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| Pen and ink by Barie Fez-Barringten |
Aesthetic principles of metaphor, art and architecture
Aesthetic principles
of metaphor, art and architecture (C)
(Aesthetics, metaphors and architecture)
By Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com
Emails welcomed: bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
19,317 words on 38 pages
Abstract:
While aesthetics is a guiding
principle in matters of artistic beauty and taste, metaphor is the warrant to
taste and is used to form works of art and architecture. Aesthetics is also
reasoning matters having to do with understanding perceptions. There fore it is
appropriate to consider the aesthetic nature of architecture and metaphors.
William Wilson said that "a generous
Age of Aquarius aesthetic that said that
everything was art” It was during this time that we proposed that
architecture is an art because it too makes
metaphors and held the lecture series at Yale University. Most definitions
of aesthetics
concern the appreciation of beauty
or good taste including the basis for making such judgments. Without a theory
of metaphors these judgments mostly deal with probability and are inductive or
deductive, deductive when depending on accepted premises which is the
commonplace of the metaphor or inductive using logical induction.
Inductive reasoning is inductive inference from the observed to the unobserved.
It was given its classic formulation by
David
Hume, who noted that such inferences typically rely on the
assumption that the future will resemble the past, or on the assumption that
events of a certain type are necessarily connected, via a relation of
causation, to events of another type.
Early monographs justifying architecture as the making of
metaphors were steeped in deductive reasoning since we could not find new
information pertaining to metaphors. Many of my monographs included analyzing
and explaining the syllogism:
- Art [F] is the making of metaphors
- Architecture is an art[F]
- Therefore architecture is the making of
metaphors.
Till now we did nothing to reason why art [F] is neither the making of metaphors nor
why architecture is an art. Since 1967 I proceeded to analyze the presumptions
and find its many applications. This new information in Metaphor and Thought 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 questions of why metaphor is the stasis
to any of the syllogism’s claims and implications.
In argumentation [A] it is noted that in induction there is no new information
added. In both methods the metaphor is
at their root and as such the basis of aesthetics and as such essential to
understand the stasis to what makes all arts the making of metaphors and how
that Wilson’s statement is true for everything as most are metaphorical s as
well. The matter then is one of standards, social rightness and the ability any
one or another work has an explanation of its form.
Architecture as the making of
metaphors not only is the stasis to why architecture is art but also explains
the formation of architectural aesthetic vocabulary.
The below is predominantly developed from a study of
“Metaphors and Thought” by Andrew Ortony, [1] and, is in addition to over forty
years of my work about “architecture as the making of metaphors. It is my hope
that this monograph will introduce to aesthetics an architectural vocabulary to
further the appreciation of works of architecture.
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| Gibe by Barie Fez-Barringten |
Axioms: 16,343 words
Axioms (shown in Roman numerals) are self-evident principles
that I have derived out of Ortony’s
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 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”.
1. Introduction:
Arnold Berlant’s writes that: “Sense perception lies at the
etymological (history of words) core of aesthetics (Gr. aesthesis, perception by the senses), and is central to
aesthetic theory, aesthetic experience, and their applications. Berlant finds
in the aesthetic a source, a sign, and a standard of human value”. It is this
human value which is one leg of the metaphor and the very basis for the view that
metaphor is the foundation for both art, architecture and aesthetics, and why I
have spent over forty years researching the stasis to architecture being an art
(because it too makes metaphors) it can also be shown that this same stasis is
the commonplace to the works of aesthetic thought and investigation. . This
coincidence (between aesthetics and art) confirms the intrinsic nature of this study
of epistemology of architecture and aesthetics. The metaphoric evidence I
believe will prove both useful to the creation, teaching and valuation of works
of art as well as their architectural off-spring. In fact metaphor is the driving parte
for most creative arts and architectural works.
Some
contemporary aesthetic theory differs with how best to define the term
“art”,
What should we judge when we judge art?, What should art be like?, The value of art, things of
value which define humanity itself; contrasted to
Raymond Williams who argues that there is
no unique aesthetic object but a continuum of cultural forms from ordinary
speech to experiences that are signaled as art by a frame, institution or
special event. Conversations about aesthetics, metaphors and architecture reassess
current and traditional issues by providing a scientific analysis for the way
metaphors work in architecture.
The commonality of all arts is that
they express thought in terms of their peculiar craft and thus they (all arts)
are technically metaphoric, metaphors because they transfer, carry-over and
express one thing (some idea) in terms of another(the craft). {Parenthetically,
there is no doubt that craft itself derives from ideas and concepts and within
each is a sub-metaphor}. The sculptor who finds the figure as he malls the block
is where the craft and the material inform the artist. The splashes of paint to
canvas by Jackson Pollack even prevented any slow and deliberate cognition
until the process was complete. Mies van der Rohe belittles his forms by simply
ascribing his end result to being faithful to the materials and their
properties. While all art is not expressed as a linguistic metaphor all arts
are metaphoric. Likewise, if architecture is the making of metaphors what are
the linguistic, psychological, and cognition science’s commonalities between
architecture and metaphors? This monograph is linguistic analogy transferring
from linguistic, psychological and cognitive fields to art and architecture
what has been scientifically studied.
This is the “stasis” (the state of
equilibrium {equipoise} or inactivity
caused by opposing equal forces) of the controversy of architecture being an
art; that if architecture behaves, acts, looks and works like art than it too
must be an art. Why? Because it, too, makes metaphors, and those metaphors are
varied in depth, kind, scope and context. It is the stasis because it is where
art and architecture meet. The metaphor is the conceptual focal point. While
many claim that the architect is the “techne” artist being a crafts man point
has been conceptual and so useful as to bridge, carry-over and provide both
artist and architect a common authority over the making of the built
environment.
As stasis, “architecture as the
making of metaphors” enables the center of the dispute to be argued with common
purpose. So this is a stasis in definition which concedes conjecture. While
there may be other concepts justifying the relationship between art and
architecture the metaphor is the stasis, common ground and apparent commonality.
It not only is apparent but with wide and broad applications to a variety of
arts and architectural definitions, practices and contexts. There may have been
a time when the architect was the “master builder” and the lead craftsman but for
most that is only true by his skill in drawing, design and specifying and not
his skill as a master carpenter.
Before solidifying our hypothesis
about architecture and metaphors we both compared architecture to the art of
sculpture reflecting my wife Christina’s work as a sculptress and my work as an
architect and designer. It soon became apparent that while we could easily
agree that buildings were “sculptural”,” colorful”,” lyrical”, “graceful”,
”rhythmic” etc. these were illusive and neither a field, base, or a true
commonality to all the arts, including sculpture and architecture; so what was
it?
The commonality of all arts is that
they technically express something in terms of their peculiar craft and thus
they are metaphoric. However technically metaphoric, how does architecture
conceptually make metaphors and is there an influence between the technical and
the conceptual architectural metaphor?
“If the walls could only speak”; they do! Are you listening?
When kingdoms created dynasty’s
iconic buildings the architect and artisans took their ques from the reigning
monarch. In our modern 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 architects
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.
In 1967, during the series of
colloquia [2] at Yale on art, Irving Kriesberg [3] had spoken about the
characteristics of painting (art) as a metaphor. It seemed at once that this
observation was applicable to architecture (since scholars have long proclaimed
that architecture was an art) and to the 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.
However, since then, in 1977, a
group of leading philosophers, psychologist, linguists, and educators gathered
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to participate in a multi
disciplinary conference on metaphor and thought which was attended by nearly a
thousand people. Our symposium at Yale was had a smaller attended and our
proceedings were transcribed and later in 1971 partially published in Main
Currents in Modern Thought.[4] 1979 research has been completed and documents
in Andrew Ortony’s compendium book on metaphor and thought to advance this
metaphoric comparison.
With all the controversy around
"knowing"; how do we know we know and the inaccuracy of language and
dubious nature of scientific conclusions I have written over fifteen monographs
about “architecture as the making of metaphors” This is the first with the
sciences of linguistic, psychology and cognition definitions of the metaphor and there fore a set of third party facts
by which to base our comparison. It was my hope that these commonalities provided
substantive reasons to allow the metaphor linking architecture to metaphors as
my theorem (stasis): "architecture is the making of metaphors”.
“If art is the making of metaphors and
architecture is an art then it too must make metaphors. But until now aside
form this formal logic we have not shown the informal logic, argument and
evidence of this proposition.
The below are excerpts form my
monograph of paradigms and axioms about architecture based on Metaphor and
Thought. In each of the below cases I have fist paraphrased the scientist's
conclusions based on a notable commonality to architecture where space allowed described
an architectural process or product in the terms of each finding. Out these
comparisons there came topoi [5] (A traditional theme or motif; a literary
convention.) which we can use to describe architecture and aesthetics, all
below sections and paragraphs reference Metaphor and Thought by A. Ortony. [1]
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| Illustration for Main Currents by Barie Fez-Barringten |
2. Relevance:
Whether by formal or informal reasoning, whether by
deductive or inductive reasoning it is necessary to know that aesthetics’ fundamental
basis for linking a specific case to general referent is, as art, bridging the craft to the craftsman, the
concept to the craft and the observation to a model. . While in earlier
monographs I have dealt with the specifics of these relationships this
monograph presents the ways metaphors work and by induction support claims.
The study shows that metaphors are not all the same and work
in different ways. These different ways are the evidence for the inferences to
the claims and resolution significant to aesthetics, art, and architecture;
namely that artist, art critiques, philosophers, architects have an awareness
of many the shapes and forms of metaphors and their possible inclusion in what
can be judged and included. Each of the below syllogisms is meant to provide
some of the early reasoning supporting our original research.
a. Art is the making
of metaphors
b. Architecture is an
art
c Architecture is an
art
A. Art transfers one
to another
B. Metaphor transfers
C. Art is a metaphor
I. Aesthetics referents
taste
II. Taste is a
metaphor
III. Aesthetics is a
metaphor
aa. Aesthetics is a
metaphor
bb. Architecture is a
metaphor
cc. Architecture is
aesthetics
Aesthetics mainstay: ’beauty is in
the eye of the beholder’ where the beholder is the referent of the metaphor and
the necessary completion of the judgment. While there can be an aesthetic experience,
without such a referent it’s understating and taste would be irrelevant. With
two referents, the social norm and the specific case, the experience and taste
is, too, a metaphor. As metaphor carries-over, transfers and talks about one
thing in terms of another; taste is at
the heart of determining whether a work is art, its value, a work of
architecture, etc. If there is no bridge then the work is another kind of
metaphor, perhaps a technical metaphor linked to the craft of the art and if
there is no bridge, determining how close or far from the ideal would be
capricious. Yet one can describe ones feelings involving the senses. Having
studied behavioral psychology many of my earlier design projects were
predicated on the affects of space, volumes, planes and shapes on the five
senses. I admired and under-studied with architect, Frederick Kiesler.
Yet these relationships between aesthetics
and metaphor, while useful do not wholly explain the aesthetic and sensual experience
of art or architecture. It only assumes these experiences as a referent to aesthetic
judgment and the making of metaphors.
Included in the below 5 sections are the 73 axioms
extracted from the Ortony’s Metaphor and
Thought and my monographs which are possible referents to any reasoned aesthetic
consideration as the warrant to an inference or the evidence of a specific
claim . I have underlined the axioms for clarity. For example this work is a
work of art because it is a generative metaphor. To reduce this size of
this monograph I have deleted so many of the architectural examples as these
might be found to be distracting from the aesthetic reasoning. The combination of all this monograph’s
axioms suggest inclusion rather exclusion of will, desire and appetite into the
consideration of the metaphor as all art, as all architecture is, for all, to
create, use, own and enjoy. While contemporary aesthetics may focus on
perception by means of the senses, cognitive capacity in creation and perception
informs conceptual metaphors and the two affect any one aesthetic experience,
subject and individual. Transferring from previous experience is not always
experiential but cognitive, where the only sense involved is the initial
referent, a referent to a transfer where one talks in terms of anther to make
the strange familiar and find a commonality to both.
3. Metaphor and Representation
[1] this section presupposes that metaphors are a linguistic phenomenon and
that metaphors are somewhat “deviant” and need to be explained in terms of
normal or literal uses of language, and that their main function is to provide
an alternative linguistic mechanism for expressing ideas-a communicative
function [1].
In his
paintbrush as pump discussion as a metaphor Schon
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 dominant what was already somewhat known.
They then 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. [6]
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 WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric Way of Knowing [7] and Paul Weiss [8]
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” [6] 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 to be close to their prime markets.
Commercial retail is now 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.
On the other hand 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”.
[9]
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.
Defining the operation of metaphor
Reddy says that “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 “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”)
That conduit [9] is the dominant
theme that unites all the Tyrolean 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 a 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. Conduit is
the parte and design system from which choices in structure, finishes, colors,
textures, etc. follow.
A dead metaphor [9]
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” (hence, dead metaphor).
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.
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. In this is
the aesthetic of public works and culturally pervasive urban design.
Defining the operation of metaphor
Reddy says that “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”)
“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 x 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. [10]
(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?” [10]
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.
An example of
novel images and image metaphors is Andre Breton’s “My wife……whose waist is an
hourglass” explains…..”By mapping the structure of one domain onto the
structure of another”, [11] “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
metal 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. [11]
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.
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. [11]
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).
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. 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 is a metaphorical act.
Subject matter, from the most
mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only be comprehended via
metaphor. [11] Much subject
matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific theories, can only
be comprehended via metaphor where metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not
linguistic, in nature [11].
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. Aesthetics
must be familiar to be perceived; metaphors make the strange familiar. [7].
Metaphorical language is a
surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor. [11]
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.
Through much of our conceptual
system is metaphorical; a significant part of it is non-metaphorical.
Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical understanding. [11] 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 metaphor 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 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. Aesthetic
judgments are affected by sense we have of both the technical and conceptual
aspects of the metaphor.
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 [11]. 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 identity the Greeks and the Romans derived
an Order of Architecture which we now call the Classical Order of Architecture.
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.
The aesthetics of this design were driven by an elegant accommodation to a
complex function.
Like the onomatopoeic metaphors
Lakoff’s mappings of conceptions [11] 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. This is the primary referent in
aesthetic judgment and the ideal in the architectural program.
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 al 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 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. .
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.
Mapping is the systematic set of
correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the
target domain. [11] 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.
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| Gibe by Barie Fez-Barringten |
The same idea of mapping between
source and target is used to describe
analogical reasoning and inferences; and 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.
Examples:
Love
Is a Journey
Life
Is a Journey
Social
Organizations Are Plants
Love
Is War
Schemas [11] 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) [11] 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. Indeed, primary aesthetics information is received through the
senses. (Arnold Berlant)
For example,
humans interact
with their environments based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and
limits. [11] 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.
Humans also interact with their
environments based on their sensory capabilities. [11] The importance of the
senses is discussed by Arnold Berlant in
the fields of human perception systems, but
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 sight lines, 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.
However, the scale of habitable
metaphors is the intrinsic relation between the human figure and his
surroundings as measured, proportioned and sensed. [11]
It is dramatically represented by Da Vinci's
Vitruvian Man (see below
illustration) 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 part 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, static ness, 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.
Piranesi vision takes on a
Kafkaesque
and
Escher-like
distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in
volume, but empty of purpose and human scale in this work and often human scale
in architecture is deliberately violated [11]
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.
Mappings are not arbitrary, but
grounded in the body and in every day experience and knowledge. [11]. 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 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 where
the generic nature of the cues are anticipated.
A conceptual system contains
thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a highly structured
subsystem of the conceptual system.
[11] 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.
There are two types of mappings:
conceptual mappings and image mappings; both obey the Invariance Principle. . [11] “ Image metaphors are not exact “look-alikes”;[11] many sensory mechanisms are at work which
can be characterized by Langacker’s focal
adjustment (selection, perspective, and abstraction); images and Image-schemas are continuous; an
image can be abstracted/schematized to various degrees; and 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.
In cognitive
linguistics, the invariance
principle [11] 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. [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.
. [11] 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 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. Yet, the traditional vocabulary of all the police functions remained
coherent, perceived and understood.
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. [11]
For example, 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. [11]. 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. In both his books on
Emphatics and Surrogates Dr. Paul Weiss amplified this theory. [16]
Elegant architectural metaphors
are those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and reinforce
one another. [17]. 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.
Filling in where people
ascertain the deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by
filling in terms of an implicitly analogy”. [17]
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.
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. [17] 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.
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. [17]
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 [17] . Architects
would not be known as artist nor should their works be known as works of art.
Both their works are the “deep” while the readers 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, cladding, etc. Vigorous
aesthetic analysis would consider all of these axioms to realize the full
enjoyment of the information contained in the work.
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. [17] In these hyper-spaces many architectural elements are fitted and combine to make a
unity. It can be argued that the seen is not at all 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.
 |
| Surreal inversion Gibe by Barie Fez-Barringten |
4 Metaphor and Understanding is about
comprehension, perception and impressions affects on metaphor
Metaphor is used, understood,
misused and misunderstood due to the inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and
many unexplained changes in linguistics
[18].
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.
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.
Difference between the indirect uses
of metaphor versed the direct use of language to explain the world. [18] 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.
There is a distinction and
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. [18].
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. In a
lesser way the design vernacular of Frank Lloyd Wright was a macro design
approach from which micro design of particular spaces, details and decoration.
Metaphors work by “reference to
analogies that are known to relate to the two domains” [19]. 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.
“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”. [20] 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”
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.
A theory of metaphor should
state the principles which relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical
utterance meaning. [20] 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 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. [20]
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”. [20]
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 coble stones.
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 (and even current) this generation found tents to be their
habitat metaphor.
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) [21] As it is with 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). Explaining
tropes (turn, twist, conceptual guises, and figuration). 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”. [21]
At each moment in its use the
metaphor may mean different things, least of which may be any intended by its authors
[22]. “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.
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. Yet, we distinguish the aesthetics of one
verse the other.
Metaphor is an abbreviated
simile to appreciate similarities and analogies which is called “appreciation”
[23].
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). [23]
Likewise aesthetics’ view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on
cultural specifics and individual interpretations. 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. We know
one from the other from the perception of the smallest detail to the overall
layout.
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. [23]
“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”. [23]
Three steps to understand
metaphors
- recognition,
- reconstruction, and
- interpretation,
In principle, the above three steps 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. [23] This would not be like the Aesthetic Movement which argued
that art was not supposed to be utilitarian or useful in any practical sense. Instead,
aesthetic experience is a fully autonomous and independent aspect of a human
life. Thus, they argue, art should exist solely for its own sake. Yet the
combination of all this monographs axioms suggest inclusion rather exclusion of
will, desire and appetite into the consideration of the metaphor as all art, as
all architecture is, for all, to create, use, own and enjoy. While contemporary
aesthetics may focus on perception by means of the senses cognitive capacity in
creation and perception informs conceptual metaphors and the two affect any one
aesthetic experience, subject and individual. Transferring from previous
experience is not always experiential but cognitive, where the only sense
involved is the initial referent, a referent to a transfer where one talks in
terms of anther to make the strange familiar and find a commonality to both.
Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization
in cognitive science, where some members
of a category are more central than others. [24] 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.
[24]
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.” [24]
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 [24].
“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. [24] When an architect creates a
metaphor it is 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
buildings which are more than a tin box but a statement of complex ideas which
demands reading and is an opportunity to be read. We may say the building has
aesthetics, is aesthetically pleasing or fits the aesthetic of iconic high-rise
buildings. How does one 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.
5. Metaphor and Science focuses on objective
experience of metaphor
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. [25]
If one maps a rectangle and circle
to a third 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. [25] The alchemists describe a system
of triangulation I 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
produce a metaphor where you find the property they both share.
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 [25].
They all
have a front of the house and back-of-the -house function (garbage, deliveries,
maintenance, etc) in many cities 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. [25]
Metaphor
is reasoning using abstract characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight
forward extension of its use in commonplace reasoning. [25]
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?
“In processing analogy, people implicitly
focus on certain kinds of commonalities and ignore others”.
[25] In my New Haven drafting service, builders would give me a
floor plan for me to redraft to build a new house: they simply wanted an
analogy to the first with no changes. The Florida School Board uses and reuses
both firms and plans to design new high schools based on plans used before to
build other schools with 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. [25]
 |
| Gibe SHELL by Barie Fez-Barringten |
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. [25]
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.
“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”. [25] Aside from
the cerebral appreciation of a work of art there is the appreciation which
comes from the senses which is separate from knowledge yet rooted in experiences
of like and unlike things? Such matching only focuses the interpretation and
links the conceptual with the technical metaphor.
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.” [25] Cushions for seats, carpets for flooring,
stretched fabric for walls and roof. cable for beams and columns, etc.
“Thus, an analogy is a way of aligning and
focusing on rational commonalities independently of the objects in which those
relationships are embedded.” [25] 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. [25]
“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”. [25] 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. [25]
“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. [25]
“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.” [26].Aesthetic judgments bridge some principle or prior
experience to a 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. [26]
Metaphors simply impart their
commonplace not necessity to their similarity or analogous. [26] 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. [26]
In scientific language there is
a difference between dubbing and epistemic access. [27] “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” [27].
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. [27]
We absorb new knowledge on the
shoulders of old experiences. [28]
about Cognition to justify Socrates
“learning as recollecting” Consider new concepts as being characterized in
terms of old ones (plus logical conjunctives)” As William J. Gordon [7] 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
[28]
“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”. [28]
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. [28]
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
Pavolivain 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 identified as teaching nothing. [28]
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. [28]
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 .
[28]
Just as practice makes perfect for
the concert pianist, opera singer, ballerina, etc so is it for the architect
and in aesthetics for the critique and the reader. 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. [28]
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. [28] While I can choose what words I use, whereas I
cannot, in the same sense, choose the 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 [28].
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.
[28] 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 [2] involving prominent design professionals and
arts and then years of research and documentation into monographs., [28]
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. [28] 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 Schonbrunn 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.
“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”. [28] Pylyshyn
asks:” What distinguishes a metaphor from its complete explication”? (In the
case of architecture the entire set of contract documents, program, etc).”
Pylyshyn answers: “I n 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. The very real existence of a
work of art that bespeaks of life and
times, exists and is accessible and in our contexts is itself a metaphor of
great significance and satisfaction; where I a building it would look like this
metaphor. 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.
“Metaphor induces a (partial)
equivalence between two known phenomenons; a literal account describes the
phenomenon in authentic terms in which it is seen”. [28] Socially speaking, worldly people that work in offices, dress,
and then behave the way they do, for example, if they reported to work in a
manufacturing warehouse? Their scenario of the behavior and the metaphor would
not correspond. [28]
7. Metaphor and
Education discusses the use of metaphor to make the strange familiar and
add new information. 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)
“Analogical transfer theory (“instructive
metaphors create an analogy between a to-be-learned- system (target domain) and
a familiar system (metaphoric domain)” [29]
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, sub dominant 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. [29]
Metaphorical teaching strategies
often lead to better and more memorable learning than do explicit strategies
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.
“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. [30] 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 cityscape's noting the metaphor of each.
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. [30]
Metaphors have a way of
extending our capacities for communications. [31]
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.
“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.” [31]
Metaphor is the solution insofar
as it encodes and captures the information:” transferring chunks of experience
from well –known to less well known contexts; [31]
The vividness thesis maintains
that metaphors permit and impress a more memorable learning due to the greater
imagery or concreteness or vividness of the “full-blooded experience” is
conjured up by the metaphorical vehicle [31].
The inexpressibility thesis, notes
that certain aspects of natural experience are never encoded in language and
that metaphors carry with them the extra meanings never encoded in language.
[31] 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, aesthetically, the work is appreciated in the senses.
“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” [31]. 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 may 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. The aesthetics of the process and the product are both
metaphoric and a metaphor.
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:
1. 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
2. The first lectures "Architecture as the Making of
Metaphors" were organized and conducted by Barie Fez-Barringten 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.
3. American painter Irving Kriesberg 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 exhibitions prominently
exhibited in the museums in Chicago.
4. Main Currents in
Modern Thought/Center for Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1,
New Rochelle, New York
5. 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
6. 1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on
problem-setting in social policy: by Donald A. Schon
7. Metaphorical way of knowing by William J.J Gordon: William J.J. Gordon began formulating the Synectics method in 1944
with a series ... William J. J. Gordon, The Metaphorical Way of Learning and
Knowing (Cambridge, ... William J.J. Gordon in his book The Metaphorical Way of Learning and Knowing,
Synectics asks participants to solve problems by thinking in analogies--to
identify ways in which one pattern or situation is like or similar to another
totally unrelated pattern or situation. Synectics uses comparisons such as
analogies and metaphors to stimulate associations, developed by George M.
Prince; Gordon was one of the original speakers at the Yale lecture series.
8. Paul Weiss: Born in 1901, Paul Weiss has made major
contributions to several branches of philosophy, as well as to teaching and
scholarly publishing. Alfred North Whitehead remarked: "The danger of
philosophical teaching is that it may become dead-alive, but in Paul Weiss's
presence that is impossible". Weiss is widely believed to be America's
greatest living speculative metaphysician, but he has also made notable
philosophical contributions to the discussion of sports, the arts, religion,
logic, and politics. Professor Weiss has been highly productive: his Being and
Other Realities (1995) was hailed as one of his most exciting books, and as
this volume goes to press he is hard at work on yet another major treatise. The
distinguished Library of Living Philosophers, founded in 1938, is devoted to
critical analysis and discussion of some of the world's greatest living
philosophers. Weiss (b.1901) is arguably America's greatest living speculative
meta physician, as well as a noteworthy philosophical contributor to the
discussion of sport, the arts, architecture, religion, logic, and politics. He
was my mentor when I began this research.
9. The
conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language: by
Michael J. Reddy.
10. In
Programs and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur
Ulrich Conrad'
11. The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff
12. Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract
13. Onomatopoeic metaphors
15 Schemas
16. 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.
16. "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.
17. Metaphor, induction, and social policy: The convergence
of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau,
and Georgia Nigro
18. Figurative speech and linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock
19. Some problems with the emotion of literal meanings by
David E. Rumelhart
20. Metaphor by John R. Searle
Section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
21. Process and products in making sense of tropes by
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
22. Interpretation of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser
23. Images and models, similes and metaphors by George A.
Miller
24. How metaphors work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar
25 The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science by
Dedre Gentner and Michael Jeziorski
26. Metaphor and
theory change: What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd1
27 Metaphor in
science by Thomas S. Kuhn
28. 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)
29. The instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids to
students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer
30. Metaphor and learning by Hugh G
Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag
31. Educational uses of metaphor by Thomas G.
Sticht
 |
| Pen and ink by Barie Fez-Barringten |
References:
A. “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
B. “
Difference and Identity”: 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”.
C. Webster’s
standard dictionary: latest edition
E. The
Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: 1998; A perspective from a Chinese point
of view by Ning Yu of the University of Oklahoma
F. Art is the intentional and skillful act
and/or product applying a technique and
differs from natural but pleasing behaviors and useful or decorative products
in their intent and application of a developed technique and skill with that
technique. Art is not limited to fields,persons or institutions as science,
government, security, architecture, engineering, administration,
construction, design, decorating, 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.
G TOC: Metaphor
2009 Monographs
- Deriving
the Multidiscipline axioms from
Metaphor and Thought [1]
- Metaphor
and Cognition
- The science supporting the stasis to
architecture being an art [I]:
- Language of metaphors applied to
multidisciplined architecture
- “Metaphor’s
interdisciplinary Axioms
- Metaphoric
Axioms for Micro disciplinary
Architecture
- Complex
Structure: art and architecture stasis
- Metaphor
axioms of art, architecture and
aesthetics
- Aesthetic principles of metaphor,
art and architecture
- The
Six Principles of Art’s & Architecture’s Technical and Conceptual Metaphors
- Framing
the art [A] vs. architecture argument
- Metaphoric
Evidence
- Managing
the benefits and risks of architectural
artificial intelligence
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 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.
Researched Publications: Refereed and
Peer-reviewed Journals: "monographs":
Barie Fez-Barringten; Associate professor Global University
1. "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 Architecture
4."Metametaphors and Mondrian:
Neo-plasticism and its' influences in
architecture" 1993 Available on Academia.edu since
2008
5. "The Metametaphor of architectural education",
North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 1997
6."Mosques and metaphors" Unpublished,1993
7."The basis of the metaphor of
Arabia" Unpublished,
1994
8."The conditions of Arabia in
metaphor" Unpublished, 1994
9. "The metametaphor theorem"
Architectural
Scientific Journal, Vol. No. 8; 1994 Beirut Arab University.
10. "Arabia’s metaphoric images" Unpublished, 1995
11."The context of Arabia in metaphor" Unpublished, 1995
12. "A partial metaphoric vocabulary of Arabia"
“Architecture: University of
Technology in Datutop; February 1995 Finland
13."The Aesthetics of the Arab architectural
metaphor"
“International Journal for Housing
Science and its applications” Coral Gables, Florida.1993
14."Multi-dimensional metaphoric
thinking"
Open House, September 1997: Vol. 22;
No. 3, United Kingdom: Newcastle uponTyne
15."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” of
Cardiff University, UK. April 2010
16. “Word Gram #9” Permafrost: Vol.31 Summer 2009 University of Alaska Fairbanks;
ISSN: 0740-7890; page 197
17. "Metaphors
and Architecture." ArchNet.org. October, 2009.at MIT
18. “Metaphor as an
inference from sign”; University of Syracuse
Journal of
Enterprise Architecture; November 2009: and nomnated architect of the year in
speical issue of Journal of Enterprise Architecture.Explainging 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 Section
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;
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 8,2009
Pgs 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. 2011
 |
| Axonometric by Barie Fez-Barringten adopted for cover design by Barie Fez-Barringten |
25.“
Architecture:the
making of metaphors”:The Book;
Contract to publish: 2011
Cambridge
Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE6 2XX
United Kingdom
Edited
by
Edward Richard Hart,
0/2 249 Bearsden Road
Glasgow
G13 1DH
UK
