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| Freehand axonometric by Barie Fez-Barringten |
by Barie Fez-Barringten
www.bariefez-barringten.com
Emails welcomed sent to: bariefezbarringten@gmail.com
Toward a new multidisciplinary architectural language, the
language of metaphors.
16,951 words on 34 pages
Abstract:
Communication between disciplines is facilitated by metaphors,
in general; and metaphoric axioms directed at facilitating multidiscipline communications
and understandings, in particular. Linguistic, psychological and cognitive
science’ metaphors apply to multidisciplinary communications and creating works
of architecture which is inherently a multidisciplinary discipline.
Early monographs 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 [9] is the making of
metaphors
- Architecture is an art[9]
- Therefore architecture is the making of
metaphors.
Till now we did nothing to reason why art is the making of neither
metaphor 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 information 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. But
now we have a linguistic vocabulary to explain architecture and show how it
makes metaphors.
The below is predominantly
developed from a study of “Metaphors and
Thought” by Andrew Ortony, and, is in addition to over forty years of my
work about “architecture as the making of metaphors” (please see background
after the monograph for your information).
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.
Axiom’s
contextual forms
Three levels of axioms matching three levels of disciplines:
- Multidiscipline: Macro most general
where the metaphors and axioms and metaphors used by the widest and
diverse disciplines, users and societies. All of society, crossing
culture, disciplines, professions, industrialist arts and fields as
mathematics and interdisciplinary vocabulary.
- Interdisciplinary: Between art [G] [9] 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 potent ional 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 contactors. As well
as owners, users, neighbors, governments agencies, planning boards and
town councils.
Relevant biographical notes:
Columbia University coursework in
behavioral psychology under Ralph Hefferline and others in voice/linguistics,
Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and Master of Architecture from
Yale University where I was mentored in metaphors and metaphysics by Dr. Paul
Weiss. For research I founded the New York City not-for–profit corporation
called Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments.
In addition to authoring over fifteen published monographs
by learned journals I have spent 20 years in Saudi Arabia and have written a
book containing pen and ink drawings on perceptions of 72 European cities.
Institutional
affiliation:
Global University ;American Institute of Architects; Florida Licensed
Architect; Programming Chairperson for the Gulf Coast Writers Association;
National Council of Architectural Registration Boards; Al-Umran association of
Saudi Arabia, American Society of Interior Designers; and founding president of
Architects International Group of the mid-east.
Introduction
In 1967, during the series of
colloquia at Yale on art, Irving Kriesberg 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. 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 twenty 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 facts by which to base our comparison. It
is my hope that these commonalities will provide substantive reasons to allow
the metaphor linking architecture to metaphors as my theorem:
"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 logic we have not shown the informal logic, argument and
evidence of this proposition.
The below is an excerpt 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 and based on a notable
commonality to architecture described an architectural process or product in
the terms of each finding. Out these comparisons there came 3.0 topoi (A
traditional theme or motif; a literary convention.) which we can use to
describe architecture.
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 architect
who not only reasons the technical but individually reasons the conceptual.
It is to the architect that society
turns to be informed about the shape and form of the context in which life will
be played. With this charge the need to know that we know and do by reasoning
what science verifies by the scientific method to know that we know about the buildings, parks, and places we set
into the environment. It is a public and private charge included in the
contract for professional services but unspoken as professional life’s
experience; to prove the relevant, meaningful and beneficial metaphors that
edify encourage and equip society as well as provide for its’ health, safety
and welfare. So it is critical to realize, control and accept as commonplace
that the role of the architect is to do much more than build but build masterfully.
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 commonality apparent
to me. It not only is apparent but I have found has 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 that is only true by his skill in drawing, design and
specifying and not his skill as master carpenter.
Before solidifying our hypothesis
about architecture and metaphors we both compared architecture to the art of
sculpture reflecting 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?
“If the walls could only speak”; they do! Are you listening?
1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social
policy: by Donald A. Schon
Generative metaphor and the
“parte”. 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.
The generative
metaphor is the name for a process of symptoms of a particular kind of
seeing-as, the “meta-pherein” or “carrying –over” of frames or perspectives
from one domain of experience to another. This process he calls generative which many years earlier 2.0 WJ Gordon called the Metaphoric
Way of Knowing and 2.1 Paul Weiss
called associations.
In this sense both in interior
design and architecture after assimilating the program the very first step in
the design process is to develop a “parte’ (An ex parte presentation is
a communication directed to the merits or outcome of a proceeding …it’s the
resolution of the argument consisting of claims, inferences, evidence and
warrants to the inference) .It is a “top-down” approach later followed by
designs which meet the parte. The parte may follow the design process and be
presented to sell the product.
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| Collage by Christina Fez-Barringten |
1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language
about language: by Michael J. Reddy.
1.2.1 A dead metaphor is one
which really does not contain any fresh metaphor insofar as it does not really
“get thoughts across”; “language
seems rather to help one person to construct out of his own stock of mental
stuff something like a replica, or
copy, of someone’s else’s thoughts”.
The landscape is replete with an infinite number of inane
replicas which render readers dull, passive and disinterested (How many times
will you read the same book?) Mass
housing, commercial office buildings and highways are the main offenders
leaving the owner designed and built residence, office, factory, fire station,
pump house, as unique and delightful relief’s in an otherwise homogenized
context. The reader stops reading because it is the same as before.
Not reading the copy yet seeing the copy and the collective
of copies focuses rather on the collective as the metaphor as the overall
project which also may be “dead”. In its time, Levittown’s uniqueness and the
sub-structures sameness were its’ metaphor. It was alive and today still lives
as new residents remodel upgrade and exhume their “dead” to become a “living”
metaphor.
Defining the operation of metaphor
Reddy says that 1.2.2 “a conduit is a minor framework which
overlooks words as containers and allows ideas and feelings to flow, unfettered
and completely disembodied, into a kind of ambient space between human heads.
There are also individual pipes which allow mental content to escape into, or
enter from, this ambient space. Thoughts and feelings are reified into an
external 1.2.3 “idea space” and where thoughts and feelings are reified in this
external space, so that they exist independent of any need for living human
beings to think or feel them”. This most
closely resembles works of architecture and what goes inside and outside works.
“Somewhere we are peripherally aware that words do no really have insides (“it
is quit foreign to common sense to think of words as having “insides”
……………major version of the metaphoric which thoughts and emotions are always
contained in something”)
In his examples one can see a
variety of putting ideas onto paper meaning that the ideas are out of the head
of the creator and onto paper to be read and then transferred.
Architecturally this is best reflected in the example
pointed out by Vincent Scully describing the geometry of urban blocks and the
location of building masses that reflect one anther is geometry to sharply
define the volume and mass of the block and experience of city streets. The
streets are defined by the 90 degree corners, planes and tightness of the cubes
and rectangles to the city plan. In this way the metaphor of the overall and
each building design no mater where it’s location on the block; no matter when
or in what sequence the metaphoric constraint appropriateness, zoning formulas,
all lead the ideas to flow form one to another architect. Furthermore, the
reader is able to “appreciate” the street, its geometry, limits and linearity
as an idea on the conduit from the architect, through the metaphor and to the
reader.
That conduit is the dominant theme that unites all the villages.
Interior decoration in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the middle of the twentieth century
was dominated by wall to wall drapes, cornices, valences, upholstered furniture
covered with slip covers, ketch and bric-a-brac figures and “charkas” known
affectionately as “Bronx Renaissance”.
The conduit that connected these
outcomes were are system of city-wide gift stores, national gift market, central fabric suppliers and
workshops and the heroic drapery hangers (of which I was one) completed their
work.
Conduit is the parte and design system from which choices in
structure, finishes, colors, textures, etc. follow. A really good design and
good designer can produce a set of documents and its detail follows easily as a
development of the logic found in the whole.
1.3 In Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about
Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad' writes: 1.3.1 “It's a strange
thought, that culture is a product of man-made, unnatural things, that instead
of culture shaping the architecture, it is the architecture (the environment)
that shapes the culture. I would guess it makes sense after some 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.
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?” The affect of the metaphor on other metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit which leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.
(2): But then if we only build steel, glass structures, wouldn't we suffer from the glass metropolis in the future, when another form or material is introduced to replace steel, concrete and glass?” The affect of the metaphor on other metaphors with all its links and consequences is manifest in the conduit which leads to one after the other and a continuation of the first.
1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by George Lakoff
About novel images and image
metaphors he quotes 1.4.1 Andre Breton’s “My wife……whose waist is an hourglass” he says …..”By mapping the structure of one domain onto the structure of another”,
“This is a superimposition of the image
of an hour glass onto the image of a woman’s waist by virtue of their common
shape. As before the metaphor is conceptual; it is not the works
themselves, but the 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.
This observation of the metaphor finds that the commonality,
commonplace and similarity are the chief focus of the metaphor. As Frank Lloyd
Wright designed his Prairie architecture with dominant horizontal axis thrust
to his structure as common to the horizontal axis of the land upon which the
building sits. Thus the two horizontal axes, the land and then the building
were wed by their commonality of horizontality.
In a city of sky scrapers
architects parallel their new shafts with those adjacent to with space between
to form the architectonic of verticality, canyons and shafts where the
commonalty of all the vertical shafts bind them together. The red tile roofs of
the Italian Riviera, California’s Mission Architecture are other such examples
of commonalities, commonalities which are synonymous with their identity and
expected class.
We note the 90 degree angles and
shape that slide into one another. We note the way like metals, clips and
angles fit; the way ceiling ducts are made to fit between structures and hung
ceiling, etc. While it is less possible
to spontaneously imagine the way we could relate the human form to a building
when we circulate through its halls, rooms and closets its accommodation to our
needs and necessities; to our self preservation and the maintenance of the
building become apparent. We can map the building structure to ours by finding
the one commonality amongst all the others. Very often we will hear someone say
this place is” me”. The common image has been located and the fit made.
Describing generic specific structure he notes that they are under the Invariance Principle and concludes that
the way to arrive at generic-level schemes for some knowledge structure is to
extract its image its image-schematic structure. This is called the Generic is Specific Structure. He adds
that it is an extremely common mechanism for comprehending the general from the
specific. So what you can deduce for part you can assume is true of the whole. So if the facade of building is in one order
of architecture, vernacular, and building system you can presume the other parts
are in a like arrangement and that the whole is of the classic order including
its plan, section and details. What are involved here are mapping, channeling
and one idea from one level to another.
1.4.2 According to Lakoff plausible accounts rather than scientific results is why we have conventional metaphors and why
conceptual systems contain one set of metaphorical mappings than another. An
architectural work establishes its own
vocabulary which once comprehended become the way in which we experience the
work, finding its discrepancies and fits and seeking the first and all the
other similar elements. We do judge the work as to have Consistency, integrity
and aesthetics. Buildings which do not have these characteristics do not work
as metaphors.
The relevance of studying architecture
as the making of metaphors is to provide practitioners, owners, and
mainly those that shape the built environment that they have a somber and
serious responsibility to fill our world with meaning and significance, That
what they do matters as in this first of Layoff’s results (Please note the
application of Layoff’s vocabulary, definitions and descriptions related to
linguistics metaphorically applied to architecture): Summary of results:
1. 1.4.3
Metaphor is the main mechanism through which we comprehend abstract concepts
and perform abstract reasoning. For example, as this is so for
linguistics(spoken or written), then I infer that it must be true for non
linguistics ,and I give as evidence the built habitats and their architectural
antecedents, being as how what is built is first thought and conceived
separately from building as thinking and conceiving is separate from the
outward expression . Whether it is one or thousands public cultures is
influenced, bound and authenticated by its’ metaphors. Not withstanding
“idolatry” the metaphors are the contexts of life’s dramas and as our physical
bodies are read by our neighbors finding evidence for inferences about social,
political and philosophical claims about our culture and its place in the
universe.
One of many warrants is
recognizing, and operating the front door of a castle as we would the front
door of our apartment; another warrant is the adaptive uses of obsolete
buildings to new uses as a factory to multi- family residential uses, etc. We
see the common space and structure and reason the building codes written to
protect the health , safety and welfare
of the general; public can be applied and the found to be re-zoned
to fit the new uses in the fabric of the
mixed-use zoned area; “comprehend abstract concepts (building codes, design
layouts, and building codes) and perform
abstract reasoning”. (Design and planning).
2. 1.4.4
Much subject matter, from the most mundane to the most abstruse scientific
theories, can only be comprehended via metaphor. Even an anonymous
Florentine back ally’s brick wall, carved door, wall fountain, shuttered
windows, building height, coloration of the fresco.
3. 1.4.5
Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.
After many years living in Saudi
Arabia and Europe and away from Brooklyn I visited Park Slope. I saw the stoops
ascending to their second floors, the carved wood and glass doors, the iron
grilles, the four story walls, the cementous surrounded and conventionally
pained widows but what I saw was only what I described.
4. 1.4.6
Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor.
As language is to speech so are
buildings to architecture where each has a content and inner meaning of the
hole as well as each of its parts. As each word, each attachment, plain,
material, structure had first been conceived to achieve some purpose and fill
some need. Hidden from the reader is the inner psychology, social background,
etc of the man when speaking and the programming deign and contacting process
from the reader of a building metaphor. As in completing an argument the reader
perceives the inferences with its warrants and connects the evidence of the
seen to the claims to make the resolution of the whole, all of which are
surmised from the surface.
5. 1.4.7
through much of our conceptual system is metaphorical; a significant part of it
is non-metaphorical. Metaphorical understanding is grounded in non-metaphorical
understanding.
The science of the strength of
materials, mathematics, structures, indeterminate beams, truss design, mechanical
systems, electricity, lighting, etc. are each understood metaphorically and
there precepts applied metaphorically but often random selections, trails and
feasibility are random and rather in search of the metaphor with out knowing it
is or not a metro and fit to be part of the metaphor at hand. On the other hand
we may select on or another based on non-metaphorical, empirical test and
descriptions of 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.
6. 1.4.8
Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract or inherently
unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete or at least more highly
structured subject matter.
Owner occupied specialized works
of architectural metaphors may begin with long periods of research,
observations, and analysis ; conclusions and redesign and re-thinking of
existing or utility of new systems; setting our system feasibility, pricing and
meeting budgets, palling and programming, diagramming and design of sub systems
and systems but when complete the metaphor is accessible, usable and
compatible.
The whole of the
metaphor is designed in such a way as to clarify, orient and provide “concrete”
reification of all the design parameters into a “highly structured’ work, a
work which homogenizes all these diverse and disjointed systems and operations
into a well working machine. Layoff’s
observations emphasize the instinctive, impulsive and intuitive nature of the
architect’s metaphor that takes place in its creation and use.
1.4.9 Like the onomatopeics metaphors Lakoff’s mappings of conceptions override
the overt spoken and descriptive and rely much more on Mnemonics (something
intended to assist the memory, as a verse or formula) .However, for Lakoff the
assistance comes from something much more primordial (constituting a beginning;
giving origin to something derived or developed; original; elementary: primordial forms of life) to the person’s or societies
experiences.
These become the matrix
(encyclopedic) of schemas (in argument; the warrants {where a warrant is a
license to make an inference and as such must have reader's agreement}
supporting the inferences (mappings) where in the metaphor becomes real). In
this way the reader maps, learns and personalizes the strange into the realm of
the familiar. The reader does so by the myriad of synaptic connections he is
able to apply to that source. Hence
architects translate their architectural conception from philosophy,
psychology, sociology, etc into two dimensional scaled drawings and then to
real life full scale multi dimensions convention consisting of conventional
materials, building elements (doors, windows, stairs, etc).
As maps are
the result of cartographers rendering existing into a graphics for reading so
is mapping to the reading of metaphors where the reader renders understanding
from one source to another. Doing so mentally and producing a rendition of
understanding (as a pen and ink of a figure) not as a graphic but a conceptual
understanding.
Reader sees
in a critical way the existing culling through and encyclopedia of referents to
make the true relationship; the mapping which best renders the reality; the
relationship which informs and clarifies as the map the location, configuration
and characteristic of the reality. As the cartographer seeks lines, symbols and
shadings to articulate the reality so the reader choices of heretofore
unrelated and seemingly unrelated are
found to have and essence common to both the reality and the rendition so that
the metaphor can be repeated becoming the readers new vocabulary .
In fact
architects do the opposite as graphic renditions are made of synapses between
amorphic and seemingly desperate information.
Yet the
process of mapping is no less intense as architect review the matrix of
conditions, operation , ideal and goals of the thesis to find similarities and
differences , commonalities, and potential for one to resonate with another to
make a “resolution” on the experience of a cognitive mapping which becomes the
metaphor, parte and overwhelming new reality. The new reality is the target of
the source and finally can be read. In
the case of the birth of an infant metaphor readers may find a wide variety of
source information which is germane to their own experience.
Before the
public ever sees the constructed metaphor Building Officials, manufactures,
city planners, owners, estimators, general contactors, 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, contactors 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. About Lakoff, In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor,
or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain,
in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity
in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). A
conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience.
The
regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which
often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the
mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.
This
idea, and a detailed examination of the underlying processes, was first
extensively explored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their work 1.4.9 Metaphors
We Live By. Other cognitive scientists study subjects similar to
conceptual metaphor under the labels "analogy"
and "conceptual blending."
Lakoff continues:
7. / 1.4. 10 Each mapping (where mapping is the
systematic set of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of
the source and the target domain. Many elements of target concepts come from
source domains and are not preexisting. To know a conceptual metaphor is to
know the set of mappings that applies to a given source-target pairing. The
same idea of mapping between source and target is used to describe analogical reasoning and inferences) is a fixed set of ontological
(relating to essence or the nature of being) correspondences between entities
in source domain and entities in target domain.
1.4.11
*Love Is A Journey
Life Is A Journey
Social Organizations
Are Plants
Love Is War
* 1.4.11 From Wikopedia on the www.
1.4.11 There is a list of over 100
schemas in many categories about basic human behavior, reactions and actions.
These schemas are the realms in which the mappings takes place much the same as
the inferences in arguments have warrants and link evidence to claims so do
these schemas, architects carry-over their experiences with materials, physics,
art, culture, building codes, structures, plasticity, etc. to form metaphor.
Identifying conditions, operations, ideals and goals are combined to form
plans, sections and elevations which are then translated in to contract
documents.
Later the contractors map this
metaphor based on their schemes of cost, schedule and quality control into
schedules and control documents. It is not until equipment, laborers and
materials are brought to the side that the metaphor starts to form. Once formed
the only evidence for the user (reader) are the thousands of cues from every
angle, outside and inside to enable use and understanding.
The latter half of each of these
phrases invokes certain assumptions about concrete experience and requires the
reader or listener to apply them to the preceding abstract concepts of love or
organizing in order to understand the sentence in which the conceptual metaphor
is used. Operationally, the
work’s entrance is the first clue about the sequence of experiences of the metaphor
taking us to the anticipated lobby, then reception followed by sequences of
increasingly private (non-communal) and remote areas until reaching the
terminal destination. The very size, context and location is couple with theme of parks, gated
communities, skyscraper’s roof tops and cladding becoming a metaphor. The very
outer edges of a metaphor portend of its most hidden content. Once we
understand the metaphor and the mapping from the context to the form the
mapping continues from entrance to the foyer and mapping from the context and
cladding to every detail. We carry-over and map the metaphor as we delve deeper
into its content and inner context always mapping the first to the current
metaphor.
In linguistics
and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics
(CL) refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation,
learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition
in general. It is characterized by adherence to three central positions. First,
it denies that there is an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind;
second, it understands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and third,
it claims that knowledge of language arises out of language use.
Therefore the metaphor of architecture is inherent not in the media of
the building’s presence, parts or bits and pieces but in the mind of the reader
and that the articulation of the metaphor as thinking and third that our use of
the metaphor increases our know ledge of the metaphor and reading metaphors
comes out of practice. The more we view paintings, ballets, symphonies, poetry,
and architecture the better we become at their understanding and its metaphor further
dwells in the reader while the building and its parts exist with out being
understood. Extrapolating: the writer of
the speech is as the architect and the speaker is as the reader of the metaphor
where the metaphor can only be experienced to be understood. Walk though an unlit city at night and feel
the quite of the building’s voices because the readers have no visual
information and with access to the closed buildings the metaphor is a potential
with being a reality. Yet the potential for cognition does exist and is real
but is not understood apart from its experience.
1.4.11 Humans interact with their
environments based on their physical dimensions, capabilities and limits. The field of anthropometrics
(human measurement) has unanswered questions, but it's still true that human
physical characteristics are fairly predictable and objectively measurable.
Buildings scaled to human physical capabilities have steps, doorways, railings,
work surfaces, seating, shelves, fixtures, walking distances, and other
features that fit well to the average person.
1.4.11
Humans also interact with their environments based on their sensory
capabilities. The fields of human perception systems, like perceptual psychology and cognitive psychology, are not exact sciences,
because human information processing is not a purely physical act, and
because perception is affected by cultural factors, personal preferences,
experiences, and expectations, so human scale in architecture can also describe
buildings with sightlines, acoustic properties, task lighting, ambient
lighting, and spatial grammar that fit well with human senses. However, one
important caveat is that human perceptions are always going to be less
predictable and less measurable than physical dimensions.
 |
| Scale,volumes,voids by Barie Fez-Barringten |
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.
1.4.11 Piranesi vision takes on a Kafkaesque
and Escher-like
distortion, seemingly erecting fantastic labyrinthian structures, epic in
volume, but empty of purpose. They are cappricci -whimsical aggregates
of monumental architecture and ruin). Many of my pen and ink drawings were
inspired by the Piranesi metaphor. In
St. Peters the spaces are so real that they imply the potential for all mankind
to occupy. The scale of the patterns on the floor are proportional to the
height and widths enclosing the space they overwhelm the human figure as does
the Baldachino whose height soars but is well below the dome covering the
building.
1.4.11 The below is where human
scale in architecture is deliberately violated:
2.0 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.
2.0 For aesthetic effect. Many
architects, particularly in the Modernist movement, design buildings that prioritize
structural purity and clarity of form over concessions to human scale. This
became the dominant American architectural style for decades. Some notable
examples among many are Henry Cobb's John Hancock Tower in Boston, much of I. M. Pei's
work including the Dallas City Hall, and Mies van der Rohe's
Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
2.0 To serve automotive scale.
Commercial buildings that are designed to be legible from roadways assume a
radically different shape. The human eye can distinguish about 3 objects or
features per second. A pedestrian steadily walking along a 100-foot (30-meter)
length of department store can perceive about 68 features; a driver passing the
same frontage at 30 mph (13 m/s or 44 ft/s) can perceive about six or seven
features. Auto-scale buildings tend to be smooth and shallow, readable at a
glance, simplified, presented outward, and with signage with bigger letters and
fewer words. This urban form is traceable back to the innovations of developer
A. W. Ross along Wilshire Boulevard in Los
Angeles in 1920.
8. / 1.4.12 Mappings are not arbitrary, but grounded in
the body and in every day experience and knowledge.
Mapping and making metaphors are synonymous. The person and
not the work make the metaphor. Without the body and the experience of either
the author or the reader nothing is being made. The thing does not have but the
persons have the experiences. As language, craft, and skills are learned by
exercise, repetition and every day application so are mappings. Mappings are
not subject to individual judgment or preference: but as a result of making
seeking and finding the commonality by practice. Architects learn to associate, create and
produce by years of education and practice while users have a longer history
approaching and mapping for use and recognition. Yet new metaphors are
difficult to assimilate without daily use and familiarity.
Often the owners of new building will provide its regular
occupants with orientation, preliminary field trips and guided tours. Many
buildings restrict users’ access by receptionist, locked doors and restricted
areas.
It is not hard to experience a built metaphor as it is an
ordinary fixture on the landscape of our visual vocabulary. It has predictable,
albeit peculiar and indigenous characteristics the generic nature of the cues
are anticipated.
9. /1.4.13 A conceptual
system contains thousands of conventional metaphorical mappings which form a
highly structured subsystem of the conceptual system.
Over the year’s society, cultures, families and individuals
experience and store a plethora of mapping routines which are part of our
mapping vocabulary. As a potential user when encountering a new building type
such as a hi-tech manufacturing center we call upon our highly structured
subsystem to find conceptual systems which will work to navigate this
particular event.
 |
| Conceptual mapping by Barie Fez-Barringten |
And finally Lakoff concludes the structure of metaphor
claiming that:
10 . / 1.4.14There are two types of mappings:
conceptual mappings and image mappings; both obey the Invariance Principle.
“A.
Image metaphors are not exact “look-alikes”; many sensory mechanisms are at
work, which can be characterized by Langacker’s focal adjustment (selection,
perspective, and abstraction);
B.
images and Image-schemas are continuous; an image can be abstracted/schematized
to various degrees; and
C.
image metaphors and conceptual metaphors are continuous; conceptual
metaphorical mapping preserves image-schematic structure (Lakoff 1990) and
image metaphors often involve conceptual aspects of the source image. (“All
metaphors are invariant with respect to their cognitive topology, that is, each
metaphorical mapping preserves image-schema structure:” Kövecses (2002: 102)
provides the following example based on the semantics
of the English verb to
give.
She gave him a book. (Source language) Based on the metaphor
CAUSATION IS TRANSFER we get:
(a) She
gave him a kiss.
(b) She gave him a headache. However,
the metaphor does not work in exactly the same way in each case, as seen in:
(b') She
gave him a headache, and he still has it.
(a') *She gave him a kiss, and
he still has it.
1.4.11 The invariance principle offers the hypothesis
that metaphor only maps components of meaning from the source language that
remain coherent in the target context. The components of meaning that remain
coherent in the target context retain their "basic structure" in some
sense, so this is a form of invariance.
1.4.15 Of the eight aspects of
metaphor Lakoff describes the two most applies to architecture which is:
Our system of conventional metaphor is “alive” in the same sense that
our system of grammatical and phonological (distribution and patterning of
speech sounds in a language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation.)
rules is alive; namely it is constantly in use, automatically, and below
the level of consciousness and Our metaphor system is central to our
understanding of experience and to the way we act on that understanding.
1.4.11 It seems that onomatopeics
are metaphors and can be onomatopoeic (grouping of words that
imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as
"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz",
"bang", or animal noises such as "oink", "moo",
or "meow") ? In this case an assemblage instead of a sound. As a non-linguistic it has impact beyond
words and is still a metaphor.
Then a metaphor is much more than
the sum of its parts and is beyond any of its constituent constructions, parts
and systems and, its very existence as a metaphor. In both his books on Emphatics and Surrogates Dr. Weiss
amplified this theory.
1.4.11 Before his death at 101
years of age completed a book called "Emphatics,"
about the use of language. Dr. Weiss
worked in the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which addresses
questions about the ultimate composition of reality, including the relationship
between the mind and matter. He was particularly interested in the way people
related to each other through symbols, language, intonation, art and music. Emphatics, (2000), which considers how
ordinary experience stands in some dynamic relationship with a second
dimension, which provides focus, interruption, significance, or grounds for the
first.
1.4.11 "Surrogates," published by Indiana University Press. Weiss says
that: “A surrogate is "a replacement that is used as a means for
transmitting benefits from a context in which its’ user may not be a part”.
Architecture’s metaphors bridge from the program, designs and contactors 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 diagramed 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.
1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and social policy: The convergence of
macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and
Georgia Nigro
Elegant architectural metaphors are
those in which the big idea and the smallest of details echo and reinforce one
another. Contemporary architects wrapping their parte in “green”, “myths” and eclectic images” are no less guilty
than was their predecessors of the Bauhaus exuding asymmetry, tension and
dissonance as were the classics and renaissance insisting on unity, symmetry
and balance.
1.5.1 Paraphrasing: “people
ascertain the deep metaphor that underlies one or more surface metaphors by
filling in terms of an implicitly analogy”. It is the “filling
in” wherein the synapse (a region where nerve impulses are transmitted
and received, encompassing the axon terminal of a neuron that releases
neurotransmitters in response to an impulse) takes place.
1.5.2 Synapse is metaphor where two
are joined together as the side-by-side association of homologous
paternal and maternal chromosomes during the first prophase of meiosis. How
this happens is as biblical as: “faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen” where our mental associations are
themselves the metaphor, the evidence of the works we do not actually see. We see the metaphor, we read its extent, we
synapse, analogies and metaphorize absorbing its information, contextualizing
and as much as possible and resurrecting its reasons for creation. The architectural metaphor only speaks
through its apparent shape, form, volume, space, material, etc that the
concepts which underlie each are known to the user as they would to a painting,
poem, or concerto.
1.5.3 Furthermore as observation,
analysis and use fill in the gaps users
inference the locations of concealed rooms, passages and supports, the user
infers from a typology of the type a warehouse of expectations and similes to
this metaphor from others. In this way there are the perceived and the
representations they perceive represents which when explored, inert what we
call beatiful, pleasurable and wonderful.
1.5.4 So while architecture is the
making of metaphors and architects
are making metaphors their works, though metaphoric, are not themselves the
metaphors but the shadow of the metaphor which exists elsewhere in the minds of
both the creator and the user. Architects would not be known as artist nor
should their works be known as works of
art. Both their works are the “deep” while the owners deal with the
“surface”; the true architectural
artisan has deep and underlying metaphors predicated two and three dimensional
space analysis, history, culture, class, anthropology, geography etc. They all
are often underlying the surface of the choices of lighting, material,
claddings, etc.
1.5.5 In a discussion of theories
of representation Robert J. Sternberg, Roger Tourangeau, and Georgia
Nigro proposes that a spatial representation in which local subspaces can be
mapped into points of higher-order hyper-spaces and vice versa and that is
possible because they have a common set of dimensions.
In this way the many architectural
elements are fitted and combine to make a unity. It can be argued that the seen
is not at al the metaphor but the transfers, bridges and connections being made
apart from the building. In filling in the terms of the analogy lies the
metaphor.
1.6.0 Figurative speech and
linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock apologizes for the
inconsistencies, lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in
linguistics to explain the way metaphor is used and understood, misused and
misunderstood.
Likewise, the street talk that permeated my childhood was a
string of “sayings, clichés, proverbs and European linguistic slang. This was
contrasted by the poetry of songs and medieval literature. The architecture was
the only source of my identity having consistency, reputation and allusions
toward science, logic and consequence.
However, Sadock’s examples and
apologies only remind me that my work to derive the phenomenon of architecture as the making of metaphors is
in its’ infancy, beginning to develop a vocabulary and understanding for the
architectural profession and its’ allies. There are none known to me that today
regards the social psychological building metaphors in a way that translates
into practice. As a result, as Sadock bemoans he also apologizes for the inconsistencies,
lack of derivatives and many unexplained changes in linguistics.
1.6.1 He thus discusses the difference
between the indirect use of metaphor versed the direct use of language to
explain the world. .
In some circles this is referred to
tangential thinking, that approaching a subject from its edges without getting
to the point. Users can accept works which are vague, inane, and non-descript,
evasive, and disorienting. Public housing, “ticky-tack” subdivisions, anonymous
canyons of plain vanilla towers with countless nameless windows, offices with a
sea of desks, nameless workstations and the daunting boredom of straight
highways on a desert plain. This too
applies to works of architecture which assembles a minimum and constructs the
minimum in a stoic fashion considering the least needed to produce a work that
fills the minimum economy of its commission. As such many architectural works
escape the many and various realities settling for a minimum of expression of
and otherwise prolific potential.
1.6.2 He distinguishes and draws relationships between micro and macro metaphors and the way they can inform one another
as the form of design may refer to its program, or a connector may reflect the
concept of articulation as a design concept.
The way one 45 degree angle may
reflect all the buildings geometry. More the way the design concept, design
vision drawn on a napkin can be the vision, gestalt, formulae, and “grand
design” of a particular project. Such an ideal can be the seed, fountainhead and
rudder guiding all other design decisions.
The macro metaphor drives the micro while they both inform one another.
Classic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Empire, Bedemier, Renaissance, Modern,
Baroque, Rocco, Gothic, Tudor, etc are examples of styles and periods where a
macro design imperative controlled micro decisions. And, vice versa, where
construction means and methods determined certain design and style as the
flying buttress and buttress of the Gothic’s, the arch for the Romans.
1.7.0 Some problems with the
emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart are “primarily
interested in the mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed”. He makes several
observations relevant to our study.
Discussing the idioms and informal expressions such as turn
on the lights;” kick the bucket” he notes:
1.7.1 Metaphors work by “reference to
analogies that are known to relate to the two domains”. In other words
there is apriori knowledge of these before they are spoken and when heard they
are immediately found. Like a building metaphor’s common elements with an
uncommon application the common connects to the unfamiliar and the architect is
able to find a way to bring them together and the user discovers their
relevance.
1.8.0 Metaphor by John R.
Searle is concerned with “how
metaphors work”. As we are concerned with how architectural metaphors work
we can draw some analogies.
1.8.1 A” problem of the metaphor concerns the relations between the word and
sentence meaning, on the one hand, and speaker’s meaning or utterance meaning,
on the other” “Whenever we talk about the metaphorical
meaning of a word, expression, or sentence, we are talking about what a speaker
might utter it to mean, in a way it that departs from what the word, expression
or sentence actually means”.
With the exception of major
corporate brands, churches, specialty building in architecture the examples is
in infinite as most works designed are with no intended message, meaning or
referent. Many are in the class of others of its types and generally convey their
class while others are replicas and based on a model. Furthermore most
architects have a design vocabulary which is foreign to the user. Conversely,
in public buildings, the user’s expectations, use and expectations are foreign
to the architect. At its best the architect may connect the vocabulary of his
design to some exotic design theory which, results I a very beatiful 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!
We are told to think before we
speak, picture what you are going to say then speak, still whatever we speak,
in tone, emphasis, timing(meter) and pitch can carry its own meanings; this was
also one of the final fields of investigation for my late mentor, Dr. Paul
Weiss.
1.8.2 Searle’s “task
in constructing a theory of metaphor is to try to state the principles which
relate literal sentence meaning to metaphorical utterance meaning”. In
like manner the architect tries to find a way that program relates to design
and design the final product.
A good example of unappreciated
excellent metaphors is the cases of the many non-New Yorkers who visit the city
and find no interest in the buildings. Whereas its’ natives have the language,
vocabulary and years of incremental experience to know both the words and the
metaphors of each and the collective of building –types. Searle adds:”
1.8.3 The basic principle of an
expression with its literal meaning and corresponding truth conditions can, in
various ways that are specific to the metaphor, call to mind anther meaning and
corresponding set of truths” In other words:” how does one thing remind us
of another”.
Without apparent rhyme of reason metaphors
of all arts have a way of recalling other metaphors of other times and places.
In my mind I recall Brooklyn brick warehouses on Atlantic Ave. with turn of the
century Ford trucks and men adorned in vests, white shirts and bow ties loading
packages from those loading docks under large green metal canopies. The streets
are coble stones. I can cross to this image when seeing most old brick
buildings in Leipzig, San Francisco, or Boston.
In the Metaphor and Thought’s
section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
1.9.0 Process and products in
making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
1.9.1 Explaining tropes (turn,
twist, conceptual guises, and figurations) ‘Human cognition is fundamentally shaped by
various processes of figuration”. “The ease with which many figurative
utterances are comprehended are has often
been attributed to the constraining influence of the context” ………..Including “the
common ground of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes recognized as being shared
by speakers and listeners (architects and users(clients, public) As
speakers architects, designers and makers “can’t help but employ tropes in every day
conversation (design) because they conceptualize (design) much
of their experience through the figurative schemes of metaphor
(design).
It explains the standard and traditional building types found
in various contexts as the chalet in the Alps and the specific style of each
found in each of the Alp’s counties and villages, etc. Psychological processes in metaphor
comprehension and memory by Alan Paivio and Mary Walsh say that Susanne Langer
writes that:” Metaphor is our most striking evidence of abstract seeing, of the
power the human mind to use presentational symbols”.
 |
| A novel metaphor by Barie Fez-Barringten |
1.10.1 “A metaphor involves a nonliteral use of language”. A non-literal
use of language means that what is said is for affect and not for specificity.
A habitable metaphor is not meant for the user to fully, continuously and
forever recall all that went into its production. At each moment in its use the
metaphor may mean different things, least of which may be any intended by its
authors. The fact that the roof silhouette was to emulate a belvedere
in Florence, windows from a palace in Sienna, and stucco from Tyrol is lost
over time. Even, the design principles so astutely applied by the likes of Paul
Rudolf, Richard Meier, or Marcel Breuer may be unnoticed in favor of other
internal focuses.
These many design considerations
may be the metaphor that gave the project its gestalt that enabled the
preparation of the documents that in turn were faithful interpreted by skilled
contactors and craftsman. Yet at each turn it is the affect of metaphor and not
necessarily its specifics that make a good design not a great work of
architecture or a working metaphor.
1.11.0 Images and models,
similes and metaphors by George A. Miller
Defends a metaphor as an abbreviated simile to
appreciate similarities and analogies which is called “appreciation”.
1.11.1 In psychology “appreciation”
(Herbert (1898)) was a general term for those mental process whereby an
attached experience is brought into relation with an already acquired and
familiar conceptual system. (Encoding, mapping, categorizing, inference,
assimilation and accommodation, attribution, etc).
Miller explains how reading metaphors build an image in the
mind. That is to say we “appreciate” what we already know. I have always
contended that we do not learn anything we already do not know. We learn in
terms of already established knowledge and concepts. We converse reiterating
what we presume the other knows, otherwise the other party would not
understand. The other party understands only because he already knows.
The architect who assembles
thousands of bits of information ,
resifts and converts form words to
graphics and specification documents communicates the new proposed (the strange
new thing) in terms of the known and familiar. The first recipients are the
owner, building officials; contractors must read seeking confirmations of known
and confirm its adherence to expectations. After its construction the users
read familiar signs, apparatus, spaces, volumes, shapes and forms. The bridge
carries over from one to another what is already known .Even the strange that
becomes familiar are both known but not in the current relationship. For
example when we apply a technology used on ships to a building or a room which
is commonly associated with tombs as a bank, etc. Both are generally known but
not in that specific context. We could not appreciate it if it were not known
.It is what Weiss calls commonalties and is the selection between commonalties
and differences that makes a metaphor. About understanding and discerning
between what is” true in fact” and “true in the model” Miller says: Metaphors
are, on a literal interpretation, incongruous, if not actually false-a robust
sense of what is germane to the context and what is “true in fact” is necessary
for the recognition of a metaphor, and hence general knowledge must be
available to the reader (user, public).
“We try to make the world that the author is asking us to
imagine resemble the real world (as we know it) in as many respects as
possible. Offices, bedrooms, lobbies, toilets, kitchens are such models which
are built to specific situations in images of yet some other context.
Kitchen is a social gathering
place, toilet is the baths of Rome, and the deck is top of a ship. The
architect accommodates all the realities of the goal of the room into the model
of the foreign context. By analogy what Miller distinguishes between what the
architect designed and what he thought are different. The architects of the
Renaissance tried to resurrect the grandeur of the classic building they
discovered and resurrected. The contemporary architect faces a vernacular of
design principles which are reified in to conventional building types. The
convention is the model whiles the specific application in the strange. Often
new buildings are likened to the first model or the prototype.
The reader knows the building type
and is able to recognize the new version. About the metaphor
1.11.2 Miller sites Webster’s
International Dictionary (2nd edition): “a metaphor may be regard as a
compressed simile, the comparison implied in the former being explicit in the
latter. In the making the comparison explicit is the work of the designer and
reader”.
“In principle, three steps,
recognition, reconstruction, and interpretation, must be taken in understating
metaphors, although the simplest instance the processing may occur so rapidly
that all three blend into a single mental act.” When we face a new metaphor
(building) a new context with its own vocabulary is presented, one which the
creator must find and connect and the other which the reader must read and
transfer from previous experience.
1.12.0 How metaphors work by
Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar distinguishes between (italics are
Gluksberg and Keysar) “metaphor topic”
and “metaphor vehicle (predicate)” “The vehicle being a prototypical exemplar (cigarettes)
of that attributive category (time bomb).
1.12.1
Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization
in cognitive science, where some members of a
category are more central than others. For example, when asked
to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more
frequently cited than, say, stool.”
I asked a New Yorker to give an example of an office building and they answered
the Empire State Building it would be because of its height, and reputation, In
fact the office building and not the “church “building shape has come to be a
metaphor of the city. New York is an office building city. I can see only a
flash glimpse and I will know it is Manhattan.
1.12.2
Their metaphor “cigarettes are time
bombs” cigarettes are assigned to a category of time bombs, what the time bomb
being a prototypical example of the set of things which can abruptly cause serious
damage at some point in the future.” It is for this reason that the
landscape is filled with many metaphoric topics (applications) based on few
metaphor vehicles (building types) not only true in functions and goals but
also in characteristic building systems and structures. Office (metaphor topic)
Building (metaphor vehicle) metaphor topic as a house may be a hotel, grand
estate, small or large private residence depends on the predicate. Carried with
each are also, social, psychological, political and geographic inferences.
1.12.3 “Metaphors are generally used to
describe something new by references to something familiar (Black, 1962b), not
just in conversation, but in such diverse areas as science and psychotherapy.
Metaphors are not just nice, they are necessary.
They are necessary for casting
abstract concepts in terms of the apprehendable, as we do, for example, when we
metaphorically extend spatial concepts and spatial terms to the realms of
temporal concepts and temporal terms. In another sense when an
architect creates a metaphor it a building which takes on the attributes of all
buildings and if it is work of art, as a building metaphor it takes on the
attributes of the calls of buildings which are more than a tin box but a
statement of complex ideas which demands reading and is an opportunity to be
read.
How do I know it is an “office building”?
1. It is located in
the neighborhood of other office buildings
2. It does not have
balconies and, curtains in the windows,
3. It has an open and
wide public plaza and unrestricted wide openings
4. Its glazing,
cladding and skin are high tech, impersonal and large scale.
In adaptive use buildings where office are housed in
residential and residential are house in office buildings precisely the metaphor
topic and the metaphor vehicle are purposefully confuses the metaphor its
unique identity.
1.13.0 In the Metaphor and Science
section of the book: The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science by Dedre
Gentner and Michael Jeziorski
Part on “The alchemists they
describe a system of triangulation I developed, taught and applied at Pratt
Institute which is as: “Metals were often
held to consist of two components: mercury, which was fiery, active and male,
and sulpher, which was watery, passive and female. Thus the combination of the
two metals could be viewed as a marriage. Metals and other minerals were often
compared with heavenly bodies and their properties triangulated to produce a
third. Not to let this arbitrary characterizations blemish the structure of
this system it is valid to triangulate and in fact
1.13.1 much of architectural making of metaphors is a matter of mapping,
diagramming and combining to conclude the validity of combining and matching
unlike materials, shapes, & systems. In this way any one of the metaphors
and the whole system of bridging and carrying over is metaphoric. Map a
rectangle and circle to a third and you get a part square part circular odd
shape. Map cold and hot and you get warm; map hotel, office, residential and
shops and you get mixed use.
Renaissance European cities beguile
their metaphor with such combinations known by their scale, cladding, décor,
and entrees. Particularly charming are the German “guest houses ("gast
hofs"), English family pubs, etc. New Towns and contemporary town centers
are mixed use, multi zoned urban cores. It isn’t the referent where one is the
other but where there is a similarity between like features of two things, on
which a comparison may be based: the analogy between
the heart and a pump. The commonality is apparent. They both share a similar
characteristic. The hotel, residence ,
office and shop are joined by their convenience
to that provide service to clients and their use of rooms, and a core of
service, mountainous and housekeeping and supply. A small staff can support
these businesses and there customers are compatible.
They all
have a front of the house and back-of-the -house function (garbage, deliveries,
maintenance, etc) in many citers lacks zoning regulations have alo9owed such
mixed uses zones to still exist to day. Seeing these metaphors is a part of the
fabric and character of neighborhoods.
1.13.2 Metaphor
is reasoning using abstract characters whereas reason by analogy is a straight
forward extension of its use in commonplace reasoning.
All this to
say and as if there was a choice that architects
have a choice where to make a new building by analogy or by metaphor. Analogies
may be the ticky-tacks, office
building, church, school building, fire station analogies to a first model
verses an abstraction of a program into a new prototype. Is the analogy any
less a work of architecture?
Or do we only mean that works of
architecture are works of art when they make abstractions?
1.13.3 “In
processing analogy, people implicitly focus on certain kinds of commonalities
and ignore others”.
In
my New Haven drafting service, builders would give me a floor plan for me to
redraft to build a 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.
1.13.4 An analogy is a kind of highly selective similarity where we focus
on certain commonalities and ignore others. The commonality is no that they are
both built out of bricks but that they both take in resources to operate and to
generate their products.
As users, design professionals begin
their design process by finding analogies from extent projects as user faced
with the building resort to their own vocabulary. Both do not favor one or the
other and vacillate between the two for what they can learn.
1.13.5 On the creative and
architect’s side: “The central idea is that an analogy is a mapping of
knowledge from one domain (the base) into another (the target) such that a
system of relations that holds among the base objects also holds among the
target objects”. On the user’s side in interpreting an analogy, people seek to
put objects of the base in one-to-one correspondence with the objects of the
targets as to obtain the maximum structural match”. Confronting a Bedouin
village of tents a westerner faced with apparent differences looks for
similarities.
1.13.6 “The corresponding objects
in the base and target need not resemble each other; rather object
correspondences are determined by the like roles in the matching relational structures.”
Cushions for seats, carpets for flooring, stretched fabric for walls and roof.
Cable for beams and columns, etc.
1.13.7 “Thus, an analogy is a way
of aligning and focusing on rational commonalities independently of the objects
in which those relationships are embedded.” However, there may be metaphors at
work as well as the user reads the tent’s tension cable structure, banners and
the entire assemblage in a “romantic” eclectic image of Arabness, metaphors
beyond the imperial but of the realm of the abstract and inaccurate.
1.13.8 “Central to the mapping
process is the principle of “systematicity: people prefer to map systems of
predicates favored by higher-order relations with inferential import (the Arab
tent), rather that to map isolated predicates. The systematicity principle
reflects a tacit preference for coherence and inferential power in interpreting
analogy”. Arab tentness and “home-sweet-home” map basics from the
“home-sweet-home” to the Arabness to make all the bits and pieces be understood.
Thus architects choose building elements from
catalogs and in the most metaphoric circumstances designs elements from
scratch. Metaphor buildings may or may not be composed of metaphoric
elements.
Metaphors and buildings which are analogies may of or may not have
elements designed metaphorically. However, it is less likely that an analogues
design will contain metaphorical elements.
1.13.9“No extraneous associations: Only
commonalities strengthen an analogy. Further relations and associations between
the base and target- for example, thematic consecutions- do not contribute to
the analogy”. Analogous matching looks for duplicates, replicas and like
elements; the more the better. Most contemporary commercial design relies on
many commonalities hence CAD, design format programs, etc assume commonalities
in and analogies. After choosing title system the rest follows as repetition as
before. Many commercial house plans, office plans, department store, etc acre
designed as analogous design schemes.
As the architect of record
for Dhahran Academy in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and after having designed and
redesigned their primary buildings the school superintendent asked how to go
about adding additional space. Rather than adding to his expense and time for another
design process I recommended and they engage a pre-engineered steel building
manufacturer to produce this building for them. In this case I knew the
analogous rather than the metaphorical process would be appropriate. King
Faisal University asked my advice to design their new and temporary school to
house their school of architecture while the permanent overall campus plans
were being completed. Again I suggested the analogous approach of a
pre-engineered building system. Of course within this approach, the specific
sizes, electrical, plumbing and HVAC requirements were all specifically
selected from already available “off-the-shelf” modules.
1.14.0Metaphor and theory
change: What is” metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd defines the
1.14.1 “interaction view” of metaphor where metaphors work by applying to the
principle (literal) subject of the metaphor a system of “associated
implications” characteristic of the metaphorical secondary subject. These
implications are typically provided by the received “commonplaces” (ordinary;
undistinguished or uninteresting; without individuality: a commonplace person.) About the secondary subject ‘The success of
the metaphor rests on its success in conveying to the listener (Reader) some
quieter defines respects of similarity or analogy between the principle and
secondary subject.”
Architects design by translating
concepts into two dimensional graphics that which ultimately imply a
multidimensional future reality. She tests the horizontal and vertical space
finding accommodation and commonality of adjacency, connectivity and
inclusiveness.
1.14.2 To Boyd, metaphors
simply impart their commonplace not necessity to their similarity
or analogous. This kind of metaphor simply adds information to the
hearer which was not otherwise available which explains the built metaphor that
is neither analogous not abstractly common but works, is unique and serves a
purpose.
I found methane gas silos on the
Ruhergebeit in Germany’s three city district conically shaped (with the wider
circumference at the base) like a Byzantine apse with channeled walks and
fluted sides. I had seen nothing like this and it took hours and an article I
wrote which was published in Progressive Architecture to explain this metaphor.
I called it Pollution Architecture. The Pricklley Mountain project in
Warren Vermont was another such example of received “commonplaces” of its
use(s).
1.15.0 Metaphor in science by
Thomas S. Kuhn speaking about scientific language he distinguishes
between
1.15.1“dubbing” (invest with
any name, character, dignity, or title; style; name; call) and “epistemic access” (relating to, or
involving knowledge; cognitive.).”When dubbing is abandoned the link
between language and the world disappears”.
Architectural metaphors are all
about names, titles, and the access to that the work provides for the reader to
learn and develop. At its best the vocabulary of the parts and whole of the
work is an encyclopedia and cultural building block. The work incorporates the
current state of man’s culture and society which is an open book for the
reader.
The freedom of both the creator and
reader to dub and show is all part of the learning experience of the
metaphor. As a good writer “shows” and
not “tells” so a good designer manifests configurations without words.
However objective, thorough and scientific; the designer,
the design tools and the work gets dubbed with ideas (not techne) we
may call style, personality, and identity above and beyond the program and its
basic design (techne). It is additional controls, characterizations and
guidelines engrafted into the form not necessarily overtly and expressly
required. Dubbing may occur in the
making of metaphors as a way in which the design itself is conceived and
brought together. Dubbing may in fact be the process which created the work as an
intuitive act.
1.16.0 Metaphorical
imprecision and the “top down” research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn
About Cognition (pertaining to the
mental processes of perception, memory, judgment, and reasoning, as contrasted
with emotional and volitional processes) justifies Socrates “learning as
recollecting” to explain that we absorb new knowledge on the shoulders of old
experiences.
1.16.1 Pylyshyn explains: “…………….consider
new concepts as being characterized in terms of old ones (plus logical
conjunctives)” 2.0 As William J. Gordon points out we make the strange familiar
by talking
about one thing in terms of another. Pylyshyn: "On the other hand,
if it were possible to observe and to acquire new “knowledge” without the
benefit of these concepts (conceptual schemata (an underlying organizational
pattern or structure; conceptual framework) which are the medium of thought),
then such
1.16.2 “Knowledge” would not
itself be conceptual or be expressed in the medium of thought, and therefore it
would not be cognitively structured, integrated with other knowledge, or even
comprehended. Hence, it would be intellectually inaccessible”. In other
words we would not know that we know. Where knowing is the Greek for suffer, or
experience. This was the Greek ideal proved in Oedipus; “through suffering man
learns”; we know that we know. Therefore, when we observe that architecture
makes metaphors we mean that we know that we know that works exists and
we can read authors messages. We learn the work.
The art [9] 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 identifies as
teaching nothing.
I don’t believe that there is such
a thing, even the “tin-box” (pre-engineered manufactured factory warehouse is a
metaphor. It may be a one page comic book character but is has content and is
readable.
1.16.3 Pulling from three
dimensional and two dimensional means
and methods, from asymmetrical and symmetrical, and from spatial and volumetric
design principles the architect assembles metaphor metaphorically by
associating and carrying-over these principles applying to the program at hand
to lift and stretch the ideas into space and across the range of disassociated
ideas and concepts making a new and very strange metaphor unlike anything ever
created yet filled with thousands of familiar signs and elements that make it
work .
Just as practice makes perfect for
the concert pianist, opera singer, ballerina, etc so is it for the architect.
However, having said this reader is at imitate disadvantage except for the
natives of a particular location. Little old ladies in the tiniest Italian
village can tell in the minutest detail all about every building, street and
area. She has learned and passed on the “knowledge” from her ancestors and is
as trained as its creators but in a totally different way. Hers is the act of
perception and reader who must recreate and challenge her memory and
recollections. She does not have to work at design but at reliving and
imagining the design process to find the details and the whole of the building
and its social, political and chronological context. Her explanations will
include great joy, violent emotions, dis-tastes and rejections of the owners
and authors. Her experience of the metaphor will be different from that of the
creators both about the same work.
1.16.4 About the difference between
words (which are limited and specific to concepts Pylyshyn notes: “…in the case of words there is a
component of reason and choice which mediates between cognitive content and
outward expression. I can choose what words I use, whereas I cannot in the same
sense choose in terms of which I represent the world.” So architects and
readers deal with materials, structures, systems and leave the concepts to a
variety of possible outcomes.
1.16.5 About a “top-down strategy”
called “structured programming” in computer science allows for a point of entry
into a the development of a new idea where you begin with an idea and after
testing and developing that idea bringing everyday knowledge to bear on the
development of theoretical ideas with some confidences that they are new either
incoherent nor contradictory, and furthermore with some way of exploring what
they entail.
The point is there are better and worse
places for introducing rigor into an evolving discipline. “This explanation is
pretty much that path of the development of my theory that "architecture
is the making of metaphors" has followed over the past 45 years.
 |
| Collage by Christina Fez-Barringten |
1.16.6 Explaining this approach as a “skyhook-skyscraper" construction of
science from the roof down to the yet un-constructed foundations” describes
going from the general to the specific in and decreasing general to an
increasing amount of detail and pragmatic evidence, referents, claims and
resolutions.
Structural engineers design from
the top down so as to accumulate the additive loads to the consecutive lower
members and ultimately the foundation which bears it all. Conceptual design and
first impressions both begin with the general and go to the specific. Gated
communities, Newtown’s, malls, resorts and commercial buildings give high marks
to the overall and superficial .Yet most working metaphors are the result of
design and perception from the gestalt (overall concept) to the emptiness (non-gestalt) . Maria Theresa’s Shoenbrun is an excellent
example along with major university campuses such as Cambridge, Yale, Oxford,
etc where theme and design philosophy prevails and dominates from the facades
to the planning techniques of large public spaces to increasing private and
smaller spaces and detailing, where with the overall one cannot imagine any
thing.
The gestalt is the entity in which
all occurs and with the concept there is no context. So it is with metaphor
with it the rest of the conversation has no framework and no conception can
begin either in its creation or use.
1.16.7 Pylyshyn asks:” What
distinguishes a metaphor from its complete explication (explain) ….”? In the
case of architecture the entire set of contract documents, program, etc.”
Pylyshyn answers: “The difference between literal and metaphorical description lies
primarily in such pragmatic consideration as (1) the stability, referential
specificity, and general acceptance of terms: and (2) the perception, shared by
those who use the terms, that the resulting description characterizes the world
as it really is, rather than being a convenient way of talking about it, or a
way of capturing superficial resemblances”.
In this ways of all the arts,
architecture is the most profound in that it combines and confirms the secular
(of this time), “how things really are” with the gestalt of personal, social,
community and private importance. If art is the making of metaphors and it has
no real use then how significant is architecture with both “reality” and
fantasy/ imagination combined and confirmed by its very existence.
I mean to say that the very real
existence of work of art which bespeaks of life and times exists and is
accessible and in our contexts is itself a metaphor of great significance and
satisfaction. Were the building us it
would be me, where I a building I be it. The metaphor expresses a value common
to both; both are both real and ideas at the same time. The metaphor is the
bridge and confirmation of art in the world, life in the flesh and flesh become
ideas. Architecture is an extreme reification from notion in both creator and
reader of materials and idea.
1.16.8 Pylyshyn asserts that:
“metaphor induces a (partial) equivalence between two known phenomenons; a
literal account describes the phenomenon in authentic terms in which it is seen”.
Socially speaking worldly people
that work in offices dress then behave the way they do if for example they
reported to work in manufacturing warehouses? Their scenario of the behavior
and the metaphor would not correspond.
Metaphor and Education
is the final section:
Readers may
wish to review my monograms on Schools and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for
Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New
Rochelle , New York and The Metametaphor of
architectural education",
(North Cypress , Turkish University
1.17.0 The instructive metaphor:
Metaphoric aids to students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer concludes
that
1.17.1 “analogical transfer theory (
“instructive metaphors create an analogy between a to-be-learned- system(target
domain) and a familiar system(metaphoric domain)” It was these concerns
behind Frank Lloyd Wright’s separation from the architecture of Louis Sullivan
and what spurned the collective work of the Bauhaus in Germany , that is to
express the truth about the building’s systems, materials, open life styles,
use of light and air and bringing nature
into the buildings environment, not to mention ridding building of the
irrelevant and time worn cliches of building design decoration, and traditional
principles of classical architecture as professed by the
Beaux-Arts [9] movement. For equipoise “Unity,
symmetry and balance” were replaced by “asymmetrical tensional relationships”
between, “dominant, subdominant and tertiary” forms and the results of science
and engineering influence on architectural design, a new design metaphor was
born. The Bauhaus found the metaphor in all the arts, the commonalties in
making jewelry, furniture, architecture, interior design, decoration, lighting,
industrial design, etc.
1.18.0 Metaphor and learning
by Hugh G Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag
Concludes that metaphorical teaching strategies often lead
to better and more memorable learning than do explicit strategies which
explains why urbanites have a “street smarts” that is missing from sub-urban;
they actually learn from the metaphors that make up the context. Of course this
is in addition to the social aspects of urbanity which is again influenced by
the opportunities of urban metaphors: parks, play grounds, main streets,
broadways, avenues, streets, sidewalks, plazas, downtown, markets, street
vendors, etc.
1.18.1 “Radically new knowledge results
from a change in modes of representation of knowledge, whereas a comparative
metaphor occurs within the existing representations which serve to render the
comparison sensible. The comparative level of metaphor might allow for
extensions of already existing knowledge, but would not provide a new form of
understanding.
The visitor (this is my word) may “well
be acquiring one of the constitutive or residual metaphors of the place (this
is my word) at the same time; same metaphor, different experiences.
1.19.0 Educational uses of
metaphor by Thomas G. Sticht discusses how the natures of
metaphor as a speech act and serves as a linguistic tool for
overcoming cognitive limitations.
 |
| Collage by Christina Fez-Barringten |
1.19.2 Sticht adds: “that
speech is a fleeting, temporarily linear means of communicating, coupled with
the fact that that, as human beings, we are limited in how much information we
can maintain and process at any one time in active memory, means that as
speakers we can always benefit from tools for efficiently bringing information
into active memory, encoding it for communication, and recording it, as
listeners, in some memorable fashion.”
1.19.3 Relevantly he points out
that metaphor is the solution insofar as it encodes and captures the
information:” transferring chunks of experience from well –known to less well
known contexts;
1.19.4 The vividness thesis, which maintains that metaphors permit and impress a more memorable
learning due to the greater imagery or concreteness or vividness of the
“full-blooded experience” conjured up by the metaphorical vehicle;
1.19.5
And the inexpressibility thesis, in which it is noted that certain
aspects of natural experience are never encoded in language and that metaphors
carry with them the extra meanings never encoded in language. One picture
is worth a thousand words and how valuable are the arts as makers of who we are
as a people, society and time.
1.19.6“The mnemonic (intended to
assist the memory) function of metaphor as expressed by Ortony’s vividness
thesis also points to the value of metaphor as a tool for producing durable
learning from unenduiring speech”.
Architects both compose the program
and reify its contents from words to diagrams and diagrams to two dimensional
graphics and three dimensional models to reify and bring- out (educate) the
user’s mind and fulfillment of unspoken and hidden needs. Needs which 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. Cognition between all the disciplines involved in shaping
the built environment involves a common system of making metaphors and applying
metaphoric axioms.
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:
1.0 Metaphor and
Thought: Second Edition
Edited by Andrew Ortony: School of Education and social
Sciences and
Institute for the learning Sciences: North Western
University
Published by Cambridge University Press
First pub: 1979
Second pub: 1993
1.1 Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social
policy: by Donald A. Schon
1.2 The conduit metaphor: A case of frame
conflict in our language about language: by Michael J. Reddy.
1.3 In Programs
and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture about Glasarchitektur Ulrich Conrad'
1.4 The contemporary theory of metaphor by
George Lakoff
1.4.11 "Surrogates," published by Indiana
University Press. By Paul Weiss
1.5.0 Metaphor, induction, and social policy: The
convergence of macroscopic and microscopic views by Robert J. Sternberg, Roger
Tourangeau, and Georgia Nigro
1.6.0 Figurative
speech and linguistics by Jerrold M. Sadock
1.7.0 Some problems
with the emotion of literal meanings by David E. Rumelhart
1.8.0 Metaphor by John
R. Searle
Section on “Metaphor and Representation”:
1.9.0 Process and
products in making sense of tropes by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
1.10.0 Interpretation
of novel metaphors by Bruce Fraser
1.11.0 Images and
models, similes and metaphors by George A. Miller
1.12.0 How metaphors
work by Sam Glucksberg and Boaz Keysar
1.13.0 In the Metaphor
and Science section of the book: The
shift from metaphor to analogy in Western science by Dedre Gentner and Michael
Jeziorski
1.14.0 Metaphor and theory change: What is”
metaphor” a metaphor for? By Richard Boyd
1.15.0 Metaphor in science by Thomas S. Kuhn
1.16.0 Metaphorical imprecision and the “top down”
research strategy by Zeon W. Pylyshyn
Zenon W. Pylyshyn is Board of Governors Professor of
Cognitive Science at Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of Seeing
and Visualizing: It's Not what You Think (2003) and Computation and
Cognition: toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984), both published
by The MIT Press, as well as over a hundred scientific papers on perception,
attention, and the computational theory of mind.
Metaphor and Education
is the final section:
Readers may
wish to review my monograms on Schools
and Metaphors (Main Currents in Modern Thought/Center for
Integrative Education Sep.-Oct. 1971, Vol. 28 No.1, New Rochelle, New York
and The
Metametaphor of architectural education", (North Cypress, Turkish University. December, 1997)
1.17.0 The instructive metaphor: Metaphoric aids
to students’ understanding of science by Richard E. Mayer
1.18.0 Metaphor and learning by Hugh G Petrie and
Rebecca S. Oshlag
1.19.0 Educational uses of metaphor by Thomas G.
Sticht
References:
2.0 Wikopedia on the www.
3.0 “Argumentation: The Study of Effective
Reasoning, 2nd Edition; by Professor Dr. David Zarefsky of Northwestern
University and published by The Teaching Company, 2005 of Chantilly, Virginia
4.0 WWW; “In Europe the Grand Central Railroad Terminal were built
and then a clone brought to New York City as part of the Park Ave Manhattan
Development project including ten underground floors bringing freight,
shopping, auto parking, etc underground and into the center of the city
providing a hub extending from the thirties up to the nineties under Park Ave.
This grand scheme was only partially carried out but forever transformed Park
Ave from a boulevard of swanky three story mansions to a sophisticated high
rent district of high-rise residences.
The first Grand Central Terminal
was built in 1871 by shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. A
"secret" sub-basement known as M42 lies under the Terminal,
containing the AC to DC converters used to supply DC traction current to the Terminal designed
to replicate the galleried hall of a 13th-century Florentine palace.
The train shed,
north and east of the head house, had two innovations in U.S. practice: the
platforms were elevated to the height of the cars, and the roof was a balloon
shed with a clear span over all of the tracks. In order to accommodate
ever-growing rail traffic into the restricted Midtown area, William J. Wilgus,
chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad took advantage
of the recent electrification technology to propose a novel scheme: a bi-level
station below ground. Arriving trains would go underground under Park Avenue,
and proceed to an upper-level incoming station if they were mainline trains or
to a lower-level platform if they were suburban trains. In addition, turning
loops within the station itself obviated complicated switching moves to bring
back the trains to the coach yards for servicing. Departing mainline trains
reversed into upper-level platforms in the conventional way. Necessity being
the mother of invention burying electric trains underground brought an
additional advantage to the railroads: the ability to sell above-ground air rights
over the tracks and platforms for real-estate development. With time, all the
area around Grand Central saw prestigious apartment and office buildings being
erected, which turned the area into the most desirable commercial office
district of Manhattan”.
In each of the above instances a
metaphor was created by attaching another concept to the primary function. Once
the projects were thought of in that added way the metaphor was born and under
it the many metaphorical spin-offs and sub metaphors. Not to mention the
metaphor of the Empire State and the overall iconic image of Manhattan and it’s
New York State. Even today when we say New York we mean downtown Manhattan. The
city is” being pumped” by its metaphors.
5.0 “Difference and Identity”: 4.0 Gilles
Deleuze (French
pronunciation: [ʒil dəløz]), (18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher
of the late 20th century. Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early
works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly
summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical
relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference
is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different
from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities.
To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference.
Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, does
Deleuze argue, "given that there are differences of nature between things
of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the
categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from
differences. Apparent identities such as "X" are composed of endless
series of differences, where "X" = "the difference between x and
x'", and "x" = "the difference between...” and so forth. Difference
goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must
grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories,
resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain difference
in itself. "If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it
is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to
what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal
difference."
In analyzing a metaphor we
ask: “What are its commonalities and
significant differences and what are the characteristics common to both”.
6.0 Webster’s standard dictionary
8.0 The
Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: a perspective
9. G. 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 [9]
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.
www.bariefez-barringten.com
 |
| Sun-Heh Collage from Legend by Christina Fez-Barringten |
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
20.
“Urban Passion”: October 2010; Reconstruction
& “Creation”; June 2010; by C. Fez-Barringten; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/;
21.
“An architectural history of metaphors”:
AI & Society: (Journal of human-centered and machine intelligence) Journal
of Knowledge, Culture and Communication: Pub: Springer; London; AI &
Society located in University of Brighton, UK;
AI &
Society. ISSN (Print) 1435-5655 - ISSN
(Online) 0951-5666 : Published by
Springer-Verlag;; 6 May 2010 http://www.springerlink.com/content/j2632623064r5ljk/
Paper copy: AIS Vol. 26.1. Feb. 2011; Online ISSN 1435-5655; Print ISSN
0951-5666;
DOI 10.1007/s00146-010-0280-8; : Volume 26, Issue 1 (2011), Page
103.
22.
“Does Architecture Create Metaphors?; G.Malek;
Cambridge; August 8,2009
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 soverign built metaphor”: monograph
converted to Power Point for presentation to Southwest Florida Chapter of the
American Institute of Architects. 2011
25.“Architecture:the making of metaphors”:The
Book;
publish: 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newcastle upon Tyne
Edited by
Edward Richard Hart,
Glasgow
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| Collage by Christina Fez-Barringten |
