different ranges, all kept within the limited confines that an
established convention prescribes” It is
amazing how that different people can understand one another and how we can
read meaning and conduct transaction with non-human extents, hence
architecture. Architecture is such a “third party” to our experience yet
understandable and in any context. In his search for what is real Weiss says he
has explored the large and the small and the relationships that realities have
to one another. Accustomed to surrogates architecture is made by assuming these
connections are real and have benefit. Until they are built and used we trust that
they will benefit the end user.
Assembling the ambulatory
we assume the occupancy, frequency and destinations. We each are surrogates to
one another yet fitted into one message. When this passage had been used as
read as had been other passages, corridors and links. Like a linguistic the
building stands, like a great, stone dagger, emphatic
against the sky. The stair, the exit, the space calls, gives emphasis
and is strongly expressive.
Despite their styles, periods,
specific operations, conditions, operations and goals; despite their building
types, country, national language, weather , climate, culture, etc. doors,
openings, windows, stairs, elevators, floors, walls, roofs, ramps, landscaping,
cladding, decoration, furniture, curtains, etc are all immediately understood
and mapped from past to present , from other to present context and form
individual to community of uses. A door in a private house is a door in a
public concert hall. In fact its differences are naturally assimilated and
unconsciously enjoyed.
1.5.0 Metaphor,
induction, and social policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic
views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro
Elegant architectural metaphors are
those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and reinforce one another.
Contemporary architects wrapping their parte
in “green”, “myths” and eclectic images” are no less guilty than was their
predecessors of the Bauhaus exuding asymmetry, tension and dissonance as were
the classics and renaissance insisting on unity, symmetry and balance. Both the
architects’ ant the public could not help but know the rules and seek
confirmation from one end to the other. The architect’s parte and the user’s grasp
of cliché parte were expected and easy “fill-in” proving the learned mappings,
learned inference trail and familiarity with bridging. 1.5.1 Paraphrasing: “people ascertain the deep
metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by filling in terms of an
implicitly analogy”. It is the “filling in” wherein the synapse (a region where
nerve impulses are transmitted and received, encompassing the axon terminal of
a neuron that releases neurotransmitters in response to an impulse) takes
place. 1.5.2 Synapse is metaphor where
two are joined together as the
side-by-side association of homologous paternal and maternal chromosomes during
the first prophase of meiosis.
How this happens
is as biblical as: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” where our
mental associations are themselves the metaphor, the evidence of the works we
do not actually see. We see the metaphor, we read its extent, we synapse,
analogies and metaphorize absorbing its information, contextualizing and as
much as possible and resurrecting its reasons for creation. The architectural metaphor only speaks through
its apparent shape, form, volume, space, material, etc that the concepts which
underlie each are known to the user as they would to a painting, poem, or
concerto. 1.5.3 Furthermore as observation,
analysis and use fill in the gaps users inference
the locations of concealed rooms, passages and supports, the user infers from a
typology of the type a warehouse of expectations and similes to this metaphor
from others. In this way there are the perceived and the representations they
perceive represents which when explored, inert what we call beautiful, pleasurable
and wonderful.
1.5.4 So while architecture
is the making of metaphors and architects are making metaphors their works,
though metaphoric, are not themselves the metaphors but the shadow of the
metaphor which exists elsewhere in the minds of both the creator and the user. Architects
would not be known as artist [G] nor should their works be known as works of
art[G]. Both their works are the “deep” while the owners deal with the “surface”;
the true architectural artisan has deep
and underlying metaphors predicated two and three dimensional space analysis,
history, culture, class, anthropology, geography etc. They all are often
underlying the surface of the choices of lighting, material, claddings, etc. 1.5.5
In a discussion of theories of representation Robert J. Sternberg, Roger
Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro proposes that a spatial representation in which
local subspaces can be mapped into points of higher-order hyper-spaces and vice
versa and that is possible because they have a common set of dimensions. In
this way the many architectural elements are fitted and combine to make a
unity. It can be argued that the seen is not at al the metaphor but the
transfers, bridges and connections being made apart from the building. In
filling in the terms of the analogy lies the metaphor. My design of a New Haven
Cultural Center Concert Hall brought the visitors form entrances on the plaza
under the stage and orchestra and up a ramp into the theater facing the audience
where they would be after socializing.
One seated they
world be watching the stage and the very access back to the street. This would
also be the place where refreshments were served and all would observe. The audience
was planned to be the entertainment along with the musicians on stage. The
architects have tools to control the metaphor and allow the users to replay
precisely what was intended by the architect. My proposal for an exhibit
called: Contemporary Theories of the Universe” consisted of a giant sphere enclosing
a continuous ramp on the inner circumference going from top to bottom around a
three dimensional mobile of our galaxy. The entry elevators brought visitors to
the top and as they made their way down they could see were overhead and side
exhibits telling the story of the various theories of cosmology and the
creation of the universe. From the metaphor of the idea, a sphere containing
the universe about the universe to the design of the entrance, elevators,
ramps, exhibits and central galaxy the mapping of the experience was from the
design to the perception. (P.S. Many
years later I was to find one of my former professors design a similar building
for the New York City Museum of Natural History as an adjunct the to the famous
Hayden Planetarium) .
1.6.0 Figurative
speech and linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock apologizes for the inconsistencies,
lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in linguistics to explain the
way metaphor is used and understood, misused and misunderstood.
Likewise, the street talk that
permeated my childhood was a string of “sayings, clichés, proverbs and European
linguistic slang. This was contrasted by the poetry of songs and medieval
literature. The architecture was the only source of my identity having consistency,
reputation and allusions toward science, logic and consequence. I just know
there was something out side of this circus. Although I could not derive what I
saw I could document and retain the types and details of each type. My hunger
and thirst to know what, why and how to make these spurned each morning waking
before dawn and doing reconnaissance from the time I was three till I was in my
teens.
My tours were capricious and free
roaming (my version of play) but not my curiosity where the metaphors fed me
with my identity and certainty of a reality.
The neighborhood authenticated
my persona, family and location. Later my study of architecture was organically
adjunctive while reason for study was to further my own metaphor. Figurative or
not , the metaphors I perceived then are still my “boiler-plate” and when I scrutinized
and sketched over seventy European cities I was able to find metaphors, similes,
and analogies. All was helped by preceding studies under architectural historians
as: Ross, Popiel, Maholy Nage and Vincent Scully (to name a few). However, Sadock’s examples and apologies only
remind me that my work to derive the phenomenon of architecture as the making
of metaphors is in its’ infancy, beginning to develop a vocabulary and
understanding for the architectural profession and its’ allies. There are none
known to me that today regards the social psychological building metaphors in a
way that translates into practice. As a result, as Sadock bemoans he also apologizes
for the inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in
linguistics.
1.6.1 He thus discusses
the difference between the indirect use of metaphor versed the direct use of
language to explain the world. . In some circles this is referred to tangential
thinking, that approaching a subject from its edges without getting to the
point. Users can accept works which are vague, inane, and non-descript,
evasive, and disorienting. Public housing, “ticky-tack” subdivisions, anonymous
canyons of plain vanilla towers with countless nameless windows, offices with a
sea of desks, nameless workstations and the daunting boredom of straight
highways on a desert plain. This too
applies to works of architecture which assembles a minimum and constructs the minimum
in a stoic fashion considering the least needed to produce a work that fills
the minimum economy of its commission. As such many architectural works escape
the many and various realities settling for a minimum of expression of and
otherwise prolific potential. 1.6.2 He
distinguishes and draws relationships between micro and macro metaphors and the
way they can inform one another as the form of design may refer to its program,
or a connector may reflect the concept of articulation as a design concept. The
way one 45 degree angle may reflect all the buildings geometry.
More the way the design
concept, design vision drawn on a napkin can be the vision, gestalt, formulae, and
“grand design” of a particular project. Such an ideal can be the seed, fountainhead
and rudder guiding all other design decisions.
The macro metaphor
drives the micro while they both inform one another. Classic, Egyptian, Greek,
Roman, Empire, Bedemier, Renaissance, Modern, Baroque, Rocco, Gothic, Tudor,
etc are examples of styles and periods where a macro design imperative controlled
micro decisions. And, vice versa, where construction means and methods determined
certain design and style as the flying buttress and buttress of the Gothic’s,
the arch for the Romans. The renaissance
not only was informed by discoveries of the Roman classics but by the
intellectual and spiritual exuberance so well exuded in music, art and
sculpture and in architecture by the eccentric articulation of figure and
bugling in pediments, capitals and form of the plans and sections. Likewise the macro Bauhaus and its principles
doggedly produced the architecture of Mies, Johnson, Breuer, Corbusier,
Gropius, and Meier turning away from fanciful experimentation, and turned
toward rational, functional, sometimes standardized building.
1.7.0 Some
problems with the emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart are
“primarily interested in the mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed”. He
makes several observations relevant to our study. Discussing the idioms and
informal expressions such as turn on the lights;” kick the bucket” he notes 1.7.1 Metaphors work by “reference to
analogies that are known to relate to the two domains”. In other words there is
apriori knowledge of these before they are spoken and when heard they are
immediately found. Like a building metaphor’s common elements with an uncommon
application the common connects to the unfamiliar and the architect is able to
find a way to bring them together and the user discovers their relevance.
1.8.0 Metaphor by
John R. Searle is concerned with “how metaphors work”. As we are concerned with
how architectural metaphors work we can draw some analogies. 1.8.1 A” problem of the metaphor concerns the
relations between the word and sentence meaning, on the one hand, and speaker’s
meaning or utterance meaning, on the other” “Whenever we talk about the
metaphorical meaning of a word, expression, or sentence, we are talking about
what a speaker might utter it to mean, in a way it that departs from what the
word, expression or sentence actually means”.
With the exception of major
corporate brands, churches, specialty building in architecture the examples is in
infinite as most works designed are with no intended message, meaning or
referent. Many are in the class of others of its types and generally convey
their class while others are replicas and based on a model. Furthermore most
architects have a design vocabulary which is foreign to the user. Conversely,
in public buildings, the user’s expectations, use and expectations are foreign to
the architect. At its best the architect may connect the vocabulary of his
design to some exotic design theory which, results I a very beautiful and
appealing building to which the user finds beautiful but has no idea about the intended
making of the whole or its parts. But some how it works!
After formulating a program of
building requirements and getting agreement that the words and diagrams are
approved by the client. If the architect built-work can meet this program and
come to be the building the client intended is such an example of the work of
architecture as a metaphor and metaphorical work.
(They carry-over,
bridge, and are each others advocate) Limited
to meeting the program and the fulfilling the design contract says nothing
about the unintended consequences of the building on the context and the way
the metaphor outcome impacts for users, community and the general public. In
some ways this is the job of municipal Departments of Community Services, town
fathers, zoning boards and building departments and their building codes. All
contribute to honing the metaphors and their outcomes which is this
relationship of intended words to spoken words and the chasm between the two. We are told to think before we speak, picture
what you are going to say then speak, still whatever we speak, in tone, emphasis,
timing(meter) and pitch can carry its own meanings; this was also one of the
final fields of investigation for my late mentor, Dr. Paul Weiss.
1.8.2 Searle’s “task
in constructing a theory of metaphor is to try to state the principles which
relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical utterance meaning”. In like
manner the architect tries to find a way that program relates to design and
design the final product. A good example
of unappreciated excellent metaphors is the cases of the many non-New Yorkers
who visit the city and find no interest in the buildings. Whereas its’ natives
have the language, vocabulary and years of incremental experience to know both
the words and the metaphors of each and the collective of building –types. Searle
adds:” 1.8.3 The basic principle of an
expression with its literal meaning and corresponding truth conditions can, in
various ways that are specific to the metaphor, call to mind anther meaning and
corresponding set of truths” In other words:” how does one thing remind us of
another”. Without apparent rhyme of
reason metaphors of all arts have a way of recalling other metaphors of other
times and places. In my mind I recall Brooklyn brick warehouses on Atlantic Ave.
with turn of the century Ford trucks and men adorned in vests, white shirts and
bow ties loading packages from those loading docks under large green metal
canopies. The streets are cobble stones. I can cross to this image when seeing
most old brick buildings in Leipzig, San Francisco, or Boston. No matter the
claims of mansion, palace, castle I will never mistake any such titled
commercial building with the likes of Versailles, Fontainebleau, etc. yet
seeing any view of formal gardens, great castles my mind’s eye will return me
to Schloss
Schönbrunn outside of Vienna (the palatial home of Maria Theresa and the
Hapsburg Empire).
In the case of
building metaphors it is the familiarity with not only the building- type, materials,
context and convention but the
architects, contactor’s and owner’s personas which increase the
understanding of the metaphor. In the case of Dubai and other such contexts it
is the lack of such familiarity and tolerance for the strange that makes the metaphor
acceptable on face value. The metaphor is accepted yet not understood. As many beautiful things they are awesome, forbidding, and indicative of some greater condition
as being a stranger in one’s own context. Buildings are perceived as cars
manufactured by some idioms indicative of their species with little conscious
relevance to the user’s context. It is very strange. Building designed for
people who before this generation found tents to be their habitat metaphor.
In the book’s section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
1.9.0 Process and products
in making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
1.9.1 Explaining tropes (turn,
twist, conceptual guises, and figurations) ‘Human cognition is fundamentally
shaped by various processes of figuration”. “The ease with which many
figurative utterances are comprehended are has often been attributed to the constraining influence
of the context” ………..Including “the common ground of knowledge, beliefs, and
attitudes recognized as being shared by speakers and listeners (architects and
users(clients, public) As speakers architects, designers and makers “can’t help
but employ tropes in every day conversation (design) because they conceptualize
(design) much of their experience through the figurative schemes of metaphor
(design).
It explains the standard and
traditional building types found in various contexts as the chalet in the Alps
and the specific style of each found in each of the Alp’s counties and villages,
etc. Psychological processes in metaphor
comprehension and memory by Alan Paivio and Mary Walsh say that Susanne Langer writes
that:” Metaphor is our most striking evidence of abstract seeing, of the power
the human mind to use presentational symbols”.
1.10.0 Interpretation
of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser is trying to define metaphor he says that: 1.10.1”
a metaphor involves a nonliteral use of language”. A non-literal use of
language means that what is said is for affect and not for specificity. A habitable
metaphor is not meant for the user to fully, continuously and forever recall
all that went into its production. At each moment in its use the metaphor may mean
different things, least of which may be any intended by its authors. The fact
that the roof silhouette was to emulate a Belvedere in Florence, windows from a
palace in Sienna, and stucco from Tyrol is lost over time. Even, the design principles so astutely
applied by the likes of Paul Rudolf, Richard Meier, or Marcel Breuer may be
unnoticed in favor of other internal focuses. These many design considerations
may be the metaphor that gave the project its gestalt that enabled the
preparation of the documents that in turn were faithful interpreted by skilled contractors and craftsman. Yet at each turn it is the affect of metaphor and not
necessarily its specifics that make a good design not a great work of
architecture or a working metaphor.
On visiting the
Marseille block I was struck by a plethora of innovation, and lack of care and
relative poor quality thane I was about standing in a Corbu building. Yet in
Gaudi’s Barcelona apartment block the affect of the sculpture was ever-present.
I could not even remember what particular theory or design principle governed,
it was just a Gaudiesque experience. It
is this observation that allows us to make parallel references to painting,
music, dance, painting, sculpture and architecture as metaphor since they are
involves a nonliteral use of language. Except the specifications, titles and performance
descriptions a work of architecture metaphor is open to interpretation and
random perceptions in time and space. What the maker might have intended and
its perception may not be exact but can be understood in a very general use of
the common functions necessary as finding the entrance, elevators, stairs, exits,
toilets, etc. At some point Alvar Aalto
chided members of his design team wanting to distort a part of his final design
to which he replied something like I would prefer you do so that it would be
less precious and still valid after intervention. Aalto did not rely on modernism's fondness for
industrialized processes as a compositional technique, but forged an
architecture influenced by a broad spectrum of concerns.
Alvar Aalto’s
early work was influenced by contemporary Nordic practitioners such as Asplund
and Ragnar Ostberg, as well as by the simple massing and ornamentation of the
architettura mirwre of northern Italy. His work evolved from the austere
quality of the Railway Workers Housing (1923), to the more Palladian inspired
Workers Club (1924-1925) (both in Jyvaskyla), and from there to the deftly
refined and detailed Seinajoki Civil Guards Complex (1925), Jyvaskyla Civil
Guards Building (1927), and the Muurame Church (1927-1929). Composed of simple,
well proportioned volumes rendered in stucco or wood, these works are
characterized by their sparse decoration and selective use of classical elements.
Whether you know any of these things when you in one of Aalto’s work you are in
awe of its space and simplicity. The same may be said of the work of Louis
Isadore Kahn.
1.11.0 Images and
models, similes and metaphors by George A. Miller Defends a metaphor as an
abbreviated simile to appreciate similarities and analogies which is called
“appreciation”. 1.11.1 In psychology “appreciation” (Herbert (1898)) was a
general term for those mental process whereby an attached experience is brought
into relation with an already acquired and familiar conceptual system.
(Encoding, mapping, categorizing, inference, assimilation and accommodation,
attribution, etc).
Miller explains how reading
metaphors build an image in the mind. That is to say we “appreciate” what we
already know. I have always contended that we do not learn anything we already
do not know. We learn in terms of already established knowledge and concepts. We converse reiterating what we presume the
other knows, otherwise the other party would not understand. The other party understands
only because he already knows. The
architect who assembles thousands of
bits of information , resifts and
converts form words to graphics and specification documents communicates the
new proposed (the strange new thing) in terms of the known and familiar. The
first recipients are the owner, building officials; contractors must read
seeking confirmations of known and confirm its adherence to expectations. After
its construction the users read familiar signs, apparatus, spaces, volumes,
shapes and forms. The bridge carries over from one to another what is already
known .Even the strange that becomes familiar are both known but not in the
current relationship. For example when we apply a technology used on ships to a
building or a room which is commonly associated with tombs as a bank, etc. Both
are generally known but not in that specific context. We could not appreciate
it if it were not known .It is what Weiss calls commonalities and is the selection
between commonalities and differences that makes a metaphor. About understanding
and discerning between what is” true in fact” and “true in the model” Miller
says: Metaphors are, on a literal interpretation, incongruous, if not actually
false-a robust sense of what is germane to the context and what is “true in
fact” is necessary for the recognition of a metaphor, and hence general
knowledge must be available to the reader (user, public). “We try to make the
world that the author is asking us to imagine resemble the real world (as we
know it) in as many respects as possible. Offices, bedrooms, lobbies, toilets,
kitchens are such models which are built to specific situations in images of
yet some other context.
Kitchen is a
social gathering place, toilet is the baths of Rome, and the deck is top of a
ship. The architect accommodates all the realities of the goal of the room into
the model of the foreign context. By analogy what Miller distinguishes between what
the architect designed and what he thought are different.
The architects of
the Renaissance tried to resurrect the grandeur of the classic building they
discovered and resurrected. The contemporary architect faces a vernacular of design
principles which are reified in to conventional building types. The convention
is the model whiles the specific application in the strange. Often new
buildings are likened to the first model or the prototype. The reader knows the building type and is
able to recognize the new version. About the metaphor 1.11.2 Miller sites Webster’s International
Dictionary (2nd edition): “a metaphor may be regard as a compressed simile,
the comparison implied in the former being explicit in the latter. In the
making the comparison explicit is the work of the designer and reader”. “In principle, three steps, recognition, reconstruction,
and interpretation, must be taken in understating metaphors, although the
simplest instance the processing may occur so rapidly that all three blend into
a single mental act.”When we face a new metaphor (building) a new context with
its own vocabulary is presented, one which the creator must find and connect
and the other which the reader must read and transfer from previous experience”.
1.12.0 How
metaphors work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar distinguishes between (italics
are Gluksberg and Keysar) “metaphor topic” and “metaphor vehicle (predicate)” “The
vehicle being a prototypical exemplar (cigarettes) of that attributive category
(time bomb). 1.12.1 Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization
in cognitive science, where some
members of a category are more central than others. For example, when
asked to give an example of the concept furniture,
chair is more frequently cited
than, say, stool.” I asked a
New Yorker to give an example of an office building and they answered the
Empire State Building it would be because of its height, and reputation, In
fact the office building and not the “church “building shape has come to be a metaphor
of the city. New York is an office building city. I can see only a flash
glimpse and I will know it is Manhattan.
1.12.2 Their metaphor “cigarettes
are time bombs” cigarettes are assigned to a category of time bombs, what the
time bomb being a prototypical example of the set of things which can abruptly
cause serious damage at some point in the future.” It is for this reason that
the landscape is filled with many metaphoric topics (applications) based on few
metaphor vehicles (building types) not only true in functions and goals but
also in characteristic building systems and structures. Office (metaphor topic)
Building (metaphor vehicle) metaphor topic as a house may be a hotel, grand
estate, small or large private residence depends on the predicate. Carried with
each are also, social, psychological, political and geographic inferences.
1.12.3 “Metaphors
are generally used to describe something new by references to something
familiar (Black, 1962b), not just in conversation, but in such diverse areas as
science and psychotherapy. Metaphors are not just nice, they are necessary. They are necessary for casting abstract
concepts in terms of the apprehendable, as we do, for example, when we
metaphorically extend spatial concepts and spatial terms to the realms of temporal
concepts and temporal terms. In another
sense when an architect creates a metaphor it a building which takes on the
attributes of all buildings and if it is work of art, as a building metaphor it
takes on the attributes of the calls of buildings which are more than a tin box
but a statement of complex ideas which demands reading and is an opportunity to
be read.
How do I know it is an “office
building”?
1. It is located in the
neighborhood of other office buildings
2. It does not have balconies and,
curtains in the windows,
3. It has an open and wide public
plaza and unrestricted wide openings
4. Its glazing, cladding and skin
are high tech, impersonal and large scale.
In adaptive use buildings where office
are housed in residential and residential are house in office buildings
precisely the metaphor topic and the metaphor vehicle are purposefully confuses
the metaphor its unique identity.
1.13.0 In the Metaphor
and Science section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western
science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski
Part on “The alchemists they
describe a system of triangulation I developed, taught and applied at Pratt
Institute which is as: “Metals were often held to consist of two components:
mercury, which was fiery, active and male, and sulphur, which was watery,
passive and female. Thus the combination of the two metals could be viewed as a
marriage. Metals and other minerals were often compared with heavenly bodies
and their properties triangulated to produce a third. Not to let this arbitrary
characterizations blemish the structure of this system it is valid to
triangulate and in fact 1.13.1 much of architectural making of metaphors is a
matter of mapping, diagramming and combining to conclude the validity of
combining and matching unlike materials, shapes, & systems. In this way any
one of the metaphors and the whole system of bridging and carrying over is
metaphoric. Map a rectangle and circle to a third and you get a part square
part circular odd shape. Map cold and hot and you get warm; map hotel, office, residential
and shops and you get mixed use. Renaissance
European cities beguile their metaphor with such combinations known by their
scale, cladding, décor, and entrees. Particularly charming are the German
“guest houses ("gast hofs"), English family pubs, etc. New Towns and contemporary
town centers are mixed use, multi zoned urban cores. It isn’t the referent
where one is the other but where there is a similarity between like features of
two things, on which a comparison may be based: the
analogy between the heart and a pump. The commonality is apparent. They both
share a similar characteristic. The
hotel, residence , office and shop are joined by their convenience to that provide service to clients and their
use of rooms, and a core of service, mountainous and housekeeping and supply. A
small staff can support these businesses and there customers are compatible. They
all have a front of the house and back-of-the -house function (garbage,
deliveries, maintenance, etc) in many citers lacks zoning regulations have
alo9owed such mixed uses zones to still exist to day. Seeing these metaphors is
a part of the fabric and character of neighborhoods.
1.13.2 Metaphor is reasoning using abstract
characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight forward extension of its use
in commonplace reasoning. All
this to say and as if there was a choice that architects have a choice where to make a new building by analogy
or by metaphor. Analogies may be the
ticky-tacks, office building, church, school building, fire station analogies
to a first model verses an abstraction of a program into a new prototype. Is
the analogy any less a work of architecture?
Or do we
only mean that works of architecture are works of art when they make
abstractions? 1.13.3 “In processing
analogy, people implicitly focus on certain kinds of commonalities and ignore
others”. In my New Haven drafting service builders would give me a
floor plan for me to redraft to build a news house: they simply wanted an analogy
to the first with no changes. The Florida school board uses and reuses both
firms and plans to dieing new high schools bases on plans used before to build
other schools and only slight modifications to make them site-specific.
This is design by analogy. Many design professionals use
standard details and standard specifications relying upon analogy to design a
new building. The overall may be either metaphor or analogous. Whole
professional practices are formulated and bases on one or the other practices. Noting these things an industry was created
called the “housing industry’ churning out analogies rather than individual
metaphors, leaving the metaphor to the context or theme of the development. It
is famous architects who are mostly famous because they made metaphors and from
them analogies were drawn. The analogous phenomenon has resulted in the nineteenth
century Sears offering pre-designed and package barns ready to ship form Wisconsin
to any where by mail order. Pre-engineered metal being and manufactured homes
are all part of the analogous scheme of reasoning the built environment. Users
have access to either and are able to shift perceptions. In commonplace users
wanting to be fed by metaphorical architecture go to Disney, European, or urban
entertainment and recreation centers. Las Vegas thrives on what I call
"metaphoric analogies” abstractions of analogous building types. It is
that synapse which attracts and beguiles the visitor hungry for authenticity
and reality.
Living in analogous
urban replicas city dweller migrated to the suburbs in search of the metaphor
of “a man’s home is his castle”. Today this metaphor has become an analogy as
the metaphor proliferates and analogies from one to another state and country.
We may be
told a “cell is like a factory” which
gives us a framework for analogy and similarity. 1.13.4
An analogy is a kind of highly selective similarity where we focus
on certain commonalities and ignore others. The commonality is no that they are
both built out of bricks but that they both take in resources to operate and to
generate their products. As users, design professionals begin their
design process by finding analogies from extent projects as user faced with the
building resort to their own vocabulary. Both do not favor one or the other and
vacillate between the two for what they can learn.
For example
HOK Sport Venue Event Company prides itself on designing
stadiums recapturing the community context, history of the teams while designing
a new abstraction worthy of the future of the game and the entertainment of the
fans.
“Populous”
(HOK sports facility business) is a global design practice specializing in
creating environments that draw people and communities together for
unforgettable experiences. So much so that the new name of the firm is:
“POPULACE”. “As Populous, we enthusiastically embrace the expertise we uniquely
claim—drawing people together around teams, athletes, events, places, commerce,
industry and ideas they wholeheartedly embrace and adore.”
1.13.5 On the
creative and architect’s side: “The central idea is that an analogy is a mapping
of knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target) such that a system
of relations that holds among the base objects also holds among the target
objects”. On the user’s side in interpreting an analogy, people seek to put objects
of the base in one-to-one correspondence with the objects of the targets as to
obtain the maximum structural match”. Confronting a Bedouin village of tents a
westerner faced with apparent differences looks for similarities. 1.13.6 “The corresponding objects in the base
and target need not resemble each other; rather object correspondences are
determined by the like roles in the matching relational structures.” Cushions
for seats, carpets for flooring, stretched fabric for walls and roof. Cable for
beams and columns, etc.
1.13.7 “Thus, an analogy
is a way of aligning and focusing on rational commonalities independently of
the objects in which those relationships are embedded.” However, there may be
metaphors at work as well as the user reads the tent’s tension cable structure,
banners and the entire assemblage in a “romantic” eclectic image of Arabness, metaphors
beyond the imperial but of the realm of the abstract and inaccurate.
1.13.8 “Central to the mapping process
is the principle of “systematicity: people prefer to map systems of predicates favored
by higher-order relations with inferential import (the Arab tent), rather that
to map isolated predicates. The systematicity principle reflects a tacit preference
for coherence and inferential power in interpreting analogy”. Arab tentness and
“home-sweet-home” map basics from the “home-sweet-home” to the Arabness to make
all the bits and pieces be understood.
Thus architects choose building elements
from catalogs and in the most metaphoric circumstances designs elements from scratch.
Metaphor buildings may or may not be composed of metaphoric elements. Metaphors and buildings which are analogies
may of or may not have elements designed metaphorically. However, it is less likely
that an analogues design will contain metaphorical elements. 1.13.9“No extraneous associations: Only
commonalities strengthen an analogy. Further relations and associations between
the base and target- for example, thematic consecutions- do not contribute to
the analogy”. Analogous matching looks for duplicates, replicas and like
elements; the more the better. Most contemporary commercial design relies on
many commonalities hence CAD, design format programs, etc assume commonalities
in and analogies. After choosing title system the rest follows as repetition as
before. Many commercial house plans, office plans, department store, etc acre
designed as analogous design schemes.
As the
architect of record for Dhahran Academy in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and after
having designed and redesigned their primary buildings the school superintendent
asked how to go about adding additional space. Rather than adding to his
expense and time for another design process I recommended and they engage a
pre-engineered steel building manufacturer to produce this building for them.
In this case I knew the analogous rather than the metaphorical process would be
appropriate. King Faisal University asked my advice to design their new and
temporary school to house their school of architecture while the permanent
overall campus plans were being completed. Again I suggested the analogous
approach of a pre-engineered building system. Of course within this approach,
the specific sizes, electrical, plumbing and HVAC requirements were all
specifically selected from already available “off-the-shelf” modules.
1.14.0Metaphor and
theory change: What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd defines the 1.14.1 “interaction view” of metaphor where metaphors
work by applying to the principle (literal) subject of the metaphor a system of
“associated implications” characteristic of the metaphorical secondary subject.
These implications are typically provided by the received “commonplaces”
(ordinary; undistinguished or uninteresting; without individuality: a commonplace person.) About the secondary subject ‘The success of
the metaphor rests on its success in conveying to the listener (Reader) some
quieter defines respects of similarity or analogy between the principle and
secondary subject.” Architects design by translating concepts into two dimensional
graphics that which ultimately imply a multidimensional future reality. She tests the horizontal and vertical space
finding accommodation and commonality of adjacency, connectivity and
inclusiveness.
1.14.2 To Boyd, metaphors
simply impart their commonplace not necessity to their similarity or analogous.
This kind of metaphor simply adds information to the hearer which was not
otherwise available which explains the built metaphor that is neither analogous
not abstractly common but works, is unique and serves a purpose. I found
methane gas silos on the Ruhergebeit in Germany’s three city district conically
shaped (with the wider circumference at the base) like a Byzantine apse with
channeled walks and fluted sides. I had seen nothing like this and it took
hours and an article I wrote which was published in Progressive Architecture to
explain this metaphor. I called it Pollution
Architecture. The Pricklley Mountain project in Warren Vermont was another such
example of received “commonplaces” of its use(s).
1.15.0 Metaphor in
science by Thomas S. Kuhn speaking about scientific language he distinguishes
between 1.15.1“dubbing” (invest with any
name, character, dignity, or title; style; name; call) and “epistemic access” (relating to, or
involving knowledge; cognitive.).”When dubbing is abandoned the link between
language and the world disappears”. Architectural
metaphors are all about names, titles, and the access to that the work provides
for the reader to learn and develop. At its best the vocabulary of the parts
and whole of the work is an encyclopedia and cultural building block. The work incorporates
the current state of man’s culture and society which is an open book for the
reader. The freedom of both the creator
and reader to dub and show is all part of the learning experience of the
metaphor. As a good writer “shows” and
not “tells” so a good designer manifests configurations without words. However objective, thorough and scientific;
the designer, the design tools and the work gets dubbed with ideas (not techne)
we may call style, personality, and identity above and beyond the program and
its basic design (techne). It is additional controls, characterizations and
guidelines engrafted into the form not necessarily overtly and expressly required.
Dubbing may occur in the making of metaphors
as a way in which the design itself is conceived and brought together. Dubbing
may in fact be the process which created the work as an intuitive act.
1.16.0 Metaphorical
imprecision and the “top down” research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn; Zenon W.
Pylyshyn is Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center
for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and Cognition: toward a
Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), both published by The MIT
Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception, attention,
and the computational theory of mind.
About Cognition (pertaining to the
mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted
with emotional and volitional processes) justifies Socrates “learning as recollecting”
to explain that we absorb new knowledge on the shoulders of old experiences. 1.16.1 Pylyshyn explains: “…………….consider new concepts
as being characterized in terms of old ones (plus logical conjunctives)” 2.0 As
William J. Gordon points out we make the strange familiar by talking about one
thing in terms of another.
Pylyshyn: "On the other hand,
if it were possible to observe and to acquire new “knowledge” without the
benefit of these concepts (conceptual schemata (an underlying organizational
pattern or structure; conceptual framework) which are the medium of thought),
then such 1.16.2 “Knowledge” would not itself
be conceptual or be expressed in the medium of thought, and therefore it would
not be cognitively structured, integrated with other knowledge, or even
comprehended. Hence, it would be intellectually inaccessible”. In other words
we would not know that we know.
Where knowing is
the Greek for suffer, or experience. This was the Greek ideal proved in Oedipus;
“through suffering man learns”; we know that we know. Therefore, when we
observe that architecture makes metaphors we mean that we know that we know
that works exists and we can read authors messages. We learn the work. The art
implicitly has gathered the information and organized it in way that given the
right apriori vocabulary, codes definitions and signal and sign cognitions one
can read the message in one way or another depending on the individual and the
variety of individual perceptions. Buildings, artifacts, products with embedded
(encrypted) workings can be read, learned, assimilated, connected and either by
epiphany or Pavlovian stimulus –response known. Climbing the stairs of a
pyramid in Mexico City or a fire stair in a high rise is essentially the same
except for the impact of its context and what the stair connects (create and
base) and the object on which the stair ascends and descends. The conditions,
ideals and goals are very different while most of the operation is the same. In
this way you can say that non-architecture can be identifies as teaching
nothing. I don’t believe that there is
such a thing, even the “tin-box” (pre-engineered manufactured factory warehouse
is a metaphor. It may be a one page comic book character but is has content and
is readable.
1.16.3 Pulling
from three dimensional and two dimensional
means and methods, from asymmetrical and symmetrical, and from spatial
and volumetric design principles the architect assembles metaphor
metaphorically by associating and carrying-over these principles applying to
the program at hand to lift and stretch the ideas into space and across the
range of disassociated ideas and concepts making a new and very strange
metaphor unlike anything ever created yet filled with thousands of familiar
signs and elements that make it work . Just
as practice makes perfect for the concert pianist, opera singer, ballerina, etc
so is it for the architect. However, having said this reader is at imitate
disadvantage except for the natives of a particular location. Little old ladies
in the tiniest Italian village can tell in the minutest detail all about every
building, street and area. She has learned and passed on the “knowledge” from
her ancestors and is as trained as its creators but in a totally different way.
Hers is the act of perception and reader who must recreate and challenge her
memory and recollections. She does not have to work at design but at reliving
and imagining the design process to find the details and the whole of the
building and its social, political and chronological context. Her explanations
will include great joy, violent emotions, dis-tastes and rejections of the
owners and authors. Her experience of the metaphor will be different from that
of the creators both about the same work.
1.16.4 About the difference
between words (which are limited and specific to concepts Pylyshyn notes: “…in the case of words there is a
component of reason and choice which mediates between cognitive content and
outward expression. I can choose what words I use, whereas I cannot in the same
sense choose in terms of which I represent the world.” So architects and readers
deal with materials, structures, systems and leave the concepts to a variety of
possible outcomes. 1.16.5 About a
“top-down strategy” called “structured programming” in computer science allows
for a point of entry into a the development of a new idea where you begin with
an idea and after testing and developing that idea bringing everyday knowledge
to bear on the development of theoretical ideas with some confidences that they
are new either incoherent nor contradictory, and furthermore with some way of
exploring what they entail. The point is there are better and worse places for
introducing rigor into an evolving discipline.
“This explanation
is pretty much that path of the development of my theory that
"architecture is the making of metaphors" has followed over the past
45 years. From general recognitions, observations and analogies within the
framework of professional design practice , painting, sculpture and philosophy
to discussions with renowned scholars most notably Dr. Paul Weiss , followed by
a lecture series involving prominent design professionals and arts and then
years of research and documentation into monographs.,
1.16.6 Explaining
this approach as a “skyhook-skyscraper" construction of science from the
roof down to the yet un-constructed foundations” describes going from the
general to the specific in and decreasing general to an increasing amount of
detail and pragmatic evidence, referents, claims and resolutions.
Structural engineers design from
the top down so as to accumulate the additive loads to the consecutive lower
members and ultimately the foundation which bears it all. Conceptual design and
first impressions both begin with the general and go to the specific. Gated communities,
Newtown’s, malls, resorts and commercial buildings give high marks to the
overall and superficial .Yet most working metaphors are the result of design
and perception from the gestalt (overall concept) to the emptiness (non-gestalt) . Maria Theresa’s Schoenbrunn is an excellent
example along with major university campuses such as Cambridge, Yale, Oxford,
etc where theme and design philosophy prevails and dominates from the facades
to the planning techniques of large public spaces to increasing private and
smaller spaces and detailing, where with the overall one cannot imagine any
thing. The gestalt is the entity in
which all occurs and with the concept there is no context. So it is with
metaphor with it the rest of the conversation has no framework and no
conception can begin either in its creation or use.
1.16.7 Pylyshyn asks:”
What distinguishes a metaphor from its complete explication (explain) ….”? In
the case of architecture the entire set of contract documents, program, etc.” Pylyshyn
answers: “The difference between literal and metaphorical description lies
primarily in such pragmatic consideration as (1) the stability, referential
specificity, and general acceptance of terms: and (2) the perception, shared by
those who use the terms, that the resulting description characterizes the world
as it really is, rather than being a convenient way of talking about it, or a
way of capturing superficial resemblances”. In this ways of all the arts,
architecture is the most profound in that it combines and confirms the secular (of
this time), “how things really are” with the gestalt of personal, social,
community and private importance. If art is the making of metaphors and it has
no real use then how significant is architecture with both “reality” and fantasy/
imagination combined and confirmed by its very existence. I mean to say that
the very real existence of work of art which bespeaks of life and times exists
and is accessible and in our contexts is itself a metaphor of great
significance and satisfaction. Were the
building us it would be me, where I a building I be it. The metaphor expresses
a value common to both; both are both real and ideas at the same time. The
metaphor is the bridge and confirmation of art in the world, life in the flesh
and flesh become ideas. Architecture is an extreme reification from notion in
both creator and reader of materials and idea.
1.16.8 Pylyshyn
asserts that: “metaphor induces a (partial) equivalence between two known phenomenons;
a literal account describes the phenomenon in authentic terms in which it is
seen”.
Socially speaking worldly
people that work in offices dress then behave the way they do if for example
they reported to work in manufacturing warehouses? Their scenario of the
behavior and the metaphor would not correspond.
Metaphor and Education is the final section: Readers may wish to
review my monograms on Schools and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern
Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New
Rochelle, New York and The Metametaphor of
architectural education", (North Cypress, Turkish University. December,
1997)
1.17.0 The
instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by
Richard E. Mayer concludes that 1.17.1 “analogical
transfer theory ( “instructive metaphors create an analogy between a
to-be-learned- system(target domain) and a familiar system(metaphoric domain)”
It was these concerns behind Frank Lloyd Wright’s separation from the
architecture of Louis Sullivan and what spurned the collective work of the
Bauhaus in Germany , that is to express the truth about the building’s systems,
materials, open life styles, use of light
and air and bringing nature into the buildings environment, not to
mention ridding building of the irrelevant and time worn cliches of building
design decoration, and traditional principles of classical architecture as
professed by the
Beaux-Arts movement. For equipoise “Unity,
symmetry and balance” were replaced by “asymmetrical tensional relationships” between,
“dominant, subdominant and tertiary” forms and the results of science and
engineering influence on architectural design, a new design metaphor was born. The Bauhaus found the metaphor in all the
arts, the commonalities in making jewelry, furniture, architecture, interior
design, decoration, lighting, industrial design, etc.
1.18.0 Metaphor
and learning by Hugh G Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag
Concludes that metaphorical teaching
strategies often lead to better and more memorable learning than do explicit
strategies which explains why urbanites have a “street smarts” that is missing
from sub-urban; they actually learn from the metaphors that make up the
context. Of course this is in addition to the social aspects of urbanity which
is again influenced by the opportunities of urban metaphors: parks, play
grounds, main streets, broadways, avenues, streets, sidewalks, plazas,
downtown, markets, street vendors, etc.
About metaphor: 1.18.1 “Radically new knowledge results from a
change in modes of representation of knowledge, whereas a comparative metaphor occurs
within the existing representations which serve to render the comparison sensible.
The comparative level of metaphor might allow for extensions of already
existing knowledge, but would not provide a new form of understanding. When visiting
new cities in another country one is immediately confronted with metaphors
which create similarities as interactive and comparative as we seek to find similarities
and differences with what we already known in our home context. Visiting,
sketching and writing about over seventy European cities I noted the character
and ambiance of each and the differences between one and another. I drew so
many vignettes of buildings and cityscapes noting the metaphor of each. I had a
Baedeker’s guide to educate me bout the time and place of each street and building.
I had already studied the history of architecture so I could relate the
metaphors to their own time and circumstance, yet I enjoyed each metaphor in my
time as places and settings for contemporary urban life with a backdrop of
their historical past,
Each metaphor was
of the past’s impact on the future with the unique design of crafts, building
materials, and skills that were peculiar to their times but were no enjoyed in
the present. In this context there are the natives who experience these metaphors
all their lives and the visitor who is fist learning the lesson of these metaphors.
Both experience these in different ways. The native knows the place and
comprehends both the old and the new knowledge domains whereas the visitor the
very same metaphor may be interactive, creating the similarity under
construction.
The visitor (this is my word) may “well
be acquiring one of the constitutive or residual metaphors of the place (this
is my word) at the same time; same metaphor, different experiences.
1.19.0 Educational
uses of metaphor by Thomas G. Sticht discusses how the natures of
metaphor as a speech act and serves
as a linguistic tool for overcoming cognitive limitations. 1.19.1 Sticht
claims that metaphors have a way of extending our capacities for communications.
As most artists their language is beyond speech and to the peculiar craft of
their art of which their practice and exercise develops new capacity and
opportunity to teach and express thought outside of the linguistics but is nevertheless
perhaps as valuable and worthy. 1.19.2 Sticht
adds: “that speech is a fleeting, temporarily linear means of communicating,
coupled with the fact that that, as human beings, we are limited in how much
information we can maintain and process at any one time in active memory, means
that as speakers we can always benefit from tools for efficiently bringing
information into active memory, encoding it for communication, and recording
it, as listeners, in some memorable fashion.” 1.19.3 Relevantly he points out that metaphor
is the solution insofar as it encodes and captures the information:”
transferring chunks of experience from well –known to less well known contexts;
1.19.4 The vividness
thesis, which maintains that metaphors
permit and impress a more memorable learning due to the greater imagery or
concreteness or vividness of the “full-blooded experience” conjured up by the
metaphorical vehicle; 1.19.5 and the inexpressibility thesis, in which it is
noted that certain aspects of natural experience are never encoded in language
and that metaphors carry with them the extra meanings never encoded in
language. One picture is worth a thousand words and how valuable are the arts
as makers of who we are as a people, society and time. 1.19.6“The mnemonic (intended to assist the
memory) function of metaphor as expressed by Ortony’s vividness
thesis also points to the value of metaphor as a tool for producing durable
learning from unenduiring speech”. Architects both compose the program and
reify its contents from words to diagrams and diagrams to two dimensional
graphics and three dimensional models to reify and bring- out (educate) the
user’s mind and fulfillment of unspoken and hidden needs. Needs which many or
may not have been programmed and intended; the metaphor is the final resolution
until it is built and used. Then it is subject to further tests of time,
audience, markets, trends, fashions, social politics, demographic shifts,
economics, and cultural changes.
Postscript: Architecture’s
New Paradigm
When kingdoms created dynasty’s iconic buildings
the architect and artisans took their ques from the reigning monarch. In our
modern federal democratic pluralistic society the free reign of ideas and
opinions as to contexts and their meanings are diverse.
Not only is my
childhood quest relevant but the essence of the responsibility of today’s architect who not only reasons the technical but individually reasons the
conceptual . It is to the architect that
society turns to be informed about the shape and form of the context in which
life will be played. With this charge the need to know that we know and do by
reasoning what science verifies by the scientific method to know that we know about
the buildings , parks, and places we set into the environment. It is a public
and private charge included in the contract for professional services but
unspoken as professional life’s experience; to prove the relevant, meaningful
and beneficial metaphors that edify encourage and equip society as well as
provide for its’ health, safety and welfare. So it is critical to realize,
control and accept as commonplace that the role of the architect is to do much
more than build but build masterfully.
We are witnessing
a shift in architectural paradigms from one set of architectural forms to
another. It was material shelter and now
its electronic affluence.
As cars are being bought not just
for their ride but for access to communications, Internet and web
technology; shelters are something other
that a habitat. As the life style of the world changed so has the accommodation
for that world. The borders and contexts specific places are global where
building systems and materials are transferred from one to another context
while we are in transit from one to anther. Life is likewise metaphoric;
analogies won’t do. Architect now form a
macro metaphor sourcing the new paradigm to the target program. No one can
afford to be parochial disregarding all pervasive contextual conceptual metaphors.
Some still unanswered non-contextual random concerns:
What is the significance of all
these findings as applied to practice, education, understanding and making better
architecture?
Can inanimate objects exude a
message? And if they can what is their
language?
How do we read a metaphor?
If a metaphor does not exude, is it
still a metaphor?
Is a metaphor an inherently social,
interactive, commutative form or is it by itself a structure which stands
irrespective of being read?
As a building will stand long after
it is created and still stands when vacant and deserted, does the metaphor? Are
the attributes of the architectural metaphor built-in and not only making the
building stand, but a potential for exuding its content?
What is the difference between a
metaphor exuding and it being read?
Architecture is
inanimate, is mute, and without a conductor or libretto. Few works will even
announce its architect unlike a signed painting; the designers remain in hiding
taking no public pride except in portfolio. What has happened? Is this
anonymity indicative of something more endemic and perhaps sinister? Is our
culture anti-art-anti-metaphor?
If we can read
paintings, sculpture, music, and dance then we can assume we can read
architecture. If it can be read as the
other arts then it too must have some similar characteristic.
People are
magnetically attracted to buildings because they are sources of information
about their culture, the future, their identity and their precious security.
All shelters are relative to the
individual, the context, society and culture and as such they are relative to
each other.
People compare one
shelter to the other in search of their status, dominance, voice and
representative cost and power in the context and relative to one another. In
this way architecture is values and like all other artifacts and arts has a
value unto itself and relative to its owner, (an n individual, corporation,
church or state) and between one another.
As shelters the
building metaphor is an essential learning tool. What else?
Architecture and not just
pre-engineered or anonymous builder’s boxes, or engineered utility structures
are a collection of thoughts whose thoughts can be read as a book (when we know
the vocabulary), touched as we can touch sculpture and can be seen as a
painting, play, ballet, and opera, but we cannot hear it as music (accept its
acoustics), nor smell (unless we inhale the smell of its materials) and taste
it as gourmet food (we do not apply our taste buds to buildings). Non-metaphors
may operate as metaphors and therefore be metaphoric but they are not metaphors
nor have a complex of intentional thoughts. But all are perceived where we have
to discern the non-metaphor as a non-metaphor and therefore an apparent lack of
message, meaning and communication potential. It communicates non-metaphor.
Does it work as a
metaphor without message? Are onomatopeics metaphors? Are metaphors onomatopoeic (grouping of words
that imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as
"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz",
"bang", or animal noises such as "oink", "moo",
or "meow") ? In this case an assemblage instead of a sound. As a non-linguistic is its impact beyond
words and still a metaphor? And, if it is then does that say that a metaphor is
much more than the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its constituent
constructions, parts and systems. Is its
very existence a metaphor?
We began this
study in 1966 at Yale University in search of bringing beauty, art and
aesthetics back to architecture. To endow the profession with its historical
place as the premier aesthetician of society which focused on meaning,
significance and beauty rather than finance, economics and efficiency?
Believing that without a vision a nation perishes so must architects have a
vision beyond the mundane? To prove the
philosophical, sociological and commercial reasons to make buildings as art the
making of metaphors, if art was the making of metaphors and architecture was an
art then architecture too was the making of metaphors. We also could have
expressed our true motives by saying that if art make metaphors and
architecture too makes metaphors then they both are art and therefore can be
beautiful ( assuming that art and beauty are synonymous) .
As voice and
musicians are to music so the constructed metaphor is to architecture. When we
hear the musicians we hear the presence of the people. It is the attraction of
all the arts to authenticate our humanity, or personage, our reality by the
reality of the voice and the confirmation of being. All metaphors share being a
tome to our human being and are valued as a person. Consider for example the
silent voices of buildings exuding the mason’s craft, the glaser's skills, the
structure’s geometry, the volume’s presence and the building’s height.
What ever its
composition, content and circumstance the built metaphor is a shelter, used,
judged and perceived on its effectiveness to shelter (a dwelling place or home
considered as a refuge from the elements). This effectiveness is relative to
overall non functional use in the urban fabric, its specific use and how its
message content can be read.
While all the arts
have a plethora of words, phrases and styles dwelling on their beauty,
architecture is without these expressions and meanings. It has an inordinate
vocabulary of technical terms but little in the way of its metaphorical tools.
These studies hope to provide those tools, vocabulary and examples as I
metaphorically apply general, psychological and linguistic theory to further
build a metaphoric language applying to built-metaphors known as architectural
metaphors.
Having argued that architecture is
an art because it too makes metaphors assumed that art is an art and that art
is the making of metaphors. While it may be arguable that art is a metaphor I
have never seen an argument for this resolution.
To date, my argument for
architecture being a metaphor using a literary term has itself never been
challenged or proven plausible or unreasonable.
The future:
Places like Masdar City (Arabic:
Masdar, literally “the source”) is a planned city in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. It is being built by the
Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a subsidiary of Mubadala Development Company, with the
majority of seed capital provided by the government of Abu Dhabi. Designed by
the British
architectural firm Foster + Partners, the city will rely entirely
on solar energy
and other renewable energy sources, with a sustainable,
zero-carbon, zero-waste
ecology.
Space cities,
cities in the desert, etc. Places free form the influences of competing
analogies, similes and contextual metaphors. Masdar City is a carbon-neutral
community. We are aiming to develop a unique clean tech cluster where companies
and researchers from around the world could develop solutions to address
climate change and global energy issues. The city itself will be developed in a
way to reduce carbon emissions from its development, making it carbon-neutral.
The whole city will be provided with renewable power which is not based on
fossil fuels and also developing a transportation system that is free from
fossil fuel. In addition to that, all the materials used in the city will
be accounted for and offset through the landscape and energy savings. The
city itself is a test bed for technologies from around the world and at the
same time it will be the source of solutions for sustainability and advancing
energy.
Like my State
University of New York in Albany by Edward Durrell Stone, Giant umbrellas, with
a design based on the principles of sunflowers, will provide moveable shade in
the day, store heat, then close and release the heat at night in the plaza of a
new eco-city in the United Arab Emirates. We called ours mushrooms and they
were the typical structural design for most of the academic buildings and their
connectors.
Campus planning and design, Malls, New
Towns, Planned Unite Developments, gated communities, city centers are all
opportunities to dub, add and enhance a
minimal building program with metaphors that reach beyond the financial,
economic and market demographics to social ,political, communal and cultural
targets and sources of the metaphor.
Places which are not like Disney, etc which are market driven but any
program which in free of extent contextual metaphorical influences.
www.bariefez-barringten.com
Citations listed alphabetically:
Boyd, Richard; 1.14.0
Conrad, Ulrich; 1.3
Fraser, Bruce; 1.10.0
Gentner, Dedre ;
1.13.0
Gibbs,
Jr., Raymond W.; 1.9.0
Glucksberg,
Sam; 1.12.0
Jeziorski, Michael; 1.13.0
Kuhn, Thomas S.; 1.15.0
Keysar,
Boaz; 1.12.0
Lakoff, George;
1.4
Mayer,
Richard E.; 1.17.0
Miller,
George A.; 1.11.0
Nigro, Georgia;
1.5.0
Ortony,Andrew;1.0
Oshlag,
Rebecca S.; 1.18.0
Petrie,
Hugh G; 1.18.0
Pylyshyn, Zeon W.; 1.16.0
Reddy.
Michael J.; 1.2
Rumelhart, David E.; 1.7.0
Sadock, Jerrold M.; 1.6.0
Schon, Donald A. ; 1.1
Searle, John R.; 1.8.0
Sternberg,
Robert J.; 1.5.0
Thomas
G. Sticht; 1.19.0
Tourangeau,
Roger; 1.5.0
Weiss,Paul; 1.4.11
Footnotes listed chronologically:
1.0 Metaphor and Thought: Second
Edition
Edited by Andrew Ortony: School of
Education and social Sciences and
Institute for the learning
Sciences: North Western University
Published by Cambridge University
Press
First pub: 1979
Second pub: 1993
1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on
problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in
our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy.
1.3 In Programs and Manifestos on 20th-Century
Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad'
1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by George
Lakoff
1.4.11 "Surrogates,"
published by Indiana University Press. By Paul Weiss
1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and
social policy: The convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert
J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro
1.6.0 Figurative speech and
linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock
1.7.0 Some problems with the
emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart
1.8.0 Metaphor by John R. Searle
Section on “Metaphor and
Representation”:
1.9.0 Process and products in
making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
1.10.0 Interpretation of novel
metaphors by Bruce Fraser
1.11.0 Images and models, similes
and metaphors by George A. Miller
1.12.0 How metaphors work by Sam
Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar
1.13.0 In the
Metaphor and Science section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in
Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski
1.14.0 Metaphor and theory change: What is” metaphor”
a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd
1.15.0 Metaphor in science by Thomas S. Kuhn
1.16.0 Metaphorical imprecision and the “top down”
research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn
Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of
Governors Professor of Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive
Science. He is the author of Seeing
and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and Cognition: toward a
Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), both published by The MIT
Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception, attention,
and the computational theory of mind.
Metaphor and Education is the final
section:
Readers may wish to review my
monograms on Schools and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for
Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York
and The Metametaphor of architectural
education", (North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 1997)
1.17.0 The instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids to
students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer
1.18.0 Metaphor and learning by Hugh G Petrie and
Rebecca S. Oshlag
1.19.0 Educational uses of metaphor by Thomas G.
Sticht
References:
A. Background:
The first lectures
"Architecture as the Making of Metaphors" [3] were organized and conducted
near the Art and Architecture building at the Museum of Fine Arts Yale
University 11/02/67 until 12/04/67. The guest speakers were: Paul Weiss,
William J. Gordon, Christopher Tunnard, Vincent Scully, Turan Onat, Kent
Bloomer, Peter Millard, Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Forrest Wilson, and John
Cage.
Three
major questions confront both the student and the practitioner of architecture:
First, what is architecture? Second, why is architecture an art? Third, what
are the architecture's organizing principles? Many answers to these questions
have been provided by scholars and professionals, but seldom with enough rigors
to satisfy close scrutiny. Nor have the questions been attached to proven and
workable forms, so that the art could be developed beyond the limits of
personal feelings.
In 1967, a group
of master students gathered to discuss the issuance of Perspecta 12, Yale's
architectural journal - a discussion which summarized the sad state of the
profession as well as the major environmental problems society was generating
and failing to solve. The group had already been exposed to studies on the
creative process, on contradictions of form, on the comprehension of relevant
facts of an existing life style, on planning systems, in educational theories,
and in building methodologies, yet it seemed that fundamental question inherent
in the profession were being skirted rather than directly attacked.
During the series
of colloquia at Yale on art, Irving Kriesberg [4] had spoken about the characteristics of
painting as a metaphor. It seemed at once that this observation was applicable
to architecture, to design of occupiable forms. An appeal to Paul Weiss drew from
him the suggestion that we turn to English language and literature in order to
develop a comprehensive, specific, and therefore usable definition of metaphor.
But it soon became evident that the term was being defined through examples
without explaining the phenomenon of the metaphor; for our purposes it would be
essential to have evidence of the practical utility of the idea embodies in the
metaphor as well as obvious physical examples. Out of this concern grew the
proposal for a lecture series wherein professional and scholars would not only
bring forward the uses of metaphor but would also produce arguments against its
use.
For obviously
there can be dissent from the metaphorical method; in this case the dissent
(which focuses upon the possibility that the metaphor might obscure reality)
actually reinforces the metaphor's wide structural applicability. Thus
developed the symposium, which was presented by the Department of Architecture
at Yale in the same year. 1967, with the intent "to illuminate, in order
to refine and develop, the idea because it makes metaphors; that a work of
architecture is a metaphor because it too blends certain programmatic specifics
with concerns implicit to its own medium.
"Those
exploring these possibilities included Paul Weiss, William J.J. Gordon, Peter
Millard, Robert Venturi and Charles Moore; the following statements are edited
transcriptions of a small portion of the talks which were contributed to this
discussion.
B. 3.0 “Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning,
2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky of Northwestern University and
published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of Chantilly, Virginia
C. 4. Irving Kriesberg; the American
painter was born in 1919. He studied painting in America at The Art Institute
of Chicago and the University of Chicago from 1938-1941 and later in Mexico
from 1942-1946. Kriesberg began his interest in art as a cartoonist in high
school in Chicago. In the 1930's he spent many days sketching the work of the
great masters Titian & Rembrandt when visiting The Art Institute of
Chicago. In the late 1930's he came under the influence of modern art via
School of Paris exhibit.
D. 5.0 “Difference and
Identity” : 4.0 Gilles Deleuze
(French
pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]), (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher
of the late 20th century. Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early
works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly
summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical
relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference
is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different
from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities.
To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference.
Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, does
Deleuze argue, "given that there are differences of nature between things
of the same genus."
That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the
categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from
differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless
series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and
x'", and "x" = "the difference between...” and so forth. Difference
goes all the way down.
To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp
beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories,
resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference
in itself. "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it
is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to
what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its
internal difference."
In
analyzing a metaphor we ask: “What are
its commonalities and significant differences and what are the characteristics
common to both”.
F. 8.0 The Contemporary Theory
of Metaphor: a perspective from Chinese by Ning Yu
G. Art is the intentional and skillful act and/or product applying a technique and differes
from natural but pleasing behaviors and useful or decorative products in their
intent and application of a develoed technique and skill with that technique.
Art is not limited to fields, prsons or institutions as science, goevernment,
securitry, architecutre, engineering, administration, construction, design,
decoratiing, sports, etc.
On the other hand in each there are both natural and
artistic where metaphors (conceptual and/technical) make the difference, art is something
perfected and well done in that field. For example, the difference between an
artistic copy and the original is the art of originality and authorship in that
it documents a creative process lacking in the copy.
H. Axiom’s contextual forms
Three levels of axioms matching
three levels of disciplines:
- Multidiscipline: Macro most general where the metaphors and axioms and metaphors used by the widest and diverse disciplines, users and societies. All of society, crossing culture, disciplines, professions, industrialist arts and fields as mathematics and interdisciplinary vocabulary.
- Interdisciplinary: Between art [G] fields Where as metaphors in general inhabit all these axioms drive a wide variety and aid in associations, interdisciplinary contributions and conversations about board fields not necessary involved with a particular project but if about a project about all context including city plan, land use, institutions, culture and site selection, site planning and potential neighborhood and institutional involvement.
- Micro Discipline: Between architects all involved in
making the built environment particularly on single projects in voting
relevant arts, crafts, manufactures, engineers, sub-con tractors and contractors. As well as owners, users, neighbors, governments agencies,
planning boards and town councils.
I. TOC: Metaphor 2012 Monographs
Barie Fez-Barringten
Is the originator (founder) of “Architecture: the making of metaphors(architecture as the making of metaphors)"First lecture at Yale University in 1967First published in 1971 in the peer reviewed learned journal:"Main Currents in Modern Thought";In 1970, founded New York City not-for-profit called Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments (LME) and has been widely published in many international learned journals including Springer publications, MIT, and Syracuse University.The book “Architecture: the making of metaphors" has been published in February 2012 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in New Castle on Tyne,UK..All glory and honor goes to Jesus Christ who is my Lord and SaviorResearched Publications: Refereed and Peer-reviewed Journals: "monographs":Barie Fez-Barringten; Associate professor Global University1. "Architecture the making of metaphors" ©Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education; Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.2."Schools and metaphors"Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York.3."User's metametaphoric phenomena of architecture and Music":“METU” (Middle East Technical University: Ankara, Turkey): May 1995"Journal of the Faculty of Architecture4."Metametaphors and Mondrian:Neo-plasticism and its' influences in architecture" 1993 Available on Academia.edu since 20085. "The Metametaphor© of architectural education",North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 19976."Mosques and metaphors" Unpublished,19937."The basis of the metaphor of Arabia" Unpublished, 19948."The conditions of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 19949. "The metametaphor theorem"Architectural Scientific Journal, Vol. No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University.10. "Arabia’s metaphoric images" Unpublished, 199511."The context of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 199512. "A partial metaphoric vocabulary of Arabia"“Architecture: University of Technology in Datutop; February 1995 Finland13."The Aesthetics of the Arab architectural metaphor"“International Journal for Housing Science and its applications” Coral Gables, Florida.199314."Multi-dimensional metaphoric thinking"Open House, September 1997: Vol. 22; No. 3, United Kingdom: Newcastle uponTyne15."Teaching the techniques of making architectural metaphors in the twenty-first century.” Journal of King Abdul Aziz University Engg...Sciences; Jeddah: Code: BAR/223/0615:OCT.2.1421 H. 12TH EDITION; VOL. I and “Transactions” ofCardiff University, UK. April 201016. “Word Gram #9” Permafrost: Vol.31 Summer 2009 University of Alaska Fairbanks; ISSN: 0740-7890; page 19717. "Metaphors and Architecture."© ArchNet.org. October, 2009.at MIT18. “Metaphor as an inference from sign”;© University of SyracuseJournal of Enterprise Architecture; November 2009: and nominated architect of the year in speical issue of Journal of Enterprise Architecture explaining the unique relationship between enterprise and classic building architecture.19. “Framing the art vs. architecture argument”; Brunel University (West London); BST: Vol. 9 no. 1: Body, Space & Technology Journal: Perspectives Section20. “Urban Passion”: October 2010; Reconstruction & “Creation”; June 2010; by C. Fez-Barringten; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/;21. “An architectural history of metaphors”: ©AI & Society: (Journal of human-centered and machine intelligence) Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Communication: Pub: Springer; London; AI & Society located in University of Brighton, UK;AI & Society. ISSN (Print) 1435-5655 - ISSN (Online) 0951-5666 : Published by Springer-Verlag;; 6 May 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2632623064r5ljk/Paper copy: AIS Vol. 26.1. Feb. 2011; Online ISSN 1435-5655; Print ISSN 0951-5666;DOI 10.1007/s00146-010-0280-8; : Volume 26, Issue 1 (2011), Page 103.22. “Does Architecture Create Metaphors?; G.Malek; Cambridge; August 8,2009Pgs 3-12 (4/24/2010)23. “Imagery or Imagination”:the role of metaphor in architecture:Ami Ran (based on Architecture:the making of metaphors); :and Illustration:”A Metaphor of Passion”:Architecture oif Israel 82.AI;August2010pgs.83-87.24. “The sovereign built metaphor” © monograph converted to Power Point for presentation to Southwest Florida Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. 201125.“Architecture:the making of metaphors”©The Book;Cambridge Scholars PublishingPublished: Feb 2012
Newcastle upon Tyne
United KingdomEdited byEdward Richard Hart,GlasgowUKLecture:Also, “Gibe” which documents his founding of international Earth Day along with John McConnell (deceased Oct 20, 2012).
